Warmup in a writing group, in which we were asked to write, in 10 minutes, the conversation we would have with G_d after our death. This is what came out.

The last thing I remembered was lying on the bed, listening to the beeping machine, hearing the beeps slowing down, and thinking “Oh dear, this isn’t good.” There wasn’t any pain and surprisingly there wasn’t any fear, there was just a hint of the sense of transition. And then there was the sense of rising, of leaving, of change, that who was experiencing this was different than the I who had been on the bed, and then there was the approach to the white light, and then an giant awareness that included everything, and then a slow fade to black.

I sat in the room and looked at myself, and I looked back at myself. “So if you are me, who am I?” I asked.

I answered, “You are me too, and as for who I am, I am that I am.”

I smiled back at me. Whether or not I was really me, I clearly had my sense of humour. And I knew what I knew.

“So this is all there is,” I asked? “Just I and I?”

“I and I. One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives,” I said.

I laughed. “Bob Dylan, 1983. I’m dead, I’m God, and I’m quoting Bob Dylan.”

I smiled. “Well if the devil can quote scripture, it seems only fair.”

I asked myself if I had any questions, but I seemed to understand it all now. It really was just me, Even if I thought it was you, or them, or it, it was all just me.

“Do I get to remember this?” I asked myself. “Sure, if I want to”, I answered. “Come here and let me give me a hug.” As I hugged me, I could feel myself fading into me, till at the end there was only me. As there had been all along, really.

Pictures taken by Diana in Algonquin Park, Nov 29th

Step one: Get his attention by waving a different stick



Step two: Throw the stick into the lake



Step three: Watch him go

Perhaps recent leaders of Israel might made better choices had they spent more time reading Sherlock Holmes. Of particular use to them might have been The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet in which Holmes says, "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Then they might have realized that the result of making a two-state solution impossible was to make a one-state solution inevitable. Having worked to weaken Palestine, to undermine all Palestinian leaders, to create – in Sharon's memorable phrase for the settlements – facts on the ground they are now like a go player who having focused exclusively on a specific battle over territory suddenly looks at the bigger picture and realizes he's lost the game.

We are now at that point of realization. Almost 10% of Israeli Jews live in the Territories or in East Jerusalem. It is impossible for any Israeli government might make a peace offer to Palestinians that would give up all that: their coalition would crumble immediately. (And it's unlikely they could do it: the BBC reports that , "An increasing number of Israeli soldiers are publicly objecting, on religious and political grounds, to their role in the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.") Similarly, it would not be possible for any Palestinian leader to accept the kind of offer any Israeli leader might realistically make: his support would also disappear. The handful of bantustans offered as a Palestinian country at Oslo might have been the closest to a joint solution ever reached. And if a two-state solution is impossible, as seems increasingly clear, then the only alternative is a one-state solution.

By a one state solution, I mean a country open to both Jews and Muslims. This is also called a binational solution, and supporters "advocate a single state in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants of all three territories, without regard to ethnicity or religion." Edward Said called for this, saying "the question is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate," Israelis and Palestinians, "but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible. But while this once sounded like an impossible dream, it is increasingly being seen on both sides as inevitable.

Stephen Walt's recent piece A New Era in the Middle East? Uh-Oh nails it:

Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton’s mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent “Road Map” -- to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine.

Jimmy Carter sees it coming too:

“Many Palestinian leaders are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” Carter wrote. “By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy,” he added.

The "demographic time bomb", the higher birth rate of Palestinians than Israelis, and the inexorable rise in the percentage of non-Jewish population in such a state has terrified Israelis. Olmert plays to that fear in a recent interview in Haaretz, in which he is quoted as saying, "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” And if you look at the polls, Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to such a solution. So how can one assert its inevitability?

That question led me to the Electronic Intifada, and a long and fascinating exploration of that very question by Ali Abunimah, a long-time commentator on the Middle East, and proponent of he one-state solution. He compares Israel to South Africa, looking in detail at the attitudes of the white South Africans who were unalterably opposed to giving equal rights to blacks and coloureds, until their government recognized that there was no other possible solution. Abunimah says:

What did change for South Africa, and what all the weapons in the world were not able to prevent, was the complete loss of legitimacy of the apartheid regime and its practices. Once this legitimacy was gone, whites lost the will to maintain a system that relied on repression and violence and rendered them international pariahs; they negotiated a way out and lived to tell the tale. It all happened much more quickly and with considerably less violence than even the most optimistic predictions of the time. But this outcome could not have been predicted based on what whites said they were willing to accept, and it would not have occurred had the ANC been guided by opinion polls rather than the democratic principles of the Freedom Charter.
Zionism -- as many Israelis openly worry -- is suffering a similar, terminal loss of legitimacy as Israel is ever more isolated as a result of its actions. Israel’s self-image as a liberal “Jewish and democratic state” is proving impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultra-nationalist Jewish sectarian settler-colony that must carry out frequent and escalating massacres of “enemy” civilians (Lebanon and Gaza 2006, Gaza 2009) in a losing effort to check the resistance of the region’s indigenous people. Zionism cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.

