My Idea of Pesach's Freedom (2015)

[A guest post on Torah by Jonny Schneeweiss! He's better known to the Internet for his Schneeblog, an insightful treatment of writing technique, fantasy/sci-fi/otaku, and human nature. Check it out – some great stuff. --Ed.]

I've been noticing lately how there are cultural trends of values just like cultural trends of fashion and entertainment etc. People don't really think into these values, but they're just caught up in the current so to speak. It ends up being this dichotomy of either you agree with the culturally supported dogma or you disagree with it and there's no other option.  If you're too swayed by the questions of the opposing side, your only recourse is to either switch to the anti version of your idea or be stubborn and irrationally stick to your guns.

A big example was something I noticed looking into Korean culture. In American culture, what's important is being "successful", which is a) something we as a culture haven't really thought out, and b) no one really knows what it means. But we want to be successful. There are only two sides to this discussion: either you are ambitious and try to make money and achieve success, OR you naively follow your dreams and passions and are not as successful but you're following your dream, so screw success and screw the man!

In Korea, NO ONE talks about success. They DO NOT care about success at all. For them, the cultural dogma is all about hard work. Every instance when, in the West, you'd hear someone use the word "success", in Korea it's replaced with "hard work".  Women don't want to marry someone who is successful, they want to marry someone who works hard.  In school, you're not told to do your homework so you can get a good job and be successful, you're told to do your homework because you should be working hard.  Are you working hard or are you playing? Success? Who cares about that? Are you working your hardest? Even if you're not making any money or moving up in the world, are you working yourself to death? That's what matters.  What else COULD matter?

There must be hundreds of examples of this, where the thesis/antithesis phenomenon as it applies to cultural values is seen as the ONLY way of thinking, when in the country next door there's a completely different thesis/antithesis argument dominating the national discource.  This reality is a sign of a) how unthought out cultural values are and b) how inescapable they are when it's literally all you're surrounded by. People can't escape the binary yes/no morality they're raised in. They don't even know they're being confined. It's like Flatland.

The nation we belong to as Israelites was founded on an event where the most dominant cultural dogma of the time was completely and utterly shattered right before our eyes. Bnei Yisrael were raised in an Egypt where priests probably argued about which gods were supreme and politicians vied for pharaoh's favor. That way of viewing the world was inescapable. But then in the very forging of our nation we were shown through events that the entire foundation was wrong.

Throughout our history, we've stood as a broken nation on the edge of more powerful nations who refuse to accept us. We grow up exposed to the culture of whatever nation we've been exiled to while still knowing that we have our own system of values and our own ways of thought. Just knowing that--that there IS another way of looking at each facet of life we hear about--is the most powerful tool humans can have against being swept up in the cultural force of values and thought trends. Even if we don't understand the values of our own tradition, we know they exist, which means we never have to be confined to the thesis/antithesis cycle going on around us. We have the freedom to say "I know there MUST a different way of viewing ALL of this, there must be a third dimension in this 2-d world, so let me think some more and see if anything else makes sense." This is just an option many people don't have. They don't KNOW they can do that, because why would they? Whom have they ever seen or heard about who has done that? Our national identity IS "a stranger in a strange land." Breaking out of cultural dogmas is who we are, and even when we failed to build our own successful culture as a nation, we were exiled for the purpose of reforging that identity in the midst of countless other cultures that refuse to accept us.  That's the freedom I was thankful for this Pesach.

Rabba bar bar Chana and the Arabian Nights

Rabbi Geometry once mentioned a Gemara about a sea where metal nails fly out of ships.Say, said I, that sounds familiar. There is a sea like that in the story of the "Third Calender" in the Arabian Nights.

The Nights were set in writing c. 1450, but they are set in Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate in, oh, the 700's.

 It occurred to me the other day that the yeshivos of Sura and Pumbedisa were for a time located in the exact same time and place as the Arabian Nights -- occasionally one turned up in Baghdad itself -- so I dug my copy out of the basement to see if I could find any Gaonim wandering around in the perfumed gardens of Caliph Haroun al-Raschid.

While I was there, I got distracted: the stories of Sinbad the Sailor are so famous, and I never read them... so I read the first one.

HA HA HA HA HA.

The first voyage of Sinbad the Sailor -- or at least the nut of it -- is taken almost verbatim from the story of Rabba bar bar Chana and the whale fish, on Bava Basra 73b.

(Once upon a time, says Rabba bar bar Chana, he and some others went a-sailing on a ship, and saw what appeared to be a mossy island. They disembarked and began to cook a meal on it... but it was really a whale; and, feeling the heat of the cooking fire, it rolled over; and had they not been close to the boat, they would have drowned.

The first time I heard this story, it was explained as a metaphor for Jewish history: we land on what looks like a safe kingdom to live in... but we better stick close with the Torah!)

Fancy meeting you here!
In the end, I did not find any mention of contemporary Jewish society in the Nights (I only skimmed the Victorian children's version); but it is obvious that there was Jewish influence on them here and there.

Steampunk, Mori Girl, and Judaism

There are a couple of identifiable alternative fashions in America -- goth, punk, ethnic -- but I just heard that in Japan, there are several street fashions each associated with a lifestyle, a philosophy, an entire approach to the world.

