My Lord; Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day on which we commemorate the savage murders of the best people in Europe. Those words, the plaintive cry that adorns the title of this post, were not cried by Jesus on his personal cross. They were cried by untold generations of Jews, bearing crosses that were not of their own construction: blamed for ritual murder, they were murdered ritually; at the wrong end of a holy sword, they lay dead and bleeding for a god they never knew.

Yom HaShoah is a dark day, an emotional day. Speak to me of the destruction of the Temples? I will tell you of the razing of the synagogues. Speak to me of the dispersion of the tribes? I will tell you of the humiliation of rabbis. Speak to me about the end of monarchy? Of an exile even within the land that our texts have taught us to believe was our own? I will tell you about children, beaten and torn; about grown men hiding in toilets; about gas chambers and ovens; dogs and lies and smoke. I will tell you about the burning of books: not the books that they burned in Paris and in Amsterdam; not the Sifrei Torah that they immolated in Spain, nor even the tractates of the Talmud, to which they put the torch throughout all of Western Europe. In Poland and in Germany they burned books of flesh and blood.

In the face of this barbaric raping of my history, I have little to no interest in Jewish festivals. I do not identify with mythical slaves that left a fantasised Egypt for their legendary sojourn in the wilderness. I do not care about the plight of a fictitious queen in her quest to thwart a fictitious plot against her people. Conquests and intrigues, battles and laws. This is the stuff of great fiction and, were I a Don Quixote, they may move me to don my hat and boldly say a prayer, but I am not. I love the texts because, on other grounds entirely, they intrigue me. Lifeless words on lifeless pages, they neither judge me nor appraise. It is I who judges and appraises them: I, in the form of the textual-critic, the philologist, the specialist in ancient Semitic languages and long-dead Israelite religions. I analyse them and I deconstruct, and yet I am myself impervious to their message. They speak too gently for ears tuned into traffic noise and cinemas.

Yom HaShoah speaks very loudly. I can hear it over the cacophany of distractions that wrack my brain. Unlike Yom HaKippurim, on which I must fast in order to sense the gravity, Yom HaShoah displays this gravity by hurtling me towards the ground, even while I eat and drink. It is a closed book to me. It lies beyond the pale of my analytic thought. It stabs my mind and lays waste my human senses. Yom HaShoah appraises me. Yom HaShoah judges me. And every year, I am left wondering if I have been found worthy. Am I worthy of the city in which I was born, the choices that I have been given, the lifestyle that I am blessed in being able to have? When it could have been me, but for the accident of birth, who was led like a slave to an ocean of crimson.

The survivers of the world that went insane were few. My grandmother and my grandfather, his siblings and their spouses. My great-grandmother, too, survived, and lived in Australia until the death that Hitler sought for her found natural means of claiming its prize. My mother, when she was four, moved here after the Hungarian revolution. They are all survivors. But the others - all the others - were not. Their missing siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles… their friends, their lovers, jobs and lives. It is all gone, swallowed up into a great black pit where nothing ever can sprout weed. A tragedy of “Biblical proportions”, and yet a tragedy that surpasses even the imagination of the Bible’s authors. And there is nothing that could ever encourage me to visit the location of their loss.

The leader of the Catholic Church arrives in a couple of months. Undoubtely, he will pay lip-service to Australia’s Jewish community. He will reiterate statements earlier ratified that the Jewish wait for a messiah is “valid” and that Jews and Catholics may work better in future, as friends and as partners. I appreciate his sentiments, and I believe that the steps that he is taking are positive steps, for both of our peoples. But do not speak to me of friends and partners. We do not want anything from you other than for you to give back what you stole from us.

You cannot return the lives of those you cruelly snatched away from us; give us back their books. When the precious literary artefacts are returned to their rightful owners, then we will be friends. Until then, Holy Father: you are my enemy.

My Aramean Father

Tonight is Erev Pesakh, and Jews around the world are going to be conducting the Seder in accordance with its laws and traditions. For the benefit of anybody who has never attended a Seder, this involves the consumption of various symbolic foods, as well as the telling of a particular narrative: frequently midrashic, occasionally obscure, permanently didactic. Children are encouraged to ask questions and, to that end, some families go out of their way to do things in such a fashion that their younger members will ask involuntarily. Most families, however, adhere to a centuries-long ritual of behavior that has rendered all genuine questions moot in the face of annual familiarity, and have even reached a point at which the adults themselves do not necessarily possess the answers.

Much of the Haggada (that section of the Seder that involves the narration) is difficult to understand without a prior awareness of the manner in which midrash works. My family skips large sections that, in English, appear banal and trivial, despite my protestations that the Hebrew is frequently interesting. We do not all share the same interests. I would like to share one particular element of the Haggada with you in an effort to demonstrate that it is, indeed, an interesting text, and not a transparent text by any means.

In Memoriam

David Noel Freedman (editor, amongst other things, of the Anchor Bible Dictionary) passed away on the 8th of April at the age of 86. Charlton Heston, at the age of 85, died three days earlier. When I went to Byron Bay a couple of months ago for a friend’s wedding, Heath Ledger dropped dead. Now look what happens when I go to rural NSW.

