The Wall Street Journal - 23.08.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, August 23, 2019 |A

Believing

In Burning Man

Radical Ritual

By Neil Shister

(Counterpoint, 241 pages, $26)

BOOKSHELF| By Chris Jennings

T

he first man was burnt on a whim, without any apparent

ambition to save humanity: In 1986, Larry Harvey, the

Stetson-wearing sage who served as Burning Man’s

emissary to the world until his death last year, gathered with

a few friends on San Francisco’s Baker Beach to burn an effigy

representing nobody in particular. It was a bit of anarchic

hijinks well matched to the foggy, punky mood of San

Francisco in its post-flowers-in-your-hair, pre-dot-com era.

In 1990 the gathering left the beach, migrating to a vast

salt flat in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a landscape so

sublimely disorienting that it has shaped every aspect of the

event, from its “Mad Max” aesthetics to its atmosphere of

End Times debauchery. In the intervening three decades,

Black Rock City, the sprawling temporary metropolis that

blossoms each August, has grown to more than 70,000 people.

In “Radical Ritual: How Burning Man Changed the World,”

Neil Shister, a Washington-based journalist and six-time

“Burner,” writes with great relish about how the annual revel

has been irradiating the culture with creativity, self-reliance,

collective action and a

democratic can-do spirit.

Mr. Shister is at his best when

describing Burning Man’s

cultural precursors in the Bay

Area and his family’s adventures

on the playa, as the salt flat is

known. His enthusiasm for the

festival’s super-charged civic

atmosphere—what he calls “a

colossal circus of trust-worthiness

and compassion, empathy and

generosity of spirit”—corrects the

common view of Black Rock City as

an al fresco Studio 54. (The image of

Burning Man is overly shaped by the sort of

people who post sexy pictures of themselves

online.) Mr. Shister’s attempts to capture his brimming zeal

on the page sometimes result in him sounding like a painfully

square Hunter S. Thompson hopped up on 2% milk. “Most of

the players not only drink the Kool-Aid,” he writes of his fellow

Burners, “they crave it. Punch-drunk on existential Red Bull.”

Unfortunately, “Radical Ritual” far too often departs the

playa for the home office. One of the defining features of

Burning Man is the sense of something immensely complex

bursting forth spontaneously. The bureaucracy underpinning

Black Rock City—“a full-fledged, multi-million-dollar

apparatus”—remains mostly out of sight. (There is a reason

that small-government types like Grover Norquist feel so at

home on the playa.) One doubts that even the most devoted

Burner will be interested in personnel changes at Black Rock

City LLC and its successor, the nonprofit Burning Man Project.

There is one obvious place to check when weighing Mr.

Shister’s claim that Burning Man is changing the world for

the better. Beyond the wastes of northern Nevada, no region

has been more enmeshed with “Burning Man culture” than

the Bay Area, the event’s birthplace and home to a large

percentage of its attendees. The old joke that Burning Man

week is the nicest time of the year in San Francisco is not

really a joke anymore. “Radical Ritual” gives considerable

space to the “symbiotic partnership” between the festival and

the tech industry, where Mr. Shister finds much “overlap with

the Burning Man ethos.” At times, “Radical Ritual” reads like

a book inadvertently about the tech industry, or at least the

stories techies tell themselves. The same guileless fervor that

makes Mr. Shister a charming guide as he pedals his bike

from one “peak experience” to the next can feel downright

sinister when, for instance, he compares the wonderful

“gifting” culture on the playa to the ways tech monopolies

are “narrowing the divide between the work and personal

sides of an employee’s life” by feeding them smoothies and

washing their clothes. While Mr. Shister allows for “ulterior

corporate motives,” even the most bright-eyed Googler

knows better than to regard such inducements as gifts.

