Yom Kippur: Misrepresentation

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2016/5777

Twice this past year I was asked to serve as a dramaturge for two local stage productions. I was deeply honored to be considered as a dramaturge, and to celebrate the occasion, I dashed off to consult Webster’s Dictionary to determine what a “dramaturge” is! I guess I had always thought a dramaturge was a person with a burning desire to act on the stage… but I come by this honestly... When my mother first came to this country and heard about Jewish Social Action, she thought it meant mixed dancing at Hillel.

So it turns out a dramaturge is a literary editor who works with both cast and director on a production for various purposes – to correct inaccuracies, to  help shape the play, and perhaps to advise on the effect it might have on the audience and so forth.

The first of the two plays was a musical about an Eastern European Jewish woman with a script that employed several Yiddish words and phrases. I think the most valuable contribution I made to this production may have been when I pointed out to the lovely young Lutheran actress that the dumplings in Grandma Sophie’s soup are not to be pronounced “crap-lach”. Yes, you’re welcome.

The second, and trickier, assignment was to assist a local cast in understanding some of the nuances of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Jew Shylock in The Merchant of Venice for an upcoming production. To the credit of the director and producers, they were very conscientious about grappling with the significance of staging a play like Merchant in the Twin Cities, circa 2016. What did it mean historically? What does it mean today, to an audience here?

So they invited me to a pre-rehearsal discussion where I admitted up front that I am no Shakespearean scholar, nor do I play one on TV, but that I do have some working knowledge of the history of anti-Semitism and how this particular play has been used over the centuries to discredit and defame the Jewish people. The character of Shylock is firmly entrenched in the Western Canon and almost synonymous with greed, avarice, and blood-vengeance. The very word Shylock is a verb meaning to lend money at extortionately high rates of interest.

I thought the cast should be aware that no fewer than 50 different productions of Merchant took place during the reign of the Third Reich in Germany. One of Hitler’s personal favorites, he hired shills to be in the audience and to hoot and hiss when Shylock came on stage lest there be any uncertainty about how the Jew was being portrayed.

I also told the cast that relevant to staging The Merchant of Venice in present day Minnepolis/St. Paul is the historical fact that this place was, at one time, outside of Europe itself, the most viciously anti-Semitic spot in the world, with broad, fabricated, absurdly false representations of Jews coming out of the likes of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Radio minister Charles Coughlin, and Pastor William Riley who used plastic, oversimplified texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to school their adherents.

A member of the cast asked “What exactly did William Shakespeare really know about Jews?” Good question. Probably not that much, given that almost all of England’s Jewish population had been expelled in the 13th century and had not since returned. The playwright may well have been working off of the same mythology about Jews as anyone in his audience in 1596.

And then there is the fact that 16th century Venice is known, among other things, for introducing the word “ghetto” into the lexicon. The Jews of Venice were confined to one section of Venice called Geto, where their commerce was limited and they wore the identifying little red caps.

Now, I didn’t want to totally bum the cast out - even though, being good actors, they smiled politely during my diatribe. So I told them, hey, it ain’t all bad. If we learn anything from studying the works of Shakespeare, and any great literature we see that well-developed human characters are deeply nuanced, Shylock included. You can label any person as a typical this or that, but you will almost certainly misrepresent their unique nature. The greatest authors and playwrights surely knew this.

There is a wonderful YouTube video made some years ago of actor Patrick Stewart demonstrating three distinctively different ways in which the character Shylock can be and has been portrayed. Using Shylock’s well known dialogue with Antonio and Bassanio in the first act, Stewart first interprets Shylock as noble, dignified member of a persecuted race; then as a greedy, vengeful bloodthirsty monster (as Stewart was originally directed to play the part); then again a third time as humorous and jocular. To the actor’s credit, he refused to portray the character in only one dimension.

Labeling any large group of people in politics, art, or in casual “locker room banter” has huge consequences in a world that desperately seeks a sound bite.  We want to sum up the totality of a race, a religion, nationality or gender in 140 characters or less. When we use stereotypes, or succumb to believing a stereotype, we grossly misinform ourselves about people. We quickly lose sight of individual integrity. We do not serve humanity. We verbally ghettoize people.

I think that a mitigating factor for the cast of Merchant might have been that the hatred portrayed lies so distantly in the past; it is old, a signature of its time and place. An historical curiosity. And there might be some truth in that.

But even a cursory glance at a Parisian newspaper, circa 2016, will reveal that Jew-baiting is alive and well in Europe. Someone not long ago mounted a kippah-cam, a small video recorder on top of a Yarmulke and walked through Paris, and the footage documented the person being spat upon repeatedly, not unlike the opening scene of Merchant of Venice some 500 years earlier.

