Honest!

I was just reading a review, six months old, of a book called Einstein’s Jewish Science. The reviewer suggests that Einstein’s theories reflected a Talmudic bent. In the way one thing depends on another in Einstein's view of the universe, so in the Talmud things operate in relation to each other. The example of a Talmudic discussion given is “The shalt not steal.” Immediately, I was reminded of an experience I had one winter, early on in my religious journey. I had gone into a church in my neighborhood–not the one I thought of as my church, but one in fact closer to my house. The sanctuary was empty except for the dramatic presence of a huge crucifix that overhung the altar and at least seemed to reach into the area over the pews. I did what I had come there to do. I prayed. And left. Except that on my way out, I saw a wallet on the floor and picked it up. The wallet had no ID inside. It did have seven "crisp" hundred dollar bills, and two twenties. Now this was back when $740 was not pocket change. Certainly not to me, who had been unemployed for some months. I went next door to the rectory to turn over the wallet, assuming that someone would inquire about it; but the priest wanted no part of the situation. Not knowing what to do next, I stood there. Finally, he suggested the police station. I went there. There were three policemen behind the desk. I gave them the wallet, filled out a form. One of the policemen said that, if no one claimed the wallet and its contents in thirty days, the money would be mine. As I walked away, I happened to glance back and saw all three policemen in quiet conversation. My intuition buzzed for attention: without a calculator, they were trying to divide 740 by three. I wasn't good at arithmetic either. I smiled to myself, not disappointed in them or in me.

Remembered, As She Was

In the prayerbook we use at my synagogue during festivals, there is a meditation preceding Yizkor that I am convinced was planted by a mind-reader or seer or maybe the god of memoir writers. As I rewrite sections of my memoir now, I find myself focused mainly on two things. The one which is most on my mind got a useful boost from this meditation. I guote: "May my memories of the dead be tender and true, undiminished by time; let me recall them, and love them, as they were." As they were. As they were. In what I thought was the final draft of the memoir my mother, whom I loved to the point where words fail, was not present as she really was. I think how much I loved her may have made me place a scrim between her and the reader, so that only what I wanted readers to see showed through on the page. My mother WAS brilliant, she WAS clever, she WAS brave, she DID love me unconditionally. But she also WAS a very complicated woman, living a complicated life she didn't do everything she might have to make less complicated. In my current rewrite, I am bent on having the woman in my memoir be fuller, as tough and pained and difficult and needy as my mother was in life. That is the woman she deserves to be in my pages. The woman I loved with a love stronger than the love I have ever given to anyone else. Yet the mother I wish had done some things differently. That mother is whom I now try to remember at Yizkor. And in my memoir. Zelya Zam Stein: as she was.

What my Memoir is, Finally, About.

