By Kevin Wolf
“Some people tell stories to put people to sleep, I tell stories to wake people up.” -Rebbe Nachman
A grand story has tremendous power to spark one’s imagination, yet a simple story can truly enrich one’s life. At Bnei Akiva camps during “slow shira” (slow singing to conclude Shabbat), someone tells a story from their life and a message they learned from that experience. I always looked forward to these stories and many times I was surprised at how people were able to transform a mundane experience into a life lesson. In my mind, Etgar Keret writes bizarre “slow shira” stories that express a felt truth, but unlike the stories from camp, his message is often ambiguous.
(To me, Keret’s stories feel almost chassidic in some ways and when I asked him if he ever reads chassidic stories, he responded that he has and he thinks his stories are “like chassidic stories, but God doesn’t come in at the end. They are agnostic chassidic tales.”)
Keret told us that the roots of his storytelling abilities are from his parents, who did not allow any children’s books in his house and were insistent on telling him a new story from the heart every night. His mother used to say, “Reading a book to a child is like buying pizza for dinner. That is what lazy families do. You have to create a story fresh every night.” (I am thankful that I didn’t grow up in a “lazy family” and my father would regularly make up bedtime stories for me.) Rather than bringing a gift home for young Keret, his parents brought a story from their day to connect to him and reveal insights into life. For Keret, telling a story was and is an expression of love. (This actually gave me a new appreciation for a line in the amidah in modim: “nodeh licha oo’nisaper tehilatecha,” “we will thank You and tell the story of your praises;” We should not only thank God, but retell the stories of our day in our prayers as an expression of love.)
Etgar read us one of his stories and when it ended I wasn’t quite sure what to take from it. The story was entertaining, clever and well written, but I felt that the trick was over and I had missed the grand reveal.During the questions, I asked him if he had a desire to write stories with more explicit messages. He responded that life is complex and there are seldom clear messages. He conveyed this through telling us about a group of prisoners he met who loved the movie Dirty Harry, even though it is about a cop who kills criminals, rather than properly taking them in for due process. Bewildered Keret asked these prisoners why they like the movie and don’t sympathize with the criminals who are killed in the movie. The prisoners responded that the criminals in Dirty Harry were actual evil people, while they (the prisoners) merely overreacted and broke the law in response to their scenario. Keret emphasized how unhealthy the type of storytelling in Dirty Harry is because it prevents people from identifying with their representative character in the story and gives people false perceptions and expectation for life. Keret intentionally protests these monochromatic narratives and humanizes all his characters to challenge us to form a nuanced view of the story and humanity. (This is also a great insight on how the Torah challenges us by having complex characters.) For Keret, the power of literature is that there is a little bit of a murderer in all of us and we should explore that and empathize with them. (There is a great story about how the Lubavitcher Rebbe cried because he couldn’t empathize with someone’s sin and he was not truly in touch with himself to reveal that element of himself.)
I was fascinated by this new angle on storytelling. I had always envisioned a story to be a medium for people to tell others about their potential and what they could be, while Keret uses stories to reveal what is. One may hastily think that it is not so impressive to state what is. Life is ineffable, yet Keret artfully crafts these nugget size stories to loosely contain these hard to capture truths. As a counselor at camp, every night I would retell, alter or make up a story for my high school aged campers. Even having practiced storytelling in different contexts Keret has challenged me to attempt to be more ambiguous and less overt to voice something which is less romantic and more realistic.
One dissenting opinion I had with Keret’s talk was his perspective on criticizing Israel. I feel strong in my cornerstone beliefs regarding Israel and am comfortable in and regularly do criticize Israeli policy and decisions; regardless, I think Keret too freely entreated our group to criticize Israel. He compared criticizing Israel to going to your childhood home and informing your parents that there is poop on the floor. Next in his extended metaphor, he said that the parents then accuse you of being hostile and ungrateful to your childhood home and not believing in it, when you were simply pointing out an apparent flaw. His message was to openly apologize for the bad things Israel does, a term that “hasbara” people like to refer to as “airing your dirty laundry”. Through this open criticism Israel will realize that she should remove the poop from her home. Unfortunately, this is an overly simplistic metaphor which is a false parallel for a manifold of reasons. Firstly, poop is objectively bad, whereas issues in Israeli society can be subjective to different audiences and their goals. Furthermore, picking up poop is disgusting, but nonetheless it is effortless and costless. On the other hand, Israel has a slew of complicated issues with no clear solution of how she should solve then, and she is simultaneously juggling this plethora of problems and must properly give priority to certain issues regarding where to allocate her resources. One may need to save some money for health care, rather than fixing the leaking sink. Lastly, when one does not live in a country, it is difficult to sense the public opinion on issues; it is hard to know all the different perspectives on current social and political events; and most of all, the decisions that country makes do not directly effective one’s immediate life.
