Nazis Caught in The Twilight Zone

So, instead of writing fiction to smear all over my blog like a child smears feces on what would otherwise be a passable crayon sketch to put on the fridge (I still suck too much to show my fiction to the wide world, is what I'm trying to say), I've decided to climb out of my "why am I not in Israel, I'm going to die here, oh God!" mood for a bit and, you know. Live. And what would life be without good stories?

I love stories. It's safe to say that I'm probably addicted to them. Whether it's books, movies, history, poems, songs, people with interesting lives or thoughts, the crazy guy on the street corner, my own bizarre, half-cocked ideas and fantasies, or even television, I love stories. Sometimes I make up stories about people's lives when I don't know much about them, just because it makes the ho-hum moments of the typical day a little more interesting. Sitting next to a weirdo who won't stop talking to you about God knows what on your morning bus route? Well, what if that weirdo was really an undercover agent playing up his cover to blend into the type of scenery we commoners expect on a city bus, such as the typical weirdos who won't leave us alone, no matter how far we shove our noses into our books or how loud we crank up the volume on our iPods? Well, what if he was a secret agent on some sort of risky, confidential mission that only people in the higher echelons of politics and crime know about? What if he knows all the things that conspiracy theorists have wet dreams over, and he's just in disguise because he has to keep his holy-shit-worthy knowledge to himself until he gets paid a gajillion dollars to get that information into the right hands?

You know, like Val Kilmer in The Saint.

This scenario gets weird and borderline creepy if you let it run away with you, and you have to remember that the smelly meth-head on the bus is, well, just a smelly meth-head on the bus...as boring as that is.

But what if...okay, just hear me out. What if the meth-head was like Val Kilmer in The Saint, and you're totally missing your chance to be his Elisabeth Shue love interest? What if?

Bizarrely placed day-to-day fantasies aside (seriously, I might have an undiagnosed psychological issue or tumor, so if you don't do this kind elaborate and extensive daydreaming in your daily life, you're totally normal and healthy, and probably function much better than I do), I do love me some stories. And lately, I've been getting into the stories of The Twilight Zone.

Yeah, that's right. The Twilight Zone. The late 1950s-mid-1960s television show about all things creepy and bizarre. The paranormal, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic world scenarios (we were in the throes of the Cold War then, after all), mind over matter, life after death, missing time, and that creepy motherfucker that William Shatner saw out on the wing of the plane, all have their special place in the stories of this beloved classic television series, and in our psyches.

Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK?

But what I really love about The Twilight Zone, is not just that it can legitimately give its viewers the creeps 40+ years after its airing, long before our culture decided to dive off the deep end of the creep factor and into the gratuitous gross-out, sociopathic, depraved cheapness that are movies such as Hostel, The Human Centipede, and other over the top cinematic crap that I refuse to waste a second of my life indulging in. (Yes, I have an opinion about those movies, and I've never seen them. When a movie or story is known more for its reputation of ickiness rather than what it actually is, like say, American Psycho, which I have seen and don't care to read, then I think I can skip the hour and a half of mindless brutality masquerading as something deep and profound, and get right to the judgment and condemnation part of the movie-going experience). No, what I love most about The Twilight Zone, is that it goes into the depths of the human psyche and explores our fears, emotions, memories we'd rather forget, and really, the darkest parts of our humanity--the things that, for better or worse, make us human. It does a damn good job of doing this, too. It's impressive that a show dating back to the infancy of a new storytelling medium, the television, can so consistently and successfully examine difficult human experiences and emotions in both a nuanced and bizarre fashion. Or maybe not. Perhaps I give modern television too much credit. While there are some good series out there today, so much airtime is dominated by the never-ending stream of "reality" television shows that basically have millions of viewers watching to see who will fuck who at the end of (or during) whatever stupid competition they are involved in. Seriously, these shows are all an elaborate mating ritual for us to watch like a bunch of voyeurs who forgot that you can just as easily access free porn on the internet, and get to the final outcome of the show's premise, and in more detail to boot. The existence of these shows are only here to feed us a sad slice of the crap pie that we've made of our pop-culture. It's all so hollow. 

So the other night, while I was staying up way too late yet again, I was looking through the premises of the Twilight Zone episodes available on Netflix, and came across the one called "Death's Head Re-visited." This episode is not quite like the other episodes, at least for me and probably many other Jews, because of it's subject matter: the Holocaust.

