What To Read This Fall

As I embark on this, my seventeenth year of writing weekly on matters close to my heart (and, I hope, also to yours), I’d like to talk about three books I’ve read over the holiday season that affected me in different ways.

The first is David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count, a remarkable volume published earlier this year by TLS Books in London. The author, whose name was unknown to me before reading the book, is apparently a well-known British comedian. (He was actually born in Troy, New York, in 1964, but has basically lived his entire life in the U.K.) But this book is not at all funny. Just the opposite, actually: it is 123 pages of very angry prose directed at a world that simply refuses to take anti-Semitism seriously as a form of pernicious racism. Mostly, his fire is aimed at progressives and liberals. But although there is more than enough ammunition left over for him also to take aim at right-of-center groups and conservatives, he’s particularly enraged at people on the left for whom the slightly hint of racism or bigotry is intolerable, yet who seem more than able to tolerate even overtly-stated, ham-fisted anti-Semitic remarks without reacting even slightly negatively, let alone with real revulsion or even feigned outrage.

Even though the book itself is really just an extended (a very extended) essay on the topic, the author has more than enough ammunition at the ready to buttress his point. Over and over he cites instances of public figures, including A-list celebrities, making overt or allusive anti-Semitic comments without facing any sort of public censure, let alone being “cancelled” in the way people who make openly disparaging remarks about other minority groups become personae non gratae overnight and are, at least in some cases, never heard from again. Some of the people he quotes will be familiar to American readers, but others will not be. Nonetheless, his analysis of the reason the comments those personalities are cited as having made are more than tolerated by the liberal public—for the most part because speaking negatively about Jewish people, Jewishness, or Judaism is somehow legitimized with reference to some specific ethnos-wide character trait that people can legitimately use as a rational basis for hate—will be familiar to any Jewish reader who lives out there in the world, who reads a daily newspaper, or who spends time wandering around in the blogosphere.

The author draws an interesting portrait of himself. He declares himself not to be a Zionist, which I take to mean that he has neither any specific interest in the fate of the State of Israel or sense of a personal stake in its wellbeing. So that puts him outside the camp in which an overwhelming majority of Jewish people I know live. And the author also self-defines as an atheist with no specific allegiance to Jewish ritual or belief, thus putting him even further outside the ranks of the kind of Jewish people who occupy the world I personally inhabit. In many ways, his prose made me think of him as the latter-day version of those German Jews in the 1930s who were so busy being German that they were amazed that the Nazis considered them to be part of the Jewish problem at all. (There’s a certain irony in that thought too, given that Baddiel’s grandparents fled Nazi Germany.) Perhaps that lack of connection to traditional Jewish values or beliefs and his disconnection from Israel is what fuels his rage—he (and so many like him) see themselves as having done nothing to offend, as holding no beliefs that set them apart from the British mainstream, as being as properly ill at ease regarding Israel’s vigorous efforts to defend itself—so how dare the world refuse to censure, or let alone to cancel, people who are overtly anti-Semitic in the way those very same people would never dream of tolerating homophobic or anti-Black racist comments!

I recommend the book strongly, despite all of the above comments. It is a short read, but a forceful, dynamic statement that readers on this side of the Atlantic will have no trouble translating into local terms. It is upsetting, and in a dozen different ways. But that only makes it more, not less, important and worth your time to find and read.

The second book I’d like to write about today is Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, published this summer by W.W. Norton. The author, born in New Jersey in 1977, has taught at Sara Lawrence and at CUNY. Some of my readers will know her work from essays published in The Atlantic and the New York Times. And she has written five novels, mostly recently A Guide for the Perplexed in 2013 and Eternal Life in 2018. People Love Dead Jews is her first book-length work of non-fiction.

