The question is this: What is reality? Or, more specifically, how can we be sure that what we perceive is really, well, real?

It’s far from a new conundrum, this. With his cave in mind, Plato postulated that we might all be trapped in some deceiving dungeon of false impressions, mistaking shadows for light. But Plato hadn’t at his disposal $160 million with which to make, say, Paris’ arrondisements fold on top of each other like a cheap tourists’ map, or prod Leonardo DiCaprio to put on the same tortured expression that he wore in his last four films and that seems, by now, to be permanently etched onto his handsome face.

DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a thief who infiltrates the dreams of others and extracts their best-kept secrets. When a wealthy Japanese businessman promises to take care of the sordid charges that keep Cobb from returning home to his children, the dream reaper agrees to reverse the process: Rather than steal ideas from slumbering and defenseless minds, he’d plant one instead and convince his employer’s main competitor to make a series of disastrous business decisions out of his own free will.

The premise, such as one exists, is merely an excuse to indulge in layer upon layer of special effects. To carry off his task, Cobb must penetrate the abyss of his mark’s subconscious, which entails going into a dream within a dream within a dream, each with its own set of rules and its designated, beautifully shot action sequences.

Herein, however, lies the problem. As David Denby astutely observed in his review of the film in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Nolan is a literal-minded director, and his interpretation of dreams is little but an excuse for elaborate chases and straightforward shoot-’em-ups. Anyone entering the movie with expectations of surrealist dreamscapes will soon run up against Nolan’s blunt instruments. A villainous, French ex-wife? Let’s call her Mal (as in Fleurs du). A young, hopeful maze-maker? Name her Ariadne. That secret place where we store our most repressed, throbbing thoughts? A James Bondesque snow fortress, of course.

What we have here, then, is failure to imagine. Even with untold riches and unprecedented technology at his disposal, Nolan could not conceive of an inner life more intricate or intriguing than a battery of battered movie clichés.

The prophet Isaiah would have sympathized. In this week’s haftorah, he delivers the first of the seven haftarot of consolation, soothing portions that follow the raging, dark weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av. He begins by invoking God’s becalming message—“Console, console my people”—and continues with a dreamlike prophecy of a happy ending for the errant Israelites, with the exiles returning to Jerusalem and the Lord’s glory gleaming everywhere.

Not all, however, would be fortunate enough to enjoy these messianic times. Those who continue to resist God’s laws, those who adhere to their graven images, they shall perish. But even when he speaks of the sinners, Isaiah is never simpleminded; their crimes, it seems, are not so much corporeal as they are ontological. These are the questions the prophet puts before the idolaters: “And to whom do you compare God, and what likeness do you arrange for him?”

In other words, Isaiah is upset not only with the existence of graven images, but with the profound fallacy governing the notion of graven images itself, namely the belief that one could somehow find an earthly representation of the omnipresent, amorphous, and mighty spirit of the divine. Like an ancient, holy movie critic, he laments the silly, simplistic attempts to conjure magic with paltry illusions and trompe l’oeils. To be profound, to be truly meaningful, art and religion alike must transcend the temptations of the literal and the banal and assign themselves to the rarified realms of yearning and redemption.

But as the millions—myself among them—who crowded in cineplexes this weekend to watch Inception can attest, the glossy and the graven and the literal and the loud offer precarious thrills that are hard to resist. Why, for example, struggle to decipher the slow-to-unfold, metaphysical beauties of lust and light in the stunning I Am Love when we can chew on some popcorn and revel in DiCaprio’s delivery of such zingers as “dreams feel real while we’re in them”? Or why bother with mining our minds and souls in search of fundamental truths when we could subscribe to a well-worn set of prescriptions and prohibitions and tropes, a readymade identity that offers no grief and requires no real effort?

This, I suspect, is the elusive lament inherent in Isaiah’s prophecies, the sad reckoning that man, after all, is a tedious animal, a beast that feasts on frozen meals and vampire novels and other forms of sustenance that are easy to consume but contain nothing of real substance. If instead of envisioning a future for ourselves and our children we indulge in name-calling and mud-slinging and such childish stuff, if instead of toiling toward progress we crave ready amusements and easy solutions, if instead of true beauty the best we can come up with is Inception, we’re likely to be among those who shall not be redeemed. Think the path to salvation is straight and narrow? Dream on.

Resorting to the parlor game of what-if, Avishai invokes an imaginary scenario in which a newly independent Quebec announces that only Catholics are true Quebecois and accordingly awards them excessive rights. If that happened, Avishai quips, no serious intellectual would ever think that what’s at stake is merely a question of Catholic pluralism; instead, they would decry the fact that a democratic state “should presume to define or legally designate” an individual’s religious affiliation, “or award material privileges to individuals based on this legal designation.”

In his view, Israel, too, must be measured according to the yardsticks of Western democracies, those virtuous remnants of the Enlightenment that hold all men equal regardless of creed. “The Jewish state,” he writes, “began as a Jewish national home, distinctive for its Hebrew language and thick cultural soup, in which individual poets, politicians, etc., made individual choices about identity and voluntarily joined associations and movements inspired by what of Jewish civilization mattered to them.”

But actually, Zionism was more than a Costco of individual choices and personal freedoms. It was, and is, an ideology calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel; and it realized its fruition in a state founded by people who believed themselves chosen and in a territory they believed was promised to them by God. This is why it’s no Quebec, and this is why it answers to a higher authority when it comes to forging its identity as a modern nation. While Israel aspires to, and in most cases meets, the criteria of modern democracy, it is still primarily a Jewish state.

The conversion bill, Newhouse argued, is disastrous because it challenges a key assertion of contemporary Jewish life: Namely, that “the redemptive history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust has rested on the twin pillars of a strong Israel and a strong Diaspora, which have spoken to each other politically and culturally, and whose successes have mutually reinforced the confidence and capacities of the other.” From this premise, the logical conclusion comes easily: Placing the power to define the boundaries of belonging to the Jewish people in the hands of a tiny religious bureaucracy would disrupt this delicate, and essential, balance.

If Avishai wants to have a problem with Israel’s intrinsically Jewish nature—to say that it is sinful, and ought to be rectified—then by all means. But this he does not do. Instead, he diagnoses in Newhouse “the narcissism of people who think that their ‘people’ is the only people in the world.” He sees this, apparently, in her description of the state of Israel as a state defined above all by its Jewishness—which is nothing more than forensically accurate. The only narcissism here is that of the journalist who thinks that his viewpoint is the only viewpoint in the world.

‘Future Historians Will Invariably Wonder’ [TPM Café]
The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]
Earlier: Conversion Bill Takes Aim at Diaspora

“The Prime Minister said today in the cabinet meeting that he objects to the proposed conversion bill, which could tear the Jewish people apart,” said an official statement released yesterday by Netanyahu’s office. “Efforts will be made to consensually remove the bill, but if they fail Netanyahu will ask members of Likud and other coalition parties to reject the bill.”

As someone who normally does not find himself in the position of praising this particular Israeli prime minister, let me say that the latter half of that statement speaks volumes: By taking a principled stand against the bill, Netanyahu is rejecting its author, David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, as well as Rotem’s political patron, party boss Avigdor Lieberman, a rift that could spell the downfall of Netanyahu’s precarious cabinet. While Lieberman has said repeatedly that neither he nor his party is slated to leave the government anytime soon, the foreign minister has nonetheless engaged in a series of provocative steps against the prime minister: On Friday, for example, Lieberman appointed a new ambassador to the United Nations without following protocol and first clearing the appointment with Netanyahu.

Seen in this light, Netanyahu’s position is even more impressive. While some skeptics noted that the prime minister originally supported the bill and changed his mind only when American Jewish leaders expressed their dismay, Netanyahu is nonetheless required to pay a steep political price for his struggle against the Rotem Bill, and opponents of that disastrous bit of legislation should take heart in knowing that Bibi’s up for the battle.

Interior Minister Yishai: Absence of Conversion Law Poses Danger to Jewish People [Haaretz]

The Hollywood jargon isn’t entirely inappropriate. The scolding sermon in question, by the prophet Isaiah, has everything a blockbuster can hope for: Sex (“how has she become a harlot, a faithful city”)! Corruption (“everyone loves bribes and runs after payments”)! A happy ending (“Zion shall be redeemed through justice and her penitent through righteousness”)! Good luck getting all that from a bunch of brooding vampires.

Isaiah laments the moral depravity of his people and preaches justice and compassion. While his fellow Israelites engage in worldly pursuits, he devotes himself to ethereal visions. This is why this Shabbat is called “Shabbat Hazon,” or the Shabbat of the vision: As we prepare to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, we’re instructed to reflect on Isaiah’s divinations and chart our own course toward repentance and redemption.

And what’s true for Jewish people is even more pressing for the Jewish state.

For the past year, I have frequently used this column to tie the prophets’ ire to Israel’s contemporary woes. Too often, I was saddened to discover in the ancient rebukes sharp lessons for modern times. The lamentations felt fresh, as if the sinfulness and hard-heartedness that so pained Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of their holy ilk were committed not in biblical times but just a short while ago. But this week, I wish to linger on no specific ill. This week, I’d like to think about vision.

It’s a strange thing, of course, to believe that a state must have a vision. The overwhelming majority of nations, after all, owe their existence not to some ephemeral organizing principle but to geographical proximities, historical consequences, and ethnic similarities. They inhabit contiguous slivers of land long enough to mine for shared cultures and common ways. They become nations the way animals become fossils, a centuries-long journey in which a once-living entity becomes an immutable part of the landscape.

Israel is not such a nation. Israel was founded on an idea. It came to be because generations of Jews looked back at the covenant between God and his Chosen People and decided that they could no longer wait for the Messiah to lead them to the Promised Land. They had a vision. Some called it Zionism, others mixed in elements of socialism or militarism or literature or labor or religion. But the Jewish vision hadn’t changed in millennia. It remained the same from the destruction of the Temple onward. The vision called for an independent and just Jewish community in the Land of Israel, the sort the Lord had in mind when he spoke, at Sinai, of a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. That was the vision that propelled scores to war and hardship, the vision in whose name I and so many others took up arms. And that vision, alas, is in peril.

The problem isn’t left versus right. It has nothing to do with Palestinian violence or the Iranian threat. It looms far above the petty concerns that fill up the pages of our newspapers and our dinner-table conversations. The problem is existential: Israel, I believe, has lost its vision.

How else to explain a nation that so desperately and candidly craves peace and yet time and again lends its unequivocal support to military escapades that gain nothing but calumny? How to account for a population that disagrees bitterly with the settlers’ zealous dream of grasping on to Judea and Samaria yet votes enthusiastically for those politicians who continue to build more and more Jewish outposts on the West Bank’s contentious hills? What do we say when no plan is in sight, no hope foreseeable, and the sole comfort comes from slinging mud at enemies, real or imagined?

These days, I can think of little else. These questions are at the heart of a new book I’ve co-written with Todd Gitlin—The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election—and I hope to have the opportunity to discuss them in greater length in the fall. For now, however, I can say this: The way out is further in. If—as Todd and I became convinced when researching our book—Israel wants to be a Jewish state, then let it be a Jewish state. Let it take Isaiah’s warning seriously and commit itself once more not merely to the mechanics of Judaism—its rituals and rigidities, its tired symbols and battered tropes—but to its wonderful and wild and vibrant soul, the same spirit that witnessed the birth of monotheism and made it its mission to tell the world of God and his mercy. Let it listen to the prophet and abandon its fantasies of might and money. Instead of accusing the world of hypocrisy for judging Israel by a different standard than the one habitually applied to other nations, let it cheer and reply that any nation that was forged in the crucible of divine election, that was founded on faith in being God’s favorites sons, has no choice but to accept double standards as a matter of fact. Let it learn to tell the difference between the malicious few who burn with hatred and the perplexed many who look at Israel’s actions and wonder—as every sensible and conscientious person must wonder—just what kind of future the Jewish state imagines for itself.

As we ponder these questions, let us praise the instruments of war or the pirouettes of peace, each of us according to her or his heart; for some the road might be clear, for others pebbled with the debris of broken promises and shattered dreams. But let us never stop thinking about our vision, and let our vision never stray far from that bequeathed to us from above. This summer, if you have only one thought of transcendence and fate, let this be the one.

A newly revealed tape of Netanyahu in 2001, being interviewed while he thinks the cameras are off, shows him in a radically different light. In it, Netanyahu dismisses American foreign policy as easy to maneuver, boasts of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery, and suggests that the only way to deal with the Palestinians is to “beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable” (all translations are mine).

According to Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, the video should be “Banned for viewing by children so as not to corrupt them, and distributed around the country and the world so that everyone will know who leads the government of Israel.”

Netanyahu is speaking to a small group of terror victims in the West Bank settlement of Ofra two years after stepping down as prime minister in 1999. He appears laid-back. After claiming that the only way to deal with the Palestinian Authority was a large-scale attack, Netanyahu was asked by one of the participants whether or not the United States would let such an attack come to fruition.

“I know what America is,” Netanyahu replied. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.” He then called former president Bill Clinton “radically pro-Palestinian,” and went on to belittle the Oslo peace accords as vulnerable to manipulation. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.

“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],” Netanyahu said. “I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”

Smiling, Netanyahu then recalled how he forced former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to agree to let Israel alone determine which parts of the West Bank were to be defined as military zones. “They didn’t want to give me that letter,” Netanyahu said, “so I didn’t give them the Hebron agreement [the agreement giving Hebron back to the Palestinians]. I cut the cabinet meeting short and said, ‘I’m not signing.’ Only when the letter came, during that meeting, to me and to Arafat, did I ratify the Hebron agreement. Why is this important? Because from that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”

President Obama, and anyone else concerned about Israel’s commitment to the peace process, may watch the tape online here.

Related: Tricky Bibi [Haaretz]

What follows, in the grand prophetic tradition, is a litany of complaints. Again we see the Israelites grumbling and scheming, comically disobedient and deeply corrupted. And again the prophet concludes with an exhortation for the errant people to mend their ways and find a path back to God. But Jeremiah never answers his own question: What wrong did God’s Chosen People find in their divine benefactor that led them astray?

For hints of an answer, don’t ask a prophet. Ask a parent.

In a gargantuan piece in New York magazine, Jennifer Senior plumbed reams of social science studies to try and explain why parenting, as the article’s headline poignantly put it, was all joy and no fun: why, in other words, so many parents are reportedly thrilled with having had children and yet driven to despair by the daily machinations associated with raising these very same tots. Senior’s finding is unsurprising—parenting, she writes, is one of those thoroughly satisfying yet frequently unenjoyable activities that give us little immediate pleasure but much by way of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Herein lies the solution to poor Jeremiah’s conundrum. Senior writes of the disappointment common to many new parents—the slow, sinking realization, after years of living as independent and carefree adults, that raising a child is an emotionally draining undertaking demanding of all manners of sacrifice. It’s not hard to imagine the Israelites feeling the same way. There they were, after all, a band of wanderers, chained in the house of bondage but never without their bit of meat and other earthly delights. Then, suddenly, midwife Moses delivers them a newborn covenant, and all of the sudden there are so many things they just can’t do anymore, like nibble on a ham and cheese sandwich or spend their Saturdays doing whatever they please. And just like so many contemporary moms and dads who ponder the value of parenthood, the Israelites start wondering whether this whole business of having a God is even worth it.

Whether we realize it or not, it’s a question that has become a staple of modern life. We may not always put it in such epic terms, but the decisions we make often force us to choose between two irreconcilable drives: the theistic and the solipsistic. The first suggests to us that there is a God up or out there and that even if we don’t follow a particular religion we’re at least obliged to acknowledge that some things are more worthy than our mere selves. The second argues the opposite, claiming that since we can’t really know for sure the true nature of anything that exists outside of our own minds, we may as well not worry about it too much.

These, of course, are profound and complex philosophical positions, but they’re frequently the engine behind simple, earthly behaviors. Greed, for example, is inherently solipsistic. Think of BP carelessly operating its drilling site just to save a few dollars and leading to the worst ecological disaster in the nation’s history, or of corporations seeking unrealistic profit margins and bleeding dry entire industries as a result. Fear-mongering is solipsistic as well, as are most of the dark urges that have come to power our politics, our economy, and so much of our personal lives.

Luckily for us, Jeremiah has an answer at the ready. The prophet never doubts that worshipping Ba’al is a kick—the Canaanite deity’s followers, after all, believed that the best way to make the earth fertile is to fornicate in the temples—but he also knows that kicks, by their very nature, don’t last very long. By worshipping God, he promises his people nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, a heavily regulated life burdened by restrictions and controlled by commandments. But he also promises them the much deeper joy that comes with doing not what feels right but what is right to do.

If we are ever to grow—as individuals and as communities alike—we would do well to follow Jeremiah’s example. This would likely mean setting aside our obsession with happiness, too often understood as the pursuit of gratification, and focusing instead on righteousness, the bleaker but more substantive quest for truth, love, and justice.

And if you have any qualms concerning what it’s like to give up so much by way of instant pleasure for something else, something more important, something bigger than yourself—hey, just call your mother.

An Israeli journalist, Hammerman befriended a teenage Palestinian girl and was heartbroken to learn that, like most Palestinians in the West Bank, the girl—writing about the encounter in Haaretz, Hammerman called the girl Aya to protect her identity—was confined to her village by a Byzantine system of roadblocks and restrictions that renders travel virtually impossible. Unable to drive even to the nearest large Palestinian town without spending hours in blazing corrugated-metal kennels, subjected to searches and sometimes denied entry just because, Aya was preparing for a summer filled with idle days, confined to her village, succumbing to boredom.

It wasn’t the most horrid story one can hear in the West Bank, but it touched Hammerman deeply. If Aya’s childhood wasn’t allowed to transcend the thicket of politics and prejudice that entangles everyone in the region, she thought, then all was hopelessly bleak. Hammerman made a suggestion: She would smuggle Aya and two of her cousins into Israel, drive them to Tel Aviv, and show them what life was like in the big city, just an hour’s drive away but beyond their imagination.

This, Hammerman was well aware, was against the law. To get Aya and her relatives into the country, she would have to lie to soldiers and policemen. And the border, she realized perfectly well, was heavily guarded for very good reasons. Still, the thought of young girls under siege struck Hammerman as categorically evil. The Israeli law book, she reasoned, also included the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, enacted in 1994 and promising every man and woman, regardless of his or her ethnicity, “no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise.”

“All of these rights,” Hammerman wrote in a recent article in Haaretz, “are denied the civilian Palestinian population living in the occupied territories under Israeli military control: Their lives, dignity and property are violated; their privacy and intimacy is not respected; and their private premises are entered without their consent. But, above all, their liberty is restricted: They are not free to leave their country, to move within it or to choose their place of residence at will. They are denied their liberty by arrest and imprisonment. Indeed, since 1967, approximately 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned for various periods of time by the Israeli military jurisdiction to which they are subject.”

With Israeli law pitted against Israeli law, Hammerman chose to err on the side of dignity and freedom. In May, she loaded Aya and her cousins into her car, drove to a checkpoint she thought would be more lenient, blurted out a few words in Hebrew to the soldier standing guard, and sighed with relief when she was waved right through. Once she hit Tel Aviv, she took her young charges to a museum and a mall, watched with delight as they frolicked on the lawn of Tel Aviv University and sprinted on the beach, bought them each some ice cream. It was two in the morning by the time she drove them back home; a few days later, reading Hammerman’s account of the day in Haaretz, a settler organization began a campaign for her arrest.

As Hammerman’s self-appointed prosecutors are self-described religious Jews, they may want to spend this Shabbat pondering the weekly haftorah. Awarded his divine mandate, the prophet Jeremiah is warned not to expect an easy ride.

“And I will utter My judgments against them concerning all their evil, that they left Me and offered up burnt-offerings to other gods and they prostrated themselves to the work of their hands,” God tells Jeremiah, preparing his servant for the coming calumny he’s sure to face. “And you shall gird your loins and arise and speak to them all that I command you; be not dismayed by them, lest I break you before them. And I, behold I have made you today into a fortified city and into an iron pillar, and into copper walls against the entire land, against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against you but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to save you.”

It is unlikely, of course, that those modern-day Israelites who still prostrate themselves to the work of their hands—the separation walls and the checkpoints and the armaments they firmly believe to be their sole measure of protection—would summon the wherewithal to take in a touch of prophecy. Now, as in Jeremiah’s time, they would likely adopt an imperious tone and talk about security and its neverending demands, or ragingly recite all of the evils, great and small, perpetrated by the nations who criticize Israel, or find a thousand and one excuses with which to extenuate the senseless brutality of the occupation.

Never mind: Now, like then, we still have women and men who are wise enough to understand that sometimes the path to righteousness leads straight to an ice cream parlor in a nearby-faraway town and who are courageous enough to drive there, roadblocks be damned.

Without giving away too much of the new film’s plot, it’s safe to say that it explores the same major theme as before, namely the devastating moment in which a toy realizes its owner has matured and is no longer interested in child’s play. It’s a moment burdened with more than the cheap sentimentality of mass-produced pop culture; watching the toys have their moment of reckoning, we are forced to have one of our own.

