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Aug
16
2024

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Nathan Goldman (managing editor): The Well I Fell Into, the excellent new album from indie rock band WHY?, finds frontman Yoni Wolf at his most plainspoken as he meditates on the ruins of a relationship. The group’s previous work is rife with Wolf’s ambiguous imagery, deadpan aphorisms, and tangles of winding wordplay, reflecting the project’s origins in alternative hip-hop. But while glimmers of this appear throughout The Well I Fell Into, the record is often disarmingly direct. On “Marigold”—a song about the futility of repairing all that’s broken—the narrator undercuts the titular motif as soon as he sets it up: “This is not a parable / this is real, it’s painful.” When the cathartic chorus erupts, it summons a cosmic-seeming sense of isolation through completely naturalistic dialogue, as a bus driver disrupts the speaker’s reverie: “Last stop, come on man, you gotta get off / I gotta get it back to the depot / Last stop / yo, bro, time to get off / what, you ain’t got no people?”

The record repeatedly wrings pathos from such straightforward scenes. On “Later at The Loon,” the couple hovers at the kitchen counter as the narrator nibbles at a skirt steak. “You ain’t eating nothing,” the speaker reports, “seems like you wanna listen / you ask me how’d my therapy go / I say, ‘we mostly talked about you.’” Soon his partner is weeping and he’s failing to: “I really want to cry but can’t / I hate how cold and strident I am.” Wolf once filled his songs with humiliating confessions and hyperbolic self-castigation. But here, the admissions of deficiency and blame are strikingly unadorned. “Please, God / someone tell me what to do,” he begs on “Brand New,” and on “The Letters, Etc.,” he admits, “I acted like a fool . . . I guess it’s my own damn fault.” Behind Wolf’s plaintive pleas and laments, the music soars. The band has refashioned its old sonic palette—pretty but brash, percussive yet ethereal—into something newly gorgeous, alternately soaring and subdued.

But even as the album’s portrait of heartbreak is anchored in the everyday, the personal arc is affixed to one with a much grander scale—the structure of Jewish time. Wolf has noted that the record’s narrative of reckoning and rebirth is bound up with the relationship between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah; indeed, the title of “G-dzilla G’dolah” frames the song’s hope for a new beginning in the context of the shofar’s call, while “Versa Go!” takes the Day of Atonement as a paradigm for the speaker’s entire way of being: “I know I’m no carnival / I’m the drive away / on a Jewish holiday / from a sorrowful, ancient calendar / a 24-hour fast.” Elsewhere, too, allusions to Jewishness quietly elevate mundane moments. In the therapy recap scene on “Later at The Loon,” the narrator isn’t consuming just steak, but a treyf pairing: “swallow with whole milk / I can tell it makes you sick.” And in the opening lines of “Brand New,” while the narrator’s partner “watch[es] Bachelorette in bed,” he “smokes about the exile,” and later confesses that he’s become “a stranger in this strange land.”

The two registers—the sacred and the quotidian—collide most subtly and powerfully on the album’s loveliest song, “Atreyu.” The opening line recasts the verse from Song of Songs traditionally used in Jewish wedding vows, seemingly to evoke a bygone era of romance: “I’m yours, you’re mine.” But it soon becomes clear that the song is something else entirely—a gesture of comfort for the narrator’s dog, an unwitting victim of human separation. “You are my only ride or die / I’ll always be right by your side,” Wolf murmurs, each syllable achingly tender. And when the chorus comes, a simple promise resounds as a mythic image of wandering and arrival: “I’ll take you / I’ll walk you home.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): In the past year, it has been hard to relax and harder to laugh, but Nida Manzoor’s comedy has been a reliable exception. When I experienced her martial-arts-meets-Bollywood-meets-bildungsroman film Polite Society, I was captivated by Manzoor’s wild imagination, the freshness of her writing, and the emotional heft of her extremely silly characters. So I watched the only other thing she has made so far: her debut Channel 4/Peacock show We Are Lady Parts, which follows a very angsty punk band made up of five very British Muslim women.

