Ari's Shtetl remarks -- Very, very long posting -- feel free to delete unread

[George Robinson <GRComm...>]

Khaverim --

First, if I may take the secular New Year as a good point for such a
thing, I want to offer my thanks -- and I'm sure the entire list will
concur -- to Ari for the many hours he puts in on the list and his
wonderful website. Speaking not only as a working Jewish music
journalist but also as someone who just flat out loves these musics, I
want to say that Ari is a national treasure, no a world treasure for
Jewish music. Anyone who works in the field owes him an enormous debt of
gratitude.

Now I didn't say that because I wanted to preface my remarks with
something positive before taking him to task, although that is an old
debater's trick of which I'm fond.

Actually I found much to agree with in Ari's remarks in his
year-end/mid-year roundup (not the least of them his choices of
records). I do want to add a few observations of my own.

Partly by the nature of the writing I've been doing (my book Essential
Judaism but also the rather wider range of Jewish music that I cover for
Jewish Week in NYC), and partly because of my own evolution as a Jew, I
have spent more time covering and being involved in Jewish worship and
Jewish worship communities. Like Ari's remarks, mine are sort of a
stringing together of disparate but not unrelated themes rather than a
closely argued essay.

To me the most exciting thing to emerge from the Klezmer Renaissance (or
Revival or whatever) is the revitalization in a small way of a Yiddish
culture. What I want to emphasize here is the rebirth of a Yiddish
community of some sort as a counterweight to a Zionist paradigm of
Jewish history in which in some echt-Hegelian sense the establishment of
the State of Israel (and a Hebrew-speaking State at that) is the
endpoint of the development of the Jewish people. If I learned anything
from four and a half years of work on Essential Judaism it's that anyone
who talks about some monolithic "Jewish people" is full, uh, blintzes.
The triumphalist Ashkenazi-Zionist scenario ends up with everyone
speaking Hebrew and worshipping at the shrine of Max Nordau's "Muscle
Jews," a scenario that is as repugnant to me as any other exclusionary
vision. I'm not rejecting Zionism in any one or all of its many
variegated forms (and it's funny how most Zionists don't acknowledge the
multiplicity of Zionisms, but that's another story); I'm merely saying
that there are more Zionisms and Judaisms than are dreamt of in your
philosophy, Horatio.

Yiddish is an enormously important part of the story of Jewish history
-- it's not just a ghetto jargon/argot, as some would have it. (I know
that saying this in this forum is what the Irish call "the committed
preaching to the converted.")

And to embrace some form of Yiddish culture is not necessarily to invoke
the romantic version of the shtetl. I have to disagree with Ari on one
important cultural point here. The romanticization of the shtetl really
owes more to The World Is With The People (Zborowski) than to Sholem
Aleichem and Peretz. On the contrary, I think the fully rounded portrait
of shtetl life painted by those two writers includes ample doses of
lice, greed, bigotry, ignorance and pogroms. Don't mistake Sholem
Aleichem for the author(s) of Fiddler on the Roof.

On the other hand, I believe that  community is a basic human need. Man,
as Arisotle wrote, is a social animal (yeah women too,). And I have
always believed that the urge to pray in the Jewish faith -- which is
channeled mostly into family or community settings -- is an urge towards
community.

A few months ago I gave a talk at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in which
this was, in fact, the primary subject. Indulge me a little while take
the supreme arrogant move of quoting myself.

