Hey, anybody know where the following comes from? It’s a quote I think I copied from something in the JTS library nine million years ago (when I didn’t know anything, and didn’t even have the basic sense to note the source) for a short story I was working on at the time. (The short story was eventually pubbed in Lilith mag, you can probably still find it somewhere).
I’ve always been under the impression that it was gemara from the first few pages of Brachot, but it doesn’t seem to be–unless in my skimming the perek just now I totally missed it, which is possible; nothing was certainly coming up in the various CD-ROM searches (in various languages) that I’ve thought to run.
Anyway, anybody know this?
“’What is twilight?’ Said R. Tanchuma, ‘it is a drop of blood balanced on the edge of a sword.’”
It’s somewhere in the textual universe close to this: , “it has been taught in the name of R. Joshua: The thickness of the sky is about two finger-breaths.”
Lovely, no? Those Rabbis sure did have a way with words. But where’s it from????
So Wednesday morning I was up by 6 (unheard of over in these parts), met Avieleh in front of her place (right near mine) at 6:40, and we were off in a cab to the Kotel [Western Wall] to be there at 7.
We’d been emailing for a couple of years, but never met. Our soferet is an absolute peach! I’m thrilled to discover how fantastic she is in real life (you never know with this whole “internet” thing–most people are as great as they write, but certainly not all of ‘em) and super happy that my new friend lives in my neighborhood and is going to be around for a bit. Maybe we can convince her to stay on a little longer….
Anyway, Women at the Wall was packed, lots of students here for the summer and a few friends/colleagues/teachers/rock-star-like acquaintences who happened to be in town, so that was nice too. The presence of so many serious heroes in one place gave the event a nice, extra feeling of weight.
Anyway, we davvened. And then Sasha, a woman doing a documentary on Jewish feminism had me, Avieleh and Haviva stick around and be interviewed some more in some sort of Three Feminist Stooges formation (she’s already gotten footage of all of us going blah blah blah on our own, as well as some particularly weird “regular life” footage, like she followed me to the grocery store when I did my Shabbos shopping–watch Danya pick through the tomatoes and buy a lot of tofu!!) Avieleh posted a picture of the three of us here; I’m the one in the red with a look on my face like I just smelled something really, really bad. The rabbi’s in the middle, and the soferet on the other end. Dang, my friends are cool.
Anyway, then we showed Sasha how to lay tefillin for the first time (she had brought along her dad’s and had been hoping to learn), which was very cool and moving. Then lady H. went home and A. and S. and I made our way to Tmol Shilshom. I had brought my computer and had figured on working, but S. and A. were there, and fun to talk to… so I wound up not getting a ton of writing done, but I DID make them talk with me about the places I was feeling stuck in the chapter, so I left with a lot more clarity, which was exceedingly helpful. (My problem, I’m discovering, is that I need to write in solitude but often need to think in hevruta, which simply means that my poor friends are very heavily tapped when I’m working on something like this. God bless AIM, I tellya.)
Anyway, S. left a couple of hours later, but A. and I stayed there, working a little in tandem but mostly just talking until 6pm. At which point we walked home, and I endeavored to make a little more progress in my chapter. It’s definitely getting there, I don’t anymore feel like it owns me, but it’s hard. Broadly speaking, this book is on the trials, tribulations and political implications of taking on a religious discipline–I’m writing some about my own experiences, and sometimes need someone who has a little more distance than I do to help me get to the real marrow of a story, and in terms of analysis–you know, who doesn’t get sharper and smarter talking about a concept with someone else? Hard work, this writing stuff is. My acknowledgements page is going to be very long.
And on that note, I’m going to get back in there. Wish me luck.
At the urging of Avielah, I have finally gone out and gotten myself a MySpace profile. Not that I have any idea what it does or what it’s good for, but I guess if it’s good enough for Ira Glass, it’s good enough for me.
There’s not much there yet, but I’ll start adding stuff as I get antsy and procrastonatey on writing. God bless the Web.
Anyway. Add me as a friend, willya? Profile is here.
But this, more than any of the rabid enthusiasms of pretty much everybody I know, makes me curious to check it out. Someday. Maybe. When I get around to it. Whether or not the series is to my taste (who knows? who cares, really?), this Joss fellow is clearly not dumb.