This premise alone may have been able to carry the show, but Manzoor does not rest on it, instead using all the filmmaking tools at her disposal to guarantee that we laugh ourselves to tears: a voiceover done right; magical realist flights of fancy; and some of the funniest songs you’ll ever hear, including bangers like “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf.” Manzoor’s ragtag assemblage of women is likewise hilariously sketched. Through the eyes of protagonist Amina—a microbiology PhD student who is on the hunt for a good Muslim husband while secretly in love with Don McLean—we meet Saira, the band’s badass leader who worships at the altar of punk and works in a butcher’s shop; Ayesha, the closeted lesbian drummer who drives Ubers for a living; Bisma, who is raising a kid on the proceeds from zines such as “The Killing Period: Apocalypse Vag,” and Momtaz, the band’s agent with a day job selling cheap lingerie to elderly aunties.

But while these irreverent characterizations are very funny, at no point does We Are Lady Parts encourage us to treat the band members flippantly. Quite the opposite: Rarely does one meet women drawn this lovingly and carefully, and I have never seen Muslim women in particular afforded full inner lives in such a natural way, laden with the complexities of identity without suffocating under them. We see Amina contending with the many joyful flavors of haram, be that punk music or the desire to make out with a dreamy crush; Bisma wrestling with what covering up her dreadlocks with a hijab means for her as a Black Muslim woman; Ayesha agonizing over her white girlfriend’s insistence that coming out of the closet is the only healthy way to be queer; and Taz and Saira beefing over how to successfully cloak Lady Parts in a “fun Muslim” aesthetic without selling out. Through these characters’ journeys, Mazdoor is able to take on the big questions: the vexed terrain in which Muslim women’s agency is shaped, the many silences marginalized creators are forced to endure to succeed under capitalism, and the evergreen puzzle of whether winning ‘a seat at the table’ is, ultimately, a blessing or a curse. This show, however, is unequivocally a blessing; it makes you laugh, cry, think, and squirm, sometimes all at once. So don’t walk to watch We Are Lady Parts. Run.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Until I watched Jon Ornoy’s Lost in the Shuffle, I had spent precisely zero minutes of my 72-year life thinking about the deck of cards. Now, thanks to this utterly wonderful new documentary, I am certain to spend hours annoying friends and family with fun facts about this curious object—and the historical revelation that Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar, the star of the film, believes to be hiding in plain sight within it.

Lost in the Shuffle explains the fascinating history of the deck, from its origins in China to its development in the West—with the first mass production occurring in the French city of Rouen—and its many modifications over the centuries. But the film is, first and foremost, a tribute to the magicians who manipulate the cards. It features an international cohort of performers, all of them wonderful raconteurs who regale us with the sources of their lifelong obsession, what magic means to them, and their favorite “plot,” or trick. A magician from England, who says the deck saved his life, ventures that our reactions to magic say everything there is to know about us, and explains that card tricks are all based on the notion of bringing order out of chaos; one from Texas, who is blind, claims he was told by a neuroscientist that he has the most highly developed tactile sense in the world—and after seeing him work the cards, who are we to doubt him? The tricks the cast performs are remarkable, and Farquhar incorporates elements of all of them into the plot that ends the film, when he solves the mystery he believes to be raised by the standard deck: the circumstances of the 15th-century death of King Charles VIII of France.

The standard story is that the monarch died after bonking his head on a doorway. But Farquhar marshals evidence drawn from the faces of the cards to argue that he was actually murdered by his wife, Anne of Brittany. His close readings of the images are pretty stunning. Did you ever notice, for instance, that the Queen of Spades faces in the opposite direction as all the other queens? Or that the King of Hearts has two sets of arms, one of which seems to be stabbing him in the head? Now look at his sleeves—they don’t all have the same pattern. In fact, the stabbing arms (at the top and bottom of the card) have the same cuffs as the Queen of Spades. Is Fardquhar’s theory plausible? Who knows! Regardless, you will thoroughly enjoy hearing him make the case and learning about all these minor details. (And as an aficionado of French history, I can’t help but love a film that quotes and doubts the writings of the 15th-century French chronicler Philippe de Commines.) No film you see this year will surprise and delight you like this one—and after watching it, a deck of cards will never be the same.

