Scars

One of the strange things that we Jews do is to rip our clothing when a close relative dies (parents, spouse or children).  It's actually very cathartic to be able to rip at your clothes when you are in deep grief.  When mom died, I was wearing a favorite sweater, that I then threw away.  When dad died, I was wearing a silly Captain America sweat shirt.  I like that shirt.  The guys in the sushi place salute me when I'm wearing that shirt.  I was going to throw it away after I ripped it.  But I think I've decided to sew it back together.  It will just have a scar.  It will be a visual reminder of my emotional scar.

Our newly remodeled synagogue also has a scar.  On the front wall where the neo-Nazi spray painted hate messages, there is a rather blotchy coat of new paint.  In certain light, you can still see the shadow of darkness underneath.  I like it.  The pristine synagogue felt a little uncomfortable to me.  Too clean.  Scar-less.  Like an old woman with a perfect face lift.  Something not quite right.

So if you see a woman wearing a scarred Captain America sweat shirt, you can go ahead and salute.

Hooray for Gay Marriage!

I adore gay marriage, and let me tell you why.  I know what being married means.  I know what it means when you introduce me to your husband or wife.  Ahh... an attempt at lifetime commitment. I get it.

What I don't understand is what your relationship to your "partner" is.  Is it an attempt at lifetime commitment?  Do you play pinochle together?  Own a deli perhaps?  Or does it mean that you've gone on a few dates?  Does it mean that you currently aren't seeing other people, but I should still keep an eye open if there is someone better for you?

By all means, let gay people get married.  It makes it far easier on the rest of us.

Frosty Road Trip

Momo and I drove to Utah for a memorial service for Papi.  My brother John flew into Long Beach and drove up with us, so we took our time going and stopped in Las Vegas for the night.  It doesn't take much arm twisting to get men to stop in Las Vegas for a night.

The memorial was nice.  The weather was not.  We drove through a snow storm.  John wisely decided to fly out of Salt Lake and skip the return drive.  So yesterday morning Momo and I drove back to the land of milk and honeys.  In the morning as he was filling the gas tank I decided to wash the windshield.  He came around the side of the car and asked me in horror what I was doing.  I had very carefully added a thin layer of ice to the driver's side windshield.  Oops.  How quickly I have forgotten the perils of winter.

Misadventures Continued

For some reason, I was kind of thinking that our streak of bad luck would end when my dad died.  Well, he died on Saturday and Monday, in the early morning hours, someone robbed our house.  My cousin's purse was stolen along with a bunch of Momo's electronics.  So my cousin and I spent our last afternoon together hanging out at the Long Beach police station trying to get a copy of the incident report so she could catch her flight home.

We just took it step by step.  When we got home, my son called me on his cell to tell me one more bad thing... the mother/grandmother of some of our dearest friends had died that morning.  All of this while we are trying to make arrangements for memorials and clear out evidence of the long illness, seemed just battering.  I felt like I'd been through the wringer.

Before anyone reading this starts thinking that the robbery is our fault for housing the strange Rasta-man (earlier misadventure post) for a couple of days, let me tell you that he has been back in New York for awhile now.

Oh... I knew there was another thing.  Sunday night the boys went to a wedding.  Their designated driver brought them home and then left the car keys on the front porch.  They were not there in the morning.  (No, there were no house keys on the ring.)  So when the locksmith came to make new keys for the car, I asked him how long it would take to pick our locks if you knew what you were doing.  He looked them over and said, "Less than a minute."  Great.

My son says, "It looks like we have the luck of the Irish, which I understand to mean no luck at all."  We are trying to hold on to the belief that we are just saving up our good luck, and it would be okay with us if that kicked in any time now.

Father Died

My father died on Saturday.  I was scheduled to lead Torah Study and Services because the Rabbi was going to be out of town.  On Friday morning, I told the Rabbi that that would be impossible, because I needed to be with dad.

On Saturday morning, as my cousin and I sat with him, I sang through the morning service.  My cousin then left the room to go help my sister-in-law cook breakfast.  I sang through the first part of Hashkievenu three times and then watched him as his breathing was finally relaxed after having struggling for weeks.  After about two minutes of us just sitting there in peace, he stopped breathing.  It was a blessing that he was able to go so softly.

Are You Sleeping?

My sister-in-law saw me exercising the other day and sneaked out of the room because she thought I was trying to sleep.  Obviously my regimen doesn't appear to be too strenuous.  My bed is just a lot softer than the floor.  Oh well.

Book: Bee Season

I just got around to reading Myla Goldgerg's book "Bee Season".  I had seen the movie with Richard Gere years ago at a Sisterhood event in Utah.  The movie was interesting to me because, at the time, I was fortunate to be studying with a student of Kabballah.  Although my teacher has excellent credentials  I do not.  On the other hand, what really makes for good credentials in mysticism?

Anyway, I knew a little bit about the terminology of Kabballah, so it made the movie viewing a richer experience for me than it may have been otherwise.

Some of the ladies in our viewing group had read the book and made some small comments about how the movie differed from the text.  I'm glad that I saw the movie first because I would've been very disappointed if I had done it in the other order.  On the other hand, I'm a lot older now and I approached the book with a lot more life lessons under my belt.

I think the book is very well constructed and brings up the basic dangers of playing with the mystical in as clear as terms as you probably could.  That's the problem with mystical... you are trying to explain things for which there are no words.  The infinite cannot be defined by its very nature.

