Who are you?

Ultimately, ultimately, ultimately, we will come into conflict with ourselves. Bottom line is that the various shards and facets of our identity cease to co-exist because there can be only one at the top spot. And we can dance around that eventuality and skirt it most of the time, it will find a way to make itself known. Who we are is so convoluted and complex but peel it all away and there are truths that are mutually exclusive and we have to choose.

It isn’t fun and it isn’t fair but it is the way it is. While we can try to reconcile all those disparate elements, some run so counter to others that being both is impossible. We can pride ourselves on being “modern-Orthodox” but on some base level, that hybrid is doomed to failure. Once we allow certain behaviors as functions of our modernity, then we have sold out the underlying thread which defines us as Orthodox. And, yes, to some degree, all of life is compromise for most people. Shabbat isn’t 25 hours of straight and consistent focus on the spiritual or the divine. We live in a world in which many have found how to justify reading a newspaper, chatting with friends about life and walking the dog. But the moment we employ whatever leniency in our understanding to allow that inch, our logical application of extensions tries to take the mile. If there is an eiruv designed to allow me to carry a holy book, can I carry my keys? Once I allow my keys, what about a newspaper? Or a game? Or a ball?

If I am in a building, so I don’t have to worry about the limitations of the eiruv’s rules, can I do something which is not inherently breaking the rules but isn’t in the nebulous “spirit” of the Sabbath? Am I keeping the day’s intention with or without inspecting the minutiae?

A current question surrounds a sports figure who, though he seems to abide by the various trappings of religion, chooses to play on the Sabbath. Does this encourage young people to opt in favor of competition on the Sabbath as the new and accepted/sanctioned normal? Is it bad enough that we silently condone, but this elevates the behavior through institutionalized approval? Or do we criticize the choice because it is at odds with traditional practice and we refuse to moderate our hold on the past? When is it authentic? When it evolves into modernity or when it resists change and rests on traditional laurels. This tension can never be resolved but we lie to ourselves and tell each other that there is a golden mean, a path amidst the mighty waters. It cannot be.

Sometimes we just have to choose, and let one adjective which describes our character come in second and that has to be good enough. It is only through this crucible of choice that we find out who we really are. We are not both and we are not serving two masters and while we can find ways, on a daily basis, to lead a life which exploits the overlap and downplays the friction we have to accept that this will inevitably and consistently lead down that slippery slope. And when it reaches a red-line we will have to accept that, in that moment, at that tipping point, we are either fully modern or fully Orthodox.

A Skin in the Game

This morning, while in the shower and looking around I spied the label on one of the hair products the wife uses. Usually, showers are a scenic rest stop but this morning the label caught my eye. It said "Vegan" on it. Color me confused.

I thought "vegan" was a label for people who don't EAT any animal based product or for food products following this same set of strictures. I'm not saying that I relish washing my hair with filet mignon but I really thought this was about eating. So I'm going to raise some questions and all you vegans out there (we know who you are) can explain stuff to me.

First, is veganism(ology?) limited to eating? Do you wear leather shoes, belts of kippot? Is any aversion to leather simply because an animal had to die? Or would you be against a company that produced leather from the carcasses of cows that, it can be verified, died of natural causes?

What about other animal products that aren't food? Does a vegan wear wool? I have heard that sheep NEED to be shorn for health reasons (read this article and see). Though I must admit - were I to live in a world filled with over-sized balls of fluff wandering around, that would be neat-o! What about snake skin that has been molted or antlers that have been shed? Can these be used by vegans if the animals CHOSE to get rid of them? Squid ink pasta where the squid ink is harvested ethically? Tzitzit using a blue dye from some sort of snail? Coral earrings? (Coral is alive) Beauty ingredients derived from urine which the animal "donates" willingly? (and you can do your own googling about this -- it is a thing. A gross, gross thing)

A step further -- and no, I'm not going to ask about yogurt, though I once tried to explain to a vegan that her plant-based yogurt might still have active cultures in it and those little guys are "alive" in some sense. If animal products and ingestion are the problem then what about mushrooms and strawberries? Each, in its lifecycle, benefits from the application of cow poop. Or to be less scatalogical, plants grown using mulch which requires little guys to live and work to break down stuff. And if the food products being composted are animal based?

Feather/down pillows, comforters or jackets? Petroleum products which develop from the all sorts of micro-organisms? 

Looking forward to some clarification. And I should probably take fewer showers.

Clear!

 Allow me to complain for a moment. Well, actally, I don't really care if you allow me -- I'm going to complain. This is what the blog was originally designed for so I'm going back to my roots and complaining.

