My father was a Yiddish literary star, writing short stories, essays, and novels. He lectured in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, and more.  He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford University.  Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel said he was “the novelist of the Warsaw Ghetto,” whose book “Ship of the Hunted” was “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth.”

Yehuda Elberg was a member of the Jewish Underground during the Holocaust.  Captured three times by the Nazis, he saw friends and most of his family brutally murdered.  There is no darker view of the cloth of truth. Yet he retained a keen sense of optimism, and a drive to rebuild his family and his people after the war.

Combine Words

I’ve inherited some of his ability to combine words into a story. Thankfully, my life has been much less eventful than his.  Most of my interesting experiences were by choice, rather than life-or-death situations. Although it was exciting, marching in protest at the Pentagon is not the same as Nazi storm-troopers coming down your street to kill you. Isolating (during Covid) in an apartment with a big-screen TV and high-speed internet is not the same as hiding inside a dark cellar, where making a sound could cost the life of your family.

I want my fiction to be “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth,” like my dad’s.  I want it to be exciting, and get the reader to consider some relevant truth or issue.  For example, as an anthropologist, I learned about transgender shamanism.  It’s nothing like the phenomenon in contemporary popular culture. The transgender shaman in Quantum Cannibals is a complex, conflicted, frightening person, reflecting indigenous shamanism rather than contemporary Western ideology.  Quantum Cannibal’s fictional shaman is an elucidation, rather than a lecture.

The novel The Red Badge of Courage is known for its realistic depictions of the Civil War, even though the author Stephen Crane was born after it ended.  Hans Ruesch never met an Inuk (Eskimo) in his life, but his novel Top of The World is an accurate depiction of traditional Inuit life and culture.  These writers didn’t experience the lives or events they portrayed.  They didn’t have access to Google to do research.  Nonetheless, their fictional portrayals were accurate and their stories moving.

Dangerous Truth

Creative truth can be dangerous when it crosses the floor from literature to journalism. A documentary by a “journalist” won several prestigious American journalism awards. This journalist is a member of a terrorist organization that participated in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Worse than that, the terrorists who participated in the kidnap, rape, and butchering of women and infants were honored for photographs of their barbarism.

In snuff porn films, men actually murder the women they have sex with, and sick viewers get off watching what they believe to be the truth. Some question whether the filmed murders happened, whether they emphasized ‘creative’ rather than ‘truth.’ The barbarism that the Hamas photographers documented was a reality. These were snuff films and photos in their worst sense, and it definitely happened. The creativity was in the mental gymnastics that allowed Western media to ignore the savagery in front of their eyes. The ‘cloth of creative truth’ can be used to enlighten or conceal.

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Many historical figures were reputed to be great beauties, from Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette. Many historical figures were reputed to be great scholars, from Plato and Aristotle to Adam Smith.  We know more of the latter because knowledge and wisdom are more easily preserved than appearance.

She should be better known

Osnat was brilliant and beautiful. I wrote about her in an earlier post.  Leading scholars and rabbis addressed her as ‘teacher’, ‘master,’ rabbi’, and more.  She was a  poet and a “Rosh Yeshiva,” head of the rabbinical academy. She fell into deep poverty trying to raise funds for the academy.  All her possessions, even clothes were confiscated by debtors.  A would-be rapist claimed her beauty was irresistible.  She fended him off through the use of holy names.

In addition to being a sage, Asenath was also beautiful.  A Gentile was attracted to her, and tried at night to sneak onto her roof, with evil intentions.  She immediately pronounced the names of holy men, which left the Gentile hanging on the beams of the roof, unable to move.  In the morning, lots of people gathered to see, but no one could remove him.  The governor of the town begged her to release the Gentile, but she refused, saying that “…since he came to me with the intention of corrupting my morals, he shall remain hanging in his place.”  The governor swore that if she set him free, the governor would hang him publicly, upon which she released him, “…and he was hanged from a tree to the amazement of all the people in the town.”

She had many accomplishments.  The Jews and Muslims of Kurdistan loved and honored her.  A folk tale describes how Osnat walked from Mosul to Amadiya to save a synagogue from fire.  In one version, the flames are extinguished by a flock of Houris, the beautiful maidens who accompany the Muslim faithful in paradise.  Contemporary Muslim Kurds speak proudly of her, offering her as proof that Kurdistan has been a good place for its Jewish population.

