Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "religion"

As the U.S. increases pressure on Israel to dismantle settlements, Hebron residents wonder who they can turn to. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

HEBRON, West Bank — He’s stayed in the largest town in the West Bank for 36 years, even though most of its 167,000 residents want him to leave. He’s just won a $50,000 prize for his “Zionist activities” there. His country’s new government is vilified around the world because it’s seen as supportive of people just like him.

You’d think Noam Arnon would be feeling a lot more secure than he is.

But the 54-year-old leader of Hebron’s 700 Israeli settlers is worried that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t stand up to a new U.S. administration that promises to be tougher on Israel’s continued construction on occupied land.

“I know that we can’t trust him,” Arnon says, as he enters the ancient Cave of the Patriarchs, burial place of the biblical couples Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. “[Netanyahu:] is not a strong man. He’s very weak. Under pressure he collapses very fast.”

It’s commonplace among diplomats and foreign correspondents to refer to Arnon as “crazy.” After all, he’s bringing up his eight children in a hostile city whose municipality is run by Hamas. But the tag comes mainly from his opposition to the idea that Israelis ought to leave their settlements in return for peace. If the 282,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank are generally seen as an obstruction in peace talks, the residents of the Jewish Quarter of Hebron are viewed as violent extremists reveling in the hatred that surrounds them.

Arnon, of course, doesn’t see it that way, and he’s not the only one. In a few weeks he’ll receive the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism awarded by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida resident mainly known for his support for controversial attempts by Israeli nationalists to plant colonies in Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem. One reason Moskowitz decided to give the award to a Hebron settler was in recognition of the anniversary of a massacre of Jews in the city by Palestinians 80 years ago. It was followed by the expulsion of the Jewish residents, who only returned in the 1970s.

Until the massacre of 1929, as Arnon likes to point out, Jews had lived in Hebron since Abraham arrived 4,000 years ago. The patriarch bought the cave over which King Herod built the existing massive edifice at the time of Christ in the same style as his Great Temple in Jerusalem. (“Herod,” says Arnon, “was a complicated personality, but he knew how to build.” Which is what many people say about Moskowitz.)

The memory of the massacre, like the hostility of Hebron’s Arabs, only serves to strengthen Arnon’s determination to stay in the dusty, deserted quarter of the town where Israelis are permitted to reside. I walked with Arnon through the once-bustling market area between the Cave of the Patriarchs and the 120-year-old Hadassah building in which he lives. The Arab shops have been shuttered for five years for the security of Arnon and the other settlers.

“Don’t blame me for these shops being closed,” he says. “Blame the terrorists.”

Six paratroopers swap their red berets for helmets as we pass. They go single file into a narrow alley in the casbah, built in the time of Turkish rule. As they step out of sight, each one locks and loads his M-16 and takes a deep breath as though diving into water.

The edgy soldiers are patrolling the dividing line between Israeli-controlled Hebron and the part of the town handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1997. Arnon needs no reminding who was prime minister when the bulk of his town was given to people he considers terrorists: Netanyahu.

The new Israeli prime minister visits Washington next week. The Obama administration has been trying to weaken his opposition to an independent Palestinian state and restrictions on Israeli construction in the settlements.

Last week, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a pro-Israel lobbying group that Israel ought to “not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."

Combine that pressure with Netanyahu’s pullout from much of Hebron a decade ago and you see why Arnon has some doubts about his community’s future. To those who say Netanyahu is deeply right-wing and couldn’t possibly evacuate settlements, Arnon points out that it was the fiercely nationalistic Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who forced almost 10,000 settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.

When Arnon and I sit with the mayor of Kiryat Arba, the 7,000-person settlement that abuts Hebron, he’s deeply skeptical of Malachi Levinger’s hope to build 2,000 new homes there over the next decade.

“This is very optimistic,” Arnon says.

“If the government won’t help us, God will help us,” says Levinger, whose rabbi father was the founder of the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger says that during the February election campaign, Netanyahu promised him that construction would go ahead full steam in the settlements. “Also after the election, [Netanyahu:] said we’d move ahead with building,” he says.

