seekingferret | Entries tagged with religion

Kilayim 3:1

Ooh, neat, nobody told me we'd be doing geometry! All of the commentaries on this perek are full of fun charts trying to work out the specific logic of why each set of planting spacings work according to different mefarshim.

If you have a vegetable bed that is 6 tefachim by 6 tefachim, the mishna says you can plant five minim in the bed. One on each edge and one in the middle. I am surmising that there is some practical significance to 6 tefachim from the fact that later mishnayos call this a furrow... six isn't just a round number, it's a specific size easily achievable with a common type of plow. I think?

Otherwise I'm not sure what the point of the next bit is. It says if you have a border 1 tefach high and 1 tefach wide around the 6x6 bed, you can plant 13 minim. Three on each edge, with a tefach between each, and one larger section in the middle. R' Yehuda says you can plant six minim in the middle, for a total of 18. As I said, I think this concept of 6x6, plus a border of 1, only makes sense if it's a common shape created by tools. Otherwise, why not just start with an 8x8 area? You can use the 8x8 to demonstrate all the concepts you want to with the 6x6, plus more. So I think it must be that 6x6 is a standard size, the border is a common embellishment and the mishna wants to illustrate both. I've written sometimes that it feels like the Talmud is discussing theoretical halacha that rarely comes up, like in Kerisos, but here in Kilayim this all feels like very practical halacha in an agrarian society, and so the units they're using are what is actually common practice.

Kilayim 3:2

When we talked about cramming all those minim into a 6x6 or 8x8 square, we meant only certain species. The Mishna distinguishes between zeraim and yerakot. Only yerakot are permitted. Chardol is a zera, afunim hashufin is a zera, afunim hagamlanim is a yerek. The distinction seems to be that some vegetation spreads too much and created either a problem of maintaining kilayim, or a problem of mar'is ayin. Hashufin means polished or shiny, but based on the contrast to hagamlanim from shoresh G-M-L, the translators seem to understand it to refer to a smaller pea, but apparently with smaller peas come bigger, more problematic pea plants.

The Mishna concludes that if you have a furrow over one tefach deep, you can plant one min on each side and one min in the middle, and the depth of the furrow creates separation, showing that the one tefach separation required can be vertical or horizontal. This is part of why I think the size of the 6x6 bed must be standardized based on tooling.

Kilayim 3:3

We established in perek 2 that if you have a wheat field that is square and then a barley field is angled relative to the wheat field so that its corner touches one of the sides of the wheat field, it's not kilayim. The same applies to vegetable fields, it's somehow clear by the fact of the bad geometry that you weren't trying to mix two plants.

If you have a field of vegetables and you want to plow a row in the middle to grow another vegetable, Rabbi Yishmael permits it so long as you plow the row from one end of the field to the other, so it becomes three unconnected planted areas. Rabbi Akiva says you don't need to go end to end provided the row is 6 tefachim wide and goes down into the furrow with a sharp interface, so it's visually clear that the furrow's depth creates a separation. Rabbi Yehuda says if it's deep enough you don't need to be 6 tefachim wide, only one tefach.

Kilayim 3:4

If you plant two rows of cucumber, two rows of gourd, and two rows of Egyptian bean, each plant will take up enough space to be visually clear as separate plantings, so this is mutar. If you plant only one row of each, they won't take up enough space, the vines will go everywhere, and so it's assur. Rabbi Eliezer says if you do one row each and then start the pattern again with another row of cucumbers, it will register as a pattern of alternating crops and be mutar. The chachamim say it's assur.

Kilayim 3:5

It's permitted to plant a cucumber and a gourd in the same hole provided you guide the plants so they grow in opposite directions. Huh.

I think this goes to fundamental what is kilayim about questions. Is it about mixing seeds, as a process, or is it about plants getting intertangled? If you had asked me before, I might have been inclined to say the former, which is closer to how animal kilayim works, and kind of seems to me to be the more natural reading of the Torah, but there is a lot in this and the previous perek that makes more sense if it's really about the latter, and several things I attributed to mar'is ayin might actually be about the fundamental mitzvah of kilayim which is about the creating the visual appearance of plants mixing.

And if I had to assign a reason, I might say that maybe it's because these chokim are probably in some way about reminding us of some Torah value and so the visual intermixing that you see and are reminded of is the more critical part compared to the physical act of not intermixing seeds.

Kilayim 3:6

Suppose a farmer has a field of onions, and then decides they want to plant gourds, which as we've established have a tendency to spread and some authorities say you need to leave extra space around compared to other similar plants:

A) Rabbi Yishmael says you need to tear down two rows of onions and plant one row of gourds in the middle of that space, then leave up two rows of onions, then tear down two rows of onions and plant one row of gourds in the middle. Thus between one row of gourds and the next, there is three rows worth of space, and between the gourds and the onions there is one half row of space.

B) Rabbi Akiva says you need to tear down two rows of onions and plant two rows of gourds in their place, then leave up two rows of onions, then tear down two rows of onions and plant two rows of gourds in their place. Thus between one row of gourds and the next, there is two rows of space, and between the gourds and the onions there is no special space.

C) The Chachamim say you need to maintain three rows of space between one row of gourds and the next, but it can be all onions, no need for the extra gap.

Kilayim 3:7

If you want to plant a gourd next to another vegetable, you only need to give it the space of another vegetable, which I think is one tefach. If you want to plant a gourd next to grain, you need to give it a beit rova, which is similar to the beit se'ah in that it's an indirectly defined unit based on how much you would typically seed with a quarter kav of wheat seeds. Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Meir, and Rabbi Yose ben Hahotef Efrati in the name of Rabbi Yishmael have various stringencies requiring you to give gourds more space in different situations.

Kilayim 2:1

If you have a bucket of seeds and the majority of them are one min, and a few of them are another min, does the majority nullify the minority? Apparently D'oraysa bitul works, but the Rabbis add a fence. If there is more than a quarter of the second min, you have to pick out seeds until you have less than a quarter. But wait! When we say a quarter, we don't mean a quarter. Artscroll handily explains here, but otherwise you wouldn't figure out until a few mishnayos later, we are evaluating this in terms of a se'ah of seeds, and within that se'ah, a quarter kav is the smallest unit we are interested in doing math on. There are 6 kavin in a se'ah, so actually we are saying if you have less than 1/24th of a se'ah in your se'ah, you are okay, and if you have more than 1/24th of a se'ah, you need to pick out seeds.

R' Yose holds that if you have less than a 24th of a se'ah, bitul works just like the Tanna Kamma, but as soon as you have more than 24th, you need to completely pick out the seeds, not just reduce below a 24th, because he thinks there is a perceived kavanah to plant kilayim if you don't get rid of all the seeds once you're aware of them. This idea of perceived kavanah seems to be a recurring one in this whole perek.

The final machloket is between R' Shimon and the Chachamim about whether or not two kinds of minority seed that are each less than a quarter kav combine to count as kilayim. So if you have a se'ah of wheat that has an eighth kav of oats and an eighth kav of rye, do you need to pick out seeds? R' Shimon says no, the Chachamim say yes.

Kilayim 2:2

Here we say that the previous rule only applies to classes of seeds. Less than 1/24th nullifies grain with grain, less than 1/24th nullifies kitniyot with kitniyot, less than 1/24th nullifies vegetable seeds with vegetable seeds. At first I thought this was an idea limiting the intent of the Torah's rule of kilayim, that the only thing that counts as kilayim is grain with grain, but the following bit makes it clear I was misreading. Actually what it means is that different kinds of plant have different amounts of spread and require different amounts of seed to fill a field, so you can only use the 1/24th rule if your zeraim are the same kind of seed and otherwise you need a scaling factor.

