Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part I)

(Happy birthday to Lionel Spiegel.)

I drive my son Kalman to and from pre-school most weekdays. In the car, he usually asks to listen to Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. You can clock an average trip as the amount of time it takes to get from the beginning of the book until Mr. Tumnus confesses that he is in the pay of the White Witch as her kidnapper. Kalman knows that the White Witch is bad because she is the government and she makes it always winter. I guess I can live with him not picking up on the "and never Christmas" part.

Lewis opened with one of the finest dedications ever. Writing to Lucy Barfield, the daughter of fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, Lewis apologized to the teenage girl that she grew up faster than he could write but he hopes that one day she will be old enough to read fairy tales once again. This is a good example of one of the key concepts in Lewis' writing, reenchantment; that one can once again fall in love with the things of childhood that one's more cynical self had abandoned as part of "growing up."

Reenchantment should be understood as a response to Max Weber's notion of disenchantment and Friederich Nietzsche's more poetic "God is dead." Disenchantment is the notion that under modernity our very way of thinking is materialistic and does not allow us to truly operate within a supernaturalist framework. For example, early in LWW, the other children are simply unable to believe that Lucy has traveled to Narnia; to them, it is simply not possible that she could be anything else but either a liar or insane. They are prejudiced against belief even though logically there is nothing to suggest that portals to other universes do not exist.

It is important to understand that contrary to conventional secularist theories of modernity, Weber was not claiming that modernity had intellectually refuted religion and that people, particularly the educated, no longer believed. On the contrary, the prospect of modern secularism could cause many people to cling more tightly than ever to the outward forms of religion. Thus, it may even appear that religion is doing better than ever under modernity with more people attending church and insisting on hardline fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. That being said, such religiosity only serves to cover the fact that religion has been fossilized into something that people practice out of tradition. As such, it lacks the ability to truly inspire its adherents. In this sense, disenchantment stands as a far graver threat to religion than simple secularism. If people are convinced by argument to abandon religion then it might be possible to engage in apologetics and win them back. On the other hand, if people stop believing not because of any argument and without even realizing that they no longer believe then it is practically impossible to ever bring them back.

In addition to religious disenchantment, Lewis, in his own personal experience, confronted a more tangible disenchantment, World War I. Lewis was part of a generation of young Englishmen, who listened to their teachers and did the "right and honorable thing;" they marched off to the French trenches to be slaughtered in the mud, sacrificed to pay for the political and military miscalculations of their elders.

World War I was the death of heroism. In an earlier generation, a man could be said to be brave to stand tall in the face of enemy fire and resolutely march forward. One might die in the attempt but one could believe that he was sacrificing himself to spur his comrades on to victory. During World War I, that became suicide. Thus, the very ethos of heroism led men to their deaths in utter futility. It should be emphasized that dying was never the issue. Young men have always been marched off to war by their elders and died in great numbers. What was new here was this sense of futility that robbed one even of the ability to honor the dead for their sacrifice. By contrast, World War II could once again offer a cause to die for even as it brought the new disenchantment of the massive aerial bombardment of urban centers. As with disenchantment with religion, what was at stake was less an intellectual attack on heroism but the inability, at a gut level, to take heroism seriously in the first place. Someone who seems heroic must either be a scoundrel trying to deceive others or a fool to have bought into such nonsense.

As with fellow veteran J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis' use of fantasy can be seen as an attempt to become reenchanted with heroism. For example, in Narnia, the children are able to abandon the air raids of World War II for a land in which chivalry is still possible. This reenchantment must be understood as something distinct from enchantment. The horrors of the World Wars were real and there can be no going back. That being said, the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien were attempts to acknowledge the incomprehensible horror of what they experienced yet still allow for heroism. If the blood and the mud were real, the courage shown by the men was equally real.

This project of using fantasy to resurrect heroism must be understood within a larger effort to bring about the reenchantment with religion. Was it not that earlier generation of disenchanted believers, with their mixture of Christian ritual now supplemented with a sense of duty to king and country and a confidence in progress all while being hopelessly naive regarding the implications of industrialized warfare, that had sent all those young men to die? Perhaps, it was not heroism that was obsolete, but the ideologies of modernity? (See Joseph Loconte's Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War.)

