This song has been stuck in my head for the past six weeks. Like all my other fixations, I figured if I blogged about it maybe it would go away. Enjoy:

Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic was kind enough to cede a little bit of real estate on his blog for me to opine about the specter of binationalism, which is staring down Israel with a particular relentlessness.

Here it is:

The two-state remedy (one Israel and one Palestine) no longer seems fashionable to rhapsodize about. It's become its own bad movie franchise; there are no riffs or improvs left, at this point, it's just fatigue.The actors can't even deliver their lines convincingly.

Accordingly, the injection of binationalism into the conversation is only natural. The expanding settlements in the West Bank have blurred what was supposed to be the focus of the last twenty years--a Palestinian state, the conflict's end. Making matters worse, the settlements have also distanced Israel from some of its best supporters abroad (for example, those who are both critical and loving of Israel and those who feel pretty lukewarm about Armageddon).

On the other side, the fallout from Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (and Lebanon in 2000, if we're stacking-up bad things), upon which many hung their hopes for peace, put territorial compromise for many Israelis on rhetorical par with appeasement. Instead of bringing peace, the evacuation of Gaza gave rise to Hamas, brought about incessant rocket-fire onto Israeli towns, and begot a war so unspeakably dispiriting that no one bothers commemorating it (three years ago last week).

All of this, somberly mixed with Arafat's rejection of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Abu Mazen's non-rejection rejection of Ehud Olmert's offer in 2008, and the subsequent fracturing of the Palestinian leadership, has paralyzed the two-state camp.

In Haaretz, the Israeli novelist/playwright A.B. Yehoshua published a sobering essay that grapples with the possibility that Israel will become a binational state. He isn't advocating for binationalism (he doesn't even seem bi-curious about it), but rather, he turns the mirror on a country that he feels should imagine what it might be a couple years down the line. Yehoshua, who has made a career of writing excellent fiction, is not so bold as to predict that binationalism is coming to the Levant tomorrow, but he does something that very few of the many who talk about a one-state reality do: he asks a reader to envision it:

Apart from the religious camp (owing to the structure of its religious identity), apart from the camp of the secular extremist right (owing to the violence of its fantasies), and apart from the post-Zionist left (owing to its humanitarian-cosmopolitan vision), all other political and ideological camps in Israel grasp and articulate the fact that a binational state in Eretz Israel is a dangerous and unfavorable possibility, both in the short term and (more particularly) in the long term.

Despite this fact, we stride, as though out of necessity, toward the establishment of a binational state, an entity which at some stages of Zionist history was viewed as a plausible possibility, and even as a laudable one in some circles.

Even if many of us believe that it is possible to prevent the creation of such a state through forceful political steps, there still remains an obligation to prepare for it, both intellectually and emotionally, just as we prepare for other states of emergency. The aim of such preparation is to guarantee that a binational state will not undermine Israel's democratic structure, and will not completely destroy the Jewish-Israeli collective identity that took shape over the past several decades.

Of course, if Israel were to become a binational state, it would cease to be the homeland that Yehoshua (who is a decade older than his country) and most Jews/Israelis sought in its founding and tending:

But for those who believed in and dreamed of an independent Jewish-Israeli identity which, for better or for worse, stands up to the test of dealing with a national-territorial reality entirely its own, a binational state represents a broken dream, a surefire source of demoralizing conflicts in the future, as was proven by the failure of binational experiments around the world that involved peoples who were closer to one another than are Jews and Palestinians in terms of religion, economics, values and history.

By bringing to mind more than just the contours of binationalism, by citing its historical legacy of failure, by describing its attractiveness to Palestinians as Zionism's kryptonite, by placing it within the existential hash marks of Israel's playing field, and by asking Israelis to imagine living inside of it, Yehoshua does a novelist's work and gives the problem its terrifying color.

I

Outside the men were
drinking bottles by the fire
and laughing.
The women were inside
drinking wine and saying,
whatever it is they say,
when we’re turned away.

I saw you through the window
beyond two orbits of chatter,
standing there alone in the kitchen,
unsure of nothing,
eating crackers
with your tiny hands.

I had stopped listening,
but I kept laughing
because I didn’t want
anyone else to see.

II

In the morning I remembered
whatever it was
that I learned the night before
when the house--all but asleep
conspired us a minute.

From the porch, it seemed
worthless to say
how many stars they were
but there were enough
to make a sifter
through which
something could pass slowly
and then go back
like a colt
whose reins were tied to a pendulum
or lassoed by a coward.

