Numbers 13-15

At our Kolot Mayim service  this morning I had the rare privilege of presenting my reading of this week's portion of the Torah. Here it is:

(Numbers 13-15)

My deep dive into this text got stuck, of course, at the first two words: Shelach lecha. The phrase echoes Lach lecha — God’s seminal instruction to Abraham to “Go forth.”

Reb Google tells me that phrase occurs ten times in our Torah. That’s about twice as often as, say, the ban against adultery.  That could be paraphrased as “Stay home.” Of course, even a ban stated just once is still operational at every opportunity. But a 10-time commandment may merit special attention.

With Shelach Lacha God instructs Moses to “send forth” some scouts to Canaan. Both phrases are calls to advance to the promised land. The commentators contend that this going forth is not just to leave but to confront danger. The advance is not just in geography but in character, in courage. Hence the gloss in our siddur: “We don’t like leaving but God loves becoming.”

Or as my Bobba Bayleh might have advised,  Aroif foon dein tuches shoin, un gay mach foon zich eppes.  That was for our Jack. For some of you others, I’ll translate.  Arise already— and go make something of yourself. That’s the family Lach lecha. 

It could also be the essence of Judaism. It impels our tikkun olam — our duty at whatever risk to improve the world for humanity. Preferably without helping to eliminate the Jews. If not now, then. Tikun olam unites us even when we are driven apart.

Lach lecha even lies behind the very word “Israel.” Jacob earns that name by surviving that all-night rasslin match. To this day the Jew gets many a Dark Night of struggle. Inertia is no option. Nor is submission to the paralysis of fear. Of course — it’s hip to be hurt in that struggle.

It is just this deeper meaning of lach lecha that escapes Moses’s emissaries to Canaan. They go forth literally but fail that deeper thrust. They recoil from risk. 

By their report the grapes must be like watermelons if it takes two men to carry one cluster. But the people are correspondingly large — which scares off the scouts. They fear to go forth. 

They even exaggerate the danger: “They’re so big we feel and look like grasshoppers.” Why grasshoppers? Grasshoppers are locusts — jumping insects prone to infest. God used the locust plague in Egypt to support the Jews. But the Israelites forget that. They turn God’s instrument of support into feeling helpless. So they pour out their old whine: “Why oh why did we leave wonderful Egypt?” The gripes of wrath.

Only Caleb and Joshua keep the proper courage: “The Eternal is with us. Have no fear of them!” For that? The stiff-necked jerks prepare to stone them — but are stayed by the Divine smoke.

Now, consider how Moses negotiates with God here. When Abraham bargained with God he focused on the righteous people who might be saved from Sodom. Remember? What if there are 20? Ten? One? Will you take an IOU? 

Now Moses, instead of focusing on the people, focuses on God. He appeals to God’s self-respect. (That’s the divine form of our vanity.)

What did Moses say after the Golden Calf incident? If You kill the Jews, the Egyptians will say “you maliciously freed them from us, just to slaughter them yourself.” Not a good vibe.

And so again here.“If you slay this people wholesale” everyone will say “It must be because the Eternal was powerless” to bring them to his promised land. Moses asks God to dare to show the best of Himself. He returns God's lach lecha.

God rises to the occasion. Both just and magnanimous, he punishes the faithless and rewards the faithful.

By the way, that wholesale slaughter of the Jews? This is that rare point in the Bible where wholesale is worse than retail.  

But the story doesn’t end there. The stiff-necks screw up again. From the sin of despair they shift to the delusion of independence. Despite Moses’s warning the Israelite soldiers go forth in battle, “up to the mountain top.” It’s properly aspirational but against God’s instruction. They go without Moses, without the Ark, without God. So they’re destroyed. 

As God doesn’t have to punish them, the plot is paused for three demonstrations of devotion. On the edge of the Promised Land and after all these recent failings, that’s necessary. Two demands of activity surround one of rest. The first details another ritual of sacrifice. In the second, a dramatic incident reminds us that — the sabbath is something to die for — especially when you get stoned. In Biblical terms. 

Now, it has been some time since we mortally stoned someone for washing his camel on shabbos. But that period was the beginning of morality. That merry band of stiff-necks needed harsh reminders to stop making the worst of themselves —the anti- lach lecha.

