JustASC

Have you ever seen a wood duck? With its Mardi Gras face, color-block body paint, and extreme bicycle-racing helmet, it looks like a duck designed by one of those 1980s-era Italian design firms, like the Memphis group:

I live near an elbow of the Hackensack River, and we’re regular visitors to an adjacent pond that attracts a mob of waterfowl: mallards, egrets, cormorants, night herons, geese. The wood duck is the gaudiest of the visitors. We’ve been feeding an injured mallard all summer, who knows us well enough to come plopping ashore on her injured foot at the sound of my wife’s voice. Yesterday, walking around the pond during break before mincha, we were greeted by our old friend. The wood duck, shy until now, followed close behind.

We like to think of ourselves as friends to the animals, although real birders will probably complain that we’re turning our ducks into shnorrers.

More Yom Kippur reading: David Shield’s The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, which the author describes as “an autobiography of my body, a biography of my father’s body, an anatomy of our bodies together.”

It’s memoir wrapped around a sobering and oddly inspiring data dump on the ways our bodies grow and then dissipate — mostly dissipate, it seems: Human life, biologically speaking, is a quick and miraculous climb followed by a slow and agonizing decline. It’s a wonder anyone over the age of 40 can do the simplest task, considering our brains are shrinking and our blood and bones imploding.

Shields:

Francis Thompson wrote, “For we are born in other’s pain, / And perish in our own.” Edward Young wrote, “Our birth is nothing but our death begun.” Francis Bacon: “What then remains, but that we still should cry / Not to be born, or being born, to die?” The first sentence of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

But it is inspiring, too. Yom Kippur is in some ways a rehearsal of our deaths — we close down normal bodily funtions like eating and sex, wrap ourselves in white shrouds, and imagine we won’t make it through the day. And when we do emerge, Scrooge-like, we’re supposed to realize the ways we’ve wasted the precious few days alotted us, and imagine ways we can make better use of our brief time in this bag of skin. 

Writes Shields:

Mark Harris, trying to explain why he thought Saul Bellow was a better writer than any of his contemporaries, said Bellow was simply more alive than anyone else, and there’s something of that in my father. D.H. Lawrence was said to have lived as if he were a man without skin. That, too, is my father: I keep on urging him to don skin, and he keeps declining.

I’ve written before about my friend Elli Wohlgelernter and his belief in what he calls “unis” — the seemingly coincidental events that point to a higher meaning or intelligent universe (or something — he can explain it better than I).

I like to throw him a bone every now and then, so here’s my unis of the week: Three, count ’em three, unrelated but coincidental references to a child’s anxiety about playing hide and seek and no one tries to find him.

The first: In The Lazarus Project, by my new favorite writer Aleksander Hemon, a character remembers playing hide and seek and worrying no one would look for him:

He remembers a childhood evening when he played hide-and-seek with his friends-they were hiding, he was seeking; then they all went home, without telling him; he kept looking for them well into the night, shouting into the darkness full of their shadows.

The next day I was reading Chumash Etz Chayyim, the Conservative movement’s Bible commentary, and saw a commentary on last week’s portion, Vayelech, when Moses warns that God will “will Hide his face from them for all the evil they have done.” The commentary quotes a hasidic tale (from Buber?), in which Rabbi Baruch’s grandson was once playing hide and seek and waited for his playmates to find him. When the child complains to his grandfather that no one tried to look for him, Rabbi Barukh cries and says: ‘God says the same thing: “I hide, but no one wants to seek me.”‘” 

Then there was the Oct. 5 Garfield comic strip (go here and click “previous” a few times): That nutty lazy Garfield agrees to play hide-and-seek with Nermal, and then doesn’t look for him (or her — I’m not a maven). You can guess the ending.

So what does this all mean? Who’s hiding from whom? What am I seeking? Why was I reading Garfield?

UPDATE: Reading this over, I couldn’t help but ask: What was it like to have Rabbi Baruch for a father or grandfather? If I read the story correctly, the kid came to his granddad for a little comfort. He gets a theology lesson?

Headline on today’s press release from the Israel Project:

Yom Kippur to Begin Wednesday Evening

Holiday Marks 35th Anniversary of Yom Kippur War
 

I turned my posts on the campaign Rosh Hashana greetings into a column for next week. Here’s a sneak peek:

There’s the old joke about the elevator ride at the psychiatric convention. One guy gets off at his floor and says to his colleagues, “Have a good night.” As soon as the doors close one shrink turns to another and says, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

I feel a little like that when I read the High Holy Days messages of Barack Obama and John McCain.

(more…)

For Yom Kippur reading: the late great David Foster Wallace on life’s choices:

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I heard a nice, even important comment on the Binding of Isaac story during Rosh Hashana services yesterday, courtesy of my synagogue’s former president (who credited it to a sermon he heard at the Rutgers Hillel 30 years ago from, perhaps, Rabbi Julius Funke or Rabbi Gerald Serotta).

