Good Shabbos. Now I'm really off to work.
I start work on July 1st, this Saturday. Wish me luck!
I don't know how many of you faithful readers have been following the discussion over at House Of Gil about "shomer-shabbos residency programs." I commented a few times there, but let me air my objections in my own daled ames (personal space), where I'm not afraid of injecting non-Orthodox heresies into a cozy Orthoblog. I assume I'll have my own Ortho commenters here, at any rate. (Hi, Dov.) And feel free to remember that I am very much not an unbiased party in this discussion (see the first sentence in this post).
I think it's yet another instance of confusing leshem shomayim (for the sake of Heaven, i.e. honest spiritual striving) with a race to Chumraville. Consider the following facts: nearly everyone in, for example, an internal-medicine residency will be taking care of dangerously ill patients the great majority of the time. ("Dangerously ill" is the relevant halachic category, allowing for translation losses. One can act in certain ways to treat such patients on the Sabbath.) Secondly the great problem with regards to shmiras Shabbos (keeping the Sabbath) in a hospital is electricity, the bane of the observant Jew's existence on Saturday. Yet there is room, on the left end of the spectrum, for leniency with regard to use of electricity. Lastly, it appears that at least some of the Orthodox poskim, well-respected and, naturally, massively erudite Torah scholars, who have weighed in on this issue are not fully informed about the metsies (the facts on the ground) that obtains in modern-day residency programs.
All of these would seem to militate for a reconsideration of what it means for a resident, or a residency program, to be shomer shabbos, Sabbath-observant. It would be wonderful for the Conservative movement to have a crack at it. Or, at the very least (from my way of thinking), it would be greatly preferable to aimless speculation if the two eminent Conservative poskim I have written about my personal situation would answer my e-mails.
6/28/06
Getting used (again) to medicalese
A man is (God help us) a "male". Patients "deny" some condition or other. A person with vascular disease is called a vasculopath. All such usages are defensible logically and, of course, save precious seconds here or there that can be used to get more coffee (or save lives -- whatever). But they grate. And I hope not to use them, unless, of course, my resident makes fun of me for talkin different. Then I will submit. Quickly and cravenly.
A man is (God help us) a "male". Patients "deny" some condition or other. A person with vascular disease is called a vasculopath. All such usages are defensible logically and, of course, save precious seconds here or there that can be used to get more coffee (or save lives -- whatever). But they grate. And I hope not to use them, unless, of course, my resident makes fun of me for talkin different. Then I will submit. Quickly and cravenly.
6/26/06
6/20/06
Devil take the translator
"Not really a translation, but a conversion, Judaization, or transference."
I didn't know that Baudelaire wrote something called Les Litanies de Satan ("le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges"). It's remarkable and off-putting to read a translation of that poem into Hebrew -- for those of us whose Hebrew is religious and literary, not vernacular, it causes a visceral reaction when literary tropes associated with the Divine are used to describe the "samekh-mem."
"Not really a translation, but a conversion, Judaization, or transference."
I didn't know that Baudelaire wrote something called Les Litanies de Satan ("le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges"). It's remarkable and off-putting to read a translation of that poem into Hebrew -- for those of us whose Hebrew is religious and literary, not vernacular, it causes a visceral reaction when literary tropes associated with the Divine are used to describe the "samekh-mem."
6/17/06
Green Squall
Is awesome.
Here, read this.
MEDITATION ON RUIN
It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl, or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment -- these are the things that eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.
The death of a father -- the death of the mother --
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it's this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning -- there's a crack in the water glass -- we wake to find ourselves undone.
* * *
You see from the above, too, that Hopler could be this century's redeemer of the poetic long dash.
Is awesome.
Here, read this.
MEDITATION ON RUIN
It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl, or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment -- these are the things that eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.
The death of a father -- the death of the mother --
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it's this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning -- there's a crack in the water glass -- we wake to find ourselves undone.
* * *
You see from the above, too, that Hopler could be this century's redeemer of the poetic long dash.
6/14/06
Hiatus prep
It's not like I post that much anyway, but soon I'll be blogging even less, what with the start of my residency on July 1st and other writing projects. As General MacArthur did not say when leaving the Philippines in 1942, I really hope to be back here at some point soon -- with further hospital tales, poetry, Jewish curiosities, and the like.
It's not like I post that much anyway, but soon I'll be blogging even less, what with the start of my residency on July 1st and other writing projects. As General MacArthur did not say when leaving the Philippines in 1942, I really hope to be back here at some point soon -- with further hospital tales, poetry, Jewish curiosities, and the like.
6/8/06
A Valediction: Forbidding Rap Music
Schorsch's speech was strange, to be sure. Rap is not a devil whispering in the ear of Conservative Jews. It is, rather, a genre of popular music. (Perhaps Schorsch missed the essay in the back of Etz Hayim, written by R. Tupac Shakur, which makes this important distinction. Tupac is nothing if not inert.) Students writing random words in the snow is symptomatic of nothing but rabbinical students looking to have a little fun. Has the chancellor really forgotten his own yeshivah days?
But there is something very important that the rabbi said:
Perhaps he was too high-falutin in his language and snobby in his approach, but the problem is there and cannot be denied. There are many people working on pushing the cart of Conservative Judaism out of the theological-spiritual mud its stuck in, but the effort must be made. Criticising Schorsch for his criticism won't help us.
Schorsch's speech was strange, to be sure. Rap is not a devil whispering in the ear of Conservative Jews. It is, rather, a genre of popular music. (Perhaps Schorsch missed the essay in the back of Etz Hayim, written by R. Tupac Shakur, which makes this important distinction. Tupac is nothing if not inert.) Students writing random words in the snow is symptomatic of nothing but rabbinical students looking to have a little fun. Has the chancellor really forgotten his own yeshivah days?
But there is something very important that the rabbi said:
The history of Jewish spirituality is the never–ending effort to keep halakhah and meta–halakhah in creative tandem. Halakhah is the deed; meta–halakhah, the disposition. Halakhah is fixed, meta–halakhah fluid. Halakhah is legal, public and objective, whereas meta–halakhah is theological, private, and subjective. The intent of meta–halakhah is to inform, enrich and spiritualize our fulfillment of the mitzvot. Or to revert to my image of the aquifer, what is concealed is no less vital than what is visible.
