Monthly Archives: December 2015

Read the 2015 Summer Beit Midrash Teshvuot here!

Dear Friends and Supporters:

Orthodox Judaism should participate deeply, honestly, and creatively in the moral conversation of humanity. Halakhah should learn from everyone and contributes to everything. These principles are at the core of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership. They are at the heart of the work of the amazing Fellows of our 5775 Summer Beit Midrash. I am proud to introduce their work to you in this booklet. 

Our topic this past summer, the 18^th year of our flagship program, was halakhic competition law, a.k.a. hasagat gevul. Should this area of Halakhah have any application to a secular society? To a Jewish community which sees itself as economically a part of, rather than apart from, the broader society and nation in which it is located?To a capitalist society? To an age of stunning technological progress? What can Halakhah learn from the discipline of economics? From the (quite different) experiences and strategies of US antitrust and Canadian competition law? From general theories of regulation?

At the end of SBM, each fellow writes a responsum unique in reasoning and result based on the material we learned together, and then presents his or her work to the whole group. In the lively discussion that ensues, each fellow realizes that this diversity does not reflect arbitrariness, but rather that many positions can be reasonably and halakhically legitimate. Diverse rulings can emerge, even when there is agreement about the meaning of texts, because each decisor legitimately brings their whole personality and soul to the process of psak. Imagine if the entire Orthodox community had such an experience!

Modern Orthodox halakhah can emerge only from poskim who are confident that Modern Orthodox values should influence psak, just as Charedi halakhah emerges from poskim who seek to spread Charedi values and embody them in Torah. At the same time, both decisors and community must be aware that not all values have legal outlets in all times, and that a conflict between law and values should necessitate a rethinking of both. Poskim may not distort or falsify texts to support their values or sociological and scientific evaluations, but those values and evaluations should consciously play a significant role in weighing authority.

I want to express appreciation to the community of my hometown, Sharon, MA, which hosts the Fellows in private homes and the program as a whole at Young Israel of Sharon. Our extraordinary guest faculty this summer included Mr. Mark Katz of Davies Ward Phillips and Vineberg LLP, economists Dr. Ted Rosenbaum of the Federal Trade Commission and Dr. Martin Gaynor of Carnegie Mellon University, Prof. Chaim Saiman of Villanova University School of Law, and Rabbi Chaim Jachter of Sha’arei Orah and author of Gray Matters 1-4. Each of our visitors was highly impressed by our fellows and the entire Summer Beit Midrash program. We are gratified by our continuing capacity to attract such distinguished scholars and grateful to them for their time.

Please be in touch with the Center with your questions and feedback. Please support our work generously if it speaks to and for you.

B’virkat haTorah,

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Dean, Center for Modern Torah Leadership
[email protected]
http://www.torahleadership.org

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

In this past Sunday’s NYTimes, Cynthia Ozick argues that the narratives of Scripture, by their very existence, contradict all the anti-gossip laws and moralisms in Scripture. Ozick asserts that gossip is the source of all literature:

The instant Eve took in that awakening morsel of serpentine gossip, Literature in all its variegated forms was born,

and that gossip is at the core of being human:

To be destined to live without gossip is to forfeit the perilous cost of being born human — gossip at its root is nothing less than metaphysical, Promethean, hubristic. Or, to frame it otherwise: To choose to live without gossip is to scorn storytelling. And to scorn storytelling is to join the anthill, where there are no secrets to pry open.

Or, to frame it otherwise: “The Novel’s Evil Tongue” launches a direct assault on halakhic speech ethics, the “evil tongue” (=lashon hora) of its title.

As someone who finds great value in literature, and great beauty in the laws of lashon hora, I cannot accept Ozick’s either/or. But I think her challenge does us a service by spurring a long-overdue revisiting of the overall intents and purposes of the Law in these areas.

Ozick’s reading of the tradition she seeks to subvert might fairly be described as conventionally Orthodox. Halakhic speech ethics as popularly presented often reduce permissible conversation topics to the weather, and ban any interest in the motives or actions of our fellows. Think of the tale of an unrecognized Chofetz Chayyim thanking his peasant train seat partner for hours of conversation about the virtues of various manures for different crops.

