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150 most recent Jewcy posts
Reform Woman Decries Big Aish Deception |
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 by David Kelsey, July 3, 2009 |
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Aish HaTorah is the largest ultra-Orthodox "outreach" movement outside of Chabad. But unlike Chabad, Big Aish does not reveal that it is an ultra-Orthodox proselytizing organization. Preferably, Big Aish does not want you to know that it is Orthodox at all. In fact, Big Aish will blatantly lie about it.
Via Failed Messiah, jweekly reports,
I should have known that a trip advertised on the side of my Facebook page would not be what it seemed, but it just looked so enticing. How could I not take advantage of a trip to New York (everything but the flight) for only two hundred dollars? I decided to apply for the Women’s’ Future Jewish Enterprisers two-week trip in New York. [...]
I am a Reform Jew, and I appreciate the denominational diversity of the Jewish people, but I was informed at the beginning of the trip that Aish HaTorah does not have any affiliation with any particular denomination of Judaism, so I was less than thrilled when bombarded with Orthodox Jewish opinions.
Why does Aish resort to such deceptive techniques? Because they work, and no one that matters in either the Orthodox nor the Liberal/secular Jewish world seems to care. The State of Israel rewarded Aish with Kotel-front property for their efforts to "engage" Anglo-Jewry by hook or by crook. There are more religiously radical groups than Aish to be sure, but with the one exception, Aish is the most deceptive any major Kiruv organization.
The first prize for deceptive behavior, of course, goes to NCSY. Like Aish, NCSY - the youth group movement of the Orthodox Union - operates under an ecumenical front. The difference is, Aish targets adults, some of whom - like Elizabeth Katzki - are wise to cult-like tactics, even when coming from a Jewish source. But NCSY targets underage students through their Jewish "Student" Union (JSU) in our public schools.
Not surprisingly, NCSY and Aish HaTorah have a long history of partnership in "outreach."
Birds of a feather flock together. For them, lying in the name of Kiruv is a higher truth.
That Noise in the Background |
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| Dinosaur Jr.'s Farm | |
 by Charlie Bertsch, July 3, 2009 |
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Maybe you’re in a crowded restaurant, deep in conversation, when you gradually start to realize that there’s a song you like penetrating the din. Or your browsing at the mall to a piped-in soundtrack that refuses to be consigned to the background. Or you’re sitting at a traffic light on a lovely June night, when the sounds pulsing from a nearby car pique your interest. Whatever the circumstances, the appeal of the music inspires you to search out its source. If it was interesting enough to attract your attention from afar, imagine how good it will sound when you are able to listen to it properly? The urge to bring what was in the background closer is strong.
But the truth of the matter is that it’s getting harder and harder to devote that level of concentration to a record, no matter how compelling. Distraction is the dominant mode of experiencing music these days. Paradoxically, the very technology that allows us to carry our music with us, to keep it close at hand, makes it easier to treat it like muzak. Even if we dream of being exposed to music that we take to heart, the reality is that making that kind of long-term commitment is taking more discipline with each passing year.
That’s one of the reasons why the decline of the compact disc has led, remarkably, to a resurgence of interest in the format it had seemingly rendered obsolete. Listening to vinyl demands a degree of concentration, a ritual devotion, that the digital age has made it more difficult to muster. The injunctions that those of us who grew up with phonographs remember with nostalgia – to keep the surface of records clean, to make sure the turntable is level, to refrain from doing anything that might cause the needle to lose its groove – now serve double duty as a demand to pay attention in an era when it’s easy to consume music without paying anything at all.
Farm, the new album by alternative rock stalwarts Dinosaur Jr., does not explicitly thematize the massive changes in the music industry that have occurred since the band formed in the mid-1980s. But it does a better job than most records of making us ponder the way that our understanding of proximity and distance have been transformed as a result of that transformation. Although the songs on the album, with their tried-and-true format of guitar, bass and drums, are far removed from what usually gets classified as “ambient” music, they play with our expectations of the rock idiom.
The longest song on Farm, “I Don’t Want To Go There,” is a prime example. Replete with the sort of weighty chords and meandering solos identified with the classic rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it nevertheless manages to break with that tradition in subtle but crucial ways. For one thing, rather than building to an emotional peak, the track starts with a sonic density that suggests that we are already in the middle of things. The first words, duplicating the song’s title, further reinforce the sense that we are hearing a response to something that happens off the record. While everything about the song suggests that there is an antecedent to the refusal it delimits, the nature of “there” is never fleshed out.
The contrast to the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s cover of “Hey Joe” or Neil Young’s classic Crazy Horse song “Down By the River,” the closest classic rock equivalent to “I Don’t Want To Go There,” is keen. Instead of an electrified update of a blues standard, the sort of murder ballad whose precedents go back centuries, we get a song that conveys ambivalence, not only towards what has already happened prior to its starting point, but, implicitly, to the musical tradition that such countercultural landmarks reverentially invoked. In a sense, “I Don’t Want To Go There” is a murder ballad. But the victim is the fusion of musical and narrative tradition from which classic rock derived its authenticity.
That makes a lot of sense given Farm’s relationship, not only to the evolution of the music industry in general, but to the trajectory of Dinosaur Jr.’s career. Formed from the remains of hardcore punk band Deep Wound by longtime friends J Mascis and Lou Barlow, the band developed a name for itself by violating the tacit code of conduct governing the behavior of new artists. As Mascis has wryly noted, although Dinosaur Jr. had no fan base, having alienated Deep Wound’s demographic without effectively reaching out to a new one, they would play their hybrid of punk rhythm section and classic rock lead guitar at a literally ear-bruising volume in small clubs near their Amherst, Massachusetts hometown. Even though they were eventually banned from playing most local venues, however, they refused to compromise their musical values.
Because Mascis meets the definition of “laconic” on his most voluble days and writes lyrics that traffic in vagueness, ambivalence and resignation, early commentators on the band tended to perceive their anti-populist – or at least anti-popularity – style of performance as a confirmation that the band’s preferred mode of communication was to bring about a communication breakdown. And that was true, up to a point. But what such assessments failed to capture was the underlying cultural signficance of this seemingly perverse aesthetic. By literalizing the noise that impedes the transmission of clear signals – even the most radio-friendly bits in their songs would disappear inside the wall of distortion they generated in concert – Dinosaur Jr. wasn’t just self-reflexively fixating on a failure to communicate, they were also pointing to resistance in the transmission of tradition.
For the members of what would later be called “Generation X,” a sense of musical belonging was hard to come by. Unlike Baby Boomers who grew up with a clear sense of what distinguished their culture from The Man’s, children of the 1960s who were actually born in the 1960s had a harder time deciding what to rail against. While those who were strongly influenced by older siblings sometimes identified upward, claiming the classic rock and soul acts of that era as their own, most were ambivalent about music that was constantly being held up as a standard against which their own efforts were bound to fall short.
Anyone who spent time reading Rolling Stone as it progressed from counter-cultural rag to establishment glossy will remember the distinction that its reviewers tacitly maintained between legendary figures of the past, even if their current work was lackluster, and newer artists who were consistently found lacking. Within the five-star rating system that the publication popularized with its 1979 book The Rolling Stone Record Guide, only the former ever seemed worthy of the highest marks. The impact of this caste system, together with its corollaries elsewhere in the music industry, on those who were teenagers in the 1980s was profound. Some avoided painful comparisons by measuring artists according to extra-musical criteria, such as fashion, dance moves or pure celebrity in the abstract, a trend that contributed to the success of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince, as well as lesser stars like Boy George. Others, too invested in history to forget that their youth culture was classified as second rate, confronted the tastemakers head on by turning to forms of popular music, like punk and electronic pop, that rejected Baby Boomer culture on principle.
In the end, though, many of the musicians identified with Generation X found the pull of tradition too powerful to ignore. Although they were happy to piss off their elders by expressing affection for music that was too abrasive or too slick to appeal to the Woodstock or Wattstax crowds, they began to integrate more touchstones from their forebears’ record collections. In the realm of hip-hop, this grudging reconciliation took the form of a new musical approach. Rather than produce a collage of many different samples, whose origins were frequently difficult to determine, producers began to prioritize one seed track, typically a classic soul number, at the expense of other sources.
While legal concerns may have motivated this shift – it’s easier to clear samples if you’re using fewer of them – it also marked an aesthetic decision. During the heyday of unfettered sampling, typified by Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, the music of the previous generation was often treated like the screw and nail section of a hardware store, a repository of parts too small to stand alone. By the mid-1990s, however, most of mainstream hip-hop had reverted to the less complicated collages characteristic of the genre’s early years, before digital sampling has been introduced.
The pioneering single Rapper’s Delight, with its appropriation of the instantly identifiable bassline in Chic’s “Good Times,” was once more the template. But there was a new wrinkle this time. The resurgence of this less adventurous form of appropriation was accompanied by an explicitly historical consciousness. “Good Times” had barely left the charts when The Sugarhill Gang made it the bed for “Rapper’s Delight.” By contrast, the hip-hip of the mid-1990s went out of its way to expose listeners to the music that was popular immediately prior to the genre’s emergence. Whereas “Rapper’s Delight” made use of the Chic song “Good Times,” which had come out very recently, many of the most popular and effective new tracks used the soul, funk and reggae hits beloved by their parents as a musical bed. The effect of this fusion of old music to new lyrics was to give props to the past without falling prey to the illusion that it could return as a livable future.
In the domain of rock, which saw its scope and influence shrink as that of hip-hop expanded, the equivalent to this complex relation to musical and, by extension, political history usually took the form of an attempt to couple the aggressive sound of punk with elements derived from the countercultural icons that it had set out to skewer. While the sudden rise of Nirvana from respected independent-label band to platinum-selling standard-bearers brought this aesthetic sensibility to mainstream attention, their path to fame had been cleared – as Kurt Cobain always took pains to acknowledge – by predecessors such as Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, The Replacements and, yes, Dinosaur Jr., all bands that had managed, in different ways, to retain the attitude and energy of punk while invoking the melodicism and sensitivity of the best classic rock.
Just as hip-hop in the 1990s hearkened back, not to the blues or jazz tradition that preceded the rock and roll era, but to the output of the Motown, Stax and Philadelphia International labels as a tradition, these rock groups from the 1980s steered clear of “roots” music in order to explore the tangle of classic rock sources to which punk had initially threatened to sever all connection. Indeed, the difficulty of positing antecedents so characteristic of Dinosaur Jr. lyrics reflects a broader anxiety about finding a way to reestablish contact with roots which, even though they had only recently been laid down, were cut off from present-day concerns.
What makes Farm such a great and troubling album – it speaks volumes that the Pitchfork review of it has ranked as one of its most read since the day of its release – is that it perfectly simulates the aesthetic approach that Dinosaur Jr. and other alternative artists from the 1980s developed, only from within a cultural context in which that aesthetic approach has itself become, for many, the tradition that newer artists express ambivalence towards. The band have never been better. J Mascis remains one of the greatest living lead guitarists, able to turn out a melancholy solo or brutal chord sequence with equal aplomb. Drummer Murph has become a master of the hardcore punk-derived style of drumming that Mascis, who sat behind the kit in Deep Wound, always wanted him to deploy. And bassist Lou Barlow, returned from years of independent label-style commercial success in his other bands Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, gives each song a loose-limbed momentum that prevents Mascis’s more finger-happy moments from losing the sourness that keeps them pleasingly sweet.
One would be hard-pressed to name a better post-reunion record than Farm, which surpasses Dinosaur Jr.’s first new effort since getting back together, 2007’s excellent Beyond. Few of their classic rock predecessors can claim the same mid-career triumphs. With the possible exception of Neil Young, most of the big surviving countercultural icons started turning out watered-down versions of their sound by the end of the 1970s. While fans of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks dutifully trotted out to purchase their favorites’ latest records, even the most diehard of them would have to acknowledge that, given the choice, they would much rather have listened to those bands’ classic offerings. In the case of Farm, however, we are confronted with a product of older, wiser middle age that is no softer than the youthful output it so ably mimics.
Indeed, Farm may well be the best Dinosaur Jr. album, combining as it does the highlights of the original line-up’s approach with the more nuanced songs that J Mascis wrote in the 1990s, after turning the band into a solo act in everything but name. Those later albums, particularly the fine Where You Been, suffered, in retrospect, from an absence of the underlying muddiness that had made Your Living All Over Me and Bug special. Although they still conveyed a failure to communicate at the lyrical level, their clarity sometimes pitted form against content. By contrast, Farm’s sophisticated yet defiantly “old school” production values make it possible for Mascis’ lead guitar to emerge far enough from the dense rhythm section to activate our body memories of classic rock without getting so far away from it that his solos give us the troublingly untroubled musical bliss of that era. There’s a hesitance, a shame even, that accompanies his fretwork fancies that identifies Farm squarely with the band’s mid-1980s origins.
The problem, though, is that this troubling runs the risk of producing the satisfactions of nostalgia in a different register. If we are pleased to be troubled, if our expectations are met in the process, we can easily lapse into complacency. Ambivalence, too, can be its own reward. The challenge that faces us is to perceive it as a provocation instead of a salve. The brilliance of Farm is that it provides the tools we need to remind ourselves that the background should always be at the forefront of our concerns.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: MJ to Release More Music, Big Bad Dino Found, and Statue of Liberty Open to Visitors |
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 by Ashley Tedesco, July 3, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- A military helicopter crash has killed 26 Pakistani soldiers after the aircraft faced technical problems on board. Thirteen others are dead in Pakistan after a suspected U.S. drone attack on a Taliban stronghold.
- For the first time since September 11, 2001, the Statue of Liberty's crown will reopen tomorrow in honor of Independence Day.
- The death toll in Monday's Italian train derailment has risen to 22.
- There are reports that Michael Jackson was working on two albums at the time of his death. There is speculation that they will be released posthumously.
- It's almost the 4th of July, which can only mean one thing. No, not fireworks - tea parties. Anti-tax tea parties are planned for more than a thousand locations across the country. Good luck with that. [Editor's note: Actually, the number one thing you should associate with the Fourth of July is the hot dog eating contest in Coney Island. Obviously, my money's on Joey "Jaws" Chestnut.]
- A really, really old dinosaur has been found in Australia. Scientists have confirmed that the Australovenator lived 98 million years ago in the Outback, and he wasn't a friendly dinosaur.
- A 16-year-old boy is dead after being shot by Chicago police. He allegedly had a gun pointed at the cops.
What Flavor of New Jew Are You? |
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 by Patrick Aleph, July 3, 2009 |
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At a glance, there really aren't that many "movements" in Judaism. Orthodox, reform, reconstructionist and conservative. That's pretty much it. Sure, there are some variations on this, but compared to the Christian world, Jews like to keep it simple.
Or do we?
I decided to jump into the proverbial rabbit-hole of Jewish Denominationalism and discovered that there are more ways of being Jewish than there ever have been before.
Secular-As-Balls:
You still don't understand WHY Jews believe in G-d. Frankly, you think the whole "G-d Thing" is irrelevant. There's nothing about being Jewish that requires religion, customs, beliefs, worship, a love for Israel or the Jewish People. But if anyone DARES to slam the Jewish People or pretend that the Holocaust didn't happen, you'll be the first to kick their ass. It's like being an older brother: you can torture your siblings all you want to. But the minute some other kid tries to pick on your kid brother/sister, you're going to pound them into the ground. You express your faith (or lack thereof) by reading Heeb Magazine and going to the opening of the new Jewish Museum in your neighborhood. Just try to avoid the rabbi at all costs!
Hippiedox:
The product of Orthodox or immigrant parents, you voted for Barak Obama because he's cool like the new iPhone. You tone of voice moves between stoner and yiddishkeit, and your love for Matisyahu at times rivals the Lubavitcher Rebbe. You're more comfortable at Whole Foods than you are around your conservative in-laws, but you still feel a sense of sadness when a non-kosher restaurant opens near your shul. Kabbalah is your favorite pastime, because it's like being on a permanent acid trip.
See: Shemspeed, FrumSatire and "that guy" on the Birthright Israel trip.
Chabad-Could-It-Be: Thanks to Chabad's supply chain of eager rabbis, your small town of approximately ten Jews just got an Orthodox shul. Too bad for you that you have a shaved head, love bacon and still don't know what a mezzuzah is. But because you feel a cultural connection to Judaism, you decide to start attending services. You really hate the religio-political attitude of Chabadniks, but because this movement offers you the "real" Judaism that you cannot muster for yourself, you keep going back as an atonement for all the Friday nights you spent playing X-Box instead of reading the Good Book.
See: any Jew living west of the Mississippi river and east of Phoenix, Arizona.
Trans(gender) Denominational: You're an activist within Judaism. You want to reform (no pun intended) every corner of the Jewish World. Your obsession with Tikkun Olam really has nothing to do repairing the world as a whole, but instead concentrating on key issues within Judaism. Such examples include gay/lesbian rights, trans-inclusion, gender feminism, environmentalism and animal rights. You can't settle on one shul because they just don't address your "issues". Like a serial monogamist, you fall in love with one synagogue/rabbi and work the hell out of it until there is nothing left, then move onto another hot affair.
See: Union For Progressive Judaism, Barney Frank, and Kosherveg.com.
PolitiKosher: You love Israel. In fact, you're IN LOVE with Israel. There's something about the desert, the ruins, the graffiti and the bombs that just gives you this tingling feeling in your stomach. You think the Palestinians are secretly plotting your death and that if Netanyahu could just get his act together, the Messiah will surely come. Hopefully that person is you. Just in case, you've got your passport and a duffle bag filled with tallit ready to go.
See: Friends of the IDF, the Libi Fund and anyone wearing an "I Love The IDF" T-shirt.
Deconstructionist Judaism: Innovation is the tradition of the Jewish faith, and you are its greatest champion. You believe that G-d has a great sense of humor and personally marvels at your creative thinking skills. You pioneered such moments in Judaism as the chocolate seder, dog and cat bar mitzvahs, and menorahs hacked together from leftover Ikea stuff. You express your Judaism by taking Jewish ideas and making them better.
See: Moderntribe.com, Rabbi Laura Baum, Mel Brooks.
Many religions approach their movements like a ladder: the higher up you climb, the more "authentic" your faith. And generally speaking, the more conservative practice is usually what you're striving for. Judaism has a motto of horizontally-intergrated faith. A belief that Judaism is not a climb to the top, but rather a continuum that you place yourself on. More liberal? Slide to the left! More Orthodox, then move to the right.
Judaism, for me, is more like a spider web. A spider web starts by having a few pillars to hold it together. From these platforms, the spider is able to weave its web to the center. The purpose: to catch what the spider needs in order to survive. If one of the pillars that the web is connected to simply cannot hold the web, then the creative little spider finds a new anchor. If someone breaks the web from the inside, then the spider repairs it, differently than it was originally created. Still, the web stays intact. And every spider web is different, just like everyone's Judaism.
'Yes Men' Say 'No Thanks' to Jerusalem Film Festival |
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 by Jewcy Staff, July 3, 2009 |
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For those of you who bought tickets to the Jerusalem Film Festival, you might want to know that the docket now contains one less film. The Yes Men Fix the World, about a group called the Yes Men who "impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them," will no longer be screened at the Festival. The Yes Men themselves have written this open letter to the festival's organizers in order to explain why they chose to pull their movie from the lineup:
Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,
We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (http://www.bdsmovement.net/).
This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name. This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there. And Mike has always wanted to connect with the roots of his culture.
But despite all our feelings, we cannot abandon our mission as activists. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.
When Is A Mosque Just A Mosque? |
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 by Lilit Marcus, July 3, 2009 |
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I've been in Israel for a couple of weeks on a fellowship (more on that to come), and before coming back home to New York I decided to do a quick three day stopover in Istanbul. While friends in Tel Aviv told me Istanbul was a great getaway for a long weekend and the airfare was pretty cheap, I still had some reservations about journeying to a Muslim country. Yes, I'm well aware that Turkey is a pretty secular country, but the reality of being a white Western woman traveling alone makes me a little bit more anxious about any destination. (Note: I am meeting up with a friend here, but I had the first 24 hours to myself. You can stop worrying, Mom.)
After a whole day in Istanbul, I can definitely say it's a beautiful city with helpful people and good food. (You know how pretty much every culture has a food that is potatoes, cheese, and/or meat stuffed inside fried dough? The Turkish one is called a burekha, and it is rad.) I'm staying in a pretty touristy neighborhood, so there are always lots of people walking around on the street and I feel very safe coming and going on my own. I have definitely had to get stern with a couple of men who didn't take the hint that their advances weren't welcome, but this is far from the only country where that's happened. This morning, I got up, caught a bus, and headed over to the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, arguably Turkey's two most famous sites.
So, if lots of the women dress in Western style and people speak English with you, what's the problem with being an American here? The issue, of course, is that I'm not only an American - I'm also a Jew. And, as a Jew, is it right or proper for me to descend eagerly into a mosque, wearing a scarf on my head and snapping photos? As a person who writes often on the subject of religion, it seems logical that I'd want to visit important religious sites all over the world - after all, in Jerusalem I went not only to the Kotel but to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount. Is there anything odd about wanting to see in person the famous Hagia Sophia art and architecture that I studied in college? Shouldn't I, as a person of the Book, believe in expanding my knowledge? And does wearing a scarf over my head mean I'm trying to look like a Muslim or that I'm just being respectful of local rules and customs?
At what point, I wondered to myself, does a mosque stop being an art museum or a tourist attraction and start becoming a place of Muslim worship? As I walked out of the Blue Mosque, I noticed that the guards at the front were not allowing any more tourists to come in. By the time the midday call to prayer began, I was already in a tram, heading back across town.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Gay Sex in India, No State Funds for Sex in Argentina, and Jackson Memorial Scheduled |
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by Ashley Tedesco, July 2, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- India has lifted its ban on gay sex. But only to those 18 and older and living in New Delhi.
- South Carolina has found that there was no misuse of state funds in Mark Sanford's love affair scandal. Just misuse of better judgment.
- The Jackson saga goes on, with a raging custody battle, fights over funds, and rumors of drug abuse, but perhaps most importantly, his memorial service will be held at the Staples Center in LA on Tuesday.
- Vice President Joe Biden has arrived in Iraq to visit U.S. troops, two days after all American combat troops were removed.
- A 13-year-old girl committed suicide in fall 2006 after her "rival's" mother started harassing her on MySpace. A federal judge overturned the misdemeanor ruling against the "cyberbully" today. Because bullies need more opportunities to ruin middle schoolers' lives. Literally.
LimmudNY: Next Year in Somewhere Warm |
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by Lilit Marcus, July 2, 2009 |
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Last year, I wasn't very silent about my unhappiness with the way that the LimmudNY event in upstate New York was handled. The Nevele Grand Resort, where the conference was held, had a long record of inadequate or nonexistent heating during the winter months. True to form, their boiler broke down just before LimmudNY was scheduled to begin, and the freezing hotel set off a chain of events that led to the conference being less than a huge success.
Luckily, Limmud seems to have learned from last year's error and has chosen a new location for the 2010 conference. Not only that, but they're taking the Nevele to court. Here's an email that went out to last year's participants:
Dear Limmud NY 2009 Conference Registrants: We are almost at the halfway point between our 2009 and 2010 Conferences, and wanted to take this opportunity to update you on an important development at Limmud NY.
Although we have been working diligently since January to try to resolve these issues without resorting to legal action, we ultimately found it necessary to do so. Limmud NY has recently filed a lawsuit against the Nevele and one of its owner-managers for their failure to provide adequate heat and habitable facilities at our 2009 conference. While we will not know the outcome of the lawsuit for some time, we wanted to make you aware that we have undertaken this important step.
