email #63 -- country music, loneliness, and j'lem taxi matchmaking
Leon Kraiem
Dear friends,
I don’t know what music you all are listening to these days, but if you – like me – have been sleeping on country lately, don’t. I've spent this week with Ella Langley on a loop.
A week ago was the Ninth of Av, the day on which the First, and then hundreds of years later the second, Temples were destroyed, the Jews were expelled from Spain, the final approval for the Holocaust was given, the first deportations began from the Warsaw Ghetto. Rock bottom of the Jewish calendar.
Now, with that in the rear-view mirror, thoughts turn to consolation – and there are few signs of God’s grace that are as obvious as the inspiration of timeless music. It’s a teeny tiny parallel of the bringing-into-being of a person. Kids ask their parents: ‘Where do babies come from?’ And we’re so busy with our snark and our shame and our salaciousness we lose sight of the fact that we have no clue where babies come from. We know how to summon them; that’s not the same thing.
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‘Choosin’ Texas’ is a classic. That it happened to be written by this particular woman, in this particular year, is historical trivia, like the human author of a Biblical text.
Evidence of the song’s timelessness is that the first version I heard of it was not Langley’s own, but a cover by Israel’s Jane Bordeaux, for the IDF pop station Galgalatz, and it never even occurred to me that this was a recently-released song, rather than some oldie with a new Hebrew spin.
Bordeaux (that’s technically the name of the band, but I’ll “Frankenstein” this one and use it to refer to their frontwoman) does a little Israeli twist at the end, by which Texas becomes Haifa, and Tennessee becomes Tel Aviv. This is cute, but it makes the whole song sound less like a cover to me, and more like karaoke.
Because Southern American states are worlds of their own – you could fit Israel into Texas twenty-five times -- and Abeline to Nashville is a twelve-hour drive without stopping. Tel Aviv to Haifa is an annoying commute, but it's not the sort of thing you'd write a country song about.
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The spaciousness of the States has been on my mind since I returned from the Greatest Country on Earth about a week and a half ago. This trip, I spent a lot of time on Amtraks, partly to get where I was going, but partly for the going itself. You can't log more than a few hours on a train here without hitting a very-much-not-open border.
I take trains across America, because I don’t drive. Yair Lapid, on the other hand, is apparently quite the road-tripper. The former premier wrote an essay in The Atlantic, on the occasion of the semiquincentennial. It’s a remarkable love letter to the country, not least because it was written by the leader of a very different one, and seems to celebrate how they aren’t the same.
The essay is called “American Loneliness,” and – while it does not deny the realities or severities of what gets called the ‘loneliness epidemic’ these days – it challenges the pessimism with which those words are often laced, especially when they’re brought together as a unit.
"America is the place where the individual precedes the tribe and the story precedes history. Loneliness is not a glitch in the system; it is the raw material from which the system was built," he writes. "The vastness of the land is part of this. The infinite emptiness forces Americans to decide whether they are lost or simply haven’t yet found what they’re looking for.”
Because it’s not just geography that makes Bordeaux ill-suited for the country genre. It’s that lone-ranger, on-my-own thing that’s in America’s DNA, and utterly absent from Israel’s.
“In the world I grew up in," Lapid writes, "loneliness was a form of nonexistence—not merely the absence of people, but the absence of witnesses to your being. Do you remember the question about whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest with no one to hear it? In the forest where I grew up, it could not have fallen in the first place. The trees around it would have gently wound their branches about it to help it stand.”
–
Back in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon, as the afternoon waned and public transit stopped for Shabbat, I hailed a cab, thinking I'd have a few quiet minutes to get myself in the mood for the imminent day of rest.
Instead, I found myself in the middle of an intense conversation between the driver and someone else to whom he was already giving a ride.
“He won’t touch me!” said the woman, probably in her late 40s, maybe early 50s. “He’s talking to angels, every week, and all of his focus is on what they said to him. I’m telling you, he used to be a maniac. Now, nothing I do will interest him. But if he quits altogether, he’ll be so boring.”
