The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is known for its collection of Near Eastern antiquities from the Biblical period. Yet amidst its galleries stands a startling cultural artifact of far more recent origin.
Kuma—meaning “Rise”—is a nearly ten-foot-long scroll depicting a dense, vivid, intellectually rich, and aesthetically stunning account of Jewish history. Its full title, “Kuma, Mei Afatzim ve-Kankantum,” refers to the materials used to prepare ink for Torah scrolls and other sacred texts. Evoking an unfurled Torah scroll, Kuma is the high-school senior project of a brilliant young yeshiva student, artist and poet named Eitan Rosenzweig הי”ד. Staff Sgt. Rosenzweig, an Alon Shvut native and student in the Yerucham Yeshivat Hesder, served in the Givati brigade and was killed in Gaza in November 2023, at the age of 21.
Kuma weaves together Jungian theories of the unconscious, the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of the heroic journey, and imagery drawn from Western art and Jewish history—some of which appear elsewhere in the Bible Lands Museum. Kuma also incorporates literary allusions to the Bible, Talmud, modern Hebrew literature, Eastern and Western general philosophy, and more. It is a work of art that one must study rather than merely observe.
It was an honor to review Koren Press’s outstanding new book One Day in October for the Jerusalem Post Magazine this past week. While the book is not necessarily “literary” in nature, it is brilliantly written and edited, and moved me in a way that few books have. This piece is actually an abbreviated version of a longer review essay that will hopefully appear in the Jerusalem Report in the coming weeks. Grateful to be part of this “עם של אריות,” “nation of lions,” whose incredible bravery continues to exhibit itself each and every day.
It’s now been two weeks since we heard the news of the murdered hostages – six holy souls who were executed in cold blood after enduring eleven months of torture at the hands of their Islamist captors. The news hit everyone in Israel quite hard, and it cast a shadow over the normally hopeful first day of school. Since then quite a few more innocent Israelis have been murdered or killed, including a policeman whose own daughter was killed defending the Sderot police station on October 7th. Yet even as a society that has been completely bombarded with tragedy over the past year, the uniquely cruel nature of these deaths, compounded by newly released footage of the horrific conditions in which they are kept, has left many of us struggling to find the conceptual vocabulary to reflect on the events unfolding around us.
Almog Sarusi H”YD
Since everyone in Israel is separated only a few short degrees, one name that particularly seared me on September 1st was of the hostage Almog Sarusi, a handsome 27 year old who was abducted from the Nova festival. Almog’s father Yigal owns an electrical shop in Ra’anana, around the corner from where I live. Almog was a charming, thoughtful, engineering student who loved nothing more than to explore Israel, play guitar, and spend quality time with his family and friends. He attended the music festival with his longtime girlfriend Shachar and stayed behind to help her when she was shot and severely wounded (she later died.) Since his abduction, his parents fought tirelessly on his behalf, exhausting every political and spiritual resource they could muster. The Sarusis don’t define themselves as “dati,” or religious. Yet Yigal nobly stood nearly every Friday on the corner outside his electrical shop requesting passers by say a tefilla or a bracha in the merit of his son Almog’s safe return. My friend Tamar accompanied him and provided home-baked cookies and boundless energy to find recruits on the sidewalk. Unlike some of the other hostages, there were no videos released of Almog during his captivity, and we didn’t know with any certainty the status of the young man for whom we prayed. My first thoughts when I heard the news on September 1st was that perhaps these prayers did keep Almog and the others alive for 11 grueling months. My subsequent thoughts, of course, threw me into a theological rut from which it was harder to emerge.
