The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky




Tom Wolfe CreditMark Seliger


“If you are not having a fight with somebody,” Tom Wolfetold The Guardian in 2004, “then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning.”


Mr. Wolfe is famous for his bright-eyed and best-selling books of literary journalism (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” in 1968, “The Right Stuff” in 1979) and for jumbo-size social novels like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) and “A Man in Full” (1998). Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine.


He took aim at Modern art and its enabling theorists in “The Painted Word” (1975) and modern architecture and its critical druids in “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981). In his essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989) he bird-dogged the American literary establishment for its solipsistic retreat from realism. He referred to three of his antagonists — John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving — in the title of another essay, published in 2000, as “My Three Stooges.”


Mr. Wolfe’s assaults were not meant to be well received by his entrenched opponents, and indeed they were not. He was tagged as an incorrigible philistine and worse. Few took his more combative books and essays altogether seriously, though they sharpened the conversation. Oddly, little of the stirred mud stuck to him. To recall these contretemps is to freshly appreciate Mr. Wolfe’s cameo appearance in “The Simpsons” when, after Homer smears chocolate on the author’s trademark white suit, Mr. Wolfe yanks it off to reveal an identical clean one underneath.


Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists.







Secondarily, this book is a rebuke of the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky, whom Mr. Wolfe refers to as “Noam Charisma.” Rebuke is actually too frivolous a word for the contumely Mr. Wolfe looses in his direction. More precisely, he tars and feathers Mr. Chomsky before sticking a clown nose on his face and rolling him in a baby stroller off a cliff.

Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds; in fact, he is an atheist. He begins by declaring the notion of the big bang to be vaguely ridiculous, and likens it to a mythopoetic bedtime story. Everything came from nothing?

Most essentially, Mr. Wolfe employs new research from the controversial anthropologist Daniel Everett to argue that the power of speech — man’s signal attribute — is not the product of evolution at all but rather a tool that man created. “Bango!” Mr. Wolfe writes. “There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal.” He wonders how airtight the theory of evolution can be if it does not account for such a thing. “What is it,” he asks, “that has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled when it comes to speech?”

Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms of sussing out speech, through the combined use of anatomy and physiology and biochemistry. The structures that support language don’t fossilize, so evidence is simply harder to come by. This is not something we will lose sleep over, no matter how much you pogo and spit in the Sid Vicious manner.

Mr. Chomsky, on the other hand, reading “The Kingdom of Speech,” may lose a bit of sleep. Mr. Wolfe chronicles the arguments against two of that linguist’s central theories — the notion that humans are born with an unseen language organ in the brain, and the complicated structural concept of recursion in language — and declares Mr. Chomsky to be bankrupt in nearly every regard, a pretentious man whose ideas set linguistic study back for decades. He narrates disputations of Mr. Chomsky’s work as if they were prizefights: “OOOF! — right into the solar plexus!”

Mr. Wolfe seems especially incensed that as a scholar, Mr. Chomsky privileged mental work over fieldwork, making linguistics an indoor rather than an outdoor pursuit. (In this book’s first section, Mr. Wolfe attacks Charles Darwin on similar grounds, paying almost no attention to the nearly five years Darwin spent aboard the Beagle.) These arguments neatly parallel his brief against American novelists whom, Mr. Wolfe thinks, don’t get out of the house nearly enough.

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, there is a great deal of funny and acid commentary on social class. About the possibility that Darwin, a wealthy and connected British gentleman, might have plundered some of his ideas about evolution from Alfred Russel Wallace, a social nobody, he writes:

“The British Gentleman was not merely rich, powerful, and refined. He was also a slick operator … smooth … smooth … smooth and then some. It was said that a British Gentleman could steal your underwear, your smalls and skivvies and knickers, and leave you staring straight at him asking if he didn’t think it had turned rather chilly all of a sudden.”

Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, a torrent of language is set free. Sentences spin past like whirligigs, or like Rube Goldberg devices that emit a pellet of information only after bouncing off four increasingly unlikely surfaces.

Mr. Wolfe’s prose here is mostly sure-footed, but there are moments when he seems on the verge of losing it, of falling into fragments of Morse-code nonsense that will put older readers in mind of the insane ellipses-filled columns Larry King once filed for USA Today.

