While a new all-star Haggadah plays it safe, others reinvent the Passover story as a call to action

“The point of a seder is to engage people; it’s just a meaningless ritual if it doesn’t engage people. Part of engaging people is asking contemporary questions, speaking in a contemporary idiom…” So far, so un-controversial — though the very blandness of this prescription alludes to one of the core anxieties of Jewish modernity. What if Judaism — with its traditional rituals and liturgy, practices and beliefs — can no longer provide a sustaining framework of ‘meaning’ for the Jewish people?

The New American Haggadah is an elegant production. Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and featuring a new translation by fellow-novelist Nathan Englander, the text is supplemented by perpendicular themed commentaries: ‘Library’, ‘Nation’, ‘Playground’, ‘House of Study’. Each insert is a mini-essay, using the traditional text as its departure point, and many of them deserve quiet study. Designed by Oded Ezer, this haggadah pays visual homage to centuries of Hebraic manuscripts through an imaginative use of Hebrew lettering from Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Italian liturgical traditions. The visual reverence is reflected in Englander’s text and voiced in Safran Foer’s introduction: “how do you write something that will have meaning to con- temporary readers while maintaining the reverential tone of the book?”

Seder nights are psychodramas. They allow the community to re-tell its foundational myth — the Jewish journey from slavery to freedom — through an act of collective memory. The liturgical framework for that annual re-evocation and re-enactment took several centuries to evolve; but from the era of the first completed haggadah text — Saadia Gaon — in the 10th century until the 19th century, the text itself saw very few changes or additions. Illustrations might reflect a haggadah’s contemporary setting — with the ‘Four Sons’ often providing a backdrop of social commentary: the rasha (the ‘wicked’ child) might have been portrayed as a soldier in the Middle Ages and, later, as a gesticulating smoker leaning away from the table, or in stylish hunting gear complete with riding crop and monocle. And commentaries around the text would offer additional rabbinic insights into the set liturgy and rituals. The traditional haggadah text offered a yearly opportunity — no, obligation — to retell the story of the Jewish people and how it came to be fused with themes of oppression and liberation. Transmitting that message of timelessness to the next generation was also woven into the mythic narrative: “And you shall tell — v’higadata — your child on that day: ‘It is because of what the Eternal One did for me when I came out of Egypt…’” (Exodus 17:8). Over generations, an anthology of songs was added to the end of the service, but only one new liturgical text was grafted into haggadot. In response to anti-Jewish persecution following the Crusades and the spread of the blood libel throughout Europe in the 12th – 13th centuries, four verses from the sacred texts of Psalms and Lamentations were woven together into a hymn of defiance and hope and inserted into the existing haggadah text: ‘Pour out Your wrath on the nations that do not acknowledge You…Pursue them, and destroy them…’. This Biblically-sanctioned cry of pain and anger howled for divine intervention; as God had brought redemption in the past, the haggadah declared, so it would be in the future. The overturning of injustice was God’s work — and waiting for it was a Jewish spiritual discipline, fine- tuned over the many centuries when Jews had no power to influence their collective fortunes. They prayed for this, generation after generation, with whatever devotion they could muster, in spite of lurking internal scepticism. The rasha embodies the longstanding Jewish antagonism towards the obligations of faith, and the burden of being bound into the collective. Yet this dissenting figure also represents an often enriching Judaic rebelliousness against the status quo.

From the 19th century onwards, new civil freedoms for Jews prompted changes in the haggadah template: traditional references to the “return to Zion” or “rejoicing in the rebuilding of Your city” were replaced with phrases such as “rejoicing in the hope for the coming of Your kingdom.” Mid-century Vilna, bastion of Orthodoxy, produced editions that omit the anguished “Pour out Your wrath” and change “this year we are slaves, next year we shall be free” to “this year we are slaves in many places, next year we shall be free as we are in this our land.” By the end of the century the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was included within a new Reform haggadah and there was an anarchist haggadah in New York. As the 20th century began, Jewish preoccupations spilled out into the Passover text: “Mah Nishtanah, how are we worse off than Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meir the banker, from Zarah the moneylender, from Reb Turdus the Rabbi?” asks a Bundist haggadah from 1900. And Yiddish haggadot emerged, giving voice to causes like workers’ rights and reflecting an increasingly secular generation keen to throw off the old religion yet still committed to its essential message: “On this very night of freedom and pride/Sing of peace among nations, of faith deep inside/ In justice and love and courage we shine/ Lomir heyben dem bekher — raise up your cup of wine.” New York, so often the scene of a radical re-working of Jewish tradition, saw an annual Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring) Third Seder that integrated music, dance and performance by Yiddish actors; in spite of material poverty, this was a celebration by immigrants of the freedoms of the New World.

Meanwhile in Palestine, ideologically moderate kibbutzim began producing their own haggadot, downplaying the text’s religious message — God is often conspicuously absent — and emphasising nationalist and seasonal elements (spring, the return to working the land, the ingathering of the Jewish people) and, as the decades went on, introducing modern Hebrew literature, poetry and secular texts. In Hashomer Hatzair’s leftist allegorised text, the traditional four cups of wine represented Jewish statehood; workers’ freedom; world peace; and blessing for the earth’s produce and the fruits of honest socialist toil. In the early years of the State (1955) the Fourth Son — the ‘child who does not know how to ask’— is portrayed as an eastern-European religious youth with kippah and peyot, the representative non-Zionist who knows nothing of the new Jewish life emerging in Eretz Yisrael.

By the second half of the 20th century Jews felt able to free the message of the haggadah from its particularistic Jewish context and make it universal: there is an eternal force in history — whether you picture it as ‘divine’, or as the divine potential within the human hand — that can move individuals, groups and peoples from states of oppression and injustice towards freedom. In 1969 the ‘Freedom Seder’ held in a black church in Washington DC on the third night of Passover (April 4th — the first anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King) used a haggadah assembled by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that interpolated texts by, amongst others, Ghandi, Thoreau, Eldridge Cleaver, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Emanuel Ringelblum of the Warsaw Ghetto, and King himself, alongside edited excerpts and adaptations of the traditional liturgy. Waskow took to heart the haggadah’s words: “All who expand upon — go beyond — telling about the departure from Egypt, they are worthy of praise”. Capturing the spirit of the times, he produced a document of immense religious courage and creativity — see it here — that went far beyond a re-telling of the traditional story. He juxtaposed Ringelblum’s 1942 words: “Most of the populace is set on resistance. It seems to me that people will no longer go to the slaughter like lambs. They want the enemy to pay dearly for their lives. They’ll fling themselves at them with knives, staves, coal gas. They’ll permit no more blockades. They’ll not allow themselves to be seized in the street…” — with those of King: “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the principle of non-violent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-acquiescence and violence…Non- violence can reach men where the law cannot touch them. So we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.” Violence or non-violence? Which way was it to be, when the hour for the liberation of the oppressed was again at hand? “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! who hast confronted us with the necessity of choice and of creating our own book of thy Law. How many and how hard are the choices and the tasks the Almighty has set before us!” The Freedom Haggadah went through several incarnations in the decades that followed as its new-old liturgy and radical rhetoric acted as a model for, and a stimulus to, an explosion of Jewish religious creativity in America.

‘Let my people go’ still rings with the hope that oppression can be overturned and that a transformative power will bring justice

Once Waskow had universalised the central text of the haggadah — “It therefore is incumbent on every person in every generation, not merely every Jew, but every man and woman, to look upon himself as if he had actually gone forth from Egypt…” — it became possible for Jews to use the haggadah and the seder rituals as a template for other causes (ethical, moral, political) where themes of slavery and freedom, oppression and liberation, were involved. Discarding the traditional Four Questions, the San Diego Women’s Haggadah (1979/1986) asks four new questions, the first of which reads: “Mother, we ask, why is this night different from all other nights? Why do we celebrate a women’s seder?” And the answer is: “We celebrate a women’s Seder tonight so that we are free to be ourselves, not afraid that our actions will be misjudged or misinterpreted, considered bold or unwomanly.” In the same spirit, The Women’s Haggadah (1993), replaces the traditional question about bitter herbs with “Why have our mothers on this night been bitter?” It is “because they did the preparation but not the ritual. They did the serving but not the conducting. They read of their fathers but not of their mothers.” The message that the personal is political had always been woven into the tapestry of the haggadah — but new times and new situations allowed that thread to stand out more clearly. After all, the five rabbis sitting in Bnei B’rak discussing the exodus all night were, so the story goes, planning rebellion against Roman tyranny, “for when we are slaves, we must talk, but we must do more than talk” (The Rainbow Seder, 1984).

The Amazon website now offers many, many hundreds of different haggadot. The majority contain the timeworn traditional text, but the range of ‘alternative’ haggadot available — most of them published in the US where religious creativity does not have to battle against establishment conservatism — suggests a widespread dissatisfaction with the formalised liturgy that took the Jewish people from the 10th century into modernity. As well as the original civil rights-themed Waskow ‘Freedom Haggadah’ — still one of the most exciting politically- focused social action haggadot around — you can buy a Survivors’ Haggadah, a Rebirth of Israel Haggadah, an Interfaith Family Haggadah, a Haggadah for Jews and Buddhists, a Holistic Haggadah, an Animated Haggadah, a Haggadah for the Non-Observant, a Fun Family Haggadah, a Haggadah for the Vegetarian Family, a Green Haggadah, anti-war haggadot — even, if you are so inclined, a Messianic Passover Haggadah and a Passover Haggadah for Christians. Or dip into the excellent Jewdas website for a compendious range of political activism and social justice haggadot that certainly can, in Safran Foer’s words, “engage people”by “asking contemporary questions”. In these more recent texts the emphasis is upon the human power to transform; the narration of our transformative journey becomes an implicit call to action.

The symbolism of breaking the middle matza can also resonate with wider concerns: “In the world today there are many who are so pressed-down that they have not even this bread of oppression to eat. We remember people in Iraq, in Palestine, at home and all over the world where the U.S. government, multinational corporations, the world bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have caused poverty and starvation. There are so many who are hungry that they cannot come and eat with us tonight. Therefore we say to them, we set aside this bread as a token that we owe you righteousness, tzedakah, and that we will fulfil it. (Set aside a piece of matzah).” (from Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah, 2003).

Many of these haggadot recognise that the Jewish story of liberation has the power to inspire; “Let my people go” still rings with the hope that oppression can be overturned and that a transformative power will bring justice. But ‘liberation’ is never genteel. Many of these newer texts have a wild, unruly, polemical edge — yet they all engage with the underlying ethos of Passover as the festival of freedom.

The core liturgical texts and rituals often remain — a testimony to the enduring potency of the slavery/ freedom archetype in the Jewish psyche and how it is rooted in the language of tradition. But the additions and substitutions priotise subjective concerns over reverence towards tradition. Whether this profusion of radical re- workings is symptomatic of a Judaic culture in disarray, or represents a post-Shoah renaissance of Jewish creativity akin to the Talmudic re-invention of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, remains to be seen.

What happens to Jewish identity if its traditional religious basis no longer speaks in a language we can accept?

What we can say is that the fissiparous nature of modern Jewish identity has led to this explosion of available Passover liturgies. They are a response to the questions behind the questions of the editors of The New American Haggadah: What happens to Jewish identity if its traditional religious basis no longer speaks in a language we can accept? What happens when people reject the idea of a divine Being that intervenes to save people from oppression? What happens when one recognises that the tradition has cast upon us the mantle of responsibility for bringing heavenly ideals of freedom and justice down to earth and into our own hands to enact?’

New rituals are constantly added to the Seder itself. In the early 1980s Professor Susannah Heschel placed an orange on the seder plate. It symbolised, she said, ‘the fruitfulness of all Jews when lesbian and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spat out — a gesture of…repudiating the homophobia of Judaism.’ In recent years some Jews have begun to put a bowl of olives on the seder plate to symbolise awareness that Palestinian olive-groves are being uprooted or occupied in our name: “In the lands of Israel and Palestine, olive groves provide…security. When olive groves are destroyed, the past and future is destroyed. Without economic security, a people can much more easily be conquered, or enslaved. And so this year, we eat an olive, to make real our understanding of what it means each time a bulldozer plows up a grove. Without the taste of olives, there will be no taste of freedom. Keep one olive on the Seder plate, and pass out olives.” (Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah).

But rituals old and new, and haggadot traditional or contemporary, are only a beginning. Beyond doorways into memory and the mythic underpinnings of Judaism and our sense of peoplehood, they are not only about a Jewish journey from ‘slavery’ to ‘freedom’. They are — as they always have been — an invitation to action: to take the words on the page, the motifs of the tradition, and translate them into a commitment to live out the blessings and radical vision of our heritage.

Is The New American Haggadah a spur to action? It is a decidedly literary creation. (Though what is it with the need to define a diaspora haggadah in relation to nationhood? Something called The New British Haggadah would never see the light of day.) No, this luxurious edition represents another stage in the symbiotic relationship between Jews and America. Two of America’s leading young Jewish novelists have combined to create a comforting text almost completely apolitical and unchallenging of the status quo. At the respective ages of Foer and Englander, two of their Jewish American predecessors were finishing Portnoy’s Complaint and publishing The Armies of the Night , the ‘history as a novel/ novel as history’ account of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. Pity we never got to see a Roth/Mailer haggadah — but what makes me think that if we had, we might have found in it more than a single glancing reference to the greatest Jewish ethical challenge of our times, the plight of the Palestinians?

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life and he blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com.

Judaism: A Way of Being

by David Gelernter

Yale University Press • 2009

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

by William Kolbrener

Continuum • 2011

I blame Jonathan Sacks. Across his oeuvre he has pioneered a style of writing about Judaism designed to put even the most refined gentile Englishman at ease. Beautifully written, his work weaves in philosophy, literature and history, giving the impression of a writer who draws upon all the wisdom of the world, seeking truth wherever it may be found. Naturally the Judaism portrayed is of a relatively orthodox variety; but this style and breadth of reference gives the reader the sense that Judaism is not dogmatic or parochial; rather it is tune with the best of humanistic and rational thought; [authentic] Judaism is both timeless and utterly relevant to the modern condition. Sometimes the philosophy is a little woolly, the logic slightly questionable, but we are swept along by the quality of the prose and the frequent anecdotes, designed to dig the Chief Rabbi out of whatever intellectual hole he may have dug himself into.