The Rabbis define a unit of land area called the beis se'ah, which is circularly defined as the amount of area in which you would plant a se'ah of wheat. But if you had a se'ah of vegetable seeds, you would plant a much larger area with it because vegetable seeds produce proportionally larger plants per seed volume. So you can batel a much smaller amount of vegetable seeds in a se'ah of wheat seeds because otherwise the vegetable seeds would overwhelm your beis se'ah. And on the other hand, R' Shimon teaches that flax seeds produce proportionally smaller plants compared to their seed volume, so you can batel a larger amount of flaxseeds in your se'ah of wheat.

Kilayim 2:3

If you plant wheat seeds and then decide that you screwed up and you would rather plant some different seed in the field, you have to wait for the seeds to root before you turn up the soil and get rid of them, because otherwise there might still be wheat seeds that would grow and make the field kilayim.

You might say "Oh, I have to plow the field to uproot these rooted wheat seeds, and then I have to plow the field after I have seeded it with, say, barley, to distribute the barley in the soil and aerate it, so how about I kill two birds with one stone and just spread the barley and then do the ploughing? It will uproot the wheat and aerate the soil for the barley." This is forbidden, presumably because one might forget to go back and make sure the wheat is all gone or something like this.

The Tanna Kamma holds that the uprooting is sort of pro-forma, it's a demonstration that you don't intend to grow wheat anymore, so you just go through the whole field with your plow and it's okay if you miss some spots. Abba Shaul teaches you have to go through and thoroughly plow to uproot all the wheat.

Kilayim 2:4

If you plant wheat and it's rooted and grown, and then you want to switch over to make your field a vineyard, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. And if you have a vineyard and you want to turn it into a wheat field, you similarly can't plant the seeds and then uproot. But there is a leniency that you can just chop down the above ground vines until they are at shoe level and then uproot. I guess if you do that, the grapevine won't grow back, so you know you're good?

Kilayim 2:5

If you've got a field with a plant that takes years to germinate, like karbas or luf, you have to actually wait out the years with a fallow field before switching it.

If you have a field of wheat and various known weeds, like something it calls isatis, grow in the field, there's no problem of kilayim because it's a weed, not something the farmer planted themself, and there's no problem of mar'is ayin because anyone will look at it and think "Poor Farmer Jim, he has a weed problem," rather than "Sinner Farmer Jim planted kilayim." But if the farmer goes through and partially weeds the field, but leaves some of the apparent weeds, people will start to think that they wanted the kilayim, and apparently the Rabbis think that in addition to the prohibition of planting kilayim, there is a prohibition of maintaining a field of kilayim.

Kilayim 2:6

If you plant two strips of land with two different crops, you need to maintain a gap between them sufficient that people won't think you planted them together. It's a funny disagreement between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammi- Beis Shammai says it's two furrows wide, Beis Hillel says it's one yolk wide, the Tanna Kamma says look, those are basically the same thing.

Kilayim 2:7

If you plant two fields of grain, one wheat and one barley, and they're oriented so that they touch in one place but mostly are separated, because they're oriented differently, that's sufficient separation.

If you plant a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, they can literally touch each other at your land boundary because the Torah prohibits an individual from planting kilayim, there's no communal ban on kilayim. And the Mishna goes one step further. If you have a field of wheat and your neighbor has a field of barley, and your neighbor's field goes up to their land boundary and you have a gap between your field and the land boundary, you're permitted to plant barley to fill the gap, because it won't look like kilayim.

This is one of those halachos where if I'm the Rabbi and someone asked me if they could do this, I'd say, technically yes, but I forbid it because this might be fine from a kilayim perspective but it's going to lead to disputes over land boundaries.

You can't plant a third plant in the gap, because it would look like kilayim, but you can plant flax in the gap because as discussed earlier flax grows small and so you would never fill a small gap with flax if you're growing a field, so clearly the understanding would be that you're just planting flax to test the field, and are planning to uproot it once it takes.

Kilayim 2:8

On the other hand, you cannot plant hardel or haria in a gap like this- Artscroll translates as mustard or saffron, I thought saffron famously could only be grown in Iran, but apparently it just grows optimally in Iran but can be grown elsewhere in Mediterranean climates. The reason is that these are crops that are grown in small fields, so the understanding would be that you do intend to cultivate these crops as crops. But you can grow hardel or haria in the gap between your field and your neighbors field if both are vegetable fields rather than grain fields, apparently because hardel and haria somehow interfere with the growth of vegetables so the understanding would be that this is a test growth and you're planning to uproot it once it takes.

Kilayim 2:9

We've been talking about gaps that were sort of rectangular in shape. If you split up your field into squares, so that your beis se'ah field is divided into 24 beis rova sections, you can plant 24 different crops in each square, apparently without any gap, because the square shapes will make it clear that they're all separately planted crops. But if you have empty sections, you need to maintain gaps. Rabbi Meir says only two squares can be a separate crop, the Chachamim say if you have empty squares, you can only plant 9/24 squares, arranged in a checkerboard pattern so they only contact each other on diagonals and are otherwise separated by a square length in each direction. R' Eliezer ben Yaakov says you can't mix up squares in a beis se'ah in any way.

Kilaym 2:10

According to the Chachamim's position that you can plant 9/24 squares, any seeds in that square make it count as a planted square, even if part of the square is taken up with a rock or a grave or a fallow area required by a certain crop.

Kilayim 2:11

If you have maintained the proper separation between two species, but they grow so that one covers the other, it's still okay as long as it's not the greek gourd, because the egyptian gourd has vines that entangle themselves too much with the other plant. R' Meir says he was taught by his teachers that the cucumber and egyptian bean also entangle too much, but he would otherwise lean toward the Tanna Kamma's position.

There is a Boston community effort to make a Siyum Mishnayos on October 6th for the sake of the captives and those who have died in Israel in the past year. I signed up to learn the first four perakim of Kilayim, I might do more if I have time. I chose Kilayim because I find the rabbinical science interesting, because it connects to the agricultural laws of Eretz Yisrael, because I've been having some houseplant adventures lately, and because it's not likely to bring up anything traumatic.

Kilayim 1:1

It starts with a list of minim that are so similar that if they grow together it's not kilayim. The very first is chita and zunin, wheat and poison wheat. Which seems to mostly be understood as triticum aestivum and lolium temulentum, which a)are completely different genera! And b) are so interconnected that wikipedia notes that they often grow together, are often confused for each other until the seeds grow, and that lolium was historically a significant weed problem for wheat cultivators.

To make two key points, I've written a bunch about how the Rabbis' idea of min is not the modern idea of species, but for whatever reason it bugs me a lot more here. I was talking it through with someone and I think it’s because the underpinning of Kilayim is a much vague set of taxonomic distinctions than kashrut, so it's not clear what the Rabbis are working off. There’s no fins and scales type dividing lines. Is it halacha l'moshe misinai? Is it pure empirical observation, and if so, what empirical elements are prioritized? Is it folk wisdom about agriculture?

I found myself longing for a modern rule like a 99.3% DNA similarity threshold means it's the same species. I know this is silly and also imperfect, and I know that western taxonomy concepts like classifying triticum vs lolium are not even that objective, but... I'm allowed to want things to be orderly and consistent.

And second, there's pretty consistent understanding that chita is triticum, but I've found multiple species identifiers for zunin, by different modern translators, and zunin is one of the less controversial ones. Some species we just don't have much of a clue, or at least more than it's some kind of bean that grows in Israel.That makes this mishna hard to study, it's just a bunch of old Hebrew words nobody is quite sure of.

Kilsyim 1:2.

More of the same. Kishit and milaffon are not kilayim with each other. The first mishna was on grains and edible seeds, this one is on vegetables. Nobody seems entirely clear whether kishit and milaffon are two different kinds of cucumber, a cucumber and a melon, or two different kinds of melon. Maybe cucumbers are melons.

A lot of the species have vernacular names that impute similarity. Chazeret and mountain chazeret, for example (modern jews know chazeret as the green vegetable on the seder plate, often understood as romaine lettuce). Anyone who knows anything about plants can tell you that the names give you zero clues about how actually similar two plants are.

Kilayim 1:3

More of the same, this time featuring brassica, which is of course incredibly confusing because it's the same species but different cultivars can be radically different. The mishna seems to be able to recognize that they're all the same.

Kilayim 1:4

More of the same, but now with fruit trees. Fruit trees aren't the same because you're allowed to plant two different fruit trees next to each other because they will each maintain their own separate space, but you are not allowed to graft two fruit trees together.

Kilayim 1:5

Different, now the list is of plants that have some similarity, but they are not considered the same species and so they are kilayim with each other. Something like the Greek gourd vs the Egyptian gourd, I think this night be like brassica where the plants are the same but the fruits look very different. Wikipedia writes "Calabash fruits have a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle-shaped, or slim and serpentine, and they can grow to be over a metre long."

Kilayim 1:6

Animal kilayim! A wolf and a dog are kilayim. Bafflingly, a horse and a mule are kilayim even though mules are infertile. I guess I understand that very rarely a mule can have limited fertility. I think we'll get back to animals way later in the masechta, but it's a nice reminder that these rules work on similar conceptual levels.

Kilayim 1:7

You definitely can't graft a fruit tree to a fruit tree, or a vegetable plant to a vegetable plant. The Tanna Kamma and R' Yehuda argue about if you can graft a tree to a vegetable plant, R' Yehuda is mekil.

Kilayim 1:8

Examples of forbidden grafting, extremely fascinating, because they're really specific and each one doesn't just forbid the specific graft but explains the purpose behind it, like grafting a sun sensitive fig seedling in a tall bush to provide it with starting shade. I like this because it gives you a picture of historical agricultural practice.

Kilayim 1:9

Apparently in this pre refrigeration era some had the practice of burying harvested vegetables underneath grapevines for a couple days to store them safely until they would be eaten. This is not kilayim because it would be well understood that the planter would come back before they rooted, so it's not kilayim and it's not mar'is ayin.

Very struck by this David Zvi Kalman writing...

When you dip your finger in the seder wine cup this year to commemorate the fallen Egyptians, maybe this year don’t stop. Keep dipping your finger, from cup to plate, and then maybe put in a thumb, an index, a hand, and spill the cup like a conspicuous Elijah, like a jostled table, until there’s more wine on the table than in the glass, a drop for each plague in the haggadah’s maximalist mathematics of how many plagues were indeed visited there (because every plague is actually many plagues, you see, if you really read about it, if you would just pay attention), and now the cup is empty, the cup is overturned like we wanted, and now we’re one cup short of redemption, but next year four, next year in Jerusalem, next year in the rebuilt city, next year maybe we’ll know, we’ll really know, how to ask about what is different.

Pesach is somehow today! Yesterday I cooked all the things.

Maybe next year I will have more of my shit together. I basically finished unpacking my apartment last week, just in time to start repacking up the chametzdik stuff.

With the new job, I couldn't justify taking the time to go home to my parents for the Sedarim, so that left making a Seder up here with R or finding a host. That second option was unfortunately taken out of our hands because R has had some leg problems the past couple weeks and can't really walk to any of the places we could have gone. So I am making my own Seder for the first time, just me and R. I'm going to miss the family Seder, but I'm really looking forward to having my own, and figuring out how to make it feel like something I have ownership in. And doing it together with R should be special.

I made matzah ball soup and potato kugel and a zucchini thingy and latkes and roasted asparagus and baked salmon and shredded chicken and flourless chocolate cookies and all the seder plate things. So much cooking. Also I made a Seder plate, using my laser cutter. Since I was customizing it, I added a space for a tapuz. :)

Chah sameach, everyone.

The Rabbi stopped hakafot at the fifth Hakafah and instead of singing dance tunes and dancing around with the Torah, he spoke to us. He told us that they'd decided to do Hakafot as normal today because Simchat Torah is not a frivolous event, it's a celebration of the Torah that is the center of our lives. But nothing is normal right now. Then he asked us to spread out around the room in a big circle and he led us in singing "Acheinu" and "Im Eshkachech". It was incredibly emotionally moving but also complicated. It felt wrong and out of place, or maybe what I mean is it reminded us that anything we did today would be wrong and out of place, given what's going on in Israel. Then we sang "Kol Haolam Kulo"- the whole world is a very narrow bridge- and as we switched to the second line of the song- the key trick is to have no fear at all- we returned to dancing with the Torahs.

Praying for klal Yisrael. Praying for the Gazan civilians. Praying for the safety of my friends and familly. Praying for the end to this war, and the war in Ukraine, and all wars.

I know

lirazel is a big fan of Mark Oppenheimer, but I hadn't listened to any of his work until I stumbled on Dara Horn's promo for his podcast Gatecrashers, which sounded very up my alley. It's about the 'secret Jewish history of the Ivy League', which is to say, the secret history of the non-Jews running the Ivies trying desperately to keep their schools from being overrun by Jews. I did not personally attend an Ivy, but I spent Shabbos at the Hillel of every Ivy except Cornell in the early 2000s, and I formed definite opinions about the Jewish character of these schools.

I really liked Oppenheimer's presentation of the facts. There's a definite Jewish trauma around the Ivy quotas and the history, and it would be easy to present a simple story about the hateful goyim running the show (and this tends to be Dara Horn's presentation of these facts, fwiw), but the reality is a lot more complicated and Jews are a lot more culpable for our participation in the system than the simple story would suggest. Oppenheimer gets that. He gets how the Jews who got in felt differently than the Jews who didn't, he gets how the Jews were not always sympathetic to Asian-Americans and African-Americans faced with similar systems, or how many Jews regarded the inability of POCs to work around the system in the same way the Jews did as a failure of intellect or discipline. He gets how the social dynamics after the fall of the quota system were not always to the credit of Jewish students. I really appreciate the way he balanced these debilities against the constant way the Ivies reminded Jews that they didn't really belong.

I do wish he spent some more time acknowledging that while this trauma is real, it was nowhere near as high on the radar of most Jews as the actual violent traumas that have been experienced. And I am sure Oppenheimer could have found incidences of anti-Semitic violence or threats of violence on Ivy campuses, to the point where the show's emphasis on the effects of quotas and micro-aggressions and the occasional slur starts to seem trivializing.

per

liv's request, some thoughts on the making of "Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid"

"Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid" has multiple converging origin stories.

I think the most significant might be that my favorite Jewish movie is the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, and Jews don't dance in that movie, and it always felt like a hole in my Jews dancing vids that they didn't include A Serious Man. I know I've written several times that I've started to feel that movies that feature Jewish dancing tend to feel more authentically Jewish than films that don't. Not that every movie that had Jews dancing was a satisfying representation of Jewish life, but moreso that if there were two movies and both featured Jewish weddings, but one only showed the ceremony and the other showed the dancing, then the one with the dancing would usually be the one that overall had done a better job of telling a story about Jewish identity, because it recognized that the dancing was not just a fun thing to do but an actual and necessary part of the wedding ritual. But A Serious Man was a glaring exception- the whole movie leads up to a Bar Mitzvah, a beautiful representation of what it feels like to go through the ritual, and then no dancing. And I've wanted for years to find a way to work A Serious Man into a vid that showed how beautiful its representation of Jewish life is. Mostly that effort has been concentrated in trying to specifically make an A Serious Man vid- in the past year I've auditioned a few dozen songs and have partial timelines for three different vids, none of which have quite worked out. Someday.

