NOTE FROM MY SON BEN ON JEWISH VEGETARIANISM . . .

Interestingly enough, Rav Kook promoted vegetarianism. He even wrote an essay titled "A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace". I have read that he stated that we still have the chiuv to eat meat on Shabbos on the account of "ain simchas ele be'basar", but ate the minimum to fulfill his obligation. I have even read that he is of the opinion that all of our korbanos in the time of the Moshiach will be vegetation, rather than animals.

Here are 2 links that have differing explanations of his views: the first is from a guy named Richard Schwartz who is of the opinion that Rav Kook promoted vegetarianism actively for our time. Marty Lockshin vehemently denies this was Rav Kook's opinion. This is the link: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ravkook_veg.html.

The second article is from Rav Shlomo Aviner. He was probably the closest talmid of Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook. He maintains that Rav Kook only meant what he wrote about vegetarianism as a future, Messianic idea. As people living in an "imperfect world", vegetarianism isn't a necessary concept. The link to this is: http://www.ravaviner.com/2009/02/maran-ha-rav-kook-and-vegetarianism.html.

CALLING ALL VEGANS TO SHABBOS DINNER AT MY TABLE

Every Shabbat, I sing with gusto about luxuriating in “duck and quail,” “fatted stuffed chicken,” “meat and fish and other delights.” For all the mitzvot that I take at their figurative value, this is one that I take literally, with impeccable gravitas.

Yes, yes, I know all about Jonathan Safran Foers and his vegan protestations. They will eventually, I predict, go the way of all pop-culture, along with the Rubik’s cube and pet rock. Yes, I foresee a day when moderation will hold sway in the culinary world, and gluttony will never be confused with an occasional well-marbled steak.

The path to moderation will likely never satisfy those humanitarian souls who deem the fleishig route a one-way ticket to hell. I have no desire to convince them to the contrary, except to say that I am certain that many a great spiritual master and humanitarian succumbed to eating a hamburger without being sentenced to perdition. The Rambam a vegan? Akiva? Samson Raphael Hirsch (although he wrote to the contrary, that hypocrite!)? I have it on good authority that even the saintly Lubavitcher Rebbe ate meat at his meager repasts. I would not go so far to call vegans “The Hezbollah of Food,” ala Anthony Bourdin, just perhaps slightly misguided in their protestations about us meat-eaters.

My purpose is to reassure that we carnivores have not gone off the track by slaughtering, butchering, koshering, and proudly serving a delectably juicy brisket at our Shabbat table – while keeping our humanity intact.

Look, I wouldn’t lie to you. I’d be hard pressed to find any noteworthy rabbinical authority who says that slaughtering animals for human consumption is some kind of ultimate virtue. If anything, it is a necessary vice until “the time” comes when humanity attains its moral perfection. That noble Divine experiment was thwarted ten generations after creation at the time of Noah, when license to eat meat was introduced to the human diet. I dare say that our state of moral perfection hasn’t gotten much better since.

In fact, the Torah refers to the common hamburger as basar ta’avah – “lustful meat” – as anyone who stands in front of a grill al fresco with a beer in hand knows only too well. As much as I hate to hide behind the skirts of Divine authority, God does instruct that eating meat is a licit pleasure, deriving from a lust that is “kosher,” unlike lusting after a married woman or someone else’s property. A few scholars even maintain that slaughtering and ingesting meat signifies human dominance over the animal world, thus elevating the animal to a higher spiritual level by putting it into the service of man. Don’t get angry at me; I’m just reporting the news. Regardless, so long as man finds lusty gratification in eating meat, God will bless its use to celebrate Shabbat, holy days, and a variety of simchas and celebrations.

Let’s consider, then, that kashrut is the last line of defense between eating meat in the way of a mensch or as a barbarian. The animal must be chosen from a clean variety. The slaughtering itself must be performed swiftly and painlessly by an expert shochet, wielding an impeccably honed knife. The blood must be meticulously removed, so as not to intimate that the animal’s life-flow will be used symbolically to victimize it. For like reasons, we do not cook/eat milk and meat together. Thus, even if slaughter itself has odious connotations, the animal’s preparation for consumption is performed with sensitivity to the gravity of the act.

When I embarked on writing this essay, I knew that I would be hard pressed to justify the absolute virtue of dining on a juicy, rare steak. In the abstract, the vegans are probably right. Well, let the abstract be damned! Let me turn the rest of these ramblings into a confession, no, perhaps a love-song: Count me among those who lust for meat. I have never pondered the inconsistencies between that and my commitment to traditional Judaism, any more than a nearsighted person ponders his myopia. I feel no reason to defend my carnivorous inclinations.

Mr. Foers’ moral imprecations aside, I cannot contemplate the joy of a Shabbat dinner being complete without a steaming bowl of shimmering chicken soup, crowned with a matzo ball. Better yet, crown it with kreplach – a swatch of noodle encasing a tiny treat of hockfleisch, “Jewish wonton,” if a feeble comparison is necessary.

Just as our hearts have been lifted heavenward by ethereal golden broth, we are drawn back to the primal mothering of earthy chopped liver – the most negligible organ of the chicken transformed to nobility when napped in egg, onion, and hearty schmaltz.

Heaven and earth collide as the main course of brisket is presented. I do not mean the so-called “first cut” brisket, completely devoid of fat, that upon cooking morphs into a pile of wet hemp. Feh. Goyische nachas. No, I mean the whole brisket, fatty deckel and all, sliced so that each bite contains some of the fat and the lean, the perfect culinary yin-yang. And let every bite be accompanied by a morsel of potato kugel, again enriched by copious amounts of schmaltz.

Dessert? Why Apfelschalet, of course!

So much for Shabbat dinner. Fast-forward now to lunch. We return home after schule. The savory aroma of cholent greets us as the door – beans, barley, potatoes, garlic, of course, there must be garlic. But without a hunk of well-marbled brisket or flanken to fatten and season the mélange, one no longer has cholent, but a silly pot of baked beans.

My “Rhapsody in Fleisch” could go on endlessly. Suffice to say that “lustful meat” plays a role in celebration, or even perking up an otherwise ordinary day, that no mess of red beans and brown rice could ever replace. Propriety tells me that I should admire my vegan brethren for the moral perfection that they have attained. But why should I lie? I feel sorry for people who cannot throw health and pietistic concerns to the wind every once in a while for the gratification that only a juicy steak or a hot dog slathered in mustard can provide. As for me, I’ll ask God to arbitrate the dispute. I figure that God is already so picky about the things I may not do that I may as well fulfill my lust when God nods His approval.

Mr. Foers, you may find that my taste for meat is depravity personified. I’m willing to take my chances. After all, what would be worse? Spending an eternity in purgatory or a lifetime subsisting on tofu and soy?

A HOUSE OF PEACE AT GROUND ZERO

Let us say for argument’s sake that there is not something outright malevolent in building a mega-mosque at Ground Zero. Yet, no one can escape the truth that it is an act of the most inconceivable chutzpa (gall) on the part of purportedly well-motivated Muslim movers-and-shakers.

Someone had to have whispered in someone’s ear, “Think of how much ill-will we would generate by dropping that edifice down at the foot of the symbol of abject hatred. How much worse would building the mosque sully the reputation of a people already alleged to be intent on ‘taking over the world’? How many people would ‘get it’ that our motives were only the highest? Isn’t resisting that kind of controversy and ill-repute worth our buying some less tragedy-steeped plot of land? Should we not have the wisdom, kindness, and pursuit of peace to move elsewhere?”

The day will likely never come for that mosque to represent anything other than rancor, ill-will, and the antithesis of the Muslim pledge to foster ways of peace. Perception is everything, and the perception will always be twenty-stories of chutzpa, if not outright malevolence.

Were that space next to Ground Zero to remain mosque-less and empty, no higher cause would have been served. If anything, Muslims would be vindicated, because no altruistic goal whatsoever would be realized by a conspicuous gap in Downtown architecture, or worse, filled in by a bodega.
What then? Just a thought, now:

What about a House of Peace, welcoming to all people? I envision it as a calm and serene place, a respite from the shoulder-jogging bustle of the Downtown streets and financial district chicanery and intrigue. No graffiti or rancor. Cool, quiet, fountains, areas that lend themselves to meditation, others to discussion and study, with serene plantings and a grotto. Not a museum, but perhaps niches where in solitude one can listen to the words of the world’s peacemakers. A string-quartet here. A flute recital here. And no Wi-Fi. Serenity. Restfulness. Restoration. Peace.