Here is Mr. Wolfe, for example, on the work of eight evolutionists he wishes to mock: “I surfed and Safaried and finally moused upon the only academic I could find who disagreed with the eight failures, a chemist at Rice University … Rice … Rice used to have a big-time football team … the Rice Owls … wonder how they’re doing now? I moused around on the Rice site some more, and uh-oh … not so great last season, the Owls … football … and I surfed to football concussions … exactly as I thought!” The call-waiting system in his cranium, here and elsewhere, has gone haywire.

“The Kingdom of Speech” is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe,185 pages, Little , Brown

Kehot, Chabad Publishing House.... Godliness and Hafatzat Ma’ayanot Chutzah

Kehot, Chabad Publishing House.... Godliness and  Hafatzat Ma’ayanot Chutzah

When Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson arrived in the United States in 1941, his father-in-law, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn, asked him to head the new Chabad publishing house, Kehot. It was an inspired decision. A prodigious scholar and bibliophile, the future Rebbe devoted himself passionately to the task of spreading the “wellsprings” of Hasidic teaching “outward” (hafatzat ma’ayanot chutzah). Although Rabbi Schneerson’s charismatic personal leadership and the global network of shluchim, or emissaries, he established as the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe have received a great deal of attention in the recent discussions occasioned by his 20th yahrzeit and the recent biographies by Joseph Telushkin, Chaim Miller, and Adin Steinsaltz, his work as an editor and publisher has been relatively neglected. Yet, it is in the light of this work that some of his most ambitious lifelong goals must be understood.




Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1954. (Courtesy of TheRebbe.org/Chabad.org.)



Chabad is often described as the most intellectual of the Hasidic schools that first arose in 18th-century Eastern Europe. While other Hasidic groups are designated today almost exclusively by the names of their towns of origin— Kotzk, Breslov, Chernobyl—only Chabad has come to be known for the distinctive form of contemplative divine service it promoted, as well as the town (Lubavitch) in which it once flourished. The term Chabad is an acronym for the three cognitive faculties (Chochmah, Binah, and Da’at) that link the human to the divine in Jewish mystical psychology. While other Hasidic schools have tended to concentrate on emotional experience, especially in ecstatic prayer, Chabad leaders have always insisted that feeling follows thought. They have remained focused, moreover, on the radical demand to make “godliness,” as Rabbi Schneerson would later write, “visible to eyes of flesh.”


The contemplative study of Chabad texts was meant, among other things, to make the absolute contingency of the world upon divine vitality perceptible to the reader. This, in turn, would help to make this “lower” world a fitting “habitation” (dirah ba-tachtonim). Yet while the Tanya, written by the movement’s founder Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, and a few other key Chabad texts became well-known even outside of Hasidic circles, most of the tracts written by successive generations of Chabad leaders remained in manuscript form, passed from hand to hand as precious heirlooms. On his deathbed the fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, reportedly told his son and successor, “my soul I return to my Maker, the ksavim [manuscripts] I leave to you.”

Only a handful of classic Chabad texts were widely available for study when Rabbi Schneerson assumed the leadership of Kehot in 1942, but a steady stream of new publications has been emerging ever since. He also was perhaps the first Orthodox publisher in America to understand the importance of producing well-made, aesthetically pleasing (though inexpensive) books. Initially at his father-in-law’s instruction he also began annotating many of the texts himself with attention to sources, parallel passages, and variant manuscripts, but even in those early years, he was thinking popularly as well. In the 1940s he commissioned comic book artist Michel Schwartz to create a character based on Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese in the visual style of Chester Gould. Schwartz recalls the Rebbe’s specific instructions: “Ess zul oys’zehn vee Dick Tracy.”




Dick Tracy poster.



