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From my cousin Rom: Separated at birth?
Okay, I was uneasy about this one. Because you guys know me as the big tough punk of G-dcast, and this is SO SWEET AND HIPPY. But it's pretty damn praiseworthy, and Chanan makes it so beautiful that it's kind of inevitable how good this is. If I do say so myself. And it's possibly one of the most abstract G-dcasts we've done, for a just-as-abstract parsha, which led to some interesting discussions about animation, and about the Torah. And now that you're watching it, hopefully, it will lead to some more.
I have no idea what's going on here. But a secular Israeli in a Spider-Man outfit and a shtreimel -- who seems to be accompanied by a giant llama and the Village People -- singing the Yiddish alphabet...well, you can't not watch it.
It's hard to top a beatbox harmonica Shema, but the first 3 seconds of Ekev really do it. Just the post-bris expression is what my 10-year-old cousin likes to anthropomorphize as an "OMG moment."
Okay, I'm not Stevie Wonder, and chances are you aren't, either -- but let's not forget the grand Jewish tradition of the Song of Songs. If writing a bad Jewish poem is too hard for you -- or if you're only into good Jewish poetry, or something strange like that -- then Tu B'Av is for you. It's a day of love, one week to the day after we mourned the destruction of the Temple, when young single Jews dress up and wear white. In ancient times, they all met up in the field on the outskirts of the city. Today, we, uh, go to singles bars. 
First, get a Twitter account. Then tweet a special message to a special someone. Remember to include the tag #15av in your message. We'll gather up the messages and vote on the best ones.
Three winners will receive a copy of In the Fever of Love: An Illumination of the Song of Songs by Shefa Gold, a book that's guaranteed to get you in the Tu B'Av mood.
So start the tweets, and keep 'em coming! The contest starts this Tuesday at sundown and goes till Wednesday at dusk, just like the holiday -- so load the love cannons up, and start firing.
Last night I was working at our local co-op market. The crowd there is pretty diverse -- Hasidic Jews, Caribbean immigrants, Park Slope people with $50 t-shirts (ironic, baby, ironic!)...and anyone else in search of good, cheap food. Once a month, I wait in front of the store in a loud orange vest and carry people's groceries. Sometimes you get some good conversations. Other times, you can't believe the people you're talking to.
We made conversation for a few minutes, and I could tell she was gunning up to ask me something. (When you've got a beard and sidelocks and a t-shirt, it's only a matter of time until people ask, in one phrasing or another, what's up with you.) She prefaced it: "Now, don't feel you have to answer this..."
Oh, boy. This was going to be a good one.
She told me how she was a God-fearing, church-going woman, and she believed in every word of the Bible ("Old and New," she said). And she didn't think homosexuality was right. But what, she asked me, do I think about that man in the homosexual club?
"The gay club murders, you mean?" I said. "In Tel Aviv?"
She nodded. "I mean, I know those people have it comin'," she said. "But that thing that happened, it just seems...wrong."
This next part, I don't understand at all. I could have told her how some of the holiest people I know are gay; how the most devout Christian I've ever met was a gay man who believes that Jesus made him gay as one more way of accentuating how we'll never truly understand the mysteries of Creation, and how one of the most Godly books that's been written this generation, Wrestling with God and Men, is about the incomparable onus of being queer and religious, and was written by Rabbi Steve Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi and a gay man. Or I could just tell her how I helped start the straight-gay alliance in my high school and how a group of tranny boys showed me that being a man was okay (or just showed her the book I wrote about it).
But I didn't.
Instead, I said, "Of course it's wrong -- it's just as wrong as opening fire on people because they're spending money on the Sabbath or wearing the wrong color of clothes." I told her I believed that God made everyone the way they are for a reason, and it's not up to any of us to try and decide what that reason is -- it's between them and God."
She went "Mm-hmm" -- that kind of conversational combination of amen and keep on talking that I learned about when I was doing fieldwork in college at black Baptist churches and haven't heard anywhere else. "It's like Sodom and Gomorrah," she said. "People there were doin' all kind of Lord knows what, and God took care of them. And I know that day's coming, but I ain't gonna be the one to tell 'em that. He told Abraham and his nephew to leave that city, and only after they left, God swept down the destruction."
I said, "Who knows what God's really thinking? God's got an agenda. He didn't put us down here to be the Angel of Death; He's got angels for that. All He told us was to love our neighbors."
He? Since when had I referred to God as He? And why was I agreeing with her?
At this point, my brain split up into a few parts. Part of me was freaked that she was asking me as a typical Orthodox Jew, and I was supposed to answer like some sort of spokesman or something. And then part of me saw it as a teaching opportunity, like I was undercover as a gay-people-supporter and I could subvert all her bigoted views and show her the One True Path.
