Jay Michaelson’s Heretical Tales
Courtesy of Jay Michaelson.
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is a journalist, meditation teacher, professor, and prolific writer. In December, Michaelson’s short story collection and first major work of fiction, The Secret That Is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales, was published by Ayin Press. Michaelson’s stories revolve around themes of Judaism and queerness, revelation and concealment. In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Havurah Journal’s editor Ellie Klibaner-Schiff sits down with Michaelson over Zoom to discuss his latest work.
Ellie Klibaner-Schiff: What inspired this collection of short stories? How did it come into being?
Jay Michaelson: It has an unusual origin story. The very first versions of these stories date back a very long time, like 16 years or so. There's a Hasidic quote that depression is replaceability, the idea that you could just be switched out for another person. So the converse of that is figuring out what your unique expression of creativity or of the divine is. I had read Nathan Englander’s short stories, his first book For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, and other things like that. I was like, I have my way of doing this. It's gonna be a little more queer, and more Kabbalistic, and so I did that.
EKS: A lot of the other writing you've published has been nonfiction. And this is your first major fiction book. How do those feel different to write and to bring it to the world?
JM: I think a lot of nonfiction writers consider ourselves failed novelists. I sort of do too. I have a couple of unpublished novels that probably will remain unpublished. A lot of the themes of this book I could see myself writing about, but it was way more fun, and it felt more authentic to the issues too, to enact them in stories rather than write them out as theology. I'm not even sure they're that original theologically, but I hadn't read these stories. When I was coming up, these didn't exist for me. And so I wanted to write what didn't exist.
I did learn in my MFA program that I'm more of a nonfiction writer. I have to screen and remind myself, what does the room look like? What are the smells? I'm very good at articulating things, from a nonfiction point of view, and I do a lot of different kinds of nonfiction. Some of it was that there was a freedom in the way to write, and then some was also whatever the opposite of freedom is, like, okay, let's remember, we’re telling a story, someone has hair, what color is it?
EKS: You teach meditation, and I noticed that in your stories there's a lot of really powerful consciousness tracking, where the characters think and feel with a purposeful intention. Do you think your meditation practices influence the way you write?
JM: My own way into the inner life of these characters is that we all have our own inner lives. For me, that's shaped a lot by meditation. I did try to parody that in one story, “The Secrets of Nakedness,” where I want to make sure to not be too sincere in the depiction of meditation. Sometimes that world is so sincere, which works nonfiction wise, but as a storyteller there's nothing more exhausting than someone putting the character who has all the answers, and they're the wise meditation teacher. So I kind of made fun of that character, even though she's based on one of my core meditation teachers, Shoshana Cooper. She's like a parody of an actual meditation teacher. I was very cautious to never preach in fiction, at least I try to never preach.
EKS: Another thing I noticed is that your stories really center the act of imaginative interpretation, and sometimes subverting tradition. I'm thinking specifically about “The Verse.” What role do you think fiction can play, with its act of world building and creating alternate realities, in envisioning a queer and Jewish future?
JM: I love that. I mean, that one's like science fiction. It was so different from the other stories that I wanted to provide the interpretation that it might be a dream that the character has, while also not making it just a dream. I can do a spoiler alert that Jill Hammer, who’s a close friend and also this multi-genre writer, her book of Jewish science fiction is coming out next year from Ayin Press. And that I think is a real project of world making. It’s creating, like Neil Gaiman, or Ursula Le Guin, or any one of the greats, creates this whole world. I think the terrain is really open. It's interesting to contemplate the relationship between those worlds and making our own world more just or less shitty in some general way. I think about, just in general, did the Sandman series change this world? Or did it just create the possibility of imagination? Or back to Ursula Le Guin, her dystopias and utopias, I don't know if I want to judge them based on their impact on how they affect this world. I think what's joyful about them is that they are these imaginations. And then there's some nonlinear way in which that could filter through. If there's a dystopia, how are we approaching that in our own lives? Obviously, we are, a lot, and so I think that's where it's not linear for me. It's not like I will create this vision with the secret intention of it being reality.
EKS: At the same time, I think in a lot of the stories there are real tensions that are grappled with that are very present in our current world. You choose specifically to use very traditional language, which I think really helps to set the scene and sense of place. I'm wondering about two forces, the deeply progressive and the deeply traditional, which can sometimes feel in tension with each other, both in reality and in these stories. What played out in your mind as you were writing?
