lavendersparkle

My, it has been a long time since I have updated. I'm still reading my reading page every day or so, but life has been just the right combination of busy, happy and uneventful to keep me from writing posts with any regularity.

I thought I'd give you an update on my spiritual PDE efforts.

I have now read my way through the whole Tanach in translation. I think it has given me an appreciation of how the bits that pop up as haftarahs fit in with the whole. I commented to a friend that it was a bit like actually sitting down to watch the box set of a show you've previously just caught the odd repeat of when flicking through TV channels. I've found the reading on my commute method every week quite useful, so I've bought The Observant Life on Kindle and have just started reading that. In terms of Talmud, I'm continuing going to Talmud study at my rabbi's house about once a fortnight and I've also started doing chavrutah with kerrypolka on the alternative weeks. We're doing about one daf (page) a go in English, which means that it will take over a 100 years for us to get through the Babylonian Talmud at this rate. I don't think we're going to make it.

I have done less well with the Hebrew. I've only attempted any translation about three times in the last more than three months. I just can't seem to bring myself to get into the habit of studying it regularly. Grammar exercises are boring but translation at my current standard is a massive slog, looking up the majority of the vocabulary and trying to remind myself of the verb and noun forms. I think another obstacle is that I need a grammar book and a big dictionary to have a hope at translating anything, which means that Hebrew practice can't be done on my commute, which is a shame because I find that the easiest time to slot in learning (the Tanach was read almost exclusively on the Northern Line). I'd welcome suggestions for ways to brush up my Biblical Hebrew other than just sucking it up and getting on with doing it on a regular basis.

I'm starting to think more about children. Don't jump the gun with the 'mazel tov's, but as a happily married non-childfree woman in her thirtieth year, they're beginning to become less of a far off hypothetical. I've been thinking about the kind of Jewish upbringing and eduction I'd like to provide for my children. Now, I hate the 'Judaism as a giant intergenerational ponzi scheme' but I think that, just as 'what would you do if you had a million pounds?' can be a useful thought experiment, 'what kind of religious example do you want to give to your children?' can be a useful thought experiment to work out what you'd like your religious life to be. This has motivated me more to improve my Hebrew. It's also made me want to explore prayer. Aside from shul, I almost never engage in set prayer. I think when (G@d willing) I have children, I'd like to encourage them to start and end the day with prayer. Many times in the past I've had a go at praying regularly, but I've never kept it up. This time I'm having a go at starting small. Really small. I'm trying to get into the habit of saying Modah Ani when I wake up in the morning. I'll see how I go at that.

At work we have just been through the PDE process. I have to confess that I'm not quite sure what PDE in this case stands for (and Wikipedia in this case wasn't much help). Basically at the start of the year we sit down with our line manager and set some goals for the year. These are divided between work type goals (I will deliver this set of National Statistics on time) and development type goals (I will improve my skills in verbal presentations). The form and how we fill it in are a bit clunky but we're supposed to narrow them down into SMART goals. Over the course of the year you review your goals every so often and they can be adjusted in response to changes in your role and circumstance. Then at the end of the year review how well you did at them and come up with a new PDE for the next year inspired by your review of the previous year.

I reflected last Yom Kippur, that Yom Kippur is rather like this process. You use Elul and the Days of Awe to review the year just gone and try to improve in the next year. It struck me that it might be useful to go through a similar process of setting myself some SMART goals for my Jewish life and even making a record of them to review every so often.

At Yom Kippur I just didn't really have the head space to do this. Settling into a new home, new job, new shul; my head was spinning too much to set myself those kinds of goals and try to achieve them. Now I'm finding that over the last few months my minds been thinking about Jewish observance in a bit more of a serious development way, so maybe it's time to have a go and setting some SMART religious goals in a mid-year PDE to be reviewed in Elul and Yom Kippur.

One thing I have been thinking more seriously about is Jewish Learning. Living in North London gives me a lot more opportunities than I'd have in most other places I might live in the next few decades. At first I started by just going to a lot of classes at my shul. Now I've started to think a bit more about what's manageable and what learning would be the most useful to me, not just what happens to be available and convenient.

