Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Tomorrow, Wednesday, August 20, we will be showing Monsieur Ibrahim, a French-speaking, 95 minutes long, R-rated movie from 2003 with Omar Sharif and Pierre Boulanger. The full title of the movie is “Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran“, which translates to “Mister Abraham and the flowers of the Qur’an.” It is set in the 1960’s Paris, where an elderly Turkish shopkeeper befriends a young Jewish boy. The movies tag line reads, “Two different generations, two separate religions, the unlikeliest of friendships.” What these lines do not cover is how beautifully this movie was shot. The lights are playful, but in a different way, on the streets of Paris and in the Turkish desert, creating an aura for the film that makes it feel like a Sufi fable. Sharif’s Monsieur Ibrahim is deep, mystical and understanding. The film has some erotic content but ultimately I would describe it more spiritual and than anything else. Please join me for a kind a warm movie.

The main lesson I learned from last week’s showing of “The edges of the Lord” that no matter how big stars are in a movie (Osment and Dafoe) and no matter how important I consider the topic, people are not interested in watching “yet another” movie about the Holocaust. Only four of us showed up. Two of the visitors were from the Church of Nazarene (I hope I got their church’s name correctly in my conservation with them). In a way they were a more suitable audience, because the movie had just as much Christian content and references than Jewish, if not more. For example, Tolo, a young boy developed a “Jesus complex” and wanted to become and act similar to him. For example upon learning that Jesus was a Jew, he started to consider himself one. He carried this to the extreme, but I do not want to spoil the end of the movie for those who did not see it yet. His actions were more in vein with the Christian concept of sin and repentance than with the Jewish version of the above.

With the exception of the German characters, a Polish man and his son everyone was a positive person. The priest, the children, the villagers were all good people. This in itself would not have been a problem for me. Considering that the movie was written and directed by a Polish artist and was produced mostly from Polish money it is understandable. But I feel a bit of an imbalance, because I do not know of too many movies that shows the traditional Polish anti-Semitism. I think that if there are a only a few movies are made of the Shoah in Poland it should be more proportionate in its description of how many people helped and how many did not the Jews. This is not to belittle those heroes who saved (or tried to) lives. This movie showed the compassionate side of that nation, which surely exists, but that is not the only one.

The movie is available for borrowing in the library on DVD.

Francine Klagsbrun did for Jewish ethics what Arthur Hertzberg did for Judaism: compiled the definitive and authoritative compilation of writings. The full title of Hertzberg’s book is Judaism: The key spiritual writings of the Jewish tradition and it contains an introduction and integrated short quotes of the most important sources on people, G-d, Torah, holidays, land, doctrine and prayer. Klagsbrun’s compilation is titled Voices of Wisdom: Jewish ideals and ethics for everyday living. It covers

• You and yourself
• Relating to others
• Love, sex and marriage
• Family relationships
• Health and medicine
• Study, scholarship and superstition
• Work wealth, and philanthropy
• Government, law and authority
• Faith and freedom
• The value of life
• Death and the world to come

The main differences between Hertzberg’s and Klagsbrun’s volume beside their subject is their approach. Hertzberg integrated the quotes into one flowing coherent narrative, while Klagsbrun limited herself to short introduction for the book and each of its topics, followed by a cornucopia of quotes with exact citations. Each of the 11 many topics listed above is divided into dozens of subtopics. A detailed index helps to find relevant quotes on any subjects.

On hand the majority of the quotes are coming from a relatively limited set of sources: Tanakh, Mishnah, Talmud, and Responsa. On the other hand these sources put together would fill tens of thousand of pages. Klagsbrun did a great service to all of us by distilling these into a size that is easy to read and follow. Voices should be used a as reference book for any occasion when ethical considerations are part of a problem or conversation.

The library had two biographies of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. One of them was published in 1955 (Halasz‘ Captain Dreyfus; The story of a mass hysteria) and the other in 1973 (Lewis‘ Prisoners of honor; the Dreyfus affair). We recently received Michael Burns‘ Dreyfus; A family affair, 1789-1945, published in 1991 by HarperCollins. You might question why we need three books on the same, relatively narrow topic. The answer has two aspects. First, the “Dreyfus Affair” as his legal troubles between 1894 and 1906 are known is an important turning point both in the history of modern anti-Semitism and the fight against it. Second these books show different sides of the story.

