After a soulful conversation with one of my closest relatives, whom we refer to as Cousin Boss, we have found just enough chutzpah to go there...
I recently posted some quotes on Fb from the Jewish-Palestinian musician, Daniel Barenboim, founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
Following up on that consideration of conflict, racism, counterpoint and dialogue, I want to share some timely quotes from Vassily Grossman's 1960 epic chronicle, Life and Fate (trans. Robert Chandler. NYRB, 2006).
My intention is aligned with Barenboim's advocacy for dialogue as the mere beginning of a process without which peace will remain out of reach. (As I finished that rather academic sentence, I sighed at how idealistic, if not fruitless, such an exercise is...)
From Life and Fate's back cover: “A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of WWII and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the 20th century…Grossman fashions an immense intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope…[it] juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag… characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin…unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity…”
Written by a Ukrainian Jew, the excerpts on Anti-Semitism could be adapted to fit Islamophobia and other racist ideologies and strategies. I believe the "power of music" excerpts need no adaptation for their universality to resonate.
On Anti-Semitism, (Part 2, Ch. 31):
Anti-Semitism can take many forms - from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms…
Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of - I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.
In accusing the Jews of racism, a desire for world domination and a cosmopolitan indifference towards the fatherland, National Socialism was merely describing its own features.
Anti-Semitism is also an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms…States look to the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry for explanations of their own failure.
Anti-Semitism is also, of course, a measure of the religious prejudices smoldering in a society.
Anti-Semitism has always been bound up with the most important questions of world politics, economics, ideology and religion. This is its most sinister characteristic: the flame of its bonfires has lit the most terrible periods of history.
Excerpts on the power of music, Part 2, Ch. 45:
People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way.
What music resurrects for the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heartbreaking miracle of life itself….everything had fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce of life itself.
Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads…music was the key that unlocked man’s innermost core.
Once again the orchestra struck up. The people chosen to work entered the town built on the marshes. // Dark water forced its way sullenly and mutely between heavy blocks of stone and slabs of concrete… It disappeared underground, came back to the surface, disappeared once more. Nevertheless, it forced its way through - the waves of the sea and the morning dew were still present, still alive in he dark water of the camp. // Meanwhile, the condemned went to their death.
There was nothing left but the music and the glow in the sky. The sad, powerful melody filled David’s soul with longing…// The band howled; it was as though some huge, dried-up throat had started to wail.
From Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler. NYRB, 2006.
The prayers I find most resonant speak to our shared humanity, are rooted in the present, and focus on our ethics and actions in the here-and-now. Eternity takes a back seat to repairing the world we're in.
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
from the laziness that is content with half-truths,
from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth.
,,, deliver us.
This poem resonates outward from the particular to the universal. (Both are from Mishkan T'filah, a Reform Jewish Prayerbook)
I am a Jew (Edmund Fleg)
I am a Jew because my faith demands of me no abdication of the mind.
I am a Jew because my faith requires of me all the devotion of my heart.
I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, I weep.
I am a Jew because at every time when despair cries out, the Jew hopes.
I am a Jew because the word of the people Israel is the oldest and the newest.
I am a Jew because the promise of Israel is the universal promise.
I am a Jew because, for Israel, the world is not completed; we are completing it.
I am a Jew because, for Israel, humanity is not created; we are creating it.
I am a Jew because Israel places humanity and its unity above the nations and above Israel itself.
I am a Jew because, above humanity, image of the divine Unity, Israel places the unity which is divine.
I can't read this poem without hitting the wall of the final couplet. I don't believe that Israel's unilateral government represents the majority of Jews around the world anymore than the terrorist group Hamas represents Palestinian and Muslim communities. Reread "I am a Jew" again and change the name. I am a Christian / Muslim / Humanist / Druze / Sikh... The message re-sounds.
We are capable of the intelligence and understanding necessary to hold opposing sides of conflicts, politics, and belief systems in balance. Are we not?
OK, stepping down from soapbox. The end. Salaam Aleikum. Shalom. Peace be with us.
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