From the yearly archives:

2010

The Necrophilia of Hirshel Tzig

by Ben Atlas on 07.30.2010.7:49am · 2 comments

The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination.

Did you ever converse digitally with Hirshel Tzig? You feel like you are in a reancatemnt of the Turing Test. It was the test devised by the great Jew Allan Turing before he killed himself. The iconic test was to ask a computer a series of questions to demonstrate a machine intelligence. And although in the test there is a margin of error to confuse a machine with a human, there is no error with Hirshel Tzig. Your know for certain you are talking to a machine that only responds to a linear input and crashes on metaphors, nuance and humor.

There is a story about the Mitteler Rebbe, when a chossid confessed to the Rebbe about an incident of necrophilia. As was the Mittler Rebbe’s discipline, he was trying to find a symbol of the sin within himself but he couldn’t relate to the astonishing crime till he realized that sometimes he says a maamar chassidus (a religious discourse) but the chassidim, his disciples, are not listening…

Come to think of it, anyone who became a Chabadnick and joined the Lubavitch court after the Rebbe was alive or was only virtually alive is now a practicing, card-carrying, necrophiliac. And the Breslevers, naturally, paved the way and perfected the shtick, or should we say covered it up… As Schneur would write “a quick Wikipedia search would show” that most often cited reason for a Necrophilia is that it momentary kills the fear of rejection…

The Messianic creed is so much healthier, you follow the good old Christian model to reject the death altogether. It’s alive and hovers right next to you ready for an embrace. Just close your eyes, can you feel it? Leave it to the healthy imagination, in other words your Garden of Eden variety onanism. And even Reb Nachman already rejected this type of worship as a meta sin and instructed people to come to his grave specifically to atone for the vanity (btw, since Reb Nachman himself never wrote anything, the lurid, pathological ritual might be a pornography left by his heartbroken spiritual lovers).

And sensible people understand that the Messianic living presence was not what the Chabad Rebbe had in mind. As we all know these type of obsessions are passable. And naturally if one, a leader, have a not so secret hobby centered on a tomb, than the legacy lives on. Especially if for some totally random reason the leadership is passed to the undertaker with the official occupation listed as “cemetery transportation”.

You might ask how do I have the insight? I followed the living example of the Mitteler Rebbe and realized that I was a shameful practitioner. Remember when I rode the wave of youthful yearnings long after the intimacy of a personal, social intercourse was inhumed?

Karl Marx on the American Civil War and the Slaves

by Ben Atlas on 07.29.2010.9:37pm · 0 comments

1861 papers on the American Civil War by Karl Marx. He followed every minute detail of the war with the incredible detail. There is a total lack on any moralistic rhetoric about slavery (heck, he was hatching in his head the greatest salve civilization in history). He dissects every political and economic detail of the conflict and he is exasperatingly thorough. Here is a quote that caught my eye:

“The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. “In fifteen years,” said he, “without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”

So Marx recognized that there are slave producing states and states where the slaves could be used (Mexico and Arizona?). And when a territory is saturated “either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”

Are the American people obsolete?

by Ben Atlas on 07.27.2010.11:00pm · 0 comments

The facts described in this article have been obvious to me for years (Jews and the Great Recession), yet it’s amazing that there are so many people blinded by their temporary circumstance that still don’t get it. “Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes” - Michael Lind in the Salon:The richest few don’t need the rest of us.

photo via flickr/robdobi

Past Fear

by Ben Atlas on 07.27.2010.6:46pm · 0 comments

Aaron Haspel wrote that “more people fear the past than the future”. People fear that the future will invalidate the past or bring the past effort to an impasse. In that sense they fear that they will be unable to extricate themselves from the past. But most people still prefer the future to the horror of the now. In fact most would rather idealize of vilify the past or dream about the future, as long as they don’t have to burden themselves with experiencing people around them or feeling the indescribable presence.

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Chaim Rapoport and Samuel Heilman – in search for a Snag within

by Ben Atlas on 07.27.2010.3:25pm · 3 comments

About Schneur’s review. People tell stories, the verbal reenactments is the root of evil. I was reading Prof. Hurtado paper Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? (pdf) Take a look, it’s instructive. I mean if there was one particular disease that the Jews passed on to the Christians, it’s the delusion that a reality could be fully reconstructed from the indirect memories and quotations, even a law. I mean who cares what St. Paul wrote, he never seen or kissed Jesus, period.