The malaise of Conservative Judaism today . . . is that its adherence to halakhah is devoid of a spiritualizing meta–halakhah.
Perhaps he was too high-falutin in his language and snobby in his approach, but the problem is there and cannot be denied. There are many people working on pushing the cart of Conservative Judaism out of the theological-spiritual mud its stuck in, but the effort must be made. Criticising Schorsch for his criticism won't help us.
To the Rabbinical Assembly
I just had a chance to daven (as shliekh tsiber) from the newish Sim Shalom siddur for weekdays, known as "Slim Shalom."
One request, though. Can I ask you esteemed rabbis -- when you next publish a book, and it includes a Yiddish selection, can you please, please proofread it? Pick a spelling system. Any spelling system; you have several to choose from! (I have a soft spot for YIVO, but it is a sefer, after all, so you might go with Standard Charedi.) Even Soviet spelling. Anything's better than what-the-hell-it's-only-Yiddish-let's-spell-it-however-we-want. Ditto for the transliteration.
Pretty please? Look, I'll do it for free.
I just had a chance to daven (as shliekh tsiber) from the newish Sim Shalom siddur for weekdays, known as "Slim Shalom."
One request, though. Can I ask you esteemed rabbis -- when you next publish a book, and it includes a Yiddish selection, can you please, please proofread it? Pick a spelling system. Any spelling system; you have several to choose from! (I have a soft spot for YIVO, but it is a sefer, after all, so you might go with Standard Charedi.) Even Soviet spelling. Anything's better than what-the-hell-it's-only-Yiddish-let's-spell-it-however-we-want. Ditto for the transliteration.
Pretty please? Look, I'll do it for free.
6/6/06
Readings
The 11th Street Bar was as packed as a herring barrel. The reading started on time, every reader stuck to the time limits, and no fakery was evident. Miraculously, everyone read work that was worth hearing. Hopler was vigorously lyrical, not as bawdy as he represents. Siken was knotty, associational. Strekfus was mythopoetic. Glück prophesied.
Afterwards, tipsy from a beer on an empty stomach, I walked and talked with a friend. At dinner, I read a poem to him. With generosity, good will, and enlightenment, this friend then ripped the guts out of the poem, splayed them out in front of me, and explained their pathology. Such criticism beats any praise.
On the bus home afterwards, I started some new poems. I didn't say they're good, but they're different.
The 11th Street Bar was as packed as a herring barrel. The reading started on time, every reader stuck to the time limits, and no fakery was evident. Miraculously, everyone read work that was worth hearing. Hopler was vigorously lyrical, not as bawdy as he represents. Siken was knotty, associational. Strekfus was mythopoetic. Glück prophesied.
Afterwards, tipsy from a beer on an empty stomach, I walked and talked with a friend. At dinner, I read a poem to him. With generosity, good will, and enlightenment, this friend then ripped the guts out of the poem, splayed them out in front of me, and explained their pathology. Such criticism beats any praise.
On the bus home afterwards, I started some new poems. I didn't say they're good, but they're different.
6/4/06
6/1/06
Tales of a Twenty-Sixth Grade Nothing
Not a student anymore. Can I handle it?
MEDICINE MENSCH: Bidding the Classroom Adieu
For some people, 12 years of school is enough. Add four years of college and 10 years of a long M.D.-Ph.D. program. Finally, at the end of all that, I can say that I'm no longer a student. I'm ready to enjoy the benefits of my new station in life: sleeping late, meals at my leisure, freedom from subordination to institutional requirements.
Just now, though, medical residency stands in the way. I will be working the hours I am told; my schedule of rotations includes more than a few lectures. During my three-year program, I'll have to pass several challenging exams, including the feared American Board of Internal Medicine certification. I'll have to make presentations, turn in written reports, be deferential to my instructors, and remember everything I'm told in case I have to repeat it at a moment's notice. I'll have a locker and eat in the cafeteria. The cool kids will wear better clothes. Sundays will be for laundry and homework.
Suddenly residency seems a lot like the past 26 years of schooling.
I could leap to the cliché that we are all life-long learners, and that my transition from student to residency is merely an example of the transitions we all undergo. More accurately, we are all both teachers and students, with the two roles assuming various proportions during different stages of our lives.
Becoming a resident doesn't mean that I quit being a student; it just means that the teachers, modes of evaluation and goals are different. It also means that I have become a teacher myself, counseling and tolerating medical students who are just like I was two weeks ago. Someone will throw themselves to the floor in a patient's room, trying to find the cover of a ballpoint pen, and I'll have to strike the teacher's balance between friendly sympathy and calibrated advice. ("Maybe you should get one of those clicker pens?" I'll suggest, and the student will nod dutifully.)
I'll have to teach each patient as I give treatment, not knowing if my words are making a dent — or if the patient is just smiling and agreeing with me in order to get the heck out of my examining room (or so that I can leave him at peace in his hospital bed). In return, every patient teaches the doctor, though it's often not immediately obvious what is to be learned from the umpteenth sick person you've just met.
Something else came to mind during my graduation from medical school, a carefully arranged, flowers-and-champagne event with more popping flashes than pomp and circumstance. The commencement address was the customary sort, reminding us that now is an extraordinary time in medicine: Unimagined advances in science and technology can be brought to bear in the struggle against disease, but, on the other hand, premiums for malpractice insurance are high, and the wolves of overregulation are at the door. (Because the acoustics weren't so great, I might have missed a metaphor or two.)
But there are many times when nothing is being taught or learned and no death-defying struggles are being waged, long stretches of workaday medicine where no high-tech progress is made. It's just doctor and patient waiting for the most recently agreed on medical strategy to take effect, saying hello to each other yet again — like co-workers who keep passing each other by the water cooler in the hall, wondering whether they have to say "Good morning" every single time.
