Picking Nits on Gun Control

This week's Time features the following little blurb about the civic center massacre in Binghamton last week:

Before he opened fire on a citizenship class at a Binghamton, N.Y., civic center, Jiverly Wong mailed a rambling, paranoid letter to a Syracuse TV station, bemoaning the loss of his job assembling vacuum cleaners and accusing the police of harassing him. "I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people," it began, and signed off with a chillingly bland "Have a nice day." Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant, killed 13 people before taking his own life in the worst U.S. mass shooting since the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Despite a 1992 arrest for fraud, the 41-year-old had licenses for both of the handguns used in the attack. [emphasis added]

I'm really only going to take issue here with one word - despite - which may just be a typo (I find far more typos while reading weekly magazines than I imagine I should). But if the word despite was consciously chosen, even if used incorrectly, the author of this blurb seems to be an off-the-wall proponent of gun control.

If we acknowledge that, original intent of the second amendment be damned, there is a constitutional right to own your own weapons, then it seems to me quite obvious that someone convicted of a white collar crime (like fraud or the like) should not in any way have this constitutional right revoked. Violent crimes, of course, are a different issue. What could possibly be the rationale of revoking the right of someone arrested - not convicted? - for fraud? Wouldn't that just mean that anyone with a minor infraction on their record - say, a parking ticket or an indictment but acquittal for embezzling - also shouldn't be granted a license for a handgun?

I'm all for gun control - especially after Bowling for Columbine - but this piece seems to distort the issue and make it seem like under current law we could imagine an interpretation whereby an arrest for fraud would make someone ineligible for a license to carry a gun. I know it's a few weeks early, but I'm pretty sure רש"י had the right response to this: מה ענין שמיטה אצל הר סיני?

Potpourri: High Smarts and Low Laughs

I'll begin with the low laughs:

Slate answers the always relevant question: can you test positive for a drug that you never ingested but that your oral sex partner did?
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Mental Floss presents some of the funniest videos I've ever seen. (Parental discretion advised.)

WOW.

If you like laughing, watch at least the first 2 minutes of the first video. At least.
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Like the idea of paternity leave? So does this guy.
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Insightful stuff from HuffPo on Obama's handling of the North Koren missile "crisis" and the pirate hijacking off Somalia.
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Analysis of women, layoffs, and the recession.
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Joe Posnanski on Bill James's brilliance.

New definition of brilliance? Looking at old problems through new eyes.
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XX Factor's guest poster, Vanessa Gezari, tells us we're morons for thinking the recent hullabaloo about the so-called "Afghan rape law" demonstrates the West's naivete when it comes to imagining the ongoing plight of women in most of the world, especially Afghanistan.
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This article, linked from TV Worth Watching, is not actually as good as Bianculli seems to think it is. It is more superficial listing than deep analysis, and doesn't grab me as it should (or maybe I didn't get a lot of sleep last night ...). Either way, a worthwhile read (as opposed to watch, pun ex post facto accepted) for the next time someone tries to eviscerate Stewart for taking his place in the pantheon of the great American patriots - it doesn't get bigger, on that front, than Franklin and Twain.
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Clarence Thomas, reactionary of reactionaries, and the conservative vision for America.

N.B.: You may need to shower after reading this. But it's worth it.
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XX Factor reports on Amazon's sketchy-as-hell move to deem books depicting homosexuality as "adult" and, therefore, to de-rank them on the site. Sketchy Amazon, very, very sketchy. Booo Amazon.

Double Entendre, much?

A little contest for those interested:

How many possible double entendres can you find in this obituary of porn star Marilyn Chambers?

Added bonus: What one word could you change to add yet another amusing (to me and other adolescent males) allusion?

I'll wait for some responses, then share my numbers.

Shoutout: Two Babies and an Article

Rabbi Bradley Solmsen, director of BIMA/Genesis at Brandeis University, Associate Director of the Institute for Informal Jewish Education, wonderful colleague and great thinker, and his wife Aliza Kline, executive director of the exciting and creative project to reimagine mikvah, Mayyim Chayyim Living Water, welcomed third daughter Nomi into the world on April 4.

More recently, dear friends, lovers of good food, and on-again-off-again חברותא Jason and Dara Rogoff welcomed their first child, a daughter, this morning, April 14.

Dear friend, former quasi-housemate, Wexner colleague and someday-awesome-Rabbi Annie Lewis wrote this summary of her recent work with Storahtelling at a BBYO convention.