JM: I think if I looked at some of the past generations of Jewish writers engaging in a thick way with tradition, that tension is obvious, it's just the background. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example, or any of the old Yiddish writers from generations ago. There's something incredibly rich about the mythic world that traditional religious people inhabit. I was raised as a normal American Conservative Jew, like USY and Camp Ramah and things like that. And I did then become a ba’al teshuva for 10 years, basically for my 20s. I was also late coming out as queer. I wasn't in the closet because I was being Orthodox; I was being Orthodox because I was in the closet. There was a saturation of that world with eros and with connection with community, and that was the only way that, at that time, I could really access it. The book is a lot about the parallel and intersecting lines of desire and religion. Those lines were two sides of the coin, to use a cliche about it. There could be this eros drive through sexuality, or it could be through mystical religion, but it's the same energy going in these different directions. I don't think the characters in the book are on that page, exactly, or some of them get there and see that. And it’s not linear. There are different permutations, otherwise it'd be kind of boring. There are all these different permutations of those different lines.
And that's in the epigraph of the book. [Note: The book’s epigraph quotes from Mishnah Hagigah 2:1, “The laws of forbidden relations may not be expounded before three persons; the workings of creation before two; nor the workings of the Divine Chariot before one.”] There seems to be this connection drawn in that quote between the boundaries and unboundaries around sexuality, and the boundaries and unboundaries around God and spirituality. That definitely is central to my life. And it has been for a long time. This is the first book where I've really gone there to this extent, and I think it's not a coincidence that this is a work of fiction.
EKS: Going back to what you were saying about showing and telling and when you choose to do those things, so many of these stories are about secrets—it’s in the title—and about concealment and revelation, and when you choose to do which. It seems to me that there's a lot of power in that agency, of choosing when to reveal what. Can you tell me more about why you chose to write about secrets?
JM: It's interesting. In the first story, where it's the Chabad woman who can't stand her husband's beard, she creates all these secret ways to try to somehow get away from it. It's as if it's its own entity somehow. On the one hand, there's that agency, she's claiming power. She's voluntarily come into this very patriarchal society where women's power is so limited by power structures. And she's carving out a space where there is that agency, but it has to be kept secret, which was true of all the heretical movements in Jewish history, but also just in history. I feel like that character might also be trapped by the limits on that agency and the consequences of her actions.
I'm always fascinated by secrets and open secrets, and especially weird secrets. I'm really interested in unusual religious secrets, Mormonism’s secret doctrines, for example, or Scientology's secret doctrines. I'm not Mormon or Scientologist, but I know a little bit about the Jewish ones. And they're weird. I think that's really interesting. I say ‘weird’ not as a judgment, but as I find that so compelling. The fact that 80% of U.S. Evangelicals think the rapture is going to happen in the next few decades. That's fascinating if they really believe that. It's one thing if they're just checking a box, but they say that they really believe it's gonna happen. That means the end of the world, right? Of course, a lot of people on the left would say, also, the end of the world is coming, but maybe through climate change and climate disaster and sciencey things rather than the rapture. So it's interesting that there's folks on the right and the left who might agree, even though we disagree about the reasons.
There's also this tension between the hidden and the manifest and what's real. I don't want to dictate what I think the title of the story of the book means. But there's this constant push-pull of, What is the secret? Is the secret that there isn't a secret? One of my teachers, Rachel Elior, she was my dissertation advisor, I have a PhD in religion, in Kabbalah, and she wrote a whole book about Jewish mysticism as an expression of freedom that was created by very subjugated, persecuted people—Jews in medieval Europe. They created a secret world in which they had all the power over the universe. Because the whole universe depended on the performance of mitzvot and theurgy and they could even influence God. And these are people who had no power. And so the creation of that secret world, it goes back to your point about science fiction. It's this fictional world that creates all this power, but at the same time, it takes you out of this world. So for those Jews in medieval Europe, they didn't have a choice, they couldn't attain freedom in this world. But for those of us who do have that opportunity, or that choice, it's this, for me, endlessly fascinating tension.
EKS: Right now, in the aftermath of October 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza, I think many American Jews are feeling perhaps more isolated from and more united with various communities and groups than in other moments in recent memory. Your stories touch a lot on community, both in queerness and in Judaism, and on what it means to be alone and what it means to be together. How do you think this collection is coming to meet and interact with this current moment right now?
JM: I had to rediscover after October 7 the kind of Jewishness that I actually like. I have my political stuff, I have been writing a lot on the war. But the kind that I actually like is closer to what's in the book, actually, these weird mystical byways and kind of peculiar subcultures. And that I can affirm unequivocally. There is not ambivalence or tension in the love of that weirdness and Jewish forms of weirdness. Maybe there's a place for that as a point of reconnection. I think, particularly more on the left, there's an appreciation of the diaspora Jewish culture that's pretty rich sometimes, it's a pretty deep engagement. It's not just bagels and cream cheese. It's a real engagement with radical Yiddish cultures of the past and present or other examples of that. And, in a way, this book fits in there a little bit. It's not about Yiddish culture, but there is this cultural richness that I think is really fascinating and deep and problematic. In a weird way, maybe sitting on a sofa is finding my kind of Jewish community, and this is how we do community.
