True Ancestor

Sunrise of Liberation

Wednesday, April 8 marks a pretty cool confluence of events on the Jewish calendar: the return of the Sun to its place in the heavens at the moment of its creation; and the fast of the firstborn on the eve of Passover.

The Sun comes to this point once every 28 years. For many years now, and many years hence, April 8 is the date when it occurs. This year, April 8 is also the day -- the evening -- that marks the beginning of Passover. According to one sage, the birkat haChama has fallen on the 14th of Nissan in the Jewish calendar only twice before: once, before the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt; once, before Esther redeemed the Jews at Purim. In fact, this confluence of events has occurred 11 times in Jewish history. There are other sites that speculate on the auspiciousness of this event.

I'lll be joining Rabbi Karyn Kedar and many others at sunrise on a local hilltop on April 8; I'll lead a brief meditation as the Sun emerges as it might have done in its first moments.

At times like this, Olam habah, the world to come, is also "the world that is coming:" like a train of infinite cars, it's always arriving, always moving past. Creation is still happening. Liberation is still happening. When you bless wine or bread, you're raising it. When you read of liberation, you're raising yourself.

And when you feel wonder at the Sun -- its magnificents as a tonic, mnemonic, a disc of creation and destruction -- you move Creation forward to this moment. You move light into every dark space. You move all moments to this one. You are free.

My Thoughts Awaken Me to See You

By Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra

My thoughts awaken me to see You; They show me in my heart's eye Your deeds; They teach me to tell Your wonders,      "When I behold Your heavens,      The work Your fingers made." Around its course the disk of heaven walks, A potter’s wheel enwhirling the world; It has no lips, and yet it tells Your glory To earth, unmoved within its orbit,      Suspended in the void,      By cords of Your love stayed. Thither the sun yearns, and there burns, And of its light some to the moon lends. While heaven’s sphere is spread out like a tent, With stars blooming on it, a garden,      Proclaiming how profound      The plans that You have laid.

 

Have a liberating Passover. Easter. Moment. Life.

--T.A.

So much to do, so little to say

I have suddenly forgotten why I blog. Suddenly and completely.

I can't think of much to say. Not much, anyway, that would make a damn bit of difference to me or anyone else. Or that wouldn't be dredged up and misinterpreted.

I'm at work, I'm in school, I'm at home, I'm the co-president of the board of an organization that serves the Jewish poor and is struggling, like so many other Jewish organizations, to raise money to meet rising need; the world is changing and this isn't a refuge for me anymore. For some reason, I feel like I have to be careful -- with my time, with my writing, with my energy.

The world will be changing -- is changing -- in ways that both defy and require description, documentation. If you weren't here, you wouldn't believe the stuff that's happened in the last 12 months. The next 12 will only be more of the same.

There are a very few blogs that will be very useful during that time.

I'll be around some. Just not as much as in days of yore.

--T.A.

City of Self-Importance

Henry Paulson ramping up production for the stimulus package: "Warp speed, Scottie!"

Gabe and I paid a weekend visit to Oldest Daughter in DC this weekend. O.D. graduates from college in less than 2 months, and the three of us had some memories to make.

We paid visits to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the International Spy Museum and the Newseum. We ate Chinese, Indian, and the Daughter's own inspired home cooking. We walked til our legs almost fell off, and we saw I Love You, Man, a very funny story about how to get married and make friends at the same time.

Traveling with Gabe, 13, is a little like traveling with a dog. Give him some exercise and plenty to eat, and he's very happy. At the end of the day, a little cuddling disguised as tussling, and he passes right out.

But seeing Oldest Daughter living off-campus with four friends, keeping house and nailing down post-graduation employment, it quickly becomes clear how fast these people grow up and move on. A rabbi friend of mine likes to say at bar and mat mitzvahs that, once they're 13, you only have a literal fistful of years left with them under your roof. At 14 or 15 they start high school, at 16 they get behind the wheel, at 18, with any luck, they leave for college.

Washington is an impressive and somehow ominous city. It radiates self-importance. It bathes in self-reference. In the same way that the street grid radiates out from the Capitol and the White House, the muscle of its bureaucracy and the grandeur of its collective ego seems to peer down at you from Art Deco/New Deal facades, from grand memorials, from hidden cameras.