As a result of his undisputed success, Sacks has spawned a line of imitators, each displaying prose of impeccable quality, littered with philosophical and literary references. William Kolberener is the latest in this dynasty, and is rewarded for his efforts by a fulsome endorsement from the master on the back cover. Kolbrener, according to Sacks “engages in conversation with the timeless texts of the Torah [and] the result is both enlightening and enthralling.” While Kolbrener indeed sets out to engage in a conversation between classical Jewish texts and wider intellectual currents, the dialogue is frequently a one-sided one. Demonstrating his breadth of knowledge, Kolbrener references a diverse array of writers and thinkers: Wittgenstein, Hobbes, Descartes, Freud, Niels Bohr and Sophocles among others. These voices however, are rarely used to demonstrate an insight from which the tradition can learn. They either reinforce Jewish tradition or present an opposing view, which is then shown to be wrong. Either way, Judaism, or at least Kolbrener’s version of it, always wins. In Isaac’s Bad Rap T.S. Eliot is depicted as believing that “a classic is not the work that begins a literary tradition, but the one that allows for the tradition’s continuity”. So Eliot is supportive of Jewish textuality; this would have been a surprise to the notoriously antisemitic poet. In Modernity and Hell, Korah and Hobbes, the eponymous philosopher, who believed that “brute power provides the only barrier to endless war” fails to understand the possibility of Judaic conflict management in which “disputes for the sake of heaven” can be resolved because “these and these are the words of the living God.” Jewish reformists do little better: Prayer and the People sees Kolbrener baffled by the Reform movement’s attempt to create a contemporary liturgy that “reflects our values and ideals” — far better to stick with the (apparently heaven-sent) traditional siddur, ideally in the version edited and introduced by Jonathan Sacks.

There are, of course, several iterations of the classic Sacksian trope: clever Israel and the stupid Greeks. ‘Lighting Up; The Beauty of Hanukah’ sees the “Greek scoffers reducing everything to the laws of nature” as opposed to the Hanukah lamp that leads to “continuous recognition of the miraculous character of the every day”. Torah and the Pleasure Principle contrasts Greek thinkers who ‘stand outside’, relying on ‘rational principles’ and the sages of the Talmud who ‘think with their hearts.’ This is feel-good knockabout masquerading as philosophical reflection; whatever the rhetoric of Hanukah, the long history of Greek speaking Jewish communities, centred in Alexandria demonstrate centuries of Greek-Jewish synthesis; Judaism as we experience it today has been inescapably shaped by Hellenism. Open Minded Torah creates a superficial feeling of intellectual cosmopolitanism in which Judaism is in dialogue with the great ideas of modernity and western civilisation, but the wider sources function as a series of straw men whose all too easy rebuttal is designed to assure the reader of Judaism’s intellectual sophistication and superiority.

The idea of a work that weaves high- level Jewish scholarship around everyday life events is a powerful one. Unfortunately though, Kolbrener misses the opportunity to say something profound about Judaism and modernity. Modern Jews are in genuine need of unflinching analyses of the possible ways a rethought and renewed Judaism might offer an intellectually credible path in contemporary society. The requirement however, is not for writings that blithely assert the superiority of the Hebraic over the Hellenistic but instead, as Levinas suggested, bring Athens and Jerusalem into a genuine dialogue of equals.

If Kolbrener is Sacks’ direct descendant, David Gelernter is his wayward bastard child. The elegant prose is present, the literary and philosophical references (Kant, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Newton, Chesterton et al) utilised, the attempt to answer head on the great questions of life in a language accessible to the secular reader. But while Kolbrener’s view of Judaism represents a fairly mainstream Modern Orthodox position, Gelernter portrays a Jewish orthodoxy that he seems to have dreamed up himself. Gelernter writes extensively of the ‘Torat Halev’ (Torah of the heart); the term is used so frequently and with such assumed authority that the reader might imagine it to be rabbinic in origin; it is in fact a moniker of Gelernter’s invention. The hubristically titled Judaism presents itself as nothing short of a contemporary Mishneh Torah, with its author a latter day Maimonides. Gelernter declares his hand in the Preface: he is writing about a “common”,“normative”, “full strength, straight up; no water, no soda aged in oak for three thousand years” Judaism, which he identifies as “Orthodox”. This is a discomfiting start to all who view the Judaic tradition as diverse, plural and having been radically changed throughout its history; we, presumably, are practicing a Judaism more akin to cheap white wine. Gelernter sees as inadequate approaches to Judaism that focus on the particular; he wishes to move beyond specific aspects of Judaism in order to reinstate “the grand scheme itself: the picture that encompasses all these elements; the underlying idea.” While Gelernter doesn’t quite say that only he can access this God’s- eye perspective he comes pretty close. Not for Gelernter the approach of summarising “current thinking among theologians and philosophers of Judaism”, instead: “I attempt to summarise Judaism itself ”.

The main body of the book is split into four extended meditations: Separation; on halacha, Veil; on an ineffable transcendent deity, Perfect Asymmetry; on women and marriage, and Inward Pilgrimage; on the problem of evil. Perfect Asymmetry is by far the weakest: in attempting to justify a conservative position on gender roles and relations Gelernter sounds like a tea-party moralist and an apologist for some of Judaism’s most offensively patriarchal texts. Despite this, the other chapters work fairly successfully as free flowing, romantic ruminations on Jewish practice and texts, inventing new metaphorical and mythical frameworks to understand and promote Judaism. There is nothing wrong with this romanticism; the beauty of the prose and the novelty of some of the ideas make for engaging reading. What is problematic is the insistence that Judaism is homogenous, coherent and unchanging along with an accompanying insistence that said Judaism is defined, not by its classical texts, but by David Gelernter’s idiosyncratic understanding. Where there is a minor text that fits his viewpoint it is elevated to the status of ‘authentic Judaism’; where there is a major one that gets in the way it is treated as an aberration or an accident of history.

There are moments, however, where Gelernter goes further and presents ‘normative’ Judaism in ways that simply beggar belief. An especially unhinged appendix on Jewish and Christian ethics contains a series of remarkable claims on Judaism’s approach to violence: ‘In Judaism pacifism is immoral;…’Jewish morality is warrior morality. It is no accident that Abraham, Moses, and David, the Bible greatest heroes should all have been described as warriors… Judah Maccabee…frequently cited in Medieval Europe as the model of a Godly and chivalrous knight.’ Any familiarity with pre-modern Judaism would reveal this to be nonsense — most rabbinic and medieval texts display strong hostility to violence, an attitude which seeped through society and led Jewish communities to be famously passive and non- violent. Gelernter’s normative Judaism then is not ‘orthodoxy’ nor is it historically grounded: it is the ideal Judaism of Commentary magazine, where Zionism is central, social morality conservative, and God’s role is ultimately to let you ‘preserve the morality you already accept’.

Jonathan Sacks’ ultimate tragedy is the wasting of his gifts. An impressive knowledge of philosophy and a talent for elegant prose are squandered because of a need to tow the party line and defend a Modern Orthodox status quo. These two books are no less missed opportunities; while Kolbrener fails to take on board any lessons from non-Jewish sources, Gelernter’s obsession with depicting an essential and authentic Judaism leads him to downplay his own innovation and distort evidence to fit his goals. With such exquisite writing, knowledge of classic Jewish texts and broad frame of literary reference both writers could have produced works of transformative scope that point towards future Judaisms. As it stands, both, despite their tremendous sophistication, are works of apologetics.

By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent books provides a much needed opportunity to map out exactly where the borderline between disillusionment with Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism actually lies.

David Landy, an Irish-Jewish academic and Palestinian solidarity activist offers a sympathetic but not uncritical analysis of Jewish pro-Palestinian activism, based on extensive interviews. Through these he demonstrates that ‘Israel critical Jews’, as he calls them, are often motivated by a desire to reclaim their Jewish identity from Zionism, and it is through pro-Palestinian activism that many have actually come closer to their Jewishness. Further, some see themselves as providing a kind of guard against anti-Semitism within the wider pro-Palestinian movement. In these respects, most of Landy’s interviewees refute the criticism often made that Israel critical Jews are cynically ‘using’ their Jewishness.

The book raises complex questions about Jewish activists: Should they concentrate on convincing other Jews and transforming the Jewish community? Should they support groups within Israel itself? Should Jews support the Palestinians as Jews at all? Should Palestinians be the ones to set the agenda for activism? These are difficult questions, and the seriousness and sensitivity with which Landy and his interviewees address them does them credit, even if one disagrees (as I do) with some of the positions they take.

Israel critical Jews are subject to vituperative criticism from other Jews. They are accused of treachery, of being superficial ‘AsAJews’ and — most seriously — of being apologists for antisemitic anti-Zionism. Sometimes these accusations have merit and sometimes they are simply part of a self-perpetuating circle of intra-Jewish conflict. Amid these inflamed passions, the recent controversy over Gilad Atzmon’s now notorious book The Wandering Who?  superficially looks like another example of an Israel critical Jew being hung out to dry. In fact, Atzmon is a very different character and much more than a Jewish anti-Zionist.

The Wandering Who? is full of bluster, pompous verbiage and heroic posturing as Atzmon, an acclaimed jazz saxophonist and one of the disillusioned, self-exiled Israelis whose creative cynicism enriches the British cultural scene, seeks to explain his total rejection of Jewish identity. His argument is based upon the premise that Jews fall into three types: ‘those who follow Judaism’, ‘those who regard themselves as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin’ and ‘those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits’. The first two types are ‘harmless and innocent’ but ‘third category’ Jews are the real ‘problem’.

For Atzmon, in the post-emancipation era it is positively archaic and poisonous for Jews to maintain their ‘tribal’, marginal identities. Atzmon claims to be against what he considers the ‘myth’ of identity, and any kind of minority identity politics. We are all nothing more than human beings. While such a monolithic universalism may be oppressive and in any case unachievable, it doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic as any group identity would be invalid. But Atzmon only singles out one other group for his opprobrium — separatist lesbian feminists — and refrains from mentioning any other ethnic, religious or national minority identity as problematic. It seems that it is only Jews that destructively cling on to their identities.  By clinging onto Jewish identity, ‘third category’ Jews become part of a global network that ‘is all about commitment, one that pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship’. Zionism is just one part of a ‘unique political identity’ that is responsible for Western expansionism, and even the credit crunch (which Atzmon calls the ‘Ziopunch’).  Ultimately, Jews care only for achieving power and dominance, through Zionism and other means.

Atzmon reserves his greatest contempt for secular, left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews.  To campaign for universal values while identifying as a Jew is contradictory at best and mendacious at worst. To campaign as a Jew for the Palestinians and against Zionism is to automatically invalidate one’s own argument.  Since Jewish identity is the cause of Palestinian oppression, it cannot contribute to Palestinian liberation. Only through the renunciation of Jewish identity can those who are born Jewish bring peace and justice to the world.

Atzmon argues that the politics of anti-Zionist Jews, neo-cons and every other kind of Jew are simply part of one interdependent Jewish political identity, engendered by what Atzmon calls the ‘holocaust religion’. This predates the actual holocaust (which in any case Atzmon appears to be skeptical about, while not actually denying) assuming the latter actually took place and is a religion based upon an imagined fear of gentile hostility designed to perpetuate separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity. The holocaust religion, according to Atzmon, requires Jews to infiltrate all of society and politics. Jewish anti-Zionists and neo-cons alike are simply ensuring that Jews cover all the bases in their quest for political ubiquity.

The book is a peculiar mix of polemic, philosophising and personal narrative which creates a veneer of radicalism and up to date thinking. But, beneath it all, Atzmon is more conventional that he thinks he is. Ultimately, The Wandering Who? boils down to a number of hoary old anti-semitic tropes:

When Jews appear to be assimilating, they are really infiltrating and subverting.

When Jews identify themselves as Jews, they are primitive separatists.

Jews are obsessively concerned with attaining power and influence.

Jews are responsible for the hatred they attract.

The holocaust myth is simply a Jewish strategy to gain power through the world’s guilt.  The Wandering Who? is an anti-Semitic book certainly, but is it a dangerous book? So ludicrous are his arguments and so pompous is his tone that it is tempting to dismiss Atzmon as a crank. More genuinely disturbing is the fact that this book was published at all. Zero Books is a small company that has published some excellent quirky philosophy and intellectually rigorous criticism; they should have seen the book for what it was. (The book is endorsed by figures like Richard Falk, John Mearsheimer and Karl Sabbagh who, while strong critics of Israel and Zionism, should have heard alarm bells ringing when they saw the chapter entitled ‘Swindler’s List’). Ironically, it is precisely Atzmon’s Jewish background that gains him this platform, providing an alibi for his antisemitism.

Perhaps Atzmon has done us a service by illustrating exactly where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism. In fact, anti-Zionist Jews, like Tony Greenstein, are among Atzmon’s most severe critics. Perhaps agreement over Atzmon might even provide the basis for a productive dialogue on antisemitism between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.

To the extent that Landy’s book is mostly carefully argued and certainly not antisemitic, it is perhaps unfair to compare it to Atzmon’s.  But both of them demonstrate the weakness of a certain kind of contemporary Jewish critique of Jewishness: it develops in ignorance of Judaism and the contemporary Jewish world.  To give one example of both authors’ ignorance, Landy says that Reform Judaism ‘may be developing into a syncretic Judeo-Christian religion’ and Atzmon doesn’t acknowledge that it even exists in his blanket statement that ‘Judaism is a non-reformable religion’.  Atzmon sees the apparent divisions between Jews as irrelevant, and Landy lumps all Zionist Jews into one monolithic bloc. Landy’s caricature of the Jewish community as filled with fervent Zionists who live in denial of the Palestinian plight may not be as antisemitic as Atzmon’s caricature of Jews as a clan of power-crazed paranoids is, but they are both caricatures nonetheless.