And then there was a part of me that wasn't being subversive at all, but was instead trying to reconcile my own personal beliefs about homosexuality -- as a person -- with the beliefs of everyone around me. And, perhaps, with the beliefs that I am supposed to hold.
And I realized, I'm kind of answering her truthfully. How do I know what God believes about gay people? How does anyone? For all I know, maybe God really did give the queer gene to certain people in order to test their willpower. That sure as hell doesn't sound like the God I believe in -- but, then again, I really firmly believe that God is both more powerful and more clever than anything that we give God credit for.
So, yeah -- I didn't say any of that to her. And she didn't say much more to me -- just took her bags from my hands, nodded like she agreed with me, and started to descend to the subway.
"I think you're right," she said. She'd stopped on the third step down, turned around, and cocked her head, that universal gesture of going into Deep Thought mode. "The Bible doesn't say 'Abraham destroyed the city of Sodom,' it says that God did. I'm going to think about that."
With that, she disappeared into the belly of the subway system, leaving me stunned and thinking. Of all the lessons I could have gotten from her, this was what I least expected: using texual analysis to combat hate -- or, at least, to learn how to hate more lovingly.
She was absolutely right. Man, if she walked into the club in Tel Aviv, I bet she would've given those people a hug. And possibly taught them a thing or two about how to wear floral pastels.
And more illuminatingly, I think she hit upon the basic flaw of fundamentalists -- or, at least, fundamentalists like the Tel Aviv gay club murderer: They really never read what the Bible actually says.
When user-testing the Tagged Tanakh, the Jewish Publication Society's attempt to user-navigate the Bible, my first reaction was, this is the mother of all blog -- and the logical next step in human technology. When I worked as a trend forecaster, we had a maxim that started, "If Hewlett-Packard only knew what Hewlett-Packard knows," which effectively meant that big corporations have no idea how to fathom the entirety of the knowledge that's already at their fingertips. If there was a way to do that to the Bible -- not just as a simple search engine, but as a real, organic, multi-reference work that ties together the entire body of human religious knowledge -- it could, without hyperbole, rock the socks off of academia.
The thing is, the Tagged Tanakh might do exactly that.
JT Waldman, the Tanakh's creator, sat me down at his laptop and told me to start out easy. "Search for a word," he said. "Any word?" I asked, typing in "nose ring."
We only received one result, in Isaiah, which troubled both of us a little. "We're working on the search feature," he explained. Attempting the variation "nose-ring" with a hyphen got us what we expected -- Rebecca's gift upon meeting Isaac for the first time; the women of the Children of Israel donating their jewelry to create the Golden Calf. This didn't bother me as much as it should have. It was a minor glitch, which JT said would be fixed before the official launch; besides, Google has accustomed me to searching for variations more or less automatically, like "chazan" when your desired search doesn't turn up much for "hazzan."
But that was only the beginning. "Tag it," JT encouraged me. He showed me a few options: I could read commentary on the verses, write my own commentary, or tag the phrase -- that is, I could sort it by applying a label (such as "jewelry," "gold," or "punk-rock accouterments in the Torah") and grouped it with other similar instances in the Tanakh. I could use a tag that already existed, such as "ritual objects" (since nose-rings were thought to mark engaged women in early Sumerian societies), or make my own, like the aforementioned punk-rock tag.
I went with both. Then I went to a more frequently-visited section -- Exodus 9, one of those "Let My People Go" chapters. I clicked on the lemma view, which displayed notes and annotations by scholars, and came across a note by Elaine Adler Goodfriend (identified as a "scholar," the highest possible designation on the site). On the biblical passage "the hand of the Lord will strike your livestock," she'd written, "A letter from Ugarit refers to pestilence as the 'hand of god/s'." Not the absolute most insightful thing I've ever read, but still pretty insightful. (It led me to Googling "Ugarit," in any case.) Then I went back to the text itself, with all the phrases that had notes on them highlighted. It felt like I'd hit paydirt -- like one of those Internet mazes where you're confronted with a thousand different links, and you want to click on them all.
Okay, so, not. But there *is* a movie coming out called "Losers," and it's not based on a novel about comic book geeks, but it is based on a comic book.
I just took a walk outside on the rare lunchtime spent in the company of fresh air -- well, as fresh as it gets in urban Manhattan, anyway -- and I can report back, with almost no mean degree of inaccuracy, that this is going to be the summer of the Michael Jackson t-shirt.
And then I start wondering, where did we get this idea to wear our heroes on t-shirts in the first place? You didn't find the Children of Israel wearing I Heart Moses t-shirts, and how many times did he save their lives? More than Michael Jackson did, for damn sure.
Recently, in Israel, a clothing manufacturer started selling baby t-shirts that bore Rabbi Akiva's summary of the Torah, the words V'ahavta l'recha kimocha -- literally, "love your neighbor like yourself" -- written across the bosom. As much as Rabbi Akiva probably didn't linger too long on the free-love double entendre of his core principle, it's not a bad thing to go spreading to the rest of the universe. And, hey, it encourages various rereadings and reinterpretations...which is the essence of Torah commentary in the first place, right?
