Sex and Jews

I wrote a short piece over at The Forward on the launch of Jewrotica.org and the question of whether diasporic Jews have absorbed a Christian understanding of sex. Read it here.

Women and the Pregnant Body

Check out my latest post over at The Forward (Sisterhood blog):

These days, news of a woman’s pregnancy elicits all sorts of shameless demands from people with voyeuristic drives to see her naked stomach. I should know; I’m pregnant...

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/165961/being-pregnant-doesnt-mean-baring-all/#ixzz2C7nM1naZ

No Apologies

I wrote a Yom Kippur piece for the Sisterhood blog over at The Forward a few days ago--it's about women apologizing too much, and often for things about which they don't need to be sorry. Yesterday morning I found myself doing exactly what I warn against in this piece. I was paying for some candy at an amazing new candy store at The Grove in Los Angeles. I had already given my debit card to the cashier so I began to search for something else in my wallet, only to look up a few second later and realize that the cashier had been holding my card out to me. "Oh, I'm so sorry," I said. "You're not forgiven," she replied, with a look of feigned contempt, "because that is a totally egregious error." I laughed to myself,  thinking about my piece about refraining from squandering apologies, which had been posted earlier the same day. "You know," I said, "I'm really not sorry."

What Does the Pervasiveness of Rape Jokes Say About Us?

Check out my post on rape jokes over at The Forward (Sisterhood).

Name Me

Choosing novels to take on vacation is an anxiety-inducing exercise. The night before a recent trip to French Polynesia, I stared at my bookshelves, agonizing over which novels to bring along in addition to a giant stack of unread issues of The New Yorker, Commentary, and The New Republic (and, I confess, an unsubscribed to issue of Vanity Fair). I ended up with these: Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (through which I had previously only skimmed), John Updike's The Terrorist, and Nathan Englander's What we Talk about When we Talk about Anne Frank. I really had no desire to read the Updike, but since I've been teaching post-9/11 fiction I felt that I should at least take it along for the ride. A Franzen hardcover started out in the pile, but given the immense weight and size of his books, it was thrown aside minutes before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport.

I didn't think much about the fact that, armed with multiple novels about terrorism, I was getting ready to board an 8-hour flight. And I'll I'm going to say is that by the end of my trip I was sick of reading about terrorism. (And I couldn't, just couldn't, finish that awful Updike.)

Orpheus Lost proved to be a gift: one of my new favorite novels, the kind that leaves you longing and makes you sad once you finish because there's no more to read (and especially if you're stranded in paradise and all you've got left is Updike). There's so much to say about this novel, and this writer, but I keep thinking about one idea in particular:

"Names are always a problem . . . They're never you. They're baggage from your parents."

Of course this is likely much more true in some circumstances than in others. I suspect there are people who are quite able to choose names for their children based solely on sound, rhythm, alliteration. Surely not everyone considers the meanings or histories or connotations of names. But even then the parents' choice conveys something about their needs, desires, preferences, or histories. A name chosen simply because it was on a list of most popular names for a given year says just as much about the parent as does a name that is somehow rare, unique, or laden with symbolic meaning, doesn't it?

We are born violently and into a position of responsibility: to bear our parents' burdens. We bear witness to their wounds from birth: this is our origin.

As I consider names for my own soon-to-be son, I feel the burden, of course, and I contemplate how I might relieve him of having to carry anything of mine. And I don't know how to name someone I have never seen or met--someone of whom I have no knowledge, other than what I imagine. But this is the way things are done. We imagine our children and who they will become, and we name them accordingly. We imagine them in our image, and because of this they inevitably carry our desires within them.

But I would be dishonest to suggest that I don't experience a modicum of pleasure when I imagine my little son carrying a certain brand of burden: the one that teaches us to struggle and to discover delight in the struggle, the kind that teaches us to care for others, especially those who are different from us. I know that I carry a few of my parents' burdens and that they have made me who I am. I can only hope that my own child similarly delights in the burdens he will help me carry.

Border Crossings

Check out my review essay in The New Republic:


WE ARE A CULTURE obsessed with memory. More precisely, we have a tendency to fixate on the memories of others—collective memories that both are and are not ours, imagining ourselves to be the rightful heirs of all manner of trauma, narrative, ritual, and conquest passed down to us through the movement of history. We claim possession over these memories. The American impulse toward ownership leaves not even the so-called sacred geography of memory untouched. READ MORE...

