bits of ink

Last night, upon hearing about the horrific terrorist attack (is there any other kind?), I changed my Facebook status to “Ilan is mourning the victims of the terror attack.” this morning, I changed it to “Ilan woke up and realized it wasn’t all just a bad dream. Sometimes, it isn’t.”
This is one of the things we do. Our generation posts the thoughts off the top of our heads in short, concise bits, so our friends know. So, I compiled a list of my friends’ reactions to the shooting last night, as posted in their Facebook status updates. I thought it might be worth sharing these. Feel free to post more in the comments. I will update this post if more come in.
Note that the names are removed to protect privacy, but with a few exceptions, each of these is from a different person:

• _____ is very angry because of the מצב.
• _____ is thinking of everyone by Merkaz Harav.
• _____ thinks its important to still go out tonight. Who’s with me?
• _____ had been remembering another terrorist attack today, and now this.
• _____ is feeling a bit numb after hearing the news.
• _____’s family is all safe.
• _____ is mad, angry, frustrated, and at a loss. I hate our government!
• _____ is sad.
• _____ is welcoming in Adar, and mourning for Jerusalem.
• _____ is ok.
• _____ feels transported back to Jerusalem, circa 2001.
• _____ is wondering how long the Israeli government is going to keep trying to make peace with our enemies instead of throwing them out of Israel!
• _____ is safe after the terrorist attack, and is sad…………….
• _____ May Hashem Avenge their Blood.
• _____ is falling asleep to a lullaby of ambulance sirens.
• _____ is in pain for her nation.
• _____ is not able to comprehend.
• _____ is השם ינקום דמם.
• _____ is playing david broza to get some clarity.
• _____ is praying for those hurt by the terrorists in Israel today.
• _____ is wondering when the terrorism will end… just horrible news…
• _____ is crying to hashem..
• _____ weeps for the children who have returned to borders breached by what the universe must be given.
• _____ is sad and can’t fall asleep. may Hashem avenge their blood.
• _____ is trying to comprehend how it happened.
• _____ is wondering why she’s in america.
• _____ decries the cowardly Jihadist attack on Mercaz HaRav.
• _____ is waiting for the requisite post-bombing UN cycle of violence statement.
• _____ Can’t believe what happened tonight. I was scared for the first time EVER to walk around Jerusalem. What is going on here? Anyone in charge here????
• _____ is excited about [statement of hatred deleted] in the powerful month of Adar Bet. HaShem Yinakem Dmam.
• _____ is deeply saddened by the shooting in the Jerusalem yeshiva and is disgusted by others rejoicing this.
• _____ is really upset by the tragic events in Yerushalayim today. Hashem yerachem.
• _____ is literally sick from looking at the news.
• _____ is very sad.
• _____ doesn’t understand why the government is so incompetent.
• _____ על אלה אני בוכיה.
• _____ is hurting. She wishes a Shabbat Shalom of Geulah Slemah for ALL KLAL YISREAL!
• _____ is upset over today’s events.
• _____ Yochai Lipschitz, 18, of Jerusalem; Yonatan Yitzchak Eldar, 16, of Shiloh; Yonadav Chaim Hirschfeld, 19, of Kochav Hashahar; Neriah Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem, Roe.
• _____ is wondering what G-D is trying to hint to us on this fateful rosh chodesh adar - that itself is a contradiction in terms!
• _____ is shocked and sad at the murder of 8 young yeshivah students in Jerusalem by an Arab terrorist. Jews, wake up!!!
• _____ is looking forward to Shabbat Across America-Together, while Shabbating in Jerusalem, blocks from Yashiva Mercaz HaRav, where 8 Souls were taken from this World.
• _____ is still trying to comprehend…
• _____ is mourning with the families.
• _____ simply has no words.
• _____ is looking to a peaceful healing shabbat for all of am yisrael…
• _____: May God protect Israel, since our government certainly can’t.
• _____ hopes shab will make things better. why dont they get it?!
• _____ is trying to balance simcha and etzev…
• _____ is המקום יינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבלי ציון השם ינקום דמם.

