Zeek's Editor-in-chief, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, talks with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert about social justice, feminism and her book, Whose Torah?

Zeek: When people hear your name, Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, they tend to think, "Jewish feminist lesbian." Has that label been useful or helpful for you?

 

Rabbi Rebecca Alpert: All labels are problematic, but I don't mind taking on this label, and people do think of me that way - though they are often shocked that my current work is on Jews and baseball, or that my earlier work was on Reform rabbis developing an understanding of healing in the early part of the twentieth century. The label, though, was helpful back in the 1970s and 1980s when the idea of a lesbian rabbi was shocking. I was perfectly happy to stand up and confuse people.

 

Zeek: I was impressed to learn in your new book,Whose Torah, that you have deep experience in peace and poverty work.

 

RA: I do see feminism and gay rights work as part of a larger progressive agenda, both within the Jewish community and in the world at large. I have always understood feminism as being about more than just equal rights for women. Feminism opened my eyes so I realized that if you make life better for women, you make life better for everybody. Social justice is the grounding for the movement. Coming out of Reform Judaism, I believed social justice was the main way we Jews could make a contribution.

 

Zeek: How do you see social justice and spirituality connected within Judaism?

 

RA: I am very moved by Arthur Waskow's vision linking social justice to spirituality. That connection has not been the main impetus for me. The older I've gotten the more secular I've become, but I really see the importance of people seeing that there is a religious vision for social justice. There are so many people in the Jewish world today for whom spirituality is the center of their Jewishness: it's great when they make that connection to social justice.

 

Zeek: In your book, you frame Judaism as a kinship network as well as a spiritual source of faith. One element we lack in contemporary America is strong community, and you need strong community for justice work.

 

RA: I'm with you 100%. We see ourselves as Jews, fundamentally, as both a cultural network and a religious community. They are intertwined. That understanding that Jewishness is not only about spirituality throws people sometimes. People are surprised that religious people don't think you are any less a Jew because you are not spiritual. I am a post-Zionist, but I am always deeply moved by the Israeli world, the way they need to deal with the secular-religious connection. For instance being gay in secular Israel - as long as you are not in the chareidi camp - people say 'they are our brothers because they are Jews, they deserve rights.' Of course, it's a problem if our community is limited only to Jews.

 

Zeek: If the social justice impetus comes from Judaism as an ethnic tradition, why not just do social justice work from a purely secular position, or from another community that one is part of-for example, you talk about African-American Jews, Arab Jews. If you are a Jew with that kind of dual community, why not do social justice from an African-American position as opposed to a Jewish one?

 

RA: I guess it's the "as opposed to" that I don't agree with. People find a place from which they do their work. I don't think one place is better than another. I am a Reconstructionist Jew, which means I don't believe Jews are the chosen people. Every group has something to contribute. If doing the work from the Jewish perspective is meaningful, then great. If doing it from a different perspective is meaningful, then great. The connections are more important to me than the divisions.

 

Zeek: I can hear people saying, "Oy vey! This rabbi is saying we don't have to believe in God and we don't have to be Jewish just because Judaism is better, so why bother? Why bother learning Torah? It's too difficult! Why would anyone be Jewish! This will kill Judaism!" You must get this sometimes.

 

RA: I wish I was so powerful, that I singlehandedly could kill Judaism. I would have to be a bit careful about what I ever said to anybody.

 

Zeek: (laughs)

 

RA: Seriously, I don't do this because I believe in God or because it's the best way, but because it's my way. I see great wisdom and beauty and truth in Judaism. If I didn't find Judaism a tremendous source of wonderful ideas I wouldn't be a rabbi. I think Judaism holds up to rational scrutiny. It holds up to my questions. I feel I am in the tradition of Abraham arguing with God. You know, God in the Bible does not get along so well with the Jewish people, and the Jews didn't get along so well with God. There is always an argument, always questioning. That is the most wonderful part of the Judaism I grew up with.

Since its release in 1982, Jacob Goldwasser's first feature, Under The Nose (Mitahat La'af) has acquired cult status in Israel, setting the cinematic standard for portraying domestic social problems for many years to come. To mark its 25th anniversary in 2007, Under The Nose was released on DVD. A script book was also recently published which included an interview with the director and the scriptwriter, three essays, and a short story inspired by the film — a rare event for a cultural scene in which the study of film is sparse.

Under The Nose is based on an incident that made headlines in Israel in 1976. In what was initially reported as a daring and sophisticated crime, burglars penetrated Jaffa’s police headquarters and removed a safe containing 3 million Lira (the name of Israel’s currency until 1977). The capture of the burglars revealed them to be small time criminals, who clumsily carried out the burglary, and whose success was traced to their luck, and, mainly, to the ineptitude of Jaffa’s police to prevent such an event from taking place in their very own HQ.

Goldwasser and his scriptwriter, Haim Merin, turn the story into a parable about the margins of Israeli society. Sammy and Herzl, the two main characters, who are played by Uri Gavriel and Moshe Ivgy respectively are small time criminals, who in the Israel of the late 1970s and early 1980s (as well as today), would be triply marginalized: Mizrachi in a world where Ashkenazi Jews rule; poor in a society that is taking quick strides to dismantle its public sector and adopt American-style capitalism; and obscure players in a milieu where prestige—built on competence and dare—counts for everything.

Sammy and Herzl dream of the big strike that would deliver them from their marginalized positions, make their reputation, secure their financial needs, and provide them with the means of starting a new life in Amsterdam. When Sami reads a story in the newspaper about a safe full of foreign cash that is located at Jaffa’s police headquarters, he turns to Janna, his childhood hero, known in his prime as the “Climbing Cat,” played by the one time actor Zadok Zarum. His enthusiasm pulls Janna out of retirement, and together they plan the crime.

However, the solidarity of the group begins to disintegrate when Jacob Haguel, played by the late Jucky Arkin—Herzl’s brother in law (Janna’s former partner, now a used car dealer) who plays cards regularly and always loses—forces himself on the three. The gang pulls off the burglary, despite the fact that Sammy gets completely drunk on the eve of the event, and Jacob gets nervous and leaves the crime scene without the group’s getaway car, without waiting for his friends.

Detective Ben-Shushan, played by the Israeli-Palestinian actor Makram Khoury, is given the task of solving the crime. Ben-Shushan believes that the burglary was committed by local people, rather than by an international gang as Police Chief Superintendent Hason would have it. The names of all of the characters involved are markedly Mizrachi. The conflict in the movie is, therefore, not one between the Mizrachi underclass and the Ashkenazi establishment and upper class, as Israeli films (to the present) are wont to depict it, but an internal Mizrachi affair. This is the case, even if some of the Mizrachi characters clearly serve Israel’s Ashkenazi-dominated establishment, as the huge portrait of David Ben Gurion hanging at Chief Superintendent Hason’s office indicates.

Under The Nose’s portrayal of Mizrachim served as an important precursor to Benny Toraty’s 2001 film Desperado Square (Kikar Ha-Halomot), which likewise presents a world without Ashkenazim. Both films dismiss the traditional portrayal of Mizrachi-Ashkenazi class conflict in order to focus on the internal mechanisms of the Mizrachi dream of transcending their underclass status in Israeli society. Toraty’s film takes place in a poor neighborhood, inhabited exclusively by Mizrachim. The film tells of brothers Nissim and George’s struggle to reopen their father’s cinema and to screen once more the Indian films that once captivated their neighbors. Toraty’s film suggests that movies, specifically the communal experience of watching films, offers not only refuge from one’s daily miseries, but also transform their viewers’ lives. Desperado Square is a paean to cinema and its emancipatory power. Goldwasser’s characters, on the other hand, struggle to realize themselves within the very real strictures imposed upon them by Israeli society and by their own psychology. Crime is the central component of their fantasy of breaking away from these constraints. The characters’ failure to transcend their situation, however, is of their own doing.

When the four burglars assemble to crack the safe and divide the loot, Sammy refuses to hand Haguel his share; he now imagines himself a bigshot, and pays no heed to Janna’s pleas and forewarning that this would endanger all of them. Unbeknownst to his lifelong friend Herzl, he plans to leave Israel for Amsterdam with his girlfriend. When he does not show up to a reconciliation meeting arranged by Janna, Herzl goes looking for him. When Herzl finds him and realizes that Sammy is on his way to the airport, he stabs him, just as police officers, who have been informed by Haguel and were following him, arrest them both.

As well as its social insights, Under The Nose is a commentary on the relevance of the Israeli cinematic models that had preceded it. Specifically, the film critiques the Bourekas social comedies popular in Israel in the 1970s and early 1980s (such as Boaz Davidson’s 1974 film Charlie and a Half and Menachem Golan’s Kazablan, that came out the same year). These comedies relied on stock characters and lowbrow humor, often ending with a wedding that marked the resolution of conflict and a new beginning. Goldwasser’s film not only diverges from the Bourekas stereotypes, but also demystifies the artificiality of social reconciliation in Israel that these comedies consistently presented. Under The Nose offers no such reconciliation, neither between Mizrachim and the establishment, nor between the characters in the story.