When you stop to think of it, a house of peace is the only meaningful use of property once so sullied by hate and every antithesis of peace.

“Get real!” you say. And, I would say that you are right. Think of the security, the coordination of programming, the fundraising cocktail parties and extravaganzas, the decisions of what does-and-doesn’t represent the vision of peace, the designs of the fountains and grottos, the letting of contracts for construction . . .

Getting real is precisely the point. It’s inconceivable that we would ever find a critical mass of people – particularly people of influence – to concretize a vision of peace, even if it’s merely a symbolic one, or even to agree to what “peace” would look like. Yet, what we do with that parcel of land at Ground Zero must bring the issue to a head. If not a mosque, what then? If not a symbol of chutzpa and provocation, then what in its place?

There are dreamers and “big-picture” people, and I confess to being both. I know an ideal when I see it, and I know that the only thing worse than having dreams is to have no dreams at all. The events at Ground Zero left many of us cynical and dreamless. We need some good dreams, not ones of revenge and vindication, but of places here and there, if not everywhere, that peace becomes reality for all who dare to dream it. We may never have a House of Peace in Lower Manhattan, but what a lovely dream, if only we held in our hearts and did not capitulate to cynicism. The world may laugh at our dreams, but in a dreamless world, how dare we not dream them?

THE LANDSMANSCHAFT PICNIC

My mother’s parents, Pa and Bubbe, arrived in Chicago fresh off the boat from Grodno, Poland, in 1921. As years went by, they took on American ways, prospered but retained ties to the Old Country and old friends through the Grodno landsmanschaft. The landsmanschaft was a friendship circle of the Jewish people who hailed from the same town in Eastern Europe, its members commonly known as landsleit.

Landsleit would periodically convene to socialize, play cards and gossip. They also looked out for each other and financed each other’s debts. They donated selflessly to ransom other landsleit out of the horrors in Europe and get them started in the New Land, which they cherished. (You’d get a chuckle out of their Yiddish version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, sung on patriotic occasions.)

To their immeasurably grief, too many relatives and landsleit were left behind to perish in the horrific concentration camps. A saintly old rabbi, despite knowing of my grandfather’s socialist leanings, wept when he discovered that I was his grandson, telling me in a hoarse whisper, “He is blessed. He saved many, many lives.”

The Grondo picnic was the apex of the landsmanschaft’s year. By the time I was old enough to be taken along, the landsleit had aged out. They still spoke Yiddish with each other, and memories of their youth and starting over in the Promised Land had evolved into full-blown wonder-tales.

Pa lorded over the picnic like a godfather. He had the charisma and grooming of Gotti. He was the quintessential glad-hander and big talker: An ingratiatingly arm around shoulder. Quick with a handclasp. A robust “Sholom aleichem!” – “Peace be with you!” A laugh enhanced at the edges by as asthmatic rasp. Heaping more food on your plate, want it or not. Calling over every child by his Yiddish name, then “Kum aher!” (Come here!), stuffing a dollar bill in each kid’s pocket.

Ah, the food . . . I was, I guess, the typical all-American kid – baseball, rock-and-roll, and picnics of hamburgers and hotdogs. Yet, the Old World cuisine of the Grodno picnic intoxicated me. Ironically, I thought that I had to eat it surreptitiously for fear that a classmate would spy me and report to jeering friends that I ate the same foods that their grandparents did.

Let them be damned! It was delectable, a symphony of robust tastes and textures. The American hamburger is at best a swatch of carpet and its hotdog a link of garden hose. The Grodno picnic was a holy-day al fresco in the Garden of Eden: vampire-banishing garlicky brisket and orange-yellow gravy (at home, our brisket was always bland as wet hemp because garlic upset my cranky grandmother’s stomach), roasted “Sabbath-style” chicken, oven-browned potatoes shimmering in grease like motor oil, Pa’s throat-puckering sour pickles and tomatoes, fermented in crocks in his basement, buckwheat kasha, dense potato kugel (pudding). To be honest, I do not remember the sweets, despite knowing that they were abundant, because I had already lapsed into a coma of well-fatted meat and potatoes long before dessert.

Of this I assure you: Recreation did not mean egg tosses or potato sack races. Instead, there were card games like Kaluki, brought over from the Old Country (although, ironically, its origin may be South African or Caribbean). And Pa, voice still honey-sweet despite his asthma, would lead the landsleit in Yiddish songs, happy, melancholy: Teyere Malkeh – Fill again my cup with wine! Hob’n Mir a Nigen’dl – Let us sing a song of childhood! A Sudenu – How shall we host a feast for Messiah? And the doleful Partizaner Lied, in memory of the Partisans who struggled valiantly against the Nazis – Never say there is only death ahead!

I still think a lot about the landsleit and their magical picnics, now all of them gone to their heavenly reward. I think of their arrival in Columbus’s Golden Land, the hope, the fear, the unknowingness, the self-doubt. Then, even as the decades wore on, once a year the landsleit would gather to replicate the deliciousness of their long-ago salad days, their customs and cuisine yet intact.

Why I too miss those days I have yet understand. Perhaps it is because the memories are not simply cherished, but consecrated. Ach, maybe next Sunday I’ll take the kids to the park and show them a real picnic with brisket and potato kugel. Shall I teach them how to play Kaluki, too?

HELEN THOMAS AND THE QUESTION OF ANTI-SEMITISM

Helen Thomas, just shut up.

The doyenne of the Washington press corps has long been known for her tart tongue. She opens her mouth for better or for worse, and people listen, perhaps not sufficiently to shape public policy, but enough to gain a glint of polarizing attention from the hoi polloi.

A week ago, she broadsided about Israel’s Jews, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine . . . Tell them to go home to Poland and Germany . . .” Ironically, during the 1930s, the streets of Poland and Germany were covered with graffiti, “Jews, go back to Palestine!”

God knows, here is not the place to reassert the millennia-old claim to Israel as the Jewish homeland, even for those of us who advocate a two-state solution. And God knows, one need only Google “Holocaust” to determine the historic “hospitality” of our Polish and German hosts.

Ultimately, we cannot hold Helen responsible for what she thinks. However, what she says demands accountability. That’s because it gives new legitimacy for every vituperative anti-Semite, from the right and the left, to come creeping out of the woodwork. Her words might not be a rallying cry, but they certainly embolden those who are already pre-disposed to think ill of Jews, Israel, even Judaism.

As an upper-middle-class Jewish kid growing up in the shadows of the Holocaust, I had occasional minor encounters with Helen Thomas style anti-Semitism. A crotchety guidance counselor (back then they were called “adjustment teachers”) announced to our recalcitrant seventh grade class, “You Jewish children are all too high-strung.” Then, the principal would each year preface the holiday pageant with, “Isn’t it a pity that so many of you children don’t have a Christmas holiday?” Armstrong Elementary School was 90% Jewish.

Parents didn’t protest, because, well, that generation of Jewish parents just didn’t protest.

By ninth grade, the stakes turned higher. Now in a high school that was only five percent Jewish, I became whipping boy of a mechanical-drawing teacher, despite my timidity. He accused me of cheating, and of having my father, an expert draftsman, do my homework. (No, he didn’t.) Naïve or just a sap, I had no idea that the teacher was motivated by anti-Semitism. And if my parents thought so, they weren’t saying anything to me.

Spring of 1963, my private hell ensued. Passover came, and I stayed out of school to attend religious services. Such absence, properly verified by parents, rabbi, and guidance counselor, was officially excused. All but to Mr. Hellman. He summarily expelled me from class for not bearing an excused absence and flunked me.

This time my father did, atypically, react. He protested to Hellman, to no avail. The rabbi was called, again to no avail. Four days later, the guidance counselor intervened, and Hellman begrudgingly reinstated me. Naturally, the balance of the year was beyond purgatory – accusations, poor grades, losing homework assignments that I had handed in, capped by a D- grade. And no honor roll that year for an otherwise exemplary student.

But, you know what I remember most? Hellman mumbling at me upon my readmission, “You people are always pulling strings.” Then, as I took my seat, he announced loud enough for the entire class to hear, “Why don’t you go to one of the special schools they have for your people?”

