Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Sunday Morning Short Film: Yossi and Yasmin

This beautiful little Israeli film of remembered queer adolescent longing and desire is sweet and sad, filled with yearning that aches with with the mixture of love and sensuality.

I love the way it tells the story indirectly: what happenened to the young gay boy and his young lesbian friend with their respective love interests, and what happened after the kiss...is left to the imagination. That makes for a good discussion post film, and I'd love to know what you think...

5770: The new year and the power of intention, individual and communal

This is the last calendar day of the Judaic calendar year 5769. Tonight, at sunsets around the world Jews will gather in synagogues and around dinner tables to mark the change and to examine their lives in the hope of change.

Change. A word we heard a lot of in the last year. We have the quadrennial change of presidents (or administrations) this year. And it has been a momentous societal change that has also brought up stiff resistance. The election of an African-American president has lanced the boil of racism in our country, and all the pus is spilling out. The poisonous thinking and beliefs held by many has become a daily part of the public lack of discourse. It took no less a moral force than former president Carter to name the elephant in the room. And today House speaker Pelosi talked about the violence that is born when this kind of talk is not merely condoned, but whipped up, by media clowns whose only responsibility is to their ratings.

Since the vast majority of these people are Christians, their communal review is generally around the secular new year. But I think of the words in the first blessing said every morning during the Shaharit service: “day after day You renew Creation.”

The celebration of the new year could be at any moment in any season. We have the communal celebrations of tradition that come down to us based on seasonal and agricultural reasons. Based on the position of the sun in relation to our orbit around it. The Jewish new year usually falls close to the autumn equinox. The Western secular new year falls close to the winter solstice. Both are moments of transition in our relationship to the light of day. Both remind us that time moves forward, that darkness falls and that light returns, in nature and for our planet at least. But clearly we can chose any time of the day or night, and any date on the calendar to review our lives.

As a (Buddhist) Jew, at this time of year I usually find myself in a synagogue reciting a prayer that takes responsibility — the communal confession of the Ashamnu and the Al Het. The prayer is not: “I lie, I steal…” but “We lie, we steal….” It is said with the understanding that as a community we are responsible for our words and our actions.

In my community, one of the phrases we say is “We are zealots for bad causes.” And we are all guilty of this at times.

This is certainly a time when the entire country would do well to do some self-examination.  Here though is the rub. True zealots don’t do this kind of self-examination. And this is the trap Jay Michaelson has fallen into in his recent essay in the Forward on losing his love for Israel.

Jay says that it is “exhausting to maintain my ambivalence.”  Zealots don’t face this kind of exhaustion. Their monomaniacal dedication to their cause energizes them around a single “truth.” But because Jay sees the multiple truths, and the insane zealots on the Israeli side, he loses his resolve.

I understand completely. But this is what happened to Hamlet. When faced with the opportunity to act, his doubts caused him to lose his resolve. And instead of avenging his father and killing his uncle cleanly, everyone ends up dead. As Arjuna stand before his cousins about to go to war with them, and has his doubts, understanding the full horror and moral ambiguity of the situation, Krishna schools him on taking action whole-heartedly.

I am not pretending that I am able to do this. I just recognize the peril of ambivalence.

I have seen how in our support for good causes we have come to mirror the faults of those we oppose. You can see this in Keith Olbermann, who is as guilty of simplification and manipulation of the facts as many on the right, he just happens to be on the side I agree with — I still find him annoying. And more tragically, we can see it in the way Israel betrays it's ideals by slowly becoming what it was founded in reaction against. But at the same time, to come back to the subject of the president and the racism spilling out across America, this is where I lose my patience with Obama. So it looks like he just stands there and takes the punches while the wing-nut right goes to town. He talks of bipartisanship in a city where one party has the knives out for him. It isn’t easy to do that. It is insanely reasonable (there’s a phrase for you). It’s, pardon the expression, Christian. 

It’s how he was able to go the Islamic nations and speak to their issues in ways anyone rarely speaks out (or can in their societies without fear of imprisonment or worse). And how he was able to tell Israel off on the subject of the settlements.

It’s how he was able to go to the black churches and say he supports lgbt rights while at the same time pushing back on the lgbt community, and pushing our buttons by embracing so-called religious figures we see as divisive if not simply outright hateful.

The thing that seems to give Obama his strength is just his ability to hold the tensions and see the ambiguities. He isn’t ambivalent in the face of these things. Psychologist Arnold Mindell has made a career of studying the ability to stand in this position and gain strength from it. He calls it Worldwork.

It’s a way of finding strength in admitting and opening to the individual and community failures, and committing listening deeply to the other. Listening to what’s under some of the insane words: the fears that aren’t spoken because they are more threatening, and speaking to them.

I won’t say Obama is a master of this at all. He enrages me much of the time, and disappoints me. And I worry that his insanely reasonable attitude will lose the next election. But at the same time, I have to admire his unwavering commitment to staying open. He said it in his recent speech to Congress when he offered to work with others who were willing to constructively work together even it meant compromise and conflict. He doesn’t shy from that. But he did say that he would move ahead without them if they weren’t willing to do the work.

