Midstream- A Monthly Jewish Review

Summer 2011 Feature

  • Gilad Shalit: A Meditation on the Return of “the 1” Haim Chertok
  • The Hasidic Revolution: Foundation of American Popular Culture Robert Cherry
  • The Great DiMaggio and the King of Judah Leo Haber

    Gilad Shalit: A Meditation on the Return of “the 1”

    by Haim Chertok

    In Arad, the small city in the northern Negev where I've lived since 2008, the posters were taken down the very day after Gilad Shalit's release.  For nearly four years, the greater part of his ordeal of incarceration and isolation, I passed the two outsized posters three or four times a week. They hung on fences at either end of Arad's ORT High School.  They had been displayed strategically the better to catch of eye of street traffic and passersby.  Depicted on a field of blue and white was a stylized portrait of a boyish face.  The only other prominent detail was an unfurled Israeli flag.  The caption read "Gilad Adaiyin Chai"—Gilad Is Still Alive—and, in smaller letters, "www.gilad.org."  Identical banners were fastened outside of Arad's junior high school and, indeed, outside of junior and senior high schools, at prominent roadside intersections, at shopping malls and comparable public interfaces throughout the land. Nowhere were they more dramatically placed than those opposite the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem where Gilad's parents, Noam and Aviva Shalit, abandoning their family home in a village near the Lebanese border, had been living in all weather, in all seasons in a protest tent outside the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem for fifteen months.   Nothing about the visual image announced that the young man was a soldier.  That surely was intentional.  Gilad was visually depicted as an iconic Israeli youngster, an innocent son of Israel who had been thrust into the lion's den but, lest it had for the moment slipped through our minds, was not dead…not yet.

    Behind that blue visage there loomed a veritable palimpsest of earlier poster portraits of our sons, of other ghostly faces.  Staff Sergeants Zecharya Baumel, Zvi Feldman, and Yehuda Katz, all missing in action in a battle at Sultan Yakoub in the First Lebanon War—my war—in 1982; Major Ron Arad, captured in 1986 when his plane was downed over Lebanon; Guy Hever, abducted from his base on the Golan Heights in 1997; Druse soldier Majdy Halabi, last seen at a hitchhiking stop on the Golan in 2005.   Then there were Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, Israeli reservists abducted near the Lebanese border in 2006.   Few retain sober expectations that any of these MIAs, at least not in this world, will ever smile or embrace his family again. Nevertheless, this lost platoon still exercises a potent, lively presence in the Israeli imagination.  They represent false hopes and illusions, perhaps a failure of imagination, almost surely lost opportunities.  

    And then there is 19-year Nachshon Wachsman, an Israeli soldier kidnapped in 1994 by a Hamas cell operating in central Israel and then imprisoned in a Palestinian village, one under Israeli control not more than fifteen minutes from Jerusalem.   Wachsman was killed in the course of a failed rescue attempt.  If the IDF could not liberate a young soldier from captivity when they knew exactly where he was located within terrain where they enjoyed total freedom of movement, what chance of success could there possibly be for an operation to extricate Gilad Shalit alive from Gaza? 

    Indeed, the last time Jewish captives were returned home with breath in their bodies was a year before Gilad Shalit was born.  In May of 1985, in exchange for 1,150 Palestinian prisoners, none of them, at least technically, murderers, three Israeli soldiers were liberated.  At the time it seemed a staggeringly disproportionate price to pay.  After all, just a year earlier, for 291 soldiers, thirteen civilians, and 74 soldiers' bodies were recovered. Nevertheless, compared to what came after, these earlier exchanges looked like terrific bargains.  The most recent previous exchange deal, prior to this past October, returned home six Lebanese terrorists and 200 bodies.  That was in July of 2008.  In return, we received the corpses of two Israeli soldiers.  Four years earlier, Israel yielded 430 Palestinian prisoners and sixty bodies in return for one civilian and three of our dead soldiers. 

    And now in 2011, inflation has set in with a vengeance as the Palestinians have parlayed their small stake into spectacular gains.  What the return of Gilad Shalit has cost Israel has been the phased release of 1,027 prisoners—477 of the most dangerous all at once, and another 550 two months later.  

    Amidst all these wildly disproportionate figures, what is truly salient is the difference in kind. Initially the exchanges had been soldiers for soldiers.  Since 1985, however, Israel has been delivering up, not soldiers for soldiers, but prisoners, many highly dangerous, for corpses.    The majority of the first batch of 477 returnees this October had been convicted of planning or perpetrating murderous, terrorist operations against hundreds of Israeli civilians.  They were serving sentences of life imprisonment.  Their release violated, indeed renders null and void, that long-established fixture of Israeli policy: refusing even to countenance the release of any prisoners with "blood on their hands."  Marking a new, highly controversial watershed, it represents a quantum leap into uncharted territory rife with more precarious calculations and equivalencies than ever before.

    In spite of this, according to the Israeli press, the deal for the release of Gilad Shalit has enjoyed the approval of four out of five Israelis.  Of course, most of us are genuinely elated that this most recent prisoner exchange deal would consummate not with the return of bodily parts but with the return of "our boy" to the embrace of his family, a denouement, I suspect, for which not many Israelis entertained real hopes.   And yet, it is certain that this support, while very broad, does not run very deep.  How could jubilation be unalloyed when what we really feel is something profoundly equivocal: inexpressible relief commingled with unease and trepidation.  It is well that no one from Ma'ariv or Ha'aretz solicited my opinion because amalgamating my “wherefores” and “however” into a definite "aye" or "nay" would have been excruciatingly difficult.

    Of course, one would have to be stony-hearted not to have been moved by ubiquitous images of the boyish, skinny soldier—a very embodiment of the Israeli Everykid— reunited with his loving, extraordinarily resourceful family after his five dark, dismal, “eyeless-in-Gaza” years of captivity and isolation.  How churlish not to perceive his return to his family and country as "a good thing."  Not so, however, for one select contingent of Israelis, united by a particularly public kind of personal tragedy: those who have lost husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers in terrorist attacks, those for whom a major source of solace had been the knowledge that all of the murderers would remain imprisoned until their dying day.  These Israelis have very publicly registered their sense of betrayal by the State of Israel.  Their tortured images in the press and passionate objections voiced over TV have been heartrending.  If the larger situation argues that, on balance, their agony must perhaps be overridden, nevertheless, it cannot be dismissed peremptorily.  

    Based upon past experience, Israel may anticipate thatsixty per cent of the released terrorists, say about 290 of the first group of 477, will return again to the regimen of organized mayhem that lent meaning to their lives and their incarceration.  In order to minimize this menace, fewer than half of the released have been returned to the West Bank.  There the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas has in recent years been cooperating with the IDF and military intelligence to successfully suppress terrorism.  The rest of the prisoners, presumably those considered more dangerous, have been directed either to Gaza or sent into exile in Turkey, Syria, or Qatar.  

    How effective the deportation stratagem will prove to be over the long haul is impossible to predict.  Certainly, Israel has no reason to believe that Hamas or Syria or flotilla-prone Turkey will expend much thought or energy on containing their new residents.  It is far more likely that many persons, heartened, like myself, by Gilad Shalit's release, are at the same time deeply apprehensive that future activities of many of those 477 will result in death or serious injury to a significant number of Israeli civilians.  Remember those 1,150 Palestinians who were released en masse in 1985?  In the end, 178 Israeli civilian casualties have been attributed to a return to terrorism by some of them.  Which is to say that the overwhelming support within Israel to the agreement leading to the lopsided exchange of October 18th could very possibly prove ephemeral.  Rather than clearheaded, the agreement to which Israel concurred in 2011 may be viewed by history the way it is already being perceived by Israel's sworn enemies—to be a supine, sappy sign of weakness.  On the other hand, a belief in the sanctity of human life cuts in both directions: Does the redemption of a single living, breathing Israeli captive in the present overbalance the likelihood or, let us be clear, the near certitude that the upshot will be Israeli casualties in the future?  Or does it not? 