When I started working at MJL, there was a dress code. I suppose most day jobs have one. But, being as though I'd spent the past three years doing single days at law offices and anywhere that needed something typed, I wasn't used to having to do something that didn't require my one tie and single pair of fancy pants.
I learned pretty quickly, however, that the MJL dress code didn't cover much -- basically, it was no t-shirts with writing on it. It sounded pretty simple at first (I mean, the last thing that fosters a productive work environment is an ALOHA FROM MAUI shirt, or one of those ITHACA IS GORGES joke t-shirts that nobody really understands but everyone spends hours looking at, trying to figure out) but I soon came to have a different understanding of the rule. Wearing a word on your chest, whether it's "Sexy" or "Rock Star" or "I Voted for Fred Thompson," it's making a statement. It's limiting you. Even if the word is as simple as "hope," it's still setting a direction for your day. And the beauty of us as human beings is, our days can go anywhere.
Which is the biggest reason (though certainly not the only one) that I'm not going to wear a "V'ahavta l'recha kimocha" t-shirt. But even if there's nothing across my chest except for a blank shirt and a couple buttons, you'll know exactly what I mean.
Husband-and-wife team Rachel Harvrelock and Yuri Lane did this week's G-dcast. I really think it might be the best one yet. Do I say that a lot? Well, I mean it. Evidence: this does mark the first appearance of a capella gospel beatboxing in a G-dcast. And Old Man Moses is making me a little jumpy, after being used to Dynamic Puffy-Beard Moses, but I think I like him. He reminds me of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. And that swelling of the beatbox just as Rachel fades from her own words into the words of the Torah...man, I get chills.
If you haven't schooled yourself on The Goldbergs -- one of the first American sitcoms, a virtual one-woman show created by writer/producer/director/star Gertrude Berg, who won the first Emmy Award for Best Actress ever given -- there's no better time than now to start.
awesome slate of guest appearances -- including the director, Aviva Kempner, as well as Mrs. Berg's grandson (who appears in the film, and tells some great stories), and the granddaughter of the actor who played "Uncle David" (of course) -- to go with screenings of the movie. Today was funny and sad and moving and poignant and pretty awesome, all told, the kind of day that makes you question why you do what you do, and then shows you by smacking you squarely in the head. Here's the song I'd listen to if I listened to music, but it's still part of that time period where we don't listen to music, so I'm dwelling in the silence instead. Which might be just as well.
First was Young Adult Writers Drinks Night, which are definitely my 5 favorite words in the English language to say together. laughing and making merry with david the editor and coe booth and other good folks. and then i looked up from my drink and saw Richard Nash, who (until last month) was editor and director of my other publishers, Soft Skull Press. And then Anne and Denise, who took over Soft Skull, showed up too, and I had this uneasy realization that, if someone dropped a bomb on that bar, I would have no editors left in the world.
I went to the B&N on 66th Street and did a covert signing. (All they had was Candy, but hey, one book signed is one book maybe-sold.) I don't know if it was a good sign or a bad sign or what. Asked the guy who worked there if they could order more, and he said he'd try to remember to ask his boss in the morning.
Then I went to the Mimaamakim poetry text study. It was a pretty amazing feat -- 80 or so Orthodox folks going over Lucille Clifton and Seamus Heaney, analyzing their words like Torah and ripping them apart like Talmud. It was kind of glorious. Even the painful parts (well, the parts that were painful to an English kid like me) were glorious. People don't just read poetry these days. Especially Orthodox people. Except, they do.
As we were packing up, two girls came up and asked if I was me, and told me how they'd both read Goldbergs and about their class projects in yeshiva and they had no idea there were other people in the universe like them. I wanted to tell them all about Michael Muhammad Knight and how he hadn't known there were other punk Muslims in the universe -- and then I realized, I was the same way with punk Jews. This was kind of my signal flare to the universe, my "are you out there?" call. And, dammit, sometimes people reply.
Yes: it was a good night.
Now I should be asleep. But I'm waiting up for my family to get home. My family! I wonder what Hava would say to that.
Sometimes it's better not to be disgruntled or disillusioned or distrustful and, when a bottle tells you to drink it, just gulp it down.
edit: not as good quality. but at least it exists.
Dear Tim Burton: We can so be friends again.
My wife and kid are out of town. Which means that I end up staying out past 6:30 p.m., my daughter's bedtime, and wreaking havoc on the town. To me, blotting out how much I miss them by consuming maddening quantities of alcohol is an expression of love.
