Blasphemy as spritual tool by Julian Ungar-Sargon

BLASPHEMY AS A SPIRITUAL TOOL…………………..MAY 2013

Vicky Nanjappa Will world renowned author Salman Rushdie come to India for the Jaipur Literary Festival? That is the question on everyone's mind. There has been no confirmation from Rushdie himself so far and the festival organizers maintain that the invitation to the writer has not been cancelled. However, several Muslims organizations across the country, which have been hurt by some of his writings, say they would welcome him with brickbats and shoes if at all he visits India.

Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan, president, All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat, who is also the chief editor of The Milli Gazette, says that if a person can cross all limits of decency only to sell his writing, he should be prepared for the kind of reaction shown by Muslims ever since his novel, The Satanic Verses, was published three decades ago.

In an interview with rediff.com's Vicky Nanjappa, Dr Khan says people will denounce Rushdie and hurl shoes at him if they find him. "The blasphemer" should be ready for such a reception, he adds. What do you make of the controversy surrounding the visit of Salman Rushdie to India? Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, hurt the sentiments of millions of Muslims around the world by writing Satanic Verses, which in a nutshell tries to claim that the Holy Quran is not divine and revealed.

If a person can cross all limits of decency only to sell his writing, he should be prepared for the kind of reaction shown by Muslims ever since this blasphemous novel was published three decades ago. He has not ever shown remorse; rather he has said that he should have been more forthcoming and critical in his writing and depiction of characters. As such, it is very natural that people who were hurt will protest whenever an opportunity presents itself. And what best opportunity than when a foreigner visits a country where millions dislike what he said and wrote. Rediff News: 'Blasphemer Rushdie will be welcomed with shoes in India' ‘Blasphemer Rushdie will be welcomed with shoes in India' January 20, 2012 11:41

“Atheism (heresy) comes as a cry from the depths of pain to redeem man from narrow and alien straights—to raise him up from the darkness of the letters and aphorisms to the light of ideas and feelings until faith finds a place to stand in the center of morality. Atheism has the right of temporary existence because it is needed to digest the filth adhered to faith for the lack of intellect and service.” Rav Kook (Orot 126)

The results of trauma and violence reverberate through the psychic landscape of children into adulthood. In the pericope of the blasphemer in Leviticus 24 the midrash fills out the scene whereby the blasphemer has a past that expresses his traumatic childhood. It is unclear whether his mother, Shlomis bas Divri was seduced raped by, or consented to, the Egyptian taskmaster. As I read this passage I was reminded by the boy Maciek in Begley’s novel, Wars and Lies.

The testimony of young children who have survived extremes of persecution and cruelty carries an authority that is all the stronger because they are not yet able to judge the offenses committed against them. It is this kind of unguarded authority -- as if the appalling events spoke themselves -- that compels us in the voice of "polite little Maciek," the narrator of Louis Begley's masterly first novel, "Wartime Lies," as he recounts his life as a Jewish child trying to avoid discovery in Nazi-occupied Poland. Behind his automatic smile, everything registers -- from the German officers' dazzling aura of invincibility to the cheerfulness of ordinary Poles at the shelling of the Warsaw ghetto to the savagery of Ukrainian terror squads attacking civilians at random.

But the singular resonance of Maciek's story comes from its framing within the perspective of the man he later becomes, who after years of disclaiming his early history now confronts the inner wounds that have never healed. This man, whose musings preface the young boy's story and occasionally intersect with it, reads the classics for consolation and insight -- the "Aeneid" for its portrayal of the sad survivors of Troy, the "Inferno" for its exploration of hell. And he interprets them with a mordant brilliance, as in his comment that Dante's Virgil "resembles a Jew with technical qualifications indispensable to the Reich." Still, his suffering does not diminish: "The man with sad eyes believes he has been changed inside forever, like a beaten dog, and gods will not cure that. He has no good deeds to look back upon."

