Thursday, July 30, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So guess what:

Trump can't cancel or postpone November 3rd. He can, however, say that he wants to postpone it because of the potential for election irregularities, election irregularities that he will do everything in his power to maximize.

So why did he say it today particularly? Because the worst economic report ever, and that means in the entire history of the nation, just came out, and he wants you all screaming about potential schemes he'd have to be brilliant to mastermind while the real danger is right in front of you.

How bad was that economic report? Well, there was one detail particularly that should freeze your blood even much more than that Trump wants to cancel elections:

Almost 30 million Americans did not have enough to eat last week.

That's the America we're now living in, and there's no potential for Hitler until that America becomes the reality for years at a time.

Do everything you can to defeat Trump, stay mad, but anybody who's mad for the wrong reasons can be manipulated into situations that will make you still much madder.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

I Don't Get Along With Other Jews...

So at a socially distanced get-together with an extremely gentile friend today, I confessed to something: in spite of barely knowing a single non-Jew until I was sixteen, the vast majority of my good friends are not Jews. I can barely get through a twenty minutes of a conversation without bringing up Judaism in some facet, now as twenty years ago, but perhaps in part consequence, I really just don't get along with a lot of other Jews....

I haven't read or listened to Seth Rogen's opinions on Israel, and the amount of a shit I don't give about this can stretch to the Middle East and back six hundred thirteen times. Of all the things to be concerned about.... the fact that anybody at all cares about what a stoner celebrity thinks about Israel while the world is on the verge of burning - and particularly every country with a sizable Jewish population, is a perfect explicator of the trivial distractions that allows the world to exist in its current state.

As I've said many times here, I grew up in Pikesville, Maryland, arguably the most Jewish place on earth, a Jewish United States of America in which a hundred thousand every hue of Jew was thrown together in a claustrophobic nine mile space. We were so Jewish, we didn't experience 'The Jewish Question' as Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer asked it, we experienced 'The Jewish Perspective on Every Question.' There was no such thing as a separation of synagogue and state, because there wasn't even a state. There was just the ongoing debate: 'is this good for the Jews?' And contrary to popular belief, nobody knew, and therefore nobody could truly act in Jewish interests. The more they asked the question, the lessJews could act in their own self-interest, because no two Jews in any given room ever agree on the answer. The whole town of Pikesville Maryland was a ridiculous place, possible only for a single generation when secular and orthodox Jews were distinct enough to be completely different and similar enough to trust each other to live together in relatively solid harmony. As Baltimore continues its decline, most of my generation of non-orthodox have long since left, and Pikesville is gradually becoming another frum/orthodox stronghold - little different from Munsie or Lakewood.

Was there wall to wall Israel propaganda every day when we were growing up? You better fucking believe it. We were fed it with the latkes, we drank it with the Manischewitz. BUT, anybody who tells you that Israel education in school was a Zionist North Korea is either selectively remembering or lying. There were leftist parents screaming at every Day School PTA meeting about how terrible it was and making sure when other kids came over that they knew the 'other perspective' so that they could have a 'serious conversation about the Middle East,' there were teachers who believed that too and made sure the kids knew it, and most importantly, at that point, every mainstream Jew in a mainstream Jewish Day School believed that by being Zionist, we were also being liberals who showed how to make a more functional democracy in 45 years than it took America to be for at least a hundred-fifty (and that remains true...), that we were being progressives who supported Israeli attempts at Kibbutzim and better organized labor than we ever had here (which by the 90s was already a notion outdated by a generation...), and that we in no way had dual loyalties but in fact, quite the opposite: we were being American patriots because in multicultural America we're supposed to celebrate our hyphenated identities, and Americans so celebrated difference that they seemed even proud to welcome a peoplehood who defended themselves. There were two types of people who objected to all that: one was the leftist parents who in the eyes of people like my parents, seemed arrested in sixties adolescence. Even after seventy years of dealing with the Soviet Union and its factory of death (and NEVER forget, the Soviet Union on its most benevolent day was a meat grinder compared to the United States on its most malicious), they still believed in all those old-fashioned notions of revolution, socialism, and solidarity with the oppressed. And on the other side of that divide, the only people who agreed with the leftists that the peace process was a disgusting ruse and the only solution was a one-state solution, were the right-wing meshugoyim, the meshuggeh-frum, the Likudniks, the neocons, the people who simultaneously wanted to bury the Soviet Union in the ground and also not-so-secretly admired Soviet culture's deference to authority and their lack of concern for human rights' niceties. If these were the basic options, we need to forgive people a generation ago who decided that full support for that particular Israel, striving for peace, seemingly so close to being a permanently liberal democracy, was the only good option, and the only option that didn't put them in cahoots with people who seemed both crazy and a little bit evil.

