True Ancestor

Memory: in the Academy, on the Beach

Working feverishly on a paper on religious vs. historical memory. It's been interesting to be thinking so much about memory, and what it actually is. Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting is a wonderful guide through this terrain; so, in a very different way, is Y.H. Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.

Two nights ago, sister #4, her husband and I watched a compilation he had put on video: almost 50 years of our family's home movies, including the beach here in Florida as early as 1957. Back then it was a forlorn tropical barrier island, lined with the skeletons of departed docks; now it's a cheesy resort chock-a-block with hastily built condos and 7-Elevens. In some of the videos, my parents are younger than I am now. They were both gorgeous. The men smoked and drank bottled beer caught fish by the boatful and smiled broadly through stubble and cigarette smoke; the women always wore lipstick and cat's-eye sunglasses and tied a kerchief on their head. They smoked, too. We kids, at first unused to having a lens trained on us, stared at the camera quizzically. Then we horsed and goofed for it; then we ignored it.

Before coming on this trip, I watched, with Gabe, another video taken here in Florida, at a family gathering in December 1994. The girls are getting their first look, in the video, at this whole raft of step-cousins they've inherited through me. Middle Daughter is on a different lap in each shot. Oldest Daughter is on a beach -- the subject of virtually all her childhood artwork. She is happy. Gabe was conceived on that trip.He and I marveled at the fact that in this video, he exists, though none of us knows it yet.

And in that way, memory reaches into the future, even as our forgetfulness erases the past. The beach, though vastly different, seems like a character in these videos -- an intelligence with its own memory,desires, obstacles, treasures. It's the mnemonic metronome, pr the archive that keeps yielding sacred manuscripts, hidden in the Qumran caves of our past, looming above and behind us, hidden in plain sight.

 --T.A.

How to Stay Married Forever

OK, so as of Saturday I'll have been married 15 years, so I'm not really qualified to lecture on this subject. But that's never stopped me before.

I have other good examples to draw from, though, like me True Ann-Sister, who's been with Jacques for about 35 years, all of it on a roller coaster; and the Aged and Revered Parents, who recently celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary. That's as close to forever as I can imagine, in marital terms.

So here are 15 hints I can give you for staying married, one for each year that I've managed not to screw it up.

1. Marry the right person. You can be forgiven for botching this one (after all, I did, the first time around). But if you do botch it, you might as well skip the next fourteen.
2. Recognize that marriage is the Universe telling you that you're not the center of It (see number 6).
3. Admit that the two of you will occasionally be attracted to others -- but resolve not to act on those attractions, especially if you have kids. A friend recently said to me, "I could never have an affair, because that would be being unfaithful to my kids." Even if you don't have kids, your marriage is part of a constellation of relationships. All those relationships will suffer if you have an affair. 
   
4. Make the happiness of your significant other your first thought and action, and last thought and action, of the day.
5. Go ahead and get mad at the other person, but then retreat until you can regain your perspective and your equanimity.
6. Humility is the essence, and the enduring lesson, of matrimony.
7. Become deeply familiar with your love's sense of humor, and play to it a little, every day.
8. Same thing with their appetites for romance, sensual pleasures and whatever other talents they possess. Do all you can to support your love in what they're good at (and here's hoping they're good at the sensual pleasures part).
9. My mom says "Never go to bed angry." I say, "It's OK to go to bed angry. Just be sure to write down your dreams that night."
10. Never underestimate an angry silence.
11. Make most of your gifts imaginative but inexpensive: you don't want to spoil the other person or blow your budget, and you want the really good and expensive gifts to be especially memorable.
12. At least once a year, play a really good practical joke or spring a surprise adventure on your love. Predictability is one of the slow-working poisons of committed love.
13. Love the ones s/he loves. And if you can't -- fake it.
14. Go away on your own every now and then.
15. Serve your love unswervingly through periods of illness and mourning. Nothing kills a relationship like selfishness in a crisis.

Tomorrow is Independence Day in the States, so, in honor of July 4, here's an extra truism:

• Every day is Interdependence Day.

Feel free to chime in with other bromides. We marrieds will appreciate and use all available help.

Happy 4th. Happy Interdependence Day. Happy weekend. Happy Marriage. Shabbat Shalom. Ciao.

--T.A.

