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The Sichuan Broadcasts

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Broadcast three: An irreversible mental event.


  For the sake of truth, there is something I can't hide from you. I have been the subject of an irreversible mental event. It was in the Garden of Idependence in Jerusalem. I was lying on my back, in the dead of night, watching the stars. I had fled the ghetto a few weeks earlier. I still put on a white shirt and a black skullcap every morning to go to Mea Shearim. I worked there as a cashier in the bakery shop of zionist crooks who sold black dyed bread for country bread to gullible Hasidim. But I was sharing a house with a bunch of other apostates and I didn't keep any commandment anymore. I felt very clearly that I would never be a good Jew, that I couldn't be one, and that there was no point in trying to be one. The problem was me, not Yiddishkeit. The Torah was true, I had no doubt about that; the five books of Moses had been revealed from above.


  I had had all the possible rational objections against that. When I arrived in Paris to study philosophy, I was a staunch atheist, a radical leftist hating all forms of racism and sexism. I couldn't be farther away from religion, especially from such a reactionary and exclusive cult as Judaism. I had come to Paris full of zeal for the truth, swollen with youthful energy to fight for freedom and equality. Nobody was interested. They were all trying to figure out which theoretical trend would be fashionable by the time they attended postgraduate school, and scheming career plans. They were preparing examinations. I had come too late. I wasn't a teenager in the 70's, I was a generation late. In May 68, the biggest workers' strike ever and the students' uprising had started an epic decade of social unrest. Life had been about to change. Thousands of young Jews had thrown themselves into that heroic struggle. But the struggle had waned, and the movement had collapsed. Life hadn't changed. Many of them didn't cope with the failure and lost their mind or killed themselves. Most sold out in time and made a career of denouncing what they had worshipped. Those are today's leading intellectuals, who deal in fast-thinking and ready-made ethics for sensible policies, the left flank of the scribbling detail of Capital. But a stubborn handful hadn't surrendered. The advent of Revolution was an impossible, but they knew they had been right to rebel.  They felt that if it is right to rebel, it is because a messiah should come. They had stuck together. They had kept studying and arguing together. And they had met a most extraordinary Morrocan Rabbi.
  He was born in the misery of the mellah and had made his way trough the lithuanian yeshivot to the top. He was very short, he had a thunderous voice and spoke with a heavy Arabic accent. Often, he would tell folks around him: " How did I become such a successful rabbi? People say that I understand a lot. It is true that I have sat at the feet of great men when I was young, and I do remember a few things they said. But if I made it, it's really because I am the best wedding party entertainer in this country!" He had his way to set a party on fire. It is a religious duty to gladden the bride and groom on their wedding day, but that can get a bit awkward, joy by order. He would embark on a discourse about Torah, and come up with some astonishing contradiction that no-one had ever thought of. He spoke a lot with his hands, and some screaming, spicing up his demonstration with matter-of-fact side remarks that stunned everybody. (Like that one, which became famous: "The Torah is not a religion because religion is shit".) He would walk briskly, back and forth across the dancing floor, suddenly crouching when getting at a crucial point of his argument, and led his bewildered audience through the dark regions we'd rather ignore. His speech would end abruptly, on a question or a riddle, and he would strike up a traditional tune, one that begins with a slow melancholy strain, and goes faster and faster, and turns into a song of wild joy, and he would start to dance like a madman, and draw the crowd after him, and make them all dance like madmen.

 

Posted by , on 24/08/04 in Actualités.