Mar

14

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For those of us who identify as “readers,” it can be difficult to disentangle who we are from what we’ve read. I have often in my life—though I admit, mostly when I was much younger—had the sensation that a book was a direct message, sent to me by some higher power (even when that was, well, a teacher). Like a most accurate tarot reading, it said this is what you need to know right now, or even, this is who you need to be, in characters and symbols at once clear and obscure.

In Bibliophobia, the critic Sarah Chihaya attempts to take stock of her reading life, and to understand its intertwinement with her severe depression. In place of, say, a family tree, or a character list, the book’s very first pages are a list of the texts she will discuss in order of appearance, suggesting both love as well as a formidable loneliness. “Since I was a child,” she writes, “I have secretly believed that if I read enough, one day the right book would come along and save me.” Of course, if books have the power to save, they can also destroy—either directly, by shattering some defense or mendacity (The Bluest Eye does this for an adolescent Chihaya trying to understand her own experience of race as a Japanese American in lilywhite Ohio), or simply by withholding the anticipated salvation. “For me,” Chihaya writes early in the book, “being a depressed person and being a reader-writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning.” The book braids together close, impressionistic reads of various meaningful texts with passages tracing Chihaya’s suicidal thought habits from her youth through adulthood. She consistently reads her own life as just another text, and yet the triumph of the book is that in its writing, you begin to feel her finally inhabiting this life as fully as the stories of others, where she previously preferred to dwell.

For me, one of the joys of the book was actually the personal inventory it inspired me to perform. How have I been changed by literature? Which pieces specifically? What did they do? I can rattle off the texts that destroyed me and put me back together—Angels in America, Gilead, Giovanni’s Room, Villette—but unlike Chihaya, an inveterate re-reader adept at weaving literature into her own biography, I find it difficult to answer these questions with as much particularity. It was always about language, that much I know, and the sense that despite all the fumbling to communicate in real life—the fundamentally doomed linkage between signifier and signified—these books were a place where language had, impossibly, won. Here I was, somewhere else, seeing something in my own mind’s eye, thinking a thought I had always known but never articulated. I suppose I’m describing an experience of hope, though I’ve never thought of it in those terms before. In the weeks since I’ve read Bibliophobia, I’ve been trying to isolate different texts in my mind, to imagine myself without them. It is never so straightforward as a major life lesson missed, merely a small, subtle glitch in my form: an imperceptible blurring in part of my outline, a dull discoloration on a small patch of skin. But without all those books, it would be obliterating.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the mysterious opening of Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, a group of youngish people are gathered in a room as an old computer is wheeled in. The device contains ten-year-old footage from a movie that was never completed, which we soon get to see: A handsome young man is on the balcony of an apartment building with another man in drag; they go to a crowded market and soon wind up in bed together. One of the men in the audience makes a call and asks the person on the other end to come see him. The recipient, it turns out, is one of the actors in the unfinished film, who has aged well, and the man summoning him is the director of the material, who explains that he wants to complete the project, jumping over the decade between shoots. (During this interval, he explains, the footloose and fancy-free young man we saw has become a wildly successful real estate magnate.) They have limited time to complete the film, due to the actor’s prior engagements—and the imminent birth of his child. So they agree to rush the process, squeezing it all into the 15-day Lunar New Year of 2020. But with only a few days to go, word comes that a dangerous epidemic has broken out in Wuhan.

Watching An Unfinished Film, which is shot in a compelling documentary style, you can’t help but feel that you’re there in the midst of the original Covid outbreak. The handheld camera follows the cast and crew as they are struck by panic and descend into chaos. The director does his best to hold everything together, but it’s futile; they try and fail to flee to their homes as security forces blockade them into the hotel in which they’re shooting the film, in accordance with China’s strict quarantine procedures. The lead actor, desperate to get home to his wife and infant, scuffles with the police to no avail. And so the world is reduced to a hotel room.

Ye, one of China’s most respected directors, expertly blends the footage from the supposedly old film fragment (which is actually a current work-in-progress of his own) into the many layers of the present, mixing fiction with actual scenes of China under lockdown. He elegantly deploys split-screen to capture the uncanny but all-too-familiar multiplication of images in video calls, in which each speaker appears twice: on the screen of the film, and on the miniature screen-within-the-screen. But it is the claustrophobia and fear of the terrible first Covid months that pack the main punch. An Unfinished Film is a masterful “making of” film of a film never made—but it is also a documentary of a real-life disaster.

Maia Ipp (contributing editor): What if there was an MFA program for stand-up comedy? This is the premise of Camille Bordas’s wonderful new novel The Material, which dives into a world where aspiring young comedians workshop each other’s routines and their mid-career faculty begrudgingly advise them while trying to get their own careers and personal lives back on track. I was delighted by how Bordas made it feel effortless to take on Big Ideas and serious emotional content alongside so much genuine, sometimes painful humor. Indeed, the question of cruelty in comedy comes up throughout the book in interesting ways, and the book’s commitment to narrative is matched by its sharp intelligence. And perhaps most importantly for a book about comedians, it’s very, very funny. I loved it. (And I’ll avoid spoilers, but one of the student’s bits, about an interactive Holocaust survivor hologram, might be of special interest to the JC audience.)

