Recently, on a trip to South Korea, I was moved to tears at a rock formation venerated by Korean shamans.  The place was so holy that the power of it, the energy of it, was immediately apparent and absolutely obvious.  And it moved me to tell a story about irony, idolatry, and nature.

Here's the irony: for many monotheists, nature-centered spirituality smacks of paganism, and thus idolatry.  But for me, being cut off from nature is idolatry.  When I'm surrounded by the noises of the city, and the incessant lures of consumer capitalism, I become diverted from my true self and my spiritual path. 

I'm not such a puritan as to resist the joys of urban life.  Yet those pleasures evoke, sometimes within minutes, a consumption-based perspective of "what do I want and how can I get it" -- the yetzer hara indulged so completely that it becomes invisible, taken for granted.  I define myself in terms of the pleasure or pain that is being provided, and confuse stillness with boredom.  Surrounded by glass and concrete, I lose my connection to my Source, and have to work to get it back.  So, to the extent I still subscribe to monotheism at all, I find it enriched, not compromised, by the spirits in nature my Israelite ancestors sought so hard to erase.

Theoretically, as a nondualist/pantheist/whateverist who thinks that "God is Everything" makes more sense than "God is in Heaven," I shouldn't be so attracted to nature.  My spiritual practice is oriented towards resting in the simple feeling of being, in naked awareness itself, regardless of what perceptions are occurring.  In theory, I should be as at home in a parking lot as in a meadow; awareness is in both.  "Is" -- the way I translate YHVH -- is in both.  And yet, I'm not.

Perhaps the pivot here is that, while we often think of nature as a positive quality, as if it is something added to our experience, I want to suggest that nature is, well, our natural state.  It is urban life that is something added to life as it is, something that covers up the natural state.   Our ancestors lived in conditions more immediate with the facts of natural life than all but the most rugged of our contemporary vacations.  Like other animals, humans are connected to the cycles of time and the seasons.  Yet unlike other animals, we have created an artificial world that defies those cycles.  That world, not "nature," is the change.  The artificial world is the idol we erect between ourselves and everything else.

So it's not that "going into nature" is adding ingredients to the soup of consciousness.  "Going into nature" is subtracting noise.  Maintaining contact with "the simple feeling of being" is easier sometimes than others, and when there is something interposed between the soul and its natural state, and that something is a giant titillation of the selfish inclination, it is more difficult to rest in the omnipresent truth.  Nature does not condition God.  But un-nature tends to block our awareness of Her.

There is, perhaps, even a third irony, which is that I am most able to be monotheistically devotional when I am polytheistically awake.  When God is abstract, I am able to approach God-consciousness with wisdom.  But when God is concrete, and manifest in form, then devotion becomes primary.  When I'm in touch with the various spirits inherent in natural settings, my heart opens, and my religious soul awakens.  The fact that the spirit in question resides in a sacred mountain venerated by shamans might trouble some monotheists, but at this point in my journey, the particular form in which God/dess manifests is much less important than the energy of the manifestation itself.  I am a more ardent Jew -- that is to say, a more heart-centered and devotional one -- when I am in sacred spaces, regardless of the particular traditions which venerate them.

More ardent -- and more firmly grounded in what matters.  In my experience, religion denuded of religious experience is likely to have a very short lifespan.  Of course, I know that many people are not interested in spiritual experiences, and do not want to have them.  I didn't have them myself, until a few years ago.  Ten years ago, if someone had told me they visited a shamanic rock and felt a surge of sacred energy, I would raise my eyebrows and confess that such experiences were not part of my spiritual path.  But because I have trained, investigated, and explored, they are now.  And as a result, I feel closer to, not farther from, the essence of religious life.

My intent is not to pronounce judgment on those who worship an abstract God, or an imaginary father figure derived solely from Scripture.  I have also experienced God in traditional monotheistic ways -- as a father figure, concerned with righteousness and integrity -- and I appreciate that experience.  But I appreciate it because it is an experience, not because it happens to conform with a text or tradition.  It sits alongside my experiences of Goddess-in-the-form-of-nature-spirit, God-as-emptiness, Spirit-as-eros, and so on.  Thus the last of my ironies is that precisely because I remain a monotheist, I am committed to the holiness of all of these encounters. 

I confess, the spirit of the sacred mountain does not feel to me like the spirit in the ancient tree; they do indeed seem like separate, distinct things, and if I were differently inclined, I might well describe some as sacred, others as profane.  But I am not so inclined.  I want to know the sacred in all of its garbs, recognizing all our concepts and maps as so many attempts to interpret the uninterpretable.  The counter-intuitive and revolutionary proposition of monotheism is that beneath all those forms, there is One Reality.  And to me, the necessary consequence of that proposition is that all religious forms gesture at the truth.  Of course, the interpretations we provide may well lead us astray from monotheism.  But before and beneath those interpretations, there is the experience, and that is where truth resides.

I want to suggest that, today, monotheism needs the paganisms of nature in order to fight the new paganism of commercial capitalism, with its deification of desire and its technologies of satisfaction.  Against the market, God doesn't stand a chance, unless religion offers a tangible alternative to Mammon -- and that means experience.  Indeed, we are seeing in our times a return to non-rational experience, to spirituality, and to personal mystical encounters with the Divine.  This trend is both for better and for worse -- all these moves are often couched in fundamentalist religious language, or still more crusader-like zeal.  But if we open the doors to multiple forms and sources of inspiration, monotheistic religion can be radically pluralistic, rather than imperialistic, and, above all, deeply powerful.  Dry religion cannot be felt -- but nature religion can.  Let's open our hearts to the spirits of the rocks and the trees.  They will forgive us our trespasses against them.  We need them.

From: King David
To: Governor Sanford

Dear Governor Sanford,

Lying here in my crypt in Jerusalem, I heard across the span of 3,000 years that you recently gave me a shout out.  You said, "King David...fell mightily.  He fell in very significant ways.  But then picked up the pieces."  It's true, I did fall, but not in the same way that you did.  You fell in love.  I didn't.  I never did.  I was too busy fighting and killing.  It's not easy founding a kingdom.

I presume you were comparing your affair with my affair with Bathsheba, but that really is comparing hummous to babaganoush.  In my case, my affair was wrong, not because I was married (I had a number of wives and concubines at that point), but because she was.  That is, she belonged to another man, and taking her was like stealing. I know, you live in the enlightened 21^st century, and women aren't chattel or property, but I bet that if your wife was doing the hora with another man and then became big with child, the Iron Age man in you, too, might be roused from its egalitarian slumber. 

But wife-stealing wasn't the worst of it.  I brought Bathsheba's husband home on a furlough to try to get him to have marital relations with his wife so I could pass the kid off as his, but he refused to do the deed with her since soldiers in battle weren't allowed to have sex (it diminished their capacity on the field).   I had no option but to get rid of him and make it look like he was a casualty of war.  He was sent to the front lines where he was killed.  Nobody would have known any differently, either, but God knew, of course.

Yet, what I find so amazing, even after all this time, is that I'm remembered more for a sex scandal than for all of my other, far more egregious, behavior.  I was a pillager and plunderer and extorter and murderer; I raided and took the spoils.  I killed the Philistines, then turned traitor and was hired as a mercenary by them and fought against Israel, my own people.  But as you know, Governor Sanford, you can do whatever you do - whether good or bad - and it doesn't matter: get caught with your willy in the wrong woman, and that's all anyone talks about.   

Governor Sanford, in my day, having sex with this divorced woman would have rendered her your concubine.  It wouldn't have been considered adultery.   But let me share with you a parable that Nathan the prophet said to me after I'd had Bathsheba's husband killed.  He said, "There were two men, one of whom had everything, and the other had only this little ewe.  The one who had everything was preparing a dinner for a traveler, but instead of dipping into his own flocks, he took the other man's ewe and killed it.  What should happen to that man?"  And I, livid, because I had a wicked temper back then, said, "Kill him!"  Nathan looked me in the face and said, "That man is you." 

In your case, when Bill Clinton was found to have a wandering wanker, you said, "That man should resign!"   The extra-marital affair is your own business.  It's your hypocrisy that has all of the other hypocrites' tunics in a twist.    Because there's just nothing that creates such a frenzy as one puritanical hypocrite outing another, especially when the hypocrisy is related to sex. 

I feel for you.  I'm even a little jealous of you.  But mostly, I don't understand you.  I was collecting Philistine foreskins; you collect love letters.  You like to coo.  (The tan lines!  The curvy hip!)  I prefer to coup.  (The Jebusites, the Amalkites, the many ‘ites'!)  As for love, I loved being loved.  My first wife, Michal, who was my arch-enemy, King Saul's daughter, loved me, (from my perspective, she brought me closer to the throne), and her brother, Jonathan's, love for me was more than the love of women.  You can make of that what you will.  But I was so busy creating my kingdom and getting rid of anyone who stood in my way that I had no time for or interest in love. 

In the end, as an old man, I was always cold, could never get warm, and so a young virgin was brought to me to warm me.  (They make wonderful hot water bottles, these virgins.) She was my companion but I never had sex with her.  Oh, I could have.  I wasn't really impotent.  But my heart wasn't in it.  I was cold in every way, you see.  My life had made me cold to emotion and to love.  You are no King David, Governor Sanford, though you cheated and lied.  And for that, you should be grateful and thank God. 

Finally, my advice is, don't resign.  Nobody else ever did.  Repentance is good, though. And a word of warning: there are those around you (not mentioning the lieutenant governor by name) who are going to use this little scandal to claw their own way into power.   I understand politics.  Love remains a mystery.

From my cold grave in Jerusalem, I wish you luck picking up the pieces and I remain, yours,
King David

In Part I of this series, author Ilan Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a Jew. Part II focused on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah. Here, Stavans argues that Borges carefully styled himself as a literary son of Jewish precursors.

"Each writer creates his precursors"--Borges

Borges was the first, and for a while the only, supporter of Kafka in the Hispanic world. In an essay called "Kafka and His Precursors," published in 1951 and included in Other Inquisitions (1952), Borges writes in Eliot Eeinberger's rendition:

At one time I considered writing a study of Kafka's precursors. I had thought, at first, that he was as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after spending a little time with him, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various literatures and various ages.

Rather than offer a hermeneutic interpretation of Kafka, the essay then concentrates on a catalogue of echoes in Kafka's work: Zeno's paradox against motion, a fable by the ninthcentury Chinese author Han Yu, Kierkegaard, the anti-Semite Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. Borges concludes:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka's idiosyncrasy is present in each of those writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scrupules" by Robert Browning prophesizes the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word "precursor" is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as well as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter. The first Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

Without a doubt, Borges works to create Kafka as his own precursor: In 1943, Borges introduced, for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, Kafka's La metamorfosis. A few years earlier he talked about him (and about Max Brod) in El Hogar (July 8^th, 1938). Borges also included material by Kafka in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), co-edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, as well as in his compendia Libro del cielo y el infierno (1960, also with Bioy Casares), Libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), and Libro de los sueños (1976). A third and four pieces by Borges on Kafka were in the form of introductions. The third was the fourth title of A Personal Library, Borges' last editorial project, published between 1985 and 1986 in Argentina and Spain by Emecé and in Italian by Franco Marco Ricci. His selection included Amerika and some short stories. The fourth piece is a prologue he wrote toward the end of his life, as part of a project called The Library of Babel paid by the publisher Ediciones Siruela in Spain from 1978 to 1986.

Why Kafka? First, Borges needed to see literature globally. He doesn't even mention his Czech origins and his German-language style. What matters to him are the reverberations of Kafka's motifs. Yet, the particular reverberation of Kafka that most interests Borges is, again, the Jewish connection. While he does not approach Kafka in the context of Jewish literature exclusively,  Borges is more interested in the Kafka of the Hassidic parables than the novelist of The Castle. His prologue to Kafka's tale, The Vulture, offers fresh views on Borges' opinion not only on the author but on Jews in general.:

Everyone knows that Kafka always felt mysteriously guilty toward his father, in the manner of Israel with its God; his Judaism, which separated him from the rest of mankind, affected him in a complex way. The consciousness of approaching death and the feverish exaltation of tuberculosis must have sharpened those faculties...

Two ideas-or more exactly, two obsessions-rule Kafka's work: subordination and the infinite. In almost all his fictions there are hierarchies, and those hierarchies are infinite...

A less overt tribute to Kafka than these essays, yet one that is equally significant, appears in the story "The Secret Miracle."  Like "Deutches Requiem," this short story has a single, unifying argument: the last hours of a prisoner about to be executed by the Nazis; and the two focus on a single concept: self-redemption. The former has a Jew as its protagonist, but it is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator; the latter, instead, has a Nazi as its main character, and it is he who delivers the tale to us.

I will discuss "Deutches Requiem" in the next section: here, I want to focus on "The Secret Miracle," which owes much more to Kafka. "The Secret Miracle," was written during World War II and collected in Ficciones as a triptych with Borges' other Jewish tales: "Emma Zunz" and "Death and the Compass." (I included the three in the anthology Tropical Synagogues [1994]). It is more than a subliminal tribute to one Kafka, dead by then for approximately a couple of decades.

The story opens with an epigraph from the Qur'an, 2:261: "And God caused him to die for an hundred years, and then raised him to life. And God said, ‘How long hast thou waited?' He said, ‘I have waited a day or part of a day'." Borges sets the plot in Prague in 1943. In the first scene Jaromir Hladik, a translator and playwright arrested by the Nazis for being Jewish, is taken to prison. The first scene is emblematic, and highly Kafkaesque: it describes a dream Hladik has of a long chess game in which the opponents have been at each other for such a long time that they have forgotten what prize was to be. Even the rules of the game have been forgotten. Clearly, Borges is setting the stage for a rivalry between Jews and Nazis as ancient as the world itself.

It is in his cell where Hladik communicates with God, and this communication is the centripetal force in the argument. Hladik, we find out, is the author an unfinished drama called The Enemies and he knows that, if his life is to have any meaning, it is because of his authorship of this drama. So he requests that God grant him a miracle-a secret miracle, since only he and he alone will know about it. In the final scene, as Hladik faces a German firing squad, the universe comes to a stop:

The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who were to kill him stood motionless. The sergeant's arm eternized an unfinished gesture. On a paving stone of the courtyard a bee cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a picture... He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work; His omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him; German lead would kill him at the set hour, but in his mind a year would go by between the order and its execution.

In the very last line of the story, Hladik is shot to death on March 29^th, at 9:02 A.M. Even though no evidence of a finished manuscript of The Enemies can be found, the prisoner dies satisfied: his life has been justified. His justification, obviously, has to do with immortality, a theme, again, parallel to Kafka's. Borges' statement is clear: a writer's raison d'être is to leave behind the better part of his talent, and to struggle so that that contribution is finished, even if only "ideally." It is clear, to me at least, that in the face of tyranny and death, the Argentine understood what Jews in Europe were about: faith, endurance, and posterity.

Isaac Babel

Borges' interest in European Jews and in particular, the Hasidim, led him to a tangential interest in Isaac Babel, another Jewish author with few echoes in the Spanish-speaking world. In a "capsule biography" about him published in 1938 in the magazine El Hogar, to which Borges contributed between 1936 and 1939, he portrays Babel, who was still alive at the time, as a defiant Jew. Herein Esther Allen's translation:

He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa, late in 1894. Irreparably Semitic, Isaac was the son of a rag merchant from Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrophe has been the normal climate of his life. In the uneasy intervals between pogroms he learned not only to read and write but to appreciate literature and enjoy the work of Maupassant, Flaubert, and Rabelais. In 1914, he was certified a lawyer by the faculty of Law in Saratov; in 1916, he risked a journey to Petrograd.

In that capital city "traitors, malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned: the category was somewhat arbitrary, but-implacably-it included Babel. He had to relay on the friendship of a waiter who took him home and hid him, on a Lithuanian accent acquired in Sebastopol, and on an apocryphal passport. His first writings date from that period: tow or three satires of the Czarist bureaucracy, published in Annals, Gorky's famous newspaper. (What must he think, and not say, about Soviet Russia, that indecipherable labyrinth of state offices?) Those two or three satires attracted the dangerous attention of the government. He was accused of pornography and incitement of class hatred. From this catastrophe he was saved by another catastrophe: the Russian Revolution.

In early 1921, Babel joined a Cossack regiment. Those blustering and useless warriors (no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often than the Cossacks) were, of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite. A couple of well-timed and flashy exploits enabled Babel to make them leave him in peace.

By reputation, through not according to the bibliographies, Isaac Babel is still a homo unius libri. His unmatched book is titled Red Cavalry.

The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories-"Salt"-enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems, and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.


Years ago I introduced Babel's stories into a Spanish-speaking audience. (An English version of the introduction to Cuentos de Odesa and Cuentos de Odesa [1993] appears in my book The Inveterate Dreamer [2001].) Borges' profile is a revelation because no two writers could be more different. Indeed, they are like and oil and water: the Russian, while a meticulous stylist á la Maupassant, focused on the physical (e.g., the Jewish body) and on political and social tensions in the early Soviet Union; the Argentine, instead, was an escapist concerned with the metaphysical. Borges' understanding of Babel, obviously, comes through secondary sources, as did much of his knowledge in general. Still, even if he had read his stories, and I'm skeptical about it, the connection between them would have remained tenuous.


Agnon

A stronger, and more vital influence on Borges came from a different direction, Israel, but through the same chain of association: the Hasidic world of Eastern Europe.  Agnon (aka Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes), was an Israeli writer, but among his earliest works was a translation of the Tales of the Ba'al Shem Tov. Whether Borges found Agnon through these tales, or through another means, by the mid-sixties Borges was sufficiently enamoured of Agnon's writing to devote a series of lectures to him.

Delivered  at the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Israelí in Buenos Aires, two of these lectures, one on the Book of Job, the other on Spinoza,  were eventually translated into English. It turns out that there was a third lecture as well.A chance comment with Neal Sokol-included in Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations (2004)-in which I state that Borges never read Shmuel Yosef Agnon, prompted a Canadian friend, Carl Rosenberg, editor of Outlook, to send me, so as to correct my ignorance, a third, previously unknown and significantly shorter lecture by Borges. It was delivered in the same institution in 1967, approximately a year after Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he shared with the German poet Nelly Sachs.

In "On Sh. Y. Agnon," which I hereby reconstruct in English (the Spanish transcription is awful), Borges mentions, in passing, Agnon's edition of the Tales the Ba'al Shem-Tov. He also refers to Days of Awe, which Schocken issued in 1965 in the United States, under the supervision of Nathan Glatzer, with one of those elongated subtitles more suitable for poetry slams than for libraries: "Being a treasury of traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and new". But as the nonbeliever he was-and even less an enthusiast of religious rituals-Borges prefers Contes de Jérusalem (1959), which he read in the French rendition of Rachel and Guy Casaril. The anthology includes nine of Agnon's tales, among them "Forevermore," "Tehila," "The Whole Loaf," "Ido and Enam," and "Orange Peal: A Fantasy." Here is Borges:

I begin with some considerations that run the risk of appearing digressive but which should take us to the essential theme: the personality and oeuvre of our great contemporary, Shmuel Yosef Agnon. My ignorance of Hebrew-ignorance which I deplore but which it's late to remedy it-has forced me to judge him through Days of Awe, about the Jewish liturgical year; and Contes de Jérusalem. I'll limit myself to the astonishment I've experienced in these volumes, the latter especially.

Let me ask a simple yet complex question, which is what all questions are: What is a nation? My first reaction is to offer a geographical answer, but it would be insufficient. Instead, let us envision a nation as the series of memories stored at the heart of a people. George Bernard Shaw was once asked: How much suffering is humankind able to bear? His answer was that the suffering of a single individual is enough and is also the limit. In other words, the limit might be an abstraction, although the suffering itself is real. And so, if misery is impossible to measure in collective terms, how might one define a nation?

To me there isn't a clearer example of a nation than Israel, whose origins are almost confused with those of the world entire, and who reaches us today after much misery and exile. A nation is made of the accumulated memory of successive generations. In itself, memory is often approached in a couple of ways: as a barren collection of dates, names and locations; and as a catalog of curiosities. But there's another approach neither endorsed by historians, nor by students of folklore: memory as experience incarnated in people. This, precisely, is what I find in Agnon.

Contes de Jérusalem ought to be read like one reads Dante: as a series of tales, at once tragic and humorous; and as a set of symbols. Agnon enables us to appreciate ancient Jewish tradition through a game of mirrors. In it he also invites us to recognize the role of Hasidism. Unquestionably, the Hasidic tales compiled by Martin Buber and, in his early years, by Agnon too, left an indelible imprint on him. For instance, "Ido and Enam," filled with mystery, is the bizarre tale of a scholar who, in an act of revelation, sees ninety-nine words of an unknown language. Ninety-nine are also the names of God; the Tetragramaton, which is the hundredth one, is infallible. Indirectly, Agnon recalls in his pages the legend of the Golem, made out of sand by means of words by a Cabalist in Prague's Jewish quarter.

I shall now refer to "The Whole Loaf," a story about chance. It reminds me of Kafka, who is part of Jewish memory too. Agnon chronicles the infinite yet minuscule obstacles undergone by its hungry protagonist as he prepares for the Sabbath. Whereas Kafka was about the lack of hope, or else about a hope so remote it generates in us a terrible feeling of desperation, Agnon is patient: he waits because he's a believer. Indeed, one of the right decisions the Swedish Academy made recently was not to award its Nobel Prize to a writer of sadness and despair. Instead, it honored one who, like Bernard Shaw, also a laureate, is sensitive to tragedy but knows that a joyful conclusion to the human quest isn't altogether beyond us.

Another story in Contes de Jérusalem is about a country that could be any country. This one in particular is punished with a drought marked by an inexorably blue sky. Furthermore, enemies are always on the attack, the earth is barren and rivers are empty. The population is divided into two parties: on one side are the cover-headed, on the other the naked-headed. [...] The two parties are ready to destroy each other. Yet there's a single individual who is beyond any affiliation. He furtively leaves the city, praying for God to send a compassionate storm to stop the destruction. When the others find out, they excommunicate him. His sin: not to have alerted the authorities to his wishes.

A decision is then made to have everyone build a huge tent for protection from the storm, which must be large enough to cover the entire country. A commission is established to decide what name to give to the tent. Alternative commissions take the responsibility of studying the etymology and orthography of the chosen name. As the population wastes its energy in trivialities, God allows rain to fall-and the barren land is fertilized, just as modern Israel itself was fertilized. I hear a distant echo in Agnon's story of the Jewish tradition that says that every generation includes a total of thirty-six just men. By the way, this tradition was studied by Max Brod, Kafka's friend. Unacquainted with one another, these just men navigate the world and are replaced as soon as they die. Right now their dynasty redeems us.

Israel's memory is in Agnon-not an erudite but a living memory. He is known through a pseudonym; he didn't write for his own vanity. Somehow he knew he was the living memory of that admirable people to which, beyond the vicissitudes of blood, we all belong: the people of Israel.


The interest in Agnon is part of Borges' admiration for Israel as a young nation. His relationship with the Jewish state was ambivalent at first and only in later years-when he himself became an institutional luminary-did he soften his approach to it. It isn't that Borges was critical of Zionism. In fact, judging by his work, he seems to have a limited knowledge of it. International politics didn't interest him in the least. He seldom talked about Theodor Herzl, not even about Eliezer ben Yehuda, credited for the modern revival of the Hebrew language.

I said before that Borges visited Israel. He was there twice. The second time was in 1971, when he received the Jerusalem Prize. The first trip came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and in particular of his positive views on Israel. He had been active in the Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build in Jerusalem an Argentine cultural center. He also was the first to write in Sur (no.254, September-October 1958). In the autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges stated:

Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Geneva days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediately sides. White the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week later, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:

Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet,
Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.

Actually, Borges wrote three poems while in Israel, collected in  In Praise of Darkness (1969). All were later included in his Obras Completas. These poems have been rendered into English before. Herein my own version. First, "To Israel":

Who shall tell if you, Israel, are to be found
In the lost labyrinth of secular rivers
That is my blood? Who shall locate the places
Where my blood and yours have navigated?
It doesn't matter. I know you're in the Sacred
Book that comprehends Time, rescued in history
By the red Adam, as well as by the memory
And agony of the Crucified One.
You're in the Book that is the mirror
Of each face approaching it,
As well as God's face, which, in its complex
And hard crystal, is appreciated in terror.
Long live Israel, who keeps God's wall
In your passionate battle.



"Israel":

A man incarcerated and bewitched,
a man condemned to be the serpent
that keeps the infamous gold,
a man condemned to be Shylock,
a man wandering through the globe,
knowing he had been in Paradise,
an old and blind man who ought to tear down
the temple columns,
a face condemned to be a mask,
a man who in spite of humankind
is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the Kabbalists,
a man that is a Book,
a mouth praising heaven's justice
from the abyss,
an attorney or a dentist
who talked with God in a mountain,
a man condemned to ridicule
and abomination, a Jew,
an ancient man,
burnt and drowned in lethal chambers,
an obstinate man who is immortal
and now has returned to battle,
to the violent light of victory,
beautiful like a lion at noon.


And "Israel, 1969":

I feared Israel would be threatened,
with sweet insidious,
by the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated, like sorrowful treasure,
in the cities of the infidel, the juderías,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams-
the nostalgia of those who, near the waters of Babylon,
longed for you, Jerusalem.
What else were you, Israel, if not that nostalgia,
the will to safe-keep,
from the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgy,
your solitude with God?
I was wrong. The oldest of nations
is also the youngest.
You haven't been tempted by gardens,
otherness and boredom,
but by the rigor of the last frontier.
Israel has announced, without words:
you shall forget who you are-
you shall leave behind your previous self.
You shall forget who you were in those lands
that gave you their afternoons and mornings
and which you shall no longer cherish.
You shall forget your parents' tongue
and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You shall be an Israeli. You shall be a soldier.
You shall build the homeland with swamps,
you shall erect it in deserts.
You brother shall work with you, he whose face you haven't seen before.
Only one thing is promised:
your place in the battlefield.

There's a strange, triumphant, pompous (almost unBorgesian) tone and tune to these poems. They eulogize the Six-Day War figuratively, in the abstract, without placing it in context: The oldest of nations is also the youngest. Whoever is interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict won't get an uninterested picture though them. Instead, the reader appreciates a blind fervor. In these poems, the political Borges, a Borges I will discuss in the next section, makes one of his earliest appearances.

#

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. 

Politics is an inescapable part of human existence. It concerns the way that people organise themselves, in particular how they act within institutions and units of governance. Above all, politics concerns the way humans interact with power. It is therefore self-evident that politics exists in the British Jewish community, but what I want to question is how far the British Jewish community has an acknowledged politics.

In much of the British Jewish community, politics is in ‘bad taste’. In synagogues a macher that is too overt in political scheming is likely to be viewed with suspicion. On a community-wide level, inter-denominational politicking is widely practiced, but often looked down on. In the oldest and most influential UK Jewish representative organization, the Board of Deputies, which has a quasi-parliamentary structure and whose deputies elect a president and vice-president, there is nothing resembling parties and deputies rarely face election fights in their own communities. Even those few organisations that are openly political, such as the UK branches of Israeli political parties, tend to be low-key and poorly supported.

In short, there is a disparity between the de facto inevitability and ubiquity of British Jewish communal politics and the degree to which this politics is openly recognised. British Jewish politics is largely a matter for quiet, behind-the-scenes activity.

This reticence is perhaps a function of a tacit assumption that politics is antithetical to community. To be openly political is seen to be to seek to divide, to create strife and discord that threatens to rupture communal harmony. In part this may derive from long-held feelings of insecurity that as a minority in British society, the Jewish community must show a united front and that division can only equal weakness. In terms of Israel, one of the most contentious issues in British Jewish life, public campaigning against Israeli policies (from both a right and a left perspective) or open support for Israeli political parties, are marginal activities – viewed by much of the community as bad form and potentially dangerous. 

The assumption that small minorities need to present a united front is not necessarily illegitimate. The problem is that the lack of politics can create problems more serious than those it is designed to combat. If Jewish communal politics is not acknowledged, politics will still continue, but it will continue in ways that can be corrosive. If those who disagree with a particular direction the community takes can only been seen to legitimately disagree if they do so privately, this increases the likelihood that rather than accept their marginality they will resort to attacking the community.

