Rejected YCT Article on Judaism and Culture with my explanatory comments
David Shasha
The Central Place of Religious Humanism in Judaism and American Civilization: Episodes and Figures in Cultural History
It is always an adventure on those rare occasions that I see a “Call for Papers” announcement and choose to submit something. Past experience has shown me the malevolence – always cloaked in “civilized” discourse – that Ashkenazim express towards the Sephardic tradition.
In the past I have presented to SHU readers some pertinent examples of rejected pieces allowing me to discuss the nature of the rejection and what I think it means for the integrity and self-respect of Sephardic culture.
The following examples come from the now-defunct Open Zion, edited by Peter Beinart, and from the journal Conversations edited by Rabbi Marc Angel:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/M6S2UBrCC00/9FrUHe-ZOKEJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/davidshasha/yj_4nB1nWTk/PSVcxzqBsKEJ
I will not review these cases, but will say briefly that both of them were connected to one or another issue involved in Sephardic culture and its exclusion from institutional Jewish discourse. The tone of both pieces is heated and polemical.
When I saw the following announcement on H-Judaic, I thought I would present a more generic version of my work, leaving aside the polemics:
CALL FOR PAPERS: A
JUDAISM ENGAGED WITH THE ARTS
In his final authorial statement as Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks challenged twenty-first century Jewish
leaders "to deepen the conversation between Torah and the wisdom of
the world, and to do so globally." (Sacks, A Judaism Engaged With The
World, 2013, p. 28.) Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) Rabbinical School is an innovative Orthodox institution that is on the cutting edge
of this intercultural conversation. The faculty, students and publications of
YCT exemplify the openness and sophistication of academic freedom, and the
rootedness and sanctity of the halakhic (observant) Jewish tradition. YCT now
seeks to deepen the conversation between Torah and one of the essential
bodies of worldly wisdom and beauty-the arts.
This year's edition of Milin Havivin, the official Torah and Jewish Studies
journal of YCT, will be devoted to Judaism and the Arts. We invite scholars of
Religion and Jewish Studies, rabbis, and artists to explore the interplay between
Judaism and the arts. We are particularly interested in essays and articles
that address the following question: Why is a knowledge of, and appreciation
for, the arts beneficial (and perhaps even necessary for) a deeper, enriched,
dynamic engagement with Talmud Torah (traditional Jewish learning) and Jewish
Studies? How can literature, music, film, painting, dance, and theatre reveal
the Jewish tradition's hidden insights and open new vistas in Jewish learning?
We are also interested in articles and essays from scholars of the arts
(Professors of Literature, English, and the Literary Arts; of Art, Painting,
and the Visual Arts; of Music and of the Performing Arts; and of Film) that
discuss how an engagement with Jewish learning and Torah study can enhance the
study of (and the engagement with) the arts.
Scholars and artists may explore this question, or other topics of interest,
from the perspective of their particular artistic discipline, or from a
multitude of artistic disciplines.
The journal will also consider brief "personal reflections" from
academics, rabbis, and artists that recount how a particular novel, story,
play, poem, painting, film, or musical composition allowed them to discover new
meaning in a traditional Jewish practice, and/or how the artistic work enabled
them to view a text of Jewish learning with new eyes, or hear a Jewish prayer
with new ears.
Featured writers in this edition will include Dr. Matthew Baigell,
professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University and the author of
seventeen books; artist Jill Nathanson, who will be writing about her
"Seeing Sinai" painting series (exhibited at Yale University's Slifka
Center and at other galleries); and Professor Marc B. Shapiro, Chair of Judaic
Studies at the University of Scranton and two-time National Jewish Book Award
finalist.
After submitting the article I quickly received a rejection notice from journal editor Daniel Ross Goodman:
I very much appreciate your interest in submitting something, and you are a talented and knowledgeable writer. However, please tailor your article to fit one of the specific prompts form the CFP. We are looking for articles that address one or some of the issues raised in the CFP. It is not a general Judaism and Culture, or Judaism and Religious Humanism issue, but a Judaism and the Arts issue that is seeking articles that clarify how a certain artistic discipline can enlighten our understanding of Torah. Please submit something along these lines; if you need to write something new, you have until late January to do so, there is no need to rush and submit something to me right away.
Upon receiving the rejection letter I immediately got into action and contacted two SHU readers to use their resources to see if something could be done to rectify the matter using backchannels.
No luck!
The article will be quite familiar to veteran SHU readers as it is a composite of a number of my articles on movies, music, and general cultural issues connected to the theme of Jewish Humanism that is the foundation of my work. A great irony here is that the announcement prominently cites the words and values of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks whose books are a central part of my writing as they express the sacred values of Religious Humanism. I discuss this in greater detail in my 2003 essay on Rabbi Sacks’ seminal book The Dignity of Difference, the essay published in the Edah Journal, now affiliated with YCT under the name Meorot:
http://www.edah.org/backend/JournalArticle/3_2_Shasha.pdf
Given all these complications, and in order to make sure that I was not losing my mind, I forwarded my article on Judaism and Culture to a number of people, along with the “Call for Papers” announcement and the rejection letter. I wanted to confirm that something seriously wrong was going on here and that it was not just in my mind.
Without over-parsing the rejection letter and trying to get into the inner psyche of its author, what does seem to be happening here is something very important in light of the work I do in the SHU. Some careful analysis is necessary.
The values of Religious Humanism are alien to contemporary Judaism, just as they were once the common currency of most educated Jews. A good deal of this shift has come from an increased tension between the many Ashkenazi factions. In fact, the very institution publishing the journal I submitted the article to – Yeshivat Chovevei Torah – continues to be embroiled in a bitter controversy over what has become known as “Open Orthodoxy”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/65-pgkt2JH0
When we try and process what is happening in this battle over Orthodox Judaism what we need to remember is that the conceptual language of the discussion is predicated on an Ashkenazi mental lexicon.
What we can learn from the rejection letter is that it is not simply a problem of geography when it comes to Sephardic Jewish culture. There is a completely different mindset that has served to block the basic values of Sephardic Religious Humanism from the Jewish discussion.
SHU readers have by now become quite used to the way in which I routinely deploy Jewish values and concepts in order to present cultural issues. Movies, books, music, and the rest of the Arts are all seen in the larger context of our Jewish heritage; a strategy that I did not invent, but one that is rooted in the mentality of the Andalusian rabbi-poets whose genius has been presented in Peter Cole’s classic anthology The Dream of the Poem:
What the rejection letter tells us is that beyond the obvious ethnocentric racism of Ashkenazim that I have shown through many examples, there is a deep conceptual-psychological-moral block that completely refuses the idea of Religious Humanism as a licit model for Jewish identity.
Religious Humanism is a complex cluster of values that speaks in a language alien to the mindset of today’s Orthodox Judaism. It is clear that this value-laden language cannot be perceived by those who see Judaism in strictly mechanical terms bereft of the internal connections embodied in the construct that is Religious Humanism.
