THE ESCHATON IS OURS, COMRADES!

...But the mood of the conference was best summed up in the title of the keynote address, by the political philosopher Michael Walzer: “The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism.” What was once a proud inheritance now seems like a problem in need of a solution. For many Jews, it remains axiomatic that Judaism is a religion of social justice and progress; the phrase “tikkun olam” has become a convenient shorthand for the idea that Judaism is best expressed in “repair of the world.”

In his speech, and in his new book In God’s Shadow: Politics and the Hebrew Bible, Walzer offers a contrary vision of traditional Judaism, which he argues “offers precious little support to left politics”—a truth that he recognized would surprise those who, like himself, “grew up believing that Judaism and socialism were pretty much the same thing.” If a leftist political message cannot readily be found in the traditions of Judaism, it follows that the explosion of Jewish leftism in the late 19th century was actually a rupture with Jewish history, and potentially a traumatic one.

***

Walzer’s reluctance to associate Judaism too simply with leftist politics, or indeed with any politics, represents a break from his earlier thinking. In his influential 1985 book Exodus and Revolution, for instance, Walzer argued that the Exodus narrative had provided a template for generations of revolutionaries and progressives in Western society, offering a model of how to escape an oppressive past and create a better future. The contrast with his new book could not be sharper. In this work, Walzer reads the Bible with an eye to its explicit and implicit teachings about politics and finds that its most eloquent message on the subject is silence. “The political activity of ordinary people is not a Biblical subject,” he writes, “nor is there any explicit recognition of political space, an agora or forum, where people congregate to argue about and decide on the policies of the community.” ...

...Much of In God’s Shadow deals with the ambiguous status of the prophet in the polity of ancient Israel. When contemporary liberals and leftists want to anchor their beliefs in Jewish tradition, it is to the prophets that they most often turn: the scathing denunciations of Amos and Jeremiah, the messianic vision of Isaiah. “We have a picture in our mind of the people described by Amos,” Walzer writes. “They are, so to speak, the local bourgeoisie,” and Amos speaks for the Israelite proletariat.

But if you look at the actual content of the prophets’ message, Walzer points out, its political bearing is not so clear. “Theirs was … a fiercely antipolitical radicalism,” he writes, which had little to say about the power structures of Israelite society. Indeed, one of the themes of In God’s Shadow is that the writers of the Bible were so uninterested in politics that they included remarkably little information about how the Israelites were actually governed on a day-to-day basis—almost everything we can say about the functions of kings, judges, and royal officials is speculative. When the prophets called for justice, they didn’t mean a redistribution of power but a society-wide submission to God: “God’s message overrode the wisdom of men.”

The same thing was even more dramatically true when it came to international politics. Jeremiah, for instance, was active toward the end of the Kingdom of Judah, at a time when that small nation was caught between the empires of Egypt and Babylon. Much of the last part of Kings is made up of the attempts of successive Israelite monarchs to ally themselves with one of these imperial powers against the other. But, as Walzer emphasizes, the prophets simply refuse to accept that this geopolitical problem is a problem at all. If the Israelites trust in God and obey him, all will be well; if God is determined to punish them, nothing they do will avert his justice. “All that he and his fellow prophets have to say in the global arena is ‘the God of Israel, the God of Israel,’ ” Walzer writes, “implying that diplomacy and defense are unnecessary so long as faith remains firm.”

The long-term effect of this usurpation of the public sphere by God, Walzer concludes, was the growth of Jewish messianism. “The secret source of messianic politics is a deep pessimism about the self-government of the covenantal community. … Israel was more often the subject of absolute judgment than of conditional assessment and counsel.” And while Walzer does not say so explicitly, it is easy to imagine what his denigration of messianism means for the modern Jewish radical tradition, which has so often prided itself on holding out for a messianic transformation of human society. If the Messiah is what we demand when we can’t or won’t engage in politics, then the Revolution, too, must be seen as fundamentally antipolitical, a dangerous dream that rests on the abdication of human judgment. The rejection of Revolution as a concept is perhaps the dividing line between liberals and leftists, and Jews increasingly find themselves on the liberal side of that line.

The left’s rejection of Judaism, Walzer concluded in his speech at YIVO, was both “necessary and profoundly wrong.” Necessary, because traditional Judaism did not offer a basis for a social justice movement; but also wrong, because the severance with tradition rendered the Jewish left culturally disoriented and spiritually impoverished.

