A Jew and a Muslim Walk into a Bar...

8:00 a.m. It's been 7 hours since last night ended -- and 3 hours since I woke up -- and I'm still shaking.

I set up a reading with Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of the Muslim punk novel The Taqwacores -- mostly, I confessed on stage, so that I had an excuse to meet him. My old religion teacher, S.H. Nasr, always used to say how different religions were just parallel paths to the same destination, but before I read Taqwacores, I was never convinced that anyone was taking a path remotely in the same direction as mine.

When I showed up, Mike and his friend were already there. He was apologetic -- "I don't think I'm going to read from Taqwacores tonight," he said. "Not sure if that throws off the theme of the evening, or not." Instead, he said he was going to read from Blue-Eyed Devil, his travelogue of Muslims in America. "There's this ritual I've been thinking about," he told us. "When Shi'a Muslims pray, you remember the battle of Karbala and remember the suffering of the third Imam, Imam Hussein, and you hit your chest."

Sometimes, he said, the beating can get intense. People praying themselves into a frenzy have been injured, and sometimes killed. "There's this part in Blue-Eyed Devil about the bed of nails," he finished. "I think I'm going to read that while I administer the blows to myself."

I nodded. I'm only a dozen pages into the book, but I knew what he was talking about. It's just like the Jewish al chet prayers on Yom Kippur, slamming our fists into our hearts. Easy stuff. Divergent religions, comparable practices. Yay, Nasr.

And anyway, it wouldn't be my first time with radical performance art. I mean, I spent five years living in San Francisco. Having a conversation with someone who was self-flagellating or immolating was practically coffee-table talk.

I went first. I read out of the sequel to my novel Losers, where Jupiter forgets it's Rosh Hashana and then runs into God. It started out being about forgiveness and repentance, but somehow he ended up talking about having crushes on girls and checking out girls through the mechitza in synagogue. I can't really explain it. That's just Jupiter.

Then Mike got up to read.

He started reading about going to visit the grandson of Malcolm X, who was incarcerated at the time, and talking with him about Islam and prison life. Somewhere, he transitioned to talking about the Muslim al-chet prayer* and describing it being administered -- it's not just a simple fist-tapping-heart; you raise your arm up all the way, and then slam your palm into your pectoral muscle. Mike talked about people bleeding beneath their shirts. Others just ripped off their shirts to feel the full brunt of the blows. As he read, those people by the bar who were just ordering a sandwich began to order quieter; the line for the monologue show got a little less monologuey.

His voice was really picking up steam now. He pulled off his shirt. We almost didn't notice; it seemed like the natural thing to come after talking about it.

Then he started to read about men throwing themselves down on a bed of nails -- small nails, thousands of them scattered on the ground. Which is when he picked up a plastic bag and scattered a tiny golden rain across the floor.

We craned. Thumbtacks. Literally hundreds of them. He gave the bag a final shake, tossed it aside, and then threw himself on the floor.

When he came up, they were sticking to his arm in droves. They actually stuck to his arm, lining it, kind of like a He-Man villain, or like Dr. Claw on Inspector Gadget. Then he threw himself down on his other side.

Somewhere in between being introduced and when the reading started, I talked to Mike's friend. When we met, he was eating the most out-of-control pasta I had ever seen, but he wore a purple silk shirt and managed to evade the volleys of tomato-sauce with gusto and aplomb. He told me that he was scripting the adaptation of Blue-Eyed Devil, a kind of meta-commentary of Michael Muhammad Knight on himself, exploring his own faith at the same time as he's supposed to be writing an authoritative guide of American Muslims' faith. It's all pretty incredible. Before the event, Mike murmured, in what we thought at the time was a joke, "Maybe tonight'll become a part of the movie." Now, in that meta-meta-everythingle zone of retrospect, I'm not sure about the joke part.

Much later, we showed up to see Raz Hartman, the rabbi from our yeshiva, who was visiting from Israel. He was supposed to be giving a lecture in an apartment on the Upper West Side. As soon as I got off the elevator, I could hear a piano-drum-and-violin jam. I booked it down the hall. Rabbi Raz was perched at the piano, swaying like a spring hurricane in Kansas. He was shockeling, that back-and-forth motion you do when you're praying, but wilder than anyone in America knew how. His fingers never left the keys, though, and like a tornado, he had a steady epicenter that he always returned to. It was a totally different kind of passion -- not the kind that pierced you like pins, but that held you in place like pins.

Same tools, different direction.


* - whose name I can't track down, although I found a fascinating article about the ritual itself

G-dcast: Hesta Prynn & Pinchas

The Daughters of Tzelophechad have the hardest-to-pronounce surname in the entire Torah. That isn't the reason that we asked rapper Hesta Prynn to talk about them in this week's G-dcast -- it's because the story of the Daughters is one of the most intense feminist-or-is-it? stories in the Torah, and we wanted to know her take on it.

The real reason that we asked Hesta is kind of twofold: one, I read an article by ethnomusicologist Mordechai Shinefield about how 2/3 of the hip-hop trio Northern State is Jewish -- a trio which my daughter was really into at the time. (She was six months old then. Now she's 16 months, and is more into They Might Be Giants, but still needs to get her hip-hop fix now and then.) They're also no strangers to my own CD player. So I wrote them up, said pretty please, and Ms. Hesta was incredibly receptive.

And so, without further ado, the Daughters themselves:

10 Things I Hate about Commandments

I'm a big proponent of making the Torah relevant for modern society and everyday life. Maybe it's my whole Orthodox Jew trip of believing that Torah was given to us as a gift. Maybe it's because I'm a writer, and I want to believe that the stories we tell have life beyond when we tell them, and that they can pertain to different people in different circumstances -- and that the Torah, as the greatest story of all, can apply to anyone, anywhere.

But I don't think I have any excuse for loving this video as much as I do. Except, possibly, that I have dreamt all my life of someone turning my book into the next Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

OK, so the addition of Samuel L. Jackson "as Principal Firebush" at the end is a bit of a stretch, and doesn't at all fit with the tight-as-anything leitmotif that the rest of the video established. But who doesn't love themselves some Samuel L.? He didn't even totally suck playing a one-eyed black Nazi in The Spirit.

(One more note: yes, it is creepy that the narrator says "we'll see who can get the girl" just as Basya -- otherwise known as Moses's freakin' ADOPTIVE MOTHER -- comes onscreen.)

Bowery Poetry Club tonight!

At tonight's Mimaamakim show, I might do something I've never done before, and read a d'var Torah. I promise, though, it will probably involve at least two of the following: crushes, interspacial travel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and robots.

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:

G-dcast: Flaming Carnivorous Snakes

Yes, this stuff is in the Torah. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible: I'm not even talking about midrash or Mishna or anything. There it is, in regular black and white -- the raised black ink and veined white parchment of the Torah, that is. I feel like a bit of a Torah ignoramus admitting this, but I never realized that this story existed in the Torah until the amazing Malki Rose brought it to our attention.

At first she came to us with a script that tried to cram in everything that happens in Chukat -- Aaron and Miriam dying, Moses striking the rock, the Red Heifer, as well as a bunch of the Israelites' military victories over Sichon and Og and Arad. All in under three minutes, of course. Sarah and I pulled her aside and had a talking to. The talking to basically went like this: If we try to animate half this stuff, our animators' hands are going to be falling off.

So, I asked, which is your favorite part? Which part speaks to you the most?

"Oh, that's easy," she replied. (If you couldn't tell, her voice has this great Australian brogue.) "The flaming snakes."

Sarah's and my jaws hit the ground in synchronization.

The flaming snakes?

Yep -- the flaming snakes. Go see for yourself.