We want to take this opportunity to thank you once again for standing with us. We are deeply disappointed that the Nevele's failure to live up to its commitments led to a compromised 2009 conference experience, and promise that we will do everything in our power to make Conference 2010 the best Limmud NY ever.
In that regard, we are excited that we have secured a new, improved location for our 2010 conference, and planning is well underway. We will be returning to The Hudson Valley Resort, home of Limmud NY's first conference in 2005, which has been fully renovated. It offers both comfortable surroundings and modern conveniences.
We appreciate your continued support and patience. We look forward to seeing you at Limmud NY events during the months ahead, as well as at our sixth annual conference - January 15-18, 2010 at the Hudson Valley Resort.
B'shalom, The Limmud NY Board, 2009 Steering Committee, and staff
I really hope that Limmud wins their lawsuit.
Especially if it means I finally get that refund.
Robo-Goys, Kosher Phones and Other Jewish Technological Innovations |
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by Patrick Aleph, July 2, 2009 |
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People don't like to think very far into the future. I understand that: I can barely think about next week, let alone a decade from now.
But if the Tribe is going to survive, we need to learn to adapt. Judaism came from a pre-modern era. Now, more than ever, we need to find creative ways to use technology to bring the Tribe into the 21st Century...kicking and screaming if we have to.
So here are five technological innovations, which I feel will greatly improve Jewish life and further the Jewish People.
Twitter Minyans: I brought this up in my last article on Judaism and Marketing. It makes no sense to me that technology and prayer have not been fused together. Most of the prayers are short enough that they will work in Twitter, and we can shorten the other ones to fit in the 150 character box.
Digital Shabbos Candles: There's nothing that requires a Shabbos candle be a physical candle (haters beware, I did look in Code of Jewish Law for this), so we can assume that a candle screen saver would work just as well for Friday night. If you want something a little more low-tech, a simple flashlight would work just as well. But remember that if you do that, you have to let the battery run out, as switching the light off is "work."
Robot Shabbos Goys: Need a Shabbos goy but don't want to bother the nice Christian family next door? In the future, we'll have robots to do that for us. Even today, modern conveniences like the Roomba by iRobot take away any pressure to work on Shabbat.
Kosher iPhone: The future is here and it's called the iPhone. iBlessing and ParveOMeter are two amazing iPhone/iTouch apps to appease the yiddishkeit desire to introduce efficiency into the Jewish lifestyle. Future apps that I would like to see include the Modeh Ani alarm clock and a call-your-mother app that sends pre-recorded voicemails to your mom, letting her know you haven't dropped out of med school (yet)!
Insta-Conversion: Utilizing the power of the Internet, we can completely re-think how new Jews are brought into the Tribe. The general requirements are a pre-interview, some kind of Judaism 101 class, Bet Din, bris, mikvah and a public ceremony. If we break this down, we find that most of this can be done quickly and efficiently, utilizing e-technology. Pre-conversion interviews between rabbi and convert can easily be done via IM or Skype. Classes can be modeled after distance learning with e-books to read and online exams. The Bet Din can be turned into a teleconference, or again, another Skype adventure. The bris (for men) and mikvah would need to be in person, but as far as I'm concerned a public ceremony could be a mass update on your Facebook/Myspace/Twitter. We could also use webcams to broadcast this event.
Stay tuned; I am sure I'll come up with more.
Monotheism and the Spirits of Nature |
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 by Jay Michaelson, July 2, 2009 |
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Recently, on a trip to South Korea, I was moved to tears at a rock formation venerated by Korean shamans. The place was so holy that the power of it, the energy of it, was immediately apparent and absolutely obvious. And it moved me to tell a story about irony, idolatry, and nature.
Here's the irony: for many monotheists, nature-centered spirituality smacks of paganism, and thus idolatry. But for me, being cut off from nature is idolatry. When I'm surrounded by the noises of the city, and the incessant lures of consumer capitalism, I become diverted from my true self and my spiritual path.
I'm not such a puritan as to resist the joys of urban life. Yet those pleasures evoke, sometimes within minutes, a consumption-based perspective of "what do I want and how can I get it" -- the yetzer hara indulged so completely that it becomes invisible, taken for granted. I define myself in terms of the pleasure or pain that is being provided, and confuse stillness with boredom. Surrounded by glass and concrete, I lose my connection to my Source, and have to work to get it back. So, to the extent I still subscribe to monotheism at all, I find it enriched, not compromised, by the spirits in nature my Israelite ancestors sought so hard to erase.
Theoretically, as a nondualist/pantheist/whateverist who thinks that "God is Everything" makes more sense than "God is in Heaven," I shouldn't be so attracted to nature. My spiritual practice is oriented towards resting in the simple feeling of being, in naked awareness itself, regardless of what perceptions are occurring. In theory, I should be as at home in a parking lot as in a meadow; awareness is in both. "Is" -- the way I translate YHVH -- is in both. And yet, I'm not.
Perhaps the pivot here is that, while we often think of nature as a positive quality, as if it is something added to our experience, I want to suggest that nature is, well, our natural state. It is urban life that is something added to life as it is, something that covers up the natural state. Our ancestors lived in conditions more immediate with the facts of natural life than all but the most rugged of our contemporary vacations. Like other animals, humans are connected to the cycles of time and the seasons. Yet unlike other animals, we have created an artificial world that defies those cycles. That world, not "nature," is the change. The artificial world is the idol we erect between ourselves and everything else.
So it's not that "going into nature" is adding ingredients to the soup of consciousness. "Going into nature" is subtracting noise. Maintaining contact with "the simple feeling of being" is easier sometimes than others, and when there is something interposed between the soul and its natural state, and that something is a giant titillation of the selfish inclination, it is more difficult to rest in the omnipresent truth. Nature does not condition God. But un-nature tends to block our awareness of Her.
There is, perhaps, even a third irony, which is that I am most able to be monotheistically devotional when I am polytheistically awake. When God is abstract, I am able to approach God-consciousness with wisdom. But when God is concrete, and manifest in form, then devotion becomes primary. When I'm in touch with the various spirits inherent in natural settings, my heart opens, and my religious soul awakens. The fact that the spirit in question resides in a sacred mountain venerated by shamans might trouble some monotheists, but at this point in my journey, the particular form in which God/dess manifests is much less important than the energy of the manifestation itself. I am a more ardent Jew -- that is to say, a more heart-centered and devotional one -- when I am in sacred spaces, regardless of the particular traditions which venerate them.
More ardent -- and more firmly grounded in what matters. In my experience, religion denuded of religious experience is likely to have a very short lifespan. Of course, I know that many people are not interested in spiritual experiences, and do not want to have them. I didn't have them myself, until a few years ago. Ten years ago, if someone had told me they visited a shamanic rock and felt a surge of sacred energy, I would raise my eyebrows and confess that such experiences were not part of my spiritual path. But because I have trained, investigated, and explored, they are now. And as a result, I feel closer to, not farther from, the essence of religious life.
My intent is not to pronounce judgment on those who worship an abstract God, or an imaginary father figure derived solely from Scripture. I have also experienced God in traditional monotheistic ways -- as a father figure, concerned with righteousness and integrity -- and I appreciate that experience. But I appreciate it because it is an experience, not because it happens to conform with a text or tradition. It sits alongside my experiences of Goddess-in-the-form-of-nature-spirit, God-as-emptiness, Spirit-as-eros, and so on. Thus the last of my ironies is that precisely because I remain a monotheist, I am committed to the holiness of all of these encounters.
I confess, the spirit of the sacred mountain does not feel to me like the spirit in the ancient tree; they do indeed seem like separate, distinct things, and if I were differently inclined, I might well describe some as sacred, others as profane. But I am not so inclined. I want to know the sacred in all of its garbs, recognizing all our concepts and maps as so many attempts to interpret the uninterpretable. The counter-intuitive and revolutionary proposition of monotheism is that beneath all those forms, there is One Reality. And to me, the necessary consequence of that proposition is that all religious forms gesture at the truth. Of course, the interpretations we provide may well lead us astray from monotheism. But before and beneath those interpretations, there is the experience, and that is where truth resides.
I want to suggest that, today, monotheism needs the paganisms of nature in order to fight the new paganism of commercial capitalism, with its deification of desire and its technologies of satisfaction. Against the market, God doesn't stand a chance, unless religion offers a tangible alternative to Mammon -- and that means experience. Indeed, we are seeing in our times a return to non-rational experience, to spirituality, and to personal mystical encounters with the Divine. This trend is both for better and for worse -- all these moves are often couched in fundamentalist religious language, or still more crusader-like zeal. But if we open the doors to multiple forms and sources of inspiration, monotheistic religion can be radically pluralistic, rather than imperialistic, and, above all, deeply powerful. Dry religion cannot be felt -- but nature religion can. Let's open our hearts to the spirits of the rocks and the trees. They will forgive us our trespasses against them. We need them.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Jackson Breaks Records, Sanford Tries to Fall in Love, and No More Jewish Repulican Senators |
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by Ashley Tedesco, July 1, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order (with a little extra to make up for our mini hiatus since Monday):
- A Yemenia plane crash over the weekend is thought to have left only one survivor, a 12-year-old girl, who is now sharing her story of the traumatic incident.
- The South Carolina governor scandal gets stranger as Sanford says that his mistress is his "soulmate," but that he's trying to fall back in love with his wife. Which makes sense because love is definitely something that can be forced if you try really, really hard. And ignore your so-called soulmate.
- It's July 1, which means Sweden has taken over presidency of the EU for the next six months. Its first topic of conversation? Global climate change.
- Gossip Girl is getting a new face for drama this fall: Hilary Duff.
- Bad news bears for Republican Jews: the last Jewish GOP senator, Norm Coleman, has been defeated, leaving the GOP without a Jewish senator for the first time in more than fifty years. Ouch. More on this story to come.
- In the aftermath of the death of Michael Jackson, his album sales have shot through the roof - literally. 422,000 copies of his combined solo albums have sold since his death last week. His solo albums and one from his work with the Jackson 5 have taken the top nine spots on Billboard's Top Pop charts for the week, breaking all records.
- Yesterday's train crash in Viareggo, Tuscany has claimed the lives of 17 people and caused injury to more than 34, 12 of whom are in serious condition. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was booed as he arrived for a press conference.
- In case you needed more reason why you shouldn't keep a python as a pet, horrifying news is coming out of Florida, as a 12-foot-long Burmese python escaped its aquarium and strangled a two-year-old toddler as she slept. The mother's boyfriend, who owned the "pet," did not have a proper permit to keep the murderous creature.
- Oscar-winning actor Karl Malden, known for his roles in "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" has died. He was 97.
Angetevka |
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| Letter from the Crypt | |
 by Angela Himsel, July 1, 2009 |
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From: King David
To: Governor Sanford
Dear Governor Sanford,
Lying here in my crypt in Jerusalem, I heard across the span of 3,000 years
that you recently gave me a shout out.
You said, "King David...fell mightily.
He fell in very significant ways.
But then picked up the pieces."
It's true, I did fall, but not in the same way that you did. You fell in love. I didn't. I never
did. I was too busy fighting and
killing. It's not easy founding a
kingdom.
I presume you were comparing your affair with my affair with Bathsheba, but
that really is comparing hummous to babaganoush. In my case, my affair was wrong, not because I was married (I had a number of wives and concubines at that
point), but because she was. That is, she belonged to another man, and
taking her was like stealing. I know, you live in the enlightened 21st
century, and women aren't chattel or property, but I bet that if your wife was
doing the hora with another man and then became big with child, the Iron Age
man in you, too, might be roused from its egalitarian slumber.
But wife-stealing wasn't the worst of it.
I brought Bathsheba's husband home on a furlough to try to get him to
have marital relations with his wife so I could pass the kid off as his, but he
refused to do the deed with her since soldiers in battle weren't allowed to
have sex (it diminished their capacity on the field). I had no option but to get rid of him and make it look like he
was a casualty of war. He was sent to
the front lines where he was killed.
Nobody would have known any differently, either, but God knew, of
course.
Yet, what I find so amazing, even after all this time, is that I'm remembered
more for a sex scandal than for all of my other, far more egregious,
behavior. I was a pillager and
plunderer and extorter and murderer; I raided and took the spoils. I killed the Philistines, then turned
traitor and was hired as a mercenary by them and fought against Israel, my own
people. But as you know, Governor
Sanford, you can do whatever you do - whether good or bad - and it doesn't
matter: get caught with your willy in the wrong woman, and that's all anyone
talks about.
Governor Sanford, in my day, having sex with this divorced woman would have
rendered her your concubine. It
wouldn't have been considered adultery.
But let me share with you a
parable that Nathan the prophet said to me after I'd had Bathsheba's husband
killed. He said, "There were two men,
one of whom had everything, and the other had only this little ewe. The one who had everything was preparing a
dinner for a traveler, but instead of dipping into his own flocks, he took the
other man's ewe and killed it. What
should happen to that man?" And I,
livid, because I had a wicked temper back then, said, "Kill him!" Nathan looked me in the face and said, "That
man is you."
In your case, when Bill Clinton was found to have a wandering wanker, you said,
"That man should resign!" The
extra-marital affair is your own business.
It's your hypocrisy that has all of the other hypocrites' tunics in a
twist. Because there's just nothing
that creates such a frenzy as one puritanical hypocrite outing another,
especially when the hypocrisy is related to sex.
I feel for you. I'm even a little
jealous of you. But mostly, I don't
understand you. I was collecting
Philistine foreskins; you collect love letters. You like to coo. (The tan
lines! The curvy hip!) I prefer to coup. (The Jebusites, the Amalkites, the many ‘ites'!) As for love, I loved being loved. My first wife, Michal, who was my
arch-enemy, King Saul's daughter, loved me, (from my perspective, she brought
me closer to the throne), and her brother, Jonathan's, love for me was more
than the love of women. You can make of
that what you will. But I was so busy
creating my kingdom and getting rid of anyone who stood in my way that I had no
time for or interest in love.
In the end, as an old man, I was always cold, could never get warm, and so a
young virgin was brought to me to warm me.
(They make wonderful hot water bottles, these virgins.) She was my
companion but I never had sex with her.
Oh, I could have. I wasn't
really impotent. But my heart wasn't in
it. I was cold in every way, you
see. My life had made me cold to
emotion and to love. You are no King
David, Governor Sanford, though you cheated and lied. And for that, you should be grateful and thank God.
Finally, my advice is, don't resign.
Nobody else ever did. Repentance
is good, though. And a word of warning: there are those around you (not
mentioning the lieutenant governor by name) who are going to use this little
scandal to claw their own way into power.
I understand politics. Love
remains a mystery.
From my cold grave in Jerusalem, I wish you luck picking up the pieces and I
remain, yours,
King David
Borges and the Jews-Part III |
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| Precursors: Kafka, Babel and Agnon | |
by Ilan Stavans, June 30, 2009 |
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In Part I of this series, author Ilan Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a Jew. Part II focused on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah. Here, Stavans argues that Borges carefully styled himself as a literary son of Jewish precursors.
"Each writer creates his precursors"--Borges
Borges was the first, and for a while the only, supporter of Kafka in the
Hispanic world. In an essay called "Kafka and His Precursors," published in
1951 and included in Other Inquisitions
(1952), Borges writes in Eliot Eeinberger's rendition:
At one time I considered writing a study of Kafka's precursors. I had thought,
at first, that he was as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after
spending a little time with him, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his
habits, in the texts of various literatures and various ages.
Rather than offer a hermeneutic interpretation of Kafka, the essay then
concentrates on a catalogue of echoes in Kafka's work: Zeno's paradox against
motion, a fable by the ninthcentury Chinese author Han Yu, Kierkegaard, the
anti-Semite Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. Borges concludes:
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka;
if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is
what is most significant. Kafka's idiosyncrasy is present in each of those
writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would
not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and
Scrupules" by Robert Browning prophesizes the work of Kafka, but our reading of
Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not
read it as we read it now. The word "precursor" is indispensable to the
vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of
polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His
work modifies our conception of the past, as well as it will modify the future.
In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter. The first
Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and
terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.
Without a doubt, Borges works to create Kafka as his own precursor: In 1943,
Borges introduced, for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, Kafka's La metamorfosis. A few years earlier he
talked about him (and about Max Brod) in El
Hogar (July 8th, 1938). Borges also included material by Kafka
in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature
(1940), co-edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, as well as in
his compendia Libro del cielo y el infierno (1960, also with Bioy
Casares), Libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), and Libro de los
sueños (1976). A third and four pieces by Borges on Kafka were in the form
of introductions. The third was the fourth title of A Personal Library, Borges' last editorial project, published
between 1985 and 1986 in Argentina and Spain by Emecé and in Italian by Franco
Marco Ricci. His selection included Amerika
and some short stories. The fourth piece is a prologue he wrote toward the end
of his life, as part of a project called The
Library of Babel paid by the publisher Ediciones Siruela in Spain from 1978
to 1986.
Why Kafka? First, Borges needed to see literature globally. He doesn't even
mention his Czech origins and his German-language style. What matters to him
are the reverberations of Kafka's motifs. Yet, the particular reverberation of
Kafka that most interests Borges is, again, the Jewish connection. While he
does not approach Kafka in the context of Jewish literature exclusively, Borges is more interested in the Kafka of
the Hassidic parables than the novelist of The
Castle. His prologue to Kafka's tale, The Vulture, offers fresh
views on Borges' opinion not only on the author but on Jews in general.:
Everyone knows that Kafka always felt mysteriously guilty toward his father,
in the manner of Israel with its God; his Judaism, which separated him from the
rest of mankind, affected him in a complex way. The consciousness of
approaching death and the feverish exaltation of tuberculosis must have
sharpened those faculties...
Two ideas-or more exactly, two obsessions-rule Kafka's work: subordination and
the infinite. In almost all his fictions there are hierarchies, and those
hierarchies are infinite...
A less overt tribute to Kafka than these essays, yet one that is equally
significant, appears in the story "The Secret Miracle." Like "Deutches
Requiem," this short story has a single, unifying argument: the last hours
of a prisoner about to be executed by the Nazis; and the two focus on a single
concept: self-redemption. The former has a Jew as its protagonist, but it is
narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator; the latter, instead, has a
Nazi as its main character, and it is he who delivers the tale to us.
I will discuss "Deutches Requiem" in the next section: here, I want to
focus on "The Secret Miracle," which owes much more to Kafka. "The Secret
Miracle," was written during World War II and collected in Ficciones as a
triptych with Borges' other Jewish tales: "Emma Zunz" and "Death and the
Compass." (I included the three in the anthology Tropical Synagogues [1994]). It is more than a subliminal tribute
to one Kafka, dead by then for approximately a couple of decades.
The story opens with an epigraph from the Qur'an,
2:261: "And God caused him to die for an hundred years, and then raised him to
life. And God said, ‘How long hast thou waited?' He said, ‘I have waited a day
or part of a day'." Borges sets the plot in Prague in 1943. In the first scene
Jaromir Hladik, a translator and playwright arrested by the Nazis for being
Jewish, is taken to prison. The first scene is emblematic, and highly
Kafkaesque: it describes a dream Hladik has of a long chess game in which the
opponents have been at each other for such a long time that they have forgotten
what prize was to be. Even the rules of the game have been forgotten. Clearly,
Borges is setting the stage for a rivalry between Jews and Nazis as ancient as
the world itself.
It is in his cell where Hladik communicates with God, and this communication is
the centripetal force in the argument. Hladik, we find out, is the author an
unfinished drama called The Enemies
and he knows that, if his life is to have any meaning, it is because of his
authorship of this drama. So he requests that God grant him a miracle-a secret
miracle, since only he and he alone will know about it. In the final scene, as
Hladik faces a German firing squad, the universe comes to a stop:
The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who were to kill him stood
motionless. The sergeant's arm eternized an unfinished gesture. On a paving
stone of the courtyard a bee cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased, as
in a picture... He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work; His
omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him; German
lead would kill him at the set hour, but in his mind a year would go by between
the order and its execution.
In the very last line of the story, Hladik is shot to death on March 29th,
at 9:02 A.M. Even though no evidence of a finished manuscript of The Enemies can be found, the prisoner
dies satisfied: his life has been justified. His justification, obviously, has
to do with immortality, a theme, again, parallel to Kafka's. Borges' statement
is clear: a writer's raison d'être is to leave behind the better part of his
talent, and to struggle so that that contribution is finished, even if only
"ideally." It is clear, to me at least, that in the face of tyranny and death,
the Argentine understood what Jews in Europe were about: faith, endurance, and
posterity.
Isaac Babel
Borges' interest in European Jews and in particular, the Hasidim, led him to a
tangential interest in Isaac Babel, another Jewish author with few echoes in
the Spanish-speaking world. In a "capsule biography" about him published in
1938 in the magazine El Hogar, to
which Borges contributed between 1936 and 1939, he portrays Babel, who was
still alive at the time, as a defiant Jew. Herein Esther Allen's translation:
He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa,
late in 1894. Irreparably Semitic, Isaac was the son of a rag merchant from
Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrophe has been the normal climate of his
life. In the uneasy intervals between pogroms he learned not only to read and
write but to appreciate literature and enjoy the work of Maupassant, Flaubert,
and Rabelais. In 1914, he was certified a lawyer by the faculty of Law in
Saratov; in 1916, he risked a journey to Petrograd.
In that
capital city "traitors, malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned: the
category was somewhat arbitrary, but-implacably-it included Babel. He had to
relay on the friendship of a waiter who took him home and hid him, on a
Lithuanian accent acquired in Sebastopol, and on an apocryphal passport. His
first writings date from that period: tow or three satires of the Czarist
bureaucracy, published in Annals, Gorky's famous newspaper. (What must he
think, and not say, about Soviet Russia, that indecipherable labyrinth of state
offices?) Those two or three satires attracted the dangerous attention of the
government. He was accused of pornography and incitement of class hatred. From
this catastrophe he was saved by another catastrophe: the Russian Revolution.
In early 1921, Babel joined a Cossack regiment. Those blustering and useless
warriors (no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often
than the Cossacks) were, of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on
horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman
only added to their disdain and spite. A couple of well-timed and flashy
exploits enabled Babel to make them leave him in peace.
By reputation, through not according to the bibliographies, Isaac Babel is
still a homo unius libri. His unmatched book is titled Red Cavalry.
The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of
certain scenes. One of the stories-"Salt"-enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for
poems, and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.
Years ago I introduced Babel's stories into a Spanish-speaking audience. (An
English version of the introduction to Cuentos de Odesa and Cuentos
de Odesa [1993] appears in my book The Inveterate Dreamer [2001].)
Borges' profile is a revelation because no two writers could be more different.
Indeed, they are like and oil and water: the Russian, while a meticulous
stylist á la Maupassant, focused on the physical (e.g., the Jewish body) and on
political and social tensions in the early Soviet Union; the Argentine,
instead, was an escapist concerned with the metaphysical. Borges' understanding
of Babel, obviously, comes through secondary sources, as did much of his
knowledge in general. Still, even if he had read his stories, and I'm skeptical
about it, the connection between them would have remained tenuous.
Agnon
A stronger, and more vital influence on Borges came from a different
direction, Israel, but through the same chain of association: the Hasidic world
of Eastern Europe. Agnon (aka
Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes), was an Israeli writer, but among his earliest works was
a translation of the Tales of the Ba'al Shem Tov. Whether Borges found
Agnon through these tales, or through another means, by the mid-sixties Borges
was sufficiently enamoured of Agnon's writing to devote a series of lectures to
him.
