"Radical Judaism"

I first met Rabbi Arthur Green in the fall of 1969, at Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Mass. Since then he has gone on to be a leading academic in the field of Jewish Studies as well as a religious leader: first the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Philadelphia, and, recently, the founder and head of a new rabbinical seminary in the Boston area. Nevertheless, I first met him as "Art," and I can't think of him as Rabbi Green or Professor Green. Though we share a last name, we are not relatives.
In 2010 Yale University Press published Radical Judaism, which grew out of the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures, which Art gave in 2006. The book was of deep interest to me for personal reasons - my acquaintance with Art and my admiration for him - and because I have been negotiating and renegotiating my own relation to Judaism throughout my life.
Unlike Art, who made a profession of his personal struggle with the demands of Judaism, I moved to Israel, partially so that I could think about other things and take Judaism naturally - which has turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would.
Radical Judaism is a theological statement by a scholar and thinker who has done the serious work that I never put my mind and heart to. It is a bold and honest book, totally without sanctimonious posing, an effort, as he says toward the end, "to rethink our most foundational concepts - God, Torah, and Israel and Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, and to ask how they might work in the context of what we really believe in our age."
My own difficulty with Judaism has been reconciling a strong emotional commitment to being Jewish with an equally strong (or even stronger) inability to believe in God. I enjoy participating in prayer, and I don't believe a single word. From his writing, it is clear that Art doesn't "believe" the words of the prayers either, though he makes them stand for what he does believe in, something I can't do, because I haven't figured out what I believe in and don't ever expect to.
Art's way of remaining religious is what he calls "mystical panentheism," the belief that God is inseparable from the universe, not exterior to it as a creator, but identical with it, permeating it, and that the Whole, as it were, is greater than the sum of its parts, or, that we have within us a holy place that is connected with the holiness of the entire universe. He also admits that his belief is not one that can be demonstrated philosophically, claiming that theology is more akin to poetry than to rational thought.
I'm not sure I can follow Art all the way in that direction, but I am more sure than ever that pretending to "believe" is no way of living as a Jew.

Footnote, the Movie - For a Local Audience?

If the new Israeli movie, "Footnote," comes your way, you should see it, though seeing it here in Jerusalem is unlike seeing it anywhere else in the world. The movie is about a closed world within a closed world: the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University. But it's about a huge subject: the relations between fathers and sons.
The film obviously means a great deal more for someone who lives here, and who could more or less identify every location in the film, and who knows people very much like the characters in the film, than it could for someone abroad, who doesn't speak Hebrew, who doesn't have the slightest idea what the Jerusalem Talmud is or why anyone cares about its text.
But I think that most successful works of art address a local audience first, and, if they're good, a broader audience can eavesdrop on the local conversation. At the recent Jerusalem film festival, we saw movies from Albania, India, Israel, and Greece. I know virtually nothing about Albania and very little about India, but those local films, about local people, with personal problems, were accessible to me and meaningful to me. Obviously I didn't have the flash of recognition that a local audience would have had upon seeing a familiar landmark, but I could identify.
The best art, I maintain, is intimacy overheard. That's why an intense group of creative people, living close to one another, can stimulate great work: the poet writes first for the poets around him, the painter paints first for his painter friends, the novelists critique each other's manuscripts. That personal interest in the work going on in the group creates a potential interest for the audience.

A Pessimistic Vision

Sometimes the people in the world, especially the decision-makers and activists, seem like automatic toys that keep moving in exactly the same direction until they bump into something, fall over a precipice, or their battery runs out. Especially here in Jerusalem, people follow their own agendas, come what may, no matter what the consequence, no matter what the facts may be.