On Gender Dynamics in the Jewish Community: A Definition of Adaptive Change (Part 1 of [at least] 2)

I've had a post brewing for a little over a week about gender dynamics and the less-than-ideal (read: laughable) state of the Jewish community in grappling with them. I don't mean, for the record, Orthodoxy's struggles with what embracing the gender (as opposed to sexual) component of the feminist revolution, nor am I interested whatsoever in the pre-modern approach to femininity in ultra-Orthodox circles. I speak of the ways in which the organized Jewish community in America lags far behind its corporate cousins in advancing the cause of women in major leadership roles, a fact that is exacerbated by the disproportionately large representation of women in all other aspects of communal Jewish life.

My interests go far beyond that of concerned citizen. I have heard firsthand my father's accounts of the way that search committees treat female candidates, and watched from a relatively unique perch as the (mostly embarrassing) politics of a large Conservative synagogue played out - where women's involvement is the exception to the rule. I work for an organization that I have become increasingly convinced is the very definition of an old boys' network with all its overt ickiness and subtle prejudices. I have friends who are and will be female Rabbis, and campers I care for dearly who ought to embark on prominent careers in Jewish communal service; I hope someday to be the father of a girl who will want to play a role - professional or lay - in the Jewish world. And I am affiliated with the Wexner Foundation, an organization that places issues of gender dynamics not just on the front burner but on every burner.

My thinking on this topic has moved significantly in the last year, both as a result of listening to and engaging with real narratives and perceptions (which are, here, as good as realities as far as I'm concerned) and due to my reading of Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life, by Wexner leadership guru Marty Linsky, Wexner feminism guru Shifra Bronznick (founder of publisher Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community), and Didi Goldenhar. I am not finished reading the book - such is life when you only read a book during the down moments in Friday night davening at Yakar - but it has changed the way I look at this particular issue and moved my positions on certain specific institutions and factors. The book is set up as a "guidebook" to walk its reader through a gender equality initiative in their organization, and focuses on what might be the highest profile version of this problem in the Jewish community - the heads of the largest Federations (that's up for debate). In doing so, however, I believe it also serves as a worthwhile guidebook to any difficult change initiative in any organization, and have recommended the book as such to anyone facing such an effort.

I realized that, before I enter into some of the specifics of my thinking in a forthcoming post, it was important for me to lay out a core piece of Leveling the Playing Field. I have written about Marty Linsky repeatedly on the blog [here and here] (and there is a long-brewing post about my recent experiences with leadershp at the Winter Institute of the WGF that will delve further into Marty's work) but have not yet found a space to actually articulate Marty's (with his partner, Ron Heifetz) paramount contribution to the field: the distinction between technical problems (and how to correct them) and adaptive challenges (and how to change them). Though I may bring other parts of the book to analyze in the future, I have found the very best articulation of this distinction in Leveling the Playing Field, which will serve as a basis both for the next post on gender dynamics and, I imagine, many more posts to come.

I quote from pp. 21-24 of the book:

Moving an Organization from Gender Inequity to Gender Equity is Deep Change - An Adaptive Challenge Rather than a Technical Problem

The single biggest mistake people make in exercising leadership is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.

Technical problems live above the neck: they are susceptible to a good argument or to someone's expertise. Adaptive challenges live between the neck and the navel: they are about values and beliefs, ways of being, and sense of self.

Adaptive challenges are not about logic. They are about the experience of loss - the loss of what is familiar and comfortable, including expectations and rewards, and the loss of what people think of as the values that guide their everyday decisions.

Tampering with people's values is a different kind of work than influencing their logic. That's why leading deep organizational change is so difficult. And, while we may have a vision of what gender equity looks like, we have no guarantees about what the change will look like along the way, or how long the journey will take. Deep organizational change may take from seven to ten years. So, much of the difficulty of adaptive challenge is about tolerating the losses and ambiguous terrain that lie between the status quo and the Promised Land.

Here are a couple of examples that illustrate the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges:

You go to your doctor with a broken finger. A broken finger is a complex technical problem that may require a cast, a splint, and some extra care in your daily activities. But many doctors can attend to the problem of a broken finger.

But what if you have high cholesterol? That's a different kind of problem. Your doctor can prescribe medication that may help. But she can't take your pills for you, and, more important, she can't stop eating chocolate ice cream for you or get up an hour earlier to exercise for you. Her expertise is useful, but the adaptive challenge lies within you. You will have to give up something you love - chocolate ice cream or that extra hour in bed - in favor of your health.

