Brilliant and engaging, even page-turning, overview of the history of the Jews and Judaism

Wanderings: Chaim Potoks' History of the Jews
Chaim Potok
Fawcett, 1987

"Each time the light returns and we are able to see the new world that has been created on the ruins of the old, we discover familiar elements of the overthrown civilization in the creativity of the new" (p. 379). Although specifically referring in this passage to those Germanic tribes who conquered and assimilated the Roman empire, this comment is a succinct encapsulation of Potok's larger narrative about the Jewish people. Wanderings demonstrates that the history of the Jews and of Judaism is a palimpsest in which the central theme of covenant relationship with God has been regularly reinvented, overthrown as it were and creatively reconstructed, so that it may maintain its relevance in a changing world.

For those of us whose knowledge of the Jewish people and the religion of Judaism effectively begins with "Genesis" and ends with "Malachi," this book is indispensable. It seems equally indispensable for those raised within contemporary Jewry who wrestle, like Jacob, to reconcile the idea of a God who operates in history through his chosen people with a reality that is multi-faith and often seemingly without purpose. It does not hurt that Potok, an acclaimed novelist as well as an ordained rabbi, infuses his historical narrative with a pace and lyrical grace more in keeping with an epic novel than a work of nonfiction.

Potok's narrative begins, in a manner similar to contemporary accounts, with those first great Mesopotamian civilizations, Sumer and Akkad. Against this background of cuneiform and clay, Bronze Age technology, extraordinary civilizational creativity, and the constant threats of catastrophic flood and drought, wanders Abraham of Ur, first of the Hebrew patriarchs. Even in the earliest recorded tales of this wanderer and his descendants, we are told, "the basic themes of the Hebrew Bible-covenant, liberation, redemption; the search for insight into a world assumed to be meaningful-remain essentially the same..." (P. 40) . The wandering tribes descended from Abraham-called Hapirus-mingled with their new Canaanite (aka Phoenician) neighbors; slowly made their way into the Black Land of the Nile to escape famine; were enslaved by the native Egyptians when their Semitic relatives, the Hyksos, were driven from the pharaoh's throne; were liberated when one of their own, a man named Moses, received a call from their God; returned to the land of Canaan, their "Promised Land," with the goal of conquest; established a kingdom under Saul, and then the shepherd boy David; built a magnificent temple under the reign of David's son Solomon; watched all these accomplishments fade under one weak and corrupt king after another; and finally found themselves taken captive by the Babylonians. In short, we follow the rise and fall of the first great Jewish civilization, all while keeping in sight the religious thread that connects these victories and calamities. "The Israelites saw each of these crucial encounters between God and man through the filtering vision of covenant relationships" (p. 141). While all of these stories are familiar to those who have read the Old Testament, Potok ingeniously retells them with a novelist's sensibility and a scholar's insight, making the oftentimes two-dimensional characters of scripture come to life and resonate with the contemporary reader.

The Babylonian captivity was not the end of the Jewish people or their religion, although that is all too often assumed by those whose only knowledge of the Jews and Judaism comes from the Christian Bible. Instead, those who were allowed to return to their homeland after almost a century in captivity began the slow transition to the second great Jewish civilization, that of Rabbinic Judaism. Potok discusses the influences of Greek philosophy and Roman political domination on Jewish thought and practice; the origins of the conservative Sadducees and liberal Pharisees; the destruction of the Temple and, later, of Jerusalem by the Romans; the expulsion of the Jews from Judea; the creation of the Talmud in Palestine and Babylon; the high Sephardic civilization of Al-Andalus in Muslim Spain; the difficulties and discrimination faced by Jews on the margins of Christendom; and the ultimate unraveling of the 1,500-year old rabbinical civilization with the coming of the Enlightenment. All along the journey, Potok discusses the regular reinvention of what it means to be one of God's chosen people: from the early days of the doctrine of dual Torah and the Pharisaic emphasis on ethics; to the Kabbalistic notion that keeping God's commandments is a way of restoring the cosmos to its original sacred integrity; to Isaac Luria's conception of God sharing Israel's exile in the process of creation; to the joyous celebration of life itself expounded by the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov; to the Enlightenment's questioning of the very need for a sense of Jewish identity.

In short, Wanderings, in brilliant and engaging, even page-turning, prose, reveals Judaism to be a dynamic and fluid faith whose drive to find meaning in the world and willingness to change even that which seems most essential has allowed it to survive, and even to thrive, on the margins of civilizations whose views of the Jewish people have vacillated between begrudging respect to genocidal hatred. This book (I almost wrote "novel") is a remarkable achievement.

(This review was originally written on August 15, 2007.)

