800 Words: Sense of Place

Biddeford, Maine: I have just gone on the first solo road trip of my life - up the East Coast, the one part of the world, save Israel which is really a small sliver of a part of the world, that I know with anything more than passing familiarity. After days spent on the couches and spare rooms of different friends and their spouses, I arrived yesterday morning at the house of my college best friend, whom after three years in Baltimore may still be my closest friend.

Even now, one-third of the way through my thirties, my mind still sees the years 21 and 22 as a very brief golden era. I was probably as miserable (or at least barely less) than I ever was. But there was something about the group in which I felt at home - a shared ethos, common values, a weirdly earnest cynicism, and a determination to have funny things to say about serious matters and serious things to say about funny ones. I probably didn't even know many of the friends I associate with those two years yet particularly well, and yet those two years set the stage for any consolation that came in later years that offset the misery that returned nearly unabated until I came to Baltimore. Inevitably, such groups can't last long, and much to my dismay, everybody dispersed to where life had to carry them. The loss was inevitable, it was also painful for a guy who direly needed a better period.

I love, truly love, my good friends in Baltimore. But I do not share many of their values, and I disapprove as strenuously of their values as I don't doubt they do of mine. I've written so many times about the differences that they require no revaluation here, but for the record, the values of Smalltimore are every bit as rotten and corrupt as the places from which we all had to so direly wish to escape in order to find ourselves amongst each other.

Even so, I worry that if my life yet again takes a sharp downward turn, I may yet view these first few years in Baltimore with the exact same halo, and I want it on the record here that if I start viewing those first few years in Baltimore surrounded by a gold plate, it wasn't at all like that, just as the last two years at AU weren't at all like that. A set of circumstances conspired to make those years only slightly less miserable than the years surrounding them. The anxiety attacks with their hand tremors and hyperventilation, the omnipresent facial tics, the helpless addiction to food, the physical pains and ailments, the compulsive going through money like water, the total inability to create the person you wanted to be, was exactly the same as it ever was. It only seemed, for a brief moment, like the fog was lifting, and you were finally, if ever so briefly, on the path to being that delusional image of a person you wanted to be.

In retrospect, there was one thing which all the people from those AU days shared: a shared devotion to, or at least an inability to escape, a certain place - a place different for each of us, but startlingly similar in particulars as all places are to the people who grew up in them. We all loved those places, even as we often hated everything about them. The roots haunted us all, the places from which we hailed gave us the wings they chose for us even as they tore asunder any wings we might have wanted to obtain on our own.

Over the years, I've traveled plenty of times to my friends' towns of origin. I've travelled so often to Biddeford Maine, or Toms River New Jersey, or St. Mary's Pennsylvania, that hometown friends of my friends have become friends of mine. I'll probably never have opportunity to visit other such hometowns of old friends like Watertown, New York or Homestead, Florida. But what I inevitably return to is that each these places are true places, with genuine senses of place within them, whereas my hometown is just a makeshift place that Jews settled because they were not from anywhere else.

When you go to Biddeford, Maine, you see a place worth preserving exactly as it is. You see the still waters of the coastline running against rocky cliffs of every color, both of which rub up against beaches that seem to stretch into infinity. Turn your head slightly away from the shores and you see land too pristinely green for a kid who grew up going the Delaware beaches to believe could exist within the same sightline. Life is calm and peaceful, surrounded by natural beauty at every turn, and every day as relaxing as a vacation. Everything about this place seems as quiet and untroubled as the landscape. A Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore can't help wonder how a person could ever be so lucky to grow up in a place so beautiful.

When you go to Toms River, New Jersey, you see a similarly seaside town - far more ethnically diverse than Biddeford, but not nearly so attractive aesthetically. And yet the diversity gives every possible amenity, and makes life into a never-ending soiree. If you want to go to a beach, everybody seems to know someone who has their own piece of private beach where you can lie and swim, practically undisturbed. If you want a good meal, you visit the restaurant of your friend who became a chef. If you want entertainment or culture, you take a simple drive to Philadelphia or New York. If you want to hang out, you call the friends you've grown up and gone to the same gatherings with since you were in high school.

Provincial though these places may seem to people who've never been there, being born to places like them is better than living any big city, and worth the lifelong fight it takes to preserve everything that's worthwhile about them. Hopefully, your children can soon enjoy all the things that enliven your time upon this Earth just as you do now.

But for a Jew who wants to truly be a Jew, there is no such truly defined place from which to hail. For all Pikesville's Jewish concentration (and it's the largest concentration outside of Israel), it's just a makeshift Jewish community that people come to because Jews live there, and leave without a second thought when better opportunities arise. It's not particularly attractive, nor is it a place where people are particularly nice to each other, it's simply a place where some Jews feel free to be Jewish without judgement. Such a place is the long-cherished dream of those who might fancy themselves "Jewish separatists", and for those who dreamed of it, it is very much a place worth defending. But for those of us who look at the fanaticism which such a dream engenders, for those of us who disapprove of the right-wing paranoia and religious fanaticism such a place can't help but breed, it is a place we can't help longing to escape, even as we feel gratitude for everything with which it provided us.

Being a Jew, by definition, means that there is no place where you should feel truly at home. There is no place on this planet where a true Jew feels accepted, and I doubt there ever will be. Many Jews thought that America, not Israel, is the true Promised Land where we can be integrated among the American population, but for many Jews integration turned out to be the same as assimilation - once you're fully American, you're no longer fully Jewish. And for all New York's Jewish heritage, it will always be a scattered, multicultural place. According to Lenny Bruce, if you live in New York, you're automatically Jewish. But if your primary attachment is to New York, then your religion is New York and there's no room for a second primary affiliation. If you live in Israel, your right to existence is questioned on a daily basis by the world, and living among other Israelis, your existence is a life permanently in conflict. Even if Israelis weren't known for being of an extremely abrasive and confrontational temperament, the challenge of creating and sustaining a productive, dynamic country in the desert, among people who wish us dead and a world that expects us to accept that wish without objection, would make any Jew who lives in Israel feel extreme rancor.