The energy of modern Chabad stems in large part from the way in which Rabbi Schneerson managed to combine the distribution and publicity-minded ethos of American publishing with ritual models embedded deep in Chabad theology. Among the various “missions” ormivtzoyim with which he charged his emissaries over the years was the bayit ma’ale sefarim campaign to literally fill Jewish houses with Jewish books. Jewish literacy is an obvious goal for any outreach movement, but the Rebbe’s passion for publishing was also intrinsic to his whole theological and messianic posture. The campaign to print Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s Tanya in every conceivable language might, for instance, have been explained by a desire to make its teachings as widely available as possible (the Rebbe is said to have celebrated particularly when it was first published in Braille), but the attempt to print it in literally each and every city was not about distribution. Nor was this the motivation for asking his Hasidim to stand on street corners with handheld mimeograph machines. It was, like the more famous effort to get all Jewish men to put on tefillin, an attempt at ritual efficacy, an attempt to improve the world and promote redemption through incremental accretion of “good deeds” and ritual acts. When Rabbi Schneerson authorized the publication of his predecessor the fifth Rebbe’sHemshech Ayin Beis in 1977, written more than 60 years earlier,he required the Hasidim to each contribute a dollar toward the effort. This was not about defraying the costs of publication. It was a declaration of shared responsibility for the momentous decision to publish a work of such transcendent holiness “before its time.”



One of the only books Schneerson ever authored in his own hand—as opposed to the many volumes of his public teachings that were memorized and written down by others—was a compendium of his father-in-law’s sayings and customs. This little Yiddish and Hebrew compilation, titled Ha-yom Yom, was first commissioned by R. Schneerson’s father-in-law as a “calendar” of daily customs and pithy encapsulations of Chabad doctrine that seems to have been designed to help Hasidim stay Hasidim in the tumultuous and enticing New World. But Rabbi Schneerson also included whole entries dedicated to the mundane details of the publication and emendation of classical Chabad texts. One of the less technical examples is an entry for 11 Tammuz, which reads simply, “In the Zholkva edition of Tanya that appeared in the year 5559 [1799], the first version of Iggeres Ha-Teshuvah [Letter on Repentance] was included. It was not divided into chapters and there are considerable variations in the content of the letter.” Publication history was apparently also sacred history.

Timing in publication can indeed be everything. Under the Rebbe’s guidance, Kehot would often release a discourse or ma’amar in pamphlet form on the anniversary of its original delivery or in response to a spiritual need of the moment. Ha-yom Yom repeats in several entries that Jews should recite words of Torah when walking down the street in order to “purify the air,” but R. Schneerson also quotes his father-in-law as saying that each rebbe had a specific teaching or discourse to which he would return periodically when he felt such purification was required. For the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, that was a teaching referred to as Hechaltzu, which was expanded upon by several of his successors. The most significant of these elaborations was by the fifth Rebbe, R. Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, who composed an extended discourse on the relationship between interpersonal ethics, especially accommodating others, and the mystery oftzimtzum, or divine contraction. Originally delivered orally in 1898 as a response to communal infighting among Hasidim, it was ordered reprinted on its 50th anniversary by R. Shalom Dovber’s son and successor Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak, who also asked that it be annotated by his own son-in-law and eventual successor, Rabbi Schneerson. There is a multigenerational quality to Chabad publishing that links each Rebbe to his successors and predecessors as well as his followers.

Such connections can be surprisingly intimate. There is a story that the fifth Rebbe once saw his young son sleeping and wanted to kiss him but refrained. Instead he sat down and wrote an essay, which he later presented to him with the words, “This is a Hasidic kiss.” The intimate sense of connection between people through texts in Chabad is one reason that the Rebbe’s commitment to modern publishing never diminished his sense of the sacred aura of handwritten manuscripts or even printed volumes that were once read by the movement’s leaders. Two of the most personally vexing dramas that played out during Rabbi Schneerson’s lifetime were both disputes over the disposition of his father-in-law’s massive library. Some 15,000 volumes of Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak’s library were seized by Soviet authorities after he was exiled in 1928, and they remain in Russia today, despite decades of diplomacy. Much later, in 1984, Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak’s grandson claimed part of the remaining library as an inheritance and sold several volumes including a rare illuminated haggadah. The case eventually went to court, and he was forced to return the books. In both cases R. Schneerson made it plain to followers that his manifest distress over the integrity of his father-in-law’s library was about far more than legal or financial considerations. The missing books were not just symbols of his father-in-law’s position as leader, but something like literal embodiments of his spiritual vitality in material form.