    The only Israelis constrained by oath and duty to attempt to resolve such insoluble conflicts are our politicians.  Unlike newspaper polls, their ayes and nays impact directly upon lives and events in real time.  Here, without the least attempt to square past remarks with new realities, we have witnessed a volte-face: Israel's Prime Minister, whose signature issue throughout a long career in public service has been national security, who in print and person has for many years argued cogently (and also fulminated vociferously) against any dealings with terrorists, has exposed himself to the charge of dancing unapologetically with jackals.  Equally remarkable, the 1,027 for 1 accord was exacted with the concurrence, not of a narrow majority of Israel's right-of-center government, but by an overwhelming margin in the cabinet of 26 - 3.  One of the recalcitrant three, current Minister of Strategic Affairs, Lt. General Moshe Ya'alon, explained the inner dynamics of his "nay" in terms of the difficulty to vote for the "head" over the "heart."  So the question remains: why at this juncture did Israel choose, to suspend rational considerations and be guided instead by what may be viewed as sentimentality?  

    The bedrock supporting this 1,000 to 1 shot that came home a winner rests upon historical Jewish experience and traditional Jewish sources.  "Every Jew is responsible for every other Jew"—Kol Yisrael arevim zeh-ba-zeh—strikes a deeply resonant emotion in the Jewish psyche whether one is observant, secular, or "traditional."  This conscientious precept is deeply imbedded in Jewish law (halachah) as a mitzvah rabah, "a great commandment."  Indeed, halachah has consistently considered captivity worse even than starvation or death.  In Israeli military tradition, this hallowed principle assumes the form of pidyon sh'vuyim, or Redemption of the Captives.  Hence, the powerful injunction not to rest easy until every Jewish captive is redeemed. 

    Hamas and Hizbollah, nothing if not adroit bargainers, have selectively familiarized themselves with Jewish ethical mandates and have become past masters exploiting them to the hilt.  They have learned to play the prisoner-swap game with cutthroat finesse.  In order to raise the anxiety level of the Israeli public, they made Shalit's isolation from the outside world effectively hermetic.  Over the course of five years, the young man was permitted to write his parents on only three occasions.  Despite repeated requests for humane treatment of Shalit emanating, not only from Israel and the International Committee of the Red Cross but also from public figures such as America's Obama, Britain's David Cameron, Germany's Merkel, France's Sarkozy (Shalit holds dual Israeli-French citizenship), Russia's Medvedev, Archbishop Antonio Franco (the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel), and even Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas did not budge.  They were fully aware that conditions of confinement for thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel would in no way be affected by how well or poorly they treated the single Israeli in their custody.  They were confident that given the singular fate of earlier Israeli MIAs, pressures within Israel to secure Shalit's release would only augment with the passage of time.  In sum, they held a good hand: by remaining obdurate, they could increase their demands without fear of withdrawal or reprisal.  

    The truly new factor this time around in the prisoner-negotiations track was the  energy, initiative, pluck, and perseverance of Noam and Aviva Shalit, Gilad's parents.  Almost from the start, the elder Shalits demonstrated that they had learned the hard lesson from the past. In its dealings with the families of Ron Arad, Zecharya Baumel, and the others, Israeli authorities were quick to offer assurances that they were doing their best and would continue to do all that was humanly possible to secure the release of the missing sons and husbands. The truth is that they could not be fully forthcoming about the current state of negotiations, nor—and this was a slow and painful realization—with pursuing all possible avenues to the hilt in order to achieve the release of the imprisoned Israelis.  Moreover, independent initiatives by family members were for the most part frankly discouraged.  Until too late, most family members acquiesced.

    In contrast, the Shalits, with the lamentable fate of recent Israeli captives to guide them, did not allow themselves to be lulled into waiting mode by government assurances.  In tandem with but entirely disengaged from the Israeli government's behind-the-scene maneuverings, the Shalits pursued an independent agenda to try to secure the return of their son.  Although the pressure their efforts exerted was surely felt by the Israeli authorities to be more of an irritant or an impediment rather than collaborative, in retrospect it actuality complemented official efforts towards securing their son's release. 

    Given the Israeli Prime Minister's notorious lack of chemistry with many world leaders, the Shalits were far better positioned than he to appeal for support from the likes of Sarcozy, Obama, Merkel, Cameron, and the UN's Ban Ki-moon.  Moreover, being more focused and single-minded, in addition to soliciting backing of vocal support from leaders on four continents, the Shalits were tireless in organizing support groups, marches, and public demonstrations; in speaking out to the media; in poster-campaigning Gilad's image into the national and international consciousness.  In New York, for example, September 7, 2011 was proclaimed Gilad Shalit Day.  The nerve center of this remarkable, multi-pronged campaign, was, of course, that protest tent that stood opposite the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem like a standing reproach.   

    In the end, in spite of decades of arguing against any and all talks or dealings with terrorists, Prime Minister Netanyahu talked and dealt.  In extenuation, he claimed that he forced Hamas to reduce its demands substantially—from, give or take, 1,500 prisoners to a handful over 1,000 and to the exclude from the deal an uncertain number of particularly egregious implacable terrorists.  There seems little reason to doubt these claims or even the inference that had it not been hardliner Bibi doing the dealing, the upshot could have been worse for Israel. 

    Yet even granting this mitigation, for Mr. Security they amount to little more than a fig leaf.  One feels strongly that, in his heart of hearts, the Prime Minister did not truly wish to deal at all.  So did he by his actions demonstrate his capacity for pragmatism or the depths of his humanity?  Or, rather, incapable any longer of withstanding the force field emanating from that vexatious protest tent that stood across from his front door, did he not simply cave?  It seems to me that all the aforesaid were, to varying degrees, in play.

    1,027 for 1!  Would not the Prime Minister likely concur with the considered judgment of former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who amidst the general elation that after the five-year ordeal of the Shalit family was ending happily: provided a cautionary slant "I'm glad Shalit is back.  We had no choice but to strike a deal, but…I oppose the deal which was implemented.  I thought it wrong to release 140 terrorists to the territories.  Many of them will resume their terrorist activity. We bolstered Hamas and weakened the P.A."  In sharp contrast are the views of seasoned observer J. J. Goldberg in the Jewish Daily Forward: "What happened was that the government made some hard calculations, and the math came out in favor of the deal…It's a good deal in two ways.  For one, the security risks are not nearly as great as critics claim.  More important, it's a vital strategic move for Israel."  

    Though I must demur from Goldberg's first conclusion (and therein lie the grounds of my own ambivalence), on his second, "more important" point, I find his reasoning to be sharp and informed.  As the grandfather of one grandson who has just completed IDF basic training, of a second who is a reservist, and of a third, a high-school senior who will be serving in the near future, a paramount concern was addressed in Goldberg's concluding remarks: "rescuing captured soldiers isn't tenderheartedness; Israel's survival depends upon it.  Its citizens must don uniforms and risk death repeatedly for the sake of their country.  They need to know that their country has their back [sic].  It's that simple.  The army's morale is Israel's most important weapon, strategically speaking.  And given the turmoil in Egypt, the key intermediary, the window to Shalit's freedom might have been closing.  He could have been lost forever, like aviator Ron Arad.  That would have been devastating."

    I feel quite certain that a substantial majority of fellow parents and grandparents of soldiers would share the above sentiments.  Hence, the extreme reticence of the IDF about public discussion of its so-called "Hannibal Protocol," a mandate that sends shivers down the spine of many parents (and grandparents).  As succinctly expounded by the headline writer of a recent article in Ha'aretz (November 18, 2011), "IDF warns soldiers of kidnappings ahead after Gilad Shalit's release: Army tells soldiers to do anything necessary, including endangering comrades, to avoid abduction."  "Anything necessary" is then glossed as stated by an anonymous infantry battery commander as follows: "Under no circumstances should a soldier be taken hostage.  Our soldiers do their utmost to prevent this from happening—they [are ordered] to fire at a group of abductors even if that means their IDF comrade would be killed.  And the soldiers understand this fully: They cannot become another Gilad Shalit."  

    The broader context?  Shouts emanating from the jubilant Gaza crowds for the taking of "one, two, a thousand Gilad Shalits" and the $1,000,000 prize offered by a Saudi prince to anyone who captures an Israeli soldier for the purpose of  swapping him for Palestinian prisoners. Does this not suggest that the 1,000 to 1 deal is not an unqualified morale-booster for IDF soldiers or, more poignantly, for their loved ones?   