Osnat’s story needs to be better known.  She deserves to be one of the great figures of Jewish culture and lore, along with other great scholars and wonder-workers.  Until recently, she was mostly hidden in academic books and journals.  Online searches, if properly phrased, could pull up some information, one source a duplicate of the other.

A children’s book

In 2021 Sigal Samuel, an Iraqi Jewish author published a children’s book Osnat and Her Dove.  Well-written and beautifully illustrated, this book brings Osnat to life.  In doing so, it reveals an important aspect of Jewish heritage, and of women’s accomplishments.  If you have children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews between the ages of four and eight, this is a good book to read with them.  It’s a great way to introduce them to this oft-ignored facet of women in history, and Jewish culture.

Quantum Cannibals is a fantasy novel.  Its violence makes it appropriate for an adult audience.  Osnat and Her Dove is a gentle children’s story. Both honor the historical Osnat Barzani.  I recommend you read them.

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The novel

One of the timelines in my novel Quantum Cannibals is set in a post-modern city where everything is relative, and almost all behavior is acceptable.  The police act primarily as psychologists, with the right to summarily execute people.  It’s a society where intolerance is a capital crime, where the unthinkable became normal.  Is that where we’re headed?

Our non-fictional world

Divorce used to be considered evil in non-fictional America, to be used only as a last resort.  Today fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.  Fifty years ago it was less than one percent.  The unthinkable became normal.

As a corollary, twenty-five percent of American children live in single-parent households.  Sixty years ago it was nine percent.  There is a clear connection between doing poorly in school and living with only one parent.

The common term for men who dressed as or pretended to be women used to be “perverts.”  Now RuPaul has his own mainstream television series.  If you don’t praise “trans rights,” you get canceled. The unthinkable became normal.

Armed robbery, drug dealing, or theft usually lead to serious criminal charges and jail time.  Alvin Bragg, the new District Attorney for Manhattan has announced it won’t seek jail time for anything short of murder or deadly assault.  If this trend catches on like the “defund the police” movement did, theft and violence won’t be high-risk projects.  Look at the crime rate in just about any major U.S. city.  The unthinkable became normal.

Although adults having sex with children was common in some ancient civilizations, it is mostly taboo in contemporary western society.  Mostly? A reputable psychologist placed foster children with pedophiles for thirty years, all with German government approval.  The beat poet Allen Ginsberg promoted the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).  An academic press published a scholarly book promoting intergenerational sex.

From criminal to conventional

Homosexuality used to be a serious crime.  Armed robbery, carjackings, assault used to be serious.  Single motherhood, divorce, were frowned upon.  Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world.  Women were property, considered too dumb to vote.  Murdering Jews and other lower forms of human life wasn’t a crime… As the poet-pederast Allen Ginsberg said:

I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

Progress

We’ve gotten better at some things.  Although Kinsey’s fake research played a large part in contemporary acceptance of homosexuality, it doesn’t invalidate the change in attitudes.  But how far do we take it?  If a lesbian is sexually harassed by a trans “woman” she considers a man, is the lesbian being intolerant?

What about NAMBLA?  Are we going to be cool with man-boy love?

In the 1960’s civil rights activists were murdered by racists, sometimes by authorities.  We remember and eulogize them.  Now when the authorities kill violent criminals, we lionize the criminals.

Some old boundaries deserve to be smashed.  But that doesn’t mean all boundaries, whether ethical, legal or physical have to go.  A world in which everything once unthinkable became normal, would not be livable.

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Though answers may change, many questions stand.  Dr. Anthony Fauci made an important statement about the fluid responses to the Wuhan virus.

“So when you hear someone say something at one point and then two or three months later, if you stick with what you said at the original time when you had one-fifth of the data that you have now, I think that would be inappropriate.”

COVID is something new.  People panicked as it mutated into a global pandemic, not knowing what it is or how to respond.

Difficult questions

• Did COVID come from the lab or wet market in Wuhan?

