The Chickens have come home to roost, too. I find myself watching the local news which came on after the Ohio State - Penn State football game, to a piece featuring Kobey's Swap Meet. Apparently, things are so bad that business is down AT THE SWAP MEET by 33%. That's DOWN ONE THIRD.
This is what is being doled out as news to Mr. and Mrs. Sixpack. Mr. and Mrs. Sixpack just want a change in their lives and feel powerless to change the tidal wave that has hit them. Barack Obama will be judged in large measure how he LEADS this country during the course of the first year in office. Nobody will expect miracles from the guy, but he knows well that expectations are high and that at this point in time, in American history, failure is again not an option. May the force be with him. B"H.
Randy Shiner
25 October 2008
So When Will Banks Give Loans?
So When Will Banks Give Loans?
“Chase recently received $25 billion in federal funding. What effect will that have on the business side and will it change our strategic lending policy?”
It was Oct. 17, just four days after JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, agreed to take a $25 billion capital injection courtesy of the United States government, when a JPMorgan employee asked that question. It came toward the end of an employee-only conference call that had been largely devoted to meshing certain divisions of JPMorgan with its new acquisition, Washington Mutual.
Which, of course, it also got thanks to the federal government. Christmas came early at JPMorgan Chase.
The JPMorgan executive who was moderating the employee conference call didn’t hesitate to answer a question that was pretty politically sensitive given the events of the previous few weeks.
Given the way, that is, that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had decided to use the first installment of the $700 billion bailout money to recapitalize banks instead of buying up their toxic securities, which he had then sold to Congress and the American people as the best and fastest way to get the banks to start making loans again, and help prevent this recession from getting much, much worse.
In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who’s been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.
(He didn’t mean to, of course, but I obtained the call-in number and listened to a recording.)
“Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase,” he began. “What we do think it will help us do is perhaps be a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for some banks who are still struggling. And I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way and obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop.”
Read that answer as many times as you want — you are not going to find a single word in there about making loans to help the American economy. On the contrary: at another point in the conference call, the same executive (who I’m not naming because he didn’t know I would be listening in) explained that “loan dollars are down significantly.” He added, “We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit to fully reflect the high cost of pricing on the loan side.” In other words JPMorgan has no intention of turning on the lending spigot.
It is starting to appear as if one of Treasury’s key rationales for the recapitalization program — namely, that it will cause banks to start lending again — is a fig leaf, Treasury’s version of the weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation. As Mark Landler reported in The New York Times earlier this week, “the government wants not only to stabilize the industry, but also to reshape it.” Now they tell us.
Indeed, Mr. Landler’s story noted that Treasury would even funnel some of the bailout money to help banks buy other banks. And, in an almost unnoticed move, it recently put in place a new tax break, worth billions to the banking industry, that has only one purpose: to encourage bank mergers. As a tax expert, Robert Willens, put it: “It couldn’t be clearer if they had taken out an ad.”
Friday delivered the first piece of evidence that this is, indeed, the plan. PNC announced that it was purchasing National City, an acquisition that will be greatly aided by the new tax break, which will allow it to immediately deduct any losses on National City’s books.
As part of the deal, it is also tapping the bailout fund for $7.7 billion, giving the government preferred stock in return. At least some of that $7.7 billion would have gone to NatCity if the government had deemed it worth saving. In other words, the government is giving PNC money that might otherwise have gone to NatCity as a reward for taking over NatCity.
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel as if we’ve been sold a bill of goods.
•
The markets had another brutal day Friday. The Asian markets got crushed. Germany and England were down more than 5 percent. In the hours before the United States markets opened, all the signals suggested it was going to be the worst day yet in the crisis. The Dow dropped more than 400 points at the opening, but thankfully it never got any worse.
There are lots of reasons the markets remain unstable — fears of a global recession, companies offering poor profit projections for the rest of the year, and the continuing uncertainties brought on by the credit crisis. But another reason, I now believe, is that investors no longer trust Treasury. First it says it has to have $700 billion to buy back toxic mortgage-backed securities. Then, as Mr. Paulson divulged to The Times this week, it turns out that even before the bill passed the House, he told his staff to start drawing up a plan for capital injections. Fearing Congress’s reaction, he didn’t tell the Hill about his change of heart.
Now, he’s shifted gears again, and is directing Treasury to use the money to force bank acquisitions. Sneaking in the tax break isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring, either. (And let’s not even get into the less-than-credible, after-the-fact rationalizations for letting Lehman default, which stands as the single worst mistake the government has made in the crisis.)
On Thursday, at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, the chairman, Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, pushed Neel Kashkari, the young Treasury official who is Mr. Paulson’s point man on the bailout plan, on the subject of banks’ continuing reluctance to make loans. How, Senator Dodd asked, was Treasury going to ensure that banks used their new government capital to make loans — “besides rhetorically begging them?”
“We share your view,” Mr. Kashkari replied. “We want our banks to be lending in our communities.”
Senator Dodd: “Are you insisting upon it?”
Mr. Kashkari: “We are insisting upon it in all our actions.”
But they are doing no such thing. Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead. And those pleas, in this environment, are falling on deaf ears.
Yes, there are times when a troubled bank needs to be acquired by a stronger bank. Given that the federal government insures deposits, it has an abiding interest in seeing that such mergers take place as smoothly as possible. Nobody is saying those kinds of deals shouldn’t take place.
But Citigroup, at this point, probably falls into the category of troubled bank, and nobody seems to be arguing that it should be taken over. It is in the “too big to fail” category, and the government will ensure that it gets back on its feet, no matter how much money it takes. One reason Mr. Paulson forced all of the nine biggest banks to take government money was to mask the fact that some of them are much weaker than others.