There is nothing comfortable or harmonious about a Jewish existence. I don't know the origin of the term 'People of the Book', but being a Jew is the definition of being at home nowhere but in your own thoughts, and a properly applied mind is an extremely turbulent place to live. Whether among themselves or among non-Jews, Jews thrive best in an atmosphere of conflict, defiance, opposition. Wherever we're from, our sense of place will always be filled with tension, and tension is the lifelong burden which every Jew takes on himself. There is no inner harmony to Judaism, and no sense that life should be fun. There is only constant debate and argument. The hightened state in which argument exists produces many crucial things that improve the quality of life, but it is not a life to be enjoyed.

800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet Part 2

But it was the very perilousness of Israel’s situation that made Netanyahu’s attempts to create a securer Israel so extraordinary in its danger. There were many right-wing administrations before Netanyahu, some brutally so, but the Netanyahu administration was the first in Israel’s history to so covet an honored place among nations that he would attempt to take it by force.

Benyamin Netanyahu’s relationship to the West, and particularly to America, was Shakespearean in its tragic depth. He was a modern-day Saul whose premiership followed a long series of Davids and Solomons. Like his biblical antecedent, he was the king nobody wanted - a Nixonian figure, anointed by whatever god controls destiny as a leader of convenience, isolated upon his throne and beloved by nobody. If the ‘founding generation’ of Rabin, Peres, and Sharon inspired their followers with pre-1948 visions of what Israel could become, then Netanyahu, Prime Minister for nearly as long as those three leaders combined and the first and only Prime Minster born after the State’s founding, represented with eerie exactitude what Israel seemed to be. Netanyahu exemplified everything with which the modern Israeli was stereotyped - intransigent, overachieving, bellicose, temperamental, brilliant in precisely that low cunning sort of way that history falsely associates with Judaism from time immemorial, and symbiotic with turn-of-the-century America to the point that he seemed to control it like a puppet.

And yet the ironies of how he came to exemplify the modern Israel are stupendous. Netanyahu was descended from Israel's intellectual royalty. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was one of his era’s most eminent scholars of Jewish history and served as personal secretary to Ben-Gurion’s most eminent right-wing rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His uncle, Elisha Netanyahu, was a famous mathematician and dean of Israel’s once-famed science institute - the Techniyon. His aunt, Shoshana Netanyahu, was an Israeli Supreme Court Justice, and his grandfather, Nathan Mielikowski (later Netanyahu), was a writer who moved in the earliest Zionist circles and was widely known as early Zionism’s greatest orator. As an older man living in Palestine, Mielikowski broke so definitively with mainstream Zionism that he personally defended the two men accused of assassinating the eminent left-wing Zionist leader, Chaim Arlozoroff.

Still more ironic is that Netanyahu was perhaps more American than he was Israeli. Until he turned forty, a full half his life was spent in the United States. So privileged was Netanyahu’s upbringing that he lived the majority of his formative years not in scrappy early Israel but in then-prosperous Philadelphia, where his father was a tenured professor. After five years of army service, he spent the majority of his twenties as an architecture student and economist in Boston, and spent the majority of his thirties as a high-ranking ambassador - first in DC as Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States, and then in New York as Ambassador to the United Nations. From the beginning of his career, Netanyahu was fast-tracked because of his Americanness during a period when Israel began to look to America as its sole ally of consequence. Like the far more diplomatically suited Abba Eban before him, Netanyahu spoke an English so beautifully eloquent that he easily out-orated most of his American allies in their mother tongue. In time he became, in so many ways, the right-wing leader turn-of-the-century Republicans desired for America. But only an Israeli intellectual could covet an honoured place among American conservatives at the moment when the American Conservative was the most hated person on the planet.

Whereas Yitzhak Rabin presonified a "Sabra" who seemed just as comfortable on a Kibbutz as he was with a rifle (even though he grew up in Tel Aviv and his knowledge of farming was purely by academic training), and Shimon Peres's elegant polish personified the 'Yekke' - one of the sophisticated German Jews of intellectual bent who were so important to giving Israel credibility in the world's eyes during its early years (even though he was actually from Polish peasant stock), and Ariel Sharon seemed like the ultimate 'Chayyal', the soldier who exemplified the fighting spirit that was so crucial to Israel's establishment (even though he grew more obese with every promotion), Netanyahu seemed to have nothing of Israel's pioneer spirit about him. To Israelis, he exemplified the 'Yordim,' Israelis who left Israel in the 50's and 60's and were heavily looked down upon because they left Israel at its time of greatest need. But once the Yordim and their children began to return, richer and with extremely valuable work experience, the wisdom from the outside world which they accumulated made them re-embraced. To the world, Netanyahu was Israel, but to Israel, Netanyahu was the world - the wider world they longed to see and take their place among as an equal member. 

But to Netanyahu himself, he was Israel's conscience - all that stood between Israel and the second Holocaust he unwittingly helped to facilitate. The more he saw of the wider world, the more afraid he became of it, and the more determined he became to protect Israelis who slept soundly in their beds, not knowing the horrors which could await them without his protection. At the heart of Netanyahu's worldview was his father's. His father lived to the ripe old age of 102, and in his many years, pronounced so many apocalypses that some of them had to come true. At Benzion's 100th birthday celebration, the son recalled his father uncanny prescience about antisemitic elements - having predicted the European Holocaust in 1937, the attack by Islamic fundamentalists upon the World Trade Center in the early 1990's, and towards the end of his life, the nuclear attack in Israel arranged by the Iranian government.   

