Competing Voices

Go, make a cake
Find
My bed is full of water
The floor has mud
Pebbles, dried like black beans

So pull up her pants.
Laughter
I don’t have sugar and flour
You can’t have

And then, a doctor, a comic chemist
Look up.
Receivers can pick up a new traveler on their way up
Nose down
Not just upon land
Eyes up
Maybe

What if you’re sad?
You want sad?
The funeral is on the radio
What
What
And now, you’re a gardener?
Prove it, with years

Drink all the coffee you want
It’s the wrong funeral.
Deeper, like the tunnel where the princess was flashed to death
I know what you want

Turn over
White bath of sheets
A lover.
Dryness broken, with bile and sweet saloon
Bitter, coffee lips meet
Streaks of black hair, and oil, and lace
Nostrils filled with tears and sexy crows’ feet
Have the cake

I didn’t know you were in my bed
Yes, put plastic under the sheet
Really, I didn’t know.
The flowery blanket
Cut shapes
The beans have grown like supernovae.
Cut shapes!

And then, a mother
Finished
My family in a grotto
Lit with tungsten, and furnished like a summer home on a coniferous island
But still, finished
The floor has mud

A parade descends the stairs
There were stairs.
What if there were stairs?
And my pants keep falling
That’s really dangerous.

You really cannot.
And I’m not sorry
I’m sorry, I’m just not sorry
Have it -
You can turn away, and laugh, and commit crimes, and learn from a limping dwarf
But I’m sorry,
You just can’t.
Sometimes, there’s science and math.

Old Red Whine

There's finally something that's making me happy, outside of those moments, of course, where I marvel at my child or the love that our cat, Tiny, has for my wife.  It's like walking into a forest with a cathedral - canopy of trees hanging over the green stinking mist of forever. Don't really know how to talk about it.  But anyhow, my damn, shameful obsession with The Who is once again brought to the surface because of this new film that came out a couple of weeks ago.  It's called "Amazing Journey - The Story of The Who," and really, it's several films woven together. 

But I don't want to say much about it because it's all about feelings which, if you're not a fan of The Who, these feelings are like something insipid or foolish uttered in a mockumentary.  So, well just fuck that, and you know, it's all silly.  With the wisdom, ahem . . ahem. . . of nearing forty-one, and that jaded eye, quivering with caffeine and sprouting crows' feet like cracks in the L.A. sidewalk, I look askance at my history of wasted time, money and tears over this shit.  But this is my life, after all, and if you don't give a shit, then don't keep reading.  But really this document that the film is, well, it just makes me happy.  Happy in a way that a good workout used to make me happy.  I don't cry.  I haven't cried since I stood at my father's graveside, and in the toilet on the ElAl, and this film doesn't make me cry.  But it would have.  Now it's just about seeing stuff in a very inside-out kind of way; these people who make up the band, or rather the remnants, Pete and Roger.  Of course, members of their crew, family members, and famous members of other bands who were influenced by the band, like Sting and Noel Gallagher pepper the film with opinions and smiles. But this is a painful document to watch.  

Watching it sober, in more ways than one, is at once raw and transcendent.  It's quite definitive for my taste, at least, and I don't really give a shit what other more seasoned or critical fans are saying that the film is lacking or leaves out some performance, or how it strays, or fuck knows what else.  The theme of chapters presented as "tracks" of a vinyl album is effective.  It reminds me of them old good days.  I like it.  Enough said.  Now go and buy it or try to catch it somewhere in a theater or borrow it from me.  

I'm having a really tough time and it's just making me happy and giving some needed distraction.  It stinks like an ashtray, and vomit, and gin, and it sounds like a party.  And I'm glad to be alive with it. 

Vision

Today I have learned of the untimely passing of Rabbi David Zeller, a grand soul of spirit and vision. May his family find comfort among the mourners for Jerusalem. I dedicate this to him and his students.

There was a profoundly touching program last evening on "Talk of The Nation" on NPR. The guest author wrote about a man blinded at an early age by an accident. This man had been offered restoration of his sight through a breakthrough medical procedure. The man risked cancer and even death through this surgery and the drugs that would be necessary retain his vision. It was in line with the ethical conundra presented on my undergraduate public policy final exam. In short that test posed an essay question of how to institute control (public or private) over a hypothetical machine which could transport an individual over massive distances in a split second. In the fantasy scenario, the machine made a piercing screech every time it was used which would instantly render deaf, anyone within a hundred mile radius. I loved the question. I believe that I wrote an argument for public control over the device, and further advocated to have it permanently dismantled.

The benefits to a person suddenly given sight after many years blind, were to me at least quite evident; to finally know the green of a forest, to explore the work of Van Gogh, Rothko, and Vermeer. To hear the sun with ones eyes. Images. I am numb at the potential for eternal rediscovery. The author on last night's program did much research into the little known area of people "cured" of their blindness. Apparently there are no more than 20 such recorded cases dating back to antiquity. In so many cases the result for the patient was the same; despondency, depression and even self mutilation. It appears that the brain grows accustomed to the means and the signals which it is given to perceive and make sense of the landscape around it, even if those messages are, at least to us in the sighted community, clearly and obviously diminished when one is blind or otherwise afferently incapacitated. The deaf learn to read lips and grow ultra-sensitive to vibrations. The blind can know the presence of a friend just by her footsteps or from the mix of sweat and perfume. What a gift I thought to be granted a new pallette with which to enjoy and understand the world. But instead it seems that a life spent learning through alternative means, magnifying and developing abilities as variants to the damaged sensory receptor, is not only a compensatory set of responses, but may indeed be simply natural.

