Torah Commentary For the Rest of Us

This is the kind of commentary that the world needs more of. Last night I was at dinner with a friend from Washington Heights. As far as Orthodox Jews go, they're kind of the opposite of my Crown Heights world -- modern, shaved faces and striped shirts. While the Hasidim are overly concerned about things like the kabbalistic ramifications of our actions -- aah, what if I don't take on a new stringency this year? -- the folks in WashHeights are more troubled by the black-and-whiteness of it all, and will freak out for hours if they do something un-halachic, like touching the bottom of their shoe and not washing their hands immediately afterward.

These might sound like the same thing, but they're not -- think of the difference between breaking the rules of your mother's cleaning regimen and breaking the rules of a really intense game of Risk.

Anyway -- the fact is, that's the way people in each community are supposed to be. How this plays out in real life, however, is quite different. More often than not, people are more concerned about the surfaces of things, less about what they're doing and more about whether they look like they're doing it.

That's why I love Frum Satire. He looks at the texts, not in a classical way of commentary, but how they're being utilized today. It's like a daily dose, not of MyJewishLearning, but of MyJewishLiving. Here, he's talking about kiddush levanah, the sanctification of the moon ritual that Jews perform every month.

Booklust

Last night Ethan and I got lost at the Strand for a while. I'd never been in their graphic-novel section -- and, I found, with good reason. I didn't buy anything, but the struggle was a hard one. The gorgeous special edition of Ghost World was $25, still expensive but more respectable than the $40 cover price; and my current lust, Kramer's Ergot #7 -- a coffee-table collection of comics that's the size of a coffee table -- is $99, listed at $125.

Not to bore you with the money thing. Some people love porn, and some love fast cars. I am addicted to nice-looking books, the kind with bindings that could have been in the Library at Alexandria. This is why I spend so much of my time reviewing books for places that pay dismally -- because, if I wasn't getting a couple of bucks for a three-hour review, I'd be spending massive amounts of cash on the same books.

I've always been wary about where i spend money on books and music -- well, music not as much, I'm fine with used record stores -- but in general i try to mostly buy small-press books and books of new & unknown authors. (hence me always bugging you for, oh, star wars mass-market pop-up books and the such.) i have a huge appetite for books, and not much budget for it, but I'll always buy Stephen King used (and thank you l*rd, there is so much to go around) but i won't buy, say, a Manic D Press book for $.01 on amazon.
it's a hard balance. and i think it especially sucks that so many people who love reading are in industries that don't make money. so the total capital of editors-and-librarians-and-authors-who-buy-books is steadily small, and feeds back into their salaries, which are also small -- whereas, say, pro basketball games are not mostly attended by basketball players and basketball editors (uh, managers? ticket-sellers? I don't know what the equivalent would be).

Taqwacore wisdom

All weekend I've continued my obsession with Michael Muhammad Knight's book The Taqwacores, which follows a bunch of young Muslim Punks living in a group house in upstate New York. The setting is often just an excuse to explore the dynamics in Muslim culture, but those dynamics are insightful and often brilliant. In one part, the main characters (all single, all roughly college-age) are arguing over whether or not they're going to raise their children within Muslim tradition:

"I'd just give my kid a Quran," said Fasiq, "and tell him to be on his way. Go find your own truth, you know?"

"I dont' need my kids saying 'Allahu Akbar' when they pray," said Rabeya [who wears full-body burqa and sings Iggy Pop covers]. "That works for me, and I would teach it to them so they know me and who I am and where they're coming from, but if they found something else, cool."

"I wnat my kids to be smart," said Muzammil. I admit it took me a second to remember that homosexuals do raise families. "If I was ever a father I'd take my kid to every kind of temple, real early on. By the time he or she was eight years old they'd have been to a masjid, a church, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, a Sikh gurudwara, whatever we could find. I want a worldly child. Buy second or third grade my son-slash-daughter will have more appreciation for diversity and the beliefs of others than most adults."

