Some Thoughts on Rosh Hashanah

       Rosh Hashanah presents an interesting quandary to the Modern Jew. For so many of us, the specter of a three day holiday scares us into apocalypse mode. Some of us return home to the complexities of family dynamics; others remember their earlier days of fear and passion, while some just feel the weight of boredom pressing down on their long weekend. We ask each other, “So, how do you plan on getting through the holiday?” This assumes that we must struggle, even fight with the status quo of our expectations of these days to make them meaningful, or even enjoyable. We feel shock that on some level we might even look forward to the holiday. We horde books and other means of entertainment to distract us through the storm. We get through the day with the reward of DVRed TV that awaits us when that time finally elapses. Essentially, our accumulated baggage detours us from the simple opportunities of the day, opportunities that exist despite our espoused beliefs.
    Because, when looked at with the calm of distance, as a day in the year, Rosh Hashanah manages to encapsulate the range of human experience. Nothing evades its grasp. Not the smallest, mundane detail of life falls outside its range. The ideas of the day, whether you believe in their literal truth or not, allow us to live, if we so choose, on a different plane of existence, a more immediate, urgent level of life. The day recreates that first experience of the knowledge of your own personal death. We all know about death: we hear reports of its machinations on the news, we attend funerals, we even worry about friends and family, but that moment when you truly confront mortality surpasses all these experiences. The prospect of our physical demise, of our cessation of breath, ironically hones our intellect and sends our senses into a frenetic dance. We know this. We learned this in high school, we read about this from the existentialists in college, and we experience it from time to time in the trenches of everyday living, but Rosh Hashanah ritualizes this confrontation. In that sense, despite the abstract nature of the day, a day spent muttering, speeding through, or shouting old words, Rosh Hashanah ultimately partakes in the most physical aspect of our existence: our transience.
      Regardless of what we believe, whether in atheism, monotheism, agnosticism, etc. we cannot pretend our lives end differently. Death certainly equalizes, to an extent. But given the opportunity of the day, a day of solemnity, a day reckoning, of redemption, renewal, cleansing, introspection, gratefulness, a day of questioning, of confronting our choices, putting them through the lens of our ideals and values, measuring the extent to which our actual selves measure up against our ideal selves, and even questioning our goals in life, we neglect the drama of the day at our own personal loss. For these activities, all falling under the larger umbrella of what we like to call self-awareness, apply to everyone.
    Rosh Hashanah, for all its complexity, allows us to take, one maybe two days in the year, and act like Socrates, or that pesky advocate of the devil, in questioning our most basic assumptions about life. How can we not embrace this chance? In our day to day living we rarely, for a sustained period of time, question the foundations of our life. We can quibble over the details of the day, or fret over a certain issue, but rarely does that lead us down the path into the ambiguity of our values. As many comment, it appears that most people in the world live their lives based on a somewhat coherent set of rules and values. Deep down we all believe in something, a guiding principle, whether that entails a more humanistic or a more religious bent. However, most of us do not explore our system of thought enough, or cannot express it coherently on any given day. But imagine a day in which someone, whether God or tradition, culture, or family demands an answer to the question of why do you live this way and not that? And yet, something about this demand makes us uncomfortable.
    Though we, as a culture, value self-awareness, the idea of judgment stands as one of the new cardinal sins along with intolerance, racism, naivete and others. Consequently, we shy away from “judging” lifestyle choices. A person may choose to spend their free time volunteering, good for them, while most people might choose to spend their free time relaxing, or catching up on TV. Both are equally fine choices as long as neither hurts any other person. Charles Taylor comments that we no longer think of morality when we think of how to live the good life, though, for centuries philosophers saw lifestyle and worldview as one of the main realms of morality. Nowadays, we look at the good life as a matter of pragmatism. Whatever works for that person’s self actualization without causing harm to another person falls within the purview of an acceptable lifestyle. But Taylor points out the loss of discernment as to what we truly want from life when we stop learning how to “judge” lifestyles. Now, this treads into dangerous territory, one of discrimination, arrogance, and intolerance, but in some ways he seems right. We are a culture that knows way more about the details of what we do than about why do these activities in the first place.
    Perhaps then, Rosh Hashanah, whether in a synagogue or out, whether hearing the wake up call of the shofar or not, allows us to set aside time to take a step back and ask ourselves the basic questions of life: why this and not that? What do I believe in and why? What do I want to accomplish in life? What type of relationship do I desire with other people, with my family, friends, and significant others. What do I value in life, what does that say, if anything, about me as a person? Can I improve as a person? On one level these questions seem so obvious, simplistic, to almost border on the clichéd, but we can deny their power when truly dwelled upon. They can shake our foundations if we let them, and we all need a tiny experiential earthquake from time to time. 
Here’s wishing everyone a Happy, Healthy, self-aware/actualized, year.
Thanks for reading,
JoeTalk.
Here are some gorgeous poems regarding self awareness, repentance, and introspection:

The first two are from Yehuda Amichai:
A man in his life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

2
The waters cannot return in repentance
The waters cannot return in repentance
To where would they return?
To the faucet, the sources, the ground, the roots,
the cloud, the sea, into my mouth?
The waters cannot return in repentance,
every place is their seas/days of old, their waters of old,
every place a beginning and end, and a beginning.