Everything is at stake. One of the Toy Story franchise’s most profound achievements is its ability to remind us how pure our vision was when we were children, when the objects laid at our feet weren’t merely 5-inch figures of polyethylene and fabric but fearless cowboys and daring space rangers.

Had he been around to visit the local multiplex, Walter Benjamin would have likely enjoyed Pixar’s creation. In a short essay, unpublished in his lifetime, Benjamin discussed the difference between the adult’s vision and the child’s. “Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerted, [their sight] is something spiritual,” he wrote. “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see.” This, he argued, was the reason children’s drawings cancel out “the intellectual cross-references of the soul,” creating instead “a pure mood, without thereby sacrificing the world.”

Pure mood is what Toy Story 3 is all about. It’s also the theme of this week’s haftorah. Like Buzz and Woody, the prophet Micah strikes an existential tone. Like the animated toys, he, too, is distraught by the notion that one day the being in whose grace we all live might lose interest in us and move on.

But unlike Andy, the toys’ owner, God himself doesn’t merely mature and abandon his knickknacks of old. Instead, Micah informs us, the Creator pursues a grim course of action: First he empowers his people—“all your enemies shall be destroyed”—and then he punishes them. “I will destroy the cities of your land,” God promises Israel, “and I will break down all your fortresses.”

It’s a bleak sequence of events. First comes redemption, then destruction. Why not the other way around? Why not suffering followed by salvation? To answer the question, we need not a prophet but a puppet, a toy truck, or an action figure. We need to look at the objects we’ve abandoned and recall how they could once conjure entire worlds writhing with thrills and promises. We need to think of the carefree lives we’d had when we toddled and realize that with each skill we’ve acquired, with each spurt of growth and drizzle of maturity, we’ve lost the most magical of all human capacities, the gift of being able not to reflect but just to see.

Unlike many other Hollywood blockbusters, the Toy Story movies do not require us to suspend our disbelief, nor do they pretend that a return to innocence could ever be possible. Impermanence is their point of departure, acceptance their goal. But not in the Buddhist way, not by Nirvana, not through transcending suffering or outgrowing the boundaries of our own consciousness. Instead, Woody, Buzz, and their friends are, I believe, good, observant Jews. They know, like Rabbi Akiva, that all is foreseen and permission is granted. They have no doubt that they are destined for abandonment by their master, and yet, in their earthly toy world, they depend on each other and love one another and strive for a better life. They worry about fate, but not enough to stop playing.

We may never be able to again see the world with the child’s untainted gaze, but if we listen to Buzz and Woody we may still be able to go—say it with me now!—to infinity and beyond.

One day, after turning 30, she took the bus to the university and asked to be enrolled. She was interested in studying Hebrew literature and theater. These weren’t exactly what one might call practical things to study, but Jenny had a passion for language and art; besides, she thought, a college degree, any college degree, would help her get the sorts of jobs that didn’t require spending her days breathing in exhaust fumes. She was accepted, and she prepared for classes with joy.

To make ends meet, Jenny applied for the stipends that the state guarantees by law to poor students, as well as for the myriad tax exemptions to which a person in her position is entitled. Without them, she realized, there was little chance of making it through. Then a curt letter from the state arrived: You are not eligible for any stipends, it informed her; kindly don’t apply again.

Confused, Jenny took the letter to a Jerusalem city councilman she knew and trusted. Why, she asked him, was she being denied the very same privileges awarded each month to hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students? Why would the government sponsor those who study Talmud but not those who study Yehuda Amichai or Amos Oz? Why the double standard?

No explanations were evident apart from the obvious political ones. In Israel’s fractured electoral system, the ultra-Orthodox parties still wield an obscene amount of power and influence, and the laws governing aid to unemployed students were designed to benefit their constituents, the majority of whom do not work and spend their days studying Torah. But a law, Jenny thought, was a law; it couldn’t discriminate between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. She decided to appeal to the Supreme Court.

This was in 2000. She heard nothing. Struggling, taking on odd jobs wherever she could find them, she managed to complete her studies and began a master’s degree in social work at the university. She was determined to spend her life helping women who suffered the misfortunes she had had to overcome. For a decade, no word came from the court.

Until this week. The discriminatory policy, the court finally ruled, was to be overturned immediately. The ultra-Orthodox politicians called it an “evil verdict,” and promised to resist.

Instead of making inflammatory statements, they would do well to take a look at this week’s haftorah. There, they would find the story of one Jephthah. Here’s what we know about him: “Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor, and he was the son of a woman harlot, and Gilead begot Jephthah. And Gilead’s wife bore him sons; and his wife’s sons grew up and drove Jephthah out, and they said to him, ‘You shall not inherit in our father’s house for you are the son of another woman.’ And Jephthah fled from his brothers and he dwelt in the land of Tob.” Needless to say, Jephthah’s siblings are soon forced to swallow their pride and beg their brother to come back and deliver them from the evils of the Ammonites. He does, but not before he extracts a promise to be installed at the head of his clan. It’s a classic tale of the underdog’s revenge.

Jephthah’s spirit seems to be running rampant in contemporary Israel. A day after ruling in favor of Jenny Baruchi, the Supreme Court judged that the yeshiva in Immanuel, an ultra-Orthodox settlement, was legally obliged to allow Sephardic female students to study together with their Ashkenazi peers. The school made headlines in recent weeks for its refusal to allow such ethnic intermingling, and, reacting to the court’s ruling, some ultra-Orthodox politicians sounded defiant. Moshe Gafni, a member of Knesset with the Degel HaTorah party, promised that the ultra-Orthodox community will not respect the Supreme Court’s ruling. Instead, it will instruct its members to go to jail en masse rather than desegregate the school.

“These photographs will be published worldwide,” Gafni threatened, describing the potential aftermath of the court ruling. “There will be no escape from thinking about what happened in other countries at other times when ultra-Orthodox Jews with side locks and beards went to jail.”

And go to jail they did, supported by tens of thousands of demonstrators, marking the deepest rift yet between Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox populations. Most secular pundits decried the community’s refusal to desegregate in universalist terms, citing the precedent of the American south in the 1950s. But there’s a distinctly Jewish argument to be made as well, one that argues that nowhere in the Jewish codex is ethnic segregation commanded or even defended, and one that puzzles over the fact that some of Judaism’s brightest minds, from Maimonides to Rabbi Yosef Karo, would, most likely, have been locked out of Immanuel’s school.

An ultra-Orthodox leadership that is primarily concerned with punishing the metaphorical sons of another woman—the secular, the Sephardic, an assortment of other Others—should be ashamed of itself. One could only hope that this Shabbat, in the shuls of Jerusalem or Immanuel or Bnei Brak, the heroic story of Jephthah’s rise will soften hearts and open minds.

For now: Here is David Mandelbaum, of the New Yiddish Repertory Theater, and Alyssa Quint, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia, performing, first in English and then in Yiddish (translated by Caraid O’Brien), a scene between Leopold Bloom and an ex-girlfriend of his, Mrs. Breen.

But hummus in a squeeze bottle? That’s blasphemy.

To be fair, I haven’t tried Zohan Hummus. To be fairer still, everything about it—from the already-stale pop culture reference to the bizarre pillow fight in its ad—seems designed to keep serious hummus connoisseurs away, and should therefore count, perhaps, as some sort of dialectical good. But first principles are first principles: No matter how delicious the paste or how convenient its mode of dispensation, squeezing hummus from a bottle is an abomination.

You see, in Israel, where I was born and where I received years of higher hummus education, one never simply states that one is about to eat hummus. When it comes to hummus, the correct verb is le’nagev, or to wipe. Tear a small piece of pita, introduce it to the plate at an approximate 50-degree-angle, and wipe the tasty paste with short, semi-circular motions. Such is the ritual—anything else is heresy.

To those of our readers whose proclivities demand that food be squeezable, bon appetit. Otherwise, for some serious hummus experience, please consider these guys.

It’s an old tradition. For Dwight Eisenhower, an atheist was anyone who watched Notre Dame play Southern Methodist University and didn’t care who won. Those of us who grew up in the Middle East share the sentiment if not the specifics; in Israel, the atheists are those who don’t care a lick for soccer.

As I prepare to spend the next four weeks watching the World Cup unfold, I look forward not only to entertainment but to elation. I was 10, after all, when, watching Diego Maradona score one of the most beautiful goals of all time, I became thoroughly convinced that there was a God, and that God—fond, no doubt, of baseball and hockey and other pastimes—reserved his true passion for The Beautiful Game. Four years later, watching the 1990 World Cup, I learned an even more profound lesson: Miracles, Roger Milla taught me, happened.

Milla was 38 when the tournament started, a talented player past his prime. When Cameroon’s coach put together his team, nicknamed The Indomitable Lions, Milla was left out. Too old, everybody thought, washed up. But Cameroon’s president, Paul Biya, intervened. Milla was his hero, and if the old lion had to go down, he should at least be given one more chance to roar.

The tournament’s first game pitted Milla and his team against Maradona’s Argentina, the defending champions. Most of my friends didn’t even bother watching; one of them joked that it would be like watching the Los Angeles Lakers play our junior-high team. But I’m a zealot, so I tuned in. And I screamed as Cameroon won, thanks in large to Milla’s spectacular plays. A week later, when Cameroon faced Romania, the streets of Herzliya were empty, as was the case in so many towns across the world. We all wanted to watch Milla. He scored twice, and after each time he ran to the goal post and did a crazy jig—half rain dance, half epilepsy attack—that became his trademark. The next day, at school, we all pretended we were Roger Milla.

Milla’s fairy tale lasted a while longer. When Cameroon advanced to the next stage of the tournament, he scored another pair, deposing the heavily favored Colombians. Only a tight game against England in the quarterfinals curtailed Cameroon’s aspirations.

The Bible, of course, is notoriously short on soccer matches, but I’ve no doubt that had he been around to watch Milla play, the prophet Samuel would have been pleased. Here he is, in this week’s haftorah, addressing the people on the occasion of King Saul’s coronation. A king, Samuel famously argued, was an abomination—God himself had anointed all of Israel as his “kingdom of priests,” and a kingdom of priests needn’t have any other king but God himself. Like Milla, however, Samuel needs one more coup de grâce before going gently into the good night: He calls on God to summon thunder and rain. “All the people,” the haftorah tells us, “greatly feared the Lord and Samuel.”

What, we may ask, was the purpose of Samuel’s parlor trick? Moments later, after all, the skies turned bright once again and the coronation proceeded as planned. Why bother with miracles if defeat was preordained? Because, often, it’s the miracles we remember best. Few soccer fans today can even recall who won the tournament in 1990—it was West Germany, in what is largely considered one of the worst finals in the cup’s history—but nobody could forget Roger Milla and the Lions of Cameroon. Similarly, when Samuel was done conjuring the elements, it was less the flesh-and-blood king his listeners had on the mind—though the flesh-and-blood king was the one who would rule them for years to come—but God.

Such are the ways of the Lord, and such is his relationship with us, his chosen people. We ourselves are a bit of a miracle—a tiny nation that survived the trials of time, the least-likely candidates for grace, never the mightiest but frequently the most memorable. Like Roger Milla, our mandate is not so much to triumph as it is to inspire.

I’ve lived through this myself: After the World Cup of 1990 ended, I finally took to playing soccer. Watching Maradona dominate the tournament in 1986 was great, but it wasn’t much by way of motivation. Maradona was clearly superb; no number of hours spent dribbling the ball were going to make me even a fraction of the footballer he was. Brazened by his immense gift, he ended up bloated, face down in a pile of cocaine. But watching Milla was different. Everything about the man—old, flawed and wonderful—suggested that presence of mind and dedication could drive talent much further than it would have gone on its own merit.

This is the logic that drives religion. It’s also the logic that drives soccer. Starting today, and for the next month, the two, as far as I’m concerned, are the same.

Just a few days before the disastrous flotilla affair, I’d written a column about the prophet Zechariah and his command that redemption should be pursued “not by military force and not by physical strength” but by the spirit of the Lord. For the most part, readers who commented on the piece took umbrage. Military force, they pointed out, was often necessary, especially for a persecuted minority. They demanded an elaboration, and as I thought about the flotilla, I realized an elaboration was in order. Rather than write a column this week, then, I want to expand on last week’s column, and try to explain the true meaning of Zechariah’s prophecy.

Here’s what it means.

It means, to borrow the wise words of my friend and coauthor Todd Gitlin, that we may not always know what to do, but we must always know what not to do. Amid the sound and fury following the attack on the flotilla, the voyage’s original purpose was often obscured: The men and women aboard the Mavi Marmara tried to deliver necessary supplies to one and a half million Palestinians, under siege for more than three years. And placing a million and a half people under siege is immoral. Hamas represents a concrete threat, and as such calls for concrete responses, both on the battlefield and in the international arena. But not starvation. Not deprivation. Not collective punishment. We must remind ourselves time and again that there are lines we must never cross, not even in the shadow of missiles, not even facing the direst of circumstances. Condemning a vast civilian population to grave suffering is such a line, and such a line it must remain.

It means that we should never exchange our inherent moral compass for the flimsy fluctuations of political brinksmanship. In his first public appearance after the flotilla affair, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the world of hypocrisy and “a biased rush to judgment.” His followers were not far behind in offering a quiverful of litanies, noting, for example, that the world decried Israel’s blockade but said not a word about Egypt’s continuing refusal to allow any traffic between it and the besieged Gaza Strip. These accusations are not entirely false. It is doubtful that anyone who is both decent and intellectually honest could convincingly argue that Israel is not frequently singled out for calumny with an intensity that is spared other, far more benighted regimes. But Judaism, I firmly believe, is predicated—both historically and theologically—on the notion that God had designated one nation to be unto Him a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. If Israel is just one more nation among others, why bother having a Jewish State at all? If we want to preserve that exalted status, we must understand it as what it truly is: a terrible responsibility, a divine burden, a never-ending call to justice. To that end, if we truly believe the tenets of our faith, we must worry not about others but about ourselves, and we must do what is right no matter how dear the cost. We have an awesome and ancient guide to righteousness, the foundation for our morality, the source of our survival; if we exchange it for the piffles of politics, we will surely perish.

It means that we should not shy away from the use of force, but that we should remember that power demands prudence. Writing in The New York Times a few days after the fiasco, Amos Oz put it nicely. “I do not discount the importance of force,” he wrote. But, he soon added, “every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters.”

It means that there could be no path more disastrous than ignoring the immensity of the problem. The “Freedom Flotilla” should serve as unequivocal proof that Israel has lost its way, and it should spur those of us who care deeply for the Jewish State to take immediate action. Even if we accept the most ardent arguments out of Jerusalem, we cannot deny that Israel’s recent actions, both large (provoking the U.S. administration with a miserably timed construction project in East Jerusalem) and small (denying entry to a host of vocal critics of Israel for no reason other than being critical of Israel) suggest that rather than viewing power as a means to an end, Israel now perceives its might as an end in and of itself, gleefully and frequently flexing its considerable muscles at enemies both real and imagined. That is not the way for any nation to act. No matter where on the nexus between rigid theocracy and liberal democracy it may choose to plant itself, Israel needs to recommit itself to a firm and clear vision and make sure its actions are in accordance. If the images of Israeli commandos—previously considered the fiercest in the world—being thrown overboard teach us anything, it is that nothing fades faster than power applied for its own sake.

And it means that we are running out of time. If we care, let us speak out now, and let us speak out loudly. Anything else is disgraceful.

There he is, for example, in this week’s haftorah, casting aspersions on the high priest Joshua, who, we’re told, “was wearing filthy garments.” Whether we’re meant to take Joshua’s misstep literally—the high priest falling behind on his personal hygiene—or metaphorically—filthy garments meaning sins—the text makes it clear that God is not too amused with Satan’s antics.

“The Lord shall rebuke you, O Satan,” God thunders, “Is this one not a brand plucked from fire?” An angel is summoned, the filthy garments removed, Joshua’s iniquities forgotten. But God is still not satisfied. He makes a promise: “Hearken, now, O Joshua the High Priest, you and your companions who sit before you, for they are men worthy of a miracle-for, behold! I bring My servant, the Shoot.”

The Shoot is the Messiah, so called for being a descendant of King David. How do we go about facilitating his rapid arrival? No problem, says the prophet Zechariah, the haftorah’s narrator; it’s as easy as lighting a menorah. In an intricate and poetic vision, he speaks of a golden candelabrum, flanked by olive trees, a symbol of everlasting light. The magical menorah, we’re told, will be set ablaze “ ‘Not by military force and not by physical strength, but by My spirit,’ says the Lord of Hosts.”

At first read, this is a maddening sentence, deceptively simple to the point of irrelevance. “But by My spirit,” says God, but his spirit, of course, is unknowable. His spirit is that elusive, ephemeral, and awesome stuff we devote our lives to try and ascertain. The paradox is complete: To light the menorah, we need his spirit, but if we knew his spirit, we wouldn’t need the menorah, as redemption would already be ours for eternity.

We are not, however, left altogether in the dark. The sentence has two parts, and the first one could not be clearer: “Not by military force and not by physical strength.”

Just as Woody Allen conjured Marshall McLuhan to settle an argument with a stranger, I often wish I could summon Zechariah. This is how I imagine the exchange: I’ll be at some dinner party when someone will ask me about Israel. I’ll reply as mildly and politely as I can, but it will be too late: Another guest will be paying rapt attention. No sooner will I finish my response then he’ll jump in:

“Why shouldn’t Israel have the right to defend itself?”

“If the Canadians were lobbing rockets on Buffalo, do you think America would be this restrained?”

“And what about the fact that the Palestinians left willingly in ’48, prodded by the rest of the Arab world? And what about the fact that the Arab world has allowed the Palestinian refugees to languish for decades? And why is Israel the only one required to make sacrifices for peace?”

“I’m sick and tired of Jews feeling like they have to justify their right to exist!”

Usually, this is the point at which I take a deep breath and engage. I gently convince the speaker of my Israeli bona fides, refute any historically incorrect or overly simplistic statement, and offer an alternative view as calmly as I can. But if I had Zechariah, none of that would matter. Like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, all I’d have to do is step aside for a second and return with the prophet in tow, then delight as Zechariah repeats his mantra: Not by military force. Not by physical strength.

Boy, if life were only like this. But unlike Allen’s protagonist, who seeks nothing more than validation in a petty argument, bringing up Zechariah has deeper meanings. Increasingly, his is the message we need to hear.

When Israel refuses entry to a host of men—from a renowned academic to a famous clown—who don’t agree with its policies, it’s time to roar once more: Not by military force, not by physical strength.

When it ignores its own Supreme Court and continues to allow settlers to seize private Palestinian lands, let us once again say: Not by military force, not by physical strength.

And when our discussion of Israel and its policies is increasingly vehement, increasingly thoughtless, increasingly angry, we should shout in response only this: Not by military force, not by physical strength.

It may not encompass the totality of God’s spirit, not exactly. But it’s a sound beginning.

“His dad’s name is Judas,” rapped QP, “the same dude who betrayed Jesus / ‘Cause that’s the type of shit a Jew does.” (“Jew does,” “Judas”: Not a bad rhyme.)

Reaching back into his own tradition, Soul Khan quickly retorted with the perfect comeback. “You spit the ten plagues,” he rapped, “I can’t really lose / ‘Cause that was dope, but guess what / The plagues came from the Jews.”

A few quips later, Khan was even more definitive: “I’m part of the chosen people,” he shouted, “We wrote the Old Testament, you followed a phony sequel.”

The show’s Hebrew name is meant as a metaphor for the three stages in the development of the average male: Green Light (single! stupid! oversexed!); Yellow Light (in a committed relationship! confused! anxious!), and Red Light (married with children! desperate! emasculated!). As befitting such a premise, the American show’s mastermind is Bob Fisher, who wrote that classic of male arrested development, Wedding Crashers.

Here’s a quick taste of the traffic light, American style. Say, is that Pam’s ex?

Fox Buys Israeli Sitcom ‘Ramzor’ [Ynet]

In Israel, a nation sometimes forced into and often infatuated with fantasies of self-annihilation, suicidal thoughts have taken on several forms over the course of the last few decades. In the early 1940s, with Erwin Rommel galloping through Egypt, the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine proposed a plan entitled Masada on Mt. Carmel. If the Wehrmacht swept past the border and into the Promised Land, went the thought, the Jews would move en masse to the northern mountain and fight there, to the death, just as their ancestors had done on the arid desert plateau millennia earlier. Rommel was stopped at El Alamein, but two decades later, in the early 1960s, the now-independent Jewish nation once again had suicide on its mind. If the belligerence of its Arab neighbors became too great to resist, several of Israel’s leaders mused in private, the Jewish state’s last resort might have to be a massive nuclear assault that would eliminate both Israel and its aggressors. Searching Jewish history for inspiration, they found a model hero; the plan became known as the Samson Option.

The immediate threat, luckily, has passed, and Israel prevailed in armed conflict after armed conflict. But Samson, whose birth is the subject of this week’s haftorah, remains a potent emblem for Israel today, a nation whose strengths and weaknesses have never before been so intricately intertwined.