Canvassing for tefillot on Ostrovsky Street
The 1943 short story “The Secret Miracle” by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges depicts a Jewish man named Jaromir Hladik, a moderately well-known author and playwright, who is earmarked for execution by the Nazis. Hladik is terrified by the prospect of death, but he is also terrified that he will not have the chance to finish his magnum opus, a verse drama called The Enemies. In the darkness of jail cell he prays to God ,“Thou who art the centuries and time itself,” to give him some extra time. And indeed, in a “secret miracle,” God gives him a year to complete his play in the privacy of his own mind: “the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.” The story raises interesting questions about whether there’s such a thing as a perfect work of art, even if it is entirely disconnected from an audience or context. By extension, it also explores the meaning of consciousness, and celebrates the value of life, of perception, and of artistic creativity for its own sake. These lofty concepts contrast with the Nazis for whom all of this could be snuffed out for the most shallow of reasons. At the end of the story, Hladik is murdered like countless other Holocaust victims. In an act of magical realism, he experiences a secret miracle that allows him to observe, feel, and create, albeit unbeknownst to anyone else, for a precious additional year’s time.
The six recently murdered hostages survived nearly a year under the most horrific conditions and are now dead. Recalling the “secret miracle” of the Borges story, what did those 11 months mean for Almog, Hersh, Eden, Ori, Alex and Carmel? What kind of torture did they endure? Amidst their suffering, what sort of sanctuary did they find, in their thoughts, in their environment, and with each other? What gave them strength, and what sort of discoveries did they make, about themselves and each other, about life, and about God?
Almog’s family sat shiva in a park next to pastoral green walking paths in Ra’anana. Many people from all walks of life came to pay their respects. We sat for a bit with Almog’s father Yigal, who spoke with remarkable composure, deftly balancing sensitivity to the various parties in front of him: two bashful seminary-age girls, another pair of women with tall head coverings who had driven in from the Shomron, and Noam Tibon, the retired army general turned October 7th hero who is firmly on the left politically. Yigal spoke about Almog’s love for the land of Israel, his sensitivity for others, how his army friends call him “Abba,” because he was the sort to always take care of those around him. He also spoke about the complexities of his own efforts to free his son. He did not believe in a hostage deal “at any cost,” but he believed that in the absence of complete victory over Hamas then the hostages had to be prioritized. His comments kept drifting to the 6 martyrs, the 6 “kedoshim” he called them. He said that Almog loved to have deep conversations, and he imagined what sorts of things they spoke about together. In his better moments, he thought of Carmel Gat doing yoga exercises with them, of how they must have given each other strength and solace until the end.
He also spoke about how even in this most devastating of circumstances, “miracles” had occurred. It’s a miracle his family could bury Almog with his body intact. That only several short days after he was killed they could stand at his gravesite and give him a proper funeral that paid tribute to his many wonderful qualities. And maybe other miracles too, he wondered aloud. I thought of his weekly efforts to canvas for tefillot near his shop on Ostrovsky Street.
It’s hard to say what constitutes a miracle and what is precisely the opposite. Even in the Borges story, one can dwell on the “miracle” experienced by the protagonist, or the pure and unadulterated evil that led to his predicament in the first place and ultimately his murder. I have heard so many wonderful October 7 miracle stories and it is hard not to be moved by them. But then there are the “non-miracles,” the Nova escapee who survived hours in the woods only to be killed by a fresh wave of terrorists, the hostages who were killed just hours before their rescuers arrived. In these circumstances we are left looking for more modest sources of consolation. Maybe this is the meaning of a “secret miracle,” not only a miracle that happens in secret, but a miracle that we manage to see or experience even when everything else seems to have gone wrong. Moments of strength, courage and love in a dark and claustrophobic tunnel. Even the sheer miracle or life itself, sustained for so long in an environment so hostile to it. Or the miracle of the resilience of the Jewish people. A father in immeasurable pain who raises his eyes to God and also to others, managing to transcend an impossible circumstance with an expansiveness of spirit that itself is also a kind of a miracle.
The upcoming holiday of Shavuot evokes the receiving of the Torah on Har Sinai, flowers and greenery, and of course delicious dairy food. It is also the holiday of “malkhut,” or kingship, when we read the book of Ruth, which recounts the backstory behind the emergence of the royal house of David. Shavuot is the culmination of 49 days of counting the Omer, a seasonal agricultural offering in the Temple wherein each week of seven weeks is categorized by one of the Kabbalistic “sefirot”. The final one of these sefirot is Malkhut, described by the Zohar as “having nothing of her own.” Notwithstanding its connotations of royalty, Malkhut is understood to be a void that receives all of the preceding weeks’ sefirot. While Passover celebrates the miracle of liberation from Egypt, Shavuot emphasizes groundedness in the Land of Israel. In contrast to hastily baked matzot, Shavuot features the wheat harvest and the bread and first fruits (“bikkurim”) offerings in the Temple. Its theme of malkhut prompts us to think about the nature of leadership in our own time – that which we have and that which we lack. It prompts us to question what true kingship might look like in a modern era.
