Holiness and the Temporary

The festival of Sukkot (or, the Feast of Tabernacles) begins tonight at sundown. The holiday marks the 40-yr period during which Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert before entering the Promised Land. For this reason, the idea of temporary dwellings becomes literal, and a family will build a Sukkah in which to reside--or at least eat meals--during the holiday.

The prayer that is said over meals eaten in the Sukkah--Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu leisheiv basukkah--is translated as "Blessed are You, our God, Creator of time and space, who enriches our lives with holiness, commanding us to dwell in the sukkah."

There is holiness in the temporary.

But there is also something magical about the temporary. At least, there was when we were children. How many times have we observed young children building tents in their bedrooms out of blankets and comforters, laughing with delight as they then crawl into their own magical spaces? I remember how my younger brothers used to build "forts" in their bedrooms or outside in the backyard. These spaces were small and temporary, but they were special.

And I also remember how, many years ago, I taught a Sunday school class of 30 6-year-old children, and during the holiday I helped them build a Sukkah in our already crowded classroom. The children, who moments before had been out of control--and who, the week before, had turned their Torah scroll crafts into swords with which they would demolish each other--seemed to somehow sense the special-ness, the holiness, of the temporary space, and immediately became quiet, looks of awe on their little faces. (Then again, I was probably the only Sunday school teacher in the history of that church to sneakily teach the little Christian children to build a Sukkah!)

As adults, we get to a point where we stop creating these magical, temporary kinds of spaces. We search for something more stable, something that will be around forever, that can't easily be knocked down. We forget that there is holiness even in the temporary.

I wonder if this also translates to emotional and relationship spaces, not just physical spaces. Is there something holy about the friendships and relationships we maintain with people for only brief periods of time? Do we destroy their magic by asking more from them than they can give?

Addendum to the original post: More paintings like the one featured above can be seen at the artist's website.

When Vanity Becomes Terror

When you see this image posted at the top of this post, you might imagine that I've lost it, given the fact that I don't usually snap photos of my clothing and use them as fodder for my blog. But here is what happened.

I received this Cynthia Vincent dress in the mail a few days ago. I had ordered it, but had forgotten about it. On the day the package arrived, I recall hearing my doorbell and hiding in my bedroom because I don't like to answer phones or doorbells. I am overly suspicious of anyone at my door. Later, of course, I discovered the package waiting for me, and felt quite silly. Since that day, the dress has been hanging on the outside of my closet for two reasons: first, I am taking time to decide how I feel about it; second, I am too lazy to find space for it in my already overly crowded closet.

And, I must admit, I like the dress. My mood is instantly better when I see it hanging there. It has become a bizarre source of pleasure and distraction.

The problem--and, my problem in general--is that things often change shape in the dark, which is exactly what happened around 4:30 this morning, when I awoke to a night terror of an altogether different sort.

I opened my eyes and saw a man's long pale face, the space between the hanger and the bodice of the dress. I saw his long arms dangling at his side. I saw his long dark coat, tattered and shredded at the bottom--the place where my dress became scrolls of embroidery. And I stared at him while he stared back at me, the hand my imagination had blessed him with slowly stretching toward me. I sat there, immovable, stationary with the knowledge that this was finally it.

And I began to scream. And scream. And scream. This time, the terror was real, I said to myself as I screamed. This time, it is no hallucination. My screams did not cease until I heard a woman's voice, outside of my window, frantically asking me--or whoever she imagined was screaming--if I was okay. I was stunned into silence for a split second. I looked toward the window, and then back toward my closet door, watching as the ghoulish man's image began to dissipate into the form of a silk dress hanging on my closet door.

"Yes," I said, weakly, to whomever had addressed me through my open window. I couldn't help but sob after that. And this morning, my throat still feels the screams.

I love to say--and do quite often--that darkness illuminates more brilliantly than light. Darkness reveals to us the things that we cannot see when our vision is obscured by light. And so I can't help but wonder what, if anything, was revealed to me, as I witnessed my vanity become my terror. Perhpas there is a metaphor somewhere in here--something about how often we create our own terrors. We organize and arrange them, believing we can control them but never realizing that they control us.

I Don't Know

I recently helped a friend put together an online dating profile on Match.com. With the exception of a brief exploration of JDate a number of years ago, I have had very little experience with such things, but I had this feeling that I would be the best one for the job--that I would know exactly how to craft such a profile.

It turns out that knowing, however, is a big problem when it comes to the online dating world. And I'm not talking about knowing what one wants in a mate (or soulmate, as online daters like to say). What I found while scanning hundreds of profiles (both men and women) was that an insane number of people from their late twenties to early forties claim to be agnostic when asked about their religion. Although some would disagree, and argue for a more nuanced understanding of agnosticism, the term essentially means "I don't know." It suggests that the existence of deities is unknown, and that perhaps even ultimate knowledge and realities are unknown--unable to be known.

I found this interesting because I don't really think I've met many people in person who have claimed to be agnostic. Most people I know either believe or they don't. They are either religious or they are not. They believe in God or they don't. In other words, coming from the world of academia, I have plenty of friends who say they are atheists. But because I am close to people in both the Jewish and Christian worlds, I also know many people who say they believe in God. I, myself, believe in God, though I don't always know exactly what that makes me. But rather than look for a term that encapsulates all of the textures of my spiritual impulses, I choose to say rather concretely that I believe in God, perhaps even that I love God. I would never call myself an agnostic.

So what I want to know, is where are all the agnostics hiding? Are they only online? Is it somehow culturally hip to present oneself as the ultimate repository of "I don't know" when creating an online personna? Is it seen as somehow pretentious to presume to know one way or another?

I don't mean to criticize people who call themselves agnostics. I mean, looking back on the twentieth century it's easy to find plenty of historical moments that call into question the existence of God. It's just that I find it curious--the fact that I never meet agnostics in person.

Are we becoming more and more afraid to admit that we know anything (or that we think we know anything)? But I think the more important question is this: At what point is "I don't know" translated as "I don't care"? My sense is that many people who label themselves as agnostic simply don't care to know the answer, and for reasons I can't quite articulate, I find this most troubling.

I suppose I just want to know that someone cares about the answer to such a big question.

I used to know a man who said he hated God. His eyes would tear up as he told me how angry he was at God. For some reason I found this compelling. I loved God, and he hated God, but somehow we were on the same page. I know another man who refuses to use the labels of atheist or agnostic, and when asked what religion he is, suggests that he is nothing in an effort to resist the labels. I can almost understand that impulse as well. It used to bother me that he didn't care enough to ask whether God exists, but now I appreciate the way he has shifted the question to something that has to do with how and why we use the labels we do in order to categorize our spirituality.

Here's what bothers me (I've just figured it out): I wonder if applying the label of "agnostic" to oneself is really just a sneaky way out of being responsible for at least making a shot at figuring it out, for asking the right questions. If certain things are unknowable, then we are off the hook when it comes to trying to figure them out, right? If we will "never know," then we never have to think about it. So there's my conclusion, for now anyway: agnosticism is perhaps the antithesis to responsibility.

Zizek on Israel: A Lesson in Idiotic Pop Psychology

I love when Zizek talks about Kieslowski. However, I'm not so impressed with his new comments about the situation in Israel (okay, I'm repulsed). Shahar Ozeri, over at Perverse Egalitarianism, says of Zizek's newest comment on the situation: "Bluntly, it’s a a pathetic projection and at best idiotic pop psychology." Ozeri is right--unfortunately Zizek has succumbed to the trendy strategy of "Nazifying" Israel. Come on, give us something new, Zizek.

Tarantino's Way vs the Jewish Way

I haven't yet seen Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, so I'm not going to say much about it. But Liel Leibovitz, in a piece in Tablet Magazine, calls the movie (and its maker) a failure. Leibovitz suggests that Tarantino's comment in the production notes--“I like that it’s the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis. But not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality.”--is indicative of this overall failure.

