Jonathan Boyarin, "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," and:

• Karen Armstrong, "Does God Have a Future?"
• Jon Krakauer, Selections from Into the Wild
• Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Boyarin link-o-mat.

Boyarin and Armstrong: The Future of God and the Future of Community

We might say that in "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," Jonathan Boyarin also takes on Armstrong's question, "Does God have a future?" But Boyarin poses the question in a rather different way, concerned less with the disappearance of God than with the disappearance of a community of believers. As he recalls, the religious community of his childhood is today "as obliterated as any shtetl in Eastern Europe." If the survival of God depends on the reinvention of such communities in the ways that Boyarin describes, then what are we to make of Armstrong's call for a turn away from a "personal God" and toward a more mystical religion? Will this turn renew waning communities of faith or will it only hasten to their disappearance?

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Boyarin and Krakauer: The Search for Identity

In "Waiting for a Jew," Jonathan Boyarin travels from New York to Paris to Jerusalem to Los Angeles, tracking the various ways that he is received and the varying ways he comes to identify himself as Jewish. In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer describes a rather different spiritual journey: Cris McCandless' voyage from Atlanta to Mexico, up through California and Canada on to Alaska. What is the difference, would you say, between Boyarin's search and McCandless' search? What role does tradition play in the search for identity?

Boyarin and Sacks: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...

Both Boyarin, in "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul", and Sacks, in The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See, act as observers attempting to make sense of alien worlds. While Sacks watches, as it were, from the outside, Boyarin often alternates between the roles of actor and spectator.

How does the status of the observer, with respect to the system under observation, affect the nature of observations made and what implications does this have for an observer attempting to understand him/herself?

Monika Krishnan, Fall 2005

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