Gershom Gorenberg

A Jewish Fable Has An Argument, Not a Moral

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at Moment Magazine:

My son and I found the story one Shabbat when he was home from the army. We slipped out of morning services a bit early to study Vayikra Rabba, an ancient collection of midrash. If I hadn’t decided to make aliyah before he was born, he’d now be coming home for weekends from college, not the IDF. If we lived in America, perhaps his Hebrew wouldn’t be good enough to study midrash in the original, though that’s less certain. Sometimes I wonder about whether there’s a grand meaning to that choice I made years ago, before he was born, some significance an inch beyond the reach of words.

That morning, though, we were just reading a strange set of folk tales inserted into the midrash. In one, a man’s wreath of magical herbs protects him from a snake’s venom. In a second, a hoopoe wants to build his nest in a hole in a stump in a rabbi’s orchard. There’s a board nailed over the hole, so the hoopoe brings an herb that dissolves the nail. The rabbi hides the herb so thieves don’t use it to “destroy creation.” In another tale, a man sets off to make aliyah from Babylon. Along the road he sits down to rest and sees two birds fighting. One kills the other—and then brings an herb and places it on the corpse, which returns to life.

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The People’s Holy Space

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece on South Jerusalem’s unofficial, non-establishment, do-it-yourself holy place is now up at the Hadassah Magazine site:

On the far side of the circle from me, women sang, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem,” in a soft, melancholy melody. There were a couple of hundred silhouettes in the circle—the women mostly sitting on one side, near the dark shapes of the olive and pomegranate trees on the downhill slope beyond the lawn, the men mostly sitting on the other side, near the rough stone retaining wall of the promenade above us.

The song ended; a young male voice began chanting the Book of Lamentations, “Alas, lonely sits the city once great with people….”

It was actually rather difficult to forget Jerusalem: I needed only to stand to look beyond the trees and across the valley below them to see the Old City walls and, within them, the gold Dome of the Rock illuminated by floodlights. That jewel-like scene was set in the wider panorama of the lights of nighttime Jerusalem, from the hotel and office towers of West Jerusalem on the left to Abu Dis on the right.

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The Allure of Lawlessness

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece on the arrest of alleged terrorist Yaakov Teitel and its context is up at The American Prospect:

The glossy flier was posted on a bulletin border in a small, illegal outpost of Israeli settlers near Nablus in the West Bank when I visited last week. The black print appeared over a soft green picture of olive trees. The West Bank is famed for its olive oil, and autumn is harvest season. For years, it’s also been the season when settlers from the most extreme outposts and settlements clash with Palestinian farmers and vandalize orchards.

Citing religious sources, the flier urged Jews to “harvest” the Palestinians’ olives if they could, and uproot the trees if they couldn’t. Since Judaism forbids not only theft but also the destruction of fruit trees even in warfare, the writer had to use considerable casuistry to make his case. It was, in religious terms, akin to preaching the “obligation” of adultery.

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Last One Out, TurnOff the Mike

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the implosion of the Israeli left at the very moment when American Jewish doves are finally speaking out is up at The American Prospect:

Danny Ben-Simon has quit. If anyone needed more evidence of the disarray of the Israeli left, this is it — but then, no one actually needs any more evidence.

Ben-Simon became the whip of the Labor Party’s Knesset delegation just five months ago. That sounds like a prominent position for a first-time Knesset member, until you remember that the once-powerful party now has just 13 representatives in the 120-seat parliament and that at least four of them have had nothing to do with Labor since its leader, Ehud Barak, insisted on joining Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government in order to become defense minister.

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The Ehud Syndrome

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Gershom Gorenberg

My apologies for being AWOL recently; I’m in the midst of research that has kept me very busy.

As a result, I failed to mark the passing of Dr. Yair Carlos Bar-El. Yair was for years the Jerusalem district psychiatrist and head of the Kfar Shaul mental hospital. Among other things, that meant he was responsible for dealing with normally sane people knocked off their balance by coming to Jerusalem, along with the already unbalanced people attracted to sacred ground like iron filings to a magnet.

