Bad Rabbi Media Rabbi Charlie Buckholtz

"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it."
Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever past I had") and why discovering punk was a world-opening revelation ("Punk rock was very theatrical, there was the opportunity to recreate oneself; it valorized the outsider…and all those things spoke to me"). He talks about the process of becoming a filmmaker, including a possible encounter with the ghost of a dead punk rocker in the Nola hotel room he died in, and the horror shorts film festival he's curated for the past 11 years in Brooklyn -- interspersed with reminiscinces of his time apprenticing to a Hasidic Kabbalist in the Lower East Side who'd been a beat poet in the '50s. He also gets into his own religious and spiritual journey with Judaism, including the humbling intellectual intricacy of Talmud study. "It absolutely blows me away to see that the parts can fit better in a counterintuitive way…and it makes me also a little humble about my own intuitions…"  
"I like films that are surprising…I like to delight the audience by surprising them," he told me, and this in some ways is the headline for his artistic process more broadly -- the canvas of which is not just film, not just writing, not just music, but life itself. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It was both challenging and illuminating to speak with my old friend Shawn Ruby, an Israeli citizen who is deeply rooted in his Zionist identity (having originated in Canada and raised his family and made his life in Israel, one child a high-ranking IDF officer), firmly anchored in an unwavering pursuit of moral clarity, and overall one of the most thoughtful people I know. We spoke an hour past the time the last group of hostages was supposed to be let out, in the midst of what he described as a great national anxiety, "everyone is sitting by their radios and tvs."
"There is enormous mourning. I find myself crying all the time. And it’s just been like that continuously."
"We were on the way to shul, when a neighbor came and told us something was going on down south, and it’s really bad...A good friend of ours lost his life that first day of fighting…this is a kid that we’ve known forever, we’re good friends with his partners. So that’s when it became very real."
"I was raised on Holocaust stories and pogrom stories, and it’s not like that anymore, we’re fighting back—and it’s good that we’re fighting back…But when you have power, you have responsibility—and we have responsibility also for the lives we’re taking now..."
"I am livid at my government for allowing Hamas to sit on our border for the past 15 years…I think the reason was to keep the Palestinians divided. That was immoral and wrong."
"What we’re doing is occupying the Palestinians for the past 50 years, and that is a moral stain on our country…and we were powerful enough to figure out how to solve it in some way. We were the more powerful party...We have to make people aware that as the more powerful party there are things we can do to move this thing along."
"How do we move people to a different place? It’s not that they don't think the occuparion is immoral—they do think the occupation is immoral. They just think the alternative is national suicide."
"I want to live with these people. I want Gaza to be successful. But not if they’re going to keep trying to kill me."
"I don’t think right now that the Israeli response is so disproportionate to what happened to us, and to what is needed to make sure it doesn’t happen again…cause it’s not revenge. But we’re interested to make sure it doesn’t happen again."
 
 
 
 

"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now…"
Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is Rabbi Shaul Judelman, Israeli resident of the West Bank town Tekoa, coexistence activist and co-founder/co-director of the non-profit Roots-Shorashim-Judur. That's why he is BAD RABBI's first 3rd-time guest, and why I'm so excited to stop typing right now and get this episode up so you can listen to it already. I basically just dumped out all of my current observations, anxieties, analyses, and critiques on the (metaphorical) table in front of Shaul and asked him to poke, prod, add, subtract, organize, and shed his own considerable light on it. We didn't agree about everything, but imo it would be silly not to take everything he sees and says very seriously.
Here are some salient excerpts from our conversation:
"Society is overflowing with purpose. Because it’s The Home. The Home has been shattered... So there’s this incredible sense of unity…The army failed us. The government is inept in many ways. In general we’ve been on a long slide of losing faith in our national institutions that are supposed to take care of us. But the Israeli society has just stepped up in the most emotive, amazing way, to take care of each other...
"[Prior to 10/7,] the reservists were threatening not to serve. The pilots were threatening not to fly. The leaders on both sides were just fanning all they vitriol. So it looked pretty bad. So when the attack came, I imagine Iran and hezbollah thought we were a society that was falling apart. But we were already enlisted. You had 300,000 people who were already enlisted to show up every Saturday night to fight for the Israeli they believed in. For the values they believe in. For the home they want to live in...By the next day [i.e. 10/8], the big protest movement had organized a control room and were evacuating people under fire from all the border towns, setting up places for people to go, already doing the food package in…it was a matter of sending out a WhatsApp on the channel. Because the network was there…the army at the end of the day turned to them for inspiration."
 
Why is Bibi still in office?
"The entire north of the country is worries about hiznollah commandos storming in through a tunnel…That day of reckoning is going to come. But the sense of right now, the most important thing to do is that our people in the south can’t go home until Hamas is out of power, until their ability to fight is done. Until that’s done, there’s a big swath of our country that is empty. And we owe it to those people who we’ve already failed to give them the security that they can live their lives within the established borders of the state of Israel."
 