Asked if the prime minister had actually told him since the election that new building permits would be issued, Levinger backs off. “No, but I’ve been told this in conversations with ministers,” he says. “They’ve told me.”

Arnon shakes his head.

Pope's visit satisfies few
Analysis: After a five-day visit to the Holy Land, the Pope may be wondering why he came. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — As the Pope’s special El Al flight departed Tel Aviv for Rome Friday at the end of his five-day visit to the Holy Land, he might have kicked off his red slippers, dropped his seat into recline, and wondered why he bothered to come.

He had to endure a nasty anti-Israel tirade by a Palestinian cleric at what was supposed to be an interfaith dialogue meeting in Jerusalem. He was excoriated in the Israeli press for insufficient hand-wringing at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Then the Israeli prime minister buttonholed him about Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions, which would hardly be within the remit of Benedict XVI’s “personal pilgrimage” to the Holy Land.

Of course, the Pope wouldn’t be the only one wondering why he came. Israeli newspaper commentators acknowledged that, at best, he meant well. Palestinians were glad he posed in front of the Israeli wall around Bethlehem, but wanted a stronger denunciation of Israel — on that score it’s fair to say they’re hard to please. Even local Christians were disappointed that, unlike his predecessor, Benedict chose not to boost their flagging community by urging Catholics around the world to make a pilgrimage to the Christian sites of the Holy Land.

And everyone wondered why the 82-year-old pontiff didn’t smile.

When he visited the Western Wall on Tuesday, the Pope faced the old Herodian stones of the ancient Jewish Temple’s retaining wall and recited Psalm 122: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.”

The response from the people of Jerusalem was, in effect: “Prayers? That’s all you’ve got?”

Because the people of Jerusalem had more than just prayers for Benedict.

At the Notre Dame Pontifical Institute opposite the New Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City, the Pope concluded his first day in the Holy Land by walking off the stage to signal his disapproval of an undoubtedly pre-planned outburst by Sheikh Taisir Tamimi, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Islamic courts. Tamimi grabbed the microphone to welcome Benedict to “the eternal political, national and spiritual capital of Palestine.”

The interfaith meeting was billed as an occasion to recognize the suffering of others, rather than dwelling on one’s own victimhood as is the wont of Israelis and Palestinians. The Pope’s address was a rather esoteric meditation on religion’s role in a world made somehow smaller by new communications technologies.

“Can we then make spaces — oases of peace and profound reflection — where God's voice can be heard anew,” he said, “where His truth can be discovered within the universality of reason, where every individual, regardless of dwelling, or ethnic group, or political hue, or religious belief, can be respected as a person, as a fellow human being?”

Tamimi had the microphone for 10 minutes. But he’d only have needed one word to give his response to the Pope’s question: No. (Although his accustomed style would’ve necessitated three words: No, no, no. And an exclamation mark.)

Given that Tamimi was the cleric who, at the same location, rained on the parade of the much more popular John Paul II in 2000, the Pope’s entourage ought to have seen this coming. The Sheikh went on to invite Christians to join the Muslim struggle against Israel.

Had anyone bothered to translate the Sheikh’s remarks for Benedict, he might have responded that Tamimi should’ve heard what he said at Yad Vashem an hour earlier: “The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to a genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews."

Of course, Tamimi wasn’t the only one who didn’t listen to those words. Israeli commentators paid more attention to what Benedict failed to say. They attacked him because he didn’t refer to his membership in the Hitler Youth, to his German nationality, or even apologize for centuries of institutionalized anti-Semitism from the Catholic Church. (Just before his departure on Friday, the Pope called the Holocaust an "appalling chapter in history" that must "never be forgotten or denied," and said that many Jews had been "brutally exterminated under a godless regime," according to wire reports.)

It was the same story much of the week. It must have been a relief for the pontiff to arrive Thursday at an interfaith meeting in Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up and which is now in northern Israel, to hear representatives of the three major Abrahamic faiths actually talk to each other in a spirit of respect and forgiveness.

