True Ancestor

I wonder:

• Will New Orleans come back from a second catastrophic hurricane strike?
• Will Sarah Palin change the Republican Party?
• Will this presidential election, regardless of the winner, result in any substantive change in direction for the country?
• Having dropped seven pounds, can I lose another 13?
• Having raised two stepdaughters, why haven't I learned patience? My son can drive me crazier, faster, than the girls ever could.
• Is it because he's a boy?
• Or is it because he's like me, only smarter, better looking, and generally more evolved?
• Given that we're overfishing the oceans, should I swear off tuna?
• If you were in Cleveland, what would you do for fun besides going to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame?
• Will my family enjoy my son's bar mitzvah more than, say, the average trip to the dentist?
• Why am I writing this post?
• What are you doing this fine weekend?

--T.A.

Middle Daughter's Moniker at College: "The Jew"

I guess that's what can happen when you go to an institution of higher learning founded on a religion other than your own.

Middle Daughter has always prided herself on being able to get along with anyone. Now that she's already known by her first name, followed by "The Jew," which gives it a kind of gangland ring (think Joey 'the Clown'  Lombardo), I guess she'll find out now whether that's true or not.

Gabe and I have been at home by ourselves since Tuesday. Meals have been generally wordless affairs, punctuated by the occasional sarcastic remark (mine) or punch on the shoulder (exchanged).

Tonight, for the first time in our lives, Shabbat dinner will just be the two of us. Which means that the White Sox v. Red Sox game might be taken in during dessert.

First, however, we will work on his d'var Torah, his explication of the Torah portion that he'll share with us at the Friday night dinner on the eve of his bar mitzvah, three weeks from tomorrow.

For me, Tuesday begins a month-long, intensive excursion into Biblical Hebrew. After that, I begin a trek that puts me on course for an M.A. in Divinity. And perhaps a PhD in my mid 50s.

Hey, my mom did it. So don't laugh.

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.

Watching Moses, with the sound off

I was marooned in a late-night traffic jam last night, crawling home from a board meeting, so I listened to Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic Convention on the radio. I commented over at me True Ann-Sister's live-blogged post that, if I had wanted to come up with a parody of the introductory speech of a first-lady-in-waiting, I'd like to think I'd have written something similar to Michelle Obama's speech.

This has nothing to do with my voting predilections and everything to do with how political theatrics have come to rule so thoroughly over substance. Deprived of the chance to see Ms. Obama -- whom I consider to have at least as much charisma and intelligence as her husband -- I was totally reliant on what she said, which came out, to paraphrase Joe Biden, as "noun-verb-woman-of-the-people."

I was reminded, as I crawled past lane closures and a four-car fender-bender, of my frequent visits to my parents' place in Florida, and the peculiar but somehow sensible nature of their TV-watching habits. They'll both sit and watch a baseball game, or any sporting event, with the sound down; then my Mom will wonder out loud about what's going on in the commercials. This dated, no doubt, to the days of my youth, when my father would watch a ballgame on TV but listen to it on radio, because the radio announcers painted much more vivid pictures and gave much more savvy analysis of the game.

In recent years, given my mom's tendency to read (aka: sleep) through large parts of a game, and because nationally televised games aren't always on the radio, my dad has just left the TV's sound off. But when Mom is awake, she'll watch the commercials intently and say, "What are they selling? What's that supposed to be? Why would they think that would make me want to buy a car?!"

This drives me nuts. Fer cryin' out loud, I'd say, if you want to know what's going on in the commercial, un-mute the freakin' TV!!

Which is really stupid advice. Because deprived of one sensory input, your other senses permit you to grasp the frantically seductive and manipulative nature of advertising, without being grasped by it. The commercials make much more sense, in a sociopathic way, with no sound.

Deprived as I was of the compelling visuals of the autobiographical video that preceded Michelle Obama's speech, I was peculiarly unmoved by the speech itself. I felt sure that the speech was aimed at a demographic that didn't include me, and that it tried much too hard to reach that demographic, which included nervous white people in the 25-45 age range, and bitter, disaffected Hillary supporters.

