(Purim) Power Suits

This is from today's magazine online.A really interesting and current take on Purim. If you do not know the Hunger Games, you are not where 12-14 year-olds are. The books are a horribly bleak and nasty, but wonderfully written dystopian vision that involves children fighting to the death.Power Suits

Dressing up is a crucial element of the Purim celebration—as well as a powerful piece of the Hunger Games trilogy of young-adult novels

By Abigail Miller|March 6, 2012 7:00 AM

Once upon a time, a young girl from an oppressed minority was summoned to the capital. The nation watched as she competed against her peers, and won. She could have done the thing that was expected of her and lived happily ever after. But instead she risked everything—not just her newly won riches and standing, but her life—to stand up for her people. And these people, with her as their heroine and figurehead, rose up violently. We would like to say that then they all lived happily ever after, but the text doesn’t quite permit us that luxury. Still, the war was epic, and the story became beloved, the bitterness of the ending often skipped over. Its legend is considered myth, fairy tale, or fantasy, even though the supernatural is notably absent.

Sound familiar? This is the story of the Book of Esther—and of the Hunger Games, a trilogy of young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins with an eagerly anticipated movie adaptation ^[1] coming out March 23. The Hunger Games and its sequels Catching Fire and Mockingjay are set in the future totalitarian nation of Panem, in what used to be America, where America’s reality-television obsession and the growing gap between rich and poor have been taken to their dystopian extreme. Every year a boy and a girl from each of Panem’s 12 districts are sent to compete in the Hunger Games, a broadcast reality TV show in which 24 children fight to the death until only one survives. The annual show is both entertainment and commemoration of the crushing defeat by the Capitol ^[2]—a city for the nation’s rich and powerful—of an uprising of the districts, decades before.

The trilogy’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, comes from District 12, a poor coal-mining district, and her background—half-orphaned and impoverished—is both asset and defect in the competition; on the one hand, she lacks the physical size and training of children from the wealthier districts, and on the other, she is tough and resourceful.

In the Book of Esther, the Jews of Persia are to be put to death, a plan devised by the evil Haman, a minister to the king. But Queen Esther foils Haman’s plan, revealing to the king that she is Jewish. The Jews triumph, and the gallows, built by Haman to hang the Jews, are instead used to hang Haman and his sons, among others. Every year on the 14th of Adar, the holiday of Purim celebrates this victory. The Book of Esther is read aloud twice, in a spoof of the king’s proclamations, on which the story hinges, and of the reverence of the usual Torah and Haftorah reading, and the story is reenacted with drunken celebration, masks, costumes, and pageants. Purim isn’t the only holiday in which we remember a story by reenacting—on Passover, we are taught that each of us has been taken out of Egypt—but it is the only one in which costume and disguise are central to the observance.

And at the heart of the story is Esther becoming Queen Esther. She is introduced as a beautiful young woman, but her edge over the other maidens seems to come after she enters the harem “… to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women. And the maiden pleased him, and she obtained kindness of him; and he speedily gave her her ointments.” It’s no small thing; the cosmetic regimen lasts “twelve months—for so were the days of their anointing accomplished, to wit, six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odors, and with other ointments of the women,” before Esther is presented to the king. She wins the king’s favor with her beauty, and she does not reveal that she and her family are Jewish.

I’ve found myself drawn to this part of the story for a while. For the past several years, I’ve been part of making an elaborate annual Purim show in New York, and part of what interests me is the glimpse of spectacle and artifice in the story itself; that the Esther who is sent before the king is a character whom Hegai has been working on for months and months, just as I might work on a costume for the Esther in our show.

But the Hunger Games trilogy has helped me think more about the place of the makeover as a cultural archetype, and especially about the sort of transformation Esther undergoes as part of a power play. The makeover is a staple of entertainment, most obviously today in reality TV shows like What Not To Wear, but with a long and broad history including everything from My Fair Lady to Cinderella. Putting on an outfit and some makeup at home might be private, slow, and subtle, but the makeover of TV and film is visually striking, dramatic, and fun to watch. The showmanship is made visible, and we get to see the power of costume and spectacle at work. The TV-driven world of the Hunger Games features a series of makeovers for Katniss, masterminded by a designer named Cinna—we might think of him as Panem’s Hegai—and a “prep team” of stylists.^[3]