In contrast to Tarantino's failure of both "morality" and "imagination," Leibovitz predictably points to films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. Of these films he writes:

"It’s no coincidence that all three of those filmmakers are Jewish. Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn’t see cinema as a way to look at reality, but—ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek—as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat."

I like the idea that Lanzmann, Ophuls, and Melville's approaches are talmudic, but I'm not convinced that it's Tarantino's tendency to create alternative realities that make his approach anti-thetical to the Jewish or so-called talmudic one. Isn't it possible that the staging of such an over-the-top alternative reality might actually force us to "worry about the complexities of morality"? Again, I haven't seen the film so I won't say much more. I'm just not convinced that there isn't something useful about what Tarantino is doing. And, is there no way, as Leibovitz suggests, to see Tarantino's film as art? I don't know. We'll see.

I'm not going to compare Tarantino to Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski, but this discussion makes me think of the latter's A Short Film About Killing, which contains the longest murder scene in cinematic history. But Kieslowski is famous for grappling with moral and ethical quandries, and so his inclusion of this scene seems to ask the question: As members of a so-called civilized society, how much can we bear to see, and for how much of our own past and present transgressions can we bear to take responsibility? It will be interesting to see if this kind of thinking makes its way into Inglourious Basterds.

PS I'm so annoyed by Tarantino's insistance on mis-spelling words in his title.

UPDATE: Charlie Bertsch has written an extensive piece on Basterds over at Jewcy--it's worth reading. After seeing the film, I can say that, moral scrutiny aside, it is certainly not a film about the Holocaust, though I'm not sure I really expected it to be. In many ways, it's another film about film, epitomized in the final scene of the movie, where everything is set ablaze in the cinema.

Where My Feet Will Not Walk

I'm back to Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault after a not-so-brief hiatus of reading other things, including Jabes, which I think I will be consistently reading for the rest of my life: Torah and Jabes--I wonder if that's all I need. Perhaps it will have to be enough--along with my solitude, that is. Anyway, Michaels writes:

"A nation is a sense of space you will never walk with your own feet yet know in your legs as belonging to you."

This is not, of course, the way we typically conceive of nations. In this era--and perhaps as far back as we can go--one's nation is precisely the place where he or she walks with his or her own feet. Where we can and cannot tread defines the place we call our nation. Borders and boundaries keep us in and others out.

But here in this passage the nation is something altogether different. It's very nature suggests its resistance to being tread upon. The implication is that once you walk on it, it is no longer yours. The nation is characterized by longing and anticipation rather than firsthand knowledge. We hope for something because it is not yet ours. And yet it is ours because we feel it in our legs, even though our feet cannot find the evidence of its existence. It is another of life's great paradoxes. I want only the paradoxes, if truth be told. I want the burden of responsibility that comes with such paradoxes.

The nation is symbolic and evocative of yearning and aspiration as opposed to the banality of experience that characterizes our life in the space upon which our feet walk. And I can't help but think--there are places my feet do not walk, but which I know in my legs and up through my heart to be mine. And who are you to tell me that I do not belong? I am looking for a good fight.

Here is Jabes, for good measure (from The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion): "For place, all you will have had is the hope of a mild place beyond the sands: a mirage of repose."

Academia and Atheism

My friend Casey forecasts a split in American academia--which boat will you be on?

Questioning a Scream to the Infinite

Rather than wasting precious nocturnal silence by sleeping, I'm reading Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions tonight. The title itself is enough to blog about. Shouldn't there be only books of questions, rather than books of answers? Shouldn't the arrogance and presumptuousness of claiming to know enough answers to build a book out of them be traded for the honesty and insight of one question?

"The light of Israel is a scream to the infinite" (164).

A brief sentence, but it already contains three words to which I always gravitate: Israel, scream, infinite. I could speculate endlessly on the meaning of this sentence, but I suspect that the only thing to remain would be the question(s). Is the scream a silent scream that howls indefinitely? Or is it one primal, gut-wrenching scream that bleeds itself raw?

In a story that follows the above quotation, a character remarks: "Even when she does not scream, I hear her." Another character says: "I do not hear the scream. I am the scream."

And, the infinite. When I think "infinite," I think of infinite responsibility. Is the light of Israel forever connected to the "Here I am" that resounds in the narratives of the Torah? Years ago I took a nineteenth-century American literature class (I know, abrupt segue). I remember the professor always spoke of "the more within the less"--and that's the infinite. What is a scream to the infinite?

It's just one line in the middle of a large book, and yet I keep asking questions.

"How Much of the Earth is Flesh?"

I'm about 50 pages into a new novel, and so far two passages continue to run circles in my mind.

"Simulation is the perfect disguise. The replica, which is meant to commemorate, achieves the opposite effect: it allows the original to be forgotten," writes Anne Michaels, in her new novel The Winter Vault.

This is Michaels' second novel. Her first was Fugitive Pieces, which may be one of the most perfect novels ever written--let alone one of the most insightful novels regarding trauma and the Holocaust. Considering the work I do, Fugitive Pieces was compelling because of the way it brings trauma to the forefront through focusing on absence and the immense roars of silence, as opposed to diving deep into the traumatic event and attempting to depict it as it really was.

And clearly this theme of allowing emptiness to speak is continued in her newest novel, which has nothing to do with the Holocaust. This one is about a couple living on a houseboat on the Nile River, moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. The main character, Avery, is one of the engineers charged with the task of dismantling and reconstructing the temple in order to rescue it from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Avery loves technology, but he is torn between it and his awareness of the destruction it perpetrates.

Michaels remarks on simulation are interesting because they raise critical questions about originals vs replicas, especially in the context of memorials and commemorations. What, really, do we achieve by constructing a representation of something (an event, an historical period, a feat of nature, etc)? By creating one thing to stand for another, all we really do is distance ourselves from the original that we seek to capture.

But even if Michaels' narrative is concerned with the creations and upheavals of our physical world, she is also deeply aware of the enterprises of the heart--the intimacy and immensity of the way that emotion functions in our world.

And here is the second passage that I cannot yet forget:

"And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch---it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another--but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment."

It seems that even in the enormity of being in love, it is still about what one chooses not to have; it is still about the presence of absence. It makes me think also of Lot's wife, who (according to some of the Midrashim), while fleeing the city of Sodom with her husband, gazed behind her so that she could look back on the two daughters she was leaving behind. And at that moment, she became a monument of her love for them: a pillar of salt.

Multiplicity and the Secret of the Text

I often find treasures in the middle of night, when everything is opened up and illuminated by darkness. Here, silence is not golden, but it is razor sharp.

I'm in Toronto for the North American Levinas Society conference. I have a presentation tomorrow on Levinas's essay "Reality and its Shadows," in which he questions the nature of art and criticism. I'm going to use this essay to offer a reading of Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, which is so perfect that my heart hurts every time I read it.

Of course it's 2am and I have not finished my presentation, so I'm working--alone, where it's silent and I can see the darkness outside.

Accidentally, a few minutes ago I started re-reading Levinas's essay "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition." I read the following:

"...the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniquness of each act of listening carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation in precisely the inflection lent by each person's ear, is necessary for the truth of the Whole. The fact that God's living word can be heard in a variety of ways does not only mean that the Revelation adopts the measure of the people listening to it; rather, that measure becomes, itself, the measure of the Revelation. The multiplicity of people, each one of them indispensable, is necessary to produce all the dimensions of meaning; the multiplicity of meanings is due to the multiplicity of people."

Even when I am unabashedly appalled by someone else's viewpoint, I must--according to my reading of this passage--listen to his or her contribution in order to discover the "secret of the text." Perhaps one only finds meaning in a room where a number of people are engaging in disagreement.