The book itself, about 100 pages longer than Baddiel’s, is also about anti-Semitism, but is written in an entirely different key—one given away subtly by the book’s subtitle, Reports from a Haunted Present. And, indeed, the book’s twelve chapters, while all discrete essays that can be read separately and without reference to each other, are also all rooted in the same soil: the author’s slow, eventual understanding and coming to terms with the fact that most of the way the world thinks about Jews—and, even more to the point, the way Jews think about the way the world thinks about Jews—are floating along somewhere between dishonest and disingenuous. Her opening chapter, for example, about Anne Frank points out that the great success of her diary rests to a great extent on the endlessly cited passage in which Anne, still hiding in the Achterhuis and hoping to live to adulthood in a liberated Holland, writes that she still believes, “in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” She surely changed her mind when she got first to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister Margot died in the spring of 1945. But that detail, unpalatable to those who wish to see Anne not as a murdered Jewish child but as an apostle of universalist optimism, is generally ignored. And so, to address that issue specifically, Horn provides an obituary for an imaginary Anne who survived the camps and lived into her 90s, and who definitely did not end up thinking that all people, presumably including the guards at Auschwitz, are truly good at heart. It’s that kind of writing that will grab readers from the very beginning and keep them engaged to the end.

The three chapters devoted to the rising level of anti-Semitism in the United States should be required reading for all Americans, but particularly for Jewish Americans still living in their grandparents’ fantasy world regarding the impossibility of America ever engendering its own violent version of “real” anti-Semitism, the kind that moves quickly past quotas and sneers to actual violence, including the lethal kind that cost those poor people in Pittsburgh their lives one Shabbat morning in 2018. Yes, the book is uneven. The admittedly fascinating chapter about her trip to Harbin, China, is at least twice as long as it needed to be. The chapter about the recent Auschwitz exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage is unfocused, the author’s point (at least to me) unclear. The chapter about The Merchant of Venice will leave most readers without university degrees in Shakespeare at least slightly confused. But the book itself is wonderful—thoughtful, intelligent, challenging, and stimulating. I recommend it to all without hesitation.

And the third book I want to recommend for my readers’ reading pleasure this fall is Noam Zion’s Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy, published earlier this year by the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia. The other two books were short, perhaps even too short, but no one will say that about Zion’s book, which weighs in at almost 550 pages. But potential readers who allow themselves to be put off by the book’s size would be making a huge error of judgment—the book is long and complicated because its subject is complicated and the sources he cites, often at length, are many and complex. But the book itself is a true tour-de-force and deserves to be considered in that context.

Most readers, used to thinking of sex as something antithetical (or at least unrelated) to religious philosophy, will be amazed to learn how seriously rabbis writing over the last two millennia have taken the very same topics that engage moderns when the talk turns to intimate matters: the limits and boundaries of marital fidelity, the relationship of fantasy to reality in the healthy sexual context, the possibility of legitimate sexual liaisons outside of marriage, the relationship of homosexuality to heterosexuality (and, by extension, of gay people to straight people with respect to the legitimacy of their coupling), the precise nature of the obligation spouses bear to provide sexual satisfaction to each other, and the relationship of reproductive possibility to ongoing sexual activity in the absence of such possibility.

The book is organized chronologically with respect to the sources the author cites, but most readers will be far more impressed by the breadth and depth of the sources than by their relationship to each other chronologically. Many of the authors cited, particularly from the Haredi world, will be unknown to almost all readers. Only a tiny percentage of them wrote in any language other than Hebrew or Yiddish. An even smaller percentage have had their books or essays translated into other languages. As a result, reading Zion’s book is something like being ushered into an art gallery featuring works of great creativity and depth by painters you’re slightly amazed never to have heard of. (I include myself in that category, by the way: almost all the books, essays, and pamphlets cited in the 150-odd pages on Haredi authors were unknown to me.) But the breadth and depth of Noam Zion’s reading of these books, and his willingness—given the riven nature of the Jewish world, his truly remarkable willingness—to consider these men (all of them are men) and their writings in light of writing on the topic by my own colleagues in the Rabbinical Assembly, by authors affiliated with various Reform Jewish institutions, and (even more impressively) with feminist authors of various sorts, that is truly what makes of this book something that my own readers should think twice about not reading.

Noam Zion is a friend. His home in Jerusalem is just a few blocks from our apartment. His wife taught the Lamaze course Joan and I took when we were anticipating the birth of our first child. I mention all that merely to be fully transparent, but also so that I can also say that I would recommend his book this highly even if he and I were not acquainted personally. It is a magisterial work on a complex topic that all readers interested in Jewish thought and its relationship to practice will find fascinating.

