Jewish Jesus

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 101
David H. Stern, Ph.D., Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: a Message For Christians

Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef was Jewish. So were his Apostles and earliest converts. Even Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” never stopped calling himself Jewish. Though Yeshua’s ministry included stops among Samaritans and Romans, his outreach centered on fellow Jews, and included extensive citations from the Hebrew Tanakh. But after the last Apostles died, Yeshua’s ministry became dominated by Gentiles. During Bar-Kochba’s Rebellion, Jews and Yeshua-followers split permanently.

Dr. David Stern, a Princeton-trained economist and lifelong Jew, became persuaded in middle age that Yeshua was the Messiah of prophecy, the promised one to reunite the scattered people of Israel. He has written about this conviction since the 1970s, becoming a leader in the Messianic Jewish community. But, half a century later, confusion remains around what Messianic Judaism means. Dr. Stern hopes to solve some of that confusion.

History hasn’t been kind to Jews who believe Yeshua fulfills the Covenant prophecy. Such Jews were rejected by fellow Jews, particularly surrounding the violence enacted by Roman conquerors. Then Gentile Christians required Jews who wanted to follow Yeshua to abjure their Judaism, contrary to Scriptural messages from Jesus and Paul. Only since the middle 1800s has the Venn diagram of Judaism and Yeshua-belief reclaimed the overlap that once dominated.

Messianic Judaism isn’t Christianity. Stern emphasizes that, the few times the word “Christian” appears in Scripture, it always describes Gentile converts. Instead, Messianic Jews remain Jews, with all the controversy of identity that this entails (for instance, should we keep kosher? Stern and his family do, but he refuses to criticize others who don’t). As such, the Hebrew Covenant continues to govern his people, who continue living under the Law of Moses.

This causes some confusion, since Paul’s letters, and to a lesser degree the Gospels (particularly John’s) proclaim believers’ freedom from the law. Doesn’t that mean the Hebrew Covenant doesn’t apply? No, Stern insists, and uses the historical context under which Paul and the Evangelists wrote to prove his point. He makes a persuasive case that, while Gentile converts live under a New Covenant, the Hebrew Covenant still governs Yeshua-beliving Jews.

Jesus as a young Jew, painted by Rembrandt

Moreover, he writes, Christians owe Jews heavily. Stern describes what he calls “olive-tree theology,” based on an analogy Paul writes in Romans, Chapter 11, that all Israel is a cultivated olive tree, onto which new believers are grafted. New Yeshua-believers needn’t necessarily become Jewish (see Acts 15), but based on statements from Paul and Yeshua, Stern believes Gentiles are grafted onto Israel, and eventually both will become one tree.

(It’s worth asserting here, that some organizations calling themselves “Messianic Jewish” aren’t Jewish in any true sense. Though they use Jewish liturgical language and selectively apply kashrut law, their theology is Evangelical Protestant. Dr. Stern doesn’t address these organizations; his interest is in actual Jews who consider Yeshua the Messiah of prophecy, and his message is unambiguous: Jews who become Yeshua-followers never stop being Jewish.)

As such, since new believers become joined into the Hebrew Covenant, Jewish believers have a different relationship with Yeshua than Gentile Christians do. Gentiles are invited into covenant which begins with relationship with Yeshua. But Jews already have their covenant; they don’t need invited in. Instead, for them, Yeshua becomes the culmination of a covenant they already possess, the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and the unity of the Jewish nation.

Based on this, Stern believes it’s anti-Semitic for Christians to not extend outreach to Jews. Many Christians, he acknowledges, are justifiably reluctant to evangelize Jews, because historically, Christians have used high-handedness, even violence, to forcibly convert Jews. But Stern asserts this doesn’t mean we should refuse to evangelize; it only means our evangelism must begin in humility, willing to seek forgiveness for our forebears’ failure to follow their own teachings.

This synopsis does Stern’s theology a disservice. Though brief, his book is dense with references to Jewish and Christian history, deep dives into Scripture, and careful analysis of ways Yeshua and (especially) Paul speak from categorically Jewish foundations. He carefully translates these concepts into laypersons’ language, aware that he’s writing for a diverse audience. But he doesn’t shy away from complicated theological arguments.

Recently, I’ve heard much about Gentile Christians becoming curious about their religion’s Jewish foundations. Not long ago, the firewall between Christianity and Judaism was difficult to breach, but not anymore. Dr. Stern writes for Gentiles willing to learn more about where their religion originated, and Jews eager to discover the figure Yeshua who claims to be the Messiah. Both audiences will find much to discover.

On a related topic: Indigenous Jesus

Bringing Water to the Promised Land

Seth M. Siegel, Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World

“I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
   and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
   and the parched ground into springs.”
—Isaiah 41:18

As 2015 winds down, and we look backward on history’s hottest recorded summer ever, perhaps it’s time to consider the future. As entrepreneur and philanthropist Seth Siegel writes, changing rain patterns severely threaten human populations. The California drought offers a foretaste of impending crop failures, urban stresses, and ecological catastrophe. Siegel directs our attention to the one nation with a long history of forward-thinking water policies: Israel.

The state of Israel has pioneered important advances in how to use and improve our water consumption since before the state existed. They've developed ways of moving water from where it exists to where the people need it, allowing high-yield agriculture in regions traditionally arid, even in historic deserts. They’ve improved water use techniques, increasing farm yields with less water, while cities consume less, leaving farmers and wildernesses more.

