Seen in Shaare Tzedek Hospital, Jerusalem:

The white outlets are part of the ordinary hospital circuitry.

The brown outlets lead to the grama circuit, an electrical system designed to indirectly close circuits on the Jewish Sabbath — not something you’ll find in common home use, but perfectly acceptable for use for the sick. Also on the grama circuit is the call button, so that patients will feel free to call for a nurse even if they don’t have an emergency (for an emergency, anything will do, of course).

Not shown are the red outlets, on the emergency generator circuit, and often designed to accept hospital equipment only.

If you’ve ever heard Orson Welles on the radio, you know his style: the deep voice of authority, the dramatic pacing of volume and tone, the occasional gong punctuating the most climactic statements. Fourteen August is Orson at his most… Wellesian. And then comes the kicker: “With God and Uranium on our side…”

I nearly swallowed my chocolate.

It’s a classic snapshot of the attitude of the late 1940s and early 1950s: the belief that any problem could be conquered with the concerted focus of good scientific brainpower. Of course, many of world’s problems could be resolved — or at least relieved somewhat — by more attention (money, brainpower, willingness, etc.). But some have turned out to be resistant to such treatment, which makes the explicit faith in science come across as pathetically naive.

What is today’s equivalent?

One of my interests is medical ethics. I’ve gone through much of the contemporary Orthodox bioethical literature, subscribed for many years to Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, and am a voracious reader of all most things medical (well, dermatology’s just not my thing).

There are some advantages to reading what the professionals read: I’ve been able to help a number of family members and friends to research diagnoses and treatments, as well as benefiting from a realistic, unvarnished image of the biases and conflicts within the profession. (In the December 2000 issue of Jewish Observer I published a small piece entitled Ethics, Ethics, Everywhere, describing the efforts of my grandfather’s doctor to “let him go” after he suffered a stroke.)

I have great respect for doctors and the knowledge they carry. But they’re only people, with all the opinions, biases, and weaknesses that implies.

This week Jerusalem Post health reporter Judy Siegel reported that Samuel Golubchuk, the 84-year-old frum Jew from Winnepeg, whose doctors seek to remove him from his ventilator and feeding tube, had awakened. Mr. Golubchuk is now described as “awake, alert, has returned back to his baseline, sitting up in a chair at times, more interactive, and shaking hands purposively.”

Nevertheless his doctors still seek to kill him, and are contesting the matter in court, including moving to exclude the affidavits of experts on the grounds that they arrived too late. Apparently winning to them is more important than Mr. Golubchuk’s life. Indeed in a similar case recently in Calgary, involving an elderly Chinese man, whose family contested the doctors’ decision to cut off life support, and won, the patient eventually improved so much that he was able to walk out of the hospital and return home. Nevertheless the doctors continued to pursue an appeal. Presumably they wanted to bring him back to the hospital and kill him. [via CrossCurrents]

Jonathan Rosenblum is writing a little sarcastically here, but that shouldn’t disguise the fact that this is a really, really important case, and one which the religious Jewish community has been following closely for a week or so now. (The Golubchuk family asserts, without contradiction, that their father would want lifesaving measures taken, were he able to express himself.) I am not Canadian, and don’t know where one would begin making one’s voice heard on this issue, but I do know that we must not watch silently.

Why? Because this is not just “somebody else’s” problem. Because unless you hold deeply Galtonian Social Darwinist beliefs, it should matter to you that your own personal wishes for your care be respected. If you are, G-d forbid, ever unable to speak for yourself, you do want your Living Will to be consulted, don’t you? And you would like to have the person to whom you’ve granted power of attorney for healthcare matters consulted and their decisions followed, don’t you?

There’s a tricky side to this: vulnerability.

A GUI (graphical user interface) that offers too many options is just plain overwhelming. Keeping the interface simple and straightforward reduces stress, encourages uptake, and is conducive to a more positive user experience. It is not easy to create an interface that is simple and straightforward, and at the same time offers powerful user control over details (Apple is remarkable for their ability to successfully design software this way).

