Last update - 00:00 09/02/2007
The trait of Sodom
By Michael Fox
Older readers may remember a musical from the early 1950s called "Kismet." The action takes place in Baghdad, 11 centuries before Shock and Awe. This is Baghdad of the Arabian Nights, peopled with wazirs, poets, beautiful princesses and colorful beggars. There is a caliph with the usual caliph equipment: turban, sash, scimitar and well-stocked harem. This mildly pleasing piece of Middle East hokum has been restaged from time to time, mainly, I suspect, because even after "Hair" in the '60s made its mark as the first full-frontal Broadway musical, the public (or half of it, anyhow) has never tired of seeing oodles of odalisques with death-defying decolletages lolling around in diaphanous pajamas. The 1955 film of "Kismet" had Vic Damone in the role of the caliph. Because I had heard his name long before I saw it in print, I still think of him as Victor Moan. What a perfect name! The Happy Family of Mr. Bun the baker, Mr. Block the builder and Mr. Tuckin the chef can now be augmented by Mr. Moan the crooner.
Whatever the shortcomings of the plot, the score is excellent. It ought to be because, in an act of musical daylight grave robbery, "Kismet"'s writers shamelessly pilfered the work of the 19th-century Russian composer, Alexander Borodin. The show's music is principally derived from Borodin's sublime second string quartet and from his opera, "Prince Igor."
The celebrated "Polovtsian Dances" are the source of a witty number in the show - "Not Since Nineveh," which - in its Danny Kaye version - was at one time a treasured record of mine. According to the song, eighth-century Baghdad was an unprecedented sin city, the axis of an evil far more alluring than George Dubya ever dreamed of. Space constraints prevent me from giving the lyrics in full, but I cannot resist quoting the last lines of one of the verses: "Not since Nebuchadnezzar's hanging gardens went to pot, / Not since that village near Gomorrah got (pause) too hot (pause) for Lot / No, not since Nineveh."
I cite this verse because it is, to my knowledge, the only instance in literature that Gomorrah is mentioned to the exclusion of its more colorful Sodomite neighbor. Gomorrah may well have been Sodom's equal in wickedness, but it has always been a stooge, a satellite. Gomorrah is Robin to Sodom's Batman, Watson to Sodom's Holmes. The Lord did a good job of wiping Gomorrah off the map with fire, adding brimstone for good measure and, so far as I know, the town never made a comeback. There is no Gomorrah in the Israeli gazetteer - but, in contrast, Sodom is today a thriving town on the Western shore of the Dead Sea, known usually by its Hebrew name of Sdom. Indeed it is a popular tourist destination, though I agree that saying you are off to Sodom for your vacation might still cause a ripple at a Manhattan dinner party. Disappointingly, Sdom is for the health tourist, not the sex tourist. If your problem is an outsize libido, you are better off going to Thailand. All that a dirty weekend in Sdom conveys is getting caked in mud.
Dog in the manger
Traditional Jewish sources do not stress the practice with which the world associates Sodom. Although the dictionary definition of sodomy lacks precision, there is no doubt that it has a derogatory sexual meaning. The ninth Marquess of Queensberry left his visiting card at a London club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite." The aristocratic author of the laws of boxing may not have known how to spell, but everyone knew what he meant. There is, of course, clear biblical authority for reading the sins of Sodom as offenses of sexual perversity. Only a providential attack of blindness visited on the men of Sodom saved Lot's angelic guests from a fate worse than death. Yet, while rabbinic literature attributes all kinds of misanthropic behavior to the Sodomites, it is rarely of a sexual nature.
For the sages of the Talmud what particularly characterized the Sodomites was excessive mean-spiritedness. The Talmudic reference to the "trait of Sodom" is to a characteristic known in Western culture as the dog in the manger. That beast, in Aesop's fable, ferociously prevented the cattle from eating the hay in the stable though he himself was unable to eat it. The ox articulated the trait of Sodom in declaring the moral: that people often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves. The trait of Sodom is so commonplace a feature of modern life that we fail to remark it. The driver of that huge gas-guzzling 4x4 that stops in the intersection in front of you so as to block you when your light turns green, though he himself has gained no advantage by it, is a Sodomite. The man who wants to prevent you from hearing Wagner though he has never been to a concert in his life is another.
The trait of Sodom often appears in the form of class envy. It was very much in evidence in the zeal that British legislators showed two years ago in passing a law criminalizing fox hunting. I truly have no ax to grind here. Not only have I never taken part in the pastime that Oscar Wilde described as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, I have never been anywhere near a hunt. Since the time that Jacob stayed at home perfecting his recipe for lentil soup while Esau went hunting, Jews have never gone in for the chase; they prefer canasta. "Jewish Fox Hunters" surely qualifies for the title of the world's shortest book. The only character who could conceivably appear in that book would be that iconic fox-hunting man, the poet Siegfried Sassoon. But, despite his Jewish ancestry, he was brought up in the Church of England and embraced Roman Catholicism before his death. I find it easy to contemplate a world without fox hunting or, come to think of it, of any other kind of hunting, but I cannot escape the impression that the MPs who passed the Hunting Act, 2004, were less motivated by their concern for animal rights than they were at depriving those red-coated toffs of their pleasures.
And, getting closer to home, I suspect that the yawn that has greeted the imminent closing of Israel's only full-sized golf course, at Caesarea, contains more than an element of the trait of Sodom. The owners of the land, the Caesarea Development Corporation, propose to build luxury houses in the middle of the course. The general public has shown scant sympathy for the plight of the business executives, corporate lawyers, airline pilots, diplomats, media personalities and consultant surgeons who are to be deprived of the game they love. But it is a shame. Personally, though no longer a golfer, I would feel the kind of ache at its disappearance that I would at the extinction of an indigenous species of animal. We can live without golf and we can live without spotted owls, but life is just that bit better with them.
Poets on golf
I thought of the Caesarea golf course when I read a couple of weeks ago of the death of that peerlessly funny writer, Art Buchwald. Art played at Caesarea in the early 1960s. He wrote that it was the only golf course in the world where, if you hooked the ball, it would drop into the sea and if you sliced, it would fall in enemy territory. He might also have remarked that it is beautiful. There are so few spots in Israel where you can lose yourself in nature and the thought that such a wild, sylvan area will be covered by rows of villas to be sold as second homes to absentee tourists is a melancholy one.
Robert Browning's Andrea del Sarto believed that a man's reach should exceed his grasp or "what's a heaven for?" When I did play golf I played it spectacularly badly, but the laws of probability decreed that, playing week after week, things would occasionally go sufficiently right for me to catch that glimpse of a golfing heaven beyond my grasp, but within my reach. It was another poet, the bard of suburbia, John Betjeman, who best described the euphoria that a poor golfer feels when the ball runs well for him. In his poem "Seaside Golf," he describes a rare birdie three. We follow him as he plays an iron to the green:
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I'd find it on the green.
And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most surely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.
Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendor, splendor everywhere.
Splendor indeed! Don't let the Sodomites take it away.