While a number of speakers at the YIVO conference invoked Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “non-Jewish Jew”—figures like Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected on principle any definition of themselves or their goals in Jewish terms—both Walzer and Ezra Mendelsohn warned against the idea that identity could be so abstract and universalized. Walzer called instead for a renewed critical engagement with Jewish tradition, including a return to the Jewish calendar and Jewish lifecycle events.

more--and obviously this is an interpretation, which by its nature leaves out some things and emphasizes others, but I found it pretty fascinating and I think many of my readers will want to grab Walzer's book. The Groom's Family, I'm looking at you....

It is significant for our understanding of the nature of the religion of Israel among the religions of the world that meaning for her is derived not from introspection, but from a consideration of the public testimony to God. The present generation makes history their story, but it is first history. They do not determine who they are by looking within, by plumbing the depths of the individual soul, by seeking a mystical light in the innermost reaches of the self. Rather, the direction is the opposite. What is public is made private. History is not only rendered contemporary; it is internalized. One’s people’s history becomes one’s personal history. One looks out from the self to find out who one is meant to be. One does not discover one’s identity, and one certainly does not forge it oneself. He appropriates an identity that is a matter of public knowledge. Israel affirms the given.
-Jon Levenson, which I found here

"THE CHILDREN'S SUBLIME." My piece on Maurice Sendak. The New York Times obituary was also quite good. RIP.

THE BLOGGER AT "THE GROOM'S FAMILY" wants you to ask her anything about the intersection of Jews and Christianity! Personally I'd be interested in her take on Christianity in Jewish Terms, a very pomo essay collection from which I got much more theological meat than I expected.

A FOOTNOTE on Spinoza and The New Jerusalem. And Unequally Yoked has one post on it so far. (In the latter case, linking is not endorsing! I would not frame most of these issues the way UY does.)

OCCAM'S RAZOR IS THE WORST RAZOR! Some thoughts on revisiting The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, which has been revived at the DCJCC's Theater J and will play through April 1. My review of the original production is here, so these are just some scattered additional notes. (Oh, and here's a post about a Philadelphia production, over at The Groom's Family!)

First, the play is still fantastic, Alexander Strain is still ridiculously compelling despite playing a guy who is kind of a jackass (albeit a jackass under unbearable pressure), and they've toned down the cartoonishness of Rebecca a bit, which I doubt will pacify the people who didn't like her character the first time around.

I still don't understand why Spinoza is so in love with simplicity. Why is a belief, a God, a proposition, or an argument better because it is simpler than other possibilities? Why force a cube-shaped faith on a mountain-shaped world?

The focus on simplicity or unity, along with the strange, unsettling paeans to philosophy as a love with no beloved (or in which the beloved is totally unable to love you back), made me feel like this was all just backsliding into Platonism. Didn't we try this already?

Last time I'm not sure I noticed that both Spinoza and his Gentile Juliet, Clara, do the adolescent thing where they think they're in love with you because you deserve it so much. Everything about Spinoza's pedestal love of Clara is done so well--it's painfully endearing, it's totally wrongheaded, it's relatable, and it captures at least half of the problems with his philosophy. Plus Strain uses his voice really well, shifting perfectly from the ringing tones of the confident genius to a rougher, lower, more intimate register with Clara.

One benefit to the philosopher of having a definite, obligatory community is that he has to deal with everyone's questions, even the ones he doesn't like or see the point of. The Jewish community, because it includes so many people who are totally unlike Spinoza, can provoke and challenge him in a way that a community made up solely of his friends or equally-intelligent philosophers could not. (This, by the way, was one major failing of the "talk back" panel afterward, in which Leah Libresco very ably moderated two academic philosophy-types. We didn't get to talk back! It was insufficiently Jewish--specifically Jewish questions weren't raised at all, actually--and since the audience, full of feisty old Jews, didn't get to ask questions, the panelists were able to stick to their own preferred topics and approaches.)

Spinoza at one point comes very close to echoing this gnomic utterance of the squid!

I was weirdly reminded of this article about David Foster Wallace's use of popular self-help books and his fight against what in AA circles is called "terminal uniqueness" and which I think is called by Catholics spiritual pride. Spinoza by the end of this play has been through many shattering experiences: his father's death, his realization that he will die young of tuberculosis, and then the awful events of the play itself. But the thing is, none of the suffering or humiliation he undergoes happens because he's wrong, or in the wrong. That at least he's spared. And so in the end, when he thanks the congregation (aka us the audience) for what he's gained from what he's been put through, even this is not a gesture of full humility.

So. That's what the play made me think about. What about you?