In an era that saw the height of the Bush family, Osama bin-Laden, Vladimir Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orban, Tayyip Erdogan, and the toppling of Qaddafi and Mubarak, there was not a single world leader who inspired the vitriol heaped upon Netanyahu. The more hated he became by the wider world, the more determined he became to isolate Israel from her remaining allies. The more Israel’s Arab neighbors grew militant, the more his heart was hardened to match them militance for militance. The greater the gulf between the world’s criticism of Israel and its excusal of her neighbors’ intransigence, the more determined Netanyahu became to show his contempt with actions that seemed designed to make his people all the more hated.

800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet - Part 1

Chapter XVIII

By 2015, the rational postwar liberal was not quite deceased, but he was very much a dying breed, and he could almost sympathize with the worldview of Prime Minister Netanyahu. For every moment from its founding to the unspeakable manners of its destruction, the State of Israel was an encircled, besieged state; never a refuge from Diaspora but an extraordinarily compromised part of it.

For the entirety of its existence, Israel was a state that strove mightily to be a democracy, yet with every year it seemed to fall farther short of its goal. This Jewish country which never contained more than a few million Jews was encircled upon every side by three-hundred million Sunni and and Shia Muslims, and every poll indicated that the vast majority of their neighbors, at times nearly a unanimous majority, viewed Israel as an enemy combatant whose very existence should be extinguished at the nearest possible opportunity by any and all means.

Like every country, Israel was enabled to exist because of an unspeakably terrible original sin, and its original sin was to forcibly and violently relocate more than half a million native Arabs into still tinier corners of its tiny territory. Jeffrey Goldberg, a famous journalist of the time, posited the analogy that twentieth century Europe of the was a burning building out of which the Jews had to jump lest they be destroyed, and they fell onto an innocent bystander on the street - the Palestinians. It was a horrific act born of the most extreme desperation, enabled by more prosperous Arabs all too willing to allow violence upon their impoverished brethren for their own benefit, perpetrated by Israelis mostly with regret, sustained and consented to by most Israelis with a fervent hope for its eventual end. But colonization born of desperation is still colonization. Israelis grew ever more comfortable with this arrangement with each passing generation, and as Israel grew into one of the most reliably prosperous countries for business in the entire world, she saw no reason to compromise her prosperity for a people who never passed up an opportunity to pass up an opportunity. If generations of Arab despots in every Arab country were categorically unwilling to embrace greater political freedom for their Arab citizens, why should Israel embrace greater freedoms for her own? Had any neighboring state been a functional democracy for any period, they could have absorbed a Palestinian population as hungry for opportunity as anyone in the world had ever been.

At the twenty-first century’s commencement, nearly half the world’s countries suffered from authoritarian rule, and many more had authoritarian leanings that threatened their democracies at their very foundations. But not a single one of these countries earned more than a fraction of the international approbation continually heaped upon Israel - a state that always imagined herself democratic to the marrow. Israel’s actions vacillated between extreme principle and extreme opportunism, its leaders were everything from lions of liberalism to war criminals, yet criticism and censure of her remained at the highest possible level for the entirety of her lifespan.

The original Zionist dream was built upon sand both literally and figuratively. It is a fool’s errand to create a parochial state that is absolutely committed to the primacy of one religion over others, yet also to the most liberal values of secular democracy. But the doomed attempt to fuse these two concepts was the only way in which millions of Jewish lives would ever be saved, for a time at least. The tension between Israel’s religious dictates and secular aims was the tension which enabled the unprecedented worldwide prosperity of the Jewish people. No longer were Jews a people without a land, and after two thousand years, there was finally a dear price to pay for persecuting Jews.

At the same time that Israel was a triumph for Jews, it was a triumph, perhaps the ultimate triumph, of liberal principles. In nearly every conceivable sense, Israel was the vital center of worldwide discourse - geographically positioned at the absolute cross section between Asia, Europe, and Africa; politically positioned at the exact center between secular values and religious, legally positioned at the exact place between a liberal democracy and an authoritarian dictatorship; economically positioned between capitalism and socialism, and historically having a strong claim at being both the most obviously colonized and most obviously colonialist people on Earth. Upon every issue which the world debates, modern Israel was the ultimate experiment to see if the modern world, with all its contradictions, could long endure. Israel, alleged to be an exclusionist society for every day of its existence, was in its way the most pluralistic country in the world.

Absolutists of nearly all stripes - Islamists, pan-Arabists, Christianists, Libertarians, Marxists, Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, Libertarian Communists, Anarchists - decried Israel for its many sins with a viciousness it reserved only for Zionism as though Zionism was a more totalitarian ideology than any of theirs. Most of them claimed that their motive was human rights, but in fact, their enemy was the permissive modernity that allowed a state as contradictory as Israel to exist. Such worldviews cannot allow for accommodations to pragmatism, and therefore the Jewish state always struck a terrible wrench into their absolutist worldviews. Zionism was always a practical compromise to reality, an ideology as corrupt as any other, allowed to govern a country only because the world is too imperfect to allow any other way to maintain the Jewish people’s security. And for a time, Zionism did ensure that the Jewish people remained fundamentally safe from persecution.

Because of its many contradictions, Zionism was a venture destined to fail from its inception. But so long as it was permitted to exist, the modern world, with all its permissiveness, its imperfect liberties and equalities, knew that it could survive and fight another day to better itself. Jews have long been the petri dish by which the world could gauge its health. A society that allows this consistently overachieving people to flourish is a healthy one, a society that segregates its Jews is an underachieving society, and a society that kills Jews is killing itself. When a society mistreats its Jews, it is not long before every other underclass is still more mistreated. Judaism, a portable religion grounded not in faith and authority, but upon book learning and debate, has always been the yeast by which all the societies which make space for them are allowed prosperity far greater than they would ever have had without them.

