Torah

First-Step Messiah

CONSIDERING THE GREAT POTENTIAL CONTAINED in most human beings, and the difficulty we have getting started on projects, perhaps we might accordingly revise our notions of messianism. The Re-(or Un-)born King may not set things right so much as give us the tools and gumption we need (or point out that we’ve had them all along). After all, getting started is the hardest start to any project. Perhaps we just need a little push and can take it from there.(1)

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(1) Disclaimer: This being Monday morning, I tend not to believe in a literal Messiah. In fact, I tend not to believe in a Messiah at all unless as metaphor or if I have a really, really bad headache. But “believe as thou wilt shall be the hole in the Law.”

Eats, Life

Pithyism #12

YOU’RE BETTER OFF THAN MOST if your dinner worries concern what, rather than whether, to eat.

Writ

Days Like Doors

THERE ARE DAYS WHICH OPEN into unglimpsed circles that inspire and uplift.
And there are days which close the heart like a fist.
There are days when the angels sing within range of human ear
And days when all you hear is chopping.
There are days like green hills, a-prance with lambs,
And days like rotting undergrowth, a-stench with mold.
All these days are given unto you,
like gloves God wears when He’s fixing something special
like small wandering children seeking a hand in the dark
like the door that opens into silence and light.

Life

“What A Time We Might Have Had”

THE TITLE IS TAKEN FROM a line in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, and it always comes to mind when I hear someone (or myself) voice a semiserious regret. I don’t carry many of these — not out of “holiness;” it just doesn’t occur to me — and I only say it out loud whenever Ann or I regret something trivial: “Our favorite Twilight Zone episode was on last night” or “The store was out of Brand X” or even “Looks like they’re not repealing the Patriot Act.” It’s part of the private language of people who’ve been together long enough to know and willingly co-conspire with each other’s zigs, zags and wild-eyed lunacies.

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Crit, Life

Pithyism #24

A GOOD DAY IS ONE in which the artist heaves a stone and the ripples wash up smiles and murmurs.

(Or, put another way, “Blessed be the One who makes the makers.” I don’t know that one needs to “believe” in a “Creator” (or even a “creator”) for that metaphor to work. I hope not. A friend who’s a nurse speaks of the contention-avoiding “Design Group,” which both sounds cool and works well whether you take literally “impersonal forces,” Genesis 1:26 or anything in between. It’s a fine sport to find the universal metaphor embodying the idea of First Cause-ness outside of a specific agency, or even necessity. The Talmud attributes the creation of miracles to the evening of the last day of Creation itself — miracles as nothing more than well-timed and -intended natural occurrences — to which someone added “Including (blacksmith) tongs, which were made with tongs.” When I speak of First Causenesslessness, or even God, it is to just this sort of chicken-or-egg, we’re-all-here-now paradoxical origin as shrouded in mystery as the moment the first fish slithered ashore into the evolutionary chain. Somewhere or somewhen is a moment past which everything was different: the tongs were used, the chicken hatched, the amphibian evolved. It really doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that creating puts your hands on the moment of creation (or, if you like, the Moment of Creation). It brings something into the world that wasn’t there before — among other things, beauty, solidified intent, and self-evidence of simple existence.)

(None of which, unfortunately, fits on a bumpersticker. Ah, conciseness! thou’rt a fickle mistress.)

Life

Introductions

SOMETHING HOLY/TENDER/FRAGILE/GIDDY THERE IS ABOUT someone introducing a member of one world to a member of another: as, one’s relatives to one’s colleagues, one’s colleagues to one’s friends, one’s friends to one’s relatives.

It’s more than just a person-to-person connection. We embroider each other with so many memories and associations that it’s sometimes difficult to see who we’re looking at. Introductions help us clear away the clutter. We can’t help but see what and how the introducee sees: someone new to learn, some bigger but unglimpsed circle to explore.

Our worlds have edges. Introductions show us where they are; and, sometimes, melt into more world.

Torah

Instant Everywhere

FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I shall unite the Universe.

Ready?

It is Now as I write this; it is Now as you read it.

(Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be here all week.)