Smart Power

The word and rod are both a part
of power, soft but also hard,
together they are very smart,
each one the other’s guard.
Without the word you can’t inspire
confidence and mutual trust,
but rod must be its pacifier,
or word will quickly gather dust.
Be smart and let them both combine,
the smartness of the word and rod,
and cautious people won’t consign
the combination to their God.

Joseph S. Nye, the Harvard University, political scientist wrote in Foreign Affairs on July 1,2007:

The willingness of other countries to cooperate in dealing with transnational issues such as terrorism depends in part on their own self-interest, but also on the attractiveness of American positions. Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade rather than coerce. It means that others want what the United States wants, and there is less need to use carrots and sticks. Hard power, the ability to coerce, grows out of a country's military and economic might. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. When U.S. policies appear legitimate in the eyes of others, American soft power is enhanced. Hard power will always remain crucial in a world of nation-states guarding their independence, but soft power will become increasingly important in dealing with the transnational issues that require multilateral cooperation for their solution.

One of Rumsfeld's 'rules' is that 'weakness is provocative.' In this, he is correct. As Osama bin Laden observed, it is best to bet on the strong horse. The effective demonstration of military power in the second Gulf War, as in the first, might have a deterrent as well as a transformative effect in the Middle East. But the first Gulf War, which led to the Oslo peace process, was widely regarded as legitimate, whereas the legitimacy of the more recent war was contested. Unable to balance American military power, France, Germany, Russia, and China created a coalition to balance American soft power by depriving the United States of the legitimacy that might have been bestowed by a second UN resolution. Although such balancing did not avert the war in Iraq, it did significantly raise its price. When Turkish parliamentarians regarded U.S. policy as illegitimate, they refused Pentagon requests to allow the Fourth Infantry Division to enter Iraq from the north. Inadequate attention to soft power was detrimental to the hard power the United States could bring to bear in the early days of the war. Hard and soft power may sometimes conflict, but they can also reinforce each other. And when the Jacksonians mistake soft power for weakness, they do so at their own risk.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Erewhile A Holocaust

The phoenix that erewhile has from a holocaust
arisen is reborn anew, molecularly
distinguished from its predecessors, having lost
all contact with its past, now living secularly
estranged from rules and customs and from texts that formed
its previous identity. It has a land
that it can call its own, but it does not conform
with aspirations ancestors could understand.

The ovens and the ashes from which it emerged
extinguished the traditions that once helped it fly,
but quite miraculously new ones have emerged
providing ashes with curricula vitae,
but like Samson it can blindly now bring down
the temples of its enemies, new Philistines
who do not want to let it fly, as Gaza town
confronts its new-old settlements in shrapnelled shrines.
Inspired by an article on Milton by Frank Kermode in the February 26,2009 edition of NYR (Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday”) in which Kermode review three new books on Milton, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot by Anna Beer and Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? by Nigel Smith:
The last of Milton's poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, are both profoundly concerned with heroic virtue (Job, Jesus, Samson) , with variations on a pattern he also applied to his own life. Christian heroic virtue shuns glory, shuns sensual satisfaction, shuns even pagan learning and poetry. It includes all other virtues. Milton seeks to achieve it in his own life and to represent it in his last poems. Commentators have often wondered at the change in character of the blank verse in Paradise Regained, but it is a bold move from the prosody of grandeur in Paradise Lost to one of calm assurance, a deliberate rejection of glory, like its hero's. The verse of Samson Agonistes is even more extraordinary, not Greek, not Hebrew, a celebration of the operation of unexampled heroic virtue under the direction of Providence, and so once again a reflection of the triumph of the blind master:
But he though blind of sight,

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Blighted Trees

Like flowers in the spring, youth proves
that winter’s ended, and its bloom
can’t sense the distant horses’ hooves
that come to trample its perfume.

Like blighted trees, we’re doomed to die,
first at the top, although our roots
help us, when falling from the sky,
to greet the gloom without our boots.