Orthodoxy refuses the organic connections of Religious Humanism and demands that Judaism and civilization are disparate blocks that must be brought together by using bridging mechanisms; mechanisms that are not at all necessary in the inclusive, pluralistic Judaism of the Sephardic tradition that forms the basis of my article.
The rejection letter attempts to hide this bitter pill of Orthodoxy in a formalistic fog – I did not “follow the assignment” – but it was clear to all those I forwarded the material to that the letter indicated a more disturbing inability to understand the concept of Jewish Humanism. Note well the demand at the end of the letter that I re-submit a completely different article than the one I wrote. It reflects an Ashkenazi mindset that sees Judaism as disconnected from general civilization in a way that necessitates some formalistic connection. It means that Jews need to get “beyond” Torah and connect to the larger culture. It does not acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish Humanism.
The way that I formulate my ideas about Judaism and Culture in my writing denies the separation and the need for any bridges. Following the traditions of Moses ibn Ezra’s Arab poetics, Samuel ha-Nagid’s Andalusian-Hebrew revision of the epic war poem, Judah al-Harizi’s adaptation of the rhymed-prose narrative tradition known as Maqama, and Maimonides’ scholastic insights on classical Jewish literature and Greek philosophy, I have not drawn in my article the absolute lines that seem to be a central part of the contemporary Ashkenazi mindset.
The undercurrent of confusion and hostility that permeates the rejection letter speaks to my inability – something I have become used to – to speak in the accepted language of the Ashkenazi consensus. It is very much a “closed” discourse, not open to alternative Jewish approaches.
All this discussion brings us back to this whole spurious concept of “Open Orthodoxy” and YCT. “Open Orthodoxy” is an encoded term that is to be understood by insiders who know just how the game is played. In this iteration of Orthodox Judaism the Sephardic tradition and its expansive religio-cultural sense can have no place. It is not just about the ethnic differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, it is a complete conceptual clash of civilizations.
My article is based on many other articles that I have written for the SHU which are routinely re-cycled to newsletter subscribers on a regular basis. The comments in the rejection letter are the first time I have ever heard that my cultural analysis was not part of Torah Judaism.
The whole matter speaks to the agonizing difficulty that contemporary Sephardim have in trying to secure a place in the Jewish discussion. We find that it is not just because we do not speak in Yiddish – in point of fact many of the examples in my article are of Ashkenazi Jews – one of whom actually spoke Yiddish!
No, it is a rejection based not simply on ethnic grounds and the Sephardi-Ashkenazi battle. It is a complete rejection of the conceptual mindset that once controlled American Jewish discourse.
Here are some recent examples of the way this has been changing:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/GF8znQCzdnM
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/U2xbqhwa92o
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/rY6tsM-gviU
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/2ft9qSk5ICI
Whether the discussion is predicated on specifically Sephardic ethnicity and historical concerns or on conceptual-religious issues makes no appreciable difference. One can see how a dysfunctional mentality has gripped an American Judaism that – as has been shown by the Pew Research survey report – is in dire straits. It is a Judaism that needs the expansive values of Sephardic Religious Humanism in the most desperate way.
But when we read such a rejection letter we see that the rot has set in very deep. Ashkenazi Jews are unable to hear the cultural genius of the Sephardic past and the way it has been formulated along the lines of Religious Humanism. Instead of embracing a tradition which has successfully negotiated the complex values of Western civilization, we are instead being force-fed the idea that a rejectionist Ashkenazi Orthodoxy can actually be considered “Open.”
It is a sad testimony to
an American Judaism without a clue; a Judaism that has rejected the most
brilliant minds and ideas that our history has bequeathed us. In a short time this attitude will cause the
almost-complete destruction of the Sephardic heritage and the values of
Religious Humanism. All that will be
left is the dysfunction and acrimonious battles we see each and every day in
the Jewish world.
For more information on the ideas of Religious Humanism please see the special edition of the SHU I prepared on the subject:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/d9Q4PNeOS0U/L8JjvNmL0cIJ
An intriguing post-script to the rejection of my article came when I read a post written by Mr. Goodman that I have discussed in the following post published in the Weekly Items of Note dated September 21, 2014:
I thought the following post on controversial restaurant chain Chik-fil-A somewhat curious:
Not the least because it was written by a rabbinical student in the Open Orthodox seminary Yeshivat Chovevei Torah.
And then there is the connection to the Witherspoon Institute where the article was first published before it was re-posted to the radical Right Wing Mosaic magazine:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/09/13811/
Here is some background on the ultra-Conservative Witherspoon Institute:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witherspoon_Institute
One is not quite sure what to make of the so-called “Open Orthodox” movement given that the editor of its literary journal is writing articles for a think-tank that represents the most reactionary and vile positions in the current cultural debate.
Even more intriguing is the fact that I previously encountered the writer of the article, Daniel Ross Goodman, when I submitted an article to the YCT Milin Havivin journal that he edits. I have been holding the article that Mr. Goodman rejected along with his actual rejection letter until the actual issue of the journal is published. Suffice it to say that I now better understand why my article on Jewish culture and Religious Humanism was rejected!
And then there is the main point of fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism. Chik-fil-A does not hold to Judaism or the Sabbath. Our Sabbath is on Saturday, the Christian Sabbath is on Sunday; the day chosen as a rejection of Jewish Law.
http://www.chick-fil-a.com/Company/Highlights-Sunday
The point is that extremist Christians see Judaism as an outmoded covenant which was superseded by the coming of the Messiah who abrogated the “old” Law. Jews are eternally damned according to this theology.
It is absurd for any religious Jew to praise Christian supersessionism while at the same time affirming their commitment to Halakha. Goodman keeps kosher, but believes that Chik-fil-A’s position on the Sunday Sabbath is a great thing. It makes no sense at all.
One indeed wonders what reactionary Jews like Goodman are actually thinking when they support the very radical Christian elements like Chik-fil-A that have done so much damage to our people over the course of history as they have marked our Torah as a “dead letter.”
Knowing all this, I will now cherish my rejection letter from Mr. Goodman that much more.
For those who would like to see the contents of the special edition of Milin
Havivin on Judaism and Culture:
http://www.yctorah.org/images/milin%20havivin%202013-2014%20-%2012.18.14.pdf
DS
1. Introduction: Sephardic Religious Humanism as a Model for Jewish Culture
Central to the Sephardic Jewish tradition is the precious value of Religious Humanism. We are often fooled into thinking that religion is purely a matter of our relationship to God and the spirit. Where is the place of humanity in this religious scheme?
And, conversely, where can we find the voice of religion in the vast enterprise of Humanistic studies?
Rather than maintaining religion and humanism as two separate categories, the great thinkers of the Sephardic tradition have sought to articulate these critically important values as one.
