National Scholar Updates

“It’s strange the way circles hook up with themselves.”

—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, p. 288

I

            When he begins to play we are transported to pre-war Europe, a world all but destroyed by the Nazis—outside, unsuspecting pedestrians are startled by each clear note as they stroll down West 4^th Street. The dilapidated room, holding an American flag and a threadbare parokhet, is filled with Village hipsters, pruriently dressed clubbers, a rag-tag group of local musicians and artists, Doc Marten-wearing bridge and tunnel folks, an NYU professor or two, three yeshiva students from Melbourne on holiday, and a group of curious onlookers who have stumbled in to see just what the sign bearing a blue imprint of a Lubavitcher Hassid beneath the large block letters “BLUEGRASS,” really foretells. Weaving in and out of all these questers, an impish-looking shamash, Herman Lowenharr, sporting a Yechah-style straw hat, carries a frighteningly large bottle of Jim Beam Rye tucked expertly under his right arm. I stand in the Charles Street Synagogue with a large group of West Texans—my students from the University of Texas at El Paso—adding yet another layer to this absurdly cosmopolitan mix of faces crammed into the tiny, well-worn synagogue. The place seems to be on the verge of collapse—until the first note escapes Andy Statman’s clarinet, and then the rickety contraption of a shul comes alive, shedding not just decades, but centuries, from its grimy façade. In that moment, Statman’s clarinet points our motley crew in the direction of the old country and into the future of Jewish imagination. [See Figure 1at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

II

            For the past decade Andy Statman and the other inspiring musicians in his trio—Larry Eagle on drums and Jim Whitney on bass—have been playing a mixture of traditional Hassidic niggunim, Klezmer, Bluegrass, Jazz, and Country music to ecstatic audiences at the Charles Street Synagogue in the West Village of Manhattan. To hear Statman is to be immersed in the vitality of an imaginative culture that has borrowed and invented from every civilization Jews have called home before their eventual expulsion or murder. Statman’s clarinet is aural cosmopolitanism. Statman is a Lubavitch Hassid, which means he plays with a large black velvet yarmulke perched on his head, his tzitzith elegantly twisted and modestly tucked into his black pants pockets; he sports a trim Lubavitch-style beard above a tightly buttoned white shirt. In contrast, his two band-mates are not Hassidim—they, in fact, are not Jewish, and yet, they too, have imbibed the spirit of the Hassidishe music that they all transcendently play together.

As a great-grandson of the Modzitzer Rebbe, I always wait for the moment when Statman will segue into a Modzitzer niggun as part of his repertoire. This particular evening, on a painfully hot, early summer day in 2010, Statman begins the concert with the plaintive notes of the Modzitzer Rebbe’s niggun for Mizmor L’David—a mournful tune that the Rebbe, my grandfather’s grandfather, titled “The Song of the Homeless” after watching the thousands of refugees streaming through the streets of Radom, Poland[i] during World War I. Looking around the room, it seems as fitting a melodic place as any to begin. To my right is one of my students, who earlier that day uncovered his Jewish grandfather’s difficult immigration history at the Ellis Island museum and confided in me as we waited for the shamash to open the doors to the synagogue, that he couldn’t remember ever having stepped foot in an actual synagogue. Through Statman’s music my students and I, as well as the others in our eclectic group, experience not just a working, living synagogue and tradition, but each of us in attendance becomes a part of the musical tapestry of contemporary Jewish imagination. It is as if Statman himself is a sort of timeless, musical genizah—a repository of thousands of years of history and texts. His musical compositions are the shemos, the many pieces and fragments of a collective Jewish culture throughout the world in different eras bound into a meaningful whole.

The very texture of these almost lost cultures can be felt in each of Statman’s compositions. His version of the Modzitzer niggun for Adon Olam, known the world-over as a welcome song to the weekly Shabbos, day of rest, also, in Statman’s recasting, becomes an invitation to explore other realms of being—uncovering perhaps, just what Shabbos, ideally, should be about: experiencing another way of living.

Although Statman is a unique, almost legendary figure in the New York music scene, he is also, in many ways, a representative of the contemporary Jewish imagination.  It seems the further Statman digs into his own Jewish past and the roots of Jewish liturgical texts and rhythms, the farther ahead he surges within contemporary American culture. And, in this regard, Statman is not alone. In this essay I seek to answer biblical scholar David Stern’s challenge to literary scholars, issued in his pithy volume, Midrash and Literature (almost two decades old), to begin the real scholarly work of linking midrash to literature and contemporary literary theory. As Stern writes:

Now that the buzz and flurry of the initial excitement has passed, the time has arrived to reap the fruits of the original linkage and to begin the real work of reading midrash theoretically, as literary discourse—that is, to use the theoretical sophistication appropriated from literary studies to describe midrash’s literary forms in their specificity and full complexity; to use the language of midrash as the base from which to discuss its hermeneutics in the light of the history of interpretation, and perhaps, most importantly, to employ our growing knowledge of the social, religiopolitical, and gender constructions of literature in order to analyze the singular forms of Rabbinic writing. (9)

Indeed, this is precisely the issue I examine in my soon-to-be-completed book, Midrash and Modernism: The Making of the Jewish Imagination. What I seek to do here is to take up Stern’s analytical challenge by discussing several examples of midrashic storytelling in a variety of contemporary art forms. My aim is not only to connect midrashic modes of storytelling to literary criticism alone, but also to look at the myriad ways that midrashic modes of composition have infiltrated and empowered the contemporary Jewish imagination. From the music of Bob Dylan and Andy Statman, the stories of Isaac Babel and Gary Shteyngart, and, lastly, to the graphic art of Ahron Weiner and Tobi Kahn, midrash and midrashic modes of composition link all of this Jewish imaginative work of modernism through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

III

“The midrash says…”—how many memorable stories and lessons from my childhood days in yeshiva began with this deceptively simple declaration? From stories of Hassidic masters’ perfect faith and holy men performing miracles in the old country, to story-like interpretations of talmudic discussions, midrashic storytelling for generations of readers, has often filled in the many gaps and fissures encased within original biblical passages. In contemplating the current state of Jewish culture, I have found that the ancient biblical exegetical method of midrash surprisingly offers key insights in understanding the contemporary Jewish imagination.

            So just what exactly is midrash? Midrash is an exegetical tool of biblical scholarship that assumes that every word and letter of the Torah has meaning.[ii] In his study, Midrash and Literature, Stern says that the popularity of midrash has much to do with the “wayward antic features of midrashic interpretation that had often been considered scandalous in the past” (3). Rather than seeming disreputable in the postwar American academy—it was precisely this outlaw and subversive quality that drew proponents to midrash and midrashic interpretation. In his study, Stern defines just what this type of interpretative storytelling entails:

The typical midrashic predilection for multiple interpretations rather than for a single truth behind the text; its irresistible desire to tease out the nuances of Scripture rather than use interpretation to close them off; and most of all, the way midrashic discourse mixes text and commentary, violating the boundaries between them and intentionally blurring their differences, flourishing precisely in the grayish no-man’s-land between exegesis and literature—all these features that once had seemed (since the time of Maimonides at least) to be the most problematic and irrational aspects of midrash now became its most intriguing and fascinating qualities. (3–4)

This subversive quality that blurs boundaries and genres is, in my mind, a hallmark of much of contemporary Jewish American literature and culture.

In Reading the Book, Burton Visotzky says that once a canon is closed, the problem facing a person and a community is one of “searching out the meaning of a text before our eyes” (5). Put another way: how does one find a “useful reading strategy” (5) and method of analysis for making the biblical text personal and relevant? As Harold Bloom suggests in Kabbalah and Criticism, through the ages, what all Jewish writing attempts to interpret is the Bible, or more specifically all Jewish literature worthy of the moniker implicitly asks the difficult question, “How to open the Bible to one’s own suffering?” (xxiii). Ideally, this is precisely what Torah study should accomplish: through the stories and lessons of the Hebrew Bible, the full range of human experience is illuminated.

Contemporary Jewish American writers and artists—using midrashic interpretive and storytelling techniques—then, often make the ancient, foundational texts of Judaism relevant to our postmodern, contemporary American lives. According to Visotzky, midrash is a method of reading the Bible as an “eternal text,” and is the result of applying a set of hermeneutical principles evolved by the community to guide one in reading the canon, in order to focus one's reading. The ultimate goal of midrash is to “search out” the fullness of the biblical language. Visotzky explains that the word “midrash” refers to a “homiletical exegesis of Scripture—the ‘reading out’ of moral lessons,” (9) and that midrash means a “searching out” (10) of this biblical interpretation.

In analyzing biblical language there are two schools of thought: the first suggests that biblical language is no different from the language of regular human discourse, and is subject to the same redundancies that we all encounter in everyday communication; the second view, on the other hand, holds that since scripture is the word of God, not one word is superfluous. Every apparent mistake, or seeming grammatical error, has some encoded meaning. This is where midrash comes in to play. Midrash ultimately minimizes the authority of the wording of the text as normal language; instead it places the focus on the reader’s moral application of the text, allowing for an endless variety of interpretations.

            In his blending of poetry and criticism, modernist poet Wallace Stevens writes in “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of / finding / What will suffice” (1–3). Although, he surely does not have Jewish American literary texts in mind when he writes these lines, Stevens’s ideas about the conflation of theory, criticism, and poetic diction woven together, bears much light on Jewish writers and artists steeped in the traditions needed to find a language that will suffice—a vessel capable of containing the thousands of years of textual history while being modern and contemporary in its outlook. For the writers and artists I will be discussing in this essay, midrashic storytelling is that sufficient language. Using midrash enables these Jewish writers and artists to uncover and illuminate their own culture, while deeply connecting to and extending the thousands of years of Jewish textual history as well.

            I would add to these definitions on midrash, my own ideas on the ways that modern or contemporary midrash functions.  I believe a key component of midrash is that it extends and completes[iii] an earlier (often biblical or medieval) text. A midrash fills in gaps and creates new meanings and understandings of difficult biblical stories. In so doing, midrashic storytelling not only makes these ancient stories relevant, but it also brings them immediately into our realm—recasting these stories on the contemporary stage of Jewish American culture. 

IV

            A wealth of literature and artwork has been created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by people aspiring to create "Contemporary or Modern Midrash,” including music, poetry, prose, and painting. I begin here with an excerpt of the biblical story of the Akedah, or The Binding of Isaac, before analyzing a midrashic re-interpretation and extension of this story:

 ¹And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

 ²And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

 ³And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

 ⁴Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.

 ⁵And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.

 ⁶And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

 ⁷And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

 ⁸And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

 ⁹And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

 ¹⁰And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

 ¹¹And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.

 ¹²And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

 ¹³And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. (Genesis 22:1–13)

This is, obviously, one of the most troubling and disturbing stories in the entire Hebrew Bible. It has consequently lent itself to literally thousands of midrashic reinterpretations, completions, and extensions. Recall the blurring of boundaries and the preference for multiple interpretations rather than a single truth that Stern spoke of in relation to midrashic texts. These same qualities are certainly true for the zeitgeist of the 1960s, the supposed “youth movement” or “counter-culture”—a movement that quickly anointed a baby-faced Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota as its high priest. In 1965 Bob Dylan was looking for a way to capture the absurdity of the American political moment—he turned toward a midrashic interpretation of The Akedah, or The Binding of Issac to make his statement in “Highway 61 Revisited” [See Figure 2at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]:

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61

Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light, he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61

(Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music)

There are numerous ironies and levels of meaning in Dylan’s midrashic reinterpretation of the ancient biblical story of The Akedah. Dylan’s deeply American, vernacular “translation” of this archetypal biblical story of faith and sacrifice is, in many ways, indicative of the contemporary Jewish imagination. As Robert Hass reminds us in his poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking (1–2).

We should first notice the intense conflation of time in Dylan’s lyrics and song: in seven short lines, Dylan midrashically links several key biblical stories: 1) Genesis 17, the story of God’s changing Abram’s name to Abraham, 2) Genesis 18, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 3) Genesis 22, story of the Akedah, or The Binding of Isaac.

In “Highway 61 Revisited,” the voice of God is still the voice of Yahweh from the Hebrew Bible, a fierce God of retribution, yet the voice of Abraham assumes the guise of a contemporary of Dylan—mid-1960s Greenwich Village hippie: “Man you must be putting me on,” Dylan’s Abe says. Yes, much like the story told in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis: 17, Dylan changes the Patriarch’s name. Even this aspect of the song is a rather humorous and ironic reversal (an extension through subtraction) of the original biblical story in Genesis: “Neither shall your name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee” (Genesis 17:5). In the Hebrew Bible story, God does not shorten Avram’s name, but rather lengthens it (by including the name of God, represented by the letter “heh,” to Avraham). Dylan’s shortening both Avram and Abraham to just an American-style “Abe” suggests an ironic reversal of the closeness to God and his watchful gaze here on Earth, and his promise that Abraham “will be the father of many nations,” that the patriarchal name Abraham represents. It is the reversal of the name Abraham, which contains God’s name within it, that Dylan alludes to throughout the apocalyptic lyrics and carnivalesque rhythms of “Highway 61 Revisited.” The song moves toward the indifference of authority figures to outright cruelty, sadism, and destruction by those in power (promoting a “next world war”) and not the birth of great nations as the God of the Hebrew Bible promises Abraham. Consequently, Dylan’s song might represent a terrifying state of hester panim, or a time when God has “turned away his face.”

Of course, in the context of warfare, it is also hard to hear the name Abe, either with the Vietnam war raging in the background, or the imagined “next world war” discussed in the powerful concluding stanza of Dylan’s song, without immediately imaging Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War—thus, “Abe” functions midrashically as yet another ironic reference embedded within Dylan’s song. Whereas Abraham Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator” represents freedom and justice—all is ironically reversed in “Highway 61 Revisited.” The name “Abe,” in the context of the 1960s underscores the lack of justice and the absence of freedom that the youth movement felt toward an increasingly militaristic American government.[iv]

            Another biblical story midrashically alluded to in Dylan’s song is the episode of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities that have come to be synonymous with evil. Through his midrashic storytelling in “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan seems to equate the consumer obsessed capitalism of America—(“I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings / And a thousand telephones that don’t ring” (16–17)—which hides behind patriotism with ultimate evil.

Soon after God changes Abram’s name to Abraham in Genesis, God reveals his plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah:

²²Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the LORD. ²³ And Abraham came near and said, “Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it? ²⁵ Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
²⁶ So the LORD said, “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
²⁷ Then Abraham answered and said, “Indeed now, I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord:

²⁸Suppose there were five less than the fifty righteous; would You destroy all of the city for lack of five?”
So He said, “If I find there forty-five, I will not destroy it.”
²⁹ And he spoke to Him yet again and said, “Suppose there should be forty found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it for the sake of forty.”
³⁰ Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Suppose thirty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”
³¹ And he said, “Indeed now, I have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: Suppose twenty should be found there?”
So He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty.”
³² Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten should be found there?”
And He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.” ³³ So the LORD went His way as soon as He had finished speaking with Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place.(Genesis 18:22–33)  

The knowledge of this impending destruction and loss of life, leads Abraham to desperately bargain with God on behalf of the righteous among these cities. This tense back and forth bargaining between God and Abraham in Genesis Chapter 18 is midrashically alluded to in the opening lines of Dylan’s song, particularly lines 3–6, where Abe and God seem to bargain back and forth until Abe accepts God’s demand to “do the killing out on Highway 61.”

Like an aged prophet from the Hebrew Bible, Dylan sings his song from the depths of the counter-culture revolution sweeping America—in its numerous hidden allusions and allegorical meanings, it is a midrashic commentary on the state of America at war in Vietnam, the civil unrest at home, and the rising tide of violence, and indifference overtaking the United States.

