Tales from the Old New Land #4

Tales from the Old New Land #3:

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is, where to look, where or when we'll find it; but the material who, the how and whither, the warp and weft, the length, width, depth, and time; the dwelling, foundations, splendor, and even eternity, are all mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space within the space, the dimensions between where exist possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap: a place of the world of no end that by wrestling within its unbounded bounds, we bring, so it seems, a very few of its tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific indeed finite time, if only in a small indeed definite place. It is that land within which all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we glimpse its possibilities, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.

Bransk: 1899

We begin 'every-shtetl' Northeast Poland of six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers, half-Jewish, half-Christian, a place of Jewish hicks where nobody of particular distinction ever hailed from, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.

The name Kharlap is an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish merchant-grifter who realized he could mark up his prices if he lied about the eminence of his family lineage (his 'Yichus' as we say in Yiddish).

Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. It is a family that incarnates in somewhat mythical circumstances, akin to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he accepted editors' suggestions, something which this writer shall do only with the greatest reluctance).

It's just before Christmas, just before the final week of the 19th century. For we begin there because while there were as many as 40 centuries of Jews before the 19th, it is only in this century that there did there truly begin reliable historical documentation of the pluralities of every individual human, each life now acquiring meaning not only for when it was lived and what it lived among, but meaning something in itself for its own sake. "This person lived, here is where and when.' Occasionally there is even record of what they looked like, and even more occasionally, record of what they did. All things before this era are legend, and while legends are of what this work shall be made, we aspire after this brief beginning to ground this part of the work in something that seems like fact.

And so while Reb Yaakov Kharlap did not truly exist, there were thousands of men recorded by censuses like him, which even in the backward environes of 19th century Czardom, were compiled by thousands of skilled statisticians, public servants, and scientists, who gathered their findings in some of the most reliable composite we had yet of whom and what humans are.

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap is a small town Rabbi, not even the rabbi for his town but merely a Kheder instructor - Kheder being the elementary school through which shtetl children are first taught their Hebrew letters, how to pray, how to read, how to memorize pages at a time of the Torah and Talmudic tractate. He is an alte mensch of the alte shul, very free with the ruler upon the knuckles and elsewhere, and extremely proud about the brood of his twelve adolescent children: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah (a daughter), and Yoseph; no doubt proud well past the point of opleykenung.

You may recognize those names as the exact names of Jacob (Yaakov)'s children in the Old Testament or Tanakh. The reason for these names was because when the already middle aged Reb Yaakov was told that after he and his not particularly young wife's difficult years of conceiving, an angel appeared to Reb Yaakov in a dream, and in response to Reb Yaakov's insistent demand for a blessing, announced to Reb Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, which Reb Yaakov must in turn name after the twelve tribes of Israel.

The children come in six sets of twins of absurdly quick succession over five years between 1880-1885. Never mind in what order, it doesn't matter, but all of whom, like the miracle Reb Yaakov knew would happen that everyone else doubted, survived into adulthood, albeit with many illnesses along the way that were meant to test if Reb Yaakov's faith is truly unbreakable. All eleven of his sons are now Bar Mitzvahed, and while to his disappointment he has a daughter in addition to all eleven, the now septuagenerian Reb Yaakov eagerly awaits the birth any day now which his unnamed sexagenarian wife will give to what he absolutely knows will be his twelfth son, whom at his bris shall be named Binyamin.

Of course, Reb Yaakov has a twin brother himself, Ezra. Unlike Reb Yaakov who cannot make more money on his own than a small town teacher's salary can afford, Ezra is a wealthy man in the nearest Polish city., Bialystok. And while most shabboses Ezra goes to deh greicer shul in Bialystok (burned by the Germans, 1941), he has by and large abandoned Judaism as Reb Yaakov understands it for palant, kielbasa, and the occasional shiksa factory worker whom his shaygets foreman brings and takes away under night cover, and while Reb Yaakov has no idea of Ezra's disreputably goyisher habits, he is well aware that Ezra's much more 'enlightened' wife Ada has nothing but contempt for Reb Yaakov's unchanged ways, and through her perhaps correct pressure, Ezra is forced to consistently cut the sums he sends Reb Yaakov to feed his children, who now are old enough to work on their own.

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As I said, we begin in the Kheder class of Reb Yaakov, who is very free with the ruler and constantly berating his luftmenschen for their lack of attention and refusal to sit still. And incidentally to the story, in case you haven't noticed, most of the characters will speak in a kind of Yid-lish patois which gives the character of the language while still hopefully being intelligible to the average English-speaking reader, except for the gentiles, who will speak in a similar patois that mixes English with their native languages of origin. But the narration, rather, will be entirely in English, except for those many moments of subjective voice when the author forgets to hold up the wall of segregation between narration and character speech, during which moments the narrator shall carelessly slip into the Yid-lish or Pol-lish or Germ-lish or Americ-lish of his many characters..

But in any event, Reb Yaakov sits with his students at the head of an unsturdy rectangular table that has been in the property of this cheder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayeh is bored, this wild animal they call a talmid rocks the table without even realizing what he's doing, and every year, the batayt that the students find Reb Yaakov boring drives him a little more meshuggeh.

Today's drasha is a particularly poignant one for Reb Yaakov. The gerekhteh Reb always tied his lessons to the Torah Parsha of the week: and this week's parsha, Vayeshev, is the infamous Biblical story of Onan, Tamar, Yehuda, and Er. Tamar, the beautiful bride whom a series of husbands refused to blemish by making her pregnant, and always spilled their seed upon the ground during shtupzeit. Every Judaica teacher has their favorite stories, and every time Reb Yaakov's taught this story, he had to fight back tears as he thought of his wife forty-five years ago (never mind her name), how beautiful she was when they first met at the khuppah of their wedding, and how a lifetime of a childless marriage wore her beauty to withers, and just when he thought she could not get more ugly, how a second lifetime of raising twelve children wore her down further from a meeskeit into a mekhasheyfeh. This eshes khayil, who was always everything to him, to whom he gemakhted lebe to every Friday night for forty-five years, and many regular nights too, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to her neshawmeh, to the memory of the beauty she once had, and to the eybik lebe he had for this woman for whom he always knew he'd been all too mazeldik in their shatkhan, and that she'd been all to shlemazeldik; who conceded to his any unreasonable demand, whom he heard crying from other rooms in their years without kinder, and who had no time to ever cry again in the years since all those births - all so frequent and fecund. That woman he so lebed but never knew if she lebed him back, and whom always suspected his ba'ager for her destroyed both her beauty and her glik.

Und yet again, when he teaches Vayeshev, the students can't repress their gelekhter, all those mentions of sheynkeit and geshlekht, and one at a time, each of those so called talmids breaks down into a fit of giggling. Yedes yahr it's the same with these vildeh khayas, and finally, Reb Yaakov can't take it anymore:

NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA!

He just can't stand their naarishkeit anymore, their skhok v'kalos rosh, and if ever there was a moment when held back his rage before (and there weren't many), he didn't hold it back this time and lets loose at them the worst curse a Jew can utter to another Jew in 1900: "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!"

And if this were a theater work, then what follows would become a nervous breakdown of exposition in which he relates precisely the story of his life as related both above and below. He tells these pischers everything of his long life's past of which they couldn't care less, and then tells the story of being passed over as the new town Rebbe after decades of faithful service and sacrifice to a town whom he'd taught everything they ever knew. He compares these naarisher pischers to his model Yiddisher Kops (whom he raised correctly to be menschen and tzaddikim). And how Hashem has finally rewarded him for his greyceh tzuris, with a final child, whom he knows will be a son he shall name Benyamin, a boy whose tzadeykkes will put them all to shame.