Delivered at the Instituto Cultural
Argentino-Israelí in Buenos Aires, two of these lectures, one on the Book of
Job, the other on Spinoza, were
eventually translated into English. It turns out that there was a third lecture
as well.A chance comment with Neal Sokol-included in Ilan Stavans: Eight
Conversations (2004)-in which I state that Borges never read Shmuel Yosef
Agnon, prompted a Canadian friend, Carl Rosenberg, editor of Outlook, to
send me, so as to correct my ignorance, a third, previously unknown and
significantly shorter lecture by Borges. It was delivered in the same
institution in 1967, approximately a year after Agnon was awarded the Nobel
Prize, which he shared with the German poet Nelly Sachs.
In "On Sh. Y. Agnon," which I hereby reconstruct in English (the
Spanish transcription is awful), Borges mentions, in passing, Agnon's edition
of the Tales the Ba'al Shem-Tov. He also refers to Days of Awe, which Schocken issued in 1965 in the United States, under the
supervision of Nathan Glatzer, with one of those elongated subtitles more
suitable for poetry slams than for libraries: "Being a treasury of
traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom
Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and
new". But as the nonbeliever he was-and even less an enthusiast of religious
rituals-Borges prefers Contes de Jérusalem (1959), which he read in
the French rendition of Rachel and Guy Casaril. The anthology includes nine of
Agnon's tales, among them "Forevermore," "Tehila," "The Whole Loaf," "Ido and
Enam," and "Orange Peal: A Fantasy." Here is Borges:
I begin with some considerations that run the risk of
appearing digressive but which should take us to the essential theme: the
personality and oeuvre of our great contemporary, Shmuel Yosef Agnon. My
ignorance of Hebrew-ignorance which I deplore but which it's late to remedy
it-has forced me to judge him through Days of Awe, about the Jewish liturgical
year; and Contes de Jérusalem. I'll limit myself to the astonishment I've
experienced in these volumes, the latter especially.
Let me ask a simple yet complex question, which is what all questions are: What
is a nation? My first reaction is to offer a geographical answer, but it would
be insufficient. Instead, let us envision a nation as the series of memories stored
at the heart of a people. George Bernard Shaw was once asked: How much
suffering is humankind able to bear? His answer was that the suffering of a
single individual is enough and is also the limit. In other words, the limit
might be an abstraction, although the suffering itself is real. And so, if
misery is impossible to measure in collective terms, how might one define a
nation?
To me there isn't a clearer example of a nation than Israel, whose origins are
almost confused with those of the world entire, and who reaches us today after
much misery and exile. A nation is made of the accumulated memory of successive
generations. In itself, memory is often approached in a couple of ways: as a
barren collection of dates, names and locations; and as a catalog of
curiosities. But there's another approach neither endorsed by historians, nor
by students of folklore: memory as experience incarnated in people. This,
precisely, is what I find in Agnon.
Contes de Jérusalem ought to be read like one reads Dante: as a series of
tales, at once tragic and humorous; and as a set of symbols. Agnon enables us
to appreciate ancient Jewish tradition through a game of mirrors. In it he also
invites us to recognize the role of Hasidism. Unquestionably, the Hasidic tales
compiled by Martin Buber and, in his early years, by Agnon too, left an
indelible imprint on him. For instance, "Ido and Enam," filled with mystery, is
the bizarre tale of a scholar who, in an act of revelation, sees ninety-nine
words of an unknown language. Ninety-nine are also the names of God; the
Tetragramaton, which is the hundredth one, is infallible. Indirectly, Agnon
recalls in his pages the legend of the Golem, made out of sand by means of
words by a Cabalist in Prague's Jewish quarter.
I shall now refer to "The Whole Loaf," a story about chance. It reminds me of
Kafka, who is part of Jewish memory too. Agnon chronicles the infinite yet
minuscule obstacles undergone by its hungry protagonist as he prepares for the
Sabbath. Whereas Kafka was about the lack of hope, or else about a hope so
remote it generates in us a terrible feeling of desperation, Agnon is patient:
he waits because he's a believer. Indeed, one of the right decisions the
Swedish Academy made recently was not to award its Nobel Prize to a writer of
sadness and despair. Instead, it honored one who, like Bernard Shaw, also a
laureate, is sensitive to tragedy but knows that a joyful conclusion to the
human quest isn't altogether beyond us.
Another story in Contes de Jérusalem is about a country that could be any
country. This one in particular is punished with a drought marked by an
inexorably blue sky. Furthermore, enemies are always on the attack, the earth
is barren and rivers are empty. The population is divided into two parties: on
one side are the cover-headed, on the other the naked-headed. [...] The two
parties are ready to destroy each other. Yet there's a single individual who is
beyond any affiliation. He furtively leaves the city, praying for God to send a
compassionate storm to stop the destruction. When the others find out, they
excommunicate him. His sin: not to have alerted the authorities to his wishes.
A decision is then made to have everyone build a huge tent for protection from
the storm, which must be large enough to cover the entire country. A commission
is established to decide what name to give to the tent. Alternative commissions
take the responsibility of studying the etymology and orthography of the chosen
name. As the population wastes its energy in trivialities, God allows rain to
fall-and the barren land is fertilized, just as modern Israel itself was
fertilized. I hear a distant echo in Agnon's story of the Jewish tradition that
says that every generation includes a total of thirty-six just men. By the way,
this tradition was studied by Max Brod, Kafka's friend. Unacquainted with one
another, these just men navigate the world and are replaced as soon as they
die. Right now their dynasty redeems us.
Israel's memory is in Agnon-not an erudite but a living memory. He is known
through a pseudonym; he didn't write for his own vanity. Somehow he knew he was
the living memory of that admirable people to which, beyond the vicissitudes of
blood, we all belong: the people of Israel.
The interest in Agnon is part of Borges' admiration for Israel as a young
nation. His relationship with the Jewish state was ambivalent at first and only
in later years-when he himself became an institutional luminary-did he soften
his approach to it. It isn't that Borges was critical of Zionism. In fact,
judging by his work, he seems to have a limited knowledge of it. International
politics didn't interest him in the least. He seldom talked about Theodor
Herzl, not even about Eliezer ben Yehuda, credited for the modern revival of
the Hebrew language.
I said before that Borges visited Israel. He was there twice. The second time
was in 1971, when he received the Jerusalem Prize. The first trip came at the
invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his
philo-Semitism, and in particular of his positive views on Israel. He had been
active in the Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to
build in Jerusalem an Argentine cultural center. He also was the first to write
in Sur (no.254, September-October
1958). In the autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges
stated:
Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting
days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home the conviction of having been in
the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living,
vigilant land to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Geneva days, I had
always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element
of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few
years back I found myself taking immediately sides. White the outcome was still
uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week later, I wrote another on the
victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit.
There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from
Shakespeare:
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet,
Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.
Actually, Borges wrote three poems while in Israel, collected in In Praise of Darkness (1969). All
were later included in his Obras Completas. These poems have been
rendered into English before. Herein my own version. First, "To Israel":
Who shall tell if you, Israel, are to be found
In the lost labyrinth of secular rivers
That is my blood? Who shall locate the places
Where my blood and yours have navigated?
It doesn't matter. I know you're in the Sacred
Book that comprehends Time, rescued in history
By the red Adam, as well as by the memory
And agony of the Crucified One.
You're in the Book that is the mirror
Of each face approaching it,
As well as God's face, which, in its complex
And hard crystal, is appreciated in terror.
Long live Israel, who keeps God's wall
In your passionate battle.
"Israel":
A man incarcerated and bewitched,
a man condemned to be the serpent
that keeps the infamous gold,
a man condemned to be Shylock,
a man wandering through the globe,
knowing he had been in Paradise,
an old and blind man who ought to tear down
the temple columns,
a face condemned to be a mask,
a man who in spite of humankind
is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the Kabbalists,
a man that is a Book,
a mouth praising heaven's justice
from the abyss,
an attorney or a dentist
who talked with God in a mountain,
a man condemned to ridicule
and abomination, a Jew,
an ancient man,
burnt and drowned in lethal chambers,
an obstinate man who is immortal
and now has returned to battle,
to the violent light of victory,
beautiful like a lion at noon.
And "Israel, 1969":
I feared Israel would be threatened,
with sweet insidious,
by the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated, like sorrowful treasure,
in the cities of the infidel, the juderías,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams-
the nostalgia of those who, near the waters of Babylon,
longed for you, Jerusalem.
What else were you, Israel, if not that nostalgia,
the will to safe-keep,
from the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgy,
your solitude with God?
I was wrong. The oldest of nations
is also the youngest.
You haven't been tempted by gardens,
otherness and boredom,
but by the rigor of the last frontier.
Israel has announced, without words:
you shall forget who you are-
you shall leave behind your previous self.
You shall forget who you were in those lands
that gave you their afternoons and mornings
and which you shall no longer cherish.
You shall forget your parents' tongue
and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You shall be an Israeli. You shall be a soldier.
You shall build the homeland with swamps,
you shall erect it in deserts.
You brother shall work with you, he whose face you haven't seen before.
Only one thing is promised:
your place in the battlefield.
There's a strange, triumphant, pompous (almost unBorgesian) tone and tune to
these poems. They eulogize the Six-Day War figuratively, in the abstract,
without placing it in context: The oldest of nations is also the youngest.
Whoever is interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict won't get an uninterested
picture though them. Instead, the reader appreciates a blind fervor. In these
poems, the political Borges, a Borges I will discuss in the next section, makes
one of his earliest appearances.
#
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction.
What is British Jewish Politics? |
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by Keith Kahn-Harris, June 30, 2009 |
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Politics is an inescapable part of human existence. It concerns the way that people organise themselves, in particular how they act within institutions and units of governance. Above all, politics concerns the way humans interact with power. It is therefore self-evident that politics exists in the British Jewish community, but what I want to question is how far the British Jewish community has an acknowledged politics.
In much of the British Jewish community, politics is in ‘bad taste’. In synagogues a macher that is too overt in political scheming is likely to be viewed with suspicion. On a community-wide level, inter-denominational politicking is widely practiced, but often looked down on. In the oldest and most influential UK Jewish representative organization, the Board of Deputies, which has a quasi-parliamentary structure and whose deputies elect a president and vice-president, there is nothing resembling parties and deputies rarely face election fights in their own communities. Even those few organisations that are openly political, such as the UK branches of Israeli political parties, tend to be low-key and poorly supported.
In short, there is a disparity between the de facto inevitability and ubiquity of British Jewish communal politics and the degree to which this politics is openly recognised. British Jewish politics is largely a matter for quiet, behind-the-scenes activity.
This reticence is perhaps a function of a tacit assumption that politics is antithetical to community. To be openly political is seen to be to seek to divide, to create strife and discord that threatens to rupture communal harmony. In part this may derive from long-held feelings of insecurity that as a minority in British society, the Jewish community must show a united front and that division can only equal weakness. In terms of Israel, one of the most contentious issues in British Jewish life, public campaigning against Israeli policies (from both a right and a left perspective) or open support for Israeli political parties, are marginal activities – viewed by much of the community as bad form and potentially dangerous.
The assumption that small minorities need to present a united front is not necessarily illegitimate. The problem is that the lack of politics can create problems more serious than those it is designed to combat. If Jewish communal politics is not acknowledged, politics will still continue, but it will continue in ways that can be corrosive. If those who disagree with a particular direction the community takes can only been seen to legitimately disagree if they do so privately, this increases the likelihood that rather than accept their marginality they will resort to attacking the community.
I am thinking here about the position of those who disagree with communal support for Israel. Contrary to the commonly made accusation that the community ‘suppresses’ debate, it is more the case that debate is possible if it is done quietly and behind the scenes. The trouble is that some will not accept only being able to disagree privately while in public maintaining a facade of unity. Without a legitimate political process through which to debate communal policies, those British Jews who are critical of Israel have often resorted to attacking the community from the outside.
I recently attended the annual general meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, an organization whose aims I broadly support. Many of those attending were extremely bitter with the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community, and most were uninterested in working to bring Jews who were more involved in the community on board. As much as the mainstream community shuns leftist critics of Israel, many of them effectively shun themselves.
It is essential to begin the process of rethinking British Jewish politics. The tacit assumption that politics and community are antithetical needs to be questioned. In any but the tiniest, most homogeneous community, differences of opinion are inevitable and there has to be a way of dealing with these differences without the dissolution of the community. What models might there be for a community whose political system could allow for the mediation of difference? What kind of political language do British Jews need to embrace in order to function without undue rancor?
One source of inspiration might be parliamentary democracy itself. The Board of Deputies is structured as a kind of parliament, but it lacks one crucial element of parliamentary democracy – an official opposition. When a politician who has been democratically elected speaks for a country, region or locality, it is clear that even if they govern for all, they were only elected by some. To be a leader in a democracy is to publicly affirm that not everyone agrees. Indeed, when democracies work best (and admittedly they often do not) the opposition plays an important role in the democratic process, scrutinising the executive and acting as a constant rebuke to delusions of unanimity. Political opponents may disagree vehemently but in the best parliamentary democracies, this does not stop them respecting each other as individuals, nor does the fact of divided political loyalties necessarily prevent the cohesiveness of the nation.
The parliamentary model is of course not applicable in its entirety in the British Jewish community. It is hard to envisage a truly representative Jewish parliament – who decides who is a Jew and who can vote? But the parliamentary model teaches us that it does suggest that politics can overt politics can not only allow community and difference to be balanced, it can also improve the quality of the leadership within of the Jewish community. Above all, it suggests that we should not fear politics but embrace it.
The Neglected Poetry of Yossel Birstein |
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by Andrew Firestone, June 30, 2009 |
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This summer, Zeek has been re-examining the work of Yiddish writer Yossel Birstein. Our summer print issue includes a never-before translated Birstein story; here, we offer Andrew Firestone's discussion of Birstein's only book of poems, written when he was living in Australia, before making aliyah to Israel--Adam Rovner, Zeek Translations Editor
I have always loved poetry, so I was delighted when the Jewish Museum of Australia asked me to research and report on the Yiddish poets of Melbourne. Of several gems which came to light, no book impressed me more than Yossel Birstein's Unter Fremde Himlen, Under Alien Skies, (Melbourne, 1949).
Most of these pre-War poems movingly describe a young man's immigrant experience of alienation, as he holds on to his Jewish Yiddish culture far from home. But some of the strongest writing appears in the series of fifteen memorial poems that open the book. Here Birstein makes his poetic response to the martyrdom of his family and the other Jews of their Polish town of Biala-Podlaska. When he wrote most of these verses, in 1945, he was twenty-five years old.
Yet, after he wrote Under Alien Skies,Birstein gave up poetry for prose. Why?
From Poland to Melbourne
The bare bones of Birstein's biography are these. He came to Australia unaccompanied at the age of sixteen, in 1937. He was the eldest of four, and two years later, in the nick of time, Reyzl, the next child, followed. Grandparents in Melbourne paid the fares and arranged their papers, and Birstein lived with them. His home was in Carlton, which then resembled New York's Lower East Side--as much Yiddish and Italian were heard on the street as English.
Birstein worked in a clothing factory and began to write poems, which the two local Yiddish newspapers were pleased to publish ("a homegrown product"). His friends were left-wing bohemian writers and artists. His best friend, whom he had met on the journey from Poland, later illustrated Under Alien Skies. This was the artist Yosl Bergner, whose father, the famous Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitch, was then living in Melbourne.
The rest of Birstein's family never followed. The war came and Birstein's parents and the younger children all perished. By 1949, Birstein was married with a daughter, and working as the first paid secretary of the now thriving Yiddish cultural organization in Melbourne, Kadimah. (In this Birstein was unusual in his generation: few of his own age were interested in Yiddish, and more than once Birstein publicly bemoaned his own generation's abandoning of Yiddish.)
He didn't work for Kadimah long; soon after his book of poems was published, Birstein and his family moved to Israel. There, Birstein became a writer of short stories and novels, in Yiddish and Hebrew; and a well-loved storyteller, on the radio and at festivals.. He wrote but one more poem after leaving Melbourne. He passed away in Jerusalem in 2003.
Poetic Influences
Birstein left school at age twelve to assist his father, a poor shoemaker. Birstein was a voracious reader though, and in Melbourne he continued his reading, in Yiddish and in English. In addition he was a regular at weekly left-wing lectures.
His friend Bergner has recorded that, soon after the two of them arrived in Melbourne, he visited Birstein at home one day, and was invited to "seat thyself": Birstein was teaching himself English by reading Shakespeare!
Birstein and Bergner: from Benny LapidBergner's father, the famous poet Melekh
Ravitch, must have impressed Birstein; but Birstein's work is quite different. Many of Birstein's poems resemble folksongs,
albeit refined ones, perhaps due to the influence of his mother, a singer of
recognized talent. His verses, written to be heard, are
always rhymed. (It is difficult to convey their musicality in translation,
though there have been some remarkable successes.)
Birstein's earliest poems often sacrificed clarity for musicality; but his technical mastery developed rapidly. Soon after his first poems were published Birstein soon was contacted by I. I. Giligich, the doyen of Melbourne's Yiddish school principals, who introduced Birstein to the verses of Leyb Naydus and Itzik Manger.
Birstein was also influenced by the short stories of Pinkhas Goldhar, a social realist writer, and the social realist paintings of Yosl Bergner and Noel Counihan-all artists Birstein knew well in Melbourne. Like them, Birstein tried his hand at poems in the social realist mode, perhaps the best among them being "At the Factory," translated by Floris Kalman.
At the factory
Translated by Floris Kalman
I murmur to myself
timeworn everyday words
until they pass into silence -
and silence too is just a game.
Looking around I see
from every separate thing
a muteness flowing out
and weeping, in its own tongue.
Bending down I say
to the iron head of the machine:
I too am a thing, nothing more...
of a different kind, I know.
The silvery dust covers me too,
the walls surround me as well,
through the pane a luminous ray
stretches out to me a warm hand
Caresses my dust-covered head
at the iron head of the machine -
I too am a thing, nothing more...
of a different kind, I know.
Another influence was the poet Moyshe Leyb Halpern. Halpern, like the social realists, was also interested in social justice, but his style and tone is much more modernist. Indeed, Halpern was often criticized for his "coarse" writing, according to scholar Julian Levinson.
Birstein echoes the alienation of the modernist in the following poem, both musical and suspenseful, which morphs from the Gothic into personal angst:
A Visitor On My Doorstep
Translated by Leigh Fetter
I clean away the plenitude from my
table,
remove my wellbeing, as if
another's clothing.
A visitor is on my doorstep -
come to stay for ever, he's
intending.
He sits down at the table by me,
near,
to wait until these become my own:
the misfortunes of his body,
his sadness, and his fear
which lies hidden beneath his load
of silence.
On bowed shoulders his head is
firmly set,
and I can tell he waits for me to
say:
I want to be humiliated like you,
like you I also want to be
depressed.
I don't know if I tell him that or
not,
but over me starts swaying low
the heavy fate of my father's lot
which my father too hid silently
below.
It may be that my father - it is
he,
this visitor seated by my side
silent, heavy and constricted, as
if awaiting
my forgiveness for some wrong he's
done.
But it could also be, the visitor
is simply me,
and I'm beside myself, by sorrows
overcome -
waiting for a word to rise in me
waiting, to tell myself something.
This sense of sorrow is felt most acutely in the poems that open the book, the Memorial poems.
Memorial Poems
Hard on the liberation of Europe, in July1944, a left-wing anthology of Yiddish prose and verse , Tsushteyer (Supporters), appeared in Melbourne, Australia. Yossel Birstein, then twenty-four years old, wrote
In the folds of my
granny's clothes
Yellow
prayer-psalms smoulder,
Making my little
gran herself
A prayerbook of
oldfashioned laments.
And continued
The secret is
secret no longer
Out of the dust a
reckoning is coming...
Birstein's Mother: Source: Benny LapidThe emotional
composure of this poem suggests that confirmation of the deaths of all of
Birstein's family in Eastern Poland was yet to come. When it did, the force and poignancy of the series of fifteen
memorial poems he wrote for them was remarkable. (Translations following are by
Beni Gothajner. All the poems of the book Under Alien Skies can be found
in Yiddish, along with English and Hebrew translations of some of them, at www.YiddishPoetry.org).
Who can I reach out
a hand to?
a whole house:
a wall, a table, a
chair;
even they silently
demand
that we remember
them.
Each of his family is memorialized. Here is the first verse of "My little brother":
The Yiddish
word and the Yiddish song
are held in
stocks of sorrow and pain.
Such a store is
the soul of each
who takes part
in our weeping.
May they shine,
the word and the song that dress
young spirits
with dreams of happiness -my little
brother is a small mound of ash.
Every verse of that poem ends with the same line...
But the most poignant poem of the series is the one for his sister, "Oyf dayn fayerdiker khasene." The word fayerdik means both fiery and celebratory, for light and fire are part of all festive occasions.
At
Your Fiery Wedding
Translated by Beni
Gothajner
You would have
been a virgin bride by now
with all the
graces of the young and chaste.
Instead, Death
snatched you to his side
and married you
in haste.
Who was missing
at the ball?
Everyone came;
strangers, neighbours, all.
The devil
danced a reel with the whole world,
with you - and
all Israel in one.
How beautifully
you danced; with flare, with flame.
Only our people
can dance the same,
committing to
the fire both body and heart.
Only our spirit
and flesh know how to dance this part.
I alone did not
turn up at all
to dance at
your fiery wedding ball.
You are not mistaken if you detected survivor guilt in these poems, which can be read even more plainly in the following piece, translated by Miriam Leberstein, New York:
No
More To Do With The Roar
Translated
by Miriam Leberstein
I have no more
to do with the roar of the city
and no more to
do with the hearth of my neighbour.
Door murmurs to
door signing like the deaf
"Who was it
that halted him in his tracks?"
It isn't the
beautiful sky or the sun
nor is it the
day, autumnal and windy
but a kind of a
bell ringing out its command
which resounds
in my head "you are guilty... are guilty."
Why am I guilty?
I don't know why.
The tragedy is
spreading like weeds through my life.
My dear ones
that died visit during the night,
they demand
sorrow of me, but I have none to give.
They stand by
my bedside, immovable, stubborn
staring in
silence, as is their habit
as I lie
outstretched in my cushiony bed
dying of
surfeit, not from privation.
And what
happens next? Nothing else happens.
I wake to a
morning splattered with sunlight
and try to
forget in the taste of my bread
the world that
visits my bedside at night.
But a bell
keeps on ringing: "Know this, you are finished -
and what is
more - you have been cut adrift.
You have no
more to do with the roar of the city
and no more to
do with the hearth of your neighbour."
Where could Birstein go from here?
From Poet to Novelist
After Under Alien Skies, Birstein would only write one more poem, just after arriving in Israel, and then no more. Why? I have asked his wife Margaret, and she doesn't know. They are not lying unpublished in a drawer. Though he continued writing almost all of his life, Birstein published poetry between the ages of 19 and 30 only.
One reason might have been the lukewarm reception with which his poetry was received. Even though the book was reviewed by two of the Yiddish world's most respected critics, Yehoshua Rapoport in Melbourne and Yankev Glatstein-perhaps the best-regarded Yiddish poet then living-in New York, neither reviewer seemed to appreciate Birstein's work and both ignored the strongest poems of the book, the Memorial sequence.
We can appreciate the critics' wishes to shield their readers at that time from Birstein's Memorial poems. They had their own losses, and those of their readers, to take into account. But how much was Birstein affected by this response?
Instead of characterizing Birstein as a poet of the Jewish world, Rapoport in particular put Birstein into a smaller box, as an Australian Yiddish poet-not quite the scope an ambitious writer wanted. The only poem Rapoport discussed in depth was The Plea (given here in Gothajner's translation), as descriptive of Birstein's struggle to remain an authentic Jew while adapting to Australia. From another perspective, Birstein here expresses his existential angst (which he did a good deal) very unusually--with Jewish imagery:
The Plea
Translated by Beni Gothajner
I come now from caves, from forest
and field.
Wonderful - wonderful God - is your
world...