The message was clear: “You don’t belong here. ‘We’ belong here. You belong in a yeshiva, or maybe your home in Poland and Germany. Just not here.”

By and large, the kids laughed. The rest of the year, they jeered about my “special school.” “A joke,” said Nietzsche, “is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”

Hellman may not have fomented anti-Semitism that day for a class of ninth graders. And, I guess that for me it built character. But, he did legitimate anti-Semitism, the same way that Helen Thomas did on the White House lawn. And, legitimacy opens many foreboding doors.

An epilogue: Hellman was promoted to assistant principal. I kid you not. At least Helen shut up, resigned, went home, and probably blamed the Jewish lobby.

HOW A TORAH SHOUT-OUT MIGHT HAVE PROTECTED WALL STREET FROM ITSELF

In my meanderings through the synagogue world, I am always amused by the only instance in which shouting out during the Sabbath service has become a ritual, if not a well-cultivated art form. For the uninitiated, the focal point of the service is the ceremonial reading from a portion of the Torah inscribed in Hebrew on a parchment scroll. Chanting from the scroll is no small feat even for a Hebrew literate; the words appear with neither vowels nor musical notes. The reading requires the uncanny ability to memorize the vocalization and notation of about 120 verses of the weekly text. Think of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” . . . sans vowels and notes.

But a few wisenheimers in the pews always seem to know better. If, for example, the hapless reader should mistake the letter “resh (R)” for a “dalet (D)” – Hebrew lookalikes – the know-it-alls instantly shout out the correction. Lest the mistake go unnoticed, their tone is smug, belligerent and put-upon, perhaps even a little arrogant.

They say that every Jewish custom has a righteous origin, even if it has come to be abused by ensuing generations. “How, then, rabbi, can there merit to the Torah shout-out?”

“Even this,” the rabbis answered: Its origin was in the fear that even the simplest mistake might be incorporated into the text by erroneous usage and change its meaning, unless it was corrected instantly. Belligerence and arrogance obviously came later.

Legitimate or not? For the pious, for whom the Holy Writ is the inerrant word of God, every letter is sacred and must be prized beyond diamonds. Playing fast-and-loose with the words might result in sacrilege, desecration, or worst, in altering some sacred principle of The Law.

I confess that that indecorous little custom has always left me a tad ambivalent. Ambivalent, yes, until a week ago when that a serf Wall Street might have hit the "b" key, as in "billion," instead of the more temperate "m," just one key away. Ask your second grader the difference. The market began its freefall, the Dow plummeted a thousand points, and sell-orders went wild. From a single glitch, the fatalists had their day - or at least their 20 minutes – on Wall Street.

Yes, the error was righted in a matter of minutes. But just think: What if a couple of cranky old traders had instantly shouted out, “It’s ‘M’, you idiot, like in ’million’!” like they do in those arcane little synagogues? You know what would have happened: The miscreant would have hit the backspace and righted the $14,985,000,000-error quicker than I could change "Madam" to "Adam" in my Torah reading.

How many other disasters could be averted if we dispatched a few crabby nitpickers to undo minor mistakes that could lead to tremendous disaster?

• “No, it says 'abort' the warhead, not 'deploy' it!"

• “No, it's righty-tighty, lefty-loosy, when you turn the dials on the oil well’s control panel!"

• “Ben, hit ‘L’ and get out of the elevator; don’t follow Mrs. Robinson up to her hotel room!”

Sure, there's a grey line where conscience, free will, and personal accountability must kick in, or we’d be far the worse for it. But, dare we dream that all our mistakes could be waylaid by a crabby voice thundering, “’M’ not ‘B’!!

So you see, I have come to appreciate the transcendent meaning of those funky shout-outs. Yes, they come from bellicose old men, but those curmudgeons are the very ones who really still believe that the Holy Writ is the inerrant word of God. Wall Street may play with its billions, but the curmudgeons are the guardians of eternity. Let there be no mistaking: They preserve and protect it. Most of us simply dabble at buying-and-selling it.

N.B. If you'd like to be part of a Torah Shout-Out, call me, and some Sabbath I'll take you on a field trip. Of two things you may be sure: At some point, the reader will make a teeny mistake. And, quicker than I can mispronounce “Zelophehad,” some belligerent voice will shout out its correction. It might not build or destroy your faith forever, but it would still make a helluva term paper for your Comparative Religions class.

MAISHE CHAYIM, WE DARE NOT MAKE FUN

I was bullied.

Pudgy. Clumsy. Momma's boy. I was an easy target for the taunts of bullies who knew that I was more likely to run home crying than to stay and fight. Tough guys have a knack for meting out brutality on kids like me who are the most vulnerable.
I read about Phoebe Prince bullied into suicide, and I read it with an empathy that surmounts even my anger at the bullies. Perhaps . . . I think, it might have been me. Perhaps had I been a teenager, and not a ten-year-old, and there had been Facebook, and I’d been even a bit more vulnerable, and . . . and . . . and . . . Perhaps had it not been for the serendipity of birth – my time, my place, my mother – fate would have been so cruel to me as it was to Phoebe.

You see, one day in fourth grade, the moment arrived for me to test the hypothesis that it being the persecutor was sweeter than being the persecuted: There came Peter, plodding kid who limped. I accosted him in the schoolyard.
"You’re a bowlegged pig with lumbago!” I crooned. How I chose that particular jeer, I will never know.

I stood for an eternal second outside myself, stunned by the discovery of my untapped reservoir of cruelty. I watched Peter crumple. I will never forget the panic that twisted his face. He loped across the yard like a bewildered puppy to his mother's embrace. I chased behind, not knowing how to dispel the enormity of his hurt. I cowered as I surrendered to a mother's wrath.

But his mother simply shook her head and whispered a few words at me in a voice I now recognize as war-weary, "If you only knew how many tears we have cried . . . “
Mortified, I ran the eight blocks home, knowing as only a child that I could gain atonement only by confessing to my mother. She listened impassively as, between sobs, I choked out the story of the pain I had inflicted and my ensuing contrition.
"Maishe Chayim," she said, reverting to the Yiddish with which disappointment and counsel were dispensed, "M'tor nisht oplachen. We dare not make fun."

However many wrongs I commit with my errant life, I will forever be haunted by the image of panic-stricken Peter, his mother's whispered lament and my mother's wisdom. I pledge that I will haunt my kids with them, too. We dare not mock the differences and adversities of others. We dare not rejoice even when our adversaries stumble.

Why?

Because we were not put on earth to hurt. Because if I laugh in the moment of your distress, I have bequeathed to you the right to delight in my misfortunes. Because a society that luxuriates in hardship is on the road to being a society that is systemically heartless. Because a downfall, even when it is deserved, is not an occasion for intimations that we are above reproach.

Thus, we must teach our children even in their earliest years not to make fun of the child who limps or stutters or who can't catch or throw as well as the rest. We must teach them what vicious weapons words can be, how there has never been any act of treachery that did not begin with the abuse of speech.

Our children learn best when we show them that we live by the lessons we teach them: We must not toss off racial epithets. We must not grab a cheap chuckle from the sight of morons wearing tee shirts that extol hate-talk. “Just joking,” will we tell our kids? I think not, for Dr. Nietzsche’s wisdom will prevail: “A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.”

And, we must assiduously resist the impulse to gloat self-righteously over of public personages who have been scandalized, even when it is coming to them. For, if their excesses are to leave any ennobling lesson, it will never be found through our own hypocrisy. "M'tor nisht oplachen.” Evil is to be condemned. But, we dare not revel, for then we will have learned nothing.

So, that day I tried out the theory that it might be tastier to deliver the blow than to receive it. Peter, I will never forget the terror that crossed your face. I will never forget your mother's look of anguish, nor my mother's admonition that sealed the memory forever: "Maishe Chayim, we dare not make fun." Please know, Peter, that even if you do not remember, I will never forget and will forever beg your forgiveness.

As for you, Phoebe, now God be with you and rest in peace.

A LETTER TO A SON WHO IS JUST LIKE ME

Dear Ben,

Over the last days of Passover, I had plenty of time to think. It made me want to tell you where I am with my life, the peaks and valleys -- and tell it especially to you, since you are truly my child in your passions and gusto. You and I share a joie de vivre and lust that never tolerates anything halfway. You are not only religious, but Chasidic. When I was in the rabbinate, it wasn't "a job," but 24-7, often, I confess, to the neglect of you kids and mom. We like our steaks big, thick, and rare, our l'chayyims from the best single malt, our beer the most esoteric. Passion, lust, joie de vivre, man.