So that was how I ended up telling the erstwhile Frum Satire to meet me at a bar in midtown for the most random of convocations, which I'd been invited to by a well-meaning friend: a happy hour for Jewish professionals for the explicit purpose of social networking.
I arrived before Frum, and slipped in unobtrusively, figuring there'd be someone I knew, or at least someone who thought I looked interesting enough to talk to. I was stopped at the door and asked what I was doing there, and whether I was invited -- it was a networking event, but strictly for Jewish professionals -- "that is," I was told, "people in JCC's, nonprofit organizations, that sort of thing." "Oh, dude, I'm totally that," I said, thinking I could brush past, get my nametag, and score some free falafel-based snacks.
But I wasn't so fast.
"Oh, that's interesting!" she deflected me again. "Who are you affiliated with?"
At this point, I name-dropped MJL -- which caused everyone to smile a bit ("I use that site all the time!") and gush over us. (Forgive my immodesty, but: Score!) At this point, I had a bit of an existential moment, realizing for the first time that day -- because I sometimes forget -- that I look like such a hardcore Jew with my beard and payos, and they might have thought I was just stopping by to eat their nosh. Which, after all, I was. What they didn't realize was, i was
I was pretty freely admitted. But then my pocket began vibrating. It was Frum calling. He was right around the corner.
So we had a twenty-second debate. Stay or go? We were by far the least well-dressed people there (-1). We were both artists (-1), and therefore had no grounding or no interest to these people (-2). Except, possibly, that they might want to book us to do a show (+2). And maybe invite us to more events (+1). With more free food (+5)...
This obviously took longer than twenty seconds. What really broke up the argument was when an Israeli in a t-shirt and painter's cap came up to me, started calling me tzadik, which basically means "saint," and asking whether he could get me a "kos plasteek." Frum and the person we were talking to, who was involved in several Zionist organizations but apparently didn't speak Hebrew, looked at us, baffled, for a translation.
"He asked if I want a beer in a plastic cup," I told them.
Because, in my experience -- and in all seriousness -- no one treats Orthodox Jews better than totally 100% secular Israelis. Calling me a saint was totally ironic, of course -- secular Israelis do this often, and it always is -- but it was an even higher compliment than if he'd meant it literally. It means that he considers us close enough to make a joke, and he considers me good-natured enough to take it well. Which, of course, I did.
I explained back at him in my bad Hebrew, and then translating for everyone else in bad English, that you don't need to worry about drinking cold beverages in a plastic cup; that they'll still be kosher. And then I asked him what he was drinking -- and what was he drinking from? It was a mojito. The ultimate Israeli drink: alcohol, soda, and fresh chopped-up mint. And he was drinking it from a Mason jar.
That settled it: we were staying.
It was a good time, even if the food wasn't kosher. Inside, we really did meet some pretty cool folks. Someone who was in charge of the Meira chapter of Hadassah, whose slogan on their cards was "We're not JUST your grandma's hadassah!" The person who runs Limmud NY, who I'd been email-harassing for a year to have me come speak, but who was actually very nice and not offended at all in person. And the guy who runs a travel blog called YeahThatsKosher.com. And then the awesome Sarah Chandler showed up, webmaster of the equally awesome JewSchool. She told me, "I wasn't going to show up, but I figured there was some reason I needed to go."
Yeah, I said to her. I know exactly what you mean.
The New Yorker, everybody's favorite highbrow magazine, likes to drag their heels in the mud with the rest of us from time to time. Check out their new illustration regarding Britney Spears' ostensible conversion to Judaism:
Just back from LA, and expecting that I will get a full night of sleep one of these days. The G-dcast fiesta was totally awesome. I spoke about G-dcast and the process and the amazing people we work with, and everyone kept clapping when I showed videos, which was weird, since I wasn't sure whether to bow or thank them, or just to tell them that I'll pass it on the next time I see Marcus Freed or Malki Rose or Stereo Sinai.
But the participants were great, and we had some amazing talks -- about my being Orthodox, about what we all thought of the Torah, and about why we were here in the first place. And this is what I didn't show anyone -- Shawn Landres's great G-dcast that takes us right into the Book of Devarim, the last of our 5 rounds of Torah this year.
I'm reporting to you live on location from the airport lobby. At 6:00 AM, the place gleams with a shine usually reserved for window-washing commercials and baby's backsides. Even when it's hygienic, it still has that suspicious airport smell. I couldn't tell you why. I think it's just part of the way G*d created the world.
Anyway, it's not 6:00 AM anymore. It's a little past 9, and the place is a lot more filled and a lot less gleamy. And I'm in Terminal 5, the JetBlue terminal, instead of Delta, where my flight is, because people who fly JetBlue look less gloomy and because there is free (and non-hiccupy) internet.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
And to try and scrounge for another seat. Now, I have anxiety issues. At 7:00, there was a flight that they couldn't get me on because they tried too late. At 7:45, same thing. Eventually, it was 8:30, I still didn't have a ticket, and I was getting dangerously aware that the latest time I could possibly pray was rapidly creeping up.
