Yip Harburg - Over The Rainbow

to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance.

 The young Martin Buber, in 1902

"At the turn of the century,  a young philosopher, a graduate of the University of Vienna equally at home in German letters and traditional Eastern European Jewish folk culture, suggested an alternative response to the "Jewish question", neither conversion nor traditional separatism but rather a conscious embrace of Jewish history as part of one's German culture. The young man, Martin Buber, postulated nothing less than a "renaissance" of Jewish secular and literary identity through folktale amd myth. Buber introduced Hasidism - a conterculture of pietistic and ecstatic mysticism outside "official" Judaism, widespread since the eighteenth century in Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine - to enlightened Jewish and non-Jewish germans, popularizing it as no one in the West had done before.  Hasidism resembled other Eastern European traditions of ecstasy and worship of charismatic, miracle-working saints. Although Hasidism's "wonder rabbis" were often not learned Talmudic scholars, they were widely regarded to be men of great wisdom and experience, linked to the divine through mystic contemplation: some were also healers, working with magic formulas, amulets, and spells. Their concern for the poor and downtrodden attracted thousands to their "courts" to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hasidism was still alive in Eastern Europe but, like cabala, was overlooked or derogated in the West as mere superstition and primitive belief. A story was told of the great German Jewish bibliphile Moritz Steinschneider, the father of modern Jewish bibliography. One day as he was proudly showing a young scholar through his vast library, the visitor pointed to a room full of obscure Hebrew texts on Hasidism and remarked, awestruck: "And you Herr Professor, have studied them all!" "Certainly not, young man," Steinschneider responded. "You don't expect me to read that nonsense."

It was just such emphatic insistence on dry rationalism that Buber opposed, hailing instead the creative "lefe-giving" force of Hasidism. (...)

In trying to bridge the old gulf between German and East European Jews, Buber hoped to expand and enrich the possibilities of German Jewish identity. His vivid and colorful interpretation of Hasidic tales and homilies appealed all the more young Germans - Jews and Gentilles - as it coincided with an upsurge in Germany of interest in spirituality and the "exotic" cultures of Asia and Africa. Buber called on secular young German Jews to seek, as he put it, a genuine Erlebnis - an "inner experience" - of the popular "soul" of Judaism, a Judaism beyond the restrictions and injunctions of Talmudic law, which most German Jews, including Buber, no longer observed. Though ridiculed by some as a pretentious neo-Romantic affectation, his message was taken up by a new generation.

Hasidism came to be hailed (especially be secular Jews) as a vital force, more genuine and robust than fossilized orthodoxy or secularized reform. After watching a troupe of Yiddish actors perform in Prague's café Savoy, Kafka concluded that here was a genuine folk spirit, warmer and more humane than the stiffness and self-denial of Western Jews. "

                           Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 237-239.                                   

John Searle: Our shared condition -- consciousness

Tintoretto, Galileo Galilei, 1605-1607

 

O começo da física. Por sugestão de Jorge Calado, Haja Luz.

Arnold Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw (cond. Simon Rattle)

her heart's blood was contained in every envelope

Rahel Levin Varnhagen, by William Hensel, July 7, 1822 (185x149 cm).

"The most famous salon and probably the liveliest and most influencial, however, was lauched in 1791 by Rahel Levin, an unmarried twenty-year-old. (...)

The poet Jean Paul wrote that scholars, Jews, officers, Prussian bureaucrats, noblemen, and all others who elsewhere "were at one another's throats" contrived to be "friendly at [Rahel Levin's] tea table." Even Goethe paid a visit. (...)

Rahel - she was widely known by her given name alone - was an early feminist, a willfully independent woman who set out to build her life on her own terms. She had many lovers, some of whom, like Friedrich von gentz, remained enchanted with her into old age. (...)

More than just a renowned socialite, Rahel was also the most important German woman of letters of the nineteenth century; Gentz called her the very first Romantic. Entirely self-taught, she left no conventional oeuvre but was an astonishingly prolific letter writer. Intensely personal and introspective, her correspondence (more than six thousand letters survive of an estimated ten thousand) reveals her impatience with the superficialities and hypocrisies of the elegant world in which she lived. She had a rare ability to portray herself with utmost sincerity; it was said that her heart's blood was contained in every envelope she posted. Since her handwriting was difficult to read, her friends had her letters copied so they could pass them around. the letters touch on all aspects of literature and art; remarkably, politics and the extraordinary historical events of her lifetime (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) are rarely ever mentioned. The cult of Innerlichkeit (intense introspection) so dear to the Romantics predominates.

A thoroughly assimilated Jew, Rahel was credited with having inaugurated the so-called symbiosis between Germans and Jews. (...) Rahel was not interested in Jewish reform; she yearned for integration into the German world. She was revolted - the word is not too strong - by her observant relatives.  Mendelssohn's version of judaism hardly appealed to her more; it was too dry and sterile in its rationality. She worshiped feeling, not reason. Her religiosity was of the heart and, like that of other romantics, couched in the mystical imagery of christianity; Christ's Passion and the Mother of God. (...)

Rahel's rejection went beyond religiosity. She hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life. For much of her adult life she was what would later be called self-hating. (...) And in 1814, after her mother's death, she converted. But her origins continued to haunt her even on her deathbed.

Rahel supreme desire was to live life as though it were "a work of art". Such a life demanded a "great love." And indeed, she gave herself to love unreservedly. (...)"

