Holy Cow.

The freeway broke.

Thank God nobody was killed.

More pictures here.

Counting

I’m here for less than a month. Then I go back to America. I’m frantically trying to finish up revisions on this book and to make headway on another project and prepare for the various things I’ll be doing this summer and preparing for several important events that’ll happen here before I leave, and to figure out, say, the logisitcs of packing and moving house back to halfway around the world.

It seems that everyone I know is particularly preoccupied these days, has lots of things to do (more than usual) and is trying to get them all done without dropping anything. I’m sure that it’s not everyone, but certainly lots of people I know fall into this category now.

I think it’s very Omer-y. Counting, making lists, trying not to forget, knowing that if you forget a little, it’s still redeemable, but if you forget more than a little, you’re in big trouble.

Also, an anticipation–of leading up to Revelation/Mattan Torah, or the anticipation of being a people who left one thing and haven’t yet figured out what the next thing is to be, what structure will carry them now that slavery isn’t it. The limbo-time in between chapters.

I see a lot of people in this limbo space now, preparing to end one chapter (or having ended it) and not yet having begun the next. Not yet knowing what God’s going to say to them next, and how that’s going to shape the pieces to come.

Onward and Upward

I’ve got three chapters left to revise–mostly easy stuff, though I also have to insert a particular thread that I’m not so sure how to approach–and I have to write a proper Introduction. My word counts have already bulged past the mark, and any real work yet to come is in adding. I hope my editor gives me another 5k, because I don’t want to cut stuff that belongs in the book just for the sake of hitting the right price-point on the volume. That just stinks.

I’m such a nerd, paying attention to the directions like this. It’s the curse of the former freelancer, I’m told I have 800 words, I submit 800 words. I’m told I have 80,000 words, I hate having to submit more than that. A friend of mine handed in a 1,000-page mss to her publisher. Eventually they made her cut it to 400 pages. Talk about a not-fun revisions process. Lo aleinu!

Memory, Action

Today, Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) in Israel, seems like a good time to bring your attention to a project by Jews opposing the American presence in Iraq: Jews Against the War. They have a petition that will be published on Shavuot as an ad in Jewish papers nationwide and sent to US Senators and Representatives.

Be encouraged to take a look and, if you agree with the statement, to sign.

Personally, I think that trying to keep people from dying unnecessarily is the greatest honor that one can offer the dead.

We Are All One Under God

Couldn’t resist posting this little scene from Jen’s Tefillin Barbie workshop.

Rechavia Moment

Bibi is sitting next to me at the coffee shop, talking to (who I imagine to be) potential donors. It’s true what they say, his English is fantastic, not even a trace of an accent. One of the Americans just asked if he would run for Prime Minister again, and his response was, quite accurately, that it’s not really up to him (but that yes, of course, he would if it were.) He looks completely TV ready.

It’s not appropriate for me to share my thoughts with him about his budget and his politics, and it’s not like he would care about my opinions, even if it were. But still. I’m thinking those thoughts to myself, very strongly. Is it too much to wish that he might have a touch of the ESP?

Baruch Dayan Ha-Emet

Much love and comfort to everyone impacted by the shooting in Virginia yesterday.

What is wrong with America? Really. These shootings–and their frequency over the years–are not the sign of a healthy society.

I remember that Julie Brown song, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” In 1987 or so it was funny, in that black comedy sort of way, because the premise was so far out and fantastical, so utterly impossible and removed from reality. It’s painful–so painful I don’t really let myself fully contemplate it–how much has changed in twenty years.

Gun control laws are part of it, of course. But there’s something else, much deeper down inside American culture that’s seriously broken. The question is, is it irrevocably broken–and if not, how can we begin the process of repair?

For Shame

Ynet reports,

A third of Holocaust survivors living in Israel are poor, the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund reported this week. According to the fund, some 80,000 of the 260,000 survivors in the country live under the poverty line.

