Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 22 January 2003 — Page 25

January 22. 2003 NA T13

Book Reviews

Writer’s sloth makes even sin boring

Lieberman recounts 2000 campaign

By JACOB NEUSNER The Seven Deadly Sins. Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Nature. By Solomon Schimmel. N.Y.: The Free Press. 2 L )H pages. $22.95. Professor of Jewish Education and Psychology at the Hebrew College, Boston, and a practicing psychologist, Solomon Schimmel addresses the theme of the seven deadly sins - pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, and sloth. He argues that the category of "sin" has been neglected by "secularists," but the "sins of tradition, and particularly the seven deadly ones, are primarily concerned with what it means to be human and humane and the responsibility that we have to fulfill if we want to be considered as such." He argues that "pleasure will give way to unhappiness because it alone cannot sustain us spiritually," and maintains that "most sins...concern the core of what we are, of what we can become, and most importantly, of what we should aspire to be. Amoral psychology is uncomfortable with 'oughts'; it prefers to think that it can deal with the facts about human nature, shunning values." To conduct his "reflections on human nature," Schimmel "draws on three great moral traditions," Judaism, GraecoRoman moral philosophy, and Christianity, and he also "culls the psychological insights of poets such as Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton." He opens with a brief survey of "the three great moral traditions on sin and vice," the Judaic (Old Testament, with a few later sources), Greek and Roman (Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Stoics and especially Seneca), and Christianity. He proceeds to the seven deadly sins (why seven in particular? why capital?). Then, in the succeeding seven chapters, he provides a collection of thoughts on each of the themes - pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth - which he defines as "the loss of one's spiritual moorings in life" (where the discussion shades over into depression, anomie, despair). The final chapter deals with "sin and responsibility." Here he deals with free will vs. determinism. Here his contribution is as follows: "My own view is that the determinist model if more scientifically

useful than the free-will one in the search for a better understanding of why we behave as we do. However, our use of the language of freedom remains valuable and even necessary. It enhances our self-esteem, encourages us to develop selfcontrol, and reminds us how limited are our understanding of behavior and our ability to predict and control it." In more concrete terms: "When considering the responsibility forcertain sins or crimes, the free-will model will often be unjustifiably harsh, and the determinist model unjustifiably lenient." Here is SchimmeTs conclusion: "We have seen that many discussions of sin and vice in classical and religious literature are aesthetic gems which make fascinating reading. Many great thinkers...were also brilliant stylists. They merged content and form to create powerful works that can be read repeatedly with profit and delight. ...It contemporary therapists made greater use in treatment of the powerful appeal of art and imagination they would probably have greater and more lasting impact. "Perhaps the tantrums of the angry, the stinginess of the miser, the maliciousness of the envious, and the voraciousness of the glutton would decrease, if they periodically read literature or watched films in which the ludicrousness and self-de-structive nature of their sins were portrayed. Therapists should at least test the hypothesis that the aesthetic-dramatic power of treatment programs can improve their chances of success." Within the topical program at hand, the seven chapters that form the shank of the book follow a single pattern: an allusion to a contemporary event (often: the Gulf war), a case ("a patient of mine was..."), the particular sin as treated in Judaism, Christianity, Greco-Ro-man, and medieval writings (very, very heavily quoted), contemporary "moralists, psychological comments (often: more cases), and so on. Schimmel has taken a perfectly good idea and turned it into a farrago of obvious and banal commonplaces. That a work should appeal in such lifeless prose to aesthetics, announce portentously the discovery of banalities, propose a