Now I myself love hearing from people about their fields of expertise. But this popular presentation cannot be the whole story. Halakhah requires people to choose leaders, exercise financial prudence, save people from danger; none of these can be done without the kind of insight into human nature that cannot be gained without vast experience, and without testing our judgments against those of our peers. Halakhah requires us to study intensely the very narratives Ozick claims contract its norms.

I generally start classes on Jewish speech ethics with a selection from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. No one is better than Austen at explaining both the necessity for judging others and the harm caused when negative judgments are spread. No one is better than Austen at conveying the genuine moral anguish of a good person who must harm the reputation of one person in order to prevent them from harming others. But in the end Edward Ferrars must speak to save Marianne from Mr. Willoughby.

Ozick rails against the prospect of an innocent society, with no illicit sex or violence. Her only alternative is our tawdry reality in all its tawdriness. But it is the purpose of some fiction, and history, to show us our reality so that it might be improved, not toward “second innocence” but rather toward mature virtue. Fiction, history, and Scripture must be allowed to present the psychology of evil without being presumed thereby to endorse it.

A world in which we always judge not, lest we be judged, is a recipe for ISIS rather than Eden, since the others we ostriches refuse to judge will not refrain from judging, and executing, us. But that does not mean that we must convey every judgement to everyone as soon as it is formed.

Jewish speech ethics, including but not limited to the laws of lashon hora (true but defamatory information) and rekhilut (= gossip, or information that the teller has not verified), recognize that information about others often must be shared, and that evaluating the character of one’s peers is an essential part of being human. We must judge, and prepare to be judged, and recognize that many of these judgements will be current in society.

But we can have great art, and still eschew People magazine; we can ban slander and yet celebrate whistle-blowers; we can prevent serial date-rape without slut-shaming. Partial or acontextual truths can be worse than lies, and brilliant art can nonetheless be evil. Not all whispering snakes should be celebrated.

Here are some different articles by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper appropriate for Christmas:

What is the Halakhic Status of the Doctrine of the Trinity?

Revisiting “Confrontation” After Forty Years

The Meiris Halakhah about Christians and Christianity A Response to Halbertal

SBM 2004 Jews and Christians

Jewish Values Online: Jews, Art and Churches

Jewish Values Online: Jews and Gospel Music

Jewish Values Online: Jews Entering Churches for Secular Ceremonies

This week’s alumni dvar torah is by Rabbi Joshua Strulowitz

A common question at the core of the story of Yosef and his brothers is why Yosef never attempted to inform his father of his whereabouts. While he may have harbored animosity towards his brothers, he surely held no such feelings towards his father. Why wouldn’t he at least relay the message that he was alive?

In the well known commentary the אור החיים (R. Hayyim b”r Moshe ibn Attar, Morocco, Algeria and Israel 1696-1743), he compounds the question. He writes:

ותגדל עוד הקושיא על ימי הרעב שהיו עוברים ושבים מארץ מצרים לארץ כנען ולא חש על צערו ועוד
מי התיר לו אחר שבאו אחיו להאריך לו ימי צרה שלא להודיעו תיכף ומיד

To make the question even greater, what of the time of great famine that the family kept going back and forth between Egypt and Israel?

Also, who permitted him (i.e. Yosef) to not inform his brothers of his identity immediately upon their arrival?

Not only did Yosef cause his father more suffering by not informing him that he was alive, he allowed Yaakov and his family to struggle through a difficult famine for well over a year before giving them the peace of mind of knowing that they would be taken care of. Why would he do that to his father?

To answer this question, the אור החיים breaks up Yosef’s time in Egypt into two segments. He explains that in Yosef’s first 14 years in Egypt he was either a slave or a prisoner. He had no power or ability to send messages, and even if he did he would be afraid that the brothers would intercept the message before reaching Yaakov and send someone to kill him to maintain the lie they had been telling their father.

However, what of the final eight years? In a fascinating study, he writes:

וחש על כבוד האחים מלביישם לפני יעקב ויצחק וכל זרע יעקב וסבל שישאר אביו בצערו מלביישם

Yosef was concerned for the honor of his brothers, not wanting to embarrass them before Yaakov, Yitzchak and all of their children. He ultimately thought it was better for his father to be in pain than to embarrass them.

