Category Archives: Judaism

In praise of alcohol

28 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Food, Friends, Health, Judaism, Place, Pleasure, Rites, Zest

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Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has fallen to record lows, with only 54% of Gallup survey respondents saying they consume it. Nearly every cocktail-serving restaurant or even bar I visit these days has non-alcoholic mocktail options, often with sophisticated bartending flair – something barely imaginable twenty years ago.

The reasons for this are not too hard to imagine. On the one hand, the medical studies about alcohol’s harms keep piling up, often indicating that even moderate drinking – the kind touted as beneficial to health a couple decades ago – may now have many negative health consequences. On the other, alternative mind-altering substances are now easily available – most obviously cannabis, legal in many American jurisdictions and across Canada, which is a clearly healthier alternative. All in all, all things considered, the downward trend in drinking is probably not a bad thing. And there’s plenty of traditional precedent for being suspicious of alcohol: the fifth of the Five Precepts, guiding lay people, enjoins refraining from alcohol on the grounds that it causes heedlessness.

That said, there are reasons why alcohol has remained so enduringly popular in human history. And we do ourselves a disservice by disregarding them. Alcohol is not for everybody – many people find it takes control of their lives in a harmful way. But even for those people, there’s usually a reason it got so powerfully appealing in the first place. In many human lives, ones where one can control its consumption well, alcohol plays a very positive and valuable role. And as we approach the one festival in the North American ritual calendar where the drinking of alcohol typically plays the largest role, it’s worth thinking a bit about alcohol’s positives.

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Who were the Magi?

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Christianity, Greek and Roman Tradition, Judaism, Place, Supernatural

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Depiction of Jesus with his visitors, from St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Wikimedia Commons photo by Wojciech Dittwald, CC-BY-SA licence.

One of the most familiar and celebrated parts of the traditional Christmas story is the tale of the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus at his birth. If you were raised anywhere in North America or Europe you surely at least know of this tale, even if you have no Christian background. More than any other part of the Christmas story, this tale may have served to create Christmas as we know it today – since few things are more central to modern Christmas than the giving of gifts, and that giving is usually held to commemorate the story of these visitors. The famous Christmas carol “We Three Kings” is entirely about them, and several other beloved carols refer to their story (“The First Noël”, “What Child Is This?”)

Yet there is something enigmatic about these visitors. Biblical scholar Eric Vanden Eykel wrote an interesting book on them (which also serves as an engaging introduction to the methods of biblical scholarship). Vanden Eykel doesn’t even try to ask the question of whether they historically existed, because we have so little evidence on which to base an answer. Within the Bible, they are not mentioned outside of one short passage in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, and there are no other texts from a similar time period that mention them either. There are apocryphal Christian texts – texts outside the Bible – that mention them, and I was hoping these might tell an alternate story, but Vanden Eykel points out that that these are significantly later and draw on the Matthew story themselves; they are not independent witnesses. That means that if they ever existed historically – Vanden Eykel never asks that question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he believes they didn’t – Matthew is by far the closest thing to a witness that we have.

So let’s take a look at what Matthew says about Jesus’s visitors. I’m taking this translation from the New Revised Standard Version, which I understand to be the most historically accurate – though leaving a couple words in the original Greek because we’ll talk about them later. I’m leaving out the part in the middle about their encounter with King Herod for space, but providing everything it says about them and their encounter with Jesus:

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Self-proclaimed philosophers should have known better

30 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Fear, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Politics

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A couple years ago I wrote a post arguing that we should not be defined by biological categories. I stand by that post today. It focused on transgender (and did so before I came out as gender-fluid myself), but it also mentioned race: “I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are.”

Anyone who read that post could have come up with the reasonable question: well then, must you not also believe that we should allow transracialism alongside transgender? That people should be allowed to define their own race just as they define their own gender?

Rebecca Tuvel, from her faculty page at Rhodes College.