So what's a boy to do? What, indeed, except go and throw the politest, most courteous s#!+-fit that he could. And smile politely afterward and explain that he needs a ticket.
Sometimes, all you need to know is how to speak the language. Not more than five minutes later, ticket in hand, I sat, confident and assured that I still had nearly six hours to kill before my flight, and unwrapped my talis and start to pray.
This was the point where I noticed something was amiss. People were staring at me. And not in that hey-didn't-you-write-a-book-I-read way.
I started swaying into the prayers, trying politely to ignore it. Then I took out my tefillin and started wrapping the black straps around my arm.
That was when they started looking at me like I was about to blow something up.
It's pretty understandable, actually. I mean, I have nervous and paranoid fantasies all the time. I'm always thinking in terms of a worst-case scenario. (Like, for instance, whenever we're headed for an airport, I just know we're going to miss our flight. Totally baseless, and it never actually happens...whoops.) When some dude who looks like an alien with upside-down antennae covers himself in a white cloth and begins wrapping possible-dynamite-but-it's-actually-leather around himself, there aren't too many things that it could be.
And so, if I saw myself praying in an airport, I'd probably think something was up with that, too.
I tried to ignore it. I couldn't, of course, but I had a script in front of me in the shape of a prayerbook, and I just tried to do the best that I could.
And then I turned -- as I often do -- to Lost. Itta's been watching the whole series nonstop, and last night, in the middle of a stakeout (in a boat, watching for signs of the evil people who might not be evil...oh, never mind), one of the characters -- Sayid, the former Iraqi soldier turned US spy -- whipped out his prayer mat and started praying.
It was so nonchalant, and so much a non-event, that it almost seemed natural. The same way that the characters on Friends were always running to and from each other's apartments without knocking, or that a good friend uses the bathroom in your house without asking where it is, Sayid just took five minutes to do his Allahu Akbars. 
And, by the way: JetBlue is not always the cheeriest terminal around. For the past 15 minutes, they've been playing all of George Michael's most heart-wrenching synth ballads. And I'm not even supposed to be listening to music in the first place.
Mayim just sent out this puzzling email, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to publicize it or not, but she is awesome, and so I am. Any time she's on TV, it's better than her not being on TV.
Which is why you should all watch Saving Grace tonight. When the one and only Mayim Bialik is going to guest-star as, I believe, a Satmar Hasidic Jew living in Williamsburg.
i am certain you are dying to know what i would look like as a chassidic jew and on 'saving grace' on TNT tonight you can find out. here's a hint: no make-up, snood over my hair, very roomy clothing.
so tomorrow morning, please don't ask me about if i liked it.
just enjoy a laugh at my expense.
my upcoming role on secret life of the american teenager will be much more exciting i promise.
Not to get too furry on you people, but my friend, collaborator, and ex-housemate Ethan Young's comic Tails just got written up in a big way in Comic Book Resources. Like the reviewer said: "It's a largely autobiographical comic about dating and cats. None of those things sound like something I'd be interested in....but yet in less than two dozen pages, Young charmed me with his drawing style and his jubilantly downtrodden protagonist."
It's an appropriate sentiment: people can write stories about the most esoteric things and make them universally-relatable, and people can write stories about walking down the street that no one in the universe will relate to or care about. Ethan falls squarely in the first camp.
(And Ethan and I are working on something together, too...I can't say what, yet, except that it's nothing like you expect and it's going to be awesome.)
Here, check out a page -- and then go read the rest:
Sixteen days to go, that is -- out of a total of 21. During the Three Weeks, we're not supposed to listen to music...leading people like me to drive ourselves insane. This is about when I usually reach my breaking point. For a perpetual headphone-head like me, who likes to walk around with a soundtrack to everything, it's hard to just give up my iTunes -- let alone, the 15 CDs that I always carry around, because I am Old School like that.
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Finding something good to listen to during the Three Weeks: How not to get 'Lost' |
Over Shabbos, I read my screenplay.
I know -- three logical responses to this:
* So what? You wrote it.
* What, you don't remember it?
* It's been, what, a month?
And the answer to all three is: Actually, I'd completely forgotten it existed in the first place. I'd spent five months trying to write this script, and writing something -- a thing that, at times, I thought was the script -- only to realize, once the producer (also known as the guy who's bankrolling this whole affair) had flown to Spain to meet with the director and was deep into plotting out WHICH character should be in exactly WHICH place, and whether scenes that were supposed to be filmed out deep in the country would be filmed in the suburbs or a vacant lot in the city, that the movie they were going to be making....well, it was going to be a completely different movie.
What happened exactly was, the day I sent it away, I wasn't completely happy with one of the minor characters. And that character ended up having their own movie. And that movie...well, 15 pages came out that day.