  

• Was it deliberately enhanced by the Chinese government to make it more deadly?
• Did Xi Jinping (Chinese leader) deliberately spread the virus throughout the world?
• Is it Satan’s, Tam’s, Trump’s, Trudeau’s, Fauci’s, or the World Health Organization’s fault?
• Does closing borders help prevent the spread?
• Are lockdowns effective?
• Do medical grade masks help?
• Do dollar store grade masks help?
• Are the vaccines deadly, effective, or somewhere in between?
• Do ventilators help or harm patients?
• Is hydroxychloroquine a helpful treatment or a placebo?

So many questions.  So many deaths, so much suffering.  Not just from the illness, but from the disruption it caused.  So many people lost their livelihoods, so many other diseases went undiagnosed, untreated.

There are answers to all these questions.  The virus originated somewhere.  The ventilators had an effect.  Masks do something, but we don’t know where or how much.  We may never know.  The questions stand.

The Talmud, a book of Jewish law and tradition consists mostly of records of discussions between rabbis.  Sometimes they agree with each other, sometimes not.  The rabbis challenge each other with difficult questions.  There are many they cannot resolve, so they declare “Taiku.”  It’s an Aramaic word saying the questions stand unanswered.   It’s also popularly explained as an acronym for a declaration that Elijah the Prophet will answer all questions with the advent of the Messiah.  A declaration of “Taiku” is not an admission of failure.

The man Taiku

Taiku is also the name of a character in Quantum Cannibals.  As the chief of a thriving Bronze-Age village Taiku has to build roads, stop bandits,

calm ethnic hostility, and protect refugees, all the while facing an unfathomable foe that threatens to destroy his world.  He has many decisions, many questions, but his best source of answers has been murdered.

The invader follows its own version of the real 1999 People’s Liberation Army (China) military treatise “Unrestricted Warfare.” The authors of this

frightening work stress that there is no distinction between war and peace, and that all means should be used to defeat the enemy.

Taiku knows how to deal with most of the issues he faces, but on too many there is no clear answer.  The questions stand.

There are few clear answers regarding COVID, its origins or how to deal with it.  So much of what was assumed to be true at its outset has been proven false, and vice versa.  Politicians have to make informed guesses, relying on experts who for the most part, are also making informed guesses.  One says “left,” the other says “right.”  The questions stand, but the leaders cannot stand still; they are obliged to act.  In hindsight we know who to call brilliant, who to condemn for his foolishness.

We’re hopefully approaching the end of the COVID pandemic.  Would it have come quicker if our leaders had acted differently?  That’s another question that will stand.

Does Taiku get the answers he needs to save his world?  Read Quantum Cannibals to find out.

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Transgender rights (privilege, if you prefer), are an intractable issue in contemporary Western culture.  Is a man who decides he’s a woman entitled to be treated as one?  In the novel Quantum Cannibals Aarluk, a major character, changes from male to female as part of becoming a powerful shaman. (S)He marries and copulates with a nice man, and even adopts a daughter.

Aarluk doesn’t physically change.  In fact, as prelude to adopting Osnat, he uses his male body to rape her.  It’s not easy for a man to completely shed his masculinity.

Conflicting Rights

Abigail Shrier agrees about the problem of transformation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed :

“…in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.”

Martina Navratilova was named the greatest female tennis player in the world for thirty years.  She came out of the closet in 1981 (before it was trendy) but recently has come under heavy criticism for violating the official progressive narrative.  She said that transgender ‘women’ taking part in female athletics “is insane and it’s cheating… It would not be fair.”  How long till she’s silenced by social media?

President Biden seems to disagree.  One of his first Executive Orders was to force schools to allow transgender women to compete with biological women in athletic competitions.  While some see this as a great advance for respect and dignity, others claim that it erases women from sports. Girls competing against people with male bodies will inevitably lose in many sports (and maybe scholarships that go with them).  In some activities (such as wrestling), biological females will inevitably suffer real injuries at the hands of transformed persons.

Transformed Person Shamanism

Aarluk, the fictional transvestite shaman is based on a real phenomenon.  Among some Aboriginal Siberian peoples (and elsewhere in the world), the spirits would order a young man to wear women’s clothes.

“He loses masculine strength, fleetness of foot in the race, endurance in wrestling, and acquires instead the helplessness of a woman. Even his psychical character changes. The transformed person loses his brute courage and fighting spirit, and becomes shy of strangers, even fond of small-talk and of nursing small children.”