From a foot away
I knew you were cold
but you stayed
for whatever charity
the new year allowed.

I felt the same
as I had in the old years
like I had on the same
jacket I wore when
I was younger
but by then it was too late
to walk to the beach.

Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views.

My latest for Tablet about the political orthodoxy at Hebrew Union College. With this, I firmly put to death the dreams my mother had about my becoming a rabbi.

Sorry marm.

The division between the old guard and at least some of HUC’s current students is not just over politics, but over what the very definition of pastoral duty should be today. The students I spoke to tend to believe in a very different conception of the rabbi than the previous generation.

“I personally—and this is an argument I get into constantly—have no patience for politics from the bimah,” Herman asserted. “I think that the job of the rabbi is to teach and that any given event or issue being played out, it’s usually very difficult to find what Judaism says about it unequivocally. You take any sort of issue, and there’s not usually a Jewish answer to that issue, which is why I don’t believe in the Religious Action Center and why I don’t think rabbis should be preaching from the pulpit, as they say.”

“The Jewish community needs spiritual leaders who can bring people Torah, they don’t need someone who’s going to read the New York Times and give a sermon about it,” Beraha added. “People are intelligent, you can tell them what Torah, Talmud, Midrash says, end of sentence. Let people go a step farther and understand that Judaism says feed the poor and don’t add Obama’s policies on wealth distribution.”

Following my piece in the Atlantic, an old professor of mine (who suffered through some clunky/abstract/overwrought writing of mine on more than one occasion) sent me this essay by Steven Johnson, to remind me that the long search for clarity in writing isn't something I've suffered through alone. As back-handed compliments go, I take it with aplomb.

But the essay is good too.

Embracing semiotics came with certain costs. In my own case, I spent most of my mid-20s detangling my prose style. (It got younger as I got older.) I now spend more time learning from the insights of science than deconstructing its truth claims. I slowly killed off the desire to impress with willful obscurity. During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting “under erasure” the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, “I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.” It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity.

"Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands and relinquish life alone in your room. It isn’t life and it isn’t you. It’s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on in a zoo like that and you’d think it was horrifying. 'But surely they could hang a tire for him to swing on—at least bring in a little mate to roll around with him on the floor.' If you were to watch some certified madman groaning over a table in his little cell, observe him trying to make something sensible out of qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm, see him engrossed to the exclusion of all else by three such nonsensical words, you’d be appalled, you’d clutch his keeper’s arm and ask, 'Is there nothing to be done? No anti-hallucinogen? No surgical procedure?' But before the keeper could even reply, 'Nothing—it’s hopeless,' the lunatic would be up on his feet, out of his mind, and shrieking at you through his bars: 'Stop this infernal interference! Stop this shouting in my ears! How do I complete my life’s great work with all these gaping visitors and their noise!'”

---"The Anatomy Lesson"

My latest up at Tablet is a profile of Ean Seeb, who is (amazingly) both a marijuana dispensary owner and a machar in the Denver Jewish community. Read here:

Seeb is a third-generation Jewish Denver native. Ean, his first name, comes from his grandmother’s name, Estelle. Like many others, his last name bears the hallmark of unintentional immigrant reinvention.

“The story is when my great-grandfather got off the boat, he didn’t speak English,” Seeb told me. “He was a tailor. They asked him his name, he told them what he did, which was ‘zip,’ so his immigration records show Zipp. Just over time Zipp became Seeb.”

Like his great-grandfather’s, Seeb’s name, at least in Denver, is synonymous with his work.
Denver Relief emphasizes social action and community service in part out of a genuine sense of mission and perhaps also to distinguish itself from other dispensaries. The Green Team aids in clean-up following Denver’s massive marijuana festival held each year on April 20, the highest of holidays for habitués of the marijuana community. One Saturday a month from April to September, the dispensary offers bicycle and wheelchair repair, selling the parts at cost and providing free labor. Inside the dispensary itself, there is a canned-food drive, which benefits the food pantry at the Jewish Family Service and needy patients. And in a move that perhaps best encapsulates how pervasive marijuana culture is in Colorado, on Veterans Day Denver Relief offered a 10 percent discount to vets. (Some took the dispensary up on the offer.)

“In order to be treated like any other industry, we have to act like any other industry,” Seeb said. “We just want to run our business and not have all of these crazy legal hurdles and not have all these problems with taxes and banking. By following a model that says ‘Look, we’re doing something that any other business would do,’ hopefully we’ll get rid of some of that stigma.”

Really good story: