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New Yorker: Shallow Graves; The Novels of Paul Auster b

By James Wood

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The Limited Circle Is Pure by Zadie Smith
Franz Kafka versus the novel I.

Kafka is the novel’s bad conscience. His work demonstrates a purity of intention, a precision of language, and a level of metaphysical commitment that the novel partially comprehends but is unable to replicate without, in the process, ceasing to be a novel at all. Consequently, Kafka makes novelists nervous. He doesn’t seem to write like the rest of us. Either he is too good for the novel or the novel is not quite good enough for him–whichever it is, his imitators are very few.

Now, why is that? Where are Kafka’s descendants? Only a handful–Borges, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard–have successfully “channeled” the Kafkaesque in any meaningful way. The result has been queer. His influence seems to cause a mutation in the recipient, metamorphosing the novel into something closer to a meditation, a fantastical historiography, an essay, a parable. What is it about Kafka’s lessons for the novel that cannot be contained within the novel in the form as we have come to know it? How does Kafka lead novelists away from the novel?

Clearly, the intentions of most novels are not Kafka’s intentions. The American writer Wallace Stegner tells us that “if fiction isn’t people it is nothing,” and this is a usefully succinct version of the novel’s story about itself, as a form. By this account, the novel’s achievement is to offer us so many “splinters” of consciousness, so many intimate portraits of people. The complexity and the psychological depth of these portraits–Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Herzog, Holden Caulfield, and on and on–perform a service of variousness. Singularly, they are that interior communication with human otherness that Aristotle thought essential to our ethical development. Collectively, as “Literature,” they are the description of a struggle against those more dogmatic and therefore deceitful versions of self generated by church, by state, by ourselves at our weakest, and now by our rapacious televisions.

At its most metaphysical, the novel might go as far as to investigate how selves are made, their superficial unity and hidden fragmentation, as Virginia Woolf did; or it might investigate the extreme porousness of certain borders between self and world, as James Joyce did. But when it comes to a discussion of–as Kafka put it–”the impossibility of being alive,” well, the novelist cannot go quite as far as this. Novelists as a breed are broadly Hegelian: they assume at least some kind of rational relationship between the individual and the world. Then they proceed accordingly, unpacking their intimate vision of that relationship, assonant or dissonant depending on their temperaments. Kafka is the exception. He has no interest in psychology, not as something that individuates our tastes, desires, needs, opinions. Only the first half of that fetishistic modern word “lifestyle” could mean anything to Kafka. The novelist’s question “What does he do with his life?” is made strange in Kafka’s parabolic world, where “life” is not a fact but a transitive state; not something one could do things with but rather a process (Der Prozess is the title of The Trial in the original) to which we submit. Kafka’s question is harder to listen to and harder to answer: “Is it possible to be alive?”

Most novelists are just not up for these kinds of ontological shenanigans. As a rule they are–as surely everyone has noticed by now–intuitive people rather than truly intellectual. It would be comforting, then, for novelists to call Kafka a philosopher, or a theologian, and thus strip him of any further power to trouble our consciences. But Kafka was no philosopher, no theologian. Literature was, or so he believed, his entire existence and his life’s work. In a letter to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer, whom he would leave for this very reason (he was in the habit of leaving chicks for books), he explained: “I am literature.” If this were true, of course, we could not pick out five practitioners of literature in the past five hundred years. But Kafka seems to mean something very different by “literature” than the rest of us mean.

I am literature! Bloody hell. Fearing the truth of this statement, novelists shrink from Kafka. Like the cast of a gaudy musical, they hide in the wings, looking on nervously at this solitary man who, with less to work with than even his beloved Yiddish actors–no props, no costume, not a scrap of makeup–steps onto the floodlit stage. Confronted with this purity, the humbled novelist cannot help but think of Mary McCarthy’s famous put-down of Lillian Hellman (“Everything she writes is a lie, including `and’ and `the’”) and reflect that here, in Kafka’s crystalline prose, we discover its exact inversion. It is prose unlike any other. It rejects so many of the “things of the novel”: its tools, tricks, machinery. It is as if he is at war with the novel itself.

When we turn to Kafka’s own real life, as everything he wrote induces us to do, there is still no respite. The comparison between Kafka and the rest of us is pretty damn harsh. Here Milena Jesenská, the second woman he left for literature, offers us a precis of the essential differences between a man such as Kafka and people such as you and me:

         Obviously, we are capable of living because at some time or
         other we took refuge in lies, in blindness, in enthusiasm,
         in optimism, in some conviction or others, in pessimism or
         something of the sort. But he has never escaped to any such
         sheltering refuge, none at all. He is absolutely incapable
         of lying, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He pos-
         sesses not the slightest refuge. . . . He is like a naked
         man among a multitude who are dressed. And his asceticism
         is altogether unheroic ... he is compelled to asceticism by
         his terrible clarity of vision, purity and incapacity for
         compromise. . . . I know he does not resist life, but only
         this kind of life: that is what he resists.

All novelists who are worth anything at all resist a version of life as it has been presented to them. What Flaubert meant by bourgeois life is not what his age meant by bourgeois life, and what Austen meant by the word “woman” was subtly at odds with the usage of that word in her time. But it is a rare and scary man who takes it upon himself to resist what the entire Western world since the birth of Jesus has meant by “life.” Novelists simply do not resist life in this fashion. Life, in its shared social form, is, for lack of a less vulgar term, their material. They cannot say, as Kafka did, “Never again psychology!” Psychology is where they begin their work of the novel. And consciousness is the portal through which they explore the validity or otherwise of this shared social “life” that we speak of every day.

Make no mistake: Kafka fully understood the isolation of his position; he lived it. As a the son of a Czech Jew he was isolated in a Germanic culture, but as a German speaker, without any Yiddish, he felt isolated from many of his fellow Jews. As a Prague resident he was on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; as an intellectual, an antisocial vegetarian, he distanced himself from his own petit-bourgeois family; and as a novelist he knew his work existed at a remove from those novelists whose public readings he attended every week. Here he attempts to delineate this sense of extreme alterity: “I completely dwell in every idea, but also fill every idea…. I not only feel myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.”

Of course one must take into account Kafka’s solipsism, which in his diaries makes singular that which in the fiction is more clearly the condition of all our lives. (Kafka wrote not only because it was impossible for him to live but also because it is impossible for all of us to live, though his point was that most of us do not grasp this.) But it is certainly the case that Kafka alone brought us to the very boundary of the novel, rejecting any interest in a writer’s “subject”–a place, a culture, a community, a group of people–and replacing it with a dismantling of the very idea of subjects and subjecthood. In this regard both the overtly Freudian and the overtly religious interpretations of Kafka are misguided, insofar as they identify a definitive “subject,” a final point or a “bottom line,” of a prose that has no final destination, only a journey. They miss what David Foster Wallace has described as “the central Kafka joke–that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home.”

I suppose such an awfully rigorous joke loses much of its humor in the telling (though we should keep in mind the lovely autobiographical fact that Kafka could not contain his own laughter when reading The Trial out loud to his uncomprehending family). The laughs get even thinner when we try to employ “Kafka’s joke” for our own aesthetic practice or as a way to comprehend our daily lives. This is black humor indeed, and the punch line is not that Kafka hated his father or that God does not exist. These are not the center of Kafka, because Kafka has no center. Kafka avoided every telos, all termini, purposes, meaningful endings, and resting spots the way most of us avoid the dentist, as Max Brod reminds us:

         He rejected anything that was planned for effect, intellec-
         tually or artificially thought up.... As an example of what
         he himself liked Kafka quoted a passage from Hofmannsthal,
         "the smell of damp flagstones in a hall." And he kept silent
         for a long while, said no more, as if this hidden, improbable
         thing must speak for itself.

What freaks out the novelists among us is that Kafka’s rejection of the central in favor of the resonant particular on the periphery also happens to exclude that rather central matter of “other people.” For it is, of course, not flagstones but people who are not in earnest, people who perform public versions of themselves, people who are frequently “planned for effect” and artificial. This aspect of our humanity may be vulgar, and it may be untrue in relation to some absolute idea of “being-as-truth”; but this “self-making,” as we see it done every day, is precisely the novelist’s fascination. Kafka, by contrast, had a horror of it. In his life and in his work, the artificial human relationship made Kafka despair: “In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.” And again: “Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because I think it does. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me feel almost as though I were maliciously being attacked. A marriage could not change me, just as my job cannot change me.”

What is this literature of Kafka’s that is so absolute that it exists as the opposite of life and other people? It is a limited circle, to be sure, and it is pure–but can it contain a novel? On the evidence of what Brod saved from the fire, the answer is no, not quite. In fact it is here that we find partial consolation for the envious novelist and the true subject of this essay, namely, Kafka’s failure. “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and peculiar beauty,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.”

At its simplest, this refers to Kafka’s output. Although he completed hundreds of letters and fragments and stories, he never finished a novel. Writing a complete novel proved impossible, intellectually and practically. The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika are all unfinished; the versions we have were cobbled together by Brod after the fact and against the author’s wishes. They are fragmented internally, too, the order of chapters rarely more significant than the order of parables in a collection of Hasidic stories. If part of what it is to be a novel (rather than a collection of short stories) is to have significant sequence in a narrative, then Kafka’s miraculous novels fail to fulfill one of the novel’s defining criteria.

