Monday, April 22, 2013

Boston: Not So Fine

Like almost everyone I know, I was magnetized by the coverage of the Boston marathon on tv. No matter how many times I saw the same pictures, I didn't leave the set. My emotions were many, and I expect that that, too, I shared with millions of other Americans.

But now I find myself dismayed by the repeated announcements that Boston is back to normal. After dutifully staying inside as instructed, Bostonians jammed the streets in joy that the second bomber was in custody; baseball came back; this morning,  the second bomber is even communicating (in writing because he cannot speak). God's hanging out above Boston again. 

No one on TV has said that nothing will ever be quite "normal" again for the people who lost a limb (or two) last Monday. Would someone please tell me why?  is there a chance that would dampen the mood just a tad?

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Where Was God?

April 17, 2013.


Whenever a horrifying man-created act occurs, one hears someone ask "Where was God?"  Meaning: if God exists, why did she allow this to happen? Why didn't She stop the perpetrators before they had a chanace to complete their terrible deed?  Why didn't God see to it that there was a warning?  There are many possible versions of the question.  Many.  Often, the question is asked calmly by non-believers, the current devastation yet another proof that God does not exist. Because if a God existed, surely she would intervene in the plans of terrorists--or tragically demented teenagers. But believers, too, grief-stricken for victims they never met, may whisper, "Where was God?"  Their belief in God's existence not shaken, but their "faith" in God's power and love may be.

In the two decades after the Shoah, a bookcase filled with books arguing these points appeared.  I myself was overtaken by the question a week before a Yom HaShoah service at my synagogue, the first I would ever attend. I was new to synagogue life--and, indeed, to practicing Judaism. For four days, I sat on my bed and sought an answer to "Where was God"  during the Jew-killing? When Jews were cremated in the death camps by the efficient Nazi murder-machine, where was God? That particular question pushed at me, pushed inside me, pushed me to the limits of my mind's strength to use reason to come to an answer that didn't immediately shrink to an excuse.

As I sat, I wrote, filling page after page of a yellow pad with phrases, thought, twigs of ideas, solitary stark words. I didn't mean to write something--a piece of writing. But whenever I am faced with a mental or emotional or spiritual hurdle, I know that, if there's any way I can vault over it, my only pole is made of words. Back then, finally, on the fourth day, I leapt at this possibility: that, when Jews were marched into the crematatoria, God went in with them.  And because the God who is central to me cannot die, she had to emerge alive--only to repeat that devastating process of companionship, over and over and over. That possible answer stayed with me, seemed to me a way God might have "lived through" the Holocaust.  And later that day, I pieced together some of the bits I'd written and began to write the meditation which emerged from my odd version of meditating. 

When, a few days later, I read what I'd written at the Yom HaShoah service at my then-synagogue, it caused some angry responses--as though I had said that God died and was resurrected. Many of my fellow members knew that I had, for some years, been a Catholic. Was I not saying--claiming!--that God died in the crematoria and was resurrected? The next morning, I stopped by my synagogue, and found that the quick anger of the night before wasn't over: the rabbi was getting indignant phone calls.  As I sat near her desk, bewildered and saddened by what people heard--but that I had not said--a member I hardly knew poked his head into the rabbi's office. She asked him what he thought my meditation was about. He hesittated only a moment or two, then said : "a singed God." His gift of insight a gift to me and, I hope, the rabbi. 

Day before yesterday in Boston, Where was God? I think she was lying in the street, one of her legs shredded.  Of course I don't know where God was, precisely, and my anthropomorphic image may be very off-putting to some; but if we are made in God's image, does not that mean God also has arms and legs a home-made bomb can wound? Maybe not.

What I am sure of is that God was in Boston Monday, perhaps yet again berating herself for having bestowed free will on her creation. But, then, perhaps, seeing all the people who ran to help the victims, God sighed with relief because they, too, were exercising free will. 

Friday, April 12, 2013

An Anniversary

April 12, 2013


In the candy store, the man behind the cash register was talking with a customer about a horse that just died. People talked about horses often there, and I didn't pay attention. I paid and headed home.  The walk was a long block to Fort Washington Avenue, then three more to my house, which was on the corner of Haven Avenue.  A few girls were playing potsy out front. They were singing something and laughing at how they were managing to keeping time as they jumped. I barely caught the words: "Roosevelt kicked the bucket, Roosevelt kicked the bucket."  I must have misunderstood. Could there be  a horse named after President Roosevelt? And why would they know about a horse dying, anyhow? They were just kids a year or two older than I was. I was nine. I hurried upstairs to get the story straight.