Treating the former group, Yair found a repeating pattern he named the “Jerusalem Syndrome.” While in the city, the victims are overwhelmed by the need to purify themselves, dress in white, appear at a holy place and preach. The episode is brief; afterwards, they are sane, and thoroughly embarrassed.

As for the latter group, he said, “People with personality problems arrive here to pray… There are people with illnesses who identify as Jesus, John the Baptist…” Once, he said, “We had three simultaneous cases of the Virgin Mary.” He wasn’t cynical about this. He was a dedicated, caring doctor. The madness of Jerusalem was simply part of his responsibility.

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The Scent of Smoke in a Dry Field

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece on what’s behind the recent tension at the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif  – and where it could lead – is up at The American Prospect:

Five cops edged the Street of the Chain carrying riot batons and shields. A few meters away, in the shadows of a covered alleyway, four more cops were doing what police do so often, which is wait. The Street of the Chain is one of the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem’s Old City, a narrow, stone-paved walkway descending toward the entrance to Haram al-Sharif, a.k.a. the Temple Mount. It’s lined with Palestinian-owned shops selling scarves, t-shirts, the trinkets of three faiths, and anything else that might catch a tourist’s eye. On Tuesday afternoon, police reinforcements were deployed along the street, on the lawn outside Jaffa Gate, and throughout the Old City.

At a checkpoint a block from the entrance to the Haram, a police commander with a very small vocabulary insisted that non-Muslims, even those with press cards, could not go any closer to the holy site. For that matter, Muslim males under the age of 50 were also barred from entering the wide plaza where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand. Somewhere high in the line of command, someone has decided that testosterone and sanctity are too dangerous a mix.

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Hiya Judge: On Dancing Yom Kippur

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Gershom Gorenberg

Once, on our way between Bombay and Chaing Rai in the Golden Triangle, Myra and I spent Yom Kippur with the friendly Jews of Bangkok. Most of them had their roots in Iran or in points further east, from Herat through Samarkand. There was also at least one family from Beirut and Aleppo.

It was our first time spending that long day of prayer and fasting with mizrahi Jews. We were used to the mournful melodies of  Ashkenazim on the edge of bursting into tears.  In Bangkok, standing before heavily judgment, the Jews rocked. “Hatanu lefanekha, rahem aleinu” – “We have sinned before you, have mercy on us,” they belted out, as if no thought could be happier.

When we arrived back in Jerusalem, somewhere just before Hanukkah, we told our friend Eric, who’d been housesitting our micro-apartment, about the difference between Ashkenazim and mizrahim on the day of divine judgment.

Eric is a defense attorney. He thought for about 3 seconds and said, “See, these two guys have their day in court. The first one is led in, sees the judge, and thinks, ‘Oy, what I’ve done,’ and wails, “Judge, have mercy, mercy.‘

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Skipping the Summit for the Movies

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article about the superb new Israeli film Ajami (and the silliness of the protests against the Toronto Film Festival) is up at the American Prospect:

The advance publicity accurately predicted that this week’s U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian summit would fall short of great historical drama. Despite Barack Obama’s efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.

Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami. Like last year’s Waltz With Bashir, it’s an example of Israeli cinema’s maturation as engaged art, harsh and sympathetic. Ajami focuses on Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who are fated to live on both sides of the conflict. In the process, the film’s Palestinian and Jewish co-directors blur the boundary between fiction and documentary.

The film is named for a neighborhood in the coastal city of Jaffa. Until 1948, Jaffa was the cultural center of Arab Palestine. When it was conquered by Jewish forces that year, all but a few thousand of the Arab residents fled. Jewish immigrants moved into abandoned houses, and Jaffa was annexed by the neighboring Jewish city of Tel Aviv. The remaining Palestinians became Israeli citizens and outsiders. Ajami, a mostly Arab neighborhood, has stayed poor and crime-ridden.

