True Ancestor

We Are All Burmese

The peaceful protests of Buddhist monks and nuns in Myanmar have dissolved, leaving only bloodied sandals and emptied streets behind. Internet connections in the country have been cut. Unarmed people have been shot at point blank range.

Now Buddhist monasteries are being raided, and monks are being beaten and hauled away.

The Internet is abuzz: there are the usual petitions to sign in support of the protesters (the link, sent to me by a friend, is to an organization co-founded by MoveOn.org), but there is also this to ponder: what group, what community, what adherents to a particular belief system or proponents of a certain school of thought, have the stature to stand up to the erosion of civil liberties and the steady, creeping invasions of privacy here at home?

--T.A.

How to Handle a First, Crushing Disappointment

Gabe received the first rejection in his life as a budding athlete yesterday, being left off a travel basketball team on which eight of his Alpha-male friends earned spots.

Now 12, Gabe is becoming increasingly taciturn, monosyllabic and withdrawn. As a depressive, I'm watching these behaviors carefully: are they just the beginning of adolescence, or are they something more ominous? Will he rebound from this, will he use it as motivation, or will he withdraw into himself?

These things sound so small, but to a lucky kid like Gabe they're enormous. He's always been a good athlete, but never particularly big or fast. His contemporaries are starting to get bigger and stronger. Of his favorite sports (baseball, basketball and soccer), basketball is probably the one in which he has the least talent.

He absolutely will not let me talk to him about this. Fortunately (I guess), I wasn't home last night when he received the bad news, and the One True Wife spent the evening alternately consoling him, leaving him alone and listening to him, depending on his mood at the moment. He had basically cried himself to sleep before I even got home.

I remember that, until about the age of 30, I absolutely cringed when my old man wanted to Have A Talk, or Give Me Some Advice. There was a certain tone that I perceived in his voice -- a certain gravity and ponderous pitch, and a somber stitch at the center of his brow -- that I couldn't bear. I see myself having just this affect on my son, despite myself.

There is so much I want to say to him: Michael Jordan was left off his high school basketball team his sophomore year, and used this as motivation for the rest of his playing days. Maybe he (Gabe) can find motivation in the rejection -- what else, after all, is rejection good for?

Our daughters had contentious but DNA-reinforced ties with their mother that they didn't have with me; and my son thinks I care too much about his success in sports, and would rather I never spoke to him about it.

But I see his hollow eyes and his permanently downcast gaze, and I fear that more than just his athletic life is at stake.

What does one say?

--T.A.

It's Not Writing Anymore: It's Typing

But you wouldn't want to be called a "Typer," would you? A famous typer? A prize-winning typer? A struggling typer?

(If you were a famous typist, that would be kind of cool, but also not what I'm talking about.)

I keep a journal, of sorts. I write in it at the end of the day. Typically, in Mussar work, I'm working a particular middah (Hebrew for measure, but used in this context to refer to a personal trait), and I record how I did with respect to my focus on that trait during the day. Or maybe I'll simply write a few thoughts, or recap an event that stimulated or irritated me.

After even a few paragraphs, my fingers get tired and my hand cramps up. That's not the worst part. The worst part is really two parts: my handwriting is so bad that often, when trying to reread it later, I can't decipher my own scribblings; and my hand can't keep up with my thoughts. I can type so much faster than I can read that writing has become typing.

What changes does typing cause in the thought process? How much less private do your thoughts seem when they're displayed on a screen, looking very authorial, as opposed to being scratched into the fragrant pages of a bound book, smeared, crossed out, accompanied by doodles?

Keeping a journal on a computer doesn't feel right. It accents the vanity of the diary form and removes the intimacy and immediacy. A blog is a kind of online journal, but its content is changed merely by the knowledge that someone else may read it.

On the other hand, my mind is spurred from a trot to a canter by the ability of the hands to stay close behind. So maybe the writing is less censored, rather than more.

The sound of typing is somehow more gratifying than the scritching of pen on paper: each snackling clack of a keystroke is a glyph committed to existence. The semaphore proclaims the quantity of your work (sadly, there's no correlation to quality). It encourages you to keep going.

