Kesher Talk: 09/07/2003

Saturday, September 13, 2003

Two for the price of one. Oliver Kamm fisks both John Pilger and Iraq Body Count in one post.

Even if the maximum figure for civilian deaths as cited by Iraq Body Count is true, that is almost precisely one half the number of corpses found in a single mass grave dug and filled by the Baathist tyranny at Al-Mahawil.

Then he takes apart IBC's methodology.

Some good news for a change. Honey, yesterday was David's blogiversary! And David and I never managed to meet while he was in NYC. Maybe if I'd gone to shul more often . . .

PSA. After services this afternoon, Ben told me that Steve Silver had given Ben's minyan Kol Zimrah a link. Although I blogged about the service where I met Steve (and he did too), I was remiss in not giving our host Kol Zimrah a link. So if you are in NYC and want some spirited progressive Carlebachian Shabbat davening with musical instruments, check out Kol Zimrah. If you prefer your haimisch lay-led service in a different style, check out the list of minyanim at the bottom of their page. Oh, and give them some money so they can do more ambitious stuff. This has been a Kesher Talk Public Service Announcement.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords.

It's all been said.

PS This is so disgusting. What's that definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over in hope of achieving a different result? (Great idea - but they won't.)

UPDATE: Bill Sjostrom has some links.

Friday, September 12, 2003

Ellul countdown. On Rosh Chodesh Ellul I linked to a wonderful commentary on Psalm 27 which can be used as a guide to self-examination during the month of Ellul, leading up to and preparing for the Yamim Nora'im. (As part of our spiritual preparation we recite this psalm everyday from the first of Ellul through Hoshanah Rabbah.) You don't have to be Jewish, or even religious, to find this moving and useful.

I have divided Psalm 27 into four sections with the thought in mind that you might like to concentrate on one section during each of the four weeks of Elul, as you prepare for your own teshuvah. I have correlated these four sections to four steps of repentance.

Week 1: Responsibility.
Last week: Regret.
This week: Rejection.

On 9-11 a lot of poems and psalms were posted around the blogosphere - but I didn't see Psalm 27. Here it is ("Adonai" is the Hebrew word for "Lord" and is usually substituted wherever one of the abbreviations for God's name appears in Jewish liturgy and scripture):

Adonai is my light and my life. Whom shall I fear?
Adonai is the foundation of my life. Whom shall I dread?
When evil-doers assail me to devour my flesh,
It is they -- my adversaries and enemies -- who stumble and fall.
Should an army besiege me, my heart would not fear.
Should war beset me
Even then would I be confident.
One thing I ask of Adonai,
Only this do I seek: to live in the house of Adonai all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of Adonai, to frequent his Temple.
For Adonai will conceal me in his sukkah on an evil day,
and hide me in the covert of his tent,
raise me up high on a rock.
And now my head will be lifted up above my enemies all around me
And I will offer sacrifices in [Adonai's] tent
with the sound of trumpets.
I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to Adonai.
Hear my voice, Adonai, when I cry out
have mercy on me and answer me.
"For yourself," says my heart.
"Seek My face."
Adonai, I seek Your face.
Do not hide Your face from me.
Do not push aside Your servant in anger.
You have always been my help.
Do not forsake me, do not abandon me, O Lord my deliverer.
For my father and my mother abandon me, but Adonai gathers me up.
Show me Your way, Adonai,
and lead me on a level path
because of my ever-watchful foes.
Deliver me not over unto the will of my adversaries
For false witnesses have risen up against me
and those who breathe violence.
If I had not believed to look upon the goodness of God,
[I would no longer be] in the land of the living.
Look to Adonai.
Be strong and of good courage.
Look to Adonai !

Help for thesis about DC Jewish community, circa 1930-1960.

I am working on my senior history thesis at American University this year on the response of DC-area Jews towards the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel during the 1940s. In addition to my research at the DC Jewish Historical Society and other local museums and libraries, I wanted to interview those who were around at the time. If any Kesher Talk readers fit the description (or know anyone who fits the description) and is willing to be interviewed, send me an email at jk2069a@american.edu OR austudent@comcast.net.