V

In the first installment of his memoirs,Chronicles, Volume I, Dylan talks about his early method of song composition: “I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues… What I usually did was start out with something, some kind of line written in stone and then turn it into another line—make it add up to something else than it originally did” (228). One would be hard pressed to find a more exact definition of the act of midrashic storytelling—including its subversive element and its addition and completion of an original biblical story—the line, which was originally “written in stone,” that Dylan alludes to.

The Highway 61 that Dylan takes as the name of his album and this song from the collection has its own highly mythologized history. After the failure of Reconstruction and the development of the Jim Crow south, Highway 61, which follows the contours of the great Mississippi River, became a major migration route for African Americans heading north for opportunities they were barred from in the deep South. As they traveled the nearly seventeen hundred miles of Highway 61—stretching from New Orleans all the way to Duluth, Minnesota—right next door to where Dylan grew up in a Jewish home in Hibbing, Minnesota, these African American migrants brought with them their musical traditions. One such traveler was the bluesman Robert Johnson, who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil on Highway 61 at a crossroads near Clarksdale, Mississippi in exchange for his musical talents. Those who were privileged to hear Johnson play surmised that this story was the only way to explain such supernatural talent.

Many music critics interpret Dylan’s use of Highway 61 as a return to his roots—the musical roots of the Blues—and, suggest that Dylan’s songs showcased how Rock and Roll (and electric guitars) could actually incorporate the best of the Blues as well as the Folk music Dylan began his career singing and creating. While I would largely agree with this assessment, I would also suggest that “Highway 61 Revisited” conveys an even deeper significance and return for Dylan, a concomitant return to his Jewish roots along with his musical ancestry. The fact that Dylan uses the biblical story of the Akedah as a starting point—the “lines written in stone” that he will midrashically re-imagine and reinterpret in a contemporary American setting suggests a much larger, philosophical and thematic return. Dylan’s, “Highway 61 Revisited,” is both a commentary on a culture of violence that sacrifices the “best minds of his generation” (1) to warfare and slaughter, to quote another midrashic poem, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as well as a re-interpretation of the biblical story of the Akedah. 

Highway 61 mostly parallels the great Mississippi River, its watery path forever linked to the heart of America through Mark Twain’s canonical novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound, anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep… (135)

Through the many musical legends who migrated up north along the land route of Highway 61 (such as Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson), and the musicians who, years later, in search of those musical traditions traveled back down south along Highway 61 (including Bob Dylan), the highway itself, much like the Mississippi River, has just as impressive a mythical life—legends that Bob Dylan midrashically tapped into while writing “Highway 61 Revisited.” As Dylan suggests in Chronicles, Volume One:

Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from… Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors.  The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood. (240–241)

Dylan’s musical exploration of Highway 61 along with his turn back toward the language and stories of the Hebrew Bible in 1965 signaled a seismic shift in Jewish American literature and culture. Many critics thought that with the passing of the immigrant generation Jewish art had lost its main theme. With Dylan pointing the way toward the future through re-invigorating the past, Jewish American culture was about to explore exciting new developments in art, culture, and representation.

VI

Lenny Abramov, a Jewish Russian immigrant to New York City, is the unlikely hero of Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, chosen as one of the New York Times’ ten best books of 2010. The novel is set sometime in the-not-too-distant-future, when New York City, as well as the rest of the “American empire,” is coming to a close. The entire rickety structure of the U.S. government, including its long-neglected infrastructure, is about to fall apart. In one memorable scene in the novel, part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses into the East River—all of this rotting-away, in Shteyngart’s biting satire, is, of course, symptomatic of America’s many moral failings. In this frighteningly all-too-real look into the future, there is no longer a two-party system of Republicans and Democrats—now there is only a need for one party which calls itself—in deference to the supposed two-party politics of years ago—the Bi-Partisans. In Shteyngart’s vision of the coming American century, all citizens wear around their necks an electronic device called an äppärät, which resembles a sort of high-tech cross between the choshen mishpat and an advanced iPhone that constantly streams data and, most-importantly, ratings for every person one encounters (does this remind anyone of Twitter, or Facebook?).

Lenny works for a company called Post-Human Services, owned by a man named Joshie Goldman. Post-Human Services offers its rich clients eternal life, but this “product” is only available to those extremely wealthy individuals who can afford the exorbitant fees that Post-Human Services charges—or as Shteyngart puts it—High Net Worth Individuals or HNWI’s. This concept of eternal life is accomplished through painstaking blood work, healthy eating habits, and an extremely high-tech drug regimen. This painful routine of constant monitoring of clients’ blood levels for fat and triglycerides, and so forth—is, of course, Shetyngart’s satire of our current culture’s complete obsession with youth and beauty, a preoccupation that many elevate to the level of a new religion.

When the novel opens, Lenny, our hero has been living abroad in Italy for a few years selling eternal life to HNWI’s, and in the scene I examine below, he has just returned to New York to his office at Post-Human Services, which is situated at an old, and now-defunct, midtown New York synagogue, built in the Moorish architecture style. Shteyngart is probably modeling this fictional midtown synagogue on the famous Central Synagogue in New York. Shteyngart writes:

The Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung Corporation is housed in a former Moorish-style synagogue near Fifth Avenue, a tired-looking building dripping with arabesques, kooky buttresses, and other crap that brings to mind a lesser Gaudi. Joshie bought it at auction for a mere eighty thousand dollars when the congregation folded after being bamboozled by some kind of Jewish pyramid scheme years ago. (56–57)         

Shteyngart’s satirical joke of the venerable midtown synagogue being sold at auction hits painfully close to home. The effect is enhanced by the fact that this travesty was caused by “a Jewish pyramid scheme”—an obvious reference to the Bernard Madoff scandal, which deeply affected numerous Jewish charitable organizations that had invested with Madoff (The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, among others). Shteyngart’s midrashic reversal continues throughout this scene:

The ark where the Torahs are customarily stashed had been taken out, and in its place hung five gigantic Solari schedule boards Joshie had rescued from various Italian train stations. Instead of the arrivi and partenze times of trains pulling in and out of Florence or Milan, the flip board displayed the names of Post-Human Services employees with the results of our latest physicals, our methylation and homocysteine levels, our testosterone and estrogen, our fasting insulin and triglycerides, and, most important, our “mood + stress indicators,” which were always supposed to read, “positive/playful/ready to contribute,” but which, with enough input from competitive co-workers, could be changed to “one competitive betch today” or “not a team playa this month.” On this particular day, the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-tika-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from “overcoming loss of loved one” to “letting personal life interfere with job” to “doesn’t play well with others.” Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues, including my fellow Russian, the brilliantly manic-depressive Vasily Greenbaum, were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELLED. (56–58)

Shteyngart has midrashically replaced the ark of the Torah, which holds the scroll of the law, with a Solari flip information board that does nothing but contain data. The difference of the endless interpretations spilling out from the Torah’s thousands of stories, which have been interpreted and re-imagined by Jewish writers and thinkers for thousands of years, versus the notion of all of this being replaced by a simple Solari flip-data board, representative of our future, as well as a wry commentary on our current culture—life within the information age—is hard to miss. This satirical scene might also be a sad addendum to recent Jewish history: in a post-Holocaust world, it is difficult to see a European train schedule board in a synagogue and not have it convey numerous associations to the Holocaust-era cattle-cars and trains, which carried Jews from the farthest reaches of occupied Europe to the Nazi killing centers. [See Figure 3 andFigure 4at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

Additionally, Shteyngart obviously does not choose the number five at random; rather, each of the Solari boards can be understood to replace one of the “Five Books of Moses,” the Hebrew Bible. This displacement of prayer services and the numerous activities of a synagogue, which promises eternal life in olam haBa, the world to come, with the headquarters of a corporation premised on delivering eternal life in olam haZeh, the present world, showcases Shteyngart’s familiarity with midrashic ironic reversal. In fact, these many ironies, of using midrashic exegesis to decry American culture’s displacing of literacy with raw data, becomes the major theme of Shteyngart’s novel. Despite these many midrashic interpretations, Shteyngart’s main focus remains on the present, information and ratings-obsessed cultural moment; in decrying our current culture’s reliance on data over the endless multiplicity and imagination of books, Torah exegesis, and midrashic reinterpretations, he ironically employs an extended midrashic story to make this observation.

We can see this theme further developed during a key moment in the novel when Eunice, Lenny Abramov’s love-interest in the novel, does something radical in this futuristic post-literate New York City: she attempts to read a book, or rather, she asks Lenny to read a book to her. In Shteyngart’s dystopic vision of the American future, a time and place where the Ark of the Covenant has easily been replaced by a Solari information board, people do not read books anymore. Books are considered extremely “uncool” and they will lower your rating on your äppärät—clearly something to be avoided in a data-obsessed culture where a person’s success is entirely dependent on one’s rating. Despite the many perils of literacy in this futuristic New York, in a brave moment in the novel, Eunice attempts to understand Lenny’s old, yellowed, dog-eared copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—a book about love and mortality. She asks him to read to her from the novel. However, after a few moments, Eunice appears to give up: “Eunice’s gaze had weakened, and the light had gone out from her eyes, those twin black orbs usually charged with an irrepressible mandate of anger and desire” (277). Eunice’s wandering attention leads to the following conversation:

 “Are you following all this?” I said. “Maybe we should stop.”

“I’m listening,” she half-whispered.

“But are you understanding?” I said.

“I’ve never really learned how to read texts,” she said. “Just to scan them for info.”

I let out a small, stupid laugh.

She started to cry…

“Even I’m having trouble following this. It’s not just you. Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for Dante to appear? Many, many years.” (277)

The knowledge and wisdom contained in the Torah (synonymous with Judaism’s textual history), has been entirely displaced in Gary Shteyngart’s futuristic view of a “post-literate” America bereft of values and all the knowledge that our print culture contained. Instead of midrashic interpretations of the Five Books of Moses, much like a retro Twitter account, the five Solari flip boards endlessly stream data concerning the health and mood of the Post-Human Services employees. Through the Solari information boards, streaming endless statistics and blood-work data, Shteyngart creates a modern midrash that also works allegorically, as the Solari boards imported from Italian train stations cannot help but bring to mind the roll-call of the European death trains. Even as the Solari boards broadcast the health and vitality of the workers at Post-Human Services, in an ironic midrashic reversal, Shteyngart has them memorializing the “post-human” quality of all that endless life. Shteyngart’s ironic displacement suggests to his readers that without the Torah and the stories and ethics and the “understanding” that goes with it—the hermeneutics and interpretation of the Torah—all is reduced to a mindless scanning of texts for data, for useless information. Indeed, it is a sterile vision of our age and the future it foretells. Through his ironic reversal of the Torah ark, Shteyngart midrashically underscores the perils of ignoring our spiritual and cultural heritage contained in the Torah and our thousands of years of textual exegesis on that foundational, living document.

After he is convinced to give up books in favor of a shiny new äppärät, Shteyngart’s hero Lenny reports to his readers: “I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors” (78).

In contrast to a post-literate future, Shteyngart himself does not just draw attention to an amnesiac America, which is turning its back on classical texts and literacy, but he also draws upon many of his own literary forbears as well to make his case—extending their reach and relevancy. The entire novel of Super Sad True Love Story might be thought of as a recasting of the Russian master Anton Chekhov’s novella, Three Years. Shteyngart liberally quotes from Chekhov throughout Super Sad True Love Story, drawing attention to the many parallels as well as the disjunctions between Lenny Abromov’s predicament and the tragic story of Chekhov’s hero Laptev. Despite the obvious importance of Chekhov’s novella undergirding Shteyngart’s deeply literary novel (this is part of the midrashic irony he employs), I believe there is yet another Russian writer lurking beneath the surface of Shteyngart’s novel—the Jewish short story writer, who was initially hailed by the Soviet-system as an important writer and respected comrade, only to be murdered by Stalin as a Jew and a parasite on the state: Isaac Babel. Babel might have had as profound an influence on the twentieth century and contemporary Jewish imagination (from Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick to Shteyngart, Nathan Englander, and Dara Horn) as any other Jewish writer. After reading of the displacement of the aron kodesh, the ark of the Torah, in Shteyngart’s novel, Babel’s short story, “My First Goose,” comes to mind. Nearly a century before Shteyngart replaces the Torah ark with Solari information boards, Isaac Babel, in his well-known short story, “My First Goose,” replaces the promised land of Israel with the false promise of a communist paradise on earth.

VII

“My First Goose” was published in Red Cavalry, a collection of Babel’s stories drawn from his years fighting on the front lines with a Cossack unit (The First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army) during the Polish-Soviet Warof 1920. The purpose of this war was to spread communism and the doctrines of the Revolution to Poland, and then, to the rest of the world. Babel was raised in a traditional Jewish home in Odessa, and according to Cynthia Ozick he “was at home in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was familiar with the traditional texts and demanding commentaries” (15). In one of his stories, Babel describes himself (the Jewish intellectual) as follows: “you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart” (146). Despite these poetic leanings, as a young man Babel was assigned to a murderous Cossack unit fighting to spread the gospel of communism. “My First Goose” tells the story of the pivotal first hours of Babel’s service with this Cossack unit (or Lyutov—his fictional, but deeply autobiographical, first-person narrator of “My First Goose,” as well as many of the Red Cavalry stories). Things do not go well for the Jewish intellectual Lyutov. As an insular fighting group, the Cossacks have rejected him as an educated “cream-puff.” To the amusement of the unit, one handsome young Cossack has thrown Lyutov’s suitcase out into the street; he then impresses his comrades by farting in the intellectual’s face. Yet, other men incessantly make fun of the new recruit:

I went down on my hands and knees and gathered up the manuscripts and the old, tattered clothes that had fallen out of my suitcase. I took them and carried them to the other end of the yard. A large pot of boiling pork stood on some bricks in front of the hut. Smoke rose from it as distant smoke rises from the village hut of one’s childhood, mixing hunger with intense loneliness inside me. I covered my broken little suitcase with hay, turning it into a pillow, and lay down on the ground to read Lenin’s speech at the Second Congress of the Comintern, which Pravda had printed. The sun fell on me through the jagged hills, the Cossacks kept stepping over my legs, the young fellow incessantly made fun of me, the beloved sentences struggled toward me over thorny fields, but could not reach me. (232)

The situation is desperate for Lyutov. If he is not accepted by the men of his unit, he realizes he will not survive very long in the midst of war in a very unforgiving environment. Lyutov decides to act. He gets up from his intellectual pursuit of Lenin’s latest speech and approaches the mistress of the house (undoubtedly a Jewish woman as are so many of the poor peasants we meet in Babel’s Red Cavalry stories):

I put away the newspaper and went to the mistress of the house, who was spinning yarn on the porch.

“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub.”

The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes to me and lowered them again.

“Comrade,” she said, after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself.”

“Goddammit!” I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. “I’m in no mood to start debating with you.”

And, turning around, I saw someone’s saber lying nearby. A haughty goose was waddling through the yard, placidly grooming its feathers. I caught the goose and forced it to the ground, its head cracking beneath my boot, cracking and bleeding. Its white neck lay stretched out in the dung, and the wings folded down over the slaughtered bird.

“Goddammit!” I said, poking at the goose with the saber. “Roast it for me mistress!”

The old woman, her blindness and her spectacles flashing, picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron, and hauled it to the kitchen.