But you're forbidden from making a deliberate, creative mess of your page. It's all finished and ordered. It looks like a Published Work on your screen. It announces a kind of readiness for readership, deserved or otherwise. Typing your thoughts into and saving them onto a computer is an inherently un-private act, at least for my generation.

And now I will hit "Save," and you will read this.

Thoughts?

A Yom Kippur Revelation, or: Where the Rabbi Meets the Road

Yesterday, I gave a talk about my journey through Buddhism at a break during the Yom Kippur services offered by a wonderful local synagogue.

It's a talk I've given many times before: How I went in search of equanimity and a deeper spiritual understanding; how I found it in Zen Buddhism; and how, in a transformational moment on the zafu, I came into direct contact with a forgiving Omnipresence that directed me back toward Jewish practice.

I got a lot of interesting questions and reactions to my talk, which was given to an audience of young and old from all varieties of Jewish background. After the talk, a young man approached me. He allowed as how he'd come in from Colorado to hear me talk -- at the behest of his parents, who stood solemnly nearby, hoping I'd turn him around. They were concerned about him because he had recently earned an M.A. in Tibetan Buddhism (I inferred from this that he's a practicing Buddhist). He was a graduate of the host rabbi's first Confirmation class, back when she'd first come to the synagogue more than a decade ago, and here he was, a grown man, a Buddhist, humoring his parents -- and gently challenging the story of my epiphany.

"Maybe it wasn't God you met on the zafu," he said. "Maybe it was just your Buddha Nature guiding you back toward Jewish practice."

What a wonderful point. It's the point at which Jewish belief meets Buddhist practice -- where the rabbi meets the road, if you'll pardon the expression. Perhaps what theists call God and what Buddhists call Buddha Nature is just each community's argot for the enlightened potential that lies dormant in (almost) all of us. Is there really any difference between the two?

I gave my own answer to this question yesterday -- but I'm left dwelling with the question. Living with the questions is the task that any Buddhist, any Jew, any spiritual seeker, has before them.

Which reminds me a of Jewish koan that a rabbi imparted to me recently:

Human beings invented God because God needs us.

Which may just be another way of saying:

We invented the Buddha because our Buddha Nature had no other way of being heard.

Here's to a sweet new year of peace, prosperity and progress for all of us.

--T.A.

Snapshots: The Aged and Revered Parents

The Aged and Revered Parents are ensconced once again in their home on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Having given up their Chicago redoubt, they are now, entirely, Floridians. Snowbirds.

Traveling to Florida on business and staying with the folks has gone from pure pleasure to something else: part pleasure, part watchful evaluation (I write this knowing they will read it): can they still carry on as an independent couple: are some daily tasks starting to be too much for them? Mom allows as how she uses her giant, three-wheeled bicycle to cart the garbage out to the road, as it's easier and less harrowing than having my dad (whose hips and back ache) drag it out. Can they still lug 5-gallon jugs of drinking water up out of the car trunk, up the stairs and into the kitchen? They've chosen delivery of 3-gallon jugs instead.

But a visit with them is not without its pleasures:

*

We sit together in the morning and have coffee. The Parents read the local paper and the New York Times. I stare at the Gulf of Mexico just over their shoulders and try to fathom the challenges of the workday ahead. They keep the house "cooled" to about 81 degrees. After one cup of coffee, I've begun sweating, and won't stop until I shower 12 hours later, if then. I ask The Parents if we might turn the air conditioning down, for my sleep's sake, to a frigid 78 degrees tonight.

"Oh, sure," Mom says. "We'll just throw on an extra blanket."

*

The Parents have strange TV-watching habits: they prefer dinner at 7, which at this time of year is about a half-hour before sunset, so they can be outside as the sun goes down behind Sanibel Island. But eating at 7 means they would miss their beloved News Hour with Jim Lehrer. So they turn the sound up, and we listen to (and peek at) the News Hour from the screened-in patio, while the news of the day is called to us from the living room.