The stylists are recurring characters in the televised Games, and the opening ceremonies, which include a parade, televised training, and finally beauty pageant-esque interviews with these children who are about to have to kill each other, are part of the cruel entertainment. So, our first instinct, shared with Katniss, about Cinna and the makeover, is that it’s a vapid sugarcoating of the violence of the Games. Yet Cinna quickly emerges as a rare character: a loving, caring, respectful, competent adult in a dystopic YA novel ^[4]. The costumes he devises are startling in their beauty and innovation—they often feature fire in one form or another—and are carefully designed to elicit certain strategic reactions from the audience. In the second and third books, these costumes become overtly political, but even in the first book, we are starting to see that these costumes are not just a sort of disguise or passing, in which a poor girl looks like a princess, but the seeds of opposition. At these moments in which the Capitol seems to be in total control of the images it broadcasts and the lives it cuts short, Cinna’s costumes actually give Katniss a measure of power, turning her fear into confidence and transforming her in the eyes of the nation into a dignified figure to be reckoned with.

When fashion blogger Michael von Braithwaite writes ^[5], “You probably won’t want to dress like a dystopian hero every day, but if you’re feeling down and out, slip on your Katniss look and stare down every person you pass on the sidewalk,” he is being cheeky, but also at some level recapitulating what seems to me to be Cinna’s lesson: that clothes can work on us from the outside in, giving us confidence and letting us feel what it is like to be the character we’re dressed up as. And the series of extraordinary costumes in the Hunger Games trilogy seems to me to give the lie to two assumptions about femininity and power. The first is that the power of feminine beauty is predicated on male attention and desirability. The second is that a girl’s political power is as a symbol of vulnerability and innocence.

That is, when girls lie down in front of tanks in the West Bank ^[6], or when this country is galvanized watching the NYPD pepper-spray girls at Occupy Wall Street ^[7], we see the barbarism of the state in stark contrast. These assumptions that the Hunger Games books upend are the very ones that underpin the story of Esther: Esther is powerful only insofar as she finds favor in the king’s sight (“If I have found favor in thy sight, O king,” she beseeches him, “let my life be given me at my petition”). And, to make her plea to stop the massacre of Persia’s Jews, she does present herself as a personal, feminine symbol of her people’s victimization (“we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed”). Thankfully, some 2,400 years later, and given an additional 1,100 pages or so, a somewhat more nuanced heroine is possible. The Hunger Games books suggest that beauty can, in itself, be a form of resistance and self-possession, and, especially as the trilogy’s ideology becomes more complex in the third book, Katniss is a heroic public figure not because she is blameless, but because she is tough, brave, and well-dressed.

Regardless of the exact nature of the roles of their respective heroines, though, what Purim and the Hunger Games share is an understanding of the value of dressing up. If the Hunger Games trilogy teaches us about the power of costume, Purim teaches us to push at the lines between utopia, dystopia, and reality. When we listen to this story of Esther becoming queen, of the fate of the Jews catapulting from demise and triumph, and when we dress up as kings and queens, we are tracing out the extremes of power in a society, mocking authority, and, for a moment, feeling what it might be like to be the kings and queens we’ll never be. Purim makes me want to believe that our fantasy lives and our outfits matter, that inner transformation is both part of and preparation for larger struggles, that political work can start with the heart and the sewing machine.

Find this story online: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/93160/power-suits/

Tablet Magazine is a project of Nextbook Inc. Copyright © 2012 Nextbook Inc. All rights reserved.

Mifgash Means Encounter, Part 1

Six months ago, some of us thought holding a day long conference with the Fellows and Mentors of the Leadership Institute and a group of Israel public school principals was not a good idea. We are bringing people thousands of miles for a mere 9 days of traveling and learning in the land. How could we devote more than 10% of that time in classrooms? We were certain there would be a revolt.

Still, the plans progressed. Evie Rotstein - our fearless leader - along with Roberta Bell-Kligler and David Mittelberg and the rest of their staff at Oranim framed the conference around the idea of Jewish Peoplehood.  Mittelberg described the idea of Jewish Peoplehood as emerging from a dialogic discourse. It describes both process and content. He invited the combined American/Israeli group of educators to explore and model what Jewish People can emerge to be. 

Doctor David Mittelberg

He cited two studies (NJPS 2000 and Avi Chai/Guttman 2012) that indicate that both American and Israeli Jews have between an 80 - 93% sense of connection to the Jewish people. So what is the problem with that? Why a conference and a whole department of Jewish Peoplehood at Oranim? Mittelberg says that both Israeli and Diaspora Jewries are partial and incomplete. Neither can do it on their own. Both communities see imparting a sense of connectedness to our children as real challenge.

