The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for December 2005

Oh Chanukah- Some Assembly Required

by 5 Comments

“Oh Chanukah,” he said exasperatedly. Ok, that is not really what I said and most of the time I don’t refer to myself in the third person but tonight merited special attention.

You see the toy manufacturers have taken great care to make the acquisition of their toys to be one hell of an adventure. It is not just a matter of purchasing a toy and spending a few minutes assembling it, oh no, it is much more than that.

In order to assemble the toy you have to be able to remove it from the box and that is no easy feat. The box is sealed shut with tape and some sort of elephant snot glue and on the bigger boxes you can see that a welder took great care in making sure that the toy is sealed tighter than the hatch on Lost.

The nice thing about being a Taurus is that I may not have grace but I did receive the strength of the bull and I can usually work a little magic on whatever it is I need to open. The big trick is not destroying the contents of the package and more importantly great skill is required in making sure that the young children who are eagerly waiting to play with these toys do not learn any more colorful words than they may already know.

The good news is that it only took me 17 hours and three minutes to get the fercocketeh toy assembled. The bad news is that by the time it was done my children who are far smarter than I am had stolen my credit card and called ToysRus and placed an order for said unit fully assembled and ready to roll.

Under different circumstances the deliveryman might have been thrown out on their asses (I am a child of the ’70s and did own the GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip) but my after 17 hours the Phillips screwdriver had become permanently attached to my left hand and right arm had lost its cunning and that was in spite of the picture of Jerusalem next to my bed.

So you’ll forgive me if I end this here. It is awfully hard to type with my nose.

Jewish Mysteries-Our Connection and The New Year

by 15 Comments

I wrote this for the Jewish Connection but thought that as part of my end of the year recap it merited another look.

I am an independent in many ways including both politics and religion. Every now and then someone decides to take a swipe at me because they think that I pick and choose.

For example, I don’t keep Kosher, but I would never drink a glass of milk with meat. There are other examples, but I don’t want to make this post about me but about the mysteries of Judaism.

That is the term that I used when speaking with a friend about his kollel and their outreach program to unaffiliated Jews/Jews who are unhappy with their shul. But it really is most applicable to Jews who do not have a real strong Jewish education and their approach to Judaism.

What I mean by this is that Judaism is highly sophisticated and filled with layers and layers of ritual and for a lack of a better term obligations/responsibilities that we usually refer to as the 613 mitzvot.

Add to that the minhagim (customs) that have been acquired over the centuries and many people do not know whether the things that they do are based upon minhag or halacha and even if they do they often do not know why they are being asked to do them.

Consequently there are many mitzvot that are not followed because people do not feel/see the connection and or reason for them to do it. You cannot tell someone who does not know if they believe in G-d that this being/person/creature has commanded them to do anything and expect that they are just going to do it. And you especially cannot expect a thinking adult to engage without provding them with substance and reason for why they should do whatever it is you are asking them to do.

So what you end up with is a group of people who look at the mitzvot/commandments and see them as being optional. Earlier this week Mirty wrote about her feelings when she accidentally ate something that was treif. I thought that it was interesting because my heart tells me that I should be keeping Kosher but my brain says why.

My head wants to know what is the reason. What does it do? I already know that lightning will not come out of the sky and strike me down if I do not. I know that if I drive on Shabbos I am not going to be stoned. I know that if I commit an aveirah I am probably, more than likely going to be ok.

And what this means is that I have to search harder for a reason to stop my behavior and change. I need more than just because. I need something that speaks to me and thus far I haven’t found it and I am someone who searches for answers.

Take me out of the equation and go back to the person who has little to no background. Now stick them in shul and watch how many of them squirm because they do not understand what is going on, why we bow at some times and not at others. They stumble through mechayei meytim without any idea about the hours of thought and discussion that those words created, they do not understand what they do but go because of guilt.

I watch and listen because even though I can say that I received a solid Jewish education it has some holes in it and there are places that are more like gaps. I watch because this time of year is a huge struggle for me. It makes me crazy, I go meshugah because I feel like my heart and head are in two different places. My heart says to just go with the feeling, follow the passion and daven because it will take me to where I need to be and my head scoffs at this.

My head laughs at superstition and takes a simple position of trying to be a good person. Be a good person, teach your children, give back to your community and do what you can to be a mensch and everything will work out.

I’ll go to shul and I’ll wrestle with being there. I’ll think about the streets of Yerushalayim and the hike I took in Yosemite. I’ll go to the bathroom and be distracted by beautiful women, by watching the young children look up in awe at their parents and by the sound of people davening. I’ll sit down and consider the mysteries of Judaism and ask myself how much I really know and realize that my depth of knowledge is good, but never enough. I’ll shake my head and feel like I’ll never be satisfied and then I’ll sigh.

And in between and throughout all of it I’ll come here and write a post that started out with a serious nature and just became a stream of consciousness and wonder if I really said anything or made sense to anyone.

The New Year is coming and I feel unsettled.

