(DV) Leverant: Reflections on "Made in Palestine", "Dybbuk", & "The Holocaust"

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Reflections On “MADE IN PALESTINE”,
“Dybbuk”, and “The Holocaust”
by Robert Leverant
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 29, 2005

We do unto others what was done unto us. What we do to others reveals our personal and collective history. Primo Levi, who had been There, said, “The Palestinians are the Jews to the Jews.”

I was reminded of Primo Levi’s statement on Sunday when I saw “MADE IN PALESTINE,” an exhibit of Palestinian Art, at the SomArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. [1]

The poster for the exhibit had an excerpt from “I am From There” by Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian and world poet.

“I have learned the words of bloodstained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one: Home.”

Reading this, I was reminded of an essay that for years has haunted and troubled me, because of the parallel universe inhabited by the Palestinians with the Israelis. It was written in 1938 by Judah L. Magnes and entitled “Letter to Gandhi.” [2] It is a rebuttal to Gandhi, who Magnes was in correspondence with, as to the why the Jews of Germany could not offer Satyagraha to the “godless fury of their dehumanized oppressors,” and why the Jewish people needed and had a right of return to Palestine, their ancestral land -- “The Jewish National Home.”

The SoMa gallery is located in the garment/furniture district of San Francisco. It was somewhat hard to find. When I entered off the dirty street, it was dark inside the small and dimly lit lobby. I was disoriented. This was a good prelude to appreciating the show. After adjusting to the light, I saw what appeared to be the gallery below, a floor down.

I go down a flight of steps with a split landing, and enter the show. It is a metaphorical descent into Hell; into the feeling tone of the daily life of the Palestinians, who, as the show portrays, live and face, with great dignity, unimaginable torrents and onslaughts of depravity and bestiality directed towards them by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Jewish settlers.

The presentation is museum quality. The works of art are first rate. They are profound, inspired, and relevant, not just to the Palestinian Community, but also to the world community. The exhibit bears witness to the heroic struggle of the Palestinians against forces of darkness that threaten not just them, but us all and all life.

My hope is that the exhibit will be put on-line where it can reach the large and world audience that it deserves.

III

The artwork is by both schooled/professional artists and also self-taught artists, some of whom began their art journey as prisoners in Israelis jails where they were tortured.

One work is a medium sized brown metal ammunition box that had been used by the IDF. It is filled with stones that can be accurately aimed and thrown. This is conceptual art at its best. The asymmetry of the war in Palestine is immediately conveyed by this one image/idea. The choice of subject matter and material is a reference to the biblical tale of David and Goliath and enkindles hope in the Palestinian people on the imaginal level for victory against Goliath: Israel.

A kindred photograph is a monotone in a faded desert brown ink. It is of a boy in shorts throwing a stone at an object. His target isn’t the typical tree or wall a boy may choose, but a nearby and massive tank that eclipses him. He risks being killed by an IDF sniper or someone inside the tank, but he does it anyway, and he looks so natural.

This is one photograph in a series. All are the same color, have the same 5x7 or so image size, and have been screened on clear glass 8.5x11 inches, the standard size of photographic printing paper. The choice of glass allows a large see-through border which is vital to the success of the whole series. Glass is easily broken and shattered.

Though flat pieces, they are not hung on a wall. Each is on string at a different height, close together and sometimes close enough to appear to be brushing another. The net effect is a mobile.

As a group, because of the see-through borders, the mobile appears like a three dimensional map of alleyways in an ancient city that could be blown away or shattered by the wind/blast from a bomb or hand grenade. When I “got” this collective image, I realized how profound and conscious the artist. I was being moved by a very subtle and delicate, yet bold and subterranean art piece to a feeling/function understanding of the struggle of the Palestinians.

The ground is unstable. Everything can and does change in an instant, as easily as the wind blows. Lives can be shattered in an instant. I began to glimpse and kinesthetically feel the fragility and heroism on another level of the Palestinian people. These heroic humans, as portrayed in this series and the exhibit, have created some semblance of normalcy in their daily lives that are riddled with bullets, bombs, assassins, poverty, malnutrition, checkpoints, helicopter gunship, torture, and the blood of martyrs. To be able to endure the occupation all these years and not go away is not a defeat, but a major victory.

Most of the other works had the same intelligence, power, beauty, creativity and artistic virtuosity.

“MADE IN PALESTINE” is a magic mirror and raises a question to the magic mirror: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, in Palestine who is the most frightening and terrible of all?”

Revealed in the mirror is the face of Yahweh, the ancient yet living wrathful God of the Jewish people.

Seeing His face in the mirror, I renamed the exhibit “MAIDEN PALESTINE.”

The exhibit reveals that the Shekinah, the female Presence of the godhead, now resides in Gaza. From Palestine, she returns to observing Jews on Shabbat, when the candles are lit on Friday evening.