I wear glasses, and this is usually something I'm ok with. Sure, no one makes passes at me, but also, fewer people hit me and I can take them off or put them on for dramatic effect. So there's that. Over the years I have had a bunch of pairs of glasses so I have gotten a bit expert in dealing with them. My most recent pair was purchased about a year and a half ago. The prescription is (to my mind) a little stronger than I need but I'm dealing with it. Possibly by weakening my eyes. It's all good.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that there seemed to be (for lack of a better term) schmutz on the glasses that I couldn't clean. I looked the glasses and saw that both lenses have a whole lotta little marks. They don't feel like scratches (I ran my nail across and fely no nicks) and there are really so many of them all over the lenses. Now when I use the glasses, every light source has a halo and everything else is smudgy.

So I went to the store (well, first, I made plans to get new glasses but the plans fell through) to complain. Not that I'm expert at complaining in person but I thought that this would be good practice. When I showed the "Lab Technician" my glasses and explained that I treat them well, only wearing them, placing them down NOT on the lenses, or putting them in shirt or jacket pocket, he said, "well there's your problem. These are pocket scratches." He 'explained' that cloth like shirts can scratch glasses and one should always put them in a micro fiber bag before putting them one's pocket. I don't know if this is true but I'm skeptical.

Here's the thing -- I have been wearing glasses since before this "technician" was born. Really -- I'm that old and he is that young. I have been wearing glasses and putting them in my pocket for over 40 years and never have I ever seen this happen to a pair, even ones which I used for significantly more than 1.5 years. So it is a hard sell to tell me that putting glasses in a glasses shaped pocket causes spontaneous scratches.

I mentioned this to a co-worker and he said that he had the same problem and it had to do with a flaw in the lens, or the coating or something. I'm no scientist but I think that this is, indeed, more likely a lens problem and not a pocket cloth problem. So I still need to spend the money to get new glasses, and in the interim, I will be squinting, so stay off the roads. One thing is certain, though, and that's that I will be going to a different store next time. One with older lab technicians.

No Thanks for the Currency

I was trying to construct a line - you know, a humorous one off, as I am wont to do. Sometimes the muse descends and gifts me a completed joke but other times, I have to tinker and revise so the balance and flow are crafted to elicit the exact kind of reaction I need (a laugh, a groan, a punch in the nethers). I was also inspired by a gift from my family, a book called Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold Onto. This book is a collection of witticisms, some approaching Zen Koan-like status in their paradoxical nature. Often, when I write a line, it, too, has that same self-contradictory, or at least self-aware approach.

So I had something like "the only things I can't remember are my memories" but I didn't like the use of both "remember" and "memories" so I switched to "the only thing I can't remember is what happened" but that also presented as "I remember everything as long as it isn't in the past." It is still a work in some sort of gress, though many will deny that progress is the apparent direction. But it did get me thinking, and that's always a bad thing.

It isn't that I'm against reunions. I have developed an aversion to them because of how they have been presented to me. Time was, you had an experience and you let a requisite and necessary amount of time pass before you revisited it. Reunions were on anniversary years like 25, or 10. And I can accept "5" even. But then my kids went to camp and came back, ready for school. Note -- the camp situation that my kids went through was markedly different from mine. They went to camps that were favored by many of their friends from school and from the neighborhood. They fit in because they were like everyone else. I rarely went to camp, and when I went, I knew no one, and it mostly stayed that way throughout the summer. I was an unhappy child and that contributes to my sparkling personality now. Hurray.

My elder asked me if I could, on some weekend in September, drive her to her "camp reunion." She was having a reunion with people whom she knew well and many of whom she still saw frequently, weeks after returning from camp. Not years, and not even months. Weeks. I was reminded of the practice on one of our school retreats: students go on a bus together on a Thursday. They do activities on a Friday, spend a sabbath together and then have a bonfire on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, they watch a video recapping the weekend. They relive memories that are still happening.

It takes time to digest and consider, though maybe that's a vestige of an old fashioned way of thinking. In the era of instant gratification and computers that can pull up anything in the bl- of an eye (that's like, less than half a blink), maybe the new way of being is to reunite before there is any separation.

So why does this come to mind now? I got a message from my roommate from my first year of college recently. He showed me a picture of a hall mate of ours and we got to chatting. For the first time in over 30 years, we talked about some of the stories that developed during that year. We have spoken once or twice in the interim but those conversations were about current family and life concerns, not about 1987. We laughed (virtually) at strange things we did and I was able to thank him for being exactly the kind of roommate I needed at that time. It was nice, but it was also 30+ years in the making.

I needed to grow and learn to recognize and appreciate. Maybe I had an inkling of this after I graduated. Maybe it dawned on me 5 years later. The point is, I wasn't ready to have that conversation, and see things in proper hindsight in September of my second year of college. We, or maybe just I, need to absorb, analyze and reflect and that takes time. I'm not saying I don't love that Google can find me things in an instant, but I think that there is real merit in not reconnecting until we are different enough people that we can stand outside of our experiences and evaluate them dispassionately. We can make sense of our lives through the lens of time and by dint of having had significant other life events which create a context in which we can trace our own development.