I should stay in Sydney before anyone else gets hurt.

I survived!

Seems that my body is still used to crawling out of my tent at a ridiculous hour. I didn’t get to bed last night until around midnight (a good four hours later than my recent average) but it is 5:30 in the morning now and I am thoroughly awake. Nothing for it but to read my new book: A Biblical History of Israel (Provan, Long, Longman) and thank the good Lord that I don’t have to ride my bike today. Two weeks in the saddle have taken their toll.

The follow is a brief synopsis of the distances that I cycled each day:

“Death By Pedals”…

… is how it was recently described to me.

So that you know, I am about to participate in a cycling marathon to raise money (and awareness) for MS. Over the course of thirteen days I will be riding a distance of 730km. Some days are not too topographically tricky, although some (despairingly, a 104km day is one of the worst) have more ups and downs than Britney’s career. I will be leaving on Thursday, although the marathon itself does not start properly until the Sunday immediately after: getting there early allows me to enjoy the first campsite without having to dismantle my tent and fly off first thing the next day, get to meet my fellow cyclists in an informal setting, and also to enjoy the pre-ride cycling trip around Lithgow on Saturday. Because 730km is evidently not enough.

I doubt very much that, with everything else that needs to be done before I leave (such as, you know, convincing my supervisor that I really am giving top priority to my PhD), I shall have any time to write another post. Not that I have been doing much in that department for a while, but I expect the next update will occur after my return on the 10th of April. I also expect that writing a post may be the only thing that my body will be able to do, the extremities of my fingers being the sole appendages still capable of tactile perception.

We shall see… Until then, cheerio!

The Spirit(s) of the Festival

While most of the world is preparing to get drunk over Easter, those of us who were actually responsible for the festival are going to be getting drunk for a very different reason. Purim is, to me, exactly what I love about Judaism. We get to read a nonsensical story about a stupid, drunkard king and his Gargamelesque viceroy, both of whom get outsmarted by a silly, dithering queen and her irritating cousin. And then, to clinch the matter, the “victims” of the narrative run around murdering all the people by whom they feel threatened, and we all head off to the bar to consume enough drinks that the story makes sense. I am not a fan of organised religion, but this is disorganised religion at its absolute finest.

An Aussie Bible Reading

While driving, I often listen to News Radio (630 on the AM dial). When they play broadcasts from Parliament time, I tune out. Not that I don’t enjoy the spectacle of apes flinging faeces at one another, but listening to it is rarely as entertaining as getting to watch. The other day, I happened to tune in right at the start and, before I had time to angrily stab the button and switch it back to Classic FM (hey, I might not be 60 yet, but it still beats bubble-gum pop), I noted that they commence each session with the Lord’s Prayer. Some guy with a voice like a bloke from the pub read the following, and placed his stress where I indicate it here in bold:

Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed by thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.

What a schmuck.

I Have my Ups and Downs…

A teacher of mine once joked that in Hebrew, any word can have one of four meanings:

1. The plain meaning;
2. The exact opposite of the plain meaning;
3. Something to do with sex;
4. A type of camel.

She wasn’t far off. The amount of words in the Bible that can also imply their opposite, have a dirty nuance, and relate (in some contexts) to something phenomenally specific is astounding. It is therefore some consolation to me, now that I am trying to write a translation of the Coptic “The Martyrdom of Isidoros” that the Coptic word for “up” also happens to mean “down”. Maybe that has something to do with the geographical placement of “Upper Egypt”, relative to “Lower Egypt”? Either way, it’s bloody fantastic.

The Sad Story…

… of my life.

This isn’t even a real post. There are so many in the works. But this particular comic sums up so perfectly my current state of progress that it would be a shame not to share it. And now, it’s back to the sofa.

Subjunctives

A little while ago, I had the following question:

How does a native Israeli Hebrew speaker express a subordinate clause in the subjunctive? Take a statement, for example, like: “That is what she would have wanted”. It would seem that the subjunctive virtually doesn’t exist at all in Biblical Hebrew (excepting certain remnants of older “energic” and cohortative-looking forms) but surely Hebrew speakers today have developed a means of distinguishing it from purely declarative statements?

I asked two people: my friend, Daniel, and my undergrad Hebrew teacher, Dr Shani Berrin. They both gave me the same response:

You do it using a strangely English-translated sounding method - and your sentence comes out as: זה מה שהיא היתה רוצה
(Daniel)

I’m not coming up with anything in Classical Hebrew, but modern Hebrew would use perfect plus participle: היתה רוצה
(Shani)

It seems interesting to me that Biblical Hebrew lacks a specific means of conveying the subjunctive (at least, the phase of “Biblical” Hebrew that is represented by the MT), and it also seems interesting to me that the Israeli Hebrew collocation is indistinguishable from the habitual (”that is what she used to want”) and from the iterative (”that is what she wanted from time to time”). Just thought I’d open that up here, and see if anybody has any alternative suggestions for the subjunctive - both in Classical, as well as Israeli, Hebrew.