“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “This makes me want to hang myself.” As she pulled the door shut behind her. (232)

This act of violence, so out of character for the mild-mannered Lyutov (Babel’s Jewish-intellectual alter-ego), impresses the Cossacks, and he is subsequently accepted by the tough, violent men of the unit. By the end of the story, he is seen reading Lenin’s speech to group of fighting men gathered round him, their legs entwined together under the stars, yet the guilt of this first act of violence (there will soon be many more to come) troubles Lyutov’s fitful dreams:

…then we went to sleep in the hayloft. Six of us slept there warming each other, our legs tangled, under the holes in the roof which let in the stars.

I dreamed and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.” (233)

            It is this seminal midrashic moment in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry that I believe Gary Shteyngart is building upon and extending in Super Sad True Love Story. In Babel’s story, Lyutov is rejected by the regiment of Cossacks to which he has just been assigned to. One of the older men has, in fact, thrown his suitcase into the street and, at the beginning of the paragraph, the narrator, on his hands and knees, is in the process of retrieving its contents. Once he has collected the many manuscripts together, he places them beneath his head as a pillow of sorts. Only his rest is troubled and he quickly abandons the notion of sleep in favor of the violent act that ingratiates him to his comrades. Notice the obvious reworking of the midrash that Rashi writes extending the original biblical story of Genesis 28:11. While fleeing his brother Esau, Jacob leaves Beer-sheba and travels toward Haran. In Genesis 28:11 the Torah says that before preparing to sleep, Jacob “took of the stones of the place and put them under his head.” Later in the same chapter of Genesis 28, in section 18, the language of the Hebrew Bible refers to Jacob taking one “stone,” singular. Rashi, (see Babylonian Talmud, Hullin 91b as well), tells a midrash to help explain this seeming grammatical error or inconsistency:

“And he put it under his head—He made them into a sort of cape round his head, for he was afraid of wild beasts. The (stones) began to quarrel with each other, one saying, ‘Upon me shall the righteous man place his head,” and the other (stone) said, ‘Let him lay (it) upon me.’ Immediately the Holy One Blessed Be He made them into one stone (sing, in verse 18) that he had put under his head.’” (Rashi 28:11, The Pentateuch with Rashi’s Commentary, p. 275)

            Rashi’s midrash is clearly glossed in the decisive moment in Babel’s “My First Goose.” Lyutov takes his manuscripts and creates a sort of pillow using the communist manuscripts just as Jacob had done with the stones during his moment of crisis fleeing his brother Esau. In the original biblical story, after his dream, Jacob then uses the stones to make an altar for an animal sacrifice to God who, in his dream, has promised Jacob the land of Israel. Lyutov’s sacrifice of the goose in his short story does not lead to the dream of Jacob’s ladder as it does later in Genesis Chapter 28 and God’s promise of a homeland. Instead, in Babel’s story this sacrifice leads to the joining of Lyutov with his fellow violent comrades in this vicious Cossack unit, off fighting a war for the dubious mission of spreading the gospel of communism to neighboring Poland. Thus, Babel’s “My First Goose” functions as a midrashic extension of the seminal story in Genesis. Rather than gaining the promised land of universal brotherhood, the communist dream that both Babel and his first-person narrator Lyutov are so enamored with at the outset of Red Cavalry, in actuality, what transpired was the murder of Isaac Babel before one of Stalin’s firing squads. Thus, Babel’s personal history adds another tragic layer of meaning and commentary to “My First Goose.”[v] [See Figure 5 andFigure 6at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

In Babel’s retelling of this midrash, the stones that would become part of Jacob’s altar to God and the basis for the future temple on that same site are replaced by the many communist manuscripts contained in his little suitcase, which are gathered into a pillow. Lyutov’s sleep does not lead to a dream of redemption by God and the promise of a great nation and homeland as in the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder. Instead, it foretells a midrashic replacement of God’s temple and promise with the hope for the new religion of communism and Lenin’s Comintern speech reprinted in Pravda.  As we have already seen, this displacement of the Torah with other political or social ideas is glossed throughout Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, particularly in the scene with the Solari flip boards replacing the Torah ark.

So, to recapitulate the narrative timeline we have been sketching: the redactors of the Talmud tell a midrashic story to explain a grammatical inconsistency in Genesis 28; many centuries later Rashi re-interprets and retells this talmudic midrash in his commentary on the Hebrew Bible; in the early twentieth century Isaac Babel recasts this midrash to explain the predicament of being a Jewish intellectual in a Cossack unit fighting for the spread of Communism; and early in the twenty-first century Gary Shteyngart builds upon each of these midrashim to reinterpret the story anew in his satire, Super Sad True Love Story, using the displacement of the wisdom and multiple interpretations of the Torah with simple Solari information boards to prophesize his vision of America’s future bereft of midrashic storytelling. In following this timeline we can begin to glimpse the many ways that midrash is central to understanding the contemporary Jewish imagination.

VIII

To understand more fully the contemporary Jewish imagination and the ways midrash spurs creativity, I turn my attention here to the work of renowned contemporary artist Tobi Kahn, who, from the very beginning of his career three decades ago, has been using biblical texts and stories to connect viewers to the stories of their own lives and experiences.

While Gary Shteyngart has created a modern midrash in which the ark of the covenant contains Solari train schedule boards to replace the ancient stories of the Bible, graphic artist, Tobi Kahn has not created a metaphorical ark as his midrash, but rather an actual aron kodesh, Orah (1987). Orah was originally commissioned as a moveable ark to hold a Torah scroll for prayer services in a New York-area hospice. In place of the customary lions holding the rounded form of the Decalogue, Kahn has created a beautiful, and somewhat abstract, landscape painting with two mountains in the distance and a flowing river moving from the right foreground of the painting into the distant mountains in the center of the painting at the “vanishing point” of the image corresponding with the lowering arc of the second mountain to the right. In this evocative painting, Kahn tells a story about olam haZeh (this present world) and olam haBa (the world to come).

In an interview with art critic and historian Emily Bilski, Kahn notes: “Although Judaism has emphasized words, language, and commentary, I have found the visual elements of the tradition equally illuminating. For me, the life of the spirit is integrally bound up with the beauty of the world, with the rituals and symbols that are a Jewish medium to transcendence. Like language, what we see can be a benediction” (6). [See Figure 7 at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

As Bilski explains, Kahn builds up the surfaces of his paintings by

adding over ten layers of gesso, each layer sanded before the next one is applied, to ensure an extremely smooth surface, with no trace of the texture of the material. On this prepared surface, Kahn executes a black-and white drawing; he then starts building up the surface with a mixture of modeling paste and acrylic polymer. This is followed by eight to ten layers of opaque pigment, over which Kahn applies a final fifteen layers of transparent washes of acrylic paint that resembles glazes. Thus he achieves the richly luminous surfaces that have been a hallmark of his expressive paintings. By building up multiple layers of modeling paste and pigment, he creates tactile surfaces resonating with a rare depth of color. (16)

As Bilski explains, just like most midrashic art, there is paradox and contradiction (irony) in much of Tobi Kahn’s artwork: “a simultaneous embrace of the human experience and celebration of the physical world, along with a desire to transcend that world and achieve a higher spiritual state” (17). This paradox is poignantly seen in Kahn’s portable ark for a Torah scroll, Orah, acrylic on wood (1987). This work of ritual art tells a midrashic story of Kahn’s own family history. Kahn’s father was born in Frankfurt Am Mainz, Germany, a member of the Breuer’s Kehillah. For generations of Kahns (Kohanim, members of the priestly tribe), Germany was home—until during Kristallnacht in 1933, an uncle of Kahn’s was among the very first group of Jews murdered by the Nazis. The remaining members of the family soon managed to flee Germany for America, and Kahn was born and raised as a member of the Breuer’s Kehillah, which was re-established by Rav Joseph Breuer in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Kahn’s father is, in fact, a “haver” one of Rav Breuer’s inner circle of adherents and leading members of the Kehillah, the Breuer community. Although the Kahn family found respite and safety in Washington Heights in what became euphemistically known as “Frankfurt on the Hudson,” given the Kahn family history, the necessity for an easily transportable ark—one that can easily be moved in times of crisis and exile—becomes apparent.

            Orah contains other midrashic and historic elements as well. The architectural form of the ark is simple and hearkens back to Shaker furniture, which influenced the American arts and crafts movement and the furniture of Gustav Stickley. Kahn’s borrowing from this somewhat obscure Christian religious sect for his variation on the traditional form of a Torah ark deeply resonates with Andy Statman’s continual borrowing and improvisation with indigenous American musical forms: Blues, Jazz, and Bluegrass. As already mentioned, the central image in most arks from at least the middle ages, are the twin forms of the Ten Commandments—the Decalogue. In Kahn’s American reimagining of this central conceit, however, the two rounded tablets are replaced by the form of two mountains with a river running through them. Although there are clearly two mountains discerned in Orah, Emily Bilski sees in this landscape painting a modern reinterpretation on the midrash on Proverbs, 68.9, which tells the story of how there were actually three mountains present at the giving of the Torah: Mount Tabor, Mount Carmel, and Mount Sinai, each competing to be the site for the giving of the Torah (Ritual Art, p. 26). Bilski sees the suggestion of yet a third mountain ciphered within Orah in the hollow, rounded door knob on the front of the ark. While I agree with Bilski’s brilliant commentary on the midrashic elements hidden within Kahn’s sculptural form and the painting contained within Orah, I believe there may be yet another hidden meaning contained in Orah.

This painting calls to mind the famous landscape artists of the Hudson River School of landscape painting: Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, even Sanford Gifford in the luminous, shimmering surface of Kahn’s paintings, including Orah, a Hebrew name, which means “light.” As a boy, Tobi Kahn spent each of his summers in Tannersville, NY, a vacation spot in the Northern Catskill Mountains, as his family would follow Rav Breuer up to some of the highest peaks in New York State. I see the river running through the center of Orah as a visual representation of the Hudson River, which not only meanders beside the Catskill Mountains, Kahn’s summer home, but also flowed past Kahn’s boyhood residence in Washington Heights overlooking the Hudson River one hundred and twenty miles south of Tannersville. Thus Kahn’s abstract reimagining of a Hudson River School landscape such as Cole’s Sunrise From the Catskill Mountains is not only an homage to his childhood homes, but it is also a means for Kahn to tell a personal story of family redemption in this art work. Through Orah, Kahn also suggests the union of ancient Jewish culture with indigenous and contemporary American art forms. In creating his landscape midrash as a house for a Torah scroll, Kahn is also suggesting the many imaginative ways that contemporary America has served as a home for the Torah—its stories, wisdom, and lessons—and the myriad, new interpretations being spun from the ancient Hebrew scroll contained within Orah by so many contemporary writers and artists. Thus, Kahn is typologically and midrashically transposing three Northern Catskill high-peaks for the ancient Judean hills from the Hebrew Bible, and in so doing, through the shimmering surface of Orah he allows us to glimpse the reflection of an endlessly inventive contemporary midrashic imagination.  

Kahn’s interpretive improvisation with indigenous American art forms and religious movements from Shaker furniture to Hudson River School landscape painting to his reimagining of the ancient ritual object of an aron kodesh, parallels the powerful midrashic imagination evidenced by Andy Statman, Bob Dylan, and Gary Shteyngart. Although it might not be immediately apparent, upon studying Orah, Kahn’s transgressive and subversive imagination is stunning. When one considers Orah as a functioning piece of ritual art, a working aron kodesh, a house to hold a Torah scroll, the holiest object in Judaism, its full import and beauty is recognizable. Kahn is not making his statement of blurring borders and boundaries between old-world ideas of sacred and secular, between what constitutes “acceptable religious iconography,” at the margins of Jewish culture, but instead he is forcing viewers to take up his aesthetic and spiritual challenge right at the center of Jewish life and ritual. Kahn confronts these questions and ideas through the literal house of Judaism’s most sacred object. All of Kahn’s ritual art objects are made within the halakhic specifications and are fully functioning ritual objects. Kahn’s midrashic imagination purposefully blurs the boundaries between text and commentary and suggests a seemingly ceaseless number of interpretations for his Torah ark. In so doing he creates a contemporary midrash on the ways that New York City itself, and by extension America, has been a welcoming home for Torah and the millions of Jewish people who have made their modern lives on the shores of the Hudson river. Stern suggests all great midrashic works should “tease out the nuances of Scripture rather than use (artistic) interpretation to close them off” (3). This is precisely what Kahn’s art does: it invites viewers to re-imagine ritual and reinterpret biblical stories through aesthetic beauty. Whether he slyly references ancient midrashic stories about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, as Bilski suggests, or whether he evocatively alludes to Shaker simplicity or the complex story of exile and survival that is his own personal and familial history, Kahn’s Jewish imagination works midrashically—in so doing he returns all viewers of his art to the fundamental principles of Judaism and the complex negotiations required of cosmopolitan Orthodox citizens of the contemporary American scene. Rather than seem heretical and problematic, as might have been the view of an earlier Jewish audience, say a mid-nineteenth-century Hirschian worldview, in the twenty-first American century, Kahn’s objects of the spirit truly inspire all who view them.

IX

The last midrashic work I would like to take a look at is a series of photographs taken of “décollage” images by Ahron Weiner, a contemporary New York artist. His show, titled Bible AdInfinitum, opened in June of 2011 at Superfine, a Brooklyn gallery in Dumbo. I was able to attend this opening with my Jewish Studies students from the University of Texas at El Paso when we were all in New York for my summer class, New York Through the Literary Imagination. Weiner’s midrashic aim for Bible AdInfinitum is to combine advertising “décollage” and digital photography to uncover new interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. The French word “décollage” translates into English literally as “take-off” or “to become unglued.” Essentially, what Weiner does is walk the streets of Manhattan looking for old advertising posters placed around the city at major construction sites. After many months, or years, (just ask any New Yorker about the speed of contractors and construction in Manhattan…), there could be twenty or thirty advertising posters pasted one on top of the other plastered onto the protective scaffolding around a construction site. In an act of “archeological semiology,” Weiner removes a large section of these pasted-together advertising posters and, back at his Long Island studio, begins the task of stripping away at the palimpsest to reveal iconic images and story fragments redolent of tales from the Hebrew Bible.

Unlike Tobi Kahn’s painstakingly slow building up of an image through numerous layers, Ahron Weiner employs a reverse method of décollage, of tearing at a surface to reveal the hidden meaning within. Instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images (as is done in collage), it is created by cutting, tearing away, or otherwise removing pieces of an original image. It is this “un-mooring” of the original image from its advertising intent that frees it to be manipulated back into a biblical context.

In an interview, I asked Weiner to elaborate on his choice of décollage as his compositional method. He responded: “I think the ancient Kabbalistic tradition of permutation—rearranging words and letters to uncover deeper meanings­—foreshadows what I’m doing. The semiotic archaeological aspect of this series quite literally echoes the work of archaeologists working on tels across the Middle East, seeking physical evidence of biblical sites and stories” (interview). Weiner’s attempt to find hidden meanings in advertising images, particularly allusions and reinterpretations of ancient biblical stories, partakes in the midrashic imagination that has animated so much of Jewish art over the centuries. The element of ironic reversal, which, as we have already seen in this essay, is a defining characteristic of the current midrashic imagination, is apparent in Weiner’s image The Creation of Man—a work that retells a Hebrew Bible story (Genesis 1:26) through obvious allusion to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, one of the most revered and copied images in Christian iconography and Western art. Yet Weiner sees this image as relevant to the Hebrew Bible as well: “My compositional appropriation of Michelangelo’s iconic Sistine Chapel fresco in my “Creation of Man” is relevant, important, and ironic. In addition to being an homage to an artist I revere, it suggests all that Christianity appropriated from Judaism” (interview). [See Figure 8at http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=69307]

Weiner goes on to suggest that through Bible AdInfinitum, he is “appropriating advertising—a medium that appropriates from everything else—to retell these biblical stories. Whereas the Bible is eternal, holy, and written by God, advertising is temporal, unholy, and most certainly written by man” (interview). Despite this “unholy” quality infusing advertising, Weiner still believes that he can use this medium to retell these ancient biblical stories. When I visited the opening of Bible AdInfintum in Brooklyn in June of 2011, I witnessed an eclectic mix of advertising executives, art gallery owners, inquisitive Williamsburg hipsters, former and current Yeshiva students, and my students and I from West Texas. All of us together stood around discussing these ancient biblical stories as if they were current news—whether it was the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) or the Creation of Man (Genesis 1:26)—stories uncovered through Weiner’s décollage technique.

