If You Read The Whole Thing You're Capable Of This Job
Dearest Editors,
So I won't lie, this is a daunting project, like... this is not even your run the mill novel. As it exists in my head, I doubt I could ever finish this project, I wonder if it's even finishable, but if I do more than 4% of it I will have gotten further than Sufjan Stevens did in his 50 State Project.
So before we begin, before I even describe the project, here's the biggest obstacle, and as an editor it would be your #1 mission to look out for any and all examples of this because it's the curse of every ambitious person in the world: Importantitis - the idea that your work should matter, that it will change the curvature of the world, that people will rethink their lives from reading what you have to say, that it will overthrow a government or cause world peace. Importantitis kills everything it touches - it gives everybody who suffers from it automatic creative block, and whatever gets written is inevitably more pompous than it ever would be if you weren't posing for history.
So as an editor, if you see even a sentence I write with importantitis in it, unless it's funny, send it back to me (or any other writer) for a rewrite. Here's particularly why....
Ahem,... I have not exactly made a secret on social media of my struggles over the years with mental health, and this project, like the musical one I've been doing for seven years, came to me from what we'll charitably call the 'magical thinking' of my brain as a younger man before I got it under control really.... well... it took a while...
Here's the thing... take a deep breath and sit down everybody because this sentence is automatically self-selecting...
At some point, I don't even remember how, I got it into my head that God had charged me with writing a (or THE) great epic meganovel of Jewish history from its founding to the present day, and that it would be a maze of interconnected stories that connects the stories of every generation to one another over thousands of years. At this point I'll just quote one of the best half-paragraphs I ever wrote (after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting) to give a better description of why I've wanted to write this novel than I could come up with here and now:
"Because the fact is, everywhere we've (Jews have) gone, we are the barometer of your civilization. We have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably say, but we have been the yeast that makes your society rise. When we are your honored guests, your civilization prospers, when you do us dishonor, your civilization declines. It's probably not because God is watching over us, it's because a civilization well-disposed to its guests is a civilization that values tolerance and progress and liberty and justice, and is therefore destined to improve."
So it follows that the aim, if not the achievement, of this... whateveritis, would be to show how Judaism and Jews, guests of every world civilization, act as a kind of filigree that connects every major new civilization (at least every major Western one... so far...) to those cultures who came before and those who will come afterward. How those who take us in inevitably seem to be rewarded (if you squint), and those who punish and expel us inevitably seem to be punished themselves (if you squint a little harder).
I will explain more as this goes along, but here's what Joseph Campbell (or Dan Harmon) would term the monomyth on which these stories would be based (Campbell, by the way, was the world's most goyish thinker, and not particularly fond of us... I'll try to limit the parentheses from here on...).
Every time and place in Jewish History:
1. Spring - romance: Somewhere in the world, a not particularly prosperous place has a community of good people who stumble on the secret of improving their communities: hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better. And being so often the most down on their luck people in the world, Jews inevitably come, and find a kind of understanding from people who are simultaneously appalled by their suffering yet find them distasteful, are fascinated by their culture yet terrified it will pollute and pervert their own, and ultimately, realize that these people are improving their lives with astonishing speed, such speed that the natives can't resolve for themselves if these immigrants are entirely human.
2. Summer - comedy: This place grows incredibly prosperous, and it may or may not be because of the influence of Jews, or of immigrants generally. Nevertheless, the country/community/society is disproportionately successful, and even within that place, Jews are particularly disproportionate in their success. But this country's native born Jews, whose parents and grandparents dwelt in so much oppression, become very conspicuous in how they display their success, as the newly rich often do. It creates what seems like a golden age in the community, at least in retrospect, but so high is the prosperity that expectations grow of what the future will bring, and inevitably, the better future doesn't come, because it was already there.... So the new generation, who never knew a time without prosperity, rebel against the prevailing expectations of their society, and even the smallest rebellions against the society seem like earthshaking events (think of the sixties and Baby Boomers...). And in this new society, Jews are so conspicuous and eminent that they are the leading figures in both the rebellion against the community, and the establishment who wants to keep things exactly the way they are! (think of the difference between Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg, or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman - remember him?).
3. Fall - tragedy: Just as Jewish success never lasts very long, a country's success never lasts particularly long either, and eventually it collapses (sorry but it's true) in war, or famine, or dictatorship, or anarchy. It seems to happen in every country and every era, I grievously doubt we will be an exception. The reason that happens is that success is a poisoned chalice. It always manages to highlight those ways in which we're all still lacking, and eventually the inadequacies seem larger than the successes, and because the inadequacies seem larger, the inadequacies BECOME larger because nobody has the morale to do the colossally tough work and sacrifice it takes to keep a society functioning properly. And so people turn to explanations for why life isn't better than it is, and these explanations become like an intellectual suit of armor for them that explains the inexplicable. At the time, their newly adapted identities seem to them like revelations which will change the quality of their lives forever; but life is tenaciously mysterious, and no explanation of why life is the way it is solves our problems any more than temporarily. But since Jews are inherently mysterious and ambiguous, both native to their countries and not, It is inevitably blamed on the country's most conspicuously successful people, who suddenly find themselves the most oppressed people in their society as quickly as their parents or grandparents rose to success.