"She Washed My Hair": Feeling loss as love

One of the greatest rewards of having spent seven years in graduate school is seeing some of my former peers and close friends publish extraordinary work. This past week Leslie St. John published a little book of poems called Beauty Like a Rope: it has already become dear to my heart. The poems are so delicately and beautifully crafted. And they hurt. I've always loved the rare poem that causes me to ache in some way. I hope we see more and more from Leslie.

One poem, "She Washed My Hair," gives an autobiographical account of a traumatic moment in the poet's life. Years ago her eye was hit by a cd tossed into the crowd at a concert. She ultimately lost the eye and now wears a prosthetic (though it's virtually impossible to discern this now; Leslie is quite lovely). But the poem captures the beginning of her healing process, and toward the end describes an intimate moment between the poet and her mother:

after Mom raised my lid to drop medicine,
she washed my hair,


untangling rusted screw curls, not with force
as she had after dance recitals
and ice skating competitions, but with care--


a jeweler unknotting a thin gold chain
rubbing each kink smooth.


Her small hand supported my head
dangling from the foot of the bed,
the other tipping an iced tea pitcher


of water to rinse the shampoo.
So, how to tell her now--


twelve years, two states, one husband,
and three prosthetic eyes later--
she made me feel even this loss as love?


To feel the loss as love. Washing someone's hair, allowing someone to wash one's hair: it's is a peculiar kind of intimacy. And the intimacy is so much more complex when it takes place between a mother and a daughter.

My own mother, one day last week, told me a story about washing her own mother's hair. My grandmother has Alzheimer's disease, and it goes without saying that this condition is one of the most barbaric afflictions. The way it wraps its horror around all those in proximity to its victim is startling. No one in the victim's orbit remains unscathed, even if it is only by virtue of being the recipient of a blank stare: I don't know who you are. Because all we ever want is to be known. And if we have felt known, perhaps it is more painful to experience the process of being un-known.

Later that day, when I got off the phone with my mom, I cried a little bit, thinking of her washing her mother's hair, painting her nails, dabbing a bit of blush and lipstick on her questioning face. And yet I don't quite know who I cried for. My mother? My grandmother? Myself? I suppose I cried because of the unknown--because I don't know who will wash my hair one day. I don't know whether I will feel, as Leslie did, the loss as love.

Up Close and Personal With the TSA

I've finally published a few of my thoughts regarding the TSA and airport "security." For more on what I call the "spectacle of fear" and "security theater," check out my article on the cover of this week's Jewish Journal.

Red: An Encounter

I saw Pina last night--the new Wim Wenders film about the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. The image pictured above is a still from the film. I had wanted to see Pina for the past year, ever since I taught a class on post-WWII German film and got really into Wim Wenders. It's raw and intense, but not in a manner that is overly draining. And it's in 3D, which is really important to the experience of the film--it's in no way gratuitous or cool for the sake of cool.

The opening scene is all dirt (spread over a stage), barely clothed bodies with intense facial expressions, dramatic movements, and one piece of thin red fabric that we later see is a dress that one dancer will be forced to wear. But with the 3D component, I felt as if I were standing there at the edge of the dirt in and among them. At one point a dancer brings the red fabric to the edge, where I felt I stood, and looked right at me before dropping the fabric at my feet.

It was one of the most intense encounters with the recognition of responsibility that I've ever experienced. This woman, the agony on her face, her eyes piercing me, the red fabric laying at my feet, the horde of dancers now at the opposite end of the stage watching me--what was I to do with it? Where had it come from? Why was it suddenly mine?

And I could hear them breathing. Dirt, sweat, breath, and one red flash: our origins.


I had suddenly become its hostage. And it occurs to me now that this is always the texture of responsibility--what it necessarily looks and feels like. The sense of horror comes from the agony of both ownership and captivity. I could not look away, and now I keep looking back to that first moment of the film.