Last year I decided to try to read the whole Tanach in a year. Well, I say the whole Tanach, I decided to make it easier on myself by calling the Torah done as I'd heard it all in shul. I stuck to just the Neviim and Ketuvim. I sat down, counted how many chapters there were in total and worked out how many I'd need to read a week on average to get through the whole thing in a year. I then set myself a schedule, dividing longer books into multiple weeks and grouping together shorter books into the weeks. It actually only boils down to an hour or so's reading a week, which I can do on my Monday commute. I've managed to keep to that schedule and I'll finish the Neviim in a couple of weeks.

I've started doing Talmud study. Studying Talmud is something I've always wanted to do and I've always seen as serious learning for serious Jews. Not just hearing the story of Honi the circle maker every Tu B'Shevat, but actually sitting down with a page of Talmud, with all the blocks of Mishnah, Gemara and commentaries on it, and going through it making sense of the argument. Luckily my shul has started a fortnightly evening class which does just this which I've started going to.

The Talmud class has made me realise a big area of need for Jewish development: Hebrew. I've learnt Biblical Hebrew at various places at various times but it's never been that amazing and it's certainly gotten rusty since the days a couple of years ago when I knew my pual from my piel. I can see that this is a barrier to Jewish learning and participation because I can't study texts in Hebrew and I feel a bit embarrassed about it. Answer: I'm spending half an hour to an hour a weekend working through The First Hebrew Primer which I already had on my bookshelf from a previous set of Hebrew classes. Once I get to the end of it I'll see where my Hebrew is and reevaluate where to go next. I might move onto another textbook or I might just sit with my BDB and some verb tables and try to translate a bit of Bible each week.

I think three ongoing Jewish learning projects at a time is probably just about right to keep things going and not get overwhelmed. If I have time I might post about ideas for goals in other areas of Jewish life.

I was pootling around the internet and I noticed something odd on Plymouth and Exeter Methodist District's website. Rev Pete Pillinger, the chairman of the district has a little biography on which he mentions his son and his daughter.

( Bio here for the link phobic )

This is odd because Pete in fact has two sons, but only mentions the elder son in his bio. This is even more odd because his youngest son was born in 1990 and he mentions in 1990 moving back to Britain, now with a daughter, but doesn't mention the birth of his youngest child.

I wonder whether it has any connection to the fact that his youngest son didn't attend the trial of his eldest son. Peter Pillinger's eldest son, Tim Pillinger, was convicted of beating his wife this summer and Pete Pillinger, his wife and his daughter all attended the trial but his youngest son wasn't there.

I'm being a bit inspired by the blog On Being Both as I've just started reading through it over the last few days. I have quite different approaches to the author to Judaism and interfaith marriage. I hope she doesn't take these posts as attacks, it's more that her posts have inspired me to articulate some of my views on the things she writes about.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I dislike the way that interfaith dialogue often relies upon manufacturing superficial levels of agreement and papering over differences. One of the ways that this happens in relation to Jesus. The general party line is to describe him as a wise teacher and good man, if you're a non-Christian (Muslims have this easy because he's a prophet to them).

I thought about this when I read the post:
But go and ask ten of your Christian-born friends if they believe that Jesus is their personal savior. If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to make an educated guess that most of you born or raised Christian think of Jesus as a role model, an important historical figure, a revolutionary rabbi, an inexplicable mystery, or even an inspiring myth. Or as the son of God, in the sense that we are all sons and daughters of God. All of which works for me just fine.

Actually the first thing which struck me in the post was the idea of Christians not really believing that Jesus is their personal saviour. Alec dislikes the term 'personal saviour' because it's the kind of term used by people who seem to think that Jesus is their boyfriend. However, Alec, and almost everyone I know who describes themselves as Christian, would say that they thought Jesus was the Messiah and G@d incarnate. I didn't think that that was such an unusual view for Christians married to non-Jews to have.