The same conclusion is explored on "Informed Comment", Juan Cole's award winning blog. Cole starts by quoting Saeb Erekat, who heads the PLO steering committee, who recently asked "that Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas should be frank with the Palestinian people and admit to them that there is no possibility of a two-state solution given continued Israeli colonization of the West Bank." Cole goes on to say:

It is morally and ethically unconscionable to leave millions of Palestinians in a condition of statelessness, in which they have no rights ... Therefore, if there isn't going to be a 2-state solution, there will have to be a one-state solution, in which Israel gives citizenship to the Palestinians.

The implications of Erekat's statement gets a fine exegesis on counterpunch, where John Whitbeck observes that, "This statement just might signal a turning point in the long, frustrating search for peace with some measure of justice in Israel/Palestine."

So is that the end of Israel? Not necessarily. Over at Radical Middle, there's a fine exploration both of the reasons why a one-state solution is coming and the extent – in the blending of economies, electric grids, aquifers – it's already here. Here's a fine quote from that piece:

The former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, nicely sums up this line of thinking when he says, “The question is no longer whether [Israel-Palestine] will be binational, but which [one-state] model to choose.” The one-state solution is more than just a sensible adjustment to the facts, though. As presented by its post-Arafat, post-Zionism-as-religious-statehood advocates, it is both sensible and visionary.

So if, gallingly, there is to be a single state in partes tres (Israel, Palestine, and Gaza) how could Jewish culture, language and religion ever survive? Where is there a model for a minority holding on to such a separate identity? In a recent post on Mondoweiss, Bernard Avishai suggests a possible route:

The reason why I would like to live in a democratic state with a Jewish character is my attachment to the Hebrew language, the challenges of Jewish history, the grandeur of the Torah, the excitement of modern Israel poetry and popular culture—in other words, the same reasons why French Quebecers want a democratic province with a Québeçois character....Could I be happy if Israel were in some larger federation, like Quebecers, or French citizens, for that matter. Yes.

As an anglophone in Québec, I grew up always surrounded by two cultures, and the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual richness of that experience was a great gift, not a hardship. Canada certainly has political challenges, (that's a different piece!) and there are valid reasons why people of good faith support separatism, but the country has survived by being in the classic phrase, as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances. At its best that means honouring the different founding cultures, races, and religions. It means there is no one way to be Canadian, so different cultures aren't expected to melt down into a mythical homogeneous whole, (which is why there'll never be a House of UnCanadian Activities). Compared to the horrors of an endless war in pursuit of an impossible two-state solution that is somehow acceptable to both sides, a Québec solution doesn't look so bad.

If the war on drugs needed a spokesperson, it could hardly do better than select Chico Marx in Duck Soup, saying "Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" Sadly for the drug war effort, increasing numbers of both people and governments are starting to believe their own eyes. And what they see is that the war is a futile and counterproductive effort, causing over half the incarcerations in the US, with no measurable decrease in the amount of drugs consumed. But the war fights back, shooting messengers who speak truth to power. It's enough to make you reach for a .... whatever.

First, a quick flashback: drug use goes back further than we once thought it did. David Hillman has been the messenger (and his academic career has received a few grievous wounds as a result) about the extent of drug use among Greek philosophers:

An example from Hillman’s own research is a text by Thucydides where brave slaves are sneaking supplies to besieged Spartan soldiers. They carry with them skins of “poppy mixed with honey and pounded linseed.” The original text uses the Greek word for poppy (mekon), which is another word for opium, but in this passage the English version is translated as “poppy seed.” “You don’t send poppy seeds to wounded soldiers,” chides Hillman. “You send them opium.”

The earliest banning of drugs came in the 7th century, when Islamic countries prohibited the consumption of alcohol In the US, the first ban was on smoking opium, prohibited in San Francisco due to fear that "many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise. " There was no evidence of that having happened, and the consumption of opium in laudanum, a pain-killer sold to white consumers, remained legal for years afterwards. Selective drug law enforcement based on race and media fear mongering is sadly traditional.

That tradition is carried on today, and nowhere more dramatically than the phoney teen drug crisis.

In the U.S. as a whole, teens are the least likely of any age group except children to die from drug abuse....But there is indeed a major, exploding drug problem in the U.S. -- one inconvenient for anti-drug warriors. In the last dozen years, drug deaths have risen 8 percent among adults, primarily middle aged men of all races, and today stand at record-high levels.

The Guardian newspaper recently ran a glorious graphic showing the ratio of numbers of deaths caused by specific drugs versus the coverage of deaths. For alcohol, a 2% ratio; for cannabis 484%. In response to such absurdities, the defections from the war effort have started. Professor David Nutt was the British government's chief drug advisor, at least until he started giving the "wrong" advice. Nutt was sacked a day after he claimed in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. After his firing, not surprisingly, other scientists on the committee felt that there wasn't much point to doing research if only the government's predetermined answers were acceptable. As the Guardian reports:

Three more government drug advisers resign over the home secretary’s sacking of Professor David Nutt as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). The three all resigned after a face-to-face meeting with Alan Johnson, the home secretary, which was called in an attempt to heal the rift between the scientists and the government over Nutt’s sacking.
The loss of three more members of the council brings the total who have gone to six out of an original membership of 31 the home secretary appointed to advise him on drugs policy... The scientists in particular [had] wanted assurances their reports and recommendations would in future be taken seriously

But of course science is based on what you see with your own eyes, so sometimes it doesn't necessarily produce the answers the Government wants. Reality, as Mr Colbert memorably noted, has a well-known liberal bias.

