The Talmudic Secret of Foreplay

 Via Daniel Boyarin's epic book Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and and the Invention of the Jewish Man:

So, um, I believe a wow is in order. Also in the same chapter: I learned that James Joyce's Ulysses uses the phrase "goyim naches."

#fuckyeahtalmud

The Moment When All Prayers are Answered

When you pray by the first light of dawn, the Talmud says, Heaven pays attention to your prayers immediately. And when you time your prayers so that they culminate with the Amidah prayer at the moment that the sun breaks the horizon -- again, according to the Talmud -- that's the moment where the gates of heaven are flung open unreservedly, so that any prayers are answered immediately and without question.

My daughter is still on East Coast time. She woke up at 5:00. This is the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean from the villa we've been staying at. (We're down the street from Julia Roberts and one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Although, at this particular moment, none of that earthly name-dropping stuff seems to matter.)

Great House - National Book Award Finalist

A day after its release, Nicole Krauss's novel Great House was named a National Book Award finalist, which is either a great bit of luck or a great bit of marketing.

It's not surprising, though. The novel -- which tells the story of a massive desk (yes, a desk) that trades owners from a middle-aged writer in the USA to a vindictive Israeli Holocaust survivor to a South American radical -- is sprawling, confusing, and beautiful. It's a book that makes you kick yourself and bite your tongue because it's so full-on and self-centered (you'll see what I mean in a second). But, at the same time, it really is great.

The book opens with a middle-aged writer, spilling over with despair, as she tells the story of a Chilean poet she loved. He left her to go back to his native country, where he was captured by the government -- he was a protestor in a country where that sort of thing was usually fatal -- and the poet was subsequently tortured and killed. Years later, a young woman shows up pretending to be his daughter, and summarily removes the desk, leaving the writer both deskless and with an incredible writer's block.

And that's the first chapter. I didn't spoil it, I promise -- you know every detail of the story from the start, except where the plot is headed from there. Where it's headed is in a number of different directions, with several disconnected stories that intersect at times but never entirely unite. It's quite beautiful, but it's like watching a movie you know is supposed to be great. You're never sure whether it's actually going to entertain you, in the end.

Whatever Great House does, it does to 100%. The book is made of two parts and eight chapters, each told by one of four narrators. This sounds confusing, but it's actually not at all -- the stories are so distinctive and remarkable, and each cuts off at just the right point, that you thirst for resolution until the latter half of the book. All four narrators basically share the same voice -- you know this voice; it's a thoughtful, carefully meandering New Yorker-style of monologue. There aren't even quotes around dialogue. Also, nothing happens. There's no character progression, not for the main characters, anyway. Each is narrating the story in one place, unmoving, with full awareness of his or her audience and position as a storyteller.

Not that I'm complaining. Even if the characters all talk the same, the voice is so compelling that it's hard to nitpick. Metaphorically or literally, she's caught all of these characters in a moment between drunkenness (painful, honest drunkenness) and standing on death's door -- those times where people are most candid, blunt, and where they can see the sum of their lives.


GH takes its name from a story at the book's very end -- a story snatched from Rich Cohen's book Israel Is Real, who snatched it in turn from the Talmud. In the end, you'll realize, Great House was in fact entertaining -- each moment of it, you're in the moment, even if it's only a single moment that lasts through each of its 30-page chapters. I still can't tell you exactly what happened in the book, but I can tell you I'm already feeling nostalgic to go back and revisit it.

but the voice is so compelling that it's hard to nitpickN

Talmud FAIL: Yalta vs. Ulla

Most of my favorite Talmud stories center around Yalta. She's a Talmud-era commentator who's sometimes thought to be Rav Nachman's wife (the Talmudic sage, not the Hasidic rebbe) and is also sometimes thought to be the daughter of the Rosh Galuta, the head of the world Jewish community at the time. And she was an arbiter of Jewish law and philosophy in her own right.

We also named our daughter after her. There are two famous stories in the Talmud -- seven in total, but two that are really famous -- that center around her. One involves Rav Nachman coming to her and asking what to do if you hunger for non-kosher food (she schools him). The other goes as follows (courtesy of halakhah.com):

Ulla was once at the house of R. Nahman. They had a meal and he said grace, and he handed the cup of benediction to R. Nahman. R. Nahman said to him: Please send the cup of benediction to Yaltha.