The producer -- who, ordinarily, has a reputation for being a calm and reasonable gentleman -- yelled at me over an international number. His voice sounded more like the Matrix than an actual voice, but the meaning was still clear. "WE. NEED. A. SCRIPT."
"Seven days," I begged. "Give me seven days."
And, in those seven days, all the thoughts that I'd been pushing to the back of my head for the past of those five months came rushing to the front of my head, and the sides of my head, and filling the rest of it, too.
So I wrote it. Put it aside for a week. Realized the ending was wrong, and that there needed to be a scene that there wasn't, and rewrote that part. And, with that, I handed it over to the people who know much more about the visual moving image than I ever will.
That was a month ago. Friday night, everyone else crashed out early, and I found myself wondering what had happened to my main character. And I found myself reading it. The entire thing.
I used to read parts of Never Mind the Goldbergs when it came out. Candy, too. Losers, I haven't read at all. But I've never actually
((yeah, i'm not sure what happened to the end of this...but i figured it was important to post.))
Today is the 17th of Tammuz, the day when five big catastrophes happened in Judaism:
* Moses smashed the original Ten Commandments;
* The daily tamid offering was not offered in the Temple for the first time since it was constructed;
* The walls of Jerusalem were breached by Roman armies;
* A Torah was burned by a Roman general; and
* An idol was erected in the temple.
Last night was singer, pianist, and storyteller Rabbi Raz Hartman's last night in town. I got there late (I had a show of my own, and I was running late, and on low energy. But when I heard Raz singing, I bolted down the hall. (Being as though this was a fancy Upper West Side apartment building, with single-and-well-jobbed Jews all over the place, it was probably the first time the hallway had ever seen bolting.) It was a sudden rush of adrenaline, a memory of the first time I sat at his table for Shabbos. There's probably something in Hasidus that talks about the need for sudden devekut, but I don't know the quote. All I knew is, I needed to be there, right now.
And it was a joyous time. It was a really good time. I used to stay on the Upper West Side a lot, back when I was single and weird. I went to a bunch of social gatherings, and they were almost uniformly uncomfortable -- lots of "you're a professional poet? No, but what about for money?" -- and I was almost ashamed of my initial reaction that night, which was to gloat that I was the only male present (bli ayin hara) with a full head of hair.
But I pushed it to the side. Oh, there were the bankers and the lawyers and the people with their shirts tucked in and girls who wouldn't look twice at me, but I have my own girl, and I have my own job. And Raz was singing songs about rebuilding Jerusalem, and telling everyone in the audience that we need to come over for Shabbos dinner when we're in Israel. And it was so awesome and holy and joyful that it was hard to remember that we were on the precipice of a fast day, and that the next three weeks were the anniversary of the amazing city that we're singing and storying about getting ransacked and destroyed by the Roman army.
Occasionally, here at MyJewishLearning, we get in theological debates. (It is a Jewish website, after all.) When I wrote our article on The Three Weeks, I originally included a concluding paragraph that talks about the coming of the Messiah, and how the Jerusalem Talmud prophecies that the Messiah was born on the climactic day of the Three Weeks, on Tisha B'Av. It was cut out -- because, as one editor noted, some people don't believe in the Messiah.
Yeah, I'm Orthodox, and saying that you don't believe in the Messiah is like saying you don't believe in fairies -- you're either a heartless bastard or a 10-year-old boy with something to prove. The Messiah and the World to Come represent hope, and goodness, and that one day we'll have better things to worry about than bills and nuclear war.
To my surprise, though, they let me keep in a quote from the Munkacs Rebbe, who is totally awesome (and, by the way, is a cousin of our site's good friend Dan Sieradski) which closes out the article:
The Talmud says, "When the month of Av enters, one should decrease in joy." The Hasidic rebbe Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira (1861-1937) said that, though the Talmud says to "decrease in joy," it should be read, "decrease...in joy." In other words, though it is proper to mourn, even in that mourning, we should do so joyously, knowing that better times are ahead.
That, I hope, is a sentiment that everyone can get with. Whether they're balding or not.
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. 
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
How geeky and sixth-grade USY nightmare does that sound?
Okay, so Facebook is collecting your private data. And it's going to use it to sell your contact information to marketers. Who didn't know that already, or at least suspect it? When any automated website asks you for your five favorite bands, it doesn't want to know in order to agonize about how cool Regina Spektor is with you. It wants to sell you other music that sounds like Regina Spektor.
If, on the other hand, I join a website that fits with my individual identity or my musical tastes or my personal convictions (vegetarian networks, for instance), I can limit myself to associating only with people who I'm actually interested in and care what they have to say...and I'll feel like my ad money is going to people I support (in this case, goth geeks) instead of Mark Zuckerberg, who I just feel kind of gross about at this point.