 Jorge Luis Borges: (It's shocking that a man of such complexity wrote such a simple, yet elegant, basic poem)
  If I could live again my life,
In the next - I'll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed,
I'll be more full - than I am now,
In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,
I'll be less hygenic,
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more sunsets,
I'll climb more mountains,
I'll swim more rivers,
I'll go to more places - I've never been,
I'll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,
I'll have more real problems - and less imaginary
ones,
I was one of those people who live
prudent and prolific lives -
each minute of his life,
Offcourse that I had moments of joy - but,
if I could go back I'll try to have only good moments,
If you don't know - thats what life is made of,
Don't lose the now!
I was one of those who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umbrella and without a parachute,
If I could live again - I will travel light,
If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet
at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn,
I'll ride more carts,
I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children,
If I have the life to live - but now I am 85,
- and I know that I am dying ..

Emily Dickinson:

MY life closed twice before its close;
  It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
  A third event to me,
 
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,        5
  As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

David Foster Wallace: In Memoriam

Writing about the significant author in your life, for a literary dork, is often akin to talking with passion and longing for an old childhood imaginary friend of yours. For me, and I suppose for others as well, we revere our beloved authors with the ferocity of a religious zealots. We treat them like prophets: every action of theirs serves as a sign of some sort. We view their works as scripture in that we devour every word they said, every letter they wrote whether in a margin of some book now in Austin, or on their numerous drafts of their sacred works, or even their poems from childhood. We want to know every detail of their life.  We defend them regardless of the accusation until proven otherwise by conclusive evidence. We assume most people don’t truly understand the author, not like we do anyway. We wait restlessly for a biography to emerge, and applaud the academic world for finally catching up with our knowledge of the genius of this author, though we cry for the reason he emerged now. Of course, I’m talking about David Foster Wallace(the title gave it away, I know). It’s strange to think that this kind of obsessiveness we normally think we reserve for those in love, or stalkers, but where else do we find this kind of obsession besides for the world of art?  

To then begin to talk about them in a way that both does justice to the saint-like version in our mind while at the same time honoring the fact the author also existed as a real person, well, it seems like a futile attempt. I want to convey what David Foster Wallace meant to me because I believe his beautiful capabilities can affect other people too, but in a way, writing a eulogy gives in to this illusion of kinship between myself and this author. I never met him. I don’t know him at all in any private way. In no way do I believe that because he wrote with his blood on the pages that I understand him at all as an autonomous complete other human being. I can speak to the public's David Foster Wallace, why he drew so many obsessed fans, why people called him the voice of their generation, how he goes about making you feel as if he is whispering all his words into your ear, humbly. How our lionization of this human being actually belies his writings, but I can still not claim to know him, despite that strange feeling he bestows that he knows us, or that if given the chance we could actually be best friends.

This rests not on some abstract argument regarding the death of the Author, or authorial intent. Simply put, even he knew that on some level, as much as literature served as a mode of communication for him to us, he also knew of the artificial nature of that dialogue. We all realize the mask of literature, its crafted nature, something projected, we just sometimes stare at it for so long we forget it’s there.

In some ways, though this might sound obvious, but I imagine it still needs mentioning. David Foster Wallace was an eminently flawed human being. His writing overflows with, even if he gave reason for these indulgences, extraneous matter, with a brilliant mind experimenting, exercising for his sake, not necessarily the readers. What I find disturbing about Saint Dave, or this closeness that we feel is how much he began to insinuate his authorial self into my personality. To this day, I ask myself, what would David Foster Wallace think about this situation. I miss him, viscerally, and I think many of his Fantods do to. I cannot help but think his thoughts, write in his style (or attempt to), and lean on his words in times of weakness. (God, how many times have I/we read that graduation speech.) The problem with all of this adoration, as with any adoration is that it blinds us to other visions, shuts us off from divergent thinking, from noticing the strong depressive streak in his writing that colors his viewpoint. Maybe in some respects, David Foster Wallace, even got things wrong. Maybe we don’t live in a world of Total Noise. Maybe the answer to boredom lies not in attention, and maybe he didn’t plan on making many life assertions as we import to him. The point being that at the point you stop thinking for yourself, because of a schema you received from someone else, you should assess your relationship to that thought system.

With that being said, he matters too much now, to not speak positively about his contribution to my life. I too found him in the solitude of sadness (I think Franzen nails this point on the head), and for me he emerged as a light, a guide, a voice that spoke through the total noise of life. He accomplished, at least for me, what he set out to do, a rare feat for an author: to make the normal feel weird and the weird normal, and he comforted the masses of lonely people. Not people who necessarily live alone, or anti-social people, but existentially lonely people in a way that no one in our generation has. He allowed us to partake in genuine conversations, to indulge in genuine feelings and questions without looking stupid anymore. Through him, so many people overcame this post-modern tic of cynicism.