I ask questions. If I’m awake, I ask questions. Sometimes I think I confuse asking questions with breathing. Few of my questions are rhetorical. I want answers. To be clear, when I ask questions, it isn’t THE answer I’m looking for--not right off. Multiple, various answers are what I want from friends and acquaintances, or other people who are likely to know more about the subject at hand than I. I am happy for every answer. Give me three or five–a dozen. More! I will put them inside this safe place in my head. There, I will hold each one up against the question, looking for a likely match--the match that will fit tightly in the square hole of my question. Though most answers don't fit, I do not hurry, unwilling to risk eliminating a fine match just because it doesn't slide into place at once. Because that is almost never how it happens. Even an answer with huge potential will need to be shaved and smoothed down and polished before it's a perfect fit. That work is the part of the process for which I am--enthusiastically--responsible. For, to tell you the whole truth, after a lifetime of asking questions and collecting answers, I've become something of a craftsman at doing the fine-tuning, the work which turns the best of them into answers I can live with contentedly. And I do. Still, very occasionally, a question of mine will have no possible source for an answer other than my own mind. Or soul. Take a question that came to me about the title of this book. For as long as I have thought about writing a book about my spiritual journey, long before it led me to where I am now, long even before my story had a form–it had a name. At the top of the first page of a journal that became my first draft, I typed "Run with Patience." It was a phrase from Hebrews that seemed to me a perfect description of an imperative, on the journey on which I unexpectedly found myself: not to rush ahead at the headlong pace I did most things. I might think of the journey as a race–in the Bible it’s called that–but it was not against time. If my race, my journey, was against ANYTHING, it was against EVERYTHING that made or would make me want to stop. Perhaps at what seemed like a dead end. Or when the road directly ahead looked risky to take, even dangerous. Or, more than once, when I was --simply--exhausted to my marrow. It took me a very long time to realize that a genuine spiritual journey is not only not a sprint, not even a marathon, but that there is no finish line. The journey never ends. (I don’t even know–of course I don't!–that it ends with death. Why would it?) Another insight followed quickly for a change: I didn’t get to set the pace, God sets the pace. And not once. Slows me down, hurries me along, makes me stop to breathe deeply a few–or a few thousand–times. Along the way, I have been presented with many choices, but,I see now, never have I been my journey’s scheduler. I had to accept that, I finally understood, or drop out of the race altogether. As I was unwilling to do the latter, I had to do the former. And I did eventually understand that it might be good that I was not, and would never be, in charge of the clock. So, in the end, Run with Patience declared itself to be a good title, an honest title. But was my hard-learned surrender to God as timekeeper what my journey, and therefore my book, was about? It was only when I reached the end of my manuscript that I had my answer–or, more likely, was willing to accept that, although I had become very fond of "Run with Patience," it reflected only how I wended my way spiritually, not what I learned along the way. The main lesson of my journey was deeper, but also quite obvious once I was willing to see it. My story was, and is, about how God is. Here–and everywhere else. Him and Her–yet One. A mystery–and always available. In our midst–and lonely. Those are some descriptions of lessons I’ve learned on my journey. But all of them are gathered in this one: God belongs to no one. He is my God–and everyone else’s. Belonging to no one, He is the God of all: the God of “us,” and also the God of “them.” If God belongs to no one, but, rather, to everyone, i have learned, She is "nobody's God." And it does--truly--follow that all of us, on our many and different paths, however narrow or wide they happen to be, need to share Him. So my book’s name is now "Nobody’s God." You may as well know that I’m smiling. Because I have just realized something. Call it today's lesson: God, Who gave me faith, also gave me the title of this book.

Revising by Me, Revising by God

Finally, there's something God and I have in common: awareness that revising is a tricky business. It needs to be done carefully, because once done (in writing, once published) that's it. Well, unless you are famous enough to make changes in a new edition--a league in which league most writers, including obviously me, are not in. God, unlike most writers, could continue making changes indefinitely if He and She chose, but instead seemingly determined early on that we should take that over. In some circles that's referred to as "continuing creation"--although it often seems to involve more obliteration than creation. (Consider that, after the flood, God revised the injunction against eating animals to reflect only how they are killed for our consumption. Obviously, it would be healthier for chickens if we didn't put them on the menu--but is it not conceivable that we might also be healthier without the Colonel's tubs or home-grilled breasts--or even--imagine!--chicken soup?) If we are now pretty much in charge of revising the world, that may not have been the wisest decision. Maybe the "re-start" button of the flood was more traumatic for God than we know. Also, there are some believers who restrain the impulse to make a change until they have talked to God about it, and then listened for more than a few seconds for that 'still small voice" which occasionally whispers advice. Lately, I have been revising small sections of my memoir. I've been doing it as part of my participation in the memoir writing group which meets bi-weekly at the Montclair Library under the auspices of the Write Group. I happen to enjoy the process of revising--I know, I know, many writers, especially folks new to writing, will think this weird. But the fact is, in the heat of writing a first draft of anything, the writer's focus has to be on "getting it down." Word order, phrase order, sentence order, paragraph order--none is something to stop and dwell on. But after you have the initial draft, making all those choices--and many more--is what revising is about. And it's an exhilarating process. At least for me. A good deal of my time spent revising is devoted to making sure I have chosen the most accurate word to communicate a physical thing, an emotion, a response. I say "word" because a basic tenet of my writing philosophy is that the more words a writer uses to describe anything, the weaker the description becomes. There is an obvious difference between revising a manuscript and reconsidering an aspect of creation. The most our revising will affect is one writer's attempt to create the best manuscript of which he or she is capable. Any revising God does is. . .a miracle?

