vayishlach: kisses and other methods of midrash
sholem aleichem,
It's been a week! Let's dive right in.
Content warnings: eugenics, antisemitism
I'm teaching statistics this semester, which means that I'm also teaching the history of eugenics, as covered in detail in this nautilus article. A brief summary: Galton, the inventor of the term "eugenics", was also the pioneer of many modern statistical methods, including correlation and comparisons between normal distributions (the origins of the book The Bell Curve.) His disciple, Karl Pearson, advocated race war and genocide while formalizing these methods in the form of the Pearson correlation coefficient, Pearson chi-squared test, and other methods of statistics that still bear his name and are taught in every Stats 101 course. It's not just a couple bad apples, either: the first university department of statistics was an offshoot of a department of eugenics, and many of the modern journals of statistics began as journals of eugenics. When I talk about this with students, there's usually at least one who asks a common question in these situations: can we separate the statistics from the statistician? In other words, of course there were racists developing statistics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but maybe that's not statistics' fault.
Unfortunately, though, there's a reason eugenicists developed statistics. Universal racist claims fall apart given one counterexample (though this doesn't stop some people from believing them), but statistical claims about averages and distributions and tendencies are much more difficult to refute. For example, we're still trying to refute the claims about distributions of human ability that Galton made a century ago and The Bell Curve updated in 1992. As a specific example, Karl Pearson studied correlation so that he could make arguments like this one (genuine, published argument from him — see the Nautilus article linked above):
Jewish children are on average less intelligent than non-Jewish children, and there's no statistically significant correlation with any environmental factors, therefore this is innate, therefore we should not allow Jews fleeing pogroms into the UK.
and claim that he was merely "following the data." It is precisely because statistics can only tell us if there is a correlation, if there is a signal in the data, but not why or what to do about it, that the field is (I believe) uniquely susceptible to this kind of misuse. This is why it is not an accident that statistics was developed by eugenicists. Statistics was necessary for eugenics to thrive in the way it did, leading to untold numbers of lives lost and destroyed.
We can't just throw statistics out, of course, since it can be very useful. For example, without statistics, we wouldn't have these wonderful COVID vaccines. So what can we do? During the COVID pandemic, the organization Data For Black Lives has been collecting and analyzing COVID data specifically related to Black people. As part of their research, they established a list of prior limitations on the use of data, even if you find statistically significant results. For example, from their website:
COVID-19 data should not be used to inform any of the following automated decision making systems, for example:
Predictive policing and enforcement of social distancing orders
Public safety assessments to determine whether a person can be released from jail or prison
...
Denying a person access to health care...
Denying a person access to public services and benefits
Statistics should be used, but it must have limits placed on the actions we can take based purely on finding statistical signals in the data. That is, we have two questions to ask about a statistical result:
is the statistical result methodologically valid
do any prior limitations we have imposed on ourselves prevent us from taking action based on this
I've been taking a course in Rabbinic theology this semester with Laynie Soloman, the associate Rosh Yeshiva at SVARA. We've spent quite some time looking at the midrashic/interpretive techniques of different Rabbis with regard to developing halakha. For example, must we start with the plain text and only apply a few rules of logical reasoning to develop halakha, or can we use more expansive midrashic techniques, pulling halakhos out of individual letters? Is just anyone allowed to use these techniques, or only certain people? All of these are questions of methodological validity.
In this week's Torah portion, for example, we read about the reconciliation between Esav and Yaakov:
וַיָּ֨רׇץ עֵשָׂ֤ו לִקְרָאתוֹ֙ וַֽיְחַבְּקֵ֔הוּ וַיִּפֹּ֥ל עַל־צַוָּארָ֖ו וַׄיִּׄשָּׁׄקֵ֑ׄהׄוּׄ וַיִּבְכּֽוּ
Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept.
You might notice that there are a bunch of dots over the word וישקהו (and he kissed him.) The Rabbis ask: when is it valid to create midrash based on these dots?
אמר רבי שמעון בן אלעזר
rabbi shimon ben elazar says
בכל מקום שאתה מוצא הכתב רבה על הנקדה אתה דורש את הכתב
in all places that you find more text than dots, you drash the text
הנקדה רבה על הכתב אתה דורש את הנקדה
more dots than text, you drash the dots
This is a question of methodological validity: in one case, it is valid to drash the dots more than the plain text, and in another case, not. (Incidentally, the above is my own translation. The translation of this passage on Sefaria says "in every place that you find a lot of text with few dots on top, you need to interpret the dots" but I think this is a mistake in translation. If you see something I'm missing here, let me know. The Radak agrees roughly with my translation.)