    Shortly after his return, photos of Gilad Shalit, in army uniform, newly promoted to sergeant major but looking frail, were widely displayed over the media.  Upon arrival by helicopter at Tel Nof Airbase, he saluted the Prime Minister who, curiously, for the occasion had chosen to wear a distractingly bright blue necktie.  Neither figure appeared especially natural.  How could they?  But looking on when the young soldier embraced his waiting father, Netanyahu's smile grew warmer, seemed more genuinely affectionate.  He had, in fact, participated in performing a mitzvah that embodied core Jewish values.  No matter the consequences, at that moment he basked in the knowledge that he had done an unimpeachably good deed.  

    Three weeks have now passed since the posters have come down at the ORT High School in Arad, since the protest tent in Jerusalem has been disassembled, and since Gilad has returned to his family and home, in Mitzpe Hila, the small village in Western Galilee that is home to about half as many residents as the total number of Palestinians for whom he was exchanged.  His father reports him to be generally in good health.  

    At the request of the Shalit family, the Israeli media have, for the most part, been respecting their privacy.  Gilad's only incursion into the public eye occurred just on his first Shabbat back at home.  After five sunless years, the young man, accompanied by his family, had chosen to go to the beach.  Ah, but this is Israel where, for a "celebrity" such as the "1," such "innocent" choices can have antic sequels.  A Knesset member from Shas (Sephardi Ultra-Orthodox Party), appointed by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef "to help to bring Shalit closer to Judaism," publicly chastised the 25-year soldier for choosing to spend his first Shabbat morning at the beach instead of in synagogue where he could have said Birkat Ha-gomel, the blessing traditionally recited after a Torah reading upon one's deliverance from a life-threatening situation.  

    Well, such is the meddlesome, impertinent country that I (who am, by the way, a Sabbath observer) chose to inhabit.  More than three decades of living here have not inured me to the presumptuous shenanigans of my fellow Israelis.  So far the body politic has not, thank God, experienced any cause to regret the celebrated prisoner deal.  On the contrary, at least on the surface, an era of relative good feelings reigns.  But beneath the surface, where one's deeper apprehensions lie dormant, I know I am far from alone in sensing that the ramifications of the Shalit narrative have not yet reached their final denouement.  In dread, many of us await the drop of the other shoe.   •



    About the author
    Haim Chertok, who made aliyah in 1976, is a writer who lives in Arad and teaches at Ben-Gurion University.  His latest book is The Life of James Parkes: He Also Spoke as a Jew.  His most recent appearance in Midstream was a review of Curt Leviant's A Novel of Klass (Winter 2010). 

    The Hasidic Revolution: Foundation of American Popular Culture

    by Robert Cherry

    At the end of the nineteenth century, Askenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland and the Pale of Settlement in Russia came to the United States. Their behavior was perceived by many nativists to be distinctive and threatening. One set of behaviors stood out. Irish Catholicism stressed an Augustinian revulsion towards bodily pleasures as did, to a lesser degree, Protestant Victorian morality. They both strove to repress sexual desires, especially among women. In contrast, Jewish immigrants seemed to be pleasure seekers and embraced female sexuality; behavior that drew the ire of many observers, including Henry Ford and the Catholic League for Decency. For Ford,

    “Frivolity, sensuality, indecency, appalling illiteracy and endless platitude are the marks of the American Stage as it approaches its degeneracy under Jewish control. … Little by little the mark of the filthy tide has risen against the walls of the American Theater until now it is all but engulfed.”1

    Within the literature, there is conflict between those who believe this immigrant behavior has its roots in Jewish religious tradition and those who believe it reflected the behavior of those who were escaping the religious dictates of the old country.2 By looking more closely at the attitude of the Hasidic communities of Eastern Europe towards bodily pleasures, we can better judge the relationship of the behavior of immigrants to the religious communities that they left.

    The extreme piety of the Safed community was a particularistic response to Spanish expulsion and the havoc it created for Sephardic Jewry. During the seventeenth century, Ashkenazi Jewry experienced comparable devastation. The 1640s peasant rebellion against Polish sovereignty, led by Bogdan Chmeilnicki, destroyed some 700 Ukrainian communities. It caused the deaths of a few hundred thousand Jews, more than had been killed during both the Crusades and the Black Deaths.3 While order was eventually attained, for the next century, pogroms periodically occurred, perpetrated by Ukrainian dissidents to continued foreign rule. In addition, the declining power of the Polish state caused economic hardships for much of Polish Jewry.4

    This bleak situation was one factor that enabled Lurianic views to gain adherents among the Eastern European religious elite. Buttressed by the legacy of the German pietists, these works complemented a deeply pessimistic world-view in which continual, joyfully accepted suffering, both physical and mental, was central to religious perfection. It was essential to withstand all physical temptations (i.e. pleasures) in order to surmount all obstacles that this world perversely presents, in order to attain the beatitude of the next.5

    During the seventeenth century, influential treatises began to stress “unremitting gloom, pessimism, and oppressive piety.” Sukkot would be ignored because its joyfulness “was incompatible with the central themes – weeping, worrying, self-mortification, and despondency. Every possible occasion for critical self-scrutiny accompanied by sorrowful self-mortification is exhaustively expatiated upon. Even the Sabbath was to be, for the truly devout, a day of tearful mourning—despite clear halakhic statements to the contrary.”6

    The discussion and practice of popular Kabbalah informed daily discourse. Cheap Kabbalistic books found their way into many homes. Now even the masses could see how important Kabbalah was and could learn some of its principles through ritual observance, listening to popular sermons, colloquial conversations, and viewing the decorations in the synagogue.7 Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Kabbalistic ideas were widespread and asceticism was practiced by many pious Jews.

    One practitioner was the Baal Shem Tov, usually referred to by his acronym, the Besht. For seven years he led an ascetic life of solitude in the Carpathian mountains, living apart from his wife for much of the time. During this time, the Besht drew closer to God and mystical Kabbalistic ideas. He then worked as a schoolteacher and tutor, before publicly proclaiming himself to be a baal shem: mystic who could use the Kabbalah to perform miraculous acts.8

    At the time, baalei shem were respected members of the Jewish community. The Besht’s reputation grew over the years. When, in 1740, he moved to the “large, secure, and generally prosperous” town of Miedzyboz, the Besht was widely known.9 Like other baalei shem, the Besht gave advice to Jewish families in need and communed with God on their behalf. He also began to foster a new outlook for the Hasidim that attracted a following.

    At the time, the Kabbalist hasidim were elitist and separatist. They often conducted their own prayer services apart from the community synagogue, held themselves to a stricter standard of kashrut so that they would not eat the meat normally sold by the community butchers, and restricted access to their group. And they engaged in severe ascetic practices.10

    In contrast, the Besht sought to bring God to the common Jew, so he rejected their separatist nature. Just as important, the Besht forcefully rejected and denigrated ascetic behavior based on a verse in Isaiah: "The whole world is full of His glory" (6:13). If the whole world is full of God's glory, the Besht reasoned, then the pious Kabbalists were wrong in thinking that one had to turn one's back on the pleasures of the world.