To his ardent defenders—and there are many in the annals of rabbinic thought—Samson is a tragic figure, a miraculously born vessel of God who played his part and paid the price. Even when Samson sins, noted some rabbis, he does so with some hidden, divine goal in mind. When the muscular hero, for example, decides to take on a Philistine wife, his parents are distraught. “Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren,” they moan, “or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?” But the biblical narrator makes sure we readers know the real deal. The very next verse reassures us that Samson’s “father and his mother knew not that it was of the Lord, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines: for at that time the Philistines had dominion over Israel.”

Other commentators, however, have been less forgiving. Sure, they argued, many of Samson’s woes were preordained, but he himself is no innocent lamb. Never one to resist temptation, he followed his heart’s desires, wedding women and slaying foes and surrendering often to his animal instincts. The 12th-century scholar Rabbi David Kimche went as far as claiming that this was the reason Samson ended up being blinded by his enemies; no punishment could be more fitting for one who so frequently followed his eyes rather than remain pure of heart.

Which Samson we choose to see depends on our worldview. Comparing Greek tragedies with Shakespeare’s, W.H. Auden famously made the following helpful distinction. Watching Oedipus, Auden wrote, the audience is stricken by a sense of tragedy that originates from witnessing the Greek follow the preordained path that leads him to doom. As father is slain and mother wed, the audience, Auden claims, whispers “what a pity it had to happen this way.” But the same audience, watching Shakespeare’s Scottish play, is likely to experience a sensation of an altogether different sort; witnessing Macbeth consider his options and then, of his own free will, favor a bloody, murderous path, the audience, sighs “what a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.” This, the poet instructs us, is the fundamental difference between the Greek and the Christian tragic hero: The former is tragic because he has no choice, the latter precisely because he can choose.

The Israel that contemplated mass suicide decades ago could easily be categorized as the former. Besieged by its neighbors and starved for resources, the Jewish state glared at its alleged nuclear arsenal and thought that, like Samson, it, too, would perish and take its foes down with it. But the Israel of more recent times—the one that gave the name Shimshon, Hebrew for Samson, to a special army unit designed to infiltrate the Palestinian population in order to arrest and assassinate militants—is no longer that desperate nation. Like Samson, it must now learn that no matter how great the promise at birth, it’s the things we do as adults that matter. Like Samson, it must now learn to cope with its power.

Again, Samson himself sets a poignant example. When he used his considerable, divinely inspired strength to defend his people, the spirit moved him, and his transgressions, numerous as they were, were all forgiven. But when he continued to abuse his might, he ended up weak and tortured, with a murderous suicide as his only measure of reclaiming a sense of agency and a trace of dignity.

Like Samson’s supporters, those who defend Israel’s actions without thought or criticism are dooming it to a tragic end. If we insist that war is always justifiable, always inevitable, always a desirable way to flex our muscles and bare our teeth, we may as well begin lamenting, like Auden’s audience, the pity of a disaster foretold. But if we think, like Rabbi Kimche, that no measure of divine will releases us from taking responsibility for our actions, and that much more is expected of those to whom great privileges and powers have been given, then the tragedy becomes much more profound: We are left to lament not only what was but what could have been as well.

The haftorah did well by introducing us only to Samson’s birth and leaving out the later story of his downfall. We are left to understand that we must not only mourn the slain Samson but also, and primarily, contemplate the circumstances of his demise. For anyone who is seriously committed to the well being of the state of Israel, there could be no subject more urgent. This week, Peter Beinart took a courageous and important step in the right direction, but even if we reject his interpretation, we’re not permitted to excuse ourselves from this discussion. If we do, we’ll end up powerless and blind.

CREDIT: Esther Wu

Shavuot celebrates the Israelites’ receiving the Torah, but if our forefathers were thrilled with the Word of God they were also hampered by their new dietary restrictions. Animals, the new laws made clear, had to be slaughtered in a particular way, but since the Torah was given on the Sabbath, and since the Torah forbade any work on the Sabbath, a nice roast was out of the question as the Israelites celebrated their status as God’s chosen people. With nothing else to eat, they turned to dairy, which is why it is customary to eat dairy on Shavuot.

Or is it?

Look at the Shulkhan Aruch, the famous 16th-century manual of Jewish law, and you’ll find two different answers. Rabbi Yosef Karo, the Sephardic rabbi, says nothing about eating dairy; Rabbi Moses Isserles, the Ashkenazi rabbi, does. While this may be a pure coincidence, said David Kraemer, librarian and professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary, it also suggests that the dairy consumption was perhaps not a custom among Sephardic Jews.

And yet, there’s not much love for dairy among Ashkenazi Jews, either: Most available studies suggest that lactose intolerance, the scourge of Shavuot, disproportionately plagues Jews, regardless of their ethnicity and origin. Like other Mediterranean people, as well as Asians, an overwhelming number of Jews lack the enzyme that helps digest milk and its products. Ahskenazi Jews fare only a little bit better than their Sephardic coreligionists, but still far less well than the European peoples in whose midst they lived for centuries.

But wasn’t the Promised Land, the cradle of Jewish civilization, touted as the land of Milk and Honey? Indeed, but don’t take it too literally. Honey most likely meant date or fig honey, or the nectar flowing off any fruit. And milk, according to Kraemer, probably meant fat, as in the fat of the animals the Israelites would be blessed to have in their possession, and not necessarily milk itself.

Milk as we know it would have been rare for the ancient Israelites—without pasteurization or refrigeration, it would have gone bad. Back in the day, the Israelites most likely ate a thickened, soured milk concoction, similar to labneh, the strained yogurt still popular in the Middle East and in Middle Eastern restaurants throughout the world.

Milk itself was saved for special occasions, like, say, some angels knocking on your door. When Abraham receives the three celestial visitors in his tent, he served “some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared.” The father of the Jewish people mixing milk and meat? Prior to receiving the Torah and its commandments, this wasn’t an issue.

Need a more mystical for the connection between Shavuot and dairy? Here goes: Moses was on Mount Sinai for 40 days. Add up the numeric value of the Hebrew letters for milk—Het, Lamed, and Bet—and you get, you guessed it, 40. Even better: The Torah, we’re told, has 70 facets, and if you add up the numeric values of the letters making up the Hebrew word for Cheese—g’vina—you get, drumroll, 70. Another name for Mount Sinai is Har Gavnunim, meaning the mountain of peaks but sharing an etymological connection with the word for cheese.

So there.

And yet counting is a particularly Jewish obsession. We count the numeric value of letters in search of hidden meaning, and we count the numbers of Jews in each country in the world in search of a glimpse at the future. We believe some numbers—7, 13, 18—have a special, symbolic meaning.

This week, then, I’d like to look back at the evolution of my Jewish identity as represented by a few meaningful numbers.

10: I was 10 years old when I realized for certain that I believed in God. Watching the soccer World Cup religiously, I made the acquaintance of Argentina’s Diego Maradona. He wore No. 10. Playing England in the quarterfinals, he scored a goal with his fist, which none of the referees seemed to have spotted. It was, Maradona later punned, the hand of God. Later in the game, he ran single-handedly across the pitch, hardly touching the ball, bypassing five English outfielders and scoring what is widely considered to be one of the most incredible goals in the history of the game. On our blue corduroy couch at home, I wept. Only the existence of a higher force could explain what I’d just seen.

14: I became a man a year later than Jewish ritual said I did. At 13, reciting the haftorah at my bar mitzvah, I felt like a phony. No matter what the rabbi said, I thought, I was still very much a kid. Thirteen, I snarled, was much too young for anyone to accept the burden of manhood. A year later, however, when my father was arrested and imprisoned and my life changed radically, I realized Judaism had it just right: Lacking a choice, I grew up overnight. I was not too young, and all that talk of burdens and responsibilities now made perfect sense.

17: To compensate for becoming a man a year too late, I became a soldier a year too early. At 17, I was already wearing the oily, olive-colored uniform of the Israel Defense Forces. I spent 1,155 days in the army and passed most of them thinking about what it meant to be an Israeli and a Jew. Under fire in Lebanon and in Hebron and in Gaza, I had to ask myself repeatedly what I was fighting for and if it was worth it. And every day I decided that it was. I didn’t agree with many of the policies I was sent to enforce, but I was nonetheless proud to know that I contributing, in whatever minuscule a way, to the Zionist project, madly audacious and wildly hopeful and deeply essential. My opinions have since evolved, but I’m still thrilled to know that I did my bit. Whenever I get into an argument about Israeli politics, I’m happy to know that I’ve got the scars to back up my opinions.

318: Is the number of hours I spent on a hunger strike in front of the prime minister’s house in Jerusalem, protesting the stratospheric costs of higher education and the inequity between the fully subsidized ultra-Orthodox yeshivot and the overcrowded, underfunded universities.

500: Was the price, in shekels, of the ambulance ride to the hospital after collapsing during a demonstration in Zion Square.

32,000: Was the annual salary, in dollars, I received after moving to New York and becoming a novice press officer at the Consulate General of Israel in New York in 2000.

150,000: Is the sum, in dollars, the foreign ministry is now paying its “Internet warfare team” to tweet for Israel.

6,000,000: Is the number with which each I, like so many Jews, begin and end so many thoughts. When I was young, my favorite television show was The Six Million Dollar Man, which, in Israel, was called The Man Worth Millions. I was just learning English when the show came on, and I asked my mother why the show’s Hebrew name was changed. She said it was because of the Holocaust. I asked what the Holocaust was. Not even Lee Majors could prepare me for the answer.

Now, dear readers, if you are so inclined, kindly comment below and share some of your meaningful numbers. To get you started, here’s a terrific song from Israel’s hip hop band HaDag Nachash, all about the numbers that really count in life.

It’s a confession that would have saddened my great-great-grandfather, who left Slovakia for the Old City in the 19th century, as well as most of my family, who live there still. Out of respect for them, I have spent most of my life keeping my predilections to myself. My dislike for Jerusalem, I was sure, was predicated on all the wrong reasons: because its restaurants were not as chic as Tel Aviv’s, its stores not as trendy, or any number of superficial considerations. Jerusalem, I felt, just didn’t represent me.

Looking at newly released statistics this week, I was dismayed to find that the problem is deeper than that. Jerusalem, it is becoming more evident, doesn’t represent the majority of Israelis.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, only 21 percent of Jerusalem’s 774,000 residents are secular, less than half the national average, and 32 percent are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, nearly four times the national average. At a time when most Israelis look with great pride at the country’s booming high-tech industry and rising college graduation rates, 49 percent of Jerusalem’s students, enrolled in ultra-Orthodox institutions, will fail to receive high-school diplomas this year. This number is likely to continue to grow. And while Israelis in general are entering the workforce in greater numbers, Jerusalem is becoming increasingly impoverished: 60 percent of all Israelis currently participate in the workforce, but only 45 percent of Jerusalemites do. This number is likely to continue to drop.

The capital’s problems don’t end there. As has been widely reported for some years, vast swaths of its choicest real estate are being gobbled up by wealthy American Jews who, for the most part, either keep the property empty as a second or third home or, in the case of more religiously observant buyers, provide housing for ultra-Orthodox families. Lamenting this change, some of the city’s disgruntled residents told me in private conversations that Jerusalem was now Israel’s most international and yet least cosmopolitan city.

Ramot Eshkol is a case in point. In the 1970s and 1980s, the northern neighborhood was a bastion of secularism, home to authors like Amos Oz and Meir Shalev and numerous others in Israel’s cultural and intellectual elite. In 2004, an average three-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood cost $100,000. Today, in part because of the influence of American buyers, similar three-bedroom apartments sell for half a million dollars or more, and over 70 percent of the neighborhood’s 9,000 residents are ultra-Orthodox, many of them either American or supported by American charity organizations. As the ultra-Orthodox moved in, the neighborhood’s previous residents fled, grumbling that their old neighborhood was no longer an exclusive, secular community. And with prices in Ramot Eshkol skyrocketing, ultra-Orthodox families have started looking for homes in nearby neighborhoods, moving there and setting off similar population shifts in Ramot Alon, Bayit Va’Gan, Kerem Avraham, and neighborhoods all over the city.

In and of itself, this process is not unique. Cities, after all, change all the time, neighborhoods reinvent themselves, populations drift out and others settle in. But real estate in Jerusalem is more than just a series of transactions; it has become a contact sport.

In Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood north of the Old City, American-backed settlers have successfully sued to retrieve property that, historically, belonged to Jewish families forced out by Arab violence in the 1930s and 1940s. Most Israelis found their efforts appalling: If Jews, after all, pushed prior ownership as an admissible reason to retrieve previously pilfered land, similar legal concessions would have to be made for Arabs who left Jerusalem and Jaffa and Haifa and Lod, a potential calamity for the Jewish state. Those concerned primarily with Jerusalem’s boundaries, however, paid no heed to the throngs of demonstrators—including authors, academics, and other members of Israel’s mainstream—now congregating in the neighborhood each Friday afternoon. They continued to build. With Florida millionaire Irving Moskowitz’s money, they erected another Jewish residential compound in Sheikh Jarrah and cheered on as Eli Yishai, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minister of housing, announced a plan to build 1,600 units for Jews in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot Shlomo. Yishai’s announcement, timed to coincide with Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Jerusalem, sparked the most severe diplomatic crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations in at least two decades.

Such developments are not just a matter of politics. As the reality in Jerusalem drifts further and further away from that of the rest of Israel, the very idea on which the modern Jewish state was founded, Zionism, is called into question.

No one, perhaps, represents classical Zionism better than Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s legendary mayor from 1965 to 1993. Like Theodor Herzl, after whom he was named, and David Ben Gurion, to whom he was a close friend and aide, Kollek believed that the Jewish people could only survive if they freed themselves of messianic mythologies and reintroduced themselves into history by building a viable, modern state, a normal nation that thrived alongside others, independent and proud. To that end, Kollek established a host of public institutions that reinvented Israel’s capital as a thriving, cosmopolitan, and modern city.

But Jerusalem, Kollek realized, would never be accepted as Israel’s legitimate capital unless it could demonstrate civility and grace toward all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. Less than a week after the end of the 1967 war, Kollek visited east Jerusalem’s defeated Arab mayor to pledge Jewish-Arab cooperation, a promise he largely kept throughout his tenure. Jerusalem, Kollek believed, was too important to serve as a battleground where politicians and activists could make grand ideological gestures. For the most part, Kollek kept the extremists at bay, preserving the delicate fabric of Jerusalem as a city sacred to all three monotheistic religions.

But the Jerusalem of today is one Kollek would hardly recognize. Its ultra-Orthodox residents, for the most part, negate Zionism altogether, believing that only prayer and mitzvot will bring about redemption. And its active settlers, those bent on Judaizing eastern Jerusalem, are similarly steeped in messianic zeal, committed to recapturing the alleyways and hilltops of biblical Israel even at the risk of alienating their fellow Israelis and the world at large. The old-school Zionists, those who voted for Kollek five times, have, for the most part, either died off or left town: In 2009, for example, 19,900 people left Jerusalem, the highest departure rate of any major Israeli city, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. While some of these former Jerusalemites are ultra-Orthodox headed for nearby West Bank settlements, many are young secular Israelis who are exasperated by the changing nature of the city.

One, of course, may disagree that a capital must, or can, represent its nation. We may argue whether or not Washington, D.C., say, embodies the United States, or what is quintessentially Dutch about The Hague. But Jerusalem has always been special: While it is an earthly city, it is, unlike most of the world’s capitals, also a theological concept, the sum of all the Jewish people’s yearnings and beliefs. When Israeli paratroopers reunified the city 43 years ago, many, like Kollek, believed that now, finally, heaven and earth would move a little bit nearer together and that the actual city would come as close as any actual city can to resembling the idyll Jews have been praying for. Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the opposite is true: Jerusalem represents a narrow portion of the Jewish population, highlighting the conflicts and the differences that plague Israel, never further from heaven.

So, it’s Teddy Kollek’s Jerusalem—a Jerusalem I never knew—I commemorated on Yom Yerushalayim this year. By the time I was old enough to learn to appreciate the city, Ehud Olmert and his ultra-Orthodox associates were already in power, and the secular exodus from Jerusalem had begun in full force. But like the many Jews who pine not for the earthly city of Jerusalem but for Jerusalem that’s in our prayers and in our minds and in our hearts, the eternal capital of the Jewish people, I, too, yearn. One day, I pray, Jews will once again return to Jerusalem and rebuild it, Jews who have faith in the ancient traditions but also in the promise of a better future, Jews who feel as comfortable with Twitter as they do with their tefillin, Jews who are confident enough in their birthright to treat others with dignity and respect. If they ever come back to Jerusalem, these Jews will make it the city Teddy Kollek fought for, both particularly Jewish and truly international, a city, in other words, I would very much love.

I’d like to think that the many targets of my ire—Israel’s cruel and senseless immigration policy, Republican lawmakers who lie and obfuscate, mirthless moralists who refuse to partake in cheerful gossip—are deserving. But I’d be no better than the ninnies whose missteps I’m paid to decry if I failed to look at the mirror and find a big, fat target there, ready for scrutiny, inviting heat.

Here goes.

In this week’s haftorah, Jeremiah reveals the key to a fulfilling life. “So says the Lord,” he proclaims, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He shall be like a lone tree in the plain, and will not see when good comes, and will dwell on parched land in the desert, on salt-sodden soil that is not habitable.”

I, dear reader, am very much a man who trusts in man, and my deep belief in everything related to flesh and arms accounts for the National Rifle Association lifetime membership card I carry proudly in my wallet. But before this week, I never thought of myself as a lone tree, nor of my comfortable apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as salt-sodden, one recent plumbing crisis notwithstanding. Am I, to put it plainly, doomed?

Like all of life’s worthwhile questions, this one is difficult to resolve, but any attempt at an answer must begin with absolute candor. Like most Israelis, I, too, was reared on the theology of Do-It-Yourself, a deep-seated faith that can scream out, say, against the travesty of Jewish settlements in the West Bank even as it sometimes can’t help but admire the temerity of establishing facts on the ground. And if I ever start a religion of my own—and what entrepreneurial chap hasn’t given this, the ultimate revenue stream, a lick of thought?—it’ll be called GOI, an acronym for Get Over It. Services will be short: adherents will walk in and tell me their problems, and I’ll smack them as hard as I can and suggest that they stop whining and take charge. As my liturgy, I’ll offer Faust’s cri de coeur:

‘In the beginning was the Word’: why, now
I’m stuck already! I must change that; how?
Is then ‘the word’ so great and high a thing?
There is some other rendering,
Which with the spirit’s guidance I must find.
We read: ‘In the beginning was the Mind.’
Before you write this first phrase, think again;
Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.
Does ‘mind’ set worlds on their creative course?
It means: ‘In the beginning was the Force.’
So it should be—but as I write this too,
Some instinct warns me that it will not do.
The spirit speaks! I see how it must read,
And boldly write: ‘In the beginning was the Deed!’

Jeremiah, one suspects, would be none too pleased. By definition, we consecrators of the Deed have no choice but to trust ourselves first, others second, and any additional forces—divine or otherwise—thereafter. Are we heretics? And, conversely, are those who are faithful but inert blessed? I have always refused to believe that was the case. When I was growing up in Israel during the first Gulf War, some prominent rabbis distributed little books of psalms with the catchy title tehilim neged tillim, or psalms against rockets. It made me laugh: King David’s ancient poetry of devotion was lovely, I thought, but if you wanted to stop rockets you might want to try bigger rockets instead.

And yet, Jeremiah wasn’t entirely wrong. He’s well aware that a thin line separates self-reliance and arrogance and that those who trust in man may speed past independence and dart all the way down to delusion. This is what happened to Jeremiah’s Israelites, and it’s what happens to so many of us, states and individuals alike. Capable of acting, we come to believe that our actions are the only forces that shape our world. Possessing of power, we come to see power as a sine qua non.

Or, at the very least, I do, and I struggle not to let the demons of the Deed drive me far away from the spirit of the Lord. I have many wise counselors, thinkers who caution me that power yielded for its own sake is a dark thing and that a life is worth living when we’re graceful enough to strike a balance between the deed and the word, between power and piety, between what we’re capable of doing and what we choose to do.

Martin Buber is one such guide. Eulogizing the anarchist philosopher Gustav Landauer—stoned to death by right-wing goons in Munich in 1919—Buber wrote the following words: “Gustav Landauer fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution. The revolution will not thank him for it. But those will thank him for it who have fought as he fought and perhaps some day those will thank him for whose sake he fought.” Amen to that.

On the afternoon before the Passover seder of 1938, Shoshana, then 18, married David Raziel. No more than two dozen people attended the wedding, a simple ceremony held in a friend’s back yard, and after David and Shoshana were wed they had lunch with their parents and checked in to a Tel Aviv hotel. They had to register under a false name: David was a wanted man.

In an interview given a few weeks before her death, Shoshana recalled that her husband spent their wedding night hunched at the hotel room’s desk, writing. He was the leader of the Etzel, also known as the Irgun, a militant group that parted ways with the main defense force of the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine to pursue more radical, and frequently more violent, paths. He lived for the struggle.

