Shylock’s Dilemma: To Judge Is to Be Judged

In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as payment for a debt. Considering that Shylock is the villain and a rather unpleasant character (whether or not he is also an anti-Semitic caricature), it is easy to lose sight of how formidable a challenge Shylock presents. His argument is unchallengeable. Antonio freely entered the contract knowing the risks and failed to pay back the loan. Shylock has every right to his pound of flesh and no power on Earth can stop him. Not even the Venetian Court can refuse Shylock as to do so would undermine the very notion of contract, the foundation of the State. To say no to Shylock would simply be to destroy the State and leave Shylock’s right to revenge unharmed. This is similar to the White Witch’s claim to kill the traitor Edmund. For Aslan to deny her a kill would be to go against the Emperor’s magic and destroy Narnia. 

Antonio’s flesh was valuable to Shylock as an excuse to kill Antonio but also to strike at the Christian society around him. It was not be enough for Shylock to knife Antonio in a dark alley with the authorities privately deciding to not pursue the matter. Shylock needed to kill Antonio in public with the court’s full agreement that he was right and that they were powerless to stop him. Thus, any attempt to argue with Shylock or ask for mercy simply demonstrated that he was right and brought him ever closer to his moment of glory when he would be able to sink his knife into Antonio's body with the full consent of a defeated court. This enflamed Shylock's desire for revenge and made him less likely to compromise. 

Portia is able to defeat Shylock, in the end, precisely because she refuses to fight him on his chosen ground. She acknowledges that he has the right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body. The catch is, of course, that Shylock cannot shed a drop of Antonio’s blood. Portia’s insight is that Shylock, by pursuing Antonio, has also made himself vulnerable to the charge that he is trying to murder Antonio. If Shylock is going to put Antonio on trial for his pound of flesh there is no reason why Shylock should not be on trial for attempted murder, particularly as it was Shylock who decided to initiate this case in the first place. Here lies Shylock's dilemma. He might be perfectly justified in claiming Antonio's flesh but he cannot do so without convicting himself of murder. Thus, it is not enough that Shylock is right. He still loses. (My father should take note that I am conceding a point he has long tried to make to me that sometimes being right is not enough.)

One could ask, how foolish is Shylock to believe that a Christian court was actually going to let him kill one of their own. Of course, they were going to find an excuse to turn this around and punish the Jew. Shylock was blind to this possibility because he thought that Venetian society simply hated him as a Jew even as they needed him as a moneylender, demonstrating their hypocrisy. Since he believed that Venice had no intellectual case against him, it made sense that all he needed to do was come with facts and logic and he would smash through any opposition. No amount of prejudice could deny that Antonio freely entered this grisly bargain and that the State needs contracts to be enforced even unpleasant ones.

What happens, though, once we acknowledge that Venice was not run by hateful Christians, who deep down had a guilty conscious for their intellectually indefensible prejudice? What if it was something far more dangerous; people with a well-worked out narrative in which Shylock the Jew was a harmful outsider and that Venice was better off without him? All of a sudden, Antonio's murder was not an incidental part of Shylock's quest for justice, but the primary issue as it fits into that preexisting narrative about the Jew. Now Shylock was no longer someone who offered a necessary service, but a devil who tricked good Christians into mortgaging their very flesh. Such a Shylock cold be denied his bond with a clear conscience. One could even rob him of his wealth and threaten to kill him if he did not convert and believe that one was righteous for it. On the contrary, it was the people who thought that Shylock had a point and should be shown mercy who were guilty of murder and the moral corruption of the city.

Here the issue of whether Shylock was part of Venice or an outsider becomes important. If Venice could operate without him then Shylock, even if he was unpleasant and disliked, was part of the society no different from, if not the heart, perhaps the large intestine within the political body. As a part of Venice, all promises to him were sacred and must be followed even to the point of death. If Shylock was a foreign parasite then all promises were null and void and he could be lied to much in the same way that, except for radical Kantians, we accept that it is ok to lie to Nazis. Nazis are outside the web of moral responsibility so there never was an obligation to be truthful with them in the first place. By pursuing his pound of flesh, Shylock reminded Venice of why they might consider him an outsider in the first place. Thus, Shylock's argument, though correct, created a catch-22 and was invalidated by his very act of making it.

