Burning of the Jews during the Black Death, Liber Chronicarum, 1493
Two Jewish treasures discovered in Colmar, Alsace region of France in the 19th century and recently in 1990s in Erfurt (former Eastern Germany) are on display in London at the Wallace Collection. The exhibition will be on the permanent display in the Old Synagogue of Erfurt, one of the oldest synagogues in Europe. Both treasures were hidden during the flight from the towns by the Jewish families. Guardian has a video review of the exhibition. Amazing jewelry and memory.
The Erfurt wedding ring with a bell inside. Many photographs show just the crown of this ring while the most unusual detail are the two folded hands on the bottom of the ring. The tops of the widow decorations are slightly bent inwards so a beautiful bride wouldn’t scratch herself. The stars form what appears to be a three-dimensional Star of David. I feel it is possible to imagine and bring to life the bride that was wearing the ring, bring back her flowing robes and her fleeting dreams. Hes sense of doubt and her generous acceptance. The fragrance and the love.
The image above is part of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
I weep easily, but this film in Hebrew is just hard to describe. Half a century in half an hour. Lodz, Frankfurt, Auschwitz, Arkhangelsk, Samarkand, Tel Aviv, Rego Park, Paris, Sinai. This film is a heartbreaking masterpiece.
The fatal story of a family discovered with detective precision based on the photos found in a garbage container in Tel Aviv. The film is strikingly minimalist, yet hauntingly beautiful. The dramatic suspense of the biblical fate punctuating one family, one of many. The unsettling proximity of the tragic century (the video is slow to load but well worth it, pay no attention to the commercials): Ynet – תעלומה במכולה הירוקה
I read some snag last week commenting that “BTs brought the culture of crisis into orthodoxy”. Hold it, the huge number if not the absolute majority of the orthodox in Israel and North America (for sure in Europe itself) are from the post Holocaust or post Gulag families. And the BTs brought in the crisis, really? But wait, the Judaism itself is the culture of crisis (heck they even manged to pass the crisis bug to the world through the one who suffered for our sins). What would you expect from a legacy in a perpetual survival mode? The Zionists understood that in a survival mode you shut down and can’t grow. They called this the Galut mentality.
Speaking about the “crisis culture”. So a friend says that most of the orthodox Jews know that the orthodoxy is bonkers, but they see no other option if they want to preserve their children as Jews. My question is at what point Jews turned into Hungarians? The Jews I know are the children of Abraham who smashed his father’s idols and became a man on his way away from home. The Jews I know are called Yisroel fighting with the angels. But somewhere along the long and terrible golus the proverbial Hungarian erev rav got mixed in and succeeded in redefining orthodoxy away from Judaism. That’s the real crisis. Next time someone tells me they pretend Orthodoxy for the sake of their children I send them to seek the services of Rabbi Tropper’s former racket, pants or no pants…
thejc.com – Palestinian attack on JC website. For the background of this event there is a somewhat long post by David: Treppenwitz – A week in (Egypt) England.
I have been thinking about the sweeping metaphors, like “Egypt”, etc. Douglas Rushkoff for example says the “dark ages” got a bad rap, but then he falls into the same trap by describing that ten centuries period as “good”. Lars Brownworth laments the historical clichés about the Byzantine millennium. The soundbite descriptions are not even true for the eight years, as in the “Bush decade”, let along centuries. So when you start a conversation with a sweeping and patently inaccurate metaphor your description trends towards the one-sided oversimplifications, hopelessly inadequate in portraying the complex, multidimensional and multistaged historical dramas.
We all know the precarious posture of the European Jewry, the Islamic expansion in Europe is a political hot potato, considered by many a threat to the entire European civilization. But it is astounding that David Bogner fails to mention that he lives in the west bank town armed and surrounded by a wall, travels to nearby capital in a bullet proof bus, and I believe David walks around with a gun. His town Efrat is precariously perched on the edge of the Palestinian annexation. And he still complains about the security in London? In fact the security detail in London is there to guard against the terrorist virus hatched within a mile from the David Bogner’s new home, the deadly virus now spread all over the western world.
