True Ancestor

Studying Like a Kid, Part II

Some months ago, I wrote about the desire to go back to school to really study the workings and the history of religion. I have an active spiritual life, but it's defined by my intellectual curiosity. I felt I'd gotten to a point in my life, perhaps even economically (jury's still out), where I could pursue the study of religion single-mindedly, without dragging my family across the country, or the world, to do it.

So, naively, I applied to two PhD programs in the Chicago area. One -- Northwestern, the one I'd courted more assiduously and set my hopes on -- rejected me. Yesterday, I found out that the other, the University of Chicago Divinity School -- somewhat more prestigious, about twice as far from home as Northwestern, and the institution that set the backdrop for my childhood -- accepted me.

I have a terrible time making major decisions. I have no problem exploring possibilities, but when a possibility reaches some kind of fruition, I seize up. I text-message Oldest Daughter with the news. She texted back: "Daddy: This is not the kind news you text message! Call me when you get this." When I called her, she told me that if I did not go to the U of C I would regret it for the rest of my life.

Annie and Jacques called. Jacques left a message on my cell phone and said, "Congratulations on becoming Chief Rabbi," and then he and Annie dissolved in laughter.

My brother's wife, an Episcopal priest, went to Yale Divinity School. From her I began to learn that some divinity schools are more "church-y" than others, and that the U of C is not a "church-y" divinity school. So that's good.

It's also -- and I know this not just from my past in its shadow, and its reputation, but from asking around -- that the University of Chicago is a fiercely intellectual place. And I'm just not sure I have that kind of energy anymore (if I ever did).

Fortunately, I don't have to decide right now. I can feel good about getting accepted, and go teach my Jewish meditation class, and watch Scrubs with Gabe, be grateful for the opportunity -- and for the chance to let it sink in a little.

--T.A.

Random Thoughts and an Act of Self-Promotion

• Here's an article I wrote that's out today in the February '08 issue of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought & Culture. I'd love to know your thoughts.
• It's a snowy, blustery day here in the Chicago area. Ironically, Gabe's Jewish day school is open, but Our Lady of the Snows in Chicago is closed due to inclement weather.
• Samson Raphael Hirsch has opened my eyes to Psalm 23. Here's his translation:
  • A Psalm of David. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall want for nothing.
  • He makes me lie down in pleasant green pastures; He leads me beside the peaceful waters.
  • Again and again he restores my soul; He desires to lead me in the paths of Justice for His Name's sake.
  • Yea, though I walk in the valley overshadowed by death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
  • Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my oppressors; once Thou didst anoint my head with oil; my cup has been full ever since.
  • Only goodness and loving-kindness shall follow me all the days of my life, and then I shall return to the House of the Lord -- forever.
• Of course, this is a translation into English of Hirsch's interpretation/translation from the original Hebrew into German. Still, its Buddhist essence is evident: a relationship with All That Is cleanses you of bottomless desire. You live sustained by a knowledge that each breath is an impossible bounty. As Hirsch says in his commentary on verse 5, "Any situation, once I understand it and once I know how to use it as a means of coming nearer to [blank; he says God, a Buddhist might say Emptiness], brings me nothing but joy. The ordinary concept of 'good fortune' or 'calamity', therefore, no longer has any meaning for me. Changes in my fortune cannot disturb the table of spiritual contentment which [he says God; you say potahto?] set before me." Then you die and go home.
• I am trying to adopt this viewpoint of immeasurable bounty. In the past week I've been rejected by a graduate school and had a book idea rejected by a publisher. And it's probably a good thing that both those things happened. Really.
• I'm glad to hear Hillary and Barack didn't go at each other's throats. I think that means they're scared, and that they understand that if they keep tearing each other down, McCain will climb up and plant the flag on their smoking corpses.
• Fred Thompson really does remind me of Deputy Dawg.
• I've got to cut out this insomniac blogging. I'm going back to bed.
• Shabbat Shalom.

--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?

I'm a blogsolipsist!

Yes, that's what I am: a solipsist with a blog. And a blogger who blogs far more than he reads other blogs.

I'm not an old man yet, but I'm starting to think like one: I have my blogpod  (see below, right) -- what I need to go gallavanting around in the blogosphere for? I'm not a single blog, looking to hook up with some other wee winsome bloggie. Why, in my day, we had to blog in the snow! Uphill! Both ways! And we liked it that way!

I hear noise in my head that has to be deposited here. I think thoughts that get strung together here. I perform self-hypnosis here. I belly up to the bar here. I decompress here. I even pray here.

And when I want to know what other people do with their noise, I go mostly to a few particular blogs -- you know who you are.

If you're a blogger, and I've never been to your site, just leave me a note. I need to get out more.

--T.A.

Being Honest Every Day

Every day, I exhort myself to be both honest in all my interactions and positive in all my thoughts.

How's that for a koan?

I have a decidedly negative outlook. I just do. I learned, through the study of Zen, to see this as a self-limiting story that for a short time was useful, but whose roots, once grafted, sank in deep and wouldn't let go.

