True Ancestor

Everything I learned climbing the Aon Building, I learned before we started

Sunday was another climbing day.

Gabe, my brother and I climbed the Aon Building, Chicago's second tallest building.

As we stood on the mezzanine level, awaiting our turn to start lurching up the fire stairs to the 80th (and top) floor, we passed by a gigantic art installation of gongs and mallets hung from the marble walls. Each gong had a word etched into it: PEACE. DREAM. SLEEP. LOVE. There were more than a dozen of them, hung in three tiers. (I couldn't find any pictures of it, nor did I see any info on who the artist was.)

You could reach the lowest tier of gongs with the lowest mallets. I grabbed a mallet and hit a gong (I think it said SLEEP). The gong let out a low roar -- actually, half roar, half sigh. The sound washed along the marble wall, and all the other gongs trembled a little. The gong I'd struck vibrated and exhaled for several minutes as we inched our way toward the fire stairs.

That moment stayed with me.

It reminded me of the meditation bell that's rung in Zen centers -- usally just a small metal bowl hit with some kind of cloth-covered mallet -- to begin and end a meditation session.   It usually makes a clear tone that fades until it dissolves into that humming sound that you hear when it's absolutely quiet -- the sound of your blood racing past your eardrums.

In just that way, everything you touch vibrates with your deposited energy. Everyone you interact with ripples a little, like the surface of a pond, and you do the same, reflecting the way in which they've touched you.

When I can't sleep at night I pick up Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. Much of it seems like rehashed and processed Zen to me. But last night I read something that I woke up thinking about. It said something like:

The definition of 'ego' is "a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment."

A gong or a meditation bell offers a visceral demonstration of how moments vibrate and dissolve into each other. The same way the gong shook its undulations along the smooth wall, the effort of the climb was a pleasing pulse in my legs the next day. Just as when you hold someone -- or push someone away -- the wave of that energy is still moving, all but undetectable, as it's washed over by other waves, other stimuli.

That gong was probably still vibrating, undetectably, when I finished the climb 20 minutes later.

--T.A.

In Defense of Coffee (as if defense were needed)

I've posted previously -- somewhere -- about both the health benefits and the mystical import of coffee -- how it's not only good for your body, but good for your soul. How we use it to wake up -- and how medieval Kabbalists used it to stay up into the wee hours to study, meditate and pray.

Nonetheless, some who claim to have my best interests at heart insist that I'm killing myself by drinking the stuff. True, I occasionally pollute it with chemicals; these days I'm back to just putting a little milk in it.

Now comes news that coffee lowers dementia risk. Patients in a study who had consumed three to five cups of coffee a day over a period of 21 years were 65 per cent less likely to develop dementia. This may be in part because coffee is associated with reducing your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, which is associated with the development of dementia. Animal studies have shown reduced risk of the incidence of amyloid plaques in the brain; those plaques are associated with Alzheimer's disease.

And finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect.

Oh, and the study also suggested coffee may be associated with reduced risk of developing Parkinson's.

I don't drink Red Bull or any of that other swill that sends you rocketing off the walls. I'm just in need of regular doses of caffeine, in the first half of the day, because I'm spending most of my time these days trying to keep up with people half my age.

So, to all those who would have me drink less coffee:

Student Nerves

For the first time since returning to academe, I woke up in the middle of the night, nervous, and couldn't get back to sleep.

I was nervous about all the work I have in front of me. School work.

I had promised myself, upon returning to school, that I would never be nervous about school. After all, it's just -- school. After having exposed myself (literally and metaphorically) as an actor in regional theater; burying myself in arcana and obscure statistical journals as a copy editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica, moving, on a whim to strange city, where before long I was in a highly visible job and engaged to a woman with two young daughters; then moving back to my home town and joining my brothers-in-law in their family business, and spending a decade working hard at something I wasn't very good at; after all that, I swore to myself that I would never be nervous about school.

But I must have been kidding myself.

When something matters to you, you want to master it. But that takes a long time. Meanwhile, it masters you. And though it may not matter to most people -- in fact, that's part of the beauty of it -- the work you do, the subject you're tackling begins to tower before you with a terrible majesty, and you're just -- in my case -- some guy.

I could be intimidated by some of the great Medieval Jewish scholars about whom we've been reading. Like Isaac Abarbanel.
Here's a man who was a high-level adviser, courtier, philosopher and statesman who was also a member of one of the Iberian peninsula's greatest Jewish families -- oh, and he was an outstanding Bible scholar, too.

He managed to maintain these careers despite having to flee Portugal when his king died and the new king accused him of being part of an assassination plot, then being expelled from Spain, along with the rest of Spain's Jews, in 1492. He reestablished himself in Naples, then had to flee when it was taken by the French. He lived in Monopoli, Corfu and finally Venice, where he once again became a prominent statesman -- and it was during all this flight and upheaval that he wrote his voluminous and unparalleled works of Jewish philosophy, Biblical exegesis and astrology-influenced Messianic apologetics.