And regardless of who it was aimed at, I didn't understand why the candidate's wife had to impress us with her credentials. Well, yeah, I did understand, when I heard a commentator say that more than 50 per cent of voters take a candidate's spouse's character into consideration when they vote. And I understood, too, because I believe, as Obama's team clearly does, that Michelle Obama will prove an asset to Barack Obama's candidacy. And yet, the whole tenor of the speech seemed like a craven response to the neurotic whispering and New Yorker-cover fears, and not about the crushing problems we face as a nation.

Ironically, perhaps, the Torah parshiot we're reading during this time, toward the end of the Jewish calendar year, consist of Moses' long parting monologue to b'nai Israel before they cross the Jordan without him. He is articulating his legacy, but he's doing far more than that: he is warning the Jews that their fate and the fate of God in the world are inextricably interwoven. Even for a people who has been through the unimaginable, this is a tough speech to sit still for.

I often wonder: How did Moses make himself heard? A literal interpretation would suggest that 3 million Jews crossed the Jordan. How could they all have heard a 120-year-old man with no microphone?

Perhaps they didn't: perhaps, just like my parents in front of the TV, most people were watching him with the sound down. And they understood him perfectly.

If he gave that parting talk today, he'd have an army of pollsters and consultants choreographing his every move and analyzing its effect on his ratings. They'd be dispatching press releases to clarify the controversial and broadcast the inaudible. The speech would be given in an air-conditioned arena; the great man would wear a wireless mic and there'd be a huge image of him projected on the screen that filled the stage behind him. It would be recorded and videotaped from a dozen angles, posted on YouTube and replayed and dissected in the next half-dozen news cycles.

And we wouldn't remember a thing he said.

--T.A.

Have you ever been "bageled"?

My good friend and Mussar chevruta just introduced me to the verb, "to bagel."

When you get "bageled," you get a hint from someone you're speaking to that they're Jewish.

For example, if you tell someone at work, "I don't answer the phone or check e-mail from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday," you've let them know that you are, to some degree, shomer Shabbat (Sabbath-observant). You're also "bageling" that person.

And if they say in return, "Well, I usually go to synagogue on Saturday, but I have to drive there," then you've been bageled right back.

This may stem from the need to reach out, tentatively, and connect, subtly, with other members of the tribe.

Have you ever been "bageled"?

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.

Waiting

We're all waiting.

Not just for Barack Obama's VP pick. But for the Next Big Thing. The next international incident, plane crash, terrorist attack, meteorological event, stock market free-fall. The next viral video, CD, book, or news of the next fallen celebrity.

We wait publicly; we also wait privately. I wait to go back to school, which happens a week after my son's bar mitzvah. The One True Wife will be the only one of our family not enrolled in school (and paying tuition).

This has been a summer of waiting. I've dawdled. I've wasted time; I've read some, and frolicked some, and stared out the window a fair amount. I have enjoyed not being consumed with busy-ness.

Today I had lunch with Danny Miller, his daughter Leah, his sister Sue, and Sue's adorable sons Spencer and Sammy. I really do think I'm crazy enough to qualify as a member of your family, Danny. And vice versa. It's great to have blogfriends. And I got to reflect, again, on how crazy it was to have met Danny Miller through blogging; to discover we were born at the same hospital within weeks of each other; and that his nephew and my son were cabin-mates at the camp Danny's mother attended in her youth. That's fertile ground for friendship.

I can feel the High Holidays approaching, and with them, an even higher level of introspection than usual. I'm beginning to sense the utter silliness of ambition for its own sake, and the need to love how I spend my days -- because, after all, what else have you really got? I can tell I will be puzzled and nervous and occasionally exhausted by this new chapter of life, but I've decided that the moment I don't love it, or understand why I'm doing it, then I'm done.

I've been waiting to be able to say that for a long, long time.

--T.A.

Escape from My Own Personal Egypt

The other night, in my dreams, I was lost in the bowels of a building very much like Swift Hall, home to the University of Chicago Divinity School.