Weiner has been an advertising executive for several decades, and, he says about drawing biblical tales out of the most unlikely of places: “I didn’t set out to create an advertising-based abstract biblical narrative. I’ve been working with AdInfinitum since 2002—it took me eight years before I realized that I could use it to tell the biblical narrative. This series is a synthesis of my three major influences: Jewish history, art history, and advertising. It’s that mother’s milk, sub-rosa, informing my artistic expression” (interview).

Although graphic artists—Kahn and Weiner—use somewhat oppositional methods of composition, they share a similar fascination with the ancient stories of the Hebrew Bible: they both give new life to ancient biblical stories and recast Jewish history on the contemporary American stage thus making it relevant and meaningful to new audiences.

X

            In Midrash and Literature, David Stern asks us to consider the many ways we, as citizens of the modern world, inscribe meaning in our lives. Stern asks: “how are we to secularize our understanding of [midrash] this inherently religious literature, as we must, without profaning it?” (2). The numerous artists and writers that I analyze here, Andy Statman, Bob Dylan, Isaac Babel, Gary Shteyngart, Tobi Kahn, and Ahron Weiner challenge us to find new and innovative ways of incorporating biblical stories into our contemporary American lives.

Before I conclude, I would be remiss if I did not mention that in a future essay I will be looking at the particular ways that Jewish women writers, interpreters, and artists—people such as Dara Horn, who reanimates lost Jewish worlds and languages, Basya Schechter, the lead singer for Pharoah’s Daughter, and biblical scholars Nechama Lebowitz and Aviva Zornberg—after thousands of years of being silenced and shut out of midrashic storytelling and biblical exegesis, are reinvigorating this ancient form of analysis. The incredible variety of midrashic reinterpretations currently ongoing by female scholars and artists requires and deserves its own analysis—one that looks at the many ways that for centuries women’s voices were silenced. Today women midrashists, having largely overcome this centuries-long neglect, are among the most innovative practitioners of this ancient exegetical compositional method.

XI

As Dylan says, it’s funny how circles always seem to hook up with themselves. Or as Walt Whitman reminds us in his meditation on the timelessness of change, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” when it comes to people connecting to each other through great art, “it avails not, time nor place—distance avails not” (20). As I sit in the Charles Street Synagogue, surrounded by my students from West Texas, together we listen to Andy Statman play his clarinet in the heart of Greenwich Village, like the Hassidic masters of old, listeners and fellow travelers, each of us can begin to discern a path to redemption through niggun, through song. Although Bob Dylan was speaking about Aaron Neville when he said, “There’s so much spirituality in his singing that it could even bring sanity back in a world of madness” (Chronicles, p. 178), had he ever stumbled into the Charles Street Synagogue on a Thursday night, he would have to agree that the same description would just as easily apply to Andy Statman as well.

Whether contemplating one’s life journey in a makeshift synagogue through Tobi Kahn’s painstaking layering of abstract forms into shimmering surfaces which reveal the journey of contemporary Jewish history, or whether one considers the travails of Jewish history and the plight of African American’s migrating north up Highway 61 while listening to Bob Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, or perhaps while viewing Ahron’s Weiner’s slow, meticulous scraping away at contemporary advertising culture to reveal a small biblical kernel within its unholy wrapping, when one notices the smoke rising from Isaac Babel’s lonely childhood hut and when one heed’s Gary Shteyngart’s prophetic warning of a post-literate world (think of the implications for the people of the book!)—we are, each of us, participants in the midrashic imagination. Midrash is what unites each of these distinct Jewish artists—the vibrant, renewable, midrashic imagination, which is rediscovered anew for each generation. We today in the twenty-first century are seeing the completion of a circle—the long arc of Jewish imagination that knows no linguistic limitations and admits no geographic boundaries. Nearly half a century ago at the height of the youth movement in the 1960s, Bob Dylan stridently warned his listeners: “Don’t look back.” For the artists and writers that I examine here, as well as so many other contemporary Jewish artists from Jerusalem to New Orleans, one need not turn around to see what might be gaining ground. With the steadying force of the timeless midrashic imagination behind them, contemporary Jewish artists confidently face the future knowing that following the long arc of tradition, like a circle hooking up with itself, will, eventually, bring them right back home again. 

List of Works Cited

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic, 1981. Print.

Babel, Isaac. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Ed. Nathalie Babel. Trans. Peter Constantine.

Intro. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.

Ben Isaiah, Rabbi Abraham, and Rabbi Benjamin Sharfman. The Pentateuch and Rashi’s

Commentary: A Linear Translation into English. New York: S.S. & R., 1949. Print.

Bilski, Emily. Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn. New York: Hudson Hills,

2004. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. 1975. New York: Continuum, 1999. Print.

Chekhov, Anton. The Complete Short Novels. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Print.

———. “Highway 61 Revisited,” Highway 61 Revisited. Warner Bros. Inc., 1965. CD.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl: And Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959. Print.

Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitis,” The Apple Trees at Olema. New York: Ecco Press,

2010. Print.

Kahn, Tobi. Orah. 1987. Acrylic on Wood. Private collection.

Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

Stern, David. Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies.

            Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry,” The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a

Play.Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Suggs, Jack M. et al., eds. The Oxford Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: Norton,

1999. Text.

Visotzky, Burton, L. Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society, 2005. Text.

Weiner, Ahron. Personal interview. 15 June 2011.

———. Creation of Man. 2011. Paper. Collection of the artist.

Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. New York:

Norton, 2002.

An Orthodox synagogue finds itself in an unusual position as an educational institution. Although there are growing numbers of Conservative, Reform, and multi-denominational Day Schools, it is often a synagogue-based religious school that provides the primary Jewish education for non-Orthodox youth. An Orthodox synagogue, however, has no such imperative, since most of its constituents send their children to Day School.[1] The Orthodox synagogue may ask itself: if our children already attend a Jewish Day School, what is our further role in Jewish education? The problem is that this question is not even asked.

Why isn’t this question asked? Many parents are satisfied as long as there is something for the children to do while the adults pray. Other parents expect the synagogue to reinforce what the children learn in school, but do not expect it to add anything to their children’s Jewish development. Often, the youth programming at an Orthodox synagogue is of a social nature. At best, the Shabbat morning groups offer a place for the children to pray at their own pace, and at worst they provide glorified babysitting.

An Orthodox synagogue can, and should, see itself as a serious educational institution, even if it does not have a formal religious school. In order to do that, as members and staff of Orthodox synagogues, we must challenge our assumptions about children at synagogue. We must think outside the box—in fact, outside of several boxes. I have framed the conversation below in terms of four of these “boxes,” which represent our assumptions and the resulting limitations we place upon ourselves. Some of these ideas represent efforts I have implemented at my own synagogue in Chicago, while others are dreams and musings of what could be possible. The goal is not to be exhaustive, but to stimulate conversation and to help us rethink what we assume to be true about children and synagogue. Once we free ourselves from these assumptions, we can think creatively about what children can gain from their synagogue experience. We can build innovative models of synagogue youth education.

Box #1: We think like a school.

One of the biggest advantages of providing Jewish education in a synagogue context is that a synagogue does not have the constraints of a school, such as grade levels, testing, and curriculum requirements. This may be obvious—“shul” is not school![2] So then why are we thinking like a school? For example, why must our youth groups be organized by grade level? There certainly are advantages to dividing children by age: they share a similar level of knowledge and ease of social interaction, and it also is the easiest way for everyone to know which room to go to. But the grade model might be an unnecessary limitation for a synagogue.

What if we organized the youth groups by neighborhood? What if each Shabbat morning children of a range of ages, who live near each other, gathered together to pray and learn together? What if each child in grades K–6 was paired with a child in grades 7–12 who lives in his or her own neighborhood, and these partnerships formed a mentoring relationship? In small groups, the older children would teach the younger ones, under the guidance of a well-trained educator, who would guide and facilitate these interactions. What if these children then saw each other later that afternoon on their block where, on long summer Shabbatot, they would gather in someone’s home for hevruta learning and Seudah shelishit? This is just one possible model, but we can simply recognize that there are many ways to organize the children into groups, and the grade division is just one. Once we let go of the assumption that “shul” needs to think like school, we open up richer and more creative ways of engaging the children.

The youth program could also tap into what is perhaps a synagogue’s greatest asset—the synagogue’s membership. This includes, but is not limited to, parents and grandparents who would be eager to participate and offer their presence and expertise. Young adults in the community are ready role models for teens especially. We have one older member of our congregation whose family has been with the synagogue for five generations. He possesses a wealth of knowledge about the congregation’s history, and some wonderful anecdotes about former rabbis and deceased members. He accompanied our B’nai Mitzvah group on a hessed outing to help clean up the synagogue’s cemetery, which is over 100 years old. He was able to regale the children with stories of past members and give them an appreciation of the heritage of our community. What a treasure.

Box #2: Just as long as the kids enjoy coming to synagogue…

I recently asked a parent (not a member of my synagogue) what she hopes her children will gain from the Shabbat morning youth program at her synagogue. She presented me with something of a hierarchy of goals. First and foremost, she said, it needs to keep them out of my hair so that I can pray in peace. If they enjoy it enough to make them actually look forward to coming to synagogue, all the better. And if they even gain something educational from the youth groups, then that’s wonderful.

Why have we set the bar so low? Shouldn’t we expect the synagogue to actively contribute to our children’s growth as Jews? Even in the best-case scenario, synagogues place unnecessary limitations on the education they offer. Some provide an extensive Tefillah program, where the children pray together at an age-appropriate pace, increasing the number of Tefillot as the children get older. In addition, they may talk about the parasha or play a game. These certainly are positive things for children to do, and these activities reinforce the skills and knowledge the children are already gaining in school. But can’t we offer education that children are not already receiving elsewhere[3]?

The synagogue is a place that is ripe for compelling and immersive Jewish experiential education. Encourage the children to ask their “big Jewish questions,” to explore ideas that their teachers do not have time to cover in school. Even within a parasha discussion, have the children get up and act out the characters in the story, or ask them what they might do in the same situation. One of the favorite games that our children like to play is “Agree/Disagree,” where the youth leader makes a statement (for example, “All Jews should make aliya, and the children respond by voting with their feet—standing on one side of the room or the other to demonstrate whether they agree or disagree with the statement, or anywhere in the middle to show where their opinion falls on the spectrum. They then defend their stance, which leads to rich conversations, and gets the children thinking about important Jewish issues.

If children are spending their time in engaged in these innovative and creative activities, when do they pray?

It is not necessary to eliminate praying from a youth group program. One can split the time wisely, or even weave some of these creative activities into the praying. However, there is another option: children can pray where the adults do. Which leads us to…

Box #3: Children and adults pray separately.

Most children who are readers are able to sit in synagogue and pray what they know. Even my two-year-old notices when we say “Shema,” and she covers her eyes and approximates the words. I recall that when I first knew the aleph-bet, I would sit with my mother for a few minutes and “daven,” reading the aleph-bet that was printed in the back of our siddur. After that, I could go outside and play with my friends. (Our tiny shteibel had no youth programming to speak of.) Sitting in synagogue is the best way to teach children about praying, and to show them the ways that the Tefillah is different on Shabbat than during the week. Bringing a book and a quiet snack also teaches children synagogue-appropriate behavior—to sit quietly and be respectful. Each parent knows his or her child, and knows what length of time is appropriate for that child. Bring your children to synagogue before groups start, and spend some time together in the sanctuary.

The youth groups can be designed to assume that children will be in synagogue with their parents beforehand. At our shul, we encourage our B’nai Mitzvah group (the 6^th- and 7^th-graders) to arrive for at least part of Shaharit and Torah reading. About halfway through Torah reading, the group meets for what we call “Tefillah Off the Deep End.” They start by praying Mussaf together, then break for a short Kiddush of their own, and finally engage in meaningful and “deep” discussions, often driven by their own questions.

It is a shame for children to experience synagogue in a vacuum, away from where synagogue happens for the adults. When they walk in and go straight to groups, and get picked up by a parent at the end, they never set foot in the sanctuary and never grow to understand what actually happens in a Bet Knesset. There are many ways to integrate children into the sanctuary. Our Yeladeinu group (1^st- and 2^nd-graders) comes into synagogue at the end, and sits together for the completion of services. They’ve learned to follow Ein K’elo-heinu and Aleinu, and they are even beginning to learn Anim Zemirot simply by hearing it each week. One rabbi I know has a “Bring Your Child to Shul Day” to encourage children to arrive before groups start. During Torah reading, he asks parasha-related trivia questions before each aliya, and the children search for the answers as the aliya is read. This is a great way to teach children to follow Torah reading, and to help them feel comfortable in the sanctuary.

An unexpected benefit to having children in the sanctuary is for the adults. There’s nothing like a child to make an adult take his or her own synagogue experience more seriously. When we are aware that the children are looking to us as models, we are challenged us to be our best selves.

Box #4: Youth Education is the job of the Youth Director.

I have encountered rabbis who are not tuned into what the children are doing in their synagogues. A Youth Director would benefit greatly from guidance and vision of the Board, the rabbi, and other stakeholders. Synagogue activities often operate in silos—the youth program, the hessed committee, and the adult education classes, for example, have minimal interaction. Instead of each one operating in its own bubble, these functions can coordinate their efforts. If the social action committee is organizing a drive for winter coats for the homeless, then have the children learn about the concept of a sukkah as a temporary dwelling (coordinate the timing with Sukkot), and think about those who do not have permanent homes. Offer a similarly themed class to adults on an appropriate level. Have the children participate in the coat drive, along with the social action committee.

Ideally, the youth education, as well as every other area of programming, is an extension of the mission and vision of the synagogue itself. The Board should give the Youth Director its mandate, to reflect the goals and values of the institution. The Youth Director often feels like they have the lowest job on the totem pole and that community members don’t respect the position. I believe this can stem from a lack of support and input from the synagogue stakeholders. The Board should engage the Youth Director as a partner in the synagogue’s growth in carrying out its mission.

Challenges

Our Sages teach us, “Emor me’at v’aseh harbeh” (Say little, and do much). It is easy to pontificate but harder to take action. Challenging the status quo is especially difficult when the general sentiment is that everything is “fine.” The children like coming to synagogue, and they’re even praying a little… what’s the problem? The greatest challenge is tapping into our creativity, peeking outside these constricting “boxes” and asking the question, “What if?”

It might also be challenging to motivate the children to actively engage in creative and thoughtful activity at synagogue. Jewish Day School students often see synagogue as a break from learning. They look forward to hanging out with friends or getting a good snack. However, children respond when they see that their time is being well-spent, and that they have much to gain. At our shul, I have parents who tell me that their kids jump out of bed on Shabbat morning because they don’t want to miss their group. For many children, however, jumping out of bed on Shabbat morning for anything will entail a real paradigm shift.