He challenged the reader to accept the possibility that they are smarter than they think they are, or he made us smarter, demanding more from us whether it entailed patience, attention, looking up word after ridiculous word, or simply guided us into the directions of other authors, of foreign ideas, (Wittgenstein!) He forever taught. He couldn’t help but teach because he saw so much pain and hoped to alleviate just some of it, apparently his own, but mostly ours. He allowed us to realize that art can demand from us, he opened us up as a perennial though unwitting teacher to Todd Gitlin, to David Lynch, to the intricacies of tennis, basically to think intelligently but feeling immensely in every situation. How any situation has what to tell you if you look hard enough. that solopsisim is the worst state possible, that an intellect is not a free pass to or from anything, that morality still matters, that cliches are important, that genuine connections still command our attention despite the effort and complexity they demand.

He let us take comfort in our humanness, in our innumerable frailties, our endless reserves of courage and strength, our actual feelings of hope; In our addictions, not in a sense of contentment, but an empathic understanding and caring for the well being of ourselves and others. He let us see both the extent of our pain, our damage, our selfishness, our skewed values, our predicament, while also showing us ways out. If he liked to wallow in the dregs of our life it was not only because of its humane beauty but because of the belief that you can only get better, and grow, if you can actually describe the sickness. As in the opposite of Hal knowing way more about the things he did than in the why he did anything. He brought back words that some of us wouldn’t dare to utter. God, humility, morality, obligations, civic duty, genuineness, honesty. He made writing cool. He actually seemed to believe in something we might even call the human spirit. How quaint.

But in the end, even as we still mourn his death, for me, I know I need a break. I need to leave the obsession behind, maybe separate completely, for now. Too many authors exist out there, too many points of view that to limit myself, to focus, for the most part on his ideas only hinders my ability to grow as a human being. But I cannot, on this day of remembrance, undervalue his importance in my life. I don’t know who to thank or what to mourn for per se, but I know I feel grateful for his existence and literary output, I feel grateful for his struggle that he shared with us, and I feel mournful for both the loss of public Dave, and the loss to his family and friends of the private Dave Wallace.

You are loved.

Thanks for reading,

JoeTalk.

Ten Years Later: The Lessons of 9/11

Soon we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the day that changed contemporary American life forever. We as a nation stand embroiled in two endless wars. We created a homeland security sector of the government, we feel less naive, more vulnerable, and less certain of ourselves as a country. Airport experiences are more of a nuisance, but when it comes down to it, on a day to day, basic level, has 9/11 changed the lives of the masses in America? Obviously, those who actually lost friends and family in the attacks, those who suffered trauma from the attacks, their lives have been changed irrevocably and I dont mean to make light of their burden and suffering, but for most Americans, even most New Yorkers, does it matter, does it affect our lives, or better yet, do we care? Do we care about the politics, has it made us more active in anyway, whether in a need to know more about world politics, or in the desire to help other people, or to bridge cultural gaps? I don’t know.

This isn't to say that the day isn't vividly stained on our memories. We can all remember where we were when we first heard the strange news. I was in class, Jewish History class in my junior year in high school, with a teacher who we made fun of most of the time, and someone came in an announced the news, “A plane hit one of the Twin Tower,” and like that this bearer of awful news flew away probably to tell another class.  At first, we all laughed. We didnt actually understand, or we couldnt understand the words. A plane hit the Twin Towers. Apparently, when an event falls so far out of the range of expectancy or normalcy it takes your brain some time to actually process it. We thought a dinky little toy plane crashed into one of the windows. We simply, as 16 year old teenagers ,could not fathom the actual destruction. As people obsessed with events of terror we knew of terrorism, in Israel, we knew of bombs tearing through restaurants, but like so many other people, in our minds, that danger stayed out there, never in our home. This supposedly, was different.

The administration then ran an ad hoc assembly in which they attempted to allay our fears, though I dont remember many of us fearing anything in particular, because as teenagers it takes something truly personal to break through our shell of self-involvement and insecurities. Some people cried, I think. Some parents immediately took their children home for reasons I didnt fully understand then. No one really knew much of anything, and some people started to use the day as social currency. “Well, I saw ash rise from the roof, I saw it with my own eyes. Well I found a document floating in the air.” Some teachers allowed their classes to watch the news, to watch the towers fall in real time, while others, like myself and my group of friends watched it on endless replay later as we got home. Traffic came to a standstill so my house, a mere ten minute walk from school, became a haven for six of my friends stuck in brooklyn. We all watched TV, hungrily waiting for news, seeing all the newscasters without their jackets on, sweat all over their face, and a strange look of calm as they continuously replayed that famous footage. But even on that day, on that day itself, we ended playing video games, probably mario kart, or mario tennis, or more likely goldeneye, because what else could we do?

Eventually, it seems, we as a people acclimated. Life continued, we forgot the fear and striking excitement of the day. We laughed at the anthrax jokes, at the random color coded levels of alert, and life went on day in and day out, and for me, as I imagine for many others nothing actually changed, at all. We went to war, I think I watched some of it on TV, possibly I argued about it, but most likely not. We went to war again, and again, I watched it on TV and definitely did not argue about the merits of invading Iraq. I knew nothing about the details, and I still no very little about the details. As a people we’ve grown tired of the wars, but dont seem to care that much how to end them.