At the Church of Annunciation, where Christians believe the Angel Gabriel told Mary she’d bear the son of God, Sheikh Muhammad Abu Obeid, the judge of Nazareth's Islamic court, said: “The Muslim has become a suspect for his mere name, and the Christian's motives are doubted because of his mere words, and the Jew faces anger for his mere entity. All of this disturbs the world's balance and leads it toward evil.”

At the end of the meeting, the Pope joined hands with a rabbi and a Druze religious leader, as they sang a song of peace. Then, finally, he smiled.

“Fuck,” said God. …That’s a line from one of the short-stories in Shalom Auslander’s “Beware of God.” I live in the Middle East, so I feel like I hear God saying “Fuck!” almost every day. (If He doesn’t, then He’s not reading the newspapers.) “Beware of God” nails faith and the faithful as only a genius of satire can do. A very angry genius of satire, I ought to point out. As you’ll discover with Auslander’s second book “The Foreskin’s Lament.” It’s a memoir of Auslander’s Orthodox Jewish upbringing in a family as scarred as a lamenting eight-day-old foreskin. Here’s my interview with America’s scourge of religion.

How long did it take you to get published?

Not as long as it took me to write. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer; it wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I realized how badly I wanted to burn the world to the ground, and writing was the most immediate way I could do that. Once I started writing, getting published came soon after.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

No, and I read them all. And what I realized is that no matter what advice might be found inside, there’s an admission in just looking for help that “I can’t do this.” Writing needs to come from a ludicrous sense of self-assurance (combined with a terrifying degree of insecurity).

What’s a typical writing day?

Wake. Ride to my office. Delay. Delay. Delay. Get angry at myself. Write.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

“Foreskin’s Lament” is a memoir of growing up in an emotionally dysfunctional and religiously stifling home. It may or not be great, but it’s honest, and full of rage, which is nice.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Beckett, first sentence of ‘Murphy.’ Taking the most joyful part of the day and bending it, by perception, into something utterly bleak. Mazel tov.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

I research my books a lot, because research is easy and feels constructive while it really just kills time. “Wow,” I can say at the end of the day when I’ve written nothing, “That was a productive day!”

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

A pain? You mean one? No.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Have courage. Write a book that will shake up the world. Writing isn’t war, but at it’s best, it’s a bit like terrorism – take a small, 200-page bomb, plant it in the holiest place you can find, and kaboom. Candide was a bomb. Huck Finn was a bomb. Catch-22 was a bomb.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Mostly good. Translators who think of books as literature upset me, because they won’t translate “cocksucker” as “cocksucker.” They’ll try to soften it, try to “elevate” the book into something weak and mealy. “Cocksucker” is not the same as “homosexual.” Someone who is a motherfucker is a motherfucker, not a “jerk” or a “cad.”

Do you live entirely off your writing?

No. I work part-time for Satan in a Manhattan marketing firm.

How many books did you write before you were published?

One.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Angry Orthodox Jews accosted me, told me I was a heretic and a heathen and was finishing what Hitler started. “Did you read the book?” I asked. “No,” said God’s inexplicably chosen ones. “And we don’t want to.” Sigh.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I have this idea for a book that claims to be the Word of God and that tells the story of how the Earth came to be. But who the fuck is going to believe that?

The magazine of Harvard's Nieman Fellowship asked me to write an essay about Jeffrey Fleishman's "Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad". I wrote about why international correspondents like me and Fleishman, Cairo bureau chief for the LA Times, turn to novels to express the depth of what we learn about a foreign culture. Here's how the article begins:

Jay Morgan, the central character of Jeffrey Fleishman’s thought provoking “novel of Jihad,” carries an undeveloped roll of film shot by his young photographer wife in the moments before she was killed in Beirut. Morgan lifts her wounded body to safety, but she dies anyway. It’s a fitting image on which to build Morgan’s deep bitterness and disillusion about journalism as he covers the war in Kosovo. In these days of cyberjournalism, idiotic reader “talkbacks” and nonsensical newsroom cutbacks, the only thing apparently more useless to the media industry than an undeveloped film or a dead photographer is a living foreign correspondent.

