Category: Religion

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Things Behind the Sun

Late last year, I donated some money to the Chabad house that had taken care of me & my dad the last two Yom Kippurs (here and here). I’d been meaning to do that for a while, but it slipped my mind. After the Mumbai terrorists targeted the local Chabad house for special treatment, I didn’t have any excuse.

My donation led my being added to the distribution list for their weekly e-newsletter, which usually goes out Friday mornings. I skim through most of the contents, but I try to check out the parshah section, which details that week’s reading from the Torah. (For those of you who are unacquainted with Judaism, here’s the skinny: each Saturday morning during sabbath services, the Torah is brought out and a portion of it is read in seven segments. Over the course of the Jewish year, the congregation works through all 5 books that comprise the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. At least, I think that’s how it works. I’m sure my brother or my mom will correct me on that.)

I’m not a practicing Jew, and if I were, I doubt I’d be part of the Lubavitcher movement, the Hasidic sect that runs Chabad. That said, my experiences with them have been rancor-free; they welcomed me and Dad with open arms and demonstrated zero pushiness or guilt-tripping about our religious slackness.

Early this week, they sent an e-mail about a ceremony I had never heard of: Birkat Hachamah, the 28-year-blessing.

See, because the solar cycle is 365 days and 6 hours, it takes 28 years for the sun to be in the same position on the same day of the week. Today is supposed to mark the anniversary of the creation of the sun, so Jews go out within the first 2 hours of sunrise and thank God for creating the sun. (Read the FAQs; they explain it better than I do. And there’s always Wikipedia.)

I didn’t have time to meet up with the Chabad group this morning to pray. Actually, I didn’t have the inclination to do it. I know the spirit of prayer for Jews is that of community, not solitude, but there are a lot of ways I fail to live up to my heritage, so there you are.

Instead, I printed out the prayer & the psalms, put on my yarmulke, and walked around the block to the area with the best view of the rising sun (which happens to be the yard of a house owned by observant Muslims). And in the chilly morning I read:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who re-enacts the work of Creation.

What a beautiful, evocative and mysterious phrase that is: “Who re-enacts the work of Creation”! How better to characterize the sunrise?

(The psalms that followed had a few, um, problematic sections, mainly the ones about ruling the nations of the world. But hey: I didn’t write ’em.)

Once I finished reading, I walked home, trying my best not to look over my shoulder to glimpse the sun again. Yeah, I failed at that, too.

* * *

In keeping with my half-assed Judaism, I should note that tonight is the first night of Passover. My mom’s visiting for the occasion, but we’re going to have our seder on the second night, because it’ll be easier on us and the dozen or so gentiles who’ll be in attendance. To all my Jewish readers, observant or not, chag sameach!

Here are a couple of neat Passover-related links, a little Unrequired Pesach Reading for you:

Take a three-hour hasidic tour!

Ever wonder why how they make matzo?

Israeli Jews & Arabs can work together just fine sometimes!

Update: One of my coworkers told me that the sun-story reminded him of this old cartoon, the Sunshine Makers:

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The Book of, uh, something and something else

I was too darn busy this weekend to write about that final Montaigne essay, and this week’s going to be pretty rough at the office, but I don’t want to leave you guys in the literary lurch. So here’s the closing passage from Philip Roth’s 1980 interview with Milan Kundera.

It’s not that I’ve been poring over Kundera lately, or contemplating this interview. Rather, an acquaintance sent out a request for someone to dig this interview up and provide him with the passage for something he’s writing. It initially ran at the end of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Roth included it in his Shop Talk collection of interviews & essays. I typed it up for him, then decided to share it with you:

Roth: Is this [novel], then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

Kundera: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian novel, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

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FUAE (or FUBAI)

I know it’s gotta burn my mom’s ass that there’s a big “Fly Emirates” logo on the jersey of her favorite FC, but she’s gotta be happy that the UAE has caved and will now allow Andy Ram, an Israeli doubles-tennis player, to participate in an ATP tournament in Dubai.

Weirdly, the ESPN article (derived from Reuters & AP) treats the ban on Israelis as though it’s a UAE response to the fighting in Gaza, and not, y’know, long-standing official policy. (Allegedly, they’ve been loosening up a little, partly in response to Dubai’s growth in the diamond trade).

But keeping the surreal quotient high:

On Wednesday, Swedish authorities said that Sweden and Israel will play their first-round Davis Cup tennis match in an empty arena next month because of security concerns.

Anyway, I still won’t do PR for Malaysia.