Perhaps the crisis was precipitated by evidence from the Portuguese experiment. In 2001 Portugal decriminalized the use of almost all drugs, and as the results of that experiment come in, it's clear that deaths are down, and drug use isn't up. The Scientific American has a full report:

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections. Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006,  

And that was just the start. If western democracies were studiously averting their eyes from Portugal, Latin America was not. After years of being blamed for North American drug use, they're saying no más en masse. Simon Jenkins reports:

Push has finally come to shove. Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was “unconstitutional” to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use. It asserted in ringing terms that “adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state”. This classic statement of civil liberty comes not from some liberal British home secretary or Tory ideologue. They would not dare. The doctrine is adumbrated by a regime only 25 years from dictatorship.

In August Mexico decriminalized possession of small amounts of all major narcotics, (marijuana, heroin, and cocaine most notably). But in the rest of North America, not only are there no major bills being passed, there's barely even small change. The AMA announced its support for medical marijuana. But as the US Senate started to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to explore the current state of the situation formerly known as the War on Drugs (a term the Obama administration has quietly dropped) Senator Charles Grassley (Rep-Iowa) proposed an amendment "that would explicitly forbid any recommendations that even mention drug legalization or decriminalization". That way one avoids messy situations such as the UK, where you have to shoot the messengers after the message leaks out. And in Canada, Donald MacPherson, the Vancouver "drug czar" resigned, saying in his letter of resignation, "the approach to the drug problem that we have in Canada . . . [a] war-on-drugs approach has utterly failed over the past 40 years and must come to an end. The emperor truly has no clothes in this case."

But it seems inevitable that the disaster of prohibition will eventually pass. And really doesn't recreational drug use seem just a little twentieth century? Looking forward, the next real drug problem is just shooting up over the event horizon. That's the use of so-called "smart drugs", drugs that enable you to work longer and harder. The Atlantic has a fine and scary coverage in Jamais Cascio's article "Get Smarter", focusing on that classic performance drug issue: if the guy in the next cubicle is working sixteen hours a day productively because he's using them, how can you afford not to?

If the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves. Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity.

Yes, when it comes to North America, drug use, and laws, you can't go wrong with Chico. In A Night at the Opera he said, "You can't fool me – there ain't no sanity clause". And this remains an area where there really isn't.

It is 8 A.M., on November 12th. Today is a day of celebration; it’s the day when the Charter of Compassion will be released. It’s a document first dreamed of by religious writer Karen Armstrong, and now created by a collaborative group of religious leaders from around the world. I’ve been inspired by a number of Armstrong’s books, and by the wonderful talk she gave on accepting the TED prize, where she first shared her vision of the Charter. The idea, which is based on the universality of the golden rule to all religions, is to first create a statement expanding on the role of compassion, and then call on all religious groups to endorse the goal of being more compassionate in the world. I decided to be part of this action, and have gotten Tikkun Toronto, the political-spiritual group with whom I work to publicize what I have chosen to do: meet at the labyrinth in the heart of High Park, read the Charter, and walk the labyrinth while meditating on how I can manifest more compassion in the world. There’s only one minor problem: the Charter isn’t out yet. The website has featured a countdown to the day of the release, and here we are on that day, and there’s nothing online. What’s plan B? I find an old poster that shows the different religions’ versions of the golden rule, reformat it so it will fill the blank space on the sign a friend has made, and decide the best thing to do is to relax and to wait. I manage to keep the second part of that decision.

At 9:30 I go back and check the website, and the Charter is up! Now I really can relax. I copy it, reformat it, print it out, and put together the large poster, with the Charter at the top, and instructions for our action at the bottom. We want people to read the charter, walk the labyrinth, (which takes about 30-40 minutes), while meditating on how they might reach the goals of the Charter, and then fill out a small card with their resolutions. They’ll take the cards away with them. We’ve publicized this through email, Facebook, Twitter, and even word of mouth. I’ve printed up 50 cards, so I print 50 copies of the Charter as well, but I really don’t have any sense of how many people will be able to take time off on a Thursday to come to a spot about 15 minutes walk from the nearest public transit. High Park is huge (400 acres) and a labyrinth in its own right; one third is wild, and it’s easy to get lost trying to find the inner Labyrinth, despite the maps on the email invitations. But I’ve known from the moment I decided to do this that the only way to make it work was to let go of expectations: if I start defining success or failure, the only thing that will do is to guarantee it fails for me. The weather is certainly a success: a beautiful fall day, crisp and sunny, with autumnal leaves heavy on the ground. Whatever happens, I intend to have a successful meditation.