This harsh verdict is revealing. For Maciek, like the nameless boy of Jerzy

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Kosinski's novel "The Painted Bird," was thrust into the wartime underworld so young that its vicious rules of survival became part of consciousness itself. Mr. Kosinski's child, left totally alone, learned the predator's ways and worshiped power; but Maciek, born a few months after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, is taught to behave like the animal that is preyed upon -- to freeze all responses, to deny himself, to practice endless deceit. Older children, as we can see from the autobiographical accounts of Janina David ("A Square of Sky") and Yehuda Nir ("The Lost Childhood"), could manage the game of multiple identities while remembering and valuing who they really were. But for the younger ones, such distance was hardly possible.

In "Wartime Lies," Maciek fights an intense losing battle for his own integrity. It will turn out that his closest adversary is at the same time his savior and the grand heroine of this drama of survival, his Aunt Tania. To understand what is at stake between them, it is necessary to turn back to the start of their relationship, when the infant Maciek, born at the cost of his young mother's life, is taken in charge, along with the entire household, by Tania, her older sister. Theirs is a family of prosperous and distinguished assimilated Jews; Maciek's father, a doctor, was educated in Vienna, his maternal grandparents are established landowners. But Tania, despite her wealth and beauty, is unmarriageable, something of a misfit thanks to her arrogant independence of mind and suspected love affairs.

Nor does her dominating temperament make her a good foster mother for a

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needy, sensitive infant. By the time Maciek is 3 years old he is a chronic sufferer from eating disorders and nightmares -- until Zosia, a gentile nursemaid, restores him to health by taking him into her bed and mothering him with generous sensuality. The bad dreams fade away; but just as Maciek comes into his own as the happy center of his comfortable and privileged world, the war begins. First his father is taken east with the retreating Russian forces; then the invading Germans start their roundups of Jews, and Zosia's father removes her from the household. Tania, however, even while the pace of harassment, eviction and degradation accelerates, discovers her extraordinary gifts for the outlaw's life. Defiant and without scruples, Tania already knows and is prepared to do what is necessary to save her family. She takes a German bureaucrat as her lover and protector until they can escape this small town where they are known. When her lover is betrayed and commits suicide after killing Maciek's grandmother, who is caught with him, the SS is on Tania's trail. Warned just in time, she moves, with Maciek, a jump ahead, through a chain of squalid rooming houses, until they acquire the false papers under which they can travel to the larger underworld of Warsaw, where the boy's grandfather is already in hiding. Living on the run, conscious of her own daring, Tania has moments of exhilaration that, significantly, Maciek finds disturbing. "I suffered from her jokes," he remembers. "I thought they made us feel even lonelier. I didn't like the thought of being a criminal." He clings to his sense of himself as a treasured only son, the sole heir of his family, and is offended by the means Tania finds necessary for their survival: the adaptation of every word and gesture toward the impersonation and seduction of their enemies.

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Moreover, because his first lies are forced upon him, the child is deprived of a vital key to his own autonomy. It seems inevitable that when he wants to assert himself by using Tania's techniques against her, even in so seemingly innocuous a matter as altering the instructions for his homework assignments, he is easily found out. "She hated cheating, except to avoid capture. . . . When we were alone, Tania said scornfully that if it was my nature to be a cheat it was too bad that I was not at least original and clever at it."

The curse on Maciek's life is this essential bond of apprenticeship to a mistress he must love, admire and terribly resent; to save his own soul he must not succeed at the craft of lying -- yet he cannot afford to fail, for that would mean death. Through the ordeal of the Warsaw uprising, a desperate flight into the countryside and the loss of his beloved grandfather, until the last shot is fired on the eastern front, "Wartime Lies" braids together Tania's nightly critique of their progress -- "as if one performer were speaking to another about their art" -- with Maciek's unspoken resistance to the perfection she demands. The war over, Tania's moment has passed: Maciek's father returns from detention in Siberia with a mistress, soon to become his new wife. Now the alliance of aunt and nephew rapidly dissolves. Unable to restore their old life, given the continuing hostility to Jews, they will soon leave Poland. It is right, then, that the scenes from Maciek's world that remain with the reader have a pristine clarity that suggests places in memory unblurred by later contact, willfully kept at a distance rather than absorbed into Maciek's adult life: the small child building fires of weeds to jump through as a game with his grandfather; the boy melting

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lead on the kitchen stove to cast his toy soldiers; and, later on, his clinging to a warm cow in a wintry field when he and Tania, having fled Warsaw, must beg work from peasants.