If one could recover heroism, perhaps it could lead back to faith and to a religion that might once again be relevant to a modern world. As Screwtape, the Satan of Lewis' disenchanted world, notes, the very fact that non-believers (much like the teenage Lewis, who was then an atheist) march off to war, to give themselves to a cause larger than themselves places them at risk of becoming open to the "enemy." Part of what is going on here is the ability to believe in things that are beyond the physical senses. Disenchantment works precisely by taking the physical as the gold standard of what is real. Thus, before the debate even begins, the spiritual has already lost to be relegated to being less real. The moment we introduce something that is non-physical yet more real than the world of the senses, the spell of disenchantment is broken and the process of reenchantment can begin.

Regardless of this wider religious context, a major aspect of Lewis and Tolkien's legacy to fantasy as a genre has been a kind of optimistic faith in heroism in the face of modern cynicism. (In Lord of the Rings, this optimism is only sharpened by the fact that the book is fundamentally a tragedy.) Thus, it could only be expected that if Lewis and Tolkien represented a kind of enchantment with heroic fantasy, it would produce a backlash of disenchanted fantasy. The most important example of this has been George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. This series is a repeated exercise in both the physical and ideological murder of heroism. Those like Ned Stark and his son Robb, who risk themselves doing the right thing, do not come out ahead. It is not even that they die achieving some noble goal. On the contrary, they come to ignominious ends marked by utter futility. On the other side, you have the anti-heroism of Jaime Lannister. Jaime commits regicide and incest even as the former probably saved lives and he is faithful to his sister as his one true love. To Martin's credit, Jaime fails to be a simple caricature of chivalry. Rather, (much like the more comic Harry Flashman), readers can still love Jaime for his simple honesty in knowing himself to be a scoundrel. In a world without moral absolutes, hypocrisy is the only sin and honesty in one's sinfulness the only virtue.             

I am Engaged to a Wonderful Jewish Asperger Girl (Part II)

(Part I)

So how did I propose to my one and only dream Jewish Asperger girl? Well, like in most relationships I suspect, she really proposed to me while allowing me the pretense of going through the motions of asking her to maintain the facade of my manly control in this relationship. So a few weeks ago Miriam announced to me that she intended to have an engagement party in August. Naturally, I was curious as to who would play the role of the groom at this engagement party and decided to volunteer my services before some other guy tried out for the part. This past Sunday, I took Miriam to the Aquarium of the Pacific. In the last post, I mentioned that Miriam's special interest is the South Pacific. It is actually much more specific than that; it is in Palau. In case you have never heard of Palau they are a group of islands several hundred miles to the east of the Philippines. (Lionel Spiegel had heard of them because of some of the tropical life off its coasts.)

(Here I passed her test to find Palau on a map, thus making myself a suitable partner for marriage. Naturally, any person with designs on world conquest has to know something about geography.)


The aquarium possesses an entire section on coral reefs based on the ones off Palau. Thus making it the perfect set piece to stand in for Miriam's favorite place in the universe.

How to make it a surprise? The disadvantage of being an Asperger is that it makes you a really bad liar. The advantage of dating an Asperger is that they are very easy to lie to. So I simply told Miriam that I was taking her out on a simple date to the aquarium with a picnic dinner. She believed me. To confirm her belief she checked on a bottle of wine we had just bought to see if it was still in its place. It was. I simply grabbed it afterward when she was not looking and stuck it in my knapsack.

So we headed to the aquarium. As a good boyfriend, I obviously let Miriam take the lead and she took me straight to the Palau exhibit. That finished we went through the rest of the museum. (For some strange reason the people who run the aquarium think that people want to do things that have no connection to Palau like pet sharks.) Heading out of the aquarium, I suggested that we go back one more time through Palau. I then told her to find the most magical place in the exhibit. She parked herself right in front of the red snapper fish. (Miriam, like me, tends to associate love with eating even as she fails to apply this philosophy to its logical conclusion of kitty and human.) While having her stare into the fish tank, I stood behind her and said: "I know nothing of the customs of Palau, how they ask certain questions, but as a western imperialist, I feel entitled to simply make up whatever Palauan customs I wish. So I going to do it this way. Miriam, would you turn around?" She turned around and I asked her the question that was burning on my mind at the moment. "Would you have dinner with me by the shore?"

So we walked to the shore and had a sunset picnic dinner with leechee fruit, which grows in Palau, for dessert. Afterward, we walked along the shore toward the setting sun. I then had Miriam look out to over the water to the sun and once again spoke to her: "This is the closest we can get to Palau without a boat or plane, but I promise we will go there eventually."

She then turned around, and I had pulled out the bottle of wine. She then went into gasps of "oh my god" a bunch of times, before eventually kindly allowing me to ask her an embarrassing question that did not involve food.