A few months later, when David was arrested by the British police, Shoshana visited him in jail. She told the warden she was Raziel’s sister. If anyone knew the rebel had a wife, Shoshana realized, she, too, would be locked up. David was eventually released and resumed his command of the Etzel. He orchestrated the bombing campaigns of several large Arab markets, killing dozens of civilians and wounding many more. He targeted British officers. The Jews, he fervently believed, were fighting for their right to survive, and they had no business holding back.

In May of 1941, David kissed Shoshana goodbye. He was off on a routine mission, he told her, and would be back in 10 days. That Shabbat, Shoshana attended a synagogue and read Parashat Emor, the same parasha we read this week.

Ten days passed, then 20. Shoshana went to look for David in a number of apartments she knew the Etzel used as hiding places. He wasn’t there. Finally, she went to see David’s parents. His mother, Bluma, had little to say. “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” she mumbled. “May His name be blessed.” With that, she ripped a small tear in Shoshana’s blouse. At 21, Shoshana was a widow. She was also a few weeks pregnant with David’s child. The boy would live for only one day.

There was little left for Shoshana to do but fight David’s last battle. He had died in Iraq, she learned, on a reconnaissance mission for the British army. As soon as England went to war with Nazi Germany, David had reached out to his former enemies; he would immediately cease all anti-British terror, he promised them, and instead enlist to help defeat Hitler. A German plane bombed his convoy. He was buried not far from where he fell, in the Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad. For more than a decade, Shoshana pressed to have his remains exhumed and brought to Israel. It took two decades for David to finally come home; in 1961, he was given a state funeral and posthumously awarded the rank of major general in the Israel Defense Forces.

Many, myself included, take issue with Raziel’s predilection for violence, as well as with many of his organization’s tactical and strategic goals. But this week, the week of Parashat Emor, let us remember him.

The haftorah might serve as a useful guide. Speaking of the priests, it enumerates the clergy’s numerous restrictions and obligations: their hair neither shaved off nor allowed to run wild, wearing linen hats and linen breaches, steering clear of the dead, the divorced, and other impure sorts.

As we read the list, we have no choice but feeling somewhat sorry for these elected few. To perform ritual, to serve as intermediaries between God and man, they are thrust into a sort of divine holding pattern, veiled from life’s grisliness and wants and preserved without blemish. It even comes down to their food: “Anything that has died of itself or is fatally wounded,” the haftorah tells us, “whether it be bird or beast, the priests may not eat.” These elevated men must snack solely on sacrificial meat, the consecrated offerings of their lowly brethren. It may not make them holy, but it makes them pure.

David Raziel was certainly not holy. The bloodshed he’d orchestrated is a matter for historians to discuss. But he was not unlike the priests his wife would have read about in synagogue the weekend, 69 years ago, that he died in Iraq. The man who spent his wedding night writing revolutionary tracts, the man who left his young wife to sift the sands of a faraway desert for valuable intelligence, the man for whom there was nothing but struggle, that man was pure. Ordinary men and women would do well to fear and question his zeal; they must, indeed, examine the consequences of his actions and try their best to find more sober, peaceful paths to achieve their goals. But they must also never lose their awe for the David Raziels of this world, the mad priests with the bloodied hands and the pure hearts. For better or for worse, they are the ones who make history hurtle by.

It isn’t a joke. As faithful Bahai are forbidden from drinking alcohol, my friend was dangling on his stool and nursing a soft drink when he was accosted by two drunken gents he knew and who decided to mock his faith. At first, my friend did nothing. He merely smiled and looked away as the lushes lashed their tongues, calling him names and disparaging his beliefs. But when they started shoving and poking, my friend didn’t stop to think. With his glass still in his fist, he smashed it into the nose of one of the offenders, cracking it. With blood gushing down his face, the man looked up, shocked. “I thought Bahais were supposed to pursue peace!” he said indignantly.

“We are,” replied my friend. “I’m a bad Bahai.”

I’ve heard that story at least a dozen times, and it amuses me still. But beyond the bravado and the catharsis, the story, I think, appeals to me because it rests on a fascinating premise. For the joke to work—my friend being the bad Bahai—we have to assume that the normative Bahai, the kind that shies away from violence, is the good Bahai, and that one is definitely preferable to the other.

But is it true? Let’s assume for a moment that the answer is yes. If one wanted to be a good Bahai, then, all one would have to do is consult the rulebook and keep to the straight and narrow. And the faith—any faith, for that matter—would become nothing more than a spell of spiritual bookkeeping, with good deeds acting as debits and each of us constantly busy with calculations of cost and benefit. In short, religion wouldn’t be much fun, nor would it hold as a system of moral justice.

This week’s haftorah makes this point elegantly, not so much by what it says as by what it keeps veiled.

Channeling God, the prophet Amos offers his listeners a brief glimpse into the future of the Jewish people:

For, behold I command, and I will scatter the house of Israel among all the nations. As it is shaken in a sieve, and not a coarse particle falls to the earth. By the sword shall all the sinful of My people perish, those who say, ‘The evil shall not soon come upon us.’ On that day, I will raise up the fallen Tabernacle of David, and I will close up their breaches, and I will raise up its ruins, and build it up as in the days of yore.

It’s one of those glorious disjointed sentences that makes the prophets so much fun to read. One moment God is talking about scattering the Israelites among the nations, and the very next He promises their resurrection and return to Zion. The one thing this paragraph lacks—the one thing modern, rational readers have every right to expect—is causality. God could just as easily have vowed to raise up the fallen Tabernacle of David only if the Israelites all obeyed His rules, repented, or otherwise proved worthy of His mercy. But God remains vague. He promises salvation but is unclear about its terms.

Reading the passage, I thought of childhood and of totalitarian regimes, two constructs that for reasons too tangled to discuss here are closely intertwined in my mind. “If you don’t know what you’ve done,” says the parent to the errant child, “I’m not going to tell you.” Panicked, the child looks inward and digs for clues, trying to ascertain which of his or her seemingly innocuous deeds so upset the parent. In the process, each deed is reevaluated, each action examined. The parent needn’t intervene any further: The child is now his or her own police state. Which, of course, makes the work of real police states that much easier; as any biography of state terror suggests, obfuscation and innuendo are the tools with which obedience is crafted, not clearly stated and eloquent accusations or demands. The tragedy of living under totalitarianism, as has often been noted before, is that one never really knows the precise nature of the state’s logic and is constantly left guessing. As today’s hero could likely be tomorrow’s pariah, and as the grand ideology of the morning could dissipate by nightfall, the best thing to do is nothing at all.

Religion works on a similar principle, but in the inverse. It, too, keeps moving the goal post. There are, of course, precise rules to follow, clearly prescribed in books and upheld by the clergy. But reading this week’s haftorah, and many other Biblical texts like it, one gets the feeling that it’s not blind adherence to the rules that is paramount, but rather some elusive spirit, some flash of enlightenment that brings us much closer to God than all the strictures in the world ever will.

What does God want? We don’t know. He wouldn’t say. Why would he punish us one moment and reward us the next? No clue. But while the cynic and the tyrant both urge us to do nothing about this natural state of uncertainty, the prophet is urging us to explore, to inquire, to figure it out for ourselves. If we do, we would become much closer to God. All redemption really means, we would learn along the way, is asking the right questions. My Bahai friend has always done just that. It’s what led him to punch his provoker in the face; more than pursuing peace, he believes, a man must pursue justice. It may not sit well with the sticklers, but it’s his own path to God. Could there be any other?

This, at least, is how the Internet would have it. Slapping original subtitles onto a scene from the 2004 German film Downfall, scores of YouTube auteurs have made Hitler one of the Internet’s most popular memes. The scene remains the same—the Führer, portrayed by Bruno Ganz, is livid, shouting at his generals and flailing his arms in anger—but the creative translations explore every nook of the news, from politics to pop culture. The most popular videos in this cottage industry have attracted more than 4 million viewers to date.

Much has been written about this phenomenon. For the most part, commentators either dismissed the clip as another in a long line of random and amusing Internet gags, or focused on the obvious and argued that laughing at a horror such as Hitler provided catharsis.

While such explanations are plausible, neither addresses the fundamental question at the heart of this cultural anomaly: why Hitler? Why not, say, Darth Vader? Why not Robert Duvall’s apoplectic Stalin? A host of other characters fit the bill just as well, yet we chose Hitler. And not, mind you, the Führer of The Producers or The Great Dictator; while these and other earlier comic depictions found much to mock about the Nazi leader’s power and pomp, the Internet clips find humor in Hitler’s darkest hour, when he ceases to be the bête noir of history and comes as close as we’ll ever see him to a vulnerable human being.

There’s much evidence to suggest that Internet Hitler is vastly different than former parodies of the man. Mel Brooks’s Hitler, for example, as well as Charlie Chaplin’s, made us laugh because they exaggerated the silliness evident just beneath the surface of any totalitarian enterprise, with its fetishistic approach to power and footwear and its childlike insistence on immediate gratification. Internet Hitler, however, is just the opposite. He can’t catch a break. Nothing goes his way. With few exceptions, he finds himself put down by some large and cumbersome bureaucratic organization, be it the DNC or the NFL, Microsoft or a municipality. In his energetic rant, Internet Hitler is a latter-day Howard Beale, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

We can ask for no better endorser of our ennui. Once we overcome the joke’s initial appeal—can you imagine Hitler going on Facebook?!?—we’re left with a pulsating feeling, not always coherent, that the joke’s funny because it’s true; that Hitler would get mad at Microsoft; that even Hitler would get mad at Microsoft; that the inconveniences and annoyances that make up so much of our days are so outrageous that even the greatest architect of evil our collective imagination could evoke would find our condition utterly intolerable.

To better understand how we’ve come to feel this way about Hitler, it’s to Hitler himself we should refer, not the film version but the real historical figure. Whatever else World War II had been—a momentous battle, shaper of geopolitical realities, engine of death—we remember it now primarily as a symbol for perhaps our last great and uncomplicated war. From the mud in Faluja or the dunes of Kandahar, all we have to do to assuage the ambiguities of our current conflicts is close our eyes and think of Normandy. But specificity, of course, fades with time, and the war and everything it represents in our memory gradually became embodied in its talisman: Hitler, the Absolute Evil. Like every religious icon, when we see Hitler, we’re supposed to feel a swell of transcendental emotion: Just as the Christian beholding the crucifix should feel Jesus’s compassion and sacrifice and love, a Jew—or, for that matter, any American, or any contemporary westerner—looking at the image of Hitler should feel hateful and enraged and proud to side with the enlightened men who risked everything to rid the world of this mustachioed menace.

But just as Christ evokes a spiritual ideal that could never be obtained by us mortals, so does Hitler. We will never again have an enemy who so purely and uncomplicatedly represents all that is foul with humanity. Milosevic, Ahmadinejad, Mugabe—none has succeeded in dethroning Hitler as the universally iconic stand-in for all of humanity’s malice. We may fear them and loathe them, but we do so as humans fearing and loathing other humans. This is why the constant rhetorical gambit abused by politicians, the one about it being 1938 and the next Hitler being right around the corner, is not only historically inaccurate but also emotionally empty. Most of us won’t let ourselves get swept up by it precisely because we know—we feel!—that there could never really be another Hitler to terrify and enrage us so purely as the original once had.

And with no real Hitler, with no real evil to fight to the death, the unpleasantnesses that dot our lives loom larger and larger. The sports franchise run by greedy executives who make disheartening choices and degrade the game, the large corporation policing our hardware and software usage to maximize its profits, the clerks who regulate our city’s parking rules: They all exert so much influence, governing how we spend our free time and available income, that we’ve come to see them not so much as necessary evils but as world-historical forces. We have no more battlefields on which to infuse our lives with meaning; the battlefields we do have are teeming with doubt and confusion. If we could only imagine another Hitler, another epic battle we might once more be called to fight for the good of the world, the parking ticket may not seem so bad. But we can’t, because the point of Hitler is his singularity, his momentous stature as the sum of all our fears. Searching for the next best thing to rail against, we rail against what we see, the ephemera and detritus that make up so much of life.

Who better to express our anger, then, than Hitler? Who better to shout about the inequities that torment us? In that sense, Hitler is like a solution to a centuries-old riddle. It is this: Human nature is to seek certainty. Modernity’s nature is to inspire doubt. How would humans live as moderns? How would they tolerate uncertainty? One solution may be the creation of modern myths, markers of absolute good and absolute evil to help them navigate their way through a world bereft of both. When we laugh at Hitler’s fictitious rants, we use him to vent our frustrations, but also to color our too-frequently-relativist world with a drop of that old-time righteous rage. This is as close to an act of faith as many of us would ever get.

And yet it’s a deeply flawed habit. To return for a moment to Hitler as religious icon, it should be noted that religious icons come with religious feelings, and those—in theory, at least—develop our tolerance for the unknown and our acceptance of the immutable. Not so Hitler: Hitler refers only to himself, he teaches us nothing, he’s all sensation and no sublime transcendence. There can be no salvation with him, no moment of epiphany, only fear and rage. So, while religion—again, at its best—teaches us to accept personal responsibility and strive for change even when we realize that change is highly unlikely, Hitler encourages us just to scream. He provides us with catharsis, but not with redemption.

Is it any wonder, then, that it’s the Internet that made Hitler a pop star? What, after all, is communications on the Web—the tweets, the blogs, the status updates—if not a steady stream of sniping and snapping and snark, an agora where malcontents can shout out their frustrations for other malcontents to criticize or praise? What a blog is to writing, what a tweet is to conversation, Hitler is to a value system: shorthand, a substitute, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Like any worthy epic hero, Jeremy—whom I’ve just invented for the purpose of some modern mythmaking—is more fiction than fact, the embodiment of our cultural values and anxieties. He was born to educated and affluent parents, ambled through adolescence, and attended a great college where he spent his years thinking worthy thoughts. Then he graduated, moved in to an apartment in the city with two roommates, dated and drank and held a string of jobs that filled his days and his pocket but nothing more. One by one, he watched as his friends embarked on what appeared to be adult careers, with clear trajectories and handsome salaries. Now nearing 30, he stared at the mirror and saw there the stony gaze of doubt. He had so many things he wanted to do, so many interests and beliefs and possibilities, yet no idea which path to pursue. One by one, horizons narrowed and opportunities died down. Slowly, habit crept in and took over. Jeremy’s odyssey ended before it had even begun.

If Odysseus struck the Greeks as a perfect hero for a Hellenic world, clever and cunning and brave, Jeremy is a man for our times, a man who can do so much and yet does so little. Jeremy is what we get every time we’re tempted by the siren song of self-indulgence and confusion and despair. There’s a bit of Jeremy in many of us.

This week’s haftorah, however, has other heroes in mind. They’re lepers, and their condition had taught them a thing or two about how to live life.

“Now there were four men, stricken with [leprosy], at the entrance of the gate,” reads the haftorah. “And they said to each other, ‘Why are we sitting here until we die? If we say that we will come into the city, with the famine in the city, we will die there, and if we stay here we will die. So now, let us go and let us defect to the Aramean camp. If they spare us we will live, and if they kill us we will die.’ ”

The lepers enter the camp and find it abandoned. The Arameans, Israel’s enemies, had fled, fearing God’s wrath. The lepers share the good news with their co-religionists, who are quick to plunder the Aramean camp and its riches. As they rush to collect the goods, they trample an army officer to death; he’s the very same chap, we’re told, who had doubted God’s promise to subdue the Arameans before Israel.

It’s a fascinating role reversal. The lepers, society’s ultimate rejects, are delivered from their dejection because they refuse to succumb to hopelessness or abandon their faith. Calmly, they appraise their situation. They take action, and for that they are richly rewarded. The officer, on the other hand, is crushed, his sin being his refusal to acknowledge that in the chaotic course of human events, the highly unlikely is never too slim of a probability.

Jeremys the world over may want to take heed. When we believe, as most Americans believe, that we can do whatever we want to do and be whomever we want to be; that there’s an infinite number of future selves for us to choose from; that life cascades in a neat waterfall of cause and effect, we run the risk of being paralyzed by our own potentials. Having nothing to lose, the lepers did the right thing, entered the Aramean camp and informed their brethren of its condition; burdened by status and responsibility and knowledge, the officer chose somber military assessments over wild faith. They prospered, he perished.

When we next find ourselves pondering what to do with our options-laden lives, all we have to do is think of the lepers, come up with a plan, have a little faith, and take action. We should be like those ancient Babylonian statues of dogs, at the bottom of which wise men of antiquity had engraved: “Don’t think. Bite.” No other path could make us a hero, no other path takes us back home.

Until two years ago, I was no more familiar with the Torah than I was with Beverly Hills, 90210.

I admit that I knew both texts intimately: Growing up in Israel, I spent each Friday afternoon with one and each Saturday morning with the other. I followed closely the stories each told. I memorized the kind of negligible details only a youthful admirer might notice, like Noah’s age when he died (950) or the license plate on Steve Sanders’ Corvette (I8A4RE. Say it quickly). But I was not a thoughtful consumer of either sacred text. I read and watched, but I didn’t care much.

When I was asked to begin writing a weekly column for Tablet’s predecessor, Nextbook, commenting on the week’s parsha, or Torah portion, I approached the task with wry amusement. My mandate was to unearth any relevance the Torah may have to contemporary life, and to ascertain what, if anything, we young, secular, and not exceedingly educated Jews might learn from the Good Book. I looked forward to writing biting critiques that gently mocked the ancient book’s strange and antiquated stories. I expected to feel everything but enlightenment.

Two years into my journey—after a year of writing about the parsha, I moved on to commenting on the haftorah, the weekly reading from the Book of Prophets that supplements the Torah portion—I have changed in profound ways. I have no plans to observe the Sabbath, and I still consider my burger bereft unless veiled by a thick layer of Gruyère, but reading the Bible closely each week, and asked to grapple with its meanings, I feel more resilient than I’d ever been in my faith.

Some readers, I know, may be unwilling to free faith from the tethers of ritual and will consider my own brand of belief invalid or flawed. Without delving into details—the intricacies of the matter are too great to paint on such a modest canvass—I will say that at the core of my faith is a fervent belief in God, coupled with a strong skepticism that any one human, or any one book, could ever grasp the entirety, the enormity of his mysterious and ultimately unknowable will.

And while I don’t believe the Bible to be literally divine, I have come to see in it an astonishingly astute guide to human thought and behavior, a beacon in whose light us moderns—having ravaged with conviction every last bit of certainty, weary with knowledge and wary of truth—might do well to walk.

Of all the lessons the Torah had taught me, one stands above all: There is a God, but the rest is up to us.

Consider Sinai. If we look at the Bible as a tale, the moment at the foothill of the mount is its absolute peak. Everything we’ve read so far has been leading up to this. God chooses Noah, then Abraham, then makes Abraham into a nation, then banishes that nation into exile in Egypt. Finally, they are redeemed. Finally, God is willing to speak to the whole people. He’ll give them his living word, his law. He’ll tell them what it’s all about. But here’s what God has to say: “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” That’s it.

Listening intently, the Israelites may be forgiven for feeling somewhat swindled. God, after all, had just told them that they were his Chosen People, but he hadn’t told them why, and, more bafflingly, he hadn’t told them what, now that he had conferred on them this most singular status, he expected them to do with it. A kingdom of priests? A holy nation? That’s hardly a blueprint for peoplehood.

At the heart of Divine Election—a chosenness that extends in time and applies not just to the particular people huddling in the desert millennia ago but to all Jews in perpetuity—is doubt. We understand, of course, that observing God’s laws is an irrevocable component of redemption, but it is not the only one. Sinai suggests something else, something spiritual. It invites us to wonder what it means, to question how we should act to prove worthy of being the Lord’s favorite sons and daughters. It puts the onus on us.

This, I believe, is one of the Bible’s most awesome tenets. Judaism shies away from heavenly arithmetic; it is not a world where the good and the bad are both calculated, measured against some divine standard, and used to determine life and fate. It’s not a religion that poses a straight and narrow path to salvation and punishes anyone who transgresses. Instead, in weekly portion after weekly portion, we get deliberate ambiguity and exhortations to take action.

Take Isaiah, for example. “This people I formed for Myself,” says the prophet, channeling the voice of God. “They shall recite My praise. But you did not call Me, O Jacob, for you wearied of Me, O Israel. You did not bring Me the lambs of your burnt offerings, nor did you honor Me with your sacrifices; neither did I overwork you with meal-offerings nor did I weary you with frankincense. Neither did you purchase cane for Me with money, nor have you sated Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities. I, yea I, erase your transgressions for My sake, and your sins I will not remember.”

Writing about this passage a few weeks ago, I commented on its astounding lack of causality: The people sin grievously, yet God gracefully forgives. In Judaism, unlike its sister monotheistic religions, salvation doesn’t necessarily depend on prior action. Salvation comes first; what you choose to do with it is the whole point.

That is the message of Isaiah, the message of Sinai, the message of Moses and numerous others of our spiritual founding fathers. It’s a message of responsibility and of purposefulness. It’s also a message of freedom: Rather than a painting-by-numbers approach to morality and mortality—follow the rules and go straight to heaven—Judaism revolves around that chief faculty that distinguishes us from God’s other creations, namely free will. The rules are all set, but we’re free to rebel.