800 Words: Park Heights Ave vs. North Ave Part III

V.

In case you don’t or can’t read my facebook page (or have blocked it), I’ve been discussing this war quite a bit lately on this most vapid and life-wasting of all websites. After the past two weeks, the NSA will now be fully informed of the extent of my knowledge (or more likely, ignorance) on this topic, and my surfeit of skill in the once lost art of rhetorical pugilism which the internet now revives.

I usually socialize with people who are emphatically not practicing Jews nor hold the State of Israel’s existence as one of their moral imperatives. Early on in my life, I realized that somewhere within me dwelled an anti-authority streak that made me very bad fit for religious institutions. But over time, I realize that it made me just about as bad a fit for anti-religious institutions as well. In my social life, I’ve heard a lot of disturbingly anti-Israel sentiment over time which would straighten out the curling beard of many a Rabbi. Frankly, neither side seems much deserving of respect, but were the people I associate with online largely pro-Israel militants rather than anti-Israel ones, I would gauge my delightful online trolling to upsetting their prejudices rather than the prejudices of the people I generally associate with.

What amazes me most about this foolish ‘adventure’ in persuasion is that every new posting seems to bring me a new ‘opponent’ with a new objection and a new way to contradict facts which I see as extremely basic to an understanding of an issue I’ve felt compelled to think about since I’ve been able to think. Who knows? Maybe some of their points, maybe all of them, are right. I wouldn’t bet the house on it, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve tacked my ability to feel proud of myself onto moral positions that I’ll be ashamed of myself for holding in twenty years - just as I once held certain beliefs I’m now ashamed I held. But I wonder, do they ever entertain such doubts? Do doubts ever gnaw at the assumed correctness of their beliefs? Have they ever changed them? Have they changed them more than once? Or do they simply know that they’re right and I’m wrong?

Most of their objections don’t bother me much. I think they’re wrong and misinformed, perhaps their beliefs are even destructive and noxious, but I know myself well enough to know that there is far too much about me that is noxious to hold one noxious belief against any of them. I think that 'halflings' like me who are at least partially in ‘their world’ have to stand up to them and tell them that what they believe is horrible. It's better that people I like hear it from me than grandchildren who would one day ask them how they could ever believe such evil things. Of course, it might be my grandchildren (if I ever have any) who ask such questions, but clearly, I’ve made my bed on the idea it will be someone else's grandkids.

But there was one objectant whose exchange genuinely bothered me very much and genuinely depressed me for a few days afterward. This is a person I’d come, perhaps falsely or at least prematurely, to regard as a good friend.

In the last year, I’d come to know her through music - we’d played string instruments in various chamber groups together. She was a midwife or a ‘doula’, and always on call for potential births, but it never really seemed to get in the way of rehearsal. She was a great musician, a much better classical musician than I and impeccably credentialed of course. She went to one of the premiere arts high schools in the country, and when she got a performance injury transferred from music school to one of the greatest universities in the world. She was clearly more than smart and articulate enough for such a background, and we talked and joked at a very ‘high’ level.

I don’t think I kid myself in thinking we got to know each other rather well over that time - conversing after rehearsals and such, which sometimes lasted longer than the rehearsals themselves. Occasionally the post-rehearsal became dinner and drinks. In that time I discovered that she, like me, was not only Jewish but the granddaughter of ‘survivors.’ Clearly, the paths we’d taken were very different. I'm an ersatz-member of my grandparents' generation, whereas she's lives in a hippie/hipster group house. But we clearly bonded over the similarities just as well, and it seemed like we both understood how comically ill-fit we were for the images we presented of ourselves. She was clearly as organized and hyper-competent at life's requirements as I am incompetent and bumbling. But regardless of such details, I felt that I'd stumbled on a friendship that was truly unique in my life - or anyone's; someone with whom you disagree totally but with whom you have a complete understanding and sympathy.

And yes, I don’t doubt it helped enormously that she looked like a young Claudia Cardinale, and of course I was quite attracted to her, as I’m sure every guy is who isn’t narrow-minded enough to be automatically put off by the hippie lifestyle. But even so, I’d like to think that I’m the kind of guy for whom friendship with women isn’t just a waystation. I never tried particularly hard to pursue anything more than friendship - not because I did not desperately want to, but partially because the very idea of my 5’4 220 lbs self pursuing a girl for whom so many guys were also clearly hoping for was laughable, but also because I simply couldn’t get past the choices she’d made. I was a very little in love, but I was far more jealous. God knows how my life would have been different had I her advantages. All that talent, all that privilege, all that intelligence, all that education, all that hyper-competence, and somehow it’s used in the service of dangerous pseudoscience and false notions of truth - and what’s worst about it is that she’s so smart and charismatic that people would believe her. I’d figured that she knew what I thought of her profession and beliefs, and I knew what she’d thought of mine, and on that premise we’d get along just fine.

Of course, when it came to Israel, we parted ways. We’d talked about it in the past, very politely, and I figured we’d said to one another anything that need be said. I expected online pushback from others, but not from her. That one genuinely hurt. When most other people criticize me or object to what I think, it slides off. In many cases, I can wear it like a badge of honor. But getting a fingerwagging pushback from her felt both a bit like a betrayal and made me wonder if perhaps I truly collaborate as much with evil as some people no doubt think I do - and as I wonder myself if I do in unguarded moments (and I obviously have many). Given that her response felt meant to be personal, I responded personally, and rather than use her name I called her by the name of her ultra-privileged university. As always, I amuse myself…

I was a bit relieved that she never responded back, because the tone was already pretty ugly. But the fact that such an altercation (even an online one) happened at all between me and her made me very sad. It’s just another piece of evidence that understanding between people who have real differences truly isn’t possible.

