One of the most interesting features of the wonderful, but recently ended HBO series "Six Feet Under" was the opening segments of each episode in which a person who is about to become a client of the fictional funeral home Fisher and Diaz meets his demise. These segments were often morbidly playful, especially when they involve people who will be done in by their own stupidity or neglect, like the baker who climbs into a dough mixer without cutting off the power or the guy who leans out of his car to pick up the paper, falls out and is crushed under his own SUV.
I was thinking of those moments while doing work around the house yesterday, and it suggested to me that the show's writers may have done thousands of viewers an unwitting service by teaching us to be more careful in our daily lives. Standing on a ladder in my garage, for example, I scanned the ground below for any sharp objects on which I could be impaled if I fell. How easy to picture myself with a rake sticking out of my guts as the screen fades to white and my birth and death dates flash in the screen.
I thought of those "Six Feet Under moments" again this morning when I heard the news about Kyle Lake, the 33-year-old pastor in Waco, Tex., an oterwise intelligent person by all accounts who died as a result of a moment of bad decision-making. Performing a Baptism while immersed in water up to his shoulders, Pastor Lake reached for a microphone, and was electrocuted as his followers looked on in horror.
The recent horrors of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and suicide bomb onslaughts have surely brought home the message that all our planning, our hopes and dreams and aspirations can come to an abrupt end in the tragic blink of an eye. But a story like that of Pastor Lake and other "Six Feet Under" moments reminds us, as well, that despite all the long-term decisions and tough choices we make throughout our years, one seemingly insiginificant choice or decision or idea can turn out to be the most consequential act of our lives.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Proof Of God
EREV YOM KIPPUR
A friend of mine whose opinions matter to me informs me that he has no plan to go to shul on Yom Kippur, he'll be working, and worked as well on Rosh HaShanah. He doesn't particularly believe in God, and even if he did, it would be hypocritical, he says, to change his behavior on one or two days a year to try to please Him.
I believe it's natural and totally acceptable to struggle with God, what He means and how he manifests Himself. God doesn't reveal Himself or overtly intervene in our lives-- stopping wars or genocide, thwarting hurricanes or earthquakes -- because h]He wants us to come to Him through logic and reason and not simply by rote training, although a majority of religious people today probably do the latter. Despite my own doubts I have never been able to dismiss the idea of God, despite many influential people I've met who are atheists.
The reason is clear: We choose the kind of world we want to live in, and in mine I can't accept a world spinning out of control, with no Divine intervention and human beings left to our own devices, like children left home alone with parents who will never return.
This is a logical as well as emotional point. Watch the news each day and ponder the ability of human beings to destroy ourselves and each other; the health and environmental risks we create and endure; the hatred we foment among ourselves; the destructive power we create and all too often harness.
It is now 60 years since the advent of the most destructive weapon ever created, and somehow it has only been used for war twice, and in a single conflict. Mankind now possesses more firepower than it would take to annihilate all life on this planet, and yet something has held us back from doing so. Not for lack of instinct. In 1963 two mighty fleets headed for a showdown in the Cuban missile crisis. Despite the savagery of the war that ended only eight years prior and the hatred and paranoia fueled for years on both sides, reason somehow prevailed, we are still here, and human endeavour for good is thriving, enough so that you are able to read this through a technology no one could have imagined 25 years ago.
There can't ever be absolute proof of God. But the fact that you and I are here today, somewhat against the odds, is to me a pretty good indication.
A friend of mine whose opinions matter to me informs me that he has no plan to go to shul on Yom Kippur, he'll be working, and worked as well on Rosh HaShanah. He doesn't particularly believe in God, and even if he did, it would be hypocritical, he says, to change his behavior on one or two days a year to try to please Him.
I believe it's natural and totally acceptable to struggle with God, what He means and how he manifests Himself. God doesn't reveal Himself or overtly intervene in our lives-- stopping wars or genocide, thwarting hurricanes or earthquakes -- because h]He wants us to come to Him through logic and reason and not simply by rote training, although a majority of religious people today probably do the latter. Despite my own doubts I have never been able to dismiss the idea of God, despite many influential people I've met who are atheists.
The reason is clear: We choose the kind of world we want to live in, and in mine I can't accept a world spinning out of control, with no Divine intervention and human beings left to our own devices, like children left home alone with parents who will never return.
This is a logical as well as emotional point. Watch the news each day and ponder the ability of human beings to destroy ourselves and each other; the health and environmental risks we create and endure; the hatred we foment among ourselves; the destructive power we create and all too often harness.
It is now 60 years since the advent of the most destructive weapon ever created, and somehow it has only been used for war twice, and in a single conflict. Mankind now possesses more firepower than it would take to annihilate all life on this planet, and yet something has held us back from doing so. Not for lack of instinct. In 1963 two mighty fleets headed for a showdown in the Cuban missile crisis. Despite the savagery of the war that ended only eight years prior and the hatred and paranoia fueled for years on both sides, reason somehow prevailed, we are still here, and human endeavour for good is thriving, enough so that you are able to read this through a technology no one could have imagined 25 years ago.
There can't ever be absolute proof of God. But the fact that you and I are here today, somewhat against the odds, is to me a pretty good indication.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Wait Until Next Year?
How depressing is the thought of a fifth straight season without a Yankee world series.