(OK -- now Ulla's gonna get really crabby. Especially considering he's a guest in the home of an honored rabbi...not to mention, of course, Yalta.)

He said to him: Thus said R. Johanan: "The fruit of a woman's body is blessed only from the fruit of a man's body, since it says, He will also bless the fruit of thy body." It does not say the fruit of her body, but the fruit of thy body. It has been taught similarly: Whence do we know that the fruit of a woman's body is only blessed from the fruit of a man's body? Because it says: He will also bless the fruit of thy body. It does not say the fruit of her body, but the fruit of thy body.

(That was Ulla showing off and being a smart@$$ -- and, basically, saying that women suck. Now comes the good part.)

Meanwhile Yaltha heard, and she got up in a passion and went to the wine store and broke four hundred jars of wine. R. Nahman said to him: Let the Master send her another cup. He sent it to her with a message: All that wine can be counted as a benediction. She returned answer: Gossip comes from pedlars and vermin from rags.

...and THAT, my friends, is how you deliver the whiz-bang kung-fu punch to an honored rabbi: with a combination of physical force and a good proverb. Apparently, people are still taking this to heart today. Courtesy of FAILblog:

Torah for the People

I just wrote this to the uber-mentionable Yonah Lavery, creator of Talmud Comics (who, btw, just inked a deal with the also-awesome Ben Yehuda Press). We were discussing our love of Torah and our mutual wavery position in the Torah world:

i used to have a terrible phobia of haredim. i think i still do, and yet i seem to have become one of them. albeit an obama-votin', peta-flag-wavin' haredi. i think g-dcast really encapsulates what i am: people learning torah is good. people living torah is good. and people being creative with torah is good....until they get to be either fascists or hippies. then they just give me a headache with their hating and/or vibing.

i'm not sure if i stand by that since i'm half asleep, but it might just be my mission statement.

The Smell of Non-Kosher Food

I spoke to Stephanie, who was coming out of the very tasty (and very not kosher) Tartine Bakery, on 18th and Guerrero Streets in San Francisco. She'd just gotten an iced coffee, and she was complaining about it.

Stephanie: Every time I walk past this bakery, I'm reminded of that Gemara that says that God's going to ask if we enjoyed all the pleasures of this world. And I'm going to be like, no, I didn't, because the pleasures of this world weren't kosher.

Me: I used to read this book of Chinese stories when I was a kid. One of them was about a poor student who lived above the fanciest restaurant in Peking and each night, he would sit by the window and eat his plain rice and smell all the good-food smells. Then one day the restaurant owner noticed him and asked what he was doing -- he had the entire apartment to eat in; why was he by the window? The student said that the smell of the good food made his rice taste better.

The owner was furious, and brought him to court. He contended that the student should pay him for the past year's worth of meals. Now, most families in Peking couldn't afford to eat in the restaurant. Couples only went there on their anniversaries, or special occasions. One meal there cost a month's wages. For the cost of a year's meals, the student would have to pay for the rest of his life.

After hearing the case, the judge asked the student, How much money do you have? The student got terrified and said, only 5 copper coins. It was the only money he had in the world -- for his rent, his tuition, his rice.

The judge told the student to take them out. He did. Then the judge ordered the student to toss them from one hand to the other. He did. The restaurant owner, unable to conceal his glee, rubbed his hands together.

Then the judge said to put the coins back in his pocket.

"What!?" the owner burst out. "Those coins are mine!"

But the judge shook his head no. "Just as the student stole the smell of the food from you," he said, "the sound of the coins will be his payment."

Lag B'Omer: The Lag Blog, Pt. 2

aLast night: campfire was every bit as awesome as we wanted it to be, except the kids were asleep. This was probably better for all concerned, because Boruch and Itta were doing musical stuff, Karen was tending the fire, and I would have been grabbing all three of them by the scruffs of their collars and held them in the air and not let them walk anywhere because there were ticks and an open fire pit and I am pretty much the typified neurotic paranoid parent who never lets my daughter out of the house, except to stand in the sun for 10 minutes twice a week to get exactly her recommended dose of vitamin D. Yeah.