It frankly occupied more headspace than it should have for a few days. I was genuinely sad last week, the delight of picking fights simply wasn’t there anymore… and I grew rather exhausted by the constant barrage of anti-Israel attacks I saw that consistently seemed to cross the line into something much darker, which thereby began this series of posts.

But something amazing happened on Sunday afternoon which helped me to regain my equilibrium almost completely. She snubbed me. Not just an accidental, ‘sorry, I didn’t notice you,’ kind of excusable snub we all give to a person we don’t want to see that moment but apologize to later. It was one of those theatrical ‘walk six inches from you in a very crowded space while you loudly say hello yet still not acknowledge you’ kind of snubs. I figured that after I said hi, we could make fun of each other a little bit and move on as all people must. Instead, she told me, in the most indirectly direct manner imaginable, that the friendship was over. It was absolutely glorious.  

I frankly can’t swear on a bible to the fact that I was ignored, in which case I will have an enormous amount of explaining to do for this blogpost… and yet I would venture a 99.9% guess that that is exactly what happened. And yet, after getting snubbed, my mood improved enormously. It alleviated me of feeling that I caused the rupture of something truly unique in my life. Something as banal as a friendship rupture is far easier to deal with than knowing that you disappointed a person in your life who never disappointed you. I could return to my impregnably arrogant self, able to keep a lid on my doubts until the next battle was over.

(postscript: of course, a few days later, I bumped into said girl and she acted as though nothing happened and claimed no memory of the event. It's of course, entirely plausible. And I should have long since taken this post down. And yet, somehow, I haven't. Maybe I just have that much of a self-destructive urge. But what I wrote is what I wrote, and for once in my life, I'd like to feel the need no longer to take down potentially awkward writing about the emotional malestrom that is Evan Tucker every time a 'girl' is involved.)

VI.

In the 1 in a million odds case that anybody cares enough to need actual clarification about my point of view, here it is:

1. If you believe that a Jewish state should cease to exist to give way to a binational state in which Arabs and Jews coexist - your belief is antisemitic and in all likelihood going to get thousands of Jews killed, if not more.

2. If you believe that Israel has a god-given right to borders greater than what the obvious political realities of the moment will ever allow, your belief is fascist like any other fascism, only different in promoting Jews rather than scapegoating them.

3. If you believe that Israel should refrain from measures that will prevent its citizens from being safe, you are delusional, and might as well believe antisemitic things because the end result is the same.

4. If you believe that Israel should take any and all means to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, you're delusional, and going to get us all killed.

5. If you believe that Israel's use of force is absurdly disproportionate, if you believe that the use of violence countermeasures will only cause more death and not prevent it. You're too naive to be reasoned with.

6. If you believe that Isreal's #1 priority should be anything other than a continual effort to find a peaceful, two state, resolution to the conflict, if you believe that Israel must occupy Palestine indefinitely under which Palestinians continue to live as second-class citizens, you are no better than all the oppressive goyim under which Jews lived for 2,000 years.

7. If you conveniently decided only to care about human rights in the Middle East during the last few days, and joined the bandwagon only when the wagon was facing Jews; if the outrage you feel towards Israel is even a sliver larger the outrage you felt when thousands of protesters were killed and maimed in Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more than ten thousand were killed in the South Sudanese Civil War, when 1800 Palestinians were starved and killed by Bashar al-Assad in Syria, when 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, then yes, your belief is the absolute definition of an antisemitic one. I can live with it if you can. I know that there's enough noxious about me that I would never divorce friends over one noxious belief. But you ought to know what the your anger is coming from.

800 Words: Park Heights Ave. vs. North Ave. Part 2

“The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

The most incurably frustrated--and, therefore, the most vehement--among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Eve the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

III.

And then there was Hyde…

I’ve written about the experience of The Hyde School endlessly on this blog and will no doubt write about it far more endlessly before long, so I’ll simply link to this particular blogpost and move on...

When I arrived at college, I was, for all intents, a full-on radical. On 9/12, three weeks after college began, I was dominating the classroom discussion to the rage of many peers about how the Bush administration would exploit yesterday’s tragedy for its own personal gain. As it turned out, I was absolutely right, and yet, something was very very wrong.

Without going into detail, the years of Hyde left me profoundly, psychotically depressed. If those last three years happened, then any other nightmare could come true - and there were times when they genuinely seemed to do so. I did my pathetic best to fit in among other students and carry on in circumstances which easily could have killed me, but I was anything but able to do so functionally, and it’s amazing that I got through college in one piece - because that first year-and-a-half was played by the seat of my pants. In my politlcally half-informed state (better, no doubt, than the quarter-informedness of many peers) I might have become a political radical as a way of reclaiming my identity, but it didn’t work - I didn’t believe in my own beliefs, and my mind was so far gone that it wasn’t even a good social outlet for me. I felt as irreparably broken as I ever have in my life, and as I ever hope to feel. In retrospect, I don’t think I believed I’d live to see the venerable age of thirty-two at which I now reside rather comfortably. And I surely didn’t think a fairly harmonious relationship with my family was possible. But here we are…

But what saved me was politics. Music, perhaps, drove me mad. But an interest in politics, an interest in certainties based on facts, gave me the secure ground on which I was able to rebuild myself. We all need certainties, and for some people, theological certainties are enough. But what good is faith when faith can so easily be demolished by informed argument?

And what is radical politics but a new kind of theological certainty? At its base, every kind of radicalism operates on a one-sentence explanation of the world - the rich don’t owe the poor anything, or the government owes its citizens everything, or governments around the world must be overthrown - and then suits the facts to fit its theory.

IV.