A second stream was Grey's Anatomy, which introduced Dr. Levi Schmitt a few years ago and has given him lovely movements of exploring what Jewish ritual meant to him- an episode where he serves as a shomer for his dead uncle and in the process of performing that ritual learns new and unexpected things about him is a beautiful example. In this latest season he arranges an in-hospital Bar Mitzvah for a surgery patient and it was such a viddable sequence I wanted to do something with it.

But the third stream is all the conversation I've had over the years with so many of you about what the Jews dancing vids mean and how they worked for people. I'm incredibly proud of both Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing and the Sequel and I'm proud of how they represent Judaism as a diverse and complicated set of communities, but I also have started to see the lacks and the shortages in the vid in terms of how we Jews experience Judaism. For some Jews, Judaism is just about dancing. But for many of us, it's about so much more than just dancing. Religion matters, faith community matters, and I wanted to find a way to say that that was important even if it excludes some kinds of Jews. I wanted to make a less inclusive Jewish vid, because my religion is exclusive and that is not entirely a bad thing.

I had some nice exchanges with

kass about this.

kass's faith community has a lot of overlap with mine, but also a lot of difference, and I was uncertain to some degree if I wanted to exclude some of her experiences from the vid or not. Or maybe to be put more clearly, should this be a vid about Orthodox Jewish ritual, or about Jewish ritual more broadly?

kass is so smart and warm and generous, so I think our conversations ultimately led to me making some effort to make sure she felt included by the vid, but I want to mention it because I want to make it clear that it was a thing I debated. Scope was such a much more fraught topic in making this vid, compared to the Jews dancing vids, because this vid was so emotionally close to my heart it was practically bleeding. My father always says that Jews don't make denominations, Rabbis make denominations, and if you got rid of the Rabbis you'd just have Jews. ;) Ultimately I think that was the concluding influence on how I approached who I chose to include and exclude. I wanted to show Jews doing Judaism. As simple and as complicated as that.

I had some different, equally useful conversations about scope with

bironic. I was feeling out the edges of whether this is a happy vid about warm happy communities or if it had room for grief and sadness and conflict, and ultimately I decided that part of the joy of Jewish community is the sadness, and part of the joy comes in confrontation. Hadvash and ha'oketz. The funeral sequence was not the last edits to the vid, but it was the last section to get added to the vid as a section, and that was in direct response to

bironic saying she wasn't sure I should be showing these sadder or angrier moments and me going NO, MORE SADNESS NEEDED. Not to criticize

bironic at all- sometimes the best beta feedback is feedback that helps to negatively clarify what your vid isn't doing right yet. Again, this vid was so close to my heart it was bleeding..

Maybe it's worth a brief review of the different sequences in the vid and what they mean to me. The vid opens with bentsching licht, primarily for Shabbat but also for Chagim and for Chanukah. This felt like the natural starting point, lighting candles is how we start and end most Jewish holidays. I did think about starting with an entering a room kissing a mezuzah shot, but the candles felt more right. From there I move to a passage introducing the ideas the lyrics are introducing, of Jews living together as brothers. Images of Jews gathering together for ritual observances of different sorts. Gathering, learning Torah together, eating together. Eating together coalesces specifically into spending holiday meals together- there's a decent length sequence of Passover meals and one of my favorite cuts in the vid is from the orange on the seder plate to the egg on the seder plate. Then I have some latke eating. Somewhere in there is a purim shpiel. Then I segue to the start of a synagogue sequence. Bar Mitzvahs, Shabbat services, weekday davening, as the music intensifies. I was trying to suggest finding both a connection to God and a connection to other Jews, but it was important to me to show the synagogue as a site of both connection and conflict. Women struggling to find a place in the shul, people coming to shul to talk to God about their grief, or their feeling of disconnection, or their uncertainty. Coming in conversation with the divine is an awesome, powerful thing. People doing it have to pay certain prices, but also reap immense benefits. From the synagogue sequence I transition back to different kinds of Jews gathering for different ritual purposes, wrapping up with a section of Jewish mourning rituals- both the ones that give us space to feel our aloneness and the ones that bring us back to our community- before the final conclusion. When talking to

lirazel about this I said that my struggle was in balancing the vid's two spheres of ritual activity- the bayis and the beis k'neses. I tried to show both of those at their biggest and most meaningful. There's a sort of hidden image in this passage, lurking underneath fleeing Anatevka on Yentl's boat to America... the image is Moses gathering the Jewish people in the Ten Commandments. It was in many of my drafts before I took it out because it wasn't entirely landing for everyone, but I still sort of think it's there, because so much of this vid is in one way or another about how Jewish ritual recapitulates the Bible, how Jews remain in touch with our history. I end with Danny Saunders saying goodbye to Reuven and leaving the room with a kiss of a mezuza, an appropriate Jewish ritual of leavetaking.

There is a famous Gemara prescribing the specific way in which a Jew is supposed to tie their shoes- the order of feet and so on. I don't think a lot of Jews actually follow this practice strictly, but it's famous because it cartoonishly captures a significant Jewish approach to ritual- ritual is a thing that is supposed to affect every moment of how we live our lives. There is a correct Jewish way to enter and leave a room. There is a correct Jewish way to eat an apple. There is a correct Jewish way to witness a thunderstorm. I wanted to gesture to the deepness of that practice, how if you animate these actions with spiritual meaning they will mean more than simply tying your shoes as a means to an end.

One of the things in the vid I have mixed feelings about is my use of a lot of Hallmark movie content. I don't love these movies, but I have a lot of feelings about them. I think they are on the shallower side compared to deeper representations of ritual in other movies I use, and they are full of goofs like lighting the chanukiah backwards or lighting when it's still light out. But I think sorting out my feelings about Hallmark Jewish movies was a fourth stream leading into making this vid, and so they are there because my feelings about them are unsettled and I wanted to work through some of that.

I think ultimately my sense of these movies is that they are in fact deeply interested in ritual, they're just not so practiced at making that feel specifically Jewish. So they fit in nicely, there's a filmic sense of curiosity about how traditions work and how they fit into peoples' lives, and then since they are romances, how new people can be fitted into old traditions. This is a thing I am thinking about a bunch lately, so even though these movies themselves do not fit as deeply into my heart as A Serious Man or Crossing Delancey, the rituals they depict ended up hitting me, in context of the vid, with a similar power. While making my bicycles vid, I had a conversation with

frayadjacent about the way multifandom vids can be 'best bits' vids for shows where you don't have to feel obligated to acknowledge the parts that aren't interesting to vid. I feel like the best bits versions of these Hallmark movies are more than the sum of their parts here.

Lastly, I want to talk about the fact that I almost didn't post this at all. This vid is so emotionally important to me, and it was hitting similarly notes for the Jewish fans I was privately sharing it with, and I wasn't sure if I was willing to share it with non-Jewish fans who wouldn't have the same emotional reactions to it. I specifically decided that I didn't want to premiere it at a con, because to me it's making a somewhat evangelical argument that didn't seem fair to share with an unwilling audience. But even for a willing audience I wasn't sure. Maybe I could just have this be a vid I would continue to share privately with people I was comfortable with, and never make it publicly available. I've got a few fanworks where that was the choice I made, it wouldn't be the first time. But I shared it with

sanguinity and her take was that it felt like a sort of invitation to be a guest to these experiences, and I decided I was comfortable with that.

