It’s not uncommon to set about our day and experience a barrier. Often, we can remove the obstacles ourselves, but sometimes we need help. Recently, I got a call from a buddy who needed his car jumped. I immediately stopped what I was working on and was there in 15 minutes, knowing he was on a timeline. He carefully attached the cables between the batteries, and in a few minutes, there was enough voltage to get his rig started.
Arlene Goldbard’s “The Intercessor” is like that jump start — a transmission of electrifying writing that will spark your creative sensibilities and perhaps remove a barrier or two.
Goldbard is primarily known for her writing, art and activism revolving around culture, politics, and spirituality.
She introduces us to a group of individuals whose lives are bound together by Jewish community. It starts out innocently enough, but soon things get spicy. These are familiar but not archetypical characters, flawed, emotional, thirsty, real. Their beloved rabbi has just passed, and the search is now underway for his replacement. The community is in turmoil. Thus an intermediary is called upon, a melitz yosher; someone to advocate on one’s behalf in the heavenly courts.
Published last year, Goldbard’s book comes at a time of turmoil in the wider Jewish community.
After October 7, many in the Jewish community were slowly pushed out of civic and public spaces. We were being held collectively responsible, as individuals, for the actions of a nation-state. Anti-Zionist “curatorial polices” preempted censorship. As three art history students proudly told me during a studio visit, “We are erasing you Jews from the art history books.” For progressive Jewish people dedicated to social justice this shunning was especially complicated.
Our right to be self-defining, or even to enjoy basic human rights, now denied, we created new cohorts and communities of practice. It’s within this context that “The Intercessor” unpacks a story that will inspire you in unexpected ways.
A constant thread in the book is that we need to show up to build Jewish community. Sometimes we need a melitz yosher to ease the way.
You can order the book here: https://arlenegoldbard.com/essays/books/the-intercessor/
Michael B. Schwartz is a conceptual artist and painter based in the American Southwest.