Thus, you have likely assumed that there is a reason that I spend most of my time rattling around an empty house. Sure, I learn some Talmud each day, do a little organization work, read, write. But, I guess I learned an ethos from Poppa and Opa that without a job, a man will never be complete. "They" say this is called "retirement," but in fact, it is really "an empty house."

The reason I am "retired" is because "they" say that I am disabled. Health, particularly the remnants of the stroke and the atrial fibrillation, have screwed up my equilibrium, prevented real exertion, and require that I rest at least an hour or so every afternoon. No, I do NOT have one foot in the grave. Everything I have is manageable, and I plan with God’s help to live a long life, at least to dance at the baby’s wedding! 99.9% of the time, my attitude is great. But I am missing just enough health to not enable me to work. I also don't do too well with being bossed around.

But, here is the cautionary part of the tale that relates to our profound similarities. My problems likely started out about 20% genetic. Unavoidable. But, 80% came simply from not taking care of myself, going back to my twenties. I can show you a handful of 13 pills I take every morning and night that keep me alive from irreversible damage caused by arterial blockages, arrhythmia (hence, pacemaker), diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke. (BTW, had it not been for an undeserved Divine intervention, I should have been dead from pancreatitis, had to have my heart zapped twice, and would have been deprived of ever seeing any of the grandkiddies.)

A lot of it has had to do with my weight fluctuating so radically -- definitely a function of the lust for food and drink that the two of us share. I have again gone to obese. Now, after a couple of recent health scares, I am back on a roll (bad metaphor), losing 30 pounds with another 20 to go, no goofy diets this time, just counting calories.

I am feeling so much better, clothes fit, can even walk up the hill to synagogue again. I am already so much healthier, even though I will still always have these chronic problems hanging over me, the ones that forced me to "retire" at the ridiculous age of 60.

None of this was intended to alarm or to be a bummer. I just thought you should have a clear perspective on where I am with things. AND because you are so much like me, I don't want you to have to face what I do in my relative youth.

To the contrary, I am a happy guy. I have a wonderful wife. I have a sense of peace with your mother. I have the best kids in the world. My stepkids honor me. And I have more delight than any ten grandparents deserve from my grandchildren. I have respect in my community and am known for being a catalyst for good things. I've made my peace with the synagogue and can even attend and get a little inspiration.

Yes, the health will always be a concern. Mine and yours. I think back on my life, and look forward even more hopefully to yours. I never want you to have to say, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been' ... " (Whittier)

Always be the good boy you are. I love you.

Dad

A SEMINARY STRUGGLES FOR ITS SOUL -- FORTY YEARS LATER

Issues of doctrinal loyalty and removal of trustees struggling for the soul of Erskine evoke déjà vu that tugs at me to relate of a similar struggle forty years ago at my alma mater.

Once upon a time, my alma-mater yeshiva (seminary) was a kinder, gentler place, occupying the role of relative liberalism among the yeshivas descended from the academies of pre-Holocaust Europe. As is typically the case of “relative” liberalism, it was routinely criticized from both right and left – doctrinal impurity from one, wishy-washiness from the other. History will show, though, that for decades, it fended off the barbs its detractors, and stayed its own course.

That was true until the late sixties, when the yeshiva tilted to the path of rigid orthodoxy. The sociology would take days to explain, but the rightward direction came to be personified by the recruitment of a Rosh Yeshiva (“Head of the Yeshiva”) whose doctrinaire orthodoxy was surmounted only by his penchant for intimidation.

And therein lay the rub. Heads of classical yeshivas ruled by divine right. But the vast majority of them also led benevolently. Among the last vestiges of moderation in our yeshiva was that rule was shared between the Rosh Yeshiva and a lay board of trustees. So long as the Rosh Yeshiva was a benevolent scholar, harmony prevailed. The new Rosh Yeshiva, though, took his divine right as a mandate, and a rule of tyranny began, to the increased chafing of the trustees.

How does one define tyranny in the arcane world of Orthodox Judaism? Most of it is purely sociological, however much cloaked in theological terms. First, there must be the perception of “enemies within,” the scourge of those who are personally and doctrinally allied with the Rosh Yeshiva. Then there are the goons, loyalists ready to antagonize the enemies, either with the encouragement, or the benignly approving eye, of the Rosh Yeshiva.

As you likely surmise, I was one of the enemy, a handful of us who were relatively liberal, openly aligned with the “old left.” So . . . one day on return to the dorm, I found that my poster from the Lyric Opera had been shredded and “liberal” books had been trashed from the shelf. Other such indignities became a regular occurrence.

I was not singled out. The other principle of tyranny is to divide the immediate world into an all-virtuous “us” and an all-vilified “them.” In the world of the Rosh Yeshiva, the “them” were all other “denominations” that were not orthodox-adherent – Conservative and Reform Judaism and their derivatives. His pronouncements were unequivocal. He forbade yeshiva students from serving as teachers in schools sponsored by the non-orthodox. Then, he prohibited the students from teaching in schools of synagogues whose only infraction against orthodoxy was that men and women sat together during worship. Finally, he imposed that one could not be ordained unless he agreed to serve only in congregations in which men and women worshiped seated separately and concretized it in a signed contract.

Those of us who were within a couple of years of ordination were caught, if we were to have refused his final demand. But, the trustees assured us that it would not happen. Then, in a slug-‘em-out that could be fomented only by testosterone-pumped men, the trustees demanded that the Rosh Yeshiva yield. He refused. They fired him. He declared divine right. They hired a new Rosh Yeshiva. The Rosh Yeshiva declared the new Rosh Yeshiva illegitimate. Then he named his own trustees. The old trustees locked him and the new trustees out. He conducted classes in protest outside the yeshiva, with TV cameras running, the stations alerted by the goons. And so it went.

Please hear me well: This is not about Erskine or any other seminary. It is about what happens anywhere that benevolence gives way to tyranny, and testosterone substitutes for justice, mercy, and humility, when a beloved legacy, be it the Bible or the Constitution, falls into the hands of mean-spirited, malevolent interpreters.

All told, the reign of terror in the last years of my life at yeshiva was small potatoes. Forty years later, matters of far greater gravitas are still being fought out with hate-speak and bombs and the cruelty of wild-eyed talking heads. When will they – and we – ever learn?

IT IS NOT IN OUR POWER . . .

May I give you a brief Hebrew lesson? Repeat after me: “Ain bi-yadenu – It is not in our power . . .” Pat Robertson must have missed the day in seminary when the phrase was taught as prelude to a maxim spoken by one Rabbi Yannai. Had Pat been there, he would have known that Rabbi Yannai encapsulated hundreds of years of suffering and thousand of years of theology in two sagacious words: “Ain bi-yadenu,” Yannai said, “it is not in our power to explain the well-being of the wicked or even the sorrows of the righteous.”

What are we able to say about the victims in Haiti? Round and round the theological track we blunder, only to return to “ain bi-yadenu.” Is God impotent over natural disasters? Ain bi-yadenu. Is there no God; only the chaos of nature? Tell me that, as you smell a rose on a magnificent spring day or witness the tenderness of newborn life. No, ain bi-yadenu.

Then come along Pat Robertson and his cadre of tin-whistle yesmen, and claim, yes, bi-yadenu, we do have the power to understand. It’s all part of God’s plan to slay the innocent and devastate their land.

No use excoriating Pat Robertson. Every generation brings more than its share of smug demagogues up the pop-chart. They will always find a way to cloak their misanthropy in virtue. As they proffer more and more Biblical passages to defend their position, it should prod further the resolve of decent people to articulate the higher truth – that we commoners actually do know more about God and theology than Pat Robertson: Ain bi-yadenu.

The real vexation is about their benign supporters, the silently acquiescent – the ones who quietly believe that Haitians are getting what they deserve and the earth is being cleansed because Pat or El Rushbo, or their local preacher told them so. Are they evil? Are they dupes? Are they just stupid? Have they no sense of moral autonomy – the innate knowledge that something is wrong or sinful, regardless of whatever an attractive demagogue tells you to the contrary?