I’m not sure what this says about me, or if I am correct in my generalizations, about my generation that 9/11 is a blip on our radar. In fact, 9/12, strangely represents a more important day, the day David Foster Wallace hanged himself. But I imagine I am not alone in my apathy. I dont know anything about the two wars. I dont read the news about them, I dont know the names of the general, or the stages set up to lessen the presence of our troops their. I dont know how the number of casualties. For the most part, If you asked me is my country at war i would know to say yes, but the words would feel false. I dont know if this brings up some pressing questions such as: Why do most of us care so little about politics? Is it the more pressing economic needs, because even then most of us do not care about the process or the details of the economic plan, we just want happy results. Is it embarrassment at the outcomes, or lack thereof, of the wars? Why do movies that discuss the topics of our wars, and 9/11 mostly fail? Do we need more distance, or do we simply not care.

Does this experience, our general ability to simply keep calm and carry on, speak to resilience or to apathy, and how can you tell the difference between the two? What would it look like to take the “lessons” of 9/11 to heart? Are there lessons of 9/11? Is it that America is a vulnerable state that needs to beef up its security, its military, or is it that we need to understand extremism better and fight it not with similar tactics military prowess but with understanding and connection, is that a pipe dream? For the most part, as an American and a human being I feel the pain of the loss, of the victims murdered on that day, and on the loss of life the fight on terror continues to take, but as an American citizen, I feel wholly at a loss to understand the lessons of the day, and as the start of a pretty widely agreed upon awful decade I feel some lesson from history must be heeded, but what, I do not know. I’ve read the tenth anniversary remembrances from different magazines, intellectuals, and cultural critics, and I still dont know what to think. We like our historical lessons to be clear: never forget, tyranny fails etc. but I cant seem to think of anything concrete to think about on this upcoming day of remembrance, anything tangible to inculcate into my life. Maybe I am alone in these sentiments, but if not, then I think that scares me the most. 

Thanks for reading, 

JoeTalk.

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Sensibilities - Reading Seneca

For a Non-Fiction writing class, I recently began reading the writings of the forerunners to the personal essay. Specifically, the works of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. I always stayed away from the classics because in my occasional forays into their writings the foreignness of their culture and their assumptions drove me away from immersion. Instead I lived in the world of contemporary writing certain of its relevance and wisdom. I read what feels important, what makes my nervous system tingle, which is usually limited to contemporary literature. But ancient literature provides a certain type of pleasure that eludes contemporary writing. Mainly, in both the similarity and difference it makes from the assumptions we carry about life.

Each generation claims to have recreated the wheel. We pride ourselves on our voracious progress, unaware of the history we climb over to stand on our singular perch. (A wise man once said that each new theory that emerges must present itself as sui generis, without precedence, in order to gain acceptance despite the fact that few, if any, theories remain untainted by the pervasive influence of the past.) Nowadays, I imagine, most people do no think in this manner. The past decade has shattered much of our self-image, as people, as a nation, and as a generation, that instead of the staggering pace of progress most of us feel lost, uncertain how in the year 2011 much our of internal and external world appears to be crumbling at its foundations. In times like these, when our economy stubbornly stagnates, when jobs evade even the most qualified candidates, when you can spin a globe, stop it with your finger, and bet with good odds that this country is entangled in some sort of war, a return to the classics, to the wisdom of yesteryear provides a humbling perspective on life.

In a sense, similar to the study of history, reading ancient literature allows us to transcend these transient times of ours. Not as a means of escape, but as method of gaining perspective on the exigent issues of our times. History, in allowing us to detach ourselves from this moment, in offering the larger mural of time, helps us put into perspective our troubles, our issues, our struggles. Think of the countless people who starved to death during the industrial revolution, the great depression etc, think of the World Wars, then return home to your life. Usually, this detachment and reattachment evokes some sort of gratitude at our position in life.

Additionally, and this might lie in the realm of a personal stereotype, I tend to assume that people in the past lacked a certain complexity in their thinking, in their humanity. While we do live in what appears to be an unprecedented age of complexity, one in which the overflow of information challenges our ability to form opinions, to think clearly, I find it increasingly hard to say that we’ve progressed as human beings, in our personality, in our capability of thought when reading ancient literature. Here is a piece from Seneca’s letter on Noise. It reads like contemporary wisdom, but written thousands of years ago, well, it makes me feel less unique, less complex, more humble, and more connected to a long chain of human beings attempting to understand life, some with success some with failure, but no longer alone. Here Seneca discusses how external noise need not distract a person from the task at hand:

For I force my mind to become self absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam without so long as there is no commotion within, so long as fear and desire are at loggerheads, so long as meanness and extravagance are not at odds and harassing each other. For what is the good of having silence throughout the neighborhood if one’s emotions are in turmoil?

The peaceful stillness of the night had lulled

The world to rest

This is incorrect. There is no such thing as, “peaceful stillness” except where reason has lulled it to rest. Night does not remove worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even when people are asleep they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.

Now, with the hindsight of history and experience I find it slightly easy to pick apart this contention. (Very few theories of life, of how to live, remain whole under the skeptical eye of reason. I’m not sure if that speaks to the weakness of our philosophies of life or to the weakness of reason in the realm of experience) Calm places do evoke calm thoughts. External actions affect our thinking at the same time that our thinking affects our bodily functions. Our rational minds rarely use rationality to the extent we imagine, or even use it effectively. Talk rationally until the end of days to your chemical imbalance and you will not prevail. The existence of a subconscious, a being separate but tied to ourselves, possibly not under the dominion of rationality, the need for acceptance and indulgence of the spectrum of emotions often without moderation as a form of catharsis, all of these theories, or lifestyle choices belie this Stoic wisdom, and yet, so much of what rely on today partakes of it.