When you’re involved in the arts, the very act of being a normal, boring liberal makes you sound to most other artists like Mussolini. It’s a phenomenon I first noticed in college. I can’t deny that I have an artist’s temperament, but I differ from most artists in that I’ve spent my adult life regretting that. Most people in the arts get involved because they’re normal people who are scared to death of being boring. But I, who’ve had so many brushes with mental illness, long for nothing more than to be normal.

The problem with only associating with other artists is the same problem as when you only associate with people of your own job or creed or interests. You’re shielded completely from any reality that is not your own, and the myopia of your mind breeds like rats. If you’re sheltered within a cocoon of your own beliefs without having them challenged, your mind atrophies and starts to rot.

During 2005-2006, I lived in the Negev desert with a bunch of artists and hippies. I was certainly somewhat closer to the American Center in those years, a sort of Tony Blairite liberal hawk, and one of the only people on the entire program/artists’ colony that was unabashedly pro-Israel. I swore to them that there was an ocean of gulf between me and right-wing nuts, I gave them a battery of facts to try to prove it, but nobody believed me.

I was also one of the only people on the program who knew anything about Judaism. Unlike all those hippies who wanted to come to Israel to connect to Jewish roots their families never showed them, I went to Israel as a kind of rite of passage. My parents both regretted never living there, and they were willing to give me the money to live there rather than among the ‘goyim’ as I did during college. I’m sure they were slightly horrified that most of my friends weren’t Jewish, and were scared that Judaism was going to lose me as it loses half its practitioners in America. Perhaps, so they reasoned, I’d meet a Jewish girl over there and stay ‘within the fold’ for the rest of my life - with the added benefit that I might stay in Israel, and they’d be relieved of regularly dealing with me. I certainly fell in love while I was living there (with a girl much more right-wing than I was), but it was absolutely not to be.  

I left Israel dejected on all fronts - broken friendships, unrequited love, blocked as a composer (a block that never really lifted…), too depressed to hold a job, and having to move back in with my parents in Pikesville - the one town to which I swore I’d never return.

As a learning disabled, mentally slightly unhinged, eccentric, you don’t connect well with “normal” people - no matter how much you aspire to be like them. I knew I was smarter than 999 of 1000 kids I met growing up, and yet here I am, stuck in a job that’s barely a job while many of those Pikesville kids go on to pinnacles of achievement in America (more on that later…). Temperamentally, if I connect with anyone, it’s to the more bohemian types who believe that concepts like career and family are imaginary constructs which don’t really matter.

But they do matter, they matter very much. We are human beings, biologically constructed to keep ourselves occupied with ambition. Ambition gives us a reason to plow through the difficulties which we encounter every day, if we think of the source of ambition as just a distracting ‘construct’, what reason have we to get out of bed in the morning? Being a ‘bohemian’ artist type is not embracing a way of life, it’s a justification for not having one.

And yet, you ought to have enormous sympathy for people with this type of problem, of which, of course, I’m one. Because the temptation to fall for simple explanations and easy outs is especially strong. Rather than blame ourselves for failing to live up to life, it’s easier to blame life. And perhaps we should blame life, because life is goddamn hard. The problem is not that people blame life, but that they embrace quick-fix cures for life’s hardships that will only make life worse.

And yet I can’t deny my own hunger for those quick-fix cures has never slaked.  I somehow end up at Red Emma’s a couple times a week, and I invariably feel like Travis Bickle when he drives his Taxi through Times Square, longing for the very thing which disgusts him. I sometimes find myself driving through Upper Park Heights on Saturdays and see shul-goers walking around the neighborhoods. Both these people seem so at peace with their surroundings, not giving a shit what anybody outside their community thinks of them, shielding themselves from the world’s judgement. I wish I had the lack of self-consciousness to do the same, and even if this appearance is just a mirage, I envy them their mirage.

800 Words: Delusions of Grandeur - My Unrealized Projects - Part 1

In Yiddish, we have a word which I suppose the Germans have too, but it’s such a colorful expression that I can only surmise that it went from Yiddish - a language of colorful expressions - into German - the language of functionality - rather than the other way around. The word is ‘sitzfleisch’, which literally means the flesh on your ass where you sit. When a Yiddish speaker says ‘er hat sitzfleisch’ they mean the fortitude it takes to sit down for mammoth periods of time to complete hard tasks.

Perhaps this is a delusion of grandeur in of itself, but when it comes to things I’m passionate about, I pride myself on having more sitzfleisch than 99% of the world population. But whether I have more than 99% or 1%, it’s still nowhere near enough. The failure is, I believe, not a failure of work, but a failure of nerve. It is very difficult for anyone to convince themselves to devote the best years of their lives to projects that require years and years of work for a product that may be mediocre, or worse. And so rather than stake my life on projects I’d really be passionate about, I content myself with short blogposts that can be finished in a few hours before the sitzfleisch might fall asleep.

But should I ever work up the nerve, the next few blogposts are probably going to be about the various projects I would do if I had the nerve to plow through the doubts about my ability to do them well. It's highly unlikely that a single one of them will ever be done, and perhaps its lunacy to think that I'd ever be able to accomplish any of them. But still, what follows are the projects I fantasize about doing every day.

Non-Fiction History:

The Atheist Reformation: Well, at least I’ve made a very rough beginning on this one. This project used to simply be a book about music in my head, then Alex Ross wrote a far more exhaustive book very nearly about the exact subject I wanted to cover called ‘The Rest is Noise.’