So what do I think about Jesus? I don't really know what to think. I think it's a good bet that he existed. It would be odd for such a large sect to grow so quickly based upon the teaching of someone who was entirely fictional. I don't think that he was G@d or the Messiah. As a child I read the prophesies of Isaiah and came to the conclusion that the Messiah promised in them had not yet come. The problem with coming to any further conclusions is that all that we have to go on are the writings of the builders of a religious sect, written decades after he died. Trying to work out what Jesus was like based upon the Gospels is like trying to work out what Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson was like based upon the writings of Messianic Lubervitchers. It's not going to be a balanced historical picture. So maybe he was a good teacher or a wise rabbi who was just a bit misunderstood by some of his followers. On the other hand, he could equally have been a charlatan or a lunatic. There's no way of knowing. There's no way of knowing how much the Gospels even bear any resemblance to what he actually said or did.*

The thing which really annoys me is the reason for the adoption of the 'Jesus was a wise teacher' approach, which is basically to avoid pogroms. I object to having to adopt positions to placate the religious privilege of others and to avoid the threat of physical violence. That's not a paranoid view, it's the reality of over a thousand years of Jewish-Christian relations. For centuries Jews kept their less complimentary views on Jesus hidden from Christians in Hebrew religious texts. When European Christians became aware of these texts it led to book burnings, blood libels, host desecration allegations and massacres. No wonder today most Jews aren't even aware of the Talmudic passages which describe Jesus in Hell in a pit of boiling excrement and it's only mentioned in antisemitic websites and academic papers.

I am a stubborn, stiff necked person. I can't bear to be blackmailed or threatened. I can't bring myself to tell you sweet nothings about your Messiah, whilst I feel that there's a gun to my head. Talk of Jesus the role model makes me think of accounts of his actions in the Gospels which I find morally objectionable. Talk of Jesus the important historical figure makes me think of the thousands of my co-religionists killed in his name. Talk of Jesus the revolutionary rabbi makes me think of the German feminist Christian theologian who equated Judaism with patriarchy and Fascism. Talk of Jesus the inspiring myth makes me think of how often I bang against people who don't even realise the extent to which their views are dependent upon a Christian world view.

I'm not as angry and bitter all that sounds. I have lots of Christian friends and relatives and, of course, a Christian husband, and we can all get along and love each other whilst acknowledging that we believe different things. I love my husband, who has dedicated his life to Jesus, so much. Even more amazingly he loves me, even though I don't accept his Messiah and even though it means that he can't avoid confronting the ways in which his religion has created the antisemitism which now endangers his wife and future children. I think that it's more worthwhile to stare into these ravines together, rather than try to paper over the cracks.

*For example, I'm rather suspicious about whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem. There doesn't seem to be any other historical documents backing up the census and mass movement of people which is supposed to have resulted. On the other hand there are prophesies that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem, which are a bit awkward if your Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth. It all seems a bit too much like a convenient plot devise to get Jesus born in the right place.

Tomorrow is the fast of Esther, to commemorate the fasting our ancestors in the hope that we would be able to find a way to avert our destruction at the hand of tyrant. Monday, the day after Purim, the day of our rejoicing in our near miss, will probably be the first day of trial of the husband of my friend Ellie, for beating her.

Whether you will be fasting or not, please pray for Ellie.

One of the things about being close to, but not part of, the Anglican church, is that when there is ecumenical drama I can sit back with the pop corn without mourning the situation of my own religion.* On the other hand, this is the church of lots of the people I love, so I do have a vested interest in its goings on. I suppose the thing to remember in all this is that the this whole kerfuffle, whilst making the news, is quite peripheral to most members of the Church of England. Forward in Faith only represent about 800 parishes worldwide, to put that into context the diocese of Ely contains over 300 parishes. More than anything, when sections of the Church of England drive me to despair, I think of the work that Alec does as a part-time chaplain at the local hospital: bringing comfort and listening to the believers and those without a faith; to Anglicans and Roman Catholics all manner of other faiths; to regular churchgoers and those who, for a variety of reasons, haven't set foot in a place of worship in years, but now wish to speak to him; to the healing and the dying. I know that theology and sacraments are important, but increasingly I feel that that human connection, which transcends our doomed attempts to classify and understand the universe, is what it's really all about.

