The First I in Identity

Ten years ago today I became a Bar Mitzvah. Four years ago today I was confirmed. And not only is this weekend my birthday, it is also Shavuot–the birthday of the Torah, the celebration of God giving his word to us, his chosen people, the Jews. It’s said that all Jews were present at Sinai when the Law was given. If that’s the case, it was this day almost four years ago that divinity struck the mundane and carved commandments into stone.

It’s a time for reflection, and if it isn’t, I want it to be. It’s a tradition on Shavuot to study late into the night. At midnight, the sky is said to open for a sixtieth of a breath, barely a split second, and the way into heaven can be seen. These past two or three years I’ve looked, but I’ve been too slow to see it.

Lately I’ve been thinking about me and Judaism. How I realized, some nights ago, that I haven’t been saying the Shema before I go to bed, and that when I do, it hasn’t been as poignant as in the past. How, without religious school, my last constant act of observance has been broken. We don’t go to services so much anymore. We don’t light Shabbat candles. Just last week I played video games all day Saturday without even realizing it was Shabbat. I keep kosher, but by now it’s habitual. And habitual isn’t quite ritual.

So lately I’ve been thinking.

Sabbath Delight

Family was this week’s theme. My brother and his family came up the first and we all visited until they left today. And whenever I had free time, I was busy journalling and playing video games. In fact, I’d probably be off playing video games right now if it weren’t Friday.

“If it weren’t Friday?” But–but the weekends are supposed to be for fun! And aren’t video games fun? Well, yes, but you see, that’s not the only thing the weekends are for….

To Give and Not To Get

Giving is one thing, but getting is another. I enjoy getting presents (who doesn’t?), but sometimes I feel a little heavy when I get stuff… Maybe it felt like a compulsory gift, like it was given without heart? A mandatory procedure, purely bureaucratic. Is a cabinet gift a meaningful moment?

Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

Anyways, there’s another kind of gift that’s not just meaningful for the one who gave it (or the one who received it), but for many others, too: And that, if you didn’t already know, is a gift that keeps on giving. And that, which you should see coming, is what leads me to being thankful for what I’m thankful for today: Charity.

Like Coals of Fire

Today I’ve been lax. I just haven’t had the energy to do anything. Not that I’ve been sleeping too restfully, though. Why is it when I yearn for sleep most my dreams keep me awake? Perhaps I’m more stressed from the prospect of school starting on Monday than I had imagined.

In any case, our time here is beginning to close. With the passing of one narrative births another, and only seven teachings remain.

2.15 Each of the disciples taught three things.

Rabbi Eliezer taught:

Cherish your colleague’s honor as your own;
Be not easily provoked to anger;
Repent one day before your death.

(He is also quoted as saying: Warm yourself at the fire of the scholars, but be wary of their glowing coals lest you be burnt. Their bite is that of a fox; their sting that of a scorpion; their hiss that of a serpent–indeed, all their teachings are like live coals of fire.)

The first three can go without saying. Treat others how you wish to be treated. Take a deep breath. Say you’re sorry. It’s all things my mother taught me, and surely things other children have been taught all throughout their childhood, too. What interests me is not the teaching itself, but the notes at the end.

Coals of fire… What could it mean?

Obvious Facts and Obscure Facets

If I say I’m going to break the trend by not including an introduction, but this very statement precedes the teaching and therefore carries the trend along, is the trend still kept or broken? No matter, just some musings, carry on.

2.6 This was another teaching of his:

A boor cannot be reverent;
An ignoramus cannot be pious;
A shy person cannot learn;
An ill-tempered person cannot teach;
Not everyone engrossed in business learns wisdom;
Where there are no worthy persons, strive to be a worthy person.

Hillel fascinates me. His attention to detail, his slightly skewed lessons that take some genuine thought to come together, his peculiar yet poetic way of phrasing things. If I should ever be a rabbi, I should like to be one like him. I suppose even if I never am a rabbi, I still will be a writer and a teacher, and these qualities of his I most invest my admiration in can still be mine someday. No matter, just some musings, carry on.

As you read this, should you be reading this around the time WordPress mechanically posts it as programmed (for, you see, the magic of the internet allows me to write this on Wednesday and post it on Saturday), I will be in a van destined for Jackson, Mississippi, for the ISJL Annual Education Conference. The ISJL, more verbosely known as the Institute of Southern Jewish Learning, provides my synagogue’s congregational school with our curriculum and most of the teachers are going. Obviously, I will be among them, but I mention this otherwise invisible temporal deception for one key point: That three of the six lines (that’s a whopping fifty-percent!) of this teaching concern, well, teaching. I find it ironically appropriate. The perfect lesson to learn before attending the conference.

