Apr

4

2025

Daniel May (publisher): On March 17th, Israel resumed its bombing of Gaza, killing in one overnight attack 436 people, among them 183 children. Here is how the Associated Press described the scene at one of Gaza’s few remaining emergency rooms: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Reading these words, I found myself returning to a grim set of questions, well-worn by the days and weeks and months of the last year and a half: How much to keep reading? How much to look? Does staring into this void force me to face it? Or does the staring just build mental calluses that wrongly soften the blows? Is looking away simply necessary self-protection, or am I building up the muscles of avoidance? And what is the point of these questions anyway; isn’t this all a slide into narcissism, when children’s legs have been blown off?

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the Egyptian American journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad faces the void—and stays there. Over 187 pages, he tracks the emotional and political toll of witnessing Gaza’s devastation. In form, the book is a polemic, an assault on the myths that the West tells itself and the hypocrisy of American liberals who proclaim their commitment to human rights while insisting that the unfolding destruction of Gaza is justifiable. For El Akkad, this is a story of many losses—above all the losses of Palestinians murdered by those who profess their commitment to freedom, but, most personally for him, the loss of a belief in American ideals that, as a child growing up in Egypt and Qatar listening to Nirvana records whose covers had been blackened by censors, provided inspiration from afar. Covering the wrath of America’s war on terror as a journalist showed him “the ugly cracks in this thing called ‘the free world.’” And yet, he continues, he “believed that the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The book describes what happens when that belief is abandoned. One outcome is anger, directed primarily at politicians, journalists, and arts institutions that describe the destruction as “tragic,” but are in fact most offended by protestors whose tactics they find distasteful or those who buck liberal dogma by refusing to vote for the president who supplied the bombs. When the Democratic president supports genocide, he writes, “an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more’ starts to sound a lot like ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.’”

As scathing as that indictment is, I found the book most affecting, and most troubling, when El Akkad turns his gaze inward. “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal?” he asks. “What is wrong with all these people who can?” And what is to be done when every action seems so limited, at best symbolic? Ultimately, the book lands on a call for refusal: a refusal most practically to support the machinery of war economically, but, more broadly, a refusal to participate in any institution that contributes to or supports the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. He calls this “negative resistance” and suggests that while the state is well equipped to handle protest, it has no answer for the person who says “I will have no part of this.”

It’s not entirely clear what this might mean in practice, at least for most of us. How exactly are we—as taxpayers and students and workers and rent-payers in the heart of the empire—supposed to “have no part of this?” El Akkad finds some solace in recent protests and boycotts, but given the darkness of the book, it isn’t surprising that he is most moved by the extreme sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. This example points to the central dilemma of withdrawal as a form of political resistance: The most meaningful sacrifices seem beyond what most could be expected to offer. For this reason, Thoreau’s famous refusal to pay taxes to a slave nation always felt to me both the only morally defensible position and of limited political power. I can’t say, though, that I have answers for what to do in the face of such unrelenting horror. But in reading El Akkad’s book, I realized just how much, over the last year, I have trained myself to stop asking these questions. I know the reasons why I’ve done so, but it is still a moral and political failure. Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When the French director François Ozon is on his game, there are few filmmakers who can equal his ability to draw out the uneasiness, the pure creepiness, that dwells beneath the surface of his characters’ lives. In his work desire is omnipresent, though often expressed obliquely, and nothing and no one is safe from its depredations. Secrets abound, and what people show others is merely a screen concealing who they really are, what they really want.

The director’s latest film, When Fall Is Coming, is Ozon at his most Ozonian. None of the characters are who or what they initially seem to be; their acts at first appear to contradict their nature, but gradually their logic emerges. The film revolves around Michelle, a beautiful and stylish octogenarian who lives in a middle-class home in the French countryside. Against this rural backdrop, she carries herself with a distinctly urban grace. Her closest friend is the chain-smoking and down-to-earth Marie-Claude, who is much more of the region. But despite their apparent incompatibility, the two women are close enough that Michelle regularly drives her friend to visit her son, Vincent, in prison. Michelle’s quiet life in retirement is disrupted when her beloved grandson arrives for an extended visit, escorted by his mother—who is poisoned by mushrooms picked by Michelle. While she insists it was a terrible accident, accusations fly that the poisoning was intentional, and the visit is quickly terminated. There are hints of Michelle’s louche past, which has destroyed the mother-daughter relationship and ruined her daughter’s life.