The seventh day of rest was not just a holiday but a basic principle of being — beginning with God’s Creation. It defines life as a constant discipline. There are equal duties of rigour and relief, of impulse and control, of action and thought. The sabbatical of the seventh extended from that day of rest to the rules of servitude, to the organization of human debts and responsibility, even to the summer fallowing of the fields. 

There are equal duties in repose as in action. There is fertility in abstinence. Hence the old proverb, Abstinence makes the heart go fondle. (Yeah, I made that one up.) Or from another poem in our siddur: That open space is like the air between the logs that enables the logs to burn.

The third dedication we get here is —the talles! Or — the talleet, as you young whippersnappers have it. To me, talles includes alles, which is everything. Like the inviolable sabbath the talles is our distinguishing dedication. 

Symbolically, the prescribed blue evokes the sea and the sky, our origin and our aspiration. The straight lines are our brief moment in eternity. The golden collar is an ennobling yoke. The talles combines the collective flow of fabric with the individuation of the tsitsis, the fringe. Even those threads are both individual and intertwined. Like our people. In a room full of activated talleiseem we are a community of solitudes.  So also even when we wear one alone. 

What surprised me here is the purpose of the talles. It is literally prescribed to prevent following “your heart …and your eyes… and go whoring.”

That’s the Robert Alter wording. The Israelites are often warned against “whoring after false gods.” Alter elsewhere suggests that monogamy is a Biblical metaphor for monotheism. But as infidelity is a  real human temptation in its own right -- or so I have been told — I’d rather call it a parallel.

The Plaut translation is “lustful.” But the point is the same, succumbing to our lower senses. Remember, the Sinai orgy began with religious doubt. Then it dipped to idolatry — then sank into sexual anarchy. Of course, that was my favourite scene in the movie. But it was the Israelites’ lowest point. From their spiritual potential they sank into demeaning chaos. 

To ward that off, the talles gives our spirituality a sensual experience. It’s our last remnant from all those unimaginably rich multi-sensory rituals of sacrifice. 

The talles is tactile, whether it cocoons us over our head or it embraces our shoulders. The fringe entwines our fingers. Wearing it, touching it, seeing it, are a healthy sensuality. Our sensations of the talles check our temptation to run improperly loose, in the mind or in the flesh. To mistake weakness for freedom. Think anti-lunatic fringe. The talles recalls us to our strengthening dedication.

And for the talles on steroids we lay on the tefillin — an even more physical spiritual commitment — the box on our forehead, at our heart, our bound arm, by which we bind ourself to our highest address. With this sensual spirituality we dare to take risks, to aspire. We find the courage to get out to make the most of ourselves. Lach lecha. 

Which is where I came in. Thank you and good luck.

The Shrouds

 

The Metaphysical Shrouds of David Cronenberg

The Shrouds may be our octogenarian David Cronenberg’s richest film. Like Prospero he looks back upon his life and marshals the magic at his disposal for one climactic statement.  

As the reviews have dutifully revealed, the script and film are his most personal. Lead Vincent Kassel is as sharp a Cronenberg lookalike as you’ll find outside his mirrors. The face, hair, build, quiet intensity — he’d pass anywhere. Almost. The hero’s obsessive grief over his wife’s death grows out of Cronenberg’s loss of his own Carolyn to cancer in 2017. 

Where does the film go beyond that?

Kassel plays Karsh Relikh, a super wealthy financier emotionally as well as fiscally invested in “the shrouds.” In this new technology a corpse is buried in a special covering that enables an outside viewer to watch the body’s decaying on video. This truly “still life” is additionally manipulable to provide intense closeups and 3-d rotation. Paradoxically, the “shroud” that normally conceals here is made to reveal. Science trumps history.

But Karsh’s ideal has been compromised. His technical whizkid Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce) proves the obligatory Evil Scientist. He has opened Karsh’s personal project into an international snooping system torn between Russia and China. 

However unnervingly current that international overlay, it’s not as compelling as the love-story. Becca (Diane Kruger) has been compromised dead as well as alive by her college prof seducer Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman). Karsh’s last romantic commitment to Becca — to be buried beside her — is violated when vandals attack the graves. Karsh finds his planned burial site with Becca’s filled with Eckler.