DUBNER VS. DUBNER:

...First, the Dubner story is a reminder of the critical importance of how we – as Christians, and as humans – understand death. For both Stephen and his mother, the spark that led to their respective rejections of their families’ religious views and their own conversions was the way in which death was dealt with by these families. As a child, Florence Greenglass wanted to understand why her family feared death so deeply that they never talked about it – indeed, never told her that her own grandfather had died – while their Catholic neighbors marked the house of the dead with a ribbon and their children freely discussed whether the newly deceased had gone to heaven or purgatory. In becoming a Catholic, she embraced Christ’s victory of death, pinning her hopes on the joys of heaven: death no longer needed to be feared. But ironically, it was a very similar frustration that led Florence’s reflective and intelligent son away from Catholicism. When his father died, the ten-year-old Stephen was deeply uncomfortable with the way in which his death was treated almost as a joyful occasion in the family, with much talk of the happiness of the deceased in Heaven – and little room for the living to grieve on earth.

It’s worth noting that Stephen did not know – at the time – that his father had been profoundly depressed, struggling for days to get out of bed; he thus could not understand what must have been very genuine feelings on his mother’s part that the long-suffering Paul was indeed in a better place. At the same time, his Catholic household failed in the same way that Florence’s secular Jewish one did: forgetting – in the adults’ resolute decision that death was, respectively, either a terrifying evil or almost a non-event – to make room for a child to make inquiry of the reality of death and to come to terms with it.

more

He who joins in singing a chorale, or who listens to the mass, the Christmas oratorio, the passion... wants to make his soul stand with both feet in time, in the most real time of all, in the time of the one day of the world of which all individual days of the world are but a part. Music is supposed to escort him there.
--Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, quoted in this interesting piece. (There's some unspoken stuff here as well about the interplay between satisfaction and surprise in the coming of Jesus, the promised Messiah in distinctly unpromising form....) Link via First Thoughts.

"FOR AS LONG AS SPINOZA IS A JEW, HE SPEAKS AS A JEW, EVEN IF WHAT HE SAYS IS FAR FROM JEWISH." Fantastic blog post from The Groom's Family (Soviet Russia->Israeli Jewish->Orthodox Christian convert, you should be reading her already!) about David Ives's play about the trial of Baruch Spinoza. I wrote about it here. Ah, the interplay between control and powerlessness (in the face of the state, and in the face of the community) is so well-described in this post, and her closing thought is so ferocious. Fantastic stuff.

IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN: A genuinely illuminating interview with Maurice Sendak. I was wary at first, thinking he might come across as self-impressed, but that really didn't happen (in my opinion):

...At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through:

Ebooks: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book." ...

The term "children's illustrator" annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person." He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He's sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. "They led desperate lives," he says of his parents. "They should have been crazy. And we – making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, 'Why were we so unkind to Mama?' And I said, 'Don't do that. We were kids, we didn't understand. We didn't know she was crazy.'"

There was a partial reconciliation with his parents, a moment of understanding. They never made much of his work except once, when he was asked to illustrate a set of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1978. They were proud of that, he says. For the illustrations, Sendak went back to the family album. "There were the photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting-looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother's relatives and some of my father's and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that."

more (also via A&LDaily)

MY DRUNK KITCHEN: VODKA/LATKE! You have no idea how happy this makes me.

The best-ever death metal band out of Blogwatch...

Real review of, seriously, maybe seven or eight Mountain Goats cds once I've finished listening to them. For now you get a blogwatch.

"How to Become an Author, In Five Incredibly Difficult Steps." The usual Cracked.com disclaimer, but I loved #2 a lot, and the point about needing a huge amount of research in order to write fiction is also really good. #1 should be skipped unless you really, really want to feel bad about your bank balance.

Guest posters at Megan McArdle's site:

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro made an important contribution to the social sciences. His unexpected declaration that the port of Mariel would be temporarily open to any Cubans seeking to flee the island served as a natural experiment that has helped labor economists understand the impact of immigration. In his now classic paper, economist David Card convincingly showed that the massive influx of 120,000 Cubans increased the labor force of Miami by 7% yet had almost no impact on the employment or wages of natives.

This result is probably shocking to many, and certainly runs contrary to the popular but unfortunate myth that immigrants "steal our jobs". But while this study is an important result in the literature, it is not an isolated one. Most research on immigration shows small or zero impacts on unemployment and wages. This, however, does present something of a puzzle: if immigration increases labor supply, then why didn't wages fall and unemployment rise? How was it that the labor market in Miami was able to absord so many new workers?

more; mostly interesting to me because I care about Mariel, but that of course raises the question: Does US growth depend on immigrants a) fleeing sufficiently-fleeable-hell and b) not assimilating to our awful demographics once they gain some economic success?

