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Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Moby Dick, Police Blotter, Two Different Worlds and my Bumper Sticker


                                      
     


Two Different Worlds

A recent column by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman made the point that “the world is being divided into regions of ‘order’ and ‘disorder,’ and for the first time in a long time, we don’t have an answer for all of the people flocking to get out of the world of disorder and into the world of order.”  Whether they are driven by hunger, fear or economics, people want to move to that world of order, regardless of the cost or danger involved in getting there.


The forces of “nature” such as population growth and crop failures, the “globalization” of what once were local economies and finally, the improvements in technology and its ready availability worldwide are driving this movement of people from disorderly places to orderly ones.

http://www.techdigest.tv/african-people-mobile-phone.jpg

A Syrian fearing the next military attack in his family’s neighborhood, an African existing on a near-starvation diet in the Sudan, anyone anywhere who fears that their religious or ethnic identity may put them on the wrong side of whoever is in power in the country where they live … all of them now have seen the European and North American world of order on television, have smart phones and access social media and know for certain that their world of disorder is not the way it is everywhere.  And changing their particular world of disorder to one of order is something they just do not have the time nor the resources to risk undertaking.

 

And this is the real basis for illegal immigration throughout the world.  It is a problem Friedman sees as just starting, and for which “we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead.”


If you and your family were in that “world of disorder,” and you knew about the “world of order” elsewhere, and possibly already had friends and relatives who had gotten there, what would you do?
JL








                       

                                 
My Presidential Bumper Sticker



Hillary Clinton will end up getting the Democratic Presidential nomination, for which she has worked so hard for the past eight years.  But will she deserve it?  I do not put very much weight on the Republican attacks on Ms. Clinton in regard to her role as Secretary of State at the time of the Benghazi consulate attack, in her handling of government business on her personal Email account and her relationship to the Clinton’s foundation which receives money from foreign as well as domestic donors.  In the big picture, these are things which the G.O.P. has blown far, far out of proportion in order to attack her and her integrity.  But, beyond this, what has she done to qualify her to be President? 

She has served the country as a United States Senator from New York and as Secretary of State, but in those roles, has she done anything out of the ordinary (as her successor at State, John Kerry, has accomplished in negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran) or shown herself to be a strong leader? 

The 2016 Presidential election will witness a battle of ideology.  It is unclear from what position the Republicans will campaign since their many potential candidates all are against the way things are now, but offer no realistic alternatives.  Voters, particularly women and minorities, will find it hard to vote for a Republican candidate whose party is beholden to so many fringe ideologies most Americans find to be reprehensible.
                                      
                                
                                                   Hillary and Bernie

In an effort to hold together the traditional Democratic combination of minorities, women, union members and so-called “liberals,” Ms. Clinton has come out with a politely enunciated version of traditional Democratic positions.  The true positions of the Democratic Party are being more properly voiced by Bernie Sanders who is unabashedly pro-union, for increased government regulation of business, free college education, and a greatly increased government safety net, including a single payer universal health insurance program (Medicare for everybody).  He represents traditional Democratic ideology far better than Hillary Clinton does.
That’s why, although I don’t expect him to get the nomination, I have a “Bernie” sticker on my car.
Jack Lippman


                                           


Police Blotter
Each Thursday the Palm Beach Post carries excerpts from the “Police Blotters” of local communities (but not of the much larger county police force).   Sometimes they are amusing and sometimes they are sad.  

Recently reported from Boca Raton were thefts of $65.63 worth of groceries from a supermarket and a rotisserie chicken from another business.  Both thieves were arrested.  Sadly, it seems to me that the motivation to steal was “hunger” on the part of the thieves for themselves and/or their families.  This is a sad commentary on the condition of many local families existing below the poverty line, and the actions taken, possibly as a last resort, by what might be unemployed “breadwinners,” who choose to become “bread-stealers.”   Shades of Jean Valjean!

                                            

Two other arrests reported involved the theft of a bottle of scotch from a liquor store and the shoplifting of a pair of $40 men's underwear.  This is testimony to the exquisite taste found in Boca Raton, even among thieves.  


http://wine-laos.com/Pictures/johnnie-walker-blue-label.jpg

JL






                                                  



A High Holiday Appreciation of Moby Dick

With the Jewish High Holidays approaching, I am including a piece I wrote some years ago about Herman Melville's great novel, Moby Dick.  In retrospect, it barely touches the surface of what the book is all about, but it still is worthwhile reading at this time of the year.