A Radical Departure

Most often I recoil from posting anything of too personal a nature on this blog--especially in the form of photographs. Clearly I subscribe to a different brand of self-indulgence. But we just loved working with these photographers so much that I couldn't resist posting a link to some of our wedding photos on their blog. I'm still as dark and deliciously unhappy as ever, but I do love these photographs. I hate to say that they make me happy, but . . .

Wilderness Has No Words

Sometimes I imagine that life has already picked my bones bare. And then I tell myself that I have not yet lived. But the truth is that I have lived enough to know that I am already dying. But I feel alive, even as I slouch farther and farther from the bright chaos of origin, of birth, of coming into this world.

Sometimes this means I don't know how to talk to you. Or to her. Or him. Or maybe it means you don't yet speak my language.

I'm a literature/philosophy person. I love ideas and poetry--things that cut us in every direction. I didn't study rhetoric or linguistics like some of my friends, but I am still often fascinated by conversations in which people engage--by their structures and rhythms, their transparencies and idiosyncrasies. I also simply love language, and recently it occurred to me that conversations can destroy language. Language is something that is shared--a dialogue. In theory, a conversation is also something that is shared--an exchange of words and ideas. Well, yes, it should be.

But words are used so carelessly. I'm thinking of a conversation in which I recently pretended to engage: two men, two women, beautiful faces, charming smiles, careless laughter, many words. My soul is dying as I pretend to be kind. Many hours together and yet I cannot recall why I laughed when I did--why I appeared to laugh--or what I could have possibly said, what words I could have used as I skimmed the surface with them. If only I, too, could be satisfied.

And then tonight I found something. Someone recently gave me a collection of poems (The Deleted World) by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.  Something about this one ("From March 1979") feels right:

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,

I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages

stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language, 

language without words.

And I wonder: is it really true--must a need for language without words exile us to a wilderness?

Knowing Secret Things

Just the other night I went looking for something: a love poem. That is, I went searching for some kind of philosophical musing on love, something both painful and exhilarating--something that would name what it is that we experience, something that would present itself as an alternative to some of our impulses, ever the anti-thesis to happiness. Perhaps, for once, I had need of cliches. Don't we all, at some point, if only to account for their pervasiveness?

I thought of Yehuda Amichai; I thought of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Love, for both Amichai and Rilke, is fraught, always already. It is heavy and laden, threaded through with a doubt--a knowing insight--that stabilizes and clarifies more than the purity of a love that one seeks and never finds. I suppose I should have considered Elizabeth Barrett Browning--how do I love thee?--or a voice equal to such hyperbolic exaltations of something we name love.

But I know better.

I stayed with Rilke, though I felt nudged to wander. And, as on many nights, I found what I didn't know I was looking for: I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone. And I found my love poem.

I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone.


Those who know secret things: the things we all close our eyes to. I once read an essay about the difference between how little girls and little boys form friendships with their peers. Girls, running around on the playground, stopping to whisper into another girl's ear: a secret. And little boys: yelling, running, pushing, panting. Bonding, both. What is it about secrets that bind women, in their younger years, together?

We abhor secrets and secrecy as we grow older. We relinquish mystery for the mundane. Perhaps we cease, consequently, to love. And yet secrets are not simply the opposite of the mundane, mystery romanticized until it become the object of an immature obsession.

But what are these secret things? No. What is the secret? I can't help but think that it hurts, that it longs, that it agonizes and even hates.

I once knew someone who loved G-d so much that he hated him for his failure and silences. He would go to the synagogue on Shabbat to stand in the back and glower and hate and agonize. But I would take this. I would take a hatred so intense that it threatened to reveal its own secrets.

Sometimes being with someone who knows secret things means not being with him, with her. I read Jabes, Levinas, Rilke--I think of wounds and red threads and of being your hostage. And it becomes my secret. It becomes my love. To be with those who know secret things . . . means to be alone.

I am with you, always. I love you, always. The freedom to long, the space to desire: the knowledge of secret things, of things secret.

Dropping the H(olocaust)-Bomb: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Comedy

I'm giving a talk called "Dropping the H(olocaust)-Bomb: The Ethics of Post-9/11 Comedy" tomorrow night at a BINA salon. Somehow I've managed to transition from midrash to comedy, but the Holocaust is still present.

UPDATE: You can watch the talk here.