And, hopefully, I'll have enough time this semester to at least occasionally contribute to the site.

Democratic candidates' Jewish problems: As Kesher Talk has discussed before, the only people really disturbed by Senator Joe Lieberman's Jewishness in his run for the presidency are ... other Jews. Of course, his inability to campaign on the Sabbath has already hurt him in small ways, especially considering that the Democratic grassroots tend not to understand what being religious means.

But how long will Howard Dean last? Letter from Gotham recently discovered that Dean's wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, is Jewish. Sound the alarms!

Thursday, September 11, 2003

We remember September 11, 2001.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Two years will have passed since those attacks . . . And while the passage of time heals injured hearts, it also poses a bit of a danger, a danger that as those events grow more distant there's at least the possibility that people hoping to get on with their lives will begin slowly to forget. And it's important that we not forget.
-- Donald Rumsfeld

Today is another early fall New York day: Warm, cloudless, the sky an aching blue. This morning officials and victims' families gathered at Ground Zero and found comfort in names. Jeff Jarvis was there.

Individual stories:
My absolute favorite 9-11 story of dedication and transformation - it makes me cry every time I read it. (Here is the complete NYT article.)
An audio montage from news archives on 9-11. Including the black box.
102 minutes inside the WTC and the Port Authority tapes. - interactive sites with diagrams, voice-over anecdotes, photos, emails.
Scroll down for many individual anecdotes from that day.
The line between life and death was the 91st floor.
Voices: Michelle's project of remembrance. In the right-hand column you will find a long list of links to individual stories by bloggers.
More 9-11 stories.
Howard's story.
Ilyka's story.
Dan's story.
Jonathan's story.
Meryl's story and several others.
Lesley's story and more. And what she wrote then.
John's memory of a perfect sky.
Rossi's story.
Social Reject's story.
Mike's story.
Geoff's story.
Tacitus' story.
Phelps' story.
Sgt. Mom's story and several more in the comments.
A story from Capitalist Lion.
A story from Virtual Sanity.
Christopher's story.
Boswell's story.
Darren's story.
Porphyrogenitus' story.
As it happened through the eyes of the dean of the blogosphere.
More links from Ilyka.
The last person found alive in the debris of Ground Zero.
Photos from Brooklyn.
What the Twin Towers meant to one immigrant from Iran.
She saw her father's death on TV - over and over.
The saga of Rick Rescorla.
The heroism and hospitality of Gander, Newfoundland.
The flight attendants who fought the shoe bomber tell their story.

Links about the attack on the Pentagon.
Victims of the Pentagon attack.

Memorial site for Flight 93.
Lyzbeth Glick remembers her husband, one of the heroes of Flight 93.
"They only had us on the mat for 109 minutes." Another remembrance of Flight 93.

Victims of the World Trade Center attacks, by country.
Portraits of Grief from the NYTimes.

More memorial sites:
This is a Jewish blog. Some Jewish victims of 9-11.
The memorial wall in the Union Square subway station. I walk past that about twice a week.
Lesley's remembrances of her co-workers who came to work on time.
Memorial pages from Silent Running ("Kufirs with long memories") and Sgt. Stryker and Donald Sensing and Dissident Frogman and Tina and Matthew Stinson and Jane Galt and AmericanZine (most unusual photo of the towers).
The Black Day.
Memorial site of the FDNY.
Memorial site of the NYPD.
Memorial site for passengers of Flight 11.
Reactions around the world.
"In commemoration of all those who were lost on September 11th, 2001, TD Waterhouse will join the New York Stock Exchange in observing four separate moments of silence."

Words words words:
A retrospective on the purple prose generated by the attacks. Well I recall tuning into NPR that evening (one of the last times I listened to NPR) and being horrified at the fatuous guilt-mongering of Lewis Lapham et al. I mean, it hadn't yet been 24 hours, and these pompous fools were already lecturing us on how we had it coming.
Sheila O'Malley also has some choice words for the mea culpa crowd.