A friend whose father was incarcerated in Buchenwald and whose grandparents perished at the Nazis’ hands, gave the following opinion:

People basically want their own comfort and well-being. As my Father would say: The German people were nice, and they were sad that they couldn't buy from him anymore. But that didn't stop them. They were quiet and just followed their leaders. Perhaps deep down they were saying, “Let's get rid of the Jews.” They really didn't care. But to the Jews, the neighbors expressed sadness.

Yes, of course, the analogy to the Holocaust and Nazis is a gross overstatement, except in one respect: Those acquiescent people in the pews or in front of the radio are silent accomplices to terrible wickedness. We should not let them off so easily. As one of my rabbis underscored the point, remember that only four percent or so of the Israelites actively engaged in the Golden Calf, while the sin of the remaining 96% was that “they sat by on the sidelines,” maybe too intimidated to complain or maybe just not caring to upset their own comfort.

The good news is that the vast majority the hoi polloi like you and me do hold the Robertsons and Limbaughs in disdain, see the plight of the Haitians as a horrific injustice, call it an “Act of God” without grave theological distress, and donate time and money selflessly to right such a tremendous wrong, whatever its source. We have marginalized the voices of hate into “nutcases” and their amen-corner into malcontented gabble on right-wing talk shows.

Most of us, knowingly or not, have already come to understand and accept the reality of “ain bi-yadenu.” A bitter pill. Don’t we wish God would explain it once and for all? I’m not so sure. You see what happens when ill-spirited people think they know more than God is showing. Stuff them back in their squawk-boxes and drown out their evil pronouncements with words and deeds of benevolence and love. And tell the silently acquiescent in the pews that for however little we know about why the righteous suffer, we know full-well how to stop the suffering.

A WORLD IN WHICH SUSIE WOULDN’T HAVE SUFFERED

Susie Schwartz did not come to school on the first day of second grade. Nor the first week. Nor the first month. “Oh, she’s moved away,” Miss Davis told us. But there was a tolling in her voice, one which years later we came to understand as pathos. How far away, we had no idea.

Little by little, a whispered rumor slipped out, that Susie was dead. An illness of which only a few of us had heard. “Cancer made her very sick, and finally, God took her away.” Away forever? Few of us had yet become cynical enough to ask how God could be so selfish. Surely, God had elderly grandparents to entertain Him, not at the cost of the life of a seven-year-old playmate.

Would God take me forever? Would it be better than opening Chanukah presents with Mommy and Daddy? Playing with my friends? No playmates? No Miss Davis? Just some far-away place, never to return. The dread of my body lowered forever into the ground?

It’s the devious nature of childhood to be able to phrase the questions of life without yet being able to comprehend the answers. We certainly did not realize that even our parents and ministers had a hard enough time answering them. True: All the theologians in the world cannot explain away the death of one innocent child.

Susie’s death set off my phobia of death, which was shortly redoubled by the picture of Pius XII lying in repose on the cover of Life – his slumbering face ghoulish blue-green tinged. Susie, too? Me? Soon? Inescapable? The patent unfairness of a child’s death? Each one of us can say that we have had our fill. My classmates Marlene from leukemia, Judie overdosing, Barry in an auto accident, God having “taken them,” when who could have used their presence more?

Ironic, or some morbid fixation that I still have my first grade class picture, and look at it – no, study it – from time to time to see Susie’s innocent smile. And likewise, Marlene, Judie, and Barry from my high school yearbook.

Over 40 years on and off in ministry, I have buried too many children – anorexia, cancer, overdoses, accidents, heart disease, congenital disorders – and reawakening each time to second-grade fears and unanswerable questions.

Then last year there was Alana. She was a toddler whom I came to know through St. Baldrick’s, raising funds for children’s cancer research. We fought with every resource to defeat the leukemia – chemo, surgery, transplant. Her parents fought, too, burdened by grief, self-doubts, fatigue, roller-coasters, and likely, too, by the most irrational feelings of guilt. Finally, her little body could take no more, and she died. Her funeral was more one of resolution, you could see, than of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, you have to wonder: Wherein lies the optimism to leave you with hope and not merely morbidity? The answer is trite and simplistic, so trite and simplistic that we have yet to figure it out. The answer is resolve and resolution, not surrender to despair. A thousand theologians may not be able to explain away the death of one innocent child. But, we are obliged to explain before God how we can allow innocent children to die.

Why does God let children die? That I do not know. Why do we let children die? That I can tell you: It’s because a society of Joe Six-Packs still spends incalculably more on cigarettes and Bud than it does on cancer research. It’s because people “cannot” give as much because of the recession. Try explaining the economics of recession to a child dying of heart disease. Priorities, man, priorities.

How many more young people would contemplate dedicating their lives to research or poverty medicine or law, or fundraising, or teaching, if we had our priorities straight? Who would provide us with moral exemplars and heroic stories of self-giving for children to learn lessons of inspiration? How much more character would we inculcate into our students if we would educate them in character as much as in science and math?

It’s the stuff of which quixotic, wide-eyed optimism is made, right? Spare an entire world full of children from the doleful fate of Susie and Alana? Maybe not in our generation or the next. But, don’t say never. Spare one more child here and there, and the cumulative results will be stunning. Dare we dream . . . ? “Drop by drop,” the rabbis of old would say, “can penetrate the hardest stone. It is not for you to finish the task. But, neither are you free to desist from it.”

A NEW YEAR’S CALL: GO TEACH!

Here we stand at the eve of another Rosh Hashanah – Jewish New Year – and the introspection to which we are called by God leads me back to recollections of equal measures of elation and grief. Such is this memory:

When I was in the throes of my deepest depression, I would lie in my bed and watch reruns of Rhoda at 2:00 in the afternoon. If you know about clinical depression, we lie in bed not because we want to, but because life, as we perceive it, has left us no option.

Out of its depths, though, I took a nanosecond of faith to spend a weekend in Brooklyn, with a Chasidic friend who was an adherent of the Grand Rebbe of Lubavitch. There would be no pressure. We would stay with his parents. His father, serendipitously, was private secretary to the Rebbe. If nothing else, it would be an insight into an arcane world, surrounded by empathic people.

The Rebbe was imputed by his disciples to have supernatural powers, and to be granted an audience was regarded a metaphysical encounter. My friend’s father arranged such an encounter for me. It would take mere moments and its primary gift would be the Rebbe’s blessing, which, he assured me, contained influence above.

Whether or not you are a believer, the Rebbe radiated an aura of ethereal sunlight. But, apparently he stopped short of a blessing for me, at least in so many words. Instead, he stroked my arm, peered through crystalline eyes, and spoke to me softly: “You should teach.”

Upon my departure, my friend’s father asked almost accusatorily, “So what did the Rebbe tell you?”

“He said I should teach.”

“Did he bless you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Listen, he blessed you. So when will you start to teach?”

I hemmed and hawed: I had no students. I had no way of getting any. I had no space. I had no energy.

“The Rebbe said you should teach!” His voice was now bellicose. He is asking me to buy into blind faith, I thought. The Rebbe communed with God. The Rebbe knew the antidote, whatever it was to be.

“What?? Where?? Whom??”

“The Rebbe said you should teach! Even if it’s one person in your bedroom! Go teach Talmud! You have a good kop (head)!”

“OK, I’ll try.”

“Don’t try! The Rebbe said you should teach!”

The conclusion to the story is eerily supernatural: At Sabbath’s end, my voicemail held a message from a rabbinical colleague from whom I hadn’t heard in ages. Just popped up out of the ether. “Please call me as soon as you can,” he said.
Anxious, I returned the call.

“My congregation is starting an adult education program, and the committee and I want to know if you’d like to teach. We’re thinking Talmud, since you have such a good kop.”

Ya gotta be kidding, I thought. This was not smoke-and-mirrors. This was the real thing. I’d had had the metaphysical encounter with a man connected by his holiness. He told me to teach, and poof, in spite of my self, I’m teaching!

Whether or not you believe in miracles, what happened in Brooklyn had at its core the message that most restores the human soul: To be healthy, we must turn our energies outward. Nothing is more uplifting to the mind, heart, and spirit than to give something precious of ourselves to others who need it – to reach out with wisdom, wherewithal, energy, compassion, empathy . . . in a word, to “teach.” And nothing is more devastating to the spirit than to implode our all our energies into ones self and preoccupations.

Good meds and psychotherapy have helped greatly. No more, thought, than the pivotal moment when I listened to Rebbe, threw depression to the wind for the quickest second, started to teach, and thereby began relearning the patterns of giving, not subsisting.

