The Shabbos Goy – Solidarity or Shanda

June 14, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

The shabbos goy used to annoy me. I don’t mean the goy himself; I never met one. I mean the whole concept.  The Bible says, “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day” (Exodus 35:3). The shabbos goy was the person Jews hired to light their ovens on the Sabbath so they could still cook without technically violating the commandment. Strictly observant Jews extend the fire-kindling prohibition to anything that might start an electric current – turning on the lights, or pushing an elevator button.  Somewhere today, no doubt, a shabbos goy has gone into an Orthodox home, turned on the TV, and tuned it to ESPN for the World Cup.

This legalistic ploy allows Jews to keep the letter of the law while violating its spirit, and I always found it embarrassing. Is this what we want others to see in how Jews practice their religion?  A shanda fur die goyim. It’s sort of like getting around “Thou shalt not kill” by hiring a hit-man goy.  The purpose of the commandment, I thought, is to make everyday life more difficult so that Jews would spend their time worshiping God. Instead, they hire a shabbos goy so they can have their sabbath cake and bake it too.

It wasn’t just the hypocrisy that bothered me. It was the tone that accompanied it – at worst a smug satisfaction, more typically an amiable chuckle – as though there were virtue in putting one over on God.

How unsociological of me. How could I not have remembered Durkheim? Religion – its rituals and rules – is not about suffering or self-denial or carrying out God’s wishes; it’s about group solidarity. The point of the laws is to draw the boundary lines of the group. Like the funny clothes and hair styles, these laws separate Us from Them. These are our laws. They define who we are. It doesn’t matter so much that we believers have also evolved ways to circumvent them.

What reminded me of this was an article in the Atlantic (here) by Dominic Pettman.  (“Dominic, Dominic,” I can hear my grandmother rolling the name around in her head – “interrogating” it, as we might now say - and finally asking point blank: “Is he Jewish?”  I don’t know, Grandma.)  Pettman lives in a building with a shabbos elevator. It is programmed to stop at every floor so that the strictly Orthodox don’t have to push a button. Of course, if you live on a high floor, all those stops take forever.  Jews must suffer. Sometimes.

Pettman chides me for my accusations of hypocrisy.  “Certainly we cannot pretend to know if God is angered by the conceit of the Shabbos elevator, or if He chuckles at the elaborate nature of the solution.” True. Maybe God is totally cool with the shabbos goy, and I am wrong to think that the Jews who hire him are hypocrites. More important, the hypocrisy in this case is sociologically irrelevant.

For the Durkheimian angle, Pettman digs out a copy of a 2003 book by folkorist Alan Dundes, The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges. I’m not sure I agree with all of Dundes’s ideas, for example the one about the “Jewish character” being “culturally and historically drawn to ingenuous workarounds.” Dundes takes the Durkheimian idea to places beyond where I would go. Solidarity, he says, comes not just from the special rules but also from the communal subterfuges for avoiding them and the collective rationalizations for this avoidance.  I disagree, on the basis of no evidence, probably because I would still be embarrassed to think that these “counter customs” (as Dundes calls them) are essential to Jewish solidarity* rather than merely incidental. 

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* I should add that I myself have never felt much solidarity with the Orthodox community.

Unintended Insights

June 12, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes it’s hard to be a conservative, supporting a status quo that’s not working, at least not for large numbers of people.

Brad Wilcox’s latest defense-of-marriage op-ed, “One way to end violence against women? Married dads” (here), carried the seeds of its own destruction (or at least deconstruction).  It’s not just that Wilcox failed to control for things like age, social class, and time trend. The trouble was that while the article was, on its surface, a sermon on how marriage makes women safer, the subtext was a damning critique of the gender status quo. Wilcox did not make that critique explicit, nor did he intend the article to be a feminist document. Just the opposite: “So, women: if you’re the product of a good marriage, and feel safer as a consequence, lift a glass to dear old dad this Sunday.”

But by pointing out the relative safety of married women, Wilcox was also calling attention to the dangers faced every day by unmarried women. The karaoke track Wilcox wanted was “Stand By Your Man” – clear support for the benefits of marriage. But what he wound up singing was “Stand By Your Man . . . Or Else.”

This focus on threat was not accidental. The op-ed begins with the UC Santa Barbara shootings and the “millions of girls and women [who] have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack.” You could hardly blame his critics for homing in on the “Or Else.”