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Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Weekly Parshah Commentary

Parshat Va’etchanan

In the opening verses of Parshat Va’etchanan, Moses continues the address to the Israelites that he began last week in Parshat Devarim. He reveals that he had desperately pleaded with God to be allowed into the Land of Israel—to “cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan”—but that God refused his request. He then goes on to impart a number of laws, explaining that they are necessary “so that you may live to enter and occupy the land.” Indeed, more than ten times throughout the parshah, the Israelites are enjoined to keep the commandments “so that you might inherit the land” or “so that it might go well for you in the land.”

At first glance, these verses appear to present the land itself as the main point, the desired object and end. But rabbinic commentators trouble this view by complicating Moses’s seemingly simple longing to enter the land, rejecting the idea that he would wish to do so merely to enjoy its physicality, to lay some visceral claim to it. Instead, the medieval Chizkuni and the 19th-century Malbim suggest that Moses’s desperate plea is premised on an overwhelming desire to perform specific mitzvot that can only be carried out in the Land of Israel. (In a similar vein, the 19th-century rabbi the Netziv argues that Moses wished to enter the land “because of the greatness of Torah, that he might root the power of study in the land.”) According to this paradigm, it is not that Moses feels unfulfilled without any physical claim to the land the Israelites are set to enter; rather, he feels that entering the land is necessary to fulfill the Torah he has relayed, to embody the mitzvot in their entirety. Following that understanding, some commentators and midrashim envision God’s response of “rav lach,” often translated as an angry “Enough!,” as a tender reassurance: “You have done enough. You have performed enough miracles, observed enough mitzvot; you are not dying with any obligation unfulfilled.”

How, then, do we make sense of Moses’s incessant reminders to keep the commandments so as to inherit and live long in the land, which seem to suggest that the mitzvot are merely a means to an end, with ownership of the land as the ultimate goal? The Malbim, in a later comment, strenuously pushes back on this interpretation. He notes that the commandments relayed in this parshah, to which these mentions of inheritance are linked, are not ones that can only be performed in the Land of Israel. According to the Malbim, they sit alongside the invocations of the land because “even though the mitzvot are not dependent upon land, the land is dependent upon mitzvot.” For the Malbim, “the Land of Israel was only given to [the Israelites] in order that they might keep the Torah.” In other words, Torah and mitzvot are a necessary precondition for inheriting the land, not a means subordinate to the greater end of ownership.

In our parshah, as well as in countless other places in the Torah, God reminds the Israelites that if they violate the commandments, they will be expelled from the land—that their presence is not an eternal unvarying guarantee, but conditional on ethical behavior. In our parshah, we also see that warning’s inversion: If you fail to keep the mitzvot, there is no point in inheriting the land at all. It is not simply that egregious violations of religious and ethical mandates pollute the land and prompt expulsion, as we marked just this past week on Tisha B’Av; rather, the rabbis note that there is no value to land for land’s sake, no sanctity in rooting in a place for the sake of rootedness. If the goal is to root ourselves and not, as in the Netziv’s framing, to root Torah, this pursuit is utterly profane.

Thus, Moses’s plea—which becomes a paradigm for prayer despite remaining unfulfilled—can also function as a paradigm for both relationship to the Land of Israel and absence from it. We can model a relationship to the land based on sanctity, viewing it as a place to worship rather than a thing to be worshiped. And we can also embrace the tender possibility of “rav lach”; wherever you are, the sanctity you are pursuing, the community you are building, can be enough.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.