Goldwasser has also pointed out that Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Street has influenced him greatly. Sammy and Herzl could thus be seen as a local version of Charlie and Johnny Boy and their struggle to climb up the mafia ladder. Yet, while self-sacrifice is central to Scorsese’s film (Charlie sacrifices himself on behalf of Johnny Boy), Goldwasser’s characters are incapable of such an act, and it is their inability to see beyond their own inflated egos that leads to their downfall.

Under The Nose also bears reference to European crime comedies such as Mario Monicelli’s 1958 Big Deal on Madonna Street, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman. A farce about a group of incompetent ne’er-do-wells who plan to burglarize a state-run pawn-shop through an adjacent apartment and find themselves, after many hours in the kitchen of that very same apartment, Big Deal likewise sets its characters head over shoulder in a situation well beyond their meager abilities. In Under The Nose, on the other hand, the crime is indeed comic, but not its consequences. Following the theft, the film turns into a Greek tragedy, in which doom is traced to flaws of character. Yet, this drama is quite frustrating, precisely because of its hopeless conclusion.

What these three films share is their use of the fabled “crime scene” to explore the way that their characters conceive of their masculinity, and how their self-image as men shapes their relationship with women. In Under The Nose, the predominant female character in the film is the safe (the noun for ‘safe’ is feminine in Hebrew). Cracking it is portrayed as a rape scene. Flesh and blood women characters, on the other hand, are under-developed and this is arguably the weakest aspect of the film. Still, it is Sammy’s girlfriend who, in the end, succeeds where all the male characters have failed. Witnessing Sammy and Herzl’s arrest, she proceeds to the airport with Sammy’s share of the burglary and makes it to Amsterdam. While men are ‘captured’ by their social and personal limitations, the film ultimately suggests that the hope for liberation should be pinned on women.

Donari Braxton has written brave quantities of fiction, poetry, theater, and "cross-genre work," and has also translated. His writing has been widely anthologized in the UK and the United States, and his first collection of stories, I, will be succeeded in 2008 by a second. Presently he lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on a novel.
Here are my favorite lines of this story - "These Hollows, and Suchlike" - which is funning on both us and itself, anything but "hollow" and yet, full of holes:
"Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: ‘Jewish humor, my nigga?'"
Dr. Choggys West has appeared in Braxton's fiction before. One hopes he will have the occasion to consult with us again.

- Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor


"I want you to tell me your favorite word in 1994."
"My favorite word."
"In 1994, yes."
"No."
"Be a sport," said Choggys real rationally-like.
But I was being a sport, I insisted to Choggys, who scowled and added:
"Be an art then," he added, so to that I quickly stammered off:
"Ask me again?"
"1994 please, your favorite word."
"Hiccups."
Choggys hesitated before asking, "And presently?"
"Yes."

†

Dr. Choggys West had one rule. Don't be a push-over, and the vowel, always, is the tonic syllable. I didn't see how the second rule related to helping me grow as an individual, so I said that to Choggys, and asked him what kind of therapy he practiced. "Hula-hoop." "The fuck outta here," I told him. So vaguely twinkling like a loose basement tug-incandescent he added, "And if I keep it up, I may even get my degree."
Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: "Jewish humor, my nigga?"
And Choggys sniggered and uttered nonchalantly:
"Why, are you Jewish?"
"Would that premise my question?" I asked.

"Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?"

"Better, Donari, better."

†

"I want you to tell me about your very first memory."
"I was a hole."
"You were a hole."
"Correct."
"Do you mean you were a sperm?"
"No, I do not."
"Were you referring to your mother's vagina then, Donari?"
"I certainly was not."
"Tell me about it then," pronounced Choggys in a very phony Arabic with a fake German accent-Freud, I suppose, was the idea-that didn't entirely crucify the vowels; diphthongs, ablauts, even emoticons over obscure lower-case i's reeked of discriminate meaning when he vomited them up, so that if he were in the midst of confessing his sins, on the brinks of orgasm, making pp's or war-talking the enemy, each word made a kind of finger-print in the ear of the listener, not one identical to another and so on.
Choggys was actually a Russian and in reality one-half-parts Jewish but three-parts water, like a woman.
He wasn't listening and I wasn't listening and at some point Choggys was saying the following:
"My motto, prior to playing Rasputin under the Saudi Prince, is to always make of the vowel the tonic syllable."
"I know that already, doc," I told Dr. Choggys.
"Subsequ'ently, for example."
"Subsequ'ently, for e'xample."
"Wiederholen Sie bitte."

D'i'nosaur, l'it're'ture, e'xtra'o'dinar'y, supercalafragel'i'sticexpialadocious.
Sophistication will saturate you over motherfucker, he reassured me.
MEINE Raffinesse is sehr, sehr gut, he reassured me.

†

Our sessions took to the street when the traveling Russian circus came to make its three-day festival of our tiny, unpronounceable village, and Choggys, parading through it, exuded confidence for everyone's benefit, making small talk with peasant folk, women and Africans in the Russian language. Had they been Arabic speakers like myself, he'd never have acknowledged their existence. If I'd asked him: ‘What did that one just say, Dr. Choggys?' then Choggys would not translate their words, but rather summarize for them their words, and usually proceed by briefly psychoanalyzing them, too. I offer an example:
This one says that he wonders what I am doing in this country, and if I am a diplomat. I told him that he should be careful to ask only questions that require definite answers, the Maoist.

Dr. Choggys had pushed a young Slav into the mud who had stepped on Dr. Choggys' shoes. He tiptoed over the man and sniggered.
"In a mud-puddle, I am the absence of mud-puddle," Choggys recited above the filthy young Slav, temporarily blinded and very, very sad.
But then, just beyond the mud-puddle where the Slav had once been standing, some form of gambling slot-machine in fact was what was missing, and I said Look! and Choggys, half-embarrassed, turned and made to walk away. But I insisted for health reasons. I said: After all, Dr. Choggys, I'm paying for this!
Choggys had no choice but to walk back and pull down on the machine's ruby-knobbed lever.
First its currency detector declined Choggys' money, but secondly I put in a coin and the six reels started spinning patterns of symbols that couldn't have belonged to a rainbow, as if six-thousand eyeballs were rolling back in its head. Choggys would have glanced over to shit on my superstition, but he couldn't look away either, and soon the reels began to accelerate exponentially, and the ready symbols of colors bled into a canon, whipping around snow-gloss that gleamed like diamonds, then vacuumed itself up again suction-cup-like.
Through the loud, schlocky humming of the machine, the young Slav had risen to his feet and came to stand beside us. Choggys told me, "Put another coin back in, stupid Fuck!" And Choggys screamed to the Slav in Russian, "You, clean yourself up!"
But the machine was at rest, and the symbols were letters, and the letters, we couldn't help but notice, almost certainly spelled hollow.
"Us holes," I began to tell Choggys, who I'm sure was piqued by the sight of an irrepressible smile bubbling under my lips, "us holes just have nothing to lose."
"Oh shut the fuck up," replied Dr. Choggys.
I guess he thought I was only I-told-you-so'ing, but smugly, having figured him out long before, I wasn't.

†

"There's more to a hole than the gravity," I began to answer his question. "More than the plummet, there are also the feelings, like the feeling of passing from one thing to the next, hibernation..."
"Oh go fuck yourse-"
"Wonderland rabbits, for instance, will come and go through a half-sister of mine, and another one, my grandfather's brother, was the barrel through which Kennedy got slugged."
"Ja ja ja ja ja ja!" He exclaimed his disinterest.
"Friends of mine are just about everything imaginable, from trenches so-to-speak where tyrants pigeonholed, to Manhattan manholes, puncture wounds and wormholes, chimneys on anthills and assholes, et cetera."
And finally, I noticed, Dr. Choggys was beginning to listen.
"Believe me, Dr. Choggys, well-born parents will mobilize and leave eyelets for blue blood, exhaust-pipes on Benzes, famous popstars' gold pie-holes and other such things, though all prearranged, these hollows and suchlike, just as everywhere across the board in existing."
"You," diagnosed Choggys West, "are a dirty, dirty man."
Was.
I was a great gaping hole. Succussing the shit left from passers-by by gurgling it right into the soil. Ingesting it straight into the soul of the earth. Speaking to myself quite often.
But by then, however, Dr. Choggys was hup! so sorry, afraid that our time was up.

During the late 1970s, I can't remember how many times my siblings and I would hear a song on the radio--most often English-language pop and disco--and try to sing along. We'd mimic the lyrics, switching back and forth between English and Hebrew as we unsuccessfully attempted to master particularly difficult American-sounding turns of phrase. Boney M's 1978 mega-hit "Rasputin," and Earth, Wind and Fire's 1979 smash "Boogie Wonderland" were particular sources of amusement, as friends and family would struggle to properly enunciate "R" and "W," sounding, in the case of "Vonderland," like Israeli caricatures of Bela Lugosi.