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We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Yisachar, and Z'vulun, because... why not.... And the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop, the deceased last year Bransker Rebbe who seemed to live forever, and by the standards of memory before the actuarial expectations of the modern medicine era, apparently did live forever. Rabbi Schkop was born, as one of those all too heavy-handed literary coincidences would have it, on an unspecified date in June 1815. Historically minded readers would put his birthday right around the signing of the Concert of Europe at the end of the Congress of Vienna, which created the Austria and England dominated long peacetime of the European 19th century. Were anyone ever to read this book, perhaps a literary academic with a particular passion for symbolism would read the stability of the Congress of Vienna into the auspicion of Rebbe Schkop's birthdate and biography. But Jewish-minded symbolists would note that June is the month of Shavuos, when Hashem gave us His Torah and His (or it's) laws. And within Rebbe Schkop's infinitely long beard was the lawgiver of Bransk, the judge, the man whom for sixty-five long years sat all too patiently in the study of his house, which we of the shtetl and its descendants refer to as the Bet-Din, the 'House of Judgement', within which a Rabbi functioned as its Philosopher King in virtually every shtetl in the Pale of Settlement: for the Jews of his town, he was judge and jury, legislator and executive, professorial lecturer and school headmaster, giving his ear to every legal dispute from trivial to grand between any two Jews, serving as both their prosecutor and defense, so that legal issues might be solved within the community, and as many Jews as possible spared the terroristic might of the Czar's law.

And it was just in year one of Chaim Schkop's long tenure that the great Rebbe found his star pupil, the ten year old Yaakov Kharlap. Little Yankele was one of those Illuim, a potential Shas Polack whom by his Bar Mitzvah seemed able to recite all twelve books of the Talmud Bavel from memory, or at least soon he would.

On the weekend of his Bar Mitzvah, Reb Yaakov was given the Pin Test. A pin was placed at random in the book of Tehorot, it landed on daf fifty four, Reb Yaakov was asked the seventh word of line 18, he got it right (this writer is not going to take the time to look up the word himself...). He then was asked the seventh word on line 18 of page one hundred twenty six. He did the same feat when asked to name the place of specific words in Zera'im and Kodashim. Three books. But when he got to Nashim, Reb Yaakov failed the Pin Test (another piece of heavy handed symbolism for those who get the Hebrew), and never would he be a Shas Polack in his Bar Mitzvah year, and dreams of him being an illui so precocious to be celebrated throughout the pale would never come to pass. Were he to memorize the Talmud by seventeen or eighteen, just another Shas Polack would he be, good for a wedding party trick, and however good their memories, those Shas Polacks were rarely good for any khokhmah that students could actually use.

So Reb Yaakov was thirteen, Rebbe Schkop was twenty-three and thin enough to walk through a torah scroll - barely able to stand up straight even at that age. The spine of Rebbe Chaim Schkop's ectomorphic frame curved another few inches every decade until he could barely face his plaintiffs and defendants without lying down face up on a bed which Avraham the carpenter built specifically for that congested room of halacha, and which Rebbe Schkop seemed to issue his judgements from for sixteen of the eighteen hours a day he heard cases from his all too contentious nakhgeyers. From the moment in 1848 (more heavy-handed symbolism) when Rebbe Schkop could no longer stand up straight, everyone expected Rebbe Schkop to breathe his last on any day, and joyfully give give his neshawmeh to Hashem, and take with him all the freylikhkeit of the town for whose presence he brought so much joy, even if he could never dance with that freyikhkeit himself, to be replaced by that unhuman encyclopedia who'd taught every Jewish man in the town from his 1.8 million word (give or take a few) Talmudic suppository. And Reb Yaakov waited for Rebbe Chaim to die for ten years, twenty, thirty, forty... and in 1897, year 49 of Rebbe Schkop's krankeit, when two milkhikers were arguing for the fifth time that year about which of them had the right to distribute their dairy to residents on which which streets, the Rebbe fell ashlof in his bed, an old man and full of years, never to wake. And yet he still did not give up the ruakh until the end of 1898, year fifty, existing in a twilight state in which Reb Yaakov, now seventy-three himself and in the perfect health of a mensch who had twelve children at the age of sixty, had to function as both Rebbe and School Melamed, Din Torah, and father tzu tzwelf kinder, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder on the very day Rebbe Schkop went to schlaf with his fathers, and for a few hours Reb Yaakov too was presumed gathered to his people. The town makhers wrote immediately of this miraculous emergency in which both their beloved Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). The Mirrer Yeshiva immediately wrote back that this was a sign that Bransk would need a truly greys neue Rebbe, and they would send one of their most promising young khokhams. For fear of making him faint again, no one told Reb Yaakov that the Mirrers had given Bransk one of their greyster yunge khokhams to become the neuer Bransker Rebbe until the morning of the neue Rebbe's arrival, and Rebbe Yaakov only learned when he saw a boy people called Rebbe Weberman move into Rebbe Schkop's old house.

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Anyway, we not so immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which brothers? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, because... well, who cares.... And the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop.... Perhaps if he were asked, he would say he is trying to avenge his father's ignominy, but this narrator frankly doubts Z'vulun put that much thought into it.

"Don't fucking pisch on the Rebbe!" Shimon knows he shouldn't be surprised but he's stunned even so that Z'vulun broke off from their stance around the latest Yiddish paper which Tateh hasn't even seen yet, reading the latest schlock about the shandehs perpetrated on some schtik drek named Dreyfus in France.

Of course, Dreyfus is not any schtik drek. It's not that these na'ars have no idea who Dreyfus is. How would any Jew not know who Dreyfus was in 1899? And for five years, Reb Yaakov, the only mobile Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy to subscribe to a newspaper, has bludgeoned his kinder's ears with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. Every Shabbos, Reb Yaakov brought new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransk shul, his former talmids every one, who never much considered why they cared so for the tzuris of a wealthy Jewish gentleman of the French military whom even after five years of wrongful imprisonment would probably shpay on them in the street, and suddenly cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. So much so that Reb Velvl would be on the doorstep of the kheder every morning to be the first to get new news, and in the afternoon Reb Daniil would be waiting at the Kheder door, thinking he rather was the first to get new news. But the very first to get new news was inevitably Reb Yaakov's kinder, every day with the breakfast Reb Yaakov's wife would quietly get up at four-thirty every the morning to prepare so that she could serve them at five thirty so they could milkh deh kauz und plau de felds before they go to shul for the Shacharis minyan and then to cheder and when they reached a certain age Jews tend to refer to as adulthood, to arbet.

By this time, l'affair Dreyfus had been ongoing for well over five years, but Reb Yaakov's obsession did not truly begin until a bit over two years ago.

Five years ago, Reb Yaakov might have read about Dreyfus in some Yiddish paper, but he would have just been another oysshteller climbing the goyisheh ladder and having the kind of shlekhter mazel every Yid should expect when they think they're a greyceh goy.

By three years ago, Alfred Dreyfus had probably come onto the mental radar of a man like Reb Yaakov, as it began to become known that Dreyfus's imprisonment through exile was a framing to cover for a mer vikhtik officer with a much more becoming name for treachery: Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Why put a Dreyfus away and not an Esterhazy? Well, for five-hundred years, the Esterhazys were the second-most important dynasty of the Austrian Empire - almost literally, they were the 'Hungary' in 'Austria-Hungary.' While however wealthy individual Dreyfuses ever became, Dreyfus is a spelling of the name 'Trevus', a German surname meaning 'man from Trier', a German town from which all Jews were expelled in 1555. Do the math...

But it had to only have been in 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was reopened and Major Esterhazy was indicted for court martial that the Reb Yaakov's of the world truly began to go meshuggeh. It was only when Esterhazy was tried under court martial and acquitted within forty-eight hours that their sense of injustice truly farbrented for this French Yid who barely even knew he was a Yid and doubtless wished more than ever that he wasn't. A sense that only increased when Esterhazy fled to England, when Dreyfus was re-tried and found guilty yet again under extenuating circumstances, and reached its fever pitch as the mob outside the courthouse chanted not 'Death to Dreyfus,' but 'Death to the Jews.'

Among the Bransker, the Dreyfus-khopteh is now in year three. The new Rebbitzin, Batsheva Weberman, loudly weeps in synagogue whenever she hears the name of Dreyfus. Khazzen Nudler puts in a special M'shebeirach every Shabbos for Dreyfus, to which there inevitably is the week's most ostentious choir of Amens.

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.....So we immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, because who gives a shit..., and the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of the old Bransker Rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Schkop.....

"Don't fucking pisch on the Rebbe!" Shimon knows he shouldn't be surprised but he's stunned even so that Z'vulun broke off from their stance around the latest Yiddish paper which Tateh hasn't even seen yet, looking at this ridiculous bild of this kadkokhes in France.