Pottery: It's Been Three Years

I went to my weekly pottery lesson this morning, and it occurred to me while I was there that I started just three years ago. I enjoy it so much, that I can't help wishing that I had begun long ago, that I hadn't dropped the pottery class I was taking at Greenwich House because I was the only boy in it, that I didn't get deep into pottery when I was a young man, instead of following an academic, literary, intellectual path that hasn't really taken me anywhere I actually wanted to go.
Of course the wise part of my mind dismisses those fantasies out of hand. Not only that, instead of lamenting, "Why did I get to it so late?" it says: "Isn't it wonderful that a man in his sixties could have begun a totally new activity and gotten involved in it?" I might discover other wonderful activities before I get sick and die!
Anyway, could anyone, looking back at his or her life from the middle of its seventh decade, say,"The path I took was right for me; I am just where I hoped to be when I began"? Wouldn't that be rather dull? I knew just where I wanted to go, I found the right road, and I got there. Where are the surprises?
My skill in pottery is definitely increasing, and I'm actually pleased with some of the things I've made - though, as always, the maker is more aware of the flaws and shortcomings than anyone else. I'm improving at making the clay do what I want it to do - though I'm far from consistent, which doesn't actually displease me. Sometimes the fun lies in exploiting an error, in turning a project that was supposed to have been a jug into a bowl.
From the start I had the attitude that I wasn't trying to produce perfect pottery. You can buy perfect factory made dishes and vases in any department store. A handmade pot should look handmade. Also, in decorating the pots, I know my limits as a painter. If I tried to do dainty flowers and birds, they would just look silly.
Finally, I keep reminding myself that the whole point is that I'm doing it for fun, for the pleasure of doing it - not a trivial kind of pleasure, but the deep pleasure of molding useful and sometimes handsome vessels with my hands, the sense of communication I have with all the people who have made pots for thousands of years.

Mark Strand

I always feel slightly guilty about writing poetry while I am not an enthusiastic reader of poetry. On our last trip to America, three months ago by now, I went into a huge bookstore in a shopping center near our daughter's house, and browsed through the poetry section. Compared to the number of books about achieving salvation through better orgasms, there were relatively few books of poetry. I ended up picking out four, including David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh and New Selected Poems by Mark Strand.
I have only begun to browse through that rich volume, and I expect to stay with it for a while. I am enjoying the way Strand brings out the strangeness of experience and his almost plain, almost clear language: "Nothing will tell you/ where you are./ Each moment is a place/ you've never been."
Last week my friends' twenty-year-old son died in a diving accident, a meaningless and devastating stroke of terrible misfortune. I have a good idea how heavy the burden of grief will be for them, year after year. Such tragedies make it impossible to find meaning in life, just as they make it imperative to do so. Poetry dwells in the chasm between impossibility and necessity.
In a poem of my own I wrote:

The Company of Misery, March 2011

I watched a dying hedgehog stagger on short legs.

Troubled by that sick animal, whose pain
Was nothing to the pain of Japan at that moment –
Earth heaving like water,
Water pounding harder than rock.

Japan is distant,
The hedgehog is right here at my feet,
Too feeble to flee.

I could no more help the being near me
Than the people dying far away.

Does Anyone Need Five Saxophones?

Aspiring amateurs (who can afford it) invest in equipment. Maybe Mr. X takes boring pictures, but he has six cameras and seventeen lenses and a gadget bag full of filters and a closet full of tripods and lights. So I have five saxophones, two clarinets, four or five recorders, and a bunch of ethnic instruments.
Of the five saxophones, I mainly play two: the baritone and the alto. I play the baritone in a big band, and I practice on it a lot, because I'm not exactly the strongest player in the band, and I have to keep my level up. I've been playing alto because it's in the same key as the baritone, so if I learn a song on one instrument, I can play it easily on the other, without transposing it again. I bought an inexpensive soprano about a year ago, and I play it on and off. My tenor has been in the hands of an instrument repairman for ages - that's another story. The fifth saxophone is an old C Melody saxophone that's sort of for sale, but no one in his or her her right mind would buy it, so I plan to take it back from the shop where it's been on sale, and maybe I'll try to overhaul it myself. If I do, I'll also invest (finally) in a C melody mouthpiece rather than use a tenor mouthpiece.
As for the clarinets, one of them is a metal G clarinet that I bought in Turkey, and I can barely play it. The key system is an old-fashioned one, even older than the Albert system that German clarinetists use, and the finger holes are so far apart that I have to stretch my fingers to play it. The other clarinet is an ordinary French wooden clarinet that I bought used a few years ago, and I play it now and then - I'm always surprised that I can play clarinet at all, but that was my main instrument 50 years ago, and your fingers don't forget.
Oh yes, I almost forgot my EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer with 100 built in sounds. I've been playing it fairly regularly with my wife (who plays piano) and our friend, a flautist. We play trios, from early baroque through classical. If I tried to play the trios on a saxophone or clarinet, I'd have to transpose, and, since we're mainly sight-reading, I couldn't really play well enough. With the EWI I don't have to transpose. It has flute-like and oboe-like sounds that fit in pretty well with piano and flute. I can even play a cello part on the EWI (it has a 7 octave range!), though reading bass clef is hard for me. Oddly, I can read bass clef easily on the piano, but not on an instrument that usually uses treble clef. When the cello part is written in tenor clef, I really lose it.
For quite a while my strategy was to concentrate on the baritone, to decide that was my main instrument and to work on it. But when I pick up another horn, I find I enjoy playing that one too, so I'm thinking of adopting a different strategy: going from horn to horn every day that I practice. Two days ago I played clarinet, yesterday I played the soprano, and today I plan to play the alto or the baritone.
Even though a saxophone is a saxophone, as Gertrude Stein ought to have said, there is a big expressive difference between the soprano and the baritone - obviously - and each of the horns offers something different to the musician.
I find that playing the EWI is essentially different from playing my acoustic instruments, probably because neither the sound nor the pitch depend on my embouchure. There's something abstract about playing it, and I conceptualize the music differently.
I certainly don't need five saxophones and an assortment of other instruments, but if I had to sell all but one of them, I don't know how I'd choose.