We have long been a country that has treasured its diversity of banks; up until the 1980s, in fact, there were no national banks at all. If Treasury is using the bailout bill to turn the banking system into the oligopoly of giant national institutions, it is hard to see how that will help anybody. Except, of course, the giant banks that are declared the winners by Treasury.
JPMorgan is going to be one of the winners — and deservedly so.
Mr. Dimon managed the company so well during the housing bubble that it is saddled with very few of the problems that have crippled competitors like Citi. The government handed it Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual because it was strong enough to swallow both institutions without so much as a burp.
Of all the banking executives in that room with Mr. Paulson a few weeks ago, none needed the government’s money less than Mr. Dimon. A company spokesman told me, “We accepted the money for the good of the entire financial system.” He added that JP Morgan would use the money “to do good for customers and shareholders. We are disciplined to try to make loans that people can repay.”
Nobody is saying it should make loans that people can’t repay. What I am saying is that Mr. Dimon took the $25 billion on the condition that his institution would start making loans. There are plenty of small and medium-size businesses that are choking because they have no access to capital — and are perfectly capable of repaying the money. How about a loan program for them, Mr. Dimon?
Late Thursday afternoon, I caught up with Senator Dodd, and asked him what he was going to do if the loan situation didn’t improve. “All I can tell you is that we are going to have the bankers up here, probably in another couple of weeks and we are going to have a very blunt conversation,” he replied.
He continued: “If it turns out that they are hoarding, you’ll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay.”
Let’s hope so.Fat Girls and Weed - An Essay From Bob Lefsetz
"Well since Mary Jane met Jenny Craig
She's got more to love, she never makes me beg
Take a sack of flour and a hit off my bong
She looks really good in that good thin thong
If I can't drink her pretty I'm gonna smoke her thin
She's my corn-fed baby with a double chin"
There's a song on the new Kenny Chesney album entitled "Ten With A Two". Kenny's gone on record that he lived this life when he was in college. His beer goggles fogging his vision, he woke up to find the girls he was with...wouldn't be featured on any magazine covers.
I think this is cruel. I'm surprised Kenny included this track on his album. Which despite many complaining about its dour tone, I like very much. Because of its honesty. But I couldn't help thinking what Kenny's audience would think of this relatively upbeat number. They're working in the bank all week, they put on their cowboy hat and boots, cover their beer roll with their t-shirt and pay good money to sing along and fantasize about one good night with their hero, who it turns out is going to make fun of them.
But Renegade Rail is not making fun of the obese.
What's better? To stand on the sidelines, waiting for someone thin and pretty enough to impress your friends or jumping into the action? What's more fun? Going to dinner with a woman who picks at her food or sitting on the couch, eating pizza and drinking beer as you rub flesh, with no one in the room but the two of you?
What's wrong with popular music is it no longer reflects real life. It's been so homogenized, made for a theoretical person who doesn't exist, that no one can relate to it. And who wants to sleep with Mariah Carey? Who enlarged her breasts and dieted down to nothing to please a critical press that doesn't buy her albums or pay for concert tickets anyway.
Can you look in the mirror and accept what you see? Or do you need hair plugs and four hours a day in the gym? Do you want to rub up against the coarse limbs of Madonna, touch her inflated cheeks, or hang with someone imperfect, but real?
Most guys would choose the latter. They might say the former, but that's only because they're afraid of being laughed at by their friends, of breaking a societal taboo.
I was sitting at a light in Pacific Palisades pushing buttons on my XM receiver and I came across this track on X Country. I immediately cracked up.
"I don't ask for much, I'm easy to please
There's just two things that satisfy me
Fat girls and weed
That's all I need
Well we've both got the munchies..."
You know this guy. The one who looks more like Kevin Smith than George Clooney. He's got no pretensions. He's not on the fast track. He lives to get high. Sometimes even at work. He doesn't exercise, he wants to relax, read his comic books and get laid.
If satellite radio survives, if the financial crisis doesn't make it implode, it still won't resemble the Top Forty of the sixties, even the eighties. It's a bunch of niches, appealing to everybody, but everybody isn't listening. Not needing to program for a psychographic profile, but playing what sounds good, stuff like Renegade Rail's "Fat Girls and Weed" can sneak through.
Is it gonna be played on the "Today Show"? Sung at the ballpark? Used in a commercial? Those are the criteria employed by the usual gatekeepers, to decide what's going to be promoted. But what about what sounds good at home? What sounds good in the club? You know if you heard "Fat Girls And Weed" in a bar, you'd raise your glass and sing along. Putting your arm around your buddy, feeling the donut encasing the torso of the woman you just met as your belly jiggles over your belt. You're in it together. And that's what the human condition is about. Facing the pain, the fury of every day life with your buds, laughing at the ridiculousness of the system, having a sense of humor.
Twenty years from now, no one will want to hear the Top Forty wonders of today. But when "Fat Girls And Weed" comes on the radio, you'll smile, just like you do when you hear the Toyes "Smoke Two Joints" today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfduFy26EE0 ).
"Another tape from Bin Laden to the Al Jazeer
Well the future looks dim and the end is near
We got fires and floods and hurricanes
It's enough to drive a crazy man insane
Well I don't ask for much, you know I'm easy to please
There's just two things that satisfy me
Fat girls and weed
That's all I need"
Track 2: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=50060544
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1
If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=unsubscribe&uid=d8e708faeeac520e5ffa113bf0337de0
She's got more to love, she never makes me beg
Take a sack of flour and a hit off my bong
She looks really good in that good thin thong
If I can't drink her pretty I'm gonna smoke her thin
She's my corn-fed baby with a double chin"
There's a song on the new Kenny Chesney album entitled "Ten With A Two". Kenny's gone on record that he lived this life when he was in college. His beer goggles fogging his vision, he woke up to find the girls he was with...wouldn't be featured on any magazine covers.
