Makhlokets of the Week: Conclusion

So it feels a bit inappropriate to talk about the Middle East when our second city is up in flames; but for the moment, the Middle East is still a lot more lethal, and so much of the problem is that we don't pay attention to what's going on elsewhere. So let's finish what we started here.

There are only two things you need to do to understand the Middle East.

1. Believe nothing you hear.

2. Believe everything you hear.

What? You say that's a complete contradiction?

You're not Jewish, are you?

The Middle East is incomprehensible. Anybody who tells you it can be understood is an unreliable guide: Jewish or Gentile.

Nobody knows what's going on. Not even the eyewitnesses, not even the actors themselves. Everybody is an unreliable narrator from the biggest perpetrators to the biggest victims, precisely because the worst perpetrators exploit the good faith of the worst victims.

But we have to proceed as though everybody is telling the truth, because in so many ways, they are.

The objective truth is out there. Reality exists, but emotional heat warps perception, and even if certain people see the truth in full, we'll never know whom they are, and you'll have to disregard their testimony because if you take theirs seriously, you'll provoke the ire of people you don't take seriously, and in the Middle East, ire costs lives.

What you have to do is listen. Don't judge, don't let them influence you, but give them a chance to be heard. People have to tell 'their truth', but if you let one side tell their truth, you have to let the other do it too.

And then you judge what you don't judge. You have to do the paradoxical work of taking it all in with equal seriousness--something so many scholars refuse to do--and then take none of it seriously.

There are many thinkers who say there's no historical truth, only narratives. They're not just bad scholars, they're manipulative scholars bordering on evil. If there's no truth, what does anything matter at all? If all that matters is power and narrative, then the powerful would just make it up as they go along, and there would be nothing but power. Justice wouldn't matter, freedom wouldn't matter, sympathy wouldn't matter. All that would matter is strength, and for all they protest many claims to work for justice, all they would do is replace one set of oppressive people with another.

But at the same time, the villains have a point. There's the truth of what happened, but in reality, we have to precede as though we'll never know the full truth.

But what we can do is piece together what likely happened from a composite of testimony, and know that that composite has a better percent chance of being closer to the truth.

So what would the composite of all this testimony about massacres in food and aid distribution sites look like?

You know as well as I do what likely happened. Israel established aid sites with the express intention of letting Hamas initiate massacres at sites for aid the IDF has no intention to distribute.

I think Hamas embedded itself among the starving, opened fire, possibly on both Israelis and Palestinians, and the soldiers were only too willing to fire back. Lots of Palestinians died in the crossfire, and that's exactly what the leadership of both sides wanted. And this scenario will repeat itself, again, and again, and again, week after week, until long after Palestinians begin to starve en masse.

But this is not only Hamas's responsibility. This is exactly what Netanyahu wants, this is exactly what his government wants, this is exactly what his supporters want. The whole point was to provoke Hamas into attacking. The whole point was to create a crossfire as a way to say to Israelis: we tried to help them and this is the result. It's just another excuse to keep the war going and keep Netanyahu in power. The second it ends, Netanyahu goes, possibly to jail, possibly to the Hague. But even if that weren't a possibility, Netanyahu would still do it. Like any antisocial person, he just wants power over you, perpetually, forever. Dodging jail is just part of the thrill for people like him.

The more isolated Israel feels, the more the international community holds all its Jews complicit, and the tighter they're bound to Netanyahu, who is constantly yelling at them that the world is all antisemites just as Hamas tells its population that the West is all colonialists and infidels. Hamas and the Netanyahu coalition have the exact same vested interest: keeping their populace as scared and aggrieved as possible.

This is a region of Jobs beset by twin devils who've convinced God to subject His people and land to the worst of tests. Every mental state that is true for one side is true for the other. The more isolated these peoples feel, the more radical they both become, and the closer the war draws to the worst shames against He who subjects us to shame.

Quick LA statement for whomever cares

 

LA is where we were always headed. The US was never the country you thought you knew. Even the people who hate America misunderstand it. We are just catching up to the fact that we're an impossibly decadent country with the wrong priorities everywhere at home and abroad, a late civilization exhausted of fulfilling the responsibilities it takes to be functional, long overdue for a crash landing that makes the Civil War look civil, and all of us complicit in our various ways, exhibiting an astonishing lack of humility before processes of history and human nature so much bigger than us all. I could elucidate the ways I think that's true, but you don't want to read them. It'll just get you mad and longtime readers will know them exactly already. Will the worst happen? Well, the US has been so lucky so far that I suppose there's still a chance we'll pull it out but it will take very different ways of thinking than we're currently prepared to do.

Europe underwent all of this and far worse than what we've endured yet. Look up it's great 20th century antitotalitarian thinkers who thought through these problems as they lived them, and when you have time, read them: Orwell, Arendt, Camus, Berlin, Aron, Koestler, Hoffer, Canetti, Havel, Milosz, Dangerfield, Croce, Kraus, Havel, Michnik, Kovaly, Solzhenitsyn, P. Levi, Sperber, Spence, Shire, Hilberg, Wilson, N Mandelstam, Yoshimi, Tansman, Czapski, Serge, Tsvetaeva, Bialoszewski, Psychoundakis, Fondane, Ledig, ... Fiction writers like the Mann family, Kafka, V. Grossman, Pasternak, NaWeight, J. Roth, Kundera, Stoppard, Musil, Broch, Bradbury, Borges, Nemirovsky, Remarque, Zweig, Capek, Huxley, Grass,Kadare, Lem, Mahfouz, Oe, Achebe, Tisma,Dismantle, Rezzori, Valle-Inclan, GGM, MVL, Pavese, Sciascia, Krzhizhanovsky, Bastos, Bellow, Szabo, Teffi, Baum, Pekic, Shalamov, Malaparte, Kempowski, Doblin, the Singer family. Read them now, or at least read the wikipedia summaries. Finding their books may be harder in the future.

But the problem is that this will not even be the future's biggest issue. Global warming and AI can cause an unprecedented level of chaos. The planet itself may betray us because we've betrayed it. AI will speed up the collapse of our reliance on knowledge that the internet and 24 hour news already began, and from that can arise an unprecedented level of totalitarianism. The thinkers and leaders who can show us the path through all that will only reveal themselves when the challenges reveal themselves.

The basic state of the world is neither war nor peace. It's conflict: tension between different people who can't help but want different things. That doesn't mean both sides are equally right, that doesn't mean that one side is right at all about certain things, and it certainly doesnt mean you should assume everybody's operating in good faith. But the world is a process where conflicts eventually do battle, then resolve, and then the resolution creates new conflicts.

The world is worth saving. Life is worth living. Our loved ones are worth loving. But the fact that survival is never guaranteed is the reason for all that. Were there no conflict, all this would be meaningless. It's through conflict that we perceive the value of those moments holding conflict's absence, But if conflict is absent for too long, the human mind creates conflicts. Search your life stories, we're programmed that way.

Many of us will make it to the other side, likely more than most of us, but the more ready we are, the more knowledge we have, the more of us can be saved.

The Makhlokets of The Week: Part 1

I don't dare presume speak for anyone on the other side of this issue, but every Jewish generation has 'their' massacre: the Israel/Palestine massacre with which they came of age and they realized the full extent of this farkakter balagan we were born into. For the later millennial Jews it was Shuja'iyya. For our generation it was the Battle of Jenin. For gen-X it was Qana. For later Boomers it was Shabra and Shatilla. For early Boomers it was Red Sedr. For the Silent Generation it was Khan Yunis. For the 'Greatest Generation' it was Deir Yassin. And retrospectively, there have been a couple dozen Deir Yassins for us all.

