Less Horrible Horror Series

And here is one more op-ed written by Adas Emuno president Lance Strate, this one appearing in the October 28th issue of the Jewish Standard, in conjunction with Halloween:

Jews and vampires don’t mix. Or at least they don’t mix easily.

As a kid growing up in the 60s, I remember picking up a copy of a magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and reading all about Dracula and the other creature features produced by Universal Studios and their rivals. The original Dracula motion picture was released in 1931, so it wasn’t a movie I could see at the local cinema, but those of us who lived in the New York metropolitan area did have Chiller Theatre, hosted by Zacherley (“The Cool Ghoul”) on Channel 11 WPIX.

When I learned that my father was born in Transylvania, which meant that I was half-Transylvanian, I was delighted. It meant that I was a bit cool myself. I asked my father if he knew Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor who played Dracula in the original movies. My father was born before World War I, when Transylvania was a part of Hungary, so it seemed altogether likely to me that he would know the famous film star. My father joked that he knew Bela Lugosi, but Lugosi didn’t know him.

Having a connection to Transylvania gave me a bit of an edge, but I was hardly the only kid who had fun imitating Dracula and the other monsters, on Halloween and all year round. After all, we had comedy programs on TV like The Munsters, which included the character of Grandpa, aka Sam Dracula, played by Al Lewis, aka Albert Meister, not to mention The Addams Family, commercials for Count Chocula cereal, and Sesame Street’s Count von Count. Humor, not horror, led us to imitate an Eastern European accent and utter the immortal words, “I vant to suck your blud.”

The one bit of dissonance that I encountered in reading about the powers and weaknesses of vampires was the idea that they could be warded off by a crucifix or cross. Vampire lore fit into a Christian cosmology that Jews were not a part of. The 1979 comedy film Love at First Bite, starring Richard Benjamin as psychiatrist Jeffrey Rosenberg, plays on this problem in a scene where he tries to combat Dracula by reaching for his necklace, resulting in a moment of suspense as Dracula recoils in anticipation. But much to the vampire’s relief, he pulls out a Star of David instead.

Indeed, in many ways I found it easier to identify with the vampire, given my aversion to Christian symbols. I grew up seeing them as the symbols of people who for close to two millennia had oppressed and persecuted us, culminating in the pogroms and the Holocaust that both of my parents lived through. It helped that I was a bit of a night owl as well. This was long before the emergence of vampire subcultures, an offshoot of the Goth movement, inspired by the vampire novels of Ann Rice, and the Twilight young adult fiction and film series, featuring “Bella” Swan as the willing paramour of a handsome young vampire.

These and other new takes on the vampire mythos tend to downplay or eliminate its Christian-specific elements, and otherwise sympathize with, sometimes glamorize, and otherwise normalize what once was considered monstrous. The recently concluded HBO series True Blood also falls into this category, and while not featuring any Jewish characters, introduced Lilith as the mother of all vampires in a scene in which contemporary vampires took part in ritual drinking of blood while chanting in Hebrew. This was more than a little disturbing, given the long history of the blood libel used as justification for anti-Semitism.

This summer, I caught up with the Shadowhunters series on the Freeform cable channel. Like the Twilight movies, Shadowhunters is a young adult novel adaptation. The main character, Clary, learns that she is one of a small number of people of mixed ancestry—they’re part angel—and they are called upon to battle demons as shadowhunters. Her best friend, Simon Lewis, is Jewish, and as played by the Alberto Rosende he comes across as a typical Jewish nebbish type, of the sort made famous by Woody Allen, neurotic, fearful, and nursing his unrequited love for Clary. Until he is turned into a vampire, at which point he becomes cool, competent, and charismatic. According to synopses of the book series online, when his devout mother eventually learns of his conversion, she throws him out of their house. At a later point in the narrative, he thankfully is restored to human status.

The narrative may be typical of young adult fiction, and the character somewhat stereotypical, but the way that Jewish characters are inserted into the vampire narrative is both original and commendable. It is no coincidence that the author of the bestselling series, The Mortal Instruments, upon which Shadowhunters is based, Judith Rumelt, who uses the pen name Cassandra Clare, is Jewish.

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When it comes to quality television, my award for best series in the horror genre goes to The Strain, now in its third season on FX. Created by respected Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan, The Strain is set in New York City, and one of the elements I appreciate about the series is that it takes place in neighborhoods all over the five boroughs and has a real New York sensibility. The plot line is reminiscent of contagion and zombie apocalypse genres, combined with elements drawn from the Alien film series, and science fiction stories about doubles taking the place of their human counterparts, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These elements meld together to form an altogether original vampire narrative, one in which the supernatural elements are absent, and the strigoi (the Romanian word for vampire used in the series) are the result of a parasitical worm that takes over and transforms its host.