"Death's Head Revisited" was written and aired in 1961, during the infamous Eichman Trial. In the story, a former SS officer returns to the Fatherland from his exile in South America, convinced that enough time has passed for him to return and wax nostalgic over his days as a brutal officer at Dachau during WWII. The officer, Gunther Lutze, checks into a local inn and the woman at the front counter is clearly shaken by his presence. She reluctantly admits to him, after he intimidates her, that he reminds her of an SS officer from the war, as the SS commonly used to stay at the inn. Lutze insists that he was battling on the Russian front during the war, and she must have him mistaken for someone else. Still, clearly getting off on her obvious fear of him, he implies rather heavily that he is that former SS soldier that she suspects him to be, but what is she going to do about it?

Lutze decides to go to the Dachau camp to revisit his glory days of absolute power. A true sadist, Lutze wanders about the ruins of the camp, and reminisces fondly of hangings, denying water to a dehydrated man begging on his knees, and rousing exhausted prisoners from their slumber early in the morning in freezing temperatures to go outside into the snow and do "some exercises." The imagery used during Lutze's recollection of the days from the war are quite convincing. By this time, seventeen years after the end of the WWII, the world knew what those death camps looked like, and what the prisoners suffered through within their walls and electrified fences. It's somewhat alarming to see it in the context of a Twilight Zone episode.

Lutze imagines his victims as they were in their last moments.

Then Lutze encounters a familiar face when a former inmate, still clad in his striped prisoner's garb, shows up. They discuss the war and the past a bit, with Lutze nonchalantly considering the past to be nothing terribly offensive, that a few silly mistakes were committed, and of course, he was only following orders, just like any good soldier would. The man from his past, Alfred Becker, is calm in his demeanor...as calm as the dead. He reminds Lutze that ten million human lives were extinguished in the camps and that the tortures and inhumane evils they were subjected to are a bottomless pit of human depravity and injustice. When Becker informs Lutze that he's there to be put on trial, and Lutze suddenly remembers that Becker was among the many victims killed by his brutality, he panics and tries to leave. The Dachau gates close; Lutze can't leave, because you see, he is to be put on trial for crimes against humanity by the very people he tortured and killed. 

Lutze, of course, flips out. But there's nothing he can do, and within the blink of an eye he finds himself on the floor of one of Dachau's bunkers. As he looks up, the camera lingers on his horrified expression before revealing to the audience what he sees:

Lutze's jury

Gripped with panic, Lutze attempts to plead his case ("Let me go! This is inhumane! I was following orders!"). He tries frantically to escape while Becker reads from a list of charges, all that Lutze is on trial for. He numbers the murders, the tortures and the human experiments while the faces of the victims look on solemnly and hauntingly real. Lutze begins to scream in protest as Becker continues to read, almost drowned completely out by Lutze. His screams are so piercing, so convincing, that there's an uncomfortable moment as the viewer, where you almost feel sorry for him. Almost: "What, feel sorry for a Nazi? What's wrong with me?" But that's the point: most of us, I like to think, have a heart, and naturally deplore the sound of the tortured screams of another human being. And yet there's some satisfaction in it as well, because we know what kind of man Lutze is. Many like him got away with murder and so much more after the war, and were never brought to trial. This realization makes the whole story that much more compelling. Lutze, of course, has no remorse for his actions. The remorse he feels comes from being caught and to face punishment for what he really knows was beyond wrong.

Lutze passes out, and when he comes to, only Becker is there. Lutze begins to run all over the camp like a wild animal caught in a cage, while Becker reads him his sentence: a lifetime of insanity. What's more, is that he can feel the pain he has inflicted upon his victims; he feels the bullets that pierced their bodies, he feels the fear that gripped them and he feels the torment of the medical experiments. He writhes and screams while Becker tells him, "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God." 

Lutze writhing in pain while Becker looks on.

At the end of the episode Lutze is found on the grounds of the Dachau camp and has to be sedated before they take him away to a sanitarium. Meanwhile, doctors try to understand what could make a man unravel so quickly. As they stand in the Dachau ruins, the doctor wonders aloud, why Dachau is still standing. The innkeeper from the beginning also mentions wanting to burn the place to the ground. In Rod Serling's closing monologue, he states, "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

I sometimes have a difficult time with anything revolving around the Holocaust. I've never completely explored Yad Vashem despite my year in Jerusalem; one walk through the Children's Memorial after visiting other parts of the museum knocked my spirits too low to continue through the rest of the place. I attended only half of the day of classes at Pardes on Yom HaShoah, knowing that there is only so much I can stomach. I am consistently disappointed in, and sometimes disgusted with Holocaust movies. I have accepted that Hollywood is not in the business of telling historical truths or striving for accuracy, nor should it be. And I am, for some reason, more receptive to theater productions that touch on the Holocaust. But most movies, no matter how well-made and well-acted The Pianist is, no matter how sensitive and respectful Schindler's List is, I just can't watch them with any sort of cathartic satisfaction. What actually happened is too awful for me to wrap my head around, so watching a movie about it seems ultimately absurd.

