"Don't know what a slide rule is for"

In October 1980 I was a month into my my seventh year of teaching.  I was teaching social studies at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx and the fall presidential campaign -- Jimmy Carter running for re-election against Ronald Reagan -- was an important part of our curriculum.  In those days political cartoons were always on the US History and Government Regents Examination so we introduced them in class from time to time.  It turns out that the visual language of those cartoons is anything but universal and so the tropes and memes have to be taught.

That need for teaching was glaringly apparent on this day.  I cannot find the cartoon, so I will have to describe it.  It showed Carter and Reagan debating.  Carter had a chalkboard covered with complex equations and cryptic symbols, while Reagan's chalkboard simply showed a smiley face.  My students were able to see that the cartoonist believed that Carter was overly complicating things and speaking over the voters' heads, while Reagan was over-simplifying the issues.  What they could not interpret was the device Carter held in his hand: a slide rule.  They had never seen one before; they didn't know what it was.

I graduated high school only ten years earlier, in 1970, when the slide rule was a clear marker of the science student and the engineer.  Not all my classmates knew how to use one.  Hell, I suppose most of them didn't even know what a slide rule was for. (See the great Sam Cooke's song, "What a Wonderful World.")  What I liked about multiplying and dividing with a slide rule was the constant reminder that you were approximating your third digit and that was the best you could measure anyway.  After all, I measure the distance from my home in the Bronx to my daughter's in Brooklyn in miles, not feet or inches.  Anything more than miles is a false precision.

The slide rule was a big deal in my house, too.  My dad was an engineer.  When he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946 and returned to college, his GI benefits didn't help much with tuition, because City College was still free!  But those benefits allowed him to purchase a top-of-the-line Keuffel and Esser slide rule for the equivalent of a week's pay, $25.  It was always near to hand when he was working, so I was happy to learn how to use one and get my one of my own, even if it was inexpensive and made of plastic.

The complete disappearance of the slide rule in just ten years, to the point that teens didn't even recognize it is pretty astonishing.  People today know what CD's are, even though it has been fifteen years since the first iPod came out.  People still go to the movies seventy years after the popularization of home TV.  But a slide rule is an antique, a piece of technical arcana.  It has been erased.

That year, when I was a high school senior, the first "pocket" calculators came out.  One of my classmates, the only child of well-to-do parents, got one.  It was what we later called "four function," meaning it could add, subtract, multiply and divide.  By the time of that Reagan-Carter cartoon in 1980 you could buy such a thing for under $5 and actually fit it in your shirt pocket.  The calculator my classmate had in 1970 sold for about $500, was about the size of a modern tablet (9"x5"), and weighed a lot.  And $500 in 1970?  More than the $2000 cost of a laptop today.  I bought my first used car then for $300.

I couldn't imagine why anybody would want such a thing.  But I have been remarkably blind to the emergence of the calculator all along.  I'll permit you another opportunity to laugh at me.  In 1983 or 1984 I took a year of college physics because I felt like it.  When it came time for the first exam I saw that all my classmates were carrying calculators.  I smiled, because I was absolutely certain the professor would forbid us to use them.  These were programmable devices; you could save all the formulas we were being tested on right inside the calculator.  Why would they be allowed in an exam room.  But I was the idiot: they all got to use their calculators while I was left doing all my computations with a pencil.

When I was an assistant principal for Math and Science at Monroe Campus in 2001 all our ninth graders had to learn how to use a graphing calculator.  They were encouraged to use it on their Regents exams and we had to provide one for each of them in class and during the exam.  But when I say "learn how to use" that is exactly what I mean.  They were not intuitive at all and required the mastery of a particular set of key strokes.  I remember one principal actually scolding parents for buying their children $120 shoes instead of that $100 calculator.  Her position was that if they didn't practice with it nightly, on each homework assignment, then they would be at a profound disadvantage on the day of the test.

Today (and for the last ten years) I have all the functionality of that calculator in my pocket at all times.  It is built into my telephone, along with a high-definition video camera, a GPS app, a music player, a portable TV and all sorts of other things.  It is a much easier calculator to use than that TI-82, but I suppose that the kids still can't bring it into exams because it also allows them to text answers to one another.  In any case, I have seen electronic miniaturization erase the slide rule, replacing it with the pocket calculator, and now -- almost -- erase that calculator, too.

But I still think that one think has been lost, and it has to do with the false precision I mentioned above.  I keep on seeing people who mistakenly think that all those decimal places we get, on calculators or phone apps, actually mean something.  In 1996 I saw a student presentation by a tenth-grader on the  epidemiology of sexually-transmitted disease.  For her study she inferred the number of STD's among teens in a particular census tract in the Bronx.  She multiplied the CDC's estimate of teen STD rate by the number of teens in that tract in 1990.  I will ignore now (I did not then) the conceptual flaws in this method.  But my other problem was that she hit on a number of cases with decimal places extending to the limit of her calculator!