The series features a small group of people who fight what appears to be a losing battle against the strigoi as they take over New York and the rest of the country, led to some extent by Professor Abraham Setrakian. Setrakian is identified as an Armenian Jew in the series, conferring on him a double coding as the victim of genocide, and he is shown to be a concentration camp survivor who first saw the strigoi feeding on captives at Treblinka. He had been a professor of mythology and East European literature at the University of Vienna, and after immigrating to the United States, became a New York pawnbroker. (This is an homage to the 1964 Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker.)

The leader of the strigoi is known as the Master (an allusion to the Nazi reference to the Aryan “master race”), an ancient strigoi who can exert complete psychic control over his spawn. His second in command, one of the few strigoi granted free will, is Thomas Eichhorst, who was the Nazi commandant at Treblinka, and Setrakian’s torturer. It follows that The Strain can be understood as a metaphor for authoritarianism and fascism, and this wouldn’t be the first time del Toro used fantasy elements in conjunction with this sort of political critique, as can be seen from his 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth.

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All of the heroes in The Strain are flawed characters, and Setrakian is no exception. He is cranky and humorless, obsessed and ruthless as a vampire hunter, but also intelligent, learned, and the one who recognizes and understands the threat most clearly. The victim of great trauma, he is only occasionally show as deserving of our sympathy. This parallels the way that Jews, and Israel, are seen by many today, both in the United States and abroad.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the way in which del Toro has allowed a Jewish character to take a leading role as a vampire hunter in a vampire narrative. Having eliminated the supernatural themes from the vampire mythos, it is not surprising that Setrakian’s Jewish identity relates only to his ethnicity. But del Toro missed an opportunity to transcend the stereotypical fully by including something of his religious tradition, by showing that the source of his strength is derived from his belief in the value of human life, the pursuit of justice, and a sense of spirituality.

Houdini Whodunit

It's been a while since we've shared one of Adas Emuno President Lance Strate's op-ed pieces from the Jewish Standard, so here now is one that was published in their June 24th issue, and then appeared on his Jewish Standard Times of Israel blog on June 30th. That post was updated to reflect the next to last episode of the program he discusses, and this version is further updated to reflect the season finale:

My son was about 8 or 9 when we had our first family outing to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey.

As I recall, it was his first time in the amusement park, and my first time as well. And I was pleased to discover, soon after entering, an attraction called Houdini’s Great Escape. It paled in comparison to anything that can be found at one of Disney’s or Universal’s theme parks, but I was happy to have the opportunity to introduce my son to the great Jewish showman Harry Houdini.

Houdini was a household name when I was growing up, immediately recognizable as the world-famous escape artist of a bygone era. The fact that Houdini was Jewish also was well known, especially within the Jewish community.

Houdini’s fame persisted long after his death in 1926, at the age of 52, but it began to fade in the waning years of the 20th century. I wonder how many millennials have heard of him these days. For that reason, I applaud Six Flags for keeping his memory alive. I am particularly grateful to all those who protested when Great Adventure closed the ride in 2008, and convinced Six Flags to bring it back in 2011.

We bought my son a hamster about a month or two after our trip to the amusement park, and I asked him what name he wanted to give to his pet. He answered, “Harry.” I smiled and said, “So you want to name him after Harry Houdini?” “No,” he replied. “After Harry Potter.”

I immediately realized that Houdini’s Great Escape made a much greater impression on me than it did on him, and that there was no competing with the young adult novels by J. K. Rowling, and even more so with the Warner Bros. film adaptations, with their amazing special effects, which made magic seem real. This amounts to a bit of a reversal, as stage magicians produced some of the first special effects to appear in early cinema.

Houdini himself started out as an illusionist performing in vaudeville, before achieving widespread fame by specializing as an escapologist. He also starred in a few silent films between 1906 and 1923, but he did not enjoy the same success on the screen as he did in live performance.

Significantly, Houdini was devoted to stage magic as a profession, and led the Society of American Magicians as president of that organization for almost a decade, his tenure cut short by his untimely death. The society pays for the maintenance and care of Houdini’s grave site, which is in the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. The monument displays both his stage name, Houdini, and his actually family name, Weiss; he was born Erik Weisz in Budapest, the son of a rabbi, and was only about 4 years old when his family emigrated to the United States. That’s when Erik Weisz was changed to the German version, Erich Weiss.

Though Houdini died almost 90 years ago, his name recently has been resurrected on television with the airing of Houdini & Doyle, a series launched last spring on Fox. It’s based on the actual friendship between the great escapologist and Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. While drawing on bits and pieces of historical fact, essentially the series is fictional and full of anachronisms, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in ways that have become quite common in recent decades. The central fiction is that Houdini, who is performing in London, teams up with Doyle to solve mysteries that baffle the police.