My father was seated in the wheelchair he occupied since returning from the hospital a few days earlier. My mother sat in a chair pulled up near the wheelchair. Both their heads were bent toward the radio. As I came in, my mother turned, motioned me over, but put her finger over her mouth, so I would be quiet. When I got close, the took me onto her lap, as though I was a baby. I listened with them, as the radio made plain that it wasn't any horse but President Roosevelt himself who had died.

A statement from Mrs. Roosevelt was being read. She asked that everyone support President Truman, who had just been sworn in. 

President Truman?  I always thought President was President Roosevelt's first name.

The rest of that Sunday was very sad in our apartment. My father took the news especially badly.  The next morning, he had to be taken back to the hospital. Eighteen days after President Roosevelt, on April 30, 1945, my tateh died.

So did Hitler.
 
Years later, when newspapers made a point of noting that it was the 40th anniversary of Hitler's death, I joked about that coincidence. Surely, I said, anyone else who died that day got into heaven one, two, three--because God must have been very busy with Mr. Hitler.

Jokes are how I get by.  But I know that there are still people in this world who miss Hitler. 

Maybe almost as much as I miss my father.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

How Close Do You Want to Get to God?--A Few New Thoughts.

April 10,2013

What follows occurred to me after I happened to look back at the blog by this name, published in August 2011. It would come at the end of that post.

We cannot know if God's traits are a combination of what distinguished those remarkable human beings--or a set beyond our imagining. More spectacular? Simpler? Quieter? Generally at peace with his/her creation or furious at having given us free will? Don't waste your energy guessing. We have to decide without having the answers at the back of the book. They're not all even in the body of the Book.
Living with uncertainty is the price of belief.

So: how close DO you want to get to God? 

Waiting

April 10, 2013

Waiting

The single thing I do least well among all my life situation and issues happen to ask of me.

But it was always true, back in the day, those heady days when I used up a bottle of Mitsouko in less than seven years.  When I wore high heels and elegant suits (always keeping my jacket on, so i wouldn't be mistaken for a secretary) and claimed I never flirted though my credits were impressive.

Today, most of my waiting is to get a medical report. What fun!  And yet the decades have made me a slightly--very, very slightly--better "wait-er" than in years past. Experience taught me that staring at the phone does not, in fact, make it ring. Going into "new mail" does not make the single one I want to see, appear? What I've learned to do is to keep busy. That's such an old trick. You can't lose a negative activity or habit  unless you substitute a new one.

Given my total disability when it came to waiting, I have substituted not one but two other activities. There's keeping busy--which to me means either writing or doing laundry. And there's my fail-safe remedy to cross any mountain: I pray. Not for God to hup (spelling!?!) to and help me: She knows when to do that without any nagging from me. No, when waiting, I pray simply to stay focused on the fact that whatever it is I am waiting for will not change my life. Or will.

So I might as well stay sufficiently calm to handle either outcome.


Monday, April 8, 2013

God's Palm

April 8, 2013

Having grown up in Manhattan, I am not surprised that you can get an MRI at Cornell-New York Hospital  on Sunday evening. Last evening, I was only at NYP long enough to have an MRI at 6:30. I was greeted with a smile, taken promptly, and out of there by 7:15.

What I want to share here is what the actual procedure of having an MRI is like for me--because it just might be of use if you  have never had one, do at some point need to have one--and are anxious or plain terrified about being in that noisy clanking tunnel for half an hour or more.

Where do I come off?  I had my first MRI in the fall of 1994, when my neurologist ordered one to rule out MS. The report said, at some length, what the test showed that I did not have MS. Then, in a remarkably brief paragraph at the end, it mentioned that I had a sizable tumor on my pituitary gland. Some "by the way!"

I postponed having pituitary surgery for a year and a half , even though the neuro-opthomologist told me plainly that if the tumor, which "rested on" my optic nerve, broke through it, I would require surgery within twenty-four hours--or likely go blind. One day it occurred to me, what if it happened on the Fourth of July?  I had the surgery.

A complication of that procedure--known medically as a "side effect"--plus a few other issues have ended up with me having about two dozen MRI's in the past nineteen years.

