Linda Kinstler (contributing writer): Lately, I have spent a lot of my time reading about forgetting, trying to understand how forgetfulness has been commanded and recorded, about when it is a balm and when it worsens the wound. On the recommendation of Daniel Boyarin, I recently delighted in Jenna Kemp’s Forgetting to Remember, a scholarly exploration of the transmission of cultural memory in the Hebrew Bible, and am looking forward to reading Anette Yoshiko Reed’s forthcoming book on forgetting in ancient Judaism.
But it is to poetry that I’ve found myself returning time and again. In Yehuda Amichai’s 2006 collection Open Closed Open, he describes the sense of stillness that comes after testimonies are taken and memories conveyed: “Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers,” he writes in the titular poem. In another, “Who Will Remember the Rememberers?”, he writes, “the best way to preserve memory is to conserve it inside forgetting / So not even a single act of remembering will seep in / And disturb memory’s eternal rest.” It is a beautiful and concise description of the paradox and problems of memory—to preserve memory has, for too long, meant forgetting what memory is for, what it is supposed to teach us and why we must listen.
I’ve been reading it alongside Mahmoud Darwish’s prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness, an account of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Darwish describes how, during the siege of Beirut, the world was collapsing around him and all he desired in that moment was the smell of coffee—to brew a fresh cup was to refuse to be further displaced, to stay in his home, to defend his existence. “Conquerors can do anything. They can aim sea, sky, and earth at me, but they cannot root the aroma of coffee out of me,” he writes. “I will be sated with the aroma of coffee, that I may at least distinguish myself from a sheep and live one more day, or die, with the aroma of coffee all around me.” He walks out into the street to look for a newspaper, refusing to hide from the bombers overhead. “Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions?” he asks. “The one looking for paper in the midst of this hell is running from a solitary to a collective death.” It’s the kind of poem that at once documents and memorializes—as the Israeli bombing campaign resumes, Darwish describes taking one last glance at his study and wondering, “is this the longest day in history?” We could ask the same question today.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): When I was a freshman in college, my friends and I queued in line in Santa Cruz’s sleepy downtown—abutted by redwood trees, next to the ocean—with big “V”s drawn on our cheeks in red lipstick. We were waiting to see a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show acted out by a shadow cast in front of the screen. (It was our first time: “V” is for “virgin.”) We were thrilled and enamored by the dramatics of the night: The audience participation—raising newspapers over our heads during a rainy scene, shouting rebuttals at the screen in unison—and the cast of larger-than-life characters. We went to see it many times over the years. My college girlfriend joined the shadow cast, originally playing Riff Raff—a hunchbacked butler, her blond hair messy and limp around her face—and eventually graduating to playing Rocky, the mad scientist’s buff creation, clad in skimpy gold spandex. The rest of the cast members were lovely, and the nights were a mix of earnestness and play.
I was brought back to these memories as I watched the recent documentary about the making and legacy of the show, Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror. The filmmaker, Linus O’Brien, is the son of Rocky Horror’s writer, Richard O’Brien. His adoration of the project is obvious, but not indulgent or overly chummy. He offers an artfully crafted and thorough look at the events that coalesced to create the original London stage musical, and its unlikely transformation into a Hollywood cult classic. Richard provides some central narration of the timeline, challenges, and impacts of the work. We see footage of the original stage play and hear from film producers and crew members. Interviews with the actors—reflecting on the project now, 50 years later—are a delight.
The documentary also tracks the initially cold reception to the film, and its slow metamorphosis into a midnight staple at movie theaters across the country. An interviewer speaks with people who have been involved in shadow casts, and documents the significant impact that the film—and the community formed around it—has had on young people looking for alternative spaces and fellow misfits. For some, it served as the first entry into exploring queerness and gender; for others, it provided a safe space to find camaraderie in that identity. I had not thought of it in that way when we were all heading into screenings together in our late teens, but in retrospect, it makes sense.
Watching the documentary, I was struck by all of the people and decisions that made this film phenomenon happen, and the genuine possibility it might not have existed at all. It has inspired me to take a new friend to a showing later this month, and I’ll see whether she gets swept up in the humor and passion of it too.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The key words in Cutting Through Rocks, a visually stunning and heartbreakingly tragic documentary by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, are spoken by a male resident of the small Iranian town in which it is set. He says to Sara, the film’s protagonist, “You should give a girl shoes but not a path.”
Sara is a motorcycle-riding midwife, elected to the town council with the highest number of votes of any candidate, admired by the women of the town, and a model to the young girls. She visits a junior high school filled with bright, beautiful preteen girls whose eyes are all aglow as she speaks to them, making them promise not to become child brides and to continue their education into high school and beyond. You believe they mean it, and they even sign a pledge to do so. One 16-year-old child bride flees her marriage to a man 23 years her senior and is taken in by Sara. She learns to ride a motorcycle—a symbol of resistance and freedom—like her hero, and she’s joined in this by girls from the junior high class. Maybe the girls have both shoes and a path. But by the time the film ends, 17 of the 22 junior high girls are married, the escaped bride is back with her parents after a male judge refuses her demand for divorce, and Sara’s spirit has been crushed by a series of injustices.