That all got rather earnest so without further ado, some links of reactions to the Pope's announcement of plans for personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering the Catholic Church.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about here is an article about what's going on.

Christina Rees and Rev Dr Giles Fraser of St Paul's Cathedral reacting to the the announcement on the Today programme. Neither seemed particularly concerned by the prospect of chunks of Forward in Faith leaving the church. Giles Fraser's said that he had nothing but congratulations for people who found a better fit outside of the Anglican church. Chistina Rees position could possibly best be summarised as "Off you fuck".

Bishop Alan (the first blogging CofE bishop) echos Rev Dr Fraser's sentiments with the insightful caveat that:

"Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

1. people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition. Becoming Roman Catholics will enable them to be better disciples, so the whole Church of God, every denomination, is enriched — the wealth of one Christian expression is the resource of all: Hip, hip, hooray!

2. people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms. “The disciplines and relationships of Community are for the little people...”"

**

So, at least three Anglican's are happy with the move. More concerned is Catholic comedian Frank Skinner in his piece My Church is not a safe haven for bigots. He raises the point that conversion to Catholicism should really be due to positive feelings about the church rather than negative feelings about a different church, although his list of possible attractions to Rome is, perhaps, a little unconventional.

"If the Anglicans seeking this shelter were doing so because of their instinctive recognition of a great truth; because some part of them yearned for the poetry of the Old Church, rather than the prose of Anglicanism; because they had come to believe that the Pope was a direct, if sometimes fractured, link with St Peter; or even just because they felt an unexpected surge of joy when Glasgow Rangers lost 4-1 at Ibrox on Tuesday night, I would rejoice at their return to the fold. The fatted calf would already be on the rotisserie."

Another group not happy with possible exodus is Reform, a group of Conservative Anglican's at the low evangelical end of the church. As their press release shows. They're so keen not to see half the members of their special anti-female bishops club leave that they say that even if a priest believes in the doctrines of the Church of Rome, they should still consider staying in the Church of England so that they don't have to submit to so much discipline.

Finally, there's the people who might leave. I have to say, it's not as if anything's been preventing them from paping all these years and they've even been allowed to keep their wives since the first wave of priests crossed the Tiber to escape female ordination. The tone of the post doesn't generate much sympathy on my part.

"Please note, the desire for buildings and fabric is not a money grabbing point, rather it is a pastoral consideration. The British hold firm allegiance to bricks and mortar, a fact regardless of the rights and wrongs entailed. It would seem churlish, for example, to take S. Barnabas church building from a congregation that has only ever worshipped in the Catholic tradition, especially when there are so many other churches in Tunbridge Wells! Why not offer the emerging RC Anglican Patrimony Church a place in which to worship? A small sacrifice for the gift of women bishops."

That last line just sounds a bit too much like some arsehole blackmailing his wife over a get. What's a few tens of thousands of pounds/churches for getting me out of your life?

As this set of links is, of course, hugely influenced by my own prejudices here's a link to a page of lots more links about the story.

*It reminds me of an anecdote Ed Kessler likes telling about how an Orthodox priest friend of his reads the Jewish Chronicle and explains that reading about all of the broigus in the Jewish community makes him feel so much better about his own church.

**I wonder whether the use of Tinky Winky to illustrate the post was a covert reference to a particular part of priestly discipline that some of the priests and bishops who have threatened t leave the church over female bishops aren't so good with.

I might surprise some people by revealing that I am very saddened and angered by the verdict of the Appeals court in the JFS school admissions case.