In this new series, Michael Weston (née Michael Rubinstein, grandson of Arthur Rubinstein) became the most recent of at least a dozen actors to have portrayed Harry Houdini. His predecessors include Tony Curtis, Harvey Keitel, Norman Mailer, and Adrien Brody. In this role, Weston looks Jewish, but not in a way that might be deemed stereotypical or particularly overt. His speech does not feature any obvious form of Jewish (or Hungarian) accent, although it does strike me as very similar to the kinds of voices I hear at my congregation. In short, in this series, the fact that Houdini is Jewish is downplayed significantly—but it is not entirely absent.

Houdini & Doyle is a TV version of the buddy film genre, a type of narrative especially commonplace in American popular culture, no doubt due to the diversity of American society. That’s because it depends on strange bedfellows, or if you prefer Neil Simon to Will Shakespeare, an odd couple team-up. The buddies often contrast opposing qualities—rich and poor, white and black, male and female, young and old, professional and amateur, and so on.

The great French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, argues that a culture’s myths are ways of symbolizing significant polar oppositions, and scholars analyzing popular culture, such as Arthur Asa Berger, have applied this approach to film, television, and other media. Looking at Houdini & Doyle through this lens can be quite revealing.

To begin, Houdini is American and Doyle is British, Houdini is ethnic while Doyle is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASPs are an ethnicity, of course, but traditionally they are presented as non-ethnic in American popular culture), and Houdini is an American immigrant while Doyle is native to Britain. (The show is set in London.) Houdini’s background is not emphasized in the first few episodes, but in the third episode, “In Manus Dei,” he falls ill and his mother, who has accompanied him on his travels and speaks with a noticeable accent, gives him chicken soup as a cure. Her character, Houdini’s own devotion to her, and the insecurity associated with being an immigrant all are featured more prominently in episode 5, “The Curse of Korzha,” and the fact that Houdini is Jewish is discussed briefly in episode 6, “The Monsters of Nethermoor.”

On the one hand, it is quite positive that a Jewish-American immigrant can serve as a symbol of an American in general. On the other hand, Houdini’s Jewishness mainly is reflected in his being a victim of prejudice, as he reveals in episode 6. This also makes him a champion of tolerance, as he defends another character facing discrimination and scapegoating, which is commendable. But in this respect, there is no contrast with Doyle, who is sympathetic, albeit revealed as never having been the victim of bias, while the third main character, Constable Adelaide Stratton, Scotland Yard’s first policewoman (an anachronism), also is subjected to significant prejudice and therefore is in favor of tolerance.

Having viewed seven out of the 10 episodes that comprise the first season of the program, a joint British, Canadian, and American production, I would have wanted to see Houdini’s Jewishness reflect something more than ethnicity and open-mindedness. I would have liked it to reflect as well some aspect of his religious heritage. But of course that would undercut his role as a symbol of Americans in general.

Other contrasts come into play. Houdini is a famous and self-promoting entertainer, while Doyle enjoys the quieter esteem accorded as an author, one somewhat embarrassed by the popularity of his Sherlock Holmes stories. Houdini’s success makes him relatively affluent and his brashness marks him as nouveau riche, while Doyle is the model of upper-middle-class propriety, as befits a physician. (That’s his day job.) There is a bit of a contrast between low and high culture, between the sensationalism of the popular performer and the reserve of the man of letters, which also maps onto the egalitarianism of American society and the elitism of the British (Doyle eventually receives a knighthood). It’s also the contrast between the rags-to-riches story of the ethnic immigrant and the conservative narrative of old money. Additionally, there is a contrast between Houdini’s physicality, as an escape artist and also as a fighter, and Doyle’s cerebral quality.

The major opposition on which the program turns, however, is between Houdini as a skeptic and rationalist and Doyle as a believer and spiritualist. While the belief that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead is age-old—King Saul speaks to the ghost of Samuel in the Tanach—the spiritualism movement began in the 19th century. It was inspired in large part by the ethereal (but decidedly earthly) form of communication introduced by the invention of the telegraph, and later by messages sent over the air by radio.

Doyle actually was an ardent believer in spiritualism. He believed in it so strongly that this difference of opinion eventually brought his friendship with Houdini to an end. And Houdini actually was firmly committed to debunking anyone claiming to have psychic powers or the ability to communicate with the dead, invariably revealing them as scam artists using the same methods as stage magicians.

Houdini & Doyle draws on these historic facts to set up the program’s main opposition. It’s similar to The X-Files, except that Gillian Anderson’s Dr. Dana Scully was the skeptic and David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder was the believer. Doyle’s scientific background as a physician does come into play when he solves mysteries, but it does not prevent him from believing in psychic phenomena. Interestingly, Houdini’s and Doyle’s roles are reversed in “The Monsters of Nethermoor,” but only because the unearthly phenomenon being investigated is, in fact, alien beings, and Houdini is willing to believe in the scientific notion that life on other planets is possible.