While Ozon sometimes explains what in the characters’ pasts drives them in the present, for good and ill, a zone of shadow lingers over the edges of every life and action. Did Michelle mean to poison her daughter, after all? Certainly not—unless she did. Even she’s not sure. Why, when Vincent is released from prison, does he develop a strangely close relationship with Michelle? And why does he say he’s going to hang out with friends late at night but actually head to a deserted playground, where unexplained figures occupy the swings? We expect things to go badly awry, and indeed they do—or perhaps they don’t, and all is for the best. In When Fall Is Coming, Ozon presents us with a world whose inhabitants are much like the mysterious mushrooms. Are they toxic or a delicacy? It’s almost impossible to tell.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): I first encountered the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in 2014, where—accompanied on stage only by his guitar and his wife, Amanda Shires, playing fiddle—he performed memorable melodies from his breakthrough album, Southeastern. In the following months, I grew attached to the album, the release of which capped off a comeback narrative for Isbell. A one-time songwriting prodigy for the Drive By Truckers, he had been kicked out of the band for excessive drinking, but thanks to the steadfast love of Shires (also a talented songwriter and musician in her own right), he had managed to get sober. Southeastern chronicled this tale with songs like the classic love ballad “Cover Me Up,” and alt-country jams like “Stockholm” and “New South Wales.” But here and on his next LP, Something More Than Free, Isbell also dabbled in richly drawn fictional portraits, inhabiting the psyches of lost Southern men trying to maneuver their way toward emotional attachments. Throughout much of college, whenever I was running out of time before a paper deadline, I’d drag myself to a back corner of the library, face the wall, put on Southeastern or Something More Than Free, and white-knuckle my way through the writing. Shockingly, this association hasn’t diminished my love for the albums: The melodies were just that catchy, the lyrics just that clever.

Isbell released his next few records under the name “Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit,” reflecting the pride-of-place of his full band (including Shires). These albums, particularly 2017’s The Nashville Sound, continually elevated his stardom in the Americana world, earning several Grammys, but I was less captivated. The band is talented, and a real treat to see live, but outside of a few standout songs, many of Isbell’s melodies seemed less specific, his songwriting voice less unique. And the narrative—of his and Shires’s world-conquering love—was beginning to get, well, repetitive. Isbell had aced the straightforward pledge of devotion with “Cover Me Up,” and the much-acclaimed “If We Were Vampires” couldn’t live up to it. Forgive me, but there are parallels here to Taylor Swift, who spent several albums spooling a meta-narrative about escaping scandal and finding the perfect man, which resulted in her writing the same song again and again.

At the end of 2023, though, Shires and Isbell divorced. All too soon after, Isbell, now in his mid-40s, had shiny white veneers on his teeth and a new 29-year-old girlfriend. As with fans’ reactions to Swift’s 2023 breakup from longtime beau Joe Alwyn and subsequent fling with edgelord 1975 frontman Matty Healy, many die-hard Isbell fans were none too pleased to see their oracle acting, well, like an asshole. (And if you think pop stans are the only dramatic ones, you should see the folk-rock bros melting down over Isbell’s betrayal on Reddit.) But just as Swift responded to this friction with some daring songwriting, the personal turmoil seems to have driven Isbell back into the studio—alone with only a guitar, where he recorded Foxes in the Snow, released last month, his most intimate and interesting album since his earlier solo efforts. Here, Isbell’s deft guitar picking manages to do the work of a full band, swelling and fading in a multiplicity of voices. The songwriting is simple and focused, relying on Isbell’s natural ability to churn out choruses that sound like instant folk classics. Lyrically, the songs offer honesty, even when uncomfortable: “I was a Gravelweed and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when I felt that I was raised,” he sings, on the best song, “Gravelweed,” sounding both penitent and bitter. The next line doubles as an apology to both an ex and an audience that seemed to prefer an older, better-behaved version of him: “And now that I live to see my melodies betray me / I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” (On “True Believer,” the narrator has harsher words for the meddling fans: “Why y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”) Elsewhere, on “Good While It Lasted,” he captures how the giddy anxiety of a new relationship can share some of the same emotional hallmarks of heartbreak: “For a moment in the afternoon / I almost didn’t think of you / And it was good while it lasted.” It’s not a perfect album, and there are a few snoozers here—“Don’t Be Tough,” “Wind Behind the Rain”—but Isbell’s return to the core songwriting skills that make him great is something to celebrate.

As we begin reading Vayikra’s detailed instructions for slaughtering animals, I return to a remark of Mira Balberg’s, from her book about sacrifice in rabbinic thought. Riffing on the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s earthy saying, “Dumplings in a dream are a dream and not dumplings,” she writes, “Ritual in a text is text and not ritual.” In other words, the Book of Leviticus is a book and not a Levite, and, at least for the past several millennia, it has inspired the spilling of much ink, but little blood. Indeed, the rabbis, living after the destruction of the Temple and thus unable to offer up animals, frequently insisted that studying the sacrifices counts as performing them. While Rabbi Asi attributes the traditional practice of starting young learners not with Genesis, but with Leviticus, to the idea that “the children are pure and the offerings are pure—let the pure come and engage in the pure,” I often wonder if the purity in question is really about the absence of pragmatic, real-world content—that is, if a defunct law code was chosen because the point isn’t to teach children anything in particular; it’s to teach them to read.