Jewish history is so littered with dates and places on which we were massacred that after the initial shock, a new massacre doesn't register much. Obviously, Jews are still massacred; not nearly as often as pre-1950, but the butchery never went away. On the other hand, excepting October 7th, none of them seem dramatic enough to stick in the Jewish consciousness for thousands of years. I don't know what it's like for people old enough to remember the Munich Olympics, but even the massacre in Pittsburgh feels like a hundred years ago. We can't think about every massacre when within a year it's just another one among ten thousand for a people who always have a new one to mourn.

But massacres perpetrated BY us, massacres that MAY have been perpetrated by us, massacres we are accused of perpetrating, SOMETIMES legitimately? That is something unique that occupies our generations of Jews our whole lives long. Jews may think these events are discussed too much in the wider world, as though people can absolve themselves of their own historical guilt by catching Jews red-handed in our own atrocities, but Jews discuss these events in private still more than any antisemite. These events touch on exactly where Jews are most sensitive, most insecure, most resentful, most fearful. You cannot blame a peoplehood embattled for so long, who've been falsely accused of mass murder (not just deicide) for so many centuries past, for perceiving all the thousands of ways in which these accusations are deeply unfair long before they see that many of these accusations are true.

I've been experiencing these queasy events my entire lifetime, and so have my parents, and yet they still feel strange. We don't know what to make of circumstances like that because there hasn't been much instance of it since the Tanakh (Bible) was codified. Just as no Jews since biblical times have experienced the responsibilities of a people who own their land, no Jews since biblical times experienced the consequential horrors of owning a land.

Don't misunderstand: there's no era of Jewish history when we weren't accused of massacres during our entire time in exile, but during the 2000 years of diaspora, those accusations were a travesty--usually perpetrated by a theocratic autocracy on a public they deliberately kept stupid. But the world has changed over the last 2000 years. There's no better evidence of the world's evolution than the State of Israel, so when a large group of Jews are accused of politically motivated murder, it is no longer a given that these Jews are innocent.

And therefore, no critical tradition exists, nor a philosophical tradition, nor a Rabbinic tradition, nor even an oral tradition, about how Jews should handle political atrocities that may be committed by Jews.

In Biblical times, massacre was just what people did on a Tuesday. People basically expected their lives would end in some kind of murder. The most civilized places like Rome and Greece were often the cultures that killed with the greatest alacrity in the greatest number, and the bloodiest war leaders were the most praised: Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson, David, Joab, Elijah, Judah--all Biblical heroes, all mass murderers who today would be carted off to the Hague unless Israel maintains bipartisan American support. The only great Jewish leader who had a thoroughly modern taste for peace was Solomon, but with regard to women Solomon would have been metoo'd so quickly that he'd have to impart his wisdom on youtube.

It's an unfortunate fact for Jews that the Western world began to look at war as a shameful pursuit only after the Tanakh was written. The Western pursuit of peace doesn't begin with Christianity, but it begins in time for Christianity to take up pacifism as a banner pursuit about which most converts have never heard. No movement in world history advanced pacifism's cause more than Christianity, and there can be no better argument against pacifism than that no movement ever since, not even Islam, killed with anything like the efficacy of Christianity and Christendom.

So after so much history, both for Jews and the world, here we are, after roughly two thousand 'years of our lord,' and only now have Jews begun wrestling with the modern implications of what it means to be the killers instead of the killed.

There's nothing in the Mishna about what to do in case two Jewish extremist militias carry out a massacre and forced evacuation during the Israeli War of Independence: a massacre against a town that signed a non-aggression pact with the main Zionist defense force. No sage commented on what to do in case there's some evidence that all the Jewish military forces were working together. Consequently, many Jews deny it ever happened. Some Jews acknowledge it happened and say it was justified. Some Jews acknowledge it happened but deny that the main defense force had any involvement. Some Jews point to that historians lowered the death toll over time to say that the whole thing is clearly exaggerated. Other Jews not only acknowledge it happened, but believe a few hundred other towns experienced massacres exactly like it. Many among those who believe this massacre happened in hundreds of towns believe it invalidates the entire State of Israel. Some others even say that while this massacre happened, it didn't happen hundreds of times, but it should have. A few even believe it happened hundreds of times over, but didn't happen nearly often enough, and wish that the genocide was carried out right away that Israelis have been accused of perpetrating ever since. But no matter what their belief, what happened at Deir Yassin is the central event in the whole Israel/Palestine conflict. Whether or not it was just the first of many violent evacuations of Palestinians by Israelis, or whether it caused a panicked Palestinian stampede into Gaza and the West Bank, it is basically the event around which the whole conflict revolves. So there isn't a single Jew able to think about what happened at Deir Yassin with a completely level head.

There is no tractate in the Gemara about a massacre (and worse) in 80s Lebanon of a refugee camp perpetrated by an extremist militia of Lebanese Christians fighting on the same side as the Israelis. No Israeli soldier seems to have been directly involved in the killing, but the Israeli army patrolled the exits and blocked residents from leaving. Some Jews say that the Israeli army had nothing to do with it and had no foreknowledge. Some say that we knew, but you can't blame the perpetrators because Lebanese Christian leader (just elected President) had just been assassinated by Syrian Muslims, and their army was out for Muslim blood, so if Israel didn't let them sack something, the Christians might have turned on the Israelis. Others say that the number of killed was vastly exaggerated. Many others allege that the operation was an unfortunate necessity since the camp was one of the Palestine Liberation Organization's main training grounds. Some say that however much culpability Israel held for the massacre, it was less of an outrage than that the UN's report about it holding Israel guilty of genocide. Most Jews, of course, say that Israel's Defense Minster had gone rogue and was pursuing his own policy behind the backs of his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. No matter what happened, the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla may technically be a Lebanese event, but the heads of Israelis and Jews have been reconstructing the circumstances of those three days with a level of detail worthy of the Kennedy Assassination. About Sabra and Shatilla, we've constructed our daf of Talmud.

And then there's what happens when you're trying to process history in real time. There's nothing in the Shulchan Aruch about what to do when the casualty reports from a battle in a West Bank enclave range so widely that it's absolutely impossible to know what happened. Some sources put it at 500 dead Palestinians, another puts it at 50 dead Palestinians, and more confusingly, there are sources on both sides reporting both extremes.

Both sides are arming their faithful with propaganda from minute 1. You're getting emails telling you it was a massacre, and emails telling you that the people who want you to think there was a massacre want you to be massacred. Say the wrong thing to someone on either side and you get the ear thrashing of the century for the slightest deviation from their party line (guess who did from both sides...). You could hear literally every possible reconstruction of what happened in Jenin. Everything from 'There was no massacre in Jenin' to 'If there was a massacre, there was a damn good reason for it.'

And we would read everything: On the one hand, we'd read that Jenin was known as 'The Martyrs Capital' because Jenin was known as where most suicide bombers got their training and arms and that 23 suicide bombers were dispatched from Jenin just in the last two years; that the Palestinian forces had booby trapped Jenin house by house and the IDF broadcast in Arabic warning civilians to leave the camp. We'd also read that Israeli trucks would remove dozens of Palestinian bodies at a time before any outside observer was let in. Even Israeli TV broadcast refrigerator trucks taking the bodies of what we were assured were combattants to 'terrorist cemeteries.' Even the Israeli High Court issued a moratorium on Israel's transfer of bodies out of Jenin. Then we read that these trucks were there so that army reservists slept in them for heat relief and safety, and Palestinians who happened on them misinterpreted what they saw and spread the rumor that the trucks were full of dead Palestinian bodies

No Maimonides, Rashi or ibn-Khaldun could make sense of all this. It's not just a battle of bodies and bullets, it's a battle of narratives, and every detail of this narrative battle is fought so intensely that it's impossible for anyone to swear that anything about it is true at all if they don't want to sink their integrity. So great is the intensity all this inspires that even the people who were there aren't reliable witnesses.