As Karsh now finds, a blind date may not share his fascination with watching his dead wife rotting. But for him the tech keeps her “still” with him. This literalizes our standard hope that our dearly departed remain always with us. 

But hey, what kind of first name is “Karsh” anyway? An echo of “harsh”? Or the “marsh,” swamp, that the international shenanigans make of the romantic financier’s dream? 

Of course the name pays homage to the late Yousuf Karsh, Canada’s most famous photographer, best known for his celebrity portraits. Karsh and Cronenberg are Canada’s most distinguished workers in film art, David in moving pictures, Yousuf in evocative stills. Here they merge. Additionally, Karsh himself found an afterlife in Canada when he fled the Armenian genocide. 

Then there’s that “Relikh.” Karsh’s family name suggests an object recovered from a buried past. The archaic spelling compounds the antique. But it also recalls John Donne’s famous poem, “The Relic.” There the bedded lover muses that the blonde hair he has just wrapped around his wrist may in some distant future be found and taken for a religious relic. That “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” would elevate their sexual engagement to holiness, them to saints. Her enveloping hair transcends his dead bone, in a miniature of the sex act.

“What miracles we harmless lovers wrought,” muses the poet. The speaker assures his bedmate that their carnal relationship has achieved spirituality. But also: it’s a sad miracle that lovers die and  “rot.” Here Cronenberg’s first line of dialogue is “Grief is rotting my teeth.” His characters’ high-tech technology reveals the beloved rotting — as appears Karsh when he briefly dons the titular x-ray suit.

Indeed Donne even provides for Eckler’s displacement of Karsh in Becca’s tomb: “(For graves have learn'd that woman head, To be to more than one a bed).” 

Donne was one of the great Metaphysical Poets, with a  belief and intensity that T.S. Eliot famously regretted we lost through our “dissociation of sensibility.” Eliot argued that after the seventeenth century English poetry lost its ability to poetically amalgamate disparate experience. Poetry began to separate thought from emotion, whereas the Metaphysical poet “could devour any kind of experience.” After the Donne peak, English poetry no longer united the sensational and emotional with thought, the body with the idea.

Cronenberg has achieved in film an equivalent to Donne’s Metaphysics. His “body horror” is a contemporary equivalent to the poet’s uniting of thought and emotion, spirit and flesh, high and low. Cronenberg blends  the human with the technological. Shoving a video cassette into a man’s belly is a neo-Metaphysical moment. 

That was Videodrome. What here?

Here the extension of what we might consider humanity is exemplified in Diane Kruger’s casting. She plays a spectrum of realities in Karsh’s relationships. She is the scarred and dead beloved Becca, by name the most enterprising of the Biblical matriarchs. She also plays Becca’s twin sister, Terry Gelernt, who — turned on by conspiracy theories — has a fling with Karsh. Kruger also provides image and voice for Karsh’s “personal assistant,” the avatar Hunny. That Germanic twist on “Honey” proves human enough to be treacherous. Kruger thus plays the new human range from the flesh to the tech fantastical. 

As Karsh’s sister-in-law, Terry is also his connection to his primary aid and ultimate undoing, Entrekin. That off-family name says “between family” —which is what Maury thus is, literally “only by marriage” but metaphorically unrooted himself in any relationship. He is obsessed with recovering the wife he rejects as mad. 

The Becca/Terry family name, Gelernt, is yiddish for “learned,” which helps to validate both Becca’s experimentation with the mad science and her sister’s grounded suspicions of its abuse. 

As an old English major, Cronenberg knows the thematic potential of characters’ names. Here the nominal characterization is another delightful fusion of the old with the new. Specialty of the Cronenberg house — at least this first generation. 

Given that range of human existence, here a love survives not only death but the interpolation of separate bodies. A passion and commitment can transcend individual relationships. In the film’s most extensive sex scene, Karsh obsesses over Becca’s professor while Terry urges him to think he’s making love to the dead sister/wife. Eckler’s replacement of Karsh continues in death. 

