is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Where 'is' is not 'ought.'
One night in my Talmud reading group (you heard me.), as we were reading through a complicated set of commentaries on a story of two people who approach a judge both claiming ownership of a cloak, one of the students complained that 1) she couldn�t understand all the fuss over a cloak and 2) couldn�t one of them just punch the other, grab the cloak, and run? The Rabbi covered #1 admirably by saying (in just the voice you�re imagining), �come on, in those days a cloak was like a buick! it was valuable.� (A question that I posed to myself at that point in time was: do buicks still exist? The choice of automobile names is even funnier given that the Rabbi looks like he is 12 or something.) To address #2, when there was a lull in the conversation, I said, �the point of beginning a story with two men approaching a judge is to show that both have already decided not to solve the dispute by resorting to violence. it is a story about law.� (I mean, dude, we�re reading the TALMUD.) That didn�t seem to make much of an impression on her. So I suggested that perhaps the cloak in question was a Chanel cloak. That registered because it was the week after the most recent Barney�s sale, where life is often nasty, brutish, and short.
I think what was missing was an understanding that two men claiming ownership of a cloak might choose to approach a judge without being coerced into doing so by any form of power beyond their own desire to solve a conflict by means other than violence or theft.
There is a whole complicated mass of things to be said by me at just this moment about whether meaningful freedom means �giving the law to yourself� and, if it does, how that would be accomplished, given that we aren�t just born with �the law� within us, and, what with the fine line between pedagogy and indoctrination, where does the �law� that we �give� to �ourselves� come from (and, while we�re at it, where do our �selves� come from� it�s not like we are just born with those all fully formed either), and how neither reason nor the passions nor traditions, conventions, or training are an unerring guide to justice or good judgment, oy, but in beginning on such a path I already know I�m headed toward an argument that subverts linear temporality and that no one reading this over coffee in the morning wants to read such a thing. At least that is how the story seems to me just now. So I�ll wait until I�m less tired and more hopeful.
This is also a way of deferring the inevitable turn to Rousseau and Kant that comes from a paragraph such as the one just prior to this one. It would be easy enough if I could just believe in Rousseau and/or Kant enough to give you their solution(s) to the problem. But I cannot in good conscience do so.
Still, that I often have to point out to young adults that law isn�t only about �the man� or unfair treatment, that it is embodied in how we inhabit our own selves and comport ourselves toward others� that law is not only simple legality or the admittedly imperfect justice of errant or corrupt institutions� (though that is part of what it is)� it makes a person wonder about civic education, despite the unending worry �a person� might have about the fine line between pedagogy and indoctrination, and the further worry a person might have about teaching a tradition that has ideas of legality and responsibility that are simultaneously so hopeful and so warped, that learning more about the tradition might only turn the students from being cynics who have no real understanding of what law is into cynical lawyers who pride themselves on understanding what the law ought to do while doing whatever they can to work the system as it is (where �is� is not �ought�).
This entry has been brought to you by the aging spirit of a young girl whose dad, on days such as this, would call her "Crabby Jill."
Good morning!
Don't worry. Some of the students will never lose their idealism. And some of them will even be idealist lawyers. And a select few of them will even dream up new ideas to displace ideals whose time has come.
In other news: on Friday, the gentleman named Josiah brought me Levinas cake. It is tasty. On Saturday I made Gus a fancy meal, and that was fun.
12:36 a.m. - March 20, 2007
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