4. Winter - Irony: Having cleared a community of its Jews, the newly cleansed society is supposed to take root in a luminously glorious new golden age. But it never does, because it turned out Jews were not parasites, they were yeast, and without Jews, the bread falls and burns. So depleted has this society become from its obviously misplaced priorities that the misfortune which was supposed only to fall upon Jews falls upon everybody. Here's another of the best paragraphs I ever wrote: "If we're The Chosen People, it's not because we're a better nation, it's because God chose us for his laboratory. We're an unending scroll through which is inscribed the whole world's history. Every new century and country is a new chapter but the lesson of Jewish history is that everything Jews undergo, the world undergoes next. By enslaving us, Egypt eventually enslaved themselves. By crucifying us, Romans eventually crucified themselves. By massacring us, the Crusaders eventually got massacred. By putting us in a religious torture chamber, the Spanish put themselves in too. By imprisoning us in a ghetto, Russians eventually imprisoned themselves. By burning us, Germans eventually burned too. When Jews are accepted, others get accepted next. When Jews are rejected, others get rejected next. When Jews are killed, you get the point...
5. Spring somewhere else, where Jews go next...
So when you perceive these life cycles in society, how they keep happening everywhere from century to century, and how often Jews seem involved, it's very hard for some of us not to see an animating hand in it. Perhaps there is someone out there using Jews as test subjects. Is God testing the Jews? Or is he testing the people who react to Jews? So whomever he tests, why is he testing us? And are these tests in fact a reason to celebrate him or a reason to condemn him?
Obviously, this myth is not true, and if there is truth in it, it's obviously a matter of perspective. Jews are not big on monomyths. We're Pharisees, remember? We only like rules when we can make exceptions to them, because the state of every Jewish life is ambiguous. If you've read the first five books of the Bible, particularly Leviticus, you'll realize that the Torah has so many laws (613 to be exact) that it is impossible to observe in modern daily life unless they are constantly reinterpreted for new circumstances, generation after generation. We don't even know what our own laws mean!
It then follows that the one monomyth which applies to Jewish life is that anybody who believes in their own monomyth eventually comes across terrible trouble with Jews. Whether your monomyth is Christianity or Islam, or paganism, or nationalism or socialism (or obviously combinations thereof), or science and technology, or atheism and philosophy, you will come to look at Jews with incredible amounts of suspicion, because the nature of Jewish identity is so incredibly difficult to pin down.
Just to take the most obvious example from contemporary life: are American Jews loyal first to US or Israel? The answer is obviously the US, or at least usually the US by far. Are there Jews who are loyal to Israel first? Sure. Even a few powerful ones. But the vast majority of Jews of any social station are self-evidently Americans before Israel comes into the equation at all. But to anyone whom the suspicion of dual Jewish loyalty occurs, they seem unable to get it out of their minds, and it can act on them like a mental poison.
And the reason is because antisemitism is another of those ambiguities. It's like racism, but it's not the same. Racism is, in many ways, a gut level disgust for someone who looks different than you. But an antisemites can never be sure that anybody they meet is not a Jew. It acts almost like a paranoid psychological disorder, and in that way, it's closer to homophobia. But nobody, nobody sane at least, is worried that gays are secretly controlling any industry but culture, whereas Jews are supposed to be controlling not just our culture, but our media distribution, our banks, and our government.
Furthermore, agreement about whether Jews are white isn't nearly as widespread as the average
There are a bunch of leftists out there who think Jews are all capitalists who control all of those organizations. There are a bunch of right-wingers out there who think Jews are all radical socialists trying to upend the societal order they think they've always known and loved. There are these 'dual versions' of how Jews poison a society in every country Jews have ever lived in.
Obviously, most people sympathetic to the right or the left don't believe that, but there are certain things they believe very passionately. Right wingers see that there's clearly a disproportionate number of Jews in Hollywood (which is true...), and therefore draw a conclusion that Jewish influence on Hollywood and culture is something insidious, and some version of that always gets said in a a heated argument. Left wingers, on the other hand, see that there's clearly a disproportionate number of Jews in Washington (also true), and they draw a similar conclusion about Jews' role in government - that some conspiracy of Jews is creating our foreign policy to be beneficial only to Jews. And in heated arguments, that always comes out too.
So eventually, when conflict becomes unavoidable, the host countries suffer terribly, but Jews so often seem to suffer the first and worst. Ultimately, I don't know why that is or if that's entirely true, but it just seems to be the way of things: Germany, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, more recently in the Middle East (we'll talk about that controversy another time...) and if you go far back enough, there are examples all around the Western world.
So the question becomes, when Jews are getting killed, why do millions of people not defend Jews against their murderers? Not all Germans were Nazis, not all Russians participated in pogroms, not all medieval Spaniards denounced their neighbors as Jews or went to auto-da-fe's (public burnings of heretics). But when encountering clear evidence of horrific oppression, why did so many of them just kinda shrug?