Siegel provides an intriguing mix of history and science, describing not only what advances Israel has made in water management, but also why it made particular advances. He describes the unique political, economic, and geographic pressures shaping Israeli water policy. The mix of intense regional water close to lifeless desert was, recently, almost unique to Israel. But as Siegel notes, if environmental trends continue, similar conditions may soon exist globally.

First, Israeli culture doesn’t disparage water. Children never sing “Rain, rain, go away.” Israel nationalizes water access, making all water everywhere a common good. While American libertarians campaign to repeal laws against rainwater collection, Israel maintains a strict enforcement policy: rain barrels aren’t a right. Hoarding or misusing water isn’t abstract moral wrong; Israel considers water abuse theft from the people, and prosecutes water hogs accordingly.

Because water is scarce and distributed unequally by nature, sharing and distributing water has the same aura of civic responsibility in America that we get from, say, joining the military. Responsible water use isn’t some mere principle; it’s a foundation of common civic government. By basing much public philosophy on communal responsibility to water, Israel’s government might superficially resemble American conservatism; but it expresses very different impulses in actual policy.

But Israel couples this nationalizing with incentives for more egalitarian, democratic water management techniques. According to Siegel, much municipal water in Europe and America gets lost to leakage, but Israel has created technologies designed specifically to curtail leaks and limit mechanical waste. Especially since home leaks often aren’t noticeable until they’ve created significant structural damage, the shift to preventative identification has both public and private benefits.

Israel's National Water Carrier, a triumph of modern civic engineering

Israeli engineers, working through public-private partnerships, have invented more intense, ecologically specific irrigation technologies: Siegel extols drip irrigation, invented in Israel and now more commonly being adopted in other nations and continents. Israeli agronomists have created new plant variants that put more growth into edible fruits and flesh, less into inedible stems and foliage. This boosts agricultural yield from limited water applications, costing less in transpiration and wastage.

Israel’s National Water Carrier, which moves water from the moister north to the arid south with minimal evaporation, rivals the Interstate Highway System as a marvel of public-spirited engineering. Israel has found ways to recycle urban wastewater into clean, fresh irrigation, and connect water where it is with soil where water’s needed. Siegel describes the public commitment to water in ways familiar to Americans praising George Washington every July 4th.

This book describes technologies, social movements, and other important forces in language accessible to non-specialist readers. He describes very intricate advances in aquifer management, farming, and sewage removal, without bogging down in terminology. Siegel’s storytelling resembles a novel: much like Leon Uris, he makes Israeli history moving and alive. He’s just discussing water, and water policy, rather than war.

Siegel delves into the history of Israel’s water consumption style. It didn’t just intend to create better water usage; many of its techniques were invented to facilitate land grabs in places like the Negev before Partition in 1948. Some readers might find the political opportunism distasteful, and the implications for Palestinians who farm in more time-honored ways has harsh undertones, but Siegel spotlights the advances themselves, not transnational politics.

Informed readers realize water management issues aren’t one nation’s problem anymore. Droughts in California and floods in Texas signal new times for handling clean, drinkable water. Siegel’s descriptions of Israeli advances give world peoples hope that, as climate changes, human ingenuity can manage these changes proactively.

Portmanteau's Compliant

Eytan Bayme, High Holiday Porn: A Memoir

Imagine Woody Allen did a remake of Portnoy’s Complaint. Really early Woody Allen, too, not the reflective, self-critical director of Annie Hall, but the undiscovered young playwright whose Play It Again Sam straddled the boundary between comprehension and desperation. Then trowel on extra desperation. Like really, really desperate for us to like him for hating himself. The product might, distantly, resemble this portmanteau of ethnic stereotypes and confessional self-loathing.

Humorist Eytan Bayme, who’s certainly no Dave Barry, begins his autobiography of Jewish apostasy by admitting to whining because he can’t eat trayf. His ultra-orthodox parents expect him to keep kosher during Passover, but he desperately wants donuts. Why can’t Jews eat pizza and cheeseburgers, he wonders? What makes today so special that we consider it too holy, to eat? Why celebrate holiness through self-flagellation? But Mom, I’m staaarving!

By page ten, however, Bayme discovers something more interesting than food. Right in chapter one, he expounds the six-year-old joys of provoking his brother, antagonizing his mom, and catching his grandmother betraying dietary rules in public. Then he discovers masturbation. On the dining-room floor, at Grandma’s feet, during the Seder, age six. The sheer number of events, and exhibitionistic nature, makes observant readers suspect this “memoir” will reek of exaggeration.

Sure enough, by chapter two, he confesses openly masturbating during synagogue, Talmud class, and riding in the family car. Bayme contends he unabashedly stood up and wanked himself against the desk in his grade-school classroom whenever lessons became boring. His saddle sores must’ve been impressive. Considering that, at that age, peers openly mocked me for admitting I occasionally needed to pee, I have difficulty crediting Bayme’s recollection.

I accepted this book for review because I found Shulem Deen’s memoir earlier this year particularly moving. Deen’s description of moving into, then back out from, Hasidism’s loving but constricting embrace, summed up why religious devotion attracts true believers, before it drives the most dedicated away again. It also encapsulated my own recent faith struggles. I expected Bayme, a seasoned short-form humorist, to produce Deen’s Borscht Belt parallel.