Yosef was in a complicated predicament. He needed to figure out whether his father would rather be kept in the dark but maintain the dignity of his family, or know the truth and risk the family being torn apart. He decided it would be best for his brothers, and ultimately his father, for his being sold into slavery to remain a secret, a secret they kept until Yaakov’s dying day.

Sometimes in life the greatest courage is doing what is best for someone even though you can never tell them what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. Yosef kept silent, knowing the pain it caused his father, because he was confident he was helping his father in a much greater way. May we always have that level of thoughtfulness, courage and sensitivity in our most difficult moral decisions.

Rabbi Joshua Strulowitz (SBM 2000) is the Resident Scholar at Ohab Zedek on the Upper West Side and on the faculty of Yeshiva University’s High School for Girls.

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

For much of 2015, every effort was made, on both sides, to send American Modern Orthodoxy into schism and compel the formation of a separate denomination called Open Orthodoxy.  These efforts have often been disingenuous or irresponsible, and each side is accountable for its official and auxiliary spokespersons.  But it would be equally disingenuous and irresponsible to deny that there are deep substantive issues in play.

Recent weeks have seen encouraging efforts by some on both sides to rein in their rhetoric, and Rabbi Francis Nataf has wonderfully modeled the constructive critical discourse that Rabbi Gil Perl beautifully advocated for. But frank conversation and responsible leadership are still desperately needed.

I contend that schism will lead to disaster and eventual oblivion for both sides.  The “right” will lose its desire and capacity to engage seriously with modernity, and the “left” will lose its commitment to and capacity for rigorous halakhic analysis.  The “right” will come to reject any notion that halakhic decisions can be held accountable to ethics in any way, and the “left” will cease to see any value in genuine halakhic deliberation on ethical issues.

To prevent this, both left and right must take active steps to prioritize their confluent mainstreams over their dueling extremes, while at the same time seeking to keep those extremes within the same community to the extent possible.

Here is a set of concrete proposals to that end.  Each will require hard choices from some or all, and many will be unpopular.  But we are long past being able to find an easy way through.

1) The RCA must provide YCT graduates with a clear and plausible path to membership

YCT graduates need a professional organization.  If the RCA summarily rejects them, they cannot be blamed for steering a wholly autonomous course.  Moreover, they will be out of conversation with graduates of other yeshivot, and so will understandably care less and less about staying part of the same community.

This path to membership cannot require YCT graduates to renounce their teachers or their education.

At the same time, the RCA will not be compelled to accept all YCT graduates, nor will it be required to offer membership to graduates of Yeshivat Maharat.  The RCA may decide that davening in a partnership minyan generally excludes a candidate from membership regardless of the source of their semikhah.

 2) Orthodoxy must make room for theological and halakhic creativity and experimentation; it must allow people, even rabbis, to make mistakes in the effort to make things better

Both theological and halakhic creativity are desirable, and Modern Orthodoxy should celebrate noble and serious efforts to address serious issues even when they fail, even when they fail badly.  “No one finds his standing in words of Torah without first stumbling in them.”  But – theological creativity and creative halakhic practice must be kept separate.  When halakhic creativity is justified by theological creativity, it has lost all connection to the existing community.  Orthodox theological creativity must be compatible with obedience to existing halakhah, and Orthodox halakhic creativity must be compatible with acceptance of existing hashkafah.

3)  Communities and institutions on the left side of the Modern Orthodox spectrum must take responsibility for members and graduates who consciously and purposefully use the Orthodox mantle to legitimate positions that the RCA considers out of bounds.

They don’t have to reject or expel them, but they need to acknowledge and respect others’ refusal to admit them.  They need to acknowledge that communities have the right, and sometimes obligation, to draw boundaries, and that belonging to a community, and having the opportunity to influence it, sometimes means accepting boundaries one disagrees with.

The most challenging issue in this regard is clearly female clergy, and it will not work to have groups of men exclusively work out the solution to this issue.  But I believe that a workable solution can be found if there is trust and goodwill, albeit one that will be very uncomfortable for everyone.

It must be clearly acknowledged that the approach laid out here is fundamentally asymmetric, in that it leaves the RCA with no right-wing boundary.  For example, the RCA will not be required to exclude members who assert that it is forbidden for women to learn Talmud, or that get-withholding is a legitimate tactic in divorce negotiations.  My hope is that these positions are and will remain very, very marginal within the organization.