It is vital that Jews, Judaism and Jewishness be subjected to critique in order to stay alive and dynamic. There is a long and distinguished history of Jewish heretics and mavericks, from Elisha Ben Abuya, through Spinoza to Walter Benjamin. But the ones who really made a mark were those who were steeped in the traditions they rebelled against. Critiques founded on ignorance and fantasies will always fail.

‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger

A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to his house doesn’t remove the fear.A sense of security is not so easily gained, for fear has its own authority. He could, after all, fall down the stairs—he lives in a mansion and there are many flights of stairs. So he decides,‘for safety’s sake’, to confine himself to the ground floor. But soon he realises that the floors downstairs are polished: couldn’t he easily slip and break his neck? The dining-room, however, is fully carpeted, so he decides to live only in that room. Ordering his staff to serve his meals there, he never leaves the room. Yet still he feels unsafe: he thinks,‘I could still stumble and fall, hit my head and die’. So he orders an armchair to be placed in the middle of the room, away from all sharp objects and hard surfaces and—in a moment of triumphant certitude —insists that his servants tie him down into the chair. A sense of security descends. No danger now of a fall, he thinks. The loss of his freedoms is nothing compared to the relief that his fear can never come true. But when he hears the rustling above him, and feels grains of plaster on his skin, he looks up and sees the ancient crystal chandelier over his chair unmoor itself from its casing and begin to fall towards him…

I read this story as a child and it has never let me go. Today, Iassociate it with the quest for ‘security’: the efforts of individuals, groups and nations attempting to design projects that will guarantee their security.The recurring fantasy of total control over one’s fate was mocked millennia ago within the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.Yet we still try to design a solution to what is essentially a psychological and existential dilemma: that none of us knows how or when we will die. The story reminds us that viewing the world through the prism of our fears restricts us in damaging ways. It also reminds us that the stories we are told—and tell ourselves—can shape our fears, as well as contain them and that this world-view can unwittingly catalyse the very thing we fear. The world may be a dangerous place, but more often than we are aware it is we who make it dangerous.Although we know there are people ‘out there’ who hate us, it can be hard to bear the reality that ‘security’—what it is, what we need in order to achieve it, where it comes from, and what we feel threatens it—is an internal experience. Implicitly, this story invites us to construct more life-enhancing stories than those ghosted by our fears.

I recently had a conversation with a young Jewish woman who was preparing a Channukah pageant for local children at the provincial Arts Centre where she works. She’d been approached by a woman in a hijab and a conversation had ensued. The woman said she’d just arrived in the UK from the Middle East with her child and was exploring the neighbourhood.The Centre’s publicity had caught her eye and she was wondering if the event was open to everyone. Something about this conversation felt ‘troubling’: the visiting woman seemed ‘glassy-eyed’ and had a ‘vacant’ look; she seemed rather needy and during a follow-up conversation the next day she hadn’t seemed satisfied by the resources offered to her that were available in the area. The woman telling me this story started to wonder if this woman was hiding something: why should a Muslim woman be interested in the details for a Channukah event? Perhaps she was a suicide bomber and this open event, where anyone was welcome, would make a perfect target. Perhaps, she thought, she should cancel the event, just in case.

She called the CST—the Jewish community’s self- appointed ‘Community Security Trust’—to report her suspicions and seek advice, which was duly provided. Although she felt they were ‘measured and reassuring’ in their response, she nevertheless decided, on reflection, to cancel the event. She regretted the lost opportunity for children of all faiths and none to come together, dress up and celebrate, but once her anxiety had been triggered she couldn’t rid herself of her ‘gut feelings’.

This story—and it is not a parable—filled me with an immense sadness. I knew that this enlightened young woman had a sound understanding of how we uncon- sciously project onto others disowned feelings from within ourselves, and then feel ourselves threatened by those very feelings. If even she had succumbed to collective Jewish unease about Muslims, what hope was there for our collective well-being in the UK, when the community is led by those with a less psychologically-informed and more outwardly belligerent approach to questions about security?
Who will reflect on the ways in which our own unconscious aggression, our own explosive rage, is projected—so that we feel we live in a hugely insecure world that is liable to blow up in our face, metaphorically or literally, at any moment? Who or what can we trust, we say, if we can’t trust our ‘gut feelings’? Our deep fear of annihilation may be generated in the earliest stages of our lives and can re-awaken when catalysed by a current situation; or it can be projected forward as a picture of our future.

Here the personal and the collective merge. As a community, have we any sense of the historically-deter- mined unconscious hostility we hold within us that is continually being projected that we are then obliged to protect ourselves from? And what terrifying crimes do we unconsciously imagine we have committed that would need to be punished by all those aggressors ‘out there’ waiting to attack us?

We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess.

The stories we tell ourselves—about the persecutory world ‘out there’ and the undying hatred of our enemies— provide a sort of comfort: they offer a coherent narrative for our lives. By constantly reaching for and repeating the same familiar story—the story of our insecurity—we unconsciously fabricate for ourselves a kind of security. It is, of course, a pseudo-security, but its advantage—it offers ersatz ‘meaning’—can outweigh (and help us avoid) the painful psychological task of facing up to the innate vulnerability that is intrinsic to being human.
We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess. But feelings of ‘insecurity’ are psychological, spiritual, existential – such feelings can’t be eliminated by more of this chimera we name ‘security’.

Today, bitachon is used in modern Hebrew to mean ‘security’ in a military/political context. It’s travelled a long way from its original meaning in Biblical Hebrew: ‘trust in what we cannot see’. The prophet Isaiah demanded trust in the unseen and intangible—‘God’—rather than in human power alone. Of course since the Shoah such trust has been exposed as hopelessly naïve, even dangerously deluded. In our post-Shoah world, where bitachon has become secularised, Jews put their trust in what they can see, and in the power of their own hands. Who dares to disagree with this pragmatism? Who would disavow this realpolitik? Even the religious settlers on the West Bank with HaShem in their hearts have an Uzi in their hands.

So is that to be the last word on ‘security’? Is that what a 3000 year-old tradition of Jewish struggle to articulate a moral vision comes down to? ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’? Perhaps Isaiah’s understanding needs re-visioning. Perhaps to experience ‘security’ we need a renewed faith in aspects of ourselves that we Jews used to attribute to the Holy One of Israel: a capacity for compassion and reverence towards other human beings, a capacity to discern forms of idolatry that offer false security, a capacity to transmute anger into a passion for justice, and an enduring capacity for truth-telling that holds the impossible tension between love of the Jewish people and a responsibility to the ‘other’, the stranger, the outsider, who may never love us but whose well-being is still our concern.

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life. He blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com

Rethinking God & tradition

By Arthur Green

Yale University Press, 2010

Everything is God:

The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism

By Jay Michaelson

Shambhala Publications, 2009

What does it mean to be radical? In the context of religion, the term can conjure up images of extremism, violence and fundamentalism (as in ‘Radical Islam’), often through strict adherence to orthodox norms. But to be radical is paradoxically both to depart and return—to depart from conventional or accepted forms, and to return to something essential, the ‘root’ of an ideology or philosophy.

What then would ‘Radical Judaism’ be? Perhaps the gun-toting hilltop nationalism of the Settlement movement? Or the ultra-Orthodoxies of Stamford Hill or Mea Sharim? Or could it be something altogether non-Orthodox, a return to a perceived essence prior to or beyond those outer forms and beliefs?

Two recent books that emphasise their radical credentials are Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition, by Arthur Green, and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson—and they have far more in common than merely their titles. Michaelson, a scholar and activist who writes on spirituality, Judaism, sexuality and law, and Green, rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College Boston and a major scholar of kabbalistic and Chassidic thought, both eschew conventional conceptions of a personal God who is outside of creation and intervenes in the world, in favour of a more mystical—yet immanent and accessible—Oneness.

These works of theology are certainly very far from Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, and much of what dominates public discourse on God. Green states at the very start of his introduction that he is not a ‘believer’ in the conventional Jewish or Western sense. He simply does not encounter God ‘as ‘He’ is usually described in the Western religious context, a Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it.’ Instead, when Green refers to ‘God,’ he means ‘the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ He also refers to it as the ‘One’ ‘because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is.’

Similarly Michaelson’s central concept of ‘nonduality’(‘not-two’) is based on the idea that ‘despite appearances, all things, and all of us, are like ripples on a single pond, motes of a single sunbeam, the letters of a single word.’ The ‘true reality of our existence’ is ‘Ein Sof, infinite,’ and it is this infinite which Michaelson refers to when he uses the word ‘God.’ Like Green, he has let go of the old (and popular) image of ‘the benevolent Parent who cares.’ He encourages his readers to doubt everything, all concepts they might attach to divinity, and see what is left, which Michaelson chooses to name ‘God.’ Nonduality is ‘where monism [belief in the ‘One’] and atheism shake hands. Nothing is added or taken away from the universe as it appears.’

Both writers differ slightly from classic pantheists like Spinoza, who said that God is entirely equal to nature. They refer explicitly to ‘panentheism’—the view that all is in God. But both go on to collapse or at least blur the differences between pantheism and panentheism. According to Michaelson, nothing is added by the word ‘in’. If we can meaningfully refer to anything outside of everything, it too is something.

Though Green describes himself as a ‘mystical panentheist,’ he too is something of a ‘radical immanentist.’ He believes that God is ‘present throughout all of existence’ and ‘underlies and unifies all that is,’ that ‘this whole […] is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts,’ and that it ‘cannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings.’ But ‘transcendence’ here ‘does not refer to a God ‘out there’ or ‘over there’ somewhere beyond the universe’ since Green (much like Michaelson) does ‘not know the existence of such a ‘there.’ Rather transcendence means ‘that God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence.’

If, then, they are ‘adding nothing’ and ‘taking nothing away’ from the universe as is, why should the authors refer to God at all? And how is this radical or significant, except as a semantic exercise? Are Michaelson and Green simply atheists, dressing up their denial of God in the language of religion?

Michaelson recognises his philosophy’s similarity to atheism. In both he knows ‘there are no puppet-masters pulling the strings of our own reality.’ But internalising and living from the understanding that nothing separate exists—not even the self—has drastic effects, and ‘the stage [or our reality] is now a cathedral.’ Referring to Being as ‘God’ is, for both Green and Michaelson,‘an act of naming.’ It is to choose to address the universe as‘You,’‘proclaiming my love and devotion to Being’ (Green) or marking the moment ‘when knowledge becomes love’ (Michaelson). It is also a concession to the human heart, a bridge between an overwhelmingly abstract Unity and the human need for relationship and apprehension. Michaelson, more compre- hensive in his theology here than Green, argues for the relative ‘truth’ of such personification. Gesturing towards mystical traditions both Jewish and otherwise (from the wildly shifting imagery the Zohar uses to portray the divine, to nondual Hinduism’s understanding that all is Brahman but can be worshipped in different guises), he suggests that the individual who has accepted that everything is God can recognise all worldly manifestations as ‘masks’ or, to use a phrase taken from the Sufi poet Hafiz,‘God in drag.’

Vitally, neither author stops at the stage of recognising Oneness.They are concerned with how to live in a world of diversity and variation. For Michaelson, this is the culmination of the mystical journey.The true nondualist first moves from the apparent diversity of the world into unitive consciousness, but this is only an ‘interme- diate phase.’ If everything is really one, that also includes experience of two.The third and final stage is to return to the world, transcending and including both the dual and the nondual, experiencing duality while maintaining the consciousness of unity.This is a particularly Jewish monism, this-worldly rather than world-denying.A central question for Green is how the individual responds to the divine call. What does God require of me, so to speak? This is what the Biblical God asks of the first human:‘Ayekah?’—‘Where are you?’ Am I stretching my mind to the fullest to know the One, stretching my heart to become more aware, and working for the good of ‘every creature and every life form,’ which is ‘a garbing of the divine presence’?

But it is here, in Green’s application of theology to the world and religious, that he has come under fire, seemingly too radical—here meaning ‘extreme,’ beyond the pale of accepted norms—for some Jewish commentators and rabbis. Radical Judaism is the culminating instalment in a trilogy of theological works that Green started with Seek My Face, Speak My Name and continued with EHYEH: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. It reads very much as an attempt, driven by an awareness that ‘the day is short,’ to articulate as fully and systematically as possible his theology and what Judaism might look like as a result.This means using the traditional structure of ‘God, Torah and Israel,’ upon which three things the Mishnah claims the world stands, and reinterpreting their meaning. So Torah, in the absence of a separate commander, is not the literal word of God but, to quote Daniel Landes in the Jewish Review of Books, ‘a purely human response to ‘the wordless divine call.’ Thus Green’s interpretation of the Ten Commandments, a re-rendering for the radical Jewish seeker and teacher, is too free for Landes, Director and Rosh HaYeshivah of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Landes focuses on Green’s new understanding of the prohibition on adultery, the ‘replacement of a firm prohibition of adultery with nothing more than self-selected boundaries (‘make sure that all your giving is for the sake of those who seek to receive it’)’. Landes and another rabbinic reviewer, David Wolpe,whose review ‘Rethinking Judaism’ appeared in The Jewish Journal in March 2010, take just as much issue with Green’s definition of ‘Israel.’ Putting aside Green’s relationship with the modern state of Israel (he describes himself as a ‘religious Jew’ and a ‘secular Zionist’), Israel is expanded as a concept, potentially to include other ‘God-wrestlers’ and seekers, from other traditions, whom Green hopes will be among his readership.Again, for some this is beyond the pale. Shaul Magid, writing in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, points out that the title ofWolpe’s review subtly brings into question whether Green’s Judaism is Judaism at all.

