Rantings For a Tuesday Night: 
The Sin of S'dom, Ex Machina, and Questions of Our Godliness

Regarding the practices of the city of Sodom

... they had beds upon which travelers slept. If the guest was too long they shortened him by lopping off his feet; if too short, they stretched him out...

- Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 109a:

In this Talmudic passage, the civic rules of S’dom and Amorrah—what Sodomites believed to be righteous and decent behavior—is in fact a warped holiness, turned completely on its head.

What if Sodom "justice" truly is the state of things wherever we look?  Certainly the Talmud here sidesteps the matters of sexual deviancy we have come to associate with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Human potential for sanctity belies our animal nature.  Therefore, I posit that people didn’t invent the sacred, and we would be really bad at it anyhow.

Here's what I mean.

A couple weeks ago I saw a movie called Ex Machina.  Boiled down it’s Shakespeare's The Tempest meets Cyril Hume's Forbidden Planet, crossed with Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio.   Nathan, Geppetto / come Dr. Frankenstein in Ex Machina, evokes a man teetering between a hot latin lover, an Israeli commando gone AWAL, and an ISIS ideologue.  But Nathan is also Steve Jobs on steroids.  This brilliant, sassy, malevolent and beardy scientist easily cajoles a fly into his lair.  Caleb, the Richie Cunningham-like whiz kid programmer bites from Geppetto's proverbial apple.  Oy, clumsy mixed tropes. Forgive me.

  (Domhnall Gleeson) Caleb and (Oscar Isaac) Nathan share a moment in the thriller "Ex Machina."

  Alicia Vikander as Ava, the consummate variety of AI in "Ex Machina."

Oscar Isaac as Nathan in "Ex Machina" preaches in front of his Pollack.

Geppetto as I will call him, has created Ava, a robot so revolutionary in its artificial intelligence, that it begins to ask the essential questions in a more meaningful and practically clairvoyant way than the human(s) who created her.  Geppetto, with his superior technical expertise, and an ego so infernal you could cook a steak on it, invites Caleb, another brilliant young programmer to come “test” his invention.  There are many wonderful cliches in this movie. As one might expect, Gepetto as perfect as he is, is also sloppy.    

Gepetto’s living room is a well of stone and crafted wood. Think: Heffner makes a shopping trip at Ikea.  But again, it’s nothing new.  In Dr. Frankenstein’s isolated, lonely laboratory, we meet the same character.  In speculative fiction this archetype is often so SO bad a man. His hungers blind him though.  For Gepetto, it’s fun to become God, because now he gets to make up the rules too!   That’s what it means to be God.  I may or may not like the rules, but I’d better get used to them, because they are what they are.  But, then there's that pesky creation with its unrelenting need for "choice."

What would your rather live in, an office building or a serene hut nestled in an alpine village?  In the case of our proverbial Gepetto in Ex Machina, perhaps the serene hut would be a thousand miles of rugged land with an odd, fortified cement laboratory smack in the middle. That’s the genius’ house.  He’s there “alone,” drinks lots of vodka, and works out like a gang-banger in his multi-room palace.  It’s Rocky Horror too, if we’re willing to see it, except Ex Machina’s eroticism is more Kubrik.  Suffice it to say, s’awright if you like Modern. 

As a meditation on the divide between mundane and holy, as I alluded to above, the thesis of Ex Machina can be construed as what happens when the mundane takes on a holy sentience.  In its poignancy the film also shows that we who are presumed to be “holy” by birth, stoop to levels of dirt.   That’s the magic of the film.  I should note that it’s also a strong, though distorted woman’s power flick.  At its best, this movie aspires to a faint prayer on the sacred / mundane divide.  Spoiler alert: the creation outsmarts the God who made it.  Ex Machina is R rated so as a rabbi, I really shouldn’t endorse it.  But if we’re in hell already, might we not take a dip into the skeevy molten stuff?