But Benjamin’s diagnosis is also of a more profound failure. The peculiar beauty of Kafka lies in the very impossibility of his project, which was, I think, to express concretely–in the most precise language available–those things in life that fall outside of the concretely explicable or expressible. It is this project of Kafka’s that we approach with rightful awe, and which induced Brod to identify his friend’s work as “religious.” But Kafka’s work is analogous to religion only in its process, not in its content. It does ask you to put your faith in absolute contradiction, as God asked of Job when he punished him, and it does ask you to locate your ethics outside of the social world as you know it, as God asked of Abraham when he commanded Isaac’s sacrifice; but these requests are not religious in themselves. They are part of our modern moment exactly because they commit themselves to a new transcendency, as yet undefined: “I was not led into life by the sinking hand of Christianity, like Kierkegaard, nor did I catch the last tip of the Jewish prayer-shawl before it flew away, like the Zionists. I am the end or the beginning.”

If Kafka ended the possibility of the novel, the death throes have been strangely long and loud. Nabokov came after Kafka. Graham Greene came after Kafka. The reassertion of the Great American Novel came after Kafka. It seems more likely that he began something, that he helped to trigger a radical doubt in the form which then rippled throughout his century and continues to ripple rather more banally through ours, making its weekly appearances in the literary pages of newspapers and in sophomore essays on campuses. Whenever we ask whether the novel is dead, we prove ourselves the inheritors of Kafka’s doubt.

In the end, however, Kafka’s doubt affected nobody as much as himself. The high metaphysical seriousness of his project is what drew him to the form of the Jewish parable–that focused jolt of spiritual attention–and away from the form of the novel. In his diary, while writing the most “novelistic” of his novels, Amerika, a book that betrays the improbable influence of Dickens, he questioned the suitability of the novel for the work that he needed to do, describing the form as “the shameful lowlands of writing.”

Kafka–the poet laureate of shame in all its delineations–felt sure that the shame of the novel would outlive him. Most novelists ask you to pay sustained attention to something outside of yourself, something in the world on which they have placed value. Frequently this is “other people,” in all their shameful, worldly vulgarity. But Kafka directs your attention inward, momentarily and with great force–as Emerson did, as Kierkegaard did, as some poets frequently do–in search of a kind of pure being for which the world has no precise name. And this, too, this inexpressible thing, is also a part of our experience on this planet. We all know this; most good novelists know this, too; I believe they begin to write for this very reason. They know that some portion of this life is not adequately expressed in our newspapers, in our daily conversations, in our most intimate relationships, not even in our truth-seeking fairy-tales.

Novelists have some hint of the inexpressible–otherwise they wouldn’t even try. But at a certain point in their development, consumed with a great delight at their ability to express almost everything about life, they forget this other thing, the inexpressible, which is the thing that Kafka meant by “life.” “I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed,” he writes to Milena, “to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell something I have in my bones, something which can be experienced only in these bones.” The novel as a form revels in the shared world, exploring how individuals partake of that sharedness or rebel against it. Kafka concentrates on what is not shared, what is profoundly unshareable. As a result, the novel did not quite fit him. He extracted from it those things that he couldn’t use, and made them strange. Two of those things were time and ethics.

II.

Our favored idea of the Kafkaesque is of a “labyrinthine bureaucracy.” We think of thin corridors that lead only to doors that in turn lead to other doors. In fact, Kafka wrote very few scenes of this kind. What is bureaucratic and labyrinthine in The Trial is not the rooms in which Josef K. finds himself, nor even the people who obstruct him, but rather the infinite time it takes to get anywhere at all. What is labyrinthine, in Kafka, is time itself.

Before the law a door is meant only for one man, but “not at the moment.” Consequently he will die waiting. How long is this moment? In an office supply closet, a man prepares to whip two people, and Josef K. looks in. The next day he returns to the door, opens it once more, and finds that “everything was unchanged…. The printed forms and inkpots just over the threshold, the whipper with his cane, the warders still fully dressed, the candle on the shelf….” Meanwhile an imperial messenger in a parable tries to get a message out of a palace, but “how vainly does he wear out his strength … and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years….” And then there is the world-famous hunger artist, whose handlers neglect to continue the tally of days written on the front of the cage. No matter how long he starves, no time will appear to have passed in the world.

This is not the time of most novels. But neither is it, as some have claimed, a dream-time, a nightmare-time, although it is true that in dreams, when we are deprived of our timepieces and our calendars, we are closer to understanding it. Kafka’s time is bureaucratic–or, rather, bureaucracies reveal to Kafka something of the impossibility of time and living in it. I discovered this temporality for myself with a marvelous concreteness when I went recently to the American Embassy in London to obtain a visa. I had been given an appointment for 8:15 a.m. There were four hundred people in a line outside the building: they also had an appointment for 8:15. Many years appeared to pass; at last we were allowed inside to be given a slip with a number on it. Mine was 169. But the numbers on the screen came up at random–502, 164, 80, 670, 378–and with no discernible connection to the number of people in the room. “Would it be all right if I popped out?” I asked the guard. “Oh, yes,” said the guard, cheerily. “You can always go out. You’re free to go out. But then of course you’ll miss your number.” I sat down again. In the hall there were two celebrities, a pop singer and an actor. Both considered themselves to be special cases before the law. I watched them plead their special case, and I watched the men at the desk allowing these two to waste their own time, out of a kind of pity, if only to keep them from thinking that they had neglected to try everything.

This is the time of bureaucracy–time with no end, no demarcations, and no benign purpose. In the rather comically demarcated number 39b of Kafka’s Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way, he explains how bureaucratic time differs from time as we are trained to think of it: “The way is infinitely long, nothing of it can be subtracted, nothing can be added, and yet everyone applies his own childish yardstick to it. `Certainly, this yard of the way you still have to go, too, and it will be accounted unto you.’” The speaker’s voice here expresses time as we understand it, with our childish yardsticks, our clocks, our calendars, attempting to take an accurate measurement of the infinite mystery.

But bureaucratic time– absurd, infinite, and without revealed meaning–is for Kafka the true glimpse of reality. Benjamin called these glimpses of the infinite in Kafka “the rumor of true things … a kind of theological whispered intelligence,” and it is because it is emet, the truth–though it be awful–that Kafka submits to it. This has confused many readers. Since they read Kafka as an indictment of the “Modern” and bureaucracy as the “Kafkaesque nightmare,” they are surprised to find Kafka’s characters submitting to the bureaucratic with an almost ecstatic swoon, as if submitting to the law was the ultimate fulfillment. To resolve this perplexity, they call Kafka “ironic.” This is a mistake. In Kafka’s world it is always better to submit to a terrible truth than to live a comforting lie. For this reason, people in Kafka mean exactly what they say, and no irony is involved. When Josef K. argues that the doorkeeper in the parable has been deceitful by preventing the man from entering, the priest corrects him.

         "You have insufficient respect for the narrative," said the
         priest. "The narrative contains two important statements
         from the doorkeeper about admission into the law, one at the
         beginning and one at the end. The first is that he `cannot
         grant him entry now' and the other is `this entrance was made
         only for you.' If there was a contradiction between these
         statements, then you would be right and the doorkeeper would
         have deceived the man. But there is no contradiction."

We, too, have insufficient respect for Kafka’s narrative. His writing attempts to hold within it contradictory ideas, and when we read him we should, like Job, resist the temptation to resolve what is irresolvable. The impossible journey home is in fact your home. This door is meant only for you: I cannot grant you entry now. In that now Kafka unpacks the human horror of what time really is, how powerless we are before it. He once remarked that “our task is commensurate with our life.” When most of us think of time in our lives, we like to imagine it broken into many tasks, plural–children, decades, houses, careers. Novels are made of this stuff. But Kafka rejects these illusory ways of “filling” our time, and he does so with the vehemence of a teenager. Here he is on October 21, 1921, at the age of thirty-eight: “All is imaginary–family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this: that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.”

For Kafka, the time of our social life is untrue. To this accusation, the priest in The Trial retorts: “One does not have to believe everything is true, one only has to believe that it is necessary.” And Josef K. replies: “Depressing thought. It makes the lie fundamental to world order.” If the world lies about time, then the novel as a form is an artistic compression of this lie. From its epistolary beginnings (dates carefully written atop each letter), the novel has prided itself on a beginning, a middle, and an end, produced in convincing sequence. Yet Kafka radically doubted the novel’s ability to convey our true experience of time, of how time actually feels.

The following is from the long short story “Description of a Struggle,” a title as pertinent to Kafka’s troubles with the form of the novel as to any tensions among the two curious characters:

         I could go home alone and no one could stop me. Then, secret-
         ly, I could watch my acquaintance pass the entrance to my
         street. Goodbye, dear acquaintance! On reaching my room I'll
         feel warm, I'll light the lamp in its iron stand on my table,
         and when I've done that I'll lie back in my armchair which
         stands on the torn Oriental carpet. Pleasant prospects! Why
         not? But then? No then.

Something has gone wrong in this imagined, sequential narrative–a failure of faith, maybe, or an inability to lie when necessary. The novel asks, hopefully, and always with one eye on a happy ending: But then? And Kafka answers: No then.

Kafka found “Description of a Struggle” so difficult to write that when he finished it he told Brod the only thing that he liked about it was getting rid of it. Amerika was similarly a battle of “and then . . . and then.” There is surely something of Christianity’s messianic enthusiasm for the future in this “and then … and then,” which characterizes the novel’s narrative method. But is it possible to identify in Kafka’s “But then? No then” something distinctly Jewish? It is certainly a narrative attitude that turns away from soon-to-come happy endings and finality and admits instead an incomprehensible, infinite “now” that we–with our limited human consciousness–cannot comprehend. Is this Jewish time?