The brain is not only a computer that stores and recalls events, people, or sensations. Yes, its job is to help us learn and identify the difference between the likes of fur and sandpaper, of course. However it is also a creative universe of buried and dormant lenses. I've heard musicians and writers go as far as to say that they cannot be responsible for their creations; that they tune in on something, and become the conduit for that thing. It is as if they are mute and rigid ducts through which an understanding or influx of meaning can flow from one dimension to the next. Nice idea, especially if their art either stinks or really angers a whole lot of people. Not to digress really, because the converse of that affective response to their role in society communicates a singular and important humility. I had an art professor who once said, "in this painting, you can see the artist smiling." Some sort of pure heroine-like substance flushes my brain when I even consider that state of creativity. Click, brightness, nirvana.

The brain is also a cognitive tool that seeks to make connections from what it knows to what it now sees, and I use the latter sense as a metaphor for all senses. The blind person with newly restored sight can in fact be granted better than 20/20 vision. Amazing. It is said that his perception of color and movement is more crisp and vivid than for those with unfettered and perfect vision all their lives. Yet there is a down-side associated with the gift. Apparently for those of us in the sighted community, our ability to discern the subtleties involved in relationships concern a lifetime of studying and interpreting facial expressions. It's a secondhand skill for the majority. Those with newly restored sight often cannot make sense of the human face. It is an enigma, a puzzle; a new form of blindness with which the patient now must contend. Context is broken and an alien set of stimuli need to be assimilated, if possible. And it's not always possible. Suicide is a very real and not uncommon outcome.

This reminds me of the story of four scholars who enter the proverbial "Pardes," (Hebrew for grove) an allegory for new meaning, the Garden of Eden, knowledge of the eternal. In this story, one sage dies upon his encounter. Another scholar becomes an apostate, and yet a third goes mad. The last one exits with the mission to open an academy of learning. Those who learn the mystical texts and discover the science and the supernal wonder of the infinite gain one, if not a million profound insights, among which is the realization that the more one knows, the less one really knows. With true knowledge also comes a humility, not just a smack across the wet nose to the uninitiated, or an impatience born of exile in an ivory tower. To know that world is to know this world more. To see the presence of God on that side, is to see her all the more on our side. To the blind, being granted "sight" can be an overwhelming, maddening, and frightening prospect. For others it is a charge to untie a difficult knot. Imagine having all that you know, all that with which you find comfort and routine, summarily moved aside - even just a bit. You would face a terrifying unfamiliarity. You would be as one could say, deaf, dumb and blind. We're on our own, cousin.

Uncertain Girl

Hi everyone,

I thought you might like this lovely tune that didn't make it onto The Who's latest album, Endless Wire. On this YouTube video, you'll see Pete demo-ing it for Rachel and Mikey. It's ethereal, disturbing, and just another example of why I think this guy is a musical genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9EF33vIbbc

Do You Get It?

"From the horror and heroism of Monday's campus massacre, stories emerge of 32 extraordinary lives ended on a spring day at Virginia Tech. .... families, friends, colleagues and classmates share poignant memories of the victims of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. The people these stories speak of were characterized by great promise and outstanding achievement."

That's a quote from CNN.com, 8:50 am, April 19th, 2007. I, like some significant chunk of the western world, have been mulling over this horrific event since the first shots cracked out of a student's gun, down the endless wire into my various computers. Endless wire, just for the record, is Pete Townshend's term of art for the internet. Pete Townshend invented the internet, of course when in 1970 he wrote, "from tree to tree, from you to me; traveling just as fast as any freeway. Every single dream, backed up in the scheme - we all get carried on the Relay."

Anyhow, back to 2007 where 150 can get mowed down or have their throats systematically slit in a suburb of Baghdad in one single day. That story by the way, will hit the front page for about 15 seconds and then I'll take a sip of hot coffee and think about a good shit I took a few minutes earlier. But this thing in Virginia, where a pathological, probably abused, flatlining, sugar-brain with too much access to ammunition, with nobody interested in "managing his case" from the outset, goes and shoots up a quiet eastern university; and we're rightly obsessed. The story is everywhere. It's unthinkable that a civilized society wouldn't be shocked into picking the event apart in the same way a ninth grader carefully dissects the innards of a grasshopper with grotesque fascination. If I were the parent of a victim, I would descend into an abyss of grief for a decade. If I were a friend of a victim, I would weep quietly in the morning and drown my sorrows at night.

