Three Yiddish Stories by One of Hebrew Literature’s Underappreciated Geniuses

Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921) wrote the bulk of his short stories and novels in Hebrew. Yet between 1902 and 1906, he composed a series of short stories in Yiddish, set, like most of his work from this period, in a fictionalized shtetl. Seeking neither to satirize nor to romanticize, Berdichevsky—“the most tragic Jewish writer of modern times,” as Hillel Halkin has called him in Mosaic—instead portrayed “outward harmony . . . fraught with inner conflicts.” James Adam Redfield has rendered three such stories, perhaps better described as character sketches, into English. Here is how the first, “Yankev-Nosn,” begins:

Yankev-Nosn was a clever fellow: one of those brainy, traditionally learned Jews who also dabble in other areas. He seemed to know it all; he had an angle on pretty much everything: a page of Talmud or an interpretation by the Tosafists, a verse with Ibn Ezra’s commentary, a tricky math problem, even a discourse on astronomy. He was never so concerned with any one subject in and of itself—what he loved was knowledge as such; he loved being a connoisseur, a scion of our intelligentsia. Nor was he especially pious: he knew there was a God, but that sort of knowledge never moved him, never really took root. He never transgressed a commandment: he was simply too lazy to resist praying or doing whatever you’re supposed to.

Jewishness was just something he did, like pulling on his long coat or his socks and shoes. Desire, now there was a subject he knew nothing about—whether for eating, making money, or other things. What mattered to him, above all, was the intellect—understanding something forward and backward. He didn’t wrap up what he started; having a grasp of it was enough.

Read more at Yiddish Book Center

More about: Arts & Culture, Berdichevsky, Hebrew literature, Shtetl, Yiddish literature

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society