What am I to do with myself?
More than alarm felt for my home
town
the fear pursues every step of my
own...
What am I to do with myself?
How cruel it is here? How quiet,
how still?
I too am made numb and tired of it
all...
What am I to do with myself?
I envy the stone that someone has
thrown
into a well, where it sinks
straight down...
What am I to do with myself?
Your call: Let light be! has dimmed
and turned dark.
My life is laid waste. But not yet
my heart...
What am I to do with myself?
Birstein, as we now know, was not planning to stay in Australia at all, having already made plans to move to Israel. In fact, that move may be another reason he stopped writing poetry: poetry may have been a medium he associated too much with pain and loss.
Birstein's last published poem, written on Kibbutz Gvat soon after his arrival in Israel, is very different from his previous work. All angst and urgency have vanished. A relaxed tone, an easy pace--the lines are open, as if to the sky and the fields: "I drink and drink - can I continue to drink like this, without measure? Is there no one behind me to ask ‘why?' The answer comes from the encompassing silence. The world is wonderful, humans more so."
Birstein's poetry up until 1949 had nearly all been written in a narrow emotional range of negative emotions--of grief and loss, emotional pain and despair and alienation. Perhaps once he felt at peace in himself, in Israel, it felt right to jettison the poetic vehicle altogether?
In any case, such a transition from poetry to prose is not so uncommon. Two of Australia's best known novelists, David Malouf and Rodney Hall, for instance, published very good poetry and then turned to prose--and readers will think of other examples. Yet, however Birstein understood his poetry, for us today it is an important legacy, not just as a record of an Australian Yiddish Jewish response to the 1940s, but as a set of excellent poems well worth reading in their own right.
I think it would have pleased Birstein that last year a Melbourne musician, Ben Nisenbaum, set to music his poem Oysyes (translated as Signs). And at long last, one of his poems has been read at a Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration.
Perhaps at last Birstein's poetry will get "a fair go", as we say in Australia.
#
Dr Andrew Firestone is a psychiatrist. He edits websites of Yiddish poetry translations under the umbrella of YiddishPoetry.org. He is an Adjunct Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Monash University, Melbourne. His current project is an anthology of the Yiddish poetry of Poland between the two World Wars, with sound files of the Yiddish poems read by native speakers. There will be translations into Polish, English, French and Hebrew.
All images courtesy of the Birstein Project
Another Crack |
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by Mya Guarnieri, June 29, 2009 |
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I was walking down Carlebach Street when the wailing air raid siren announced the biggest civil drill in Israel’s history. Though I’d timed a morning interview around it, (who wants to pause for two minutes of alarm?), I was otherwise unprepared. Unsure of what to do with myself, I stopped and stood at the edge of a sidewalk café, under the shade of the awning. I was still. I listened. The sound was barely audible, drowned out by the noise of construction and late morning traffic. I looked to the people around me for cues. Their conversations continued, coffees were sipped, cigarettes puffed.
A waitress, her blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, pointed to an underground parking garage across the street and reminded us that we were to head to the nearest “protected space.”
Not that we needed the reminder. On the heels of Netanyahu’s induction, most homes received a pamphlet accompanied by a colorful magnet: a map of Israel, carved into color-coded regions, edged by cheerful images—splashing dolphins, dancing camels, and a smiling skier in snow-covered Golan Heights. That skier is in a red zone—according to the key, if he hears a siren he must slide to a shelter immediately. Tel Aviv is colored like a ripe orange. In the case of a missile attack, I will have two minutes to get somewhere safe.
According to the “Recommended Equipment for the Protected Space” list on the magnet, I ought to bring 12 liters of water, food, a fire extinguisher, a TV, and a WIFI ready computer with me. And I’d better not forget to bring “things that will make passing the time pleasant.”
Home Front Command English Magnet Branding
I stuck the magnet on my already cluttered fridge. Now I take it for granted as part of my kitchen scenery.
As the practice alarm sounded, a sole café-goer stood as though he might head for the parking garage. But when it was obvious that none of his companions were going with him, he hesitated, gave a nervous laugh, and then sat back down. Office workers from a nearby building, led by clipboard-bearing managers, streamed like ants to the underground.
The waitress leaned in the doorway, watching. Though she didn’t actually do anything, she looked concerned—she squeezed her chin, and worriedly rubbed her lips with her fingers.
We looked at each other and she shrugged, “What is there to do?” she asked me.
I gave her a weak smile. Despite the June heat, the surging siren brought goosebumps to my skin as I wondered what would happen if we have a real attack?
Like many Tel Avivians, I have no idea where the bomb shelter nearest to my apartment is. I haven’t bothered to find out. Despite the fact that the drill was publicized for weeks in advance, no one I know took the time to figure out if their “protected space” is a bomb shelter, a stairwell, or a certain room in their apartment. If the alarm sounded, where would we go? And how would each of us carry roughly our own body weight in supplies?
Are we apathetic? Or are we in denial?
As I went about the rest of my day, I turned these questions over in my head again and again. But I couldn’t find the answers within myself. So I turned to Boaz, a typical Tel Avivi, for help. I asked him why he didn’t bother at least finding his bomb shelter.
“I’ll find it in the moment I need to,” he said.
“Really? So, when that siren goes off you’ll just magically know where to go? What, are you going to hop on the internet and look it up? You don’t think you need to be prepared?”
“How will it help me to be prepared?” he asked. “How does it help me to think about all this? No one has the energy to deal with these things,” he concluded.
I knew then what I’d been avoiding myself, what I didn’t have the energy to face—a scenario that included missiles landing in Tel Aviv would mean we were in the midst of an all out war. It would be the end to Israel as we know it.
What is there to do?
Sitting helplessly below slabs of cement doesn’t seem like enough. It almost feels like a joke… like dancing camels and the suggestion that passing time during a missile attack could be pleasant.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: US and Germany BFF, Sanford Keeps Apologizing, and Toddler Body Found |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 26, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- President Obama met with German chancellor Angela Merkel today. They talked about global climate change, among other things.
- Whales may be facing bad news as the head of the International Whaling Commission says he doubts whaling can be regulated internationally within the next 12 months.
- South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is continuing with his trail of apologies, this time to his staff.
- The FCC has a new chairperson. Julius Genachowski was approved by the Senate this morning to head the Federal Communications Commission.
- A body has been found in rural Indiana, believed to be that of 2-year-old Jada Justice who vanished last week. Further investigations will take place.
Al Andalus: Tales of an Imaginary Spain |
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| Reading "Shemot" | |
 by Andrew Ramer, June 26, 2009 |
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"The most important thing in this portion is seldom
noticed," Rabbi Solomon ibn Uzair said, as he lay on a pile of cushions beside
his lover Joseph. A small scroll of the Torah lay open in front of them, rolled
to the beginning of the book of Shemot.
Beyond the rabbi's study, in the square below, they could hear the sounds of
the market, heavy wooden wheels of carts, and the horses that pulled them,
sounding on the hard dry earth of summer. The cacophony of shoppers' voices,
the cry of vendors calling out their wares, all mixed together and rose up into
the room, bringing the heat of day into that chamber, lit only by the shafts of
light that poured through the open lattice-work shutters.
"And what is that?" Joseph the younger man asked his lover,
running a slim dark hand over the rabbi's forearm, running against the grain of
coarse hair, his own hand then stopping over the page, like a golden yad above the text, pointing. The rabbi
smiled and let his own hand caress his partner's shoulder. "Joseph, you aren't
paying attention to what I told you last week, when we were finishing Bereshit."
"How can I pay attention, when the day is so hot and dusty?"
Solomon leaned over the young man to grab a pitcher off the small round copper
table that sat beside the divan. Tall and thin, the pitcher of green glass was
filled with water, which he poured into the two empty cups on the table.
"You mean the water?" Joseph asked. "There's water in Bereshit and now there's water here, the
river." The rabbi smiled. "You've got the right idea. But go back to the text
and read for me." Stumbling over the Hebrew words, Joseph read the first
passage. The room was still. He could feel his lover's impatience with him, in
the controlled rasp of his breathing. These were moments when he hated Solomon,
only five years older, but acting as if he were the wisest man in all of Jewry.
He glared at him for a moment. The older man's hand extended over the open
scroll, about to point out what he had missed.
"Don't! Let me find it," Joseph snapped. Solomon pulled back
his hand. He hated it when his temper rose, especially when it rose up against
Joseph, so sweet, so good to him. Without waiting, Joseph dived back into the
text. He read slowly, with an edge of hostility in his voice. And then he came
to the beginning of the story about Moses, to the fifteenth word, and the
sixteen. "Ki Tov!" "That's it, isn't it? That's what you wanted me to see. That
Bereshit begins with God saying Ki
Tov about creation, and now, at the very beginning of Shemot, Moses's mother says that about her baby son!"
Solomon reached out a broad hand and rumpled Joseph's hair.
Usually when he did that Joseph hated it. "I'm not your horse," he'd snap, "so
get your fingers out of my mane." But this time, the heat, the words of Torah,
and the tender warmth of his lover's dark hand, telling him that he'd learned
the lesson of the day, made him smile, grab that hand, pull it to his mouth and
sink his teeth into the web between Solomon's thumb and index finger. "Ouch!"
the rabbi shouted, pulling his hand away. But Joseph grabbed it back and licked
where his teeth marks remained. "Ki Tov," he whispered, then licked it again,
as Solomon, with his other hand, rolled up the scroll of the law and placed it
on the table.
Can I Moonwalk During Shiva? |
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| Mourning The King of Pop as a Jew - How to do it, and how everyone else is doing it. | |
 by Emily Goldsher, June 26, 2009 |
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Much of the global consciousness today is focused on the death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Headlines in New York City publications are declaring "Shock and Grief Over Jackson's Death" and "Jacko has Gone to Neverland" while people dance in the streets, and every bar, restaurant and car blasts the sounds that have spanned Jackson's long and strange career. In Paris, "Michael Jackson: Death of a Planetary Icon" stretches out across Le Monde's front page. In Berlin, "King of Pop is Dead: Jackson was Pioneer of Black America", while The China Post in Taiwan simply states "Michael Jackson 'King of Pop' Dead at 50."
But what of Jewish and Israeli news outlets? Jackson's relationship to Jewish culture has had it's ups and downs over the past decade, culminating in a series of anti-semitic remarks hashed out in this 2005 Jerusalem Post article. Just 4 years ago, ABC's Good Morning America replayed tapes of Jackson calling Jews "leeches" on one of their November broadcasts, inevitably incurring the wrath of the ADL. Once the recordings had been verified, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement condemning Jackson's words, and pointing out that his 1995 track "They Don't Care About Us" was deeply wrought with anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Looking at those lyrics now, I can see why the ADL was very concerned: Will me, thrill me / you can never kill me / Jew me, sue me / everybody do me / kick me, kike me / don't you black or white me. The controversial video is primarily devoted to protest against racial injustice, and includes actual footage taken from slums outside of Rio de Janeiro; however, Jackson goes out of his way to include terms that are undeniably racial slurs. In his response, he asserted that the lyrics are meant to be from the point of view of the Jew, not against him. If it were not for his later commentary on the Jew as leech, perhaps I would have an easier time defending his position here.
All things considered, Jackson is far from a Jew-hater. His friendship with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is well-documented, and is currently the subject of a thoughtful piece on The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles' blog. Though the two drifted apart after critical remarks on the part of Rabbi Boteach, it is clear from the excerpted interview that the Rabbi continues to hold Jackson in high esteem, regardless of the Rabbi's declaration that "it is utterly unacceptable for a grown man to sleep in a bed with a boy that is not his son."
When I heard of Jackson's untimely death, I was a bit nervous to see what the Jewish media had to say about a man who had come under fire more than once for critical and alarming actions. I expected a saccharine and sentimental response that glossed over his past transgressions, but feared a somewhat biting and brief au revoir.
The Jewish media on the whole seems to have responded to this tragedy with a certain distance and aplomb. The print headlines are for the most part general: "World Mourns Michael Jackson's Death" in the Jerusalem Post and a Reuters article "King of Pop Michael Jackson dies at 50" in Ha'Aretz. Digitally, more risks are being taken, and emotions besides grief are coming to the surface. There is a slightly more daring link to the Boteach interview hidden away in The Forward's blog. The JTA links to Boteach's just-posted editorial on The Jerusalem Post. It is more forgiving than Boteach's last interview about Jackson, but his tone is pitiful, bitter and somewhat disrespectful, mostly in that he insinuates that Jackson's demise is directly linked to a refusal to engage with the salvation that Boteach had offered to him.
And so the world mourns, mostly in their own particular and odd ways. I met with a friend last night that had come just from a Reboot event, and he told me that someone led the Mourner's Kaddish for Jackson. Oddly enough, that made me feel a bit more at ease with the entire situation, as grim as that is.
HaMakom yenachem et'chem b'toch shar avay'lay Tzion vee'Yerushalayim. May the Omnipresent comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Queer Liturgy |
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 by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, June 26, 2009 |
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Why do we pray? What do we pray for?
Liturgy
raises the most fundamental theological questions, daily, if we pay
attention. But we rarely do. We are born into or find a denomination,
are born into or find a congregation, and learn its liturgy.
Often—too often—the prayers become rote. But not for everyone. Because if you read the texts, actually read them, you will often find a language that is unbearable: an angry, vindictive God; a masculine universe; and an abstract language of praise completely disconnected from the world we know—the world of plants and animals, friends and family, love and loss.
Some of us can mask these uncomfortable words behind a linguistic veil, chanting Hebrew or Aramaic we do not understand or allowing ourselves to forget the meaning and find comfort, even uplift, in the familiarity of old niggun communally sung. However, especially for those whom conventional prayer excludes, the very act of praying can become agony, a struggle (agony’s root: agon) between words on the page and words in the heart.
Queer liturgy arises out of the particular struggle of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to find their own voices in prayers that are meaningful for their lives. Queer liturgy attempts to answer the theological questions hidden behind the solid wall of conventional prayer: why pray? What to pray for? To Whom do we pray?
Why call this liturgy “queer” instead of “lgbt” or some other set of acronyms? The word “queer,” reclaimed from decades of abusive use, reminds us that sexuality and gender are not fixed. “Queer” suggests that lines are always a bit fuzzy and a bit curved, that nothing ever is quite as “straightforward” as it seems. Queer liturgy begins in identity but does not remain there: it is a liturgy that keeps moving, keeps questioning.
Why Pray?
Queer liturgy insists upon prayers that are intimately personal, prayers that allow us to speak directly as ourselves to a God who is approachable. In the remainder of this essay, I will take as examples prayers from Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, a new LGBT siddur which I was privileged to help edit and guide to completion as project manager.
Here is a prayer to be read before lighting candles on Friday night, a prayer that asserts the direct, personal connection between the person who prays and the God to whom prayer is directed:
I draw Your energy toward me with my hands before
Covering my face with Your warmth, and at once it
Seeps through my eyelids, into my blood vessels,
Soothing organs that have held the week’s anxieties
And uncertainties, pouring in stillness and
Timelessness, bringing me closer to myself.
Blessed are You, O God, whose light comes to life in
Friday evening’s burning flames.
This prayer draws upon the custom of lighting the Shabbat candles, drawing their light towards the eyes with hand gestures, and then closing the eyes. The custom of closing the eyes began to ensure that as we bless the candles, they are not “working” to provide us with light. Here, however, the gesture is reinterpreted as one that removes anxieties and draws one closer to oneself. And that self is not some abstract someone but a person of flesh and blood, organs and vessels, in need of healing and prayer. Why pray? To bring God into my life.
The One Who Prays
Queer liturgy is adamant about recognizing the person who prays. Who is that person? Torah tells us that each of us is created b’tselem elohim, in the image of God. We are each of us holy.
Leviticus chapter 19 is known in Judaism as the “Holiness Code” because of its many commandments regarding human relationships and dietary laws, including the prohibition against sodomy. The following prayer, by Rabbi Lisa Edwards, reframes sexual and gender identity in the fuller context of the chapter:
Example:
On Holiness
We are your gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered children:
You must not seek vengeance, nor bear a grudge against the children
of your people. (LEVITICUS 19:18)
We are your bi, trans, lesbian, and gay parents:
Revere your mother and father, each one of you. (LEVITICUS 19:3)
We are elderly lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, and transgendered people:
You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old.
(LEVITICUS 19:32)
We are the stranger:
You must not oppress the stranger.
You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the
land of Egypt. (LEVITICUS 19:34)
We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi Jews:
You must not go about slandering your kin. (LEVITICUS 19:16)
We are your trans, gay, bi, and lesbian siblings:
You shall not hate your brother or sister in your heart.
(LEVITICUS 19:17)
We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi victims of gay-bashing and murder:
You may not stand idly when your neighbor’s blood is being shed.
(LEVITICUS 19:16)
We are your bi, gay, trans, and lesbian neighbors:
You must not oppress your neighbor. (LEVITICUS 19:13)
You must judge your neighbor justly. (LEVITICUS 19:15)
You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. (LEVITICUS 19:18)
Precursors of Difference
The aim of creating a liturgy that speaks to us, now, today, is not really an innovation. Many of our prayers were written in Aramaic because Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Second Temple period—these were prayers meant to be said by ordinary Jews in the pews, not by the priests in the Temple. Many of the most beautiful prayers in our siddurim, the piyyut, were written in the middle ages in order to bring more spiritual uplift and beauty to a collection of largely formulaic prayers. The entire Kabbalat Shabbat service was added by the kabbalists of Safed in the 16th century to inject a sense of spiritual oneness into the Shabbat service.
In the 19th century, nationalists added prayers for country and state; rationalists began reworking prayers as they questioned theological principles like the chosenness of the Jewish people.
The most significant change to the liturgy since the kabbalists was the work of feminists in our own time. When we think of feminist liturgy, we may think mainly of new rituals like the revival of rosh chodesh as a women’s holiday, or we may focus on the egalitarian language feminists introduced to more accurately represent a God without gender. The most significant innovation that feminists brought to liturgy has been our effort to reconnect the personal with the spiritual (just as, in the secular world, we reconnected the personal with the political).
A strong non-canonical liturgical tradition of women’s prayers flourished through the last millennium. Often these were very personal prayers connected to childbirth and lifecycle events. Contemporary feminists brought back that tradition by creating prayers that connect aspects of our daily lives to God. For example:
On Being A Woman
The moon is inside me,
Rage, joy, sadness, love –
They cycle, crescent, gibbous.
When young, I could not control
This wash of blood and light.
With age – and your help, Shechinah –
I can direct these currents,
Ride them to new shores.
Shechinah, give me wisdom
To find power in my cycles.
Bless you, Mother of us all,
For giving women the strength of the tides.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liturgists have carried this feminist model into their own liturgy, creating prayers that recognize the uniqueness of the lgbt experience. These prayers are rooted in identity difference, yet refuse to name specific difference. Instead, queer liturgy embraces difference and uniqueness as qualities, celebrating that which makes each individual b’tselem elohim, an image of God.
Unique In The World
My God, I thank You for my life and my soul and my body; for my name, for
my sexual and affectionate nature, for my way of thinking and talking. Help
me realize that in my qualities I am unique in the world, and that no one like
me has ever lived: for if there had ever before been someone like me, I would
not have needed to exist. Help me make perfect my own ways of love and
caring, that by becoming perfect in my own way, I can honor Your name, and
help bring about the coming of the Messianic age.
If feminists—at least some feminists—focused on bringing women into the liturgy, queer liturgists want every Jew to feel welcome, no matter what their sexuality or gender, no matter what their race or religion of birth. As Jay Michaelson notes, LGBT people have suffered enough exclusion that the aim is to be inclusionary whenever possible.
Here is an example of a prayer familiar to us from the Shabbat evening liturgy, the “vShamru,” reconceived to remind each of us of the commandment to observe Shabbat. The Hebrew calls on “b’nei Yisraeil” to celebrate Shabbat. In Hebrew, the plural is formed from the masculine noun, so that the word for “children” and “sons” is the same. What if a minyan of women reciting this prayer? What if we do not identify as either sons or daughters, as either male or female? Why not open up the language to numerous possibilities:
V’sham-ru v’nei Yis-ra-eil…
V’sham-ru v’not Yis-ra-eil…
V’sham-ru a-dot Yis-ra-eil…
V’sham-ru ke-lal Yis-ra-eil…
et ha-sha-bat, la-a-sot et ha-sha-bat
l’do-ro-tam brit o-lam.
Keeping Shabbat
The sons of Israel / The daughters of Israel…
The communities of Israel / All of Israel…
shall keep Shabbat, observing Shabbat
in all generations as a covenant for all time.
In a queer context, the service leader might choose any of these options—or, more likely, will encourage the community to sing the option that most meets their needs. The resulting mix of words and voices creates unity from difference, the harmony of multiple identities woven together.
Beyond Identity
But queer liturgy moves beyond identity politics, since the experiences of lgbt people also invokes theological problems. Who is chosen? How do we trust the words of Torah when Torah prohibits our love?
The most radical aspect of queer liturgy may be its refusal to answer these theological questions. Queer liturgy is about questioning, not answering. It is defiantly non-canonical. At Sha’ar Zahav, the most significant argument around the new siddur was whether in fact to publish the siddur at all. As long as our prayerbook was stapled and Xeroxed, congregants argued, it could be easily changed, while a hardcover might look like an impenetrable canonical text.
That reluctance to fix prayers is echoed in a reluctance to resolve theological problems. In the v’Shamru, for example, “bnei,” “sons,” is not replaced by a neutral term, but rather offered alongside other options. Likewise, multiple names of God are used in English for the unspeakable Name, including Adonai (Lord, a masculine name), Shechinah (Presence, a feminine name) and God (the English neutral).
Like the Reconstructionist liturgy, queer liturgy questions theology that seems to exclude rather than include. For example, why must we pray, in the Aleinu, that we have been chosen by God from among all other people? One way to address such questions is to change the text, to change “from” others to “with” others. Queer liturgy, however, prefers to leave the root text because we understand that prejudice cannot just be ignored—it must be addressed. Alongside of offering a language change for the Aleinu, why not also offer a new Aleinu that reworks the theme, thanking God for choosing lgbt people, making us “different from all others,” with unique gifts to offer? This playful—though serious--response addresses the theological question without answering it.
Queer liturgy often includes prayers that question why we pray, that question Torah, that question God. Queer liturgy includes commentaries that suggest we might not want to take prayers for granted, might want to change them or even discard them. For example, Siddur Sha’ar Zahav includes an alternative Amidah that is a Contemplation for Non-Believers.
What may be most moving, however, are prayers like these from the Remembrance section. Here we have another example of the personal as spiritual, a direct address of the individual to God in the prophetic mode: angry, defiant, but still engaged.
On Leaving Me Angry
It says in the Amidah that You revive the dead. What good does that do for
me now, God? Now You have taken, much too soon and far too cruelly, one
whom I love and long for.
To put death in Your world and not fully explain why – why trees fall, why
mountains crumble, why whales sink into the abyss and our beloved ones
vanish – leaves me twice mad, God: once at death, and once at You, Creator
and Destroyer.
And I cannot say, Amen.
For An Unresolved Relationship
Your memory is blessed in anger and in love. Both fill the space of your
absence in equal, imperfect measure, for how else could I honor the truth of
your life or of mine?
In struggle born of love our boundless and dangerous hearts sanctified each
other with rage’s improbable grace. I cannot now forget how each hand of these
feelings fed the other if it is really you I want to remember. My anger, like my
love, is also sacred. With them both I bless your stilled and silent body, your
still and silenced breath.
Queer liturgy brings back the prophets. It brings back an engagement with God on God’s own holy ground. How Jewish is that?