I am thinking here about the position of those who disagree with communal support for Israel. Contrary to the commonly made accusation that the community ‘suppresses’ debate, it is more the case that debate is possible if it is done quietly and behind the scenes. The trouble is that some will not accept only being able to disagree privately while in public maintaining a facade of unity. Without a legitimate political process through which to debate communal policies, those British Jews who are critical of Israel have often resorted to attacking the community from the outside.

I recently attended the annual general meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, an organization whose aims I broadly support. Many of those attending were extremely bitter with the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community, and most were uninterested in working to bring Jews who were more involved in the community on board. As much as the mainstream community shuns leftist critics of Israel, many of them effectively shun themselves.

It is essential to begin the process of rethinking British Jewish politics. The tacit assumption that politics and community are antithetical needs to be questioned. In any but the tiniest, most homogeneous community, differences of opinion are inevitable and there has to be a way of dealing with these differences without the dissolution of the community. What models might there be for a community whose political system could allow for the mediation of difference? What kind of political language do British Jews need to embrace in order to function without undue rancor?

One source of inspiration might be parliamentary democracy itself. The Board of Deputies is structured as a kind of parliament, but it lacks one crucial element of parliamentary democracy – an official opposition. When a politician who has been democratically elected speaks for a country, region or locality, it is clear that even if they govern for all, they were only elected by some. To be a leader in a democracy is to publicly affirm that not everyone agrees. Indeed, when democracies work best (and admittedly they often do not) the opposition plays an important role in the democratic process, scrutinising the executive and acting as a constant rebuke to delusions of unanimity. Political opponents may disagree vehemently but in the best parliamentary democracies, this does not stop them respecting each other as individuals, nor does the fact of divided political loyalties necessarily prevent the cohesiveness of the nation.

The parliamentary model is of course not applicable in its entirety in the British Jewish community. It is hard to envisage a truly representative Jewish parliament – who decides who is a Jew and who can vote? But the parliamentary model teaches us that it does suggest that politics can overt politics can not only allow community and difference to be balanced, it can also improve the quality of the leadership within of the Jewish community. Above all, it suggests that we should not fear politics but embrace it.

This summer, Zeek has been re-examining the work of Yiddish writer Yossel Birstein. Our summer print issue includes a never-before translated Birstein story; here, we offer Andrew Firestone's discussion of Birstein's only book of poems, written when he was living in Australia, before making aliyah to Israel--Adam Rovner, Zeek Translations Editor

I have always loved poetry, so I was delighted when the Jewish Museum of Australia asked me to research and report on the Yiddish poets of Melbourne. Of several gems which came to light, no book impressed me more than Yossel Birstein's Unter Fremde Himlen, Under Alien Skies, (Melbourne, 1949).

Most of these pre-War poems movingly describe a young man's immigrant experience of alienation, as he holds on to his Jewish Yiddish culture far from home. But some of the strongest writing appears in the series of fifteen memorial poems that open the book. Here Birstein makes his poetic response to the martyrdom of his family and the other Jews of their Polish town of Biala-Podlaska. When he wrote most of these verses, in 1945, he was twenty-five years old.

Yet, after he wrote Under Alien Skies,Birstein gave up poetry for prose. Why?

From Poland to Melbourne

The bare bones of Birstein's biography are these. He came to Australia unaccompanied at the age of sixteen, in 1937. He was the eldest of four, and two years later, in the nick of time, Reyzl, the next child, followed. Grandparents in Melbourne paid the fares and arranged their papers, and Birstein lived with them. His home was in Carlton, which then resembled New York's Lower East Side--as much Yiddish and Italian were heard on the street as English.

Birstein worked in a clothing factory and began to write poems, which the two local Yiddish newspapers were pleased to publish ("a homegrown product").  His friends were left-wing bohemian writers and artists. His best friend, whom he had met on the journey from Poland, later illustrated Under Alien Skies. This was the artist Yosl Bergner, whose father, the famous Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitch, was then living in Melbourne.

The rest of Birstein's family never followed. The war came and Birstein's parents and the younger children all perished. By 1949, Birstein was married with a daughter, and working as the first paid secretary of the now thriving Yiddish cultural organization in Melbourne, Kadimah. (In this Birstein was unusual in his generation: few of his own age were interested in Yiddish, and more than once Birstein publicly bemoaned his own generation's abandoning of Yiddish.)

He didn't work for Kadimah long; soon after his book of poems was published, Birstein and his family moved to Israel. There, Birstein became a writer of short stories and novels, in Yiddish and Hebrew; and a well-loved storyteller, on the radio and at festivals.. He wrote but one more poem after leaving Melbourne. He passed away in Jerusalem in 2003. 

Poetic Influences

Birstein left school at age twelve to assist his father, a poor shoemaker. Birstein was a voracious reader though, and in Melbourne he continued his reading, in Yiddish and in English. In addition he was a regular at weekly left-wing lectures.

His friend Bergner has recorded that, soon after the two of them arrived in Melbourne, he visited Birstein at home one day, and was invited to "seat thyself": Birstein was teaching himself English by reading Shakespeare!

Birstein and Bergner: from Benny LapidBergner's father, the famous poet Melekh Ravitch, must have impressed Birstein; but Birstein's work is quite different. Many of Birstein's poems resemble folksongs, albeit refined ones, perhaps due to the influence of his mother, a singer of recognized talent. His verses, written to be heard, are always rhymed. (It is difficult to convey their musicality in translation, though there have been some remarkable successes.)

Birstein's earliest poems often sacrificed clarity for musicality; but his technical mastery developed rapidly. Soon after his first poems were published Birstein soon was contacted by I. I. Giligich, the doyen of Melbourne's Yiddish school principals, who introduced Birstein to the verses of Leyb Naydus and Itzik Manger.

Birstein was also influenced by the short stories of Pinkhas Goldhar, a social realist writer, and the social realist paintings of Yosl Bergner and Noel Counihan-all artists Birstein knew well in Melbourne. Like them, Birstein tried his hand at poems in the social realist mode, perhaps the best among them being "At the Factory," translated by Floris Kalman.

At the factory

Translated by Floris Kalman

I murmur to myself
timeworn everyday words
until they pass into silence -
and silence too is just a game.

Looking around I see
from every separate thing
a muteness flowing out
and weeping, in its own tongue.

Bending down I say
to the iron head of the machine:
I too am a thing, nothing more...
of a different kind, I know.

The silvery dust covers me too,
the walls surround me as well,
through the pane a luminous ray
stretches out to me a warm hand

Caresses my dust-covered head
at the iron head of the machine -
I too am a thing, nothing more...
of a different kind, I know.

Another influence was the poet Moyshe Leyb Halpern. Halpern, like the social realists, was also interested in social justice, but his style and tone is much more modernist. Indeed, Halpern was often criticized for his "coarse" writing, according to scholar Julian Levinson.

Birstein echoes the alienation of the modernist in the following poem, both musical and suspenseful, which morphs from the Gothic into personal angst:

A Visitor On My Doorstep
Translated by Leigh Fetter

I clean away the plenitude from my table,
remove my wellbeing, as if another's clothing.
A visitor is on my doorstep -
come to stay for ever, he's intending.

He sits down at the table by me, near,
to wait until these become my own:
the misfortunes of his body,
his sadness, and his fear

which lies hidden beneath his load of silence.
On bowed shoulders his head is firmly set,
and I can tell he waits for me to say:
I want to be humiliated like you,

like you I also want to be depressed.
I don't know if I tell him that or not,
but over me starts swaying low
the heavy fate of my father's lot

which my father too hid silently below.
It may be that my father - it is he,
this visitor seated by my side
silent, heavy and constricted, as if awaiting

my forgiveness for some wrong he's done.
But it could also be, the visitor is simply me,
and I'm beside myself, by sorrows overcome -
waiting for a word to rise in me
waiting, to tell myself something.

This sense of sorrow is felt most acutely in the poems that open the book, the Memorial poems.

Memorial Poems

 

Hard on the liberation of Europe, in July1944, a left-wing anthology of Yiddish prose and verse , Tsushteyer (Supporters), appeared in Melbourne, Australia. Yossel Birstein, then twenty-four years old, wrote

In the folds of my granny's clothes
Yellow prayer-psalms smoulder,
Making my little gran herself
A prayerbook of oldfashioned laments.

And continued

The secret is secret no longer
Out of the dust a reckoning is coming...

Birstein's Mother: Source: Benny LapidThe emotional composure of this poem suggests that confirmation of the deaths of all of Birstein's family in Eastern Poland was yet to come.  When it did, the force and poignancy of the series of fifteen memorial poems he wrote for them was remarkable. (Translations following are by Beni Gothajner. All the poems of the book Under Alien Skies can be found in Yiddish, along with English and Hebrew translations of some of them, at www.YiddishPoetry.org).

Who can I reach out a hand to?
a whole house:
a wall, a table, a chair;
even they silently demand
that we remember them.

Each of his family is memorialized. Here is the first verse of "My little brother":

The Yiddish word and the Yiddish song
are held in stocks of sorrow and pain.
Such a store is the soul of each
who takes part in our weeping.
May they shine, the word and the song that dress
young spirits with dreams of happiness -my little brother is a small mound of ash.

Every verse of that poem ends with the same line...

But the most poignant poem of the series is the one for his sister, "Oyf dayn fayerdiker khasene." The word fayerdik means both fiery and celebratory, for light and fire are part of all festive occasions.

At Your Fiery Wedding
Translated by Beni Gothajner

You would have been a virgin bride by now
with all the graces of the young and chaste.
Instead, Death snatched you to his side
and married you in haste.

Who was missing at the ball?
Everyone came; strangers, neighbours, all.
The devil danced a reel with the whole world,
with you - and all Israel in one.

How beautifully you danced; with flare, with flame.
Only our people can dance the same,
committing to the fire both body and heart.
Only our spirit and flesh know how to dance this part.

I alone did not turn up at all
to dance at your fiery wedding ball.

You are not mistaken if you detected survivor guilt in these poems, which can be read even more plainly in the following piece, translated by Miriam Leberstein, New York:

 

No More To Do With The Roar
Translated by Miriam Leberstein

I have no more to do with the roar of the city
and no more to do with the hearth of my neighbour.
Door murmurs to door signing like the deaf
"Who was it that halted him in his tracks?"

It isn't the beautiful sky or the sun
nor is it the day, autumnal and windy
but a kind of a bell ringing out its command
which resounds in my head "you are guilty... are guilty."

Why am I guilty? I don't know why.
The tragedy is spreading like weeds through my life.
My dear ones that died visit during the night,
they demand sorrow of me, but I have none to give.

They stand by my bedside, immovable, stubborn
staring in silence, as is their habit
as I lie outstretched in my cushiony bed
dying of surfeit, not from privation.

And what happens next? Nothing else happens.
I wake to a morning splattered with sunlight
and try to forget in the taste of my bread
the world that visits my bedside at night.

But a bell keeps on ringing: "Know this, you are finished -
and what is more - you have been cut adrift.
You have no more to do with the roar of the city
and no more to do with the hearth of your neighbour."

Where could Birstein go from here?

 

From Poet to Novelist

After Under Alien Skies, Birstein would only write one more poem, just after arriving in Israel, and then no more. Why? I have asked his wife Margaret, and she doesn't know. They are not lying unpublished in a drawer. Though he continued writing almost all of his life, Birstein published poetry between the ages of 19 and 30 only.

One reason might have been the lukewarm reception with which his poetry was received. Even though the book was reviewed by two of the Yiddish world's most respected critics, Yehoshua Rapoport in Melbourne and Yankev Glatstein-perhaps the best-regarded Yiddish poet then living-in New York, neither reviewer seemed to appreciate Birstein's work and both ignored the strongest poems of the book, the Memorial sequence.

We can appreciate the critics' wishes to shield their readers at that time from Birstein's Memorial poems. They had their own losses, and those of their readers, to take into account. But how much was Birstein affected by this response?

Instead of characterizing Birstein as a poet of the Jewish world, Rapoport in particular put Birstein into a smaller box, as an Australian Yiddish poet-not quite the scope an ambitious writer wanted. The only poem Rapoport discussed in depth was The Plea (given here in Gothajner's translation), as descriptive of Birstein's struggle to remain an authentic Jew while adapting to Australia. From another perspective, Birstein here expresses his existential angst (which he did a good deal) very unusually--with Jewish imagery:

 

The Plea
Translated by Beni Gothajner

I come now from caves, from forest and field.
Wonderful - wonderful God - is your world...
What am I to do with myself?

More than alarm felt for my home town
the fear pursues every step of my own...
What am I to do with myself?

How cruel it is here? How quiet, how still?
I too am made numb and tired of it all...
What am I to do with myself?

I envy the stone that someone has thrown
into a well, where it sinks straight down...
What am I to do with myself?

Your call: Let light be! has dimmed and turned dark.
My life is laid waste. But not yet my heart...
What am I to do with myself?

Birstein, as we now know, was not planning to stay in Australia at all, having already made plans to move to Israel. In fact, that move may be another reason he stopped writing poetry: poetry may have been a medium he associated too much with pain and loss.

Birstein's last published poem, written on Kibbutz Gvat soon after his arrival in Israel, is very different from his previous work. All angst and urgency have vanished. A relaxed tone, an easy pace--the lines are open, as if to the sky and the fields: "I drink and drink - can I continue to drink like this, without measure? Is there no one behind me to ask ‘why?' The answer comes from the encompassing silence. The world is wonderful, humans more so."

Birstein's poetry up until 1949 had nearly all been written in a narrow emotional range of negative emotions--of grief and loss, emotional pain and despair and alienation. Perhaps once he felt at peace in himself, in Israel, it felt right to jettison the poetic vehicle altogether?

In any case, such a transition from poetry to prose is not so uncommon. Two of Australia's best known novelists, David Malouf and Rodney Hall, for instance, published very good poetry and then turned to prose--and readers will think of other examples. Yet, however Birstein understood his poetry, for us today it is an important legacy, not just as a record of an Australian Yiddish Jewish response to the 1940s, but as a set of excellent poems well worth reading in their own right.

I think it would have pleased Birstein that last year a Melbourne musician, Ben Nisenbaum, set to music his poem Oysyes (translated as Signs). And at long last, one of his poems has been read at a Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration.

Perhaps at last Birstein's poetry will get "a fair go", as we say in Australia.

#

Dr Andrew Firestone is a psychiatrist. He edits websites of Yiddish poetry translations under the umbrella of YiddishPoetry.org. He is an Adjunct Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization, Monash University, Melbourne. His current project is an anthology of the Yiddish poetry of Poland between the two World Wars, with sound files of the Yiddish poems read by native speakers. There will be translations into Polish, English, French and Hebrew.

All images courtesy of the Birstein Project 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was walking down Carlebach Street when the wailing air raid siren announced the biggest civil drill in Israel’s history. Though I’d timed a morning interview around it, (who wants to pause for two minutes of alarm?), I was otherwise unprepared. Unsure of what to do with myself, I stopped and stood at the edge of a sidewalk café, under the shade of the awning. I was still. I listened. The sound was barely audible, drowned out by the noise of construction and late morning traffic. I looked to the people around me for cues. Their conversations continued, coffees were sipped, cigarettes puffed.

A waitress, her blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, pointed to an underground parking garage across the street and reminded us that we were to head to the nearest “protected space.”

Not that we needed the reminder. On the heels of Netanyahu’s induction, most homes received a pamphlet accompanied by a colorful magnet: a map of Israel, carved into color-coded regions, edged by cheerful images—splashing dolphins, dancing camels, and a smiling skier in snow-covered Golan Heights. That skier is in a red zone—according to the key, if he hears a siren he must slide to a shelter immediately. Tel Aviv is colored like a ripe orange. In the case of a missile attack, I will have two minutes to get somewhere safe.

According to the “Recommended Equipment for the Protected Space” list on the magnet, I ought to bring 12 liters of water, food, a fire extinguisher, a TV, and a WIFI ready computer with me. And I’d better not forget to bring “things that will make passing the time pleasant.”

Home Front Command English Magnet Branding

I stuck the magnet on my already cluttered fridge. Now I take it for granted as part of my kitchen scenery.

As the practice alarm sounded, a sole café-goer stood as though he might head for the parking garage. But when it was obvious that none of his companions were going with him, he hesitated, gave a nervous laugh, and then sat back down. Office workers from a nearby building, led by clipboard-bearing managers, streamed like ants to the underground.

The waitress leaned in the doorway, watching. Though she didn’t actually do anything, she looked concerned—she squeezed her chin, and worriedly rubbed her lips with her fingers.

We looked at each other and she shrugged, “What is there to do?” she asked me.

I gave her a weak smile. Despite the June heat, the surging siren brought goosebumps to my skin as I wondered what would happen if we have a real attack?

Like many Tel Avivians, I have no idea where the bomb shelter nearest to my apartment is. I haven’t bothered to find out. Despite the fact that the drill was publicized for weeks in advance, no one I know took the time to figure out if their “protected space” is a bomb shelter, a stairwell, or a certain room in their apartment. If the alarm sounded, where would we go? And how would each of us carry roughly our own body weight in supplies?

Are we apathetic? Or are we in denial?

As I went about the rest of my day, I turned these questions over in my head again and again. But I couldn’t find the answers within myself. So I turned to Boaz, a typical Tel Avivi, for help. I asked him why he didn’t bother at least finding his bomb shelter.

“I’ll find it in the moment I need to,” he said.

“Really? So, when that siren goes off you’ll just magically know where to go? What, are you going to hop on the internet and look it up? You don’t think you need to be prepared?”

“How will it help me to be prepared?” he asked. “How does it help me to think about all this? No one has the energy to deal with these things,” he concluded.

I knew then what I’d been avoiding myself, what I didn’t have the energy to face—a scenario that included missiles landing in Tel Aviv would mean we were in the midst of an all out war. It would be the end to Israel as we know it.

What is there to do?

Sitting helplessly below slabs of cement doesn’t seem like enough. It almost feels like a joke… like dancing camels and the suggestion that passing time during a missile attack could be pleasant.

"The most important thing in this portion is seldom noticed," Rabbi Solomon ibn Uzair said, as he lay on a pile of cushions beside his lover Joseph. A small scroll of the Torah lay open in front of them, rolled to the beginning of the book of Shemot. Beyond the rabbi's study, in the square below, they could hear the sounds of the market, heavy wooden wheels of carts, and the horses that pulled them, sounding on the hard dry earth of summer. The cacophony of shoppers' voices, the cry of vendors calling out their wares, all mixed together and rose up into the room, bringing the heat of day into that chamber, lit only by the shafts of light that poured through the open lattice-work shutters.

"And what is that?" Joseph the younger man asked his lover, running a slim dark hand over the rabbi's forearm, running against the grain of coarse hair, his own hand then stopping over the page, like a golden yad above the text, pointing. The rabbi smiled and let his own hand caress his partner's shoulder. "Joseph, you aren't paying attention to what I told you last week, when we were finishing Bereshit."

"How can I pay attention, when the day is so hot and dusty?" Solomon leaned over the young man to grab a pitcher off the small round copper table that sat beside the divan. Tall and thin, the pitcher of green glass was filled with water, which he poured into the two empty cups on the table.

"You mean the water?" Joseph asked. "There's water in Bereshit and now there's water here, the river." The rabbi smiled. "You've got the right idea. But go back to the text and read for me." Stumbling over the Hebrew words, Joseph read the first passage. The room was still. He could feel his lover's impatience with him, in the controlled rasp of his breathing. These were moments when he hated Solomon, only five years older, but acting as if he were the wisest man in all of Jewry. He glared at him for a moment. The older man's hand extended over the open scroll, about to point out what he had missed.

"Don't! Let me find it," Joseph snapped. Solomon pulled back his hand. He hated it when his temper rose, especially when it rose up against Joseph, so sweet, so good to him. Without waiting, Joseph dived back into the text. He read slowly, with an edge of hostility in his voice. And then he came to the beginning of the story about Moses, to the fifteenth word, and the sixteen. "Ki Tov!" "That's it, isn't it? That's what you wanted me to see. That Bereshit begins with God saying Ki Tov about creation, and now, at the very beginning of Shemot, Moses's mother says that about her baby son!"

Solomon reached out a broad hand and rumpled Joseph's hair. Usually when he did that Joseph hated it. "I'm not your horse," he'd snap, "so get your fingers out of my mane." But this time, the heat, the words of Torah, and the tender warmth of his lover's dark hand, telling him that he'd learned the lesson of the day, made him smile, grab that hand, pull it to his mouth and sink his teeth into the web between Solomon's thumb and index finger. "Ouch!" the rabbi shouted, pulling his hand away. But Joseph grabbed it back and licked where his teeth marks remained. "Ki Tov," he whispered, then licked it again, as Solomon, with his other hand, rolled up the scroll of the law and placed it on the table.

 

Why do we pray? What do we pray for?

Liturgy raises the most fundamental theological questions, daily, if we pay attention. But we rarely do. We are born into or find a denomination, are born into or find a congregation, and learn its liturgy.

Often—too often—the prayers become rote. But not for everyone. Because if you read the texts, actually read them, you will often find a language that is unbearable: an angry, vindictive God; a masculine universe; and an abstract language of praise completely disconnected from the world we know—the world of plants and animals, friends and family, love and loss.

Some of us can mask these uncomfortable words behind a linguistic veil, chanting Hebrew or Aramaic we do not understand or allowing ourselves to forget the meaning and find comfort, even uplift, in the familiarity of old niggun communally sung. However, especially for those whom conventional prayer excludes, the very act of praying can become agony, a struggle (agony’s root: agon) between words on the page and words in the heart.

Queer liturgy arises out of the particular struggle of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to find their own voices in prayers that are meaningful for their lives. Queer liturgy attempts to answer the theological questions hidden behind the solid wall of conventional prayer: why pray? What to pray for? To Whom do we pray?

Why call this liturgy “queer” instead of “lgbt” or some other set of acronyms? The word “queer,” reclaimed from decades of abusive use, reminds us that sexuality and gender are not fixed. “Queer” suggests that lines are always a bit fuzzy and a bit curved, that nothing ever is quite as “straightforward” as it seems. Queer liturgy begins in identity but does not remain there: it is a liturgy that keeps moving, keeps questioning.

 

Why Pray?

Queer liturgy insists upon prayers that are intimately personal, prayers that allow us to speak directly as ourselves to a God who is approachable. In the remainder of this essay, I will take as examples prayers from Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, a new LGBT siddur which I was privileged to help edit and guide to completion as project manager.

Here is a prayer to be read before lighting candles on Friday night, a prayer that asserts the direct, personal connection between the person who prays and the God to whom prayer is directed:

 

I draw Your energy toward me with my hands before

Covering my face with Your warmth, and at once it

Seeps through my eyelids, into my blood vessels,

Soothing organs that have held the week’s anxieties

And uncertainties, pouring in stillness and

Timelessness, bringing me closer to myself.

Blessed are You, O God, whose light comes to life in

Friday evening’s burning flames.

 

This prayer draws upon the custom of lighting the Shabbat candles, drawing their light towards the eyes with hand gestures, and then closing the eyes. The custom of closing the eyes began to ensure that as we bless the candles, they are not “working” to provide us with light. Here, however, the gesture is reinterpreted as one that removes anxieties and draws one closer to oneself. And that self is not some abstract someone but a person of flesh and blood, organs and vessels, in need of healing and prayer. Why pray? To bring God into my life.

 

The One Who Prays

Queer liturgy is adamant about recognizing the person who prays. Who is that person? Torah tells us that each of us is created b’tselem elohim, in the image of God. We are each of us holy. 

Leviticus chapter 19 is known in Judaism as the “Holiness Code” because of its many commandments regarding human relationships and dietary laws, including the prohibition against sodomy. The following prayer, by Rabbi Lisa Edwards, reframes sexual and gender identity in the fuller context of the chapter:

Example:

 

On Holiness

We are your gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered children:

 

You must not seek vengeance, nor bear a grudge against the children

of your people. (LEVITICUS 19:18)

 

We are your bi, trans, lesbian, and gay parents:

Revere your mother and father, each one of you. (LEVITICUS 19:3)

 

We are elderly lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, and transgendered people:

You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old.

(LEVITICUS 19:32)

 

We are the stranger:

You must not oppress the stranger.

You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the

land of Egypt. (LEVITICUS 19:34)

 

We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi Jews:

You must not go about slandering your kin. (LEVITICUS 19:16)

 

We are your trans, gay, bi, and lesbian siblings:

You shall not hate your brother or sister in your heart.

(LEVITICUS 19:17)

 

We are lesbian, gay, trans, and bi victims of gay-bashing and murder:

You may not stand idly when your neighbor’s blood is being shed.

(LEVITICUS 19:16)

 

We are your bi, gay, trans, and lesbian neighbors:

You must not oppress your neighbor. (LEVITICUS 19:13)

You must judge your neighbor justly. (LEVITICUS 19:15)

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. (LEVITICUS 19:18)

 

Precursors of Difference

The aim of creating a liturgy that speaks to us, now, today, is not really an innovation. Many of our prayers were written in Aramaic because Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Second Temple period—these were prayers meant to be said by ordinary Jews in the pews, not by the priests in the Temple. Many of the most beautiful prayers in our siddurim, the piyyut, were written in the middle ages in order to bring more spiritual uplift and beauty to a collection of largely formulaic prayers. The entire Kabbalat Shabbat service was added by the kabbalists of Safed in the 16th century to inject a sense of spiritual oneness into the Shabbat service.

In the 19th century, nationalists added prayers for country and state; rationalists began reworking prayers as they questioned theological principles like the chosenness of the Jewish people.

The most significant change to the liturgy since the kabbalists was the work of feminists in our own time. When we think of feminist liturgy, we may think mainly of new rituals like the revival of rosh chodesh as a women’s holiday, or we may focus on the egalitarian language feminists introduced to more accurately represent a God without gender. The most significant innovation that feminists brought to liturgy has been our effort to reconnect the personal with the spiritual (just as, in the secular world, we reconnected the personal with the political).

A strong non-canonical liturgical tradition of women’s prayers flourished through the last millennium. Often these were very personal prayers connected to childbirth and lifecycle events. Contemporary feminists brought back that tradition by creating prayers that connect aspects of our daily lives to God. For example:

 

On Being A Woman

The moon is inside me,

Rage, joy, sadness, love –

They cycle, crescent, gibbous.

 

When young, I could not control

This wash of blood and light.

With age – and your help, Shechinah –

I can direct these currents,

Ride them to new shores.

 

Shechinah, give me wisdom

To find power in my cycles.

Bless you, Mother of us all,

For giving women the strength of the tides.

 

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liturgists have carried this feminist model into their own liturgy, creating prayers that recognize the uniqueness of the lgbt experience. These prayers are rooted in identity difference, yet refuse to name specific difference. Instead, queer liturgy embraces difference and uniqueness as qualities, celebrating that which makes each individual b’tselem elohim, an image of God.

 

Unique In The World

My God, I thank You for my life and my soul and my body; for my name, for

my sexual and affectionate nature, for my way of thinking and talking. Help

me realize that in my qualities I am unique in the world, and that no one like

me has ever lived: for if there had ever before been someone like me, I would

not have needed to exist. Help me make perfect my own ways of love and

caring, that by becoming perfect in my own way, I can honor Your name, and

help bring about the coming of the Messianic age.

 

If feminists—at least some feminists—focused on bringing women into the liturgy, queer liturgists want every Jew to feel welcome, no matter what their sexuality or gender, no matter what their race or religion of birth.  As Jay Michaelson notes, LGBT people have suffered enough exclusion that the aim is to be inclusionary whenever possible. 

Here is an example of a prayer familiar to us from the Shabbat evening liturgy, the “vShamru,” reconceived to remind each of us of the commandment to observe Shabbat. The Hebrew calls on “b’nei Yisraeil” to celebrate Shabbat. In Hebrew, the plural is formed from the masculine noun, so that the word for “children” and “sons” is the same. What if a minyan of women reciting this prayer? What if we do not identify as either sons or daughters, as either male or female? Why not open up the language to numerous possibilities:

 

V’sham-ru v’nei Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru v’not Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru a-dot Yis-ra-eil…

V’sham-ru ke-lal Yis-ra-eil…

et ha-sha-bat, la-a-sot et ha-sha-bat

l’do-ro-tam brit o-lam.