The Dream and the Reality

For a long time what I wanted was a life with hospital corners. Neat, tight, above all looking like a bed should. I think all I meant was that I wanted a family. On both ends: I wanted my birth family to have lasted, and I wanted to have a traditional family "of my own." I got neither wish. My birth family was gone by the time I was halfway through college. My mother died the summer between my sophomore and junior years--midsummer exactly, July 30th. I was eighteen. I loved her a lot. I was a very good daughter to her very good mother. When she died, we had no leftover quarrels to regret, no loose ends of any kind to get tied in knots over. The only problem was I was left--and that feeling hung around for decades. It still crops up sometimes, in one form or another. I do occasionally feel I am living a leftover life. I think she felt that way, my mother, after my father died. She once mentioned that she never got her period again, after he died. Not that she was still young enough to get pregnant, but still. . . Several times, I fell in love, but realized--in time!--that I loved the man's family more than I loved him. It was occasionally hard, but I walked away. By the time I met Daniel, the man I married, I had stopped thinking I would ever have a traditional family. And that's a good thing. Because I was so unhappy in my marriage to this brilliant, decent man that I knew I dare not bear his child because then how would I ever leave? (By my six-month anniversary, I knew that, hard as I was trying to stay in my marriage, chances were I would someday surrender to the reality that if I did not leave Daniel, the most intelligent man I ever met, a man who was a superb teacher and even vacuumed occasionally, if I stayed on,it would one day be too long and I would die from erasure. The disease that you get if you keep needing to delete yet another inch of your self if you are to get through one more day. So I didn't have children. (I do wish someone had taken the trouble to point out that if you don't have children, it's a sure thing that you will not have grandchildren. I long for those grandchildren I will not have.) The result is that I have not had a family of either kind for a long time, and I will not ever have a life with hospital corners. Does that mean I am alone? Yes. And no. Because God is. Here.

Reading God's Mind

Reading God's mind is not only impossible to do, but irrelevant. God gave us each a mind: to think with, to change when new information makes that appropriate or even necessary, to instruct us to do the right thing. (I want to place heart in the background here; because weeping doesn't change the world, it just makes us feel righteous.) Sometimes, when a choice is complicated by national need or interests, we nonetheless have to be willing to respond appropriately to a moral imperative our MIND recognizes. Of COURSE responding appropriately can be scary--and leaders are not immune to being frightened about taking action: every important action is bound to have difficult consequences not only the desired one. Hell, we live in a time when fearful situation follows fearful situation like night follows day--every day. But isn't that a terrific cliche about courage: that courage is fear which has said its prayers? Earlier today, I made a joke on my Facebook page about President Obama being color blind. I was not referring to race. I was referring to the "red line" Syria passed when it began gassing opponents to his regime. Can we really not yet be sure? The effects are visible: rows of dead babies, are not likely to be "playing dead." And a leader--our leader--should not draw red lines unless he is prepared to follow through if the one he drew is crossed. There comes a time when a moral imperative overtakes political pros and cons. That time has come. One benefit of being a dictator is that you never have to torture or kill people yourself: you have plenty of underlings, eager or not, to do that for you. One concurrent deficit is that the dictator does not notice that, somehow, the blood of dead innocents is on his hands anyway. I recall being struck by the fact that, when Assad got serious about killing-to-ensure-progress, he attacked his wife's birthplace. Didn't we all think he wouldn't do that? This man has no intention of stopping until his opponents are all dead. And if some babies get killed, well, that's...what? Life? Mr. President, go back home. Perhaps get on your knees for a while. When you know what to do, get up and do it. If time on your knees isn't enough, try channeling Harry Truman.