This is less surprising than it might sound. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s teacher the Maggid ofMezheritch once taught that all material objects are nothing but signposts or portals—tziyunim—for the divine vitality that pulses through them. This is the basis for the ideal of divine service through physicality that is the hallmark of Hasidism in all its forms. But books, and especially sacred books, are different, because their vitality lies so much closer to the surface. Hasidim say that when Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev first held a copy of Tanya in his hands all he could say was “light,” because that is what he saw. He is also said to have expressed his surprise that Rabbi Schneur Zalman could “put so great a God into such a little book.” It is the capacity of such books to hold both human and divine vitality that makes them subject, like people, to exile and redemption, and this helps to explain why the return of his father-in-law’s library became such a vital redemptive project for Rabbi Schneerson. (It also helps explain the significance of bringing the Tanya to every city and printing it on street corners. Publishing, Rabbi Schneerson once noted, is aptly rendered in Hebrew as “bringing to light.”).




Laying out pages at the printing press in Kfar Chabad, Israel. (The Menachem Wolff Collection/Lubavitch Archives.)


The redemptive significance of publishing goes back to the very origins of Chabad. When Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi was imprisoned in St. Petersburg on suspicion of treason in 1797, he reported a dream in which his teacher the Maggid and the Ba’al Shem Tov both informed him that his arrest was due to the opposition that his openly mystical teachings had aroused in the heavenly realms. Those realms were not alone in expressing their discomfort; R. Schneur Zalman was also bitterly criticized by many of his contemporaries for making mystical secrets so widely accessible. The discomfort extended to some of his most central teachings, including his forceful interpretation of the biblical phrase “There is none but [God],”ein od milvado, to which he added the emphatic mamash, “really,” to emphasize the utter contingency of the created world upon God. So it was significant that in his dream the Maggid and Ba’al Shem Tov also told him that his release from prison would mean that he should press forward with his radical agenda. Hasidim hearing this would have known that the Ba’al Shem Tov himself once reported a dream conversation with the Messiah who, when asked when he would come, replied that he would come only when the “wellsprings” of the Ba’al Shem’s own Hasidic teaching were spread outward.

Chabad has always considered itself the best and most authentic vehicle of this redemptive process. In an explanatory note to the recently published English edition of Schneerson’s Ha-yom Yom we learn that when the fourth Rebbe of Lubavitch complained as a boy to his father that the Messiah had not come on a certain promised date his father replied, “but this is the year the book Likkutei Torah was published!” That the publication of an important Hasidic work, even one by the movement’s founder, could be invoked as a partial fulfillment of messianic expectations, speaks volumes.

The date of Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s release from prison, 19 Kislev, is still celebrated as a major holiday in Chabad. In recent years it has frequently been accompanied by the release of major new publications and sales. In Jerusalem, this year I noticed that the Chabad book fair at the National Convention Center has become a magnet for Hasidim and other Orthodox Jews of all stripes, including many whose ancestors violently protested R. Schneur Zalman’s teachings. This would scarcely have been possible if Menachem Mendel Schneerson had not become Chabad’s publisher-in-chief. Indeed, publishing was in retrospect a natural vehicle for a bookish and introverted young scholar like Rabbi Schneerson, who was nonetheless destined to play a major role in 20th-century Jewish life.

There is a sense of ambivalence in parts of Chabad today over the direction the movement should take despite (or perhaps because of) its impressive continued growth in the 20 years since Rabbi Schneerson’s passing. Though much of the attention from outsiders has focused on the schism between messianic purists (a few of whom even protested the recent yahrzeit observance because of what it implied about their Rebbe’s passage from this world) and Chabad’s more pragmatic institutional core there is also a different, arguably deeper, tension at work. It is the tension between “corporate Chabad’s” global outreach network and the old spiritual quest for inwardness through study and prayer. This isn’t just a struggle between different camps; it is frequently expressed as ambivalence on the part of Hasidim who continue to feel the call of both values but must find their way forward today without the demanding and insistent presence of their Rebbe. The apparent paradox of an intellectual, spiritually demanding Hasidism elaborated alongside every kind of popularization—works of breathtaking mystical scholarship alongside “Dick Tracy” knock-offs—may have seemed like less of a contradiction when the Rebbe was present to bridge those worlds in his own person.