 

 Keeping Shabbat

The sons of Israel / The daughters of Israel…

The communities of Israel / All of Israel…

shall keep Shabbat, observing Shabbat

in all generations as a covenant for all time.

 

In a queer context, the service leader might choose any of these options—or, more likely, will encourage the community to sing the option that most meets their needs. The resulting mix of words and voices creates unity from difference, the harmony of multiple identities woven together.

 

Beyond Identity

But queer liturgy moves beyond identity politics, since the experiences of lgbt people also invokes theological problems. Who is chosen? How do we trust the words of Torah when Torah prohibits our love?

The most radical aspect of queer liturgy may be its refusal to answer these theological questions. Queer liturgy is about questioning, not answering. It is defiantly non-canonical. At Sha’ar Zahav, the most significant argument around the new siddur was whether in fact to publish the siddur at all. As long as our prayerbook was stapled and Xeroxed, congregants argued, it could be easily changed, while a hardcover might look like an impenetrable canonical text.

That reluctance to fix prayers is echoed in a reluctance to resolve theological problems. In the v’Shamru, for example, “bnei,” “sons,” is not replaced by a neutral term, but rather offered alongside other options. Likewise, multiple names of God are used in English for the unspeakable Name, including Adonai (Lord, a masculine name), Shechinah (Presence, a feminine name) and God (the English neutral).

Like the Reconstructionist liturgy, queer liturgy questions theology that seems to exclude rather than include. For example, why must we pray, in the Aleinu, that we have been chosen by God from among all other people? One way to address such questions is to change the text, to change “from” others to “with” others. Queer liturgy, however, prefers to leave the root text because we understand that prejudice cannot just be ignored—it must be addressed. Alongside of offering a language change for the Aleinu, why not also offer a new Aleinu that reworks the theme, thanking God for choosing lgbt people, making us “different from all others,” with unique gifts to offer? This playful—though serious--response addresses the theological question without answering it.

Queer liturgy often includes prayers that question why we pray, that question Torah, that question God. Queer liturgy includes commentaries that suggest we might not want to take prayers for granted, might want to change them or even discard them. For example, Siddur Sha’ar Zahav includes an alternative Amidah that is a Contemplation for Non-Believers.

What may be most moving, however, are prayers like these from the Remembrance section. Here we have another example of the personal as spiritual, a direct address of the individual to God in the prophetic mode: angry, defiant, but still engaged.

 

On Leaving Me Angry

It says in the Amidah that You revive the dead. What good does that do for

me now, God? Now You have taken, much too soon and far too cruelly, one

whom I love and long for.

 

To put death in Your world and not fully explain why – why trees fall, why

mountains crumble, why whales sink into the abyss and our beloved ones

vanish – leaves me twice mad, God: once at death, and once at You, Creator

and Destroyer.

 

And I cannot say, Amen.

 

For An Unresolved Relationship

Your memory is blessed in anger and in love. Both fill the space of your

absence in equal, imperfect measure, for how else could I honor the truth of

your life or of mine?

 

In struggle born of love our boundless and dangerous hearts sanctified each

other with rage’s improbable grace. I cannot now forget how each hand of these

feelings fed the other if it is really you I want to remember. My anger, like my

love, is also sacred. With them both I bless your stilled and silent body, your

still and silenced breath.

 

Queer liturgy brings back the prophets. It brings back an engagement with God on God’s own holy ground. How Jewish is that?

 

"Israel will not freeze settlement construction for natural growth, despite intense pressure from the Obama administration to do so," The Jerusalem Post, June 1, 2009.

The argument that “natural growth” is crucial to Israel's well-being is utter nonsense.  

Here are a few facts. 

First of all, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the population growth in the settlements is 5.6% annually. That is three-and-a-half times the rate of Jewish population growth in Israel. Forty percent of settler population growth is directly attributable to immigration, with a significant part of the rest due to the increased childbirths as a result of that immigration.

Second, there is no housing crisis in the settlements. There remain many vacant units. The idea that "natural growth" forces families to separate is simply counter-factual. Creating more opportunities and incentives for settlers to move back to Israel proper would be a welcome development, but barring “natural growth” contributes little, if anything, in this regard. It simply stops the settlements from expanding.

Third, the idea that a young couple or an expanding family should somehow have the right, guaranteed by the government, to live in the place of their choosing, irrespective of the housing market, is absurd. No one in New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else has such a guarantee, nor do people in Tel Aviv, Haifa or Beersheva. Young settler couples, like any others, must hunt for housing in the existing housing market, and sometimes that means they have to move to a nearby town.

Fourth, the implication that families will be “separated” if some members need to move back to Israel is ridiculous, as anyone who has ever travelled in Israel knows. Israel is a small country. If someone needs to move and finds a nice, affordable place in Israel, they are a short drive or bus ride away from their former community.

Fifth, the municipal boundaries of the established settlements are three times the size of the built-up areas. Therefore, allowing ‘natural growth” exceptions has enormous potential for major settlement expansion.

Sixth, the argument that Israel cannot legally halt construction once tenders have been issued, apartments sold, and work begun, is absolutely false. In 1992, when settlers sued the Rabin government over their decision to freeze work already begun, the High Court of Justice ruled that even after work has begun, the government can stop work due to its policy decisions. If losses are thereby incurred, they would be settled in civil court. Two different decisions agreed on this point, and there is no contradictory precedent in Israeli jurisprudence.

That adds up to the seventh and overriding fact: there is no reason or rationale for making any exception, including “natural growth,” to a settlement freeze. It certainly doesn’t serve Israel’s interests; the settlements are a terrible strain on Israel’s budget, with housing subsidies, increased security, and the need for new infrastructure to supply electricity, roads, water and other services to comparatively remote locales. That is a cost the budget, with education, health and other social services being strangled, cannot withstand.

Under these circumstances, it is astounding that the Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai (Shas) is threatening to grab every shekel he can and pour them into the settlements while Israel’s social services die a slow death. The only reason to oppose a settlement freeze is to oppose ending the occupation of the West Bank. It is to oppose any move toward peace. Sadly, for some like both Yishai and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that is apparently far more important than the well-being of Israelis behind the Green Line.

After the Freeze

Whether he ever admits it publicly or not, Netanyahu is overwhelmingly likely to implement the settlement freeze the US is demanding. The real question is: what then?

A settlement freeze accomplishes two things: one, it buys some time for the Palestinian Authority and for a real, tangible peace process to be revived. But only a few months. In those months, it will be crucial that genuine progress is made on the diplomatic front, on the ground in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and in terms of Israeli security.

The second thing it does is to bring the confrontation with the hardcore minority of the settler movement closer to the surface. A frequent refrain of late has been that Israel is “a country of laws.” Unfortunately, this has generally not been the case when it comes to enforcing the law on the settlers. That will have to change, and the most radical settlers’ likely response to a full and genuine freeze on all construction in the West Bank will put law and order to its final test. Either Israel gets serious about applying Israeli law to the settlers or it will demonstrate that it is not a country of law.

But that’s the limit of a freeze’s effects. Some, including such notable figures in Washington as Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation, have argued that a freeze is the wrong goal, and that the enormous political capital a freeze demands from the US would be better spent on pushing for dismantlement of settlements. They fear that once a freeze is obtained, that political capital will be depleted.

I see it differently. I believe that a freeze will be an investment of political capital, one which will generate great returns if successful and open up more opportunities, including opportunities to push for a rollback of the settlement project. It will give the Palestinian Authority the first evidence it has had that, in the age of Obama, their approach works and Hamas’ does not. The continuing ability of the Palestinian Authority's forces to keep a lid on terrorist activity in the West Bank, coupled with a settlement freeze, will create hope and support for next steps.

But Levy and Atallah are certainly correct that a freeze does nothing in the long run by itself. It must be followed quickly by serious steps toward a final resolution of this conflict. It will open the opportunity for such an outcome.

Benefits of a Settlement Freeze

A freeze will restore some credibility to the PA. If it is successful and Israelis see no decline in security, it will legitimize Obama’s approach and further discredit Netanyahu’s intransigence, particularly in the eyes of the Israeli public.

The ball will then be in Obama’s court, and the next step will be even more difficult. In order to capitalize on the freeze, he will have to get concessions from both Israel and the Arab world. He will have to continue to press Netanyahu to continue with the removal of roadblocks in the West Bank, to dismantle the “illegal outposts,” keep a moratorium on house demolitions in East Jerusalem and to find some way to allow reconstruction materials into Gaza without strengthening Hamas.

The danger is that if Israel is seen to be making all the concessions and getting nothing immediate in return, Obama will start to lose the unprecedented support he has right now from Congress and the pro-Israel community. The Palestinians will need to maintain and even strengthen their security apparatus and prove that they can maintain control in the West Bank.

But much more will be needed. Obama will have to get the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to begin to melt the ice between themselves and Israel. Nothing like full diplomatic relations, of course, which must wait until a Palestinian state emerges. But something is needed -- some kind of trade relations or an easing of the boycott of Israeli products.

It can’t all wait until the occupation completely ends. Obama has already begun pushing for some steps from the Arab world, and it will be crucial that he convince the Arab states to take them. One of the main problems with bilateralism is that the Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel that is tangible. The Arab states do, and Obama must obtain something to show Israel that peace is paying off for them as well.

That’s really the dance the President has to do now. When he gets the freeze (and I have no doubt he will get it if he sticks to his guns), he then needs to make sure it means something in the long term for the Palestinians and that it pays off for Israel as well. Not easy, but certainly possible. Obama has acted forcefully and boldly on this issue much earlier than most thought he would. He has earned some faith that he can take the more complicated steps before him. He’d better; because time is running short for a two-state solution and the obstacles in the region are perhaps as big as they’ve ever been.

At my son’s eighth grade graduation ceremony, his class sang a song in which “hallelujah” was repeated so many times that I almost shouted “Hallelujah!” when it was, mercifully, finally over.  What made it somewhat bearable was remembering something my friend, Sharon (of blessed memory), once told me during one of our lunch outings at our diner on Broadway.  “When you sing hallelujah, there are certain syllables, like ‘la’ ‘la,’ that lift your palate which sends an enjoyable message to your brain, sort of like the one you get when you have an orgasm.”   She was absolutely serious and, though I’ve never been able to corroborate this, I believe her. 

Every other day new, scientific research reveals that another ordinary, everyday thing is, if not orgasmic, pretty darn close.  There’s chocolate, with its “neuroactive alkaloids” which affect the pleasure center in the brain.  And red wine, which protects you from diabetes, lung cancer, aging and telephone solicitors from yeshivas in Brooklyn.  (Okay, it doesn’t protect you from the telephone solicitors, but wine makes you less cranky when they call.)   One of my favorites is a relatively new study that discovered that Botox increases one’s happiness.  Apparently, even if you aren’t happy, if you look happy, it makes you actually feel happy.  I guess that proves that internal happiness is overrated and there’s something to be said for faking it, after all. 

Likewise, I’ve read:  smiling even if you don’t mean it, even if it’s not a genuine smile, releases endorphins and relieves tension; laughing increases T-cell antibodies and decreases stress and pain; sunshine chases away depression; having friends who live close by boosts happiness immeasurably; and people who pray live longer, have lower blood pressure, less depression and less heart disease.

My friend, Felicia, recently gave me a “head massager,” a weird contraption with copper wires that looks sort of like a small rake with the prongs in a circle.  Her son, Tristan, told her that he learned in science class that a head massage is 1/60th of an orgasm.  (This is far more useful scientific information than dissecting frogs has turned out to be.)  Indeed, simply scratching one’s head touches all sorts of nerve endings and acupressure points on the scalp.  This brings me to an article written by a non-Jewish author in the Chinese Journal of Medicine.  He did research and claims that the Jewish prayer phylacteries – two small leather boxes attached to a wide, leather strap, one of which is placed on the biceps of the weaker arm and the second on the head, with the leather straps wrapped in a proscribed way -  are in contact with exactly the points at which the acupuncture needles are inserted in order "to increase spirituality and to purify thoughts."   Apparently, thousands of years before the Jewish love affair with mushu chicken, there was a Chinese-Jewish connection.

Prayer has been a part of a number of studies, some of which have concluded that sick people who, without their knowledge were prayed for, fared better than those who were not prayed for.  The studies are inconclusive, but if true, prayer falls in the Botox category – something external can trigger a real internal response.  And that, in turn, brings me back to the eighth grade “hallelujahs.”  It’s a Hebrew word that means, “Praise (halel) God (yah),” and it appears often in the book of Psalms.  The word “psalms” in Hebrew is mizmorim, “something sung”, and indeed, the psalms were meant to be sung.  But the name of the book in Hebrew isn’t Mizmorim but Tehilim, Praises.  When someone is sick, it’s considered beneficial to recite certain tehilim on his or her behalf.   There’s a fine line between words being used as an incantation (like abracadabra, a word that might be derived from Aramaic, avda kedavra, “What was said has been done.”) to affect change, or words used as a supplication to God to hear and to intervene. 

Why psalms?  Well, again and again they pointedly remind God that “death holds no mention of You” (Psalms 6).  In other words, the dead can’t worship You, so keep me alive so I can sing Your praises.   I like this ever so subtle way of appealing to God’s vanity.

Admittedly, I collect arcane information that supports my current views and practices, and I ignore anything that might challenge it.  This works for me.   But whether this all holds up scientifically or not, I strongly recommend having chocolate for breakfast, drinking red wine for dinner, and in between smile, laugh, sit in the sunshine, have a little Botox, a nice head massage, pray for one another, and sing hallelujah.  Can’t hurt.

On January 30th, Unveiled: New Art Form the Middle East opened at London's Saatchi Gallery. A collection of recent works by Arab and Iranian artists, the exhibit documented the extent of social criticism engaged in by photographers, painters and installation artists working in the greater Muslim Levant. From the Arab-Israeli conflict to religion, homosexuality and gender, Unveiled was both inspiring and an educational opportunity for Westerners unused to associating the Middle East with such radical creativity.

Of all of the artists on display, the work of Tehran photographer Shadi Ghadirian was the subject of specific emphasis by the exhibition's curators. Used in promotional literature, featured prominently in the show catalogue, one can understand why. Ghadirian's photos are both documentary and subversive, playing with traditional representations of Muslim femininity, and simultaneously expressions of intense, gender-specific suffering. An Iranian Cindy Sherman? Not exactly, but the sensibility is indeed shared.

As the post-election protests continue on in Iran, the following four photos of Ghadirian's work, taken last winter at Unveiled, do a good job of tying together today's upheaval with the artist's own reflections on the status of women in post-revolutionary Iranian society. 

 

Untitled from the Ghajar Series

 

Untitled from the Everyday Life Series

Untitled from the Ghajar Series

 

Untitled from the Everyday Life Series

"Faith of Our Fathers" is a rousing hymn that never fails to inspire even the weakest of voices to roar.  I well remember singing it in church with my family, the words and the swelling music eliciting from deep in my soul a feeling of passionate faith: 

Faith of our fathers, living still,
in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

The fathers that it referred to were, I assumed, my own Christian ancestors as well as the larger Christian world, for we, and only we, were people of faith.  By definition, if you didn't believe in Jesus, you weren't Christian.  Therefore, you didn't have faith.  As I got older, I reluctantly would agree that there were non-Christians who had faith -  but not the right kind of faith, not the kind that I had, not faith in Jesus. 

But then, for various reasons, I lost that faith.  And if I no longer believed in Jesus, was it possible to have any kind of faith? 

It was then that I became more interested in "our fathers", the Biblical patriarchs and the original "fathers" of monotheism who pre-dated Jesus, and who obviously had faith in God.  They also pre-dated the events at Mt. Sinai and therefore there was no temple, no holy days, no required sacrifices, no laws on purity and impurity with respect to everything from food to sex to clothing, none of the rules and regulations that the three monotheistic faiths all now require.   These guys didn't really pray, they just sort of talked to God when God came around or when they wanted something.  Nor was the afterlife or being saved a part of this early theology.  It would be difficult to say exactly what these fathers had "faith" in, aside from this one God who was interested in their lives and Who'd created the universe.  Abraham's was a nascent faith, and seemed to simply assert that faithfulness will be rewarded with land and progeny. 

"Faith of our Fathers," written by Frederic William Faber, an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, was composed against the backdrop of the Anglican Church's persecution of Catholics in the time of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I.   Many of my Jewish friends remain puzzled by this propensity Christians have had to kill fellow Christians, simply for being a different type of Christian.  No matter how much you may disagree with another Jew, you will ignore your temptation to annihilate him, and content yourself with calling him a shmo.  We don't have any extra Jews to spare, first of all, and second, there's no central authority in Judaism that monolithically dictates how each person should practice his faith and so, though we might not like the other's stance or agree with it, but we don't take it personally and wouldn't kill you just because you eat bacon sandwiches - on white bread. 

It's not that there aren't Jews who are passionate about their faith.   But Christianity is literally based on "The Passion" - Jesus' crucifixion.  As a result, getting people to believe in Jesus' deity and thereby be saved is quite important.   In Judaism, when religious arguments do break out, it's more of an intellectual exercise - fencing for the soul - in which you try to poke a hole in the other person's logic, not in order to be right, but just for the mental stimulation of it. 

At a bar mitzvah not long ago, the bar mitzvah boy went into a very long, complicated and scholarly explanation of the Biblical text he'd studied.  It was like hearing a legal brief - there was one rabbinic citation after another.  Not only was it painfully boring, but I didn't spy God anywhere in any of the gobbledygook he'd said.  It had clearly been more about displaying his mental acuity than it was about discussing where God was in his life.  For me, I couldn't help wondering: What's the point?  Seriously.  Sure, you can be a Jew culturally and historically, but when you leave religion or faith out of it, Jews are no different than Armenians or Finns or any other ethnic group in the world.   

When I converted, I became a "bat Abraham," daughter of Abraham, and that is true.  Normative Judaism rarely makes my heart "beat high with joy," and I often feel it lacks the spiritual depth that I expect from religion.   Abraham, on the other hand, "had faith in the Lord," and God "found his heart faithful and made a covenant with him."  

Faith of our fathers, we will love
both friend and foe in all our strife;
and preach thee, too, as love knows how
by kindly words and virtuous life...

Happy Father's Day to Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths.

           

 

1. Jake
I look up again at the sign, and it seems this must be the right place. It says Seir Cafe, in bold letters, broken neon lights filling up the antique-looking script, and I think of my family, think of how they didn't even want me to come here to see you, and I'm thinking maybe I ought to turn around and get in my car and speed home. But then I see you sitting in the corner of the restaurant, and even though I haven't seen you in twenty years, I know it's you, because even though you've got gray in your hair now and you've gained weight, your face is still the same and your cheeks still glow with that ruddy complexion. And you see me and you bound over to me and you throw your arms around me, and in your bear hug I can feel how small I still am compared to you, and for a moment you hold me so tight I'm afraid you might suffocate me.

And you ask me what I'm doing now, and I tell you that I became a rabbi with a large family, and you laugh a little and say that you might have expected that, and in your laugh I can feel a scoffing, a still-bitter brokenness just beneath your voice, but I know that it's only fair that you're still angry at me, and I'm glad when the waiter comes over to take our order, because you order a steak and I order the salad and we both laugh until we have tears in our eyes and I can see you can't be that angry with me any more and that we won't go to our graves as enemies.

2. Es
I try to pretend I think you're funny but you really aren't, and I can see how relieved you are when the waiter comes because you want some diversion, something to distract ourselves from how surreal this all is, some way to avoid the fact that you came half way across the country to meet me near my home so you could patch things up with me because it pained you so much for us to have been estranged from each other for all these years. And I'm looking at you, at that head with a kippa on it like the ones we both wore when we were boys, only darker, at your black jacket and your graying beard, and I'm looking for things I once loved, but instead I watch your eyes, the way they look up when you talk instead of at me, and I see you're still the same smarmy, self-righteous little brother you always were. And when I tell you that I'm a well-paid lawyer for the defense industry you nod knowingly, and pretend to be impressed, and smile a disparaging smile like that's what you expected of me. And you tell me that Dad always said I was very clever with words, that I could trap a man with nothing more than my tongue, and I laugh and you laugh but you know that it's no compliment, and that no matter how successful I was at anything, Mom was on your side and made sure Dad was, too. And you reach into your pocket and take out your wallet, and show me pictures of your family as if to suggest they are your riches, like mine aren't good enough, and so I take out my pictures to show you my family and though you only smile and say lovely I can almost hear you shouting shiksa in your head and when you look at my children and their foreign faces I know you are never in a million years going to invite them over to play with yours.

3. Jake
I'm looking at the beautiful Asian eyes of the nieces and nephews I'll never know and not knowing how to tell you how gorgeous they really are without saying something wrong, something that might sound racist, and then I remember how upset Mom and Dad were about you marrying out, and I decide to say nothing at all. And so I tell you why I came, why I tracked you down, and I explain to you that my life has been quite difficult these last years, how I've struggled to survive and got cheated in bad business deals, and that through all of my problems I realized that the only way I'd ever be at peace was to come back and reconcile with you. And I tell you that I've finally recovered from my financial misfortunes and I want to pay you back for what happened, but when I try to pass the envelope across the table you put your hand on mine and say, don't, I don't need it now, and I try to push it back and say, use it for your kids, for college, for something for them, and you say, I don't need it, and I can feel something turning over in my stomach, the part of you that remains forever inside of me, still wrestling with who I am.

And so I try to explain why I did what I did, why I took Dad's will in to him while he was sick and made sure that I'd be the main beneficiary even though you probably should have had at least half. When you ask me I admit the truth, that it was Mom who told me to do it, and that I didn't want to disobey her and that I had no choice. I nod and I tell you that I know it sounds bizarre now, but that Mom told me she had been having all kinds of dreams about us and told me it was the right thing to do, that it was what God would want. I know it will sound crazy to you. But what was I supposed to do? And I look at your bare head and your blue jeans and I tell you that now, all these years later, I realize it was unfair, but that it probably came down to the fact that I went to shul every day and you refused to go, that I was already planning on becoming a rabbi like Dad and you were running around eating traif and going out with shiksas on Shabbes and you acted like you had no interest at all in taking over the synagogue. That's the world they were raised in, Es. You're either in or your out. You're lucky Mom and Dad didn't sit shiva for you. Maybe it's not fair. It's just the way it is by us. But I can see you're not really listening to me and when the steak comes you slice off a piece like a butcher and devour it with no bracha and I feel as if you and I have been living on different planets.

4. Es
So I start to eat the meal we've ordered just to make you happy, because after bothering to track down the only kosher restaurant in this part of town just to please you, I'm not going to pass up on a good rib steak. But I realize I have no appetite at all and this time around, you won't get off easily just by treating me to a meal. And frankly, this talk about how Mom talked you into it makes me feel a bit sick, because that's no excuse for making Dad sign a new will when he was too ill to think straight, and woe is me, Jake, all your sob stories about what Mom wanted and what Mom dreamed just aren't going to cut it. And yeah, I've had to go through therapy, too, Jake, spent hours trying to work out why I could never do right in Mom's eyes, but when I tell you this you cross your arms lean back in your chair as if to say it isn't true. But you know, Jake, you know it is. And I suddenly remember when you came to me that night, when I had just gotten back from being out late at the clubs, and you asked me to give up my place in the will, and I said sure, what the hell, well, I thought you were only kidding. And Dad wasn't exactly about to die anyway. How should I have known you were serious? It never seemed that Dad had that much money anyway, so what was the point? We lived in that tiny apartment all those years! I assumed we were poor because Mom and Dad only bought what they needed to survive. And I watch you pick at your salad and I can see you can't eat either, and I imagine you at home with all of those children and I wonder whether they ever ask about their uncle and their cousins. I roll my eyes over the edges of your worn suit, your old briefcase with some worn Hassidish book popping out the top, the red plastic droplet on your lapel showing that you gave blood, and I realize you have become just the man Mom and Dad had hoped you would be. And for me to be a secular man, a person who didn't need your God and your rituals to be become enlightened, that was always going to put me far below a good holy-roller like you. And when you explain yourself you shuckle a little with each point, that prayer-sway I haven't seen in decades because we don't even have your type around here, it almost feels like you're bowing just for me. Towards me. And for the edge of a moment I think I see the Jacob I once loved, the smart little boy who helped Mom around the house, the handsome guy the girls all noticed, the student who had a sense of humility.

5. Jake
And I can see now that you have changed some, Es, but you haven't changed all that much, and that you're still a materialist person, still calculating what you lost in numerical estimations instead of spiritual ones. And you go back to your steak and I poke my fork around my salad, and I imagine your life now, surrounded by a family so different from the one in which we grew up, no vestiges of the religion our parents taught us, closed off  to the prayers that were a blessing to me and a burden to you. I remember that Dad said he also wanted you to be blessed, that he said he loved you no matter what. And I look down at the business card you push across the table towards me, and I see you have changed your last name, and when I ask you why, you shrug and tell me that you didn't feel the need to go through life with an annoyingly long Jewish last name that's like wearing a Star of David on your lapel. And I take the envelope again and hold it with trembling hands and I feel ashamed and my eyes fall and I tell you I really wish you would take it so I could feel right your eyes again, and when I look up again I can see in your eyes that you will never truly forgive me. But you reach across the table and upon my hand you lay yours, the dark hairs on it grown wiry with age, and you whisper OK, I'll take it, and the white flag of folded paper rises up and changes hands, and I am filled with relief and I remember that I had a brother who could also be kind and generous and I want to say so much more and nothing at all. And the final bill comes and we part, and I limp on my way and you don't even notice, and I know we are as at peace as we will ever be, and that we may be the world's only brothers who can love each other and love knowing that we will never, ever meet again.

***

Ilene Prusher is Jerusalem Bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor. She teaches creative writing at the Pardes Institute. This story comes from a larger series, titled Genesis Next.

Photograph courtesy of Channel 4: a still from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, USA Series 2

The only consolation about Benjamin Netanyahu's second government is that two months into office it appears to be the most universally disliked in Israel's 61-year history. Whether at home or abroad, no one, it seems, has anything good to say about it. Following Bibi's predecessor Ehud Olmert, that's an impressive achievement. On the eve of the Prime Minister's long-awaited speech about his approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, US President Barack Obama was already hotly rumored to disapprove of Israel's new policy, the European Union was busy meeting with Hezbollah, and 80% of Israelis polled were reported to have said they could live with a nuclear Iran--even, as the Tel Aviv University study stated, a nuclear-armed Iran.

It's not like this situation appeared out of the blue. During Bibi's first month in office, another poll showed that over fifty percent of Israelis already disapproved of his coalition. So what would compel the Likud leader to continue to emphasize links between Iranian weapons of mass destruction and the Palestinians? Maybe the Americans? Not likely, judging from Senator John Kerry's statement last week to the Financial Times that America could live with a nuclear Iran. Reiterating Obama's debut of this opinion in Cairo, the American position couldn't be any clearer. How about the newly rightist Europeans? They didn't poll well enough to make a difference, and even if they did, these conservatives are purported to hate Israel even more than Europe's left.

Indeed, its a nightmare scenario for Israel's most fluent English-speaking head of state. How did Bibi get himself into such a mess? Was it his inability to do anything besides assert leadership over the country's right-wing parties? Was it Tzipi Livni's refusal to enter a coalition government? What about Netanyahu's deep ties to Jewish power-brokers in the Diaspora? Couldn't they have tipped him off better? Why did his aides not serve him with better information on the Americans? None of this was hard to predict, especially Europe’s continuing ambivalence and the seemingly new American attitude.

Throughout the presidential campaign, rightist activists and pundits across the Jewish world warned repeatedly of the dangers of an Obama-led US government. It would be friendlier to Muslim states and seek diplomatic over military solutions to problems. And it would be led by a mixed-race black politician with a far more troubling intellectual pedigree than any previous president—a pedigree that would insist, for example, on the difference between “Likud” and “Israeli.” Contrast that to a predecessor who when first asked couldn’t say where Afghanistan was located. Much to the right’s chagrin, everything that Obama has done since entering office has affirmed their predictions.