We get together with old friends. We look at old photos and watch old movies of ourselves as children. We reminisce -- there is no value to just miniscing the first time. We want to get back something far gone, not something that is still part of who we are. 

I know, this isn't a new idea. TV shows like "That was the Week that Was" and "Last Week Tonight" have lampooned the idea that we look at anything before yesterday's episode of The Bachelorette as "history," to be dissected, reconsidered and critiqued. But those shows do so as satire, poking fun at the entire idea that we can develop nuanced understandings of our world so quickly. Until we can create distant memories of things that didn't happen, we can't really talk about what did. Or something pithy like that. I, too, am still a work in progress.

Thoughts during a meeting

 Another  teacher made a comment during a departmental meeting, saying "God is not a teacher." Then we had time to free write, so I wrote. No goal, no aim, no end. Just this.

God is not a teacher but is that because he isn’t supposed to be or because what he wants from us cannot be taught. Or maybe we don’t understand what it is to be a teacher. Maybe he is a teacher in a new mold – not working from the position of frontal instruction, but acting as observer, with the occasional gentle nudge, guiding us by seeming to let us follow our own bliss while he sees a bigger picture and knows us better than we know ourselves.

Maybe we aren’t students so we don’t need a teacher. It could be that we are active partners in a constant creation and while we crane our necks to find a leader we never look back at ourselves and see that we are responsible for our own progress and we can’t absolve ourselves of that responsibility by foisting the role off on anyone or anything else, preferring to see ourselves as sheep and not acting as our own shepherds.

And it could be that we are looking to hang a label on God in a way that will make us feel more comfortable relating to Him. If we can name, if we can consign to a single role or position, then we can know where we stand But if we become stuck in that mode of God’s supposed relationship to us, then when He acts in a way which defies the expectations and projections we have established then we find fault with him. So it isn’t whether God is or is not a teacher, but whether it is right to see that feature as definitive and limiting and to the exclusion of any other hats he might metaphorically wear.

Wondering about God as teacher also presumes another level of awareness – the question as to whether God IS in the first place. Maybe this is an advanced stage or theological pontificating; we can safely hang on to our central belief by arguing straws and not substance. We can make our jibes and act the goof because all of that is predicated on a firm bedrock of silent acknowledgement. That could be a good thing because then we never (have to) confront the central issue of faith.

Is the poem a teacher? Is the goal for us to respond, to branch off, or to absorb and reflect? Should a poem make us think of new stories, be inspired to dream, or should we be puling the poem apart, dissecting it so see how its heart beats. Which will prepare us to read another poem, and is that the ultimate goal? Does that poem exist to drive us forward and away or inward? Does God want us to understand God and our world and make new ones, or does God want to guide us to finding ourselves and seeing how we work? Am I to be a new poet or creator or a master over what already is?

 

Beginning Parsha Questions

 This Shabbat, we read the first portion of the Torah, B'reisheet ("Genesis"). I have questions. These are not designed as riddles or trivia questions; they are sincere and developed questions seeking real and sourced answers, so if you know something, say something. Thanks.

1. Why did the creation process take 7 days (yes, I count the establishing of rest on Shabbat as part of the creation cycle)? God could have created the entirety of the world in an instant but did not. I have seen that discussed. But why specifically 7 days? Is there something independently important or sacred about the number seven that it fits the process? If we look at the events on each day, some could have been combined, or split apart so the process could have taken ANY number of days.

One idea I heard attached it to the name sheva for seven as sh-v-ayin is related to satiety. But that name is not inherently "seven" and could have been applied to any number that was at the end of the creation process. Had God decided to do the entire thing in 5 days, then he could have called the 6th day "sheva". And the 8th day, shmoneh, which I have, elsewhere, connected to "shamen", fat because it is "over satisfied", could have been used to name the day after those 6!

Someone suggested that 7 has value because, hey, look, it comes up in the shmita cycle. But maybe that's just echoic -- a reference to the 7 DAYs cycle as played out on a grander scale. Is the concept of seven a pre-existing religious and theologically important idea which we then make other things fit to, or do we look at the things and say, "hey they stopped on seven so from now on, seven matters"?

2. Each week, in Kiddush for the Shabbat morning, we are told that the Children of Israel observed the Shabbat as a sign and bond between God and the Jews because it is a weekly reminder of the first Shabbat, when God rested.

But why do we mark this weekly? I don't see it as marker of the end of the creation process because we don't do anything on it to sum up the whole cycle, just to memorialize the resting that happened ON THAT DAY after the cycle ended. Man was created on day 6 -- is there anything we do weekly to mark our own creation? We wait for the year anniversary to mark creation on the whole (and though we mention that many things are rememberances of creation or the Exodus each day, we don't do anything to ritualize that memory until, for example, Passover).