Some background. JFS is an oversubscribes Orthodox Jewish state school in London. In the UK, state funded faith schools are allowed to give priority to children from their faith communities in their admissions policies. As JFS is very oversubscribed, you can only get in if you're Jewish, and as JFS is an Orthodox school they use an Orthodox definition of who is Jewish. In 2006 a boy applied for the school, whose father was Jewish by Orthodox standards and whose mother had undergone a Conservative conversion. His father enquired about whether it would be possible for the boy to have an Orthodox conversion so that he could go to the school. The London Beth Din replied that conversion would take longer than a year and the boy would not get priority for admissions by virtue of being in the process of conversion. The school was oversubscribed, the boy didn't get into the school. The father appealed but did not win his appeal. He then took the school to court on the grounds of racial discrimination. The school one the case in the High Court, so he appealed and recently won in the Appeals Court. The school, with the backing of the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbi, will be appealing the verdict in the House of Lords.

The current policy of JFS means that I would not be able to send my children there, but I am still appalled by the verdict. Lots of people I know are pleased by the verdict because there don't like JFS, for being the epitome of everything which is awful about non-observant 'Orthodox' Anglo-Jewry, the London Beth Din, due to their arsey power politics particularly in the area of conversion, and faith based admission policies. However, the verdict of the Court of Appeal was not about the virtue of the London Beth Din and in my opinion it is worse. What the verdict boils down to, is that the Jewish definition of who is Jewish, is racist. When I say 'Jewish' I mean the definition of Jewishness held by all mainstream Jewish movements. If this verdict is upheld in the Lords it will effect JCOSS's admissions policy just as much as it will effect JFS's. Orthodox, Masorti and Reform Judaism all essentially have the same definition of who is a Jew, they just don't all recognise each other's conversions, but they all agree that you're Jewish if your mother is Jewish or you convert. The Court of Appeal have declared that this definition of who is Jewish is racist, and Jewish schools must instead use a Christian based definition of who is Jewish based upon religious practice. I'm not sure how exactly they propose to measure this. Presumably, as we're already applying Christian standards of religiosity let's go the whole hog, they're going to use synagogue attendance. Never mind that Judaism is a home based anarchic religion in which one can live an observant lifestyle without darkening the doors of your local shul too often, Anglican religiosity is often gauged by church attendance, why shouldn't Jews fall into line. Even if school places genuinely did depend upon observance, do we really want children's school places to depend upon whether anyone saw you drive on shabbat or grab a bite to eat from a non-kosher restaurant?

Another thing which annoys me about the case is that the judges are claiming the JFS admissions depend upon whether the child's mother is Jewish. This is blatantly not true. The majority of JFS pupils (possibly all) will have Jewish mothers, but they are there because they are Jewish. I don't know how the London Beth Din does about child conversions, but there are circumstances in which a child might be Jewish independent of his or her mother. If an Orthodox couple adopted a non-Jewish baby, it is usual for an Orthodox Beth Din to be willing to covert the infant, as long as they are satisfied that it will receive an observant upbringing. It is quite common for children to convert at the same time as their parents, it's possible that a widower or divorcee might convert his children with him. I wonder whether there may not be many children there in these circumstances because JFS isn't frum enough to attract Orthodox converts and their children. I rarely agree with the London Beth Din, but I have to say that if I were contacted by someone who'd suddenly decided he wanted his son to convert so that he could get into a particular school, my reply would be similar to theirs. Conversion to Judaism is a serious undertaking. I would hope that most rabbis of any denomination, faced by someone seeking a quicky conversion so blatantly not 'for the sake of Heaven', would, in the nicest outreachy way possible, tell them that they were being completely unreasonable.

Anyway, what's this world where children's admission to policies depend upon the faith of the child rather than that if his or her parents. Children apply to secondary school at the age of 10 or 11. Of all of my friends who've managed to confound their parents by adopting a different religion, I've never met someone who managed it before the age of 10. I think some of the same people who are applauding the JFS case would be appalled if a religious group converted a child that young without their parents' permission. So all faith schools, even the nice C of E ones, are basing their admissions on the religion of the parents rather than the children.