Shmarya Rosenberg in the FM War Room. Ben Garvin for The New York Times
I used to get upset when people compared my blog to Shmarya’s but then I realized that these are the very people who think that since the New York Times and the New York Post are sold on the same street corner, they both must be newspapers.
Just few years ago I was berated for merely linking to his blog and last week, surprisingly the nasal and monotonous radio host Zev Brenner gave Shmarya a microphone of the most listened to radio program in the post-holocaust metropolis. Ma nishtana? Behold, “Change has come to America”. Oh, yes Shmarya was in the New York Times. And here is the ironic paradox, the market where Zev Brenner sells his radio signal negates the popular culture and at the same time is defined and validated by the popular culture. So literally if you are in the hated mass media, than you exist and visa versa.
But there is more. Why there is no good music today? Why create when you can mix? It’s a DJ culture, get yourself a spin table and mix away. A perfect Web 2.0 set up for Judaism. Two thousand years of hyperlinked quotes about quotes. Your value is commensurate with your command of the quotes and the spin, not your own prose or opinions, not even your unauthorized dialogues with God himself, God forbid.
I once asked Shmarya about his competitors, who are they? “VIN” – answered Shmarya without hesitation. Indeed Shmarya copies the entire articles for the same reason VIN does. The actual newspapers where the articles originate are treif and that includes the very NY Times that gives Shmarya the legitimacy and pays the journalist to actually write and investigate ready to cut and paste articles. Indeed if you strip VIN and the Failed Messiah of the “focus”, it’s the same readership and the same link fest. Steal articles wholesale, DJ news. The ideological differences between VIN and FM are incidental but the readership is the same, the same derivative DJ culture of link and spin, the same toxic morass of anonymity.
Yet Shmarya deserves the credit for his maniac perseverance, for putting up with the death threats, the horrible fundamentalists nastiness, the rejection by the commissars and apparatchiks. In life it’s all about the persistent perseverance and I sincerely wish that Shmarya sees a glimmer of happiness, he deserves this above all. And the very people who object to his blog could have killed the “creativity” with love long time ago, but what would they read instead?
I don’t know a single person, from the heretics to the messianists and all the in-betweens, who think that the Judaic State is functional today. People with different degrees of attachments or detachments, the geeks absorbed in the Talmudic abstractions, the utopian dreamers living in the projected past, the rebels and the swindlers, no one can stare at the present without averting his or her eyes.
How would one define a contemporary post-Judaism or post-Orthodoxy? The two most significant ideologies of the last centuries – Marxism and Freudism represent a post-Judaic eruption, except they don’t brand themselves as Judaism anymore. Similarly Christianity and Islam are the plagiarized branches of Judaism, even after they severed their ties with the trunk. The Jewish history itself is replete with what I call the source code hacks, indeed Chassidism itself was a post-orthodox eruption, so was Kabbalah, etc. Is the evolution possible today?
Speaking about the future is futile; you never know when a “black swan” will glide in unexpectedly. We are constructed to see the world in a rear view mirror. Sometimes we can master the heroism to glimpse the present, but never the future.
Contemporaneously I observe two main groups of people in various stages of the Judaic rejection. First are the tiny minority who managed to escape relatively unscathed. You can literally count them on one hand. The second group is the vast majority. I call it nominally the Chulent Brigade, these are the people who reject or more likely were rejected by the religious communities. They feel that the secular world doesn’t understand them, the religious world doesn’t accept them, so they live in the in-between, the intergalactic void. A friend compared them to the Eastern European dissidents – “the commies are evil but the West doesn’t get us”.
Psychologically people who were subjected to the various flavors of orthodox indoctrination can be compared to the victims of a sexual abuse. The survivors of the abuse are forever torn between the hate towards the abusers and the longing, even love. This very confusion is the lethal and unrelenting legacy of a sexual abuse, and blasphemously speaking, the confusion of is the staple of a ideological or religious indoctrination. I just don’t meet many people who can break from this.