Oh, gosh. In the interview scene from the book The Devil Wears Prada, Andy (Full name Andrea Sachs) is asked if she speaks any foreign languages. She says she speaks Hebrew, and her future boss Miranda (full name Miranda Priestly) says that she was hoping for a useful language, like French. It later emerges that Miranda is the child of an impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family who rejected her family heritage out of a desire for success in the secular world. And changed her name from Miriam Princhek to Miranda Priestly, to boot! Priestly! This identity stuff is not super-subtle. When not mis-calling Andy Emily after the name of the former (very goyish) assistant, Miranda insistently calls Andy "Ahn-dre-ah", a sort of Frenchified desemitification which is more of Miranda's nominative rejection of both her own Judaism and also Andy's. Miranda's whole mission could be explained as trying to teach Andy that if she becomes less Jewish, she can succeed in the world of Western letters and literature. In the novel's conclusion, Andy rejects Miranda's abusive tactics, but she does not abandon her hopes of succeeding in New York magazine culture.

That's the paradox of Andy. Her family is deeply, substantially Jewish- in the sense that they eat an 'expertly ordered' spread of bagels and lox every year the night before Thanksgiving. And you know, that's not what comes to mind first for me when I think of my Jewish identity, but clearly being Jewish matters to Andy and her family, and that's enough to make her represent a threat to the New York establishment. Her name, the name that so threatens Miranda, is Andrea- certainly a fairly common name for secular American Jews (there were two Andreas in my Hebrew school class), but it's not like we're talking Rivka Sachs here. But it doesn't matter. No matter how full of Jews the New York elite is, our toleration is always conditional. Miranda knows this to her core, and even Andy sort of knows it. So the question Andy is faced with is how much of her deepest self she has to give up. She rejects Miranda's answer, she rejects giving everything up. But she still accepts that she has to give something up. America is designed to force Jews to compromise ourselves. Boy do I feel this.

The funniest part of this Jewish narrative in the book, to me, is that Miranda's boss, the head of the Elias company, is named Irv Ravitz. There's a couple scenes where Miranda goes to meetings with Irv Ravitz and comes back grumpy, and I think it's very funny that Miranda went to all this effort to change her name and erase her Jewishness out of a deep seated conviction that the visibly Jewish cannot rule the secular world, and then she ends up at the beck and call of a man named Irv Ravitz. How it must rankle, especially because Miranda is still not wrong. Weisberger absolutely gets the many paradoxes and indignities of being Jewish in America, and in particular being a Jewish woman. The unwritten rules are never fair.

Also, the whole thing is striking given that the book is widely considered a roman a clef on Lauren Weisberger's experience working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, who is a Christian upper crust Briton who is not in any way, shape or form Jewish. Weisberger made this deliberate choice to imagine an alternate version of Anna Wintour who is covertly a self-hating Jew. This subtext did not need to be there. I find that utterly fascinating, trying to figure out what Weisberger is trying to say about the world of high fashion media by this choice.

Like, is the point that Weisberger realized that she can never be Anna Wintour because she, as a Jewish woman, would have to become Miranda Priestly instead? Is the question of Andy's trajectory as seen through the lens of Miranda as a potential endpoint so important to the novel that Weisberger got stuck on the unattainability of a Jewish woman ever Becoming Anna Wintour, and instead had to write a story where she asks whether Andy could ever become the Jewish version of Anna Wintour? Man, that is bleak.

[Aside: I'm a little nervous about doing this aside, but here goes! Doing the math based on the timeline of her career, Miranda Priestly was born to this impoverished London Orthodox Jewish family with 11 children probably in the early 1950s. (Anna Wintour was born in 1949, I'm comfortable saying Miranda Priestly was also born in 1949). So there are two possibilities, either she was born to an established impoverished London Jewish family (unlikely) or she was born to a family of Survivor refugees from Poland (much likelier). That makes Miranda's story of rejection of her family's heritage much more consonant with the history, and much sadder. Many of those Survivor families never talked about the Holocaust with their children, but they wore it in their every action in a way that drove away their children, who knew instinctively that their parents could never be happy people. You can easily see how a family life like that could help lead to a woman like Miranda Priestly. I have no idea if this is what Weisberger intended but it makes an awful lot of sense. But the most uncomfortable part of this reading is the scene where Miranda stays in 'the Coco Chanel Suite' at a fancy hotel in Paris. Yikes.]

In the film, all of this is gone. Miranda and Andy are played by non-Jewish actresses Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, Andy now has a supportive Midwestern family (she's still called Andy Sachs, though!) and a goyish chef boyfriend and Miranda's upper crust British heritage is apparently authentic. And I hate when Hollywood does this, and they do it over and over and over again, taking texts designed to interrogate the emotional choices forced by Jewish identity and turn them into something less than that, when there are millions of authentic Christian stories out there already. The film felt really flat to me even before I realized the missing Jewish subtext, because nothing it says about fashion is really profound or interesting. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section on the 'cerulean speech', most of which I think is nonsense, but the final paragraph of the wikipedia article assesses what is so sinister about the nonsense- that Streep delivers that pile of self-centered bullshit dispassionately, with total lack of interest in what Andy makes of the speech, as the ultimate putdown. This is why the movie doesn't work, because it's trying to make you care about the growing, complicated relationship between Andy and Miranda, but Miranda is just a bitch. There's nothing interesting about her being a bitch, capitalism is built on exploitation of labor and Miranda exploits her assistants because she knows Andy is trapped and she doesn't care about Andy as a person, just as a cog in the machine she runs. The most sinister line in the film is when Streep tells Andy that Andy can be like her; It's the moment that shakes Andy to her core and prompts her rejection of the entire lifestyle. There is nothing human about any of this, the moral choice that movie runs on is whether it's acceptable to hurt other people just to benefit yourself. It's not. There, I've said kol torah kulah while standing on one foot.

There's a very funny cold open to an episode of The Office where Michael is watching The Devil Wears Prada a half hour at a time and until he hits the end he thinks that Miranda is the hero of the movie and keeps imitating her at work by asking Pam to perform absurd feats of assistance. It's funny because it recognizes the obviousness of the moral vacancy of Meryl Streep's character, that the whole movie is wrapped up in the idea that Meryl Streep is so profoundly charismatic that many people can ignore that she is just boringly meanspirited.

There's nothing really more morally interesting about the book, it's still a simple book about how capital abuses labor and labor tricks itself into thinking that its work has independent value, but that's okay because the book has these interesting layers of identity play instead of moral dilemmas. Andy has two friends left over from her sojourn in the mires of being Jewish at Brown University- Lily who is now a miserable grad student in Russian literature at Columbia, and Alex who has parlayed his Ivy League experience into a soul-sucking job at Teach for America in a failing Bronx school. They are very specific people in a way that the film versions of Alex and Lily are not. Both of them look at Andy and are horrified at the amount of work she is doing, and that is a basic joke on its own- when a literature grad student thinks you're doing too much meaningless drudgery, something has gone terribly wrong- but it's also a question about identity, because young upper middle class Jews are not afraid of work, but they want their work to mean something. That's the contrast Weisberger is trying to set up, here are three young people who are miserable with their work lives, but there's a difference between them.

In the end, I think Weisberger sees Andy's sojourn with Miranda as a cul de sac that ultimately does lead her to rethink her values and execute an escape: Jacob dwelling with Laban.

to celebrate Tu B'Av, a new vid I've been working on for a while

Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid (0 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Multi-Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Judaism
Summary:

An exploration of ritual and Jewish community

Watch on YouTube

Happy Passover!

So here is a story about matzah:

Yeast is everywhere! That's the whole idea behind sourdough, right? When we make bread, we add yeast because baker's yeast has been cultivated particularly to rise well, predictably, and add good flavor to the bread, but we could just leave water mixed with flour out on the counter and it would ferment because of wild yeast in the air, and wild yeast in the flour.