There will be times over the next three years when I'll be neither teacher nor student, just an average guy doing a job day in and day out. But if I'm to keep a proper balance, this ordinariness carries with it its own sort of responsibility: to remember that my job is not, in the final analysis, an average one. This means, among other things — and with every bit of my well-earned humility, sense of insignificance in the larger scheme of things and healthy respect for my own fallibility — that what I do is important. Thus, even as I trip over myself countless times during the first year of residency, I still have value, and my patients need me. I want to remember this during the first night on call, when my first bonehead move makes a nurse slap herself in the forehead once I've turned my back. And since this is my final column, I hope I'll still have the opportunity to write about my mistakes — and have readers to point them out to me.
If you'd like to follow the Medicine Mensch through his residency, you can read his blog, http://zackarysholemberger.blogspot.com. Bye for now!
Not a student anymore. Can I handle it?
MEDICINE MENSCH: Bidding the Classroom Adieu
For some people, 12 years of school is enough. Add four years of college and 10 years of a long M.D.-Ph.D. program. Finally, at the end of all that, I can say that I'm no longer a student. I'm ready to enjoy the benefits of my new station in life: sleeping late, meals at my leisure, freedom from subordination to institutional requirements.
Just now, though, medical residency stands in the way. I will be working the hours I am told; my schedule of rotations includes more than a few lectures. During my three-year program, I'll have to pass several challenging exams, including the feared American Board of Internal Medicine certification. I'll have to make presentations, turn in written reports, be deferential to my instructors, and remember everything I'm told in case I have to repeat it at a moment's notice. I'll have a locker and eat in the cafeteria. The cool kids will wear better clothes. Sundays will be for laundry and homework.
Suddenly residency seems a lot like the past 26 years of schooling.
I could leap to the cliché that we are all life-long learners, and that my transition from student to residency is merely an example of the transitions we all undergo. More accurately, we are all both teachers and students, with the two roles assuming various proportions during different stages of our lives.
Becoming a resident doesn't mean that I quit being a student; it just means that the teachers, modes of evaluation and goals are different. It also means that I have become a teacher myself, counseling and tolerating medical students who are just like I was two weeks ago. Someone will throw themselves to the floor in a patient's room, trying to find the cover of a ballpoint pen, and I'll have to strike the teacher's balance between friendly sympathy and calibrated advice. ("Maybe you should get one of those clicker pens?" I'll suggest, and the student will nod dutifully.)
I'll have to teach each patient as I give treatment, not knowing if my words are making a dent — or if the patient is just smiling and agreeing with me in order to get the heck out of my examining room (or so that I can leave him at peace in his hospital bed). In return, every patient teaches the doctor, though it's often not immediately obvious what is to be learned from the umpteenth sick person you've just met.
Something else came to mind during my graduation from medical school, a carefully arranged, flowers-and-champagne event with more popping flashes than pomp and circumstance. The commencement address was the customary sort, reminding us that now is an extraordinary time in medicine: Unimagined advances in science and technology can be brought to bear in the struggle against disease, but, on the other hand, premiums for malpractice insurance are high, and the wolves of overregulation are at the door. (Because the acoustics weren't so great, I might have missed a metaphor or two.)
But there are many times when nothing is being taught or learned and no death-defying struggles are being waged, long stretches of workaday medicine where no high-tech progress is made. It's just doctor and patient waiting for the most recently agreed on medical strategy to take effect, saying hello to each other yet again — like co-workers who keep passing each other by the water cooler in the hall, wondering whether they have to say "Good morning" every single time.
There will be times over the next three years when I'll be neither teacher nor student, just an average guy doing a job day in and day out. But if I'm to keep a proper balance, this ordinariness carries with it its own sort of responsibility: to remember that my job is not, in the final analysis, an average one. This means, among other things — and with every bit of my well-earned humility, sense of insignificance in the larger scheme of things and healthy respect for my own fallibility — that what I do is important. Thus, even as I trip over myself countless times during the first year of residency, I still have value, and my patients need me. I want to remember this during the first night on call, when my first bonehead move makes a nurse slap herself in the forehead once I've turned my back. And since this is my final column, I hope I'll still have the opportunity to write about my mistakes — and have readers to point them out to me.
If you'd like to follow the Medicine Mensch through his residency, you can read his blog, http://zackarysholemberger.blogspot.com. Bye for now!
5/30/06
Taste and see: Shavuos foods from many lands
Plus, parve buffalo wings with blue-cheese sauce: a whimsical Torah derivation.
A tasty post, Becca!
Plus, parve buffalo wings with blue-cheese sauce: a whimsical Torah derivation.
A tasty post, Becca!
5/25/06
Shabbos Dinner
On cleaning out some files, I found this account of a memorable Shabbos dinner with some disaffected Jews, originally published in the now-defunct journal Response in 1999 or 2000. Given the recent publication of Unchosen, I thought it might of interest for some. I know you're not supposed to publish long blogposts, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with it. This is exceptionally long, though; my apologies.
I should also say that I wrote this a number of years ago; I'm posting it unedited, because it's beyond editing. I wouldn't write the same thing now, and I probably wouldn't even have the same opinions.
Let's meet some disaffected Orthodox youth.
I've been invited to a Shabbat dinner in Brooklyn Heights by my visiting friend Yosl, an ex-Hasid, nigunim instructor, and occasional pizza boy living until recently in Omaha, Nebraska.
Although language is more often context than cause, you can say that I got to know Yosl through Yiddish. I was introduced to the language in high school, when my senior English teacher – a brilliant diabetic with thick glasses, little tolerance for fools, and a limited interest in pedagogy – suggested I study Yiddish, which she knew from home, as a filler for one of my free periods. She didn’t instruct me per se, but her suggestion was enough to get me started. Some of my most productive hours of high school were spent in the back of Ms. Donsky’s German class (she knew a half-dozen languages, I think), reading the Yiddish Forward while my recalcitrant contemporaries broke their teeth on German verbs. I’m not sure what everyone else thought I was doing. (I don’t know what Ms. Donsky is doing now, either. The last I heard she was living in Ohio with her sister. I don’t think of her enough, considering the importance of what she introduced me to.)
Thus I started up the slope, wanting to learn a little bit more, then learning that extra little bit and finding that the unknown extended even farther than I had thought. I read Yiddish books voraciously through high school and college (although my academic studies were not in Yiddish). I started writing Yiddish poetry, which has been published in most of the depressingly small-circulation journals that still exist in the secular (non-Charedi) world. I am active in Yugntruf, a Yiddish-speaking young people’s organization. In short, Yiddish-language promotion and creativity is a large part of what I spend my time on.
