Monday, March 4, 2024

Not Alone

 CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG


Written by Moss & Rotchin


There was one who said that she felt lonely,

There was one who begged me to come home,

There was one who told me that she loved me,

And I told her she was not alone, she was not alone.


There are times things just don't seem right,

There are times you feel it in your bones,

And you know there's something that she's hiding,

When she speaks you hear it in her tone.


In her eyes I saw what she was thinking,

In her eyes I saw she wasn't true,

That was when I felt my heart was sinking,

I could tell she saw just what I knew, saw just what I knew.

 

There was one who said that she felt lonely,

There was one who begged me to come home,

There was one who told me that she loved me,

And I told her she was not alone.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Always Between

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG


I've got me a job,

I guess it's okay,

Don't care very much,

But it's worth the pay.


I've got me a girl,

Yeah, she's alright,

Watch movies, have dinner, 

Almost never fight.


Sometimes I think, 

There's another way,

Choices I could make,

Before I go gray.


Take myself down,

A different road,

Where the sky is wide,

The air not cold.


Ain't as young as I was,

Or as old as I'll be,

It feels somehow, 

Like I'm always between.


My girl ran away,

Took part of me,

All she left behind, 

A mountain of lonely.


Used to have buddies,

Shared a game and a beer,

They're off doing something,

Or so it appears.


My folks worry 'bout me,

Say my life's a dead-end,

I'm happy they're talking,

Since their marriage did end.


I may not go far,

Whatever 'far' means,

I'm heading somewhere,

I'm always between.


Ain't as young as I was,

Or as old as I'll be,

It feels somehow, 

Like I'm always between.

Friday, March 1, 2024

A State For The Jews

A state for the Jews, or a Jewish state? This dilemma, which has been at the heart of Israel's identity for at least the last 40 years, is coming to a head. Reframed, the question is really about whether Israel is to be a democracy or a theocracy. It has been moving toward theocracy for political reasons at least since the mid-1980s, as the secular right-wing Likud Party saw that the only way it could maintain its stranglehold on power was to consolidate an alliance with the religious parties. Today, Israel is a divided nation, as divided as it has ever been in its 75 year history. And now, the war with Hamas has brought those divisions to the fore with a new move to eliminate the exemption of Haredi military service. Some points to keep in mind... 

Point 1: Israel was never meant to be the guardian of Orthodox Judaism. Quite the opposite. There were 37 signatories to Israel's Declaration of Independence, and only three were rabbis. The signatories were chosen to represent a broad cross-section of the yishuv (the pre-Independence settlement Jewish society). There is no overt mention of God in the document (unlike the US Declaration of Independence which mentions God in the first paragraph). There was some debate surrounding whether or not to include it. Most of the signatories were strongly against any reference to God, but they finally settled on including the euphemistic term 'Rock of Israel' near the end of the document. They rationalized that secular Jews would understand that phrase in the literal sense as the Land of Israel. The Zionist movement(s) that inspired the creation and building of the modern State was decidedly secular, beginning with Herzl who envisioned a country where Jewish culture could flourish together with European heritage within a society that balances the best of Capitalism tempered by elements of Socialism. Religion did not factor, except in the sense that freedom of religion had to be a basic right. Herzl wrote, "Matters of faith were once and for all excluded from public influence...Whether anyone sought religious devotion in the synagogue, in the church, in the mosque, in the art museum, or in a philharmonic concert, did not concern society. That was his [own] private affair."

Point 2: In 1948 the exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox was justified by the need to restore the Torah world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. At the time it made sense on a couple of levels. The Haredim of this era were a relatively small minority of the country. In subsequent decades, the explosion of the birth rate in the religious community combined with their aliyah (immigration to Israel), and the comparative collapse of secular births together with their emigration from Israel, means that one in four young Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox by the end of this decade.

Point 3: Military service in Israel is a central factor of cohesion in Israeli society, reflecting a sense of civic responsibility and creating networks of lifelong interpersonal bonds. It's commonly seen as the great social equalizer, of the rich and the poor, of cultural groups and traditions, of the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Yemeni. The Haredi exemption did the opposite. It split society in two, creating a division of two main specialized classes of citizens, as it were, distorting the social contract of Israeli society. The exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox generated a two-tier society in which haredim were seen as 'privileged', and secular citizens who served in the military increasingly grew to resent them for it. There is the sense that society's burdens are not equally shared, with secular Israelis paying the heavier price. As it was put in a recent article,"...the time has come to strip the Israeli flak jacket from the haredim..."

