Shabbat Reading List
Sign up for our email newsletter, featuring exclusive original content

Feb
7
2025

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): Palestinian pianist Faraj Suleiman’s new album, Maryam, is quick to lure its listeners into a world of domestic bliss. The opening track, “Packed Love,” sung in a duet with Dima Zahran, paints a picture of two lovers at home: “the stillness overflowing on the carpet” and “the scent of the cooking on the walls.” But this exaggerated satisfaction seems destined to be undercut, and we soon find that the relationship at the center of the album, and indeed the whole world around it, is more ephemeral than any of his previous work. Already by the second track, “A Handful of Air,” a list of a lover’s requests—“a handful of air,” “a smile in a glass,” and “a box for my laughter”—teeter somewhere between high romance and empty promises. Unlike the firm grounding in Suleiman’s other albums, and in particular, the contrasting pulls of Haifa and Berlin as home and diaspora, Maryam is dislocated, and follows this dream-like relationship from the vantage point of a break-up.

The lyrics of this brief album—it clocks in at just over half an hour—are written by Amer Hlehel, an acclaimed Palestinian actor whose role in the black comedy Mediterranean Fever (2022) deserves its own recommendation. In contrast to the political and sardonic lyrics of Majd Kayyal, who collaborated with Suleiman for his albums Better Than Berlin (2020) and Upright Biano (2023), Hlehel is a dramatist: The album has characters, in this case, two lovers, and something resembling a narrative arc, and physical objects—such as a recurring hair clip and a picture of the couple—feel like anchoring props in an otherwise unmoored world.

In its exploration of lost love, Maryam charts a range of emotions from the most mundane to the most elevated. “Bye Bye Love” begins with the male protagonist sitting down at 2 am to watch back-to-back films before insisting that he really is okay. The song thrillingly blends video-game beeping with an expansive brass band that captures the contrasting coexistence of regression into digital rabbit holes (he also imagines Super Mario jumping ahead of him) alongside the psychological high-drama of a break-up. Meanwhile, the most tender song of the album, “Remnants of Soul,” is a stripped-back piano ballad in the tradition of Suleiman’s very best songs. Addressing the earlier requests from his lover, the bewitching simplicity of delivering a hair clip feels like a desperate lunge for something concrete as the rest of the world recedes.

The album’s ambition, though, is larger than break-up music: It is about the shattering of reality—and tentative attempts to piece it back together—which arises from the end of love, and from the end of the world as we know it. Maryam ends with the song “Counting Two Lives,” which repeats the full lyrics of the opening track, only now with Suleiman singing alone. The repetition signals the passage of time, and his solo drawl sounds defeated—but it is not only the delivery that has changed. He adds a verse that the two have grown old and gray, that their love has been “constant like a port,” and then in another verse, he declares that his lover has left and that “everything sweet” from the opening song has turned bitter. Yet we also become aware that, all along, both the first and last song of the album have been framed through the hypothetical; memories, projections, and reality all blur into one another. At its conclusion, the song again returns to the same peaceful domestic images, repeated this time instead as a prayer of hope, the words themselves something to hold on to.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): The work of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas tends to elicit incendiary reactions from his ideological opponents. One of the most common Democratic responses to his conservative voting record, which has helped to weaken voting rights and abortion access, is that he is an “Uncle Tom”—a traitor to Black Americans. The epithet mirrors the name-calling that often targets anti-Zionist Jews who are told they too are traitors to the Jewish community. These insults are often used to shut down debate and obscure the fact that there is no monolithic “community” to appeal to. Just as anti-Zionist Jews often make a case rooted in what they see as Jewish interests for why Israeli policy should be countered, conservative Black thinkers like Clarence Thomas make a Black case for why liberal policies should be countered. This is not to say that Thomas’s political project should not be rebutted, but rather that it be opposed on its merits instead of through identity-based attacks.