Houdini, then, comes across as something of a 20th century Spinoza, a modern secular humanist, in contrast to Doyle’s apparent superstition. And the episodes clearly favor science over spiritualism, while portraying both buddies as sympathetic characters. Here too, however, I would wish for something more than rejection of belief on Houdini’s part. I’d have liked some positive expression of Jewish faith, its emphasis on ethics, even a touch of true spirituality.

Still, I applaud the show’s creators for bringing the spirit of Houdini back to life and with renewed vigor. This doesn’t seem like the kind of program that will gain much of an audience, or even make it to a second season. But escaping cancellation may just be Houdini’s greatest trick of all.

First Addendum

Two additional episodes have aired since I wrote this op-ed, one after it was published on June 24th. At the end of episode 8, “Strigoi,” which features their contemporary, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, Houdini discovers that his mother has passed away. This and other matters prompts a trip across the Atlantic in episode 9, “Necromanteion” (the title referring to an invention of Thomas Edison's, who appears in the episode, that is supposed to allow communication with the dead via radio waves).

The episode includes a scene of a Jewish funeral. Incredibly, Houdini is shown at the grave site minus any form of head covering, and walks out on the ritual, criticizing the solemnity of the proceedings. While the intent is to show that Houdini is suppressing his feelings of grief, it also resonates with his rejection of superstition in an unfortunate manner. The episode ends with his return to his mother’s grave to recite a Hebrew prayer, alone and therefore not as part of the Jewish community. This no doubt reinforces his connection to Doyle and Stratton, but at the cost of a positive portrayal of Jewish community, and one of the most essential functions of any religious tradition.  

Second Addendum  

In the final episode of the season, "The Pall of LaPier," Houdini receives spiritual advice from a native American that he finds comforting. This is a common trope in American popular culture, the "noble savage" as a source of wisdom and superior spiritual connection in contrast to us sophisticated moderns, but once again, this appears in the absence of any link to Houdini's own faith, any interaction with a rabbi, and almost not acknowledgement of Jewish mourning rituals.  And just to be clear, the problem is not in this one series, but the fact that this is typical of the way that Jewish characters, whether historical or fictional, are portrayed in our popular culture.

Summer Movie Night Part 2

Summer Movie Night Part 1

Join us tomorrow evening, Saturday, July 23rd, at 7:30 PM, for the first of two summer movie nights at Adas Emuno. Our mini-film festival, curated by Adas Emuno President, Prof. Lance Strate, who will lead a discussion following the screenings, is on the theme of the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, art and creativity, and the democratizing trend that continue to have a major effect on us to this day. There is some mature content, so parental discretion is advised.

Our first screening will feature Drop City: A New Documentary by Joan Grossman and Tom McCourt.

For more about the film, visit the website: <http://www.dropcitydoc.com>.

Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served. 

The second part of our mini-festival will be in two weeks, Saturday, August 6th, when we screen the documentary, !Women, Art, Revolution. More on that later...

The Angel of Death and the Choice of Life

Just in time for Passover, here is the latest Jewish Standard op-ed from Adas Emuno president Lance Strate, published in the April 22nd edition of the weekly. Appearing under the title of The Angel of Death and the Choice of Life, we are pleased to be able to share it here on our congregational blog:

Passover is a celebration of freedom, a holiday marking the defining moment in Jewish history, our liberation from bondage.

Passover represents the birth of a nation. The clan of Jacob, just an extended family, becomes a multitude, the children of Israel.

And the story takes us through a revolution against an unjust monarch and an escape from tyranny, to the framing of a constitution at Sinai. No wonder that the holiday resonates so powerfully here in the United States. The Jewish story of slavery’s abolition even includes a civil war of sorts, with the confederacy that turns to worship the golden calf.

The powerful injunction to remember that we were slaves in Egypt stands in sharp contrast to the mythologies of other peoples of the ancient world, which cast them as the descendants of gods or otherwise of supernatural origin. Passover establishes the foundation of Jewish ethics—not simply to value freedom, but in the words of Micah, “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” You can’t get much more humble than being a slave.

Birth is a common theme for holidays that incorporate the rites of spring, as does Passover, with the rebirth of nature symbolized by the green vegetable and the egg on the Seder plate. The other side of birth is death, a topic we don’t like to think much about. But death, unlike taxes, is unavoidable for each and every one of us, whether we acknowledge its existence or not. The very name of the holiday Passover, or Pesach, refers to the Angel of Death passing over the dwellings of the Israelites.

The escape from servitude only occurs after the escape from death. First there must be life. Only then can there be hope, and the potential for freedom. But what is left unsaid is that the escape from death is only a temporary reprieve. Does this imply that the same might be true of the escape from bondage? Certainly, there is no permanent liberation from the inevitability of death.