Right now I am a citizen of this country and I have the physical, emotional and intellectual detachment which lends me the privilege to comment, using this web log without more than 20 minutes of my morning lost to tapping out some thoughts for whomever wishes to peruse them. My observations are clouded by a blissful if not totally deluded sense that this cannot happen to me. But having been immersed, albeit filtered through a flat screen for nearly 12 years, in the happenings of the second World War I cannot fathom some sort of picture that doesn't include mobile killing squads, gas vans, slave-labored populations, hangings, and systematic starvation, just to name a few. And as I have been typing away, some reporters for CNN have busily done their jobs, cranking out copy, assembling photos or combing through the murderer's vitriolic, scattered diatribe which he placed in the form of Quicktime movies. Isn't it interesting that we know what brand of video he used? If he had saved his messages using Windows Media Player, would we know that too? I have to say that the reason Mr. Cho's final messages to the world are being coined by the press as Quicktime movies is only because the computer of the first person to play these movies had Quicktime set as the preferred application for playing media files. Quicktime is such a nice and neat little term. It would be a shame if it were to do any harm to Apple Computers to have their video player forever tied to a massacre.

There's so much with this thing and I want to focus on the irony that I see. This series of shootings at Virginia Tech is being called the deadliest, or worst, depending on who reports it, shooting in U.S. history. Given the specific context, I suppose there's some accuracy to that. Shootings with a gun, on American soil, not related to any war; the drug war included; well I just don't know enough to know. Regardless of how that notion was crafted, one thing for certain is that we all have the distinction to live in an age in which the deadliest shooting in U.S. history has occurred. Just like that. I suppose it's like when some really big movie comes out and everyone can say that he remembers seeing it for the first time when he was 9 or something. How special that was. I remember holding my baby daughter in the Spring of 2003 when the first shots were fired into Baghdad, precipitating the war in which the U.S. is currently embroiled.

A student, like the one described in a rock song by the Boomtown Rats, "I Don't Like Mondays," lost all sense rational thinking, now takes the cake for being the biggest offender to all our decency, morality, white bread goodness and shiny post-9/11 "just shop and travel" happiness. Deadlier and different than Kent State. Bloodier than the Manson killings and worse than the Tuskegee Experiments. I quote here from President Bill Clinton regarding the latter: "The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist. —President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997" If you want to learn more about that by the way, you'll find that 399 black, mostly illiterate men suffering from syphilis were used as unwitting guinea pigs for a cruel and frankly Joseph Mengele-like form of medical treatment between 1932 and 1972. In all the intervening years the U.S. government, its agents, foreign and domestic never did anything quite as bad, bloody, deadly or "mean," as one of Cho's professor's puts it, on Monday April 16th, 2007.

I can punctuate with words like "senseless violence" as the press does too. But all violence is senseless. Violent is missiles, planes used as missiles, small missiles fired out of guns, as is violent cold science, or that done in the name of national security. War isn't senseless? I do get it by the way. There's clear distinction between U.S. soldiers defending themselves against improvised explosive devices and that perpetrated by a weirdo, crazed student on a Spring morning in Virginia. But it gets foggy when a police department firebombs a whole neighborhood in Pennsylvania, doesn't it. It loses its punch when U.S. soldiers or contractors are ordered to keep driving their massive trucks through war zones, even when little kids are under their wheels - and that happens too. But yes, I do get it. Don't you?

Triplets Separated at Birth?

Tasteless? Perhaps, but compelling nonetheless. Terrorist and all around butcher par-excellance Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Pornstar Ron Jeremy & late humorist John Belushi. You decide if their lineage has some common thread . . .

Cream Cheese

I walked down the hall and there was a tray of scant leftovers from the breakfast which the institute provided to some photographers who were doing a shoot here today. The black plastic platter was littered with crumbs and a half-cut miniature muffin over an oil-soaked paper doily. A pitcher stood off to the right with the dregs of orange juice, and next to it were two coffee carafes and a stack of plastic handle mugs. Then there was this smallish bowl with single serve packages of jelly and cream cheese. I thought about taking one of the cream cheese tins into my office and scooping it out with a disposable knife – eating it alone, without bread or anything. Pure cream, on top of the cigarette I just smoked. If the cigarette wasn’t enough, I was about to trowel thick milk fat down my throat which would in a few minutes, meet up in my blood stream with the gazillion chemicals from the Camel Light, embracing like two long lost Mafioso’s. There the combination would decide what direction to take, perhaps directly to some prime artery only a few years or months from clogging, or maybe to my brain where the now freshly stimulated blood would surge right to an insipient aneurism, knocking me dead right there in a dusty sunbeam. They’d find me slumped over, the right-hand clutching my temple, a stain of feces soaking into the cloth seat, and my pale face with a look of total and utter surprise in my eyes.

I decided to cram a stale slice of Big Red gum into my mouth instead.

Rushashunna

The ripples move at the speed of September
The unseen mist is clever
And my nostrils feel clear and cold
I have the pricked ears of some rodent
listening for the pounce of a predator.

Or perhaps I am just going nuts.

The Armies Remaining Will Judge Without People or Courts

Betsy,
I write to you from the parallel universe that is known in most places as Los Angeles. Some Mexicans and decedents of those tribes who used to live here probably call it something I cannot pronounce. But it has been Los Angeles for long enough that nobody really cares - at least nobody with bombs or threats to use them. It's certainly a strange world.