Poems:
110 stories.
When the Towers Fell.
There Will Be No Peace.
Another day came.
No One Came Home.
Saddest Day of My Life.
To a Terrorist.
The Missing.
9/11 Before and After

Archives:
Tons of links at Winds of Change.
Archive of New Yorker reporting about 9-11.
The 9-11 archive of the City University of New York.
Archived news footage.
Here is New York photo archive.
CNN: America remembers and 2001 archive.
New York Times coverage 9-11-03. Be sure to scroll down for the photo slideshows and the interactive articles about the attacks, the collapse of the buildings, etc. (for the geek in all of us).

Root causes:
Remember, this war had already been going on for awhile.
Palestinians celebrate the 9-11 attacks. (Yes, the footage is real.)
Why U.S.? asks a documentary.
Michael Totten answers with a lot of photos and some words from Paul Berman.
They don't care if you are on the "left" or the "right."
Blaming the Jooooooos.
The Islamic Council of Britain meets today to celebrate the anniversary of 9-11.
Mohammed Atta's final instructions.
Taliban Uses Anniversary to Renew 'Jihad' Call.
Bernard Lewis.
An Egyptian intellectual apologizes.
Global sympathy for the USA after 9-11 was just a minor blip in a longstanding antagonism.
rossi always tells it like it is.

Looking forward:
Some ideas from Jewish tradition about meaningful rituals for mourning the event and incorporating it into our national consciousness. (Specifically, Passover, Yom Kippur, and Yom Ha-Zikaron.)
Damian Penny has some acerbic thoughts on "closure."
Michelle Malkin is angry at incompetent and venal bureaucrats.
Stephen Green is angry but not terrified.
Yuck.
The gradual restoration of Ground Zero.
Winds of Change asks: The key enablers and co-conspirators for September 11: Where are they now? Lots of links and analysis in the thorough WoC manner.

Never Again.

PS I added some late links here.

Questioning time. One self-described punk's political seismic shift after 9-11.

Immediately after Sept. 11 I started reading outrageous statements from prominent leftists that shocked and saddened me. The Left does not speak for me on this issue. I find Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Katha Politt, Susan Sontag et al's attempts to blame the U.S. for this mass murder ideologically weak and morally absurd. I have never felt more clearly my alienation from political movements in this country than I do now. To analyze the causation of the terrorists' actions is to accept their violence as a legitimate political expression. I do not. I feel the Left grasping at the idea of anti-Americanism which is its only core now that Marxism has been discredited by history. But this Anti-Americanism is not an appropriate reaction to the murder of 5000 Americans on Sept. 11. It is clear to me that the cornerstone of the American Intellectual's entire identity is dependent on his position of "critic of the state." . . . My friend's murder has snapped me out of my dogmatic view that the U.S is evil, and all our political opponents must be good, must be right, must stand for justice and the deserving third world people, and tolerance and diversity.

Read the whole thing.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Mad Mel gets mad. Previous posts on Mel Gibson's movie about the death of Jesus here, here, and here. The latest:

In one of a series of inflammatory remarks quoted in this week's The New Yorker [unfortunately not on the website - ed.], Gibson accuses "modern secular Judaism" of trying "to blame the Holocaust on the Roman Catholic Church".

"It's a lie. And it's revisionism," said Gibson, a follower of Traditionalist Catholicism that still performs the Latin Tridentine mass. "And they've been working on that one for a while."

Not sure what that has to do with Gibson's historical revisionism (Jesus didn't speak Latin, and some scenes are from ecstatic visions by 18th century nuns), but unfortunately the Catholic Church was heavily implicated in the Shoah, not only by not speaking out, but by encouraging the antisemitism in which Naziism grew. It's not a lie. It's not revisionism. (via Damian Penny)

PS David Kertzer and Daniel Goldhagen both spoke at the YIVO Conference on Antisemitism in New York this spring.

UPDATE: Here's a Mel Gibson Script-o-matic for those of you who want to craft your own flaky Gibson-flavored Jesus movie. (via Electrolite)

Slouching toward Washington. Howard Dean sure has been putting his foot in his mouth a lot lately.

That's okay. I wasn't planning to vote for him anyway.

