It is simply easier to talk about God in Hebrew. When God discussions occur in English, for native speakers, they easily fall in trite categories and suppositions. A religious or liturgical language is efficacious in this regard: it gives the God seeker freedom from the bounds of his or her own language. It connects one with an ancient tradition well versed in exploring the boundaries of the relationship between the divine and human. Hebrew fills this role. When I speak or write about Hashem, Ein Sof, there is a freedom of movement and expansion. There is a great role for Hebrew in the spiritual life. It can help bring a person to an appreciation of the One behind the many.
There are some writers who are tedious in their complaints. I don't know what causes it exactly. It is a combination of the awful sense of isolation and rejection that writers live with, and the tremendous ego that makes really good writing possible in the first place.
Maybe there are two problems at work here:
1. The writer who can not write. He or she is like the baker who can't bake. Is there a reason to call oneself a baker if you can't make a loaf of bread? This type of person is the artist, and is usually a different breed entirely. I have here a person in mind. He came to live in Ithaca a few years ago. He thought, in a puerile way, that moving would make him create. But creation wasn't his goal; narcissism was; and he degenerated into drug use, booze, a DWI arrest. And what did he get out of it? That life is a work of art. That he is art. And what does he have to show for it? A pointless work of flattery for a band he worships. Like most of his type, he became a critic and a sycophant. In the end, his efforts are a kind of meaningless example. Looks kids no hands.
2. The other type is the writer who has so many theories about him or herself and the process of writing that he or she is hamstrung. Writing should come from the writer like breathing from the lungs. There are snags and points of friction. But writing should flow. It may not always have the quality one wants, but expression is the key. I have a writer in mind here. She creates within certain narrow confines of her opinions. The work is good, but it fails on a deeper level. There is a lack of connection with the work and the world. In the end, that gap is felt by readers, and they don't want to read.
When people tell you, over and over, that your work fails to engage, it is time to search out a new avocation, or take a good look at the motivations for writing.
על שלושה דברים העולם עומד--על התורה, ועל העבודה, ועל גמילות החסדים.
I have been re-reading David Vogel's (1891-1944) novella Nokah YaHam, Facing the Sea.
In order to fully appreciate Vogel, Hebrew poet, the author of two novels, a novella, and a series of diaries in Hebrew, many poems, you must understand that except for one year of living in Palestine, Vogel never wrote in a Hebrew environment. He was the last of his kind: the Hebrew writer in Europe.
And the setting of his novella, Facing the Sea, is intimately European. Barth and Gina are a young couple taking a vacation in a steamy southern town. They are entinced by the sensualism around them. Barth succumbs with another woman and Gina with Cici, the Dionysian Italian lover of brute, short proportions and powerful passions. The plot line is modernist in the sense we find in D.H. Lawrence. The passions can save us, can be a new religion, but they can tear us apart with their power.
There is nothing particularly new here. The plot line and concerns fit with the 1920s. What is new is that the writing is in Hebrew; the characters speak and write in a Hebrew which for the author were not his native tongue. We can presume that everyone in Facing the Sea would be speaking French.
Vogel created a naturalistic and modernist Hebrew in a place and time where it did not exist. In that sense, he was the precursor of Israeli writers who would take Hebrew into uncharted territories. But for Vogel, Hebrew was, oddly, quintessentially European. It could express the shades and nuances of conflicting impulses in modern life in a Western setting.
Vogel anticipated Hebrew linguistic normality. When he was killed by the Nazis in 1944 he was little known. A later generation of Israeli writers and readers discovered him because his project was a precursor to their own.
You are many people I have known, but you have one thing in common, you have let me down.
Really, how can it be your fault? We are dealing with a mistaken apprehension. With a tangled epistemology. You are you and I am I and nothing can change that. But in my memory, you are part of me, and therefore I have expections, and you have dashed them.
What have you done? It is simple: people exist to fail you, so inevitably, as a person, as all people, as a composite of all the people I have know, you have failed me and fail me still. There are no phone calls. No visits. The wedding I wasn't invited to by you, my old old friends. The distance you created. The posts you won't answer. My published stories you never read or comment upon, my books you have never read. And more.
There is no way out. That is why you peer in the fog of something else, something beyond all of this. To find the ALL behind the many.
Alexis Santi offers a unique service in the battering world of literary journals.
He and his staff at OUR STORIES provide a critique of each and every story that is submitted. For seasoned submitters, the standard response is the form rejection. If you are lucky, or unlucky (depending if you see degrees of rejection as good, which I do) you get a note about the story from the editor/reader. In it, there is usually an expressed admiration for the story. There is not enough admiration, however, to take the story. Only enough to make everyone feel very bad about the outcome.
OUR STORIES provides crucial advice for the developing story. Santi and the staff will comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, and provide a guide map for improving the story.
The my story part of OUR STORIES was a piece called "And Moses Made a Serpent of Brass." OUR STORIES took it after some simple alterations. It was the first story that I published (more came later, as if OUR STORIES was a key I picked up along the way).
The fact that OUR STORIES, a journal that takes a tender and loving treatment of our writing, took my first work of fiction, made it all the more satisfying.
My first book, Religious Syncretism, gestated for about a decade before it became an active work of research and writing. It was published as a textbook with SCM-Canterbury in 2006.
I had been thinking over the years about the curious customs of pagan origins that continue in our day to day lives. Tossing coins in fountains (a variation of a Celtic practice of tossing coins to the dead in marshes to gain their favor). Knocking on wood (again, another Celtic practice, done to stir up the soul in a tree for protection). Our daily lives, and especially our monotheistic holidays, are studded with pagan holdovers. The obvious ones, Christmas trees, Easter eggs, the Sukkah, are only the most evident expression of religious borrowing.
My book shows the pervasiveness of borrowing. It takes examples of hybrid varieties of Islam, Christianity and Judaism to show the fluidity between these religions and so-called paganism. The three great carriers of syncretism in religion are saint veneration, mysticism and folk practice. My book illustrates that all three pervade Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and offer interesting and compelling examples of how the three Abrahamic religions share among one another and paganism.
