A Man's a Man for a That

Part 1

On a Thursday night at the end of January, I drove to Jerusalem to celebrate Robbie Burns’ birthday. My friend Naomi has a Scot cousin who every year brings out the whiskey, the haggis (which, this night, was not a haggis* at all, as it had none of the offal that characterizes the dish) and with revelry, jokes and toasts in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic, celebrates the birthday of the Scots bard.

The celebration was rung in to the sound of bagpipes performed by a young man in red tartan kilt, black vest, and a white purse on a chain below his waist. Lenny, Naomi’s cousin, also went about in a kilt, as did a number of the other guests, several of whom spoke in an accent so thick, it might have been cut as easily as the haggis.

The Bard, whose name was given an inimitable pronunciation (at least to me) that was a cross between Barnes and Burns, as if someone spoke with a mouth full when trying to say a German umlaut, was praised in a long toast that claimed facetiously that Rabbie Burns was none other than Rabbi Burns, who secretly belonged to either a Shabbatei Tzvi sect or Chabad.

To my surprise if not amazement, I discovered in Wikipedia not only that the Burns supper in honor of the Bard’s birthday has been celebrated since 1802 but it has a proscribed order.

So in outline form, the order follows:
1. Host’s welcoming speech—This was Lenny’s moment of glory as he mingled more Yiddish words than I knew with Scottish pride and humor.
2. The Selkirk grace – Skipped.
3. Entrance of the haggis. In truth, the haggis (here but a pumpkin shell filled with a thick vegetarian rice pudding, too sweet for both a haggis and my taste) was introduced with bagpipe fanfare. Mercifully, the Burns’ poem, “Address to a Haggis,” which begins, “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face/Great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” was not recited.
4. Supper – delayed until after “Immortal Memory.”
5. “Immortal Memory” – This was when Bobbie Burns was gloriously transformed into Rabbi Burns.
6. Appreciation (for the former speaker) – Skipped
7. Toast to the Lassies – Thankfully brief, since this year the man who usually raises the toast was spare in jokes and what was there was generally as flat as beer set out on a summer day.
8. Reply to the Toast to the Lassies – The woman, who claimed afterward that it was all “rubbish,” had the perfect timing of a stand-up comedienne and brought down the house with her toast to men.
9. Other Toasts and Speeches – Spared
10. Works by Burns—These were both read and sung. See Part 2.
11. Closing – Oddly skipped, since even to an American heretic like me, the closing of a Burns supper is self-evident: everyone sings “Auld Lang Syne.”

Part 2

I would like to write about one of Burns’ songs. Dina, an American who despite her white hair and age looked like the idealist hippy she no doubt once was, played a dulcimer (what else?) and sang, “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” by Robert Burns. The last stanza goes:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that,)

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

“Gree” means the prize for victory. I thought immediately of Schiller’s, “Ode to Joy,” “An die Freude” with its famous line, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” and wondered again at the marvelous hope embodied in those lines. Schiller wrote his ode ten years before Burns; both, no doubt, influenced by the American and French revolutions. How simple that period seems in retrospect—although, of course, it wasn’t: the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s Wars—but the current of events was limited to Europe and, in part, to the New World, as Europe’s extension. There was no immediate knowledge of the globe, no El Qaeda, no war on terror or Iran’s nuclear threat. Burns could have the conviction that sense and wealth, over all the earth, would bear the prize, for all that, and under their influence, mankind would realize that all men are brothers.

In the Middle East, that conviction retains its radical ring. The Middle East, as I’ve written before, is about putting up fences to define who you are, where one is assaulted daily by the bigotries of tribal loyalty, and many if not most Orthodox Jews and Moslems would never consider the possibility that all men might be brothers. I return to a story I’ve told before. Once, on visiting an Arab friend in Nazareth, we switched to English, since he had spent several years in Berkeley, CA. Suddenly, it seemed to me that in English, unlike Hebrew, Arab and Jew ceased to be relevant. English offered a different Weltanschauung—perhaps, after all, because neither of us was English and the language had no native, patriotic roots in the Motherland; it was, in this case, a lingua franca.

And yet, one can argue, that the Jews, especially the Jews, have a case for disbelieving in idealistic, rather Christian convictions of the brotherhood of man, for throughout history, they have been singled out. I might be laughed at for Robbie Burns’ convictions: no proof is forthcoming. That is the power of the narrow-minded, for evil in history is always there to back them up.

Lenny’s son had protested the past weekend and been arrested. Orthodox Jews have occupied a house in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and literally expelled its occupants for the past 50 years. The justification – the house was owned by Jews before the War of Independence. According to the same principle, much of Jaffa and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout Israel should be returned to Arabs.

When Lenny’s cousin, a fat representative of the “booboisie” as Mencken labeled them, her face creamed with make-up, a large diamond glinting on a finger, her grandchildren’s photos tucked in her I-Phone, heard the crowd’s applause for Yotam, she grimaced. We should have shouted his praise to the rafters.

*For those, like me, who may be unfamiliar with the allure of a true haggis, according to Merriam-Webster, a haggis is “a traditionally Scottish dish that consists of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or a calf minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal.”