Sexless, we lose all respect
from those we love, though we still cast
a shadow which they can’t dissect
till our life, like a day, has passed.

James Wood reviews “Exit Ghost” by Philip Roth in The New Yorker, October 15,2007:

Before his death, Jonathan Swift pointed to a blighted tree and said to a friend, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top.” Philip Roth’s dying animals, at loose in the twilit carnival of his late work, reverse Swift’s prophecy: they fear they will die from the bottom up. Their minds are ripe with sexual energy, with transgressive vitality, but their bodies are sour with decline. The aging David Kepesh, in “The Dying Animal, ” makes the mistake of growing infatuated with one of his many young conquests, and becomes the toy of her youthful sexual mastery. The elderly nameless protagonist of “Everyman, ” Roth’s previous novel, weakened by heart surgery, watches young women jogging along a New Jersey boardwalk, aware of the absurd disparity between his waxing mind and his waning body. He starts a foolishly flirtatious conversation with one of them, who then changes her route and never returns, “thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.”…
Suddenly, isolation in the Berkshires has given way to a “crazed hope of rejuvenation.” (The novel is set during the week of the election of 2004, and the bitter madness of those days is a kind of Forest of Arden in which Nathan’s antic moment can be played out.) Now Amy is pulled into the swirl, too, since Nathan must seek her out to hear her account of Lonoff’s “great secret.” He finds her in a grim walkup on First Avenue. Movingly, grotesquely, the dying woman who was once the object of Nathan’s desire has ceded her power to the thirty-year-old Jamie, and is now good only for the sexless respect of posterity. She will have a little place in literary history as Lonoff’s final partner, but there is no erotic gravitational pull on the seventy-one-year-old Nathan. Amy confirms Kliman’s hunch, but Nathan rejects the fact and, more important, the premise of the fact, which is that fiction can be read confessionally. If Lonoff was writing a novel about incestuous relations, Nathan argues, then that was the fiction he was making. A fiction, not a report. “Fiction for him was never representation, ” he tells Amy. “It was rumination in narrative form. He thought, I’ll make this my reality.”

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Strizhevskaya

Strizhevskaya likes food that fresh,
as do so many of her friends,
eschewing fish and cattle flesh,
which carnivores who don’t offends
until they see that ethics may
be quite compatible with taste,
which she believes to be the way
demanded by the Torah, laced
with wine, and many kinds of cheese,
which both de rigueur are for her
and all her friends who’re glad to seize
the Sabbath as a friendly burr,
the special holy moment when
Jews should be eating only food
that turns young Hebrew boys to men
and makes sure that the girls are Jewed
with eco-friendly partners who
to Torah words are most attentive.
Food-consciously she gives this crew
to be good Jews a great incentive

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Deft

Though both of my two hands are deft,
I do not want to use the left;
when I between your thighs tonight
slide one, I think I’ll use the right.

Directly as a rocket flies,
your private places I’ll surprise
and then, exploding, plan to enter
not right or left, your deadly center.

Deft as hands will be my heft
when entering your secret cleft,
far smarter than the magic wand
of which you’ve told me you are fond.

Like a rocket I’ll direct
myself towards your hole, erect,
and as soon as I explode,
leave you behind, and take the road.
Inspired by Ali Smith’s article on the lives and poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland in the TLS, January 2,2009 (“Unrhymed Couplet”) .

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Not Ashamed Of Being Ashamed

Some Frenchmen are ashamed of being French,
while others are ashamed that those who are ashamed aren’t proud;
though nowadays it’s hard to be a mensch,
it’s harder to oppose opinions of the madding crowd,
as well as those espoused by the elite,
which turns a blind eye to the problems of identity,
opining that a nation should backbeat
traditions and become an obsolete nonentity.