I’m stoked.

My Deepest Dreams (Part One): Grounded

I was sitting in a circle and somehow felt like the corner of a square. I was waiting for a woman who would never arrive. I was tossing cards like a shark but consumed like the shrimp in its stomach.

Somewhere amidst all of this, somewhere between doing all I could do and still coming short, somewhere between trying and failing, I realized all the things that have kept me glued to my ideal have become undone.

It’s a solemn solace, this something, this sudden sinking, something that’s not sinking at all, but settling–at last–upon the bottom of the sea and looking up to see the surface in all its glowing glory.

This feeling is fueled by five things, each of them in their own fueled by just one: Fear. I’ll speak of them each in turn. It’s simply simpler that way, since although they each are their own, they are all one whole just the same.

A Sojourn of Self and Soul

The Saturday before last was the youth Shabbat at my synagogue. In other words, the majority of the service was led by youth from our congregation, mostly middle- and high-school-aged students, with a few college kids and some of the teachers at our synagogue’s congregational school mixed in. It got me thinking. About a lot of things.

First of course, let me say this: You really feel old when you realize that you remember most of these children when they were a third their current size and had barely a tenth of their present Hebrew-reading skills. On the one hand it was gratifying in that way only known to educators to be able to say I shared a slight moment in their development, a minuscule step in the path that brought them each to leading services Saturday, but on the other hand, it makes me feel tremendously old. It’s like looking down at my own grandchildren: They started so small, and now they’re all grown up.

Worse is that this trail of thinking always evolves further. Soon I was thinking about all the other times I’ve lived through, all those faded fads I supported and all those past professions I’ve participated in. Pokemon, Digimon, Cardcaptor Sakura–some of these names you’ll never know if you’re even a few years younger than me–FernGully, Little Nemo, the Lion King and other classic Disney movies before Pixar (which although fabulous, is not nearly as classic) came around, the Brave Little Toaster, Thomas the Tank Engine, Encyclopedia Brown, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages–all these things that I grew up on, now most of them, gone. It brings a sudden realization to the fact of how quickly time really changes. We don’t think much of those “when I was your age…” stories that seem so trite, but trust me, children: When I was your age, things really were different. And I’m not that much older than you.

Of course, thinking about growing old always leads to thinking about growing older. The average life-expectancy of a man living in the US is only 76. I’m almost 22. That means more than a fourth of my life–or more precisely, 27.8% of my expected lifetime–has already passed me by. I’m more than a fourth dead by that statistic. And, just as I wonder every time I get on the path of wondering this, where have I gotten in the last decade? What have I done with my life?

Alongside a Spider

I’ve been going to the gym lately. I’ve been building bridges lately. Partly it’s a pun, an allusion to my finally being able to do the asana (yoga pose) known as the bridge, which I’ve been practicing since the spring if not since many years before then, and partly it’s an affirmation of the number of connections I’ve been making lately.

So there I was, sitting beside the lake, sitting at one of the picnic tables eating my packed lunch, when along came a spider. It was a small one, so small I could barely make out all eight of its tiny legs without wanting for a magnifying glass, and it was just…there. It stayed almost stationary for a long while, crawling a little bit forward here or there, or just wiggling its legs around in the afternoon sun.

For as long as I can recall, I haven’t liked spiders. I’m not nearly a clinical arachnophobe, but on occasion–typically at the site of a spider–I imagine I might as well could be. And yet, sitting there, watching the little guy go by, there was an absence of fear whose presence I never noticed: Things simply felt simple like they should be, and for that moment, as for many more lately, things just felt right.

17. Happenstance

My Pen is a Vector

I loved high school Physics. I loved high school Physics so much I decided I wanted to major in Physics (but decided against it since I didn’t think I could handle all the math, and now I’m a math major. The irony kills me). I loved the theories (for this was merely conceptual physics, and that much I could handle then) and I loved the beauty of being able to see such profound order in the most ordinary chaos. Perhaps it would seem counter-intuitive to base one’s faith of God upon science, but for me it made sense: Without God to create it, how could such magnificence randomly fall into place?

Better were the parallels I saw between faith and fact: Such as, for example, in Judaism the minimum gathering of people to pray being ten, a minyan. And in Physics, the number of equal sources of sound required to exactly double the loudness of a said sound is–take a guess–exactly ten. The awe I reaped from that one realisation was stupendous, and still stuns me today: How beautiful it is, for ten to gather to pray, for their prayers to be doubled and uplifted to heaven?

So it’s in that vein that I’ve come to love physics.

It was not in that vein, however, that I’ve come to love vectors.