Memoir as Mnemonic

Dear God, how things started coming back. Not in a flow, but like a blast of wet wind. Did I really do that? Did I really show up at a party peopled by my husband's department colleagues and toss him my silver flask? I couldn't have. I think I did. I hope I did. They were desert-dry, those Colgate Philsophy & Religion parties. This teetotaler thought bringing along a flask with some scotch in it was a wifely thing to do. Also not very likely to make me popular. As though I cared. I did, I cared. But they had already made clear that I did not fit in. That was only the second time I carried the flask anywhere--such an elegant thing, even if tossing it was not an elegant thing to do. I do hope I did it. The first time was several years earlier. I put the flask in my attache case when I left for a presentation in D.C. to the board of the Washington Gas Company. Washington, I'd been warned, was really a southern town and the board was all-male. They might well be put off by a woman making the presentation, let alone being in charge of the account. To complicate matters a teeny bit more, I had a fierce cough. I prepared. I studied my materials as though for a major test--because this was, I suppose. I wore a stunning red dress and mad sure my make-up was not a tinge overdone nor underdone. And, when we had gathered around the long table and I'd been introduced, I stood and I smiled and, in my softest toen range, made my presentation. Every so often, I stopped speaking, smiled and said, "Excuse me," then took out the flask, unscrewed the top, and took a ladylike sip of the contents. Cough medicine, if I had to swear on the Bible, but it never crossed the minds of those gentlemen that the flask contained other than good bourbon, I'm sure. What they saw--I hoped--was a woman matching their idea of a woman in business who had not forgotten her sex. Believe me, I had not. (No man on earth--"Mad Men" to the contrary--would have, could have, pulled off what I did.) They sat in the palm of my hand, those men, as I sold them my ad campaign. I think that when I finished, they were disappointed not to be able to do more for me than sign off on the campaign. Thank God, it was a good one, or I'd have that day's wiles on my conscience still. Oh the memories of when I was young and brave. Oh, dear dear God, Whom I love truly. Did I flirt until I was on the cusp of the no-turning-back border? Yes, there was such a border back then. And, yes, I did, more than two or three times--practically wore through my skirt sitting on that fence. I did virtuous things, too, that I'd forgotten till I began to write my memoir about God. But, not wanting to mix milk with meat, U will save thinking and writing here about those till another time.

The First Ten Commandments

It's seems to me that Jews who read the Hebrew Scriptures, par'sha by par'sha each year sometimes think the huge non-Jewish part of  the Judeo-Christian world is unduly satisfied with the first ten comandments; whereas they--we--have to deal with six hundred and three more (less those, of course, which are impossible to follow today, because they involve a temple and an altar and some still-volatile lighter fluid).

Yet, this past Saturday at services in my synagogue, we had an evocative discussion about, among other things, the "first ten." And it came to me--I'm ashamed to admit, for the first time--that these are more than "starter" commandments. They provide a fairly complete guide to living a good life. By which, of course, I do not mean "the" good life, as in one with expensive accouterments. I mean a life lived with awareness that one is only one among many; a life in which we listen as well as talk; a life in which we share some of what we have with those who have less;  a life in which we love without a list of pre-conditions; a life in which we honor our elders, no matter how old they are; a life in which we teach the young mainly by example; and a life in which we show gratitude to God for everything--violets and Bach and all the greens grass grows in and the helpful criticism of a good friend and church thrift shops and the Frick and the color of Roman buildings and ripe nectarines and the Sea of Galilee and the poems of George Herbert and cherries every June and the thrillers of Alan Furst and Middlemarch and Mitsouko perfune and people who know how to make ailing computers work again.  For a start. And, dear-God-how-could-I-leave-it-out, for 72% chocolate.

