Today is the anniversary of the passing (yahrzeit) of Meir Abehsera.   Since Abehsera’s opus, The Possible Man gives one of the most prescient readings (and enactments) of the holy fool in our era, Schlemiel Theory has – in the past – posted several blog posts on his important book.

Today we are going to remember him and his great work, discuss it, learn from it, and determine how to best bring his teachings into action in our crazy world.  Meir always believed in the power of the deed over thought. More can be accomplished in a deed that draws on the “madness of the holy” than any idea.

The Zohar – a classic of Jewish mysticism – says that the Yahrzeit is an auspicious time to bring the energy of influence of the person who has passed into the world.  As Meir always said, “memory is redemption.”

Now is the time to make his teachings – many of which draw on the schlemiel character – into a reality!  The greatest memory of all is the one that doesn’t remind in memory alone but is living and breathing amongst us, between us.

Today at 1pm there will be a conversation on Zoom with three people very close to Meir Abehsera : Simcha Gottlieb, Yonatan Razel, and Rabbi Yerachmiel Tilles.   Menachem Feuer, the author of Schlemiel Theory, will also be joining the conversation by way of selected readings from The Possible Man.  (The image on this post provides info for that online-event.)

Here is a complication of articles from Menachem Feuer, author of Schlemiel Theory on The Possible Man:

Meir Abehsera’s “Possible Man” – The Holy Fool, The Writer, and the Beggar – Part I

Meir Abehsera’s “Possible Man” – The Holy Fool, The Writer, and the Beggar – Part II

The Whistle and the Gaze of the Holy Fool – Take 1

The Whistle and the Gaze of the Holy Fool – Take 2

Seeking Alms at the Circus: The Schlemiel and the Old Beggar

Becoming-Dog: The Old Beggar, the Miser, and the Return of the Schlemiel as a Dog

Neo-Hasidic Magical Realism and the Revision of the Hasidic Schlemiel

Menachem Feuer – the author of Schlemiel Theory – recently wrote an article on Jerry Stiller for theJ.ca that addresses his Jewish identity and career: American Jew or Jewish American?

Click here to see it.

Stay tuned for a long piece he will be publishing on Stiller.  It will be appearing in London-based, Zine, Berfrois.  To see Feuer’s essays on the Schlemiel and Jewish Comedy for Berfrois – where he is one of the editors –  click here.

The Jewish-American family has almost always been depicted in a comical way in novels, films, and TV shows. In the Jewish-American family, the mother plays a powerful role and is the pit of many jokes. In the 60s and 70s, many novels (such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Bruce Jay Friedman’s A Mother’s Kisses, TV shows like the Mary Tyler Moore Show or Rhoda, display the strong mother alongside a weak father; the children are, of course, schlemiels or Jewish American Princesses.

Maurice Berger in an essay entitled “The Mouse that Never Roads: Jewish Masculinity on American Television” (in Too Jewish, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt) argues that the dysfunction of the Jewish family was central to these shows and that the mother was at the center of it all:

The Jewish mother’s dysfunctionalism – her inability to respect emotional boundaries, her disregard of her children’s privacy or feelings, and her over-controlling nature – renders her undesirable as a parent. The self-depreciating neurotic, exemplified by Rhoda Morgenstern on the Mary Tyler Moore Show or Brenda Morgenstern (Julie Kavner), Rhoda’s bank-teller sister on the sitcom spin-off Rhoda (1974-1978), especially in contrast with her elegant WASP counterparts, continually undermines herself through whining entreaties that further denigrate her feminine voice. (95)

The weak father and the schlemiel fit well into this home which is run by the mother. Following the cultural theorist Hommi Bhabha, Berger calls this a “partial gender system.” In this system, everyone is partial in their gender. This goes for the mother and JAP daughters as much as it does for the men who are, in his reading, feminized schlemiels.

The wider significance of the partial system is exemplified by one of television’s most insidious masculine stereotypes: the feminized Jew. Given the rarity of the reverse construction, that of the hyper masculine or macho Jew, it is almost inconceivable that Jewish actors such as the starts of Bonanza (1959-1973), Lorne Green and Michael Landon, could have actually played their roles as Jewish cowboys – a role afforded to only one character on American television. (97)

Berger sees this epitomized in Felix Ungar (Tony Randall) of the Odd Couple. Even his roommate, Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman), “reads as both effeminate and closeted”(99).