To be fair to Green, he considers a number of interpretations of what ‘Israel’ might mean, both symbolic and historical, imagining different groups and peoples claiming the name in different ways. But I agree that his book is weakest in the latter stages, in its attempts to depict a coherent system of Judaism based on his altogether more convincing theological foundations. Michaelson succeeds in his book because he feels no need to create a complete system or impose what he describes on his readership.The first half of his book also makes use of the classic Jewish triad ‘God, Torah and Israel,’ reinterpreting the latter two as much if not more than Green. Torah, in Michaelson’s book, is simply ‘Judaism and a nondual devotional path,’ and Israel is ‘Community, history and nondual messianism.’ But that is the point. It is simply in Michaelson’s book; he makes no claim that this is what these terms actually mean or even should mean. They are ways of thinking about such categories, while the focus remains on the nondual theories and practices. His style is more discursive and comprehensive than Green’s. He summarises a huge range of practices, texts, philosophies and ideas that support a nondual approach to Judaism, but he leaves the exact angle of that approach up to the individual reader. Michaelson’s nondual Judaism has room for any and all denominations,‘from Hasidism to Reform, from cultural/ nationalistic to spiritual/universal.’ He takes ‘nothing for granted’ and questions everything. He invites his readers to access the nondual experientially, devoting the second half of his book to practice (a sort of ‘spiritual cookbook’) in imitation of the schema of Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye, the leading disciple of the founder of Chabad Hasidism and ‘perhaps the most systematic expositor of nondual Judaim.’ In R. Aharon’s words, ‘Without feeling, the thought of unity is just imagination.’

And this brings us onto one answer to the question, ‘Why now?’ Why have these books been published at this particular point in Jewish and wider cultural history? Michaelson told me there is, in his opinion, a movement towards what he calls ‘I-spirituality’ (or should that be ‘iSpirituality’?), whereby the individual chooses and experiences for him or herself the optimum blend of practices to find God (or Unity or enlightenment, if you prefer). So more people are actually participating in the practices that lead to these insights.Although Green’s book is more conventionally theoretical than Michaelson’s, he too emphasises the importance of experience in his intro- duction.The divine is everywhere, but we can perceive it most in moments of peak experience, when all else falls away or perhaps appears in heightened form.

In a number of ways, there is nothing new about these works.The authors’ projects incorporate the tracing of theological roots, to both Jewish and non-Jewish precedents. Green successfully places today’s conventional conception of God in the context of a much longer history, including periods when nondual theologies in Chassidut and Kabbalah held a more dominant position among mainstream Jews. Michaelson’s book, too, is littered with references and quotations from mystics and practitioners, from Isaac Luria to Ram Dass.

Green and Michaelson each mention the ‘New Atheists,’ those recent writers such as (in the UK) Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, who have stated the case against the existence of God, and there is no doubt this is something of a cultural context.To Michaelson the New Atheists simply set up a ‘straw man,’ a version of God he too would deny.The ideas in Everything is God and Radical Judaism are not exactly direct responses to the recent trend—both authors were penning articles and books saying something similar before the New Atheism arrived on the scene. But both have attempted to write convincing works of theology that might appeal to rationalists. It could be said the cultural and philosophical currents that have made Dawkins and his fellow atheists popular have also enabled the publication of books like these. Renewal rabbis such as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Waskow have publicly advocated and promoted similar nondual theologies since the 1960s, but have been easier to dismiss as‘fringe’ ,wrapped up in the hippy movement. It is not yet entirely clear just how popular or significant Green and Michaelson’s contributions are but Green is certainly a figure of sufficient academic, philosophical and religious stature to have, at least, attracted mainstream attention, even if mainly in the form of critique.

Might we, then, be witnessing an evolution of theology, leaving behind overly-simplistic ‘old man in the sky’ stuff for these more mature integral conceptions of the divine? From time to time, writers such as Waskow and Schachter-Shalomi have claimed God itself is evolving— that the processes of biological, psychological and societal development are ‘God becoming aware of Godself.’ Such claims, echoing Hegel, Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi, are unverifiable, and neither Michaelson nor Green go so far in their assertions. Green does see evolution as the primary scene of God’s manifestation, and Michaelson devotes a small section to consideration of ‘nondual messianism’ culminating in a more integral, all-embracing, virtually transparent conception of God.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that more mainstream, conventional ideas of God are about to give way. The ‘Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it’ still dominates popular theology. In a recent Jewish Quarterly conversation with Michaelson, Rebecca Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, argued she must engage with that ‘straw man’ of the New Atheists, because so many millions around the world place Him (and this God is surely a ‘Him’) at the centre of their lives. But it is a vicious circle. Our continued engagement with such ideas at the expense of more mature and sophisticated theologies, such as those of Green and Michaelson, perpetuate ignorance—or at least delay our development. It remains to be seen whether these two books constitute a significant step forwards, whether mainstream cultural discourse can more fully embrace the God they describe. Now that would be radical.

Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few. There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

‘Jewishness’ can mean anything from chicken soup to klezmer to Woody Allen. But when I use the word in the context of this essay I mean something more specific. I am alluding to the fact that Judaism appropriates the story of the children of Israel as told in the Hebrew Scriptures. By ‘the Jewish people’ I mean, in the first place, the group that identifies with the Israelites in the biblical narrative. And by ‘Jewishness’ I mean the quality (or set of qualities) that this act of identification implies.We take it as read that we inherit the mantle of the children of Israel. But how careful is our reading? Perhaps the nuances of the narrative have escaped us and perhaps our identity lies in the nuances. A closer look at the text—plus our relationship to it—subverts the contrast between particularism and universalism; a fortiori, it refutes the view that Judaism expresses the first over the second (or, for that matter, the second over the first, as some commentators claim).

This essay does not offer anything like a complete or comprehensive reading, but it begins to take that closer look. Based on a few scattered passages in Tanakh (principally from Exodus and Deuteronomy), I wish to present the Jewish people in a certain light. In this light, the people are still a particular people: they do not dissolve into an ocean of undifferentiated humanity. But their particularity turns out to be something peculiar. It is not like an ethnicity or a nation—something determinate. In a certain sense, it is more than itself. In another sense, it is never quite itself. Seen in this light, we are (or ought to be) forever scratching our collective kop. A people: but how so exactly? Particularity: but what precisely? These questions are as perennial as the people; and as unsettled; and as unsettling.

To recover this light, let us revisit the place where the Hebrew slaves, after a three-month schlep in the wilderness, find themselves: Mt Sinai.They find themselves, to be precise, presented with an offer from the ruler of the universe, an astute operator who knows how to drive a hard bargain. First, he lures a destitute people out into the wilds and then, on a bare mountain in the middle of nowhere, amid the razzmatazz of fire and smoke and the fanfare of the shofar, he talks up a storm. He makes them an offer that they had to be mad to accept but which they were in no position to refuse. True, they had probably stashed away some unleavened dough. But (to paraphrase Deut. 8:3) man cannot live by matzo alone.As for the manna that had sustained them to this point, God had a worldwide monopoly on its production: if he wished to turn off the supply, all he had to do was say the word. So he seems to have had the children of Israel over a barrel. Be that as it may, Moses presents them with a choice—not once but twice: first at Sinai, shortly after their departure from Egypt, and again forty years later, in the land of Moab, when they are perched on the verge of Canaan. (For the purposes of the argument, I am consciously conflating these two episodes, treating them as two moments of one event: Israel’s entering into a covenant with God.) Moses says to the people:‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life …’ (Deut. 30:19). Given that these are the options, the choice rather makes itself. But in choosing life the people get more than they bargained for: they get a brand new identity. ‘Hear, O Israel!’ exclaims Moses, addressing the entire congregation.‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’ (Deut. 27:9).

What does Moses mean? He cannot have forgotten that, long before this special day, God had referred to the children of Israel as ‘my people’. He did so when, speaking out of the burning bush, he referred to ‘the plight of my people in Egypt’ (Ex. 3:7) and again when he directed Moses to tell Pharaoh to ‘let my people go’ (Ex. 5:1). For there was an earlier covenant that tied the people to God and God to the people: the one made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, the later covenant—the one made with the people—cannot be reduced to the earlier—the one made with the patriarchs; for, if it could, then it would be redundant. Yet nothing is less redundant in the entire Tanakh than the covenant made at Sinai between God and his people. Far from being redundant, it is the necessary condition for the children of Israel to come into their own. At Sinai they stand before God not merely as the descendants of their ancestors but as menschen in their own right. This is the special significance of the second covenant. It is a coming of age, a rite of passage, the collective bar mitzvah of bnei Yisroel. Think of Sinai as an alfresco synagogue, with Moses as the rabbi, addressing the young initiate who has just finished reading his or her parshah. But this bar/bat mitzvah girl or boy is an entire people. So, instead of saying ‘Today you are a man’ or ‘Today you are a woman’, this is what Moshe Rabbeinu says: ‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’.

‘The people of God’: the very idea is outrageous. Not only the ultimate chutzpah, it carries a double dose of mortal danger. For a chosen people is a proud people, the envy of the nations. Pride and envy: the one begets arrogance and chauvinism, the other breeds hatred and contempt. None of which is conducive to happiness and all of which sounds depressingly familiar in the chequered career of ‘the people of God’ from that day forth. Now, if you were God, would you wish these things on your favourite people? Then why does God gull the children of Israel with an offer that is a poisoned chalice? And why on earth does he announce to the nations that the Israelites are the apple of his eye (Deut. 32:10)? If he really loves them, why not do his favourite people a favour—and stay shtum?

Unless there is more to God’s partiality than meets the eye. At first sight, it seems as if, with the insouciance of the divine, God reaches down onto the plane of the nations and picks out one—the people of Israel—that happens to catch his fancy, promising them the earth (or at least a portion of it somewhere in the vicinity of the river Jordan). But, on second thoughts, there is something wrong with this picture of events, something missing from this depiction of God: God. God, the ruler of the universe, is not just another petty, despotic, nepotistic, totemistic, Mesopotamian deity, some tinpot stone idol, a god or goddess whose dominion is purely local. ‘For the Lord your God,’ explains Moses to the Israelites encamped in the land of Moab on the outskirts of the promised land, is ‘elohei ha-elohim va’adonai ha-adonim’, the God of gods and the Lord of lords, ‘the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribes’ (Deut. 10: 17). Really? Shows no favour? Yet, only two verses earlier, Moses reminds the people of Israel:‘He chose you … from among all peoples’ (Deut. 10: 15). Can a God who shows no favour have favourites? Moreover, in the previous verse Moses points out God this way: ‘Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it!’ (Deut: 10:14). Or, in the words of the psalmist: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that it holds, the world and all its inhabitants’ (Ps. 24:1).The dominion of God, who shows no favour, extends to the whole of creation. So, if there is anything to which he is partial it must be the whole; it cannot be one part over and above the rest. God is God of all peoples.Yet Israel is ‘the people of God’? Go figure!

I figure it this way. When God enters the frame, the whole of the frame shudders. If he singles something out, the thing in question, whatever it might be, is not granted a special privilege over and against everything else. Rather, it is raised to a higher power.The part, while remaining a part, is not merely a part: it comes to signify or stand for the whole (which is not the same as the sum). So, on the one hand, when Moses says, ‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’, he does not add ‘and you have ceased to be what you were yesterday’.Their brand new identity does not erase the old. Nor does ‘raised to a higher power’ mean elevated to a superior rank. They are still the humble house of Jacob, the ragtag mob that staggered out of slavery in Egypt. On the other hand, today this mob has taken on a meaning. Becoming the people of God, they become a signifier, signifying what it means to be a people, in the full sense of the word, where being a people means meeting the standard God builds into the word.This makes them representative, rather than exceptional, representing the idea of a people, a people that is wholly a people. As such, they are the apple of God’s eye. As such, they are the people of God. Of God, that is to say (recalling and continuing Moses’ invocation), ‘God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger’ (Deut. 10:18). If such is God, then being of God means partaking of these selfsame qualities. It means being, like God, partial to the utmost impartiality: partial, in a word, to justice. ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (Deut. 16:20): thus Moses directs the Israelites, calling them out of Egypt, calling them to go from being slaves of the ruler of an empire to being subjects of the ruler of the universe. Raised to a higher power, they are called to a higher standard. Called ‘the people of the Lord your God’, they are called to book. The blast of the shofar, the summons ‘Hear, O Israel’, calls them to the bar of justice. God is a calling; doing justice is the hearing that Israel, being his people, owes the Lord their God.

Why is ‘Jewish’ the Houdini among identities: always escaping the boxes in which it is put?

But he is no more theirs exclusively than they are his exclusively; for then he would not be himself and they would be the people of a god, not God. The choice of Israel is thoroughly inclusive, for they are chosen as an epitome, not as a pet. But why Israel? What makes Israel greater than any other nation? Nothing; that is the point. Not only not greater, but least of all. Consider how exquisite is this choice. God in heaven is seeking a people whose peoplehood is exemplary.As his gaze passes over the mighty empire of Egypt, his eye is caught by a miserable band of wretches who have been downtrodden for generations and have no prior experience of exercising sovereignty as a nation: the obvious choice for the people of God! For God, oddly, it is. Being the lowest of the low makes them attractive to God, who has a penchant for the humble and oppressed.We have seen this in the way Moses emphasizes his concern for the orphan, widow and stranger. We see it again in the assertion of the psalmist that ‘the Lord is close to the brokenhearted; those crushed in spirit he delivers’ (Ps. 34:19) and in the topsyturviness of the just society:‘the lowly shall inherit the land’ (Ps. 37:11).

Could it be that their innocence—their virginity as a nation, their lack of familiarity with self—government— commended them too? Did God regard them as a tabula rasa, a blank political slate, primed to receive the indelible stamp of his two tablets of stone? Absolutely not! Not for one moment does God harbour the slightest illusion about the feckless people he has chosen. As he tells Moses near the end of the forty—year saga, it is inevitable that Israel will let him down and betray their promise: ‘You are soon to lie with your fathers.This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them’ (Deut. 31:16).To put it mildly, this people is not distinguished by its outstanding merit, a point that Moses immortalizes in his song, written at the end of his life, a swansong, composed at God’s behest, not exactly a love song, sung ‘in the hearing of the whole congregation of Israel’ (Deut. 31:30), whom he addresses thus: ‘O dull and witless people’ (Deut. 32:6). Not that the enemies of Israel get a better press.They are ‘a folk void of sense, Lacking in all discernment’ (Deut. 32:28). It comes to this: neither better nor worse, par for the course: this is Israel. Fundamentally, they are no different from the rest of their kind: humankind: a typical bad lot.And God knows it.