Like its class of fiction, Ex Machina is nothing new in its attempt to have us consider the power of our own creativity.  It makes one crave the simplicity of a field, where people and cows are wonderfully all that’s necessary for us to be happy.  But as we learn from baleful parables, nature is dangerous too.  Look at Michael Crichton’s 1972 Westworld, with Yul Brynner as a menacing evil gunslinging robot in the midst of an adult DisneyWorld.  Brynner will scare the absolute bejunk out of you.  It’s so nice to see the guy who once played Ramses turned into the mean cholera you knew he always truly was. What a face!  What a glint.

Take Star Trek’s (the original silly but brilliant series) “Requiem for Methusela,” an episode in which our heroes beam down to a planet for some urgent medical need, only to discover that an ageless Methuselah lives there.  Spock discovers a freshly written piece by Brahms on the man’s piano.  “I am Brahms,” the man later admits.  Mr. Flint, he’s called.  A quiet genius who crafts the perfect girl for himself.  Of course the robot girl falls in love with Kirk.  This genius character is everywhere in literature.  We don’t normally regard God as a character, like an evil genius.  But that is precisely what these fables provoke.  The point (?): Humans don’t completely understand the power of their own God given potential, though in accord God may not completely dominate the chaos which God-self has created.

To become so licentiously perverse in our brilliance we can go to great lengths, without even thinking about it, to fulfill our most salacious desires. 

"Be Holy; for I the LORD your God am holy."

-Leviticus 19:1

But you know what, we do think about it.  To be sentient is to have an understanding what’s happening around you and your role in it.  Torah teaches a particular brand of sentience.  Torah’s message is this: if you’re going to act SO smart, then try this food for thought.  Torah’s food for thought is the language of holiness; that life truly is consequential, meaningful, and worthwhile.  The Torah's message to us sentient beings is that decency IS holiness.  See chapter 19 of Leviticus for many examples.

Another among Torah’s key messages I glean, is that humanity is beginning to grow up.  It’s becoming aware.  But even teenagers need to be told: Don’t think you’re so smart. That was among my dad's z'l's quintissential insights.  Don’t be such a huhim (a wise guy), my dad used to say dismissively.  In that very repudiation, the resonance of Ex Machina is magnified. 

My dad, of blessed memory also had good sense, but also insufficiency of tact when he sagely but meanly declared: “you know some’ting, you’re styoopid.”  You see, I can’t talk about sci-fi without talking about my dad, because as a kid I tacitly looked to his approval on just about everything related to entertainment.  With genuine interest, dad would sit and watch an old episode of Trek, and in his inimitable thick Yiddish inflection pronounce, “dis is styoopid.  Such styoopidities.”  Sometimes my dad was hip enough to see what actually wasn’t so styoopid after all.  At other times, I was frustrated by what he did not see. “No dad, that’s actually profound,” I remember saying when watching the hearing room scene in the original Planet of the Apes.  In that Scopes trial-inspired setting, Taylor, the only talking human as played by Charlton Heston, confronts the consummate madhouse of a S’dom variety: the veritable turning of reality on its head.  The reality in that Twilight Zone “planet” is that apes are supreme and instead humans are treated with contempt.  

But alas, the planet is a war-ravaged future earth.  "Humans” are treated by their simian overlords as black people are treated in many American cities.   As a kid, I realized cinema’s power to comment on my world.  I saw the intelligence in the story.  As to my dad’s read of Apes, well his dismissal was rooted in either of two ideas: his sheer disdain of seeing grown men in ape suits acting out such a scene and on such a hokey set . . . or he remembered from his time as a guest of the Germans, that human nature is way more grim than anything Holly’Vood could muster.  Both estimates might be accurate, and coherent. 

So what do these recurring themes in literature and entertainment inspire us to ask? Hopefully it’s not just, are we moving closer to a world of robots yawwn, but rather if in our dopiness we become so enamored with our own creations, then maybe do we merit being outsmarted by them?!   

