Wednesday night was the launch of READING SCHOLEM IN CONSTELLATION, at Hopscotch in Berlin. The book came out of a group that began at Hopscotch last autumn, falling online for the winter. I was too overwhelmed with zoom and moving cities to make any of the meetings, but got to know the group’s coordinator Rachel Pafe, who, despite my absence, kindly included a short text that I originally wrote for this newsletter. Rachel documented the work of the group here and you can get the PDF of the whole book here. It was a beautiful evening: Rachel read an introduction on the political urgencies of lament and mourning, and Mimi Howard and Rachel read from their essay on Susan Taubes (the focus of the next group, alongside Simone Weil). We also heard Seda Mimaroğlu’s poem in Turkish and English as the swifts played above. To mark the launch of the book, I decided to return to the topic of palm tree bisexuality.
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Rachel tracked down the book where Scholem talks about the bisexuality of palm trees in kabbalistic literature, the insight that got him his first job at the university. It was in The Origins of the Kabbalah, first published in German in 1962. The reference occurs in relation to the thirteen-century Book of Bahir, about which Scholem wrote his 1923 dissertation. The first reference to a palm is from a story about
[…] a man who went to buy date honey and who did not take with him a container to carry them home. He said: I will carry them upon my breast, but they were too heavy for him. He was afraid that they would break open and soil his clothes, so he threw them away. Then he was doubly punished: once for the spoiling of the food and once for the loss of his money.
Scholem adds:
[The] detail concerning date honey suggests that other passages of the Bahir, which presuppose and interpret mystically the bisexual character of the palm and its artificial fecundation […].
The argument breaks off but he later returns to the idea. He says the palm branch of the lulav – held together with hadass (myrtle), aravah (willow), and etrog (citron), for the festival of Sukkot (pictured below) – is like ‘a spinal column in man’. He then says that a relation is established between the palm tree and the syzygy (a straight line within an astrological constellation) of the masculine and feminine in connection with the name Tamar, given Tamar’s children, Perez and Zarah, signify the sun and the moon as both masculine and feminine. In the lulav, the upright branch of the palm represents the masculine, and the stone of the date, the feminine, which corresponds to the power of the moon above. It’s hard to follow what he means but it did get him the job at the university.
Rachel added wider context: the kabbalistic idea of the creation of the world resulting from God contracting into Itself and splitting into a masculine and femminine side. The femminine side is supposed to be exiled in the physical world and identified with the Jewish people, while harsh laws and judgment come from the masculine side. Kabbalistic practices and rituals – perhaps involving palms but also not necessarily involving palms – attempt to reunite these two sides.
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CODA: In 1996 Madonna started to study the Kaballah. For some reason this event was an important moment in my childhood. I searched to see if she ever talked about it and found an interview with Larry King. It starts with a conversation about Guy Richie’s film Swept Away (2002), which went on to bomb at the box office. Madonna then talks about the gender roles of her children: how boys like cars, wheels and mechanics; how girls like dolls, dresses and high heels. The polymorphically perverse bisexuality of children, the foundation of Charlotte Wolff’s 1977 study on bisexuality (something I want to write more on), is lost on Madonna. Boys are boys and girls are girls and neither are palm trees. The interview continues; there’s a palm behind. She talks about how she loves new things and how she got swept away by Kabbalah. She talks about how Guy Richie was skeptical at first, that he’s a darwinist, but that she got him interested. Larry King calls a commercial break and it’s over.
Thanks for reading this, and thank you to Rachel Pafe and everyone involved with the book. If anyone has more insights into the theological work on the palm, I would be keen to hear. Also watch this Madonna interview if you are looking for more/better content. Happy weekend all ۵