Nevertheless, the Netanyahu government has gone about its business assuming that the status quo would somehow stand, and that Israel and America would share the same policy goals and the same general approach. This US government was supposed to support Israel like other administrations had, if not perhaps as much as the Bush administration. And Israel would continue to perform itself as it always had, paying lip-service to the peace process, disciplining the Palestinians, and dealing with its neighbors as it so chooses. No wonder Bibi's aides have been so surprised at the lack of cooperation from the Americans.

Blame it on the differences that inevitably characterize the clash of two distinct governments. Pin responsibility on Ehud Olmert's inexpert handling of the Lebanon war, his corruption, or Tzipi Livni's inability to successfully negotiate a coalition agreement with Labour, let alone all of the other parties with whom she could have signed deals. Lots of players can take the blame. The point is that even without these variables, we’d be facing the same conflicts between Bibi and the rest of the world due to the pathology that the Prime Minister represents—not to mention his already problematic relations with the Clinton administration during the 1990s.

To put it bluntly, Netanyahu was the worst conceivable contender for the job. He’s displayed a stunning obliviousness to the changes in US strategic thinking, let alone American society, as a consequence of the Bush years. To borrow from the language of psychoanalysis, denial comes to mind. What else could one infer from Bibi's words of frustration—"What do they want from me?"—following his first meeting with Obama? It’s indeed unprecedented that his negotiating team wouldn’t be prepared for the Americans to insist on a total freeze to settlement building, and that Israel's leader would choose to persist in differing with the US so far as allowing ministers and military leaders to continually criticize the Americans.

Did Netanyahu ever count on the US Jewish community backing President Obama's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Did the Prime Minister ever imagine that Congress might endorse the new administration taking such an initiative? No-one of any consequence in the US—not even AIPAC—has been able to extend Netanyahu an effective helping hand. The situation is that bleak. This represents enough of a massive miscalculation that it could almost be seen as the diplomatic equivalent to being snookered by a surprise attack. Netanyahu's failure to work with prior intelligence and adequately prepare makes this episode comparable to the 1973 War, albeit with the Americans.

Bibi's memory of his relations with the Democrats has similarly failed. Even the faintest overview of the Clinton era would make it impossible to conjecture that the present administration would want to work with an Israeli leader who caused them so many problems—including legitimizing the incitement that led to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, on whom the White House was counting on to deliver a peace agreement. What about the Bibi who befriended Newt Gingrich when he was leader of the congressional opposition to then-President Clinton and seeking his impeachment? Wouldn’t that inspire a sense of mistrust in a government largely made up of officials from that era?

Certainly, for anyone with a knowledge of that era, Bibi comes across as a harbinger of the negative that transpired over the next decade. Championing every major idea about the Middle East common in neocon circles today, the Israeli leader was every bit the forerunner of the Bush administration, and its emphasis upon Islam, totalitarianism and terror. Why Netanyahu never had the luck to coincide as Prime Minister with a US leader of his ideological bent will surely never cease to frustrate him. That it had to be Sharon and Olmert to sit across from Dubya, and not Bibi, will forever be his fate. The best Netanyahu could do at this point would be to invite Dick Cheney to address the Knesset. After all, Olmert already did it. Why can't Bibi?

Advance word on Sonic Youth’s latest record The Eternal was mixed. Some listeners praised it for picking up where its predecessor Rather Ripped left off, disciplining the band’s tendency for extended improvisation in single-length, propulsive tracks that pay sufficient tribute to rock’s traditional verse-chorus-verse structure without sounding too pop. Some, noting the same continuity, lamented the band’s aesthetic retrenchment, as if the experiments with form that made their music special had been abandoned for commercial reasons. And some notable critics, like Wire editor Mark Fisher, who writes under the name “k-punk,” took the opportunity to question the notion that the band was ever that innovative to begin with.

“The problem,” Fisher declared, is not that Sonic Youth failed to be the sort of “self-destructive fuck-ups” that play a central role in rock history, so much as that “they seem to be so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn't appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them. It isn't that they ‘don't mean it’ so much as they only mean it.” In other words, the band’s artistic moves have always been too calculating to seem like the expression of true feeling. “There is no sense, even in the early work as far as this listener is concerned, that the music is drawing on any unconscious material.”

As even staunch defenders of Sonic Youth will attest – and I count myself among the staunchest – there is considerable truth in this critique. In live performance, the band excels at building to forceful crescendos without ever seeming to peak personally. Almost preternaturally relaxed on stage, they manage the musical ebb and flow with the insouciance of technicians who have turned the most challenging work into a routine that doesn’t require them to break a sweat. And their records reflect the same eerie calm, even when turned up to a window-rattling volume.

If anything, The Eternal takes this sense of coolly going through the motions to a new extreme, which explains the mixed reception it has been receiving. Although I settled easily into its familiar patterns on my first listen, I still haven’t shaken the sense that they could have done more. At the same time, though, the music conjures the distressed sheen that the band’s fans love. The songs run together, but that’s nothing new. Indeed, it’s the album’s “nothing new” air that makes it both satisfying and troubling. Sonic Youth is happy to give you what you expect from them, whether you have played every one of their records so many times that they feel like bodily appendages or whether you’re coming to their music for the very first time, because you’ve heard that they are a band you simply have to experience in the course of your aesthetic education.

Although Fisher makes it clear that he doesn’t think highly of the band’s music, he acknowledges the unique place they have occupied in the past twenty-five years of rock history. “It seems to me that Sonic Youth's very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being ‘people of good taste’ - curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff.”  While this assessment is intended as a negative judgement of the band’s own music, certainly, it also provides a way of understanding the influence it can have on receptive listeners.

I didn’t hear Sonic Youth until 1988, when I was freshman at UC Berkeley.  I was browsing in Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue when I noticed that the in-store stereo was playing tones that sounded like nothing I’d heard before. Intrigued, I listened closer. Although I’d spent my teenage years thoroughly caught up in the psychedelic revival underway at the time, playing Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane when my classmates were fixated on Van Halen, I still struggled to find my way through the record’s noisy passages. They made me feel as if I’d lost my balance. But this sense of disorientation was one that I welcomed, because it was set to bass and drums purposeful enough to lead me through the sonic labyrinth. More bluntly, even though the music was radical by my standards, it still rocked in a way that made sense to someone who thought that John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow was a masterpiece.

I was sufficiently impressed by the music coming over the loudspeakers to overcome my fear of appearing out-of-touch and ask the man working the register the name of the record. “Daydream Nation,” he muttered with more than a hint of scorn. “That’s the band name?” I inquired sheepishly. “No, no,” he responded, his eyes starting to roll upward, “The band is Sonic Youth!” As upsetting as this interaction was for me – no one likes to be identified as ignorant – I nevertheless went to find the CD in the racks and then purchased it immediately. I knew that this was one opportunity I couldn’t afford to pass up.

Predictably, when I later told my more cosmopolitan acquaintances of my remarkable discovery, they looked non-plussed. I thought I’d been lucky enough to learn of obscure music with the capacity to change one’s consciousness overnight, like mind-altering drugs without the attendant consequences. But, even if they weren’t familiar with Sonic Youth, they had all heard of them. Once again I had the awkward sensation of having arrived at a party a day late, stupidly holding a six-pack whose superfluousness was made clear by the empties stacked by the door. In this case, though, I didn’t mind. The interactions I had with Daydream Nation –  it really did feel like I’d become acquainted with a new person, incredibly knowledgeable yet willing to teach me without making fun of me – were so rich that I was willing to put up with the shame of growing up far from the centers of cool.

“Malibu Gas Station” is one of the least successful songs on the new album, adhering so closely to formula that listening to it has repeatedly stopped me short, convinced I had somehow entered an artist-specific shuffle mode offering up a number from the band’s back catalogue. Although it will never be a favorite, however, I find it impossible to hear with unpleasure. The memories of what Sonic Youth did for me two decades ago are too strong. Call it reasonable gratitude or excessive fidelity, I know that listening for The Eternal’s flaws instead of its strengths would be to reject myself as much as the band.

I suspect that many of Sonic Youth’s fans feel similarly. The band falls squarely into the category of artists who have the special power to serve as a “first time” for their audience. We tend to be sentimental about those turning points in our lives when our worldview is transformed, even if they constitute a loss of innocence. Developing “good taste” in the musical sense that Fisher means forsaking, to some extent, the capacity to listen without measuring one’s own pleasure against the pleasure of others. But what I learned from Daydream Nation wasn’t just to sort the “good” from the “bad” in a more sophisticated, stylish way. As I listened to the album for weeks on end, I also learned to immerse myself in the experience of music in a manner antithetical to the passing of critical judgment.

The Eternal does not introduce any major innovations in Sonic Youth’s repertoire. The most noteworthy change to my ears is the more sinewy bottom end introduced by new bassist Mark Ibold’s playing, especially on the pleasingly pared down “What We Know.” But it’s not like founding member Kim Gordon was a slouch on bass. The guitar parts somehow sound both grittier and more focused during the verse-chorus-verse portions of songs than has typically been the case on their recent records. And the noisy interludes that interrupt most tracks, those “bridges to nowhere” for which the band is famous, feel uncharacteristically goal-oriented. Despite the fact that this is no ground-breaking album, however, it still manages to do most of the same things that Daydream Nation did. I am fairly certain, that had I been able to hear The Eternal at Rasputin’s, it would have had almost as powerful an effect on me as its much-lauded predecessor.

Maybe the best way to think about this new record, as well as Sonic Youth overall, is to reconceptualize the curatorial dimension of their work that Fisher smartly singles out. Yes, they have done an enormous amount to introduce worthy younger artists to new audiences, including notables such as Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, Pavement, Bikini Kill that they brought on tour with them. Thurston Moore, in particular, has made a point of seeking out new music and mentioning it in the course of the generous interviews he gives to publications big and small alike. But the band’s support of what Fisher terms “good taste,” isn’t simply a matter of putting their imprimatur on the music of others.

Sonic Youth have made a point of trying to collapse the divide between mass culture and the traditional art world as well, showcasing notable visual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Jeff Wall on album covers. While the gallery-hopping set might regard this as a ham-handed exercise, intended as much to benefit the band – conferring legitimacy to its choice of medium – as to benefit those visual artists, the fact remains that this move actually did introduce many fans to their work and, more importantly, inspired some of them to reflect on the relationship between different means of cultural expression. For better or worse – and I would definitely opt for better – Sonic Youth has played an important role in the reorganization of the arts that has occurred during the postmodern era. The elevation of comic books, genre fiction and, of course, popular music to the status – potentially, anyway – of “serious” art and the concomitant weakening of the distinction between “high” and low” culture that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century has resulted in a situation where the definition of “curator” itself has undergone a massive overhaul. While museum curators still exist, they have do-it-yourself competition that would once have been unthinkable.

Even if we factor Sonic Youth’s interest in bridging the gap between different media into account, however, we are still thinking of their curatorial work in terms of content. From my perspective, as someone who vividly remembers the impact that listening to their music had on my mind, the most interesting aspect of their body of work is the way it simulates a curatorial function at the level of form. The detachment the band’s members project with regard to their craft, that sense that they are technicians managing a flow, rather than embodying the stereotype of the tortured artist handed down to us from Romanticism, is doubled in the music itself, which invites listeners to imaginatively stroll down its passages at their leisure rather than forcing them to a particular destination.

Sonic Youth has certainly supported artists who used their music to vent their passions, from Kurt Cobain to Johnny Thunders, whose photograph is featured on The Eternal’s sleeve. But their greatest achievement has been to create music that avoids the sort of identification that such individuals elicit without becoming so cerebral that it denies us the pleasures of rocking out. Indeed, we could conceive of Sonic Youth’s whole project as an attempt to demonstrate that true ecstasy comes, not by living our lives through others, but by seeing how we can live differently as ourselves. The Eternal may not be their best album, but still forcefully reminds us of what their music can do for us if we open our minds to its mind-altering power.

In Part I of this series, author Ilan Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a Jew. This next section focuses on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah.


I feel a contentment in defeat.
-J.L.B., "Deutches Requiem"

I said that Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn't overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.)

It's true that Carlos Fuentes has taken up topics in which Judaism is more than tangential, writing on the Nazis in A Change of Skin, on the Arab-Israeli conflict in The Hydra Head, and on Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492 in Terra Nostra. Mario Vargas Llosa, likewise, in The Storyteller, featured a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon .More often than not, however, Jews and their contribution to Western Civilization are ignored. Typical is the magisterial oeuvre of Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, who addressed every single imaginable topic in the world of arts and letters but never addressed Jews, Judaism or JewishnessPaz wrote on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, corruption, art and architecture, the Gulags, the Mexican inferiority complex, and so much more, yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Unlike Paz, Marquez, and most of his peers, Borges made  Jews and Judaism central to his sense of self . Yet, Borges was not interested in Jews as flesh-and-bones people, overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervor, and personal passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors.

I do not mean to imply in the least that Borges did not know Jews himself, or socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he befriended a number of Jews ofPolish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and as Simón Jichlinski. They were "my two bosom friends," Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces published in The New Yorker. "One became a lawyer and the other a physician. I taught them to play truco, and they learned so well and fast that at the end of our first game they left me without a cent." He also became close to Rafael Cansinos-Assens, a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted Borges the writer was the Jew as symbol.

Self-Anointed Kabbalist

SephirotBorges' Jewish obsession starts with the Zohar, the canonical text in Kabbalah. His knowledge about Kabbalah came from secondary sources, such as Jewish Magic and Superstition by Joshua Trachtenberg, The Holy Kabbalah by Arthur E. Waite, and Le Kabbale by Henri Sérouya, as well as texts by Adolphe Franck and Knorr von Rosenroth, and the entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Borges liked the concept of Sephirot, the ten emanations of God; the method of Gematria, a kind of Jewish numerology; and the idea, expounded by Jewish mystics, that language antecedes the creation of the world.

While on a trip to Israel to receive the Jerusalem Prize, Borges was asked what he wanted to see. "Don't ask me what I want to see because I am blind," he responded. "But if you ask me whom I want to see, I'll answer, right away, [Gershom] Scholem. I spent a beautiful afternoon in his house. We met a couple of times. A charming person. He speaks perfect English." Shortly after, Borges wrote a poem about the Golem, the mythical Frankenstein of Ashkenazi Judaism, animated by a single word of its human creator. The word "Golem" in Spanish is impossible to rhyme-unless, of course, it is matched with Scholem. Herein the first three stanzas in the translation of Alan S. Trueblood, included in Alexander Coleman's Selected Poems (1999):

If, as the Greek maintains in the Cratylus,
A name is the archetype of a thing,
The rose is in the letters that spell rose
And the Nile entire resounds in its name's ring.

So, composed of consonants and vowels,
There must exist one awe-inspiring word
That God inheres in-that, when spoken, holds
Almightiness in syllables unslurred.

Adam knew it in the Garden, so did the starts.
The rusty work of sin, so the cabbalists say,
Obliterated it completely;
No generation has found it to this day.

Borges places the myth of the Golem in the kabbalistic tradition. He's interested in the power of the Hebrew language, which, according to legend, was created by God even before the universe came into being. The Argentine extends this kabbalistic infusion of words with religious magic by adding his linguistic attention to the Saussurian relationship between object and word. But Borges can't remain serious-in a winking aside to any of us readers who may have missed this deep reading of the Golem as a sign of the power of language, Borges clarifies by linking this medieval monster to the great modern master of Kabbalah:

That cabbalist who played at being God
Gave his spacey offspring the nickname Golem.
(In a learned passage of his volume,
these truths have been conveyed to us by Scholem.)

Borges had discovered Kabbalah at an early age. In a conversation with Jaime Alazraki, which took place at Buenos Aires' National Library,  Borges suggested his interest in Jewish mysticism was sparked by Dante's Divine Comedy and by his adolescent readings of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

I found it in Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy which he undertook during the Civil War to avoid thinking about the war he was too preoccupied with. There is a three-page appendix in that translation that Longfellow took from a book-I believe it was Rabbinical Literature-by J.P. Stehelin where there is a discussion of the Hebrew alphabet and of the different meanings and values that the Kabbalists attributed to those letters. And the other reference must have come from the Britannica. As a youngster, I used to come here, to the Library, quite frequently, and since I was very shy and didn't dare ask the librarian for books, I would take a volume of the Britannica, any volume, from the shelf myself.

It was not just the American writer, though, who provoked Borges' curiousity about Kabbalah. Years later, he found Jewish esoterica in, of all places, a German text as well:

The first book I read in German, when I was studying German by myself, around 1916, was Meyrink's novel, Der Golem. I was sent on the study of German by my reading of Carlyle whom I greatly admired. (Now I find his style more intimidating than persuasive.) I started by the same foolish thing many people do, by trying to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in German, a book not even Germans understand, and which very few people comprehend. Then a friend of mine-what was her name?-she was a baroness from Prague, wait, oh yes, Baroness Forschtübber, she told me that a very interesting book had just been published, a fantastic novel entitled Der Golem. I had never heard that word before. That was the first work in German I read through-the first book in prose, since I had earlier read Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo.

Many others had read Longfellow and even Der Golem without becoming caught up in Kabbalah. For Borges, part of the attraction was that Kabbalah was Jewish. As he notes in the same interview, "all things Jewish have always fascinated me." There was even more, however, a personal note:  Borges suggests that some of his interest in Kabbalah came from a desire to have some connection to religion even though he could not bring himself to believe in a "personal God."

Since I have not been able to believe in a personal God, the idea of a vast and impersonal god, the En-Sof of the Kabbalah, has always fascinated me. Later on, I have found the same, well, in Spinoza, and in pantheism in general, and also in Schopenhauer, and in Samuel Butler, and in Bernard Shaw's idea of "Life's force," and Bergson's "élan vital." All that responded to the same attraction.

Borges' first piece on the Kabbalah is called "Una vindicación de la cabala" ("A defense of the Kabbalah"). It was first published in Discusión (1932). Though Borges had thought of himself as a writer for over a decade, his style at the time was still unformed.

Neither the first time it has been attempted, nor the last time it will fail, this defense is distinguished by two facts. One is my almost complete ignorance of the Hebrew language; the other, my desire to defend not the doctrine but rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it. These procedures, as is well known, include the vertical reading of sacred texts, the reading referred to as boustophedon (one line from left to right, the following line from right to left), the methodical substitution of certain letters of the alphabet for others, the sum of the numerical value of the letters, etc. To ridicule such operations is simple; I prefer to attempt to understand them.

He talks about the Kabbalah itself indirectly. His mission is to discuss the divine nature of the Holy Scriptures as understood by Christians and Muslims. He isn't interested in religion but in the fact that "the Spirit" creates the universe, e.g., turns Himself into a Creator, an exciting prospect for a writer, a creator in words:

Let us imagine now this astral intelligence, dedicated to manifesting itself not in dynasties or annihilations or birds, but in written words. Let us also imagine, according to the pre-Agustinian theory of verbal inspiration, that God dictates, word by word, what he proposes to say. This premise (which was the one postulated by the Kabbalists) turns the Scriptures into an absolute text, where the collaboration of chance is calculated at zero. The conception alone of such a document is a greater wonder than those recorded in its pages. A book impervious to contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light... How could one not only study it to absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the Kabbalah?

Mystical Motifs

Throughout his life, Borges used a number of kabbalistic motifs, sometimes overtly, others in a tangential, even subliminal fashion. "The Circular Ruins," for instance, might be read as a tribute to the myth of the Golem. In the story, a magician who has never had a child decides to dream his own son. Night after night he shapes his successor, until the creation acquires its own life. Then there is "The Aleph," arguably Borges' most emblematic-and famous-tale. While the primary leitmotif in this story is the Divine Comedy, played out by Borges, his deceased love Beatriz, and his rival, Dante Argentino Daneri, the elusive item at the end of the men's descent is the magical "Aleph," clearly a reference to the Kabbalist's reverence for God's beginnings and the universe's mystic one-ness.

Kabbalistic themes also appear in Borges' poetry. In a sonnet about Spinoza, collected in The Self and the Other. (1964) and translated byWillis Barnstone, Borges imagines the philosopher polishing a crystal lens which gives him access to "the infinite/Map of the One who now is all His stars." Likewise, in the second Spinoza sonnet, titled "Baruch Spinoza" and collected in The Iron Coin (1976) again translated by Barnstone, Spinoza is figured as a kabbalist, summoning God from words:

The magician moved
Carves out of his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he's begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.

The persistence of the kabbalistic imagery can be traced in the story  "Death and the Compass," where the Hebrew alphabet serves as both literal and figurative map. It was published in the magazine Sur in 1942 and later gathered in Artifices (1944). It became part of Ficciones (also 1944). In his forward to Artifices, translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions, Borges writes:

Two of [the stories], perhaps, merit some comment: "Death and the Compass" and "Funes, His Memory." The second is a long metaphor for insomnia. The first, in spite of the Germanic or Scandinavian names in it, takes place in a Buenos Aires of dreams: the twisting "rue de Toulon" is the Paseo de Julio; "Triste-le-Roy" is the hotel where Herbert Ashe received, yet probably did not read, the eleventh volume of an imaginary encyclopedia. After this fiction was written, I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the time and space the story covers: the revenge might be bequeathed to others, the periods of time might be calculated in years, perhaps in centuries; the first letter of the Name might be uttered in Iceland, the second in Mexico, the third in Hindustan. Is there any need for me to say that there are saints among the Hasidim, and that the sacrifice of four lives in order to obtain the four letters that the Name demands is a fantasy dictated by the shape of my story?

Death and the Compass: From the film by Alexander CoxInspired by Spinoza,  "Death and the Compass" takes place in a European city much like Amsterdam.The genre is the detective story, but here, with a geometrical plan. The detective is Erik Lönnrot and his nemesis is Red Scharlach. (Notice the redness of the names.) Lönnrot is invited to exercise his intelligence by sorting out a series of four murders, each committed within symmetrical coordinates of time and space (December 3^rd, January 3^rd, February 3^rd, etc., in northern part of the city, the western part, etc.). The victims are all Jews: Dr. Marcelo Yarmolinsky, Daniel Simón Azevedo (the last name is Borges', too), Ginzberg or Ginsburg, etc. He comes across a book by one Lausden called Philologus hebræogræcus (1739). The victims are at times Hasidim-one of them has an octavo volume about the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tov-, or simply others taxi drivers. Lönnrot gets information from a journalist of the Yiddische Zeitung about the Tetragramaton, the four-lettered divine name: YHVH. After each murder, a sign appears: "The first letter of the Name has been written."

Red Scharlach, also known as Scharlach the Dandy, was a criminal who"had sworn upon his honor to kill Lönnrot, but Lönnrot never allowed himself to be intimidated. He thought of himself as a reasoning machine, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him, even something of the gambler." Eventually Lönnrot realizes a fourth murder is to take place in a precise time and place: March 3^rd, at the abandoned Villa Triste-le-Roy. He has suspected that maybe Red Scharlach might be the last victim but then dismisses the idea. When he arrives, he sees Scharlach. Lönnrot asks: "Scharlach-you are looking for the secret name?" Hurley's translation:

Scharlach stood there, impassive. He had not participated in the brief struggle, and now moved only to put out his hand for Lönnrot's revolver. But then he spoke, and Lönnrot heard in his voice a tired triumphance, a hatred as large as the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred.

"No," he said. "I am looking for something more fleeting and more perishable than that-I am looking for Erik Lönnrot."

Scharlach explains how he carefully executed each and every one of his crimes. Lonnrot realizes he's about to die. He considers the three symmetrical crimes:

"There are three lines too many in your labyrinth," he said at last. "I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well. When you hunt me dawn in another avatar of our lives, Scharlach, I suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B and halfway between them. Then wait for me at D, two kilometers from A and C, once again halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at Triste-le-Roy."

"The next time I kill you," Scharlach replied, "I promise you the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless."

He stepped back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.

The ending is intriguing: is the Greek line more desirable than the impenetrability of the kabbalistic quadrants? Or do they both, for Borges, ultimately lead to the "invisible and endless," the unutterable mystery of life and death?


Stay tuned for Part III of Borges and the Jews next Wednesday! Sign up for Zeek's RSS feed or our facebook page for a reminder!

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction.

The illustration of Borges was drawn by Zeek's online art editor, Maya Escobar. The image of Death and the Compass is a still from the film of that title, directed by Alex Cox and based on the Borges story.

The Holocaust Museum murder and the murder of Dr. George Tiller at his church in Wichita share several characteristics:

Both men who have been accused of the murders have long histories of involvement with ultra-right-wing political-religious groups like the Christian Identity movement. Both might, therefore, have been labeled "Christian terrorists" by the media as various other murderers have been labeled "Muslim terrorists  or "jihadis." So far as I know, this has not happened. I would add, "Thank God" for this restraint, if I thought the media would abandon that kind of labeling for every such incident.

I must admit, however reluctantly, that the media won't abandon religious labels because there is a seed of truth in them. Something about the mysterium tremendum that is at the heart of religious experience is somehow engaged in murders like these. Not only did the alleged perpetrators base some claim to legitimacy in their religious beliefs, but both attacks were aimed at sacred places: the Lutheran church in Wichita, one formally designated "sacred" by our customs; the other, the Holocaust Museum, treated essentially as a place of pilgrimage and awe even more than as a place of education.

The fact is that all our religious traditions (even Buddhism: see under "Sri Lanka") have streaks and strands of blood woven in their fabrics. Even though most of us experience a special twinge of horror when religion is invoked as the justification for murder and when a "sacred" place is the scene for murder, every tradition has been guilty of "playing God," taking the name of God in vain in order to commit acts of violence.

How can both these impulses - the impulse to celebrate our own "god" through murder and our impulse to be horrified by violence in God's Name or in God's Place -- co-exist within us?

It is because each tradition passionately teaches community in celebration of the One. Then proponents of each tradition meet other folks who claim also to be honoring The One but have a totally different set of words, symbols, metaphors, practices. THEY must not only be wrong about their connection with the One; they must be lying about it. Demonic falsehood!

It is clear that we need to strengthen that twinge of horror at "religious" violence" into a torrent. Every one of our traditions needs first to unpeel the truth of its own bloody streaks, -- in bloody texts and bloody actions -- and do penance for them.

We must not only apologize, but publicly mourn the deaths that have been committed in our name, as well as the deaths we have suffered. Lutherans horrified by the murder of a Lutheran in a church on Pentecost Sunday need to grieve the deaths of Jews who were demonized by Luther and murdered by Lutherans. Jews outraged by a murderous attack on the Holocaust Museum and by murderous attacks on civilians in Sderot need to mourn the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed by Jewish bombs.

After looking our selves in the mirror, each of our traditions, our communities, needs to make much clearer its prohibition on violence, not only within the circle of its family but toward us all, each other. No more chaplains should be hired by the military-instead, but independent clergy should instead challenge each soldier to stop killing. Congregations that observe Memorial Days and Armistice Days should mourn not only the dead but the system that killed them.

May the One Who makes harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe teach us to make some harmony within ourselves, among ourselves, for our own tribe and for all the unique and glorious tribes that You have shaped upon our planet.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director, The Shalom Center http://www.shalomctr.org; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author  of  Godwrestling - Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism,  and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on US public policy.  The Shalom Center  voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click on  http://www.shalomctr.org/subscribe

 

In the beginning: There was adam, a human being, a creature of the earth.  On the sixth day of creation, God performed surgery, removing a rib from the human, thus creating man and woman. 

 

Six thousand years later, or thereabouts

Day One: My daughter's pre-prom party:  The girls are wearing dresses up to here and down to there, exclaiming over each other's hair, make-up and outfits.  The boys are ambling around, necessary as escorts and for the photographs, trying and sometimes succeeding to be included in the girls' animated conversations.  

Dinner with other parents after: Sitting next to me at the table is a father of one of my daughter's classmates.  I've never spoken to him before, but seeing our daughters so grown up and sending them off to college, we comfortably launch ourselves into a heartfelt conversation about how time has gone so fast, and our lives and decisions have been centered around our children and now what?  He half-jokingly says he would like to have another to see if he could get it right this time.  I admit that I have no doubts that I would make exactly the same mistakes, for I am over-indulgent with my great-nieces.  I'll just wait to be a grandma.      