I think this is cruel. I'm surprised Kenny included this track on his album. Which despite many complaining about its dour tone, I like very much. Because of its honesty. But I couldn't help thinking what Kenny's audience would think of this relatively upbeat number. They're working in the bank all week, they put on their cowboy hat and boots, cover their beer roll with their t-shirt and pay good money to sing along and fantasize about one good night with their hero, who it turns out is going to make fun of them.
But Renegade Rail is not making fun of the obese.
What's better? To stand on the sidelines, waiting for someone thin and pretty enough to impress your friends or jumping into the action? What's more fun? Going to dinner with a woman who picks at her food or sitting on the couch, eating pizza and drinking beer as you rub flesh, with no one in the room but the two of you?
What's wrong with popular music is it no longer reflects real life. It's been so homogenized, made for a theoretical person who doesn't exist, that no one can relate to it. And who wants to sleep with Mariah Carey? Who enlarged her breasts and dieted down to nothing to please a critical press that doesn't buy her albums or pay for concert tickets anyway.
Can you look in the mirror and accept what you see? Or do you need hair plugs and four hours a day in the gym? Do you want to rub up against the coarse limbs of Madonna, touch her inflated cheeks, or hang with someone imperfect, but real?
Most guys would choose the latter. They might say the former, but that's only because they're afraid of being laughed at by their friends, of breaking a societal taboo.
I was sitting at a light in Pacific Palisades pushing buttons on my XM receiver and I came across this track on X Country. I immediately cracked up.
"I don't ask for much, I'm easy to please
There's just two things that satisfy me
Fat girls and weed
That's all I need
Well we've both got the munchies..."
You know this guy. The one who looks more like Kevin Smith than George Clooney. He's got no pretensions. He's not on the fast track. He lives to get high. Sometimes even at work. He doesn't exercise, he wants to relax, read his comic books and get laid.
If satellite radio survives, if the financial crisis doesn't make it implode, it still won't resemble the Top Forty of the sixties, even the eighties. It's a bunch of niches, appealing to everybody, but everybody isn't listening. Not needing to program for a psychographic profile, but playing what sounds good, stuff like Renegade Rail's "Fat Girls and Weed" can sneak through.
Is it gonna be played on the "Today Show"? Sung at the ballpark? Used in a commercial? Those are the criteria employed by the usual gatekeepers, to decide what's going to be promoted. But what about what sounds good at home? What sounds good in the club? You know if you heard "Fat Girls And Weed" in a bar, you'd raise your glass and sing along. Putting your arm around your buddy, feeling the donut encasing the torso of the woman you just met as your belly jiggles over your belt. You're in it together. And that's what the human condition is about. Facing the pain, the fury of every day life with your buds, laughing at the ridiculousness of the system, having a sense of humor.
Twenty years from now, no one will want to hear the Top Forty wonders of today. But when "Fat Girls And Weed" comes on the radio, you'll smile, just like you do when you hear the Toyes "Smoke Two Joints" today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
"Another tape from Bin Laden to the Al Jazeer
Well the future looks dim and the end is near
We got fires and floods and hurricanes
It's enough to drive a crazy man insane
Well I don't ask for much, you know I'm easy to please
There's just two things that satisfy me
Fat girls and weed
That's all I need"
Track 2: http://profile.myspace.com/
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?
If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Movie Review
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
From left, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Noonan in "Synecdoche, New York."
Dreamer, Live in the Here and Now
Correction Appended
More About This Movie
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Abbot Gensler/Sony Pictures Classics
From left, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Williams and Tom Noonan.
Multimedia
To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.
Yet since this is a review of a new Charlie Kaufman work, perhaps I should hit rewind: “Synecdoche, New York” is the first film directed by the writer of such unlikely Hollywood entertainments as “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a romance of such delicate feeling that it’s still a shock that it carries a studio brand. Mr. Kaufman’s kinked, playful screenplays are usually accompanied by a flurry of “e” adjectives: eclectic, eccentric, edgy, eggheady. (Also: quirky.) That’s true only if you consider the contemporary American screen, with its talking Chihuahuas and adult male babies with mother fixations. Come to think of it, the main character in “Synecdoche” has a thing about poop and bosomy women, though happily not at the same time.
To continue, despite my agonizing self-consciousness: “Synecdoche” is the story of a theater director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman, exhaling despair with every breath), miserably married to a talented painter, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener). The two live in Schenectady, N.Y., with their 4-year-old, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), who, when the story opens, is casually evacuating radioactive-green feces. Neither Caden nor Adele is alarmed, so intensely are they wrapped up in a depressive melancholia they seem to have nurtured longer than their daughter. Even couples therapy (with Hope Davis, in a dazzling brief turn) brings out the worst in them. “Can I say something awful?,” Adele asks (as if she needed permission), before confessing that she fantasized Caden dying. Which made her happy.
Caden lives with Adele and Olive in a “fragile-seeming home,” which is true even if those particular words were written by Arthur Miller, who uses them to describe Willy Loman’s home. As it happens, Caden is directing “Death of a Salesman,” but with a twist: the actors (including Michelle Williams), are all young. The tragedy of the play, explains Caden, will emerge from the casting: the audience will see the young actors and know that, in time, they will end up every bit as crushed as Willy. In “Salesman,” Miller writes that an air of the dream clings to Willy’s home, “a dream rising out of reality.” Mr. Kaufman doesn’t directly quote these words, yet they hover over the film nonetheless.
“Salesman” is a smash, but everything else falls to smithereens. Adele, who smirks through the play and asks Caden why he’s wasting himself on other people’s work, takes Olive to Berlin for a show that will make the painter a star Caden stays behind, worrying the sores that have sprouted on his body and watching a pharmaceutical commercial in which he appears to play a part. Is he delusional? Dreaming? Before you have time to reach for Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams,” he wins a MacArthur Award, a so-called genius grant, and begins work on a monumental theater production. I want, he tells his therapist with baleful sincerity, to create something “big and true and tough. You know, finally put my real self into something.”