Eytan Bayme

Instead, Bayme deluges readers, from page one, with intimate confessions of raunchy naughtiness. He evidently considers his narrative rollicking, and lumps one atop another before we’ve had any opportunity to process what we’ve previously read. Hey, he confesses, I humped my brother’s stuffed animals! I stole smut catalogs from the goyisher kids! I left my temple’s most sacred ceremonies to sneak home and get myself off!

Skeptical readers just sigh.

It isn’t just Bayme’s general implausibility (again, he purports he discovered masturbation at an age when most children still have a favorite stuffed bear). It’s the lack of friction he faces. Shulem Deen faced expulsion from his community, including loss of his children, for illicitly getting a library card. Bayme’s mother discovers his pornography stash and basically says, grimly, I’m disappointed in you. She even promises not to tell Daddy.

One struggles to understand why Bayme’s struggle even matters. He rebels against strict Jewish orthodoxy before he’s too old to reasonably commit to anything. Unlike Deen, whose apostasy represents a religious coming-of-age moment, forcing him to literally leave the community of his childhood, Bayme basically kicks and screams because he feels entitled to think with his stomach, dick, and general abdomen. Because, dammit, he’s six!

Don’t misunderstand me. Bayme didn’t need to mindlessly ape Deen’s style. Each man has his unique story, which he should tell his unique way. However, Deen convinced me his struggle represented real risk. With a family, community, and people, he had something to lose. Bayme comes across like a spoiled child, not a daring insurgent. Before page fifty, I started skimming, because I’d become irretrievably bored with this self-indulgent schmuck.

And worst, Bayme isn’t even funny! One Jewish friend criticized Deen for being excessively solemn, so I won’t suggest Bayme should’ve acted more earnest and po-faced. However, his accumulation of off-color anecdotes never coalesces into a narrative, much less anything humorous. He resembles a kid shouting “Penis! Penis!” in public to make Mommy squirm. The humorless, cringe-inducing outcome is very unpleasant to read.

In my teaching days, one comp student wrote an essay praising Free Speech, peppered with cuss words and vulgar metaphors to simultaneously construct and demonstrate his argument. It was hilarious, not only because it was true, but because I never felt he wasted any words. I wish I had a copy to send Bayme, because my student said more in two sentences than Bayme says in some entire chapters.

The Jewish Women's Recovery Circle and Self-Flagellation Society

Lauren Fox, Days of Awe: A novel

Somewhere around page 55, our first-person narrator, Isabel Moore, chaperoning a fifth-grade nature camp, opines: “You know what it’s going to be like. The psychological warfare of the girls. The grievous bodily injuries the boys will inflict on one another.”

Wow. It’s unusual for fiction writers to state their novels’ theses so openly. I’d find the honesty refreshing, if the book wasn’t so trying.

Isabel’s life has gone haywire since her friend Josie’s death. Her limp-rag husband has moved out, their eleven-year-old daughter has become a sullen teenager, and her mother is steering her into another relationship before her first is formally over. But there’s a seeping wound at Isabel’s core, one she hasn’t yet seen clearly. If she doesn’t address it, it’ll spill over, tainting everybody and everything she loves.

Reading Lauren Fox's third novel, I practically felt the author daring me to fling the manuscript. She ramrods unpleasant characters into contrived situations, tells their stories in stilted prose, and evidently cares little for logic, sequence, or comprehensibility. Like an MFA thesis, we never stop being aware of the text as a made thing.

First, Isabel is an aggressively unpleasant person. She uses sarcasm and flippant one-liners to keep others at arm’s length and avoid taking personal psychological responsibility for anything: her relationships, her job, her life. In flashbacks to while Josie’s alive, such sarcasm makes her appear playful, but annoying. After Josie’s death, it edges into scorn and mockery. In her early forties, she sounds stuck in high-school “mean girls” mode.

This isn’t small beer. Isabel recurrently complains about the uncrossable gulf that has appeared between herself and those she loves: her husband, daughter, mother, and Josie’s widower. Yet she constantly creates and reinforces that gulf through dismissive wisecracks and contemptuous put-downs. She finds ways of communicating her superiority, earned through grief, until everyone leaves her. Then she cries at their leaving.

Lauren Fox

Second, Fox’s excessively polished prose gives the impression of aggressive workshopping and focus testing, which denies Isabel the opportunity for even one legitimate insight. We cannot even regard her as an unreliable narrator, because we cannot see her as human. Not through her slick lines which emphasize her as authorial stand-in, the dialog as precise as Hollywood script doctoring, and her metaphors redolent of ample time for revision.

The confluence of Fox’s consciously constructed writing and Isabel’s manifestly irksome character comes across in exchanges like this, with her loving but tediously passive husband:

     "''Iz,' he whispers, the nickname that sounds like an existential proclamation. 'I need you.'
     "And I laugh out loud. Who's writing your lines? Need? Need! I suck in my stomach at the sound of that word."

As this exchange undoubtedly conveys, Isabel’s every personal interaction is about establishing dominance. She doesn’t converse, she engages in word skirmishes. Through such battles, we learn quickly that Isabel completely dominates her husband, and is dominated by her mother. This revelation follows quickly upon the discovery that Isabel is Jewish and her husband isn’t. Like we couldn’t tell.

Jewish Mother stereotypes, however, vanish almost without a ripple among recovery group stereotypes, rebellious daughter stereotypes, bereavement stereotypes. The accumulating weight of familiar boilerplates makes reading difficult, because we less immerse ourselves in Fox’s story, than recognize the tropes. I wondered why this all felt so familiar. Then I realized: Fox here uses a less Y-chromosome-ish version of Ben Marcus’s playbook.