Yo, judío: Borges Looks for the Jew in the Mirror

A few months ago I saw Ilan Stavans give a talk at UCLA. Today there's a piece over at Jewcy that he's written about Jorge Luis Borges' connection to the Jewish world. Stavans writes:

"'Yo, judío,' [Borges'] 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."

Lately I've been really interested in this phenomenon (okay, so it's not really a phenomenon) of non-Jewish philosophers and writers exploring their invisible/imagined Jewish side. There's Maurice Blanchot, of course, whom I convinced Jeffrey Goldberg to add to his Philo-Semite 50 list. And of course there's Bernard Malamud's "All men are Jews" statement. And now Borges.

I always say that Judaism is a mode of being (please bear with my implied conflation of Judaism and Jewishness here). But I wonder if these writers are getting at something else when they seek out their own personal connections to Judaism and/or Jewishness. I wonder if they are tapping into something that is beyond any philosophical, literary, or cultural articulation of Jewishness.

Then again, I suppose they say that there was a certain number of non-Jewish people present at the giving of Torah at Sinai...I love seeing these people emerge in contemporary society.

The Love Affair Continues

"In the night one can die; we reach oblivion. But this other night is the death no one dies, the forgetfulness which gets forgotten. In the heart of oblivion it is memory without rest," writes Maurice Blanchot in the context of his discussion on the various forms of night: night, the first night, and the other night.

For Blanchot, when everything disappears in the night, it is in reality the appearance of the disappearance. At least, this is what happens in the other night. It's when absence shows up, when the wound is revealed. You can see where I'm going with this: back to trauma (the absence) and midrash (the night that reveals the disappearance): "Here the invisible is what one cannot cease to see; it is the incessant making itself seen."

And now my own ego brings it back to me.

Blanchot writes, "Those who think they see ghosts are those who do not want to see the night. They crowd it with the terror of little images, they occupy and distract it by immobilizing it--stopping the oscillation of eternal starting over."

I go through periods of time where I experience night terrors consistently--where I wake up and experience a hallucination. These nights are crowded with the terror of little images. And then there are periods of time where I experience only the memory of the terror. On these nights I fall peacefully into the revelation of absence, quite content to see "the incessant."

Perhaps I have only myself to blame for the terrors with which I have crowded my night. I want the invisible made accessible, the absence illuminated, but sometimes the night contains the unbearable textures of sadness. I've written about this before in some way-- about Levinas's notion of the Il y a, the nothingness/somethingness that represents the rumbling I hear when I put the old seashell up next to my ear. I'll defer to someone else here.

I have a feeling none of this really makes sense. But Blanchot just does this to me: the chaos that brings everything into order.

The Dynamic Duo: Hitler and Obama

I can't sleep. And it's probably because I keep thinking of the creepy sign that these even creepier young people are holding. Last weekend we walked down to the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica to have lunch. There are always any number of street performers and soap box preachers to be found at the Promenade, but this was the craziest experience I've ever had there.

I had never heard of Lyndon LaRouche, but apparently this guy has quite a record for stirring up crazy conspiracies--he's an extremest crackpot with a political cult following, it seems. At any rate, a large group of college-age kids spouting off countless LaRouche inspired philosophies had gathered to speak out against Obama's healthcare plan. Okay, that's fine. I have my issues with "universal" or government-run healthcare too. But that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that they were using the Holocaust to create a spectacle that they imagined in their LaRouche-induced stupor would somehow advance their worthy cause. There were 8 different signs (most of which I snapped photos of) depicting Obama as Hitler and explicitly stating that Obama is continuing the work that Hitler began with his new health plan.

I usually don't indulge crazies. Arguing with them gets you nowhere. They simply stare right through you and continue to regurgitate whatever propaganda they've been fed no matter what you say. But when I saw a young black man (part of the group) dressed in a suit, wearing a name tag that said "Prez" and sporting a sharpy-drawn Hitler mustache on his lip, I couldn't restrain myself.

I walked up to the table to collect some of the literature, and said to the young man handing it out, "Yes, you guys are absolutely right. What Obama is doing is EXACTLY the same thing as stuffing millions of innocent people into gas chambers and crematoria." And he told me that it is the same thing, that Obama has explicitly stated that he intends genocide.

Do you laugh? Or do you spit in his face? I mean, really? The issue is not whether or not I like Obama or his ideas regarding healthcare reform. I think it's clear what the issue is here. He then went on to tell me that I knew nothing about the Holocaust. Good Lord...now those are fighting words.

I have so much more to say about this, but it will have to wait until tomorrow's post. In the meantime, here are a couple more pics from the spectacle.

Spinoza Transfusion

I've been reading a bit of Spinoza as I finish an article on Levinas and Dara Horn's novel In the Image. In the novel, there is a character who develops an obsession with Spinoza in the context of some much larger questions about the nature of God and commandment in a post-Holocaust world.

In a review of Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, Harold Bloom writes:

"As in Epicurus and Lucretius, Spinoza's God is scarcely distinguishable from Nature, and is altogether indifferent to us, even to our intellectual love for him as urged upon us by Spinoza. Many Americans are persuaded that God loves each of them, personally and individually. Is that our blessing, in this era of George W. Bush, or is it not the American malaise, partly productive of the daily slaughters on the streets of Baghdad? A transfusion of Spinoza into our religion-mad nation could only be a good thing."

Our nation--"religion-mad"? No...

The Diversity of Night Terrors

My night terrors are becoming so much more ethnically diverse. Usually--at least two nights each week--I awake from a deep nighttime sleep to see a creepy white man standing either in the corner of my room or directly above me. He's always about to kill me, of course, because nobody hallucinates about people who are there to hang out and have an intellectual discussion unless there are quaaludes involved.

But last night there was a diversity breakthrough. I awoke about three hours after I had fallen asleep to see a very tall light-skinned black man crouching down in the corner of my room opposite to the one where the creepy white guy is always hovering--I think he was a cross between Obama and Dwight Howard from the Orlando Magic. I sat up on my bed, stared at him, and started screaming my head off while edging myself off of the bed and calling for my boyfriend, who had moved to the couch because apparently I had already screamed twice earlier in the night.

No, I wasn't more frightened because he was black. I was more frightened than usual because I've grown accustomed to the creepy white guy. I just wasn't used to this new would-be killer. But I suppose it's a good thing that my hallucinations are growing more diverse. I think it's probably something like what they say about learning a new language: you know you are fluent when you begin dreaming in the foreign language. I'm hallucinating about people of all races killing me now: I am truly tolerant.

God Looks for a Wrestling Match

In an essay from her newest book For the Love of God (which I reviewed for Shofar a while back), Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes:

Open disclosure: I write as a Jew, a woman, a wife and mother, a third-generation lefty, a feminist, a poet. And I write as a reader, for whom words are primary—even sacred—realities. The Hebrew Bible marks, for me, the point in Western culture where human life, human language, and the human experience of the divine, most fully converge. I can learn from it. I can wrestle with it. It fights back, and we both grow stronger. It is both a primary source of my most strongly held values and a source of much that I deplore and struggle against. I believe that the Bible, and God in the Bible, want to be wrestled with. This is how they stay alive. This is why the sages say, "There is always another interpretation."

For me, apart from my lifelong fascination with Torah, Ostriker's work is where it all began. She is one of the most magnificent and compelling writers out there when it comes to dealing with the Hebrew bible in the context of poetry, story, and philosophy. I think I have always loved most the idea of wrestling with God--of a God who truly wants to be wrestled with, rather than blindly and uncritically obeyed.

Levinas in France!

I'm excited about this one--our next North American Levinas Society conference will be in France, and we'll be teaming up with another organization (SIREL). Below is the Call for Papers.