    The Besht not only rejected self-mortification, but he mandated the use of material pleasures as a means of spiritual elevation. Because the world was full of God, the Besht believed that a person always should be joyful. Indeed, it was said that the soul cannot rejoice in the spiritual until the material has rejoiced in the corporeal.11 One of his disciples, Pinhas of Koretz claimed that “the essence of Hasidism began with the Besht because he abrogated many of the customs instituted by Rabbi Judah Hasid in the Middle Ages and observed up until the eighteenth century.”12

    This doctrine was a strong challenge to many ideas current among Jews in the Besht's time. The kabbalists preached asceticism and advocated that Jews fast every Monday and Thursday. The Besht warned people against such practices, fearing that they would lead to melancholy, not joy.13 He stated: “In my view, everyone should bring himself into a state of love of God, love of Israel, and love of Torah; and there is no need for mortifications.”14

    Many of the Besht’s disciples came from this Kabbalist tradition. For example, Nahman of Horodenka said, “When I was a great hasid, I went every day to a cold mikveh. Despite this I could not rid myself of wayward thoughts, until I turned to the wisdom of the Besht.”15 Not surprisingly, some continued ascetic practices. Most notable was Dov Ber who became an influential Hasidic leader after the Besht’s death. Before meeting the Besht, Dov Ber (the Maggid) had adopted Lurianic prescriptions of strict fasts and severe self-mortification.16 Even after the Maggid began studying with the Besht, he continued, to some extent at least, with his earlier ascetic ways of fasting and self-affliction despite the fact that the Besht opposed such practices.17

    The Besht actively tried to wean his disciples from their ascetic practices. A case in point was Jacob Joseph of Polnoy. When learning that he continued some of his ascetic practices, the Besht wrote:

    I have received your letter and note from the first two lines that you think it essential to fast. My innermost parts trembled at this report. Thus I decree that you do not involve yourself with such things, Heaven forfend, for this is an act of melancholy and gloom.18

    David Biale places much more emphasis on the ascetic tendencies of the Maggid and his students than the Besht’s philosophy. Biale stated: “But there were those among his most influential disciples who rejected this understanding of his teaching in the half century after his death.” He then recounted the ascetic views of some members of this group:

    Mendel of Kotzk, perhaps the most extreme ascetic in the whole history of Hasidism, … urged that young men come to his court immediately after marriage, so that when sexual desire was at its peak, he could crush it once and for all … Mendel understood the Biblical prohibition on adultery to include relations with one’s own wife! … … [Dov Baer] concludes that ‘even during intercourse,’ one should ignore the physical in favor of the spiritual. … One should love one’s wife the way in which one loves one’s tefillin, for one loves them [as an instrument] for fulfilling the commandments of God.19

    Mendel of Kotzk and the compiler of the Maggid’s saying, Elimelech of Lyzhansk, both subscribed to an Augustinian-like view of Adam’s downfall: it was not the sexual act but his lustfulness. And like Augustine, these men championed celibate-like marriages. Biale pointed out, “These [ascetic] teachings were not universally accepted by all Hasidic sects, but, because the Maggid developed a circle of disciples who themselves founded sects, his radical ideas formed the basis for a whole school that dominated early Hasidim.”20 Biale then concluded:

    In its attitude toward relations between men and women, Hasidism radicalized some of the ascetic tendencies in earlier traditions and introduced the most extreme anti-erotic values ever to appear in any Jewish texts, values that in some respects resemble Christian monastic renunciations of sexuality. On the threshold of modernity, then, one finds one of the most widespread movements of sexual asceticism in Jewish history.”21

    The Maggid was past fifty years old and had well-formed Lurianic views before his relatively brief relationship with the Besht.22 While the Besht seemed to stress radiant visionary perceptions, he virtually ignored self abnegation. By contrast, the Maggid rarely taught the radiance but focused on the annihilation of the self. Similar to Biale, Lowenthal concluded, “The theme of self-abnegation is paramount and reaches extremes which, some writers suggest, have never previously been expressed in Jewish literature.”23

    Almost all of the senior disciples of the Besht did not accept the Maggid as his successor.24 In particular, Pinhas of Korzec vigorously questioned the Maggid’s interpretation of Hasidism and his way of conduct.25 He was particularly upset in the way the Maggid separated himself from the ordinary hasid. Pinhas exclaimed, “Of what benefit to them is the Maggid of Mezeritch since he has excluded himself for so many years.”26

    Most notable was Jacob Joseph of Polnoy who strived to bring the Besht’s teachings to a broader group within the Jewish community: rabbis, itinerant preachers, learned ritual slaughterers, and teachers.27 He strove to repair the bridge between the rabbinic elite and the masses. He argued that even the common man has a path to commune with God rather than the traditional religious view that “mystical communion with God had always been regarded as the prerogative of a small minority of spiritually gifted men.”28

    Jacob Joseph’s Toledot Yako Yosepf (1780) was the first major Hasidic work to be broadly circulated. It transmitted the luminous inner-circle teachings of

    the Besht and tried to translate them into a clear social directive. By contrast, the publication of the Maggid’s teachings in 1784 “did not include any attempt to make them ethically meaningful to the ordinary members” of the Hasidic community.29 Dresner contends, “It is true that the future of Hasidism after the death of the Besht depended largely on the practical efforts of the Maggid to reorganize it and to provide it with leaders. But ultimately it depended just as much upon the writings of Jacob Joseph, which gave to the leaders and the people the teachings by which they might live and engage in their holy work.”30

    Allan Nadler makes very clear the gulf between the Maggid and the Besht. Nadler stated, “Although Beshtian Hasidism, did, in a certain sense, share the final goal of the earlier mystics, namely to transcend the physical universe … its method for achieving that exalted state was radically different from that of the Lurianic ascetics.”31 Rejecting the Lurianic notion that sparks of divinity were entrapped in the physical world, Beshtian Hasidim believed that man is able “to serve God through material gratification as well.” As a result, Beshtian Hasidism thoroughly rejected asceticism: “The Besht’s emphasis on joyfully serving God with one’s physical senses and his insistence that an immanent God completely pervades the created physical universe combined forcefully to eliminate any place for ascetic piety in early Hasidism.”32

    Nadler commented on the group that Biale highlighted: “An often ascetic tone is to be found in some of the classical writings of early Hasidism.” But Nadler quickly added, “Yet these minority ascetic voices were overpowered by the celebratory monistic-materialist majority in the Hasidic camp.” Thus, Nadler endorses “the overwhelming Mithnagdic view [which] held that Hasidism was indeed a grossly materialistic, even hedonistic movement.”33

    By only preaching to “the scholarly classes,” the Maggid reinforced religious notions that there was a deep gulf between the religious elite and the common Jew.34 As a result, the Maggid’s disciples, “were not, it seems, particularly impressed with the intrinsic spiritual worth of their humble charges. For Rabbi Abraham of Kalisk, they were coarse simpletons whose religious edification must be limited to the inculcation of humility, fear of God, and faith in the Tzaddik. For Levi Isaac of Berditchev, they were supremely worthy objects of compassion, ever-innocent defendants in their trials of adversity, whose case he was always eager to plead. But they remained mere objects to the Tzaddik as subject: He prayed for them, blessed them, and defended them because they were his hapless brothers, religious and existential weaklings who meant well and whose Father appreciated such concerns for his still-beloved children.35

    The proscriptions for ascetic behavior reflected the rules—hanhagot—drawn up by the Jewish religious elite for themselves following this Lurianic tradition. The Maggid and his followers are associated with Tzavvat ha-Ribash (The Last Will and Testament of the Baal Shem Tov) which includes: “He should attach his thoughts on high and he should not eat or drink overmuch and should not give himself pleasure.”36

    “Elimelekh and many others of the Maggid’s inner circle remained committed to a more elitist vision that continued to place the Tzaddik at the center of the religious experience and limited the agency of the masses.” 37 The Besht’s great-grandson, Nahman of Bratslav, focused his asceticism solely on “the ‘true tzaddik” (by which Nahman meant himself) [who] experiences pain rather than pleasure during the sexual act.”38 And it is clearly the perspective of Mendel of Kotzk.39 Even Biale is forced to admit (in a footnote) that as a result of Mendel’s elitism, the “Ger Hasidim, which derived from Kotzk, lacks [his] ascetic element.”40

    Since these rules were only for the elite, their extreme fasting and self mortification “was done in private and even while teaching their followers to do otherwise.”41

    The Maggid’s most important student, Shneur Zalman of Lyady is a case in point.42 Shneur Zalman’s discourses among the Hasidic elite “are distinguished by the harsh, other-worldly demand they impose on the disciple. He is expected to strip himself of all material desires; there is repeated reference to the ideal of ‘breaking’ one’s appetites for the physical world.”43

    Shneur Zalman, however, breaks with most of the Maggid’s disciples and, through the Tanya, sought to bring the inner-teachings to the broader Hasidic community.44 Once he desires to spread the word to the “intermediate man,” Shneur Zalman emphasized contemplation as the primary method of becoming unified with the Divine. He advised others that God does not desire fasts: “Contriteness and humility are what fasts are supposed to accomplish and ‘according to my masters’ (e.g. the Besht and Maggid) these can be achieved through meditation.” 45 Nevertheless, Shneur Zalman could not bring himself entirely to reject voluntary penitential fasting.