Now we celebrate a new year – a time we believe is the “Birthday of the World,” particularly the human species. For all of us, then, an occasion of rebirth, renewal. If only we could take our lives so far as to get out of bed, shut off Rhoda, and reach outward, our deadly, depressing isolation would heal, and this would become a truly blessed new year for all of creation. Now, go teach!

WACKY ON THE WATER

If you have nothing to write after a cruise, you know you have attained a new level of writer’s block. OK, the ports of call – Newport, Boston, Halifax – were memorable. The food, as always, defined conspicuous consumption. The service created a weeklong illusion of luxury the likes of which we rubes would never enjoy, were it not for a blitzkrieg infusion of cash.

What’s left to tell about my cruise? As a Boomer of the ‘60s, I dare not gloat too lavishly, lest I be perceived as bourgeois. But, as an almost-senior in 2009, I dare not be too critical, lest I be perceived as a cynic and a crank. So, let’s say that that it was neither an orgy of giddy abandon, nor an experience that would turn sweet cream sour.

After three cruises, I finally realized that the word that was missing from my vocabulary to describe the milieu was “wacky.” Everything you do on a cruise has a patina of “wack,” intended or not, perpetrated by crew, voyagers, or the basic ambiance.

A quick example: The after-dinner entertainment is notorious for its cheesiness. But when the show hopscotches instantaneously from a little-too-energetic medley of “Hair” to an unctuous tenor crooning a dewy-eyed rendition of “Danny Boy,” you know that we have wandered just a little too far into the Kingdom of Wack.

You know what else is wacky? The inability to divest ourselves of our cellphones when we’re upon the high seas. As we (and I mean “we,” as in “me”) draw nearer to the coast, we check our reception as frantically as a nicotine fiend grabs for his next cigarette. Why? To check our voicemail, of course. Or, to call Cousin Birdie about the food. (“Terrible . . . and such small portions!” as the Yiddish joke goes.) That, and call into the office to sweat some new crisis. And, not to be outstripped by lo-tech, checking our email is also irresistible, fetched from a place ominously called the “Internet Café.” I failed to resist for eight measly minutes, and it cost me $22.50. And, yes, the whole ship is rigged with wi-fi, so that you see folks constantly pecking away at their laptops poolside, balancing one of those frou-frou banana daiquiris in their free hand. Wacky? You tell me.

The reputed leisure of cruising is also fraught with wack. Yes, the food and portions are legendary. But, so is the pushing, shoving, and butting in the buffet line, the likes of which make Times Square feel like a croquet match. And the din? One day, a this was a mother to her daughter at 100 decibels above the madding crowd: “Did you remember to call your Cousin Sharon?? She’s having a cyst removed from her ovary.” Next day, another mother/daughter, same scenario: “I had a little headache, but at least I didn’t get diarrhea!!” And, where else can your otherwise well-behaved dinner partner get up the wack to run her finger through the majestic Baked Alaska and lick it off, just before you were going to do the same? Wacky, no?

Five years ago, after my first cruise, I wrote a piece that dripped with cynicism. Could there be that much difference in aging from 55 to 60? This time you will not hear a snide word. The voyage was just what my therapist ordered: Asian waiters dressed like Venetian gondoliers, who actually called you “Signore.” Fluffy drinks with teeny umbrellas. Bumbling magicians. The black-out Baked Alaska sparkler-lit caravan. Table talk about surgeries and scars. The Internet Café. The Brobdignian buffet, somehow always served on the “Lido Deck.” Elderly women with their wheelchairs pulled up tight to the slot machines. Having your picture taken hugging a lobster.

The profound moments of a cruise will more than identify themselves – a magnificent view, historic site, a lover’s kiss. But, whenever the profundity subsides, the real way to enjoy a cruise is to savor it through the glasses of wacky. You will be neither disappointed, nor cynical, nor bored.

So call me neither bourgeoisie nor misanthrope. I’ll stand now and forever for the appellation of “wacky.” I had this confirmed thousand-fold the moment we disembarked in New York and I was greeted by a stevedore who told me in no uncertain terms to “f*** off,” because I had chosen someone other than him.

Ah, back to terra firma and its unvarnished realities, pining for just one more frou-frou daiquiri and another day of wacky.

A FORTY-YEAR OLD TALE OF MY OWN “PROFILING”

At the outset, let me make clear that this is not a missive about “who’s got it worse.” The discrimination that Jews have suffered here at home, however egregious, holds no comparison to that of African Americans, from slavery, to Jim Crow, to racial profiling. As a product of the Jewish upper middle class, though, I cannot resist relating my own experience with “profiling” – at least in an attenuated sense – however like or unlike that of Henry Louis Gates.

Four decades ago, I was one of the protesters who marched through the streets of Chicago during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, albeit that I was pretty clean-cut and respectful, as befitted a yeshiva bochur (orthodox Jewish seminarian). In the convention’s aftermath, I attempted to attend the equally infamous Chicago Seven trial, at which leaders of the protest were tried for everything from disturbing the peace to sedition. The mood was, as one might expect, a frenetic, highly-charged mix of courtroom angst and countercultural buffoonery.

A spectator’s seat was nearly impossible to procure, but I waited my turn and was seated for an afternoon session. I remember dressing neatly; appropriate to the behavior of a yeshiva bochur, down to the yarmulke (skullcap) I always wore back then, a mandatory sign of devotion of the orthodox Jew to the One Above.

Upon being called to order, courtroom-tension as thick as ever, a marshal pointed to my yarmulke and signaled to remove it. I moved to the aisle to explain.

“Take off the beanie.” The marshal was adamant.

“It’s not a ‘beanie.’ It’s . . . “
My explanation was cut ominously short.

“I said, take off that beanie.”

But, giving me no time to either explain or remove it, he wrenched my arm and pulled me out of the courtroom, where a marshal grabbed me under the other arm and dragged me down a hall. At this point, I remember being only too willing to walk under my own strength, but every insistence just ratcheted up the dragging.

“Should we arrest him for ‘disorderly’?” one barked at the other.

“Too much trouble,” the other answered.

With that, they threw me in an elevator and boxed me into a corner. When we got downstairs, they slammed me against a wall and threw me through the door, warning me to “Get your ass out of here, and don’t come back, or you don’t know what hell is.”

The story made a box in next morning’s Sun-Times. I heard that Abbie Hoffman, the clown-prince of the conspirators, shouted out in open court, “It’s a shondeh for the goyim (a shame for the gentiles)! They’re taking a yeshiva bochur away!” for which he was cited for contempt.

That is the kind of tale you tell your grandchildren, worn like an achievement badge or a pair of tix to Woodstock – the day that Zayde got roughed up by the cops. Can you imagine that? Zayde? Truth be told, though, except for an occasional brush with low-grade anti-Semitism, I have lived a charmed life in which the cops have been my friends and no one has demanded that I remove my “beanie.”

But my 40-year-old singular experience with thugs-at-law is also a cautionary tale. It means that estrangement from basic justice and the presumption of innocence, the violation of personal integrity and decency, are an ever-present danger to anyone who dares to be different – much more so by dint of the color of ones skin.

So you see, once upon a time, decades ago, I lost my own presumption of innocence to the profile of a timid, nerdy yeshiva bochur, just trying to explain that my “beanie” defined whom I was. Is it that too much unlike Professor Gates defining himself by the color of his skin as a source of pride, not shame nor suspicion?

INTIMATIONS OF USELESSNESS

Would you indulge me in this opportunity to wallow? I just received my Medicare card and first Social Security check. Maybe you’d wallow, too.

My mind for an eternal moment is lingering over the most irrational thoughts. So, please don’t tell me how much I still have to give to my family and friends and community. I know. Please don’t tell me how many productive years still lie ahead of me, if I would just exercise more often. I know. Please don’t tell me that, with deference to the poetry of Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra, “the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.” I know.

You see, I have read the word as “disabled,” but through the dyslexia of depression, I have perceived the word as “useless.”

“Useless.” In my most lachrymose times, I look at the card and check, and feelings of uselessness overwhelm me. No, I have not been able to find gainful employment for seven years. “Experts” have calculated that I had more to gain by being declared “disabled” – too bipolar to hold down a real job among real people working for a real boss meeting real deadlines.