Case in point, Burns–having written a book earlier about the Dreyfus Affair’s societal implications in Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1886-1900–turns his attention to the Dreyfus’ background: his family. This richly documented and indexed 576 page volume starts of with the story of Dreyfus’ great-grandfather and ends with his grandchildren’s involvement in the French Resistance during World War II. The book’s twenty five chapters are divided into four parts, out of which only one (the third) is dealing with the Dreyfus Affair. Even there the focus is on the Captian himself and his family’s reactions and fight. This approach is different from the rest of the literature dealing with the Dreyfus affair, because they tend to treat Dreyfus as an accidental victim, who is not even important from a larger point of view of the story.

The book is not a novel, but its narrative does recall the grandiose family dramas of an earlier age. If you disregard for a second that the subject is the Dreyfus family, it could be the story of any European Jewish family with its up and downs throughout the centuries. It is a fascinating read as a historical document.

Rabbi Dr. Michael J. Shire had put together a daring, beautiful and inspiring book titled “The Jewish Prophet: Visionary Words from Moses and Miriam to Henrietta Szold and A.J. Heschel”. It is daring because it extended the concept of prophets and prophecies from the traditional biblical period throughout history, to our days. The first of the three main parts of his books introduces eight prophets from the Tanakh, but also three post-canon sages: Hillel, Yohanan ben Zakai and Akiva. The second section covers 9 individuals in the period between the 11th and the 19th century. The third part lists 10 people whose active period was in the 20th century. On page 11 Shire justifies his choice to name prophets those who traditionally are not considered such,

“Each of the men and women in this book has been described as a prophet by biographers or by the historians of their own time. Some may perceive this as a controversial appellation but I believe it has been used for these individuals because of the special category of holiness and direct actions that they demonstrated.”

The book is also daring to include women amongst prophets. According to the Talmud (Tractate Megillah) seven prophetesses preached to Israel… Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, Esther. Shire includes only Miriam from these seven and two more women for each of the other two parts of his book. I, with my egalitarian views, was happy to see these inclusions; particularly that I was not aware of the activities of these wise women.

The book is beautifully designed, printed on high quality paper that is a joy to look at. Almost every page includes an illustration taken from the manuscripts and early prints of the Hebrew Section of the British Library, selected by the collection’s curator, Ilana Tahan. At the end of the book there is a detailed list of the illustrations and their sources. I think that these images are so rich and remarkable that could stand on their own as the basis for an art book.

But all of these were only about the structure and the design of the book. The essential content is about the life and words of the prophets from various ages of human/ Jewish history. Fore each of the 30 prophets we are given their names, a single phrase conveying their significance (e.g. Barukh Spinoza as the “defender of truth”), the period they lived in, a short quote from/of them, a few biographical pages with description of their thinking and activities as well. Furthermore there are 3-4 extensive quotes from their works, or in the rare cases, when they themselves did not leave much written material behind then about them. These were remarkably inspiring people. Having read the whole book in one sitting from beginning to end I am inspired by them. Such a wide range of circumstances they lived in, but how uniformly passionate reactions they produced. They were all passionate I their quest for justice and morality. I recommend this book to anybody who needs a motivation in any area.

Here is the full list of prophets covered in this book:

• IN THE BEGINNING: Moses, Miriam, Samuel, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Hillel, Yohanan ben Zakkai, Akiva
• FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION: Solomon ibn Gabirol, Bachya ibn Pakuda, Moses Maimonides, Isaac Abravanel, Dona Gracia Mendes, Manasseh ben Israel, Barukh Spinoza, Baal Shem Tov, Hannah Werbermacher
• EVEN IN OUR OWN TIME: Theodor Herzl, Henrietta Szold, Rav Kook, Leo Baeck, Lily Montagu, Stephen S. Wise, Martin Buber, Janusz Korczak, David Ben-Gurion, Abraham Joshua Heschel

Please allow me a personal note. In the early 1990’s I attended the Leo Baeck College in London for one year. Rabbi Shire was teaching there at the time, but I did not have a chance to take any of his classes. I only listened to a few of his shiurim. My recollection is that I was impressed not just by the depth of his knowledge, but also his friendliness to the audience. He had a direct and warm presence. Some time since I was studying there he deservedly became the College’s vice principle.

I just read from beginning to end Ronald H. Isaacs‘ Miracles: A Jewish Perspective. It was a great read and gave me a quick overview of the topic. However I think the primary use of this book will be a reference guide, because it contains such a comprehensive list of miracles. The miracles are listed according to their source, thus the book’s main body is divided into sections like miracles in the Bible, Talmud, philosophy, quotations, short stories, and prayerbook.