In the early days after October 7th, for many of us here in Israel, our feelings of shock, horror and grief were also accompanied by a sense of having been set adrift. With greater urgency than ever, we asked- the question of who, if anyone, was steering our national ship. One didn’t have to be a member of the anti-Bibi camp to feel that our leadership had failed us. Moreover, it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, might be able to lead us out of this morass. A friend commented that “this was the first time in my life that I realized we had a problem that even a group of the most brilliant Jews in the world together in a room couldn’t solve.” In the months since the massacre, these questions have in many ways been exacerbated, as Israel finds itself mired in an even deeper set of conflicts – balancing international pressure with achieving its military goals in Gaza and of course the question of how best to go about retrieving the hostages, to the extent that our efforts may yield any fruits at all. It’s not that these issues don’t have solutions per se, it’s that the leaders needed to implement these solutions, who can rally their nation, unify factions, leverage diplomatic relationships, inspire trust and move forward with confidence, often seem to be missing from the room.
Counterintuitively, as our politicians continue to bicker and the international picture looks bleaker by the day, we find ourselves surrounded by heroes. It wasn’t only the countless tales of heroism from the day itself: the brothers Elhanan Hy”d and Menahem Kalmanson who jumped into their cars on October 7 and drove from the settlement of Otniel to battle terrorists and evacuate dozens of survivors of kibbutz border communities. Aner Shapira Hy”d, who caught and threw back seven explosive grenades while hiding in a shelter near Re’im with two dozen others until he was killed by the eighth. Or Amit Mann Hy”d, the paramedic with an angelic voice who was killed treating patients in the makeshift clinic she refused to abandon in Be’eri on that day. In December of this year, Hanukkah time, the singer Ruchama ben Yosef released a wonderful song called “VaYehi Or,” “Let There be Light,” where she addresses the theological implications of October 7th for a person of faith: “a great miracle did not occur, we did not find the jar of oil.” Instead of discovering a miracle from above, ben Yosef sings, “we discovered ourselves.”
News reports out of Israel are, more often than not, depressing. Yet the closer in you stand to events the more you can see how in many ways the days since October 7th have demonstrated a national love affair with our soldiers. These young men and women, representatives of every single sector of Israeli society, jumped into action on October 7th and have not since stopped sacrificing to protect our beloved country. Included in this category are their families who also sacrifice and in the most tragic cases mourn, all also in the name of duty to our country and nation. Israeli civil society has also been roused into activity, supporting the many populations left vulnerable by the ongoing threats from Hamas and Hezbollah. When you evaluate it top-down, the picture in Israel does not look great. But from the bottom-up we have a society that continues to be strong, resilient and for the most part united.
This dichotomy is one that we have seen before in Jewish history, and it is nowhere better exemplified than in the book of Ruth. Ruth is a story about two brave women who transcend tragic circumstances in order to make a lasting contribution to the Jewish people. The Book of Ruth is also, as mentioned above, a story of malkhut. It depicts the transition from the Book of Judges, wherein centralized leadership is lacking – “in those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did as he pleased” – to the Book of Samuel, which depicts the beginning of the Davidic Monarchy.
In his wonderful book Rising Moon (previously reviewed here) Rabbi Moshe Miller explores the nature of malkhut as it manifests itself in the Book of Ruth. True kingship, according to Miller, is not the exercise of power by a single individual. “Rather,” he writes, “it must emerge from society in ways that are infinitely complex, entirely unpredictable, and almost impossible to trace.” Miller suggests that the best way to understand malkhut is by drawing on the philosophical and scientific category of “emergence,” which describes complex systems, like beehives or ant colonies, that are not reducible to the sum of their parts:
“Individual bees or ants are incapable of functioning alone; they cannot reproduce; they cannot find food. They exist only as units within a larger whole. Put these units together, and suddenly, as if by magic, they begin differentiating, each individual performing a specific task according to the needs of the integrated system, the super-organism. When a hive attacks a person, it comes after him like a single organism; when ants go on a march, their relentless miles-long movement is that of a unified power, an army. Malkhut is the name we use to describe a system in which components work synergistically to produce a whole that is greater than its components.”
