Efrim Menuck fronts the band currently named Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band—a band whose appellation, along with its sound, changes and grows with each new release. Currently, the band is a seven-piece composed of (among other instruments) violins, guitars, and a cello—and group choral chanting. Their newest release, Thirteen Blues for Thirteen Moons, finds the band in a more aggressive, rock-edged mood than usual, supplanting their experimental punk backgrounds (Menuck, along with the band’s violinist and bassist, also play in the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor). Just landed from their European tour, Menuck graciously filled us in on the band’s philosophy, writing habits, and the Facebook invasion of Canada.Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band: chilling in a field

I can't make up my mind whether your music and the imagery of your lyrics and albums reminds me more of old Baptist church spirituals, or old Jewish ones. Is that intentional?

We grab water from both of those rivers, because faith is a lovely thing, even if you don't believe in God. It's partly why the band is named after Mt. Zion—it's the holy mountain in the awful desert that illuminates the choruses of Baptist hymns, dusty klezmer tunes, and 6-minute dubplates. Also, I spent grades one through nine at Hebrew day school, and came home every night to my atheist father, who would try to undo any little thing I’d happened to learn that day.

This means that, somewhere in my little pea-brain, there's a knotted scar where the secular and the godly have fused; means that I tend to see things in terms of good and evil, write large, and means that I believe in congregations, hymns and prayers but not in God, so when I try to put words together to sing on top of this music that we all write together, that jumble just pours out of me, worried and conflicted and messy as hell.

Critics keep talking about your music as protest music, but it seems less like specific issue-oriented protests than protesting the system in general—a nonspecific cry to start over, build anew.

Yeah, for us it's all a raucous blues or joyful punk-rock implosion, but if we had to semaphore our primary complaints and concerns, it'd probably go something like this: The world's a mess, and we're led by murderous thieves who keep dragging us unwillingly ever closer to the gaping precipice.

What's your writing process like? Does one person come up with an idea for a song, or do you all start jamming and then run with it?

Our writing process is slow and backwards. We start with a handful of riffs, and hammer at them for hours on end, until some sort of rough counterpoints start to bloom. Then we break it all into little pieces, strew ’em all over the floor of our jamspace and then put them back together again as best we can. When the whole teetering pile is almost structurally sound, I'll start throwing words at it, and tangles of melody too, to harmonize with us all singing at once.

Then we bring these songs with us on the road and dump them into the laps of whatever audience has blessed us with their kindness and grace on any given night, and repeat that narrative, like long laps on a dimly-lit track, until the song itself is weathered, dented and true.

Is the music scene in Montreal going through a real golden age, or is it just attracting more attention? What's it like up there?

No, it's no golden age in Montreal right now. Skyrocketing rents, an overabundance of Facebook-obsessed university students, and an oversaturation of self-promotional A&R types has led to a state of affairs whereby most gigs glow with the impermanence of a flash-mob instead of any sort of self-sustaining community.

There's still a bunch of tiny, crucial glimmering flames though, and, like in any large city, there's a constant surplus of good people doing good work in the lovely shadows.

Are there a lot of Jews involved in the scene? Is it a coincidence, or did you grow up with other people who were into the same influences as you were?

No more Jews than any other scene, I guess; Mt. Zion's got four Jews and three goys, but most of Montreal's Jews took off when the FLQ [the extremist Front de liberation du Québec] started planting mailbox bombs in the early seventies. I spent most of my punk-rock adolescence being the only Jew in the room, so it's nice to feel a little less isolated these days, especially ’round the high holidays.

In "Blindblindblind," you sing, "My the light of our striving still shine." It almost feels like a prayer for something beyond—beyond the album, beyond the band, a kind of creative immortality. How do you want your music to be remembered?

Bad endings can ruin even the best story, so the only thing I know for sure is how I don't want things to end—the world is not a kind place for musicians, and there are very few happy endings in the grand historia de la rock, means that I don't want die poor and alone, nor do I want to be the vain jerk in the diaper stinking up the stage at the retro-festival, and while I hope that our band's stubborn little discography still glimmers with its own hard-won internal logic 30 years from now, I’m more concerned with a more achievable type of permanence. Good friends, a healthy family, and a couple of crucial smudges and footprints across our collective histories sounds more than pretty good to me.