Well, my list is long and could be a lot longer, but to my point: beyond gratitude to God for all life's pleasures, there is gratitude to God for the first ten commandments, which if we take each one to heart and mind and spirit, offer us guidance enough to live a good life.

I vote for the sanctity of behavior over observance every time. I suspect and, yes, pray that God does, too.

Amen.

Romance Times Three

He had a peg leg and an ace up his sleeve.  His name was Timothy Angus Jones, and I had been given his phone number. I almost didn't call, because the other connection Martha and Quentin had in mind for this, my first trip abroad, turned out to be so rude to the waiter during our lunch that I coudn't bring myself to see him again--even though that meeting might well have included tea with Bernard Berenson. A once-in-a-lifetime chance walked away from because I was taught that manners count most when you are dealing with people who are not in a position to tell you to go to hell.

So I only phoned Timothy because I was unexpectedly lonely in London. I told him who gave me his name and where I was staying. And he, after perhaps forty-five seconds, said a cool goodbye. Not only didn't he ask me out, he didn't ask me anything. I sat staring at the phone in disbelief. Mind you, the friends who had recommended both these men had excellent manners. About Timothy, moreover, they had said that he was "the most charming man in London."

The phone rang. Gingerly--phones were not to be trusted--I picked it up. Again quickly, Timothy Jones asked me to lunch that very day--in less than two hours!--without offering any explanation for his behavior either time. (Of course he did, eventually, but that's not an essential part of this memory.)

Well, he was the most charming man in London. Not that I had many with whom to compare him, but when--if--you meet a man that charming, you just know there aren't twenty more like him within any city's limits.

So charming was he that, halfway through our lunch, he invited me to meet his mother. No, he wasn't that smitten--or foolhardy. His mother was Enid Bagnold. (If you don't know what she wrote, you should...well, actually you do know one of  her books--or at least the movie. But she wrote better books and terrific plays.)  When I asked for and got permission from my boss at Crown Publishers to extend my stay in London, Timothy also invited me to stay in his flat. I already knew there was not a guest bedroom. Or even a futon. (Did they or even the word exist back then? No matter.) I moved in.

The next three weeks were a fantasy for this girl from the Bronx. We did visit Enid Bagnold--and her husband. Timothy's father was Sir Roderick Jones, all five-foot-three of him wildly delightful and not merely because he chased me around their gazebo.  That night, at dinner, when Sir Roderick joined the table, he turned to me and said, "Miss Stein, my children do not revere me enough. What shall I do?" And I, twenty-two and dazzled but not enough to keep my mouth shut, said, "Sir Roderick, if they revered you any more, you'd have to be in a mausoleum."

That visit was more flull of romance than I dreamed possible, or experienced again. But I am not greedy. Falling in love with Timothy, his mother, and his father--and having all three reciprocate my enchantment, well, once was enough.

  

My Favorite Place

For as long as I can remember, my favorite place has been on a beautiful old carousel horse going up, down, and around. Coming upon one during an outing, I have at times embarrassed a friend who thinks carousels are exclusively for children--and a parent, if needed by the wee ones. Frankly, I think that carousels, like Jonathan Swift, are not for children. To a child, it's just another form of being lifted up. That's my theory, anyway.  Whereas to me a carousel is a grand trip around a safe world: the gorgeous horse I'm on, not terrifying, the way real horses are; the music reliably old and without hate for anyone. And I can let go--not the easiest thing for me to do.

That reminds me of an experience I had during my first trip to England. A new--brand new--invited me to drive down to Rottingdean to meet his parents. They turned out to be titled, and for good reason. But that part of the story is for another time. After a long, late lunch, all gathered in one of the cozy living rooms. Conversation began and ebbed and soon everyone retired to his or her own thoughts--or none. Seated beside the fireplace, something came upon me, a kind of half-dream state. Totally unfamiliar. As I leaned back into the chair and my feeling of ease grew, it--very slowly--tiptoed into my head that this was what being relaxed felt like. My virgin experience. I was twenty-two.

So: carousels and one of the three connected Jones houses in Rottingdean make the list of favorite places cherished memories. (Although if anyone reading this wants to drive me to a carousel I haven't been on,  I can be ready in twenty minutes.) But my all-time favorite place is one I have never visited. Nor, if you're reading this, have you. I have no idea what it's like--I used to think it was either where I would get all my questions answered; or, still better, have no more questions. But now...I want to be surprised. You listening, God? That would be heaven.    

The Real Trouble with Procrastination

Everybody says it's bad, except the folks who are both honest and know it pays off.  Some work done before you're ready, such as washing the kitchen floor, is an excellent idea--because unless you're a mop, there's never a good time to wash the kitchen floor. If, however, the work you've got to do is paint or write or sculpt or build a new computer program, it may be a good idea to wait until your mind signals that it's prepared to focus 100%. I am definitely not saying that you should wait for your muse to show up--she may be on a jaunt to Finland--but only until you can concentrate on the project at hand. Then do not delay. Get to work.

Still, there is, as the title of this little post suggests, a problem with procrastinating even when the work to be done calls for serious focus. And the problem is, some days the only way to achieve focus is to face the adversary--the blank screen--and stare back at it until your fingers start writing SOMETHING. Or stare at the canvas...or fiddle with a program you have already developed and see if you can get it to cough up an ancillary idea.

In other words, if you have a craft or an art or want to grow up to be Steve Jobs, there's no point in procrastinating because you can't clock out for good, you just can't. Might as well start work now, since it IS
your work that's waiting.

There is one--but only one--out. Go wash the kitchen floor. After that, your real work will remind you of Eden.

To Chocolate

Better think of this as a conditional ode. And love shouldn't be conditional.  Though, of course, it usually is. If it were not, I would have stayed married even though my husband found it silly to carry my handkerchief in his jacket pocket when we went out. I did require that. In fact, I thought that not having to carry my own handkerchief when I was dressed up was the best thing about being married. (I may have mentioned that once or twice, which might explain why he did not fight the divorce.)  But this talk is not about my former/late husband and me, it's about chocolate and me, and all the two relationships really share is, well, that "me" part.

Let's get my confession out of the way. Chocolate is getting increasingly expensive. And that doesn't seem to affect my behavior. I satisfy my lust for chocolate regardless of the escalating cost of a decent bar. And they do add up. No modest square  or two of Ghiradelli or Godiva 72% after dinner satisfies my hunger. One square leads to another, and any number of good intentions are forgotten in the pleasure of a thin square of dark chocolate on my tongue. (I did mention 72%, right?)

Let's just say that I am not a person who carries moderation to extremes. All one or two squares satisfy is my asking myself why I cannot resist starting that bar--when I know the answer.  Other relationships cost more, that's why.

And it's true, most of the time chocolate and I have a delicious relationship. Still, there are times I feel a need to be alone. At peace. I figure it's the abbess in me. Anyway, it's my need from time to time not to be involved with chocolate that brings me directly to why I laud chocolate only conditionally. I would praise its dark sensual taste without reservation, praise in rhyme its ability when thin enough to melt on my ready tongue, its glide down my throat--well, not conditionally, if it only didn't call to me in its siren voice every time I walk by the kitchen.

I never said I was ready to relinquish my independence.  

Writing a Semon to Celebrate July Fourth

Giving a sermon is one of life's surest opportunities to bore someone listening--or not.