I just don't think that it's racist for a religious minority to stick to their over 2000 year old definition of who is a member of their religion, rather than have to adopt the definition of used by the majority religion. It's not racist that I couldn't have an aliyah until I converted. It's not racist that Alec can't toivel our dishes whereas our bacon loving friend Rob could. Legally imposing the categories of the majority religion upon a religious minority for no good reason, on the other hand, is oppressive.

There was a program on Radio 4 yesterday which really bothered me in a WTF kind of way. I found it hard to articulate exactly what made me so bothered by the broadcast but Alec seemed to agree that the broadcast was problematic so I don't think I was over reacting.

The broadcast which pissed me off so much was Sunday Worship, which was a service marking the 80th anniversary of the birth of Anne Frank held in Blackburn Cathedral. I must confess that when I heard them say what the broadcast was going to be I turned it off (I don't usually listen to Sunday worship anyway). I later listened to it on iplayer because I should at least liste to it if I'm going to criticise it.

Here are some of my issues.

I don't think that there was anything else on the BBC that day to mark the anniversary. If you're only going to have one thing on the radio to mark the life of someone who was murdered because she was Jewish, is an Anglican service really the appropriate thing to have.

I really think that European Christians should commemorate the Shoah. It's such a huge and traumatic part of our collective past that we all need to find to mark and reflect upon it, just as we need ways to mark and reflect upon the world wars. However, there's always going to be a tension in Christian worship about the Shoah. Although the Holocaust was based upon a 19th and 20th century mythology of race, the Jewish victims of the Shoah were killed in part because their ancestors had managed to resist centuries of Christian persecution to abandon their Judaism. It's hard for Jews to really claim victims of the Shoah as martyrs because Christians and atheists with one Jewish grandparent were killed along with the most pious Jew. However, if you take the prayers and hopes of people clinging to their Judaism when G@d is allowing them to be killed for being Jews, and slot them into a Christian service without even trying to flag the tension involved, that's fucked up.

The service was quite universalised. It wasn't as bad as I had feared. They did mention quite frequently that Anne Frank was Jewish but the service was less an attempt to listen to the experience of Jews and other victims of the Shoah and more an attempt to shape an Anne Frank narrative which was convenient for promoting interfaith relations in Blackburn, to listen to a composer of Christian choral music's work and to pick bits of the testimony of some Jewish Shoah victims which fitted well into a Christian message of faith and hope. If you want to discuss genocide and persecution as universal (Christian) themes, why pick a particular Jew to build that message around?

This brings me onto another thing, I don't really like the cult of Anne Frank. I just don't find Anne Frank the best way to engage with the Shoah. Possibly it's partly because my whole attitude to the Shoah has been shaped since I was in my teens. I think it's also partly because I tried to read the Diary when I was young and give up before she went into hiding because I found her so irritating. A less personal problem I have with such emphasis on Anne Frank is my suspicions about why she's become the Holocaust "poster girl" to the gentiles. I understand that her diary was one of the first accounts to be published, but I can't help but wonder whether an awful lot of it has to do with the fact that she was young and pretty and female, and died whilst still young and pretty and "innocent" and our culture loves women who die before their looks fade. She was middle class and her family was highly assimilated. Obviously the diary stops before the horror of deportation and the camps, so the reader doesn't have to engage with the torture that happened there. The story focuses on the non-Jews who hid the Franks, rather than the people who perpetrated the Holocaust or the majority who did nothing and let it happen. It makes it a more comfortable read. I get the feeling that when Anne Frank is held up there's an implicit message that the murders of older, less than saintly, ugly, working class and non-assimilated Jews, and homosexuals and gypsies and everyone else not similar enough to middle class Western European Christians, weren't as much of a tragedy.

If such a service can reduce the likelihood of race riots in Burnley then maybe it's worth it, but such an act of appropriation wasn't appropriate for broadcast on national radio. Those are my thoughts anyway.