So the key to bread not leavening is keeping the flour from touching water, because as soon as you have water and flour, wild yeast will start doing its thing. Fine, that makes sense. Of course, the Rabbis didn't know microbiology, they just knew this observable fact, and so the halacha is based on observation and inference, not scientific delineations of fermentation. So the halacha of making matzah is that you need to protect your flour to make sure that it does not become exposed to water at all until you start making dough. What is flour, though? It's wheat seeds that have been ground up into a powder. So one might reasonably ask if wheat seeds touch water, does yeast start doing its thing there, too? Logically and observationally, the answer is probably not, because the wheat in seed form has a cover on its so the water can't get in, and also since it's not ground it's not really in a form that can really become a dough that rises. But if we're really being careful about this, because avoiding chametz is the central mitzvah of Passover and the Torah goes so far as to say "Guard your matzah", maybe we would ask what if there's a hole in the wheat seed's cover and so water can get in, and it'll start fermenting too early.

So there's a stricter form of creation of matzah, resulting in so-called Shmurah Matzah ("guarded matzah"), where you watch the wheat seeds from the moment they are harvested, to make sure no water comes in contact with them. Not before the harvest, obviously, because rainfall is obviously going to happen and the wheat plants need it. So the Rabbis' understand that the moment of harvest is a transformational one where a thing that was an appendage of the plant becomes a new thing on its own, and from that point on it's considered potentially susceptible to fermentation. (This is a total side tangent, but this idea of the moment of harvest as transformational makes a lot more sense with respect to questions of ineffability like tumah, as compared to physical processes like fermentation. I totally get the idea that a plant is not susceptible to tumah when wet but after you harvest a fruit it can now become susceptible to tumah. But fermentation? The Rabbis clearly know that fermentation can still happen on the plant, there's discussion of grapes fermented on the vine at various places in the Gemara, though I guess it's possible they don't connect grape fermentation to wheat fermentation? I don't know. Sometimes the answer is that Rabbinic distinctions are a thing unto themselves and don't need to be entirely logically consistent.) I haven't really found a detailed description of the practical details of the guarding process, but my general assumption is that this is comparable to other forms of hashgacha, where it's not like you actually have to physically watch the wheat at all times, you just need to make sure that when you're not watching it, it's in sealed containers that can't get water in them, and access to the storage facility is limited only to trustworthy individuals, and so on. But maybe you really need actual eyes on the wheat 24/7, I could be wrong here. Matzah made from such flour is called shmurah matzah. Many Jews make a point to only eat shmurah matzah, or at least to only eat shmurah matzah at the seder. But non-shmurah matzah is perfectly kosher.

We still have a mitzvah of "guard your matzvah", though, even with non-shmurah matzah. Non-shmurah matzah is matzah where you only care about the exposure of the flour to water after it's actually become flour. Which makes a lot more sense. But it still needs to be watched from that point on. So you can't typically actually buy matzah flour, either shmurah or not, in any store, because making sure it meets the requirements of not being exposed to water in accordance with halacha is too logistically intensive. I figured this out back in 2020 when I had all this pandemic bread-baking energy and I wanted to figure out if I could make matzah myself. I decided I couldn't because of the flour problem.

But eventually I realized that if I mill my own flour then I can make non-shmurah matzah. So I bought an inexpensive hand flour mill. And then a few weeks ago I bought wheat berries. So the plan was to very carefully mill the flour and seal it up very well until I was ready to bake with it. I live alone so I think that milling it myself, sealing it myself, and keeping it in a place that only I can access it should qualify completely for watching the flour. At least by my standards and the standards of my family, and I don't really care what other people think. The milling was kind of chaotic- I clamped the mill to my table, but my table's not that stable, so in order to crank the mill effectively I needed to steady it with my other hand. But I kept forgetting the correct place to hold it and grabbing it by the feeding hopper, which wasn't very well secured to the mill body (because the manufacturer wanted to make it easy to change out for a different sized hopper) so I kept yanking off the hopper and throwing wheat berries all over my floor. But in the end I managed to get some flour- some whole wheat and some sifted. More whole wheat than sifted, because my yield from sifting was extremely low.

That left me with one remaining significant problem, which is that my oven, a normal domestic oven, only goes to 525F. Most matzah seems to be baked at higher temperatures, at least 600F, I think because there's a concern that if the temperature isn't hot enough, rising will happen while the dough is heating up initially in the oven before it reaches 'baking temperatures'. We can consider as an extreme example the weird bread I make in my slow cooker where you don't need to pre-rise it because when the slow cooker is first warming up that is effectively a very efficient pre-rise. That said, I don't think 525F is necessarily a problem, especially if I turn on my broiler too. The cutoff temperature is not some absolute number, given that the Rabbis were writing at a time before thermometers were a thing, and it may in fact be that 525F is fine. Stack Exchange cites the Igros Moshe as saying the temperature should be 'when straw will burn', which seems to be probably in the 500-600F range. The risk was that if I determined that the result is chametz, I'd need to re-kasher my oven before Pesach. In any case, to settle this problem I did a testbake in my oven with normal chametz flour a few weeks ago and it seemed to make reasonable matzah. I set the temperature to 525 and then turned on the broiler and it seems to be good enough.

There is sort of a third problem, which I have kind of alluded to, but it's not a particularly unknown problem. Equipment and material issues aside, making kosher matzah is tricky. You have only eighteen minutes from when you start mixing water and flour to when you put it in the oven, and you need to be continually working the dough and keeping track of it to make sure you don't allow any of it to sit and start rising, and there are a variety of other technical details to get right of water to flour ratio and dough shape and size and exposure to sunlight and all sorts of weird halachic rules to make it properly. These are the reasons why typically people leave making matzah to the experts. But this can be managed, My strategy was to make one matzah at a time. I set my timer for eighteen minutes, mixed the water with the flour, then started kneading the dough. After I was happy with the dough, I rolled it out into a thin sheet, then docked it with small holes. Then it went into the oven onto a pre-heated baking steel. While it baked, I clean my mixing bowl and my workspace and get ready to make the next piece. It's extremely inefficient, but it works. Maybe if I do this again, I'll get some helpers so we can do more than one matzah at a time.

I was describing my plans to

ghost_lingering and she asked me a good question: Why are you doing this? I don't have a great answer. I got nerdsniped during 2020 and couldn't shake it until I tried? That's probably the honest answer. I wanted a deeper understanding of what matzah means, maybe, is a better answer. Matzah is Lechem Oni, which might be translated most commonly as the 'bread of affliction', but is perhaps more literally the "bread of poverty". I think this process taught me that it lies somewhere in the middle of those two axes. On the one hand, as practiced now it's not exactly a bread of poverty, in that the complicated, labor intensive process makes it expensive to produce. But it's made from the simplest possible ingredients (just bread and water, no other ingredients allowed) in a simple baking process, so it has the Form of a bread of poverty. This is not crazy or paradoxical to me, the idea of putting a lot of effort into creating a bread which formally represents the bread of poverty in a pure form makes logical sense to me as part of a ritual of contemplating slavery and freedom.

But in terms of the bread of affliction, I think there's something very powerful in making it yourself because what matzah is supposed to represent narratively is the bread made in haste as part of the escape. It conjures up the fear, the stress, the danger of the Exodus, and the sacrifices that had to be made. So actually re-enacting making bread in haste feels like a substantial and significant connection back to the Exodus that we are supposed to relive at the Seder. I'm very much looking forward to eating my matzah tonight.

Chag sameach!

Hanukkah on Rye is terrible and I love it.

I've written several times about how much I love Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. But also my wish that it were more detailed in its halachic analysis. I've said I wanted to write a commentary for years, but I hadn't gotten very far in that work beyond doing background Talmud and Torah study.

WOOF is the Worldcon APA (Amateur Press Association), a style of fanzine where writers writer whatever they want and print enough copies to distribute to all the other contributors. An editor then collates all the contributions and sends them out to everyone who participated. When I saw the announcement this year I decided to use it as motivation to really start the project. I wrote some analysis for all of the animals in the Imaginary Guide that begin with the letter A. Then I typeset the thing in LaTeX and submitted it for WOOF. My first ever fanzine contribution!

