Jul

31

2025

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): I can still remember my first introduction to the Lebanese satirist, playwright, and musician Ziad Rahbani, who passed away last week at the age of 69 after a half-century-long career. In the winter of 2019, my friend Amir was driving us north from Haifa to what remains of the Palestinian village of Iqrit. As is customary for that time of year, he was listening to Fairuz’s Christmas jingles, and he asked me if I knew about her son Rahbani. When I told him “no,” my education began. He put on Fairuz’s Al Bostah (The Bus), a nine minute orchestral arrangement of funky flutes and cutting violins that was unlike anything I’d ever heard by her, or heard at all. In contrast to Fairuz’s more ethereal tracks, Rahbani’s lyrics were gritty and grounded. Sitting with a puffa jacket in the cold, I felt like I was in the choking heat of the bus in Lebanon, just on the other side of the border. I could almost hear the roar of the engine, the strange yet memorable cast of passengers munching on figs and lettuce; I could almost see Alya’s dark eyes.

Rahbani was a singular force in the history of Arabic music. Using traditional Arabic instruments with jazz scores, he created “Oriental jazz,” most perfectly realised in his 1978 two-track funk album Abu Ali and his 1984 follow-up Houdou Nisbi (Relative Calm). The opening track of that latter album, Bala Wala Chi (Without Anything At All), is perhaps Rahbani’s most famous song. (What sheer chutzpah to open a mostly-instrumental album with one of the most beautiful love songs of all time!) Bala Wala Chi talks with great sincerity about a love that rises above material and social constraints. But the chorus retains Rahbani’s quintessential wry political style as the speaker invites his love outside the realm of private ownership, singing “come let’s sit in the shade, nobody owns the shade!”

Unlike his mother Fairuz, who cut a unifying figure above the parapet in Lebanon and the Arab world, Rahbani was an avowed communist and outspoken champion of the Palestinian cause. The title track of his 1985 album Ana Moush Kafer (I’m No Infidel) opens with the line “I’m no infidel, but hunger is an infidel” and the album pulls no punches about who Rahbani holds responsible: the corrupt political class he mocks in the album’s penultimate track Bhaneek (I Congratulate You) where he unleashes mocking praise for the “purity of [their] stances.” Today, Rahbani remains as popular and relevant as ever in the Arab world because his decades-long diagnoses persist, and the justice he sought so unrelentingly was never done.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): “All our struggles are connected” is a rallying cry of the contemporary left. But Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity—the retrospective on display at the Jewish Museum until October 12th—highlights that the notion is an old one. Shahn (1898–1969) embodied it consistently throughout his artistic career, targeting racism, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism as intertwined evils. Accordingly, almost every cause that mattered to the American left from the 1920s through the 1960s is reflected in this exhaustive, generous exhibition.

Shahn’s earliest and perhaps most famous series in the show is The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, which chronicles the case of the two Italian anarchists accused of murder during a botched robbery at a factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920, at the height of the First Red Scare. The left took up their cause, but to no avail. Produced a few years after their 1927 execution, Shahn’s paintings served as a memorial to the martyrs. His stylized gouaches of the men and those who surrounded them during their trials (both literal and figurative) include those who supported them as well as those who participated in their judicial murder. In a lesser-known but no less evocative series, Shahn’s brush pays homage to Tom Mooney, the labor leader accused of bombing a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, killing six people.

Elsewhere, we see works promoting Popular Front leftism (those supporting the war effort as well as FDR and the New Deal); the industrial unionism of the CIO, where Shahn worked; and the rights of Black Americans, many made well before the civil rights movement sprung to the fore. When that struggle exploded onto the scene, Shahn placed his art at its service, producing movingly simple portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, the activists murdered in Mississippi by the KKK. Though best known for his paintings, Shahn was also a skilled photographer—and in many cases his camera was the source for his work with the brush. The exhibition lets us linger over his images showing the labors and poverty of Southern workers and farmers, both Black and white, and scenes of daily life among the Jews of the Lower East Side and the Italians of the neighboring Greenwich Village.

