Reb Arie's Midrash

July 1st, 2009 | Tikkun Daily

I am a rabbi, I debuted Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children (7JC for short) in Canada , and so let us please not have any nonsense about 7JC being anti-Semitic – unless you want to dare suggest that I am an anti-Semite? Caryl Churchill is a playwright based in the United Kingdom. She appropriates the Jewish voice for her play, and in my correspondence with her I have told her that she didn’t succeed at it that well. I appreciate the risk that went into her artistic conceit, an artistic conceit that is not anti-Semitic. You would have to make a case for the Torah being an anti-Semitic document to suggest so. Tzedeq! Tzedeq tirdof! shouts the Torah — “Justice! Pursue justice!” We are not told Tzedeq tirdof le’am “pursue justice in the nation”. There is no qualification given. We are also told (Exodus 23:9) “And the stranger? There should be no oppression. You well know how strangers were treated in Egypt.” There is, in other words, a Jewish imperative to accept “the Other”.

Seven Jewish Children is a series of seven monologues. It is a one-sided and ignorant portrayal of how a Gentile thinks Jews might speak about the problematics of Jewish history. The play presents Jewish adults speaking among themselves, their friends, and their own parents. The adults speak about their children but never to them. The play is “monotypical”: it portrays Jewish voices in only one way – frightened, defiant, strident, and at the end, uncaring. 7JC is problematic thematically. It is also remarkable because it tries to impose the Other from within a Jewish voice.

Churchill’s appropriation of an unreal Jewish voice is a dilemma from a real Jewish perspective. The Jewish voice has become, for most middle-class secular Jews, so far submerged into the Other that the Jewish quality disappears entirely. I oft-encounter Jewish university students, all of them white, for whom Israel and the Holocaust are what Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, of blessed memory, criticised as twin pillars of Jewish identity.

Yet how identified with Israel can one be when they can’t read or write or speak a word of Hebew? It’s ironic when you consider that these students who strongly identify with Israel can’t do that. Neither do they have any idea about even the rudiments of Jewish history, culture, or religion. Why should they? I didn’t, and they are the children of my age-group. It took me years to overcome my upbringing.

This contrasts to the Palestinian Arab students I encounter, who are not usually white (though a few are), who are fluent in Arabic, and who have strong cultural attachments even if they are not particularly observant as Muslims or Christians (though a few are). The dilemma of the modern secular Jew is being the Other. Morton Weinfeld, an academic and sociologist at McGill University in Montreal identifies this as “just like everyone else – but different”.

In my first post I identified myself as the great-great grandson of a Polish Chasidic rebbe and the great-great-great grandson of a Turkish rabbi. The tensions of being a progressive Chasid from a Sefardic background allowed me to lend truly authentic inflections to the inauthentic voices Churchill writes in Seven Jewish Children. The play has been (correctly) denounced as one-sided – as if playwrights are under any obligation to write balanced perspectives in their plays?

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery“, perhaps the most remarkable American short story written in the 20th century, is also one-sided. It became a classic in spite of this, and Ms Jackson’s art was quite misunderstood in its day. Caryl Churchill’s play is not destined to be a classic. It is a remarkable artistic statement for all its faults.

I was recently seriously unsettled by the strident ignorance of a young Alpha male, a seriously by the book left-liberal who was, I later discovered, originally a conventional Jew-as-Other who went on Birthright, a programmed trip to Israel that attempts to create connections between Israel and Diaspora Jews. He now promotes Israel Apartheid Week on a Canadian university campus. Young Alpha represents perfectly the submergence of the Jewish voice deep into Other.

This encounter occurred at the annual general meeting of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), which was held in a union hall just afive minute walk up the road from where I live in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. IJV formed to provide a progressive Jewish voice to counter Canada’s primary Jewish communal organisation, the Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy. I went to IJV on erev Shabbat (Friday evening) to hear the parents of Rachel Corrie (a young activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer) and also went Saturday evening, intending to do Havdala (the prayer formally ending the Sabbath) for them and also to see how they portrayed the voices in 7JC.

Havdala was cancelled. I did not stay to hear their portrayal of 7JC, largely because I did not feel wanted. I have since come to other understandings, which I will post on shortly.

Young Alpha feels free to post far-left agit-prop on the Potlucks for Peace listserv but does not feel free to accept criticism for using a listserv designed for a Jewish/Palestine dialogue group. Dialogue is of no use to anyone – we need action! Who am I to argue? Jewish tradition agrees:

“The main point is not study: rather, it is action!” (Pirqei Avot 1:17). Two important qualifications are attached to this remark, whose author asserts [1] “I was raised among the sagacious greats” (he had spent his life learning in the Jewish academies of Roman Israel) and [2] “Too much talk leads to sin”. Talk does not lead to inaction – it leads to transgressive behaviour!

Seven Jewish Children portrays the devolution of Jewsto transgressive behaviour – can anyone really assert that transgression evolves? The increasing complexity of an urbanised and scientistic society leads, I think, to decreased spiritual complexity over time. This speaks as much to the secular progressive rejection of spiritually progressive Jews as it does to the journey of Jews from oppressed to oppressor.