My goal is still to complete a commentary on the whole book, but that will take time and energy, better to do it in little chunks. I'm really pleased with what I do have, the writing feels tonally appropriate and gets at a whole array of different halachic concepts beyond what people usually talk about when they talk about these kinds of questions.

The official WOOF version will be up on the web at... some point? But you can read Sefer Chayot Agadiyot Volume 1 from this google drive link.

The Ms. Marvel Disney+ show is two episodes in and it's great! If you liked the comics, you'll love the way they're adapting the visual style into a live action show, and the characters are great and complicated and fun.

But it's also kind of a punch in the nose how much the show is about Kamala and her cultural background. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's great. Muslims dance in this show! And there are lots of different kinds of Muslims representing a diversity of viewpoints and attitudes and senses of identity and approaches to American life.

But "Jews danced" in Hawkeye in the sense that a character danced whose never-appearing sister had a mezuzah on her apartment door, with no acknowledgment in dialogue of any Jewish identity. And "Jews danced" in Moon Knight in the sense that the alter-ego of a Jewish character, whose Jewish identity is acknowledged in the observance of shiva for his brother and a Star of David necklace but not in any way in the dialogue, briefly dances. The alter-ego might be considered Jewish, but he never says anything to indicate such an identification.

And Ms. Marvel shows how possible it is to tell stories in the MCU where religious and ethnic identity informs characters in rich, deep ways. And I love it, I've loved every minute of it so far, but also I keep watching and thinking why couldn't the Jews also get that? I'm sick of having to do all this work just to read the faintest glimmers of Jewish identity into the MCU.

Tikkun Leil went mostly pretty well, with a few little annoyances. And I didn't make it through the whole night, I threw in the towel around 4:30 AM, realizing I wasn't going to be functional for davening. But pretty well, all things told.

The biggest annoyance was, predictably, the fact that I was basically the only person in either of the beis medrashes I went to wearing a mask. Nobody gave me shit about it, in fact it seemed to make people uncomfortable. Several people, like, congratulated me for wearing a mask? They literally congratulated me for being smarter or more cautious than they were being? But nobody else was wearing a mask. Even though we're still in a pandemic and we were gathering to spend hours together in a room, including visitors from out of town? I didn't want the congratulations, I wanted them to see me in a mask and say "Oh, hey, maybe I should do that." Especially the guy who spent the whole 3AM shiur clearing his throat or coughing or something. I'm sure it's allergies or some other medical condition, I'm sure it's not covid, but still, I wished I had the guts to go up to the guy and say "Hey, if you're going to be coughing, could you please at minimum wear a mask? Be mindful that we're still in a pandemic?"

But, you know, I'm vaccinated and boosted and masked and not in any at risk category, so at this point in the pandemic COVID is an annoyance I am trying to avoid because it'd be a pain in the neck to miss the work time and you never know what might happen, not because I'm seriously worried about my health, so I did not choose to go home in spite of that. And one thing I will admit: It was hard to wear a mask for almost five hours like that. It's a big ask of people, I know that. I'm fairly confident it had something to do with my not making it through shacharis. So there really is a tradeoff people have to weigh, and even though it's frustrating I get why a bunch of people balanced it differently than I did.

Anyway! I got my 4 AM giddy gut yom tov in the street! I got some satisfying time to study texts on my own, did some paired learning, and attended some fascinating and inspiring shiurim, the best of which was about the power of music in spirituality and connection to God. I got some homemade cheesecake from a friend! It was a good, meaningful time that helped me feel connected to God and my community, in spite of the pandemic, and the pandemic has certainly taught me to accept that as the best we're going to get right now.

Thanks to the magic of Google Calendar, I have successfully counted the Omer with a bracha so far. If I do it tonight, I will have made it through the whole Omer. Before I started using Google Calendar to remind me, that was just about impossible, but I've been able to do it successfully the last three or four years. I'm proud of myself! Better living through technology, truly.

That means that tomorrow night is Shavuos! I'm very excited for the holiday in general, and for Tikkun Leil Shavuos in particular. The tradition in my town is for the Rabbis at the eight or so shuls in town to each develop a one hour shiur and then they wander around town overnight delivering it several times in different shuls. You can either stay in one shul and hear multiple shiurim from different speakers, or wander around yourself to catch the shiurim you're most interested in, or do chavrusa learning or whatever you want. It's such a nice experience of community observance. Because of the pandemic, for the last two years we haven't gotten the full experience, which for me is highlighted by giddily wishing people Gutt Yom Tov at 3 in the morning as you pass them on the street, so I'm really looking forward to doing it again if I can stay awake.

Chag sameach! Have a meaningful holiday, however you celebrate.

Two Saturdays ago, someone vandalized a mural in town. A stunning, beautiful mural about welcoming refugees into America: https://colab-arts.org/

The vandalism involved spray painting a Star of David over the face of a woman wearing a hijab. So what I felt wasn't just anger and upset, but also shame. Shame that apparently a member of my community, claiming to stand for my values, was making this statement. In the past few weeks, tension between Jews and Muslims in Israel have been a bit higher than normal, with fighting at the al-Aqsa mosque and a number of street attacks, so it seemed like a plausible inference that there was some connection. But this Jew did not speak for me.

There was a vigil that Saturday to stand against the hate, but most observant Jews weren't aware of it because it was Shabbat, and a lot of Jews felt like it was important to be visibly there to say this does not represent us. So they had another vigil on Monday, maybe a hundred people showed up and a bunch of clergy and community leaders spoke. I felt obligated to show up.

At the vigil, I learned that the artist had been harassed while painting, and had asked for police protection from the mayor, who promised it and then failed to deliver. The mayor later spoke and she apologized, while kinda making it sound like it was the police's fault, not hers. Either way, there's a missing part of the story there that I doubt we'll ever learn.

Then on last Thursday, the police announced they'd arrested a suspect. Who was apparently not Jewish. I don't know if he did it or not, he is innocent until proven guilty and I don't have that much reason to trust the police. And now it goes to the courts, which means any evidence won't become fully public for a while, if ever.

We're unlikely to ever know the whole story, which makes it even more frustrating. Why did he the vandal do it, and why did they use a Star of David as the symbol of their hate? I am reminded of an opposite story back in 2017 when a spate of threats to Jewish federations was ultimately traced to a Jew. We rarely get the full story, these things cross our social media dashes and we form opinions about them from incomplete data and those opinions shape the way we see the world.

But as a concluding thought, the explanation of the mural that they discussed at the vigil is that its intention is the show symbols of the homelands of the refugees, to indicate their deep longing to return home. It stands in contrast to classical American iconography about immigrants, which generally emphasizes adapting to a new homeland. As a Jew with complicated feelings about immigration and assimilation, I am sitting with that idea and reprocessing. I hope the mural gets repaired soon and that it stays up for a long time, so I can continue to reflect on its messages.

Chag sameach!

The Merchant of Venice with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock

I saw it at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn this afternoon. Mostly I enjoyed the experience a lot. Thompson was an incredibly charismatic and moving Shylock. I felt his struggles, the way he seethed with fury at the way he was treated and the way it led him astray from his moral values until he crossed lines he could not walk back.

The problem, if we can call it that, is that he was such a dynamic presence that he sort of sucked the oxygen out of the room. Whenever he was on stage, he drew all your attention. Whenever he wasn't on stage, the show felt more sluggish.

And there was such a clarity to Thompson's performance that I understood everything he was trying to say about who Shylock was and what he wanted. The result being that I spent most of the play mentally trying to make sense of the other characters, mostly Antonio and Portia and Jessica.