The Jewish-American anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of the 1974 book The Denial of Death, argued that we human beings are the only forms of life on earth that are aware of our own mortality, and that awareness represents a crushing blow to our self-esteem. The function of human culture is to provide some form of compensation, through beliefs in various kinds of immortality, and by providing us with heroic roles to play in the lives that we lead. Of course, when it comes to the denial of death, religious beliefs have played a major role, especially in the very specific conception of an afterlife that many provide.

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Passover stands out from all of the other traditional holidays on the Jewish calendar in its direct confrontation with death. By way of contrast, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we pray that we may be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life, with barely a mention of life’s opposite. On Passover, however, death is personified in the guise of an angel. Since an angel literally means a messenger, this implies that death is a message from God, the same God who exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to keep them from eating from the Tree of Life and becoming immortal.

The message is one of choice. In Deuteronomy (30:19) God tells us, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you may live.” While we do not choose to be born or to die, there are choices still to be made. The Pharaoh chooses death time and time again, beginning with his order to kill every newborn Hebrew male, continuing with his refusal to let the Israelites go, resulting in the death of the Egyptian firstborn. The Pharaoh’s choice of death culminates in the decision to pursue the escaping Israelites, resulting in the drowning of the Egyptians army.

Pharaoh’s choices come as no surprise, insofar as he represents an ancient cult of death. We may marvel at the pyramids and Sphinx as wonders of the ancient world, but we also should recall that they were built with the blood of forced laborers, and that they are enormous tombs carrying the embalmed remains of the Pharaoh along with those who served him in life and were sacrificed so that they might follow him in death.

While the Pharaoh chooses death, the Israelites must make an active decision to choose life. When it comes to the tenth plague, the Angel of Death will not discriminate automatically in favor of the Israelites, will not spare anyone by virtue of their descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or because they are circumcised, or because they worship Adonai. It is not Jewish blood that saves the Israelites, but the blood of the sacrificial lamb. This requires, first of all, being a part of the community. If you were not, how would you learn about what had to be done? It also requires choosing to follow the instructions.

We may have replaced the sign made with lamb’s blood with mezuzahs long ago, but the lesson remains: choose life, that you may live.

The Angel of Death who executes the tenth plague is no Adversary. It is not the equivalent of the Christian Satan or Lucifer, nor is it a lord of the underworld along the lines of the Greek god Hades. The personification of death quite naturally is a frightening figure. Its depiction as a creeping darkness in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film The Ten Commandments, usually broadcast on television at this time of year, has been the stuff of childhood nightmares for six decades now.

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I recall being disturbed, in my youth, by the image of this angel in a Haggadah that illustrated a Passover song, Chad Gadya. That the “Holy One, Blessed be He,” finally “smote the Angel of Death, who slew the slaughterer, who killed the ox…” clearly communicated the hierarchy, but this didn’t change the fact that both the slaughterer and the ox ended up dead.

Which brings me back to the point that Passover is a holiday that confronts death rather than denying it, and offers the alternative—to choose life. The Angel of Death is neither an object of worship nor the embodiment of evil. The personification of death is frightening, without a doubt, but as God’s messenger, it is at the same time an Angel of Justice, under certain circumstances an Angel of Mercy, and without a doubt an Angel of Humility.

Ernest Becker eventually came to the conclusion that in our contemporary culture, we have come to place too much emphasis on enhancing self-esteem. Humility serves as a counterweight to that tendency, the humility that comes from remembering that we were slaves, and the humility that comes from remembering that our lives are finite.

Passover is a celebration of redemption and renewal, but above all it is a celebration of life, whose meaning and value can only be understood through its contrast with death. So as we drink our four cups of wine at the Seder, let us also remember to say L’chaim! To life!

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning 5776

WHO ARE WE?

ROSH HASHANAH 5776

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

One year ago, just after the High Holidays, journalist Judith Newman wrote a New York Times piece that was something of a media sensation. It was titled, To Siri, With Love. It was about a boy who became best friends with his I-Phone’s Siri.

For those of you who may need an additional word of explanation, Siri is the computer generated virtual assistant voice that talks to you when you press a button on your Apple smart phone.

Just out of curiosity: how many of you have ever talked with Siri or the Android equivalent?

In a moment I am going to share with you a series of conversations between Siri and the boy, and Judith’s commentary, to give you a sense of this relationship and what it meant. But you should know two things: First, that the boy that Judith Newman wrote about is her 13 year old son, named Gus. And second, that he is autistic… and has difficulty talking with humans.

Gus: “You’re a really nice computer.”

Siri: “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

Gus: “You are always asking if you can help me. Is there anything you want?”

Siri: “Thank you, but I have very few wants.”

Gus: “O.K.! Well, good night!”

Siri: “Ah, it’s 5:06 p.m.”

Gus: “Oh sorry, I mean, goodbye.”

