Voeskhanan, Orthodoxy, and Kink / ואתחנן, אָרטאָדאָקסיע, און שגעון

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim (Tōrah commentaries) written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist, with guest posts from comrades. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance, and it's crucial that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. I aim to offer comment which is true to the pshat (i.e. engages with the plain meaning of the text, especially when it's difficult) and uses Tōrah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal

My friend Kamal needs help to leave Gaza. He is trying to immigrate to Greece to search for his missing son, who in desperation took a small and dangerous lifeboat across the Mediterranean. Please donate what you can.

Content note

Genocide in Palestine; sexualization of Nazis and the Holocaust; Nazi imagery; kink and softcore pornography; mentions of rape.

Grief and optimism

This week's parsha always comes after Tisho b'Ov, when we read Eykho and lament the destruction of the Beys h'Mikdesh (the Temple). After the Three Weeks of mourning the loss of Hashem's dwelling place on Earth, we comfort ourselves with Voeskhanan: a reiteration of the earlier promise that we will inherit the land. This promise is from long before the Beys h'Mikdesh was built. We pivot backwards to an earlier point in our history/mythology when we were filled with optimism, despite knowing how the bleak narrative goes: after we enter the land, the Beys h'Mikdesh is destroyed not once but twice. Jewish history—and human history at large—trudges from violence to violence. The establishment of the Jewish state culminates in fascism and genocide. We are grieving, and this week we're soothing our grief with the memory of naive optimism.

Jewish time is cyclical, and Tōrah is rounding off the narrative. The long journey of the Israelites is almost over.

Before we enter the land, Mōshe Rebeynu reminds us, again and again, to remember and keep the commandments. We know that we will not, and Yerushalayim will fall as a result. We know that the Holocaust will be used as cover for the Nakba. We know that the state of Israel will kill at least 60,000 Palestinians since October 7, and that the Knesset won't even pretend to care about the hostages. We know things will go wrong and Hashem will be furious with us. And yet we take comfort in the promise we know will not be fulfilled.

Still, we try to follow the rules. We play in the sandbox of strict religious observance. Hashem hits us. Our queer Jewish peers, disillusioned with orthodoxy and resentful of our continued proximity to it, hit us. Our homophobic frum peers and rabbis hit us. The goyim hit us. Hashem hits us again. We grieve. We know better. We're optimistic anyway. It's something not unlike fun.

As Tōrah scholars, we are beseeched to insert ourselves into the story. This week, you and I are not only 21st century Jews mourning the mass murder in Palestine done allegedly for our safety; we are Israelites, gazing across the river at that promised land and listening to Mōshe deliver a final soliloquy to prepare us to enter it.

Mōshe recalls asking to see Knaan and being rebuked by Hashem. Mōshe doesn't get to cross the Yardeyn (Jordan) into the land, and is only permitted to look upon it from atop a mountain. This is punishment for the sins of the first generation of wandering Israelites, all of whom have since died; only Mōshe remains, guiding their children. The captain is going down with the ship.

Mōshe reminds the people to follow the laws that Hashem has given them. The 10 commandments are reiterated along with many other rules. Should we fail as Jews and, for example, worship false idols like Zionism, Hashem will kill us and scatter us among hostile nations. Should we return and repent, Hashem will not let us fail or perish, for Hashem is compassionate and will remember the covenant made with our ancestors. This compassion is conditional on our good behavior, and we're subject to collective punishment.

The autistic desire for rules and clarity

Don't worship idols. Don't take oaths in vain. Don't work on Shabos. Honor your parents. Wrap tefilin. Don't test the word of Hashem. Don't covet. Don't kill.

Orthodoxy holds every commandment as sacred and immutable. The rabbis have argued back and forth across centuries, pondering and guessing and "what if"-ing and perfecting the finer points of each mitsve. Some movements see halakha (Jewish law) as just a historical document or an anachronistic set of superstitions, politely indulged but ultimately overruled by modern norms and conveniences. On the contrary, in orthodoxy you can add but you can't subtract. Once something is codified—whether by Hashem in Torah, or by rabbis in the divine act of co-creating halakha—it's there forever.

Maybe I like orthodoxy because I like rules. The structure is appealing but it puts its queer leftists in a tough spot. Orthodoxy is quite blatantly patriarchal, homophobic, and racist. Why engage with a tradition hostile to our identities and values? Why not abandon rabbinic Judaism altogether as we create new Jewish institutions?

As my dear friend Josephine said to me, sometimes the medium is problematic or even hostile, but that's where we're compelled to make art because we can achieve something that we can't elsewhere.

Horror movies. Pop music. Judaism. Did you know that stand-up comedy has its origins in minstrel shows? All of these formats are tainted with exploitation and real violence, but their flaws allow us to be in a point of interesting tension.

To put it another way: we like playing in the mud.