Point 4: As Israel has become more religious and politically dominated by religious movements - who themselves have become more extreme as exemplified by the push to expand settlement of biblical Judea and Samaria - it has become more alienated from the secular Jewish diaspora. In recent decades Israel has trumpeted its economic independence and strength, at the same time as it has become increasingly isolated within the international community, and direct involvement of the United States in the Middle East has receded. The traditional alliance between Israel and the United States is fraying, and we can expect it will continue to fray as long as successive Israeli (right-wing/religious) governments define themselves in terms that are antagonistic to the west. Some don't think it matters, or that it's temporary. I don't believe it's temporary, nor do I believe tiny Israel can afford to lose the support of the secular Jewish diaspora.

Israel continues shifting away from an open secular democracy toward a socially fragmented, institutionally atrophied, theocracy at its peril. It's splitting the country apart. The so-called Judicial reform proposed last summer was part of it. Israel is at a crossroads. Hopefully, the post-war period will result in a political and cultural reckoning that will re-calibrate the country's navigation system toward the secular democracy and home to all Jews that it was always meant to be.   

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Riding a Bike

We live in a constant state of anticipation. Always waiting for the resolution of conflict. Our minds and bodies exist in a permanently agitated condition, in the throes of omnipresent anxiety and duress, and we don't even realize it, because we are not in the moment. 

It's hoping for a temporary ceasefire in the Middle East that will bring hostages home. 

It's waiting on the next judicial decision in any one of the number of cases against Donald Trump. What it will mean for the future of democracy, and maybe even the world.

It's the news, the notifications, the messages bombarding us on our phones. 

It's thinking about what others think. Caring about what others care about.

It's the obsession with things that are beyond our control. The anxiety of the unknowable future.

I'm thinking about how two of my children never learned to drive a car. One of my children never learned to ride a bicycle. When she was in her late teens I tried to teach her, but it was very difficult to the point of frustration. Like learning language, riding a bike seems to be much easier when you are younger. She eventually gave up trying. Perhaps my kids (they're adults now) will never know the feeling of mastering a skill to such an extent that it feels so natural they don't think about it. When people use the expression, 'you never forget, it's like riding a bike' they get it wrong. Riding a bike has nothing to do with memory. Riding a bike is the opposite of memory, it's un-remembering what you've worked so hard to learn, until the point that no thought whatsoever is involved. It becomes a skill that your body just 'knows' by feeling, your senses are calibrated precisely to achieve balance through acceleration and momentum. It's what your mind and body feel like when they're in the moment, the barrier between oneself and the world outside has fallen away, and you are inseparable from the forces that govern your movement. In fact, if you were to 'think' about riding a bike while you were doing it, the chances of faltering probably increase. It doesn't mean you don't have to pay attention. Of course you do. If you didn't pay attention to the road you'd hit the curb, or god forbid, a pedestrian. But what are you actually paying attention to? Not the mechanics of riding/driving. Not your body or thoughts in action. You are paying attention to the moment and your surroundings as you move through space and time. Your mind is not wandering off. You are in the moment so much so that your emotions and thoughts are untethered to anything but the moment itself. It's the mind-body 'problem' resolving into balance.  

I am reminded of the Zen-Buddhist teacher Alan Watts who described one indispensable qualification needed by a person to comprehend the path of Zen, "...he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously...He must be free of the itch to justify himself."

But back to bike riding. I get a kick out of seeing those serious helmeted cycling dads, clad in stretchy, sleek, fashionable body-hugging apparel, riding on their $20,000 titanium racers up and down Mount-Royal. I respect their desire to keep in shape, and cycling is great heart-health exercise, but do they have to look like they're competing for a gold medal? I was a pretty serious cyclist myself in my late teens. Bought a state-of-the-art 18-gear racer and went on two or three day cycling trips with a buddy through the Green Mountains in Vermont or the Adirondacks in New York. That was forty years ago and a phase that didn't last long. A few years ago while cleaning out the garage I came across my old bike. The chain was rusty and the wheels were flat. It looked decrepit. There was another adult racer in the garage that must have belonged to one of my kids. It was driveable. So, unhelmeted, I took it for a quick spin. It was a warm sunny day. Instantly, it all came back to me. I don't mean how to ride, of course, that did. I mean the feeling of being at one with my body and the wind, the untethered feeling of serenity and careless joy. 