But the origin of this book is in Paris, at the famous English language bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., when I found a book I’d long been searching for in America to no avail - A Cultural History of the Modern Age. A history book which takes us through the modern world and its intellectual development from the end of the Black Plague in 1348 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Thanks to the great Clive James (long may he survive his leukemia) and his book, Cultural Amnesia, I learned about Egon Friedell - the cabaret performer and coffeehouse wit who began his adult life as a failed intellectual… sound familiar?... But in middle age, he wrote a three-volume book called ‘A Cultural History of the Modern Age’ which took the German-speaking world by storm. Apparently, every middle-class German household had a copy. In the ever-darkening climate of Nazism and Communism, this work became a symbol for Germans that learning, curiosity, humanism, and freedom are our greatest friends. When the Nazis marched into Vienna, Friedell was one of their prime targets. When they came for him, his maid stalled so he could commit suicide by jumping out of the top window of his townhouse, but not before calling out to passersby to get out of his way as he went down.

Given my excitement when I found the first two volumes in Paris, I couldn’t imagine that the actual reading would be even more exciting. But Friedell is one of the greatest writers I’ve ever had the privilege of reading - the square inch density of ideas he puts forth is only matched by the beautiful clarity with which he phrases them. Like all thinkers who have a million ideas, most of them aren’t very good, but why should that matter? What matters is their passionate profusion, and the vitality which so many ideas generate. As Friedell points out quite correctly, accuracy in history is a secondary concern. There is no empirical way of determining historical accuracy, there is only the ability to make these dead eras and people of our past live again. In the 20th century, there were as many great historians who were clearly anti-democracy as there were anti-democratic great philosophers - Spengler was a fascist German Nationalist,  Solzhenitsyn was a fascist Russian one, Eric Hobsbawm was an unapologetic communist to the end, A.J.P. Taylor a Stalinist fellow traveler, Jacques Barzun was openly anti-democracy, Niall Ferguson is a rank apologist for Empire and imperialism, Paul Johnson a theocrat and a fascist fellow-traveler. And yet all of them made towering contributions to the history of thought, perhaps contributions far greater than their philosophical counterparts, in no small part because their ideas are so wrong.

Philosophy is the study of questions, history is the study of answers. When dealing with life’s ambiguities, we all have to be as humble, timid, and and meticulous as we possibly can. One small misperception can lead to unprecedented disaster. But in the face of life’s certainties, we all have to be audacious, provocative, and cynical. What if our certainties are not as certain as we believe? We have to be certain of our certainties, or else we fall through the ground upon which we stand. The best philosophers are miniaturists, tinkering endlessly with the most infinitesimal possible material, because they know that material so small can create chain reactions that are positively seizmic. The great historians are maximalists, taking in as much of the universe within their grasp as they can, and prodding it endlessly to ensure that the ship upon which we float has no leaks.

Such a metaphor might make it seem as though history is useless, dealing with issues which are already settled and therefore of no consequence. Quite the opposite is true. The re-evaluation of events which already happened is how we plan for our futures. The more endlessly we examine past - the more endlessly we prod and probe its foundations, the more clearly we see what the future holds for us. Even if the logic of a historian is ultimately incorrect, the speculation is what’s important. The sweep of the narrative, the way the historian speculates how one event came logically out of another, is what makes history so useful. The idea that life is nothing more than simple game of chance is a concept that could only be espoused by a bad philosopher. The idea that nothing can be explained may ultimately be true, but contradicts so much evidence that it’s utterly counterproductive to believe. Furthermore, such nihilism is precisely what turns generations of kids off of history, and precisely why so many people in our generation are profoundly ignorant of where they came from.

But what of my project? My attempt to get wrong the history of the world?

Here is my idea. In roughly the mid-19th century, we finally began our ‘evolution’ to the next crucial conceptual step in human thought. Around the year 337, Emperor Constantine was said to have converted to Christianity on his deathbed, therefore Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, monotheism overthrew polytheism as the dominant worldview, and monotheism became the most dominant worldview of the world’s most dominant empires for nearly 1600 years thereafter. It took roughly three hundred years from Christianity’s gestation to the point that it conquered the world.

Just as monotheism was present in the world for many centuries before the death of Christ, atheism was present for many centuries (indeed, a number of millenia) before Darwin. But just as monotheism required the Gospels to become its pulpit so that it might transform into the Western world’s intellectual currency, atheism too requires a pulpit. Atheism’s pulpit is principally The Origin of Species, which gives us a mythology (even if it’s probably a ‘true’ mythology) that explains how the world came to be in a manner that doesn’t involve God. 200 years before Darwin’s book, Newton’s Principia Mathematica replaced God as the Cosmos’ primary mover with Gravity. But while God no longer had power over the heavens, he still had power over the Earth, a far more powerful weapon for the control of the human mind. But when Divine Creation was replaced with Evolution, God lost his primary reason for being the explanation for the world.

There is not a single part of the human worldview that matters more than a person’s view on how we were created. As Egon Friedell says in another one of his good ideas, a person’s view of religion lies at the center of his view on life itself. If you view the world as being made by a creator for an ultimate purpose, no other concept could ever color your worldview more than that.

The purpose of this book is to interpret all the various important cultural movements through that prism. So many of the movements of the next 150 years: Communism and Fascism, Psychology and Critical Theory, Emancipation from Slavery and Concentration Camps, Technological Worship and Hippie Primitivism, the Rise of the Atheist Movement and even the Resurrection of Religious Orthodoxy, can perhaps be best explained by this relatively new absence of certainty about God, and by people’s strenuous but (thus far) failed efforts to find a replacement.

History works in mysterious ways. It’s been 155 years since The Origin of Species was released to the public. It took 300 years for Monotheism to take hold in the world after Christianity’s appearance. No one can know precisely what the future can hold. But the world is always changing. Just as the appearance of Rome marked the second half of Classical Civilization’s domination, perhaps the appearance of America marks the second half of Western Civilization’s domination. Who would have thought that the most important legacy of polytheistic Greece and Rome would be monotheism? In the same way, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Christian Europe and America will be atheism.

