Shana and Jade
Here is the thing, I am under no contract to say something snarky about Romemu (make your own subtitles). These are just double portraits. ►►►read more
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I asked this man if he is seeing any interesting birds? He said: “Look, other there is the famous Central Park Red-Tailed hawk Pale Male with his pair”. And sure enough there was this building facing the 5th Ave. and the nest about the arch of the top middle window. The glorious bird flying in and out of it.
I went to breath in the air of the Great Hall of the New York Public Library. Much has changed there since it was my reading room in the late eighties. Only the last three southern rows are specifically computer free. Everyone else is looking at a screen of some sort. There is an annoying constant trickle of tourists taking digital photos, even I took a few… This must be unbearable for the volumes.
Alas the blue recycling bins is a visual insult to the magnificent millwork, far worse than the laptops. But still there is a magic about the room. It must be one of the best places in the world to read and dream.
What used to be the great cafeteria and now the great Greek Hall at the Met on Sunday.
On a Tel Aviv bench, photo by Max Reider
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With all the chatter about post-orthodoxy I had a chance to observe some in the belly of the beast this Purim. There are certain aspects of a civilization that are almost non existent in the Jewish tradition, like civil governance, the structure of education, etc. You would expect this from a tribe historically deprived of a country. But there are the persistent formulas. Hey, you can tell a Russian from a mile, long after they crossed the pond (at least a Russian can). So while I was watching the Purim dancing a woman pointed to the dance floor and said to me: “Why the vulgar moves?” It was too noisy to respond but I immediately recognized a Russian girl and the typical Russian dance moves. It was not vulgar; it was how they dance in Russia.
On my way to New York I was reading the book about Spinoza by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that she kindly signed for me. The opening chapter is a lengthy description about the first encounter with Spinoza in the Lower East Side Orthodox high school in the late sixties. All the angst of the intellectually curios girl colliding head-on with the “history” as taught in the typical indoctrination factory. I was getting inpatient, I read millions of such descriptions in the Jewish context but especially for people who grew up behind the iron curtain this was our life. There are volumes of the dissident literature that talk about the subject. Nevertheless the book came back to me after Purim. It takes a heroic effort, the mad curiosity of someone like Rebecca to overcome the indoctrination. Most people succumb to the path of least resistance and carry the legacy through their lives. And one can gleam the post denominational insight from the real pockets of the New York post orthodoxy. Here is want you should expect from the post orthodox culture:
- You should expect to meet people who have a transactional relationship with other human beings. The value and emotion are reserved for the vertical interactions with the tribal social hierarchy and the family (antisemitism anyone?). This includes the hierarchical dead. An orthodox or post orthodox Jew is much more likely to have an emotional encounter with a grave than with a human being.
- You should expect to meet people who view women as highly evolved domesticated animals and you should expect women to expect to be treated accordingly.
- You should expect to meet people who internalized the belief that ideas and inspiration are to be contained, at best are just an exercise in futility.
- You should expect to meet people who have been taught from the cradle that “words never actually mean what they say”, there is never a “simple meaning”. This has some unexpected outcomes, for example 10 am never actually means 10 am (I was wondering about that… There is the historic antisemitic misreading towards the assumed subterfuge of what Jews say or promise. Actually this culture is only a reflection on the stubborn assertion that there is a deconstructed secondary meaning to any narrative). I have to agree that one is pretty annoying.
But let me break from the list as I am about to make a point about Purim. So I was sitting having my lunch on Tannis Ester. Over sudden there is a herd of yeshiva yingelach walking down the street. I knew some of them; they looked like they just landed from the moon in that neighborhood in Boston. I was wondering where they were going till they took a sharp turn to a consignment second-hand clothing shop. But of course they were shopping for the Purim costumes. So wait, don’t they already wear a costume? In a regular culture a carnival is a day when you exercise your alter ego. But what do you do as an orthodox Jew when you daily life is behind a mask in a costume. Do you come out as yourself? For this very reason I always felt that the orthodox Purim is such an unsettling horror show. I am yet to meet an orthodox woman without a tzitzis envy that doesn’t have a proudly displayed photo of herself when she was 14 on Purim as a bearded Chassidic man…
- You should expect in a post orthodox world to meet people who have ten times more personalities and costumes than a regular person and you never know what mask you are talking to at any given moment.
Shakespeare in the Park
A friend called me last week to challenge me on my assertion in The Derivative Trifecta – Internet, Jews, Wall St. that Judaism is a derivative religion. He conceded that the culture, the popular ideology is derivative but then there were the mad creative eruptions, the heroic innovations. We went through a glorious list and I had to agree. I was thinking on a bus to NY and realized that I really wrote about this before. But let me try to remodel the expression, being that the Evanston Jew quote is still ringing in my ears:
“Some hide, (Jewish Studies Judaism) some party (Carlebach and Jewish Renewal). Many many turn away from the burden of a historical memory (intermarrieds, secular, Reform), leaving only the pintele yid, a pointillism of sorts, some call it a post impressionism, that sees Orthodoxy as belonging to the world of OCD and psychopathology.”
Evanston Jew calls Jews shearis hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors) and I would add shearis hapleitah b’arey hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors in the biblical cities of refuge). Let me explain. There is a temptation to describe a culture by its highest expression. A repressive ideology forces the crime of a genius to a city of refuge. There a creative sprit can find a reprieve from the blood thirsty mob. There a spirit can hide behind some exquisite grammar studies, poetry, law, etc. But then comes the forgetfulness, the criminals lose track of the geography and claim that they, the citizens of the cities of refuge define the culture outside of the walls. On rare occasions the claims catch on and a sect is born but in general this is exactly what the sign on the gates says – an escapist illusion. This is like saying that the way communism is practiced under the comrade Stalin is not a true communism but few of us here in the Manhattan chapter of the Communist Party really know what the true communism is all about. So please leave the non derivative thinking where is belongs, in the escapism of the cities of refuge, not in Judaism.
I took some photos today but my heart is not in it, perhaps because I met people on the path who had their dog wearing snow boots. ►►►read more
Some of the photos I took at the post-election party in and around Park Plaza Hotel today. ►►►read more
I noticed kids playing hockey on the Chandler pond in Brighton and I decided to come back to take some photographs of the hockey in the snow. But twenty minutes later they were gone, they couldn’t play anymore in the heavy snow. So I took some photos anyway. Nothing better than a snow. ►►►read more
My friend tells me that the expression “360-degree turn” is amusing because you end up in the same place. But when you return to the same place after a 360-degree turn you are a different person and you see things differently. Perhaps if you travel to a new place you wouldn’t notice the 360-degree difference.
The ubiquitous Central Park photos are pretty stupid, but I couldn’t resist a few. ►►►read more
As I watched thousands of bright colored revelers I was asking myself, where are they hiding during the week? And then of course the fringes always appear numerous when they come out to dance. Everything important is always at the fringes. ►►►read more