And the war keeps going. There were rumors yesterday that Israel had taken out the major Hizbullah outposts in southern Lebanon, but given that there are more rockets falling in northern Israel today, it seems that nothing’s over anytime soon. And now there are rumors that some other Arab and/or Muslim countries might be getting into the game, so who knows how long, and how scary, and how bad this could all go. Of course one major fear is that all of this heavy force on Israel’s part will only further radicalize the civilian population of Lebanon, creating exactly the circumstances that create and strengthen Hizbullah and groups like it. And yet, some of my friends argue, we can’t just let terrorist organizations kidnap soldiers and throw bombs. Me, I just want everybody to stop. I have no policy suggestions, I have no strategic or diplomatic suggestions. I just fear for safety and the lives of people in the North, and the safety and lives of innocent Lebanese civilians (who are, increasingly, refugees). I want… I don’t know what I want. For everybody to have the peace, safety and resources to live happy lives. I don’t know how we get there from here. I really don’t.
Things in my little life are plugging along, I suppose. Friday night there were 80 people davvening Kabbalat Shabbat in my apartment (which is, as you might imagine, not built to house 80 people.) That was an interesting experience–kind of cool, kind of stressful. I was leading mincha as these waves and waves of people came in my front door, making the room tighter and increasingly packed. People were bumping into me as I was going hazarat ha-shatz. I’ve never been that distracted while davvening before. All in all it was, I think, a nice evening, but… whoa.
Shabbos day I spent, having woken up somehow too late to go anywhere for shul, reading this book, which kicked a prodigious amount of butt. Anybody interested in technology’s unintended and unarticulated impact on theology ought check it out–it’s about more than connecting via blogs or using fancy gadgets in a worship setting (which the author is pretty much neutral about–there are ways to do that well and ways to do that poorly, etc) but more about left vs. right brain, interest in narrative vs. abstract concepts, a return to Christian iconography, interest in certain forms of worship or leadership possibly at the expense of others, etc. Reccomended.
Last night I went out, saw some folks I don’t see often, met some new folks. Was fun, though I don’t know why some of my friends find it necessary to start hanging out at 10pm instead of a nice, civilized, 8 or so. Some of us are both old and have work to do the next day, you know….
In the meantime, prayers and more prayers for peace. And back to this chapter. I can do it. I think I can I think I can.
P.S. Why is there suddenly like this sudden increase in people Googling my name lately? The stat counter thingo is going off the charts with this. Who are you people? Long-lost friends who want to make sure I’m not getting blown up, or is this academic, or is this totally random/coincidental, or what? I’m not trying to come off conceited, I’m just curious–particularly if it’s folks in the first category. Leave a note in the comments, willya? (This actually applies to all lurkers–I’d love to hear from you sometime.)
So the war drags on. There’s a discernible tension in the air; you can feel it.
The other day there was one of those classic Israeli moments when a car and a bus got a little too close for comfort pulling up to a red light. The drivers start screaming at each other from their open windows, and then the car driver gets out of his car, fist raised like he’s about to do some whuppin’, bangs on the door to the bus (yes, an Egged bus) and the bus driver opens it holding a baseball bat, and they were SO going to have at it. (I didn’t see what happened; I was in a cab and we got the turn signal.) Even for Israel, that was pretty good–and I think a lot about tense people blowing off steam any way they could. Or maybe they were both just nuts, I dunno.
I check in every day or so with my friends in Haifa–they hear the bombs from their apartment, they’ve stopped bothering going down to the bomb shelter, they just wait, after a siren starts, for the sound of something landing so that they can go back to what they’re doing. “It’s not nice,” she tells me. But, true to type, “Ain ma la’asot”–there’s nothing we can do but do whatever we would do. I guess if this happened to me every ten years, I’d get used to it too. Maybe. I don’t know that getting used to any of this–that thinking that it’s normal in any way–is a good idea. I know it’s considered good machismo here to shrug one’s shoulders like one can’t be bothered to having a reaction to all this, but I’d frankly prefer to keep my sensitivities intact. This IS a big deal, and I hope I never get so jaded that I can’t see it as such. I know that for a lot of folks, well–there isn’t anything that they can do right now, so choosing not to get wigged out seems like a better idea than getting wigged out (given that external reality’s going to be the same either way). I get that. And maybe that is the more enlightened position, I dunno. But that way, something else gets lost. I hope I don’t get used to this, ever. Ever.