And this brings me to Samuel Heilman, does he have any idea how it feels to be in the pit under the bimah on Rosh Hashona in 770? How it feels to catch the Rebbes eye by the tuv taam v’daas lomdeini? Did he ever throw up on the Kingston Avenue at 4:30 am? Did he even interview someone who did? People today write books about Google without ever seeing anyone who works there, the heck you can write a book about Google just by googling Google. I mean Boteach is not too smart and he no longer thinks of himself as a Lubavitcher but he is smart enough to recognize that there is a difference between reading a prewar telephone book and being with a special person, just ask Shmuley about MJ.

And Menachem Butler and Dan Rabinowitz, they can’t get enough of that crap, after all the thrice removed from a human experience quotation ping-pong is their bitter bread and the stale butter.

And Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, should he open his opus with a sponsor? Even better, perhaps he can post the invoice so we all can resolve once and for all the burning question on who is signing the checks over there today. But not to worry, I am sure Chaim Rapoport can redeem his integrity by picking a random Kohos book and subjecting it to the same rigorous analysis. In fact I know what a special hell awaits Chaim Rapoport in the future, he is destined to scan the Kohos books for the historical errors till the cows come home. Free of charge that is.

Ponzi Scheme Validation

by Ben Atlas on 07.27.2010.11:49am · 0 comments

“We are most motivated to help those who do need us the least” – Nassim Taleb

Try telling someone you feel isolated or you need money, the result is the opposite, but why? At the same time people love to hang out with popular celebrities or do altruistic favors for the rich. I think people don’t trust themselves and their own senses. They need to be told that a person or an object has a worthwhile quality. At the root of this is the peculiar human skepticism about our own ability to see and to judge. There result is that if many people say that a person is rich, than it’s an outside signal that the person it worth throwing money at. If people say  a person is a party animal, that’s a signal that the person is worth handing out with. This is the psychological Ponzi scheme and it permeates every corner of this culture. The books, the blogs, the aphorism are read only if people say they read them and it has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of an art, an idea, etc. Again all this because people don’t think they can recognize a value by themselves. There is a practical outcome of this internalized self-deprecation. You can never sell yourself, you need to be recommended, you need an agent, a pimp. Only outside validation can make or break a person on an idea.

The Weimar Hyper-inflation and the Judefetzen

by Ben Atlas on 07.27.2010.8:14am · 0 comments

An article in the Telegraph - The Death of Paper Money quotes from the book ”When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-inflation”. The book describes economic upheaval in Germany in the 20s, the upheaval that paved the way for the Third Reich:

“Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

“In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended,” she wrote.

Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to undertand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments.

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. “Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else,” said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. “My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice,” said one well-connected woman.

“You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged — not in the streets — but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for.”

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who — by luck or design — had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as “Judefetzen” (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.”

Schneur on the Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson

by Ben Atlas on 07.26.2010.4:41pm · 6 comments

A Guest Post by Zalman Alpert

A review of the new book by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman - The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

Although the subtitle of the book is “The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson” in fact a more accurate would be a partial life of Menachem M. Schneerson. In as far as they go, I found the book to be a fairly objective accounting of the life and activities of Menachem Schneersohn. In specific the chapters on Schneerson’s years in Western Europe from 1927-1942 are commendable, although there are any number of factual errors there. In general the book is marked by a serious number of factual errors, this has already been remarked upon by my good friend Rabbi Chaim Rapoport in his detailed reviews on the Seforim Blog. I was going to post some of there mistakes about facts, but Rabbi Rapoport has enumerated many of these and I see no point in adding to the list. If anyone is interested, I can be contacted and I can cite page and line in over twenty places. It seems that to the authors of this book, Schneerson’s years as Rebbe from 1951-1994 were marked only by Messianic activity, outreach activities and an interest in Israeli political life which the authors nicely relate to the Messianic and outreach campaigns.

What the book fails to capture and even deal with in the slightest is how Schneerson functioned as the Lubavitcher Rebbe in his day to day work as a traditional Chassidic Rebbe and as head of the community in Crown Heights and the international Chabad-Lubavitch community. What was the source of loyalty to Schneerson by his followers, especially the younger generation who grew up under Schneerson’s leadership or joined the movement under his tutelage, there is really no attempt at explaining the source of Schneerson’s remarkable charisma and leadership traits. There is no attempt made at describing or analyzing the yechidus experience under Schneerson’s leadership. After all it was this experience which bonded an individual chassid to his Rebbe and from 1950-1977, these unique sessions took up a great deal of Schneerson’s time. Little if any space is spent discussing this experience.