Karsh ultimately accepts a compromise to fulfill his eternal promise to Becca. He takes his Grave Tech to Budapest with his beautiful blind new lover Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt). Blind, she is not restricted by her senses from attempting unusual experiences. In Barbara Kruger’s last casting, Karsh projects on to Soo-Min Becca’s voice, scars, deformity, love and commitment to be buried with him. She allows him the eternity that Eckler’s grave highjack denied him. She enables him to maintain his ardor into eternity. 

In Cronenberg’s new Metaphysical the visual preservation of the dead woman here achieves substance. The spirit turns into a body. In Donne’s terms, Soo-Min enables Karsh and Becca “to make their souls, at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay.” The “little stay” is their brief visit in life, but also stretching their moment into eternity.

With this substitution Relikh pragmatically avoids himself becoming a heartbroken relic from our restrictive past. Our new science extends not just our life but our power over reality, its defeats, our losses. That reality may be of our mind as of our physical world. The new tech may expand the human not necessarily destroy it. In our new life, our new flesh, we might still sustain our old values, like fidelity — with new flex. We might really reanimate that bracelet of bright hair about the bone. From that frightening science — a happy ending.

Adolescence (UK TV)

  Phillip Barantini’s four-episode British TV series Adolescence is as powerful and compelling a work as the medium has ever produced. I doubt a better work of film or theatre has emerged this decade.

It opens with a 13-year-old Jamie arrested and charged with murdering a girl from his school. He pleads innocent.

         Apart from the brilliantly realistic dialogue and uniformly masterful casting and performance, each episode is filmed — in one continuous shot! 

This was a huge challenge. Imagine having the props, lighting, background, performances, camera movement, all set so firmly that a single take catches and freezes all. That took work.

Of course that laborious technique has a point. The unbroken continuity of each episode embodies the central theme — not fully articulated until the end of the fourth. That is, the uninterrupted continuity of a debilitating “masculinity” from the violent grandfather, to Jamie’s father— who vows not to repeat his father’s cruelty, but still manages to stultify his son with his oppressive expectations. Then Jamie himself is ultimately victim of his inherited temper and inability to accept himself.  

        As the parents finally realize, they made their son and their daughter. The masculinity accounts for their different being.

In that light, the drama could as well be titled Adolescents. For all three generations of men have been unable to survive the demands and pressures of “manliness” placed on them. All are weakened — indeed, incapacitated —by their requisite, ostensible “strength.”

That also includes the cop who attends the psychiatrist’s interview in Episode 3. He hates his job/role and wishes he could switch with her, not just in profession but in feminine sensitivity. For her part, the therapist articulates the “manhood” paradox and embodies the burden of women’s roles in these men’s lives, extending into Jamie’s mother, sister — and victim. 

That includes the cop Bascombe in Episode Two, whose detached relationship with his own troubled son is a replay of the central drama. His prominent role in the first two episodes segues into Jamie’s father as the at first implicit, then clear focus of the last two episodes.

In the last, in a lengthy car conversation Jamie’s parents — to their daughter’s embarrassment — recall their adolescence, the school dance where the boy broke loose, fell calamitously but won the girl’s first kiss. That romance began with the boy's embrace of vulnerability -- lost in his adulthood. 

Then there’s the music. Very little, if any, within the drama. But the songs that crop up carry thematic weight. Aurora’s closing lyric, “Through the Eyes of a Child,” extends the theme and emotional power of Jamie’s father’s realization. After four hours (i.e.,about a year?) he finally breaks down in open tears, as he puts Jamie’s teddy to bed, in his son’s place, and finally admits the softness he has wasted his life in suppressing. Manhood.

This level of continuity has two film precedents — both a pale breeze in comparison. One was a Russian meander through their famous Hermitage art gallery. 

Before that — and more pertinently -- came Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). In Patrick Hamilton’s source play a philosophy prof is stunned to find that two students acted on his theoretical argument for eliminating the weak. They lived out his theory that the superior may transcend the law. When he learns his word became a murderous deed he was astonished — and morally implicated — by that continuity. The continuity of the titular rope was embodied in Hitchcock shooting the entire film in the 10-minute stretch of the film reel, finding ways to cover the technical breaks.

Shooting in 10-minute units was a challenge in 1948. Even with all our tech advances, though, the up-to-60-minute flow of each episode-long shot here is astonishing. 