Everyone in his village is too frightened by his physical and shamanic power to challenge Aarluk’s gender identity.  Nevertheless he turns out to be a good mother, protecting, teaching, nurturing Osnat.  It takes time, but eventually his daughter (an accomplished scientist) chooses to love and appreciate Aarluk.

What’s Your Equipment?

Is Aarluk a man or a woman?  Is a six-foot, two hundred pound athlete with X & Y chromosomes and male genitals a man or a woman?  Would a one-hundred twenty-pound person with ovaries want to enter a physical competition with such a transformed person?  Would she want to share a locker room with a person with male equipment?  The actress Keira Knightly recently said she would only do sex scenes with a female movie director.  Would she feel comfortable, for example, with a transformed person like Dr. Richard/Rachel Levine, a respected pediatrician and high government official?  It’s never simple.

It’s not simple even with the brute Aarluk:

“Osnat looked at the person who had raped her when they first met. Now the overwhelming feeling she had for Aarluk was – well, she didn’t know what it was. There was no word, no concept that encompassed gratitude, deep affection, revulsion and terror. It wasn’t love, it wasn’t hatred, nor was it somewhere between those feelings. But it was absolutely what she felt.”

If someone sees themselves differently, as a transformed person, to what extent are other people obliged to accept that vision?  Are we allowed our own view?

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There’s an ancient story about a man who was walking down the road when he encountered a great sage, whom he greeted with great respect.   The rabbi replied “You worthless, ugly person. Are all the people of your city as ugly as you?” The man rebuked him, saying “I don’t know, but you should say to the Craftsman (God) that made me: How ugly is the vessel you made.”  The sage fell do the ground, contrite.

Contemporary studies find that beauty is an advantage.  Beautiful people are typically treated better by others, aren’t insulted by passing sages.  For women, researchers found that enhancing a woman’s attractiveness boosted people’s perceptions of her competence, likability and trustworthiness.  Of course concepts of beauty may vary, from Rubenesque fleshy appearance popular from the 15^th century, to the emaciated Twiggy look of the 1960’s.  Powdered wigs, blonde hair, green hair, no hair… the variation is endless.

Physical beauty or ugliness is rarely an issue in Judaism; wisdom and knowledge take priority.  In Proverbs we are told that a woman’s charm is deceptive, her beauty vain.  The same woman, though, is praised for her wisdom.

The novel Quantum Cannibals was inspired by a woman from history; both wise and beautiful.  I introduced her:

Asenath accepted her beauty and wisdom as a gift. The former, she ignored; the latter, she nurtured and fed. She didn’t feel arrogant about either. “Tanayt” wasn’t a name, but a title her people had bestowed on her. It was reserved only for the greatest sages, for the most able of leaders, and hadn’t been given to anyone in hundreds of years. Certainly not to a woman…  Such beauty, people reasoned, could only be a result of divine favor.

This description applies as much to the historical (16^th c.) Asenath Barzani as it does to my fictional adaptation.    She was head of the Jewish religious academy in Mosul, Kurdistan, and was admired by both the Muslim as well as Jewish population.  Although she was a legitimate female rabbi, her title “Tanayt” was a much higher designation.

I took my Asenath out of ancient Kurdistan.  I kept her as a scholar, but placed her in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.  I also set her in the arctic, where she was an exiled inventor, quantum biologist and warrior.  It may sound confusing, but if you read the book you’ll understand.

The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said “never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.”  The historical Asenath Barzani was the personification of that idea in her beauty and wisdom; in her life.

The post Beauty and Wisdom- The Character appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

This is the first in a series of posts introducing characters from the novel Quantum Cannibals

Alex is a secondary character in Quantum Cannibals. He’s a renowned poet whose wife tells a friend “Alex likes young men and boys.”  The character was inspired by the pederasty of beat poet and cultural icon Allen Ginsberg. He said:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”

Howl was a brilliant poem, a work of art.  Not so brilliantly, Ginsberg also said

“Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in two days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape.”

I recall reading a transcript of his chat with fellow icon William Borroughs where they declared that the younger the child, the better the sex.  A progressive literary magazine in the 1970’s featured a story about a man who pursued sex with prepubescent girls (I won’t use the story’s obscene term).  The journal was progressive, it was cool.  Not perverted.