Here in Jerusalem, in any case, there is work to do. I’m up to my eyeballs in the chapter I knew would be one of the hardest to write, and sure enough, it’s hard. There’s just so much to cover, and some of it is going to be really relevant to later chapters even if it doesn’t seem so important now–and I can’t tell what stuff that is. I basically have to write considerably more than I’ll need, and figure out how to make the coherent narrative emerge, with a side order of the chewy analytical stuff. (And yes, I’m writing a book. I’ve already signed the contract with Beacon Press, so I guess it’s OK to talk about it now. More on subject matter another time. But I’m thrilled that this has all worked out–I’ve been wanting to do this project for a while, and the publisher is great–they really know what they’re doing, don’t want something dumbed-down and insipid, and my editor is a model of competence in all the most reassuring ways.) Glad to be doing this work, but man is it hard work. OK. Onward.
But first, a few links:
The first 45 min of the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz convergence you may or may not have watched in college has been put together here
Speaking of which, not as funny as it should be, but the pilot for a show called SuperNerds, featuring Sarah Silverman and that guy who played her friend in Jesus is Magic. Found here, worth it for the snarky one-liners.
Everybody on the Jewish blogosphere is blogging at great length about the war. And I just don’t have the heart to. You can read the papers, that’s mostly what I’m doing, checking every few hours to see where bombs are landing and what’s happening, and calling friends in Haifa periodically to make sure they’re OK (didn’t hear back from them yesterday, but I’m assuming it’s because they’re camped out in the bomb shelter, and/or trying to take care of business.) JewSchool is another place you can go for news, and Harry at The View From Here did a roundup of people blogging on all this here.
Yeah, I don’t know. Not a lot to add to all of this. My general emotional reaction right now is to want to hide under the bed, which doesn’t make for a lot of sharp political analysis.
I’m not really hiding–I’m working, meeting friends for work dates or social visits, sitting in coffee shops, will be going to my Reiki class (!!) tonight, et cetera. But I’m really feeling like… you know, analyzing much of anything at the moment, at least as far as political and military things go. You want analysis, click on one of the links above.
It was nice to hang out yesterday with friends who immigrated here a long time ago and who have small kids, whose reactions to all this were somewhere in the middle between my jaded Israeli friends (”well, in a way, this is kind of good, because we can solve things once and for all….of course some more bombs will be dropped on Israel, that’s par for the course, just don’t get all upset about it”) and the skittish, freaked-out Americans. Kind of reality-checky.
More when I have more to say. Or when you all send me stupid distracting things to which I can link.
Well, if you want to be completely overwhelmed by the situation, this Israel-English news aggregator is definitely the way (thanks to Harry for the link).
For those of you who don’t know about Haaretz, that’s a pretty good place to check as well–more info on some things than you’d get from Google News or CNN or whatever.
As for me, I’ll welcome links to whatever you’ve got that can provide a welcome distraction.
Anybody else surprised at the part of all this where Peretz is the defense minister?
I feel as though I should be commenting constantly on the…well, war.. that’s breaking out here. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit freaked out, but I’ve been assured by people who know what they’re talking about that Jerusalem should be safe, and frankly I don’t feel that I have a lot to say in a more global sense right now. Wargames? Not my forte. I want there not to be a war. I want people to be safe. I want there to not be suffering.
For now, I’m not sure what decent response I have for any of this but to pray hard, and often.
As I’ve promised a few folks, I’m going to keep using this blog as a way to let people know that I’m OK if freaky stuff starts happening. I’m probably not going to be always, or even that much, talking about politics and the big world because I prefer not to blah blah about something about which I don’t have anything intelligent to add, and there are only so many ways to say, “this sucks.” Sometimes linking to whatever dumb article I’ve read that day will be a way to wave hello (and sometimes it’s just a way to share said link with the world.)
And in the meantime, a lot of prayer. That’s what I’ve got tonight. Maybe something else tomorrow, maybe not.
…שים שלום בעולם טובה וברכה חן וחסד ורחמים עלינו ועל כל ישראל ועל כל יושבי תבל
