Thursday, October 13th 2022
The latest map reading
Zelinski talks about the second wave of rockets…
DW tells us about the G7 nations being in after the missile attacks throughout Ukraine. The world is calling this simple terrorism.
Here is Denys Davydov with the specifics.
The Americans are in… but they are planning on the weeks, months and years ahead. In other words, the defense industry is making money.
Proof of this also reaches Germany where the war in Ukraine means more funding for the German military.
About the Russians, here is a strange piece from India about Sergey Surovikin, a ruthless man, who is now in charge of the war/terrorism effort. There are quite a few cricket references here which is pretty strange. But the information is there once they get to it. Basically, it’s about drama and a lack of fear for using violence against civilians.
Meanwhile, the BBC covers the extensive mass exodus of men who do not want to participate in Putin’s “vanity” war.
One way to think about this is like a microcosm of globalization generally. It is what has been happening to the world for the last couple of decades where the shift away from communities having not only rights to self-determination but that the texture of life is that people did have to take care of themselves to allowing corporations to do all of the work for them. In this case, it’s almost starting to look like professional wrestling. The rations are playing the bad guy and playing up how much hatred they can get from the audience. But it really doesn’t matter because money is flowing and Russia will get just as rich as “the good guys”.
One of the first things I noticed about the world was during the 1980s. I guess I was pretty fresh in the world so to me, I was just interested in what my place in the world would be. During the 1970s, when I was just a boy, I remember seeing a New York where the place seemed to be full of entrepreneurs. It was a time where the so-called “American dream” was in full bloom. It was a time where an individual could try and establish for themselves a place where they could interact with the community and perhaps get enough support from the community to pay for their family. I just remember noticing that the world seemed to be built on the backs of small businesses, microscopic really, where you had something called an owner operator. This meant that the person who held the contract actually came to work everyday and it was just a matter of someone doing their job and having available people to help them do it. Everybody made their money this way.
But then suddenly all of this started to change. I usually think of the villains in this as being Walmart, Kmart, the price club and other such massive corporate entities that started to show up and take business away from the small-time individual local operators. Where before, you had hundreds and thousands of individuals all creating a community tapestry, now you had one monolith agency that had really no local basis for existence except to undercut prices and therefore drive all of those small-time entrepreneurs out of business. Before you had 20 small operations servicing a community with 20 owner operators playing an active role in that community, now you had one store doing those 20 functions and 1,000 wage slaves taking the place of community members who no longer have a vested interest.
The effect of this business landscape gentrification is that you have two negatives playing a part in almost all communities. The first is that you now have a siphoning of profits towards a distant centralized location and secondly you have less people who are pillars of the community because they no longer have that vested interest in the coming soon goings of their town. You create poverty and apathy where before you had some vibrancy and energy. Basically, you sell people that saving money is good but in fact your breeding poverty and apathy which of course festers like cancer.
Over the last 20 years, this has been basically the same thing that happened here but it worked in a slightly different way. The state already was everywhere and the actual “small businesses” didn’t really exist as actual entities. In the states, you could go to City Hall and get your business license and open up your pickle business on the corner. This was a legitimate place of business and there was some oversight as to quality. Here, it was just a tapestry of self-sufficient people who helped each other out. The entire world was under the table here. There was the state system and they were basically here just to provide raw stolen materials to everyone else. This may seem chaotic, and it absolutely was with no legal oversight as to quality anywhere, but this is the way the world was and this is how people lived.
A lot of my interactions with Ghenna are exactly old school Soviet soyuz in this regard. This is not Sly knowledge, I make jokes about this with him all the time. Of course, he laughs at anything I say but the truth is still the truth. He may be a drunk but he does have that old school pragmatism that materials are materials and common ownership is simply the rule of law. Unfortunately this is also true for the vodka.
Anyway, over the last while we here have been experiencing the exact same gentrification. I’ve seen many, many stories where small individual businesses get wiped out to make way for larger corporate businesses who take the food out of local entrepreneurs’ mouths and do exactly the same damage as the big corporations were doing in the United States back in the 1980s. Whereas before, being patriotic meant working with your community and being available, now though was simply nothing but to find your money from your job and go to the corporate stores and buy whatever garbage they wanted to sell you.
Unfortunately, the vibrancy of the argument that used to be at the heart of that functioning self-sufficiency regardless of “legality” now got used to be abusive to anyone not towing the line for the new wave of doing business. Whereas before, it was basically love for your neighbors that kept things going, now it was adherence to State policy. They still told people to be together, they still used words like “our people” and “them”, but now it was done without happiness, with an air of violence and the demands for people to conform rather than accepting the fact that joining would put you in the pocket of love.
