11/4/95

 Gentiles will look at that date and see only numbers. Most Jews, the Jews for whom the identity is important, will look at those numbers and no matter how they order them, they'll know exactly what this means.

So much of that day is seared into my memory. The bat mitzvahs on the same morning of G------- Z----- and Y--- F--- at Chizuk Amuno congregation, the weekend visit of the L-----s at my parents house from upstate New York, the call from my uncle telling me that Rabin was killed, and the way I embarrassed myself at the Pikesville Hilton in front of a pretty girl at G-------- Z-----'s bat mitzvah party by doing a Jerry Lewis impression.

When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, we knew the world would change forever. It turns out we underestimated how much.

Maybe the idea of peace was a chimera, but were it a mirage it was as much because of the people on either side who refused in bad faith to believe in it, or even to want it. There are people out there, hundreds of millions of them, who want the slaughter to continue in perpetuum, and not just the Arab side. They so hate each other that to them the only way to resolve this conflict is the eventual extinction of the other; and they don't just pursue it resignedly, they pursue it with a joy that's barely restrained. Hoping for slaughter becomes their reason for living. It's Likudniks as well as Hamasniks, apocalyptic Christianists as well as apocalyptic Islamists. If the right of this debate is not as murderous as the left, they are far more powerful, and they have far less distance to travel between murderous thoughts and murderous actions.

It's a generation later. Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister when he was five years older than I am now. He's lived the majority of his life since then as Prime Minister, and is now older than Rabin ever was.

What's happened in the meantime is the shattering of every dream a Jewish liberal ever had. All that's left is a left who not only rejects us, but rejects that either the US or Israel as any force for good, and in many cases, rejects that it ever could be.

My generation may well be the last generation of American Jews to believe you can be entirely liberal and entirely Jewish. So long as the left gets in bed with the lowest kind of Hamas sympathizing totalitarian forces and entertains the idea that the entire State of Israel is indistinguishable from a colonialist project, that's over. There is little future for Jews on the left, there may not even be a place for Jews in a center that no longer exists in our era that dismisses people on the other side of discourse as less than human - and not just their ideas but the people themselves. All that can be relied on to protect Jews is the loving arms of a reactionary far right that's perpetually on the verge of eliminating republican democracy around the world. We are the one minority they'd save, and when their power is eventually threatened, we will be the minority casually disposed of as a concession.

It certainly never felt that way, but in many ways, my childhood was idyllic. Almost all the bullies I knew, kid and adult, were other Jews. The problems of every Jew from the beginning to the end of recorded time did not exist for me. The problem was that I felt like a Jew among Jews, as many Jews inevitably do. In visiting my own pain on others, I don't doubt I made other Jewish kids feel the same way - maybe even other adults.

My very comical town of origin, Pikesville MD, is undergoing something of a renaissance. When it came time to pursue their own lives, most kids my age moved away. But now that kids ten years younger are starting families, these younger contemporaries are, to my astonishment, moving back and electing a life in Baltimore.

Why is that? What changed in the years between my peers and my youngest brother's peers that made life in Pikesville attractive again? I can only surmise, but the ultimate difference is a tiny critical mass of pressure: feeling just a tiny bit more of those gentile screws on their temples. I don't have statistical backing for any of this, it's only my own anecdotal speculations, and statistical measurements may prove wrong everything I say below.

Baltimore was always a dream deferred, but the Pikesville I grew up in never was. Within our white picket eruv kids who wanted to fulfill their dreams got the education, the connections, and the prestige to go to the best colleges, get the best jobs in the best cities, and live their best lives. That won't be true for kids just a little bit younger than us. For better or worse, DEI crowds many Jews out of the best colleges, and being a doctor or lawyer is nowhere near so lucrative a profession as it was in 1995. To my astonishment, Jews are about to become middle class again. Maybe that's a good thing, but the middle class is hollowing out everywhere. So long as the trajectory is downward, will their grandchildren even be middle class?

But the issue in the early 21st century that makes Jews feel completely unwelcome among non-Jews? You guessed it, there can only be one issue that describes the discrepancy. It's the simple fact of Israel. Not whether Israel is peaceful or bellicose, liberal or conservative, a nation of sanctuary seekers or a nation of colonialists: Israel itself. Over its history, Israel's been as all the world's most functional states have, but what has never changed is the animus against Israel, even in its most principled moments. Yes, the hatred of Israel is particularly vehement now, a little bit of it deserved, but the bacteria of anti-Jewish hatred is always there, waiting for a particularly humid climate when it can eat its way through a whole culture. Anti-Israel criticism is often not antisemitic, but YOUR anti-Israel criticism may be in ways you make a conspicuous effort to not understand.

