Dec

20

2024

The Jewish Currents staff will be off the next two weeks to recharge, so there we won’t be publishing content or the Shabbat Reading List (though you can still look out for the weekly parshah commentary). See you in 2025!

Diana Varenik (director of circulation): In 2003, a dozen Palestinian teenagers erected a 16-foot-tall horse at the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. The piece was titled “Al Hisan,” or “the horse,” and for 20 years it was both commemorative—its body made from the rubble of buildings and vehicles destroyed by Israeli forces—and celebratory, a monument to enduring Palestinian resistance after the Second Intifada. On October 29, 2023, an Israeli raid targeted and destroyed Al Hisan.

I learned this and much else at The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus, which the political puppet troupe Bread and Puppet recently performed at the Theater for the New City. The circus opens with the demise of a clown puppet bearing a sign that reads “empire” (and, with its demise, also the downfall of the contemporary beasts of Amazon, Nestle, Monsanto, and other corporate monsters). Bread and Puppet’s characteristic life-size papier-mâché figures, accompanied by an extremely zealous live brass band, then perform a non-linear series of vignettes: an homage to the Haitian Revolution, a tribute to healthcare workers, a march of screaming trees set to a stirring violin requiem, and a troupe of dancing fuschia piglets declaring forcefully that “the silly is a necessary ingredient of the serious.”

I admit that I entered the performance skeptical of Bread and Puppet, whose art and creative direction appear not to have changed significantly since the troupe’s early days in the anti-war era of the ‘60s. I visited the Bread and Puppet museum in Vermont earlier this year and found the artwork eerie and impenetrable. Absent the political context explored on stage, the puppets seemed to be empty signifiers alienated from the present.

But Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus was not out of touch. The show itself was startlingly relevant and forthright—whatever I had found enigmatic about the lifeless puppets in the museum was totally transformed in production. One macabre routine featured tigers ripping out and eating the entrails of billionaires, gruesomely returning some meaning to the oft-repeated slogan “eat the rich.” Some moments were extremely somber, including several tributes to Gazans murdered by Israeli forces over the last 14 months. One particularly rattling performance featured the story of Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old disabled Palestinian man who was mauled by an Israeli military dog and left to die after his family was forcibly removed from their home.

For me, the most memorable moment of the performance was a scene in which a performer narrated the story of the Jenin horse while the rest of the troupe brought out a 20-foot-long puppet of a person lying horizontally. Slowly, the puppeteers pulled pieces of the puppet’s body apart and rearranged them to produce two large horses. As the narrator described the destruction of Palestinian sites of culture and memory, the other performers re-shuffled the horse’s pieces. When the performers stepped aside so the audience could see the puppet, it had taken human shape once again—this time standing upright, and waving a Palestinian flag high above the audience.

Like Al Hisan, the metamorphosed puppet was a composite of objects that retained the memory of its prior selves, even as these components reformed again and again. And if such evolution is possible, the puppet suggests, then attempts at cultural destruction or erasure may ultimately be futile. I thought of the pieces that had once constituted Al Hisan—scraps from a Red Crescent ambulance which had carried the wounded, the building fragments which sheltered families, the pieces of cars which transported residents of Jenin to work and to school—and I thought of the rubble that may one day be given a voice in Gaza, in Jenin, and beyond.

Aside from the impressive artistry and emotional range of the performance, I think the reason I liked the show so much was to spite the men sitting behind me who grumbled throughout that they didn’t feel like being depressed (“Isn’t this supposed to be a circus?”) To them, I’d cite the fuschia piglets, who rightfully pointed out that the silly and the serious—indeed, even the tragic—cannot exist without each other. Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus is no longer playing, but Bread and Puppet Theater isn’t going anywhere. So don’t miss out next time these puppets take the stage near you!