In late November 2023, I stared at photos of Israeli soldiers preparing for Chanukah by erecting a 15-foot tall menorah in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Horrified but unsure how to respond, I texted myself the link. I began sending myself every instance I saw of Jewish religious ritual in Gaza. Soon I was watching as soldiers read the megillah for Purim—and in one case, set off explosives to fulfill the custom of drowning out Haman’s name. As Passover approached, I read about seders celebrated across the Strip and about a new halachic work published to guide deployed soldiers in their observance of the holiday. On Lag BaOmer, when it is customary to light bonfires, I watched as soldiers sang a traditional holiday song while burning down Palestinian homes.

As the year went on, the awful examples continued to accumulate. On Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the exile and homelessness that followed, I watched soldiers chant Eicha as a thousand Israelis gathered at Gaza’s border to read the traditional scroll as part of a call for renewed Israeli settlement in Gaza, apparently oblivious to the irony. In the lead-up to the High Holidays, I watched soldiers blow the shofar and do kapparot, a pre-Yom Kippur atonement ritual, in Rafah (in another case, soldiers altered the ritual’s words while directing explosives toward Lebanon). Not long after, I watched soldiers dancing joyfully at the end of Yom Kippur in Gaza and then started seeing pictures of sukkahs built in Gaza, as well as in Lebanon. Soon enough, it was Chanukah again, and I watched as soldiers burned Palestinian homes while singing about lighting candles—which they lit in the Netzarim Corridor, Rafah, Jabalya, Beit Hanoun, Zeitoun, and elsewhere across Gaza, as well in Lebanon and Syria. Throughout this all, I saw documentation of Israeli soldiers setting up makeshift synagogues in Gaza and Lebanon and performing countless other Jewish rituals. And I watched, too, as soldiers recited the Shema before blowing up a mosque and studied Torah amidst Gaza’s rubble.

Eventually, I converted my dossier of religious perversions from an endless text thread to a Google doc—an ongoing record that now spans many pages, single-spaced. Why have I kept this obsessive catalog? I have told myself that it’s for journalistic reasons, that there will one day be something to say about how religion has been drafted into the service of brutality. But I know that it’s also personal: that I’m morbidly captivated—and tormented—by seeing the rituals that are most dear to me being performed in the context of such violent abuse. It feels like a necessary, if insufficient, act of witnessing, to anchor myself in the terrible specificity of the misuse of our tradition.

I thought of my document when I revisited Moses’s response to witnessing the Israelites’ idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf in this week’s parshah, Ki Tissa. As I read about Moses angrily smashing the Ten Commandments, which he had just received from God on Mount Sinai, I immediately sympathized with his irate outburst—with the rage, despair, and grief our fellow Jews can inspire in us. My appreciation of Moses’s act has an ancient precedent: While the rabbis debated why Moses broke the sacred tablets entrusted to him, and some criticized or lamented his behavior, others lauded his conduct. One sage, Reish Lakish, draws on the sonic similarity between the word “that” (asher) in the phrase “that you broke” and the first word of an idiom meaning “congratulations” or “way to go” (yasher koach) to imagine God extolling Moses. Later rabbis extended this appreciation for brokenness beyond Moses himself. The 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas, drawing on the Zohar’s idea that a person’s heart parallels the Ark, as well as the Talmudic assertion that the shattered first tablets were kept inside the Ark along with the unbroken second tablets, argues that “to represent the shards of the tablets, one’s heart must also be broken and downtrodden, in order to be prepared for receiving the divine presence, as God’s presence resides only in broken vessels.”

I find some solace in this rabbinic esteem for brokenness. If the divine presence dwells in broken hearts, then God stands not with the soldiers who proudly pray amidst the ruin they have wrought but rather with those of us who are distraught watching this happen. And if Moses’s transgression born of anger can become part of our tradition, our ire at those corrupting that same tradition can likewise be carried within it. But how might we carry this brokenness responsibly? It is helpful to consider how the Bible situates Moses’s breaking of the tablets within a wider context of destruction, reflection, sorrow, and repair: The smashing, according to Rashi, occurred on the 17th of Tammuz—a date that later became one of repeated calamity for the Jewish people—and God delivers the second set of tablets on the 10th of Tishrei, the date of Yom Kippur.

Surprisingly, some Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions liken that solemn holiday to the merry one we celebrate today: Purim. (Some even go so far as to understand Yom Kippur as a lesser version of Purim.) This suggests that what we usually conceive of as a festival of light-hearted revelry holds the potential for the serious work of teshuva. In this light, Purim might offer a lesson about the meaning of my record of Jewish ritual in Gaza—a record which I sadly added to today. The Book of Esther, more than any other book in the Hebrew Bible, which largely depicts a primarily oral society, is replete with references to writing, textuality, and documentation. And notably, every moment of writing in the megillah spurs significant upheavals—most importantly, King Achashverosh’s request to be read the “book of remembrances” on a sleepless night, prompting him to remember Mordechai’s deeds that had led to the king’s own salvation, which ultimately saves the Jewish people. Any contemporary “book of remembrances” recounting Jewish deeds would provide a much grimmer account; today we are not saviors but perpetrators. But perhaps documentation is the necessary first step toward a Purim-esque reversal. Indeed, after smashing the first tablets but before receiving the second tablets in our parshah, Moses asks God to “erase me from the record which You have written”—that is, to remove Moses himself from the Torah’s accounts, if God refuses to forgive the Israelites for the sin of the Golden Calf. Repentance, it seems, requires remaining within the record, however sullied it may be.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.