"I believe in teaching my children Islam," I offered. "Just as Pakistan is part of their heritage, so is our religion. You can't separate it. I don't know how strict I'll be; maybe we'll just go to the masjid for Eids and that's it. I doubt we'd pray five times a day, though we wouldn't admit that outside the house. I don't know how I'd be if I had a daughter who wanted to go to the prom...or if my son came home drunk one night. But my own values are constantly changing, so it's hard to say. I honestly have no idea but I have a nice little image in my head of what Islam can be for them.

And, bonus: A startling, impassioned, and sometimes violent Al-Jazeera video segment that profiles the Taqwacore movement:

depression and prayer

A few years ago, right about the time I was becoming religious, I started getting hit with Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's a condition with possibly the dumbest acronym in the universe (sound it out, kids), but it was very real -- I'd graduated college, I was taking on all these new social restrictions (no more random hook-ups, no Friday night concerts) and I didn't have much in the way of happiness coming in.

I asked a rabbi about it, and he said to start regularly praying Mincha, the afternoon service. Ideally, you're supposed to pray right at sunset, which creates a separation (like one Jewish prayer says) between light and darkness, daytime and night. And that way, the sixteen-hour darkness doesn't seem overwhelming and like it's stealing from your day; instead, it feels like a new, unexplored territory.

From this comes the really cool site of the day: Borei Hoshech, a blog that examines the relationship between prayer and depression. At first it may seem like two arbitrary ideas thrown together -- or, on the contrary, two opposites (prayer=hope! depression=sad!) -- but the blog's anonymous author takes a non-judgmental, open approach to both depression and praying, dissecting the liturgical texts piece by piece to see if s/he can find deeper truths, connections, and hope.

In a series of entries on Modeh Ani, the prayer that's said first thing in the morning, Borei Hoshech agonizes over not wanting to get out of bed, and tries to find validation and hope from the words of the prayer:

So even though I am in the pit of a deep, dark depression, and certainly will not or cannot daven this morning, I will say these brief few words, as I struggle out of my pajamas and into work clothes and down a handful of M & M’s in an effort to propel myself out the door.

For Chanuka, Borei Hoshech quoted a disturbingly awesome passage of Talmud:

“Our rabbis taught: When Adam saw the days becoming shorter, he said: ‘Woe is to me, because I have sinned and the world is returning to chaos!’ He prayed and fasted until the winter equinox when he noticed the days becoming longer. ‘This is the way of the world,’ he said, and he established an eight day festival.’”

The author oscillates into and out of depression, and those entries with a distance from depression give a whole different perspective, equally insightful. Both are totally worth reading.

So Out It's In

My new feature on Nextbook hits up singer-songwriter Avi Fox-Rosen and the rerelease of the quintessential '70s Yiddish dance-pop divas the Barry Sisters:

Avi Fox-Rosen likes to identify himself as “anti-folk,” part of a movement most notable for its insistence on what it’s not—that is, the hokey and sincere “pro-folk” music that hails John Denver and Judy Collins as its lovable, naively optimistic icons. In some ways, however, Fox-Rosen’s music fits more comfortably in the latter camp. His first solo effort, One, is stuffed tight with nostalgia and melancholy, and feels like a fuzzy sweater you could fall asleep in on a cold winter night. On the first song, “All I’d Like to Say,” Fox-Rosen sings, “I'd like to give you my heart but I can't / It's still beating in my chest and I need it for the time being,” his voice ballooning with emotion that’s more Motown soul than Matador irony; his guitar practically drips with the earnestness that’s boiled over from his voice.

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Matisyahu: Return of the "King"

Although I can't actually remember whether he played "King Without a Crown," that iconoclastic first single that a friend swore was going to condemn him to one-hit wonder status forever, it didn't feel like Matisyahu's brief history was being reinvented last night. On the seventh of his eight-night Hanukkah stint at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (insert the appropriate jokes about how Shabbat makes Orthodox Jews late for everything here), he played a more-than-two-hour set that was alternately pensive and meandering and quietly grooving and straight-ahead all-out rocking.