Here, we're going to stop and talk about the job. I need seven to eight hours a week and will pay $40 an hour. I need someone with a real knowledge of history and real knowledge of the bible, and when talking to you individually I will obviously pop quiz you with intermediate level questions from both. I don't need a Jewish editor (though it would be nice maybe...) but I need someone who clearly knows a thing or seven about Jewish culture, and has obvious familiarity with the general way Jews do things - which is both exactly like everybody else and very, very different. I need someone who can edit the obvious howlers in my careless punctuation and tendency mid-correction to forget replacing the deleted word with the correct word. I need some who edits the authorial voice with a view to making it sound less pompous than its author; but I'll also be going to great lengths to establish very specific authorial voices, so please do your best to edit the tone with an eye to sharpening it, not dulling it. We would meet for roughly ninety minutes by zoom at some point during the week for a combined notes, brainstorming, talk about other books, and general therapy with a guy who has been going to it almost without a break for thirty years. I may or may not get to know you very well over this project, but you will certainly get to know me.
Most importantly, I need someone who can handle colossally dark subjects without getting more disturbed than its author, maintain a sense of humor when reading and talking about the darkest subjects, and find ways of appreciating the beauty in terrible struggles. Jewish history is very dark, the life of the crazy is very dark. As my longtime musical engineer recently told me, in terms of being actually crazy, I'm still clearly an 8 out of 10, but in terms of actually being difficult, he called me a 5.5 - not a pushover, I'm still this guy... but not actively difficult to work with either and certainly not someone who ever makes a request without five preparatory clauses before and five apologies afterward. Maybe he was being nice... but once he tells you you're 8/10 crazy, it's hard to imagine he's trying to sugarcoat things.
For better or worse, I can assure you, dear editors, this current easygoing go with the flow Evan is still alive at 40 due to an enormous amount of personal work and introspection he had to undertake so he might have some hope to control a live wire of a brain which was suffering quite a bit more than I ever even admitted to nearly anybody. Part of this project will be to document those chapters of my life in relative detail, I will enumerate that later in this proposal as well. So now let's go back to the question three paragraphs up.
There's no easy answer to that question, but I think there are four layers operating here:
1. They're obviously afraid of dying themselves. When helping condemned people condemns you and your family, you're obviously not inclined to help.
2. Peer pressure. I doubt more than one-third of Germans had truly positive feelings about Hitler and Nazis, but when defending the defenseless means defending the most hated people in your country, it will even change the opinion of people who love you enough not to turn you in. You become thought of at best as a lost soul, at least as someone who is no longer trustworthy, at worst, someone deserving of contempt and humiliation.
3. There's always the off chance that some of those awful things Hitler and Torquemada (if you don't know who he is take a moment to look him up now :) claim about Jews are true. So why take the chance to save them when Hitler just might be doing a social good by getting rid of them?
4. Even if the claims of Hitler and whoever else are untrue, there are so many competing claims about Jews. Some people say Jews are horrible because we're capitalists, some because we're communists. Some say we suck because we refuse to be Christians, others say we suck because we made the seed from which Christianity sprung. Today, some of the world thinks of us as the most brutal nationalists on earth, and some of the world thinks of us as the world's most corrupt cosmopolitans who ruin everything distinct about every culture we touch. So when so many competing claims are made about Jews, millions simultaneously must reason, 'Nobody knows the specifics, but everybody agrees that Jews are bad, and if people who disagree on so much else can agree on that, they must be just as bad as everybody thinks.'
Jews wander from nation to nation, penniless and persecuted, but in new countries they're given opportunity, and suddenly they run circles with it and rise to the top of society more quickly than anyone ever knew somebody could. They change everything about the societies in which they live, but the whiplash of quick societal change can hurt everybody. Half the society gets hung up recapturing the way things used to be, and half the society gets hung up on why the new society isn't better than it is. It distracts them from doing the work of maintaining their society, which makes the society worse. The only thing both sides eventually agree on is that this new country that Jews helped build sucks, it needs to be torn down, and it was only ever to Jewish people's benefit.
All they come to agree on is that we are parasites. We accelerate the growth of a society, and we accelerate its demise. Letting Jews emigrate to their society is a 'deal with the devil' for short term gain at the expense of long term success.
The average Jew might be a little more successful than the average person elsewhere, but not markedly so. But still, it's hard not to notice that there's a lot of disproportionately successful Jews, and that seems to be true everywhere Jews go. How do so many Jews get disproportionately successful? Well, Jews aren't inherently smarter than anybody, but Jewish life is a series of routines. You keep the kitchen a certain way, you memorize hundreds of prayers, you have laws for how to dress, how to raise children, how to do business, how to.... go about every facet of your life. So Jews, at least Jews raised in the culture, learn very early about the importance of perspicacity, precision, and practicality. We are trained practically from birth to do routines. The routines may be stupid or meaningless, but they do prepare Jews for the routines that are meaningful in creating a good life.
Form
I don't believe I'm capable of writing a long-form narrative. My ability to sustain a narrative usually empty out around about 7,000 words and my best quality writing averages at about 4,000. This will most likely be a long collection of short stories.
So here are the options for how to do it.
1. A loose collection of short stories, none of which technically have anything to do with the other.
2.
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