One of the defining qualities of Burning Man is the

inconvenience of building a temporary city in a remote

desert beset by dust storms and floods. That inconvenience,

in turn, brings the importance of communal action and civic

life to the fore. Working hard with strangers for something

fundamentally pointless has been part of the equation from

the start. When I attended Burning Man two decades ago, I

was genuinely moved to see so much labor spent on a

collective good time. Unfortunately, the tech industry, which

Mr. Shister identifies as Burning Man’s standard-bearer out

in the wider world, has made facile convenience its crowning

virtue, often at the expense of civic life.

Despite Mr. Shister’s sanguine outlook and a handful of

admirable examples, the view from the Bay Area suggests

that nine days of sexual liberation, psychedelic exploration

and cashless communalism does not trigger much in the way

of social progress. If anything, Burning Man’s concentrated

dose of social idealism and bohemian living seems to help

the fleece-vested masters of the universe return to their

standing desks untroubled by the utopian and democratic

impulses that infused the early internet.

Over the decades in which Burning Man and Silicon Valley

have grown up together, tech culture has slid from

“information wants to be free” to “we’re selling all your

information.” That is not Burning Man’s fault, but Mr. Shister

breezes past the heart of the matter when he records Burners

musing, “Might, heaven forbid, the talk of ‘changing the

world’ itself be misguided?” without pursuing the thought.

The idea of a party so good that it can change the world

is not exactly new. A few decades ago, it was called a

“happening” or a “be-in.” The notion that a brief frenzy of

cordoned-off transgression might actually buttress the

status quo is as old as the ancient Roman Saturnalia. Mr.

Shister accepts the premise, propagated by Larry Harvey,

that Burning Man represents something “grander than

revelry.” Maybe a really great party is grand enough.

Mr. Jennings is the author of “Paradise Now: The Story of

American Utopianism.”

A six-time attendee claims that the annual

desert revel is a fount of creativity, collective

action, self-reliance and a can-do spirit.

You’ve Gotta Walk the Walk

I

walked 114 miles the
other week, according to
my tracker. It would have
been more but there were
downpours, and I forgot the
handy device on one of my
outings. Oh, and I put in a full
week at the office.
Still, 114 isn’t shabby. That’s
16.3 miles a day—here, there
and everywhere in between.
Not my best weekly total, but
considering I had a stress frac-
ture on my right foot a few
months ago, it will do.
How is that possible, the
skeptic asks? Easy, the walka-
holic responds. There’s a 6-
mile march with the dog each
morning—I’ll carry him if he
complains. Plus, a 6-mile
round trip to and from work
(take the long route). A quick
2 miles between afternoon
conference calls—sometimes
during the calls (remember to
mute passing sirens). An en-
core 2-mile dog haul before
dinner (“Again?” his dark eyes

plead). And maybe a nightcap

mile to spare my wife from

the last dog pee. It adds up!

For a while, I was logging

another 10 miles with a 4 a.m.

start on alternate days in Cen-

tral Park, communing with

New York’s raccoons and cops.

It was magical and pushed my

weekly total to 130 miles—I

even got a client to join me

once and we marveled at New

York’s bejeweled skyline hours

before the city came to life.

But my wife put an end to that

craziness.

I’d rather run, as I did for

many years, packing in more

aerobics over less miles. Then

the injuries piled up—ankle,

knee, hip, psoas. I put in my

hours at the gym—bike, ellip-

tical, rower, treadmill. More

injuries and physical therapy,

and having to wait for my fa-

vorite machine.

Friends suggested nonim-

pact workouts—yoga, Pilates,

Gyrotonic. I have no patience

for static exertion. I demand

locomotion. My wife compares

me to a shark—I need to keep

moving.

Walking was my old

standby—no special equip-

ment, warmups or venues.

Just go. Now it’s the go-to ex-

ercise, with purpose and thick-

soled shoes. Need some paper

towels or gum? I’m out the

door, striving for that extra

milestone. It’s sort of in my

genes—my mother’s maiden

name is Walk.

