Ghost Recon begins in 2008, with civil unrest in Russia. Ultra-nationalists have seized power in Moscow, with plans to rebuild the Iron Curtain. Their first step is clandestine support of rebel factions in Georgia and the Baltic States.

During the first few missions of the game, the Ghosts battle South Ossetian rebel forces from the north of Georgia, who are harassing the legitimate government and its allies. The Ghosts fight in the forests, on farms, and in villages while assisting their NATO allies in fighting the enemy. Unfortunately, the Russian government complains to the United Nations that the Americans have interfered in their affairs, and eventually they send in their army to aid the South Ossetian rebels. The U.S. cannot hope to stop the Russian Army from invading Georgia, so the Ghosts slow down the invading forces so that their allies can evacuate. Eventually, the Ghosts are all that’s left of the U.S. forces in Georgia, and they evacuate by SH-60 Seahawk helicopter on the rooftop of the American Embassy in T’bilisi, just barely avoiding the Russian forces. The Georgian government flees to Geneva and sets up a government-in-exile. Sadly, with the fall of T’bilisi, Georgia surrenders and is forcefully incorporated into the RDU.

We can only hope that this war doesn’t continue to play out as the game writers imagined it might. I’m no expert on these matters but I suspect that regardless of Georgia’s invitation to NATO membership earlier this year, the U.S. won’t be fielding special forces in Georgia that are already deployed in the Middle East and the Hindu Kush. Read more of Ghost Recon’s plot summary at the wikipedia.

UPDATE: From Russia’s perspective, Georgia is a proxy power of the U.S. on it’s southern border, so it might be something of a propoganda coup to capture U.S. Special forces or NATO troops fighting in the interests of Georgia. Thinking of this, I’m unsure what to make of the following story which has so far not been picked up by Western news media outlets (as of Sunday night 10PM EST):

Russian news media site Rosbalt (Google translation) is reporting that Russia has captured a U.S. citizen among a group of Georgian sabatouers that had “committed a group suicide.” Another news site Izvestia (Google Translation) identifies the American as a NATO instructor and reports that “among the corpses in Tskhinvali was found several bodies of black people who fought on the side of Georgia.” According to Rosbalt, the citizen is currently being held for interrogation in Vladikavkaz (capitol of Northern Ossetia). (There is a photo of a soldier in this article, but it looks like a stock photo lifted from somewhere else.)

Do sabatouers commit group suicide upon fearing capture? Should the bodies of “black people” be assumed to be the bodies of U.S. mercenaries? This all seems very suspicious to me.

Then I noticed that the ipods had album shuffle. The new players from Cowon and Archos did not, nor any others that fancied themselves as ipod competitors. But I still wasn’t convinced to buy an ipod yet. My trusty if heavy and slow Archos had a (then enormous) 100gb hard drive that I had installed myself and the largest ipod then available was 60gb. Ahh, but just before my birthday Apple announced their release of a new 160gb ipod. I was won over. Soon I gifted myself with a new Ipod Classic 160gb.

iPod Management

When it arrived, the ipod’s hard drive came formatted with Apple’s native file system, HFS Plus (HFS+). As the Windows operating systems cannot natively read HFS+ drives and my Thinkpad runs Windows XP, iTunes reformatted the ipod with FAT32, a file system engineered by Microsoft. At the time I didn’t think too much of HFS+ vs. FAT32, I was just happy that the ipod was working. And so, I put all concerns about file fragmentation and the need to periodically defrag FAT32 volumes to the side, and got to work filling the ipod up with good music and videos.

Over the last year I’ve learned how to corrupt my ipod’s database (and how to fix it painlessly) by avoiding iTunes as much as possible. iTunes had the advantage of supporting Album shuffle, but I preferred to use Winamp with the Album List plug-in for listening to albums on my computer. I had some success using Floola (which does not support Album shuffle) and Floola is my choice ipod manager on my Linux boxen. But on my Thinkpad running Windows XP, I was more interested in whether there were any plug-ins for Winamp that could suffice as a fully featured alternative to iTunes.

Looking at Winamp I discovered that it supported iPods through a plug-in bundled with the Winamp installer called pmp_ipod. Trying it out I was underwhelmed by its poor support of album cover art on the ipod, a feature I had really come to love. Then I discovered ml_ipod — an open source winamp plugin written by independent developers that could do (almost) everything pmp_ipod could do but better. The only thing I would need iTunes for would be for occasional firmware updates. ml_ipod support was fairly well documented on an online wiki and any further questions could be pursued on an active support forum hosted at Winamp. I’ve been using ml_ipod since January and have donated money to the further development of the plug-in.

File Fragmentation in FAT32 vs. HFS+

A few weeks ago I began to wonder again what my ipod’s FAT32 volume file fragmentation looked like. Unsurprisingly, after tens of thousands of file transfers, the ipod’s music, video, database and artwork files were critically fragmented according to Diskeeper, a windows defrag tool. A fragmented file system meant that my ipod needed to work harder and slower than it should have to. The answer to a fragmented ipod file system isn’t defragging it though. Ever wonder whether you should defrag your ipod? Don’t waste your time. Defragmenting an ipod over USB takes a LONG time. It is much much faster to simply do a full restore from your computer’s existing archive of music. (Before doing so, make sure you have an archive of all your iPod’s music.)

Even after I initialized and reloaded my FAT32 ipod, I found that the the iTunes database of music files as well as the artwork database of cover art were still fragmented — just less so. I began to explore what benefits there might be to manage the ipod with its original HFS+ over FAT32. I was impressed to find that HFS+ drives do not suffer from the same fragmentation problems as FAT32 drives. As this comparison of file systems shows, the main reason for the lack of fragmentation in HFS+ is because unlike FAT32, HFS+ supports Extents. Wikipedia explains:

An extent is a contiguous area of storage in a computer file system, reserved for a file. When starting to write to a file, a whole extent is allocated. When writing to the file again, possibly after doing other write operations, the data continues where the previous write left off. This reduces or eliminates file fragmentation.