I get to the Labyrinth at 11:30. I have brought a broom, as my wife suggested when she scouted the Labyrinth this morning while walking our dog. High Park’s is a copy of the one at Chartres, a concrete circle thirty yards across, with the pattern one walks painted onto it. Unlike a maze, there are no choices: you follow the pattern till the centre, and then reverse and walk out. No minotaurs anywhere, I’m relieved to see. But the broom was a good idea; much of the Labyrinth is covered with oak leaves from the large grove that surrounds us. I sweep the leaves away, pound a hole in the ground with a stake, and put the sign up. It wavers, but holds- fortunately there’s no wind. Now I can really relax. I actually read the Charter, which I’d only skimmed earlier, and find it deeply moving. I’d wondered why bother rewriting the golden rule? Would the product be some horrible committee-speak, aimed at offending no one by not having any real content? But this is quite wonderful, both powerful in its goals, and poetic in its phrasing. As I finish my reading of it, I see the second person appearing, a long time friend and collaborator. I smile, and wave my broom at him ... in a compassionate manner, of course.

By 12:15 we have four people at the Labyrinth, all of whom I’ve known and worked with for fifteen years. It’s a wonderful group, and a stunningly beautiful day. We start to walk, which has at least one complexity I hadn’t thought of: you always have to walk slower than the person in front of you, as the paths are about a foot wide, and a meditation on compassion doesn’t really work with overtaking on the curves. But after a tight start we spread out, and gradually I let go of all the planning and focus on the idea of compassion and the places where I most need to bring it in to my life. After a lifetime of teaching, I tend to focus too much on what’s wrong, on judging where the inadequacies are, rather than supporting what is good and making that central. Just as I reach the centre, a six-petalled flower shape, two more people appear, read the sign, and start the walk. One of them I know from Tikkun, the other is someone I don’t know. Our advertising has worked! I smile and let them pass as they move towards the centre, and I move away.

And now we have all finished our walk. We silently fill out our cards with the actions we have chosen to do, and then we talk. The stranger is someone whose proposed action for the Charter I had read about online, but neither he nor I could get permission to hold events downtown; there was no compassion we could invoke in the hearts of city regulations. But here we both are, in the warmth of slanting sunshine, in a collaborative action anyway. The moment and our action feel powerful and meaningful, despite the few people who came. Sometimes successful political action can be changing what is inside rather than what is outside. I place my card, (with its resolution to be less judgemental of people with whom I disagree) in my wallet, where it will be protected but visible.We hug one another, take down our signs and leave, as the leaves start to gently reoccupy the Labyrinth.

"The fun of the story for us," say the Coen Brothers, in their gloss on A Serious Man, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry." He’s the only nice person in the film, and if torturing nice people is your idea of a good time, this might be the film you’ve been searching for. Or if you have always wondered what self-hating Jews really look like, here’s a matched set of brothers to demonstrate.

It’s a natural phase to go through as a child that when your life is miserable, you take out your toys and torture them. But by the time you’re in your fifties, surely it’s time to move on. Much has been made about the similarity of the A Serious Man’s setting to the Minnesota world the Coens grew up in. But surely even Minnesota, let alone Hollywood, has therapists that could help? Torturing two-dimensional puppets is no occupation for two grown men, let alone the basis of an entertaining spectator sport.

So what do the Coen brothers hate? They hate all their characters for a start. The rabbis are ignorant know-nothings, marriage is a farce, the only person who is affectionate to Larry is the Sy Adelman, who’s shtupping Larry’s wife. Larry’s daughter is a an obnoxious teenager who steals his money to save for a nose job; Arthur, his brother is a sponging failure; and Danny, his son, is a perfect example of what really makes the film so vile.

Danny is oblivious to everything going on around him, and smokes a lot of dope to help him stay that way. The running gag (four times! the film runs, you gag) is that whenever something particularly horrible happens to his father, Danny will phone up to request Dad work on the TV antenna so his favourite shows get better reception. Danny is supposedly studying for his Bar Mitzvah, but he listens to Jefferson Airplane instead, and smokes more dope. Terrified of what he doesn’t know, he gets really, really stoned before his big day, goes up to the Torah, and does what everyone hails as a brilliant job. So not only is Danny a farce, but the Bar Mitzvah is a farce: no one even notices he’s incompetent. Then he goes in to see the third rabbi, (the first two have been revealed as racist morons earlier), to receive the Words of Wisdom... and the rabbi mangles a few lines from Jefferson Airplane (Danny corrects him.) Yep, it’s shit all the way down in this film.

The university is a farce, with Larry’s prospective tenure wavering on the basis of anonymous letters about him, and a racist portrayal of a Korean student who both bribes and threatens Larry to get a passing grade. Larry’s neighbours are psychopathic blond deer-hunters who haunt his dreams, and only show any warmth when someone they can despise even more (the Korean student’s father) shows up. The Coens are nothing if not equal opportunity haters.

And boy, do they hate their characters! The portrayal of Jews would be called anti-semitic if anyone non-jewish had done it. A rabbi tells a long pointless story to everyone who seeks spiritual support, focussing on a Jewish dentist who is working on a non-Jew who somehow has a mysterious message in Hebrew engraved on the inside of his teeth. Puzzled by the lack of conclusion to the story about the dentist, Larry asks, “What happens to the goy?”

The rabbi responds, “Well, who cares?” Why would a Jewish rabbi care about anyone who wasn’t Jewish?