In certain Hasidic parables time is not a benign force marching toward our redemption, but an abject tautology that resolves itself only in God’s mind. In these tales men fool themselves when they attempt to manipulate what God has revealed only in partial form. Here is one of Kafka’s favorite Hasidic parables:

         A group of Jews sit together in an inn on the Sabbath, all
         local people except one stranger, a beggar. They make wishes
         around the table, imagining what they would be if they had
         their time again. One wishes for money, the other for a new
         carpenter's bench, another for a pleasant son-in-law to re-
         place the one he has. When it comes to the beggar he says,
         "I wish I were a great king living in a magnificent castle.
         But one day the castle is attacked by rebels and I am forced
         from my bed with only a nightshirt on, leaving all of my
         possessions. I dash over hill and dale on foot, and run for
         days until I reach the inn I am sitting in now." "What the
         hell's the point of that?" asks one of men. "I'd have a
         shirt," says the beggar.

So much and no more is the beggar’s (and our own) ability to manipulate the time of life. In parables of this kind, Kafka found a model, a compressed space to suit his aphoristic intensity. And it was when he was brief, as in the story “The Judgment,” that he professed himself most satisfied. He wrote that remarkable story in a single physically demanding nocturnal burst, and compared it to an ejaculation. “Only in this way,” he said, “can writing be done.”

Kafka had come to believe that only brief work quickly done came close to the truth of organic artistic creation. These short pieces are his greatest work, some of them only a few lines long, and in themselves pure parables of time and its deadly operations. In “The Next Village,” time is so foreshortened that the narrator cannot see how the whole of a human life is long enough to ride to the next village. In “The Hunter Gracchus,” a man’s death ship loses its way; now he cannot die, and yet he is not alive. “I am here,” he says, “more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder….” This is what time feels like. Life is like this. We are imperial messengers, too, and will find out that just because we have a message and plenty of time does not mean that we will ever succeed in delivering it. As Nabokov coolly tells us in the first line of his own time-defying autobiography, our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

So who are we to speak of time? “Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man,” Kafka writes in the final lines of the “Imperial Message” parable. “But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.” That is us, at the window, dreaming, reading a novel. In novels there is time to live. Novels are our necessary lies, our journeys that lead somewhere.

III.

In my dictionary, “Kafkaesque” is defined as a “vision of man’s isolated existence in a dehumanized world,” as if Kafka feared the rise of the typewriter or an epidemic of those threshing machines that he came across in his insurance work, the ones that so regularly removed human digits. But no. Not dehumanized; human, rather, all too human. It was people in their insatiable fullness, not in their mechanized emptiness, that Kafka feared. If he was a prophet of the coming danger, it was by predicting not the rise of the machines but the rise of a people whose sense of their own human potentiality was dangerously overflowing. He was proved correct. The Nazis did not go about their business like machines or automatons; they went about it with a lust and a passion.

Life, when it considers itself triumphant, is itself a kind of tyranny. It is triumphant life that replaces the poor hunger artist once the public has tired of him:

         Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insen-
         sitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping
         around the cage that had so long been left dreary. The panther
         was all right ... he seemed not to even miss his freedom; his
         noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all
         that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too;
         somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; the joy of life stre-
         amed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the
         onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it.

The very fullness and variety of life that novels admire–especially contemporary novels–is obscene in Kafka. One person’s expansiveness will only result in another person’s confinement.

Kafka had personal experience of this, living cheek by jowl with his own oppressively lively father, whom he describes in his magnificent “Letter to His Father” as possessing “the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have, whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.” What would Kafka make of present-day England, where pure personality itself– otherwise known as “celebrity”–is the only defense plea that anybody need make? Those chilling final lines of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor’s sister takes on an “increasing vitality,” finally becoming herself–springing to her feet in the train carriage, stretching her young body to her parents’ appreciation–these are ominous portents of a world of unreason, where just to be full of your own life is enough.

The novel has, historically, been in love with this vibrant individual; but Kafka dreads her. All forms of individuation are to him an echo of the original division: in his blue octavo notebook he claimed to understand the fall of Adam and Eve better than any man on earth. It is separation from the eternal oneness that hurt Kafka. Even mountains and objects and skies can wound this hypersensitive sensibility, just by asserting their own separate thingness. Here he addresses the landscape: “But it is not only the mountain that is so vain, so obtrusive and vindictive–everything else is too. So I must go on repeating with wide-open eyes–oh, how they hurt!”

Yet Kafka would not be so compelling a writer if he were not himself compelled by what he most feared. As Klaus Wagenbach reminds us in his penetrating biography, Kafka was deeply affected by Kierkegaard’s definition of dread: “Though dread is afraid, yet it maintains a sly intercourse with its object, cannot look away from it.” Dread is a masochistic pleasure in Kafka; the circus audience dreads the life of the panther, but still “they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want to ever move away.” Kafka is both disgusted and fascinated by other people’s confident assertion of their own existence. His characters are frequently watching other people, not, as in a novel, in the hope of forming a meaningful relation with them, but as if by observing them one might discover how indeed it is possible to live. “And I hope to learn from you how things really are,” says the supplicant in “Description of a Struggle,” “why it is that around me things sink away like fallen snow, whereas for other people even a little liqueur glass stands on the table steady as a statue.”

Why is life, for some people, a simple fact, obvious as a statue, while for others it remains an impossible feat? Kafka, as well as being the poet of shame, was the poet of awe. That people managed to locate and to identify themselves was amazing to him. “It is as if,” comments Benjamin, “he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering that there are such things as mirrors.” Here is Kafka in a letter to Brod, expressing this wonder:

         I opened my eyes after a short afternoon sleep, still not
         quite certain I was alive, and I heard my mother calling
         down from the balcony in a natural tone: "What are you up
         to?" A woman answered from the garden, "I'm having my tea-
         time in the garden." I was amazed at the stalwart technique
         for living some people have.

Kafka had no such talent for living. The question “What are you up to?” could induce paralysis. Next door the woman answers it as if it were the simplest question in the world, which in a way it is, except that Kafka has no access to simple things. The everyday ability to self-fictionalize, to make of oneself a narrative, to say, “I am here, doing this,” was miraculous and strange to him. He could allow himself to enjoy those self-creations only when they were deliberate and not simultaneously a self-deception. This is surely why he so enjoyed the Yiddish theater and grew fascinated with its actors, actors being the one group of people whose vulgar self-making is never disguised. It is the same fondness that Hamlet has for those traveling players. One welcomes the stage players–who are honest about their artificiality–when one lives in a world where artificiality wears the garments of the truth.

Like no other writer, Kafka is debilitated by the idea that when people say, “I am in the garden,” they seem able to place their whole being into that “I.” Actors, by contrast, only play with “I,” it is a provisional “I”–an “I” that is never required to make a real choice and therefore, in an Aristotelian formulation, never truly reveals character. Character itself is finitude in Kafka; to say “I” is not to be, but to not be.

This dread of individuating one’s existence–of saying I am here, doing this, this is my home, my lover–strikes the English ear as similar to Philip Larkin’s dread of “Places, Loved Ones.” For Larkin, choosing a place and a person would be to close down one’s infinite choice; paralysis is preferable. And for Kafka, as for Larkin, it is women in particular who shut down possibility. “Women are traps,” Kafka is reported to have said, “traps which lie in wait for men everywhere, in order to drag them down into the Finite.” Larkin’s deeply sarcastic poem “To My Wife” catches some of this bleak madness. Kafka did not wish to–as Larkin puts it–”shut up that peacock-fan the future,” but rather to hold on to the “unlimited/Only so long as I elected nothing.” Likewise Kafka’s nasty little parable “Rejection,” in which two young people spot each other in the street, imagine choosing each other, imagine the entire relationship, imagine the pain that would result, and decide not to bother–and all this in a handful of sentences–is strongly Larkinesque. At its most comic this attitude can be reduced to: Why bother? We’re all going to die anyway. (“Give it up! Give it up!” yells Kafka’s policeman to the man who asks for directions.)

This was pretty much Larkin’s attitude. He, too, couldn’t see the point of individuation, seeing as how we are all hurtling toward the unindividuated abyss. He also thought his capacity for getting depressed about all this was far greater than Kafka’s. In the poem “The Literary World,” he responds to a diary entry in which Kafka complained he hadn’t written anything for five months:

My dear Kafka,
When you've had five years of it,
  not five months,
Five years of an irresistible force
  meeting an
Immoveable object right in your belly,
Then you'll know about depression.

Working out who was the more miserable between these two is rather a mug’s game. But Kafka’s ethical prose was certainly a more substantial thing than Larkin’s exquisite English pessimism. For Kafka, the rejection of individuation has a serious worldly consequence. It unbalances ethics as a set of ideas situated in the world. The individual in Kafka can no longer look to a social universal for its ethical ideas, because there is no social universal and there is no convincing individual.

This is where his split from the novel truly occurs. A consummate novelist, such as Austen, tests her individuals against situations and other people in the world, locating her ethics always within the social. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle compared Austen’s procedure to that of a vintner or wine taster. She studies ethical qualities in individuals not by developing the quality in a single character but rather by “matching it against the same quality in different degrees, against simulations of that quality, against deficiencies of it,” in other people and in varied social situations. We get to know Elizabeth Bennet and she gets to know herself by way of a series of comparative refinements. She is tested against the world in many different ways, and as an ethical individual and therefore a social one; her moral performance is judged within the totality of a social life.