The issue of sex with children goes back farther.  There is a debate among scholars of ancient Greece and Rome whether sex with kids was considered normal.  “In Athens a man would have been regarded as perverted if he sought a relationship with another person equal to him in age and status.”

Sexy cuties around the world

In Afghanistan, the sexy cuties were found  in the widespread tradition of bacha bazi ‘dancing boys,’ some as young as ten.  Men force these boys (no transitioning counselling) to dress like little girls, then abused them.  Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea prepubescent boys had sex with adult men.  It was crucial for them to swallow the men’s semen in order to develop into warriors.  I can’t find anything cute about that.

Given the wide history of sex with children, isn’t it just another cultural norm? Doesn’t progressive ideology believe that all cultures are of equal value?

If so, does ancient slavery justify contemporary slavery?  How about mass murder, pillage, cannibalism?  There are plenty of precedents for those throughout history.  Should we remove their contemporary stigmas because someone else did it at some other time?

There is a story in ancient Jewish writings about a rabbi (352-427 CE) who vilified the Biblical King Menashe (reigned 698-642 BCE) for pursuing idolatry.  Menashe appeared to the rabbi in a dream and rationalized, “If you had lived in my day, you’d have picked up the hems of your garment to run after idols!”  Maybe if we’d have lived in those eras, in those places we’d have no problems with slavery or cannibalism…  But we don’t live in those eras.

Is there anything you can’t do for the sake of art (and money)?  Many critics have accused the Netflix series Cuties of sexualizing young girls.  The creators of the show argue that they’re actually combating the sexualization of children by showing kids behaving seductively. Given all the history and culture of sexualizing children, should we really condemn Netflix’s sexy Cuties?

Better we learn from, rather than replicate the misdeeds of the past.  We shouldn’t look for history or art to excuse wrong behavior in the present.  There are poor rationalizations for the making of “Cuties,” but no justification.

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The novel Quantum Cannibals has a large cast of characters, some evil, some saintly.  Most are complex, neither black nor white.  A person can be a good character, but simply confused when facing an impossible situation.  All of the characters in the book are intended to reflect back on our non-fictional world, to say something about how we can respond to both the impossible and the ordinary.

Many of the characters were inspired by real-world people or other fictional characters.  Nonetheless, Quantum Cannibals is a work of fiction.  Names and characters are products of my imagination and are not to be construed as real.

I will write a series of “Good Character” posts, introducing people from the novel: who was their inspiration, and what is their relevance today.  Some of the people (and their inspiration) you will meet are:

• Eric (Eric Cartman, from TV show South Park)
• Alex (poet Allen Ginsberg)
• Simon (the Rabbinic sage and mystic Simon bar Yochai)
• Lillith (Lillith)
• Asenath (Asenath Barzani, a 16^th century religious academy leader in Kurdistan)
• Mustafa (Ottoman general, Siege of Famagusta (Cyprus), 1570-71)

  

• Aua (early 20^th Inuk (Eskimo) shaman)
• Taiku (the Talmudic concept of a question that cannot yet be answered)

Some people say I’m too didactic, always finding a lesson in something.  Others say I’m always making jokes out of everything.  I hope when you read the “Good Character” posts that follow, they inspire you to reflect, and inspire you to laugh.

Oh, yeah, and inspire you to buy and read the novel.

Click here to read the post about Alex/Ginsberg/Cuties, and romanticizing kiddie porn

The post Trying To Be a Good Character appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

1921-22, among the Iglulik Eskimo (Inuit):

“I once went out to Aua’s hunting quarters on the ice outside Lyon Inlet… For several evenings we had discussed rules of life without getting beyond a long and circumstantial statement of all that was permitted and all that was forbidden. Everyone knew precisely what had to be done on any given situation, but whenever I put in my query: “why?”, they could give no answer. They regarded it as unreasonable that I should require not only an account, but a justification, of their religious principals….

It had been an unusually rough day… The brief daylight had given place to the half-light of the afternoon. Ragged white clouds raced across the sky… our eyes and mouths were filled with snow. Aua looked me full in the face, and pointing out over the ice, where the snow was being lashed about in waves by the wind, he said:

“In order to hunt well and live happily, man must have calm weather. Why this constant succession of blizzards and all this needless hardship for men seeking food for themselves and those they care for? Why? Why?”