The show concludes with a key component of Shahn’s worldview: his Jewishness. We see biblical scenes, artfully calligraphed Hebrew passages (a nod to the prohibition against images), and a variety of figures from Maimonides to the combatants of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For Shahn, Jewishness and the fight for justice were one.

A. Gopalan (news editor): On the eve of the end of the world, what will you do? As the inevitable approaches, will you still try to save something—your children, your city, your continent—or just lay down your arms and hope it comes quickly? These questions are the cornerstones of countless dystopian novels and TV shows, but the piece of media that I think has done them the most justice come from a completely unexpected corner of online storytelling: Dungeons & Dragons.

A few years ago, when a friend introduced me to the roleplaying game, I quickly understood its appeal. Collaborative improvisational storytelling where you and your friends create characters, fill in backstories, go on adventures, cast spells, navigate complex plots and thorny social dynamics—all using just a couple of sheets of paper and some dice? Yes please! But while I enjoyed playing the game, I still didn’t understand the appeal of watching others play it—and so could never get into the “actual play” D&D shows that are so popular in the community.

That changed this year, when I discovered the incredible four-episode D&D show called Calamity. It belongs to the extended universe of Critical Role, probably the most popular D&D entertainment franchise around. But thankfully, you don’t need to have watched CR’s hundreds of hours of content, or even know much of its lore, to get into this 10-ish hour prequel series. The premise is simple: The world is ending. A “Calamity” approaches that will last hundreds of years, causing untold amounts of death and destruction. We know it’s unstoppable—most CR stories are set in the centuries after the cataclysm, grappling with its long aftermath—but of course, the people living before the Calamity, or in its first moments, have no idea. Far from it: The six players around the table each embody a character living in the mythic “Age of Arcanum” immediately preceding the disaster, a gilded age of hubris when the continent’s wizards believed that the sun would never set on their magical ambitions, and that there would never be a price to pay for their rapid acquisition of godlike power.

Knowing this premise, I had expected it to be at least somewhat satisfying to watch these arrogant mages get their comeuppance, but of course it wasn’t. Like any good story, Calamity makes you care about these power-hungry, compromised people: It shows you their bonds with their spouses and children, many of whom are not going to survive what is to come and reveals their better angels time and time again—especially as they begin to realize what they’ve unleashed and fruitlessly scramble to stop it. It was amazing to watch the players, who know where the story will most certainly end, nevertheless portray characters who earnestly try to redirect the course of history, or, failing that, to save this one child; that one neighborhood; delay the devastation from reaching other cities, confess long-withheld loves; renounce private wealth and status to try and save the collective; and do all the other things we would do if we were all preparing to die. Even more astonishing was the game master’s ability to imbue the story’s foregone conclusion with profound dramatic stakes, so much so that while I initially tried to listen to the show on my walks, I quickly gave that up after I repeatedly found myself standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at my phone, riveted.

Ultimately, of course, what gave the show its emotional force was the resonance with our present. I realized this most clearly when I read an article in the most recent issue of Acacia, which quotes the hadith that goes, “if the Hour comes while you are planting saplings, and there is a sapling in your hand, still plant the sapling.” Calamity may be the best depiction of the pain and joy of following that edict, planting the last sapling even as the fires break out around you.

When my youngest sister was in eighth grade, her Jewish day school class took a trip to Israel. On the evening they arrived, I went to meet the group in the hopes of spending a few minutes with her before the students were whisked away on their tour. After I got to the meeting point in Jerusalem—a promenade that overlooks the skyline and the Old City—I stood for a moment, watching them before they noticed me. A young, energetic Israeli tour guide spoke excitedly to the pack of jetlagged American 13-year-olds and their chaperones. He stretched his hand in the direction of the city: “This is the land upon which our father Abraham stepped!” he nearly shouted in joy. “This is the land where King David trod,” he continued. “And this,” he said with a final flourish of his hand, “is the land where our great teacher Moses walked.”