The Flaw of Orthodox Kiruv (Outreach) on One Foot |
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by David Kelsey, June 26, 2009 |
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The flaw of Big Kiruv is ultimately the same one that has ravaged traditional Judaism for centuries. It is why we left in the first place. It is why today, most Jews are not Orthodox, and will never be Orthodox, despite Liberal Jewry's rapid attrition, and the high birthrate of the frum. A difference between the normative Orthodox "ex-Os" and the "baal teshuvahs" (newly ultra-Orthodox) is that the latter are not brought up with this nonsense and do not have the same familial restraints, so their fallout is naturally much higher as the truth fights its way to the surface despite every possible appeal and exhortation. And even with the BTs (baal teshuvahs) that stay, many of their children and grandchildren return to the secularism and Liberal Judaism of their ancestors for this very reason. Once you have seen the light, it's out there. There's no submerging it forever.
The fatal flaw of Big Kiruv on one foot is:
Kiruv recruits are told that they are learning how to serve God. But in the end, they are taught how to serve rabbis.
All else is commentary about this inherent structural flaw of traditional and fundamentalist Judaism.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Saying Goodbye to Fawcett and Jackson, FAFSA Made Easy, and Oscars Widen Audience |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 25, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- Actress Farrah Fawcett has died after a three-year long battle with cancer. She was 62.
- The entertainment world lost a second legend hours later when 'King of Pop' Michael Jackson suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 50.
- The Supreme Court has ruled that Arizona school officials violated a thirteen-year-old girl's constitutional rights when they strip-searched her in the school nurse's office. Why did they do it? She might have been carrying Midol. This reminds me of my elementary school prohibition of chewing gum. But strip-searching a teenager with cramps is always a good idea, of course.
- The United States and Venezuela are set to restore full diplomatic ties after four years of tense relations.
- College students rejoice! The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is about to be streamlined by President Obama in an effort to return sanity to those families who have come to the realization that you need a doctoral degree to properly fill out the 153 question form.
- In an effort to increase lagging viewership and widen appeal, the Oscars will now feature 10 nominees for best picture, double that of the recent past.
License to Carry: The State of Eruvim in America Today |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 25, 2009 |
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San Francisco now has its first eruv thanks to congregation Adath Israel. Eruvs are important to observant Jews who adhere to the halakhic prohibition against the 39 acts of work on Shabbat, which prevents them from being able to carry anything outside of their homes. The eruv allows those Jews to carry within its boundaries (roughly 20 square blocks), enabling them to wheel strollers, carry purses, and ultimately allow Jewish families to attend Shabbat services together, with the little ones in tow.
Gone are the days when ensuring the eruv was still kosher meant tracking your rabbi down--the eruv has its own Twitter account and will tweet any necessary updates. Fabulous.
Several dozen eruvs exist across the country, in places one might expect, like New York City and Boca Raton, Florida, but also places you might not, like Mequon, Wisconsin and Overland Park, Kansas. In fact, eruvim exist in 25 states and the District of Columbia. I'll admit I got that information from Wikipedia--eruv.org hasn't published their complete directory yet.
There are also a handful of college campuses enclosed by eruvim, including nine of the fifteen participant universities of Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC), as well as Harvard University and, of course, Yeshiva University.
Debate over the construction of an eruv even played a role in the election of trustees on Long Island recently.
Stamford, Connecticut and Norfolk, Virginia are among the "emerging Orthodox communities" enticing families relocating from more quintessentially Orthodox neighborhoods in the greater New York area and beyond. Even my home state of Pennsylvania features two "emerging communities," including Allentown and its capital, Harrisburg.
Personally, in my own learning and adapting process of finding exactly where I fit in the Jewish community, I've toyed with a lot of ideas and observances falling into the "conservadox" gray area. I'm okay with no tweeting on Shabbos and I've toyed with the idea of shutting my Blackberry off completely in favor of peace, quiet, and reading books. Prohibitions against toting my matching Coach bag along with me when I (drive) to synagogue, however, have not quite made it into my personal level of observance. Still, though, I think it's important to take note that eruvim are continuing to pop up in observant Jewish communities across the country and around the world. Whether it's a growing trend is difficult to say, as is whether their appearance means a rise in Orthodox Judaism or so-called "liberal Jews" of other movements adopting some of the more traditional observances, but it's something to think about nonetheless. Jews are staking their claim in cities and towns across the country and we're here to stay, eruv and all.
On a somewhat unrelated note, anybody interested in Mikvah shopping should check out Lakewood, New Jersey--by some odd anomaly, the town has ten mikvahs. That's more than even Manhattan. The only single location in the country with more? Jewcy's hometown, Brooklyn.
Iran's Hard and Uncertain Road |
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 by Howard Schweber, June 25, 2009 |
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The courage and determination of the protestors in Iran are inspiring, and the brutality of the regime’s response is revolting. The reminder that, as Fareed Zakaria recently put it, “What you know about Iran is wrong” could not be more timely.
All that being said – with absolute heartfelt sincerity – it is worth looking ahead and thinking about what is likely to come next. There are two things to think about here. First, how long can the opposition sustain itself? Four, five, or six weeks from now, will the protests still continue? Will the world still be watching Youtube videos being recycled on CNN? Second, if a revolution were to occur, what would it look like? The catchphrases of this opposition are “death to the dictator” and “Allah u Akhbar.” Both are religious arguments: a Muslim ruler is expected to rule justly, so a “dictator” cannot be a legitimate Muslim ruler. But the religious language in which this uprising is being conducted should make us cautious in assuming too much about the consequences of even a dramatic change in the ruling regime.
Start with the cause of the protests, the stolen election. If there was any remaining doubt on that question, this statement by Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadhodaei should settle the matter: "Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities” and that no more than 3 million votes are likely to have been affected. Ah, well, in that case … (Kadhodaei points out that Iranians are not prevented from voting outside their home districts so that some occurrence of greater than 100% turnout is not impossible. That argument is not remotely persuasive. For a very fine statistical analysis confirming the conclusion that the election was fraudulent, see Walter Mebane’ paper here.
But the fact that the election was stolen does not mean that Ahmedinijad lacks widespread support. There is good reason to think that Ahmedinijad would – or at least could -- have won a clean election. There is an unlikely but not impossible scenario in which new elections are called … and the outcome is the same. (I assume here that the effects of the protests themselves on a subsequent election would be mixed; repeated reports that the basijis being bused into Tehran come from other parts of the country suggest that in this as in all things, “the Iran people” is not a singular, monolithic entity.)
As everyone involved recognizes, however, the protests and the initial government reaction have raised the stakes to the point of a challenge to the legitimacy of the governing regime. The government’s responding violence should not have come as a shock to anyone. But it remains the case that that violence is being carefully kept within limits. Some Western observers are reacting as though there has been slaughter in the streets: the announcement that European embassies are considering opening their grounds to provide sanctuary to injured protestors reminds me of the “unauthorized acts of decency” that were reported during the massacre at Smyrna in 1922. But that’s hardly an analogous case: the massacre at Smyrna involved the murder of tens or hundreds of thousands of Armenians (150,000 is one common estimate) by Turkish forces. The current analogy – the one we’re hearing over and over -- is Tiananmen Square.
The problem is that that, too, is a weak analogy. Tiananmen Square started with a million people occupying a central location on April 15; thousands participated in a lengthy hunger strike; tens of thousands remained there seven weeks later when the tanks rolled in on June 4. The Chinese Red Cross estimated that 2,600 people were killed in a matter of hours. The issue at Tiananmen was stark: particularly against the background of the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, the future of Communism itself seemed to be in the balance. And the world was watching closely, fed reports and images by western correspondents right up to the end.
The Iranian protests don't seem to be going that way. First, neither the protestors nor the government – especially the government -- seem to be looking for a pitched confrontation. After the biggest marches, on Monday, everyone went home. Day after day the protestors have come back for more in the face of teargas and batons and frequent live fire … but there has been nothing like the sustained seizure of public space that set the battle lines at Tiananmen Square. Saturday would have been an opportune moment for an all-out confrontation: many protestors were ready to face death, and in some cases the government obliged, making the tragic death of a young woman named Neda the signature moment of the conflict thus far. But even on Saturday the government forces did not unleash full-scale military repression.
The government’s strategy appears to be Tiananmen in slow motion: the application of low-level but steady violence in the hopes that the protestors will eventually give up. There are some signs that the strategy is working. Protests continued Saturday night and Sunday, but the numbers are down. Tactics like using the police to bar access to public squares and forcing people to keep moving are making it much harder to mount large-scale sustained marches. Using police and basiji forces to prevent gatherings or disperse them before they grow too large – rather than trying to disperse them by force after the fact -- and the widespread arrests of perceived or potential leadership figures are strategies aimed at turning a flashpoint confrontation into a sustained low-level counterinsurgency operation, a strategy should sound familiar.
The Iranian government is dominated by a generation that remembers not only the Revolution of 1979, but more immediately the Iran-Iraq War with its million Iranian dead. The basijis who are doing the skull-cracking and shooting now are the same force that launched suicidal human wave attacks against much better (American) armed Iraqi forces in the marshes. In other words, this is a regime that has no trouble accepting casualties and has the forces available that are ready to both inflict and absorb much, much more.
Meanwhile, the extensive efforts to curtail the use of cell phones and cameras, the government’s Youtube propaganda strategy, the effective exclusion of direct reporting by Western agencies, in turn, are aimed at preventing the world’s attention from focusing around a symbolic object like the Lady Liberty statue. (What a triumph Nico Pitney’s live blog has been for Huffpo; and how pathetic has the MSM been in comparison? Is anything sadder than CNN’s putting up videos they got from Youtube?) The world is trying to watch what is happening. Will they still be trying just as hard after a month without direct news reporting?
We hear that there is a fierce power struggle going on in the meantime, between clerics aligned with Rafsanjani – these are real ayatollahs, which Khamenei is not – and others loyal to the regime, but nothing thus far suggests that a revolution will emerge from Qum. The move are complicated, and hard to read – presumably Rafsanjani and Khamenei are each trying to line up support. Khamenei recently spoke well of Rafsanjani, suggesting the he wants to avoid an outright split. At the same time, The New York Times has a story today detailing efforts to discredit Moussavi as an agent of foreign powers in the government press, a move described as suggesting “that the government may be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi.” The story also quotes Iranian politicians calling for retrenchment and “reconsidering relations” with European nations. The worst outcome could be a power-struggle that Ravsanjani loses, leading to retrenchment and reconsolidation. The best outcome appears to be some incremental steps or revisions in power-sharing arrangements, at the most; nothing to turn the unrest in the streets into a top-down revolution.
Finally, even if revolutionary change does come, it might be well to be cautious in predicting its consequences. As I noted previously, the language of the protests has become religious. Some of this is an attempt to enlist popular support rather than a reflection of the protestors’ underlying beliefs, but the result is the same: they are protesting in the name of Islam. That is part of what makes the opposition's appeal so powerful, which should be yet another reminder of the simplistic American public understanding of Islam – particularly Shiite Islam -- in the Middle East. But as we have learned time and again, “democracy” does not necessarily equal “Western,” let alone “secular” or “liberal” (this is as true in the U.S., Israel, and Europe as anywhere else.) And certainly “democratic” does not mean “pro-American.” Khamenei’s government earned its unpopularity by staggering economic incompetence, not by its belligerent nationalism; very broad support for that nationalism remains. In other words, a new or revised regime might be one that features considerable reforms internally but that is no less eager to be involved in regional affairs, particularly with respect to Shiite Iraq. It is ridiculous to assert that Mousavi would not govern Iran differently than Ahmedinijad in terms of its internal affairs, but it is far less clear that Mousavi would be an Iranian Gorbachev, as some have suggested. (Ironically, this is a fear that has been expressed by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders: officials in Netanyahu’s government fear that a reformed government would be just as ambitious but less isolated, while Palestinians fear that a reformed government would be less inclined to make their cause a central concern in its dealings with Western nations in order to maintain good relations.)
Most likely the protests will continue through this week, and so will the low-level violence and the clampdown, the obvious acts of violence by government provocateurs, and the equally obvious propaganda. Down the road? Something powerful is moving in the streets of Tehra, but (to mix my metaphors) it is not clear that this new bird will be ready to hatch and take flight for some time yet. And we can have only the dimmest idea as to what kind of bird it will be turn out to be.
[cross-posted at Huffingtonpost.com]
Unnatural Growth |
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| Making a Freeze Pay Off | |
by Moshe Yaroni, June 25, 2009 |
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"Israel will not freeze settlement construction for natural growth, despite intense pressure from the Obama administration to do so," The Jerusalem Post, June 1, 2009.
The argument that “natural growth” is crucial to Israel's well-being is utter nonsense.
Here are a few facts.
First of all, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the population growth in the settlements is 5.6% annually. That is three-and-a-half times the rate of Jewish population growth in Israel. Forty percent of settler population growth is directly attributable to immigration, with a significant part of the rest due to the increased childbirths as a result of that immigration.
Second, there is no housing crisis in the settlements. There remain many vacant units. The idea that "natural growth" forces families to separate is simply counter-factual. Creating more opportunities and incentives for settlers to move back to Israel proper would be a welcome development, but barring “natural growth” contributes little, if anything, in this regard. It simply stops the settlements from expanding.
Third, the idea that a young couple or an expanding family should somehow have the right, guaranteed by the government, to live in the place of their choosing, irrespective of the housing market, is absurd. No one in New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else has such a guarantee, nor do people in Tel Aviv, Haifa or Beersheva. Young settler couples, like any others, must hunt for housing in the existing housing market, and sometimes that means they have to move to a nearby town.
Fourth, the implication that families will be “separated” if some members need to move back to Israel is ridiculous, as anyone who has ever travelled in Israel knows. Israel is a small country. If someone needs to move and finds a nice, affordable place in Israel, they are a short drive or bus ride away from their former community.
Fifth, the municipal boundaries of the established settlements are three times the size of the built-up areas. Therefore, allowing ‘natural growth” exceptions has enormous potential for major settlement expansion.
Sixth, the argument that Israel cannot legally halt construction once tenders have been issued, apartments sold, and work begun, is absolutely false. In 1992, when settlers sued the Rabin government over their decision to freeze work already begun, the High Court of Justice ruled that even after work has begun, the government can stop work due to its policy decisions. If losses are thereby incurred, they would be settled in civil court. Two different decisions agreed on this point, and there is no contradictory precedent in Israeli jurisprudence.
That adds up to the seventh and overriding fact: there is no reason or rationale for making any exception, including “natural growth,” to a settlement freeze. It certainly doesn’t serve Israel’s interests; the settlements are a terrible strain on Israel’s budget, with housing subsidies, increased security, and the need for new infrastructure to supply electricity, roads, water and other services to comparatively remote locales. That is a cost the budget, with education, health and other social services being strangled, cannot withstand.
Under these circumstances, it is astounding that the Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai (Shas) is threatening to grab every shekel he can and pour them into the settlements while Israel’s social services die a slow death. The only reason to oppose a settlement freeze is to oppose ending the occupation of the West Bank. It is to oppose any move toward peace. Sadly, for some like both Yishai and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that is apparently far more important than the well-being of Israelis behind the Green Line.
After the Freeze
Whether he ever admits it publicly or not, Netanyahu is overwhelmingly likely to implement the settlement freeze the US is demanding. The real question is: what then?
A settlement freeze accomplishes two things: one, it buys some time for the Palestinian Authority and for a real, tangible peace process to be revived. But only a few months. In those months, it will be crucial that genuine progress is made on the diplomatic front, on the ground in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and in terms of Israeli security.
The second thing it does is to bring the confrontation with the hardcore minority of the settler movement closer to the surface. A frequent refrain of late has been that Israel is “a country of laws.” Unfortunately, this has generally not been the case when it comes to enforcing the law on the settlers. That will have to change, and the most radical settlers’ likely response to a full and genuine freeze on all construction in the West Bank will put law and order to its final test. Either Israel gets serious about applying Israeli law to the settlers or it will demonstrate that it is not a country of law.
But that’s the limit of a freeze’s effects. Some, including such notable figures in Washington as Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation, have argued that a freeze is the wrong goal, and that the enormous political capital a freeze demands from the US would be better spent on pushing for dismantlement of settlements. They fear that once a freeze is obtained, that political capital will be depleted.
I see it differently. I believe that a freeze will be an investment of political capital, one which will generate great returns if successful and open up more opportunities, including opportunities to push for a rollback of the settlement project. It will give the Palestinian Authority the first evidence it has had that, in the age of Obama, their approach works and Hamas’ does not. The continuing ability of the Palestinian Authority's forces to keep a lid on terrorist activity in the West Bank, coupled with a settlement freeze, will create hope and support for next steps.
But Levy and Atallah are certainly correct that a freeze does nothing in the long run by itself. It must be followed quickly by serious steps toward a final resolution of this conflict. It will open the opportunity for such an outcome.
Benefits of a Settlement Freeze
A freeze will restore some credibility to the PA. If it is successful and Israelis see no decline in security, it will legitimize Obama’s approach and further discredit Netanyahu’s intransigence, particularly in the eyes of the Israeli public.
The ball will then be in Obama’s court, and the next step will be even more difficult. In order to capitalize on the freeze, he will have to get concessions from both Israel and the Arab world. He will have to continue to press Netanyahu to continue with the removal of roadblocks in the West Bank, to dismantle the “illegal outposts,” keep a moratorium on house demolitions in East Jerusalem and to find some way to allow reconstruction materials into Gaza without strengthening Hamas.
The danger is that if Israel is seen to be making all the concessions and getting nothing immediate in return, Obama will start to lose the unprecedented support he has right now from Congress and the pro-Israel community. The Palestinians will need to maintain and even strengthen their security apparatus and prove that they can maintain control in the West Bank.
But much more will be needed. Obama will have to get the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to begin to melt the ice between themselves and Israel. Nothing like full diplomatic relations, of course, which must wait until a Palestinian state emerges. But something is needed -- some kind of trade relations or an easing of the boycott of Israeli products.
It can’t all wait until the occupation completely ends. Obama has already begun pushing for some steps from the Arab world, and it will be crucial that he convince the Arab states to take them. One of the main problems with bilateralism is that the Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel that is tangible. The Arab states do, and Obama must obtain something to show Israel that peace is paying off for them as well.
That’s really the dance the President has to do now. When he gets the freeze (and I have no doubt he will get it if he sticks to his guns), he then needs to make sure it means something in the long term for the Palestinians and that it pays off for Israel as well. Not easy, but certainly possible. Obama has acted forcefully and boldly on this issue much earlier than most thought he would. He has earned some faith that he can take the more complicated steps before him. He’d better; because time is running short for a two-state solution and the obstacles in the region are perhaps as big as they’ve ever been.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: No More Crack, More Political Affairs, and Epic Car Chase |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 24, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- The UN has reported a decline in the production of cocaine and heroine worldwide. Apparently, the drugs have been replaced by stimulants.
- Oh boy, another politician has admitted to cheating on his wife. South Carolina governor Sanford had a handful of trysts with an Argentinean woman over the last year.
- A Baghdad bombing has killed at least 72 people, wounding at least 135 others. It remains unclear who is to blame for the attack.
- It appears that faulty circuitry is to blame for the tragic DC Metro crash on Monday.
- Five French tourists were welcomed to New York City with a 7-mile police car chase in an unlicensed airport taxi van. I thought that only happened in the movies. So, apparently, did the tourists.
Angetevka |
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| Don't Worry Be Happy | |
by Angela Himsel, June 24, 2009 |
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At
my son’s eighth grade graduation ceremony, his class sang a song in
which “hallelujah” was repeated so many times that I almost shouted
“Hallelujah!” when it was, mercifully, finally over. What made it
somewhat bearable was remembering something my friend, Sharon (of
blessed memory), once told me during one of our lunch outings at our
diner on Broadway. “When you sing hallelujah, there are certain
syllables, like ‘la’ ‘la,’ that lift your palate which sends an
enjoyable message to your brain, sort of like the one you get when you
have an orgasm.” She was absolutely serious and, though I’ve never
been able to corroborate this, I believe her.
Every
other day new, scientific research reveals that another ordinary,
everyday thing is, if not orgasmic, pretty darn close. There’s
chocolate, with its “neuroactive alkaloids” which affect the pleasure
center in the brain. And red wine, which protects you from diabetes,
lung cancer, aging and telephone solicitors from yeshivas in Brooklyn.
(Okay, it doesn’t protect you from the telephone solicitors, but wine
makes you less cranky when they call.) One of my favorites is a
relatively new study that discovered that Botox increases one’s
happiness. Apparently, even if you aren’t happy, if you look happy, it
makes you actually feel happy. I guess that proves that internal
happiness is overrated and there’s something to be said for faking it,
after all.
Likewise, I’ve read:
smiling even if you don’t mean it, even if it’s not a genuine smile,
releases endorphins and relieves tension; laughing increases T-cell
antibodies and decreases stress and pain; sunshine chases away
depression; having friends who live close by boosts happiness
immeasurably; and people who pray live longer, have lower blood
pressure, less depression and less heart disease.
My friend, Felicia, recently gave me a “head massager,” a weird contraption with copper wires that looks sort of like a small rake with the prongs in a circle. Her son, Tristan, told her that he learned in science class that a head massage is 1/60th of an orgasm. (This is far more useful scientific information than dissecting frogs has turned out to be.) Indeed, simply scratching one’s head touches all sorts of nerve endings and acupressure points on the scalp. This brings me to an article written by a non-Jewish author in the Chinese Journal of Medicine. He did research and claims that the Jewish prayer phylacteries – two small leather boxes attached to a wide, leather strap, one of which is placed on the biceps of the weaker arm and the second on the head, with the leather straps wrapped in a proscribed way - are in contact with exactly the points at which the acupuncture needles are inserted in order "to increase spirituality and to purify thoughts." Apparently, thousands of years before the Jewish love affair with mushu chicken, there was a Chinese-Jewish connection.
Prayer has been a part of a number of studies, some of which have concluded that sick people who, without their knowledge were prayed for, fared better than those who were not prayed for. The studies are inconclusive, but if true, prayer falls in the Botox category – something external can trigger a real internal response. And that, in turn, brings me back to the eighth grade “hallelujahs.” It’s a Hebrew word that means, “Praise (halel) God (yah),” and it appears often in the book of Psalms. The word “psalms” in Hebrew is mizmorim, “something sung”, and indeed, the psalms were meant to be sung. But the name of the book in Hebrew isn’t Mizmorim but Tehilim, Praises. When someone is sick, it’s considered beneficial to recite certain tehilim on his or her behalf. There’s a fine line between words being used as an incantation (like abracadabra, a word that might be derived from Aramaic, avda kedavra, “What was said has been done.”) to affect change, or words used as a supplication to God to hear and to intervene.
Why psalms? Well, again and again they pointedly remind God that “death holds no mention of You” (Psalms 6). In other words, the dead can’t worship You, so keep me alive so I can sing Your praises. I like this ever so subtle way of appealing to God’s vanity.
Admittedly, I collect arcane information that supports my current views and practices, and I ignore anything that might challenge it. This works for me. But whether this all holds up scientifically or not, I strongly recommend having chocolate for breakfast, drinking red wine for dinner, and in between smile, laugh, sit in the sunshine, have a little Botox, a nice head massage, pray for one another, and sing hallelujah. Can’t hurt.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: SJP and Matty Broderick Welcome Twins, Jon & Kate Split, and 9 Fatalities Confirmed in Metro Crash |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 23, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- Nine fatalities have been confirmed after the D.C. Metro train crash at the peak of rush hour yesterday. It is the worst accident in the history of the Metro.
- Gossip blogger Perez Hilton had a little spat with rapper Will.i.am that led to a black eye for Hilton and an even bigger attack--from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, accusing him of "vulgar anti-gay slurs." They called him intolerant of homosexuals. It must be difficult to be intolerant of yourself.