Just ask yourselves: how often do you make a point of condemning Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia vs. how often you condemn Israel? Is it commensurate with how great a threat each of these countries are to world peace? And even if you do it equally, is it in proportion to the crimes these countries commit? And even if you think the US is too tied up with Israel economically, aren't they economically bound with China and Saudi Arabia? Stand outside yourself and then count: how many justifications do you have to make for the disproportionality of your attention to Israel's crimes before it sounds normal to you again?

You may find this trivial, maybe it is, but so long as the world believes in microaggressions and safe spaces, this may make the difference between making Jews feel welcome and making them mistrust you. Why should Jews be the only minority expected to accept feeling unsafe?

Hopefully more later. There is so much of this...

A Liberal Israel

Look, I've said this many many times already, I'll probably say it many times again, but I feel stretched on a cross, and I think most liberal Jews feel the same way. It takes no great insight to see the direction Israeli policy is trending, and our blind insistence on a rubber stamp for Israel aid has lead to the blind arrogance of a now permanently ensconced Israeli government. Even if Ganz leaves Netanyahu's government, there is still a conservative majority until 2026, and I think not even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are stupid enough to give that up, and no liberal government will ever give the orthodox what the conservatives will.

We live in the real world, and there is no world in which the beginning of this war wasn't justified but fantasy, but going after Rafah is the red line past which this becomes a war of choice, and all the casualties are no longer on Hamas. But whether it's Netanyahu, Netanyahu-lite, or Netanyahu-extreme, we are stuck with some version of his policies for a while yet, and if impartial arbiters eventually confirmed that a few more ten-thousand Gazan civilians died, how would it not be justified to call it an ethnic cleansing? How would it not be justified to call it ethnic cleansing in the most brutal scale and manner?

Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 troops, but ask yourselves, what would happen after they're all gone? Knowing that ending the war ends his chances for keeping his job and possibly avoiding jailtime, would Netanyahu ever end the war willingly? So long as Netanyahu is Prime Minister, he will find new threats. If not Hamas then Hezbollah, if not Hezbollah then Fatah, if not Fatah then god knows what else.

It's one thing for Zionists to turn our backs on anti-Zionist Jews, it's another to turn our backs on the few Jews brave enough to say more than once that these policies can kill us. If Israel is endangered again, there's no decent insurance policy for when things get hairy abroad, and it's difficult to conceive of a future when things aren't about to get hairier.

A large part of being Jewish is dealing with ambiguities that would drive the rest of the world insane, and at the same time as we're endangered in the longer term, we're temporarily more secure than ever. We're heading towards a potential future where Trump is the President again, and it's naive to expect that Netanyahu or whatever sheol replaces him won't have blank checks. Not even Netanyahu or anyone short of a Ben-Gvir is dumb enough to wage a genocide, and were a genocide to happen, it wouldn't be a war like what's waged now, but the real thing where Palestinians are killed with the impunity with which China may have annihilated the Muslim Uighurs. But eventually, Netanyahu will almost certainly try everything he can to deport Palestinians from territories he very much views as Israel's, I'm sure he's tried already, but he will almost certainly fail. And yet, if an Israeli PM of the future offers some nearby country in crisis a price astronomical enough, some country can buy them.

So some form of ethnic cleansing is a very likely future. The worst of it wouldn't be in 2024, but by 2050 after global warming and AI can hit with the force of dozens of atom bombs. No country will get through it without the stink of their shit clinging to them for the next hundred years, but no people is punished for their sins as frequently as Jews are. After war, ethnic cleansing that goes well beyond 1948, that is a very real potential future, but god knows what would follow it for Jews.