Wilcox moved on to laud “some other men [who] are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers.” [Emphasis in the original.] It’s almost as though in response to Sandy Hook or other school shootings he had written an op-ed extolling the safety of home schooling.  It may be true, but “Home school your child . . . or else” ignores the way most parents think about the problem and its possible solutions.

It’s risky to point out dangers and then tell people to seek individual solutions. Urging those on the short end of the stick to keep holding on to it may work, but it may also lead them to the sociological insight that the problems are in the system. In the early years of this blog (here) I used “Stand By Your Man” as an example. National Review had put it among “the  50 greatest conservative rock songs.”*  Yet despite the song’s ostensible support for the status quo, it is also telling women what a crummy deal marriage is for them. Imagine a Saudi version that began the same way – “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” – and went on to list problems like jealous co-wives, no driving, no going outside alone or clothed in anything but a black tent, and so on.The resounding refrain of “Stand by your man” might ring a bit hollow.

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* The song is not rock; it’s pure country. If you are unfamiliar with this Tammy Wynette classic, you can hear and see her lip-sync it here.

Down These Mean Median Streets

June 11, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

For a quick illustration of the difference between mean and median, I often use the example of income. I choose a plausible average (mean) for the classroom population and review the math. “If Bill Gates walks into the room,” I say, “the average income is now in the billions. The median hasn’t has hardly moved, but the mean has gone way up.” So has the Gini coefficient.

Here’s a more realistic and global illustration – the net worth of people in the wealthier countries.  The US ranks fourth in average worth – $301,000 per person . . .

. . . but the median is far lower – $45,000, 19th out of the twenty nations shown.  (The graph is from Credit Suisse via CNN )

The US is a wealthy nation compared with others, but  “average” Americans, in the way that term is generally understood, are poorer than their counterparts in other countries.

But as with so many things, most Americans are unaware of how life is lived in other countries.  In our ignorance and arrogance, we just know that, although things may not be perfect here, they are in all respects better than anywhere else.  As Sen. Marco Rubio put it at the 2012 Republican convention, speaking about Democratic proposals on things like inequality and health care, “These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America.”

The key word, of course, is “threaten.”  Affordable health care for all,  a higher median net worth – are these a threat? Only in America – or, more accurately, Republican America.

Marriage and Protection from Violence

June 10, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

This was the original headline in the Post Everything op-ed by Bradley Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson.

Apparently, many outraged readers pointed out the  “blame the victim” assumption in the headline. Or as Erin Gloria Ryan, at Jezebel translated it,  “Violence Against Women Will End When You Sluts Get Married.”

Others pointed out that the data did not support that claim.  Wilcox, the lead author, tweeted.

The new headline wasn’t much better.

Offensive terms like “baby daddy” have been removed, but the idea is the same. And while Wilcox didn’t write those headlines, they do represent his thesis: marriage as protection.

And, most fundamentally, for the girls and women in their lives, married fathers provide direct protection by watching out for the physical welfare of their wives and daughters, and indirect protection by increasing the odds they live in safe homes and are not exposed to men likely to pose a threat. So, women: if you’re the product of a good marriage, and feel safer as a consequence, lift a glass to dear old dad this Sunday.

Philip Cohen (here)  has looked at the data, which clearly shows the trend Wilcox has been wringing his hands about for a long time: marriage in the US is on the decline. Wilcox would predict that the fall in marriage rates would result in huge increases in violence against wives and girlfriends.

But it hasn’t.  In this same period, the data show, “intimate partner violence” has also declined.  (Cohen’s analysis requires a bit of statistical sophistication, but his discussion makes the data clear, and his post is well worth reading.)

There are ecological-fallacy problems in the data, as Cohen acknowledges. But such problems have not prevented Wilcox from drawing shaky conclusions about the broad benefits of marriage.  Philip even provides a parody version of Wilcox’s strategy, though Cohen uses the data to draw the opposite conclusions about marriage.

We had reason to believe marriage was harmful, on average . . . as if marriage feeds off itself in a violence loop. . . . The bottom line is that intimate partner violence is much less common in years when marriage is more rare.

Cohen is kidding.  Sort of.  Underlying the traditional marriage – the one Wilcox takes as the ideal – is a power imbalance.  For Wilcox, that’s a good thing. As he says, husband/fathers provide “protection,” both direct and indirect.

But the marriage-as-protection trope reminded me of something Philip Slater wrote forty years ago:

In relation to women, men have taken the stance assumed by the warrior-aristocrat toward the peasant: “If you feed me, I will protect you.” Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: “Give me what I want and I will protect you against me.