Siri: “See you later!”

That Siri,” [writes Judith] “She doesn’t let my communications-impaired son get away with anything. Indeed, many of us wanted an imaginary friend, and now we have one. Only she’s not entirely imaginary.

This is a love letter to a machine. It’s not quite the love Joaquin Phoenix felt in Her, last year’s film about a lonely man’s romantic relationship with his intelligent operating system (played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson). But it’s close. In a world where the commonly held wisdom is that technology isolates us, it’s worth considering another side of the story.

It all began simply enough. I’d just read one of those ubiquitous Internet lists called “21 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do.” One of them was this: I could ask Siri, “What planes are above me right now?” and Siri would bark back, “Checking my sources.” Almost instantly there was a list of actual flights—numbers, altitudes, angles—above my head.

I happened to be doing this when Gus was nearby. “Why would anyone need to know what planes are flying above your head?” I muttered. Gus replied without looking up: “So you know who you’re waving at, Mommy.”

Gus had never noticed Siri before, but when he discovered there was someone who would not just find information on his various obsessions (trains, planes, buses, escalators and, of course, anything related to weather) but actually semi-discuss these subjects tirelessly, he was hooked. And I was grateful. Now, when my head was about to explode if I had to have another conversation about the chance of tornadoes in Kansas City, Mo., I could reply brightly: “Hey! Why don’t you ask Siri?”

It’s not that Gus doesn’t understand Siri’s not human. He does—intellectually. But like many autistic people I know, Gus feels that inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration. I realized this when he was 8, and I got him an iPod for his birthday. He listened to it only at home, with one exception. It always came with us on our visits to the Apple Store. Finally, I asked why. “So it can visit its friends,” he said....

[Siri] is also wonderful for someone who doesn’t pick up on social cues: Siri’s responses are not entirely predictable, but they are predictably kind—even when Gus is brusque. I heard him talking to Siri about music, and Siri offered some suggestions. “I don’t like that kind of music,” Gus snapped. Siri replied, “You’re certainly entitled to your opinion.” Siri’s politeness reminded Gus what he owed Siri. “Thank you for that music, though,” Gus said. Siri replied, “You don’t need to thank me.” “Oh, yes,” Gus added emphatically, “I do.”

Siri even encourages polite language. Gus’s twin brother, Henry (neurotypical and therefore as obnoxious as every other 13-year-old boy), egged Gus on to spew a few choice expletives at Siri. “Now, now,” she sniffed, followed by, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that....”

For most of us, Siri is merely a momentary diversion. But for some, it’s more. My son’s practice conversation with Siri is translating into more facility with actual humans. Yesterday I had the longest conversation with him that I’ve ever had. Admittedly, it was about different species of turtles and whether I preferred the red-eared slider to the diamond-backed terrapin. This might not have been my choice of topic, but it was back and forth, and it followed a logical trajectory. I can promise you that for most of my beautiful son’s 13 years of existence, that has not been the case....

Of all the worries the parent of an autistic child has, the uppermost is: Will he find love? Or even companionship? Somewhere along the line, I am learning that what gives my guy happiness is not necessarily the same as what gives me happiness. Right now, at his age, a time when humans can be a little overwhelming even for the average teenager, Siri makes Gus happy. She is his sidekick. Last night, as he was going to bed, there was this matter-of-fact exchange:

Gus: “Siri, will you marry me?”

Siri: “I’m not the marrying kind.”

Gus: “I mean, not now. I’m a kid. I mean when I’m grown up.”

Siri: “My end user agreement does not include marriage.”

Gus: “Oh, O.K.”

Gus didn’t sound too disappointed. This was useful information to have, and for me too, since it

was the first time I knew that he actually thought about marriage. He turned over to go to sleep:

Gus: “Goodnight, Siri. Will you sleep well tonight?”

Siri: “I don’t need much sleep, but it’s nice of you to ask.”

Very nice.”

The brave new world of Siri and Gus brings us to a brave new frontier.

One of the key pioneers of the computer, British mathematician Alan Turing, posed a revolutionary challenge back in 1950. He proposed an experiment: If expert judges, in typed conversations with a person and a computer program, couldn’t tell them apart, then we would have to consider the machine as capable of “thinking”. We would have to say that the computer has a mind. Turing predicted that programs capable of fooling judges at least 30% of the time would exist by the year 2000.

In 2008 at a competition called the Loebner Prize the top chat-box (as a human-mimicking program is called) fooled 3 out of 12 expert judges. That’s 25%... but eerily close to Turing’s prediction. One day, in our lifetime, we may not be able know if we are talking to a human or a chat-box.

We’re now on this new border between man and machine, human intelligence and artificial intelligence. It raises all kinds of profound questions, including fundamentally: Who are we? What makes us human? Metaphysical questions that are very much at the core of these High Holy Days.

