Broken Taboos
Ignore Them This Time
They’re back for more. Fresh from a Supreme Court decision that enshrines their military funeral protests as protected under the First Amendment, the Westboro Baptist Church will once again make their way to Cambridge on Wednesday. This time, however, the members won’t be protesting the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School for its gay-straight alliance, or the Harvard Hillel for bolstering Jewish life on campus. Instead, next week, the WBC will be protesting the memorial service for Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Harvard’s spiritual mentor who passed away last month.
Quite simply, Gomes is the epitome of everything the WBC opposes. There is nothing that gets this church’s blood boiling more than a homosexual Christian preacher who spent his career pushing for pluralism, tolerance, and religious compassion. “He, in the name of God, teaches rebellion against God,” said spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper.
The Book of Esther
After a fantastic weekend wandering the side streets of the Old City of Jerusalem with a group of religious overseas students from my program, I went to friend a few of them on Facebook. For one of them—a girl named Esther Petrack—I didn’t find a profile. Instead, I discovered a fan page devoted to someone with her name. My jaw dropped.
As a result of her appearance on “America’s Next Top Model” this season, Esther, a graduate of a Modern Orthodox Jewish high school in Brookline, has received a tremendous amount of censure from her community and her religious Jewish brethren. But although she takes full responsibility for her choices, she told me, there is far more to her tale than meets the eye. Of course, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Her name in Hebrew, after all, is similar to the root for the word “hidden.” And as I discovered over the course of my interview with her, this Orthodox Jewish rebel possesses an even more striking beauty than is at first apparent—a determination to respect the traditional community that raised her even when many from that community have denounced her.
Another Brick in the Wall
The poster for “With God on Our Side,” a documentary about Christian Zionism screened at the Divinity School last week, depicts the barrier separating Israel from most of the West Bank towering over two women, one of whom wears a hijab. “I grew up in a house that had very specific [religious and political] views toward Israel,” the film’s producer/director Porter Speakman, Jr. told the audience, referring to his upbringing as an Evangelical Christian Zionist. After spending five years living beyond that West Bank barrier, however, Speakman realized that there was a side of the story that he wasn’t being told in church.
The film, he explained, is not meant to be a “historical film,” nor a film that aims to depict “the whole story” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It aims instead to weave the history into a critique of modern-day Evangelical Christian Zionist politics and theology. The film argues quite convincingly that this denomination’s religious belief should not necessitate the support of every single Israeli policy, especially if doing so would override Christian values like justice and compassion. However, while the film successfully makes space for religious criticism of Israel, its rhetorical slant undermines its own call for an honest assessment of religious support for the Jewish state.
My Date With Lena
Before I came to Harvard, a Rabbi from the Israeli Yeshiva where I spent my gap year cautioned me about the spiritual dangers of attending a non-Jewish university. He wasn’t going to discourage my attending a “secular college” like Harvard, he said, but he was going to warn me about the corrosive effect that the frivolity towards sexuality on campus would have on my religious devotion if I let myself interact extensively with that culture.
Basically, he meant that Harvard can be a hazardous place for religious Jews like me because of people like Lena Chen ’09-’10, the former sex blogger extraordinaire with whom I met this past Friday.
The Varieties of Moral Experience
“The separation between science and human values,” argued Sam Harris last month at the 2010 TED Conference, “is an illusion.” Although a myriad of philosophers believe that moral statements cannot be proven through facts alone, Harris asserted that through science we can indeed deem some actions as more objectively moral than others. Last week, in a discussion with her husband Steven Pinker at the Harvard Hillel, novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein also attempted to bridge the “is-ought gap.” It is reason alone, Goldstein claimed, that necessarily binds us to refrain from hurting others if we expect them to refrain from hurting us.
In a column last month on his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish takes the exact opposite approach. In his review of Steven Smith’s “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” Fish expounds the ineffectiveness of “secular reasons” in justifying political or moral decisions. “While secular discourse,” asserts Fish, can “amass scores of data,” it is unable to tell us what to do with that data. In other words, Fish claims, it is utterly impossible to make value judgments without religious principles.