Fitness experts would say

I’m overdoing it. While re-

search has shown greater car-

diovascular health among

postal workers and Amish men

who trek at least 15,000 steps

daily, there are studies claim-

ing that 7,000 is plenty for

keeping weight, blood pres-

sure and other vitals in check.

No one recommends anywhere

near the 45,000 steps I traipse

in a typical day.

I’m thrilled with a resting

heart rate of 45 and blood

pressure of 90/60. But walking

has other benefits—medita-

tive, restorative, creative. And

it’s taught me a few things,

like never to look for short-

cuts and that it’s OK to ex-

plore dead ends. It’s also fine

to stop to admire a view or

say hello to someone—things

the runner in me would never

have done.

I have friends who are

starting to talk retirement and

all the bucket-list trips they’ll

take to far-off locales. I’m

looking forward to exotic

walks through Brooklyn,

Queens and the Bronx, wher-

ever my feet will take me. As

long as I can keep moving, I’ll

be happy wherever.

Mr. Ripp runs a press rela-

tions firm in New York.

By Allan Ripp

Amish men and some

postmen take more

than 15,000 steps a

day. I take 45,000.

OPINION

Coming in BOOKS this weekend

The writers of the Cold War • The Borgias, the Medicis

and the Renaissance • The mosquito: a human history •

Counting down to Doomsday • A poetics for surfcasters

• Goethe in love • The bright Louise Penny • & much more

Teaneck, N.J.
Graduates of
Heichal
HaTorah
should be
“budding
Talmud scholars,” says Rabbi
Aryeh Stechler, headmaster of
the all-boys Orthodox Jewish
yeshiva high school. That’s not
all. The boys should also ap-
preciate “how unique this
country’s values are, and how
much America has done for
the Jews.”
For two years, Heichal
HaTorah has piloted the Tik-
vah Humanities Curriculum, a
Great Books honors track for
ninth- and 10th-graders study-
ing Western history, literature
and philosophy. The Tikvah
Fund, the foundation behind
the curriculum, believes He-
ichal is the only Jewish high
school in America with a clas-
sical-education program.
At some Orthodox schools,
subjects such as English, his-
tory and math take a back seat
to the analysis of Jewish texts.
Others, especially in Modern
Orthodox communities, dial
back the Judaic studies some-
what to provide rigorous all-
around education. They usually
do that, however, by aping top
secular schools, adopting pro-
gressive curricula that can be
hostile to traditional values.
Heichal HaTorah is evidence
that there’s a better way, sug-
gests Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, se-
nior director of the Tikvah
Fund. Better, he says, to “in-
fuse the humanities with the
Jewish spirit” than “look over
one’s shoulder for the latest
fad,” be it vulgar contempo-

Jerusalem Meets Athens in New Jersey

rary novels or revisionist his-

tory textbooks that Howard

Zinn might applaud. Heichal

HaTorah, which advertises a

“classic yeshiva education and

superior general studies pro-

gram,” articulates a different

vision of cutting-edge Jewish

education.

Heichal’s honors students

display impressive range in the

classroom. Back in June, ninth-

graders were reading Meister

Eckhart, a German medieval

theologian, and discussing the

West’s evolving understanding

of God and man. A question

arose and a student shouted a

relevant line from the Torah,

quoting it in Hebrew. While I

struggled to connect the dots,

another student compared

Eckhart’s view to an older one

from myths about Hercules. A

third cited Cicero.

“It’s like studying Talmud,”

said Shaya Zimerman, 16.

“Even on one tiny bit, there

are so many different opinions.

So you start at the beginning,

go in depth, read the opinions

and work through it.” Aggres-

sive annotations in the mar-

gins of his source sheet at-

tested to his training.

Few are better primed to

appreciate great texts from

long ago than yeshiva stu-

dents. “Of course the old argu-

ments of the Talmud shape the

Jewish laws we follow,” said

Tzvi Ginzberg, 16. “But

Thomas Paine’s ‘Common

Sense’ also influences how we

live, right now, in America. It

influences what we believe.”