Ethnic cleansing is not just Israel's likely future, it's the likely future of the entire world. In the years after World War II, Palestine was just another ethnic cleansing among dozens: German speakers from every Eastern European country, 12-14 million of them, along with 3 million displaced Poles in the Polish Civil War that followed WWII (including my grandparents). India and Pakistan, 11 to 14 million displaced in the partition, as many as 2 million killed. Stalin ordered 3 and a half million ethnic minorities resettled all around the USSR to break them of their national identities - the expulsion of 300,000 Italian speakers from Yugoslavia, the expulsion of 150,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 100,000 Greeks from Turkey, 300,000 Indians from Burma. By the 70s, another 300,000 Rohingya from Burma, 425,000 Chinese from Cambodia, 140,000 Kurds from Syria. By the 90s, another 360,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 60,000 Turks from Uzbekistan, 100,000 Bhutanese from Nepal, another 150,000 Rohingya from Burma, 125,000 in a population transfer between Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, roughly 4 million former Yugoslavians displaced in the wars that followed the country's collapse, roughly 800,000 from the Kashmir province on the India-Pakistan border, untold smaller expulsions, and, don't forget, 270,000 to 400,000 Palestinians from Kuwait! And, nobody cares off course, but 1 million Sephardic Jews expelled from all around the Middle East to Israel by 1970. And yet it's all Palestine, Palestine, Palestine as though the world itself didn't commit the same sin. After war comes, ethnic cleansing is the sin of every peace that follows, and in the whirlwind that follows the worst of it, it won't just be Palestinians that are expelled.

We liberal Jews are neither leftists nor conservatives, and we're reminded every day of how far we are from both camps. We know that there is no Jewish future worth having without Israel. We also know that there is no Jewish future without Israel taking so much more care. We are at an impasse, and there may be no fix for it. Israel must survive, but it must survive as a country worth fighting for.

Yes, it's true, Jewish loyalties are dual to the US and Israel. Get over it. This accusation of 'dual loyalty' usually comes from people who find the US a force for evil and feel no loyalty to the country at all. And yes, it's true, we conspire to make the US pursue Israeli interests. Not in the way people think, but yeah, I guess it has to be seen as some kind of conspiracy, even if compared to most political conspiring, it's relatively benign. We've partaken in a conspiracy to make the US pursue interests which, until recently, were in the interests of both the US, and of human rights. Oh how evil we are. Damn us all to the cross again.

Please try to understand, for Jews - not Israelis, Jews - it is still October 7th. The writing is on the wall again. It's not just about October 7th, it's about the 2000 years of October 7ths which might follow. We had a lifetime off from history's melee, but we are right back to where we were. Some Jews have to be forgiven for not seeing that peace is the only way out. Jews are subject to the same historical forces everybody else is, and if you put the backs of Jews up against the sea, they will radicalize and fight just like any Islamist would. But read Jewish history, not just the highlight reel but the unflattering stuff they didn't teach us in day school. We usually lose, and there were times we probably deserved to lose. We're like any country or peoplehood, we get complacent and arrogant, and we demonize the people who point that out. But there's a reason we remember Jeremiah and Isaiah: they denounced the ways of the Israelites, but it turned out they were right, and we paid the price sevenfold for not minding our sins.

So f*ck human rights. We need to pursue peace to save ourselves. No god would let us win forever.

Ten reasons I haven't written about the campus protests so far.

 

1. I think they're incredibly silly.

2. I think the counterprotests are incredibly silly.

3. Academia is the last place to encounter meaningful thought

4. This might be the most complex issue on Earth and everybody involved in this silly flareup reduces the issue to something that fits on a fortune cookie.

5. There's not a single person involved in any capacity of these college conflicts who is not willfully toxifying discourse on a scale far more massive than a social media feed.

6. Whether the ideal is justice, security, liberty, equality, halacha, or sharia, idealism untempered by realism about human capabilities is what gets people killed, as untethered idealists inevitably come into lethal conflict with idealists of other stripes.

7. Academia is not only the node of where ideas are created, but of where bad ideas are created. The vast majority of academic ideas are unusably bad. That's fine, because the point of academia is to create ideas, but there is no place in the world more disconnected from praxis than the modern university, so they have no way of knowing that their ideas are bad until they can prove so in practice. Which at this rate they eventually will.

8. All through modern history, from the original Protestants to the original socialists, the academic disconnect from real life has been a reliable unwitting incubator of revolutionary death.