But I do also recognize that people tell stories, whether through cinema, stage, music, text, or conversation, to try to understand, analyse, describe and express the wide variety of human experiences and emotions. We're complicated, we do complicated things for complicated reasons, and we don't always fully understand why. And yet, isn't that what people are always trying to answer? Who, what, when, where and how are easy enough most cases. It's the why that we understand the least, but try so hard to. 

I was really surprised by and impressed with "Death's Head Revisited," perhaps because it doesn't ask why. It's simply the story of a sadistic brute who thought he got away with murder a thousand times over, but was ultimately caught, tried, judged and punished. That is satisfying catharsis. I had the same feeling, (but a bit more exhilarated), when I watched Inglorious Basterds (the many times I've watched it). Sometimes, I just want to see Hitler get his face blown to bits by a machine gun, and clap my hands in triumph over a theater full of Nazis exploding. Sure, it sounds awful, but hey, I'm human. We can be pretty awful. Better to satisfy that desire for revenge via fantasy and storytelling, especially when feeling so powerless. Revenge stories help us cope. We get to imagine taking down evil and bringing it to justice. It's great a story, and we tell it over and over again. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more stories to watch, read and listen to. I'm always living my story, so I might as well escape from it for a bit and tell myself another one. Storytelling and fantasizing, if you do it well, can be rather illuminating and thought provoking, after all.

Still Lost in Jerusalem...

It's bizarre to physically be in one place, and the rest of you in another. As new problems, revelations and uncertainties arise, I've become single-minded in my focus to get back to Jerusalem, and it has become an all-consuming obsession. Sometimes I think I'm running away from something. Sometimes, I think I'm running towards something. In either case, as things currently stand, I'm running in place. I'm sure I'm not the first or last young Jew to fall in love with Jerusalem only to be brokenhearted by forced separation from her, but for those of us who have experienced it, we know that one may fall in love dozens of times throughout an entire lifetime, but Jerusalem is the love that takes your breath and your heart away. I'm just not the same person now.

People spend years deciding and carefully planning on moving to a foreign country, permanently. Me? I dive in head first with reckless abandon. My impulsive nature has caught up with me and my recognition of it has had no effect on alleviating my desire to go back to Jerusalem. Start over. Begin a new chapter. The current story arc has become tiresome.

So, while my days are pretty much the same, and my mind is set on one, single goal, I've decided to escape for a while from this...whatever this is that I'm doing in this blog, and wander off into the land of fiction. I used to be a daydreamer, so it shouldn't be too hard to conjure up that old behavior again, and put it to use with my writing. Fiction is not something that I do all that often, so I'm terribly rusty, but I need to put my mind somewhere else for a while before I snap, and I might as well throw it onto this blog. So, it's story time, folks. Stay tuned...

Losing My Religion

Two weeks have passed since I said goodbye to Jerusalem and hello to an old familiar foe, Medford, Oregon. The job hunt continues, and the sudden realization of how far away the nearest shul is, a mere ten miles, seems as though it might as well be a thousand miles, considering my lack of mobility. The only kosher meat I can find here are the Hebrew National Franks in the supermarket, and believe me, I know from experience that those get old really quickly. Israel is practically another planet, and I feel like an alien that has been away to see what's on the other side of the galaxy, and has forgotten what the home world is like. The air is different. The sun doesn't even shine the same way here. And then, of course, I've always felt a bit out of place here. The memories of those feelings are still with me, and every time I walk down a familiar path from my past, those memories rise up to the surface of my psyche and overwhelm me.

But I'm not a teenager anymore and I've changed considerably in the eight years it has been since I've lived here. There is some comfort in this realization, but still; old habits die hard, and instead of sticking with the positive attitude that I have been cultivating to guide me through the challenge of living a Jewish existence on a non-Jewish planet, my old friends from the past, good old Self Doubt and Despair, have shown up on my doorstep, and they have been overstaying their welcome. But since they are old friends, just because they have been around for so long and we know each other so well, I've been having a hard time telling them to go away and leave me alone. This was me before Judaism. This is miserable me.

It would be easy to blame the environment that I find myself in for my sudden regression but I share a good part of the blame as well. It would appear that my old habit of sitting and staying stuck with a bewildered sense not knowing what to do, so I'll do nothing, has never really left me. I don't think people every really break old habits. I think they're always there, lying dormant, and once something triggers them to wake up again, getting them to go back to their slumber takes a monumental, single-minded effort. There it is again, that old habit staring you in the face, while you're trying to sleep or get the motivation to get up and out of the house. "Hello," it says to you in a mocking tone. "You didn't really think you broke me, did you?" So, here they are; Old Habits, Self-Doubt and Despair are sitting here with me right now as I write this, just hovering. How annoying.