Next the farbrengun experience where Schneersohn bonded with his community as a whole, is almost ignored except in passing. No description of these remarkable events is attempted. No discussion of the various topics discussed at these communal gatherings. The Rebbe spoke of politics, talmudic discourses, his famous Chumash and rashi lessons, his Hadranim, and above all his chassidic Maamorim. One would expect some sort of evaluation of the nature and quality of the Chassidic discourses delivered by the Rebbe over the course of forty years. May I add at this point little time is spent in this volume analyzing Schneerson’a ability as a talmudic scholar and scholar of Jewish mysticism. Clearly there are people out there who have what to say on these matters.

As leader of the Crown Heights community, Schneerson also established and ran a school system there. What was the nature of this school system, what was taught, what was the curriculum of this educational system, who were the teachers. Not a word in the book about the Lubavitcher Yeshiva system around the world and especially in Crown Heights. This is troubling given the fact that the Rebbe created a school system known as Ohelei Torah in Crown Heights (today called Ohelei Menachem in his honor) that taught boys from the age of 4 until 18 and had absolutely no secular studies. I am certain that many of my readers will not believe this, but in fact the Berlin and Paris educated Rebbe created and served as spiritual patron of a schools system with no secular studies at all. One would have expected the authors to comment on the general accepted fact that Lubavitch yeshivas failed to produce more than a few talmudic scholars over the course of the forty years of the Rebbe’s leadership and that most of the shluchim are not considered serious rabbinic scholars by the wider orthodox community. This in contra distinction to the Chassidic communites of Belz, Bobov, Kluizenebrg and others who have produced many notable dayanim and rabbinic scholars. At one point in Jewish history Chabad was widely respected for the rabbinic scholarship, yet by the time of his death in 1994, rabbinic scholarship in Chabad was at a all time low. What happened, again silence from our authors.

The book fails to explore the second most powerful organ in the Lubavitch community under the Rebbe’s leadership namely the Rebbe’s secretariat, while referencing the Rebbe’s secretaries we do not learn how this body functioned, what they did, how they dealt with questions of access to the Rebbe and the like. The Rebbe’s chief aide Rabbi Chaim Mordecai Chadakov is mentioned in passing but his role as the second most important man in the Chabad community is ignored. The roles of Rabbis Leibel Groner, Binyomin Klein and others are again shrouded in silence. Even financial scandals involving family members of one of the aides, that upset the Rebbe and forced the secretary’s temporary resignation are ignored in this volume.

Crown Heights like all Jewish communities had a rabbinate that dealt with legal, ritual and other religious issues. The Rebbe was very much involved in selecting or as was the case not selecting this rabbinate. The conflict over chosing Rabbis in Crown Heights continues to this very day and to a great extent the Rebbe insured that no one could claim to be the Rabbi of Crown Heights. Again the book does not even mention this body. It does not mention the Rebbe’s involvement in chosing a Rabbi for Crown Heights after the death of Rabbi Zalman Dworkin and the politics surrounding that choice.

If we are to read this book at face value, we would be led to believe that once the Rebbe assumed control in 1951 all opposition faded. In fact many senior chassidim continued either to oppose the Rebbe (for example Rabbi Yaakov Landau, the chief Rabbi of Bnai Brak and close disciple of the 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe) and Rabbi Zalman Schneerson a cousin and close associate of Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn) or to adopt a neutral policy in regards to the Rebbe’s leadership. The book completely ignores various chapters in the forty years of his leadership where opposition was raised. These include the Rebbe’s attempts to integrate the Jerusalem Lubavitch communtiy of the Yishuv hayashen in the general Israeli community and the opposition of the Havlin family, the opposition to the Rebbe’s philosophy expressed by some of the Lubavitchers who arrived from the Soviet Union after the 1967 war and settled in Nachalat Har Chabad, which required the dispatch of several dozen American Lubavitchers to make sure things did not get out of hand, the Dovid Fisher affair in Crown Heights, the Lubavitcher attack against the senior chassid Rabbi Moshe Ber Rivkin of Yeshivath Tora veDaas for failure to obey the Rebbe in a matter connected to Israeli politics. Not a note on these matters. Other notable omissions from the book are the Rebbe’s reaction or in fact lack of reaction to the Crown Heights Riots and murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, not a word about this in the book.