Here's an illustration from the Jewish world:

Your agency does not have a kosher kitchen. But when the organization hires its first Orthodox Jew, he asks if the kitchen can be koshered and kept kosher. Some staff members embrace the idea; others say that this is a major imposition. The CEO supports the change, saying that a Jewish organization should respect its most observant member. New dishes and utensils are purchased, and the appliances are blow-torched. That speaks to the technical problem.

Two months later, the meat and milk dishes still get mixed up despite elaborate systems to label everything. The technical problem has been solved, but the nonkosher staff members are resisting the adaptive challenge. They value their own religious choices; for them, a kosher kitchen at work means giving up individual freedoms, like bringing leftovers from home or ordering from the local pizzeria.

Organizations typically try to address adaptive challenges as technical problems. Individuals and groups will almost always try to interpret issues as technical, individual, and win-win, rather than adaptive and systemic. That way, no one has to endure any losses or deal with conflict.

Advancing gender equity in Jewish organizational life is an adaptive challenge because it will expose the gap between the espoused values of the agency, as epxressed by the people at the top, and the real norms, as embodied by day-to-day behaviors. Part of your role will be to keep the adaptive change central - with all its disturbing implications - while the pressure is on to come up with short-term, technical Band-Aids that allow you to avoid dealing with deeper issues.

Most adaptive challenges involve some technical aspects. Sometimes a Band-Aid approach is the only way to start the change process. Sometimes a modest, more technical idea can test the waters, and you can incorporate this idea into a larger, more ambitious strategy. But be forewarned: since most organizations gravitate toward technical fixes, you will have to evaluate at each step along the way whether a proposed technical fix is a step toward an adaptive change or a diversion from it.

Leading Deep Organizational Change, Such as a Gender Equity Initiative, is Difficult Work

If you embrace this challenge, be prepared for the difficulty ahead.

There is an idea tha tpeople do not like change. Wrong. Winning the lottery will certainly change your life, but no one gives away a winning lottery ticket.

People resist significant change when they experience it as a threat or as a potential loss, no matter how good they think it will be for them.

Resistance to gender equity will surface in all the familiar arguments - that there are no qualified women for high-level jobs; that women aren't good fundraisers; that women choose family before work; that the statistics don't prove anything; that raising gender issues will lead to lawsuits or embarrssing stories in the media; or that the issue is effectiveness, not gender equity.

Be prepared for this resistance since it is likely to appear in both direct and indirect forms. When an organization makes a commitment to gender equity, people who benefit from the current system may feel threatened. Men who have been waiting for their chance at the brass ring - and doing everything expected of them along the way - may feel cheated if the rules of engagement change. The same may be true for women who have adapted to the male-dominated culture by already making significant compromises in their personal or professional lives in order to succeed.

In the face of resistance, you and your colleagues will need to exercise consistent leadership. People typically avoid leadership because it means putting themselves out there - taking risks and making people uncomfortable. That's why exercising leadership requires both skill and courage.

Islam's Architectural Revolution

Intriguing article in this week's Time about an architectural revolution in the design of mosques around the world.

Some of the more interesting lines:

The disputes over modern mosques echo larger debates taking place in the Islamic world today about gender, power and, particularly in immigrant communities, Islam's place in Western societies. Even the simplest design decision can reflect questions that are crucial to Islam and its adherents: Should women be allowed in a mosque's main hall or confined to separate quarters: Are minarets necessary in the West, where laws on noise levels mean they are rarely used for the call to prayer? What should a mosque attended by Muslims from different parts of the world look like?

The most daring buildings are dreamt up by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, who have the confidence and cash to build stone-and-glass symbols of Islam's growing strength in places like Europe.

The designs behind the best of the mosques take the opposite view: they may be making statements but they are also sensitive to local concerns and aesthetics. [One] mosque ... in a gritty working-class Manchester [UK] neighborhood, uses reclaimed wood and solar panels on the roof to power its underfloor heating. Inside, peach carpeting and plasma TVs give the air of a prosperous suburban English home, while the prayer hall has carvings inspired by the 10th century North African Fatimid dynasty.
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Innovation also blooms in unlikely places such as southern Bavaria. In the town of Penzberg, the Islamic Forum, built in 2005, last year won a Wessobrunner ARchitekturpreis, an award granted every five years for outstanding Bavarian architecture. A simple block of glass and pearly stone, the Forum beckons Muslims and non-Muslims alike to enter through two doors built to resemble an open book. ... The delicate minaret, lace-like from a distance, is a calligraphic representation of the words of the call to prayer, punched out of steel plates.

Traditional mosques tend to keep women hidden by walls or curtains. In newer, more progressive buildings, prayer areas for men and women often remain separate - but equal.