Back to Ex Machina.   By casual incident, Caleb learns that Gepetto likely disposed of the people who built his entire complex.  Here are shades of historically real places: Chelmno or Belzec (Operation Reinhard Nazi death camps in Poland) where the slave laborers build/run extermination centers, and ultimately too, became their victims.  But in Ex Machina, this becomes a puffed-up archetype in which literary bravado itself just might be the robot; i.e. the puppet that has taken on its own intelligence.  We needn’t ask if Artificial Intelligence has arrived or not.  The creepiness of this film works best when we are able to laugh at the film when the film is laughing at itself.  There's a fun moment when we insider Trekkies realize that Gepetto is akin to Trek’s Methuselah—no sooner does Gepetto come right out and name-check Star Trek in a passing reference.  If that’s not badly cloaked homage, I don’t know what is. 

Notwithstanding the paltry worth of cinema in general, I found in Ex Machina some teachable material.  It's more fertile and intriguing than Darren Aronovsky’s Noah which couldn't shake it’s connection to the Bible.   Duh.  But honestly, what I found is that Ex Machina is a much more interesting contemplation of human/deity relations and delusions than is Aranofsky’s film.  In Aronofsky’s Bible tale, humanity is depicted in the guise of Noah’s reach for evolved enlightenment against Cain’s bestial and sordid iniquity.  Noah,  a creative being with a budding, incipient sentience, possesses maybe even the kernel of “holy.”  Or perhaps, all of these allegories are tales of paradise lost. 

My takeaway: It’s all holy.  The higher aspiration.  The technical excellence.  The lust.  If we push it, even righteous and the unrighteous deaths are holy too.

Ex Machina isn’t Bible, but in it’s own way, it forces upon us kindred provisions for an evening’s meditation.  From Greek Myths, to Eden, to the Golem of Prague to Yul Brynner, to Ex Machina, the question of our own Godliness is at the center.

The Impairment of Facility, and other Musings

The junction of State (NY 5) and North and South Pearl streets (NY 32) is the oldest settled area of the city (of Albany, NY), originally planned and settled in the 17th century. - Wikipedia

Background

When I was growing up, my siblings and I shared a drawer full of wires, motors, batteries, and light bulbs. This receptacle at the lower left of my brother Izzy’s desk, was known as the junk drawer (jd). In the jd were AC and DC materials sufficient to both fascinate and endanger me. Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I electrocuted myself on several occasions. My father quite happily contributed to jd with stuff that had been torn out the walls of the large bank in downtown Albany where he worked in the maintenance department. Wikipedia describes that address as such:

The junction of State (NY 5) and North and South Pearl streets (NY 32) is the oldest settled area of the city, originally planned and settled in the 17th century.

The building was designed by Philip Hooker, who was a fairly renowned architect of stately brick buildings outside of New York City during the 19^th century. Another of my Hooker favorites is The Albany City Hall. His work is a monument of the Gilded Age at the shores of the Hudson. It's a look that shaped Albany when it enjoyed status as the 10^th largest city in the US, which was the case during much of the mid 1800’s.

69 State Street was a grand old building. It was consumed by an oily waft of peanuts constantly, regardless of the season. A cute little Planters Peanuts shop sat right at its foot, facing onto Pearl. When my mom and I would hang out a while in the women’s clothing store next door, waiting for my dad at end of a day, the smell of roasted nuts was positively intoxicating. I was certain that the smell of roasting nuts was better than any real peanut could ever taste.

I can only imagine what it was like to witness my dad, laced with his thick Yiddish accent—touting sensibilities wrought in Tomaszow-Mazowiecki Poland’s branch of HaShomer HaDaati—to work as a painter and interior decorator in the bowels of a building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He used to kid and kibbitz with the bank execs whose offices he remodeled. They let him "liberate" their assorted old typewriters, intercom speakers, and even a whole set of (admittedly old and somewhat outdated) Encyclopedia Brittanica. Our jd was always overflowing into the rest of the bedroom with the detritus of 69 State Street. In the bank workshop, my dad shared space with all kinds of wood and metal craftsmen, telecom specialists, and electricians. These are the various artisans to whom we owe most of our conveniences in a modern age.