Miller points to the statement in the Talmud, Bava Batra 15B, “Whoever says that Malkhat Sheva (lit. Queen of Sheba) refers to a woman is mistaken. Rather it means the Kingdom of Sheba.” The implication here is that malkhut does not refer to the reign of an individual king or queen, rather, malkhut is what enables a nation to act in a united and cohesive fashion.
This particular vision of kingship as a kind of emergent collective phenomenon is not necessarily characteristic of the institution and reign of historical kings generally, or even in Israel in particular. Not every melekh represents malkhut in this sense of the word. The reign of Israel’s first king Saul, for example, was initiated by the urging of a frustrated nation, tired of Philistine abuse, against the better instincts of its prophet Samuel. Despite Samuel’s warnings about the potential pitfalls of monarchy the people insist “we must have a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations: Let our king rule over us and go out at our head and fight our battles.” (1 Sam. 8:19-20). Note the language here: to be “like all the other nations” with a top-down authority figure to “fight our battles.” Saul, from the powerful and clannish tribe of Benjamin, is genuinely a remarkable figure – the best ancient Israel has to offer in some ways – and he does end up succeeding in many battles. His great failure is when he spares King Agag of Amalek and his flocks, a lethal combination of misplaced pity and eagerness to draw short term approval from his own troops. Saul is like many leaders we know: genuinely impressive and talented, but ultimately representing a paradigm of leadership that does not emerge organically and thus could not withstand the test of shifting generations.
David the Judean, on the other hand, represents a different model. He emerges, not from a position of prominence, but seemingly out of nowhere. He attracts the admiration of all who encounter him, but he elicits love rather than intimidation. While the first physical description of Saul is that he “was a head taller than anyone else in the nation,” (1 Sam. 9:2) one of our first visual encounters with David is as a miniature shepherd standing up to a giant. David defeats the Philistine ubermensch Goliath without a sword or spear or javelin – for these the Israelites were dependent on Philistine metalsmiths who forbade the transfer of advanced weaponry to the subjected populations of Israel. Instead he attributes his success to God and nothing else. David will also make his own share of mistakes, which are in some ways even more serious than those made by Saul. But his kingship endures because it is not reducible to him as an individual or even the Judeans as a tribe. As a leader he embodies the spirit of his nation. In contrast with Saul, he is the embodiment of the bottom-up form of leadership we see incubating in Israel today. And while a feature of true malkhut is that it seemingly emerges out of the ether, the Bible does provide us with a prequel of sorts, and that is contained in the book of Ruth.
The book of Ruth provides a genealogy for the Davidic line, rooted in the union of Boaz, a wealthy Judean landowner, and Ruth, a Moabite convert. The circumstances in the early verses of the Book of Ruth are rather bleak – they depict famine, intermarriage, and the premature death of Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, and their two sons Machlon and Kilyon. The Rabbis of the Talmud detect another layer of discord in this time period, reading the book’s opening line of “it happened in the days when the judges judged” as “this was a generation that judged its judges” (Bava Batra 15b). That is, even the nominal forms of leadership at this time were unsteady and up for debate. This reading of course evokes the postmodern erosion of institutional authority across the West, or perhaps the recent debates about judicial reform that rocked Israel until more pressing concerns arose. Yet even more evocatively, the context from which Ruth and Naomi emerge is one of grief and suffering. Having lost nearly everything, they leave Moab in a state of poverty and degradation. Naomi urges her daughters-in-law Ruth and Orphah, whom Jewish tradition describes as Moabite princesses, to turn back – “My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord has struck out against me.” (1:13)
The Book of Ruth records several moments of chesed, lovingkindness, which ultimately serve to transform this situation of atomization and hopelessness into one of transcendence. The first such act is when Ruth chooses, despite their reversal of circumstances, to stand with Naomi: “for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (1:16) Ruth’s bravery here, which will ultimately produce the crowning glory of the Jewish people, begins with an act of love for and solidarity with Naomi. Ruth’s behavior forms both a parallel to and contrast with the previous actions of Elimelech who left his ancestral home in order to seek his fortune in Moab. Both figures leave their homelands, but for Elimelech it’s in order to improve his economic situation, whereas Ruth at this point is stepping into the abyss. All she knows is that she stands with Naomi, and this simple, visceral act of loyalty, it turns out, will have more of an impact on the course of Jewish history than the battles and treaties of far more senior figures in positions of leadership.