The final perspective on little Maciek is given to the man in midlife, who, as a reader of the classics, speaks an epitaph consigning his childhood self to the realm of vanitas -- the emptiness of lies. This is indeed faithful to the dark ironies of Maciek's fate, which it is Louis Begley's great achievement to have confronted and sustained. But it seems no less than justice that Maciek and Tania should be given their honorable place also in fiction, where lies may be reconciled with truth. And Odysseus and Athena, if not Virgil, will be happy to welcome them.

EVOKING A CHILD'S MEMORY Anyone reading Louis Begley's first novel, "Wartime Lies," about a family of Polish Jews in flight from the Nazis, will wonder if the story is autobiographical. "It is, in that I was born in Poland and I'm Jewish," Mr. Begley said in a recent interview in his office at Debevoise & Plimpton, the Manhattan law firm where he heads the international practice group. "I spent the war on 'Aryan papers.' I lived in Warsaw during the uprising. But what is in the interstices is fiction." Mr. Begley, 57 years old, acknowledges that he did experience some of the harrowing events that befall Maciek, the boy in the novel. But he feels that any revelation of his own past would add nothing. "I'd be doing the reader a disservice," he remarked, "if I tried to distinguish the grain of sand from what I hope is the pearl that formed around it."

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For years, Mr. Begley did not expect to be writing at all. After immigrating to the United States in 1947, he graduated from Harvard College, served in the Army and went on to start a career and a family. Then, about four years ago, he decided to begin a book about his late father, a physician. Instead he found himself writing about the boyhood of a man roughly his own age. But Mr. Begley knew the work had to be fiction. "A child's memory is not like that of a man who keeps diaries," he explained. "If one wanted to recall precise events, one would be left with what would fit in the palm of a hand. If one wants to tell what really happened in an emotional sense, one has to imagine and invent the facts." -- LAUREL GRAEBER1 They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded. Stanley Kubrick on the meaning of 2001 A Space Odyssey2

There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies 1

WARTIME LIES By Louis Begley. 198 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Interview with author NY Times on the web

I mourn the fact that Kubrick gave up on his last planned film Aryan Papers which would have brought his creative genius to the Begley novel.

somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories—it's always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion.

Will Love Be A Seven-Letter Word? [William Kloman, The New York Times,4.14.68 Section Two]

I am obsessed with what might have been, had Kubrick made the film on the Holocaust. And the little boy Maciek and his relationship to the aunt Tania, reminded me of the midrash below regarding the relationship between the “megadef” the blasphemer in Leviticus and his mother, outcasted by her husband and divorced after her being seduced by his Egyptian slave master. The woman Shlomis bas Divri raises the child who now claims his inheritance in the tribe of Dan, but his half brother refuses, and in court, the judge, none other than Moses rules against him. Leaving court he blasphemes the name of God, which results in his execution by stoning. However the Zohar comes to his rescue in claiming his motives were for the protection of his mother’s honor. The complexity of the Midrash and Zohar warrant further discussion.

A blasphemer: who protects the integrity of his violated mother.

10. Now, the son of an Israelite woman and he was the son of an Egyptian man went out among the children of Israel, and they quarreled in the camp this son of the Israelite woman, and an Israelite man.

.‫וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית וְהוּא בֶּן אִישׁ י‬ ‫מִצְרִי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה בֶּן‬ ִ‫הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית וְאִישׁ הַיִּשְׂרְאֵל‬:‫י‬

11. And the son of the Israelite woman .‫וַיִּקֹּב בֶּן הָאִשָּׁה הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית אֶת יא‬ pronounced the [Divine] Name and cursed. So ‫הַשֵּׁם וַיְקַלֵּל וַיָּבִיאוּ אֹתוֹ אֶל משֶׁה ְושֵׁם‬ they brought him to Moses. His mother's name :‫טּה דָן‬ ֵ ַ‫אִמּוֹ שְׁלֹמִית בַּת דִּבְרִי לְמ‬ was Shlomis the daughter of Divri, of the tribe of Dan. 12. They placed him in the guardhouse, [until his .‫עַל פִּי וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ בַּמִּשְׁמָר לִפְרשׁ לָהֶם יב‬ sentence would] be specified to them by the :‫ְיהֹוָה‬ word of the Lord.