The story of “Promised Virgins” revolves around Morgan’s trek through the mountains as he interviews Serbs, Albanians and CIA operatives on the hunt for a newly arrived jihadi who has brought Islamic fundamentalism to the otherwise nationalistic Muslims of Kosovo. In truth, the book is about a foreign correspondent’s uncomfortable personal connections with the society he covers and his realization that they’re the only things keeping him from despair at his ever-shabbier trade. Read more...

Orthodox Jews face off against secularists in the Holy Land — a sign that all is well. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.

All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.

Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.

When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or "Haredim" as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.

The Sabbath, they argued, ought to be sacred to every Jew, but at the very least no one ought to drive along Bar-Ilan, reminding them that its sanctity was being violated (by people who in turning their keys in the ignition were violating the rabbinic commandment not to kindle a flame on the Sabbath. It’s one of 39 tasks “set aside” on the Sabbath, because they were used in building the Ark of Covenant and therefore shouldn’t be carried out on the day of rest. No ritual slaughtering, tanning — of leather, that is — or separating of threads is allowed either, for example).

In my neighborhood, there was one old white-bearded rabbi who used to sit on a stool at the side of the road reading and wagging his finger at me as I drove by. But in more religious neighborhoods there was real violence. In Mea Shearim, the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, gangs of black-hatted rioters used to light trash cans on fire, throw stones, kick and spit on journalists, and aim rather feeble punches at policemen. (Feeble because almost all the rioters are full-time yeshiva students who are, to say the least, short on regular physical activity.)

Secular activists used to counter-protest in Jerusalem. They’d turn up, too, at shopping malls near largely secular Tel Aviv to barrack the so-called “Sabbath inspectors,” non-Jews employed by the government to hand out fines to businesses that opened on the holy day.

This was among the most important issues of those days.

Then came the intifada. The Sabbath wasn’t so contentious anymore with suicide bombers working every day of the week. Maybe it’s also that Israeli Jews decided it was time to unite against their attackers.But a month ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (who replaced his ultra-Orthodox predecessor this spring) decided to leave a parking lot beside city hall open through the Sabbath. There are plenty of restaurants and bars open Friday night on a nearby street and Barkat’s aim was to prevent that street from filling with poorly parked cars.

Trouble was the lot wasn’t far from the edge of Beit Israel, one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods stretching through central Jerusalem. Rabbis ordered out their spindly troops and rioting ensued.

Barkat switched the parking lot to one underneath the Old City walls beside the Jaffa Gate. If he’d started out there, things might’ve been different. But the rabbis had a good head of steam up and had returned to the rhetoric of my early days in Jerusalem — namely that secular Israelis were the worst anti-Semites, because they were self-hating and felt inadequate in the face of the dedication to religion of their ultra-Orthodox compatriots whose observance they wished to destroy.

So this past weekend the rioting reached a new stage of ugliness. Police arrested 57 ultra-Orthodox protesters, many of whom had bussed in for the Sabbath. One man fell off a wall and was in serious condition in hospital. The riots continued throughout Sunday, as the ultra-Orthodox protested for the release of those who had been arrested the previous day. The riots centered around Sabbath Square in the middle of Mea Shearim.

There are plenty of problems for Israel these days, not least the tortuous attempt by the current right-wing government to persist with settlement building in the face of (for the first time in years) genuine American insistence on a construction freeze. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, too, that Europe might get tough on Israel unless peace talks with the Palestinians show some fruit.

But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.

Her methods may be kosher, but in Israel baker Pnina Konforti faces a bigger commercial obstacle: She's a Messianic Jew.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

GAN YAVNEH, Israel — I always thought that by following kosher laws religious Jews only missed out on certain flavors and debatable delicacies. Turns out that by turning their back on “treyf” they also steer clear of Jesus.