Dave Denby nailed it in The New Yorker, “ As a piece of moviemaking craft, A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable.” It is brilliantly filmed, provocatively cut, with a fine soundtrack, Trumanesque sets, and excellent acting throughout. And it is utterly hollow at the core. There is no hope, nothing of value. Characters either know themselves to be living a lie, or falsely believe themselves to be living the truth. At the end, Danny gets through his Bar Mitzvah, and gets the money he’d lost so he can pay off his dope dealer. Larry gets tenure, sells out to the Korean student so he has money, and it looks like just maybe things are going to be okay. Then Danny is about to get killed by a tornado (because his incompetent teacher can’t get the tornado cellar door open) and Larry has some terrible incurable disease that he has to go see the doctor to find out about. So really, they’re both going to die. The End.

Laugh? I thought I’d cry.

I like black humour. I love Heller, Vonnegut, Dr. Strangelove. But these work because there’s a tension between characters (Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, Lionel Mandrake) whom we care about (and who are respected by their creator) and the irrationality of an uncaring world. Real art is created when the artist can show weaknesses and still leave us feeling compassionate towards their subject. As Cohen sings in Anthem, “There is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in.” But if it’s all dark, on either side, why care about the cracks, particularly the wisecracks? They don’t matter. Pynchon memorably wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” But to the Coens all answers are wrong, so if you ask anything from life you’re just another fool.

Don’t waste your time on A Serious Man: go see a film that raises real questions, not one that’s too afraid of the world to dare admit there are any.

================= apologia pro censura sua ====================

My review is – I admit freely – unbalanced, or (to put it more kindly) intended to counter balance the raves (85% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, 8.3/10 on IMDB) A Serious Man has received. A "fairer" reviewer might have dwelt on the excellence with which the story is told, and the exemplary cinematic skills manifested throughout.

And yet: Hamlet says the purpose of art is “both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, a ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature..." So if a mirror shows no virtues at all, why talk about the craft of the frame within which it's mounted?

As I look at the media coverage of swine flu, I remember an old Yiddish joke about two women at a Jewish resort in the Catskills.

The first woman says, "Isn't the food here terrible?"

"Yes," responds the second, "and such tiny portions too."

That's it...all I read is alternating stories about the dangers of the vaccine with stories about how awful it is that there isn't enough of it for everyone NOW.

Somedays, it doesn't even seem worth chewing through the leather straps.

Many people have been saying many things about what the political relationship between different groups of American Jews and Israel is or should be, and the rest of the world (including Israel) has been reacting to what they've said, and that statement is probably where agreement stops. I'm going to attempt to show some of the more interesting things that are being said about J Street, as we go into the week of their big conference in Washington. This will hopefully provide some interesting background and context. The selection and the content certainly don't represent any Tikkun point of view; heck, some of them don't even represent mine. But if I only looked at things I agree with, how would I learn anything I didn't already know?

J Street has become the major alternative to AIPAC as a group trying to shape the US policy in the middle East and towards Israel. Wikipedia has a good factual summary (though even here I read, "The neutrality of this article is disputed") on the background and politics of J Street.

According to the J Street website, the organization seeks "to change the direction of American policy in the Middle East" and to become "the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement."[1]
J Street supports Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland, as well as the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state of their own.[1] According to its executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street is neither pro- nor anti- any individual organization or other pro-Israel umbrella groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He says J Street is proud of AIPAC's many accomplishments and clarified that the two groups have different priorities rather than different views.[4][3][5]
Explaining the need for a new advocacy and lobbying group, Ben-Ami stated: "J Street has been started, however, because there has not been sufficient vocal and political advocacy on behalf of the view that Israel's interests will be best served when the United States makes it a major foreign policy priority to help Israel achieve a real and lasting peace not only with the Palestinians but with all its neighbors. ."[6]

The New York Times has a good background piece on how J Street is becoming a major new player in this game. Here's a taste of the politics of power:

In July, President Obama met for 45 minutes with leaders of American Jewish organizations.... During the July meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama that “public disharmony between Israel and the U.S. is beneficial to neither” and that differences “should be dealt with directly by the parties.” The president, according to Hoenlein, leaned back in his chair and said: “I disagree. We had eight years of no daylight” — between George W. Bush and successive Israeli governments — “and no progress.”
It is safe to say that at least one participant in the meeting enjoyed this exchange immensely: Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and executive director of J Street, a year-old lobbying group with progressive views on Israel. Some of the mainstream groups vehemently protested the White House decision to invite J Street, which they regard as a marginal organization located well beyond the consensus that they themselves seek to enforce. But J Street shares the Obama administration’s agenda, and the invitation stayed. Ben-Ami didn’t say a word at the meeting — he is aware of J Street’s neophyte status — but afterward he was quoted extensively in the press, which vexed the mainstream groups all over again. J Street does not accept the “public harmony” rule any more than Obama does. In a conversation a month before the White House session, Ben-Ami explained to me: “We’re trying to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel. You don’t have to be noncritical. You don’t have to adopt the party line. It’s not, ‘Israel, right or wrong.’ ”

So when J Street's first major conference opened in Washington this week, there were a lot of positions taken on every side of every wall. In Israel the right wing flailed wildly against J Street. The always interesting Bradley Burston sums up the hostility in a marvellous Haaretz piece: Dovish Jews? They love Israel? Excommunicate them

The opening shot was fired this month by the former chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, Isi Liebler, who declared... that although J Street and other U.S. Jewish groups critical of Israel may describe themselves as Zionist, "their prime objective is to pressure the U.S. government to use 'tough love' against Israel - a euphemism for demanding that the Jewish state make further unilateral concessions to neighbors pledged to its annihilation."
Israel's official response to J Street, which though less than two years old has been described as a counterweight to AIPAC, this week went from chill to cold-shoulder.