Random stuff I just wanted to share, all crammed into one post

• My brother has written a novel! And gotten it published! I've bought 15 copies -- one for me, 14 for the only people I know who aren't related to me and still speak to me. I'm sure that if they stop speaking to me, my brother's writing won't be at fault.
• I've had an essay published in this book. A pretty interesting book, if you're into that sort of thing.
• Charles Martin explores Buddhism (and some other things) in a revived blog that I'm sure will be worth reading. So I've added it to my Best of Blogolalia list.
• Rabbi Daniel Landes, co-founder and director of the PARDES Institute, a renowned multi-denominational center of Jewish study in Jerusalem, coined a phrase that I'm going to have made into bumper stickers: Jews for Exegesis.
• He also invoked the Talmud as proof that Jews of radically different backgrounds could speak to each other -- even across centuries and continents. So why are Jews of different backgrounds having so much trouble speaking to each other today?, he asked.
• Here's a doctor who says the only way to level the athletic playing field is to permit and regulate steroid use. He's been called "the loneliest man on the planet." And far worse.
• That Airborne stuff actually works.
• Hardest things I've ever done: 1) Meditate 2) Be a step-parent 3) Go onstage as Banquo's ghost, during a high-school matinee, drenched in chocolate syrup (it looks like blood under stage lights), and wearing only white body paint and a G-string. I think the director had it in for me. I looked like a sundae with legs.
• Funniest thing Gabe ever said: "Why is Uncle Dick named after a private part?"
• Middle Daughter is off on her journey to save the world again. She's the "World Traveler" on the family blog-roll.
• Oldest Daughter has an intimidating internship with the Federal District of this outfit.
• I haven't the slightest idea who I'm going to vote for in my state's primary. Tell me: who's fiscally conservative, understands the gravity and staying power of the threat from radical Islamic terror, recognizes that working men and women have their backs to the wall as never before, and knows what to do about it; has the guts, and the brains, to address health insurance, immigration, housing, and begin to revive our crappy reputation and foreign policy, without being beholden to special corporate or religious interests; and has the brains, the political capital and the respect necessary to assemble a top-flight Cabinet? And who isn't a TOTAL CREEP?!
• If I were Donovan McNabb, I wouldn't want to finish my career before I had the chance to flatten Terrell Owens before a national television audience.
• And if I saw Roger Clemens, I'd offer him this.

--T.A.

Death of a Neighborhood Grocery Store

Another venerable institution -- a neighborhood grocery store, a socialist experiment, an icon of my childhood -- has bitten the dust.

The Hyde Park Co-op was a cooperative grocery store started in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood as a Depression-era, working-man's alternative to company stores. It was started, in all likelihood, by U. of Chicago idealists who wanted to create a collective -- oh, and by the way, get good food at decent prices. In time, it became the neighborhood grocery store -- a place whose smells, whose characters, whose chilly charm I can still recall, and whose opaque white fluorescent lights, ensconced in a drop ceiling, made me dream of heaven.

I remember trudging alongside my mother (in those years when she wore horrible Danish clogs and sounded like a Clydesdale thundering along the cobblestones) through the aisles of that store, sweating in my corduroy winter jacket with my mittens clipped onto the ends of the sleeves. I remember the neighborhood kids who bagged groceries there, and the vast aisles of produce and the smell of wet cardboard and citrus. I remember discovering the allure of infinite food, and the colorful aisles of cereal boxes; the siren song of Captain Crunch and the grrreat, cheerful masculinity of Tony the Tiger's Frosted Flakes.

I see the Co-op, still, from a small child's perspective. When I revisit my memories of the place, they're from perhaps three feet off the ground: the shelves are enormous, the workers' green aprons look like sails on a schooner, and the cornucopia is a miracle, each aisle disappearing in a parallax of impossible plenty.

Which is, of course, no reason to keep the store around. To read the comments under the Chicago Tribune article about the Co-op's demise is to understand how far the Co-op has fallen in recent years. It was never exactly a food boutique, but commenters (many of them former U. of Chicago students forced, for lack of choice, to shop at the Co-op) feel the Co-op is getting its just desserts (pardon the expression).

Perhaps Hyde Park is, too. Now the University will rent the space to a Jewel or a Dominick's. The neighborhood that loves to be different will be a little more like every other neighborhood. And the neighborhood residents who subsist on low or fixed incomes -- well, ironically, they'll actually probably be better off.

--T.A.

The Sears Tower, Alan Dershowitz and Martin Buber: Thoughts on a Brief Ascent

Sunday, as I was climbing 2,109 steps -- ascending 1,353 vertical feet in the process, during the world's longest indoor stair-climb -- I had the time, and the motivation, to set my mind elsewhere. These climbs are relentless, endless -- then, suddenly, they're over. They're hard work, they're paralyzing, they're inspirational. They're life in a nutshell.

I wanted to think but I couldn't until I got home. It's hard to think when your lungs are working that hard.

So I came home, had some coffee and lots of water, and set to thinking: why does what we believe, or what wisdom tradition we follow, matter? Why does any of it matter?