Which, needless to remind, we do. Forty days after receiving the Word of God, the Israelites make themselves a golden calf. For 40 years in the desert, they gripe and moan. They’re such incurable complainers that God himself calls them a stiff-necked people. And yet he seldom punishes them and never abandons them. He knows they’re human and that the only way they can be redeemed is not by accepting him unconditionally, or subjecting themselves to his every word, but by slowly overcoming their own weaknesses and learning to be a little bit more divine each day.

At its center, then, Judaism places Man. Blessed in his confusion, holy in his errors, searching. The search is the thing; the goal is less important. Not for us all this eschatology: Time and again, the rabbis remind us that there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except for removing the yoke of foreign bondage. Our Messiah is not only ordinary, he’s a paradox: As Michael Walzer astutely noted, the Jewish Messiah can only come when the entire people are worthy of him, by which point the Messiah is no longer needed. If it’s salvation we want, Judaism teaches us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

These are some of the lessons I’ve learned from reading the Bible. I’d like to think that they’ve made me more observant, not in practice but in thought. Like those trembling Hebrews at Sinai, I’m overwhelmed by the peerless heights; I look up and can’t see the sky. And like them, too, I suspect that there’s a good 40-year-trek lying ahead, most likely with no Promised Land on the other side. Never mind; I’ve got one hell of a guidebook.

In Leviticus, Aaron’s sons are put to death for being creative with their burnt offerings. “And Aaron’s sons,” reads the parasha, “Nadab and Abihu, each took his pan, put fire in them, and placed incense upon it, and they brought before the Lord foreign fire, which He had not commanded them. And fire went forth from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.”

While we moderns may judge the punishment as a tad severe—the boys, after all, were quite possibly guilty of nothing more grievous than fulfilling their priestly duties with a bit more zeal than is called for—it makes perfect sense in the context of the time’s rigid rituals. A cohen should know better than to mess with foreign fire.

The haftorah, on the other hand, draws us into murkier moral territory. As King David’s crew is transporting the Ark of the Covenant, a terrible accident occurs.

“And they set the ark of God upon a new cart,” it reads, “and they carried it from the house of Avinadav that was on the hill; and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Avinadav, drove the new cart. … And they came to Goren-nachon, and Uzzah put forth [his hand] to the ark of God, and grasped hold of it, for the oxen swayed it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him down there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.”

What, we may be forgiven for asking, was poor Uzzah’s sin? Seeing the holiest relic about to topple, the alert young man lent a steadying hand, thinking, perhaps, that were the ark to fall, many more men would have no choice but to touch it so as to lift it back up onto the cart.

Generations of commentators have addressed these two grim stories, trying to find a workable explanation for the deaths of Nadab, Abihu, and Uzzah. Aaron’s sons, argued the Tanna Rabbi Ishmael, were struck down for being drunk in the Temple. And Uzzah, some scholars argued, may himself be innocent, but he died because of King David’s decision to transport the ark atop a cart rather than have it carried on the shoulders of Levites as he’d done before. No matter what the theological justification, however, the simple explanation remains unchanged: God did what God wanted to do because God is above morality and beyond explanation. We may require reasons, but He does not.

What lesson, then, might we extract from these seemingly senseless slayings?

A crucial one: Life is unfair.

It’s a lesson we’re constantly at risk of forgetting. Somewhere between Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock, between our drive to validate emotions and our quest to master reason, we seem to have willfully denied the fundamental truth of our existence—namely, that we live in a universe that is neither just nor orderly.

When we are younger, this cosmic senselessness hits us hard. With a child’s innate sense of fairness we rage at the world, trying to understand how bad things happen to good people, how the wicked sometimes triumph over the pure, how some go hungry while others gorge. Growing up, we sublimate these raw fears. We understand that injustice is innate but also that it is our duty to do whatever we can to eradicate as much of it as possible. This is how we become responsible, morally committed adults.

A court decision in Massachusetts this week, however, called this logic into question. It charged nine teenagers with bullying a classmate, Phoebe Prince, who ended up taking her own life in January of this year. The concrete details of the case are still unclear—as of this writing, no report specified precisely what the nine did to Prince besides relentlessly and repeatedly calling her derogatory names—and so I’m reluctant to address it directly. But witnessing a bullying case fall under the purview of the criminal justice system makes me cringe. To be clear, I do not doubt for a moment that bullying is a serious issue, one made more resonant and disturbing by the ubiquity of social media. Nor do I deny the scope of the challenge facing parents and educators as they struggle to deal with this prevalent problem. But unless there is serious bodily harm or a threat thereof, calling in the cops strikes me as thoroughly counterproductive.

The schoolyard, as most of us may remember, is a perfect microcosm. It is also the place where most of us first encounter the grandeur of inequity. When I was in the fourth grade, a gauche comment I’d made led to a prolonged and oftentimes vicious campaign of taunts and harassment. Having never seen that side of life before, I ran to my parents, weepy and confused. They couldn’t be more clear.

“Life is unfair,” they said. “Deal with it.”

In today’s child-centric world, when parenting often turns into something of a competitive sport, such a terse response would probably come across as insensitive and insufficient. And, as a child, it took me a long while to understand just what they meant. But when I did, I went back to the schoolyard and dealt with it, knuckles and all. I got tough, and it didn’t take long for the bullying to stop and for my self-esteem to skyrocket. My parents realized that my predicament was neither rational nor just, and rather than talk it through or involve the school they dispatched me to fight my own fight. When I did, and when I won, I learned not just about self-defense, but about self-worth as well.

As we deal with bullying, then, it is probably advisable to advocate for increased vigilance on behalf of teachers and parents and take whatever steps we can to make schools a safe and welcoming environment.

But an equally important lesson lies in this week’s parasha and haftorah: Life is unfair, but we love it anyway, or perhaps we even love it because it is unfair. After all, a life strictly regulated by rules, a life of perfect causality and order and reason, such a life wouldn’t be much fun at all.

Make that the patron saint of Passover, too: Of all of Jesus’s entourage, only John and Peter were permitted to ride into town and start making preparations for the seder, and when the big night came—it was, after all, Christ’s Last Supper—it was only natural that John would snag the seat right next to the Boss.

But of his many charms, John may be best remembered for the following pronouncement: “God,” he said, “is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.”

Too often, this sweet bit is presented in counterpoint to Judaism; the old religion, goes the trope, is the religion of law, the new one the religion of love.

John, meet Jeremiah. In this week’s haftorah, the prophet has a message from God that might resonate with the loving crowd.

“So says the Lord of Hosts,” quoth Jeremiah, “the God of Israel; Add your burnt offerings upon your sacrifices and eat flesh. For neither did I speak with your forefathers nor did I command them on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning a burnt offering or a sacrifice. But this thing did I command them, saying: Obey Me so that I am your God and you are My people, and you walk in all the ways that I command you, so that it may be well with you. But they did not obey nor did they incline their ear, but walked according to their own counsels and in the view of their evil heart, and they went backwards and not forwards.”

The implications of this divine rant are vast. Those who perceive religion to be nothing more than the laws governing the mechanics of ritual are sharply rebuked: What matters most, the Lord thunders, is not the system but the spirit. Spend too much time on practices and observances, and you risk losing sight of your true goals. Dive freely and joyfully into the ocean of compassion and meaning that is God and His commandments, and you’re swimming in the right direction.

The word of God, you would think, would resonate with those who declare themselves his ardent followers. This week, alas, Israeli politics provided us with two searing examples of the self-professed faithful walking backwards and choosing the law over love.

It began with Yaakov Katz, a religious member of Knesset from the right-wing National Union Party and the chairman of a committee convened to address the crisis of illegal immigration to Israel. With thousands of African and Asian laborers—many seeking refuge from bloody civil wars—illegally entering Israel in search of service or construction jobs, Katz searched his soul and came up with a solution to stem the tide. Israel, he argued, should declare martial law and shoot on sight any unlucky immigrant caught sneaking into its territory. Those who’d already made it in, Katz continued, should be arrested, placed in labor camps, and forced to work on major, arduous infrastructure projects. When he reclines at his seder table next week, Katz may do well to remember the part of the haggadah that reminds us that the Israelites, too, were once strangers in a strange land.

But Katz’s wicked statement was soon eclipsed by an even grander bout of benightedness, this one involving Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman. Despite the demanding nature of his position, this member of the United Torah Judaism party has received little by way of a secular, scientific education, the sort of education you’d like the man who is the de facto overseer of the nation’s health care system to have. When his underlings, the doctors and professionals who run Israel’s hospitals and clinics, strove to care for the living, Litzman was looking out for the dead. Last week, he urged the government to delay the construction of a new fortified emergency room in Ashkelon’s Barzilai hospital. The new emergency room, he argued, is slated to be built over what may very well be an ancient Jewish gravesite. A master in the arithmetic of precarious political coalitions, Litzman managed to have his way, forcing his fellow ministers to order that the project be relocated to a nearby site. That the hospital is located just a few kilometers from the Gazan border, and as such is often the destination for Israelis wounded by the Qassam rockets lobbed by Hamas, mattered little to Litzman. That the new plan will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and take at least three more years to complete—leaving doctors and patients alike with no adequate protection in the meantime—barely registered. Let the ancestors rest in peace, Litzman decreed; everybody else, run for your lives.

The wounded weep, the foreigners cower, but the strictures of orthodoxy at their narrowest are zealously observed. It’s a good thing Moses isn’t around any more; had he celebrated Passover in Israel of 2010, with Litzman and Katz and their ilk, he might’ve been devastated to know just how much the Promised Land had come to resemble Egypt.

With no flour necessary, the fried potato pancake, Boulud said, is a perfect combination of textures, soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. And to augment that other, tired Passover staple, the gefilte fish, Boulud’s latkes are topped with smoked salmon, with a quail egg thrown in as a bit of elegant finish.

“I think it’s a dish that has no cultural bounds,” Boulud said, “but I hope it is also a small tribute to my many Jewish patrons and their joyful embrace of good food and food memories.”

Potato Latkes With Smoked Salmon, Quail Eggs, and Watercress

Makes 40 Latkes

20 quail eggs

1½ pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and coarsely grated

3 scallions, trimmed and coarsely chopped

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

1 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 tablespoons minced chives

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup heavy cream

1 bunch watercress (about 6 ounces), leaves only

6 ounces sliced smoked salmon, cut into 1-inch squares

2 tablespoons minced chives

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Prepare an ice-water bath in a large bowl. Gently lower the eggs into the boiling water and cook for exactly 2 minutes. Drain immediately, then transfer the eggs to the ice-water bath. When cooled, drain and carefully peel the eggs. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate.

Squeeze the grated potato with your hands to remove the excess water; place in a medium bowl. Add the scallions, lightly beaten eggs, parsley, and chives; season with salt and pepper; and toss well to combine.

Warm 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over high heat. Form latkes that are about 1½ inches in diameter and ¼ inch thick. When the oil is hot, add some latkes to the pan. Cook until golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes, then flip over and cook until crisp and golden brown on the bottom and tender on the inside, another 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate to drain. Repeat with the remaining potato mixture, adding olive oil as needed. Sprinkle with salt and serve immediately, or reheat to serve later.

Bring the heavy cream to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the watercress and stir until well combined; remove from heat. Puree the heavy cream-and-watercress mixture in a blender until smooth. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Refrigerate until cool.

Using a whisk or a mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip the watercress cream until it forms soft peaks. Season with salt and pepper. Cut the quail eggs in half lengthwise and place a half on each warm latke. Drape a salmon square around each egg and garnish with a dollop of the watercress cream and a sprinkling of chopped chives. Serve immediately.

The term, referring to unobservant Jews who adopt the strictures of Orthodoxy, represented, to us tanned and ignorant teenagers, some cosmic hazard that resided far beyond the reach of our drug-addled universe. We fierce fornicators, we ravers and surfers, just couldn’t fathom how anyone might abandon our raucous ranks, put on the black hat and coat, and forgo life’s profane pleasures, the pursuit of which was as close as most of us had ever gotten to the purpose-driven life.

And yet, abandon us they did, a dozen of them at least, off to ultra-Orthodox enclaves in Bnei Berak or Jerusalem, off to a different life that seemed to suck them away like a dark vortex. The most traumatic departure was that of an older friend, a hazel-eyed chap two years my senior. After learning that he had become religious, we came to think of his past attributes as tombstones for a life he would never again have, tucked away in some yeshiva on a dusty hill somewhere in the south. No more basketball. No more weed. No more trips to the Kinneret with some girl he’d met only the week before, skinny-dipping before slipping into the same sleeping bag, wet with sweat and sex and wild with hope. Instead, our friend was studying Torah, which, to us, meant that he was drying out the flower of his free will between the pages of an ancient and largely irrelevant book.

I thought about my ba’al teshuva friend years later, when I myself began giving Judaism some serious thought, and was amazed and a touch horrified that, back then, I saw his spiritual odyssey as nothing but a long day’s journey into night. I was 19, and religion’s emotional and intellectual depths were invisible to me, like pockets of cool water lying still beneath a thin layer of ice. All I could see were the negations, the denials, the unbearable yoke of religious adherence. Mercifully, that has since changed, and the transformation from valiant son of the Enlightenment to keeper of the faith now represents not surrender but a path along which one is free to travel as far and as stridently as one pleases.

Such, I believe, is the spirit of this week’s haftorah. “This people I formed for Myself,” says Isaiah, channeling the voice of God. “They shall recite My praise. But you did not call Me, O Jacob, for you wearied of Me, O Israel. You did not bring Me the lambs of your burnt offerings, nor did you honor Me with your sacrifices; neither did I overwork you with meal-offerings nor did I weary you with frankincense. Neither did you purchase cane for Me with money, nor have you sated Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities. I, yea I, erase your transgressions for My sake, and your sins I will not remember.”

It’s a beautifully haunting passage, because at no time does it mention that staple of Western thought, causality. The people sin grievously, yet God gracefully forgives. Isaiah uses no conjunction, no grammatical hook to connect the two sentences together. He simply states: You wearied me with iniquities; I erase your transgressions. Seemingly, no action is required on the part of us humans. Forgiveness comes gratis, compliments of the Almighty.

That, of course, is not the point of prophesy. Isaiah, like his fellow holy orators, speaks in the hope of propelling the people toward purity. He demands repentance, rebirth. But the passage is illuminating nonetheless, suggesting that in Judaism, unlike its sister monotheistic religions, salvation doesn’t necessarily depend on prior action. Salvation comes first; what you choose to do with it is the whole point.

Where does that leave us? How do we go about living when we’ve already been forgiven for our sins? Strangely, that might make our spiritual load even heavier. The burden of proof is always on us. Ours is not a system of penalties and rewards; ours is an endless run toward a goal no human being can ever achieve, namely being entirely worthy of God’s compassion. But that doesn’t mean we should ever stop running. Somewhere along the way, we become righteous.

Each one of us, then, is a little bit of a ba’al teshuva. We may not, like my childhood friend, exchange Madonna for Maimonides, but whether consciously or not, we never forget the true nature of our relationship with God. He, we know, doesn’t need our sacrifices. He, we’ve read, has already forgiven us our worst behavior. In charity, in ritual, in kindness, we all repay the favor.

So says the Lord God: In the first month, on the first of the month, you shall take a young bull without blemish, and you shall purify the altar. And the priest shall take of the blood of the sin-offering and put it on the doorpost of the House, and on the four corners of the ledge of the altar and on the doorpost of the gate of the Inner Court. And so shall you do on seven [days] in the month, because of mistaken and simple-minded men, and expiate the House.

—Ezekiel 45: 18-20

This week, the human Leibovitz was kind enough to let me have his column and say some things I think you guys need to hear. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m a bull.

And folks, it’s about time we had a nice, long chat. Granted, I’m only a young bull. A young bull without blemish, true, but a young bull nonetheless. And I’m probably not as well-read as some of you—you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is for a bull to get a library card—but I do read the Bible. And in the Bible, there’s a lot of talk about bull sacrifice. This week’s haftorah, for example, begins with the slaughter of one of my kind, a good chap martyred “because of mistaken and simple-minded men.” Can you believe it? Can you imagine how angry that makes me? Well, let me tell you, it’s shenanigans like these that give your species a pretty bad reputation out here in the field.

By now, some of you are probably thinking I’m being unreasonable. After all, you dropped the sacrifice thing a while ago, and except for the Spaniards and their moronic matadors, most of you treat us well enough. Still, I read Ezekiel and my blood boils: The more I think about it, the more I realize that while your kind may have forgone the actual sacrifice, it never got rid of the sacrifice mentality.

The other night, for example, I was watching the Academy Awards. It’s something we animals do every year. We particularly like the In Memoriam section; there’s something thrilling about having outlived all those gorgeous, fit humans. But when Mo’Nique took the stage, everything changed. “I would like to thank the Academy,” she said in her acceptance speech, “for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.”

I wasn’t sure I understood, so I went to consult with the horses. They’re terrible gossips and know all about celebrity stuff. But even they were confounded. Any way you choose to interpret it, Mo’Nique’s statement can only mean one thing: Had the Academy chosen to give the award for best supporting actress to anyone else, it would have succumbed to some subtle thread of racism and disrespect, Mo’Nique alone being the paragon of thespian greatness. Even when they triumph, mistaken and simple-minded humans still feel that old-time urge to blame everyone else for the circumstances of their life; luckily for us folks, you no longer take it out on us.

Instead, you take it out on one another. Like Elinor Burkett, producer of the Oscar-winner for best documentary short. The film’s director and producer, a smiling, tall gentleman named Roger Ross Williams, walked on the stage and began his heartfelt speech, when Burkett charged out of nowhere, grabbed the microphone, said, “Let the woman talk,” and proceeded with her crazy rant. Let me tell you, even the pigs were shocked. Pull a stunt like this on the farm, and it’s no feed for a week.

What bothers me about Burkett and Mo’Nique has little to do with bad manners or lack of taste. What drives me mad is that even those members of your species who are at the top of the food chain—wealthy, talented, celebrated—are so quick to see their lives as a series of slights, so ready to blame others for everything, so comfortable with conspiracy theories and spite and indignation.

And Hollywood is just the tip of the iceberg. The Republicans in Washington, the governor in Albany, the rambling tea-partiers all over the nation, all screaming the same screed: It’s somebody else’s fault! Somebody else must pay the price!

Used to be you could sprinkle a dash of bull blood and consider yourself purified of your baser instincts and your stupid mistakes. No longer. Best of luck to your species.

Sincerely,

Unblemished Bull

It’s a fantastic monument, not only because the fish—its expression resembling that of a teenager rudely awoken from an afternoon nap—looks thoroughly fake, but also because it suggests to the uninitiated traveler that beyond the terminal’s gates lies a world of wonders, strange creatures and all.

In a sense, this is precisely the feeling the Antiguan government is interested in promoting. More than 300,000 tourists, on average, descend on the island’s shores each year, a horde of salmon-hued Brits and beer-battered Germans that both sustains and overwhelms the local population, estimated at 72,000. There’s little the Antiguans can do: Tourism accounts for more than 60 percent of the island’s economy, leaving the locals with no choice but to vigorously market their tiny nation as a magical Caribbean getaway, a sort of real-life Fantasy Island. Along these lines, the fish is a monument to the impossible: St. Bart’s may have the reputation, and Mustique the celebrity appeal, but only in Antigua, the marlin suggests, may the very laws of nature be bent for your amusement.

Last week, my wife Lisa and I flew to Antigua for a weekend to attend the wedding of Mr. B., a hotelier, at his lovely Antiguan resort. Much time was spent pondering what to wear—the groom threatened to beat up and toss out any guest who dared wear a tie—and very little contemplating such minor issues as entry visas. If Israeli citizens needed a visa to visit Antigua, I told myself, Mr. B.’s son-in-law, himself Israeli and my close friend, would surely have let me known.

But no sooner had we landed and admired the oversized fish than an immigration official broke the doleful news: no visa, no entry. Meekly, I removed my baseball cap and shades and said that I had no idea I needed a visa, an idiotic statement that seemed to elicit more pity than disgust. “Well,” said the immigration official, “you do.”

There was no other choice. I invoked Mr. B.’s name. This had the desired effect: Lisa and I were removed from the line, taken to a secluded spot by the nurse’s office, and instructed to wait. Soon, another official, smiling warmly, moseyed over and told us that she’d do whatever she could to help us resolve our little problem as quickly as possible.

Veteran travelers, we refused to succumb to panic. Instead, we pulled out our phones and texted Mr. B.’s daughter, informing her of the snafu. Two minutes later, there she was, beaming, standing by our sides. There was no point in asking how she’d gotten through security, immigration, and all the other barriers that are supposed to stop you from walking right into an airport’s secure detention spot. A few words were exchanged, and it was agreed that I would be released on my own recognizance, passport unstamped, and sent to the Ministry of National Security to settle my affairs.