- Showbiz superstar Ed McMahon has died at the age of 86.
- It's the second day of summer, which means it's time for the first Pacific storm of the season. Tropical Storm Andres hit Mexico this morning, killing one person and causing severe flooding and damage.
- A pilot is dead after an F-16 crash at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Captain George Bryan Houghton was 28.
- Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick are welcoming a set of twins through a surrogate. In keeping with SJP's apparent like of long-ass names, the girls have been named Tabitha Hodge Broderick and Marion Loretta Elwell Broderick. I wonder if Tabby will be jealous of her sister for her three names.
- Jon and Kate Plus Eight is now Kate Plus Eight as the couple files for divorce and Jon allegedly seeks out bachelor pads in New York City. I'm heartbroken. Really.
Riot Grrrl Goes Tehran |
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| The Photos of Shadi Ghadirian | |
 by Joel Schalit, June 23, 2009 |
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On January 30th, Unveiled: New Art Form the Middle East opened at London's Saatchi Gallery. A collection of recent works by Arab and Iranian artists, the exhibit documented the extent of social criticism engaged in by photographers, painters and installation artists working in the greater Muslim Levant. From the Arab-Israeli conflict to religion, homosexuality and gender, Unveiled was both inspiring and an educational opportunity for Westerners unused to associating the Middle East with such radical creativity.
Of all of the artists on display, the work of Tehran photographer Shadi Ghadirian was the subject of specific emphasis by the exhibition's curators. Used in promotional literature, featured prominently in the show catalogue, one can understand why. Ghadirian's photos are both documentary and subversive, playing with traditional representations of Muslim femininity, and simultaneously expressions of intense, gender-specific suffering. An Iranian Cindy Sherman? Not exactly, but the sensibility is indeed shared.
As the post-election protests continue on in Iran, the following four photos of Ghadirian's work, taken last winter at Unveiled, do a good job of tying together today's upheaval with the artist's own reflections on the status of women in post-revolutionary Iranian society.
Untitled from the Ghajar Series
Untitled from the Everyday Life Series
Untitled from the Ghajar Series
Untitled from the Everyday Life Series
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Thanks For Not Smoking, Lightning Strikes, and Seacrest and Lohan to do Reality Show |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 22, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- President Obama is about to sign a landmark anti-smoking bill which will allow the FDA to strictly regulate tobacco products, with bigger warnings, bans on flavoring and "light" products, and a reduction in nicotine. Perhaps these things would have helped Obama in his own struggle to quit smoking.
- Attacks in Iraq have claimed the lives of at least 27 people, with 77 others injured as car bombings and other attacks continue to be on the rise.
- All this rain has not come without consequences: eleven people have died across the country as a result of lightning strikes. a number that's "unusually high." And just think, the month isn't even over yet.
- An Aussie airliner hit severe turbulence on its flight from Hong Kong to Perth, rising and immediately dropping more than 800 feet and injuring at least a dozen passengers. The passengers have all since been treated and released.
- Two of my favorite people are pairing up to make some kind of nauseating addition to my favorite genre of television: Ryan Seacrest and Lindsay Lohan have a new reality show in the works. Remind me to toss my television out the window the day it hits the air.
- The North Korean vessel suspected of carrying missiles that the nation has threatened to launch is being tracked closely by the U.S.S. John McCain. Its current location is about 200 miles south of Shanghai.
- Four teenagers accused of theft in Somalia are facing a rather severe punishment--the amputation of one hand and one leg each, in a flashy show of power by the militant Islamist government. This brings new meaning to the phrase, "it cost an arm and a leg."
All That Is Rock Melts Into Hope |
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by Charlie Bertsch, June 20, 2009 |
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Fifteen years ago, the alternative music press was fixated on the idea of “post-rock.”
Whether that label was applied to artists that featured guitar, bass
and drums – like the Chicago band Tortoise, whose excellent new album Beacons of Ancestorship will be released June 23rd – or, more diffusely, to the
sort of computer-enabled sounds that inspired the term “electronica,”
its popularity indicated that the mainstream music industry was already
experiencing a crisis of self-understanding. Labels had enjoyed a lengthy boom in the wake of the massive changes made visible by Billboard’s shift to the SoundScan method of measuring record sales, a development that gave formerly marginalized genres like hip-hop and punk a new legitimacy in the marketplace. While
sales were still strong in the mid-1990s, however, the relentless
search for new products had severed artists from the scenes that had
previously nurtured them, stifling the countercultural energies that
had fueled the rise of self-consciously “alternative” music. 
In the domain of hip-hop, this added up to a commercially savvy, but culturally suspect depoliticization of the genre, reflected in the ascendancy of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs as a major player in the industry. As the sort of content he favored became a staple of the sales charts, rock and roll’s popularity in the marketplace began to slip. Although the renaissance heralded by the surprising success of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day had not ceased entirely, the difficulty major labels were having in finding successors to those bands suggested that their flowering might have been the result of an unexpected autumn heat wave rather than a new spring.
Although none of the artists associated with the idea of post-rock seemed likely to produce platinum records, the attitude they demonstrated towards music seemed to hold more diffuse commercial potential. For one thing, their preference for extended instrumental passages made their music well suited for use in soundtracks and commercials, where vocal-driven rock and roll songs have often proved too distracting. But it was the rejection of rock and roll’s foundational premises that most excited the people promoting a post-rock sensibility. Whereas traditional rock had marginalized other genres of music, artists like Tortoise and Moby seemed intent on dissolving the boundaries that kept those genres apart. The expansion of musical possibilities made possible by this shift was breathtaking.
As an added benefit, post-rock opened up record labels’ extensive back catalogues for a fresh look. Just as hip-hop’s use of sampling had revived interest in funk and soul tracks from the 1960s and 1970s, post-rock’s refusal to reject genres for failing to meet a rock standard encouraged listeners to seek out older material, not in a historicist mode, but as music that was capable, in the right context, of sounding completely contemporary. If the break that Elvis Presley marked in the mid-1950s had made even the popular music of a few years earlier seem irredeemably dated for the younger generation, post-rock seemed poised to usher in an era in which the distinction between pre-rock and rock no longer held much significance.
In the end, though, post-rock did not prove to have the impact that its supporters had hoped. Although it pointed the way towards a new cultural sensibility, its leading lights were too dim to transform the music industry to a meaningful extent. As it turned out, the crisis in self-understanding that post-rock had signalled proved to be a prophecy whose full meaning could not be immediately discerned. In his remarkable 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French thinker Jacques Attali inverts traditional leftist thinking in arguing that changes in music often anticipate changes in the social order rather than merely reflecting them after the fact. While post-rock may not be the sort of music he had in mind, his suggestive comments about the revolutionary potential in free jazz – a major influence on some post-rock luminaries – make it possible, without distorting his ideas egregiously, to claim that the radical structural transformation that we have been witnessing in the music industry was prefigured, both in post-rock’s rejection of traditional notions of genre and in the reluctance to pursue stardom exhibited by most of its practitioners.
That being said, there’s no doubt that the major factor in this structural transformation was the technological progress that made music available on the internet. But it is worth nothing that, long before Napster, MySpace and YouTube came on the scene, astute critics had imagined the future that those services would later make flesh. In his comments on the future of composition, written a number of years before the development of the compact disc became a hot topic, Attali himself proves remarkably prescient. “The consumer, completing the mutation that began with the tape recorder and photography, will thus become a producer and will derive at least as much of his satsisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces.” Interestingly, though Noise is about music, Attali clearly includes the manipulation of images in his conception of composition, a sign that, together with future-oriented media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, he anticipated a world of what Henry Jenkins calls “media convergence.”
This vision of a world in which consumers want to feel like producers of their own content highlights the most profound change that popular music has undergone since being made available on the internet. More and more, even the most devoted music lovers struggle to identify what they are listenting to and, as a consequence, also frequently struggle to identify with it. Despite the fact that today's listeners can carry “their” music around on an iPod or access it from internet sites like LastFM or Blip.fm, they regularly forget what they have in their collection. It used to be that, once you put an LP on the turntable, you were pretty sure of what you were going to be hearing, even if it was your first time listenting to the record. Now it’s common to see people pause to look down at their iPod or up at their screen to remind themselves of the name of a band they’ve heard many times before.
Rock and roll has always been perched, like a mountaineer navigating a breathtakingly precarious defile, between the promise of abandon and the realization that selling music demands the preservation of ties that prevent that promise from being kept. We want to lose ourselves in the music but find, over and over, that anonymity poses such a profound threat to the status quo that its pursuit is only sanctioned in contexts in which we are willing to name our desire. The advent of file-sharing threw the music industry into a crisis it may never escape not only because it let people listen for free – after all, radio had been doing the same thing for decades – but because it permitted them to build vast collections that were not organized by the corporate structures that package music for consumers. Anyone who has spent much time engaged in illegal downloading can attest to the number of tracks out there that are either unlabeled or, worse still, mislabeled. Combine the spread of this sort of entropy with the fragmentation of taste publics promoted by the sheer excess of content, much of it self-produced, that is available online and you have the formula for a catastrophic financial collapse.
The panic inspired by this disorder has given us a corporate counter-reformation in which record labels concentrate on selling people what they already know and, in many cases, already own. Reissue culture, the repackaging of old material with new extras, such as previously unreleased tracks or footage, or in new formats, such as high-grade vinyl, is the most obvious expression of this trend. But it is also reflected in the almost hysterical insistence in the media that consumers pay close attention to the latest product by artists with established careers.
The hype surrounding Bob Dylan’s recent albums, in stark contrast to the indifference and frustration with which much of his work from the 1980s was met in the marketplace, is a prime example of this phenomenon. So are the conservative impulses manifest in contemporary alternative music culture, typified by the fact that the critically lauded 1990s band Pavement has now reissued expanded versions of all but one of its albums, with each one getting reviewed by popular publications like Pitchfork as if it constituted a new release, despite the fact that the band has been defunct for a decade.
While it’s not hard to rationalize such behavior – after all, the artists who receive this treatment have stood the test of time in a way that newer ones have not – it confirms the sense that rock and roll is well on its way to joining jazz as a musical idiom whose liveliness feels like a simulation, like the awkward stumbling of the undead. From another perspective, however this decline could be construed as a positive development, with the potential to destroy once and for all the divide between music that is deemed “contemporary” and that which is identified with the past. In other words, what the idea of post-rock promised fifteen years ago, the current state of the music business has the power to deliver fully. If listening to rock mobilizes the same antiquarian impulses as traditional music from the developing world or, for that matter, the sonatas of Scarlatti, it becomes pointless to restrict the definition of what counts as a living musical language.
Not that people have given up trying, mind you. From the radio stations that still have a traditional rock format to the impulse items on display at your local Starbucks, there are numerous examples of attempts to conserve what was best – in theory, anyway – about the music of the counterculture and its aftershocks. Sometimes the same-old same-old really is the same-old same-old. And sometimes it just sounds like it. But whether the artists are new or old, the way they are marketed reflects nostalgia for a time when rock was what linguists term an “unmarked case,” the default mode for popular music rather than just another narrow channel in the vast river delta of post-internet taste.
As previously noted, this metamorphosis in the music business has had profound consequences for devotees of forms once marginalized for not being commercially viable. Indeed, a major reason why we’ve seen a huge resurgence of interest in traditional ethnic music is that it is now possible for casual listeners to explore the material without feeling like they have entered a nightmarish alternate reality in which they are trapped inside a Renaissance Fair at which everyone but them is wearing historically appropriate costumes. Time is now so out of joint that the only anachronistic attire would be the sort that lacks a touch of anachronism.
The
philosophical implications of this situation are wide-ranging and hold
particular importance for the study and practice of religion. That’s
why the work of prescient twentieth-century thinkers like Walter
Benjamin – not to mention Jacques Attali, whose work shows the
influence of the former’s essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – seems more
relevant with each passing year. And it’s also why musing on the health
of rock and roll almost inevitably gives way to meditations on
the meaning of devotion in an era that deprives us of the secure
identities that fidelity seemingly requires. One pledges allegiance
to a name, after all, even if it’s in pursuit of a state of being in
which freedom is identified with namelessness.
Fear is an inevitable byproduct of uncertain times. Just as the penetration of modern thinking throughout the world has inspired panicked attempts to return to a solid foundation – fundamentalism, in other words – the massive changes that have come to the domain of popular music make many people long for sounds with which they are already familiar. To be sure the consequences of reactionary musical taste are not as significant as those derviving from reactionary political or religious taste. Nevertheless, it is worth taking the time to consider Jacques Attali’s thesis from the other side. If new sounds can presage a new socio-economic order, what might the retreat to old sounds foretell?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the state of the contemporary music industry – to be more precise, its increasingly rapid shift from assembly-line production to do-it-yourself craft – is that it presents us with a situation in which the turn to traditional forms of musical expression, those of a folk or religious character, may be a more progressive move than the insistence that “rock and roll will never die.” If musical fundamentalism means the desire to listen to the same Billy Joel and AC/DC songs – and on many classic rock stations, the number of songs in regular rotation is astonishingly small – until one is consigned to a nursing home, then the willingness to seek pleasure further afield, in music that makes punk with a klezmer sound or soul with the sampled burbles of a washing machine, seems far more optimistic about our chance of arriving at a tomorrow better than today. From this perspective, the erosion of rock inspires hope of a new solidarity.
Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Voodoo in Queens, World Hunger Increases, and Supermodel Pregnant |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 19, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- North Korea has pointed its missiles at Hawaii as tensions between the nation and the U.S. continue to mount. Government officials are working to fortify the islands and ward off attack.
- The Senate has approved a "cash for clunkers" plan that will subsidize the trade-ins of old gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles, up to $4500.
- Supermodel Gisele Bundchen and her husband, football player Tom Brady, are expecting their first child. I hope supermodels are immune to stretch marks.
- A police inspector is dead after a car bomb exploded in northern Spain. The Basque separatist group ETA is being blamed.
- In another case of parenting gone wrong, a Queens mother has been charged with assault after conducting a voodoo ritual that involved lighting her 6-year-old daughter on fire. The girl has since recovered and has been placed in foster care.
- World hunger has hit one billion, up nearly 100 million since the global economic crisis. Nearly 650 million of those undernourished people live in the Asia-Pacific region of the world.
- Former president Bush may have a thing or two to say about what he deems the failures of the new administration, but the White House had a pretty simple retort: "We won."
- Two U.S. troops were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan. No other information has been released at this time.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: US Apologizes for Slavery, Pilot Dies Mid-Flight, and Obama Serial Fly Swatter |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 18, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- A pilot died in midair on a flight from Brussels to Newark today. The flight landed safely at its destination and passengers were none the wiser.
- A suicide bombing in Somalia has left 23 dead, including a security minister. The car bomb is just the latest in two months of unrest in the region.
- President Obama is an executioner, according to PETA. Why? He swatted a fly, of course. They claim he should have shown more compassion. To the fly. Because this is really the biggest of our concerns in the world right now. The swatting of flies.
- Big time bummer for Twilight star Robert Pattinson, who, in the process of fleeing from crazed teenage girls (out for his blood, maybe?), was hit by a taxi cab in New York City. Ouch. He's okay, just in case any of you crazed teenage girls were wondering.
- The Senate has approved a bill that will apologize to African Americans for slavery and segregation.
- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fell late yesterday on her way to the White House and fractured her elbow. She is apparently recovering and will undergo surgery next week, though some doctors say she may need to undergo months of physical therapy to be back to 100%. Boniva?
A Not-So-Sweet Cookie Story |
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 by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, June 17, 2009 |
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In my childhood, Shabbat never felt complete without Stella D'Oro cookies. For the uninitiated, these are dry cookies whose chief (or only) advantage is that they are parve (dairy free) and therefore can be eaten for dessert after a meat meal. I was especially partial to the Swiss Fudge flavor, which featured a dollop of chewy fudge in the middle of an otherwise-bland cookie-if you nibbled away the outside first, you could enjoy a few bites of pure fudge at the end.
I have since stopped eating meat and have learned to bake, thereby eliminating the need for parve supermarket cookies, but still have a soft place in my heart for Stella D'Oro. I was therefore upset to hear recently that workers at the cookie-maker's Bronx factory went on strike this past summer, and even more upset that this strike has attracted (as far as I can tell) virtually no notice in the Jewish community.
In 2006, Brynwood Partners bought Stella D'Oro from Kraft Foods. As soon as the contract of the existing 136 workers ran out in the summer of 2008, the new management demanded that the workers accept pay cuts of up to 26% and begin contributing to their health insurance plan. The workers scheduled to bear the brunt of this pay cut would be the women who package the cookies. (Brynwood has classified certain jobs-mostly those held by men-as "skilled" and thus subject to smaller paycuts.) The workers walked out in August.
The Jewish community has already demonstrated an ability to change Stella D'Oro policy. A few years ago, the company decided, for financial reasons, to start using dairy ingredients in the aforementioned Swiss Fudge cookies. Jews around the country rose up as one and demanded justice. Faced with the possibility of losing its primary (or only) customer base, Stella D'Oro quickly reversed the decision to dairy-fy the cookies, and returned to purchasing parve fudge filling.
Will we harness this same economic power to save the livelihoods of 136 Bronx families?
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Man Plays Dead Mother, Teen Gets Surprise Tattooed Face, and Billy Joel Splits From Wife |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 17, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- Autopsies of the bodies found among the Air France wreckage suggest that the jet broke up in midair.
- A New York man has been accused of impersonating his dead 77-year-old mother for more than six years to collect Social Security and city rent subsidies valued at over $100,000. He even went so far as to dress up as his mother to collect cash in person. This sounds like a bigger problem.
- Tamil protests in Sri Lanka have ended after 73 days. Still, another rally is planned for Saturday in Central London.
- A 54-year-old man suspects he was kidnapped in 1955 and raised by the couple that nabbed him from outside a New York bakery. DNA tests are pending to confirm or deny.
- A Belgian teen fell asleep during a body art session and woke up with approximately 53 more tattoos than she requested. On her face. The lesson here? Don't fall asleep while someone is holding an ink gun to your face.
- Billy Joel and wife Katie Lee have separated after five years of marriage. The two remain "caring friends." I'm sure.
Angetevka |
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| You Gotta Have Faith | |
by Angela Himsel, June 17, 2009 |
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"Faith of Our Fathers" is a rousing hymn that never fails to inspire even the weakest of voices to roar. I well remember singing it in church with my family, the words and the swelling music eliciting from deep in my soul a feeling of passionate faith:
Faith of our fathers, living still,in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.
The fathers that it referred to were, I assumed, my own Christian ancestors as well as the larger Christian world, for we, and only we, were people of faith. By definition, if you didn't believe in Jesus, you weren't Christian. Therefore, you didn't have faith. As I got older, I reluctantly would agree that there were non-Christians who had faith - but not the right kind of faith, not the kind that I had, not faith in Jesus.
But then, for various reasons, I lost that faith. And if I no longer believed in Jesus, was it possible to have any kind of faith?
It was then that I became more interested in "our fathers", the Biblical patriarchs and the original "fathers" of monotheism who pre-dated Jesus, and who obviously had faith in God. They also pre-dated the events at Mt. Sinai and therefore there was no temple, no holy days, no required sacrifices, no laws on purity and impurity with respect to everything from food to sex to clothing, none of the rules and regulations that the three monotheistic faiths all now require. These guys didn't really pray, they just sort of talked to God when God came around or when they wanted something. Nor was the afterlife or being saved a part of this early theology. It would be difficult to say exactly what these fathers had "faith" in, aside from this one God who was interested in their lives and Who'd created the universe. Abraham's was a nascent faith, and seemed to simply assert that faithfulness will be rewarded with land and progeny.
"Faith of our Fathers," written by Frederic William Faber, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, was composed against the backdrop of the Anglican Church's persecution of Catholics in the time of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I. Many of my Jewish friends remain puzzled by this propensity Christians have had to kill fellow Christians, simply for being a different type of Christian. No matter how much you may disagree with another Jew, you will ignore your temptation to annihilate him, and content yourself with calling him a shmo. We don't have any extra Jews to spare, first of all, and second, there's no central authority in Judaism that monolithically dictates how each person should practice his faith and so, though we might not like the other's stance or agree with it, but we don't take it personally and wouldn't kill you just because you eat bacon sandwiches - on white bread.
It's not that there aren't Jews who are passionate about their faith. But Christianity is literally based on "The Passion" - Jesus' crucifixion. As a result, getting people to believe in Jesus' deity and thereby be saved is quite important. In Judaism, when religious arguments do break out, it's more of an intellectual exercise - fencing for the soul - in which you try to poke a hole in the other person's logic, not in order to be right, but just for the mental stimulation of it.
At a bar mitzvah not long ago, the bar mitzvah boy went into a very long, complicated and scholarly explanation of the Biblical text he'd studied. It was like hearing a legal brief - there was one rabbinic citation after another. Not only was it painfully boring, but I didn't spy God anywhere in any of the gobbledygook he'd said. It had clearly been more about displaying his mental acuity than it was about discussing where God was in his life. For me, I couldn't help wondering: What's the point? Seriously. Sure, you can be a Jew culturally and historically, but when you leave religion or faith out of it, Jews are no different than Armenians or Finns or any other ethnic group in the world.
When I converted, I became a "bat Abraham," daughter of Abraham, and that is true. Normative Judaism rarely makes my heart "beat high with joy," and I often feel it lacks the spiritual depth that I expect from religion. Abraham, on the other hand, "had faith in the Lord," and God "found his heart faithful and made a covenant with him."
Faith
of our fathers, we will love
both friend and foe in all our strife;
and preach thee, too, as love knows how
by kindly words and virtuous life...
Happy Father's Day to Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths.
The First Basket |
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by Lilit Marcus, June 16, 2009 |
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While you may not associate Jews with basketball skills, it might surprise you to discover that the very first basket in professional basketball was sunk not by a 6'5" phenom but by a Jewish kid. That mythical basket, as well as the story of Jews and their connection to the sport of basketball, is told in the new documentary The First Basket. Here are a couple of clips. See if you can spot Friend of Jewcy and Yeshiva University professor Jeffrey Gurock.
The Sacrifice of Isaac ('s Foreskin) |
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 by Sam Apple, June 16, 2009 |
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The following is an excerpt from Sam Apple's new book American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Modern Adventures in Babyland.
Thirty minutes before the start of my son Isaac's circumcision, I had almost everything I thought we needed for a successful event: whitefish salad, bagels, regular and low-fat cream cheese, orange juice, coffee, and topical anesthetic for Isaac's penis.
The only thing I did not have was a wife. Despite being in favor of circumcising Isaac, Jennifer had decided that the entire event was too much to bear and had taken refuge in a neighbor's apartment. I was disappointed that Jennifer wasn't going to attend the ceremony and was delighted when she walked back into the apartment ten minutes before we were to begin. It looked like everything was going to be okay, that we would share this frightening but important moment together as a family. Then Jennifer walked into our bedroom and witnessed the mohel dangling Isaac's testicles above his head.
It turned out that what Jennifer saw was a small oval-shaped sponge that, after having been dipped in a mixture of red wine and sugar water, looked astonishingly similar to our newborn son's genitals. Indeed, had thousands of people entered a contest to create a model of Isaac's scrotum, I sincerely doubt that even one would have come up with a more perfect replica. In any case, Jennifer had seen enough. She turned around and left the apartment.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: More Human Traffickers, Passenger Overboard, and Palin and Letterman BFF Again |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 16, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- The Iranian election saga went into day four as thousands of people took to the streets in Tehran today. These demonstrations are the biggest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
- The annual "Trafficking in Persons Report" is out from the U.S. government and it's put more than 4 dozen nations on its watchlist for not doing enough to combat human trafficking. Seventeen nations are up for sanctions and 52 are on the watchlist.