It grows difficult even to find a story. In flashback, Isabel and Josie mock a children’s TV program that lacks conflict, where things just happen. Perhaps Fox here tacitly acknowledges her low-stakes tenor. Her narrative primarily consists of scenes montaged together out of sequence. Though conflict exists, mainly of Isabel’s own making, she never persuades me anything matters, even to her.

This slippery time sense infects Isabel’s storytelling. She slips between present and past tense, not necessarily consecutively; and her grasp on “now” seems tenuous. She’ll reveal something, and its context for months or years afterward, then continue like she hasn’t just stepped outside her own storytelling: "That's what my brain felt like on the day of my best friend's funeral and for many weeks after." Sorry, what?

Lauren Fox has received generous praise from critics and fellow writers. It’s easy to see why: she writes for readers deeply immersed in words and stories, not for mainstream audiences. She happily excludes readers who lack time and experience enough for her collocution. I’m an avid reader. So if I have difficulty caring, something’s gone deeply, seriously wrong.

The Brooklyn Jewish Boys' Auxiliary League and Transnational Bomb Squad

Jonathan Papernick, The Book of Stone: A Novel

Matthew Stone is alone on Earth now. Since his imposing father’s death, Stone lacks relations, skills, or purpose, his life circumscribed by the copious library his father, The Judge, bequeathed him. But when a rogue rabbi and a zealous g-man pressure Stone to relinquish secrets even he doesn’t know, he realizes his father concealed untold power deep within his beloved books. Now he races to liberate family secrets before they imprison him.

One back-cover blurb describes Jonathan Papernick as “an utterly original writer,” which is palpably untrue. Seasoned readers will recognize the same Jewish literary heritage that nourishes David Mamet, Jonathan Lethem, and countless less-famous writers. Papernick’s story isn’t even original to Jonathan Papernick; this novel is a reworked re-release of Who By Fire, Who By Blood, by “Jon” Papernick. This book follows trails already familiar and well-respected.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though Papernick participates in Jewish literary tradition, he doesn’t merely obey it. Like his protagonist, he darts into and out from tradition, suddenly religious, now humanist; alternately separatist and assimilated; militantly Hebrew and steadfastly Anglophone. He uses tradition without ever feeling anchored to it. Thus, Papernick’s story frequently feels familiar without ever becoming common. What readers receive will reflect what they expect.

Stone comes from deeply mixed birthright. His grandfather Julius Stone reputedly served as triggerman for the notorious Brownsville Mafia. Julius’ son Walter Stone rejected Julius, studied law, and became The Judge. But The Judge was reputedly corrupt, doctoring cases to let fellow Jews walk. And after The Judge’s death, it appears he funneled money to violent Zionist organizations, possibly using Julius’ old connections. Connections hidden in Stone’s bequest of books.

Abandoned by his mother, dominated by his father, unwilling to learn Hebrew or participate in Jewish religion, Stone makes the perfect picture of half-secularized Brooklyn turmoil. But following The Judge’s passing, Stone realizes everything he believed was fabricated. His mother had reasons to flee. The Judge’s coldness probably represented a long plan cut short by mortality. Getting both criminals and cops off his back may require returning to the faith.

Jonathan Papernick

Deep among Stone’s secrets lies Fairuza. Following a rather self-indulgent collegiate breakdown, The Judge packed Stone off to a West Bank kibbutz, thinking time spent in the Homeland would cure Stone’s vapors. But Stone fled to Jerusalem, where he romanced Fairuza, a beautiful Palestinian Christian, embodiment of everything The Judge despises. Stone could’ve defied The Judge, but didn’t; Fairuza’s faith after Stone’s return to America proves his biggest guilt, and most powerful secret.

Papernick’s publisher markets this novel as a “thriller,” which perhaps isn’t altogether true, considering how Papernick’s cerebral storytelling somewhat mutes his story’s thrills. Papernick writes deliberately, thoughtfully, more interested in characters’ motivations than cinematic display. This cultivates dawning awareness rather than shocking jolts. Despite his gangland milieu, Papernick clearly prefers guiding audiences to deep revelations, than peppering us with sudden explosions.

This tone requires certain trade-offs. Anyone buying this novel expecting James Patterson-ish plot-driven commotion will find Papernick’s style confounding. Protagonist Stone (consistently addressed thus, “Stone”) spends early chapters enrapt in long, wretched self-pity. He requires nearly a quarter of this book’s considerable mass to overcome inertia and begin unpacking The Judge’s riddles—though that quarter proves immensely valuable later. Getting into this book requires some effort.

Persistent readers will find this book rewards such investments with generous dividends. Stone finds himself inheriting the nexus of a transnational conspiracy that should’ve been his father’s responsibility. Forced into his father’s footsteps, the path he’s always avoided, Stone begins reevaluating everything he’s ever believed, including himself. Reality, as Stone knows it, proves to be a massive edifice of lies; I didn’t mention David Mamet frivolously earlier.

If the review volumes I’ve received accurately reflect the larger publishing world, 2015 is proving the Year of the Jew. I’ve received three times as many Jewish-themed books in 2015 to date as I’ve received since I began reviewing. But this trend isn’t uniformly self-congratulatory. Besides giddy autobiographical novels and laudatory histories, I’ve read apostasy memoirs, novels of deceit, and this often-opaque tale of self-loathing and ethnic violence.