Shylock is important to our political discourse because all claims of absolute justice amount to a demand for a pound of flesh. The danger of demanding a pound of flesh is that, even when you are right, you are placing yourself on trial with your enemies, those who already possess a narrative to justify killing you, as the judges. To pursue such justice, therefore, requires a mind-blindness to not see that your enemies honestly believe that they are right to kill you and are not simply haters whose prejudices can be overcome by your carefully selected facts. 

Camp Chimerical Anti-Christianity: Facing the Consequences

A few years ago, for the fast day of Tisha B'Av, I wrote a hard-hitting post, raising some uncomfortable questions about the Jewish community. As that is one of my personal favorites, I decided to follow it up for this Tisha B'Av. My purpose is not to attack anyone and, for that reason, I have avoided names. I hope that my ambiguous feelings about my camping experience rather than hatred should be clear. As is often the case with me, I am more interested in asking questions that I find myself struggling with than in offering solutions.    

When I attended Haredi summer camps, I once played a villainous Spanish Inquisitor in a play. While waving a torch, I gave a speech about Judas Iscariot as the model traitorous Jew, which included a joke reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as well. I remember watching another play in which a priest murders the prince, who started asking difficult theological questions regarding Judaism, in order to set the Jews up for a blood libel. Both performances can be seen as anti-Christian. The difference between them is that while I expressed a "rational" opposition to Christianity, the other person made a chimerical assertion. Spanish inquisitors are historical facts. The figure of Judas did play an important role in medieval Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric. Even Christians would agree with me on this. By contrast, there is no evidence of Christian priests murdering Christian children in order to frame Jews just as there is no evidence of Jews murdering Christians for their blood. Christians can hope to negotiate with someone possessing a legitimate negative impression of historical Christians. Such a person can be convinced that modern-day Christians are different and not a threat. A person with a chimerical opposition to Christianity will never be convinced that Christians are not a threat even by the evidence of his own eyes as he already believes things about them that he never had any evidence to begin with. Such a person will inevitably sink into the black hole of conspiracy theories to the point where the lack of evidence for his beliefs will simply prove to him that there is a vast cover-up.

In regards to this story of a priest murdering a Christian to cover up the fact that Christianity is false, I am reminded of Israel Yuval's argument that Christians came to believe in the blood libel because they saw Jews kill their own children during the Crusades. If Jews would kill their own children so that they do not fall into the hands of Christians, might Jewish mothers poison their children's kugel if they thought they were attracted to Christianity? If Jews hated Christianity this much, surely Jews would gladly murder Christian children. Thus, Christians had "no choice" but to kill Jews in self-defense. Similarly, it would be reasonable for impressionable Jewish children in the audience, like myself, to conclude that if priests would kill Christian children to stop them from converting to Judaism, they would gladly kill Jewish children. The logical conclusion from this would be that, if we ever found ourselves in a position of power, we should kill Christians.

Let me be clear, this play about a murderous priest was in no way exceptional in how Christianity was portrayed at this Haredi camp. One of my favorite rebbes used to tell stories with his stock villain, "Father Schmutz" (dirt). When priests were not trying to start blood libels, they kidnapped Jewish children and held them in secret monasteries to try to convert them. In case you were wondering if this was just a matter of some overzealous teachers, the head counselor of this camp used to have a radio show, "Children's Stories of Inspiration." In addition to blatantly idolatrous stories that endorsed human sacrifices to angels and a Satan capable of acting independently of God, one of his stories involved a Father Francois murdering a Christian child in order to start a blood libel. His plan was thwarted when he was forced to take hold of the hand of the dead victim, who then refused to let go.

Installing the campers with a visceral hatred of Christianity as a religion and a fear of Christians as people were part of a conscious top-down effort. I doubt the camp administration wanted us to actually go out and harm any Christians. That being said, their jobs depended on demonstrating to parents that their children were being protected from outside "negative" influences. In an exercise of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the fact that these administrators were, ever so slightly, putting every Jew on the planet in danger clearly took a back seat.

What are the consequences of this kind of education? When the Passion movie came out, I told my father that I could not call it anti-Semitic for the simple reason that its portrayal of Jews was not worse than the portrayal of Christians that I was regularly fed in camp. My father, the assistant-head counselor of that camp, agreed with me. On a more serious note, consider the role played by Islamist schools in installing a pathological hatred of Jews, directly leading to Jews dying in terrorist attacks.