At the time I wrote the first post I would have refused to answer that question – for reasons that came down, in a word, to fear. I saw what happened to Rebecca Tuvel, who defended the idea of transracialism in a philosophy journal (Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy). After a smear campaign on Facebook and Twitter where Tuvel was accused of doing “violence”, more than 800 people signed an open letter demanding that the journal retract the article and publicly proclaim that publishing it was a “failure of judgement”. An associate editor immediately published an apology for publishing the article, followed by a spate of resignations that ultimately took the journal’s entire editorial staff.

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Notes on a Jewish Sufi

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in African Thought, Islam, Judaism, Politics, Prayer, South Asia, Sufism

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I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

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A hymn to Ecclesiastes

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, Deity, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.

Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.

Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.

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A very brief survey of African philosophy

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in African Thought, Asian Thought, Christianity, Early Factions, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Place, Supernatural

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For the most part, the study of non-Western philosophy has tended to focus on the continent of Asia. There are many good reasons for this. More than half of humanity lives in Asia. And Asia has long, rich traditions of philosophical reflection that have survived and left their works to us – unlike the thought of Mesoamerican traditions, where so much was pillaged and destroyed by the barbarian Spanish invaders. Asia is not even one single context; I would argue that South Asian philosophy is in many respects more like Western philosophy than it is like East Asian. In particular I see no problem in maintaining an Asian focus in my own work, since it is the philosophies of Asia – especially Buddhism – that have left by far the biggest influence on me. One can love all wisdom, but one cannot inhabit all of it.

Still, when we do aspire to love all wisdom, it’s worth taking a look beyond both Asia and the West – at least what we usually think of as the West. There is considerably more to the world. The continent of Africa, in particular, may well overtake Asia in population by the end of this century. So perhaps it is particularly worth thinking about African philosophy.

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How the Grinch found eudaimonism

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest

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Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.

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The light is coming

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Aesthetics, Deity, Happiness, Health, Hope, Judaism, Politics, Rites

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Tomorrow is the winter solstice: the shortest, darkest day of the year. After that, everything will slowly start getting lighter and brighter. And never in my lifetime has that felt like more of a perfect metaphor.

Christmas is perhaps the festival that most obviously commemorates the light in the darkness at this time of year, but it is not the only festival to acknowledge the darkest days and prepare for the light. Hanukkah is a smaller part of the Jewish ritual year than North Americans typically make it out to be – it is not nearly as important as Passover – but it is a real Jewish festival of light at the darkest time of the year. So too, Westerners mark a new year beginning just as the old year is at its darkest.

All these events happen every year. But this is a year like no other.

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On “philosophy of religion”

06 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Deity, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

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A while ago I was contacted by an academic publisher asking me to review a new introductory textbook on philosophy of religion. I didn’t do so, even though the publisher offered me a stipend. The main reason was just that I didn’t have the time for it. But the more interesting reason was my objections to the work’s entire project.

The book’s proposed table of contents spoke of a work devoted entirely to God: the concept of God, and arguments for and against his existence. That is not an idiosyncratic approach; there are many existing textbooks in “philosophy of religion” that take the same approach. So there was nothing especially or unusually outrageous about this textbook and its other. And that is exactly the problem.

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On wanting it darker

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, Deity, Despair, External Goods, Hope, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

2016 has taken many great musicians from us. Early in the year we lost Prince and David Bowie. Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip is still with us for now, but the band played its last concert. And then there was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen began his career as one of the long parade of 1960s singer-songwriters who temporarily changed the phrase “folk music” so that it now referred to the music of educated urban élites. He earned a place alongside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan – many of whom he played with. In that context he developed his talent for enigmatic, evocative lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, none of his real greatness comes from that period. If he had died as young as Janis Joplin (or Amy Winehouse), I wouldn’t be writing this tribute, and a few decades from now I’m not sure that he would be remembered.

Cohen’s real brilliance came out in the 1980s and early 1990s, when decades of whisky and cigarettes had lowered his sensitive folkie voice into a gravelly growl, and his music took a darker turn to match. Continue reading →