> A decade ago, I went to a synagogue for the first time in more than 20 years. 
> I had little idea what I would find there.  Much to my surprise and delight, 
> I found that I loved it. Ten years later, I'm an active member of that same 
> synagogue, a trustee, choir member, newsletter editor; I served as president 
> for two years, I  lead services often, give occasional sermons, have taught 
> both children's and adult classes.
>       What happened? Simply put, the discovery that I made on my journey back 
> into Judaism was that when I thought I was seeking another "political" 
> identity and community, what I really had been looking for all along was a 
> spiritual community. It has been the search for the ineffable, the 
> mysterious, the . . . well, the holy, to be blunt, that has drawn me ever 
> more deeply into Judaism as an adult.
>       And here is where my journey is more typical than unusual. 
>       Sometime in my mid-30s, my father -- may his memory be a blessing -- 
> was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Dad would die two days before my 38th 
> birthday.In the long, agonizing trudge from his illness to his death, I often 
> found myself grappling with those impenetrable questions of life and death 
> that haunt all adults at some point. And usually that point first comes not 
> when they face their own death but when death reaches out to take a parent. 
> If you do some basic arithmetic, you can see that for the baby-boom 
> generation, that time is pretty much now. 
>       The other side of that coin is the creating of life, and for most 
> boomers, that is happening now, too. So many of friends, my contemporaries, 
> are having children, raising children. 
>       As I began to prepare this talk I realized that this date, November 2, 
> is neatly bracketed by Shabbat Bereshit, which was last weekend, and my 
> father's yahrzeit, which is exactly one week from today. Birth and death. And 
> we are not even a month from the High Holy Days, from Rosh Hashanah, the day 
> of the birth of the world in Jewish tradition, and Yom Kippur, the day on 
> which God seals the book that contains our fate for the coming year. 
>       I think about the opening of Bereshit, the Book of Genesis, often, 
> particularly at this time of year. We read the story of the Creation on Rosh 
> Hashanah and repeat it on Simkhat Torah as we begin again the yearly cycle of 
> Torah readings. And we read it once more on Shabbat Bereshit, the first 
> Sabbath after Simkhat Torah.
>       "Bereshit bara eloheem et ha-shamayim vi-et haaretz;  when God began to 
> create the heaven and earth. . . ."  
>       When I hear that passage from Torah, I think of something I once read, 
> a quotation from Allan Sandage, a protege of the great astronomer Edwin 
> Hubble, and a great scientist in his own right.  Sandage was trying to 
> describe what it is like to sit in the observer's cage on a mountaintop 
> observatory in California, looking into the night sky.  He said, "You sit 
> there straddling the pier with your privates nestled up against the cold of 
> the universe."
>       "Your privates nestled up against the cold of the universe."
>       It's a wonderfully pungent image, one which juxtaposes the core of a 
> single human against the vastness of space.  It brought to mind another 
> incident from a couple of years ago, when the satellite Voyager made its 
> final looping journey around the edge of our solar system, transmitting 
> photographs of Uranus and Pluto back to earth before moving out of range of 
> our communications devices.  We stayed up until two or three that morning, 
> watching as CNN broadcast the photos, and I recall quite vividly a deep sense 
> of melancholy as the last transmissions took place, as the satellite slipped 
> into an outer darkness that is beyond my non-scientist's comprehension.
>       "The cold of the universe."
>       Adherents of the Big Bang Theory posit a universe which is 
> ever-expanding, one which is perhaps running down like a spring-driven clock, 
> as it approaches entropy.  For all but the scientist, such a concept is hard 
> to fathom. 
>       It's like the old joke about the astronomer who is lecturing to a group 
> of laymen and observes that in a billion years the earth will crash into the 
> sun and be incinerated.   At the back of the room a hand goes up and a voice 
> asks timidly, "Did you say a million years?"  The scientist replies, "No, 
> sir, a billion years."  And the fellow in the back of the auditorium says, 
> "Boy, you really had me worried."
>       We cannot imagine the endless infinite emptiness of space.  Even  the 
> cosmologists--physicists and astronomers though they be--imagine nothing but 
> an intricate web of equations and phenomena, not the thing itself.
>       And so we sit here, alone in the dark.  Sandage says, "That's the way 
> it is.  It doesn't really matter whether I feel lonely about it or not."
>       For the rest of us, such resignation is not so easy to achieve.  When 
> we contemplate infinity we are awed and, yes, lonely.  Pascal writes, "We die 
> alone," and I can't help but connect our sense of loneliness in the face of 
> the infinite with the fact of our mortality.
>       As much the universe is limitless, our time in it is severely 
> delimited. And the baby-boom generation is beginning to hear the meter 
> running, their biological clocks beginning to slow down.
>       We die alone, surrounded by the cold of an infinite universe, or so it 
> seems to us in our darkest moments.  
>       And just as we cannot imagine the vast universe, neither can we fathom 
> a life beyond our senses, a life beyond our fingertips and our lifespans.  
> Small wonder that there are people who refuse to believe that men walked on 
> the moon, people who are convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax 
> staged somewhere in the Arizona desert.  After all, they didn't see it 
> themselves.
>       Yet we yearn for something beyond our fingertips, our lifespans. 
>       Which is why, I think, so many men and women born between V-E Day and 
> the 1960 election have found themselves gravitating towards spirituality, 
> myself among them. 
>       Certainly, like children scared of the dark, we cry out to the big 