Devorah Lauter writes an article about French identity politics in the LA Times, December 14,2009 (“As the French debate their identity, some recoil”) . The allusion to the Swiss minaret poll brings to mind my poem “Swiss Minarets, ” which Huffpo chose not to put on its blog. Lauter writes:
It was one of a series of government-run public debates aimed at defining the values that constitute French national identity. But in this middle-class suburb west of Paris, the discussion last week quickly turned into a cacophony of hot-tempered accusations. Rather than give his version of what it means to be French, an invited speaker, historian Jean-Yves Mollier, attacked his host (who sat stone-still a few feet in front of him) for supporting the national dialogue. Mollier said the ongoing debates represent none other than Vichy-style propaganda attempting to 'stigmatize' those who don't fall into France's ruling native caste, in this case mostly French Muslims of immigrant origin. Mollier and several other attendees proceeded to walk out. Meanwhile, two actors disguised as avid participants launched into a faux back-and-forth. 'Today, I'm ashamed of being French! ' said one of the men, standing up to be heard. The other, jumping to his feet, replied, 'Excuse me, but I'm proud of being French, and you, you should be ashamed of being proud of being ashamed of France! ' 'It's a shame for France! ' shouted back the first. 'I'm proud of the shame I feel for people like you who are ashamed of being French! ' cried the second. In the crowd, one middle-aged man's face turned the color of his pink shirt. He termed the scene 'disgraceful.' Host Anne Boquet, the local police chief, expressed her hope that the dialogue would 'remind people of their Republican values and to respect authority.'

'The debates can introduce that respect, ' she said, and help 'define the face of France we like today.' That, it seems, may be a long way off. The 3-month-long national debate series, spearheaded by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy and his minister of immigration, has been the subject of heated controversy since a late November vote in Switzerland to ban the construction of minarets on mosques. Sympathy for the Swiss vote here, according to polls, has helped focus the debates, which began in November, on widely held demands that Muslims do more to blend into French society. Polls show that a small majority in France favor a ban on minarets like the one the Swiss approved with a 57.5% majority.

12/14/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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From The Balcony

From the balcony where women sit
they need a pole to slide and join the men,
but if you lower the mehitsah just a bit,
will they still iterate “amen, amen, ”
which Numbers in five twenty-two explains
a woman has to say if she ignores
the warning to be separate, and remains
suspiciously sequestered with señors.
Oh bitter are the waters she must drink
in case she swells with pride because she knocks
her man on floors of sanctuaries to sink
with sanctimony that is Orthodox.

Inspired by an article Anthony Weiss in The Forward, “An Orthodox woman rabbi by any other name” copied in Haaretz on May 25,2009:

Plans for a new school to train Orthodox women as clergy are pushing the issue of the role of women in Orthodox Judaism to a new and untested frontier. Avi Weiss, a leading advocate for a more liberal Orthodoxy, and Sara Hurwitz, a protege of Weiss, are now taking inquiries and applications for Yeshivat Maharat, a four-year program set to open this fall to train women as 'full members of the Rabbinic Clergy, ' according to an e-mail announcement. But they will not, as of yet, be called rabbis. 'We're training women to be rabbis, ' Hurwitz told the Forward. 'What they will be called is something we’re working out.” The move appears to place Weiss and Hurwitz at the precipice of what is possible under traditional Orthodox law without actually jumping off. In striking that balance, they are risking the possibility of alienating those to the left who want an equal rabbinical role for women and those to the right who argue that spiritual leadership is incompatible with the place of women in Orthodox society. 'My best guess is that we are seeing further evidence of a coming division in Orthodoxy between left and right, ' said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. But, he noted, 'Rabbi Weiss has not only been able to push the envelope, but to do so successfully.'…

Indeed, the new program has already spurred criticism that it will make women’s roles in Judaism a more charged issue. 'I don't see how this promotes the growth of women's learning, ' said Rabbi Yosef Blau, spiritual advisor of Yeshiva University's rabbinical seminary. 'It makes it more controversial and more difficult for women who are ready and who are committed to learning.'
He added: 'There are already programs of advanced study for women. If any women showed interest, or if shuls showed interest, in something like this, they would be doing it.' But Weiss has experience in successfully pushing the boundaries of Orthodox liberalism while still remaining a respected, if controversial, member of the Orthodox world. His recently established Yeshivat Chovevei Torah has become an important training ground for progressive and social activist Orthodox rabbis who, despite resistance from a number of prominent leaders, have found jobs and roles in mainstream Orthodox institutions.

