Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2007
REVIEW
YEARNINGS
By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser
Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, by Irwin Kula with Linda Loewenthal. Hyperion, 2006.
Admittedly, a Jewish tradition that excused its adherents from belief has stirred the imagination—and the pride—of countless sophisticated urban Jews. The notion that a tradition based solely in a dialogic ethics could stand against fundamentalisms of all stripes has been a source of solace during the 20th century's dark ages of Holocaust, Occupation, and Terror.
Yet, after almost 150 years of enlightened Judaism, Jews want more. Progressive Jewish leader and rabbi Irwin Kula identifies what we desire in Yearnings. We yearn for truth, meaning, the way, love, the ability to create, happiness, and, perhaps most of all, transcendence. We want to know what we are and why we are, which is our way of asking what God is and why God is.
Kula does not provide easy answers. Instead, in a book filled with anecdotes of the every day, he asks us to embrace "the sacred messiness of life." Instead of imagining a God who can answer all our questions, Kula marries the Socratic emphasis of ethical Judaism to our newfound desire for faith, asking us to embrace the unknowable, to have faith in the questions rather than the answers.
The author's faith in embracing uncertainty is not the same as a secular Jew's cynical rebuff of capital "T" truth. According to Kula, the one who yearns constantly reaches out for answers even though they are well aware that they may never find what they seek.
Yearnings imagines each of us as Moses, standing by the burning bush, hearing God say, "I am. I was. I will be." That's not, Kula points out, a God who will tell you what you want to hear. Believing in God is not about finding answers for our prayers so much as a way we allow ourselves to enlarge our sense of the possible.
A life-long progressive at the forefront of Jewish thought, Kula wants us to learn how to be as messy as life is. Why can't we, he asks, "hold two seemingly opposing truths together: the mystical and the pragmatic; the fantastic and the mundane; the idealistic and the realistic; the ordinary and the enchanted." Kula knows that some days we just want to be comfortable, and some days we want to change the world. Yearning is not enough, but neither can we live without it.
Source Citation
Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. 2007. Yearnings[Review of the book Yearning:Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life] Tikkun 22(1): 73.
Civilization
By Peter Campion
Civilization, by Elizabeth Arnold. Flood Editions, 2006.
Few poets convey the relation of the self to history as convincingly as Elizabeth Arnold. Maybe that's because history is not the past for Arnold, but the very substance that we inhabit. In this second collection of poems, Arnold not only attends to the most global (even galactic) realities, but she brings them to bear upon the minutest aspects of our lives. To read Elizabeth Arnold is to see such connections in refreshing, if sometimes disturbing, lucidity. This is what makes her poems so vital.
Take the three-line poem, "Polis," with which she opens her collection:
It's alive in us, what you thought,
what you made
happen in the mind, o precarious
ones,
threading your life into us from the
other end of time.
In these lines, the bare acts of consciousness turn out to carry the imprint of all of human history.
That may sound merely philosophical or dry. But in Arnold's poems, the links between the individual and the world at large conduct great emotional heat. For one thing, those connections are always "precarious." For another, the poet's exploration begins in and returns to family life. At the heart of Civilization stand Arnold's moving portraits of her father as he descends into Alzheimer's disease. In the poet's metaphor, he himself is "a civilization" falling out of the world.
The power of this work flows not from subject matter alone, but from the formal friction of the lines themselves. Like the modernist poet George Oppen, Arnold works in a ductile free-verse measure. Her tone is free ranging. She employs the vocabulary of science at one moment and translates Greek lyrics at the next; she takes on the idiom of family shouting matches in some poems and of philosophical inquiry in others. But the poems never sag into diffuseness. Arnold's phrases are condensed, stark. Each word seems to sear itself into the page, like molten platinum. In a book that renders personal and political instability with unrelenting fierceness, there's genuine pleasure in such consummate artfulness.
Source Citation
Campion, Peter. 2007. Civilization[Review of the book Civilization] Tikkun 22(1): 73.
Unspeakable Love
By Cynthia Hoffman
Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, by Brian Whitaker. University of California Press, 2006.
In the opening chapter of Unspeakable Love, Brian Whitaker gives us a brief introduction to the scanty cultural capital available to gays in the greater Arab world.
Eschewing conventional reporting on the regressive character of Sharia's (Islamic law) positions on gender rights, Whitaker calls our attention to its more progressive positions on the subject. Sodomy, for instance, is not one of the so-called hadd crimes for which the death penalty is authorized. This means that legal opinions making it a capital crime are "human, and therefore fallible."
True to advocacy journalism's form, however, Whitaker also tells us the kinds of personal stories that are the bread and butter of queer histories everywhere, reproducing letters to periodical editors asking if it wouldn't be better to commit suicide, for instance, rather than be gay. Such testimony, sadly, constitutes the main reportorial thrust of Unspeakable Love.
What Whitaker's coverage of this situation ought to instruct us is that when we speak about problems of democracy in the Islamic world, we also need to call to public attention its maltreatment of gays and lesbians.
Prior to the al-Aksa Intifada, one of the few places that Israelis and Palestinians could be found dancing together was in Israeli gay bars. Reading Unspeakable Love reminded me how atypical that was, and why most of the Middle East is so far behind the West in granting civil recognition to its gay and lesbian citizens.
Source Citation
Hoffman, Cynthia. 2007. Unspeakable Love[Review of the book Unspeakable Love] Tikkun 22(1): 74.