For full disclosure, I cover my hair. I've covered my hair since I got married, just under eight months ago. I really like covering my hair. I like having parts of my body which I keep private for myself and those I choose to show them to. I like the way my pretty scarves look. I like the way the scarf can pull together a whole outfit. I like being able to fall out of bed and rush out of the door without having to brush my hair. I like not having my hair blow in front of my face when I'm cycling or falling into things I'm doing. I also come from a background where this is unusual. I am white. I was raised in an Anglican family where hair covering was not practised. I go to a synagogue where one other woman covers her hair. I am married to a man who has no expectations about how I should dress and very much takes his lead from me. When I am pooteling about people probably look at and think 'hippy' rather than 'danger to democracy'.

This all, I am increasingly realising, gives me a very different approach to head scarves than an awful lot of people. When I see another woman covering her hair I think good on her.* I project onto her my feelings and motivations and assume she's happy with what she's wearing. I'm sure that there are some women who are forced to cover their hair, legally required in some countries. This is not nice, but actually, in the big scheme of things, I doubt that being made to cover their hair is the main problem facing these women, in the way a lot of the media makes out. Generally, violence and the threat of violence and economic disempowerment are far greater threats to women than any dress code. A burqa (contrary to what my nearest Amnesty International book shop might claim) is not violence, the threat of violence to a woman who does not wear one is. Generally, it just baffles me why anyone would be so concerned about what other people choose to wear.

I was rudely awoken from my benign view this morning. I vaguely remembered that some employer in the UK had commissioned staff hijabs for their hijab wearing staff to wear, in the company colours.** Now, I think that this is just a bit of fun. Most employers are perfectly happy with women wearing hijab in black or white or he company colours and have no need to make a special corporate hijab. I wanted to show pictures of the hijabs to someone so I Googled a bit to find web pages about it and was really saddened by the results. As well as Ikea, the Metropolitan police an the Lincolnshire fire brigade*** have introduced uniform hijabs, that's a good thing in my book. What saddened me was the number of Google results which saw these innovations as the end of Western civilisation. I just can't for the life of me understand their point of view. Usually I'm quite good at understanding views I don't agree with but I just can't understand why people would object so strongly to police woman covering her hair in a way that matches her uniform. Part of the sadness is that this is slightly personal in that, in the unlikely event I ever joined the Metropolitan Police, I'd probably end up wearing the snazy police hijab. However, more it saddens my to think that hijabis, and muslimahs in general, have to face this constant barrage of negativity from the media. It makes me think of how I feel whenever Israel is involved in conflicts and why I don't read the Guardian anymore.****

Muslimah Media Watch is a blog which comments on this sort of thing. I was struck by one story she was dissecting, the BBC coverage of yet another "I was raped and beaten by my evil Muslim family but then I fled to the West, took off my hijab, abandoned Islam and became free!" stories. Now, there are women who are beaten and raped and escape to the West and abandon Islam and feel better for it and they deserve to be believed and have their voice heard. The problem is, call me cynical, but I don't think that these stories get lots of coverage because of the media's deep concern about violence against women. These narratives serve a nice purpose. They make non-Muslim Westerners feel good and allow them to think that their hatred of Islam and Muslim countries is based upon honourable concern for their poor women-folk. Rape is endemic in every country on Earth. Lots of women are raped by their Western secular step fathers. Lots of rapists are successfully prosecuted in Muslim countries. I'm sure there must be a woman somewhere who was repeatedly raped by her Western secular step-father, was ignored by the Western authorities, escaped, converted to Islam, married a Muslim man and moved to a Muslim country where she now happily potters about feeling free in her abaya. You'll never see that story published and if you did it would be spun as crazy brain washing Muslims preying on a vulnerable woman rather than as a indictment of the whole of Western society. The bias comes from choosing which stories to report, which stories can be made to fit into a particular narrative.

This is very, very bad. It's bad because it confirms prejudices. It's bad because it breed complacency and denial about the violence against women in Western societies. However, it's worst effect is upon Muslims. It sets up the discussion that either you're for rape or against Islam, you can't support one and not the other. This paralyses attempts to combat violence against women in Muslim communities because it closes off the discussion if the possibility of being both against rape and for Islam is denied so strongly. The obvious defence is denial and there is a terrible temptation to deny the experience women like Fatimah and call them liars to protect Muslims from the threat of Western Islamophobia. Even more cruelly, it causes Muslim women to silence themselves to protect their communities. Would you seek help from domestic violence from the authorities if you knew that your suffering would be used to discredit your religion? If you knew that you might be exposing your friends and family to police violence and more state intrusion against your community? When you use women's experiences to serve your own agenda, sometimes the only defence women have is to keep silent.