We tried to be forgiving of each other, but sometimes it just wasn't so easy. As a family composed of multilingual Israeli parents and British-educated adolescents, we were no strangers to the embarrassment of lacking fluency in such a resolutely complex linguistic context. However, it made appearing cool and hip that much harder, especially when it came to showing off our knowledge of popular music. "Stairvey to Cheaven," I can recall an older relative singing in our car once, as the Led Zeppelin song came on the Voice of Peace station. That time, I had to work a little harder than usual to stifle a laugh. I was ten years old, and at that age, anyone's shame was my own personal gain--especially when I could congratulate myself for knowing better than a longhaired twenty-something.

Listening to the new Numero Group compilation Soul Messages From Dimona is like being transported right back to that time. An anthology of soul, funk and disco by Black Hebrews who'd decamped to Dimona (home to Israel's sole nuclear reactor) this twelve-track collection recorded between 1975 and 1981 sounds exactly like what everyone would have done back then if they'd happen to have gotten everything right--including the air guitar. Consisting of tracks by four different bands made up of veteran musicians from Chicago and Detroit, this surprising, highly politicized collection is a stark reminder that despite the overwhelmingly Anglo-American rock leanings of Israeli bands like Kaveret, there was some remarkable urban music being produced in the country during the 1970s that was every bit as good as The O’Jays.

Okay, so the few efforts at Hebrew on this CD sound just as clumsy as Israeli attempts at sounding like African-Americans. But damned if, when the religious pretense is dropped, each one of the groups on Soul Messages delivers musical goods that sound unlike anything else that was happening in the Middle East at the time. Indeed, the funk and jazz-damaged instrumental workouts on this album are frequently stunning and exhude an almost avant-garde quality--not only musically but also in terms of cultural context. When The Spirit of Israel sings “I just want to live in Israel/Live a life of purity" in “A Place to Be’” these four bands’ work takes on an immensely profound significance, especially when you realize that the song was most likely written in the shadow of a factory producing the region’s first nuclear weaponry.

If what you want is to encounter a quintessentially “Israeli” record that inhabits the essence of local vernacular in all of its contradictory glory, you can't do any better than Soul Messages From Dimona. How can you argue, when the Tonistics praise their hometown on the final track: "Dimona, the spiritual capital of the world"? For a dusty desert community that feels like it is at the absolute end of the world (and, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have you think, a place that also threatens Iran's destruction), that lyric says an awful lot about how appropriately “native” this music really is--so much so that, of course, it would take me nearly 30 years to finally hear it, not in Israel, but America.

Biting into Her Beauty

In memory of Noah Orbach

And then came this tall guy and said he had been
Ordering large meals at Burger King where she was working
Just to bite into her beauty.
Her death milkeed his teeth. He no longer rips
Little packets in order to squirt
Ketchup on meat, now orphaned
In the belly of a bun.
Outside, a dry June wind heated the pot of the street,
A spoon of sun was stirring in his head as in a bowl of soup,
And memory of her was like oil boiling and turning
A cocoon potato into butterfly-fries
To be salted by a tear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guillotine

(Or: In regards to a Young Poet)

If one of these days you meet the Frenchman, Englishman, and German,
All brought to the guillotine, remember!
The Frenchman asked they put him facing
Upward to look death in the eye;
The Englishman wanted to bury his gaze into the ground.
With both the blade got stuck
An inch before their head sang
A farewell song to their body.
When they asked the German in what direction to put him,
He answered: "First of all, fix the guillotine."
And you,
Don't forget to stare straight into his eyes
And tell him, it's not worth fixing her who wanted
To behead your thoughts,
But you should let her dream about
The fireworks of the word blood,
Even if she decides to stop an inch before
This "impolite encounter" with
The nape or
Throat.
Remember!
The guillotine can be as small as clippers
You use to clip off fingernails
That in your love poems scratched
A page's neck.

Continue reading...

I'm tired. Most of my reading time in the last few weeks has been devoted to the "Four Horseman of Atheism"-Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And now that I've emerged from my self-imposed sequestration-blinking in the sunlight and desperate for a beer-I deeply regret ever suggesting this article to Zeek.

My problem is not with atheism per se. If someone does not believe in God, that's no concern of mine. Just as it's no concern if, say, another Jew practices a more stringent level of observance than I do. (Or a lesser one, but he'd tough to find.) My problem, rather, is with these authors, for their smugness and dogmatism. I felt alternatively harangued or patronized or downright bored. Reading their books, one after the other, was an enervating experience.

Champion of Godlessness: Christopher Hitchens

The exercise did begin well, with Hitchens' god [sic] is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens is a gifted writer, so his book is actually entertaining. He explores many of the same themes as his colleagues in godlessness-how religion leads to ignorance, oppression, and ethical confusion-but in a more diverting way, despite, or maybe due to, his rhetorical excesses. Those who read this kind of book looking to be offended will come away satisfied: Hitchens calls the God of the Hebrews "ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial"; he refers to Jesus as one of many "deranged prophets." Strong stuff, but why should he pretend to be reverent?

Many people dismiss Hitchens as a bloviator, an armchair warrior against "Islamofascism." But this book, anyway, is not an anti-Muslim screed. It's a sustained argument against the broader tenets of all religions-against the infallibility of scripture and the claim that religion "improves people." When Hitchens does discuss the murderous meetings of religion and politics (e.g. Belfast, Beirut, Belgrade), it's in support of his assertions, not to score points for "The War on Terror." And he is capable of tolerance. (Although I did wonder why, if, as Hitchens suggests, he'd be fine with religion if its adherents would just "leave [him] alone," he keeps running off to participate in televised debates.)

Extremist Atheist: Sam Harris

Anyway, if Hitchens goes overboard occasionally, Sam Harris falls in the water with disturbing frequency. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that reason (e.g. secular humanism) is in a fight to the death with the forces of irrationality (e.g. evangelical Christians and every living Muslim). This is a plausible, if not original point. There is no place for faith in political discourse, and we are facing real threats, such as an "Islamist regime" acquiring "long-range nuclear weaponry." (Or short range, for that matter.) But Harris often evinces his own form of extremism. To him, even religious moderation is a hypocritical "myth." In fact, he wants to chuck the whole thing out the window-baby, bathwater, and baptismal font (or bimah). And unless we do, he argues, we're all gonna die-we risk a global, religious-based conflict that causes the end of civilization.

Okay, I suppose that this is a possibility. But so was Y2K. And I'm still scratching my head over his limited support of-wait for it-torture. In all fairness, this issue is a small part of The End of Faith. Still, it highlights the book's bizarre mixture of rationalism and fearmongering. Harris paraphrases Alan Dershowitz, that subtle thinker, who proposed that we consider torture if, say, we have custody of a "known terrorist" who "has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city." Harris himself suggests that if we can accept wartime "collateral damage"-which he defines as "the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children"-then we should be able to accept the purposeful torture of guilty people. In other words, "If there is even one chance in a million that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda," it would be "perverse" to disallow it.

Actually, what's perverse is using extreme examples to justify an unreliable, corrupting practice. And to assume that it's possible to use torture with judiciousness. Listen, if Dershowitz's scenario comes to pass, I will personally pay for the car battery. Until then, one chance in a million is not enough.

Scientific Fundamentalist: Daniel Dennett

With Harris' apocalyptic warnings ringing in my ears, I turned, with relief, to what I supposed would be the coolly objective realms of science. "Supposed" is the key word here, for the proponents of natural selection, apparently, can be just as unappealing as its detractors. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Tufts professor Daniel Dennett "[extrapolates] back to human history with the aid of biological thinking." What this means, in English, is that Dennett speculates about the origin and development of religion through the lens of natural selection. For example, he explains that early "folk religions" may have served Darwinian needs-in terms of group survival through social cohesion, or individual survival through the placebo effects of superstitious rituals. Today, though, with democracy and antibiotics, we have no need for these outdated belief systems, whose benefits are "mixed" at best and "toxic" at worst.

While these ideas seem reasonable, there is something oppressive about Dennett's (and Dawkins') assumption that natural selection explains everything-that human development can only be seen in terms of competitive advantages. I admit that I am oversimplifying, and I would never argue against natural selection. I only wish to point out that irrespective of his "humble philosopher" persona, Dennett can be as smugly dogmatic as an evangelical preacher. Surely he can admit that some aspects of human behavior remain mysterious, if only because no one was around to observe their development? Probably not. The condescension, the self-satisfaction that oozes from every page of Breaking the Spell suggests otherwise. And there's really no excusing Dennett's assertion that atheists should call themselves "brights"-which Hitchens, to his infinite credit, refers to as "cringe-making."