      


It is clear to me that not considering the children in this video and certainly their teachers as legitimate military targets (the kids are even in uniform and practicing military maneuvers) will lead to dead Jews. The problem is that any non-Jew can respond that Jews also indoctrinate their kids to hate and I have simply too much personal experience to point-blank deny that fact. So the administrators of my camp have real Jewish blood on their hands. Their actions have made it harder to form the necessary alliances needed to fight Islamic terrorism and save Jewish lives.

Now it needs to be said, that the people I am talking about are warm wonderful people that I gained much from. These are not anyone's stereotypes of hate mongers. I loved camp and many of my fondest memories come from there.  Coincidently, the staff member who played the murderous priest later became my tenth grade English teacher at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and taught me Julius Caesar (he was even good at his job). At the time, I did not see myself as being indoctrinated to hate and I still have my doubts as to calling this hate. Everything was framed in such a positive and loving way, which may have made it all the more insidious. There was much good to my camp; that being said, beyond the fun times and spiritual growth lay a dark side that needs to be faced.

The BZ and Miriam Wedding Skit

Aspergers are often accused of suffering from "mind blindness" and lacking a "theory of mind," a notion that other people think differently. I see this as a more general problem with the human mind. Aspergers, having the misfortune of being born with minds that are more different than most, simply are likely to reach a crisis moment in their mind blindness far sooner than most. It is possible for the neurotypical mind to spend a lifetime with neurotypicals of similar economic and social class and of the same creed and never realize that in fact other people are different. It is easy to intellectually say the words "everyone is different," but to, at a subconscious level, believe it requires work. A simple test to see if you suffer from mind blindness is to ask yourself if you believe that you are capable of forming empathetic links with others. If you do so despite the fact that human beings lack the means of engaging in telepathic communication then you need help not just for mind blindness, but for a general lack of consistent rationalist thinking. If you recognize that your sense of other people's feelings is merely your fantasy of what other people might be feeling, albeit a socially useful fantasy, then you can congratulate yourself for your hard won rationalism in the face of societal superstition. (See Neurotypical Menetal and Emotional Handicaps.)

I believe that everyone, Aspergers and neurotypicals, needs to work on their theory of mind skills. In addition to having logical and scientific reasoning integrated into one's daily life, another helpful method I have found is theater. In this I must admit a debt of gratitude to Dr. Anthony Beukas of the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society, from whom I learned this. There is something to be said about spending weeks and months in someone else's mind. You walk into the theater, from the moment you are first handed a script to the final curtain, you are someone else. Being a good actor does not just mean memorizing lines and blocking. The character needs to be a "real" person to you with a complete history full of thoughts, desires and motives that go beyond the script and inform every line spoken and every glance. To do this properly requires one to recognize and accept that the character being played is fundamentally different from oneself. One needs to take a step back and allow oneself to fade into the background to allow the character to come into existence as a true person.

Despite the fact that Miriam and I both are Aspergers, we are both different people with different interests and ways of reacting to the world. What being Aspergers gives us is a sense of being different from others and a recognition of a common set of developed survival mechanisms. For example Miriam is much more socially outgoing than I am,  much better at starting conversations and making friends. Meeting Miriam forces you to discard the stereotypes of Aspergers as cold and anti-social; she is anything but that. While our outward methods of social interaction are different, we both consciously work from a mental checklist of lines to deliver to people. In a way social interaction for us is just another type of theater in which you play a part. Above all else what we have in common is that we both learned a long time ago that the only way we were going to survive navigating through society is if we verbally explained our thoughts to others, instead of just imagining they would intuitively understand us, and had others verbally explain their thought to us, instead of imagining we could intuitively understand them. Miriam and I have a good relationship and understand each other fairly well not because we are so much alike, but because we are good at talking to each other, particularly about our differences.

Drawing from my theater experience, little game that I invented for us, as a means of thinking about our relationship and explaining how we relate to each other to others, is the BZ and Miriam skit. I play her and she plays me. She tends to play BZ as dour with a penchant for monologuing. I tend to play Miriam as jumpy and ecstatic with a touch more common sense than BZ. When we first gave a public performance of a BZ and Miriam skit at the kiddish her parents sponsored in our honor, BZ ended up lecturing the audience on the differences between ritual murder and blood libel charges with Miriam asking him if this made him happy and if he could please do the dishes while he talked.