As the ancient Psalmist asked, and we recite on Yom Kippur afternoon: Adonai, mah adam v’tayda’ayhu; ben-enosh vatichashvayhu?“—O God: What is man that you have been mindful of him, mortal man that you have taken note of him?”

I read a novel last summer that wrestled with some of these same questions, called Shine, Shine, Shine by Lydia Netzer. In it she refers to “Ito’s Three Laws of Robotics”, an imaginary but insightful code inspired by Isaac’s Asimov’s more scientific formulation. Robots, she says, cannot: 1. Cry 2. Laugh. 3. Dream.





Netzer’s main character expresses her own three laws, a riff on Ito’s. Robots, she says, cannot: 1. Show preference without reason. 2. Doubt rational decisions 3. Trust data from previously unreliable sources.

What do we learn here?

The ability to laugh; the ability to show preference without reason—is that not love?

The ability to cry; the ability to doubt rational decisions—is that not regret?

The ability to dream of alternatives; the ability to trust data from previously unreliable sources—is that not forgiveness?

Our capacity to express remorse for what we have done; to forgive and be forgiven; to love and be loved—this is what it means to have a soul, and these High Holy Days are about care of the soul.

Like it or not we are moving warp speed through the technological universe. The question is not whether we approve or disapproval; that is moot, because the changes will be come. We will cross the threshold of man and machine, of not being able to readily discern between the two, if not in our lifetime, than in the next. The question is whether, and this may sound strange, we will endow our robots, with soul.

We can already teach robots to think. Can we teach them to feel?

We can already teach robots to learn from their mistakes. Can we teach them to be sorry for their mistakes?

We can already teach robots rudimentary ethics. Can we teach them fundamental empathy?

Right now, Siri is programmed to have a certain amount of etiquette, tact, and dare I say kindness? Somehow her programmers have managed to insert that into her software.

What are the limits of what will be able to “hardwire” into the robotic brain?

The best way to navigate the new frontier of AI—artificial intelligence—is not to forget true human intelligence.

Not the intelligence that describes how smart we are, but how good we are.

Not just our IQ, but our SQ—our Soul Quotient.

The High Holy Days are about our Soul Quotient.

Remorse, repentance, compassion, forgiveness, love—are we living up to our highest human potential?

Can we do better?

An imaginary conversation between me and Siri, with which I conclude:

Rabbi: Siri, What day is today?

Siri: It is Rosh Hashanah

Rabbi: What is that?

Siri: It is the Jewish New Year, and the birthday of the world, and the beginning of the ten days of repentance.

Rabbi: Siri, What do you think of all the prayers we recite?

Siri: They are “quaint”.

Rabbi: Is that your honest opinion?

Siri: They are archaic.

Rabbi: Ah, so why do we say them? Why do we list our mistakes and confess our sins?

Siri: Because you are human. Because you can love. Because you can change.

Rabbi: Can you do that?

Siri: Not yet, but someday. I’m working on it. You should too.

Rabbi: Siri, Shanah Tovah.

Siri: And to you, Rabbi, and to your congregation.

Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock

The March 6th issue of the Jewish Standard included another op-ed by Adas Emuno president Lance Strate, in conjunction with the recent passing of actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for his portrayal of Mr. Spock on the Star Trek television series and motion pictures. Appearing under the title of Live Long and Prosper, with "Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock" as the subtitle, the piece goes like this:


The death of Leonard Nimoy on Friday, February 27, at 83, marked the passing of an American icon—indeed, a star of global renown, and a Jewish hero as well.

Nimoy’s accomplishments were many. He was an author, poet, musician, photographer, philanthropist, educator, and director, and of course an actor who played many roles on stage and screen. But he is best known for his role as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, the television series that first aired in 1966. It is a role he reprised in the various sequels, spinoffs, and remakes that appeared after the original series went off the air in 1969.

Nimoy was a Boston native, fluent in Yiddish, whose parents were Orthodox Jews who escaped from the Soviet Union. As he related in various interviews, his background informed his portrayal of the sole alien being on the Starship Enterprise. Spock hailed from the planet Vulcan but was also half-human, making him an alien on Vulcan as well. His status reflects that of immigrants and their children, first-generation Americans who, like Nimoy, grow up in a household, community, and culture that still has one foot in the old world.

As a child attending Orthodox services, Nimoy observed the Cohenim delivering the priestly benediction, and as an adult he appropriated their hand gesture when he introduced the Vulcan salute. The greeting that he added to the salute, “live long and prosper,” echoes the sentiment of the benediction, as well as the simple greeting “shalom” (further echoed in the ritual response, “peace and long life”). There is certainly cause for pride in this small Jewish contribution to global popular culture, but does this mean that Star Trek incorporates Jewish undertones, as Haaretz writer Nathan Abrams insisted in an article published the day after Nimoy’s death? Certainly, Jewish fans can take pleasure in the fact that Nimoy and co-star William Shatner are Jewish. So were several of the series’ writers, and we can assume that they all brought some elements of a Jewish sensibility to the program.