Société internationale de recherches Emmanuel Levinas (SIREL, Paris)
North American Levinas Society (NALS, USA)
International Conference: "Readings of Difficult Freedom"
July 5-9, 2010: Toulouse, France

CALL FOR PAPERS

First published in 1963, with a second edition in 1976, Difficile Liberté, Essais sur le judaïsme is considered Levinas' mostaccessible book and constitutes an e xcellent introduction to his work. This collection of essays which appeared in a variety of journals (L'arche, Information juive, L'esprit, Evidences, etc.) reflects the society, culture and philosophy of France from the 1950s to the 1970s. These essays are closely bound to traumatic events of the time, but Levinas – and this is one of the strengths of the book –tackles these issues directly. He sets forth the reconditions for the reconstruction of a world governed by aspirations for justice and a renewal of Judaism, as signified by the living symbol of Israel.

Difficile Liberté should not be seen purely as a collection of circumstantial writings. Levinas attempts to define post-Holocaust Judaism, and charts the conditions and the need for Jewish thought and education in an authentic but distanced dialogue with modern, i.e. Christian, society. These considerations are often interspersed with references to writers and thinkers who influenced Levinas such as Claudel, Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, S. Weil, Gordin and Rozensweig, but more frequently to sacred texts, the Bible and the writings of the Sages of Israel which Levinas felt were so critical to study. Can it be said that Levinas' modernity may be found in his appeal to Jews to return to those old "worm-eaten tractates" (the Jew of the Talmud should take precedence over the Jew of the Psalms)? These articles are still innovative, sharp, concise and overarching; the style is sometimes lyrical – Levinas rarely wrote in such a strident, argumentative way, blending conviction and stupefaction.

Beyond the obligatory step of analyzing the title (taken from the last few words of the article "Education and Prayer") this conference aims not only to place the essays in Difficult Freedom in their historical context and within Levinas' evolving thought, but more importantly to examine them afresh – with the wonderment and probing they still elicit today. Diachronic and synchronic analyses of the articles in Difficult Freedom will help situate them with respect to Levinas' other works, themes could be explored such as the Holocaust, Israel, phenomenology, ethics, links to Heidegger, Rozensweig, French philosophers and writers, Talmudic readings, Levinas' relationship to Christianity, etc.

This international conference is organized by the Société internationale de Recherches Emmanuel Levinas (SIREL), and by the North American Levinas Society (Purdue, USA), in conjunction with the Levinas Ethical Legacy Foundation (New York), the Centre Raissa et Emmanuel Levinas (Jerusalem), and other partners to be announced. The conference will host participants from all over the world, with more than a hundred presentations. Priority will be given to students and young researchers. The proceedings will be published (articles selected by the editorial committee). If funding permits, some financial aid may be made available, in particular to young researchers.

SUBMISSION DUE DATES
1. On or before July 14, 2009: submission of title and a short author bio-bibliography.
2. On or before September 30, 2009: submission of a 500-word abstract presenting the paper (talks will be 20 minutes, in French or in English).
3. On or before November 15, 2009: author notification, based on the decision of the scientific committee.
4. February 2010: publication of conference program.

Questions concerning this conference and all submissions should be sent
(preferably as Microsoft Word files) electronically to: dl2010@gmail.com
http://www.levinas-society.org
Society Newsletter, 4.1 May

Levinas and Midrash

And the discussion continues over at Perverse Egalitarianism...

My UCLA Talk

My UCLA talk ("Literature, the Holocaust, and the Midrashic Impulse") can now be heard online. You can even hear my post-illness smoker's voice. There were lots of lovers and haters in the audience, which is evident in the question/answer session. I never really thought of my work as being so provocative until this talk, but I realize now that typically, people either love or hate what I'm doing.

One female scholar of Rabbinic Midrash (who I actually respect and admire quite a bit) told me I should abandon the idea of midrash altogether. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that it will be very difficult to persuade some people to accept the use of a sacred term ("midrash") outside of its sacred context. I don't aree with this woman, but it's certainly something to think about.

Discovering Agnon and his Doubters and Skeptics

I was recently introduced to the writer S.Y. Agnon by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, who also gave a talk last night, which I attended. Agnon has been on my "need to read" list for a few years now, but I kept pushing him back onto the shelves. I've only read a couple of his stories so far, but I'm hooked--he's compelling on so many different levels.

As Rabbi Bouskila suggested, while Agnon's work utilizes the language of the Talmud and Midrash, he explores something that is radically missing from these sacred texts: emotional states of being, and the ambivalence of emotion that often characterizes the authentic human experience. To be anchored in one world, but long for another is a theme dutifully explored by Agnon.

A number of Agnon's stories--including "Fable of the Goat," which we read at the talk last night--play with Talmudic stories, flipping them upside-down and intricately re-telling them in the context of modern/postmodern questions and quandries. And I suppose this is the primary reason I find Agnon so compelling. His grappling with the sacred texts shows (in my reading) his love for them, even if he feels the need to respond to them with literary re-inventions of his own. Rabbi Bouskila called one story a midrash on a prior Talmudic tale--I think he's right.

And here's something I love. In Afar Eretz Yisrael, Agnon writes: "The doubters and skeptics, and all who are suspicious of things--they are the only people of truth, because they see the world as it is." The "truth" is not typically black and white, as I was taught to believe. Truth is always already subject to scrutiny and interrogation, or it is not truth. And it must be so, if only that we might never fall into the trap of thinking that truth does not evolve along with us.

It reminds me of something E. L. Doctorow once said, and to which I return again and again, even on this blog: "True faith cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile."

Jews and the Jesus Problem

In an essay in The Forward, Jay Michaelson writes about the Jesus issue in the Jewish community:

"One wonders when, if ever, we Jews will be able to heal from the trauma of Christian oppression and actually learn from, while still differentiating ourselves from, Christian teaching and tradition. Along my own spiritual path, I’ve been amazed at how much I learn from the teachings of other traditions — Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Sufism — yet how jittery I get when it comes to Christianity. Yes, like many Jews, I have an appreciation for the teachings of Jesus, and I even wrote my master’s thesis on Paul and the Talmud. But this isn’t enough. I want to understand Christ the way Christians do — not to become one of them, but in order to enrich my own religious life. I want to learn from them how to have a personal relationship with a personal, humanized, embodied God who cares, and who saves. I want to experience Jesus as a human being enlightened enough to see everyone as holy, even the impure, the leprous and the marginalized. And I want to follow his example, seeing all my fellow human beings and myself as sons and daughters of God."

I like this paragraph because it resonates with something I often say as I try to reconcile my Christian background with my Jewish impulses. Perhaps it doesn't matter whether or not one believes that Jesus is the son of God. Perhaps it is more important that we live a life like his, that we learn to see the value of loving our neighbor.

Thou Shalt Argue With G-d

This week I've been reading a recent collection of Jewish fiction called Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From the Edge. I've read most of the authors in the book, but some were new to me. Aimee Bender, Ellen Umansky, and Rachel Kadish are three writers who I'll likely return to--good stuff.

In Kadish's "The Argument,"a man named Kreutzer is sent to a nursing home to see if he can get the old dementia-stricken rabbi to reveal the whereabouts of the deed to the synagogue. Kreutzer, who had previously made it a weekly ritual of his to compose notes to the rabbi expressing his dissatisfaction with the sermons, finds the encounters to be awkward. Kreutzer can't get the rabbi to recall ever being in a synagogue, let alone the words of the sh'ma or any other prayers.

In one instance, Kreutzer recalls his own younger days, when he attended a cheder:

"Paired with another boy--for a Jew must study with a partner, a co-counsel in the court of the One True Judge--[he] was instructed in the skills of debate. When God's people debate His tradition, He knows they love Him. True faith, the rabbis taught, was an unresolved argument. Jews argued; in His heavens God laughed and was satisfied."