We had come out just at the time when the men were returning from their watching at the seal blowholes on the ice, toiling against the fierce wind… Not one of them had a seal in tow; their whole day of painful effort and endurance had been in vain.

I could give no answer to Aua’s “Why?” but shook my head in silence. He then led me into Kublo’s house, which was close beside our own. The small blubber lamp burned with but the faintest flame, giving out no heat whatsoever; a couple of children crouched, shivering, under a skin rug on the bench.

Aua looked at me again and said: “Why should it be cold and comfortless in here? Kublo has been out hunting all day, and if he had got a seal, as he deserved, his wife would now be sitting laughing beside her lamp, letting it burn full, without fear of having no blubber left for tomorrow. The place would be warm and bright and cheerful. The children would come out from under their rugs and enjoy life. Why should it not be so? Why?”

I made no answer, and he led me out of the house in to a little snow hut where his sister Natseq lived all by herself because she was ill. She looked thin and worn. For several days she had suffered from a malignant cough that seemed to come from far down in the lungs, and it looked as if she had not long to live.

A third time Aua looked at me and said: “Why must people be ill and suffer pain? We are all afraid of illness. Here is this old sister of mine; as far as anyone can see, she has done no evil; she has lived though a long life and given birth to healthy children, and now she must suffer before her days end. Why? Why?”

This ended his demonstration, and we returned to our house…

“You see”, said Aua “You are equally unable to give any reason when we ask you why life is as it is. And so it must be. All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask…”

“We fear the weather spirit of the earth, we fear dearth and hunger in our igloos, we fear the great woman at the bottom of the sea that rules over all the beasts of the sea. We fear the sickness that we meet with daily all around us. We fear the evil spirits of life, we fear the souls of dead human beings and of the animals we have killed.”

“Therefore it is that our fathers have inherited from their fathers all the rules of life which are based on the experience and wisdom of generations. We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we keep those rules in order that we may live untroubled.”

From the book “Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos”, by Knud Rasmussen, published in 1929

*******************

This Saturday is the anniversary of the death of my mother Tehilla. I would like to tell you about my mother, about her accomplishments, about my memories of her, how she guided and taught me.

I can’t.

My mother died of cancer when she was in her thirties and I was four years old. For much of those four years she was in hospital. We did spend time together, but I was too young to remember it. I know she did affect me, I know she shaped me, but I can’t tell you how.

My mother had her years taken from her. She died in great pain, she suffered. I shivered reading the medical reports from her final days, imagining the agony that was being coldly and clinically described.

Why did she have to suffer so? As far as anyone could see, she had done no evil. Why must people be ill and suffer pain? Why did my sister and I have to grow up without the one who bore us? Why?

Her earlier life was also difficult. Her father was hospitalized for many years. She and her sister were brought up by my grandmother Rivka in deep poverty. Why did she have to undergo that deprivation? Why?

You are equally unable to give any reason when I ask you why life is as it is. And so it must be. What can we know, what can we understand?

Can we understand an earthquake in India? “Amid an acre of blackened mounds sits Hauth Chand. Beside him is the body of his granddaughter Manisha and in his hand a surgical glove filled with water to sprinkle over her body, according to tradition. At 5 years old, Manisha is too young to be cremated.” There are a hundred thousand other personal stories from that earthquake.

Can we understand the suffering of the wrongly convicted prisoner, freed decades later by DNA evidence, or God forbid, executed? The victim of a terrorist armed with a car or machete? It’s harder to remember that these are real people, with feelings and aspirations, just as you and me. They’re not just players in a television or internet news drama.

How do we understand Jewish history? From 1648 to 1653 the Cossaks, occasionally allied with the Tartars or Poles killed close to one hundred thousand Jews. They didn’t have the technology available to Hitler but their viciousness and cruelty might have even shocked the Gestapo. This period of suffering, known as Tach V’Tat gave rise to the false Messiah, Shabtai Tzvi, helped give birth to both Hassidism and the Haskalah, secular Judaism. Jews tried to find some answer, some explanation for their suffering. They asked “Why, why…?” Why does it appear that two plus two equals five?