I already know where we are going for our honeymoon. I hear some of the islands near the Philippines are quite magnificent. The natives do not particularly care for nuclear weapons so I guess I will have to give up on conquest.

   

Stephen Brush on the Whig Narrative of Science

In response to my post yesterday about Dan Brown and early modern science, Lionel Spiegel pointed me to a piece written by Dr. Stephen G. Brush on the Whig narrative of science in the introduction to his book, Nebulous Earth: The Origin of the Solar System and the Core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys. In regards to the back and forth shift in scientific consensus between the monistic dualistic theories of whether planets evolve with or without the aid of stars, Brush notes:

For the historian of science, this uncertainty about the correct answer does have one important advantage. It undermines the tendency to judge past theories as being right or wrong by modern standards. This tendency is the so called "Whig interpretation of the history of science" that one usually finds in science textbooks and popular articles. The Whig approach is to start from the present theory, assuming it to be correct, and ask how we got there. For many scientists this is the only reason for studying history at all. ...
But Whiggish history is not very stisfactory if it has to be rewritten every time the "correct answer" changes. Instead, we need to look at the cosmogonies or planetogonies of earlier centuries in terms of the theories and evidence available at the time. (Pg. 4)

This tendency to judge by modern standards unfortunately goes far beyond science and infects the entire stream of popular history, particularly all discussions about women and the interactions of people of different races or creeds. It is meaningless to talk about whether women in different societies were more free or less free or whether certain societies were "tolerant." The real questions that should be asked are what circumstances lead to more hierarchical or egalitarian relations with the underlying assumption that there are no better or worse system just different equally reasonable reactions to different circumstances.

Agora’s Two Acts

I finally got around to watching Agora. My friend Lionel Spiegel got a hold of a copy and so, armed with popcorn, we got ready to wage merciless Mystery Science Theater 3000 against the movie's Whig biases. Agora tells the story of the female pagan philosopher Hypatia, who was murdered by a Christian mob, and the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria at the hands of Christians. I therefore expected a highly simplistic movie with virtuous enlightened pagans living in paradise and vicious intolerant Christians ruining everything and bringing about the "Dark Ages." I must admit, though, that the movie turned out much better than the trailers had led me to expect, managing for the most part to be fair to the actual historical events. This is until the second act of the film.

First off, full credit has to be given to the set designers for their breathtaking reconstruction of late fourth century Alexandria. This has to go down as one of the best reconstructions of a pre-modern city in the history of film. I was not even so bothered by the lack of mud; this still being the Roman Empire. Next, you have Ashraf Barhom's film stealing supporting role as the Christian monk Ammonius. If I had seen this movie earlier I would have tried showing at least parts of it to my 111 class as part of our unit on Christianity. Barhom's portrayal of Ammonius fits precisely into the Rodney Stark model of religious outreach that I presented. Ammonius preaches on the streets of Alexandria to crowds, picks debates with pagans and performs "miracles" (in his case walking through fire), but what makes Ammonius effective is his charismatic charm, which allows him to form relationships with individual people. This allows him to attract, not massive crowds in single dramatic speeches, but to slowly win over individuals, in the case of the movie Hypatia's slave Davus. This is essentially how I imagine Paul preaching and winning converts. Whatever you might think of his actions, this is a man that you like and can understand why others might change their lives around to convert to his religion and follow him.

Anchored by Barhom's Ammonius, the film actually does manage to offer a nuanced portrayal of Christianity, where, even if Christians are still the villains of the story in the end, there is a recognition that the world of late antiquity was not completely black and white. If the Christian mob ends up sacking the Library, it is only after the pagans' started the fight. In keeping with the narrative of the slow, quite non-dramatic spread of Christianity, the pagans find the tables turned on them by the unexpected size of the Christian counter-attack, leading one of the pagan leaders to exclaim: "who knew that there were so many Christians?"