Sublimity Now:

While she was doing this, she went on for a while about how lucky she is, given that some people get shingles all over their bodies, and she only has to deal with an useless right arm, and apologized profusely for not being able to prepare a duck dinner for my brother before he ships out to Quantico.

Please remember her in your prayers.

it is okay she eats so slow--at least she eats!

and even moreso:

Point is, my father thought I was literally plowing a field instead of being vaguely emo. He is the best. May we all strive to think so well of our loved ones!

context, but why?

The Groom's Family:

This sentiment, i suspect, is due no less to the sheer fact of my being a Jew than to my personal biography. Any Jew, with the questionable exception of the generations born in Israel, is always an immigrant, caught in a complex relationship between a home from which he is distanced by both space and historical time, and a current residence from which he is separated by a paper-thin but surprisingly resistant mental wall. He has no choice but to be a cosmopolitan, and there are three general ways in which this cosmopolitanism may manifest. ...

The religious Jew, as the monk, is a cosmopolitan in that he makes do everywhere and belongs nowhere.

The progressive secular Jew is a cosmopolitan in a very different way. Like his religious brother, he never has the pleasure of belonging to a place; as the Nazi episode among others illustrates, his decision to treat a place as his home means very little to others and to history. Unlike his religious brother, however, he does not see his loneliness in the midst of the nations as a prelude to salvation; it is rather a source of confusion and often pain that he must learn to mitigate.

more; emphasis added because I genuinely believe that sabra Jews often carry the marks of displacement without the humility forced by the humiliation of needing to understand others' perspectives in order to survive--or, to put it more bluntly, I sometimes think that growing up in Israel is bad for Jewish children. Jews must raise their children in a Jew-hating world; ideologies of Jewish superiority are one obvious path. (And, for contingent 20th-century reasons, often an atheist path which leads to dissolution of Jewish identity in the later generations.)

The Rat:

It reminded me of some of the things we were taught in hospice training; and also of a line from Paul Claudel that MFB quoted to me in a letter well over a decade ago, but that's stuck with me ever since (even though I'm not Christian): "Jesus did not come to remove suffering, but to fill it with His presence." The principle holds whatever your religious affiliation (or lack thereof), and also seems to me one that might be particularly useful in this country, where even the most well-meaning people—Christians included—can often have trouble negotiating secondhand tragedy. We're a nation of fixers, and also of Pelagians—plus there's so little guidance out there about this kind of thing.

There are so few things we can ever really do for another person, however much we like to think we can, and however many fairy tales/Hollywood scripts/etc. are themed around rescue. If you know a survivor (esp. a recent survivor) of trauma, do have a look at this list, and others like it

.
more

"But in her memory, Jewishness was more a sense of a way of life and of community, rather than anything religious. Or maybe it was just the loss of memory. When people secularize, they don't really remember."
--quoted in Doubly Chosen

ELSEWHERE: Figured I'd tell you all about a couple of new/relaunched blogs. First, you may already have noticed The Groom's Family on the blogroll. This is a blog dedicated to exploring the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, from the perspective of a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity. Hey TGF, this is your reminder that you promised to lend me Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church, by Judith Kornblatt, when you finished it! Gimme.

And I'm very glad to report that Alias Clio has started up again! The author, "Musette," is an artsy, fashion-conscious, romantic Catholic lady of French-Canadian extraction; the blog will focus on reviews of books related in some way to history. She opens with a review of the recent Henry VIII novel Wolf Hall.

I WANT ASSAULT RIFLES AS LONG AS THEY'RE FREE; I WANT YOUR LOVE: It's been many years since I've run a contest on this blog. But in honor of what's happening right now in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in every country where people watch those scenes and dream of freedom--especially those countries where the American mainstream media response is, "But we liked your dictators!"--I will print any awesome rewritings of "Bad Romance" in which the two parties are the US and her client states. I don't care who is whom.

(I won't, and I wish this were obvious, print anything which doesn't understand why Israel happened. Huge hint: It's about England and the USA at least as much as it's about the Holocaust. If you don't understand why Israel's existence as a religious state is the result of Christian Western NIMBYism from Hell, then I don't really know what to do with you.)

Joe Biden says, “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Lady Gaga says, "You're not a criminal as long as you're mine."

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)

Valkenburgh: You spoke about philosophy with a simple girl? About what Plato thinks and what Aristotle thinks?

