A FUNERAL IS A GROUP of people standing around talking about someone they’d rather be talking to.
Sometimes I Hate This Job
I’M PUTTING OFF WRITING A eulogy. Doesn’t everyone?
Linda Tomback is a good friend who used to attend our Saturday morning Torah study. Her death is the eighth in our congregation in the past two years; the first two were also regular members of our study group — a cantankerously proud “old-school Reform Jew” named Larry Giller, and big enthusiastic ba’al teshuvah (returnee to Judaism) Steve Surtshin.
Then Richard Bien, with whom I enjoyed some intense Torah and life discussions but didn’t know as well as I would have liked; Esther Norton, whip-tough and smart and motherly generous; Paul Habas, tall and formal, devastating sense of humor; Margaret Laybourn, cherished by many friends but someone I only saw across the oneg table; and the gentle yet formidable Richard Newman, who taught me why we have principles — and how to live by them.
“Each man’s death diminishes me,” John Donne wrote. True, it’s our common fate — less evitable even than taxes, since we share it with everyone fish or plant or fungus — but when it happens within a small social group within a small historical moment, Donne’s truth rattles rather loudly.
Linda’s funeral is this afternoon. I have not attended any of the above friends’ funerals either due to medical complications (mine), privacy (the family’s), or ignorance (again mine); in fact the last funeral I attended was Jim “Sputnik” Gjerde‘s in 2003. He was about the best friend I had, of 24 years through high school and young manhood and whatever our particular manhood is; as Shakespeare might have said, our lives were seated on the ground telling ribald stories of the lives of kings until we rang the chimes at midnight. His death undid me, and frankly rather soured me on the whole prospect. “Death? Pfffft. What else is on?”
Funnily enough, I said a few words at Sputnik’s funeral too.
Torah study is a lot like golf, in that you can really get to know someone while you’re doing it; it demands openness and honesty and the sort of integrity that’s perhaps better called consistency. I didn’t know Linda long — only two years or somewhat less — but she was a lot like Sputnik: intense, smart, funny, kind, instantly easy to hang out with, generous beyond measure, unselfconscious in her approach to God and Its mysterious ways.
Maybe those ways are less mysterious to her now, and she’s hanging out with Sputnik and Larry and Steve and Richard and Esther and Paul and Margaret and Richard and whoever it is that you miss, when you think of conversations you can’t have. I don’t know; I don’t think I will know until my own death, and perhaps not even then. But I have told you their names because, according to one voice of Jewish tradition, they contain our souls, and thus live on with each mention, and who knows but that might be true, in some sense. May we all partake of this, or similar, immortality, or at least the comfort that pondering it may bring.
Perfuming Smacks (was Wadi, Inner Quay)
MORE ON THE EFFABLE FRAMING of ineffability: Back in November, I wrote a flashfictional fable (or, if you will, a flashfable [term (c) 2010 Neal Ross Attinson]) “Awe and Inquiry”. I called it that because it seemed an apt metaphor for one variety of spiritual experience (plus, I like the way it sets up the punchline).
Once it scrolls off the front page, I tend to forget what I’ve written. Imagine my pleasure to find “Awe and Inquiry” being read, not once, but several times — onvce a day for the last couple weeks, in fact. According to my .log files, it’s sweeping Eurasia one computer at a time: England, Sweden, Denmark, Ukraine, Moscow, the Netherlands, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and, just this evening, Prague.
I have no idea why, but it doesn’t seem to be a series of globetrotting bots so much as a closed connection within the (real and original) Matrix. To everyone who’s wandered by here, including the Brit who found me while Googling “Robert anton wilson recipe golem” on his or her iPhone: thank you for reading. Really, thank you. After all — it’s why I write.
UPDATE (3/28/10): I just had a closer look at my logs; %$#@!ing spammers is what it is, bouncing off of various anonymizers. Which is still interesting, but more depressing in light of my original take … especially in the sense of my baby “Awe and Inquiry” being understood by anyone but me. Ah, well. Back to the keyboard.
Another Roadside Definition
FUNNY THING ABOUT DEFINING GOD: Despite the impossibility of the task, it does draw one’s imagination and eloquence (or directness, if you’re lucky). I made a stab at it in http://metaphorager.net/working-definition/, tried to understand my understanding in /four-points-of-contact/ and reflected on how I got there in /judaism-as-art/. But waking from a nice Shabbat nap this afternoon, the thought occurred:
“God is the face of the Universe looking back at us.”
Wit Dealers
TERSE WORDSMITHS, ATTEND: WEIRD TALES, that neo-venerable publication whose pages were graced by the first fruits of H.P. Lovecraft and Tennessee Williams, is currently accepting submissions for One Minute Weird Tales, which they describe as “sharp little micro-stories of 20 to 150 words, presented in a quick sequence of brief one-screen chunks.” (See more at http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/contact/submission-guidelines/; AC, RS and DH, ferstehen?)
This Week In Torah: Vayak’hel/Pekudei
VAYAK’HEL/PEKUDEI (Exodus 35:1-40:38; haftarot I Kings 7:51-8:21 and, because Nisan starts on Tuesday making this a special Rosh Chodesh Shabbat, Ezekiel 45:16-46:18) WRAPS UP THE BOOK of Exodus by building the Tabernacle: the traveling God-tent whose structure and contents are so lovingly detailed in the previous four portions. After making certain that all the parts are laid out and accounted for, Moses proceeds to assemble the people’s manifold contributions into a single coherent whole — after which “the kavod (honor, glory, gravitas) of Adonai filled the Tabernacle.”
At the beginning of Vayakhel, God asks Moses to assemble “the generous-hearted … the wise-hearted … all of the Israelite community” — the distinction being that the generous provide the materials and the wise shape them into meaning. Earlier commentators might see this “those who can, do — those who can’t, contribute” metaphor as a prooftext for community support of Torah scholars (or one’s synagogue!). But another meaning might be that building the sacred — especially sacred community — requires each member to provide the raw ingredients and wrestle them into place; to be and to become; bumping along together, shaping each other and being shaped into something that (we hope) looks a little more like God than it did before.
Shavua tov, gut woch and have a nice week,
Reb Neal (from our synagogue e-letter)
Preface: Across the Rimless Sea
These fables are self-contained excerpts from the picaresque hopepunk work, The Cook For Any Price: Across the Rimless Sea. Because the tales encompass a world of spectacular landscapes and forgotten ruins, teeming with vastly different and occasionally commingled cultures, religions, prophecies, species and cuisines, those curious to explore it may benefit from the following helpful words.
ACROSS THE RIMLESS SEA LIE the Exilic Lands, where dreams come to die – or so say the coffeehouse wits of Soharis. But they are a cynical lot, and often fervent in their presumptions.