If the movie had ended after the first act, I would have been on my feet acclaiming this movie as one of the greatest historical films ever, one that could allow Christians to burn down the Great Library of Alexandria and maintain some sense of nuance. The second act, though, with Hypatia's conflict with Bishop Cyril, leading to her death, manages to fall into all the Whig anachronisms I feared. First, there is Hypatia's grappling with the problem of the elaborate system epicycles, circles on top of the planet's circular orbits, in the Ptolemaic geocentric solar system. Even this is well done and worthwhile as a portrayal of the necessary thought processes on the road to heliocentrism. The fact that Hypatia is made out to be a heliocentrist is also not a problem, even if we have no evidence that she was, as the belief was found among the ancient Greeks. The film though decides to go one better and has Hypatia preempt Kepler in the theory of elliptical orbits, necessary in order to avoid the problem of epicycles. If you are going to go that far then why not have her ask why planets move in elliptical orbits and come up with Newtonian mechanics or even Einstein's Theory of Relativity? Then there is the crude misogyny of Bishop Cyril as he quotes Paul's Epistle to Timothy about the role of women. (Anyone who sits in smug judgment of pre-modern patriarchy without considering the inevitable logic of a highly militarized society, in which women do not serve in the military, has failed to engage in due historical thinking unfit to comment on historical events.) In keeping with this theme of misogyny, Cyril levels the ultimate patriarchal accusation of witchcraft against Hypatia even though the charge of witchcraft did not come into common use until the fifteenth century. (Sorcery is a completely different issue.)

No, we have no reason to assume that Hypatia could have jump started the Scientific Revolution in late antiquity Alexandria only to be stopped by Church misogyny. The story of Hypatia and the downfall of Greco-Roman civilization is tragic enough without that. By all means, go watch this movie for the first act; if you feel so inclined, try to stomach the second.

Meeting Patrick Rothfuss

Last night I went with Lionel Spiegel to meet Patrick Rothfuss, who was speaking at a Borders in Northern Virginia. For those of you who are not familiar with him, Rothfuss is one of the leading fantasy writers today. My only hesitation in putting him in the league of Tolkien as one of the greatest fantasy writers ever is that he has only written one book so far, the Name of the Wind. I will say that Rothfuss' Kvothe is the most interesting lead character in a fantasy since Thomas Covenant. Fantasy is a genre that usually focuses on building interesting worlds, populated by odd side characters to take over the story, leaving the main character trapped in the role of hero. It is Rothfuss' gift as a writer that can create a world as interesting as he does with so many great side characters and still have them play second to Kvothe.

I went to the bookstore simply for the pleasure of meeting a man whose work I so admired in the flesh and to hear him talk about his work, perhaps even to catch an unguarded slip as to what is going to happen in his next book, Wise Man's Fear, which fans have been waiting three years now for. What I was completely unprepared for was how much fun Rothfuss was in person as he mixed responding to questions with reading various pieces of his, including a pathologically hilarious gerbil story and yes the prologue of his next book. Writing is a solitary task and one has no reason to expect authors, even those who can create personable characters, to have it themselves. Watching Rothfuss, I was struck by the fact even if he lacked the romance cover long red hair of Kvothe, (in fact the original cover for the book was dropped because it looked too much like a romance novel) here was Kvothe, with all of his wit and charm, in the flesh. Even if I am unable to convince you to try reading a nearly 700-page work of fantasy, I would still recommend, if you have the chance, going to see Rothfuss on his book tour. He is worth it all for himself and if I cannot convince you to read him, seeing him perform might.

I will be circumspect as to what Rothfuss spoke about as he asked at the beginning that there be no video recordings for fear that something could come off the wrong way and end up on Youtube. (The speech was an adult affair, though hardly smut for smut's sake, and not for children, even if Name of the Wind is perfectly fine.) There were a few things that I think should be alright and worth mentioning. Rothfuss spoke passionately about the value of fantasy as speaking its own truth even as a work of fiction. He challenged the assembled group of, assumingly, fantasy lovers, as to what meant more to them, Narnia or Peru. (Asking forgiveness from my friend who studies Early Modern Peru, I must confess that I raised my hand for the former.) I asked him what he would advise aspiring fantasy writers as to how to avoid the trap of rewriting Tolkien and turning out clichés. (Another of Rothfuss' strengths is how he took a story with a hero going to magic school to learn to be a wizard that could have so easily turned into a cliché and made it stand on its own as something clearly within the fantasy tradition and yet so original.) His advice was to start off at the age of twelve and read a fantasy book a day. (At least that is what he did.) If you understand the genre you can work with it, know what has already been done and avoid repeating it.

If I have talked about how talented Rothfuss is, I would end by noting what a nice person he is as well. After speaking, he posed for a picture with the entire crowd and stayed to sign books. It was close to an hour by the time I got to him and there were still plenty of people behind me. These are people who have already bought the book and will likely buy the sequel no matter what. Rothfuss has nothing to gain, particularly as he does have better things, like his newborn son and the mother of his child, to deal with.

I went back and forth as to whether to bring my copy to be signed. I picked it up off a library used pile. In the end, I agreed to bring it; Rothfuss was a fellow follower of the vow of poverty known as graduate school and I do have Wise Man's Fear on pre-order whenever it comes out. Rothfuss was kind enough to sign it to Izgad. (It is easier to say and remember than Benzion.)

Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part II)

(Part I)

I wanted to scream at the audience around me: don't you people understand. This society of nineteenth-century Victorian England was one in which the vast majority of people, except for a narrow elite, lived in a poverty that we cannot even imagine. Do you know what it means to have a society in which starving to death is a real issue? The only thing saving our elites from falling in with the wretched masses is the force of tradition. Anyone who plays with convention is pulling at the spider's web that keeps not only them feed but everyone around them. I would like to see you tolerate such a person. This was particularly true for women, who were limited in their labor prospects and lacked the sort of education that might have allowed them to hold well-paying jobs even if society let them. Can you imagine the position of a widowed mother, living with the trappings of wealth and its expectations, knowing that without her husband to support them there is nothing to stop her and her daughter from sinking into abject poverty? And by poverty we do not mean food stamps, but the slow demise over years due to malnutrition and disease as you work yourself to death. The only thing saving this person is the prospect of a good match. How dare you any of you smirk or feel superior when such a person decides that whether her daughter is in "love" might not be of utter importance.

We now move from the film's pointless introduction to having Alice fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. My father often likes to say that comedy is the hardest genre to perform. Comedy is an either/or proposition. Either you are funny or you are not. There is no in-between or partial success. With drama you can always hope to salvage something even if the project fails as a whole. Humor is not a science; it is something that happens sometimes, but cannot be created at will. You can have genuinely talented people who get out there and, through no one's fault, the material just does not work. Without a question, there were some talented people in this production. The team of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter is nothing to be laughed at. (Just watch Sweeny Todd.) There is no logical reason that this team should not have once again produced something absolutely magical. Except that for some unfathomable reason the material just failed to click.

This failure may have had something to do with the fact that, as Lionel put it, they tried to mix whimsical fantasy with epic fantasy. It was not enough that Alice should explore this strange and downright psychedelic world; the film also had to have her go on a quest to defeat the Red Queen, restore the White Queen to her rightful place and defeat the Jabberwocky. Tolkien just does not go with Carroll. This could have still worked as tongue and cheek. The problem is that of all comedy, I would argue that tongue and cheek is the hardest. For tongue and cheek you have to succeed on two counts. In terms of comedy, you still have to actually be funny and as drama you still need to produce characters who make sense and whom the audience connects with on a deep emotional level. One can always try to cover trash by saying that it is only meant tongue and cheek. Saying that something is meant only tongue and cheek can in no way be an excuse for bad writing. I have so much respect for people like Joss Whedon, J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer who use tongue and cheek and make it work. To all those who turn their noses up at their work as popular entertainment that "anyone" could do, I say give it a try.

I could not end this without saying something about what happens back on the top side of the rabbit hole once Alice comes back to her Victorian world. She rejects her upper-class twit of the year and approaches her father's old partner about a really radical business venture, trading with China. Someone needs to offer the writers a history lesson and explain that even our stuffy Victorians were up to trading with China; there was nothing radical in the nineteenth-century about such a prospect. The West even fought several opium wars to open China to western trade. Even people in the Middle Ages were imaginative enough to try trading with China. This was how we got Columbus accidentally discovering America in the first place.

I really wanted to like this movie. I was waiting for it since I heard about it this past summer. I even had a poster of it up as my desktop background. (This proved to be a mistake as some of my little Haredi cousins wanted to use my laptop and started screaming about the not "tznisudic," immodestly dressed, girl in the picture.) However much I respect the people behind this film, it was a failure and not even having it in 3-D could save it.

Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part I)

This afternoon I went on a belated birthday outing with my friend Lionel Spiegel to go see Alice in Wonderland. I should have been more cautious; the last time I went to the movies with him we ended up nearly laughing through Transformers wiping Israel off the map. (Since both of these were my choices, he should probably start questioning my judgment when it comes to going to movies in the future.) A number of loosely assorted observations related to the film.

We went to the Regal movie theater in downtown Silver Spring. The projector crashed right by the opening credits and had to be restarted. This resulted in the movie starting about forty minutes late. To the credit of the movie people, they offered everyone a free movie pass as an apology for the inconvenience. This is the second time I have watched a conventional movie in 3-D and so far I am not impressed. The glasses gave a shaded taint to the screen. Maybe this was a problem with how the film was shot, the theater's lighting or the glasses themselves, but I had a difficult time seeing the screen. I ended up watching a fair amount of the film without the glasses even though the screen obviously was blurry without them. The other problem with the glasses is that they are quite uncomfortable for anything more than a few minutes. When using them I found myself holding them up in front of my face instead of letting them sit on my nose. Maybe it would be a good idea if they produced opera style glasses for 3-D movies. The fact that I did not have a comfortable time may very well have influenced how I took in the actual content of the film.