I grew up around these buildings; lived, from 8th grade through high school, perhaps half a mile directly east of Swift Hall. We snickered at the pale, idea-befogged university students, we Lab Schoolers, as they crossed streets while reading, pushed coke-bottle glasses up the bridges of their pimpled noses and squinted in the harsh winter sunlight like unearthed moles.

Swift Hall is gloomy and gothic: the University of Chicago as it lives in my memory. For the next couple of years -- unless I just can't take it -- I'll be living in that building. I'll be staggering across those same streets, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my increasingly hairy nose and wondering why, just when I began to understand one field of endeavor, I moved to another.

In the dream, I was in a warren of rooms in a chilly, windowless basement, with large, plastered pipes snaking along the ceilings like vines through the apertures of a forgotten temple. Two characters appeared: Me True Ann-Sister's husband Jacques, who commanded me to eat a gigantic sandwich he'd made, that had bacon splaying out of it on all sides; and my grandmother of blessed memory, who grabbed my face in her hands and gave me a huge kiss. The kind of kiss you'd give a grandson you hadn't seen in twenty-five years.

If you believe your dreams are your subconscious sending you messages and working through issues, you might just believe that the Universe sends you signals, too. You might even be enough of a fool to believe in a transcendent energy that pulses through everything, toward everything else, that we have personified, deified and vilified, in cycles, ever since the idea was introduced. Or introduced itself.

I got into this particular program -- technically, not even a program I applied to -- after years of despairing and scheming, alternately plotting my escape from the family business and trying to prove my worth to it, dreaming my dreams of teaching and writing and living out my own personal self-estrangement. My own personal Egypt.

I made bricks during my own personal Egypt: I managed to preserve about 650 units of affordable housing and start an effort that could become significant, over time and with the right leadership. The people I've been lucky enough to hire and to work with are better at this than I'll ever be.

There is no telling what will happen. Right now, I'm in my dread phase. I've finally been around long enough to understand that it has a life of its own, a part of me but apart from me, seeding an apprehensive energy that will propel me, initially, into trying too hard and aiming to please professors who are, at least in age, my colleagues.

The adventure begins in two weeks, with an all-day, 3-week long intensive Biblical Hebrew class. Then "real" classes start on Sept. 29th -- ironically, Erev Rosh Hashanah, the advent of the Jewish New Year.

--T.A.

The Little Linda Liberation Organization [UPDATED]

Gabe enjoyed his camp again this summer, although he prefers 1st session to 2nd session, and even though he doesn't have the kind of roots at the place that Danny Miller's nephew (Gabe's cabin-mate) has.

I went to a camp where you lived in the woods, hiked and canoed your little butt off and saw as little of civilization as possible. That's one way you could tell it was a camp for rich, non-Jewish kids. Gabe goes to a camp for Jewish kids, so, they do things like go to ball games and state fairs.

On the camp trip to the Wisconsin State Fair, Gabe was astonished and a little horrified by an exhibit (not the one pictured here; that's from Coney Island) claiming to reveal the "World's Smallest Woman."

I didn't know they did that kind of crap to people anymore. Much less at a state fair.

Gabe gazed through a viewing screen and saw "Little Linda," who he described as a very short, plump, African American woman, holding her cell phone with both hands, texting away. He said her cell phone looked as big as a car windshield next to her.

So we were interested to read today about the death of the woman listed as the world's tallest. At 7 feet, 7 inches, Sandy Allen used her height to help kids learn to accept people who were different. It's interesting to me that a school will have in a very tall person to help kids accept those who are different; and that camps will then take those same kids to fairs where people who are physically different are put on display. Gabe's school goes out of its way to mainstream kids with mental and learning disabilities, but kids are kids, and camps are camps, and I guess that's human nature.

I was just plain short until halfway through high school. Not brutally short, not state-fair-short, but short. Girls said I was "cute," the way their little brothers might be. I longed not to be different that way. My parents, brother and I lived in Mexico during what would have been my 7th grade year. When I came back and saw my friend and next-door neighbor, who had grown about three inches since I'd last seen him, he did a j'accuse point at me and howled: "You're still short!"