Here is the BZ and Miriam skit from our wedding on October 30, 2011. For some reason I failed to notice that the wedding was scheduled at the same time as the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the New England Patriots. Even more mysterious is the fact that the sizable contingent of Steeler fans in my family came to the wedding and missed what was probably the highlight of the Steeler season. (Congratulation to New York Giant fans on beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl.)

          

Japan Jewish Relief: A Guest Post Plea

I was recently contacted by an old friend of mine from the Yeshiva Collage Dramatics Society, Felissa Elfenbein, (how a woman became a member of a guys theater group is a story for a different time). Felissa is working with Japan Jewish Relief and asked if I could help spread the word so I agreed to allow her to do a guest post.  


Benzion asked me how I became involved with helping Japan Jewish Relief as its Social Media Coordinator and I knew that the response would be more in depth then he expected.



From March 2007 until March 2008, I Iived in Hong Kong. Arriving at the end of March Pesach was fast approaching and I was still living in Corporate Housing waiting all of my stuff to arrive via cargo ship. With a kitchen the size of a closet in the US I knew that I needed to find somewhere to go for Pesach and that is when I met the amazing Chabad Rabbi in Hong Kong Rabbi Avzton. I spent Pesach Sedar at his family's table in Hong Kong.



I had to leave but I will never forget Hong Kong and would love to move back someday. To sort of stay connected I remained a member of their email list receiving all of their updates. Most are happy updates telling of special Shabbas Meals, Holiday Events, or Baby Births and Bar Mitzvahs. But there have been two series of updates that really impacted me they weren't the usual Shabbas emails. Rabbi Avtzon is the head Rabbi in Asia and the Far East. The first series of email was about the attack in Mumbai and specifically on the Chabad House there asking Jews around the world to unite in prayer for the family.



The second Series of email newsletters was about the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. I was already aware of the situation and helping to raise money so that Veterinarians could go over and help treat the animals that had survived, I write a Pet Blog so it made sense to join and post under the the Paws for Japan Campaign. I received the first email update from Rabbi Avzton in regards to Japan Jewish Relief on March 14th the day that Roy Somech with the help of Chabad of Asia and Tokyo had commissioned a Bakery in Sendai to bake bread for all of those who had no other source of food. I received several more updates always wanting to do something wishing I could go over to Japan to help. But the reality just out of reach as I don't speak Japanese. I read them all and kept blogging about the human animal bond in Japan about the hardships they were going through and what the rest of the world could do to help. Then the update arrived that was sent out on March 31st which ended with "Please read this update to see how we are responding and how you can help"

Obviously they were asking for money or a connection to supplies in Japan that would be cheaper to source or a delivery company that would deliver the goods at a discounted price so that they could feed more people with the money they were receiving. I don't have money to offer and certainly not in the amounts needed to help feed entire cities but I do have a pretty good grasp on Social Media and how to gain support from people all over the world who otherwise would not know about an organization. So I wrote an email to Rabbi Avzton without a second thought about how I could help develop a Social Media presence for Japan Jewish Relief. I set up the Facebook page and some "likes" started to trickle in. I went back to Rabbi Avtzon with an idea and by the next morning everything was in place for our $10,000 for 10,000 friends campaign. All it takes is a click of your computer mouse to make a major impact to help feed an entire city for a day.

Would you like to help Japan? A donor has stepped forward and promised to donate up to $10,000 dollars to Japan Jewish Relief if we can reach 10,000 Facebook fans! All you need to do is click the link and become a fan and ask your friends to become fans as well

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Japan-Jewish-Relief/199231426777913



There is a lot of work that remains to be done in Japan and it will take years for the country to rebuild but there are people who are hungry and in need of hope now. We are able to be on the ground in Japan when so many other organizations are being asked to wait until they can be self sustained in the most damaged areas they are trying to help. Our team is very small and everyone on the ground lives in Japan some like Roy are from Sendai and saw what an impact Japan Jewish Relief was making and asked to help and others are from the cities we are helping. We aren't using their meager and scare resources we are bringing them food and hope because they know that someone cares and wants to help from their hearts.