But now it's almost 30 years later. Reality, of course, is much, much more complicated. There was never a time when the tensions in all those contradictions weren't incredibly taut, they always were, they always will be. Israel is as good a proof as anywhere in the world that there is no life where you don't have to make compromises and alliances with people who often hate you and you often hate hate them right back. For a golden generation between 1967 and 1993, it seemed as though there was no tension between aspirations of nationalist self-determination and liberal or progressive ones. There always was, and the challenge of Israel has always been that the survival of the Jewish people depends on threading a needle that seems impossible. If Israel becomes sufficiently illiberal, it will eventually lose the United States. No ally is powerful enough yet to give Israel everything the United States did, and no emerging state will ever be energy independent enough in our lifetimes to not require far deeper friendship with oil-rich Middle East states than even the United States has with Saudi Arabia.

Seth Rogen is exactly my age. Every Jewish Day School student who's our age can probably remember a night-and-day difference between being Jewish when we were kids and being Jewish now: 1993 was not 2020. In 1993, peace seemed like a very legitimate future, the brightest possible future seemed part of being American generally. Neither of those states of being are true anymore. For the first seventy years of Israel, the vast majority of American Jews have been liberals, and a relatively small minority were conservatives. That is changing. Secular Jews are in the process of irreversible assimilation, and orthodox Jews are becoming ever more distinct, and ever more mistrustful of liberalism. Like everyone else in America, the left and right divide between Jews is hardening ever more, and as the wall thickens, a kindling is placed in the wall's foundation that practically begs troublemakers to light an explosion event whose consequences are irreversible.

Neither of these are my Judaism, in fact, I believe outright that both of these are misrepresentative abominations of the religion they claim to practice. Judaism is the religion of ambiguity, of pragmatic discourse to weigh the nuances of every problem with the greatest care so that the most livable and durable solutions can be found. These are, writ small, the descendants of all the same Jews who once believed that there could be accommodation between Jews and hard-right nationalists on the one side, and Jews with hard-left socialists on the other. All that is for another post, but I don't know how many times Jews need to repeat the same episodes of their history, but equivalents have happened so many times already that at this point one can only assume that it's long since embedded into the fabric of the Jewish condition.

Hard right and hard left Jews share one particular and very surprising trait: almost all of them are so much nicer people than their peers in the center, and I so often prefer their company. They are untroubled by the doubts which rive so many who can't lean on walls for their basic assumptions that other people have built for them. And consequently, when they like you, they really like you and there is so much less chance for drama and aggression. But once you're written out from their respective books of life, you're really and truly out, and there is no getting back in their good graces. People can only be that nice to you if there are enemies upon who they can direct all of their aggression. You are either friend or enemy, and it seems virtually impossible to be anything in between.

But this state of affairs was created by my parents' generation, and our generation is absolutely right to complain that we got sold a false bill of goods, but we're still looking at the wrong bill. It's Twain who said 'Jews are just like other human beings, only more so.' And if in the late-20th century, the entire country bought into that American Beauty rat race to be the most successful, rise the highest, have the best possessions, and present the best possible image of yourself to society, then Jews bought into it twice as hard. American Jews are now, unquestionably, the most successful minority in the history of the world. And a person can only project high status by making other people feel lower. Meritocracy is a complete myth, but it's not a myth because of systemic injustice, and it's not a myth because people abdicate personal responsibility. It's a myth because success is itself a myth, and the Jewish story is the ultimate example of it. Success, money, property, status, even friendships, can all evaporate in the span of a minute. What is real is survival, and the ability to help others survive. Every Jew who became a banker instead of a scientist, a lawyer instead of a teacher, an entrepreneur instead of a public servant, a PR consultant instead of an artist, put self in front of society. So who can be surprised then that millions who were not able to advance themselves at the expense of societal decay then embrace totalizing mass movements left and right that explain that America will be cured of its ills when its ruling class is overthrown? And what did all of that success matter when the dumbest men in America cut in front of all those meritocrats to the front of the line and took the Presidency, possibly in perpetuity?

The center has not held, and it didn't hold because the center was wrong to be the center. It didn't hold because the center had a choice to help everybody, or help themselves, and we chose ourselves. And now, 25 years after the assassination of the Jewish leader who could have lit the way for us all had we not ignored him after we killed him, we are all beginning to pay the price he foresaw.

Monday, July 27, 2020

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 Moshe 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 he is proud well past the point of denial.

You may recognize these 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.

--------

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 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 of his many characters, perhaps even in the scenes where the characters speak American English.

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.

-------

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.