- Lindsay Lohan's in trouble again, this time accused of swiping jewels worth nearly a half million dollars from her last photo shoot with the British edition of Elle Magazine. Nothing is confirmed at this point, but let's be honest, we're only interested in the gossip anyway. [Editor's note: Remember how she once stole a fur coat from the coat check at some club and the owner sued to get it back? I wonder if all this time we thought Lindsay was a junkie and it turns out she's just a klepto.]
- After a meeting between Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and President Obama, Italy has agreed to take three Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
- A Carnival cruise ship has lost a passenger in the Gulf of Mexico, thought to have gone overboard. The Coast Guard is conducting a search-and-rescue mission.
- Thank goodness, we can all rest easy now: Sarah Palin has accepted David Letterman's apology about his joke she claimed was about the statutory rape of her daughter.
Seir Cafe |
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by Ilene Prusher, June 16, 2009 |
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1. Jake
I look up again at the sign, and it seems this must be the right place. It
says Seir Cafe, in bold letters, broken neon lights filling up the
antique-looking script, and I think of my family, think of how they didn't even
want me to come here to see you, and I'm thinking maybe I ought to turn around
and get in my car and speed home. But then I see you sitting in the corner of
the restaurant, and even though I haven't seen you in twenty years, I know it's
you, because even though you've got gray in your hair now and you've gained
weight, your face is still the same and your cheeks still glow with that ruddy
complexion. And you see me and you bound over to me and you throw your arms
around me, and in your bear hug I can feel how small I still am compared to
you, and for a moment you hold me so tight I'm afraid you might suffocate me.
And you ask me what I'm doing now, and I tell you that I became a rabbi with a
large family, and you laugh a little and say that you might have expected that,
and in your laugh I can feel a scoffing, a still-bitter brokenness just beneath
your voice, but I know that it's only fair that you're still angry at me, and
I'm glad when the waiter comes over to take our order, because you order a
steak and I order the salad and we both laugh until we have tears in our eyes
and I can see you can't be that angry with me any more and that we won't go to
our graves as enemies.
2. Es
I try to pretend I think you're funny but you really aren't, and I can see
how relieved you are when the waiter comes because you want some diversion,
something to distract ourselves from how surreal this all is, some way to avoid
the fact that you came half way across the country to meet me near my home so
you could patch things up with me because it pained you so much for us to have
been estranged from each other for all these years. And I'm looking at you, at
that head with a kippa on it like the ones we both wore when we were boys, only
darker, at your black jacket and your graying beard, and I'm looking for things
I once loved, but instead I watch your eyes, the way they look up when you talk
instead of at me, and I see you're still the same smarmy, self-righteous little
brother you always were. And when I tell you that I'm a well-paid lawyer for
the defense industry you nod knowingly, and pretend to be impressed, and smile
a disparaging smile like that's what you expected of me. And you tell me that
Dad always said I was very clever with words, that I could trap a man with
nothing more than my tongue, and I laugh and you laugh but you know that it's
no compliment, and that no matter how successful I was at anything, Mom was on
your side and made sure Dad was, too. And you reach into your pocket and take
out your wallet, and show me pictures of your family as if to suggest they are
your riches, like mine aren't good enough, and so I take out my pictures to
show you my family and though you only smile and say lovely I can almost hear you shouting shiksa in your head and when
you look at my children and their foreign faces I know you are never in a
million years going to invite them over to play with yours.
3. Jake
I'm looking at the beautiful Asian eyes of the nieces and nephews I'll
never know and not knowing how to tell you how gorgeous they really are without
saying something wrong, something that might sound racist, and then I remember
how upset Mom and Dad were about you marrying out, and I decide to say nothing
at all. And so I tell you why I came, why I tracked you down, and I explain to
you that my life has been quite difficult these last years, how I've struggled
to survive and got cheated in bad business deals, and that through all of my
problems I realized that the only way I'd ever be at peace was to come back and
reconcile with you. And I tell you that I've finally recovered from my
financial misfortunes and I want to pay you back for what happened, but when I
try to pass the envelope across the table you put your hand on mine and say, don't, I don't need it now, and I try to
push it back and say, use it for your
kids, for college, for something for them, and you say, I don't need it, and I can feel
something turning over in my stomach, the part of you that remains forever
inside of me, still wrestling with who I am.
And so I try to explain why I did what I did, why I took Dad's will in to him
while he was sick and made sure that I'd be the main beneficiary even though
you probably should have had at least half. When you ask me I admit the truth,
that it was Mom who told me to do it, and that I didn't want to disobey her and
that I had no choice. I nod and I tell you that I know it sounds bizarre now,
but that Mom told me she had been having all kinds of dreams about us and told
me it was the right thing to do, that it was what God would want. I know it
will sound crazy to you. But what was I supposed to do? And I look at your bare
head and your blue jeans and I tell you that now, all these years later, I
realize it was unfair, but that it probably came down to the fact that I went
to shul every day and you refused to go, that I was already planning on
becoming a rabbi like Dad and you were running around eating traif and going
out with shiksas on Shabbes and you acted like you had no interest at all in
taking over the synagogue. That's the world they were raised in, Es. You're
either in or your out. You're lucky Mom and Dad didn't sit shiva for you. Maybe
it's not fair. It's just the way it is by us. But I can see you're not really
listening to me and when the steak comes you slice off a piece like a butcher
and devour it with no bracha and I feel as if you and I have been living on
different planets.
4. Es
So I start to eat the meal we've ordered just to make you happy, because
after bothering to track down the only kosher restaurant in this part of town
just to please you, I'm not going to pass up on a good rib steak. But I realize
I have no appetite at all and this time around, you won't get off easily just
by treating me to a meal. And frankly, this talk about how Mom talked you into
it makes me feel a bit sick, because that's no excuse for making Dad sign a new
will when he was too ill to think straight, and woe is me, Jake, all your sob
stories about what Mom wanted and what Mom dreamed just aren't going to cut it.
And yeah, I've had to go through therapy, too, Jake, spent hours trying to work
out why I could never do right in Mom's eyes, but when I tell you this you
cross your arms lean back in your chair as if to say it isn't true. But you
know, Jake, you know it is. And I suddenly remember when you came to me that
night, when I had just gotten back from being out late at the clubs, and you
asked me to give up my place in the will, and I said sure, what the hell, well, I thought you were only kidding. And Dad
wasn't exactly about to die anyway. How should I have known you were serious?
It never seemed that Dad had that much money anyway, so what was the point? We
lived in that tiny apartment all those years! I assumed we were poor because
Mom and Dad only bought what they needed to survive. And I watch you pick at
your salad and I can see you can't eat either, and I imagine you at home with
all of those children and I wonder whether they ever ask about their uncle and
their cousins. I roll my eyes over the edges of your worn suit, your old
briefcase with some worn Hassidish book popping out the top, the red plastic
droplet on your lapel showing that you gave blood, and I realize you have
become just the man Mom and Dad had hoped you would be. And for me to be a
secular man, a person who didn't need your God and your rituals to be become
enlightened, that was always going to put me far below a good holy-roller like
you. And when you explain yourself you shuckle a little with each point, that
prayer-sway I haven't seen in decades because we don't even have your type
around here, it almost feels like you're bowing just for me. Towards me. And
for the edge of a moment I think I see the Jacob I once loved, the smart little
boy who helped Mom around the house, the handsome guy the girls all noticed,
the student who had a sense of humility.
5. Jake
And I can see now that you have changed some, Es, but you haven't changed
all that much, and that you're still a materialist person, still calculating
what you lost in numerical estimations instead of spiritual ones. And you go
back to your steak and I poke my fork around my salad, and I imagine your life
now, surrounded by a family so different from the one in which we grew up, no
vestiges of the religion our parents taught us, closed off to the prayers that were a blessing to me
and a burden to you. I remember that Dad said he also wanted you to be blessed,
that he said he loved you no matter what. And I look down at the business card
you push across the table towards me, and I see you have changed your last
name, and when I ask you why, you shrug and tell me that you didn't feel the
need to go through life with an annoyingly long Jewish last name that's like
wearing a Star of David on your lapel. And I take the envelope again and hold
it with trembling hands and I feel ashamed and my eyes fall and I tell you I really wish you would take it so I could
feel right your eyes again, and when I look up again I can see in your eyes
that you will never truly forgive me. But you reach across the table and upon
my hand you lay yours, the dark hairs on it grown wiry with age, and you
whisper OK, I'll take it, and the
white flag of folded paper rises up and changes hands, and I am filled with
relief and I remember that I had a brother who could also be kind and generous
and I want to say so much more and nothing at all. And the final bill comes and
we part, and I limp on my way and you don't even notice, and I know we are as
at peace as we will ever be, and that we may be the world's only brothers who
can love each other and love knowing that we will never, ever meet again.
***
Ilene Prusher is Jerusalem Bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor. She teaches creative writing at the Pardes Institute. This story comes from a larger series, titled Genesis Next.
Photograph courtesy of Channel 4: a still from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, USA Series 2
Everywhere But There |
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| King for a Day | |
by Joel Schalit, June 15, 2009 |
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The only consolation about Benjamin Netanyahu's second government is that two months into office it appears to be the most universally disliked in Israel's 61-year history. Whether at home or abroad, no one, it seems, has anything good to say about it. Following Bibi's predecessor Ehud Olmert, that's an impressive achievement. On the eve of the Prime Minister's long-awaited speech about his approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, US President Barack Obama was already hotly rumored to disapprove of Israel's new policy, the European Union was busy meeting with Hezbollah, and 80% of Israelis polled were reported to have said they could live with a nuclear Iran--even, as the Tel Aviv University study stated, a nuclear-armed Iran.
It's not like this situation appeared out of the blue. During Bibi's first month in office, another poll showed that over fifty percent of Israelis already disapproved of his coalition. So what would compel the Likud leader to continue to emphasize links between Iranian weapons of mass destruction and the Palestinians? Maybe the Americans? Not likely, judging from Senator John Kerry's statement last week to the Financial Times that America could live with a nuclear Iran. Reiterating Obama's debut of this opinion in Cairo, the American position couldn't be any clearer. How about the newly rightist Europeans? They didn't poll well enough to make a difference, and even if they did, these conservatives are purported to hate Israel even more than Europe's left.
Indeed,
its a nightmare scenario for Israel's most fluent English-speaking head
of state. How did Bibi get himself into such a mess? Was it his
inability to do anything besides assert leadership over the country's
right-wing parties? Was it Tzipi Livni's refusal to enter a coalition
government? What about Netanyahu's deep ties to Jewish power-brokers in
the Diaspora? Couldn't they have tipped him off better? Why did his
aides not serve him with better information on the Americans? None of
this was hard to predict, especially Europe’s continuing ambivalence
and the seemingly new American attitude.
Throughout the presidential campaign, rightist activists and pundits across the Jewish world warned repeatedly of the dangers of an Obama-led US government. It would be friendlier to Muslim states and seek diplomatic over military solutions to problems. And it would be led by a mixed-race black politician with a far more troubling intellectual pedigree than any previous president—a pedigree that would insist, for example, on the difference between “Likud” and “Israeli.” Contrast that to a predecessor who when first asked couldn’t say where Afghanistan was located. Much to the right’s chagrin, everything that Obama has done since entering office has affirmed their predictions.
Nevertheless, the Netanyahu government has gone about its business assuming that the status quo would somehow stand, and that Israel and America would share the same policy goals and the same general approach. This US government was supposed to support Israel like other administrations had, if not perhaps as much as the Bush administration. And Israel would continue to perform itself as it always had, paying lip-service to the peace process, disciplining the Palestinians, and dealing with its neighbors as it so chooses. No wonder Bibi's aides have been so surprised at the lack of cooperation from the Americans.
Blame it on the differences that inevitably characterize the clash of two distinct governments. Pin responsibility on Ehud Olmert's inexpert handling of the Lebanon war, his corruption, or Tzipi Livni's inability to successfully negotiate a coalition agreement with Labour, let alone all of the other parties with whom she could have signed deals. Lots of players can take the blame. The point is that even without these variables, we’d be facing the same conflicts between Bibi and the rest of the world due to the pathology that the Prime Minister represents—not to mention his already problematic relations with the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
To put it bluntly, Netanyahu was the worst conceivable contender for the job. He’s displayed a stunning obliviousness to the changes in US strategic thinking, let alone American society, as a consequence of the Bush years. To borrow from the language of psychoanalysis, denial comes to mind. What else could one infer from Bibi's words of frustration—"What do they want from me?"—following his first meeting with Obama? It’s indeed unprecedented that his negotiating team wouldn’t be prepared for the Americans to insist on a total freeze to settlement building, and that Israel's leader would choose to persist in differing with the US so far as allowing ministers and military leaders to continually criticize the Americans.
Did
Netanyahu ever count on the US Jewish community backing President
Obama's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Did the Prime Minister
ever imagine that Congress might endorse the new administration taking
such an initiative? No-one of any consequence in the US—not even
AIPAC—has been able to extend Netanyahu an effective helping hand. The
situation is that bleak. This represents enough of a massive
miscalculation that it could almost be seen as the diplomatic
equivalent to being snookered by a surprise attack. Netanyahu's failure
to work with prior intelligence and adequately prepare makes this
episode comparable to the 1973 War, albeit with the Americans.
Bibi's memory of his relations with the Democrats has similarly failed. Even the faintest overview of the Clinton era would make it impossible to conjecture that the present administration would want to work with an Israeli leader who caused them so many problems—including legitimizing the incitement that led to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, on whom the White House was counting on to deliver a peace agreement. What about the Bibi who befriended Newt Gingrich when he was leader of the congressional opposition to then-President Clinton and seeking his impeachment? Wouldn’t that inspire a sense of mistrust in a government largely made up of officials from that era?
Certainly, for anyone with a knowledge of that era, Bibi comes across as a harbinger of the negative that transpired over the next decade. Championing every major idea about the Middle East common in neocon circles today, the Israeli leader was every bit the forerunner of the Bush administration, and its emphasis upon Islam, totalitarianism and terror. Why Netanyahu never had the luck to coincide as Prime Minister with a US leader of his ideological bent will surely never cease to frustrate him. That it had to be Sharon and Olmert to sit across from Dubya, and not Bibi, will forever be his fate. The best Netanyahu could do at this point would be to invite Dick Cheney to address the Knesset. After all, Olmert already did it. Why can't Bibi?The Holocaust... Not Just for Jews |
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 by Bradford Pilcher, June 15, 2009 |
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“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event.” So sayeth Assemblyman Dov Hikind, representative of Brooklyn.
You might not be aware that Nazi Germany, in addition to murdering six million Jews, also managed to snuff out the lives of some five million other undesirable groups: gays, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses just to name a few. If you weren’t aware of that, it’s probably due in large part to the efforts of people like Dov Hikind.
The occasion for Hikind’s remarks is a plan that would honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution at Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park. You’ve probably seen a memorial like the one in Brooklyn. They exist all over the country, virtually anywhere a sizable population of Jews reside. It hardly matters that the Holocaust didn’t happen here. Hikind and others in the Jewish community have made it a communal mission for several decades now to commemorate the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s minions.
Good for them. I’m a fan of remembering the Holocaust. I think it’s a significant part of our history, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and we have much to learn from it. As with all shameful moments in human history, it can be tempting to turn away from it, bury it, pretend it could never happen again. It is critically important that we not bury it, not forget it, if only because it certainly can happen again.
During World War II we marched Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After 9/11 we didn’t have to march Arab-Americans and other Muslim citizens into camps. But we did persecute them in a similar manner. In a moment of fear, we repeated our historic mistakes.
To avoid this, we study history. That is why it is there, recorded for posterity. That is how we learn.
That is why Hikind is an unlearned fool.
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Ohio Repels College Grads, Cat Killer Nabbed, and Canadian Government Overthrow |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 15, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- At least three of the hostages abducted in Yemen last week have been killed. They disappeared while picnicking on Friday. Reports say as many as nine could have been killed.
- In an interesting report, more than half of students in Ohio colleges are planning to leave the state after graduation.
- Canada's opposition government, the Liberal party, is prepared to bring down the minority conservative government.
- We reported last week about the serial cat killer in Miami. An 18-year-old Florida resident has been arrested and charged with 19 counts of animal cruelty and 19 counts of improper disposal of an animal body. He was arrested last month for driving on a suspended license and possession of marijuana. [Editor's note: Has anyone besides my mom and me seen that show "Animal Cops: Miami"? I really hope they were the ones who caught this guy. They don't fuck around. One of the cops is in charge of pinning down and capturing alligators who wander into neighborhoods.]
- Bruce Springsteen joined Phish on the stage at Bonnaroo 2009 this weekend in a performance being called "electric."
- A family of four has been found dead inside their home in a gated Orlando community in an apparent murder-suicide.
Noah vs Cousin Moishe, Part III |
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by Jewcy Staff, June 15, 2009 |
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This is the third installment in the saga of Noah, a secular Jew who is happily engaged to a non-Jewish woman, and his baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. Moishe emailed Noah to express his displeasure with Noah's choice of a bride, and Noah wrote back basically telling his cousin to go play in traffic.. Now, Moishe has emailed his own mother ("Mother") and Noah's mom Rachel, hoping to pull them into his battle for Noah's eternal soul.As before, not a single word or misspelled word has been changed.
Subject: hi HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!
This
is a special birthday message to you to give you a very great present-
namely coaching on this very important matter to give it the proper
focus and energy and intention it deserves!!
I have timed things perfectly as I have now successfully 'tilled
the soil' sufficient enough for you each to share your true feelings
with Noah.
The truth is before one sews seeds one must take a
perfectly goo dpeice of land and rip it up quite a bit and so now the
ground is soft for you to plant our delicate seed Rachel, please do so
with care.
Rachel,
I recommend, especially after seeing his having written
that you could care less and you don't believe in G-d, that you tell
him the truth about how it saddens you, and weakens you, and that you
don't feel good at all about supporting the endeavor in any way and
that you were only merely resigned to having to say 'what can I do'
Mother, I recommend you tell Noah the truth about your loss, my
lack of a Father, your lack of a husband and that you admit that had
your parents or grandparents been clear to you about not supporting you
to go through with it, that you likely would not have as you respected
your parents and what they told you.
Furthermore, I recommend you get clarification as to what Noah
meant when he made the claim as to the 'crazy women that raised me'
what he meant by that.
The Noise of Middle Age |
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| Sonic Youth's The Eternal | |
by Charlie Bertsch, June 12, 2009 |
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Advance word on Sonic Youth’s latest record The Eternal was mixed. Some listeners praised it for picking up where its predecessor Rather Ripped left
off, disciplining the band’s tendency for extended improvisation in
single-length, propulsive tracks that pay sufficient tribute to rock’s
traditional verse-chorus-verse structure without sounding too pop.
Some, noting the same continuity, lamented the band’s aesthetic
retrenchment, as if the experiments with form that made their music
special had been abandoned for commercial reasons. And some notable
critics, like Wire editor Mark Fisher, who writes under the name “k-punk,” took the
opportunity to question the notion that the band was ever that innovative to begin with.
“The problem,” Fisher declared, is not that Sonic Youth failed to be the sort of “self-destructive fuck-ups” that play a central role in rock history, so much as that “they seem to be so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn't appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them. It isn't that they ‘don't mean it’ so much as they only mean it.” In other words, the band’s artistic moves have always been too calculating to seem like the expression of true feeling. “There is no sense, even in the early work as far as this listener is concerned, that the music is drawing on any unconscious material.”
As even staunch defenders of Sonic Youth will attest – and I count myself among the staunchest – there is considerable truth in this critique. In live performance, the band excels at building to forceful crescendos without ever seeming to peak personally. Almost preternaturally relaxed on stage, they manage the musical ebb and flow with the insouciance of technicians who have turned the most challenging work into a routine that doesn’t require them to break a sweat. And their records reflect the same eerie calm, even when turned up to a window-rattling volume.
If anything, The Eternal takes
this sense of coolly going through the motions to a new extreme, which
explains the mixed reception it has been receiving. Although I settled
easily into its familiar patterns on my first listen, I still haven’t
shaken the sense that they could have done more. At the same time,
though, the music conjures the distressed sheen that the band’s fans
love. The songs run together, but that’s nothing new. Indeed, it’s the
album’s “nothing new” air that makes it both satisfying
and troubling. Sonic Youth is happy to give you what you expect from
them, whether you have played every one of their records so many times
that they feel like bodily appendages or whether you’re coming to their
music for the very first time, because you’ve heard that they are a
band you simply have to experience in the course of your aesthetic
education.
Although
Fisher makes it clear that he doesn’t think highly of the band’s music,
he acknowledges the unique place they have occupied in the past
twenty-five years of rock history. “It seems to me that Sonic Youth's very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being ‘people of good taste’ - curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff.” While this assessment is intended as a negative
judgement of the band’s own music, certainly, it also provides a way of
understanding the influence it can have on receptive listeners.
I didn’t
hear Sonic Youth until 1988, when I was freshman at UC Berkeley. I was
browsing in Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue when I noticed that
the in-store stereo was playing tones that sounded like nothing I’d
heard before. Intrigued, I listened closer. Although I’d spent my teenage years thoroughly caught up in the psychedelic revival underway at the time, playing Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane when my classmates were fixated on Van Halen, I still struggled to find my way through the record’s noisy passages. They made me feel as if I’d lost my balance. But this sense of disorientation was one that I welcomed, because it was set to bass and drums purposeful enough to lead me through the sonic labyrinth. More bluntly, even though the music was radical by my standards, it still rocked in a way that made sense to someone who thought that John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow was a masterpiece.
I was sufficiently impressed by the music coming over the loudspeakers to overcome my fear of appearing out-of-touch and ask the man working the register the name of the record. “Daydream Nation,” he muttered with more than a hint of scorn. “That’s the band name?” I inquired sheepishly. “No, no,” he responded, his eyes starting to roll upward, “The band is Sonic Youth!” As upsetting as this interaction was for me – no one likes to be identified as ignorant – I nevertheless went to find the CD in the racks and then purchased it immediately. I knew that this was one opportunity I couldn’t afford to pass up.
Predictably,
when I later told my more cosmopolitan acquaintances of my remarkable
discovery, they looked non-plussed. I thought I’d been lucky enough to
learn of obscure
music with the capacity to change one’s consciousness overnight, like
mind-altering drugs without the attendant consequences. But, even if
they weren’t familiar with Sonic Youth, they had all heard of them.
Once again I had the awkward sensation of having arrived at a party a
day late, stupidly holding a six-pack whose superfluousness was made
clear by the empties stacked by the door. In this case, though, I
didn’t mind. The interactions I had with Daydream Nation –
it really did feel like I’d become acquainted with a new person,
incredibly knowledgeable yet willing to teach me without making fun of
me – were so rich that I was willing to put up with the shame of
growing up far from the centers of cool.
“Malibu Gas Station” is one of the least successful songs on the new album, adhering so closely to formula that listening to it has repeatedly stopped me short, convinced I had somehow entered an artist-specific shuffle mode offering up a number from the band’s back catalogue. Although it will never be a favorite, however, I find it impossible to hear with unpleasure. The memories of what Sonic Youth did for me two decades ago are too strong. Call it reasonable gratitude or excessive fidelity, I know that listening for The Eternal’s flaws instead of its strengths would be to reject myself as much as the band.
I suspect that many of Sonic Youth’s fans feel similarly. The band falls squarely into the category of artists who have the special power to serve as a “first time” for their audience. We tend to be sentimental about those
turning points in our lives when our worldview is transformed, even if
they constitute a loss of innocence. Developing “good taste” in the
musical sense that Fisher means forsaking, to some extent, the capacity
to listen without measuring one’s own pleasure against the pleasure of
others. But what I learned from Daydream Nation
wasn’t just to sort the “good” from the “bad” in a more sophisticated,
stylish way. As I listened to the album for weeks on end, I also
learned to immerse myself in the experience of music in a manner antithetical to the passing of critical judgment.
