Assorted Thoughts

The Rambam was six years old when Rabi Yehuda HaLevi died. In his biography on HaLevi, Hillel Halkin imagines an aged Rabi Yehuda HaLevi holding an infant Rambam. HaLevi is one of our Torah giants. Halkin does a great job of discussing this man, his milieu, and his work. Poetry and a poetic sensibility seem to be at the center of a proper of understanding of HaLevi.

The term neo-Platonism came up at my most recent Shabbos dinner. Of course. Someone expressed great displeasure with the popular frum dichotomy between body and soul. She said that it's not found in Torah or Chazal, the the terms ruchniyut and gashmiyut are not originally Hebrew, but are translations of concepts that are not integral to Judaism. This resonated for me and reminded me of a poem I once wrote (before the leaves that were green turned to brown). I'll include it at the end of the post to avoid distraction.

A Shabbos guest of mine was learning and "giving over" Torah of the Mei Shiloach. I've heard of the sefer via Shlomo Carlebach and his students. The present rabbi of the Carlebach Shul likes to teach from this sefer as does the Rav who gave me smicha. His thoughts on the episode of Pinchas' act of zealotry are among his most controversial and difficult to understand. I just wrote the vort and it disappeared, and I'm going to take that as a sign.

What is memory, and what is experiences that remain? I feel like I don't remember much of anything, but that which I experience stays with the the way barnacles stick to a ship. Some like this about me, some really don't - some like it sometimes but not others. Sometimes I like this aspect of myself, sometimes it feels burdensome. Sometimes I think people who don't experience things strongly and then don't remember them are blessed. Sometimes it hurts when someone tells me something deeply personal or experiences a deep moment with me and it doesn't stay with them. Sometime I do a magic trick - I tell people things about themselves that they are shocked that I know. The trick is that I was there when they told me, very there.

For me it's too early - and there may never be a time that - to have anything to express other than sadness and an acceptance of G-d's will regarding the crazy and tragic abduction and murder of a child in Borough Park last week. It seems disrespectful in several directions to be use this tragedy in way way as part of being pedantic or mussar-ey.

Remembering is a form of forgetting. We experience and process things we see, hear, do and feel and then we rinse, repeat and integrate until we're convinced that the story we tell is the one we lived - and we did, but the fact that we lived a memory doesn't mean that it happened the way we went through it. Like a wave, everyone gets hit by events differently, by another part of the splash.

I think I like stories best when they don't have a plot. I can spin a yarn because I know people like that. And I can enjoy twists and turns of narrative. My favorite part though is the capturing of characters and scenes. This is why I love the movie (that many found slow and un-special) Going In Style, which I saw many years ago and just watched for the second time.

Are Those Rubber Sole Shoes?

By Neil Fleischmannn

One day my body

will fall away

like a peanut shell.

That's what I learned 

in my yeshiva days.

Those were just words,

and that was long before

the nut started cracking,

filling with dotted lines

to tear upon.n

Those were just words,

spoken without due respect

to "the irrelevant piece",

"the unessential

the husk."n

I'm 45 and it's 7:20

treadmill sweat trickles my head.

I self inflict pain because I -

the rider and the horse -

I want to stay alive.