Appropriately, then, when Jewish Currents began featuring weekly parshah commentaries, the magazine followed the ancient injunction to begin in Leviticus (though JC started with next week’s portion, Tzav). Though coincidental, the choice was nonetheless felicitous, for these little sermons cannot demand that their readers adhere to particular beliefs or rituals; they can only ask that you momentarily entertain a certain structural relation to a sacred text. They were, after all, written for an outlet with a long tradition of antipathy to religion: As a contributor, I still get paid by the “Association for the Promotion of Jewish Secularism,” the name of the nonprofit that publishes the magazine. And sure enough, some readers have responded with bemused skepticism, others with outright hostility. (Okay, yes, many of you have emailed that you like them, thus securing your portions in the world-to-come.) Few Currents subscribers, I imagine, dream of a restored sacrificial cult, and I doubt many even take the Pentateuch to be divinely inspired or normatively binding; all we commentators can reasonably expect is a formal interest in the text, a willingness to indulge its autonomous pleasures.

In this context, however, pure form paradoxically carries a political edge, because it stakes out the left’s side in what George Steiner described as Jewish consciousness’s central tension: “between an unhoused at-homeness in the text, between the dwelling-place of the script on the one hand (wherever in the world a Jew reads and meditates Torah is the true Israel), and the territorial mystery of the native ground, of the promised strip of land.” In this vein, the Jewish scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith argued that the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a rebuilt Temple, which consists of an elaborate array of distinctions, hierarchies, and binaries, established a “system” that “could be transferred” and “decentered.” To be sure, Ezekiel seems to yearn for a sacred place. But Smith was counterintuitively suggesting that, by meticulously delineating the Temple’s laws and precisely describing its spatial organization, the prophet was actually investing authority in the abstract system itself. Indeed, Ezekiel crafted his religious system not from Jerusalem but from the banks of a Babylonian river, living in exile after the destruction of the First Temple. For him, and for the ritual tradition he represents, legal structure predominates over cultic center. This priestly order is thus our blueprint for a transportable Jewishness—that is, for the diaspora. In these parshah commentaries, our homeland is the text; we worship in a moveable sanctuary, which is to say, we are brought together by form, rather than content.

Fittingly, before all the sacrificial instructions, Leviticus itself begins with a formal summons. Our parshah’s opening verse awkwardly displaces the subject of its first verb; translated word for word, it reads: “Called to Moses and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying.” In the final scene in Exodus, the Divine Presence prevents Moses from entering the Tent, which he has just finished constructing. Now God invites him to return. When this verse was in the middle of one continuous Priestly text, its verbs had their subject back in Exodus 40:35, at the end of the previous book. But after Leviticus was detached into its own book, the scholar Jacob Milgrom suggests, an editor added the name of God next to “spoke,” presumably because that is where it usually appears (as in the formula, “And God spoke to Moses saying”)—stranding the first verb as an odd, disembodied call. A midrash interprets this initial phrase through a parable, comparing God to a king who ordered his servant to build him a palace. On whatever the servant built, he wrote the name of the ruler—on the walls, the columns, and the roof. When the king entered the palace, he saw his name everywhere and exclaimed, “All this honor my servant did for me, and I’m inside, and he’s outside!” So he calls the servant to enter. Similarly, when God told Moses to build the Tabernacle, whatever Moses built, he would write on it, “As God commanded Moses”—a phrase found numerous times in the final chapters of Exodus. This, according to the midrash, is what prompted God to notice the injustice of excluding Moses, and thus to invite him in. Two points about the midrash stand out: First, while the servant in the parable inscribes only the king’s name on each feature, Moses adds his own name too; as it turns out, he thus literally writes himself into the Tabernacle. Second, what lies behind this midrash is a pun on that opening verb, “vayikra,” which can mean not only “to call” but also “to read.” For while the king sees his name as he tours his new digs, the divine name isn’t physically written on the Tabernacle. Rather, God only encounters this phrase by reading the final chapters of Exodus.

Like the rabbis (and us), God sees the Tabernacle not as a physical structure, or the site of a bloody ritual, but rather as a passage of scripture, an assemblage not of posts, planks, and cloths, but of words: “posts” (Exodus 36:36), “planks” (36:34), and “cloths” (36:8). And perhaps there is a deeper meaning here for that oddly impersonal address. While the Divine Presence physically fills the Tent as a cloud, there is another aspect to God: a disembodied, readerly summons, transcending not just corporeality but even subjectivity, emerging only in response to human writing. It is, I think, this genius loci who is the presiding spirit of these parshah commentaries, this elusive attentiveness that they solicit. Over the course of reading the past year of these exegeses, I have felt that many of us are desperately attempting, in the face of so much distance and alienation, to invite ourselves into this text. I hope, perhaps with equal desperation, that you, reader, will also find yourself inscribed here.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.