Often, the difficulty of motivating the children stems from the parents. Adults have a variety of reasons they come to synagogue, as well as their own baggage about what it has or hasn’t been for them. Parents who want their children to be happy about going to synagogue often hesitate to make it a requirement for their child. They worry that if they force their child to attend the youth group, it will make their child resentful. Some parents may recall their own feelings of being forced to go to synagogue when they were young, and do not want to recreate that for their children.

The problem with parents bringing their children very late, or not at all, is that they are depriving their children of the opportunity to develop an appreciation for the synagogue. How can your children enjoy something they barely get to experience? By trying to ease up on their children, parents are depriving them of a formative Jewish experience. Instead, parents should focus on modeling the desired behavior. Show your children how important it is for you to go to synagogue, and show that you are going in order to pray and to learn; that will send the message loud and clear that synagogue is worthwhile. If parents see the synagogue as place of growth and Jewish development, children will do the same.[4]

There are also some logistical challenges. In order to create a real youth education program you need real educators. Appropriate staffing can be difficult. Often, high school students are the ones running the Shabbat morning youth groups, but that makes it hard to create and implement high-level programming. At our synagogue, we hire graduate students and young professionals who are experienced educators to run our Shabbat morning program. However, in order to retain this level of employee, you need to pay well. We have made the commitment to pay them as would a competitive urban Hebrew school. That means devoting significant funds to the youth program.

What Lies Outside the Box

In the face of these challenges, it is extraordinarily helpful to constantly remind ourselves of what creative and engaging youth activity could look like, and where it can lead young people. One recent Yom Kippur, I had a group of middle schoolers arranged in the four corners of a classroom. I had asked them to stand in whichever corner represented their own metaphor for God: parent, monarch, best friend, or guide. Only one girl stood in the corner that represented God as a best friend. When I asked her for her thoughts, she said: “I think of God as my best friend, who knows what I think and is always on my side.” I was genuinely moved. To go from this exercise into an examination of the “Ki anu amekha…” prayer, where we lay out numerous metaphors for the relationship between God and the Jewish people, enriched the discussion immeasurably. If we can create this kind of atmosphere of curiosity and thought for our youngsters, they will grow up feeling more connected to the synagogue and to their Judaism, and will be ready to contribute to our community.

“All who are thirsty: come for water…”

—Isaiah 55:1

As a poet, I am often asked to explain poetry. Webster’s defines it as 1. the art or works of a poet, and 2. writing in metrical verse.[1] Although this may be true, it is like trying to define Torah as a book of sacred writing. Such definitions do not do justice to either poetry or Torah. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defines poetry as “best words, best order.” To paraphrase Yvor Winters, a poem is a statement in words about a human experience with particular attention paid to the emotional connotations of language. Edward Hirsch, in Poet’s Choice, says that “poetry puts us in touch with ourselves. It sends us messages from the interior and also connects us to others. It is intimate and secretive; it is generously collective.”[2] Robert Frost asserts that “like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”[3] And poetry is as simple and difficult as that.

We don’t speak poetry in our daily lives. Poetry is manipulated language. The poet leads the reader. The word choice, the resonance(s) each word conjures, the line and stanza breaks, whether the poem is written as formal or free verse, and how much information the poet chooses to reveal all go into making a poem.

In Passwords – Teaching Wislawa Szymborska: In Praise of the “I Don’t Know,” Sarah McCarthy writes,

Wislawa Szymborska believes poets pursue truth by engaging in what she calls the continuous and unutterable, ‘I don’t know.’ In her Nobel Prize speech, Szymborska declared, ‘Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was absolutely inadequate.’ According to Szymborska this declaration of uncertainty ‘expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.’ In this, she joins a long tradition of poets who engaged in what Keats called negative capability, or the state ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ For students, this can be terrifyingly difficult to grasp. In fact, it can be so overwhelming that teachers, writers, and students alike prefer not to acknowledge it at all. We rarely teach our students to embrace what they don’t know.[4]

As soon as I’ve completed one poem and start the next, I do feel “wholly inadequate.” I have nothing to say. I have no faith in my writing, in my abilities. But once I allow myself to write something, anything, I begin to be filled with wonder, and that allows me to keep finding out what I don’t know and to keep writing. If, at the beginning of a poem, I know exactly where I am going, exactly what the poem should be, there is no discovery, nothing to be learned.

I am not equating poetry with Torah, but I think my writing and studying poetry is much the same as studying Torah. Torah is so vast, has so much to show us, that a lifetime of study would not yield all it has to teach. “Just as water stretches from one end of the world to the other, as it says, ‘To him that spread forth the earth above the waters’ (Psalms 136:6), so the Torah goes from one end of the world to the other, as it says, ‘The measure thereof is longer than the earth’ (Job 11:9). Just as water is a source of life for the world, as it says, ‘A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’ (Song of Songs 4:15), so the Torah is a source of life for the world…” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah, 1:19).  

Poetry, using metaphor and a variety of other literary techniques, gives the reader more than one way to view the text. Torah, with its seventy faces, gives us the opportunity to view the text from many different angles and points of view. Poetry and Torah employ some of the same literary techniques. They both invite us in, invite us to have that initial reading (p’shat) and then call us to dig deeper, to explore, and learn more (d’rash). Poetry has many definitions and so does Torah. Good poetry shows and doesn’t tell. Torah, even when it seems to tell, shows.

Martha Collins, in an interview in The Writer’s Chronicle, states “I’m from a family of musicians; I played piano and violin. But I hated to practice because I could always hear in my mind what I was supposed to be playing before I could play it. That was not interesting to me. What I discovered when I began writing poetry—unlike a term paper where you plan and then write it, unlike a sonata where you know what it sounds like before you can play it—was that I never knew what was going to happen when I started. That was exciting.”[5]

“Just as water is from heaven, as it says, ‘At the sound of His giving, a multitude of waters in the heavens’ (Jeremiah 10:13), so the Torah is from heaven….Just as [the downpour of] water is accompanied by loud thunderings, as it says, ‘The voice of the Lord is upon the waters’ (Psalms 24:3), so the Torah was given with loud thundering…” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:19). When I study Torah, I try to keep in mind that all I know is that Torah, like water, is a source of life and I don’t know what will happen, what I will discover. What an amazing gift Torah gives me—it folds and unfolds like origami before me and invites me to see more and more each time I engage with the text. Martha Collins continues, “I really believe that poetry is a dialogue between oneself and the poem….For me, it’s the poem on the page–it’s talking to me and I’m talking to it.”[6] There are times when Torah comes to me with loud thunder, and I have moments of great clarity and think I definitely understand, but mostly I have these quiet moments, ice melting slowly on the page, that elucidate a word or if I am lucky, a pasuk. Torah is talking to me, and I am talking to it.

In her essay “The Pen Has Become the Character: How Creative Writing Creates Us,” Sarah Porter writes,

To be a writer means, perhaps, exactly this: surrendering the defined, expressible self to the wider possibilities of the page. It means giving up the belief that you know who you are, in exchange for a chance at discovering who you are, again and again; after all, the self that jumps up at you from your writing might exceed anything you had previously imagined. For me, and I believe for most other writers, the exhilaration of writing comes exactly when the words pick me up and carry me with a will of their own: when I look back, dizzy with momentum, and can hardly believe that I’m the one who wrote the lines I’m reading….By giving us a new perspective on ourselves, a new point of view, the words we read are helping to create us: they promise to make us bigger, freer, more authentic human beings: What could be more truly loving than that?[7]

If I keep this in mind when I write, how much more so should I keep it in mind when studying Torah. Torah gives me the opportunity to discover myself over and over again, to be dizzy with momentum from wrestling with the text, to gain new points of view, to grow in ways I had not previously imagined.

Netziv says in Ha'amek Davar, his commentary on the Torah, poetry is not simply characterized by meter, rhyme, alliteration, etc. The essence of poetry is that it contains many deeper allusions packed into fewer, more powerful words. One who treats poetry as prose will gain only the most superficial understanding of the material, and will not catch all of the allusions that the author intended us to find. Similarly, the Torah contains much depth—one who just understands the basic prose meanings, will miss much of the intended meaning.

My study of Torah has been enhanced by seeing its poetry, and my poetry has been informed by Torah. Torah is sacred, and I believe that all great poetry reaches toward the sacred.

“Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.” (Christian Wiman).[8] I go to Torah for the same reason. I can still recall the exact moment I knew I wanted to join Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City. During the kedushah of Shabbat Musaf, I was listening to the hazzan sing o’me’reem pa’a’mayim b’ahavah. In Ashkenazi services, it is o’m’reem pa’a’mayim b’ahavah shema o’m’reem. The word ahavah, love, carried me into the Shema. Once I heard that shift in the order of the words, the poetry in the prayer, I knew I was in the right place.

Mary Kinzie in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry writes, “The best poems satisfy by surprise, either because they reject something more familiar, or because they teeter on the edge of confusion in knowing something else. Understanding the poem we are reading is a process that moves from ignorance through partial insights to higher levels of understanding.”[9] Torah surprises, it invites and challenges me to live a fuller, more holy life. Poetry gives me another way to live a fuller, more holy life.

When I began this piece, I knew two things: 1. I am committed to Torah and believe poetry has much to teach, and 2. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write. It can be terrifying to be in a place of not knowing—it’s not how many of us are taught to navigate this world. But Torah and poetry are always there, inviting me to teeter at the water’s edge of knowing, of not knowing, and to be open to surprise, mysteries, and doubts, to stay in the not knowing for a while, and to be willing to listen to all Torah and poetry can show me. What could be more truly loving than that?

Would you like to study Torah with a Rabbi who has mastery over the text, depth of understanding, and breadth of knowledge? Do you want a teacher who not only is steeped in classic rabbinic interpretation, but who is aware of and sensitive to the literary features of the text, the relationships of Torah narratives with ancient stories of the Near East, insights of modern biblical scholarship?

All of us should want such a Rabbi and Teacher of Torah.

We have such a Rabbi and Teacher of Torah: Rabbi Moshe Shamah.

Rabbi Shamah is a remarkable man and a remarkable scholar. He has been serving for many years as Rabbi of a Sephardic Congregation in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. Over the years, he has taught and written about the Torah texts, and has engaged in lively conversations on the various interpretations of the words of the Torah. A close disciple of the late Rabbi Solomon D. Sassoon, Rabbi Shamah has learned from his teacher to study the Torah text with great care and exactitude, patiently extracting meanings that most readers would miss.

Rabbi Shamah has published a monumental commentary on the Torah: “Recalling the Covenant: A Contemporary Commentary on the Five Books of the Torah,” (Ktav Publishing House in association with the Sephardic Institute and Tebah Educational Services). This commentary takes the reader, patiently and thoughtfully, through the texts of the Torah. In its over 1000 pages, it reminds us of things we always knew (or always should have known!); and it opens new channels of information and interpretation that awaken our own intellectual faculties.

This is not a book that one could (or should) read in one quick sitting. Rather, it is a volume to be studied slowly and carefully; we need to imagine ourselves as students in Rabbi Shamah’s synagogue, listening carefully to his explanations and his methods of text analysis. Indeed, as we read his book, we feel that we can hear his voice—the book is a fine reflection of his style of communicating ideas.

This is a book to own. One shouldn’t buy it and then place it on the bookshelf. Rather, one should keep the book handy and study it week by week, reading the comments on each weekly Torah portion.

A RECEPTION IN HONOR OF RABBI SHAMAH AND HIS NEW TORAH COMMENTARY WILL BE HELD ON TUESDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 13, AT 7 P.M., AT CONGREGATION SHEARITH ISRAEL, 2 WEST 70TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY. COPIES OF THE BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE.

THIS PROGRAM IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

I.

A fellow art student—we’ll call him Tal—once described to me how it felt to wear a skirt for the first time—jubilant, liberated, correct, and uncomfortable. The skirt exposed a deep truth; but even as he felt whole, wearing a skirt meant sacrificing the convenient comportment he had once used as a shield. Since he had always been an unassuming person, the stares took some getting used to. Tal worried that wearing a skirt was overly flamboyant; he didn’t want to be a drag queen, he just wanted to be a gay man who wore a skirt. His conclusion, and I have thought of this often, was that joyously idiosyncratic behavior is almost always viewed as extravagant, whether it presents as a man wearing a skirt or a woman wearing a headscarf.

All this poured forth from Tal as we sat in a studio waiting for the model, spiderlike, to refold her limbs for the next pose. We were the only two in the class wearing skirts. Tal’s commitment to joyous idiosyncrasy lent his demeanor a peace I envied. I longed to feel as at ease in my skirt as he, his hairy leg propped up on the orange bucket of a plastic chair, apparently did in his. But I’m still coming out to the art world as Orthodox, and to the Orthodox world as an artist. So, on that particular day, I did not wear my skirt with aplomb.

I have failed to find a comfortable home for myself at the intersection of contemporary art and Modern Orthodoxy. Perhaps someday I’ll easily inhabit both realms, but most days I feel like a barely viable chimera. Until recently, I have kept art and religion as separate as milchigs and fleishigs. But in the past year, I have become involved in the Jewish Art Salon of New York and Jewish Art Now. Hesitantly, I look around and I see pockets of religious Jews, more hopeful than I, who desire a place for art within Orthodox life.

If they endeavor to carve out such a space, they may encounter some of the tensions I outline below. Or not. The challenges I list presuppose an orientation toward contemporary, secular, and liberal art, and there exist other art forms—beautiful ritual objects, folk traditions, and meaningful illustrations—that integrate with Orthodoxy far more readily. Further, these challenges only exist if the Orthodox world wishes to co-opt my work. I make no claims about the inherent Jewishness or Torah value within the product, process, or audience of my art. While I can try to convey the foundation for my work and the cultural prerequisites for its production, ultimately, the Orthodox community arbitrates which types of art they value.

II.

As an artist, my aim is fidelity to the thickness of experience, experience being the sine qua non of art making. Watching a pink towel flutter or a carp gasp for breath in the market can serve as the kernel for a piece, or the impetus can be something more dramatic, like driving through Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Inspiration depends only secondarily upon the material and primarily upon one’s mindset during the encounter. Now, I am too much of a structuralist to wait around for transcendent or ineffable experience. Although I despair of escape from Barthes’ ubiquitous web of meanings, I concede that one might bounce above that web briefly, like the kid who becomes momentarily airborne while jumping on his trampoline on shabbos afternoon. While aloft, the readjusted lens of perception renders anew the subject of encounter. One always returns to earth, but if you are an artist or a poet, you get pretty decent hang time.
I refer to these episodes as “getting hit” because they have a passive quality, and because they are often violent in their power. Salvatore Quasimodo wrote a few lines that capture the quality these experiences brilliantly:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
Traffito da un raggio di sole:
Ed e subito sera.

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world
Pierced by a ray of sunlight,
And suddenly
It is evening.

The heart of the world represents the territory trodden most regularly by humanity, falling in love, giving birth, or simply watching a pink towel fly from an open window. People pass back and forth over essentially the same experiences, yet, paradoxically, they stand alone. The bounds of sense swell in reaction to being pierced, or hit. When that occurs there is a constriction of all but the subject of experience. Then the ray of sunlight. As a painter, I prefer to think of this not as an epistemological metaphor, but as a sharpening of the senses. “And suddenly it is evening.” One returns to the mundane, which is the matrix but not the location of this event, and finds it dim.

Frequently, but not necessarily, these episodes are correlated with states no polite religion condones, like drunkenness, lustfulness, shock, anger, or mania. Whatever else one might say about them, these states sometimes help launch the artist away from his demons: the verbal, the propositional, the prosaic, the linear, and the assumed. To the extent that Orthodoxy deifies these modalities, it becomes hostile territory for art making.