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The recently opened Franz Kafka exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, marking 100 years since the death of the great author, provided me with more chills of excitement than almost any show I can remember seeing. This assemblage of manuscripts, diary pages, postcards, and letters allows the visitor to gaze upon the originals of some of the most important works ever written. Among works of art, only the end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg moves me to tears—and yet, as I approached the display case containing the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis, and there, written clearly in Kafka’s hand, its famous opening words—Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt—I had tears in my eyes.

The page bearing this immortal line shows just how smoothly the writing of this novella went. The beginning of the story is written in the most relaxed and legible of hands, and the page contains only seven minor crossings-out; one sees how naturally this tale of a man turned into an insect came to Kafka—how immediate its experience was to him. Elsewhere, we see that this easy flow of prose was not uncommon for the writer, even though he often claimed that his works had to be wrenched from him. The final page of The Castle, for instance, moves along smoothly, with few corrections. But then it ends abruptly, mid-sentence: She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it is hard to understand her, but what she said— We’ll never know what the woman said, and the words hanging on the page make Kafka’s defeat all the more clear. Revelations such as these give this exhibition a greater value than the benefit inherent in being just inches from these basic texts of modern literature, of modern life.

The exhibition also works at undermining the image of Kafka as a lone genius, weighed down by the heavy responsibility of his talent. Loving postcards to his sister Ottla figure prominently, and they show that Kafka was not devoid of a sense of humor. One such missive is formally addressed to “sehr geehrte fräulein”—dearest miss—and continues in the same mock highfalutin tone. The photos of Kafka interspersed through the show, many of them taken in sanatoria where he stayed to cure his tuberculosis, show him simply having fun with friends. The curators make the case that some of the iconography of the tortured soul is a result of trickery: A famous photo of Kafka sitting alone, which appears on the cover of several books about him in English and French, is displayed here in its original form; it turns out that the author is not alone here at all, but sitting alongside a dog and a beautiful young woman, a waitress at a tavern he frequented.

For those interested in the question of Kafka’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, there is a whole section dedicated to this topic, including his fascination with Hebrew, which was linked to his interest in Zionism. The show features a letter he wrote in the language to his Hebrew teacher and a notebook with select words written out in German and in Hebrew. His Hebrew was obviously utilitarian rather than religious—“enema” and “fever” are among the words he cared to translate.

The next significant anniversary on the Kafka calendar—the bicentennial of his birth—is 59 years away, so those who care about literature have a long wait ahead of them before seeing an exhibition of this grandeur. It’s up until April.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): My idea of a break from my job—which entails consuming copious amounts of contemporary news about US and Middle East politics—is to read American history. It’s not exactly unrelated to my job, but it’s different enough. I started this practice in the hopes of better understanding the country I live in after being thoroughly destabilized by Donald Trump’s first win in 2016. Since then, I’ve read a lot about the American right, including, most recently, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

Like his earlier book Nixonland—which I previously raved about for the Shabbat Reading List—this book is a dizzying compendium of political events and pop culture happenings that Perlstein unearths to guide the reader from 1973 through 1976, when Richard Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford took his place. Reagan is a central character in the book, although I often found myself wondering why Reagan was mentioned in the subtitle when he would not become president until 1980. In fact, much of the book is devoted to Reagan’s formidable, but ultimately losing, quest to defeat the establishment-minded Ford in the 1976 Republican presidential primary. But in losing—notably, less badly than one might have expected in a primary against an incumbent president—the former California governor activated a right-wing network of business leaders, evangelicals, and Cold War hawks who jolted the Republican establishment and would make up the core of the Reagan coalition when he eventually won in 1980.

In addition to its main plot—the rise of Reagan as a political force—the book has a series of subplots that kept me engaged: a mini-biography of the shapeshifting Reagan, an exploration of Congress’s transformation in the wake of voter backlash to Watergate, the roots of the myth that hundreds of American soldiers were left captive and abandoned by the Johnson administration in Vietnam, and much more. The book was a perfect way to fill in my previously lackluster historical knowledge of this era. The 1960s and the Reagan years have clear ideological origins and lasting impacts, but the early- to mid-1970s have long been a black box to me. The Invisible Bridge clarified those interregnum years, making plain how a mix of inflation, Middle East wars, radical left-wing movements, and changing gender norms set the stage for a conservative counter-revolution that would ultimately coalesce in a president winning on the slogan “let’s make America great again.”

