πάσχειν γάρ τι τὸ μανθάνειν ἀτεχνῶς ἐστι

Consumption

2013-07-05T10:46:27Z

I dreamt I was walking through a fairy fair. There was a wide, dusty yellow road, and on either side stretched little wooden booths as far as the eye could see, selling jewellery, perfumes, and all manner of foods. I saw people I knew buying food from the booths and warned them, "Don't eat fairy food! Don't buy from fairies at all!" but nobody paid me much attention. I thought it wouldn't be so bad if they bought a beautiful necklace and in the morning it turned out to be a little pile of rocks, but to eat fairy food meant you would get stuck in their kingdom forever.

Finally I came to a building that the kids and I used to walk past when I brought them home, which we called "hajungel" because it had a swimming pool inside and great big vents on the outside which blew very hot and humid air. In the dream I was walking to this "jungle" because class was about to start with my teacher, all about kashruth. At the door I suddenly realised I hadn't been wearing my arm tefilin, which was alarming. I found it in my satchel and pulled it out, but just then my teacher came walking by. "Hello, Yonah," he said to me. I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of him by showing myself to be weird and extremist, so I put the tefilin back in my satchel. As I did so, I noticed it had a little tear in the strap. I wanted to ask about it, but we went inside (where it was Pardes) and class began.

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Crime

2011-11-23T18:30:22Z

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.

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The Hydric Violin

2011-09-01T08:17:43Z

In this dream, I was the "French ambassador to London" (I looked like a police inspector from the age of Victor Hugo). I had a sparse wooden desk in an enoromous, clean but abandoned train station. There were giant windows and it was always, always raining.

There were ripples in my desk and what appeared to be tunnels under them; same thing with the worn-out runner carper going from my desk to nowhere in the middle of the room. It was understood that these were infested with mice.

Lestrade, a detective from the Sherlock Holmes stories, arrived with another officer. They inspected the tunnels and told me they would have to play "the hydric violin" to flush them out with water and kill the mice. The hydric violin turned out not to be a lot like a violin but rather a grotesque and complicated brass pump.

The perspective of the dream suddenly changed and I was a mouse in the tunnel, watching as their huge faces peered in through the hole before being replaced at last with the violin pump.

*

An email from my Esteemed Teacher arrived recently; he wrote to say he finally picked up my test on hilkhoth Shabbath and marked the first ten on the bus. He said "So far you are doing okay." Since "okay" is code for "You are mentally deficient," or my greatest fear, "Almost as good as the boys' tests," this threw me into a depression. But I was almost there anyway so this is probably just my excuse.

The strange exhaustion sickness continues.

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Vulcan

2010-09-21T21:38:51Z

I'm learning towards smicha from a rabbi whom I accidentally entered into my cellphone as "hikh." This is a response of R Hikh to a comment I made regarding electricity and Shabbat candles: "[name here], what is the matter with you? I mean, I consider myself a rationalist but I'm not a... not a Vulcan!" I'm obviously very proud of such a description.

Dream described in an email to my sister:

Dear [sister],

I dreamed that you worked for "Herpes Canada." Your department figured out a way to cure Herpes by sending people emails with a double "s" in the sender's address. You wrote your department a scathing email yourself saying that it was stupid and beneath a government organisation to send from a "bulky" email address. Somehow you made that sound very funny and I woke up laughing. I tried to explain the joke to [spouse], who didn't even realise it was supposed to be funny. I said "I think the truly funny part was [sister] working for Herpes Canada anyway" and then had a laughing fit so intense and so prolongued that I began to fear a serious medical source to my laughter.

Love,
[name here]

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