In America this predicament is only worse. There is the unprecedented chasm with the secular society. And then there is the cruelty of the mass produced indoctrination. What was traditionally, by and large, a private religious instruction, turned into the factory-like school system, where an ego and dissent are crushed by the debilitating group-think. The proud graduates are measured, rewarded and awarded a Stockholm syndrome degree. Is a post-abuse, a post-Stockholm syndrome possible for a post-human? Not even God can ask that much from a mere mortal.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
Monument to Russian Soldiers in Berlin
A right-wing affiliation of the orthodox Jews in America is a persistent paradox. To put it simply if the welfare state and the socialist safety net of the post depression America were to disappear, the Orthodox institutions would crumble in a month and the birthrate will drop far below the national average, except perhaps for a few families with unique talent and experience in stealing. Yet despite the fact that Orthodoxy in American is only possible because of the socialist institutions, there is the ubiquitous libertarian rhetoric.
But this is not even half as paradoxical compared to the fact that while Orthodox Jews like to proclaim allegiance to the Anglo-Saxon ideal of the liberal democracy, their culture and the internal communal structure is a bizarre mixture of feudal lordships, monarchy and communism. Most of the orthodox groups are ideological dictatorships run by family clans where nepotism is the decisive power, the very opposite of the idea of the liberal democracy. And this is far more insidious than the “goim and us” universe. There are rules for us and different rules for everyone else. The game we play at home and a different game we play outside.The totalitarian idea is internalized. I actually met people who are passionately libertarian yet believed in brain washing, propaganda, manipulation of the masses, crowd control. Hardly what the Anglo Saxons founders had in mind. Are you still asking why this American experiment is failing?
photo via flickr/tagl
On the subject of Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship. One of the greatest creative achievements of the Kabbalists following Moshe De Leon was the multidimensional vision of the universe. Even the word sefira implied a sphere, a circle and gematria is of course geometría. Kabbalists poetically imagined the geometric structure where the smallest part contains biggest and hiskollelus or inclusion and interconnection form the kabbalistic cosmos. After the eruption of the vision, it was inevitable that just few centuries later the science would articulate the same idea. Compare the kabbalistic cosmos and the discovery by Galileo Galilei.
Sefirot in Kabbalah, Moshe De Leon 1250 – 1305
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
The catholic apparatchiks couldn’t care less if the earth was a flat rock or a ball. But the spherical cosmos deprived them of the earthly hierarchy, of the top and down, the low and high. This was a management problem. The Pope needs to be on top at all times and that requires the flattened subjects.
Chassidim, especially Chabad, did their best to downplay the complex multidimensional cosmology of Kabbalah and substitute it instead with a pure vertical axis. The geometric metaphor repeatedly evoked in Chabad (and especially during the communist/fascist era) is up and down, high and low. For the same reason that the Catholic apparatchiks preferred a flat earth, Chabad commissars saw the world divided into high, low and not low enough (bittul). “And yet it moves!”- Galileo.
Today is 377th birthday of Baruch Spinoza, the eternal hero of the Nation of Israel. Gilles Deleuze writes in What is Philosophy, pages 59–60:
“Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside – that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility of the impossible. Thus Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves or draw near to this mystery. Spinoza the infinite becoming-philosopher: he showed, drew up, and thought the “best” plane of immanence – that is, the purest, the one that doesn’t hand itself over to the transcendent or restore any transcendent, the one that inspires fewest illusions, bad feeling and erroneous perceptions.”
The Herem written in Portuguese: “The chiefs of the council make known to you that having long known of evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from evil ways. Not being able to find any remedy, but on the contrary receiving every day more information about the abominable heresies practiced and taught by him, and about the monstrous acts committed by him, having this from many trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness on all this in the presence of said Spinoza, who has been convicted; all this having been examined in the presence of the Rabbis, the council decided, with the advice of the Rabbi, that the said Spinoza should be excommunicated and cut off from the Nation of Israel.”