Next, in the barley fields of Bethlehem, it’s Boaz’s turn to shine. He sees Ruth gleaning on behalf of her mother-in-law, his own distant relative, and is moved by her story, “I have been told of all that you did for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people you had not known before.” (2:11). Boaz makes sure Ruth is treated with dignity and generosity – he even invites her to share a meal. Boaz is willing to forgo the conventional status hierarchies and sees glowing virtue in a person that others are bound to ignore. The fact that this takes place in the grain fields is significant. Whereas as others look up to the skies, or to regents or kings for inspiration, Boaz looks down and it’s there that he finds Ruth, bent to the ground but driven by something noble and profound.
The climactic moment of chesed in the book is one in which it’s not quite clear which character is doing the giving and which is receiving. Ruth, following Naomi’s suggestion, lays at Boaz’s feet in the middle of night and in a position of great vulnerability, asks him to fulfill his role as a “redeeming kinsman.” (3:9) That is, as a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz is asked to marry childless widow Ruth and thus rescue their family name from oblivion. This is complicated by various factors. For one, Ruth is far younger than him, and far lower in stature. She is also a Moabite, a nation whose members Israelites are forbidden to marry by Torah law. Yet Boaz’s reacts to Ruth’s unusual entreaty with gratitude, “Be blessed of the Lord, daughter!” he exclaims, “your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first.” Like the starry eyed couple at the end of O’ Henry’s famous story “The Gift of the Magi,” the dichotomy between giver and receiver collapses in this nighttime scene. This moment of generosity and the erasure of ego will eventually result in the overturning of a legal paradigm in Ruth’s case. Boaz’s heartfelt antinomianism will ultimately usher in the birth of the David, the beginning of true kingship, which also points toward the eventual messianic age.
So what do these collected moments of chesed have to do with Jewish leadership and with the difficult times we live in today? In all of these cases it’s the loyalty, heroism and ingenuity of regular people, rooted to their land and to each other, that manages to change the course of history. Elimelech and Naomi’s original flight from Bethlehem, the tragic deaths of Elimelech and his sons, Naomi and Ruth’s downward spiral into penury, all of these things should have served to dissolve their family bonds and separate the characters in the book from one another. Instead, something marvelous happens. In their pain they grow closer, and the bonds they build together, some of which existed previously (like Boaz and Naomi’s familial ties) some of which are forged anew, end up forming the matrix from which malkhut will eventually emerge. Still it will take several generations for David to be born. And perhaps, even now, we are only in the early or midway stages of this process of forging a context from which a truly enduring paradigm of Jewish sovereignty, malkhut in its loftiest sense, may emerge.
In recent months, there’s hardly anyone here in Israel who hasn’t been touched by loss. Attending funerals or visiting shiva houses of bereaved families of IDF soldiers, even those we do not personally know, is a new national pastime. We show up to demonstrate that we share in the suffering of these families, we are grateful for the heroism of their sons, husbands and fathers, and we would like to think that maybe one more visitor or attendee might ease their burden just an infinitesimal bit. In such circumstances it’s often difficult to find the right words to say. One of the handful of lines that repeats itself is “we should be worthy of their sacrifice.” It’s possible to interpret this phrase along the lines of what we see in the book of Ruth. When confronted with tragedy that hits too close to home, all of us in a society, not only those directly affected, may take one of two paths. We can sink into feelings of despair and hopelessness, which are, admittedly, justifiable. Or we can use this painful opportunity to strengthen our bonds and form a kind of web that connects us with those we have lost, with each other, and with future generations yet to come. This latter movement characterizes the modality of malkhut, whether it may one day manifest itself in a David-like leader, or whether it’s already manifesting all around us. As Naomi blesses Boaz halfway through the book, “Blessed be he of the Lord, who has not failed in His kindness to the living or to the dead” (2:20). The emergence of malkhut will not bring back those we have lost, but it ensures that their contributions are embedded within a larger living organism that allows them, in a sense, to still be with us.