Simply put, there is nothing that is good for Elizabeth Bennet that is simultaneously bad for the world and the people she lives in and among. This is Hegel’s “ethical universal.” But Kafka’s characters have no such relationship with the world. His refinements are sketched in absurdist circles that direct themselves inward. There is no attempt at shared meaning. “Is that what you mean?” asks a character. “That or something else” is the reply. And here is another perfect Kafka sentence: “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.”

Where the good is located in this sentence it is impossible to say–in being small, in being inactive, in action, in beginning? Its punctuation frustrates us at every turn, and the things that are compared are not of a likeness; with respect to ethics, they are apples and oranges. This reminds one of Gertrude Stein at her most extreme–forcing one to think alternately, to think in unlikely, nonsensical ways, as if just doing this was an ethical ideal in itself.

The ethical individual in Kafka cannot rely on the world for his morality. Here Kierkegaard was essential to Kafka. Kafka recognized that both personally and philosophically, as he put it, “his case is very similar to mine, despite essential differences.” Both Kierkegaard and Kafka left women for books, and both became fixated on the story of Abraham, who in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac introduces a concept that the Hegelian universe does not contain: faith. “The state,” argued Hegel, “is in and by itself the ethical whole.” The state has faith in itself–and the novel thinks of itself this way also, as a place with an internal ethical structure. The novel judges its individuals in the context of the novel’s social world. But Abraham brought Isaac to the altar with no hope of recourse to the social. He could not kill Isaac because it was good for him as an individual, good for Isaac, good for the world, or even good for God. He could kill him because he had suspended the very idea of the ethical and placed his faith in something that he could neither express nor properly conceive.

This Kierkegaardian interpretation of Abraham has been called the beginning of existential thought, but Kafka is not really an existentialist novelist and his characters are not quite successful existentialists. It is true that his characters dismantle any hope of locating the ethical in the social–not without turning into a bug of a man. But after this (and here is the “essential difference” of which he spoke) they do not ascend to the kind of “self-defining freedom” that Kierkegaard recommends. Instead they struggle terribly, like Kafka did himself. They are unable to create their own ethical sphere or to create themselves, in the absence of other people and of God. It is not easy being one’s own judge and jury. As Emerson warned, “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”

Divorcing oneself from the shared human world is a torturous process. From the very beginning Kafka wanted a prose as torturous as the process that it attempted to describe. As a twenty-year-old, he writes that “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books . . . we need the books that affect us like a disaster.” So, no, Kafka does not make us happy like your average best-seller, but he did not make himself happy, just as Kierkegaard did not make himself happy. Judging yourself–being the whole courtroom in your own person–is no easier than being put on trial by your society or by your God. It incurs terrible wounds.

Yet still we do it, we still request judgment unprompted by higher powers: this is the great Kafka joke, the great Kafka terror, the great Kafka mystery. The king’s messengers keep on delivering after all the kings are dead. Prometheus hangs against the rock so long that both he and his judges forget what he is doing there. And the officer in the penal colony will put his own body into that terrible machine long after the public has lost interest in such brutal punishments. In the absence of God or moral certainty, how we call down judgment upon ourselves is simultaneously the most horrific and the most beautiful thing about us.

Everybody is in need of judgment in Kafka, especially Kafka himself. This need in Kafka was more than a ploy or a style, it was a condition of the man. In that sense his work is indeed about psychology–but the psychology of only one man. It was the literature of one man’s consciousness; the aggadah and the halakhah of Mr. Franz Kafka. Nobody else was ever remotely involved. His concretization of metaphor is symptomatic of this. He does not show you how much a man hates his work by describing his job and his colleagues, but by making these feelings concrete, material. I felt abject as a bug today. I ate shit at work. I was sick as a dog. I am insignificant as a mouse. Kafka makes the word flesh.

This is not to everybody’s taste, and there is an obvious harsh judgment of Kafka that he graciously lends to one of his female characters: “You don’t impress me at all. Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn’t make it true. What I really think, sir, is that you can’t be bothered with the truth because it’s too tiring.” We may accuse Kafka of this, and he will be delighted. “God, how good that makes me feel!” says the “I” character in response. “To find oneself so well understood!”

Kafka knew that life is not like that. It is not impossible to live. We do live, obviously. Here we all are. But he was in the business of postulating the opposite truth, a divine negative of the truth, which he expresses in his most difficult parable:

         "It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the
         simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never
         be exhausted."
           "You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot
         not-live, after all."
           "It is precisely in this `Cannot, after all' that the mad
         strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes
         on form."

When we are “before Kafka,” we sit waiting before an entrance that the novel will never enter–certainly not without losing its very shape–and yet must continue to strive to enter, even if it is only to wait insistently, passing the time by describing the face of the guard, or making a note of the flies on his collar. I mean that the novelist does well to keep Kafka’s absolute contradictory truth somewhere in mind, because we will tell fewer lies that way. And yet “telling the truth like Kafka” also means forgetting many other significant parts of our life and our work. The ideas with which Kafka engaged–infinity, absolute paradox, inexpressibility, utter abjection in the very face of existence–are so awesome that they can sometimes hide from us Kafka’s limits and failures.