Most Jews in Israel, America, and presumably elsewhere in the world, see ourselves as the victims of the Palestinians; as the Davids and not the Goliaths, whom we are.

Why?

There is no one answer. Each has to answer this question for one’s self.

My answer: personally and collectively, particularly with regards to “The Holocaust,” we grieve only for ourselves, the Chosen People, and not, our oppressor, the person we call a “Nazi”; nor for the others who also suffered and perished in the Camps, like the Romani.

In fact, all whose lives were touched by The Nazi Holocaust are it victims, not just the Jewish people. This is why I use quotation marks to distinguish The Nazi Holocaust, an actual event, from “The Holocaust,” a cultural creation. [3]

As a result of the exclusivity of grieving, our mourning is incomplete. [4] It does not lead us to letting go (partial), nor open us to forgiving (full) our oppressor(s); the Nazis (on Yom HaShoah) or the Pharoah (Passover). Thus, instead of gaining consciousness and freedom from our suffering through these ceremonies, we remain victims in and to our suffering.

Consciousness is the redemptive fruit of grieving/mourning/forgiving. Without consciousness, we go about our lives unaware. What we see, think, believe and feel, we take as given, like the air we breathe. In turn, we pass on to our children our drives, judgments, loyalties, projections, complexes etc.

Thus our victim hood, a Jewish complex, is perpetuated. It lives and rules us individually and collectively. It clouds our eyes to what we are doing in the present in Palestine. We do to the Palestinians what was done to us in “The Holocaust”.

“When I saw the Palestinians [with stamped serial numbers on their hands and blindfolded] with their hands tied behind their backs, young men [kneeling in the desert and left there without food and clothing for 24 hours or more], I said, ‘It is like what they did to us in the Holocaust,’” Yarkoni [dubbed the “singer of the wars”] said. “We are a people who have been through the Holocaust. How are we capable of doing these things?”

Her words were deemed so offensive that the union representing the nation's performing artists called off a planned tribute to Yarkoni that had been in the works for two years. The head of the union said it was forced to make the move after members of the public flooded its offices with complaints and returned tickets purchased for the event, and after sponsors canceled their financial support.

Government ministers denounced Yarkoni, who won the coveted Israel Prize in 1998. The town of Kfar Yona canceled her performance at a Memorial Day event to honor Israeli soldiers who have fallen in battle. Youth movements declared a boycott of her music. The septuagenarian, who served in the Givati Brigade in the War of Independence, received so many hate calls, her daughter said that she is now too frightened to appear in public. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2002)

I left the exhibit to see “Dybbuk” performed by the S.F. Ballet at the S.F. Opera House. This is in an upscale, safe and clean part of the Civic Center area of San Francisco. In contrast to SoMa gallery, the Opera House is opulent, grand, well lit, and well maintained. The audience is well clothed, fashionably and expensively.

The contrast between the two showcases, their locations, and the audience was a cross-cultural statement about money, safety, and privilege. Unlike the exhibit, the ballet was packed, a sold out house. The highest ticket price for the matinee was around $150+. Each of our seats cost $55. By contrast, the donation bowl at the exhibit was empty. A donation of $3 had been requested.

VII

“Dybbuk”

Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, adapted an ancient tale into a formal ballet. Leonard Bernstein composed the orchestral score.

The S.F. version on April 10, 2005 was the same version as that of the World Premiere on May 16, 1974, performed by the New York City Ballet.

The performance was stunning. Yuan Yuan Tan, who danced the female lead role, Leah, is one of my favorite dancers and a world-class ballerina. Leah’s lover, Channon, now dead, possesses her body as a dybbuk, and forces her to refuse her bridegroom, chosen by her parents, on her wedding day.

“Dybbuk” was not only an enactment of a personal story, but an inner event because of its archetypal dimension. In addition to the excellence of the artistry of the company, the director, and the orchestra, this dimension accounts for the power of the ballet.

VIII

A dybbuk is a wandering soul of someone who has left the body, but, somehow, has not left the world. (In Judaism there is no afterlife.) The dybbuk has not left, because it has a task or mission to complete. It clings (“dybbuk” is the Hebrew word for clinging) to a living human host through whom it will finish its work. (This is a quasi-mystical definition of Rabbi Freud’s description of the unconscious and its workings, particularly the collective unconscious later described by Jung. It could be said that personal analysis is exorcism, a rite forbidden by traditional Jewish law. Analysis removes a dybbuk, the unconscious material that lives in the body and mind of the analyst.)

A dybbuk may seek revenge for some evil done to it while it lived. For 23 centuries evil has been directed towards the Jewish people. [5] Many seek revenge.