“It’s dangerous,” the driver nodded. “I know a guy – my son-in-law’s cousin – he was a lawyer, hotshot, very successful. He went to India, ate a mushroom, it completely broke him; when he got back to Israel, went straight to the psych ward. Six months.”
“You sure it was mushrooms,” the woman challenged him. “Not acid.”
“No!” he said, insulted. “It was a mushroom. (His use of the singular each time did not convince me he was terribly familiar with the substance.) What, like it makes a big difference?”
“Of course it does!” she said.
Then, he asked me: “What do you think? It makes a difference, if it was acid vs a mushroom?”
At this point, I asked to be brought up to speed on what she’d said before I joined the conversation. Turns out this woman’s boyfriend – who was raised ultra-Orthodox, but is no longer traditionally religious – has recently adopted a practice of consuming truly insane quantities of psilocybin every Friday at noon, such that he is blasted off into the astral plane with enough time to get back on the ground for Shabbos, and as a result of his newfound experiences in the higher dimensions, he’s leaving her out in the cold.
Oh, Jerusalem, I thought. It’s good to be home.
–
After the woman in the passenger seat had told her story over again to me, I tried to remember where she and the driver had gotten to before I asked them to rewind.
Turning to the driver, I asked: “Your friend, the lawyer. What happened with him, in the end?”
“Oh, now he’s fine, thank God,” the driver said. “Took him a while, but he’s back on his feet.”
And then, before I knew it, we weren’t talking about the lady’s boyfriend anymore.
“Yesh lo shidduch?”, the woman asked, about this erstwhile mental patient. “How does he look, is he good-looking? Tell the truth.”
When the driver confirmed the man was single, in his mid-40s, and – he had to repeat this one several times before his passenger believed him – good-looking, she got excited.
“I have a friend – that Greek friend I was telling you about – she loves psychiatric people.” (Her words.) “She likes to take care of them, it’s like a maternal thing. But she’s great.”
It was then established that the bad-trip lawyer and the Greek would-be nurse ought to meet.
–
Six days after the Ninth of Av comes – you guessed it – the Fifteenth of Av, which is a sort of traditional Jewish Valentine’s Day.
Last week, shortly after Tisha b’Av ended, a bunch of the egalitarian shuls in my neighborhood sent out a flyer for a Tu b’Av matchmaking event, in which single people were not meant to participate. Rather, the event is for groups of congregants to huddle together and, with their single friends’ consent, try to set them up.
It is hard for me to imagine any of the American egal communities I spend time with doing one of these things, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.
For one thing, there’s the cringe factor – this is a goofily earnest undertaking; Two, the ‘mind your own business’ factor – even if the subjects agreed to it, there is something inherently nosy about setting up someone else, especially when done as an activity, among people who are strangers to everyone else involved.
Thirdly, though, – and this follows from the last one but it’s subtly different, I think – there’s what you might call the ‘Who’s to say?’ factor.
Who’s to say, that is, that your single friend would be better off in a relationship? Why are you assuming they aren’t living their best life right now? You’re judging, when it would be so much more appropriate to “validate.”
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For America's 250th, I stayed with some friends in Boston, and together we hosted an Independence Day seder, the evening of the Third of July. As is tradition, we sat around in a circle and read the Declaration together, line by line, stopping whenever we encountered something that called out, as these things do, “interpret me!.”
One phrase we spent a good deal of time on, as we do every year, was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This last bit is an especially American turn-of-phrase. The Declaration of the Rights of Man lists “liberty, property, safety and resistance to oppression” as its non-negotiables, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights starts with “life, liberty and security of person.” Israel guarantees freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture” in its declaration, but the word “happiness” never shows up.
It’s also worth dwelling on the specific construction – “the pursuit of happiness” – not least because happiness, according to every wisdom tradition in history, is something you cannot obtain by directly pursuing it. As a much-maligned but nevertheless insightful Canadian psychologist once put it: “You can’t be isolated, alone, without responsibility, and pursuing your hedonistic nonsense, and not be insane and miserable. Those are all the same thing.”
All of which is to say: I'm proud to be an American, I'm glad to be back in Israel, and I think it's time for me to get a dog.
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Shabbat shalom, choose Texas, etc.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
Leon