In the US, there was equal hostility from AIPAC and its fellows. (Not surprisingly: groups that have power never welcome new groups taking away their power. Some things are universal.) MJ Rosenberg offers a good summary of the attempts by Jewish groups to the right of J Street to make their conference fail in a piece which attempts to answer the question, "Why is the pro-Israel right so afraid of J Street?"

Next week’s J Street conference can already be deemed a success. That is because it has caused the organizations and individuals who constitute the old pro-Israel lobby to drop any pretense of tolerating deviation from the status quo...the hard-liners are doing everything they can to ensure that the J Street conference fails.
But here is the ironic part. In recent years, several books and articles have been published that argue that the pro-Israel lobby effectively stifles debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the halls of Congress, in academia and even in the media....But now those tactics are being employed against J Street by the very people who insist that no such tactics have ever been used.

One of the attacks on J Street by AIPAC lobbyist Jeremy Ben-David concerned their accepting donations from Muslims! The idea that peace might help both sides, or that some people hold the view that this conflict is a human problem weeping for a humane solution is clearly beyond the pale in which some people choose to dwell. As Rebecca Abou-Chedid puts it in Nightmare on J Street

At last, somebody found me out. This week, former AIPAC and Israeli embassy official Lenny Ben-David published an article revealing that I had given a donation to the "pro-Israel and pro-peace" organization J Street. Because I am of Lebanese descent, this clearly indicates that my dollars must be intended to advance some pernicious anti-Israel agenda -- and that J Street must be the vehicle for those aims....
It is possible to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, not out of some blanket support for either government, but out of a sincere belief that peace is in both people's best interests. I hold that belief as a result of years of work within the Arab and Jewish American communities, working in partnerships not just with J Street but also with such groups as Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, and Israel Policy Forum. I have traveled to the region and remain humbled and inspired by the courage and tenacity of those Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to submit to the cynicism or pessimism this conflict so often demands.

But if some groups lashed out at J Street, others welcomed them. Brit Tzedek announced they're joining J Street.

Brit Tzedek chapters and activists and its heralded Rabbinic Cabinet will soon become part of J Street's new national field and grassroots program when the new program launches early next year, the venerable Jewish grassroots organization's board said Friday.

But - perhaps to establish its political centrality and neutrality - J Street has started its own attacks on those to the left of them. Ben Ami, the J street founder and leader is outrageous on Walt and Mearsheimer, as Mondoweiss summarizes. Here's a quote from Jeremy Ben-Ami.

There is no question that over the last 40 to 50 years, the American Jewish community has developed a very sophisticated lobbying mechanism to promote its views and its interests, and I am in awe of that as a student of politics. I also happen to respect and value much of what has been achieved. ... However, when the analysis of that lobby veers over a line and essentially says that all of American foreign policy is controlled by this one lobby and this one interest group, to me, personally, this does smack of the kind of conspiracy theories contained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notion that somehow Jews control this country, they control our foreign policy, that there is some diabolical conspiracy behind the scenes, this is when you cross that line.  I believe that the analysis in the Walt and Mearsheimer book and article crossed that line, but this doesn’t take away from my view that this is an incredibly effective lobby.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? As a comment on Philip Weiss's blog cruelly asks, is J Street about ideals or positioning? The answer seems to be a bit of both. Sounding a bit like an early Springsteen album, there's the Wild, the Innocent, and the J Street Banned. Amongst the latter are Kevin Coval and Josh Healey. They were poets who were to perform at J Street's conference, until it came out that Josh had certain lines in a certain poem that compared the occupation and the Holocaust. The right wing attacked and the poets were out of the conference. As they write in counterpunch:

What is disappointing, and troubling, is J Street’s response in caving to this sort of McCarthyism. The executive director of J Street called us to say  “I know what I’m doing is wrong...but there are some battles we choose not to fight,” before canceling our program, and disinviting us from the conference. This accommodates their red-baiting and is the wrong response. Rather than give in, which only emboldens the right and legitimizes their attacks, we need to stand up for our principles and engage on that front. 

Similarly, Tikkun and Michael Lerner were not accepted as representatives at this conference. Dave Belden has a piece on this blog explaining the background to that rejection. Lerner is on the left, and as Jeremy Ben-Ami says, in a very clarifying interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

I hope that we have a very strong left flank that attacks us, that Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups that are consistently upset with us for backing Howard Berman's sanctions plan and for refusing to embrace the Goldstone report and for standing up for the right of Israel to defend itself or for its military aid -- I hope we get attacked from the left because I would characterize J Street as the mainstream of the American Jewish community.

