I mean, yeah, people who are dying do have a palpable something about them. There’s the thing, and you can feel it. Nobody better than this cat, it seems. What a great cat. I’m glad he goes to give the folks love when they get close to crossing over.
Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.
…
His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.
“He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
…
After about six months [after the time that he was adopted], the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.
Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. “This is not a cat that’s friendly to people,” he said. Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill.
Just on the other side of Tisha B’Av, this is too good not to repost.
This recent-ish story in the Washington Post is, as Kol Ra’ash Gadol points out, the perfect antidote to the Kamtza/Bar Kamtza story about why the Temple was destroyed. (It’s summarized pretty succinctly in the post just below this one.) It’s also pretty good on its own, and rather revealing in terms of what kindness–even kindness born of fear–can effect.
A grand feast of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp was winding down, and a group of friends was sitting on the back patio of a Capitol Hill home, sipping red wine. Suddenly, a hooded man slid in through an open gate and put the barrel of a handgun to the head of a 14-year-old guest.
“Give me your money, or I’ll start shooting,” he demanded, according to D.C. police and witness accounts.
The five other guests, including the girls’ parents, froze — and then one spoke.
“We were just finishing dinner,” Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan, 43, blurted out. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us?”
The intruder took a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry and said, “Damn, that’s good wine.”
The girl’s father, Michael Rabdau, 51, who described the harrowing evening in an interview, told the intruder, described as being in his 20s, to take the whole glass. Rowan offered him the bottle. The would-be robber, his hood now down, took another sip and had a bite of Camembert cheese that was on the table.
Then he tucked the gun into the pocket of his nylon sweatpants.
“I think I may have come to the wrong house,” he said, looking around the patio of the home in the 1300 block of Constitution Avenue NE.
“I’m sorry,” he told the group. “Can I get a hug?”
The good Dr. Aryeh Cohen has some worthwhile commentary on the Iraq war and Tisha b’Av over on the Jews Against the War site. It begins:
When we are lucky we get a second chance. Tragedy often results from blowing the second chance. Two stories bring this thought to mind. One is found in the Midrash and is a reflection on the destruction of the Temple. The other is about a very prominent twentieth century philosopher. These thoughts occur to me on the background of the three weeks of reflection that lead to the fast of the Ninth of Av, and which, this year, began the day before the Fourth of July.
Zechariah ben Avkulos is a rarely recorded Sage who apparently lived in the time of the Second Temple. According to the Palestinian Midrash Eichah Rabba, he happened to be at the party that led to the destruction of the Temple. The party was thrown by some very important individual who had invited all of the Rabbis and others of the upper strata of society. He invited Kamtza, his close friend and purposely did not invite his nemesis Bar Kamtza. There was some mix-up, however, and Bar Kamtza ended up at the party. The man was so enraged that he demanded that Bar Kamtza immediately leave. After much pleading so as to avoid public humiliation (“let me pay for my food…; let me pay for half the party…; let me pay for the whole party…”), the host physically ejected Bar Kamtza. As he was being dragged out, Bar Kamtza saw that all the Rabbis, including Zechariah ben Avkulas, did not lift a finger to help him.
Bar Kamtza was so enraged that he hatched a plot to prove to the Roman Ceasar that the Jews were rebelling. As the culmination of the plot, Bar Kamtza brought a sacrifice from the Ceasar to the Temple. Bar Kamtza knew the animal was blemished, but in a way that the Romans would not notice and thus when the priests refused Ceasar’s sacrifice it would be obvious that the Jews were no longer loyal subjects.
By chance, Zecharyah ben Avkulas was at the Temple that day as Bar Kamtzah brought the Caesar’s blemished sacrificed to be burnt upon the altar—second chances. The Midrash relates that, instead of making up for his earlier performance, he blew it again. He did not have the courage to either bend sacrificial law (put the blemished sacrifice on the altar) or criminal law (kill Bar Kamtza) to save the Temple and thousands of lives. Was it because he did not have the courage to stop Bar Kamtza’s humiliation that he could not summon the courage to thwart Bar Kamtza’s plan? When does one start slipping down the slope? When do you know that it’s a slope?
My world is pretty small these days. Most of my days are occupied with various iterations of scheduling with my 3 hevrutot–L. on Monday morning, J. on Monday afternoon, S. on Tuesday morning, J. on Tuesday afternoon, etc. Periodically I study the dappim (2-sided pages) I have to do on my own in a coffee shop. I’m on a section that’s particularly sloggy, looking forward to getting to the other side of that. At regular intervals I do something related to my internship, which happens to be located in my neighborhood–which is great, and I’m learning a lot so far, but not necessarily the thing that leads me to exotic vistas. It’s all OK though; it makes a certain amount of sense to keep the external reality rather contracted when there’s so much happening in terms of input, etc.
It’s very interesting to have switched from such intense output mode (writing a book and all) to such intense input mode (studying Talmud all day every day). I find that it’s made me rather quiet–like with this blog, I just haven’t felt like I have a lot to say, even though there’s plenty what to say about this whole process and the stuff I’m learning. I’m mostly just trying to shut up and learn, and I suspect that later this fall I’ll have more to say about the process I’m undergoing now than I do now, while it’s happening.