Martin Morgenstein (Harold Gould) plays the “subordinated schlemiel,” the “weak father…continually henpecked by the Jewish female, the Jewish father is shy , quiet, and usually un-opinionated; he is often berated or ignored by his wife and children who overrule him and undermine his authority”(99).

I’ll end this part of my reflection on the comedic Jewish family in TV and literature in the 60s and 70s with Roth’s Alex Portnoy – a definitive schlemiel character – and his awed and resentful description of his powerful mother (which goes on, in one paragraph, for a few pages):

It was my mother who could accomplish anything, who herself had to admit that it might even be that she was actually too good. And could a small child with my intelligence, with my powers of observation sought that this was so? She could make jello, for instance, with sliced perching hanging in it, teachers just suspended there, in defiance of the law of gravity. She could bake a cake that tasted like a banana. Weeping sufferings, she grated her own horseradish rather than buy the pashas they sold in a bottle at the delicatessen…..She dredges the further recesses of my ears during cold peroxide into my head….She lights candles for the dead – others invariably forget, she religiously remembers, and without even the aid of a notation on the calendar. Devotion is in her blood….When I am bad I am locked out of the apartment. I stand at the door hammering and hammering until I swear I turn over a new leaf. But what is it I have done….What can I possibly have done! (9-12)

To be sure, Portnoy blames his mother for his being an emasculated male (schlemiel). Powerful mothers and schlemiels are in films like Heartbreak Kid (1973, redone in 2017 with Ben Stiller) and also dot many stories of Bruce Jay Friedman.

What about now?

Powerful mothers and schlemiel children remain but with differences since, in the much used formula of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, the schlemiel ends up a different, more “functional” character at the end of the film and so does the mother. For instance, Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand played the powerful mother/schlemiel son duo in the film Guilt Trip but the duo is functional by the end. While Jessie Eisenberg – a millennial like Seth Rogen – also turns to mothers and schlemiel duos in his book Bream Gives me the Hiccups the duo is comical in a way that is charming.

The awkwardness of the schlemiel character – from shows like Parks and Recreation to Community – makes awkwardness a norm; so, in contrast to Berger and an age that emulates masculinity, we now have shows that don’t see the awkward male or child as an issue. To be sure, both men and women are schlemiels in these shows. Disfunction is not in contrast; its the norm. If anything, masculinity and authority are the target of these comedies. Jeff, in Community, represents this kind of masculinity but, if anything, that is challenged in nearly every episode by the other schlemiel characters.

Simon Rich – who writes for SNL, the New Yorker, and is the creator of Miracle Workers on Netflix – is an up and coming writer of the schlemiel in many of his comedies.

But in these shows by Rich we see less families and more people just starting off in life. He seems to be avoiding the powerful Jewish mother trope.

Nonetheless, what we seem to be seeing more of these days is a shift. Although the schlemiel remains, the mother is not the source of all dysfunction in the Jewish comedic family. You don’t have the same kind of schelmiel family anymore, whether that is to be found in Arrested Development or in Transparent. Because the understanding and reception of gender has changed, so has the comedic family. The schlemiel – in many ways – has become more than an American icon; it has become a norm of sorts in American TV and film.

Following WWII and well into the 80s and 90s – when films like Rambo and Top Gun were blockbusters – America was deeply invested in masculine images. Many of its fantasies were framed in terms of weak and strong. But following 9/11 all of that seemed to change. America became more vulnerable and fluid. And in our time – where gender is being multiplied and masculinity is under attack because of the #metoo movement – distinctions between weak/gentle and tough are falling through the cracks.

This distinction has been used by different scholars in Jewish studies to read the meaning of Jewishness in terms of the Schlemiel or the gentle Jew. The distinction between the weak (schlemiel) Jew and the strong Jew (an imposter who, for a few theorists, should even be called a Jew) has been used for political reasons – above all – to contrast Jews in Israel and Jews in the United States.

Is the power of the Jewish people to be found in words or in action? In being gentle or one of the tough nations? The schlemiel gets tossed into these contrasts/questions because the character is framed – by virtue of them – in terms of being gentle and or tough.