The Orthodoxy I know is fairly risk-averse, favoring replicable, consistent behaviors over sensual experience, which is neither predictable nor controllable. To be risk-averse is prudent when sin is the price of a bad gamble and, in light of the concept of commanded-ness, replicable behaviors make good sense. Unfortunately, being risk-averse is not a great way to approach art, and predictability does not tend to foster the seed experiences that produce art. However, once that seed experience is had and the artist sits down to draw or paint or sculpt, Orthodox culture dovetails rather nicely studio practice. The sense of personal responsibility for and dogged pursuit of meaning that Twyla Tharp describes in “The Creative Habit” is one of my favorite characteristics of religious life.

I do not believe that religious and artistic truths are fundamentally at odds. Although religious text might structure some experiences, there remain broad tracts of lived meaning that I have never heard a Jewish text or voice address. Torah does not usually answer questions such as, what did it feel like to give birth? (Not what should you feel like, but what did you feel like?) Or: why does a red wheelbarrow standing in the rain make me feel both full and empty? Or: what is the quality of this widower’s pain? Or: how do I experience space, fantasy, memory, fur, lust, displacement, meat, or glee? Torah may dictate that we experience this meat and not that one, but it is silent on the topic of the meat’s redness. All these are phenomenological questions and narrative truths that religion does not address and, perhaps, cannot answer.
The artist, however, does ask these questions and, while chipping, gouging, and shaping, he must continually recall the seed experience until it instantiates as form. As Dewey wrote, “while that initial thing is certainly experiences, it is not experiences in such a way as to be composed into experience.” To that end, the artist must spend long nights at the drafting table. The painting or sculpture she creates in the slow after burn of inspiration is the best answer to a question like, “how do I experience space?”

III.

I asked a student of mine, a talented painter from a kollel family, why she thought painting and frumkeit were compatible. She answered that learning something of perceptual painting gave her self-confidence and cultivated her appreciation of Hashem’s physical creation, so, nu, what was the problem? This is a legitimate, and quite beautiful, way to combine art and piety. But I remain dissatisfied with this answer because it treats art as therapy. What is the distinction between art as therapy and art as aesthetic experience? Audience. Art does not blossom into aesthetic meaning until someone other than the artist sees it. As John Dewey puts it, “expression is not merely a process of discharging personal emotion. It is a rhetorical stance, a technical stance.” And for a rhetorical stance, one needs an audience.

The scarcity of Orthodox gallery-goers hinders the cultivation of an Orthodox aesthetic culture at least as much as the dearth of Orthodox artists does. Capturing an audience requires compromise and subtly, the essence of rhetoric. For the sake of an observant audience, one might refrain from unnecessarily crass imagery. For the sake of a broader audience, one might abstract cultural particulars.

Sad to say, I have run up against this “audience problem.” I make paintings that are walls, not windows. This concept stands in counterpoint to the art historical notion of perspective as a metaphor for infinite space. My idea is not a purely “Jewish idea” anymore than Alberti’s original description of drawings as windows is not an unalloyed “Christian idea.” Even so, this formal concept has deep roots in my experience as an Orthodox Jewish woman, specifically in feelings of claustrophobia and containment. After getting married, but before the birth of my daughter, I made a drawing based on an old class portrait. While working through these drawings, I discovered that the neurotic repetition of childish faces reflected my ambiguous feelings about motherhood; these faces were hypnotic and compelling even as they overwhelmed me.

The first private creative space I ever had was my graduate school studio; dark perhaps, but utterly precious—Woolf’s paradigmatic room of one’s own. This cubbyhole became ground zero in my fight to protect the space for intense art-making. Within, I drew an infestation of the almost-children who threatened the boundaries of my creative practice. The work showed nationally and won a major prize, but more than one critic complained that the work was irrelevant because the art world had dealt—apparently conclusively—with these “women’s issues” 30 years ago. Within the contemporary art world, visual art emanating from a life predicated on a non-liberal religious tradition is almost impossible to pull off.

I regrouped and tried another version of this project. My original problem was partially one of audience. Few, if any Orthodox Jews saw the work, and secular gallery goers on whole could not relate to the experience of having limited access to birth control. My solution to the first half of this problem was to abstract. Instead of speaking about the commandment to procreate, I spoke of threatened interiority. Gaston Bachelard description of the process of abstraction is more eloquent and precise than I could ever be. While he speaks of language, his concept also applies to painting:

Words—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in foreign commerce on the same level as the others as the passer-by who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an etymology, looking for treasures. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

Bachelard’s poet employs registers where looser bonds obtain between signified and signifier. The downside to abstraction as a rhetorical tool is that the piece often loses emotional and political urgency. In the case of this project, abstraction only solved half the problem. Although the second, abstracted, version of my project was more accessible to a secular audience, still, few observant Jews saw the work.

IV.

The first step toward making art and Orthodoxy friendly is to clearly demarcate the boundaries between phenomenology, the realm of art, and ethics and ontology, the territory of religion. Once we have avoided a turf dispute, there remains the issue of risk-taking behaviors and the cultural value of experience. But an even bigger source of friction is the texture, not the authority, of religious truth. Modern Orthodoxy imagines revelation as mainly proscriptive, rather than descriptive, logical rather than evocative, cerebral rather than sensual. From the Orthodox vantage point, then, so too must all truths be. This cultural bias does not welcome my particular brand of art making.

Finally, there is the problem of audience. From the standpoint of contemporary art, audience is key. Because the Orthodox audience for art is small, there is only a very limited possibility that a sculpture or painting will significantly impact the religious mind.

Some of these problems are potential fixable, but there are so many, and some of them are ponderously deep. I remain somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of a vital art scene welling up from within the Orthodox world. And yet, I’m not going to stop being an artist and I’m not going to stop being Orthodox. I might just have to ignore some of these obstacles, while trying to solve some and waiting for the cultural climate to change. In the meantime, I will focus on being joyously idiosyncratic.

I cannot sing this place.

I stand on ash, balance
on the platform. The audience of ten
faces, hollow and ghostly, urges—
Try not to fall into those earthen jaws,
moats of dust mixed with rain.
Looking into the deep troughs, dizzy
from time-induced nausea, I think
of that lullaby, Sleep, sleep,
one day you will have raisins and almonds.

I try to make a song here.

The air drips with inky streaks,
bus fumes and burnt hair.
Charred scrawls on the station
wall condemn me to death,
Stars of David replace Xs, cross
out hearts, point to the letters in Polish,
need no translation: Gas the Jews.
I want to scream old songs, erase
these coal marks that smudge, but do not fade.

My voice is no vandal.

One small voice: I hate
the green narrow barracks
These icy beds, cracked,
gravel under boots. Bones
ache, thinking of boots,
and breaking bodies.
Bald and fleshless,
song keeps me human.

And another: Labor
at poems—no ink, no scraps of paper
bags, cardboard packaging. Try
to sing my words, help commit
them to memory. Others make simple
tunes, children's nighttime songs. I do not
want to lose my words. I cannot
lose them. They are all I own.

I do not always remember.

A raspy once-tenor: The tattoo on my
arm wrinkles as my body fades. I
listen to folk songs, rock
to jagged breathing. My fellow men,
dying, sing German songs with
dulcet words. They chant as though still
in taverns, men with real clothes,
reeking of ale-splotched wool.
Their songs transport me
to another town, to a place where one
need not stumble onto a crowded train
with suffocating grandmothers.

When I try the first note, my throat constricts,
closes around a small D.

And a voice like a tin bell: I drew a picture
yesterday, with two pieces of colored
wax. I snuck them in here, and
a few envelopes, and I drew a bird
with long feathers and lots of corn to eat.
I was told that if those men
find my envelope-bird they will take it
away. I have no pockets to hide, I want
to put it on the wall, by my splintery bunk,
where women sometimes sneak to tell stories and
sing quiet songs. My favorite one
is about a white goat that eats almonds.
My bird would like to eat almonds, too.

No lullaby is needed here, I think.
Everything already sleeps.
I am alone with my family of ghosts,
ready to sing to them:
Rozhinkes mit mandlen, shlof, shlof.
But the words are foreign.

(How can I sing these words?)

I grab the gnarled black fence,
rusted and thick. I do not care
that this border is sharp, I just want
to sing, to have a soft note leave
my body, some small solace—
a salve of words to cover these
bitter marks in my palms. Bloody lines,
here an alef, there a jumble
of burning crossroads.

And still my scarred throat demands:
Where is the song?

Rabbi Marc D. Angel has come out with a new book, published by Skylight Illuminations, a division of Jewish Lights Publishers. Entitled: "Maimonides: Essential Teachings on Jewish Faith and Ethics," the book includes an introduction to Maimonides' religious philosophy; an English translation of most of Maimonides' Book of Knowledge and his 13 Principles of Faith; and a running commentary by Rabbi Angel. This book allows the reader not only to learn about Maimonides, but to study his essential teachings in his own words (translated into English).

The book is available through the online store at jewishideas.org Bulk rates are available by contacting [email protected] The book is valuable not only for personal study, but for group discussions and adult education classes.

In this accessible examination of Maimonides’s theological and philosophical teachings, Rabbi Angel opens up for us Maimonides’ views on the nature of God, providence, prophecy, free will, human nature, repentance and more. He explores basic concepts of faith that Maimonides posits must serve as the basis for proper religious life. He also examines Maimonides’ insights on reward and punishment, messianic days, the world to come and other tenets of Jewish faith.

“An invaluable new translation ... a valuable overview of Maimonides’s theological thought [and] a very helpful, lucid commentary that makes the work accessible.”
—Dr. Howard Wettstein, editor, Midwest Studies in Philosophy; professor of philosophy, University of California

"Accessible and authoritative....Gracefully traces the contours of Maimonides' attempt to liberate Judaism from particularism and obscurantism. A wonderful and refreshing achievement."
--Dr. Menachem Kellner, Department of Jewish History and Thought, University of Haifa

Review
By Israel Drazin

Maimonides
Essential Teachings on Jewish Faith & Ethics
The Book of Knowledge & the Thirteen Principles of Faith
Annotated & Explained
By Rabbi Marc D. Angel, PhD
Skylight Illuminations, 2012, 177 pages

There are divergent interpretations of the brilliant sage Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). Some scholars, such as Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago, are convinced that Maimonides wrote for two audiences, intellectuals and the general population, and that he frequently hid his true views from the non-intellectuals, convinced that the more philosophically-minded could mine what he wrote and understand what he really thought. Others, such as Menachem Kellner of the University of Haifa, believe that this is not true. Maimonides meant what he wrote and did not hide ideas so as not to disturb the common people or say things just to make people feel better. Rabbi Marc Angel, the founder and director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals (jewishideas.org) takes the latter approach and presents it well.

He includes his English translations of texts from Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge and from his famous Thirteen Principles of Judaism. He chose these two sources because they give a clear presentation of Maimonides’ teachings on morality, ethics, Torah study, idolatry, and the principles of Judaism. He places Maimonides’ words on the right side of the book, puts numbers where there are ideas he wants to explain, and he explains them on the left side.

For example, he quotes Maimonides’ teaching about when Jews should give up their lives for Judaism on the right and gives historical examples on the left. Similarly, he mentions Maimonides view that prophets must be philosophers on the right and explains on the left that people do not have to accept his view and gives his opinion why. Also, he quotes Maimonides that righteous people do more than what the law requires and deviate from the middle path on the right and describes the higher standard on the left. His explanations are clear and he frequently refers to other books that help clarify and supplement Maimonides’ thoughts, including other books that Maimonides composed.

Rabbi Angel starts his book with a thirty page introduction that introduces Maimonides, his history, and writings to the reader. He tells readers that Maimonides was both a rabbi and a philosopher, and how he attempted to harmonize these two worldviews. He describes the Book of Knowledge and the Thirteen Principles. He points out that Maimonides insisted that religion must have a sound intellectual foundation. “His approach (to religion) allows a person (of every religion) to be religious without turning off his or her brain.” He tells readers that Maimonides emphasized knowledge of God, rather than simple belief in God.

Rabbi Angel informs us that Maimonides felt strongly that there is no ontological distinction between Jews and other human beings; humans are humans. The Torah emphasizes this message when it states 36 times that we should love the stranger. Non-Jews know things Jews don’t know and everyone should learn from everyone else; the truth is the truth no matter what its source. One cannot be a true Torah scholar without deriving wisdom from all sources. Righteous non-Jews have a place in the world to come.

The book is filled with Rabbi Angel’s insightful interpretation of Maimonides and this great sage’s important teachings, such as the following: Maimonides believed in miracles, “but God does so very rarely.” People should not be ascetic, such as fasting when not required to do so. Contrary to the thinking of some ultra-Orthodox, Maimonides stressed that Torah scholars should work for a living and not depend on the charity of others.

In summary, readers will gain much by reading this book because Maimonides was the greatest sage since the biblical Moses and Rabbi Angel gives us a good explanation of his views.

Together with some friends, I’ve established an organization called KayamaMoms. I’m religious, 40 years old and unmarried and I would like to have children. Like me, there are thousands of women in Israel and the rest of the world who have dreamed their entire lives about having a family but unfortunately have not yet found the right partner.

I won’t hide from you that today’s topic is very personal. As it happens many times in life, my own experiences have led me to realize that there is a collective social obligation on us to bring this matter out in the open and to enlist society, and specifically the Jewish world to this important issue. I don’t pretend to be objective; however I sincerely hope that even those who are not in my shoes will understand and empathize with us, as there is an objective problem in the Jewish community.

From the Torah we already learn that the quest for children is existential, permanent and deep; it pushes many women, including our Foremothers, our heroines, to act in ways that are almost above human capacity.

Rachel says to Yaakov: “Give me children or I shall die”. On this, Rashi says that the person who does not have children is considered dead. Ramban on the same verse says that what Rachel meant was that if she didn’t have kids she would kill herself with sorrow. We know that Yaakov was angry at Rachel for seeing her purpose in life in her “Eve” aspect of herself (i.e. – bearing children) and not in the “Isha (woman)” aspect of herself (i.e. fulfilling all the other womanly goals). Some Midrashic commentators criticize Yaakov for this reaction. Rabanan Droma in the name of Rabbi Alexandray wrote: “Yaakov was angry at Rachel…” Hashem answered him: This is how you answer women who are feeling such pain? – Your punishment will be that your sons will stand in front of her son (Yosef).

Chana who prays while "muttering "to herself and is accused by the High Priest of being a "drunk woman," defends her plight and continues to pray. And of course, it is only too appropriate to read the Gemara in Masekhet Berakhot in this context. It says in Shemuel I: “Chana is talking about that which deals with her heart” – “says Rabbi Elazar in the name of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra: She was talking about what her heart was experiencing. She said to Hashem: Hashem – everything you’ve given to a woman was not in vain: You’ve given her eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, a mouth to talk, hands to do work, legs to walk, breasts to breastfeed: The breasts that you’ve placed on my heart – why should I not breastfeed? Give me a son so and I will breastfeed him! Elkana, her husband, doesn’t understand her pain and says to her: “I am better to you than 10 sons”.
Society does not always understand a woman's need to bear children, while women throughout history felt the importance of having children and fought for it.

Let us consider some realities in our world today.

First, there is a higher ratio of women to men resulting in a larger number of single women than "available" men. Second, these women approaching 35 – 40, feel pressured because of their dwindling fertility rates while the men of corresponding ages do not feel such pressure.

How are women meant to deal with this gap?

Many women in the religious Orthodox world are now considering single motherhood by choice.