And yet he chooses them, making the offer of a covenant, calling on them to become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Ex. 19:6). It is a beautiful idea. But no actual people is—nor conceivably can be—a thing of beauty; not as a people, not as such.A priesthood of priests is one thing, but a kingdom? A holy woman or man perhaps; but a nation? How can an entire people be of God? How can this whole transaction not end in tears? Perhaps the Israelites needed the services of a business advisor when they were made the offer in the wilderness ‘Yes,’ this astute advisor might have cautioned, ‘You are being showered with promises, promises that are practically irresistible, a land of milk and honey, and so on, and certainly they come with a cast iron guarantee from an impeccable source— but on conditions that you cannot meet and with a penalty clause that will strip you of all your assets. Beware!’ But they did have an astute advisor—in the person of Moses. For, not only is Moses completely up front about the penalties, he forewarns them of their fate. He lays out the future before them and it’s grim: they will break the terms of the covenant and lose the whole caboodle. (True, there is light at the end of the tunnel of history, but this is hardly of interest to them in their predicament). He could not be clearer about the disastrous consequences of the offer they have received from God:

I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not long endure in it, but shall be utterly wiped out.The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left among the nations to which the Lord will drive you (Deut. 4: 26-27).

So, what the devil is God up to? What the heck is going on in the drama enacted with the children of Israel in the wilderness?

There is something vaguely reminiscent about this drama, an echo of events that took place long, long ago, when the dust had barely settled on a newly—created world. Let me try to bring out some of the resonances. God, who had brought every kind of being into existence after its kind, singled out one, the human, which he made in his own likeness. Being b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), this chosen being is raised to a higher power vis-à-vis creation as a whole. At this point, the whole of creation is a garden in Eden, a kind of promised land. Being like God, the human couple, Eve and Adam are called to a higher standard.A beautiful idea! But being all too human, they fall short of their billing (which is their very being) and, unable to avoid going astray, do not long endure in their paradise (or their paradise does not long endure: it comes to the same thing), but are utterly expelled, their progeny scattered to the ends of the earth, where they can be found to this day. Sounds familiar? Hearing these echoes of Genesis in Exodus, it is tempting to say that, in the crucible of Sinai, amid the divine fire and smoke, a bit of humankind is remade in the image of God—with the same instantaneous fall from grace as first time round. How human are the people of God! They are just like the rest of their kind! So much so, that in their story every people—even every person—can recognize themselves; they are less a light, more an illuminated mirror to the nations. Sinai, which might have been a reprieve (whether for one people or ultimately for all), turns out to be a reprise of an old, universal story.

This is how the Torah tends to work: it tells a universal story through a particular case: one couple (Eve and Adam), one individual (Abraham), one people (Israel). In each case, the flesh and blood characters in the story seem to transcend themselves—but never by becoming abstrac- tions. A creation is the opposite of an abstraction and the Torah is the book of creation.And also re—creation.Twice in the narrative the children of Israel are presented with the aseres had’vorim, the ten words or commandments: first at Sinai shortly after they leave Egypt and then again in the land of Moab just before they enter the promised land. But with the fourth clause—the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy—there is a striking difference between the two versions. In Exodus, the reason given is that God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Ex.20:11). In Deuteronomy, the explanation is that God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt (Deut. 5:15). How can this be? Unless the two reasons are ultimately one: unless the second is a reminder of the first, and the creation of the people of God is the re-creation (in some sense) of humankind.

The Jewish people are to the rest of humankind what an instance is to a universal: an example: a case in point: illustrative, not illustrious.

In any case, the outcome of the torrid affair at Sinai is never in doubt for any of the participants. God knows it from the outset, Moses too, and the people are told it in the most forthright fashion. Each party in advance knows fully what lies in store.Yet God (who loves his people) asks of them the impossible; Moses (who led them to freedom) urges them to choose it; and the hapless people, eyes wide open, do.They choose to be what they cannot be. It is an intimate triangle—God, Moses, Israel—with an intricate, indecipherable plot, a paradox on a cosmic scale, a riddle made for eternity. Suffice to say that becoming ‘the people of God’ seals the fate of the Israelites.The rest, as they say, is history.

But whose? One answer lies inside the text, where the story is handed on from book to book, from Moses to Joshua to the judges to the prophets and duly recorded in the annals of Kings and Chronicles.These are chapters in the career of a people inscribed in a book, a book forever closed: a complete testament. But outside, in the world, beyond the pale of the book, where the future is open: whose history and whose fate?

Enter the Jews, a kind of twist to the Hebrew tale. For who are the Jewish people? They are the people who, peering over the lip of the book, espy the children of Israel and exclaim: ‘Look! That’s us: We’re them. See?’ But no one on the page looks back at them—at us—to confirm our view. There is no mutual embrace. It is a one-sided relationship.We Jews might identify with the Israelites, but the Israelites don’t identify with us. They interest us but we don’t concern them.They are too occupied with being themselves, the people in the book. Seen as holy writ, the book is a finished work: it is complete unto itself and set apart in a manner unlike any other text. Here is God’s word, there God’s world, and between them—a gap, a little like the chasm that separates heaven from earth. In the beginning, God divides the one from the other, earth from heaven; which does not mean that there cannot be passage to and fro—think of the traffic on Jacob’s ladder—but it does mean that every rung is a reach. Likewise, passing from Tanakh to terra firma, every step is a trek that is longer than the distance between Egypt and Canaan—even via the route that the Israelites took; it is infinitely longer. (Imagine the Torah suspended forever one tantalizing inch above the tips of your outstretched fingers: this shows how short infinity can be.)

We take Israel’s story to be ours; but it is a take.What is given is the Torah; but how we take it is down to us. Seeing it as given specifically to us, seeing ourselves in the part of the people who receive it in the text, is already a take—for which we bear full responsibility.We have to see it as our choice; if we don’t, then we are certainly not the people of Israel, who become the people of God through choosing. Let us by all means identify with the Israelites, but let us see this for what it is: an act of identification: an act, a doing, and a pretty audacious one at that, identifying with the people of God: a risk we run, a choice: a choice, like the choice that Ruth the Moabite makes when she declares herself to Naomi, saying:‘Your people shall be my people, and your God my God’ (Ruth 1: 16). Seeing the Torah as ours, we receive it; but until we receive it, it is not ours. It is not ours till we take it upon ourselves to see it as given to us.

But we would be well advised to think twice about such an undertaking—just as the people whom we choose to regard as our ancestors, the chosen people, might have been wise to ponder what was on offer to them. For, like them, we run a risk or two. For what are we doing when we assume their mantle? We are inserting ourselves into the intimate triangle at Sinai, with its intricate paradoxical plot, writing ourselves into the middle of a riddle ‘made for eternity’.The awesome complexity of this riddle might be the making of an eternal people—but is liable to be the undoing of a people in time.We say theTorah is given to us; the risk we run is that in taking it we snatch at it and, thinking we get it, lose the plot. Unless we are very careful (which we are not), we end up spoiling the very thing that we say we prize, leaving our grubby paw prints all over the text as we grab it, flatten it, pocket it, plunder it, laying claim to its promises, covering ourselves in its glory—to our lasting shame. In short, we run the risk that every ‘dull and witless’ people runs when presented with an unfathomable gift: becoming a nation of nudniks—just like the biblical people of God. Being like them, we lack ‘a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear’ (Deut. 29:3).

Who are we, what are we, we Jews, wandering from box to box, from people to nation to culture to ethnicity to religion to race (God forbid!), traversing all the known categories, unable to settle into being one thing and not another? Why is ‘Jewish’ the Houdini among identities: always escaping the boxes in which it is put? Because our point of origin is a conundrum.Taking Israel’s story to be ours, we appropriate the name ‘the people of God’. The people (particular) of God (universal): the very idea is a kind of surd: a quantity that does not add up or make sense, a logical scandal, a formula that is always liable to split apart at the seams. When it does, when it splits, its splinters become fragments that fit, more or less, one box or another.We settle for being a nation, religion, ethnicity, whatever.We settle down, finding our niche, knowing our place, fitting in, adding up, making sense.

But suppose this idea, remaining in tension with itself, holds: then something choice comes into being: a people defined by a surd: an absurd people, conceived within the leaves of a book (or the rolls of a scroll) and dedicated to a simple but untenable proposition: that they are both radically apart from the world and thoroughly a part of it. That’s us, the Jewish people. How can we possibly maintain this impossible stand? By taking the narrative of the Israelites and turning it into a stance, a posture towards existence; in a word, an attitude. Not one but three in one: aspiration, the continual striving to be exemplary; atonement, the sorrowful acknowledgement of repeated and abject failure; and hope, a broad hope, hope not just for ourselves but for the whole creation: the stubborn belief in the light at the end of the tunnel that will wipe away all the tears of history from the anguished and wrinkled face of the earth. It is not so much a stance as a step, like the dance of the lightly-clad David, whirling like a dervish before the Ark of the Lord on the road to Jerusalem, (2 Sam. 6:14). Put on the spot, we are always on the hop, shifting from one position to the other, from aspiration to atonement to hope, and back again, constantly, faithfully, religiously. Holding the pose, performing the dance: this is the inner sense of our ceremonies. This, our style, our ritual, is our raison d’être. (If ritual can be empty, it can also be full). Thus we loom in the dark, part light, part mirror, to the nations.

Judaism, on this reading, never solves the conundrum that lies at its point of origin. Christianity does. Parsing a human being into‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ and substituting the one for the other, it proclaims itself to be ‘the new Israel’, ‘the new people of God’: a people constituted ‘not according to the flesh but in the Spirit’ (Lumen Gentium, Second Vatican Council). With this distinction, Christianity resolves the logical scandal posed by the very idea of ‘the people of God’, converting the people into a worldwide church, a spiritual union, a union via communion. Thus, in effect, Christianity replaces the particular (people) with the universal (church). Judaism does not know a systematic distinction between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. It resolves nothing. It is not so civilized. Embracing the scandal at its heart, it insists on the flesh and blood particularity of the people —but aglow in the supernal light that pervades the whole creation. Seen in this light, how can we, the Jewish people, be taken for a normal people? And seeing in this light, how can we possibly keep ourselves to ourselves?

Seen in this light, how do the Jewish people appear? Not altogether steady on their feet. How could we be steady on our feet when we cannot fill our own shoes? How can we fill our shoes when we are never merely or quite ourselves? For there is more to being Jewish than being Jewish.We do not add up.We are a wild thing. Our cup runneth over and, looking slightly the worse for wear, we stagger from point to point, doing our dance, recalling our calling, retelling our tale, preparing to meet our maker at the ends of the earth. Who is our maker? ‘He is bright, he is ruddy; his clothes are red, as when he came from treading the winepress in Edom’ (Anim Zmiros, Song of Glory). It behooves us, being the people of such a God, peering over the lip of his luscious creation and drinking in what we see, always to be a trifle tipsy, perpetually a bissel shikker.

If we stand out, it is only to signify that none of the nations stands above any other. For, seen in the celestial light that pervades the whole creation, the Jewish people are to the rest of humankind what an instance is to a universal: an example: a case in point: illustrative, not illustrious. And if, in some sense, we hold ourselves apart, this is not to keep our distance but, on the contrary, to re-establish our involvement in the here and now, where we belong.What is the place of the Jewish people in the world? In the world, wherever we find ourselves, living in its midst, steeped in its joys, immersed in its tsuris, disquieted by its injustices.A people apart? Only in order to recollect ourselves and, reinvigorated, re-enter the fray of creation, with all our heart, all our soul, all our might.

Brian Klug has written extensively on Jewish identity, antisemitism, Zionism and related subjects. This essay is based on the prologue to his latest book, Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). Other books include Offence: The Jewish Case (London: Seagull, 2009) and, as co-editor, A Time to Speak Out (London, Verso, 2008). He is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at St Benet’s Hall, Hon Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, Southampton University, and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago.

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

Dylan’s echoing of this encounter between G-d and Moses also references the ‘I-Thou’ theology of Martin Buber, to whose work Dylan was reportedly introduced years earlier by his manager, Albert Grossman. The song paints a bleak portrait of absolute alienation: the narrator is alone even when he’s with a sleeping lover (‘if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk/ I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was’); he goes out for a walk and concludes ‘Not much happenin’ here/ Nothin’ ever does’ and sees a train platform ‘with nobody in sight’; and he contemplates the end of the world (‘The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right’). Yet through all the emptiness he perseveres—‘I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part’—towards the world, holding on to Buber’s teaching, ‘One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.’

Consciously or not, Bob Dylan’s use of the modes of Jewish prophetic discourse as one of his primary means of communication, determine not just the content of his songs but also his style of delivery, which is closer to declaiming rather than melodic singing. The vocals on his live albums from the 1970s (Before the Flood, Hard Rain, and Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue) are positively stentorian, underscoring his relationship to his audience, whom he never wooed but chided and provoked: You who philosophise, disgrace, and criticise all fears Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears.  (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’)

‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,’ he sings in ‘Positively 4^th Street,’ addressed to the folk music traditionalists who first called him one of their own. Going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, playing commercial country music on Nashville Skyline and releasing a double album of cover songs mischievously titled Self Portrait are just a few examples of Dylan’s propensity to subvert his relationship with his fans in order to jar them from their complacency, like a Biblical prophet. Throughout his career, whether singing about racial injustice in ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Hurricane,’ Cold War anxieties in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Masters of War,’ the treatment of Vietnam War veterans in ‘Clean-Cut Kid,’ or corrupt politicians in ‘Political World’ and ‘The Disease of Conceit,’ Dylan has repeatedly returned to that same prophetic tradition to infuse his songs with a measure of impact and dignity that so obviously sets his work apart from other singer song writers of the rock era. Bono, the singer of the Irish rock band U2 and himself a strong believer in a type of Christianity with ancestral Jewish roots, understands this about Dylan. ‘[Dylan’s] was always a unique critique of modernity,’ he writes. ‘Because in fact Dylan comes from an ancient place, almost medieval… The anachronism, really, is the ’60s. For the rest of his life he’s been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not . . .’

