Davar Akher

I don’t get many comments on this blog, but an increasing number of them are from spambots who wish to offers me pills to increase my height (unless I am misreading something), photos of “nubile teens” (does the word “nubile” even exist in a non-porn context anymore?), and congratulatory remarks for having written a “ssenbational artilcle”, or for being the “enemy of conffusion”. As a result, future comments from unknown personages are going to be withheld until I can approve them. It seems that the sins of the few must inconvenience the ever-so-slightly more than a few.

Should anybody wish to contact me directly, I can be reached at…
Hmm. Maybe another time.

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

… A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

… The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge’s fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin’s halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies the crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 308-309.

_______________________________

אדון עולם אשר מלך בטרם כל יציר נברא
לעת נעשה בחפצו כל אזי מלך שמו נקרא
ואחרי ככלות הכל לבדו ימלוך נורא
והוא היה והוא הווה והוא יהיה התפארה
והוא אחד ואין שני להמשיל לו להחבירה
בלי ראשית בלי תכלית ולו העז והמשרה
והוא אלי וחי גואלי וצור חבלי בעת צרה
והוא נסי ומנוס לי מנת כוסי ביום אקרא
בידו אפקיד רוחי בעת אישן ואעירה
ועם רוחי גויתי יהוה לי ולא אירא

- Adon ‘Olam

That so many things I despise so deeply about the modern-day blockbuster should be listed within the one paragraph is truly astonishing. The following is a brief list of reasons as to why the folks at IMDB’s Summer Movie Guide think that Final Destination 5 won’t be absolute garbage:

One reason that this franchise is on its fifth installment is that audiences (of which we’re included) get an entertainingly visceral, now three-dimensional, thrill watching the innovative, grisly ways the filmmakers come up with to knock off most of the very attractive cast of up-and-comers.

Why is it always pretty young starlets that get killed for my ‘entertainment’? I can think of some producers whose last moments might be more interesting to watch.

For some reason, I tend to discover things several years after the rest of the world does. Whether it’s first seeing George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy in 2004, or only discovering Coppola’s The Godfather in 2005, it’s not strange for me to wait until the hype has completely died down about something, and all but the most hardcore of fans have stopped enthusing over it, before I give it a go. Such has certainly proven to be the case with television programs for, as an avid non-watcher of television, I can easily go for years without knowing about such excellent series as The Office (BBC) and The West Wing. Imagine my sheer and unadulterated delight when, some time ago now, I discovered The Sopranos. A longstanding fan of gangster films, from Donnie Brasco to Once Upon a Time in America, the premise of this 86-hour television series really struck a chord. From The Godfather to Goodfellas, there have been gangster movies that have inspired me, excited me, uplifted me and intrigued me, and yet The Sopranos beats them all.

I know that nobody has the time to sit down and watch an 86-hour long television series in anything briefer than half a year, but for those of you who have seen the genius that is David Chase’s creation, the following advertisement is stirring indeed. Made by the very talented Lyle over at exeterstreet.net, I cannot think of a better and more fitting tribute to this remarkable series.

And for those of you who, like me, find the conclusion to the last episode a real punch to the stomach, “MasterofSopranos” has composed a lengthy defence of his interpretation, which I think is well worth a read. His general conclusions are the same as mine were, but his observations as regard POV, smash-cutting and the types of visual imagery that David Chase employed were all new to me, and much appreciated. The first page of his lengthy analysis can be found here.

This is old news now, but some may not know it. John Lennon’s incredible 1971 interview with Rolling Stone magazine is available as a free podcast download from the Apple iStore. Over three hours in length, John speaks candidly (and shockingly) about his relationship with Paul, the life and death of Brian Epstein, his experiences with drugs, his feelings about music, his feelings about Yoko and his plans for the future, which were sadly to go unrealised. Occurring only shortly after the release of his greatest album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John was still employing the psychological techniques that he had learned with Dr Arthur Janov, the net result of which was a brutal, scathing honesty. Declaring Paul’s music to be pathetic and the Beatles in general to be utter garbage, John proceeds to alienate everybody who might have counted themselves amongst his former friends. Uncomfortable at times, and nothing short of genius at others, I encourage anybody who is interested in John Lennon to have a listen.

In the meantime, the following is an amateur recording by the fourteen-year old Jerry Levitan, who gained access into John’s hotel room in 1969. With artwork by James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina, the short film produced is as entertaining as it is provocative:

And as for the lesser Beatles, the upcoming third wedding of Sir Paul McCartney inspired me to look through the interwebs, and I was most shocked to discover a disclosure of his, when speaking with Uncut Magazine back in 2004. Are you ready for it? “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD! While I couldn’t find the interview in question, BBC News commented upon it here. There’s a whole lot of the usual nonsense (cannabis, heroin, cocaine … smoking tea?), but you’ll find the relevant information in the fifth paragraph. And to think: all these years, I have been completely defending their continued insistence that it had nothing to do with LSD at all, like an absolute idiot.