At least that’s the verdict of rabbinates in two Israeli towns who’ve been denying a kosher certificate to a local cafe owner for three years — not because she doesn’t conform to the laws of “kashrut,” but because she’s a “Messianic Jew.”

Pnina Konforti, owner of the two branches of Pnina Pie in Gan Yavneh and Ashdod, this month won a decision in Israel’s Supreme Court forcing the rabbinates of the towns to give her a kosher certificate. Just because she believes in Jesus, the judges said, doesn’t mean she can’t keep kosher. Without the kosher certificate, many religious and traditional Jews refused to frequent the cafes and Konforti’s business was failing.

The case looks set to provoke a battle between the more secular organs of the government and the state rabbinate. It’s also a new point of conflict in the long battle between Israel — particularly its ultra-Orthodox community — and the Christian faith.

The rabbis insist they’re the ones who ought to decide about matters of kashrut and they refuse to allow a Messianic Jew (or a “Jew for Jesus” as they tend to be known in the U.S.) to receive a certificate. Though that sounds extreme, the rabbis aren’t entirely wrong (at least in the archaic terms of kosher law). After all, in Israeli wineries, non-Jews are forbidden from touching certain apparatus for fear of making the wine non-kosher — a prohibition going back to the days when a non-Jew might have used wine for idol worship.

Konforti’s point — which the Supreme Court accepted — is that she isn’t a non-Jew. She just happens to have decided during a stay in Ohio that the world’s most famous Jew, Jesus — or as she, an Israeli, calls him, “Yeshu” — is her savior.

The fear of Christian proselytizers or, even worse, Jews for Jesus is a common one among Israelis in general, and it has a long history that reaches back to a Europe where Jews were often persecuted or forced to convert to Christianity.

In that sense the court decision marks a rare gesture of conciliation by the organs of the Israeli state toward those who profess to be Christians.

It hasn’t always been that way.

In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court denied citizenship to a Polish priest who had been born a Jew and converted to Christianity while hiding in a monastery to escape the Holocaust. Oswald Rufeisen, known as Brother Daniel, qualified for immigration under Israel’s “Law of Return” because he was born a Jew, but the court refused to accept a man who no longer called himself a Jew. (Eventually Rufeisen gained residence and died in a Haifa monastery a decade ago.)

Neither is pettiness a bar to paranoia. In my largely secular neighborhood of Jerusalem a few years ago, a tiny kiosk serving coffee in a small park was driven out of business because locals whispered that the owner was a Messianic Jew.

The lesson of such cases is that two thousand years of persecution at the hands of the church isn’t quickly forgotten, even by those who’ve never faced so much as a single anti-Semitic slur.

It’s a lesson only some in the Roman Catholic Church seem to have learned. Pope John Paul II won over many Israelis during his papacy with his visit to an Italian synagogue and talk of reconciliation during a 2000 visit to the Holy Land.

But the current pope, Benedict XVI, appeared cold and, to most Israelis, pro-Palestinian when he visited this spring. Many newspaper commentators complained that a former member of the Hitler Youth representing a faith with a history of persecuting Jews ought to have been less academic in his public addresses and more contrite toward Israel.

To understand the depth of fear among the ultra-Orthodox, consider the leaflets posted in Gan Yavneh warning residents against Konforti’s cafe: “Beware! Missionaries! What is hiding behind the Cafe-Bakery?” (In a community where television and radio are often not allowed, having been deemed negative modern influences, leaflets posted on walls are the favored way to pass information around among ultra-Orthodox Israelis.)

The answer, according to the leaflets: “Jews who sold their soul, betrayed their nation, and converted to Christianity.”

The leaflets advised citizens not to enter the cafe or “she will try to ensnare you in her Christian religion.”

Must be pretty good pie, you’re thinking.

I came across Pnina Pie in January when I visited Gan Yavneh during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Missiles from Gaza landed several times on this small town, which is home to an air force base and several thousand Tel Aviv commuters.