-------

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.

They're standing around a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, reading about the injustices done to some guy named Dreyfus in France,

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Tales from The Old New Land #2

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 Moshe 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 he is proud well past the point of denial.

You may recognize these 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.

--------

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, by the way, the narration will be entirely in English, but 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.

Reb Yaakov sits with them at the head of an unstudy square table that has been in the property of this cheder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayehs is bored, they rock the table without even realizing what they're doing, and every year, the batayt that they 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 Parsha of the week: and this week's parsha, Vayeshev, is the 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 Yehuda 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 had worn her beauty down to a nub, 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 mekhasheyfe. This eshet khayil, who was always everything to him, whom he gemakhted lebe to every night for forty-five, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to the beauty she once was and to his eybik lebe for her to this woman who obeyed every command and gave her entire life to everything he asked and demanded, and whom he always suspected his ba'ager for her completely destroyed her beauty and her happiness.

But yet again, when he teaches Vayeshev, the students can't repress their laughter, the mention of sheynkeit and geshlekht, and one at a time, each of his 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!

It's the funt fun tzurikkummen, 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. "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!"

If this were a theater work, then what follows would basically be a nervous breakdown of exposition in which he relates precisely the story of his life as related above. 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, and whose tzadeykkes will put them all to shame.

-------

We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Naftali, 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 our living one, apparently did. 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 in judgement in his house, which we of the shtetl and its descendents called the Bet-Din, the 'House of Judgement', within which a Rabbi in virtually every shtetl in the Pale of Settlement functioned as its Philosopher King, judge and jury, legislator and executive, teacher and headmaster, hearing every legal dispute from trivial to grand, serving as both prosecutor and defense, so that all Jews could be 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 Yankele Kharlap, one of those Shas Pollaks 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. On daf fifty four, a pin was placed at random in the book of Tohorot, Reb Yaakov was asked the seventh word of line 18, and then 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, it. was only when they got to Nashim that Reb Yaakov failed the Pin Test (another piece of heavy handed symbolism for those who get the Hebrew).

Reb Yaakov was thirteen, Rebbe Schkop was twenty-three and barely able to stand up straight even at that age. The spine of Rebbe Chaim Schkop's ectomorphic frame curved another few inches 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. From the moment in 1848 (more heavy-handed symbolism) when Rebbe Schkop could no longer stand up straight, everyone Rebbe Schkop to breathe his last, like all men must, and give up his spirit, replaced by the unhuman encyclopedia who taught every Jewish male in the 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... in 1897, year 49 of Rebbe Schkop's illness, the Bransker Rebbe finally fell unconscious to his bed, an old man and full of years, never to wake. And yet still would not give up the ghost until the end of year 1898, year fifty, existing in a twilight state in which Reb Yaakov, now seventy-three himself and in the perfect health of a man who had twelve children at the age of sixty, had to function as both Rebbe and Cheder Melamed. After a year of this impossible lebn in which Reb Yaakov had to function as Rebbe, Din Torah, Melamed, and tateh tzu tzwelf kinder, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder on the very day Rebbe Schkop went to sleep with his fathers, and for a few hours.Reb Yaakov too was presumed gathered to his people. The town machers wrote immediately of this emergency in which both their beloved Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead on the same day. The Mirrer Yeshiva immediately wrote back that this was a sign that Bransk would need a truly groys neue Rebbe, and they would send one of their most promising yung chachams. For fear of making him faint again, no one told Reb Yaakov that the Mirrers had given Bransk one of their greyster chachams 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.

-------

Anyway, we not so immediately cut to We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: which? Perhaps Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, because... why not.... And the last mentioned of whom is pisching on the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop....

They're standing around a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, reading about the injustices done to some guy named Dreyfus in France,

Monday, July 20, 2020

Tales from the Old New Land #1

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 Moshe 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 he is proud well past the point of denial.
You may recognize these 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.
--------
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, by the way, the narration will be entirely in English, but 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.
Reb Yaakov sits with them at the head of an unstudy square table that has been in the property of this cheder since 1772 (repaired in 1793). Year after year, whenever a vildeh chayehs is bored, they rock the table without even realizing what they're doing, and every year, the batayt that they 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 Parsha of the week: and this week's parsha, Vayeshev, is the 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 Yehuda 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 had worn her beauty down to a nub, 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 mekhasheyfe. This eshet khayil, who was always everything to him, whom he gemakhted lebe to every night for forty-five, and when she was no longer beautiful, he blew the candle out and gemakhted lebe in the dark to the beauty she once was and to his eybik lebe for her to this woman who obeyed every command and gave her entire life to everything he asked and demanded, and whom he always suspected his ba'ager for her completely destroyed her beauty and her happiness.
But yet again, when he teaches Vayeshev, the students can't repress their laughter, the mention of sheynkeit and geshlekht, and one at a time, each of his 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!
It's the funt fun tzurikkummen, 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. "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!"
If this were a theater work, then what follows would basically be a nervous breakdown of exposition in which he relates precisely the story of his life as related above. 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, and whose tzadeykkes will put them all to shame.

