What we Carry

Often thought that the things in my bags and pockets shed n light on somehow my essence, or at least paint a staccato picture of my inner world.

Wallet with it's credit cards, string of IDs over time, frequent flyer cards, a few different currencies
Bags with siddurim, pain killers, lots of water.
Shlepping back from the States with - favors - a Fender '67 Strat, three boxes of Bran Buds, and two packages of corn holders.
Celebrate, from time to time, that my pockets are no longer the place of lighters and cigarettes, contraband, and the means of its administration.
A box of a house packed in with holy books, vinyl records, a guitar I don't play, and too many computers.

Looking for an empty bag now, Ignorance by far the more valuable than knowledge.

Dynamic Tension at 90 kph

So out here in the Wild West Bank there's a culture of hitchhiking. A finger pointed down means local, a finger out means long distance. There's almost always someone on the road. Since I have a car, I usually stop. But something bothers me about it. Nothing in the culture; I think it's beautiful. It's not the danger of it either, not exactly. It's that as soon as I have a hitchhiker in my car, I'm tense. The best I can formulate is that I'm socially tense. I am keenly aware of the person in the car.

I picked up a young woman tonight (okay, so she was cute, that's mostly immaterial to the progression of our story.) I made a touch of small talk, and then the silence set in. I felt the tension, palpable. It has a similar flavor every time - nothing accidental, nothing really to do with who the other person is, clearly coming from me.

I decided to face it. I pulled out my psycho-spiritual tool bag. I acknowledged it, the tension, gave myself some sympathy, stepped outside it, then a new tool - sat in the tension in a light meditation of not knowing - active not knowing, real open ignorance, then consciousness of God's name, God's presence, in everything, in me, in the the young woman next to me, in this feeling, in this tension, all the time not knowing - not needing to know.

A realization - when someone gets in your car in the West Bank, for all of the assumed nonchalance of it, they are offering you a deep trust. It creates a bond, a deep bond, a trust of life. But really - they don't know you. You're just a guy driving a car. There's a connection and no connection, a bond and no bond, a trust and a strangeness. The conversations that happen in a car seldom get to the level of intimacy that has to be present for the person to step through the door and sit down. That's the tension.

I was so excited, I told the young woman.

Now that I'm writing about it, I think it might also be the weirdness in a lot of perfunctory relationships. The salespeople in stores, the guys handing out flyers in the street. They all have eyes, souls, and the flitting relationships are an ill-fitting mask for the deep currents that underlie all human contact. It's just more pronounced in a closed car in the Wild West Bank.

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Up-date

I'm working it in. Can't not. Thank God. So so so so important.
Still struggling with the early morning wrestle.

Set Adrift in Foreign Lands

Some people are set on fire by slichot (the penitential prayers leading up to Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur.) The best I usually do is slog through them. I'd be much more open to some sort of active exploration of how to improve myself and what I've done wrong in the past - almost any sort of searching. The heavy poetry and page after page of words words words doesn't do it for me. I've got to set aside time to do the real work of Tshuva, but with early morning slichot and a full schedule - how am I supposed to work it in?

Yours truly,
Searching in Jerusalem

A Way from my Window

On Sexuality

After reading MCAryeh's incendiary post on homosexuality and orthodoxy, I felt the need to throw in my opinion. I agree with his support of the individuals involved as people. I admire his listening and his care.

However, just looking at the issue in itself...

Where do we find that a person has a god-given right to have sex with who they are attracted to?

For the past nine years, while I have been halachically observant, attracted to women, and unmarried - I haven't had any sexual relationships. This is not for any lack of desire, trust me. That's the way the law goes.

And there's reason to the law. Sexual contact has an enormous power to damage individuals, corrupt societies, and twist the world to fit its animalistic image.

I saw the world it created as I grew up a sexually active teenager in a sexually driven society.

The law aims to contain a volatile force - allow its positive expression, but keep it from finding its full, and damaging, expression.

Is the attraction to people of the same sex natural? Sure. Is a strong sexual attraction normal? I don't think it's terribly rare. Is the expression of that sexual attraction helpful in any way to the individuals involved or society? I strongly doubt it.

I think that for a Torah Jew, the homosexual act is like any other act of conscious breaking with halacha. Generally, it serves immediate desires and does long term damage.

Am I dooming the person who can't bear to think of heterosexual sex to live a sexless life? Uhh, yeah. I've been there. It's liberating.

It's part of the damage that rampant sexuality has done that we think this is a fate worse than death.