The Ministry of National Security is located in downtown St. John’s, across the street from a Subway sandwich shop, in a building that looks more suited to botched drug deals than to any official matter of state. The posters on the wall make clear the ministry’s main concern; most of them warn against abduction and modern-day slavery and feature a host of pink figures engaged in subservient activities, from forced intercourse to mopping floors. The ministry’s employees, however, were unperturbed: R&B ballads roared from the tinny speakers of a far-off computer, and most officials, dressed in blue-and-white uniforms, seemed as unburdened as only those entrusted with defending a thoroughly unthreatened Caribbean nation can be.

Accompanied by our friends and Larry, Mr. B.’s lawyer, we located the right official and pleaded our case. The official, a woman in her fifties, was baffled. You were already allowed into the country, she said as she looked at my unstamped passport, you may as well just stay.

Larry, a former LAPD police officer and a man with many connections on the island, asked for a moment alone with the official. A few minutes later, he came out and said quietly that he thought he figured out the entire mess. Antigua, he said, had a diplomatic relationship with Libya. After Israel assassinated a Hamas official in Dubai last month, the Libyans demanded that Israelis no longer be allowed to enter Antigua, or, at the very least, that they be required to pay a hefty fee for a special tourist visa. The Ministry of National Security, he added, was cool with letting me stay, but it was the prime minister’s call, and we needed to report to the prime minister’s office to sort everything out. Unfazed, we said our goodbyes to the lovely folks at National Security, who saw us off by making us promise to convey heartfelt congratulations to Mr. B. on his upcoming nuptials.

On our way to see the prime minister, however, my mind began racing. Here I was, I thought, in paradise, detained for a crime I didn’t commit. All I wanted was a quick vacation, and instead I was forced to account for my country’s follies. I had left Israel behind, emigrated to America, got my Green Card, opted to abandon the perpetual association with the sort of militaristic shenanigans that lose friends and alienate people. Clichés started swirling in my head: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. You can run, but you can’t hide. You may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with you.

The car stopped. We were parked in front of a one-story office in the midst of a patch of grass, guarded by a single soldier in a green t-shirt and no gun. In front were two enormous stone lions, the sort popular both in China and in chintzy souvenir shops on Manhattan’s 59th Street. It looked, I whispered to Lisa, like a dentist’s office in a Long Island strip mall.

It smelled like one, too, with the unmistakable odor of acrylic monomer, ammonia, and quiet desperation. Magazines were strewn everywhere, mainly an oversized glossy called China Today. It was a thick hint: Chinese government contractors are in charge of most major construction projects in Antigua, as they are in so many developing countries across the globe. Hence the stone lions. A poster on a nearby wall read: “What will come to us will come to us, so quit your worrying!” I took the advice to heart.

A hospitable secretary greeted us, indicating that the Ministry of National Security had already filled her in on the details. We were asked to pay $40 and received a printed receipt. We were officially welcomed to Antigua and allowed to drive on to the resort.

There, in the shadow of palm trees and in the company of some of the island’s most influential men, scotch and talk both flowed. The Mossad, one tough old developer said with a smile, nearly assassinated our vacation plans. Another advised me to try and avoid killing anyone while on the beach. I grinned politely but stared at the umbrella floating in my cocktail; if everyone already saw me as a murderer, I brooded, I might as well enjoy it.

Gradually, however, my ire subsided, drowned in drink and merriment. The weekend was glorious. When I saw the prime minister himself at the wedding, I smiled politely and shook hands. Antigua, after all, let me in. There was no need for a diplomatic incident.

Tanned and thrilled, we flew back home to New York, where two feet of snow were still piled on the ground. The next morning, we talked about our time as personae non grata in paradise. At a distance, the entire story seemed fantastic. Would Antigua really care about the Mossad? Would a mere visa requirement constitute punishment of Israel and its policies? And would any nation, even one as relaxed about its official undertakings as Antigua, really change its rules overnight and fail to notify the rest of the world?

Anxious, I called the consulate general of Antigua in New York and asked to speak with the tourism representative. I told her everything, about my arrival and the prime minister’s office and how everybody on the island, officials and guests alike, suggested that I was the target of an international mishap involving the Libyans. The woman was silent for a few long moments. She knew nothing of the Mossad, she finally said, but was quite certain that Israelis had always required a visa to visit Antigua. But there was no way, she added, that anyone in Antigua would ever allow me in without stamping my passport, Israeli or otherwise.

I thanked her, hung up, and thought of the marlin.

Postscript: Further investigations show that the Consulate representative was right: Israelis have always needed a visa to visit Antigua. So, it turns out, have Libyans.

No need to thank me, however. I was just doing my bit. Or rather, Kratos was: He is the protagonist of the God of War video game franchise, the third installment of which, to be released next week, is easily the most eagerly anticipated game of the year.

The premise is simple: As the first game begins, Kratos, a Spartan warrior with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s midriff and Naomi Campbell’s temper, is on a mission to subdue Ares, the God of War. Through a series of frightening flashbacks, we learn that Kratos had once served Ares, an association that led to an abundance of mutilated old ladies as well as to the gruesome deaths of Kratos’s own family members. Haunted by his bloodied past, Kratos seeks revenge on his former boss; eventually, he becomes a god, to the chagrin of many on Mount Olympus who find his scarred face not pretty enough for the pantheon. Deserted and betrayed, poor Kratos must fight the entirety of Greek mythology to clear his conscience and calm his soul.

Both the original title and its sequel have been deservedly celebrated for their elegant gameplay, and guiding Kratos through a bacchanalia of hacking, slashing, severing, and stabbing provides gamers with hours of glorious fun. But the series’ success, I believe, owes more to morality than it does to mayhem.

Consider this: At the end of the first game, Kratos, having finally defeated the evil Ares, begs Athena to honor her word and free him of his nightmares. No can do, says the goddess. Your past sins, she tells Kratos, may be forgiven but they will never be forgotten. Distraught, he leaps off the highest cliff, preferring a crushing death to a life spent in the company of the ghosts of his past. Athena saves Kratos from his fall and crowns him the new God of War. Even as a deity, his demons taunt him still.

It’s a stunning spell of complexity for a medium commonly believed to be all about mindless fun. As we blistered-thumbed devotees know all too well, video games present perhaps the most fascinating arena in current popular culture for the serious contemplation of weighty moral questions.

I realize this is an audacious claim, but a few hours with a controller at hand will convince even the most stony skeptic that there’s real thinking inside the video game box. Sometimes, players get their morality fix indirectly; playing as Kratos, we’re led to believe that if only we kill enough people we’ll forever be rid of our burdens, a belief shattered with each pixilated prowler we slay. Other games demand that we make direct choices that influence the outcome of the game and reveal more than a little about our own dispositions. In Fallout 3, for example, a dystopic action game released in 2008, one particularly brilliant sequence introduces the player to a laboratory controlled by a mad scientist, in which people sleeping securely in special pods dream up virtual scenarios they perceive as real. The scientist in charge, a distorted sadist, demands that the player commit a series of increasingly evil deeds, from breaking up a happy marriage to killing an innocent woman, acts perpetrated in the virtual environment alone that have no real consequences. The player may obey, or he may trigger a certain sequence and bring about the real death of everybody in the laboratory. In the context of the game, the latter option is presented as a mercy killing; no fate is worse than a dormant life of false consciousness dictated by a deranged doctor. And yet people will die. Which is nobler? Which more moral? How we choose makes a world of a difference.

With my knuckles numb from exhaustive play, I turned off the Playstation and picked up the Bible to read this week’s haftorah. In it, the prophet Ezekiel delivers God’s speech to the errant Israelites, promising the Chosen People that even though they had sinned, the Lord will nonetheless redeem them.

“And I will sprinkle clean water upon you,” God promises, “and you will be clean; from all your impurities and from all your abominations will I cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”

I have no idea if God is much of a gamer, but if He is, He’s certainly familiar with the natural progression of video games: You play, you die, you try again. Game over? Press continue, and play until you win.

In a sense, this is the biggest difference between video games and real life, that unhappy parade of days that never allows us the opportunity to relive our grimmest moments until we manage to set everything straight. But video games and life are more similar than we imagine. Ezekiel knows it: This week’s haftorah is meant as an accompaniment to the story of the Golden Calf, and the prophet is reassuring his people that no matter how badly they mess up their covenant with God, the Almighty will always give them another chance at the game, another shot at getting it right.

It must be so: Unless we’re allowed to play and play some more, we could never reach perfection, and in life, just like in video games, the only way to get it right is to keep on trying. Just ask Kratos.

Yes, a soldier in the Israel Defense Force redefined the meaning of Too Much Information last month when he logged on to Facebook and posted, “On Wednesday we’ll clean out [the village of] Kattannah, and on Thursday, God willing, we’ll be home.” He also provided the name of his unit, and the exact location and time of where the operation was slated to take place.

Several of the soldier’s Facebook friends, shocked by his indiscretion, reported him to the army’s Division of Information Security. Almost immediately, the operation was called off and the soldier tried and ejected. An unfriending for the history books.

IDF Operation Canceled Due To Facebook Status [Ynet]

I thought about him last weekend as I watched the most recent offerings from two of cinema’s contemporary masters, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski. In The Ghost Writer, Polanski’s first film in nearly a decade, a young and bewildered scribe, hired to pen the memoirs of a former British prime minister, soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving the International Criminal Court, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Kim Cattrall’s desperate and futile attempts at fashioning something resembling a British accent. In Shutter Island, Scorsese’s biggest hit in many years, a young and bewildered federal marshal, charged with solving a mystery in a creepy mental asylum on a remote rock off the coast of Boston, soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving the Office of Strategic Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Ben Kingsley’s shiny, bald head. Both films are permeated by a thick mist of paranoia, enshrouding both sky (dark! rainy!) and soul (burdened! terrified!).

Leaving the theater after this daunting double-header, I was a shaken man. What, I couldn’t help but wonder, if the the film’s eponymous ghost writer and I had more in common than I’d previously realized? What if I were called upon by my publisher to spend stormy afternoons watching Pierce Brosnan work out? Or what if the doctor’s office I’m slated to visit soon for my yearly physical turns out to be a Shutter Island of sorts, an institution so grim that the most cheerful conversationalist around is Max von Sydow?

Such is the power of paranoia. An inmate at Shutter Island puts it best: reaching out from behind the bars of his cage, he asks a frazzled-looking Leonardo DiCaprio a piercing question. “Do you know what fear does to the mind?” he spits out. “Corrodes it. Rusts it.”

But the lunatic is preaching to the choir. DiCaprio portrays a heaving federal marshal who was among the first Americans to liberate Dachau, and the sites he’d seen there—arranged by Scorsese as obscenely beautiful tableaux vivants of bony death and writhing Nazis—have returned to haunt his dreams. Soon, his mind corrodes and rusts as well.

The death camp connection injects the otherwise baffling movie with one fascinating element: not only is the film a paean to paranoia, but its brand of paranoia is a distinctly Jewish one. When DiCaprio meets von Sydow for the first time, he immediately detects the doctor’s faint German accent and scornfully accuses him of having been a part of Hitler’s killing machine. This is very poor police work—the marshal has no evidence—but it’s the sort of visceral distrust that we’ve all seen in grandfathers, in elderly friends, perhaps even in ourselves.

We’ve certainly seen it in Polanski. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto and lost his mother to Auschwitz’s ovens, the famed director dedicated his career to exploring what could be called the Homo Roman: a man with no past or commitments, trapped in a menacing and strange place, doing his best to survive the wrath of forces beyond his control. J.J. Gittes of Chinatown is such a man, and so is Trelkowski, the terrorized protagonist of The Tenant. It’s no coincidence that the latter is played by Polanski himself—the director, too, is a Polanski character, in real life as much as on-screen. He’s never stopped looking over his shoulder.

This week’s haftorah nicely complements this spirit of paranoia. It’s largely about Amalek, the desert-dwelling descendants of Esau who attacked the Israelites as they were marching out of Egypt. For their crime, the Bible more than once prescribes stern punishment: “Now, go, and you shall smite Amalek, and you shall utterly destroy all that is his, and you shall not have pity on him: and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Before we get wrathful with any asses, however, it might help to know just who today’s Amalek is. By most historical accounts, the ancient tribe is no longer with us, at least not in any pure and recognizable form. They’ve been diluted into nonexistence by centuries of wars and intermarriage. This fact—in addition to the inconvenience of dealing with a direct exhortation to commit murder—has led many rabbis and scholars to interpret the animosity toward Amalek either as a historical non-issue (now that Amalekites no longer exists, no smiting is necessary) or as a metaphor (Amalek as code for all the nasty things we’d like to change in ourselves).

For some Jews, however, Amalek is real, and he’s around every corner. A few years ago, for example, Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an essay in The New York Times, describing a bris he was attending in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

“I am looking at our life today,” said the newborn’s father, “and what Amalek wants to do is swallow up the people of Israel.”

A young woman attending the service agreed. Her name was Ayelet, a teenager in a long skirt carrying an M-16 rifle; when asked if she thought Amalek was still around, Ayelet didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she replied, pointing towards a nearby Arab village. “The Amalekite spirit is everywhere.”

Naturally, those who see Amalek everywhere are always inclined to try and stamp him out. This is the logic that guided Baruch Goldstein as he celebrated Purim in 1994 by massacring 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. And this, alas, is the logic that still guides so many of us, in Israel and America alike, who see doom around each corner and sanctify violence as the only available cure.

My commander, then, had it just right: just because we’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us. But he left out one important reminder, namely that a life spent parsing conspiracies isn’t much of a life at all.



In recent years, however, another holiday has started eclipsing Passover’s status as Jewish identity’s vastest playground. Sanctioning a host of transgressive behaviors—from drunkenness to masquerading in costume—and commemorating a tale of Jewish valor that culminates in the slaughter of 75,000 Persians more than 2,000 years ago, Purim is increasingly providing Jews of all backgrounds and ages with an opportunity to engage with whatever concerns them personally and politically.

In a way, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Book of Esther, Purim’s ur-text, is one of only two biblical books that omit any mention of God, focusing instead on individuals and the consequences of their actions. Purim is also a holiday traditionally observed not in the synagogue (Megillah readings aside) or even around the family table, but on the street and in nightclubs, surrounded by friends. Add to that the playful tradition of masquerading, and Purim comes as close as possible to that rarest bird, a Jewish holiday that transcends the communal and allow revelers to focus instead on the personal.

Emily Nepon, a writer, performer, and activist, has come to see Purim as an opportunity to reconcile her Jewish and queer identities. In 2004, she helped organize “Suck My Treyf Gender,” an evening of progressive-themed performances inspired by the Purimspiel, the ancient tradition of staging rowdy bits of theater loosely based on the holiday’s story.

“There was something incredibly powerful about the overlap of the Jewish cultural norms of Purim and the queer cultural otherness,” she said. “When we put them together, we were shocked by how much they magnified each other. We were moved by it.”

The evening came complete with a manifesto, which reflected these sentiments. “On Purim,” it reads, “we are religiously obligated to get so shit-faced [drunk] we can’t tell the difference between ‘blessed’ Haman, and ‘cursed’ Mordechai. Binaries, dichotomies, opposites are emphasized, exaggerated and celebrated. We masquerade as Good vs. Evil, Male vs. Female, Oppressed vs. Oppressor, but the goal is not to reinforce these dichotomies, but to realize that they are false separations, that there is a beautiful space in between all opposites, and that is the space where we live as happy, healthy beings. It is in between the extremes, somewhere between ‘male’ and ‘female,’ healing our experiences of oppression while checking ourselves on the power we have to oppress others, that we walk Hashem’s path.”

And with a new reading of the holiday rose new heroes. Mary Gendler suggests in her 1976 essay, “The Restoration of Vashti,” that we look at Vashti and Esther as two contrasting archetypes. The two women “serve as models of how to deal with [male] authority,” she writes. “And the message comes across loud and clear: women who are bold, direct, aggressive, and disobedient are not acceptable; the praiseworthy women are those who are unassuming, quietly persistent, and who gain their power through the love they inspire in men… We have only to look at the stereotyped Jewish Mother to attest to the still-pervasive influence of the Esther-behavior model.”

This popular feminist interpretation—Esther as subdued supplicant versus Vashti as brave resister of the patriarchy—endures and thrives, frequently serving fodder at Jewish educational institutions, including Bar Ilan University in Israel, hardly a bastion of progressivism.

Nepon embraces this interpretation. A few years ago, she wrote a Purimspiel in which Vashti becomes possessed by the spirit of Lilith, a mythical figure that Jewish tradition believes was Adam’s first wife, banished from the Garden of Eden after she refused to be subservient to her husband and eventually turned into a demon.

“I think that’s a pretty common feminist experience,” Nepon said of her play. “Being true to yourself can get you kicked out of the community, and if you do stick up for yourself and do your own thing you’re in danger of losing your community… Many people, not just radical weirdos, experience Vashti as a feminist. I think for many of us it’s easier to identify with that character than with the one who’s eventually a tool of men. Esther gets credit for doing hard and scary things, but she’s essentially doing what everybody else is telling her to do. She’s courageous, but she’s not resisting anything out of any personal agency.”

Such talk, Abby Wisse Schachter believes, is leading to the holiday’s demise. In a recent article in Commentary titled “The Problem with Purim,” Wisse Schachter accused those invested in reimagining Purim with sacrificing the holiday’s traditional core on the altar of political correctness.

“For three decades,” she writes, “an effort has been underway to change not so much the observance of the holiday but the meaning of Purim itself. This celebration of a great reversal of fortune—the deliverance of the Jews of Persia from a massacre—has been transmogrified into a feminist holiday that also calls into question the entire concept of Jewish self-defense, which is at the heart of the story’s conclusion. Unfortunately, this effort to modernize the Purim story lionizes the wrong woman, promotes a false political message of nonviolence and tolerance, and worst of all embraces failure instead of promoting perhaps the greatest of Jewish heroines.”

The conservative point of view, then, is concerned with more than merely preserving the Purim of the past, it’s also about seeing Esther as an icon of Jewish self-defense. Esther’s successful appeal to allow the Jews to arm themselves against their foes, Wisse Schachter argues, may have led to bloodshed, but was also a good and necessary strategy, one that should inspire rather than repulse young Jews today.

But Wisse Schachter’s critique only further reveals how fertile a ground Purim has become for Jewish scholars seeking to explore the furthest reaches of Jewish history and thought. While gender and sexual orientation are possible prisms through which to observe the holiday, another, far more complex one is that of Jewish violence. Elliott Horowitz, a history professor at Bar Ilan, dedicated a book, Reckless Rites, to the history of Jewish violence and the inspiration it sometimes draws from the Purim story.

Baruch Goldstein is a gruesome case in point: in 1994, the Brooklyn-born resident of a settlement near Hebron walked into the town’s Tomb of the Patriarchs—sacred for both Muslims and Jews—opened fire, and murdered 29 Muslims. His timing was no coincidence. The massacre was carried out on Purim. Reached for comment shortly after news of the tragedy broke, Knesset member Hanan Porat of the National Religious Party giddily told reporters that since it was Purim, Jews were obligated to rejoice.

Goldstein’s bloody act, some scholars suggest, was one major catalyst in the drive to infuse Purim with personal and political meaning. Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the massacre made many people pay serious attention to Purim’s intimations of Jewish violence.

“I think it was as much that event itself as anything else that led to changed perceptions,” he said. “I think that some of the things that Jews have done when they were oppressed in the Diaspora they’re still doing when they’re in control in Israel, and that’s inappropriate. When Jews spat at churches surreptitiously, that’s resistance. But when the Jewish majority of Israel treats Muslim cemeteries with contempt, that’s no longer resistance, that’s oppression. The same acts can take on different political meanings, given a change in political and social situations. We still have powerful enemies, there’s still real anti-Semitism, but that’s not the issue with respect to Israel’s Palestinian subjects, and we have to be very clear who Haman is as we celebrate Purim.”

The most prudent approach, Boyarin added, was not to allow the Purim pendulum to swing too far in any one direction, acknowledging the merits of both progressive and conservative interpretations of the holiday, but steering clear of any path that might lead worshippers where it had led Goldstein.

In a way, such shifts in meaning have always been Purim’s lot. Naomi Sheindel Seidman, a professor of Jewish culture at the Graduate Theological Union, noted that those Jews who’d integrated into European society in the 19th century rejected Purim as a crass celebration, while the following generation, comprised of many in the artistic avant-garde, embraced it warmly as a folk tradition that allowed for theatrical experimentation.

“What people were looking for,” she said, “were those parts of the tradition they felt could speak to them as moderns, and the Purimspiel fit the bill.”

It still does. Traditionally, the spiel has always invited participants—mostly unprofessional performers—to introduce various humorous and irreverent twists on the classic story. In that spirit, one recent New York Purimspiel featured puppets and protested the death penalty, another raised awareness to the issue of trafficking in women, a third used our current cultural fascination with zombies to tell a story about gentrification and displacement.

Such variety, said Nepon, was necessary if one was to successfully go about integrating Jewish life into the mosaic of modern life. “I found a way to locate my radical queer culture self in my Jewish life,” she said. “Purim is about chaos, about cross-dressing, about theater, about letting go. It’s an opportunity for everyone to try on being someone else, facing their biggest fears and their greatest hopes.”

