I was talking the other day to Ariel Cohen.

‘Look at this, can you believe this?’ said Ariel, waving a magazine in my face. ‘They’re asking Madonna questions about Kabala. Madonna – I mean, what the fuck?’

‘She calls herself Esther now,’ I said. ‘Jewish is the new black. All the homeboys wanna be Hebes now.’

‘Listen, where I come from it’s not Esther, it’s fucking Estie and what are they fucking asking her about Kabala for? That’s like asking Paris Hilton to explain French phenomenology’s debt to Heidegger – I mean what the fuck?’

‘They’re all into it these days, celebrities,’ I said. ‘Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Roseanne – Jewish mysticism is cool.’

‘No. No. No. No. It is not fucking cool. It’s not the fucking new yoga or frikkin’ Feng Shui, the latest fucking fad, it’s not like some kinda exotic pet like a turtle or a baby alligator – gee, isn’t it cute and when the fucking thing grows up you flush it down the toilet and it turns into some kinda mutant life form in the sewers. No, that’s not gonna happen. That’s why they don’t let you study it until you’re forty years old and married and a fucking pillar of the community and you know Shas off by heart – I mean, does Madonna even know what Shas is?’

‘Hey, she’s not studying mamash Kabala,’ I said. ‘She’s learning with this Rabbi Blurg or Blorg or whatever the fuck he calls himself. It’s all happy self-help shit mixed up with a couple of Jewish mystical concepts.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about; that’s exactly what gives me the rage. That mamzer, that fucking apikores … he’s a rabbi like … like …’

‘Like Paris Hilton is an astro-physicist,’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. That’s what gives me the rage. This prick is selling them tap water and bits of red string to tie around their anorexic wrists and charging them a fucking fortune for it, bunch a gullible twats. Hey Lady Madonna, let me enlighten you with a bit of ancient Jewish wisdom – this putz is pissing in your face and telling you that it’s raining. And another thing, you can’t have Jewish mysticism without the Jewish misery. This shit we take deadly seriously. We’ll fucking live in ghettos for centuries and we’ll let the fucking Crusaders burn our children on stakes – that’s how fucking seriously we take it. Oh, it’s cool now. “Come on everybody, let’s all get on the Kabala train. It’s groovy.” Yeah, it’s groovy now but wait till you find out that Hitler is driving this train and Eichmann is in charge of the drinks trolley and if you happen to get injured – well, come right this way, Dr Mengele is dying to have a look at you!’

‘Dude,’ I said, ‘I think you’ve kinda oversold your case.’

Ariel smiled wryly. ‘Yeah, maybe just a little,’ he conceded. ‘But I mean it when I say you can’t have the Jewish mysticism without the Jewish misery. You can’t have the Kabala without the Halacha. They think they’re gonna get mystical power from a piece of string? Well, imagine how much power they’ll get from not eating shrimp and pork and dressing like fucking Polish cowboys and fasting for things that happened two thousand years ago and wearing fucking doilies on their heads and spending their days debating how many ants you have to eat, even inadvertently, before you’ve transgressed the prohibition against eating crawling things. Let them do that miserable shit, day after day, and then they can fucking study as much fucking Kabala as they can stand.’

‘Dude,’ I said. ‘You’re taking it all too seriously. They just want the cool stuff. They just want to feel like they’re in contact with something old and exotic.’

‘The cool stuff,’ snorted Ariel derisively. ‘I hate that fucking word – “cool”. It’s a fucking word to be used by fucking callow teenagers. Guns are “cool”, calling your girlfriend your “ho” is “cool”. Well, they can fuck right off. There is absolutely nothing cool about Judaism. That shit – at least to me – is sacred and the sacred is fucking sacred. Haven’t these pricks seen Mean Streets? Didn’t they hear what Harvey Keitel has to say? “You don’t fuck with the Infinite.” No, you don’t do that. Let me put it like this – there’s a difference between Jewish and Judaism, as far as I’m concerned. You wanna hear what that is?’

‘Testify, brother,’ I said waving my hands in the air. ‘Testify. Tell it like it is.’

‘Jewish is what Jews do. Eating bagels is Jewish. Gefilte fish and kugel is Jewish. Klezmer music is Jewish. Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen are Jewish. That stuff is “cool”. Anybody who wants that shit can have it. With pleasure. Barbara Streisand is Jewish – they can have her. Please, have her – she’s a fucking embarrassment to us.’

‘David Cronenberg is Jewish,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, well, he’s Jewish like Kermit is a frog.’

‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means.’

‘So what’s Judaism then?’

‘Like I said. It’s the sacred stuff. It’s the prayers and the festivals and all that stupid irrational shit that you do because it’s the stupid irrational shit that you do. And some of that shit is our mysticism. It’s ours and we fucking paid a heavy price for it and cunts coming in and pawing it like it was some sort of commodity – no, no, no, fucking no. I don’t fuck your wife, don’t fuck up my religion.’

‘You know what,’ I said, ‘You know what you remind me of?’

‘Two tickets to the opera?’

‘Yeah, yeah. You remind me of a joke.’

‘A Jewish joke?’

‘The ultimate Jewish joke. This man brings up his kid, all his life to be an atheist. And then when he’s like seventy years old the doctor diagnoses this guy with cancer. He’s got months to live. He comes to his son and he says to him, “Promise me that when I die you bury me in a Jewish cemetery and say Kaddish for me when I’m gone.” “But dad, you raised me to be an atheist.” “Yes, son. But don’t ever forget – you’re a Jewish atheist.”’

Sean Shapiro
19 August 2004