I asked at random about the

ideas of the French Revolution,

which they studied earlier in

the year. Quickly, a 10th-grader

explained that the revolutionar-

ies’ universalism sadly encour-

aged France to export its revo-

lution by force. More broadly,

Tzvi said he disapproves of the-

orizing about politics from the

“state of nature.” I asked if that

means the American revolu-

tionaries were wrong, too. “Not

all of them were Lockeans,” he

responded, rejecting my prem-

ise. “Many only claimed the

traditional rights of English-

men, which Britain was clearly

violating.”

Rabbi Mitch Rocklin of the

Tikvah Fund smiles with pride.

He’s the principal instructor of

the honors track at Heichal

HaTorah, and he’s on a mission

to revive Jewish classical edu-

cation, once a requirement at

several top Orthodox schools

in prewar Europe. “It allows

students to see themselves as

part of a living Western tradi-

tion to which their Jewish

faith is fundamental,” he main-

tains. Rabbi Rocklin highlights

the connections by including

contemporaneous Jewish texts

in his lessons. “The students

start to love their Jewish reli-

gion in a new way,” he says.

He tries to show Jews

“what their religion has to do

with their culture, and what

their culture has to do with

their religion.” It seems to be

working. This year Heichal’s

honors track will expand to the

11th grade and a new Tikvah

program will launch at Bais

Yaakov Machon Ora, an all-

girls Orthodox Jewish school

in Passaic, N.J.

Rabbi Rocklin, who is both

a Princeton postdoc and a

chaplain in the New Jersey

Army National Guard, told his

students the course he taught

would be the hardest they’ve

ever taken. He has worked

equally hard, even volunteer-

ing to record a lesson while on

duty in Erbil, Iraq. (The boys

didn’t mind when the takeoff

of a V-22 Osprey aircraft inter-

rupted his lesson.) Finding

people willing and able to

teach such a wide-ranging cur-

riculum may be an obstacle to

the growth of Jewish classical

education. Another is that

many parents want their chil-

dren prepared intensively for

Advanced Placement exams.

Rabbi Rocklin says his stu-

dents will be ready, but insists

he won’t “bow down at the al-

tarofAP.”

No doubt some compro-

mises will be necessary. But if

traditional schools are going

to teach secular subjects, it

makes sense to teach them

traditionally. Rabbi Rocklin’s

students deserve to learn the

best the West has thought and

said. It’s their patrimony, too.

Mr. Kaufman is an assistant

editorial features editor at the

Journal. He has attended and

helped select participants for

Tikvah Fund educational pro-

grams.

Heichal HaTorah

teaches the great texts

of both the Jewish and

Western traditions.

HOUSES OF
WORSHIP
By Elliot
Kaufman

According to
presidential
aspirant Eliza-
beth Warren
and her sup-
porters, the
Massachu-
setts Demo-
crat “has a
plan” for ev-
erything. Stu-
dent-loan for-
giveness, immigration reform,
criminal-justice overhaul—
check, check, check. The sena-
tor even has strategies for pav-
ing dirt roads in Indian country
and for providing “fresh, af-
fordable, local food.”
It is the presence of so
many plans that make notable
the one policy area for which
Ms. Warren doesn’t have a
clear strategy: health care.
That missing agenda item
speaks volumes about the
shrewdness—or deception—of
her campaign.
To be sure, Ms. Warren
suggestsshe has a health-care
plan. In the first Democratic
debate, she stated she was
“with” Bernie Sanders on
Medicare for All. She ap-
peared to double down on this
commitment in the second de-
bate, joining Mr. Sanders to
rough up his detractors, and
promising to “fight for” single
payer.
In reality, she’s been far
less clear about what she will
do and when. Wade through
Ms. Warren’s detailed website,
and you’ll find no health-care
section. She avoids specifics
on the campaign trail, avoids
the whole topic when she can.
She has refused to answer
yes-or-no candidate questions

Warren Is Missing a Plan

on health topics. Read the

second debate transcript

closely, and you’ll notice she

spends most of her time argu-

ing that insurance companies

bring in too much and pay out

too little.