This novel doesn’t reveal its secrets lightly, not to its protagonist, and not to us. It resists casual beach reading. But for readers willing to brave Papernick’s densely plotted writing—and his annoyingly low-key tone—will find a story reflecting Jewish America’s, and all America’s, struggles between tradition and individuality. Don’t undertake this novel flippantly. It demands big sacrifices from intellectually engaged readers, but offers generous rewards and vast insights in return.

The Wandering Jew Redux

Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir

Shulem Deen found his home among the New Square Hasidim in his teens.They provided him everything a good Hasidic boy wants: acceptance, family, guidance, home. But not answers. Moving into adulthood, embracing an arranged marriage and a lifetime of Torah study, he found millennia-old dogma unsatisfying. And when modernity intruded upon his obstinately unchanging community, his boyhood faith slipped away. So one day, amid ordinary ritual and family life, Shulem Deen found himself expelled.

Hasidim, like Shakers or the Amish, draw admiration and scorn in equal measure from outsiders for their exceptional devotion, besides their rejection of modernity. But like Amish, Hasidic communities are independently governed, and each population enjoys (if that’s the word) unique standards stemming from tradition and reason. Deen’s community, the Skverers, founded by Ukranian exiles during Stalin’s purges, are so conservative that, in Deen’s telling, even other Hasidim find their insularity and single-mindedness forbidding.

Nevertheless, Deen recounts a conversion experience so passionate, it’s hard to doubt his one-time sincerity. Raised among diverse Hasidic communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Deen stumbled across the Skverers accidentally, almost lazily. Once there, however, he discovered a people deeply unified behind shared customs, profound mutuality, and Daniel-like refusal to accomodate this world’s influences. Deen elegantly captures Emile Durkheim's assertion that religion emerges, first, to unify the people; God appears in religion, if He does, only subsequently.

What they’re unifying into matters, though, in ways Deen initially misses. The Skverers share an appalling fear-based ethic: fear of outsiders, fear of heterodoxy, fear of their own flesh. As Deen describes the events preceding his wedding, observant readers will feel afraid for him: he lacks vocabulary to identify his own body parts by name, and his elders deliberately obfuscate factual knowledge. Deen’s community so fears change, that any frank discussions produce reflexive primal terror.

This includes important faith-based issues. Though Deen, like all observant Hasidic men, spent years studying Mishnah and Talmud, records of Judaism’s great historical debates (rather than studying, say, algebra or job skills), the Skverers consider all debates closed after Maimonides died. When Deen’s modern experience differs from historical precedent, he cannot manufacture pat explanations. Worse, modernity’s three great temptations—AM radio, a library card, and the Internet—increase Deen’s questions. Blind faith no longer suffices.

In Deen’s description, moving outside faith lacks Richard Dawkins’ beloved Road-to-Damascus conversion to secular clarity. Instead, dawning unbelief is scary, trapping Deen outside his beloved community, lost in modernity’s solitary, nihilistic hinterlands. Lacking the experience secular peers obtained decades earlier, modern life becomes fraught. Deen must negotiate such minefields as job hunting, making friends, and building a life without community support. Meanwhile, his ex-wife demands the kids remain Hasidic, permanently dividing him from his children.

Religious memoirs, including memoirs of agnosticism, never really describe situations as they existed. Deen crafts moments to expose how the Skverer community attracted and embraced him, then how it failed to encompass his growing needs. Therefore, we cannot read Deen’s account as objectively describing what happened. People, including his rebbe, wife, and children, become essentially characters in Deen’s arc; life’s sloppy, chaotic events get reorganized into a plot. Deen admits structuring events into a story.

Within those confines, Deen describes the terrors that accompany losing faith. When one’s community prizes uniformity of thought above all else, knowledge becomes sinful, so we share Deen’s stolen thrill of reading children’s encyclopedias at the public library. When one’s community cultivates a fortress mentality, besieged by vast worldly wickedness, discovering like minds outside undercuts everything else, so when Deen discovers conservative Christians on AM radio feel persecuted, too, he realizes his people aren’t unique.

But where modern necktied atheists proclaim secularism as onerous religion’s antidote, Deen learns, discovering himself means leaving others behind. Though forced into an arranged marriage, he loved his wife, and cherished his children. But they didn’t share his journey. When the Skverers expelled deen, his family tried following him, but ultimately couldn’t. They belonged among their people. He didn’t. Modernity, like religion, requires embracing important ideas, and those who do, must abandon those who cannot.

A Jewish friend tells me ex-Hasidic memoirs have become real hot commodities recently. Though outsiders frequently lump all Jews together, Judaism in today’s society is as fragmented as Christianity, and while some seek religion’s nourishing community, others reject its burdensome bonds. That’s why this book succeeds, because it ultimately isn’t about Shulem Deen. It’s about us, and the frightening, ambiguous, transcendent questions we face daily. In today’s turbulent world, can we ever know certainty again?

Antigravity's Rainbow

Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West: A Novel

Veteran magazine writer Daniel Torday’s debut full-length novel starts strong. His parallel narrative, of an aging war hero’s renewed glory and his young admirer’s unquestioning reverence, carries readers’ attention gracefully for a while. But pages accumulate upon pages, and Torday starts making weird choices. Veteran readers quickly see where he’s headed. And I find myself struggling to pick the book up again.