Over the course of publishing the Sephardic Heritage Update newsletter I have attempted to present the genius of our civilization by highlighting the values of Religious Humanism from a number of different vantage points. We can see Religious Humanism in our literature as well as in other forms of art and expression.
Religious Humanism is a value system that exalts the wonder of life itself along with our love of God and His guidance and protection for His creatures. It is a system that demands justice and compassion. While we seek to explore and investigate the world around us through the tools of science and philosophy, we are duty-bound to care for our neighbor and protect the weak and helpless. It is through the values of Religious Humanism that we are most able to express our humanity fully.
2. Maimonides and Sephardic Religious Humanism
The Sephardic tradition of research and science hinges in great measure on the following seminal passage in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed:
It was not the object of the Prophets and our Sages in these utterances to close the gate of investigation entirely, and to prevent the mind from comprehending what is within its reach, as is imagined by simple and idle people, whom it suits better to put forth their ignorance and incapacity as wisdom and perfection, and to regard the distinction and wisdom of others as irreligion and imperfection, thus taking darkness for light and light for darkness. The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt. (1:32)
Studying the sacred words of the great master of Cordoba we learn the most basic and elementary definition that set the parameters of what we have called “The Levantine Option”; the articulation of a foundational Religious Humanism that would provide human beings with a sensible way of balancing tradition with the needs of the moment. Religious Humanism for Maimonides was an intellectual and ethical formation that bore within it two interlocking mechanisms that could not in his view ever be wrenched apart: According to this text, the scholar must know that the Bible did not mean to close off the reader from speculation and science.
Maimonidean allegory presented the Bible as a paradigmatic construct that leads the religious scholar to investigate further and to listen to the words of truth from whence they come. Wisdom in the Maimonidean epistemological system can come from anywhere and must be judged on the basis of what we know from the Prophets as well as from our own human investigations. The second and equally important point made here is that there is a limit to what we can know and understand – even from our scientific investigations.
The first point reflects the medieval Scholastic’s concern with humanistic values; those values that are common to all mankind and create a shared civilization that we can confidently assert as a universalism. The acceptance of such an understanding was not to be taken for granted in the medieval Jewish community; the philosophical works of Maimonides were placed under a ban by the school of Nahmanides and were eventually burned by the Inquisitors in France after the Jewish community there handed them over to the Christian authorities.
This first real attempt to articulate a Jewish Religious Humanism, a weltanschauung that would take into account the science and philosophy of the Gentiles, became one of the main points of contention between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.
But when looking at the second point Maimonides makes in his text, we see that he does not permit secular universal humanism to have the final say. Indeed, there are limits to our rational mind and the purpose of the Prophets and Sages was to set those limitations. So for Maimonides there is religion, the practice of investigating the Divine Writ as articulated through the revelation of the Prophets, but then there is also humanism, the ability of human beings to construct a scientific understanding of the world and its phenomena – and this includes, as Maimonides is at pains to prove, the very metaphysics of the invisible world of God.
3. Sephardic Religious Humanism as Classical Jewish Culture: From Maimonides to Grace Aguilar and Sabato Morais
The standard reading of Jewish culture is refracted through the German-Ashkenazi Haskalah which produced the schismatic relationships that have anchored modern Jewish life and belief. The separation of religion from science, in the Descartian modality, marks the ways in which 19th century Jewish culture is read. Eschewing the Religious Humanism and cultural pluralism of London’s Rabbi David Nieto (1654-1728), emerging from the Sephardic traditions of Isaac Cardoso (1603-1683) in Venice which lead us back to Maimonides, post-Graetz Jewish historiography has drawn a portrait of Judaism that is marked by conflict and polemics.
Having filtered Jewish Modernity through the mechanisms of these polemics, contemporary Jewish scholars have painted a picture of a culture that is Byzantine in its complexity and impenetrable in the static nature of its various individual and conflicting components.
As contemporary Jews look for wholesome models of their culture which would allow for the possibility of preserving a Jewish parochialism within a larger universal humanism, Jewish scholarship has failed to articulate the ways in which Sephardic Humanism created a living and breathing model of just such a phenomenon – a Judaism that was at home in its own tradition and in the world at large.
Our ignorance of Anglo-Jewish history is due to this denigration of the Sephardic component.
The first scholar to restore the lines of this tradition has been Arthur Kiron in his brilliant dissertation on Sabato Morais (1823-1897), Golden Ages, Promised Lands. It is in Kiron’s trenchant and brilliant formulations that we see for the first time the interlinked cultural constructs that brought together Italy, England and America. It is through the agency of a figure like Morais that we can trace the lines of influence that bring Maimonidean Humanism into the Modern Age.
As we have seen in Yosef Yerushalmi’s classic biography of Cardoso From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, Cardoso’s Iberian Converso culture was transplanted to Venice which then led to the emergence of the University at Padua as the central place for enlightened Jewish education in Europe. Padua served to produce the most innovative and brilliant thinkers of European Jewish culture in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Sephardic scholar Jose Faur has been able to successfully reconstruct a neo-Maimonidean renaissance among Sephardic thinkers by tracing the line from Maimonides to the Conversos and on to the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Nieto and eventually to Elijah Benamozegh (1822-1900), that final flowering of Jewish Humanism prior to the occlusion of Sephardim from Jewish discourse.
Kiron follows Faur in establishing that a neo-Maimonidean tradition had been established in a nexus which linked Livorno, London and Philadelphia.
Morais devoted a good portion of his life in the United States, as we will see, through his innumerable public lectures and addresses, trying to communicate (and often, literally, translate), his formative experiences and Livornese Jewish perspective to his American audience. From childhood, Morais was imbued with profound political and religious convictions. From his later writings, which he produced in the United States we know that he was a sensitive student inter alia of medieval Spanish traditions of philosophy and ethics (particularly of Maimonides, and Bahya Joseph ibn Pakuda) and of “secular” Hebrew poetry, the theology and poetry of Judah ha-Levi, another outstanding figure of the Spanish Jewish golden Age; the fourteenth century “Jewish Dante,” Immanuel of Rome, the early sixteenth-century Biblical exegesis and theological writings of the Iberian Jewish refugee Isaac Abravanel, the sixteenth century Italian Jewish humanist Azariah dei Rossi, the seventeenth-eighteenth century Haham [David] Nieto, his predecessor in Livorno and London… Beyond his literary interests, Morais also nurtured a deep love for music, including Italian opera, composed occasional Hebrew poetry, and later was reputed to be one of the most outstanding Hebraists in America in the nineteenth century, though he characteristically rejected such honorifics.
The period in which Morais traveled from Livorno to London and on to Philadelphia saw a flowering of Nieto’s Religious Humanism in the writings of two prominent members of the London Sephardic community.
