Hendel's Messiah

An important part of the hostility of Berkeley that has to this point been neglected in blog coverage is antagonism to religiosity, stemming both from haters’ internal conflicts about religion and the glib self-satisfaction endemic to academia. On that note, let’s explore Professor Ron Hendel.

I encountered Hendel this morning in Jewish Studies 101, a course that offers an overview of the various professors associated with Jewish courses by having a different one give a lecture each week. Today was the first such lecture, purportedly centered around the topic “The Hebrew Bible and its Historical Contexts.” As it ended up happening, the lecture had little to do with the Hebrew Bible itself, and equally little to do with its historical contexts; instead, it was little more than a 40 minute session explaining that nothing described in the early parts of the book of Genesis ever happened, which we can be sure of for the scientifically credible reason that Hendel and Co. say so.

Now, I have no problem with non-believers, but I maintain that they have no more proof that god doesn’t exist than I have that he does, and I absolutely oppose people who dismiss religion out of hand. As the talk progressed, Hendel went on to say that the Bible’s fictitiousness is irrelevant, because of the “cultural memory” it provides to those who believe in it (in this case, giving a moral compass and communal identity to Jews). Yet he did not explain of his own volition why we could be certain that the 7 days of Creation were a crock, nor did he provide any such insight – knowledge that has eluded man for millennia, but which he evidently has access to – when prodded by his audience.

As a consequence, I ended up learning more about the man himself than I did about what he was supposed to be teaching. I learned that while his wife was in labor and asking why it hurt so much, he answered by quoting the line in Genesis that deemed it punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve in Eden. I learned that when his kids came home from school excited about the Pilgrim-Indian cooperation on Thanksgiving, he explained that Pilgrims were actually an extremely “intolerant” people, and that only by his strength of will did he refrain from continuing that had his children been at Plymouth in 1621, they would have been burned at the stake as heretics.

Hendel’s dismissiveness of his students spoke to a man disdainful of his religious heritage; his treatment of his family spoke to a man unkind to the people that surround him (I can only hope the image isn't representative) and indignantly sure of the credulity bestowed upon him by his PhD. Yet it wasn’t a stuffy professor unflinchingly faithful to the work done by him and his colleagues that gave us a lecture this morning. Instead, it was a geeky young boy who’d been beaten up because of his fondness for school and his corrective orthotics, taking revenge on his tormentors the only way he could – by getting paid to attack the religious beliefs he’d never agreed to sign up for, under the protective umbrella of academia.

If smarmy childishness is what Professor Hendel’s gotten out the “cultural memory” he’s allegedly an expert on, he’s missed the point entirely. And those of us who found that out this morning were not impressed.