Culture and Ideas

Serious Pluralism, Serious Judaism, Serious Democracy: Aryeh Geiger z”l

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Haim Watzman South Jerusalem lost another of its pillars this week. Aryeh Geiger, a religious educator for whom the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin signaled the need for a complete revision of religious education in Jerusalem, passed away this week after a four-year battle with cancer. I, and my daughter Misgav, were among the many hundreds … Read more

Do Good Novels Make Good People?

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Rabbi Joshua Gutoff, one of the most thoughtful and regularly heretical people I know, is now blogging at Frost and Clouds. I recommend his heretical thoughts about the role of literature in moral education, especially because they poke holes in my cherished assumptions:

So I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge… Her argument, briefly, is that (certain kinds of) novels have a unique role to play in moral education, in that their portrayal of finely-drawn characters in nuanced situations helps the reader develop that kind of vision necessary to a high moral imagination…

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Jews, Despite the Holocaust–“Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Dear Niot,

You told Holocaust jokes at the table on Friday night. Ima and I grimaced and tried to segue into a discussion of the boots you are refusing to buy and your insistence on trudging through the Polish snow in running shoes. We acknowledged that telling jokes with your classmates would be a legitimate way of letting off pressure during your trip, although we didn’t think the ones you told us were particularly funny.

It was then that I knew how I was going to write this letter, a letter that your teacher asked us to deposit with him in a sealed envelope for you to read, in Hebrew, when you arrive in Poland. That’ll be at about the same time that The Jerusalem Report’s readers receive it in their mailboxes in English (and thanks for giving me advance permission to share it with them).
I reminded you that when your older sister and brother wanted to sign up for their class trips to Poland’s Nazi death camps, in what has become a routine part of the Holocaust curriculum for Israeli high school seniors, I objected. “Why?” you asked.

I explained that I don’t want my children to be Jews who are Jews because they are victims. I don’t want my children to be Israelis because the world hates them. Our history, tradition, and culture are rich and powerful and provide adequate reason to want to be a Jew and an Israeli even if Hitler had never been born and the swastika never had reigned.

When your sister said she was going to Poland anyway, I was reminded of a comedy skit I once saw at a club in New York.

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Rape Those Women! Slaughter Those Babies!–Why You Can’t Just Stage “Henry V” For The Hell Of It

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Haim Watzman

Shannon Kisch, the director of Shakespeare Jerusalem’s initially promising but ultimately amorphous production of Henry V, at least has my daughter Mizmor on her side. At nearly midnight last night, as we walked home from The Lab (Jerusalem’s newest and finest stage), Mizmor said, “It’s nice for a change to see someone just do a Shakespeare play the way it’s written.”

Which is what Kisch, in her program notes, says she wanted to do. Recalling a conversation about the problems of staging this historical drama, she writes: “The sentence I remember most clearly, and that which made the most sense to me, was this: ‘Why don’t you just tell the story?’”

I love my daughter and respect her opinions, and I sincerely admire Shakespeare Jerusalem’s ambition to stage the Bard’s works for Israeli audiences, but this production is a textbook demonstration of exactly why you can’t just “just tell the story.”

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Tony Hillerman Leaves the Mystery of Justice Unsolved

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Tony Hillerman has gone to reap his heavenly reward.

I begin that way only because I’m sure that the comment would bemuse Hillerman, who died this week at age 83.

You could sum up Hillerman’s career by saying he wrote murder mysteries, mostly about two Navajo policemen. But for my money, that would be like saying that Jane Austen wrote romances, as if they were bodice-rippers.

I’m not usually a reader of mysteries. Raymond Chandler’s critique of the mystery writers before him, in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” is blunt, brutal and accurate:

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Intimate Mourning–“Shiv’a”

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Haim Watzman

I’m a Jew provincial enough to have only the vaguest notion about what gentiles do when a loved one dies. Non-Jews, and assimilated Jews, may be surprised, intrigued, or revolted by Shiv‘a , an award-winning Israeli/French film by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz. The film chronicles the traditional week of mourning observed by the large Moroccan-French-Israeli Ohaion family when a brother, Maurice, dies unexpectedly. A silent, stern-faced family matriarch and nine brothers and sisters, with their spouses, spend the week of mourning in the well-appointed Haifa apartment of the dead man’s widow and two young sons—sitting and eating on the floor, sleeping all together on twin mattresses in the living room, and churning their loves and hatreds, loves and rivalries, grudges and financial complications.