... [T]he Floating Mosque currently under construction off the cost of Dubai ..., an arresting building, which is due to be finished by 2011, resembles a futuristic submarine rising from the Persian Gulf with minarets to short and slender they could be periscopes. Built of floating modules of concrete and foam, it will be cooled by seawater pumped through the roof, walls and floors.

... [A] group of young Dutch architects ... wanted their concept for the Polder Mosque to achieve a similar level of cool. Riffing on the Dutch idea of seeking consensus, their design features not minarets but windmills. Inside, they planned space for a hammam (or bathhouse) and a row of shops. The mosque was never meant to exist but to generate discussion.

[The] An-Nasr [mosque, in Rotterdam] will [have a minaret of] glass - transparent and subtle, rather than dominating the skyline. The call to prayer will be broadcast in lights, pulsating to the rhythm of the muezzin's voice.

Here's the question on my mind:

To what extend does the article mirror trends in the Jewish community from the middle of the 20th century? As Jewish synagogues and other communal buildings found more cultural acceptance - of course, with the same 2nd and 3rd generation as the movers and shakers - was similar language used? Similar ideas? (Paging Sliv:) Was it this type of conversation out of which the synagogue-as-community center model emerged?

The Fourth Word in the Equation

Throughout Jewish education, reductionist versions of the fundamental debate about the nature of the modern state of Israel are hashed out, at differing levels of (reductionist) nuance. The most basic question (rehashed to no end at Ramah in Wisconsin last summer, to my great annoyance) pits Judaism against democracy, actually a false dichotomy, but we'll leave that aside for the moment. The more complicated question, acknowledging our c. 5 million non-Jewish fellow inhabitants of the land that stretches מהלבנון עד מדבר מצרים ומן הים הגדול עד לבוא הערבה, adds a third factor: the land. This triangle of "Jewish," "democratic," and "the (whole) land" results in a situation (as pointed out recently at an Encounter debriefing) whereby two out of three are pretty easy to achieve, but to include the third factor? Aye, there's the rub.

I'd like to suggest that we too often conflate two different ideas when we use the word "democracy" in referring to the Jewish state. One of the great geniuses of the post-Enlightenment nation-state is that democracy itself - rule of the people - is not enough to guarantee a liberal state. Liberal states - and here Israel falls far short of accepted Western norms - possess legal acknowledgments of basic human rights and have a constitutional structure that protects citizens from themselves. Such is the brilliance of a political environment where Madison had to fear the "tyranny of the majority" becomes something to be reckoned with - the creation of stopgap measures to prevent democracy from destroying itself.

This editorial, which appeared on the Haaretz website yesterday, introduces in somewhat inflammatory language the obvious facts: it is not a "democratic" state which is in direct tension with a "Jewish" state, but a "liberal" one. And, as Gideon Levy points out, the fault lies not with the minority who take advantage of the states anti-liberalism, but with the majority who allow it to happen, cowed by I-don't-know-what. An Israel I would want to live in would be a democratic one infused by a liberal Judaism (not the liberal Jewish movements, though that might be a start) - that is a synthesis worth striving for.

The mere chopping-off of certain non-Jewish areas of the state for the sake of maintaining the so-called "democratic" state that now exists (where a misguided, immoral, and strategically moronic settlement policy has thrived for 35 years; where cutting off your nose to spite your face has become the hallmark of a litmus test for "true believers" of a religion that has survived by its adaptability and pragmatism; and where the governmental system calls into fundamental question the absolute values of so-called "representative democracies," and "public servants," [not to mention a judiciary that must be fundamentally activist and liberal]) is not a sacrifice worth making. That Israel is not one I could be proud of either.

And so I (we) are faced with a double-problem, the conflation of the occupation with the anti-liberalism of the country. That dual status quo is what the settler movement seeks to preserve and what, frankly, the organized political institutions are also trying to preserve. Can we attack one without the other? Is one worth defusing if the other still exists? Morally, the plight of the living Palestinians is more compelling a cause than the abstract ideals and relatively insignificant advances in standard-of-living that a liberal state would bring with it. But at the same time, the creation of a truly liberal culture in the Middle East (which, as Levy implies, would need to be truly a creation ex nihilo) might allow for us to live side-by-side with our (internal) neighbors, as opposed to fearing the "democratic" label being flipped on a majority-non-Jewish state, with all the anti-liberal bullshit that we now foist on each other and the Palestinians falling back, with a vengeance, squarely on our shoulders (not unlike that scene from Slumdog Millionaire).

Where's the reset leader this country needs?