Matis's music has always lived in the space between worlds -- the secular and religious, the contemplative and the party vibe, the reggae and the rock. (Here's an article about his new work, just to get you caught up.) Last night, the wings of the place were filled with Hasidic Jews who wanted to come to the show but were avoiding the dancing, and the tiny two-steps-up division served as a makeshift boundary for them. The crowd was all over the place -- I was skeptical that it would be mostly Orthodox Jews, and afraid that it would be mostly hippies, but most of the folks there were just regular people. Good-looking people, too, as opener Mike Doughty pointed out repeatedly in his set*.

The couple in front of us were these Asian-Australian cool-kid transplants who wouldn't have been out of place at the Yeasayer show down the street, which gave me hope that (a) the one-hit wonder thing isn't happening, and (b) his music really isn't as insular as my default listening position (jumping on the furniture around the house, payos bopping, shouting out Aramaic phrases at the top of my lungs) might give one reason to think. And when a hippie did finally pop up, it was onstage -- this dreadlocked kid going wild on a whole array of percussion instruments, doing intense and admirable things to a tambourine.

Which brings us to the music. The band started playing before Matisyahu came onstage, which in normal circumstances I always think of as an egotistical pretense -- the crowd raves, the band builds up, and the singer ascends to his place of glory. But when Matis came on, there was none of that -- it wasn't like he was ignoring it, but more like he was unaware that it was happening at all.

The band launched into "Sea to Sea," which I always used to call "the Amidah song" before I looked it up on Amazon twenty seconds ago -- it's the song that opens his live album, which is the band doing their low bass funk thing while Matis sings the Hebrew words that introduce the silent devotional. It was faster than the album version, and the band was putting in everything, and Matis was holding his own but not going crazy.

Turns out he was just building up.

From there they blasted through "Youth," which gave the crowd the requisite recognizable song before launching into the meat of the set. It leaped between hard, driving guitar rock and more chill, rhythm-propelled stuff. At times it didn't seem like songs so much as ideas, Matis and the band tossing freestyles at each other. At one point, he was alone on stage with Shalom Mor, an Israeli oud player who flew in especially for this series of concerts, and a harpist, and -- after nearly an hour spent beatboxing-free -- he dropped into a fast beat.

That was the pace of the entire show. Usually, you see a band play three songs, and, boom, you know what they're about. Here, every twenty minutes it was a completely different concert. I started to get bored during the first extended jam (although it might have just been annoyance with the cloying pot smell that suddenly sprang from half a dozen different places...damn Hasidim), and then the guitarist started plucking a pop song, the drummer jumped in, and Matisyahu started freestyling over it -- well, not exactly freestyling so much as an impromptu rendition of the liturgical song "Yibaneh Ha'Mikdash," which roughly translates to "building the Temple."

I think the best songs alive are cover songs. Maybe it's because they stick around forever; maybe because they're the songs that are so good that they're addictive. That is, I think, where prayers com from. They're essentially cover songs that we perform every day.

I couldn't tell you why, but "Yibaneh" is the moment I realized that I really love what Matisyahu is doing. I've never been that big a fan of reggae, and though I've warmed to Jewish music, I still mostly feel like Jews and I live in two different worlds: they don't get me, and I don't get them. But that moment when he was screaming out the words -- words that most of the crowd probably didn't understand, and even more of them weren't paying attention to the meaning of -- I felt like I was in the middle of his lyrics and like I understood. There's a midrash that says that the Third Temple isn't going to be built by the Messiah; that we're going to have to start building it ourselves. Not to be *too* cliche, but it seems like Matisyahu's doing exactly that.



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* -- who is an amazing musician in his own right, and has a huge archive of concerts on mp3 here. I might write about his set later, but we'll see.