4)   None of us should tolerate the soft bigotry of excusing (let alone praising!) women for statements or achievements that in men would reflect theological or halakhic shallowness or error.  But-all of us must acknowledge the underlying scandal that Modern Orthodox women who want to learn Talmud deeply and thoroughly may choose institutions whose hashkafah makes them uncomfortable because the learning is better there, even though it does not approach the learning available to men in Yeshiva College, let alone RIETS.

Young women who learn at the same level as their top male counterparts are given no opportunities for growth at Stern College. GPATS at its best may equal what is available to a moderately talented Yeshiva College undergraduate, and undergraduate women are offered much less than that.  Yeshivat Maharat is no better.  I say this with great respect and appreciation for the many talented, learned, and dedicated faculty members at each of these institutions.  How can we tolerate this?

For those who rue the existence of Torah-educated women who take positions significantly to their left – the proper response is to insist that right-wing musmakhim, and the YU roshei yeshiva themselves, teach women at the highest level.  This will give them the same influence with talmidot that they have with talmidim, and eventually produce women scholars who will continue their masoret, teach at their level, and receive the kavod due them for their Torah achievements and contributions.

The approaches laid out above can reclaim the public square for constructive conversation and criticism, and enable us to approach all issues with a presumption that disagreements are leshem shomayim (for the sake of Heaven).

As dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership, I know this is possible.  It happens each summer in our Summer Beit Midrash program, where young men and women from across the Modern Orthodox spectrum, and from all the relevant institutions, learn together in an atmosphere of profound halakhic commitment, uncompromising intellectual rigor, and critical moral engagement.  These future leaders deserve the opportunity to build a community together that will bring nachas to all of us.  Our current leadership must take the necessary steps to ensure they have that opportunity.

Check out the best of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership this past year in the 2015 CMTL Anthology!

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Was Yaakov Avinu a coward? By Caesar’s standard, it seems yes; few biblical characters if any taste death as often as Yaakov. The only patriarch not to suffer the anxiety of childlessness also seems the least at peace with his mortality.

But does Judaism share Caesar’s standard? In Genesis 46:30, Yaakov seems briefly to come to terms with death:

ויאמר ישראל אל יוסף

אמותה הפעם

אחרי ראותי את פניך

כי עודך חי

Yisroel said to Yosef:

I will die this time,

after seeing your face,

that you are still alive.

One midrash suggests that this moment denies him immortality, for G-d cannot cause the death of the righteous without their prior permission. It seems to me that in this reading immortality would not be a blessing, since it does not eliminate the fear of death. Moreover, Yaakov’s words make clear that his rapprochement with death is not fundamental – he is willing to die now, and only now – he would not have been willing yesterday, and he will not be willing to die another day.

What made this moment unique?

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, in the footsteps of Seforno, suggests that:

He reached the apex of felicity, so that it would be impossible to experience greater felicity!

At this apex of felicity, he seeks to have his life end.

This reading does not remove the taint of cowardice. Why wouldn’t seeing Yosef’s life, and his great-great-grandchildren, be more joyous? If not more joyous, is a life of merely ordinary joy not worth living? The wish for death in such circumstances seems the result of fear that they will not last.

Targum Yonatan suggests that Yaakov previously lacked moral self-confidence:

If I die at this time, I am consoled

that it is the death of the righteous that I die.

Midrash Tanchuma adds a concrete consequence.

When they came and told me “Yosef died,”

I said: “I am dead in both worlds”;

Now that I have seen that you live –

I am informed that I will die but once

The question is whether these disquiets are praiseworthy, and properly lead to a generally unresolvable fear of death. Perhaps the Rabbis disagree fundamentally with Caesar, and the rabbinic hero is a Shakespearean coward. Perhaps fear of death can lead to fear of sin, and even to fear of Heaven.

In Ish HaHalakhah, the Rav contends that the yeshiva tradition, in sharp contrast to the Mussar movement, firmly rejected the use of mortality as a spur to morality. He is fully aware that this relegates great swathes of traditional literature to the realm of the bediavad.