He longed for Spain, which he considered his home, but where he never produced a completed work; he bemoaned the time lost to flight -- and even to his work as a courtier and financier -- and yet the volume and quality of his work is staggering .

And he didn't even have wireless Internet.

Not that I expect to live up to such an example, but I lie awake at night, feeling as though I'm running along a platform after a train that's picking up speed.

That could also be because Gabe, my brother and hiked up the 80-story Aon Building yesterday. More likely, it's because my train has left the station.

--T.A.

A triumphant return from Vegas; a farewell missive from President Bush

Vegas is everything I feared it would be. Including utterly unspontaneous. There isn't an inch of developed ground on which you can relax. Hotels surrounded by astroturf conceal speakers in amongst the real foliage, and music suppurates out of them constantly: Sinatra, Streisand, Neil Diamond, Wayne Newton; others howling from the bottoms of their white shoes, as if possessed.

Draw close to the entrance of any building and the music is drowned beneath the saccharine whine of the slot machines. The maniacal whoodle-doodle of their sound systems and the cheery cannibalism of their colors pulls you right into their one-armed embrace. Every building is slick, phallic, wrapped in reflective glass the color of a headache.

In our hotel, I saw people perched at the same machines Monday morning at which I saw them when going up to my room on Sunday night. They were as good as dead.

Despite this -- or because of it -- after our meeting, I decided I had to lose my Vegas virginity. I slunk into the vast, vibrating lobby of the hotel and approached a $25 blackjack table where the dealer had no company. I explained to him that this was my first bet in Vegas, ever, and it was his job to make sure I had a happy memory. His automatic shuffler was broken, so he received a supervisor's permission to shuffle by hand. Then he dealt: two cards face up for me, one up and one down for the house.

"Am I playing against the house?," I asked him.

"Not really," he said. "You're playing against your own hand."

He had a king up. I had a ten and a two.

I sighed and asked for a card. I got a four, leaving me with an unenviable 16.

"Don't you have to stick at 17?," I asked.

"That's right," he said.

"Well, I guess you better hit me," I said.

I got another four. He had a seven down, for a total of 17. I had won.

"What do I do now?," I asked him.

"What was your objective, again?," he asked.

"To play one hand, and win it," I said.

"Mission accomplished," he said, sliding $50 in chips across the felt, which looked a lot like the "lawn" outside the hotel. "The cashier's window is right behind you to your left."

I thanked him, left, and cashed in my chips.

John was his name. From Philadelphia. He was great.

The rest of Vegas you can have: it is lunar, lascivious, horny, drug-addled, falsely gorgeous and mean. Slick, shallow, vast and vapid.

Sad thing is: sometimes, that's exactly what you want.

*

Today -- mere hours after Barack Obama took the oath of office, and a day after I won my first and only bet in Vegas -- I received the only piece of correspondence George W. Bush ever sent me.

It was a handsomely produced retrospective (in the guise of a "thank you") of the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (FBCI). With the creepily Crusader-ish subtitle "A Final Report to the Armies of Compassion," it lauded the success of the FBCI in helping communities help themselves. Articles on the topic, however, were not so laudatory. This recent article from the Washington Times claimed that the piece was designed to overcome the stench raised in a book by David Kuo, former FBCI deputy director. That book, published in 2006, detailed Kuo's allegations that the FBCI office made religion a mere tool for shaping a broad political agenda. 

Most government links to FBCI are already gone. Mostly blank pages beneath the White House Logo say that the "Obama Administration" has created a new White House Web site, and you're warmly invited to view it..  

I never felt our government should be involved in giving its benediction -- and its resources -- to particular faith-based groups. Initiatives like this veer close to violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment.

Apparently, our new president disagrees with me. That's OK. Maybe, with some redirection, FBCI can make sense.

A little redirection will be good for us all.

--T.A.

Same guy, different worlds

I've avoided Las Vegas all my life. I'm afraid of it. Afraid of the smoke and the greed and the lust.

And afraid I'd love it.

I'm going there for the first time today.

Fortunately, I'm going for a board meeting and will be busy the entire time.

Tonight, I'll go out with fellow board members for dinner. Two of those board members are my brothers-in-law. It's a board meeting of the family business in which I'm a partner -- a business that just laid off eight employees. A business that is going through the same tough times as most other businesses.

Aside from my brothers-in-law and me, the other board members hail from Atlanta and Los Angeles, so we occasionally meet in those cities, or other cities that are easy to fly into. This meeting was to have been a kind of board meeting/family funfest in Palm Springs, but the economy dimmed our appetite for fun, not to mention spending money.