An ancestor of mine, Rabbi Yom Tov Lippman Heller, the Tosafot Yom Tov, theorized that Tach V’Tat was a punishment to the Jews for talking and light-heartedness in synagogue. He instituted a prayer to be recited in honor of people who undertake not to talk during prayers. It’s still used in many institutions.

And of the holocaust? Eliezer Berkovitz, in “Faith After the Holocaust” says that he stands in awe before the memory of the holy martyrs who walked into the gas chamber with the Ani Ma’amin, I believe, on their lips. Berkovitz goes farther, however. “…so also is the disbelief and the religious rebellion of the concentration camps holy… Those who were not there and, yet, readily accept the holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of the disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.” Berkovitz continues that “…the disbelief of the sophisticated intellectual in the midst of an affluent society- in the light of the holy disbelief of the crematoria- is an obscenity.”

That disbelief can be holy, teaches that you are not obliged to shut your eyes, to erase your mind, to ignore your heart. If anything, we must keep ourselves open to truth. Torah is truth.  Two plus two equals five.  Is this the reality?

Gerald Schroeder, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, tries to explain suffering in the book “The Science of God.” The geological forces that give rise to earthquakes are necessary for the conditions that allow life to exist. He says that stars without lethal radiation that lead to mutations and birth defects would not be natural. “Obviously, an omnipotent Creator could remove all randomness from nature… But the price would be too high.” Randomness is necessary for free will. Free will and the potential for tragedy go hand-in-hand. Schroeder describes this randomness as an aspect of the divine contraction that allows our universe to exist.

Randomness? Schroeder is attributing randomness to the true Judge, whose every action is just? God could just have easily made a world supporting life without earthquakes. Stars without radiation could have been just as natural seeming as what we know and are familiar with. In fact, the only difference between nature and miracles is that we are so used to certain miracles, such as air, water, life, thought, that we consider them natural. A leading mathematician marveled at the fact that two plus two equals four. There is no intrinsic reason for it to be that way, he explained. Two plus two could have just as easily equaled five. God made it four, and we take it for granted.

The book Ethics of the Fathers asks “Why did God create the world with ten utterances? What does this teach us? He could have created it with one utterance?”

God could have created a world without cancer. He could have created a world without hunger, with good weather, without suffering. He could have made a world without terrorism. He could have made a world with free will, yet without random pain. God had all kinds of leeway in making the world. He is the One who can do whatever He wants. What does his choice of design come to teach us?

“Rabbi! I am forced to think and think constantly, and I cannot find peace of mind.”

“About what are you thinking so much?” inquired the Kotzker Rebbe.

“I am wondering if these is a Supreme Judge, who deals with the world justly,” replied the hassid.

“What does it matter to you?” asked the Rebbe?

“Rabbi, if there is no Judge and no justice, then what sense does the Torah make?”

“And why does it matter to you?” insisted the Rebbe.

“How can you say that? Surely it matters to me.”

“If you are so concerned, then you must be a good Jew. A good Jew is allowed to think,” consoled Rabbi Menachem Mendel. “Now go and learn.”

The Kotzker didn’t tell the hassid he would find an answer to his question. The inability to have such understanding is explained in the Bible according to the Kotzker by God’s pronouncement to Moses: “And you shall see My back- but My face shall not be seen. This means that although so many things in this world appear to be the reverse of what they logically should be, that is because the world stands with its back to the logical truth. The difficulty of the situation is that the “face” of God’s guiding light is hidden; it is far removed from human comprehension… it cannot be seen, for it is too bright for our eyes.

Albert Einstein deals with this difficulty: “The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Putting the Kotzker Rebbe and Einstein together, we learn to appreciate our limited understanding, appreciate that He has given us the opportunity to glimpse his back, to see the refined light of his wisdom, albeit filtered and reduced, such that we can achieve at least some level of comprehension.

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My mother was an ardent Zionist, deeply involved in the creation of the modern state of Israel. She was a writer and a translator, having published an English edition of Yitzchak Leib Peretz’s The Three Canopies. She was cut down before reaching her potential. May her memory be a blessing.

I was too young then to say “Baruch Dayan Emet. Blessed is the True Judge.” I say it now.

I do not understand what happened to my mother or why. I do not understand why two plus two equals four.  But we are taught that by definition, everything that God does is good. That’s a difficult formula to grasp.

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