One of the most rewarding ways of approaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics is to read them as the work of a poetic mind immersed in Jewish texts and engaged in the age-old process of midrash: a kind of formal or informal riffing on texts in order to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings. Perhaps the most famous of these riffs takes place in one of Dylan’s best-known songs, 1965’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ his whimsical retelling of the Akeidah, the story of the binding of Isaac, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters.

G-d said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’

Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’

G-d said ‘No.’

Abe said, ‘What?’

G-d said ‘You can do what you want, Abe But the next time you see me co min’ you better run Abe said, ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’ God said, ‘Out on Highway 61.’

U.S. Route 61, incidentally, is the main highway leading from New Orleans to Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, where he was born to a man named Abram.

In 1982, Dylan’s son Samuel became bar mitzvah in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter, Dylan’s earnest prophetic style gave way to a hardline Zionism that suffused the 1983 album Infidels, with a sleeve featuring Dylan overlooking the Old City.  The song ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ defends Israeli aggression with little regard for the plight of the Palestinians :

Well, the neighbourhood bully, he’s just one man

His enemies say he’s on their land

They got him outnumbered about a million to one

He got no place to escape to, no place to run

He’s the neighbourhood bully

Coming as it did in the wake of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, this strongly nationalistic identification with Jewish peoplehood and land did not endear Dylan to those still on the Left. Neither did the song ‘Union Sundown’ on the same album, whose chorus appeared to be a critique of organised labour :

Well, it’s sundown on the union

And what’s made in the U.S.A.

Sure was a good idea

’Til greed got in the way.

A scathing review in New York City’s Village Voice, dubbed Dylan ‘the William F. Buckley of rock and roll,’ in reference to the founding editor of the conservative journal, the National Review. For many, it seemed, the one-time ‘voice of a generation’ had turned into a right-wing crank, a Bible-thumping, washed-up relic of the sixties. Dylan’s album sales plummeted to an all time low and where they remained for much of the 1980s, when he seemed, at best,irrelevant or, at worst, pathetic.  In the final year of the decade, however, Dylan returned with one of the strongest albums of his career. Oh Mercy reflects a mind steeped in a Jewish worldview and one whose creative vision prompted what became his Never Ending Tour. This tour has been going on for over two decades and, at nearly 70, Dylan continues to play around one hundred concerts each year. ‘Everything Is Broken’ portrays the Kabbalistic concept of a world in a state of disrepair, and ‘Political World’ includes a vivid description of Kiddush HaShem, the religiously inspired martyrdom of those who were dying in Auschwitz around the time Dylan was born.  When Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 1991, the focus of his acceptance speech was a passage that astute listeners recognised as a paraphrase of Psalm 27, the prayer based upon notions of repentance that lie at the heart of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. Dylan, it seemed, was transmitting a coded message to those who may have thought he had forsaken them. Why else accept a Grammy Award by paraphrasing a Jewish prayer written by Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, the spiritual leader of traditional German Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century?

Dylan has continued to find inspiration in Jewish scripture in recent years. His 1997 Grammy Award–winning album, Time Out of Mind, is a catalogue of regret and reflections on mortality (released shortly after his recovery from a near fatal heart infection); ‘I was born here and I’ll die here against my will,’ he sings in ‘Not Dark Yet’, paraphrasing Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnah 4:29): ‘Against your will you were born, against your will you die.’ The same album’s opening track, ‘Love Sick,’ borrows its unusual central complaint from King Solomon’s love poetry as expressed in Song of Songs 2:7:

‘[Bereft of your presence], I am sick with love’ or, to put it more succinctly, as does Dylan, ‘I’m sick of love… I’m love sick’, the cry of an aging lonely man who engages with other people only when he takes the stage for one of his concerts on the Never Ending Tour.

In recent years, Dylan has been spotted at Yom Kippur services, typically at whatever Chabad synagogue he finds himself near as he tours the world. The central imagery of the concluding Neilah service, that of a penitent standing at a gate, praying to be written into the Book of Life before the doors are shut, finds its way into Time Out of Mind’s ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’:

Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore I’ve been walking that lonesome valley Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

Knocking on heaven’s door may not be unique to Bob Dylan, but the Neilah reference undoubtedly is, and it frames his own late work within a Jewish context of sober reflection and repentance.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner), from which this essay has been adapted.

Please visit him on the web at www.dylanprophet.com

So wrote Gershom Scholem to his colleague Franz Rosenzweig in his 1926 letter, ‘A Confession about our Language’. Scholem, a young Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had just immigrated to Palestine. He was among the founders of Brit Shalom, an organisation that supported the establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state, and was concerned not only by the dominant political trends of Zionism, but with its very tongue, with the project of reviving, modernising, and secularising Hebrew. Scholem believed that recruiting the sacred biblical language for the modern political Zionist cause would plant a messianic ticking bomb in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people in Palestine.

The echoes of ‘God will not remain silent’ still whisper in the streets of Jerusalem, eighty-four years after these words were written. Although Scholem feared that religious sanctity would either dominate or destroy the people, he did not anticipate the more complex, ambivalent relationship that Zionism would form with religion. He did not assume that the very political struggle that facilitated the return of the Hebrew language actually included asking God, very politely, to remain silent. This attitude enabled the founders of Zionism and the majority of Israelis today to pull out of the sea of Jewish knowledge religious precepts that support their agenda. Like skilful pearl divers, Israeli society has brought up to the surface only those glowing stones which have Zionist purposes, and kept those which do not (including those in which God himself is mentioned) deep at the bottom of the ocean.  Consider some of the more popular Israeli-Jewish ‘moral validations’ of state policy. These validations, drawn exclusively from Jewish tradition and texts, have become part of the political consensus, and secure the place of religion not just in the ‘secular’ political debate but in wider Israeli-Jewish society.

Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo is a teaching of increasing popularity among Israelis.  Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72:1, its most precise translation is: ‘If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It seems that every online newspaper Comment section will include this sentence when discussing Israeli aggression: the Gaza offensive? ‘Kill him first’. The Second Lebanon War? ‘Kill him fi rst’ again. A Google search for the expression ‘kill him first’ and ‘flotilla’ yields more than 4,200 Hebrew results, confi rming the centrality of this narrative.  This convenient license to kill extends beyond the online community to Israeli decision makers and politicians. Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card:

‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ Meharsayikh u-Makharivayikh Mimekh Yetse’u is another overexploited formula. Translated as ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you,’ and taken from Isaiah 49:17, this sentence has become Israeli society’s remedy for criticism that comes from ‘within’—from Jews, either Israeli or Diaspora. It stems from a refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing and brands all critics ‘destroyers’.  From Gideon Levy’s Haaretz articles on the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to Judge Goldstone’s report proving that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinians waving white fl ags, the chorus rings out: ‘Destroyers and devastators will depart from you.’ Also for Channel 10’s Shlomi Eldar when he dares to say that ‘Hamas is not a diabolical junta’, and for the eminent Israeli poet Natan Zakh, who supports the end of the siege on Gaza, even volunteering to swim there. The Israeli Government’s recent revival of the embarrassing ‘Ministry of Propaganda’, offi cially known as the Ministry of Public Affairs, effects a similar principle—it ignores the dissenting voices from within Israel, rejecting them as ‘destroyers’ rather than as concerned players. In other words, Israel is not going to rethink its policies, but will only strive to explain them better.

Almost as popular as these two precepts is‘Aniyei ‘Irkha Kodmim, loosely translated as ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city.’ Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 71:1, this is used by Israelis to justify the

preferential treatment of Jews. It is quoted almost every time human rights organisations highlight the inferior treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel or the living conditions for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The use of this quote has intensified lately due to the debate about the thousands of refugees and migrant workers threatened with deportation. The fact that many of them have children who were born in Israel, or that deporting them would endanger their lives, does not convince large parts of the Israeli public, who cleave to principle of the ‘precedence of our poor’. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz announced that at the heart of their plan to reduce unemployment is a strategy of encouraging Israelis not to hire migrant workers, and emphasised that ‘precedence of the poor of your city’ is a sacred principle.  This Talmudic proverb has also served well during wars and military operations. One month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, Yossi Peled, a Minister from Likud, gave a good ‘Jewish’ explanation for the future use of excessive force. ‘I don’t want to hurt the Palestinians living in Gaza Strip, but we need to defend ourselves, or as the Jewish tradition teaches: “The poor of your city take precedence”’ Six weeks later, the poor people of Gaza had buried 1,400 men and women.  These three verses, overused in Israeli-Jewish discourse, exemplify the hijacking of ‘Judaism’ to suit the Zionist programme. It is therefore not surprising that they are much more popular among ‘secular’ and national-religious Jews in Israel than among the traditionally Orthodox Jews. Interestingly, when considered in their religious context, their assumed meanings appear to be quite different. ‘Get up early to kill him first’ refers in contemporary Israel to the pre-emptive strategy of the Israeli military, particularly the notion of defensive rather than offensive action.  The expression supports the Israeli ‘self-defence’ theory by presuming that all enemy casualties are caused either in response to a previous act or a pre-emptive ‘response’ to a future act. But the original verse refers to an individual acting in self-defence, and there is no indication that this teaching applies at state level. Indeed, one can even argue that the sacredness of life lies at the heart of this precept, since it sanctions killing only to preserve life, and only when the enemy is coming to kill you. It is anything but a religious ‘license to kill’. Similarly, ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you’ originally taught that foreign elements will eventually leave the country they are trying to destroy and carries no reference to internal criticism and how to handle it.

Zionism’s basic separationist aspirations—Hebrew labour, a Hebrew market, a Hebrew state—have been nurtured and protected by the belief that ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city’. In contemporary Israel, this verse provides a pseudo-religious justification for racist practice, while in its original context it is closer to our own ‘charity begins at home’. According to the Talmud, if two people request a loan from the same rich person and he or she is unable to help both of them, that wealthy individual is ordered to be more generous with the poor of his own city, regardless of religion. In the case of ‘the Jewish state’ of Israel, ‘the poor of your city’ are actually the Palestinians and the migrant workers who remain socially and politically disenfranchised.

Selecting religious texts for political use is not a Jewish invention. But the selected adages, which all stem from a Diasporic experience, acquire new meaning and dangers when used by a majority in a sovereign state, and even more again when that state also happens to be the strongest military power in the Middle East. Ironically, Israeli society attributes fundamentalist readings of religious text to Islam, choosing to deny its own decontextualised following of violent texts. With respect to Bava Metzia, the Sanhedrin, and even to the Prophet Isaiah, there are texts more central to Judaism with more urgent lessons for Israeli society: ‘Foreigners living among you will be treated like your own people. Love them as you love yourself, because you were foreigners living in Egypt’ (Leviticus 19:34).  A clear threat to Zionism’s founding principles, this has been marginalised, together with God, and more politically comfortable quotations selected.  Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has summed up the relationship between Zionism and ‘secular’ Judaism: ‘There is no God, but He promised us the Land.’ God has indeed been left outside the Israeli political debate, replaced by the People and the Land of Israel. Slowly but steadily, concepts such as ‘the State of Israel’, ‘the Arab’, ‘security’, or even the Iranian ‘existential threat’ have been shaped through misquoting of Jewish religious texts, a process aided by national institutions like the Chief Rabbinate, the IDF rabbinate, and the Religious-Zionist movement.  Gershom Scholem warned that God would not remain silent in the language that invoked him thousands of times. The revival of Hebrew and its common use in Israel did not bring God into the lives of ‘secular’ Jews but instead created a dangerous validation of contemporary political dilemmas with the authority of ‘omnipotent’ religious texts.  Contemporary Hebrew with its ancient Biblical resonances grants this political-religious God-free coalition the illusion of entitlement. How long God will remain silent is another story.

Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on the relationship between security, politics and Arabic language studies in Israeli-Jewish society.  The research is conducted at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of ‘Reflections on Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies’, which will be published in 2011.

In between beatings and arrests by the police, we managed to hold a bilingual (Hebrew and Arabic) Selichot evening with both Israeli and Palestinian participants. It began with a joint study of Talmud portions on repentance and forgiveness and continued with the chanting of Selichot and Palestinian poems in front of the stolen houses in Sheikh Jarrah. We also built a Sukkah in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, with young Israeli and Palestinian children working together and preparing decorations. This Sukkah was demolished as an illegal building by the munici- pality’s inspectors minutes after it was set up; they neglected to give any excuse why our Sukkah was illegal while thousands of Sukkahs all over the city are considered legal. And every several weeks we conduct a full Shabbat evening ceremony in this tormented neighbourhood, with prayers, Kiddush, and dinner.
This is not the first time religious left-wing associations have involved themselves in Israeli politics. In the 1980’s the late Rabbi Yehudah Amital founded Memad, a moderate left-wing movement. Deeply upset by the massacre in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 during the first Lebanon war, Amital saw the need to challenge the growing sense that religious Judaism was synonymous with nationalist politics; the people of Israel, he proposed, were more important than the land of Israel. In 1988, Memad failed to pass the election threshold and has since integrated into Labour, where it makes up a fraction of the dwindling party. Memad was involved in leading the Birthright Israel project and in promoting joint secular-religious prayers on high holidays in community centers. They were also a part of the ‘Citizens’ Accord Forum,’ which tried to promote a grassroots dialogue between Jewish and Arab Israelis, but remained quite marginal. Netivot-Shalom and Oz ve-Shalom started as two small movements in the beginning of the 1980’s but soon united to form Oz ve-Shalom- Netivot Shalom. Further to the left than Memad, this group was composed of religious Israeli intellectuals wishing to deliver an ideological alternative to religious Zionism through educational programmes. Apart from periodic seminars and conferences, the movement’s main activity was and still is its portion-of-the-week pamphlet, distributed in selected synagogues, especially in Jerusalem. The most visible group of religious left-wing activists today is Rabbis for Human Rights, which wages campaigns for social and economic justice and protests against human rights abuses such as the intimidation of Palestinian farmers by settlers and military forces; they even escort hundreds of farmers during the harvest, serving as human shields. Most of the rabbis active in this organisation are non-Orthodox and therefore marginalised in Israeli religious discourse. Despite their achievements, these groups have not succeeded in creating an effective counter-voice to the prevailing nationalism among religious Jews. The religious establishment has played a vital role in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation, aligning itself with the extreme right since 1967. This phenomenon can be called also clear when setting the moral criteria expected from inhabitants of the holy city: ‘Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart; That hath no slander upon his tongue, nor doeth evil to his fellow, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.’ (Psalms 15, 1-3). Since when is it Jewish to treat your neighbours as inferior and expel non-Jewish working immigrants from your society because they pose an ‘ethnic threat’ to the maintenance of a Jewish majority? Numerous verses in the Torah warn us to remember our time in Egypt as gerim, inhabitants who do not enjoy the full status of citizens. A compelling example is found in Exodus 23:9: ‘And a Ger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a Ger, seeing ye were Gerim in the land of Egypt.’ Judaism, unlike democracy or dictatorship, is a not a form of government. The religious activism I’m engaged with is in no way a dominant trend in contemporary Israel. We are a small group within an overwhelming majority of right-wing religious congregations. Some of us belong to the more liberal congre- gations in Jerusalem, both politically as well as halachically, but most of us do not belong to one particular congregation. Within the religious part of Israel we are absolutely anonymous. The only recognition we receive from the wider religious community is through the heated responses we attract from the religious settlers in Sheikh-Jarrah, who fail to understand how a person can claim to be religious and at the same time ‘love the Arab terrorists’. It is mainly through verbal confrontation with the settlers that we, religious peace activists, are addressed ‘in the name of the Whole’. Just as Israel needs a new democratic, anti- fascist leadership, so it is in want of a new (and in the same time very old and original) set of Jewish tenets. These are vital not only to Jews in Israel, but to all Jews, wherever they may be.