In the classic work of Moses Angel (1819-1898) published in the generation following Nieto’s ministry in London’s Sephardic community, The Law of Sinai and Its Appointed Times, published in London in 1858, the outpouring of Religious Humanism and its rich and brilliant values comes to the fore:
[B]lind obedience is generally the result of early teaching or of ignorant imitativeness; it may arise from faith, but it is faith of so undignified a character that it scarcely rises above superstition. On the other hand, the faith which is based on reason, acquires all the majesty of self-sacrifice and all the beauty of devotion; it is unshakable because it is not capricious, it is unerring because it is founded on principle. True, faith, as our ancestors taught us, must precede reason, but also true that reason must follow faith. Faith without reason is like those golden fruits which are tempting to the eye but rotten at the core. Reason without faith would resemble that motion into eternal space which depended on projection without attraction; it would be aimless and endless. Reason and faith conjoined form that lovely combination which resembles the pure mind in the pure body; the inner life is as unsullied as the outward frame is consistent with harmony.
It is here that we finally arrive at the historical person of Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), one of the most arresting Jewish writers of the Modern period, whose work springs from this grand, albeit forgotten, tradition and represents the most accessible library of Sephardic Humanism in Anglo-Jewish letters.
Standing in contrast to those modern feminists like Virginia Woolf who would come half a century later, Aguilar remained the perfect model of a Religious Humanist; disdaining the false luster of the purely secular as much as she did the zealous ignorance of the fundamentalist, Aguilar was a restless and searching wanderer for truth and a firm partisan of character and morality. She would have found our current penchant for extremes – religious and secular – to be distasteful and foolish. While fighting for the elevation of the status of Woman she would never degrade the character and beauty of the female person, as she would never minimize the significance of Judaism and its wondrous spiritual values.
Grace Aguilar a shining example of the varied and multiple polarities of a deeply religious person who was pointedly concerned with the proper dignity of women who could at the same time harbor a commitment to the intellectual values and priorities that we would claim as the inheritance of Modernity.
For some today that might mean that Aguilar was a bundle of contradictions. And yet our means of comparative understanding, the analytical tools that we have at our disposal, might not be rich enough to penetrate the world of one as brilliantly complex and polymorphous as Aguilar.
While Hannah Arendt preserved a version of an Ashkenazi woman, Rahel Varnhagen, who she showed as reflecting a prototypical variant of the modern Enlightened Jewish woman, Grace Aguilar did not see herself as any kind of revolutionary. She blazed her own path in a life cut tragically short by a debilitating physical illness which silenced her voice in its very prime. Her writings were not composed with any sense of cultural limitation or indulgent self-absorption. In essence, her writings were the product of a deeply confident Jewish consciousness that was fully aware of the world in which it was a part and the needs that it had to address to fulfill what Aguilar saw as what was lacking in the Jewish community of her time.
Thus we can see that Sabato Morais, Moses Angel, and Grace Aguilar are all seminal figures that reflect the tradition of Jewish Humanism transmitted through the agency of the Sephardic traditions of Maimonides and Bahya ibn Paquda and which had been channeled by illustrious figures such as Isaac Abrabanel, Solomon ibn Verga, Isaac Aboab, Isaac Cardoso, Menasseh ben Israel and David Nieto.
4. Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat: The Culture of North African Judaism and its Colonial Discontents
In his brilliant series of books The Rabbi’s Cat the French visual artist Joann Sfar has gone back to a part of his family history in Algeria to tell some very imaginative stories about a widowed rabbi, his beautiful daughter and their cat. It is a set of stories that draws from the classical Sephardic past as it comes into contact with the discontents of Modernity.
Mr. Sfar specializes in what has become known as the graphic novel; a sub-genre of the art of cartoon drawing that expands the form to be inclusive of a larger and more subtle canvas. The graphic novel seeks to tell stories which reflect the scope of the literary novel rather than the short format of the comic strip. The most famous example of a graphic novel by a Jewish writer has been Art Spiegelman’s Maus for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. The graphic novel is a wonderful way to tell a serious story in a way that enables the reader to not only feel the contours and rhythms of the tale, but to visualize in a concrete manner the images of the story and of the past that it purports to reconstruct.
In the case of The Rabbi’s Cat we are introduced to an Algerian Jewish family with a very unique cat. The family has lost its matriarch and the cat, in love with his young mistress, decides to eat the family parrot and thus is enabled to talk. This literary device permits Sfar to have an ongoing philosophical dialogue go on between the rabbi and the cat.
In these dialogues, one part humorous and one part existentially challenging, we see emerge a richly textured portrait of Algerian Jewish life. Sfar skillfully draws a verbal and a visual image of a society that is deeply complex and in the throes of some extremely difficult changes and transitions. The rabbi is shown as having been a community leader and now must take a test given by the French consistoire in order to maintain his place as the community’s rabbi. We see the rabbi studying French texts in order to pass this dictation exam. As this is happening, the cat wishes to be Bar Mitzvahed and to begin the study of Kabbalah, Jewish mystical lore. In the conversations between the cat, the rabbi and the rabbi’s rabbi we see a kind of Marx Brothers hilarity that is replete with many of the complicated issues that mark the modern Jewish condition.
The cat appears to be a cynic and questions many of the religious beliefs and orthodoxies of the old rabbi and his Sephardic rabbinical traditions.
Here we see Sfar reconstructing the philosophical debates that existed among Sephardic rabbis since the time of Se’adya Ga’on and Maimonides. This proclivity for philosophical discussion is of course tempered and recontextualized by the more modern Western elements that become a subtle thematic in the book as a whole.
Throughout The Rabbi’s Cat there is a constant battle waged between the traditional ways of the Algerian Jewish past, a past that is deeply embedded within its Arabic cultural environment, and the great pressures that have been exerted by the French presence in Algeria; pressures that have caused internal problems for the Judaism of people like the old rabbi and for the continuity of an old world that saw Jews and Arabs forming relationships that were both amicable and peaceful. The cat is an agitator who seeks to trip up the rabbi and force him to relinquish many of his long-cherished beliefs. But the rabbi continues counsel the cat and stand up to many of his challenges.
In this aspect, Sfar looks at the battle between traditional Sephardic Judaism and the challenges of modernity. And the rabbi does not acquit himself poorly in this regard. He shows himself to be a wise and sensitive teacher, filled with a warm spirit and a giving heart. The pressures that are being exerted from the side of a corrosive French presence in Algeria are seen as forcing traditional natives like the rabbi out of their own identities in a way that will ultimately do damage to their internal equilibrium. These native Algerians live under a racist French occupation where they are refused service in restaurants and where they must prove their proficiency in the French language in order to minister to their native communities.