The Jewish people have no millennia long experience in how to establish collective innocence or guilt because for two-thousand years, we were always the innocent.

My Top 5 Verdi Operas

I guess this is in order?...

Explanations:

Falstaff: At eighty, Verdi arrived at musical imagination and human comedy that equalled the greatest of the great masters. Verdi's only 'poem unlimited'. Verdi was finally responding to the first music he studied as a child. If Mozart or Haydn had written at the end of the 19th century, if Mendelssohn wrote in the vain of his Midsummer music in the 1890s, they'd have written music not unlike this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ_oYes2VmQ

Otello: It's not just the perfect and greatest operatic tragedy, it completely upends the tropes of Italian opera Verdi himself helped codify (Donizetti and Bellini did plenty). A dozen times, it seems as though it will go into the generalized form of opera arias, only to surprise us with something far more naturalistic. It often seems like it anticipates Janacek or Rosenkavalier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8FD9G5Sf5s

Traviata: A misunderstood opera. The vast majority of it is a pastoral slice of life, not unlike Figaro or Meistersinger. Even the villains aren't villains even if they commit villainous acts. It is so clearly Verdi writing from his own experience with his two wives. The death of one, the isolation of the other. The personal side feels real in a way so much Verdi, in my never humble opinion, does not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDmLniM2cic

Rigoletto: The momentum stops only once in the middle of Act I. It is Verdi raising the ghost of his daughter in a way that does not feel exploitative (as in Il Trovatore). Act III is absolutely perfect. It shows, as only Verdi can, that beneath the bonhomie of human fun can lie sickening evil. Rigoletto is Verdi's most complex character, and shows that opera, operating at its peak, can equal the sophistication of great theater. Riccardo Stracciari Mercedes Capsir Dino Borgioli Ernesto Dominici Rigoletto full opera (1927&1930)

Ballo: Verdi is, sadly, never funny except in Falstaff, but he is music's student of 'fun.' Like Rigoletto and Traviata, Ballo builds on the dual nature of pleasurable experience and how exploitative it can be, but it takes the investigation to the next level with tropes that come from low class arenas like the music hall, cabaret, opera comique and operetta and ties it to the high goings of royal courts (in the original...). Then it adds the tropes of Bellini and Donizetti at their most tragic to tell a much darker story that takes ironic dichotomies to an extreme never otherwise found (so far as my limited knowledge of Verdi knows). Not to mntion that the Ulrica music anticipates passages in the Ring Cycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlDG8ZTz0JI

From Generation to Generation

Welp, we're at the point that no Jewish assembly is completely safe. Two in one week... Now we'll have to look over our shoulders in just the way Israelis do. On the High Holidays, you'd better believe there's going to be an attempted attack somewhere, and we're all going to be praying to Hashem it's not our synagogue.

We're not ready for this. We never are. Whenever the evil eye comes to a new country it feels like a rude interruption of history in an era for which history is now over. We thought we 'made it' in country after country, but every country tires of us because we didn't make it anywhere else.

It was not a protest in favor of the war, but a demonstration in solidarity with the hostages. These demonstrations happen in every city in the US with a synagogue nearly as frequently as demonstrations for Gaza happen on college campuses--and by 'nearly as frequently' I mean usually once a week, whereas the college campus demonstrations often happen 24 hours a day in encampments.

On the other hand, we say these are solidarity rallies for the hostages but... come on, of course they're in favor of the war. As much as we want the hostages home, we use the cover of the hostages to demonstrate in favor of Israeli policy as much as the pro-Palestine crowd uses every slogan from Free Palestine to River to Sea to Intifada Revolution as a cover to demonstrate for violently wiping Israel off the map. Both the Netanyahu coalition and Hamas is depending on a certain percentage of protestors disagreeing with their most violent aims, but not realizing that by demonstrating they've endorsed the bloodiest tactics of both Hamas and the IDF. I'm sure there are some idiots at both sets of protests who don't realize what they're protesting for, but over in Israel/Palestine, everybody fighting the war takes your demonstrations as a blank check for the most violent incarnations of their aims.

It would seem that except for the kids, almost everybody at the Boulder protest was between 67 and 88, meaning that some nice Bubbie took her grandchildren. Sadly, that will not happen as often anymore.

These unfortunate Bubbies and Zaydies have lived through an intrusion from the future. The world they know is the world of Israel bonds appeals, Israeli folk dances, Israel advocacy tutorials, and Yom Ha'Atzma'oot programs, and for all intents that world will be dead in thirty years, or at least it will be dead as they understand it. When the last people who remember the Yom Kippur War are gone, the idea that Jews support Israel because it is a beachhead of liberal democracy in a sea of tyranny will go the way of all bassar. In its place will be naked appeals to nationalism, to the idea that our Jewish brothers are stranded in a sea of murderous barbarians, so we must kill and imprison as many of our enemies as we can so we may continue showing the world what civilization looks like.

The liberal Judaism they remember is as declined as they. Israel hasn't been the underdog in fifty years, and as the 'favorite', progressives have changed their allegiance to the other side. But then again, 'liberal goyism' has changed too. 'Liberalism' as it was defined from Franklin Roosevelt to Biden and Hillary is over, everybody's now either a progressive or a socialist, because for American liberalism's descendants, 'liberal' has ugly connotations from 'neoliberalism' to cold war proxy wars. Liberalism to them signifies the compromise of principle, and Israel is the ultimate compromise.

Israel IS the ultimate compromise. Think about it for a literal half second. If the Jews of 100 years ago could realize any of their dreams, do you really think they'd have wanted that tiny strip of land where nothing grows? Where they were isolated from culture and civilization and home? Of all the pre-1948 Jewish settlers of Palestine (what we call the 'Yishuv'), about a third of them found it so hard that they went back to Europe. Like all ideological movements, Zionism was a dream they had to will themselves into believing was their dream. The only pre-Israel Jews who truly wanted Israel were exactly the ultraorthodox communities who at the time believed there should never be another Jewish state before the Messiah arrives--and remember, ours never got there...

Zionism is reality's ultimate practical accommodation. It exists because we were not allowed to exist anywhere else. If we were able to reliably live as Jews in any other country, we would still be there. "Go back to Israel" antisemites used to say in Poland. Now antisemites say "Go back to Poland" in Israel.

Until recently, a number of anti-Zionists would say that the real promised land of the Jews was America, the place where Jews were completely free to worship, assemble, speak, write, and do it all safely. And, of course, at the time, it was probably true. When times are good for Jews in one place, they're usually good in multiple places (obviously not everywhere...). The irony is that at the time we had the most support for Israel among the widespread American public, we didn't need Israel. But now that the position of Israel is getting insecure again, we're beginning to be insecure too. So now that the necessity of Israel's existence is challenged, we may need it sooner than we know.

Don't think the Israeli government doesn't know that. One of the terrible ironies of our predicament with Netanyahu is that the worse his tactics, the more difficult he makes life for Jews abroad, and the more difficult life gets for us in diaspora, the more Jews who eventually feel no choice but to emigrate to Israel, where they bring their financial holdings, their international connections, and their educations. This is already happening in France, where some sources report that 80% of French Jews are considering moving to Israel because of Islamic terrorism, which is a fact of French life and disproportionately affects Jews.

This tactic, and I believe it's uppermost in the mind of the Israeli right, is based on a messianic level of self-belief. Perhaps drunk on tales of Maccabees and Shoftim (Judges), I think a lot of Jews believe that if Jews pool their resources together and work together as Jews to the exclusion of all others, there's no achievement of which the Jewish people are not capable. There are millions of Jews, even atheist Jews, who believe in this triumphant narrative of Jewish history that there is some kind of divine wind on our backs that eventually bends the moral arc of the universe toward victory.

