"'The book would make clear who was Jewish and who was not, why a highland Peruvian, a cholo, was not, and could not be, Jewish'.... But when Villanueva opened the book, what he found was a revelation. It described precisely the way he and his followers were already living, and he arrived home delighted, the mystery solved at last. Guess what, he told his congregation: They were Jewish! They’d been Jews all along!... Is it a matter of bloodlines? Tradition? Observance? Faith? But Villanueva was neither aware of nor interested in religious gatekeeping.... In one memorable scene, Villanueva and his congregation return to the rabbi in search of circumcision (not the metaphorical kind) but are turned away; their only other option is a surgeon who will perform the procedure for the hefty sum of $60 apiece. One imagines that many men would simply (and perhaps relievedly) abandon the enterprise at this point, but Villanueva would not be deterred: Three years later, he and a dozen followers were back with cash in hand."
ADDED: That last link goes to Amazon, where there is this blurb from Judith Thurman: "If Gabriel García Márquez had written the Old Testament, it might read like Graciela Mochkofsky's staggering true account of a humble Peruvian carpenter's spiritual odyssey from a shack in the Andes, via the Amazon, to the Promised Land of Israel with a community of devoted followers."
Posts
9 comments:
"One Man and His Followers Sought Salvation. Did It Exist?"
Stay tuned for the sequel where Villanueva finds out that many Jews practice religious atheism and are agnostic on the subject of salvation.
"The rabbis, it turned out, were as fallible as any other leaders, prone to conflicting interpretations of the Torah." That seems like an unreasonable standard.
I still remember the beautiful synagogue jn Cochabamba, Bolivia. Two of the four people with whom I shared quarters in the 'residenciál' were observant Jews from New York, long term tourists. I was there for ag development work, but had grown up amongst observant Jews near New Haven. As they scrambled to prepare a small dinnerco for the Seder, I offered to help. Raised eyebrows, but nothing compared to when I said "May i ?" for the first cup and chanted the Kiddush in Hebrew.
Come Saturday, they asked if I'd join them at a synagogue they'd seen earlier in the week. They spoke tourist Spanish, and had figured out than I'm near-native fluent. What a wonderful place, packed, and with one of the most beautiful artistic blue ceilings I've ever seen. And the congregants were speaking Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish, along with some old folks (refugees from Franco and Hitler) speaking Ladino and Yiddish amongst themselves.
They and their parents' generation had built the synagogue in the late '40s, a smaller copy of the one in their former Spanish city.
Filed under sex organ surgery we like.
They weren't called the Chosen People for nothing!
How long before circumcision becomes the justification for government subsidized gender mutilation?
Doctor: Circumcisions are $60 apiece.
Villanueva: Done. And we will throw in a 5-pound bag of cocaine for your trouble. We ask only one thing.
Doctor: What is it?
Villanueva: You only get the cocaine after the surgeries...
There are lots of stories like this, especially famous is the story of the Chinese Jews.
History is so much more than we can imagine.
It's not a big deal but my comment was edited, a link was dropped. The especially famous story was about the Ethiopian Jews. Let's see if it works this time.
Post a Comment