9. What began with a revolution of liberals in 1848 seeking self-determination became the Marxist pre-war revolutionaries of the years around 1900 in which social democrats collaborated with the most violent Marxists and anarchists. And now, the basically liberal precepts of the sixties turn into the illiberal left-wing revolts of the 2020s, in which intersectional social democrats collaborate in real time with a number of actors brutal enough to make Israel look like Switzerland.

10. The funding of these protests by hostile states is comically obvious. So is Israel's funding of counterprotests.

Probably more later.

Grrr....

One More Thing about Yom HaShoah

There are two Holocaust memorial days. One is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The other is Yom HaShoah. One is for them, the other is for us.

Yom HaShoah may be an official Israeli holiday, but the speed with which Yom HaShoah took over Jewish memory is unprecedented - it's a holiday that feels as though it had always been there, even to Jews alive before the Shoah or the State of Israel. It is just one of a million ways that you could never separate Jewish identity from Israel. I'd never heard of International Holocaust Remembrance Day before the internet, and I guarantee most Jews hadn't either. For us, Yom HaShoah is the day of Holocaust remembrance, it is the day in Israel, it is the day in the US, it is the day for Jews around the world.

I'll spare you the lecture about Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha'Atzma'ut. 

Six Out of Seven: How to talk about the Shoah

Eighty years later, we still don't know how to talk about the Shoah. The key figure is not that six million Jews died, the key figure is that six million died OUT OF SEVEN MILLION. THAT's what makes the Holocaust unique in recorded history. Other numbers are larger, and you'll have to excuse me for mentioning some ghoulish figures, for they all defy belief, but six out of seven is the ratio that makes the suffering of Jews unique among all groups of human beings.

On the intersectional side of things, you often hear that ten million died in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold. What's not said is that it was ten million out of twenty, and ten is an extremely high estimate that's sometimes put as low as two. In Russia you hear that Russians suffered as much or more in World War II, and that's true in some ways, something like 27 million Russians died in what they call The Great Patriotic War, but of the USSR's population that was one in six. In China under Mao, somewhere between 40 and 120 million died. It's enough to make you wash your hands of humanity forever, but China in 1950 was about 550 million people, so that's somewhere percentage-wise between 8 and the low twenties. It's true, the genocide of Native Americans wiped out 95% of the population, but it was conducted over 400 years, facilitated in large parts by accidental incursions of disease rather than deliberate murder. The closest modern approximation is the Armenians, and again, we don't have very reliable figures. The percentage may in fact be close to the Jews, as high as 1.2 million out of 1.5 - 80%, but that's only a high estimate. The low estimate is 664,000 out of 2.4 million, roughly 27%.

The horror of it all is unspeakable, and how can we wonder why genocide keeps happening when people don't even know these figures which should be on the standardized tests of every high school student?

What makes the Holocaust unique is its almost complete success. For the suffering of the Shoah, we have, relatively speaking, extremely reliable records - the Germans were, as ever, quite punctilious. It is the only genocide in modern history for which the goal was the complete annihilation of a scattered peoplehood. It is the only genocide in which the victims were chased around a continent from country to country in the effort to end them. It is the only genocide whose effort spanned almost an entire continent all at once; and the vast majority of it took place over just two years.

And if that's not horrific enough, ample evidence exists that Stalin was getting ready to finish in Europe what Hitler started, and only his death prevented his murderous plans. Counting Soviet Russia, before the Holocaust were nine million Jews in Europe. Had Stalin lived just a few years longer, all but a few hundred thousand would be gone.

Jews don't have a monopoly on suffering or genocide, but the Shoah has no parallel in man's inhumanity to other human beings, and those who insist that other groups endured what Jews endured are no friend to the Jews.

The worst fight anyone ever got into on this once very loud wall (much louder than now if you can believe it) was when I insisted on exactly that sentiment. All sorts of left friends and acquaintances I haven't heard from in years recoiled in disgust: 'horror is horror' they exclaimed, 'how can you quantify it?', they brought up imperialism, they brought up the suffering of nearby in Baltimore, they brought up how the Holocaust is always used as a cudgel to minimize other people's suffering.

Stalin is supposed to have uttered two quotes that put all that in perspective. One is the relatively famous: 'the death of a single person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic.' The other? 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' You can't quantify horror, but you can quantify murder.

There are other forms of horror in the world that are arguably as bad, but Jewish history is unique in how frequently it contains the widespread profusion of nearly all those other forms of horror in addition to the worst of murder. It is also unique in how it prioritizes life over all things. So long as one is alive, there is hope for improvement, all that can cease hope is death.