Moby Dick, a Jewish Novel?
(or “Moby Dick, an Incomplete Anagram”)

Jack Lippman


I have always felt that there was a special relationship between Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, and the Jewish High Holidays.  Many of the biblical allusions in the book relate specifically to Jewish scriptural occurrences which are part of the Jewish High Holiday liturgy.  This is so striking that I have often wondered, even though it is clear that Herman Melville had an extremely thorough knowledge of Jewish scriptural writings, whether he might also have had a Jewish friend who took him to synagogue during the High Holidays. 

Herman Melville.jpg Herman Melville



For people who like to play with words, the very title of Moby Dick is enticing and perhaps exciting.  If you look at the letters spelling out the whale's name, and try to construct an anagram from them, you fail to produce “Yom Kippur,” but you do come fairly close.  The first five letters of the holiday’s name, “Yom Ki” easily fall into place, but then the anagram fails.  But this failure to complete the anagram may not be accidental.  In the book, the white whale called Moby Dick never appears in his entirety, only that portion of him which is not submerged in the water being visible.  Might it not be logical that Melville, in entitling his book, would create only a partial anagram since his view of the whale was never more than a partial one?   He actually says “… there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like.”   (Chapter 55)



In another quote, Melville apparently associates the sperm whale, whose face he considers to be an inscrutable blank wall, with the Deity. (Chapter 79)  He paraphrases Exodus 33:23 (“Thou shall see my back parts … but my face shall not be seen.  But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face”)  (Chapter 86) causing us to wonder whether Melville is talking about God or about a whale.  To those familiar enough with the novel to subscribe to the idea that the White Whale might be a manifestation of God, or actually represent a Deity which mankind has never actually fully seen, the incomplete anagram may make some sense. 

                      



Herman Melville came from a socially prominent Manhattan family which had lost most of its money, precluding his pursuing higher education.  Instead, at age eighteen, he went to sea on a merchant vessel.  This was followed by whaling voyages, capture by cannibals, teaching, lecturing, and ultimately a government job at the Custom House in New York.  Early on, Melville turned to writing about his experiences at sea and from Moby Dick, it is clear that he was very familiar with Jewish scripture.  I am unaware of Melville having any close relationship with Jews of his period, although undoubtedly, there certainly were Jews in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Perhaps, as I have thought, he had a Jewish friend.   But let us get on with the book, and of course, its uncanny relationship to the Jewish High Holidays



The “Etymology” which begins the book includes the word for “whale” in many languages.  It is noteworthy that first of all of them, however, Melville lists (in Hebrew letters, no less) the Hebrew word for whale.  Immediately following that is a section labeled “Extracts,” where quotations involving whales are cited from various historic sources.  The first five of the many extracts quoted, notably, are from Jewish scripture, specifically from the Books of Genesis, Job, Jonah, Isaiah and Psalms, texts with which Melville obviously was very familiar.



The novel itself starts with three words, “Call me Ishmael.”  And Ishmael is the narrator as we read “Moby Dick.”   In the Bible, Ishmael is Abraham’s son, born of Hagar, his wife Sarah’s maidservant.  Genesis 21 tells us that when, after years of barrenness Sarah gives birth to Isaac, she no longer wants Hagar and Ishmael to remain in the household.  The Lord instructs Abraham to accede to his wife’s wishes and to send Hagar and Ishmael off, assuring Abraham of Ishmael’s future wellbeing.  Apparently, Ishmael did survive his wanderings, because years later, we find his namesake about to set off on a whaling voyage out of Nantucket, which as his telling the story evidences, he also survived.  Coincidentally, Genesis 21 often is the morning Torah reading for the First Day of Rosh Hashanah during the Jewish High Holidays.



On his way to Nantucket, Ishmael stops in the whaling port of New Bedford, waiting for a boat to take him to the island, where he will seek employment on a whaling vessel.  He visits the Whaler’s Chapel in that city where he listens to a sermon about the punishment which awaits those who defy and disobey the Lord, but how the Lord also forgives those who repent.  This, of course, is the story of Jonah, which in the salty language of the seagoing preacher, is told in its entirety in that Chapel in New Bedford.  That same Book of Jonah also is read, again coincidentally, as part of the afternoon service on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. 