I hear from my sister-in-law, Margo, that things are rather insane in your parts, not to mention from the constant barrage of news reports on cnn and haaretz.com. I don't believe there's any easy solution to this problem, though I was forced into a rather depressive state cogitating the matzav as I sat on the floor listening to sefer eicha the other night. It told of our enemies laughing at us, at a God who had turned his face away. I was worried and frightened that I somehow merited to be in a generation of loss for am yisrael. And how ironic that the very same march of years, my 39+, have witnessed such a rollercoaster of events. Six days, Yom Kippur, Sadat in Yerushalayim, Lebanon, Intifada, Oslo, assassination of Rabin, Intifada II.

How can I contemplate the world descending into global violence and utter breakdown of all value and reason when there are so many signs of hope? My daughter Adinah as she marvels at a balloon or a lovely dress - and then I recall that cringing moment when the first plane smashed into the world trade center, and as if it were timed to happen a million years before, a flock of birds gracefully ascended from a traffic signal in the street below - - and charred love notes trickled down to the pavement. Indeed, there are many faces to the Almighty; she is at once a cherub, an autistic teen, a firefighter, and a murderous soul who's been bought.

I wish the face to turn once more in the favor of our children and history tells us it is only a matter of time. Thank you for relating things as they are in eretz yisrael. May many a peace come in our days.

Shabbat Shalom,
-Chaim

Chaim's Open Archive

Here's something I scribbled on 12/26/04.

I don’t know where to begin. I do realize that it’s a rather hackneyed way to start a topic, but in fact I’m afraid, confused and feeling just ignorant, inadequate and unworthy. There are plenty of opportunities for my ego to soar – when I master my visual craft, when my daughter looks groggily toward me and says “abba, I happy.” The smooth experiences are overwhelming gifts for which I have no explanation and no way to repay. I sense some balance at these moments, as if all the hard work and the tears and the arguments and doubts have somehow culminated in a massive win. And also it’s that whole tincture of goodness, which I’ve spoken about before. That notion of the negativity in the world, with its overwhelming ability to strike fear and paralysis into me; and then as if an elixir of magical intensity, born of absolute redemption, like a droplet of amniotic fluid, breaks through reminding me that the sun shines. It’s the same feeling I have when listening to Bob Dylan’s “The Hour When The Ship Comes In.” You know he really had this ability to sound like biblical verse, and I want to weep when I hear him, just in the same wavering quiveriness that my father’s voice took this evening when he paraphrased the book of Ruth as we drove down Los Feliz Boulevard.

This is what it is. I told my father this evening, during his many refrains about the death of Jewry, and not just Polish Jewry, but the actual death of The Jew, in the gas chambers (I’m so fucking sick of the gas) – what I told him, what I thought he wanted to heare, is that he’s the last Jew left on earth. And for him it’s true, and I think that even though it’s grotesque to say that, it’s true for him. You know? I mean he’s the last surviving member of the Singer clan, that is other than his cousin in New York, and he’s so pissed off at her for whatever reason. He just goes on and on about what the Nazis destroyed. And I get so raging angry with him. He’ll stand there in Walgreen’s at the photo counter, exasperated and disgusted with Jews and Judaism and the liturgy, all swirled like a caustic soup and it splashes out at the frum (religious) Jews standing, waiting for their photos. These tall guys with dark beards and tzitzis hanging down their hips and my father’s squealing a foot away that there are no Jews left. And he rants on, how it’s preposterous; the centrality of the exodus from Egypt in our prayers. He wants the narrative of destruction, the annihilation of Polish and Lithuanian Jews to replace the “going out from Egypt.” And he’s disgusted with young Jews who for him know nothing, blindly and happily chanting “you’ve chosen us from among the other nations and lifted us above them . . . “ And I feel like I should summon the peace to let him know that I feel the truth in those words of prayer; that I identify with the notion of holiness brought to people by the commission of commandments, and most of all I want to tell him, to somehow prove to him that he’s wrong. But how can I tell him he’s wrong? He thinks that Moses was killed by the people after the Korach rebellion. He thinks that the corruption in Jewish history is so deep and pervasive, that he contradicts his own idealized view of his fellow Jews in Tomaszow prior to the Shoah. He thinks that Hitler was successful.

He asks where is his "goral" which sort of loosely translated means fate, and my mom tells him to turn around and to look in the back seat, and I say yeah your goral is snoring in the backseat, referring to our little girl snoring with abandon just like my dad, strapped in her car seat.

Heaven Scent: A Bisseleh Marquee

Hi everyone,
please visit http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-179599007488340439&q=heaven+scent to view my self-produced animated short entitled "Heaven Scent."

Listen to your heart.

-Chaim

Keeping On It

I'm in the final throes of completing my semester project in Character Animation. I do wish to extend a hearty and profuse thanks to Joey Jones, my mentor this semester. The graph editor is now truly my friend. Still so much more to learn, but now greatly enhanced by enjoying what I'm doing in this software environment.

I wish to reform as an artist. I want everything around me to become art. I don't care if it's shit. I just want it to be art.