But the Israeli Office may be home to more than just bumbling, affable paper salesmen. One of the show’s lead writers, reportedly, is Uzi Weill, the creator of some of Israel’s fiercest political satires—his hit 1990s show, Ha’hamishiya Ha’kamerit, frequently poked fun at such sensitive topics as the Holocaust, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and the Israel Defense Force. And the new Office, it seems, will follow the same provocative path: according to its producers, the show will include such characters as Abba, an Ethiopian, and Abed, “an intellectual Arab with a gentle soul.”

In the meantime, Gervais, the show’s original creator and star, sounded a happy note. “I am thrilled and amazed that Israel [is] making The Office with local writers, directors, and actors,” he said. “I mean, who ever heard of Jewish entertainers?”

Israeli Version of Hit TV Sitcom ‘The Office’ in the Works [Haaretz]

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a federal agent investigating a crime on the eponymous island, a state-of-the-art (for the ’50s) mental asylum for society’s most psychotic criminals. Soon, however, he begins to mistake one set of barbed wires for another: with ample use of flashback, we learn that DiCaprio’s character was one of the American soldiers who had liberated Dachau, a traumatic event that haunts him still. This conceit gives Scorsese the freedom to pan across large vistas strewn with frozen bodies, zoom in on tortured faces, and generally infuse his otherwise restrained film with gore and allegory. At some point, the DiCaprio character begins to suspect that the experiments conducted on Shutter Island owe more than a little to the Nazis and their heritage.

Then, however, comes the surprise twist, and gradually shots of Dachau give way to shots of the lovely Michelle Williams, playing DiCaprio’s wife. Finally! A Holocaust film with a soothing ending.

It’s not that different from the fleshy kind: glossy magazines featuring intricately lit and carefully airbrushed spreads, measurements prominently displayed and met with oohs and ahs, fantasies of a more enticing life clouding the mind and quickening the pulse. Instead of naked men and women, however, real estate porn aficionados find delight in pictures of a classic six on the Upper East Side, say, or a pre-war co-op on Riverside Drive. In New York, dwellings often take on a spiritual significance, endowing the lives of their occupants with secret meanings and discrete charms.

The situation, you’ll be pleased to hear, was not much different in the Promised Land. In this week’s haftorah, we are treated to an intricately detailed description of Solomon’s Temple; those of us conditioned to consider an 800-square-foot apartment as spacious are likely to swoon.

“And the house which King Solomon built for the Lord,” we are told, “the length thereof was sixty cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits, and the height thereof thirty cubits.” The haftorah goes on at length about, well, length and width, touting the Temple’s ample size as if it was not a description of God’s dwelling place but a listing for a Park Slope townhouse.

Why, we may be forgiven for asking, should we care? God, we’re told since we toddle, is everywhere, and omnipresent beings, presumably, should care little for cubits. But Jewish tradition is infinitely wiser and more intricate; even deities need domiciles, it tells us, because without bricks and mortar even the divine is at risk of being forgotten. The Temple, then, is not so much about an atavistic belief that God dwells in one specific edifice as it is about the symbolic acknowledgment that for our eyes to look heavenward, first they must see something beautiful and concrete. And because we’re forbidden graven images, a big building is a perfect solution. It serves both as the headquarters for the hierarchy of priests entrusted with our spiritual wellbeing and as an embodiment of our intricate relationship with the Almighty. Is it any wonder that so many of us have come to approach the real estate section of the local paper with reverence and awe?

A similar appreciation for the inner spiritual lives of residential units was shown last summer in Israel. There, not too far from the site of Solomon’s doomed Temple, the Supreme Court ruled that several Palestinian families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem could be evicted after a Jewish organization had successfully claimed that the houses in which they were residing were historically the property of Jewish families.

A bit of background is in order: in the late 19th century, a small Jewish community settled in the neighborhood, believing, as some Jews do, that the 4.5-acre compound they had purchased was the burial place of Shimon Hatsadik, a great high priest of the Second Temple. Arab violence in the 1920s and 1930s forced the Jews to disperse, and by 1948 none remained in the neighborhood. In 1956, the Jordanians, then East Jerusalem’s sovereigns, settled 28 Palestinian families in the compound. When Israel took over in 1967, these families were sued by the original Jewish owners; in 1982, the Israeli court ruled that the Palestinians were “protected tenants,” but that, as they didn’t own the property, they were required to pay rent to their Jewish landlords. The Palestinians, on their end, refused to accept this premise: if Israel started looking at who owned what piece of land prior to the state’s establishment in 1948, went the logic, it would have to concede much of its current territory to Arab refugees who fled the nascent Jewish state. Without incontestable proof of ownership, argued the compound’s Palestinian residents, no financial obligations are due.

Israelis saw things differently. A settler organization named Nahlat Shimon bought the land from its original Jewish owners and renewed the legal campaign to clear the compound of Palestinians. Incredibly, in the summer of 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in Nahlat Shimon’s favor, arguing that since the property was once owned by Jews, the original owners still held the rights to the homes they were forced to abandon decades ago.

With this, Israel erupted. Even moderates such as renowned novelist David Grossman took to the streets to demonstrate. Their argument was more historical than political; if the highest court in the land granted Jewish residents the rights to ancient homes, it could not feasibly deny the same rights to Palestinians seeking to take back their old dwellings in Jerusalem and Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit dedicated to researching issues pertaining to Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, was clear about the potentially disastrous repercussions of the court’s decision: “The legal recognition of the rights of Jews to sue for ownership over properties that were theirs before 1948,” the organization wrote in a report last month, “and in their name to evict Palestinian families living there for decades, constitutes a precedence that is liable to have serious political consequences. Indeed the Israeli law does not recognize the right of Palestinians to sue in a similar manner for the return of their properties within the Green Line from before 1948, but a collective lawsuit—if only symbolic—is liable to place the State of Israel in the most embarrassing situation in both the local and international arenas, in addition to transforming the discussion around solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from discourse around the 1967 borders to one around the 1948 borders. It is doubtful whether a process such as this will serve the interests of the Israeli governments.”

The authorities were unimpressed. Demonstrators in Shiekh Jarrah, Israelis and Palestinians alike, were arrested. They appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled the demonstrations legal. The Israeli police, as it often does, ignored the opinion of the court; peaceful protesters are arrested in Sheikh Jarrah still.

If any of them are unfortunate enough to spend this Shabbat behind bars, they may pass the time reading the haftorah. If they do, they’ll learn of the special spiritual connection between Jews and their buildings. Acknowledging this connection, Israel’s courts have opened the floodgates to an unimaginable deluge.

Or, more accurately, the writing on the hand: addressing the Tea Party movement’s national conference, Sarah Palin—paragon of stately elegance, former vice-presidential candidate, present television commentator, future unknown—jotted down the key points of her speech on her palm. The media, of course, reveled in Palin’s faux pas, but somewhere amidst the swirling scorn, the actual message was lost.

Here is what the Deer Hunter from Wasilla had on her mind: moving from thumb to pinkie, Palin had scribbled “energy,” “tax,” and “lift American spirits.” Of the three items, it was, naturally, the second that most delighted Palin’s listeners. The Tea Party, after all, takes its name from a famed tax revolt, and the movement draws much of its energy from its members’ deep-seated dismay with the federal government’s power to levy taxes.

Where does Palin stand on the issue? Like most of her political stances, her opinions on this subject are a collage of inconsistencies, misrepresentations, and lies. She claimed, for example, that Ronald Reagan ended the recession in the 1980s by cutting taxes (a dubious claim at best, and one that ignores the small matter of her idol having raised the national debt an incredible $2 trillion in eight years), or that undoing Bush’s tax cuts would hit working class families (in fact, only families making $83,000 and more would be affected). But like everything else with Palin, it’s not so much what she says as how she says it.

In her book, Going Rogue, there are several references to taxation, none more telling than the one in which Palin introduces her readers to that other uneducated, inexperienced darling of rabid Republicans.

“Our campaign,” Palin writes, “quickly realized that Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber by trade, typified the everyday American laborer who had worked hard to make his own way, was trying to improve his economic lot, and ought not to be punished by oppressive tax policies. Joe the Plumber reminded me personally of those Country Kitchen guys I’d sat with on Friday mornings in Wasilla when I was mayor. I liked him.”

If Palin’s putative presidential bid is successful, we can only assume that her policies would be designed to please Joe the Plumber and his fellow travelers in the Tea Party movement. Anyone wondering what such policies might yield need only look at California, where a successful 1978 taxpayers’ revolt known as Proposition 13 effectively curtailed the state government’s ability to govern the state. This, as Kurt Andersen writes in an insightful article in this week’s New York magazine, makes California “a big canary in this mine. Too much democracy and too little elite wisdom has crippled the state.”

The people who cheer on Palin, of course, are unlikely to heed such warnings when they appear in the media organs of the liberal, northeastern snobs. Perhaps, however, they might listen to the Bible.

If they took a few minutes to read this week’s haftorah, the Tea Partiers might find some jarring stuff. It’s all about taxation. The Temple, we’re told, had fallen into disrepair during the regime of an evil, incompetent, and power-hungry queen. The new administration, ashamed of the neglect gnawing at the nation’s most sacred place, announces plans to renovate, but the priests have become too corrupt: they’d rather filibuster the king than get down to fixing what’s broken. The work is then entrusted to the workmen themselves, who approach it with honesty and diligence and joy.

All that, of course, is in the very distant past. Had the same workers been around today, we can imagine, they would most likely denounce King Jehoash as a socialist and rush off to appear on Glenn Beck’s show.

If we truly want to lift American spirits, then, we need to reread II Kings, chapters 12 and 13, and remind ourselves that it’s not about taxation or representation but about responsibility, the kind of strong personal commitment that drives people not to for-profit festivals of malice and merchandise but to work for the common good.

The righteous men living in the time of Jehoash understood that restoring the Temple was a sacred task that addressed the spiritual and communal wellbeing of the entire nation. Likewise, the righteous men and women living in the time of Palin understand that affordable healthcare, social security, and similar programs designed to safeguard our health, our welfare, and our dignity are sacred tasks as well. If history is any measure, those who strive to repair the situation will triumph over those who listen instead to the din of demagogues. If they don’t, we would at least be able to say that we’ve seen the writing on the hand.

As the films in foreign film-category are not typically the Oscar ceremony’s most widely viewed—more people, it’s safe to assume, are likely to have seen Avatar on any given day on any Manhattan movie screen than will see Ajami throughout the film’s entire theatrical run—brief recaps are in order.

The third Israeli film in as many years to receive an Oscar nomination, Ajami is an unusual work. Co-directed by an Arab Israeli, Scandar Copti, and a Jewish Israeli, Yaron Shani, the film was shot on location in the multiethnic Jaffa neighborhood for which it is named. Most of the people on screen are not professional actors. The plot jumps around from story to story, giving the events unfurling before our eyes a lifelike feel. Like the streets it so faithfully depicts, Ajami is bustling, messy, kinetic, and loud. There’s always something going on, and always someone at hand to threaten or amuse you, to offer you a strong cup of coffee or a blow to the face.

Good luck getting a decent cup anywhere in Eichwald, the village at the center of The White Ribbon. The film is the latest work from Michael Haneke, the master of such unremitting shockers as Funny Games and Caché, and it portrays a series of violent events in a sleepy, rural hamlet on the eve of World War I. The folks in Haneke’s village aren’t too friendly, and if they are you can be sure that deep inside their homes they’re doing unspeakable things to their children.

There are also aesthetic differences. Ajami is colorful and apoplectic, The White Ribbon shot in still, stark black and white.

But the main notion setting the two films apart has little to do with mise-en-scene or character development. It has to do with the way each work understands the basic ties that bind human beings to each other.

In Jaffa, it seems, everyone is his brother’s keeper, and brother-keeping comes at a steep price. Binj, a nihilistic Arab, is harassed by Dando, a Jewish policeman, because his brother deals drugs. Dando, on his end, is concerned with the disappearance of his own brother, a soldier. Omar needs to raise a large sum of money if he and his brother are to avoid a horrible fate; in his despair, he turns to crime. The film, in other words, suggests what anyone who has ever spent the holidays with his or her extended family already knows: your relatives may very well be the death of you, but in matters of life-and-death, there’s no one else you’d rather trust.

Not so in Eichwald. As the film progresses from one act of violence to another—an invisible wire felling a horseman, a retarded child brutally beaten, and other such pastoral scenes—Haneke never leaves us in the dark as to the true culprits. The genial doctor? Here he is, abusing his mistress and raping his teenaged daughter. The preacher? Sit back and enjoy a nerve-wracking, interminable scene in which he sends an errant child to fetch a whip, then uses it to deliver some old world discipline as the other children watch in silence. We never see the actual lashing; Haneke’s camera remains in the corridor, fixed on the closed door. But the boy’s whimper as the leather descends will break your heart.

In Haneke’s world, then, family—and with it school, the church, the aristocracy, the police and just about any other hierarchical institution—is the root of all evil. It is there, in our own childhood bedrooms, watching our own dear parents, that we first learn how to inflict pain on our fellow men. The film ends with news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and we are left to wonder what the malicious little children whose lives we’ve just followed for two-and-a-half hours would be doing in 20 years’ time, when they’re adults and the next world war rolls by.

It’s appealing, of course, to see in Eichwald the foundations of Auschwitz, and to read Haneke’s film as a thinly-veiled thesis on the particular problem of the German soul and its tenuous relationship with evil. It is just as tempting to see Ajami as a scale-sized model of the entire Middle East, a part of the world where the only thing more powerful than your loyalty to your clan is the hatred you feel for the clan next door. But both films are terrific precisely because they manage to transcend the specificity of their beautifully wrought locations and offer a vision that is universal. Watching Ajami, a kid in Baltimore, for example, is just as likely to find meaning and comfort in the idea that our family may be responsible for the harsh circumstances of our lives, but it also capable of providing us with warmth and comfort and support. And a viewer in Bahrain, walking out of The White Ribbon, may empathize with that film’s assertion that the evil that men do begins at home, and that without grace and compassion all we have to look forward to is an escalating body count.

Which film’s worldview you find more appealing depends, of course, on how you answer some pretty hefty questions about the meaning of life, man’s true nature, and the fine print of the social contract. Then again, you could always ignore both and go see Avatar.

Hebrew for “evil tongue,” it’s Judaism’s catchall phrase for slander, gossip, and other forms of potentially hurtful speech. And it’s second only to tikkun olam—repairing the world—in the short list of phrases Jews who aren’t necessarily devout turn to when they crave a spot of spirituality.

But let’s be honest: swearing off slander is no act of righteousness. Neither is it a particularly Jewish act—most cohesive sects, be they major religions or World of Warcraft guilds , have some sort of prohibition on members speaking ill of one another. If they didn’t, after all, what kind of people would their adherents become?

In all likelihood, they’d become like me. I revel in lashon hara. I roll evil words in my mouth like fine wine. I’m not talking, of course, about lies, or insinuations, or other crass forms of untruth that only appeal to vicious and feeble minds. I’m talking about gossip. To me, gossip is like a sweet symphony, moving and soothing and sublime. Someone I know was dumped via email? Fell out with her family? Fell in with a cult? Tell me all about it.

Lucky for me, my taste for blather is shared by some late, great men. Like Isaiah: in this week’s haftorah, the prophet has no qualms admitting to being a bit of a flibbertigibbet. To God, no less.

It’s a stunning bit of prose. “I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne,” speaketh the prophet, “and His lower extremity filled the Temple. Seraphim stood above for Him, six wings, six wings to each one; with two he would cover his face, and with two he would cover his feet, and with two he would fly.”

If he were retelling the story to modern-day listeners, Isaiah might have said that seeing God freaked him out. And retell the story he certainly would have: looking the seraphim in the eye, Isaiah immediately confesses to being fond of idle chatter.

“Woe is me,” he tells the winged fellows, “for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and amidst a people of unclean lips I dwell, for the King, the Lord of Hosts have my eyes seen.”

The seraphim, however, have been around the block a time or two. They’ve met everyone from Adam to Zebulun. With a light flutter of his wings, one of the angels hovers over to the altar, grabs a glowing coal, and touches it to Isaiah’s lips. In a good way—the prophet isn’t harmed, just enlightened.

“Behold,” says the seraph, “this has touched your lips; and your iniquity shall be removed, and your sin shall be atoned for.” Because no bit of redemption goes unpunished, Isaiah is ordered to deliver a message to the people: “Go and say to this people, ‘Indeed you hear, but you do not understand; indeed you see, but you do not know.’ This people’s heart is becoming fat, and his ears are becoming heavy, and his eyes are becoming sealed, lest he see with his eyes, and hear with his ears, and his heart understand, and he repent and be healed.”

A simple “Don’t Gossip” would have sufficed, but that’s not the message the divine creatures wish to convey. They understand that gossip is part of life, that curiosity and Schadenfreude and malice make up the human DNA just as much as compassion, altruism, and faith. What they want, then, is not an act of superhuman transcendence—one Jew did try just that, but he sort of ended up outside the fold—but rather attentiveness, which means doing all those things that we humans do but keeping our ears and hearts and minds open all the while.

Our ancestors understood this principle intuitively. Here they are, after all, in this week’s parasha, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, awed by the presence of God, scared out of their minds. Turning to Moses, they are unequivocal: this, they say, is too much.

“You speak with us, and we will hear,” they tell their aging leader, “but let God not speak with us lest we die.” When it comes to divine words, speaking and listening are both extremely hard for humans to do.

Let us, then, relish our rumors. Let us call and text and email each other excitedly any time a tasty morsel of private information drops into our laps. And let us not feel ashamed of it anymore. Just as long as our eyes keep looking heavenward, there’s nothing wrong with occasionally dipping our tongues in the gutter.

No doubt you’ve seen this black magic practiced before, and most likely, you’ve found it odious. But if you’ve never stopped to ponder the mechanics of this feeble act of conjuring, here’s a primer into the working of lazy journalistic minds: begin by taking a contemporary subject that’s popular and preferably controversial; find a historical subject that’s obscure; bend the rules of logic and decency until you can force both into the same intellectual framework.

You might, for example, claim an invisible affinity between the Na’vi, the heroes of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, and the followers of the French socialist Comte de Saint-Simon, or you might argue passionately that Snooki, the diminutive diva of MTV’s reality show Jersey Shore, is nothing but a modern-day reincarnation of the late Qing Dynasty’s Empress Dowager Cixi. In either case, a few well-placed historical facts may be selected to obscure other, equally pertinent and utterly contradictory historical facts and thus to endow you, the writer, with the everlasting halo of incomparable intelligence.

To demonstrate just how despicable I find this practice, allow me to repeat it: as I sat down to read this week’s haftorah, I opened the Book of Judges and was shocked to read about Sarah Palin.

In the book, her name was Deborah, and she was not the onetime, short-term governor of Alaska and current Fox News bloviator but rather a warrior and a judge. Still, there was little doubt: Sarah/Deborah spent most of her time speaking, simplistically, about God, about War, about people she hated and who were in no way like her and who would do well to just disappear.

It seemed a little strange, of course, that the book, describing events that took place circa 1280 BCE, during the reign of King Seti I, would so uncanninly capture the mindset of Queen Sarah, born 1964. But there was no mistaking it. The woman sitting under her tree between Ramah and Beth-el and the woman sitting on private jets between Wasilla and Washington were one and the same. Reading about Deborah, I could almost hear her claiming that she could see Canaan from her house.

Need proof? Here goes. Below are two quotes. Try to tell Sarah and Deborah apart.

“Why do you sit between the borders, to hear the bleatings of the flocks?” chided one of the two women, disparaging those of her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “At the divisions of Reuben, [there are] great searchings of heart. Gilead abides beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why does he gather into the ships? Asher dwelt at the shore of the seas, and by his breaches he abides.”

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C.,” chided the other woman, disparaging her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

Which is which? Impossible to tell.

There is no need, of course, to carry this exercise any further. Mainly because it is not, alas, an exercise at all. While the historical comparison between the politician and the prophetess is a bit flimsy, the ideological underpinning, sadly, is not.

Lodged between Joshua—heir to Moses, practical fellow, conqueror of the land—and Samuel—holy man, anointer of kings—the judges represent, to modern, progressive eyes, a particularly dark period in Jewish history. Devoid, for the most part, of any concrete interest in governance or strong commitment to leadership, these swordsmen (and one woman) are blinding beacons of totality. For the glory of God and the love of the people, they will slay their enemies by the thousands, martyr themselves like Samson, or slaughter their daughters like the hapless Jephthah. With shedding blood their sole responsibility, they go about their business merrily, righteous and fierce and unquestioning.

Even in this flock of fanatics, however, none, perhaps, is more monolithic than Deborah. When we are first acquainted with the judge, she is concerned not with justice but with vengeance, summoning Barak, a local strongman, to her side and ordering him into war. Such, she claims plainly, is God’s will.

The battle, hallelujah, goes according to plan, but Deborah is just getting started. Elated, she breaks out in a thankful song, a stunning concoction of ecstasy and venom.

“Praise! Praise! Deborah,” goes one of its more feverish lines. “Praise! Praise!”