Rashi, commenting on this episode (24:10), cites two theories presented in the Midrash to explain what led the megadef – the son of an Egyptian man and Israelite woman – to blasphemy. The first theory builds upon the juxtaposition between this incident and the immediately preceding section, which presents the mitzva of lechem ha-panim – the “showbread” placed each week on the table in the Mishkan. What troubled the megadef, according to this view, was the fact that the bread was placed on the table every Shabbat and eaten by the kohanim only a week later. Why, the man wondered, would the kohanim eat the bread a full week after baking it, rather than it eating it fresh? He deemed this disrespectful to the Mishkan, to the point where he resorted to blasphemy. The second theory that Rashi cites attributes the megadef’s blasphemy to a personal misfortune that he suffered. He had pitched his tent among the tribe of Dan, with which he naturally associated and felt a sense of belonging given that his mother belonged to this tribe. Strictly speaking, however, he was not a member of Dan, since his father was a gentile, and not a member of Dan. The case came before Moshe, who ruled in favor of the Dannites who demanded that this individual leave their territory. The ruling incensed the megadef to the point where he publicly blasphemed God’s Name in the middle of the camp. According to Toras Kohanim and Midrash Tanchuma, the blasphemer had sought to pitch his tent in a certain location, but the people in the area objected. A court case ensued, presided over by Moshe himself, who concluded that the man may not pitch his tent in that land. Embittered and frustrated, he left the courtroom and publicly cursed the God of Moshe.

Rabbi David Silverberg wonders (VBM Torah) whether perhaps some connection exists between these two theories. Are these presented in the Midrash as two entirely independent, mutually exclusive opinions as to what took place, or should we perhaps view them as two angles of the same story? Secondly, how might we explain the first theory, that the megadef was led to blasphemy by the concept of stale bread in the Mishkan. Why did this phenomenon trouble and offend him so dramatically? In the typically psychological-literary motif of the VBM-Torah school (of yeshivat Ohr Etzion) Rabbi Silberberg speculates that the megadef, who, though technically an Israelite, came as an outsider, was enchanted by Bnei Yisrael and very much sought to become a full-fledged member of the nation. He viewed life as an Israelite as an idyllic condition to which he aspired. The miraculous existence in the wilderness, the Shechinah’s presence among the people – this was the perfect life that he sought and which inspired him to seek permanent residence in the Israelite camp. Soon enough, however, he realized that life among Bnei Yisrael wouldn’t be quite as ideal as he thought. He pitched his tent – and a legal battle ensued, a battle, which he eventually lost. This experience brought the megadef to complete disillusionment. Could this happen among a nation in whose midst the divine presence resides? Is this the ideal life that a Torah nation is to enjoy? Expecting a spiritual and material utopia, the megadef encountered a life with obstacles that must be overcome, and complications that must be resolved. He found that even in a reality characterized by the Shechinah’s presence, there is “stale bread,” not every detail of life works and satisfies to perfection. The rosy, utopian expectations proved to be unrealistic, and the realities of life, the “stale bread” that must be endured even in otherwise ideal situations, led the megadef to disillusionment and utter rejection of God. Joshua Waxman analyzed the text in a thorough review of the commentators especially Rashi, who cites two possible views mentioned earlier, of the blasphemer’s father. The first as seducer or rapist, the second as convert who married his mother appropriately. I am particularly interested in the Zohar’s reading of his court appearance as one of defending his mother’s honor, which would sympathize more with Rashi’s first citation.

Louis Begley's masterly first novel, "Wartime Lies," looks at the child’s inner life as his aunt must lie in order to survive. Her living with the German bureaucrat in order to survive and the need to conceal her identity as a Jew, put the youngster in a precarious moral predicament vis a vis his own integrity, compromised for life. The so-called megadef too, attempts to protect the honor of

