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,
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 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.
WHY IS A calendar important? (Aside from telling us when to spring forward and fall back, that is.)
One answer comes from our Torah, where G?d tells Moses and Aaron that “this month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). The context: Nine plagues have been sent against Pharaoh and his country. Following a hint of the final and most terrible plague – the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, in direct consequence of Pharaoh’s identical edict against Jewish infants – G?d wants the Jews to mark forever afterward our going-forth from slavery.
But to do that, we first require a calendar – the first mitzvah given to us as a nation.
Slaves don’t need a calendar. They work when ordered to, until commanded to stop. Free people, on the other hand, can organize their time however they wish, so our ancient sages organized the Jewish calendar to be both lunar and solar. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, its months follow the phases of the moon, with seasons following the position of the sun. In seven years out of nineteen, we add an extra month so as not to, for example, eventually celebrate Pesach (Passover) in the wintertime.
The communal Pesach lamb-feast is the second mitzvah given to us as a nation. So important is this event to our identity that this week’s Torah portion also includes four different directives commanding us to tell our children just what happened on this most momentous of dates.
Perhaps that’s why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” And that’s the perfect kavvanah (intention) to hold as we enter into Shabbat!
SO. MY 89-YEAR-OLD father entered a Jacksonville hospice yesterday following a week-long bout of very severe pneumonia/COPD (reports vary) and attendant complications. When I spoke with him by phone, his speech was slurred as he said, “It’s been a wild ride.” Those may have been his last words to me; I don’t know if he was talking about the illness, which robbed him of his natural optimism, or his life in general – the latter being very full with people he loved and who loved him in return. He taught me to be a mensch and how to appreciate eating and cooking (especially the adventurous variety), classic comedy, baseball, Slack, music, generosity, thrift, and “the little things in life you treasure.” (See more at “Why I Love My Dad.”)
As Dad would say, “C’est la vie.” I believe he will eventually be at peace.
But dammit — he will be missed.
(And today, the 23rd of January, at 2:40pm Eastern, he is. Terribly. BD”E, Dad, and welcome to the What-Was.)
“Now is never just a moment. The long now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.”
— Brian Eno, cofounder of the Long Now Foundation
OUR SMALL COTERIE WAS IN Oakland in 1989, and in that aftermind imbued by any Grateful Dead concert: happy, playful, joyful and a wee bit mischievous.
We were also ravenously hungry, so on the way back to the car we stopped halfway through Chinatown and took in a restaurant crowded with locals. Somehow and somewhere along the way, I had acquired a small chip of dry ice and was amusing myself (and the others) by tossing it about inside my top hat. But once we were seated, I realized I needed to divest myself of my acquisition.
So I dropped it in the hot teapot sitting in the middle of our table.
You may imagine the scene which unfolded next. (No? Well, then: imagine a thick column of steam roiling up from the pot’s spout, expanding outward along the ceiling to the edge of the room, and slowly creeping down the upper part of the walls. Silence reigned among the astonished diners, while I sat there wearing my best “I meant to do that” face. Got it now?)
The rest of our meal passed in peace and relative quiet, concluding with an enormous tip and profuse thanks to the unsmiling owner.
It’s a wonder he didn’t kick us out. I guess you can’t argue with physics.
A KEY PHRASE in this week’s Torah portion of Va’eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35) reveals much about the state of mind of our centuries-long Egyptian slavery. It happens after G?d tells Moses to proclaim that G?d will liberate our ancestors and bring them home to the Land of Promise.
However, nobody pays attention: “Moshe spoke to the B’nei Yisrael, but they would not listen to Moshe because of [their] shortness of wind and hard labor” (Exodus 6:9; Metsudah Publications translation).
The Hebrew word translated by Metsudah as “wind” is “ruach,” which can also mean “breath” or “spirit;” Jewish mystical tradition teaches that ruach is the spiritual element connecting our physicality (“nefesh”) to our inner spark of G?dliness (“neshama”). Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates our verse’s second half as “…but in the brokenness of their spirit and brutal labor they did not listen to him.”
It’s very hard for the continually (and generationally) traumatized to work toward, or even hope for, better days. Rabbi Sacks puts it like this: “If you want to improve people’s spiritual situation, you must first improve their physical situation. … Alleviating poverty, curing disease, ensuring the rule of law, and respecting human rights: these are spiritual tasks no less than prayer and Torah study. To be sure, the latter are higher, but the former are prior. People cannot hear G?d’s message if their spirit is broken and their labor harsh.”
Words to ponder as we all continue to hope for, and work toward, a better world.
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