Hillel Ben Sasson: born and living in Jerusalem, is a member of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement. He is working towards completion of his PhD in Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jonathan Wittenberg is Senior Rabbi of the Assembly of Masorti Synagogues UK
DESTITUTION
There are an estimated 285,000 destitute asylum seekers living on the streets of Britain. Many are told by the British government that they do not fit the necessary criteria to receive refugee status but they stay as they are too scared to return home to countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. A very small minority of failed asylum seekers receive Section 4 Support which consists of £35 of supermarket vouchers a week, plus accommodation. The rest live hand to mouth, sleeping rough or on the floors of people’s homes. Some asylum seekers end up destitute because of administrative errors — they are entitled to support but the UK Border Agency process their asylum claims incorrectly and as a result people find themselves ejected from their accommodation with all support cut off. There is a high rate of post-traumatic stress in the asylum seeking community. Many are stripped of basic human dignity in a country they were hoping would offer them protection.
Perhaps the best account of what life is like for destitute asylum seekers can be found in the reports from the drop-in for destitute asylum seekers started by members of New North London Synagogue (NNLS). It runs the first Sunday of every month and provides essential services to 200 destitute asylum seekers such as medical and legal advice, supermarket vouchers, hot food and clothing. Below is an excerpt from the November drop-in report:
‘Two elderly women tearfully recounted their recent experiences of rape and torture in prison in Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are surviving here entirely on the kindness of friends. Both have multiple physical health problems as well as enduring psychological trauma. Rape is always a horrific crime but is particularly disturbing when it involves very young or very old victims.
Another elderly woman wept continuously as she detailed her experience of torture in Angola. She lifted her skirt to reveal horrific torture scars on her legs and said that her whole body was covered with such scars. She also has no support and moves from friend to friend. Although she struggles to walk the Home Office has decreed that she must ‘sign on’ at one of their reporting centres for failed asylum seekers every two weeks.’

RELUCTANT REFUGEES
The novelist Mark Haddon recently wrote an article in the Observer about an Armenian doctor he met called Sergey.  Sergey told him: ‘When I was in Armenia I was very happy. Everything was OK for me, for my family, thank you God. In the city I have a good home. I had popularity because I help many people to survive. It is my duty as a doctor. So everybody knows me. In the street they say, “Hello, Doctor.” The police know me. They say, “Hello, Doctor.” Even the Russian KGB, they say, “Hello, Doctor.” But after the Soviet Union break-up, there is life without law. There is mafia. There is killing, many times. My friends. My neighbours. Tomorrow, maybe me.’
With the help of friends, Sergey managed to escape hidden in a truck, while his wife and children went to stay with relatives.  When he reached England he assumed he was finally safe. But he was refused asylum and became homeless. While sleeping rough Sergey contracted Hepatitis C, leading to liver disease. He will not survive without a liver transplant, but he doesn’t qualify for one because of his asylum status. Eventually, with the help of a Law Centre, he got some basic subsistence, and was seen by a doctor, who told him to eat three meals a day and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. He has to do this on £35 of vouchers each week, but these have to be spent in one specific supermarket, with no change given . He is not allowed to earn any money.
Sergey could be saving people’s lives. He is not asking for money. He just wants to work as a doctor.  Meanwhile he is cut off from his family — he cannot visit his wife and children, who now live in one room in Italy, and they cannot visit him.
Today in Britain there are tens of thousands of destitute asylum seekers. They must choose between living in abject poverty or returning to places like Congo, Zimbabwe, Iraq and Afghanistan.  Among them are journalists, dentists, engineers, teachers, and civil servants. Others are not professionals but also flee here because their homeland is too dangerous. Many are homeless. Most are desperately poor. None of them is allowed to work. In purely economic terms this is a terrible waste of money and skills which this country, according to the latest skills shortage audit, desperately needs.
Fortunately, many Jews have mobilised around this human problem, both in groups and as individuals.  A couple of hundred volunteers help to run a monthly drop-in centre in London; small charities work hard to raise awareness; some people fundraise for basic necessities; others write letters and lobby their MPs; and some have taken destitute asylum seekers into their own homes.
Defying the shrill anti-asylum rhetoric, these and many other initiatives not only help people, but also help rehabilitate the very notion of asylum, in keeping with the best of Jewish tradition.

Dr Edie Friedman Director, Jewish Council For Racial Equality (JCORE) and co-author of Reluctant Refuge: The Story of Asylum in Britain

Reality-TV aficionados know that the format is predicated on the sort of psychological profiling that is designed to create precisely such tensions. But that doesn’t mitigate the point that ethnic tensions clearly do still exist in Israel. The Big Brother incident — variations of which repeat on a daily basis in real life, some harmless and some serious — is proof of the one thing that so many Israelis believe is no longer the case: that ethnic origin is at all relevant or a source of disharmony within the Jewish state.

It’s a statement based more on wishful thinking than on actual fact. Clearly, (Jewish) Israelis both desire to be and define themselves as a well-integrated nationality — for a people whose nationhood seems constantly to be scrutinised by others, this is understandable. But the most cursory of examinations would reveal that Israeli society is split along ethnic lines, with Ashkenazi (European-origin) Jews more predominantly a feature of the upper layers of society and Mizrahi or Sephardi (Middle Eastern/North African-origin) Jews more present in the lower scions. If you don’t believe me, take the standard university test: walk on to an Israel campus and see how many lecturers are of Mizrahi origin. Now check out the cleaning staff. Or take another test: ask an Israeli to impersonate a market-trader and count how many times the mimicry is carried out using a ‘Mizrahi’ accent.

In fact, academics have figures that easily back up such anecdotal assessments: children of Ashkenazi origin, they report, are three times as likely to hold university degrees as those of Mizrahi origin, while Ashkenazi employees earn over a third more than their Mizrahi peers. By the late 1990s, 88 per cent of upper income families were Ashkenazi, while 60 per cent of low income families were Mizrahi, according to the Israeli policy analysts, Adva. A concerned Israeli education ministry picked up on the schooling gaps sometime in the 1950s and concluded that Mizrahi kids were falling behind because they were playing catch up. Not because they were innately dumb, but because they’d come from the intellectually crippled backwaters of the Middle East. Actually, a team of top-notch Israeli sociologists came up with such theories, which became the backbone premise of the education system. Two generations later, the Mizrahi kids are still playing catch up, and the gap hasn’t been bridged.

Education obviously dictates earnings potential, but there are other reasons for the lag. Mizrahis experienced a constantly reduced allocation of national resources and were excluded from political and state power. Again, Mizrahi and other Israeli academics have shown that this sector of the population was disproportionately sent to live in the periphery, was allocated inferior land and did not relocate to the county’s centre as swiftly as their Ashkenazi counterparts. Ask Mizrahis living in Israel’s periphery — the notoriously neglected city slums and development towns once disparagingly referred to as ‘the Second Israel’ — and many will angrily related exactly how relevant they still feel ethnicity to be.

Meanwhile, there overwhelmingly exists in Israel the sense of a country seeking a Western or European alignment, in tastes, in culture and in sensibility. Sometimes you have to concentrate really hard to remember that you are living in the heart of the Middle East, among a majority population of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahis suffered a negation of their heritage and culture — perceived as low-quality and belonging to the enemy Arab camp. Having developed over a two- thousand-year period in hospitable, sustainable and creative Arab or Islamic environments, the Mizrahi heritage reflects that — which is why the historians refer to it as a Judeo-Arabic culture. But scores of Mizrahis still recall how this culture was scorned in the Jewish state, causing them either to put it away or to enjoy it in private. Many children of those first-generation Mizrahis were so ashamed of this home culture that they tried to ban it. Actually, some Mizrahis speak of inventing new identities for themselves when they were young, identities that were bleached of all those embarrassing Oriental hallmarks. Nowadays, few Israelis know about the rich and myriad culture brought to the Jewish state by its Mizrahi citizens — something that Mizrahi campaigners, activists, educators, rabbis, writers, poets, artists and musicians are desperately seeking to redress.

But Mizrahi campaigners lament the cultural loss for another reason, too. It’s not just that Mizrahi Israelis have been disconnected — from themselves. It’s not just that Judaic culture in Israel has been stunted by losing one of its supporting columns. It is also that Israel as a nation has disconnected itself from the region — even while the Judaic culture of the majority of its citizens has distinctly regional roots. Throughout the history of Israel, Mizrahi commentators have been arguing the geopolitical stupidity of such a move.

First there was Elie Eliachar, a Sephardi Jewish notable of Mandate Palestine, who later served in several Israeli Knessets. He constantly warned the Zionist movement of the time of the dangers of ignoring the Sephardi community, which he described as ‘a ready-made barometer of Arab sensibilities’. Eliachar thought that the Zionist New Settlement was alienating the native Palestinian Arab population — which might have been avoided, had the movement watched and learned from the long-standing and well-established Sephardi community. The leaders of the New Settlement ignored him. Years later, the Iraqi-Israeli academic Nissim Rejwan would lament Israel’s missed chance as he wrote: ‘The way Mizrahis were looked upon and received — ambivalent, derogatory, and on the whole openly hostile — has proved to be one of the cardinal in a series of fateful mistakes that Israel committed, and continues to commit, that have led to its isolation and alienation and continued rejection by the world surrounding it.’

This is a multi-tiered argument and sometimes difficult to disseminate, especially when the dominant narrative has Israel’s Mizrahi populace cast as Arab-haters rather than proponents of a negotiated peace (the voting polls indeed show this to be the case, but there are myriad possible explanations for it that are not at all connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict). Still, on one level the case is perfectly straightforward: if Israel was not so alternately condescending and ignorant of Arab culture then it might be more inclined to foster harmonious relations in the Arab world — and naturally, those knowledge gaps start to narrow at home, with Israel’s Mizrahi population. Having come from Jewish homes that moved to the cultural rhythms of the Arab world, many older generation Mizrahis are well-equipped to dispel a few myths and misconceptions over the Middle East. Their children might be too, if they grew up within an openly proud Mizrahi environment which nurtured an awareness of the family’s valuable culture-stock. On another level, Mizrahis across the political spectrum often speculate that they might have made better negotiators in peace talks with the Palestinians. This perspective is based on a perception of mindset or outlook that Mizrahis are claimed to share with Palestinians, but which European-origin Israelis do not have. The accuracy of such a statement is debatable — Palestinian negotiators don’t agree with and in any case argue that Mizrahi politicians did not make a refreshingly different contribution to proceedings at the talks tables. But such observations speak volumes about a Mizrahi sense of exclusion from the corridors of power and a desire to bring something new to the Israeli identity at its interface with ‘the enemy’.

Rejwan and others relate that a rejection of the surrounding world has contributed to a false dichotomy of Arab versus Jew, as though the two are polar opposites destined to forever be at each other’s throats. Nothing could be further from the truth: Mizrahi history reveals a long, shared past – not always harmonious (whose history was?) but very often tolerant and productive. Mizrahi kids are often shocked to discover this to be the case: they’d just assumed that Arabs have historically hated the Jews. Indeed, some Mizrahi-Israeli academics have recently tried to challenge the polarity by self-defining with a taboo hyphenation: ‘Arab-Jew’. Such campaigners argue that Jews who once lived in Iraq or Morocco or Egypt are as much Arabs as Jews who once lived in Germany or Austria are European. Such arguments usually prompt fierce reactions, as the dominant narrators of this story seemingly prefer a script of permanent, preordained enmity.

But however Mizrahi-origin Israelis choose to define themselves, what is clear is that Israel desperately needs to rectify the imbalance and bring the Mizrahi fully into its history and culture — as equals, not as some kind of folkloric embellishment (witness the Israeli appreciation of Mizrahi food, traditional dress and customs of hospitality).  Researching a book on this subject, I was fortunate to meet countless Israelis of Middle Eastern origin who showed me many manifestations of what I like to think of as ‘Mizrahi booty’. Some of these individuals are first-generation Israelis with clear memories of past lives once easily shared with Arab and Muslim neighbours in Iraq, Morocco or Yemen. Those recollections are stamped with the templates of a possible coexistence today. It is not too late to listen and to learn from these valuable oral histories — for within these memories are the almost buried tracks of a shared, peaceful future for these two nations of the Middle East.

Rachel Shabi is a freelance journalist. Her book Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands is published by Yale University Press in January 2009.

The letter Hey is made up of a Dalet and a Yud. The Yud is rotated and hovers inside the Dalet.