The Distancing Dance

Folk and friend,
Here's a few words from my dear comrade Dr. Aryeh Cohen. I'm pleased that he has contributed this fine piece to the Urinal Puck. I hope you enjoy it.
-Chaim

------------------------
What is it about Jewish comedians that makes them feel as if they need to throw up all their self loathing Jewish stuff all over their audience?

The other night I saw one of these comedians. She was the poster child for the richuk campaign. You know there are all these organizations that are interested in keiruv, a Hebrew word which means bringing closer and has become a term of art for Jewish evangilizing to Jews. The most sought after person in the Jewish community is the unaffiliated Jew. The Jew who doesn't care about his or her Judaism, the Jew who doesn't belong to a synagogue or has any other Jewish affiliation-hence unaffiliated. This is the person that all Jewish organizations slather over. They literally get hot and bothered just thinking about getting these Jews into their synagogues, boardrooms, living rooms, social justice organizations, temples etc. They sit in a room full of interested and yet, miraculously ignorant Jews talking about how important it is to get those people who don't want to be in that room into that room. The people in the room remain in their blissful Jewish ignorance, yet they all come up with plans to get all the hipsters who couldn't give a damn into the room.

Anyway, the opposite of kiruv is richuk. It is also a Hebrew word which means distancing. It is not yet a term of art. There are no grants that magically appear by telling the foundations that you will leave all these Jews who have chosen not to care about their Jewishness alone. -I am thinking of starting an organization which might just make richuk into a term of art. My working organizational title is "Get the fuck out of my bes medrash." This might be a bit strong. Maybe I should just call it "I'll leave you alone and you don't mess with my religion."

I went to a wedding recently of a family friend. They were both Jewish by birth and both wonderfully unafilliated. Neither of them really cared about Judaism. She had spent her whole life wanting to be "normal". That is wanting to be white bread American. He had spent his whole life not thinking about Judaism for more than two or three minutes.

The wedding was on a Saturday. The officiant was a Unitarian Minister who came with the hotel, and did a great job of making believe that she didn't know anything about religion either. So everything was going along swimmingly-it was eighty degree Arizona in the middle of the winter, what could be bad? They had done an amazing job accomodating my family's observant tendencies-they had ordered kosher food for us and everything.

At the reception, the DJ was playing everything you expect a DJ to play at a wedding‹danceable music from the last three decades. All of a sudden somebody decides its time for the Jewish dance. The bride and groom have to be planted on chairs and hauled above our heads so that we can dance around to some Hava Nagila song. This was supposed to make me happy. Did I miss something here? Was I co-opting your religion? Did I put on a piece of triangular cardboard and prance naked in the freezing cold rooting for some overpaid group of thugs that gets paid more than many countries' GNP? Did I? Then why are you messing with my religion?

So I saw this "comedian" who can be the poster child for the whole richuk movement. In her act she touched on all the aspects of her Jewish identity-loudness, New York accent, the catskills and the Holocaust. If she had just sung Hava Nagila she would have scored a perfect ten. Its not that she wasn't funny. Well, actually, it is also that she wasn't funny. The problem is that she thought she was both funny and edgy. As if five decades of comedians haven't done Longisland jew jokes.

As a follow-up, this vanguard of Jewish vaccuousness also took a courageous stand for the Holocaust. She defended the Holocaust. No, she didn't defend the killing of six million Jews, but she did defend the honor of the Holocaust, or at least took a stand against people making fun of survivors of Auschwitz. Now that was ballsy. I am sure she is also against infanticide and the random shooting of the elderly.

So what is this? What is it that drives people to see these people? How screwed up is it that 99 people get in a room to reaffirm their Jewish identity by announcing their loathing of their Jewish identity? There is a symbiotic psychosis at work here. I make fun of me. You laugh at you. We both make fun of each other. We make believe its hip and edgy because it trashes something we are supposed to care about. But we don't. So, actually, its not.

The Heavens and The Earth - And Ears

Folks,
I'm pleased to post (with the author's permission) a recent D'var Torah by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson. I hope that it provides you with as much inspiration and food for thought as it does for me, especially for those moments when food's not an option.

May I also add that even though the title of this blog is not so reverent, my intent is not to defame but rather to raise the sparks. Shana Tovah.

-Chaim

By: Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies

Shabbat Parashat Ha'azinu
October 15, 2005 - 12 Tishrei 5766


The Heavens and the Earth--And Ears


Torah Reading: Deuteronomy 32:1-32:52
Haftarah Reading: 11 Samuel 22:1-51


What is the essence of human nature? Are we really creatures of spirit and mind, capable of forming ourselves at will to correspond to the highest conceptions of humanity possible? Or are we, rather, little different than the animals of the field and forest, driven by instinct and whim, incapable of modifying either our behavior or our aspiration?

The question of whether we are little lower than the angels or simply a standing, naked ape has preoccupied poets, philosophers, and sages from the dawn of time. In every age, cogent defenses of both positions volley forth from vociferous advocates, each deaf to the merits of the other's position or to the flaws of their own.