"Look at the schmattes on this amoretz! This guy's as Jewish as the shtupping Pope!"

"Look at the stripes on his fucking ho

"And what the shtup is that mustache?

"How can a Yid who dresses like that ever not be guilty?"

"And what's with all the fucking knepls on his shirt? What color is that even?"

"It's, you won't believe this... Yosef told me.... The uniform is red, white, and blue!"

"Reyt, weiss, und bleu? How the fuck do the zelners go to the feld without the other soldiers knowing where to shoot them from a hectare away?!"

"Even a feinschmeker like this guy wouldn't walk into a barber and say 'MAKE THE MUSTACHE LOOK LIKE THE HAIR OVER MY PUTZ!"

"Seriously, why the shtup do all these alte trombeniks give so many fucks about some French faygaleh?"

Movements of Jewish History - First 3700 Words

This is not a podcast, this is not a book, this is not even history. As a work of scholarship, it is absolutely worthless. As a document for policy advocacy, this has negative worth. We record these writings merely as a way to document a series of speculations about the nature, meaning, and purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, an experience, hurtled through eons of episodes so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the infinite light of meaning, that the lessons to learn seem to have no end: connected both to the essence itself of being and thought, and also to life lived in every experience every day. Or, perhaps, these speculations have no essential meaning at all.

But from a certain point of view, from many points of view, world history, and/or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who lived the experience of history's main events. And whether our outlooks are sacred or secular, I would venture at least a 50% likeliness that this coincidence is not simply because Judaism is blessed or chosen by God, and I would venture no guess that Jews and Judaism are in any manner superior to others and their faiths, nor would I ever have such chutzpah to speculate that the story of Judaism is somehow connected to the fundaments of the ultimate plan and/or purpose of the world that a divine being sets in motion for us to realize; but rather, because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism's always been placed at the exact center of the world story. Whether a divine being placed us at there is not the purview of this podcast, but the story of the Western world is tethered to the Jews and Judaism at their umbilicals, and now, in 2020, as the Western river of history seems potentially at its mouth, flowing itself as an overdocumented tributatary into an ocean of world history, the story of the world still seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.

And this centrality need not be explained through any theory of Jewish superiority, or any theory of the of a Jewish god's superiority - though those are regrettably popular Jewish explanations; but in this explanation, at the center of the Jewish story is a series of accidents.

The first accident is a mere accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within this tiny junction at the center of every map, one of the many peoplehoods who inhabited it synthesized the influences of their experiences with surrounding geographical environs into the practice of an intellectual, spiritual, and moral revolution which, becacuse of their central geographical proximity to the entire world, was able to be more exported in all directions more easily than any other worldview. That's accident #1.

So that first accident, a geographical accident, causes a second accident, which is really a a long series of accidents which still have not ended. From its very beginnings, the people of Israel seemed to synthesize ideas of their neighbors most significant to ancient history. Three idea of consequence particularly:

Idea 1: taking the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt; particularly when, during the period of Hebrew slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. From this, Israelites perhaps gained the idea of a single god, to whom not a single miraculous natural feature was attributable but many seemingly miraculous feats of nature - perhaps even all feats of nature.

Idea 2: the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them upon their emigration to Canaan. From this, Israelites perhaps gained a concept of a divinity concerning itself with affairs of humanity more than affairs of nature, and therefore more concerned with the particularities of human behavior.

Idea 3: the complex legal codes of morality from Babylon, perhaps Hamurabi's, of which like codes must surely have become prolific in nearby civilizations, perhaps the best evidence of which is the religio/moral revolution in Canaan which could only have flourished with the aid of a sophisticated ethical system. When complex moral codes are combined with the idea of a singular god with human qualities whose powers border upon omnipotence, the beliefs and judgements of such a being, both human and omnipotent, must apply not only among the people and places where this god's rule is unquestioned, but in all places and times, even and perhaps especially in those places where his word has never been preached.

Together these three concepts created a singular, universal, and exportable morality.  And therefore, one can view the place in which this revolution incubated as a petrie dish of thought, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, and far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around the Tigris and Nile but to include ever new parts of the world, so too each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel influence upon them. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the western half of Asia. As common era Jewish diaspora reached the second half of its second millenium, the world story still expanded to include the Americas on one side and East Asia/Oceania/Australia on the other, and as the centuries pass into the third millenium of this common era, these previously unknown corners of the world to commonly shared history have only accumulated greater and greater influence upon world affairs, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.

The third is as follows:

As we hope to have already established, these tensions of world influence operated at their ultimate point of pressure in this geographical node between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and this diversity of influence created a revolutionary peoplehood. Once a peoplehood in Canaan was so revolutionzied, a series of more powerful neighbor civilizations - be they Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and/or Roman - found these Israelites and their subversive beliefs to be such a threat that these Hebrews must be neutralized by any and all means over a period of a millennium, until such time as the most powerful civilization of them all, the Roman Empire, decimates the Hebrews into  the same basic non-existence to which Rome brought hundreds of other peoplehoods for which thereafter was little record or none. But because of this same geographic tension that causes an overwhelming diversity of intellectual influences, this decimated peoplehood created yet another series of intellectual and moral revolutions.

The first of which, and this is accident #3, is a Rabbinic revolution which teaches almost precisely the opposite precepts to the original revolution of prophetic revelation:

The original moral revolution of the Hebrews, a pre-classical, mystic revolution of revealed truth, espoused a deity who preached a universal worldview, applicable to all times and all places. But this next moral revolution is a thousand years later, and established a long series of particulars within this universal morality. After 500 years of exposure to Greek culture in forms Syrian from the Selucid Dynasty, Egyptian from the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and Macedonian from the Antigonid Dynasty, all of them broken apart residues after the brief conquests of Alexander the Great. Taking with them exposure by either text or osmosis to the Socratic dialectics of Plato and Zeno. But while the Socratic dialogues were a kind of Athenian declaration of philosophical independence from the Homeric era of myths and gods, the Mishna and Gemara were a retethering back to the era of primal myths for a Judaism which had now assimilated the intellectual nuance of classicism. As Socrates's death showed, Greek philosophy and skepticism provided a radical break with its past, but by this time, the truly radical Israelite break with its Semitic past was already a millennium ago. For the Hebrews of the Roman era, the truly revolutionary act would not be a second radical break with their past, but rather, radical continuity: to preserve the essence of a past culture but nevertheless make it capable of evolving to the accommodation of new eras' requirements, rather than every epochal shift necessitating a radical break, as one had to figure every pre-historic attempt at civilization did, which is perhaps why recorded history as we know of it began only when it did.

Perhaps it is paradoxical, even now in 2020, to declare that the second revolution of Israel was a revolution of conservation, a coup d'etat of permanent stability, but this revolution was a statement of labyrinthinely complex principles over three hundred years, declaring in the first that all the lessons and laws of Judaism had entirely been received and permanently fixed, perhaps in part because there was already so much to conserve, but also in part because there was no guarantee that Jews would be able to create any more history within their formative land. The Sages of the early common era knew very well that their time as the principle occupants of the land of Israel was severely limited.

Each new preeminent civilization had come to Israel, correctly perceiving this geographic node between the continents as being of the most vital strategic importance, and each coming to grief because they could not control the vital people within this vital land - each new preeminent civilization more powerful than the last, both in their capabilities for creation and destruction. Perhaps one could even say that the Common Era was created because the Roman Empire had such extreme capability compared to preceding Empires that they could build and destroy civilizations in manners of which even the most inventive civilizations before them lacked. And therefore, in a new rung of human evolution, with entirely new creative and destructive capabilities, the dynamism of Israeli minds, which already seemed relatively extreme in "per-keppe" comparison to any other peoplehood, had to be refocused entirely for a new existential challenge: Preserve the identity and history of Israel in foreign lands. Continually interpret and re-interpret the foundational texts for the requirements of every new era and place. Rather than worship according to the unquestioned revelations of prophetic authority, constantly question, constantly discuss, constantly engage in dialogue, and if not yet among the laymen, then at least among the sages, one rabbi to another, questioning each other page by page, question by question, across geographical space and time over more than half-a-millennium, creating a mosaic that, as often is commented lately, looks uncannily like a 2010s hypertext. And by doing so, and declaring that the truth of Judaism is not in the skies, which is not just how Abraham and Moses would conceive of religion, but also Plato, but here on earth, for we, the living, to determine and actuate according to the pressing needs of our time and place. And consequently, the religion of the Israelites, formerly tied as all worship was, to the land, is transfigured into a portable religion, newly designed with the capability to practice in the least sympathetic places and times, and rather than center a religion upon a covenant of land, centers the religion upon the book which promises that now mostly broken covenant of land.