Spinoza's Grave in Den Haag ברוך שפינוזה
Photo via flickr/roel1943
The contrarian view is interesting and important. I didn’t read the book. But I just listened to over an hour lecture in New York by Shlomo Sand, published on his blog (the relevant part starts at the 20 min mark). I find the presentation and the conclusions are extremely charged politically and this does a great disservice to the scientific validity of the book.
OK, the Maccabees converted entire nations to Judaism, hence King Herod, I get that. There were Judaic kingdoms in Iraq, Berbers in Morocco, the Jewish kingdom in Yemen and of course the Khazars. I am even willing to accept the idea that there was no mass expulsions by the Romans. The Khazars founded Kiev, the birthplace of Russia. So far so good. But if Shlomo Sand intends to draw a direct line between the Khazars and the Eastern European Jews, he would have to explain in relative detail what happen between the Jewish Kiev and the Jewish Kovno. This is the glaring ten century gap, I doubt Shlomo Sand adds anything new on the subject, but I am keeping my mind open. But Shlomo Sand is right, the idea that Jew and Judaism resists conversions is a very recent distortion. Undoubtedly there were mass conversions by force and through missionary work. Hence the kingdoms and the Jewish colonies.
The cavalier dismissal by Sand of the German track into the Eastern Europe is not very serious, I don’t recall anyone in Berditchev speaking a Turkic dialect of Khazars, they spoke “German”, enough said. The marginal communities in Georgia, the Mountain Jews and even Iranian Jews is a different story, but those are the low hanging apples, too low even for Shlomo Sand.
I have been thinking about this film for a couple of days, a serious work of art. This is not a nostalgic flick, nor is this a sugar flavored tale set in the old country. This is a very personal film about St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The film is set in 1967, the year the character of the movie Danny Gopnik and the older brother Joel Coen had his bar mitzvah. Although 1967 is not mentioned in the film, the brothers are very specific, in an interview they said “if it was 1966 or 1968 it would have looked differently”.
There is this idea promoted by Tyler Cowen (another misspelling of Cohen?) in his blog and in his latest book. He speaks of the new Internet Autism. Tyler says that autistic people channel the world, they ignore and block-out vast areas of human experience and instead focus intensely on a specific channel. Hence the new Internet Autism that enables all of us to channel and remix the news and the information stream hyper locally and super narrowly and autistically ignore the rest. Perhaps now I have the key to the body of their work. The Coen Brothers are autistically sensory, they recognize the smells, the images, the sounds, the faces, the tension with the goy next door, the village hottie, the inevitable uncle with an intestinal problem, etc. And this is the reason their (and Tarantino’s films) resonate so viscerally today when this sensory range is at the forefront of the contemporary culture. But the curse of the Jewish is in the Text, it autistically ignores precisely the sensory range so dominant in Coen’s (and Tarantino) films. This is in a nutshell is the age old problem with Jewish education and tradition, sometimes mislabeled as the problem with the “Jewish Religion” (although it’s hard to separate the two).
And so the Coen Brothers created a personal epic, the most meaningful film about suburban Jewish America. Granted I see the film through the eyes of Danny Gopnik, not his father Larry who is the main character of the movie. After all this is the personal vision at the heart of the story.
Larry Gopnik in his class
“A Serious Man” is the most amazingly textured film that condemns the textual. The horror and the dull ugliness of a Midwestern suburbia recreated with the vividness of a sensitive teenager. The minor characters bulge to the screen as grotesque exaggerated caricatures with comic bodies and movements. Those minor characters hold the film together, the story is framed in between the visits to the three Rabbis. And then there is the musical channel, the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” takes turns with a Yiddish song. In an interview the brothers said it was the musical backdrop – “rock ‘n’ roll and the Cantorial music”. And this brings us to the channel that is autistically tuned off by Danny Gopnik, the day school and more broadly the textual. He sits in his Hebrew class with a secret radio plug in his ear and goes through school, and specifically through his bar mitzvah ceremony in a pot induced daze.
The film opens with a rashi quote: “accept with simplicity everything that happens to you”
( תמים תהיה עם ה’ אלקיך (דברים י”ח : י”ג
התהלך עמו בתמימות ותצפה לו, ולא תחקור אחרי העתידות, אלא כל מה שיבוא עליך קבל בתמימות, ואז תהיה עמו ולחלקו
Larry Gopnik, the father, enters a Kafkaesque plot preempted by the five-minute Yiddish mini-film. An episode with the Dybbuk somewhere between Lvov and Lublin. And although there is no obvious connection to rest of the story, I see it as an announcement by the Coen brothers that the film is about Jews who call themselves ivrim because they are m’ever, from the other side of the river and everything they do is connected to what happened elsewhere, i.e not here. Ethan Coen said “it feels right”. The paradox of this film is that you are not really sure if this is a comedy or a horror. I am leaning and landing on the horror side of the river.
Danny Gopnik meeting Marshak
P.S. Notes from the nitpicking department (blame Scarsdale Rabbi Dan Sklar, the consultant):
- If you are in Poland don’t mix Polish and Litvish Yiddish dialects.
- Dybbuk is the Amercan projection on the Polish Yiddish culture (even though the original movie Dybbuk was produced in Poland), you could do better to authentically evoke that time .
- In Poland they wouldn’t call the holy town of Lemberg, Lvov (this is the Russian name of the town after the Ukrainian Lviv).
- Mrs. Gopnik, not having a get doesn’t mean you are an aguna.
- The character of the 3rd Rabbi Marshak. My guess is that the prototype was Rabbi Jacob Twerski? I doubt he had an open Sephardic style Sefer Tora with a human skull lodged in it, nor is Rabbi Jacob Twerski going to have a reproduction of the 1601 “The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio on his wall. But knowing the Twerskis, he indeed could have had some strange animals in formaldehyde around.
- The suede yarmulkes (and those metal clips) were not yet invented in 1967.
Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac" 1601 -1602, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The Caravaggio published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
As far as pashkevils go this has to be a classic. The collision of the modern images with the ornate and layered language is beautiful and poetic.
By the way of subtitles the article by Hanoch Daum who speaks with authority only allowed to people who know the subject first hand: Ynet – Bored out of their minds:
“The truth must be told: The fundamental motivation behind ultra-Orthodox protests on Shabbat, regardless of whether they are directed against Intel, the Karta parking lot, or anything else is deep boredom, incredible emptiness, and the great frustration of haredi youngsters. These protests are not about love for the Shabbat. Hundreds of energized young haredim are looking for something to do; looking for something interesting. They have no e-mail, no Facebook, and no place where they can play soccer. They don’t join the army and most of them will never work. Long years at the yeshiva, from a very young age, where studies begin early in the morning and end very late at night, prompt great frustration among many of them – and especially those unfit for such a demanding course of study. They have no real interaction with the world that rages around them, and this impossible reality coupled with their archaic and unrealistic way of life, along with the strict modesty limits, leads to protests that are sometimes wild and reckless; the type of protests that even haredi leaders don’t know how to stop.
And this pretty much sums it up:
“After all, these young haredim are not really committed to the Shabbat. Had they been truly devoted to it, they would not be holding protests that prompt hundreds of police officers to desecrate the Shabbat. They would also not be assaulting reporters and media personnel with such crude violence. However, the young protestors from the haredi neighborhoods have no commitment to the Shabbat. In fact, they have no commitment or obligation to anything. They do not need to make a living or support anyone, they do not need to join the army, and they do not need to take entry exams for university. All they need to do is pass the time in the great darkness surrounding them.”
The Pashkevil via israeltech.net