Cognitive therapy, that second wave in psychology, basically regimented Stoic advice. Yoga, the rise of meditation, mindfulness practice, all of these resuscitations of old waves started, even if they branch out in different directions, on the same ground of Stoicism. Keep calm and carry on, that famous sign put up in Britian during the Second World War. Mind over matter. You create the reality you want to live. We often feel controlled by emotions we don’t understand, emotions that feel more real than the wisdom of ages, but just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s real, or there. So many slogans and clichés, so much of the wisdom of our stories, our culture, our self help books all preach some form of stoicism, some form of control and moderation, and each time a person usually feels as if they’ve stumbled upon some new found element in the period table.  

And yet, despite the soundness of this advice, it often cannot compete with that other, somewhat higher value of our culture. Mainly, the value we place on personal and artistic expression. Imagine telling an artist to keep calm and carry on, or not to indulge in their passions? Art, culture, for so many of us has taken the place of religious wisdom, of prophecy. Artists peer into the souls of our century, see its beauty and flaws and attempt, sometimes, to guide us, or at least illuminate the maps of minds. How then do we reconcile these two conflicting, but sound ideas? How does stoicism fit in with our need to let loose, to lash out, to rage, to celebrate without inhibition, to let off steam, to black out, to be our true selves, to confront the darkness?  How do we know when to explore and when to retreat. The problem with clichés lies not only in their simplistic nature, but in the conflicting accounts of life. Most of these questions depend on the person, the context, the infinite number of variables, I think.

Now, the plethora of wisdom out there can make engender distress. Who do we listen to? Can we trust our intuition, should we rely more heavily on rationality. Is moderation the key to life, or just a cowards rationalization for not challenging themselves? Now true, the ambiguity can catch a person up in an endless loop of what ifs, but they also provide hope. They offer proof to the contention of the liquidity of life. Of our ability to choose different circumstances. Of the life given not needing to be the life we live. This is a particular gift of history and of ancient literature: to realize both amorphous and persistent nature of humanity.

Just as a side note, many criticize the stoics for their ostensible embrace of the status quo, regardless of the conditions. Seneca, like Socrates, killed himself as per the command of the country. He did not foment revolution, nor did he fight his sentence. He accepted his death with the calm and dignity that he preached all his life. Something about this grates against our collective personality which demands that we fight against injustice, that when we see something, we not only say something, but we do something. Fair enough. In hindsight, it’s much easier to criticize, but I find something courageous and admirable in the self-restraint displayed by these Stoics. In our culture steeped in freedom, we rarely discuss the beauty of self-control, of self-transcendence. We are a people of unprecedented access to freedom, flailing around in a sea of openness. For all intents and purposes so many of us can live any lifestyle we want. Freedom removes hindrances but fails to provide guidance even if in the end it’s something as simple as Seneca’s final answer to the problem of noise:

“This is all very well,” you may say, “but isn’t it sometimes a lot simpler just to keep away from the din?” I concede that, and in fact it is the reason why I shall shortly be moving elsewhere. What I wanted was to give myself a test and some practice. Why should I need to suffer the torture any longer than I want to when Ulysses found so easy a remedy for his companions even against the Sirens (earplugs...)

Thanks for reading,

JoeTalk.

Thoughts on Hurricane Irene

Does anyone else feel a range of strange thoughts towards this hurricane? (I find it somewhat odd and scary that I already can envision a monday full of facebook pictures, tweets etc., some genuine, some ironic, of the storm)

First off, I understand that the government wants to protect its image, and who actually knows the true magnitude of the hurricane, but even the cynic in me cannot quell the genuineness and real care our city government evinces in this speeches. I get that politicians, regardless of the situation think of themselves, their career and how a disaster might affect their futures, but Mayor Bloomberg, as well as the others speak with frustrated concern. They feel the need to urge us of the veracity of the danger of the hurricane (for some reason, most of the people I talk to about the hurricane treat it as an adult version of a snow day). I cannot remember the last time I felt pride in my mayor, or sensed his intelligence all (Ok, I can Guiliani post 9/11 but any other commonalities are just vulgar). I usually imagine politicians as formal, as unnecessarily dodgy in their answers,  but Bloomberg is just speaking with authority. He’s just killing this speech, which seems like a small matter in the larger picture, but he’s speaking with such knowledge and power, and such annoyance with the stupid (yes, pretty stupid questions of the jourmalists.). Shadows of C.J. from the West Wing. He gives off the impression that he can barely keep down his annoyance with the inanity of the questions. He said his piece and seriously just wants people to know this matters, people can die. He keeps snapping out like a father who needs to repeat basic safety instructions like don’t touch fire, or the outlets in the house. One feels a but stupid that our mayor, our city’s protector, feels the need to talk to us like such children, but do we really trust people to do everything to stay safe?