During these last two weeks, I've exhausted myself looking for a job (I've submitted dozens of applications) and making a concrete plan for my return to Jerusalem. It's been all-consuming, and with each day that passes that I remain unemployed, my already overactive anxiety level amps itself to such a degree that my stomach gets tied up in knots, and I find myself perusing my mother's wine rack once again. Not too surprisingly, somewhere in the middle of this stressful mess, I've been slowly losing my grip on my Jewishness. You see, the plan for my Jewish survival this summer, was to daven twice a day, every day, always light Shabbat candles, always say kiddush and hamotzi over challah and to make sincere efforts to make it to shul at least once in a while, even if that means breaking some of my Shabbat observances, such as paying money for transportation (though there were more than a few times last year when I lived on French Hill when I had to choose between a Shabbat meal at someone's home, or not paying money for a cab and instead, sitting in my dorm, gazing gloomily at the flickering lights of my Shabbat candles, all alone. Needless to say, I always opted for the meal and paid for the cab, of course). The plan has been...well, discarded, for lack of a better term. Today was the first day that I davened mincha, realizing that I was giving up on the challenge of being a one-Jew army until I can be reunited with the tribe. I had no Shabbat dinner the night before, I hadn't lit candles, and no blessings were recited over anything. I am not proud of this, and it bothers me that I put forth such little effort in keeping my Judaism thriving even when out of its element, but I think the most shameful thing I did this Shabbat, was do something that I would consider work, and davening the weekday mincha...because I actually forgot it was Shabbat.

Now, I'm not entirely a halakhic Jew. Far from it. But I am observant in many ways that are meaningful for me, and not working on Shabbat is about as basic as it gets when it comes to Jewish observance. The "work" that I did this Shabbat, was for the sake of a precious job interview at the mall, buying people's unwanted jewelry for cash. At a lonely kiosk in the middle of the mall, I underwent a one and a half hour interview process, a large chunk of which required me to hand out fliers to passersby, awkwardly asking them in they wanted to sell me their jewelry. As I bugged people walking by the kiosk, getting tongue tied as I'm prone to do and having a hard time hiding my complete lack of enthusiasm for what I was supposed to be getting them enthusiastic for, I started to have unpleasant flashbacks of my past mall jobs, trying to sell people things they don't need, or possibly even want. I hate this kind of job, because if there is one thing I am not, it's a salesman. So when I found myself saying, in my too quiet voice, "Hi, how are you? Do you have any broken or unwanted jewelry that you'd like to sell to us for cash?" what I appeared to be saying, considering my overall demeanor, is this: "Hi, how are you? Yeah, I don't care. Look, we'll give you cash if you have unwanted jewelry to sell us, but then again, you can read the sign above our kiosk, and I'm probably annoying the hell out of you by being one of those people who get paid to pester other people until we find the rare person who is actually interested in what I'm pitching to them. In fact, I'm annoying myself right now. Just take the flyer, please? The guy who might hire me is watching and he says these fliers fulfill a quota. Yes, I know I'm awkward and I just told you that we'll take your cash for unwanted and broken jewelry and it's kind of funny, but I feel ridiculous. I'm no good at this, but I need a job. I didn't leave Jerusalem to come here and buy jewelry off of people from a mall kiosk...I want to go home." That's the general vibe I believe I gave off. I tried to fake my attitude, but I'm not a good actor, either. I have the unfortunate "blush intensely when you're nervous and uncomfortable" gene, along with a tendency to get tongue tied when I'm forced to speak to absolute strangers who I have no interest in speaking with, whatsoever. I'll find out on Monday if I get the pleasure of actually getting paid to recreate this awkward scene for hours at a time. Pray for me, will you?