He succeeds in doing the first (the big, the true, the tough); it’s the self part that proves trickier. Among many, many other things, “Synecdoche, New York” is about authenticity, including the search for an authentic self in an inauthentic world. For Caden, creating something that will justify the genius award, which will quiet Adele’s mocking criticism and his own restless doubt, becomes all-consuming. Inside a fantastically, impossibly enormous warehouse, he begins rehearsing with dozens and then hundreds, thousands, of actors, directing them in separate lifelike vignettes. Ms. Williams’s Claire, the adoring young woman who earlier played Willy Loman’s wife, joins the new cast and soon marries Caden, Adele having abandoned that role. (“I’m famous!” Adele blurts out to Caden on the phone from Berlin before hanging up.)
There’s more — including Samantha Morton as Hazel, Caden’s sweetest of sweethearts — so much more that you would need to recreate the film in its entirety to get it all in, which is precisely Caden’s own tactic. Inside the warehouse, he builds a replica of his world line by line, actor by actor, until fiction and nonfiction blur. Like the full-scale map in Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science,” the representation takes on the dimensions of reality to the point of replacing it. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard uses Borges’s story as a metaphor for his notion of the simulacrum, which probably explains why Caden, who has trouble naming things, considers titling his production “Simulacrum.” I don’t even know what that means, sighs Hazel.
You may giggle knowingly at that line, but the poignancy of this exchange is that Caden, who is so busy creating one world that he forgets to live in another, doesn’t seem to really understand what it means either. Mr. Kaufman rarely stops to explain himself, but like that simulacrum aside, he continually hints at what he’s up to, where he’s going and why. (Even Caden’s last name is a clue as to what ails him.) Mr. Kaufman is serious about seriousness, but he’s also serious about being funny, so he drops heavy weight (Kafka, Dostoyevsky) lightly, at times comically, and keeps the jokes, wordplay and sight gags coming amid the on- and offstage dramas, divorces, births, calamities, the fear and the sickness and the trembling.
Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.
“Synecdoche, New York” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for grown-up words and female nudity.
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman; director of photography, Frederick Elmes; edited by Robert Frazen; music by Jon Brion; production designer, Mark Friedberg; produced by Anthony Bregman, Mr. Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Sidney Kimmel; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes.
WITH: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Caden Cotard), Samantha Morton (Hazel), Michelle Williams (Claire Keen), Catherine Keener (Adele Lack), Emily Watson (Tammy), Dianne Wiest (Ellen Bascomb/Millicent Weems), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Maria), Hope Davis (Madeleine Gravis), Sadie Goldstein (Olive, 4 years old) and Tom Noonan (Sammy Barnathan).
Correction: October 25, 2008
A listing of credits on Friday with a film review of “Synecdoche, New York,” misspelled the given name of the composer of the music. He is Jon Brion, not John.
24 October 2008
New Cheesy Clips From Flynt's Paylin Outrage—With Guest Stars "Hillary" and "Condi"
This is pulled from the Daily Beast. They are somehow horrified that Larry Flynt made a porno involving a Sarah Palin lookalike (they appear to abound). I think it's terrific and wish Mr. Flynt well. I am sure that this will, after the initial surge, to borrow a word, fade into the dustbin of porno history after November 5. Then again, Mrs. Palin could be on the national scene for some time; personally, I predict that she'll get her own call-in show, a kind of Rush Limbaugh with female parts. Who knows? Mr. Flynt's made some decent investments over the years. This could be one of them. Who knows? A series might be in the offing.
Randy Shiner
Randy Shiner
New Cheesy Clips From Flynt's Paylin Outrage—With Guest Stars "Hillary" and "Condi"
Forget Joe the plumber. Here comes Larry the pornographer.
Today, the Daily Beast cinematheque presents two previously unreleased scenes from Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, Larry Flynt's filmic treatment of the Alaska governor. Porn star Lisa Ann plays the governor. The clip has been censored and there's no full nudity. But there is still some of naughty stuff, including shots of "the governor" canoodling with "Hillary" and "Condi", so the clip is NOT APPROPRIATE for young eyes.
Click the images below to watch the videos.
The second clip features the governor getting frisky with one of Todd's snowmobile buddies.
Several other scenes from the movie have surfaced in the last week, including a raunchy trailer on Hustler’s site.
It’s not the first time Larry Flynt has co-mingled with politicians, of course. Flynt won a 1988 Supreme Court decision against Jerry Falwell. In 1998, at the height of the impeachment Sturm und Drang, Flynt pledged to pay any women $1 million if she could prove she had an affair with a high-ranking politician. The yield: he forced the resignation of House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston with news of an extramarital affair, and accused Rep. Bob Barr of paying for his ex-wife’s abortion. Nearly a decade later, Flynt’s investigators unearthed Sen. David Vitter’s calls to a Washington, D.C., madam. The porn king’s stated m.o.—beyond selling magazines and maintaining his spot in the gossip pages—is to hit at “hypocrites” whose moral values may not match their rhetoric.
Having found no such hypocrisies in Sarah Palin’s past, Flynt decided to invent some. The film doesn’t advance the debate over health care, and most certainly does not offer what Barack Obama would call “hope,” but it does go farther than Tina Fey ever dared.
Harvard Law Prof, Reagan SG, Gives Obama His Vote
Harvard Law Prof, Reagan SG, Gives Obama His Vote
LB Readers, please let us know if you hear tale of any famously liberal law profs throwing their weight behind the McCain/Palin ticket. For now, all we've come across is the flip-side: notable conservatives supporting Obama/Biden.
The latest: Harvard's Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Reagan and as recently as January was working on behalf of McCain, has publicly endorsed the Democratic ticket. Click here for the New Republic story written by Fried colleague Cass Sunstein.