Stalags and the sexualization of the Holocaust

The 1961 Eichmann trial coincided with the advent of Stalag fiction—Israeli erotic pulp about evil-sexy sadistic SS female officers torturing and raping Allied POWs, before they are themselves raped and killed in revenge. This popular smut was consumed mostly by the teenagers: the first generation of native Hebrew speakers and children of Holocaust survivors. While the typical Stalag story didn't involve Jews explicitly—the heroes were captured soldiers from America and England—for the Israeli child reader in the 1960s, "he doesn't think of Poles of Frenchmen. For him, the inmates are all Jews".

Stalags weren't the first Jewish media to sexualize the Holocaust. The 1955 book The House of Dolls by Yehiel Dinur, an Auschwitz survivor who wrote under the pen name K. Tzetnik (an abbreviation of the German "Konzentrationlager": concentration camp prisoner), was about women prisoners forced into sexual slavery by the Nazi guards. Originally received as testimonial, Dolls was later understood as a fictionalized and eroticized precursor to the Stalag pulps. Though arguably no less "true" than other artistic or poetic depictions of the Holocaust, Stalags were (and still are) dismissed as "illegitimate" Holocaust literature.

"The legitimate Holocaust literature typically consisted of quasi-fictional tales of heroic resistance and sacrifice: children smuggling food and guns into the ghettos, Janusz Korchak going with his students into the gas chambers, heroic youths preferring to die as fighters rather than victims. Focusing on action, sacrifice and meaningful death, these tales were very much in line with Zionist ideology, and therefore used as teaching material in schools. ... Unlike the moralizing narratives propagated by Zionist ideology, the illegitimate texts provided a source of illicit excitement by violating a double taboo—sex and the Holocaust, two domains sanctioned by adults and barred to the young."

— "Holocaust Perversions: The Stalags Pulp Fiction and the Eichmann Trial", Amit Pinchevski & Roy Brand, 2007

Doing that which we are not allowed to do is titillating. Israeli young people are still giggling and salivating over Stalags, processing potentially not only their inherited Holocaust trauma but reckoning with their own abhorrent actions as IDF soliders.

Engaging with oppressive structures on our own terms subverts them and allows us to process our traumas. The victims of violence are entitled to eroticize their experiences. And what about things that don't directly victimize us? We have an uncomfortable but undeniable fascination with the unsavory. We are drawn to bad things not in spite of but because they are bad. Plus, the aesthetics or orthodoxy are sexy even divorced from this context. Frumers and I share a fetish for 1950s century fashion.

Genocide as abuse from G-d

The parsha prepares us to go into the land, finally, after a two-generation journey through the desert and 400 years of slavery in Mitsrayim. But it isn't pretty.

This is one of several genocidal passages in Tōrah. Is this what IDF soldiers think of as they level Gaza, or what West Bank settlers fantasize about as they shoot people—are they finally inheriting the land, the Palestinians "delivered" to them by Hashem?

By any reasonable definition, what's been happening in the "promised land" since October 8 is a genocide. What difference does a word make? (A terrifying question to confront as a writer.) Is this all pointless semantics? How many hours have been wasted by Jews in the diaspora hand-wringing over the words "ceasefire", "Zionism", "Israel" (or "IsraHell", "Isn'tReal", "the Zionist entity"), "IDF" (or "IOF"), "from the river to the sea", and of course "genocide"? If we all agree to call it "ethnic cleansing" or some even more euphemistic phrase, does that make it ok? Fighting a language war betrays our imagined powerlessness to do anything material.

This parsha gives us the Shema and the V'ohavto, the most central line of liturgy in all Jewish text. The commandment to love Hashem in the face of genocide, and enthusiastic support for the genocide, and reluctant but stubborn support for the genocide, is ridiculous. How can I? I don't imagine G-d must respond with immediate tit-for-tat whereby my daily activity is tallied with good deeds rewarded and sins punished; but I cannot take seriously a deity who seemingly ignores (or worse, condones) violence at such a scale. The suggestion that G-d's timeline for justice is longer than the human lifespan is uninspiring. If there is no justice in the lifetime of someone who is wronged, then there is no justice.

We try to faithfully follow all the rules, difficult and illogical as they may be—forcing love is especially brutal—and we are routinely punished for failing to meet impossible expectations. This is kink. Or, this is abuse. I'm distracted by semantics again. Either way, we bow to Him and say thank you for it. Sometimes it helps.

Optimism and grief

Fatalism is an understandable position in our time. But we cannot know what will come, and even if we could, I believe that it is our moral responsibility to act as though the future were not yet determined. We must have optimism. Failing that, we must act as though we do.

The Eichmann trial did not accomplish the goal of legally codifying the atrocities of the Holocaust. But its "failing to bring closure to trauma was precisely what did justice to the inexplicability of trauma," (Pinchevski & Brand, 2007). Trauma resists closure. The story isn't over because it's never over.

We're already in the mud. We may as well splash around.