But let's go back to that first one. As I was instructed to lay down on a sheet-covered "thing" that  looked like a narrow table,which would take me inside the depths of the machine, it occurred to me that I didn't know if I was claustrophobic, and wasn't dying to find out. But I am far too easily embarrassed to scream that I had changed my mind and decided, to skip the test, thank you very much anyway. So I lay down and they covered me with a blanket which in no way lessened my chills. But as the "table" slowly moved me inward, it changed. Its flatness rounded, curving just enough to hold me. . .safe. The flat thing had become. . . the palm of God's hand. There, I was of course safe, from powerful magnets and anything else in that tunnel. "Anything else" turned out to be the loudest noises I'd heard since I baby-sat my oldest nephew for the first time. Kevin's screams scared me stupid--stupid enough to hold his chubby eight- months-old self up at the front window for the entire time his mother went to a matinee in the city and came home over seven hours later. During that first MRI, the sounds receded into the distance, and in what seemed only moments, a technician was pulling me out of the machine, saying "You're done."

It happened again last evening, God's lending me a Hand.











































Friday, April 5, 2013

Faith: A Definition to Consider

April 5, 2013.

Last night, in the Zohar class, the teaching and discussion focused for me on a thought so huge, so challenging, that I share it without comment. For now, anyway.

Faith is not an idea or a synonym for belief; faith is action, how one lives, day by day. One doesn't  HAVE faith, one DOES faith.





Thursday, April 4, 2013

On an Unclear Day

April 4, 2013

On an unclear day, you can hardly see tomorrow.  Today's that kind of day.  The kind that used to make me attack chocolate as though it were the armed forces of three enemy nations. (If  that were still my way of dealing with blurry days, I'd be air-mailing 72% bombs to North Korea, Putin's Russia....Can't think of a third target at the moment. That's how unlcear a day like this makes my head: can't even list all the dictatorships on my hit list.)

Now that I'm no longer in my 72% chocolate total warfare mode--war is delicious only to maniacs--
I plan to concentrate on more real-life strategies which don't melt in the mouth, but can sometimes sweeten a heart.

Prayer isn't a strategy in the more usual sense of strategy. Yet, sometimes, on "unclear days" such as today, it  IS how I get through the hours.

I will share two of my favorite prayers with you. Sometimes, I pray them to center myself, sometimes to signal God that I'm paying attention, sometimes as seat belts to keep me safe if day darkens.

First prayer: this is more advice than a prayer, but I rely on it daily. I used to be ignorant about what it's teaching, and am grateful to have found it, a couple of decades ago, in a Zen compendium. It's by Zen master Leonard Cohen: 

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There's a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

The second prayer, said every night as I enter a drifting-off state--or repeatedly if drifting off quickly is plainly not in the cards:

The light of God surrounds me,
The love of God enfolds me,
The power of God protects me,
The presence of God watches over me.
Where I am,
God is.
And all is well.

I sometimes have trouble with the third line, but "enfolds" is a wonderful image. I didn't use that word; but, in November 1994, as I was moved into the chamber for my first MRI, I suddenly felt that the cold flat table was, instead, God's curved palm. I definitely felt "enfolded" by God's love.  The image of being safe in God's palm has made my many MRI's an utterly calm experience.

I do believe that "where I am, God is."  

Please, God, bless all who are, like me, having an unclear day.
And everyone else who wants a blessing, too.
Amen.
Amen.






Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Keeping Appointments

April 3, 2013

Yizkor is a prayer said only on the four Jewish "Pilgrimage" holidays. As I understand it,  a while back, the duty was to get oneself to Jerusalem to pray for one's dead on each of these four days. To pray that one would honor them by doing good works in remembrance of them. I did not have to get to Jerusalem--only to my synagogue, which is about nine blocks from my house. Still, yesterday, the last day of Passover, it was a little complicated for me to be at the Yizkor service.

Not because of some dramatic excuse like a donkey with two broken legs. No, I had a dental appointment. What's more, it was only for a cleaning. Still, the appointment was made weeks earlier.  And among my steely convictions is that it's mandatory to keep appointments unless there's a REAL emergency. Had I consulted my Jewish calendar  instead of my "regular" (larger) calendar when I made the appointment, I would not have made it for that day.

I cancelled the appointment.

Because I felt I had a prior appointment. With my parents. And with God.  Because the Yizkor prayers are to me a mnemonic: they remind me that when I act charitably toward others, I honor my parents. That's why I went and prayed Yizkor, because, most days, I do believe that my long-dead parents continue to live through me--so long as I act like their daughter.

What makes me doubly grateful that, this once, I broke an apppointment for a non-emergency, was that God, Who never had a mother or a father, and may have had an appointment with a dying child (or His own dentist) was also there in shul. Listening to my vow.