"Imagine you’re a Palestinian committed to peace, and your Israeli partner says, 'I think we have to hit Gaza, we have to hit Hamas, I don’t see another way out.' The cost of that, whet it means on the Palestinian civilian life is tremendous and how can you possibly say that. But I think that most Israelis have come to that feeling."
"On the Israeli side, people were triggered by Palestinians saying, I don’t think any children were killed, Hamas only attacks military targets, your media is lying to you. And you have someone in our WhatsApp group who just buried her niece."
 
"For a lot of people, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, who is the victim? & both sides have a pretty good case. But if you’re a Palestinian and you’ve been watching the world ignore you more and more, and looking at Occupation get wo

Poetry, right?
I don't know about you but I'm feeling like I could use some poetry right about now. To that end! Right before the High Holidays started I had a conversation with one of my favorite Jewish writers, poet and translator Atar Hadari. The episode was slated for release on Monday 10/9, and of course intervening world events made it nearly impossible to think about poetry, much less listen to it read aloud, much less claim a moment of open-ended reflection to contemplate, assimilate, absorb.
But at this point, I feel like we could all use a bit of poetry in our lives.
And Atar's new book Gethsemane transports readers to a setting that is chronologically remote but cluturally ever-present: Israel during the time of Jesus, the people and events narrated in the New Testament. Atar does us the honor of reading three poems I requested from Gethsemane . From wildly illuminating and entertaining angles, the poems explore some of the fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity as communal spiritual value systems -- and does so from a place of profound empathy, sensitivity, and understanding.
Jewish characters, some of whose names still reverberate into our modern "Judeo-Christian" culture, some 'background characters' whose names were never known, observe the events of Jesus's life with emotions we are not used to associating them, given the New Testament's flat characterization of them as either stone-hearted legalists or zealous converts. In the landscape of Gethsemane, ancient Israelites view Jesus with a wide range of attitudes: curiosity, bemusement, annoyance, pity, indignation, indifference, respect. (“There are many kings of Israel that come off a lot worse than Jesus does.")
They wonder things like, How did Jesus make a living? How is this a paying gig?
Through these homey, local voices, a value system emerges organically that pokes and prods at some of the fundamental premises of the New Testament's theological challenge to Judaism. Miracles, in this view, are both freely acknowledged and deprioritized. And taking responsibility for a commmnity's 'mundane' spiritual needs -- via the Temple rituals so mocked in New Testament, via adherence to the legal minutae of Jewish Law -- is the highest stature a person can attain.
"They *needed* the money lenders…it’s just a whole system of commerce they doesn’t work without money lenders…it’s like, Jesus went and threw all the clerks out of city hall. 'Well that’s great Jesus, but how am I going to pay my taxes!'"
 
 
 

"So now I'm in a weird place" is a sentiment many can relate to these days. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, following the latter's barbaric 10/7 torture-rape-massacre of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 240 more, has provoked some of the most acute fissures of my generation, with implications that can't be fully predicted except to say we will be living with them for generations more. Joshua Leifer experienced what he describes as an acute awakening about the nature of left-politics in the wake of the massacre. "I reacted very personally to people I knew personally from the left-journalism milieu, reacting excitedly, triumphantly -- or just justifying the Hamas attacks."

"I was surprised by the controversy of the humane left piece...and even more surprised and kind of appalled by the published response to it."

"These were things that I thought were basically uncontroversial ideas."

"I don't think my fundamental analysis of what's happening has changed. but my sense of where i fit into the american political scene...has changed a little bit."
"That argument incensed me...I just couldn't accept that that was something that was being said. and it turned out to be the case that his sentiment was pretty widely shared among progressive Jews."
 
Toward a Humane Left - Dissent Magazine
Inhumane Times | Joshua Leifer | The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com)

“We are all characters in our stories, and we have to look internally, and hopefully at the end of 90 minutes we’ll become a better person. But sometimes the characters don’t change, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, you were offered the opportunity to grow and learn from your experiences, and instead you’re still being the same turd you started out as.’ ”
Bonus episode! I've been wanting to interview the awesome Daniel Zana for a while because I'm such a huge fan of the Jews on Film podcast he cohosts with Harry Ottensoser. There are so many different kinds of Jews, and so many ways of connecting with Jewish identity and tradition, and art is such a prominent and useful channel for connection and openings to new (or long-hidden) feelings and ideas. So I asked Daniel to give some thought to a few movies people might enjoy and engage with during this Highest of Holiday months. He digs up some great recs from the Jews on Film archives (feel free to pause and check out relevant eps!) and hits all the right notes. You'll laugh, cry, think, and feel! No spoilers!
Shana tova umetuka goodness & sweetness & growth & this year!