I learned from my acting training to be able to pull back and hear this as my "inner monologue." Let me just say, you might not mind hearing a brief standup act from that voice, but after about 10 minutes you'd have had more than enough. He's rented an apartment in my head, though; he must have rent control up there. He will not move out.

I've learned from Judaism that this misanthrope is my yetzer hara -- my evil inclination -- and that not only will he not move out, but I cannot do without him: if properly trained and contained, he can provide me with ambition, spur me with motivation, urge me to improve, not let me relax into arrogance or lassitude.

So I go through each day embracing this contradiction. I open my eyes on a Monday morning and I try to get my arms around it: positive and honest. Positive and honest.

W. Clement Stone.

Barack Obama.

Jacob wrestling with the angel.

Happy Monday.

--T.A.

My First Bad Review. And It's Really Bad.

Clicked on the amazon.com page for Letters to a Buddhist Jew today, and saw a new, scathing review of the book I co-authored with Rabbi Akiva Tatz.

Written by a "novelist, attorney, licensed psychotherapist, recreational sailor, and pipesmoker," the review reserves special scorn for me. I'm thinking of having a new book jacket made up with the following endorsements:

• "The David Gottlieb on these pages is so colorless that it seems like he may not even be real."
• "...[Gottlieb's] grasp of Zen philosophy and literature seems shockingly weak."
• "Gottlieb seems to know nothing at all about Jewish history, Jewish religious practices, Jewish philosophy or Jewish mysticism, even though he describes himself as a "seeker" and claims to attend a Conservative synagogue regularly. If Gottlieb's ignorance is real, then it is a bitter indictment of the pallid state of mainstream American Judaism. But there is something so contrived about the intellectual befuddlement evident in Gottlieb's letters that this reviewer strongly believes that they were intentionally crafted so as to give Dr. Tatz a ready-made foundation for his numerous theses in this book."
• "Gottlieb is of no use here."

And worst of all:

• "Gottlieb now runs a website named "True Ancestor" which is strictly Judaic in content."

(Hunh?!!)

Like a good Zen student, I watched my reaction to this review very carefully: I was hurt. There was a physical sensation of hurt, a lack of breath, a palpable sickened feeling. Then, there was righteous indignation, signaled by a burning sensation on my face and scalp. During this phase, I composed counter-arguments in my head, point by point, to each of this reviewer's assertions.

Then there was resignation, in which I threw out each argument: after all, what's the point? Am I going to change his opinion of the book?

I then felt a surge of magnanimity. I e-mailed the reviewer and thanked him for such a detailed and thoughtful, if profoundly misguided, review (and if you find the review helpful, or just entertaining, you, too, can e-mail him).

And finally, I felt compassion for this walking axis of evil -- lawyer, psychotherapist and novelist, an unholy combination if ever there was one --  and sorrow over the intensity of the suffering and disappointment which caused this erudite scorn to come pouring forth like cherry-scented smoke from his gnarled Bjarne. It's bad enough to simply be lawyer, psychotherapist, novelist and pipe-smoker -- but to brandish these blots on your character as some kind of pedigree strikes me as a cry for help.

Of course, I tend to reserve less-than-erudite scorn for pipe-smoking sailors. Guys who live in Old

Spice ads and take themselves terribly seriously should not review books. I also spit upon lawyers and fear and loathe psychotherapists, whose main qualifications for helping you solve your problems is that they're more screwed up than you.  And novelists are beneath contempt entirely.

So, all in all, this negative review, coming from a fellow in a jaunty cap and a turtleneck, spittled Viking dangling from his shiny lips, both hurts and invigorates, both enrages and delights me.

Perhaps I need help.

But, no, I have the Noble Eightfold Path before me -- urging me to hold to the Right View of my reviewer; I have the foundation stone of Judaism, the Decalogue, reminding me not to murder, be it in thought, in speech or in actual deed. Just as I resolve not to give in to the hatred, the fuel of Samsara, so shall I be kind to the stranger in my midst -- for I, too, was once a pipe-smoking sailor in the land of Egypt.

Seriously, let's face it: if you're going to author or co-author a book, someone is going to hate that book. Some one of them is bound to say so in writing. And to do so is their inalienable right. Even if they are sailing psychopaths -- I mean, psychotherapists.

And I must admit: I not only understood this reviewer's points, I actually agree with some of them. Still, although I'm angered by his haughty tone, I am reminded that both Buddhism and Judaism -- about which I know nothing -- say you must not give in to your anger.

So as much as I'd like to break his Meerschaum over his balding pate, strangle him with his turtleneck, and throw his bloating corpse over the lee rail of his schooner, in the name of the brotherhood of authors, I shall refrain.

It's both the Buddhist and Jewish thing to do.

Isn't that right, Mr. Minde?

--T.A.

(B)logging off

Time for a little blog hiatus.

I will be back sometime in mid-July, after a 10-day trip to Israel.

Hope to "see" you then --

--T.A.

Verses of a Spiritual Voyager

I love this.

And I love the fact that it was written by an Orthodox rabbi.

--T.A.

A Capitol Weekend

The Family decamped to Washington, DC this past weekend. We went to see Oldest Daughter at her college, and on Friday night I spoke at Beth Chai, a Jewish humanist congregation that meets at the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda.