9-11 Commemorations.At the New York Historical Society:

Wednesday, September 10 and 11 / 7 p.m.
Special Benefit Performance of "The Guys."
Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of playwright Anne Nelson, actors Dan Lauria and Swoosie Kurtz, and director Thomas Kail, we present the first of two special benefit performances of The Guys, Anne Nelson's moving post-9/11 drama of courage and fortitude and in the face of unimaginable loss and grief. Dan Lauria plays the NYFD Captain faced with the challenge of delivering the eulogy at the funerals of the many firefighters who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He is helped by a journalist, played by Swoosie Kurtz, to find the words to express the unexpressable.
Admission is $15. Payment must be made in advance by check or credit card. Seating is limited. Please note that due to the nature of these performances, the N-YHS has reserved certain seats for honored guests from the NYFD, NYPD, their families and the families of the victims of 9/11.
Call 212.873.3400 ext. 269 to reserve.

September 11: A Day of Remembrance
Enjoy free admission to the museum all day. Daytime: Showcasing four 9/11 films. Please note that viewing times are approximate. Evening: The Guys second benefit performance (see September 10 for details).
10:30 a.m./1:15 p.m. Evan Fairbanks: Video Footage of September 11 (25 minutes)
Fairbanks documented the morning's events from around and inside the World Trade Center for an hour and a half. Just moments after he exited the Plaza, the south tower collapsed behind him, marking the end of his recording.
11:00 a.m./2 p.m. Etienne Sauret's WTC: The First 24 Hours(30 minutes)
The film, thirty minutes in its final version, is an examination of feelings through imagery, accompanied only by natural sounds, including sirens, voices, whistling locators and alarms.
11:30 a.m./2:30 p.m. The Spirit of St. Paul's (1 hour)
From September 12, 2001 through June 2, 2002, thousands of people responded to the tragedy of the World Trade Center attack, met at St. Paul's chapel (located across the street from Ground Zero) and were transformed by its spirit.
12:30 p.m./3:30 p.m. All Our Sons (30 minutes)
Craig Kelly and Lillian Benson's moving documentary about the mothers of African American firefighters who died in the attack on the Trade Center towers.
In the evening, reserve tickets for the second benefit performance of The Guys.

At the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue (the B. Altman building, between 34th & 35th Street), Thursday night, 6:30 pm, $10 donation (proceeds go to The Graduate Center's "3 Weeks After Paradise Scholarship Fund" to assist children and grandchildren of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks with tuitions fees):

Israel Horovitz, playwright - "3 Weeks After Paradise." It's a 52-minute film, originally presented on 9/11/2002, with Mr. Horovitz introducing it and available for questions afterwards.

CUNY also has an online 9-11 archive. (via my blackout friend Murray)

Jews in odd places: Russia: In the 12 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, a return to Judaism in Russia has begun. Today, community leaders estimate that about 5 percent of the country´s estimated 500,000 to 1 million Jews are religiously observant. JTA has the scoop.

Mind you, Russian Jews could probably do without a high-profile Russian Jewish criminal...

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Comments are back! So go comment already.

Arrival Day blogburst. I was very remiss in not contributing to Jonathan Edelstein's
blog tribute to the 349th anniversary of Arrival Day:

349 years ago today, the ship St. Catherine landed at New Amsterdam carrying 23 Jewish settlers. They were not the first Jews to set foot on American soil - the merchant Solomon Franco had visited Boston in 1649 before returning to Holland - but unlike Franco, they came to stay. They were the founders of the six million strong Jewish community of the United States, and the day they landed - September 7 - is Arrival Day.

I can only plead busyness and distraction, and add this to my teshuvah for Rosh Hashanah. It's a great idea about a date in Jewish history which will be the subject of a public commemoration next year. Go there and read. And Jonathan's previous posts on Jews in early America (linked from the blogburst) are also great snippets of history.

Bodycount. Current estimate of civilian deaths as a result of Iraq war: 6000-8000
(This is a high estimate by people who want the war to look as bad as possible. The numbers are probably much lower.)

French heat wave deaths: 15000.

