Latke vs. hamantash

Tuesday night I made a journey to the South Side to attend the 60th Annual Latke-Hamantash Debate at the University of Chicago. I went with a pro-latke bias, but I must admit I found the defender of the hamantash to be the more persuasive of the panelists.

Philosophy Professor Yitzhak Melamed argued that it was pointless to argue whether the latke was superior to the hamantash, since he could prove that the hamantash does not even exist. (According to him, the hamantash is an item in an exhaustive list of things that don't exist.) His argument went as follows... There is nothing to distinguish one side of an equilateral triangle from the others; therefore all sides of an equilateral triangle are actually the same side, and the equilateral triangle can have at most one side. It follows that a three-sided equilateral triangle is an impossibility. Further, Spinoza asserted that the more perfect something is, the more reality it has. If isosceles and scalene triangles have less reality than the more perfect (but still impossible) equilateral triangle, then they cannot exist either. So no triangles exist, and no triangular objects, such as the hamantash, can exist. As far as I can tell, the chain of logic was properly constructed, but I had nagging doubts as to whether all the premises were true.

Rev. Alison Boden, Dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, then stepped bravely up to the lectern to defend the hamantash, which we had just been led to believe could not exist in nature. My expectations were not high. After all, what does a UCC minister know about latkes and hamantashen? Rev. Boden gave a sermon-like lecture that, like many sermons, went on too long. But in the end, she had me convinced that if there is an all-powerful being that takes interest in my affairs, it would want me to vote for the hamantash.