Reading for the Wound

Last year at this time (Rosh Hashanah) I wrote about the sweetness of a new year. I believed that happiness must be inevitable for us all because there was possibility, coming in the form of a calendar yet unblemished. I imagined that the hope conjured up by those without hope was something to which I too could aspire.

I knew it was going to be a sweet year. And it was. But sometimes sweetness becomes suddenly like sand in our mouths.

I traveled from Los Angeles to Boston only recently. For many months now I have prepared myself for potential airport trouble because I refuse to pass through the body scanner and I refuse to submit to the pat down. I have legitimate reasons why I refuse to do so--many of which will be discussed in various entries on this blog over the next month or so. But until this trip I was always given the "option" of going through a metal detector as opposed to the more recent intrusive methods (well, to be honest, I always scope out the line--and there's always one--that doesn't have the body scanner). But this time it wasn't an option: every line had a body scanner.

My travel companion and I both knew that we might not be able to fly, but we had agreed to stand our ground. We were polite, articulate, and compassionate in our refusals, but we were also adamant. The details will be discussed in a future blogpost, but our standoff involved every possible "supervisor" at the airport as well as multiple members of the LAPD. We did fly that night, but with only a few small victories. I was ultimately "forced" to submit to an intrusive pat down.

I was devastated and ashamed of myself--mostly because I knew that I could have let them arrest me rather than capitulate. They only forced me because I allowed them to. I am disappointed that I did not, finally, sit down on the ground and refuse to leave the premises and allow the police officers to, reluctantly, arrest me.

At the end of my trip, as I began the security screening process once again in Boston, I was met with much more hostility and cruelty (in LA, for example, the TSA employees were--with the exception of one man--somewhat understanding and respectful even if they lacked the capacity to articulate themselves; the LAPD officers were surprisingly kind--more articulate and intelligent than the TSA staff). The TSA employees at the Boston airport were inhuman (the men, that is; the women were fairly average in attitude)--some of the most hateful individuals I have ever encountered. Something about sneering, hateful men in uniforms chills me.

But I am equally disturbed by the mass apathy that flanked me on both sides in the form of travelers mindlessly walking through the body scanner and assuming the position. Why? Because someone in a uniform told them to do it. I saw as others watched, horrified, the way the Boston TSA treated us. They were scared.

I have been deeply disturbed for days now. No number of apples dipped in exotic honey can sweeten my disposition. And there is a sense of foreboding for this year to come. But I am also more deeply aware--of exactly what, I am not ready to articulate. But it is an awareness nonetheless.

Responsibility begins with awareness. And I have become aware. I am now responsible for this awareness. It holds me hostage.

And yet I don't know exactly what is my responsibility--to myself, to my community and country, to God. I also know that I experienced something else--something painful. I don't, however, know what it is. And so I've come running back to books and theories and ideas, looking for an answer to what it is I'm experiencing--what can only be described as an existential trauma of sorts. And so, like always, I read for the wound.* But this time I feel it inside of me.

I have yet to find answers to what it is I feel, what it is I want to say, to scream. My first thought was to read Enrique Dussel (yes, this whole thing must be about the philosophy of liberation!). Then Agamben--because of course the space occupied by the TSA is a kind of "state of exception." (I'm not convinced it's not, actually.) And then of course I come back to Levinas, where I feel comfortable. It doesn't give me answers, but it reminds me to ask the right questions, namely: what is my responsibility here?

Maybe I need to get angrier. One of my favorite writers, Alicia Ostriker, has said (with regard to women in the context of the Hebrew bible): "We are not yet angry enough."

I know that I will not be able to forget these incidents or the larger issue of citizens being forced to undergo invasive screening procedures and being treated like animals when they politely question the need for it or request an alternative. And yet, all I can do right now is look for the right questions, continue to read for the wound.

*The phrase "read for the wound" is borrowed from Geoffrey Hartman.

Nothing De-Scribed

The disaster . . . it is the limit of writing.

Only now, in the earliest hours of September 12, 2011, do I venture to write anything. The day before seemed to me little more than the culmination of our collective desire to write something, anything--to pretend to remember, to commemorate. How can we remember what we don't know?