The book also fails to note that after assuming leadership the Rebbe made certain that his former rival Rabbi Shmaryahu Gourary would no longer have any power. Firstly as mentioned he organized a parallel Luabvitch school system in Crown Heights called Ohelei Torah in competition to the United Luabvitcher Yeshiva controlled by Gourary. As Gourary was also the senior officer of Agudas chassde Chabad (Union of Chabad Chassidim) the umbrella Chabad group, the Rebbe put this group on ice and created a counter group called the Union of Chabad Youth controlled by himself thereby assuring that Gourary would have no organizational power in Chabad. Until the organization was revived as a tool in the book case against Barry Gourary,”Aguch” functioned solely as a burial society for over thirty years. Finally since Gourary was delivering a chassidic discourse at the Shlosh Seudos meal in 770, the Rebbe abolished this ritual in Lubavitch. Of course Gourary continued to lead the 770 meal, but it was sparsely attended as all knew that this was without the Rebbe’s blessings. Was the Rebbe living in a dream world when he cried in response to his not being invited to Barry’s wedding at the same time?

Another fact ignored by the authors was the growing power by Avrohom Shemtov and Yudel Krinsky. Both created the American Friends of Lubavitch as a fundraising vehicle and as such became the voice of their donors in the Lubavitch court. It was their voice and power as conduits for rich donors that led the Rebbe to drop his “Who is a Jew”  demands from the Israeli governement. The American donors many of whom were not Orthodox could not stomach such a demand. In fact this cosmetic treatment of Chabad by Krinsky and Shemtov continues to this very day. When the Australian Chabad millionaire Joseph Gutnick and the whole Chabad community in Israel supported Netanyahu in the Israeli elections, a denial was issued by Krinsky and Shemtov claiming that Chabad was neutral in these elections. Of course the American Chabad donors could hardly be expected to look favorably on Chabad’s support of the hard line Likkud and their opposition to the two state solution.

Together with Rabbi Manis Friedman they developed a new philosophy for Lubavitch outreach. Where as previously Lubavitch was out to make new orthodox Jews and chassidim, now the chief purpose was to attract the newcomers to “Judaism Lite” and to insure continued contributions to the Chabad cause. The new phiosophy smacked more of Mordecai Kaplan than it did of lets say the Baal Shem Tov. In fact shlichus became a financially positive career as most shluchim were living well better than their brothers who remained behind in Crown Heights. In fact publicity and fundraising became the chief responsibility of many Chabad shluchim. And the aging Rebbe seemed unable or unwilling to deal with these new ideas.

The book also fails to devote any significant space to analyzing the cult of personality that was developing about the Rebbe after 1970 which included the use of his portrait in their books and ads. His speeches of hours upon hours and other similar tactics were clearly patented after other totalitarian leaders.

In terms of the afterlife the book plainly ignores the deterioration of Orthodox religious standards in Crown Heights since the death of the Rebbe. Costume for men and women was becoming modern, beards were being trimmed if not removed and a general laxity in the strict standards of Chasidic social norms were reported. Many young Lubavitchers were leaving the community, others were going to college including Modern orthodox schools like Yeshiva University and Touro College. A quick glance at the Wikepedia biography of Rabbi Avrohom Shemtov will reveal this fact in the Rabbi’s own family. This culminated in the creation of a controversial wine bar “BASIL” in Crown Heights run by a group of young lubavitchers. In general one wonders how a community that is now having difficulty in retaining the loyalty of its own youth can go out and offer itself as a model and solution for secular and modern Jews? In fact the turmoil and conflict in Lubavitch today is not between the Messianists and anti Messianist but between those Lubavitchers who wish to continue to function as Chassdim and those who seemingly wish to become Modern Orthodox and less.

Speaking of the turmoil, the books fails to explore any post Rebbe leadership models. As I am certain the authors know there were those in Crown Heights who wanted a new Rebbe, yes few in number but there were such people. Others like Rabbi Yecheskel Sofer the campus Rabbi at the University in Beersheva also called for some formal system of spiritual leadership in post Rebbe Chabad.