    Asceticism did find other adherents among the Mitnagdim, especially the strain promoted by the Vilna Gaon. His followers were called Perushim, meaning "separated,” because they separated themselves from worldly pleasures to study the Torah. Eliezer Diamond noted that unlike Christian asceticism, however, these Mitnagdim rabbis place no value on self-denial in and of itself, but rather require of themselves the virtual abandonment of familial, social, and economic life in favor of an absolute commitment to the study of the Torah. They firmly rejected Lurianic penitentials of excessive fasting and self mortification. It is an asceticism of neglect, rather than negation.46

    While Beshtian Hasidism had an independent development, it grew rapidly because it was an effective response to the gloom and doom that enveloped some Eastern European Jewish communities at the beginning of the eighteenth century.47 The Besht re-established the inherent goodness of bodily pleasure in Jewish life. Though some of his disciples could not wean themselves from Lurianic penitentials, it remained their secret affliction that in no way undermined the central Hasidic message. As a result, the festive aspects of Judaism flourished once more and provided the underpinnings of Jewish involvement in popular culture.

    The merriment that the Mitnagdim found so troubling built upon the social norms already in place: the Sabbath meal, Jewish weddings, and the Purim play. Memoirists emphasized elaborate preparations and week-long scrimping so that even the poor could eat something special on the Sabbath. They intermingled memories of Sabbath, home, and food. Morris Raphael Cohen juxtaposed his everyday impoverished boyhood with the sensual relief of “the savory Sabbath tcholent (a baked dish of meat and potatoes), the white bread, and the tzimis (a compote of turnips and carrots) were the green oases in the desert of our early life.”48

    Music and entertainment were integral to the joyous celebrations surrounding Jewish weddings. On the Sabbath night preceding the wedding was the forshpil (the “merry entertainment”), a celebration by the bride’s friends and relatives, with food and dance. … Since Jews were not allowed to play instruments on the Sabbath, “some families invited Christian musicians to entertain the guests.”49 The wedding day usually began with the badkhn’s serenade of the groom and then the bride at their respective homes. In addition to hired musicians and professional jesters, the wedding party included traditional dances and songs replete with allusions to the tensions between the new in-laws.50

    The badkhn was not simply a jester. His role reflected the religious importance of weddings. In reinforcing faithfulness to Jewish law (halakhah), the badkhn functioned as “the magid (preacher) and speaker of the muser—Jewish self-help literature. Just as important, he fulfilled the religious command to delight the bride and groom even by means of jokes. It is in this context that the badkhn is mentioned in the Talmud and continued to perform at Hasidic weddings in Israel and the United States even in the twenty-first century.51

    In the nineteenth century, Purim was not a one day affair. In the days preceding it, Purimshpilers would burst in at neighbors’ homes and perform. Many of the professional Jewish actors of the twentieth century, including [the martyred Russian Solomon] Mikhoels, fondly recalled these purimspielers as an early influence.”52 During their performances, which usually included musicians, food was plentiful. Many of the children would stuff themselves with the traditional Purim hamantashn.53

    Some Jewish communities also presented folk plays at the winter holiday of Hanukkah, and others enjoyed plays at rich families’ weddings. These plays were similar to Purim plays in style, content, and feeling. Direct and unsophisticated, the plays were accessible to everyone. Even if you weren’t rich, learned, or related to the rabbi, you were comfortable knowing what to expect. And when comic liberties were taken with the story, they were always the same kind of liberties, so they themselves came to be part of tradition and thus familiar. The other forms of Jewish popular theater—jesters and clowns, singers and acrobats—were also at home within the Purim play context.54 Hasidism encouraged the popular arts. It glorified spontaneous song and dance as expressions of joy in the divine. It encouraged the creation of simple lyrics in the vocabulary of the masses.

    Between 1825 and 1875 the Jewish community expanded its popular culture venues. It had developed a stable financial base able to support popular theater, and a group of professional singers, proto-actors, and a knowledgeable audience.55 Most important, it had instilled in the Jewish community the notion that pleasurable entertainment should be an integral part of one’s life. These were the cultural norms that Jewish immigrants brought to America at the end of the nineteenth century. •



    NOTES:

    1 Henry Ford, The International Jew, Chapter 28 “Jewish Control of American Theater.” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_International_Jew:_The_ World's_Foremost_Problem/Chapter_28; For Catholic condemnation of the Jewish-run movie industry see, Charles Morris, American Catholic (Random House, 1997).

    2 For assimilationist desires, see Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (Anchor, 1988); for Eastern European cultural heritage, see Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (University of Chicago Press, 1983).

    3 Samuel Dresner, The Zaddik (Abelard Schuman, 1960) 24.

    4 Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (Brandeis, 2005) 110.

    5 Foxbrunner, 4.

    6 Foxbrunner, 25.

    7 Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism (University of California Press, 1996) 19-20.

    8 Etkes, 57; Simon Dubnow, “The Beginnings,” in Gershon Hundert (ed.) Essential Papers on Hasidism (NYU Press, 1991) 30.

    9 Rosman, 69.

    10 Rosman, 31.

    11 Immanuel Etkes, The Besht, 140.

    12 Rosman, 38.

    13 Joseph Telushkin. Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History (William Morrow and Co., 1991) 216.

    14 Jacob Schochet, The Great Maggid (Kehot Publication Society, 1978) 77-78.

    15 Etkes, The Besht, 146.

    16 Schochet, 25; Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite (University of Chicago, 1990) 18.

    17 Schochet, 75. The Maggid’s son, called the Angel, was reputed to be an extreme ascetic. Despite this, the Maggid hoped that after his death, Hasidic leadership would pass to his son.

    18 Schochet, 80.

    19 David Biale, Eros and the Jews (Basic Books, 1992) 130, 134-136.

    20 Biale, 134.

    21 Baile, 122.

    22 Schochet (53) tries to strengthen their intellectual relationship by referring to texts that claim that the Maggid went to the Besht “in the quiet and secrecy of the night.”

    23 Lowenthal, 30-31.

    24 Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism After 1772,” in Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.) Hasidism Reappraised (Vallentine Mitchell and Co., 1995) 90; Schochet (65) notes and dismisses a 1758 letter from the Besht to the Maggid stating “You have taken for yourself a different way which, despite its [inherent] goodness, is not agreeable to me.”

    25 Heschel (12) noted, “Under the influence of the Besht, R. Pinhas abandoned the ways of self-mortification which he had followed from his youth and taught that ‘one can worship heaven through eating.’ ”

    26 Abraham Heschel, The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov, edited by Samuel Dresner (University of Chicago Press, 1985) 19.

    27 Lowenthal, 21

    28 Immanuel Etkes, “The Tzaddik.” In Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.) Hasidim Reconsidered, 164.

    29 Lowenthal, 45.

    30 Dresner, 74.

    31 Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999) 80-81.

    32 Nadler, 81.

    33 Nadler, 83-84.

    34 Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism After 1772,” 162; Lowenthal, 33.

    35 Foxbrunner, 37

    36 Louis Jacobs, Holy Living: Saints and Saintliness in Judaism (Jason Aronson 1990) 78.

    37 Etkes, “The Zaddik,” 165.

    38 Biale, 135.

    39 Heschel (xxvi) stated, “The Baal Shem gave me wings; the Kotzker encircled me with chains and entered into joys with my shortcomings in mind … The Baal Shem suspends sadness, the Kotzker enhances it.”

    40 Biale , 273 n.30.

    41 Foxbrunner, 79.

    42 Foxbrunner (37) does contend that Shneur Zalman was the one disciple that believed the common hasid “possess[ed] unique spiritual potential.”

    43 Lowenthal, 68

    44 Lowenthal (77) notes that R. Avraham of Kalisk claimed, “For [the general Hasidic community] faith in the Tzaddik and an occasional spark of the hidden radiance should be sufficient … Tany was dangerous ...”

    45 Foxbrunner, 132.

    46 Eliezer Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003).

    47 Jacob Katz’s thesis as described in Immanel Etkes, “Past Trends and New Directions,” in Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.) Hasidism Reappraised, 451.