According to TNR, in a letter to the McCain/Palin campaign, Fried asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."
In a note to TNR, Fried, who authored the book "Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution," later explained himself, along the way rendering a not-so-hearty endorsement of Obama.:
I admire Senator McCain and was glad to help in his campaign, and to be listed as doing so; but when I concluded that I must vote for Obama for the reason stated in my letter, I felt it wrong to appear to be recommending to others a vote that I was not prepared to cast myself. So it was more of an erasure than a public affirmation -- although obviously my vote meant that I thought that Obama was preferable to McCain-Palin. I do not consider abstention a proper option.
The Fried vote follows a similar endorsement by Pepperdine law prof Douglas Kmiec, made back in March. Back in March, Kmiec told the Law Blog:
President Reagan used to tell all of us in his administration, and the public generally, that his proudest achievement was making the country feel better about itself. I believe Obama is committed to giving us reason to feel better about ourselves. Ive seen it in the classroom. Ive been teaching for 40 years, and have not seen a more electric and engaged atmosphere with regard to the democratic process.
See and Post Comments: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/10/24/harvard-law-prof-reagan-sg-gives-obama-his-vote?mod=djemWLB&reflink=djemWLB&reflink=djemWLB
LB Readers, please let us know if you hear tale of any famously liberal law profs throwing their weight behind the McCain/Palin ticket. For now, all we've come across is the flip-side: notable conservatives supporting Obama/Biden.
The latest: Harvard's Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Reagan and as recently as January was working on behalf of McCain, has publicly endorsed the Democratic ticket. Click here for the New Republic story written by Fried colleague Cass Sunstein.
According to TNR, in a letter to the McCain/Palin campaign, Fried asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."
In a note to TNR, Fried, who authored the book "Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution," later explained himself, along the way rendering a not-so-hearty endorsement of Obama.:
I admire Senator McCain and was glad to help in his campaign, and to be listed as doing so; but when I concluded that I must vote for Obama for the reason stated in my letter, I felt it wrong to appear to be recommending to others a vote that I was not prepared to cast myself. So it was more of an erasure than a public affirmation -- although obviously my vote meant that I thought that Obama was preferable to McCain-Palin. I do not consider abstention a proper option.
The Fried vote follows a similar endorsement by Pepperdine law prof Douglas Kmiec, made back in March. Back in March, Kmiec told the Law Blog:
President Reagan used to tell all of us in his administration, and the public generally, that his proudest achievement was making the country feel better about itself. I believe Obama is committed to giving us reason to feel better about ourselves. Ive seen it in the classroom. Ive been teaching for 40 years, and have not seen a more electric and engaged atmosphere with regard to the democratic process.
See and Post Comments: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/
23 October 2008
Ron Howard's Call To Action, Featuring Andy Griffith and the Fonz
See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die
Waiting for Nov. 4th - Larry David
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Waiting for Nov. 4th
Read More: Barack Obama, Election Day, Larry David, Larry David Election, Larry David Nov 4, Larry David Obama, Michele Bachmann, Obama And Racism, Stolen Elections, Waiting For Election, Politics News
I can't take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope. I can't work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I'm anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I'm finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.
Five times a day I'll still say to someone, "I don't know what I'm going to do if McCain wins." Of course, the reality is I'm probably not going to do anything. What can I do? I'm not going to kill myself. If I didn't kill myself when I became impotent for two months in 1979, I'm certainly not going to do it if McCain and Palin are elected, even if it's by nefarious means. If Obama loses, it would be easier to live with it if it's due to racism rather than if it's stolen. If it's racism, I can say, "Okay, we lost, but at least it's a democracy. Sure, it's a democracy inhabited by a majority of disgusting, reprehensible turds, but at least it's a democracy." If he loses because it's stolen, that will be much worse. Call me crazy, but I'd rather live in a democratic racist country than a non-democratic non-racist one. (It's not exactly a Hobson's choice, but it's close, and I think Hobson would compliment me on how close I've actually come to giving him no choice. He'd love that!)
The one concession I've made to maintain some form of sanity is that I've taken to censoring my news, just like the old Soviet Union. The citizenry (me) only gets to read and listen to what I deem appropriate for its health and well-being. Sure, there are times when the system breaks down. Michele Bachmann got through my radar this week, right before bedtime. That's not supposed to happen. That was a lapse in security, and I've had to make some adjustments. The debates were particularly challenging for me to monitor. First I tried running in and out of the room so I would only hear my guy. This worked until I knocked over a tray of hors d'oeuvres. "Sit down or get out!" my host demanded. "Okay," I said, and took a seat, but I was more fidgety than a ten-year-old at temple. I just couldn't watch without saying anything, and my running commentary, which mostly consisted of "Shut up, you prick!" or "You're a fucking liar!!!" or "Go to hell, you cocksucker!" was way too distracting for the attendees, and finally I was asked to leave.
Assuming November 4th ever comes, my big decision won't be where I'll be watching the returns, but if I'll be watching. I believe I have big jinx potential and may have actually cost the Dems the last two elections. I know I've jinxed sporting events. When my teams are losing and I want them to make a comeback, all I have to do is leave the room. Works every time. So if I do watch, I'll do it alone. I can't subject other people to me in my current condition. I just don't like what I've turned into -- and frankly I wasn't that crazy about me even before the turn. This election is having the same effect on me as marijuana. All of my worst qualities have been exacerbated. I'm paranoid, obsessive, nervous, and totally mental. It's one long, intense, bad trip. I need to come down. Soon.
22 October 2008
Israelis Don't Want To Hear About Arab Democracy
 | Israelis Don't Want To Hear About Arab Democracy | |
| Why U.S. Candidates Should Stop Talking About Israel | ||
 by Jeffrey Goldberg, October 22, 2008 | ||
From this Series
[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.]