Not your run of the mill comic book

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History is at once the autobiographical tale of an American baby boomer trying to get to know his Holocaust-survivor father and of that father's experiences in and survival of the Holocaust. Spiegelman's audacity in attempting to use a "child's art form" to discuss one of history's greatest atrocities is matched only by the skill, both as a writer and a graphic artist, with which he accomplishes this goal. This groundbreaking graphic novel is definitely deserving of the accolades it has received.

In Maus, Spiegelman has demonstrated that comics and cartoons cannot be automatically relegated to the literary ghetto of the Sunday papers. This novel also proves true the old adage that pictures are worth thousands of words. Consider, for example, the cut-away view of the hidden bunker (p. 86) which graphically (in every sense of the term) shows the lengths to which Jews and other untermenschen had to go to hide from the Third Reich. Maus is successful not only in terms of its artwork, but also in terms of the stories that it tells. Spiegelman manages to show not only how the evils of the Holocaust unfolded and shaped his father, his late mother, and his new step-mother, but also how those same events shaped the relationship between Vladek Spiegelman and his son Art thirty years later.

At the risk of admitting my aesthetic thick-headedness, I still don't understand why Spiegelman chose to use animals instead of people in this work. Perhaps it is because, as some have suggested, seeing Nazis and Jews as animals allows the reader to drop the mind-stopping question of how humans could treat one another in such inconceivably barbarous ways. Perhaps the use of mice for Jews and cats for Nazis is an allusion to the old phrase about playing cat and mouse, or maybe it is a symbol of the Nazi perception of Jews as vermin. I tend to think Spiegelman's use of mice refers to his father's comment that maybe Artie will grow up to be like that famous cartoonist, "what's his name." After all, "what's his name" became famous through his cartoon mouse character, so why shouldn't Art Spiegelman? Whatever his reasons for the interesting choice to use animals as people, it works.

(This review was originally written on July 11, 2007.)

A must-read for wage earners and other people who work for a living

Strike!
Jeremy Brecher
South End Press, 1997

"The United States, while founded in revolution and proclaiming itself based on the consent of the governed, reveals under its democratic veneer an ambiguous reality....the emergence in the nineteenth century of a class system whose main actors are workers and corporate capitalists and the persistence of that system through the twentieth century violate the cherished tenets of the American myth. Instead of a society based on freedom and consent, we find a small, circumscribed realm of protected liberties, surrounded by vast--and now increasingly global--hierarchical institutions based on command and backed by force." (pp. 273-4)

Using the phenomenon of the mass strike as his focus, Brecher examines this "ambiguous reality" of circumscribed liberties, of command and force, and the way that it has played out in the lives of America's working people. From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, when previously independent farmers and craftspeople suddenly found themselves poor wage earners in someone else's factory to the successful Teamster strike against UPS in the late 1990s, the stories that Brecher relates demonstrate the power and integrity that working people have demonstrated repeatedly in their attempts to realize democracy in the workplace. This book demonstrates that, far from being protectors of our liberty, as patriotic platitudes would have us believe, the police and military far too often have been used by the state to defend the economic interests of the few against the needs of the many. It also puts the lie to other cherished myths, such as the notion that working people don't have the capacity for self-management or that labor unions are unambiguously pro-worker and anti-employer. Most importantly, though, through its detailed and energetic accounts of spontaneous insurrections on the part of working people, this book restores a lost history and dignity to the American worker, which is essential for the labor struggles that will be an inevitable part of global capitalism's future. As Bob Marley noted, "if you knew your history, then you would know where you're coming from." In short, this book provides an engaging and highly readable introduction to one aspect of the "lost" history of American labor and whets the appetite for more.

Dense, intricate, important look at the somatic side of Western history

Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West
Morris Berman
Bantam, 1990

Morris Berman begins his exploration of the "hidden history" of the West with a discussion of the nemo, a word he borrows from John Fowles' The Aristos which connotes the sense of non-existence at the core of the existential condition. The experience of this nemo, according to Berman, results from a developmental split between the felt sense of embodiment (somatic awareness) and the mental self image that comes from how others see us (specular awareness). Berman uses the history of mirrors and the human relationship to animals to demonstrate how this split has led historically to a de-valuation of somatic, embodied experience, a consequent preference for "cognitively top-heavy" abstraction, and various attempts to heal the breach between the two.

The core of the book is an exploration of four different periods in Western history---the origins of Christianity and Gnosticism, the Cathar/Albigensian heresy in Southern France, the rise of modern science from the practice of alchemy, and the modern phenomenon of Nazism. Berman investigates how these periods relate to the suppression of the body in favor of the abstracted intellect and to the return of that suppressed somatic experience in different forms (e.g,. Gnostic mysticism, romantic love, scientific abstraction, and Nazi mass murder).