A moving new rendition of Naomi Shemer’s “Shiro Shel Aba,” sung by the students of Yeshivat Har Etzion high school in memory of their beloved teacher Shai Pizem H”YD who fell in battle in Gaza in December. Note the new additional lyrics added by Rabbi Amichai Gordon and Rabbi Chaim Navon. This is an eloquent expression of the relationship between malkhut and loss that I was trying to articulate above:
“אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז, אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז, לא לשווא אחי נפלת בין נהר לים, כי מן הדמים האלה ייבנה העם ייבנה, ייבנה, ייבנה העם”
If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold You did not fall in vain my brother – between river and sea For it is this blood that will build the nation May the Nation be rebuilt May the Nation be rebuilt
Walk the streets of Israel post-October 7 and one experiences a country transformed. This transformation manifests in many aspects of our lives: our political allegiances, our sense of certainty and security, and our attitudes toward one another. But our streets have also literally, physically, been transformed. Cars are bedecked in Israeli flags and bumper stickers that commemorate fallen loved ones and friends. The now iconic red-and-black hostage posters line storefronts and traffic poles (in Israel they don’t get ripped down). Army green is everywhere—at times every fifth person walking down the street seems to be in uniform and carrying a large weapon. And street art and graffiti that focuses on the hostages or the ongoing military campaign is ubiquitous. Grassroots memorials take various forms—from yizkor candles to red poppies (the classic symbol of military loss is also a common wildflower in the south of Israel) to countless other manifestations. This spontaneous public art is intense and concentrated in certain places, such as Hostage Square in Tel Aviv and the Nova massacre memorial in Re’im. But it also can be found on random street corners and benches, in malls or in doctor’s offices. Art is everywhere, a direct outcome of a nation that is actively grieving horrific events and continuing crises.
Ziva Jelin, Panorama: Pavement and Mud, 2018, acrylic and tar on canvas. Photo credit: Ron Plitnitzki.
A new exhibit, recently opened at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, seeks to explore this creative phenomenon in real time. The exhibit is simply titled “October 7.” It begins by considering the notion that art is irrelevant at the height of wartime, as expressed by the proverb “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent.” Orit Shaham Gover, the chief curator of ANU, proposes this alternative: “As the cannons are heard, the voices of the muses are emerging all the more clearly from deep down in the throat.”
Traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.
I’d like to belatedly share excerpts from an article that appeared a few months back in Mosaic Magazine. The growing popularity of religious singers among secular audiences here in Israel has been noted elsewhere. One hopes that this rising trend can serve to combat some of the tragic division we see in Israeli society right now.
“This past Sukkot, a crowd of about 500 children, parents, and grandparents gathered in the Recanati Theater in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The audience was made up of affluent and mostly secular residents of north Tel Aviv and its suburbs—stylishly dressed, sipping lattes and organic juice sold at the trendy coffee shop nearby. To an outside observer, the scene would be almost indistinguishable from a family-oriented play or concert in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The content, however, was distinctly Israeli: a jukebox musical called Aluf ha-Olam (literally, “Champion of the World”), based on the songs of the religious Zionist singer Hanan Ben-Ari, written and performed by Israel’s most prestigious children’s dramatic company, the Orna Porat Theater. Tickets for Aluf ha-Olam are in high demand and sell out quickly, so I booked seats for me and my children several months in advance. One could sense from the anticipation in the theater that many others had done the same.