There are many interpretations as to what the Hey alludes to. Some suggest that it is a diagram of detachment: the experience that action is detatched from thought, others see it as a symbol of speech, with the left leg representing words or breath leaving the mouth. But it does seem that the beauty of the Hey is somehow related to the mysterious hovering of the left leg.

According to the laws of Hebrew Calligraphy, the letters do not sit on the line as we find with English lettering, but rather hang down from it. A line is scored into the  parchment beneath which the letters  are written. Some scribes prefer to use a rose thorn so as not to use any steel in their work,  steel being a material associated with war.

In every Torah scroll just after the account of the creation, you will find a verse which contains an unusually small letter Hey.

The verse says: ‘These are the generations of heaven and earth “Behibaram” when they were created’, but the diminutive letter Hey suggests that it can be read ‘B’ Hey Baram’ with a “Hey” were they created, announcing, quietly, that through speech was the world called into being.

The definite article

In Hebrew grammar the Hey is used to denote the definite article which, in the defining moment, simply attaches itself to the beginning of the definiendum i.e. the thing which it seeks to define. Please note however, that if the Hey is attached to the end and not the beginning of the definiendum, it results not in definition but in a feminine ending.

Hey the Fifth letter

In Arabic the number Five is pronounced Hamsa similar to the Hebrew Hamesh.  Hamsa is also the name given to the Five fingered amulets popular with Sephardic Jews and Muslims for warding off the Evil-eye.

Five sided shapes and the rules of football

Some of the most perfect pentagons in the world at the moment are those found on the surface of a football. According to mathematicians the football is something which satisfies the following rules:

1.     It is a polyhedron that consists only of pentagons and hexagons

2.     The sides of each pentagon meet only hexagons

3.     The sides of each hexagon alternately meet pentagons and hexagons.

Heys and Almond trees

In trying to define the secret of the Hey’s beauty, consider that of the Almond flower. Almond flowers have two things in common with us:

First, like us they are alive and second like us, with hands and feet, they are multiples of five.

www.alefsinwonderland.com

Ethereal and voluptuous, sinful and sacred, cheesecake, is the ultimate Jewish dish. The Greek gods feasted on nectar and ambrosia; the Jewish God, it is safe to say, prefers cheesecake. Why else do we eat cheesecake to relive our mind-bending, world-altering encounter with God at Mount Sinai?

In the Torah, God feeds the Israelites with manna, and they feed Him with roast beef, in the form of animal sacrifice. But what does He eat for dessert? We learn from Marcus Cato’s De Re Rustica that the ancient Romans left a cheese loaf called libum as an offering to their household gods. Would the Jewish God accept anything less?

It is a little-known fact that, along with democracy and theatre, the Ancient Greeks also invented cheesecake. It became associated with both religious ritual and pleasure when athletes in the inaugural Olympic Games of 776 BCE ate it to enhance their performance.

According to Evelyn Rose, Jews first ate cheesecake during the Greek occupation of Palestine. Indeed, the oily potato latkes that we consume with abandon at Chanukah derive from salty fried cakes made from cheese; in the Book of Judith, the seductive title character feeds them to the evil Assyrian general, Holofernes. These cheesecakes make him so thirsty that he overindulges on wine, becoming so drunk that Judith is able to slice off his head with his own sword. Again, the cheesecake symbolises sex, but also strength — the cheeky heroine takes on a decidedly masculine role in slaying the oppressor.

Throughout the Middle Ages, cheesecakes of all kinds were popular throughout Europe. Monks cooked cheesecake with Roquefort. Italians prepared it with ricotta and mascarpone for a light filling. And a mid-sixteenth century English cookbook has a recipe for a ‘tarte of Chese’, which calls for the cheese to be immersed in milk for three hours, broken up with a mortar, strained with egg yolks, seasoned with sugar and butter, and baked. The modern cheesecake was made possible by New York dairyman William Lawrence in 1872. He took cream cheese, introduced by English Quakers a century earlier in the Delaware Valley near Philadelphia, renamed it ‘Philadelphia’ and started selling it across America. In no time, it was a best seller.

Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe maintained a special fondness for cheesecake. With distance and years, cheesecake, like Proust’s madeleines, became the repository of memory. In Mary Antin’s lyrical memoir The Promised Land, published in 1912, her nostalgia for Russia is crystallised in her memory of cheesecake from her hometown of Plotzk. Just thinking about it brought back ‘the flavour of daisies and clover picked on the Vall; the sweetness of Dvina water; the richness of newly turned earth which I moulded with bare feet and hands; the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place; the fragrance of all my childhood summers’.This intense nostalgia gave cheesecake a special meaning for Jewish immigrants, who strove to balance their desire to become American with their need to retain their Jewish roots.

As Jews became more accepted into American society, they found ways of expressing their Jewish identity that did not depend exclusively on religious observance. Many second generation Jews moved to the outer boroughs of New York City, especially Brooklyn and the Bronx, where they continued to live, work and socialise almost entirely with other Jews. Most felt little need to go to synagogue or perform religious rituals but still felt deeply attached to their culture and ethnicity. This new secular Jewish identity revolved to a great extent around the foods that they shared.

The incorporation of cheesecake into the wider community, and the way in which its very essence fused with the notion of American richness and excess, is an illustration of Jewish arrivisme not to be underestimated. Luscious, full-fat cheesecake bespoke American bounty; eating it enabled Jewish immigrants and their children to affirm that they had achieved the American Dream. In blending concepts from the shtetl and the New World, cheesecake successfully straddled and synthesised different cultures and, like Jewishness itself, combined different flavours in one dish.

Jewish foods also penetrated the mainstream of American society. The huge number of Jews in New York — more than a quarter of the city’s population in the years between the two World Wars — ensured that their foods became part of the wider culture and beloved of non-Jews as well. Cheesecake became an iconic New York Jewish delicacy and the ‘New York Cheesecake’ was especially associated with non-kosher theatre district delicatessens like Reuben’s and Lindy’s. Non-Jews ate cheesecake as avidly as Jews, vicariously taking part in the New York-Jewish experience. As The New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne once wrote, cheesecake is the ‘one dessert in America that is as typically New York as the subway, corned beef and pastrami, or the waiters at Lindy’s’.

As Jews have become more assimilated, and as foods like cheesecake and bagels have begun to slip their Jewish moorings, the context of eating Jewish food has assumed more importance than the food itself. Eating cheesecake may still make Jews ‘feel Jewish’, if it takes place in a Jewish restaurant or on a Jewish holiday, but it no longer serves as an all-purpose symbol of Jewishness for Jews and non-Jews alike. The cheesecake has melted in the mouth of progress, with, as is fitting, no discernible aftertaste.

Jewish mysticism offers some intriguing insights into what might make cheesecake inherently Jewish. The Kabbalah understands God in terms of overflow — the holy vessels were shattered by a superabundance of divine energy. With its staggering fat content, cheesecake represents the culinary equivalent of this divine outpouring. Mystics associate dairy products with God’s quality of chesed, or loving-kindness. In the Song of Songs, the Torah is compared to milk: ‘Like honey and milk [the Torah)]lies under your tongue.’ The love engendered by dairy products is so overpowering that it even dominates a subsequent meat meal. In Genesis, Abraham magnanimously served the angels cottage cheese and milk, but then followed it up with meat. In The Kabbalah of Cheesecake, Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson notes that ‘it was in the merit of the dairy-followed-by-deli feast that the Torah was given to the Jewish people. Hence, each year on Shavuot we reenact that Abrahamic feast: we eat dairy, followed by deli, demonstrating that earth prevailed over heaven; that it is in our labour to sanctify the soil in our life where we touch the truth of existence’. It is our eating cheesecake that, every Shavuot, makes us worthy to receive the Torah anew.

On the first night of Shavout at a tikkun leyl, we stay up all night studying Torah and eating cheesecake. By the dawn’s early light, we are so exhausted that we cannot tell the difference between the two; for all we know, we might be eating Torah and reading cheesecake.

Ted Merwin is theatre critic and food columnist for the New York Jewish Week. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. He teaches Judaic Studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

It is Moses season in America. There are Moses on the radio and Moses on TV. Followers of one Moses hand out fliers at the grocery, followers of another Moses put up signs along the street. ‘Moses 2008,’ shouts a blue sign, ‘Vote Moses!’ shouts a red. There are rallies for this Moses, marches for that one, and every week or so, all the Moses gather together on stage and attack, to the delight of the ravenous crowd, the other’s plan for the Exodus.

‘I promise to lead you out of bondage in the first year of my Presidency.’

‘Oh please, you voted for the bondage last year.’

‘But then I voted against it. Can we keep this

discussion about the Pharaoh?’

‘I’ve been working to fight the Pharaoh since college.’

And so on. It is Moses season in America, and I never liked Passover much to begin with.

I was raised in the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey, New York. It’s a bit more ultra now than it was then — perhaps then it was just mega-Orthodox, or mondo-Orthodox, or Orthodox Xtreme — but suffocation is an absolute, and suffocate I did. My rabbis taught me that God was violent, that God was vengeful, that God was quick to anger, and that when He got angry, watch out: the Earth just might flood, the blood just might turn to water, another Holocaust just might happen and God just might once again decide to ‘turn His head.’ God, basically, was a prick, and for the first twenty years of my life, my rabbis stood with their hands raised overhead, exhorting us to do what He says if we didn’t want any trouble. This sounds troublingly like what gunmen say when they hold up a bank, only with gunmen, it’s possible the police will rescue you; nobody, unfortunately, is going to kick in the doors of the synagogue and pump God full of lead, so you do what your rabbis tell you and hope the All-Homicidal goes away without killing anyone. A dysfunctional home life only made the problem worse; I might not have believed all the bad news about my Father in Heaven if my father on Earth wasn’t just as violent, just as erratic, just as terrifying as the God my rabbis were telling me about. All of which makes me, 37 years later, a big fan of exodus, but not so much of Passover.

For one thing, I don’t think Moses and me would have gotten along. I don’t trust politicians, particularly those raised in palaces, and frankly, he seems like he was a bit of a reactionary. ‘Oh, the bush told you to confront Pharaoh, did it?’ We do have two things in common, though: we share the same vindictive lunatic of a God, and we both found ourselves in a place that was stifling, restrictive, and which we needed to leave. The trouble is, Moses was heading for the place I was escaping.

From a very young age, I wanted to go. I wanted to run.  I didn’t know where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to leave — my community, my family, my God. Consequently, no other story was as frustrating to me then as the story of Exodus. It had the best beginning and the worst ending. Go! it began. Be free! Be liberated! Live your own lives! How excited I was by that. ‘I can leave?’ I thought. ‘That’s cool with everyone?’ But then, somewhere around the middle of the second act, the story takes a turn for the worse. Because from where I was sitting, the place the Israelites were going did not sound like a place of freedom. It sounded like Monsey. It was a place, again, of rules and obligations, another land ruled by a vicious dictator (in fact, according to some, when this Dictator gave them the Holy Rule Book at Mount Sinai, he held the mountain over their heads until they accepted His rules; out of the Egyptian fire, so to speak, and into the kosher frying pan). Check out the Table of Contents if you don’t believe me: the promising Book of Exodus is immediately followed by restrictive Book of Leviticus. The Book of Freedom is followed by the Book of Submission. The Book of Possibility is followed by the Book of Do What I Say. I was hoping for a story of leaving, but this wasn’t what I got; this was a story about digging your way out of one prison only to emerge from the ground, muddy and disappointed, in the yard of the prison next door. And the Warden of this new prison, if my rabbis were to be believed, was even crazier and more powerful than the warden of the last. Here’s what the story said to me, a young boy stuck in a bad place, under the thumb of an abusive father and an even more abusive God: you can run, but you can’t hide. From the introduction to the Artscroll Family Haggadah:

It is a night when every Jew should regard himself as though he were freed from Egyptian slavery, and began the march toward Sinai, where Israel would receive the gift of the Ten Commandments… On the night of Passover, (the nation) came to acknowledge no master but God…

Crap. Here’s the ending I was hoping for:

And all the Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea, and the Israelites were free. And Moses said, ‘All right, cool, that’s over. Do what you want. I’m heading south, but I’m kind of a sun guy.’ And Aaron went north, because he had some friends who had a ski lodge up there, and everyone else went off on their own, free to do what they want. The End.

Alas.

I didn’t think about this much until my son was born three years ago, and it was his birth that made me, at last, bring to a close my own exodus — an exodus from a poisonous family, a restrictive place, a destructive theology.  It had been a long and difficult journey — not quite 40 years in the desert, but close — and it was around the time of his first birthday that I realized I probably wasn’t going to make it. I realized that even though I had managed to leave my family and community behind, the terror they had instilled in me from such a young age was so hard-wired, so ingrained, that I would probably never rid myself of this God, never stop worrying, every minute of every day, about the cruel traps and painful punishments He was setting for me around every corner. But I also realized that maybe my son could. Maybe my son could live in a land without God, or, at the very least, without this God, this cruel God, this Prick my rabbis had taught me about. And suddenly, there — on my son’s first birthday — was a third thing Moses and I had in common: we don’t reach our Promised Lands, but we count it as the far greater victory if our children somehow do.

In a few months time, my fellow citizens are going to elect a new Moses. Right now, all we can think about is what we’re escaping from: our politicians stand proudly before microphones and cameras, promising to deliver us from the evils of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and behold, the people do clap and cheer, and they dance and sing before their new Moses, be it Moses McCain, Moses Clinton or Moses Obama. But listen, I know these stories, I know how they end, and though I’m as excited as the rest of my nation to be out of bondage, I know that a month, or six months or a year after our emancipation, our new leader will reveal a whole new set of rules, a whole new type of bondage, or, more likely, the same old kind, and I watch them on TV and think ‘Why bother?’ But then I think about my son, and I think about that one Exodus story in my head, that one where Moses heads south and Aaron goes north and everyone goes their own way, that improbable one that really does end in freedom, and I reach over to my nightstand and set the alarm clock for 6:30 AM. It’s Primary Day tomorrow, and the polls open at 7.

Shalom Auslander is a writer. Originally from Monsey, New York, he now lives in New York City. His most recent book, Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir is published by Picador.