From Cambridge to Munkatch

I'm back with a minor story to relate, which actually began about 5 years ago. Otherwise, I've been kept busy by unimportant ad-hoc assignment at work, which I attempt to complete with cheerful aplomb. The mortgage must be paid you see, so too yeshiva tuitions and Saturday night restaurants dinners for the wife (so that she continues to like me), which also means a $12/hour babysiiter.

Robert to Avram Part I

I used to work for an energy trading concern in Midtown Manhattan, a sort of mini Enron. Like many other companies like it, it closed after the collapse of Enron. Many interesting, well educated and talented young people worked there, most holding advanced degrees from Princeton, Harvard and MIT. One of my buddies there, I’ll call him Robert, held degrees in physics, mathematics and philosophy from MIT, and was one of the designers of the system of wholesale electric power trading in the US and elsewhere. Robert was a brilliant little guy with lively inscrutable little eyes hiding behind thick glasses and a mouth naturally shaped into an impish Mona Lisa smile.

When I first met him, and after years of wrestling with the issue, he had finally decide that he did believe in god, and had entered the next stage: the process of accepting that the one true revelation is the one received by Moshe at Sinai.

'Why?' I asked him.

'Because I believe!' He answered happily.

Now known as Avram, he moved to the Upper West Side (for a ‘true’ Jewish experience), hosted shabbes dinners at his house, and invited attractive twenty- and thirty-something potential baal tshuva candidates to share his revelation. He invited to once: during dinner an Aish haTorah rabbi (a former reporter and himself a Harvard grad) rose to speak. The assembled 'attractives' listened raptly, and nodded enthusiastically. Their souls were introduced to prophecies revealed through hidden codes, to the notion (the fact, he said) that 2.5 million people at Sinai can’t lie and couldn’t be wrong and more ‘facts’ I can’t remember. Also, I tried to raise several points, but after two (surely brilliant) questions, the Rabbi was on to me and ignored my raised hand. He wasn't interested me. I was rejected for the new revelation. He wanted fresh meat, tabula rasa, naive and wide eyes with no base of knowledge. New 'naaseh venishma' troops. He had no need for an ex-yeshiva boy cynic, and so he brutally cut me out. I was left to nibble on one of those spicy Israeli pickles.

But Avram remained hungry. He became dissatisfied with what he thought of as uninspiring, dry moderdoxy and was getting bored by Aish haTorah.

To be continued...

On this day in the life of the Jews...The first Auto de Fe in 1481; The Spanish Inquisition established by Sixtus IV, but it didn't begin in full force until 30 months later, when six men and women were burned publicly in Seville for 'Judaising'. This was the first of about 2,000 such burnings across the Iberian peninsula, the last of which occurred in 1826. In total, 31,912 were burned in person (alive or dead) while another 17,659 were burned in effigy. And in our own day, Jew hate in Spain especially, has been redirected into vicious Israel hate. For as anyone with seychel realizes, Israel is the embodiment of the 'The Jew', since it's not vogue -- not yet -- to be an overt anti semite. Not yet

Colors scrubbed into black & white, and grim events in Basel 658 years ago

Black and white aren't merely the preferred wardrobe colors of the Jewish hyper-devout. They're also a reflection of the way view the Torah's personalities.

What makes the Bible wonderful? It's that its characters are lovingly painted in various colors, warts and all, glorious in their many flaws, people we can identify with and not some perfect gods. And thoroughly human.

Look at some of our heroes: Abraham essentially gives his wife (twice) to a king to protect his own skin, then, like a zombie attempts to sacrifice his son, Isaac who in turn grows up to be passive and semi senile. Isaac is cheated by his mama's boy, second born son Jacob, who with his mommy's help underhandedly gains the rights of the first born from his slightly dimwitted brother Esav.

Jacob blatantly and stupidly favors his son Joseph, who brags to his brothers about being 'da man'; his brothers will one day be the founders of our twelve (or eleven, or thirteen, depends where you read) tribes; yet they sell their brother to a bunch of proto-arabs (Yishmaelites or Midyanites, the scripture can't decide here either) and tell their father that a mean animal ate him up. Meanwhile, our saintly four mothers exhibit jealousy, competitiveness and are not shy about pulling shtiks. Great stuff.

Jump foward to King David who we revere so, head of a legendary line of kings, forefather of the Messiah to come....Yet this same David undermines King Saul, was a mercenary for the despised Philistines, had rivals routinely assasinated, voyeuristically watched Bathsheba showering below his window and seized her from her husband Uriah who he sent to a sure death at the front on the Golan Heights...I can go on and on.

And there are the raunchy stories which you and I relish. Take Tamar. Make that the two Tamars. One poses as a hooker to lure her father in law Yehuda (Judah) in Genesis (as a result of the sexual problems of Onan his son and her husband).
Then another Tamar, this time David's daughter, has incestuous sex wth her brother Amnon. My perush (commentary) on it is that Tamar was a word in lushon hakodesh (holy tongue) for 'hottie' or 'vixen'. In fact an echo of this definition has trickled into Englsih. How? the definition of Tamar is 'date', as in the fruit of the palm. But this word's homograph (same spelling different meaning) is another sort of date, the one that guys take out. So we can say that Tamar was, shall we say, a hot 'date', involved in two of the naughtiest stories in the Tanakh...

As I was saying, these are all colorful, ambiguous personalities, drawn in pastels, anything but black and white. Thoroughly imperfect.
And human.

So what did the Rabbis do? They took these carefully crafted characters and turned them all into good guys and bad guys. The three fathers and four mothers? Perfect and godlike. Everything they ever did was perfect in every way. And not only that: they were all great scholars and prophets, knowing Torah, halachot, Rashi, Tosfot and each and every other commentator to ever come. And what of the abandoned Yishamel (Isaac's brother) and cheated Esav (Jacob's older twin)? Reshaim. Evildoers.

I once had a brief exchange at table 12 ar some relative's vedding in Ir Hakoidesh (Borough Park) with my cousin Heshy about Yaakov and Esav. As we awaited the khatan and kallah (groom and bride)to emerge from seclusion, I said something about Esav getting screwed by Yaakov. Heshy rose up, almost tipping over his soup, knaidalakh (dumplings) and all, thundering, pointing wildly:

"But Esav was a rasha (evil)!".
"That's not how he's portrayed in the scripture." I said. "And if he was a rasha, how come Isaac loved him so much?"
"All the mefarshim and midrashim, everyone knows he's a rasha! What do you know?"

And so it is with all the characters. Heshy's response is typical of fundamentalist Jewish thinking. Over the ages the rabbis scrubbed the colorful multi dimensional tapestries scrubbed into flat blacks and whites. I guess we shouldn't make things complicated for our kolel boys and ulpana girls.
Brought to you by the same guys that insist that Shir Hashirim (Song of Songs) isn't an erotic love song.

On this day in 1349, a massacre took place in Basel in what is today Switzerland. This was one of the most tragic in a series of anti Jewish spasms of sadism that occurred during the Black Death, which decimated a third of all Europeans. Jews were accused of having spread the pestilence by poisoning wells, though people knew that this wasn't so; Jews died with everyone else.
A massive wave of massacres had swept the region of Savoy. When it spread to Basel, city elders attempted to protect the Jews, in vain. The mob gathered all of the town's Jews, and forced them all into a shack on an island in the middle of the Rhine River. The shack was set alight and burned down with the Jews inside.
Against their parents wishes, a few of their children were saved and baptized.
A decree was later issued banning Jews from Basel for 200 years; the decree was overlooked as soon as the town's requirements demanded it.



*lithograph by Marc Chagall 'Tamar, the daughter in law of Juda'