The talk -- ostensibly about Letters to a Buddhist Jew, but much more wide-ranging, in the end -- revealed to me, again, the fascinating depth and diversity of Jewish thought and belief. The reaction to some of my comments (and some of the assertions of Rabbi Akiva Tatz, my very Orthodox co-author) were somewhere between anger and bewilderment, but toward some of his analogies and ideas there was head-nodding and a visceral recognition.

The Beth Chai web site lays out, in kind and careful terms, how secular Jews approach Judaism. It say, in part:

Human beings possess the power and responsibility to shape their own lives independent of supernatural authority.  In other words, not all Humanistic Jews believe in a God:  Your own beliefs are up to you.

A Jew is a person who identifies with the history, culture, and future of the Jewish people.

Judaism is the historic culture of the Jewish people.

Jewish history is a human saga, a testament to the significance of human power and human responsibility.

Jewish identity is best preserved in a free, pluralistic environment.

The freedom and dignity of the Jewish people must go hand in hand with the freedom and dignity of every human being.

I can't find much to argue with there. And anyway, I wouldn't. One of the messages I tried to convey in my talk was the need, indeed the inevitability of Jewish diversity. Not only is it impossible for us all to practice, believe and worship in one particular way, it's not wise. It's not even the way we were designed. The Chasidic masters recognized the unique spiritual wiring of every individual. On a macrospiritual level, it would seem this kind of diversity has a Darwinian wisdom to it. Besides, it's much easier to learn when you're not so busy defending your own beliefs that you can't hear what the other is saying.

Another of my messages was in response to a very good question: Just why are Jews drawn in such large numbers to Eastern traditions? Is there some wisdom there that we lack in our own tradition?

My answer was that meditative and contemplative strains of Judaism were always there -- they're there in the Torah -- but, for a variety of reasons, they did not achieve dominance in a faith that had to survive in Diaspora, and in the Holocaust the masters of these disciplines perished in large numbers. In moving toward meditative traditions, it seems as though the Jewish soul is responding in a deep and even involuntary way to something that exists on the Jewish spiritual wavelength but is hard to find in standard Jewish practice -- in the West, if not elsewhere.

*

Oldest Daughter is in her element in college: staying up late, socializing with a steely determination, working when she must, and very happy to see the rest of us --at least, in small doses. While she and Middle Daughter slept off a campus party on Saturday morning, Gabe, the One True Wife and I took a trolley tour of notable Washington sites. Gabe wanted to stop at the Lincoln Memorial, so we ascended the steep steps, passing through groups and around couples; we probably heard about seven different languages before we reached the top step.

Gabe was awed by Lincoln: impassive, impossibly large; seeming as if at any moment he might burst out of his pose and stand, wearily, to acknowledge the wistful gazes of the hundreds who were there. On the wall to Lincoln's right, his Gettysburg address; to his left, his second Inaugural address. He wrote them both, longhand. He spoke them both, without the aid of teleprompters or the shield of bulletproof glass. The memorial shouts, not just of Lincoln, but of Martin Luther King; not just of eloquence, but of an angry insistence that we live up to our lofty notions of what America represents; and of a resignation that we never may.

The rest of the weekend, we ate and laughed. Until, that is, the four travelers spent three hours on the tarmac at Regan National Airport, waiting for the weather in Chicago to clear.

April was a busy month. Amba turned 60. Another sister turned 55. A nephew turned 30, a niece turned 20. The One True Wife turned -- well, let's just say she had a birthday -- and my brother turned 50. It is an astonishing moment in our family life, an alignment of ages that speaks of our collective good fortune (I spit three times, knock on wood and throw salt over my left shoulder after typing this).

May good fortune be yours, along with easy travel.

Happy May --

T.A.

Filling Books

On the way down to Florida earlier this week, I was writing in a journal I keep. I mostly write in this journal in bed at night, and on airplanes.

A man sitting across the aisle asked me if I was writing a book. I said no. But on the plane ride home today, I filledthe last page of this book, and realized that, yes, I had written a book, in a way. It will now take its spot on a closet shelf bulging with books I've filled with tortured cerebrations and self-recrimination going all the way back to 1971.

Sometimes I flip through these books, pick a page at random, and see how much I've changed. The answer: astonishingly little. My mind has more information now, but it still processes that information in much the same way. The inner monologue is more fluid, but it still hits the same points over and over again: the search for a "calling"; the rigors of work; the roller-coaster of family life (in which we move from the furtive rebellion of adolescence, to the madness of matrimony, to trying to control the furtive rebellion of adolescents); and a brief review of the golden days of various vacations.

I say I haven't changed that much, but there are two big changes: one is that the shadow of depression doesn't hang over recent writings the way it did all through my first marriage and into my second. The hollow ring of resentment -- of anger bent back at me, like the muzzle of Elmer Fudd's rifle -- is absent. Mostly.

But I'm also getting older, and more used to typing: my handwriting, especially at night, gets progressively more drunk and disorderly, and usually the entry ends with me falling asleep with the pen in my handszszzz.....

--T.A.