Tonight, a man walked into a yeshiva here in Jerusalem, and shot and killed 8 people, 7 of them teenagers, and wounding dozens of others, 11 of them seriously. They were celebrating the first day of Adar Bet, the happiest month of the year. I don’t have more to say. What can I say? I can remember the fallen, but frankly, that just isn’t enough right now. When there’s a real hurt, a physical pain in the pit of my stomach from this…bedlam, then all of the pretty words or high-minded ideals don’t help. It’s just, sometimes a thing gets broke, can’t be fixed.

Some days, you look at your work, and you say, “I do that?” Or at least that’s what happens to me.
I work from home. Today, I stepped back and looked at the stuff I mapped out to build the web application I’m working on today. (See left.)
I think maybe I need to get out more.
Or drink more. Or drink less.
Maybe get a trained monkey.

Yeah, trained monkey’s good. I think he should have a hat.
He will have a hat and I shall call him Gerald.

Popular media abounds with cached tropes, with easy, prepackaged ideas that travel in the wake of simple visual or textual cues. A man kicks a beggar and has scary facial hair? Ok, so he’s evil. Another is clean-shaven and helps the beggar? He’s good, and will probably save the world, especially if he’s an orphan and/or was born under mysterious circumstances. You get it. The writers of these works put in cultural reminders, so we know early on how we’re supposed to feel about certain characters. It’s easier than developing them, and the superficial result is the same. Good writers, of course, will be aware of these tropes and use them carefully, or subvert them when useful.

One of the most oft-invoked tropes in coming-of-age stories is the loss of innocence¹ as the step that causes a character to grow up. But what do we mean by “loss of innocence?” It’s not “innocence” in the sense of “having done nothing wrong” but in the “naive,” “blissfully ignorant” sense. The idea is that once the character has witnessed or experienced evil, or just tragedy, he or she is somehow an adult. Of course it’s not that simple, but I believe that it is one of those things that reappears so much precisely because it rings so true. We feel the truth of it. What is it, though, about witnessing bad things that causes a person to grow up? I don’t think it’s the comprehension that bad things happen or that they happen without clear justice. It’s the part after that. The part where things are broken. In the short-lived cult-TV series Firefly, there’s a scene where their ship isn’t working, due to a particular part being broken. The captain asks the mechanic, Kaylee, to find some way to fix the ship. Kaylee, who has a deep, almost affectionate connection with the ship, just looks up at him with despair in her eyes, and says, “Sometimes a thing gets broke, can’t be fixed.”

I think that’s the loss of innocence - the recognition that for all your good intentions, even for all your good actions, no matter how hard you try, things go wrong. Things go wrong, and they can be your fault, and there’s no way to make them right again. I imagine that it comes as a bit of a shock to anyone who encounters that late enough in life to understand that all of the storybooks and all of the movies had it wrong. Things don’t always go right, and you don’t even always get a chance at redemption when things go bad. True, it doesn’t always play out that way. Sometimes, you can fix it. But, sometimes, “a thing gets broke, can’t be fixed.”

And that, in part, is what it means to grow up.

1. No, before any of my friends start getting all worried, let me assure you that I’m fine, and there’s no tragedy that sparked this post. ^

At 2AM:
Me: Ooo. The hours are getting too wee.
I think I must meet my Maker for a bit.
Layla tov.
My friend: great, i see you still speak in iambic pentameter

I was going through some old emails recently, and came across this quote that my father sent me a while back, saying it was “just something someone’s very wise grandmother used to say to him,” not specifying whose grandmother:

“If it is in your way, it is part of your way. And that way is derech Hashem.”

“How is your life?”
“Mine is good.”
“That’s good!”
“Like, surprisingly so. As if ‘good’ just sort of crept up on me, put its hands over my eyes, and said, ‘guess who?’ And I turned, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you. We were just talking about you. Cool, come, sit down. Let’s hang out.’
Hmmm…I think we’re going to end the metaphor here.”