Misfired: Richard Dawkins

I had similar problems with Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion-he, too, is hopelessly arrogant; he, too, cannot conceive of human behavior outside of the terms of natural selection. Take altruism. Why, Dawkins asks, should we want to help strangers-the "orphaned child weeping," or tsunami victims-if they can be of no direct help to us? It's an important question; one, Dawkins admits, that Darwinism doesn't "easily explain." But instead of turning to sociology or brain chemistry, he speculates that altruism is like sexual desire. We don't desire only those with whom it would be advantageous to mate. But hey, when we were baboons in "strong, stable bands," we helped and desired each other. So maybe, in humans, these are vestigial urges-maybe when you give a bum a quarter and feel strangely attracted to a surly barrista, you are experiencing Darwinian "misfirings," "blessed, precious mistakes." Maybe. Or maybe humans, having higher cognition and more complex societies than baboons, have these urges for reasons that are only related to natural selection. But why bother asking that, when we already have our theory of everything?

Most of Dawkins' book, though, isn't about religion and natural selection. Really it's an atheist tract. Or think of it as a primer, containing everything from refutations of Thomas Aquinas' "proofs" to the dubious morality of scripture. All this would be illuminating, if The God Delusion didn't read as if it were written with closed fists. Dawkins is a reputedly a good writer, and this may be evident in his other books. In this case, though, I grew impatient after the fifth time he (a) announced that a joke was coming; (b) told the joke; (c) reminded the reader that he had just read a joke. This may seem anti-intellectual: perhaps I should critique only the quality of his ideas. But style matters too. Especially when one has just read about the same topics in three previous books.

Not a Horseman: R.D. Gold

Now I must cop to another mistake. When I came across R.D. Gold's book, I assumed that he had written a kind of atheistic primer for Jews-which was why I thought Gold should ride with the Horsemen. Instead, with Bondage of the Mind: How Old Testament Fundamentalism Shackles the Mind and Enslaves the Spirit: Towards a Better Understanding of the Religious Experience Gold seems to be going for the world's longest subtitle.

Well, that and a book-length debunking of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism-which, to Gold, is synonymous with fundamentalism. An American Jew, Gold is troubled by the growing "aggressiveness" of Orthodox Jewry's proselytizing. Although there's little personal information about him, in his book or on the web, it seems safe to say that he was inspired by the Horsemen: he calls fundamentalism "one of the most noxious forces in the history of mankind." But Gold doesn't go as far as atheism, arguing instead that religion "can play a positive role in one's life-sociologically, philosophically, and psychologically."

Gold spends the better part of his book explaining that the Torah is "a fanciful account of Jewish history, not a historical record of what really happened." In other words, the Torah was not revealed at Mt. Sinai, the Exodus never occurred, there was no conquest of Canaan, and so on. In addition, Biblical prophecy, the "uniqueness of the Jewish people," and the "superior morality" of the Orthodox are all illusions or logical fallacies.

All of Gold's arguments are sound. As is the second, shorter part of the book, which presents a guardedly positive description of Reconstructionist Judaism. Here, the author also suggests that a propensity for religious or spiritual longings may be "hard-wired" into the human brain. But just whom is Gold addressing? Less religious folks like me are not going to start shlepping to shul just because "the operating system of the brain" says that it's a good idea. Nor will fundamentalists, Jewish or otherwise, be swayed by neurology.

Who's Still Reading?

Actually, the question of intended audience is a crucial one for all the aforementioned books. Only Dennett overtly wishes to cajole a religious reader into re-examining faith. The rest of them seem to be talking to people who already believe what they do. And what is the point of that? I did find it instructive to read Dawkins' speculations about morality and natural selection. But I'm not a creationist. Indeed, while I have reservations about all these books, for the most part I can't argue against their theses. That's because while I do believe in God, I also know that belief in His existence is not proof of His existence: there is no logical argument for faith.

Similarly, I know that you cannot claim a causal link between religious belief and ethical behavior. You could even argue the opposite, considering just how many religions have a long history of oppression and slaughter. Thus while I may irrationally ascribe to Judaism, I believe that religion has no place in any government or legal system. But these books aren't really about the separation of church (or synagogue) and state. These books are against religion, or fundamentalism, even though there's barely a chance in hell that an "Islamofascist" or a Kahanist or a Rapture-ready Christian will ever read them, let alone become "brights."

Why not? Because human beings are irrational. Against our own self-interests, we smoke, we eat too much cake, and we don't save money. Against all evidence to the contrary, we believe in God, or gods, or that a savior was born in Nazareth. And we kill each other in the names of these gods. It's depressing, but I don't see how we can stop it. Even if we could, we'd find "reasons" to bash each other's brains out anyway. I'm not concerned about the apocalypse; nor, paradoxically, do I place much faith in the elevating power of reason. People being what they are-that is, venal and stupid-I can easily imagine bloody wars over the question of who is more of a secular humanist.

Suzane Adam’s acclaimed novel, Laundry, reminds readers that childhood is all too often pervaded by fears, both real and imagined, both spoken and unspoken. In this lyric excerpt, a grown woman recalls the distant torments of her childhood in the 1950s ‘beyond the forests’—in Transylvania. Sickness, slaughter, and long suppressed secrets form the backdrop for the narrator’s dark fairy tale of her youth. What begins as a closely-observed domestic scene from a lost world soon burns with feverish menace. But only by understanding her painful past can the narrator make sense of the mystery of her Israeli present.---Adam Rovner, translations editor

 

We sat on the carpet in the large room that we used for both family and guests. One large rug covered most of the parquet floor. My sister was watching me. For some reason the rug caught my eye; with concentration I methodically traced the patterns. A wine-colored border two fingers wide, a thin black stripe, a thin white stripe crossed by black lines like the teeth of people in the pictures I drew. Flowers and stems twisted in a wonderful pattern in the middle of the rug, leaves streamed from the flowers in stripes and circles, each shape changing and turning into a new shape, burgundy, black, brown, white, gold, green—an expensive Persian rug, they’d explained to me. I wasn’t allowed to walk on it in my dirty shoes. Only in the summertime did they take up the heavy rug—my mother, my father, and Anna, too, who only came to clean and iron—hanging it on the wooden fence outside, and all the neighbors passing by would stop and marvel at its beauty. My mother would put a kerchief on so she wouldn’t get dust in her braid, then she’d beat both sides of the rug with a carpet-beater made from a bundle of reeds. When she was finished, a cloud of dust was created with every sigh that came from her body. Then she brought buckets of vinegar diluted with water, and with a soft brush she gently scrubbed the silk fibers of the rug until they sparkled and gleamed in the sunlight.

It was hard to clean the rug, and I thought about this as I traced the curling flowers between me and my sister. A strange trembling seized me, as if I’d been turned upside-down by one of the winding vines, a cold wind shook me from the inside, a cave formed in my body, even though I’d only heard of caves in stories and folktales, at the bottom of that cave I felt inside me there was a heavy whirlpool of mud, like the ones I saw once when the Samush overflowed its banks. I wanted to sleep, I was so tired, I was cold, and I was hot, and my sister was crying. My sister, who was almost three, opened and closed her mouth like a dying fish that has washed ashore. My last thought was that I was supposed to be responsible for her

When I woke up, I was naked from the waist up. Dr. Ontel, Joschka’s father, was pressing his fingers to my neck and under my armpits, placing a palm on my chest. With his other hand he tapped steadily, his ears trying to interpret the echo inside my ribs. I was cold, and when Joschka’s father turned me over onto my belly and started tapping on my back, the curls that fell on my face had a faintly sour smell. The sheet and mattress were soaked with cold urine. I turned my head from side to side, examining my surroundings in terror. Beside me my mother whispered, Hush, hush, everything is fine…

***

The next day, after I’d fainted once more, I was taken away to a hospital that specialized in children’s diseases. My mother bundled me up in a fur jacket that barely buttoned over my woolen underwear and two sweaters. My father’s thick scarf was wrapped around my head, I wore flannel pajama bottoms under my itchy wool pants that I hated, plus gloves and boots. I sat like that on the edge of the kitchen chair, my body sealed up, beads of sweat dripping from my forehead and blurring my vision, waiting for Pishta, Bijou’s father, to come with the slaughterhouse truck.

The slaughterhouse truck was coming for me, I was sick, the sick went to the slaughterhouse. Even though I recognized it, its color, the sound of its engine, and even though Pishta, my best friend’s father, sat in the driver’s seat, and even though my mother stood anxiously at the open door of the truck’s cab, and even though the truck seemed to be innocent of anything wicked and evil, I refused to climb in and sit on the bouncy, brown leather seat. Bijou’s mother held my crying sister on her hip, comforting her. All the children were at school, the neighbors were busy. The street was white except for the tire tracks of the snowplows, whose blades had turned the white snow into a brownish porridge. I saw footprints people had left on the sidewalk, big and small, blurred, deep. My mother was getting angry, Pishta was in a hurry, and again I felt as though I were about to take flight. Before I collapsed again I had enough time to look at the roof of my family’s house melting into the branches of the tree that stood like a naked sentry.