In addition to VampireFreaks, there are social networks for Christians, vegetarians, and even pets. So why haven't Jewish social networks ever taken off? 
Is that the real reason that Jews don't join Jewish social networks -- because they're so small, you might actually have to run into someone?
For my own part, I'll save my Jewish networking for the same user-platform my parents are on -- the local synagogue -- and use social networking for the things that I really need computers for, like writing protest letters to congressmen and finding new music. In the meantime, if anyone comes looking, I'll be on Vampire Freaks. Want to join my cult?
It's official: we got our first Lubavitcher Rebbe video as a wedding souvenir last night.
This afternoon's two lead topics on the BBC:
My story, "Cacta," is an intro to a bigger story about a girl who gets cactus-based superpowers, a set of superpowers which is both way more cool and way more awkward than it sounds. Anyway, the reviewers liked it:
"The art on this one is very solid, with a rather striking splash page...My favorite part of this story, however, was not the super heroics, but our young heroine's inner dialogue as she struggles not to flaunt her deeds at school the next day."
I'm counting it as a solid vote in my comic writing ability, even if my first and last names both got misspelled in the review. The other stories have more than a fair helping of ass-kickery, and it's pretty awesome to be included with them. My one caveat: I'm a little uneasy about the title of the anthology, Lady Fight Comics, although I suppose it's technically the exact opposite of saying that girls can't fight. (I actually tried to propose another story for it called Lady Fight Club, but that got shot down...probably deservedly so. Although, if anyone wants to illustrate a short comic script about 1950s housewives and Fight Club, give me a holla.) The issue is out, now, in comic shops and on IndyPlanet: order it here.
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.
This is the best birthday present I've gotten all year. 
And -- uh -- says them all in cute, random metaphors and rhyming couplets and sweet, sweet melodies.
After the meandering intro of "The Calculation" -- a good, mid-tempo, semi-funked-out song about relationships, technology, and emotional indifference -- we get a virtual onslaught of Regina with the instant hookiness, smileyness, and spine-tingling anticipation of the piano chords that lead into "Eet."
The song might be named for its homonym, or it might be the way Spektor writes down her own whimsical non-word singing on paper. Then, when the drums come in -- "You spend half of your life/trying to fall behind/using your headphones to drown out your mind" -- the song becomes simultaneously triumphant and snarky. And it's especially victorious when you consider it's a song about hipster kids who are so preoccupied with looking cool that they forget how to dance. (That's what I think it's about, anyway.) Really, it's a self-defeating argument -- by the time you're done analyzing, you're hopping up and down in your desk chair, anyway.
A few weeks ago, I posted from Regina Spektor's new video, "Laughing With." It's been seized upon and passed around a fair bit among the bloggy folks, but I don't think any of us have really given as much credence to the lyrics as they deserve.
No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet
So freakin' true. And yet, if this wasn't being sung within the context of an MTV video with cool effects and a Harry Potter-like Cloak of Invisibility, we'd probably freak out and call the writer a zealot or a fundamentalist.
But Spektor always likes to close her songs abruptly, which drove me crazy when "Better" was on the radio, or when I listened to her songs out of sequence 
"Two Birds" is the natural offset to "Laughing With," a parable about two birds that don't trust each other. The chorus, "I'll believe it all/There's nothing I won't understand/I'll believe it all/I won't let go of your hand," speaks to our natural tendency to distrust each other, to get cold and clam up and retreat into our own little worlds.
To one extent or another, artists are all recluses. We hate other people. We distrust them and fear them and don't want to trust our ideas with them, preferring instead to remain in our own little universes that we draw and write around ourselves. Again, witness the "Laughing With" video...or just try to talk to me while I'm writing in my notebook. And then, on the other side of the spectrum, we're trying more than anything to understand the way people work, and get inside their heads, and to create a song or a story that's bigger than ourselves.
I think what I love most about Regina Spektor is that she really gets both of these things. And both of them, she does so well.
Our awesome filmmaker friend Sonja Kroop and her puppet Krumpet just entered a contest to get a 6-month gig as the social networking director of a wine factory. If she wins, she gets to live on a vineyard for six months -- plus, she is insanely talented as a director. To vote for her video, go to the Murphy-Goode Wine site and vote for it. (You have to give your email to confirm, but that's the only thing they use it for.) Or just watch it here -- and, yes, I'm pretty sure the only reason she made that Manischewitz joke is so I'd post it:
This week's G-dcast makes me really happy. Not the idea of Korach rebelling, or the whole thing where the earth itself swallows up 250 people...I just think it looks really cool. And I wrote the curriculum to be all about good rebelling vs. bad rebelling.
Or, like axiom I once heard: In other religions, if you question authority, they call you a heretic. In Judaism, if you question authority, they call you a rabbi.