In a startling episode in the second section of the book “Malka of the Lions” the rabbi takes a trip with the cat to the grave of his ancestor Messaoud Sfar where he comes across an Arab sheikh named Muhammad Sfar who is traveling by donkey to the very same gravesite to visit the very same ancestor on his birthday! The two men find that they share a common ancestor. Sfar has the two men’s animals argue over the meaning of the name Sfar:
Wait, an Arab is called SFAR?
Yes. Sfar’s an Arabic name.
Are you kidding? Sfar comes from “Sofer,” which means “to write” in Hebrew. Sfar is a Jewish name.
You ass, Sfar comes from “yellow” in Arabic. It evokes the sulfur flower used by coppersmiths. Sfar’s Arab through and through.
Besides, we’re going to the grave of Messaoud Sfar our ancestor.
That’s where we’re going too.
Messaoud Sfar was a great Sufi, a saint.
No way! Messaoud Sfar was a rabbi.
The animals have this argument while the rabbi and the sheikh calmly travel together and relate to one another in terms of a fellowship that is both extraordinary and deeply moving. The two men interact with one another on a human level as equals and discuss the problems that the rabbi has been having with the French examination. At the end of their discussion they celebrate the rabbi’s success on the test and dance and sing into the night.
Such are the strange but moving emotions that flow through the pages of this book. We see before our eyes a beautifully etched portrait of a world now lost that is filled with compassion, warmth, intelligence and the sensibilities of the human condition under trying circumstances. All of this is leavened with a keen sense of humor and a penchant for the absurd. It is a sweetly nostalgic tableau of a group of characters that are rarely drawn for us in these times.
In the final of the three stories that comprise the book, Sfar shows the ways in which the internal world of the Algerian Jews falls apart. The rabbi’s daughter falls in love with a young rabbi who comes to Algeria from Paris and brings her back to France to meet his family. On this trip back to France, the rabbi and his daughter leave not merely their home, but are challenged to hold on to their traditional values.
We witness the almost complete collapse of the “old” world under the pressures of the “new” world.
The daughter is anxious that she and her father will appear to be old-fashioned and out of step with the mores and values of her new French family. And indeed, the rabbi elects to run away from his new in-laws and walk the Paris streets where on Shabbat he completely loses it. He seeks out his nephew, a singer named El Rabibo who we later learn can only make a living as an Arab caricature acting as a minstrel street singer. Wishing to practice the traditional musical arts of Algerian singers, El Rabibo is forced to take the role of a stereotype to conform to the racist expectations of the French who see Arabs as just so much exotica.
The rabbi becomes disillusioned and violates many of the Sabbath precepts and eats an extremely non-Kosher meal at a French bistro on Friday evening. Concurrently, his daughter is trying to acclimate to the French ways by going to buy new clothes and by discarding her Arab dress.
This clash of cultures speaks to the tensions and prejudices of the Western view of Arabs that has existed for many centuries. The cultural racism emerges in The Rabbi’s Cat out of a French sense of superiority and by the ways in which the French colonized the Arab world. Going from Algeria to France we see that it is Western elitism and superiority that has left the native Algerians in a state of degradation. The natives are left without their culture and without any sense of human dignity; a dignity that was once a determinative factor in the balance of human existence in the Arab world of the distant part.
5. Gertrude Berg in the Cauldron of American Culture
From the complex cultural world of North African Jews we come to encounter the equally complex universe of American Jews and a staggering array of new cultural options previously unknown to the European immigrants.
Ashkenazi Jews have engaged America in many ways: One of the most well-known is that of the entertainment industry and, more specifically, the art of comedy.
There is an important question to be asked of American Jewish culture that speaks to an evolution in sensibility related to Jewish Humanism:
How did we get from Gertrude Berg to Larry David?
We have tragically moved from a warm and giving heimische immigrant Jewish culture typified by perhaps the best-known American Jew of the first half of the 20th century, to a Hollywood Jewish nihilism that marks Jewish culture and the Jewish psyche as fatalistic and hopelessly, fanatically misanthropic.
For the answer to this question we must go back to the early days of Hollywood movies and the New York radio world.
As is well-known, the movie studios of Hollywood – those of Warner Bros., MGM, Universal – were founded and run by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Those immigrants were ruthless and hungry entrepreneurs. They lacked a formal education and vigorously sought the American dream. Their Judaism was something that for them – and many other immigrants who found opportunity in the Goldine Medina as they called America in their native Yiddish language – a negligible factor to be discarded as necessary.
The great moguls like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Harry Cohn could not but help draw from their own life experiences, but were very careful not to rock the boat when it came to formally portraying Jewish religion and ethnicity. Jews never appeared in their films by name and the idealized America that they created was exclusively White and Christian.
The first attempt by Hollywood to seriously deal with Jewish identity and Anti-Semitism came from the Gentile producer Darryl Zanuck in his 1947 groundbreaking classic “Gentleman’s Agreement” which starred a very Gentile Gregory Peck playing another Gentile who chose to examine Anti-Semitism by going undercover and acting the part of a Jew.
Once Hitler took over Germany, the moguls took a “wait and see” approach and even continued to do their very lucrative business with the Nazis until it became impossible to do so. With the exception of the Warner brothers whose 1939 “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” – still on the late side, but better late than never – addressed the issue head-on, there were no attempts to deal with the Nazi menace until years after the Nazis first took power. Probably the worst offender was Louis B. Mayer who kept his very profitable MGM relationship with Germany well into the Hitler era.
Only Charlie Chaplin – a maverick independent – addressed the Hitler menace with any substance in his 1940 classic “The Great Dictator.” And Chaplin was not Jewish!
The Jewish moguls in Hollywood were Jews by birth and culture – they all had pronounced Yiddish accents – but saw that America could provide them with riches and power if they could assimilate into the society. Country clubs and marriage with Gentiles were largely the order of the day in a land dominated by WASPs. The moguls sounded like Shtetl dwellers in Poland, but sought to become good Episcopalians.
To understand the historical importance of Gertrude Berg, the subject of Aviva Kempner’s extraordinary documentary film “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” one must take note of the Hollywood pattern of assimilation and the suppression of all overt signs of Jewish identity that became the norm for many of the Eastern European immigrants at that time. Unlike life in the old country where religious boundaries were strictly circumscribed – on both sides of the divide intermingling was off-limits – America encouraged outsiders to become part of the “Melting Pot” and did so through the imposition of the dominant Christian culture.
For those too young to remember, Anti-Semitism was a factor in American life as millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived to these shores. Many Jews saw relinquishing their traditions and identity as a favorable thing that would expedite and ensure their successful adaptation to American life and the happiness it could bring.
As “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” so expertly relates, Gertrude Berg came from a family that did not follow in this pattern of assimilation and Jewish rejectionism. Living in the teeming anarchy of New York’s Lower East Side and eventually moving to run a resort hotel in the Catskills, the family of Tillie Edelstein – Berg’s birth name – was locked into the very intimate realities of immigrant life that continued to live in a largely insular Jewish world where Yiddish culture was the norm. It was a difficult life that offered little of the expansive largesse that was available to the Jews who assimilated. It was a claustrophobic world where success was based on ingenuity and sheer guts.