Kelly Hunter's Tempest Workshop

Recently Aspirations, the autism support group I work with here in Columbus, hosted Kelly Hunter to give a workshop on acting. Kelly Hunter is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and specializes in using theater to work with autistic children. (A later search revealed that she also guest starred in an episode of Doctor Who. I will leave it up to my readers to judge for themselves as to the relative importance of the two.)   

Ms. Hunter pulled off one of the most incredible teaching sessions I have ever seen. Beyond anything she can do for children, her performance was worth it simply as an exercise in teaching. She presented Shakespeare's The Tempest to a room full of parents and children and some were more interested than others. Not using the text of the play, she had everyone group up in a series of exercises to follow the various characters. For example there was an exercise with Miranda teaching Caliban to speak and Caliban becoming a little "too friendly" with Miranda. (In the play Caliban actually tries to rape Miranda in order to produce "little Calibans.") My Caliban was inspired by Gollum in Lord of the Rings. And then there was Ariel leading Ferdinand to Miranda and the two seeing each other with "new eyes." This is followed by Prospero's objection. My Prospero was based on Sean Connery.

Such a method of teaching avoids the trap of lecturing to people, of forcing them to simply memorize information and instead invites them into the process to take it on their own terms and make it their own. Furthermore this method plays to all three varieties of learning styles, auditory, visual and above all kinetic.

Inspired by this, I attempted to apply some of these ideas in my History 111 class the next day by asking students to group up and role play two different figures from different time periods that we had been discussing, Cicero and Giordano Bruno, and have them talk to each other. The students did not take well to this exercise and I was told that they much preferred being lectured at. Well you cannot win all your battles, but I am not going to give up on more theatrical history classes.    

  

The Bard and the Mouse

I recently attended the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of All's Well That Ends Well. It is not one of Shakespeare's better plays. The central plot is about a woman named Helena, who falls in love with Count Bertram, who rejects her. Helena succeeds in curing the King of France of an ailment with the help of a medical secret left to her by her late physician father. As a reward, she is given the choice of any man in the kingdom. She chooses Bertram. Bertram, though, runs off to Florence, resolving to never accept Helena as his wife until she can produce his ring on her finger and his child inside her. Helena pursues her Count and discovers that is seeking to bed Diana, the daughter of an innkeeper. Helena manages to switch places and gain Bertram's ring and baby. So we have a lead female character defined by her supposed intelligence and her willingness to throw herself after a man who neither wants nor deserves her. Bertram is someone who spends the entire play being a complete louse yet nothing bad actually happens to him. At the end of the play he is humiliated, but for some strange reason is now in love with the cause of his misfortune. I find this more problematic than anything in Taming of the Shrew.

There is one bright spot in the play in that, like all Shakespearean comedy, All's Well features a great comic side character, the foppish and cowardly Parolles. Parolles gets a deliciously naughty back and forth with Helena at the beginning on the uselessness of virginity and, later on, is tricked by his comrades into believing that he has been captured by the enemy and promptly agrees to sell out his own side. All's Well is worth it simply as an exercise in how Shakespeare relied on side characters, usually of relatively base origin, as comic relief and commentary on the higher born main characters. Parolles is essentially Falstaff of Henry IV parts I and II and Merry Wives of Windsor. Much Ado About Nothing has Constable Dogberry and Midsummer's Night's Dream has Puck and Bottom. All of these characters, in the hands of the right actors, are quite easily capable of taking over their respective plays.

There is another institution in modern times that does this, Disney. From almost the beginning, when Disney started to make full-length animation films, it worked on a model of taking well-established stories, adding in a few musical numbers and some wisecracking sidekicks. Pinocchio got Jiminy Cricket, a cat and a fish and Cinderella a band of talking mice. Flash forward to the more recent era of Disney animation, Little Mermaid gets a talking crab and a pair of henchmen eels; Beauty and the Beast gets talking dishes and Aladdin, a monkey and a parrot. It is almost always these side characters who are the most interesting parts of the film to the extent that the films would not work without them even though they are not that important to the actual plot.  

Considering all this, it is surprising that, with the exception of Lion King (Hamlet in the Sahara, complete with an evil uncle, a murdered king, a dithering hero and a ghost), Disney has not ventured to do Shakespeare. I, for one, would be curious to see what Disney could do with Midsummer's Night's Dream or The Tempest. Then again, considering what they did with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe not.

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.