While watching the ballet, I reflected on the Palestinian art exhibit. Clearly a dybbuk or dybbuks have and still do occupy many Zionist and Jewish bodies in Israel. Dybbuk. How better to understand the behaviors of Ariel Sharon, the current Prime Minister of Israel, and all the previous prime ministers beginning with Ben Gurion? All have knowingly committed crimes against humanity towards the Palestinians. They willfully have ignored the Geneva Conventions, set up after the Nazi Holocaust at the request of the Jewish people to ensure “Never Again”. [6]

How better to understand the split in the Jewish soul: dybbuk.

Violence done to oneself in a family or a nation becomes suffering in others -- children, other family members, a community, a nation, etc.

This suffering can take one of two courses.

1. Violence to others (as Jews and Zionists are doing to the Palestinians).

2. Compassion towards others (e.g., Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa). Despite the horror of “The Holocaust,” no world-class Jewish apostle of non-violence and compassion (the likes of Bishop Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, or the 14^th Dalai Lama) has appeared on the public stage.

Why?

Is this because revenge, violence, and hatred are part and parcel of the Jewish psyche? Some persuasively answer yes. The Jewish people believe that our God instructs us to hate and punish the wicked and the enemy, who persecute us, and in some cases, never forgive. [7]

On this point, Jesus differentiated from his Jewish tradition: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven….”

In a well-intentioned moment of religio-cultural chauvinism, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi recommended to H.H. 14^th Dalai Lama in Dharamsala that the Tibetan people have a Passover holy day and Seder ritual. [8] The rationale was that now, like the Jews once were, the Tibetans are in diaspora. To the other Rabbis there, his suggestion was the greatest thing since unleavened bread. However, lacking yeast, i.e. that which raises and distills spirit for the Buddhists, it got no rise out of His Holiness. The basis of Mahayana teachings is impartial compassion and love for all sentient beings, including one’s enemies and those who have harmed us.

Driving home, my head a buzz, I reflect on my afternoon:

1) I had just seen art that easily could have arisen from Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi Germany.

2) I realized that I haven’t seen much, if any, real art from “The Holocaust.” I don’t think that much, if any, exists.

3) Both the Palestinian “final solution” (a term used in the press in Israel) and “The Holocaust” are genocides, ethnic cleansings, exoduses and diasporas from one’s homeland, and dehumanizing. The resultant trauma that may take lifetimes and generations to heal, if ever. [9]

4) I remembered that Pope John Paul II, who just died, refused to pardon the Jews, 2,000 years later, for committing the crime of deicide; his advisory panel had suggested to him that the Jews be forgiven.

5) Evidently, in the Pope’s eyes, The Holocaust (plus the Inquisition) didn’t wipe the slate clean; that the Jewish people hadn’t sufficiently atoned for their crime and had to suffer more.

6) Or, maybe, he was possessed by a dybbuk.

I also reflected on the perilous alliance of Jewish Zionists and Orthodox Jews with Christian Zionists and fundamentalist Christians, who need the Jews to take back the Temple of the Mount in order to fulfill a prophecy. When this happens, Armageddon and End Time will come, according to the faithful, who believe they will bodily be taken up, experience Rapture and be saved. The rest of us will instantly be vaporized and suffer eternal damnation.

While this may seem like cult groupthink, I find it scary. In the U.S. and Israel, these folks have their fingers on the nuclear triggers.

Earlier in the morning, I had read in the NY Times “A Culture of Death, Not Life” by Frank Rich. [10] One paragraph stood out because it touched my paranoid Finzi-Continis fears: “No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance -- literally so -- than the doomsday right. The “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, ‘Left Behind: The Kids,’ that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. [emphasis mine] Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series’ 60 million....”

This brief essay has suggested that human hatred and destructiveness arise in response to, and are not innate in the human organism, nor permanent. It was Hitler’s childhood experience that gave birth to a hatred fanned by several million adults in Germany and Europe who themselves had seeds of hatred and destructiveness in them. [11] This caused extreme suffering in millions, not just Jews, nor was this confined to one continent and one generation.

In Palestine, Jews, many of us from Eastern European backgrounds, are keeping alive Hitler’s torch by doing what was done to us, using the same words even, to our cousins and neighbors, the Palestinians.

MADE IN PALESTINE, an art exhibit of contemporary Palestinian art, is carrying the torch of the Shekinah, the bearer of the light of wisdom. Through the artwork in this exhibit, She is telling us that the Holocaust will never be over until we learn its lessons. [12]

May peace come to the Palestinian and Israeli people. May their ancestral lands be returned to them. May their families in exile return to their homeland. May there be one state where all live in safety, free from inner and outer harm. May peace, joy, and forgiveness prevail and come into the Holy Land of our hearts.

Robert Leverant is a depth psychotherapist and photographer. He has published some fifty articles on a variety of subjects, including Israel and Palestine, in online and professional journals.