Daniel Boyarin’s 1997 book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Rise of the Jewish Man, contended that the “new Jew” heralded by the Zionists was an invention that can be traced back to German or Austrian Jews like Freud, Max Nordau, or Theodor Herzl who saw the traditional Jew as weak. Boyarin – seeing the gentle Yeshiva Bocher or Mensch as the figure of Jewishness – sees Zionism as alien to what it means to be Jewish. While Boyarin doesn’t include the schlemiel in his book, it is clear that he would see him as partaking in the essence of Jewishness which is not militant, masculine, or violent.

Boyarin is not the only scholar who is deeply invested in dichotomies between “tough Jews” and “gentle Jews.” The gentle Jew – for Warren Rosenberg in Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture and Paul Breines, in Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry – is figured in the schlemiel character. Rosenberg, writing in the wake of both Boyarin’s book and Breins’ book (published in 1990 by Basic Books), builds on Breines’ claims and argues that although the era of the schlemiel has passed after 1967 and the growth of Jewish and Black Power movements, it should be understood that the image of the “gentle Jew” (embodied in the schlemiel) concealed a “legacy of rage.” The legacy, he argues, can be found in the Bible.

Breines argues – in the anti-Zionist spirit – that the schlemiel character, in the wake of the Holocaust, served as a justification for the tough Israeli response to Palestinians. It gave it ethical heft. He sees this in the main character of Ken Follet’s book, The Triple.

He writes:

The hero, Nat Dickstein, is in nearly all respects the prototype of the new, tough Jew image I am examining. His itinerary is roughly this: He lost his family to the Nazi Final Solution. He survived Death Camps and made his way to Palestine after the war. By the time of the novel’s main action in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nat Dickstein is a Mossad commander….Dickstein kills, often in hand-to-hand combat, a substantial number of Arab and Soviet operatives. (9)

In Dickstein, Breines sees IB Singer (and his Gimpel character) and Ben Canaan of Leon Uris’s Exodus. The schlemiel character is to be seen, in Nat Dickstein’s body:

Among contemporary images of tough Jews, Dickstein’s body is distinguished by its insignificance, its near frailty; he is approaching his fifties, balding, with a smallish, wiry body….Follet’s hero looks the part, not of a new Jewish warrior, but an earlier, slightly meek Jewish victim. (10).

Breins reads the schlemiel into Nat Dickstein to show a new post-Holocaust hybrid, the weak schlemiel Jew justifying the strong Jew:

Reading the Polish-born, Yiddish American writer into Nat Dickstein is an imaginative and moral strategy. Singer, the writer, had created an unmatched galaxy of Jewish gentleness – in the author photos of dust jackets of his books and in his public lectures and occasional essays on mysticism, vegetarianism, pacifism, and Yiddish as a language peculiarly expressive of today’s frightened humanity. The merger of the images of Singer and Nat Dickerson resulted in the gentle and tough Jew in one, the schlemiel as terminator. (11)

Follet’s book really troubled Breins. Since he identified with the schlemiel (much like Boyarin who identifies with the gentle Jew), he wanted to revise its hero:

My own particular revision required Isaac Beshevis Singer. For me to accept and eventually embrace Nat Dickstein, he had to become Isaac Beshevis Singer, and my need for a Singerized Dickestein only mirrored the ideological necessity with the novel itself. For if Dickstein is to have any moral stature at all, he must have the body of a schlemiel. of a victim. Only such a body – those “narrow shoulders…shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees” – can imbue Dickstein’s killings with some sort of moral action. For that body crystalizes the history of hapless Jewish suffering. Only such a body could vindicate Dickstein’s actions, transfiguring him from a killer who is merely skilled into one who is moral as well. (16)

For this reason, he has a dilemma. How can he save the schlemiel (the schlemiel’s body) when it is used to vindicate or justify violence? Will he throw the schlemiel to the flames? Wouldn’t that efface the notion of Jewish gentleness?

This question also plagues the discourse of Warren Rosenberg who pits the fiction, writings, and plays of Norman Mailer and David Mamet against Cynthia Ozick and Tony Kushner. Rosenberg suggests that the “legacy of rage,” suppressed by the schlemiel- gentle-Jew image and given vent in Mailer and Mamet needs to be balanced out. The irony is that both Ozick and Kushner turn to comedy. The schlemiel is still here.