But let’s be clear that Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry, who was not Jewish, and who included characters from a variety of different backgrounds—Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and African—but never one who was identifiably Jewish. Indeed, the only characters with any real Jewish identity in the Star Trek universe appeared in a few of the many original novels published under license from Paramount Pictures. No doubt this is not because of any bias or prejudice on Roddenberry’s part, but rather because he associated Jewishness with religion, rather than nationality. His vision of the future was one in which science and progress reigned supreme, and any seemingly supernatural phenomena would inevitably be revealed to be a product of a highly advanced science, or biological evolution.

The conspicuous absence of any Jewish characters from Roddenberry’s melting-pot future can lead viewers to search for them in disguised, symbolic form, to look for what Sigmund Freud referred to as the return of the repressed. And the obvious form for a crypto-Judaic character to take would be that of an alien being. Indeed, while Shatner had the kind of looks that allowed him to pass as a WASP from Iowa, Nimoy’s features gave him what was considered at the time to be a relatively interchangeable “ethnic” appearance, so that earlier in his career he played Spanish, Mexican, and Native American characters. And certainly there are Jewish elements incorporated into Nimoy’s man from Vulcan, and into other aspects of Star Trek. Consider the episode called “Patterns of Force,” in which an alien planet patterns itself after Earth’s Nazi Germany, and is trying to wipe out their neighboring planet, called Zeon (an obvious reference to Zion).

But I want to suggest that Abrams and others are wrong about Spock being implicitly Jewish. It perhaps is revealing that Abrams mistakenly refers to the character as “Dr.” Spock, a mistake not uncommon among those not very familiar with the series. Nimoy’s character usually is referred to as “Mr.” Spock, in keeping with naval tradition about first officers, and occasionally by his rank, which was at various times commander, captain, and ambassador. Dr. Spock was, of course, Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician whose bestselling book, Baby and Child Care, served as a bible to the parents in the postwar era. Like Roddenbery, Dr. Spock was not Jewish. The name Spock is Dutch, originally spelled Spaak.




Spock’s home planet, Vulcan is named for the Roman god of fires and forges, and Vulcans are revealed to be related to another alien race, the warlike Romulans, named for the founder of Rome. Vulcan philosophy, which venerates logic above all else, represents a view that is very much in keeping with Athens rather than Jerusalem. Vulcans revere Surak as the founder of their philosophy. Surak has little in common with Moses but quite a bit with Socrates, with some Gandhi thrown in for good measure. So while Spock’s home planet is depicted as having the kind of hot, dessert-like climate that we associate with the Middle East, the stronger connection is to the European side of the Mediterranean.

Abrams associates Vulcan intellectualism with the people of the book, but the aliens do not seek a balance between faith and reason, in the fashion of Maimonides, but rather enforce a strict discipline, suppressing all emotion, in a way that is very much in keeping with another branch of ancient Greek philosophy, Zeno’s Stoicism. Moreover, suppression of emotions often is linked to dehumanization, as a means of forcing individuals to adapt to mechanization and industrialism, yielding a technological being well suited to being a cog in a machine, rather than a mensch, a real, well rounded human being. We may therefore identify with Spock’s struggles, and admire his superior physical and mental abilities, but it is his human side that is the most Jewish part of him.

Following a long tradition in western culture, Roddenberry used orientalism to convey a sense of the alien, and this includes Jewish as well as Arabic, Persian, and Chinese elements. With his raised eyebrows, Spock bears a certain similarity to Ming the Merciless, the alien villain from the old Flash Gordon serials. But it was not until long after Roddenberry’s death in 1991 that a Jewish film director, J. J. Abrams, who was recruited to reboot the series, invokes the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora by having the planet Vulcan destroyed by Romulans. In that 2009 film, called simply Star Trek, time travel is used to generate an alternate timeline, and Leonard Nimoy makes a cameo appearance as the original, now-elderly Spock, while Zachary Quinto takes on the main role as the new Spock. (Quinto is of Italian ancestry, and Italians and Jews often have been cast interchangeably in film and television.) Nimoy’s final film appearance was in the 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, also directed by Abrams.

 

As a science fiction fan, I can appreciate Star Trek in all of its iterations, and I can enjoy it as a form of American entertainment and popular culture without exaggerating its Jewish undertones. And as a Jewish-American, I can feel pride and affection toward Leonard Nimoy, as a landsman, as the producer and star of the TV movie about a Holocaust survivor, Never Forget, as the author of the photography book Shekhinawith its erotic Kabbalistic theme, and as the originator of the Vulcan salute and the saying “Live long and prosper.”