And in this world the ever-creative Tillie Edelstein flourished. After her very young brother died of diphtheria, her mother was devastated leaving her without the support any child would need to grow in a normal way. Her mother would suffer with mental illness for the rest of her life. Tillie’s father was a ne’er-do-well who started off as a humble tailor but continued to seek a way to find his American fortune – though his efforts went largely unfulfilled.
Tillie found her calling in the many tasks that she found herself required to perform at the family’s Catskills hotel. She began to work to serve the guests in a number of different ways: conventionally she worked as a servant in the hotel, but she also began to work on the business end of things by doing the books, but, most importantly, she expanded her role in the business by developing her skills as an entertainer.
In order to keep their patrons happy, the hoteliers found entertainment a necessary part of the service. So Tillie began to write playlets and skits. Her keen eye for observing others played a critical role in this process. From an early age Tillie had an uncanny skill for looking at people and processing their behavior in a way that allowed her to translate experience into art.
When she met and married Lewis Berg, a British Jew who moved to America, she was able to acclimate to a wider worldly culture. Because of Berg’s British background he had a more rounded and complete education than was the norm among the Eastern European immigrants in New York. Berg opened up Tillie to new ideas and intellectual values that she fused with her street smarts; a fusion that led her to a new level of artistic skill and a burning desire to “make it” in America.
Although Lewis Berg was a very successful engineer, his wife had the wanderlust to make something of herself as well. After a spell in New Orleans, the couple found themselves back in New York where Tillie – now Gertrude – decided to go into the acting profession. Strangely, her first job in the entertainment industry was doing a voice-over for a radio commercial. Even more strangely, the product she shilled for was Christmas cookies – the commercial to be done completely in Yiddish!
Critical here was the fact that Gertrude, born in New York, was not a native Yiddish speaker. Lewis, who was raised in a traditional Ashkenazi home, had to transliterate the Yiddish words for her so she could do the commercial.
The commercial was a big hit and she continued to seek ways to break into radio.
After a failed attempt at securing a radio program about two American girls, Gertrude hit on the idea of creating a show about a Jewish family called the Goldbergs. Once she got the show on the air, Gertrude never looked back.
The show, which debuted the very day after the great Stock Market Crash of 1929, became a huge hit with the Goldberg family entering the millions of American homes looking for some comfort in the midst of the Great Depression. As would be the case at other critical points in her career, Gertrude Berg found herself in the right place at the right time. But not leaving well enough alone, her massive drive and passion to succeed led her to work diligently not only as the lead actor in the program, but as its sole creative force – she wrote all the scripts, saw to the business end of things, and acted as producer of the show.
It is said that over the course of her long career Gertrude wrote some 12,000 scripts.
“At Home with The Goldbergs” was a national sensation. Recreating the world of the Lower East Side in all its tumultuousness and color, Gertrude remained true to the humanity of the people who lived there. The characters all spoke with the requisite Yiddish accents, even though Gertrude had never had such an accent.
And this is the first thing that must be noted about Gertrude Berg and her artistic world: In order to create the iconic Molly Goldberg she had to turn back to a culture that many Jews were turning away from. As the great Ed Asner states in “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” Molly Goldberg was shining a light on an aspect of Jewish life that he and his family were trying to suppress and get rid of.
By playing the ethnic card, Gertrude was doing something daring and deeply counter-intuitive. The Hollywood moguls had already made their fortunes by papering over their Jewish past and looked forward to a new post-Jewish world of personal assimilation and artistic Gentility. Accents were to be shunned in their movies and Jews were not to be identified as such.
Now there were many distinguished representatives of the Yiddish culture working in Hollywood at that time. Most prominently, we can point to the brilliant actors Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, and the directors Edgar G. Ulmer and Anthony Mann; all of whom were once a part of the world of the New York Yiddish theater that produced ethnic stars like the great Mollie Picon.
But the Jewishness of these actors and directors was sublimated and never permitted by the moguls to take on an authentically Jewish cast. Muni played every possible historical role except that of a Jew. Robinson was best known for his portrayal of an Italian gangster. Ulmer made low-budget thrillers after an independent career in Yiddish film, while Mann became a director of Westerns, epics and Film Noirs. Each of these men was immensely talented and provided a quietly intense form of Jewish humanism in a world where Jews could not overtly be authentically Jewish.
But Molly Goldberg saw none of these limitations. Gertrude Berg was a maverick in many aspects, none more important than in the way she designed Molly and her place in the world. Eschewing the static caricatures of the Yiddishe mama current in Vaudeville, Molly Goldberg harbored two complementary personalities: She was a balabusta, a fully-functioning homemaker who ran her family firmly, but with tenderness and compassion, yet was also attuned to the psychological trends of the Modern world.
Molly Goldberg was a hybrid creation that reflected a blending of the Old and the New. Gertrude infused Molly with a proto-feminism that was cast in a traditional idiom. Molly was both traditional and modern at the same time. We can see in the personal catastrophe of Gertrude Berg’s real life the basic components that allowed her to create such an innovative character. Her genius came from her personal pain.
The most important things about Molly Goldberg were her strength, wisdom, and courage. She was never overwhelming or aggressively in-your-face, but with kindness and tenderness acted out the part of a Jewish Sage as if she stepped out of the pages of the Talmud. There was a mild subversiveness to Molly Goldberg that was perfectly calibrated. Never a threat to others, Molly with her quiet dignity imposed on those around her a moral rectitude that was borne of the wisdom of many centuries of Jewish experience.
6. Clarence Brown’s “The Human Comedy”: The Apex of American Religious Humanism
Central to the American myth as it has been parsed in its literary and artistic heritage is the intimate link between the human condition and the inclusive social community. Human life is one that is lived in the midst of people; families, communities and the world of God here on earth signal the places where we are able to be most fully human. The human family is one that relies on individuals to do what is right, just and noble. These are the sacred and precious values that once constituted our culture, before it was taken over by the false, the vain and the dishonest. The drama of human existence is not banal or maudlin as it is not a vain and self-centered optimism. It is a world of pain, suffering and the ennobling joy that comes from the accomplishments of work, struggle and passion.
At the heart of the human drama is the primacy of love as an enabling force that cushions the pain of the tragedies that we must face in our lives. Love emerges triumphantly out of the human community in the midst of our prosaic daily lives.
In the first images of Clarence Brown’s masterpiece “The Human Comedy” a young child named Ulysses Macauley stands along the train tracks waving at the men who are riding the rails. We are not told who these men are, but we sense that they are lost in this world and are looking to find a home; a place where they can find comfort, hope and love. Ulysses is the youngest child of a family whose patriarch, played by Mercury Theater vet Ray Collins, is deceased and from heaven will narrate the various stories of this deeply reverential film; a movie that speaks in the awesome cadences of the sacred and the holy.
