a movie review

This is being dictated into my phone and I don't know how to do punctuation and back spaces and things like that so there's a lot of not that here. 

I sat down to watch karate Kid Legends this evening simply because it existed and I thought it was probably a good idea for me to have some idea of what's going on in the world. The movie what there was of it did not fail to disappoint to fail or vice versa I'm not sure which. the writers took the inherently complicated story which haunts the Karate Kid universe and stripped it down so that there were no confusing subplots or complicated, well, plots. It boiled down to two young men punching each other to the delight of the irresponsible quasi adults that are the hallmark of the millennial identity.

I made that last part up. Did that sound reasonable to you?

Anyway the movie is relatively short somewhat harmless and it has a few good cameos and it's also got some really horrible acting a lot of punching and foreshadowing and all the other things that make for a movie so this certainly qualifies as such the end.

High Holiday prayers - a question

Today we have the result of very little research but a mind wandering throughout synagogue services on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana.

In terms of the Jewish liturgy through the year, one thing that we don't do very much is repeat prayers. There are very few times when we are told "say this x number of times". Usually, when we pray, we say and we move on. There are exceptions through the year. Based on my zero research and doing this entirely from memory, our repetitions through the year are limited to two verses said when the Torah is taken out of the ark on a holiday which happens on a weekday, and a few statements made during the sanctification of the new moon. That's it. While there are prayers that we say more than once a day, each time we say it is a discrete instance, separate from the others.

Then we hit the high holidays and suddenly we are swamped with prayers that we repeat. Before we blow the shofar, we say a chapter of Psalms 7 times. When we do kaparot, we recite it 3 times. Yom Kippur is bookended by the repetitions (three times for Kol Nidrei and then the culminating repetition of the Sh'ma and other phrases 3 and 7 times at the end). Suddenly, we say things over and over.

What is it about the high holidays that makes repetition so essential?

twenty-four years later

 My experiences have become history. What I see when I close my eyes is now fodder for history textbooks. Students in high school hear my stories as if they happened in another country, in another lifetime.

As time passes, our memories bcome distilled down to the essence, the few and striking facts that stand out and which we enshrine in our long-term memory, rife with sensory details to make the scene complete. But it doesn't seem like that's fair.

Twenty-four years -- longer than a lifetime, almost a quarter century. How much are we allowed to keep hurting? When are we supposed to move on or forget, because in some ways, I can't do either. Look at video from the Hindenburg disaster; it looks like it was recorded at another time. Even video from Pearl Harber -- it still looks separated by years. But look at the video from 9/11. It could have been recorded yesterday. Cars look pretty much the same. Buildings? The same. The quality of the recording? It looks current. It is easier for the past to become part of the past if we can distance ourselves fom it and consider it archaic. This is why, when we recall religiously significant dates and events, we are driven to picture ourselves as being part of the event so it does not become an empty ritual recalling a distant and irrelevant past.

Do we want to keep living with 9/11 as current events? Isn't it, though? Aren't we still living in the shadow of 2001? But at the same time, High School students see the day in the same way that they look at any other ancient history. We have moved on so now the question is, how tdo we want to hold on to it and do we want to keep it fresh so that we feel the pain acutely, or should we let it become the dull throb that we get used to over time?

I look at the sad moments of my life (dating back to the religious ones) and I see that tere will always be this tension between embracing the now and living as part of a heritage and storied history.

I don't know if I want to remember, but I have been brought up to know the importance of not forgetting.