I am not sure the same can be said for their American counterparts... I suspect that it is only the rare person on this side of the Pacific who says, "I think I will dress, and live, and look at life, as if I were a Poe character (or a clockwork Victorian, or a Tibetan herdsman), as much as possible." But in Japan the fashion of let's pretend we live in the woods has got its own name (mori-kei) and publications and corresponding philosophy and values and, if I understood correctly, not a small number of adherents.

Fascinating.

It's very Jewish, that your style of dress should be an organic expression of your philosophy and values -- though in the case of mori-kei, and I could be wrong about this, I am not so sure the interest in the weltanschauung gave birth to the fashion instead of the other way round.

Jewish dress is defined by Torah principles, which makes it fairly difficult to pin down, as fashions go: it's not defined by a particular shape (like steampunk) or color (like goth) or texture (like mori-kei) or place (like goncha) or era (like vintage) or being different from what everyone else is wearing.
One of these days I should write about what does define it... does someone more learned who writes for this blog want to tackle that one?

As it comes out, Rav Bulman zt"l once observed that traditional Jewish dress is the dress of the nobility of the past generation. But that's incidental.

Flotsam

Japanese Dock Washes Up in Oregon

"I can't believe the journey it's made, without anything pulling but the ocean," said beach visitor Sandie Fink. "It's just absolutely amazing to me."


The article is not interesting. But the story as told in the headline alone reminds me of the feeling you get watching an airplane fly off to somewhere else.

How Vashti Hosted a Party

Esther opens with a description of the king's party, including all the drinking going on in the courtyard, and then it says (1:9):
Queen Vashti also made a party for women, in the palace of King Achashverosh.


What were they doing there?


The Midrash (the Yalkut Shimoni) explains that women like to know everything, so Vashti gave a tour of the palace, pointing out where the king slept, ate and drank, leading her guests though the painted rooms...

 "for as Rabbi Avin said, a woman would rather look at pretty things than eat fatted calves."

The 1912 Project, Titanic Fascination, Numenor, Murasaki, a Niggun and a Sigh.

One hundred years ago, 1,514 people drowned in the Atlantic, and many others were ruined financially.
In commemoration of this event, 400 dressmakers around the world are sewing themselves new outfits.

Does this strike anyone else as an odd memorial for the dead?

Titanic fascination is a very odd phenomenon, when you stop to think about it. It's not enough to say, "We love the glamour of the era." No -- you love the glamour of the era that sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.
It is glamour, depth, and tragedy all at once - like an opera! The clashier Western version of, the next best thing to, the sweet pain of Númenor (Where now are the Dúnedain, Elessar, Elessar?), or Elvish mourning over the swiftness of time, or the Japanese mono no aware (defined here)- which are subtler.

I have been trying to work out whether there is any similar idea in Judaism - that there is something lovely, lyrical, about entropy, the falling of the leaves, the passing of the generations. Sorrow is obviously not the same thing as depression, but I haven't found that we celebrate it in any way, any more than we celebrate any other characteristic of our relationship with the Eternal, knowing that it will eventually be turned inside-out to reveal joy.

Galus, galus, vie lang bist du...
...
!

The Vintage Pattern Lending Library has recruited 400 volunteer dressmakers to test vintage 1912 patterns. And all we have to do is sew and blog.
Although I doubt that this post is what they had in mind.
Free Edwardian patterns? Really? SIGN ME UP!

Thank you to the VPLL for coordinating the project.

So an Assyrian and a Jew walk into Lydda

Bifel I sat next to an Assyrian on the airplane.
Syrian?
No, Assyrian.
Really? I did not know that you still exist, I said, stupidly, looking at the woman sitting next to me and trying not to think of her as a bas-relief.
Yes -- there are some thousands, scattered round the world, she said. And we still fast for the three days that Nineveh fasted when Jonah told it to. The pious do not eat at all for three days and three nights running.
Do you have a tradition as to the identity of that king of Nineveh? We do.
Is that in the Bible? she asked, surprised, being conversant with the text.
No, I said, it is an oral tradition.
Oh. No, we don't have such a tradition. It is not clear that we are actually descended in a straight line from those ancient Assyrians, but we identify with them. We name our children Ashur and Sargon.

We then had a very interesting conversation about whether it is possible for religion and nationhood to overlap.
We did not discuss ancient history.

Japanese Yiddishists

What makes this article - on a new Yiddish-Japanese dictionary - citeworthy on this blog is the following line:

All [Japanese Yiddishists], he says, are driven by “healthy intellectual curiosity and interest in traditional Ashkenazic culture, which, unlike modern Israeli culture, seems to have much in common with traditional Japanese culture.”

Koreans Visit Ponevezh Yeshiva

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seAUU2K3BYk&feature=player_embedded

It is by now fairly common knowledge that portions of the Talmud have been translated into Korean and are avidly studied in South Korea.
The fascination of Koreans with the Talmud is partly because of its values, and partly because they recognize that its study sharpens the intellect. But as the rav in this short film explains, the real value of Talmud study is changing oneself.