The point is this: there are ideologies proliferating these days which tell us the suffering of the Jews is held on a pedestal to minimize the suffering of others.

Fuck them.

The purpose of showing the Shoah as the unique crime of history is not to minimize other people's suffering but to prevent anything on a scale nearly so vast - whether inflicted on Jews or on anybody else, by mapping out all the symptoms and signposts. Records are meant to be broken, and the Shoah is there as a lesson for exactly how these events can happen again.

There may be another post later tonight.

Two Further Thoughts on Rafah: particularly the negotiations

 1. There was never going to be a ceasefire agreement, the negotiations were always going to break down. That is Hamas's strategy. The strategic gambit is to bait Israel into offering the maximum number of concessions, then reject them at the last minute as a means of provoking Israel into the maximum possible assault on Rafah and bait Biden into sympathy with Israel's point of view.

Until a significant portion of the world stops making Israel shoulder 100% of the blame and pressures Hamas in the way they pressure Israel, the slaughter will continue.

2. A lot of people are going to say that it's Israel who walked away from the table. That's technically true, but an Egyptian official has already leaked that it was actually Hamas who deliberately blew up the deal. Let's face it, both sides of this table are negotiating in bad faith, and both sides want the Rafah invasion to happen, whether now or in six weeks. The truth, of course, is a much more complicated picture, and you won't get at it unless you're willing to put in the work to see it in the round.

Which everybody is always willing to do when it comes to this conflict...

All reactions:

All reactio

Facts in the round: Some thoughts at the beginning of Rafah

  On the one hand, even if the statistical figures of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry are true, there is a ratio of civilian to combatant dead that is roughly two combatants for every three civilians, that is unprecedentedly low in modern urban warfare by quite a margin. It means that even the Gaza Health Ministry can't disguise Israelis are generally fighting this war with extreme care.

On the other hand, there are a total of roughly 100,000 Palestinian casualties - casualties is a term that's widely misunderstood, it doesn't mean total dead, it means total dead + injured, and when you add the two, it's roughly 100,000 people. That's almost 5% of Gazans. And this is just the figure at the beginning of Rafah, which, for all we know, could double the figure in just a month or two. It does not include those about to die or get injured, it doesn't include those who are currently starving, or worried about how their routine infections could worsen, it certainly doesn't include those who are psychologically damaged for life, and it can't possibly include all those who are missing.

Even if Israelis are fighting this war with extreme care, even if, as American military observers note, they are using all kinds of safety precautions the US never used in Iraq or Afghanistan, they can't hide the fact that they've also deployed a level of weaponry the US never did in Iraq or Afghanistan. You read that correctly. The level of weaponry deployed is greater than Iraq or Afghanistan: not just relative to the size of the areas, but in real terms: in six months, more weaponry's been dumped on Gaza than were inflicted on two countries in twenty years that are 1500 times Gaza's size.

On still the other hand, the vast majority of these bombs are not dropped on civilians. They're dropped to destroy Hamas's tunnel network, which is forty percent larger than London's subway system in a territory less than a quarter the size. Tunnels built so deep that even the biggest bombs struggle to reach them. You cannot possibly expect that Israel will allow the tunnel system to remain in place, and if it means destroying Gaza to do it, well... nobody was calling Gaza that great a place to begin with, and even now, Israel is far from the sole author of Gaza's shame (we'll get into that another day).

On the other hand again, even with the extreme care taken for human life, there are no guarantees in war, particularly war of this scale. Areas that are planned to be safe turn out to not be safe: sometimes due to incompetence, sometimes due to competent people's margin of error, and occasionally because war crimes are committed - not by the Israeli military, 'Israel' has, thus far, neither planned war crimes nor committed them. Even now, Rafah will be unspeakably bloody, but depending on how the invasion is conducted, it can still be within legitimate rules of warfare. But individual Israeli soldiers? Even individual units? You'd have to be incredibly naive to not guess that war crimes are committed every day, just as individual soldiers do in every asymmetric war since the beginning of warfare. And if Israel does not eventually prosecute those soldiers who commit them, Israel itself will have committed war crimes.