In the big hospital, they put me in the second bed to the left of the door. There were ten beds in all. The large windows had bars. It was the eighth floor of the ten-storey building. A hospital just for children. The regulations were strict: we could only leave the room to use the bathrooms and once a day for a shower, according to a schedule devised by the nurses. The children were listless. Some were bald, some bloated, some gaunt. The smell of Lysol was new to me. I felt as healthy as a horse, I had an appetite, thankfully. I was pink and chubby, a stain of health among the sick. They took a lot of my blood in glass syringes. I stared at the floor the whole time, making sure my blood wasn’t dripping into a groove next to my bed. My mother didn’t understand, the doctors were not as nice as Dr. Ontel, always scolding me, insisting I lie quiet. Some of the other children slept, some of them groaned, tossing restlessly. They were quiet; they didn’t act like any children I knew. Their visitors were sent home. According to the regulations, patients were allowed visitors once a day for two hours, even if the patients were frightened, crying children. My mother rented a room from a family nearby; this was very expensive. She promised me she would come back the next day. I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was abandoning me.. The next day I was shocked when my mother’s worried face found me beneath the covers.

And there was a girl there, fragile as a baby chick, whose age I couldn’t guess. She sat rigidly straight. Her hair was not like a girl’s hair—it was just a yellowish-white down that seemed to float like a halo above her scalp. This was Marishka the artist. From her I learned that I could draw instead of faint.

The doctors bandaged my vein and went to see what was wrong with my blood. The thin, smiling nurse who always patted the children walked by the big room at all hours, peeking in to make sure everyone was quiet. I cried and cried, and when I finished crying beneath the covers and couldn’t faint from fear, and didn’t see colors swirling together, and didn’t feel any caves in my belly, I got up from the bed with its squeaky steel springs. With my healthy steps I approached Marishka’s creaky bed and sat down.

She was very thin, the skin of her hands nearly transparent—through it I could see bluish scribbles, and yellow, pink, even blotches of purple, as if the colors of the drawings scattered around her were staining her from the inside. Her eyes were two sunken brown holes. She didn’t have any eyelashes, the only color on her face that wasn’t somewhere between gray and white were her pinkish lips. From the corner of her mouth her pale tongue stuck out, decorated with little white dots. Her head tilted toward the same side as her tongue pointed, and when she moved her tongue to the opposite corner of her mouth, her head also leaned to that side, as if her tongue were helping her head keep her balance. It seemed to me that her bed was bigger than mine because she only took up as much room as a pillow, at the very top. I sat on the edge of the bed, at the end of a path of colors strewn across the white bedspread. She didn’t speak, just kept drawing with surprising concentration, ignoring her guest. Maybe she hadn’t seen me.

“What are you drawing?” I asked in a whisper, so as not to disturb her, and also so I wouldn’t break one of the hospital regulations—I still didn’t know them all. She raised her head from her notebook and stared at me the way my teacher used to look at students who disturbed him when he was in the middle of reading a book, except that Marishka didn’t have glasses, and her gaze wasn’t threatening or scary. She lifted up her notebook and turned it around so I could see the results of her labors, and said in an older girl’s voice, “I’m drawing a picture. Isn’t it pretty?” The page was crowded with lines, smudges, colors streaming into each other to make more colors and more lines. There were no blue skies, or houses with red roofs, or flowers coming out of brown earth, like in the pictures Bijou and I drew. “Is it pretty?” she asked again. Yes, the picture was pretty. She turned the page and showed me the picture upside down. “Isn’t it pretty?” I thought this upside-down picture was pretty, too. I didn’t say it out loud, but I nodded, and she carefully tore off a page and held it out to me. “You draw something, too,” she commanded. I picked up a blue pencil, the color I loved, and thought about what to draw as I chewed on the end of it. “Draw,” she insisted. “Close your eyes and draw,” she said in the firm voice of a teacher. I thought this was a silly suggestion. If I closed my eyes, how could I see what I was drawing? I tried anyway, if only out of curiosity. With my eyes shut, I scribbled with the blue pencil, then felt around for other colors without opening my eyes, until I was completely frustrated. “You’re not drawing, you’re doodling. Draw!” she said. She was so small and fragile, more so even than the porcelain girl with the goose that decorated the high shelf of the buffet at my house. She gave me another page and coolly turned back to her own drawing.

I understood she was giving me another chance. I closed my eyes and saw my mother’s smile, the snow, the rug, the Samush overflowing its banks. I drew black lines, crowding together, beside them lots of sky blue, between them paths of red and brown and two purple circles above them, from which pointed yellow horns that blended with the green at the bottom of the page. I don’t know how much time passed; when I lifted my head I felt the way I felt every time I woke up after fainting. Marishka watched me, her mouth forming a smile. “You drew a beautiful picture,” she said, and collected all the colors in a small wooden box, where she also put the notebook, without having to fold the pages. She put the closed box next to the pillow she was leaning on, groaned like a woman exhausted by a long day of work, and slid under her blanket, disappearing. Her body made such a small lump in the covers that it seemed as though the bed hadn’t reacted to the fact that someone was lying there.

The next day, during visiting hours, I asked my mother to bring me a notebook and many colored pencils. For hours that day, between the needles and the examinations, I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. For ten days the doctors tried to solve the mystery of my fainting spells. They only talked to me when they wanted me to lie quiet while they did their daily tests. I said nothing, I didn’t tell them a thing.

From Marishka I learned how to mix colors. I never figured out the secrets of her drawings, and she didn’t examine the contents of mine. Two days before my mother bundled me up and took me home, Marishka’s bed was empty, neatly made, without her wooden box. “Where is Marishka?” I asked the nurse. “She’s gone.” I was afraid to ask where.

To this day I regret not knowing what happened to her. Maybe she died, maybe today she has children. She taught me to draw.

 

Continue reading...

 

I so want to be in love

To believe monotheistically in you,

that you are my tender, most tender love

and give to you my sense of wonder --

worlds captured in words

- Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Youngest Desire"

 

Falling out of love is never easy, especially after a three-year relationship with someone you hoped to marry, raise children with, and be parted from only by death. For me, the last several months have been like a period of grief; some days are fine, some are filled with shadow, and most are a little hollow. But as the winter has given way to spring, and spring begun to hint of summer, the silver linings of the clouds have begun to reflect more light.

In that light I've seen how the way I am in relationship often undermines the best parts of me. I tend to fall in love, as Heschel wrote, monotheistically. While my recently ended relationship was not physically monogamous (few lasting gay male partnerships are), it was, for me at least, emotionally monogamous. I wanted my partner to be my primary source of love, affection, companionship, and support. I wanted to turn to him whenever I needed help, and hold him when he did. Although I maintained many friendships, some of them quite dear, I loved that my partner was my best friend, my secret-keeper, the one who was dear to my heart.

I know I am not alone in regarding my beloved in this way, and I am sure that for many people, it poses no problems at all. But in the months since our separation, it's become clear to me that all this monogamy of affection came at the price of my love for other people. For all my deep friendships and erotic connections, I was cut off. People would come up to me after a workshop or retreat, for example, and tell me how inspired they were, how grateful, how I'd changed their lives. And often, I'd be unable to take it in. I'd try; I'm neither so famous nor so arrogant as to simply shrug it off. But sometimes, the words would almost bounce off of me, like so much small talk.

Or, I'd have lovely gatherings of friends, on special occasions like a birthday or book-launch party, and barely feel the love and affection they were offering me. Again, not always. But often, there would be an invisible disconnect between us. No wonder that, when things were difficult with my partner, I felt so alone. I had multiple offers of support, listening, and aid -- but I felt unable to embrace them. I had been so emotionally monogamous for so long that I'd cut myself off from the love being offered to me by others. (My partner, in contrast, was never this way; indeed, the difference in how we embraced the love of others was one factor in our separation.)

Even more damaging than this alienation from the love of others, though, was my alienation from my own capacity to love. It's been observed before that perhaps the most joyous aspect of loving relationship isn't being loved by someone else -- it's being able to love them. To feel love, not just loved. Love feels delightful; warm, energized, buoyant; all the cliches turn true. And of course, it's possible to feel that love not just for one's partner, but for oneself, and for other people, even for God and trees and breath. Yet I was so monotheistic in my love that two paths were interrupted. First, I focused my love almost entirely in one place; even my love for spirit often felt like a misdirection, let alone that for other people and things. Second, I came to rely so much on the love I received from my partner that I stopped relying on myself to generate it.

This, I suppose, is what dependency (co- or otherwise) is about: relying on someone else to provide something you ought to provide yourself. Even in ordinary circumstances, it can turn into a neediness, a clinginess. At its worst, it can lead to jealousy and rage. In my own case, it was a kind of self-impoverishment. I had seen, in contemplative and shamanic settings, how important it was for me simply to love -- to love myself, others, God, the world. And yet it was almost impossible for me to do that, so accustomed I had become to receiving love from someone else. Indeed, trying felt like yet another betrayal: what if, by generating love for myself, I cut myself off from the love of my sweet partner? What if I had no need for him?