Finally, Berman looks at our prospects for the future. Since the abstraction/experience split and our attempts to smooth it over are still going strong in modern Western societies, Berman fears the potential for a resurgence of fascism. (Given the tenor of the 21st century so far, it would seem that his fears are well founded.) Instead of advocating another mystical or political attempt to heal over the split and to fill in the nemo, Berman discusses the possibility of a "gesture of balance"---learning to accept the split and the feeling of the nemo without being compelled to fill it in or smooth it over. This radical acceptance of the gap might be the key to "resolving" the gap altogether.

In short, this is a book that demands serious attention from students of history, politics, religion, philosophy, psychology, and also for those dedicated to pursuing a spiritual path.

(This review was originally written on June 7, 2006.)

An intriguing collection of ideas about Jesus, based on circular reasoning

Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
John Dominic Crossan
HarperOne, 1995

"If, by the way, our eyes or heads are now spinning, this is part of the process. We are persuaded of the validity of the argument by the sheer difficulty in taking it apart. It is almost easier just to listen and nod or read and agree that to analyze, explore, and disentangle." Although Crossan makes this comment (on page 150) about those who historicized prophecy by reading the texts of the past into the events of the present, it is just as readily applied to his arguments in this book. While I do not necessarily disagree with his conclusions, most of which boil down to the idea that Jesus threatened the fabric of the social order (both Jewish and Roman) by preaching and living a gospel of radical egalitarianism, I take umbrage with his incessant use of circular reasoning to make his points. For example, Crossan will read a passage from Josephus that explicitly makes a claim, he will assert that this explicit claim was added to Josephus by later Christian editors, and will then use his edited version of Josephus (minus the alleged addition) as evidence to support his thesis; interestingly, he assumes his thesis when editing out the explicit claim made in the first place. This sort of "argumentation" occurs so frequently in the book, which is otherwise very nicely written, that the reader can be forgiven if she begins to accept Crossan's assertions as arguments and facts.

One further problem that continues to plague me about Crossan's vision is why this illiterate peasant made such an impact on the world. I ask this question because, by Crossan's own admission, revolutionaries and sapiential teachers were quite common at the time. Crossan fails to adequately explain how the Jesus of history became the risen Christ of faith, and by extension how this illiterate Mediterranean peasant came to claim the hearts and minds of billions, which is a major hole in an otherwise interesting collection of ideas.

(This review was originally written April 24, 2006.)

Nuanced, if rambling, prose makes for an interesting look at the history of Western thought

The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our Worldview
Richard Tarnas
Ballantine Books, 1993

I once heard a story that Tarnas would fire up a doobie before sitting down to write material for this book, and the rumor seems true in light of Tarnas' regular use of extended turns of nuanced phrase. That prose style is at once the major strength and weakness of this work. The fact that each paragraph comprises several precisely written (if overlong) sentences each containing at least one exhaustive list of examples makes for cumbersome reading, as I often have to reread the same sentence three or more times for the whole import to sink in. At the same time, this style does a fine job of articulating the manifold, complex, and often contradictory ways in which the seminal themes of Western thought have interacted. (For example, Tarnas does a brilliant job of showing how many of the ideas of the Protestant Reformation ironically contributed to the later undermining of Christian certitude and the rise of scientific materialism.)

I have other issues with the book, most of which have been described elsewhere on this site. Tarnas' lack of citations and primary sources (i.e., where he is getting his information?) make this a less-than scholarly review of Western thought, his repeated emphasis on astrology left me cold (which is odd, considering that I am a Leo-Virgo), his chapters on the late modern period and postmodernity need to be expanded upon, and his epilogue is a bit flakier than even I like.

That said, I will re-read this book and will recommend it to any reading about Western philosophy. It is a lively introduction to Western thought that does a darn fine job of pointing out the complex inter-relatedness of disparate elements and how they've played out over the last 2500 years.

(This review was originally written March 6, 2006.)

A classic book about chili that runs a bit Texas-heavy

A Bowl of Red
Frank X. Tolbert
Texas A&M University Press, 2001

A Bowl of Red serves as a history of chili, with a few other chapters added as filler (sort of like pinto beans are to a chili purist). According to Tolbert, chili is an American (not Mexican) dish which has its origins in the "chili queen" culture of late-19th century San Antonio. Texas chili is basically ground beef and chile peppers, with optional frijoles on the side; chilli chefs from other parts of the country, such as those who make the "Greek chili" served in Cincinnati and Springfield, will disagree. Tolbert also provides a few chili recipes, but not enough to make this a cookbook. Interesting book, but definitely a one-time read.