This week’s parshah, Vayeshev, contains some of the Torah’s most morally fraught and emotionally wrenching narratives: Joseph’s brothers, in response to the favoritism bestowed upon him by their father Jacob and the arrogance with which Joseph treats them, sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt, where he is falsely accused of sexual assault and incarcerated in Pharoah’s prison. But the parshah’s first verse, from which its name is taken, gives no indication of the tumult to come, offering only a small piece of geographic exposition: “Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan.” The medieval commentator Rashi, noting the disjunction between the ease conveyed by this opening sentence and the chaos in store for Jacob’s family, reads this statement not as a neutral description, but rather as aspirational. The phrase “Jacob was settled,” Rashi suggests, actually signifies Jacob’s wish to be at ease, to live without upheaval or anxiety. As contemporary commentator Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg paraphrases Rashi, “Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquillity after all his troubles.”

It is easy to empathize with this desire: Who doesn’t want to find freedom from turmoil? But rather than validating Jacob’s yearning, Rashi tells us that God rebukes him for it, citing a classical midrash to insist that virtuous people have no right to expect ease in this world. The midrash expresses this rebuke in stark terms: “When the righteous seek to live in tranquility, Satan comes and testifies against them.” Righteousness, in other words, precludes attempts to escape society’s turbulence, and instead demands an engagement with the world in all its chaos and misery. In a sermon delivered in 1939 in the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) cited Rashi’s interpretation of this verse to speak to the obligation of moral conduct that is incumbent upon us even in the face of grave adversity. Righteous people, he explains, may want to choose comfort and complacency, “accustoming themselves to the state of exile we are in, and to its suffering.” God, however, insists that “the righteous must do more than care for their own survival. They must work to increase compassion.” A moral obligation to face the pain of others, and to work toward easing it, is more important than fulfilling a desire to live in tranquility.

Avoiding anxiety in the midst of a broken world can take many forms, the most obvious of which may be the cultivation of complacent ignorance toward the problems others face. But the first Izhbitzer Rebbe—Mordechai Leiner, a 19th-century mystical commentator—also sees this passage as a corrective for those maintaining an inverse form of complacency: anyone who wants to respond to the world, but insists on doing so only from a place of fanatical purity and self-certainty. The verse “Jacob wanted to dwell in peace,” the Izhbitzer Rebbe asserts, refers to “the particular kind of peace that occurs when a person acts in a way removed from all doubt.” This teaching urges us to guard against the uncritical conviction that is one of the common, and dangerous, pitfalls of religious belief, and which also plagues forms of secular faith. The Izhbitzer Rebbe explains that it is impossible to jettison doubt entirely or to act in a way that one can be certain is absolutely morally upright. Nevertheless, he insists that, even though we can never have total confidence in the righteousness of our behavior, “God desires human actions, and in this world one must act with love, which means to act in ways that are not in the highest state of purity.”

When read through these commentaries, the seemingly mundane verse with which our parshah opens becomes a guide to engaging with a suffering world. We can neither ignore the misery around us in an attempt to protect our own peace, nor can we rush to respond to that misery while eschewing any doubts about the absolute rightness of our actions. Instead, these interpretations demand that we challenge ourselves to behave with compassion even at the expense of our own tranquility, while embracing the anxiety that inevitably arises from attempting to act morally in a world fraught with ambivalence. In the midst of today’s narcissistic cultural and political life, which often tries to force us into either complicit complacency or self-certain righteousness, these commentaries demand something genuinely radical: that we deprioritize our own psychological comfort as we strive to alleviate the pain around us.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.