Finally a word about recent reviews of this book. This book is hardly anti Lubavitch. I think it paints a very evenhanded portrayal of the Rebbe’s life. Parts of the book are clearly very favorable to the Rebbe, other parts present him as a human who was undergoing change as he got older and changed circumstances. Yet why the long negative reviews of the book? Seemingly they seek to present the book as having many historical errors, in fact the book does have many such. But permit me to say that is the case in many academic studies, but in does not need interfere with the auhthors thesis. So what is really bothering men like Rabbi Boteach or Rapoport? Clearly the chapter about the Rebbe in Berlin and Paris (my conversations with Mr. Barry Gourary over the course of many years gave me a much clearer picture of the Rebbe’s life and times in Berlin and I am a tad surprised that Friedman and Heilman did not use such materials if it was available to them) does not warrant a forty page response and I think the answer is clear, while the book is objective and overall depicts a favorable portrait of Rabbi Schneerson, these reviewers would not be happy with anything less than a propaganda work about the Rebbe the like of which their own press churns out on a regular basis. Nothing less will make these people completely happy. That is sad because the reviewers are intelligent and likeable people, yet they too are caught up in the cult around the Rebbe. Perhaps that fact itself shows the power of Rabbi Schneerson that even years after his death seemingly intelligent and good people still can not stomach any biogrpahy attempting to deal with the life of Rabbi Schneerson and leaving his afterlife to G-D. For now this book is a welcome addition to the study of the life of Rabbi Schneerson, with warts, mistakes and omissions, it still attempts to deal with Rabbi Schneerson as a human who functioned as such. Hopefully in the future a more complete biography based on the same methodology will be undertaken. In the meantime I think the book is worth reading and can serve as the basis for future study of his life.

photo illustration via flickr/robdobi

Isaiah Berlin on Centrifugal and Centripetal Ideas

by Ben Atlas on 07.25.2010.4:53am · 0 comments

The Borodino Battle. 1967 Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film "War and Peace."

This is a follow-up on my post about Isaiah Berlin’s essay. He quotes Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin than divides writers and philosophers in two categories, either a fox or a hedgehog:

“Dante belongs to the first category [hedgehog], Shakespeare to the second [fox]; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.”

The centrifugal force ideas pull away from a center in multiple direction, this is a fox, a writer with broad themes and interests. The centripetal force ideas succumb to the gravitational pull of a center, this is a hedgehog, a writer or a philosopher who always gravitates towards his or her central theme. In the essay Isaiah Berlin is trying to understand if Leo Tolstoy is a fox or a hedgehog and he stumbles upon a contradiction:

“I shall confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing.”

Tolstoy believed in a unified messianic idea (hedgehog), but he saw only chaos and randomness. As an artist he was compelled to be truthful and his entire voluminous work is crash testing his unified beliefs. But not a single time the ideas of Leo Tolstoy the mystic could stand up to the art of Leo Tolstoy the writer. Isaiah Berlin explains the contradiction:

“Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level – in War and Peace, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic; some simple, quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly, and all the items can be assessed in terms one another by some simple measuring-rod. Tolstoy’s genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all. But then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury, particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very simple standard: say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the Gospels declare to be good.

This violent contradiction between the data of experience, from which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive judgement and theoretical conviction – between his gifts and his opinions – mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life, with its sense of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement – all of which is nevertheless illusion – and the laws which govern everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion of them – so that all scientists and historians who say that they do know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving – but which nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky, whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy’s ‘sanity’, are well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himself – fails to forget – what he is doing, and why.”

Fantastic! Berlin writes that people think Gogol and Dostoevsky are crazy, with a split personalities, etc., but let me tell you who is really crazy while on the surface being simple and unified. This is exactly what I wrote in my Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The Rebbe was an introvert who saw only chaos and was deeply skeptical about people. But he spent his later life fighting himself. He was a fox pretending to be a hedgehog. A person who couldn’t stand any change, was deeply isolated, he called for an imminent and global revolution. Like Tolstoy his creative output was to desperately prove himself wrong. Like Leo Tolstoy he was a fox pretending to be a hedgehog. This tragic predicament was also described by Isaiah Berlin’s and Rebbe’s great grandfather the Alter Rebbe when he invented a beynuni. Perhaps due to the fact that Isaiah Berlin witnessed the October Revolution and he had the messianic family history, he instinctively understood the false premise of Jean-Paul Sartre and all the monotheistic revolutionaries.