On the one hand, it is remarkable what marvels humans have accomplished. With only the power of our minds, we have erected buildings that stand across the millennia and stretch up to the very skies. We have turned the desert into farmland and found ways to link people separated by thousands of miles through a vast array of communication and transportation, so that flying from Los Angeles to New York City takes less time than driving from Washington, D.C. to Boston. Having conquered a long list of malignant diseases, our scientists seem on the brink of winning the battle against illness, even as our educators perfect methods of conquering illiteracy. We are truly reflections of the divine, able to create worlds through our will and our words.

And yet...

Even as our accomplishments loom so large, our failures assume an even more terrifying posture. Our scientific advances threaten to poison our air, render our water unusable, and leave our land blighted. Even as medicine advances, we grapple with plagues that reminds us of our continuing frailty and our devastating impotence. Despite our tremendous wealth, the illiterate and unemployed, the outcast and the hopeless loom ever larger, making a mockery of our smug self-satisfaction. Women are still underpaid, and subject to assault. Terrorists and floods catch us ill-prepared. Blacks and Latinos are still underemployed, and subject to assault. Gays and lesbians are still despised, and subject to assault. Maybe we really are animals after all.

Jewish tradition rejects this simple dichotomy, a false attempt to force humanity into the role of either paper saint or preprogrammed bug. Both angel and animal, human beings are unique precisely because we have the potential to develop in either direction, often both at once.

Our Torah portion opens with Moses' stirring words, "Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter." The Talmudic and geonic rabbis asked themselves why it was that Moses felt impelled to mention both heaven and earth. Wouldn't one have sufficed as a witness?

In Midrash Devarim Rabbah, several answers all point in the same direction: Rabbi Tanhuma said "Because God will redeem Israel only through the agency of them both." Another explanation posits that "the Torah was given only through the agency of them both." Or that "manna and the quails were given through the agency of them both." Or finally, that "God compared Israel to the stars of heaven and the dust of the earth."

Each of these answers insists that salvation comes only through the combination of heaven and earth, of the mundane and the spiritual, of the ideal and the concrete. Both lofty goal (often unattainable) and repair of the world (often prosaic) are necessary for the redemption of humanity and the establishment of caring community.

Without a goal of complete social justice, our communities and the family of man cannot attain a better world. But without a willingness to look after the little details--the individual homeless, poor, sick, or hungry--the goal will remain elusive and ethereal.

Without a sense of the mitzvot as a goal--seeking to incorporate God's will and a sense of the sacred into our lives--there is little hope of elevating our souls. Yet holiness can only enter our lives when translated into practical behavior--shaping how we eat, study, pray, rest, and how we celebrate.

Our destiny as a people, as the House of Israel in the modern age, integrates that same stubborn balance: A flesh-and-blood people still wrestling with an angel in the night, still insisting that holiness is possible, that righteousness must flow like a mighty stream.

By holding on to our own physical nature, we can hope to elevate the material world into something higher. By retaining our dreams, our vision, and our faith, we provide a direction for otherwise pointless business and dreary years.

All it takes is heaven and earth, and the ability to listen. It hasn't changed since Moses first sang to us his song of love.

Shabbat shalom.

Reese Pecked

So he looked in the mirror and saw some residue still there; a leftover of that mask of attractiveness a woman had seen one minute ago. It was fading fast; a freckled tan in September. He talked to himself when he pee'd. He muttered to himself that it wasn't the type of person he wanted to be. He looked at his flaccid penis, and he was reminded of a pubescent dream, one where he was orally copulated by a woman while standing at a urinal. Unlike players in some other dreams, this woman was actually an acquaintance, but up to then hadn't contemplated her in a sexual way. She looked him in the eyes as she slowly, moistly took him into her mouth. It soothed him for 20 years. When he saw her again in the halls of the synagogue, she didn't known of any dreams, and he didn't see anything in her eyes. His dreams were like an annoying cancer trying to take hold of his thoughts. It was really too bad, he thought, that he was so emotionally resilient. It would have been much easier to break like a twig, and ask her to follow him into a bathroom and risk the consequences. He felt informed by some vague or distantly understood set of values. So what good were the values, he thought, if he couldn't even articulate them. Again it came to mind; that's just not the type of person he wanted to be. It wasn't enough that he wanted some sort of earthly reward for his propriety and restraint. No. He wanted a trophy for his silence, for his good heart. The goodness of his heart had after all prevented a toothy and reprehensible, smiling, fat, groaning monster from taking him away into fantasies realized. A tincture of goodness was all that was left. And it ripped away the curse of smoothness and likeability - that thing, melting away in the mirror.

How can the thing which makes you likable be the source of your folly at once. It's just cruel. A cruel mistake of the creator. Pleasing proportions, everything arranged nicely, not even perfectly, but even pleasing was so much better than the dog-faced ugly creatures who roamed the world. With their horsy smiles, sharky noses - nostrils lifted upward revealing the awful dank cilia inside - and the mother fuckers all smile. He wanted to snap their heads off. Strangle them. Why did they get the gift of blissful ignorance? Ah, their ugliness was his reward. Better now that he remembered all the fine balance in creation. His silence had become an armor and their lies bounced off him. His goodness was both his enemy and the very sword that would slay his nemesis. Cruel God.