Once as a teen while typically helping my dad fill out some form or another, we had occasion to laugh at his situation. This form was one in which he was being asked to evaluate his workplace. The form asked "overall, how would you describe your job?" We both cracked up as I suggested that the response be that he wears overalls, and that was the overall picture. As to the atmosphere in the bank? As peaceable as it usually was, it was quite apparently contentious too. Mavis Pushy (not his real name, but the surname was similar) used to taunt my dad (one of the reasons my dad despised a certain presidential patriarchate whose surname is a homophone for push). This guy at the bank was never known as Mavis—rather only “Pushy.” Referring to people by surname was very common then, by the way. It’s like a classic cliffhanger in the Six Million Dollar Man where the bad guys' chief thug is eyeballing our hero Steve from a distance, while popping some substandard store-bought peanuts into his wretched mouth. He says deviously, “we’ll get the money, but first, we gotta take care of Austin.” The music booms "dah dah daaaaaah!!!!” Good power.

“Pushy!” as dad belched his name, puffing out his cheeks, in a spittle-laced P, “pUshy, dis shtick cholera.” My dad often called people [shtik i.e. a piece of] cholera, even members of his family, when he was ticked off. I just read that one can die from cholera in one day. I think being called a cholera is worse than being called a turd. Yes, you get cholera from raw turds, but if you eat a turd would you die in one day? I think we have no idea how bad some lives are. I think modern sanitation is really wonderful, but it’s also dangerous because it makes us soft.

Soon after he died, about five years ago I started having dreams where my dad was leading me through the streets of a third-world city—some place in India, or something. We fly to a place where, just outside the airport, there are massive abandoned shells of office buildings, overgrown with ivy and vines, and shreds of gray yuck hanging from their gaping windows. Next I am trying to catch up with my dad who is walking on the street. He’s wearing a heavy herringbone trench coat, and his gate is spry but determined.

My dad both passively and actively encouraged me to learn things by accident and trial. I totally don’t do that with my kid. I’m so scared of having her hurt something or herself. I'm cautious for several reasons, partially because she loves the attention of being really hurt and her whining drives me bananas. But also because I think I might end up hating any thing or any person who hurts her, forever. Pushy threatened my dad with physical violence once. It was murmured that he once grabbed my dad by the suspenders, lifting him off the floor and threatening him. Hearing of this, I could have killed Pushy. In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in an episode called The Survivors, there is an elderly couple who were the only survivors of a decimated planet. As it turned out the man, grief-stricken at the loss of this wife, had killed all the Husnak everywhere, the entire race, with a single thought. I wished I’d had Voldemort-like power to annihilate Pushies of all stripe when I heard that Pushy humiliated my dad. You don’t do that to people. I mean, what the heck! Why did my dad have to put up with so much garbage like that? As a kid, I dealt with a lot of antisemites on the street. However my dad’s earlier history had been a whole lot more intense than suffering the humiliation of being called a faggy boy by one of the hoodlums on Pinewood Avenue in 1975, as I had. Halevai that my dad’s experiences were ONLY so tame.

Being a survivor of the Nazi's ghetto and camp system, my dad’s interface with antisemitism wasn’t peppered with just the garden variety tough, working class neighborhood stuff. Pushy’s early childhood in Albany or whichever industrial cesspit that spewed him into existence, was probably as rough as my was my dad’s before the Nazis came into Poland. I’ll bet Pushy and his parents had it hard during the Great Depression. Pushy’s dad probably beat the tar out of him and his mom in front of him. I have to conclude this, because no self-respecting man acts like Pushy did with my dad, unless he feels constantly threatened. I mean, that’s just damaged; picking up a workmate by his suspenders. I don’t know, but I cannot imagine that my dad threatened this guy in any meaningful way to instigate that. It’s possible, given my own predilection for blurting out stupid things, that my dad said something that made Pushy feel like a moron. On the other hand, this probably wasn’t too difficult to accomplish, given my ideation of Pushy’s childhood. Only a person who is stunted in his adolescence behaves that way. I doubt anyone offered sliding-scale therapy to any of these people.

