True Ancestor

Into the blogosphere, like a pebble into the ocean, drops . . .

My 800th post.

--T.A.

Do you speak "Student"?

I'm counting that among the languages I'll have to learn when I return to school in the Fall.

The Academy, from which I've been absent about a quarter century, doesn't function the way the business world does. For one thing, the academy uses more syllables. Do business people regularly, or ever, use a word that has as many syllables as, say, epistemological?

For another thing, the overweening and overbearing bureaucracy of most academic institutions is stunning. I see where I'm going to have to get all up-to-date on my vaccines, as if I were Middle Daughter trekking off to the Steppes of Asia. I'll have to register for courses, and petition committees of the faculty to accept my proposed course of study, and get various approvals from various deans . . .

On the other hand -- how different is that, really, from the business world? You want to do something, you usually have to put your plan in writing and get several layers of approval. You have to talk a good game.

But in the business world, that talk is business-speak. In the Academy, you have to speak "student."

Oh -- I'll have to learn Hebrew, too. I mean really learn Hebrew. And pass a reading exam in another language (most likely German), before it's all said and done.

James Robinson, a professor in the History of Judaism at the Divinity School, has been very supportive of my mid-life adventure. I asked him which other professors I should meet before choosing courses for the Fall.

His advice: You don't need to meet them. You need to read them.

Ah, of course, I thought. Academic networking is an exchange of ideas, not contact information. The monograph is the business card of the Academy.

I just finished reading three works, recommended to me by Professor Robinson, on the "ecstatic Kabbalah" of Abraham Abulafia, a 13th-century Spanish Kabbalist who came to be convinced that he was the Messiah. After becoming convinced of this, he decided he had to meet Pope Nicholas III. Abulafia was persistent until an audience was arranged. Little did he know that Pope Nicholas had given instructions that Abulafia should be taken outside the gates of Rome and burned.

Abulafia was on his way to the audience when the Pope suddenly suffered a massive stroke and died.

Abulafia's radical idea was that you could achieve prophecy through the careful study and practice of meditation and chanting of various combinations of Hebrew letters. He thought that every Hebrew letter was a name of God, and therefore every combination of letters another Divine name with different mystical properties. He believed that, when one achieved the highest levels of prophecy, the student became, in a sense, one with the Divine. Having achieved that, Abulafia figured he must be a Messianic figure. He lived as an itinerant mystic, traveling and teaching throughout Europe until his death at the age of 50.

Why is this interesting to me? Because I think it's an early example of Judaism using meditative practice to discover Oneness.

Because Abulafia was a master of non-attachment.

Because he spent his life teaching that mystical experiences are accessible to anyone.

Because he was a nut.

Because there's power in the Hebrew language.

Because it's part of Jewish history.

And because he taught Jewish meditation seven centuries before it was cool.

--T.A.

Incremental Apocalypse

Middle Daughter arrived home on Sunday, after her five-month volunteering jaunt through India and Africa. A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with malaria. She immediately upped her anti-malarial medication, and yesterday, a battery of tests showed no sign of the disease. Either she eradicated the malaria with the increased dosage of medicine, or she never had the disease at all. We'll never know.

As I write this, she's under the knife in the chair of an oral surgeon, getting skin scraped from the roof of her mouth and grafted onto a small portion of her lower jaw where, for some reason, she's suffered an almost total loss of gum tissue. She'll be in a lot of pain and a drug-induced swoon for a couple of days; then, we hope, she'll begin to heal in earnest.

From the minute we picked her up at the airport, stories have been tumbling out of her: the fall she took into a ditch in Tanzania, leaving, on the back of her left thigh, the largest bruise I have ever seen; the terror of crossing a street in Delhi, and learning the trick of crossing next to a cow, whose sacred status means it musn't be harmed (and whose size almost guarantees that it won't); the site of a black rhino at the Ngorongo Crater (hey: there's one now!); learning to sleep on trains clutching all your belongings; the deep bonds formed with the kids in the schools in Delhi and in Moshi, Tanzania, where she worked (that's Moshi in the other photo).

