Wednesday is our new year's eve for year 5768. I was shocked to read that among the traditional foods eaten on the Jewish new year are black-eyed peas, which I always eat on the first day of the secular new year. So my Texas and Jewish heritages converge. The peas and other foods (such as sheep's head) supposedly arouse the heart to prayer. I am planning to make kosher gumbo, made without shellfish and also without the heads of fish or mammals. The fishmongers at Dirk's will even de-bone and cut up the fish for me. I recommend Dirk's for fish, but if you tell him that Cancer Bitch sent you, Dirk will not know what you are talking about.
My mother went to pick up her special security parking card today for her synagogue parking lot. This is in addition to her parking lot sticker, which was mailed to her. I am going to be taking the L to a little synogogue in Rogers Park, because the rabbi-who-married-us is no longer leading services at my usual place, DePaul. The little synagogue in Rogers Park is invisible. It meets inside a visible church. Just like our congregation met inside a Catholic university. In a way you could say we're hidden Jews but there are always signs pointing to where we are gathering. And if there are no signs you can just follow the guy on the street holding the velvet tallis bag.
I am reading "Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology" by Arthur Green. He doesn't talk (so far) about believing in God or not believing in God, but says that the Hebrew word for God is a verb, and that that verb is what's behind growth everywhere. And that we are all part of everything and each other, a notion that we would call Zen. Or physics. I know all this, that we are dust and air, and yet I am so critical of all who are Other. A blonde women in pink who is walking too slowly on Michigan Avenue. On the L a pudgy woman with dyed red hair in a housedress with mismatched seams, who is wearing earrings I wouldn't wear and whose sweat smells old. Should I move? Would it be rude to move? (She smells of hard work, lazy old Cancer Bitch.)
I'm equally judgmental about women who wear stiletto heels, because they show bad sense, retro politics and misplaced vanity. Unless they are reading books that I think show evidence of a live intellect. A therapist once suggested that I look at people as works of art. I have taken figure drawing and I should be able to do this. But I am critical. Of just about everything. Most of the thought that is underneath my thought has to do with comparing. I am trying to figure out if this person (in paisley, for instance) is as fat as I am or fatter. This is what girls are trained to do. Our comparing comes partly from our never being able to know exactly what we look like from the outside. Another part has to do with the patriarchy. The other other part has to do with keeping ourselves to ourselves. Yes, we are made of sand and ash like everybody else, but what if we really believed deep down to the bottom of our DNA that we were just made up of molecules and atoms and subatomic particles, just as everything and everyone else is--like this keyboard and the sidewalk and the person in paisley--would we then lose our outline? Would we merge with the rest of the world? Would our skin fly off and all our thoughts breeze away into the clouds?
Perhaps.
And that is why I am afraid of meditation.
This is all I have to say. Except: Read my scalp. (U.S. out of Iraq.)
No comments:
Post a Comment