But whatever the case, my dad had spunk. He didn’t try to prevent me from hearing about that incident. He didn’t try to shield me from all the lousy behavior on the earth. He knew that fecal matter was just at the front door, if not over the treshholt itself, as he would have put it. In the same dream I alluded to earlier, I see his foot step in a puddle, as he deftly moves on down the street, under a steel gray twilight. He looks young. I am proud of him.

Dad worked with all sorts of people at the Bank. He befriended great guys, some of whom came to our home and performed astoundingly competent maintenance. Notably, there was Rick who fixed our pipes and was a general whiz with stuff. Why Rick went by first name and not surname, perhaps says something about friendship? I don’t know. Other immigrants used to call my dad “Singer.” My mom used to call one of the ladies “Likhta,” and I thought that was the woman’s proper name for years! The whole immigrant surname thing always seemed brusque. In contrast to the nice guys in my mind’s eye, when Pushy lifts my father off the concrete floor, I want magic powers that can destroy him. Pushy took another potshot at the statue that my dad had been, and my dad was beginning to tumble. But I don’t think my dad was too invested in being a statue. This whole rant is soaked with matters of behavior and hinukh. I love the mechanics of things, and of relationships.

Among the things I loved to do was take apart tape-recorders and see how they worked. I was pacified by such activity, over voluminous stretches, discovering that I could reproduce my voice in reverse by messing with the playback head. I spent endless, unsupervised epochs playing with electricity, radios, and cannibalizing things. My wife is most shocked at how unsupervised I was as a child. But I wonder, if I have impaired my child’s facilities by being too protective? I know this: during the next big disaster, say a Coronal Mass Ejection—you know, a really vengeful one—which wipes out electronics made before 1985, particularly tape recorders, I’ll be making the big bucks as a repairman, and of course my family will be safe. Come to think of it, something of a Divine scale SHOULD disable all the useless crap that’s piling up in my house. Then I’ll have an excuse to throw it out. It’s important to use whatever time we have to think about the well being of our families.

Resolve

There are usually no easy and clean solutions, but just because the task is lousy, we cannot ignore it. The mishnah in pirkei avot teaches that it is not upon me alone to complete the [veritable] task. But, the sage adds, "nor am I absolved from it [the task]." In so many words, the text says that I shouldn’t try to do everything at the expense of a decent personal life. It implies that it’s good to have labor laws that institute a sane workday for all, while we jointly build a better place to live. But in this grace of freedom and peace, I as a lucky white rab student am also granted no clemency from the prison of truth; I am in no position to slough away my responsibilities. It is on these and similar grounds that some make an urgent call for justice: that we not stand idly in the face of injustices, regardless of who is victimized by the injustice.

Does a just and civil society contribute to a world more desired by The Divine? Is Democracy truly mystical, as Dr. Aryeh Cohen would put it? It sure sounds nice to me, but is that what God wants? I don’t really know. Dr. Cohen's position presumes a particular construct of God. It is one in which we have great power. We have the power to ensure that the other is not being systematically victimized by the very same system from which we derive benefit. It sounds like a good start.

We the people perpetuate a privileged aristocracy that wields grotesque power over disproportionate masses. Is it incumbent upon us to modulate the influence of the barons, gated communities, and their aggregate new-found personhood. Could be. Here, I have a moment where I see that it’s not about antisemitism anymore. At least it’s not about antisemitism any more than it is about bad parenting. And I think a whole lot of antisemitism is a result of bad parenting.

Maybe we all need to get more accidental electric shocks as young children. But maybe too, if our kids learn together in cleaner, safer, classrooms, ones in which they’re not being rushed for time, where they are loved and respected for who they are, then candies will fall from the sky. Our kids can learn at their own pace in expensive schools, unfettered by federal education standards. They can succeed and take over the world, and inherit their portion of the 1%.

No, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day.

Thoughts on Sefer Melachim.

Do miracles change peoples' behavior?

Does punishment serve as a motivator for ethical behavior?

Elija's currency is contained in grand events, but his educational method leaves much to be desired.

Maiseh on Melekh Shlomo

So the man said to me, "I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking for a life."

And I knew that he was right. If we become the sum total of our jobs, then we cease to use the tools of our humanity for building community.

Do you have a job? No? Volunteer.

We can all do a bit more of that.

You'll meet people. You'll make connections. You'll find people who need you in ways you didn't know existed.

East & West

The Tradition is invested in eternity. The West is not. The West would have electronic dishwashers that eventually end up in a junk heap. The Tradition would instead fashion a set of tefillin until they are ready to be solemnly buried. The Tradition exudes a yearning for the reanimation of the dead upon the coming of the Messiah. Does that include tefillin?

Buddhism & Shtus

Says Alan Watts, Buddhism is Hinduism, stripped for export.

In the same way that there are both cultural Jews (Hiloni) and religious Jews (Da'ati'im), there are also cultural Hindus and religious Hindus.

Hinduism asserts that one cannot be a full Hindu without living in India. There is a similar contention in Judiasm—that one cannot be a total Jew without living in the land of Israel. Perhaps it is at least the land of the Israelites.

In any land there is a cultural mix of elements, among which are climate, the arts, architecture, music and so on. These background elements inform the culture for the native Jew living in The Jewish land. Thus, Conservative Judaism can also be understood as "Land of Israel YKVK post-Israelite religion," but stripped for export. And that is among, if not the chief reason that the Conservative Judaism of the west is nearly irrelevant in Israel.

Had Conservative Jews settled Israel on masse, then perhaps the timbre of modern Israeli culture would be different. But Conservative Judaism fails to consider the reality of being an Israeli, living as an observant Jew. How does one craft an identity? The modern Israeli embraces a broader Jewish social state of being.

Conservative Judaism where I grew up, was like going to the circus. Purim was fun. Simchat Torah was flags, apples, and Hershey bars. But then when I got home, there was Elvis and Happy Days. The religion of Hiluni Jews in Israel is surely not more erudite or profound. For my Israeli counterparts however, because of their shared common experiences—living in an intentional Jewish national polity—the voice of everything is Jewish/Hebraic. The language of things in Israel is Hebrew language.

But the language in totality of a Jew in Israel reflects myriad influences, and surely no less than those faced by Jews in America. Israelis for example, share an implicit informality. Some are not necessarily polite, and others have limited patience. This appears to be inherent to Israeli life. These characteristics might be attributed to the effects of compulsory army life and the levels of urgency and camaraderie which that institution fosters.

I'm thinking that Israelis are this "way" also because they are more tied to ancient cultural attitudes and truths inherent to this part of the world. Whatever the case, I think that my idea here places an interesting focus on the distinction between natural Judaism and movement Judaism (natural meaning born in Israel, and the movement being a largely American phenomenon). Movements are subject to commodification, but more about that another time.

People living in a state of native comfort recognize one another on a different level. It is like tuning in to a radio wave. You either get it, or you don't. The transmission is either jammed, or it's clear. If you have the right receiver, you'll pick it up.

Alan Watts

Alan Watts explains the Buddha's dialectic method as such, via an anecdote about RH Blyth, the scholar who introduced the modern world to haiku poetry.

Blyth said, "If you ask me if I believe in God, the respons would be as follows: If you do, then I don't. If you don't, then I do."

From a pedagogic standpoint, this is a constant demand to achieve clarity in meaning. It asserts, "I know what I believe, but tell me what you believe. If you are seeking sweetness, then I'm here to tell you that everything is miserable, and if you are miserable then I'm here to teach you about the sweetness."

Parashat Noah

In this week’s parsha we learn about the generation of the flood: the antediluvian riff raff that was swiftly done away with, using what one midrash calls boiling waters of the deep. Eek.