More than twice as many innocent people died in France this past month of heat than died during the Iraq war which lasted about the same amount of time. The heat wave blasted most of Europe but no other country has suffered more than 50 deaths related to it. Most of these deaths were preventable (no other European country has the same attitude about air conditioning) as shown by lessons learned from the Chicago heatwave of 1995.

PS Previous snarky post about France.

Baghdad Bloggers Anonymous. I can relate to this:

Some people watch daytime soaps, I follow blogs. I follow the hyperlinks on the blogs I read. I travel through the web guided by bloggers. I get wrapped up in the plots narrated by them. I was reading so many blogs I had to assign weekdays for each bunch, plus the ones I was reading daily.

You don't have to be a an Internet-deprived resident of a police state to get addicted to blogs. (via Instapundit)

PS I watched the promo, which came across as an antiwar video - Salam's views were far more ambivalent.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has more Salam interviews.

Continuing technical difficulties. Kesher Talk has always had a comment function, we like getting comments, and we have not deliberately removed our commenting application. But it's not working for some reason. But we do want to hear from you.

Separated at Birth: Grasshoppa notes a stunning likeness in the Middle East peace process...

Jews in odd places: Poland: There were a ton there before the Holocaust, but it turns out not every Polish Jew who survived the slaughter left right away -- they were kicked out years later. But this summer, many Poles welcomed Jews back with open arms. The Forward has the story:

The leader of the Communist party in Poland, Wladislaw Gomulka, blamed the Jewish "Zionists" for fomenting the student unrest [in 1968] and announced that the Jews "were free to leave." Leon Ejdelman (pronounced Adleman), then a Jewish student in Szczecin who now resides in Yonkers, N.Y., knew what this meant. "In a Communist country, where no one was allowed to leave, Gomulka's suggestion was a way of telling us to get out," Ejdelman explained. In a matter of months, thousands of Jews throughout Poland were fired from their jobs and their membership in the Communist Party was revoked. By the end of the year, 13,000 Jews felt forced to leave the country and consequently gave up their citizenship.

This summer, the Jews of Szczecin finally reunited in the town for the first time since the traumatic events of 1968. Former residents flew in from all over the world — the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and different cities within Poland itself. Szczecin, a port city located on Poland's western border with Germany, was actually part of Germany until the end of World War II, when the allied countries decided at the Potsdam Conference to turn it over to Poland. Many Jews returning to Poland after the Holocaust settled in the new city rather than go home to their own towns and villages, fearing the reaction of their former neighbors.

Szczecin quickly became a thriving Jewish community. In 1946 the Polish government allowed the Jews to open their own Yiddish day school, called the Peretz School, after the well-known Yiddish writer, Yitzkhok Leybush Peretz. (Yiddish was deemed "kosher" by the Communist authorities, in contrast to Hebrew, which was verboten due to its Zionist and religious associations.) There were three Jewish sleep-away camps in the area around Szczecin and a well-organized communal life for Jews of all ages.

Little remains of the vibrant Jewish life in Szczecin today. The reunion participants were eager to revisit the places of their youth, but they harbored no illusions. On a tour of the former Jewish sites, they discovered that the Peretz School was now a sleekly renovated training center for teachers, and the few active members of the community were frail and elderly. One notable exception was Roza Krol, the energetic organizer of the reunion, who is, like many of the reunion participants, in her fifties.

But it wasn't just nostalgia that moved the former Szczecin residents. It was the unexpected enthusiasm of the Poles. The Jewish reunion was written up in a number of Polish newspapers (sample headline: "In '68 They Were Forced to Leave Poland, and Now — Back to their Youth"). Even the highly esteemed Gazeta Wiborcza, often referred to as The New York Times of Poland, sent a reporter to cover the reunion in Szczecin. "TV cameras followed us wherever we went," Krol remarked. The governor of the province, Zygmund Meier, participated in the unveiling of a plaque on the former Peretz School and later invited a group of the reunion participants for a business meeting in his office about doing business with Polish companies and hopefully investing in Polish companies as well.