When I was invited to give the sermon at my synagogue's "July 4th Shabbat" service, my first reaction was surprise. I'd given talks at Shomrei Emunah before, but hadn't been offered the opportunity in a long while. Nine years or two rabbis ago, depending on how your clock tells time.

Surprise gave way quickly to pleasure. I like thinking through the subject of a sermon, and sharing that. I admit to also liking the performance aspect of it--you can never completely take Performing Arts out of an alumna.

But my pleasure soon gave way to setting aside feelings and starting the work. The topic had come to me quickly and easily. I wanted to talk about the connection between liberty and law. That called for research to support my thesis.  And doing research is a lot like watching a soap opera: once you get into it,  it's hard to stop looking. In this case, I was researching what everyday folks like George Washington and Ben Franklin had to say about liberty--and law. It was fascinating reading. When I finally made myself stop doing that part of my research, I had to reread the Declaration of Independence and much of the Constitution. Very slowly. Next, I browsed  through the book of Leviticus (which sounds more casual than what it felt like). I was looking for commandments I might talk about briefly in the sermon--ones that made me believe that the laws in the Torah were the way Jews were truly freed from the prison of slavery. I found some that seemed as relevant to life now as long ago. That brought me to the realization that in practice--when practiced--liberty and law can lead to love.

My reading did provide me with one laugh--though someone more earnest than I might well not consider funny what made me laugh. This: I had somehow overlooked one commandment I wish I'd known years ago: God forbade us to eat fat! (But, seriously, as they say, my guess is that He or She considered it very special--like blood--and therefore had it permanently on reserve.)

Speaking of fat, this week I have spent some time every day adding a little and cutting far more of my talk. Fortunately, it's way too long, so I can cut as much as my editorial conscience demands--yet leave in a little humor. The fact is, I am constitutionally unable to speak for twenty minutes without being a little funny. 

Reading can be Dangerous

Fair warning: taking on a writing assignment can lead to spending time as though there are a million tomorrows. I have spent the last few weeks reading a lot about United States history, not my subject. In college, my major was British Civilization; my graduate work was on the Tudors. I've been to London more times than I've been to Brooklyn. But I am in love with this country. So, when I was inivted to give the sermon at my synagogue's July Fourth Shabbat service, I was honored.

It did not occur to me instantly that one of the leftovers of being a history major is that I could not write my sermon from the heart alone. I needed to do research, go to the sources. And as anyone who has ever written a Master's thesis knows, the main thing you get from studying any source is the imperative to go on to another. So for the time being I am reading and reading and reading, stopping today only to put into writing here that I am preparing myself to write a sermon not a Master's thesis. And if spring has passed us by this year, summer still starts in a week, and our July Fourth service is only three weeks from tomorrow.

Wish me the discipline to stop reading and start writing...soon?

Answers or Questions

It seems to me that, when we pray, we often are looking to God for an answer to some problem, when we might do better listening for a question. The question may come from God, or from someplace inside ourselves we haven't thoroughly explored. Either way, the right question is sometimes our answer. 

And yes, it's scary to shut up and listen with  more patience than we think we have.

The Joy of Revising

I began last week to reread and revise a manuscript I finished two years ago.  When I finished writing,   I was thoroughly exhausted.  Apparently, even before that I looked as done in as I fwas starting to feel, because one evening, after a class I was taking with him, my rabbi said, You know, you could finish your book and drop dead. The other day, I told him that he'd been more right than wrong about what that manuscript was taking out of me. He did not know, for example, that the only thing I did besides work on the manuscript was to take that class. Oh, I brushed my teeth every morning and showered every night--at least one of which I neglected when I was writing my first novel several decades ago.

So tired was I when I finished the book, that I put it away without making any changes or even reading it through. 