As of recent I have been learning some material from Kings I—about the transition of power from King David to King Shlomo, and also the tarnished luster of Shlomo’s reign. The text outlines deals that Shlomo made with local kingdoms in exchange for lavish materials and artisans to fashion the Beit Hamikdash (God’s holy temple) and the King’s palatial holdings. I’ve also learned that difficult truths pulsate under this saga.

Now I’m not the type of person who enjoys “guilting" people. Quite the contrary, actually, because God loves all of God’s creations, as we’re about to see, even when we anger God. Shlomo must have had a good press agent, because even he comes out OK, despite his not-so-nice qualities. Firstly let’s examine conditions for the workers Shlomo hired; those tens of thousands who were employed to fell trees, construct, craft, and mine stones, were forced laborers. Plain and simple. If one was conscripted to do service for the King, he didn’t have much of a choice. It’s not as though he could say, “well Shlomo, let me check my calendar and get back to you.” Yes, it’s true, we’re not perfectly analogous to King Shlomo. For certain. But there are important things to consider.

Our flawed hero King Shlomo goes on to dedicate statuary and temples to other gods. I have to pause here to inject, that if I ever learned these facts about Shlomo in Hebrew School, then there must be massive holes in my memory, and that’s just disturbing. Curiously, I recall that my dad Shmuel Shalom Zynger z’l was very hip to both the exotic genius and the excesses attributed to King Shlomo: that he could talk to animals, like an ancient Dr. Doolittle, and that he had hundreds of wives.

This got me thinking about what it means to be a king in general. Kings have access to sumptuous resources, and can summon most anything their whims desire, be it the object of a fad or otherwise. Kings get what they want, and they will pay great sums to acquire stuff and status. But what if there were a king who checked, for example, if the metals used in his new iPhone 4S, were mined humanely? I suppose I sort of feel like a king when taking a moment to examine the comforts I enjoy.

Oddly, this got me thinking about the generation of the flood, and now we’re back in this week’s parsha. Genesis 6:5-6 reads,

“And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.”

So this is pretty heavy. God is not pleased with these people, but it also sounds like God loves these people. Anyhow, we know what happens. God decides to bring about a flood and destroy everything that lived on dry land. And let’s not pretend that God was ready to be merciful. For example, lest someone fought for dear life by floating on a scrap of driftwood , eating dead seagulls, like up in Halifax or somewhere. Nope. The waters of Genesis 6-8 remained for 150 days . . . I guess that 150 days was just to make sure.

With all this however, I do not posit that we today are the generation of the flood, nor are we all living lavishly on the backs of the poor and oppressed, like some despotic rulers do. Well not intentionally or callously at least. Seriously though, I do think there is something to be considered in all of this. That while we are not constructing palaces to false gods, we do find comfort in all the things which distract us from the glory of God’s creations, and that glory includes each one of us. The generation of the flood must have been pretty bad for God to have taken actions ensuring that the whole generation perished. Indeed, God would start over again with people like Noah. Cue double rainbow.

What does it mean? Good question! It means that humans earned a ribbon, and that banner was God’s form of a promise written in the sky, so to speak, when it reads in Genesis 8:21

'I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

Thousands of years after the flood of Genesis, Shlomo’s massive building projects in Jerusalem lent notability and glory to the history of Israelites and their land. But Shlomo was a complicated character. He took for himself, and apparently thought little about the servitude by his workforce. Was Shlomo good for the local economy? Undoubtedly yes. Was he a fair employer? Not so clear. The passage above from Genesis shows God’s surrender to the evil of humanity, as if to say, “you’re rotten from the core, but gosh darn it, I love ya.” Useful here is juxtaposing ancient epochs of human development, against our current one. What questions does this raise for you?

It's essential to see Artoo Detoo for what he is: a tripodal service droid. Here he is along with a friend on an unnamed planet.