• The Biblical part is further subdivided to miracles demonstrating the wrath of G-d and then the Love of G-d, finally stories related to Elisha and Elijah.

• The Talmud part starts off with 7 specific extended quotes (all explained) positioning the roles of miracle within Talmudic thinking, then lists 37 individual stories and finishes of Elijah related examples.

• The Jewish philosophy part begins with the medieval period, describes nine rabbis’ position on miracles (from Saadia Gaon to Moses Mendelssohn) and then devotes two pages to three 20th century thinkers (Rosenzweig, Heschel, Kaplan.)

• The next part includes 25 short quotes on six pages gathered from the Bible, Talmud and Midrash.

• The four short stories, each of them being two pages long, in the next part appear without sources cited.

• The last (”prayerbook”) section takes specific prayers from Jewish liturgy (e.g. Modeh Ani, Asher Yatzar, Mi Kamocha, Amidah…), summarizes their content one by one and analyzes the miracle related points. I particularly liked that this part included blessings for seeing a rainbow, trees blossoming, creatures of unusual beauty, lightning, and hearing thunder.

Now that I covered the content of the majority of the book I need to point out the two short introductions. The first examines the question what a miracle is, or more precisely what ti was for the Jewish people throughout the ages. The analysis includes etymology of the Hebrew words for miracles, historical comparison and differentiation between hidden and revealing miracles. The second introduction introduces the differences between Christian and Jewish understanding of miracles. It does not go too deep into the former, because that is not the topic of this book, but provides quick list of 46 miracles of Jesus and the references in the New Testament.

The two things I most appreciated in this book were its expansive coverage and precise citing of the source. Not being an expert on the topic I cannot tell you whether the author left out any important miracle related writing from Jewish authors, but the list certainly seems comprehensive enough for me to start off the journey to learn more. As Isaacs devotes only a page or two at most to any giving miracle, it is very much a beginners’ book. That is why I am so grateful for specifying the sources. I can go off and find out more about any of them. I admit, I am a bit dizzy, as jumped from one miracle/story/context to the next as I turned the pages. But if you want to have a generic overview of the Jewish perspective on miracles this is an excellent the first book to read. (If you want more there is a short bibliography of further reading at the back of the book.)

I would like to point out a little used feature of this blog. If you are reading the entries on the website (as opposed to via email) then on the right side of the window you see a heading called Categories. Under that word there are 8 links. Each of those links lead to a subset of all the blog posts, belonging to that particular category. (Most blog posts belong to more than one category though.) Here is the explanation of what the categories refer to:

• About: posts related to the physical facility of the library (e.g. new shelf labels, opening hours, furniture …), its virtual presence (e.g. links or representations on other sites) or involving the staff.
  Purpose of the category: to share the news what’s going on in the little world of the library.
• Books: posts describing individual (or sets of) books in the library.
  Purpose: to generate interests to books in our collection related to current events, anniversaries. To counter the general tendency to focus only on newly published books at the peril of forgetting exiting works.
• DVDs: posts pointing out items in our growing DVD collection.
  Purpose: our intention is to create a great assortment of Jewish themed feature film DVDs, making the library a destination and source for entertainment.
• Events: posts announcing and reporting of events, such as filmclubs, author readings, festivals …
  Purpose: to market the events of the library (and other organizations) to the potential audience and summarize lessons learned.
• New books: posts featuring newly acquired or donated books. (Currently we are still through a backlog of the 100+ books we received from Copperfield books earlier this year. Once all of those are introduced we will start purchasing books again and “new books” section will feature books as they are arriving.)
  Purpose: to point out new books for those who are thoroughly familiar with the existing collection.
• Resources: links to other sites, lists of books, topics of interests not necessarily related to the library, but more generally to Jewish literature and literacy
  Purpose: to serve our readership with interesting resources outside the library, to position the library in a wider context.
• Reviews: longer evaluations of books from the library, read by the staff. If a “review” of ours does not appear in the category it means we generated the description based on paging through the book, reading others’ reviews, but not by reading the book itself.
  Purpose: to give detailed overview of interesting books containing and objective description and subjective analysis.
• VHS: describing one or more of our 100+ VHS tapes
  Purpose: to help readers and patrons discovering these somewhat hidden gems. We can not convert most of these to the nowadays more common DVD format because of copyright reasons. Nevertheless, our collection of documentaries, children films, feature films, and musical tapes is worth checking out.