As someone who loves to argue with religion and tradition (and G-d), this resonates with me because I know that I do it out of love. And when I feel that I hate it, it is only because it feels, for a moment at least, that the argument that surrounds it--the dialogue--has come to a close. And there is nothing in that space. Nothing for me.

I'm also reminded of something that E. L. Doctorow has said in a couple of different places: "True faith cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile." The unresolved questions and arguments that surround faith, religion, sacred texts, and G-d are the necessary realization of "true" faith.

I've decided that, yes, G-d is pleased when we argue His traditions. But somehow we are always left wanting more, never satisfied in the way that He must be. But perhaps that is as close to happiness or satisfaction that we can come in this world.

Kosher Adventures

Today was a long day, and not just because I have been sick for the past two weeks. The other day, I was invited to a seder (for tonight, the first night of Pesach) at the home of an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine. I was asked to bring the charoset, kosher wine, and some kind of kosher for Passover entree. No big deal, I thought to myself. This is Los Angeles, and I can wait until the last minute to collect these goods. Kosher food is everywhere in LA, right?

Not really.

Normally I would jump at the chance to make my own charoset and cook up some food for the seder. But I don't keep kosher, which means nothing I might cook could possibly be kosher for Passover. So I took a drive up Wilshire, but Whole Foods was sold out of the kosher for Passover potato latkes, and nobody knew what charoset was. They kept pointing me toward the matzo. I did, however, find a bottle of kosher for Passover wine.

I finally found one kosher glatt market on Santa Monica Boulevard, but the place was madness and mayhem, with lots of pushing and shoving and very little left on the shelves. They had neither charoset nor prepared kosher for Passover entrees.

So I traveled over to the Pico-Robertson area, where all the kosher restaurants and markets of LA can be found. But it was 4pm and they were all closed. "Why would you look for charoset now?" asked one very large and sweaty Iranian Jewish man who kept pushing back his yarmulke.

Great question. I never did find what I was looking for.

Fake Holocaust Memoir Contest

Are you kidding me? I am speechless.

Holocaust Films and Second Generation Voices

I just watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It's set during WWII and is about an 8-year-old boy, the son of an SS soldier in charge of one of the camps, who befriends a boy his age on the other side of the fence. Near the end of the film, the German boy actually dons a prisoner's attire and sneaks into the camp, with dire consequences. I suppose it puts a new spin on the idea of artists going into the camps in order to represent the Holocaust.

At first I was opposed to the idea of this film--respecting the unknowability of the tragedy and all that--but I think I liked it in the end. The moments depicted within the gates of the camp are minimal, and the entire narrative is told primarily through the eyes of the 8-year-old. What remains is the child's untainted perspective of how senseless and illogical and barbaric everything really is.

I gave a little talk at LMU today, and I learned that last week the students listened to a public lecture by a second generation Holocaust survivor who basically denounced every single Holocaust film out there, not to mention the numerous works of fiction that don't quite live up to his expectations when it comes to representing the Holocaust. Apparently, this film was one that he mentioned negatively.

But this leads me to another question that I explored with my students over this past winter quarter: What right does even the second generation survivor have to usurp the narrative of the Holocaust? What right does s/he have to claim authority over the ethics of talking about the event? Are they not, perhaps, still a bit too close to the trauma? Certainly their voices are critical to understanding the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust, but does that also mean that they are authorities on the ethics of Holocaust representation?

The Midrashic Impulse

I don't usually write directly about my main project, but I'll be blogging every now and then over at a friend's blog, and I've just written a post on what I call the "midrashic impulse." The challenge was to write a brief summary of what I'm working on for an audience of educated people who are not in my field. Little do they know, it's often hard enough to explain my project to people who are in my field...

Redeeming the Perpetrator's Voice

Yesterday I heard a talk given by Eyal Sivan at UCLA as part of a conference on Leo Hurwitz's filming of the Eichmann trial. Sivan is the filmmaker responsible for The Specialist, a film inspired by Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem (and by her argument regarding the banality of evil). The film, however, is not without its fair share of controversy, and after listening to Sivan today, I can understand why.

He used two phrases, a number of times, that I found especially provocative. Regarding the editing choices he used in putting together the clips of the actual footage of the trial for his film, Sivan asked, "Why are we not redeeming the perpetrators' voices?" He also talked about what he calls the "silencing of the perpetrator." He then went on to reduce Holocaust scholars' (and Israel's) tendency to "redeem" the voice of the victim to little more than a continuation of the Christian tradition of relying on a Jewish victim narrative.

Yes, of course, he's right--it's exactly the same thing.

Now, I actually like The Specialist, so I have no reason to think ill of Sivan or his work. And I do believe that it's important to hear what the perpetrators are/were saying--not because there are two sides (in the case of the Holocaust), but because Nazi voices are witnesses to the atrocity as well.

My problem here is that an ethical awareness was conspicuously missing from Sivan's claim (at least in this brief talk). He did reference Agamben at one point when he spoke of witness (albeit in a somewhat dismissive manner), so I'm sure he's aware of the importance of such ethical considerations. But there was no discussion of why he feels it is necessary to "redeem" the perpetrators' voices. My answer would be that perhaps in some testimonies--for example in the case of many Nazis who were tried at the Nuremberg trials (i.e. Goering), who neither demonstrated remorse nor offered apology--we need to hear what is not there, namely responsibility.

The absence of ethical awareness that can be seen in many of the testimonies is as important to the memory of the Holocaust as the voice of the survivor, or of the testimony of those who did not survive, whose dead and mutilated bodies speak for them. And in the case of those perpetrators' voices that do admit responsibility to a certain degree--well, we need to hear those too, even if they challenge(d) the dominant narrative of evil, non-human monsters creating heinous crimes by showing us that the perpetrators often seem quite average. And surely this was part of Sivan's goal--to underscore the complexity of the situation rather than buy into the paradigm of good vs evil.

But is it asking too much to suggest that Sivan should address the ethical nuances of this situation rather than to simply demand both sides of the story?

CFP: Humor in Jewish American Literature at the MLA

I'm on the executive committee for the Modern Language Association's Jewish American Lit group. For some reason our CFP for this year's panel at the MLA conference in Philadelphia did not get circulated, so I thought I'd post it here.

Modern Language Association Conference: Philadelphia, PA December 27-29 2009

Panel: "Jewish Wry"--Humor in Jewish American Literature

This panel is a tribute to the late Sarah Blacher Cohen, whose work dealt with humor in Jewish American literature. We are looking for papers that deal with any aspect of humor in Jewish American literature. Please send abstracts to Ann Shapiro at shapirar@aol.com before March 1, 2009

Women Victimizing Women

So it looks like Samira Ahmed Jassim, a 51-year-old Iraqi woman who confessed to recruiting and sending more than 80 female suicide bombers off to their pointless deaths, has been arrested in Iraq.

Sure, we all have causes we believe in. And I think we can agree that suicide bombing is bad for all involved, and is needless to say the epitome of what it means to take something too far. But this woman takes it to yet another level, and makes all the other suicide bombers and recruiters look good, if such a thing were possible:

In a prison interview with the Associated Press — with interrogators nearby — she said that she helped to organise the rapes of young women and then stepped in to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame.

I understand that people who blow themselves and others up think they are fighting for a cause--that they are fighting for the freedom of their people. But who, or what, is Jassim fighting for when she violates, dehumanizes, and sends women off to their deaths all under the guise of obliterating the shame that she herself has given them?

And here I was thinking that Sarah Palin was the big bad witch of the northern hemisphere, with her insistence that rape victims must pay for their own rape kits. Suddenly I feel silly for over-criticizing Palin when there are far worse indecencies being committed against women in other parts of the world.