And coming home, she was at first delighted, then somewhat stunned at the ho-hum opulence of American life. A bathroom -- all to herself?! A toilet that wasn't a hole you had to squat over?! Heat, and lights, and big, comfortable cars, and television? And sushi?!!

The other night, before Middle Daughter got home, the One True Wife and I went out to dinner with friends who have the largest and most opulent house of any family I know. The friends built this house about five years ago. They told me that their kids now run through the house turning off lights in empty rooms, and scolding their parents for their excesses. It's more than just the cheerily correct PR of the classroom. Kids intuitively understand what their parents cannot or will not grasp: we're on the point of no return. The next little burst of energy into your flat-screen TV, or the switch that illuminates that room full of recessed lights, might be the end of the beginning of the end.

The latest science is clearly suggesting -- and in unusually frank terminology -- that the tipping point in global warming is happening right now.

The will to survive exerts itself spectacularly against spectacular threats -- but when the threat is creeping and gradual, the will may arrive too late.

Our kids know this in their bones. Middle Daughter fears that India will become one giant traffic jam when the bargain basement Renault/Nissan/Bajaj joint venture car begins to pour onto the market at the rate of 400,000 per year. She thinks even cows will become roadkill. And then there's the huge increase in demand for oil that the new cars will instigate.

Gabe is appalled that my Honda Accord Hybrid only averages about 25 miles per gallon. You call this a hybrid? And when are they going to hurry up and produce the Chevy Volt?

Oldest Daughter, she of the Washington, DC, internships and political perspective, thinks the Prius will look like a dinosaur within 18 months, and we should all hold out for better, more environmentally responsible technology.

Two nights ago, at Middle Daughter's craving's behest, we bought sushi from Whole Foods and sat around our ancient analog TV set, watching awful television and enjoying being together again. I thought about where the fish had come from, and the Burmese who could really have used that rice, and the electric meter spinning like a top; I loved having my whole family together again, and stopped, for a moment, wondering when the other shoe would drop.

--T.A.

When you're up close at a baseball game,

you can see the distrust and loathing cross the players' mostly stoic faces as they come within earshot of the fans. You can see what the players and coaches do in the dugout when they think no one is watching: razzing opposing players and coaches, ogling women in the stands, imitating teammates' batting stances. And spitting -- lots of spitting.

You can see how the fans howl insults and pleas for attention in the same breath. "You suck! Throw me a ball!"

You can see how big and how specialized a professional athlete is. Every muscle, every piece of equipment, every tic, is, like every inch of the field, carefully considered, created and calibrated for the prevailing conditions.

You can see how the modern ballpark is built to distract us from the fact that we're not watching the game on TV. The frequent musical interludes, the cavorting mascots, the inane between-inning contests, the ADD-inducing scoreboard are all meant to function like commercials in real time, so that you're tempted to spend money on the products that cross your field of vision, and so that you don't have to concentrate on anything for an extended period.

However, with all that said: sitting in really good seats, with Gabe and two of his friends, and seeing a well-played ballgame, was a real MasterCard moment. The kids were so stunned by these seats they started waving hello to the ballplayers. "Hey, Mr. Young! Hello! Ozzie! Hey Ozzie: Hi!!!" The speed of the pitches, and the batted balls, made them yelp with terror and excitement.

And two majestic home runs by the hometown boys -- two rainbow arcs down the left-field line -- made them howl in glee, and high-five the guys behind them, who by this time were so drunk that the boys instantly became their new best friends.

Gabe got thrown a t-shirt by some nubile, dancing representative of Chevrolet. His buddy Jeremy, who'd never gotten a major-league ball in his life, got a ball tossed to him by one of the Minnesota Twins' coaches.