Washington's denizens have a seriousness and a purposefulness about them that even makes Sunday feel like a workday. I left Gabe asleep in the hotel room this morning and went to a Starbucks down the street; there they all were, studying the New York Times and Washington Post like yeshiva students poring over a page of Gemara. Or else hunched toward their laptops. In a way, it wasn't all that different from the basement lounge of the U of Chicago Divinity School. Only the coffee wasn't as good.

Most of Oldest Daughter's roommates joined us for breakfast. It came up in casual conversation that three of them came from homes where the parents had divorced. I'd forgotten how common it is. They had all already met O.D.'s biological father, and it felt like there was some amiable scrutiny occurring. Maybe not. When you're a step-parent, you just assume that's what's going on. More likely it was Sunday morning, they were a little tired, hung over or both, and they were just happy to be fed.

More sobering was the fact that their job prospects are dim. A couple of them are interning for media or PR companies. These internships would ordinarily lead to a job, but the companies have made clear that that's not going to happen this year. These young women are emerging into the worst job market of my lifetime, let alone theirs.

Middle Daughter has a job waiting for her after graduation. In government consulting -- surely one of the only growth industries out there. When I told my old man what she would be making, he shook his head. "That's more than I made in any one year of my entire working life," he said. She is lucky, but she's made a lot of her own luck. Still, there's so little of the self-important about her. She seems strangely . . . mellow.

Gabe and I flew home this afternoon, leaving our hearts with Oldest Daughter -- and also our camera. Perhaps she'll bring it home with her at Passover.

--T.A.

Managing Expectations

Going back to school has begun a transformation in me. So far, it's enlarged my brain and withered my soul.

I worked full time in property management for more than a decade. I wasn't on the front lines, where I would've lasted less than a week. Instead, I was placed in management, which is where people go when they are related to other people in management.

I have unlimited admiration for property managers and leasing agents. This is a profession almost no one gets into on purpose. It requires organizational skills and people skills; math skills and language skills (especially the ability to parse documents in Bureaucratic Mandarin for hidden meaning); time management and stress management skills; and a sense of humor. Most of all, it is a constant exercise in the art of crisis management. Which is to say, it's a lot like life, but not like living.

Apartment buildings are big, imperfectly built computers: assemblages of different, distantly related kinds of engineering, thrown together quickly and inexpertly and then managed and maintained (usually) so as to maximize revenue for the owner, well ahead of the comfort and "private enjoyment" of the "consumer" (aka, the resident).

Universities are kind of like apartment buildings. They are assemblages of physical and intellectual assets designed not for the benefit of the "consumer" (in this case, the student) but for the purpose of self-perpetuation. Graduate students understand this very well, entering into a business arrangement with the intention of furthering their own careers while helping the graduate school build its reputation and its balance sheet.

Being in graduate school is about managing expectations and appearances, and about forging alliances and connections. It would appear to be about gathering knowledge, but that actually takes a back seat to the work of positioning oneself for whatever graduate school is supposed to put within reach. There is fine work to be done, don't get me wrong: elevated thinking and experimentation, and energetic exploration and analysis, the development of lasting friendships and the reading of great works. It's just that none of that's really the point.

As you can see, just lately, I have become profoundly, deeply exhausted by being in school. I'm not talking about tired here; I'm talking about old to the bone. I'm talking about being done with ambition and the desire to remake myself or be something I always thought I could be but clearly am not. I have never been good at exploiting situations or relationships, even in the best sense of the term. I've tended, instead, to let myself be exploited, figuring that it's an honor to be useful to some entity larger than myself, and that besides, then I don't have to figure out what I stand for.

At this age, I am what I am. I am not elastic enough or plastic enough to remake myself. I entered into the Faustian bargain of a relationship with a fine university, and a well-known department within it, thinking that we could mutually benefit from the arrangement. It wasn't just a mid-life crisis, it was a last-ditch attempt to remake myself in the image I'd always had of myself in my mind's eye (OK, maybe that is a mid-life crisis).

But those images are dangerous things to hold onto. Institutions are not built by dreamers, and they are not there for the benefit of dreamers. Rather, dreamers are the fuel consumed in the furnace room of the institution.

Can you tell it's finals week?