Were I 60 and retired, people would think me lucky to have days to commune with my keyboard, the dog, and what we’ll make for dinner. How many working stiffs would doubtlessly tell me they’d love to trade places, collect their check, chuck their boss?

But I am 60 and “disabled.” I have seen and even buried those who have faced disability and mortality far younger than I. Yet, now how cannot I feel it so acutely when the disability is mine?

Here’s the real rub: I know that my existence still makes a difference. People are still touched by the things I write. I can still pull together the critical mass of good-hearted, bleeding-hearted, and discontented people to make causes happen. I can still get a yuk out of a Biblically-relevant joke that I crack at my ragtag weekly Bible class.

Yet, it’s the finality that is killing me, boys – now having been declared “disabled” by social convention. No, no, don’t you see that I am perennially 16, a silly teenager still full of puns, double-entendres, goofy voices, and practical jokes. In my mind, I am immortal. Now, I face the reality of being named elderly at age 60.

How much of a man’s worth is bound up in his employability? Worth should come from ones ethereal, spiritual majesty, brother. Tell that to your preacher, not to someone whose nose is rubbed in a Medicare claim each time he visits his doc. “Take a little nap every afternoon,” he says. I need it, he says, for all the meds I’m taking. Then go get the mail and watch the cycle revolve around another letter from the Social Security office, all the while struggling with the thought that I am still far more hippie than Yanni.

I could make a friend, call a friend, but . . . I could go to the lunch for seniors at the synagogue, but . . . So damned much apoplectic self-pity, the weight of depression. Linda knows better, God bless her. The shrink will listen impassively, so long as I can afford the faux-empathy. The meds help me avoid sleeping fitfully until 4:00.

One day, rationality will once again prevail. Promise lies ahead. I know that the best is yet to be. I will again feel it again and even preach it. It’s just that mortality means to accept that a smile can occasionally just mask the fear, and even the feelings of uselessness, announcing that one has already arrived at the “last of life” for which the first was made.

Ah, feeling better already. Excuse me while I go back for another dessert.

FEEDING THE APPETITE FOR SCHADENFREUDE

It might be too early to write about the depths of Mark Sanford’s damnation, but it is not too soon to write about his pain, however well deserved. Paving the road to his purgatory and perdition has yet to be defined, not so much by the prospect of illegally misappropriated funds as by salacious bikini tans. Learn well, though, that the self-righteous hooting of his lynch-mob breeds its own kind of love affair. It is the affair fed by schadenfreude, the public’s insatiable appetite for the delight in another’s undoing.

Perhaps in this open and unrelenting society, comedy will always be inevitable. Winding up as one-liners in a Conan monologue or a Letterman Top Ten list has become part of the ritual of public exculpation, a flogging before the jeering throng.

Call me a sourpuss, but let me give the tawdry misdeed a different perspective: This situation is a tragedy, plain and simple, not an SNL sketch. A once-respected leader capitulated to misbegotten lust. Who knows the demons at work in his soul? Who knows the conflicts that were prey to his narcissism? All we do know is that he is already suffering all the grief he deserved and then some. He is likely to have forfeited his job, his marriage, his esteem, his authority, his ability to walk down the street without facing murmured scorn or derision.

Once, though, that society has meted out its explicit and implicit punishments, who will be there to give a modicum of solace and encouragement to a hurting, isolated, failed man who gave in to impulses that bespeak tortured unwholeness, not criminality? Who will comfort him, show him some understanding, and restore his sense of self-worth?

It will not be a psychotherapist at hundreds a session. It will, and must, be a person of exceptional compassion, tolerance, and insight. Perhaps it will be someone who has himself been humbled by scandal or impropriety, who knows the internal conflicts and lurking demons. Perhaps it will be a “wounded healer,” one who has himself gained a great ability in comprehend others' troubles thanks to the awareness of his own pain.

Having mercy on a person who has suffered undeservedly is, sadly, a rare quality in our contentious, calloused society. Granting mercy, or even understanding, to one who had done wrong and deserved punishment is even more exceptional. Yet, anyone who has been there knows that everyone needs someone by his side, someone who may loathe the sin yet acknowledge the humanity of the sinner. Those of us who have sinned, especially to the public’s derision, know only too well the paradigm of the pain, the emptiness, and if God grants us, the healing.

“Everyone needs someone,” you say? Even Hitler and child murderers and cold-blooded killers? To that, I have no rational answer, but I do have an existential one that I learned from Elie Weisel. I was privileged to have coffee with Weisel at the time that Ivan (“The Terrible”) Demjanjuk was on trial. Knowing his staunch opposition to capital punishment, I asked Weisel if his opposition extended to Demjanjuk, et al. “No,” he said. “That’s different.” He did not elaborate, and there was a note of finality to his voice. It said, “This should not require further explanation.”

I guess that there is a point of malignant depravity that moves beyond any claim to compassion or even human validation. And I guess that we must rely on some higher instinct with which God has blessed us to know where to draw the line. This, however, I do know: What Sanford did was not mass murder. Likewise 99.9 percent of the sins that feed schadenfreude-hungry audiences a steady diet of scandal, titillating innuendo, lush gossip, comedic scripts and unjustified intimations of our own moral superiority.

OK, OK, so we got a good yuk out of self-righteous public personage getting caught with his pants down. Next week another deserving candidate will be welcomed to the pop chart. But, who among us will see tragedy in another’s downfall? Who among us will be there to wipe their tears and ease their burden?

If the public has a right to the comedic dimension of human downfall and moral frailty, then let them know well enough also to see tragedy as tragedy. For, imputing only comedy to a person’s undoing is the greatest tragedy of all.

THE WASTE OF A LIFETIME

What a waste of a lifetime.

People will find a thousand ways to analyze why a hateful 88-year-old man tried to shoot up a museum devoted to the lessons of man’s greatest inhumanity. We have already heard minds small and large prognosticate about the causes being in a climate of national misanthropy to Freudian traumas dating back to toilet training. I prefer the theory that sometimes evil is simply evil; it plainly transcends psychological or sociological explanation – “two parts Hitler,” my Holocaust-survivor Talmud rebbe, would call it.

In all the rightful questioning, there also resides a bitter lament – please don’t quote me out of context – that we should recite over Erik von Brunn: What a waste of a lifetime. Look at all the good that a man could have accomplished were his mind not preoccupied with hate.
He was obviously a capable man. His vituperative writings are at least intelligible, even articulate – subject, predicate, object. He knows the language that musters the rabble. He carefully thinks through his twisted slurs and paranoia. He’s not a dope. This is not some Cro-Magnon Klansman, but a hatefully intelligent man.

So I repeat, despite my own hate for him and his deed: What a waste of a lifetime. What a crooked evil that led him to the waste of others. Think: Those skills of his, were they rightfully motivated, could have written provocative essays or books, even an illustrative memoir of his apparently tormented childhood. How many people searching for meaning might he have enlightened? How much misanthropy might he have quelled? What if his advocacy were for childhood cancer or illiteracy? What a pity. What a waste of all the good he could have accomplished over 88 years.

The lament is not von Brunn’s alone. It extends to each of us. Every one of us, to a greater or lesser degree, brings some passion or skill to the table. To what good? The physician, bringing compassion to people in need, along with book-learned and clinical skills? So, too, the attorney, the accountant, the craftsman, the skilled and unskilled laborer, the homemaker, the retiree, the rambunctious teenager, the precocious child? What shall we say to defend nonsense, just-for-me-ism, couch-potato-ship, text messaging, apathy, while so much yet good begs to be done?

What a waste of a lifetime.

Once I asked a mechanic what he did for fun. “Go home and kick the **** out of my dog,” he answered. It needn’t be a mechanic, does the answer need to be so horrid, but to some greater or lesser extent, what does it mean to “kick the ****” out of ones lifetime? What a waste.

Each of us has the capacity for evil. Of this, we know only too well. For each of the impulses for evil we harbor, something humane – God or even atheism – cries out with some countervailing potential for good.

Reb Moshe Leib Sassover asserted that every human attribute, however base, could be converted into a virtuous deed. Once upon a time, Reb Moshe was taunted by a disciple to explain how atheism could become honorable. “Even that,” Reb Moshe proclaimed. “For if someone comes to you in hurt, you may not say, ‘Take your problems to God.’ No, at that moment, you must become an atheist, act as if there is no God; that there is only one force that can help this man. YOU!”