*

Afterward, we sit on the beach. Dad and I smoke cigars and have a glass of brandy. Mom sits between us, dramatically fanning away the smoke and the bugs. The horizon is draped in violet clouds and slanted curtains of rain. Somehow, the clouds to the west part enough for the sun to torch the towering cumulonimbus to our north; dragonflies dart across our field of vision, devouring no-see-ums. The sky behind the cloud-tower is, somehow, turquoise. The last few pelicans and gulls commute south toward their rookeries, their tireless work done for a few hours. Dad, who is known to his local friends as the "Director of Sunsets," surveys the scene with some satisfaction. I say to him: "I guess you're not out of a job after all."

*

Dad and I watch a Red Sox-Yankees game, with the sound down, while Mom pretends to read but actually dozes off. "It's so late," she mumbles. Dad and I point out to her that it's only 9:15. She revives, and at 11:30, she is still at her desk, working on God knows what.

*

Dad is fishing on the beach. It is getting very uncomfortable for him to stand for long periods of time. Mom, with a new knee and a new lease on life, crosses the beach and walks about 100 yards with a plastic chair for him to sit in.

*

I stand a few yards away from Dad, casting beyond the sand bar. I turn to see if he's still fishing. "Impossible snarl in my line," he says, sitting in the plastic chair. "I'm going to have to go in and re-rig." But he is just sitting, watching me fish. Even though he doesn't have a line in the water, joggers and beach-combers go by, see his rod, and duck, thinking they're about to be garrotted by 8-pound test. I make a few dozen casts; bait fish jump out of the way, and gulls swoop expertly past the line to see if anything is following the lure. No one is following, but it doesn't matter.

*

Dad is outraged by the war in Iraq, and says, in as many ways as he can, that every day our troops are there is a criminal waste of money, energy and, most of all, lives. He hears the newscaster say that two more American servicemen have died in Iraq today. "It hurts every time I hear that," he says. Sixty-five years later, he still mourns his brother, and he still hates the dissembling of politicians.

*

We discuss the upcoming Jewish holidays. I allow as how I'll likely have to chew some instant coffee crystals in the morning: I'm giving a talk at a synagogue in the afternoon, and if I have no caffeine in my system, the withdrawal headache will by then have me in a semi-vegetative state. Dad says, "You might be interested to know I'm giving up something for Yom Kippur, too."

"Really?," I say (Dad is no fan of religion). "What?"

"My bridge game," he says. I laugh and congratulate him. "Now don't you go putting that in your blog!," he says. Sorry, Dad.

*

Mom hugs me goodbye before I head down the stairs to get in my car and drive to the airport for the trip home. She watches me pull out and she waves. I feel like a kid who's just climbed onto the school bus, a little embarrassed, a little relieved, but grateful -- grateful the way a grownup is grateful, for having parents who, all these years later, still stand at the top of the steps and wave goodbye.

--T.A.

Author Andrew Keen to bloggers: Shut the hell up

For some reason, posting on this blog has recently felt like an actor's nightmare. I feel as if I'm dancing around naked (not a pretty sight, I assure you) in front of a sound-proof, one-way mirror, and that legions on the other side are either snorting in disgust or, more likely, not paying attention.

Last night, Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, was discussed on the News Hour, and the author -- an erudite, irritated looking Brit -- was interviewed on the show.

His point seemed to be that we are all making too much noise, blathering on about our opinions with decreasing knowledge and increasing incivility. We're coalescing into oblasts of opinion, nuking others who don't agree with us, and in the process undermining civil discourse in larger or more traditional media venues that serve as the backbone of a democratic society.

Because we are all transformed into experts through the "radical democratization" of the Internet, we are losing the ability to listen and learn. Keen laments the death of expertise, fearing that it creates a din in the marketplace of ideas that drowns the most learned in the wrath of the loudest.

Becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a journalist, or an engineer requires a significant investment of one’s life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying excims, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours. A professional writer spends years mastering or refining his or her craft in an effort to be recognized by a seasoned universe of editors, agents, critics, and consumers, as someone worth reading and paying attention to. Those in the movie industry submit to long hours, harried schedules, and insane pressure to create a product that will generate profit in a business in which expenses are high and hits are unpredictable. Can the cult of the noble amateur really expect to bypass all this and do a better job?

(His examples are revealing: he seems as concerned with losing his place as a writer and a font of knowledge as he is of YouTube swamping 20th Century Fox.)

Well, that's enough about Andrew Keen. Now, it's time for my opinion.

I can attest to the fact that blogging has created new relationships and new kinds of communities that don't replace, but that are also in no way inferior to, the traditional social or meritocratic circles that the author wistfully mentions. These communities coalesce around ideas, and voices, and values that can affect the world -- have affected my world -- for the better.

Keen acknowledges this, but thinks that the Web has become about chatter instead of change. When asked what he proposes to change, or what he wishes we would change in his interview last night, he said something like this: "I would ask that the 70 million bloggers in this country, when next sitting down at their computer, would honestly ask themselves, 'Does the world really need to know what I had for breakfast this morning?'"

Expertise is different from popularity, the author says. However, I would staunchly defend the expertise of Danny Miller or me True Ann-Sister: by virtue of their distinct kinds of omnivorous curiosity, they attract readers, divulge knowledge, explore new ideas, and participate in debates of their own creation with a depth to which a traditional expert would probably not condescend.

Unfortunately, as the author points out, civility is often trashed by the cloak of anonymity, and listening -- deeply, patiently taking in an author's point -- can die in a dumpster full of vituperative comment and libelous screed. Which is kind of fun -- like watching a train derail in slow motion.

But that's enough about me. What do you think of me?

--T.A.

Jonah under the gourd

The Book of Jonah is studied in synagogues and Jewish homes at this time of year. It is all the more famous for being so fantastical, and so brief, and for so much happening in so few verses.

Jonah is included in the writings of the prophets, even though his only prediction is the destruction of Nineveh. At this time of year, we're Jonah, sitting in the shade provided by a gourd plant, awaiting the destruction of others, unmindful of our own frailty, our own exposure to judgment. If we cast a jaundiced eye on others, our own shelter collapses.

Here are the verses I'm thinking about right now:

And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. And God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them, and He did it not. (3:10)

So God does evil? Does this mean that any harm brought upon anyone, no matter how deserving, is evil?

And God repents. That's interesting, too.

Then there's this, from Chapter 4, after God causes the gourd to grow and provide Jonah with shade, and then a worm to kill the plant, and a broiling wind from the east to cause Jonah to wish to die:

9And God said to Jonah, "Doest thou well to be angry over the gourd?" And he said, "I do well to be angry, even unto death."

   
10Then said the LORD, "Thou hast had pity on the gourd for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night.

   
11And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also many cattle?"

And that's the end of the book of Jonah.

Jonah has built himself a booth on the east side of Nineveh, and there he assumes a kind of contemplative pose, waiting to see what happens to the city. God provides shade that makes that waiting pleasant, almost contemplative; then it's gone.

The evil God was going to visit upon an entire city is instead visited, in far milder fashion, upon one person whose anger possesses him. In the place of wholesale destruction, God offers a teaching. The teaching involves a lesson from the east -- and I see references to the East in the Bible as having a meditative connotation (the source for this is Genesis 25:6, in which Abraham sends the sons of his concubines "to the east country," with some midrashic sources saying these gifts were meditative and mystical in nature).

The teaching also reveals the transitory nature of equanimity, evil, even the inscrutability of God's will. All things are made with the capacity for both evil and repentance.  When God has pity upon people "who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," the deeper, Kabbalistic meaning is that even people who cannot maintain a balance between compassion and strength can find redemption. They may not appreciate the difference between right and left, but God does; He knows His right hand from His left: in other words, God is equal parts judgment and compassion.