Additionally, because HFS+ was specifically engineered to minimize disk access and quickly access individual files, its specific utility for the iPod seems obvious. This specific advantage of HFS+ over FAT32 was summarized well by the user, “Millenium,” over on the macnn web forum in a 2006 thread on HFS+ vs. FAT32:

You may hear that HFS+ is slower than FAT32. That’s true in some cases, but not in others. In particular, HFS+ does not do very well in tasks where you need to access many small files at once…

For looking up individual files, however, HFS+ is actually one of the fastest filesystems out there, and has been for a long time. This all comes from the way that HFS+ stores its data: when you’re working with relatively few files it’s better, but when you’re working with many files at once it isn’t as good. It’s a design tradeoff, and whether it will be better or worse for you in this regard really depends on how you use your computer.

The original Macintosh File System (MFS, from which HFS and then HFS+ directly descend) was created in an era when most people used floppies to store all of their data. The same is true of FAT16, which is where FAT32 comes from. Apple’s engineers decided that since floppies were so slow, people and applications would try to minimize disk access in general, and so they optimized their filesystem to work best under those conditions. It worked extraordinarily well for the time, and even today there aren’t many better filesystems for people who work under those conditions.

In other words, one of the best file systems available for the iPod is HFS+ (especially compared with FAT32). Unfortunately, FAT32 is not a comparable alternative to HFS+. FAT32’s presence as an alternative file system for the ipod simply reflects the lack of support in Windows OSes for the more advanced HFS+ file system.

Perils of FAT32 to HFS+ Conversion

As a result of learning this, I became increasingly interested in converting my FAT32 ipod to HFS+. Besides fragmentation and reliability, I also wondered if a change in ipod file systems might affect the file transfer speed over USB 2.0. File transfer speeds over USB 2.0 with my FAT32 formatted ipod averaged around 6000 kB/s. Would HFS+ perform worse or better?

General information on converting the iPod from FAT32 to HFS+ was plainly lacking and specific recommendations advised iPod users to accept FAT32. I was on my own. To access HFS+ formatted drive volumes on Windows I’d need to install special software like MacDrive by Mediafour. So to begin, I downloaded the MacDrive software and formatted my ipod to HFS+. So far so good. I wanted to make certain that my firmware was installed correctly so I proceeded to initialize my ipod with iTunes, and then re-transfer my mp3s and mp4s to the newly formatted ipod with winamp + ml_ipod. This seemed to work fine (although I didn’t see any discernible change in file transfer speeds). But afterward, I was surprised to find that my ipod was still formatted with FAT32! I soon learned that as part of its restore sequence, iTunes for PC will automatically format HFS+ formatted ipods with a FAT32 file system. It also copies ipod for PC firmware that seems tailored specifically for FAT32.

In my next attempt, I reformatted the ipod to HFS+ with Macdrive, ignored iTunes altogether, and did a full restore with ml_ipod in winamp onto the Ipod. ml_ipod recognized the drive and transferred the files. This time the file transfer speed was much higher: 9500 kB/s vs. 6000 kB/s. I was impressed but once the transfer completed, I found the ipod would not recognize any of the files that had been transferred. The itunesDB database was not corrupt and the actual data files were all present so what could be the problem? Was it a problem with the iPod’s firmware not being able to read HFS+?

I found the answer on a wiki page written for Gentoo Linux users on how to update ipod firmware. Simply formatting the ipod’s drive to HFS+ would not work because HFS+ formatted ipods have three partitions: the first partition contains the partition table, the second partition the ipod for mac firmware, and the third partition the media files and databases. (FAT32 formatted ipods have two partitions: a hidden one for the ipod for pc firmware, and the other for the media.) The ability to create these HFS+ partitions on the iPod aren’t available on Windows, even with MacDrive. MacDrive can format a disk to HFS+ but does not provide the ability to create three separate partitions on the disk. And to make the ipod work, I would also need the correct ipod firmware installed in its respective partition. Could iTunes solve the problem? iTunes for PC will neither create the three HFS+ partitions nor copy anything but ipod for PC firmware to a FAT32 partition. The only solution I could imagine for copying the correct firmware and creating the correct partitions would be by connecting my ipod to a computer running OS X and restoring my iPod using iTunes for Macintosh.

So iPod USB cable in hand, I visited my friend Isaac S. and his Macbook, and soon afterward I had a functioning ipod with the correct HFS+ partitions and firmware. (Thanks Isaac!) Back home, I found that with MacDrive installed on my Thinkpad, ml_ipod and winamp had no difficulty recognizing the HFS+ volume. Transfer speeds hovered mid 8000 kB/s. Success!

The conversion did not come without any caveats. After the full transfer was completed I did notice that there was less free space available on the ipod. The ipod with HFS+ used approximately 5% more storage for the same files than when it was formatted with FAT32. (116gb/FAT32 vs. 122gb/HFS+ out of 148gb total.) I don’t know why, but perhaps it has something to do with the extents allocated for each file in HFS+ (described above). (See update below on this weird problem.)

Because ml_ipod was designed to restore fat32 formatted ipods, I don’t think I’ll be able to use ml_ipod’s “restore or initialize ipod” feature anymore, nor will I be able to rely on iTunes for PC for the occasional firmware update. Rather than buy a whole new Apple computer for this task, I’m looking at vmware workstation, an emulation environment that I can run OS X on within Windows. Another option is to use another piece of software by Mediafour called Xplay.