It seems that the image of the gentle Jew – of the gentle Jewish body – is deeply embedded.

But in our time the body of the male schlemiel has gone mainstream. Whether it is Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, or Jonah Hill, this body and this dichotomy doesn’t seem to fit. Comparing them to the bodies in Fauda doesn’t fit either. Why is it that the comparison of Jewish American to Israeli bodies is no longer a matter for discourse? Perhaps we should turn to some other framework to understand the schlemiel (something I have been suggesting in this blog).

Today’s America is different. But the schlemiel is still here. How has it – if at all – changed? Today we have more women schlemiels, too. What’s the right frame to use? Does the weak/tough Jewish body still hold?

Philosophers, mystics, and schlemiels have something in common. They are all, in some way, detached from the world and aloof. In Plato’s Theaetetus, there is a telling tale about a Thracian servant girl who laughs at Thales, the philosopher; who, while gazing at the stars, falls down a well.

Socrates

Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.

He falls into the well because he can’t see what’s in front of him. Socratessees this as a good analogy for “those who pass their lives in philosophy.” There is something charming and laughable about the person who stumbles in the world.

The same can perhaps be said for the mystic and certainly that’s the case for the schlemiel.

This is a motif that Herbert Weiner uses in the second chapter of his book 9 1/2 Mystics. The chapter, entitled, “The Mystic of East Broadway,” portrays “Mr. Setzer” an elderly bachelor – who has an office on East Broadway – a master of Kabbalah, as a tragic-comic schlemiel mystic.

When I first read the chapter, I was astonished by what Werner had done. It made me pause. I’d like to recount this portrayal as it suggests that we look at the person and not just his or her ideas about Kabbalah. The person, he suggests, embodies these ideas in a particular way.

One of the ideas that is found in the Talmud is that one should not study the Kabbalah unless one is married and above the age of forty. While Setzer fulfills one, he doesn’t fulfill another. Like Robert Walser and Franz Kafka (or even Kierkegaard) or any of their schlemiel characters, the bachelor schlemiel takes on a certain kind of comical-mystical aloofness and desperation that is unparalleled. Their separation from the world makes their characters into philosophical or mystical figures. Everything about what they say or do is odd and awkward.

Weiner’s descriptions of “Mr. Setzer” clearly convey this.

That Setzer was not easy to approach became apparent on my first telephone call. A high-pitched voice answered and quickly refused my request for an appointment to discuss arrangements for studying the Zohar….On my third call, however, I received an invitation to his office which was located on East Broadway in lower Manhattan.

Setzer’s “office” turned out to be a basement store which was approached by descending several steps below street level. When I arrived for my apporintment at eleven o’clock at night, I could see through the storefront window a man sitting alone over a pile of books and papers. He appreared to be tall, but it was mostly his extreme thinness and long face that gave the illusion of height….He seemed tired, and his discolvored nose and red-rimmed eyes showed he was suffering from a cold. (24).

Like many a schlemiel, Setzer is imbued with a comical kind of smallness. Everything is off about him. He speaks out of turn and has an odd way of responding to people. It’s a mystical thing, apparently.

He initially refuses Weiner’s desire to learn Zohar with him. Weiner notes, “Disappointed, I asked Setzer why he had first refused to see me and then changed his mind. It was his ‘mystic philosophy’, he replied. ‘When a call comes in once or twice, I ignore it. When it comes in three times, it is possible that they are involved.'”(25).

Who are they?

“They,” I later learned, was Setzer’s designation of the hidden, but ultimately, controlling power of the “other” domain. “They,” however, were evidently not telling Setzer to agree to my request…Only when I was about to leave did he agree to see me again, specifying that I must come only in the evening, after seven o’clock.

The sad thing about Setzer is that he was a scholar in Europe who had published many articles and had speaking engagements. But in NYC, he fails. Jewish Institutions – think of Plato’s Academy and Socrates living on the it’s generosity- couldn’t support his scholarship. After he puts a notice in for a class in the Zohar, the only person who shows up is Weiner. Apparently, it’s a schlemiel’s endeavor to teach the Zohar in NYC.