Anyone who fancies himself a writer of any kind had been thinking about what he would write, what he would say, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. We filled the empty space with the appearance of mourning, but what we call mourning is perhaps nothing more than self-therapy in drag.

We want to tell our stories. We want to remember our selves: where we were when we heard the news of the disaster. We want to identify the remains of our egos in the rubble. But the truth is that we've forgotten what we've never known. Our knowledge, our memories, are mutilated.

I'm not saying it's wrong. But I didn't want to be a part of this.

This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

I didn't want to be a part of this, and so I thought of nothing. Nothing until now. And yet now I find that it is even impossible to think of nothing. We emerge into this world from nothing, and it is the return to nothing that we fear with a fear so deep that we disable our capacity to conceive of it. It terrifies us with its lack of clutter and chaos. Absence, silence, emptiness: they remind us of our origins, of the place from which we come and the future that quietly threatens us.

I reject coherence, here and now, in a vain attempt to write the de-scribing of disaster.

Like the surface tension in a cup of silence, trembling.

I read something earlier today, on a blog, about how we are perhaps only in the latent stage of trauma--we have not yet borne witness to the events of 9/11. When we do, the stories will cease for just a little while in favor of silence.

We do believe that we want to know everything about the collective trauma, though. It's kind of like the time when Moses said to G-d: "Show me your face!" He saw, instead, the back of G-d. The story is that it would've been too much for Moses to bear had G-d revealed his face. I always wonder if Moses was underestimated. And on other days I wonder alternatively if he, Moses, was traumatized, and whether he found comfort in deception ("No, no, I never saw His face.")

And weeds grow in my mouth.

I'm only talking about things I don't know. Doesn't it feel gross to use our own words on occasions such as these? I just thought of the end of a poem by Norman Finkelstein:

Now among more twisted paths,

where each new archetype proves less adequate than the last,

I move forward in mourning,

proceed looking backward, mumbling a kaddish for the myth of the resurrection,

the unruly corpse we cannot put to rest.

Not everything will live again. Everything need not be rebuilt, even if the re-building happens only through narrative. And yet I still cherish these stories, if only because of how they illuminate our amnesia.

* Italics are quotations from Maurice Blanchot, Alicia Ostriker, and Yehuda Amichai respectively.

Hitler and Humor

I've reviewed Rudolph Herzog's book Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany over at The New Republic. Read it here.

Love and Other Origins

I was reading someone's life just the other day, and I found myself lingering in the most melancholy of moments. The moments of sorrow--both real and imagined--harbored the sharpest insights. They caused the woman to come alive. She was unequivocally her in these dark flashes.

I tried not to listen too carefully, but I heard her tell the man by whom she felt betrayed: "These tears are not for you, not really. They are for all the betrayals and sadnesses that have come before you, the ones that have lodged themselves deep inside of me. You are just the smallest flicker at the end of a long line of disappointments. You haven't really hurt me. You have simply reminded me." He had become a trace.

And I thought of things, as I do. I thought of the impossibility of separating one thing from another, one sorrow from the next. Everything, even our emotional responses, functions midrashically, one sorrow an extension of another, never discrete from its dark predecessor. Each sorrow is enriched by the next. We are always reminded of origins.

I suspect we often become emotionally involved with people who represent our origins, who return us to the self. Love and loving are rarely distinct from a certain degree of narcissism.

A year or so ago I wrote about a poem I had discovered, by Cheryl Dumesnil. The poem was prefaced by a Rumi quotation:

"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along." Love, then, at least in this regard, is about the act of recognition, of responding to something we already know and allowing that knowledge--that understanding--to be deepened and enriched.

There are at least two ways to spin this. I can call it beautiful--that is, I can see in it what I want (or should want) to discover, which is something lovely and promising. Or I can despise one's selfish impulse to claim to have found love when really one has found another version of herself to idolize.

I suppose it's the aspect of "need" that I find especially distressing. To love another human being because he has been in me "all along," as Rumi suggests, might simply be another form of self love, a manner of fulfilling a need. For this reason it has always chilled me to hear a man say that he needs me. I know that Levinas says something, somewhere, about how love ceases to be when one person "needs" another.

Love without need, however, may not exist, not even between lovers.

Two Ways of Splitting Fish

When a tradition is in good order, it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose. --Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.