Dear Shmuel,
Happy End-of-the-Holidays. I don't know what I'm looking forward to less -- two more weeks of this campaign, or taking down my sukkah. I have to get a better sukkah next year.
Before I get to McCain, let me acknowledge your perspicacity, as Bill O'Reilly would say: One of the things that's been missing from the debate over which candidate is better for Israel is the question, Which candidate will make America stronger? Because a strong America is a necessity for Israel. I think that the Israeli officials you speak with who suggest that Obama might actually strengthen America's standing in the world are on to something.
This is a long way of saying that Israelis, in the main, will be relieved when America stops talking about Arab democracy. That said, I don't think John McCain is quite the neoconservative democracy warrior his enemies make him out to be. He is a more practical man, I think, than George W. Bush. But so, for that matter, is Barack Obama. I've looked for signs of incipient Carterism -- defined here as an overarching belief in the power of the talking cure when it comes to evil dictators -- in Obama's actions and statements and so far, I haven't found them. Which is not to say that might not overvalue negotiations when it comes to Iran; we just don't know. I could go on about McCain's views of the Middle East -- where's he strong and where he's not (I do think that, unlike Obama -- thank you, Joe Biden -- America's enemies might not be so eager to test McCain, in part because they might be under the impression that he's crazy) but, today at least, the McCain campaign has a posthumous feel to it, and so I'm thinking more about Obama.
And so, to address your final point: Is it good for Obama to talk about Israel all the time? Yes. I agree with you, but for a slightly different reason. When I interviewed Obama on this subject, he said that one of the jobs of an American president is to hold up a mirror to Israel to show it where it might do better. This was his very polite way of suggesting that he wants to help Israel find a way out of the territories. The key, of course, is for Israelis to feel that a friend is holding up that mirror, not an enemy. Obama is trying very hard to show himself to be that friend.
To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.
RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.
Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.
The Intersection of Politics and Retail Commerce
Yes, if only I could actually afford to piss away $29 for a t-shirt to remember this time in life? I could argue both ways.
Randy Shiner
Randy Shiner
Jewish Poetry from Jewcy
An Opening
It is said that if a Jew makes an opening
in his heart for G-d to enter,
even if it is as small as the eye of a needle,
a g-dly energy will flood through,
as though the hole were as wide as a road
many caravans travel.
And perhaps the riders of the caravans
will also be Jews,
who have come from very far, hauling
their belongings from one exile to another,
always anticipating the final sweet message:
The redemption is upon us.
Tangerine
for my grandmother
I know you only as a small boy knows an old woman,
peeling a tangerine for his small mouth
and from the inscription in the Yevtishenko book
you gave my father when he was a boy:
May you never be afraid of your Russian sensitivity.
But as I read your notebooks
I see that we share the same fear of science,
and a distrust for all the gifts we believe we have not earned.
And on the Sabbath before my wedding?
a day after my father and I had visited the cemetery
to invite you and Zada to the ceremony?
a stranger in a shul I had never been to
asked me my name
and if I knew you.
Ma Shissel,
I know you are watching over me,
peeling the hardships from my days,
allowing me to live as a boy
who has never put the hard skin of the world
to his lips.
The Brisket King
View from the booth: Yasher Koach to Andrew Gow for this very timely and very accurate and thought-provoking piece. I can draw only dire conclusions for our faith if Modern Orthodoxy, to which I ostensibly am affiliated with, is any model, with a few possible exceptions that mainly have to do with a certain breakaway yeshiva which is, to the best of my understanding the closest thing to a real, authentic Judaism as exists, to the extent that one or the other feels right to me, based of course on my own admittedly limited in some respects, experience.
That there is so much good and valid Jewish thought from everywhere on the religious spectrum from Reform to Chassidism makes it impossible for a person like me to say I am one thing or the other; they all have their place in Judaism. I am troubled by and myself reject the Reform rejection of Halachah as not binding and accounts for my departure from that stream. It's not that Reform is necessarily wrong. I just believe that Halachah is binding, and Reform Judaism was created to assuage the guilt felt by too many Jewish Americans, under pressure historically and presently, to make money and blend in without revealing our inner Christ-killer. It's just a pity that people - human beings - have to ruin what are wonderful, spiritually and halachically uplifting ways to live - really live - one's life. My experience runs the gamut from being born and raised in Classic Reform to present Modern Orthodoxy, at least by the definition hewed to by Rabbis I respect intellectually and spiritually. And not a very good one of that, for that matter, as well, though in my own defense, I do try.
My admittedly limited brushes with more "observant" people, as for example most recently my understanding what experiences women have to face within the Young Israel movement, which is itself ostensibly a "Modern Orthodox" movement as is the same one that I belong to. Or, not. My experiences with people in Chabad have all been quite nice, but also quite superficial; I am sure that if I asked a Lubavitcher why he felt a need to dress as Jews did in Poland 200 years ago, that I would be barraged with a host of Talmudic authority mandating the wearing of pais, Big Black Hats, long black frock coats and a pair of rimless gold wire glasses.
I will never understand the validity of those choices. Those people, my fellow Jews, have a future only in their imaginations, because time is passing them by and no matter how many babies they have, time will force adaptation or death. It is not any wonder why reasonably smart people like me look askew at such folks that call themselves Jewish just like I do. They are in a massive denial of reality. Or perhaps they only care about being in a certain place at a certain time, itself the inherent denial of the possibility of change for the better and an extremely cynical view of the future.
What connection could I ever possibly have with such people, save the minor but truly definitive notion that we both believe in one Gd? After acceptance of that fact, the rest is commentary, isn't it? Why is their such a rush to define something that is inherently indefinable and inherently only describable? Why do some Jews, mainly from within Orthodoxy, feel that they have a monopoly on the truth of Judaism? That they get to define "who is a Jew"?