And those are the three books I would like to recommend to you all as autumn reading you’ll enjoy and find stimulating and very interesting. 

9/11 Twenty Years On

There are days that come to serve as historical pivot-points to the extent that it feels reasonable to refer to divide the history of the nation with respect to them into time-before and time-after. April 15, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln died, feels that way to me. So does December 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so too does November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Others, I’m sure, will have their own dates to add. (What is true on the national level is also true on the personal, of course: which of us would not add in his or her wedding date as one of those pivot-point dates or the date on which any of us became parents for the first time? But I speak here of the nation, not of its individual citizens.) And I think most Americans would agree that September 11, 2001, is in that category as well—and not just because something horrific occurred on that date, but because it has transcended its own news cycle and become part of our national culture. There are no college students (except maybe older, “returning” students) who remember 9/11 personally: the freshman and sophomores were born after that awful day and the juniors and seniors were babies or toddlers in 2001. And yet there is no newspaper or website in the nation that feels obliged to explain what it means when it references 9/11 without mentioning the year or the events of that day. Everybody just knows. That is, I suppose, what it means for a day to serve as a pivot-point in history: everybody, including people born after the fact, know precisely what is being referenced without any further explanation needed.

This Shabbat marks the twentieth anniversary of that horrific day. Like all of you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the North Tower. (It was a quarter to six in the morning in California, but I’m an early riser and always check a few news websites before I get down to my day’s work.) And I remember too that stomach-turning moment just twenty minutes later when the second airplane crashed into the South Tower and it suddenly became obvious that we were dealing not with a single tragic aviation accident that had just happened, but rather with a fully intentional act of violent barbarism intended to kill as many random Americans as possible at once as a way of making some sort of perverse political statement. By the time most Californians were waking up, the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and no one knew what might not happen next. In retrospect, it seems odd that we took our kids to school that morning as though it were a normal school day—but we did and then we went right back home to watch CNN and try to understand what was going on.

So much has been written about that day and its aftermath that I won’t attempt to say something new or to share some insight that no one but myself has had over these last two decades. Instead, and with the full understanding that this Saturday is the yahrtzeit of almost three thousand innocents whose lives were cut short by an act of insane savagery, I would like to offer an image from the past that has comforted me over these years…and particularly once we moved from California to New York just a year after 9/11 and settled into our new home not twenty-five miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan.

The image derives from one of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems. The poet, originally from Huntington but by 1883 a veteran Brooklynite, is looking out at Lower Manhattan from his perch in Brooklyn Heights. He takes note of the ongoing effort to build the Brooklyn Bridge (which was completed later that same year, the year of my maternal grandmother’s birth), then shifts his gaze and focuses instead on the ferry boats that in his day brought commuters back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn all day long for all the years before any bridge linked Long Island to Manhattan. (And there were a lot of them, too: the first grant for a commercial ferry linking Brooklyn and Manhattan was issued by the New Amsterdam authorities to one Cornelis Dircksen in 1642, a cool 241 years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built. For more details, click here.) But this is a nineteenth-century image I’m trying to conjure up, not a seventeenth-century one. And by Whitman’s day the ferry is a real thing, a regular part of New York life, something ordinary and banal. Yet, as the poet looks out at the harbor, he is struck by the timelessness of the scene before his eyes, by the simultaneous in-history and outside-of-history aspects to the scene before his eyes, by the ability of the city to transcend the life of its own citizens. The poem is wistful and sober; for me, it as if the poet had some sort of preternatural ability to see the Towers absent, then present, then absent again as he somehow understood something of what would one day happen to the vista stretched out before his eyes as he gazed across New York Harbor on a sunny day in the 1880s.

The poem is called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and is about the strange way people live within time and outside it, each of us living a life bounded by the dates of fortunate birth and inexorable death but also living in a world in which life transcends the lives of the living, thus making each living soul part of a grand scheme of history that exists independently of the details of their own lives. And then the poet looks (at least in my mind’s eye) directly at the patch of ground on which the World Trade Center will one day rise and somehow sees growth and loss, tragedy and rebirth, a city that both is its inhabitants but which also exists independently of them:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

And in that idea—that the city, and by extension the nation, somehow both exist anchored in time but also fully capable of transcending time, and thus capable also of surviving even the most horrific disasters and tragedies because those events are by definition time-bound whereas the nation is specifically not—within that single idea lies, at least for me, some comfort as I think back to that September two decades ago and seek some kind of context for thinking about our terrible losses on that terrible day.