When women my age consider this bold step, there are many aspects that they must consider: Halakhic, psychological and medical.

Let me start with the Halakhic considerations:
There are sources that are brought forth by organizations like Puah that state that becoming a single mother by choice, even by medical intervention only, is an act of prostitution that negates ‘love thy neighbor as yourself.’ They call this step “an unacceptable intrusion upon the authority of the Torah”, and add that “new” is forbidden by the Torah.

I think we need to employ some logic here. For instance, how is the use of donated sperm and IVF an act of prostitution? As for ‘Love thy neighbor as yourself’, we must look a little more broadly at this and consider the research that has been done on single parent families. In any case, why does the phrase ‘and you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ not also cover the thousands of women who will remain childless?

As for “new” being forbidden by Torah, each woman needs to consider to which community she belongs and whether belonging to that community is good for her.

The Halakhic issue of Yihus, status and lineage, also seems to come up here. But Rav Moshe Feinstein is of the opinion that a married woman is allowed to take sperm from a non-Jew. So how is it that there’s no problem with lineage in that case? And we know about many other cases where married women take donated sperm from a non-Jew, with Rabbinic permission. One of our members, Dr. Dvori Ross, did a full, important and very interesting research on the Halakhic sources and you are all encouraged to examine her research.

In the Talmud Tractate Yevamot 85b, there is a discussion on the issue of ‘be fruitful and multiply’. There is a question on whether the obligation to have children is only on the man or on the woman as well? Rabbi Yohanan ben Beroka says that the Halakha applies to both women and men, while the other opinion states that the woman is not obligated to have children as ‘conquering is not a womanly way’. The next section states that "conquering” is both on women and men (as it is written in the plural form). The final conclusion is that according to one opinion Halakha follows Rabbi Yohanan ben Beroka, while the other opinion states that Halakha does not follow Rabbi Yohanan ben Beroka.”

The tractate goes on to describe the case of a woman who asked for a divorce after she was married for ten years and did not have children. Rabbi Yohanan asked why she wanted a divorce since it was not she who had not fulfilled her obligation (i.e. she has no obligation to have children). She responded, ‘what will my fate be in old age? Who will look after me?’

What is clear from these and other sources is that there is at least one opinion that states that women are obligated when it comes to the verse ‘be fruitful and multiply’ i.e. to have children. Furthermore, even according to the opinion that she isn’t obligated to have children, her right as a women is valued with very high regard and she is able to request and receive a divorce.

The Meshekh Hokhma explains that the reason there is no obligation on a woman to have children is because Hashem’s judgments and His ways are ‘pleasant and all His ways are peaceful’; thus, you don’t force anything upon a woman that is difficult and dangerous for her. And so, according to the Meshekh Hokhma, before the sin of Adam and Eve the woman was obligated to procreate (as well as the man) as the verse ‘p’ru urvu’ is written in the plural, but after the sin when ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is written in the story of Noah it says ‘and He Blessed Noah and He blessed his sons’, which means that the commandment was then only on men. To summarize, when giving birth was easy, women were also obligated to have children, but once it became difficult and dangerous they were no longer obligated.

A special thank you to Rabbi Benny Lau for these sources.

There is an additional issue here and that is the fear that siblings (of children born through IVF) could inter-marry, and therefore, a lot of Halakhic authorities prefer that women use sperm from non-Jewish men rather than from Jewish men, as there is no issue of family relationships amongst non-Jews. Another Halakhic option is to use sperm from a Jewish man who is not anonymous.

Rabbi Yuval Cherlow sums up the Halakhic issue thus: ‘when a woman reaches the age where the chances of parenthood are expiring and when she has made all the efforts to get married and was not successful, one must not, according to Halakha, deny her hope’.

The Psychological Voice

Concern for the welfare of the child, the ‘you shall love thy neighbor as yourself’ if you will, must, of course, be examined.

There are those who say that becoming a single mother by choice involves a lack of consideration for the child, and is egotistical. Even if this were true, and I don’t think it is at all true, is it really that different from children born to a bad marriage where the reason to have the child is to unite the parents? Is it so different when children are born to couples with no money to raise them? Where is the concern for the child in these cases?

There is research that states that single parenthood does not have that significant a negative impact on a child growing up.

Michael Lamm, Professor of Psychology, Cambridge University writes that what is important for the child is not the presence of one or two parents as they grow up, but the quality of relationship with the parent, that the child feel supported and lives in a harmonious atmosphere in the home.

There is even research that suggests that children brought up with one parent can be more successful long-term than those brought up by two parents. In her book, ‘Choosing Single Motherhood,’ Mikki Morrissette suggests that many single mothers go further than their attached counterparts to find male role models for their sons, like grandfathers, uncles, godfathers, friends and teachers. Morrissette describes these as ‘collected families’ which give boys a broader variety of positive male role models. She also suggests that often boys of single mothers learn to deal with their aggression with more empathy than sons in traditional families. She asserts that these boys have a wider circle of interested parties and friends and thus they deal better with conflict and are often mature for their age. She has based these findings on research carried out over ten years focusing on sixty children who grew up without fathers.

Of course, as with everything, there are different opinions, but it is important to consider these details and remember that this conversation is about older, more mature women, women who are responsible, grounded and settled. We are talking about women who really really, from the depths of their souls, want these children, who want to give and bestow love. In comparison to the rest of the population I’m not sure how many come to motherhood from that place.

The medical challenges:

Usually, the chances of a woman over forty having a child is lower than 10% and of course the chances get smaller as the time goes on.

Today, the law in Israel that initially did not allow single women to freeze eggs, now does allow women between the ages of 30-41 to freeze eggs. One could therefore think that all our problems are solved. Thanks to the option of egg freezing it seems those women are now able to beat that omnipresent ticking clock. The trouble is that, in many cases, the closer a woman is to forty the more arduous is the process to become pregnant. The chance of pregnancy from a frozen egg is 17%. It is true that today there is new technology that boasts very high success rate for freezing eggs but we have to remember that only 17% out of 2-3 of these ovum end in a pregnancy. Additionally, a woman who freezes eggs and then waits is limited to the number of eggs that she had frozen. Despite the advances in the methods of freezing eggs, all experts agree that past a certain age (generally 40-41), there is a much higher rate of success to try and become pregnant through IUI or IVF. Also frozen embryos have higher rates of success than frozen eggs.

Let’s also remember that the price of this process is at least 15,000 NIS. The older the woman, the higher the cost and it can be up to two or three times more. In Israel, the medical process to become pregnant even with fertility treatments is covered by national insurance including for single women.
Another issue to consider is whether it is good to wait even longer to conceive, despite this now being technologically possible, and to be mothers at forty-five or fifty. Do we really want our children to be looking after us all their lives?

Despite everything I’ve said, it is very important for me to state clearly that we are not in any way coming from a point of creating a ‘new family’; that’s why we put a question mark at the end of the title of this presentation.

We at KayamaMoms believe in the traditional family unit as the preferred unit. I doubt there is anyone who would choose single motherhood over married parenting. But as you’ve seen the number of singles is growing and, to quote Rachel again, the deep ‘Hava li banim’ ‘Give me children – otherwise I will die’ desire only grows more intense.

Therefore, we at KayamaMoms, are creating a supportive and sustainable community that empowers women who have already decided to take this bold step and will provide advice and guidance to women who are thinking about becoming single moms. The organization will create seminars, including a question and answer evening with rabbinical leaders including Rav Benny Lau and Rav Yuval Cherlow as well as psychologists and doctors. We will also be organizing Shabbatot, including a singles Shabbat for single mothers, in the hope that finally everyone gets married.

It is also important to point out that a bad marriage doesn’t provide a good family life for children, and therefore we do not encourage anyone to ‘get married, have children and then think again about the relationship’; this is not an idea that’s good for anyone.

Single parenthood is not simple. It is the giving up of a dream that we all grew up with, and as we give up this dream we usually have to mourn its passing. Single parenthood isn’t for everyone, either. We at KayamaMoms will encourage women to consider this amazing option, to understand that the clock really is ticking and that the decision not to make the decision, might end up being the final decision.

Within the framework of KayamaMoms we will also actively try to change the laws regarding adoption that currently make it extremely difficult for single women who might prefer to adopt. We see adoption as a very noble and important act.

We will also work to equalize the prices of freezing eggs for single women to that of married women so that we don’t create a situation where singles become a disadvantaged group.

I am also aware that our community makes an effort to help singles get married. There are many different marriage orientated websites and believe me when I say I know every single one of them well, but I’m afraid that this wave, or tsunami, of single women who are growing older, is only increasing.

We also hope that KayamaMoms will help to raise awareness, so that people in the Jewish community work harder to introduce those around them towards matches that end in marriage.

Preface

            “Jewish, not Israeli” is a phrase I found myself repeating to many a Palestinian this summer (the summer of May 2010, following my senior year of high school) at Seeds of Peace international conflict resolution camp. Although I was part of the American delegation, and by definition not an Israeli, I was often identified by Palestinian campers as the “other side.” But Israel is neither my birthplace nor my current home, so one need not have expected my beliefs to oppose Palestinian existence.

            Seeds of Peace is a nonprofit organization that brings together young adults from conflict areas in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to share their personal stories from the conflicts that often shape their lives. Two hours of every day at camp, a dialogue was facilitated among a group of about four Israelis, four Palestinians, two Egyptians, two Jordanians, and two or three Americans, when the campers had a unique opportunity to discuss the conflict on both a political and personal level. The rest of each day, the campers played sports and games or participated in lighthearted activities that allowed them to get to know one another outside their national identities.

            As a Jewish American, I often found it difficult to define my role in the dialogue sessions, as well as at other times among my peers. My connection to Israel had thus far been solely a religious one, and I had never explored the idea that perhaps I have an obligation to defend the land as a political state. I found that many of the Palestinians’ stories resonated with me on a personal human level. And while I did not necessarily always agree with their presentations, I had a deeper historical and national connection with the Israeli narrative. I felt that as a Jew I have some obligation to the State of Israel, although I could not define what that obligation is or whether the State of Israel has an obligation to me as Jew. 

            The tension I felt between the identities “Jewish” and “Israeli” led me to explore the perspective and self-identification of my Israeli friends who were at the camp. None of them practiced mitzvoth or Jewish customs; none had been educated at religious schools; their familiarity with Jewish texts, practice, and religious history was extremely minimal. Except for one or two Israelis in the program, the only defining characteristic of their Jewish was is the fact that they live in the Land of Israel. To most of them, being Jewish was not part of their national identity; rather, it is a religious heritage, and one hardly relevant to their lives. To these secular Israelis, to be a Jew means something different than to be part of the Israeli nation, the former being an abstract, religious identity and the latter being a tangible, definable political identity. When the dialogues would turn to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, Judaism was not factored into the equation by secular Israelis, because in their minds the two identities are separate. This tension between Zionism and Judaism can largely be explained by the fact that Zionism is an ideology that emphasizes a land with borders, and a government, while Judaism was originally defined first and foremost by an event that took place outside the land of Israel, and for the past 2,000 years has been about a relationship between a nation and God—whether that nation lives in the land of Israel or not.

            The Jewish nation is unique in its definition and establishment, and especially in its relationship to land. It began as a family, descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—defined primarily by blood—united by the events that took place after the Exodus from Egypt and ultimately forming a sovereign state following the conquest of the land of Canaan. Although the Jews became an autonomous nation within physical borders, the status of an Israelite was defined by descent. Therefore, the Jewish nation is a family that belongs in a land but is not reliant on a land in order to exist. There is no other case in which a nation is defined as a nation before it enters a land; every other nation unites as a nation as a result of geographical commonness. Philosopher Michael Wyschogrod, in his bookThe Body of Faith, articulates this unique quality of the Jewish nation.

The land had to be conquered. The result has been that Jewish consciousness has vividly retained the memory of the land as having belonged to others before it came to belong to Israel. Other nations do not retain such memories. Their memory does not go back to a time when they did not occupy their land. In fact, the national identities of other nations are land-bound identities. The nation is defined by the territory it occupies. But [the Jewish nation] comes into national existence before it occupies the land. It becomes a nation on the basis of a promise delivered to it when it is a stranger in the land of others. This awareness of being a stranger is burned into Jewish consciousness. The God of Israel is not a God whose jurisdiction is defined by territorial boundaries. (Wyschogrod, 220—221)

Wyschogrod further explains that what unites Jews is their familial descent from Abraham. As such, Jews do not internalize the common Western division between faith and nationality. To be a Jew is not merely to have religious obligations, it is first and foremost to be part of a family and nation.

Judaism is not a set of beliefs, however broadly that term be interpreted. A full definition of Judaism does, of course, involve a whole complex of ideas, beliefs, values and obligations posed by Judaism. The whole of the immense literary output of Judaism consists of the elaboration of just these ideas. But however crucial these are, they are, in a sense, superstructure rather than foundation. The foundation of Judaism is the family identity of the Jewish people as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Whatever else is added to this must be seen as growing out of and related to the basic identity of the Jewish people as the seed of Abraham elected by God through descent from Abraham. (Wyschogrod, 57)

Because the Jewish nation is not defined by a geographical area but by a familial bond, it has been able to survive in exile for the past 2,000 years. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has noted that “after they were exiled from the land with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., [Jewish] nationhood remained intact for millennia, enabling a Jew born in 19^th-century Morocco to consider himself a member of the same nation as a Jew born in 19^th -century Poland.” The memory of—and the longing to return to—the land has also played a vital role in sustaining the cohesiveness of the Jewish nation through prayer and a collective ultimate goal, but it has never been the defining characteristic. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, “there is a difference between where we are and who we are. Judaism is not wrong to see identity as a matter of birth” (Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll, 46).

            In the book of Exodus, Moses is one of the first Jews to struggle with his identity and with what it means to be a Jew. When God comes to him at the burning bush and assigns him his task of leading the Jews out of Egypt, Moses’ first question is “Who am I?” Moses is questioning the fundamental identity of nationhood. Who is he—what is his identity—that makes him qualified for such a job? He did not live among the rest of the Jews, was not brought up as they were, nor was he even considered one of them for most of his life. The only connection he had to his people was a familial one, and at this turning point in his life he questions the legitimacy or sufficiency of that connection. God answers him by explaining that He is the God of Moses’ ancestors, and, as Rabbi Sacks puts it, “Moses’ crisis is resolved and never reappears in that form. He now knows that he is part of an unfinished story that began with the patriarchs and continues through him. He may wear the clothes and speak the language of an Egyptian, but he is a Jew because that is who his ancestors were, and their hopes now rest on him” (Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll, 46). The Jewish nation is defined by ancestry, not by culture or location, and Moses’ return to his nation shows how strong the familial tie can be in holding a nation together. The Jewish nation has stayed alive without the bonds of language or homeland for hundreds of years, and Moses was the very first to demonstrate how powerful the bond of family can be in re-uniting a people.

            That Judaism is defined by a familial rather than a racial or geographical bond is evident in the conversion process. When one becomes a Jew, he or she severs all previous familial ties—her siblings are no longer her siblings, and he has neither a mother nor father; for he or she has joined a new family. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, in his essay on conversion, “How Not to Become a Jew,” explains that “just like a born Jew, a convert is not only a coreligionist, not only a fellow citizen, but also a new brother or sister. In reciting Jewish liturgy, the convert joins all other Jews in referring to the Almighty as ‘the God of my fathers’; he means it, and he is meant to mean it, in more than a metaphorical sense.” For this reason, Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein explains, conversion to Judaism is not a private religious baptism; it takes place in a Jewish court, because it is a citizenship hearing. Thus, Rabbi Lichtenstein notes, the biblical Ruth only informs Naomi that “your God will be my God,” after she first declared, “your nation will be my nation.” Because the Jews are a family, a child born to a Jewish mother will be a Jew from the moment of birth (unlike a child born to a Christian mother who becomes Christian upon baptism) until his death, regardless of his actions or beliefs. The Jewish people is the only people that is considered both a religion and a nation, and is not defined conventionally like any other faith or nation. This uniqueness gives the Jews a special role in both of mankind’s religious and nationalistic spheres.