Nothing can make of Kafka a bad writer, but there were things that lay outside his ken. The communal, the shared, the necessary social lie. And, most significantly, other people. That Kafka fully comprehended this lack in himself, that he measured the shape and depth of his own wound–this is finally what made him a genius.

~~~~~~~~

By Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the author of WHITE TEETH AND THE AUTOGRAPH MAN (Random House). She is currently a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

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The noted Israeli newspaper, Ma’ariv, just published their interview with Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain in its Spirituality section at http://www.nrg.co.il:80/online/43/ART1/746/327.html. An English version of the interview is attached, and a Turkish translation is in now in the process of being done.

According to Yonatan Levi, editor of Ma’ariv who conducted the interview, “The interview is up and our dialogue received already appreciative feedback. the title is “Kabel Het-Het”, which in military slang means “well done” (het-het as acronym of postive enforcement – “hizuk hiuvi”).”

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MA’ARIV INTERVIEW WITH REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN

MA’ARIV: Why neo-Sabbatianism? What does this approach have that other religious streams, in or outside of Judaism, lack?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: First, we are not a “religion.” Neo-Sabbatianism seeks to destroy religion, not to compete with it. Religions — all religions (and most especially the so-called “Abrahamic” religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) — are the Kellipot surrounding and entrapping the Glory of God. Jews worship Judaism; Christians worship Christianity; Muslims worship Islam — we Neo-Sabbatians worship God, not as a supernatural being but as an infinite, boundless, undefinabable Mind possessing no corporeality or substance, yet having self-awareness, intelligence, emotion, will, and intention. All things that ever were, are and will be are in this “God,” but in potential rather than physical form. This “God” is energy, not entity — at first, before creation, Energy in its potential state but, during and after creation, energy in its kinetic state as well. Like energy, and because it is energy, this “God” can neither be created nor destroyed. It corresponds more to the Ayn Sof of Kabbalah than to the Yahweh of Judaism. Strictly speaking, we Neo-Sabbatians don’t “worship” or pray to this “God” but seek to know It, communicate with It and assist It in its return to the wholeness from which It has fallen by the act of creation. We do this not “out there” as religions do, but “in here” as the so-called mystic does. We do this not through religious creed and ritual — which we consider deterrents rather than aids to knowing “God” — but by the direct inner experience of It through the power of Ze’ir Anpin, or what C. G. Jung calls “the One who dwells within [us], whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses [us] on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

MA’ARIV: The last article of yours we published aroused much interest but one topic was ostensibly missing: the practice. What sins do you actually practice, how do you chose them, what are the consequences, the price, the reward?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: We’re not concerned in Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah with the “practice” of sin, but with the transformation of unholiness into holiness — again, not “out there” somewhere but “in here” where it exists without our needing to “choose” it. Furthermore it is on the level of thought not deed that this transformation of the unholy into the holy — this “redemption through sin” — takes place for us. As the Ba’al Shem Tov said, “The Evil Thoughts come to man even in the midst of prayer. And they come to him as to their redemption. When an evil or alien though arises in a man, it comes to him in order that he may redeem it, and let it ascend.” In other words, for us “sin” is not an outer ritual to be acted out through the body, but an inner encounter with evil in what the Zohar calls the “heart-mind” for the purposes not of enjoying the evil, but of transforming it. To quote the great poet and Sufi master, Rumi:, “To do evil is only reprehensible when it is done for its ownsake. But when evil is done for the sake of the good, then it is not reprehensible” which corresponds almost directly to the Ba’al Shem Tov’s statement, “In truth, there is no opposite between good and evil, for evil is the throne of good.”

MA’ARIV: Could you elaborate on the issue of religious conversion? How has your own religious experience changed as you took on yourself Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: To begin with, the point of my multiple conversions — like those of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank before me — wasn’t to change me, but to repair God. In fact, the entire emphasis in Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah isn’t on me — not on my salvation or my transformation — but on the salvation and transformation of God. Martin Buber put it best, I think, when he said, “No soul has its object in its own salvation True, each person is to know themselves, purify themselves, perfect themselves, but not for their own sake — neither for the sake of their temporal happiness nor for that of their eternal bliss — but for the sake of the Tikkun which they are destined to perform upon the world.” Therefore, the Holy Apostasies of Sabbatai Zevi, Jacob Frank and myself were not conversions “of-the-flesh,” as it were, but conversions “of-the-heart.” The goal of converting to each religion was to retrieve and liberate the Holy Sparks imprisoned there, rather than to become a practicing member of its religious communion. Actually, in a way, the purpose of such Neo-Sabbatian conversions is to destroy the religion one enters into, much in the way the worm destroys the apple, rather than to become a practicing member of it.

MA’ARIV: Could you briefly describe your spiritual biography – how come you found yourself drawn to antinomian religion? Do you find it related to the 60’s counter-culture?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: I’m 73 years old, and for as long as I can remember — even as far back as when I was an infant in my crib — I was mad for this “God” who relentlessly pursued me in dreams and visions — even, as I said, when I was an infant in my crib. To paraphrase our friend, Leonard Cohen, “it’s not I who chooses God, but God who chooses me.” I wasn’t “drawn to antinomian religion,” — it was God who drew me to it. As for the 60’s, I was what I was long before they were. I studied philosophy and comparative religion in college, at least a decade before the 60’s. In a way (if you’ll excuse my signature immodesty) it was people like me who created the 60’s, not the 60’s that created us.

MA’ARIV: And of course – could you tell a bit about the community of Turkish Ma’aminim and your relationship with them.

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: My mother’s family was originally from Istanbul, Turkey where their Donmeh surname was “Goldman.” (The photo you see below is of my Turkish great-grandmother, Peli, on the left, taken when she was 101 years old..) My father’s family, although not from Turkey, was from Romania, so both sides came from what was then the Ottoman Empire, cradle of Sabbatianism. Probably for that reason, the hereditary Ma’aminim of Turkey have been supportive.of our work almost from its beginning. In fact, many of them are members of Donmeh West, and one of their leaders (some say THE leader, but he denies being such) helped me establish Donmeh West on the internet a decade ago and has been our supporter and friend ever since.

MA’ARIV: In what ways do you instruct your students to get in touch with God? What is the practical teaching? Examples would do as well.

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: “God speaks first in one way, and then in another, but not one notices. He speaks by dreams, and visions that come in the night.” (Job 33:14) So the “practical teaching” we give is, Shut up and listen! Concerning this use of dreams in Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah, the noted Bible scholar, author and Zurich-Certified Jungian analyst, J. Marvin Spiegelman, wrote: “[Yakov Leib HaKohain] has made an unusual attempt at combining Jungian [dream interpretation] and the Kabbalah, significantly more than has been assayed heretofore. There have been accounts of the impact of Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah on [modern dream interpretation] — e.g. Freud and Jung — but [Yakov Leib HaKohain] is the first to our knowledge who explicitly combines archetypal information and Jungian concepts in a back-and-forth relation between dreams, personal history and Kabbalistic imagery.” (J. Marvin Spiegelman, Modern Jew In Search of a Soul,” Falcon Press, 1986, p. 84)

MA’ARIV: Would it be possible to give also some examples of the process you described, of committing sins inwardly and then repenting?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: The purpose of “committing the sin inwardly” isn’t actually to “commit” it, but to transform it, so the entire issue has nothing really to do with “repenting” as much as it does with releasing Holiness from the Klippah of Unholiness that imprisons it. To paraphrase Rebbe Nachman, one enters into the sin not to commit it for one’s own personal gratification, but to “transform it into a holy angel, a being of might and destiny.” For example if an “alien thought” , as the Ba’al Shem Tov calls it, comes to one during prayer — say, having hot sweaty sex with the young babe davening on the other side of the mechitzah — the praying man should not do everything he can to put that thought out of his mind, but he should instead “embrace” it, allow himself to engage in it, through what the Zohar calls the “Gate of Imagination,” — and this, not for his own sexual satisfaction, but to release the nitzot of holiness from its klippah of sexual desire. In other words, it is the kavannah behind the imagining that makes it either a holy tikkun or an issur sexual fantasy.

MA’ARIV: Sabbtai Zevi as described among his followers as the Messiah, not only in the universal sense (as an example of a God-Realized man for instance) but as the historic, unique savior in which one should have faith (in the Pauline sense). What is your viewqbelief of Sabbtai’s importance?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: We do not view Sabbatai Zevi as a “savior”, or even necessarily as the “messiah” in the commonly understood sense of the word. And we certainly do not view him as a God-man in the way Christians view Jesus. (Remember, this is NEO-Sabbatian Kabbalah we’re talking about.) Rather, we view Jesus and Sabbatai, along with the avatars of other spiritual traditions, as stages in an ongoing process extending from Jesus to the present moment — a process in which all of us, whether we know it or not, are participating; a process called, “the continuing incarnation of God” about which C. G. Jung wrote, “The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the third divine person, in man, brings about a Christification of many.” In other words, Sabbatai Zevi wasn’t and isn’t God, but a godly man through whom God chose to speak and act. So it’s not Sabbatai the man, but that which God revealed of Itself through that man which has any importance for us. It’s like the Shofar. The Talmud tells us that it’s the sound issuing from the shofar, and not the shofar itself, that’s holy — and, in fact, that the shofar itself is so profane that it can be used as a funnel to feed milk to a nursing infant. In that sense, Sabbatai Zevi was only the shofar; but what issued from him was the Sound. We follow the Sound, not the horn of a dead creature that makes it.

MA’ARIV: Do you think there is a similarity of the Sabbatean antinominism and the eastern type of Crazy Wisdom (adopted as well by western teachers) as a means of bypassing, challenging or destroying the ego?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: Yes, there is. Not necessarily with the “old” Sabbatianism, but certainly very much with our NEO-Sabbatianism. It’s for that reason we call it “syncretic.” Jesus united Jew and Gentile “in his own person;” Amirah added Islam and Judaism; to that, Jacob Frank added Roman Catholicism; and finally, Neo-Sabbatianism embraces and synthesizes all those and the religions of the East as well. “On that day the Lord shall be King over all the earth; on that day, the Lord shall be One and his Name shall be one.”