On the first night of Shavuot this week, I went to a synagogue in my neighborhood to hear Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo give a talk called "The Unfrozen Torah: Rethinking Halacha and Religious Beliefs." I was more than surprised--given that I was in a Modern Orthodox shul--when he opened his lecture by asking if anyone was familiar with Walker Percy. Inside I was nodding vigorously, excited by what would likely be the most tangential nod to the American literary world, but outwardly I remained immovable, having sensed that nobody around me was expressing familiarity with the 20th-century American Southern writer--the very existentialist and Christian writer, Walker Percy.

Cardozo went on to contextualize his entire talk in an analogy drawn by Percy in one of his works. One group of boys--presumably in some kind of lab or medical school--is told to cut into a fish, to split it open and see what they find. But they are also, in the spirit of education, told exactly what they will find. And so they find, of course, nothing new.

Another group of boys gathers together at the end of a dock. They split open the body of a dead fish, not having been told to do it, but acting merely on impulse. Curiosity. A desire to know. They find an entire world. They discover it for themselves.

Both groups of boys split open the same fish, so to speak. They find, for the most part, the same biological phenomena. And yet, the ways they tell the story must surely differ. The boys in the lab acquire data that was set in stone before they even considered picking up the knife to split the fish in two. They are not so readily apt to ask the questions that might lead to the discovery of new information. But the boys on the dock do not have the luxury of benefitting from the precision and propriety of data tested and true. They also are at a disadvantage, it would seem.

And yet, their eyes behold the same vision: the once living body, rent in two, turned inside out to prove its former capacity to breathe.

But the boys' meaning-making and knowledge-acquiring processes are vastly different. And here is the crux of Cardozo's argument. If there's anything that Judaism teaches us, it's that process takes precedence over product. The parts that move are more significant than the parts that stop, that stop us. But more importantly, at least for Cardozo, we need both processes. Judaism, as it were, recognizes and allows for the possibility of various processes--different ways of doing things--and so Jews must recognize not just the value but also the necessity of these varying routes.

There is a certain recklessness, perhaps, that characterizes the impulses of the boys on the dock. They are tempted. Here lies this body before you. Cut into it. Peer into it. Method is replaced by mayhem.

The boys in the lab, on the other hand, recognize and respect the intellectual and scientific work that precedes them. One mustn't go cutting recklessly into fish. Ingenuity is replaced by insight of another. These boys may miss what's new.

Cardozo's second point drew on the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (see the quote at the top of this post). We argue about what's good, and we are good. We are constantly in a process of becoming. Of becoming good. Some things should not be written in stone or we undo everything that makes them good, worth writing down. Codification reflects our ossification. Some things need to be felt, learned, struggled through. I will not let you go until you bless me, Jacob said.

Yes, there's nothing new under the sun, says the writer of Ecclesiastes. But turn it and turn it, the sages say. This is how we move.

(Image above by Jeanette Jobson)

Show Me Your Face

I taught Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body this week in my Holocaust Film and Literature course. And, like last time I taught the novel, I'm compelled to write about it. When I put this course together I knew that I would have to address the perspective of what we call the Second Generation survivor--the child of a Holocaust survivor, exposed to the terrible trauma by proxy, everything secondhand. A life spent filling in the gaps in an attempt to know the elusive parent, the formidable and perpetually unknowable. Havazelet is not a child of survivors, but he has written an incredible novel that speaks to this experience.

I have to admit that over the last few years I have been turned off by the Second Generation racket--people forging their identities and making their careers based on their status as children of survivors. As the last generation of living Holocaust survivors shrinks smaller, many of their children rise in stature, conceiving of themselves as the only repositories of the authentic story of the Holocaust. They forget that not even their parents can claim that status--that that story died with the drowned, as Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben will both attest.

Those children of survivors who write novels--their work is so often comprised of one long metaphorical scream. They make compelling cases for their entitlement, urge us to deify them with the passing of their parents. The story is ours, and ours alone, Melvin Jules Bukiet, a child of survivors, has said.