Conclusion

I hope this story helps anyone else out there wondering whether to get their FAT32 ipods converted back to HFS+ (and how exactly to go about doing that). I think it’s a worthwhile project because of the advantages that HFS+ provides in speed and reliability over FAT32, the lack of file fragmentation in HFS+, and some moderate file transfer speed advantages. The disadvantages  are the need to purchase HFS+ software for Windows like MacDrive and no longer being able to depend on iTunes for firmware updates or ml_ipod for occasional full restore and ipod initialization. (You can probably get around the latter problems by installing Mac OS X in a vmware emulation, but then you’d need to buy a copy of vmware workstation and OS X as well. Or you can buy a mac mini, macbook, or other Apple computer.) If this doesn’t faze you, then you should also expect that due to differences between the two file systems, that HFS+ will utilize more storage space on your ipod than FAT32. On my ipod, HFS+ used 5% more drive space with the same files loaded onto it.

If you want to run an HFS+ formatted ipod on a PC running Windows, follow these steps:

1. If your ipod is formatted FAT32, restore it using iTunes for Mac on a friend’s Macintosh computer. (iTunes for PC will only format your ipod to FAT32.)
2. Install HFS+ reading/writing software for Windows like MacDrive by Mediafour.
3. Optional but recommended: Install ml_ipod for winamp and transfer your files to your HFS+ formatted ipod.

In the comments please let me know if you’ve found other ways to partition ipods correctly for HFS+ without using iTunes for Mac. Besides file transfer speed changes and degrees of fragmentation, I’m also interested in documenting any other reported benefits of using HFS+.

UPDATE: A week later and I’ve reloaded my ipod once more under slightly different conditions. The important difference is that this time, the strange 5% storage space loss from my earlier adventure didn’t manifest. Instead of restoring the iPod using ml_ipod, I used XPlay (ver. 3.0.2), another piece of software by Mediafour. I’m not exactly certain what made a difference… but my iPod certainly seems happier having been reformated with MacDrive and restored with XPlay. XPlay has a trial period of 30 days or 20 times running, and I’ll be curious to know whether the software makes any difference to managing an HFS+ formatted iPod besides using its restore feature. I’ll provide another update to this post when I do.

Upon moving to Philadelphia in 2007 I bought a copy of Commercial Entertainment Product at the Digital Underground, a music store at 5th and South where I was making friends with local scenesters, and it was there that I probably learned the following year of the Spooky tour with EBN coming to the TLA. I had a mixed experience at the show. I think I got there late but was quickly impressed by EBN’s visuals. They had set up a double screen with a mirror image of the left on the right side, so there was some very cool if simple effects of action in the videos blending towards the center of the two screens. The visuals they provided for Spooky’s set were again very aggressive and I thought kind of childishly masculine, with lots of quick cut edits of men in race cars, spies, guns, and things getting blown up. EBN had made their name for videos that parodied the manipulation and dissemination of propaganda for the first Gulf War through mainstream media. For example, in their video “Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration #1″ (see below) they contrast the war footage of tanks getting bombed, with GI Joe’s cartoon battles, and scantily clad women shooting uzis in gun manufacturer advertisements, and so present the different ways violence on TV is presented in one single grotesque.

EBN’s viduals for dj Spooky’s sets were much more superficial. Without depth, EBN’s art was merely being used to complement the aggressive and masculine tone of Spooky’s presentation of illbient in relation to hip hop.

But I wasn’t dissapointed during EBN’s solo set. I saw videos that were works of art in and of themselves, and not being used to complement some other message. One of them featured a manipulation of Frank Sinatra from a short TV clip that would phase in and out of itself in audio and video. Seeing it made the entire evening worthwhile. Following the show, I searched in vain for anyone who had recorded the show. I wrote to dj Spooky asking for more information. I asked friends who new folks that regularly bootlegged shows at the TLA. Nada. And to make matters worse, I soon learned that EBN disbanded.

Fast forward to 2006. EBN videos were all over the place on youtube, and I did some exploring and found that the EBN project has been revived somewhat. All the members had gone onto other things, mostly in media production work, and EBN frontman Joshua L. Pearson had become a family man. But he had also created an official web page for EBN and posted a few videos, mostly quicktime files from Commercial Entertainment Product, for download. I still couldn’t find the Sinatra video but I was excited that it probably wasn’t lost. Hopefully it would be posted on youtube or somewhere else. At the time, looking for it would have to wait since I was terribly busy in Louisiana doing urban planning following the hurricanes of 2005. I would follow up on this later.

And so when I had some spare time earlier this year I sent out emails to all the EBN project members on whether the group had any plans to make an official release of the old videos on DVD. Greg Deocampo (currently of Mediatronica) was the only one who responded, but wow, what a response. He pointed me to his pesonal project Eclectic Method (EMN) and his portfolio of EMN videos. On a separate page of the EMN project, Greg had all the videos that had been made for the CD album Telecommunication Breakdown in 1995 but hadn’t been released due to there not being enough space on the CD for all those videos. (Only “Electronic Behavior Control System,” “3:7:8,” and “Homicidal Schizophrenic (A Lad Insane)” were released on the data side of the CD.) Mediatronica was also hosting a mirror of the videos on their video distribution site televis.es. Among the flash videos was a copy of the Sinatra video entitled “Frank”; I was overjoyed! (See “Frank” below.) A great interview of Deocampo is available in the episode archive of the public radio program, Some Assembly Required.