Sure, the Angels are a hot team with younger, more eager talent, but I can't help but wonder if the Yankees' overinflated payroll is having the opposite of its intended effect. When you're getting paid millions of dollars, win or lose, you still want that World Series ring, but I have to believe you aren't as hungry for it as the younger, lesser paid up-and-comers. When you have the means to buy anything you possibly can want in life and have change left over to leave your great-grandkids, I just don't think there's a fire in the belly. The same reason stand-up comics like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy haven't made a funny movie in the past 20 years.
Wait till next year? Only if you drop the spoiled fatcats and hire some hungry talent whose battig average is higher than the first three numbers on their paycheck.
Sure, the Angels are a hot team with younger, more eager talent, but I can't help but wonder if the Yankees' overinflated payroll is having the opposite of its intended effect. When you're getting paid millions of dollars, win or lose, you still want that World Series ring, but I have to believe you aren't as hungry for it as the younger, lesser paid up-and-comers. When you have the means to buy anything you possibly can want in life and have change left over to leave your great-grandkids, I just don't think there's a fire in the belly. The same reason stand-up comics like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy haven't made a funny movie in the past 20 years.
Wait till next year? Only if you drop the spoiled fatcats and hire some hungry talent whose battig average is higher than the first three numbers on their paycheck.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Tough Breaks
Last week I covered the controversy over a column penned in a New Jersey Jewish paper by the psuedonymous SA Halevy. In one fell swoop Halevy managed to offend just about everyone that has anything to do with Israel, from the evacuated settlers of Gaza he says didn't fight hard enough to the Jewish organizations and rabbinic groups he believes rolled over to the dictatorial Sharon government.
There is much speculation that a particular rabbi in Teaneck known to express such sentiments was behind the article, but who wrote it is less interesting than what it represents. The very insightful sociologist Samuel D. Heilman told me how this is indicative of the crisis faced by many modern Orthodox, mostly young or middle aged Jews who are infatuated with the territory captured by Israel in 1967 and the people living there. That land seems to resonate for them so much more than the post-1948 boundaries, including Western Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, etc.
Professor Heilman is better qualified than me to say why this is, but it's easy to speculate. For one thing, the West Bank comprises much more of the territory discussed in the Bible. For another, the territory was seized by Israel in the Six-Day War, one of the biggest exercises of Jewish toughness since Joshua conquered Jericho. For so many people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired over the Holocaust, the lightning strikes that punished the Arab countries for planning to attack Israel represented a redemption, if not a seismic shift in the way Jews felt and were perceived.
Gaza has virtually no connection to Biblical Israel. But it is part and parcel of that victory of biblical proportions. Clearly that's why so many were heartsick about its surrender. The post-67 notion that Jews could live anywhere they damn well please was epitomized in Gaza, where 8,000 lived in the midst of more than a million Palestinians. Giving it back signalled a potential withdrawal from the biblical lands -- even Jerusalem -- but it also meant backing down from the posture that Jews are finished backing down.
More than anything else, baby boomer Orthodox Jews and their subsequent generations want to feel tough and in control, not placid and vulnerable like the ill-fated generations before them. That's what motivates an SA Halevy to lash out at everyone who implemented, supported or didn't sufficiently oppose the Gaza pullout. He sees that shell-shocked Israel has ceased providing the macho, vicarious thrills of the Six-Day War, the Lebanon invasion and the Osirak reactor bombing, yielding instead the wimpy Oslo peace process and settler disengagement. And it scares the daylights out of him.
There is much speculation that a particular rabbi in Teaneck known to express such sentiments was behind the article, but who wrote it is less interesting than what it represents. The very insightful sociologist Samuel D. Heilman told me how this is indicative of the crisis faced by many modern Orthodox, mostly young or middle aged Jews who are infatuated with the territory captured by Israel in 1967 and the people living there. That land seems to resonate for them so much more than the post-1948 boundaries, including Western Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, etc.
Professor Heilman is better qualified than me to say why this is, but it's easy to speculate. For one thing, the West Bank comprises much more of the territory discussed in the Bible. For another, the territory was seized by Israel in the Six-Day War, one of the biggest exercises of Jewish toughness since Joshua conquered Jericho. For so many people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired over the Holocaust, the lightning strikes that punished the Arab countries for planning to attack Israel represented a redemption, if not a seismic shift in the way Jews felt and were perceived.
Gaza has virtually no connection to Biblical Israel. But it is part and parcel of that victory of biblical proportions. Clearly that's why so many were heartsick about its surrender. The post-67 notion that Jews could live anywhere they damn well please was epitomized in Gaza, where 8,000 lived in the midst of more than a million Palestinians. Giving it back signalled a potential withdrawal from the biblical lands -- even Jerusalem -- but it also meant backing down from the posture that Jews are finished backing down.
More than anything else, baby boomer Orthodox Jews and their subsequent generations want to feel tough and in control, not placid and vulnerable like the ill-fated generations before them. That's what motivates an SA Halevy to lash out at everyone who implemented, supported or didn't sufficiently oppose the Gaza pullout. He sees that shell-shocked Israel has ceased providing the macho, vicarious thrills of the Six-Day War, the Lebanon invasion and the Osirak reactor bombing, yielding instead the wimpy Oslo peace process and settler disengagement. And it scares the daylights out of him.
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