cremains | Crime

I had a dream that H. and I were working in a Korean-owned community theatre. Just before the show, H. went off to the forest to search for diamonds. Unfortunately, crack dealers were also out looking for drugs, and I was worried they would think he was after their stash. I went through the forest looking for him to bring him back to the theatre. In a little path covered with vines, I saw what looked like a dead monkey fetus, but when I looked closer I saw it was sort of white and sparkly. Was it a freakish diamond, or crack in a bag in a weird shape? I bent down to examine it but had to run away and hide from the dealers.

In class in real life, my esteemed teacher made a comment like "of course, nobody wears tefilin on Hol HaMoed." He then somehow caught my eye and read my mind, as he is scarily able to do, and exclaimed in a shocked voice "Yonah! Why!" I said that wearing tefilin on hh"m was the practice and assumption of Chaza"l as recorded in the Yerushalmi. He said, "So?" and I was at a total loss for words. For me, recreating the thinking of Chaza"l is sort of an end in and of itself. "So you're a textualist is what you're saying," he said, but that also confused me and didn't seem right. People who call themselves textualists often, to my thinking, miss the point of what Chaza"l were trying to say and do, and fail to consider that the very same ethical logic that resulted in X in their case may result in Y in our case. Also, my esteemed teacher hates "textualists" and I don't want that he should think of me as one.

By accident, I found a quote that explains my relationship to the Talmud extremely well, and maybe other people's relationship to stories/texts that move them greatly. It was talking about the reaction of the real Mafia to the film "The Godfather" and how their love for it altered their reality:

They not only loved it—-they adopted it as their own, employing the term [screenwriter] Puzo invented (the Godfather) and frequently playing the movie’s haunting theme music at their weddings, baptisms, and funerals. “It made our life seem honorable,” Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, of the Gambino crime family, later told The New York Times, adding that the film spurred him on to commit 19 murders, whereas, he said, “I only did, like, one murder before I saw the movie.… I would use lines in real life like, ‘I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse,’ and I would always tell people, just like in The Godfather, ‘If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.’”
(citation)

It illustrates the power of stories and of seeing a depiction of yourself as you wish to be, whether for bad as in the 19 murders, or for the good, or in my case simply for the weird and socially alienating.

Sometimes I contemplate drawing a mirror-gendered biography of the Vilna Gaon.

***

Speaking of my esteemed teacher, I had a test on mourning customs the other day. In order to prepare, I took one of the Israeli rabbanut's tests from previous years. What was insanely exhilarating was that I could totally do it; it was fine, it was actually fun. This fact at first made me incredibly happy, then just as much depressed.