Walking through LACMA with my son
Explaining to me in detail
The filmography of Kubrick's genius,
We finally arrive at his last unmade film
And discuss why...
Why it never was completed,
Was it Schindler's List that put him off
Or was the project too big
Too heavy,
Too close to the non divine,
Too impossible to deal with.
Was his word, his midrash to be
The last word in Holocaust literature?
Here were the clippings, the files
Even an interview with the proposed star.
We were drowning in memorabilia
And awed by his present absence,
Like the very divine he did not believe in.
I am reading the Megillah and the plot line
Queen Esther, you know,
Her entering the king's bedroom
Like Kubrick's heroine and the Nazi officer
Protecting her child...
How many Esthers were there?
How many protected their own by these choices?
midrashically she knew she would never be able to return to her husband
"Halachically" she was forever forbidden
Intimacy was sacrificed for her people
And Kubrick's starlets
Heroines among the Nazis.
I think of Moses' plea "blot me out from Your book" as he engages the divine
Threatening the divine using this metaphor of the book...
And Esther ironically pleads with the Beis Din the court that
Will arbitrate whether her book, her miracle, her sacrifice,
Will enter the canon..."kitvunee ledorot" she pleads
Moses wants out
If the divine will not forgive, forget the sin of the golden calf,
better blot him out too...
He will not lead a people into oblivion because of divine rage.
Forget the Book, it is not worth the sacrifice...
But Esther pleads for admission INTO the very book, the canon,
For posterity, for history,
To show her daughters in the future
How to suffer
How to deal with male dominance through subterfuge
How to seduce the Nazi and save the children.
So this year I mourn Rabbi Kubrick and the film that was never made
His midrash on the Holocaust
His validation of Esther
Of the insistence that the divine be held accountable
Not at some trial
Not at a Wiesel hearing with witnesses for and against the divine,
But in the bedroom of the Nazi.
beguiling the king
Seducing his male potency
The black boots, and belt,
And the self bloated male importance
Deconstructing in his vulnerable parts
The very uncircumcised maleness
That marked the Jew.