            This familial connection, which overrides differences in language, culture, appearance, location, and even denomination, has allowed the Jews to remain a nation even while dispersed over the globe. And interestingly, as Michael Wyschogrod writes, it is the Jews’ definition of themselves as a nation without a land that allowed the land-based State of Israel to come into existence in the first place.

Modern Israel could not have come into being without it. Out of people of the most diverse cultural and national traditions, Israel created one people. To be more accurate, it did not create such a people but found one in existence. In the early stages of the Zionist movement, European Jews had little acquaintance with non-European, Sephardic Jews…Yet the viability of a state made up of such diverse elements was never brought into question. There was a bond among Jews that was deeper than all the differences, which turned out to be far more superficial than would have been thought. (Wyschogrod, 240)

But the nation that arose, the modern State of Israel, relies on borders and government and judicial systems. For 2,000 years, the Jewish nation was not defined by geography, but with the rise of the State of Israel, the two identities became intertwined and often confused. Jewishness had for ages provided the bond of family, religion, and nationality to Jews everywhere, but Israeli nationality, if not defined properly, can create a new set of definitions for what it means to be Jewish and create divisions among Jews. The elements of Jewishness that allowed the Jews to remain a nation without a land also enabled the birth of the State of Israel to succeed. But this new state by its existence invites Israelis to redefine their nationhood as land-based, and the nation to which they belong as Israeli rather than Jewish. This new identity and definition carries the danger that Jewishness will no longer be about nationality, and will be redefined solely as a religious vocation.

            This is precisely the tension I witnessed at Seeds of Peace among my secular Israeli friends. Several months after camp had ended, I went to Israel to investigate this dialectic that exists between the Jewish and Israeli identities. I interviewed several of my secular Israeli friends, to hear in their own words how this tension played out in their self-identification and their identification with their state and of their faith. Among the questions I asked were: What is Israel? What does it mean to be part of the nation of Israel? What does it mean to be part of the Jewish nation? And what nations did your ancestors belong to?

            When asked to define the State of Israel, Nili, a self-defined secular Israeli from Petah Tikvah who attended Seeds of Peace, explained that it is “my home. The place I was born,” and went on to say that being part of the nation of Israel means “you belong to somewhere, you have a place that you live and you have a place that is it for you, because I’m a Jew, it’s my country so [I] belong to it.” For Nili, being Israeli is her nationality that she says is connected to the fact that she is Jewish; but when asked what it means to be part of the Jewish nation, she responded by saying (translated from Hebrew), “I am not so connected to my faith because I don’t really do mitzvoth and all of that.” In other words, for Nili, her Jewishness is a religious matter rather than a national one; she added, however, that she understands that other Jews, as they travel all over the world, “feel as if they have a community, that they have people to rely on.” She understands the connection that Jews have, but does not include herself in it, because, to Nili, Judaism is separate from her national self-identity. She defines herself as Israeli, and although she acknowledges that being Jewish contributes to that identity—along with the fact that she was physically born in the state—she does not recognize that the identities are intertwined, and that the State of Israel’s existence is a result of the fact that the Jewish nation was able to stay strong and proud and connected throughout the centuries.

To Nili, nationality is her primary identity, and she does not feel as if she is part of another community other than the State of Israel. She sees nationality as being bound by land. I then asked Nili,

            “Where are your ancestors from, and what nation did they belong to?”

             “My grandparents are from Russia, and they were Russians, on both sides.”

            “But what nation did they belong to?”

            “Russian.”

She did not say they are part of the Jewish nation or of an ultimately larger community not defined by borders; her grandparents would have certainly defined themselves as Jews first and foremost, and would have been shocked to be referred to as Russians. Before 1948, Jews had a hard time being faithful countrymen because often their countries betrayed them, and they also had to struggle to hold on to their Jewish identities. Identifying with the Jewish nation was important for survival. My experience is that “Israeli” easily replaces “Jewish” for people who live in Israel who do not practice Judaism or make it a prominent part of their existence. Nili acknowledges that Judaism plays a role in her overall sense of self, but it is not center stage, and is just a component of her nationality. When asked what the purpose of the State of Israel is, Nili said, “To bring all the Jews to one place because there has always been anti-Semitism, and I think that they should all live in one place so that they can have a government and an army and so that they can protect themselves.” For Nili, Israel is a Jewish State so that the Jewish people can live peacefully. To her, the Jews need to create for themselves a nationality with government and autonomy like every other nation so that they can define themselves as every other nation does, with borders and a government. The irony is that the existence of the State of Israel, a testament to Jewish resilience, also enables non-practicing Jews in Israel to forget the long-standing uniqueness of the Jewish definition of nationhood, which does not rely on geographical commonness, into a land-based nationalistic one.

            Many of the other self-defined secular Israeli friends I interviewed came to conclusions similar to Nili’s. Nadav, a secular Israeli living in Tel Aviv, who did not attend Seeds of Peace, said that being part of the Israeli nation means “living and being part of the Israeli life, living in Israel,” and that being part of the Jewish nation means “living among other Jews and participating in life with other Jews,” with no mention of history or ancestry. Nadav very clearly separates the two identities on a very technical level; neither identity is reliant on the other. Like Nili, Nadav said that the purpose of the State of Israel is to create a solution to anti-Semitism and to bring all the Jews to one place so that they can “express themselves as a nation.” He acknowledges the role that the Jewish nation plays in the establishment of Israel, but still his national identity takes precedence over his Jewish identity. He describes his ancestors as belonging to the nations of Poland, Russia, and Hungary, in the same way that he belongs to the nation of Israel. “The same way the French are connected with France because it’s the land of their ancestors, a territory that they have an emotional connection with, that’s Israel for me.” Nadav views nationality as being strictly land-based and, although he sees a connection between his ancestors and his nationality, he is referring to his ancestors who actually inhabited the same land that he does now, not the ones who may not have necessarily lived in Israel; they do not provide for him a reason to be Israeli.

            Nadav goes on on to create a divide between his religion and nationality, explaining that government and statehood should only be influenced by religion “as long as it does not interfere with democracy. The existence of Israel as a modern nation-state separate from the Jewish identity ultimately leaves my friends with a contradiction: why should they be allowed to form a new nation in this specific land? If Jews are not defined by descent from Abraham, with whom God formed a covenant and to whom He promised the Holy Land, then by what right do modern Israelis in this century lay claim to this land with these borders?

            The contradiction that the secular Israelis pose for themselves became evident to me during my visit when I interviewed my fellow Palestinian campers from Seeds. As I noted, secular Israelis create a divide between their identity as Jews and their identity as Israelis when asked about how they define themselves and what it means to be part of each nation—but to some extent the Israeli identity requires Judaism for its legitimacy, and here these Israelis either contradict themselves or remain answerless. In contrast, my Palestinian friends ironically understand that Zionism is intimately bound up with the fact that all Jews share a national status, and that their claim to the land lies in Jewish history and in the religious longings of Judaism. I asked Fadi, a Palestinian living in the West Bank who attended Seeds of Peace, how he thinks the Israeli nation defines and legitimizes itself. When asked to define the Jewish nation, Fadi hesitantly answered “Israel,” because to him the identities “Jewish” and “Israeli” go hand in hand, and, although he knows that fundamentally they are different, he also knows that the Israeli identity relies on components of Judaism. When asked what Israelis say to defend their right to be in Israel and to what extent he thinks their claim is legitimate, Fadi answered that “their excuse is that the country was promised to them by God, I can’t deny or agree or say [it’s legitimate]… I don’t mind living with Jews, but not in this kind of way.” Fadi sees the connection that Judaism has to the State of Israel and refers to the people that he lives among as Jews, not Israelis. Similarly, Jalal, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who also attended Seeds of Peace, defined the Jewish nation as “Israel” and said (partly translated from Arabic), “I think Israelis say, almost all of them, that it is the land that they are promised to be in by the Bible, that it’s written that it’s the promised land and that they have to be in it and protect it…”

            The Palestinians acknowledge the interconnected relationship between the Jewish nation and the Israeli nation, more so than my secular Israeli friends, because they know that it explains why Jews all over the world are allowed instant Israeli citizenship and why Israel was ultimately formed in the Middle East, and not in Uganda. Judaism has answers to all the arguments that question the State’s existence, even though they are not the only answers. The State was established for many reasons, such as to create a haven from anti-Semitism, as Nili and Nadav said, but the other reasons do not answer the questions that only a historical and religious claim to the land of Israel can.

            The Palestinian definition of nationhood is similar to that of secular Israelis—a definition that allows there to be a situation in which the nation could no longer exist. When I asked Fadi what it means to be part of the Palestinian nation, he corrected me and said that Palestine is not a nation:

            “If Palestine was a nation, it would be nice.”

            “Why isn’t Palestine a nation?”

            “Because it’s under occupation.”

            “What does that mean that it’s under occupation?”

“That a country under occupation is a country that is ruled by a different power other than its own people, including water resources, land, freedom of transportation.”

            “So it’s not a nation if it doesn’t have a country?”

            “It’s people…but it’s not a nation because it’s not a country.”

This definition of nationhood is completely based on land and statehood, a definition that the Jewish nation has never applied to itself until now. According to this definition, one that secular Israelis adhere to, nationhood is bound up with statehood, which 2,000 years in exile has proven not to be the case for the Jewish nation.

            What emerged in my interviews of secular Israelis is that at times, inability to account for the link between Jewish nationhood and Zionism causes the most secular Israelis to completely redefine the State of Israel and its purpose. Shahar, a secular Israeli from Jerusalem who did not attend Seeds of Peace, is a young woman who believes that being part of the Israeli nation means to “be ready to sacrifice yourself for others, to be ready to give up some of what you have so that others will be in a better situation.” Shahar completely separates her religious identity from her nationalistic identity. She said in her interview that she needs Israel for the same reason that the French need France and that the English need England—for reasons solely dependent on geographical circumstances. After Shahar explained that government should not be influenced by religion, I asked her how there could possibly be a Jewish state, and she answered that Israel is not a Jewish state but an Israeli state and that the Jewish religion is an entirely separate entity: “It began as a Jewish state but in my opinion [it changed], I don’t see it as a Jewish state anymore, it can’t stay like that… especially when the population changes so much.” Shahar completely redefines the State of Israel in a way that would not please most Jews around the world and even many of her fellow Israelis. When asked what is significant about the State’s location, Shahar explained that it is the perfect place to build a country—due to the “diversity of terrain, the location of Israel is so special. We have deserts and mountains and everything…the greenery in the North and the emptiness in the South it shows all the amazing things that can happen here.” This redefinition does not provide answers to the most difficult questions that face the young country today. According to Shahar, her immigrant grandparents should not be allowed citizenship anymore than a non-Jew from Asia. She could not answer the question of “why not Uganda?”

            Before the end of my trip, I had a chance to interview my self-defined religious Israeli friend Daniella from Jerusalem, who did not attend Seeds of Peace, and ask her the same questions that I had asked the secular Israelis. She immediately defined herself as “a religious, Jewish, Israeli” and as belonging to the “Jewish and Israeli nations, but more importantly the Jewish nation.” She explained that being part of the Israeli nation means (translated from Hebrew) “to care about the existence of the nation…To me to be Israeli feels like everything is on your shoulders, not every day, but we are always fighting to exist.” When asked what it means to be part of the Jewish nation, Daniella immediately responded that it is “the same thing. Jewish and Israeli isn’t the same thing but they have the same idea that we are united and in danger all the time and we always have to protect ourselves in order to preserve our nation.” To Daniella, Judaism requires as much protection as the State of Israel because they are both nations viewed in the eyes of the world as being intertwined. She views the two identities as needing protection from the same threats, acknowledging the close bond between the two and the fact that many components of the Israeli nation rely on the Jewish nation. She went on to explain that “I think all Jews should live in the State of Israel because all Jews should live together… in the Land of Israel because I believe in the Tanakh and this is the state for the Jews…. I know that we also need the state for [protection from anti-Semitism], but I don’t think that this is the main reason.” Daniella’s opinion regarding the Jewish presence in Israel poses no contradiction when asked what is significant about the State’s location: “I know it has to be here and not in Uganda, to me it is because the Tanakh says so.” Daniella also remains consistent in her opinion that all Jews have the right to live in Israel as she explains that her grandparents, although they are from Hungary, South Africa, Syria, and Romania, “they all share the Jewish nationality,” and so they all have an equal right to Israeli citizenship in the Land of Israel. She does not see the Jewish nation as a land-based one, but as a nation that wants to be based in a certain land.

            In May of 2009, Binyamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel, addressed the country and acknowledged the problem that many Israelis have with associating their heritage with their current way of life. He explained that the maintenance of historical ties can have a profound effect on the modern nation-state.

In the Book of Books—in the Bible—a subject that is close to my heart these days. It starts there. It moves through the history of our people: the Second Temple, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, leaving the ghettos, the rise of Zionism, the modern era, the wars fought for Israel’s existence—the history of Zionism and of Israel. A people must know its past in order to ensure its future… our existence depends not only on a weapons system, our military strength, the strength of our economy, our innovation, our exports, or on all these forces that are indeed essential. It depends, first and foremost, on the knowledge and national sentiment we as parents bestow on our children, and as a state to its education system. It depends on our culture; it depends on our cultural heroes; it depends on our ability to explain the justness of our path and demonstrate our affinity for our land—first to ourselves and then to others.

Netanyahu acknowledges the fact that in order for Israel to sustain its identity as a nation as well as its legitimacy it must take initiative to strengthen the ties between the heritage of the Israeli nation—the Jewish nation—and the new generation of Israelis.

            When reflecting on this experience, I was struck by differences between the opinions of the secular and religious Israelis. Although the visions and goals of both groups may be very similar, their approaches to fulfilling them are drastically different and can have many different consequences. For example, the secular Israelis who view Judaism solely as a religion and Israel solely as a land-based nation—two identities that are not fundamentally intertwined— may never be able to defend their presence in the Middle East, while religious Israelis who believe that the purpose of the State of Israel is primarily to provide the opportunity for Jews to live in the Land of Israel may wind up being insensitive to the claims and rights of non-Jewish Israelis who live in the land. Both identities are important and represent realities that the State of Israel must deal with and reconcile. Both categories of people feel strongly about their presence and the justifications for it, and although they present an array of arguments as well as contradictions, to quote Daniella, “we are all Jews and ultimately want the same things.” Although both approaches to Zionism have positive and negative aspects, the fact that the two cannot reconcile their lack of unity regarding self-identity poses a threat. A society that cannot explain itself cannot ensure its survival. The secular Israelis’ contradictory answers to my questions make me nervous that ultimately they will not be able to answer the larger questions that the world will ask: Why there? Why you? Who are you?

            By the end of the experience, I realized that the conflict that Seeds of Peace sets out to settle is just one of many problems that the State of Israel faces. The fact that there is such a large divide in both opinion and practice between secular and religious Israelis poses a problem regarding identity, self-defense, and self-sustenance. As someone who is good friends with both, I have come to the conclusion that both secular and religious Israeli Jews can learn from one another how to value the different approaches to nationality and create a more cohesive society, one better able to protect the land in the present and plant the real seeds of