Limbo

By Sam Shuman
Columbia University / JTS

Jews love to limbo. It's a wild, dizzying dance in which we've participated for thousands of years.

Even Moses did it. Raised in the Egyptian palace, he felt alien to the Jews — whom God commanded him to lead. So, without any foreseeable options before him, he found himself in limbo: an insider and an outsider to his own people. Some of the greatest Jewish thinkers — Spinoza and Mendelssohn — found themselves in similar predicaments, struggling with how to "fit in" (within the Jewish world and the world-at-large).

But then Nathan Englander comes along. He's not a prophet (as far as I am aware), a heretic or a Jewish philosopher. He's simply a storyteller. It would be easy to assume after reading his background that he would fit into our paradigm: the insider-outsider, the man alien to his own skin. Raised in a frum Jewish community, he became a left-leaning, secular Zionist. He moves back-and-forth between the Upper-West Side and Israel to find his home. As much as he moves up-and-down, left-to-right — both literally and figuratively — he doesn't really limbo.

He somehow, quite magically, transcends what we expect of him (or what we would like to expect of him). The characters he crafts (in his best-selling collection of short stories, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, 1997) find themselves struggling with the mundane hardships of life. While certain stories do address what it means to live as a Jew in the modern world and in the current climate of the Jewish world, his stories fundamentally highlight the human condition. The stories place a humane light on the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) man and woman, instead of demonizing or mocking them, by revealing that they share the same longing for love, to escape, and to experience intimacy that everyone else feels at different points in their lives. Indeed, it is Englander's insider-outsider experience that allows him to humanize complicated characters—like the ultra-Orthodox man who receives special permission from his rabbi to sleep with a prostitute.

If Englander is limboing — he's doing a hell of a job balancing himself.

Sam Shuman hails from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A transfer student from Northwestern University to the Joint-Program between Columbia and The Jewish Theological Seminary, Sam enjoys listening to "The Moth" and other storytelling podcasts, reading books about the psychology of religion, working at his favorite gas station (Sheetz), and eating chocolate-covered coffee beans.

[Posted 7/21/09]