Having become a collector of EBN videos, I was dismayed to find that quite a few were no longer accessible on youtube or anywhere else. For years, a site called GNN (Guerilla News Network) had hosted a series of seven EBN videos it called “The Lost Tapes.” A few had surfaced on youtube, and one or two on file sharing networks, but the others had since 2004 when GNN stopped hosting them, become truly lost. Another video, “Banjo Lesson,” was made inaccessible when a youtube user named Nomeus had his account suspended. And so last week, I went looking for Nomeus, and finally caught up with him on his urban exploration site flurbex.com. I’ve since been able to get copies of all the missing files and repost them on youtube. Here’s “Banjo Lesson”:

Zohan fits well within a pantheon of fantastic He-Man stories of the bible beginning with a fugitive young Moshe (Moses) defending Midianite women and ending perhaps with Moshe “Muki” Betser’s largely successful IDF hostage-rescure mission at Entebbe. Zohan is a “Golden Boy,” capable of near miraculous feats of perfect timing, detail, dexterity, strength and endurance. In the Torah, as in other Mediterranean mythologies, the source of Zohan’s talents would have been identified early on as Divine; that Zohan’s are not, points to the story being couched within a modern and secular worldview.

Zohan is really a new take on the story of long-haired Israelite strong man, Shimshon (Samson), and his clever Philistine lover and hair cutter, Delilah. Just to make sure you don’t miss the parallel, Robert Smigel named Zohan’s Palestinian love interest Dalia (played by Emmanuel Chriqui).

The connecting motif is hair. For Samson, hair represents his Nazirite status and by extension, his divinely given strength. This is a critical point since in his story both Samson and the Philistines make the mistake of perceiving his hair as the actual source of his strength, while in reality it is just an outward, if sacred, symbol. In Zohan, this understanding is implicit, since Zohan’s strength isn’t his curly Jewfro (or much discussed giant bush of genital hair). Rather, Zohan’s strength is his passion to fulfill his dream of self-becoming (a hair dresser). This is impressed in the film so many times when he tells the Paul Mitchell hair salon, and afterwards, to Dalia that he’s ready to cut hair in his salon, not because he has any prior experience but because he has the passion and desire to do so. For Samson, his strength is ultimately given to the selfless call to war and ultimately, martyrdom. Zohan’s sacrifice of what his mother calls his “safe career” as a macho war hero for his “faygele” dream of becoming a hair dresser turns this theme of sacrifice on its head. It is through his striving to realize his personal dream that Zohan discovers, achieves, and in the end help to safeguard a place on earth where Israelis and Palestinian Arabs can live together in peace and love.

Just as Jonah learned, Zohan can’t really run away from his calling; he is a born leader, a defender of his people, and his past does catch up with him. But significantly, Zohan has given up on Israel as the place where his dreams can be realized. And this is why You Don’t Mess With the Zohan has been called post-Zionist. The film speaks to the frustrated desire of many Israeli Jews to make peace with their neighbors and get on with the fulfillment of the Zionist dream to achieve self-determination within a land of their own. However, the peace that must sustain the reality of this self-determination is shown to be shallow and fleeting. The leisure of Zohan’s parade through Tel Aviv’s beachfront, through its myriad of beautiful hedonistic people, is shown to be just so fragile and fleeting. Without warning, an IDF helicopter comes to break the peace of his ocean side BBQ.

But in America, the dream of simple success trumps all nationalist and ethnic division. And here we see the difference in worldviews between Zohan and the Hebrew Hammer (2003). Only a few months ago, for the first time, five years late I watched Jonathan Kesselman and Adam Goldberg’s Hebrew Hammer . Here was a film that speaks to a diaspora Jewish identity struggling with assimilation and acculturation. Just as with the Zohan’s unapologetic clownish macho sabra-ness, the Hebrew Hammer has no interest in arguing with stereotypes. The Hammer appropriates guilt and angst into a rubric of traits that include badass decidedly non-Orthodox Jewish tattoos and pre-marital sex. In embracing tattoos and sex, the Hebrew Hammer not only presents an alternative take on Jewish identity, it arguably reflects the reality of not a few proudly Jewish hipsters.

The difference between Zohan and Hammer, however, is in the attitude towards America as either an immigrant’s dream or as the continuing challenge of diaspora Jewish identity. As a first generation immigrant, Zohan is self-confident in his identity as an Israeli Jew. As a fourth or fifth generation descendant of European Jewish immigrants the Hammer represents the insecurity of diaspora Jewry as the angry defender of a cultural world under attack. If buffoonish and over the top, Goldberg’s Hammer and Sandler’s Zohan are archetypes (if not role models) for relating to Jewish identity in the US. While the Hammer took some plenty of identity from religious Judaism, it took none from Israeli secularism, and the reverse is true for Zohan. The difference points to real divisions in Jewish diaspora and Israeli Jewish ethnocultural identities.

I promised myself I wouldn’t think too hard about this film. It’s totally enjoyable if you’re Jewish or Israeli and I’m hopeful that for all the non-Jews I saw this with at the AMC theater in Northern Kentucky it delivered a bit more nuance and sophistication into their understanding of Jews and Arabs. (After all, we can all agree that the real problems in this world are caused by greedy capitalist WASP real estate developers. Right?)

The UK release date for the film is August 18th, so Israeli cinemas can’t be too far behind. I’ll be very curious to hear how Israelis receive the Zohan.

[crossposted to Jewcy]

I’ve reposted Lavie’s poem below.

“Jeer at them” with apologies to William Blake

And did the Rebbe’s feet in recent time
Walk upon Iowa’s fields of green?
And were the illegal Mexicanos
On Iowa’s pleasant pastures screened?

And did the ICE helicoptors
Hover over our well-paid shills?
And was Crown Heights builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my public relations flack!
Bring me my homeless men of Texas!
Bring me my army of wetbacks!
Lie to my critics that afflict us!