Last week, I decided it was time to print out the manuscript and see if time had lent me enough distance to decide if it was good and, if I thought it was, to revise it productively. Some years ago I heard my brother, who is also a writer, say that it was important, in revising a manuscript, not to "dis-improve" it. The word's not in my dictionaries, but it is a fine word. And in reworking any of my writing, I always keep it in mind, just behind the forefront. For it has to be there, or one may start to fiddle too much with what works. Mostly, to me, revising means cutting out the flab I notice, and moving some phrases around so the reader doesn't have to read sentences two or three times to understand them. Because reading a book shouldn't involve manual labor.

I've read and revised 129 pages so far. And the experience is giving me joy. I'd forgotten that part: how it feels to do the actual work of making something you wrote, better. Joy--one word I won't need to revise.

A Resolution

I need to make a resolution. Otherwise, I will continue to squander my days instead of spending them as carefully as I spend money.

I don't want to phrase my resolution so tightly that it chokes off other possibilities; but I don't want to make it so fluid that my work hours will drip away into a puddle at day's end.

So here it is: instead of looking for projects that pay--which feeds my lifelong fear of ending up in genuine squalor--I will spend some money on things I want and/or need  (or both) and spend my time revising my spiritual manuscript until I feel it's entirely free of self-indulgence and therefore ready to show to an agent. And then show it.

So help me, God.  Please?

Father Lloyd and Me

Yesterday, I had a morning appointment at Cornell-New York Hospital with my neurologist. He's an unusually pleasant man,  whose only fault in my eyes is that he's so laid-back that I sometimes fear he'll tip his chair  over backward.

Afterward, I met Father Lloyd for lunch. This is a ritual I observe whenever my hospital appointments are on a weekday. Seeing one another pleases us both. I think my visits please him because I remind him about his good will and patience toward me when, as a reluctant catechumen, I took the Paulist Center conversion class three times. I must have asked a thousand questions--only because I controlled my desire to ask more. The visits please me because, at ninety-two, he remains the most open "dinosaur" (his word, not mine). I enjoy his enormous pleasure in my ongoing love for the Church, and how he examines and re-examines the meaning for him of his own father's Jewishness. Most of all, though, what bonds us is how visceral our faith is in God.  The same. The One.

Louis Stein - An Anniversary

This year, I was lucky. Most years, the Jewish calendar, Jewish tradition, and my heart lead me to observe the anniversary of my father's death three times: on the date of his death according to the Jewish calendar; in synagogue on the Saturday preceding the jewish date or, if I cannot make that one, the Saturday after; and on the "American" date.  The fortunate part this year was that the date according to the Jewish calendar fell on a Saturday, the first two dates melded into one.

I lit a Yahrzeit candle on Friday evening, before lighting my Sabbath candles. It would burn throughout that night and into the following evening. I said a few words, aloud, addressed to my father rather than God, because there is no prayer to accompany the lighting of a yahrzeit candle. I find this absence of a "set' prayer very strange, for Judaism is dense with prayers for even the most commonplace of quotidian activities. On the other hand, I like the freedom to address my father rather than God at this singular candle-lighting.

At services the following morning, I was given an aliyah (called "up" to the Torah to say a blessing and stand beside the Torah reader as he chanted a portion of the day's reading). Somepeople say the prayer both before and after their part quickly. Some even mumble. I do not hurry through it. I say it slowly.  I try to share it. I feel the honor. But not my father.

Because, yesterday as every year, it's on the "American" date, that I "felt" it. "It" being my father's presence in my life--and his absence. The latter has been far longer than his presence. Louis Stein died when I was nine, and he was fifty-two. As years went by, missing him became more and more replaced by questions about him and the sort of man he was aside from being my tateh (father). In recent years, the questions have faded, though they remain unanswered. And, overlaying them, is a kind of acceptance. That Louis Stein was a complicated man, like most of us. And that, even if I am blessed to encounter him after I die, I will probably not tarnish that moment by confronting him with my questions. Chances are, I will love him then, unquestioningly, even as I did when we both were too young for him to die.

For isn't it possible that that's what heaven is, freedom at last from all our questions?

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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.