Now think about a person whose “task function” is to make life-and-death decisions on behalf of someone they love very deeply. Even a well-prepared child will not find it easy to decide whether it is kinder to “stop the suffering” or to “do everything possible” or something in between. Under stressful conditions, the burden is almost unbearable. Following the advice of a knowledgeable doctor is the equivalent of simplifying the GUI. It makes the decisions straightforward and far simpler, while reducing the burden of responsibility. And the doctor should know, right?

Well… there’s the rub.

I had occasion yesterday to be in a group comprised of a disproportionate number of very poor women. Not women who think they are poor — most probably don’t think so — but they are.

Notable: lots of very bad teeth. Missing teeth, discolored teeth, teeth headed in all directions.

Why? First, dental coverage is weak in Israel, despite health coverage being all right. So those who haven’t got the money simply don’t have the work done.

That’s the obvious reason. There’s another reason, culturally rooted, and more potent: in haredi culture, people take pride in being non-materialistic. That’s helpful for coping if you’re poor, although it doesn’t incentivize for climbing out of poverty (another story). It also means that in certain haredi circles, women are proud of looking dowdy. Dowdiness implies disdain of trends and fashion, and a focus on more important things than external appearance. This makes spending money on external appearance less compelling than it is in other circles.

Understand that I’m not making any sweeping statements. There are other equally religious haredi circles in which the women’s clothes will make your eyes pop out (”the Europeans”), and others in which the mothers dress down but make up for it on their kids’ wardrobes and decorating their homes. But there is this anti-materialistic group, as well, and seeing it yesterday in a concentrated form (dozens at a time) was striking.

When the secular Israeli media look down on haredi society (and they do), it is generally the stereotype of this anti-materialist segment that they are despising: Bad teeth. Outdated clothes. Shabby “grandmother” shoes on women in their 40s. No makeup. Sagging stockings.

That’s the external appearance.

Internally:

Intense focus on being good, loving mothers — the education of the children comes before everything — including reading books and joining workshops on the subject. Pushing themselves to their physical limits to help neighbors and strangers with a hot meal, babysitting, a listening ear, a relevant referral. Genuine interest in and care for everyone they meet.

When I had the option, I chose to live in a neighborhood with a higher proportion of poor families rather than a neighborhood with a higher proportion of “Europeans”. For one thing, it made me feel rich, whereas the other neighborhood likely would have made me feel deprived. But I also relish the intensity, the purity, the focus on the real things in life uncluttered by recreational shopping, ice coffee, and vacations in the Alps.

It’s a different world, and a refreshing one.

It’s a culture that deserves respect and awe, not disdain and discrimination.

Seen today in Jerusalem: 

Kudos to National Geographic for being true to its tradition of respect for other cultures.

Now available: an alternate edition of the Israeli edition of National Geographic magazine — targeted to the “Torah Observant community” (the term is inclusive of National-Religious, Sephardic, and haredi groups). Presumably, this NG version selects articles that avoid controversial discussions of evolution, and edits out those images of indigenous women that kept the boys in my fifth-grade class so interested in anthropology.

Thanks to Mr. Deadfish for the National Theographic title.

Friday night was not an ordinary Sabbath evening in our haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem. At 2:30am I was wakened by a police car circling the streets, announcing: “Dear Residents: A 12-year old child is missing from his home. All who are able should come to help in the search.” The quiet zone that is Shabbos was broken.

Men in fur shtreimels, men in suits and ties, men in flannel pajamas and bathrobes, yeshiva students in sweatsuits, carrying flashlights, riding motorcycles, patrolling in cars. Helicopters circling low, flare explosions down in the valley, police hunching over a map big enough to serve
as a Shabbos tablecloth.

Hushed mid-street conferences under the yellow glow of the streetlights. Cars, motorcycles, ambulances, and police vans patrolling the silent streets. Tens of people working their way methodically from synagogue to synagogue. By 4.00am, hundreds of neighbors were quietly taking up the trail. Down the mountainside, out to the highway, peering into the ancient and crumbling structures in Lifta, carloads dispatched to an ever-increasing radius of Jerusalem neighborhoods, Ezrat Torah, Ganei Geula, Mea Shearim, Geula, Har Nof, Givat Shaul, Bayit Vegan, Ramot.