Of course, this doesn't help our case, where there is a dot over every letter. So what to do in this methodological uncertainty? There are a couple different strategies. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar continues to say:
כאן לא כתב רבה על הנקדה ולא נקדה רבה על ההכתב אלא מלמד שנכמרו רחמיו באותה השעה ונשקו בכל לבו
here there's no more text than dots and no more dots than text, rather it teaches that he [Esav] melted into his compassion in that precise moment and kissed with all his heart
This is a beautiful drash, but it comes with its own methodological concerns. For example, Rabbi Yannai argues that you could arrive at Rabbi Shimon's drash without using the dots at all, so then why are the dots there? It must mean (obviously) that Esav didn't intend to kiss Yaakov but to bite him, and that gd made Yaakov's neck hard and Esav's teeth soft. This is the meaning, Yannai claims, of the phrase "and they wept": Yaakov for his neck and Esav for his teeth.
I've talked before about how over-the-top the Rabbinic drive to villify Esav is, and I think this is no exception. This is the result, I think, of an over-emphasis on what techniques are valid to use in creating midrash and an under-emphasis on what kind of midrash we want to be creating. The Rabbis, after all, use standard rabbinic methods of midrash to turn even the most innocent or positive interactions between Esav and Yaakov into villifications of Esav. In this case, for example, the dispute between Shimon and Yannai appears to originate in a methodological debate over whether you need to interpret the dots. But can we place prior limitations on this use of midrash? Do we want it to be permissible to engage in xenophobic villification, as long as that villification is allowed by our accepted methods of producing interpretations?
You might argue that the case of Esav is just a case of storytelling, not one of deriving actionable halakha, and so what's the harm in telling a story where Esav is the villain. I would reply that even if this were true, the mostly one-sided nature of the Rabbinic stories and the extension of them to all descendants of Esav might still cause some problems. But in fact the Rabbis and commentators do use midrash on this verse and others to offer guidelines on how Jews should behave (which we might understand as halakha, broadly defined.) For example, in the Sforno on this verse, we learn:
It is of great concern to us seeing that we live among the descendants of Esau, people who are arrogant, consider themselves invincible. Yaakov’s conduct vis a vis Esau teaches that the only way to escape the sword of Esau is through self degradation and gifts....If the Jewish people during the period of the second Temple had taken [this] to heart, the Temple would not have been destroyed. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai testified to this when he said “if not for the militant extremists the Romans would not have destroyed the Temple.”
Thus the villification of Esav in midrash turns into villification of real people at the time of the Rabbis and into guidelines on how Jews should behave. This is completely understandable, given the oppression under which the Rabbis were living. But once the tendency toward xenophobia is ingrained in a tradition, it is very hard to extract, just as we are still struggling to remove eugenics from statistics.
My question, then, is what the ethical principles are that should guide the interpretation of our holy texts especially when using them as a guide to how we should live / our halakha. What are the prior limitations we impose so that even if our methods of inference are valid, we abstain from following them to certain conclusions or actions. Instead of creating thirteen methodological principles for deriving halakha, I want principles that limit the use of these methods.
Laynie Soloman has articulated one such principle, I believe, in making the distinction between dysphoric halakha and euphoric halakha. Dysphoric halakha, Soloman says, is a halakha that identifies people as problems. In the specific case of trans halakha, dysphoric halakha is halakha that defines transness by "the ways in which we aren’t right, we don’t work, and we are out of place." Just as we need to move away from our societal definition of transness in terms of dysphoria, in terms of the ways trans people suffer and "don't fit", we have to move away from this halakhic perspective even if its derivation is methodologically valid. Soloman writes:
We must move beyond a framework of dysphoria. Our task, instead, is to uncover the legal principles that enable us to find the authentic, affirming, joyful, and liberatory expressions of who we are. In other words, we must reveal euphoric** experiences of halakha. Instead of asking “What are the points of dissonance between our tradition as it has been practiced and trans realities?” we must ask “What are the profound opportunities for revelation that trans people can offer our learning communities and legal tradition?”
Saying that halakha should be euphoric is not a statement of methodology, but a principle that precedes methodology. A principle that says: even if your methods are valid, if the end result is dysphoric, we're not all that interested in living by it. We will not following logical deductions or midrashic inferences down a dysphoric path. What other paths must we avoid?
Towards euphoria, and gut shabes,
ada