When you're a kid you want so badly not to be different -- unless it's a good kind of different. Any good kind of different can be taken to extremes, though, and then it's not a good thing. Maybe being permitted to stare at someone once in a while isn't a terrible thing. After all, Little Linda wasn't chained to her little sofa. She was making a living. It was a transaction.

But still: it ain't right. If you're staring at a person whose statue is radically Other, then you're doing the same to everyone around you who stands out in some way, aren't you? And aren't you fascinated and horrified by any aspect of your self that's very different?

There's only one thing to do: liberate Little Linda.

I'm only partly kidding. Seriously: how can we truly be said to be compassionate towards the differences in ourselves and others if we're staring at people who are different? How can we follow the  commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves (or the one to welcome the stranger into our midst, take your pick) if we're paying to basically make fun of them?

Gabe is no saint. He said he saw Little Linda and ran from the booth so he wouldn't hear him laughing. At least he ran from the booth, I guess.

But he agreed to be the first member of the Little Linda Liberation Organization.

Won't you join us?

--T.A.

UPDATE: Per my Mom's comment below, here's a link to a story the late Ed Bradley did for 60 Minutes. It's about Thomas Quasthoff, one of the finest operating singers of his generation, which is even more amazing when you consider he was born tiny and with no arms, as a result of his mother's use of Thalidomide while pregnant with Thomas. His expressiveness while singing is legendary, and there's a great lesson in his joy, and great joy in the lessons he's learned.

Coffee and Kabbalah [UPDATED]

Perhaps my affinity for -- nay, dependence on -- coffee is indicative of an innate (and, currently, inert) Kabbalistic bent.

Adherents of Kabbalah, the artful and often erotic Jewish mystical tradition, typically emphasize study after midnight as a way to draw nearer to the Shechinah, the exiled feminine aspect of the Divine, and to study during, and meditate on, the daily miracle of darkness being slowly transformed into light.

But how did they do begin this practice? What enabled them to stay up all night?

One intriguing answer: coffee.

Although I've heard it posited before, I found, buried amongst the more than 900,000 hits I got when I googled Coffee and Kabbalah together (most of the hits were coffee klatsches and pictures of Madonnah), this intriguing article from an old issue of Arthur magazine. It notes that the apogee of Kabbalistic practice, and many of its most brilliant and provocative insights, came from Tzfat (Safed) in what is now northern Israel, in the late 16th century, when Isaac Luria, aka "The Ari," moved to Safed from his hermitage on an island in the middle of the Nile, where he had studied Zohar, the masterwork of Jewish mysticism, and lived alone for many years.

Decades prior to Luria's arrival in Safed, however, Joseph Karo, the great Jewish halakhist (legal scholar) and mystic, had settled there and initiated the practice of staying up all night on Shavuot (the Jewish holiday both celebrating the first harvest and commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai) and studying Torah.

Interestingly, coffee is first documented in Safed in 1528. The first coffee house opened in the town in 1580. That means coffee was being served in the town when Karo introduced all-night Torah study, and became ever more popular as Kabbalists settled in the scenic mountain-top hamlet and popularized the practice of all-night study, prayer and meditation.

So it's quite possible that my own predilection for the drink is mystical and not merely chemical in nature.

Aside from encouraging insomnia, coffee also focuses the mind, enhancing mood and concentration. And the latest studies on caffeine show that coffee has a hydrating and not diuretic effect; does not create or exacerbate heart disease, and in fact may even reduce the risk; reduces the chance of some cancers and has no discernible link to others; and reduces the risk of Parkinson's Disease and Type 2 Diabetes.

Coffee, of course, originated in the Middle East, growing in Ethiopia and being cultivated in Yemen as early as the 6th century. The drink would therefore have reached Palestine before getting to Europe. And indeed, it didn't arrive in Venice until 1615, where the first coffee house opened in 1640. Only after this date did the practice of studying all night on Shavuot becoming accepted in the Venetian Jewish community.

Coffee, anyone?

--T.A.