“The Human Comedy” is a grand artistic statement that speaks in the sacrosanct tones of Scripture as it tells the interwoven stories of some very ordinary people in a California town called, not unexpectedly, Ithaca where the full flowering of the American myth is shown as a form of Religious Humanism that effectively marks the high point of this brilliant tradition in our civilization.
“The Human Comedy” maintains a quiet dignity that distinguishes it from the American classics of Frank Capra that are often overloaded with a nervous comedy meant to leaven the deep seriousness of the themes of those movies. In the brilliant films of John Ford as well there is rarely such quiet as people and things are generally presented in the full range of their kinetic motion; in “The Grapes of Wrath” the Joad family is on the move while in “How Green was My Valley” the socialist subtext brings the viewer face to face with the harsh and unsparing realities of life in a Welsh mining town with all the attendant sights and sounds of that life.
“The Human Comedy” is a deeply American film containing all the classic markers of American society: Homer works at the very epicenter of the community in the local telegraph office which serves as the repository of all human life in the town. There is nary a detail in the lives of the people that does not somehow pass through that office. An old man named Grogan, beautifully played by Frank Morgan (best-known for his role as the wizard in “The Wizard of Oz”), sits at the telegraph machine through the long and often intense nights at the office where he frequently gets drunk and falls asleep. Grogan cannot live with or without his job: he is a lonely man in his late 60s who has no other life beside the telegraph office and yet the depth of emotions and the pain of the many death notices coming because of the war take an inevitable toll on his spirit. He asks Homer to splash water in his face and to bring him a hot cup of black coffee in order to keep him going when he nods off.
The boss in the office is a man named Spangler who is seen early on in the film selflessly assisting a poor, sick man trying to send a wire to his mother asking her to send him some money. It is in this scene as Spangler pulls out some cash to give to this anonymous man who is down on his luck that we are clearly shown the moral base of the film: human beings have been put on this earth not for self-aggrandizement, but in order to serve others. Just as little Ulysses opens his tiny heart to the poor hobos on the train, and just as Homer takes on the role of family provider with his after-school job, so do we see the way that responsibility takes on an enormous importance in the world portrayed in this movie.
Responsibility is not what gets assigned to a person in a formal way, but is something that comes from inside us. Responsibility is an intuitive morality that is learned from the religious traditions and national myths of the American culture. It is an intuition that is learned in the home, in the school and in Church. Such a morality is to be maintained in a very organic way.
“The Human Comedy” is permeated with prayers and liturgies that are made manifest in the secular lives of these characters. It is a film where life’s tragedies are recounted in a stoic spirit that reflects the mettle and brawn of the American character. It is a film whose real subject is not the stories of its characters, but the characters themselves. In each of the film’s interwoven episodes the script makes precise reference to the human condition. It is the human condition, as the title of the film indicates, that is the main character of the film and which permeates its rich symbolism and the greatness of its storytelling. The film demands multiple viewings in order to truly ferret out the great depth of its narrative and symbolic richness.
“The Human Comedy” shows us how America once saw itself: as a nation of kind, decent and honest people who were nurturing forces in the lives of others. Just as Marcus takes Toby into his confidences and makes him feel as if he belongs; just as Mary and Bess befriend some lonely soldiers for an evening before they go to the war; just as Ulysses walks beside a lonely and picked-on young boy to the library; and just as Homer – the centerpiece of these interlocked tales, recalling his Athenian namesake – is forced to encounter the pains of what it means to be a man, so does the film embody an ascetic stoicism that brings to mind the lofty morality of the Biblical past. But rather than embody that past in a static, fundamentalist manner, “The Human Comedy” understands that human beings must adapt and evolve. We must accept the cultural differences of others and be tolerant of their sometimes unfamiliar ways.
The American experiment is thus based on its innate skill in incorporating the Other into its midst while providing the space for the licit existence of foreign ways in a universal secular culture.
This experiment has been one of the most profound successes in the annals of human civilization and has been proudly lionized in the classic Hollywood cinema. Eschewing the parochialism and narcissism of the European cinema, Hollywood in its Golden Age was able to incorporate the many cultural variants of the American landscape which was held together with the Religious Humanism of its Founding Fathers; a humanism that provided individualism and freedom in the bonds of an egalitarian social fraternity and brotherhood.
7. Paul Simon and Bob Dylan in the Cauldron of American Jewish Humanism
When we return to consider the place of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in America, we constantly see the images of people like Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg who it is certainly true were groundbreaking iconoclasts in their time. And yet there is an alternative line of American culture that we can trace from George Gershwin, Anthony Mann and David Selznick to Paul Simon who all used the mechanisms of popular entertainment to make their fortunes which then allowed them to formulate an artistic vision that is far richer and more varied than that of those who worked to get the easy laugh or to startle and shock.
Anthony Mann, whose roots were in the Yiddish theater of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, made Westerns that were often as good as those of John Ford and Howard Hawks; Gershwin wrote his masterpieces “Rhapsody in Blue” and “An American in Paris,” musical landscapes as challenging and stimulating as those of his European forbears who are lionized as “Classical” while Gershwin is demeaned as “Pop”; while David Selznick brought to American film a deeply haunted Jewish concern for memory and tradition that is carried with us to this day deeply ensconced within the popular American consciousness.
It is true that we need and should respect the iconoclasts, but often it is the artist who is better able to, as Martin Scorsese has so brilliantly taught us, “smuggle” his message into a more conventional package that provides us with the most lasting art.
It is not well-known that in his “hibernation” of 1967, Bob Dylan worked at his Woodstock studio with The Band to record a set of traditional American songs and a few of his own originals, which were often attempts to relinquish his mystical, visionary voice in favor of a more straightforward lyrical sensibility, that we now know as “The Basement Tapes.” In this seminal project Dylan began to find a way out of the vast labyrinth of the stereotypical Bob Dylan persona and into a more penetrating and far-reaching musical landscape that remains the highpoint of his career and which has not diminished with the passing of time.
It was in “The Basement Tapes” that Dylan found what Paul Simon had already known: true artists must maintain humility in the face of tradition. With such humility an artist can go from good to great. The art of Paul Simon drew from the traditions of the past and patiently found a way to integrate a personal lyrical vision with these traditions.
In the same manner that Gershwin wrote his “Rhapsody in Blue,” Ellington “Black, Brown and Beige,” Anthony Mann producing American masterpieces like “The Naked Spur,” “T-Men” and “God’s Little Acre,” so too can we see the mastery and skill of Paul Simon’s many years of artistic achievement.