Many of us find it hard to admire the behavior of Abraham after God instructs him to take his son Isaac up the mountain for ritual sacrifice. Where is the Abraham who dared debate God, when God declared He was about to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah for their wickedness? Where is Abraham who demanded that God reconsider, the Abraham who argued, “Will the judge of the whole world not act justly?”

By the time we get to the binding, his moral chutzpa has been replaced with blind faith, unthinking obedience.

Some teach the story as God’s test of Abraham — a test that Abraham passes by suspending his human judgment and paternal instincts to obey God. 

But if you find that hard to swallow — and think it’s a short hop from blind faith to religious fanaticism to holy terror — consider this: Maybe Abraham failed the test, and Torah wants you to realize that.

What’s the textual proof? At the begining of Chapter 22, God speaks directly to Abraham, as he did previously in the Sodom and Gemorrah episode, here instructing him to ” Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and … sacrifice him … as a burnt offering.”

Abraham does what he is told, and is prevented from killing Isaac only by the hand of an intervening angel — an angel, not God directly. Perhaps this is a suggestion that Abraham, failing the test by not arguing for Isaac’s life, has fallen out of favor with God, Who will no longer speak with Abraham directly. In fact, God will no longer speak directly with Abraham in the rest of the Torah.

Another hint? Why do we need three patriarchs to begin with — what remained unfulfilled in Abraham’s lifetime? It takes Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, to make the story whole, and then only after he earns his new name, Israel, by wrestling with an angel. The very name Israel — ‘one who wrestles with God’ — suggests the test that Abraham failed. We earn our name — we earn our covenant — only when we wrestle with God. Not when we put aside our moral reasoning and human instincts, but when we engage with the tradition by bringing those faculties to bear. Only when we’re willing to wrestle with the implications of faith and obedience, holy writ vs. observed life, do we really pass the test.

If the McCain campaign sent out official Rosh Hashanah greetings, I haven’t been able to find them. But here’s a statement he gave to “Jewels of Elul,” musician Craig Taubman’s annual compendium of thoughts appropriate to the High Holy Days season:

Hope In Our Hands
The Jewish month of Elul is both a time for reflection and one of hope for the future. Jewish tradition teaches that a person is judged on Yom Kippur, but afterwards the slate is wiped clean for the coming year. No matter how bad the past, the future is always one of hope.

Indeed, one of Judaism’s greatest contributions is the lesson of hope. Ancient civilizations believed in fate. A man’s future was not in his own hands but in the stars. The Hebrew Bible refuted that. It taught that man is created in God’s image, and that God gave man free will. It is a lesson of hope and destiny.

It is no coincidence that the oppressors of the Jewish people, from ancient times to today, are always those who have tried to stifle hope and freedom. The reestablishment of the State of Israel and its repeated survival against all odds represents the legacy of hope the Bible infused in its people.

Natan Sharansky exemplifies the tradition of hope. He spent nine years in the Soviet Gulag – 400 days were in punishment cells, and more than 200 days were on hunger strikes. He never backed down or made a deal. He knew his future was not predetermined; it was in his hands.

That lesson of hope is one that has helped me throughout my life. And as we look to the future, it is helpful to remind ourselves that there is no problem or challenge we cannot overcome together.

If you didn’t know it was McCain, you might think it was Obama, who branded “hope” in the title of his memoir. But McCain has taken the fight to Obama’s territory before, co-opting Obama’s “Change you can believe in” to read “a leader you can believe in.”

And there are clear McCainian tropes, none so obvious as his identification with a fellow ex-prisoner, Natan Sharansky, who “never backed down or made a deal” despite his imprisonment. Both McCain’s critics and fans can have a field day with ”or made a deal” — fans will see him as firm and resolute, unlike Obama, who appears willing to meet with Iran’s president; critics will see him as bull-headed and hawkish, and fearful of diplomacy.

The specter of Iran hangs over McCain’s R.H. greetings, in a way it doesn’t in remarks by Bush or Obama (see below). At least that’s what I read into “the oppressors of the Jewish people, from ancient times to today.”

(I’m also intrigued by “No matter how bad the past, the future is always one of hope.” Can this be a message of reassurance to voters that he represents a break from the past eight years? That would be consistent with his message at the GOP convention ["I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party..."].)

Rosh Hashanah greetings are a nice gesture from political campaigns, but they are campaign documents none-the-less. Read them this way, and you can decode the candidates’ messages to Jewish voters:

McCain: “With Israel facing a dire threat from Iran, things may appear hopless. That’s why you need a leader, tested like your heroes by persecution and torture, who will stand up to that threat without appeasing the enemy or backing down.”

Obama: “The world needs fixing, and Israel seeks peace. Let’s address our problems by tapping the traditional American-Jewish commitment to social justice, and our willingness to sacrifice to make the world a better place.” 

Both messages are entirely consistent with the way the Jewish vote is breaking for the two candidates: Those most anxious about Iran and Israel are leaning toward McCain; traditionally Democratic Jews, who place domestic concerns higher among their priorities, are for Obama.

The fight is for those in-between these poles.