I will not cease from PR fights,
I will stick it to the goyishe “Man”
Till we have built Crown Heights
In Iowa’s green and pleasant land.

Adapted from “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake from the preface to his epic poem, Milton: a Poem. In 1916, C. Hubert H. Parry composed music for the poem to be sung as a hymn called “Jerusalem” (thus Lavie’s “Jeer at them”). Wikipedia notes,

The term “dark Satanic mills”, which entered the English language from this poem, most often is interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction of nature.^[1] This view has been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills, which was the first major factory in London, built in 1769 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was powered by Watt’s steam engines, and produced 6,000 bushels of flour a week. The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, by fire in 1791. London’s independent millers celebrated with placards reading, “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills.” ^[2] Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. An illustration of the fire published at the time shows a devil squatting on the building.^[3] The mills were a short distance from Blake’s home.

The Romantic movement which Blake helped invoke began in response to the dehumanization of industrialization, environmental devastation wrought by the intense exploitation of nature, and the loss of culture resulting from the alienation of artisans and craftsmen in the production of goods. The purpose of industrialization is to use efficiencies to lower costs, but often enough, industrialized mass production simply shifts costs away from the consumer and industry and onto the workers and the environment. Resources, both natural and human, are ruthlessly exploited resulting in environmental and social ills that ultimately cost more money to rectify than that incurred in the expense of a more humanely produced consumer good.

Lavie focuses on the exploitation of “illegal workers” and “wetbacks” (terms I’d never use) to describe just one corruption within the Rubashkin enterprise. Rubashkin’s business ultimately aims to satisfy Jewish Americans insatiable and unhealthy appetite for (kosher) meat through the mechanism of industrialized mass production. The exploitation of undocumented workers is one method of lowering the costs to the consumer. Unfortunately, lowering costs doesn’t come without a price — the true costs of environmental and social ills caused by pollution and labor abuse are simply passed onto the health and welfare of society and the environment we depend on.

With all the attention on Rubashkin’s disgusting labor practices, it’s also time to remind folks how Rubashkin has regularly sought to lower standards whether it be in food safety, worker safety, humane treatment of animals, and the pollution of the environment.

Might the Rubashkin travesty revive the nascent Jewish movement that aims to place renewed emphasis on Jewish and humane values in the Kosher Food Industry? You can do your part by supporting hekhsher tzedek.

In the context of Jewish mysticism, this sentiment might already tag me as a neophyte (correctly) since the majority of my ancestors and the most famous kabbalistic works not only unapologetically gender their god — the use of the dual male/female Gender system is made an essential allegory for describing the Godhead and the relationship between it and the created world. I have bunches more to read here including Elliot R. Wolfson’s Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, but I’ve read Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess. I am convinced by his thesis that a perceived feminine aspect of god can be traced back from our current neo-hasidic revival of interest in the Shekhina (the Divine Presence) to the medieval kabbalistic Matronit to imaginary depictions of the shekhina in exile in late antiquity following the destruction of the second temple, to biblical depictions of the shekhina and association with cherubim and clouds… and yes, to the Asherah. Patai having made his point, I was left struggling with its relevance for my religious imagination, even entertaining the thought of breaking with this ancient well formulated tradition that uses gender allegories to describe aspects of our god.

Influenced as much by the synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Jewish mysticism (inherent in movement like Sethianism), I’ve been more eager to describe God by what my god is not. The description Ein Sof, or god “without end,” is so much more useful to me than the distraction of gender. If I must think of the philosophical meaning of a cleft in the Godhead in the cosmogonic myth (as I often do), I will think of an illusory division between an unknowable transcendence and an intimately knowable immanence — and refuse to describe transcendence as male aloofness and immanence as female sexuality. I refuse!

I mention this all in passing to Jay Michaelson during a break at the recent New Voices conference in NYC. (I’ve been a fan of Michaelson’s writing since Paul Serici first introduced them to me, so meeting him was a thrill.) Michaelson is thinking about the gender of God taking into account the different gender identities we are only now coming to terms with in Gender and Queer Studies. In reacting to my points, Michaelson was more accepting of a gendered God in mystical experiences. He differentiated between (at least) two different kinds of mystical experiences, one of which, catalyzed by use of an entheogenic plant, would inspire a much more intimate and sexualized experience of divinity. Then he invited me to Nehirim, the shabbat retreat of LGBTQ Jews and their allies, to learn and talk some more. (Despite the suggestion of cosmic serendipity, first meeting Eli K-W also on his way to Nehirim and then to be invited by the organizer himself, I chose not to spend the full registration out of pocket to attend, and instead spent much needed time in reunion with my cousin Una.)

This brings me to introduce Rima Turner, now interning for Nehirim (congrats!). I first met zir* at Jews in the Woods: a bespectacled, diminutive, giant of a spirit whose haftorah reading one Shabbat morning managed to draw down tears from eyes that had for too long been dry. We’ve been in communicating for the past three years, sharing what we’ve learned in our respective wanderings. Rima also invited me to Nehirim, but whatever I missed there I’ll make up in responding to the interesting and personal d’var torah, “Sacred Spaces: The Tabernacle, Women’s Work, and the Body as Sanctuary.” Ze just recently shared zir essay over at Jewish Mosaic, the national (Jewish) center for seuxal and gender diversity.

On Parshat Naso (Numbers 4:21 - 7:89), Rima writes:

In Numbers 7, we read about the sanctification of the tabernacle (the Mishkan). Moses anoints the tabernacle and its components, and then the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel each bring offerings: silver, gold, incense, oxen, sheep, and goats. The offerings function as a dedication, after which the tabernacle is anointed again. Moses goes into the tabernacle, and the Divine speaks to him.

