Counting the Omer: Gevurah

[#2 in a series]

Let's start with Jewish joke #54:

On Yom Kippur, the rabbi stops in the middle of the service, prostrates himself beside the bema, and cries out, "Oh, God. Before You, I am nothing!"

Saul Rosenberg, president of the temple is so moved by this demonstration of piety that he immediately throws himself to the floor beside the rabbi and cries, "Oh, God! Before you, I am nothing!"

Then Chaim Pitkin, a tailor, jumps from his seat, prostrates himself in the aisle and cries, "Oh God! Before You, I am nothing!"

Rosenberg nudges the rabbi and whispers, "So look who thinks he's nothing!"

There is no simple English translation of the term Gevurah, which suggests boundaries, limits, discipline, humility, strength, and judgement. It's something of an antinomy or dual with chesed, so where chesed suggests a somewhat sloppy, overflowing sense of love, gevurah is severe, withholding, proper. Perhaps accuracy is a good word to use. The idea is not to abase yourself, but to have an accurate representation of yourself, to be neither grandiose or unnecessarily small.

I usually worship limitlessness, at least in the intellectual plane. My goal has always been to know everything, connect everything, take home every book in the library and somehow incorporate it into myself, to not be limited by any field or discipline. This is of course impossible, ridiculous. It's a bit disturbing how much the world has evolved towards making this ridiculous goal sort-of realized, what with devices that provide internet everywhere and much of the world's knowledge at the other end. But sadly, having all that at my fingertips doesn't quite equate to my actually knowing everything, in fact it just makes it all the more clear how little I actually know.

So limits, boundaries, structure, to whatever it is I am trying to do sound amazingly useful. Simply agreeing to follow the Omer for a few weeks creates some structure and focus. A sense of humility might also be useful, in that recognizing my finite, serial-processing brain is never going to be able to absorb even a small fraction of the interesting and worthwhile material available to it. Somehow I need to face these limits squarely rather than dance around them. Embrace finitude.

I've written before how the social media seem to screw up boundaries -- of social spaces, and of the self. They create connections and break down barriers, to good and ill effect -- but in that post I was complaining about the generalized mush it makes of our social connections, reducing a rich texture of bounded spaces into flatland.

Boundaries are obviously important political issues, whether literally as in borders and immigration policies, or more subtle questions of what the boundaries of citizenship are, what it means to belong or not belong, to be an insider or outsider. Boundaries are also social constructs, meaning they are part illusory, part permeable, and that work has to be put into maintaining them. Again, my first strong instinct is resentment and indignation at borders, seeing as how they are tools of the state to control individuals. But then again I don't want the whole world tramping through my living room. Some boundaries are not only useful but necessary, and institutions like individuals need some kind of membrane that sets them off from everything else.

I am looking for the right balance between respecting and resenting these walls, between acknowledging them and bypassing them.



A software engineer's meditations on humility

Fictional borders

JEH Smith points out in a couple of excellent posts that ethnically speaking the Hispanics were here first so we have a bit of nerve asking them to produce papers to prove their "legality". I loved this because it took a view of the issue that is zoomed up a couple orders of magnitude from the stuff in the newspapers, and highlights the essential fictiousness of states and borders. And how the demographic and economic facts on the ground can trump such fictions, no matter how much effort is made to translate the fictions into walls of concrete, barbed wire, and guns.

Taking the god's-eye-view of situations that are hopelessly unresolvable on the ground is fun. Whee!

The problem...is that the American West was only able to appear as Anglo territory, for a spell, as a result of a relatively recent (late 19th century) and concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is astounding to me that people have to be reminded of the historical fact that in order for the American West to become white, other people had to be displaced.... the population of Mexico is somewhere between 60 and 80% Mestizo, and that for them the line drawn by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 reflects no natural or deep-seated historical boundary.
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There is a cultural-geographical family there that cannot be made to fit with the arbitrary borders of states.... But the fact that it is proving difficult to maintain the Anglo identity of the borderlands needs to be understood in terms of geography, demography, and history, not as a testament to the scofflaw character of the 'illegals'.
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The northern limit of Latin America in fact extends well to the north of the US-Mexican border, and the relatively recent efforts at Anglicization do not change this historical reality.

Ethnic conflict is no joke, even if it plays out slowly over a scale of centuries. The current dust-up in Arizona is minor league and hopefully not a harbinger of more intense forms of conflict. When ethnicities face each other across a porous, fictional, and unstable border, the alternatives are conflict ultimately resulting in extermination or expulsion on the one hand, or multiculturalism or hybridization on the other. It's clear which is the preferred path, but it's also clear what happens in the normal course of history:

Now I happen to think that ethnic cleansing simply is the default activity of the human species. This is something that is perfectly easy for archaeologists to acknowledge when attempting to explain why the pottery shards of one civilization are found at a certain depth in the ground, and those of another civilization at a lower depth. Let's not play stupid: it's because the lower guys were driven out or exterminated. Why? Because their land had stuff the higher guys wanted. That's human history in nuce, yet for some reason people prefer to pretend that the human present is governed by different rules than the past...