> Parent in the Sky, "God, I don't want to die, I don't want to get old, lose 
> my teeth, my hair, my eyesight. Please help me."
>       But that's too easy an explanation and I think it underestimates both 
> the intelligence and the decent humanity of the baby boomers. 
>       I believe there is something else, more moving to me and more profound, 
> more noble and less solipsistic, in the boomer-driven  movement back to 
> spirituality in our culture.
>       Life in the modern world -- and I think this is particularly true in 
> New York City -- is a lonely thing. We live as atomized individuals, unable 
> to make contact with one another in any but a superficial way, except for 
> rare instances of breakthrough. Martin Buber famously talked  about the the 
> I-It relationship, human-to-object, which is the way we experience most 
> interactions in the world, as distinguished from the fleeting but intense 
> I-Thou dialogue. Jean-Paul Sartre in one of his last interviews talked about 
> the way that modern industrial capitalism encourages and profits from that 
> atomization, about the way that people can only experience one another in 
> serial relationships, one at a time.
>       I won't begin to speculate on whether our feelings of isolation have 
> their roots in socio-economic realities, political phenomena or spiritual 
> malaise. In fact, I don't rightly know. But I know that feeling of loneliness 
> -- I'm sure we all do -- and I have come to realize that it is that feeling 
> of loneliness -- combined powerfully with the fact of our mortality -- that 
> was what I sensed when I began my quest a decade ago, the quest that led me 
> to Beth Am, the People's Temple and, in a roundabout way, to the writing of 
> Essential Judaism.
>       I have come to believe that when we pray we are not only calling out to 
> a perhaps distant deity.  More than any other Western faith tradition, 
> Judaism specifically calls for worship in a community, for prayer as a 
> communal act, not only as solitary contemplation. As Jews, by affirming our 
> relationship to a community of belief, by praying as a community, not merely 
> alone, we assert that we are at one with a four-thousand-year history, part 
> of an ongoing process, of the People Israel defining and redefining 
> themselves.  That is why we immediately begin the cycle of readings anew on 
> Simkhat Torah, so that the chain of history remains unbroken, from 
> Deuteronomy to Genesis, Genesis to Deuteronomy, and on and on.  
>       When we see ourselves as part of that process, we hold the fear of 
> eternity at arm's length, if only for a moment.
>       Alon Goshen-Gottstein, writing on the Jewish understanding of the 
> Creation, says, "As process, creation is ever-regenerating, its outcome 
> ever-changing."  So it is with Judaism itself.  A Trotskyist friend of mine, 
> a gentile, once observed that what he found admirable about Judaism was that, 
> in addition to its commitment to the oppressed and underprivileged, it was a 
> religion which seemed uniquely concerned with the workings of history.  In 
> each of those commitments--to those who suffer and to the mechanisms of 
> history--we reach out beyond our own mortality to touch something outside 
> ourselves.
>       And for that moment, we achieve a connection to the infinite.
>       But also a connection to something finite -- to other human beings. 
>       I must confess that one of the things I find enormously satisfying 
> about Jewish prayer is the way in which Jewish history is inscribed within 
> it. Judaism is perhaps the only Western faith tradition in which text study 
> is part of daily prayer, the only Western faith tradition in which sacred 
> texts are built up over the passage of historical time, like a palimpsest, a 
> series of dialogues between generations of rabbis and scholars separated by 
> centuries, even millennia. And that process continues unabated today. 
>       I like to say that when a Jew prays, she stands simultaneously in three 
> streams of history. There is her personal history -- does this musical 
> setting of Adon Olam bring back memories of childhood? Is she saying kaddish 
> for a parent? Is this the anniversary of her bat mitzvah? Then there is the 
> history of the minhag -- the customs -- of her congregation or community. Or 
> as a founding member of my shul used to say whenever someone suggested 
> changing something, "For 40 years we didn't do it that way!" And there is a 
> 4,000-year history of the Jewish people.
>       And because Judaism is relatively non-hierarchical in its structure -- 
> no episcopate, no synod, no papacy -- just a huge number of wrangling, 
> battling, arguing experts who never seem to agree for more than a few minutes 
> at a stretch, Jews are implicated in the historical process as we re-invent 
> Judaism day by day. To some extent we make choices whenever we worship that 
> are based on those three streams of history. 
> 

(Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I figured it was easier than trying to
rewrite that stuff on the fly. And I said what I meant then, so I don't
feel a need to rewrite it.)

I don't believe that the only place to find a Jewish community is in a
synagogue. My wife has a powerful sense of Jewish identity. She's also
an atheist. I don't know about any of the other people on this list --
well, actually I DO know about many of you because you are all so frank
and generous with insights into your own lives as Jews -- but many of
you probably aren't religious by any conventional definition of the
word. 

But you have found a community in Jewish music, a community that you are
happy to identify yourself with, a community that gives you
satisfaction, a sense of belonging and of support. And that's a
wonderful thing.

Well, I've spent too much of your bandwidth and time already, so all I
will say is, this is far from the worst place we could be coming from.
Some of the communities that Ari mentions in passing in his essay are a
heck of a lot more toxic than anything we could even imagine.

I'm proud to be part of this little world -- shtetl, village, whatever
you want to call it -- and hope that we will all continue meeting like
this in the new, secular, year.

Best,
George Robinson

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