The film is less an adaption of the Lewis Carroll novel as it is a sequel along the lines of the excellent Robin Williams Hook film, where a grown-up Peter Pan has to go back to Neverland to save his children from Captain Hook. Alice opens with a stereotypical display of stuffy narrow-minded hypocritical Victorians as a grown-up Alice is faced with the prospect of an arranged marriage with a nobleman, worthy of going for the Monty Python upper-class twit of the year award, in the hopes of saving her family fortune. Someone needs to give the writers a history lesson. In the nineteenth century, bankrupt aristocrats were marrying the offspring of traders and industrialists in the hopes of saving their family fortunes, not the other way around. (Tim Burton actually got this right in his earlier wonderful cartoon Corpse Bride, featuring two of the stars of this film. He even was courteous enough, in Corpse Bride, to allow for the existence of a loving arranged marriage.)

I had an idea, which Lionel thinks should be called the Chinn rule. Historical cultures should be given the same treatment as present-day ethnic groups in terms of protection from negative stereotypes. A film in which a young black woman struggles to overcome the violent brutish and ignorant black culture around her, where all the women are on welfare and on drugs and all the men are on drugs and in jail would be quickly tagged as racist. A film about a modern Arab girl that is only about her escaping a brutish culture of arranged marriages and honor killings would also be racist. (Such depictions of Arabs are still the norm, but that is a separate story. On this topic I must say that either this season of 24 is even more horrible in its treatment of Muslims than usual or I am becoming more "tolerant," God help me.) It was okay for Charles Dickens to use comical stereotypes for the nineteenth century. He was part of that time period. This is like blacks and the N-word. Blacks are allowed to use it; if you are not black you have no business saying that word.

Let us be honest, people use negative stereotypes of past cultures for the same disgusting and immoral reason as they go after present day cultures; putting other people down makes people feel better about themselves. Watching stupid intolerant Victorians make fools of themselves makes me, living in the comfort of the twenty-first century, feel intelligent and, more importantly, really tolerant just like being able to cluck my tongue at illiterate black criminals makes me, as a white person, feel civilized and sophisticated. The hypocrisy of prejudicially being able to tag others as intolerant is just sickening. At least blacks are still alive and can knock the living day lights out of bigots (not that I encourage violence) like they deserve. The Victorians, aside from sending the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, have no one, but historians like me to defend them.


(To be continued …)

The Screwtape Letters or Theater That is Literally Satanic

After learning that our lives if not our very souls may rest on our willingness to maintain pure Ashkenazi halakhah, Lionel Spiegel and I left Rabbi Binyamin Hamburger's lecture to Metro down to Washington DC to catch a performance of the Screwtape Letters. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Screwtape Letters is a short novel by C. S. Lewis about the Undersecretary of Temptation, Screwtape, writing to his nephew, Wormwood, who is a field agent on earth, a junior tempter, and advising him as how to best keep his patient out of the hands of the "enemy" and deliver him to our "father down below." Basically this is a guide book how to spiritually destroy people. I consider it to be one of my all time favorite novels. Since I am not dating anyone at the moment, I decided, in the spirit of Prof. Henry Higgins, to take my best guy friend out. The tickets were out of my cheap Jewish graduate student price range so I opted to try to go for the $10 standing room only tickets. One more advantage of taking a guy out; you can get away with sitting around waiting to see if we could buy tickets to stand on our feet for an hour and a half. The theater only sold standing room tickets for sold out shows so we had some tense moments waiting. If only Screwtape would come out and offer to exchange a ticket for my soul; now that would have made things interesting. Thankfully we were able to get the standing room tickets and did not have to resort to any extreme measures.

Long ago I had this idea to adapt Screwtape for the stage of the Haredi summer camp I worked at. Obviously we would have needed to Jewify the whole thing or at least remove the explicitly Christian elements. (I can only be subversive up to a point.) We could update the story from bombs falling on England to terrorist attacks. I also had a more radical idea. The problem with presenting Screwtape in visual medium is the complete lack of action within the story. It is a demon sitting in his office writing off letters. How do you make that worth watching? I would have told the story from the perspective of Wormwood on earth interacting with his patient and the rest of the world much as Bruce Willis' character does in Sixth Sense. In between the main scenes, we would switch to Screwtape in his office dictating his advice and commenting on the situation. This would put an interesting twist on the climax. In the final letter Screwtape assails his nephew for his ultimate failure and prepares to eat him as the patient has come to see him and the role he plays in his life. In my play the patient was going to turn around and see Wormwood for the first time as the audience has seen him all along.