For me, this journey here began with exactly this sort of American entrepreneurialism. The only people that rejected me were the state people. When I attempted to teach at the high schools and local University, I was sent off with a political message that they did not need foreign advisors to tell them their business. They were pretty brutal about it and wasted quite a bit of my time. It didn’t bother anybody that they left me in poverty with no way to make any money. The state simply rejected me as an American. If I didn’t like it, I could go back to America.
My salvation however was in the community itself. When I first opened my doors, all I did was put a few posters on some light posts and suddenly I was flooded. My teaching simply grew exponentially. I could not stop the flood of people coming to see me. This was word of mouth. People spoke to each other and I became a part of the Pinsk community. And yes, that pocket of Love did exist. I couldn’t go to the market without people coming up to me to ask for help with their kids. And yes, I worked tirelessly for this community and absolutely enjoyed my place in it.
Let’s be completely honest though, the state never stopped being against me. They never took their foot off my throat. But for the most part, all it took for me was to pay my taxes and my business just never stopped. The state may not have liked having a foreign operator doing business but the natural marketplace was mine. No one ever complained and I was busy about 65 hours a week.
If you don’t count the economic disasters that wiped out years worth of profit several times, this was how I ended up paying for my house and my retirement. Just saying.
But then the Russians went to Ukraine and Russian businesses began to appear in Belarus. The small local scene was crushed, the internet took away our community newspaper, we all became snobs for “Euro style”, the state started dismantling the Soviet era structures in favor of new apartment buildings and new business complexes, prefabricated superstores and supermarkets came in, KFC came in, we discovered pizza and hamburgers and sushi, everybody started getting fat, everybody started buying cars, the fresh air went away, the river died and stopped freezing in the winter, the weather became miserable, diabetes started to go up through the roof and every year they made new laws to kill the local markets.
When I tell this story now, it is because this war to me seems to be just another step in the gentrification process. Whatever they do now throughout Ukraine with all of this “bad guy” terrorism is going to need to be rebuilt by somebody. And like it or not and even if it is some kind of puppet local ownership, the building materials are going to come from Russia or Europe or somewhere where some corporation can afford the packaging and the shipping. Everything is going to require trucks and movement which is going to require gasoline. Everything is going to be rebuilt as a part of the New World order. Whatever ever was in Ukraine including the landscape and anything that was ever left of natural ecology is going to go with it.
It’s bread and circuses. It is simply stress being placed on a particular area and in this public wrestling match where everybody is joining together in their hatred of the bad guys, the military industrial complex is making a fortune and soon the corporations are going to make a fortune in the cleanup and the rebuild. Everything creates profit and everything destroys any sense of individualism or even our connection with the natural world.
Just one more small facet. When I was doing translations for the Norwegians and Tatiana Britskaya, most of the stories centered on how the United Russian party was manhandling both the indigenous people and the small towns in Arctic Western Russia. The oil business, large corporations and groups sponsored by the state we’re basically doing nothing but abusing dying local towns and cultures. Whereas before, the Soviet Union was establishing at least the basic resources to keep communities alive, now there was nothing left for individuals to work with and only the profit-making enterprises remained. The towns dried up, people fell into alcoholism and lawlessness and of course everything was now held together by State security services rather than love. You were now violently obliged to toe the line rather than obliged to stay in the pocket of the community that took care of you.
One of the final stories I did, and these are all in my book, Found in the Translation, which is on sale on Amazon right now, was about the rebuilding of the region around the Norilsk Nickel smelting plant after they closed their doors and left. The damages done to the local landscape, ecology of the region, the health of people who lived there including an egregious uptick in cancer and the economy when all the money went away was supposed to be covered in something like a parachute for the community. The company was to put money into rehabilitation projects and fund New opportunities so that the community itself could carry on. Inevitably though, the actual money was never put into the community at all. It was paid instead to the building supply companies and the oligarch who ended up building a project so far away from the community that no one ever saw a penny.
That’s the game that’s being played. Putin never actually gets touched. The Russian machine never actually feels the sting of a bullet. It doesn’t bother them to send their own men into a meat grinder. It doesn’t matter what happens to their lives. The individual is meaningless against the weight of the machine. And if the ukrainians are burning with hate for the Russians, they are welcome to pick up Russian weapons and shoot Russian bullets and kill a few Russians so that they can waive their flags and retake their broken villages which is going to require a lot of Russian oil and building materials to put back together. And of course now, even if the Russians don’t win this war, the moment they stop fighting, the sanctions will be lifted and the money will start to flow in from Europe and nothing will have happened except a few rich people got richer and thousands upon thousands of hapless poor people got buried. And then there’s all the money to be made while everybody has to work to rebuild their lives in a world that no longer has a community to help them. Everybody’s got to pay corporate prices because there won’t be any other game in town.
