But what if you believe, like I do, that the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in ancient times was, from a historical point of view, the best thing ever to happen to the Jewish people?

Had we remained a temple cult, we would probably have long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history by now, like so many other sacrificial cults. Had we not internalized our culture and our faith, built a temple in the mind and carried it around the globe, the greatest achievements of the Jewish people would never have occured. And of course, we are no longer in exile. Any Jew who wants to go move to Israel (for now…of course, the Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel might problematize the whole notion of who gets to be a Jew pretty soon).

So why do we mourn?

Anshel Pfeffer argued in Haaretz last week that we shouldn’t. He wrote:

Mourning on the Ninth of Av in this day and age flies in the face of both secular Zionism and religious Zionism. It contradicts the right of Jews around the world to decide where they prefer to live. The exile is over, and the temple has not been rebuilt because we don’t want to do it.

There is plenty to mourn in the world for Jews and non-Jews alike, although the Exile is no longer one of those things. I believe Diaspora is a blessing, for all peoples. It made me who I am. It made my parents and grandparents. It made artists and thinkers and scientists and cultures. It is not a thing to grieve.

We can mourn violence. We can mourn the continued abuse of our planet and our neighbors in defiance of God and common sense. We can mourn that Israel, the nation to which we returned, is far from perfect, but to mourn that which made us a global people is to mourn that which created me.

I am a product of Diaspora. I just can’t bring myself to mourn my own existence.

As the trial of failed children’s book author and genocidal politician Radovan Karadzic moves forward in the Hague, it is important to remember that the story of bad writers and ethnic cleansing is not all there is to Bosnia.

Dr. Eli Tauber’s new book about Bosnians who saved the lives of Jews during WWII could not have come at a better time. I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Tauber when I was doing my own research into the Jewish community of Bosnia, and he is a passionate and thorough scholar. The stories of these righteous Muslim and Christian Bosnians who chose to save their Jewish neighbors at great risk to themselves are not unique in the world, but they are too often overlooked. This is just another reminder that even in the face of great evil and massive political violence, community has the capacity to survive.

Right now, in the world there are some very apt comparisons that can be made to Hitler, those leaders in Sudan, in the eastern Congo, in Burma, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Sri Lanka who are trying to exterminate their fellow countrymen for political gain. Until recently, I would have argued vociferously against the Iran comparisons, but given the regime’s current behavior toward its own subjects (but not, I should add, the Jews specifically as Jews), even that comparison is more apt than the Obama=Hitler nonsense.

Republicans and Democrats, Jews and non-Jews, and any people of conscience have a duty to focus on the real acts that are “like Hitler,” mass-murder that is very real and ongoing, and not try to score cheap points off of survivors. Limbaugh has no shame, but the GOP leadership should at least pretend to, and distance themselves from this cruel absurdity.

…it doesn’t matter whether God is a benevolent father looking down on us all, or a delusion of the mind. It doesn’t matter whether the Exodus happened or not. What matters is that we possess technology that can transform the self, open the mind, unite a community, motivate ethical action and bring forth tears when your heart is broken. Before you light candles, you’re thinking of your mortgage; afterward, you’re thinking of your kids, or the meaning of life, or something else that actually matters. That’s what counts. Of course, if the Passover story, or the Yom Kippur myth, helps you do those things, great. If not, drop them. It’s the transformation, not the myth, that matters.

I am drawn to this idea that Jewish ritual provides a set of tools for transformation, a time-tested set of tools that has built a civilization in which are contained countless ideas and worldviews, and which has seen the rise and fall of many different creeds and many more nations. The reason generation after generation has carried on Judaism and constantly sought its renewal–from the Hasidim to the Reconstructionists–is that this set of practices might just work.

One can find spiritual power in a sunset, one can build a community around The Jonas Brothers, one can base an ethical world view off the collected works of John Steinbeck, but for durable tools to do any or all of these things, Jewish practice (however you build it) has proven quite effective at doing all of these things for quite a long time under a lot of different conditions. The Orthodox believe Torah and Jewish ritual have value because they are the word of God. That works for them. I believe it has value because it works for the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox alike. It provides a set of principles and practices that reflect the best of humanity and certainly inspired other great religious traditions. It does not lay sole claim to the truth, and is not the only path to “the good life.” But it is a good path to the good life.