Max McLean's version of Screwtape also updates the story along the terrorist lines. What it does not change is the Screwtape focused story with all the difficulties that come with it. McLean, as Screwtape, is sitting around his comfy den in Hell in a red smoking jacket writing off letters. McLean's solution is to bring Screwtape's secretary, Toadpipe, into the story. While Screwtape has all the lines Toadpipe, hissing Gollum like, is at his side taking dictation, and acting out Screwtape's examples, whether as the patients mother or the different types of women that Hell has sought to encourage through their control of the fashions of the day. This is not enough to save the play from being an oral recitation of the novel. I am a big believer in the value of oral storytelling as a performance art. That being said McLean, while fun to watch, does not compare to John Cleese's turn as Screwtape for the audio book. (It seems that Andy Serkis recently performed as Screwtape for a BBC radio production. This I have to check out.) This show is certainly worth watching, particularly for fans of Lewis' work. I am still waiting for someone to take Lewis' more mature (non-Narnia) work and give it the stage or film production it deserves. McLean's company is working on a production of The Great Divorce. I will be waiting on the cheap tickets line for it.

Rabbi Binyamin Hamburger - Customs of Ashkenaz

Sunday afternoon, Lionel Spiegel and I went to hear Rabbi Binyamin Hamburger speak at the Yeshiva of Greater Washington. Rabbi Hamburger is a Haredi scholar from Israel who specializes in the culture of Ashkenazic (Germanic) Jews. This is part of a personal crusade of his to support the practice of Ashkenazic Judaism. Rabbi Hamburger has also written a book on Jewish false messiahs and their opponents. Rabbi Hamburger maintains the same sorts of biases that one usually finds in Haredi history writers. For example, his work on messianism is a rabbinic apology. The rabbis protected by their knowledge and faithfulness to Jewish tradition are capable of withstanding the siren's song of false messiahs. That being said, Rabbi Hamburger is capable of dealing with academic literature so he, while dangerous, can be interesting and worthwhile to listen to. Here are my notes from the lecture; as usual all mistakes are mine.



It is difficult to talk about Ashkenaz. German Jewry is the kernel of the vast majority of Jews in the world. Ponevezher Rav was once going to a non-religious community to speak. He wanted to talk about Shabbos, and Kosher, but was told that he could not speak about these things because many in the community were not religious. So he asked what he could speak about. He was told to speak about Judaism. We can start with the origins of Ashkenaz. We know that the two centers were Israel and Babylon. Babylonian Jews went to Spain and Israel Jews went to Italy. The two main cities were Bari and Trento. "Ki miBari tetzei Torah udevar Hashem me'Otranto" was what they said then.  From there they went to Lucca. Here is where we get R. Moshe b. Kolonymous, who was brought by Charlemagne to Mainz. There were very few Jews during the early Middle Ages maybe 10,000-20,000. We consider Germany to be the biggest anti-Semites. In truth, we never see a complete expulsion from Germany. Pockets of French Jewry had some influence on Eastern Europe and Central Europe, not the Rhineland.

R. Moshe Isserles, living in sixteenth-century Poland, in general, goes with Ashkenazic customs, though at times he has more recent Polish customs. An example of the difference between Old Ashkenaz and New Ashkenaz is Shofar. Saadiah Gaon had a wavering tikiah. We have a straight tikiah, this comes from Spain. Old Ashkenaz has a circular shevarim. New Ashkenaz was influenced by other countries. There were pockets that held on to the Old Ashkenaz. Skver Hasidim still go with the Old Ashkenazic way. There was a major controversy over prayer in the eighteenth century. Hasidim brought in their own text based on Lurianic thought. Rabbi Ezekiel Landau attacked such changes. Many Hasidim, today, claim that they come from Spain. This is absurd. R. Judah the Pious claimed that people can die because they change a hymn even to change one hymn for another. There is a story among Vishnitz Hasidim that they stopped saying piyyutim for a while. A plague broke out and they sought spiritual causes and decided to bring back piyyutim, based on the teachings about dangers of stopping/altering piyyutim. This was in the time of the 'Ahavas Yisroel' of Vizhnitz (past Rebbe). Worms had a custom not to eat dried fruit. They were concerned about worms. (No pun intended.)