Day Two: Evening, at a friend's art opening in mid-town:  Kiss hello to friends and friends of friends, and introduce my friend Judy.  With Ron, whom I have known for many years, we inquire about kids and college, summer plans, and then two minutes later we cordially say goodbye.  On to Esther, whom I've met a few times and who takes immediately to Judy.  As if they are old friends, they dive into a discussion: weight loss, anti-aging products, how many languages they both speak (5 or 7 each, I can't remember), and there is an interesting, long story from Esther about how one of her American clients, Bob, called from Turkey because his mother had taken sick on a cruise and was in a Turkish hospital.  Esther lived in Turkey as a young girl, and so she was enlisted to speak Turkish to the hospital.  Bob had introduced himself early on as father Bob, so Esther asked him how his daughter was.  She'd thought that he was certainly very old to have a daughter who was 80 and when poor Father Bob responded that he did not have a daughter, she realized - he was a priest!   I am personally not at all surprised that Esther is fast friends with a priest and now has a close relationship with the hospital staff in another country.  For all her language skills, the word "stranger" is foreign to her.

After the opening: Judy and I are walking on Madison Avenue, looking at restaurants where we might have a drink and a snack.  We are solicited by a tall, dark, handsome young man.  He entreats us to come to his restaurant.  He seems enamored by Judy, and so I impulsively say sure.  Throughout the hour that we are there, he comes by to check on us.  He hovers.  In the end, I excuse myself to go to the ladies because maybe Judy wants to give the other half of the earth creature an opportunity to connect.  When I return, sure enough, he is trying to persuade Judy to see him in the Hamptons!  He is, coincidentally, Turkish. 

Day 3: Breakfast with a friend the next morning: A fellow convert, Wendl recounts a recent class on the book of Ruth in which the rabbi had asked everyone to imagine themselves as Oprah, Ruth's sister-in-law who chose not to go to Israel and instead, remained with her own people.  Wendl pragmatically understands that Oprah wouldn't relish being a stranger in a strange land, which reminds me of how many stories in the Bible are themed around being a stranger.  "Who are you?" seems to be the operative question - Isaac to Jacob/Esau, Jacob to the angel, Moses to God, Boaz to Ruth, Judah to Joseph...  We are so often strangers to one another, circling around politely, but now and again, striving to break through.

Day 4: At my soon-to-be-niece's wedding shower in Chicago:  Saying our goodbyes post shower, my brother-in-law attempts to join my little group of women.  We are in the throes of a discussion on uncomfortable high-heels and what to do, what to do.  He eventually walks off and attaches himself to a few other females.  Within five minutes, he's back with us, only to realize that shoes continue to rivet us.  He leaves.  For good.  Later, I'm appalled at how we'd excluded him, just because he couldn't talk insoles.

In a sauna with cousin Ruthe in Chicago: Naked, we lie on our towels while the steam floats in white wisps through the air.  We are talking about uneven periods which might be related to too little progesterone, and then Ruthe mentions the Kabbalah and how so many of our ailments have to do with imbalance in energy.   The Kabbalah, from what I've studied of it, divides God in half, sort of.  Male/female, present/separate, personal/omnipotent.  And it's our job to help to unite these various aspects of God.  I wonder if God suffers at times from too much estrogen or progesterone.  If we balance our own, can we keep God balanced?  This is fanciful and strange.  Too much steam.

Day 5 In a taxi with my friend Lili, heading downtown to a political fundraiser: Her daughter calls and she answers, "Hello, my love!"  A smile is on her face, in her voice.  When she hangs up, I whine about how I am entirely too accessible to my children and others.  This knee jerk urge to nurture.  Lili cannot comprehend this.  She confesses that her daughter has just told her she's planning to be home from college four times in the fall!  "I told her she didn't have to see me if she didn't want to."  I accuse Lili of having too much progesterone. 

At the fundraiser, in a loft with exposed brick walls downtown:  It's a ladies lunch, and there are about 100 women there.  We mill, we chat, admire each others' clothes, more shoe discussions.  Arianna Huffington is the speaker, and she charmingly declares that women live with the voice of an obnoxious roommate in our heads, a voice that makes us feel guilty, tells us we're not good enough.   When I look around, I note that most women are listening intently, as if she is their personal friend and speaking directly, intimately, to them.  We are not strangers to one another. 

Day 6 At home I walk the dogs, look in the fridge for the ketchup for Daniel, tell David I won't go out into the rain to bring him an umbrella, he can buy one himself on the street, look at Anna's graduation dress and praise it lavishly, talk to my sister on the phone about establishing boundaries with her child (as if I would know about boundaries), and ponder what kind of a beautiful mosaic these individual days of our lives with friends who once were strangers is creating.    

Day 7: "And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, for on it He had ceased from all His task that He had created to do."   I'm resting.  This is the day, say the Kabbalists, when the heavens are lowered to the earth, when the masculine and feminine aspects of God are joined.  It's a day we can re-connect to God, and also to ourselves.  Who are you?  I'm not a stranger. 

Far be it for Caroline Glick to oversimplify Barack Obama. From the very outset of her televised debate with fellow Jerusalem Post columnist Gershon Baskin, the American-born pundit made it clear exactly what she thought of the new US President's recent trip to the Middle East, and his subsequent stop in Germany. Obama had massively rebuked Israel, and had done so in four different ways:

First, he visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but did not come to the Jewish state. Second, following his speech in Cairo, Obama visited a German concentration camp instead of Israel. Third, he chose to unveil his Mideast policy on June 4th, not June 5th, the 42nd anniversary of the Six Day War. Finally, Obama asserted moral equivalence between Jews and Nazis by visiting the city of Dresden, as well as Buchenwald.

For those familiar with Glick's brand of Jewish conservatism, her criticisms of the American leader check out. Obama was not only demonstrating overt deference to the Muslim world. He'd gone out of his way to placate it as well by carefully running roughshod over the deepest of Jewish sensitivities: inferring his desire to restore the pre-1967 territorial order in the Mideast and relativizing the Nazi genocide.

Of all of Glick's objections, the President's visit to Dresden is the only one that merits additional comment, if only because it is the most ideologically complex of his gestures. Over a two day period, in February 1945, US and British aircraft dropped 3900 hundred tons of ordinance on Dresden, killing upwards of 25,000 civilians, triggering a firestorm that literally incinerated 34 square kilometers of the city.

For over 60 years, the brutality of the bombing has inspired debate about whether the Allies were justified in carrying it out. Not everyone agrees Dresden was a legitimate military target, with a reasonable number of analysts arguing that the campaign constituted a war crime, that Dresden was in fact Germany's own Hiroshima, albeit one triggered by conventional weaponry. Needless to say, 12 weeks after the raids, the Nazis surrendered.

This is why its important to understand the subtext behind Glick's concern about the rhetoric of equivalency. Beneath it lies the fear that the President's decision to acknowledge the possibility of US war crimes might lead to a willingness to give in to "today's Nazis," the Arabs, and eventually acknowledge claims about Israeli culpability for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

If Obama could apologize for the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government by the CIA, call the US invasion of Iraq a "war of choice," and acknowledge, however carefully, the undeniability of Palestinian suffering, as he did during his speech in Cairo, it would be hard to argue otherwise, at least theoretically. In practice, its another story. The point is what this says about Glick's anxiety, and how we might see it as an example of that being experienced by the larger Jewish right.

Despite frightened reactions to Obama like this, it has been more common than not for Diaspora progressives to condemn Obama's recent positioning on Israel as having been insufficient. At precisely the time when the President could have elaborated a more radical agenda for the Middle East, instead he chose to still defend Israel, prosecute America's war in Afghanistan, and continue US support for distinctly non-democratic allies such as Egypt. At no point was any such threat to Israel perceived. Again, it was being sheltered by the US, albeit disengenuously, through a new deployment of liberal rhetoric.

One participant in a discussion list I subscribe to offered perhaps the hardest hitting leftist critique I encountered when he stated that Obama wasn't trying to destroy Israel, as critics like Glick fear. Rather, he was attempting to revive the notion of a 'liberal Israel,' albeit one that could more rationally serve American interests if it were not engaged in a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and antagonizing Iran. Obama wasn't trying to solve the problem of Israel itself. He was simply trying to use the country differently than it had been by previous US governments.

With certain exceptions, very few likeminded progressive critics chose to emphasize what Obama did say about Mossadegh, about Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but especially concerning those things which undoubtedly were heard as threatening by Jewish rightists. It was as though conservatives and progressives were listening to two very different Obamas, each of which was equally disappointing, albeit for entirely different reasons.

The reason why its important to pay attention to the differences between the way right and left speak about Obama's approach to the Middle East is that its impossible to get a sense of the President's actual impact without assessing such disparate responses. Considering that American policy has historically followed a conservative agenda in the region makes it that much more important to hear conservative complaints during such times of policy change, not to mention progressive concerns that he isn't going far enough in his reforms.

This is where Dresden rears its head again, and why its example so clearly matters. Glick and many like her seem to voice anxieties about Obama's rhetoric of equivalency because--at least symbolically--he’s trying to revive the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However problematic, such a settlement would mean righting Israeli wrongs, regardless of any Arab responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians.

It would also mean that the Israeli government would have to acknowledge that it was wrong to settle the territories and embark on a program of nation-building that depended on making the Palestinians disappear. Allowing Palestinians to build their own state, however imperfect, means recognizing their right to national liberation as equivalent to that of the Jews. The Israeli right fears that any attempt to portray the Germans as victims leads to a similar appreciation of their Arab other, the Palestinians.

Hence the fear of acknowledging German suffering, in Europe of all places, and of tying all concepts of equivalency to Germany's example. It highlights the instability of portraying the Palestinians, albeit the Arabs, as Nazi stand-ins, while at the same time alluding to the surplus stereotypes that progressives frequently apply to Israelis. That we actually are the real Nazis, insofar as like them, our concept of a Jewish state by necessity does not allow for the existence of someone else.

This is why I welcome President Obama's recent positioning on the Middle East, and regard it as being constructive. Because it is so deeply upsetting to those who would prefer to maintain the present status quo, because it is a catalyst for reflection on the profoundly complex knots we've used to bind ourselves to the situation, which blind us to the distinctions between German and Palestinian, let alone Nazi and Jew, anything that helps tear down these walls, to quote Ronald Reagan, will do.

Considering the religious allusion in the title of Inbar Bakal’s debut album and the fact that this child of Yemenite and Iraqi parents was raised in a traditional househould that had little in common with the faux Southern Californian cultural scene of beachfront Tel Aviv, it makes perfect sense that her music sounds a little behind the times. But the era to which she transports us is not the pre-modern world so much as the 1980s.

Although the tablas, oud and bouzouki on the record impart the flavor of true folk music, they struggle to avoid being reduced to the least common denominator of the synthesizers that ground each track. Surprisingly, however, Song of Songs works in spite or, perhaps, because of this antagonism. The fact that Bakal’s supple, multi-lingual singing has to thread its way through chords straight out of Peter Gabriel’s back catalogue gives it an impact that a more traditional musical setting would not.

More specfically, in reminding listeners of her Yemenite forebearer Ofra Haza, who managed to achieve international crossover success while proudly embracing her non-European heritage, Bakal helps to conjure nostalgia for the heady days when the rise of World Beat suggested that a new world order might be shaped with music instead of war.

Since this is Bakal’s first collection, it’s hard to determine how much of its time-out-of-joint feel was deliberate. There was a time when the work of musicians aspiring to professionalism came drenched in the difference-leveling tones of synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7, which brought the digital age to keyboards. While artists with punk roots tolerated the sonic muddiness that came from recording with limited time and money, those who wanted to mimic the sheen of major-label releases, from Bruce Springsteen to Sade, could make up for their lack of financial resources by studding their music with electronic beats and chords of superhuman smoothness.

So prevalent was this approach that most recordings from that era, no matter how big or small, sound distressingly similar to contemporary listeners. As the decline of the compact disc as a commercially viable medium has picked up its pace, vast numbers of remaindered records, the ones with the notch cut out of their plastic case, have surfaced at discount stores, making apparent the extent to which even self-produced albums of dubious merit share the DNA of platinum sellers from the 1980s.

Needless to say, the possibilities for new artists to express themselves musically have expanded vastly in the era of low-cost computer production. A teenager alone in her bedroom can capture the artificially enhanced brightness of Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” if she wants, without ever having to invest in a real synthesizer. Or she can inexpensively record the burblings of her backyard sprinkler system and then slow them down into delightfully organic hip-hop beats in a matter of hours. Everything is permitted, provide you have access to a decent computer set-up and field recorder.

It is telling, then, that Song of Songs, has the sonic texture of recordings from a time when such permission was much harder to come by. Bakal’s attempt to integrate traditional Yemenite music with anonymously professional Western sounds doesn’t always succeed. But the awkwardness that results is sometimes fortuitous. On “The Bride,” for example, a song about a young woman who pleads to avoid a forced marriage to an older man, the content of the music mirrors the form of the music to a startling degree.

Her desire for a modern bed, signaled by the synthesized timpany and drone that both sets the track in motion and undergirds it throughout, is insistently undermined by propulsive reminders of her heritage that insinuate themselves into the aural foreground. Listening to “The Bride,” listeners can viscerally comprehend the reason why Bakal felt it necessary to leave her homeland, where she served as the first female officer in the Anti-Aircraft Combat Division, and relocate in Los Angeles. It’s a powerful song, one that elegantly showcases Bakal’s artistic promise. The album’s opener, “The Battle of Jerusalem,” is similarly effective, achieving a dance-friendly momentum that recalls the great 4AD band Dead Can Dance.

Other tracks, like “Song of Songs,” are somewhat less successful in this regard, not because they lack good ideas, but because the sonic balance tips too far in the direction of the digital age. Instead of sustaining the tension between old and new, traditional and modern, they imply that technology has managed to transcend it, imbuing the album with too many moments of mirror-shaded confidence. For someone who was relieved when the culture of the 1980s gave way to grittier, more sonically diverse work, the album’s slickness can be hard to swallow.

From another perspective, though, that failure might also be perceived as a kind of success. For in recalling the rise of World Beat and its incarnation in Ofra Haza, the first Israeli popular musician to achieve major international success, Bakal’s debut inspires nostalgia for an era that seems increasingly hopeful in retrospect, at a time when political and economic pressures have done major damage to the American Dream and its Israeli counterpart.

By invoking this musical heritage, Song of Songs suggests that the traditions that hold us in bondage are not only the ones that hearken back to tribal ways, but also those of more recent provenance. After all, World Beat was fueled by the optimistic conviction that cultural and political progress go hand in hand. These days, by contrast, we live at a time when the expansion of musical possibilities only serves to underscore the contraction of political options. Significantly, Bakal describes her relocation to Los Angeles as a learning experience she would have been hard pressed to achieve back home. “I’ve spoken with more Palestinians here than I ever had the opportunity to talk to back in Israel.” In the Diaspora, she continues, “I found a whole new way of listening.”

Meditations on Nomadology

"Then later, people would ask me ‘Who are you? Where do you come from?' and I didn't know what to say."

I am not the place where I have come from and I am not the place where I am going.  My whereabouts are not recorded by the hands of contiguous faction.

Why you thought I was _______ and ______ and______and_______.

A whole religion built around historical homesickness.

Cattle, chattel, capital.

Lisa Maria and I feverishly desired to become lost.  Packed a satchel of food and walked for miles through cow fields until the shape of shadows and oak became unrecognizable. And then at last.  Joy. Nothing we had seen before.

Because my people lived everywhere.  What I am not.

"Everywhere in the music, the memory of persecution."

Wanting to pass through, pass over, this last part of you, I am left without a language to describe your lips.  More frightening, is I have forgotten their contours.  But your feet, shoes revealing toes, I see while walking, walking, out the shoreline. Mediterranean. And into dusk.

You loved falafel the first time you tried it, my mother said. 

A humor that does not leave. Even cutting the skin of the skullcap to retrieve or extricate or abandon, toss out parts, does not allow for escape. It sits in the bones and forgets to decay.  Why you could pretend to be Hitler in the mirror. 

On a train.      One hundred refugees.       Mostly children.       For at least ten days.
Forced to turn back.  Seven kilometers.  From the border.

He said his grandmother would make fun of him if she knew he was dating a white girl.  A Song: 506 years of resistance.  The boundaries of Panama, where your mother's mother walked from.  And what commingled in our flesh for 365 days times 3. Incantation.

Marginalisms. Colonial fetishes. Defined as exotic. Instead of being called American you are conveniently called one who could be from anywhere. 

The border.  Completely opaque in this light. Completely unintelligible.

"Always kept out of political decision-making, portrayed through history, as anti-social, without a culture of their own." 

The loss of not returning and the images of not enough room for the dead.

Boat people. Not allowed onto land by either country.         Wait.
While half are swallowed between mainlands. 

During a layover in Las Vegas the undercover cops in "Hawaiian" shirts handcuffed 30 people together as they exited the plane. Signed, Return to Sender

I was the most content while moving (the transition between spaces) and when we were the most poor.  Slept in the same bed with my mother. And in the compactness of our living, there was less separation between she and I and she.

What is left of an Afghani daughter, of a twelve year old girl, now 30 miles from the border of Pakistan, who cannot forget the vision of cadavers?  She will say, it is not true the U.S. has avoided the homes of civilians and then she will list off hundreds of names the land of the free has never heard of. 

Samuel recommended they name the baby girl Ocean.

The first time he met her, called her Ochun.  It was a hard act to follow.

Samuel's father carried him in a basket to the other side of Tijuana: a border called the United States.

When she went to the Philippines to visit family, she sent him old-fashioned love letters across the digital highway.  And it was as if water did not separate their bodies.

Bodhi, Hata, and Tai used to attempt walking through walls. 

At thirteen, I would lie in the dark while listening to my mother's Ram Das records.  Attempting to lift out of the body.  To float out of ligaments. Tare from the aperture. To look down and see the body of someone else.

To hear voices without bodies.

To see bodies without voices.

It begins with no other way in or out.

A place where the earth has separated. The bilingual conversation between tectonic-plates.  Canyons. Ravines. Quicksand. Difficulty walking across the Russian River.

These are natural borders.

********

 

Of Gladiolas
for Sandaka

Sandaka 21 passed through a functional existence not long ago
to a single emerald checkpoint.
“the window simply fell on top of me in pieces.”
have you ever wondered in the sky was falling?
all the charms of a blowtorch.
since he was described as fighting for life.
others fought for life with all the charms of a blowtorch.
parts of his body.  gladiola of satorious

plateaus of oblique cords, sternum of radiator
and antennae of pyramidalis.

closest to bearded fellow.  parts flung 30 ft.
dragged from Street of Prophets.  what a beautiful city.
the mother tongue can’t save you now.
Sandaka where are you?
an officer described tonight as fighting for his life.
parts of his body.  the same intimacy now breeds skull and femur hanging.
what is buried under the Street of Prophets?
did you know him?  did you ever make-love to him .  .  .
Sandaka, 21.
a bearded fellow walking along the Jerusalem thoroughfare.
did you know him? in his black skullcap
disguised as ultra orthodox.
gladiolas.
swallow.  hand me the Kiddush Cup.  take a shot.
managed to reach into his bag in time to.  drink.
where the persimmon tree used to be.
concrete barriers. all the charms of a blowtorch.
did you know his body inside and out?
Sandaka, 21 where’s your mother.
the front window simply fell on top of me.
parts of his body flung.
before clashes. 
before green lines, checkered, graphed, dug into sand.
before Sandaka.  a functional existence not long ago.
smiled from the corner of his mouth.
this man in a black skullcap, disguised, flung 30 ft.
managed to.  all the charms.
Sandaka 21 described as Sandaka 21.  fighting for his life.
a busy thoroughfare called Street of Prophets.
he did not say a word.  bearded.  twenty bodies.
twenty existences not long ago.
Sandaka asks from afar, “will you sing to me of gladiolas?”

*****

Of What is No Longer Skin

 

From here the absence of color and borders except that which separates Jordan and the Dead Sea and so far little changes except I have sat long enough to unfasten and finally completely multiple borders turn into uncut lines and only the timbre of many voices name something narrow. When I dream we are migrations through many continents and I no longer crave meat or water or coconut only see them falling with bodies and the ground opening to clean away all that is sinking. My mother’s face shrivels onto duplicate shards as I drift higher into a hexagon of shapes with sheer borders. Who has known the subject of these ligaments? Lifted into a prism, I hear people with laryngitis screaming this is our land not yours because I have shown up without a face again. The front half of my body burned from the blast does not peel away or regenerate.  Nothing to discard. For you Ziya, each lung is a ravine where oxygen slips from punctures. As for me, burnt perverted skin melds to a skull where I am unidentified by those who unveil me.

 

 

 

Mara Leigh Koslen is a 2009 recipient of a Regional Artist Project Grant, sponsored by the North Carolina Arts Council, and is completing a book of poems that centers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can find her work in the Asheville Poetry Review, One Less, Chain, For Immediate Release (www.poetz.com/fir/), and Pig: A Journal, among other places. She has performed her poetry in the United States, France and the Netherlands and holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University.

 

Images by artist Laurie Sucher 1942-2009

 

If I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata...-J.L.B., "The Secret Miracle"

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of unworthiness. He was, he claimed, unworthy of friendship, love, and public attention. The more he achieved, the more puzzled he was by the towering praise that had descended on him. And he kept on waiting for the day when people would finally recognize how mistaken they had been about his genius.

Borges felt a particular affinity towards Jews in part because of the shared psychology of self-deprecation. In stories like "Unworthy" he featured Jewish protagonists struggling to find a sense of self-worth. The Jewish characters in his work in many ways stand in for Borges himself, reflecting his own complex views about his identity.   

My intention in this four-part series is to reflect on Borges' vision as manifestedin his life and his oeuvre, offering a detailed, even talmudic look at Borges through acatch phrase here, motif there, a plotline. I must confess, as I embark upon this journey, that Borges oeuvre has been, for me, a Jew raised in Mexico, a map of identity. Through his meditations on time, dreams, doppelgangers, God, I have learned what it means to be a Hispanic Jew.

***

Borges wasn't an aristocrat, although often he behaved like one. His past was not unillustrious: one of Borges' grandfathers, Francisco Borges Lafinur, had fought at the Battle of Caseros against the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas; he died in the Battle of La Verde, which was part of General Bartolomé Mitre's failed arms uprising against Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.  However, Borges himself had not inherited this macho gene, confessing in his "Autobiographical Notes" (The New York Times, September 19, 1970) that "I spent a great deal of my boyhood indoors." He yearned, he wrote, "for that epic destiny which the gods denied me, no doubt wisely."

Rather than drawing on the line of Francisco Borges Lafinur, Borges more frequently drew upon a largely ethereal  connection with the soldados in Argentina on his mother's side of the family.  Simply put, Borges refurbished his background, making it look more distinguished that it was; or more suitable to the ethos that defines a life spent with too many books around and too little adventure. He used literature to become what he felt he was not, to become the warrior he could never be. [jgk1] .

***

As Borges searched for a genealogy he could truly own, he returned again and again to the Jews. His genealogical tree doesn't show any Semitic lineage. But he longed for one. In a poem written in 1967, celebrating the triumphant Six-Day War in which Israel defended itself against its Arab enemies, he wondered if Israel, as an emblem, could be found in his genealogy. Indeed, he faithfully searched throughout his entire life for a trace of Jewish blood in his ancestry. This is poignantly clear in a brief essay called "Yo, judío," "I, a Jew," whose historical value is decisive in understanding Borges' interest in things Jewish. Over the years, that interest, in its different facets, and to various degrees of success, has been explored by academics like Edna Aizenberg, Saúl Sosnowski, and Jaime Alazraki. Here is the first paragraph of "Yo, Judio" in Eliot Weinberger's English translation, included in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fiction (1999):

Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past is one of those things that can enrich ignorance. It is infinitely malleable and agreeable, far more obliging that the future and far less demanding of our efforts. It is the famous season favors by all mythologies.

"I, a Jew" appeared in the April 1934 issue of the Buenos Aires magazine Megáfono. It is among the least known essays by Jorge Luis Borges, who saw it as an orphan piece, never collecting it in Other Inquisitions or any of his nonfiction volumes. It has always been available in Spanish in one form or another; before Weinberger included it in his Selected Non-Fiction, it surfaced briefly in English in an American anthology published by E.P. Dutton called Borges: A Reader (1981), edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Thomas Colchie.  The essay continues:

Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol [Crucible], in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my "Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden" (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me).

Borges reacted with enviable concentration, even stalwart conviction, to an accusation, made in 1934 by the magazine Crisol, that he was indeed a Jew. The accusation came from an anti-Semitic faction of the Argentine intelligentsia and had as itsobjective to discredit Borges in public opinion. He, in turn, took the accusation as a compliment.

At the time of the publication of "Yo, judío," Argentina, in what proved to be a pattern throughout the century, was ruled by the military. In 1933, Megáfono had devoted a full issue to Borges, who was regarded locally as what the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío once described, in general terms, as "un raro"-a Wildean dandy, an Europeanized auteur infatuated with metaphysics and prone to an obtuse vocabulary. As a response to the Megáfono festschrift, the right-wing, nationalist periodical Crisol, also published in Buenos Aires, attacked Borges for hiding his "Israelite" origins. "Yo, judío," his brave and unapologetic response to Crisol, pointed out, in the measured prose that was to become his trademark, a deep desire to find the missing link in his ancestry-the Jew in the mirror. The essay continues:

Borges Acevedo is my name. Ramos Mejía, in a note to the fifth chapter of Rosas and His Time, lists the family names in Buenos Aires at that time in order to demonstrate that all, or almost all, "come from Judeo-Portuguese stock." "Acevedo" is included in the list: the only supporting evidence for my Jewish pretensions until this confirmation in Crisol. Nevertheless, Captain Honorario Acevedo undertook a detailed investigation that I cannot ignore. His study notes that the first Acevedo to disembark on this land was the Catalan Don Pedro de Azevedo in 1728: landholder, settler of "Pago de los Arroyos," father and grandfather of cattle ranchers in that province, a notable who figures in the annals of the parish of Santa Fe and in the documents of the history and the Viceroyalty-an ancestor, in short, irreparably Spanish.

Two hundred years and I can't find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.

I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.

The final section of "Yo, judío" is emphatic. In it Borges establishes, once and for all, his unquestionable loyalty. In a country like Argentina where anti-Semitism is a norm, he made a commitment to connect with the Jewish community in Buenos Aires.

Statistically, the Hebrews were few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan province everywhere? Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews, but never Phoenicians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyians, Cyclopes, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of Memphis, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gift was granted.



In the context of Argentine letters, and, by extension, in intellectual circles of the Hispanic world in general, Borges' positive interest and appreciation for Jews is a rara avis. No other non-Jewish author from the region addresses Jewish themes with the depth and complexity of the Argentine. The question, one wonders, is why. How is it than in an area so given to ignoring lo judío comes along so influential and visionary a figure?

***

Borges learned about Jews from books, of course. While still young, he read James Joyce (whose character Leopold Bloom stroke him as emblematic of "the Wandering Jew") and Franz Kafka, a writer who inspired him to such an extent that he translated Kafka into Spanish and for decades was among his first, and sole, promoters in the Spanish-speaking world. Gustav Meyrink's German novel The Golem also left a deep impression. The Hassidic tales compiled by Martin Buber exercised a fascination for him. At different points in his life, he even expressed interest in learning ancient Hebrew. (He eventually settled for other ancient languages, including Anglo-Saxon.)

Jews had arrived in Argentina in waves from the fifteenth century onward, starting with a wave of marranos, New Christians and crypto-Jews who came escaping the Inquisition. Arriving from Portugal, the Netherlands, Northern Africa and, of course, Spain itself, these Sephardic Jews spoke Spanish and slowly disappared into the Argentine melting pot. The Argentinian Jews Borges knew best were from a very different past, part of hte immigrant wave of Ashkenazi or Yiddish-speaking Jews who arrived  roughly between 1880 and 1930, escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Bythe time Borges came of age, it was these Ashkenazi Jews, mostly poor and uneducated, who were a fixture in Argentinean society.

Jews, for Borges, thus were Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Joyce and Buber, the Jews who had arrived in Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century. They were not some distant fantastical race, but a people Borges knew. He maintained closed ties with a handful of urbane, forward-looking Jewish intellectuals, among them his tutor Alberto Gerchunoff, considered the grandfather of Jewish-Latin American letters with his collection of vignettes, The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, originally published in 1910. And he understood the vagaries of their fate: as a young man, Borges traveled with his family to Europe, where they were caught up by World War I.