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What’s the worst that could happen?

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear bomb expert who sold secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is a free man!

Khan said he was finished with his nuclear work and wanted to devote his time to education. He said he had no plan to travel abroad apart from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, for a Muslim pilgrimage.

I see nothing that could go wrong with that plan!

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Lost in the Supermarket: Amish Paradise

It’s against the law here in NJ to sell alcohol in supermarkets, so this installment is technically a cheat. Still, the liquor store happens to be right next to the supermarket, and hey, it’s my blog.

I saw this out of the corner of my eye —

— and was impressed that someone would target an Irish stout toward people headed into Rumspringa.

Then I realized that it read “BEAMISH” and not “BE AMISH”.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series

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Lost in the Supermarket: The Imitations of Crab

For this week’s installment of Lost in the Supermarket, I thought I’d hearken back to my doubleplusunkosher post by offering up . . . imitation crabmeat!

Of course, it begs the question as to whether something this artificial is actually traife. As opposed to just a Bad Idea.

This week, you get a bonus pic! It doesn’t come from a supermarket, so it doesn’t warrant its own post. However, I couldn’t resist snapping a pic of . . . a kosher hot sandwich vending machine?

I found this one up at an outlet mall in New York state. My wife & I will only go there on a Saturday morning, before the busloads of New Yorkers arrive and when the hasidic contingent has to stay home for shabbat. Otherwise, it’s like a cross of Spanish Harlem, the Axis powers, and Samaria up there.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series

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At one

Last Thursday was Yom Kippur, so Dad & I made our return to the Chabad Jewish Enrichment Center in Chestnut Ridge, NY for Yizkor, the prayer for one’s departed parents (and other family members). I wrote all about the JEC last year, so go check out the details and get back here.

Last year on Yom Kippur, I was on antibiotics that were causing me to have paranoid delusions, so I skipped the ritual fasting (no food, no fluid, no nothing for 25 hours). In relatively better health this year, I decided to give it a go. I hadn’t reckoned on how much I increased my dependence on coffee in recent months; Dad came by to pick me up around 10 a.m., and I was already thrumming and out of it. And I had another 9+ hours to go.

Fortunately, Dad made the drive “entertaining” by

  1. talking about cooking shows and food most of the time (his diabetes precludes him from fasting),
  2. talking about how good “that one white player” on the U.S. Olympic basketball team was, until I realized he was referring to Jason Kidd,
  3. employing a GPS unit that was so faulty I named it “SPG,” which led to
  4. getting so lost that I had to bust out my iPhone to figure out where we were and how to get to the JEC.

When we arrived, we stayed in the back of the rec-room/shul. There were 25-30 men present. The rabbi saw us and walked back to greet us in kittel and Crocs (no leather footwear on Yom Kippur), while the chazzan was conducting a prayer. He remembered us from last year and even recalled Dad’s father’s Hebrew name. I’m sure he has to have a good memory for the once-a-year Jews like us.

After shaking my hand and wishing me a good new year, he said, “I’m glad you’re here! We need you to open the ark and bring the Torahs out!”

The lack of caffeine and my blood-sugar wackiness were taking a toll on me. Addled and thick-tongued, I said, “Uh, um, I don’t have to do a blessing, right?”

“No! We just need your muscles!”

“. . . In that case, you might be better off asking me to read Aramaic,” I said, following him up the narrow aisle to the pulpit/reading table.

He directed me to open the fireproof safe on the wall, remove the first Torah and hand it to the chazzan. I took each velvet-covered scroll out carefully, avoiding any contact with the ark/safe as though I was playing Operation. The chazzan, in white socks and flip-flops, carried his Torah into the congregation. I followed him through the shul. Each congregant touched the Torah cover with the corner of his tallis or his prayerbook, then touched that corner to his lips.

We finished our circuit, crossing the partition so the women and children could also receive the Torahs’ blessing, and the chazzan put his on the reading table, while I was instructed to sit down in the front row and hold the second one. The top handles of this Torah were covered by decorative ornaments (rimonim) that had little silver bells dangling from them. I kept trying to find a sitting position that was comfortable, respectful, and didn’t cause constant jingling noises, in ascending order of importance.

While I kept the noise down, congregants were called up to perform aliyah, the blessing over the Torah. Dad was the second or third one called up, and performed admirably. I even began to feel a little of The Resonance, watching my dad recite the blessing. Holding the other Torah against me, I thought about atonement, and what we were supposed to be doing that day. I feel like I’ve already atoned for most of the wrongs I’ve committed against people in my life, but that’s not what this day is about. This is about atoning toward God, and I don’t know how to do that.