his mother, and as I read the Zohar passage I wondered what his argument might have been. If the Egyptian had seduced her then (like Esther or Sarah) there was an element of compulsion, if she was raped, then for sure she was a victim of violence. In the following Midrash blame is leveled squarely at her door for having engaged the Egyptian in the very first place, which ultimately lead to his return and seduction. “And he was an Egyptian man” (Lev, 24:10) The Jewish taskmasters were in charge of 10 policemen and each policeman was in charge on 10 slave-workers, so one Egyptian was in charge of 110 “Israelites. Once one Egyptian met a policeman and commanded him to gather his group, (while waiting) he entered his home and his wife engaged him in conversation, (and the Egyptian cast his eyes on her due to her beauty in the Exodus Rabba to Ex 5: 13-14), so he hid under the stairs until her husband left, then entered and defiled her (got her pregnant in Ex Rabba). Her husband happened to look back and saw the officer leave his home, and realized what had transpired. Knowing this the officer demoted him to a slave and began hitting him repeatedly during the day in order to kill him so he could not reveal what he had seen. It was this Egyptian Moses saw beating the Israelite (Ex 2:12) “ and he saw hither and thither” meaning he saw with the aid of the Holy Spirit, both hither (the Egyptian’s seduction of the slave’s wife) and thither (the Egyptian intending to kill the slave) And that ‘there was no ish, no man” meaning there was no Israelite to defend the slave (either to defend God’s reputation for justice, or to know how to use God’s name to kill the perpetrator). So Moses took the law into his own hand and killed him.3 In this Midrash the blame is placed squarely on the wife who, unlike the other Jewish women, engaged the officer, which then led to the seduction. But we must read her actions this way or else how could we justify the outcome? Well the Zohar reads the son’s defense of his mother as one of defending her powerlessness. When women are powerless are they not justified in a male dominated world to use cunning and other methods to survive? (There is an account of what transpired to cause Reb Zadok Hakohein of Lublin to divorce his first wife. She was working in her father’s clothing store and Reb Zadok saw her accepting the hand of an officer who had walked in to purchase goods. She protested her innocence at the gesture (a shopkeeper had to engage customers in Lublin and perform customary gestures of greeting) but Reb Zadok insisted on the divorce nonetheless (despite the attempts to convince him otherwise by many of the day’s greatest Gedolim as he travelled collecting signatures for a heter mea rabbanim). Some say her father had enemies who put the officer up to this knowing of Reb Zadok’s saintliness in this area, and knowing 3

Leviticus Rabba 32:4 on the verse “and he was the son of an Egyptian” Lev, 24:10

when he would come down from his learning alcove to visit with his wife in the shop. Whatever happened to his poor first wife? Did she remarry? Was she traumatized by his piety?) Like the Begley narrative I am moved as to how we portray women who “consent” in order to survive. I do not need to rehearse the large feminist literature of similar examples in Victorian England. Which brings us to the actual speech-act of the blasphemer. The text reads “and he pronounce God’s name in blasphemy” or did he use God’s name in order to blaspheme with it, was it the instrument of blasphemy or a tool to curse someone with it? The word "blasphemy" came via Middle English blasfemen and Old French blasfemer and Late Latin blasphemare from Greek βλασφηµέω, from βλάπτω = "I injure" and φήµη = "reputation". From blasphemare also came Old French blasmer, from which English "blame" came. The Hebrew cognate is ykv, “vayikov” as we are told by Frances Landy4: The narrative of chapter 24, so brief, so enigmatic, apparently superogatory, challenges the entire social and literary structure of the book. Two men fight: fighting encapsulates the violence that may or will destroy society. Two men fighting is a motif, an emblematic scene: One of them is the son of an Egyptian man and an Israelite woman; he is a typical representative of the erev rav the punningly designated “mixed multitude” that went up with Israel (Exod.12.38),17 and hence of the hybridity Leviticus resolutely condemns. He gives the lie to the pure and proper body of Israel. During the fight the man curses the “name”; the word for “curse,” nqv, is the root of nqvh, “female,” and suggests an invagination, a hollowing out, of the name of God. Desecration of the name and its derivatives, such as the priestly patri-lineage in 22.9, is the most heinous of offences, the root offence, in Leviticus. If the whole book is the working out of the name, the language, of God, as suggested for instance by the metaphoric formula, “I am YHWH,” then the curser threatens the entire sacred and phallic order. But in a post Holocaust age where the sacred order has been inverted too, where meaning is no more, and where morality had to be subverted for survival, the Zohar’s reading of “protecting his mother’s honor” reads more true than the plain narrative, of protecting God’s honor. 4 LEVITICUS, DECONSTRUCTION AND THE BODY : Francis Landy , University of Alberta, http://www.jhsonline.org/cocoon/JHS/a011.html