Five years later, Borges and his family were able to return to Buenos Aires. The contrast between the Old World and the New affected him deeply. While biographers note that this trip gave Borges a new perspective on his homeland (with its national types, the gauchos, compadritos, orilleros), it also fed his fascination with the Jews who had left that older world, the Europe in decline.

***

A story by Borges emblematic of his relationship with Jews in Argentina is "Unworthy," included in Doctor Brodie's Report (1970). As its title suggests, the theme returns to the issue of unworthiness at the heart of Borges' oeuvre. Architecturally, it is shaped as a story within a story. The story begins with the narrator describing his friendship with a Jewish businessman, don Santiago Fischbein, the owner of the Librería Buenos Aires on Calle Talcahuano. This early section allows for insightful views on politics in Argentina:

Fischbein had tended toward the obese; his features are not as clear in my memory as our long conversations are. Firmly yet coolly he would condemn Zionism-it would make the Jew an ordinary man, he said, tied like all other men to a single tradition and a single country, and bereft of the complexities and discords that now enrich him. I recall that he once told me that a new edition of the works of Baruch Spinoza was being prepared, which would banish all that Euclidean apparatus that makes Spinoza's work so difficult to read yet at the same time imparts an illusory sense of rigor to the fantastic theory. Fischbein showed me (though he refused to sell me) a curious copy of Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, but my library does contain some books by Ginsburg and Waite that bear Fischbein's seal.

Fischbein himself then takes control of the narrative. He tells the narrator a defining anecdote of his past, when he was still struggling as a Jew to become Argentinean. "I don't know whether I've ever mentioned that I'm from Entre Ríos," he states. "I won't tell you that we were Jewish gauchos-there were never any Jewish gauchos. We were merchants and small farmers." In a single, decisive stroke, Borges demystifies the tradition of Jewish gauchos eulogized by Alberto Gerchunoff and others. Kindling a debate that continues to this day, he suggests that the early chapter of the Ashkenazi immigration to Argentina, turned through nostalgia into a usable bucolic past, is fiction.  

The sociological component in this story becomes even more tangible, as does the debate on identity. How have Argentine Jews solved their dilemma of belonging? How do they understand the concept of homeland? Fischbein's parents moved their family to Buenos Aires, where they opened a store. They lived in a neighborhood where there were street-corner gangs. The anecdote Fischbein tells is of his friendship with one of them, a compadrito whom he perceived as a hero: Francisco Ferrari. "He had black hair and was rather tall, good-looking-handsome in the style of those days. He always wore black." At one point, a gang harrasses Fischbein and Ferrari rescues him. Fischbein idealizes him and Ferrari invites him to his clan. It happens, again, just as Fischbein is struggling to find his Jewish-Argentine identity. "I don't know how to explain it to you," Fischbein tells the narrator:

Today I've carved out a place for myself. I have this bookstore that I enjoy and whose books I read; I have friendships, like ours; I have my wife and children; I've joined the Socialist party-I'm a good Argentine and a good Jew. I am respected and respectable. The man you see now is almost bald; at the time I was a poor Jewish kid with red hair in a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. People looked askance at me. I tried, as all young fellows do, to be like everyone else. I had started calling myself Santiago to make the Jacob go away, but there was nothing I could do about the Fischbein. We all come to resemble the image others have of us: I sensed people's contempt for me, and I felt contempt for myself as well. At that time, and especially in that setting, it was important to be brave; I knew myself to be a coward. Women intimidated me; deep down, I was ashamed of my fainthearted chastity. I had no friends my own age.

At that precise moment, Ferrari invites Fischbein to be part of a robbery. He includes him in the planning stages and gives him a specific role. Fischbein's self-esteem improves temporarily:

Friendship, you know, is as mysterious as love or any other state of this confusion we call life. In fact, I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification. However that may be, the fact was that Francisco Ferrari, the daring, strong Ferrari, felt a sense of friendship for me, contemptible me. I felt he was mistaken, that I was not worthy of that friendship. I tried to avoid him, but he wouldn't let me. My anxiety was made worse by my mother's disapproval; she could not resign herself to my associating with what she called "the riffraff," nor to the fact that I'd begun to ape them.

True to his unworthiness, Fischbein becomes an informer-a Jewish informer. Shortly before the robbery, he goes to the police station and lets the authorities-the hated authorities-in on the details of the plot. One of the officers asks him: "Are you making the accusations because you think you're a good citizen? Is that it?" The response is symptomatic: "I didn't feel he'd understand, so I answered. ‘Yes, sir. I'm a good Argentine'."

As expected, in the middle of the robbery the police appear. Fischbein hears four shots. Ferrari's body and that of one of his accomplices are dragged out of the building. They had been shot at point-blank range. Fischbein adds: "In their report the police said the robbers had failed to halt when they were ordered, and that Ferrari and don Eliseo had fired the first shots. I knew that was a lie, because I had never seen either of them with a revolver. The police had taken advantage of the occasion to settle an old score."

Fischbein's story is not a simple one. The Jewish-Argentinian world Borges creates overturns the stereotype of the Jew as guacho. Instead, Jews are  everything else: lawyers, doctors, thieves, prostitutes. "Unworthy" is a story of guilt and betrayal. A pseudo-Jewish Gaucho enters the word of gangs and hopes to become a compadrito. But in the end he is incapable of establishing his bonds to that world and joins ranks with the wrong side: the police. Borges frames the narrative from the perspective of Jewish belonging. Are Jews Argentines? Superficially they are, sometimes in spite of themselves. But as perennial outsiders, they will never truly penetrate the Argentine psyche. In other words, they might be Argentines in paper, but they'll never be compadritos.

That Borges depicts Jews as outsiders and not compadritos, insiders, is not at all meant on his part as a slight against either Jews or compadritos. Borges was envious of compadritos. They were courageous. They were brave. Yet, he, Borges, an Argentinian, did not identify with compadritos-could not identify with them. The novelist could only understand his countrymen by scrutinizing them as an outsider.  Fischbein, then, is being placed in the same subject position as  Borges himself: an interloper, a falsifier, more connected with books than with life itself.

***

I've dreamed of one day putting together a volume of Borgeana about Jews. It would include "Unworthy" as well as a myriad essays and poems I intend to mention in this series. Of course, at the center of it would be my own favorite Borges stories, including "Deutches Requiem" and "Emma Zunz," the two dealing with Ashkenazi Jews. "Emma Zunz," included in The Aleph (1949), might well be his best, although it is also among his strangest, for no other reason than the fact Borges seldom features a female protagonist in his oeuvre, let alone a rebellious one, taking the law in her own hands, as this one does. I wrote about it years ago from the perspective of Jewish theodicy: in "Emma Zunz," we have a character who defies social rules and competes with the divine.

The story takes place in early 1922, as the female protagonist, Emma Zunz, receives a letter from Brazil announcing the death of her father, Manuel Meier, also known as Emanuel Zunz. Although she is told he died of an accidental overdose of Veronal (that is, a suicide), she knows better. She recalls a scandal in his business and the fact that her father's partner, Aaron Loewenthal, drove him to his end. Borges devotes himself to exploring Emma's inner emotions and her determination to take revenge. Indeed, this is a story of an individual taking the law into her own hands. Emma recognizes that, since the facts about Loewenthal aren't known, human law is unlikely to put him on trail. Her option, then, is to devise a stratagem in order to make Loewenthal pay for his crime but in such a way so as Emma is not deemed a criminal. "She did not sleep that night, and by the time first light defined the rectangle of the window, she had perfected her plan. In the mill, there were rumors of a strike; Emma declared, as she always did, that she was opposed to all forms of violence."

What is Emma's plan? She's still a virgin. She decides to go to the pier and have herself deflowered by an anonymous Scandinavian sailor. She then goes to Aaron Loewenthal's office above the mill when he's alone. She pretends to be sexually abused by him and then kills him with a revolver. The actual scene of revenge is described in a complex manner. Here is how Andrew Hurley (Collected Fictions, 1998) translates it :

Sitting before Aaron Loewenthal, Emma felt (more than the urgency to avenge her father) the urgency to punish the outrage she herself had suffered. She could not not kill him, after being so fully and thoroughly dishonored. Nor did she have time to waste in theatrics. Sitting timidly in his office, she begged Loewenthal's pardon, invoked (in her guise as snitch) the obligations entailed by loyalty, mentioned a few names, insinuated others, and stopped short, as through overcome by fearfulness. Her performance succeeded; Loewenthal went out to get her a glass of water. By the time he returned from the dinning hall, incredulous at the woman's fluttering perturbation yet full of solicitude, Emma had found the heavy revolver in the drawer. She pulled the trigger twice. Loewenthal's considerable body crumpled as though crushed by the explosions and the smoke; the glass of water shattered; his face looked at her with astonishment and fury; the mouth in the face cursed her in Spanish and Yiddish.

Borges' scene is strikingly cinematic. He focuses on the gun, then on the victim. He then allows Emma a few dramatic words: "I have avenged my father, and I shall not be punished..." "Emma Zunz" concludes in a philosophical tone:

Then she picked up the telephone and repeated what she was to repeat so many times, in those and other words: Something has happened, something unbelievable... Sr. Loewenthal sent for me on the pretext of the strike... He raped me... I killed him...

The story was unbelievable, yes-and yet it convinced everyone, because in substance it was true. Emma Zunz's tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.

Why does Borges set the plot amidst Yiddish-speaking immigrants? As a result of his financial dealings, her father has been forced to run to southern Brazil, specifically to the Rio Grande do Sul province. He has also changed his identity by adopting another name. erHHer fathEmma's memory brings her back to her childhood in the province of Entre Ríos. But she lives in Calle Liniers, in Lanús, a middle-class neighborhood in southwestern Buenos Aires. Aaron Loewenthal's mill is on Warnes Street, in central Buenos Aires, near the Villa Crespo commercial district.

Do the names of these immigrants signal a connection to the world of the shtetl? Emma is the daughter of a newcomer, an Argentine by birth. Thus, she is a full citizen. But she still acts like an outsider. Rather than trusting the judicial system, she resorts to implementing her own punishment against her father's victimizer. Some critics approach the text from a psychoanalytic perspective: Emma and her father are united by a natural pact, which she sanctifies when an outsider distresses their liaison.

Other scholars have struggled to understand the story from an esoteric perspective. After all, the protagonist's names each have just four letters, the same as the Tetragrammaton, the divine name. The palindromic quality of the name, the two "ms" in Emma, the two "z"s in Zunz, emphasize a numerological approach. And so some scholars approach  Emma Zunz from a kabbalistic perspective, seeing Emma as a figure of  the Shekhinah, the female aspect of God. Aizenberg states in The Aleph Weaver:



Emma, her wronged and exiled father, and the embezzler, Aaron Loewenthal, reenact the mystical story of God's Daughter-the feminine hypostasis of the divine-who is separated from her heavenly progenitor and falls into an unclean physical-sexual world as a result of sin. Since the Daughter is God the Father's power of stern judgment, she proceeds to punish the wrong-doer through destruction and violence, without, however, restoring the harmony which existed in the happy days before the sin.

I believe that Borges, who was still in his forties when he crafted "Emma Zunz" (it originally appeared in the magazine Sur 167, September 1948), made Emma's odyssey far more mundane. In an interview, for example, Borges discounts any attempt to find symbolism in Emma's name, averring: "I was trying to get an ugly and at the same time a colorless name... [T]he name seems so meaningless, so insignificant."  The plot was given to him by his friend Cecilia Ingenieros. Borges in turn dedicated the story to her, saying "I was not so much dedicating it to her as giving it to her back."

Yet, it is Borges who refines the plot, making this a story of Argentine-born, educated Yiddish speakers, cosmopolitian Jews, upper class snobs who are at home neither among the "Tevyes and Yentls" of the immigrant Jewish world nor among Fischbein's compadritos. Emma is not a believer, though that in itself only serves to underscore the rebellious spirit Borges tends to identify as particularly Jewish. Her decision to act on behalf of her sense of justice, despite the social mores of her culture, places her in the tradition of biblical characters: if society isn't ready to hand in a sentence, she is ready to do it herself. Borges' idea of Jewishness emphasizes individual responsibility above social conventions. Emma's decision to give up her virginity so as to avenge her father is a sign that the higher order is more important than integrity. She is ready to sacrifice herself for an abstract idea of justice.

"Emma Zunz," finally, is, like "Unworthy," about stereotypes. Manuel Meier and Aaron Loewenthal are businessmen. Money is on their mind. Money becomes a source of dispute. They speak Yiddish. One kills the other. This is the pecuniary world of Shakespeare's Shylock. But just as Fischbein uproots the stereotype of the Jewish gaucho, Emma's action unsettles the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew: she sacrifices herself in order to achieve a superior form of justice.

Indeed, rather than (or along with) seeing her name as a symbol of the divine, one might just as easily see the name Emma as a tribute to  Emma Bovary and Emma Woodhouse, strong-willed women in the Western canon who refuse to conform to the male establishment.

***

For Borges, Jewishness is not only about being unworthy, about suffering, but about turning suffering into vision. The essential quality of the Jew is the ability, like Emma Zunz, of turning disgrace into justice, the mundane into the divine.

Emma's premediated transfiguration reminds me of an essay by Borges on blindness-his own.Borges, since early childhood, knew he would one day become blind. It was congenital in his illness. His father, among other relatives, was also blind. And blindness struck librarians in Argentina who, like him, were directors of the National library, Paul José Marmol and Groussac. In the last lecture of seven he gave in 1977 (later published as Seven Nights) Borges addressed oncoming blindness directly (in Eliot Weinberger's translation):

People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world. There is, for example, Shakespeare's line: "Looking into darkness which the blind don't see." If we understand "darkness" as "blackness," then Shakespeare is wrong.

The world the blind live in, Borges suggests, is inconvenient, but not more so that any other inconvenience that affects those people able to see. And herein his message: misfortune as a way to appreciate life. This appreciation comes from his love for Jews, who have turned suffering into vision:

A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is always one, and continually assaulted by poetry. I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging him. Or a musician feels the strange world of sounds-the strangest world of art-is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument. Fray Luis de León dedicated one of his most beautiful odes to Francisco Salinas, a blind musician.

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

A lesson, perhaps, Borges learned from his love of the Jews.

***
Borges and the Jews will continue next Wednesday, on www.zeek.net. Sign up for the Zeek RSS Feed or the Zeek Facebook Page for a reminder!

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction.

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A baby bird fell out of a tree and landed in my friend Felicia's backyard two weeks ago.  She was watering her plants and had let the dog out and saw what she thought was a dead bird.  Actually, she figured the dog had chomped it to death.  But it was warm, so she brought it inside.  "I took a teaspoon and dribbled some water into the side of its mouth, and then after a few dribbles - or maybe I was drowning it - its beak went up and down, and its eyes opened and it shook its head.  I put the towel around it and kept it warm on my lap while I did other things.  It wasn't trying to make a getaway.  Then, maybe an hour later, it got up and it could stand but it definitely couldn't fly."

She returned the bird to the backyard and fed it moistened dog food. Over the next few days, she  watched as the bird started flying up onto a chair or on the ivy.  The mother bird would come down with things in her mouth to feed the baby, and if Felicia was around, she would cheep furiously.  When the bird finally flew away, Felicia called to say she was sad, even though she knew it had to leave.  "It's kind of miraculous, you know," I told her, "that you found the bird and got her in shape so she could eventually leave." 

I thought about miracles and remembered a medieval philosophy class I took in college in which we discussed and debated the idea of miracles.  (As if we were going to come to some consensus on it.)  At issue, really, was the nature of God: if there are laws in this universe, can God usurp those laws or is God subject to them, too?  If God cannot usurp the law of gravity, for example, then is God truly Omnipotent?  And if God can, then maybe it's not a law, and therefore it might not be a miracle.  It's simply something we don't yet understand.  

It was all quite an academic conversation, and there was no satisfactory conclusion, of course, but since then, I've come to revise my idea of miracles.  Some may call it serendipity or luck or whatever, but now and again things happen and you say, you know, that was truly miraculous.  Not necessarily miraculous like the ten plagues or parting the Red Sea, things that might defy nature, but miraculous, as if God had planted someone in your path at exactly the right moment.  

Fifteen years ago, when my oldest son was in kindergarten, we were leaving the house from the top of our stoop. He was going to ride to school on his bicycle, so as he went down the stairs, I was multi-tasking and locking the door while holding the bike back with my foot. This time, the bicycle escaped, and went bouncing down the stairs into the path of my son.  It happened so fast that there was no time to scream, or to grab the bicycle, but not so fast that I didn't see in a flash that the bicycle was going to hit him on the back, that he would fly through the air and crash on the sidewalk below.  I watched as the bike hit, he flew through the air, but then a rather disreputable looking guy whom I'd noticed when we'd walked out the door, reached out and plucked my son from the air.  I raced down the stairs to my son. I think I thanked the guy profusely, but I wasn't looking at him at all, of course-I was looking down, trying to see if there was any damage to my son. When I did look up, our unexpected hero was gone. 

I know, I know: if God wants to perform a miracle, maybe Darfur would be a good place to start, not a kid falling the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  I agree.  And granted, within the scope of the bigger world of splendid, the-sun-stands-still miracles, Felicia's rescue of the bird and my son avoiding dental work and broken bones and God knows what else is not in the category of the kinds of miracles that, in the Catholic Church, might get you sainthood.  Technically, these domestic incidences don't qualify as miracles because they were in fact possible and no laws of nature needed to be abrogated.   

My mother-in-law, like me, sees miracles every day.  When my daughter is visiting a friend for the weekend and comes home safely on Sunday night, she will say, "Thank God, it's a miracle!" as if my daughter were going to China and not Connecticut.  Or, when my nephew met a lovely young woman whom he will marry this summer, she immediately declared, "It's a miracle!"  This seems not terribly flattering to my nephew, but I concur: it's often a miracle when someone comes along and you find each other.  It could so easily be otherwise. 

My mother-in-law fell and broke her hip last week but, thank God, it's a miracle, she was with family at the time instead of alone at home, and within 24 hours, she was all sewed up and is on the mend. 

A bird falls from a tree, a child falls from the stairs, people fall in love, and grandma falls on the ground.  Sometimes, not always, in various mysterious ways, somebody's there when you land. 

 

 

On a recent Friday night, Tel Aviv ran out of the Israeli equivalent of Tylenol. A killer migraine throbbing away, I went to not one, not two, but six grocery stores in search of relief. "What's going on in this city?" a clerk asked me. "Everyone's got a headache." 

Maybe it's because we have a lot to wrap our heads around. Tel Aviv, the capital of Israeli secularism, recently marked its 100th anniversary. But we celebrated under the pall of Jerusalem's changing-of-the-guard—including Liberman's ominous "If you want peace, prepare for war."

Anat Litvak, a 29-year-old educational psychologist, doesn't mince words. "I hate it," she says of the new government. “Netanyahu is a manipulator, a dictator.” When asked if this government represents her, Litvak quickly answers, “No.” Litvak feels she speaks for many Tel Avivians, "Here, I feel very much like part of the consensus," she says. "But in situations like elections you see that most of the country isn't like Tel Aviv. It’s a shock."

The gulf between Judean-Hills-ensconced Jerusalem and oh-so-Mediterranean Tel Aviv was emphasized in the February vote when Tel Aviv went Kadima and Jerusalem went Likud. 28-year-old Jesse Fox, who immigrated to Israel from the US 10 years ago, is an urban planner, activist, writer, and something of an authority on Tel Aviv politics. Fox also points to the municipal elections as yet another reflection of the division between the “young, Bohemian” city and the rest of the Israel. Ir Lekoolanu (City for All), a party Fox summarizes as a “red-green movement” meaning that it is “both environmental and socialist”, received strong support from local voters. That members of Ir Lekoolanu were once grassroots activists and radicals now sit on the City Council signifies a realignment of the city’s politics, according to Fox. “All of the energies pushing for change are here,” he says. “But the state of Tel Aviv loses to the state of Israel." 

Fox’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for politics is less than typical. Dror Goldblum, a 25-year-old industrial design student says that he didn't vote in national elections because, "I like some of the political ideologies of the right wing, but they support the religious people... no one really represents my opinion." The result? He shrugs, takes a sip of a headache remedy—a Saturday afternoon mimosa at a fashionably-low-key restaurant on Dizengoff. "It doesn't matter to me," he says of the new government.

But does Zionism still matter? Goldblum, whose maternal grandmother who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and whose paternal grandmother who was part of the Irgun in then-Palestine, holds to the notion that Israel should be a country for Jews. But for him, the choice to live in Israel is just that. A choice. He wants to live amongst his friends and family. "It's more comfortable,” he says.

Litvak, who has toyed with the idea of leaving Israel for either England or Australia, echoes Goldblum's sentiment. Litvak’s parents were propelled from Lithuania to Israel in the 1970s by a deep belief in a Jewish nation, and a desire to be part of it, “But that isn't my Zionism," she says. “I don’t have to live here. Nowadays people make a decision [to live in Israel] and some decide to leave… I can understand people who leave and go somewhere else. If I decide to stay here, it’s not about ideology.”

Though Fox is clearly a Zionist in some sense of the word, he is hesitant to call himself one. "Do I think that Jews have a right to live here and have their own country? Of course I do. But the right-wing has co-opted the word," he says. "And the way the government uses it? I don't connect with that. Zero.” 

Fox feels that just as Tel Aviv replaced Jaffa 100 years ago and Israel came to replace Palestine, today the "Zionist vision of conquering needs to be replaced with a Zionism that is more modest and sensitive... The current government is the polar opposite of what we need now."

As much as the politicians' vision for Israel isn't representative of many Tel Avivians, Fox's less-than-optimistic view is.

But the death of optimism is nothing new here—it gasped its last a long time ago. Litvak prepares to join the festivities on Rabin square in honor of Tel Aviv's 100th birthday Saturday night. She speaks about the assassination that gave the plaza its name and our generation its disillusionment, "I was 15 when Rabin died. Before that I thought my children wouldn't have to serve in the army. Now I know they'll have to." 

Between a government that doesn’t reflect the feelings of many Tel Avivians, and city-dwellers' loose attachment to both the country and Zionism, it doesn’t seem like our headache is going away any time soon. Goldblum looks a century ahead and offers a tongue-in-cheek prediction, "All the secular people will be gone. Only the (Orthodox Jews) and Arabs will be left. They'll fight each other-- and the Arabs will win because they don't go to the army." Despite the gap between Tel Aviv and the rest of the country, Goldblum's black humor is typical of both.

 

Today we mourn the death of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who has been murdered for making it possible for women to actually use their constitutional right to choose an abortion.

All honor to Dr.Tiller, who joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion. Dr. Tiller is a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense,  killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices. (The American Jewish Congress has also condemned this murder).

And all dishonor to those vicious attackers like Bill O'Reilly who have egged on the kind of violent acts that finally murdered Dr. Tiller.  And who have blasphemously invoked the name of God to justify these incitements to murder. 

The Torah's only comment on abortion makes utterly clear that it is not murder.  (In Exodus 21:22-23 we read that if someone causes an abortion but does no other harm to the mother, the agent owes a monetary recompense to the father for the loss of his potential offspring. If the mother is killed, however, a life has been killed. This passage makes clear that while the fetus is a potential person, not just tissue, it is not considered to be a human being.)

I recognize that other religious traditions do claim abortion is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine,  by state power or by murder. Two real-life cases of abortion have shaped my judgement of the practice.

One of these real-life cases of abortion happened in my own family. My father's mother-my grandmother--had already birthed five young boys when she became pregnant again in 1914.  She hoped to be able to concentrate her energy on raising those five instead of birthing more. Because abortions were illegal, she had a "back-alley" abortion--and it killed her.  So she was unable to raise any of them.  Her early death cast a shadow over my father's life till his own dying day.

The second case is that one of my friends and teachers, a great and eminent rabbi, who was the child of a mother who fled Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria. His mother was pregnant when the family needed to leave, and they knew that the underground "railroad" to freedom was bound to be too arduous for a  pregnant woman. The choices were: staying in Austria, to die together; leaving her behind, to die alone; or aborting the fetus, so that all of the family had a chance to live. She had an abortion. Today my rabbi friend says they thought then and ever since that she had given birth to the whole family.

I wish that President Obama, when he spoke at Notre Dame,  had said explicitly what these stories teach me: that women are moral beings, possessed of moral agency and responsibility in this unique situation where their own bodies are intertwined with another's; and that the lives of women would be endangered if abortion were criminalized again.

He chose instead to say only that the choices are difficult  and that unwanted pregnancies should be  minimized. The best way to minimize unwanted pregnancies would be if our culture and our government stopped running away from talking about sex! The U.S. government should subsidize comprehensive sex education and the provision of free condoms, the pill,  and other contraceptives in all American high schools,  and should require health insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control and abortion.

And I wish that religious communities would begin providing comprehensive sex education as their children reach adolescence (and probably for adults as well). In the Jewish community, sex education should be part of the preparation for bar/ bat mitzvah.

In fact, the ancient rabbis linked sexual maturity with adulthood. Rabbis originally defined the moment when a boy became an adult bound by the sacred commitments of mitzvot as the day when he had two pubic hairs. At some later point, the rabbis said that instead of checking individuals, they would settle on thirteen years and one day for all boys. But the point about puberty and sexual maturity was made. (Indeed, it is probably precisely because of the imperative need for ethical sexual behavior beginning with the onset  of sexual maturity that the rabbis thought Jews should at that point be bound by the mitzvot.)

Unfortunately, in modern Jewish life this teaching is prudishly ignored.  What rabbi have you heard ever address the new Jewish adult and the adult community about sexual ethics, as part of the public ceremony of welcoming him/ her as a bar/bat mitzvah? Time to renew this ancient teaching! We will have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and less need for abortion.

Even so, abortion will still be necessary at times-to save the life of the mother, to save the mental health of a woman who has been raped, to allow a woman to live a full life she would not otherwise have if she birthed. And so we need more heroes like Dr. Tiller, who will stand ready to protect this important right. May his memory be a blessing.

Barely a week after Benjamin Netanyahu had his first meeting as Prime Minister with Barack Obama, the two are squaring off publicly over the issue of “natural growth” in West Bank settlements. One of the more interesting circumstances about this confrontation has been the silence of the Jewish groups who are thought of as constituting the “Israel Lobby.”

In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt brought all the theorizing and debating over the role of the “Israel Lobby” in US policy to the forefront. For many, their theory seemed to have too many holes. Those who approached the work of the two esteemed international relations professors critically but rationally pointed us toward the need of a much better understanding of the Lobby and what its effects and limits were.

The confluence of that ongoing debate and the recent direction of US policy illustrates the need for a book like Dan Fleshler’s Transforming America's Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change.

This is a book that should have been written many years ago. It is full of insight into the major Jewish organizations, as well as some non-Jewish ones, working on the issue of Israel. It’s also constructive, offering practical guidance as to how those of us whose passion for peace and desire for fair treatment of Palestinians is equal to our concern for Israel’s well-being might begin to blaze a new policy trail.

Fleshler dispassionately analyzes the depth and limits of the power held by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major lobbying force protecting the status quo in US policy. Unlike Walt and Mearsheimer, who depict AIPAC as the spearhead of a virtually indomitable bastion of power, Fleshler, operating with a great deal of direct knowledge enhanced by discussions with those of us who work in the field, reveals the mix of real influence and mythology that gives AIPAC the influence it wields.

There’s a curious effect of anti-Semitism that paradoxically helps enhance the influence of the major Jewish organizations in Washington. Fleshler reminds us of Chaim Weizmann’s ability to convince British leaders that the Jewish community, thoroughly powerless at the time, could bring valuable support in exchange for British endorsement of Zionism. Weizmann capitalized on anti-Semitic myths about Jewish power and secret control. In some ways, AIPAC does the same, though I’m sure they don’t think of what Fleshler calls “power puffery” in those terms.

That is not to say that the organized Jewish community doesn’t wield considerable political power in the US. Fleshler does a masterful job of portraying the actual political influence that AIPAC and other groups wield, without either overblowing or underplaying it.

