Yom Kayfabe
As the Yamim Noraim wind to their conclusion and we approach Yom HaKippurim 5782, I’m thinking about kayfabe.
Don’t dust off your old Hebrew-English dictionary looking for the word in there; you won’t find it. It’s a term of unclear linguistic origin that emerged from the world of traveling circuses, but it is most commonly associated with the art of professional wrestling. (That’s the one where muscular people portray aggressive characters who duel in choreographed fights with predetermined outcomes, not the one they do at the Olympics.) Kayfabe is not a specifically Jewish term. But perhaps it should be.
“Kayfabe” rhymes with “Hey, Abe” (sorry, I can’t think of a better mnemonic) and, much in the manner of any number of crucial words in Judaism, you can translate kayfabe either narrowly or broadly. Narrowly, we might say it means “fiction.” But that’s like saying teshuva just means “turning around.”
A more expansive definition is required if we are to truly understand this magnificent concept, and I would offer the following: kayfabe is a lie that people agree to believe in so as to achieve transcendence, but which falls apart upon any close inspection. In a functional sense, it’s typically used as a descriptor, i.e. “They’re just kayfabe brothers, they’re not actually related,” or “He’s not actually leaving that wrestling company, that speech was just kayfabe.” But it can also be a noun: to admit the truth is to “break kayfabe.”
Breaking kayfabe is a tricky and dangerous enterprise. You know how you’re not supposed to wake up a sleepwalker, because the experience of waking up from somnambulation can be traumatic? It’s like that, insofar as people don’t particularly like it when you point out beyond a shadow of a doubt that what they believe is preposterous.
Typically, they’ll just reject the information: despite countless exposés about wrestling’s fakeness throughout the 20th Century, its fans held fast to the lie that everything was on the level. Even now, a few decades after fans broadly accepted that wrestling is fixed, they throw themselves into any number of other falsities that wrestling executives concoct about company history, corporate responsibility, labor relations, and so on. So maybe it’s like if you tried to wake up a sleepwalker and they punched you in the face so they could keep going about their rounds.
That’s not to say kayfabe is an inherently evil or harmful force. Any worthwhile, functioning society has to allow for kayfabe, whether in the realms of religion, politics, or any number of other arenas. Kayfabe can comfort. Kayfabe can astound. Kayfabe can inspire. Accepting kayfabe is submitting oneself to the improbable, even the impossible, so as to find a higher meaning than mere reality.
If you watch a wrestling match and embrace kayfabe for that 20-minute stretch, if you really believe that it means something more than just underpaid grapplers trying to get through the workday, and if that belief leads you to appreciate beauty and be a better human, then zey gezunt.
But if you lose yourself in kayfabe permanently, if you never reckon with the fact that the world is not always what it seems to be, if you let fantasy fully dictate your and others’ reality, well … I don’t think I have to point out the obvious contemporary examples for you to get my point.
The Jewish community needs kayfabe, of course. We must allow for unique beliefs in and related to the divine, even if they seem patently stupid to others. We must allow for worldly dreams that seem as though they will never be realized, if we are to better ourselves and our community in times that crush our spirits. We must allow ourselves to hope for the miraculous. But we have tipped the balance too far. We believe too much that is not true. And so, I ask today: Who by fire? Who by water? Who by kayfabe?
Let 5782 be a year in which we cut past the bullshit and do what wrestling folks call “shoots” — conversations or monologues that come straight from the neshama and plow right through all the comforting fictions. Aren’t we Jews supposed to be inheritors of the ethics of our nevi’im? And what good is a prophet if he won’t do a shoot? If you’ll forgive the unforgivable degree to which I currently sound like a youth pastor: Didn’t Yonah try to avoid cutting a shoot on the people of Nineveh?
In the story we will read tomorrow, this reluctant prophet initially rejects his task, which is to tell the denizens of that city the truth of their wickedness and the truth of the One God. If Yonah had his way, kayfabe would have been maintained. Perhaps the Ninevans knew, on some level, that they were being wicked, but collectively chose to not think too hard about that notion. Are we not the same? Do we not require prophets to remind us of what is right in front of our eyes? Should we not desperately hope that we will hear, repent, and be spared, as the Ninevans are?
And what should Yonah say to us, if he were here in our wicked world and took up his duty? What are the truths obscured by our Jewish kayfabe? Here are a few I’d text to him, with full permission for him to steal, uncredited:
Climate change will almost certainly render the entirety of the Holy Land uninhabitable within the near future, which will make all our conversations about eternal Zionism and Palestinian liberation largely irrelevant! And practically nobody is planning with this in mind!