In addition to their grim financial situation, the survivors are also more prone to suffer from unique physical and medical problems related to the malnutrition and severe hardships they had experienced during the war years. Dental, hearing and eyesight problems are more common among survivors as well.

Many of the survivors suffer from mental distress and loneliness, and lack proper social and family support networks. Some 50,000 to 60,000 survivors are in need of some level of nursing, as 73 percent of this population is over the age of 76, and about a fifth is over 86.

Story.

The Jerusalem Post reports,

Pensioners’ rights group Ken Lazaken called Thursday for a boycott of official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies to protest the government’s failure to sufficiently help the more than 70,000 Holocaust survivors who live in poverty in Israel.

“People should not participate in ceremonies to remember the dead, when really we should be remembering and helping those who are still living,” Nathan Lavon, director of Ken Lazaken, said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

Story.

I’m not saying that I agree with boycotting Yom Hashoah, but that it’s gotten to the point that someone has to suggest a boycott in the attempt at getting the survivors’ basic needs even a modicum of attention?

There are no words for how shameful this is.

A Friendly Reminder

Dear God,

We stopped praying for rain almost two weeks ago.

Love, adoration and worship as always,
D.

Being Edited Is Good Practice for Being Alive

I’ve started getting into book revisions this week, and it’s an interesting process. Given that I worked as a freelance writer before rabbinical school, I’ve had the chance to be edited a lot. It can be challenging when the editor and I have different visions for a piece (thank God, not the case with my wonderful editor now) but I’m generally not one of those people who puts up a big fight about edits–I can think of two times in my career where I declined to edit something a particular way, and serious time constraints was a factor in one of them.

Sure, the editing process can be hard. You’re naturally protective about something into which you’ve put a lot of time and effort, and if your name is going next to the words when they get published, you wants to be sure that the words printed match your beliefs.* No question. But I have to say, writing professionally is a great way to learn about non-attachment. That is to say, something you may have written down one day is not the same thing as your blessed, immortal soul. Not even a little.

A friend working on her dissertation once asked me why I didn’t write out everything in longhand first–because with longhand, it seems, if you cross something out, you can still see it and “get it back” if you decide you want it.

Sure, I save versions of things if it seems that I’m going to be making a lot of major changes–cutting entire scenes, for example. (As it turns out, there’s at least one scene in the final mss that I had cut along the way–glad to have been able to save rewriting five already-polished pages.) But to save every precious word? Come on. You write, you change your mind, you delete, you let it go. If you decide to cut a paragraph and then later want those ideas in there, you can probably find some new words to express them. The word bank is pretty full, generally. You let something go, you make room for something else.

Greedily clutching on to words only makes you attached and makes it harder to see when your self-congratulatory pride is getting in the way of knowing what best serves the book. The book is a separate entity from you and has needs and demands of its own. (Another reason why we all need editors–authors are wayyy too close to their work and can never totally tell what’s working and what’s not.) Kill your babies, they say a lot in the writing world–the thing about your own work i with which you are most enthralled s probably the thing most likely to need to go. Learning that these words are just words and that you can just as well come up with some other words makes that whole cycle of drama a whole lot easier to avoid.

Knowing that your words are just words also has the benefit of making you feel a bunch less invested in other people’s reactions to the work, which I think is probably healthy. It’s hard when other people confuse some stuff that you wrote down that one time with your immortal and pure soul, but I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about that.

I have a friend who had shopped around a memoir-type book, and she finally found a publisher who was interested in the idea–as a nonfiction journalistic-type book, though, not as a memoir. All of the work she had done on her own story was scrapped, and she had to start from scratch. She wrote me something like, “I just think of all of those words I had already written as angels, released to the world beyond to help whoever needed them.”

I love words. Thank God I can always find some more to use.

*And I’m not talking here about non-consensual editing, in which you turn in copy and find something totally different–either less articulate or saying things you didn’t mean to say at all–published under your name. That happens, and it is eeevil. I’m talking about regular, consensual editing in which an editor sends you edits, and you revise your own piece, and they print the revised version.