That's accident #3.

Accident #4, which really is an infinite recursion of accidents that still occur every minute of every day to the very moment you're hearing my voice, is that once this religion becomes well and truly portable, the Israelites, now Jews, become not only far flung colonies occupied distantly by ancient imperialists, but occupying presences, fully resident in the land of their rulers. 

Jews become a separate nation within every nation, who therefore, and let's use a paradoxical phrase: by the closeness of their distance, "the closeness of their distance" - meaning that the many dissimilarities of Jews to their neighbors becomes accentuated by their continual presence in the lives of their host countries. All other groups eventually assimilate into one another: the Prussians, the Bavarians, the Saxons, and the Wurtemburgians all had relatively distinct identities, but by 1871 their notable features were similar enough to unite as a singular German nation for Germans, and yet the Jews, even the assimilated Jews, so crucial to the development of a united Germany, were thought too essentially dissimilar to ever be considered fully German, and eventually even partially, leading to apocalyptic results. The Castillians, the Aragonians, the Leonians, and the Navarrians all eventually became the Spanish, more or less..., but due to religious differences, Spanish Jews remained considered their own people, unworthy of citizenship on Spanish soil, and in, of all years, 1492, were given the ultimatum of conversion or expulsion, and the conversions of those who chose the former path were never fully trusted, and led to tens of thousands of tortures and auto-da-fe, meaning execution by burning at the stake.  In both cases, it seemed to be just at the moment of the country's greatest triumph, their fondest dreams, that they turned so virulently to Jew hatred. Obviously the circumstances were much more complicated, and as time goes on this extremely ADHD podcaster hopes to have sufficient dedication to this project to elaborate on said distinct complications and the like. On the other hand, during the Era of Black Death, beginning roughly 1348, and killing anywhere from a third to two thirds of the European population, Jews, who survived in far greater numbers by preserving their communities with far better hygenic practices, were often deemed to be the cause the Christian communities' death by poison, usually of the wells, and in these moments of civilizational weakness, Jews too were scapegoated in manners just as barbaric, entire communities of Jews around Europe slain and burned by the hundreds, and occasionally the thousands, until such time around 1400 as there may have been as few as 350 Ashkenazi Jews in the entire world. 

In moments of great triumph and great tragedy, both moments of extreme fervor when critical ambiguity is utterly forgotten, the excited masses seem to direct their heated passions toward Jews, perhaps always known for their nuanced and complex reasoning, which is itself often thought to disguise trickery, and these host countries inevitably indulge in sadistic concupiscience to a point well past the typical battery and rapacity of everyday crime, and rather than the crimes of sufferance and victimhood which typically befall ethnic minorities in all countries, that which is perpetrated upon Jews so often becomes crimes of eradication. 

So what causes these outbursts of "meta-mass violence" against Jews in era after era, country after country, that are too large to be explained as merely sadistic? All throughout the epochs, the violence against Jews is described in language like the attempted lancing of a wound, nations, or faiths, are the body, and while Jews are clearly part of the nation and its prosperity, this wound's pain is so great that civilizations feel as though they must amputate or irradiate whole parts of the national body in order to rid themselves of this ethnic pestilence. What has it been within Jews that eventually seems to bring out the desire in their host countries for their complete eradication and annihilation? And now, relevant to 2020 when the position of the world seems so precarious yet the position of Jews seems as close to impregnable as Jewish history ever allows, what are the chances of it happening again in our lifetimes?

Insofar as there can ever be an answer to a question so vast and painful to meditation, I believe that part of the answer must lie within an inability to forgive for Jews making their host countries come face to face with moral ambiguities. In plain English, many gentiles cannot forgive Jews for making them realize that life is complicated.  

Perhaps reality is not this way, but it would seem as though everywhere Jews have gone, we have been the barometer of your civilization. So far as I and any other Jew I've spoken to or read ever seemed to know, we have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably allege, but we were, to use a metaphor from the extremely un-Jewish Christopher Hitchens - no matter what his ethnic origins...., the "yeast" that leavened your societies' rise. When we were your honored guests, your civilizations prospered. When you did us dishonor, your civilizations declined. As we've hopefully established at the beginning of this, the reason would not seem to be that God is watching over us and keeping score of who is doing well by His chosen people, the reason is probably deceptively simple: a civilization well-disposed toward its guests is a civilization that values the exchange of knowledge, tolerance, progress, and is therefore destined to improve. 

One could make the argument, and I will make it at length in due time, that Judaism; the two millennium normative Rabbinic Judaism which is practiced unto our generation, revolves entirely upon these practical accommodation to the realities of all given moment and situation. Again and still yet again, the long-term survival of the Jewish people comes upon inevitable dependence upon practical adjustment to these realities whose dangers are quite often stark in extremis.   

But it is precisely this practicality, this ambiguity, this subtlety, so often perceived as trickery and manipulation, which inevitably runs its shelf-life in every long-term situation to which Jews are deposited. In every dominant Western society over the common era, Jews seemed to arrive en masse just before the moments of their rise to the peak of world civilization. Is that in itself a coincidence (or 'accident?') or is there a direct correlation? Did Jews attach themselves to these rising countries to ride their waves of prosperity and reap the harvests of their prosperity, or were Jews directly responsible for facilitating the country's rise? And even if it's the former, is there anything at all wrong with that? While even if it's the latter, is there anything at all beneficial about such a union if it obviously ends time and again with so much tragedy? And if the answer is both, did Jews facilitate a country's rise only so they could benefit from it at the expense of others who would have been better off had they never met a Jew? These are not questions that generally occur to Jews, but they do occur to the gentiles who are always dealing with these unfamiliar people whose reputation precedes them in country after country, and they are questions at a clearance of ambiguity which most people do not have the cerebral wherewithal to wrestle. But even if these questions do not occur to Jews themselves, this level of ambiguous thought is endemic in the Jewish experience, and somehow Jews carry with them this capacity for ambiguity to wherever they journey, and they bring to their new countries these new tools for critical thought: in economics of course, but also nearly as obviously in what's probably the most crucial of all subjects to how we live: moral philosophy. Certainly more on that anon....

This intellectual ambiguity, this constant debate whether it's talmudic disputation or the infinitesimally finer points of Zionist politics or price kibbitzing at a deli counter, seems, in one way or another, endemic to Jewish life. This kind of parsing what probably seems like bupkes is ultimately the means by which Jewish life continues from age to age, because out of the trillions of notions debated in the Jewish community over the millennia, some keyner point of disputation is ultimately the difference between survival and death. To sustain a community and civilization from civilization to civilization, two-thousand years past what might have been a peoplehoods natural death, requires that level of care to sort out every ambiguous detail, and to breathe life into the ambiguous that creates reality where there once was Atzmus, or essence. 

And this psychic difference between these Jewish and the native civilization of their lands, has entailed, over and over again, that Jews have become the main subject to which so many nations direct centuries of their mental space as they obsessively ponder how Jews can simultaneously live among others for centuries, be so incredibly influential in the lives of nation after nation, and yet seem to remain a community entirely separate. Though, of course, the Jewish community and the gentile community are never entirely separate. Thousands and thousands of Jews assimilate in country after country, give the best of themselves to the lives of their surrounding society rather than to their faith and peoplehood, and directly influence the lives of their countries in ways that seem completely as though anyone else could have done what they've done, and yet, when people squint, they inevitably perceive that Jewish ambiguity, that invisible worm of difference that irrevocably changes the society. Creating still more doubt, still more confusion, still more ambiguity, and still more chance for tension between the host countries and their extremely consequential guests. And it is in this manner that Jews directly influence the lives of every nation upon whose territory they live, and though in everything the Jewish people's mentality may seem completely unrelated to the mentality of the host country, each country has even more intimate influence on the history of Jews, as millions of Jews live their lives as Americans, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Dutchmen, Iberian/Spaniards, and yet also live lives as Jews - it seems to some as though Jews live twice while citizens of their host nations live once. And these accident of influence and co-dependence, of ambiguity and tension, of bond and resentment, of rise and fall, is accident #4.