Bloomberg also shows no embarrassment to say we are at the whim of nature. As New Yorkers, beside for travel,  we really do not know of the overwhelming, complete power of the weather, of nature. First this earlier introductory earthquake and now what appears to many as a massive storm that will affect, life and death, house and other property, electricity, the workforce, the water, and public transportation. It will shut us down. Force us away from the world of our digital addictions. Sheer us from the advances of civilization we rely on to forget about the instability of life. For us, little in our life besides sickness and death remind us of the precariousness of life, of the sheer and pathetic fact of our physicality. It’s hard to face the fact that our progressive technology cannot protect us from something so elemental.

Not to say that anything necessarily bad will happen in any significant way, who knows, one obviously hopes not, but from the way the government’s talking about the hurricane it feels serious. They have mandated an evacuation in Zone A. It will now be a class b misdemeanor to not listen to this evacuation. This is New York’s first mandated evacuation. History, right here. Also, we always worry about the role of the government in our personal lives, in our money, but for some reason, we all fall back to socialist type governmental roles in times of trouble and need. Cops will walk around the neighborhood, but will not enforce the rule, both because of the lack of man power, but apparently also because when it comes down to it each person will make their own choices, but still, the government dictating where we can and cannot be feels different than the governmental actions we are normally accustomed too.

Bloomberg also spoke of basic human decency, basic human common sense, the character of new yorkers as tough but smart, as people who need not worry about looting because we are not that type of people. When does that happen in politics? Eerily we here this both before and after the specter of death. It feels refreshingly real and urgent. I want to agree with his sentiments, but the planned proliferation of police slightly belies his trust in our decency and common sense, and why not.

None of this takes away from the urgency and dangerous implications of the storm. I guess I still do not feel the exigency of this storm, but rather it just feel’s nice to be taken care of by a government you can trust, to be reminded of the precariousness of existence, even in our technologically advanced society. That deep down, the specter of destruction, of tragedy, though we all hope nothing happens, equalizes all human beings: athletes and fans, performers and those in the crowd, people in low rent apt, in high rent apt, those poor and those rich, at the feet of nature’s destructive, awe-inspiring power.  

May everyone keep safe throughout the whole weekend.
    Thanks for reading,

Joe Talk.

The Humility of David Foster Wallace - In response to Maud Newton

A note of introduction: This blog is a response to the article. posted on the side, written by Maud Newton entitled Another Thing to Sort of Pin On David Foster Wallace (Which is already a somewhat lame way to make fun of Foster Wallace.) It’s a fun article about David Foster Wallace, and blogging, but if neither of those topics interest you, then neither will this blog post.

In this blog, I attempted, as much as possible, not to indulge in my obsession with David Foster Wallace. I often quote him, my ideas are clearly mostly watered down versions of his ideas, and my style, if I you can refer to how I write as a style, mimics, weakly, his style. But now, I think it’s time to indulge in some DFW dorkiness to defend some claims made against his writing. Listen, I love DFW, but I think we’ve sainted him too early, and I do think problems exist in his writing, both theoretical and technical problems, but this argument against his writing just seems reductive.  Maud Newton, in her somewhat endearing though ultimately simplistic article, argues that DFW always equivocates in his arguing. He constantly uses qualifiers, changes register from high brow to low brow, and use all sort of verbal tics to make him liked by the audience. This essentially closes the argument by encompassing the whole argument because in truth, she claims, he’s not making an argument but just having a friendly conversation in which he cuts off any possible criticism by alluding to all possible criticisms. In essence, she claims, he makes the arguments through establishing both his intellectual credentials and his home grown normalcy so you trust him completely when he finally makes some kind of ambiguous argument. Newton, as does Geoffrey Dyer goes on to use this as a stepping stone to decry some of the annoying tics of bloggers, which is not the topic here. Here is my straightforward response. Newton and Dyer misunderstand DFW’s rhetorical tools and their usages both in his fiction and his non-fiction.(There are many holes to puncture in Newton's argument, but this should suffice.)

I claim that Newton and Dyer misunderstand DFW’s rhetorical tools in that they believe he uses them either because he cannot transcend the postmodern ironic stance without indulging in naiveté, or he wishes to ingratiate himself so as to not come off as an ass trying to force morality upon us, which to them, lacks directness and bravery in argumentation about important matters. Ultimately though, it’s his and our obsessive need to be liked as opposed to our ability engage in true debate that pushes us to write with qualifiers and in a style that makes you feel like we are just friends, talking, not trying to actually argue for anything.

But, to make an argument based on DFW’s own work, mainly from some of his stories, and his essay Deciderization, I contend that much of these rhetorical tools and examples stem from DFW’s humility, not arrogance, from his clear understanding of the smallness of his opinion relative to the complexity of the topic, of his constant self-doubt regarding his judgments in life, even towards the complexity of topics such as race, eating animals, and abortion. Let us for a minute run with this explanation i.e. that at the root of much what we refer to as DFW’s tics lies humility and not arrogance or an obsessive need to feel liked.

            In his essay, Deciderization¸ DFW explains that we lived in an unprecedented time of total noise in which it becomes increasingly harder to know who to trust, what to read in the news, and how to form an educated opinion on the whole spectrum of issues facing the normal human being. I still, despite my attempts to read up on the topic, understand little in the ways of economics. I cannot remember the last good clear argument on a topic, whether, abortion, or the economy that did not smack of bias, which of course exists in every argument, but what DFW captured so well, was the trouble with forming an opinion in our world. Hence the need for footnotes, and qualifiers, because when it comes down to it, there is no simple argument about whether we should or should not eat meat, or whether we can judge the porn industry, whether McCain is a calculated manipulative politician or a genuine believer in his vision for the country because of the need to take into account too many factors.