It doesn't make any sense, but it perfectly describes the raison d'etre of too many branches of Judaism today, especially some in Modern Orthodoxy, and undoubtedly accounts for astoundingly low rates of intra-Jewish marriages, extraordinarily high rates of intermarriage and the really horrible rates of Jewish affiliation and religious observance among too many intelligent, sensitive Jews who would love to affiliate, but for the lack of choice.
I hope this brisket is as good as I remember from a chubby Jewish childhood.
Randy Shiner
Brisket and all the other trappings of eastern-European-dominated North American Jewry were presented to us, and consequently seemed, along with Yiddish words, Yiddish accents, east-coast Jewish-American accents, kvelling, big bar mitzvah celebrations, and certain kinds of interior décor and display, as vulgar, sectarian, ‘not-us’. ‘Us’ was upper-middle-class, assimilated-but-separate, polyglot, British-Canadian—underlain by conventions rooted in the Anglo-American Jewish, German-Jewish and even Sephardi sensibilities of our ancestors: the strongly visible and prestigious elements of my mother’s (partly) illustrious ancestry. Disdain for certain elements of Jewish culture has led, in many contexts, to disdain for Judaism, as much among Jews as among non-Jews.
That there is so much good and valid Jewish thought from everywhere on the religious spectrum from Reform to Chassidism makes it impossible for a person like me to say I am one thing or the other; they all have their place in Judaism. I am troubled by and myself reject the Reform rejection of Halachah as not binding and accounts for my departure from that stream. It's not that Reform is necessarily wrong. I just believe that Halachah is binding, and Reform Judaism was created to assuage the guilt felt by too many Jewish Americans, under pressure historically and presently, to make money and blend in without revealing our inner Christ-killer. It's just a pity that people - human beings - have to ruin what are wonderful, spiritually and halachically uplifting ways to live - really live - one's life. My experience runs the gamut from being born and raised in Classic Reform to present Modern Orthodoxy, at least by the definition hewed to by Rabbis I respect intellectually and spiritually. And not a very good one of that, for that matter, as well, though in my own defense, I do try.
My admittedly limited brushes with more "observant" people, as for example most recently my understanding what experiences women have to face within the Young Israel movement, which is itself ostensibly a "Modern Orthodox" movement as is the same one that I belong to. Or, not. My experiences with people in Chabad have all been quite nice, but also quite superficial; I am sure that if I asked a Lubavitcher why he felt a need to dress as Jews did in Poland 200 years ago, that I would be barraged with a host of Talmudic authority mandating the wearing of pais, Big Black Hats, long black frock coats and a pair of rimless gold wire glasses.
I will never understand the validity of those choices. Those people, my fellow Jews, have a future only in their imaginations, because time is passing them by and no matter how many babies they have, time will force adaptation or death. It is not any wonder why reasonably smart people like me look askew at such folks that call themselves Jewish just like I do. They are in a massive denial of reality. Or perhaps they only care about being in a certain place at a certain time, itself the inherent denial of the possibility of change for the better and an extremely cynical view of the future.
What connection could I ever possibly have with such people, save the minor but truly definitive notion that we both believe in one Gd? After acceptance of that fact, the rest is commentary, isn't it? Why is their such a rush to define something that is inherently indefinable and inherently only describable? Why do some Jews, mainly from within Orthodoxy, feel that they have a monopoly on the truth of Judaism? That they get to define "who is a Jew"?
It doesn't make any sense, but it perfectly describes the raison d'etre of too many branches of Judaism today, especially some in Modern Orthodoxy, and undoubtedly accounts for astoundingly low rates of intra-Jewish marriages, extraordinarily high rates of intermarriage and the really horrible rates of Jewish affiliation and religious observance among too many intelligent, sensitive Jews who would love to affiliate, but for the lack of choice.
I hope this brisket is as good as I remember from a chubby Jewish childhood.
Randy Shiner
 | The Brisket King | |
| or: The Perils of Dualism | ||
by Andrew Gow , October 6, 2008 | ||
If I had a brisket for every time I have heard “I’m interested in spirituality, not religion”, I’d be … um, The Brisket King, I guess.
Brisket and all the other trappings of eastern-European-dominated North American Jewry were presented to us, and consequently seemed, along with Yiddish words, Yiddish accents, east-coast Jewish-American accents, kvelling, big bar mitzvah celebrations, and certain kinds of interior décor and display, as vulgar, sectarian, ‘not-us’. ‘Us’ was upper-middle-class, assimilated-but-separate, polyglot, British-Canadian—underlain by conventions rooted in the Anglo-American Jewish, German-Jewish and even Sephardi sensibilities of our ancestors: the strongly visible and prestigious elements of my mother’s (partly) illustrious ancestry. Disdain for certain elements of Jewish culture has led, in many contexts, to disdain for Judaism, as much among Jews as among non-Jews.Many North American Jews today also have trouble distinguishing between Judaism and its current North American cultural avatars:
- Etiolated, Christianized Reform Judaism, with its college-educated congregations, organs, pastor-rabbis and ‘temples’ empty on Saturdays, the most important service of the week deliberately displaced to make room for secular, private activities;
- Largely suburban, middle-brow Conservatism, with its lavish low-rise shuls set in immense parking lots, its showy, hugely expensive b’nei mitzvah celebrations (Reform is guilty here too, of course), its dowdy, ‘participatory’ 1960s liturgy—in which the Saturday morning service might well be the only one of the week—and the well-meaning embrace of ‘traditional’ Judaism without much concern for actual observance outside of the synagogue;
- And increasingly know-nothing, pietistic, right-wing Orthodoxy, in which crude ‘creationism’ (a Baptist or at best chassidishe literalism which you could hardly have found in an Orthodox shul twenty years ago) is making serious inroads into much more sophisticated traditional Jewish ideas about how to understand Bereishis; and in which a domineering rabbinism is once more in the ascendant.