There was a third person inside him - the one that could see both. It floated detached, sucking on a mint, observing and commenting, wincing at its choice of the wrong words to describe the absurd scene unfolding before it. It too had the potential to metastasize yet another thousand voices. It was getting pretty crowded in there. The first thing he thought of was the plaza around the grand Temple in Jerusalem - with all of the pilgrims of Israel who had come to supplicate before God on the holiest day of the year. Voice upon voice. Some uttered in unison - God full of compassion - compassion the lengths of exponential infinity and favoring compassion and truth. At other times just personal screams to save an ox, a harvest blighted, a son deformed, a spouse strayed. The marble below their feet polished and trodden from centuries of feet. And behind a curtain in front of them stands a man praying for himself.

Anyone who doesn't believe in God must have some solid explanation for the cruel joke that this whole thing presents. It was true, he thought, what the sages had understood and distilled into one single shot of deep and eternal wisdom; that axiom which sees each person as a universe. Not only of the families upon families and friends, students, enemies, cashiers and lovers which encircle the individual. But did they also reference in their exalted moment of clarity about the nature of humans, the eternal and ceaseless cast looming inside every mind - the casual game of host that each of us plays, doubting one voice not so popular while giving reinforcement to another. Sometimes like a cheap talk show; the moderator with a wireless microphone running from the black woman in the fluffy sweater to the college guy in flip flops, soliciting views, opinions and passions from his audience. At other times cranking some knob to spice it up with canned laughter or applause - the audience has gone home, to give voice to their own galaxies of bit players.

The man remembered - he once thought of the word respect. In some pedantic moment of revelation years ago, that it, the word respect, had multiple meanings and therefore needed to be recorded in the annals of some disheveled diary or collection of sugar potent stupidity. Respect in fact had to do with time. Seeing the surface and not rushing to note the adjoining facet, but rather forcing oneself to be at one side, to observe it until it was fully or at least adequately understood. Yes, perhaps this realization wasn't of the same quality of the majority of flotsam which he had uncovered in all his other years. After all, it might hold the key to unlocking the serenity which he so desperately sought. Respect. No, it's not a Hebrew word, but still English does have its moments. Again, one can respect an opinion, for instance. But in order to have that capacity or knowledge, one must first have the patience to sit and hear the alternate view expressed. Or one could say, from this respect I understand thus and such in a different way. Angles, like facets of a jewel, often adjoin not at perfect opposing directions, but instead in very subtle divisions. Like roads diverging at not exacting rectangular intersections, rather splitting off, with the original path slowly diverging for miles before it sways off into its own distant sequence. He wondered what it would have been to stay on that road. He agonizes whether or not to tease himself into yet another rage, or instead to quietly regret. And yet one must still turn the precious stone in order to respect each side - to allow the light to shine from it - to have its due in the sun, under a lamp - to serve as a mirror. Even if it is the wrong side.

GO JOE!! YOU DA' MAN!

Please send your emails of support to Senator Biden. Even if you don't agree with every position he's taken - now is the time to let him know that his role in the confirmation hearings of Judge Roberts is essential in keeping vigor and critique central to the democratic process. While the Republicans tinkle over their darling nominee, Senator Biden played some very hard ball this morning and I was cheering him on. But my steering wheel doesn't care, so perhaps you all will.

-C

http://biden.senate.gov/newsroom/details.cfm?id=245583&

Pete Townshend Becomes a blogger

Hi all, I'd like to alert your attention to a new blog by my good ol' buddy Pete Townshend. He's going to blog a novella using the very same domain as I. Here's the link. I'm sure it will be very thorougly read and analyzed.

Best,
-Chaim
http://www.boywhoheardmusic.blogspot.com/

Important Message from Michael Moore

Hi everyone,
here's a link to Michael Moore's information page regarding aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina (and government incompetence - read below). Yasher Koach to Micahel Moore.

-Chaim

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=184"

Human Nature: Tribal

Government Impotence: Inexcusable

The Latest Rant by Yours Truly

The monetary cost of rebuilding areas of the gulf region destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina will be in excess of one hundred billion dollars. Many hundreds, if not thousands of lives have been lost in the wake of this disaster, both directly related to the storm, but also from hunger, dehydration, lack of proper medical attention, and crime – just to mention a few. It is possible to conflate hunger, dehydration and crime into one category – that would be labeled 'direct and immediate results of governmental negligence.’ The tragedy of lives lost due to the lack of sanitary facilities, food and safety - all begs a question; How many lives could have been spared had there been proper resources, both human and material in place prospectively, before and immediately after the storm did its thing?

I was a victim of a crime earlier this week. A person or group of persons somehow got hold of the number on my ATM card as well as my PIN and began siphoning money out of my account over a period of about 4 days. I usually don’t check my balance that often so basically my account showed a balance of 0$ by the time I saw it. I wasted a day of work dealing with this, not to mention burning precious gasoline driving to Fullerton California to file a police report. I’m stressed, angry, and also scared. I fear using plastic money for any purpose, or in any setting. I fear that the crooks actually still have access to my account and are just waiting to pounce again.