Fate intervened I suppose. Not fate, of course, but the mutual choices of two people no longer fresh in their love, and at least one impelled to take the next steps on his journey alone. Unable to risk the relationship in order to love myself, I was forced back on myself when the relationship ended.

I'm not one to look for the "reason" these sorts of things happen in our lives, or be sure to learn whatever lessons these kinds of circumstances offer. Usually, such talk strikes me as infuriating, insipid, or just plain annoying. But slowly, over the last several months, I have begun to open my heart a bit more to other people, other things, and myself -- and new growth has emerged from the branches. I find my friends all the more beloved. I want to speak to my house, to the woods, and even to God in the sing-song lovetalk once reserved for one person only. And I have learned -- been forced to learn -- some of the capacities of my own heart, to generate love like a furnace.

No doubt much of this seems simplistic, or perhaps banal, New Age, or sentimental. But to me it is, above all, truthful. As the Baal Shem Tov said, and as I've quoted more than once in these pages recently, "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart" -- because in its brokenness is openness, in its fractured state a wholeness which transcends the individual. I have experienced that over these spring months, an awakening from a beautiful dream that was nonetheless a slumber. I am even, at times, grateful.

As the title of this essay suggests, and as my religious mind inevitably would consider, I have noticed a parallel between this process of de-monogamizing my affection and the years-long process of opening in my religious life. For some time now, I have been drifting away from orthodox, then traditional, then mainstream, then exclusive, and then even non-heretical Judaism. I don't fancy myself a heretic, exactly, but I do recognize that some of my beliefs and practices may be considered heretical by others: preparing to spend several months in a Buddhist monastery, participating in 'pagan' rituals like Beltane, having intimate visions of Christ, Ganesh, and the Goddess. For many, I'm sure (and I've been told by plenty of commenters), all this is so far beyond the pale of normative Judaism that for me to hold myself as a Jewish teacher, as I sometimes do, is utterly unacceptable. I understand that, and accept the judgment. But in my experience, none of it has undermined my love of God, and of the Jewish God in particular. Quite the contrary. By gradually opening to these other forms and other manifestations, my capacity to love has increased. And so mysticism -- by which I mean the direct, loving experience of ultimate reality -- has flourished.

The analogy to earthly love is, presumably, obvious. YHVH, we are told in the Torah, is a jealous god. He wants exclusive, monogamous, monotheistic fidelity -- and elsewhere in the Bible, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a harlot, a slut. The traditional Jewish faithful today take this demand quite seriously, and comply with missionary zeal. They reject not just the idols of the nations, but their customs, their languages, their clothes. These latter-day Jewish pietists are, indeed, more faithful to their God than I am, and I know from my own past experience and their present testimonies that they experience love in return.

But that love is a kind of dependency (co- or otherwise). In its exclusivity, it shuts down other openings to sacred eros, and in its dualism, it endangers the capacity to generate love of oneself. I see in my own past Judaism the same pattern as I see in my past relationship. For years, I feared that if I stepped outside the bounds of Jewish exclusivity, the intensity of my commitment to the Jewish God would wane. And I didn't want it to wane; I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it gave me a sense of connection and security and love. It was mother's breast and father's strong arms all wrapped up in one. And so I guarded those boundaries.

Gradually, though, I succumbed to temptation. I danced at Burning Man. I sat (though didn't bow) before a statue of the Buddha. I stopped worrying about whether sacred sexuality was idolatry or not, because I felt the Divine presence within it. Throughout, I "checked in," committed to being faithful to the One I loved -- and throughout, the One was still there. In the depths, I called to God, and God answered me. I raised my eyes to the mountains, and asked where my help would come from -- and my help was there, from God. No longer "God" in any traditional sense, no longer just Yahweh, just male, or just transcendent. Now nondual, now seemingly atheistic, now a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, now feminine, now queer. At times this "God" seemed to melt away entirely, into a mere mindstate, a pattern of the brain. But no matter; the knowing remained; and consciousness itself; and love.

I still maintain many of the old forms of faithfulness. I don't eat forbidden foods, I rest on the seventh day. As I've written about before in this magazine, though, I do so not out of fear of retribution but simply as acts of love. The other day, I sat around waiting for Shabbat to end, wanting to go out, and while I questioned over and over why I was adhering to these Pharisaic restrictions, the answer of love remained. That is why I do it, I admit. I wish others would admit it as well.

So while I am not a polytheist exactly, I do no longer believe that there is but one avenue to the holy -- not even one per person. I follow many paths, and like to see where they lead. I have come to trust in the same salvation being at the multiple ends of the roads, as long as when I get there I can still say hinei, here, and trust and not fear.

And of course, while this essay is about emotional, rather than physical, monogamy, I wonder at the causal nexus between monotheism and monogamy in all its forms. Traditional Judaism, obviously, has demanded physical monogamy for the last thousand years, largely following the lead of Christianity. (Given the powerful homosocial bonds in traditional Jewish community, the question of emotional monogamy is more complex.) And today, our fiercest religious battles are not about ethics and social justice (of paramount importance to the prophets) but sexuality, pleasure, and gender. Today, to question physical and relational monogamy is to question "traditional values," that is, religious values. To delight too much in sensual pleasure is often labeled pagan, polytheistic, or worse. I wonder at the coincidence: are traditionalists worried that if one form of faithfulness is abandoned, others will follow? That if we yield to, rather than repress, our hearts, they will, as our ancestors feared, wander outside the bounds of propriety, safety, and tribe? That as we learn that love is available in many forms and faces, that we might think the same of spirit as well?

None of this is to argue for a particular model of intimacy -- indeed, not even for me personally. Just as I still look wistfully, even enviously, at my friends whose relationships have endured where mine did not, I admit that I sometimes regard the traditionally religious in this way. Their monogamous monotheism has made it, where mine has not -- and I know that in any committed relationship, there have been valleys as well as peaks, doubts as many as reassurances. I don't commend my path to others.

But if there is a salvation to be had, I am grateful that mine has been one of inner knowledge as well as outward generation. That is, in the same way that being forced back into aloneness has enabled me to cultivate the capacity to love, so too finding myself outside the communal and relational bonds of Jewish religious life has caused me to turn inward, to the unitive, the nondual. Perhaps the skeptics are right that when believers say, "I love you, God," they are really saying "I love." In my experience, there is no significant difference.

Under the provisions of Israel's Law of Return, more than 120,000 Ethiopian Jews have settled in the country over the last three decades. Many of these Jews arrived during the 1980s and 1990s, when, in response to civil war and famine in Ethiopia, the Israeli government mounted massive rescue operations. Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991 airlifted over 85 percent of Ethiopia's entire Jewish population to Israel.

All of the immigrant groups who have settled in Israel have encountered problems integrating into Israeli society, but minority ethnic groups have often had a particularly hard time. Unlike many of their central and eastern European brethren, the new Ethiopian olim arrived without educational qualifications or job skills. Coming from a subsistence economy, they often found themselves ill-equipped to work in an industrialized, first-world environment like Israel. Besides having to start virtually from scratch economically, Ethiopian Jews (like the Mizrachi immigrants two decades before them) have found themselves consistently confronted with prejudice, discrimination, and racism from both Israeli society and the country's political establishment.

While vast amounts of government money have been poured into absorbing these immigrants, progress has been slow. Figures released in 2007 show how serious the socio-economic disparities still remain between Israel's Ethiopian population and the rest of Israeli society: Ethiopians live in impoverished neighborhoods, face sky-rocketing unemployment, and have the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel. With average per capita income among Ethiopian Jews standing at NIS 2,000 a month, Ethiopians' salaries are around half those of all other Israeli Jews, and considerably lower even than those of the country's Arab population. Ethiopian youth often fall behind in basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic early on in their education. As a result, around 40 percent of Ethiopian adults of employable age don't have an education beyond elementary school level. In deprived neighborhoods, drug use is increasing dramatically and criminal activity, practically unheard of among Ethiopian Jewish communities before they came to the country, is on the rise.

 

Yuvi's Story

Yuvi Tashome arrived in Israel as a young girl during Operation Moses in 1984, when some 33,000 members of Beta Israel were airlifted to the country from refugee camps in the Sudan in a dramatic rescue operation orchestrated by the Israeli government and the Mossad. Two and a half years ago Yuvi, now in her early thirties, was among the co-founders of a community in Gedera that runs initiatives to help the town's underprivileged Ethiopian population.

Before moving to Gedera, Yuvi worked for many years in programs run by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), designed to help integrate Ethiopian youth into Israeli society. "When I was working with Ethiopian kids there" she tells me, "I began to realize quite how serious the gaps were that exist between Israeli society and Ethiopian society here in Israel."