LEAN IN Women, Work, and the Will to Lead By Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell 228 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

LEAN IN

Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

By Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell

228 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

An assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School in the early ’90s, triedto explain to a prominent senior colleague why she had not yet managed to write one of the 10 or so articles required to get tenure in three years. He listened to her then said, “Journals don’t publish excuses.”

It’s a lesson that comes through loud and clear in Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.” Her point, in a nutshell, is that notwithstanding the many gender biases that still operate all over the workplace, excuses and justifications won’t get women anywhere. Instead, believe in yourself, give it your all, “lean in” and “don’t leave before you leave” — which is to say, don’t doubt your ability to combine work and family and thus edge yourself out of plum assignments before you even have a baby. Leaning in can promote a virtuous circle: you assume you can juggle work and family, you step forward, you succeed professionally, and then you’re in a better position to ask for what you need and to make changes that could benefit others.

No one who reads this book will ever doubt that Sandberg herself has the will to lead, not to mention the requisite commitment, intelligence and ferocious work ethic. Sandberg has been the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. At 43, she has already had a storied career: research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank; management consultant at McKinsey; chief of staff to Summers at the Treasury Department; and six and a half years at Google, where she rose to the post of vice president of global online sales and operations. She has also made it to the top of the notoriously male-dominated world of Silicon Valley, where the paucity of women among the ranks of computer scientists and engineers is still all too visible.

Sandberg is not just tough, however. She also comes across as compassionate, funny, honest and likable. Indeed, although she refers early on in the book to a study showing that for men success and likability are positively correlated, whereas for women they are inversely correlated, she manages to beat that bum rap. (Who can forget when Barack Obama, in one of his few slips on the 2008 campaign trail, said patronizingly to his chief rival: “You’re likable enough, Hillary”?) Sandberg’s advice to young women to be more ambitious, which can sound like a finger-wagging admonishment when taken out of context, is framed here in more encouraging terms — “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” — addressing the self-doubt that still holds many women back.Photo

CreditOlimpia Zagnoli

Most important, Sandberg is willing to draw the curtain aside on her own insecurities. She describes the many times in her career when she was deeply unsure of herself, and the uncertainty that has never entirely gone away:

“I still face situations that I fear are beyond my capabilities. I still have days when I feel like a fraud. And I still sometimes find myself spoken over and discounted while men sitting next to me are not. But now I know how to take a deep breath and keep my hand up. I have learned to sit at the table.”

Sandberg quotes other powerful women sharing their own insecurities, including a wonderful anecdote from Virginia Rometty, the first female chief executive officer of I.B.M. As Sandberg tells the story, Rometty was offered a “big job” early in her career, but she worried she might not have the proper experience. So she told the recruiter she would have to think it over. When she discussed the offer with her husband, he pointed out, “Do you think a man would ever have answered that question that way?” It all comes down to confidence, Sandberg suggests, and it is easier to be confident if you realize that your role models have plenty of doubts of their own.

Sandberg’s career as a feminist champion began with her 2010 TED talk, in which she first laid out her lean-in message. She followed up with a commencement address to the Barnard class of 2011. Both went viral. “Lean In” builds on the themes of these earlier talks, bolstered by extensive references to scholarly works and popular literature. She advises women to “make your partner a real partner,” recalling how she and her husband set patterns early on in their relationship that made them genuine equals when it came to child care. Her phrase “It’s a jungle gym, not a ladder” describes the many different paths careers can take, sideways and even downward on their way up. She also shares Eric Schmidt’s advice to her when she was considering a job offer at Google, which was a less attractive option than others she had at the time: “Only one criterion mattered when picking a job — fast growth.” Sandberg connects this to the value of personal growth, even when, or especially when, you are afraid.