In Israel, he said, being Jewish is a matter of fact. In the United States, it is a matter of choice. The problem is both in variety of degree and in type. In Israel being Jewish is taken for granted. In the U.S. being Jewish cannot be taken for granted. And being born Jewish in either place is no guarantee anymore that you will stay Jewish. He suggested that only in our mifgash (encounter) with each other can we make up for each of our deficiencies.

He said quite a bit more, and I refer you to the resources at the bottom of this posting for more detail. It was an amazing mifgash. So much so that this is coming in three posts, as I sit at Ben Gurion waiting to go home a week later. I was skeptical about having this conference. It was the highlight of an amazing trip with a wonderful group of educators. Evie, I was wrong. You, Roberta and David were right. Now we need to have more of these mifgashim between American and Israeli educators or it will just have been a great day. It needs to be the beginning of a long and truly essential conversation.


Resources on Peoplehood:
Convergent and Divergent Dimensions of Jewish Peoplehood - David Mittelberg (pdf)
Jewish Peoplehood Education: Framing the Field - Shlomi Ravid & Varda Rafaeli
Towards Jewish Peoplehood - David Mittelberg (pdf)
Jewish Educational Leadership - A Guide to Jewish Peoplehood
ewish Peoplehood

Crossposted to Leadership Insitute: The Blog!

The Culinary Queens of Yerucham put Sallah Shabbati to bed!

Topol as Sallah Shabbati

Many of us of a certain age (50ish and older) were shown the Israeli movie Sallah Shbbati - in youth group, or in religious school, or - as in my case - on a rainy day at camp, cooped up in a M*A*S*H style tent we called the Beit Am. It was a black and white, and was made in 1964. It was for a long time the most successful film in Israeli history. It starred two actors who were then unknown outside of Israel, Gila Almagor and Topol - before he starred as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof or as Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon.
Danny Yarhi, writing in iMDB describes the film:

A Yemenite Jewish family that was flown to Israel during "Operation Magic Carpet" - a clandestine operation that flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel the year after the state was formed - is forced to move to a government settlement camp. The patriarch of the family tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Humor, sensitivity, politics and music highlight this capsule of history.

It was an hysterically funny comedy. Seeing it years later with a much deeper knowledge of Israeli history, that comedy turns out to be an incredibly biting dark satire and social commentary on Israeli society in the 50's. It brings out the best and worst of Israel - the wondrous rescue of nearly forgotten Jews and the far less than ideal treatment of non-Ashkenazi Jews by the European born or descended elites of Israel.

I recall one scene where Sallah is given a job planting trees by the Jewish National Fund. An official plants a sign next to the saplings with the name of a couple from the Diaspora. As a driver brings them up to the forest, the official tells them that thanks to their generosity, this was "their" forest. As soon as they left, the official took down the sign and replaced it with one with another name, just as another official drove up with another donor from abroad. Sallah accuses the official of dishonesty. When the next donors come to see "their" forest, Sallah starts plucking the new trees out of the ground!

As a member of the Leadership Institute, I had the pleasure for the second time to visit with one of the Culinary Queens of Yerucham. It was created by Atid Bamidbar (The Future is in the Desert) to "create opportunities for local women with no or low incomes, from diverse ethnic groups in town, to host visiting groups from Israel and abroad in their homes for an enriching multicultural culinary and human experience. The encounter gives visitors a great meal, warm hospitality, and insight into the lives of local residents and Jewish ethnic traditions; it provides the hostesses with added income, a boost to self-esteem and a widening of horizons."

It was all of that and more.

Mazal and her husband Jojo were wonderful and 20 of us had a wonderful meal. And the best part was Jojo's storytelling. He was animated, expressive and funny. He told of coming from Tunisia at the age of five with his parents. They wanted to go to Jerusalem. They were loaded on a truck at the port and driven through the night. They were told they were in Jerusalem and dumped in the desert. He has been in Yerucham ever since. He also told the story of their courtship. Rather than explain it, here are three videos!

Enjoy.

Part I

Mazal and the other Queens have taken the dark satire of Sallah Shabbati and set it aside. They are part of several projects from Atid Bamidbar and other agencies like Nativ that are changing the face of Yerucham and other development towns in the Negev. Sallah seemed to have little hope. Not so any more.