Thursday, July 16, 2020

The Shock of Return

It's been four days after four months. The new reality to which to you all accumulated gradually, I'm experience all at once. The absence of traffic in the street. The closed and often boarded up stores. The lack of supermarket selection. The socially distanced lines that go around the block. The get togethers at which people can only talk loud to be heard over the social distance and the masks; the masks, the masks, the omnipresent masks. And even worse, the surreality of people who don't wear masks and the implicit gulf between them and us, is it just a disagreement, or is it a war we're in denial that we're waging?
When I left, we all were yelling at each other over this or that Presidential candidate, the Green New Deal, the trivial outrages of a Trump Presidency that still seemed to me like a disaster no different than every other Republican disaster, everybody else seemed to think it unprecedented. But now, we all know what unprecedented truly feels like, and it's everything we feared it would be - the presence of death staring down us all everywhere, everywhen. We all try to experience normal life as we can, lest the oppressive surreality drive us truly insane, but we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and we most definitely fear evil. Is this what it felt like in the Warsaw Ghetto? Is this what Leningrad felt like in the early days of the siege? The Blitz? The Vichy occupation? Guernica or Lidice or Tokyo or Dresden right before the bombs? Bransk and Wissocky before their liquidation? Or is this just the hyperdrama of a mind that refuses to accept that an illness will pass over those of us who stay careful?
For the first time in nearly half a year, I saw my whole immediate family on Tuesday for a socially distanced cookout, masks and all. Brothers and sister-in-law, parents, Bubbie, except for a couple masks and mostly maintaining strict distance, it was little different than it's been at so many lunches and dinners over the last ten years at my parents kitchen table. But of course, the one who covertly did the worst job at maintaining the distance was me. Sneaking up and handling my parents utensils when my stomach ordered me not to wait for people to stop eating before I took seconds. My parents packed brownies and offered me some, and like an idiot, I said no, thinking I've already had my fill of ice cream this year, and then sneaking a couple brownies from both my brothers' stashes.
Otherwise, the same jokes, the same subjects (Trump), and grateful to finally be around people you love and love you, and just grateful to be around anyone at all after four months pretty much without the presence of a single other person. And yet when you go home you inevitably begin to wonder, how many of these gatherings might be left? Or at least I do... You start ranking family in order of importance of who's expendable. Obviously Jordan and Naomi need to stick around, Ethan too, and Mom deserves to be around more than I do, and she's certainly of more use. But Dad and Bubbie can obviously go before I do,... so that makes me #3 on the expendable list, and if any of the others go before me I'll have to be stopped multiple times from joining them, especially Mom.
Mom begins to start reminding me of things I have to do, with occasional assides of 'Dad and I won't be around forever' to up the urgency. A boy's best friend is his mother, and you begin to realize how ill-equipped you are to face life without your best friend, and even if there's no reason to worry, you start to worry all the same that you'll have to say goodbye long before you're ready, and not even in person.
None of us knows what comes next. At this point, we all know people who've come down with it, multiple people with scares, and we're all within two degrees of the lost. And when this plague is over, what then? More diseases? War? A crumbling planet? All of it all at once?
All my life I've dreamed of the ability to leave Baltimore, but realistically it would have been the most imprudent thing in the world, even ten years in DC was wreckless - organizational disaster after disaster, financial, professional, even social. And now, the old cliche has become true - when the pressure is on, all you want is for everything to remain the same forever: no danger, no loss, the unbreakable structures you bristled against to hold firm.
Please oh please god, if it's any of us, let it be me.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I never particularly cared for Bari Weiss's writing, she very quickly became the Bill Maher or Howard Stern of the NY Times masthead, two years younger than me but stuck in 90s Boomer centrism and regurgitating my parents generation of Jews' talking points while the existential issues of the 2020's demand attention in ways as plain as the noses on our faces. How she's treated at the New York Times is not my issue when the end of civilization is upon us. But, very briefly, the hypocrisy of her treatment was fucking breathtaking, and for pointing out the benefits of caution and moderation and correctly pointing out the double standards in how Jews are treated in today's political melees, people reacted as though Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee Sanders had infiltrated the Times. To those who force liberals to take even thirty seconds to defend her, I say:
Fuck you.