“Lean In” is full of many such gems, slogans that ambitious women would do well to pin up on their wall. Figure out what you want to do before you meet with the people who can hire you. Ask yourself constantly: “How can I do better? What am I doing that I don’t know? What am I not doing that I don’t see?” “Done is better than perfect.” And many readers will enjoy the glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous that Sandberg affords. Head lice are an all-too-frequent and upsetting part of parenting, but when Sandberg discovered her two children had them, they were all flying to a business conference on the corporate jet of John Donahoe, the C.E.O. of eBay.Photo

Sheryl Sandberg CreditMatt Albiani

Inevitable questions of privilege aside, many parents will think, as I did, that this is a young woman’s book. Indeed, I nodded in recognition at so much of what Sandberg recounts, page after page, remembering my own early professional experiences and looking back to the days when my children were 5 and 3 (the age when they complain that they don’t see enough of you, rather than wanting you to get out of their face). This is also the book of someone who has never met a challenge she couldn’t surmount by working harder and believing in herself. But for the 229 missing female Fortune 500 leaders, as well as the hundreds of thousands of women who should be occupying lower-level leadership positions but aren’t, the problem is not leaning back but encountering a tipping point, a situation in which what was once a manageable and enjoyable work-family balance can no longer be sustained — regardless of ambition, confidence or even an equal partner. Sandberg is right to say that it is easier to handle work-family conflicts from as high a position on the career ladder as possible, but if in fact it’s the tipping points that tip women out of the work force, or at least prevent them from rising, then no amount of psychological coaching will make a difference.

That is the real debate here, and it’s an important one. Sandberg puts her finger on it when she writes: “For decades, we have focused on giving women the choice to work inside or outside the home. . . . But we have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we’re failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership.” This view accords with some of the findings of the Princeton Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership, which concluded in a March 2011 report that young women at Princeton often did not put themselves forward for leadership positions and were sometimes actively discouraged by others when they did. The Princeton committee also found that “the start counts,” meaning that the first few weeks on campus are crucial for women: an early willingness to step forward as a leader will lay the groundwork for future opportunities.

Still, after the start comes a very long road, with lots of bumps and what the law professor Joan Williams calls “the maternal wall” smack in the middle of it. Sandberg’s approach, as important as it is, is at best half a loaf. Moreover, given her positions first at Google and now at Facebook, it is hard not to notice that her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. For both the women who have made it and the men who work with them, it is cheaper and more comfortable to believe that what they need to do is simply urge younger women to be more like them, to think differently and negotiate more effectively, rather than make major changes in the way their companies work. Young women might be much more willing to lean in if they saw better models and possibilities of fitting work and life together: ways of slowing down for a while but still staying on a long-term promotion track; of getting work done on their own time rather than according to a fixed schedule; of being affirmed daily in their roles both as parents and as professionals.

Some workplaces are beginning to make these changes. The Boston Consulting Group, for instance, has discovered the value of predictable time off every week, which leads team members to work much more collaboratively in ways that support one another’s needs. As documented in “Sleeping With Your Smartphone,” by the Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, this approach has required a deep cultural change for consultants used to a 24/7 environment, as well as a commitment from management. But the business benefits have proved their financial and psychological worth. Other examples include the adoption of a Results Only Work Environment, which grants employees complete flexibility as to when, where and how they work, as long as they get their work done.

So is the dearth of women in top jobs due to a lack of ambition or a lack of support? Both, as Sandberg herself grants, proposing that women should “wage battles on both fronts.” Yet she chooses to concentrate only on the “internal obstacles,” the ways in which women hold themselves back. This is unfortunate. As a feminist and a corporate leader, Sandberg seems ideally placed to ask the question that all too often gets lost amid the welter of talk about what women should do, what they should want and how they should behave. When it comes to ensuring that caregivers still have paths to the corner office, how can business lean in?

LEAN IN

Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

By Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell

228 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

Passover 2016. Mount Gerizim, Good Samaritans of Zion and Sacrificial Lambs

Members of the ancient Samaritan community, a breakaway from ancient Israelite tribes, attend a Passover pilgrimage to the religion's holiest site of Mount Gerizim on April 27, 2016.

Samaritan Passover marked by slaughter of the lambs

The Samaritan sect celebrates the holiday of Passover in close adherence to biblical traditions such as sacrificing animals and donning long white robes.

The Samaritans offer their traditional Passover sacrifice, which is their parallel ceremony to the Seder meal observed by the Jews.