Asking the big questions: The ad campaign for Satyagraha It's become a cliché to search for Jewish influences or themes in works by Jewish artist. Generally the effort is one of overzealous interpretation, if not projection. Consider the following, then, not a reading of Philip Glass's Jewish opera Satyagraha, but a Jewish reading of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha—a work which evokes both the pride and anxiety of contemporary Jewishness.

The pride came not from "one of our boys done good," although such a sentiment might be excused in this case. When Satyagraha was written in 1979, Glass was still an up-and-comer; he'd only recently made it big, was only a few years away from having been a starving artist, and was still regarded, by many, as part of the avant garde. No longer -- for better or for worse. Satyagraha opened at the Met April 11 after a bombastic ad campaign. “Could an opera put virtue back on its feet?” asked posters around New York City. “Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?”

These questions are as yet unanswered, but the New York Times did call Satyagraha “a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” Glass is probably the most widely-heard composer active today, and while some of his later works have begun to seem rather derivative, the Met’s enormous production, brilliantly [re]conceived by Phelim McDermott with sets by Julian Crouch, shines. It reminds us why we loved Glass in the first place: the repetitions are haunting, not tedious; the melodic and conceptual reaches soaring, not pretentious.

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi's struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It's hardly a nonviolent text.

Puppets for peace: The British staging of the opera Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one's holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as "Jewish": not because of its composer's ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

Gandhi was, after all, a holy man. In his later life he was an ascetic, fasting regularly and relinquishing all possessions. Like Dr. King, he regularly used not only religious language but religious spirit to motivate and comprehend his work—and to stir up his audience. Satyagraha is an opera about the power of spirit and word to require us to be our best selves -- which is also what Judaism does at its best.

It is a message we need to hear today. Just as Satyagraha's provocative marketing campaign asked us if an opera could inspire us to stand up for truth, we need to ask whether the Torah can inspire us to take a stand for justice, economic fairness, equality, human rights, and peace? Can it move us to oppose appalling injustices in Tibet, Darfur, and around the world?

The questions are not entirely rhetorical. There are those today who think religion is at best a superstition, at worst a force for ill, and should be kept entirely separate from any notion of political engagement. There are others who think that the Jewish religion is mainly about aggrandizing and protecting the Jews. Those of us who disagree, who believe that our Jewishness compels us to fight torture, unnecessary war, environmental irresponsibility, and economic oppression by our own elected officials, may be inspired by Satyagraha even if we don't speak a word of Sanskrit.

(Indeed, since few audience members do, the opera inspires by musical and visual gestures, like the sight of a hundred lanterns being lifted in protest, or remarkable outsized puppets symbolizing collective action against greed.)

At the same time as Satyagraha evoked this pride in the possibilities of a prophetic tradition, it evoked in me a feeling of shame. It's impossible to watch hordes of second-class citizens standing up for their rights against an occupying regime and not think of Israel and Palestine. To be sure, the opera never draws that connection -- it is explicit in linking Gandhi and King, and some of the new production's imagery suggests Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but nowhere does it reference the Israel/Arab conflict. Yet to my eyes and ears, the parallels were unavoidable.

Behind the scenes: Set elements backstage (photo via the New York Times) This is not because the Palestinians are in the same position as the Indians (or black Africans) in South Africa, or that Israel is a colonial power. They are not. But the contours of popular struggle against a better-armed adversary are unmistakable.

Let us grant that there may be many differences. Yasser Arafat never was Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela for that matter. The Palestinians were not a nation in the same way as India or Tibet is. And of course, Israel's safety is at stake in a way that Britain's and China's never have been, and violent, rejectionist Palestinian factions enjoy considerable power. Let us grant all of these distinctions. There are still the brute facts of checkpoints, separation barriers, closures, and settlements. There are still the day-to-day realities of people living under occupation.

If we grant all these differences, we may well end up with a political program not so different from that of the current Israeli government. Yet at the very least, the brute facts demand that such a program be pursued ambivalently, even regretfully—not with the sort of reflexive, defensive cheerleading one finds in many Jewish quarters today. If indeed these policies are necessary, then our own support of them must be tinged with the awareness that every day, they place the Jewish state on the wrong side of justice. Perhaps these "costs" are justified by a higher good—but let's not pretend that they don't exist.