In the section entailed “A Reluctant Teacher,” we gain insight into his quirks. His frustration as his failure to realize his vision come into their one-on-one Zohar sessions:

More and more…Setzer’s frustration with the fact that his plans remained unfulfilled broke into our studies. Even his satisfaction at the successful elucidation of a subtle passage was touched with bitterness. “Nu,” he would ask, “now you understand, yes? On this point sixteenth-century kabbalists like Ari and Cordovero…struggled and struggled and finally came up with nothing. It took me thirty years to undrsntad it, and now I’ve given it to you in five minutes.” He could not hide a note of regret at parting so easily with knowledge so painfully acquired. (36)

More and more, the Zohar and Kabbalah studies fall to the wayside and regret comes to the forefront:

He began to talk about his fine collection of books; it pained him to think of leaving them to one of the institutions that had been so indifferent to him. He talked faceitiously about taking the books with him, and he seriously considered trying to make a commercial arrangement with some hotel owner: he would exchange the books, which he estimated were worth about three thousand dollars, for three years of room and board. It would be a good risk for the hotel, and they would profit on the arrangement…..Naturally, he was bitter about being ignored. In Europe, he had been literary editor of one of the first Hebrew quarterlies and one of that dedicated circle that helped to bring about a renaissance of the Hebrew language. His name and his articles were known to almost every reader of the Jewish and Hebrew press…Now, almost unknown and unhonored, he had only this meager, borrowed office on East Broadway. (37)

Weiner tries to help out by giving him opportunities to go more public. But when he meets with friends of Weiner, Setzer speaks about his musings about Evil and doesn’t engage the person (46-47).

When he sets up an opportunity to talk to young Rabbis and make a big impression, Setzer also fails to take advantage of the opportunity (49-52). Instead, he reads from a paper he wrote and bores everyone. He doesn’t notice how his audience feels and doesn’t know how to respond to them. He is so deeply engrossed in ideas that he can’t see the world. His failure typifies the failure of the schlemiel.

The last part of the chapter is tragic comic.

Weiner recounts his last meeting with Setzer after this failed event. Setzer shrinks as he approaches the end of life.

He meets him in the hospital. Setzer “was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to another visitor, when I walked in. He had always been very skinny, but now the hollows of his cheeks seemed to meet in the center of his long face. Everything about him had shrunk, his shoulders, his chest, even his formerly protruding nose. His hand, when I shook it, seemed weightless”(52).

Weiner learns that Setzer has a cancerous growth at 86 years of age, and now doing what he’s always wanted to do in his life: leave for Israel to live out his last days. After leaving the hospital, Weiner goes to help him with his baggage and that is the last he sees of him.

The chapter ends with a piece that Setzer told him to put in to the chapter that would go in this very book. It is called “the prayer of a mystic.”

The piece is about a person who, in being crushed and reduced to smallness, calls out in prayer for revelation:

He feels crushed, desolate, and abandoned – and a prayer of the heart, broken and torn, then bursts from his mouth.

O cause to flow They graciousness to descend upon me, and show me the way which is for me to follow. Enlighten, my God, my eyes, that they may see and understand your wonders and signs; that I may now how to save my soul from the heaviness of this oppression which Thou hast latest upon me….

It’s telling that at the end of a life of a schlemiel mystic is a prayer for a a final revelation as one is finally reduced to the infinitesimal. The aloofness we find with the schlemiel mystic, so to speak, is a part of a long process of becoming small. This is what we find in Kafka’s “Before the Law.” The schlemiel, “the man from the country,” in Kakfa’s parable, becomes smaller and smaller as he waits to “enter the law.” His “becomes childish.”

During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live.

Like Kafka’s “man from the country” or Mr. Setzer, one must be a schlemiel to wait – becoming smaller and smaller – until the end of one’s life…for revelation. But that is the risk of the schlemiel mystic: that in becoming small, in failing, becoming infinitesimal (instead of large, like Walt Whitman’s American poet hero, “containing multitudes”), one may, one in short moment, see the truth in smallness.

Perhaps that, and not simply laughable aloofness, is the aspiration which the philosopher, the mystic, and the schlemiel share?