Those Who Know, Chuckle.
DEAR PATIENT READER (and anyone else who happens by),
Please enjoy this mellow mix of rusty recollections, offbeat observations, friendly particularism, tasty recipes, unpretentious poetry, entertaining quotes, recreational science, and wry spirituality. And if you’re eager to meet my short-story hero Prosatio Silban, the self-defrocked holyman in a fantastic land who ekes out a meager but honest living as a mercenary cook, allow me to introduce you!
Thank you for your patronage, and be well,
HERE’S THE AGONY: As an American, I am angered and appalled by the unilateral, unconstitutional, and undiscussed-with-Congress decision to bomb Iran.
As a Jew, however, I am abjectly disturbed to find myself not being more bothered by it.
To be clear, I believe warfare is the most hateful, destructive occupation we humans can engage in. It speaks from and to the darkest parts of our primate psyches. It doesn’t care who gets in the way or how – you’ve heard of “the fog of war?” – and in most cases, leaves nothing behind save broken bodies and broken souls. And while sometimes necessary, war should be the very last resort of diplomacy. It is too-often invoked by politicians who’ve never fought in one and who don’t care about the human waste involved.
And yet …
The Iranian government has been a deadly threat to Israel and the Jewish people since its emergence as a theocracy. It lines the pockets of enthusiastic murderers from Hamas to Hezbollah, in places as far apart as Bondi Beach and Buenos Aires, and has made very plain its desire to kill every last Jew on our planet. It is not this world’s only dangerous government – far from it – but it is one of the most far-reaching and single-minded, and (dare I say) successful.
So that’s my conflict. Do I want war? No. Do I want anybody to die? No. But I also don’t want the necessity of armed guards standing watch outside my place of communal worship. I don’t want to have to shield the kids I teach from the knowledge that there are people who want them dead, simply because of who and what they are. And I don’t want to live in a world where evil can take on such gleefully cruel forms.
These are my raw feelings, and to speak from my heart, they scare me. Deeply. My co-pilot the therapist says it’s possible, and even normal, to hold conflicting emotions at the same time. While I know that’s true, being opposed to and grudgingly in favor of this war is shattering me.
THE ETERNAL is one of the many, many translations for יהוה – a mostly untranslatable Hebrew divine moniker or “theonym” (which term I just now learned – thank you, Wikipedia!) connected with a form of the cognate “to be.” It appears in the Torah (Exodus 3:15) right after another theonym, אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be”) in Ex. 3:14, where Moses asks G?d what Name to tell the enslaved Jews who will question his authority to speak on G?d’s behalf. “The Eternal” takes the “to be” ball and runs with it, in the sense/concept of G?d existing forever and ever, outside of spacetime, infinite and unknowable. (We could get all mystical and Qabalistic at this point, nattering on about lofty Ain Sof (transcendence) v. folksy Shekhina (immanence), but let’s save that for another time – no pun intended.)
This is one of my favorite Names for that-which-some-people-call-God: some are creative, others traditional, each unique. If you want to see your favorite here, but haven’t, send it along with the subject line “365 Names” and let us know whether or not you want to be credited.
RECENTLY, THE PRESTIGIOUS Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on a Jewish Federations of North America survey concerning whether or not American Jews self-identified as “Zionists” – a touchy topic in these touchy times. JTA’s editor asked JTA readers the same question, and I said this:
If identifying as a Zionist means supporting a Jewish state as a refuge and gathering-place, acting as a light unto the nations by setting a good example and living in peace with its neighbors – even if it means having to be well-armed in order to do that – then yes, most definitely count me in. If it means picking fights with defenseless civilians based on some tweaked notion of ethnocultural superiority, then no, I guess I’m out.
Put more simply: I fully support Israel’s existence and achievements, but decidedly not its current government. I don’t know what that makes me label-wise, but I get the feeling I’m not alone.
At least, I hope not. How about you?
(A “Lunch & Learn” program following yesterday’s Shabbat-morning service. Feel free to skip it if liturgical wresting isn’t your thing.)
“Monotheism is not for wimps.” – James “Sputnik” Gjerde
Why am I beginning today’s “Lunch and Learn” with a favorite quote from one of my best and oldest friends? Because it begs a deeper question: Did our rabbis and sages alter our liturgy in response to what they thought others might think? In other words: Why did they change the unlovelier parts?
Take the example mentioned earlier during services. The second blessing in our Amidah, “Gevurot,” describing G?d as the One “Who gives life to all,” was altered from the traditional “Who gives life to the dead” in early (c. 19th Century) Reform Jewish prayerbooks. It wasn’t until 2007 that the phrase was restored, albeit as an option only, in Reform’s latest Mishkan T’filah siddur.
There’s a precedent for such liturgical substitution. Nearly two thousand years ago, our rabbis changed the quote from Isaiah they included in “Yotzer” (the first blessing after the Bar’chu). In chapter 45, verse 7 of Isaiah’s book, the prophet quotes G?d as saying “I form light and create darkness, make peace and create evil.” But our ancient liturgists changed that to “…Who makes peace and creates all” That’s the Artscroll translation; in Mishkan T’filah, it reads, “Who makes peace and fashions all things”).
Doesn’t that sound like G?d is only responsible for the good things we like, and not the bad things we don’t? But the Shema, and the Torah from which it’s taken, teaches that G?d is One! In whatever ways Jews think of G?d, this sort of dualism isn’t one of them. Yet isn’t that exactly what the liturgists’ changes seem to imply?