    48 Diner, 156.

    49 Freeze, 46.

    50 Freeze, 48.

    51 Yaakov Mazor, “Badkhn in Contemporary Hasidic Society.” In Michael Steinlauf and Antony Polonsky (editors) “Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife,” POLIN 16 (2003): 279-96; and Ariela Krasney, “The Badkhn: from Wedding Stage to Writing Desk.” In Steinlauf and Polonsky (editors), 7-28.

    52 Jeffrey Veidler, The Moscow State Theatre (Indiana University Press, 2001) 23.

    53 Nahma Sandrow: Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Harper & Row, 1977), p.3.

    54. Sandrow, 19-20

    55. Sandrow, 39.



    About the author
    Robert Cherry is a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; and also a longstanding member of the BC Hillel Board.  He has published on issues of poverty and economic discrimination.  His most recent book Moving Working Families Forward, was released in September 2011 by NYU Press. He was interviewed on radio station WNYC in New York on October 4, 2011.

    The Great DiMaggio and the King of Judah

    by Leo Haber

    I was just a kid during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but growing up in a sea of impoverished Jews and other immigrant minorities on the Lower East Side of Manhattan meant that I was not terribly aware of this national calamity or even of any personal deprivation. After all, everybody we knew was the same. Most of us kids played stickball on the street or in a vacant lot between tenement houses oblivious of the tension and suffering that undoubtedly prevailed all around us. We kids had to chip in to buy a “spaldeen” (a rubber ball made by the Spalding Company) for us to use in the game, and we did know that some kids couldn’t come up with the pennies for their share. It didn’t bother us. We let them play all the same.

    I should have said that “all of us boys” chipped in because the neighborhood girls didn’t play stickball. But every now and then, we lent them an old spaldeen to use in their games of jacks or that other game that required bounce-the-ball during which time the girl doing the bouncing recited some rhymes about herself keeping up with the rhythm of the bounce. This girls’ game seemed pretty silly to us boys. One truth united us all. We were all equally poor. So what?

    The tension in my parents’ apartment came from far away. My Ma and Pa often spoke of Hitler, after which my father would always add in Hebrew, “Yimach shimoi v’zichroi” (May his name and memory be erased). This really meant that Hitler was a very bad man and persecuted the Jews including my uncles, aunts, and cousins in Europe. But all that was very far away, and since we hoped and prayed that God would punish Hitler and save my relatives and all the Jews just like he saved Mordechai and Queen Esther and all the Jewish people in Persia from the evil Haman, I fully expected that my cousins would soon come to America to play stickball with me and my friends. It said so in the Torah, although not much later when I was a little older, I learned that the story of the miracle in Persia was not actually in the Torah but in another sacred book of the Jewish Bible called Megillas Esther that we read in shul on the holiday of Purim every year.

    I also learned soon enough that we were Ashkenazim from Europe, though I was born in New York, and that my father pronounced Hebrew and Yiddish with a Galitsyaner pronunciation that was common among Jews in Galitsia, a province in southeastern Poland. My parents were born there in 1895 when the whole area was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I, when my parents immigrated to America, Poland regained its independence and ruled in Galitsya. But after World War II, after the Holocaust that destroyed Jewish life in central and eastern Europe, Galitsya was awarded to Ukraine. My father spoke all the languages of the area—German, Polish, and Ukrainian—in addition, naturally, to Yiddish, my first mother tongue in America, soon to be superseded by the Lower East Side’s street version of English.

    The only major public events I was fully conscious of besides Hitler’s harangues against the Jews in those childhood days were the daily scores of major-league baseball games reported in the newspapers from April to October. (We didn’t as yet own a radio or even a telephone.) Like the well-known contemporary author, Jerome Charyn, whom I met many years later, and who recently published Joe DiMaggio: the Long Vigil, a brilliant meditation on the great Yankee even though Charyn grew up a New York Giant fan, I too as a kid followed the Giants religiously. I too chose not to support the powerful Yankees, but to cast my lot with the perennial World-Series victims of the Yankees---the great but luckless New York Giants. In later years when I could meditate and philosophize like Charyn, I decided that my lifelong admiration of the underdog was the appropriate stance for a Jew.

    I maintained that allegiance even in my adulthood. In 1957, the New York Giants abandoned New York along with the Brooklyn Dodgers, to resettle in "greener pastures” in California. I took my elder son Howie, age five that year, to his first major-league game, the last game that the Giants played in the Polo Grounds in Manhattan in 1957. As we rushed onto the field after the game, the great Willie Mays raced by, headed for the clubhouse beyond centerfield, and he tousled my son's hair lovingly. I thought that this earth-shaking event would make my boy a lifelong Giant fan, but he soon enough became a fan of Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees, to my eternal chagrin. But there is a law of compensation even in family life as in sports. My wife Sylvia and my younger son Eddie did become Giant fans (as we called ourselves in those days, unlike the current snooty but accurate term---Giants fans).

    Nevertheless, in the late 1930s of my childhood, I adored Mel Ott, the slugger of the Giants who was no giant in size but a shrimp just like me, and King Carl Hubbell, the great pitcher of the Giants who threw a screwball, a curve that went the wrong way and that few batters could successfully hit. They were my heroes even though I never saw them play at the Polo Grounds in the 1930s. It was my one connection, as a child, to the penury of the Depression years. My parents, like most others, simply could not afford the luxury of subsidizing a kid’s desire to attend a professional baseball game. Nor was my father, an immigrant from a shtetl in Poland and a Torah and Talmud scholar, interested in baseball. I was not unhappy about this. I was older now, past my Bar Mitzvah when I was studying Torah seriously and understood the commandment to respect my parents. But I was still in love with baseball. So I looked for other ways to get to see a major-league game. And thereby hangs this tale that centers on the great DiMaggio.

    The only way we ghetto boys could manage to attend a game in those days was when the local Settlement House or Boys’Social Club that catered to the offspring of the poor acquired free tickets and bus transportation to take the neighborhood youths to a major-league game. Some of those public institutions in New York are justly famous---the Grand Street Settlement, the Henry Street Settlement, the Boys Brotherhood Republic affectionately known as the BBR (now relocated from East 3rd Street to East 6th Street as the BGR, the “Boys and Girls Republic” as a consequence of the feminist revolution in America of the 1960s and 1970s). The building housing the BBR was two houses away from my broken-down tenement on East 3rd Street between Avenue C and Avenue D, now referred to as “Alphabet City” in the gentrified East Village with astronomically high rents that, thank God, my parents did not live to endure.

    My diminutive mother had been a janitor of a prior tenement we lived in, a job she undertook to be able to live rent-free in our apartment, and my father, for all his learning, worked in a Brooklyn sweatshop for three months a year during the Great Depression. The nine remaining months he called "the slack season" when other veteran workers were given their turn by the beneficent boss to work for three whole months in order to survive. When I cite these facts of family life, I realize that I knew much more about the Depression's terrible impact than I admitted to myself in those days. But for this tale of joy and sorrow, it must be understood that, as a kid in the 1930s, I did not attend any baseball games that I so loved.

    I kept up with the daily scores not only by stopping off at the corner newspaper stand to snatch a glimpse of the sports headlines on the back page of The Daily News or The Mirror before the grumpy proprietor shooed me away. (My father did not like him because he kept his newsstand open on the Sabbath and even worked there himself on the holy day. I liked him even though he was nasty to anybody who glanced at his newspapers without buying one because he was also very funny. He was a Litvak who said “Gut Sabes” to every customer on Saturday even if the rare non-Jewish neighbor approached. He couldn’t pronounce the “sh” in “shabes” or in any other word, and this was hilarious to us kids. “Rosh ha-shonoh”—in my father’s Yiddish “Roshishuneh”—came out as “Rosisoneh” from the Litvak’s mouth.)

    But from age 11 on, I frequented the neighborhood poolroom on Willett Street between Rivington and Delancey to watch one of the owners at the ticker-tape machine calling out the baseball scores per every half-inning as they came in on the tape. He also announced all the home runs. He would bellow: "National New York, Ott hit a homer, two men on; American New York, Dimadge hit a homer, bags loaded." The gamblers and even some of the pool sharks would roar in triumph or groan if they had laid bets on the winning or losing team with the resident bookie, that is, one of the owners of the poolroom.