Back to my Kubrick and the Holocaust film Aryan Papers he never brought to fruition. “Kubrick’s lifelong fascination with the Holocaust coexisted with extreme doubt as to whether any film could do justice to the subject. In 1980, he told the author Michael Herr that what he wanted most was to make a film about the Holocaust, “but good luck in putting all that into a two-hour movie.” Frederic Raphael, who co-authored the screenplay for “Eyes Wide Shut,” recalls Kubrick questioning whether a film truly can represent the Holocaust in its entirety. After Raphael suggested “Schindler’s List,” Kubrick replied, “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. ‘Schindler’s List’ is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?” “The scholar Geoffrey Cocks has written extensively about Kubrick’s fascination with the Nazi era. In numerous essays and a book, “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust,” he argues that the Holocaust serves as the “veiled benchmark of evil” in many of Kubrick’s films, specifically “The Shining.” According to Cocks, the failure to bring “Aryan Papers” to fruition had to do with a profound awareness of “the problem of how to do ethical and artistic justice to the depiction of the horror of mass extermination,” a problem that has — in one form or another — plagued all postwar artists. Unlike Harlan, who recalls Kubrick’s great enthusiasm for the project, Cocks quotes Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, as telling him that Kubrick was horribly depressed throughout his work on “Aryan Papers.””5 Can we say the same thing about texts as well? Can any text depict the horror of violence and rape? Is it possible the Zohar is actually tapping into a deep truth when “violating” the plain meaning of the periscope regarding the blasphemer, in claiming his defense of his mother as paramount? Can we say that the loss of identity this blasphemer suffered from in the disinheriting of his portion in Israel, as a price for his survival is equivalent to Maciek the child who must lie to live in Begley’s Wartime Lies? In the Zohar’s portrayal of his defense of his mother’s honor I see a similar tragic human conflict between compromise and survival. Kubrick understood this: 5

Jewish Theatre News: Stanley Kubrick’s Unrealized Vision By A.J. Goldmann, 2005, The Jewish Journal. “Tony Frewin, an assistant who worked with the director for a long period of time, revealed in a March 2013 Atlantic article: "He [Kubrick] was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject." The article then elaborates upon Frewin's statement and discusses another World War II film that was never realized— a film based on the life story of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a Nazi officer who used the pen name "Dr. Jazz" to write reviews of German music scenes during the Nazi era. Kubrick had been given a copy of the Mike Zwerin book Swing Under the Nazis (the front cover of which featured a photograph of Schulz-Koehn) after he had finished production on Full Metal Jacket. However, a screenplay was never completed and Kubrick's film adaptation plan was never initiated (the unfinished Aryan . Papers was a factor in the abandonment of the project)”

In the words of Geoffrey Cocks, he argues that the Holocaust serves as the “veiled benchmark of evil” in many of Kubrick’s films, specifically “The Shining.” According to Cocks, the failure to bring “Aryan Papers” to fruition had to do with a profound awareness of “the problem of how to do ethical and artistic justice to the depiction of the horror of mass extermination,” a problem that has — in one form or another — plagued all postwar artists. Unlike Harlan, who recalls Kubrick’s great enthusiasm for the project, Cocks quotes Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, as telling him that Kubrick was horribly depressed throughout his work on “Aryan Papers.” I am disturbed by the midrashic play that provides the background for the blasphemer. It disturbs me now, after so many years of skimming these last few lines of the sedrah, but this year it arrested me, and caused me to question what drove this man to blaspheme. Was he a Rushdie of sorts? Did he see already then the implicit degeneracy of the patriarchy where a woman’s voice is not heard? Did he hear the screams of his mother as she was raped or seduced by the Egyptian? (as an unborn child). Was the politics such that Moses had to be protected at all costs from the family of the slain Egyptian and a new woman provided? Of course the rabbinic tradition flailed Shlomis, it had to: as Rashi states: “The Torah here relates the praise of Yisrael that by explicitly mentioning her name the Torah is telling us that of the whole nation she was the only harlot, zonah.” “Shlomis” – she would chatter to everyone, “Shlom alach, shlom alach, shlom aleichon.” “Divri” – she would speak with everybody. This led to her downfall. And her husband got no less treatment, he was Dassan who was arguing with his brother Aviram about divorcing her when Moses saw the two of them fighting. (see Alshich). Of course we think of Dassan and Aviram as being argumentative and hateful people. The Maharal calls them the essence of machlokes (argumentation). Shlomis seems to have been the opposite (to a fault). “So they said one to another, ‘Let us appoint a leader (instead of Moshe) and let us return to Mitzrayim.’” The Tanchuma their states that the people wanted to appoint Dassan in place of Moshe and Aviram in place of Aharon. The Sifsei Kohen states that they were not from the lower class of people but highest of classes and important. If so, it seems that they were respected. Which brings us back to Shlomis who was therefore also of the higher echelons of society. In fact do we even know whether she realized the man entering her home was NOT her husband?6 6