Hanan Ben-Ari is one of Israel’s best-known musical performers, albeit without the international break-through appeal of peers like the religious music sensation Ishai Ribo. His strength is in his songwriting; catchy tunes, drawn from eclectic influences, and coherent, powerful lyrics that comment on personal, often spiritual, struggles…
…Ben-Ari’s penchant for infusing lyrics about universal topics with the language of the synagogue and yeshiva tends to obscure the boundaries between sacred and secular idioms. His 1980s-inspired feel-good ballad “Dream like Joseph,” for instance, argues that every story in the Bible reflects some basic human experience: “everyone leaves his father’s home/ everyone nearly sacrifices his child/ deep within is a little Sodom/ that he wishes to erase already/ and angels will rescue him…”
…Thus the prospect of translating Hanan Ben-Ari’s music into an Israeli secular vernacular, as Aluf ha-Olam seeks to do, is daunting, and perplexing. It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art…”
“On a bright spring day in a swanky Tel Aviv neighborhood, a handsome man sporting a trim beard and a perfectly perched black yarmulke alights from an expensive SUV. He kisses his beautiful and modestly clad wife, as three smartly dressed yeshiva boys across the street watch, swoon, and dream of similar lives for themselves. “A yeshiva boy who married well?” one suggests. “No, no—he earned it for himself!” his friend explains: After being expelled from a prestigious yeshiva for owning a smartphone, he flew to Rome, camped out for a week on the doorstep of Borsalino headquarters, and earned the right to open the first official Israeli chain of stores for the high-end Italian hatmaker. Although he is too busy earning money to study in yeshiva full time, he still dedicates time every day to study Talmud. “The modern haredi,” the boys say, sighing. “He enjoys both worlds. He has this and yet he also has that!” As they wave to him crossing the street, a large truck comes out of nowhere and plows into him. And so the show’s question remains: Is it really possible to have both this and that?”
Please check out the absolutely wonderful latest issue of Jewish Review of Books for a review of the second season of Shababnikim, a fabulous Israel television series with much more depth than initially meets the eye.
In a new symposium at The Lehrhaus entitled “Reclaiming Torah u-Madda,” I was given the chance to reflect on the state of “Torah U-Madda” (the relationship between Torah and Western culture) in the Modern Orthodox community today. I sought to address this topic on a philosophical level, through an analysis of a wonderful story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as through some “real-world” examples of how these ideas might play out in practice. My latter comments generated more controversy than I would have liked. I would like to emphasize that my account of what has challenged me personally about my native community is not meant to constitute a comprehensive indictment of all that is wrong with Modern Orthodoxy. My goal in the essay is to introduce a philosophical framework and then briefly suggest how this framework might cohere in real-life scenarios. I don’t mind disagreement about the relevance of these scenarios but I am even more interested in discussing the worldview that underlies them.
Please see here for the full article. And I recommend perusing all of the terrific contributions to this forum.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic last April, when celebrities around the world were lecturing us via tweet to stay home and wear a mask, British novelist J. K. Rowling took a different approach. As kids were forced to forego school and interactions with friends, she published a new children’s book and released it in free installments for families stuck at home. The novel, The Ickabog, was published in full this past Thanksgiving. Proceeds from sales of the book are donated to communities hurt most by COVID-19.
Rowling has said that the Ickabog story first came to her years ago, when her own children were young. She wrote the book during the period in which she wrote the Harry Potter books, and claims to have made no serious modifications since that time. Yet intentionally or not, The Ickabog may be the most serious literary indictment of the mass response to the COVID-19 epidemic published to date.
The cover of JK Rowling’s The Ickabog. This may be a stretch but note the corona (Latin: crown) artfully woven into the book logo.
I bought the book as a gift for my Harry Potter-loving 9-year-old, and first picked it up on the Sabbath after Hannukah. My family had just returned from Jerusalem, where the lack of tourists and the still-considerable virus restrictions cast a pallor on this normally magical time of year. After months of closures, the street vendors of Jaffa and Ben Yehudah streets finally had their Judaica and souvenirs proudly on display, albeit with few takers. Seemingly half of the usually bustling restaurants were temporarily shuttered or closed for good. I wasn’t in the mood to read more of the endless news about the pandemic, so I turned to my son’s Rowling book looking for a light fantasy escape.
The Book of Books 