March 15, 2010

　　犹太经典之中最出名的是圣经。

　　圣经是部文集，其中第一部分叫” title=”Neviim（意思是“众谕者”）” target=”_blank”>Neviim（意思是“众谕者”），这部分用一个汉字翻译，我选择“经”——圣人之书。承天命者（被上帝选中之人）劝谕百姓。

　　第三部分叫做Ketuvim（意思是“多[卷]书”），这部分用一个汉字翻译，我选择“纪”——各种其他类型(典经之外)的纪录，或者“集”——其他圣人时期的文献的集合。

　　这“典、经、纪”在一起，即犹太人的圣经，希伯来语是 犹太人的“四书” The “Four Books” of the Jews Read More »

　　犹太人的经典之中最出名的是圣经。

　　圣经是部文集，其中第一部分叫Torah（托辣，意思是“教导、训诲”），这部分用一个汉字翻译，我选择“典”——帝之书。按犹太传统，托辣乃帝（上帝）亲授。用“典”，还可以表达Torah所含“典章律例”。

　　第二部分叫做Neviim（意思是“众先知”），这部分用一个汉字翻译，我选择“经”——圣人之书。承天命者（被上帝选中之人）劝谕百姓。

　　第三部分叫做Ketuvim（意思是“多[卷]书”），这部分用一个汉字翻译，我选择“纪”——各种其他类型(典经外)的纪录，或者“集”——其他圣人时期的文献的集合。

　　这“典”“经”“纪”在一起，即犹太人的圣经，希伯来语是TaNaKh（塔纳赫）——Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim的首字母缩写(T-N-K)。

　　圣经之外，最重要的，也是使犹太人保持其犹太特性的不可或缺的经典，是Talmud（有“学习”之意），这部包罗万象的巨著用一个汉字翻译，我选择“传”——诠释“经”（圣经）之书。

　　“典”“经”“纪”“传”，此犹太“四书”。

In my eleven years living in England I often observed, as did many others, that Anglo-Jewry lacked the vibrancy and innovation characteristic of American Judaism. The absence of an electrifying sense of Jewishness and communal dynamism was a subject much discussed among the Anglo-Jewish leadership. In areas like per capita philanthropy and social services, Anglo-Jewry led the world. But in communal programming and affiliation it was hemorrhaging numbers at an alarming rate.

Some said that Anglo-Jewry’s relatively small number accounted for fewer truly original ideas. Others spoke of the natural reticence and lower-key disposition of the English in general and Anglo-Jewry in particular.

In truth the principal reason for the stagnant state of Anglo-Jewry relative to its American counterpart lay elsewhere. Anglo-Jewry is profoundly hierarchical while American Jewry is profoundly meritocratic. Britain, for example, has a Chief Rabbi who is the community’s titular head and Ambassador to the wider community while in America a rabbi’s standing is judged not by any communal appointment or particular title but by effort and impact alone. The absence of a communal hierarchy means that individual Rabbis and communal leaders can innovate and try new and transformative programming without having to fit into an existing infrastructure of control or thought.

In both countries it is interesting to note that its two most successful ideas over the past two decades – Limmud in the UK and Birthright in the United States – originated with activists who were working outside the main organs of the established community. And that’s because giant bureaucracies often stifle originality. But in the UK where the bureaucracy affects the most important leaders of all – its spiritual guides – it is extremely challenging for Rabbis to go up against the spiritual status quo.

We see the same problem manifesting itself in Israel where Rabbinical innovation is strongly limited by the hierarchical demands of an established Chief Rabbinate. In effect a Rabbi is made to feel that someone is watching over him at all times. Being an impactful leader requires the freedom to maneuver and innovate. But wherever there is a Chief Rabbinate there is strong pressure to fit in and conform. And I only partially buy the argument that having an orthodox Chief Rabbinate helps to solidify orthodoxy as the community’s main and established current. In the final analysis, an ossified orthodoxy that retains hegemony by communal fiat will always feel oppressive and invite rebellion, whereas an orthodoxy that is alive and pulsating will rise to the fore naturally and be embraced organically. In America there is no orthodox Chief Rabbinate. Yet few would argue that orthodoxy is now the community’s most potent, effective, and vibrant force. And it became that way without being artificially propped up.

There is more.

Having a Chief Rabbi assumes community cohesion in name rather than fact. Whoever, therefore, occupies the position is immediately compromised by having to be all things to all people. In the United Kingdom, the community is bitterly divided between orthodox and non-orthodox. One of the things I found most distasteful about being an orthodox Rabbi in the UK were the constraints put on me from working publicly with my conservative and reform brethren on matters of great communal concern. In the United States it would be unthinkable for an orthodox Rabbi to be prevented from working, say, to defend Israel on campus with his reform counterparts. But in the UK sharing a public platform with the non-orthodox clergy is sacrilege. This prohibition served in no small measure to sow unlimited enmity between reform and orthodox Jews even in areas where there should be clear unity and agreement. The most famous example was when we orthodox Rabbis were prevented from attending the funeral of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a holocaust survivor and Britain’s most celebrated reform Rabbi. Is it not better for orthodox Rabbis to use halacha, Jewish law, as their guide rather than rigid communal orthodoxies? And can you imagine any halacha that would forbid a Rabbi, of all people, from burying another Jew?