Choral Music:

Complete Jewish Liturgies - Morning, Afternoon and Evening Services, Complete Sabbath Services, Complete High Holiday Services, Complete Psalms -

I don’t have a very sophisticated mind when it comes to technique. The only instrument I hear much of in my head is the voice, perhaps because I can sing whatever I think of out loud, and musical voices that aren’t my own are always ringing in my ears. But as I’ve documented a couple zillion times on this blog, I have a bit of an aversion to sacred music. One of the reasons I’ve bonded so well over the years with 19th century classical music is that I can understand music that is written to express the self, even if that self is very different from mine (like Bruckner’s or Franck’s), because that is how we humans communicate and understand each other. but to directly express a god that isn’t even the god I grew up with takes a bit of a leap to a faith I don’t have to a religion that is very distant from life as I’ve lived it. There is something about Josquin and Bach that isn’t in my DNA. There’s something in the music of the great sacred masters of the Western Canon that feels like a lie to me, as though they’re telling me that the suffering of this world is to a greater purpose. I don’t want to hear that our suffering was worth it, I don’t believe there is any great reward in suffering greatly. I want to hear that our suffering has been acknowledged, and that someone up there is working to alleviate it.

And yet when it comes to the sacred music from my own ‘tribe,’ the “Chazzanus,” I’m all ears. Even if I don’t much care for the texts they espouse, the worldview of this music is my worldview. And yet the picture of Chazzanut which we have is utterly incomplete. We couldn’t record the great Cantors in their services, we’ve lost the vast majority of their oral tradition, and even what we have is a pale shadow of what it once was.

The great sacred composers of the Renaissance composed masses and motets in the same way later composers composed symphonies and sonatas. For a composer of that time, it was the ultimate musical statement in a God-fearing era which just discovered that eternity can better be expressed through the greater complexity and permanence of printed music. And yet this revolution bypassed Judaism almost completely. Except for Salmone Rossi, there was not a single Jewish composer of eminence who could make the sacred Jewish texts sing ecstatically in a ‘Western’ manner until the 19th century, when secularism became the most important part of every learned person’s cultural aspirations.

Some Jewish composer needs to turn back the clock. In the same way that Stravinsky, Britten,  Poulenc,  Arvo Part, Alfred Schnittke, Frank Martin, Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninov,  Gorecki,  Penderecki,  Gubaidulina, Randall Thompson, John Tavener, conjured mythic visions of Christianities past through a contemporary lens, we need a composer who can do the same for Judaism and create a modern compositional liturgy - pieces which the layman can listen to in awe that will move him away from the ecstasies of fake religious revelations to the profundity of silent contemplation.

We’ve gotten bits and pieces of this kind of attempt from a few: Osvaldo Golijov and Steve Reich are the most obvious examples, and I suppose before them came Bernstein, Ernest Bloch and Schoenberg. But we still don’t have any great Jewish composers, not even John Zorn, who want to take on the religion wholesale after the manner of past masters. But in this era of ours, when religious belief is clearly back on the rise, how can Jewish composers of promise resist the call for this demand for much longer? Christians have the enduring monuments to their sacred texts many tens of thousands of times over, but what have we?

Translation:

The “Bible” - I don’t have any other foreign language well enough to ever try my hand at Dante, Homer, Ovid, Pushkin, Montaigne, Cervantes, Kafka… I’m not a WASPy classics major or a well-traveled private school Fulbright scholar. I’m a Jew who went to Jewish day schools, who lives a twenty minute drive from the house which he grew up in and still sleeps over there once a week. I grew up learning Yiddish and Hebrew and did my best not to pay attention as I was learning it. Insofar as I have a ‘book’ and an ability to translate it, that ‘book’ is ‘The Bible’, or at least the ‘first half.’ For me, its importance is well past even Shakespeare. Shakespeare is universal, but even within Shakespeare I feel a bit like an interloper to a culture I don’t understand. Why is it all so… dramatic? I don’t quite understand the long-winded rhetorical bombast, I don’t quite understand the fascination with great men and royal intrigue, I don’t quite understand the obsession with sexual jealousy, I don’t quite understand the cynical nihilism of his characters, I don’t quite understand the unconcern with moral questions. But The Bible is about little people, outsiders, weirdos, people like me, and how people so isolated as I can still find their voices. The Bible tells its stories with near-absolute concision (if The Bible seems long, just think of how many stories are told within), near-absolute evenness of tone, and near-absolute infinity of vision in its pages. Even more than Shakespeare, any event is possible within its cosmos. Even if I disagree with an enormous amount of the Bible, I understand it.

It’s one of the great ironies of The Bible that no writer in English can ever surpass the King James Version - a version mostly written by William Tyndale, a writer who lived a half-century before Shakespeare and who Shakespeareized the Good Book - making it far longer-breathed, far less colloquial, far more rhetorically ornamented. Perhaps it’s Shakespeare who simply ‘Tyndalized’ the theatre. The King James Bible is a work of absolute beauty. it is also a work completely of its time and place - of extreme practical use to a State which wanted to wrest English church from the control of its Latin-speaking clergy. We need a Bible for our time, and all these minimally changed new versions rendered by committee for every splintered religious sect simply doesn’t cut it.  It’s well beyond time that a ‘good faith’ effort was made by an army of translators to release The Bible from general religious use for a more secular age. I don’t want to translate the whole thing, “God knows,” it’s a horrific waste of people’s time to read Leviticus and Chronicles. But even with my rusty Hebrew, it would be an amazing adventure to try to uncover the exact meanings of what the J-writer and the Elohist meant. To re-place The Bible in the context of its origins, and by doing so, make it as close to absolute the work of revelatory literature it is rather than the work of ever-more mundane religions it’s become.