Judaism and Religion

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 Oration Vocation–“Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Demosthenes, de: Römische Statue einer Privatperson, die vor 1818 zu Demosthenes umgestalltet wurde; Römisch-Germanischen Museum Köln 8. April 2006, Author: Marcus Cyron “I don’t like him already,” Leo Shocken barked to Inga, his svelte, silver-blonde assistant, who had just led me into his office. Large-jowled Shocken lounged behind a large desk strewn with files, calendars, and banana peels. He held a half-filled tumbler of bourbon in his hand and both his stocking feet were propped up on the desk. A thick cigar stood erect between his chomped teeth, pointing in the direction of a side wall festooned with the autographed photographs of the most famous Jewish synagogue speakers of our age.
“Misteh Hocken, it’s Misteh Atzman,” she said, tottering on her super-high heels. There was a whiff of Transylvania in her accent. Or maybe it was Palo Alto. She hadn’t yet managed to pronounce enough complete words for me to tell.

“I don’t care who the hell it is,” Shocken growled, looking me straight in the eye. “What can he do?”
Inga swayed precariously. “He a eaker,” she volunteered.

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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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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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One Measure of Awe, Please. Hold the Nationalism.

by

Gershom Gorenberg

I’d been at Rosh Hanikra recently for a wedding, held in the evening on the small plaza set on the side of the bluff, overlooking the sea. The grottoes were lit at night, but the water rushing into the chasms from the open sea was dark.

Until last week, though, it had been many years since I visited in the daytime, buying a ticket for the cable car down to the grottoes. Since my previous visit, a short introductory movie has been added to the tour, shown in the now-blocked railroad tunnel that once crossed the border into Lebanon.

The film explains how waves, wind and salt carved the grottoes in the rock. It shows how sea turtles lay their eggs on the bluff – the mothers returning to where they were born, the newborns racing at night toward the shine of the waves to escape predators.

And then there’s an explanation that the place was once called Sulamah shel Tzur, the Ladder of Tyre, in Hebrew. (Actually, the name refers not just to the bluff, but to the mountain ridge that ends at the bluff, and that one needs to ascend to come up or down the coast.) The film explains that according to legend, Abraham entered the Land of Israel here and received the promise, “To your seed I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7). 

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Whose Religion Is This, Anyway?

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on being an Orthodox dove is up at the American Prospect:

The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one state or two — and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a beret. His wife and producer wore a maxi skirt; a scarf covered her hair. Their attire showed they were Orthodox Jews. Hers, in particular, fit the stereotyped look of the Israeli religious right, of settlers and their supporters, including some Jews abroad. I was surprised. Maybe, I thought, I was the token leftist interviewee in a project by settlement backers aimed at showing that there is no exit from the conflict and that Israel must hold the West Bank forever.

I was also painfully aware of an irony: My own skullcap identifies me, correctly, as an Orthodox Jew. Countless times, my appearance has also caused people to assume, incorrectly, that I belong to the religious right.

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A Time To Be Icky: Tisha B’Av and James Dickey’s “The Sheep-Child”

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Haim Watzman

It’s summer and the Jews are being perverse again. Instead of singing of sand and sea, next week we’ll spend a day fasting and lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. The lamentation lyrics get pretty sickening—blood flows, people get tortured and burned alive, famished women cook and eat their own children. Why do we need this annual national gross-out?

I’ll answer that question by adducing a stomach-turning, very un-Jewish, all-American poem, James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” which you can read and hear Dickey read on the wonderful poetry pages of The Atlantic, here. (If that doesn’t work, try the Poetry Foundation).

The poem is about a myth, an untruth, that becomes true. The monster in the jar becomes true not because it actually can be found in a back corner of a museum in Atlanta, but because it brings about a change in human behavior. There is an effect whose cause is an object fabricated by the human mind.

The reality of the fantasy is underlined by the poem’s structure. The first stanza states the problem, the huge force of the animal instinct that drives boys to copulate with the earth itself. But there’s something that is taboo, so forbidden that it overcomes even that nearly irresistible desire. Animals are off limits.

The second stanza is the story that the boys tell, the object they have created in their minds. The third stanza is the result: the story has directed the boys’ desire to its proper object. Perhaps the story was simply a fairy tale?

. . . Are we
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?”

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How Not to Read a Holy Book

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Gershom Gorenberg

As a follow-up to an earlier post, I have a new column in Moment magazine on the Chabad rabbi who recently wrote that “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way…  Kill men, women and children (and cattle).” Manis Friedman, unfortunately, isn’t alone in our world in claiming divine sanction as he presents evil as morality. There’s a pattern that ties him to other people, in Judaism and in other faiths, who do the same:

Friedman may think he’s presenting old-time Judaism. In fact, his words are an example of the thoroughly modern phenomenon known as fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are frightened by the openness of the modern world, by the autonomy of the individual, by modern insistence on reaching truth through reasoned debate. They want to feel certain that they are following an unambiguous religious authority.

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Theology Watch

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Haim Watzman

My sister Nancy once worked for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, a project that tracks where legislators get their money from and how it affects their votes.

But Congress seems to be in danger no less from bad theology as bad money. Yesterday she referred me to this incredible video of Rep. John Shimkus, who represents a huge chunk of southern Illinois. Shimkus believes that, because God promised Noah that he would not destroy the world again, we don’t need to do anything about global warming.

Note that Shimkus segues without blinking from God’s promise that He will not destroy the world into the odd idea that therefore mankind is incapable of destroying the world on its own. That’s sloppy theology.

Maimonides would not have made such a ridiculous mistake had he been elected to Congress.

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