What does it mean to create a holy space? The Divine is not your dinner date—Ze won’t come over to your apartment just because that’s where you live. You can invite Zir in, but that doesn’t mean Ze is going to come. Those of us who pray or meditate regularly are familiar with this reality. Some days we enter into prayer and prayer enters into us—but sometimes prayer takes a day off, no matter how hard we try (or try not to try, or try not to try not to try—well, you get the picture).

I love what Rima’s done with gender-neutral pronouns. I had heard these neologisms used in referring to people (at Jews in the Woods, where else?) but never before had I seen them in discussions about divinity. So useful!

The use and innovation of gender-neutral pronouns in English has a long history summarized in a FAQ here. Gender-neutral pronouns currently in use have roots extending back at least into the early days of USENET in the 1980s, where they found popularity in nascent gender queer usegroups. The earliest use I could find of the pronouns zie and zir on USENET are in this post by a Lynn Dobbs in the soc.bi newsgroup from December 1993. (Fair warning, the subject matter is erotic.)

Richard Creel, a philosophy professor at Ithaca College, may have been the first to specifically use  gender-neutral neologisms in discussing divinity in his philosophy of religion classes. This is what Creel wrote in “Ze, zer, mer,” in the Fall 1997 issue of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy:

“Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” may seem awkward now, but if we use them regularly and the usage becomes widespread, they will soon seem quite natural. Meanwhile we will have enriched the categories of our language and improved our ability to communicate clearly, precisely, and grammatically. “She,” “her,” “he,” “his,” and “him” should, of course, continue to be used when appropriate. “Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” will supplement them, not supplant them.

To close on a personal note, in my philosophy of religion courses I explain these terms to my students, then I use them when I speak of God, which, of course, I do a lot. My students are not required to use these terms yet many of them are intrigued, attracted, and choose to do so, at first with self-conscious good-humor. My women students seem especially appreciative of an opportunity to speak of God without being forced to use a gendered pronoun or an awkward strategy designed to evade the use of pronouns altogether. Similar benefits accrue for general discussions of the nature of a person, whether in philosophy of religion or not. Hence, even if “ze,” “zer,” and “mer” do not enter into common usage (obviously the odds are greatly against that), nonetheless they can be very useful in philosophical discussions.

* As evidinced by her bio at Jewish Mosaic, Rima is exploring the use of the neologisms ze and zir to refer to zirself. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be at war even with language in determining for society what your gender identity is. But I do know a hint of a shade of this struggle from thinking about gender and god, and so I’m hopeful that in using the language that my friend Rima chooses for zirself, I will also be that much more mature in wrestling with a god that defies easy gender delineations.

UPDATE 6/15: Rima posts more at her blog.

If you look at the code and see what I added (in the section commented “wigetized” [sic]), you’ll notice that I’m shunning CSS markup for good old table formatting. I also changed a line under “switch display type”to make the widget look pretty in the sidebar. I’ve got it working in the sidebar here if you’re looking for an example of how it will look.

After you ftp the plugin into your wordpress install, you’ll still need to change the Netflix plugin settings in the wordpress backend. To make the table formatting work I have each entry start with a [tr] tag and end with a [/tr] tag.

Also, you’ll need to go to the widgets menu to add the Netflix widget that should appear there.

Maybe you’re thinking that somebody should already have done this by now. You’re right. Except it’s missing. Back in 2006 Chris Stanley over at ongoingprocess.net announced he had made a widget to work with Albert Banks’ as yet unwidgetized Netflix plugin. I searched for it in vain at his site but the link he provided had become broken at some point and was never fixed. Perhaps Stanley will dig it up someday and make it available again. Until then, you can try this out. Hope it works for you.

Here is how Solomon has Cain describe his relationship to his brother with special attention to his eponymous name, Hevel, which has the literal meaning of “breath” connoting a sense of his “fleeting” and impermanence:

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was added. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

Read more. (link, Beyond the Near)

With the essential role Cain must play in the narrative, can he actually have free will. This is a playful suggestion Solomon makes — but from Dwayne Hoover’s revelation in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to Nobusuke Tagomi’s epiphany in Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, the self-awareness of imaginary characters is a postmodern trope that resonates. As Authors we can give our characters a tselem elohim (an image of their creator) — and our characters in turn reflect whatever creative spirit we possess to our readers. When we write, when we dream we are in a state of communion with those that we are dreaming. Our imagination gives them life and if the myth of their life can be transmitted, it can endure long after we’ve ceased dreaming them.

Solomon’s reading of Cain also reminds me of the sympathetic reading of Judas Iscariot in the second century Gospel of Judas. In that second century work, Jesus asks Judas to turn him into the Romans, since “betrayal” is not really possible for a supposedly living god whose determination of all events must preclude the free will of betrayal. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the most beloved since only the most trusted lover of a god could be entrusted with the most painful job of assuring his capture and execution. In this reading popular with early Christian Gnostics, Judas is written in a sense similar to Abraham ready to offer up his son Isaac.The theme of child sacrifice within biblical and post-biblical christian narratives is more fully explored in Jon D. Levenson’s excellent Death and Ressurection of the Beloved Son: Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity.

Strangely enough, the gnostic sect that appreciated and possibly authored the Gospel of Judas were Sethians - a sect the predated Christianity and traced the lineage of their spiritual authority to Adam and Eve’s third son, the one born to replace the murdered Abel — Seth. In Sethian traditions, aspects which in other common traditions are seen as failures (e.g. the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) are seen rather as necessities in an unraveling emergence of divine transformation.