I'll have been gazing at spreadsheets all day Monday; Tuesday will be devoted to Hebrew and to the giants of Medieval Jewish exegesis.

Oh, and to watching the inauguration.

This kind of world-hopping seems strangely appropriate on the eve of the inauguration of our first African American president. A guy who moved between academia and organizing, and moves now from speechifying to statecraft.

Wednesday I'll return to life as I once knew it: drink coffee. Read the paper. Go to work.

I'll also practice saying: "President Barack Obama."

--T.A.

Death of a JuBu Patriarch

Alan Lew has died.

He was a Conservative rabbi who veered back to Judaism just short of his ordination as a Buddhist. He went on to advocate and teach meditation as a mainstream Jewish practice. Working alongside his friend, the Zen abbott Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Rabbi Lew introduced American Jewry to the novel concepts of silence and stillness, through which the Divine can become present in ways that many Western Jews have long neglected, forgotten, or perhaps never knew.

I met him once, briefly, during the time when I was practicing Buddhism. He led a meditation session at a conference on Jewish meditation put on by Chochmat HaLev in San Francisco. I waited patiently, in a line of meek Jewish seekers, and when my turn came to speak with him, I walked up to him. He was still seated on a meditation cushion, and people came and sat by him, like acolytes. I asked him if one could be both a Buddhist and Jew.

"No, I don't think so," I recalling him saying. "I think you either make God the center of your life or you don't. I think the Jewish calling is a very specific one, and it has God, and service to God, as its cornerstone."

He died suddenly, at 65, while jogging. As sad as this is, it may be that his death will bring renewed attention to his work, which is very important, and his teaching, which can still be found in his books, web sites and his students.

He was frequently referred to as a "Zen rabbi," but he was more than that -- more than just a rabbi, meditator and teacher. He was an activist, an author and husband, father and friend.

May his memory be for a blessing. And a meditation.

--T.A.

The Enchanted Forest of Exegesis

There is no end to the manner and methods of Biblical interpretation. Literally -- no end.

Gaonic, Karaite, Early Spain, Grammatical, Aesthetic, Philosophical, Kabbalistic. Each reflecting on and refracting each other, each revealing and concealing, alluding and elucidating.

The towering figures in Jewish Biblical exegesis were rabbis, scholars, mystics, itinerant seers, and philosophers of the first order. They each mapped the terrain, building on what others before them had done, and -- most interestingly -- using Greek philosophy, and Christian and Muslim thought, to further refine their own.

I have plunged into this forest with no experience and no compass, but with a very knowledgeable guide. His method is to take us through this wilderness using secondary sources as our maps -- the historiography and the history of exegetical texts that reveal this landscape, rather than the original texts themselves.

There are whole histories of commentary not just on major characters or books in the Bible, but on particular verses -- particularly Isaiah 53, the famous verse whose "suffering servant" was seen by Christianity as a proof of Jesus' messianic pedigree. The reaction by Jewish exegetes in the early days of Christianity was muted; one scholarly article* notes "rabbinic emphasis on the Suffering Servant as representing the people of Israel." This article notes "that in the early centuries a Jewish framework is maintained by Christian interpretations, with examples taken from Justin Martyr and Aphrahat, but in later centuries the commentators wholly reject the idea that the divine nature of Christ could have suffered." So now there's renewed interest among Christian scholars in Jewish views of Jesus, and in texts (like Isaiah's) that have longed been seen only as predictive and not allegorical or symbolic.

I didn't think I'd be fascinated by this, but I am: it shows how Jewish thought and memory, interpretation and philosophy was not only shaping but being shaped by Christianity and Islam. The common wisdom is that Judaism, as the older religion, lent to but didn't borrow from it's younger cousins. Scholarship today suggests that isn't the case. Judaism reacted to Christianity and Islam not just in polemic, but by absorbing modes of thought and systems of philosophy that made their way into the highest realms of Jewish text study and folklore and philosophy. These systems of thought in turn began to transform the ways in which Jewish scholars read and interpreted the Bible, and how they saw themselves.

And it's relevant. Our religions fight for primacy, or denounce or vilify or go to war with each other, over ideas that all the religions helped develop. And in which they all have common roots. We hold and propagate ideas about the origins of our own faiths, our ideas, our identities -- and more often than not, the truth is more complex than we can begin to fathom.

That's all I know, for the moment.

I'll send up occasional flares, in case I lose my way.

--T.A.

* The Journal of Theological Studies 2007 58(2):597-598

Life on the Beach

The world may be aflame, but there's always a beach somewhere, beckoning to those who favor denial and SPF 30. There's hard work to be done, though; like protecting one's hydrophobic spouse from the Pacific Surf,
or posing for pictures with your family at sunset . . .
And when you get tired of your picture being taken, you can always do as my nieces did:

 

and pretend you're on a fashion shoot . . .