Last night, the game was replayed on a local cable channel. We watched it again, because, when the camera on the third-base line focused on a left-handed hitter, Gabe and his friends were clearly visible, two rows above the Twins' dugout. He loved watching himself on TV, having a great time with his friends, in the same picture frame as a major-league ballplayer (mercifully, I was just out of camera range most of the time). He got to watch a great ballgame twice in one day, he got a t-shirt from a cute girl, and he got to see himself on TV.

I hate to say it but:

Priceless.

--T.A.

Theological Thoughts for the Day

What would an effective signal [of God's existence] be like? . . . To cope with the fact that anything can be interpreted in various ways, the signal would have to show its meaning naturally and powerfully, without depending on the conventions or artificialities of any language . . . A perfect signal should be spectacularly present, impossible to miss. It should capture the attention and be available by various sense modalities; no one should have to take another's word for it. It should endure permanently or at least as long as people do, yet not constantly be before them, so they they will notice it freshly. The signal should be a powerful object, playing a central role in people's lives. To match God's being the source of creation or standing in some crucially important relation to it, all life on earth should depend (mediately) on the signal and center about it . If there were some object which was the energy source of all life on earth, one which dominated the sky with its brilliance, whose existence people could not doubt, which couldn't be poked at or treated condescendingly, an object about which people's existence revolved, which poured out a tremendous amount of energy, only a small fraction of which reach people, an object which people constantly walked under and whose enormous power they sensed . . .

Of course, I am being somewhat playful here. The Sun does exist, it is about as good a permanent announcement as one could imagine or devise, yet it has not served to prove God's existence, even though viewing it as a signal does provide a unified explanation of why all those properties listed happen to be conjoined on one object. Since we do not find it easy to imagine how God could provide anything that would be a permanently convincing proof of his existence, why should we expect to be able to do it ourselves?  -- Robert Nozick, The Examined Life

Our religious understanding of evolution means that the divine energy is ever reaching forward and upward, in whatever halting, multiple, and spiraling ways, toward more sophisticated and complex levels of development. From where we stand in the evolutionary process, and given our ignorance of extraterrestrial conscious life forms, it seems right to say that human consciousness is a significant and qualitative leap in this process.    -- Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology

                                                                        

Diary of a middle-aged, overweight jogger

Last year at about this time, I was stretching out in preparation for the Soldier Field 10-Mile run -- a beautiful run along Chicago's lakeshore, ending at the 50-yard line at Soldier field -- when I injured myself.

You know you're well into middle age when you injure yourself stretching. That's kind of like Julia Child cutting herself in the kitchen and bleeding to death.

I had gone down into a kind of catcher's crouch to stretch my achilles tendons. Something in my left knee went snap-crackle-pop. I tried to run the race anyway, but after two and a half miles I suffered a stabbing pain in that knee each time I landed on my left foot. I limped back to my car.

I apparently didn't do anything too serious to the knee; a little rehab and I was feeling chipper again, after a couple of months. This year, I am trying to run the Soldier Field 10-Mile once again. I may not even make it to the starting line.

As I approach 49, I find running incredibly, immediately unpleasant. From about my 100th stride until I'm done, I'm working very hard, I'm winded, I'm cranky -- and I'm unfathomably slow. Yesterday I ran roughly 6 miles in about 1 hour, 10 minutes. That's barely a 12-minute mile pace.  You could put on your earphones and dork-walk at that pace (see image below for dork-walking instructions).

I still favor the left knee a little; this morning, my right achilles tendon is tender to the touch and throbbing. I came limping into the office like a zombie. Every time I get up or sit down, I grunt and wheeze like a geezer.

The event is two weeks from this Saturday. My goal is to finish. In one piece. Under my own power. On the same day I started.

--T.A.

Remember

Cross-posted on Jews by Choice

They said it couldn't happen. Some are still saying it never did.

Many claim to have witnessed it, survived it, fought against it. They are heroes to many, but sometimes they are called fools, liars or worse by many others.

Every year, those who perished are commemorated. As the grass blushes over their anoymous graves, their memories are invoked, against a tide of denial and hatred, by the ones who survived, or the ones born to the survivors.