    I was too young to be there and hear the bettors curse in a variety of languages from Italian to Yiddish or rub it in to the losers in plain filthy American English. I didn’t see Italians in the neighborhood. The only non-Jews I was aware of were Polish guys from the Polish church on Pitt Street corner Stanton. So I decided to ask my father, and he told me that the Italians I heard —I did not mention the poolroom—could be Italian Jews like Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, also called the Ramchal. I didn’t know who he was, but it did confuse me because I thought that all “Talieners” were goyim (gentiles) like Joe DiMaggio. Apparently not. Some goyim were Jews. Only later did I learn that my father was referring to a famous rabbi from Padua in Italy who lived in the 18th century and was a master of Torah, Talmud, and the Kabbalah. Joe DiMaggio was a master of hitting and fielding, and later in life he loved Marilyn Monroe. That was genius too, but not the Jewish kind to my father

    So I couldn’t afford to play pool since you had to rent a table for a minimum of two hours. Anyway, I was too young and didn't know how to play pool, and if you ripped up the surface of the table by clumsy handling of the cue stick weapon in your hands, you had to pay a fortune to repair the table. So I didn’t rent a table and didn’t bet on the baseball games. I simply listened for the scores, and I was frequently thrown out by the owner as a worthless non-paying non-customer.

    But surprisingly, when I was very young and very small, one of the bettors became my protector for a while because he was convinced that I brought him good luck by pointing out on the chalk board which teams he should bet on. He apparently knew that my father was a very religious Jewish man, and consequently, he attributed to me the inherited power of prophecy. (A fictional variant on this poolroom scene appears in a novel I wrote in another life and that was published some 65 years later.) My childhood career as a navi (prophet) in the local poolroom also ended ignominiously when my baseball prognostications began to impoverish my unsympathetic protector. But my adventure with the greatest “Taliener” who was a baseball player, not a master of Kabbalh, was yet to come.

    Then came “Joltin' Joe” DiMaggio's record-breaking major-league consecutive 56-game hitting streak in 1941. It took place in the spring and summer, in retrospect, the last lovely seasons of my childhood. In a mere six months, the American world we knew would erupt with the Japanese surprise attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor, a place most of us didn’t even know. Peace turned to war, my older brother left for the service, and so did almost all our heroes including Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and the greatest Jewish ballplayer, Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers. Naturally, countless other young American men went to fight Japanese kamikazis and Hitler’s vile Nazi armies of Germany poised to conquer all of Europe and, in the process, wipe out two-thirds of its Jewish inhabitants in the infamous Holocaust.

    Understandably, we did not know all this six months earlier in June. We could still concentrate on summer baseball glory, and even for a Giant fan like me, this meant following the day-after-day saga of Joe DiMaggio’s famous unprecedented streak of getting one hit or more every day for 56 straight games. It became the leading sports headline of daily newspapers from coast to coast. Though the war in Europe against the Nazis was surely our deep concern, our country was still at peace, and we could immerse ourselves in the exploits of Joe DiMaggio without any feelings of guilt.

    When his streak began in May, I was still thirteen. (His streak was long enough for me to turn fourteen way before it was over. I was old enough to know what “guilt” means in family life. If I nagged my parents to pay for me to see DiMaggio play during his streak, I would be burdened by family guilt. I couldn't pay my own way in, and I was reluctant to ask for money from my parents who were still struggling to survive the decade-long Great Depression and to avoid going on the government rolls of what was then called "home relief." To my father, it was a point of honor and self-respect. Working in that Brooklyn sweat shop only three months a year, putting in as much overtime as he could without disintegrating, he managed to keep us healthy. He often said how happy he was to see his wife and children in fine holiday clothes every Jewish Sabbath with chicken soup and noodle pudding (lukshn kigle) on the Sabbath table without having to go on humiliating “home relief.” He did not have to include the challah-bread or the wine for the Sabbath kiddush blessing, a life affirming ritual far older than the wine itself. These staples were taken for granted. They were indispensable on the Sabbath. For him, the cup running over was not simply a metaphor out of the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, but a living shabes reality.

    Two years earlier, in 1939, my mother gave up her backbreaking job of serving as janitor of the four-story tenement on Stanton Street where we were living at the time in one small apartment rent-free. That was when we moved to a five-story walk-up on East 3rd Street between C and D next to the BBR I mentioned above. The new apartment was heaven to me because even though we had to walk up four floors to get to it daily, we now enjoyed three rooms, and for the very first time in our lives, our own bathroom instead of a toilet in the hallway that served two to four families on the same floor. We had triumphantly left the Stanton Street apartment without a bathroom, and my mother’s job as janitor. Good riddance!

    Since the seeming affluence of a family bathroom in our apartment did not mean that I could expect to be given money for a ticket to a major-league baseball game, I had to seek out other ways of going. That’s where the Settlement Houses and the BBR on the Lower East Side came into the picture.

    My luck changed, and I got the chance of a lifetime. I had an opportunity to see the mighty superstar of the powerful Yankees, none other than Joe DiMaggio himself, in the flesh, who, at that point, had hit safely in 29 straight games, already a pretty good feat that the tabloid newspapers were headlining every day with details on every at-bat of of the great American hero. Boy, was I lucky!

    I'm admitting that I was caught up in this excitement. But I have to say this for myself. As a Giant fan, I was different from my friends who were also Giant fans, or even Dodger fans. I did not hate the Yankees. I was, in a way, in awe of them from the day five or six years earlier when my next-door neighbor in the tenement on Stanton Street, Izzy Davidman, a teenager seven years older than I, came charging into our apartment to find his mother chatting with my mother. He announced in a voice choking with excitement the great news that our parents hardly understood: "The Yankees have brought up from the minors a guy who’s gonna make us all forget about Babe Ruth! His name is Joe DiMaggio."

    We were very friendly with the Davidman family since we shared the same hall toilet, and I knew then that Izzy was telling the truth. I also knew that his words were really directed to me because both his parents and my parents came from shtetls in Poland where they struggled to survive. It was not easy to escape what my father called “Pogromchiks,” nasty guys led by another Haman called Petlura who attacked the Jewish villages in the area after World War I. How our parents escaped all this and got to New York in one piece must have been a miracle. So I knew that they weren't the least bit interested in baseball or Babe Ruth or the new hero. I also somehow knew then that Izzy’s prophecy about DiMaggio would come true, just as my prophecies on baseball scores occasionally did in the local poolroom when I was a child. But that was the first time I heard the name DiMaggio. Izzy Davidman was the prophet.

    Then there came to me an even more dramatic prophetic sign of DiMaggio’s future greatness. A few years later when I was eleven, my Hebrew School teacher was trying without much success to get us kids to memorize all the names of all the kings of Israel and Judah after the reign of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon. We had already covered all the kings of Israel who reigned after the death of King Solomon when the Jewish country split in two. The northern ten tribes who revolted against the rule of King Solomon’s son, sometimes retained the name Israel, sometimes Efrayim, and sometimes Samaria. Those ten tribes formed their own Jewish kingdom in the north of Israel. Imagine, there once were two Jewish states in the world! Hard to believe. The northern Jewish country was wiped out by the king of Assyria, and they became the lost ten tribes of Israel in Jewish lore. So we kids didn’t see any reason to remember the names of all their kings and queens. But now Mr. Wohl was teaching us the names of the kings who were descendants of King David and King Solomon and ruled over two tribes in the south—Judah and Benjamin. They were called the kings of Judah, the largest and most important tribe, and our teacher Mr. Wohl told us that we Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan were descendants of this bunch. So we were supposed to remember the names of all the kings.

    When Mr. Wohl noticed that our minds were wandering away, he made a sudden announcement that caught our attention.

    "Well, we're now up to the name of one king you should never forget because his name sounds just like the name of one of your favorite baseball players."

    We were astounded. We couldn’t believe that our teacher of Torah and the prophets knew anything about baseball. And which Jewish king’s name could be like that of a baseball player? King Greenberg? That was a Yiddish name that came from German, according to my father. So we shouted out a question. "Which king of Judah was that?"

    Our very learned teacher smiled. He had our attention. "Amatzio," Mr. Wohl said in Hebrew. He once told us that he used the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew to distinguish it from the Sephardic pronunciation common in Israel today.