"As an Ethiopian immigrant in Israel, you have to erase everything Ethiopian in order to be Israeli. For example, when you first get here they erase your name and give you a new one. When we arrived they asked me my name and I replied ‘Yuvnot.' The girl didn't understand what I said, so she said ‘OK, from now on you're going to be Rahel.' So I was Rahel until after my army service. All through my childhood I wanted to be Israeli so much, so I was Rahel, my accent was Israeli, I didn't like Ethiopian food, only Israeli food, I dressed Israeli and so on. The Ethiopian part of me was completely pushed aside. I didn't want to deal with it".

Instigated by the majority Ashkenazim, official absorption processes have often failed to account for the particular social and cultural needs of minority ethnic groups. Yuvi points to this identity crisis experienced by so many of the Ethiopian olim as a significant contributor to the alienation inadvertently fostered among the Ethiopian community by the Israeli establishment. "When two Ethiopian kids are speaking Amharic in class" she says, "the teacher will intervene and force them to speak Hebrew. When parents come to the school, the teacher will often have to translate what he says to the parents to their child, or vice versa. If you ask an Ethiopian youngster about Ethiopia or about his Ethiopian name, he'll say ‘I don't have any Ethiopian name--only Israeli'. I think it's a big problem. I think that this is a big part of the underlying cause of a lot of the things that are happening to Ethiopian youth--the crime, the drugs and so on".

It was only when she finished her army service and started working with Ethiopian youngsters in the SPNI that Yuvi herself began to reconnect with her own Ethiopian identity. "SPNI is about hiking," she says, "it's about knowing the country. When I was hiking with the kids and we talked about the history or the geography of Israel we'd always need to speak about Ethiopia. Let's say we talked about the mountains around Nazareth, we'd find a similar area in Ethiopia and draw comparisons with that. This way, once you've helped them draw out their Ethiopian identity, the Ethiopian kids who didn't want to hear about Nazareth would listen because you begin with Ethiopia, and Ethiopia interests them.

"So, of course, to work with the kids I needed to go home and ask my parents all about Ethiopia, about the hiking there, about the plants, the animals--everything I wanted to use when I was teaching the kids. This was the first time I'd really asked my parents anything about where we'd come from".

Yuvi's decision to set up a community in Gedera, which is home to around 1,700 Ethiopian families, was born of her desire to work with the youth population of one neighbourhood in particular, Shapira. "I used to work with a lot of the kids in Shapira when I was in SPNI," she told me, "and it seemed that something very strange was happening there. Every year the situation with the neighbourhood's youth was getting worse and worse. If in the first year they smoked cigarettes, in the second it'd be alcohol. If the second year it was alcohol, the next it would be drugs. I began to feel that I was investing a lot of time and energy here and something was not moving, so I wanted to figure out what it was."

Ethiopian to Israeli: Photojournalist Ricki Rosen, in her book documenting the transformation of Operation Solomon’s Ethiopian Jews into Israelis, shows how many of these Jews are encouraged to erase their Ethiopian past for a new Israeli identity ."There are many programs aimed at helping Ethiopian society in Israel" Yuvi explains, "but basically they're not working. After five, six, twenty years, things here are not getting better. I began to realize that the main problem is that the motivation for everything was coming from outside--from the government, from foundations and so on. Within the Ethiopian community itself, there's no real motivation to do anything. It's just a cycle of poverty and disempowerment."

"When I talked to my parents about their life back in Ethiopia I was amazed, because they were so activist, they were so motivated," Yuvi tells me. "But here it's the opposite. People are just sitting and waiting--waiting for what, I don't know. In Ethiopia, if you don't work, you don't eat. It's as simple as that, so the motivation's there already. It's built in. Basically my friends and I decided that we needed to come up with ways of getting the motivation for change in the Ethiopian community here to come from the families and the kids themselves."

 

Garin Kehillati

The community Yuvi and her friends established calls itself garin kehillati, or ‘seed of community.' Comparisons have been made in the past with the urban kibbutz concept, but the basic idea behind Yuvi's project is to bring people to live together in an extended neighbourhood community bound not by kibbutz-style economic communalism, but by a common ideological mission. Today, two and a half years since the garin first took root in the town, its initial nucleus of three families has evolved into two separate neighbourhood communities. Yuvi's alone now consists of eleven families, six of whom are Ethiopian immigrants, the rest sabra Israelis and Russian olim.

The communities run a variety of local-level initiatives in the surrounding area, including educational and social projects, a community garden and a non-profit organization, Haverim Bateva, all of which aim to restore a sense of belonging to the town's alienated youth by strengthening their Jewish Ethiopian identity. Every two weeks, the families meet for Bet Midrash (communal study), during which they learn about Ethiopian religion and culture, study other cultures and belief systems, discuss social problems, and share ideas about the future direction of the community and its role in helping the surrounding society.

"Everyone who wants to come and be a part of our community basically can," Yuvi says. "I don't think that there needs to be a separation between Ethiopian community and the other families living here. We're all the same; all of us are immigrants. It doesn't matter if you're black or white, religious or not religious--as long as you accept and respect the other, you're welcome. The first thing is to see the other, and to know the other." The community, she tells me, is in a permanent process of evolution and still developing all the time. "We're constantly asking ourselves how we can improve what we're doing. For example, with eight children in the community, we're now talking about opening a kindergarten and bringing in Ethiopian kids from the neighbourhood to be with our own children."

In addition to the eleven families, the community counts among its number thirteen young people from the neighbourhood aged between 20 and 25, all of whom are volunteering in the locality, half of them as permanent members of the garin. "We started to work with this group three years ago," Yuvi says. "This year, six of them go to university, so we we're very happy about that. That's a real success story for us."

Reluctant to leave Gedera, this group goes to college in the town and comes back home in the evenings. As Yuvi explains, this was an important part of the idea behind beginning the garin in the first place. "Like many other families across Israel, the Ethiopian families living in this neighbourhood have been trapped in a kind of cycle. The stronger kids from the neighbourhood always end up leaving to go on to university, so the ones who stay behind are the ones drinking, the ones who dropped out or who didn't go through the army or whatever. So when you're a young child growing up here, these are your role models. The idea of having this young community staying in the neighbourhood is to provide alternative role models for the younger kids, and already it's working. It's really working."

 

Grassroots vs. Political Change

Yuvi doesn't consider herself ‘political.' She doesn't vote, and, although she identifies more with leftist elements within Israeli society than any other, she has little faith or interest in party-politics as an agent of social change. Although the community's evolution wasn't exactly an ideologically-motivated process, the various initiatives established by the group came into being as part of a calculated attempt to bring local organizing away from local government and back to the grassroots.

"In the neighbourhood that we're talking about," Yuvi tells me, "people just don't feel like it's their own. As an example, about a year ago a group of soldiers from a nearby army base wanted to do community work in Gedera, so they came to Shapira. Without bothering to ask anybody from the neighborhood what they needed, they decided to paint the buildings. So they come to the neighbourhood at 10AM, and when their two hours was up, they just stopped painting, dropped everything and went. The neighbourhood looked like trash.

"About a week later, there was a huge picture of those soldiers with their brushes in one of the newspapers, with the caption "Ten soldiers giving back to the community" or something like that. I was so angry! Apart from anything else, how could someone have the nerve to come and paint my house without asking me?!

"So I asked the people living there why they would do something like that, and they say ‘oh, it's like that all the time here. If the mayor says it's OK, then there's nothing we can do. We don't have any power to resist that. A few people just have to go and clean everything up.' So we started thinking about ways of dealing with this. The first thing we did was to create a parents' group who wanted change, as a way of fighting against this tendency to just accept everything that anybody in authority said. If, for example, a teacher in the local school said ‘your child is not allowed to do this, this and this,' and because of that the child ends up quitting school and dropping out, all too often the parents would just say ‘oh OK,' roll over and accept it. NO! You don't need to say ‘oh OK' if you don't agree with it! There are a lot of other solutions!"

When Ethiopian immigrants began to settle in Israel during the early 1980s, their dream was to integrate and become accepted in their new homeland while at the same time retaining their own unique character, identity and values. It's a sad but very real indictment of Israeli society that they've been rewarded for their unparalleled devotion to this country with the racism, prejudice and discrimination that their communities continue to face to this day. The work being done by Yuvi and her friends in Gedera not only betrays ongoing concerns about the disempowerment of the Ethiopian community in Israel, but highlights the importance of grassroots action and local community involvement in creating meaningful and lasting political change in the face of a government and state unwilling, and often unable, to take care of its own people.

ART

Cover Photograph : Children of the Beta Israel Community. Wallaka, Gondar District, Ethiopia, 1984. Photographer: Doron Bacher. Beth Hatefutsoth Visual Documentation Center.

Ricki Rosen's book, Transformations, is accompanied by an informative text by Micha Odenheimer. The book largely celebrates the journey of Ethiopiann Jews to Israel. The images depict, in a generally positive way, the urge to assimilate into Israeli society.