On Wednesday, August 13 the library will show Edges of the Lord, a 95 minutes long, R-rated, movie from 2001. The movie was made in Poland, written and directed by Polish director Yurek Bogayevicz, but is in English, with the few short Yiddish and Hebrew lines. The story follows Romek, played by Haley Joel Osment, a 12-year-old Jewish boy who hides with a family of Catholic peasant farmers to escape the Nazis. It shows country living in the 1940’s Poland in somewhat romanticized way. But not too much, as Romek encounters not only the predictable folk-anti-Semitism, but also the brutality of children and teenagers (including a rape scene.) Being a Holocaust related movie it has plenty of sad and heavy scenes. These are somewhat balanced by the depiction of the countryside and the kind of innocent fun only children can experience. Willem Dafoe plays the local Catholic priest, who tries to defend Romek and others, but I have to admit with limited success.

This is the first movie in our series I did not find a proper trailer on YouTube or anywhere else and I could not make my own either. I found this two and a half minute segment in English with Chinese(?) and Turkish subtitles, but I could not embed it in this post. Then there is this two minute trailer, but is in German, so I just provide a link to it. Enjoy both/either.

Last Wednesday 10 and a half of us watched Walk on Water. By “half” I refer to the gentleman who missed the first 25 minutes or so the movie. Apologies to him, I am sure he got a lot out of it as well, so I should have written 11 of us, but 10 ½ was catchier. As far as I can tell the mood of the audience was great throughout the movie. There were plenty of one-liner jokes and humorous situations that we all got and laughed at together. Then we were at the edge of our seats when events turned more dramatic.

Let me share an observation about the movie that I realized now, that I watched it for the third time. A main motif seems to be that everybody has relatives and for them s/he will always be dear no matter what s/he did. The very opening scene, where the protagonist assassinates a Hamas activist on the street already conveys this message. The Palestinian’s son is crying on the street and this image will haunt our hero later, when his unconscious is struggling with the morality of killing people. The same problem arises with the old Nazi officer whom he is sent to kill. Even he has family, who care for him, no matter what he did during Hitler’s regime. Here I have to contradict myself. The Nazi’s granddaughter was disturbed enough–when she learned she was lied to and her grandfather was still alive—to cut her ties from the family. Her brother on the other hand managed to consolidate the similarly mixed feelings. (But I will not tell you how, so I would not spoil the end of the movie for you.)

For those of you are wondering why the movie’s title was Walk on Water here are the very last lines from the movie.

Axel Himmelman: You need to completely purify yourself. Your heart needs to be like it’s clean from the inside: no negativity, no bad thoughts.
Eyal: And then?
Axel Himmelman: And then you can walk on water. I’m sure of it.

The DVD is available now for borrowing from our library.

On the first Friday night of August we communally celebrated Elsie Rich’s 107th birthday. (Please send your photos so we could post them.) As part of the evening Rabbi Schlesinger sang (and led us in the singing of) the song below. I share for those sake who did not have a chance to be here and see this creative side of our Rabbi.

Elsie Hip Hooray
(To the tune: O-bla di, O-bla dah)

Elsie is a fixture in our temple’s life Every Shabbes finds her in the shul
She wants to hear just what it is the Rabbi says
And there’s a twinkle in her eyes; that is her rule
(Twice:) O-bla di, O-bla dah, Elsie’s birthday
La, la, la, la hip hooray

Scrabble is her game and she just loves to play
She’s a master and she’ll win the game
River Rock loves it when she visits them
She’s a fixture and you bet they know her name.

(Twice:) O-bla di, O-bla dah, Elsie’s birthday
La, la, la, la hip hooray

Chorus:

In a couple of years she will be a hundred ten
Who ever thought she’d never live that long
Just didn’t realize that she’s very strong.

She’s a hundred seven and it’s going well
Life for her is really so much fun.
All of us are here to say, “We send our love”
And yet our joyous party here has just begun

(Twice:) O-bla di, O-bla dah, Elsie’s birthday
La, la, la, la hip hooray

We can’t wait to be here in another year
Elsie will be a hundred eight
It’s her attitude to life that lets her live so long
And it’s the thing about her that we think is great.

O-bla di, O-bla dah, Elsie’s birthday
La, la, la, la hip hooray

Chorus:

In a couple of years she will be a hundred ten
Who ever thought she’d never live that long
Just didn’t realize that she’s very strong.

Now it’s time for us say this song is done.
But we have much more we want to say
Elsie, dear, we send our love and kisses now
And wish you all the very best on this birthday.

(Twice:) O-bla di, O-bla dah, Elsie’s birthday
La, la, la, la hip hooray

Well if you want some fun
Sing Elsie hip hooray!