***
By the way, my time with my student came to an end yesterday. I told you that I saw this coming. This was not my first rodeo. But going along with the thought above, the boy’s explanation for his failure, his polite exit from responsibility specifically cited pressure from his class that he follow an educational course that was more in line with the system itself. His ability to read and understand English suddenly rising sent up a red flag. This comment got to his mother who quickly agreed that this was the correct choice of action. Polite words were spoken between me and his father and the job was done. I could show you the whole conversation but it really wouldn’t matter. The machine is much, much stronger than the individual.
***
“The brutality of War is nothing compared to the brutality of life under unchecked capitalism.“
This was me. I said this. I said this right now and I wrote it right here. I wrote this and you should remember that I said it.
***
It’s 5:00 a.m. and I’m already up and moving. It is absolutely pointless to be this alive at 5:00 a.m. . I think I liked it better sleepy. I must be doing something wrong.
I seem to be consumed these days by doing things. This is not a bad thing and I am enjoying being tired at night and I’m enjoying the amount of blood that ends up moving around inside me. I feel cleaner from all of this movement. It’s a bit of a breaking and rebuilding process. I go until my leg can’t stand it anymore and then I’m forced to be inert for long enough to recover. But then once I recover, I just want to get going again.
I have a feeling that this is where Zen comes into it. There is this business of being inspired and creating something or starting to create something as a part of this inspiration. But then there is the downward push that comes from the daunting task of keeping up the responsibility for all the work that you have.
This is the thing that drives most people crazy. It’s not hard to fall into a mania, it’s what you do inside the mania that makes us all maniacs.
I think this is why I hate conservatives so much. They are not the workers who clean up the messes, they just make the messes and wait for other people to clean them up. I think Hemingway wrote about this one time. He was writing about a woman he loved but could never have and he wrote that her room was in the kind of disarray that only comes from people who have servants to clean up after them. I guess this is another way of saying we have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Too many cops and robbers and not enough workers to make things work.
For me though, I’m only noticing that it seems like I am me. This is exactly how I have always lived my life. I get a thought in my head and then I create something from it and dive into it as deeply as possible. I haven’t been writing plays lately, maybe next year I’m going to do this if I’m still around, but I did that from exactly these sorts of situations. I guess I needed something to do, I had a little bit more energy than was required and in looking for something to do with myself, I would get into these projects.
Writing plays is really no different from building. Or gardening I guess. You start off with an idea and then you have to go through the steps to complete it. If there’s anything different about me from really everyone in the world who suffers the same disease is that I tend to find ways that do not require a great deal of money to be spent on my projects. I like projects that are inexpensive or free. I like projects without a lot of moving parts or extra drama to them. I like projects that are recyclable and reusable. I like projects that create no ecological harm.
The Zen thing that I mentioned before comes however once you are into whatever project you are into. Perhaps this is part of what I told the boy’s father a month ago when he came to see me. The honeymoon period, that little parcel of time when the excitement is with you and all of the possibilities are there in front of you when you have all the energy in the world. But then you find yourself in the trenches pounding it out day after day and experiencing the redundancy and the boredom that the energy goes away. The feeling is just not there anymore and this is usually where people quit.
This to me is where the practice of Zen comes in. It is the philosophy of finding the joy in nothingness. It is learning the practice of meditation. It is learning the practice of being in the moment and allowing for the nuance and the minutiae of that moment to become interesting. It is learning to love the reality of life instead of chasing the dragons for their moments of excitement.
Not that it is a part of this argument or anything like that but when I was hanging out with the Jewish community years ago, they really did not want to listen to my view of Zen In This Way. They believed that Jewish tradition had its own nuances to be followed. Adopting Eastern mentality was different from the mentality of, well, “our people”.
Of course this conforming business is not what I do. I am an entrepreneur. I make my own luck. I do my own work. I am an owner operator. I am the pop of a mom and pop operation. I am a worker.
There is one type of video that I watch sometimes with great interest. Like a lot of people, I like to watch videos of people working. Specifically this would be Craftsmen who make something interesting. You can find all levels of economics in these videos. You can find people who work at caveman level and you can find people who work at corporate level. For what it’s worth, you can find information on almost every Walk of Life you might be interested in if this is the same you want to spend your time looking at and thinking about.