So far I’ve probably been over at least once close to 40 of the 50 dappim on which I’ll be tested in late August. I feel fairly confident about some of them, and with many more I’ve barely scratched the surface, and will have to spend much time with before I’ll feel prepared with them. That’s OK, though. I’m hoping to have had a good pass on all 50 before the end of the month, so that I can really use August for review and going over stuff that still doesn’t totally make sense. That will fill my days well enough.
So evidently a lot of folks are getting here today because someone name-checked me in a Dutch blog–thanks to whoever did that, but what on Earth were you guys talking about? I tried translating via Babelfish and the results were pretty unintentionally hillarious. I’m gathering there was some Christian issue about which Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev had something to say–maybe it was a gender thing? I can’t tell. Anyway, I’m all curious, if someone feels like sharing!
In other news, I have a new favorite magazine. Or a new magazine that I love, anyway. It’s called Muslim Girl, and I found it randomly on my local newsstand, and couldn’t resist picking it up. It’s fabulous!
It’s totally as cool as you would hope it would be–inclusive, flexible, asks its readers, “is your mosque
girl-friendly?” and profiles Muslim chicks doing cool/unusual things (soccer player, spoken word poet, etc.), seems to consider stuff like how one defines modesty and whether to wear hijab a personal decision (and has a non-hijabi as a cover girl in this last issue), does cute fluffy YM-demo appropriate stuff like gush about Harry Potter and then interviews women who witnessed the Bosnian genocide without blinking. It seems right on re: navigating the various issues of staying true to your religion while still integrating as much as possible in the big world (and has at least several features in which the interviewee makes a point of saying that God wants us to think through our actions and have, well, kavvanah, more than God wants strict, unthinking ritual adherence). And they had an article on interfaith dialogue, which always makes me happy. This is how religion should be sold to the preteen/teen set, really. Oh, and their fashion spreads are non-sucky.
Now, granted, the fact that I’m 15-20 years too old to be their target demographic and, you know, not Muslim did get in the way of my interest a little, but really? I’d give this to my (theoretical) kid over Seventeen magazine any day.
I contributed a little drash-let to Jewess this week on the daughters of Tzelophchad. Here’s the beginning part:
The story of the daughters of Tzelophechad is a favorite among Jewish feminists. One can see why: five women come before Moshe and the other (male) leaders of the assembly, in front of the entrance to the most sacred site of the desert-bound Israelites, and ask to inherit their familial plot of land from their father. (At the time, an inheritance would pass to other male relatives if the deceased had left no sons.) Moshe asks God, and God says, “The daughters of Tzelophechad spoke justly,” and instructs Moshe to give them their father’s holdings. It’s feminist goodness all around. And, as a bonus, the narrator of Numbers 27 tells us that these daughters are called Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah — unlike Lot’s wife, Noah’s wife, and so many other women in the Bible, these ladies have names, concrete identities of their own.
Predictably, however, there’s a backlash. A few parshiot later — in Ma’asei, Numbers 36 — the family heads of the daughters’ clan come to Moshe and the other important guys and complain that, if our heiresses marry someone from outside the tribe, their own tribe will lose out on land, because, naturally, the daughters’ property will transfer to their husbands. Suddenly this picture of female independence is not so rosy — it seems that these women don’t really own this land unequivocally. When the women are acquired in marriage, their property is acquired as well, and it does not, for example, pass down to the children through the mother’s tribal line.
Here, too, God hears the request and finds it reasonable — “just,” as God did with the daughters. Here, too, God addresses the specific case and establishes a more general rule: “Every daughter among the Israelite tribes who inherits a share must marry someone from a clan of her father’s tribe, in order that every Israelite may keep his ancestral share.” Women who inherit find their personal lives severely restricted. From a pshat [literal] reading of the text, it doesn’t even seem that she has the option to refuse her inheritance and marry whomever she pleases!
When I look at the micro of this story — the qualifications and limitations placed on the women and their inheritance, especially after they’d already been given it with no strings attached — I find it infuriating. And yet, the bigger picture reveals a larger underlying tension — namely, the tension between the individual and the community.
A lot of why I haven’t been posting much lately is that, unlike in days of yore, I haven’t had much access to computers in my day-to-day routine this summer. I wake up, rush off to a hevruta session, go from there to another one, have perhaps a work meeting in the middle or run some errands, and come home in the evening with not a lot to say about the big word, somehow.
Things are progressing. I’m working hard with my hevrutot, and we’re getting through dappim. I’ve had a good first pass at a bit less than half of the 50 I need to cover, which seems to be about on schedule–I still have plenty to cover for the first time, and lots of review ahead of me. Plus, I have 13 dappim to learn on my own (because there’s nobody around doing those pages) so that’ll take a different kind of focus and concentration. I’ve started plugging away at them, but, most of all, it’s hard to find the time since I’ve been in hevruta all day every day. But that will start to shift as I book in time for this, too.
In other news, things with the book are moving along. We have a pub date now! It might change (it wouldn’t be the first time a publisher changed its mind) but for now we seem to be on track for August, 2008. Now we just need to settle on a title, and we’ll be in business.
OK, today involves setting up my home office space (yes, I know, haven’t done that yet! It’s shameful), learning some Talmud and then going to a BBQ in honor of my friend’s kid’s first birthday. And the 4th of July, of course. Should be nice. Time to get to it.