MIRIAM AND HER BROTHERS

And the Lord said unto Moses: ‘If her father had but spit in her face, should she not hide in shame seven days? Let her be shut up without the camp seven days, and after that she shall be brought in again.’ And Miriam was shut up without the camp seven days; and the people journeyed not until Miriam was brought in again. (Numbers 12:14-15)

Beyond the camp in her tent, she lies,
A leper, whiter than the moonlight
Slanting in. She cannot catch

The bleating of babies, of sheep,
The blast of trumpets. Too far to hear
Goldsmiths hammering

Flowers and vines on the seven-branched lamp,
She is spared the seventy
Old men babbling prophecies,

The chorus weeping for Egyptian
Fish, cucumbers, melons,
Garlic, whining for meat.

Their retching from the rotten quail
Does not reach her. She hears no men
Grunting, no women snoring

She itches, aches, burns,
Yet the desert wind, hoarse and relentless,
Sings to her. With sand, it cools

Her wounds. She will heal,
Away from Aaron, who also
Whispered against the dark wife

Of meek Moses, perfect Moses,
Favored by the Pillar of Cloud.
Face-to-face, God singled her out

From her brothers— “If her father had
But spit in her face!” Let Aaron
Beseech Moses, and Moses beg

God for her sake! Oh, family!
Shamed? Unruly daughter,
She finds her voice.

Continue reading...

Bernard Avishai is a thinker and writer I've admired for some time, ever since I read his rather unfortunately titled 1985 work, The Tragedy of Zionism. That book was not, as one might think, an anti-Zionist exercise. Quite the opposite. In The Tragedy of Zionism, Avishai called for the re-establishment of the ideological roots of Zionism.

Avishai defines Zionism in the same way a great many Israelis do: as a Jewish national liberation movement. The basic impetus of Zionism, in this understanding, was the establishment of a strong and stable state. Viewed in those terms, by 1948 Zionism had largely served its purpose.

Avishai's complaint is that outmoded Zionist institutions, mixed with the ongoing conflict with the Arabs, have impeded the full establishment of Israeli democracy. In his view, such institutions should have been gradually replaced by state institutions based on legal principles rather than ideology. He calls, chiefly, for a constitution, contending that Israel's Basic Laws are a poor substitute. Indeed, Avishai argues that David Ben-Gurion "made perhaps his most short-sighted decision" when he "let the moment" for adopting an Israeli Constitution pass in 1949.

In his new book, The Hebrew Republic, Avishai takes this argument one step further, suggesting that Israel's best hope for peace-and for a bright future--is to embrace European-style secular democracy, integrating its Arab citizens into a business-driven globalized economy.

Israel and Europe

Like many contemporary Israelis, Bernard Avishai deeply admires the European Union. Though Israel spent decades emulating the United States, in recent years, whether intentionally or not, Israeli society has begun to resemble Europe more and more.

In The Hebrew Republic, Avishai writes with general approval of Israel's ambitions to become part of the EU, or to at least form a stronger partnership with it. But he also points to the barriers within Israeli law to strengthening that partnership. Not only would Israel need to settle its conflict with the Palestinians, it would face the challenge of removing the internal legal and structural barriers that prevent non-Jews from enjoying full equality in Israel. In short, Avishai's Israel would need to become a European-style secular democracy, a move Avishai supports.

Avishai points out that Israel's Law of Return is not unprecendented within the European context. Other European countries, such as Greece, have naturalization laws that give preferential treatment to returning nationals. Yet such European states also provide secular and non-discriminatory guidelines that allow other immigrants to become full and equal citizens. Israel has no such legislation. Creating one would be a sine qua non for Israel to become more integrated economically with the EU.

As one EU commissioner Avishai quotes put it, Israel could become more closely associated with the EU, but at some point "would have to make the strategic decision of whether this is what it really wants," as it implies significant structural changes to Israel's laws and institutions.

As much as Avishai discusses potential EU membership for Israel, he puts even more emphasis on the EU as a model for a regional, integrationist approach-that is, he hopes that Israel can become a member of a greater Middle East, modeled on the EU. A Middle Eastern EU has been proposed before: the French suggested something similar when they proposed a Mediterranean Union. However, all this thinking is premature.

Avishai glosses over the fact that the EU itself did not spring into being overnight: Europe underwent two deeply traumatic world wars before the formation of the European Community after WWII. Regional conflict was a major obstacle to integration in Europe, even after the process was well underway. The EU only came into being because most of Europe (with the exception of the Balkans) was at peace. It is all too evident that peace is far from established in the Middle East.At the very minimum, conflicts in the region would need to become diplomatic rather than military for such regional integration to occur.

Israel doesn't have that kind of time at its disposal, nor do the other countries in the region seem predisposed to extend the hand of partnership. To the contrary, Israel's very existence remains, at best, resentfully accepted and, at worst, is the target of attack. That's not an atmosphere where nationalism can be replaced by regionalism, no matter what happens inside Israel. Even in the advent of peace with the Palestinians and the establishment of relations with the Arab League nations, it will be many years before true acceptance of Israel takes hold and some time after that before Israelis begin to really trust that acceptance.

Leading From the Center of "Five Tribes"

Meanwhile, what can Israel do to cement a global role as a European-style nation? Avishai has long advocated the formation of an ideologically-centrist business class that could be Israel's emissaries and players in the game of globalization. The Hebrew Republic places its hopes in this globalized class of centrists, and frankly, it's a good spot to put them in. This political stratum is not confined to Israeli Jews, but includes Palestinian entrepreneurs as well. By its very nature, this economic community stands in opposition to single-minded nationalists, be they religious or secular, Israeli or Palestinian. They're also more attuned to global markets than they are to international diplomacy (though, of course, the two cannot be entirely separated), implying a greater independence for Israel than it currently has in its relationship with the United States.

Bernard Avishai divides Israeli society into five groups he calls "tribes." Tribe One is the traditional Israeli elite, generally Ashkenazi, secular and cosmopolitan. Tribe Two is the Mizrahim, largely working class, more culturally traditional than the elites of Tribe One, generally leaning more toward the right. Tribe Three is the newest sector in Israel. Made up primarily of Russian speakers, this community hails from the former USSR. Tending towards nationalism, they are also highly educated and very connected to the global economy. Tribe Four is the national religious sector, the settlers, for whom a theocratic ideology trumps all other concerns. Tribe Five is the Arab population of Israel, increasingly alienated and less educated due to getting a much smaller share of state resources, but eager for a more prominent role in the Israeli economy.

Israel's ideally centrist leadership would be drawn initially from the first three groups. Tribe Four, the religious settlers, would doubtless be beneficiaries of increased globaliation. That is not to say that the religious sector would not benefit from increased globalization. A substantial portion of religious nationalists are very deeply involved in the global economy. But the religious prioritize ideological concerns above economic ones, and would generally be opposed to the sorts of compromises and trade-offs that would be necessary to implement Avishai's proposals. Tribe Four, the religious, would remain outsiders to the centrist leadership, an obstacle that would always need to be managed.

Avishai's emphasis on creating a stronger Israeli business class is not new, but what distinguishes The Hebrew Republic is Avishai's insistence that this Israeli business class integrate Arab citizens, the Fifth Tribe, more fully into the body of the state. It is, indeed, not overstating Avishai's case to say that his vision is completely dependent on the integration of Israel's Arab sector, and on Israeli Arabs embracing such a market-based program. From my own personal experience working with Israel's Arab community, I tend to agree that they would. But, again, this possibility comes with a time limit.

Avishai documents the increasing disillusionment, alienation and gradual radicalization of the Arab community in Israel. While many argue that the Arab standard of living is higher in Israel than in any other country (true enough), the fact remains that Arabs face both legal and institutional discrimination that severely handicaps them relative to Israeli Jews. This situation continues to worsen in the twenty-first century, as racism and violence against Arab citizens of Israel continues to increase. The danger, which Avishai is not alone in pointing out, is that state discrimination against 20 percent of Israel's population is creating the next stage in the Arab-Israeli conflict, this one rooted in Israel itself, rather than in the Occupied Territories.

Uniting Peace Forces With Global Capitalists

Avishai imagines global capitalism as the cure both for internal discontent and for eventual peace between Israeli Jews and their Arab fellow-citizens and neighbors. Here, Avishai has an upward battle, as left-wing peace activists are hardly likely to embrace capitalist entrepreneurs. Most peace activists associate capitalism with colonialism, and believe global capitalism can only harm those already without rights [reference to Said or Chomsky?]. Within Israel, peace activists tend to view the global business class as creating the increased social and economic stratification within Israeli society (as noted in the introduction to another noteworthy new book, Colin Shindler's A History of Modern Israel). Given that the most prominent politician associated with the global capitalist class is Benjamin Netanyahu, one can hardly blame progressive Israelis for their doubts.

Netanyahu-style capitalists, however, have a fairly simplistic approach to Israel's economy, as Avishai demonstrates. Instead of a neoliberal economics based on crude structural adjustment policies and de-regulation, Avishai proposes a more practical, market-based economic vision rooted in sustainability, and dependent on increasing social and political progress.

Where Netanyahu believes that peace is a nice but unnecessary