Cookies

Coffee dehydrates, must drink water. Water's boring, I shift to Coke. Coke dehydrates, I feel tired, drink some coffee, cycle resumes.

Jewish mourning traditions are wonderful, they really are. I even like our coffinless funerals that involve no beautification of death. Jews are buried in shrouds, the shape of the corpses clearly visible. The dead is dumped into the grave rather than lain into it. Before the act, the rabbi reads a line of the Mishnah: "Know where you came from and where you are headed, and to whom you will need to explain your deeds. Where you came from: a smelly drop. Where you are headed: the place of gravel, insects and worms. To whom you will need to explain your deeds: to the king of the kings of kings." Merciless? indeed. Poetic? 100%.

I also like the "shiva", the seven days of community mourning, during which the family receives guests and the memory of the lost one is recreated in conversation. I like it - in theory. In practice, it's exhausting. We are at my uncle and aunt's place in a northern suburb of the city. There's a long wooden table in the back yard, an espresso machine and plenty of good cookies. On the third day of the shiva, I'm completely choked with cookies. We're all bound to gain a few pounds thanks to this tradition. Indeed, we risk being soon afflicted with atherosclerosis and getting dumped into the place of gravel, insects and worms.

Ours is not a very traditional shiva. We eat warm food. We sit on normal chairs rather than low stools. We bathe and shower through this week. We do not observe the ban on leather shoes or jewlery. The mirrors in the house are not covered (by far Judaism's spookiest custom), but my grandmother is sitting there in the shirt she wore at the funeral, with its collar that was torn by the rabbi. It's truly a heartbreaking sight. She will continue to wear this shirt throughout the weeklong observence. The shiva doesn't let her nor us forget for a moment how much her life just changed. This is its purpose, this is its curse.

A very different challenge of the shiva is the "bar-mitzvah effect". I happen to suffer from mild prosopagnosia - a neurological condition impending recognition of people by their faces. My bar mitzvah was an absolute nightmare. I knew nobody there. My grandfather's shiva is even harder. At least at 13 I was quite sure everyone was there for me. I was supposed to recognize them, so a friendly smile and feigned recognition were always in order. Here many people have no idea who I am, others are my direct uncles. I do my best not to mix them up, and fail.

But there's a lot of love going around here. My aunt warmly hugs her two ex husbands to the astonishemnt of all, old friends of my folks appear at the door, thrilling them with their presence. My grandfather left behind a rich life story, fit to fuel many a conversation. The way he died, calmly and painlessly after having a beer and watching the England-Germany match, gives a great little story with which to break the ice. His last phone call, ten minutes before his heart failed, involved a detailed critique of the English team's disastrous loss, so we even get to talk about the world cup. I just hope Wayne Roony knows to whom he needs to explain his deeds the day he kicks the Bucket. Shimon Yaar is waiting for him up there with a dish of fresh cookies and a few tough questions.

Bake Your Own!

I stopped keeping kosher on passover after baking my first matza. My ex-wife was a non-Jew who came from a religious home and loved the ceremony and symbolism of religious holidays. She came up with the idea: let's bake them ourselves.

The experience of baking matzot was so educational and so meaningful, that it made the restriction on consuming baked goods seem entirely meaningless. a matza must be prepared in no more than 18 minutes, from the moment water touches the flour, to the moment it's out of the oven. Preparing the matza in haste created a vivid simulation of the runaway experience. We actually felt as though we had only that night to excape from Egypt.

Passover is about keeping the story of the exodus in the culture and bequething it to the younger generation. Baking matzot does just that, eating matzot doesn't. I live in a country in which beer is banned from the taps for seven days. We can't buy breakfast cereal this week if our lives depended on it. Even soda bottles must carry a "kosher for passover" emblem on them in order to be sold (soda water included). What does breakfast cereal have to do with our mutual heritage? nothing. How does any of this bread-crumb paranoia educate us? It doesn't. In fact, it causes many to feel disdain towards the holiday. It's sacriligious.

Placing a culinary taboo can be effective in distinguishing a portion of the year as sacred and instilling a sense of uniqueness in people. However, in this case, it shifts the focus from the essence of the holiday to sheer nonesense, which is something Judaism's always been good at, as our various shabbat obssesions nicely reveal. The OCD behaviour common among the haredim at this time of year (they don't drink with the meals, lest a drop of water touched the matza and rendered it "chametz"), is further proof of that.

I call for a return to our roots. Lets seek reason, rather than act automatically on rules that have degenerated over millenia into idiocy. Let's eat lovely whole-wheat bread, pizza and hamburgers in a bun throughout passover, and lets bake matzot. I know it's hard to believe, but they come out tasty too.

P.S. Within minutes of publishing this post, top notch poet and editor Eli Hirsh added his two cents. He tells that in many Israeli communities in which chametz is difficult to obtain, passover has become the holiday of baking homemade bread. If anynoe needed proof that the restrictions beat the purpose - you've got it. Hirsh suggests mixing both baking experiences. I certainly have enough of an apetite to deal with that.

Beautiful, like Prophecies

When I moved into my Jaffa home, I bought myself a mezuzah: that little box that is attached to the door frame at the entry to every Jewish home. My neighbors in the building and around are mostly Muslim and Christian. I came to live in peace among them and hence felt fully comfortable in showing some cultural uniqueness.

The neighbors treated the mezuzah with full respect, but the neighborhood kids acted as kids would, removed it somehow from the door frame, and vanished with its content. Inside each mezuzah is rolled a tiny scroll bearing a biblical inscription commending Jews to love God. Since loving is not an act that can be willingly performed, but rather a feeling that stems from the heart, Judaism developed the mezuzah - a little box of love - as a symbolic form of observing the commandment.