Agamben and the Camps

On Thursday I had my class read Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. Instead of stumbling through my own lecture on the material, I asked someone who knows Agamben's work well to come and teach it for me. The lecture and discussion were great, even if my guest lecturer and I disagreed on some minor points. In fact, I'm more excited about Agamben now, particularly because what he's doing is so central to my own work on the ethics of Holocaust representation--especially his ideas about testimony and the Muselmann.

But there was one point of contention that I have not been able to fully work through. Then again, if the truth be told, I'm still working through pretty much of all of Agamben, so it's highly possible that I'm getting some things wrong in my analysis here.

The guest lecturer introduced into the class discussion Agamben's argument that the camps have become the norm (a comment that he apparently makes in Homo Sacer). Agamben uses the paradigm of the concentration camps to suggest that the "bare life" to which the camp inmates were reduced (they were called Muselmanner when they reached this point) is the extreme example of the point to which, today, we are reducing the lives of others. It is an example of the state of exception becoming, well, not an exception. In Agamben's view (or what I think is his view), it is not that we are making Muselmanner out of people, but rather that the Muselmann is the potential outcome of some of our current power structures--to the degree that the political arena begins to dictate the way in which people can live their life. And Agamben is concerned with how these states of exception become the bases for rules and regulations in the real world.

As the guest lecturer suggested, the case of Terri Schiavo provides one example for what is seen as the biopoliticization of human beings. Schiavo, in a vegetative state, was the epitome of "bare life"; she was still breathing, but was unable to speak or make any choices about her life. In this state, she became the object for heated political debates regarding who gets to decide when life should end. The Schiavo case is not an example of what our power structures have necessarily reduced a person to, but of the politicization of bare life, and the laws that are created based on such exceptional circumstances.

Okay, so let me connect all this back to the idea of the camp, and what makes me uncomfortable. In class, the suggestion was made that the idea of the (concentration) camps becoming the norm can be seen in the case of Guantanamo Bay and the treatment of the inmates there, who are treated like prisoners but have no access to legal representation. The "exception" is made here because we are (or, were, given the change in the rhetoric of the new administration in regard to "the war on terror") in exceptional circumstances in a post-911 era. So it's another instance in which laws are made based on exceptional circumstances.

Okay, fine. On one hand, I get what Agamben is saying--the power structures that allow people to be placed into camps and ultimately (at their extreme end) reduced to Muselmanner are also at work in places like Guantanamo Bay. I guess the point is that we need to examine these power structures and understand how they function so that we do not experience the manifestation of their extreme end again.

But I am still not comfortable with saying that the camps have become the norm. The implicit comparison bothers me. Perhaps we might find figures in our world who have become like Muselmann for various reasons, but I fear that in allowing such a comparison to be made we forget that the Muselmann of the camps did not become that way because of any of the choices they made; their mental and physical breaking down was intentional, and it was based on nothing other than the fact that they were Jewish.

De(i)fying the Holocaust

Tonight I was planning to see The Reader, just one of the many Holocaust films that are out right now. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Ed Zwick, the director of Defiance, I think I will see this one instead (yes, I plan to see them all, but one film at a time). Interestingly, A.O. Scott suggests that Defiance only re-affirms historical stereotypes, while Goldberg sees it as an attempt to comment on stories of Jewish resistance during WWII that are "insufficiently told."

More to come on Defiance...

Jews, Non-Jews, and Holocaust Memory

I have three days to organize the class I'm teaching this winter--"The Limits of Representation: Ethics and the Holocaust." I'm going to be teaching things like Giorgio Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz), Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved), and Emmanuel Levinas ("Useless Suffering"); as well as fiction like David Grossman's See Under: Love, Aryeh Lev Stollman's The Far Euphrates, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and Michael Chabon's Final Solution. I'll also look at some poetry by Paul Celan and a couple of films including Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. The texts are all there--I just need to decide how to arrange them.

I was discussing the course with someone, and after listing the texts I planned to include, I heard him ask, "And what non-Jewish writers are you using?" I had to think about it for a second, and I realized that other than Agamben and an essay by Dominick LaCapra, all of the texts are by Jewish writers. But is this really a problem?

Typically when I plan a literature course, I try to include works by writers from different backgrounds. In a contemporary American literature course, for example, I make sure to include works by women and people of different ethnicities. But it didn't occur to me in this context--I simply thought about the works I considered to be the best when it comes to approaching the topic of Ethics and the Holocaust.

So I'm teaching a bunch of Jewish men. And I'm not really that concerned about diversity this time around. But maybe this is wrong.

The question is whether or not I have an obligation to seek out books and essays about the Holocaust that are written by non-Jews. And, the second question is whether or not Jews, the primary group targeted by Hitler's genocidal impulses, have some kind of monopoly on the theoretization of Holocaust representation. Does being Jewish give someone a more authentic perspective of the Holocaust, or does it imply some kind of blindspot?

Chanukah Sameach!

Chanukah begins this weekend, but instead of lighting candles, I will be driving from Texas to California, helping someone move to Los Angeles. These are happy times, and they are only getting happier...despite the prospect of spending 22 hours on the road. I had hoped to post my virtual menorah again, but I couldn't get it to work this year for some reason. Then again, I suppose it's not really a menorah, but rather a chanukiah.

Crocodiles and Alligators

I just got back from spending a few days in Texas, and on the flight home I read Aryeh Lev Stollman's collection of stories The Dialogues of Time and Entropy (2003). I have loved Stollman's work ever since I read his novel The Far Euphrates, which I plan to teach in my Ethics and the Holocaust seminar next quarter. His voice is unique, and his narratives are deeply philosophical, scientific, and religious--a strange but alluring combination. Lately, in particular, I am drawn to writers who tell stories that are heavy with loss, but are simultaneously aware of their incapacities to evoke the veryloss they attempt to capture in their work. Stollman does loss in a way that no other writer, to my recollection, does it. Often when I finish one of his stories, I feel a thickness in my chest, an aching of sorts. And I don't know why.

But as much as I love Stollman's work, I don't tend to underline as much as I usually do in works that move me intellectually or spiritually. But there is the occasional one-liner that gets to me in regard to Stollman. In "New Memories," for example, a father tries to show his son the difference between a crocodile and an alligator: "Alexander," he says, "most people can't tell the difference between things. People only see what they know."

When I first read this, I thought to myself, yes, that is true. Certain people in my family, for instance, seem to see only what they have grown up with in regard to the nature of G-d, religion, spirituality, and, of course, politics. But the terrifying moment comes when I realize that I, too, must necessarily have such blindspots.

And yet the so-called quest of the so-called scholar is the pursuit of knowledge and knowing--it's about learning to distinguish the subtle nuances that ripple through every segment of life and living. It's about learning to see the difference between crocodiles and alligators. And I do, in fact, see all those nuances. But what I have come to learn is that often these nuances, and the knowledge they impart to me, are as blinding as the inadequacies that render others inable to see anything other than what they know.

We Are Second Generation

Last night, I watched an Israeli film called Jellyfish that was quite good. It's a film by Etgar Keret, a noteworthy voice in Israeli fiction and cinema, and his wife Shira Geffen. One might expect an Israeli film to be heavy with explicit or implicit references to Israeli politics, Jewish culture, or Judaism. But these elements were completely absent in a film about three women who only happen to live in Israel, and who only happen to speak Hebrew. That's about it--there's certainly a universal kind of flair to it.