FOUR MORE QUESTIONS:
1. Why do you think these verses were changed, or in the case of Mishkan T’filah, optionalized?
2. How might these liturgical alterations affect our thinking about G?d?
3. Should we change those parts of our liturgy we find baffling and/or disturbing?
4. How much can we change our traditional prayers and still consider them authentic?
IT’S NO SECRET that I loathe AI.
Well, “loathe” is rather strong language, especially since I believe modern tech in general to be an evolutionary leap comparable to the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel. Let’s just say I am deeply distrustful of AI, and more than a little saddened and dismayed by how quickly and eagerly it’s infiltrated our culture, our devices, and our minds.
Fortunately, I have some Jewish ammunition backing up my “danger-Will-Robinson” disdain. In this week’s edition of The Forward‘s “Looking Forward” newsletter, Louis Keene makes a good case for why Judaism may hold the key to the AI Resistance.
“That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil,” Keene writes. “As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed [lovingkindness] and tzedakah [righteousness] or the political power of tikkun olam [“repairing the world,” sometimes understood as social action]. … Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.”
The concern among fervently religious Jews and others, Keene relates, is that anyone can feed, say, the week’s Torah portion into ChatGPT and have it spit out a sermon. But that misses the point. Knowledge shouldn’t be commodified – it should be earned through a lengthy (and rewarding) process. Ameilut means toiling for the sake of personal growth. It’s about the means, not the end; the discovery, not the destination.
A cliche, perhaps, but an apt and important one. And a warning: don’t embrace a shiny new toy without examining, or at least giving serious thought to, any consequences.
WHEN THE BLUE GOES AWAY, the black lights up.
AS YOU MAY KNOW, Stephen Colbert – one of my cultural heroes, for more reasons every time I see him – has this feature on his show called “The Colbert Questionert.” The format: after he interviews his guests, he poses them twenty questions like “What’s the best sandwich?” and “Have you ever asked anyone for their autograph?” and “Apples or oranges?” His final question is always, “Describe the rest of your life in five words.”
Last week, one of his guests was the always intense, always entertaining Weird Al Yankovic. After being put through his interrogatory paces, Weird Al summed up the rest of his life thus:
“Be kind. Bring joy. Repeat.”
‘Nuf said. Me too. Right?
– Definition: adj expressing or of the nature of necessary truth or absolute certainty
– Used in a sentence: Edward R. Murrow was the exemplar of apodictic American journalism.
– Why: Because it’s easier to spell and less overused than “paradigmatic”
SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.
XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
“Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear?”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
AT MY DAD’S shiva minyan tonight, came a moment that caught my breath.
Roughly two-dozen fellow congregants had turned out in our synagogue’s sanctuary to help my copilot and I navigate the choppy waters of fresh grief as Jews have done for millennia: tearing the black ribbon that we had pinned on each other, praying the ancient weeknight service, sharing memories of the decedent, saying the Mourners’ Kaddish, and sharing a post-service nosh. All very halachic, heimishe, and loving.
But what really touched me was just before saying Kaddish, our rabbi (who had popped in from sabbatical to conduct the service) asked for whom else the assembled mini-multitude were also currently saying Kaddish. As each name was quietly offered, I thought, So this is why we mourn together as a community. We are none of us alone – we’re also members of a dead-relatives club. And it helps to know that. Viscerally. And very much.
To quote Spider Robinson: “Shared grief is lessened; shared joy is increased.”
Looking forward to that latter. May it come not soon enough.
(An adjunct and extension of the previous message, this one is a sermon I delivered Friday night [even though I’m writing this on Friday afternoon] – evidence of Time’s weird curling ways. As always, feel free to skip it if you’re not into this sort of thing.)
TIME. Is it really on our side? According to this week’s Torah portion, that’s all a matter of perspective.
In Exodus 12:2, G?d commands Moses and Aaron: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Having and marking a calendar was the first mitzvah given to us as a nation, even before we left Egyptian slavery.
Why is that important? Because free people need calendars to arrange their lives – slaves don’t.
In his book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” But what exactly is time?
On a micro-level, time is a property of the complex and mysterious motions of atoms. Up where we live, however, we need a more useful definition. Enter Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Rabbi Sacks tells us that time can be conceived in two ways. The first is “cyclical” or “mythic” time. It’s the time referred to by Ecclesiastes: plants and people and weather and seasons pass from being to nonbeing and back again. This is also the time of Fate and Destiny – unchanging, monotonous, predictable.
The second sort of time Rabbi Sacks describes is “historical” time. This is more random and less predictable than the first: An unknown future flows into the present to become fixed in the past. Anything can happen, and often does.
Jews – optimists and outliers that we are – live by a third type of time. It’s helpful to think of it as “spiral” or “corkscrew” time – the latter an appropriate analogy for the wine-rich Valley of the Moon. Every birthday and anniversary, every holiday and Torah reading finds us having grown just a little bit more. Each recurring event brings us farther along from our humble past and, so our tradition teaches us, that much closer to the promise of a glorious future.
Seen this way, the moments of our lives are more like souvenir stands than destinations, more like crossroads than dead ends. So my question tonight is, “What souvenirs have you collected? In other words, what events or moments helped shape you from the person you were to the person you’re becoming?”
[pass mic]
Thank you, everyone. May your road ahead be familiar enough for comfort, yet unusual enough for exploration. Shabbat shalom.
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