In 1986, Poxl West, who joined the RAF during World War II and later became a Boston-based Shakespeare scholar, publishes Skylock, his memoir of flying sorties over Hamburg. He quickly finds himself thrust into the rare air occupied by luminaries like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Poxl’s nephew, Elijah Goldstein, watching from the sidelines, admires his uncle’s stratospheric rise. But, they both discover, increased renown leads inevitably to increased scrutiny.

Torday runs his narrative along two tracks. In one, he reproduces West’s full text of Skylock. Born Leopold Weisberg in Czechoslovakia between the wars, Poxl wants only to inherit his father’s factory, avoid his mother’s infidelities, and fly open-cockpit aeroplanes. But Anschluss changes his plans. Poxl flees the coming disaster, beginning a years-long pattern of running away. Until one day, during the London Blitz, he finally takes a stand, and joins up.

In the second track, Eli Goldstein recounts the whirlwind surrounding his uncle’s book release. A genuine Jewish war hero! What’s not to love? But as fame increasingly embraces Poxl West, the unprepossessing uncle who introduced Eli to Shakespeare vanishes into the past. Hero worship quickly transitions into resentment as the very triumph that brings Poxl global acclaim estranges him from the family who supported him through lean times.

Torday’s book spotlights the lingering consequences of guilt. Poxl West’s memoir reveals a prodigious capacity for love, but an equal capacity to flee conflict. His repeated flights from life’s un-pretty aspects exact their toll: he leaves pieces of himself in Leitmeritz, Rotterdam, Grimsby. Even joining the RAF costs dearly, as German bombs find the woman he left behind. Flying bombing runs becomes the embodiment of “flight,” in all its aspects.

Daniel Torday

Young Eli, simultaneously, can’t reconcile his feelings about Uncle Poxl. He extols his uncle to anybody who’ll listen: friends, classmates, Hebrew school peers, complete strangers. He defends Poxl against creeping bourgeois animus. But his own increasing resentment at Poxl’s absence weighs upon him. He cannot admit his feelings, even to himself. The harsh collision between boyhood illusions and reality’s unforgiving existence becomes Eli’s unwanted coming of age.

But if guilt colors everybody’s perceptions, Torday also inflects that theme with issues of time. Poxl, writing his memoir forty years after the war, represents a man outside his era. A scholar of the long-dead, he’s also the last surviving member of his bomber crew. He deals poorly with the living. Eli, recounting events nearly thirty years later, cannot prevent everything he knows now transforming his perceptions of what happened then.

Torday’s premise and theme set such high standards, I feel bad reversing myself and submarining all the praise I’ve previously heaped upon him. But everything happens on exactly the same level. Poxl’s ardent wartime romances, made more urgent by death’s imminent specter, vary little in tone from his midnight bombing runs. Eli’s admiration for his uncle, and his later demand for answers, have the interchangeable uniformity of Mad-Libs.

Seasoned readers feel Torday’s parallel tracks building to an inevitable collision. It’s an axiom older than Sophocles that, the more characters feel one way at first curtain, the more certainly they’ll feel the exact opposite when the final curtain falls. Love must inevitably transition to heartbreak, devotion into disappointment. Torday leaves himself little wiggle room to impress his own creativity into this apparently inevitable arc.

Our final confrontation feels so foreordained that, somewhere beyond page 150, I began skipping huge chunks, trying to reach the destined conclusion. And, sunny gun, I was right. In 1986, Poxl West’s self-imposed tragedy might’ve seemed surprising and sudden. But today’s climate of magazine scandals, Oprah’s Book Club, and deadline journalism brings its own perspective. We’re only left to sort victims from perpetrators, tragic heroes from arrogant postmodern myth-makers.

I’ve religiously avoided spoiling Torday’s climactic reveal, though that probably matters little. Torday, sadly, signposts his destination almost from the beginning. Torday’s early chapters beautifully establish the tension inherent in Jewish identity following the Shoah. His later chapters become fatalistic, inescapable, less an act of art than a phenomenon of gravity. Maybe he put himself into an impossible literary situation. Oh, I just wanted him to do better.

In the Beginning, There Was Violence

Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

Georgetown University political historian Bruce Hoffman starts with a simple question: does terrorism work? In current political parlance, the answer seems obvious; heads of state repeatedly decry terrorism’s inefficacy. Yet newly declassified British documents have shed light upon Britain’s governance of the Palestinian Mandate between the World Wars, which Hoffman says tell a different story. As fascism’s rising tide reorganized world Jewry, and Palestinians found themselves colonized, violence began that still remains with us today.

When Britain inherited huge Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration publicized Britain’s intent to create a Jewish homeland. This immediately caused problems for Palestinians, because they were there, and Jews were not. Though European Zionists took this opportunity to relocate into their historic homeland, the pre-World War I Jewish population was vanishingly small. Jewish land purchases, inflammatory rhetoric, and utopian politics made Palestinians fear their historic nation would soon cease to be.

British Commissioners attempted to keep peace between Zionists and Palestinians. This wasn’t easy, though. The Balfour Declaration persuaded Palestinians that Britain was pro-Jewish; attempts to respect existing Palestinian property and legal claims persuaded Jews that Britain was pro-Palestinian. Britain’s succession of High Commissioners tried to remain desperately fair while quelling ethnic violence, but both offended parties believed their respective grievances so inherently right, any discussion was necessarily wrong. Britain found itself hated by every party.