None of the students, or their teachers, objected. I don’t know if no one noticed his mistake, or if nobody had the heart to tell him, or if everyone was simply too swept up in the grandeur of nationalist myth to point out that Moses does not reach the Promised Land. Tragically, he dies alone, “on the other side of the Jordan”—the place where our parshah, Devarim, is set. Our portion contains the first part of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites, about a month before his death. It is not the warm recollections of a satisfied leader, proud of his accomplishments and hopeful about the path his disciples will take. Instead it is, as Rashi writes, a speech of “reproof” for the Israelites’ many misdeeds. “I spoke to you, but you would not listen; you flouted God’s command,” Moses rebukes the people. Because of their disobedience, he tells them: “You wept before God, but God would not heed your cry or give ear to you.”

Early in his address, Moses recalls his frustrations in leading the people: “How can I carry alone the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!” he remembers saying. It’s striking that here Moses describes himself as shouldering the weight alone. The framing especially stands out in contrast with a moment later in the chapter when, using the same Hebrew root for “carry” (“n-s-a”), he recalls how he had tried to convince the Israelites that they would succeed in the struggle against their foes: “You saw how your God carried you, as a person carries his child, all the way that you traveled until you came to this place,” he reminds them. Moses understands the necessity of comforting his flock, but when it comes to his own experience, he admits to feeling utterly abandoned. Indeed, the 18th-century Hasidic text Ketonet Pasim glosses “alone” in Moses’s account as “without God’s presence.”

The first word of Moses’s anguished cry is “eichah,” a more elegiac form of “how,” perhaps better rendered as “alas.” This same word opens, and provides the name for, the Book of Eichah—known in English as Lamentations—which we read on Tisha B’Av to bemoan the destruction of Jerusalem: “How lonely sits the city once great with people.” (Tisha B’Av always falls in the week after we read Parshat Devarim; this year, it begins on Saturday night immediately as Shabbat ends.) According to a rabbinic commentary on Eichah, these are two of three key uses of the word by the Prophets, the third being Isaiah’s rebuke of the people. In this midrash, the word “eichah” reverberates backwards in time, the opening word of Tisha B’Av’s scroll invoking not only the destruction of its time but the generations of despair that preceded it. (Fittingly, there is a tradition in many communities to chant Moses’s exclamation of despair with the mournful melody of the Book of Eichah, rather than the standard cantillation of the Torah.) According to the Mishnah, “eichah” also reverberates forward; Tisha B’Av is the date that marks future calamities, including the destruction of the Second Temple, the capture of Betar during the Bar Kochba revolt, and the Roman plowing-over of Jerusalem.

In short, Tisha B’Av is the day on which we dwell in the tragedy of God’s withdrawal of the divine presence from our world. It’s a day of radical loneliness. A day on which it is fitting to ask: “How can we bear this broken world alone, without the presence of God?” This is a message that the Book of Eichah repeats again and again: We are told, relentlessly, of the bereft loneliness of Jerusalem: “Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her of all her friends. All her allies have betrayed her. They have become her foes.” Even God has “acted like an enemy.” This isn’t a temporary abandonment. One Talmudic rabbi tells us that “since the day the Temple was destroyed the gates of prayer were locked,” and “an iron wall separates the Jewish people from their Parent in heaven.”

We may take comfort in the fact that, according to the rabbis, God, too, cries, distraught, over the destruction of Jerusalem, and we may find hope in the Prophets’ repeated promise that God’s presence will eventually return. But there might be a limit to how much solace we should seek. The Talmud, in the tractate of Chagiga, lists the verses in the Torah that would make different sages cry. Rabbi Ami, we are told, would cry when he reached a particular verse in Eichah—not one of the horrific descriptions of death, devastation, and starvation, with mothers eating their children in desperation, but something that, on its face, is quite tame, even optimistic: “Perhaps there may be hope.” Yet as Rabbi Ami puts it, “All of this, and only ‘perhaps’?” Still, this is what we have: the possibility of “maybe.” We may die on the other side of the river, never to enter the Promised Land. We may be left without God’s presence, in cosmic exile with no end in sight. In the face of such horror, all we can do is cling tightly to “maybe”—charging forward and fighting on even when there is no victory visible on the horizon.

This dvar Torah is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend and comrade Awdah Hathaleen, who died on the other side of the river and who believed fiercely in the promise of “maybe.”

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.