Someone sent me a link to Steven Menashi’s review of A Serious Man. A serious reading, requiring a study. I was sitting on it for a while and finally it occurred to me that Steven Menashi treats the film according to the Four Assumptions outlined by James Kugel about the traditional approach to the Bible:
- Cryptic beyond the simple meaning.
- Relevant to people’s lives, transcendent of history.
- Harmonious in all its parts and meaningful in all its details.
- Divinely inspired.
I think this is the methodology used by Steven Menashi in interpreting the film. Granted his textual readings are superb and his observations are brilliant. But there is one point where his adherence to the Four Assumptions becomes absurd. He weaves the three Rabbis into the meaningful message and narrative while to me they seem as grotesquely satirical characters. The entire point is that they have no message. So the theme song by the Jefferson Airplane:
“When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don’t you want somebody to love”
Morphs into the anti-message from Rabbi No. 3 Marshak, who tells the bar mitzvah boy:
“When the truth is found to be lies and all the hope within you dies, then what? … Be a good boy.”
In regards to Larry Gopnik I don’t understand how Steven Menashi confuses the futile search for a meaning with insistence on a meaning. He must be projecting. There is no meaning and no hashem and his messengers. “Then what – be a good boy”.
Further reading:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I find Menashi’s essay much more persuasive than your comment on it. You seem to be so taken with your idea of a parallel with Kugel’s four-point schema of Biblical interpretation that you fail to see how strained it is. At least, you don’t make much of a case for it.
1. Cryptic beyond the simple meaning. [Yes.]
2. Relevant to people’s lives, [yes] transcendent of history. [No; or at least, not evident. Menashi does presume that the movie is not just about a certain community of Jews in Minnesota in 1967. That, surely, is a "Well, duh!" point. Is that supposed to amount to assuming the movie to be "transcendent of history"? Then virtually every movie review is committed to such an assumption.]
3. Harmonious in all its parts and meaningful in all its details. [Perhaps he presumes that it is so in all the details that he mentions in his review. Is he supposed to say, "By the way, there was this little bit and that little bit that didn't make sense to me"? What would be the point of that? Again, this is a commonplace of interpretation: if you are satisfied that the work makes sense, you look for coherence.]
4. Divinely inspired. [How is this supposed to be any part of Menashi's thinking? This is the most far-fetched point of comparison of all.]
He weaves the three Rabbis into the meaningful message and narrative while to me they seem as grotesquely satirical characters. The entire point is that they have no message.
How is the satirical character of the rabbis supposed to conflict with “weaving them into the meaningful message and narrative”? What is that even supposed to mean? To say that “the entire point is that they [the three rabbis] have no message” is virtually to repeat Menashi’s own statements. E.g.: “That’s a mystery: Life doesn’t make sense, but we’re still responsible for it, even if we had no idea what we were doing.”
Thanks for calling my attention to Menashi’s essay. Short though it is, I think it is the most insightful discussion of the movie that I have yet read.
My Kugel quote was only illustrative, it saddens me to see you focus on it. Yes this was a great review, perhaps the best but you like this review precisely because the author adheres to a meaning. The idea that I am trying to reject and you are trying to defend.