Movements of Jewish History - First 2000 Words

This is not a podcast, this is not a book, this is not even history. As a work of scholarship, it is absolutely worthless. As a document for policy advocacy, this has negative worth. We record these writings merely as a way to document a series of speculations about the nature, meaning, and purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, an experience, hurtled through eons of episodes so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the infinite light of meaning, that the lessons to learn seem to have no end: connected both to the essence itself of being and thought, and also to life lived in every experience every day. Or, perhaps, these speculations have no essential meaning at all.

But from a certain point of view, from many points of view, world history, and/or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who lived the experience of history's main events. And whether our outlooks are sacred or secular, I would venture at least a 50% likeliness that this coincidence is not simply because Judaism is blessed or chosen by God, and I would venture no guess that Jews and Judaism are in any manner superior to others and their faiths, nor would I ever have such chutzpah to speculate that the story of Judaism is somehow connected to the fundaments of the ultimate plan and/or purpose of the world that a divine being sets in motion for us to realize; but rather, because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism's always been placed at the exact center of the world story. Whether a divine being placed us at there is not the purview of this podcast, but the story of the Western world is tethered to the Jews and Judaism at their umbilicals, and now, in 2020, as the Western river of history seems potentially at its mouth, flowing itself as an overdocumented tributatary into an ocean of world history, the story of the world still seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.

And this centrality need not be explained through any theory of Jewish superiority, or any theory of the of a Jewish god's superiority - though those are regrettably popular Jewish explanations; but in this explanation, at the center of the Jewish story is a series of accidents.

The first accident is a mere accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within this tiny junction at the center of every map, one of the many peoplehoods who inhabited it synthesized the influences of their experiences with surrounding geographical environs into the practice of an intellectual, spiritual, and moral revolution which, becacuse of their central geographical proximity to the entire world, was able to be more exported in all directions more easily than any other worldview. That's accident #1.

So that first accident, a geographical accident, causes a second accident, which is really a a long series of accidents which still have not ended. From its very beginnings, the people of Israel seemed to synthesize ideas of their neighbors most significant to ancient history. Three idea of consequence particularly:

Idea 1: taking the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt; particularly when, during the period of Hebrew slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. From this, Israelites perhaps gained the idea of a single god, to whom not a single miraculous natural feature was attributable but many seemingly miraculous feats of nature - perhaps even all feats of nature.

Idea 2: the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them upon their emigration to Canaan. From this, Israelites perhaps gained a concept of a divinity concerning itself with affairs of humanity more than affairs of nature, and therefore more concerned with the particularities of human behavior.

Idea 3: the complex legal codes of morality from Babylon, perhaps Hamurabi's, of which like codes must surely have become prolific in nearby civilizations, perhaps the best evidence of which is the religio/moral revolution in Canaan which could only have flourished with the aid of a sophisticated ethical system. When complex moral codes are combined with the idea of a singular god with human qualities whose powers border upon omnipotence, the beliefs and judgements of such a being, both human and omnipotent, must apply not only among the people and places where this god's rule is unquestioned, but in all places and times, even and perhaps especially in those places where his word has never been preached.

Together these three concepts created a singular, universal, and exportable morality.  And therefore, one can view the place in which this revolution incubated as a petrie dish of thought, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, and far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around the Tigris and Nile but to include ever new parts of the world, so too each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel influence upon them. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the western half of Asia. As common era Jewish diaspora reached the second half of its second millenium, the world story still expanded to include the Americas on one side and East Asia/Oceania/Australia on the other, and as the centuries pass into the third millenium of this common era, these previously unknown corners of the world to commonly shared history have only accumulated greater and greater influence upon world affairs, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.

The third is as follows:

As we hope to have already established, these tensions of world influence operated at their ultimate point of pressure in this geographical node between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and this diversity of influence created a revolutionary peoplehood. Once a peoplehood in Canaan was so revolutionzied, a series of more powerful neighbor civilizations - be they Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and/or Roman - found these Israelites and their subversive beliefs to be such a threat that these Hebrews must be neutralized by any and all means over a period of a millennium, until such time as the most powerful civilization of them all, the Roman Empire, decimates the Hebrews into  the same basic non-existence to which Rome brought hundreds of other peoplehoods for which thereafter was little record or none. But because of this same geographic tension that causes an overwhelming diversity of intellectual influences, this decimated peoplehood created yet another series of intellectual and moral revolutions.

The first of which, and this is accident #3, is a Rabbinic revolution which teaches almost precisely the opposite precepts to the original revolution of prophetic revelation:

The original moral revolution of the Hebrews, a pre-classical, mystic revolution of revealed truth, espoused a deity who preached a universal worldview, applicable to all times and all places. But this next moral revolution is a thousand years later, and established a long series of particulars within this universal morality. After 500 years of exposure to Greek culture in forms Syrian from the Selucid Dynasty, Egyptian from the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and Macedonian from the Antigonid Dynasty, all of them broken apart residues after the brief conquests of Alexander the Great. Taking with them exposure by either text or osmosis to the Socratic dialectics of Plato and Zeno. But while the Socratic dialogues were a kind of Athenian declaration of philosophical independence from the Homeric era of myths and gods, the Mishna and Gemara were a retethering back to the era of primal myths for a Judaism which had now assimilated the intellectual nuance of classicism. As Socrates's death showed, Greek philosophy and skepticism provided a radical break with its past, but by this time, the truly radical Israelite break with its Semitic past was already a millennium ago. For the Hebrews of the Roman era, the truly revolutionary act would not be a second radical break with their past, but rather, radical continuity: to preserve the essence of a past culture but nevertheless make it capable of evolving to the accommodation of new eras' requirements, rather than every epochal shift necessitating a radical break, as one had to figure every pre-historic attempt at civilization did, which is perhaps why recorded history as we know of it began only when it did.

Perhaps it is paradoxical, even now in 2020, to declare that the second revolution of Israel was a revolution of conservation, a coup d'etat of permanent stability, but this revolution was a statement of labyrinthinely complex principles over three hundred years, declaring in the first that all the lessons and laws of Judaism had entirely been received and permanently fixed, perhaps in part because there was already so much to conserve, but also in part because there was no guarantee that Jews would be able to create any more history within their formative land. The Sages of the early common era knew very well that their time as the principle occupants of the land of Israel was severely limited.

Each new preeminent civilization had come to Israel, correctly perceiving this geographic node between the continents as being of the most vital strategic importance, and each coming to grief because they could not control the vital people within this vital land - each new preeminent civilization more powerful than the last, both in their capabilities for creation and destruction. Perhaps one could even say that the Common Era was created because the Roman Empire had such extreme capability compared to preceding Empires that they could build and destroy civilizations in manners of which even the most inventive civilizations before them lacked. And therefore, in a new rung of human evolution, with entirely new creative and destructive capabilities, the dynamism of Israeli minds, which already seemed relatively extreme in "per-keppe" comparison to any other peoplehood, had to be refocused entirely for a new existential challenge: Preserve the identity and history of Israel in foreign lands. Continually interpret and re-interpret the foundational texts for the requirements of every new era and place. Rather than worship according to the unquestioned revelations of prophetic authority, constantly question, constantly discuss, constantly engage in dialogue, and if not yet among the laymen, then at least among the sages, one rabbi to another, questioning each other page by page, question by question, across geographical space and time over more than half-a-millennium, creating a mosaic that, as often is commented lately, looks uncannily like a 2010s hypertext. And by doing so, and declaring that the truth of Judaism is not in the skies, which is not just how Abraham and Moses would conceive of religion, but also Plato, but here on earth, for we, the living, to determine and actuate according to the pressing needs of our time and place. And consequently, the religion of the Israelites, formerly tied as all worship was, to the land, is transfigured into a portable religion, newly designed with the capability to practice in the least sympathetic places and times, and rather than center a religion upon a covenant of land, centers the religion upon the book which promises that now mostly broken covenant of land.

That's accident #3.