And you can catch that rarest of moments, when an entire family is together in the same place, indulging, imbibing, relaxing and forgetting . . .

And remembering . . .

--T.A.

Hoisting One for the Old Man

My father's stentorian voice boomed through the phone on this, the morning of his 91st birthday. He was going to a meeting protesting a new residential development nearby; tonight, after guiding the sunset, he'll be treated to a dinner which he felt sure would involve two of his favorite dishes: roast duck and lima beans.

Almost a quarter century ago, he had open-heart surgery -- just in the nick of time. Since then, he's been nothing less than a miracle: mentally sharp, physically persistent; energetic, optimistic and funny.

His old man, and his old man's old man, didn't make it out of their 60s. Maybe if they'd had open-heart surgery, they'd still be with us.

My dad gets more emotionally expressive, and frank, as he gets older. He sometimes speaks, but not in a morbid way and not often, about death. When my mom (not quite as old) came up with an ambitious redecorating project and asked my dad's opinion, he demurred. She persisted: she wanted to know if he would give her ambitious scheme his blessing.

Finally, he said: "I don't like the idea, and I'll tell you why: I've got between three months and a year to live, and I don't want to spend it in a construction zone."

Mom scolded him for being morbid; the redecoration went ahead; the construction zone was endured. That was about two years ago.

In school, Gabe has been asked to write stories using different letters of the alphabet. For "G," he decided to do a story on our family history, since we're the Gottliebs. He has committed to memory some salient facts about my dad's life: how he lost his brother (and only sibling) in World War II; how he missed being shipped overseas with a regiment that wound up getting decimated in battle, because the night before he was to report for duty he got a severe case of poison ivy from a bowling ball, of all things; how his grandfather was, for a time, chief engineer of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; and how he has seen, in person, many historic moments in baseball, including one of the most famous home runs of all time.

Yes, Dad says: he did call the shot.

I owe a lot to my dad: love of Billie Holliday, Louis & Ella and baseball; a poetic streak; life . . .And my son's physical resemblance to him. My sisters like to say that none of us, in our primes, looked half as good as our mom and dad in theirs. Maybe Gabe will look half as good as Dad in his day.

It's hard to know what to get such a person for their birthday. Fortunately -- just today -- I came up with something. It should get to him before the end of the week.

Tonight, I'll hoist one to the old man and say: Here's to you, Pops, with love as enduring as you.

And that's saying something.

--T.A.

What's the right perspective on Gaza?

There is no end to the number of perspectives you can choose from, of course, on this issue or any other.Most people tend to go looking for those perspectives that will confirm what they already think.

I go looking for as many perspectives as I can get. I think John Cole of Balloon Juice is right:

I can not say this enough- it is untenable for Israel to live under constant rocket and mortar attack, and it is undeniable that the attacks have skyrocketed in recent months. It is also morally reprehensible for these attacks to be launched from schools, mosques, and hospitals, and the use of human shields is disgusting, and Hamas is now reported to be urging the continuation of suicide bombings. Having said that, I can not figure out how the answer is to just blow up said human shields and make dismissive comments about the suffering of innocents and snide remarks about their tennis shoes. [The last remark referred to this Martin Peretz post.]

Me True Ann-Sister links to a well-written blog out of Israel, where the rockets falling randomly on civilians, and posturing and positioning by ambitious politicians, have combined to create visions of a no-win situation. The writer shows the human cost the bombardment with painful clarity. (See the comments to Amba's post for an example of how a discussion on the topic can be animated and still civil.)

Andrew Sullivan culls views from many observers; quite a few of them are Jewish, but not all of them are sympathetic to Israel. Sullivan also gives his own take on the matter. He makes the critical point that screamers miss: each side has and has acted according to its own particular logic. Each side's logic has the tragic flaw of interlocking with the other in a death spiral. In sum: he doesn't see how Israel can win.

Muslim and Palestinian blogs decry the Israeli offensive; they also report on the human toll. There's this searing blog from Gaza. And this one, by a woman who says in her sidebar, "I am a Palestinian from Gaza. I am a Muslim. I am a journalist. I am a mother."

Google "Muslim blogs" and you'll find the winners of the "brass crescent awards," which leads to this winner for best group blog. It's an instant education, and not just on Gaza. If you care about Israel, some of these perspectives make for hard reading. As well they should.

Hamas is dedicated to, among other things, the destruction of Israel. Its charter says so. The charter also says that "death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes." According to this logic -- both absurd and undeniable -- every death in the conflict, be it the death of an Israeli pensioner in an apartment in Ashdod, or a Gaza child on her way to school, makes Hamas stronger and Israel weaker.

I don't know what else to say. 

--T.A.