The question of whether one wastes a lifetime lived at evil or oblivion is too easily pushed off on demons like von Brunn. It could well be said of each of us who yawn at or desecrate a magnificent, but needy, world. Let not von Brunn’s epitaph become our own.

WAS HIS VOTE WORTH IT?

I campaigned for Tony Trout. It was the first and only time I campaigned for a local candidate. I sent emails and signed petitions. I wrote him letters of encouragement throughout his rocky runs and runoffs.

Being outside his district, I could not vote for him, but I spoke, wrote, and cajoled about his worthiness and the necessity of his victory. Tony had become, even for the right-minded, the quintessential single-issue candidate. What we knew about him was that his vote would ensure that the birthday of Dr. King would be celebrated in Greenville County.

His opponent, Steve Selby, saw everything wrong, we said, and maybe weren’t far from mistaken. Little is it known, but I spent two hours in the smoke-cloying Denny’s lobbying him on the holiday issue, to no avail. His argument, as you would expect, was built around how decent people knew that Dr. King was a “womanizing communist,” as though more than a few of his own role-models were not unreconstructed sinners.

By the way, our conversation ended with him pronouncing, “Marc, I’ll miss you in heaven.” In a moment of rare genius, I responded, “Frankly, Steve, I’ve seen enough of you here on earth.”
But yes, we said, Tony was OK. Some of us knew that his motives may have been less than kosher, but for the vast majority of us, motives did not matter. We lauded him for his guts and one promise of progressivism. We got our holiday . . . and we got our Tony Trout.

Tony turned out to be the creep, after all. We snuck him into office on a single issue. Save the Dr. King issue, at least Steve Selby wasn’t a cowardly crook. Choke on the words as I may, Steve was a real straight arrow, a law-enforcement official and family man who was whistle-clean. In all, Steve may have represented by as man of ill-begotten attitude, but all be told he was honest.

How close must the ends be to the means to justify them? Reducing it to the absurd, remember the canard, that “At least he (Hitler) could get the trains to run on time.” Tony Trout is not Hitler, God forbid, but did one issue, however noble, justify not even to do a sniff-test to assess his politics, positions, and most of all, his ethical posture? Worse yet, discovering the negative, would it have even mattered? I count myself among the latter, and in retrospect, I am not proud.

This remains the dilemma: Had we to do it over again, would we have chosen the moral rectitude of a Steve Selby over a morally-bankrupt one-trick-pony? More succinctly, did one vote of a sneak and a scoundrel justify his ascent to civic leadership? Yet more succinctly, what would Dr. King have done?

I don’t know. I don’t know. If you think you do, I’ll miss you in heaven.

I AM ORDAINED A HIGH PRIEST (REVISED)

I wonder whether Aaron the biblical High Priest perpetually had second-degree burns over his hands from frying up sacrifices in olive oil. Better yet, am I ordained a High Priest because of all the times I sear myself while I attempt to cook with scorching olive oil? If so, then last week I was anointed with that holy unguent and declared High Priest by a congregation of ten burly, very gentile gentiles.

The scenario: One of my Bar Mitzvah students, Jacob, is a little more eccentric than most 13-year-olds. He reviews his portion of the service with gusto only after he has spent an hour with me in the kitchen. On that momentous day, we were planning to make beef-barley soup. We were about to sauté onions in EVOO (“Extra Virgin Olive Oil,” for you who don’t watch that cutesy parakeet, Rachael Ray, chirping about it along with her dog food. Jealous? Moi?)

In an instant, flames leapt from the pot. Shoving Jacob out of the way (a good instinct), I stuck my hand in the fire (a bad instinct) and burned it to what I was sure what be a charcoal crisp. Miraculously, I escaped with only two half-inch burns.

Being a denizen of the upper middle class, our house is equipped with the biggest and most hypersensitive alarm system, which instantly alerts the fire department every time I fry an egg.

I had already well doused the fire and sufficiently attended to my burns, when a police captain banged on the front door. He apparently handled these matters because he was so anemic that he couldn’t save my labradoodle Minnie from a titmouse. I calmly told him that no other emergency services were required.

Too late. The fire department had already snaked its way down our narrow lane with its hook-and-ladder. Out of the truck leapt six sumo firefighters, oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, insisting on inspecting the house. They spied the minor burns on my hand and announced that they were obliged to have EMS come to check me out. “Not necessary,” I protested.

But, shortly thereafter, three EMTs arrived in their ambulance. They were required by law, they said, to examine me. Before I knew it, they were taking my blood pressure. Then they discovered the scar on my chest from my pacemaker. Jackpot. They demanded that I lie down and let them take an EKG – all for two half-inch burns.

By then, our kitchen was overrun by a ten men and women of emergency crews, a quorum for worship. Law required that I be taken to the hospital, they said.

So off I go in a gurney to the ER, where I was once again meticulously examined, and then waited an hour to have salve schmered on my gaping wounds. The EMTs, firefighters, and cops stood by watchfully.

Jacob, of course, was petrified. His mother had arrived to pick him up. As I was being wheeled out on the stretcher, mother and son dutifully followed behind, offering me reassurance and asking me whom they should call. An audience of curious neighbors, God bless them, gathered outside. By the time my Linda returned from the office and picked me up from the ER, our doorstep was laden with aluminum pans full of meatloaf, fried chicken, the ubiquitous tuna salad, and brownies, all gifts of goodwill from the Bob Jones families surrounding us.

Can you comprehend the significance of that momentous occasion? I had been twice anointed High Priest, once by olive oil, then by life-saving unction, in the presence of my motley, burly congregation of ten weary caregivers.

Will I burn myself again? Of course. Just that this time, I will have disconnected my fire alarm. Will my intrepid Jacob return? Of course. But only after I promise we continue our culinary adventures only if we make something innocent, like fruit salad.

No! No! Watch out for that Santoku! It might slip and cut your . . . oh, nooooo . . .

A CAFFEINATED MEETING OF THE IN-LAWS

I have never understood why people drink decaffeinated coffee. Maybe it’s because I personally think that any coffee – even the vaunted Starbuck’s – tastes and lingers in the throat like wet cigarettes. How I know the taste and texture of wet cigarettes is simply up to ones conjecture.

What then? The only real reason that justifies drinking coffee is the, nerve-chilling amphetamine buzz one gets from drinking the stuff that’s full of caffeine – Super-Sumatra-Kenyata-Double-Deep-Dark-Roasted-Kona-Brain-Buster.

This and its cousins are brews that are not to be taken lightly. Indeed, they should be saved for special occasions when hyperkinetic attitude adjustment is the order of the day. I had one such day nearly 12 years ago that I remember with an afterglow of yet-to-be-resolved caffeine overdose.

It was the day that I drove the 90 miles from Atlanta to Macon, Georgia, to meet my soon-to-be in-laws. I knew little of them, and what I knew was dire: No, Linda and I could not sleep in the same room. No, I was not welcome at the Thanksgiving table until the engagement was “official.” What did I really do for a living? Would you please explain it again? Do people actually make money doing that?

How to confront such a dire situation? Drink coffee, plenty of it. Start drinking it before breakfast. Then, with my toast and jelly. Then, as I hit the road. Then, rolling down the highway. Then, whenever I stopped for gas – many times, of course, for we all know what coffee does to ones bladder.

Too much. By the time I got to Macon, my ears buzzed, my eyes spun, my teeth and follicles tingled, my arms and legs shook. Worst, my mind raced. The already skeptical in-laws greeted me feebly from the top of the stairs. Uncontrollably, I hailed words like bullets from a machine gun . . .

“Hello-Mom-and-Dad-I-hope-you-don’t-mind-me-calling-you-Mom-and-Dad-because-I’m-so-in-love-with-your-daughter-and-I-promise-to-make-a-good-husband-for-her-even-if-you-don’t-know-what-I do-for-a-llving-and-we-sleep-in-the-same-bedroom-and-I-really-want-to-get-to-know-you-better-because-I-know-that-you’ll-love-me-when-you-really-get-to-know-me-and-I-know-I’ll-have-made-it-when-you-invite-me-to-Thanksgiving-dinner . . . “

The in-laws were astounded. “I hope he doesn’t always talk so fast.”

“Not after he’s taken a cold shower,” Linda explained. “He’s always that way when he has too much caffeine.”

“Too much caffeine?” her mother chafed. “And here I thought it was because he wanted us to love him.”