But more often than not, and this is why Israel is in such serious trouble, part of the reason Israel's experienced so many PR disasters is not because Israel has succeeded in its military objectives, but because the cost of Israel's success is so high - and people can't help wondering if success can be procured at a lower price. Even if a 1/1.5 ratio is unprecedentedly low, all combatant to civilian ratios are too high, and any civilian murder will call an army's tactics into question.

There is all sorts of evidence of a trigger happy Israeli army, the World Central Kitchen episode is just one case study among dozens. It would appear that 142 journalists have been killed, 224 humanitarian aid workers, and more than 350 healthcare professionals. Israel can justify it by saying that many of these workers made a decision to embed themselves with Hamas, and must therefore be suspect of collaborating with Hamas - and in a sense they're correct, but surely nowhere near a majority of these workers are Hamas collaborators in any sense. If in six months they can kill so many professionals with so little regard for their collateral damage, how many outright civilians can they kill under a similar calculus? How many children?

Whatever the position about the Gaza war, we on Israel's side are going to have to get as serious about the cost of our beliefs as we wish people on Palestine's side would, not just the cost of our international esteem, but the actual human cost.

It's always tenuous to talk about morality when statecraft is involved, because a more moral world is only attained through immoral acts. But even if you don't want to view the human cost morally, you have to view the human cost politically:

We haven't annihilated a people, but we've annihilated whatever little society we allowed them, and if we don't leave the door open after this for some kind of negotiated settlement, we will have erased whatever chance we had to make this struggle not last generations longer, maybe centuries longer. If, after all this, we simply expect that we can make Gaza into an eternally occupied territory, basically an open air prison for millions requisitioned in an area 1/3rd the size of Philadelphia, we are delusional. If we expect that half the entire world won't rush to their side, do everything they can to subvert Israel's continued existence, and rush to judge every Jew as preemptively guilty helping these Israeli 'jailers', we are delusional. If we expect that Israel can perpetually occupy Gaza without Russia and China exploiting the turbulence it causes in the US to create a larger scale conflict that can topple the political power of democracy in favor of totalitarian dictatorships all over the world, we are delusional.

In history, in politics, moral absolutes are what get people killed. Leave chants and memes to the idiots. There is a far more complex morality at work, and it urgently needs more people to decode it.

Clarification #2

 Nothing about criticizing Israel is antisemitic. It's fantastically naive to go around enraged about all the things Israel does wrong if you're not giving similar criticism to dozens of countries around the world, many of them outright authoritarian regimes, many of which are propped up by the US; not to mention that Jews find the frequency of criticism irritating to the point of enraging, and it steps on all our insecurities that our friends won't look out for us when times get difficult (like now) but no, of course it's not antisemitic to criticize Israel. Israel's a state like any other state, in a complicated situation about which the whole world has lots of feelings, and given the stakes, it's going to fuck up a lot. Criticism is natural.

But there is no planet where anti-Zionism is not anti-Judaism. We'll call that a separate phenomenon from antisemitism, but the border between anti-Judaism and antisemitism is incredibly porous. The reunification of Jews with Israel is chanted in prayers at least a dozen times every day over multiple services and has been for two-thousand years. The promise of an Israelite land where Israel is goes back at least three millennia, and getting back there is the only motivation Jews had for surviving since the time of Christ and Rome. No pale skin on some of us can disguise that we are native to this land, and we deserve to live on it without worrying that it will kill us.

So it is what it is and don't kid yourself. If you oppose the State of Israel, you oppose that Judaism exists at all, and some part of you holds Jewish people in contempt. This belief doesn't mean you're an antisemite, but it does mean that some part of you is antisemitic. If you can live with that, go ahead and live with it. Some Jews will be all too happy to exonerate you and say that Judaism exists apart from Zionism, but even if they are Jews, they are not Jewish. Because Judaism IS Israel. Judaism is other things too, but the land of Israel is one of the very most important. You may disapprove of that if you like, but never hold illusions about what that means.

Rattle's Moments

 It's only six months into the Rattle tenure, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony is almost the exact opposite ensemble of what it was five years ago. I'm sure some will view that as a tragedy - and I would number myself one of them except that the Bavarian Radio Symphony of old was a product of its master, and the new one is the product of its master too. If it weren't Mariss Jansons in front of them, the discipline would sound drilled and cold, and if it weren't Simon Rattle now, the lack of discipline would be irritating. Both, however, share a warmth that makes their decisions irrelevant, they are just the outward manifestation of a personality. Jansons was raised in the postwar USSR - born to a Jewish mother in hiding and his musicmaking reflected the drilled nature of his world, Rattle comes from the same Liverpool as Lennon and McCarthy, and his musicmaking reflects the free spirit of his, but in both cases, the warmth of soul is what matters.