MA’ARIV: How do people usually react when they hear about your revival of Sabbateanism? Is the old resentment towards Sevi still active?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: Let me answer your question first with a quote from Gershom Scholem. In 1971 he wrote, “There is no longer any disagreement: The dramatic events and widespread religious revival that preceded the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666 . . . . deserve to be studied objectively, to the exclusion of moralistic condemnations of the historical figures involved . . . [But] a true understanding of the rise of Sabbatianism will never be possible as long as scholars continue to appraise it by inappropriate standards, whether these be the conventional beliefs of our own age or the values of traditional Judaism itself.” So to answer your question: modern people whose knowledge of Sabbatianism is limited to what Scholem calls “the baseless assumptions of ‘charlatanry and ‘imposture’ which occupy so prominent a place in earlier historical literature on the subject,” people such as these are predictably less than favorable in their reactions to us. On the other hand, I’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of Jews and non-Jews who are drawn to this spiritual revival. For example, almost 90 thousand people from every corner of the world come to our website at www.donmeh-west.com to read and listen to our Neo-Sabbatian teachings. In fact, an independent rating service — the “Nielsen” of cyberspace, so to speak — using sophisticated mathematical techniques, consistently ranks Donmeh West among the top-ten of the literally hundreds of thousands of Kabbalah websites on the internet. There are also the so-called “Chulent People,” a movement of young yeshiva-trained, formerly Charedi men and women (about whom the N.Y. Times has had at least one feature article) who are exploring alternative approaches to “Judaism” and spirituality, including, to some degree, our own Neo-Sabbatianism.

MA’ARIV: You mentioned your Turkish ancestry. What did your parents and grandparents had to say about your activities?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: There isn’t much to say, really, except that my family came to the United States almost a hundred years ago from Istanbul, where their Donme surname was “Goldman.” They came to America, like so many other Donme families, to escape Sabbatianism and the always-present accusation of the Jews that they were mamzerim. They never spoke of Turkey or Sabbatai Zevi or anything else related to our background until, shortly before she died, my grandmother told me about our Turkish origins and my great-grandmother, Peli, whose picture she gave me, taken of her in Donme garb when she was 101 years old. I was, I think, 26 at the time. and from then until now I had to learn everything for myself, literally from dreams, visions and my spiritual teachers — particularly the great Jungian Kabbalist and direct disciple of C.G. Jung (who was, himself, an admirer of Sabbatai Zevi), the co-founder of the first Jung Institute in the United States, James Kirsch.

MA’ARIV: Finally, we understand there is an international movement under way to restore the crumbling 400 year-old birthplace of Sabbatai Zevi in Izmir, Turkey. Could you tell us something about that.

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: Yes. This is a project that’s very important to me and many other Ma’aminim throughout the world. Sabbatai Sevi came back into the news, in January 2007, when a crumbling three-story house in Izmir was identified as his birthplace just a few days before it was due to be demolished. Now, the house is secure, but its future is uncertain. The question arises. What should be done with it now? Should it be transformed into a museum, a research center, or tourism center or something else? A special support group has been set up on the internet for people who are interested in learning more about this project and/or helping to see it through to completion. Your readers can find it at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6669864131.

PART II

MA’ARIV INTERVIEW WITH REB YAKOV LEIB

MA’ARIV: You have mentioned that the redemption of evil is done only by thought. this was not the case, of course with Sabbtai and even less with Frank, who followed the Jewish understanding that the deed is holy, therefore the mitvah habaa beaverah must be accordinglt acted out. could you comment on that?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: I didn’t mean to suggest that the only way to redeem evil is by thought; I’m only suggesting that there is another way of “acting out” the dictum of mitzvah haba b’averah. besides through the body. This is where the “neo” of Neo-Sabbatianism comes in. Let me elaborate on that with a quotation from the Zohar:  “For nothing is revealed while the person is still under the spell of the body” — thus suggesting that a deed performed physically through the body is somehow less holy than the same deed performed spiritually through the mind because the things of the body lead to the consequences of the body, while the things of the spirit lead to the consequences of the spirit, and the consequences of the body are death and decay, while those of the spirit are union with God and life everlasting.

So, yes, our understanding, like that of Sabbatai and Frank, is that the deed itself is holy, but where we part company with them and with conventional Jewish wisdom is in our further understanding that there is more than one level on which a deed itself can be performed.  What we know now that they did not know then is that a deed can be accomplished just as effectively (and perhaps even more so) on the virtual  level of spirit (that is to say, in the mind) as it can be on the literal level of action (that is to say, in the body). For example, quantum-mechanics physics proposes that anything one can imagine in his mind either already exists or literally comes into existence in some parallel universe as a result of his having imagined it.In this regard, the Zohar says, “God is unknowable. No one has ever been able to identify Him. How, then, can you say: ‘Her husband is known in the Gates?’ (Prov. 31:23) when ‘her husband’ is the Blessed Holy One. But, indeed, God is known in the Gates. He is known and grasped to the degree that one opens the Gates of Imagination! The capacity to connect to the Spirit of Wisdom, to imagine in one’s heart-mind, that is how God becomes known.” In conclusion, then, as I’ve already said, a deed performed in the body leads to the consequences of the body, which are decay and death, while a deed performed in the soul leads to the consequences of the soul which are union with God and life everlasting.

MA’ARIV: Could you elaborate what kind of spiritual practice – which would be Sabbatical in essence and opposed to creed and ritual  – do  you teach in order that one can know God?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: Given what I just said about a deed having the same or even higher consequences when acted out on the virtual as opposed to literal level, let me answer your question by saying that everything Sabbatai and Frank taught and practiced, we teach and practice also — but, unlike them, we teach and practice it through the Gates of Imagination rather than the gates of the body. Again, this is one of the principles that puts the “neo” into Neo-Sabbatian.

That being said, let me give you an example. According to Nanthan of Gaza, “the messiah’s soul is engulfed by the qelippah . . . [and just] as the shell appears before the core of the fruit, even so the messianic qellipah (that is, Jesus) appeared first in this world . . . . [Therefore] he that is the messiah will restore to holiness his qelippah which is Jesus Christ.” (Quoted in Gershom Scholem, “Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah

In other words, just as Sabbatai Zevi entered into the “Maw of Satan” by converting to Islam in order to retrieve the Holy Sparks held prisoners there, so Jesus had entered into the realm of the Sitrah Achra to do the same. But since the soul of Jesus remains trapped in the Side of Darkness, the Yechidah Mashiach, of which Jesus is the qellipah, is also trapped there with him.

Now with those Sabbatian teachings in mind, our Neo-Sabbatian practice for restoring the soul of Jesus to holiness.– not to reinstate him as the messiah or as a god-man, but only to release the yechidah mashiach of which he is the qelippah — is to fling open the Gates of Imagination and call to him by reciting the words of the Kaddish. That is, we recite the Kaddish to him, not for him.

MA’ARIV: I suppose you are asked a lot about the sexual aspects of Sabbateanism and Frankism and if you have partially or fully followed  their example?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: I’ve done nothing that Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank did not or would not have done, sexually as well as otherwise. Like them, however, although these strange actions of mine may have been what others would consider immoral and sacrilegious, they were never illegal, and I am neither ashamed of nor regret any of them. However, I will say this: it was largely out of those early antinomian sexual experiences that I realized that whatever is done through the body leads to death and corruption, while whatever is done through the soul — that is, through the Gates of Imagination — leads to union with God and life everlasting. It was out of those literal experiences that I realized the power of the virtual experience in all areas of the transformation of God.

Let me elaborate. It’s commonly understood that the first five commandments are “religious” while the second five are “civil.” That is, the first five deal with one’s relationships to God while the second five deal with one’s relationships to others. Given our Neo-Sabbatian view of virtual rather than literal antinomianism, we outwardly violate the religious commandments while inwardly observing them; and we outwardly observe the civil commandments while inwardly violating them. Furthermore, this violation of the civil commandants isn’t a ritual in which we go looking for sins to redeem; rather, it is only when the alien thought, as the Besht calls it, comes to us that we embrace it in order to transform it — and then, only through the Gate of Imagination.

MA’ARIV: About the conversions – do you encourage your students do the same?

REB YAKOV LEIB HAKOHAIN: Because the “neo” in Neo-Sabbatian emphasizes the virtual rather than the literal, because it emphasizes the Gates of Imagination rather than the Gates of the Body, I do not encourage my students to do the same as I did in my multiple conversions, although not for one moment do I regret having done it. Instead, as with almost everything else we teach and practice, I encourage them to make such conversions through the Gates of Imagination rather than the Gates of Religion — and even then, only for the purpose of redeeming the Holy Sparks, not for the purpose of becoming a practicing member of the religion to which they inwardly “converted.” Those familiar with the 19th century Hindu Avatar, Sri Ramakrishna, will recognize here the virtual way he “converted” to the multiple religions he followed, rather than the literal way followed by Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank.

This site has moved to http://7fatcow.com

just got off the phone with la leah. she and her shliach family were forced to evacuate san diego so she and the family are staying by heshi in LA. true. i could not make this shit up. i see a network of holy losers crisscrossing the globe who can offer you nothing but their company and the backwash from the bottom of a bottle of georgi . the only problem is that heshi’s staying in some mansion with a walk-in freezer but besides that it’s perfect.

-shitalphin

from A simple Jew

Yossele Kvetch comenting on RNachman and Don Ross

“It is a mean eye that causes one to see only ugliness and impurity in everything beyond the bounds of Israel, the unique nation. This is one of the most awful, debased forms of darkness. It damages the entire edifice of spiritual virtue, the light of which every spiritual soul seeks.”

Says Rav Kook [Mishnato shel HaRav Kook]:”