Update: Great minds think alike, although, as usual, I'm a step behind. Chavi just posted about coffee, too! (Chavi, I swear, I didn't know. I've added you to my blog-roll, so now I'll know.) In any case, coffee's a natural topic at the beginning of a week -- and at the end of a fast (Tisha b'Av).

Tom's Square

I spent the better part of this afternoon in Southwest Florida looking at potential acquisitions, driving between towns and counties in this humid, deserted vacation spot, touring beaten-down apartment properties awaiting rescue (or something like it).

The maintenance supervisor from my Naples property came along and led me, after our work was done, on a tour of Ave Maria, aka "Tom's Square," the holy apostolic, virgin-birthed university/town, brainchild of Tom Monaghan, he of Domino's Pizza and Detroit and "Theological Renewal," in no particular order.

The town itself is nearly deserted, especially at this time of year. Recent reports attest to the troubles the university has endured, and when you see how hard it is to get to, and to fathom, you understand why.

As we drove down Pope John Paul II Boulevard and circled the mitre-shaped cathedral, my trusted employee and guide said, "Kinda gives ya the creeps, don't it?"

"You have no idea," I said. "Quick, give me your hat, so I can hide my horns."

One can almost taste Monahan's grand vision: a renewal of traditional Catholicism, born out of splendid isolation, in a place where devotion could set down deep roots, where God State University and the University of God could develop a chivalrous yet fierce rivalry, and where everyone was just as devoted, as fervent, as dogged and rooted in dogma as everyone else.

"Of course," I said to my traveling companion, "we Jews are to blame for all this. After all, who do you think the first Catholics were?"

And in a way, Ave Maria is a 21st-century shtetl, devoted to its own path and yet dependent, in some small way, on its distant neighbors.

My maintenance supervisor and I have determined that I will get a costume of Chasidic garb, and that he will take a picture of me, smiling and waving, at the entrance to John Paul II Avenue.

God willing.

--T.A.

Generation Ech

Judith Warner's NYT�blog post�on my generation's parenting strategies leave me wanting to move to the country. Like, another country.

 

Thanks to our skills in helicopter parenting,the swankier summer camps now have parent liaisons, whose sole job is to answer the hectoring, pestering, worried, and kid-sick (as opposed to homesick) parents demanding the very best for their very own.

This is the mantle of entitlement that we have laid upon our kids -- my own, I sometimes fear, included. Warner's portrait of the�"affluenza" virus�embedded in such parenting is immediately recognizable to me:

"For affluenza is not just a constellation of symptoms. It is an ethic, a play-the-system, lie-and-cheat-your-way-to-what-you-want, don’t-let-the-peons-stand-in-your-way ethic of amorality. You rock, kid, parents teach. And you — alone — rule."

I remember a few years ago I stupidly volunteered to monitor a particular hallway after graduation and before a large post-graduation party at my daughters' high school, where the famous hazing incident took place (for the record, neither daughter was involved). My job was to keep people from walking down this hallway, which was being festooned with top-secret decorations for this party. Not using this hallway would mean that people would have to walk about 300 extra yards, taking the long way to the area where their cars were parked.

The adults were uniformly polite about this, but the graduates' reactions ranged from petulant to defiant to downright condescending. Two leggy 17-year olds with almost invisible eyebrows and rigorously straightened hair defied me to stop them. They didn't even slow down.

Rather than assure you (and myself) that I am not a victim of this epidemic, I'm just wondering aloud how a generation raised with unprecedented wealth and expectation is going to live through the very hard times that are coming. And I find myself reminded of the words of a late, great author on the prevailing ethic of the West, which sound virtually prophetic, delivered, in a way, from beyond the Iron Curtain,�at Harvard's commencement 30 years ago:

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

Which I hear to mean: we've built a great system, but we're not great enough to live up to it.

All three children will be home this weekend: Gabe from being a camper, Middle Daughter from being a counselor, Oldest Daughter from a high-flying consulting internship. Gabe's bar mitzvah is in about 6 weeks. At that point, as far as Jewish law is concerned, all three children will be responsible for their own actions.

And I'll be left to wonder whether we really made sure they understand what that means.

--T.A.