There are two problems with this: one is that it fits the world's stereotype of Jews to an absolute taf: that we look out only for ourselves, that we're disloyal to our home countries, that we are greedy for prosperity, overachievement, and superiority over all other peoples; that even if we don't want to rule the world, we want to beat it, run it, avenge it, hold the world at our mercy. If that ever happened, it would prove antisemites correct.

The other, much larger, problem is that it neglects hundreds of years of history between Solomon and the Babylonian exile when we had exactly these circumstances.

The Story of the Book of Kings is literally a lost text of the Bible that should be canonical, but the similarly named Book of Kings mentions that this book which gives all the details of Judean court of exactly these years was 'lost.' Don't think it wasn't lost by accident. There are a couple hundred years which the Judeans wanted very much to forget, probably because there were literal hundreds of years when Jewish kings were as incompetent and murderous as any pagan king. Many of them probably even worshipped pagan gods. This is not stuff any redactor wants in a text commemorating the deeds of a peoplehood for all time. And that's only in the centuries before the multiple instances we were conquered and re-enslaved, most of us assimilated into an empire's larger population.

Ergo, the problem with this tactic is that if life gets too difficult for Jews abroad, far far more difficult than it is now, Jews will be divested of our holdings, our connections will want nothing to do with us, and educational institutions will not let us in. Obviously, we're still quite far from all that, but that was what happened in Germany during the early years of Hitler, it also happened in Russia's pre-Communist years and to a certain extent continued for the duration of the Soviet Union. Arguably it happened all around medieval Europe and famously in post-medieval Spain, it happened in Renaissance Poland, it happened in the Judea of the Roman era and the Greece of the classical era, it happened around the Middle East in the years surrounding Israel's founding. It all happened then, and sooner than we know, it can happen again.

A large part of Israel, like every country at the zenith of its prosperity, believes itself invulnerable even as they believe themselves all too vulnerable. Just as we had the years after 9/11 when we simultaneously thought ourselves vulnerable to a nuclear attack yet able to remake the world into democracies on a shoestring budget overnight, Israel has these years when they think themselves simultaneously on the verge of its existence ending yet able to exile millions of people to a faraway land without five times as many countries working in concert to affect their destruction.

It's probably going to be a steady decline for Israel from now on just as it will be for American Jews. It may not seem like a decline for a while. There might be a while when we may seem more prosperous than ever. No matter what temporary ego-clashes go on between the micro-schmecklach of Netanyahu and Trump, the Jews of both Israel and America are now positioned in the oldest, most familiar position in history. Writ large, we are all what used to be called 'dhimmi' in the Arab lands, and 'Schutzjuden' in the German ones. At the highest levels, the very most privileged among this type of Jew was called the 'Court Jew.'

Our privileges will now exist at the protection and pleasure of undemocratic rulers, who decide which minorities get protection according to a mixture of self-interest and whim. As Schutzjuden, we do the ruler's bidding, and his bidding is for us to do all his most unpleasant tasks: the administration, the taxes, the moneylending and loan collection, the real estate management. Our protected status exists to absorb all the shocks of hatred that should be absorbed by the rulers, and when the leader's position is threatened, he throws the dhimmi to the masses. We are blamed for everything, and we are killed. The process may take 50 years, it may take 100 or multiple hundreds of years, but we have always found the Jewish future in its past.

From generation to generation, this is the basic story of Jewish history we pass down. We pass it down by commemorating the exceptions to the rule: the few times when Hashem in his infinite mercy granted us a reprieve from the same basic stories. Why do we celebrate so many Jewish figures who advised kings from Joseph to Mordechai and Esther, from Daniel to Ezra and Nehamia, even Abraham and Moses, and so many post-Biblical examples? We celebrate them because they used their privileged position to thwart those who would murder us. Many Jewish advisors to kings thought they had that level of influence, only to be shown that all their privileges were folly and their connections were dust, because no amount of power spared them, those they love, or their people.

The oldest demonstrator was 88 and a holocaust survivor. At the end of World War II, she was eight. The Shoah is almost out of living memory for anyone old enough to understand what was happening. For a whole lifetime, we have lived in the afterglow of the sympathy the Shoah engendered and the founding of the state meant to be a reprieve from that.

The true test of Israel is in its future. Can Israel be a reliable haven: not only for endangered Jews, but can Israel break the horrible cycle of Jewish history? Can Israel stop us from being Schutzjuden?

Israel may have been able to until recently, but now? It seems incredibly unlikely. Israel is itself the Schutzjudenstaat. Jews can go on deluding themselves about Israel's capabilities and independence, but the reason Israel exists as it currently does is the protection of the United States. Israel cannot survive alone, and Netanyahu not only made Israel more dependent on America, but dependent on America staying on its current authoritarian course. If America course corrects without Israel correcting similarly, it will be the end of the America-Israel alliance. The Democratic party will absolutely not tolerate any sort of alliance with Israel as it's currently constituted, and even my faith that they should is shaken.

If Israel's leadership wants to stop the dhimmi-cycle, they can't savor acting the villain part with such relish. The world's beginning to look at us again as though we're Shylock or Caiaphas. It may be inevitable, it may be the Crown's plan for the Kingdom, but if this is Hashem's plan, do we really have to make it so easy for Him?

The Paralysis of It All

 For days I've been staring at the screen, wondering what I should write next. There are just so many issues to deal with that the world itself seems to come to paralysis. 

And the paralysis is the nub of where we are. We've all reached the point of exhaustion.

It's not even emotional exhaustion: our generation knows we will probably deal with existential problems for the rest of our lives, and each of us, in our own way, is gathering strength from our guts and our feet for whatever comes, so that when our children reach their dotage, they will know the security we only felt as children. 

It's intellectual exhaustion: we've lost the ability to trace problems to their root, we've lost the ability to be shocked by developments we don't understand, we've lost the thread of where it all went wrong. One problem causes the next, which causes the initial problem to expand, they persist in compounding each other, and problems that used to grow arithmetically grow geometrically now. What is the point of studying problems during a moment when you don't know if there will be a half-dozen bigger ones by the end of the summer? We're past the point of understanding them, we're past the point of solving them, we're at the point of simply dealing with them. 

When you can't deal with the problems of today, you have to replenish yourself: not just with gratitude for what's right (though that's always important), but with the wisdom that comes from questions that transcend any era. More on that in a future essay...

Some people remain doggedly optimistic as a practice. I respect them, many of them deeply, and I always try against my better judgement to keep an open mind about why they may be right. Optimists were proven right plenty of times in the past, and I pray they're proven further right again and again. But speaking for myself, I'm pretty willing at the point to 'call it.' No series of policies can save us now. We are now in a state of triage. Global warming will not be solved, AI will not be solved, internet surveillance, income inequality, pandemics and global health, nuclear proliferation, mass migration, democratic collapse: all of these problems will probably hit the world with seriousness far greater than how we think of them today. 

Believe it or not, we may yet be rid of Trump. We may yet be rid of Netanyahu. Rumors have abounded of Putin's imminent death for ten years. All of the world leaders who are worldwide threats to democracy are over 70: Xi, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, they're all gerontocrats. They'll all be gone in fifteen years, probably even Xi, but their overweening ambitions and corruption are just the beginning of a generations long worldwide slide. 

The world did what it does when times are relatively good: it got complacent. When we were kids, the world had just emerged from a seventy-seven year struggle that began with World War I and went all the way to the collapse of Soviet Communism. Every person in the world was exhausted of dealing with problems, so they convinced themselves that the problems weren't pressing enough to confront--and in some senses they were right. Even the most horrific crises of the 90s: Rwanda, Somalia, the Balkans, were smaller than crises in every decade of the 20th century before them since the first, and even if they were gargantuan even so, they were far away, in countries that had little impact on our daily lives. 