Monday, September 08, 2003

This week's Pintele Yid recommendation - For our gentile friends and Jews who want to rediscover their heritage - recommending quintessentially Jewish cultural works (books, TV specials, CDs, Torah teachers, poets, websites, and more) which transport you inside a Jewish skin and show you the world through Jewish eyes.

Last week's recommendation.
Week 9 recommendation.
Week 8 recommendation.
Week 7 recommendation.
Week 6 recommendation.
Week 5 recommendation.
Week 4 recommendation.
Week 3 recommendation.
Week 2 recommendation.
Introduction to the series and first recommendation.

Kaddish, Leon Weiseltier.
An excerpt from Chapter One.

My contribution - this coming Thursday - to the blogospheric commemoration of the 9-11 terrorist attacks will be mostly New York Jewish stories from that day, some of which involve our rituals for the dead. In that spirit, this week's Pintele Yid pick is an idiosyncratic and intense exploration of those rituals - particularly the history and practice of reciting the Kaddish - the sanctification of God's name - for one's beloved deceased.

Kaddish was much reviewed and discussed when it was published, and some of the reviews address the matters of faith and doctrine raised by Wieseltier in the course of critiquing the book. They are worth reading in their entirety for that reason, so I am linking to more reviews than I usually would. I have also linked to several discourses on the Kaddish itself which tangentially mention Wieseltier's memoir.

People either love Kaddish or hate it - it will appeal most to those with a scholarly bent, and - although it is arranged chronologically, as a journal - I recommend keeping it by the bedside to dip into as the mood strikes you, rather than trying to read it straight through. Like several of the reviewers, I found it a comforting companion during the last month of my father's dying and my 11 months of saying kaddish afterwards. In any case, Weiseltier's irritable, sometimes amusing ruminations, his zigzagging pursuit of and dialogue with rabbinic sources (very talmudic!), as well as the texts he cites, are quintessentially Jewish.

Kaddish brings to life the way of the Talmud. It contains and compresses our grief, public and private, and our guilt, public and private. It fairly steams with personal emotion, private doubt, and 20th century, post-Holocaust doubt. It is not dry scholarship. It does not count the number of angels on a pin. It is, instead, a passionate portrait of a man in grief, an American Jewish man who has rejected his father's ways and yet not forgotten them. Wieseltier has created a major work that hooks the laws of the rabbis to the modern soul, that post-Freudian American, choices-abound, free-to-leave soul.

What is remarkable about Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish - both as a book and as a publishing phenomenon - is its mix of studiousness, irony, passion, and sheer randomness: it returns to a time when scholarship, love, and philosophical reflection were undivided. It is the product of "unsystematic study" - not the study we undertake to convince credential-granters and employers of our mastery, but the study we pursue through pure compulsion. In his forties, long lapsed from Jewish orthodoxy, Wieseltier returned to the synagogue (to the shul, in the homelier Yiddish word he prefers) to say the mourner's kaddish for his father, three times a day for eleven months; puzzled by this taxing cultural imperative, which is neither biblical nor talmudic, he undertook an open-ended search through Jewish literature to find the sources of the practice. The research, like the kaddish itself, was also a memorial to his father and a bulwark against grief; sometimes, too, it was the voice of his grief.

Wieseltier calls up an uncountable assemblage of rabbis from Akiva (who seems to be the source of the kaddish custom) through Maimonides, Rashi, Joseph Karo, Elaezar ben Judah of Worms - "the influential pietist and jurist of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries" known as "the Perfumer" - and on and on. Threaded through Wieseltier's mustering and quarreling with the rabbis, there are personal comments about the ups and downs of going to shul day after day, feelings generated by the ritual, the seasons of the year in Washington, D.C., the sadness of his mother whose parents were killed by the Nazis . . .

Out of his personal narrative of his year of mourning, he time after time leads us to a topic he wishes to consider, walks us through sages' discussions of the problem he has chosen, then takes us through his responses to those discussions, gradually winning our confidence not only in his learning but also, and especially, in his educated judgment. He enlists erudition in the service of the soul. What emerges is a dialogue at the depths of the human experience recorded, in their particular idiom, out of their distinctive perspective, by the Judaic saints of past and present. But what turns learning into literature is the narrative voice -- controlled, spare, restrained -- that Wieseltier has invented for himself.