Cutting Through Rocks is a damning portrait of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where tradition and men rule, and women, if they raise their voices, can only achieve limited and revocable success. The early parts of the film lead us to think that change is possible, as Sara is elected with the overwhelming support of women and the young. But Iran’s ultimate rulers do not give up without a fight, and the weight of the entire political, legal, medical, and social system is brought down on them.
Sara is an eccentric figure in all regards—she is divorced, living on her own and not, as tradition and society dictate, with her mother (her adored father died when she was an adolescent), and willing to stand up to her brothers, who oppress their own wives and sisters. She wears clothes “not fitting” for a woman and refuses to surrender her individuality and her rights. It seems for a while that her resistance will succeed, that she’ll show the way out of the backwardness that has deprived Iranian women, especially those in the countryside, of their lives. But it’s not to be, and the humiliations that are piled on her are almost unimaginable. By the end of the film Sara has withdrawn from the fight, hoping now for only small victories and changes. It makes her no less noble, and the regime no less repulsive.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Toldot
Our parshah, Toldot, Hebrew for “generations,” begins with the expansion of Abraham’s line, now stewarded by Isaac and Rebecca. The Torah tells us that Rebecca, facing a difficult pregnancy, prays for help. God reveals that she is carrying twins—two children who antagonize each other in utero, a dynamic that foreshadows an enduring feud: “Two nations are in your womb, and two tribes from your body shall be divided,” God explains. “One tribe shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.”
Following their birth, the Torah is quick to juxtapose Jacob and Esau as opposing models of human nature and culture: Esau is the “rough” hunter, “a man of the field” who will come to “live by his sword,” while Jacob is described as a simple shepherd, a homebody who “dwells among the tents.” Early midrashic works, perhaps playing on the shared root of “dwell” (“yoshev”) and “yeshiva,” suggest that Jacob was in fact a Torah scholar, an idea taken up by later commentators who similarly characterize Jacob’s tent-dwelling as time spent in study, prayer, and contemplation. As later texts read this story, Jacob’s commitment to Torah becomes a further way of distinguishing him from Esau, who instead symbolizes the world of violence.
In one legal example, the Polish halakhist Rabbi Yechezkel Landau (1713–1793) uses the images of Jacob and Esau to support his argument prohibiting hunting for sport. Because Esau is a named hunter in the Torah, Rabbi Landau infers that this “is not the way of the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . For how can a Jew kill a living thing needlessly?” Jacob’s legacy, this argument goes, mandates that Torah oppose violence. Indeed, rabbinic texts regularly transform militaristic language into metaphorical engagement with Torah, the model of Jacob eclipsing the model of Esau: “A man of war” becomes one whose erudite interpretations enable them to succeed in the battlefield of Torah debates, and “girding your sword” means decorating oneself in Torah’s ornamental splendor.
The portrayal of Jacob and Esau as interconnected-yet-irreconcilable twins echoes a midrash taught by Rabbi Eliezer: “The sword and the book descended from heaven intertwined.” While the midrash implies that the sword is given alongside Torah to threaten the Jewish people into following the commandments, one later interpretation by the medieval French sage Moshe HaDarshan instead reads the sword’s presence as a reminder that the Torah itself is under constant threat. In this view, if we do not keep the commandments, it is not our lives that are at stake, but that of the Torah, which would otherwise be swallowed by the sword’s violence. In both of these interpretations, the sword and the Torah are not interdependent; the sword’s presence is parasitic, threatening its host. In this vein, the Lithuanian Religious Zionist thinker Rabbi Yitzhak Ya’akov Reines (1839–1915) explained that the forces of Torah and the sword descend into the world as “opposites,” because ultimately “weapons are the sign of the destruction of the world,” and Torah is a tool for cultivating wholeness. This is perhaps why one Talmudic sage argues that “if one is a swordsman they cannot be a scholar, and if one is a scholar they cannot be a swordsman.”
Later in Breishit, we learn that whereas Jacob’s line produces the Israelites, his more pugilistic brother is the ancestor of the Edomites, and many later commentators associate Esau with the imperial violence of Rome. Esau thus becomes a figure who facilitates a Jewish claim to innocence; by framing an icon of aggression as an outsider, we shore up a contrasting image of ourselves as peace-loving. But Moshe HaDarshan’s and Reines’s readings of the Torah-sword dyad can help us recast the inextricability of what Jacob and Esau embody as something internal to our people. Under this view, we are not ethical paragons threatened by outside enemies, but rather bearers of both the Torah and the sword—keepers of a tradition that lives under constant threat of decimation by our own hands.
Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.
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