I went to town and bought a new ceramic mezuzah for 12 sheqels, then felt conflicted. Should I really put 90 sheqels more into the scroll? these scrolls are made by special traditional scribes, they can't be gotten for any less than that, and what if the kids tear it off again? will I just spend the rest of my Jaffa days Sysiphically traveling to Allenby to buy more and more tiny scrolls, investing all my money and time in something I don't honestly believe in except as some pretty tradition?

Then I had an idea. The previous day I found and purchased a used copy of Yehuda Amichai's book of poetry "Behind all of This, Great Happiness is Hiding". In it was my single favorite poem in the Hebrew language, the one caled "Royal Love song". It begins thus:

You are beautiful, like prophecies,
And sad, like those that are fulfilled.
Silent with the silence of the aftermath
Black in the white solitude of Jasmine
Sharp fangs in the mouth: a she-wolf and a queen.

It's really not much of a sacred text, unless you believe, as I do, that sex is truly holy, and that no beauty is complete without darkness. Here's another bit:

You are beautiful like prophecies that are not fulfilled,
and this is the royal scar:
With the tongue, to pass over it, with the sharpened hand
Over the sweet roughness.

With hard shoes you knock
back and forth bars over me
Your wild rings
Are sacred leprosy of your fingers.

I ripped out the page, rolled it into the mezuza, then glued it to the wall with the toughest industrial glue I could find.

Since them, whenever I became a bit unlucky, I'd always wonder whether that was a good idea. a Jewish superstition has it that if things go wrong around the house, the mezuzahs should be examined with a magnifying glass for flaws. perhaps the scribe slightly misspelled something and thus inflicted the house's dwellers with cancer, financial collapse, etc.

Thankfully, I suffer from neither, but the past few weeks have been difficult, especially financially. this Sunday morning I woke up dreading the morrow: the first day of the month, when both my credit card bill is charged to my account and my rent is due. I was dealing with several difficult matters, worried about myself and others, feeling rather out of love and lonely, in short, distressed.

This is just when the best day of my year began. I got an offer to write regularly for the nation's most powerful newspaper, saved a book deal that was about to tank and successfully fought against a bad deal that was to scam me out of royalties for another book. miraculously fixed an annoying flaw in my bike, realizing while doing so that I have lost weight: my pants kept slipping off at I bent, threatening a plumber's exposure to passersby on Salame St.

I got everything fixed just in time for a casual lunch with a profoundly attractive, intelligent and unique acquaintance of mine. It turned into a truly romantic date that lasted well into the night. We went to watch "Four Minutes", a random German film, picked by name. somehow it turned out to deal with everything we were talking about beforehand and be a monumental piece of cinema neither of us will ever forget.

On arriving home I found, on the mat before my door (there my neighbors bring my mail from the box as neighborly courtesy), an envelope containing a check some publication owed me. It was for 2425 sheqels. My rent, due on that same date, stands at 2300.

On the envelope lay the mezuzah. It fell from the doorframe despite the heavy duty glue. When I picked it up, "Royal Love Song" fell out of it. I read a verse:

Out of the ground emerges
all that I wished never to see again
column and windowframe, portico and jar, shatters of wine.

Make of my tale what you will, but this is not going back in.

The Chariot

A friend (Yoram) lent me a book and exposed me to something I did not know existed: "chariot literature".

It turns out that between the second and sixth centuries, Jewish mystics mapped the heavens and wrote travel guides to the realm of angels and of God himself. These books, which read like something between Carlos Castaneda, "the Neverending Story" and Lonely Planet, are accepted by the Talmud, not to mention Kabbalist Judaism. This is Judaism proper and despite protests made by Mimonides and other party-poopers, is accepted as such to this day.

I never realized Judaism had a full on pantheist mythology, including such creatures as Metatron, the man-turned-angel who walks the visionaries through realms of burning rivers and splendiferous palaces, much like a-Yiddishe-Virgil. Metatron was second to God and allowed to sit on a throne in the grandest of the seven palaces of the most sublime realm. Jewish visionary Elisha Ben-Abuya saw him there and assumed that he was a second God. Both were punished: Elisha returned to earth and was declared an apostate, while Metatron had sixty torches of fire stuck between his seventy two wings and forced to stand upright like other angels.

What I read in this story is discomfort with the seeping of pantheist ideas into Judaism (which was at the time fighting to preserve its charecter twixt paganism, Christianity and Gnosticism). Judaism preserved its monotheistic core only on the surface. Underneath that, so long as the chariot literature is not decreed heretical, we are in fact the followers of a religion that believes in monsters with thousands of eyes and magical netherworlds into which people can disappear while in a state of trance.

The epitomy of the chariot literature is a book called "Shi'ur Koma", probably composed in the Holy Land during the second century, which supplies the reader with the exact measurments of God. Make no mistake, God is enormous, but he is nonetheless antropomorphic - a man with feet thousends of miles long, sitting on a levitating, chariot-like throne somewhere quite accesible (anybody said Bhagavad Gita?). The book was given a signature of authenticity by several prominant rabbies, among them the renowned Rabbi Akiva.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Rabbi Akiva and the rest of the ancient Castanedas. Their Judaism is so much more fun than that of my old, semi-religious elementary school in Jerusalem. There we were taught that God is an invisble, conservative, mundane figure, that he spends his time looking over us as we copy in tests (this is actually echoed in "Shiur Koma") and that we should wait nicely for the bell before going out to play football in the dusty, gravelly yard with our yarmulkas hanging off the clips in our hairs.

Add a little bit of imagination to that, and you would have had me praying much more loudly in the mornings. Fortunately they hadn't.