    We were perplexed by this answer. "Which baseball player is that?” we asked incredulously. “There ain’t no player with that name," one of us insisted.

    Old Mr. Wohl replied in triumph, only the hint of a wicked smile spreading across his cheeks. "Joe DiMatzio!" he proclaimed.

    Could I not be enraptured by this Yankee star even though he was not a Giant but whose name sounded to Mr. Wohl like the name of a Jewish king of Judah? He was an Italian, but who knows? My father said that there were Italian Jews in this world. So maybe one of them is a great, great, great grandchild of a Jewish king. That’s why his name didn’t sound like Hank Greenberg. My name Haber also didn’t sound like Hank Greenberg. So maybe I had two favorite Jewish baseball players—Greenberg of Detroit and DiMatzio, King of Judah. What a discovery!

    The fact of the matter is that in later years, I remembered only two names from Mr. Wohl’s lesson in Jewish history that day–--Joe DiMatzio and King Amatzio. Mr. Mr. Wohl’s trick worked. He should have figured out how all the other Kings of Judah had names that sounded like Mel Ott or Carl Hubbell, who actually was nicknamed King Carl by fans and sportswriters of the 1930s.

    So I signed up with the BBR for a free trip to Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, June 17, 1941 to see with my own eyes the great DiMaggio tear the cover off the ball at least two out of his four or five times at bat against the Chicago White Sox. I can recall the game clearly to this very day. DiMaggio did succeed in extending his hitting streak to 30 consecutive games, but nevertheless, I was terribly disappointed. He got only one measly single in four times at bat! B’ezrat ha-Shem (With God’s help), I could even do that in a neighborhood softball game in Hamilton Fish Park or in stickball on East 3rd Street between Avenue C and D in "Alphabet City" on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Joe D.'s one-base hit would be nothing for me to brag about. I certainly couldn't tell everybody in Hebrew School about skipping classes just to see DiMadge get one crappy hit on my first trip to Yankee Stadium. They’d laugh their heads off at my expense and threaten to tell Mr. Wohl why I went AWOL from class. So I gritted my teeth, kept my mouth shut, and signed up almost immediately for the next day's game, which the BBR was again offering to all of us ghetto guys who didn't have a cent to our name. Maybe this time it would be a different story, a much better story to tell the world now and even sixty years later.

    The next day, June 18, we traveled to Yankee Stadium to see the second game against the Chicago White Sox, expecting baseball fireworks. The so-called great Joe DiMaggio came up to bat four times once again and managed to eke out one tiny single for the second straight day to continue his streak to 31 games. Everyone around me was saying that hardly anybody else gets to 20 consecutive games year after year, let alone 31. But I was not consoled. To tell the truth, I was mortified. Is this the great hero who had more than a .350 batting average for his first five or six years of spectacular hitting for the Yankees? And in these two days that I attended in person, two games in succession during his streak, the best he could do was to average a mere .250! I just about gave up on him. His streak, however long he would extend it, would not be a lifetime glorious memory to me if he turned out to be a .250 hitter. I was through with DiMaggio/DiMatzio.

    The newspapers said that “Wee” Willie Keeler held the major-league record at 44 consecutive games in a single season that he accomplished way back in 1897, 45 games if you counted a hit he got in the last game of the 1896 season. The DiMaggio I saw in two successive games, numbers 30 and 31, didn’t look as if he would get anywhere near that awesome figure achieved by Wee Willie Keeler way back in the 19th century.

    When I explained my sense of disappointment to my father who knew nothing about baseball, he comforted me in Yiddish by saying, “Ikh farshtay” (I understand). But then he added, “Eikh noflu giboirim” (How the mighty have fallen). He was quoting the words I had already studied in Hebrew School that were spoken by the young David when he received the report that his dearest friend Jonathan and Jonathan’s father King Saul of ancient Israel had been killed in battle against the enemies of the first Jewish state. David said those words of sympathy even though King Saul, jealous of the exploits of the young hero David, had even sought to kill him. “That is an appropriate response of unhappiness to the failings of great men of our people,” my father explained in English cum Yiddish. “But the failure of a ballplayer? Nisht azoy vikhtig” (Not so important).

    My mother, overhearing the conversation, had the last word. “My son, a baseball player’s failures in a game should be the worst disappointment you ever have in your whole life, mit Got’s hilf (with God’s help).”

    I had a chance to go with another Settlement House to the next two Yankee games, the third game with the Chicago White Sox and the first game of a three-game series with the Detroit Tigers. Apparently, different social service organizations in New York City were given the opportunity to distribute free tickets among the disadvantaged youth of that era to attend two successive games when the Yankees were playing at home in Yankee Stadium. But I was having none of it even though I would have also seen for the first time, the great Jewish home-run hitter of the Detroit Tigers, Hank Greenberg. I showed my contempt for a fallen idol by declining the invitation.

    Back to my junior high school by day and my Hebrew School by night where I belonged, and back to my real favorite people, my teacher in English and French, Mr. Plung, who called me “grand faiseur de mots” because I concocted a successful pun in French no less, and my Hebrew teacher, Mr. Wohl, who called me a great pain in the rear because of my constantly annoying questions about stories in the Bible. I adored both teachers, and they, at least, never failed me. I had had enough of playing hookie from my two schools that returned to being the center of my life outside of my home.

    Is this the end of my Joe DiMaggio story? Not really. In the third game against the White Sox, DiMaggio extended his hitting streak to 32 games, but this time, the tabloids screamed out the news by doubling the size of the sports headline on the back page. They proclaimed that Joe got three hits in three official times at bat. That’s batting 1,000 for the game! And in the next game against the Detroit Tigers, number 33 of his streak on the road to an unimaginable 56-game hitting streak, he lashed out four hits in five at-bats, batting in runs and scoring runs in both games with a vengeance. That game’s batting average was .800. His two-day rampage, totaling seven hits in eight at-bats turned out to be the most spectacular consecutive two-day barrage in the whole 56-game hitting streak. He ended up batting .408 for all those 56 storied games.

    Though I was a ninth-grader at Junior High School 188 on Houston Street and Avenue D and a Hebrew High School student at the same time at the Downtown Talmud Torah, also on Houston Street but opposite Hamilton Fish Park in Manhattan, I was still, after all, something of a kid, and I reacted to Joe’s sudden leap to greatness with the emotions of a kid.

    From that day on, Day 33 of the famous streak, I never forgave the great DiMaggio, not anymore for disappointing me in the two games that I attended, but for putting on that display of near-perfection and baseball heroics in the next two games when I was not there in Yankee Stadium to see it all with my own eyes—and could have been.

    I confessed this finally to my father, the Torah and Talmud scholar with a photographic memory of every Talmud page he had ever studied. The local rabbi would stop by during some weeks and ask my Pop where he could find a certain Talmudic statement that he wanted to quote in his upcoming Sabbath sermon and that he only vaguely recalled. My father would name the tractate of the Talmud, the page, and how many lines from the top or the bottom of the page where he could find the exact words. I once asked my father why he worked in a sweat shop and wasn’t a rabbi of a congregation instead. My father looked me in the eye and said, “At first, you got angry at that ballplayer that your teacher called DiMatzio. Then you changed from a child to a grown-up and stopped blaming him. You began to blame yourself for not being there for the two games where King DiMatzio excelled, for losing faith in your hero.” I wondered where my wise old Pa was heading. “Long ago, I too blamed someone else, until I found out that I had only myself to blame, that I didn’t have enough faith in ha-Kudoish-Burich-Hi (the Holy One Blessed Be He) to be a rabbi in the House of Israel.”

    In my old age, I think back to this period in my young life, recalling my parents and my teachers, and I marvel how much I learned in the remarkable year of the perhaps-never-to-be-broken 56-game hitting streak of the great Italian-American Joe DiMaggio, nicknamed after Amatzio, King of Judah, and therefore my hero too. •



    About the author
    Leo Haber, editor of Midstream, author of the novel, The Red Heifer, professor and teacher of Hebrew and English at college and high school levels, is equally proud of a game-tying 9th inning home run he hit at a summer hotel in the Catskills to great applause from his wife and two children many years ago.