I had two weighty tomes to consider: Alan Dershowitz's The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, and Martin Buber's Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. The former purports to set historical context and then make a case for the continuous necessity of the refashioning of Jewish identity, in the same way that any organism constantly refashions itself. The latter looks at the Revelation at Sinai as a historical event of surpassing importance in human history, captured in Biblical text and infused with layers of meaning beyond anything a mortal mind could fashion.

Any human endeavor is just a stair-climb: great heights achieved -- elevator down. Fleeting. Borderline meaningless. Attaining a height opens vast panoramas of understanding that may inspire you -- but how do you share it? How do you pass it on?

Dershowitz's book, which is scarcely a decade old, seems more dated than Buber's, which is four decades older. Dershowitz's concern is a fleeting one, whereas Buber's is transcendent. Dershowitz wants Judaism to survive but it doesn't seem that he can say exactly why. It matters to him, it's been meaningful in human history, even though the theology is inscrutable and the extreme adherents are depriving the larger kehilah of a desire to belong or to grow in their Judaism.

Dershowitz says that anti-Semitism is all but dead, that "it may become in the twenty-first century a faint shadow of what it has been in the past two millennia." His focus for most of the book is on the survival of the moral, ethical and cultural uniqueness of Judaism, and on the dangers of success and comfort to the survival of the Jewish project. It's only toward the end of the book that Dershowitz turns his attention to what made that uniqueness possible.

We must make Jewish education important not only to the survival of Jewish life but also to success in life in general. We must devise curricula that use Jewish sources to provide all students with competitive advantages in their business, professional and personal lives. We must persuade our children that studying Jewish sources will make them not only better Jews, but also better lawyers, doctors, corporate executives, teachers, literary critics, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, and citizens. Best-selling books have been written about how the teachings of Confuscius, Jesus, Machiavelli -- even Ghenghis Khan -- can lead to success. Why not the writings of the Prophets, Maimonides, Rabbi Akiba, Israel Salanter, Joseph Soloveichik, and Ahad Ha'am? Jewish scholarship has always balanced the practical with the theoretical. The traditional rabbi was as much a dispenser of pragmatic business advice as of ritual guidance. The modern rabbi and teacher must bring the Jewish sources alive and make them relevant to the current generation of students.

It is the essence of the Jewish vision that Buber always understood, was ever fascinated by, and bringing Jewish sources alive his singular gift. His brilliant take on the Divne Name ehyeh asher ehyeh goes to the burning essence of that vision.

And it is God Himself who unfolds his name after this fashion. The exclamation was its hidden form; the verb its revelation. And in order to make it clear beyond all possiblity of misapprehension that the direct word ehyeh explains the indirect name, Moses is first instructed, by an exceptionally daring linguistic device, to tell the people "Ehyeh, 'I shall be present', or 'I am present', sends me to you," and immediately afterwards: "YHVH the God of your fathers sends me to you." That Ehyeh is not a name; the God can never be named so; only on this one occasion, in this sole moment of transmitting his work, is Moses allowed and ordered to take the God's self-comprehension in his mouth as a name ...

The meaning of the name is usually ascribed to the "Elohist," to whose source this section of the narrative is attributed. But quite apart from the fact that there was no Elohist in this sense and that, as has been said, if we eliminate complements and supplements, we find a uniform and firmly constructed narrative -- such discoveries or conversions are not born at the writing desk. A speech like this ehyeh asher ehyeh does not belong to literature but to the sphere attained by the founders of religion. If it is theology, it is that archaic theology which, in the form of a historical narrative, stands at the threshold of every genuine historical religion ...

At his relatively late period Moses did not establish the religious relationship between Bnei Israel and YHVH. He was not the first to utter that "primal sound" in enthusiastic astonishment. That may have been done by somebody long before who, driven by an irresistible force along a new road, now felt himself to be preceded along that road by "him,"  the invisible one who permitted himself to be seen. But it was Moses who, on this religious relationship, established a covenant between the God and "his people." Nothing of such a kind can be imagined except on the assumption that a relationship which had come down from ancient times has been melted in the fire of some new personal experience. The foundation takes place before the assembled host; the experience is undergone in solitude."

By the time I reached the 103rd floor at about 8:10 Sunday morning, I was sweaty and tired. I had done something arduous and meaningless. I wanted to think again. I came home and, after the coffee and the water, took an Advil and wondered again about what can't be solved and wrote about it here. The Sears Tower and Buber and Dershowitz all came together because they all made me think about what matters and why.

And that was my Sunday.

--T.A.

The Nightingale, the Raven and the Pig

My rabbi-friend Karyn told me this fable she's been talking and teaching about in her congregation:

The nightingale and the raven were having an argument over who had the more beautiful song. Of course, the nightingale couldn't believe the raven would even make a claim for herself on this count. So confident was the nightingale of her superior song that she agreed to let the pig be the judge as to who had the sweeter song.