                                   Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 77-80.                             

Playing for Time (D: Daniel Mann)

Pat Metheny Unity Group - Rise Up

)

He sabotages me and I sabotage him.

“Yes, it’s all one big chess game. All my life I have been afraid of death, but now that I’m on the threshold of the grave I’ve stopped being afraid. It’s clear, my partner wants to play a slow game. He’ll go on taking my pieces one by one. First he removed my appeal as an actor and turned me into a so-called writer. He’d no sooner done that than he provided me with writer’s cramp. His next move was to deprive me of my potency. Yet I know he’s far from checkmate, and this gives me strength. It’s cold in my room—let it be cold. I have no supper—I won’t die without it. He sabotages me and I sabotage him. Some time ago, I was returning home late at night. The frost burned outside, and suddenly I realized that I had lost my key. I woke up the janitor, but he had no spare key. He stank of vodka, and his dog bit my foot. In former years I would have been desperate, but this time I said to my opponent, ‘If you want me to catch pneumonia, it’s all right with me.’ I left the house and decided to go to the Vienna station. The wind almost carried me away. I would have had to wait at least three-quarters of an hour for the streetcar at that time of night. I passed by the actors’ union and saw a light in a window. I decided to go in. Perhaps I could spend the night there. On the steps I hit something with my shoe and heard a ringing sound. I bent down and picked up a key. It was mine! The chance of finding a key on the dark stairs of this building is one in a billion, but it seems that my opponent was afraid I might give up the ghost before he was ready. Fatalism? Call it fatalism if you like.”

              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Loc. 5758-63.           

and Kafka began to speak about the golem

"We came to Prague to make some money and found a genius waiting for us—Homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture. Kafka wanted to be a Jew, but he didn’t know how. He wanted to live, but he didn’t know this, either. ‘Franz,’ I said to him once, ‘you are a young man. Do what we all do.’ There was a brother I knew in Prague, and I persuaded him to go there with me. He was still a virgin. I’d rather not speak about the girl he was engaged to. He was sunk to the neck in the bourgeois swamp. The Jews of his circle had one ideal—to become Gentiles, and not Czech Gentiles but German Gentiles. To make it short, I talked him into the adventure. I took him to a dark alley in the former ghetto and there was the brothel. We went up the crooked steps. I opened the door and it looked like a stage set: the whores, the pimps, the guests, the madam. I will never forget that moment. Kafka began to shake, and pulled at my sleeve. Then he turned and ran down the steps so quickly I was afraid he would break a leg. Once on the street, he stopped and vomited like a schoolboy. On the way back, we passed an old synagogue, and Kafka began to speak about the golem. Kafka believed in the golem, and even that the future might well bring another one. There must be magic words that can turn a piece of clay into a living being. Did not God, according to the Cabala, create the world by uttering holy words? In the beginning was the Logos."

              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,Loc. 5724-35.             

Tord Gustavsen trio - Colours of Mercy

)

In the dark, Kant’s categories no longer apply.

“Didn’t you once ask what makes me go on, or do I imagine that you did? What gives me the strength to bear poverty, sickness, and, worst of all, hopelessness? That’s a good question, my young friend. I asked the same question when I first read the Book of Job. Why did Job continue to live and suffer? So that in the end he would have more daughters, more donkeys, more camels? No. The answer is that it was for the game itself. We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move; we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves; we try to prevent it. We know we can’t win, but we’re driven to give him a good fight. My opponent is a tough angel. He fights Jacques Kohn with every trick in his bag. It’s winter now; it’s cold even with the stove on, but my stove hasn’t worked for months and the landlord refuses to fix it. Besides, I wouldn’t have the money to buy coal. It’s as cold inside my room as it is outdoors. If you haven’t lived in an attic, you don’t know the strength of the wind. My windowpanes rattle even in the summer-time. Sometimes a tomcat climbs up on the roof near my window and wails all night like a woman in labor. I lie there freezing under my blankets and he yowls for a cat, though it may be he’s merely hungry. I might give him a morsel of food to quiet him, or chase him away, but in order not to freeze to death I wrap myself in all the rags I possess, even old newspapers—the slightest move and the whole works comes apart. “Still, if you play chess, my dear friend, it’s better to play with a worthy adversary than with a botcher. I admire my opponent. Sometimes I’m enchanted with his ingenuity. He sits up there in an office in the third or seventh heaven, in that department of Providence that rules our little planet, and has just one job—to trap Jacques Kohn. His orders are ‘Break the keg, but don’t let the wine run out.’ He’s done exactly that. How he manages to keep me alive is a miracle. I’m ashamed to tell you how much medicine I take, how many pills I swallow. I have a friend who is a druggist, or I could never afford it. Before I go to bed, I gulp down one after another—dry. If I drink, I have to urinate. I have prostate trouble, and as it is I must get up several times during the night. In the dark, Kant’s categories no longer apply. Time ceases to be time and space is no space. You hold something in your hand and suddenly it isn’t there. To light my gas lamp is not a simple matter. My matches are always vanishing. My attic teems with demons. Occasionally, I address one of them: ‘Hey, you, Vinegar, son of Wine, how about stopping your nasty tricks!’"

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              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,  Loc. 5670-71.       

Tord Gustavsen trio - Graceful Touch

Salome