This piece is followed by comments, pilpuling about the mystery of when a voice in music is safe, differentianting between “vulgar” lyricked music and ye olde classickal music of yore, and the divine right of Rebbes to steal particular songs from the gentiles for purposes of defeating them, an old chassidic trick. Missing the point? It’s a good question: What’s safe and good to inhale from the host culture, and what’s not? Should we buy the kids I-pods? Cable? Pornography? What’s a wise filter? Because I meet modern Orthodox kids from all around, who have been lameified by their host neighborhoods and medias into shallow, petty standards of cool. Is this prevenatable? How can we filter a culture to get only the good?

—Yo

RYAN GARKO, DRINK THIS:

Well thanks to all the money and power in the world. This one couldn’t be stopped.

I recived the news this morning that one of my old friends. Finaly killed herself.

She was found dead in her apt yesterday morning. She overdosed.

Why was a known drug addict and extremely suicidal young girl living in an apt by herself several blocks away from her family?

Because G-d forbid she would effect the other (frum) children in her family.

Welcome to reality.

This is a big ol FUCK YOU to her parents!!

-Shmutzi

this is from the top of my gmail page:

Funny Quote of the Day – Willem de Kooning – “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.”

-shitalphin

sevenfatcow has over a half a million “views” (visits to the site). imagine balloons and confetti.

On Shamanism in the Carpathian Mountains

(An excerpt from Idel’s Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, Chapter 4)

The techniques of the Besht at this time, according to his epistle, were related explicitly to ascents of the soul. In the Yiddish version of the legend that is quoted above, the Besht’s utter concentration of thought is described as beign out of this world. Shuch ecstatic or trance-like experiences were related to a certain way of life: hitbodedut and hanhagah on the one hand, and a certain type of Yihudim on the other. The hanhagah, or the regimen vitae, of the Besht is mentioned in a book by his acquaintance, Rabbi Meir Margoliot, as if it were an articulated issue. I propose that these mystical practices can be traced to earlier Jewish sources, but the Besht’s emphasis on the ascent on high and on mystical states of consciousness deserve further consideration. The first-person account of the ascent of the soul is a relatively rare phenomenon in Jewish mysticism; a confession that contains not only the names of the person but also the precise date is uncharacteristic of the reports on ascensions with which I am familiar before the time of the Besht.

Interestingly enough, ecstatic practices in which the soul is describes as leaving the body for several hours, during which oracular dreams were experienced, were known on the Moldavian side of the Carpathian Mountains. Though this is indubitably a very ancient Eurasian practice (as analyzed by Carlo Ginzburg), it may be relevant for our discussion to highlight evidence concerning the practice in region of Bacau around the year 1648 as related by a Catholic friar, Marcus Bandinus. The author mentions the incantatores, a term reminiscent of the term “incantation” used in the quote from the Besht’s epistle above. Indeed , the Hebrew expression for performing an incantation for the ascent of the soul, hashba’at aliyyat neshamah, is absent from all Jewish literature prior to the Besht. While ancient ecstatic practices generally were not received positively in Christian Europe, in this particular area alone the incantatores and incantatrices were highly regarded and, according to Bandinus’s formulations, were considered to be similar to the doctores subtilissimi et sanctissimi in Italy. Moreover, ecstatic practices were not restricted to the few but were open to everyone. The assumption is that this was not a Rumanian practice but one brought from Asia by a tribe of Magyars, known as Czangos, who stopped in the Moldavian Carpathians.

Thus, less than a century before the revelation of the Besht, in the immediate vicinity of the place where the founder of Hasidism spent his time in solitude, ecstatic practices similar to his ascent to heaven were known and preformed by Gentiles. These practices have nothing to do with Jewish sources but stem from Eurasian religious heritage. However, as I have pointed out in prior discussions, practices similar to those of the Besht are also apparent in earlier types of Jewish mysticism, some of which presumably were formulated in arias remote from the Eurasian zone. 

What therefore is the significance of the coexistence of similar practices in practically the same period and geographical area? There is no simple answer to the question. Detailed descriptions and analyses of Jewish mystical techniques have not yet been undertaken. A preliminary hypothesis is that, though the Besht’s and his contemporaries’ ascents of the soul caused a resurgence of a Jewish mystical practice that had been in existence for centuries according to literary sources, this practice experienced particular impetus precicly in the Carpathian region. In other words, one aspect of nascent Hasidism – the ascent of the soul – can be attributed to the consonance between Jewish mystical traditions found in much earlier sources as well as mystical-magical practices in vogue in the geographical area from which Hasidism emerged.    

 -atgate231

Anonymous said…

SAME BAT TIME. SAME BAT PLACE.

PLUS!!!! DISCOUNT!!! JEWS SAVE MONEY!!! BARGAIN!!!
World Premier of Basya Schechter of Pharaoh’s Daughter musical
interpretation of selected poems from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s
diary—one of modern Judaism’s greatest spiritual authors—written
between 1927 and 1933 which appeared in Warsaw when Heschel was only
26 years old from his time living in Berlin. The show is a powerful
song cycle; mixing elements of Leonard Cohen meets Pharaoh’s Daughter
with the themes reflecting the foundations of Heschel’s
beliefs—struggles with radical spiritual striving to cure the world’s
ills. Musical direction Uri Sharlin, with Frank London – trumpet,
Megan Weeder – violin and Yoed Nir. – cello, basya schechter – guitar,
voice

The ticket cost is $30 but for those that could use a break there will
be a $20 Chulent discount (ticket cost $10) . These tickets can be
purchased Thursday night Oct. 18th at the Community Synagogue 325 E.
6th st. between 1st & 2nd Ave. (Please pass this along to those that
might be interested).

From Basya Schechter :

Want to let everyone know about a new special project that I’m
premiering on October 23rd, setting Heschel’s Yiddish poetry to music,
the evening is in concert with an incredibly powerful program from
Italy (See below) :

Ghetto Cabaret Diaries:
Tuesday October 23, 2007 8p.m.
The Concert Hall at New York Society for Ethical Culture
2 West 64th Street at Central Park West
Buy Tickets Now at:
http://www.oyhoo.com/shows/ghetto-cabaret-diaries

“Oy Vey” from Italy premieres “Diary of a Partisan”, Resistance songs
from the ghetto of Vilna/Vilius. The extraordinary diary of a Jewish
partisan, found within the confines of ghetto and moving to the
woodlands of Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. Songs and Music
with projection of historical photographs. Amerigo Fontaini, narrator,
Gabriela Soltz, Vocals, Daniele Poli, guitar, mandolin, bass, Ugo
Galasso, clarinet, Alessandro Moretti, accordion.

TO ALL THOSE WHO CAN’T AFFORD $10 – GET A FUCKING JOB!

A list of failed Messiahs…. (from the time period ‘m looking at)

Talk amongst your selfs..
# Alexander the Great[1]
# Judas son of Hezekiah (Ezekias) (c. 4 BCE)
# Simon (c. 4 BCE)
# Athronges (c. 4-2? BCE)
# Honi the circle-maker
# Jesus
# Theudas (44-46) in the Roman province of Judea
# Menahem ben Judah partook in a revolt against Agrippa II in Judea
# Simon bar Kokhba (died c. 135), defeated in the Second Jewish-Roman War
# Moses of Crete (5th century)
# Isḥaḳ ben Ya’ḳub Obadiah Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani of Ispahan lived in Persia during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (684-705).
# Yudghan, lived and taught in Persia in the early eighth century disciple of Isḥaḳ ben Ya’ḳub Obadiah Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani of Ispahan
# Serene (Sherini, Sheria, Serenus, Zonoria, Saüra) (c. 720)
# David Alroy or Alrui (c. 1160)
# Abraham Abulafia (b. 1240)
# Nissim ben Abraham (c. 1295) active in Avila.
# Moses Botarel of Cisneros (c. 1413)
# Asher Kay (1502) a German near Venice.
# David Reubeni (early sixteenth century).
# Solomon Molcho (early sixteenth century).
# Hayim Vital (1542-1620)
# Sabbatai Zevi (alternative spellings: Shabbetai, Sabbetai, Shabbesai; Zvi, Tzvi) (1626-1676)
# Barukhia Russo (Osman Baba), successor of Sabbatai Zevi.

if you have anything to say about any of these guys in particular. let me know.

If you have anything to share let me know. you can also email me. I’m asking for intelligent opinions and views. Preferably ones that can be backed (by midrashim).

I’m currently in hiding, doing research for a paper. Boring myself to sleep. I want some more interesting facts, maybe text in English.
Come on, put those scholarly brains to work. Help a sister out.
You were all much help with the whole cholov yisroel thing.

Thanks,

-Shmutzi

(the book) over the weekend. You can read a shorter version online, here.http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
After reading the book, my opinion was that although they present some compelling arguments, their continual reiteration (about one third of the book) that they’re not against the zionists entitys’ right to exist, that there is no jewish conspiracy, that lobbying is legitimate, etc. etc. was better proof than anything else. Has anyone else here read it?
The Israel Lobby
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

  -mohammed

SFC NEWS HQ HAS RECEIVED REPORTS OF A FRUM JUMPER O”H AT OCEAN PARKWAY AND FOSTER. WE WILL TRY TO KEEP YOU POSTED.

once there was a way to get back homeward once there was a way to get get back home sleep pretty baby and do not cry and i will sing a lullibye- oh your going to carry that weight carry that weight a long time. beatles. once when words ment well and letters designated something i could talk about the totalitarian aspects of judism and the many fallen then as things became clear that we too were infected and inflicting ,our utter failure aparent ,the pain yefta lavavahem knocked you for aloop and we began to demand the return to ashwitchz as our god-given right like an early enough kuggul on friday night and the hunger oh the hunger now well on the way thoughts in the clouds the man with the foolish grin is speaking perfectly loud but nobody wants to hear him or the sounds he appears to make they dont like him the fool on the hilberg. – yakov  |  October 16, 2007 at 7:38 am

from pilegesh.org

The Vilna Gaon, whose 200th yahrzeit is this year was the greatest Torah giant for hundreds of years.
He was also a great Tzaddik. In the course of a year, he didn’t waste a total of five minutes from learning
Torah.

He said (Ma’aseh Rav Hashalem page 276) “If I would be successful, in accomplishing two things
I would be idle from Torah and T’fillah and go from city to city [to get them accepted].

One is to eliminate the prohibition of Rabbeinu Gershom against taking two wives for with this the G’ulah (final redemption) will become closer, and the second that they should have bircas Cohanim every day.” In his lifetime he didn’t succeed, but his talmidim who came to Eretz Yisroel succeeded to have bircas Cohanim every day in Israel.

By
Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain, Founder & Spiritual Director
DONMEH WEST
As Originally Published in
THE CRITIC: A Journal of Contemporary Catholic Culture
Winter 1994 Issue

It begins on August 18, 1988 when I set sail with eight companions and a crew of five on the S.S. Doxa out of Port Piraeus, Greece. Our destination was Izmir, Turkey and the Donmeh — an ancient sect of Jewish Muslims who secretly revere Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th century Kabbalistic Messiah, as an Incarnation of God. It was the 330th anniversary of his conversion to Islam, and we planned to join them. We never got there. This is the story of what happened instead.

Departure

All of us knew the score. It was Tishah B’av, the terrible “Days of Awe,” when it’s dangerous to travel, particularly off the Coast of Turkey. But Costentinos, our captain, assured us we’d be safe, and we believed him. Partly because Mr. Lefiganos, his boss, had seven thousand dollars of our money; partly because it was too late to turn back; and partly because we were propelled by a sense of destiny. But none of us were prepared for what followed.