What does riding a bike have to do with the hostages in Gaza, American politics and the future? No idea. Probably nothing. But does it really matter?  

Zen

I heard a Buddhist 

       once give a talk about Zen;

not a word of truth.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Up is Down, Down is Up

This week we had the murder of Alexey Navalny, Russian anti-corruption crusader and leader of the opposition against Putin and his tyrannical oligarchy. Putin killed him, either by direct order or by gradually poisoning him and then sending him to a brutal Siberian penal colony. In response to Navalny's murder, Donald Trump, who is a sociopathic narcissist incapable of empathy, sympathy or even seeing anything from anyone else's point of view, commented on Navalny's 'sudden' death that it made him more aware of how America was corrupt and in 'decline'. What he meant was that he sees himself as being 'persecuted' by the American legal system after two recent massive monetary civil case judgments against him, and two major federal indictments. Of course, the comparison to Navalny is absurd. Trump is an adjudged rapist and white-collar criminal who lives in a multi-million dollar Palm Beach estate. He is the exact opposite of a corruption fighter like Navalny, whose only crime was speaking out against Putin. Trump is using the news of Navalny's death to impugn American rule of law. In Russia, where using the term 'war' to describe the war in Ukraine is 'illegal', there is no rule of law, only rule by an all-powerful tyrant. To suggest that the rule of law in America bears any resemblance to what passes for a legal system in Russia is Orwellian. Navalny's persecution bears zero similarity to Trump's criminality, it's the opposite. By erasing the distinction, Trump wants to subvert the meaning of right and wrong and turn America into a Russia-style tyranny.

The world in which we live, the shape of reality, is constructed from words. Change the meaning of the words and the construction shifts and potentially collapses. It's that fragile.

We learned the truism of the importance of words, that they construct our world, in our biblical reckoning of how the world was spoken into existence. "And God said 'Let there be light / God saw that the light was good / And He separated the light from the darkness." Spoken words bring the physical world into existence, and the words embody meaning that separates opposites. When words lose their capacity to distinguish (light and dark), the foundational meaning on which the world is constructed collapses.

In his novel 1984 Orwell updated the idea when he described how the essence of (Soviet-type) totalitarian control over people hinged on subverting the dilalectical principle of meaning that undergirds civilization, with phrases like "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” If words mean their opposite, there is effectively no meaning at all. In physical terms it's like a negative and positive canceling out coherence and truth.  

These are some of the opposite-equivalences we are experiencing in the public informational sphere that are intended to cancel out meaning: 

Self-Defense is Genocide
Insurrection is Patriotism
Criminality is Innocence
Freedom is Subservience 
Losing is Winning
Justice is Persecution
Victimization is Virtue

This week, with Navalny's death, it felt to me like the foundations of global order were shaking. I couldn't comprehend why. Trump comparing himself to Navalny clarified it for me. Order slips into chaos when language loses its meaning.   

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Bob Barker (the song)

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG


A boy at home

Nursing a cold

Bored and hopeless

Watching daytime soaps

 

The game shows

Oh the game shows

Saved the day 

For a boy so bored


No one smarter

Than Bob Barker

No one smarter

Than Bob Barker


The way that he smiled

And the way he spoke

Made contestants excited 

Gave them hope


Johnny calls a name

Says come on down

For a chance to win prizes

Jump on stage and dance around 


No one smarter

Than Bob Barker

No one smarter

Than Bob Barker


An animal lover

Cause there's nothing cuter 

Than loving your pets   

So get them spayed or neutered


Bob Barker Bob Barker

Made the world better

Guess the right price

And you're the winner


No one smarter

Than Bob Barker

No one smarter

Than Bob Barker


Spin the big wheel

Nearest to a dollar

To the showcase showdown 

With Bob Barker


Bob Barker and his beauties

Janice, Dian and Holly

Will cure any boy 

Of his melancholy.