And though the British expulsion of the Jews may indeed have occurred 8 centuries ago, you can still consult a modern edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and find the only proper noun that doubles as a verb is the word “Jew,” meaning to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way.

Deborah Lipstadt taught us here several years ago, and discussed her then recent victory in the libel case against her by Holocaust denier David Irving. It was a big story at the time because it brought to light how a single person with a re-imagined narrative and a gross misrepresentation can mold public opinion about and discredit an entire people.

Deborah’s story is again the public eye as the film Denial has just been released. In one of the early scenes she makes it clear that she is willing to engage anyone in a discussion who wants to talk about various details, specifics, figures, but that she will not debate a person who denies, wholesale, that the Holocaust occurred. Such a claim, Lipstadt says, sheds no light on anything. Such a voice seeks to conceal, not to enlighten. Such a position seeks to misrepresent, not to portray. And the Jewish people are people who always err on the side of shining the spotlight on the human condition, not obliterating it with falsifications.

Lipstadt has more recently referred to a form of “soft-core” Holocaust denial in the use of false comparisons. “What we have now,” she writes, is where you label Jews as using Nazi-like tactics.” You may disagree with Israel’s policies on a gazillion things, but they are not behaving like the Nazis. You can say that the Palestinians are being mistreated but Israel is most certainly not committing genocide. Those terms are applied by people who either seek to demean the Shoah or paint a gut wrenching slanderous picture of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Our children on University campuses are bearing the brunt of this insidious misinformation.

Why do we as a people get so upset about stereotyping? Is it not because we know the consequences of reducing human beings to a broad insulting caricature? Is it not because we celebrate this very day our ability to match our outer self with our inner self; that the two may be in harmony? Because this is a holiday devoted to the ardent study of human character and the potential for improvement? A holiday that abandons false labels and asks us to make our books of life decidedly non-fictional works?

A member of the cast then asked the elephant-in-the-room question: Rabbi, should this play be produced anywhere? Should it be banned from the stage?

No, I thought, and said as much. This is not how we roll. Jews are not in the habit of squelching dialogue. Jews do not support keeping discourse, or art, or literature or performance hidden from view. Better to reveal. Better to put it out there and discuss it. We are, after all, the people of revelation.

I noted that when Professor Suzannah Heschel, intellectual and scholar, was once asked if she thought Merchant of Venice should be banned and she said: “No, that would be a treason against western civilization. You might as well go live on the moon,” she said.

And while I agree with Dr. Heschel, I couldn’t help but note that in the movie Selma a couple of years back, her father, the great Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was unceremoniously airbrushed out of the pivotal March scene, no longer linked in history with Dr. King whom he stood alongside, praying with his feet. And you can certainly fact-check that!

Film, like the stage, is largely director’s media. You can tell the story in any way you want. Your characters can tell you how to feel.

Whether it is in the news, or in art or music, or in political discourse during an especially nasty election season, there are always going to be people who mess with the facts and spin the world to support their goals. Who cavalierly malign and label groups of people as though they were not possessed of a unique soul.

The Jewish people have been on the receiving end of this for too long. We know very well what it is to have our humanity stripped away and homogenized with a yellow-star or a red cap.

I excused myself from the meeting with the cast telling them I had to return to my day job of preparing for the upcoming holidays. I thought about the meaning of this great and awesome day on which Jewish people endeavor to harmonize the inner and the outer self. We are complex. We cannot be summed up in a sound bite. That the height of this day comes at that moment of true atonement – when we achieve at-one-ment. When the outer person who interacts with the world is the same as the individual we know dwells inside.

We do not shy away from facts. Not about the world. Not about others. Not about ourselves. We know that the more we look into our own traditions, the more we learn about ourselves and the people around us. We pride ourselves in being an or-la-goyim, a light to the nations. Darkness and obfuscation and misrepresentation are not our allies.

We as a people eternally represent all those who have been slandered, all who have been labeled, disenfranchised, mistreated, abandoned.

If you chance to be in New York and go see the latest Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof you may be disappointed to see that it does not open immediately with the Tradition piece. Instead you see a bearded man wearing a modern parka, reading a book in a subway with the Cyrillic lettered Anatevka on the wall behind him. Soon it is revealed he is Tevye the milkman and the show commences as it has done for 50 years.

At the conclusion of the play, as the Jews are led out of their “Geto” fearing a coming pogrom, the modern immigrant character reemerges and joins them in their search for a new home, taking his place in the long and tortured history of forced immigration.

Ninety-one-year-old Sheldon Harnick, the original Fiddler lyricist, who penned the words: “to life, to life, l’chaim!” had veto power over any major changes to the show and was asked about that one.

No, he said. It’s fine. It’s perfect. That is our tradition. That is who we are.