I mean, they made no excuses for the fact that “Yellow Subarine” was about smoking cannabis, nor that “Doctor Robert” was about the man from whom they had obtained acid in the first place, so it seemed reasonable to assume that if they were going to insist that a particular song was not about drugs, then surely it was not. And now it turns out that they were lying all along. I feel scandalised.

Like most yidden I know, I am a big fan of the Coen Brothers. And like most fans of the Coen Brothers, I was very disappointed with True Grit excited with A Serious Man. But unlike most people who enjoyed that film, I keep coming back to various discrepancies between the fantasy that they concocted and the fantasy that undergirds its invention. For to riff on Jewish mysticism is one thing, but to get that mysticism wrong is another thing entirely. And when it’s as wrong as the Coen Brothers got it – well, I have to feel that their mistakes might have been deliberate.

Not everybody that I have spoken with enjoyed A Serious Man at all. A film so Jewish that it’s practically balding, you truly need to be familiar with the cultural iconography in which it is steeped in order to fully appreciate it. Like Blood Simple, Fargo, No Country For Old Men, and maybe even Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski, this movie seems intent on staying just beyond the confines of any traditional genre. That alone makes it interesting and worthy of analysis, although the question always remains as to how far beneath the surface one is supposed to pick. Most people – most normal people – watch films a couple of times, enjoy them, speak about them, maybe even have an argument about them, and then walk away and live for another sixty years or so without them. I just can’t leave this one alone. Call me psychotic, but I have become convinced that there is something funny going on here, just below the surface…

Now I’m not about to tell you that I think the Coen Brothers are attempting to communicate with me personally, but I do suspect that they are trying to say something to Jews in their audience who, while not being Rabbi Marshak, “know… a thing or two about the Kabbalah.” And while this might be going a bit too far for the average cinema-goer, I’ve compiled a few examples of this phenomenon at play.

Witness the opening scene. While it’s still up on YouTube, you can observe it here. (Embedding was disabled by request: my apologies.)

While the Coen Brothers famously (and stupidly) declared this scene to have nothing to do with the rest of the film, it certainly sets the mood. An eeriness, familiar to viewers of their many movies, producing a lingering doubt as to which of the characters was wise and which was deceived. What is more, the opening quote (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you”) applies to the entire movie as a whole, and might even be seen as underscoring every one of the major characters’ personalities, each of whom suffers in some way for not being able to follow its advice. Is the quote really from something that Rashi wrote? It does not sound in any way familiar, and I would not put it past them to have made it up completely¹.

The opening scene is in Yiddish, and there are two lines in it that perplex me. They can be heard between 1:33 and 1:38 on the video’s timer, and I have included the screenshots below:

The problem is, if you listen to the video, this is not what he’s actually saying. While the subtitles state that Traitle Groshkover studied Zohar with the Krakow rebbe, the audio clearly says that what he studied was Talmud. And while the subtitles assert that he can recite any passage from the Mishna, it is of the Gemara that he is said to have photographic memory. Why the switch? Is it presumed that their audience may recognise the words “Zohar” and “Mishna”, but not “Talmud” and “Gemara”? In my experience, “Talmud” is the only word in that list that almost everybody I speak to, Jew and gentile alike, recognises as a text. Or are they trying to say two things at the same time? Trying to present something to a non-Jewish audience, while at the same time winking at Jews in the crowd and intimating that there is something else going on here?

Okay, okay, you say. Don’t put down to sly ingenuity what can easily be explained by a case of poor editing. Consider then the following scene. This is the best scene in the entire film, but as embedding here was also disabled by request, you are unfortunately going to have to view this one on YouTube too, for as long as it’s there.

The famous “Goy’s Teeth” scene, this segment of the film involves a story told by Rabbi Nachtner about a hapless dentist named Leon Sussman. Having discovered a Hebrew message inscribed into the teeth of one of his non-Jewish patients, Dr Sussman loses his ability to think about anything else. The message is הושיעני: “Help me. Save me,” as Rabbi Nachtner translates it. You can see it clearly in the following image:

So what does Dr Sussman do? Can Dr Sussman sleep? Dr Sussman cannot sleep. Can Dr Sussman eat? Dr Sussman doesn’t eat. Does Dr Sussman think of actually asking his patient? God forbid. Instead, he consults a mystical treatise and proceeds to write down the numerical value of each of the letters. The treatise that he removes from the shelf, as can clearly be seen in the following image, is the third volume of a five volume Zohar al-haTorah:

Now, the Zohar al-haTorah is traditionally printed in three volumes and not five, but that this is a five-volume set can be seen from the fact that the volume immediately after the one that he is taking has a ד on the bottom:

I can deal with this. As can be seen subsequently, the volumes that he owns feature commentary in the margin. This is sufficient to make of three volumes five, but he arranges them from left to right, and while that’s hardly the equivalent of hearing my neighbour’s dog telling me to kill people, I cannot help but feel that this is yet another clue.