My intention here is to stimulate a reengagement with the Rav’s radical claim. To that end, I offer a relevant excerpt here in three versions: Professor Lawrence Kaplan’s magisterial translation, the original Hebrew, and then my own retranslation. My starting contentions are that, as with any classic, an updated translation is useful for continued relevance, and that it may have more to say as poetry than as philosophy. Your responses are much encouraged and anticipated.

Halakhic Man pp. 74-75

Halakhic man is a man of the law and the principle, a man of the statute and the judgment,

and, therefore, he always possesses in his being, even if at times it should be afflicted with a deep melancholy, a fixed, firm, Archimedean point that is outside and above the turbulence of his soul, beyond the maelstrom of the affective life, a true source of peace and tranquility. Halakhic man vanquishes even the fear of death, which, as was explained above, is rooted in his world perspective, by means of the law and the Halakhah, and he transforms the phenomenon, which so terrifies him, into an object of man’s observation and cognition. For when death becomes an object of man’s cognition, the fright accompanying death dissipates. Death is frightening, death is menacing, death is dreadful only so long as it appears as a subject confronting man. However, when man succeeds in transforming death-subject into death-object, the horror is gone. My father related to me that when the fear of death would seize hold of R. Hayyim, he would throw himself, with his entire heart and mind, into the study of the laws of tents and corpse defilement. And these laws, which revolve around such difficult and complex problems as defilement of a grave, defilement of a tent, blocked-up defilement, interposition before defilement, a vessel with a tight-fitting cover on it in a tent in which a corpse lies, etc., etc., would calm the turbulence of his soul and would imbue it with a spirit of joy and gladness. When halakhic man fears death, his sole weapon wherewith to fight this terrible dread is the eternal law of the Halakhah. The act of objectification triumphs over the subjective terror of death.

איש ההלכה עמ’ סו-סז

,איש ההלכה הוא איש החוק והעיקרון, איש הדין והמשפט

,ולפיכך יש לו תמיד בהוויתו, אפילו כשתהגה נכאים

,נקודה ארכימידית, קבועה ומוצקת

,הנמצאת מחוץ להמיית נפשו, מעבר למעורבלות החיים האפקטביים

.שממנה נובעת שלווה ומנוחה

גם את פחד המוות

,המושרש, כפי שנתבאר לעיל, בהשקפת עולמו של איש ההלכה

מנצח הוא על ידי הדין וההלכה

,ומהפך את התופעה, שהוא מפחד

.לאובייקט של הכרת האדם

וכשצל-מוות המטיל אימים עליו לובש צורה אובייקטיבית

,של נשוא המשועבד לנושא, של חפצא הכפוף לנברא

.האימה פורחת לה כחלום יעוף

,שח לי אבא מרי

,כשפחד המוות היה תוקף על ר’ חיים

,היה הלה מתמכר בכל מוחו ורוחו להלכות אהלות וטומאת מת

והלכות אלו

,’הסובבות סחור-סחור לעניינים חמורים ושאלות מסובכות של טומאת קבר, טומאת אהל, טומאת רצוצה, חציצה בפני הטומאה, צמיד פתיל באהל מת וכו

.היו משקיטות את המיית נפשו ומשרות עליה רוח של שמחה וחדווה

,כשאיש ההלכה ירא את המוות

.הנשק היחידי להילחם בפחד נורא זה הוא החוק הנצחי של ההלכה

.פעולת האובייקטיבית כובשת את אימת המוות הסובייקטיבית

My Retranslation

The Man of Halakhah is a man of rule and of principle, a man of law and of judgment.

Therefore he always has in his being – even while experiencing depression –

an Archimedean point, fixed and firm,

existing outside the turmoil in his soul, beyond the entangledness of affective life,

from which tranquility and calm flow.

Even fear of death –

which is rooted (as was explained earlier) in the Man of Halakhah’s worldview –

he defeats via the law and the Law

by transforming the phenomenon – that he is afraid –

into an object of human re-cognition.

When the shadow-of-death which imposes terrors on him wears an objective form

of a carried subordinated to a carrier, of an object that must bow to a subject,

the terror evaporates like an evanescent dream.

My father-and-teacher once said to me in conversation:

When R. Chaim was powerfully subject to the fear of death,

he would utterly commit all his brain and spirit to the halakhot of enclosures and death-tum’ah.