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In Place of a New Year’s Card: Wishing You A Difficult and Somewhat Painful Year

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This is a guest post for Rosh Hashana, which came to me as an email from a good friend. Reprinted with his permission, and with several references to his wife Ruthie. And, oh yes, with his explanation of the headline on the post: “So what did you expect from a disciple of the Kotzker Rebbe, warmth and sunlight and hugs?”

Bob Carroll

As some of you know, I spent a decent amount of time this summer driving around the Southwestern US, taking pictures for what will hopefully become a photo book of ghost towns. It all started as an excuse to drive around the desert and get mighty lost, which in some ways is the point of this message, but we’ll get to that in a moment. So one day, having come from about ten days in Death Valley, I was looking for a certain ghost town about 2 hours away. To find this particular place, you have to drive to a town near a dry lake called Lake Owen and from there one finds a road going up to a mountain top, I think it’s about 11,000 feet high, and that’s where the ghost town is. Only I couldn’t find the $#@!! road for the life of me. So I spent about an hour in the town by the dry lake (Keeler) which is itself almost completely deserted and a very charming place to photograph. Didn’t see a soul. After a while I spotted a very elderly woman and figured what the heck, I have nothing to lose. So I rolled down my window and asked if she knew how to get to the ghost town. “Oh no”, she replies, “You can’t go up there yourself. Mike owns the land now and he really doesn’t like people mucking about up there. Let me call him and he’ll have to interview you.” After 20 minutes, a white guy arrives in an old jacked-up pickup truck, wearing spurs and a cowboy hat. Maybe in his late 50’s. Asks me what I want up there, so I told him I am just a guy who likes taking pictures of old ghost towns, and heard his was a good one. He looks me over and decides I am OK, so tells me that he is going up there to work on one of the buildings and I can follow him up.

40 minutes and one awesome narrow jeep trail later, we get to the town. Except it’s 11,000 feet up, so it’s cold, and I just came from Death Valley, where it was 122 degrees. Before I continue, a quick note: I do not advertise who I am on these trips. One never knows who you will run into, and some of them are not paragons of tolerance. So I was wearing a bandana on my head and when he asked where I am from I just told the guy that I am from New Jersey. Anyway, without thinking about it, I reached into my jeep and grabbed the only jacket I had brought, which happened to be my green fleece Border Guard jacket. It has one very small Hebrew logo on it, that’s all. Very inconspicuous.

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New in the Archive of Occupation: The U.S. is a trifle bothered by early settlements.

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Gershom Gorenberg The United States has opposed Israeli settlements in the occupied territories since 1967. But the paper trail shows that the objections were often low-key. In Washington, more attention was paid to diplomatic statements than to the “creation of facts” through settlement. The current administration is seeking to change that pattern. To provide some … Read more

Lost: Last Shreds of Sanity in the Prime Minister’s Office

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Gershom Gorenberg

So Aunt Yardena from Rehovot skypes her nephew Jason in Boston.

“Jason,” she says, “why don’t you come visit? We’d all love to see you. The last time you came was before three years.”

“Three years ago,” he corrects her. “I wish I could. Get in some wind-surfing, see the whole family. But college is running around 100K a year these days, and Mom and Dad are still sitting shiva for their Madoff money.”

“Why should you pay for it? You want to be – how do you say frier in English, sweetie? There’s ads in the papers here. And on Youtube. From the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Jewish Agency. Young Jews are being lost to assimilation. Call us and give us their names, and we’ll bring them to Israel.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about this,” Jason says, a little hurt. “You know, I’ve been in Israel seven times. I go to the egalitarian minyan at Hillel every Shabbat, and I helped organize the Breaking the Silence exhibition on campus. I even have a name that begins with J. I’m not really assimilating.”

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