Animal Farm

The Book: Animal Farm, A Fairy Story. Author: George Orwell. Satire.

Review by our esteemed guest Rabbi, Harav Shtreimel Dear, who was kind enough to employ his popular pen and sharp knife to serve us this almost-kosher, great review/opinion-piece on Animal Farm. (Oh, don't you mooo me! I said 'almost kosher'.)

[Applause]

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"תורה איז דער בעסטע סחורה!"

"ס'בעסער צי לערענען די הייליגער תורה, מער ווי אלע גאלד אין זילבער"

My kids like to sing it in chorus, as did I, as a youngster, as we all liked to. That is what we are implanted in cheider from day one, with the very first lick of honey.

This week I tried a little experiment to see how much of the mantra really jammed their thinking. I took out two packs of gum from the cabinet and offered my boys a choice:

“Would you rather we learn a little, or would you prefer a gum?” I asked them separately.

Oh, what a tough question.

* * *

“Animal Farm” by George Orwell is similar in style to his later novel “1984” and as thought provoking.

British farm animals, frustrated with the laborious tasks they have to undertake daily for the benefit of humans, successfully overthrow their oppressors and govern themselves as a collective, or as a communist state. Sadly, the pigs, the smartest of all animals, take advantage of their situation and convince the other animals that their life has changed for the better while ‘readjusting’ (deducting) their meager rations. From the 7 original commandments, commandments that looked so great on paper, or painted on the wall, as was the case in Animal Farm, only one commandment stayed, and in a very corrupted version.

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Orwell started writing the novel back in 1943, a time when communism was still seen as the epitome of socialism, when Stalin was still the greatest comrade, and McCarthy still served as a captain in the US Marine Corps. The book smartly depicts the sad nature of power and its corruption, and how with the right propaganda you can ruse entire nations (or farms) to follow whimsical resolutions and self-destroying projects, not to mention following orders in the name of the “party” that clearly violate the rules of the party itself.

Of course, conservatives all over used his writings as propaganda to push forward their causes. Orwell, while prophetically alert to human nature, remained committed to socialism his whole life. What he lectured against was the corruption of great ideas by using “doublespeak” (a word he would invent a few years later).

The allegorical animals have been masticated ad nauseum. The quarrelsome pigs unmistakably symbolize Trotsky and Stalin, and the others have been found to resemble other figures of communist Russia, but it wouldn’t take much for us, Chasidim raised in our schools, to notice the similarities to our own life, to see the connotation to the corruption of some good ideas that the Torah originally stood for and mainly to be amused by a religion that resorts to slogans and phrases that need to be imbedded in the brain from childhood on.

The experimentation I tried on my kids wasn’t really necessary. Kids are kids, and you know what they will chose. No use in trying to prove a point to their father either.

The older one smirked dejectedly, said he likes the Torah, but for now he prefers the gum. My younger son stood forlornly, not knowing how to handle himself. Apparently to this very moment he hasn’t thought of applying his ‘love for the Torah over anything else’ theorem in practice. It didn’t take him long to come up with the same line as his older brother.

I got some hope in the future generation…