When the New York Times

asked this spring about her

health-care plan, she listed

her top priorities: protecting

ObamaCare, reducing drug

costs, and getting “a consum-

ers’ bill of rights for private

insurance so that people don’t

get ripped off.” Beyond that,

she said she’d “keep moving

us to a place where everybody

is covered at the lowest possi-

ble cost.” She has repeatedly

noted that there are many dif-

ferent (incremental) “paths”

to Medicare for All—such as

lowering the age of eligibility,

or letting employers buy into

the program.

This isn’t a plan; it’s a

hedge. It’s notable because it

comes as most of the Demo-

cratic field has quietly ac-

knowledged that killing pri-

vate insurance is a surefire

political loser. Five of the

seven U.S. senators running

for the presidency are offi-

cially sponsors of Mr. Sand-

ers’s Medicare for All bill. Yet

in recent weeks, Kamala Har-

ris, Cory Booker and Kirsten

Gillibrand have all backed

away from the provision that

would prohibit private insur-

ance. Most now instead sup-

port giving Americans a pub-

lic “option” alongside private

insurance—joining the likes of

Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and

Beto O’Rourke.

Ms. Warren’s vagueness ex-

poses the limits of her liberal

“populism.” She calls herself

a progressive, but her cam-

paign has focused on captur-

ing “forgotten” voters by

uniting them against “cor-

rupt” Washington, “corrupt”

Wall Street, “corrupt” “Big

Ag.” Her playbook is relent-

lessly monotone: Highlight an

unpleasant necessity of life

(student debt, child-care

bills), blame it on the rich and

powerful, propose govern-

ment as the solution.

Her pickle with health care

is that more than 100 million

Americans still prefer their pri-

vate insurance to a govern-

ment replacement. That’s the

“popular” will. Medicare for All

would also require Ms. Warren

to go beyond her wealth tax on

millionaires and billionaires,

the revenue from which she

has earmarked for other pro-

grams—free tuition, student-

debt forgiveness, child-care

subsidies. Medicare for All, as

Mr. Sanders has acknowledged,

would require her to tax the

middle class—which also isn’t

very populist.

Ms. Warren faces Demo-

cratic primary concerns that

she is unelectable—too ex-

treme to win nationwide in

November. Her campaign un-

derstands that a clear, com-

mitted plan for Medicare for

All would add to that liability.

She initially seemed set to

get around all this by con-

straining herself to more insur-

ance regulation. But Mr. Sand-

ers and his voters are turning

Medicare for All into a pro-

gressive litmus test. The Ver-

mont independent is increas-

ingly highlighting his rivals’

failure to embrace his plan as

evidence of their phoniness.

Ms. Warren wants and needs

those voters, especially should

Mr. Sanders leave the race. A

more modest health-care plan

would alienate them.

How to straddle this? She

can’t. Which is why the

woman who has a detailed

plan for everything, has no of-

ficial plan for an issue that

Gallup reports 80% of voters

said was “extremely” or

“very” important to their 2018

vote. So far, it’s worked for

her. Progressive activists read

from her second debate per-

formance that she is fully

committed to Medicare for

All. Middle-of-the-road Demo-

crats read from her other

comments, and her omissions,

that she may settle on an in-

surance-regulation plan, ac-

companied by a proposal to

expand Medicare incremen-

tally, or over time.

The question is how long

she gets away with it. If this

election is as mind-bendingly

consequential as Democrats

claim, surely the public de-

serves to know Ms. Warren’s

plan for the U.S. health-care

system. Maybe some intrepid

debate moderator might even

ask in September: “Ms. War-

ren, whydon’tyou have a plan

for that?”

Write to [email protected].

The Massachusetts

senator has been

remarkably vague

about health care.

POTOMAC
WATCH
By Kimberley
A. Strassel