Additionally, why do we judge DFW by foreign standards? When did he claim to attempt to write arguments in the old Mark Twain Fashion? Why should we judge his output as if he was an ethical philosopher? In fact, DFW really only contended to make an argument, explicitly, once, in his essay on TV.  In his other writings, he opted to present the complexity of what it means to live as a human being today, as a person bombarded by leftist and right wing propaganda that both kind of sound intelligent, but never seem to present the full picture, as a person who lives in a time in which knowledge and opinions are tenuous at best because we know how entrenched they are in our personal experiences, and how much arrogance about our opinions ruins relationships, causes global issues, and just steeps a person in narcissism.

Here’s another straightforward contention, maybe we shouldn’t outgrow this type of thinking. Maybe we should always cling to this humility in our opinions. Now of course, some decisions must be made in life, but many decisions I make, or many of the beliefs I take do not matter in the larger scheme of things until I insert arrogance into the equation. For most people, it would seem, the question of an abortion remains abstract. Now, despite this fact most people assume an opinion on the matter, which can cause adverse affects, arguments, extremism etc. I would like to contend that DFW understood this problem, he understood that most of the moral quandaries of life are not the moral quandaries philosophers refer to as borderline cases, i.e. those cases that are all but impossible to actually argue for without making fundamentally unfalsifiable assumptions. Instead most of the moral heavy lifting involves how we relate to other human beings, how we feel towards them, how we judge them, how we balance the onslaught of self-centeredness with the need to transcend ourselves. Because most of the moral quandaries Newton wants some direct argumentation on do not affect the normal life of a normal person. That is, until we begin to think we actually fully know the answer to those unanswerable problems.

For DFW, most knowledge should be treated as precarious, as tentative because most knowledge stems from our self-centeredness, which doesn’t always bring harm, it just colors our view always, as a default. I would like to contend that qualifiers battle this self-centered arrogance, the arrogance to not see that my opinion, though internally justified in my being, might actually be wrong. Perhaps then acting upon it without fleshing out all of the sides of the argument, without seeing its complexity takes away the dignity from the human choice.

Again, why should we expect that DFW will answer the issues of abortion, when did he ever attempt to? You cannot fault an author, or an essayist for not writing an opinion on a matter. DFW wrote on what he found interesting, meaningful, relevant to everyday life, and possibly morally instructive, but the morally instructive part came from inside the object under scrutiny not external to it and in some senses, this leveled a stronger argument, which undermines Newton’s point. From the Big Red Son, I came away, if we must feel forced to talk about the practical value of any literature, which appears to be a strange assumption, feeling dirty, like I needed a shower partially because the subtly scathing criticism came from an inside view, from an attempt to not judge, to really immerse the author in the culture under investigation. To talk about the ambivalence, ambiguities, complexities, confrontations that plague these people. He humanizes everything and in doing so provides a lesson in day to day morality, not in the borderlines cases of morality that most ethical philosophers’ cannot give uncontested answers to. The lesson he gives, if a lesson must be given, is one of the complexities of human complexities, how even in the places we normally assume the worst, beats the heart of a human being we can understand and relate to, even find beauty in (the elder cop in the Big Red Son Essay).
 Similarly in his essay on vegetarianism he opts not to give his personal opinion not so as to be liked by all but because it's simply too complex a topic to confidently say one side is right and the other wrong. Instead, he forces us to confront the issue of why we choose what we choose as opposed to attempting to force us to think one way. In our world, do we not need more people like this, more people who see the multi-faceted side of all issues as opposed to those who push one path?

So perhaps, all these annoying tics are really just a smart person’s way to say, “Hey look, here is an issue I care about. It’s complicated, as is pretty much anything important in life, but it still demands our discussion. So let’s try to discuss it like friends, without resorting to simplistic argumentation, or snap judgments, let’s try to first truly understand both side of the topics and then you, as an autonomous dignified human being can draw whatever conclusion you want because that’s how we respect each others autonomy. Not by brow beating us into opinions, but by presenting the whole picture so we can then choose for ourselves.” Maybe.

I apologize for the hastiness of this post. In the next post, I hope to provide more examples of some real moral claims found both in DFW’s fiction and non-fiction, and also to hone in on some more subtle arguments Newton makes, but I believe this provides one quick answer to a reductive claim against an author who fought tooth and nail to bring morality back into literature.