Solomon doesn’t make mention of Seth in her midrash, though his absence could I think easily be remedied with a perusal of the extant midrashim on the significance of Seth, as well as the more recent discoveries of ancient lost gnostic works such as the Apocalypse of Adam.

I was having a conversation with a mathematician, Yaakov, at the University of Maryland recently, and he was struggling with aesthetic questions on what is good or bad art, so I suggested an alternative more useful question as rather, “what is this art good for?” recalling Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 essay, The Creative Act:

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The verdict of the spectator is separate from the activity of the artist. The spectator might very well take umbrage if the art object, the object of fascination (or boredom) had been or had not been toiled over, had or had not been the expression of a theory or movement, had or had not been the work of an artist at all. As a spectator, my verdict is not whether art is or is not art, but whether the art is useful — and useful only in the sense of whether it has opened my eyes and expanded my conscious awareness as to the existence of wonder in the world of relationships and things outside of frames and pedestals, galleries and museums — whether appreciation of the art object has brought me to appreciate everything else in the Everything Else room in the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum.

In a related sense, as much as I ponder myth in Judaism specifically, and religion in general, I return to this concern, that these ideas, while interesting to me, while stimulating and enriching an emerging creative expressive innerverse within me, that these ideas should also hopefully be useful for others. That if they are not, that they are trivial, and that this whole project is a delusion of self-indulgence. I will be honest with you, that I am not wholly convinced that this is not, but I am writing — with the intention that these labyrinth of ideas I’m exploring and sometimes getting lost in — that I will bring back along my wayfinding thread/trail of breadcrumbs/umbilical chord, something useful.

I’m hopeful that just as art becomes useful by revealing to an observer the greater wondrous reality outside the frame of (framed) Art, that my insights into myth and religion might also be useful for helping to reveal a greater wondrous imaginary world only hinted at within the source text of religious doctrine and dogma. Myth and storytelling thus convey the promise and potential of enduring creative liberty and the subversion of religious control to generations of eager children and aging heresiarchs.

Having said this, let me share with you something totally weird that I just found (on wikipedia, where else) that blew my mind. An Arabian myth of a creature called Bahamut (بهموت‎) which unlike the Behemot is not terrestrial, but like Leviatan, inhabits the endless depths of the ocean. This is mind blowing to me because the tradition in Sefer Chanoch, that the Leviatan is the mate of the Behemot seems much more plausible (in a sort-of mythic taxonomy) if we imagine both of them as sea dwellers rather than as opposites on a terrestrial/aquatic scale.

Just for review, I’ve written about the Behemot in Jewish myth, how it seems to relate to Apsu, the ancient ur-deity in Babylonian mythology, the personification of heavenly fresh water. I’ve written how the Behemot is imagined as a cosmically large hippopatamus dripping with condensation, and referred to in midrash as the “Ox of the Pit.” I’ve wondered whether the Pit was a reference to the t’hom, the primordial abyss, the abstraction of the other Babylonian ur-deity and personification of saltwater, Tiamat. How Leviatan seems to be synonymous with Tiamat in biblical writings. How Behemot/Leviatan are mated to one another in Sefer Chanoch. The Talmud also prefers the notion that Leviathan and Behemot were each created like all other creatures, male and female. So the existence of a myth where Behemot takes the form of a non-terrestrial sea creature like the leviathan seems significant.

From the wikipedia article on Bahamut:

Bahamut (Arabic: بهموت‎ Bahamūt) is a vast fish that supports the earth in Arabian mythology. In some sources, Bahamut is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant.

If that’s not enough of a teaser, here is the entire fantastic entry on Bahamut written by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Margarita Guerrero, Norman Thomas di Giovanni). I want to point out that I find it significant that similar to the Behemot tradition, the Bahamut myth describes the creatures with hippopotamus features.

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.

From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs: God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown. So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa ( Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.

The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

The story of Bahamut is thus a variation in a wide tradition of cosmic creatures said to be supporting the world. In Hinduism, the creature is Akupara, a ginormous tortoise. Or elsewhere in the Vedas, as the turtle being Kurma, second incarnation of Vishnu. In Greek myth, it is the titan, Atlas. If you’ve read any Terry Pratchett, you might also be reminded of the turtle that supports his fictional Discworld.

In modern Western philosophical debate, an anecdote relating the myth of Bahamut or Akupara is sometimes referred to as “Turtles all the way down” (explanation below). The anecdote has been used by enlightened moderns lampooning the logical fallacies of irrational belief systems since the 17th century. Or as the wikipedia describes it, the anecdote is used “to humorously illustrate both infinite regress, in cosmological imagery, and the perils of religious/mythic myopia.” This is how Stephen Hawking relates the anecdote in his A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Russell probably wasn’t the scientist to have been the recipient of this retort. Most identify the scientist in this popular anecdote as the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. But Hawking can be forgiven for thinking so since Bertrand Russell, said the following in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian (1927):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

William James’ godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may very well have been acquainted with the story from his peer, Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his journal in 1852,

Men are making speeches… all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

So whether the Turtles anecdote originated with Russell or James, it is clear that myths representing cosmological proofs were useful arguments of ridicule for enlightenment rationalists and other freethinkers. In 1690 John Locke may have been the first western philosopher to refer to this myth in a philosophical argument on what the substance is of an object being empirically investigated. From book 2, chapter 23 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke writes,

If anyone be asked what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before-mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on, to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.

Perhaps the Indian said, “Bahamut.” Bahamut, the imaginary foundation of the world of myth.

Above: illustration of Bahamut for The Book of Imaginary Beings by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece.