Meditation uncaps huge reservoirs of compassion within you. It doesn't have to be the full-Lotus, ohhmm-saying meditation. It can be just receptive, listening attentiveness. Your attention gives rise to compassion, which eventually causes you to go easy on others; then, you cannot help but have mercy on yourself. You see everything's effect on everything else. When you do this, you are in close proximity to the Divine. I think this is why meditation speaks to so many contemporary Jews: we are not brought into an embrace with Divinity through ritual or dogma, so much as we are through stillness, and the upwelling of compassion for ourselves and for others.

In these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I am concentrating on my anger and my lack of resolve, and then, as the Fast Day looms, I seek to unseal the reservoir of compassion that has become crusted over and buried. I seek to see it in God, and in myself; I pray that my small reservoir of compassion opens to the larger one.

I sit still and I watch, knowing the gourd will wither, knowing it will grow again.

--T.A.

Nearing the end of 15 years of daily step-parenthood -- and sad about it

Saturday, both Eldest Daughter and Middle Daughter fly the nest. Oldest daughter begins her junior year in college with a semester in London. Middle Daughter postpones college for a year by saving the world with stints of volunteer work in Costa Rica, India, Israel and Tanzania.

Nothing prepared me for step-fatherhood: the triangulation of conflict, the compartmentalization of loyalties, the knives flashing in the dark, the deep wounds that were to me, at first, invisible, then not only visible but beyond all healing.

And nothing has prepared me for this next stage of it, the end of these two incredible, complicated, gifted, mercurial women as daily presences in my life. My naivete about being accepted as the loving father the girls should always have had was replaced by the realization that they needed, and had, a deep connection to their biological father, a connection that grew over the years. The daughters see their three parents for who we are, in ways we ourselves do not. They learned, early and painfully, a lesson about adults that will take them far in life: we are story-tellers.

It isn't as though the girls are gone for good, God forbid. Middle Daughter's seven weeks in Costa Rica will be followed by seven weeks back home, and Oldest Daughter and she will vacation with us over winter break, as has become our custom.

But neither one will be here every day anymore.

The last week or so, the One True Wife has seemed on the verge of tears -- tears of exhaustion at all the Pentagon-like logistical efforts deployed in getting two girls ready to go overseas at the same time; tears of joy at how beautiful and confident and real they are; and the other kind of tears, behind it all.

Gabe's eye have a downward-slanted, puppy-dog look to them, and whenever neither daughter has been home, he's asked where they were. Having just turned 12, he sees a long stretch of only-childhood ahead of him, and has yet to understand its benefits.

There were days when I did not think I'd make it through. I recall the girls' father saying, "I give you five years." Of course, at that point, we were about to move from Denver to Chicago, into the orbit of the family of the One True Wife. I was about to join her brothers and her father in business. The girls' father knew these people, and there was a certain angry wisdom in his words.

Like any father, I have moments I regret, and yet they are part of an entire experience I would never trade for something saner, cleaner or more conventional (although, come to think of it, step-parenting is not the exception it once was).

There were days that would end in tears and recrimination; oaths and imprecations hurled from behind slammed doors. Notes left saying I hate you and You are not my father. There were thousands of the better kind of day, though, with all of us laughing around the dinner table or amusing and appalling each other with jokes, games and impromptu monologues on long car trips...

All of a sudden, 15 years later, the house is strewn with half-packed duffles, brand-new raincoats and faxed immunization records and spiral notebooks. All the girls' friends have long since returned to their schools; the five of us are home, alone together, at the advent of the Jewish New Year, living our last days as the family we truly became, beginning life as the family we will always be.

--T.A.

Rosh Hashanah and Nature

We Jews need to get out more.

I sense (but have no objective proof for) a connection between our history as the "people of the Book" and our tendency toward fevered and fussy, high-flown intellectual intensity. Well, maybe I have some objective proof: there's that study that me True Ann-Sister points out, which says that what you think affects the structure of your brain. After millennia of reading, arguing, cogitating and studying, we may be wired to miss the connection between the Immediate (aka the Divine, the Immanent) and the Now (aka the Moment).

So here's my prescription, as our High Holidays loom ahead of us: spend some sacred time outside. In Nature. Or as close as you can get thereto. Some people find God in Nature. Some just find a break.