These three mainstream movements are in serious trouble—not merely demographically and generationally, but also ontologically, in terms of their self-understanding. Renewal and Reconstructionism seem to be making gains—for the same reasons as the main denominations are in trouble, probably. All three mainstream movements are entangled in struggles of self-definition and self-legitimation vis-à-vis the others, and all seem to be on the defensive rather than actively articulating a living and viable Judaism.
No wonder many secularly educated Jews are quick to dismiss ‘religion’ and embrace ‘spirituality’, as though religion were just a disposable husk and ‘spirituality’ its valuable, essential core. We go shopping, literally, for new ‘spiritual’ experiences, as though one could isolate and purchase ‘spirituality’ via retreats, healing sessions, etc. – as a commodity. New Age, Wicca and Buddhism are major alternative destinations for disaffected middle-class Jews, followed by Christianity—though ‘secularism’ is admittedly the default destination for the vast majority, with assimilation coming close behind, probably in the generation following those who see themselves only as ‘secular’ or ‘cultural’ Jews. But for many Jews with some sort of religious itch, a synagogue is the last place they would go looking.
It’s a marginal irony that Madonna and many other non-Jews have turned to our mystical tradition, Kabbalah, for similar reasons. As the entire generation of flower-children learned to their dismay, ‘spiritual’ practice without religion of any kind generally (though perhaps not always) runs into the sand. New Age Jews have given up what they see as a stale and ‘unspiritual’ religion for crystals, chakras and energy vortices (all bound to things and places); Wiccans, many of them of Jewish descent, buy into anti-Judaic understandings of Judaism as part of a patriarchal conspiracy against the Mother Goddess, thus replicating Christian narratives of Jewish obsolescence, but also transposing narratives of survival and victimhood from real survivors and real victims (Jews as well as others, including those tried as witches) to imaginary ones (supposedly pagan [female] ‘witches’). Jewish followers of the Buddha replace the Talmudic and later Sages with an Oriental one because they cannot or will not read (or understand) the Jewish Sages’ writings. And quietism, while attractive in so many ways to privileged people of tender sensibilities, has never been a Jewish virtue. Many secular Jews yearn, ironically, for ‘spirituality’ while acting like the people who defined spirituality out of the world: (post-) Christian, (post-) Enlightenment westerners—the educated, secular but ‘Christonormative’ majority whom secular Jews emulate. But why should Voltaire and his children (legitimate and illegitimate) be allowed to disqualify and dismiss something they were radically unprepared to understand? Our ancestors did not agree with early Christians when they dismissed Judaism; they did not yield to the Crusaders or the medieval mobs or the Cossacks or even the Nazis; and we should not yield to secular Enlightenment critiques that are, after all, implicitly dualist in their attack on (some) religions as ‘formalist’, ‘obscurantist’ or ‘merely ritual’. Such attacks are dualist because theistic Enlightenment universalism, just like the Christianity in which it paradoxically has its deepest roots, presupposes a human spirit separate and in some sense separable from the body.
Disaffected Jews’ yearning for spirituality, it seems to me, derives ultimately not from problems in Judaism itself but from a (generally unconscious) participation in a Christian and Christonormative critique of Judaism as non-spiritual, as merely ‘fleshly’ or carnal. The carnal is, or course, bad by comparison to ‘the spiritual’ on the conventional ladder on western values (and those of some oriental religions too). Paul’s subordination of flesh to ‘spirit’ requires separation, and produces alienation. Consider this: if there is no real distinction between ‘flesh’ and spirit’, but rather an indissoluble union, as much of the Jewish tradition posits (along with certain others), when we look merely for ‘spirituality’, we are trapped by a badly posed question. The dualism that sees spirit and flesh as separate is, however, fundamental to Christianity.
Traditional Jewish learning has all but collapsed in suburban North America —Aramaic is not easy to read, especially for people with only rudimentary prayerbook Hebrew (or no Hebrew). Other kinds of education are more accessible, have more prestige and acceptance among non-Jews, and promise more immediate, practical rewards. Spirit-flesh dualism is no longer merely a Christian doctrine, but a commonly accepted part of western (theistic) ideas about how body and soul might relate: as separable entities. Many Jews, even many regular synagogue-goers, get their ideas about the relationship of body to soul, flesh to ‘spirit’, from the surrounding culture, not from the main sources of Jewish tradition, TaNaKh and its learned discussion by the great rabbis and sages. If we imagine body and soul as separable (except in death, which leads to we-know-not-what), we are caught in a trap not of our own devising: we are caught looking for something Judaism does not provide or cater to, at least not in isolation: ‘spirituality’. Rather, Judaism provides integrated whole-body exercise of the ‘spiritual’ *capacity*. Kavanah (roughly, devotion, but that’s a weak word for it; focused intention is as good) does not happen merely in the head. It is attained by disciplined, regular, learned activities that require body and mind to act together. Laying tefillin might look just plain weird: but what does yoga look like from outside the studio? In fact, they are very similar. Crystals might focus energy, but so too might the fringes of a tallis, or the carefully made scriptural amulets that are tefillin boxes. Some oriental religions recommend using a mantra for meditation; Judaism recommends the unending recitation of the text of the Torah, starting with the core Jewish mantra, the Sh’ma, as a point of intense focus evening and morning, every day, forever.
No-one is going to find ‘spirituality’ in Judaism because it does not exist as a separate function of Judaism, neither in practice nor in theory. But people who know where to look might discover the ways in which Judaism is ‘spiritual’, or they might find something Jewish that we might very approximately call ‘spirituality’. They will discover along the way that English words designed to express Christian concepts don’t necessarily represent Jewish ones very well—and words like kavanah or ruach will start to seem more necessary and more obvious.
Images: Sleepwalking, Hosannas, and Weep tapestries by Niradhara Lynne Marie.
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