* * * *

The sea was calm when we left Piraeus. Some of us got seasick anyway, despite our precautions. That evening we docked at Kea Island, ate dinner on the ship, and retired early. I slept on the rear-deck, hidden in a cocoon of blankets. It was comforting to be like a ghost, to see without being seen, and eavesdrop on the life around me. What I remember best are the men of Kea sitting outdoors, watching TV in their undershirts.

full article at Donmeh-West.com

Madonna leaves the Kabbalah center in New York City carrying son David.

-nypost

Poem

I’ve been bogged down by the gravity
of the idea that everyone around me
is just another actor in a culture of depravity
and that I’m new at writing poetry
so I’ve got no melodic key
except to make every line rhyme
until the end of time
so forgive me for now
i’ll do something different, when I figure out how

I forgot about the night that I was yelling at my friend
that happiness is an option, one that’s not a growing trend
he told me I would I would have a revolution on my hands
but I was still young, unclear, looking for new bands
amazed by these ideas, of revolution and anarchy
I’d hardly even given up watching television malarkey.
He was angry, not depressed, antidepressants wouldn’t help
angry that we’re all being repressed, help help!
I mentioned the names of mutual friends I thought were happy,
his reply was that the high rabbi was smoked silly
He was really grouchy, this friend of mine, a teacher whose been featured
in my first whole poems
a teacher as much a genius as at least two Noams.

continue at his website OwFuck.blogspot.com

i challenge the creative geniuses of chulent and sevenfatcow to create a purim play called:

CHULENT 2037

what do we think the future holds for all the beans, barley and potatoes that make up the crockpot that is chulent.

-shitalphin, hat tip to arora

Looked at from a Ginsbergian point of view (whether stoned or not), is there anything in ‘Judaism’ worth saving? or would it be simpler to build a new spirituality, using components from east Asia, such as Hinduism. Buddhism, Tantra, etc., and let the sad word ‘Jew’ die of superannuation?

I ask as one who was unaccountably born to non-Jews, and thus has always found life extremely boring. -comment by rowan berkeley

-shitalphin

Al aronowitz : the guy who introduced the beatles to weed

This is off wikipedia.

(If anyone can identify the actual compiler/author of this piece, I’d love to acknowledge his or their depth of understanding of the Story and moral of Raul Hilberg –YHO)

What is most contentious about Hilberg’s work,
the controversial implications of which influenced the decision by Israeli authorities
to deny him access to the Yad Vashem’s archives
was his assessment that elements of Jewish society,
such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the Genocide.

And
that this was partly rooted
in longer-standing attitudes of European Jews,
rather
than attempts at survival or exploitation.

In his own words:
“I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts
[...]

Ultimately
I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit.

(yho– Is this the main change in Jewish Theology since the holocaust?)

It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance.”

The Destruction of the European Jews provided, in Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction’ set up under Nazism.

For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgement since Arendt’s opinion of his manuscript, that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about, had influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press after he had submitted it, and thus had effectively denied him the prestigious auspices of a mainstream academic publishing house.

With a terse lucidity that ranged, with unsparing meticulousness, over the huge archives of Nazism,
Hilberg delineated the history of the mechanisms,
political,
legal,
administrative
and organizational, whereby the Holocaust was perpetrated, as it was seen through German eyes, often by the anonymous clerks
whose unquestioning dedication to their duties was central to the efficacy of the industrial project of genocide.

To that end, Hilberg intentionally ignored laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their life in the concentration camps. (emphasis mine —Yho)

Yehuda Bauer, a life-long adversary and friend of Hilberg, who often clashed polemically with the man he considered ‘without fault’ over what Bauer saw as the latter’s failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus
on the how of the Holocaust
rather than the why. Hilberg would reply,-
‘both to me and to others -
that he did not ask the big questions
for fear that the answers would be too little. [25]

Hilberg’s empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust in turn aroused considerable controversy, not least because of its details concerning the cooperation of Jewish councils in the actual procedures of evacuation to the camps.

…

‘It has taken me some time to absorb
what I should always have known,
that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews
I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought.’
‘Raul Hilberg’, The Times, (London) August 8, 2007

Wow. That’s hardcore.

(Next: part Three, Who is Norman Finkelstein? )

—Yho

p.s. And from the Footnotes!

“‘The Germans controlled the Jewish leadership,
and that leadership in turn controlled the Jewish community.

This system was foolproof.

Truly, the Jewish communal organizations had become a self-destructive machine.’ “
Raul Hilberg,The Destruction of the European Jews, (1961)1973 pp122-125,p.125
‘In Amsterdam as in Warsaw,
in Berlin as in Budapest,
Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property,
to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination,
to keep track of vacated apartments,
to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains,

until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.’

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) 1964 p.118″

Hey. I was playing a silly round of Google Yourself, and I found this super nifty bon mot

The Secret to Happiness ?
Westerners have long sought out the mysterious spiritual truths of “the East”.

Now they have been succinctly revealed. In Being Indian by Pavan Varma (Penguin, 2004), he writes:

The Indian is so prepared for the worst, that when things are just bad, he considers himself lucky.
Something to consider, for all us middle class Westerners with an overblown sense of entitlement.

It’s this cute dude, Syd, he links all kindsa fun Jew stuff up. check him out

p.s. the equation works in other directions, but it’s all true.(virtue – curiosity = vanity) and so.

B”H

“In ‘Yalhakian’ Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah, I have created nothing, invented nothing, innovated nothing. What I’ve done is simply to provide a new way of looking at, understanding, integrating and putting into practice Old Truths — nothing more than bringing New Bottles to Old Wine, so to speak.

-Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain

On September 17, 1759, Frank converted. But something was strange about these “New Christians,” who insisted on maintaining their old customs (including — I kid you not; this is my field — the eating of kugel) -jay michaelson

THIS IS A POSSIBLE SCENARIO. WE MUST BE VIGILANT.

DUE TO THE ACCCIDENT “CHULENT” HAS BEEN ASKED TO LEAVE COMMUNITY SYNAGOGUE. ISAAC SAYS HE HAS GIVEN UP TRYING TO FIND PLACES.

with his winning of the nobel peace prize al gore has cemented his position as a man of the world that is thinking globally the perfect antidote to the cheney-bush manifest destiny attitude. gore has become a source of inspiration and has transcended partisan party politics. for the future of our country and our planet sign the petition at www.Draftgore.com  or not.

-shitalphin

“Calling all snags”
I need a reference, source, anything, specific on reb moshe finstens “chumra” concerning Cholov yisroel. and a prize if you can find any proof that he forced himself to regurgitate when he “accidentally ingested cholov stam”
where it is and how do I accsess it? I need a copy of it in english.

-shmutzi

VARIETY REVIEW OF A Night in the Old Marketplace

…Meanwhile, in the midst of all this hokey blundering, there are to-die-for costumes designed by Levi Okunov, the latest 21-year-old darling of the New York fashionistas. Striped aprons and overalls echoing the stripes of the Jewish prayer shawl, triple lapels, startling colors, gunmetal sheers, raggedy ruffles — this looks like a collection of downtown chic: what the well dressed in the shtetl will be wearing next season.

Camille Looking For a Nice Jewish Boy

-Shiksa Shtupper

this was written (and posted) while I was drunk. please don’t translate, the original is lame enough.

ווען איך קען ווען
איבעררייסען די פליישיגע קייטען
פון ענגשאפט באפרייען
פון קערפער ארויס
וואס וואלט איך געווען?

ווען געדאנקען פון גלוסטען קען איך פונאנאנדערשיידען
דערווייטערען, פארטרייבען, אזוי ווי א פליג
די ברויזענדע געפיהלען, ביי’ם האלץ אנצוכאפען, דערווארגען, דערשטיקען, ווען ס’ליגט נאך אין וויג
וואס וואלט דען געשעהן?

מיין הארץ איז געפאנגען אין אייז קאלטע געדאנקען
מיין קאפ אין א טורמע פון פלייש און פון ביין
זאג מיר, ווער איז דער געפאנגענער און ווער דער פאנגער,
ווער וואס ס’שמייכעלט און ווער קריצט מיט די ציין?

און פיהללייכט פארקערט, דארף איך אויפהערען צו טראכטען, די געדאנקענדאנג אפשטעלען, פליסען מיט די שטרוים,
אזוי ארום זיך באפרייען, פון עפעס העכערס פארגעסען, מיט די ווירקליכקייט מיטלעבען, פארגעסען פון טרוים
וואס וואלט איך געווען?

די געוויסענסביסע פארשטילען, אויף אייביג שטום מאכען ,
די צונג אויסצושניידען און די ציינער אויסהאקען,
צו טאהן וואס ס’גלוסט זיך, צו לעבען און לאכען,
פון פארצווייפלונג פארקוקען, אויף קיין קלער נישט צו אכטען
וואס וואלט דען געשעהן?

געפינט זיך א “זיך” וואס מ’קען אנטייט’לען, אנכאפען,
צו צוויי קעגענזייטיגע קריפלען אויף אייביג צושלאגען?
איז אונז באשערט ווי א בלינדער אין פינסטער צו טאפען
איז פארשטאנד פון די זאכען וואס די וועלט טוט פארמאגען?

-mohammed

666 Son of Satan Jew Goldsteins Massacre at the Mosque

The Solitary Reaper

by William Wordsworth

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?–
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;–
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

The Confession

It’s all well and good to talk about the concept of pilegesh in theory. But I am one, so I know what it’s like in the real world.

I’d like to say up front that I do not agree with married men having a pilegesh. It’s not necessarily about halacha but because when people get married nowadays, implicitly they have made a promise to be monogamous to that person. And that promise is binding until that marriage ends.

Also, it upsets me when people use the framework of pilegesh to justify promiscuity. In order to be a pilegesh, you need to keep the rules. Taharat hamishpacha and all that entails. Making sure there is a three month gap between relationships.

I’ve been a pilegesh for three years with two different men (not at the same time obviously). I keep all the rules. If you saw me in the street I’d look the same as the other girls. The desperate, naive shidduch daters. I’m frum. I went to a religious high school. So you’re probably wondering why I decided to be a pilegesh to begin with.

It wasn’t something I planned on. Once I turned eighteen, it seemed I would have to get married to be able to act on the feelings I’d been having for a few years. I didn’t like the idea of having to settle down, but it didn’t seem I had a choice. Then I met a girl who changed my life. She was a few years older than me and introduced me to the idea. Not long after, I met my first boyfriend. And that’s it in a nutshell.

There have been a few major challenges. I had to find a mikvah where no one would question me or recognize me. That didn’t turn out to be so hard. I had to learn the halachos out of books instead of learning it from a kallah teacher. And of course, I have to keep it a secret. What I’m doing is not acceptable in the frum community. I understand why it can’t be. If everyone did this, chaos would ensue.

It’s hard sometimes. I wonder why I bother. If it’s not a kosher relationship, why follow all the rules? The answer is that I believe what I’m doing is halachically valid, even if it’s not accepted. I’m glad that I don’t have to get married in order to have this kind of relationship. Sure it can be difficult, but on the whole I feel it’s liberating.

-posted by Chaya on Pilegesh.org