It is precisely this contextualizing of AIPAC that marks this book a success in all the ways that Walt and Mearsheimer fell short. The two professors, whose expertise does not lie in a Washington scene with which they have only a dilettante’s familiarity, can’t match Fleshler’s insight into the workings of Washington, much less the Jewish community.

Trying to analyze not only AIPAC, but also the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents, as well as the other side of the coin -- Israel Policy Forum, J Street, and Americans for Peace Now -- without any understanding of the community from which they spring is impossible. Walt, Mearsheimer, and most of the writers and bloggers who pontificate about The Lobby make this very mistake.

But it’s a community Fleshler has not only spent his whole life in, but has played a variety of key roles in. He is thus able to round out his analysis with an insider’s knowledge of the framework and a familiarity with the people he needed to interview for this book.

The particular strength of Transforming America’s Israel Lobby is that, despite his oft-stated and clear allegiance to the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” camp Fleshler largely speaks with familiarity and objectivity about the so-called “Israel Lobby groups” like AIPAC, the AJC, and the Conference of Presidents. As a result, the reader will get the insight into the mainstream Jewish community they need to understand how these institutions achieved their stature and why they pursue the policies they do.

Fleshler reserves his harsher words for extremists on both right and left. And yet, even here, his view is nuanced. When discussing one group, Jewish Voice for Peace, which straddles a line between the far left and Fleshler’s own chevra, he notes his frequent disagreements with them, but bemoans the fact that they and the groups he favors have not been able to find a way to work at some level with each other. Indeed, he’s correct—this is a serious weakness on the left, one the right experiences to a much lesser degree.

Fleshler also draws a clear line between the far right politically active groups like the Zionist Organization of America, more center-right groups like AIPAC and centrist groups like the AJC. Almost all discussions of “The Lobby” acknowledge that there is a variety of groups involved, but fail to actually distinguish between them. The differences are actually quite important.

Fleshler is driving at an alternative lobby to create significant political pressure for the course favored by most Americans, including both Jewish and Arab Americans. Polls have consistently shown that most American Jews support increased US engagement in diplomacy and pressure on both Israel and Palestinians if necessary. Yet the leadership of Jewish organizations do not reflect the views of their own constituents and members of Congress believe that Abe Foxman, David Harris, Howard Kohr and Malcolm Hoenlein represent the views of mainstream Jews. They don’t, according to virtually every poll published.

The reason for the misperception is that the segment of the Jewish community (and this is actually true of the larger American public as well) that they do represent is far more committed and active on the issue. Most who support an American policy closer to the one Obama has seemingly embarked on simply have other concerns that are higher priorities.

The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” camp needs to find a way to galvanize those people and to make Middle East peace a higher priority for them. Fleshler does a very good job of laying out both why this is so crucial and what most of the obstacles are.

And here is where I have my one nitpick with Fleshler’s book.  In his reading of the evolution of the politics of Israel in the US, he misses what I consider to be one of that history’s major turning points: Ehud Barak’s message that there is no “partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.

Fleshler does discuss the failure of the talks at Camp David in 2000. But he omits any exploration of the impact that Barak’s and Bill Clinton’s decision to lay all the blame on Yasir Arafat for that failure. It largely destroyed the peace camp in Israel and seriously impacted it here as well, despite the fact that Barak’s picture of Camp David is wildly inaccurate (see Martin Indyk’s comments here. Bill Clinton also later changed his story about Camp David, though with very little fanfare).  That needs to play a much greater role than it does in this book in mapping out a strategy for an effective peace lobby that puts the interests of both Israel’s future and Palestinian human rights together on the center stage.

That one flaw notwithstanding, from my perspective as someone who has worked in the field of Israel-Palestine peace for years, and writing from my office in Washington, it is clear that Transforming America’s Israel Lobby is the book we have been waiting for. Those of us “inside the Beltway” have long felt much of what Fleshler says.

And the way he says it is important too. AIPAC is not presented here as a monstrous behemoth, but as an organization with people who share many of the goals that the peace camp does, just with different ideas of how to get there. The alternative he calls for must be built, and what there is of it now must mobilize in support of Barack Obama.

For the first time in decades, a US President is leading a fight against the settlement enterprise. It’s long overdue, and those of us who care about Israel’s future, who care about Palestinians’ human rights, who care about peace need to do everything we can to support him. And, we need also to build for the future. Following Fleshler’s blueprint would be a great way to do it.

If the mounting litany of threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran are any indication, Israel definitely intends to go to war. Barely a day passes, or so it seems, without a member of the Israeli government making a statement about Israel's intention to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weaponry. The warnings are forceful, consistent, and, increasingly, emotionally riven. If Israel does eventually raid Iran's strategic facilities, no one will contest that Israel's intentions weren't laid painfully bare, well in advance.  As the saying goes, with repetition, truth accretes. The rest is simply confirmation.

While Israeli leaders are reknown for build up, particularly when it comes to justifying the necessity of armed conflict, this time there is something especially fatalistic about the ritual that distinguishes it from prior campaigns of this nature. It is as though the threats were meant to communicate something else, something far greater, in terms of reach, than Israel's determination to do "everything it has to" in order to insure it's security. Is it because the threat itself is no longer a sufficient deterrent? Is it because the the bearers of the message are untrustworthy? The answer is neither.

As critics of this Israeli government have repeatedly argued in reference to its proposed domestic policies, this is the first government in Israel's history that has formally called into question the health of the country's democracy. Best identified with the anti-Arab incitement of Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, (and now cabinet member Alex Miller) and to a lesser degree, their Israel Beiteinu party's proposals to swap Israeli Arab communities for settlements, for Israelis to sign loyalty oaths to the state, obtain national ID cards, and to restrict civil rights, the concerns are wholly justified. Such a political program is patently authoritarian.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's refusal to explicitly endorse a two state solution, and the verbal combat both himself and his aides have engaged in with the Americans and Europeans since assuming office is simply the foreign policy corollary to such domestic initiatives. Best summed up by the continual invocation of the Iranian threat, and Israel's willingess to "go it alone", the entirety of his government's rhetoric can be summed up in one word: fear. The only way Netanyahu and his cabinet seem to know how to govern is by fostering tension. Not just in the Islamic world, but amongst Israel's historic allies, as well, as though Israel is paranoid that the US and EU are potential enemies on the same scale that the Arabs have always been.

The resort to fear-mongering as a foreign policy strategy is not new. Ever since the establishment of the state in 1948, Israeli leaders have always been quick to advise potential Western friends of the benefits of partnering with Israel against any number of emerging threats in the Middle East. What's new, in this case, is the intimidatory quality of the rhetoric, and the suspicion it communicates that even the Americans are possible antagonists, who have to be won over, again, and remade as Israel's friends. This has been particularly shocking to those Americans who do not understand Israeli political culture, and who found themselves wholly unprepared for this level of hostility, particularly given the sacrifices the US has made for Israel over the course of the last decade.

Indeed, Israel's political echelon has demonstrated remarkably little understanding of how the new US administration's positions on the Middle East do not reflect an ideological change in Washington concerning Israel, as much as they demonstrate the maturation of American political thinking about the region as a consequence of its military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hence the Obama administration's priorities in forming alliances, facilitating dialogue, and engaging in peacemaking, where possible. These impulses are as much a product of the opportunity that the Americans have taken to learn more about the region as both a military occupier and now a local power, governing as much as engaging in warfare.

This is by no means to praise Washington's new savoir-faire as a result of its Mideastern sojourn.  However, it is to point out that the Americans have come to derive the benefits of being a Middle Eastern hegemon in a manner that Israel's most ambitious rightists can only dream of. The US may be hopelessly enmeshed in violent conflicts from Baghdad to Peshawar. Nevertheless it is anything but isolated like Israel, particularly under the presidency of Barack Obama, who wisely has sought to exploit this aspect of America's regional presence by seeking to reconcile the US with the Islamic world. It is a singular opportunity, taken by a country still at war, and this is something that despite his bluster, Bibi cannot only identify with, but similarly lust after.

The Israeli government's rage - at the Americans, at the Arabs, at Israel itself - is a reflection of the Israeli right's inability to find a space for itself in such a context, to find itself useful, or even relevant. This is where the real anger at the Americans lies. No one knows better that the last fourty years of occupation and violence could have only taken place in a context in which the US had to tolerate Israeli territorial expansion in order to eventually justify its own permanent presence in the region. In a sense, the deepening of American involvement in the Mideast, especially since the end of the Cold War, has made Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and its conflict with the Palestinians, redundant, albeit counterproductive. One cannot, logically, have both an American and an Israeli occupation simultaneously, albeit indefinitely, into the future.

Long before the promotional campaign for the new Star Trek film started in earnest, commentators had already discerned an uncanny similarity between the personalities of Spock and Barack Obama. Calm in the face of anger, collected when others are scattered, the President-to-be struck many as the ideal to which anger management aspires. Far from taking offense at the analogy, Obama was happy to declare his love for the original television series. Leonard Nimoy reported with obvious delight that, upon meeting the actor, the junior Senator from Illinois forsook the usual pleasantries for their Vulcan equivalent, saying “Live long and prosper” while making the shape of a V with his fingers. Anecdotes of our new President engaging in other Trekkie behavior, such as pretending that his wife’s new belt buckle concealed a teleportation device, added more fuel to the fire. By the time the film was released, the link between Obama’s White House and the USS Enterprise was being insisted upon with a vigor usually reserved for official marketing campaigns.

Part of that, surely, had to do with the curious circumstance that, at a time of unprecedented crisis in the print media, pictures of the Commander-in-Chief were blanketing newsstands to an unprecedented degree. At times, it was easier to pick out the magazines that didn’t feature Obama on the cover, like Hot Rod and Needlepoint Now than the ones that did. Not only was the man struggling to rescue free enterprise from the aftermath of a grave systemic failure, his public image was serving as a substantial source of economic thrust in its own right. From this perspective, connecting his Presidency to Star Trek made as much sense as tying in other commercial ventures like the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to it.

Don’t Believe the Hype

No matter how much one admires Barack Obama or wants him to succeed, it is more important than ever to obey Public Enemy’s injunction: “Don’t believe the hype.” Whether positive or negative, the media attention devoted to him is both excessive and deceptive. If asked, I’m sure he’d say so himself. Caution is especally crucial for the Left, whose membership is divided between acolytes who see every decision the President makes another confirmation of his strategic brilliance and detractors who complain that the new boss looks an awful lot like the old one. There has to be middle ground for progressives, a position from which they can give Obama the respect he deserves without giving up the right to call him on his shit.

That’s why our initial reaction to comparisons of Spock and Obama should involve raising an eyebrow to heights worthy of Mr. Nimoy. Clearly, this coupling has been backed by the rich and powerful, which provides reason enough to be suspicious. Whoever floated the rumor that the President had requested a special screening of the new film at the White House made it painfully clear that the analogy was breathtakingly safe.

Political Allegory and Popular Culture

Once upon a time, the move to interpret popular culture allegorically was fraught with risk. Even when artists intended to spur such reflections, the social pressure to regard their work as disposable entertainment, with no function other than to bring temporary and limited pleasure to the masses, was often too strong to overcome. But things have changed. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, a number of mainstream pieces pondered whether Americans had been prepared to have an African-American President by seeing one represented in fictional texts like 24 and Armageddon. Whatever their conclusions, they took it for granted that the entertainment world has a profound effect on our perception of the real world. Instead of being dismissed as the work of out-of-touch academics or amateur conspiracy theorists, this exercise in connecting the dots between fantasy and reality was presented as a legitimate form of political analysis.

There is much to applaud in this development. Paying to attention to how and why people identify politicians – classifying them as members of some categories and not others – and, just as importantly, identify with politicians is a critical step in transcending the debilitating belief that they choose leaders by simply making a rational assessment of their own self-interest. Because identification is a fundamentally cultural process, shaped by textual influences from preschool onward, paying attention to the ways in which fiction interwines with fact enables insights that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with an approach that focuses narrowly on the domain of electoral politics.

Proceeding on the assumption that “throwaway” popular culture can have profound politicial significance also directs scrutiny to the relationship between money and power. Success in the cultural marketplace is not merely the result of a neutral competition in which innate quality prevails. On the contrary, a work’s popularity more often than not reflects the force of its financial backing. While this support sometimes converges with critical acclamation, there is no guarantee that it will. In the case of the new Star Trek film, for example, the extensive advance promotional campaign – posters started showing up in multiplexes last year – and wide range of product tie-ins emphatically demonstrate that a lot of time and money was spent trying to make it a hit.

The danger, though, in embracing this conception of popular culture is that we will let the mainstream media dictate how we interpret particular texts. To put this another way, just as the promotional give-aways at fast food restaurants are carefully orchestrated to increase a film’s profile without inspiring potentially counter-productive reflection on its deeper implications, so might analyses of the sort that equate fictional and real-world characters. Everyone knows that Barack Obama isn’t really Spock. But repeatedly emphasizing the similarities between them can have the effect of naturalizing the analogy, exempting it from critical scrutiny.

We need to let this metaphor shape our perspective on the new President without forgetting that the invitation to see Spock in Obama serves the interests of powers that stand to benefit from the analogy. One way of doing that would be to compile a list of points where the analogy breaks down. We could, for instance, focus on moments in which the President has appeared to place passion before reason. A more interesting approach, though, might be to follow through on the comparison, constructing a series of if-then scenarios.

Was Spock a Jew?

To give an example of how this latter strategy might play out with particular resonance for readers of Zeek, we can start by considering the origins of Spock’s character. The greeting Obama mimicked, making the sign of a V with one’s fingers, supposedly derives from one that actor Leonard Nimoy witnessed as a child. In his autobiography I Am Not Spock – tellingly followed by a sequel titled I Am Spock – Nimoy wrote that the idea for the hand gesture came from the childhood experience of being taken to an Orthodox temple, where he saw the Kohanim make the sign for the Hebrew letter Shin. In effect, this codes Spock’s otherness vis-à-vis the Enterprise’s multicultural human crew as analogous to the status of Jews held in the postwar American society of the original television show, a “model minority” imagined to be superior to other marked ethnicities, occupying a privileged position – Spock is First Mate on the Enterprise – but one that is in some ways further removed from the WASP norm than that of other characters.

It’s important to note that Spock is only half-Vulcan, however. As the new film repeatedly reminds us, his decision to exemplify characteristically Vulcan traits is the result of hard work, performed on him by others and by himself alike, to restrain his human tendencies. His upbringing has conditioned him to identify with his Vulcan side without entirely repressing the knowledge that he could have turned out quite differently. Within the context of the mid-1960s, the trajectory of his character combined with Nimoy’s background to imply that, in attaining the status of “model minority,” Jews were forced to suppress traits incompatible with that image. This was the price of assimilation.

Half and Half

The most compelling argument for seeing Spock in Obama derives from the President’s biracial identity. The product of a short-lived union between a dark-skinned African father and a light-skinned American mother, his life story provides an interesting comparison to Spock’s. On the one hand, his education at a mostly Caucasian prep school, Columbia University and Harvard Law suggests that he followed a characteristically “white” path. On the other, however, Obama's subsequent political career, based in the predominantly African-American areas of Chicago’s South Side, indicates that he eventually chose to embrace his minority heritage. In other words, the President's biography comprises a tale of both assimilation – suppressing his otherness – and self-conscious identity politics – celebrating his otherness.

Crucially, while Leonard Nimoy’s Spock distanced himself from the passion-ruled irrationality associated with dominant WASP culture, Obama’s rise was predicated on a careful negotiation of the relationship between a dominant WASP culture identified with being calm, cool and collected and an African-American heritage that has been historically aligned, often with gravely pernicious consequences, with an excess of passion and a concomitant dearth of reason.

We must remember, however that the coupling of Spock’s non-human side with a worldview in which the rule of logic was paramount reflected a major shift in the perception of Jewish ethnicity in the postwar United States. There was a time, during the waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the stereotyping of Jews borrowed heavily on long-standing anti-Semitic traditions. Far from being considered a “model minority,” they were identified with a series of negative character traits – untrustworthy, rapacious, lustful – that were also applied, though with more force and political malice, to Americans of African descent. This is what gave both Jews and African Americans a common experience of racism, but also distanced them from one another as well. 

 

The Passion of Dispassion

To the extent that commentators have pushed the Spock = Obama equation, then, they have implied, however unwittingly, that our new President has ushered in a new era for African-Americans, in which they have the potential, finally, to wriggle free of the negative stereotypes that have limited their advancement. Indeed, his stunning ascent from the Illinois State Legislature to the U.S. Senate to the White House has been heralded by both African-Americans and members of the Caucuasian majority as a fundamental turning point in the country’s attitude towards race.

But what about the Jews? Here is where following through on the analogy pays particularly interesting dividends. The new Star Trek film seeks to reanimate a rather morbiund franchise by fleshing out an origin story for the special relationship between Spock and James T. Kirk, the Captain of the Enterprise. While the familiar tension between Spock’s devotion to reason and Kirk’s willingness to act first and think later is retained from the original television series, we also get new insight into Spock’s human heritage.

To make a long story short, the film shows us how the appearance of disinterestedness can be a cover for self-interest. The new film’s twist on the original Star Trek narrative is to have Spock, not Kirk, assume command of the Enerprise. After First Mate Kirk questions Spock’s ability to make the right decisions after witnessing the destruction of his home planet Vulcan, Spock sends him into exile. With the assistance of a much older Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, Kirk finds a way to return to the Enterprise and convince the younger Spock that he is unfit for command, thereby securing the post of Captain that he held on the original television series. The point, ultimately, is that Kirk’s impulsiveness is not necessarily less rational than the dispassionate façade Spock works so hard to maintain.

Teacher/Student

This point is reinforced by a scene from early in the film. As the new cadets of Star Fleet are being mustered to respond to an unexpected threat, Spock, who has served as one of their instructors, is confronted by Uhura. She demands to know why, despite her superb marks, she is not being assigned to the Enterprise, the most sought-after post. Spock responds, rather cryptically, that he did not want to give the impression of favoritism. But he quickly relents and lets her transfer to the Enterprise. Only later does it become clear that he and Uhura have been having a teacher-student love affair that continues to smoulder on the mission. What this deviation from the original Star Trek confirms, in short, is that the appearance of disinterestedness can just as easily indicate that one is overwhelmed by unruly passions as that one is ruled by logic.

The fact that Uhura is the Enterprise’s only featured African-American woman crew member further complicates matters. We see Spock, who was already being identified with Barack Obama before the new film was finished, getting to occupy the position that Kirk famously assumed on the original series, when he and Uhura shared one of television’s first interracial kisses. In light of the previously mentioned ethnic coding to Spock’s character, the amorous relationship between him and Uhura encourages us to scrutinize the new film for insight into the current state of the often fraught relationship between Jews and African-Americans in the United States.

One of the most interesting developments to which the original television series led was the popularity of so-called “slash fiction,” in which sexual relationships between well-known characters of the same gender are narrated. These days, the Harry Potter books are probably the most fertile source for such copyright-flaunting tales. But the original coupling, the one that started it all, in a sense, was Kirk and Spock. Interestingly, most of the people responsible for getting that romance off the ground were female fans of Star Trek who identified themselves as heterosexual. Even today, that demographic plays a significant role in the communities that have developed around slash fiction.

Because copyright issues ensure that slash fiction based on franchises like Star Trek can only exist outside of the conventional marketplace, it has managed to retain a resolutely anti-commercial aura. That hasn’t stopped copyright holders from trying to stop its production and distribution. George Lucas, for example, is reported to have strenuously opposed the “queering” of Star Wars characters. With Star Trek, however, the situation is more complicated. Although series creator Gene Roddenberry obviously could not endorse tales in which Kirk and Spock make love, his openly stated intention of promoting diversity of all sorts made many fans feel more welcome to repurpose the show’s characters.

Whether the team responsible for the new Star Trek film was self-consciously responing to the history of slash fiction associated with the franchise is unclear, though it seems likely that at least some of the people involved were thinking of it when they concocted the forbidden love subplot between Spock the instructor and his student Uhura. Given the vast quantity of Kirk/Spock fan fiction out there, though, the invocation of such transgressive behavior and the emphasis on Spock’s passionate nature provides plenty of fuel for reanimating that subculture.

Who Is Obama’s Kirk?

Less obviously, it also provides the raw material to radicalize the comparison of Spock and Obama in intriguing ways. The invitation to see the Spock in our new President typically seems to proceed from the assumption that fictional characters can be pried loose from the narratives in which they originally appeared and treated as self-sufficient entities. But what if this analogy were returned to its place of origin, the tale of the Startship Enterprise?

Latent within the Spock = Obama equation is the notion that he must work in tandem with a figure equivalent to Captain Kirk. Shortly after Inauguration Day, The New York Times ran an interesting piece on Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that described the former Congressman from Illinois as a “fierce partisan” with a partially justifiable reputation as a “relentless hothead” who was trying hard to “rein himself in.” Those are all traits identified with James T. Kirk. But the similarities don’t stop there. Consider this sentence. “How will the feisty, bombastic and at times impulsive former congressman blend with the cool, collegial and deliberate culture of Obama World?” Substitute “Iowa farm boy” for “congressman” and “Vulcan” for “Obama World” and you have the perfect tag line for a campaing to promote the new Start Trek film.

But it’s not just the adjectives associated with Emanuel and Obama here and those used to describe Kirk and Spock that make the current White House sound eerily like the Enterprise. Again and again stories on Obama have emphasized the crucial role that Jewish advisers like Emanuel and campaign strategist David Axelrod have played in his political life. Frequently, the implication is that the President needs the passion, fight and basic willingness to get dirty identified with these advisers in order to be successful. In a reversal of longstanding stereotypes in the entertainment industry, where performers were typically depicted as passionate and lacking in self-discipline, we are being sold a storyline in which an excessively cool and calm African-American requires the heated frenzy of Jews working behing the scenes to get things done.

More subtly, we are also being encouraged to conceive of post-WASP leadership as a hybrid of superficially opposed ethnic legacies. In an era when the notion of the “model minority” has been turned on its head, the only truth that seems to persist is that cultural self-sufficiency is an illusion. Without intimate relationships that are by definition transgressive in nature, like the coupling of Kirk and Spock in slash fiction, attempts to take command of the political situation will always fall short of their goals.

The half century after World War II was a period of unusual, perhaps unique international attention to the Jewish people (as opposed to Jewish concepts of God and religion).  Spurred by the horrors of the Holocaust and what once-upon-a time was considered the heroic birth of Israel, the idea of "Jew" came to symbolize a combination of moral honor, intelligence, humor, and-of course-outsized victim.  This produced in Europe and the United States an era of philo-Semitism, a social aesthetic in which the iconic Jew was the object of a general sympathy, curiosity, and respect.

Philo-Semitism is not the opposite of anti-Semitism.  These two sets of sentiments and behaviors are products of the same baseline condition in which non-Jewish authorities and communities exercise the power to define, fashion, and alter the living conditions of Jewish objects.  Philo-Semitism does not mean that non-Jews come to love Jews as individuals or as a community-just for being Jewish.  Rather, philo-Semitism exists when Jewish religion, history, culture and "character" (constructed caricatures of suffering, humor, wisdom, and faith as well as actual expressions of communal identity) come to the center of gentile consciousness and social discourse.  Anti-Semitism does not go away even at the apogee of philo-Semitic sentiment.

Philo-Semitism Was Different This Time

Jews often have been made objects of curiosity and ideological refraction by the smart and powerful.  Philo had noted the interest in Judaism among Romans no longer faithful to the old gods (before the Jewish and Roman worlds both were inundated by the Christian alternative).  Mongols-given their fascination with all religions-had paid some attention to Jews, even though they did not go to the extent some believe the Khazars had in adopting a form of Judaism.  Both Muhammad and Luther originally saw Jews as natural candidates for conversion (as if the progenitors of the True Faith would naturally embrace their destiny by recognizing the new Authenticity).  Later, even as they celebrated the idea that they were the intellectual and spiritual heirs of the ancient Greeks, some "enlightened" Germans welcomed kindred Jewish spirits as evidence of the efficacy of their notion of Bildung.

Aside from the Mongols, however, these various philo-Semites had little interest in Jews as actual people.  Instead, some religious teleologists focused on the principle of the Jew as pump-priming converts to Christianity or Islam.  Similarly, some enlightenment figures looked to Jews to grow from Jewish particularity toward the developed human that was the ideal type of late 18^th-and early 19^th century rationalism.  From the gentile subject's point of view, either a new revelation would complete the Jewish task, or else the Jewish experience of persecution and living on the outside of history would prove to have made Jews good candidates for various versions of new-age evolutionism.  These philo-Semites' patience ran out when Jews proved unable or unwilling to perform the duties assigned them.  Luther and Muhammad became nasty when the expected mass conversions did not come.

Toleration of Jews in nineteenth century Europe was not philo-Semitic.  It represented a liberal welcome for individual Jews to civic culture rather than a particular interest in the communal character or development of the Jewish community.  Therefore, it was not the obverse of the fin de siècle anti-Semitism of Wagner, Vienna Mayor Karl Luegner, and the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus.  This ambiguous context gave Jews who cared about their relationship to the gentile world had what Hannah Arendt called the choice between being pariah or parvenu.

Before the Holocaust, these Jewish Europeans accepted a universe of options involving seeking a personal space in the larger society or accepting a role as victim and Other.  The Nazis considerably narrowed this field of thought and action.

The Holocaust created a unique context for a new philo-Semitism (it would have required a remarkable sort of communal gentile callousness for it not to).  What was unique after 1945 was the realization in the North Atlantic region that the Holocaust had been a central expression of human bestiality, and that this successful, industrial-strength effort to wipe out European Jewry was a basic refutation of the confident modernism common to the science and salons of the past two centuries.  The recognition that the Nazis' intellectual and aesthetic tools were logical-and close-cousins to the conceptual and emotional core of mainstream philosophical and ritual discourse cut deep into the moral bone.

The Jew, therefore, became a different sort of object than before.  In the past it had been easy for elites and intellectuals to distinguish their own genteel denigration of (or philo-Semitic speculation about) an essentially marginal Jewish community from cruder and more violent attacks on Jews by less exalted co-Christians (even when the elites provoked the trouble).  Kings, great lords, and their officers may have recognized that Jews could be important to commercial life, but it usually was not hard to relegate Jews as a whole to the backs of their minds.  Anti-Semitic discrimination or murder provided a useful safety valve when merchants feared Jewish competition or when peasants (in Ukraine, for example) loathed Jewish overseers, but most of the time Jews just did not matter very much.  Officials at various levels could organize anti-Jewish events and then put both the thought and the act out of their minds.

This was not the case at the end of World War II.  The Holocaust burst onto European consciousness only after the war was over, kindling a general sense of shame that so few had taken Hitler's existential threats seriously even when word of the camps and the slaughter began to make its way to Allied capitals.  Turning the neologism "genocide" into a legal category was a direct response to Jewish suffering that had been the culmination of what now was acknowledged to have been centuries of anti-Semitic outrages.

In addition, there was a sense that 1000 years of European development had led to anything but Europe's natural spiritual and material leadership of the World.  Now surviving sages (Friedrich Meinecke, for example) wondered whether the old continent deserved its relegation from Powerhouse of the Planet to a mere theater in a contest between two giants on its flanks.  Europeans adjusted to their new role as subordinate objects of scrutiny by more powerful Others; in a sense, Europe was the new Jew.

Some on the old continent started to turn the catastrophe into a positive.  Post-Holocaust West European philo-Semitism was more than a celebration of the Jews' path from slaughter to redemption and Agency.  The general disgust over the camps and the corpses gave way to a sense that a chastened Europe was evolving toward a higher ethical future.  The end of the social Darwinian competition over which Europeans were fit to dominate the world motivated what would become the effort to replace the celebration of Herderian national myths with the greater story of "Europe." 

For the United States, as one of the flanking giants that now overshadowed Europe, the intimate imagery of the Holocaust reinforced traditional skepticism of the Old World's values.  This strengthened the sense that the City on the Hill had to extend the gift of its leadership to a continent that otherwise would fall back on itself-or else fall under the control of something worse advancing from the East.  Conceptualization of the horror of Jewish suffering as a central expression and experience of humanity developed alongside the rekindling of American revulsion with the struggles for territory and power that had motivated European conflicts.