What fascinated me by the book was the classic structure of trying to tell this tale.  In our tradition we are told of four rabbis who enter into the "orchard".  I guess we could call this place a melding with G-d or enlightenment.  It's the highest form of communion that a human can have with infinite holiness.  Many many people spend their lives trying to get this closeness with G-d.  But the story from our tradition emphasizes the dangers of excess spirituality.  The four rabbis enter: one dies, one becomes a heretic, one goes insane, and one comes out whole.  (Rabbi Akiva is the one who makes it out okay.)

In Goldberg's story, we also have four main characters.  There is a father who desperately wants to enter the orchard and studies constantly but realizes that he probably just doesn't have the innate ability to make this happen.  But because of his obsession, his family also gets seduced by the idea of the possibility of attaining this elusive connection to the mind of G-d.  So, we have four people who are trying to enter the orchard.  The father can't get in, but wants to attain some degree of in-ness through his children and, in a less thought out way, through his wife.  His wife goes insane, his son becomes a heretic, and his daughter gets in and then back out safely.  His daughter is smart enough to lock the door to the orchard once she is out.

It's kind of like Moses smashing the original set of tablets when he returns from the mountain the first time and sees the havoc that has been wreaked in his absence.  Rashi tells us that smashing the tablets that had been written by the finger of G-d was what made Moses the greatest prophet of all time.

Even though I had seen the movie, I kept hoping that somehow the father in the story would die, but I guess that would've tied it up a little too neatly.

Movie: The Gatekeepers

My son kicked me out of the house and sent me to a movie the other day.  He knew I needed to take a break and wouldn't do so without a little nudging.  I am almost always nudgable in the direction of a movie.  So he did the laundry and I saw The Gatekeepers.

I was spellbound.  I felt like I should be memorizing it.  I felt like everyone should see it.  It is a documentary about the Shin Bet in Israel as described by its leaders.  Like any good Jewish story, it's not one sided.  There are more sides than you can shake a stick at.  I highly recommend that you see this movie if you get a chance.

Car Chases

Since when have car chases become so important that they supersede all other news on TV?  The local stations will literally broadcast them live for hours.  Nothing else happened today that was more important than chasing a couple of people in a car?  For this you send a helicopter?  I suppose what they are hoping for is that they can be broadcasting live when someone gets shot or blown up.  Usually the suspects are not even known to the chasers (both police and media).  Sometimes someone suspects they were involved in a crime prior to the chase.

That brings me to another point.  Why do we get more speculation on the TV news than actual news?  Talking heads are constantly asking each other what they "think" is happening.  The press will grasp at the tiniest slivers of straws.  Here is a current example:

Now A) why do we care, and B) is that really a news story?  It is reported that the sound of the letter "d" slipped from her lips.  Now it's all over the news.

To be honest, if I were a forgotten political prisoner somewhere or if my city was currently being burned to the ground, I think my heart would break to know that the attention of a "super power" was focused on a white car that may contain criminals being followed by helicopters in case something exciting happens.  How long did the television news show live shots of a cabin burning down because there may or may not have been a shooter of policemen in it?

Misadventures

There's an idea that "never a dull moment" is a good thing in life.  I would contend that more dull moments would be okay.

I think that many times I've written about the strange things that happen in my life.  This weekend a stranger asked us for help.  Very temporary help.  At first to find a non-existent address and then for shelter for a little while as he waited for someone to pick him up.  After he had been here for several hours, it came time for a meal.  He told us that he was a vegan.  Not just a vegan (as if that isn't a pain in the neck to cook for already), but a vegan who could eat only base fruits and vegetables and no bread products.  So I managed a meal that we could all eat.

After much drama he was still here in the morning.  Another pain in the neck meal.  As lunch time approached, I had exhausted our in house vegan offerings, so I went to the store to get more veggies, hummus, etc.  After lunch I told my son that I wasn't doing one more vegan meal, so this guy had to leave and go be someone else's dinner time problem.  Supposedly the visitor had lots of friends and a manager in LA.

"We were strangers once."  This is a core teaching of Judaism.  So I didn't want to be rude but I explained again that my father is dying and that we needed our visitor to go on his way.  After several more hours of stalling, my son finally packed him up in the car and took him to meet a friend in Inglewood.  Fine.  We'll laugh about it later.  Just another weird story.

But it wasn't over.  At 11:30 that night, he came back.  Really??  We kick you out and deliver you to one of your friends in another city and you end up coming back to wake us up?  He was probably hungry.  His friends probably didn't want to deal with him because they already knew he was high maintenance.

The ninja who lives here was telling a friend about this and the friend said, "Wow. This is a once in a lifetime story."  The ninja shook his head and said, "At our house, it's more like a once in a week story."  Oh, but for those precious dull moments.  

In Like a Lamb

Neither my mother nor I were ever big fans of winter.  When we lived in colder climes, we would await the first of March with great anticipation.  The saying is, "In like a lion: out like a lamb," and vice versa.  We were always hopeful that it would come in like a lion, so we could get winter over with.  No one likes a big storm at the end of March.  It's better to get it out of the way at the beginning of the month.

However, now that the family is back in Southern California, I'm pleased to announce that it came in like a lamb.  It's a beautiful day, and even mom wouldn't have worried about it.  The lionish days of winter in Long Beach are totally do-able.

You can tell the people who dress by the calendar though.  It's sunny and 85 degrees outside and I saw people walking by in jackets, knit hats and boots.  I also saw a fair number of people dressed sensibly in shorts and T shirts.