From Lev Tolstoy to Isaiah Berlin

by Ben Atlas on 07.24.2010.8:03pm · 0 comments

Leo Tolstoy

Everything is reduced to a few basic ideas. John Gray is articulating the ideas of his teacher Isaiah Berlin. If one is to assume that the most important confrontation of the modern history is that between Issiah Berlin and Jean-Paul Sartre than we can step back and ask if this all really between Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky? I have some ideas on how Fyodor Dostoyevsky fits into this cosmic argument but it’s clear who is the source of Isaiah Berlin’s ideas and inspiration. Look what I found in a little essay by Isaiah Berlin - The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History:

“We know too few facts, and we select them at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. No doubt if we were omniscient we might be able, like Laplace’s ideal observer, to plot the course of every drop of which the stream of history consists, but we are, of course, pathetically ignorant, and the areas of our knowledge are incredibly small compared to what is uncharted and (Tolstoy vehemently insists on this) unchartable. Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but, as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable: to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.

Tolstoy’s central thesis – in some respects not unlike the theory of the inevitable ‘self-deception’ of the bourgeoisie held by his contemporary Karl Marx, save that what Marx reserves for a class, Tolstoy sees in almost all mankind – is that there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them ‘great men’. What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described, side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily give to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns upon those who have the humility to recognise their own unimportance and irrelevance. This is the purpose, too, of those philosophical passages where, in language more ferocious than Spinoza’s, but with intentions similar to his, the errors of the pseudo-sciences are exposed.

There is a particularly vivid simile in which the great man is likened to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter. Because the ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bellwether for the rest of the flock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the flock, and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his will. He thinks this and the flock may think it too. Nevertheless the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play, but slaughter – a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great men of history.”

John Gray is consistent with this idea when he ridicules the revolutionary notions of Christopher Hitches and the Nietzschean roots of Ayn Rand. Plus I am sorry to say one can see where Nassim Taleb got his “fat turkey” metaphor.

Isadorable Stella Bloch

by Ben Atlas on 07.24.2010.4:33pm · 0 comments

Stella Bloch. Photo by her 1st husband A.K. Coomaraswamy, ca. 1920

NYPL: “Artist and ethnic dancer Stella Bloch (1897-1999) had many varied and unusual accomplishments during her long and productive life. Born in Tarnow, Poland, but raised in New York City, Bloch began to draw at an early age, but it was a performance of Isadora Duncan in 1914, that changed her life. Bloch became the first American student of the Isadorables, the six young women who served as the company of dancers for Duncan. At the age of 17, she accompanied the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy on a trip to India and the Far East. While there, she learned the native dances of Bali, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, and Java. She spent a year in the palace of the Prince of Solo learning the Javanese dance. Upon her return to the United States, she performed these dances to enthusiastic crowds and headlined at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York. Bloch married Coomaraswamy in 1922. It was his third marriage and it ultimately would end in divorce in 1930. While working on and off Broadway, Bloch met the lyricist Edward Eliscu and the two were married in 1931. They moved to Hollywood soon after their marriage, where both worked in the film industry for many years, later returning to New York in the 1950s after Eliscu had been blacklisted. The couple moved to Newtown, Connecticut in 1966, where they remained until the time of their respective deaths, a few months apart. Throughout her life, Bloch continued her art work. It was during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that Bloch first had sketched and painted pieces that would later be hailed as her best; subjects include Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, as well as Harlem street scenes. One of her pieces was used as the logo art of the Broadway musical Black and Blue in 1989. Bloch’s artwork also was featured in Dance Magazine and shown at many galleries. Beginning in 1983, she was represented by the Beaux Arts Gallery in Woodbury, Connecticut, where retrospectives were shown in 1996 and 2000. ”

The Etymology of Rus, Russia and the Varangian Guard

by Ben Atlas on 07.23.2010.8:37am · 0 comments

Want to tick off a Russian historian, just mention casually that the name Rus is a Scandinavian Viking name and the name Russia is the Greek (Byzantine) mispronunciation of this Viking term. The Byzantine used this name to describe the strange Viking warriors that would swim all the way South to the walls of the mighty Constantinople. Apropos to this discussion is Lars Brownworth’s post: Who were the Varangians? The fact of the matter is that the Vikings owned Russia the way they owned Normandy. Vikings founded the Rurik royal dynasty. The Varangians were similar but different from the Turkish Janissaries. The Varangians were the regular mercenaries but the Janissaries were formed from the Christian boys, sort of like the Cantonist draft in the Tsarist Russia. Janissaries were raised by Turks in a separate muslim cast as an elite army force. And ironically the Janissaries were the decisive in the fall of the Christian Roman Empire in Constantinople.

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