And then came Israel.  The fact that European governments and communities were not unhappy to have their surviving Jews ship themselves off to the Middle East was submerged in a wave of advertised European admiration for the sudden transformation of the Jew from victim to victorious settler.  For its part, the American Jewish community flexed its muscles.  Sickened and angered by the Holocaust, enabled by European culpability in its horrors, and-unlike their European compatriots-largely undamaged by two world wars, American Jews lobbied hard for US recognition of the new state, took credit when this happened, and jacked up an existing-and essential-financial and emotional umbilical cord.

Meanwhile, while martial virtue may have become oxymoronic in Europe, Europeans and Americans-Jew and non-Jew-dredged up exactly this classical ideal in defining a heroic transformation of the Jewish condition in the World.  The military triumphs that defined Israel through 1967 reinforced a sense of the Jew Revived that was refracted through various ideologies and agendas in Europe and America at the same time as Jews themselves reveled in the feeling of being the Jew Enabled.

The sum of these parts was a unique celebration of Jewish communal identity and culture.  Rather than just freeing Jews from legal restrictions or cultivating individual Jews as evolving creatures, the dominant transatlantic community embraced and mimicked traits and expressions deemed centrally "Jewish."  Yiddishisms entered transnational discourse even as Yiddish itself was dying as a language for Jews.  Jews already were prominent in music, theater and the movies and Jewish themes occasionally had crossed over to a wider audience (for example in "The Jazz Singer").  Now, however, Jewish writers and directors could create and mass-market works that were explicitly "Jewish."

In this context, the remnant of Jews left in Western Europe appeared to be freed from the sterile choice between parvenu and pariah.  The decline in perceived significance of being, say, German or French meant Jews could be lionized as part of a larger European myth.

In the United States, where nationality always had been more fluid, barriers against Jews in private clubs, schools, residential areas, and politics largely evaporated.  Jewish writers and performers gained widespread recognition through the medium of television, and the "Jewish" voice of people such as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Philip Roth became more a part of the wider philo-Semitic discourse than actual expressions of the notional or actual Jewish community.  In both Western Europe and the United States, Jews became defined as constituent members of a simultaneously diverse and pseudo-homogenized secular society.

Western Jews and the philo-Semitic vogue had little impact east of the Oder-Neisse line.  The official version of Socialist history rejected popular complicity for the Holocaust, assigned responsibility for its crimes to bourgeois racists, and coupled Jew and national non-Jew as victims of Nazism.  Meanwhile, the prominence of Jews in the Communist parties meant that East European images of the Jewish Other remained largely as they had been before Hitler.  The hated Jewish overseer/tax collector in Poland and Ukraine now was the feared Jewish party boss or propagandist.  Stalin and his East European acolytes found it useful to purge Jewish Communists along with non-Jews who had fought in local undergrounds or otherwise stayed at home instead of using the war to seek prominence among co-nationals living in exile in the Soviet Union.  The anti-Semitic campaign unleashed by Poland's Communist bosses in the 1960s differed little from pre-Holocaust outrages.

However, the existence of a tough and victorious Jewish state affected even the traditional anti-Semitism of the Communists.  For one thing, Stalin-who initially was not certain whether the US or UK would be his primary post-war adversary-perceived as useful the fighting between Palestinian Jews and the British in the 1940s.  The emergence of Nasser and Arab socialism altered the Soviet calculus, but the serial defeats of the Arabs by Israel led the Soviets occasionally to use their captive Jewish remnant communities (and even Western Jews) as conduits to the center of what Communist anti-Semites perceived as "Jewish power."[1]

The Biological and Social Entropy of Philo-Semitism

Analysis of the Israeli apogee of 1967, its aftermath, and the decline since then of Israel's standing in the world is a well-trod subject that I will not rehash here.  In a nutshell, European opinion leaders lost their taste for a martial Israel and grew impatient as Israel did not alter its behavior to suit the decline of Israel as a European vogue.  What is important to keep in mind for this argument is that Israel's behavior as a "normal" Western state (but one that acts according to the rules of pre-1945 European statecraft and warfare in a zero-sum conflict many in the West fool themselves into thinking is out of date) is only part of the reason for the atrophy of the conditions that enabled the recent philo-Semitism.

More important is the passing of the generation of non-Jews who perpetrated, suffered, and witnessed the Holocaust.  Their children and grandchildren are not anti-Semitic, ungrateful, or callous.  It is natural that the emotional intimacy associated with feeling responsible for this particular experience of horror goes the way of that involved with the other mass killings, enslavements, and expulsions that continue to recede in memory.  Museums and educational programs might instill in some students something of the feeling of what happened, but-as with slavery and destruction of aboriginal Americans, the serial slaughter of various tribes and settled communities in Eurasia and Mesoamerica, and other, more completely forgotten horrors-social consciousness simply is going to move on.  That this is the way of the world is a final insult to the murdered dead, but there is nothing to do about it.

Although this demographic development already is becoming common knowledge, the impact of the passing of philo-Semitism on the Jews who are used to its benefits might not be.  Many of us born in the US or Western Europe after World War II have not experienced the garden varieties of anti-Semitism that previous generations of Jews took for granted.  The benefits of philo-Semitism lured Baby Boomer Jews into the World, creating the belief that we could exist forever as a component unit-maybe even a central one-of modernity and secular (in Charles Taylor's sense), linear, material time.

Our children may or may not have "Jewish feeling," but they are likely to face a less friendly, more disorienting series of intercommunal experiences than we did.  Some less-than-observant Jews could find themselves feeling the Hobson's choice between pariah and parvenu, while some Orthodox Jews can hope to get what they want-the gradual disappearance of all but those Jews who adhere to the law.

The Jew as Active Subject or Philo-Semitic Artifact

Wherever they live, many Jews could find it difficult to adjust to a renewed status as marginalized Other.  Some-various orthodox and Hasidic communities come to mind-either will turn inward or proselytize among their fellows in an attempt to recreate something like the Ashkenazi universes that predated the philo-Semitisms of the 18^th and 20^th centuries.  These communities could take something like the medieval and early modern approach toward relations with the gentile Other, seeking a sort of brokered autonomy in religious and cultural existence while having little to do with politics or civic life.  A few among these might adopt some version of Herzl's universal dichotomy of Jew and Eternal anti-Semite-a notion that in a post-philo-Semitic era would erroneously posit the Jew as remaining at the center of gentile consciousness.

Other, largely less-observant Jews will assimilate into a totally civic, secular identity.  When made by committed citizens from all religious and ethnic traditions this decision can be a reasonable social choice underpinning the need to separate religion (any religion) from the means of coercion.  Of course, the price for this will be an acceleration of the disappearance of Jewish identity.

What is less clear is whether Jews who are quite "observant," but within Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist traditions can confound Orthodox expectations and maintain the strength of their congregations and social networks in succeeding generations.  The passing of philo-Semitism likely will intensify debates inside these movements over the proper role in their community and in society at large of Jews who juggle various identities in a context in which they no longer enjoy philo-Semitic pride of place.

The one choice that will not be possible, but will be tried, will be to cultivate an afterglow of the privileged philo-Semitic condition of the past few decades.  Some Jews will assume that they always will be able to use the Holocaust like some post-1865 US northerners used the Civil War "Bloody Flag"-as an automatic claim to a moral high ground that should quiet any intent to question Jewish centrality (or Israeli behavior).  The attacks on academics who criticize the influence of the American Zionist lobby have been as pointless as they are wrong.

Such defensiveness involves a default instinct toward misreading marginalization as anti-Semitism-a mistake that could undermine necessary efforts to identify and set in high relief thoughts and acts that really do reflect some racist's hatred of Jews.  Those Jewish individuals and organizations who attempt to hold on to their philo-Semitic status increasingly will become social artifacts and find themselves in an anomic existence where they seem not to belong anywhere.

Is Leaving Center Stage "Good for the Jews"?

Having lived through philo-Semitism, Jewish publicists and commentators may well confuse the emotional entropy associated with its ending with re-emergence of traditional anti-Semitism.  The numbers and intensity of hate crimes against Jews will rise and fall, but the hard task for the anti-Defamation League and other groups will be to recognize that the necessary work of identifying, combating, and resolving such acts now takes place in a context where Jews no longer can successfully claim pride of place in the consciousnesses and agendas of gentile worlds.  We once again have become peripheral, at least in the North Atlantic zone.

The passing of the recent flavor of philo-Semitism coincides with a deeper phenomenon, the end of the era of the "West."  The latter concept, which includes the notion of the inevitability of collective European and North American power and cultural transcendence, has been in common use since about 1798.  It has involved the global spread of a caricature of ideational and political forms that obscure the serial alteration of norms and rules at the West's core at least once a century since the end of the religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  There actually have been several distinct "Wests," each with its own coercive utopia of political form and cultural and legal mythology.

The current financial crisis reflects a creeping doubt inside Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States in the value and inevitability of such coercive utopias as Democracy and "free markets" (none of the latter actually exist).  Residual rhetorical celebration of something called "the" International Community obscures the possibility that the anomalous period of dominance of global power and thought by a single state form and by idea of the West is eroding.  The world could be entering a more "normal" period where multiple political, economic, and social layers will compete for resources and ideational hegemony.

The challenge of China, India, transnational informal economies, and problems of climate change, epidemiology, and environmental issues all are central to this dynamic, but the issue relevant to this piece is the reemergence of Agency and authority among Muslims.  The 9/11 attacks were an extreme version of what Charles Tilly and others have called "contentious performances," social activities that change perceptions and therefore the content of power relationships (my shorthand, not Tilly's).

Thanks to the internet and other contemporary communications media, the Palestinian intifadas, the wars in Afghanistan and the political space once organized as "Iraq," and various terrorist attacks, from now on Muslims will make their own-often contending-decisions about what matters and how the world should be organized.  Our simplistic default logic of distinguishing between "moderate" and "extremist" Muslims is mistaken in its implied assumption that dealing with us is the central issue in how Muslims will decide how they should live in this world, and to what extent that involves submission to the words of God and lessons of his Prophet.

However, for at least some Muslims the Jew may be becoming more important, even as philo-Semitism fades in the West.  The era of Western philo-Semitism, with its celebration of Israel and muscular Jewish Agency, brought traditional Western anti-Semitism into the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia.  Western global hegemony may be eroding in the Middle East and Muslim Asia, but the demonization of Israel and its hyper-publicized use of lethal coercion mean that the hated image of the West's philo-Semitic Jewish Other is not.

The relative (if often exaggerated) historical tolerance of Jews by Muslims-particularly in the context of the Ottoman millet system-is being replaced by dramatizations of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," propagation of the idea of the Jew as puppet-master of money and power, and other hoary calumnies.  This likely is an indelible change, due in part to the physical separation of Jewish and Muslims communities through, for example, the population transfers that removed centuries-old Jewish communities from the Arab states in the Middle East and North Africa after 1948.

This issue also will affect politics in the United States, but hopefully with a more constructive outcome.  Muslims likely will outnumber Jews in the American electorate by the 2020s.  That Jewish organizations chose to engage in recent debates over the American Muslim growth rate suggested the existence of some sensitivity among American Jews to this development.  Instead of fighting facts, it is to be hoped that Jews join Muslims in replicating the American civic tradition of minimizing the spread of outside squabbles into the American political fabric.  Anglo-Irish disputes and the controversy between German and Anglophile communities over American involvement in World War I notwithstanding, the dominant American instinct has been not only to avoid fighting foreign wars here, but to encourage social interaction among relevant "hyphenated" communities.  Jewish- and Muslim-Americans have the opportunity to find means for dialogue in an atmosphere where neither community can claim to hold a central place in broader gentile consciousness.  With luck, Jewish and Muslim identity will have less salience to either community in the context of the American civic arena than interests and preferences having nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

*****

David B. Kanin is a CIA senior political analyst and Adjunct Professor of European Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  The views expressed in this article are Dr. Kanin's alone, not those of the CIA or the US Government.

---

[1] This attitude did not die with the Soviet Empire.  The author was present at a lecture in 1995 in which the speaker-a leader in the Holocaust Museum movement-told of manipulating official Polish assumptions that Jews and Jewish money ran US foreign policy to trade oblique promises of influence in Washington for tangible access to Jewish artifacts and memories.

[2]Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances, New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Images are video stills from the Birthright Monologue Performances

The giving of Torah happened at one specific time, but the receiving of Torah happens all the time, in every generation.  -- Isaac Meir Alter, the Gerer Rebbe, 1799-1866

In the Torah our ancestors were instructed to make three annual pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem, at Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot. Both Sukkot and Passover are weeklong celebrations, noted for their joyous observances, but Shavuot is a one or two day festival with few symbolic rituals. It's time to change that. Like the other chagim, Shavuot should be observed for a full week.

Shavuot's origins are agricultural--early summer was the season when the first fruits and grains were brought to the temple. In many communities, the synagogue is decorated with plants and flowers, and the agricultural roots of the festival are also recalled by eating dairy meals. The Book of Ruth, with its harvest references, is read on Shavuot.

However, since the Temple was destroyed, the agricultural aspect of the holiday has diminished in significance; instead, Shavuot, which comes exactly 7 weeks and one day after Pesach (and the Exodus from Egypt), has come to be observed as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Usually, contemporary Jewish communities observe the giving of Torah by staying up all night studying from the Tanakh and rabbinic texts. This custom began in mystical circles in 16th century Safed as a way of preparing Jews to receive the Torah once again.

I propose expanding on the tradition of Torah study by suggesting that we extend our Shavuot observance to a full week, dedicating each day to another level of Torah study, using Torah in the broadest sense. Texts will be chosen each year to expand upon our understanding of revelation and deepen our capacity to be vessels of Divine inspiration. Study sessions can incorporate music by Jewish composers and art by Jewish artists, along with meditation and movement, from dancing to dance midrash. During these sessions we will also create stories, prayers, poems, songs, dances, and pictures that emerge from our studies. Gardening, flower arranging, cooking classes, and hiking in nature, and time at the mikveh will also be held, allowing us to celebrate all of our senses.

First Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the Tanakh.

Second Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the Talmud.

Third Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from Midrash.

Fourth Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from kabbalah.

Fifth Day of Shavuot - will be organized around texts and themes from the siddur.

Sixth Day of Shavuot - this day will be organized around Jewish writings from ancient and Medieval times until the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Seventh Day of Shavuot - this day will be organized around texts written by Jewish writers since the Enlightenment, in all genres, secular and religious, including novels, stories, poems, prayers, essays.

A full week-long celebration would give Shavuot its due as one of the three Torah-mandated chagim, and also illuminate the depth of Jewish textual tradition. Next year, let's make the Festival of Weeks a week-long festival!

 

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Andrew Ramer will be a regular Zeek columinst on Jewish spirituality. He writes a regular column on spiritual practice for White Crane Journal and has published essays and stories in a number of magazines and anthologies including The Sun, Sh'ma, RFD, Monk,  Best Gay Erotica 2001, Kosher Meat,and Love Castro Street (forthcoming). He is the author of the forthcoming collection,Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval and Modern Jewish Stories. You can find out more about him at www.andrewramer.com

Ever since I discovered Leonard Cohen in Jerusalem in college, I associate him with Friday afternoons when, in preparation for Shabbat, my roommate Talya, and I swept and mopped our apartment overlooking the Judean Desert while "Suzanne" and "Bird on the Wire" provided background music.  His explicit sexual lyrics shocked and titillated my Christian soul, while the spiritual longing touched me.  On one hand there was, "giving me head on the unmade bed,"; on the other,  "And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water...and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him he said, ‘All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them'."  I am embarrassed to admit that, although I'd been in Israel for a year and his last name was "Cohen," it didn't occur to me that Leonard Cohen was Jewish, nor did I delve deeply into the meaning of some of the more inscrutable lyrics.  However, I was drawn to his somber, sonorous voice that sounded dark and filled with loss. 

 

Now, twenty-seven years later, I'm sitting next to my 18 year old daughter, Anna, in Radio City Music Hall and Leonard Cohen is singing "The Future."  At the lyrics "I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible," half of the audience erupts in spontaneous applause and genial laughter.  Not only are many members of the Tribe in attendance, but from the Hebrew I overhear during intermission, there are a lot of Israelis present.  Indeed, my husband's cousins have flown in from Israel specifically for this "little Jew", the grandson of a rabbi, a member of the priestly tribe, whose songs so often allude to the Bible.  

Anna was initially worried that this would be "Bob Dylan, Part II" - a reference to a Bob Dylan concert we attended that was, for me, painfully bad, since Dylan could barely croak the words to his songs.  Luckily, although Cohen is 74 years old, slightly stooped and grey-haired, and his voice has sunk into a lower, gravelly range, he remains contemporary and relevant, and still transmits his characteristic passion and poetry.  Along with the rest of the audience, I'm pulled into his world of love and loss that's soaked in Biblical imagery and philosophy:  From "If it be your will,": "If it be your will... let your mercy spill."  And, "I forget to pray for the angels and then the angels forget to pray for us" ("So Long Marianne"). 

As he sings "Hallelujah!", I return to my original impression of Leonard Cohen - a guy who poetically blended the sexual and spiritual, recalling King David as both a musician whom God loved, ("Well, I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord")  as well as a sinner who lusted after, then slept with, a married woman, Bathsheba ("I saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you").  

In college, hearing about this kind of unabashed delight in recreational sex outside of marriage was certainly at odds with my own Christian upbringing, which preached that sex was only for someone you loved and were committed to.  Leonard Cohen managed to write about both sex and God equally naturally, as simply a part of life.   I admired his courage in writing about these subjects so honestly, something that I strived for but often wussed out and instead hid behind cleverness and irony.  

For the longest time, I didn't know anything at all about Leonard Cohen personally, nor did I think it necessary.  But later, as I learned more here and there, I realized it wasn't coincidental that I was drawn to him, God and sex notwithstanding.  His father died when he was 9, my sister died when I was 11, and this early awareness of mortality and of time running out can't help but affect the themes you're drawn to - or not.  To this day, I will not read anything at all in which a child dies and, while I rarely write about death, I often explore the idea of the afterlife and "What's next?" 

Like Cohen, I also went on a search for spiritual truth. I journeyed from fundamentalist Christianity that claimed to own an absolute truth about God and God's will, to Judaism, a faith in which rabbis argue and interpret and re-interpret but it somehow doesn't change the core belief which is the Sh'ma - Listen. Cohen, unhappy with a religion experienced largely by rote and that is based on simply being inherited, left Judaism to become a Zen monk in 1996 and then returned, becoming an observant Jew today.   However far you walk away from your past, you live in these two worlds simultaneously, the past and the present.

Three hours after the concert began, he literally skips off the stage and returns with a boyish grin, for his third and final encore.  It is a half spoken "Whither Thou Goest,": "Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people will be my people, thy God my God," the famous words uttered by the Moabite Ruth to her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi, when Ruth chooses to return with Naomi to Bethlehem and adopt Naomi's people, her land and her God as her own.   This passage came to be understood as the basis for what it means to convert to Judaism - to embrace not only the Jewish faith but also to share a personal and a national identity with the Jewish people. 

Because of the book of Ruth's themes - harvest, the individual's acceptance of Judaism, and exile and return to the land - it will be read in synagogue this week on Shavuot, a holiday that celebrates the spring harvest and the giving of the Torah to the community at Mt. Sinai.  As Jews, we're instructed on Shavuot to feel as if we were at Mt. Sinai.  For me, that means listening.  Growing up, I heard the same words from the Bible that Leonard Cohen heard, but in typical Jewish tradition, he took them and wrestled with them and ultimately transformed them into music.  So now, I can simply sit back in a concert and sh'ma to the music of past and present, of exile and return.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s common wisdom that Leonard Cohen is more than just a singer-songwriter: he’s also a poet, a sage, even a religious figure. “Leonard is this almost prophetic voice in music for me. He’s got this almost Biblical significance and authority,” said U2’s Edge in the 2005 concert film, I’m Your Man. That’s laying it on a bit thick, perhaps, but it’s an understandable reaction to many of Cohen’s songs. From ruminations about Jesus in “Suzanne” to the Jeremiad of “The Future”, his work doesn’t lack for profundity. While Cohen is widely accepted as a songwriter and a poet, however, there’s one thing that he’s rarely called: a novelist.

In fact, Cohen has published two novels, both of which be wrote before launching his music career at the age of 33. They have faded into obscurity compared to his better-known musical oeuvre, but the thematic depth and lively prose of both books show them to be more than just the scribblings of an immature writer or a brief preamble to a more significant songwriting career. And though Cohen is perfectly suited to his current role as singer-poet elder statesman, both The Favorite Game, published in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, from 1966, were criticized for their avant-garde literary experimentation and provoked outrage because of their violent, sexually explicit, and morally disturbing scenes.

By today’s standards, however, The Favorite Game seems rather tame. Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s while Cohen was living with friends in London, and later in his whitewashed, three-story house on the Greek island of Hydra, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Cohen’s Montreal upbringing and his pursuit of a poetic vocation. Like Cohen himself, the novel’s protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, is the scion of a prominent Jewish family from the wealthy neighborhood of Westmount.

Also like Cohen, Breavman loses his father at a young age, has a painfully neurotic mother, and uses hypnosis to seduce the family maid. Most of the novel focuses not on his home life, however, but on his relationships with women and with his pal Krantz. As teenagers, the two friends spend their nights driving around downtown Montreal, trying unsuccessfully to pick up girls while amusing themselves with high toned conversations peppered with loud proclamations of their own genius. Eventually Breavman’s sexual drought comes to an end, but not before a few frustratingly incomplete, coming-of-age type encounters.

“Then he was in a room undressing her. He couldn’t believe his hands. The kind of surprise when the silver paper comes off the triangle of Gruyere in one piece. Then she said no and bundled her clothes against her breasts. He felt like an archeologist watching the sand blow back.”

Negative reactions to the book were in part because of its sexual descriptiveness, but also because of its saw-toothed criticism of the Jewish community. Breavman is not by any means ashamed of his Jewishness, yet he is contemptuous of his family’s style of Judaism. “Victorian gentlemen of the Hebraic persuasion,” he terms them.

“They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the donor’s book. Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfillment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.”

Despite such deliberate button pushing, the literary and moral incitements of The Favourite Game remain relatively low-key. Beautiful Losers on the other hand, Cohen’s second novel, still retains its power to shock readers 43 years after its publication.

The book is aggressively experimental. As Cohen’s biographer Ira Nadel puts it, Beautiful Losers “almost bursts its form” by “incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama.” Or, as Cohen himself put it, the book is “a love story, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irreverent display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance.” But objections to Beautiful Losers ran deeper than readers’ discomfort with the book’s unfettered architecture.

The first section of Beautiful Losers is delivered by an unnamed narrator – a chronically constipated scholar of deteriorating mental health who is a specialist on the A – s, a nearly vanished North American aboriginal tribe. Though the book is set in Montreal, Cohen shifts his attention away from his own past to focus on larger themes, such as Quebec nationalism and the history of the Jesuits in colonial Quebec. The narrator is obsessed with Catherine Tekakawitha, the first Iroquois saint, and his disjointed narrative is riddled with invocations to her. His wife Edith was herself a Mohawk, though at the beginning of the book she has already committed a gruesome suicide at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The second part of the novel consists of a long letter written by the narrator’s friend F., and only delivered five years after his death. F. is a Quebec nationalist and a disgraced member of Canadian parliament who, in a mirroring of real life events, blows up the statue of Queen Victoria on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street. In their mutual need for each other the two characters have a Breavman-Krantz type of relationship, conducting the same kind of amused dialogue. In this case however, both characters are thoroughly stripped of any pretension to innocence. The fact of their bisexuality would have been more controversial in 1966 than it is now, but F.’s description of his affair with Edith can still raise eyebrows. The book’s signature scene is a trip F. and Edith take to Argentina, where their erotic exploits include being raped by a vibrator that has come to life and “learned to feed itself”, followed by a bath with an escaped Nazi who sells them a bar of soap made from human flesh.

Such episodes may be grotesque, but they are successful at provoking an intensity that is at the core of all of Cohen’s work. The shock factor of Beautiful Losers isn’t an exercise in masochism, but the distillation of experience to its most horrific, as well as its most euphoric elements. An acute awareness of the present moment pervades both novels, complete with all of its rawness and uncertainty. “We sought the peculiar tone of each peculiar night. We tried to clear away the static, suffering under the hint that the static was part of the tone,” F. says in Beautiful Losers. Sex in particular is a means by which his characters transverse the emotional distances that separate them and establish meaningful contact with other human beings. “When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction,” says Breavman. The narrator of Beautiful Losers expresses a similar sentiment. “For a blessed second truly I was not alone, I was part of a family. That was the first time we made love. It never happened again.”

As Cohen’s Canadian publisher observed, The Favourite Game has the quality of a first novel and it bears the traces of self-indulgence that accompany almost any kind of autobiography. Beautiful Losers is a progression, at a further remove from Cohen’s life, but the literary experiments carried on within its pages have an exploratory quality and suggest further developments. By abandoning the form of the novel it seems as though Cohen left something unfinished; experiments usually lead somewhere, even if it’s only to more experiments. Perhaps this is a small complaint against a man with no shortage of artistic achievements to his name. Reading Cohen’s books, however, and reveling in the ingenuousness of his prose, one can’t help but be a little wistful that he didn’t pursue the form further. As Cohen himself might admonish us, however, we should be thankful for what we’ve already got: two groundbreaking novels of the very first order.

Sailor at Nostrand and Bedford

I.

If you think that what I want
is to touch that sailor, to pull
his liquid body from those
polyester pants, you'd be
wrong.  Look at him, all amble
and shucks, his bright white
cap shading the acne scars
that linger on his barely post-
adolescent cheeks.  Was there
a time that I wanted to touch
every beautiful man that lived
in this world?  If there was,
it has passed.  Now, I want none
of that moment where he
discovers what his body
can do-what it is his tongue
will fit, where it is he wants
a tongue.  Does it mean that
I have left the world?  I am
happy for him, for his beauty,
hopeful that he will know
what do with it, that it will
get him what he wants before
it fades, that he will learn
just how much the uniform
enhances it, just how much
he can get with it.  And from
whom.  But not me.  I'm happy
for him abstractly, the way
I weep for the ugly children,
the way I hope everyone can
find a way in this world, but
not in the specific.  I have no
desire to learn his name, to
learn his body, to learn his
breathing or his rhythms.


II.

There was a sailor, once.

What we wanted

was the same

and each other

was the last place

we'd looked. 

Don't think

I always want

a better medication.

Don't think I'll pay

the same price. 

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books.  His poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Best American Poetry, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.  He has received fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  The recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, he is currently completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of CUNY. 

Images from Shira Rachel Apple's 2006 installation Huppah

Jewish spirituality is, in large part, in the state-change business.  At the better synagogues-i.e., the ones which actually care about prayer or spirituality or at the very least a good community feeling-you show up thinking about mortgages and to-do lists, in the middle you're feeling a holy presence, and afterward you feel refreshed and re-energized.  This is what state-change is: moving your mind from one way of being to another.  And we Jews, like all religious groups, have developed a wonderful array of tools to enable it to happen.

For most people-indeed, I'd say for about 95% of people-state change is what it's all about.  As I'll describe in a moment, spiritual states have the power to open the mind, nourish the heart, and change the world.  They are, I think, the most important force for social and environmental sustainability on the planet.  And they can be lots of fun, too. 

But, states can also become dead-ends, or misconstrued, or actually dangerous.  For every one hippie becoming one with the universe, there are five fundamentalists ossifying their experience into dogmas of hate and ethnocentrism.  So, do the costs outweigh the benefits?  Is there a way to get the good stuff without the bad?  And what lies beyond spiritual states for those of us experienced enough in the spiritual path to have grown weary of them?  Let's take a look.


1.The Benefits of (Temporary) Transformation


The first value of spiritual states is what might be called their "negative" capacity: you get to see that you are not your "box" of identity, predilections, and mind.   You get a break from being you, and that is really important. This you can experience easily.  Go to a drum circle.  Let go totally, get into the rhythm.  Forget yourself, like hopefully you do during sex.  Lo and behold!  Mind, ego, and all the rest of your personality finally shuts up-and look, you can experience life just fine