So where does that leave us? That depends who "us" is. If you support Tikkun's "pro-Israel, pro-Palestine" position, if you work with groups like "Jewish Voices for Peace" you're still not admitted to this new tent. It would be disingenuous, though, to claim that this is a case of "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". We have all reaped the bitter harvest that grew from the seeds of those who felt there was no real difference between Bush and Gore so they didn't vote in 2000. J Street marks a step in the right direction, a step out of the desert and towards a real discussion. But I'll go even further than Groucho: I wouldn't join any group that wouldn't have me for a member.

Let's face it, when it comes to science fiction, Jews wrote the bible. And they wrote a lot else besides. Ursula Le Guin says that the Frankenstein myth (and Mary Shelley) are the mothers of invention of science fiction, and she may be right (she usually is). But the Frankenstein myth is a variant on the Golem story, the story of a man created without a human soul, and it goes back over a thousand years in Jewish folklore before Shelley created her version, on that dark and stormy night in Switzerland.

Isaac Asimov, the dean of the golden age of American science fiction, (or (better) speculative fiction, or (best) SF) was of course Jewish, born in a Russian shtetl. His first novel, "Pebble in the Sky", deals with a stiff-necked and rebellious people facing the wrath of a galactic empire, with a central character called Joseph Schwartz. And there are lots of other fine Jewish SF writers, but that's just data and boring. What are the deeper patterns of Jewish SF? Why bother reading it?

Three aspects of Judaism in SF are culture, politics and religion. The culture tends to be Ashkenaz and Yiddish, featured in stories like William Tenn's "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi"; Robert Silverberg's "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV"; or Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird". Harlan Ellison's "I'm Looking for Kadak" comes complete with a five page Yiddish "Glossary and Guide for Goyim". Before the resurgence of Yiddish culture in North America, embodied in the rhythms of Klezmer music and celebrated in festivals like Toronto's biannual Ashkenaz, it seemed as though Yiddish culture might be relegated into memories of the past or projections into a future, without any toe-hold in the present. Now it is safe from that fate, and the stories can be read without such cultural weight on them.

Other SF explores the politics of being Jewish. There's Philip K Dick's wonderful "The Man in the High Castle" which was one of the first and remains one of the best parallel world stories. In the world of the novel, the Axis powers won WWII, and the US is divided into the German East, the Japanese West, and a buffer zone composed of the midwest and south. One of the central characters Frank Frink (né Fink) is Jewish, and his attempt to evade capture is one of the plotlines within the novel. Like all of Dick's work, there are multiple complex plots and themes (one of which concerns an underground science fiction book that has been written about a world in which Germany and Japan lost WWII, a world that isn't quite our world either) and any attempt to summarize would only spoil the pleasure for those who haven't read the book.

Dick isn't Jewish, but Norman Spinrad is, and "The Iron Dream" is his amazing meta-novel. In the world in which it was written Adolph Hitler fails at politics, emigrates to the US, and becomes an obscure cult SF writer. This book is his magnum opus. Spinrad frames the book with mock scholarly analyses of the Hitlerian themes and obsessions, which heighten the reader's joy in the conceit. The book itself is a classic badly written violent BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster) novel in which heroic Earthmen bond behind blond blue-eyed hero Feric Jagger, who leads the "Knights of the Swastika" as they defeat the odious aliens who rule Earth and have sullied human genetic purity. But it also is horrifyingly in your face as it suggests how much of SF is fascist and genocidal – in a word, Hitlerian. Think of the inferior race of orcs, murdered in their thousands for our entertainment in the filmic "Lord of the Rings".

Fiction that makes the reader think about religion is a profound joy, and a personal favourite is Dick's "The Divine Invasion". The book has Elijah and Yahwey as characters, though not the central ones. It's a religious novel that fuses Christian Gnosticism with Kabbalistic theology. Or, if you prefer, it's a mystery novel about the second coming. And for truly outrageous theological speculative fiction, it would be hard to top Harlan Ellison's "Deathbird" which posits that the snake is the true hero of Eden, but that God respun the true story, which is gradually revealed as the backstory to Ellison's narrative. It contains an amusingly real series of questions about Eden that show the contradictions in the familiar story (Number 7. God grew angry when he found out he had been defied. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, didn't he know? Why couldn't he find Adam and Eve when they hid?)

But all three thematic strands in Jewish SF are woven together in the tapestry of Michael Chabon's wonderful "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" which came out in 2007, and won both the Nebula (the SF writers' choice) and the Hugo (the people's choice) for best SF novel of the year. It is the story of a detective (think Bogey, think Chandler) in Yiddish Sitka, that section of Alaska to which four million Jews fled after the Arabs won the 1948 war and drove all the Jews out of Israel. The US gave the Jews a 60 year lease which is a month or so from "the Reversion" at the time the novel starts. Sitka is divided between orthodox "Black Hats" and the non-orthodox. Our hero, Meyer Landsman, is a bruised and cynical shammes (detective); we're told on page two about "the shot glass he's currently dating". Meyer is challenged to confront both the powers of wrong and a cruelly ironic universe that has arranged things so that his ex-wife became his supervisor, and his father committed suicide two days after Meyer gave him a letter explaining he never, ever, wants to play chess again. Twenty years later, after much angst and therapy, Meyer discovered the letter, unopened. And then there's the messianic theme, for as Meyer says, "Every generation loses the messiah it doesn't deserve".