Relatively speaking, times were good, and we were feeling generous: not to struggling people mind you, but rather, to people who had social stations as high or higher than our own--people who could compromise our quality of life. Against what now seems an obvious mountain of evidence, when the middle class world looked at Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney at home, at Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Central Committee abroad, we assumed they didn't mean ill. And even if we assumed they meant ill, we were too prosperous to identify the right villains. We depend on the right for vigilance on national security, but they chose to believe terrorism was the priority threat. We depend on the left to monitor our well-being, and they chose to believe neoliberalist capitalism was the priority threat rather than the American conservative philosophy that enacted what we now call neoliberalism. 

That was the time to stop these problems, and it ended with the stock market crash and Great Recession of 2008. Once the economy fell out from under the world, it was a given that the economy could only be rebuilt by making our biggest assets more secure: our banks, our oil companies, our corporations, our tech sector, our insurance companies, our pharmaceuticals, our billionaires, and all their governmental minions. They had already so kidnapped our system that rather than hold these actors accountable for creating an unstable situation, we rewarded them.

Et voila. Nous sommes la. 

We needn't feel too bad about it; not about this at least... It is human nature to face problems only when they become too urgent to be ignored. This is exactly what art and history is about, or at least it is when it's done well. The specifics change from era to era, country to country, but human folly will stay ever the same. Folly is built into the very fabric of existence. Every action in existence has causes and effects, and the effects are usually unintended. Even if AI comes to life and solves a trillion problems every second, every one of its solutions will cause new problems. AI will be subject to the same existential folly as its human progenitors, and on a far more cosmic scale. 

And yet it's also from unintended consequences that come unintended solutions. After World War II, nobody thought the 'cold peace' between the US and USSR could hold, and yet hold it fundamentally did for 46 years. Yes, the price was absolutely lethal in what--thanks to the Cold War--we now term the 'third world', and was particularly awful for China, but while China lost a hundred million people, the world got up every day for fifty years with the expectation that a billion of them would sometime be wiped out in the span of a day. As for China, for good or ill it emerged from its suffering as the potentially dominant power of the 21st and 22nd centuries (one could make a similar argument for Jewish suffering in the Shoah leading to Israel's prosperity, but I digress). 

Reciprocally, people always point to the gains of 1960s Civil Rights as a reason that we should maximally agitate against society's denial of rights, but what they neglect is that in the 1960s, civil rights and great society programs were procured by death. The American consensus reasoned that if blacks and the poor bled as Americans in wartime service to their country (and to a disproportionate extent), then they should be accorded the full rights of Americans. It unfortunately stands to reason that those who agitate for further gains in civil rights will only be able to effect it through a similar blood sacrifice. 

An existential problem is existential because it threatens your existence, and there's a good chance the threat will be carried out. So I'm sorry to say we have to switch our mentality. These problems are too overwhelming to solve before they hit us with the force of 15 kilotons of TNT. We have to move to triage: trying to save as many and much as we can in the face of imminent problems that can dwarf the wars of the last century. 

Just as in the 1990s we could solve the problems of most humans had we tried, in the 2020s, we can still save most humans from their problems were we to make provisions that work around governments that refuse to work for us. They want us to rely on private enterprise? OK, then it's up to private companies and entrepreneurs to make the solutions that governments will eventually be compelled to embrace. They want us to provide charity rather than government help? OK, then we have to not hesitate about donating our extra dollars to our causes. They want to defund our colleges? OK, we take our educations to the internet and put our educations in the hands of credentialed professionals we trust. We can still volunteer our time to the causes we prioritize. We know exactly what all the problems are, we just have to get up off our JD Vance couches and do things about them.

Will we do them? Probably not. It's human nature t...

Why Today Hurt So Bad

Today is a day of mourning. Every day has been a day of mourning since October 7th, no matter which 'side' you take if either, but for 'our side', today was particularly acute.

For 2000 years, every day of a Jewish life was in some senses a day of mourning, but up we rose every day for millennia and always gave life our best shot: a simcha here, a responsibility there, observing the 613 laws as though each one of them matters as much as much as the commandment not to kill, while Rabbis would contort the Bible in every direction to make practical accommodations to these absurd laws for their congregants... or at least they did when the congregants shoved them against a wall.

It's true, if you view it from moral absolutes, it's a little outrageous to care this much about two people's deaths when god knows how many thousands are dead in Gaza--and we don't know how many: I find it darkly humorous that the world believes the death statistics of a ministry run by Hamas, the organization who instigated this war through mass murder, but even so, I can't imagine the casualties aren't staggering. Who knows? The death toll may be even higher.

If both Jewish history and the Gaza war are accurately recorded, then Jewish history is full of death tolls that exceed whatever's happened in Gaza. Gaza is far from over, but these death tolls are never *just* about the death toll for Jews any more than death tolls are just death tolls for other ethnic groups. It's as much about the humiliation of the experience, it's as much about the inherited trauma, it's as much about the double standards set for us.

...OK, that's a lie....

It's precisely because of those large death tolls that we are acutely sensitive to everything Israel. Every new murder of a Jew is not just the murder in itself, it is the doorway to worry about whether the moloch is coming for us that's come for every era of Jewish history until now.

I'm not a believer in that inherited trauma is particularly acute in Jews. If inherited trauma exists, then every human being has the trauma of pre-history encoded into their DNA: a period lasting god knows how many epochs when the wrong animal spelled the instant death of a loved one.

What is particularly unique in Jews is how murder is uniquely encoded into the narrative of our history. Our history is not just three thousand years of beautiful tradition, it's a three-thousand year recorded history of exile, beatings, theft, rape, show trials, hard labor, humiliation; but especially of mass murder. Moreover, it is a three thousand year history of how every success is a false promise--a divine test meant to show the entire world that all earthly achievement means nothing when your host countries can take it away from you with the snap of a finger. If God exists, then this is clearly what the supposed Av HaRakhamim, the Merciful Father, meant by making us his Chosen People. He chose us to spread his word, but the real word of God seems to be a much darker text than the gospel generally spread. No one believes in mercy more than Christians, and no one ever showed less mercy than Christians did to Jews.

But that was a different era, and we had a very different relationship to the world. We had no place to retreat to, no place we could really call home, we had no insurance policy in case our world burned down. In the BC era, when we had Israel and Judea, we were safer--not much, just a little bit. It wasn't the glorious period day schools teach us about: we were both terrible killers and the horrifically killed, our rulers were every bit as corrupt and incompetent as any ruler on earth, our supposedly glorious temple in Jerusalem stank of animal shit and rotting meat. We had our great men, and in between those great fathers of our faith we had hundreds of years of disgrace to our history.

But at least we had a fighting chance to make our own mistakes and not make our lives the forfeit of everybody else's.

We're now in the third millennium after Christ. We don't have that relationship to Christianity anymore--not for the moment at least. It seems that for now, the worst of Christianity is behind us. What we do have is radical Islam.

I don't doubt that all through history, there were millions and millions of virtuous Christians who not only hated their peoples' oppressive rulers and mobs, but particularly hated what these fellow Christians did to Jews. I'm sure many of them actively worked to aid Jews in need and sabotage attempts to abuse them. I'm equally sure there are millions in every era of European history who would have helped in an instant had the price to help Jews not been to treat caught helpers like Jews.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that all through history, there was a well-meaning educated class who saw the suffering of the peasants, and saw that many Jews were disproportionately successful, and drew a substantial correlation. They saw that so many Jews were tax collectors, money lenders, merchants, jewelers, and bankers (to say nothing of doctors...), and concluded that Jews were the oppressor class. So when Jews were killed en masse, they'd think it a tragedy, but in private, they'd put an asterisk next to these tragedies they would never put next to any other sort of mass murder: 'you see how Jews oppress those under them so willingly, you can't be too surprised that vengeance was taken against them. Even the innocent Jews were a little complicit!' What these enlightened classes neglected is that if Jews were disproportionately successful on someone else's back, it's because they were forced into these professions of success.