Heschel on Prayer - Add on to Shul Hopping #4

  In my most recent Shul Hopping piece I discussed the foreignness of the Conservative Judaism experience. In some ways, I felt that I swiped at them too harshly given the limited medium one small article affords. I hope to both justify and mitigate my criticisms in this post. First, I think it became clear that I feel a discomfort with rich synagogues. In general, I feel ambivalent about religious institutions spending inordinate amounts of money on their sanctuaries. I know I fall back on David Simon too much, but something stings me about the disproportionate use of money spent on cement and concrete and not on human beings. I understand that a lofty building engenders lofty thoughts, but I can’t shake the feeling that we sacrifice possible transcendent thoughts for the urgency of charitable causes.
  However, I cannot be blind to the fact that throughout the ages Jews have poured money into their sanctuaries. The holiest of them, the ancient temple used gold and other precious materials from all around the world. I remember once, walking through the Vatican both admiring their collected (stolen, plundered?) riches, but also feeling a sense of disgust at their spoils, (Could we not solve world hunger if we sold one purple marble bathtub?) only to realize that the Jewish temple itself, while it did not pillage other civilizations, spent the equivalent, with inflation and all, of a small nation's economy on it's structure. I think all religions feels this ambivalence towards materialism. On the one hand, we respect the ascetic who lives on bread and salt alone, who looks to god alone for support, and yet on the other hand, we respect those who can use their money for good, who can make a palace fitting for god. For me though, I err in the middle, of taking care of the needs of people before the needs of God, but as a person who hasn’t really made a substantial amount of money in his lifetime, I feel that I i can only talk presumptuously on this matter.
    The second, more substantive point, revolved around the performance, rote-like feel of the service. The fact that the cantor prayed towards the congregation, the instruments, the fact that the community was emphasized over the loneliness of each human being before God, the glass like feel of the service chafed against my need for unbounded spirituality. In the first draft of the piece, I felt presumptuous as to these claims so I mitigated them in an attempt to view the service from their side. Who was I to criticize the conservative movement after one visit? Especially after a visit in which I acted as half-outsider, half-insider? But, auspiciously, I began reading Abraham J. Heschel’s book on prayer, Man’s Quest For God the week after going to Park Avenue Synagogue and he levels very similar critiques against Conservative services in general. Heschel makes a few claims that relate specifically to the Conservative movement, but one word of qualification before we engage in criticism.
    While writing a critique of the service, I attempted to understand why I felt more let down by Conservative Judaism than anything I had experienced up until that point. I believe it relates to the point I made about kiddush foods and conservative Judaism. If Conservative Judaism allows themselves more leeway in regards to the tradition, then I assumed they could fix certain problems in the prayer services more easily, but it appears their attempted solutions did not work the way they intended, or diverted attention from larger, more systemic issues with prayer, as Heschel points out:

Modern Jews suffer from a neurosis which I should like to call the Sidder complex. True, the text of the prayer book presents difficulties to many people. but the crisis of prayer is not a problem of the text. It is a problem of the soul. The Siddur must not be used as a scapegoat. A revision of the prayer book will not solve the crisis of the prayer. What we need is a revision of the soul, a new heart rather than a new text.

Here, Heschel points out that despite the changes in text, the changes that include our the addition of foremothers, and prayers for Non-Jews, i.e. political problems and answers, these will not solve spiritual problems. I felt this acutely in a Park Ave Synagogue in which I easily connected politically to the inclusions of woman, and certain prayers, but felt aloof from the actual religious service, but where does this aloofness stem from. Heschel, again:

It is not the primary purpose of prayer “to promote Jewish unity.” Prayer is a personal duty, and an intimate act which cannot be delegated either to the cantor or to the whole community. We pray with the whole community, and every one of us by himself. We must make clear to every Jew that his duty is to pray rather than to be a part of an audience.

Here, Heschel speaks to shul as a communal experience which he believes overlooks the main part of the shul experience: one of a lonely soul coming together as a group, but still alone, pouring out everything before God. Heschel then goes on to address the performative aspect of Conservative prayer:

It was in the interest of bringing about order and decorum that in some synagogues the rabbi and cantor decided to occupy a position facing the congregation. It is quite possible that a re-examination of the whole problem of worship would lead to the conclusion that the innovation was an error. The essence of the prayer is not decorum but rather an even in the inner life of men....A cantor who faces the holiness of the Ark rather than the curiosity of man will realize that his audience is God. He will learn to realize that his task is not to entertain but to represent the people of Israel. He will be carried away into moments in which he will forget the world, ignore the congregation and be overcome by the awareness of Him in Whose presence he stands. The congregation then will hear and sense that the cantor is not giving a recital but worshipping God, that to pray does not mean to listen to a singer but to identify oneself with what is being proclaimed in their name.

    I cannot speak to the internal feelings of those worshipper in Park Avenue Synagogue. As I said in the article, I found them all genuine, friendly, and passionate, but I can say that Heschel’s words ring true for me. Consequently, it was hard to partake, because of my biases, in this more performance like prayer.
    In the end, despite this criticism, I think it is important to realize that as an Orthodox Jew, I have denigrated, whether in my mind or in conversation, Conservative Judaism throughout my life, and from initial comments from like-minded friends, many of us grew up with this bias.  We are not exposed to Conservative Jews or Judaism, which it to our detriment and loss. To us I say go visit a Conservative Shul, go to talk to a Conservative Jew and you will realize that our discriminatory actions and stereotypes are baseless. I have grown to respect Conservative Judaism as a passionate part of the larger Jewish Nation, one that struggles with questions of modernity in ways that other denominations do not. Now, I feel nothing but respect and awe for their services and politics, even if I cannot personally fully connect.I believe all Jews should shul hop in the sense that it allows us to see the other denominations not as less than in any way, but as different, as commanding our respect. The more we understand other people, I have found, the more we grow in respect, and the more we understand our own biases and ourselves.
Thanks for reading, 
JoeTalk.