My swimming head

An interesting subject line. My head isn't really swimming per se... just full of ideas.

I spent this morning (re-, in one case) reading a couple of books for my oft-mentioned book (hereafter OMB) - Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts and Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours. The first chapter of my OMB has to do with working from a point of principle, as I may have mentioned. The principle, in this case, is that of tikkun olam, which is translated as repairing/restoring/healing (etc.) the world.

Now, before I proceed I will say that Dwight D. Eisenhower's admonition to Richard Nixon regarding the vice presidency (which I will not repeat - this is a PG blog) will eventually apply here, but I'm not a procrastinator in any sense of the word... yet, I've been carrying this book in my head, with not enough time to write it, for longer than I've ever carried any project. So - it feels like an eternity to me, and eventually it will be time to do the Eisenhower/Nixon thing. But not yet. Continuing...

Today, I'm thinking about writing this tikkun olam chapter. I find that I'm wrestling with several things - and I haven't yet started to write yet, so they will doubtless resolve themselves through writing (that always happens to me). They are these:

Academic convention would have me cite nearly everything I write. Yet, I don't know everything about tikkun olam, Judaism, etc. that there is to know ... and I never will. If I try to read everything that there is, I'll never do it, because...

Judaism is a culture (and a religion) based on intellectual dialogue and analysis. There is a loooong history in Judaism of discussion and debate with very little resolution - this is just the way it is. An example: one chapter in Back to the Sources focuses on Talmud, rabbinical commentaries on the Torah [the first five books of the Bible]. The chapter's author, Robert Goldenberg, is focusing on a portion of the Babylonian Talmud that asks, "From what time may people reciete the evening Shema From the hour that the priests come in to eat of their Heave-offering" (143). Referring to the Talmudic commentary - which is by several people and covers a large page (he writes that the effort to combine all of these ideas into a single whole "was undeniably a worth aim, but it has sometimes turned the Talmudic conversation into a gathering where everyone is talking at once [142]), Goldenberg says, "It may seem that this is all a practical discussion an effort to decide when in fact the time for Shema arrives and then to produce convenient test for determining whether that moment has come.

It is important to keep in mind that this is not at all the true purpose of the passage... the practical question at hand is never explicity resolved, while the answer accepted by later tradition ... actually is provided in this passage but receives no particular attention" (143-4).

So - Judaic thought, like academe, tends toward the citational practice, the rootedness in text and authority... this is, as Keith Gilyard has written, no new news. But there is a history, a convention, a culture, a tradition of no resolution - just continuing debate - so if I wanted to ground myself in sources, I could be there forever. (And I'm not trying to cop out of research, either...). Then there's the fact that

My tendency is to write "academically," from sources, and not from/about my own experience. I am no 'creative writer,' meaning I don't generally write about myself in any kind of personal way save as a WPA, a teacher, etc. This chapter, focusing as it does on a point of personal principle, is going to take more than that if it's to be at all good, which of course I want it to be. But personal stuff generally isn't academic-y and cited (which I'm obviously using as a shorthand for a whole set of postures and practices). That's where some of the essays in Kitchen Twirlers are good models... also some other stuff that I haven't yet gotten to.

So - a dilemma that I am thinking through. I will of course resolve by writing and writing and writing... because that's how I work through these things.