Just as we were forced into moneylending because the Church prohibited Christians from handling money and Jews from owning land, we were forced into needing Israel because country after country refused to make a space for us to feel at home, and in the case of the Shoah, a space for us to even survive.

Now that we have Israel, you'll have to kill us all before we give it up; and there's still a large number of world leaders trying to do just that; along with millions upon millions of acolytes who would go to any length to help them, and millions of educated people who fancy themselves on the side of the oppressed but advocate for solutions that would only replace one set of oppressors with another. This second set of oppressors would temporarily be more even more violent than the regimes they replace so they could establish their authority. That's the story of 1979 Iran, that's the story of 1917 Russia, that's the story of 1789 France, that's the story of dozens of other radical dictatorships around the world, where violent men were all but given the reins of power by left-liberals, progressives, and socialists who thought they could control the most militant among them.

What has the last ten years demonstrated above all other things? What has it shown that's above and beyond anything about social media partisanship or AI automation, above America's capacity for authoritarianism, above Russia's continued capacity to manipulate world affairs, and above China's ability to dominate the world?

It's demonstrated that this supposedly modern, safe era, protected from the vicissitudes of history, has the potential to be just as dangerous as any era has ever been. If this era is as dangerous as it seems, then do you really think Jews would be any more protected than ever before in a world without a Jewish state? A Jewish army? A Jewish lobby?

Take away all those things for the chance of a binational state on what once was Israel, and you'd replace Israel with a slaughterhouse: whether it's Muslims killing Jews or Jews killing Muslims, the entire Middle East could become an abattoir of genocide that makes Gaza look like Switzerland. The belief that Israel can be replaced by a functional democracy that fully respects the rights of both nations is one of the most naive political beliefs on earth, and millions of totalitarians depend on this binational idealism to make war all the easier to wage: Jews as well as Muslims.

Jews gave the world two-thousand years of chances to show that our society was welcome in diaspora, but over and over, the world showed their Jews that we were as welcome as a plague epidemic. If the world is as dangerous as it seems right now, Jews without a state are likely to be thrust back into the same maelstrom as we lived in for literal millennia.

We live the most prosperous, joyous time in the entire history of our people, and we hope and pray every day that we do not live at this period's dusk, because what history shows, in mind-numbing iterations, is that Jewish success is an illusion, because eventually we are punished for it in manners completely disproportionate to our sins.

Whether or not you believe that, experience shows that fact to be the most seminal element in Jewish history.

THEY... KILLED... US... EVERYWHERE

I'm just going to call it right now.

 The Elias Rodriguez trial is going to be with us for a year and a half. The guy turned himself in in order to disseminate his manifesto and make himself a cause celebre. If he gets the death penalty he will be a martyr to billions. This is literally an attempt to put the entire Israel/Palestine debate on trial before the world, and it was an absolute bullseye. It's meant to turn soft radicals hard, it's meant to turn pro-Israel liberals conservative, it is meant to depopulate Jews of friends, it's meant to inspire still more drastic measures from Israel until the entire world holds Jews complicit. It will be celebrated as proof that t*rrorism works, and it will inspire others to do exactly as he did.

When people say 'intifada revolution' or 'globalize the intifada, THIS is what they mean, whether you realize it or not.

Some strident words for chaverim on 'The Situation Over There'

I've supported Israel as best I could through their toughest period, but this new planned invasion of Gaza is ethnic cleansing of the gravest variety, and all for the craven motive to keep Netanyahu in power by appealing to his far far right base. Roughly 2/3rds of the Israeli public realizes that, regardless of October 7th, what's about to happen is unconscionable. Nothing about this has to do with Israeli security. It makes the hostages more likely to die and only increases Israel's isolation. 550 top security officials have signed a document denouncing it with the harshest terminology.

The most likely explanation is that that Israel found a taker for Gazans in some other country to be named soon, so it's probable the inhumane conditions are not ancillary collateral damage. The point is to create ghetto conditions akin to 1940 Warsaw, the claustrophobia's the point, the putrefaction's the point, the famine is the point, the point is to make life in Gaza so unbearable that Palestinians have no choice but to leave if they want to prevent deaths on a scale truly unimaginable.

This is Israel: next to Silicon Valley the most productive tech hub on Earth. It's only a matter of months before it develops the technology to monitor activity in the tunnels and plug up any hole. But in these 311 miles of tunnels, Hamas could have let some Gazans in at any point. Instead, Hamas willingly pushed their citizens in death's way, putting the largest entrances to the tunnels in hospitals, schools, and the most heavily concentrated neighborhoods, knowing that when Israel next invades, Hamas has willfully maximized their people's own casualties. Why is this not recognized? Because of naive lefties who choose not to live in the real world where self-defense and security is a fact of existence.

At the same time, while I don't want to use the G-word because nothing yet has been remotely worthy of it, if there is no alternate plan and 20-30% of Gazans die from this, there isn't another word in our lexicon for it. There should be: it still wouldn't be a crime remotely comparable to the 6/7ths of Jews in the Nazi empire who perished in gas and ovens, and the international standard for what constitutes annihilation of a people is so low because international organizations are stacked with precisely the countries who've long wanted to finish what Hitler started. The G-word word was literally invented to describe the Shoah, and the standard was lowered precisely to frame Israel as genocidal for acts that were barely a fraction comparable to what was perpetrated on Jews.

So even now, I categorically reject any claim of moral legitimacy from the anti-Israel crowd which makes no distinction between any form of Zionism and attributes a monolithic evil to a movement they know nothing about and can only cite scholars of the worst conceivable faith and sloppiest methodology to justify themselves. Even the most dovish Israeli peaceniks are little different to them from the most loathsome human rights violators on earth. They invoked the g-word before the 10/7 dead were cold in the ground: not a single word of sympathy for dead Israelis and Jews, not a single word of comfort to friends who were terrified the whole world was about to turn on them, and of course, not a single word about Hamas's role in all this. They are nobody's ally, neither Jews nor Palestinians.

But there isn't another word for it. There is only genocide.

And just as there should be a different word than the g-word for what Israel may yet do, there should be a different word than the d-word for what Israel currently is. Israel is currently a quasi-democracy that makes even more of a mockery of the real thing than our country does, and every minute the Israeli hard right remains in power, it draws ever closer to that 'other' d-word, the dreaded one: dictatorship.

So perhaps there is a third d-word that will just barely suffice for what's coming in Gaza, should Gazans be trapped by famine, it will be a democide so base that democide may be entirely insufficient a term for the scale of what comes. This plan is ethical filth, and we let it happen by unconditionally supporting Israel through its forty-five year descent into Revisionist Zionism's embrace. We too made no distinction between any form of it: whether it was the liberal Zionism of Weizmann, Rabin and Ben-Gurion, or the revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, Begin and the Netanyahus. We did not speak out, we did not make our support conditional, and we pretended one of the most prosperous countries on earth was still the little and embattled social democracy of seventy years ago. For my entire lifetime, it was always a farce, and we willfully repressed that our eyes could see the metamorphosis step by step.

Part of how we know the anti-Zionists aren't serious about their mission is that not even they are warning on the widest scale about the unprecedented operation that seems to be imminent. Why? They've exhausted their emotional rhetoric, because to them, all horror is the same in degree, without any nuance of context, and they're incapable of making distinctions between self-defense and mass murder. Surely, they reason, nothing can be more monstrous than what's already happened: oh yes it can, so very much worse. So if they're not going to warn, we have to warn. We have to oppose it. We have to root for its failure. In the long run, it can destroy Israel.