I have to imagine his performances are extremely different on successive nights. Rattle is like a surfer who rides the musical wave or a gardener who grows a musical plant. He issues very few 'don'ts' from the podium, he simply listens and paints as he goes - the moment he spots something interesting in the balance, he encourages it and brings it out. Watch the strings and you realize that there is almost no attempt to blend sonority. Some players throb with vibrato, some barely vibrate at all. It always seems he would rather have a collection of 100 soloists than an Orchestra with a capital O.

Rattle is not particularly interested in structure, and as much as he zeroes in on details, there are musicians who bring out far more (I'm sure we'll talk about Kirill Petrenko before long). What interests Rattle is atmosphere. Music for him seems a series of extraordinary moments, and his mind is always in the present. It can result in a kind of interpretive attention deficit disorder in which one phrase has nothing to do with the next. If he thinks the present can be more extraordinary with a sudden change in tempo, he'll change it with little regard for how it affects the form or the harmonic rhythm, but within those moments are the most extraordinary things: eliciting the most extremely varied dynamics, balancing lines to bring out the inner voices, balancing harmonies to get the most luminous colors, and consistently encouraging the orchestra to give their warmest sound. Is there any conductor in my lifetime who gets a sound that warm? There was at least one, his name was Mariss Jansons.

On the drive home from tonight's extraordinary Pastoral I tried playing through the piece in my head to remember all the wonderous things Rattle did with them. A few of the things he did were absurd, many were mannered, and yet the vast majority of them were so extraordinary that a truer music I've never heard. I couldn't possibly remember everything. When I heard Jakub Hrusa the other night, there was far more obvious excellence. If anyone had said five years ago that the Bamberg Symphony would sound objectively better than the Bavarian Radio Symphony, they'd be laughed out of the hall, but the Bamberg Symphony sounded better blended and more precise. The excellence was completely consistent from piece to piece. Yet it's no criticism on Hrusa - still near the beginning of his career, to say that Rattle's concert had far more music in it.

Music is not simply a checklist of tasks successfully completed, music is those moments when extraordinary possibilities take place. These moments can be recorded but they'll never sound quite the same, then again they don't sound the same depending on where you're sitting in the hall. But these extraordinary musical moments can only happen when you put the critical facility down. Certain lovers of the arts, certain critics of the arts, want excellence above all else, but excellence is boring. Excellence is predictable. Excellence can't surprise you, it can't challenge you, it can't change you. Excellence is, ultimately, a forgettable experience, because when experiencing a revelation, the last thing you can be is objective. You know exactly what you're getting with excellence, and you can hear it in your head any time you want.

And that's why Rattle is great. It's rare that every moment of a Rattle performance is true music, and let's face it, a lot of Rattle performances aren't even good, but when Rattle is good, which is often, these moments are so abundant that were you to walk among them you'd have to be careful not to step on them.

Rattle is as true a musician as there is, almost too true. Occasionally even the freest spirits among us listeners find ourselves longing for a podium musician who cares a little bit about keeping the whole thing together (as we did in the Tristan Liebestod - whose climax was dampened by a complete muddle about where the peaks were). Rattle left the Berlin Philharmonic in worse technical shape than he found it, and seems to have devolved the Bavarian Radio Symphony even more quickly, but what he does can only be done by a great orchestra. He takes great orchestras and wrings from them their whole capacity for musical moments. I doubt any conductor had an ability quite like this since Leonard Bernstein.

I've always understood why people dislike Rattle. It's amazing he was chief in Berlin for as long as he was because his whole ethos was a rebuke to Karajan and all those who love the mid-century aesthetic. He wants to play something other than the same 50 pieces, he doesn't jet around the world unless it's a tour with one orchestra, he doesn't seem to worry about recorded sound, he doesn't worry about precision, he doesn't worry about blend, he doesn't worry about clarity, sometimes I even wonder if he has a conception of the pieces he plays; he simply takes things as they come and whatever comes, he grows from them atmospheric gardens of meaning.