Wieseltier, for all his secular culture, in his own way trusts in the Covenant, and while I greatly admire ''Kaddish,'' it frequently renders me uncomfortable or even fretful. The Sanctification of the Divine Name has had too many Jewish martyrs. Wieseltier, while fully cognizant of this history of atrocities, tends to be formidably at one with his enormous company of sages. I respond strongly to his wonderful zest for Jewish learning, but sometimes wonder why he is not more critical of the rabbis' refusal to hold their God accountable for His evasions of the Covenant.

The Jewish way is to perform the commandments even in the absence of understanding. Let the hands tend to the deeds; the heart and mind will follow. That is how the rabbis interpret the Israelites' response at Sinai: Na'aseh v'nishma—we will do, and we will hear: Action first, study and comprehension later. Wieseltier begins each day in shul, fulfilling his obligation to his father. Only then does he head for the teahouse to grapple with the scholars and dreamers of the Jewish ages.

Action first—why? Because behavior governs attitude. Wieseltier's daily prayers at an Orthodox synagogue do not transform him back into an Orthodox shul-goer, but the experience does not leave him unchanged. A year of mourning, it turns out, is a year of introspection, of a sharpened awareness and continued reevaluation of his own spiritual and moral state.

A review from Commentary by Jon D. Levenson compares Kaddish to more of a "how-to" book on Jewish mourning, by Anita Diamant.

As for the aphorisms, they can at times be striking--"In religious life, habit is essential. In spiritual life, habit is shameful"--but the cryptic style and the overheated prose in which they are couched often leave the impression of mere posturing or a reaching for effect.

A perceptive comparision of four contemporary religious memoirs: Wieseltier's Kaddish, Jonathan Rosen's Talmud and the Internet (which I recommended here), James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, and Garry Wills's Why I Am a Catholic:

Religion, since it isn't science, suffers from the perception that it must be spontaneous and antirationalist, which means that we often settle for rank emotionalism on the subject. Each of these authors, on the other hand, is that rare hybrid, the modern intellectual trained in old-fashioned religious argument. Wieseltier and Rosen practice the Talmudic method, more or less, and mostly avoid the faith question, since it isn't that big a feature of traditional Judaism. Carroll and Wills take it on, because it is important to Catholics. Wills, with his rigor, is especially moving on what Chesterton called ''the mystical minimum,'' a view of being as a divine mystery, ''a creative act by which God continually draws everything up out of the abyss of nothingness.'' God is still as tough a challenge to the mind as anything in the material world, and deserves the same precision.

Here is an interesting interview with Wieseltier, also relevant to the purpose of this series, in that he makes a case for the centrality of facility in Hebrew to Jewish education.

This survey of the history of the Kaddish includes several examples of its use in 20th century music, particularly Paul Robeson's rendition in Yiddish of the Berdichever Rebbe's defiant Kaddish, at an Israel solidarity concert in Moscow in 1958 (you know, back in the Mezozoic Age when the Left supported Israel). This is a must read if only for the Berdichever's Kaddish, but it's also a good short primer on the Kaddish's development and use in the liturgy.

A kavannah before saying Kaddish.

Lastly, just for grins, my favorite translation of the Kaddish.

Sunday, September 07, 2003

Cool stuff. Another alternate history just waiting to be turned into a Howard Waldrop story.

All the presidential campaign videos (dating back to 1952) you would ever want or need. (via Stephen Pollard)

A sweet story.

If you ever need to give a D'var Torah, run, do not walk, to this site. (I think from Protocols)

How not to be a racist.

I don't think that they are better people than us and I don't think that we are better people than them. A Palestinian for me is a human being. So if he says he wants to kill me, I believe him. I don't say, "Well, he's just a savage, so we have to give up, we have to be rational and leave the irrational killing to the Arabs; we have to forgive them. I'm totally non-racist. Who says that we have to give up, we have to give and let them kill us because we are more "elevated" people than they are? It's the same racism as saying we are better than they are.

-- Yehuda Amichai

(via Michael Glazer)

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