The survivors' stories are ones of super-human determination to simply be human in the way that they were born to be human.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has put it concisely:

Judaism is the world's most sustained protest against empires, because imperialism is the attempt to impose a single truth, culture or faith on a plural world. God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity.

The act of remembering beyond this lifetime -- of consecrating a terrain of experience on which you may never have stood, but which is mapped in your bones -- is the central project not just of Jews but of any individual who insists that the world can be made whole, or at least better.

If you haven't already, please pause a moment -- soon, today; even now --  in remembrance of all those who have perished at the hands of empires.

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.

Techno-McCarthyism

You can't hang out with anybody who's controversial.

You can't say anything off the cuff, off color.

You can't sing off key.

And you sure can't be caught with your guard or your pants down, your shirt or your skirt up.

In this age of techno-McCarthyism, everyone is under suspicion. Under a microscope. Under the gun. Everyone is being watched by someone else who's being watched by someone else . . .

Think it's just presidential candidates and their coterie? Think again: if a girl can be driven to suicide by someone who doesn't exist -- someone created just to torment her -- then we're all waiting for our monsters to appear. It's Monsters, Inc. -- only, it's not a movie, and it's not cute.

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me. Someday, I'll be up for a job somewhere, and someone will wave a copy of some blog post in my face -- perhaps this very post.

"Sir," they'll say, "were you off your meds when you wrote this, or just having a bad day?"

The latter, ladies and gentlemen. I swear.

And so, gentle readers, please: grant me a prophylactic pardon.

--T.A.

Middle Daughter Gets Bit

Middle Daughter, possessed of a globe-trotting volunteer spirit, has become infected with something else: malaria.

Sometime during a couple of fun, eventful weeks teaching English in a small school in Tanzania; a brief "safari" (really just animal sight-seeing); and a Passover Seder in Dar es Salaam with most of the other Jews in the country), she must have been bitten by an infected mosquito. Despite having religiously taken her anti-malaria medication, she got the illness nonetheless.

People live with it and recover from it all the time. However, she won't be home until mid-May, at which time she faces gum surgery. Will they perform gum surgery on you if you have malaria?!

Having a kid that's sick on the other side of the world is a horribly helpless feeling. What can you do, short of helicopter parenting (of course, helicopters can't fly that far).

In other news, closer to home, Gabe continues to round into fine form as a left-handed pitcher. The neurosis surrounding the development of young baseball players has become so shrill, I e-mailed the coach of the Freshman baseball team at the high school Gabe will likely attend.

I asked him: Does a kid really have to play travel baseball and skip camp if he wants to play in high school? Does he really need lessons in this, that and the other? What does the parent of a 12-year-old who loves baseball need to do -- and not do?

To his credit, the coach said, 'Let him play and have fun. Don't worry about it.'

The coach was also Middle Daughter's gym teacher; he said to send his regards to her.

And I send her whatever healing vibes I can, in these anxious few weeks before she finally comes home.

--T.A.

"Stop napping. This is important."

Charles Martin explains the Heart Sutra, perhaps the seminal text of Mahayana Buddhism.

I'm not saying you'll come away enlightened. But I'm not saying you won't, either.

It's interesting that in Buddhism, knowledge is seasoned by wisdom, whereas in Kabbalistic thought it's basically the reverse: chochmah (wisdom) is the flash of insight -- "the beginning of all form, yet still formless" -- whereas binah (understanding) is insight leavened by the disciplined intellect.

The early Kabbalists saw the intellect as the highest faculty, the one most imbued with Divine energy. Its primary task was the domestication of the imagination, the seat of the yetzer hara, or evil inclination, in the healing service of the Divine. The Kabbalists knew that the intellect is nothing without the imagination, but they felt the imaginative faculty, when left in charge, misapplies knowledge to horrible ends (see "Garden of Eden, Expulsion From").

The Heart Sutra's climactic thought, in Charlie's translation:

There is no wisdom, and no attainment. There is nothing to be attained.

To which I say (even as I prepare to deepen my study):

Amen.

--T.A.