Saturday, December 09, 2017

I think this is a social media, but it's the medium i go to when I want to write while hiding from social media. I believe there's something positive and unique about blogging.  I believe that personal blogging has a certain form, in short - the more real and free flowing the closer it is to what this is meant to be. Recently it was the 13th anniversary of my blog, this blog (I have a whole bunch of others). (I like the word bunch, though I've been criticized for this, by one person - though maybe it secretly bothers everyone.) In my first post I wrote that blogging was "my way of  calling G-d out of my depths." I also wrote lots of other things, that first time out. That first time out was a Saturday night at home, late.  Very similar to now.  I recently was talking with some people about years ago - going back like 12 years maybe and everyone had a story. Then I was asked where i was at and I said I was doing the same things - living in same place, doing same job, etc.  someone said that's impossible, and I guess in a way he was right, though I think largely he was wrong.  Much is the same, though there's some change. It's like that story about a man who took a picture on the street at the same time every day, daily, over years, and it looked the same but he knew it wasn't the same each time.  Mom and dad were here when this blog started and they were fans, and I could critique the style of the appreciation, but I took it then, and I'll take it still.  Dad once wrote me a beautiful email, in which he said that this blog allowed him to see and appreciate me better.  I'm feeling the loss of dad strongly.  Mom, still, too - but dad's moving on was more recent, so recent, so raw.  My assignment at work changes every year, and every year starts and ends and then the next one starts again, not like many other jobs - teching is unique in how things get dismantled and set up all anew again year after year.  And in my job in articular I have had many different preparations of classes, almost never teaching a class one year that I had taught the year before. I remember when dad finally understood that, that it wasn't a repeat of the same topic each year - I appreciated that he got it.  Dad.  I miss the Shabboses every other week, and the phone calls every day.  And much as there were pieces that were uncomfortable in being my age and being so associated for myself and others as a son, I am not over the loss of being identified that way, not fully ready to move on from it. 

It's been well over an hour since I wrote the paragraph above, and so it's gotten late (that's how it goes).  And yet, before sleep I want to write more,  Writing is big for me. I just looked back at the previous sentence and dislike it, it does not come close to saying how writing is a need I have, that if I don't write my life feels lacking, unhealthy, imbalanced.  And when I write I feel more like myself.

I've been asked by friends to give a public shiur about Chanukah.  i'm excited and afraid, so many ideas and I want to connect them.  I will give some headlines here, but it may be too shorthand to make sence.  There's the Rav Zevin piece about Ohr and Oor - light vs. fire and how it fits with the war and the oil and the opinion of Beit Shamai and Beit Hillel, there are two poems - one blatantly about Chanukah and one about darkness and light, there's the idea of pachim ketanim, caring about seeimngly small things, there's the famous oil vs. war question - Al HaNissim vs. Mai Chanukah and the Maharal's answer, and the question of why eight days and what I think of as the Rav Dovid Feinstein answer, one of a hundred answers collected in Ner LeMeah.  There's Mizmor Shir that we say daily and what it means for Chanukah and for every day, how the house is inside us, how we start new each morning and rededicate our insides, and so too as a people after hard times.  And there's the Gemorah about Adam.  An there's the similarity to the moon, and the fact that we go by the moon, a reflection of light, a more vulnerable light, and there's the fact that this is the only holiday with a Rosh Chodesh in it, and there's the statement of R Elyashuv that we don't see that Mizmor as about the Bet HaMikdash because we're so far from getting it, and there's the idea of the mood being in the air at the time of the holiday even before the holiday and how this is a time for light expanding from darkness, and that's thetheme of Bet Hillel too and that's the theme of everything relating to hanukah including the weak beating the strong, the light winning, and it fit's with Yosef getting out of the darkness of jail - so described by Chazal and with yaakob becoming Yisrael and the line of being lowered and raised like bucket and how that;s how it goes like in mitzrayim and galus in general how the darkness is needed for the light.....

Time to close, good night and G-d bless.

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