I'm interested in this idea of universality as it pertains to literature and film, and the reason for this stems from a discussion I had with my Jewish American Fiction class last week about Nathan Englander's short story "The Twenty-Seventh Man," which concerns 27 Jewish writers rounded up and executed by Stalin. Englander claims that:

"The most important thing for me in this collection is universality and people being able to connect with the characters. I don't think a work of fiction, just because it's about a very specific group, shouldn't have universal themes. I have no interest in a fiction that isn't universal; if it's not universal, then it's not functioning. I'm not making any claims of success, but I can promise you if they're functioning, the stories are more about the setting facilitating the subtext than vice versa."

I was shocked at how invested the students seemed to be in whether a work of fiction should be universal, first of all, and, second, whether a story that contains predominately Jewish characters and uses a smattering of Yiddish and Hebrew terms can even be called universal. The film Jellyfish, however, takes this to another level, by sidestepping any particularist kinds of approaches and successfully stripping the plot and characters of any tell-tale signs of Jewishness.

Except in one very brief but fraught instance. Near the end of the film, one woman tells another woman that her parents were Holocaust survivors. The second woman responds: "You're second-generation?" The first woman shrugs, and says, "We're all second generation of something."

And for some reason, this did not rub me the wrong way. Usually I bristle at the suggestion that the Holocaust is just one of many tragedies, and that it is not in any way unique. But this realization--We're all second generation of something--seems to speak more to the sense of entitlement that we often give ourselves based on our own particular experiences, or more accurately, the experiences of those close to us. The statement has less to do with the Holocaust, and more to do with the ways in which people often appropriate the histories of their parents as a way of formulating their own identity.

This not to say that people whose parents are Holocaust survivors, Vietnam Veterans, or anything else do not have a unique sense of what it means to grow up with parents who have sustained traumas and injuries. But there is something to be said about moving past the narcissism of one's own experiences--imagined or otherwise--and becoming accountable for the place one occupies in the here and now.

Conflict and the Bearing of Bodies

A couple of weeks ago I was able to hear author Ehud Havazelet talk about his newest novel, Bearing the Body. Much like his novel, the author had an air of sadness and loss that hung about him. The combination of sorrow, creativity, and critical thinking is one I'm typically drawn to, even if I don't always know what to do with it. But regardless, there was something very honest about Havazelet, and something that felt emotionally raw in everything he said.

I was impressed with both of his talks for many reasons, but what I found most compelling is the sense I got of his own conflict with religion (Judaism) and the religious traditions he grew up with. Havazelet left the ways of Jewish Orthodoxy, but they have left their imprint on him and they color his writing in a way that makes one wonder whether he does not love them after all. Perhaps he is only disappointed with the false promises they imply. It's true: the rules and rituals meant to bind us together as a community can quickly become instruments of exclusion. They create shame where only encouragement should be. They teach us to look outside of our community and see people who are enemies; they teach us to look inside of our community to determine who is best at following the rules, rather than who is best at loving.

"Autobiography must be in part fiction," Havazelet said in his noon seminar. And, "Art must have some opposition in it." I am full of opposition; I wonder if that makes me a work of art. For a story to be good, I've heard it said, there must be conflict and resolution. But in reality, we know little of resolutions; all we know is conflict, unless we are blind enough to close our eyes to it.

Even the body itself is constantly in conflict, both dying and alive in any and every moment. And when we are overcome with sadness or fear or anxiety, the body betrays us with fatigue, headache, upset stomach, or a number of other physical afflictions. I wonder, then, how do we bear the body? And what is it that bears the body?

New Jewish Comics

I've added a new link to my blogroll: EV Comics, which showcases the comics work of Eli Valley, and often deals with Jewish themes. Check it...

For the Love of God

My Shofar review of Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new book, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, is now online. Ostriker continues to be one of my favorite writers/thinkers of all time...

Perverse Egalitarianism on The First Professorial-American President

My peeps over at Perverse Egalitarianism have now made me laugh twice with their witty little explanation of what they call the "first professorial-American president."

At the end of it, they write:

Now Professorial-Americans look to the future with hope again - if you could only see them yesterday some waving energetically from the balconies of their ivory towers, some excitedly drafting a paper on the significance of the commas in Presidential speeches, some plotting attempts at funny blogging the day after. Indeed, a great day for “the prof” - as they like to be called - a great day for the country that finally comes to terms with its dark anti-professorial past and is eager to move on…

Read it all (and don't forget the comments...equally funny).

The Predatory Dream

I'm reading Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body right now, both for pleasure and in preparation to teach it to my Jewish American Fiction class this week. I had originally intended to teach his second collection of short stories, Like Never Before, but found it was out of print. I don't understand why this is so--I liked it so much that I cannot imagine it not going into reprint after reprint. But this is the way it is. Bearing the Body, however, Havazelet's first novel, is even better, and I'm excited because Havazelet will actually be speaking at my university this week as well.

The plot and characters are extremely well-developed, but I think it's the undertones of loss, sorrow, and memory that are the most compelling. And it feels very, very honest. There's something emotionally raw about it that is appealing not on the basis of pathos, but because it gives one the sense that, yes, that's exactly how things are. About a third of the way through I read the following:

The dream had the placidity of memory--not to say memory wasn't painful, Sol would be the last, ever, to claim that. But it was contained, bounded by event, and, most of the time, recollection was a matter of choice. Not like dreams, which knew where to find you, how to get in. (70).

I'm struck by two things in particular. First, is the idea that memory is the product of a decision one makes--in other words, that I can choose either to entertain a memory or to suppress it. I tend not to be very good at silencing memories when they surface; I have a tendency to let them run their course and finish in whatever way they will, whether that is joy or tears. So the idea that choice is connected to memories is an interesting one.

Second, and more fascinating for me, is the idea of the dream as a kind of night-time predator--something that comes looking for you when you are most vulnerable. No doubt some dreams are merely the product of the memories we willfully suppress in waking moments. But often we don't know what they are and where they come from; they are the ultimate predator.

I can relate to this, of course, given the fact that the initial impetus for this blog was my fascination with dreams and visions that begin to take shape in the darkness but continue to bloom in daylight. I have mentioned before that I often experience night terrors--moments when I awake during the night and see a figure who has come to kill me. My predatory dreams are often themselves full of predators, whether it is a dark figure with murder on his mind, or (like last night) a giant raccoon perched on my dresser, staring at me with his teeth and claws bared.

I once knew someone who said that he didn't dream, that he had never in his life dreamed a dream in the darkness of night-time sleep. I wonder why dreams prey on some and not others.

Real Jews Vote for McCain: On Liberal Trash and Trendy Jews

I've been virtually paralyzed for the past few days because of a text message exchange I had with someone I have known my entire life (let's call him G). It's disturbing on multiple levels, including but not limited to: the use of religious terms to sanction a hateful viewpoint; the suggestion that one is not a real Jew if he/she defends Obama; the regurgitation of anti-Obama rhetoric that has already been debunked; and the use of personal insults.

I've pasted the exchange below, just because it's so incredible. I was careful to preserve all of the grammatical and spelling errors for greater authenticity.

G: Hi. Are u keeping up with all the news about barrack obama having a lot of pro Palestine friends.

Me: It’s mostly bullsh-t coming from hate groups from what I understand.

G: It seems like he has to many friends that hate Israel.

Me: Who?

G: Rashid khalidi. Who has known obama for 12 years. And also obama and ayers donated money to khalidis organization. Also obama had to give money bk to 39 doners from palistine.

G: Rashid is a PLO advisor, which is a extreme group that spreads anti Semitism. He is now a college professor , Lol. How cme these wierdos like William ayers are allowed to teach in a college and spread their hate agenda. These people take advantage of young , naïve college students who look up to them,

Me: My understanding is that in some cases they have a past that is not their present. They wouldn’t be allowed to teach that stuff. Like when UCLA fired angela davis. And DePaul letting Finkelstein go.