Spinoza: No, about what I think and what she thinks. Plato and Aristotle? You start listening to them and before you know it you're believing in rabbits out of hats, or the Virgin Birth!
--David Ives, The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch Spinoza

Lines from memory, almost certainly wrong in several places, and I admit they come across as a bit on-the-nose on the page like that. But a) obviously you know why I had to quote this, given my own trajectory! and b) the lines totally work onstage, in Theater J's fantastic, standing-ovation-worthy production. GO SEE THIS NOW. More soon.

AT MARRIAGEDEBATE NOW: interracial marriage rates, "Come for the pizza, stay for the deconstruction of masculinity," how pregnancy is viewed in Israel vs. Japan, surrogacy laws may change in India, and more.

HELL IS FOR CHILDREN: Because my life is one giant roulette wheel and I am the shiny ball, I decided to start my Eastertide by reading a 500-page Hungarian Holocaust novel.

Janos Nyiri's Battlefields and Playgrounds is one of the best novels I've read in a long time.

Personal digression, included because it might be of interest, but skip this if you want to know about why the book is so powerful: I admit that I actually haven't read that much about the Holocaust. I've read both of my grandfather's books (The Uses of Adversity, and also The Pavement of Hell which I recommend highly--and WHOA, Amazon says there's one about the Warsaw Uprising, which I need and am ordering RIGHT NOW) and a few other things e.g. Maus and Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose. But I have the impression, which could be wrong, that when I was growing up there was a concerted movement within American Jewry to move away from focusing on the Holocaust--a sense that Jews needed to ensure that their children didn't see Judaism as defined by attempted genocide. So while I felt really strong personal connections to the depictions of Jewish life in e.g. Stories My Grandfather Should Have Told Me or The Power of Light, I didn't seek out Holocaust narratives or feel especially connected to them. I didn't think about which of the neighbors I could trust to hide me. I'm conflicted about whether that's the best way to address the Holocaust for Jewish children; hatred of the Jews is intense and horrific and longstanding enough that I do think you don't really understand Jewish life unless you acknowledge it, but at the same time obviously Judaism is not actually defined by other people's reactions to Jews, and the Book of Esther is not the only book. To the extent that this whole digression is relevant to Nyiri, it's just to say that I don't really know what's typical for a "Holocaust novel." All I know is that I've never read one like this.

The protagonist is a fierce, tough, batteringly self-assured little boy. Seriously, he calls his mother a whore! (Because she takes up with a Gentile after divorcing his father.) He is ferocious and completely convinced of the rightness of his own perspective. The child's-eye perspective felt completely real. Joszka is rarely able to view things from other people's perspectives. That protects him from much of the horror around him--but not all of it.

This is also a Holocaust novel where the actual devastation of the Jewish people takes place off-screen for almost the entire time. The hell-tide is creeping nearer and nearer to his family every moment, and the reader isn't allowed to forget that, but it isn't until very late in the novel that we even see one corpse, let alone a sense of the total devastation which the novel's denouement reveals.

In the final third or so of the novel theology finally rears its ugly head. There's an amazing chapter in which Joszka's profligate, almost entirely absent father (and presumably you can write your own theological parallels there) returns to talk with him about God, and argues that the Jewish way of relating to God differs from the Christian in that the Christian believes in total unconditional surrender. Thus Christianity is a slave morality, and Christians are psychologically trained to view the world in terms of slaves and masters. So they think they are God's slaves and the Jews are theirs. Judaism by contrast, he argues, is a wrestling with God and a treaty with Him. When God blesses the Jews, the Jews can trust Him enough to bless Him back. The novel's characters really vividly portray both the degree to which this is a true portrait of Christianity, and the degree to which this is a false portrait of Judaism. I was reminded of The Trial of God.

This book is amazingly compelling. It's actually fun to read for a long time, since even as the readers' dread never abates we're still mostly following Joszka's attempts to manipulate all the adults around him; and when it stops being fun, it starts being painfully suspenseful. I can't recommend this highly enough.

The notes at the end are in large part a compendium of Catholics Choosing Hell, so there's that, also.

CAMASSIA REVIEWS (PART OF) DEFIANCE:

This, probably more than anything, is what keeps the story from being a Tarantino fantasy. The Bielskis want to die like men, but they also recognize their own impotence. As much as Tec highlights the importance of their resistance, in contrast to the more typical images of Jews as passive victims, the Bielskis are ultimately also waiting for a much bigger war machine to rescue them. And so they have neither the moral purity of the ghetto victims, nor the masculine heroism of American mythology. Instead, like most people, they live somewhere in between.

more (and my grandfather on the Jewish Councils, here)