I am not one of those who became attracted to Yiddish as a means of escape from the religious community. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there – in comfortable suburbia, away from the infighting and unreflective extremism that characterizes New York Jewry – I was exposed to a self-confident if unpunctilious brand of Conservative Judaism. My parents, themselves quite proficient in Hebrew and very knowledgeable Jews, gave me the grounding I needed pursue my Jewish education on my own.
Since high school I have become considerably more observant than my parents; in the inaccurate and obsolete taxonomy favored by mass-market Jewish publications, I am “Conservadox” – that is, on the right edge of the Conservative movement. Some might call me a “baal teshuvah” (a “returnee” to the faith), but I avoid the term due to its unpleasant connotations of blind religiosity. If I might be allowed a more flattering self-description, I try to remain within halachah – the system of Jewish law – while recognizing its inconsistencies and remaining open to necessary, modifying challenges from personal intellect and modern morality.
And that’s why I’m so involved with Yiddish. Not because the language itself embodies any exceptional qualities: Yiddish is no funnier than, say, Portugese, with all due respect to the popularity of Leo Rosten and his ilk; and it’s no guarantor of peace and love, either, having been used as a means to intolerance on both the left (Stalinist) and right (ultra-Orthodox) ends of the spectrum. But Yiddish and Yiddish-language creativity have in modern times been inextricably associated with those wrenching historical transformations which have most indelibly affected the soul and the society of the Jew: from all-encompassing religion to all-challenging urbanization; from certainty to radical doubt; from “God, Israel, and the Torah are one” to a smorgasbord of competing ideologies.
As I make my way as a Jew, I find in the history of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry a mirror – the old kind, with a decorative frame and mottled glass – of my own doubts and internal conflicts. Knowing Yiddish also affords me an appreciation of those Jews who are modern, but in a different mode – those dissatisfied Charedim who must pass from one sort of self-denying modernity, heavily accessorized to pass for what some imagine to have been 19th-century Eastern European Orthodoxy, into another modernity, broader and more confident, stripped almost bare of myth and religion.
So I follow with eager attention the goings on of Charedi society, and the often labyrinthine tales of those who pass from it into the wider world. (Charedi is a less pejorative and foreign-sounding term for “ultra-Orthodox,” the word often favored in the press. “Chasidic” is inaccurate, since many Charedim are not adherents of Chasidic philosophy and teaching.) That’s the passage my friend Yosl is traversing. He was born in Williamsburg, studied in a number of yeshivas in Brooklyn and Israel, got married – and decided, as the culmination of many years of theological doubt, that he did not want to have kids, because he did not want to raise any children as Orthodox Jews. He left the marriage and Charedi society, moving to Omaha.
I met Yosl at a Yiddish conference in New Jersey which was held (need you ask?) on the grounds of a Catholic college. I was fascinated by his personal history and drawn even more by his flouting of the rules of polite society. At this conference there was a book fair, and a certain newly-published volume on women and Yiddish was being offered for sale and autographs by the authors. Although I ended up buying the book, I expressed to Yosl some (I thought) subtle and quiet reservations about one of the essays. Yosl turned to one of the women and said in a loud voice, “Sholem says this book is bullshit.” There are more examples.
For a time I accepted Yosl’s unsubtleties with an ignorant tolerance: he’s an ex-Charedi, and must have “trouble adjusting.” He must not “be accustomed” to the rules that we follow on this side of the Williamsburg Bridge. In short, I made allowances for him (to myself) much as I would for an autistic child.
But not too long ago a friend pointed out the obvious to me: that’s just the way he is. “He gives the rest of us ex-Os a bad name,” said my friend. “He’s only drifting because he wants to drift.” Indeed, another ex-Charedi acquaintance of mine (who left that society at 16) is a rising young film-maker, well connected to just about anyone in the world of the Jewish culturally hip. Dislocation does not mean what I thought it would mean: sometimes it’s the perfect route to creative transformation; sometimes it amplifies the banalities already present; and sometimes it makes bottomless canyons out of little cracks in the psyche.
Why did I come to this dinner? I find the ex-Charedi crowd entertaining, and I think I might learn something about today’s Jews, a group close to my heart. In the circles I travel in, I know precious few people on the fringe of Jewish society – and observing the fringe gives a sense of what makes up the whole cloth. There’s a personal reason, too. I became more observant than my parents – what is Shabbat (or Shabes) like for someone who has gone in the other direction? The back-and-forth flux from O(rthodoxy) to C(onservatism) to R(eform) is what occupies the thoughts of many American Jews. What are the facts on the well-traveled ground between them?
(Yosl’s one of those who has made the cleanest break with his past, although he does maintain contact with his parents. I’ve changed the names of everyone else I’ve mentioned here, because for some of them being mentioned in an essay like this would have serious consequences.)
I arrive before sunset (so I don’t break the Sabbath by traveling) and bring a bottle of wine. Rachel, who's a non-Jew, a German student in the YIVO Summer Program, says by way of greeting, "I'm sorry, but I'm stoned." She learned Yiddish by listening to Kol Yisrael on her shortwave radio in Berlin, and now waits tables at Tavern on the Green to earn money.
I wait for the other guests to arrive. They all have a lot in common: ex-O (for Orthodox), Yiddish-speaking, versed in the texts of traditional Jewish study (and some in worldly learning as well), jobless, and disaffected. In Yiddish you'd call them apikorsim, that is, apostates. In English you'd call them slackers.
As the guests filter in, a few of us sit in the living room. The ketoyres (pot) goes around. Yudl, who is permanently high, talks with fervent enthusiasm about last night's Bob Dylan-Paul Simon concert. "'The Boxer' is a real Chasidic song," he avers. Through the segue music-entertainment-frum entertainment the topic turns to"Handl erlekh [Deal Honestly]," a Hasidic version of "Monopoly": "You're wearing a loud red dress. Pay fifteen dollars." "You're watching television. Go to hell. Do not pass Go."