While collaborating with other great artists like Art Garfunkel, Jessy Dixon, Urubamba, Philip Glass, Derek Walcott and Brian Eno, Simon has been able to display humility and genius at the very same moment. Unlike the latest incarnation of Paul McCartney shamelessly promoting the narcissistic image of Paul McCartney or the seemingly endless dog-and-pony-show of Bob Dylan who continues to feed off of impenetrable masks and purposeful obscurity, Paul Simon has always felt comfortable being Paul Simon and not hogging the spotlight. In this he has asserted his own genius – which as I have said may not be as brilliant as that of the others – that makes a more compelling case for the assertion of an American Humanism and Radical Traditionalism than almost any of his peers. His art is thus more intimately connected to that of the great American tradition than that of the others.
In the end, Paul Simon has been chastised and diminished in some quarters for being too conservative and too self-effacing – not nearly “visionary” enough. But the virtues of Paul Simon’s artistic talents are very much in keeping with many of the cultural models and paradigms that are of most use to us today. By understanding the human condition and establishing his artistic values and visions within the framework of American humanism, Simon has presented us with a composite art that teaches us that human life is a rare, noble and wonderful thing. He has been a proud inheritor of what has been passed down to him and an equally proud voice seeking to articulate the human condition in contemporary forms.
His songs have touched on problems that we all face: Jobs, wars, love, death, family, politics, and civilization. These brilliant songs question the meaning of success and failure as they ponder questions of great existential import. The inscrutability of life is demystified while the passion of living is experienced.
And that is the key to the genius of Paul Simon: The confluence in his songs between an honest reckoning with life as we live it in our daily existence and the hard work of creating memorable popular art. Deeply tied to the old Jewish immigrant experience where children were exhorted to make the most of themselves through study and hard work, Simon’s art questions the meaning of life and seeks answers to the perennial philosophical questions, as it thirsts for new and innovative ways of musical expression.
Simon is thus a quintessential New York Jew whose compassionate humanity is the very core of his being. While the critical intelligentsia often snidely dismisses Simon’s simple Liberalism and its human pathos, these values have aged extremely well by comparison with other artists – like Bob Dylan – who have sought fame by a process of self-mythology and wrapping themselves in an air of mystery and impenetrability.
Dylan’s signature song “Like a Rolling Stone” is a cruel taunt that leaves its fictional protagonist at the mercy of the poison pen of the great songwriter. “How does it feel to be on your own?” the great Dylan sneers, “like a complete unknown, with no direction home.” In fact, the last phrase was used by Martin Scorsese for his documentary on Dylan. Dylan’s stock-in-trade is not American Humanism, but a form of American Nihilism. There is no sincerity in his poetry, only scorn and derision. It represents the dark side of the Hippie dream which may well be manifest in the very poor showing of the Baby Boom generation in creating a better society than they inherited.
And this point is critical: While Dylan crassly manipulated the Protest song movement for his own ends and quickly left the socially conscious movement when he became a big star, Paul Simon took the idea of humanity very seriously. He wrote penetrating character studies like “Richard Cory,” “The Boxer,” and “Duncan” which were derided by the snooty Rock critics and effete intellectuals, but which resonated deeply with many listeners. While Dylan was wrapped in a vain mystical gobbledygook, Simon was trying to make sense of the world around him. In classic songs like “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “America” he addressed the most intimate and pressing issues in society. From the idealism of the 1960s’ social movements to the disillusionment of the early 1970s, Simon sought to honestly engage the personal and political realities of regular Americans with little mystery or obfuscation.
Paul Simon is a transcendent cultural figure who has not allowed himself to lose his very humane feelings about people. He is a compelling writer who entertains his audience as he seeks to teach life lessons to them. He is perhaps the last of this generation of songwriters but we should not mistake his traditionalism and classicism for lethargy: Paul Simon is a man bent on achieving redemption and showing his audience how he struggles with the most profound questions of life and living.
The legacy of Paul Simon is one that should not be obscured by those whose own socio-cultural values have not done as much to enrich the human experience and which have all too often deformed and disfigured the nobility of that experience. As an American Jewish Humanist Paul Simon has and will continue to teach us and illuminate for us the realities of our own lives and enrich the ways in which human beings see and understand one another. Such is the mark of a truly great artist.
8. Post-Script: Sephardic Religious Humanism in the Course of Jewish Culture
Sephardic Jews have for many centuries practiced a form of Judaism which sought a creative engagement with its outside environment. In the Middle East this meant an acculturation to the Arabic model as articulated in the first centuries of Islam. Prominent Sephardic rabbis, such as Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, acculturated to the Greco-Arabic paradigm, disdaining clericalism while espousing humanism and science, composed seminal works on Jewish thought and practice. Sephardic rabbis were not merely religious functionaries; they were poets, philosophers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, linguists, merchants, architects, civic leaders and much else. Samuel the Nagid, the famous polymath of Granada, even led troops into battle in the 11th century to fight off the Christians.
Traditional Sephardic Judaism provided for a more tolerant and open-minded variant of Jewish existence than an Ashkenazi counterpart continually living in a world apart, utterly disconnected from European civil society. The Hatam Sofer, one of the most prominent Ashkenazi rabbis of the 19th century, boldly reformulated the Talmudic slogan for modern Orthodox Ashkenazi thinking: “He-hadash asur min ha-Tora” – “The Torah prohibits the new.”
Religious Humanism was endemic to the Sephardic cultural tradition. When the Enlightenment came in the 18th century the Sephardim were able to make a seamless transition to the new culture (the Sephardic chief rabbi of London David Nieto was the first Jew to examine the scientific works of Isaac Newton while Isaac Abendana taught Newton Hebrew at Cambridge University) while European Judaism was torn by deep internal schisms, many of which continue to play out in the modern Jewish community through movements such as Zionism and Orthodoxy – each practicing a form of cultural exclusion that is predicated upon a narrow interpretation of the Jewish tradition.
While Ashkenazi Jews in the modern period broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions, Sephardim preserved their unity as a community rather than let doctrine asphyxiate them. A Jewish Reformation never took place in the Sephardic world because the Sephardim continued to maintain their fidelity to their traditions while absorbing and adapting the ideas and trends of the world they lived in. We can point to the rabbinical figures of Sabato Morais and Elijah Benamozegh, two Sephardim born in Italy, who typified the Sephardic ability to construct a Jewish culture that preserved the parochial standards of Jewish tradition while espousing the science and humanism wrought by the massive changes of the 19th century.
The future of Judaism rests on the adoption of a robust culture that has been preserved in the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism. As we have seen over the course of this article, the paradigm of Religious Humanism and the manner in which it successfully negotiates the many complexities of Modern life is the ideal model for Jewish continuity. Jewish Humanism reaches out to the larger world and provides a way for traditional Jews to engage with the Gentile world.
David Shasha
Submitted to Yeshivat Chovevei Torah’s Milin Chavivin, October 16, 2013, rejected October 17, 2013, Introductory note completed September 19, 2014