Moderation and Binationalism

This posting is inspired by an article in the NY Times, sent to me by my brother, Izzy. Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/opinion/14goldberg-1.html

Here's my take.

A strong position amongst certain scholars and politicians is one which supports moderate Arab regimes, especially Fatah. However no regime, Iran included, lives in a vacuum. Ultimately, either Ahmadinjad, his successor or perhaps a CIA-supported junta in Iran will cave and see the benefits in engagement. Hopefully it won't require a tactical nuclear strike to get there.

Reagan may have called for Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," but he was neither realistic about the implications for emerging economies, nor was he forward-thinking vis-a-vis the fallout in the Middle East and Central Asia. There's a matter of regional hegemony at stake, especially after the collapse of the USSR. The cold warriors had a relatively firm grip on their proxy players in Eurasia, even if things got testy at times. Yeah, we all miss the commies. The Saudis are nervous because the U.S. is headed for alternative energy sources, and they need to make nicey-nice with the West in order to be included in whatever 21st century trade dynamics that emerge. That is after the financial debacle gets straightened out, and it will in 10 or 20 years. Egypt will cow to whatever the U.S. and Israel want - it's in their interest, as will Jordan, Libya, Iraq, and the Gulf states. These regimes are all integrally tied into the global, petroleum-based economy however and they will be increasingly subject to the forces of extremism when the sheikhs and cultish leaders grasp for ways to keep people fed and clothed - and that's why it's crucial to support them and engage them, as unsavory as that is at times.

In any rigorous, healthy political dynamic, even the religious fanatics will have a voice and a strong influence; that's politics as usual. It gets ugly when the kooks are running the show. Look at the U.S. - things get bad around here too, what with cross-burnings and lynchings during Jim Crow, and even the shootings of abortion doctors in the last 20 years. From a certain perspective, the U.S. is a newly emerging democracy. We are just awaking from eight years of a regime that was tacitly, if not at times actively sympathetic to some forms of religious crusading. Even examining Bush in the most sympathetic light reveals arcane American Imperialism which resorts to extreme costs and measures: see Guantanamo and Abu Garaib. Through a certain lens, the war in Iraq can arguably be understood as a born-again Christian, military adventure.

It's up to the rational voices in politics and academia to make certain that extremist ideas which promote utopian visions are exposed for what they are; murderous. Both secular and religious utopias are unworkable. Dr. Yehuda Bauer is a scholar of Holocaust history, and an anti-genocide activist; I have tremendous respect for him. He posits, "utopias kill, and radical utopias kill radically." Bauer cites a variety of cases, from Islamic fascism, to Marxism and National Socialism - the desires and outcomes are consistently the same: to rewrite history from a particular, deistic / philosophical perspective, and to destroy or severely marginalize anyone who is opposed to the tyrannical despotic, utopian vision. Bauer is certainly not pollyanna about it, yet he also contends that radical Islam is NOT mainstream Islam; Wahhabi and extremist forms of Shiah Islam are NOT Islam. He sees mainstream Islam as a civilized and peace-loving creed, and believes that the majority of Muslims and Islamic governments are not interested in world dominance through a new Caliphate. He cautions that moderates must be vigilant, because the threat of radical Islam is very real.

Personally, I'm not sure a two-state solution is still viable, particularly because of the territorial division between Gaza and the West Bank / Samaria. I think if Israel is truly going to call itself an ethical democracy, it needs to contain its own extremist, militant fascistic tendencies, be they religious or secular. I think that is already happening but there are miles to go. It also must come to the reality that it needs a constitution because its judicial system is tenuously strained between the interests of British Common Law, the remnants of Ottoman Law, and the political cries of the Rabbanut who have a grip on matters of personal status. It's a parliamentary system, but it's far from a democracy. I also think there should be serious consideration to a binational Israel / Palestine which allows full voting rights, and a justly enforced rule of law for anyone who wants to live there. There's a whole lot of literature and research on that matter. I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing calls for a binational solution again in the coming months.

It will never be perfect.