Professor Hoffman’s secondary title is somewhat deceptive. Despite promising a history of the arc from 1917 to 1947, over half that time gets very short mention herein. Hoffman keeps focus primarily on flare-ups of violence, neglecting other arcs of history outside his purview. Thus, despite momentary ethnic explosions in the 1920s, the first sixteen years don’t matter much. Periods of simmering hostility notwithstanding, Hoffman’s real narrative momentum begins in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power.

European Jews displaced into Palestine had little interest in existing traditional power structures. Palestinians, who previously distributed access to holy sites quite generously, found new immigrants circumventing their control. Each side considered the other disruptive, not without reason. Jews ignored Palestinians’ traditions; Palestinian imams urged anti-Jewish violence from within their mosques. Palestinian Muslim mobs drove the entire Jewish population from Hebron. Jews responded by organizing the Haganah, a “self-defense force,” actually an unofficial paramilitary army.

Bruce Hoffman

Herein lies Hoffman’s core thesis. Jews and Palestinians used political violence to marginalize populations they considered undesirable. When Britain intervened, both parties turned their guns on what they considered a colonial occupier. Though Britain held the Mandate desperately, long after states like Iraq and Saudi Arabia became independent, ultimately the Crumbling Empire succumbed. To Hoffman, this proves terrorism sometimes works. Sometimes, dedicated ideological organizations, facing a larger enemy, can use violence to achieve political ends.

Personalities loom large in Hoffman’s exposition. One, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, dominates the entire Mandate period. A Russian Jew who fought for Britain during the war, he later became a Zionist politician and general. His mix of political skill and ruthless military efficiency made even his Jewish allies fear his influence, particularly because of his fervent anti-socialist leanings. He became a sort of Jewish Michael Collins, and like Collins, the nation he created ultimately took his life.

Jabotinsky, Imam al-Qassam, and other outsized personalities represented only the public face of dangerous utopian thinking. The city of Haifa, a peaceful enclave of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, could’ve provided a model of charitable co-existence; but demagogues stirred grudges to the boiling point. When Jews found themselves unwelcome in Muslim-dominated Jaffa, they founded the neighboring city of Tel Aviv, a rare example of willful social engineering that survived the tumult of Twentieth Century political confrontation.

Despite coming from a mainstream, non-academic publisher, this book isn’t streamlined pop history. Hoffman’s scholarly approach features long paragraphs, dense prose, and many source notes. Readers unaccustomed to reading academic writing may find his prose difficult, almost to the point of impenetrability. Even this seasoned scholar found reading required careful pacing: I needed to limit myself to bite-sized segments to digest his intense style. Budget yourself plenty of time to truly savvy Hoffman’s lengthy discursion.

Still, notwithstanding Professor Hoffman’s style, his content is both intense and edifying. The patterns of partisan violence he describes still represent conflicting parties in the same region. Recent rhetoric from Benjamin Netanyahu precisely resembles historic declarations from Ze’ev Jabotinsky. And low-tech modes of political violence still propel wars with no front line. Hoffman only lightly addresses how the history he describes reflects the present we currently live in. But mostly, he just doesn’t have to.

Barukh Atah Adonai

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner, Judaism For Dummies

Until recently, Jewish people and their faith were lumped into two categories in the public imagination: either stereotyped lawyers and entertainment executives, or abstract cultural “heroes” like Anne Frank. That is, when they weren’t hated for centuries-old fictional slurs. But recent trends have moved Judaism to a central position in public discourse, without necessarily answering important questions in outsiders’ minds.

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner come from a background in multi-faith outreach and cultural clarification. They have experience answering queries, some of them quite naive, and know what doubts and misinformation linger most in outsiders’ minds. They spot the gap between reality and what people think they already know. That makes them good choices to write a “For Dummies” book about the faith that founded the Abrahamic tradition.

If you’ve ever read a “For Dummies,” this book’s format is familiar. It’s designed to read out of sequence, dipping into the reference as questions arise. But it also rewards conventional reading, as the authors progress in inquirers’ most common sequence, from broad strokes of belief, through the people’s history, into brass tacks of practice, finishing with fine detail about what makes Judaism unique.

In their introduction, Falcon and Blatner say they write for two audiences: non-observant Jews interested in rediscovering their heritage, and outsiders curious about one of Earth’s oldest continuously observed religions. As such, the text is essentially bilingual. It gives a plain-English survey of Jewish religious precepts, then for those who want it, proceeds to a detailed investigation of exacting practice. The authors are good about defining terminology.

Jews have maintained their identity as a people over centuries of diaspora, in largest part because they have retained their traditions in ways other scattered peoples have not. Their elaborate mix of written history and oral tradition, bound in ritual that gives observant Jews a body of shared experience, preserves their mutuality. This includes their tradition of controversy, which outsiders have long mistaken for disunion.

Falcon and Blatner do a remarkable job keeping the balance between Orthodox and more Liberal traditions, especially considering that some parties in such divides consider their opposite numbers apostate. Controversy is at the heart of Judaism, as any Talmud student knows. Our authors carefully recount such debates as influence readers’ understanding, while remaining studiously neutral themselves—sometimes, the debate matters more than the solution.

Rabbi Ted Falcon

Not that they are completely impartial. They say some controversies aren’t worth having. They completely exclude Messianic Judaism, as even the Israeli Knesset does, saying it constitutes a wholly separate religion. Also, though they address humanist Judaism briefly, they preponderantly assume Jews share belief in God, while they admit the word “God” admits multiple definitions. “Israel,” after all, means “he wrestles with God.”