UPDATE 6/5: It is something of a testament to my interest (obsession?) over the Leviatan myths that I realized only today that I had provided something a fuller treatment in a post I wrote already over two years ago, “Rejoining Tetragrammaton.” You can read on below for a good enough summation of my thoughts but it lacks source references and quotes. So please go to the earlier post first if you’re interested in these myths. What appears below is a rewritten article I wrote originally as the about page for this blog when it was called — guess — “The Leviathan and the Behemoth.” In the post below I write with some more detail on what I find relevant in the Enuma Elish and I do mention Hermann Gunkel as the source for the idea that Tiamat is a cognate for the biblical hebrew Tohu/T’hom, and I should have mentioned this in that earlier post. So besides being topical, these posts will help me in a later synthesis I need to write. I think what’s important to note in any case is that all of this has been written about with greater academic rigor, sophistication and nuance in scholarly literature — what I’m trying to do is articulate how this myth may still be relevant (read: useful) in a Judaism that is both mythically and environmentally conscious. The Leviatan/Behemot myths ARE interesting specifically because they are so well linked to an ancient natural cosmology that seems to have identified and personified aspects of what we now call the Water Cycle.

——

The Leviathan is one of the oldest and most obscure creation myths in the Torah. For me, the myth must be understood in the context of other midrashim concerning the Behemot (Behemoth). Together, I believe the Leviatan and Behemot represent two aspects of the ancient Israelite cosmology: the snowy pure waters above shamayim (the heavens) and the sweet waters below the aretz (the earth). The origins of the Leviathan myth are old and can be traced even into Sumerian mythology thousands of years before the birth of ancient Israel.

Being so old, the meaning of the myth has morphed over time. In perhaps its oldest known incarnation, the Leviatan (Kur and Tiamat in Sumerian mythology, Tiamat and Rakhab elsewhere in the TaNaKH) is a primordial chaotic force which must be defeated or tamed by wisdom in order to allow for creation to proceed. According to Hermann Gunkel, the primordial mother deity Tiamat (representing chaos in Sumerian myth) is abstracted in the Torah’s Genesis as T‘hom (the abyss). Following from Raphael Patai’s reading in his Hebrew Myths (with Robert Graves) the body of the Leviathan forms the earthly depths and is alternately represented as a tremendous underwater mountain, as a dragon, as a cosmic serpent (sustained by fresh waters flowing underground from terrestrial streams), as the abyss of the cosmos (the blank slate before creation), or as purely abstract chaos.

Meanwhile, midrashim represent the Behemot as an impossibly ginormous hippopotamus or water buffalo, supported on earth by the four pillars of its gigantic legs, dripping with condensation from the fresh waters above the earth, or simply as the primordial Void. The esoteric Sefer Chanoch preserves the ancient tradition that the Behemot and the Leviatan are each others mates. If we accept Patai’s reading, then Behemot, in his earlier Sumerian incarnation, was the ur-deity, lover of Tiamat, the fresh water god, Apsu.

In the Enuma Elish, Apsu, is killed by the newborn God of Wisdom, Ea (an early cognate of the YHVH) in order for creation to proceed. After this, Tiamat, and Kinghu (her new lover) and their children (representing the chaotic unstructured waterworld) battle with Ea to return the world to its chaotic state. The two lovers must be separated (violently in the myth) in order to be defeated (this time by the hero of Ea, Marduk) and a new age to begin.

Besides the explicit tradition preserved in Sefer Chanoch, the relationship between Apsu/Kingu and Tiamat, Leviatan and Behemot was all but lost. Whispers of it, however, remained in the two creatures relationship to fresh water, their below and above relation to the world as giants, and the Leviatan’s enduring association with the chaotic Ocean and saltwater despite her reliance on fresh water.

The Talmud alternately presents the notion that to preserve space in the world, God slaughtered the male counterparts of the created Leviatan and Behemot and pickled them for later feasting by the righteous when the sukah of peace is spread out across the world at the dawn of the messianic age. The idea that the primordial deities needed to be slaughtered for creation not to be filed with cosmic monsters also recalls the motivation of Ea’s fratricide in the Enuma Elish.

Much much later, Hobbes invoked the image of Leviathan to represent the gigantic nature of state bureaucracy. The Behemot and his relationship to Leviatan was forgotten. This past century, fundamentalist Christians have revived the Behemot as textual proof for the existence of dinosaurs during the age of Man.

Putting aside Hobbes and the creationist ideas, when I think of the leviathan and the behemoth, I can’t help but join the ancient mythic ideas in my mind with Andy Goldsworthy’s observation of serpentine forms in the movement of water on the surface of land, as well as the ancient Jewish mystical belief that all forces must be reconciled and unified for their to be a cosmic healing, a Tikkun Olam.

In contrast to the midrashim describing a final battle at the end of days when God slaughters the surviving Leviatan, Behemot, and Ziz (another ginormous birdlike creature), I imagine Behemot and Leviatan as once close, inseparable friends whose love for one another was so profound it excluded the possibility of any other relationships forming. While the midrashim imagine the Leviatan slaughtered and skinned with the tzakkim (righteous) feasting on her flesh of the Leviatan and sheltered under her luminous skin, I imagine a peaceful unification after a tragic separation spanning the history of all creation. In this way as well, I can reconcile the aspiration to be righteous with my practice of not eating the flesh of other creatures

This binary relationship expressed in verticality (above/below), or terrestrial vs. marine, or inner vs. outer expansiveness (depth/void), also helps me imagine two other invisible reactives, thought of at odds: the invisible hand of the market, and the complicated ecology of nature. As a planner, my power derives from my position as an expert to provide intelligence for people making market decisions, decisions that will have wide repurcussions on an environment (that in turn impacts the market). I am a mediator between two invisible forces, surrogates for the hand of God: the Market and Nature.