The dining room fills up. Someone starts to sing "Shalom Aleichem"; a few join in, but there are some suppressed groans, and many eyes roll. Mendl, from a Vizhnitzer family and a former student at NYU, starts opening the wine for kiddush, while Yisroel Meyer, who works in the Brooklyn public library, says, "Oh, God, I can't take this" -- meaning kiddush, which he can't handle, along with all other appurtenances of tradition.
Why is Mendl able to appropriate the ritual for his own use, while Yisroel Meyer is not? I don’t know. But I do notice that Mendl – after he executes an imperfect opening of the bottle– takes hold of a strainer and begins to extract the bits of cork that have ended up in the wine. Suddenly I speak up: “That’s borer [sorting, one of the types of labor forbidden on the Sabbath].” And Mendl in response, respectfully, even chastened: “You’re right. I forgot. Maybe you should be doing this,” he says, gesturing with the bottle towards the kiddush cup. Why did I say anything? I am not that careful with that category of forbidden labor in my own kitchen, on my own turf. Why do I feel the need to emphasize my observance, when I bear no ill will towards these Jews for leaving observance altogether?
Caleb makes hamotzi, the blessing over bread. If you hang around with Yiddishists, you know Caleb. He dresses sharp, tonight in an outfit out of a 40s' movie (white shoes, white suit, thick, black-rimmed glasses), speaks and writes a fluent Yiddish, and is a goy gomer
-- a complete non-Jew -- on both sides. Nine and a half out of ten American Jews could not make hamotzi with his poise. He teaches Yiddish and earns some money (not an independent living by any means) as a Yiddish actor and public reader of poetry and short stories.
Berl arrives, tall, thin-boned, and with the remnant of a beard, and begins to spin a tale about his supposed profession: armchair terrorism, supporting despots, counter-revolutionaries, and all those who maintain the status quo. He is clever and cynical in the nihilst mold: "The Dalai Lama is worse than the Chinese, otherwise how could he stand by and let millions of people think he's a god?" He does not expect or receive any response to this claim, nor are there any cries of outrage at his choice of “profession.” It’s like a comedy routine without the audience, or any attempt to elicit laughter. The black humor is accepted as a matter of course as the currency of the evening.
Binyomin -- a long-haired, shambling, gesticulating eccentric -- is fascinated by the work of Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in literature born into a Ladino-speaking family in Bulgaria, and in particular his book "Crowds and Power." In a high-pitched, excited voice, much like Yudl in ecstasy over Dylan, he starts making fun of the yeshiva students who have just returned from protest gatherings in Brooklyn or Jerusalem: "There were thousands of Jews there! Thousands of Jews!"
Says Berl about Canetti, "That's what all religion is -- a fear of dead crowds: the rebbeim, the gedolim. Men take that fear and call it tradition." This is a quintessentially Berl-like statement: cutting yet overgeneralized, dismissive, dismissable, but fascinating. What can be said against this by one whose relationship to tradition is more positive? “No, I disagree! Religion is not a transformed fear of dead crowds!”? If I were to say something like that, I would be laughed at: not out of scorn, but out of the irrelevance of an argument on the pros and cons of religion. Religion, to these Jews, is not a selection on the menu or a component of one’s ever-shifting moral autonomy, but a determinant of one’s entire surroundings. By accepting this dichotomy between “religious” and “not religious”, they are employing the worldview of the very Orthodoxy they have in greater or lesser measure escaped.
As if to underline the point, someone proposes a debate on the value of religion between the late Bertrand Russell and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe; this leads to a suggestion for an advertising campaign for Smirnoff Vodka, which the Rebbe did not live to endorse.
The conversation, whose coherence is already sorely taxed, breaks into fragments. Binyomin brings up the Kotsker Rebbe, the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader whose philosophy is considered a forerunner of existentialism. What happened on that night, the night before the Kotsker's twenty-year seclusion? Is it true that the Kotsker deliberately extinguished the Shabbat candles by throwing his hat at them from the other end of the table, crying “There is no law and no judge!”? In a long, uninterrupted monologue, Binyomin analyses the treatment of this story in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel – a Yiddish poet, historian of Chassidism, theologian, and ideologue of the mid-20th-century Conservative movement – considers the story to be generally true, a reflection of the Kotsker’s growing internal unrest. Binyomin finds little support for Heschel’s belief.
I can’t help but see Binyomin as a gilgul of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Binyomin’s knowledge is clearly encyclopedic, and I have been told he is a marvelous writer, although I have not seen anything of his myself. He still lives with his father, in a separate room piled high with books. What sort of writer must he be? If I were to guess, I would not put him with the self-consciously rebellious, sex-obsessed “children of immigrants” (Roth et al.), nor with the modern generation (Goodman, Bukiet), surer in its Judaism but conflicted. He has the speech patterns and casts the brilliant sparks of a European master, of a Thomas Mann or a Canetti. If there were a Left Bank, a Vilna, or a Warsaw to support him, what monuments would he compose?
Or perhaps he is like Yosl, and does not wish to compose anything.
Berl says that if sleep is a sixtieth of death, and sleep is so great, then death must be a real blast. "All I need in life," he says, "is a place to sleep and some nicotine. All the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense."
Berl’s throwaway phrase (“all the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense”) means not at all what you might think it to mean out of context. “All the stuff in the Talmud” is not a dismissive wave of the hand from a college student who has taken a few “X in the Talmud” courses from the Jewish Studies professors, but a deeply felt if casually expressed declaration of rootlessness. “The stuff in the Talmud,” for much of Berl’s life, had been presented to him as “all” – and not long ago he realized that much of what he had learned did not make sense to him. It is this doubt that Berl expressed – a doubt that has been part of the Jewish makeup since Moses Mendelssohn.
I head towards the Brooklyn Bridge for the walk home to Manhattan, but somehow I get lost and fumble around in the dark byways near the bridge for the better part of an hour. By the time I get home and mount the nine flights of stairs to my dimly lit apartment (I don’t take the elevator tonight), I have lost all Sabbath rest.
I thought that Shabbat meal would be an entrée into a fascinating world of tortured, European-style struggle between the man on the street and the Jew at home. In my more self-centered moments, I even thought that we more secular-minded Yiddishists could light the flame of a Haskalah redux which would burn through the divisions between the Charedi and secular worlds. We’d produce Yiddish creativity on a par with the best of the past, lighting the way to a future both more modern and more Jewish.