I have barely been present to myself or my family or the work I still must do for these last six months. I've dwelt in a fog of abstract cogitation and Hebrew grammar (to which French has just been added, like insult to injury). I take up a space that could be occupied by someone half my age, who could really do something with the language and the coursework and the books that I waste. I will be 50 this year, and I will remain a work in progress whose progress never quite seems to be in the right direction.

I just want to be able to take my son to Dunkin' Donuts on a Sunday morning and hold tightly to my atomizing family and forget all the dreams that have distracted me ever since I could remember.

And then I want to go bowling.

--T.A.

My first symposium

This past week, I participated in my first religion symposium, an affair for graduate students at Indiana University. I submitted a paper proposal in December, and -- to my shock -- my proposal was accepted. Which meant I had to write the paper. Which wasn't on a topic I really knew anything about.

The subject of the symposium was "The Art of Religion," which I took to mean the intersection of religion and the Arts. I proposed a paper about how the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and in particular Lee J. Cobb's portrayal of Willy Loman, heralded the death of a distinct American Jewish identity. It was fun to research -- the middle of the 20th century in America was a time of enormous change for Americans generally and American Jews in particular. Death of a Salesman not only captured what had been the American Jewish experience -- in many ways it foretold a great deal about where the lives of American Jews were headed.

Above are Cobb as Willy (center), with Arthur Kennedy as Biff and Cameron Mitchell as Happy, in the original Broadway cast.

Seventeen years later -- well after his compelled testimony to HUAC, and his naming of names, had stunted Cobb's career and nearly ruined his health -- he appeared in a television adaptation of Salesman, with George Segal as Biff.

 

I reflected on how Cobb's experience -- wanting to belong, wanting the world to change, and being hunted for both -- must have been reflected in his reinterpretation of the role that he made famous, and vice versa. Though dated, uneven and in some ways melodramatic, this adaptation of the play captures its nightmarish power; you can probably get it at your local library, and you should. It captures one of the great American stage performances if the 20th century.

The other presenters -- there were 12 of us in all -- covered a range of fascinating topics, from Gregorian chant to the goddess Parvati and the evoloution of female Hindu wedding attire, to violent imagery in early Christian poetry, to the question of whether Quranic chant was music (and the wider issue of the relationship of Muslim societies to music).

The symposium's keynote speaker, Maria Heim of Amherst College, talked about the prolific 5th century Buddhist scholar and monk Buddhaghosa, and his articulation of how to be receptive student and reader.

Buddhaghosa (seated)

Just to be able to think about Buddhism, the Qu'ran, Indian wedding attire, Gregorian chant and Death of a Salesman over the course of 48 hours was thrilling. It was also fun to be in Bloomington with the One True Wife, who had attended IU's School of Music in her college days. The memories came flooding back to her; we were only a few hours from Chicago, but she'd been transported back to a particular vivid and liberating time in her life.

The best thing about the event was how interesting the people were. Many of the professors in IU's religion department were U. Chicago Divinity School grads. Their perspectives on the experience were tremendously helpful to me. One professor said he only realized, upon going back into the school on a visit a few years after graduation, "how miserable I'd been almost the entire time." Miserable not because he was unhappy, but because of the pressure and the demands of the D school's rigorous curricula and exams.

Tomorrow I will briefly return to work, and turn my attention back to real estate.

--T.A.

Is it just the Germans, or are we all addicts?

A new survey says most Germans between the age of 19-29 would, if compelled, choose Internet or mobile phone access over their significant others or their cars.

The German broadband association Bitkom conducted the survey. Its head was then quick to say that the Internet actually helps build social relationships.

Yeah. So does my semi-automatic.

Actually, one in two respondents to the survey said they'd made new friends thanks to chat forums and Internet communities.

I wonder if those respondents, like the head of Bitkom himself, get a little nervous if they're on vacation somewhere that doesn't have Internet access.

Or is there such a thing?

And you? How long are you away from the i-world before you start sweating and looking around for an Internet cafe?

--T.A.

Affordable Housing and the Jewish Social Justice movement

An article by yours truly, published at Zeek.net.

Written about five months ago -- some of it already seems dated to me. The world has changed fast, and it's not done changing.

And the Jewish Social Justice movement is not done changing it. Especially if they get into the habit of building, not just advocating for, affordable housing.

--T.A.