Thomas’s Blackness is at the heart of his court opinions—an argument expertly laid out by Corey Robin in his 2019 book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. A brisk, informative intellectual biography-cum-legal analysis, Robin’s book traces how Thomas’s early Black nationalism shows up in his conservative court opinions, and how his racial pessimism structures his politics. Thomas’s life was shaped by his upbringing in the Jim Crow South, and in response to the harshness of American apartheid, he turned to the Black nationalism of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. Thomas eventually jettisoned the leftist elements of his former politics, but he never left Black nationalism behind. Indeed, race and racism show up in Thomas’s opinions even in cases that do not, at first glance, seem to be about race at all. Thomas’s vote in the infamous Citizens United case to strike down limits on corporate spending in elections was, at least in part, a reaction to South Carolina legislator Benjamin Tillman, a white supremacist legislator who wanted to regulate corporate spending because he was worried that pro-civil rights companies would spend money to oppose racism in US politics. And Thomas’s anti-gun control opinions are rooted in a worldview that sees Black men as needing armed protection from white supremacy.

Thomas’s conservative Black nationalism may not represent the majority Black American opinion, but Robin’s provocative closing argument posits that Thomas’s worldview is “distinctively American and of the moment” and has parallels in liberal and left-wing understandings of contemporary society. Parts of the left, Robin argues, share Thomas’s vision of “the permanence and autonomy of race, of the inability of politics to overcome social disrepair, [and] of the ineffectiveness of state action.” It’s a disquieting position, in part because Thomas’s solution is to take this state of affairs and preserve it, rather than challenge it. Robin exhorts his readers to grapple with the resonances between the left’s understanding of race and Thomas’s vision, and move beyond this conception by adopting different premises that can help us change this state of affairs, rather than reify it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Given his genius, it’s almost impossible to put together a bad exhibition of the photographs of Weegee (1899–1968). But Weegee: Society of the Spectacle—the new one running at the International Center for Photography until May 5th—is superior to all of the many shows of his work I’ve seen over the decades. Loosely organized around the philosopher Guy Debord’s classic Situationist text of the same name, the exhibition calls our attention to the ways the images on display consider the role of the spectator—and the spectacle of daily life in a gritty, rundown New York. The 81 works in the show, a small fraction of Weegee’s ample oeuvre, pack a mighty punch even for those already familiar with them.

Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, was a caricature of a hard-boiled news photographer; he looked permanently pissed-off, a cigar stuck in his scowl. He was always ready to capture the latest crime or tragedy, often while the victim was still warm. Weegee managed to get the jump on his peers because when he wasn’t driving the streets, his trunk full of cameras, he’d be waiting in his apartment behind the police headquarters on Centre Street, whose activities he monitored on a police radio. Murder was his bread and butter, and this show features many of his most striking images of killings—many of them mob rub-outs, each one a film noir in still form. But he also had a keen eye for the living. The show includes perhaps his most famous photo, in which a crowd of a million people pose for his camera on the beach and boardwalk at Coney Island on a hot July day in 1940. Social commentary is present as well: In one picture, four children sleep in the same bed in a Little Italy apartment; in another, a homeless man poses with two wealthy women at the Metropolitan Opera ball, an image Weegee faked by bringing the former into the frame. (All’s fair in art and social criticism.)

As the exhibition’s title suggests, Weegee had a particular fondness for photographing onlookers. The best such shot, Balcony Seats at a Murder, shows a man dead in the entryway to an Italian café as cops stand around, seeming to enjoy the scene of which they are a part, while the residents of the building where the killing took place, as well as the neighboring tenements, hang from their windows to get a better view. Others portray people gawking at the Empire State Building after it was struck by a plane and Williamsburg children looking—and some laughing—at a dead body in front of their elementary school; in both cases, the object of interest is left outside the frame. The accumulation of these images emphasizes a grim reality: Everything and anything, particularly the gruesome, is a show.

It almost goes without saying that Weegee is commenting on us, his viewers—or rather on the newspaper readers whose daily paper originally ran his scenes of death and mayhem. What can be said about people who can casually glance at a photo in their morning paper of a man thrown from a car after an auto accident, his hands still gripping the steering wheel? But of course, Weegee, the voyeur at the source of it all, is no better than the rest of us.

Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Beshalach

Toward the end of this week’s parshah, Beshalach, the Israelites, newly liberated from Egypt and just starting their journey in the desert, become agitated. Complaining of hunger, they announce to Moses and Aaron that they regret leaving Egypt: “If only we had died by the hand of God in Egypt,” they lament, “when we sat by the meat pots, when we ate our fill of bread.” In response, God announces, “I shall rain down for you bread from heaven.” Notably, the collection of this celestial sustenance is governed by several rules: that it not be gathered on Shabbat, that one may gather only a single day’s worth at a time (except on Friday, when a double portion is provided in preparation for Shabbat), and that it be eaten in the morning (heavenly quail was provided for the evening meal). Commenting on this last stipulation, the Talmud quips, “Initially, the Israelites were like chickens pecking at the garbage”—they would eat any time they came upon available food—“until Moses came and set a specific time to eat.” The 16th-century commentator Sforno interprets this episode as initiating a transition from the norms governing the Israelites’ behavior in Egypt to a more ideal, yet in some ways more restrictive, set of norms dictated by the Torah’s commandments. In Egypt they were enslaved laborers, yet they ate freely. Now they are emancipated from slave labor, yet their consumption is subject to constraint.

According to the 15th-century commentator Abarbanel, liberation was bound up with regulation to prevent the Israelites from falling prey to commodification and consumerism. Perhaps counterintuitively, only by following these rules could true freedom be attained: “An excess of material things is a constraint and great burden on attaining completeness for the soul,” he explained; therefore, God “prepared their provisions such that they would lack nothing . . . and also wouldn’t have surplus to hoard and turn into commodities, as do those who warehouse grain, oil, and wine in order to become wealthy.” Indeed, the Torah tells us, any stockpiled manna became wormy and rotten. Abarbanel argues that such limitations were designed to quell the Isrealites’ anxiety and help them place their faith in God: “Leaving manna over for the next day,” he writes, “displays a lack of faith that God will provide on the following day.” This cultivation of faith through economic regulation is accompanied by what we might describe as a proto-socialist miracle: Irrespective of how much manna a person gathered, it was always distributed equitably—“the one who gathered much had no extra, and the one who gathered little lacked nothing.”

Building on the idea that faith in God’s provision can serve as a bulwark against commodification and excess, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, argued that these rules prepared the Israelites for their future agricultural life in Canaan. Amid the natural cycle of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, their prior experience with the miraculous “bread from heaven” would remind them that, now too, their success would not be determined by simply accumulating as much wealth as possible. Their earlier schooling in the freedom provided by a faith-based approach to consumption would serve as an enduring check against excessive production and acquisition.

This principle, according to the Lubavitcher rebbe, can also explain why it is in the context of stipulating how the manna is to be collected that the Torah first introduces the laws of Shabbat. Indeed, before the Sabbath is mentioned as one of the Ten Commandments—which are given in next week’s parshah—it is presented in relation to the need for sustenance. “See,” says Moses, “God has given you Shabbat. Therefore, on the sixth day He gives you two days’ worth of bread,” so that on the seventh day, “each person shall remain in their place.” These words, originally referring to the heavenly manna, followed the Jewish people long after they left the desert. As Avi Garelick wrote in a piece for the Rest issue of Jewish Currents, Jewish immigrants to the US in the late 19th century encountered an environment “singularly inhospitable” to Shabbat observance. “Amidst the fast pace of modern industry,” Garelick explained, “taking time to observe Shabbos or learn Torah was a sign of indolence, clogging the engine of production with the residues of culture and religion.” For the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Torah introduces Shabbat in the context of the manna because, to this day, Shabbat provides the same sort of liberating restrictions. Rupturing the cycles of economic anxiety that turn breadwinning labor into an insatiable quest for wealth aggregation, such constraints free us to turn upward, inward, toward one another—and toward the emancipatory horizon of a future in which no body or soul goes hungry.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.