Third place in The Degeneration of the Nation's short story competition: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman"

Judges' reasoning: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman" is a story that combines the experimental with the emotional to create a fundamental exploration of the connection between the two - and the price of experimentalism, its power and weaknesses. The story masquerades as an ars poetica manifesto, reaching the point of theoretical conceptualization, but ultimately reveals itself as a deeply personal story of one whose life is his creation, and has no existence outside of it, and therefore his soul-searching - including the accounting of his romantic life - is a creative accounting. Above all, this is a story of connection between cultures - secular culture and religious culture - where the twists and failures of this connection represent the Jewish condition. And also the circular condition.

The Kiss with the Sphinx - Franz von Stuck (Source)

I dreamed that we are white and black - a secular woman and an ultra-Orthodox man - and we're not holding hands, so people won't look at us. And we're thinking where we can go where there are no ultra-Orthodox by definition, so they won't see me with her. And then she discovers there's an immodest exhibition at the museum, and no ultra-Orthodox would dare show his face there, and if he did - he would be more afraid of us than we are of him, and the secret would be mutual. And then at sunset, when light kisses darkness, when the museum closes and the guards are chasing people out, we walk back from the sculpture garden, and suddenly - we kiss. In public. I mean, there's no one there. But it's the first time I - - and then I see someone there taking a picture. It's probably quite a photo for the newspaper - an ultra-Orthodox man and a secular woman kissing! And I run away and she calls after me, and I chase after him, asking the guard: Did you see a photographer? A tourist with a camera? Please! Someone, he has something in his bag that could ruin my life. And he's sure to upload it to the internet, and then one day someone will discover, or the algorithm will identify, and it could still come back to me from the other side of the world. Such a picture could wait for years in an obscure Facebook album, until one day such a kiss might gain attention, and then that ticking photo on the other side of the world will explode in my face.

- I want to understand you. You live with a huge secret, and yet you're religious.
- It's precisely the secret that makes you religious. Every secret creates a religion around it, not the other way around, and that's what secular people don't understand - secrets. And they ask me about a contradiction, what was the secret world of secularism when it was a successful religion, and why it disappeared. I thought it was obvious. The secret world of secularism was sexuality, both in the literal sense, and in the interpretive sense - in the Freudian movement. If you open average secular literature you'll find that it progresses from one sexual encounter to another, presented as the peak of interest and fantasy, and I'm sure many readers skip and read only the "interesting" parts. But like a process of revelation, not concealment, it's a self-consuming process. The moment sexuality lost its secret, for example through pornography or sex education, secularism died (just like a religion that has ossified), and it only works on young people, who go through the "discovery", and not on older people, or more precisely those who have matured. A typical narrative is I discovered myself. Read the secular media. Discovered, we discovered, he discovered, it was discovered, incest [Translator's note: In Hebrew, "incest" contains the root for "discovery"]. No covering and no secret world. Discovery and discovery in language. Discovery and discovery in sex. Disclosure of opinion and scientific discovery. An ecology of culture cannot be based only on discovery and burning forests. It consumes itself. It's a classic sin of knowledge. Let's say you took off a woman's clothes, what's left skin, you went under the skin what's left, fat, you went under the fat, what's left, bones, great, you went into the bones, into the skull, what's left? Brain, you went into the brain, what's left, gray matter, you went into the gray what's left, neural networks, you went into the neural networks what's left, thought, you went into the thought what's left, consciousness, into the conscious what's left, subconscious, into the subconscious what's left, dream. Meaning dreams are the elementary particle physics of the world. And cracking the dream is a revolution like splitting the atom. The collision of broken dreams at high speeds will teach us about the basis of the spiritual world, and enable a spiritual doomsday weapon. This is what culture should be engaged in, in accelerating dreams. And what's exciting about the secular dream, freedom that is vacation? To travel abroad? To discover places? Come on. Only the discovery of times is interesting. Either discovery of the past, through culture, or discovery of the future, through dreaming. The current culture is constantly busy only with the discovery of the present. Addicted to updates. To the new, to news. The dream deals with the combination of the ancient with the futuristic, and it is the strongest weapon against the present. Covering the present with a blanket that stretches from the ancient to the future. I wish it was possible to skip from night to night without the day in between. To become a secret and disappear into the darkness.