I know that while my fears are justifiable, they are probably not entirely rational. After all, I needed to and was ultimately able to get on with my business. Am I going to carry a couple hundred dollars in cash around with me wherever I go? Yeah, our parents probably used to do that when we were kids; when credit cards represented a different class, when Visa and Diner’s Club were basically it, and credit was something earned via personal integrity, or at very least by being one heck of a good player.

Stealing a stranger’s money can in fact be rational. If your goal is to have enough money in your bank account, to own a car and fill it with gas, have a place to live and food to eat, then finding some way of acquiring money is simply essential, and practically all means are born out of rational decision making. Yes, I think I was taught either through explicit lessons, i.e. teacher said “don’t steal because bla bla bla . . “ or I saw Hawaii five-O and guys who stole got the crap beat out of them by Danno. All in all, I pretty much figured out that stealing was a bad idea. Although I did steal The Rutles 'All You Need is Cash' (a vinyl LP) from a church carnival about 24 years ago, so I didn’t learn very well. Or perhaps I learned with caveats, like if you’re going to take something, then have a solid reason. Mine was that I REALLY wanted that album, and so even my feable attempt at winning the toss-it game or whatever before snatching the record from behind the stall somehow justified my desperate act. So my snake brain stole, and my cerebrum rationalized it.

I think it became more about stealing and not getting caught, as opposed to ‘stealing is bad.’ By and large I’m not a big thief, but there are shades of gray between career criminality and the perfect citizen, i.e. not informing the cashier that he gave you too much change. I don’t do that, but I’m not sure I would consider it outright theft either. In such a scenario, does having driven 5 blocks or from the store absolve you of the need to turn the car around for all of 50¢ ?

Stealing is on the spectrum of deviant behaviors, like peeing in public, or flicking a cigarette butt out the window. But is it deviance if nobody sees or cares that it’s happening? Is it deviant to loot from an abandoned store if the authorities recognize that looting is the only means of survival? Of course there are degrees. Stealing 50 cents from a payphone change slot and purposely dumping a bucket of urine on Rodeo Drive are two very different acts. Who decides, and when, that the rules are suspended? Is that a sub-section of rules included in the social contract we signed at birth? Forget for the moment about what is punishable by statutes because lots of things merit punishment while other things only warrant it.

Shooting at a rescue helicopter both merits and warrants immediate and severe punishment. If you don’t agree with that, then don’t bother reading more because we’re on different planets. Looting for profit in a zone of great devastation is reprehensible. It symbolizez a complete abyss in the values that our systems of education and faith are supposedly there to teach. It too merits punishment and warrants a response worthy of the act. However there are urgent needs that aren’t being met right now. And our president is appointing his predecessor and his daddy to raise private funds for victims. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been allocated toward shock, awe, the spreading of liberty, and the buttressing of a crony regime while Bush Senior and Clinton have been sent out to conduct the equivalent of a bake sale to help mitigate the suffering in our gulf region.

Theft is an act whereby an individual is deprived by another of property, money, means, rights, or to life itself. I posit that this administration has deprived the already needy and impoverished masses of people living in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to their basic rights. It’s as if they’ve been handed a copy of the Constitution with sentences blacked-out. Many have been abandoned by authorities, herded into badly planned refugee housing, or simply left to die without basic means of survival. And yet this very same administration has ordered a ‘zero tolerance’ policy (see my previous entry entitled Zero Tolerance plus One) regarding looting in the devastated areas. In my opinion, it is high time that the masses in this country begin to immediately demonstrate zero tolerance for a government which has completely upside-down priorities regarding the welfare of its citizens.

A country with inestimable wealth, medical technology par excellence, superior means of transportation, and the strongest fighting force on the planet cannot seem to muster the necessary resources to save its citizens after a storm. Suddenly we need telethons, private charity dinners, and grassroots-internet efforts to help these masses get to some degree of equilibrium. Children are dying. People are wading in their own waste and garbage FOR DAYS, without hope or any indication of when the help is going to arrive. Hundreds of billions are being spent on an unpopular, un-winnable war overseas. And our president is sitting in front of us with that all too familiar deer in the headlights expression (the same one he had four years and a few days ago when he was reading Pokey The Goat). He doesn’t know what to do, or how to do it. Perhaps he should declare war on poverty. But no, he’ll just declare war on the looters. He'll siphon off resources from victim relief to fight looters. He’ll stupidly proclaim that nobody had any idea that the levies would fail while earlier this year a huge government-sponsored commission met to study “Hurricane Pam” - a hypothetical disaster in New Orleans - and guess what folks – that’s right - the levies were breached in hypothetical “Hurricane Pam.”

I must say that the single largest revelation has been watching the footage of all the unfortunate people victimized by the storm, left like the storm flotsam itself by their governing, elected officials. An overwhelming percentage of victims seem to be black people. Say it isn’t so. This isn’t just classism (as if ‘just’ isn’t bad enough).

One last thing. Bill Clinton should publicly come to a podium and declare that he has every intention of marshaling human and material resources to benefit and save the victims. In the same breath he should then point a finger straight at the White House and ask the nation where its leader is. Where are the tax dollars being siphoned? Where is the corporate welfare pissed away? Where are the helicopters, the shock and awe of Americans coming to save other Americans?!?! But he probably won't.