-I've never quite understood the function of Antonio's (Alfredo Narciso) performance in Act I Scene 1. What is his melancholy about, what does it mean? The best answer I've seen is in the Trevor Nunn Merchant, where Antonio's melancholy is because he is desperately in love with Bassanio, and Bassanio is straight. That was definitely not the subtext here, so what was it?

One possibility is that they were playing with the idea that Antonio's melancholy is what we would call modern day major clinical depression, and Antonio spends the whole play deep in a depressive episode trying to kill himself. Why does he make a pound of flesh his bond? Because he wants to die. We notice in the final scene, the ring confrontation, that he, having escaped the Jew's tortures, immediately offers his body against as a surety against Bassanio's inevitable infidelity. He hates his body and wants to die, especially if he can be a martyr to Christ in doing so.

I think another possibility I noticed is that there's a very subtle lie in the first scene. Antonio tells Salerio and Salanio that he is not melancholy because he is anticipating his ships' return, because he has sufficient other assets that he is not reliant on their return for his fortunes.

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.

But in the next scene he tells Bassanio that he is in fact fully invested right now, that he cannot even spare a few thousand ducats for his kinsman. His speech to Salerio was a flat out lie. He has inflated his worth to his business partners, he has overextended himself unreasonably, he has taken on too much risk. I noticed that when Shylock quotes the story of Jacob and Laban to him, he distinguishes it from usury by calling it a 'venture'. And ventures are not anti-Christian, in fact ventures are noble. But ventures are terrifying, he is sustaining way too much financial risk and there is nothing he can do but spend the entire play stewing in an ever deepening well of anxiety. Antonio's final appearance in the play concludes with Portia telling him that she has news that three of his ships have finally made it back to Venice. The play is called The Merchant of Venice and it is bookended by the melancholy speech and the return of his ships. Methinks there is structure there.

-Meanwhile, Portia (Isabel Arraiza) and Jessica (Danaya Esperanza), who were increasingly set up as foils the more the play ran on. Unlike Jessica, there is investment in who Portia is in the first few acts, but nonetheless it's not much. Hers is not a particularly young Portia, there is something of the Girlboss in the way she is costumed. She strikes you as the kind of person who doesn't actually want to have any of her suitors win her hand in marriage, she is comfortable running things at Belmont, and she is comfortably bossing around her servants and not having anyone challenge her. This is the most standoffish I've ever seen a Portia/Nerissa relationship.

We don't see anything of significance of Jessica before intermission, but after intermission they took a lot of time to show her increasing realization that running off with Lorenzo is a mistake. Shakespeare gives Jessica and Lorenzo a punch-punch-kiss teasing scene at Belmont before Portia returns- in this version they play it straight, with no teasing and no reconciliation. Jessica quickly tires of Lorenzo telling her what to do and how to feel- she is her own woman, like Portia, After all, she is the one who created the plan to escape Shylock, she wants to be an independent woman and Lorenzo does not appear capable of letting her.

Similarly, the reconciliations of Portia and Bassanio and Nerissa and Gratiano are played without resolution-- the play ends with Nerissa slapping Gratiano and storming out, showing that in this play's world all of the men have disappointed their women. The end. Except...

Except for the play pulling the oh-so-trendy move of ending the play with a Hebrew prayer. In the Munby Merchant it's S'lach Lanu Avinu. In Nunn's it's Eishet Chayil. Which was it this time? Kol Nidrei. Apparently because so much of the play is about oaths and bonds, and Kol Nidrei is about nullifying oaths. This sort of works on its own, it's kind of a clever idea, but what elevated it to emotionally devastating and brought me to tears is that it's both Shylock and Jessica (in separate places) reciting it in unison. Realizing that the most important bond in the play is the one between Shylock and Jessica, and therefore showing them both realizing that they have failed each other and trying desperately to ask God to help them fix it. Oh, my heart.

There were two new versions of Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song this year, one by pop band Haim and one by Israeli rappers Nissim Black and Kosha Dillz.

Sandler we love you pic.twitter.com/QGBAwqOZld
— HAIM (@HAIMtheband) December 3, 2021

Watch on YouTube

As a reminder, my critique of Sandler's song from a couple years ago:

Certainly, it's not melodically very good, but that's sort of the point and hardly a point of critique. It's a bit of more or less off-the-cuff shtick, though like most Sandler jokes it's been pushed too far over the years. More positively, I appreciate part of the song's sentiment. It is true that it can be lonely being a Jew in a Christian country, particularly at moments when Christian activity is at a peak. It is also true that for this reason and others, Jews take comfort in the success and prominence of other Jews. I value "the Hanukah Song" for taking a step back to appreciate that success and appreciate its context: that there are a number of Jews in Hollywood, but they are still outliers and we as a nation are still outliers. That in fact, there are so few Jews in Hollywood that one can sing a couple of songs and name them all.

On the other hand, while I think Sandler grasps that subtlety, I don't think much of his audience does. I worry that "The Hanukah Song" reinforces anti-semitic lies about Jews and the media. I don't worry a lot, but I do worry. And more seriously, I worry that "The Hanukah Song" positions Chanukah so strongly in opposition to Christmas- "the only kid in town without a Christmas tree" etc... Chanukah as an observance has very little connection to Christmas as an observance except calendar compatibility. I don't want my Chanukah music to be anti-Christmas music, I want Chanukah music that is about the Jewish significance of Chanukah.

My subtler complaint about about the song is that it conflates Judaism and observance in subtly erroneous ways. Most of the show business Jews Sandler sings about are not in any meaningful sense observant Jews, but Sandler uses observances as synecdochic allusions to tribal affiliation. Rather than just saying that David Lee Roth is Jewish, Sandler says that Roth "lights the menorah". Rather than saying that Jon Bauman and Henry Winkler are Jewish, he says that they "eat together at the Carnegie Deli". I take it as assumed that Sandler isn't actually asserting these things as statements of facts. I don't think he is claiming that David Lee Roth makes a point to light a menorah all eight days of Chanukah. Rather he is asserting that these are things that Jews do, and therefore as Jews, they are things that Roth, Bauman, and Winkler might do.

Of course, the Carnegie Deli is not a kosher deli, but that doesn't bother Sandler because he's not actually talking about Jewish observance, and he's talking about people who don't much care about Jewish observance. "The Hannukah Song" is a song about being Jewish, it's not a song about living Jewish lives.

Okay, that gotten out of the way, it's obvious which one of these two covers I like more, right? I don't have anything against the Haim version saying look, there are more successful Jews in the media in the past few years we can add to the song, so let's celebrate them! It's a lovely sentiment and Haim are great performers. But boy do I love what Nissim Black and Kosha Dillz do with this song.

I want to make a perhaps subtle point, which is that they don't substantially change the theme or message of Sandler's song with their lyrics. And they could have, there are many approaches to what Chanukah means and for observant Jews, celebrating the idea abstract idea of Being a Jew is not usually particularly central to our observance of Chanukah. They could have taken the tack that the Maccabeats frequently do, of emphasizing the significance of the miracles performed by God on Chanukah and connecting to the history and the significance of marking the anniversary of those historical miracles. That would've been one way of taking Sandler's sentiment and adding something deeper to it. In fact, they instead explicitly disclaim in the lyrics the idea of commemorating the history in this song. Rather, their song is about Jews getting together on Chanukah to feel like Jews together- the same thing Sandler's song is about. The only difference is that instead of trying to do it by listing a bunch of mostly non-observant Jews who happen to be famous, they do it by showing a bunch of Jews rocking out on the streets of New York. It's not Tom Cruise's Agent that makes Judaism meaningful, the song says; Rather, it's normal Jews celebrating together. And to that end, the beat they sample from Sandler's song is transformed into a danceable beat.

I know there's a degree to which this song is inherently a novelty song, but I hope it makes it into our Chanukah canon anyway.

Seeking Ferret

Full Life. Full Agonies.

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