It’s now been many months. Yosl lives in Moscow learning Russian and teaching some Yiddish. Mendl is back at NYU, and Caleb and I were among the teachers at a Yiddish program this past summer. I don’t know what Binyomin and Berl are doing, but I have an idea it’s about the same – working at regular jobs, finding no purchase for the traction of their intellects. I still write in Yiddish and promote the language, and I still try to follow what’s going on with the Charedim – not to enter into their world but to get a better handle on my own.
On cleaning out some files, I found this account of a memorable Shabbos dinner with some disaffected Jews, originally published in the now-defunct journal Response in 1999 or 2000. Given the recent publication of Unchosen, I thought it might of interest for some. I know you're not supposed to publish long blogposts, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with it. This is exceptionally long, though; my apologies.
I should also say that I wrote this a number of years ago; I'm posting it unedited, because it's beyond editing. I wouldn't write the same thing now, and I probably wouldn't even have the same opinions.
Let's meet some disaffected Orthodox youth.
I've been invited to a Shabbat dinner in Brooklyn Heights by my visiting friend Yosl, an ex-Hasid, nigunim instructor, and occasional pizza boy living until recently in Omaha, Nebraska.
Although language is more often context than cause, you can say that I got to know Yosl through Yiddish. I was introduced to the language in high school, when my senior English teacher – a brilliant diabetic with thick glasses, little tolerance for fools, and a limited interest in pedagogy – suggested I study Yiddish, which she knew from home, as a filler for one of my free periods. She didn’t instruct me per se, but her suggestion was enough to get me started. Some of my most productive hours of high school were spent in the back of Ms. Donsky’s German class (she knew a half-dozen languages, I think), reading the Yiddish Forward while my recalcitrant contemporaries broke their teeth on German verbs. I’m not sure what everyone else thought I was doing. (I don’t know what Ms. Donsky is doing now, either. The last I heard she was living in Ohio with her sister. I don’t think of her enough, considering the importance of what she introduced me to.)
Thus I started up the slope, wanting to learn a little bit more, then learning that extra little bit and finding that the unknown extended even farther than I had thought. I read Yiddish books voraciously through high school and college (although my academic studies were not in Yiddish). I started writing Yiddish poetry, which has been published in most of the depressingly small-circulation journals that still exist in the secular (non-Charedi) world. I am active in Yugntruf, a Yiddish-speaking young people’s organization. In short, Yiddish-language promotion and creativity is a large part of what I spend my time on.
I am not one of those who became attracted to Yiddish as a means of escape from the religious community. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there – in comfortable suburbia, away from the infighting and unreflective extremism that characterizes New York Jewry – I was exposed to a self-confident if unpunctilious brand of Conservative Judaism. My parents, themselves quite proficient in Hebrew and very knowledgeable Jews, gave me the grounding I needed pursue my Jewish education on my own.
Since high school I have become considerably more observant than my parents; in the inaccurate and obsolete taxonomy favored by mass-market Jewish publications, I am “Conservadox” – that is, on the right edge of the Conservative movement. Some might call me a “baal teshuvah” (a “returnee” to the faith), but I avoid the term due to its unpleasant connotations of blind religiosity. If I might be allowed a more flattering self-description, I try to remain within halachah – the system of Jewish law – while recognizing its inconsistencies and remaining open to necessary, modifying challenges from personal intellect and modern morality.
And that’s why I’m so involved with Yiddish. Not because the language itself embodies any exceptional qualities: Yiddish is no funnier than, say, Portugese, with all due respect to the popularity of Leo Rosten and his ilk; and it’s no guarantor of peace and love, either, having been used as a means to intolerance on both the left (Stalinist) and right (ultra-Orthodox) ends of the spectrum. But Yiddish and Yiddish-language creativity have in modern times been inextricably associated with those wrenching historical transformations which have most indelibly affected the soul and the society of the Jew: from all-encompassing religion to all-challenging urbanization; from certainty to radical doubt; from “God, Israel, and the Torah are one” to a smorgasbord of competing ideologies.
As I make my way as a Jew, I find in the history of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry a mirror – the old kind, with a decorative frame and mottled glass – of my own doubts and internal conflicts. Knowing Yiddish also affords me an appreciation of those Jews who are modern, but in a different mode – those dissatisfied Charedim who must pass from one sort of self-denying modernity, heavily accessorized to pass for what some imagine to have been 19th-century Eastern European Orthodoxy, into another modernity, broader and more confident, stripped almost bare of myth and religion.
So I follow with eager attention the goings on of Charedi society, and the often labyrinthine tales of those who pass from it into the wider world. (Charedi is a less pejorative and foreign-sounding term for “ultra-Orthodox,” the word often favored in the press. “Chasidic” is inaccurate, since many Charedim are not adherents of Chasidic philosophy and teaching.) That’s the passage my friend Yosl is traversing. He was born in Williamsburg, studied in a number of yeshivas in Brooklyn and Israel, got married – and decided, as the culmination of many years of theological doubt, that he did not want to have kids, because he did not want to raise any children as Orthodox Jews. He left the marriage and Charedi society, moving to Omaha.
I met Yosl at a Yiddish conference in New Jersey which was held (need you ask?) on the grounds of a Catholic college. I was fascinated by his personal history and drawn even more by his flouting of the rules of polite society. At this conference there was a book fair, and a certain newly-published volume on women and Yiddish was being offered for sale and autographs by the authors. Although I ended up buying the book, I expressed to Yosl some (I thought) subtle and quiet reservations about one of the essays. Yosl turned to one of the women and said in a loud voice, “Sholem says this book is bullshit.” There are more examples.
For a time I accepted Yosl’s unsubtleties with an ignorant tolerance: he’s an ex-Charedi, and must have “trouble adjusting.” He must not “be accustomed” to the rules that we follow on this side of the Williamsburg Bridge. In short, I made allowances for him (to myself) much as I would for an autistic child.