See Rabbi Moshe Heigh 1997: “How did it happen that the Egyptian, the father of our transgressor, had relations with Shlomis Bas Divri in Egypt? Rashi [Exodus 2:11]) explains that Moshe had seen an Egyptian beating a Jew. The Jew being beaten was the husband of Shlomis Bas Divri. This Egyptian had taken a liking to Shlomis, and he sent her husband out at night to do work. The Egyptian then entered the tent and had relations with Shlomis, who thought it was actually her husband. The husband of Shlomis returned home and found this catastrophe. When the Egyptian realized that her husband knew what happened, he beat that man all day.”

In the deeper esoteric tradition of the Ari, Moses smote the Egyptian using the name of God… “And he smote the Egyptian” ... With what did he [Moshe] kill him? The rabbis say that he mentioned the [42-letter] Name [of G-d] and killed him. (Shemos Rabbah, 1:29; Zohar, Emor 106a). It is very interesting then that when the blasphemer cursed, he cursed the very name of God. Possibly in vengeance to avenge the method of killing of his father7 Vayikov could also mean to pierce as in nekev a hole. To pierce the Divine is to cause a fracture and I would like to suggest that the letter Heh, the final letter of the Tetragrammaton, signifying the female element within the divine, was separated. I think the blasphemer felt that if the divine would not protect innocent women who were abused then the feminine in the divine needed to be disconnected, since there was no representation “up there” as there was none “down here”. He might have been saying that without care for the feminine in this world, there might as well be a disconnect with the Schechina above. For the care of Her must take into account all representations of her archetype down in this world.

I end with the blasphemy from which all Wiesel’s subsequent novels are woven: Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. 8 For Gary Henry 9 Wiesel stands firmly within the Hassidic tradition of protest against the divine yet not giving up on the divine: Man taking issue with the Master does not seem such an outrage when the concept is viewed against its Hasidic background. Hasidism traces the tradition of "Jewish protestantism" to the Book of Genesis, where Abraham asked, "Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?" (Gen. 18:25), and to the prophets, such as Habakkuk, who accused God of indifference to the suffering of the righteous (Hab. 1:1-3). In this tradition, man struggles with God and asserts his moral equality with him. But the protest is not a disbelieving blasphemy. It is rather a loving plea. If it is anything negative, it is an expression of concerned disappointment that the Master of the Universe has apparently not lived up to his own standards of justice. 7

See Rabbi Frand 2013 Wiesel, Night p44 9 By Gary Henry: Story and Silence: Transcendence in the Work of Elie Wiesel, http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/henry.html 8

Wiesel has, along with other survivors, chosen this as a response to the Holocaust. These survivors: ...Had every reason in the world to deny God, to deny anything sacred, to oppose all promises and abort all signs of hope; they had every reason in the world to become ferocious nihilists, anarchists, carriers of fear and nightmare.10 I think our misreading of the blasphemer in the spirit of the Zohar’s meditation allows for a repair in the tradition of protest as is seen in Hassidut.

Elie Wiesel: “To Remain Human in Face of Inhumanity," condensed from an address, The Jewish Digest, XVII (September, 1972), p.40.