So do we mark our own weekly cycle of coming into existence in our prayers or actions on Fridays?

3. In this Parsha, Adam and Chava make a mistake and have to cover themselves up with leaves. God chastises them but then also decides to make for them better clothing out of skins of some sort. God acts as tailor. There is nothing miraculous about making clothing but God does it for them after they have already started a similar process. Then, throughout the Torah, God does miraculous things -- he confuses human languages, brings plagues, sends down the mon, allows the Children of Israel to pass through the Reed Sea...we have lists of the miraculous things God does and those things are inherently outside the skill set of man.

Jump to the last Parsha, and Moshe's death. In the telling of that event many commentators explain that God, himself, buried Moshe. God was a grave digger. Again, this is not a miracle, but instead a mundane and usually human activity. It just so happened that God was the only one around and so He stepped up and said "fine...I'll do it."

Are there other situations in which God does something that man can and generally does do? (I thought about the circumcision of Avraham, but it seems that the understanding is that Avraham did it himself even though God steadied him - I get this from the Rashi commentary on Bereisheet 17:24 included in brackets in the Artscroll chumash; the Rashi text on Sefaria and on Chabad do NOT have this section of Rashi and I can't find the medrashic source, so if you know it...)

By the way, I do not see "being a warrior" as the same thing because I see no place in the 5 books in which Hashem battles the way a human would or could have. I just see the description of Hashem as warrior.

It is (until I learn better) interesting to me that the 5 books of Moses are bookended by Hashem's doing the mundane.

Trick seals

 So last night, after we finished ne'ilah, I stuck around, as did a huge chunk of men, in order to daven Ma'ariv.

The question people often ask is "why daven ma'ariv in which I ask for forgiveness during my Amidah service? Did I just finish asking forgiveness? What sins could I possibly have done in the 3 and a half minutes between the joyous proclamation of "Next year in Jerusalem" and the saying of my silent prayer?

And, I'm sure, many wise and sage people have written a lot answering this question. I won't try.

But I think that the question is wrong. Shouldn't we be asking, "how dare we ask for forgiveness?" I mean, the gates are closed. The verdict is sealed. What standing do we have once the king has left the field? Yes, yes, some understand that the verdict is not sealed until the end of the Sukkot holiday but we ask for forgiveness the day after that also! So why do we even try? While, sure, we should focus on doing mitzvot, so as to build a case for ourselves next year, why ask for forgiveness if it is all about Yom Kippur and the sealing us in the book of life (or otherwise, God forbid)?

I recall as a youth, having an interest in being fancy. My parents indulged me and I got a calligraphy set. I wasn't horrible at it but there lack situations in which that skill is called for in the modern world. Shopping lists and poems about eating someone else's fruit, hastily scribbled on the back of an envelope do not require calligraphic skill. I also got a wax imprinting kit which, while interesting, was also impractical. I tend to use envelopes with adhesive already applied.

The wax kit included a colorful candle and a stamp with my initials. I don't actually remember if it it had my initials but the idea is that I could melt some wax and imprint on the still soft stuff some symbol that represented me. In the olden days, this was used to close messages and ensure that they were not read by the messenger. I cite Hamlet for this. Somewhere in the act 4 or 5 range. 

But the seal did not always mean "closed." It meant "official." And that's the difference.

God seals his verdict and then closes the book and the gates. He withdraws from the field to his courtyard within. And what are we left with? The possibility of sinning and no ability to do anything about it because things are sealed and shut?

No. Things were just decided and stamped by an official at that moment. The seal has been affixed. But if we learn anything from the story of Purim (other than the importance of sending me candy) it is that once a royal proclamation has been given the king's seal, other proclamations can still be issued! Can God undo the royal verdict given last evening? No one is asking him to. We are asking that he issue a new proclamation today, and another tomorrow.

Yes, the gates are closed but in our communal Modim prayer, we ask that (and I'm lifting this from the Sefaria translation)

"so may You always keep us alive and sustain us, and gather our exiles to the Courtyards of Your Sanctuary to observe Your statutes, and to do Your will, and to serve You wholeheartedly,"

We have to knock on the door. We have to be brought in. But nothing is locked -- all we have to do is ask. On Yom Kippur, there is a sense in the talmud that the day effects a forgiveness even if we don't ask but the rest of the year, we have to make a bit more effort. That's OK -- we got this.

So don't be daunted by the "seal." It looks fancy, and it has an important imprint on it. But it isn't the end all and be all and we need to stand at the gate, three times each weekday, and insist on being let in, demanding that we be given a chance to inspire a new verdict that is just as powerful.

In a sense, everyday is Yom Kippur. The gates are never fully closed and the verdict is never shut. Let's take advantage of the king's willingness to sign off on a merciful verdict on each and every day.