Leon Fleisher - A Musical, Not Personal, Appreciation

Unless there is no second act, you can't judge an artist by who they were at thirty any more than you can judge a human being. However promising, however accomplished, they haven't yet lived a life, their story has yet to be written. Some thirty year olds have already experienced the heartbreaking setbacks of how excruciatingly complicated life can get, but most who have by that age are not superachievers at the top of their fields.

When Leon Fleisher was thirty, he was one of a long series of (North) American pianists who looked to be the new Horowitz, the new Rubinstein, the new Rachmaninov.... Kapell, Katchen, Cliburn, Kuerti, Gould, Graffman, Janis, Istomin,... and after Kapell died in a plane crash, Fleisher was the most likely of them all to become the unquestioned king of the music world.

When you listen to those famous recordings from roughly 1960, you hear a young genius, but you don't yet hear a true artist. The infinite intelligence, technique, and fire was just about perfect for a piece like Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Beethoven piano concertos are of course magnificent, but as great as Beethoven's piano concertos are, they're not quite his best pieces (except 4, which God dictated to Beethoven over zoom). The Beethoven piano concertos are at their worst, glorious showpieces, at their best, lion's roars from the keyboard, full of fire and warmth, always young man's music. But except in the 4th concerto, where Beethoven's emotional ambiguity brings out the young Fleisher's weaknesses, there's not much in the Beethoven concertos that demand the emotional and artistic maturity of Beethoven's late sonatas, late quartets, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, even the Pastoral and the Eroica. Fleisher puts every note and dynamic in its right place as though etched in copper and zinc. There were a few truly magic moments in the quieter passages that foretasted the musician he would later become, but mostly, he still sounds as though playing to please older mentors, and they must have been overjoyed. Yuja Wang has that same quality today: she's a genius, but she still plays like the perfect piano student. It's hard to believe she won't have some similarly fraught path to find herself along her journey.

On the other hand, while famous recordings of the Brahms concertos are rightfully legendary, they're sort of legendary for the wrong reasons. I would venture a sizable amount of money that note-for-note, the Brahms piano concertos are the two hardest pieces to play in the standard piano repertoire. There are other pieces that demand more intellectually, more emotionally, and more physical dexterity and stamina, but no two pieces demand so much of them all. They are with an eye toward draining the player, and the pianist playing through his exhaustion is as much part of the music's journey as the exhaustion of a Wagnerian heldentenor in Act III.

The intelligence and technique of this playing is practically infinite. Fleisher made these recordings roughly contemporaneously to as august a pianistic personage as Rudolf Serkin, and with the same orchestra and same conductor. But when you compare the two, there's no comparison. Serkin may have grown up in the recently deceased Brahms's Vienna, but Serkin did not understand Brahms. He approached this music with such rigor and severity that it sounded no different from Beethoven. But Fleisher intuitively understood all those weird Brahmsian harmonic contours. Serkin's notes stand as firm as a piece of Bauhaus architecture, Fleisher ebbs and flows like the Danube. So it wasn't just technique and intelligence, it was emotional maturity so far beyond his years.

And yet this is still a 30 year old, there's no way Fleisher was any more exhausted by the end of these pieces as he was at the beginning. And however intelligent, you can still hear the un-Brahmsian steel in the fingers. One can almost hear how this player practiced his fingers into an early grave. When you hear the mature Brahmsians of that time play these pieces: Rubinstein, Backhaus, Schnabel, the technique is nowhere near so infallible, but you hear musicians whose brains and fingers and hearts have lived a lifetime with this music. Fleisher understood this music from the outside in, but he still did not illuminate it from the inside out. To me, Brahms is is the most emotionally complicated, 'adult' composer there is (Mozart and Schubert come close), and every few bars there's a new shift in perspective, a new emotional ambiguity. These masters who get Brahms from the inside out find a different color and approach every shift in mood. That is what true musicmaking sounds like, while at that age, Fleisher still sounds, as perhaps he must, like a brilliant imitation of them. And yet when you hear his contemporary, Julius Katchen, do the same pieces, there's something different about it - fallible, vulnerable, a human being making music rather than a god. Katchen was only five years older than Fleisher, but in less than a decade he would be dead from cancer - and in his playing there is already something of that magic vulnerability which sounds as though he already knows how complicated life can get in a way Fleisher doesn't yet. When I was roughly twenty, I heard Fleisher attempt the Brahms First Piano Concerto again for the first time in well over thirty years, it was a little sad. The steel was of course gone, and even in his early-to-mid seventies Fleisher simply did not have that adult mixture of sincerity and guile a great Brahmsian requires. Pianists attest to the fact that however easy Brahms sometimes sounds, he might be the hardest of the major piano composers to play, and a great Brahms pianist is one of the rarest of all musical things, and whatever Fleisher's greatness, he was not quite that.

At this point, I have to make an obvious admission: this is not a biographical appreciation, this is a musical one - a not particularly accomplished musician's attempt to understand one of the most accomplished of his era. So regardless of the details of how he came back to music, the one biographical concession I will make is that the Fleisher, who must have been the world's greatest piano student, became the world's greatest piano teacher. When he started making records again, he was almost an exact opposite sort of musician. The bullet-etched precision had of course vanished, but in its place was a completely different sort of precision. The recorded output was of course tiny, but there were so many notes so perfectly placed not within the barline but within the listener's inside, each of them paced and shaded so perfectly within the listener's internals that for one of the few times in my concertgoing life, I literally heard multiple listeners weep openly.

The real Fleisher was a very different sort of artist, even from his teachers. If he continued on his trajectory as. a young man, he might have become a pianist like Robert Casadesus or Maurizio Pollini - brilliant, eclectic in his tastes, with technique so secure that every note sounds permanently etched in a musical firmament, perfectly capable of fire but expressively on the cool side. But Fleisher clearly suffered too much for that to become his musical personality.

Fleisher's great teacher, Artur Schnabel, gave performances just as musically meaningful, but Schnabel was restless. When you hear Schnabel's playing, you hear his unfathomable intelligence working out ever new harmonic implications. Each performance of a piece he'd played a hundred thousand times sounded like a new experiment with ever new findings. Among today's piano gods, perhaps Radu Lupu or Krystian Zimerman is much closer to that spirit. But as a mature artist, Fleisher was perfectly serene, he sounded as though he'd already lived through all within music there was to live through, and he simply was there to share his wisdom with us. Wilhelm Kempff sounded very much like that, perhaps so did Alfred Brendel, and among today's mature artists of the keyboard, Andras Schiff does too. There's a spiritual centeredness to it, and while the notes stand firm, the lack of further search could never be mistaken for inhibition or autopilot. As though the musician has already experienced so much that there's a complete lack of need to strive for any more knowledge than they already have.

Fleisher did more in those last thirty years with the little he had than most pianists able to give ten times the concert load. Had he gotten full use of his two hands back, it would of course have possibly been the experience of a lifetime to hear him do multiple Schubert sonatas, Mozart piano concertos (and I heard him do one of the early ones just last year, it wasn't all that great...), some of the more lyrical Schumann, maybe even Bartok's Third Piano Concerto. But then he wouldn't have been Fleisher.

I used to believe that the scarcity of certain artists' availability put an aura around them which they did not deserve. There are just. toomany of these artists for them all to deserve it: Carlos Kleiber, Glenn Gould, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Guido Cantelli, Sergio Fiorentino, Klaus Tennstedt, Ginette Neveu, Marta Argerich, Dinu Lipatti, Istvan Kertesz, John Ogdon, Radu Lupu, Grigory Sokolov, Sergiu Celibidache, Josef Hassid, Maxim Vengerov, Emanuel Feuermann, Krzystian Zimmermann, William Kapell, Nigel Kennedy, Sviatoslav Richter, maybe even Pablo Casals... even composers like Borodin, Boulanger, Dukas, Duparc, Dutilleux, Corelli, Varese, Ruggles, Webern, Warlock, Griffes, Lord Berners, even some of the big ones... Mahler, Mussorgsky, Bizet, Bellini, Ravel, maybe even Chopin and Brahms.... and there are just as many examples of this in theater, movies, art, and literature, to say nothing of other types of music.... Pianists seem to be particularly prone to this sort of paucity of appearance. And no doubt, some of it is hype, and some of it couldn't be helped because of early death, and not even from natural causes. but if, for whatever reason, artists find it difficult to conform to the strict channels of performance as its generally practiced, there's often a reason, and sometimes that reason is because they are so unique that they the normal ways that art is made chews them up and spits them out. So therefore, whatever they have to offer is particularly unique: often, though not always. Perhaps it's cheating - an artist who seldom appears has much more time to prepare and therefore perhaps have a much higher, even artificially high, rate of success.