And think about how the culinary queens are one of many projects that is helping this community that has spent so long in the economic trough climb out. And make it a point to visit them for lunch! It is worth it!

Part II 

  Part III




Crossposted to Leadership Institute: The Blog!

Can extremism ever be Kosher?

Rabbi Marc Rosenstein writes the Galilee Diary in the Union for Reform Judaism's 10 Minutes of Torah e-mail and blog. Today's struck me as particularly worthy of sharing and inviting your commentary. He references a bill put before the Knesset by MK Anastassia Michaeli of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. This bill seeks to make illegal the sound of the Muezzin's call to worship for Muslims. Again, I am concerned about the extremes to which some people believe we can go in our intolerance. I will not be blogging on the Haredi riots over the arrest of some in their community for collecting tzedakah money for fraudulent causes. We need to be a light to the nations, not another example of extremists perverting their own belief system. But read what Marc has to say. And weigh in.


Ira

GALILEE DIARY
Call to prayer
by Marc J. Rosenstein

...With the realization that our brothers are capable, in their moral qualities, of relating in this way to the members of another people and of crudely desecrating their holy places, I am forced to wonder, if the situation is like this now, what will be our relationship to others when we finally do achieve ruling power in the land of Israel. If this is the Messiah, then "let him come but let me not see him."
         -Ahad Ha'am, in a letter on news from Palestine, 1913.

Typically, a village mosque has two religious functionaries, an imam, who leads prayer, preaches, teaches, and provides pastoral care and communal leadership - and the muezzin, a sort of combination of cantor and shammes, who deals with the day-to-day administration and upkeep of the mosque.  The major function of the muezzin is to call the public to prayer, five times a day, from the tower of the mosque (and to relay other important communications as they come up, most commonly death announcements).

In Israel, both of these functionaries are government employees, like [Orthodox] rabbis.  In many villages, one or both are part-time positions, and I know imams who also work as gym teachers, auto mechanics, etc.  I think that most muezzins are autodidacts; most imams receive some kind of professional training - at seminaries in Jerusalem or Jordan or Egypt; some, as in the Orthodox community, are privately ordained by a local teacher.  The division of religious affairs in the ministry of the interior, which is responsible for non-Jewish religious services, provides in-service courses and occasional seminars and enrichment programs for imams and muezzins.

The reason that mosques have minarets is to provide a high platform for the muezzin to chant the call to prayer so that it will be heard far and wide; indeed, traditionally, the municipal boundaries of a village were considered to be defined by the area in which the muezzin could be heard.  Today there are loudspeakers mounted on the minarets, and the muezzin chants from downstairs - and can be heard over a much wider radius than in former, unplugged, times (in answer to one FAQ, by the way, the chanting is still live, not recorded).

The advent of electronic amplification has led, it seems to me, to a diminution in quality of life for village residents.  Often I have been visiting near a mosque - in a school, on the street, in a living room - when it was time for the call to prayer, and been frustrated and annoyed by the blast of sound that makes conversation impossible for several minutes (think of a low-flying jet).  And for the locals, this happens every day, five times.  I wonder if this nuisance is seen as a result of incompetence, a manifestation of religious assertiveness, or simply a fact of nature/culture that is taken for granted.

Our home in Shorashim is on a hillside overlooking the Hilazon valley; it is about a mile across the valley as the crow flies, from our bedroom window to the minaret of the mosque in the village of Shaab.  When we first arrived, we were very conscious of the muezzin's call, especially the one that comes between 4:00 and 5:00 am.  However, it didn't take long for us to tune it out; if I happen to be awake at the time of the morning call, I notice it, but I don't think it has actually awakened me in many years.  Indeed, I find the plaintive chant pleasing.  And while my Arabic is rudimentary, I can identify a funeral announcement and generally even make out the name of the deceased.

Not all our neighbors are as laid-back about this as we are, and one hears complaints about "noise pollution" and the disturbance to sleep caused by the muezzin's call.  Now, a number of them are enthusiastic about a bill proposed by a member of Knesset to enforce decibel limits on the loudspeakers of houses of prayer.  Needless to say the bill was not submitted by Arab parliamentarians concerned about quality of life in their villages, but by Jewish lawmakers seeking to protect Jews from Muslim noise pollution.

All those centuries we had to suffer from the wailing of the muezzin - or the cacophony of the church bells every hour; finally we have our own state so we can shut them up.  Somehow I don't think that this is what Herzl (or Achad Ha'am) had in mind.