The limitations of having a Chief Rabbinate explains a paradox of British Jewry under the leadership of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. On the one hand, Sacks is universally admired as one of the eloquent Jewish thinkers of our time. A gifted communicator in both the written and spoken word, Sacks combines scholarship with a thoroughly modern understanding of contemporary events and social currents. Yet, the UK community has stagnated and shriveled under his leadership. Indeed, the paradox of Sacks’ leadership is how, amid Britain being privileged with arguably the most effective Jewish apologist of our generation, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment has exploded under his watch as never before. Some of the highlights include the British High Court ruling, unbelievably, that the orthodox community has no right to determine whom the members of its own community are, the arrest warrant issued against former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni by a British court, the decree that produce from the West Bank had to labeled as having been grown by Jewish settlers, and the ban by the British academic establishment of Israeli academics at their conferences. How could such an outpouring of anti-Jewish emotion erupt under Sacks’ capable watch? The answer is that in many of these cases Sacks only tangentially engaged himself. A Chief Rabbi is a member of the establishment and establishment figures – seeking respectability above all else – always try and avoid confrontation.

The closest thing America ever had to a Chief Rabbi was Stephen S. Wise who chose to be very guarded and tightlipped during the holocaust, shirking from nearly every political confrontation with his close friend Franklin Roosevelt. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has produced a brilliant documentary about his tragic reticence entitled ‘Against the Tide,’ which serves as a moving and cautionary tale of ever concentrating too much Jewish communal power in a single, establishment voice.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network and has just published ‘The Blessing of Enough.’ Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Before the “Night at the Museum” and “Meet the Parents” franchises made Ben Stiller one of the biggest comic superstars of his generation, the actor played the dramatic lead in a riveting independent film, “Permanent Midnight,” based on Jerry Stahl’s memoir of battling drug addiction while working as a television writer.  At the time, Stiller told me he was drawn to “Permanent Midnight” because, like Stahl, he considered himself “funny and Jewish and not particularly confident or comfortable” in his own skin. He added that he felt “somewhat of an outcast in the WASP culture;” and that he has felt pressured to assimilate not because he is self-hating, but because he hates when people typecast him.

A dozen years later, the now 44-year-old Stiller has made another independent film in which he plays an even more prickly dramatic lead, awash in midlife crisis.  Stiller portrays the eponymous anti-hero in Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” which opens March 19 and revolves around a fortyish misanthrope who is “a potentially repellent walking contradiction, an emotional porcupine who uses what he perceives as brutal honesty in order to perpetuate a big lie, that is, that he doesn’t really need anybody else,” the Hollywood Reporter said.

Having failed to make something of himself while his friends have developed successful careers and families, Roger Greenberg has left New York to house sit for his well-to-do brother in Los Angeles, where he is attempting to recuperate from a nervous breakdown.  There he chances to meet his brother’s twentysomething assistant, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), who turns out to be relationship material, in part because she is so passive she is able to absorb all of Greenberg’s abusive behavior and deflected self-loathing.

The depth of his self-hatred apparently extends to his Jewish background, as evidenced when Greenberg is persuaded to attend a Bel Air bar-be-queue where he meets up with some old Jewish friends.  These men are comfortably chatting about whether anyone has been to so-and-so’s seder;  various Jewish connections, and what constitutes a “Jewish” gesture (“You’re doing this,” one of them says to Greenberg, miming his effusive hand gesticulations).  “I’m half [Jewish],” Greenberg says.  “You look full,” a friend replies.  The appalled Greenberg has as much disdain for this Tribal schmoozing as he professes for his wealthy friends whom, in his opinion, have abandoned creativity in order to become successful. “Most people think I look Italian,” he says, sulkily.  “My mother is actually Protestant, so I’m not Jewish at all.”

Stiller’s own mother, the actress Anne Meara, converted to Judaism upon marrying fellow actor Jerry Stiller; Ben Stiller unabashedly identifies with the Tribe and also has mined his background to comic effect (during his stint as a presenter at the 2010 Academy Awards,  he peppered his “Avatar” spoof with Hebrew).  In “Meet the Parents” and its sequel, “Meet the Fockers,” Stiller plays a nebbishy Jewish nurse who is continually humiliated by his WASP father-in-law (Robert De Niro), a former CIA agent.  The third installment in the franchise, “Little Fockers,” will hit theaters Dec. 22, with a screenplay by Stiller’s longtime in-house writer, John Hamburg.

“The non-Jewish characters in the films are not anti-Semitic,” Hamburg told me last year.  “But there is the sense that Ben feels out of place among WASPS and also because he is a man who is not a doctor, but a nurse, which creates a kind of stigma.”

At the time of the interview in March 2009, Hamburg said he was “doing his own take” on an existing script for “Little Fockers.”  So how will the fictional interfaith couple raise their children? “When you have a couple of kids – when you have twins – and you have a Jewish dad and a non-Jewish mom, you’ve gotta make some compromises,” Hamburg said.  He wasn’t telling whether only one of the children will have a bris.

“Greenberg” is the latest film by Noah Baumbach, who specializes in difficult and despairing characters and who received an Oscar nomination for his excellent 2005 drama “The Squid and the Whale.” In a Journal interview, Baumbach said the title of “Squid” alludes to “The Clash of the Titans” diorama at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History; but it also becomes a metaphor for the battle between a confused Jewish teenager and his hypercritical, intellectual father (Jeff Daniels).  The characters were inspired by Baumbach’s life with his own parents, both lauded writers, in Brooklyn in the 1980s.  The filmmaker said that even though his mother is Protestant, he identified as Jewish because he felt a connection with the People of the Book.  He wrote “Greenberg” with his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also stars in the movie.  Baumbach and Leigh are expecting their first child this month.

Read our story on Ben Stiller 

Read our story on John Hamburg and the “Meet the Parents” franchise

Our story on Noah Baumbach

Wow, Mick Jagger is so jealous right now.

I can’t decide if Adam Lambert should be called Lady Magaga —to evoke some strange lovechild of Madonna’s goth phase and Lady Gaga’s propensity for wearing sharp objects—or if he should just be Lady McLambert. Either way, it’s quite a costume. The new drag.