And in the case of Leon Fleisher, I think we have the perfect example of an artist who seemed as though he would thrive in the impossible demands of classical music as we still currently practice it, and as could and should have been predicted, those impossible demands nearly killed him. He then became the latter kind of artist, and perhaps consequently, possibly far more valuable.

Movements of Jewish History: 2020- Chapter 1 - God's Accidents (Beginning Draft)

This is not a podcast, this is not a book, this is not even history. As a work of scholarship, it is absolutely worthless. As a document for policy advocacy, this has negative worth. We record these writings merely as a way to document a series of speculations about the nature, meaning, and purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, an experience, hurtled through eons of episodes so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the extractible juice of meaning, that the lessons to learn seem infinite and inexhaustible: both connected to the very essence itself of being and thought, and also to the lived life of nearly every experience of every day. Or, perhaps, these speculations in essence have no meaning at all.

But from a certain of view, from many certain points of view, world history, or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who have lived all that history's main events. And whether our outlooks are sacred or secular, I would venture at least a 50% chance that it is not simply because Judaism is somehow blessed or chosen by God, and I would venture no guess that Jews and Judaism are somehow superior to others and their faiths, nor would I ever have such chutzpah to speculate that the story of Judaism is somehow fundamentally connected to the ultimate plan and purpose of the world that a divine being has set in motion for us to realize; but rather because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism has been placed at the center of the world story. Whether a divine being placed us at this center is not the purview of this podcast. But the story of the Western world is tethered to the Jews and Judaism at its umbilicals, and now, in 2020, as the Western river of history seems potentially at its mouth, flowing itself as an overdocumented tributatary into a true world history, the story of the world still seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.

And this centrality does not need to be explained through any theory of Jewish superiority, or any theory of the superiority of the Jewish god. Though those are regrettably popular Jewish explanations. But in this explanation, at the center of the Jewish story is a series of accidents.

The first accident is a mere accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within this tiny junction at the center of the world, one of the many peoplehoods who inhabit it synthesize the influences of their experiences with surrounding geographical environs into the practice an intellectual, spiritual, and moral revolution. That's accident #1.

So that first accident, a geographical accident, causes a second accident, which is really a a long series of accidents which still have not ended. From its very beginnings, the people of Israel seemed to synthesize their two most important neighbors: on one side the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt when, during their period of slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. On the other side, the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of the Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them and descended upon Canaan from their place of origin. And therefore this petrie dish, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion, created a unique template for receptivity to the influences of the entire world. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around Mesopotamia and Egypt but to include ever new parts of the world, so each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel their influence upon it. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the entire western half of Asia. And as common era Jewish diaspora reaches its third millenium, the world story still expands to include the Americas on one side and East Asia on the other, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.

The third accident is the fact that these tensions of world influence operate at their ultimate point of pressure at this geographical node between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and this diversity of influence creates a revolutionary peoplehood which a series of more powerful neighbors - be they Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and/or Roman - find to be such a threat that these Hebrews and their subversive beliefs must be neutralized by any and all means, until such time as the most powerful civilization of them all, the Roman Empire, decimates the Hebrews into what their destroyers no doubt assumed would be the same basic non-existence to which Rome brought hundreds of other peoplehoods for which there is since little record or none. But the same geographic tension through diversity of intellectual influence creates yet another series of intellectual and moral revolutions. The first of which is a Rabbinic revolution which teaches almost precisely the opposite precepts the original revolution of prophetic revelation. This revolution believes that the lessons and laws of Judaism had already been received, and therefore must now be continually interpreted and re-interpreted. The religion of the Israelites, formerly tied as all worship was to the land, is revolutionized into a portable religion, specifically designed with the capability to practice in the least sympathetic places and times, and rather than center a religion upon a covenant of land, centers the religion upon the book which promises that now mostly broken covenant of land. That's accident #3.

The fourth accident is that once this religion becomes well and truly portable, the Israelites, now Jews, become not only far flung colonies occupied distantly by ancient imperialists, but fully present in the land of their ruled. A separate nation within every nation, who therefore by the closeness of their distance, become the main subject to which so many nations direct centuries of their mental space. They simultaneously live among others and yet remaining entirely separate, they directly influence the lives of every nation upon whose territory they live, and though everything their people's mentality seems completely unrelated to the mentality of the host country, the Jews within each country have the most intimate upon the history of each country, and each country has even more intimate influence on the history of Jews. That's accident #4.

(much more in the next few drafts...)

For Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)

(play it quietly...)

I must have been about fifteen when I heard Leon Fleisher give a recital at Shriver Hall, which means he was about seventy. He started with Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, I think it was the only piece for two hands he played. To this day I can't describe exactly what I heard - the way each voice in the chord came together sounded like a spiritual force of pure light. A little later in the program he played a left-handed piano transcription of Bach's Chaconne by Brahms, and during the major key section, you literally heard multiple audience members weeping. I have never heard a musician play as though he understood the spiritual, healing power of music so well.

We took it for granted that Leon Fleisher was here in Baltimore for sixty years after he lost use of two fingers and ended what might otherwise have been the greatest concert piano career of the twentieth century. But whatever he was before his injury, his injury made him so much more valuable. It's hard to explain to people who never heard his playing or sat in on his master classes. He was like a musical oracle who simply understood that music meant everything, and transmitted it more easily than anyone any of us had ever encountered.

I always took it for granted that one day over all these years we'd run into each other at a concert or at the Giant or at a coffeeshop and I could try to bore his ears off with a conversation, but in all these years, not once did I ever see him in all those places he was said to frequent. The only time I ever did was spotting him at a Peabody Symphony concert, where he was in the middle of the audience, eating a bag of sunflower seeds while the orchestra played - who was going to stop him?

He was never part of my life, and yet he was there, every day, as much a part of Baltimore as the Zappa statue and the Poe house. Every person involved in classical music in Baltimore felt like we knew him intimately, even if we never met him, and now, for very little reason at all, it feels like a close and valued friend has passed.

Movements of Jewish History: 2020- (rough draft of beginning)

This is not a book of history, this is not even really a podcast. This is just a series of speculations about the nature, the meaning, and the purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, and an experience hurtled through the eons so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the extractible juice of meaning, that the lessons you can learn from it seem as though they might be infinite and inexhaustible: both connected to the very essence itself of meaning and thought, and also connected to the lived life of nearly every experience we deal with every day. World history, or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who have lived all that history's main events. And I would venture a more than 50% chance that it is not because Judaism is somehow blessed or chosen by God, and certainly that Jews and Judaism are somehow superior to others and their faiths, or that the story of Judaism is somehow fundamentally connected to the ultimate plan and purpose of the world that a divine being has set out for us, but rather because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism has been placed at the center of the world story. The story of the Western world is tethered to the Jewish people, and now, in 2020, as the Western world seems definitively to incorporate itself finally in the firmament of the whole world, the story of the world seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.

At the center of the Jewish story is an accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. What makes Judaism unique and special is not its exclusivity but its inclusivity, the unique geographical receptivity to the influences of the entire world. And as the world story expands to include the Americas on one side and East Asia on the other, the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point.

There is no such thing even so as a convenient meeting place between cultures, and even in the age of pandemic, there is no replacement for person-to-person interaction. Person-to-person interaction between people of disparate places obviously takes enormous amounts of travel, and once exhausting travel is undergone, then comes the further exhaustion of potential for infinite misunderstandings. In the age of global travel, it's obviously easier to have that exchange, but it is never easy. And with that exchange and expand of influence comes the inevitable people and movements who say that these exchanges are never worthwhile, and those who are not convinced either way always flit back and forth between beliefs in inclusivity and exclusivity and being torn and confused and thinking there's a meeting point between the two or a way to combine the two or limitations that can be placed on how to meet - depending on some confluence what their generations and demographics particularly tend to believe, their personal experiences, the tendencies of their times of life, and which side has the most effective agitprop, they spend their lives changing allegiances between the belief of including others and belief in excluding them, and in doing so, always changing the balance of power between nations and demographics, always thwarting the best intentions and designs of people who see the world as an unchanging series of moral laws.