The next US presidential election will probably be contested and very possibly lead to some kind of violent national conflict along roughly partisan lines! And many of the most active Jews in the community will very proudly be on the side of the white nationalists!
Countless numbers of our people, even our rabbis, are willingly spreading both plague and pro-plague propaganda! They are not going to stop doubling down on words and actions that kill others! And all we offer in return is rebuke, not consequence!
Many of our most powerful and devout leaders espouse heretical messianism! I shall not name names, but come on: are we really going to allow a Jewish world where countless thousands of ostensibly observant Jews believe they know the identity of Moshiach and/or the circumstances of his imminent appearance (or, in some folks’ eyes, re-appearance)? Did we learn nothing from Shabtai Tzvi?
Virtually all American Jewish institutions have already lost the next generation of non-Orthodox Jews! They are overwhelmingly leftist and skeptical of Zionism! And every member group of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has been mealy-mouthed, silent, or enthusiastic about the rise of fascism in America and Israel! That’s not even getting into the fact that most of these organizations have no clue how to talk to young queer people!
And yet, here the Jews are, stuck in our ethical and epistemological kayfabes, our communal illusions about what the stakes are, who the good guys are, what the real impact is. Because the thing you have to remember about kayfabe is that, while the intentions of a wrestling match may be rooted in fiction, the damage done to the bodies and minds of the wrestlers is very non-fictional. So, too, are the outcomes of our communal folly. Suffering is part of life. But our self-delusions are making it far worse than it has to be.
Tomorrow, as we beat our chests and beg God for forgiveness, let us remember that, to borrow a phrase, this isn’t kayfabe and we are completely unprepared. We must become prepared. I do not know exactly how this coming epoch of cataclysm will play out, but I do have some ideas as to how we might survive in spite of it. But we can’t discuss them if we’re not willing to break kayfabe and admit that our ways of doing things simply aren’t working. Honesty sucks, but I’m making a Yom Kippur resolution to shoot as much as I can in 5782. I hope you’ll do the same.
The Zohar, that book of strategies for piercing the veil, tells us a story about life in the wake of the End of the World that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The Flood has finally ended and Noah opens the door of the ark. Louis Ginzberg’s seminal Legends of the Jews eloquently summarizes the sacred text’s account of what ensued:
When he stepped out from the ark into the open, he began to weep bitterly at sight of the enormous ravages wrought by the flood, and he said to God: “O Lord of the world! Thou art called the Merciful, and Thou shouldst have had mercy upon Thy creatures.” God answered, and said: “O thou foolish shepherd, now thou speakest to Me. Thou didst not so when I addressed kind words to thee, saying: ‘I saw thee as a righteous man and perfect in thy generation, and I will bring the flood upon the earth to destroy all flesh. Make an ark for thyself of gopher wood.’ Thus spake I to thee, telling thee all these circumstances, that thou mightest entreat mercy for the earth. But thou, as soon as thou didst hear that thou wouldst be rescued in the ark, thou didst not concern thyself about the ruin that would strike the earth. Thou didst but build an ark for thyself, in which thou wast saved. Now that the earth is wasted, thou openest thy mouth to supplicate and pray.”
Perhaps Moshiach really is around the bend. Bimhera biyamenu, as they say. Great. I can’t live with that as my kayfabe. It would be a dereliction of my responsibility: living as though this world, terrible though it may be, will keep on going. And that’s my kayfabe, I suppose. I don’t believe in the Revolution or the Messiah, but I do believe in the Apocalypse. Not to be a Hellenist, but I’ve always been fond of that word: it means both “End of Days” and simply “unveiling.” So many veils are being ripped away right now, and, ultimately, that is a necessary trauma.
But, you may be surprised to hear, I am not a pessimist, in the long run. My kayfabe is that there will be a world after the end of the world.
We are living in a time of unimaginable crisis which is also a time of unimaginable opportunity. The old ways will fall. The old institutions will die. The old ideas won’t make sense anymore. Now is the time to prepare, to dream, to meet, and to plan for the next evolution of what it means to be a Child of Israel. Lest we forget, the fall of the Temple was not the end of Judaism. It was the beginning.
The Hebrews have survived the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Black Death, and several genocides, including the Shoah — is it so beyond the realm of possibility that Jews will continue to cling to Jewish civilization in defiance of entropy? Perhaps humanity is going to go extinct, but I choose to live my life as though there will be continuity. Real continuity, not the birthrate-oriented nonsense that the eugenicists talk about. I mean continuity of learning, of ritual, of story, both textual and metatextual. Maybe such belief is an illusion. But, to quote a sage: it’s still real to me, dammit.