This is not Zionism, this is the perversion of it that happens to every ideological movement if we do not make the movement pay a price for turning its back on its own better angels. This drastic ethical backslide came for Zionism, and one day it will come for every movement of our time whose ethical standard currently seems unimpeachable to so many.

We owe our support to Zionism just as we do to any movement whose cause was fundamentally conceived in liberal ideals, but we owe any perversion of it complete, unconditional opposition.

Hamas is our enemy, Netanyahu is our enemy too along with all the hydra arms of his coalition; a hydra which is the probable Israeli future. If there ever is to be an end to this conflict, every serious person needs to agitate hard for the removal of this governance by excrement in both Israel and Palestine.

The Nihilist Music of Eugene O'Neill.

America, land of Hollywood and Broadway, doesn't have too many transcendent world dramas--not that we know about at least. But one we have, one of the greatest family dramas in world history, is Long Day's Journey Into Night: the submergence of family life into hell. It's in part clearly autobiographical. Eugene O'Neill wrote it in the 1920s and kept it in his drawer until his death in the 1950s, probably because to see a production would be too painful for him. It deals with the most painful family issues: accusations, illness, drug addiction, money, alcoholism, isolation, secrets, suspicion, dissipation, nepotism, the anxiety of impending mortality, and worst of all--claustrophobia.

Encountering it is a rite of passage for the American intelligentsia. Once every few years, a new cast of the world's greatest Anglophone actors mount it: either in New York, or London, or LA. Somewhere, full tapes exist of Laurence Olivier and Constance Cummings, or Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave with the young Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard, or David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf, or Charles Dance and Jessica Lange with the young Michael Shannon, or Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville, or Earle Hyman and Ruby Dee, or Jason Robards and Colleen Dewherst with the young Campbell Scott, and just last year, Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson. The many sided and exhausting parts demand nothing but the best to respond to each other, endure the stamina of such exhausting roles, and bring their own conceptions and personality and nuance,

Sadly, the only live versions that exist complete on youtube are the two worst reviewed: one with Alfred Molina and Jane Kazmeryk, and another with Jack Lemmon (of all people) with Bethel Leslie with the young Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher.

Fortunately, we have this movie version, starring no less than Ralph Richardson, Katherine Hepburn, the young Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell. The whole cast inspires awe, but particularly Katherine Hepburn, who finally has a film role that stretches her genius to its full plumage, and Jason Robards, perhaps the distinguished performer of O'Neill in theater history. The movie is absolutely vicious, perhaps even overly so: an abusive family that tears each other to shreds and whose resentments hold barely any compassion for one another. And yet even here, we see just how moving this play can be. These actors interpret the roles as particularly vicious people, yet even they are deserving of compassion and love they don't get, and their emotional ugliness endows them with still more sublime pathos.

O'Neill wasn't a writer of great prose, yet his writing for the stage was pinpoint to the emotional bullseye. Like Chekhov and Hemingway, a paucity of words belied a devastatingly perfect choosing of them. Emotional tension is ratcheted like in Mahler 6 or Berg's Wozzeck, and like those works, it rises to heights that are greater than can be born in equilibrium.

I used to be afraid of this work. I saw David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf do it on the West End in 2012. It was extraordinary, and I couldn't stay for the whole thing. It was just too unbearably sad, and therefore I used to poo-pooh the play. But the reason is great is that it's the nightmare image of what we all fear family life is. I still can barely watch the play. A great performance should leave you shaking. In his most tragic plays, Shakespeare provides comic relief, and even Chekhov's most tragic moments are so ridiculous that they're comic too. O'Neill provides no such relief. This play exists to drive you mad.

Here is the magnum opus of American drama in its full sublimity. You owe it to yourself to experience it.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) - YouTube

The Ten Commandments

I stayed up late yesterday to belatedly fulfil my most important annual religious obligation: a viewing of the Ten Commandments.

I missed it on network TV. Every spring to this day, the Ten Commandments plays on ABC. Not a reading of the tablets themselves, just the four hour 1956 Hollywood epic: The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brenner as Pharaoh and alongside them a massive row of 1950s stars. Like so many religious epics, it's a movie that apes religious piety while providing pruriently sexy content through its many scenes of pagan idol worship. The loftiness of the subject matter is an excuse for scenes of the most massive spectacle, full of lavish costumes, gigantic sets, and scenes which are masterpieces of coordination involving 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals. It's rumored that the production resulted in multiple deaths.

It's not a good movie.

The script is full of the most lofty sounding bullshit, most of the special effects don't hold up in the face of modern developments. Many very skilled actors try the best they can, but the famed director Cecil B. DeMille was trained by the silent era and clearly instructed them to make all kinds of woodenly absurd gestures; completely unnecessary mannerisms in an era when stories may be told through words.

The interest in the movie, as always in Hollywood, is erotic. Moses and Pharaoh compete for the hand of the sex kitten Nefertiri--her name changed for obvious reasons from the historical NeferTITI, yet that doesn't stop her character from being fitted in the most boob filling ancient dresses. When Moses arrives in Midian, he marries the equally beautiful Sephora as a kind of consolation prize. Joshua and slave overseer Dathan compete for the beautiful water girl Lillia, a slave girl fitted in a golden gown when taken to the overseer's house for sexual slavery. The muscular chests of Moses, Pharaoh and Joshua are all paraded in undress, sometimes quite oiled.

It's the old trick of the preacher inveighing against pornography while holding his worshippers' interest by describing the acts depicted. If Hollywood has a biblical epic genre, this movie defines it with constant push pull between ersatz piety and ersatz sex.

And yet I love this movie to pieces. I love every stupid campy faux-profound minute of flowery excrement in this zit on the face of cinema. I've practically memorized whole scenes, I can impersonate Heston, Bryner, Edward G. Robinson, and Anne Baxter, and take particular joy in doing her famous cry: "O Moses, MOSES!"

Part of my love is sheer familiarity. My parents taped the final two hours of the movie on VHS, and through my childhood I wore it out. Did I enjoy it that much? I wouldn't call it enjoyment, but in our non-cable house, it's what we had.

I'm pretty sure what I felt was exactly the primordial awe this work is supposed to inspire. I was a naive kid, and as religion always understood: when you hook kids while they're young, Bible stories inspire a lifelong awe. The Ten Commandments tells the story of the Exodus, and for those taught to believe, it's Exodus come to life: our mind's eye image of how it all happened. Who now can imagine Moses looking like anyone but Charlton Heston? Who now can imagine Pharaoh without Yul Bryner's sphinx-like scowl? Who now can imagine the Golden Calf without women dancing around it, striking tambourines while carried on the shoulders of men? Who now can imagine the slaying of the first born without that blue mist that's clearly dry ice symbolizing the Angel of Death?

But all that happens in the second half of the movie. In some ways it's the first half of that's more interesting: centering on the sibling rivalry between Moses and Ramses in the prime of their youth, competing for fatherly approval from the Pharaoh Sethi (in a magnificent performance from the great Cedric Hardwicke--who was Bernard Shaw's favorite actor), and particularly for the hand and love of Nefertiri, promised to whomever is the new Pharaoh; and while it goes unmentioned, Nefertiri is presumably the blood sister of Ramses; as such brother-sister marriages were expected of a Pharaoh to preserve the purity of the bloodline.

Moses's early years at Pharaoh's court are the source of nearly as much speculation as the missing years of Jesus. If something like the Exodus did happen, one has to figure Pharaoh's hard heart was not just the machinations of a god who may or may not be there, but rather due to a deep animus born of some rivalry. There are many other parts in Exodus about which to speculate, no less an eminence than Sigmund Freud theorized that Moses was not even a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest. This might explain why Moses was 'slow of speech and slow of tongue'; perhaps he barely spoke ancient Hebrew.