Sitting in the warm sunlight, Whitman saw darkness in Lower Manhattan across the bay and felt a prophetic frisson of looming disaster:

            It is not you alone the dark patches fall,

            The dark threw its dark patches down upon me also,

            The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious.

            My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

            Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.

The man was a poet, not a prophet. He certainly couldn’t have imagined the World Trade Center buildings. (The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the nation’s first “skyscraper,” opened just three years before Whitman wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and was all of ten stories tall.) Yet the evil that would befall so many in that spot was somehow palpable to the poet as he sat in the warm light of a Brooklyn afternoon and gazed out at the site on which one day the WTC would stand, developing his sense that cities and nations truly do exist outside of time and can therefore flourish and grow even despite the evil that befalls them. In that thought, lie the seeds of comfort for a stricken city and a stricken nation. 

There’s also something deeply Jewish about this line of thinking. The eternal people isn’t eternal, after all, because individual men and women live forever, but because they live their lives as individuals but also as part of a collective whole that transcends the details of their lives: that is what the prophet meant when he used the phrase am olam to describe the Jewish people and it’s what we mean today when we talk about the weird paradox that, despite everything, the most powerful of our enemies (the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Soviets) have vanished from the stage of world history and the Jewish people has somehow remained. And the same is true of our American nation, that it exists independent of its citizens and that it endures regardless of what happens to any of us. The thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly in that category, but so are the dead of 9/11: individuals whose lives were cruelly cut short, but who live on in the idea of a nation that transcends the life stories of its citizens and exists in its own right. May their memory be a blessing for us all! And may they all—the dead in the airplanes and on the ground in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—may they all rest in peace. 

Forgiving Sirhan Sirhan

Sometimes life imitates art (and sometimes just the reverse), but what is true about art is true about religion as well: there are times when specific issues are on our minds owing to the nearness of a holiday or some imminent life cycle moment…and then, just as we are focused on that specific issue, it appears on the front page of the paper in some wholly other context and invites us to consider its intricacies from an entirely different angle.

As we count down the days to Rosh Hashanah, the question of forgiveness is on our minds…and in a dozen different ways. If we have wronged someone in the course of the year now ending, can we ask for forgiveness in a way that provokes a charitable response on the part of the ill-treated party? If we have behaved poorly (even in a way known solely to ourselves), can we repent us of our sin sufficiently meaningfully and wholeheartedly for us not to be judged harshly during the course of these coming Days of Judgment? If we have remained silent and inert while seeing another soul being wronged or demeaned, or treated unjustly—or even while merely knowing that someone was being treated in one of those ways, can we forgive ourselves to the extent necessary to stand up in shul and recite our Rosh Hashanah prayers without feeling like hypocrites? Owning up to our own weaknesses of character and errors of judgment is, after all, not quite as easy as it sounds in that it requires a level of self-awareness and candor that comes naturally to almost none of us. So to do it at all is difficult. But to do it because we truly regret our errors of judgment and moral missteps and not merely because we hope merely to garner for ourselves a good write-up in God’s great Book of Life—that is neither a simple nor a straightforward path for any of us to follow.

So those were the ideas that have been occupying me in these last weeks as we move ever closer to the Days of Awe. And then I opened the paper the other day and who should be looking out at me if not Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and sentenced the following year to be executed for his crime. (In 1972, when the California Supreme Court determined that capital punishment was in violation of the state constitution’s stricture against cruel or unusual punishment, his sentence was retroactively commuted to life in prison.) The years passed. As generally happens with the incarcerated, the public heard almost nothing about him. From time to time, a brief note would appear in the paper reporting that Sirhan had yet again been denied parole. But then, just one week ago, Sirhan appeared for a sixteenth time before the parole board and this time he was recommended for parole.