I concluded an interview with the town’s mayor by asking him where I could get a decent lunch. He directed me to Pnina Pie, where a young Russian immigrant served me excellent bourekas, flaky pastry triangles filled with potato and cheese.

Unaware of the lack of a kosher certificate at the establishment, I bought a strawberry pie and served it to some guests that night. It happens all four of these friends were observant Jews.

At least they were observant Jews. Maybe by now they believe in Jesus.

After all, it really was very good pie.

A few years ago I was at a literary conference near Tel Aviv. I found an eclectic mix of writers on the panel with me. I’m a crime writer. You wouldn’t expect me to be paired with a writer of poetry who takes his inspiration from the stories of the Bible. But as Yakov Azriel read his poetry, I sat beside him feeling that no contemporary poems had ever touched me as deeply. They’re full of the knowledge of the Bible the Brooklyn-born poet garnered during his studies at Israeli yeshivas and his four decades living here. There’s something else though: they bring to life the hills and desert around Jerusalem. To an outsider, it can often seem strange that so many people are attached to a place that’s stark and rather ugly and certainly not a nurturing environment for sustaining human life. With Yakov’s poems I think you’ll find a sense of what the place means. Here’s his interview, followed by a wonderful poem from his newest book.

How long did it take you to get published?
It took a few years of submitting my first manuscript of poetry to different publishers until my first book of poetry was published.

What’s a typical writing day?
I make a living by working as a teacher, so during the daytime I do not have the opportunity to write. I usually try to write in the evenings and at night (especially at night); I try to write one new poem a week.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
My latest book is entitled Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus, and it was published in June by Time Being Books (a literary press specializing in poetry). Like my two previous books of poetry (Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis and In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus, each poem in the book begins with a Biblical verse and the book is structured as a running commentary, starting with chapter 1, verse 1 and ending with the last Biblical chapter.

This book was challenging for several reasons. My first book focused on the different characters in Genesis, and I especially tried to focus on the gaps in the Biblical narrative (for example, who was Abraham's mother?) or to give a voice to figures who are silent in the Biblical text (such as Dinah, or Joseph's wife Asenat). In the poems on Exodus, the many events in the Biblical narrative itself (the enslavement in Egypt, the Ten Plagues, Passover, the splitting of the Red Sea, etc.) readily lent themselves to poetry.

In contrast, the Book of Leviticus is considered to be "drier," without the drama and large cast of characters of the first two books of the Bible. One device I used in order to grapple with this difficulty was a conscious effort to fuse the English literary tradition with the Jewish-Hebrew heritage. For example, the first chapters of Leviticus deal with sacrifices; I decided to write a Petrarchan sonnet for each sacrifice, a sonnet that is a prayer, modeled after the "Holy Sonnets" of John Donne. In the end, one book reviewer felt that this book was the most powerful of my three published books (eventually, we will be publishing five volumes of poetry, one for each of the Five Books of Moses).

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I write poetry in all forms: mainly free verse (like most 21st century poets), but also formal, metric poems — sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, ballads, etc. Each poem has a life of its own, and it is the poet's duty to help each poem find its own voice. Just as a sculptor has to liberate the statue that is hidden in a block of marble, so the poet has to liberate the poem hidden on the empty page and grant it breath.

As I said, all my poems are based on the Bible. The Biblical verse is like an iceberg, with 90 % of its meaning under the surface; my job is to try to get under the surface.
T.S. Eliot said that there is little good religious poetry being written today because the religious poet tends to write what he thinks he ought to feel instead of what he really feels. All good poetry must be sincere. So part of my task as a poet is to be sincere, as much as possible.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
This is a very difficult question to answer! One sentence that really resonates for me in English literature is when Hamlet describes his father to Horatio in Act I, Scene II, and tells him that "He was a man." What a wonderful example of praise, love and understatement in four simple words.

In Biblical literature, one sentence that that I find very powerful occurs right after the scene in which the prophet Nathan tells King David the parable of the poor man's lamb (First Samuel, Chapter 12) and King David, incensed, says that this man deserves to die; after Nathan exclaims, "You are the man," David does not argue but admits, "I have sinned."