And yet… and yet… that technical achievement pales before the achievement of the script and performance. This work is genius.

The Roads Not Taken

  The granite-jawed writer is a romantic cliche — that writer/director Sally Potter here incisively anatomizes with a view to freeing woman from that conventional enslavement. She exposes macho romance as helplessness.

Javier Bardem is usually the dynamic force of his film. Here his Leo (the ex-lion)  leaves his bedroom stupor either for a romantic reminiscence or to fumble through the unaccommodating reality of New York City. He takes roads into memories of past romance and failure, then in reality stumbles helpless through the streets.

        As his second wife observes, Leo chooses to live in a dump by the railway tracks. He's off the rails.

His first wife (Salma Hayak) lost him to their grief over a school-bound son killed in a traffic accident. In his trauma he sees his lost son in dogs. His second wife (Laura Linney) escaped when neither could handle her becoming the far more successful. Their detachment still leaves them friends, at least in her view, but he blurs their distance. 

The film centers on Leo’s relationship with their daughter Molly. In the present tense the film follows her laborious caring for him, as she struggles to get him to and through improbable dental and optometrist appointments, a replacement pants purchase, and his survival of a nocturnal wandering. Her attempts at normalcy fail.

When her attention to him costs her an important job she resolves finally to assert her independence. 

The title involves them all. Leo floats to and from fantasies or memories of his lost desires. His pathetic flirtation with a young girl in Greece could be a fantasy temptation or a reworking of his flight from his newborn daughter for a writing freedom in Greece, that he quickly abandoned.

The first wife could not follow him further through his insistent grief. They share road scenes literal and figurative.The second wife sees his present clutch as the road she did well to escape. 

The character who grows through the film is daughter Molly. She comes to realize the costs of her father’s grip and climactically walks away to independence, leaving him with the warmth of her care. And of course a hired caregiver. 

But Molly can’t walk that road away until her father finally recognizes her, finally speaks her name. That acknowledgment enables her split. Literally.  

        Finally, credit Potter with a rich work of technical excellence as well as imagination and commitment, with uniformly fine performances.

The Problem with People

  Christ Cottam’s film may pretend to be a bucolic Irish comedy — like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, twice cited. But it takes a major, even controversial, political/philosophic turn. It examines how small familial differences can swell into a serious feud, even violence. Indeed, when the central point of contention becomes ownership of a small seaside strip of land, the film turns into a domestic miniature of the Gaza war.   

The Irish undertaker Ciaran (Colm Meaney) and the American builder Barry (Paul Reiser) are cousins who meet for the first time. Their grandfathers were once-close brothers, until one moved to New York and the other didn’t. Their separation grew into a feud, then fervid animosity. 

On Barry’s visit, Cieran’s initially warm welcome is soured when his father — who demanded the reunion — leaves Barry half his estate. Cieran tries to cheat him out of the property. Barry appears to concede, but then buys the waterfront strip of land beyond it and proceeds to build his obstruction of Cieran’s view. 

The cousins’ reunion had cheered the entire community. Barry is especially popular when he offers to buy everyone in the pub his favourite steak dinner if/when they visit New York. 

Their feud divides it, culminating in a violent donnybrook at their charity football match. 

The village’s burgeoning war subtly evokes Gaza. Co-writer Reiser makes one early joke about Jews. But his persona grows into his daughter’s very Jewish lesbian wedding to Ciaran’s ex-wife at the end. The broken glass and shared tallis seal the deal. The lesbian element affirms the need to transcend convention for personal and collective fulfilment. 

In its moderation, the film omits the extremity of jihadist Islam. Instead, the second historic faith is Cieran’s Catholicism, evoked by the Pope John and JFK photos on his walls and by the community’s young, flustered and ineffectual priest. 

In a lighter version of reviving old familial grievances, one of Cieran’s customers demands her relative be dug up after four years — to change his suit! Thus people would rewrite the past.

To appreciate the courage and ambition of this seemingly light comedy one has to remember the Irish government’s strong anti-Israel statements and the resurgence of antisemitism.  