By daybreak, several hundred people had fanned out to search, building by building, from roof to basement, then to report back to the headquarters at the community center.

Serious faces, determined expressions, blistered feet, up and down hundreds and thousands of stairs. Jackets going on and off in the cold air and heat of exertion. Every hour, the announcement repeated: “A boy has been missing from his home since the afternoon. All who are able should come help in the search.”

…the exhaustion, and the swell of relief as the news spread that he was found.

The right technology chosen for the right context. Compare with reverse 9-1-1 alerts during the California fires, and silent radio frequencies for wartime communication.

Car-mounted amplified announcements are used frequently to advertise sales, prayer rallies and funerals in religious neighborhoods, where a vast majority of the population does not access mass media outlets. In the twelve years that we have lived in Israel, this was only the third time that an announcement was circulated on Shabbos: the first was when a toddler was kidnapped (she was found, thanks in part to the amplified bulletin), and the second was when a specific brand of baby formula was found to be causing serious neurological damage to babies (it was later discovered that the problem was a lack of B-vitamins, not a toxin).

The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe’s favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society’s fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam. [from Damsels in Distress?,  Soumaya Ghannoushi]

A fascinating assertion. I won’t comment on the overall theme of the blog posting; the issue is complex. Worth reading, though. It will make you think.

From the comments (which are well-worth reading, too): 

There are other aspects to this complex, too. Thus there’s the tendency for societies to use female symbolic figures to represent themselves (Athena, Britannia, Lady Liberty etc). There’s the sentimentalisation embodied in the phrase “motherhood and apple pie”. Among many other things. Religions, of all varieties, being concerned with the regulation of social groups, are particularly interested in women, because of womens’ status as social vectors.

So if a society is reacting against “the west”, that reaction will inevitably take the form of suppressing the freedoms of women, for the simple reason that those freedoms have become associated with westernisation. And this reaction will be justified in religious terms. But equally, western and other interests seeking moral justification for intervention will highlight the situation of women.

…and this…

This argument is OK as far as it goes but may I add a couple of points:
1) Human rights can and do exist outside of an imperialist narrative. In the European context they arose in the struggle against ruling elites that were also involved in colonialism. Hence they are better framed in an anti-imperialist narrative.
2) My first point would of course preclude blowing the **** out of someone in order to liberate them, but not of being concerned with their state of being, or of engaging with them to improve their situation. (R.A.W.A. springs to mind). Your point about ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’ being an imperialist construction, is quite possibly true. However, if you then conceive of a Muslim world that is self-contained and separate from the ‘West’, (or wherever), you are reproducing the same fallacy; namely that Muslim human beings have an essential difference that requires special treatment. […]

…and also this…

What would you say to people like me who abhor Islams treatment of women yet opposed the Iraq war? I’m sorry but tarring everyone who recognises that Islam oppresses women as some kind of racist imperialist is simply false. I’m not impressed at all with the OP, she seems to be trying to brush the abuses of women under Islam under the carpet by pointing out how western governments exploit this abuse as propoganda for their imperialist wars. […]

Seen in Jerusalem this week:

[That’s Teddy Kollek wearing the black hat.] 

An advertisement in an Israeli newspaper that caters to the haredi market:

The ad reads: “One for All” (less literally, “One Size Fits All”). In this case, that one building developer is right for various “streams” of haredim. The implication is that this contractor recognizes the subtle differences between different groups of haredim, and knows how to meet each one’s particular needs.

If you don’t hang around the “Black Belt”, you likely saw a row of “identical” black hats under the yellow hard hat; it’s only haredim who are accustomed to instantly make the distinctions in style and proportion that signify group identity. The ad is clever. It’s tapping into what black hat-wearers (and their families) experience all the time: the assumption by non-haredim that haredim are a homogenous group (they’re not), that they are all the same (as if any two people ever are).

I’m not sure how relevant those subtle distinctions are to home construction, though.