He is the adult in the room. I don’t know what his spiritual path is. He spent time in a madrasah in Indonesia. He joined a church in Chicago. Like me, he may well be a boundary crosser. And I don’t know what his process of review and self-examination is. What I do know is that now is the time we in my traditional faith community spends in examination of ourselves as a community and individuals.  

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have many of them. But I won’t let my misgivings over the real problems in Israel let me waver in my defense of it in the face of insane zealotry — both from within and without. Both against the haredi attacking the lgbt community and the surrounding countries attacking Israel’s right to exist. 

And in the meantime, I’ll spend the next ten days doing some of the spiritual work of the season, examining my intention, words and actions. But I have found the best season to do this work is always now. As the 10^th step of the 12 step tradition suggests: continue to take personal inventory, and when wrong, promptly admit it.

I'm sure I've offended many with this. Well, that assumes many have read this, and have even read this far, and I know better. This is part of my own writing out of my internal struggle with these issues, in the hope that I can act with equanimity if not zealous certainty. I hope this challenges you to do your work. I welcome your comments, and of course...

May you all have a new year that is both sweet and free of high fructose corn syrup.  

Toronto Film Festival, Queer Israel, Palestinian Rights and Disordered Thinking

First an excerpt from an article by Hannah Brown in the Jerusalem Post about the controversy in Toronto with film maker John Greyson boycotting the festival there:

"...there has been a ridiculous flap over the Toronto festival's decision to feature a cinematic tribute to Tel Aviv in honor of that city's centennial, including films such as Assi Dayan's Life According to Agfa. Canadian director John Greyson chose to boycott the festival, withdrawing his 15-minute documentary about a festival for gays in Sarajevo. Greyson and others who support the boycott gave all the usual reasons, accusing Israel of apartheid and citing the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. If I had a hundred pages, I wouldn't have space to exhaust the ironies of anyone choosing to boycott a festival because he feels that showing such films as Assi Dayan's almost indescribably negative and bleak portrayal of Israel provides sparkling public relations for the country. This movie depicts Israelis as so deeply racist and irreparably corrupt, if Theodore Herzl could have seen into the future and caught a screening of it, he would have converted to Buddhism and retired to the Himalayas. Abused wives, exploited prostitutes, noble Palestinian mechanics and their lazy-slob Jewish bosses, and a selfish womanizer who trashes the lives of everyone around him are just a few of the characters featured in the other films planned for the tribute, including Danny Lerner's Kirot, Keren Yedaya's Jaffa, and Uri Zohar's Big Eyes. Eytan Fox's The Bubble is a thoughtful and, I think, generally underrated film about the culture clash that takes place when a gay Palestinian comes to live in one of Tel Aviv's chic, bohemian neighborhoods. However, anyone who would call The Bubble pro-Israeli propaganda, when it focuses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and has a hero who falls in love with a Palestinian, is so absurd as to defy any logic. It's quite possible that there is no other city in the world where mainstream (and often government-supported) filmmakers have been so staunchly and relentlessly critical of their government.

Now I am a big fan of Greyson's film Lilies, one of most interesting queer films ever made. But I find his thinking on this issue to be disordered. I am no apologist for the injustices in Israel. There are those who will point to the real danger to their lives that queer people face in the Islamic societies that surround Israel, and while this is true, you can't make grey while by comparing it to black. And Israeli society is grey to say the least. But it ain't black. As I've said before, I urge Mr. Greyson to show Lilies anywhere in the Palestinian territory. Or Egypt. Or Syria.

Meanwhile, the homoeroticism that seethes under the relationships between men in the orthodox world break through to the surface in a film that premiered in Cannes last spring, Eyes Wide Open. Will it make it to NYC? Has it found a distributor? Inquiring minds want to know. Here's a clip:

Yes, a film like this, despite the historically accurate cultural acceptance of homoerotic relations (though with an age difference that would not be accepted in the West) is something else I don't think we'll see coming out of Syria, Iran, Iraq or Saudi Arabia anytime soon, must less the Palestinian territory. The injustices suffered by Palestinians are real. The inequity in Israeli society, the growing religious intolerance and the rifts between the Jews of different cultures who've settled there make for a pressure cooker I can't imagine. I don't see how Mr. Greyson has added any light to the situation. Only heat. And that's the last thing anyone in the Middle East needs. Just my opinion.

Fundamentalists see violence as acceptable: Pinchas is the template for Haredi response

Voz Is Neias, the website of the Orthodox Jewish Community, reports today that youngsters putting up posters in Jerusalem to condemn the deadly shooting spree in a Tel Aviv gay youth center last week were attacked by haredim in Mea She'arim.

The comments in response to the report range from thoughtful to hateful with everything in between, as responses to hot button issues on a blog usually are. But make for interesting reading into the minds of a community (if a rather skewed view that can't be called representative.)