What about the gematria that he employs? Aside from the fact that he is not going to learn gematria from any of the volumes of the Zohar at all, the numbers that he produces are absolute nonsense:

3744548? That would be the “gematria” (and I use the term loosely, given that he is only writing out the values of the individual letters and not adding them) of גזדדהדח – not הושיעני.

So, I am perplexed. I approached this film in good faith. I have tried to be a serious man, but I don’t understand what the Coen Brothers are trying to say to me. Are they trying to indicate that nothing within this film is real? That it is a metaphor for something else? The Book of Job, as some wry pundits have it, or a contemporary midrash about life in American exile?

The walking stereotypes that are the gun-toting neighbour, the Korean student, the Korean student’s father and the hapless patient of Dr Leon Sussman all nicely counterbalance the walking stereotypes that are every Jew within the movie. Whether it is the quick grimace on the face of the man doing hagbah, the bizarre paraphernalia in the study of Rabbi Marshak, or the sappy obsequiousness of the synagogue’s junior rabbi, the Coen Brothers have struck chords that will resonate with anybody familiar with Judaism in the 20th century. And yet the presence of such glaring incongruities must make us pause. Is the Orthodox Rabbi Marshak somehow affiliated with the Reform temple and its rabbis? Was the decision to bar-mitzvah their son in a non-Orthodox shul made by Prof. Larry Gopnik, whose wife demanded a gett before moving in with the bare-headed Sy Abelman? Does the Mentaculus work??

I must retire from this one defeated. The Coen Brothers work in mysterious ways. How do they communicate with us, indeed? That is a good question.

¹ Addendum: It turns out that the quote is from Rashi’s gloss on Deuteronomy 18:13: “תמים תהיה עם יהוה אלהיך”. With thanks to David Bassin for having pointed this out to me.

The above is an advertisement for a particular brand of condoms, which appeared at bus shelters recently in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, Australia. Following a coordinated campaign by the Australian Christian Lobby, the offending posters were removed, and a barrage of hateful, homophobic nonsense was given loud expression. Not everybody who objected to the advertisement had a problem with homosexuality (some of them merely had a problem with public displays of sexuality in general), but in an attempt to mock those of them who did, a group of actors put together a selection of the worst and most ridiculous statements that had been made and set it to film.

This video constitutes part of a counter-campaign to have the ads reinstated – successfully, I might add, as of the start of this month. For an overview of the brouhaha, the Brisbane Times features this article. It is certainly true, as interested readers may observe, that the video was not mocking everybody. Nonetheless, the opinions that it utilised speak loudly for themselves, and prove too well a useful adage: there is something more effective than arguing with idiots, and that is giving them a microphone.

A good friend of mine recently observed that such hilarity might be produced in all situations in which one sets textual online comments to film. While I am not meaning to have a go at Christians in particular, the following video is a comedy staple.

What can I say. Perhaps if there were a program that enabled our computers to read our comments back to us before we committed them to the internet, much stupidity might be avoided. I realise, of course, that I am not the first person to consider this…

Today’s xkcd, titled “(“, presents what I am guessing to be one of Randall Munroe’s pet peeves.

Can’t say that I agree. I find far more infuriating the lone closed parenthesis, without any indication of where the parenthetical statement might be said to have begun.)

See?

(All jokes aside, when I was in yeshiva, we were once learning a ma’amar by the fifth Rebbe of Lubavitch (who was known as the Rebbe Rashab) entitled “Kuntres haTefillah” (קונטרס התפילה, “or “Tract of Prayer”). The discourse concerned the elevation of prayers through the various supernal realms, and constituted an apt meditation before “davvening Shacharis” in the morning. A great fan of parenthetical statements, the Rebbe Rashab used to drive me nuts with his subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, and I would be constantly flicking back, counting parentheses, to ensure that we had closed them all and were not still dwelling within a tangential remark.

I do not know if this could specifically be said to be a feature of Ukrainian Hassidut (I am being a little tongue in cheek: I suspect that it cannot), but the Rebbe of Breslov, Rebbe Nachman, was himself a great fan of embedded clauses, and his stories are a testimony to that. Most confusingly, they do not always end back on the surface level. (Those who are particularly interested in texts that embed subordinate clauses, without providing “an exit strategy”, would do well to read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s erudite Gödel, Escher, Bach. It comes highly recommended. The section on subordinating narratives can be found in §5 (“Recursive Structures and Processes”), but most especially in its introductory narrative, “Little Harmonic Labyrinth” (pp103-126))

A Nadder! links to a fascinating little animation about the (apparant) human inability to walk in a straight line when vision is completely impaired. Although the narrator (Robert Krulwich) refers to this as the manner in which people constantly turn even when they think that they are going straight, I would be more inclined to suggest that we have a tendency when blindfolded to think that we are going off course, and that it is our attempts at correcting our direction that cause us to go astray. But what do I know? I was born crooked.

(And because this is supposed to be a bible-related blog, even if in only dwindling measure, “Ecclesiastes 1:15″. There, I said it.)