Rooting Jewishness in a living Torah–a living, evolving, and useful spiritual practice–not only ensures the continued survival of Judaism, but uproots it from the troublesome ethnic chauvinism that cuts African and African-American Jews out of the picture, that devalues Sephardic traditions, and it cuts through the nationalist politics of Zionism that too often value F-18s over ethics. The ritual are a set of tools, a spiritual technology that, when applied, serves a variety of functions, both social and personal. It is adaptable, upgradable, expandable, and people are always tinkering with it, finding new and unexpected uses. Even better, it’s Open Source. Anyone can study it and engage with it. In fact, that’s a requirement. In that way it’s more like Linux that Mac OS X.

This isn’t all New-Agey nonsense. Look to the year 622 BCE, when Josiah declared the discovery of the Law Moses had recieved, the Book of Deuteronomy. It was then that Judaism went from an oral tradition to one of written laws. Many at the time feared that codifying the relgion into the written word would destroy it, would turn the text into an idol, that the scribes would inevitably corrupt the word of God or that the dynamism of the Israelite religion would be lost. Writing the Torah was a revolutionary act, just as, a century later, Ezra the scribe would revolutionize Judaism again by making the Torah the center of the religion, rather than the Temple, and just as assimilated German Jews and scholarly Polish Jews would revolutionize it again in the Mid-18th century in their own ways. Each of these acts was transformative, revolutionary, and hotly contested. Judaism has never been only one thing, and has constantly sought to reinvent itself for the times. Seeking out the why behind the ritual is part of Jewish tradition since the beginning, and this sort of questioning makes the religion live. If American Jews can be exposed to the phenomenal utility of Jewish ritual, perhaps even the most secular, assimilated among us can find their place in the continuum of Jewish life.

The Arbetlose Marsch (March of the Unemployed) by Mordechai Gebirtig, a writer and political activist who was murdered in the Holocaust.

Courtesy of Reboot Stereophonic, The Barry Sisters present one of my favoirte Sinatra tunes, “My Way”… in Yiddish.

My Gram Bev would have loved it.

My Way

You can buy the whole CD here.

And some more:

Putting aside the dangerous religious and ethnic nationalism around the Durban II conference, the continued criticism of the Holocaust by Iranian President Ahmadinejad (though he didn’t outright deny it this time), and the continued fear-mongering of the American and Israeli right-wing, today is a day to remember the victims and the survivors of Nazi brutality, the senseless destruction of life and dignity that occurs when people begin to worship their own power, rather than respect their shared humanity.

Death Fugue by Paul Celan
Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime

we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night

we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us to play for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite

The New York Times has a video up of the last Jew living in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zablon Simantov, in which he talks about his life there, why he stayed, and his relationship to the Taliban.

“The Taliban didn’t like Jews. They treated me very badly. But they didn’t like anyone. They treated everyone badly.”

He doesn’t mention his long feud with Ishaq Levin, the other Jew to remain in Kabul, who died in 2005. He shows the Flower Street Synagogue with the kind of detached sadness and nostalgia that fading Jewish communities everywhere seem to have, a mourning for the past he inherited that “dates back to the time of the Buddha”, and also a refusal to mourn it.

I do see a glimmer of hope here. If anyone is capable of confronting these settlers and those in the government who provide them with all this material support, it is the new right-wing government of Netanyahu. If they can find the moral courage to stand up to the extremists within their own camp, they might be able to make more progress than a left/center government, which would struggle to be taken seriously by the fringe elements who build these outposts.  Perhaps there’s hope for Israel to live up to its Jewish name, rather than strive for mere survival, if they can stop supporting the ideology of warring tribes so popular in ancient times. The fate of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah is not one that should be repeated, but one that becomes more possible with every outpost built.