There was a rabbi back in the 1970's, Everett Gendler by name. In Journeys: an Introductory Guide to Jewish Mysticism, Rabbi William E. Kaufman describes Rabbi Gendler's concerns:

Gendler maintains that Judaism has allowed itself to become so historically oriented that ties with the  natural world have been broken, and that therefore the natural world has ceased to be a source of wonder to the Jew. 'To be sure,' Gendler indicates, 'the break with paganism was vitally necessary for the development of Judaism. But the break can go too far,' he contends. 'It can become a chasm, an unbridgeable gap. We are at a stage now where we must begin to redress the balance by renewing our contact with nature. And furthermore, there originally were nature elements in Judaism, which we must revive.'

These nature elements included the significance of the rhythms of the moon, which Gendler sees "as a symbol of our connection with the rhythms of the cosmos. Whereas the sun is always the same, the moon waxes, wanes, and disappears." The moon is thus symbolic of the human condition: human life is subject ot the universal laws of birth, becoming, and death.

Rabbi Gendler saw God as Chei Ha-olamim, or "life of the Universe." God, then, becomes a pulse, a rhythm, perhaps even the will between the beats to continue the pattern. God is growth, but also the growth toward death. He suggested that, while out in the natural world, one should chant a prayer or use a meditation, like this one from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav:

Master of the Universe, grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass, among all growing things, and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer, to talk with the One that I belong to.

Rabbi Gendler was interviewed by Kaufman for his book almost 30 years ago, but this much is still true: We may have a Jewish homeland, but we find, to our dismay, that we are still exiled from ourselves. This is because our deep relationship is not only with the land, but with land, with ground, with Nature and with the cycles of Nature as reflective of our own cycles -- not just birth-growth-death, but learning-mastering-forgetting, transgressing, doing teshuvah, and starting again.

(Some have made a booming business out of reintroducing Jews to Nature, but you have to wonder: does that really transform the participants? Does it really connect them to anything? Or does it just make for great video?)

And that must go for everyone, not just Jews.

Be outside more. Start again. Anytime now.

--T.A.

My inner monologue about going to the men's room in a post-Craig world

Crap.

Going to the men's room was complicated before, but now ...

The airport men's room, I always hated that. I'd go in a bag before I'd pull my pants down around my ankles and sit down in one of those stalls. At work, or in a restaurant, it's different. When you gotta go ... but now, it's not just doing number 2, it's a statement.

Before now, the smart bet was the middle stall: that's the one nobody uses, because every guy likes to pretend he's alone when he takes a dump. Since a middle stall is used less, there are fewer stray stains or pubes in there most of the time, so that was my spot (of course, there have to be at least 3 stalls in order for there to be a "middle stall." If you've got only one or two, you choose the one closest to the urinals).

Things were easier in the old days. What did I care if someone sat in the next stall?! We weren't living together, fer crying out loud; we were taking our respective craps. Or so I thought...

Now the middle stall at the office is the most dangerous real estate in the entire building. Someone will wind up sitting in the next stall, guaranteed. Everybody's digestive tracts are on the same schedule. If they're at work, they have to go, and if they're in the bathroom, they can see my shoes, and I can see theirs.

And I know, I just know that one day our feet will touch by accident. I know it sounds ridiculous -- wide stance my arse -- but somehow, it'll happen. Like, I really will drop that piece of paper. And it'll waft over into the next stall. And I'll kind of lunge for it. And my hand will go under the divider and my clumsy-ass Dockers -- the shoes, not the pants -- will touch the next guy's.

So now I'm a pervert.

Can't take my iPod in there: start tapping my foot to the beat, and before I know it, I've got a new friend! Can't clear my throat, hell, can't even fart: that might be code for, "Want to come over and look at my etchings?"!

What about the socks? Does it mean something if they're pulled all the way up? Or if they're drooping? Wool or cotton? Garters? A shoe untied? Apparently, it's all going to mean something now.

It's all code!

And I'll be the last to know!

I think I'll go get constipated.

--T.A.