Let me clarify.  She confidently announced that in the neighborhood of the school, there were 637.1501792 teens with STD's.  (No, I don't remember the exact number, but you get the idea.)  I questioned her about her precision.  I asked her what .1501792 of a teen looked like.  I asked her what .1501792 of an STD was.  I even asked her why she was certain it was 637.  She grew increasingly angry with my questions and simply redid the computations on her calculator and angrily shoved the display in my face.  She was a bright girl.  And, yes, she was nervous about presenting her work.  She was even more nervous about my challenging it... after all, her teacher had accepted it and had approved it for presentation, so this was hardly her fault.

But the underlying problem remains. I can use a stopwatch (also in my phone!) to time myself walking a measured mile and conclude that my speed was 160.9344 meters/second.  But was that mile measured with that degree of precision?  Was the starting line itself marked off thinner than a micrometer?  Did I accurately start my timer when the leading edge of my finger crossed the plane of that (extremely thin) starting line?  How about when I crossed the (equally thin) finishing line?  Was I a millisecond fast or slow in hitting the start and the stop on the timer?

Three digits.  That's what a slide rule could handle.  I think that's also a reasonable standard for most measurements.  I don't mourn the loss of the slide rule.  I like my phone's calculator.  I like its graphing calculator, too.  But I always think about just how quickly that slide rule disappeared.  And I do miss those three digits.

Speedily Restore the Temple? Um, NO!

Back in the early nineties we traveled to Hawaii, a trip I had been wanting to make for a very long time.  On the overnight flight there, flying west across the Pacific, the sun started to rise behind the plane, lighting both sky and ocean a bright red.  Immediately a couple of Orthodox Jewish men, probably Chabad by their clothing, went to the rear of the cabin.  Each put on his tallit gadol and tefillin and – facing the tail -- began davening Shachrit.  It was a reminder to me that morning is wherever you are and that Jerusalem can always be located by the rising sun.

A few days later we were on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island.  We visited Pu’ukohola Heiau, the temple where Kamehameha sacrificed his rival to gain mana for the conquest of the islands.  The heiau itself is closed to visitors, but Native Hawaiians use it.  We could see pebbles and ti leaves left as prayers, but we also saw people praying while we were there.  In the visitor center a little girl complained that the site was kapu to women as well as haoles.

The juxtaposition of these two events interested me: one located in a place of power on a rocky coast, the other apparently cut loose from all geography and even from the ground itself.  It reminded me that Judaism has been a religion of exile.  How has worship that began in a Temple in Jerusalem been able to survive all this time in the absence of that Temple and far from it? 

2600 years ago, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers stormed into the city, sacked the Temple of Solomon, and took many hundreds of leading families into captivity in Babylon 600 miles away.  They were cut off from their center of worship, which – in any case – no longer existed!  How could their religion survive?  How could they survive as a distinct people?  I cannot express this problem better than they did themselves in Tehillim 137 (Al Naharot Bavel):

By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat,

sat and wept,

as we thought of Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung up our lyres,

for our captors asked us there for songs,

our tormentors, for amusement,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How can we sing a song of the Lord

on someone else’s soil?

Looking back from this distance in time the answer appears to have been… by singing those songs!  That poem is itself a form of worship and a song of the Lord.  The roughly sixty-year exile saw a literary outpouring of new and re-worked material: legends, histories, songs, prophetic literature, poetry.  The very idea of a Torah and of a Bible is a product of those people, in that place, at that time.  And it was that literature that enabled them to continue as a people.  Stories of a captivity in Egypt and a triumphal return enabled them to imagine their own return some day.  The story of the Law of Moses enabled them to reinvent that law for their present circumstances. 

When the Persians allowed the Judeans to return to Jerusalem, they immediately restarted the sacrifices that had been interrupted by the destruction of their Temple.  But they also began the practice of public reading of the Torah (Nehemiah, Chapter 8.)  And that practice of reading and studying and interpreting developed in parallel with the renewed Temple worship once a new Temple was built. 

The texts that we know as the Bible underwent continued creation (the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, most obviously) and editing during this period.  The body of scholars and sages known as Sanhedrin became a parallel institution to the leadership of the Temple priesthood.  By the time of King Herod the party of Pharisees (followers of these scholars) presented themselves as a popular alternative to the Sadducees, the party of the priests.

When the Romans razed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Temple worship could no longer continue.  The religious life of the Judeans could only exist in the study and prayer that had been initiated by the teachers associated with the Sanhedrin.  Later, when the Romans crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, most Judean Jews were killed, exiled or sold into slavery.  The only way to retain a religious identity as a people was to embrace the literature and scholarship of the rabbis.  And – of course – to replace the Temple sacrifices with synagogue worship.