But not too long ago a friend pointed out the obvious to me: that’s just the way he is. “He gives the rest of us ex-Os a bad name,” said my friend. “He’s only drifting because he wants to drift.” Indeed, another ex-Charedi acquaintance of mine (who left that society at 16) is a rising young film-maker, well connected to just about anyone in the world of the Jewish culturally hip. Dislocation does not mean what I thought it would mean: sometimes it’s the perfect route to creative transformation; sometimes it amplifies the banalities already present; and sometimes it makes bottomless canyons out of little cracks in the psyche.
Why did I come to this dinner? I find the ex-Charedi crowd entertaining, and I think I might learn something about today’s Jews, a group close to my heart. In the circles I travel in, I know precious few people on the fringe of Jewish society – and observing the fringe gives a sense of what makes up the whole cloth. There’s a personal reason, too. I became more observant than my parents – what is Shabbat (or Shabes) like for someone who has gone in the other direction? The back-and-forth flux from O(rthodoxy) to C(onservatism) to R(eform) is what occupies the thoughts of many American Jews. What are the facts on the well-traveled ground between them?
(Yosl’s one of those who has made the cleanest break with his past, although he does maintain contact with his parents. I’ve changed the names of everyone else I’ve mentioned here, because for some of them being mentioned in an essay like this would have serious consequences.)
I arrive before sunset (so I don’t break the Sabbath by traveling) and bring a bottle of wine. Rachel, who's a non-Jew, a German student in the YIVO Summer Program, says by way of greeting, "I'm sorry, but I'm stoned." She learned Yiddish by listening to Kol Yisrael on her shortwave radio in Berlin, and now waits tables at Tavern on the Green to earn money.
I wait for the other guests to arrive. They all have a lot in common: ex-O (for Orthodox), Yiddish-speaking, versed in the texts of traditional Jewish study (and some in worldly learning as well), jobless, and disaffected. In Yiddish you'd call them apikorsim, that is, apostates. In English you'd call them slackers.
As the guests filter in, a few of us sit in the living room. The ketoyres (pot) goes around. Yudl, who is permanently high, talks with fervent enthusiasm about last night's Bob Dylan-Paul Simon concert. "'The Boxer' is a real Chasidic song," he avers. Through the segue music-entertainment-frum entertainment the topic turns to"Handl erlekh [Deal Honestly]," a Hasidic version of "Monopoly": "You're wearing a loud red dress. Pay fifteen dollars." "You're watching television. Go to hell. Do not pass Go."
The dining room fills up. Someone starts to sing "Shalom Aleichem"; a few join in, but there are some suppressed groans, and many eyes roll. Mendl, from a Vizhnitzer family and a former student at NYU, starts opening the wine for kiddush, while Yisroel Meyer, who works in the Brooklyn public library, says, "Oh, God, I can't take this" -- meaning kiddush, which he can't handle, along with all other appurtenances of tradition.
Why is Mendl able to appropriate the ritual for his own use, while Yisroel Meyer is not? I don’t know. But I do notice that Mendl – after he executes an imperfect opening of the bottle– takes hold of a strainer and begins to extract the bits of cork that have ended up in the wine. Suddenly I speak up: “That’s borer [sorting, one of the types of labor forbidden on the Sabbath].” And Mendl in response, respectfully, even chastened: “You’re right. I forgot. Maybe you should be doing this,” he says, gesturing with the bottle towards the kiddush cup. Why did I say anything? I am not that careful with that category of forbidden labor in my own kitchen, on my own turf. Why do I feel the need to emphasize my observance, when I bear no ill will towards these Jews for leaving observance altogether?
Caleb makes hamotzi, the blessing over bread. If you hang around with Yiddishists, you know Caleb. He dresses sharp, tonight in an outfit out of a 40s' movie (white shoes, white suit, thick, black-rimmed glasses), speaks and writes a fluent Yiddish, and is a goy gomer
-- a complete non-Jew -- on both sides. Nine and a half out of ten American Jews could not make hamotzi with his poise. He teaches Yiddish and earns some money (not an independent living by any means) as a Yiddish actor and public reader of poetry and short stories.
Berl arrives, tall, thin-boned, and with the remnant of a beard, and begins to spin a tale about his supposed profession: armchair terrorism, supporting despots, counter-revolutionaries, and all those who maintain the status quo. He is clever and cynical in the nihilst mold: "The Dalai Lama is worse than the Chinese, otherwise how could he stand by and let millions of people think he's a god?" He does not expect or receive any response to this claim, nor are there any cries of outrage at his choice of “profession.” It’s like a comedy routine without the audience, or any attempt to elicit laughter. The black humor is accepted as a matter of course as the currency of the evening.
Binyomin -- a long-haired, shambling, gesticulating eccentric -- is fascinated by the work of Elias Canetti, the Nobel laureate in literature born into a Ladino-speaking family in Bulgaria, and in particular his book "Crowds and Power." In a high-pitched, excited voice, much like Yudl in ecstasy over Dylan, he starts making fun of the yeshiva students who have just returned from protest gatherings in Brooklyn or Jerusalem: "There were thousands of Jews there! Thousands of Jews!"
Says Berl about Canetti, "That's what all religion is -- a fear of dead crowds: the rebbeim, the gedolim. Men take that fear and call it tradition." This is a quintessentially Berl-like statement: cutting yet overgeneralized, dismissive, dismissable, but fascinating. What can be said against this by one whose relationship to tradition is more positive? “No, I disagree! Religion is not a transformed fear of dead crowds!”? If I were to say something like that, I would be laughed at: not out of scorn, but out of the irrelevance of an argument on the pros and cons of religion. Religion, to these Jews, is not a selection on the menu or a component of one’s ever-shifting moral autonomy, but a determinant of one’s entire surroundings. By accepting this dichotomy between “religious” and “not religious”, they are employing the worldview of the very Orthodoxy they have in greater or lesser measure escaped.
As if to underline the point, someone proposes a debate on the value of religion between the late Bertrand Russell and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe; this leads to a suggestion for an advertising campaign for Smirnoff Vodka, which the Rebbe did not live to endorse.
