Short Changed Luzzatto

Yirmeyahu Bindman attempts in his Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto:  His Life and His Works, to chronicle  this great religious scholar and master of the Kabbalah.    

Luzzatto lived in an era of monumental change (born 1707, and died 1746), during the rise of the modern nation state, democratic movements, the destruction of the stranglehold of religion upon the life of Western Europeans, and the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, Bindman’s book is poorly arranged.  The reader does not get a sense of the arch of Luzzato’s life, nor the layout of his works.   

Certainly, there is some interesting material here.  Bindman does a good job at showing the petty in fighting that got Luzzatto kicked out of Padua, Italy, into an exile of sorts in Amsterdam.

But the book lacks punch, and Luzzatto, this important figure in the history of JJudaism, gets short changed.

Miami (more than twenty years ago)

Joan Didion’s Miami is a hard hitting look at the political, social, and economic scene of the title city.  Written mostly about incidents and events which took place in the 1980s, it is difficult to tell how much of this book is still relevant.  Regardless, Didion takes on a complex topic,  handling the heady mixture of people and groups of exilic Cubans in Miami.

Care should be taken when reading this book.  Because Didion uses a narrative voice very close to the people and organizations she is examining, it often appears that she is making derogatory or even racist remarks.  But she is merely taking the tone of the person, giving their voice some play in the narrative.  She keeps, more or less, her journalistic distance.

All in all, this is a dense book that is not for everyone.  Unless you are a die-hard Didion fan, or have a vested interest in the scene in Miami (over twenty years ago) its concerns may be too remote.

The Great Reality

 

Evelyn Underhill was a British Catholic writer of mystical topics from the turn of the twentieth century to her death in the 1940s.  She was extremely popular for a time, becoming the most widely read modern mystic writing for popular audiences.

Her 1915 book, Practical Mysticism, is a case in point.  Geared toward a general audience, Underhill set about to show that mystical contemplation is an active pursuit, not a monastic calling which takes men and women out of society. 

Yet Underhill performs some very standard mystic moves.  She sets forth a program of contemplation to enable a person to move beyond their ego, their common perceptions of reality, and toward a wider, grander vision.   

She does not view the goal of mysticism as the merger of the person with God, but with something she calls Reality.  It is the goal of both dropping the individual ego and its concerns, cleansing the perceptions of the human mind, and enabling a person to have a clearer, wider vision of the nature of the universe.

In this sense, she is very much a precursor to more New Age versions of mysticism.  She combines Christian ideas of mystical thinking (especially the medieval The Cloud of Unknowing) with post-Kantian philosophy.  This is far less dry than it sounds.  Underhill provides a very compelling, rich and loving account of the mystical pursuit.   

A Hoary Tradition

The Sages Speak: Rabbinical Wisdom and Jewish Values, by William B. Silverman, sets out the encyclopedic task of ordering rabbinical opinions about various topics, including, God, Man, Prayer, Holiness, Justice, Faith, Eternal Life, The World to Come, and Hope.  Each of these chapters is divided into sub-chapters, taking an element of the broader topic and exploring one aspect.

There is a hoary tradition in Judaism for such endeavors.  Rabbinical literature is a sprawling corpus, spread across two Talmuds, commentaries, responsa, books and books, and complete command of this literature is for the select few.  So, writers like Silverman take this unorganized material and organize it.  Taking a passage from the Babylonian Talmud and placing it alongside a story about the Baal Shem Tov which share a common theme.

There will always be a place in Jewish life for such a work, since it provides a vital bridge to a past literature this is out of the reach of most.  We need such books to provide a thread leading to the past, giving us sustenance in the present, and a line to the future.

Suffering, suffering… and some more suffering

The first thing that strikes you when watching War of the Century, a documentary about the Soviet experience during World War Two, is how qualitatively and quantitatively different it was from the war in the West.  We can say this both in sheer numbers of dead, destruction of cities, and abominable behavior.

Nazi ideology considered the Slavs a sub-human category, and acted accordingly on the battlefield.  When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, atrocities in the subjugated areas were more than norm than the exception.   Jews and communists were singled out for execution, as were civilians for no other reason than the whim of local commanders, or the anarchic tendencies of German troops.  Slavs were not fully human, and their lives were cheap.

The people of the Soviet Union were further made to suffer by Stalin, who expected them to sacrifice themselves for the motherland to the point of death.  At the end of the documentary, we see a camp where Russian POWs are accused of anti-Soviet activities after their liberation by the Red Army.  Most were given lengthy sentences in the gulag.

People on both sides did horrible things on the Eastern Front, and you can watch them explain themselves in this documentary.  Very few actually consider themselves war criminal or murderers.  In the context of the times, they usually explain, what they did was justified.   

And it is hard to judge actions of soldiers in the field based on peace time morality, but if we don’t ask such hard questions, then what are human beings reduced to?  Is it really an excuse to say I had no choice, it was part of the time, we were under tremendous pressure?  It is difficult to watch an old man, a former Russian solider, smile and chuckle about the rape of German women.  How can we forgive this?  Should we ever?

What War of the Century does prove is how terribly low the human race can fall in absolute moral terms.  A war of all against all is not impossible, but probable.  It happened, and continued after the war, as Stalin committed atrocities against his own people that rival or surpass Hitler’s.

Yet more dead and exiled people.   More suffering in absolute terms. More people treating other people as mere objects.