The rest isn’t much better. After disparaging those tribes that opposed the war, Deborah blesses Yael, the daughter of the Kenite king Heber. Approached by the defeated Canaanite general Sisera—bruised and bloody after losing to Barak and his men—Yael takes the weary soldier into her tent, feeds him warm milk, waits for him to fall asleep, and then takes one of her tent’s pegs and lodges it forcefully in Sisera’s temple, killing him instantly. For this act of treachery and murder, Deborah tells us, Yael should be blessed “above women in the tent.” Women, that is, like Sisera’s mother: not content merely with describing the general’s murder in gruesome detail, Deborah goes on to gloat with a ghoulish bit about the slain soldier’s mother, waiting in vain at the window for her son to return home from the battlefield. There’s no mercy here, no compassion, no justice. The haftorah’s end is stark. Deborah’s exhortation leaves little room for the imagination: “So may perish all Your enemies, O Lord.”

In case any reader becomes enamored with such murderous Manichaeism, the Book of Judges makes sure to conclude on a sour note: all war and no pray make Israel bad boys, and the nation is soon swayed by idol worshipping, punished for its sins, and is not redeemed until Samuel, the man of God, takes its helm.

This is one historical lesson we’d be well-rewarded to take to heart. From Deborah to Sarah, each generation is bound to have its own charismatic figure that speaks in tongues and blesses the ammunition and prefers the thundering marches of certainty to the subtle fugues of doubt. Before we follow these feverish few and go rogue, however, let us remember this: we’ve read this story before, and it never ends well.

Kirshtein, currently cooking at Solo, a kosher restaurant in midtown Manhattan, took the challenge head-on, brushed up on his Mishnah, and made us a dish as scrumptious as it is symbolic. Such studious cooking, he says, is what life is like outside of the mercurial environment of reality television.

“I think the main thing you got to remember about Top Chef is that it’s more Top Cook,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about food cost, labor cost…. A New York City kitchen is a really difficult thing, because the clientele is so demanding and the food public really knows what’s quality versus what’s gimmick.”

Click below to watch Kirshtein ply his craft, and scroll down for the recipe.

Eli Kirshtein’s Tu B’Shevat Persimmon Salad

2 Fuyu persimmons
1 can ginger ale
2 tablespoons marcona almonds
2 tablespoons cocoa nibs
5 leaves Belgian endive
10 leaves tarragon
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon yuzo juice
1 tablespoon white truffle oil
Sea salt, to taste

1. Peel persimmons and punch out with a ring-cutter. Place the remaining scraps in a blender and add ginger ale as needed, until the puree is smooth. Slice the punched-out persimmons into rounds.

2. In a separate bowl, mix the yuzu juice, truffle oil, and honey, stirring until the vinaigrette is unified.

3. Using a spoon, smear a stripe of the puree onto a large plate. Place fresh marcona almonds and cocoa nibs on top of the stripe, and add two or three leaves of endive, and four or five leaves of tarragon on top. Line the sliced persimmons on the plate, and dress with the vinaigrette. Season with salt.

Serves two.

A poster by artist Mike Mitchell voices support for Conan O’Brien in his feud with NBC.

CREDIT: Mike Mitchell

I’m with Coco.

Could it be otherwise? The red-headed host of The Tonight Show, formally known as Conan O’Brien, is a bit of a hero these days, having gingerly stood up to a sinking network eager to treat him like a flipper does a pinball. Almost immediately, the Internet Illuminati divided neatly into Team Coco and Team Jay Leno, the latter casting its lot with O’Brien’s predecessor and successor. It was time to choose.

Not that I had any doubt where I stood. Even if, for some reason—a sudden stroke, maybe, or a steel beam to the head—I were to find Leno’s limp comedic antics worthy of anything other than profound contempt, I would still support Coco.

Before you accuse me of frivolity—what, after all, are these televised scuffles when millions of real people scramble for safety and cower in fear?—allow me this audacious claim: Coco’s plight is a morality tale for our time.

Let us review the facts: having promised the coveted Tonight Show to O’Brien, NBC first undermined its new host by naming his predecessor, Leno, as the host of a daily, prime-time variety show and then, when that experiment went sour, demanded that O’Brien push his show’s start time to five minutes past midnight—which would mean that the Tonight Show wouldn’t start until tomorrow—to make room for yet more Leno-led programming. O’Brien refused. He stood up to the besuited bozos who bossed him around. This week was his last on the job.

Even without having ever chuckled at the masturbating bear, say, or marveled at the moronic charm of The Interrupter, it’s easy to identify with O’Brien. Gangly and pale, with a bright-red pompadour that looks like it was born of a passionate affair between the hairstyles of Elvis and Elvira, O’Brien is one of the oddest-looking men ever to grace the small screen. His peculiarity is a big part of his charm; rarely a moment goes by without some self-deprecating quip about his translucent skin or his genuinely terrible impersonations. As his guests, writers, and friends have frequently testified, O’Brien is that rara avis of network TV, a truly sincere man, and it’s his candor, even more than his humor, that has driven millions to join the ranks of Team Coco.

And then there’s NBC. Think your employers are a bunch of power-mad loons who, as O’Brien himself so poignantly put it, eat money and defecate problems? Imagine what poor Coco must feel. Sure, he’s walking home with a reported $32 million buyout, but he now faces an uncertain future, not to mention the dozens of employees who abandoned their former lives in New York to follow him to Burbank.

This, of course, is not the first time the network chooses to engage in perfidy. Leno himself got his break at the expense of David Letterman, who, like O’Brien, was promised Johnny Carson’s old chair and then kicked to the curb. Back then, at least, NBC had the courtesy of supporting its men: it stuck with Leno for two years as he trailed behind Letterman in the ratings, allowing him to build up his base and gradually climb to the top. It also gave Leno a strong lead-in audience with hit shows like Seinfeld and Friends, innovative programming that required far-sighted executives to take risks and trust their tastes.

Good luck finding such men anymore. Run by Jeff Zucker, NBC is combating its dismal last-place ranking among major networks by making decisions that further remove it from any semblance of relevancy. Leno’s 10 p.m. show is a case in point: with low production costs and little flavor, it’s the White Castle of television programming. Viewers seeking more palatable stuff have long ago gone elsewhere.

A man who won the presidency of his high school’s student body by running on the slogan “The Little Man with the Big Ideas,” Zucker might want to take this idea to heart: this week, drop the Journal and pick up Jeremiah.

The author of this week’s haftorah tells us of the destruction of one empire, Egypt, at the hands of another, Babylon. The Egyptians’ sin is well known: cruel and untoward behavior towards their employees, the Israelites. No matter how mighty you are, Jeremiah orates, act imperiously and you’ll soon be answering to a much higher power.

Seen in this light, the late-night drama can be recast not as a salacious story of ego and ignorance but as the latest installment in an eternal cycle of power and vanity. While NBC executives are not, to the best of my knowledge, buried, like the pharaohs of old, with scarabs and servants, it’s not unfair to see the network as a diminutive reincarnation of the ancient Egyptian empire, a cultural beacon toward which others lift their eyes, a moneyed entity jockeying for global influence. And while NBC’s sins, of course, are nothing like the evils of Egypt, O’Brien’s story teaches us that the network, like Egypt of old, was driven to its predicament by forgetting that, despite some appearances to the contrary, wealth and power cannot be permitted to override the eternal values of civility, courtesy, and respect.

It’s a lesson that empires of all sorts frequently need to relearn. Until they do, I’m with Coco.

Confused? You must be among the fortunate few who’ve managed to miss the pop-culture leviathan known as Jersey Shore, a reality show that follows a tribe of young, libidinal coxcombs and slatterns as they lounge on the seaside strip.

The media reacted to the show much as a flock of cockatiels might react to the sudden appearance of a fresh field of millet, pecking away at its every bit. In Snooki, J-Woww, Pauly D and the show’s other protagonists, printer-toner stained wretches everywhere found greater meaning by the pound. For most pundits, all it took were a few hours watching MTV to collectively bemoan the imminent passing of Western Civilization, asphyxiated, presumably, by a cloud of hormones and hair product.

Western Civilization, you may be relieved to hear, is alive and well, and the legacy of the Enlightenment is firmer even than the muscles on Ronnie’s chest. But Jersey Shore does raise some worthwhile philosophical conundrums, all of which, it seems, are embodied in The Situation.

For the uninitiated among you, The Situation is the nickname Mike Sorrentino, the show’s inimitable star, has given himself, or, more accurately, his meticulously sculpted abs. So emblematic is Mr. Sorrentino’s midriff, that, in his mind, it has come to represent his entire being. This, as critics have noted humorlessly, is known as synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to refer to the thing as a whole: think “Washington” for the federal government, “wheels” for a car, or “Facebook” for three hours spent doing absolutely nothing but checking out photos of people you hated in fourth grade on an inane ski trip to Vermont.

The Situation is, perhaps, the first man in a long time to make synecdoche sexy: by designating his abs as a stand-in for his self, he declares head, heart, and all other organs superfluous. In so doing, The Situation presents a more formidable challenge to the spirit of the Enlightenment than his critics give him credit for. Forget cogito ergo sum; on the Jersey Shore, it’s I tan therefore I am.

As we have recently spent so much time enumerating the most notable things about the past decade, allow me to nominate The Situation as the emblem of the decade to come. We may be barely a month into the 2010s, but the tides emanating from Seaside Heights, N.J., carry with them a message we mustn’t ignore: welcome, it says, to the age of no consequence.

Nothing captures the essence of The Situation more aptly than his cheerful obliviousness to the idea that the things he says and does have outcomes. One moment he’s holding hands with Sammi, aka Sweetheart, in what seems like the sweet prelude to romance, and the next he’s dipping in the Jacuzzi with a gaggle of pantsless girls he has picked up in a bar. When Sammi distances herself the following morning, The Situation is baffled, so difficult is it for him to comprehend the mechanics of cause and effect.

It’s easy to pick on the hapless he-man as a boorish know-nothing, but take a closer look and you see that there are two, three, many Situations. There’s John “The Situation” Edwards, for example, the campaign trail Casanova who was shocked—shocked!—when his extramarital indiscretions derailed his presidential run. Or Bernie “The Situation” Madoff, who screwed pretty much everybody and never imagined he’d be caught. Edwards may be able to afford much better hair care than Sorrentino, and Madoff’s beachfront digs are far nicer, but, deep down, they’re surprisingly alike, ravenous men who are not about to let tomorrow get in the way of today.

Luckily for them, and for us, this week’s haftorah provides some required reading for Situations of all sorts. With Babylonian troops surrounding Jerusalem, the people of Israel look up to Egypt for support. No way, divines Ezekiel: Egypt, he prophesies, will abandon Israel in its time of need, a betrayal for which the Lord will punish the mighty kingdom with suffering and dispersal.

“And it shall be no more the confidence of the house of Israel,” Ezekiel roars, “bringing iniquity to remembrance, when they turn after them; and they shall know that I am the Lord God.”

Ezekiel’s message is as pertinent to the Promised Land as it is to the Garden State. Actions, he reminds us, have consequences, and ignoring these consequences won’t make them go away. Betray Sammi, and watch her affections dwindle and die. Betray God’s chosen people, and risk putting the Almighty in a smiting mood.

It’s a simple lesson, yet it’s one so many of us fail to learn time and again. Before we truly turn our society into a hellish, heedless mess, let’s chase that pint of pop culture down with a shot of Ezekiel. Otherwise, we may have an indescribable situation on our hands.

It’s become a morning routine for me, a former Israeli now a decade into a self-imposed exile in Manhattan: tumble out of bed, pull a double shot of espresso, tune into the latest from the Motherland, shiver with rage. But this was my vacation, and for a vacation to bestow its full rewards, one must first learn to ignore all those irritants that swirl above our daily lives like a cloud of noisy gnats, distracting and dispiriting us with their incessant hum. This morning, I told myself, this morning I’ll overcome the urge.

No such luck: man, as Albert Camus so poignantly noted, is the only creature who resists being what it is, even though resistance is largely futile. A few moments later, I was reading from right to left.

One article in particular caught my eye. It was about Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad, until recently the government’s West Bank coordinator and still one of the leading security officials in the country. Gilad was my former commander in the army, and I’ve come to respect his ability to consider every aspect of any given issue before passing judgment. Responding to accusations by Jewish settlers that a rabbi by the name of Meir Chai had been shot to death by Palestinian militants because the army opened a particular road to Palestinian traffic, Gilad, calm and confident, denied the settlers’ claims. He instead provided a reassuring statistic: the recent removal of numerous roadblocks in the West Bank, he said, contributed to an impressive boom in the Palestinian economy, which, in turn, led to a significant improvement in Israel’s overall security.

I sat at my kitchen table, coffee at hand, confused. For years, the stern men in charge of Israel’s security had been telling us laymen that roadblocks were practically inevitable, and that if we allowed Palestinians to travel freely between the villages and the towns of the West Bank—the gargantuan separation fence prevents them from getting anywhere near Israel itself—they’d waste little time abusing their newfound freedom and turn the roads into a bullet-ridden inferno. But here was Gilad—as much a representative of cautious, military-minded Israel as anyone else in the nation today—saying that quite the opposite was true, and that Chai’s murder aside, the Palestinians, finally free to move around without being subjected to lengthy, humiliating checkpoints and insurmountable closures, did what all other people would have done and raced to their offices, marketplaces, and anywhere else where the getting was good.

Why, then, had Israel persisted with its policy of rigid separation? If free traffic within the West Bank has been proven to revitalize commerce within a matter of months, why set up 99 permanent roadblocks in or around an area the size of Delaware, with an additional few dozen temporary roadblocks popping up unexpectedly each week? Why pursue a policy both cruel and ineffective?

The practical reason, of course, is that Palestinian access to roads is blocked because the settlers wish it so, yet another measure in their effort to make the biblical hills of Judea and Samaria an exclusively Jewish preserve. But there’s another answer, a more frightening one, and it involves this week’s biblical readings.

In the parasha, the Israelites, having thrived and multiplied in Egypt, are persecuted by the nefarious Pharaoh. Moses, their newly risen and still hesitant leader, has strong words with God. “O Lord!” he pleads angrily, “Why have you harmed this people? Why have you sent me? Since I have come to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has harmed this people, and You have not saved Your people.” But God is untroubled. “Now,” he says to Moses, “You will see what I will do to Pharaoh, for with a mighty hand he will send them out, and with a mighty hand he will drive them out of his land.”

So far, so good. As we are reminded each Passover, the Lord indeed keeps his promise, smites the Egyptians, and delivers his people. But read the haftorah, and things get a bit more complicated.

It’s a portion from Isaiah, the Jerusalem-born orator who preached at the time of the fall of the northern kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel. Looking at the catastrophe from his home in the Kingdom of Judah, Isaiah phrased his disdain for his sinful kin, now in exile, in roaring and beautiful verse: “Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim,” he thundered, alluding to the Israelites, “and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley of them that are smitten down with wine!”

Not one to end things on a sour note, however, Isaiah delivers the following soothing promise. “Jacob,” he promised, “shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale; when he seeth his children, the work of My hands, in the midst of him, that they sanctify My name; yea, they shall sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and shall stand in awe of the God of Israel.” Any enemy, he assures his listeners, any foe eager to annihilate the Chosen People, will suffer the Lord’s terrible swift sword.

More than 700 years, in all probability, had passed between Moses and Isaiah, and yet it seems as though not much has changed: in parasha and haftorah alike, God solemnly swears to redeem His people and crush their nemeses.

Comparing these two texts, a cynic might think that Jewish history is circular and silly, a cycle of empty promises conjured to meet the changing geopolitical needs of the day. But the truth is far more profound and profoundly disturbing: while God may or may not interfere on His people’s behalf, it is they who have the true power to both redeem and ravage themselves. If they are righteous and just, their kingdoms will thrive. If they pass their days drunk with wine or with wealth or with power, their kingdoms will crumble.

The Jews currently dwelling in Judea and Samaria would do well to take this lesson to heart. Reading this week’s haftorah, they might recall that there were once thriving Jewish kingdoms on the very same hills they occupy, and that these kingdoms perished not because they lacked might but because they were intoxicated with it, sacrificing their morality and piety alike on the altars of money and muscle and wine.

But the Jews currently dwelling in Judea and Samaria don’t seem to be paying much attention. A few days after Meir Chai’s murder, Israeli police officers blocked the road leading from Nablus to Tulkarem. Battered cabs carrying scores of Palestinians laborers were pulled to the side of the road and instructed to wait as settlers in newer cars with Israeli license plates careened through. There was no security-related reason for this imperious act: the settlers, en route to a memorial service for their slain friend, demanded to move about uninterrupted by the masses of Palestinians in whose midst they chose to live. The Kingdom of Israel has yet much to learn.

Not me.

Belonging to that class of people that was once kindly called curmudgeonly but for which common usage has since coined far more pungent adjectives, I realized long ago that resolutions were a colossal waste of my time. No single spark of goodwill could ever tame my surging waistline, soothe my familial discords—the Leibovitz clan is made of such stuff as would have Hamlet chuckle in relief, thrilled with his lot in life and flushed with warm feelings for his dear uncle—or rid me of any other sin or sordid imperfection.

Instead, I’d rather commit this day of reflection to finding fault with other people: people who say “take it easy,” for example, people who walk around with old ski lift passes still attached to their jackets, bloggers and twitterers and anyone else infused with insolence but free of introspection. Since year-end lists, however, are expected to be both concrete and concise, I’ll choose just one exemplar, one single embodiment of humanity’s slow and strange descent into the oblivion of idiotic bliss: congratulations to you, Quentin Tarantino.

Since I’ve already expressed my opinion of the celebrated director’s latest effort, Inglourious Basterds, a film as stupid and sophomoric as its intentionally misspelled title suggests, I’ll present as evidence the following nugget from the master himself, uttered in a recent interview with Jordana Horn:

“So now, in Israel, I’m watching the film, and we get into the theater sequence,” said Tarantino. “And literally, not when Hitler gets killed, but when you hear Shoshanna’s voice say, ‘This is the face of Jewish vengeance,’ the whole theater just erupted in applause. I think there were two guys that started it, but everyone jumped in. And you know something? It was violent. It was scary. There was violence in that cheer. It wasn’t like cheering Indiana Jones. There was something bloodcurdling about it. I don’t want to overstate it, but there was an edge to it. There was violence in it … there was blood in the air, which was wild. It was a wild thing to experience. It was a great experience, and it was real.”

Anyone who had seen Tarantino’s orgiastic opuses of severed limbs and tortured bodies should hardly be surprised to hear him describe, with signature thoughtlessness, interacting with a violent and unruly audience as a great experience; presumably, at no point in Tarantino’s meditations on Nazi Germany had it occurred to him that violent and unruly audiences might have had something to do with the rise of the Third Reich. Still, his enthusiasm for revenge, evident both on the screen and off it, requires a longer pause. To understand the true nature of vengeance, we’ll need a guide far more competent than a former video store clerk.

We’re in luck. Read together, this week’s parasha and haftorah provide us with a profound meditation on the true nature of fury and forgiveness. As is befitting a week in which one year ends and another begins, both texts record the last words of dying men to the sons about to succeed them.

In the parasha, Jacob, on his deathbed, summons his brood, blessing each son and assigning a specific role to his clan—the descendants of Judah will be kings, while Zebulun’s heirs will sail the seas and Asher’s seed will grow great olives. Some children—Reuben, Shimon, Levi—are censured for their past sins; still, all are blessed.

Not so the case with David, the hero of this week’s haftorah. As he lies dying, the king, still grieving for the death of his rebellious son Absalom (Absalom!), blesses his other son, Solomon. There are a few pleasantries regarding keeping the laws of the Lord, but the fading monarch soon gets down to business, dictating a detailed list of political foes to slay and supporters to reward.

What a difference a crown makes. Jacob, the last of the patriarchs, was able to overcome his rage, and offer his kindness even to his most devious descendants. He never forgot, but he knew how to forgive. Not so the second king of Israel: even in his last moments, David was still gripped by the cruel calculations of politics and power.

Whereas Jacob was subtle enough to leave his children on a note of reproach and remembrance, condemnation and celebration, affliction and affection alike, all David could muster is a hit list. Perhaps it’s only natural: unlike a father, a king can’t speak the subtle language of nuance.

Neither, it turns out, can most Hollywood directors. Like the ancient kings of the Bible, most contemporary filmmakers hold a staunchly Manichean worldview, and pay their scribes to compose simple stories of good triumphing over evil, preferably with much violence. This New Year’s Day, then, as we make ourselves a long list of solemn promises, let us add one more: this year, let us be more Jacob than David, and reject simple fantasies of bloody vengeance in favor of a deeper, subtler, and more compassionate understanding of mankind and its motives. It won’t make 2010 any less complicated, but it might make it more peaceful.

The truth, alas, was less piquant: agents were finally able to ascertain that Teitel was driving a pregnant neighbor to the hospital at the time of the community center shootings. Nevertheless, Teitel expressed his support for the horrific act, and told investigators that he had selected his nom de guerre, the Black Bear, as a clear message to Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Nethanyahu to act against Israel’s gay citizens.

Yaakov Teitel’s Investigation: The Confession, the Strange Alibi, and the Plans for the Next Murder [Haaretz, in Hebrew]