She also agreed to the raven's demand that whomever the pig chose as the winner would peck out the eyes of the loser.

The contest was held. The pig deliberated, and decided, from his grunting and earth-bound perspective, that the raven's call sounded better to him. So the raven pecked out the nightingale's eyes, and the nightingale's song, though still sweet, was a mournful one now.

One evening, a lion sat beneath a tree in which the nightingale sang. The lion called up to her and asked, "Nightingale, your song is beautiful; but why is it so sad?"

And the nightingale said, "Because I let the pig be my judge."

What a strange, and strangely beautiful, story.

What does it mean? Why is it sadder to let the pig be your judge than to be blind? Or are they the same thing?

I guess it can mean that those who don't appreciate your song shouldn't be permitted to pass judgment on you or on your song. It also can mean that within each of us there's a raven setting us up for failure, and a pig passing judgment but lacking understanding.

About 15 years ago, having left a broken marriage and a moribund acting career, I picked up one of these career revival-cum-reinvent yourself books, and it had an exercise where you write your own obituary.

I did the exercise as a kind of improvisation, not spending any time day-dreaming or meditating on it. I envisioned a life in which I'd worked in spiritual growth, community development, and writing. I had a family, and a community, and I'd actually built places to live and written things to read, and I'd lived a long, long time.

I forgot all about this exercise, but retrieved it recently and was stunned at how prescient at least the first part of that vision has turned out to be. I may not have attained the lofty goals I set for myself, but I work in all of those areas, and back when I'd written this obituary, I'd worked in none of them. Even as I was judging myself and finding myself lacking, I was becoming me nonetheless. As I said to my Karyn, a tree may get battered and its branches get broken, but, as long as it's not killed, it still does what trees must do: it grows toward the sky and reaches into the ground and becomes as much of a tree as it can.

The One True Wife is a great example of this. She had a blast turning 50 yesterday; a lunch with me and her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews; an afternoon with Middle Daughter; an evening with the family; work on her music and her teaching, the two areas in which she shines; and some expressions of devotion from me that (I think) were successful. She had people she loved around her; she spent time doing what she does best.

So maybe the moral of the story is: you're always becoming yourself, even if you don't think you are.

And: if you sing from the tops of trees, don't let a pig be your judge.

--T.A.

Soon ah will be done

Had dinner with a friend last night in a raucous Mexican restaurant in a Northwest suburb of Chicago.

The place was colorful, loud, festive; as the Mariachi band strolled over to a table next to us (Hoppy birrr-day to you, YOOPI! YOOPI!), a waitress prepared guacamole tableside with the use of her pseudo-Olmec mortar and pestle.

This suburb has revived its downtown: new apartment buildings line the commuter rail tracks that lead to and from Chicago. A loft-style building is going up across the street -- the kind of airy, high-ceilinged behemoth they were tearing down just a decade or so ago.

After dinner, my friend showed me his new apartment around the corner. He is separated from his wife of 23 years. The apartment has views of the tracks, the lofts under construction, a sliver of the neo-quaint downtown to which he can now walk.

His master bedroom has a balcony the size of a bathmat. Still, it's a large two bedroom, two-bath apartment with hardwood floors and a washer/dryer. He'll be comfortable.

"Sometimes," he said, "I look around and I say, 'How did this become my life?'"

This morning, I had breakfast with my ex-sister-in-law. Her sister and I have been divorced for more than 15 years, but the sister-in-law and I have stayed in touch. She is in town for a conference, and she gave me a call.

She is battling cancer. She told me of that family's travails, and her own struggles to maintain both her health and her busy teaching career. Her cancer is being held at bay, but will likely never go into remission. She told me cheerfully that I was on the list of people she wanted notified in case she were to pass away. I was honored.

On a cheerier note, two weeks from today is the One True Wife's birthday.

Sunday is my nephew's birthday; a week from today his mother (another sister)'s birthday; then a few days latter, that sister's wedding; then come the birthdays of another niece, and my brother.

Today is me True Ann-Sister's 61st birthday.

And next month, with any luck, my parents will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary.

Me, I'm 47 years in, and I still don't have much of an idea what to make of what the psychiatrist Gordon Livingston called "this flicker of consciousness between two great silences."  There are brief moments when one can change one's course; they're gone, and you have to deal with what's in front of you. As you get older, these forks in the road and these happy occasions seem more and more like miracles: "Holy crap! I made it another lap!," you're inclined to say; or, "Damn, I missed another turn!"

Rabbi Akiva, in Pirkei Avot, said, "Everything is foreseen; yet free will is given."

I still don't know what to make of that, and I doubt I ever will.

Tonight, on my way home from work, I'm tuning into the comedy channel on my car's satellite radio, and having a good laugh.

--T.A.