In the tradition of indexed, I thought I’d use a visual to explain why, in the morning, I prefer to daven daven
pray at my local minyan minyan
a quorum of people needed for communal prayer. In Orthodox Judaism, a minyan is ten men at or above the age of 13., which is earlier, rather than catching a later one at one of the places that has minyanim minyan
a quorum of people needed for communal prayer. In Orthodox Judaism, a minyan is ten men at or above the age of 13. every 15 minutes:

Oh, and chulent chulent
a slow-cooked beef stew, often made for Sabbath and Festival meals in the Jewish Ashkenazi culture. Right.

Back. No fanfare, no big reason for my absence. Ok, two big reasons and a bunch of little ones - I switched jobs and everything went somewhat kerflooey (that’s the technical term - I do have a degree in Engineering, after all), and I had a major role in a play that was about an hour from home. Other trials, tribulations, and time-takers I will omit and leave as an exercise for the reader, but suffice to it say that the longer you don’t write, the harder it is to take up the pen, er, keyboard.
So, the play is over (it went really well, by the by), things are calming down, and the new job is pretty good.
There is much to say, and there will be more to say in the near future, I’m sure. Such is the way of things.

Just wanted to say hello again, cyberspace. It’s nice to be back.
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Chief Rabbi of the U.K., Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, does it again.
In this week’s edition of the London Jewish Chronicle, he wrote an amazingly eloquent response to the various recent proponents of atheism / critics of religion, managing to neither deliver an ad hominem attack nor retreat under apologetics. In his typical fashion, he simply stands up and says the truth about Judaism, speaking simply but not simplistically about complex issues. I have nothing at all to add, as he said everything I would’ve said on the topic, and then some, and said it better. Here are a few choice excerpts, but please, read the whole thing:

…Christopher Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great is an angry and, at times, eloquent polemic on the evil men and women do in the name of God. It has only one drawback. It does not prove that God is not great. What it shows is that those who claim to be acting for the sake of God are not always great. But then, we knew that already.

…

Nor is it religion alone that is subverted by violence. So, too, is every institution through which human beings have regulated their conduct with one another. People have done evil in the name of politics. That does not mean that we should, or could, abolish politics. They have committed injustices in the pursuit of wealth. That does not mean we should eliminate property. They have committed crimes in the name of love. That does not mean we should ban love.

…

But Hitchens is not a prophet, and that is not merely because he does not believe in God. He does not believe in humanity either.

…

Human beings are complex, their interactions even more so. Yet we long for simplicity. Hence the perennial tendency to say, “if only”. If only we could abolish property, or class, or codes of self-restraint. If only, say the crusaders, people believed in God. If only, say the counter-crusaders, people stopped believing in God.

That is the eternal appeal of “final solutions”. They begin, every one of them, in a dream of utopia and end in a nightmare of hell-on-earth. That is why the Jewish answer to the question, “Has the Messiah come?” is always, “Not yet”. The mainstream of our tradition has always rejected the attempt to bring the end of history in the middle of history. If only people stopped saying “if only”.

The virtue of books like God Is Not Great is that they force us back to first principles — in this case to a truth about Judaism that has been far too little written about. It is, we know, a code of action and a set of beliefs. But it is also — and this gives Judaism its extraordinary internal complexity — a field of tensions: between particularism and universalism, exile and homecoming, acceptance and protest, halachah and aggadah, revelation and reason, mysticism and philosophy, sages and saints. Even religious leadership in the Torah is dual: the prophet and the priest. Judaism is not so much a creed as a conversation. It is complex because the human condition is complex. We are, says Genesis, a handful of dust, but within us is the breath of God.

….

Somehow, somewhere, people are going to have to step back from the simple-mindedness that has seized religions and secularisms alike, and re-engage in civil conversation about how best to secure a world safe for our grandchildren to live in. In the words of the Unetnah tokef prayer we say at this time: the great shofar of warning has sounded. Will we hear the ‘still, small voice’ – the voice you can only hear by listening? On that, the human future will depend.

[read it all]

(hat tip: Cross-Currents)