*I'm far too white to be able to get away with thinking like "you go girl".
**It turns out that the employer I was Ikea as you can see here.
***Before we get into 'political correctness gone mad' the fire brigade hijab is for wearing to school visits etc. not for fighting fires, when I presume they wear helmet and such like.
****Referring to funding organisations who have in their charter that they want to kill people like me as 'anti-war activities' is a good way of getting me to stop reading your paper.

Lately I've been thinking about choice and its relation to information. The question I've been pondering is, does more information about the available options give you more or less of a choice?

So, imagine you're choosing which school to send you children to. There are two schools you could send your child to and usually (at least if you're like my parents) you'd gather information on exam results, sports facilities, transportation options, curriculum etc. and make a choice. Now imagine you're given more information. Imagine you were told, from a source that was completely reliable, that if you send you child to one school, he will be killed in an accident in three years time, whereas if you send him to the other school he'll graduate and go on to university prepared for a reasonably happy life. Would that really be a choice? What if you were told nothing about the schools apart from their names and asked to choose? What if you were told to ask between A or B without being told which letter stands for which school?

I suppose in all of those situations you have a choice. The way they differ is the degree to which you have an opportunity to use your judgement in making the choice and therefore the difference between what would happen if you chose for yourself or someone else picked what they thought the best option was for you. I'm not sure whether this is because we think that people with better judgement are more deserving of shinies or whether we think that we're best at deciding what's good for us so we care more about situations in which the ranking of different considerations would affect the answer so we want to make the choice ourselves so that our ranking is the one used.

This issue was brought to my mind by a discussion about G@d. There's an old chestnut that the reason that G@d doesn't bounce about announcing his existence through sky writing is because that would give us less of a choice because it would be impossible not to believe in him. This argument doesn't make much sense to me. See how well it works in other contexts. Would it make sense for me to hide in the wardrobe so that my husband had a choice about whether to think that I was at home or not? Would it make sense for a doctor to drop hints but not explicitly tell his patient that she had cancer so that she would have more choice about medical treatment?

An argument I like more is that, whilst there might not me sky writing the sky is writing enough. By this argument there is enough evidence of G@d in the world that a reasonable person would who was judging it fairly would believe in G@d. Within this framework I suppose you could argue that not being as obvious as G@d could be allows choice because people who really don't want to believe in G@d have just enough wriggle room to be able to persuade themselves. Another option is that G@d wants some people to be atheists, in which case it makes sense to hide a bit. This seems a bit odd, but given that it's part of G@d's plan to allow genocides it seems to be the least of a theologian's problems.

Moving away from theology, I've noticed another aspect of choice and it's relation to information is the what choice one wants other people to make. In situations in which there is general agreement that one should have 'informed choice' there are differences of opinion about what information a person should have to be informed and that tends to correlate with what information would be most likely to swing someone in the direction of the decision they think they should make. People who are into 'natural birth' think that it's important for pregnant women to have lots of information about the negative effects of standard interventions but generally try to shield them from information about 'natural births' going wrong or positive intervention heavy births. A while ago a quite gruesome account of what an epidural looks like was posted on LJ. A woman who was very into 'natural birth' said that she thought it was reasonable to post so that women would have a more informed choice. Knowing that this woman is also very pro-abortion-choice I wondered whether she'd apply the same logic to grisly accounts of abortions. I somehow doubted it. I guess part of the problem is that there's no such thing as an objective opinion. Obviously your decision and what you think is relevant information are correlated because how else would you have come to that decision and once you've come to a decision is human nature to emphasise the information which backs your decision up and discount information that contradicts it. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. It's really just pondering allowed.