Which raises some very serious questions for me.  If our identity as Jewish people was based on our liturgy and our Torah scholarship, with yearning for Jerusalem mainly notional, what happened when the political Zionism of the 19^th century succeeded and Jews around the world were able to actually have a State of Israel?  Were we to scrap twenty-five hundred years of culture and religious thought and replace it with the Kingdom of David?  I meet people whose entire sense of Jewish identity seems to revolve around the twin poles of victimhood (the Nazi Holocaust) and invincibility (the myth of the IDF.)  These people seem to know nothing whatever of Jewish thought.  And all they know of our history is the tragedies: the pogroms, the expulsions, the blood libels.  They apparently think that these past tragedies not only excuse any horrors the State of Israel commits now, but actually sanctify them!

The Talmud tells us (Shabbat 31a) that a non-Jew once asked Rabbi Hillel to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one leg.  Hillel told him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah.  The rest is commentary; go and learn it.”  Am I seriously supposed to embrace the triumphalist, “might-makes-right” ideology that justifies the mass murder of Gazans as a viable replacement for the ethics of Hillel?

This new religion takes as its holy objects Galil assault rifles, Delilah cruise missiles, Jericho ICBM’s, and Sa’ar warships.  It is an apparently secular religion with no form of worship other than shooting.  And you can see the icons of this worship in this country every time a TV writer insists on including an ass-kicking Mossad agent in some irrelevant place, like an NCIS office.  You can see it when teenaged American Jewish boys wear their IDF t-shirts.

But – apparently not to be outdone – the Jewish “religious” right has now decided it is time to rebuild the Temple!  Never mind the fact that this involves razing the third holiest mosque in Islam: why would we listen to Hillel on this subject if not on any other?  I think the outrage this bizarre project inspires in Muslims (along with all sane people) may, in fact, be a large part of the point.

There is more, though.  The Temple worship required the sacrifice of large numbers of animals: cattle, sheep, goats, birds.  It must have resembled a slaughter-house, with blood running through the courtyards and the smell of shit everywhere.  Long before the destruction of the First Temple, around 740 BCE, the prophet Isaiah preached:

“What need have I of all your sacrifices?”

says the Lord.

“I am sated with burnt offerings of rams,

and suet of fatlings,

and blood of bulls;

and I have no delight

in lambs and he-goats…”

“Cease to do evil;

Learn to do good.

Devote yourselves to justice;

Aid the wronged.

Uphold the rights of the orphan;

Defend the cause of the widow.”  (Isaiah 1:11, 17)

The prophet Hosea, who lived in the northern kingdom around the same time as Isaiah was even more explicit:

I desire goodness, not sacrifice;

obedience to God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)

And the prophet Amos:

If you offer Me burnt offerings – or your meal offerings –

I will not accept them;

I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings…

But let justice well up like water,

Righteousness like an unfailing stream.  (Amos 5:22, 24)

Nevertheless, these modern “Torah Jews” are fixated on the mitzvot that we cannot perform without a Temple.  They are fixated on recreating the garments that priests must wear to perform sacrifices.  I am too personally repelled by the thinking behind this to repeat it, but you can find their rationales on their website.  They are busily engaged in creating the hardware for all this butchery: altar, knives, curtains, lamps, etc.

I realize as I write this that I shouldn’t be surprised.  A people who can accept the deaths of two thousand Gazans as not quite sufficient retribution for the unrelated murder of three Israeli teens is certainly not going to be deterred by the substitution of animal slaughter for prayer.  It is a death cult already.  Why not make this explicit?

I started writing this by referring to the Pu’ukohola Heiau on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is still used by Native Hawaiians today.  They aren’t sacrificing their enemies, there, though.  They are offering stones and leaves and prayers.  The Chiricahua Apache – like the Judeans in the days of Nebuchadnezzar – were taken captive and held for decades hundreds of miles from their homeland.  They managed to preserve their identity with worship, most importantly the ceremony in which Changing Woman temporarily inhabits the bodies of teenaged girls.  I mention this as a reminder that the Jewish experience of exile and captivity is not unique in the history of the world.  Neither is our experience of genocide.  They are no excuse for us to become Nebuchadnezzars or Pharaohs or Hitlers.

In some very important ways I have no standing to make these observations.  I do not attend synagogue or participate regularly in minyan.  I do not bentsch tefillin or wear tzitzit or eat kosher.  I do not believe in a Creator.  But I truly wish somebody with the standing to criticize these people would do so.  We regularly hear requests from non-Muslims that Muslim leaders denounce the ISILs and al Qaedas as not representing true Islam.  We regularly hear Muslim leaders making exactly those denunciations, at least those of us who are listening hear it.  Where then, are the denunciations of the death cult of militaristic Zionism as “not true Judaism”?  Where – especially – are the rabbinic denunciations of the death cult that wants to restore animal sacrifice to the har ha-Bayit as “not true Judaism”?  I am waiting.