The conversation, whose coherence is already sorely taxed, breaks into fragments. Binyomin brings up the Kotsker Rebbe, the eighteenth-century Hasidic leader whose philosophy is considered a forerunner of existentialism. What happened on that night, the night before the Kotsker's twenty-year seclusion? Is it true that the Kotsker deliberately extinguished the Shabbat candles by throwing his hat at them from the other end of the table, crying “There is no law and no judge!”? In a long, uninterrupted monologue, Binyomin analyses the treatment of this story in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel – a Yiddish poet, historian of Chassidism, theologian, and ideologue of the mid-20th-century Conservative movement – considers the story to be generally true, a reflection of the Kotsker’s growing internal unrest. Binyomin finds little support for Heschel’s belief.
I can’t help but see Binyomin as a gilgul of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Binyomin’s knowledge is clearly encyclopedic, and I have been told he is a marvelous writer, although I have not seen anything of his myself. He still lives with his father, in a separate room piled high with books. What sort of writer must he be? If I were to guess, I would not put him with the self-consciously rebellious, sex-obsessed “children of immigrants” (Roth et al.), nor with the modern generation (Goodman, Bukiet), surer in its Judaism but conflicted. He has the speech patterns and casts the brilliant sparks of a European master, of a Thomas Mann or a Canetti. If there were a Left Bank, a Vilna, or a Warsaw to support him, what monuments would he compose?
Or perhaps he is like Yosl, and does not wish to compose anything.
Berl says that if sleep is a sixtieth of death, and sleep is so great, then death must be a real blast. "All I need in life," he says, "is a place to sleep and some nicotine. All the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense."
Berl’s throwaway phrase (“all the stuff in the Talmud is nonsense”) means not at all what you might think it to mean out of context. “All the stuff in the Talmud” is not a dismissive wave of the hand from a college student who has taken a few “X in the Talmud” courses from the Jewish Studies professors, but a deeply felt if casually expressed declaration of rootlessness. “The stuff in the Talmud,” for much of Berl’s life, had been presented to him as “all” – and not long ago he realized that much of what he had learned did not make sense to him. It is this doubt that Berl expressed – a doubt that has been part of the Jewish makeup since Moses Mendelssohn.
I head towards the Brooklyn Bridge for the walk home to Manhattan, but somehow I get lost and fumble around in the dark byways near the bridge for the better part of an hour. By the time I get home and mount the nine flights of stairs to my dimly lit apartment (I don’t take the elevator tonight), I have lost all Sabbath rest.
I thought that Shabbat meal would be an entrée into a fascinating world of tortured, European-style struggle between the man on the street and the Jew at home. In my more self-centered moments, I even thought that we more secular-minded Yiddishists could light the flame of a Haskalah redux which would burn through the divisions between the Charedi and secular worlds. We’d produce Yiddish creativity on a par with the best of the past, lighting the way to a future both more modern and more Jewish.
It’s now been many months. Yosl lives in Moscow learning Russian and teaching some Yiddish. Mendl is back at NYU, and Caleb and I were among the teachers at a Yiddish program this past summer. I don’t know what Binyomin and Berl are doing, but I have an idea it’s about the same – working at regular jobs, finding no purchase for the traction of their intellects. I still write in Yiddish and promote the language, and I still try to follow what’s going on with the Charedim – not to enter into their world but to get a better handle on my own.
Yet another reason not to buy Rubashkin's/Aaron's Best/Agriprocessors meat
It's kosher . . . but it's treyf.
See this remarkable article by Nathaniel Popper in the Forward. I hope not to buy any of their meat in the future, unless conditions improve, and I hope my congregation doesn't either. (For my previous post on the matter, see here.)
It's kosher . . . but it's treyf.
See this remarkable article by Nathaniel Popper in the Forward. I hope not to buy any of their meat in the future, unless conditions improve, and I hope my congregation doesn't either. (For my previous post on the matter, see here.)
Batter batter batter
Swiiiiing philologist!
Favorite Yiddish neologism of the week (seen on a Charedi message board):
heymloyfekhts
The equivalent neologism in the circles I travel in:
kaylekhklap
Which will win? My money's on neologism number 1.
(If you don't know Yiddish, can you guess which English baseball word is being glossed here? And how do you say it in Hebrew? I dunno. If you don't feel like playing this game, here's another hint: English synonyms include big-fly, blast, clout, jack, shot, moonshot, and tape-measure shot.)
Swiiiiing philologist!
Favorite Yiddish neologism of the week (seen on a Charedi message board):
heymloyfekhts
The equivalent neologism in the circles I travel in:
kaylekhklap
Which will win? My money's on neologism number 1.
(If you don't know Yiddish, can you guess which English baseball word is being glossed here? And how do you say it in Hebrew? I dunno. If you don't feel like playing this game, here's another hint: English synonyms include big-fly, blast, clout, jack, shot, moonshot, and tape-measure shot.)
5/23/06
5/21/06
The "radical intellectual freedom" of halachah
The positive attitude to controversy so frequently encountered in the halakhic sources, is an acknowledgment, whether intended or not, of the value of free expression and intellectual creativity. It affirms that no substantive constraints should be imposed upon participants in discussions of the law, as long as they are willing to abide by the formal rules of etiquette and procedure. This is by no means a trivial point: respect and reverence, though critical, are not meant to impact the substance of new ideas being put forward, but only the mode of their presentation. The often-heard allegation that Jewish law, in upholding traditional modes of exegesis, and in constantly consulting preeminent texts and authorities, precludes substantive halakhic innovation, is altogether erroneous. Indeed, only by appreciating the role of form in the halakhic dialogue, can participants appreciate, and, it is hoped, take full advantage of, the radical intellectual freedom it embraces.
So say the authors of this book, on which more later.
5/18/06
"The last Yiddish poet in America"?
Or: someone wrote a novel about my (greatX12)-granddaughter?
[From Publishers Marketplace. Thanks, Shana!]
Or: someone wrote a novel about my (greatX12)-granddaughter?
[From Publishers Marketplace. Thanks, Shana!]
FICTION: DEBUTPeter Manseau's SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER, the story of the last Yiddish poet in America and the young Christian translator who brings the poet's notebooks to light for the first time and wins the love of his Jewish co-worker at the Yiddish book warehouse, who is passionately re-discovering her roots, to Amber Qureshi at Free Press, by Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Grinberg Literary Management (NA).
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