An interesting footnote to the chapter in which Ishmael visits the Whaler’s Chapel is Melville’s passing reference to “antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago.”  If the author was using a Hebrew calendar, and rounding off to the nearest century as he says he is doing, he is fairly close to the mark, because I place the story of Moby Dick as taking place approximately in the year 1850 or 5610 on the Hebrew calendar, only 390 years off from Melvilles’s “sixty round centuries ago.”  Melville, again coincidentally, was obviously conversant with that calendar, which moves on to another year at each Rosh Hashanah. 


                              http://p1.la-img.com/1120/56905/27860917_4_l.jpg



The novel deals with the whaling ship’s captain, Ahab, who drives his crew mercilessly in his mad quest to find Moby Dick, the White Whale who, on an earlier voyage, had taken Ahab’s leg and left him seeking revenge.  In the Jewish scriptures, Ahab was a Hebrew king, and influenced by his evil wife Jezebel, became an idolatrous worshipper of Baal.  Melville’s Ahab apparently was one who in the past, like his biblical namesake, also had disobeyed and defied the Lord.  The novel does not go into the specifics of Ahab’s transgressions but it is clear that unlike Jonah, neither the biblical King Ahab nor Melville’s Captain Ahab had any intention of repenting.  In fact, many view Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick as his way of battling the Lord’s efforts to punish him, represented by the whale.  This, in effect, is the novel’s story.  Ahab, in hunting the whale to avenge his mutilation, is fighting the God who has punished him for his sins, and continues to do so, through Moby Dick. 



Early on in the novel, before the Pequod (for that is the name of the boat Ishmael sailed on) left on its voyage, a mystical character named Elijah appears on the dock to warn Ishmael that something is wrong with Captain Ahab, that he has a history of something terrible that had happened in the past.  Elijah tries to discourage Ishmael from signing onto Captain Ahab’s boat.  In the Bible, the Prophet Elijah is precisely the one who attacked the idolatry of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, urging the Hebrew people to recognize only the one true God, and not the false god worshiped by King Ahab.  And just as the Prophet urged ancient Jews to keep their faith pure, so Melville’s Elijah is there to warn Ishmael against Captain Ahab as he signed onto the crew of the  Pequod  on that dock in Nantucket.  The parallel is striking. 



But what might you ask does this have to do with the Jewish High Holidays?  The story of King Ahab and Jezebel is not part of the High Holiday liturgy.  The Prophet Elijah is more associated with Passover, when a door is left open for him at the seder.  Nevertheless, you will find those same words Elijah used to the Hebrews, uttered in the face of King Ahab’s apostasy, still resonating to Jews of today, as Yom Kippur draws to a close just prior to the final sounding of the shofar.  “The Lord, He is God” (Adonoy Hu Ha-Elohim) is repeatedly intoned as Jewish worshippers complete their period of “tshuva” (repentance) on the Day of Atonement.   Was this the same message that Melville’s Elijah was trying to communicate to Ishmael?  Indeed, it is a Jewish message.



The novel goes on to tell the story of Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick, and how the Pequod ultimately finds him, battles him and is destroyed by him, with Ishmael being the only survivor.    As the novel approaches this climax, the vessel encounters another whaling ship, which is sadly crisscrossing the sea, looking for missing crewmen, lost in an earlier attempt to challenge Moby Dick.  These lost crewmen included the vessel’s captain’s children, and the name of the ship, the Rachel, obviously relates to the biblical Rachel who laments her lost children in Jerimiah 31.  That reading commonly serves as the Haftorah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, another indication of the relationship of Moby Dick to the Jewish High Holidays.  It is the Rachel, still searching for its lost children, which rescues Ishmael from the disaster which befell Ahab, his ship and the rest of its crew.



(Twenty-five years after writing Moby Dick, Melville published a 30,000 word poem entitled “Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.”  Melville scholars have suggested that this is really a study in comparative religion, a field which became popular in the late 19th century, when industrial and scientific advances were causing many to question long standing fixed beliefs.   Melville’s knowledge of Judaism, as indicated in Moby Dick, would logically lead him in this direction a quarter of a century later.)



No, Herman Melville was not Jewish, nor do I really believe he had a Jewish friend who took him to High Holiday services.  What is clear is that he was extremely familiar with Jewish scriptural writings, and included many references to them in Moby Dick.   In re-reading the novel, and relating it to the Jewish High Holidays, this reader has had frequent occasion to put the novel down and refer to the Torah and the Prophets in order to deepen his understanding of what Melville is saying.  To my way of thinking, a novel which prompts its readers to study Torah has to be considered a Jewish novel, and Moby Dick certainly meets this standard.

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