G: Obama was at a going away party for khalidi in 2004. At that same party a young Palestine girl read a poem that rejoiced in the death of jews. That isn’t the past. That is the present and obama went to a muslim school frm the ages of 6 to 10 in Indonesia. He is what he is. Only liberal trash will try to debate and defend obama.

G: I also have a past but I have repented and said what I have done was wrong. Obama has never once said that he was wrong, and ayers to this day believes w (missing)

Me: A lot of these politicians are in bed with the same people—they all want their money.

G: Obama and Ayers shared an office. Lol. That’s like [personal name removed] trying to say that he is not friends with [name removed]. I guess it would be okay to let a child molester babysit a 8 year old girl, as long as he hadn’t done any molesting since 2002.

Me: People are just getting angry and hateful on both sides. That’s even scarier than Obama’s alleged terrorist ties.

G: Unfortunately, for some people being a jew is just a trend.

I love the last line. He tried to appeal to me on the basis of my "Jewishness", and when that didn't work, accused me of being a Jew only because it's trendy. A real Jew, he seems to be saying, would not vote for Obama. I wonder if G knows that 75% of Jews are voting for Obama? I also derive great pleasure from the insinuation that anybody who does not hold the same opinion as G is "liberal trash."

I thought my minimal responses would diffuse what threatened to be a barrage of nasty missives sent my way, but I should have known better than to play with fire. After all, this is the same person who once said to me, in anger, that Hitler should have finished the Jews. This is also the person who has never set foot in a college classroom and consequently despises those who do. But saddest of all, this is also a person who speaks very freely about his Christianity and even uses his faith as the basis for his political hate talk. Somehow, I don't think Jesus would be cool with this.

Then again, I've also known this person to be kind, sensitive, and compassionate. I wonder if it is politics--or the fear that often motivates the hateful rhetoric we call politics--that turn good people into monsters, or whether it simply reveals what was there all along.

The kicker (or the irony, depending on how you look at it): I had been leaning more toward McCain (sans Palin) until this exchange. Hey, G, you're doing damage to the cause, man.

Multiple Choice Jesus?

Casey dissects one of my recent Torah talks on his blog.

You Betcha?

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to vote, and it's rare for me to get political on this blog. But I do know one thing: Sarah Palin bothers me on a number of fundamental levels.

Here's what some Jewish women have had to say about her:

“In the same way I resent her co-opting a feminist message in order to achieve a retrograde goal, I resent her pandering to the insecurities of American Jews,” said Ayelet Waldman, a Berkeley, Calif.-based writer who has been volunteering full time with the Obama campaign.

“She’s the anti-wonk, the anti-intellectual, someone who doesn’t want to brook differences of opinion,” said Susan Weidman Schneider, the editor of Lilith, another Jewish feminist journal. “She is certainly not someone with whom I or other Jewish women I know would identify. There’s a real sense of alienation.”

The down-home charm that Palin projects in lieu of a focus on nuance or detail is particularly off-putting for many Jewish women, who are likely to be highly educated, urban, and upper-middle class. “Most Jewish feminists are not part of the class base that she’s meant to appeal to,” said Alisa Solomon, a professor of journalism at Columbia University. “So when she’s deliberately dropping her ‘g’s and throwing out her ‘you betchas,’ that doesn’t appeal to us. We’re not the audience for it.”

But, perhaps hewing again to class lines, Lynne Bermont, a professor at New York University who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and describes herself as a fairly observant Conservative Jew, told the Forward that, “as a Jewish woman, I am most proud to be part of a tradition that valorizes ethical integrity and intellectual activity… Sarah Palin is antithetical to all of these values.”

To be fair, the article also points out that there is a small percentage of Jewish women who are happy with Sarah Palin, but these women tend to come from Orthodox communities.

Palin and the Feminists

Nicholas D. Kristof for the New York Times:

"There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims."


Somebody--an intelligent male who also happens to be a more conservative thinker--recently said to me, "Where are all the feminists when it comes to Sarah Palin? Shouldn't the feminists be supporting her?" Well, anyone who makes rape victims pay for their own rape kits is no feminist, and this is just one of many reasons why not all women see Palin as someone who is on their side.

My Two Cents Regarding the Torah

I talked Torah with Luke Ford and Joey Kurtzman (formerly of Jewcy.com) last week. In reading some of the transcripts, it sounds more like a sitcom than a Torah discussion.

Meditation Without Tashlich

Tonight is the eve of Rosh Hashanah. For the past four years, I have said Tashlich with Jews from a West Lafayette, Indiana shul, standing atop the bridge over the Wabash River. But I am new to this area, and haven't taken the time to discover a place and people with whom I can seek G-d's forgiveness and forgetfulness.

I have nowhere to go to throw my sins away tomorrow—no water to toss bread into, no current to sweep away my soggy symbolic sins. Maybe I will wander down to the ocean, walk myself through rituals and prayers that are not completely mine, but which possess me entirely. I am both captive to and captivated by your promises, frail though they might feel.

And perhaps this is why we sometimes terrorize those whom we mean only to love. From whence do jealous rages and ridiculous insecurities come? Petty and pathetic, weak and fearful, we sometimes lie prostrate before our own shortcomings, begging them to wrap themselves around us, when really we should be showing them what it means to love toughly.

Who is like You, God, who removes iniquity and overlooks transgression of the remainder of His inheritance. He doesn't remain angry forever because He desires kindness. He will return and He will be merciful to us, and He will conquer our iniquities, and He will cast them into the depths of the seas.

Give truth to Jacob, kindness to Abraham like that you swore to our ancestors from long ago.
From the straits I called upon God, God answered me with expansiveness. God is with me, I will not be afraid, what can man do to me? God is with me to help me, and I will see my foes (annihilated). It is better to take refuge in God than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in God, that to rely on nobles.

Jewishness: The Inside and the Outside

My transition from living in West Lafayette, Indiana to living in Santa Monica, California has not been easy. But now that I'm finally settled into my new place, I've been able to finish a few novels that I started over the past month or so. Last night, I finished Adam Mansbach's The End of the Jews. I have mixed feelings about it. In some respects it is brilliant--for example, the way in which the three central characters (an old Jewish novelist, his hip-hop loving graffitti artist grandson, and Nina--a young Jewish woman/photographer from former Czechoslavakia) question what it actually means to be Jewish these days. I'm also interested in the way he juxtaposes Jewish and black identity in America.

But I wonder if he is saying something about identity in general, and the ways in which it bends and sometimes even breaks down in what one character calls America, "the culture of the cheeseburger." Nina, for instance, right before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslavakia, meets a jazz trio comprised of three African American men as they are traveling through Eastern Europe. She takes their photographs, and they end up getting her out of Czechoslavakia. She fits well with the group, and the men jokingly suggest that she is "Creole, three generations back."

Later, when she applies for admission to Hunter College, she checks the box next to "Black" on her application, and is awarded a scholarship for young black photographers. We see this duplicity--despite her ignorance (coming from Czechoslavakia) regarding what it meant to be black in America--of course, as horrendous. "If you got a soulful type of vibe," she tells the grandson at one point, as he deals with the fallout of being a Jew who writes about hip-hop, "you can understand the greatness and the sophistacation of any tradition. . . . Art is universal...We gotta deal with that" (187).

On some level it seems rather silly. Thinking one is black or even being accepted into a black community does not make one black. But is it the same, I wonder, with Jewishness? I can convert to Judiasm, for example, but there is no conversion process that will render me an African American. There are different ways of being Jewish--one can be a convert to Judaism and claim Jewishness; or one can be born into an ethnically Jewish family.

But can one identify him or herself as being Jewish if both of these categories are absent? I want to say that it is possible, but not unless the identification is accompanied by a certain respect for what can never be known, in the absence of an ethnic component. I guess such a person is like the Mobius strip, in that s/he is both inside and outside of Jewishness?