These halakhot –

which come round and round to weighty matters and complex questions regarding grave-tum’ah, enclosure-tum’ah, contained tum’ah, barricades to tum’ah, utensil lids in a death-enclosure, etc. –

would quiet the turmoil of his soul and spread over him a spirit of joy and gladness.

When the Man of Halakhah fears Death,

his sole weapon with which to fight this dreadful fear is the eternal rule of the halakhah;

The objective act conquers the subjective terror of death.

This week’s alumni dvar torah is by Elliot Dine

The stories of our fathers are a sign to their descendants: This rabbinic idiom suggests that we are destined to relive the history of our forefathers, that the stories told in Breisheit reverberate throughout our own lives. The question then becomes whether the acts of our forefathers are commendable. When the situation arises once again in our lives should we mimic their decisions, or must we not repeat their mistakes when it is our turn to act.

This question becomes even more difficult to address when looking simply at the plain meaning of the stories in Breisheit, as these texts reveal little in terms of G-d’s judgment of our fathers actions. We are told simply about what occurs in each story and given no direction in our how should assess our forefathers choices.

Midrashim attempt to solve this problem by relating these narratives to the laws given later in the Torah. For example, according to Midrash Tanchuma the Torah requires the Kohen Gadol to bring two on Yom Kippur to repent for Yakov and Rivkah’s use of sheep to mislead Yitzchak and steal Esav’s blessing. This technique has in fact been around since the 2nd temple period as Sefer Yovelim makes explicit links between the laws of the inheritance of the firstborn in Devarim 21: 15-17 and Jacob’s refusal to give Reuven his proper inheritance (Thank you Ezra Newman for pointing this out to me.).

This method can help us figure out a seemingly extraneous passage in our Parasha. At the end of the Parasha we read how Yosef deals with the Egyptians during the period of the famine (Breishit 47:13-27). First, he collects all the Egyptians’ money as payment for the food rations. However, after one year the Egyptians are out of money and have nothing with which to pay for more food (13-15). So they offer their cattle and Joseph buys all the Egyptians’ cattle (16-17). Then, the next year, once again, the Egyptians cannot afford the food, so they offer to sell themselves and their land. Joseph happily agrees. Thus, Joseph buys all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, turning the Egyptian population into sharecroppers in the process, at least according to the majority of commentators (17-21, and see the Parshanim’s comments on “ואת לערים אותו העביר העם”). It is difficult to figure out the purpose of this passage as it plays no role in advancing the main narrative in this section of Breishit, namely that of Yosef and the brothers. Moreover, we cannot tell whether this passage comes to praise Joseph’s wisdom in advancing Pharoah’s wealth or to disparage Joseph’s treatment of the Egyptian people.

The Torah provides a path to answer this question with a repeated phrase that comes at the end of the story. The Torah emphasizes that Joseph does not acquire the land of the Egyptian Kohanim three times (twice in verse 22 and verse 26), and that the Kohanim are the only class of people who now own land within Egyptian society. This stands in stark contrast with the laws of land ownership in the Torah, for as we know Kohanim and Leviim are the only class of people who cannot own land in Israelite society. And in fact if we look closer at this story it becomes clear that the policies Joseph puts in place are the polar opposite from what the Torah institutes for the land of Israel. The laws of Yovel in Vayikara 25 stand against the concept of sharecropping, making the claim that each person has a right to their own inheritance to their own piece of land and cannot be a servant in perpetuity. And numerous Midrashim pick up on these contrasts; for example Breishit Rabbah pokes fun at Pharaoh requiring 20% of all the produce from the land of Egypt, claiming that One with power only needs 10% and the extra 10% shows Pharaoh overcompensating. In sum, the rest of the Torah takes a clear stand choosing not to imitate Joseph’s decisions and in the process legislates more equitable laws of property.

Hopefully, this story manages to resonate with us. Although not ideological or political, the laws of the Torah take clear positions based on sets of fundamental principles regarding laws of property. In our times, I hope we can understand these principles and apply them to the the debates of today.

Elliot Dine (SBM 2010, 2015) is currently a first year graduate student in the Molecular Biology department at Princeton University.