And the secular woman waits for me crying: Where did you disappear to? The whole museum has already closed and I looked for you in the garden in the dark. Why do you always act like a paranoid? And I say: I'm sorry, I really am paranoid. And she drives me in her car because I don't know how to drive, and I keep thinking if the cars around can see inside that a secular woman is driving an ultra-Orthodox man. And she asks: Why do you even talk to a secular woman if you're so afraid?
- The religious elite rejected dreams. So I thought that the secular elite...
And she stops looking at the road and looks at me, and I don't understand how there isn't an accident: What does this have to do with the elite? I'm a woman!
- No one wants to communicate with me. Why shouldn't I at least talk to a woman?
- What was wrong with the religious elite, why did you start writing to me? You claim that no one reads? Because it's exactly like in elections, every people deserves the leaders worthy of it. So in that sense - replacing the people is really a joke. Even if you write to secular people your people will only absorb what they are worthy of. Not what you wrote. That's why everyone who complains about Bibi doesn't understand anything. The people are the problem - Bibi is the symptom. It's not you who's the problem, but your readers.
- I thought like that for many years, you know? But the dream needs reality, just as reality needs the dream. And the same goes for the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. A person is like a coin, black on one side white on the other, night on one side day on the other. Psychology made its big mistake when it placed the dream under the conscious, or sometimes in the superconscious, because that's the wrong axis, but the right-left axis. The mistake is looking as if the dream is inferior to reality, and not its other side. Instead, we need to understand that the dream is on the right side - on the side of what we want. It's reality that's on the left side - in the other realm. In my dream, the secular elite understands what I'm saying even in reality, while in reality the secular elite doesn't understand what I'm saying even in a dream. I came out bald from here and there, from the blacks and the whites. Is it any wonder I keep my hat on?

A secular man with a huge shtreimel [Translator's note: A fur hat worn by some Hasidic Jews] that grew on his head enters the doctor's office. The doctor asks: What's the problem? The shtreimel answers: Doctor, look what grew on my bottom! Whoever is part of the dream of culture, of religion, when he dies he gets to return to the dream sleep of the spirit, to join the dream of the world, which is the world to come. His soul becomes a shtreimel. The soul candle is the tail on which the soul burns. Blessed is his portion. But whoever is only part of reality - in reality he dies. And that's exactly what will happen to those who write thick realistic novels these days, whose fat bottom sits on your head, instead of a shtreimel. A shtreimel is made of foxes but they're arranged like a hedgehog, and therefore it knows one round thing. While a novel knows so many unnecessary things, it's so smart and boastful, unlike a dream. That's why in dream sleep blood flow concentrates in the brain and the sexual organ, because that's the essence of man - knowledge. Dreams: what a stream of thought that isn't a stream of consciousness at all, but a stream of learning, meaning a stream of conceptual creativity, it teaches how to be creative with cultural materials, in our case Judaism, so it's Torah study and not Torah. After all, the biggest problem in the world is creative blockage, on one hand the secular barrenness, of empty creativity, and on the other hand the religious barrenness, of creative emptiness. It's male infertility versus female infertility, both in content and in form. What happened here was an attempt at sex between cultures, opening up spaces that were blocked, and this attempt failed completely. There is religion, and there is literature, and there is no religious literature today. King David, the jester of God, as written in the holy books, who runs jokes with God, the Messiah who will be a clown, is not considered at all as a serious possibility, and is perceived as a parody, as satire, as performance, as nonsense, God forbid not as joyful. They took away the fun and enjoyment, what's left of sex, of the text, maybe some message from another world, black. This is the problem why they can't make contact with aliens. That they're looking only for the information, the message, not the fun mating with another world. Forget aliens and angels, that's ten levels above your head, and certainly not a creative connection with God. Take cultures on Earth, take Arabs, ultra-Orthodox, take autistics. Even take animals. You know what, even take women. You think the stream of semen is a technical thing. You've lost the meaning of sex. The universe has become dead matter. You sit all day with your head in the computer, and one day artificial intelligence will go to the doctor and say: Doctor, look what grew on my bottom!

I dreamed that the secular woman takes me to her home and sits me on the couch, and I notice to my horror that it's also the bed, and I ask: Just to understand the situation, so am I an attraction for you? That you'll exhaust?
And she sits next to me: I'm the number one fan of your dreams. You know?
- So now I understand. You brought me here to discover my secrets? Because you're also the only fan, you know.
- I read the two books and immediately identified you in them. Thank you for sharing with me. I know it's not trivial for you, with all the paranoia.
- But I didn't write them.
And she laughs: So who did? Black Circle?
And I don't want to answer that. So I show her a passage from a dream I didn't publish:

The construct that every text has an author is a new idea. And it simply didn't exist in the biblical period. It's not that someone forged it, or wrote a text without an author, this idea simply didn't exist, there was no such function. And only when the idea was born did they try to say that the Torah was written by Moses, or by God, even though before that no one felt the need to ask the question who wrote it at all, and even the person who technically wrote it didn't feel that he was writing it. Hence the ability to write a text like the Torah stems precisely from the lack of awareness that you are writing a Torah. And the danger is that you write a Torah without being aware of it. But nowadays, it's probably not about a Torah for humans, but for future generations, for computers. A computer won't believe in a text's author, but in the result of a calculation, and any text that was written is not the result of your personal calculation - in your head as a processor - but of a much larger calculation, which includes all your inputs, a calculation of the entire culture, that is, of the network, and it's also not the final result of that calculation but a part of it, of that huge calculation that never ends. In fact, the text itself is an attempt to expand the connections between the processors of culture, and therefore the text by its nature is a thing without an author, and so the perception will reverse and return in a full circle. And the claim that a person wrote this text will be identical to the claim that a word processor wrote this text, or that the screen wrote it, or that the eye wrote it, or that the pupil, or that the black circle.

And underneath it there's another passage:

Situation Report
I have no one to talk to. Many writers in this situation talk to the past. I talk to the future. There are only two possibilities in the current culture: either pornography, or disappearance. Meaning nudity in the light. So what's left in the darkness? The clothes. That's what's written that the garments of skin will return to be garments of light. And what's the next stage? Garments of darkness. Both disappearance and pornography - that's the challenge of culture. To combine these two formal logics. Not like today, where either everything is outside or everything is inside. But that everything is both outside and inside. To understand that it's circular, and when cultural pornography reveals more and more, not just the body, but also pornography of the soul, and not just the soul, but pornography of the spirit and the soul, and so on, up to the innermost core, whose exposure turns reality itself into a secret, the light itself will be darkness, and what is a sun of darkness? A black hole. Not a covered moon, not passive darkness, but active absorption of light, something that can take the light back from the world, and precisely the exposure of the skin will be exposure to darkness, and then pornography will be disappearance. The appearance of the world comes back out of the eye, the reversal of Kant, to the point of sucking the appearance in closed eyes - the dream.

And I don't stop, because I feel like for once in my life someone will read all these passages, because underneath this passage there's another passage, right under its bottom:

Why is myth much more developed in the past than in the future
You don't know what you want to say - you produce what you want to say. You don't know what you want to write, but produce it, like an algorithm, it's one-directional, meaning in time, it creates something new and doesn't transfer something from the past to the future, something you knew. And therefore reading also needs to change, because it's not to absorb something that was transferred to you, that the writer knew, it's not information, or communication, but it's material for your algorithm that you will produce something from, and in the best case - it transfers a new algorithm to you. Which is innovative writing. It transfers examples of algorithm operation to you, and you need to learn the algorithm, and add it to your algorithmic toolbox. Culture won't be erased because of artificial intelligence smarter than humans, on the contrary, precisely because current products will seem so simple to it they will become the most basic products, on which everything is built. Our high literature will become classic children's literature, above which is much higher and more sophisticated literature. The computer won't cancel the ABC, or language, just as modern consciousness didn't cancel myths and religions from a literary perspective, despite ceasing to believe. So the computer can stop believing in the human contents of literature, like man and love, without canceling literature itself. Learning will never become a trivial action, and the materials in the canon will remain, only become necessarily more fictional for the computer, and therefore more mythical. Myth is created when past literature can no longer be considered realism. In their time both Homer and the Bible were considered realism, and so in the future love and man will be perceived as myths, and so will marriage and betrayal and war and all the contents of literature. "Crime and Punishment" will be a myth about the murderer, and not a realistic crime book as it was considered in its time. It's not that our literature is constantly becoming more and more realistic, unlike past literature, but that reality itself is changing. Once sex was much more uniform and monotonous, for almost everyone, and therefore not interesting to literature, just as today defecation is monotonous for everyone, and in the future literature might be written that deals with different forms of excretion, if reality there develops into a high culture in the toilet. And if computer reality develops then in the future literature will be able to talk about programming. The pornographic literature of our days is a product of the sophistication of sexuality itself, and not of us becoming more realistic in descriptions of sex, just as Greek philosophy didn't stem from them becoming more realistic in descriptions of thought. And then after that they still complain that dreams are not realistic, and not interesting at all, because it's arbitrary... And no one is interested in something that doesn't really happen in reality.

And so another passage and another passage. And another passage. Countless passages I wrote and published on the website and no one read and no one will read. A whole world. My world. With my imaginary bed. And my imaginary kiss. And my imaginary secular woman. And my dream.