Technicalities - the Craft in any Art

Every art has its component of craft: the skill and knowledge about the materials and equipment that you use. As a serious amateur musician, I'm always trying to improve my technique, my sound, and my grasp of music. When we visit the United States -- we just returned from a twelve day visit to our children and grandchildren -- I often order are saxophone reeds, and much more occasionally saxophone mouthpieces (because they're quite expensive and tricky - you have to try them to know whether they're any good for you) on the Internet, because it's expensive and inconvenient to have them sent to us here in Israel, and there is a huge variety available on the web that no local music shop can afford to carry.
Maybe as much as ten years ago, I bought a beautiful looking metal mouthpiece for my baritone saxophone. It has a very live tone, but I've never managed to master it, to play in tune with it, to control the dynamics, to keep the tone consistent, and that frustrates me.
Theorizing that the reeds I was using with that mouthpiece were too hard, this time I bought a box of five rather soft reeds. For anyone who doesn't play a reed instrument, I should explain: the bottom line is, the harder the reed, the harder you have to blow, and the more pressure you have to exert with your lips. The advantage of a hard reed is in the solidity and intensity of the tone, and the disadvantage of playing on a soft reed is that your tone can sound flaccid, and you lose projection and volume.
Mouthpieces are the other end of the equation. The wider the tip opening (the distance between the end of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece), the harder you have to work to get a sound out of the instrument. But if the tip opening is too narrow, your sound is choked, it's hard to play loudly, with projection, and sometimes you can even stifle the sound by squeezing the reed and mouthpiece together with your lips and blocking the air completely.
All of this is highly individual. There is no single good combination that works for everyone. In the reed-player jargon, the combination of instrument, mouthpiece, and reed is called a setup. If you go to one of the hundreds of saxophone sites on the web, you'll see descriptions of the setups that various famous musicians use. The (ridiculous) idea is that if I played on exactly the same brand of saxophone, with exactly the same kind of mouthpiece and reed as Sonny Rollins, I, too, would be able to play as well as he does.
The prudent approach would be to find a setup that works for you and stick with it. But musicians are, quite properly, never entirely satisfied with their sound. Just recently someone sent me the link to an interview about practicing with the late Michael Brecker, where he talks about trying new equipment. So I have approval for my restlessness. In the same vein, my late musical guru, Arnie Lawrence, often said that you shouldn't keep doing what you already do well. The only way to advance in your art is to keep trying new things and taking the risk of sounding bad for a while (if you're a musician).
This notion isn't limited to the craft and art of playing a musical instrument. If you're a poet, and you always write blank verse, try rhyming for a change. If you're a painter who specializes in watercolors, try acrylics or oils or printmaking.
Does art begin where the technicalities leave off? Perhaps, but without mastering the technicalities, one never leaps out into artistry.