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Again this is very difficult to answer, but I think that Dicken's description in Little Dorrit of the banquet scene in Rome in which Mr. Dorrit relives the past he has been trying so hard to conceal, and calls out loud to Amy, speaking about the turnkey and his imprisonment in the Marshalsea prison — this is certainly one of them.

How much research is involved in each of your books?
I have been "researching" my books all my life.

Where do you get your ideas?
This is a very good question. Often in the middle of the night an idea comes; I have to write it down, and the following evening, I work on it.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
No, I do not think that it stems from a childhood pain. Why do I write? Ask me why I breathe. The great German poet Rilke said that no one should write poetry unless he would have to die if it were denied him to write. Perhaps this is too strong (for me at least) but I cannot imagine a life for myself without writing.

What’s your experience with being translated?
I have translated several of my poems into Hebrew. However, you could perhaps claim that all of poetry is a kind of translation of dream language into waking language.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
To write it in Yiddish.


And now, some poetry: from Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus (Time Being Books, 2009)

THE SCAPEGOAT
“And Aaron shall place both his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confess upon it all the sins of the Children of Israel and all their crimes, whatever their transgressions; they will be put on the head of the scapegoat, which will be sent off to the desert in the hands of the executioner.” (Leviticus 16:21)

Bright crimson ribbons tied between his horns,
A clanking, clinking bell around his neck,
His back bedecked with ornaments of silk —
Why did the priest place hands upon my head,
Then trembling shout a list of sins and crimes?
I bet I know: they want to crown me king,
A wise and noble king who never dies.

An orchestra of Levites play their flutes,
Their golden harps, their ten-stringed lutes, their drums,
Their silver trumpets as he is taken out —
Why I alone am sent to Azazel?
And who or what the hell is ‘Azazel’?
I bet I know: they think I am an angel,
A pure, immortal angel full of grace.

Out of the Temple precinct packed with crowds,
And out the narrow lanes of Jerusalem,
And out Damascus Gate, toward desert cliffs —
Why am I brought here to this mountain peak?
Why rip the crimson ribbons from my horns?
I bet I know: they wish to worship me,
I bet I —

Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

In the West, our names tend to be pretty nailed down and unvaried. Unless you’re the child of some Hollywood goof who named you Moon Unit or Pilot Inspektor, you’re likely to share your name with many other people. Take me, for example. The family name Rees accounts for 15 percent of Welsh people – not to mention people descended from Welsh immigrants to the US, Canada, Australia. And it seems every other man of my generation is a Matthew.

Elsewhere in the world, people are more inventive. I had an Indian girlfriend in graduate school whose surname was Moorti. I noticed that her brother’s surname was Krishnamoorti. When I asked her to explain, she said that Indians could decide what their surname was themselves. That didn’t make much sense to me. So she just laughed and said I was “so Western.”

I’ve often confronted something similar in the Arab world, and it’s an element I’ve worked into my Palestinian crime novels – not just for cultural accuracy, but also as an important part of the plot. (But I won’t give away how!)

Arabs have a lengthy given name about which there’s relatively little choice. In the case of a Palestinian man, it’d be his name, followed by his father, grandfather, family and/or clan name. So my sleuth is Omar Yussef Subhi Sirhan.

But then there’s the tricky issue of the “kunya.” That’s when an Arab is known as “Abu-something”. Abu means “father of.” Traditionally a man is obliged to call his first son after his father. So even before his first son is born, if his father’s name was Muhammad, he’d be known as Abu Muhammad. (He’d actually be the son of Muhammad and only nominally the father of a future Muhammad…. But faith counts for everything, doesn’t it.)

My father’s name is David, so in Bethlehem I used to be known as “Abu Dahoud,” the Father of David. A few of my friends there were a little confused when I named my first son Cai. “Doesn’t your father object?” one of them asked.