The Eternal does not introduce any major innovations in Sonic Youth’s repertoire. The most noteworthy change to my ears is the more sinewy bottom end introduced by new bassist Mark Ibold’s playing, especially on the pleasingly pared down “What We Know.” But it’s not like founding member Kim Gordon was a slouch on bass. The guitar parts somehow sound both grittier and more focused during the verse-chorus-verse portions of songs than has typically been the case on their recent records. And the noisy interludes that interrupt most tracks, those “bridges to nowhere” for which the band is famous, feel uncharacteristically goal-oriented. Despite the fact that this is no ground-breaking album, however, it still manages to do most of the same things that Daydream Nation did. I am fairly certain, that had I been able to hear The Eternal at Rasputin’s, it would have had almost as powerful an effect on me as its much-lauded predecessor.
Maybe the best way to think about this new record, as well as Sonic Youth overall, is to reconceptualize
the curatorial dimension of their work that Fisher smartly singles out.
Yes, they have done an enormous amount to introduce worthy younger
artists to new audiences, including notables such as Dinosaur Jr.,
Nirvana, Pavement, Bikini Kill that they brought on tour with them.
Thurston Moore, in particular, has made a point of seeking out new
music and mentioning it in the course of the generous interviews he
gives to publications big and small alike. But the band’s support of what Fisher terms “good taste,” isn’t simply a matter of putting their imprimatur on the music of others.
Sonic Youth have made a point of trying to collapse the divide between mass culture and the traditional art world as well, showcasing notable visual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Jeff Wall on album covers. While the gallery-hopping set might regard this as a ham-handed exercise, intended as much to benefit the band – conferring legitimacy to its choice of medium – as to benefit those visual artists, the fact remains that this move actually did introduce many fans to their work and, more importantly, inspired some of them to reflect on the relationship between different means of cultural expression. For better or worse – and I would definitely opt for better – Sonic Youth has played an important role in the reorganization of the arts that has occurred during the postmodern era. The elevation of comic books, genre fiction and, of course, popular music to the status – potentially, anyway – of “serious” art and the concomitant weakening of the distinction between “high” and low” culture that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century has resulted in a situation where the definition of “curator” itself has undergone a massive overhaul. While museum curators still exist, they have do-it-yourself competition that would once have been unthinkable.
Even
if we factor Sonic Youth’s interest in bridging the gap between
different media into account, however, we are still thinking of their
curatorial work in terms of content. From my perspective, as someone
who vividly remembers the impact that listening to their music had on
my mind, the most interesting aspect of their body of work is the way
it simulates a curatorial function at the level of form. The detachment
the band’s members project with regard to their craft, that sense that
they are technicians managing a flow, rather than embodying the
stereotype of the tortured artist handed down to us from Romanticism,
is doubled in the music itself, which invites listeners to imaginatively stroll down its passages at their leisure rather than forcing them to a particular destination.
Sonic Youth has certainly supported artists who used their music to vent their passions, from Kurt Cobain to Johnny Thunders, whose photograph is featured on The Eternal’s sleeve. But their greatest achievement has been to create music that avoids the sort of identification that such individuals elicit without becoming so cerebral that it denies us the pleasures of rocking out. Indeed, we could conceive of Sonic Youth’s whole project as an attempt to demonstrate that true ecstasy comes, not by living our lives through others, but by seeing how we can live differently as ourselves. The Eternal may not be their best album, but still forcefully reminds us of what their music can do for us if we open our minds to its mind-altering power.
Borges and the Jews-Part II |
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| The Varieties of Jewish Mysticism | |
by Ilan Stavans, June 12, 2009 |
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In Part I of this
series, author Ilan Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a Jew. This
next section focuses on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah.
I feel a contentment in defeat.
-J.L.B., "Deutches Requiem"
I said that Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America,
particularly the left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in
things Jewish. (It isn't overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly
anti-Zionist.)
It's true that Carlos Fuentes has taken up topics in which Judaism is more than
tangential, writing on the Nazis in A
Change of Skin, on the Arab-Israeli conflict in The Hydra Head, and on Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula prior
to 1492 in Terra Nostra. Mario Vargas Llosa, likewise, in The Storyteller, featured a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot
among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon .More often than not, however, Jews
and their contribution to Western Civilization are ignored. Typical is the
magisterial oeuvre of Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, who addressed
every single imaginable topic in the world of arts and letters but never
addressed Jews, Judaism or JewishnessPaz wrote on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
corruption, art and architecture, the Gulags, the Mexican inferiority complex, and
so much more, yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let
alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel
García Márquez.
Unlike Paz, Marquez, and most of his peers, Borges made Jews and Judaism central to his sense of self . Yet, Borges was not interested in Jews as flesh-and-bones
people, overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervor, and personal
passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors.
I do not mean to imply in the least that Borges did not know Jews himself, or
socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he
befriended a number of Jews ofPolish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice
Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and as Simón Jichlinski. They
were "my two bosom friends," Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces
published in The New Yorker. "One became a lawyer and the other a physician.
I taught them to play truco, and they learned so well and fast that at
the end of our first game they left me without a cent." He also became close to
Rafael Cansinos-Assens, a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted Borges the
writer was the Jew as symbol.
Self-Anointed Kabbalist
SephirotBorges' Jewish obsession starts with the Zohar, the canonical text in Kabbalah.
His knowledge about Kabbalah came from secondary sources, such as Jewish
Magic and Superstition by Joshua Trachtenberg, The Holy Kabbalah by
Arthur E. Waite, and Le Kabbale by Henri Sérouya, as well as texts by
Adolphe Franck and Knorr von Rosenroth, and the entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Borges liked
the concept of Sephirot, the ten emanations of God; the method of Gematria, a
kind of Jewish numerology; and the idea, expounded by Jewish mystics, that
language antecedes the creation of the world.
While on a trip to Israel to receive
the Jerusalem Prize, Borges was asked what he wanted to see. "Don't ask me what
I want to see because I am blind," he responded. "But if you ask me whom I want
to see, I'll answer, right away, [Gershom] Scholem. I spent a beautiful
afternoon in his house. We met a couple of times. A charming person. He speaks
perfect English." Shortly after, Borges wrote a poem about the Golem, the
mythical Frankenstein of Ashkenazi Judaism, animated by a single word of its
human creator. The word "Golem" in Spanish is impossible to rhyme-unless, of
course, it is matched with Scholem. Herein the first three stanzas in the
translation of Alan S. Trueblood, included in Alexander Coleman's Selected
Poems (1999):
If, as the Greek maintains in the Cratylus,
A name is the archetype of a thing,
The rose is in the letters that spell rose
And the Nile entire resounds in its name's ring.
So, composed of consonants and vowels,
There must exist one awe-inspiring word
That God inheres in-that, when spoken, holds
Almightiness in syllables unslurred.
Adam knew it in the Garden, so did the starts.
The rusty work of sin, so the cabbalists say,
Obliterated it completely;
No generation has found it to this day.
Borges places the myth of the Golem in the kabbalistic tradition. He's
interested in the power of the Hebrew language, which, according to legend, was
created by God even before the universe came into being. The Argentine extends
this kabbalistic infusion of words with religious magic by adding his
linguistic attention to the Saussurian relationship between object and word. But
Borges can't remain serious-in a winking aside to any of us readers who may
have missed this deep reading of the Golem as a sign of the power of language,
Borges clarifies by linking this medieval monster to the great modern master of
Kabbalah:
That cabbalist who played at being God
Gave his spacey offspring the nickname Golem.
(In a learned passage of his volume,
these truths have been conveyed to us by Scholem.)
Borges had discovered Kabbalah at an early age. In a conversation with Jaime Alazraki,
which took place at Buenos Aires' National Library, Borges suggested his interest in Jewish mysticism was sparked by Dante's Divine Comedy and by his adolescent
readings of the Encyclopedia Britannica:
I found it in Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy which he undertook during the Civil War to avoid
thinking about the war he was too preoccupied with. There is a three-page
appendix in that translation that Longfellow took from a book-I believe it was Rabbinical Literature-by J.P. Stehelin
where there is a discussion of the Hebrew alphabet and of the different
meanings and values that the Kabbalists attributed to those letters. And the
other reference must have come from the Britannica.
As a youngster, I used to come here, to the Library, quite frequently, and
since I was very shy and didn't dare ask the librarian for books, I would take
a volume of the Britannica, any
volume, from the shelf myself.
It was not just the American writer, though, who
provoked Borges' curiousity about Kabbalah. Years later, he found Jewish
esoterica in, of all places, a German text as well:
The first book I read in German, when I was studying German by myself, around
1916, was Meyrink's novel, Der Golem.
I was sent on the study of German by my reading of Carlyle whom I greatly
admired. (Now I find his style more intimidating than persuasive.) I started by
the same foolish thing many people do, by trying to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in German, a
book not even Germans understand, and which very few people comprehend. Then a
friend of mine-what was her name?-she was a baroness from Prague, wait, oh yes,
Baroness Forschtübber, she told me that a very interesting book had just been
published, a fantastic novel entitled Der
Golem. I had never heard that word before. That was the first work in
German I read through-the first book in prose, since I had earlier read Heine's
Lyrisches Intermezzo.
Many others had read Longfellow and even Der Golem without becoming caught up
in Kabbalah. For Borges, part of the attraction was that Kabbalah was Jewish.
As he notes in the same interview, "all things Jewish have always
fascinated me." There was even more, however, a personal note: Borges suggests that some of his interest in
Kabbalah came from a desire to have some connection to religion even though he
could not bring himself to believe in a "personal God."
Since I have not been able to believe in a personal God, the idea of a vast and
impersonal god, the En-Sof of the
Kabbalah, has always fascinated me. Later on, I have found the same, well, in
Spinoza, and in pantheism in general, and also in Schopenhauer, and in Samuel
Butler, and in Bernard Shaw's idea of "Life's force," and Bergson's "élan
vital." All that responded to the same attraction.
Borges' first piece on the Kabbalah is called "Una vindicación de la cabala"
("A defense of the Kabbalah"). It was first published in Discusión (1932). Though Borges had thought of himself as a writer
for over a decade, his style at the time was still unformed.
Neither the first time it has been attempted, nor the last time it will fail,
this defense is distinguished by two facts. One is my almost complete ignorance
of the Hebrew language; the other, my desire to defend not the doctrine but
rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it. These
procedures, as is well known, include the vertical reading of sacred texts, the
reading referred to as boustophedon
(one line from left to right, the following line from right to left), the
methodical substitution of certain letters of the alphabet for others, the sum
of the numerical value of the letters, etc. To ridicule such operations is
simple; I prefer to attempt to understand them.
He talks about the Kabbalah itself indirectly. His mission is to discuss the
divine nature of the Holy Scriptures as understood by Christians and Muslims.
He isn't interested in religion but in the fact that "the Spirit" creates the
universe, e.g., turns Himself into a Creator, an exciting prospect for a
writer, a creator in words:
Let us imagine now this astral intelligence, dedicated to manifesting itself not
in dynasties or annihilations or birds, but in written words. Let us also
imagine, according to the pre-Agustinian theory of verbal inspiration, that God
dictates, word by word, what he proposes to say. This premise (which was the
one postulated by the Kabbalists) turns the Scriptures into an absolute text,
where the collaboration of chance is calculated at zero. The conception alone
of such a document is a greater wonder than those recorded in its pages. A book
impervious to contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible
variations, of revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light... How
could one not only study it to absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the
Kabbalah?
Mystical Motifs
Throughout his life, Borges used a number of kabbalistic motifs, sometimes
overtly, others in a tangential, even subliminal fashion. "The Circular Ruins,"
for instance, might be read as a tribute to the myth of the Golem. In the story,
a magician who has never had a child decides to dream his own son. Night after
night he shapes his successor, until the creation acquires its own life. Then
there is "The Aleph," arguably Borges' most emblematic-and famous-tale. While
the primary leitmotif in this story is the Divine Comedy, played out by Borges,
his deceased love Beatriz, and his rival, Dante Argentino Daneri, the elusive
item at the end of the men's descent is the magical "Aleph," clearly a
reference to the Kabbalist's reverence for God's beginnings and the universe's
mystic one-ness.
Kabbalistic themes also appear in Borges' poetry. In a sonnet about Spinoza,
collected in The Self and the Other.
(1964) and translated byWillis Barnstone, Borges imagines the philosopher
polishing a crystal lens which gives him access to "the infinite/Map of the One
who now is all His stars." Likewise, in the second Spinoza sonnet, titled
"Baruch Spinoza" and collected in The
Iron Coin (1976) again translated by Barnstone, Spinoza is figured as a
kabbalist, summoning God from words:
The magician moved
Carves out of his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he's begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.
The persistence of the kabbalistic imagery can be traced in the story "Death and the Compass," where the Hebrew
alphabet serves as both literal and figurative map. It was published in the
magazine Sur in 1942 and later
gathered in Artifices (1944). It
became part of Ficciones (also 1944).
In his forward to Artifices,
translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions, Borges writes:
Two of [the stories], perhaps, merit some comment: "Death and the Compass" and
"Funes, His Memory." The second is a long metaphor for insomnia. The first, in
spite of the Germanic or Scandinavian names in it, takes place in a Buenos
Aires of dreams: the twisting "rue de Toulon" is the Paseo de Julio;
"Triste-le-Roy" is the hotel where Herbert Ashe received, yet probably did not
read, the eleventh volume of an imaginary encyclopedia. After this fiction was
written, I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the time and space the
story covers: the revenge might be bequeathed to others, the periods of time
might be calculated in years, perhaps in centuries; the first letter of the
Name might be uttered in Iceland, the second in Mexico, the third in Hindustan.
Is there any need for me to say that there are saints among the Hasidim, and
that the sacrifice of four lives in order to obtain the four letters that the
Name demands is a fantasy dictated by the shape of my story?
Death and the Compass: From the film by Alexander CoxInspired by Spinoza, "Death and the Compass"
takes place in a European city much like Amsterdam.The genre is the detective
story, but here, with a geometrical plan. The detective is Erik Lönnrot and his
nemesis is Red Scharlach. (Notice the redness of the names.) Lönnrot is invited
to exercise his intelligence by sorting out a series of four murders, each
committed within symmetrical coordinates of time and space (December 3rd,
January 3rd, February 3rd, etc., in northern part of the
city, the western part, etc.). The victims are all Jews: Dr. Marcelo
Yarmolinsky, Daniel Simón Azevedo (the last name is Borges', too), Ginzberg or
Ginsburg, etc. He comes across a book by one Lausden called Philologus hebræogræcus (1739). The
victims are at times Hasidim-one of them has an octavo volume about the
teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tov-, or simply others taxi drivers. Lönnrot gets
information from a journalist of the Yiddische
Zeitung about the Tetragramaton, the four-lettered divine name: YHVH. After each murder, a sign appears:
"The first letter of the Name has been
written."
Red Scharlach, also known as Scharlach the Dandy, was a criminal who"had sworn
upon his honor to kill Lönnrot, but Lönnrot never allowed himself to be
intimidated. He thought of himself as a reasoning machine, an Auguste Dupin,
but there was something of the adventurer in him, even something of the
gambler." Eventually Lönnrot realizes a fourth murder is to take place in a
precise time and place: March 3rd, at the abandoned Villa
Triste-le-Roy. He has suspected that maybe Red Scharlach might be the last
victim but then dismisses the idea. When he arrives, he sees Scharlach. Lönnrot
asks: "Scharlach-you are looking for
the secret name?" Hurley's translation:
Scharlach stood there, impassive. He had not participated in the brief
struggle, and now moved only to put out his hand for Lönnrot's revolver. But
then he spoke, and Lönnrot heard in his voice a tired triumphance, a hatred as
large as the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred.
"No," he said. "I am looking for something more fleeting and more perishable
than that-I am looking for Erik Lönnrot."
Scharlach explains how he carefully executed each and every one of his crimes. Lonnrot
realizes he's about to die. He considers the three symmetrical crimes:
"There are three lines too many in your labyrinth," he said at last. "I know of
a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been
lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost
as well. When you hunt me dawn in another avatar of our lives, Scharlach, I
suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a second crime at B, eight
kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B and
halfway between them. Then wait for me at D, two kilometers from A and C, once
again halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at
Triste-le-Roy."
"The next time I kill you," Scharlach replied, "I promise you the labyrinth
that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless."
He stepped back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.
The ending is intriguing: is the Greek line more desirable than the
impenetrability of the kabbalistic quadrants? Or do they both, for Borges,
ultimately lead to the "invisible and endless," the unutterable mystery of life
and death?
Stay tuned for Part III of Borges and the Jews next Wednesday! Sign up for Zeek's RSS feed or our facebook page for a reminder!
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction.
The illustration of Borges was drawn by Zeek's online art editor, Maya Escobar. The image of Death and the Compass is a still from the film of that title, directed by Alex Cox and based on the Borges story.
Unkosher Sex: Ultra-Religious Go Online in Search of Extramarital Affairs |
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 by Monica Rozenfeld, June 12, 2009 |
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What does it mean to religiously attend church, temple or synagogue, live in a community where G-d’s laws are first and foremost, and then deliberately go on the internet in order to break one of the most sacred of commandments: Thou shall not commit adultery? It is no surprise that the internet has become an electronic meeting place for married men and women looking to have affairs; it may come as a shock, however, to learn that the web is also the hub for a growing number of ultra religious married people looking to start extramarital affairs with people who share their faith.
On sites like Craigslist and AshleyMadison.com (which carries the motto “Life is short. Have an affair.”) people who self-proclaim as “religious” can be found seeking out others of their faith tradition to be unfaithful with. In the past, philandering religious men went to strip clubs and so-called “kosher” brothels to retreat from their wives in secret. But there appears to be a trend of religious men and women seeking out affairs online; and one man has founded a website tailored specifically to his community’s needs.
“Every day I would see ads on Craigslist from the “frum” [religious Jewish] community. My wife and I started talking to them and realized there was a big need for this,” said Jerry (who does not wish to disclose his last name for safety), founder of Shaindy.com. Shaindy.com is tailored mainly to the religious and Jewish seeking extramarital affairs. Though the site is only two months old, Shaindy.com — with the tag line, “Jews Can Have Fun Too” — already has 2,500 members paying $99 annually for the right to log on and seek out other married people interested in having an affair.
“People always like to think that we are holier than thou,” Jerry said, who himself is a member of the Orthodox community. “Our community has the same needs as any other community — dating, drugs, cheating or whatever, and it’s silly to think we are ‘different.’”
Jewcy Zeitgeist: Serial Cat Killer, Chaz Bono Gender Reassigned, and DTV switch |
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by Ashley Tedesco, June 12, 2009 |
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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:
- A suicide bombing in a mosque in Pakistan has left 10 dead, including a moderate Muslim cleric who denounced suicide attacks.
- A serial cat killer is on the loose in Miami, having already claimed the lives of at least 18 cats. The gutted bodies have been left on front lawns. Miami residents are being urged to keep their felines indoors.
- Chastity Bono, child of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, is about to undergo a sex change, reportedly in order to marry her longtime partner. In the words of TMZ, "Exact same person - totally different result. Go figure." He will now be known as Chaz.
- A Sunni lawmaker has been assassinated in Iraq, inside his mosque. Five others were killed and 12 were wounded.
- Today marks the much-anticipated switchover to digital television and the end of analog broadcasts as we know it. However, an estimated 1 to 2.5 million people, depending on which reports you read, remain unprepared for the switch, which will severely cut into their Law & Order rerun-watching time.
Building a Bulletproof Vest of Brotherhood |
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 by Neshama Carlebach, June 11, 2009 |
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The news of the shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum yesterday reached me as I was en route to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to rehearse for that evening's program -- Freedom Songs -- a celebration of the shared African-American and Jewish musical heritage.
I was honored to be sharing the bill with Joshua Nelson, an African-American Jew known as the Jewish Prince of Gospel Music. As my own musical journey had recently led me to a collaboration with the soulful Green Pastures Baptist Choir, led by Reverend Roger Hambrick, I have been humbled by the magic that unfolds each time we perform in public, the combined richness of both spiritual traditions finding a perfect home in the music composed by my late father, the great Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
Though I knew that a Jewish site had been targeted by a racist murderer, I was still startled to find a squadron of police cars camped outside the Museum of Jewish Heritage at the scenic tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. Vigilant police officers stood outside their vehicles and a Fox News truck was parked nearby...to capture any additional violence by local lunatics, I thought grimly.
Once inside, I learned from museum personnel that a number of school groups had cancelled their trips that day and that the concert might also have cancellations. Shrugging, the arriving musicians began unpacking, setting up and starting to rehearse. The image of the police cars outside did not leave my eyes, no matter how many times I wished it away. Standing backstage as the auditorium filled up, I heard the news that Stephen Tyrone Johns had died in the line of duty, guarding the United States Holocaust Museum.
Shortly thereafter, I found myself on stage, performing with the talented Joshua Nelson, singing my heart and soul out with the beautiful singers of the Green Pastures Baptist Choir, this group of African-Americans who believe in the music of my father and its power to unite humankind.
"Return again," we sang last night. "Return again. Return to the land of your soul."
Yesterday afternoon, an African-American man died protecting a museum in Washington, DC. built as a monument against racism. Standing on the auditorium stage of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City last night -- side by side with my African-American brothers and sisters -- I looked beyond the footlights and saw an auditorium filled with men, women and children of all colors and faiths whose combined voices wove a bulletproof vest against hatred.
Parashah Behalotecha: Constructive Kvetching |
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by Hayley Siegel, June 11, 2009 |
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One of my favorite SNL characters is "Debbie Downer," who was played by Rachel Dratch during her tenure on the show. Debbie Downer, for those unfamiliar with the skits, always ruined people's birthdays and happy celebrations by bringing up bad news or scary statistics. Looking into this week's parashah, Behalotecha, we witness the entire tribe in full "Debbie Downer" mode, kvetching with the strength of Olympic athletes to Moses about of all things -- the lack of diversity in their diets. The Israelites cry to Moses about their cravings for the particular foods they sampled so readily in Egypt, "We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our souls are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at" (Numbers 11:5-6).
After reading the tribe's complaints to Moses, a reader is perplexed at the Israelites' critiques. The rabbis of our Jewish tradition teach that the Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, connotes narrowness or restriction. In Egypt, the Israelites' lives were constricted both spiritually and physically. Not only were tribe members forbidden from worshipping God or practicing their religious customs and traditions, they were also vulnerable to physical abuse or death at the hands of their taskmasters.In the desert, it was a completely different story. During their journeys in the desert, the tribe witnessed the splitting of the Red Sea and received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. These were just two of the many moments at which they felt a great spiritual connection to God. In Egypt, the Israelites often complained that they had felt abandoned by God during their suffering. However, in the desert, the tribe was shadowed by a special cloud which was dispatched by God. This special cloud guided them in the right direction during their travels and affirmed God's concern for the tribe's well-being. While it is certain that the tribe grew to like certain foods from their time in Egypt, they ate all of their meals in freedom during their travels in the desert. Instead of depending on their taskmasters for access to food or slaving away to produce Egyptian crops, the Israelites' basic human needs for nourishment were taken care of by God. They were sustained by a plentiful supply of manna, a special food source which was grinded to make cakes. Although the people complained about the taste of the manna, rabbinic sources teach that the manna actually tasted like whatever a person desired. Even though the manna apparently did not taste like cucumbers, watermelons, leeks, onions, and garlic, it's important to remember the tribe still had access to hundreds of different tastes and textures!
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