thesis never actually analyzed or argued, and substitute mountains of quotations for actual writing tells us that Free Press's editors have nothing much on their minds. Still, in their defense, it must be said they have not misrepresented the book. What we are promised is "Jewish, Christian, and Classical reflections on human nature," and what we get is an interminable anthology of such reflections, strung together with lots of free association, on the one side, and storytelling out of a psychologist's practice, on the other. I look in vain for a moment of analytical initiative, a case in which Schimmel asks an interesting question, whether his own or anybody else's. The book is so bland as to make sin boring. Clearly, Schimmel's ambition vastly exceeds his intellectual capacities; he has trivialized a critical subject by collecting and arranging lots of information on a theme. I thought people stopped doing that in 6th grade. How come Schimmel has turned an important subject into a boring and pedestrian one? He has ignored the creative thinkers of our own times who have conducted sustained and rigorous thought on the very topic of the book: human nature, on the one side, ethics and moral responsibility, on the other. Schimmel knows about the writings of Reform rabbis and their homiletical free association; he doesn't know about Bernard Gert's great work, The Moral Rules, a work in print for decades now. And that is only one rather obvious hole; there are much bigger ones in his strange canon. Schimmel knows how to quote Bible stories, but he doesn't have a clue about what is at issue in (to take one obvious example) the categorical imperative; the name of Kant doesn't appear in the bibliography, nor Hobbes, for that matter. Why people commit the seven deadly sins doesn't really interest Schimmel; to claim to "reflect on human nature" is to advertise what the book never does. Schimmel leaps over the great philosophers and moral theologians of our own day, as though no one but he were interested in why people sin or what sin is. To list the contemporary Continued on page 15

By MORTON 1. TEICHER An Amazing Adventure. By Joe and Hadassah Lieberman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. 273 pages. $25. To launch his effort to secure the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2004, Senator Joseph Lieberman collaborated with his wife and with writer Sara Crichton to produce this account of his run for the vicepresidency in 2000. In alternating passages. Senator Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, resort to cloying sweetness to describe the 2000 campaign. Their dulcet n a r ra five e m p h as izes Lieberman's Jewish religiosity and his wife's status as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. These characteristics apparently enhanced, rather than hindered, Lieberman's candidacy, although he does acknowledge that there was criticism of his repeated references to his Jewish identity and his religious faith. He insists that the fear of anti-Semitism, which generated these reactions, was not part of his experience, neither in growing up nor in his political life. The book presents in some detail the demands and stresses of the actual campaign, but the most interesting parts of the memoir recount Lieberman's selection by Al Gore as his running mate and the tense month that followed election day when the result was in doubt. Getting on the list of poten-

By SYBIL KAPLAN New Jewish Cuisine: Contemporary Kosher Cooking from Around the World. By Carole Sobell. Interlink Publishing. 168 pages. $26.95. I admit it! I'm addicted to kosher cookbooks; I love collecting them and writing them. So, here is another one, written by a cateress, "the leading lady of kosher cooking and catering in Britain." Chapters include appetizers, soups and starters, pasta and risottos, salads, dips, sauces and dressings, fish, meat and poultry, desserts, ice

tial candidates, making it to the short list, being vetted, quietly trying to influence the decision, and finally being notified that he was Gore's choice are all thoroughly itemized. Similarly, the 35 days after Election Day are described with all the excruciating torture they entailed until the Supreme Court, by a 5-4, vote decided who was to be the president. Two other features of the book worth mentioning are first, the delineation of the developing relationship between Al and Tipper Gore and Joseph and Hadassah I ieberman. The warmth of their association is sincerely set forth. Second, the portrayal of the comprehensive preparations for the debate between the two vice-p re side n tial candidates offers an inside view of what goes on before such an event. Lieberman acknowledges that repeated practice sessions and inclusive briefing books challenged him to the point of fatigue. Now in his third term as a United States Senator and now that Al Gore has decided that he will not be a presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman is poised to throw his hat into the ring. In effect, this book is the announcement that for the first time in American history, a Jew' is about to become a serious contender for the presidency. Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the founding dean of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

cream and sorbets, petit fours and entertaining. Before you even begin to scan the 163 recipes from many foreign countries as well as Jewish favorites, the mouthwatering color photographs will grab you. True, your finished dish may not look quite like the photograph, but the care, skill and details of the author will clearly motivate you to try. The book jacket copy refers to the author as the "doyenne of kosher with style," and the preface adds that the author Continued on page 16

Recipes that will dazzle your guests