Why is it important? There is a strong claim of tradition defended by rabbis from one generation to another. Even Maimonides, from Sephard, sticks up for Ashkenaz. He attacked the order of calling people up to the Torah. He notes that one would expect Sephardim to be messed up, but Ashkenazim should know better. Rabbeinu Ashur (Rosh) became a rabbi in Toledo after fleeing from Germany and influenced Sephardic Jewry. He attacked the traditions of Sephard and only trusted the tradition from Germany. Rabbi Yitzchak b. Moshe Or Zaruah was a leading sage in Central Europe. He was questioned as to why one should make Kiddush in shul Friday night. He defended this custom by appealing to Ashkenazic tradition of the Rhineland and attacking his opponent for daring to question that tradition.


Q&A

The custom of cutting the hair of three-year-old boys comes from Arabs. It does not come to even the Hasidim until the twentieth century. We have evidence from the Middle Ages of cutting the hair after just a few weeks. Ashkenazim were never into beards but were very careful with peiyos. This is the exact opposite of Chabad. They were not so concerned about beards for people who were out in the world (as opposed to religious functionaries within the Jewish community). But they did have something with peiyos, see e.g. depictions of Wolf Heidenheim.

I asked Rabbi Hamburger about the debate between Dr. Avraham Grossman and Dr. Haym Soloveitchik about the origins of Ashkenaz. Dr. Soloveitchik argues that Ashkenaz from the beginning was Babylonian based. Rabbi Hamburger responded that Dr. Soloveitchik is a genius and that he has not seen his evidence. Perhaps if he saw this evidence he might be convinced. That being said everyone seems to assume that Ashkenaz comes from Israel. Dr. Soloveitchik might be a genius but the Rosh was pretty big too.

Whig Propaganda Coming Soon to a Theater near You

Lionel Spiegel has tipped me off to the coming movie Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It tells the story of the late antique pagan female philosopher Hypatia, who was murdered by a Christian mob. Judging from the preview, the film seems to hit the basic Whig and feminist talking points. The fourth century is the downfall of civilization with the coming of fanatical misogynistic Christianity, who also burn down the Great Library at Alexandria. Might it be too much to ask that the movie actually give some context to these events and actually deal with some of the complexities of the political situation beyond pagans were good and tolerant and Christians were nasty and intolerant? And they have the nerve to call this a true story.

Hypatia was not a modern scientist nor was she a modern feminist. She was a Platonist philosopher who lived in the period of late antiquity. Of course, this would actually require some actual background on philosophy in late antiquity. The moment you treat her as anything besides this, you are no longer dealing with history but with fiction. Any attempt to consciously pass off such fiction as history is to engage in falsehood.

Transformers Wipes Israel off the Map

Yesterday I went with my good friend Lionel Spiegel to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I will not comment on the movie itself other than to say that it was of Mystery Science Theater 3000 quality. Lionel and I were laughing our heads off the entire movie and not in a good way; for one thing, we were probably being a nuisance to everyone around us. What really caught my attention was how the movie deals with Israel and the Middle East. As with much of what is wrong with how Israel gets reported on in the media, this is a sin of omission rather than commission. The final battle between the Autobots, along with their mostly American allies, and the Decepticons, led by the Fallen (a Monty Python worthy evil villain), takes place around an Egyptian Pyramid, along the border with Jordan. For those of you not familiar with the geography of the Middle East, here is a map of the area in question.

As you can see, while Egypt is very close to Jordan, there is a little resort town called Elat separating Egypt from Jordan. I have been to Elat; it is a beautiful place, perfect for anyone with a sense of political humor. From Elat, you can look out and see Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all while remaining firmly in the State of Israel. For some strange reason, Michael Bay failed to notice that Israel lies between Egypt and Jordan. (This is all the worse as Steven Spielberg is listed as a producer. One would have hoped that he would have jumped on such a mistake.)

This removal of Israel becomes even more ridiculous when the humans put out a call for help to the Egyptian military, whose country they are in, and the Jordanians and several Jordanian helicopters take part in the battle, mainly by getting blown out of the sky. Last I checked the Middle East superpower in the air is Israel, not Jordan. Why couldn’t we have Israel jets shooting it out with the Decepticons to save the world? This could have even been a good opportunity to stick in a peace process message by having Israel fight alongside the Muslim countries of Egypt and Jordan. Particularly since, even in real life, Israel is at peace with both of these countries.