Their recommendation, it turns out, does not guarantee his release. First, there will be a ninety-day review by the California Board of Parole Hearings. And then Governor Gavin Newsom will have thirty days to accept the parole board’s recommendation or to alter it or to reject it. The governor, who has his own hands full with a serious effort to remove him from office, has not indicated how he will respond. Sirhan Sirhan was twenty-four years old at the time of RFK’s assassination and is now seventy-seven.

I remember Robert Kennedy’s assassination vividly. I was just wrapping up tenth grade when he was killed on June 5, 1968. And I was a huge fan, one of my only classmates to prefer his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president to Eugene McCarthy’s. He had his flaws, to be sure. But he had been a presence in American life since the John Kennedy presidency, during the course of which he served not only as his brother’s Attorney General, but also as his closest advisor. As a result, his willingness to run for president represented—to many of us, at least, including to myself and my parents—the possibility of returning to Camelot, of restoring some version of the John Kennedy presidency to our riven country just five years after Dallas.

And then, in a heartbeat, it was over. The images are, at least for people my age, indelible. RFK lying on the floor of that hotel kitchen. The busboy putting a rosary in Kennedy’s hands while he was still conscious. The funeral service at St. Patrick’s. Andy Williams singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The nighttime burial in Arlington. John Glenn presenting the flag to Ted Kennedy, then the latter handing it to his mother.

The assassin, a Palestinian without American citizenship, was motivated to murder Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel. So that’s certainly part of the story—in general as well, but for me personally in an intense, meaningful way.

And now the newspaper meets the Machzor and challenges me, not to decide what the man’s fate should be (that will ultimately fall to the governor of California, Newsom or whomever), but answer a series of simple questions prompted by the parole board’s decision. Is forgiveness a gift that must be freely offered or can it be earned? If the former, can it be offered other than by the wronged party? (That is obviously an impossibility if the wronged party is dead.) Society can free RFK’s murderer…but would that be tantamount to forgiving the man? The man has been in jail for fifty-three years. He claims to have been drunk when he murdered RFK, a man he had never met and did not know personally. He admits his guilt, but only because he feels it was proven in court, not because he has any recollections at all of the actual event. He is clearly a danger to no one at all at this point. And so the parole board felt that he had earned the right to live free for whatever time he has left. They clearly have the right to free (or to start that ball rolling). But can they forgive?

The responses to the parole board’s decision have been fast and furious. Six of Robert Kennedy’s children expressed outrage that their father’s murdered could possibly be allowed to get on with his life, while their father remains dead and thus unable to get on with his. (To see Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s op-ed piece opposing parole from the Los Angeles Times, click here. To read Rory Kennedy’s piece published yesterday in the New York Times, click here.) But two of RFK’s sons, Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., support the board’s decision, the latter going so far as to say that he was grateful to have lived to see the day on which his father’s murdered could be deemed “worthy of compassion and love.” Clearly, they forgive their father’s murderer. But do they have that right? That’s the question the whole story has challenged me to ponder.

That Sirhan Sirhan is a different man at seventy-seven than he was at twenty-four is hardly an impressive achievement: of what seventy-seven year old could not the same thing be said? But the question here is neither whether he is a new man or whether he regrets his actions. Nor is the question for me personally to consider whether the man will or will not constitute a danger to society if he is freed. (Those are obviously huge questions for the parole board to work through. But I don’t sit on that board—and I’m asking a different question here, one related to the question of forgiveness, not to the actual decision regarding Sirhan Sirhan’s release from prison.)  Our tradition is clear that bad deeds fall into three categories: those which can be forgiven by the wronged party (whom the doer of the deed must find the courage to approach and ask for forgiveness), those which cannot be forgiven by the wronged party because the latter is dead (in which case tradition suggests convening a minyan at the grave of that individual, publicly confessing to the wrongdoing, and praying for God’s mercy), and those which cannot be forgiven because the aggressed-against party is not known (in which case all the doer of the deed can do is to fast, confess the wrongdoing, and pray for forgiveness). There are a thousand subcategories to those categories, but all are rooted in the same simple concept that only the wronged individual can forgive the wrongdoer. The rest of us can be understanding, generous, kind, and non-judgmental. But if you wish forgiveness, tradition instructs you to find the courage to address the wronged party and to ask—simply and unequivocally—for that individual’s forgiveness. Nothing more than that. But also nothing less.