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Blunt And Instructive

Words can be blunt and instructive,
but frequently they are destructive.
Far better perhaps to be Trappist
than savagely, hip-hoppy rappist,
but silence is no vow I’m able
to take, so I put up with Babel,
and hope you, also, dear reader,
accept like a Lebanon cedar
that destruction of forests cannot
be avoided when you have a lot
set aside for a temple. The same
applies to the words that we maim
when writing a poem, but silence
is, passive-aggressively, violence.
You have to destroy when instructive;
if not, you will be counterproductive.

Michael Kuczynski in Bryn Mawr Review reviews Sandy Bardsley’s “Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England, “ Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2006:

Speech, Chaucer explains in the House of Fame is only broken air. The definition is intended (however scientifically accurate) as

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Nowhere Else To Go

Precautions must be taken with
precaution, treated as a myth.
If not, they’ll lead us to forbid
the source of life, known as the id,
from free expression, which we need
for every yetser hora deed.

They should be scheduled for deletion
in pastures green that are Beckettian.
Ignore my wise scenario
if you have nowhere else to go,
but only someone who’s a schmuck
would disregard this wise pesak.

Inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s review of Barry McGovern’s performance in “I’ll Go On, ” a lively tramp through the vast, thorny pastures of Beckett’s prose that is being performed at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater through Sunday. The evening, directed by Colm O Briain, is part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s small program of staged versions of Beckett works not originally written for theater, all produced by the Gate Theater of Dublin (“Lingusitic Somersaults Through Beckettian Pastures, ” NYT, July 21,2008) :
He opens the show with a few introductory remarks before the curtain, a little comic warm-up with grim shafts of Beckettian bleakness embedded in it. “You can’t leave, ” he says, bulging eyes leering at the audience. “Because you’re afraid it might be worse elsewhere.” As this music-hall opening suggests, Mr. McGovern and Gerry Dukes, who together selected the texts, have concentrated on the rich seams of humor in Beckett’s writing, the mad cackle that echoes in even the grimmest passages. They have taken a sculptor’s chisel to “Molloy, ” the first novel in the series, and chipped away great chunks of language to reveal the picaresque comic narrative underneath. The title character is a tramp with a bum leg — actually two now — who is recalling a wayward journey to visit his mother. His story unfolds as a series of strange vignettes brought to physical life by Mr. McGovern, jumping back and forth between Molloy and the characters he encounters. While tootling along on his decrepit bicycle, Molloy is accosted by a policeman and taken to the police station. It is there that the unwelcome charity is forced on Molloy, in the form of a repellent cup of tea and stale bread. “Let me tell you this, ” he bitterly confides, “when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil.” Freed later, Molloy continues on his way, only to run over a little dog, and not a dog straying in the street but one safely leashed. “Precautions are like resolutions, ” Molloy darkly observes, “to be taken with precaution.” The dog’s grateful owner — the unfortunate thing was on the verge of death anyway — insists that Molloy accompany her to its burial. The bravura comic centerpiece of Molloy’s journey is a long, elaborate discussion of the mathematical processes involved in choosing the stones he likes to suck on for comfort. Such are the useless obsessions that fill the gaping days.

7/21/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Theodora And Beruriah's Sister

The words for Handel’s “Theodora”
are not written in the Torah,
or even in the book they call
the gospels, or epistles Paul
wrote to the Romans and Galatians
and other gentiles whose persuasions
conflicted with his own. Their source
is neither classical nor Norse,
but comes from legends Christians told
about the martyrs in their fold.

Most of these martyrs met their death
with Jesus’ name upon their breath,
impressing Romans by their dying
joyfully, as if relying
on Jesus to provide them better
lodging with the First Begetter,
His Father who ruled heaven and
the still unholy Roman land.
They threatened Theodora with

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