After coming home and taking a nap and glaring at the walls of my bedroom, resenting them for not being the walls of my bedroom in Jerusalem, I distracted myself from my bad mood by reading a book with a cup of coffee outside in the waning sun. "I need to daven," a tiny voice suddenly said to me, and I realized it had been two weeks since I had. I got my siddur from my bookcase, went out into the back yard, faced East, and began praying. It felt good, and I took my time, lingering over the Hebrew words, enjoying the sound of my voice whispering the holy tongue, feeling nostalgic for Jerusalem. I thought of davening in the beit midrash at Pardes with an actual minyan, taking a pause from a long morning of studying chumash or mishna, just before lunch. I reminisced of the time I was on a tiyul to the Golan Heights, and our bus pulled over to the side of the road so we could daven in the parking lot of a closed cafe, the setting sun coloring the sky with such vibrant pinks and oranges, you felt like God was right there in that beautiful atmosphere, looking straight at you as you stood there with your siddur open, rocking gently back and forth in prayer. And then there was the time we had Kabbalat Shabbat services on the roof of a hostel during a tiyul to the Galilee against the backdrop of the sun setting over the sea, where I had just been happily wrestling with the forceful waves, letting them knock me over and buoy me back up again, without a care in the world. It was a good feeling, and I wondered why I had allowed myself to be so distracted with everything else to the point of forgetting this meaningful feeling. Taking a moment out of the day to just center yourself and reconnect with your spiritual side helps make life so much more bearable. I had been needing to do this.

...then I had this thought, right in the middle of the Shemonah Esrei: "Oh shit, it's Shabbat. I'm doing the weekday mincha! Oh, I just said "shit" in my head during the Shemonah Esrei! Sorry, God..." Nothing breaks your concentration and snaps you out of a moment quite like realizing that you're doing something of immense importance to you the wrong way, because in your laziness, you actually forgot how to do it.

So, I did what any person slipping away from their faith would do; hitbodedut. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this practice, it has its roots in Chasidism, and simply put, requires one to go off into nature (if possible) and talk directly to God. "We need to talk, don't we?" I said, as I closed my siddur on the wrong page. "Okay. Let's go to the park."

Hitbodedut may be a highly unstructured form prayer in a religion that has just about everything structured, but it never the less, I think, fills a void for those of us who have trouble leading a structured life. There's also something so biblical about it. This is how Abraham, Sara, Jacob, Moses and, well, everyone in the Tanakh prayed to God. There's something profound in its casualness, something comforting in its nonchalance. I am not going to lie: I could spend hours practicing hitbodedut when I'm feeling particularly troubled or confused. I always come out of it with a clearer head, and a feeling of being rebooted. It would be easy to be cynical and say, "well, you're just talking your problems out to yourself..." In a way, that's true. I have, in the past, talked to myself in a very earnest, serious manner, as if there were someone else in the room with me. One summer, when things were really bad and life was stuck in a horrid, never ending phase of confusing transition, I had some very insightful one-sided conversations with my cat. But there is something different about addressing God, and being removed from your usual environment. While the park down the street from my parent's house isn't exactly remote, it is nice and green and has a beautiful view of the mountains surrounding the valley that this town is situated in. In fact, I didn't even wait until I got to the park to start talking; I talked the whole way there, strolling through the 'anywhere in suburbia' streets. I might have looked a bit crazy, but hey, I used to talk to my cat. But so does the lovable Jon in the Garfield comics! Of course...my conversations looked more like ones with Realfield than the witty, lasagna loving Garfield...

Come to think of it, maybe Jon just imagines Garfield to be witty, and he's a lonely, crazy weirdo with a typical cat...

In any case, I got to the park, lay down in the middle of an unoccupied soccer field, stared at the sky and gazed at the mountains, and talked to God. When I walked away, I felt more centered, more grounded, more inspired to keep my Judaism ever-present in my life, no matter where in the world I might find myself...even in the town that fills my mind to the brim with memories of my angst-ridden youth, without even one synagogue, and a Jewish community that is so small and quiet, I don't even think they exist. No, it's not like living in Israel, let alone Jerusalem, but what in the world is?

On the bright side of this conundrum, I do have a mother that goes out of her way to make sure there's something I can eat at dinner with the family that isn't treyf, who found me a chanukiah so I'd have something Jewish to decorate my room with, and there is a store here that sells challah. The guy at the kiosk in the mall told me that if he were to hire me it would be no problem to work me into a schedule where I'd never work on Shabbat, and I have a Skype date with my former Hebrew professor who has graciously offered to converse with me through the summer to keep my Hebrew from slipping into oblivion. And I finally got around to chastising myself for feeling like I live under impossible circumstances to practice Judaism, when Jewish history is full of Jews defying much more tragic circumstances than I can even fathom to keep their Jewish identity intact, and Jewish tradition alive. If the starving can find matzah for Pesach in the hell of a ghetto, and if the dying can say their prayers all the way up their last moment of life in a death camp...well, then I suppose it's about time I got some perspective. Besides, if absence makes the heart grow fonder, then that will only make the homecoming all the more sweeter, whenever I find myself back home, in my beloved Jerusalem.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go show Old Habits, Self Doubt and Despair to the door. They were never good friends, anyway.