The book is exquisitely written, meticulously plotted, fiendishly clever, and so marinated in contemporary Judaic issues and theology that at times you have to fight your way back to the awareness that it's fiction. Issues of conflict with the original inhabitants of the Sitka and the Jews, possible plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque to build the third temple, concerns over the divided loyalties of Jewish-American politicians are all there, but wrapped in a noir Jewish humour so funny you hardly notice how true it all is. One of the book's leitmotifs is "It's a strange time to be a Jew", which sometimes is answered with, "But aren't they all?"

SF, at its best, is like a good trip to a foreign land. Not only is the experience a joy in itself, but when you come home you look at your own country differently, seeing it now as just one of the possible ways things might be, rather than just how the world is. You have been opened to other ways of seeing, something essential in the challenge we all face in healing our planet. SF can help to do the same thing, in this strange time to be a human. But then, aren't they all?

I’ve noticed that for the past year I’ve been getting irritated with friends when they refer to me as “retired”. They seem, fairly enough, puzzled by this. Wasn’t it me who held a wonderful online retirement party when I stopped teaching high school in 2003, who happily lives on the pension with which the Ontario Teachers Pension fund continues to supply him, and who collect old age security from our federal government? Most of all it puzzles them because I was the person who described himself as retired. So why all of a sudden am I bridling and sputtering that I’m not retired?

My answer starts with the word itself, which Websters defines as “withdrawn from one's position or occupation: having concluded one's working or professional career”. For 32 years I taught in secondary schools. While I’m no longer in a high school, I am still teaching. I put out a weekly distillation of the week’s online politics and entertainment; I co-write an international blog about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being seen in the online world; I teach creative writing to a group of adults online. Together these three forms of teaching take up as much of my time and use as much of my energy as did teaching high school. And I do my own writing, which is slowly moving forward and out into the world.

Many people with whom I taught chose to supply teach after they left full-time teaching. It’s an easier version of the same job; you don’t have lesson planning before school, or marking afterwards. You go in, find the lesson plan on the real teacher’s desk, supervise the class, then leave. To me that seemed like stopping at McDonald’s on the way home from a meal at a wonderful restaurant to grab some fries. Even if it paid far better than the choices I was making, it seemed a diminishment of our capacity to be educators, rather than an expansion.

So part of my resentment of being referred to as having concluded my working or professional career lies in the implicit disparagement of the amount of work I’m doing. For me, this form of teaching is in many ways more challenging than teaching high school. In a traditional math course it was always clear what came next; even in an English course I knew that If I’d taught Macbeth, act V, scene 4 today, the odds were rock solid that we’d do scene 5 tomorrow. And so it went, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in that petty pace to the last syllable of classroom time, which was a good part of the reason for leaving. Now the only limits on what I choose to include in the magazine, write about in the blog, or teach in the course are my own limits, so the challenge becomes to expand and deepen those limits. My professional career has expanded, not concluded.

But it seems that the core of what defines a career in this society is whether, and how much we are paid. Susan Musgrave, a fine Canadian poet, loves to tell her story of trying to get a phone installed and being asked her occupation by the phone company. She responded, “Writer.” Without missing a beat, the person at the other end asked, “And how long have you been unemployed?”

When I left secondary school teaching, I realised I had been blessed with a rare and wonderful gift: choosing what I was going to do next without being dependent on how much it paid. So I chose to do things that both expanded my own creativity, and that I hoped would help to do good in the world. I feel pleased both with the places that road has taken me and those to which it continues to take me. So it is the privileging of money over creativity or spirituality that ultimately most rankles. Kurt Vonnegut once pointed how the classic question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” makes money the measure of mind. “If you aren’t making real money, you aren’t really working,” analogously credits cash as the consummate criterion of career.

“Work”, I believe, is the name this society uses for the way we choose to put our energy out into the world. That choice might be to put our energy into making money, into being creative, into healing, into spirituality, or into our personal mixture of such flavours. The form we select changes the way that energy comes back to us. If you need to make a lot of money this week to feed your children, writing novels may not be your wisest choice. But if you want to change the world, and speak your own truth, it might be the perfect one. The essence of “a job”, it seems to me, is to make that choice, then strive to perfect your skill in your chosen form. It is how you play at life with the universe. And whether one chooses the playing field of spirituality, creativity, or monetary skills it is still ultimately the same game.

And that’s the nub. Retiring carries a sense of withdrawing from the world, (re-tirer, pulling back, is the French etymological root). It is always a struggle, whatever our age, to be more fully present in the world, more involved with the reality of what lies in front of us. It is perhaps the great challenge of our lives to change ourselves so we can grasp the world more fully to us, to not repress, deny, block out the pain in the world and what we can do to heal it. The word for what I am doing is not retirement, but repurposing. I’m not sitting and watching from the sidelines; I’m still in the game.