I wasn't going to blog about this for another few months, since it's not going on sale until February, but Holly Black's new book The Poison Eaters has had me on the edge of my chair since the subway ride to work 3 hours ago, and it keeps pulsing in my head like a vein about to aneurysm -- it's that mercilessly good. The first story, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtowm," is kind of about vampires, but they're more like zombies. They're bloodthirsty, teeth-baring, flesh-chomping...which is actually what vampires used to be like, back in the Old World.
I almost always hate short stories. Short stories that are plot-based ignore the main character. Short stories that are character-based are almost exclusively the domain of characters stumbling around in search of a plot. Here, character and plot are suffused, and there's a hyperactive emotional terseness that creeps up on you and freezes you in place. This happens the exact moment that we learn the truth about vampirism in this world -- it's transmitted by blood, but it doesn't take hold of its victim until she tastes blood herself:
It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person's pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.
Aaah. In the first three pages, our perception of the main character switches from a slut to lovesick to cold, calculating, a kind of teen goth-girl Artful Dodger in fishnets. And that's just the setup. The execution is...well, an execution.
Can I tell you how much I can't wait to finish the rest of this book?
There. I just did. February be damned.
The new PresenTense magazine is out, and with it is a review of Losers that's more like a critical analysis. I didn't know this was going to happen until it showed up on my doorstep, and now I feel gleeful in the way, I guess, that authors do when people read way more into a book than you ever thought you were writing into it:
It is easy to empathize with Jupiter, the awkwardly-named main character of the novel who struggles through adolescence. Jupiter—who immigrated to Philadelphia with his family as part of the Jewish mass exodus from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—is concerned with his ever-present Russian accent, preoccupied with the opposite sex, and keen on hiding the fact that he lives in a working-class neighborhood.
The book starts with the seemingly innocuous line, “I lost my accent over a long weekend in ninth grade.” For Jupiter, the question of language is central to his self-perception, where the key to being popular is speaking proper English. Despite his best efforts—and some success —in “sounding American,” he nonetheless faces barriers in his quest to fit in. Indeed, Jupiter’s attitudes toward the spoken word formulate one of the more poignant themes in the novel.
(read more)
Just finished doing up the press release for my and Michael Muhammad Knight's reading at the 92Y Tribeca. If you know anywhere that might want to write about this, then please let me know!
~~~
Michael Muhammad Knight, author of the Muslim punk novel The Taqwacores, and Matthue Roth, author of the Orthodox Jewish punk novel Never Mind the Goldbergs and the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go, will read together at the 92Y Tribeca on July 8.
This event, the first of its kind, will feature both authors onstage individually and together, reading from their work and talking about what it means to be religious, and what it means to be punk. The film version of The Taqwacores (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html) will be released later this year.
Michael Muhammad Knight & Matthue Roth
92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson St.
July 8, 2009
7:00 PM
free!
I don't know why I thought that I.B. Singer died before the 20th century. Maybe I was mixing up the exotic, Eastern European ghetto, pre-indoor-bathroom locales of his stories with the land he actually lived in, the America to which he immigrated in the year (uh, quick...consult our I.B. Singer biography to pretend I know what I'm talking about...) 1935 -- smack in the middle of the New Deal and well after cars and indoor plumbing were invented. 
Yentl was originally a 1962 short story entitled "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," written by Mr. Singer. Upon publication, it was immediately snatched up in a bidding war -- as this timeline depicts -- with the winner being one Ms. Barbra Streisand, who by then was already a recording star. In the intervening time between the purchase of the script and the film's release, Singer was commissioned to write a screenplay. He ended up with a 120-page, 2-hour work that he called "a very long short story"...which was deemed unusable by Hollywood. (Incidentally, one other thing that happened between Ms. Streisand's purchase of the rights and the film's debut: the release of her record "A Christmas Album," on which Barbra sings "Silent Night," the Lord's Prayer, and "O Little Town of Bethlehem.")
It wasn't until years later, in 1984, that Singer interviewed himself in the pages of the New York Times.
While still attempting to maintain a noble bearing ("I did not think that Miss Streisand was at her best in the part of Yentl....She got much, perhaps too much advice and information from various rabbis, but rabbis cannot replace a director"), Singer systematically takes down the Queen of Pop, aspect by aspect, until the film version of his book is a smoking pile of charred ash on a soundstage whose only resemblance to the shtetls of old is that they were both completely eviscerated.
Q: Did you enjoy the singing?
A: Music and singing are not my fields. I did not find anything in her singing which reminded me of the songs in the studyhouses and Hasidic shtibls, which were a part of my youth and environment. As a matter of fact, I never imagined Yentl singing songs. The passion for learning and the passion for singing are not much related in my mind. There is almost no singing in my works. One thing is sure: there was too much singing in this movie, much too much. It came from all sides. As far as I can see the singing 
here's the rest