Following (I think) six aliyah over the first Torah, and then another over the second Torah, it was time for the Torah reading, followed by a sermon from the rabbi. Now, the JEC’s high holiday schedule indicated that Yizkor was supposed to be at 11:45 a.m., but it was around half-past-noon when the rabbi was wrapping up his sermon. I don’t think this so much an instance of Jewish Mean Time as it was a matter of making sure that less observant congregants didn’t pray and dash.

The sermon consisted of the rabbi telling a story of the Baal Shem Tov telling a story, and in a reverie I wondered if the layers would keep growing, with each storyteller launching into another story of a storyteller, all carrying the theme of Jews’ obligations to each other and God. The rabbi, feeling less postmodern than I was, elected to keep it relatively simple, although his story did rely heavily on the prospect of reincarnation and explicitly mentioned Purgatory as an afterlife destination. His message: live up to the Torah, because you may be in this world in order to “get it right this time.”

After he finished, those of us who haven’t lost our parents went outside, while the others stayed in for Yizkor. The rabbi was lucky enough to be among our number, so we shot the breeze in the backyard. He asked me, “So what do you do when you’re not praying and studying Torah?”

I filled him in on my day job. He asked for details about the nature of business magazine publishing, how we’re adapting to the internet, and why he only sees me once a year. “Because I’m not a very good Jew,” I told him. I thought about some of the others I’d seen that morning in shul, who were even less educated in Judaism than I am, but were still there to pray.

“But you’re here today!”

“I guess I’m a half-decent son.”

“That’s a start!”

We walked over to the main group of people, and the rabbi’s wife told the story about how she once passed out in the middle of Yom Kippur in an overcrowded shul. It turned out she was pregnant with their first child. Someone pointed out that it’s good to keep smelling salts on hand during the day. The rabbi said that they usually do, but he couldn’t find any this year. I mentioned how disappointed I was that there was no snuff circulating the services this year. He laughed and told me to come back next year, and maybe they’ll have some.

Once the prayer was complete, we returned to the shul. The rabbi collected the names of all the dead from the congregants, so he could lead a prayer for them. When that was done, we noticed that others were getting up and heading outside, so we took our cue to leave. The rabbi caught us and took my arm, saying, “No! We need you to put the Torahs back in the ark! It’ll only be another five minutes!”

As he led me back up the aisle, one of the congregants said, “That’s ‘five minutes’ in Jewish time!”

I told Dad that he could wait in the car, figuring that he might be light-headed from sugar-crash and would need to snack on the banana that he brought along, but he stayed. And so we prayed further, and I lifted the first Torah from the reading table. About to place it in the ark, I said to the rabbi, “It’s a 40-day fast if I drop this, right?”

“Right! So don’t drop it. You don’t want that much atonement!”

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Under the Sun

Barring a major investor jumping in during a time of financial panic, it looks like the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth will be shutting down in a week. How’s today’s Arts+ section looking?

  1. Victor Davis Hanson reviews Martin Creveld’s The Culture of War: “he presents himself as a Thucydidean”!
  2. Steven Nadler reviews Joel Kramer’s biography on the Great RaMBaM: “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses”!
  3. Eric Ormsby reviews Fernandoz Baez’ history of the destruction of books: “Unlike Borges, who delighted in inventing titles which don’t exist (but should), Mr. Báez describes books and whole libraries that fell prey not only to fire and flood but to sheer human malevolence”. . .
  4. And speaking of Borges, Alberto Manguel reviews William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel: “Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is Umberto Eco”!?
  5. Paula Deitz writes up the Venice Biennale of Architecture: “Two different exhibitions featured walls of refrigerators as stand-ins for enclosed spaces”?!
  6. In a rare disappointment for me, it turned out that Valerie Gladstone’s Bacon and Rothko in London does not actually involve pork products: “‘What I find amazing,’ Mr. Gale said, ‘is that even after all the preparation for this exhibition, looking at Bacon’s paintings still makes my spine tingle. I never stop being overwhelmed.'”

And a bonus! This weekend, the New York Times wrote about the Sun’s plight! While it can’t be bothered to mention the Sun’s top-notch arts coverage until a passing ref. 6 paragraphs from the end — presumably because it puts the Times’ coverage to shame — it does manage to include a quote from a writer at The Nation who called the Sun “a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews”! Awesome! Now I can miss it even more. . .