A Quick Flashback Versus New Material

by 6 Comments

One of the consistent and ongoing challenges of blogging is being able to continue to post new content. There are some bloggers who refuse to post unless they think that their material is top notch and then there are others who slap any old thing up there.

I fall somewhere in the middle. It is important to me to maintain a standard and level of quality but at the same time I realize that I am not always going to look at my work and consider it be my best.

That doesn’t mean that I think that I consistently posting second rate material, it is just that i understand that when you post as frequently as I do you are not going to be presenting Pulitzer prize winning material every time.

That leads in to my next point and that is a response to those bloggers who want to know how to find more material for their blog. In my experience when you are searching for something to write about you have a number of resources.

  1. Stories about your life or people you know.
  2. Searching other blogs and riffing/commenting about something that they have written.
  3. The News- Read a newspaper or website and comment on something interesting there.

Sometimes the hardest part of doing that is being able to present the material in an interesting way. I don’t see anything wrong in riffing/commenting off of the work someone else did as long as you give them credit for doing it and you have created something that is unique and have not plagiarized their work.

I should add that from my perspective there is so much material out there it is hard to imagine not being able to find anything new.

I would encourage new bloggers to blog frequently because like anything else this takes practice and the more you do it the easier it becomes.

One more note. I am not adverse to providing links to older material that I think was well done. Sometimes it is worth bringing these treasures out for another glimpse in the daylight as some of them hold up quite nicely.

What do you think?

Generations

by 6 Comments

My mother remembers the Summer of ’69 for many reasons. During the day my father had a full time job and at night he worked to finish his masters. In between he spent as much time as possible with my mother and his newborn son (me).

A new mother has a lot on her plate and my own was none too happy when she learned about the murders that had taken place she was less than pleased to be home alone at nights with her baby boy. But time passed and she grew more comfortable as a mother and less concerned about the various bogeyman of the night.

In time the family grew larger, a younger sister and then twin sisters joined our brood. At the grand old age of 30 my mother had four children ranging in age from 5 years-old to a little less than a month. During that time frame I went from having four grandparents and three great grandparents to just three grandparents.

Within a year the numbers adjusted again as my sole surviving great-grandfather died and my grandfather remarried. The readjusted number left me with four grandparents and two great-grandmothers.

The advantage of being the oldest of my siblings is that I remember all of the grandparents, including my dad’s mom who passed away when I was just shy of three. Granted the memories I have of her are fuzzy, but they exist.

The hardest memory is trying to recall her voice. I am just not sure that I really remember it and suspect that I really don’t remember it at all.

I didn’t lose my great-grandmothers until I was a teenager as they lived to be about 95 and 96 respectively. It is possible that they were slightly older or younger as the recordkeeping when they were born was not as tight as it is now.

My father has a picture that was taken when I was about 11 months old. It is of my great-grandfather, grandfather, father and myself. Four generations of the men of my family.

Thirty years later my son had the privilege of being part of a similar picture as he is seated with myself, my father and grandfather. That picture is hung next to the older version. It means a lot to me and I hope that when he is older he will appreciate it.

I remember my great-grandfather but I am not old enough to have shared in the telling of stories of his youth in Lithuania. I know from his children stories of he and my great-grandmother hiding from the Cossacks. And I know the stories of his work in Chicago in helping to establish unions and tales of fist fights with the police. I wish that I could have heard them from him, but that was not to be.

For a while after my son’s birth he was privileged to have five great-grandparents. We have since lost a great-grandmother and now we are down to four great-grandparents. It is a joy and a blessing that is lost upon my children but he is only five and my daughter isn’t quite two so I cannot really fault them.

I do what I can to make sure that they see their great-grandparents as often as possible as I can see the sand in the hourglass running. One of my grandfathers lives with my parents now and that is an interesting situation. I watch and learn from my parents as they show what kabed et evecha veh et eemecha really means and at the same time I see the toll that it is taking upon them.

I am worried because my grandfather requires more and more assistance and taking care of him becomes less a labor of love and more like work. I do what I can to help and I try hard to ease the load for all of them.

I know that it is hard for all three of them. I cannot imagine being in a position in which my children have to care for me and it pains me sometimes to see it. It reminds me of the old saying that goes something like this:

“When a father helps a son to walk only the child cries but when a son helps a father to walk they both cry”

At the same time I am watching my mother’s parents age too. It is not such an easy thing but it is the price we happily pay to be able to have kept them around for so many years. I’d write more but I have lost my muse.

So instead of continuing I am going to provide links to other posts about my grandparents.

A Grandson’s Distraction

Married for More Than 70 Years

I Feel Your Pain And I Share My Own

Putting It All In Perspective

Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy but sometimes life can be challenging.

Addicted to Love

by 7 Comments

Have you ever been a part of relationship in which you were physically and emotionally addicted to a person. Have you ever found yourself so enamored and enraptured in them that you can get lost for hours just thinking about them.

Have you ever enjoyed the sheer ecstasy of smelling their pillow, of basking in their scent. Have you ever been so in love that just holding their hand made you smile.

Have you ever lived a dream.