Not only did Freud speculate that Moses was an Egyptian priest, he speculated that Moses was a priest of the sun god, Ra, and a follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who declared that Aten, an aspect of Ra (don't ask, I dunno...), was the only god--presumably upending Egyptian society irrevocably. It was only fifty-seven years from the end of Akhenaten's reign to the beginning of Ramses II, surely Akhenaten's followers could maintain a faction for that long.

But where did Akhenaten get the idea for monotheism? Did he get it from his slaves? Did his slaves get the idea from him? Did the Egyptians enslave the Hebrews because the Hebrews were the decisive element that destabilized Egypt?

One can also look at the list of plagues and see that many of them are caused by one another. It's much tougher to explain the last two plagues, but perhaps the others can be explained, if you want to...: according to the internet, the Nile is known on occasion to turn red to this day due to certain types of mud, which may cause certain semi-aquatic animals like frogs to vacate, who can bring with them all sorts of bugs like gnats and flies, some of whom may carry diseases that affect livestock and cause boils on human skin. All this would be most likely to happen during the wet season, and if there's enough rain, surely hail is possible too, even in a river country surrounded by desert. All of these scientific coincidences are partially depicted in Ridley Scott's filmed dramatization of the Exodus--called Exodus, as it happens.....

The other part of why the movie works in spite of its longueurs is the sheer scale. Not just scale of the production, but the Shakespearean scale of its characters and relationships: it's obviously far from Shakespearean as an achievement, but it's Shakespearean in its ambition--and part of why we love this movie is how hilariously it fails to grasp nearly so high as its reach. There are twelve major characters in this epic, each of whom has a larger-than-life combination of emotions, motivations and sentiments. For years, when my musical ambitions were vastly greater than my talent, I wanted to make an opera from this movie. It's the perfect subject: a mixture of world-aspirational themes and soap opera tawdriness.

But even bad entertainment posing as art can move us just as good art can, and if The Ten Commandments can stay fresh to someone who's viewed it once every year or two for nearly forty years, there's something much better about it than we give it credit for being.

Viewing it this Passover is a particularly jarring experience. As always with art, different people will take different meanings from it. Some will take the Jewish slaves to mean the threat to the Jewish people in all times and places, particularly now as the war against Hamas renews itself and the world circles its wagons against Israel's Gaza operations and the millions of Jews who believe in them. Another enormous segment of the world would view the modern Jewish people as some of today's Egyptians, all but enslaving the people of Gaza and the West Bank so as to maintain their own prosperity. Many others will see Trump as a stupid hard-hearted tyrant like Pharaoh who deserves comeuppance on the most massive scale, with all who collaborate with Trump punished along with him. One can particularly see Trump in Pharaoh's treatment of Nefertiri. Still others would, inexplicably, see in Trump a Moses liberating his people from liberal tyranny. Many would look at the modern American people and see slaves, many others would look at us and see taskmasters getting their just deserts.

This Passover is a fraught one as much of the world presses on Jews to view themselves as Pharaohs. Even some Jews view us that way. Others among us feel the pressure of it, and even if we have a litany of reservations, we fully understand the legitimacy of the argument, and for us, this Passover was a deeply complicated holiday as we wrestle with a moral issue that cannot be easily solved no matter how much pressure is brought to bear on us from either side.

The world is very different than 1956, when America was ready to tell Jewish stories as though their own. The Shoah was still fresh, and even if many didn't know the details, they certainly remembered the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht well enough. Hollywood made a movie about Moses five years before they made a movie about Jesus. Objectively, the Western world was more antisemitic in 1956, how could it not be when still crawling with Nazis? But one of the great priorities of the era's liberal project was hearing the Jewish story, empathizing with Jewish feelings, supporting the State of Israel, telling Jewish 'truth'.

If it was the fashion of a lifetime ago to hear our story, it is the fashion of today to hear other stories, even if those stories are at our expense, even if the telling is simplistic and sloppy, even if the expectations of those who follow fashions are always unrealistic.

The world is a complicated place: much more complicated than myths in an old book. If this is ever to end, one side has to kill the other the way the Israelites annihilated Amalek. Either that or there has to be a place for the Palestinian story, and all Middle Eastern stories, alongside the Israeli story, alongside the Jewish story, with every side getting their place in the stories among the nations.

My Single Favorite Missa

 I don't believe it.

After ranting about Klemperer's famous Missa, I finally listen all the way through to his first recording of fifteen years before it, and along with Walter, it may be the most extraordinary Missa I've ever heard and, relatively speaking, in much better sound than Walter Klemperer's Missa is not a work of hope like in Jochum or joy like Bernstein or peace in Kleiber. It is, rather, a version that, like Beethoven, has not experienced such emotions but demands them as an inalienable right.

This approach is truly the best of both worlds. Its tempi are not all that different from Gardiner, but in place of an immaculately drilled and blended chorus we have the sort of chorus that surely Beethoven heard in his head. Unblended voices of extremely well-prepared amateurs, some of whom at times stick out of the composite like a frankfurter too long for its bun, but pronouncing Latin as Beethoven would have, along with an orchestra of particularly Viennese sounding instruments and the gut strings the Vienna Symphony, which was practically the last trad orchestra in the world to preserve a completely unreconstructed sound of pre-recorded epochs well into the stereo era.

The orchestral soloists cover themselves in glory - the actual soloists... can any soloists get a laurel wreath in this impossible to sing Everest (check out Masur's recording for the best singing)? This quartet comes as close as anyone ever has, but I wonder if Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is written to be impossible.

To me, this is the closest I've ever heard to the thing in itself: pure schwung and no sprawl, but no sense of drilling the human expression out of the work in the quest to nail its million technical demands; full of that mellow Viennese character, yet rising to every demand of divine fire. And not once does this famously sloppy orchestra come unglued even amid the most appassionata virtuosity (and unlike what a certain critic says, the beginning is quite together, the chord is just deliberately spread.)

...It always seems to be Walter and Klemperer standing alone at the top amid so many holy masterworks... Listen particularly to their radio broadcasts of Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Figaro, Deutsches Requiem, Zauberflote, and wonder if anyone was ever so profound in either before or since. A few get consistently close in multiple core repertoire Everests--the usual suspects of course: Erich Kleiber, Ferenc Fricsay, Eugen Jochum, Carlo Maria Giulini, Fritz Busch when he's available. But in both Walter and Klemperer, there's something in the atmosphere they generate--not an imposed vision but rather a simple reflection of the lofty but many sided way they viewed music itself. It's almost impossible to talk about, but one day I'd like to try.

Beethoven - Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer – Missa Solemnis recorded from vinyl

Teach the Songs You Love

If you have an uncommon song you know by memory, a poem you love, a quote you love, a melody you love, teach it to anyone who will listen: friends, family, strangers on the internet. Don't just make them listen once, make them really know it. If you have unread books, make sure they get read, save them to a hard drive or flash drive, loan them out to anybody curious enough to try them. If you have scientific or math skills, teach them to friends. If ten people know something, and each teaches it to another ten, the bastards can't touch what's a part of us all.

It may be of the very far future, it may be the near future, but at some point, some powerful person will try a great internet wipe in many countries of the world: a modern bonfire, in which most disappears of wikipedia, youtube, mental floss, open culture, coursera, ted, podcasts, blogs, magazine archives, the information storehouses of the future, anything with a hint of subversion. When there are too many things to learn that we can't keep track of them all, the people with the most power can wipe it out and hoard the remains for themselves without our even knowing it's gone. Knowledge itself becomes the prerogative of the few who will only teach what's necessary to consolidate their power over the rest of us.

But what exists in your memory has a chance of escaping any purge. Don't let it disappear.