Hence perhaps the balancing twist in the question of land ownership. Here Cieran has been living on the land that is newly given to his cousin. In the Holy Land, of course, the Jewish occupancy is the oldest. So, too, the violence is reduced from slaughters and the October 7 atrocities to verbal insults, some mischief with sheep, reciprocal slander — which proves very expensive for Barry — and finally that football game. 

Before the marital conclusion, the men reach peace when they’re stuck in the same hospital room with duelling curtain controls. Would that our larger war would be so easily resolved and the ancient Abrahamic brotherhood recovered. 

A Real Pain

    As writer, director and star Jessie Eisenberg has a real winner in this comedy about second-generation American Holocaust trauma.

    Honest. It is funny. 

    But it’s also trenchantly sad. The real pain is representatively borne by two (relatively) safe American cousins. They bear the burden of their grandparents’ generation’s suffering. And as contemporary Judaism only too well knows: the global antisemitism that propelled the first Holocaust looms again. That historic meaning in the title trumps its reference to the two cousins.

    Consider how we find and leave the central duo. Benji (Kieran Culkin) hangs out at the airport. He initially waits for cousin David (Eisenberg), who urgently streams phone messages about his arrival. At the end Benji spurns David’s home dinner to stay there. “You meet the craziest people here.” That’s the in-transit class, unsettled, uncentered, in between, having lost one’s tether..

    Benji is one. The last shot leaves him teary-eyed, alone, softened by the contagion of grief. After his harrowing exposure to the Holocaust site, Benji remains alone, of a persecuted people without the effective supports ceded the “normal.” Like the Beckett Unnameable: he must go on; he can’t go on; e hgoes on.

    Benji nakedly wears the moral compass that in post-Holocaust (or is it pre-Holocaust 2?) America is out of fashion. He skips out on the $12 Polish train ticket  because ”It’s the principle of paying. We shouldn't have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country.” “No,” properly responds David: “it's not. It was our country. They kicked us out 'cause they thought we were cheap.” Since the Holocaust the old line between truth and falsehood has been blurred. 

    So too Benji’s wistful outlaw spirit: “We stay moving, we stay light, we stay agile.” But in life Benji carries the burden of the Survivor conscience. His grandmother lived through it, but both cousins remain branded by it.

Benji’s ethic seems contemporary cliche: ”Man, what's stupid is the corporatization of travel. Ensuring that the rich move around the world, propagate their elitist loins, while the poor stay cut off from society.” And to Marcia: “Money's like fucking heroin for boring people.”

But that formulaic morality is here validated by the shadow that still falls across our present culture: “We're on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don't know what to tell you, man.” As the Somali Jew Eloge adds, “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak, as it were.” Behind the smile still gleams the skull.

In disclosing Benji’s suicide attempt, David reveals a strength behind his apparent weakness: “our grandma survived by a thousand miracles when the entire world was trying to kill her, you know?... like, how did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?” 

But as the ostensibly stabler David explains Benji’s climactic dinner explosion, he admits his own weakness: “I just, like, take a pill for my fuckin' OCD, you know, and I jog and I meditate and I go to work in the morning and I, like, come home at the end of the day, and I, like, move forward, you know, because I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don't feel the need to, like, I don't know, burden everybody with it, you know?” Both modern young Jews still bear their grandparents' pain.

That scene ends with that same broken Benji very charmingly playing “Tea for Two” on the lounge piano. The tea is the cousins’ confession. 

Later Benji recalls David’s fragility: “You are, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who's always running late. And I gotta, like, fish that fuckin' guy outta ya every time I see ya.” Where once Benji “used to fucking cry about everything, man. Like…” now he is the modest modern American success story. Well, “survivor” story. He has a pretty wife and a beautiful baby son at home — and a successful career selling online banner advertising. Another salesman ripe for death.

The cousins are forbidden to leave their memorial stones on their grandmother’s front stoop. David has a home, with a stoop, where he can put his stone. Benji has none so, alone in the airport, he wears it inside. 

Despite Benji’s feeling neglected David does “give a shit about you. I just don't understand how you would ever do anything so fucking stupid to yourself.” The image of the suicidal Benji burns into David’s mind like the holocaust images, searing and immediate: ”I, like... I walk around with, like, this terrible fucking image of you in my head…’

The living remain frozen by their memory of their dead, themselves not fully alive either.