But it is not. He's wrong. It belongs to no one, perhaps. And, anyway, since when did it become fashionable to preside over narratives, claim ownership over them? It certainly isn't a Jewish impulse--to own narratives. Yes, Jews love stories. But the existence of Midrash--stories that provide commentary on biblical narratives, showing us the inadequacies of the original stories, deepening them, filling them out, and extending them in a way that ensures their relevance to a contemporary era--illuminates the Jewish capacity to own narratives while simultaneously relinquishing our right to them. We would rather see them grow, take shape, become relevant in the context of now.

And yet I don't quite despise the tendency of some of the more artistically and intellectually visible Second Generation Survivors to act out, imagining themselves in cattle cars they never saw, pretending the flesh of their arms is tattooed. Let me know what you know; show me your face. This is what they are essentially saying to their parents. Let me know what you know so that you can love me, and I can love you. Let me see your face.

The face on which was written "Thou shalt not kill." The face unread. The face that remains, painfully and necessarily, hidden.

I, in part, understand this impulse. The experience of feeling known by someone, inside and out, is exhilarating. I have often been loved, but rarely known.

My father was in the Vietnam War. In fact, he was part of some of the most gruesome battles of that war. He was wounded and nearly killed. His body bears incredible scars, but these scars break away from the body under the weight of the emotional burden. This quarter, as I taught about the transmission of trauma, I couldn't help but think of the similarities between children of Holocaust survivors and children of people traumatized by other events. No, it's not the same thing, but there's something...

I will never know my father. As much as I love and adore him, and as much as he loves, protects, and adores me, I will never know him. He lives within the trauma, though his body exists outside of its chronological grasp. The inside continuous with the outside. My father, the Mobius: no lines to distinguish beginnings from endings.

These histories that don't belong to us--they haunt us in the beginning, but become ash in our mouths before the day is done. He is caught. And it is not for me to save him or try to identify with him. I only bear witness, carry traces. I, daily, bear and bury the remnants of his strife, the relics of his trauma. And I realize, today, that if I am sad, if I embrace the sadness of life, it is because I want to share in his sorrow. I want to know.

And so it is with the issue of children of survivors. It is not for me to decide whether their position is right or wrong, ethical or unethical. It's not for me to levy judgments against their shortcomings, their flailing about in a desperate attempt to know. All I can do is bear witness.

The Intimacy of Language

A shameful confession: I have carried on a long-time love affair with all things of the Hebrew persuasion without really knowing the language. A page of Talmud is beautiful to me--mysterious, compelling, intriguing. And it speaks to me. Or, at least, my translations and transliterations speak to me, read Talmud to me. Perhaps that space between the original and the translation also speaks to me, as ellipses often do.

But I've recently been learning Hebrew, thanks to someone special who gave me a gift of Hebrew classes at a local language institute, and I can't deny that I feel a new brand of intimacy when I look at a siddur in shul, or when I look at a page of untranslated David Grossman--as I feel my lips form knowingly around the sounds that become real words. Even if I don't yet know what all the words mean, I can start to read them. And it's a breathtaking intimacy that materializes even as one is in the beginnings of being able to recognize the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and breathe sounds into them.

Last week in shul, maybe for the first time ever, I did not choose the transliterated siddur. There's something about the sound of the language's voice that is emotionally evocative. It brings us back to the foundation of the world--to its chaos and creation. But especially to its chaos.

Creation is violent. God's words form a rupture that separates light from darkness, cutting them off from one another, putting enmity between them. And the world is all wild and waste. But this violence springs from language, which is, for me, the root of intimacy. Conflict, again. It's an intimate kind of violence, this linguistic rupture that births creation.

And isn't that what our words always do? They are violent because they are self-serving, often cutting us off from others despite the illusion of dialogue. The sharing and exchange of ideas is its own reward, striking with brilliant intensity. It allows us to experience intimate moments with ourselves.

But I don't think this is true for most people.

Language, for most people, serves a utilitarian purpose; it is a means to an end. One man writes a clever business proposal, hoping that potential investors will finance his project and so advance his lot in life. One woman writes a catchy screenplay, hoping to see her ideas materialize on theater screens across the country.

And then there are those who are immodest in the way they stand naked before mere words, eagerly awaiting the electrical charge of idea and intellect to come barreling into human desire.

I don't imagine that my love for language, for the sake of language, will be financially lucrative. But it's enough. It's enough.