To those who believe the world is simple enough to be moral, there is no question, the world would be a better place if it were able to conform to any series of moral strictures at all, it almost doesn't matter which, and if the people of the world simply decided en masse to follow that particular system of beliefs. the entire world population would be so much happier, simpler, easier to get long with; life would be easier to get through and far more fulfilling - probably every person within the world. But the one thing the world clearly is is no such simple place. The nature of humans, perhaps the nature of existence itself, is that people do not have the ability to live simple lives and follow directives without working out those meanings for themselves, meanings that clash with each other terribly and irrevocably. Because the meaning of the world is something perceived through the mind, and therefore we can only see in the direction of which we're pointed. No one can perceive that whole twelve tribes of meaning, but we can see and record the meanings which others than us perceived, and attempt understanding at how people came to their conclusions.

The point of this podcast is not polemic - au contraire dear listener. What this writer believes is, to the best of his ability, immaterial to the mission at hand. He has beliefs and prejudiced orientations as all people do, and no doubt as time goes on he will fess up to his particular series of so that listeners can draw their own conclusions for how to judge his judgements from the differences between my beliefs and yours. But the point is not what I or you believe, the point is to understand why we believe what we believe, and much more importantly, why everybody else but you and me believes what they believe: Why Jews through the ages believe what they believe, why the gentiles around them with no horse in our race believe what they believe, and of course, why antisemites through history believe what they believe. That is our asymptotic mission, to get as close as we can to understanding the essence of things, while still realizing that there is a no end more of essence to understand.

(music)

Coronavirus Loneliness

For four months I lived in luxury's lap. Three floors in a four bedroom townhouse overlooking a lake near an ocean. Just me, coronavirus panic, youtube, and ice cream - the most supportive girlfriend I've ever had.

Every day a procrastination until the evening for my single sojourn out, every day a gorgeous walk with the pictures to prove it, then the shower, the trip to the Baskin-Robbins drive-through, the new book I'd fail to read, the new meal I'd fail to cook before just putting more buffalo chicken veggie burgers in the toaster. In four months, not a single in person conversation except for the three days my father was in the house. Just me and the books I'd stare at without reading while the laptop keeps playing the music, the constant presence of social media as the only reliable window to a world past solipsism, and the ever replenished articles of doom.

Lots of IM'ing with friends of course, and occasional zooms and facetimes where I'd get a glimpse of the full rambunction of their children, sometimes the spouses would be there, usually just quickly enough to say hello while they were chasing the kids out of the room so the original friend could have ten minutes uninterrupted quiet time with their manchild friend.

Being in a couple or family and being single seems as though it's an exact opposite experience of coronavirus. One life's journey has no time, the other has infinite time. Time never stops for the former, time never ceases for the latter. To the former, it's an unending series of micro-events happening to them, or else life explodes in chaos; to the latter, it's an unending series of micro-events we have to make happen, or else life shrinks into nothing at all.

While at the beach, the loneliness was certainly present, but in such idyllic surroundings it could never be acute. It was a simple life in a big townhouse overlooking a lake: audiobooks, ice cream, walks, music, IM, veggieburgers, and come on, you know as well as I do..., those occasional occasions in the private windows which unattached people require....

But after three weeks back in Baltimore, the loneliness is so everyday present it's tactile. Life has gone from three floors of well over a thousand square feet to one floor of 675 sq. ft. There's so much more noise, there's so much more to see and experience, there are so many more occasions to speak to people - IN PERSON!!!, and finally, chances to see family and friends, and yet, the loneliness is everywhere, everywhen - the knowledge that at the end of this road, be it in a month or five years, everyone else will be bonded forevermore to the people with whom they shared the most intimate period of their lives. Never again will people get to know each other as well as they have the people with whom they shared the last half year, and however crazy they all drove each other, most of them will love each other all the more for having been so dependent on one other for company, support, and validation. But you, dear Evan Tucker, you shall still be here, by yourself as ever before, continuing your lifelong soliloquy to a handful of internet voyeurs, a lifelong performance in place of a life. After this period is done, those who were truly driven crazy by their partners will be eligible again, and after what they might have gone through, they particularly won't want to take a chance on crazy.

One month ago, your parents were habutally telling you in no uncertain terms how meshuggeh you were about the potential for coronavirus contamination. But all it takes is a few days in Baltimammon for your social distance resolve to fold like a new lawnchair. Whether your old new domicile increases or decreases your chances of corona, even a walk every day through this urban petrie dish will probably do nothing to you. And yet now, you can't just stop with a walk anymore. Instead, it's a new trip to the store every day, and even that's not enough. One day last week, a trip to visit with a friend working inside her store for more than two hours, and even plans to revisit soon. You're helpless as her Trump supporting coworker sneezes 12 feet from you while only half-covering his mouth with his entire mask stuffed beneath his chin. All her co-workers are very friendly and clearly glad to have the company, another one goes in for a fistbump, and as you try to hide the fact that you're immediately sanitizing your hands you realize, this is the only human contact you've had since early March.

You're overcompensating.... You're realizing that all that time alone has made the transition back all the more jarring. You knew you'd have to go back at some point, and now that you've returned, this immediate re-immersion into a very changed home life has made you a little wreckless. You always thought quickly, but never thought clearly, you always thought as much with your Falstaffian gut as you did with your brain, if you were a generation younger you'd fail every marshmallow test the school psychologist ever gave you, not that you'd be seeing her this year... And whatever your gut tells you, you were always so bad at drowning its voice out.

But it's not voices you're hearing around Baltimore, it's helicopters. There are so clearly more of them flying over us now, and more intrusively conspicuous. It takes no voice to tell you what those economic graphs mean. And it takes no voice to tell you that win or lose, Trump's voice and millions of voices like him will be with us until you reach senior citizenship, and by the time you're a senior citizen, the voices of their most implacable foes could be just as loud, and just as lethal. It takes no internal voice to hear of the stories of friends of friends who've died of the virus, the terrors of unemployment, the boarded up businesses on every streetcorner, the omnipresent online rage, and the imminent stories of eviction that will begin just this week. And it takes no voice to notice that even those bound up in loving domesticity are feeling lonelier these days. Whatever comes, if it's truly as bad as we dread, then it will come for the well-connected as well as the lonely, and know little difference between us. It does not know that you have people who depend on you for life and love, and I don't. It seems to know, be it the potential for a second wave of coronavirus or violent insurrection or environmental catastrophe or dictatorship or war, that it is acting out our fantasies of rage and murder for us, but that's just an illusion - perceiving human qualities in the inhuman, like a psychotic brain perceiving patterns within chaos.

But we are not alone, and in many ways, that's clearly as much the problem as it is the consolation. The world is chaos, and when humans demand too much order from it, the world reasserts its chaotic dominion. Loneliness certainly doesn't seem like much of a blessing, but in some ways it is. For the whole age of the internet, America has not been alone. It's been as connected as a dysfunctional family in the coronavirus era - stuck in the same house for years at a time, with nobody being able to ignore the most poisonous traits in each other's character. When a toxic-seeming person tells you that you have poisonous character traits, your most destructive traits begin to seem like virtues, because how can a person who seems venomous be able to tell a virtue from a vice?

What this country needs so desperately is a break from each other. A time out. A cool down period. Perhaps even a trial separation. But the borders have all been closed down, so we're not going to even get that unless we all want to go to Turkey. We're all stuck being unlonely for a while, and rather than being able to go visit friends who are more like us, this country is like a family that hates each other, stuck living together with no way out of dealing with each other every single day for a period of years. And that's the claustrophobic situation that makes people who otherwise would be good act in ways they never think themselves capable.

So if you're feeling lonely like me, try as best you can to be at least a little grateful for it. There are worse life experiences than being lonely. I hope we all never see what they are, but realistically speaking, we all see what they are, and at one point or another, the majority of us experience them. There's much worse out there than loneliness, and right now, they're so close to us for company; who right now can possibly feel lonely?