Shiv‘a—The Seven Days in English, a title that fails to convey the weight of the prescribed week-long mourning ritual—presents itself as a slice-of-life film. We viewers are eavesdroppers on the family’s week of alternately comforting and oppressive togetherness. We move from room to room, listening in on multilingual conversations not meant for our ears, hearing about secret affairs and about the failure of brother Haim’s successful factory, where he has employed several of his brothers.

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Friends IV: Is America Irrationally Infatuated With Israel

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Gershom Gorenberg

My friend Shaul Magid has an essay up at Religion Dispatches looking at the one consensus subject in American politics: all candidates must profess unquestioned support for Israel:

The world markets are collapsing, Russia invades Georgia, the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan, Pakistan is on the verge of imploding, we don’t even know if the dictator of a nuclear North Korea is alive (and, if not, who is running that country), Iran may be building a nuclear weapon, and they are crawling all over one another to pledge their allegiance to…Israel? What exactly is going on?!

Shaul suggests that no electoral calculus can explain this. Rather, there is a fascination with Jews as mythical creatures:

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Sharon Dolin and the Music of Nature

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Haim Watzman

One of my favorite poets, Sharon Dolin, has four poems up at Nextbook. The first, “Let Me Thrum (6 a.m.)” is a wonderful fresh and new version of “Nishmat Kol Hai,” the poem of nature extolling God that we read every Shabbat morning.

What makes Dolin’s work stand out for me is her exquisite ear, her ability to create a poem that would sound like music even if you did not know English, and whose sounds are intimately woven into her meaning. It’s on full display in this poem, where the early morning poet both hears and observes:

antennae’d and furred
all sing all shirr all rub and buzz
and fling their call to You
in song-light as the mist still clings

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Man As Anti-Creator

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Haim Watzman

In the creation story we will read from the Torah in synagogue this Shabbat, God creates the world, and man, and woman. Adam and Eve sin and are ejected from Eden.

In her poem “Eve to Her Daughters”, the late Australian feminist, environmentalist, and poet Judith Wright offers an alternative version of the story from Eve’s point of view.

Wright plays off both the biblical story and Milton’s Paradise Lost. In both those versions of the story, Adam is God’s junior partner in the creation; he names the animals, tends the garden, and is the raw material from which Eve is created. In both stories, man is ruined by his urge to know more–but the sin begins with Eve’s curiosity.

In Wright’s poem, it is Adam’s need to understand, to “unravel everything/because he believed that mechanism /was the whole secret” that is the original sin. As soon as he comes into being, Adam begins the process of uncreation. Having the power to uncreate gives him power, and power creates hubris: “And now that I know how it works, why, I must have invented it.” Adam’s surging powers of analysis lead him to the conclusion that he cannot demonstrate God’s existence–so God must not exist.

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Not Getting Married Today–When Should Young Modern Orthodox Jews Get Hitched?

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Haim Watzman

One of the problems with the liberal Orthodox Jewish Zionism that we live by here on this blog is that it delays young people’s entry into adulthood and marriage. When I graduated from a public high school in the U.S. in the 1970s, the path before me was four years of college and the real world. My son graduated high school, then studied at a yeshiva for a year and a half, and is now performing military service in a unit that will require him to serve at least one year beyond the already long mandatory term of three years. Add the de rigueur year of travel after the army, and he won’t even begin college until he’s 25. If he goes for an advanced degree, he may not reach the real world until he’s well into his thirties.

It would be absurd to pretend that the expectation that our sons and daughters will pursue high-level religious and secular studies, as well as serve extended terms of military or national service, doesn’t clash with the family values we also espouse as religious Jews. Understandably, many young modern Orthodox men and women have chosen to delay marriage and spend extended periods as singles, a phenomenon almost unheard of previously in the religious community and now the subject of a popular new television series, Serugim.

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