The authors include glossaries of Hebrew and Yiddish terms, useful in understanding Jewish thought, and several standard Orthodox prayers, including the ritual blessings, famed for their salutation: “Barukh atah Adonai.” Because Judaism, like any religion or philosophy with a long history, has its own vocabulary, these glossaries help readers understand more, better, faster.

I initially felt frustrated that the authors didn’t cite sources for some of their claims, especially for important rabbinic controversies, which they report in a “some say... others say” manner. But Appendix C cites several valuable books, magazines, websites, and organizations for readers wanting in-depth study. I still wish the authors integrated their citations, but they do pave the way for readers who’ve had their interest piqued.

Christian readers will especially enjoy this book. Our Sunday School history of Judaism often stops in the late Second Temple period, ending when the Gospels diverge from the Talmud. But Judaism, like Christianity, is a living faith. We need to understand where it is, now, if we want to understand where we came from ourselves.

As inclusive as this book is, readers should remember what it is not. Falcon and Blatner craft a synoptic introduction to the Jewish religion, not the Jewish people; you’ll find nothing about Jewish art, culture, or non-religious history. It’s also a layperson’s overview, not a rabbinical textbook, and will make nobody more spiritual, or more Jewish. Remember, this is Judaism for Dummies, not Judaism for the already learned.

But for non-observant Jews seeking a connection to their heritage, or Gentiles wanting deeper understanding of Judeo-Christian roots, this book makes a good primer. The authors’ plain English explanations, laced with gentle but pointed humor, keeps the reading brisk. Any readers interested in browsing Jewish beliefs have here a good reference to begin their research.

Ben Marcus and the Disease of Incomprehension

Nobody wants to admit that the thing they most love is the thing that will destroy them. But in Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet, parents can no longer deny that their children’s speech is the source of the illness slowly stripping the life from their flesh. Samuel and Claire still love their daughter, Esther, even as her language pushes them to the brink of death. So perhaps the only way to survive together is to find a new and revolutionary communication.

Literary postmodernism has proven a tough sell for general audiences, partly because any definition of the concept inevitably turns circular. The principle starts with an agreement that gaps exist between sign and signified. Therefore all information is provisional, and individuals can never agree wholly on meaning. Concepts like linear narrative and clear action become transient. Reading becomes not an action but an immersive experience.

Ben Marcus explores the parameters of this concept by taking it to the next logical step: if understanding is optional, it’s also perilous. Particularly, the communication between the generations, between those who most need to hear each other, becomes a vector for serious illness and death. That which we most long for and depend on, our children’s voices, becomes a voyage in uncharted waters. Here there be dragons, indeed.

The result, as with all literary postmodernism, depends on the audience. When conventions of structure become impediments to experience, readers accustomed to being led by the hand will get lost. Marcus demands readers willing to fill in the gaps for themselves. In essence, we become his co-authors. Not everyone will appreciate this.

But it does lend an intimacy to the story. As Samuel, Marcus’ viewpoint protagonist, struggles to love the daughter who is killing him, we glimpse a level of introspection more conventional storytelling would deny us. Even this has its murky depths: the writing becomes so personal that we wonder if Samuel really is Marcus. And as Samuel both is and is not Marcus, he also both is and is not us.

Samuel perseveres in the face of illness, as his wife courts listless death. Their daughter takes apparent pleasure in the pain she causes, even using her words on strangers with malice. Esther’s complete inability to bond with her parents, and her lack of sympathy with others’ pain, suggests autism. (In an NPR interview, Marcus reveals he has kids, but no teenagers. With this level of intimacy, one wonders if he’s admitting a fear of the future.)

In tandem with the “speech fever,” Marcus also expounds a future vision of dark Judaism. The Jews are the first victims of this spoken illness, and speculation abounds that this may be a dark Hebrew conspiracy. The Jews are not helped by the fact that they no longer worship in the shul, but in grim solitary enclaves, secret not only from the world, but from each other. It’s an arrangement almost customized to breed anti-Semitic paranoia.

But as Samuel holds forth on his own Judaism, parallels develop. His descriptions of speech fever symptoms—blood-encrusted lips, listless shuffling gait, protruding ribs—sound eerily familiar. It feels like the sins of the past are revisited, turned outward, projected onto the world. But because we are yoked to Samuel’s viewpoint, intensely introspective but not well attuned to the outside world, we are left to draw our own conclusions.

And herein lies the problem most readers will have with this book. Marcus gives us no guidance whatsoever. Though he has a story, with action and character, he does not give us any signs of what we can trust. Is Samuel the author’s voicebox, or an unreliable narrator? Is the speech fever a legitimate fear, or a fervid speculation? We don’t know. Marcus leaves it all up to us.

Marcus seems to dare us to ask whether a book must make any sense. One of his characters, a dark, enigmatic rabbi, answers explicitly: no. Meaning comes not from the words we use, but from the interstitial ambiguities between the words. But in this, as in the rest of the work, Marcus keeps his hands off, letting us decide how much to believe. We have to tell his story for ourselves.

Many people unschooled in literary theory use the word “postmodern” as a synonym for “incomprehensible.” That’s not unfair, since postmodernism regards comprehension as an accident of form. But in publishing a book, presumably author and publisher think an audience exists. Presumably. If comprehension is optional, maybe the book is its own justification.