This morning: Taking the Monsey Bus back to the city. Monsey being the place that it is [thanx, Chaviva], I expected the bus to be packed with every sort of Hasid -- the roly-poly kind, the diamond kind, and the opens-three-hardcover-books-on-your-lap-at-once kind -- but found that, pleasantly, it was filled with every sort of Jew, like a mini-Israel crammed into the narrow borders of a Greyhound-type bus. Hot girls in tight pants with sunglasses bigger than the circumference of their faces. Yarmulke-less balding dudes with cell phones that look like Star Trek phasers. And, yes, the roly-poly Hasidim.

At one bus stop, there was nobody waiting except for two pint-size boys in identical white shirts and argyle vests, heads shaved except for their payos. They couldn't have been more than five and six, respectively. As the bus rolled to a stop, the driver joked to the person in the front seat, "You think they're going to 47th Street?" -- a wink and a nod to the street where all the Hasidic diamond merchants work.

The bus pulled over, and a passenger leaned out. "Where you headed, boys?" he asked, then repeated the question in Yiddish. "Monroe," they replied -- saying the word like it had never referred to a president of the United States, much less pronounced in English. They moaned the M through their noses, rolled the r, and hooted the o from the apex of their mouth, not the back, owl-like.

Next to me, two men talked about their respective kids, all of whom had gone to Meron the night before for the holiday. My traveling companions were both old, and both Orthodox, but, you know, casual Orthodox -- colored shirts, knit yarmulkes. Their kids had gone Hasidic, with twenty grandchildren each and wives in burqas, the whole deal. But they talked about them like rebellious teenagers. Their crazy bonfires, the crazy praying. It was pretty utterly awesome. It inspired me to crank up the Sonic Youth on my headset all the way, startling the hell out of the dude sitting next to me, who was learning Talmud out of three books at once.

We're taught that a plague killed off thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students because they did not treat one another respectfully. I feel like the massive party that happens in Israel every year -- and like, in some small way, my bus ride -- are all tikkunim, or healings, of that rift.

And the trip took under an hour -- less than the time from Brooklyn to here! If the bus ride is this exciting every morning, I think we may have a new neighborhood to consider.

Israel: Visiting Graves, and Digging Your Own

This is Israel: Yesterday I was on a "nature trail," which, without doubt, is an Israeli euphemism for X-treme Sports. In Philadelphia, there was a nature trail that swept around a few meadows and groves of trees and dovetailed into a new housing development that had chopped away the rest of the forest. Here in the Golan, the phrase "nature trail" indicates a trail of barely-there rocks, the plurality of which are equal to or smaller than the width of your foot, jutting out of a cliff.

About an hour and a half in, without warning (and, certainly, without any semblance of sanity) the narrow trail of rocks which we've been precariously balancing ourselves upon gives out, replaced by a handful of metal rungs plopped into the side of the rock bed. Horizontal surfaces as we know them cease to exist, and there's a 20-foot drop into a steam that's 25 feet deep.

It's extreme, alright. But it’s also that particularly Israeli brand of springing total insanity upon you without warning, a reminder that for every anxiety-filled border crossing there's a mountain with a view that will knock the fear of God into you, and for every bomb around the corner, there's also a tiny 3000-year-old synagogue with immaculate stone buttresses around the next corner.

This afternoon we visited Tsfat. It was supposed to be a 30-minute drive, but we kept passing graves. There's a weird code to Israeli gravesites: many tzaddikim, or righteous people, are buried outside of cemeteries—in their own mini-graveyards, or in the middle of nature trails, or just on the side of the road. (One hopes that those ever-lovin' nature trails were not the cause of most of these tzaddikim being buried there, but since the stories about tzaddikim always seem to involve granting miracles, impossible journeys, and staring death right in the face, you have to allow for the possibility that, sometimes, death will not just stare idly back at them.) Some of the graves have domes over them, which indicates their more-exalted-than-normal status. Others, for a similar reason, are painted a turquoise shade of sea blue. I don't know if either or both of those things intimate something specific, or whether there’s a general hierarchy, but these are the things I’ve learned here in a very short time.

That, and that gravesites sometimes make the best concert venues.