The ceremony takes places at the holiest site to the Samaritans, Mount Gerizim, where the majority of believers spend the seven days. During the sacrifice they all wear white, the color of freedom by their religion.

Samaritan worshippers ascend Mount Gerizim in their white robes on April 27, 2016.

When the priest issues the order, all the sheep are slaughtered all at once.


Members of the Samaritan sect take part in a traditional pilgrimage marking the holiday of Passover on Mount Gerizim on April 27, 2016. Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters
Afterwards the Samaritans bless each other and smear their foreheads with blood in memory of the children of Israel who smeared the same on their doorposts so the angel of death would pass over their homes to survive the plague of slaying the firstborn.


Samaritans slaughter sheep and goats at Mount Gerizim in the West Bank as a part of the annual Passover sacrifice, on April 20, 2016.

The sacrificial sheep are cooked and consumed without any side dishes in keeping with the teachings of the ancient Torah.


Samaritans roast the animals after slaughter atop Mt. Gerizim as part of the annual Passover sacrifice, this year's was held on April 20, 2016. 

The Samaritans (Samaritan Hebrew: שוֹמְרִים Samerim "Guardians/Keepers/Watchers [of the Law/Torah]", Jewish Hebrew: שומרונים‎ Shomronim, Arabic: السامريون‎ Sameriyyun) are an ethnoreligiousgroup of the Levant, originating from the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East.

The Samaritans are adherents of Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism. Samaritans believe that their worship, which is based on the Samaritan Pentateuch, is the true religionof the ancient Israelites from before the Babylonian Exile, preserved by those who remained in theLand of Israel, as opposed to Judaism, which they see as a related but altered and amended religion, brought back by those returning from the Babylonian exile.

Ancestrally, Samaritans claim descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (two sons ofJoseph) as well as from the priestly tribe of Levi, who have links to ancient Samaria from the period of their entry into the land of Canaan, while some suggest that it was from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the Samaritan polity of Baba Rabba. Samaritans used to include a line of Benjamin tribe, but it became extinct during the decline period of the Samaritan demographics. The split between them and the Judeans began during the time of Eli the priest when, according to Samaritan tradition, Judeans split off from the central Israelite tradition.

The Samaritans believe that Mount Gerizim was the original Holy Place of Israel from the time thatJoshua conquered Israel. The major issue between Rabbinical Jews (Jews who follow post-exile rabbinical interpretations of Judaism, who are the vast majority of Jews today) and Samaritans has always been the location of the chosen place to worship God; Jerusalem according to the Jewish faith or Mount Gerizim according to the Samaritan faith.

In the Talmud, a central post-exilic religious text of Judaism, the Samaritans are called Cutheans(Hebrew: כותים‎, Kutim), referring to the ancient city of Kutha, geographically located in what is todayIraq. In the biblical account, however, Cuthah was one of several cities from which people were brought to Samaria,^[7] and they worshiped Nergal.^[8][9] Modern genetics partially supports both the claims of the Samaritans and the account in the Talmud, suggesting that the genealogy of the Samaritans lies in some combination of these two accounts.

Once a large community of over a million in late Roman times, the Samaritans shrank to several tens of thousands in the wake of the bloody suppression of the Third Samaritan Revolt (529 CE) against theByzantine Christian rulers and mass conversion to Christianity under Byzantine rulers and to Islam under hundreds of years of Arab and Turkish rulers.

As of January 1, 2015, the population was 777, divided between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and the city of Holon, just outside Tel Aviv. Most Samaritans in Israel and the West Bank today speakHebrew and Arabic. For liturgical purposes, Samaritan Hebrew, Samaritan Aramaic, and Samaritan Arabic are used, all written in the Samaritan alphabet, a variant of the Old Hebrew alphabet, which is distinct from the Hebrew alphabet.^[16] Hebrew and later Aramaic were languages in use by the Jewish and Samaritan inhabitants of Judea prior to the Roman exile.

Although they are drafted into the Israel Defense Forces and considered by Rabbinical Judaism to be a branch of Jews, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel requires Samaritans to officially go through formal Orthodox conversion in order to be recognized as Halakhic Jews in Israel. One example is Israeli TV personality Sofi Tsedaka, who formally converted to Judaism at the age of 18.