My Omar Yussef is no traditionalist, so he decided to name his son Ramiz. Which wasn’t his father’s name. That means most people in the novels who want to show him respect and, at the same time, familiarity, call him Abu Ramiz.

It works the same way for women, though they’re tied to the name of their husband. Omar Yussef’s wife Maryam is called Umm Ramiz – the mother of Ramiz. No matter what her father was named.

So Abu refers to your father’s name, probably, and your son’s name, certainly.

Except when it doesn’t.

Sometimes the kunya is political nom de guerre. Yasser Arafat, who had no sons, called himself Abu Ammar, after one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. It had a classical ring and also tied him to the early Muslim holy warriors.

A pal of mine who’s a big shot in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls himself Abu Leilah – Father of the Night. I once asked him if he had a daughter Leilah, and why he wasn’t named after his father even if he had no sons. “No,” he smiled, “I don’t have a daughter with that name. I just thought Father of the Night was an exciting name. Mysterious, you know.”

Some time later I was in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, investigating an uprising there by Islamic fighters who had returned from Afghanistan to battle the Lebanese army. The rising had been led by another Abu Leilah. He’d been killed by the army. I asked his family if he’d also thought Father of the Night was an exciting name.

“No,” one of them said, looking at me as though I had suggested the dead man was less than purely heroic. “His eldest girl is called Leilah.”

You can’t win, see.

Of course, in Arab society most men don’t want to carry a girl’s name and I never quite figured out why the Tripoli rebel did it. After all, for Palestinians, “Abu al-Banat” (Father of the Girls) is an insult aimed at men who haven’t been able to father any sons.

This is all the kind of thing that caused trouble with the US “no-fly” lists after 9/11. Perfectly innocent Abu Muhammads and Abu Ahmads, the Tom Smiths and Bob Joneses of the Muslim world, were suddenly
indistinguishable from people considered a danger to the nation. Including the real Omar Yussef, a friend of mine from Bethlehem.

My contribution to all this naming confusion is that in the UK I’m published as Matt Rees, while in the US I use my middle name and am therefore Matt Beynon Rees.

Why? Because I decide who I am.

Except when I’m in Bethlehem. There I’m “Abu Cai.”

UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports the discovery of a portion of a Bible from 350 AD in the library of the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. The Codex Sinaiticus is written in Greek on animal skin and the newspaper calls it "a fragment of the world's oldest bible." Well, I hate to disappoint the good Fathers in the Sinai, not to mention the hacks at the Torygraph, but there's a much, much older Bible on a hilltop just outside the Palestinian town of Nablus. The Abisha Scroll is used in the rites of the ancient sect of Samaritans. I featured it in my Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET. How old is it? Read these few paragraphs from my novel to find out just astonishingly aged it is:

“Our greatest treasure was stolen, Abu Ramiz,” Ben-Tabia said. He lifted the tips of his fingers to his beard, as though he might pull it out in despair at the thought of such a calamity. “I felt terrible shame that it should be during my tenure as a priest here in our synagogue that the Abisha Scroll might be lost.”

“The Abisha?” Omar Yussef’s voice was low and reverent.

“What’s that?” Sami said.

“A famous Torah scroll,” Omar Yussef said. “The oldest book in the world, they say.”

The priest raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The five books of Moses, written on sheepskin three thousand, six hundred and forty-five years ago. It was written by Abisha, son of Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron who was the brother of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Every year, we bring it out of the safe only once, for our Passover ceremony on Mount Jerizim.”

“It must be very valuable,” Sami said.

“It’s beyond all value. Without this scroll, our Messiah can never return to us. Without this scroll, we cannot carry out the annual Passover sacrifice, and if we fail to sacrifice on Passover we cease to be Samaritans and the entire tradition of our religion comes to a terrible close.” The priest’s eyes were moist.

Palestinians and Israelis take an eternal debate into the classroom, leaving the UN stuck in the middle. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”

The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.

On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”

The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.

Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.

In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”

Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.

U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."

A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.

Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.

Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.

In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”

For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.

“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.

“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”

All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.

Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.