This was the ambivalence I felt watching Satyagraha, the title of which means "truth-force." One of the blessings and curses of Separation-Wall Israel is that the Palestinian crisis is more invisible than ever to visitors. We can stay at the Dan Pearl, visit holy sites, and once again promenade down pedestrian malls with comparatively little fear of violence. But if we take our sacred texts as seriously as Gandhi did, they must remind us of the costs of our freedom -- in this case, costs borne largely by people who do not enjoy the benefits.

Hopefully I have been clear that neither I nor Satyagraha advocate a particular policy position. But in reminding me the beauty of religious consciousness, Satyagraha also reminded me of the responsibility it demands.

Prince Charles: goes looking for a mezuzah Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla arrived in Poland today to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish community center in Krakow’s Kazimierz Jewish quarter. While the project was overseen by World Jewish Relief (a charity group based in London and credited with aiding Jewish children in escaping the Nazi regime during World War II), the inspiration for and funding of the center came directly from the Prince of Wales.

In 2002, Charles met with many of Krakow’s Holocaust survivors and was so moved by their stories that he decided to commit himself to the building of a community center. Many of the survivors he initially spoke with were present at today’s ceremony, including Ryszard Orowski, who lost all of his relatives in the Holocaust. Orowski expressed his joy and amazement over the project: "Never did we imagine that we would have a center, a home for the whole community of Krakow."

Prince Harry: fashion faux pasThe center will be used by about one thousand neighboring community members, ranging from elderly citizens to Polish students at Krakow University. It will be open to Jews and non-Jews alike for all sorts of social, religious, and educational activities.

As a token of gratitude, Prince Charles was given the honor of nailing the mezuzah on the front door of the center, making for one of a few rather excellent photo ops.

It is probably no coincidence that the opening of the center coincides with Yom Hashoah, and thus far plans have gone off without a hitch -- unlike three years ago when the British Royal family’s plans to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day went Prince Charles Says: want to play torah slides and ladders?terribly awry after every tabloid from here to Tel Aviv had a photo of Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi soldier on its cover. Also notable is that the Prince and Duchess’s presence at the opening of the community center comes less than a month after the Jerusalem Post published an article exposing the United Kingdom as “the European center of anti-Semitism.” According to Oxford-educated Hebrew University Professor Robert S. Wistrich, anti-Semitism is so implicit in British culture – literary, political, and otherwise – that Brits can’t even recognize it anymore.

Not to belittle his efforts in Krakow, but maybe Prince Charles should take that kippah and hammer and head over to a synagogue in his own hometown.

Grannies On Patrol: unafraid of hot sun, long lines, or jaded soldiersAny effective Israeli checkpoint guard must have the following defining characteristics:

• Fearlessness
  
• Stubbornness
  
• Nosiness
  
• Chutzpa

Sound like your Jewish grandmother? Well, that’s what the ladies over at Machsom Watch thought too. Upset about the current state and management of Israeli checkpoints, they formed an organization of female Israeli peace activists to offer civilian supervision. Too many times, they say, lengthy holdups at checkpoints have caused students to miss exams, women in labor to give birth before they reach the hospital, and degrading incidents. They especially lament the treatment of Palestinians at these checkpoints, who are often not permitted to travel freely even within their own townships. They decided that checkpoints would benefit from neutral civilian supervision. But who would they send to do the job? The solution: Jewish grandmas.

Take Rahel Weinberg and Julia West, for example. Armed with sunhats, clipboards, and water bottles, they brave the heat on a daily basis in order to monitor the behavior of the Israeli checkpoint soldiers. What do they have that the soldiers do not? It's more about what they don't have: A lack of military training and an absence of M16’s on their shoulders. Like any good grandma, these two also have heart and compassion. They are willing to stand in the sun all day just so they can help speed up the checkpoint crossing process for those in need, and they understand the difficulty of the checkpoint soldier’s occupation.

Says Rahel, “They have a dreadful job. It is boring, they work in scorching temperatures and their shifts last ten hours.” What they are there to do is to make sure that these strenuous conditions do not lead to an abuse of power. Rahel continues, “When they see us, the soldiers ask themselves 'what would my mother or my grandma have to say about the way I'm behaving?'”

Bottom line: When grannies are on watch, people watch their step. And that is exactly what Machsom Watch wants.