18 July 2005 (Monday)
you get what you ask for
Yesterday's Boston Globe contained an op-ed column entitled, "Poland's New Fascination With Jews." The article began with quotes from Cynthia Ozick's 1973 essay imagining the world's reverence of the Jews, if we had all vanished long ago:
''How -- if there were no Jews -- the world would be enraptured!" she wrote. ''The people that stood at Sinai to receive a desert vision of purity, the people of scholarly shepherds, humane prophetic geniuses, dreams of justice and mercy" -- how admired they would be. In a world without Jews, the memory of Jewish civilization would be endlessly fascinating. ''Christian ladies," Ozick imagined, would ''study 'The Priceless Culture of the Jews' at Chautauqua in the summertime" or create Jewish prayer shawls at ''a workshop on tallith making."
And while there are still Jews in the world, apparently there aren't very many left in Poland. About 200, at last count, in Krakow, a city of 1.5 million people. Perhaps you can attribute a tiny sliver of that reduction to my in-laws' emigration (to New York and Israel) in the 1960s, but I seem to recall a little skirmish with the Germans wherein the Poles were all too happy to hand over their neighbors for enslavement and extermination. What was that called again?
Right. So maybe you'll understand my cynicism, the lack of warm-fuzzies, when I read that Krakow holds an annual Jewish Culture Festival, "a nine-day extravaganza of concerts, lectures, films, and exhibitions" with the goal of "'presenting Jewish culture in all its abundance.'" Included in the activity catalog are:
lectures on ''Talmudic thought" and ''Jewish medical ethics," forums on European anti-Semitism and the Hebrew poetry of Haim Nahman Bialik, concerts of klezmer music, liturgical music, and ''Songs of the Ghettos and Jewish Resistance," workshops on Jewish cooking, Hasidic wedding dances, and celebrating Hanukkah with children.
The Festival's closing concert, on "an outdoor stage dominated by a large electric menorah," lasted seven hours and drew an audience of 10,000 people (not to mention its television broadcast). Whence the crowd? Several people int he crowd told The Globe's Jeff Jacoby that "they had come because the concert is such a popular scene." Others came out of a particular attraction to Jewish culture, but I was less than satisfied with the reasoning:
''I can't imagine Krakow without Jewish culture," she told me. But when I [the reporter] gently pressed her to say what ''Jewish culture" means -- how, for example, would she explain it to her daughters? -- she replied, vaguely, ''It's more about feeling than knowing. 'Jewish' to me means a warm feeling."
That's just great. A three-thousand-year-old religion (with some developments along the way, of course) has been reduced to "a warm feeling." Kugel and candles. Perhaps next we can reduce Catholicism to Christmas trees and nuns. Oh, excuse me, I have to go retrieve my eyeballs...they just rolled right out of my head.
I was less put off by Tomasz Sierkierski, who was honored at the Festival for coordinating the retoration of a "forgotten" Jewish cemetery in Skarszewy. When asked why he did it, he told the reporter that "[h]e knows that nothing will bring back the rich Jewish culture that was so much a part of Polish life. But he wants at least to keep it from being forgotten." (I'm pretty sure it wasn't forgotten by those who have relatives buried in that cemetery, or who lived in the town. At least, it wouldn't have been if you didn't go and kill most of them and then drive the rest out of the country.)
There are non-cynical bones in my body, somewhere. I'm just having some trouble finding them today.
This is Poland we're talking about, I find myself questioning what sort of "warm feeling" they get from Jews there.
I for the life of me, lulei demistafina, don't get how ppl are going back to eastern europe to LIVE! As if rebuilding Judaism there (a) is a realistic goal and (b) would show it to Hitler.
We have better things to do. Making Aliyah being one of them.
Think of all the college kids (and older folks)out there reading Native American spirituality from cheesy paperbacks and clanking with symbolic Indian jewelry, who may never meet an actual Indian who isn't part of their personal quest.
That's what we've become to the Poles. Spiritual, cool, and dead or gone somewhere else. When they're dead, you get to take the culture, and make keychains out of it.
Am I being cynical here? Or should I work harder at it?
I get the feeling that the people in this article *love* Jews and Judaism--as long as they're dead. As much as I would love to see a Jewish renaissance of the kind that we have had in the States (and I think it's fair to say that--my dad always said he never could have guessed that there would be frum people in the US in my generation), I just don't think there is enough popular support or government cooperation for it.
I am glad that there are people who are interested in supporting Jewish life in Eastern Europe, but it makes me sad that almost everyone involved in that practice subscribes to the same Jewish agenda: mostly right-wing Jews interested in kiruv, and in coercing observance to a certain extent.