But one specific type of video I watch very often comes from these videos of Japanese restaurants and food carts. There is a very specific way. It is a natural part of Japanese culture to embrace these Zen philosophies of doing and being. There is a sense of determination of purpose and commitment that must be portrayed. It is possible that in reality people are the same degenerates all over the place but at least publicly and outwardly, the daily grind of creating edible food, hopefully very popular edible food is well presented.
It is movement by movement. It is an endless repetition of movements practiced daily to produce identical results. It is a factory with nothing but flesh and blood to make things work.
Warning: The following link has non-vegan elements in it. Viewer discretion is advised.
This is just one example. I don’t know why this is so interesting to me except that I love food and I believe I understand the practice of Zen discipline.
I personally think all of these things tied together in my personal philosophy of entrepreneurialism. Perhaps this is something that I saw and admired briefly in my formative years. My parents were corporate. My father was never not corporate and my mother made her living entrepreneurially by being a headhunter who dealt with corporate people. Everyone my parents were connected to were corporate people and their money came from being a part of corporate culture.
This was obviously their reason for rejecting me. The last thing they needed was a Zen Marxist communist living in their own home. The last thing they needed was a worker spoiling their parasite Paradise.
I remember my dad visiting me when I was living with my ex-wife in a home, our first house that we were renting. I was working on restoring a motorcycle, an old triumph, and my dad found me in the garage taking the transmission apart. He stared at me for a moment and asked me what I was doing and I explained to him that the clutch consisted of six ablative plates that needed to come together and be released in order for the gears to be changed. He blinked a few times and seemed surprised that I actually understood this. He worked in the auto business most of his adult life but had never taken a car apart or done his own service work.
Maybe these things skip a generation. His father’s family were builders. The people that came from Pinsk to the new world were builders and being from the shtetl, were inherently part of the Jewish community. They knew who they were. My father however was a ball player who liked to run on the streets. He was going to go his own way and make his own money and that’s exactly what he did. Welcome to America.
I could give my dad credit for his own resilience and character. He made a decent enough living for himself by working hard and keeping himself up. All the things that he had that made him valuable were worked at and built on. He had the Zen in him. He even fell in love with a Japanese girl during the war but left her behind and came back to the States alone.
For me, I never minded the diligence of the job. Sometimes when I feel I am swimming in waters too unfamiliar to myself I find it hard to be motivated. Sometimes when there are no decent materials to use, it is frustrating to do things. Sometimes I can walk away because the project is really not worth doing. I guess that was part of the surprise from our conversation last night. I didn’t really need too much drama or compromise. I asked the boy what he wanted and he made a very compromised statement about how everything was good “But” and I just closed off the lessons. I didn’t need to hear anymore. They had found a way to add drama to a simple task and this was enough reason to quit and go home. Belarusians don’t like to work in the rain.
The lesson he quit required professionalism. This is the last thing the boy wanted.
I could say a lot of words about this but this is not what I’m writing about. What I am writing about is that right now, I seem to be being myself for the first time in a while. I am just interested in doing things right now. My body has the energy to do things. The spirit is with me. It is like I am alive again and I’m looking for things to do.
There is a big difference however. When I was younger, I had the energy to bully through. I understood that there was going to be pain or boredom or difficulties in seeing a project through to the end. I understood it was going to take constant effort even in times when I absolutely did not want to work. But I did it because I could do it. I did it because I understood that the result of the completed project would be worth it. I did it because I needed to see my vision completed. I did it because one of the worst things in the world is to look at a piece of junk that died from lack of attention.
I’m sure there are plenty of people in the world who blame me for their problems because of a lack of my attention. Even today I have grown people crying in their beer because Adam is not giving them enough attention. I have grown people whose names I do not even know become violent and angry because Adam has not given them enough attention. I probably have more people who hate me for my not paying attention to them than any person other than Jesus Christ or God himself. I probably answer less prayers than Santa Claus and sorry kids, he doesn’t even exist. He’s a marketing scheme to buy more shit in the winter. He’s there to pick up all of the profit you made during the working year and leave you broke heading into the new one. Happy holidays everyone.
The last few days have been exactly this crazy struggle. In the morning, I get up and I have this energy to go do something. I get up on My feet and I am pleased to be upright and moving around painlessly. The whole world is available and there are things to do. I’m also in a situation where it’s my world and I can do as I like and I’m not restricted by community or how much money I have. I have so much to do, it would be impossible to do all of it in a day or a week or a year or ever. There is a never ending need for things to be paid attention to.
So I start working and I am so pleased to be doing things and working again. I am so happy to be moving and solving problems. I am rapturous with the love of manipulating materials, worrying things into place, measuring things and solving problems and figuring out how to get things done and then physically going through the motions of executing them.
I had some friends who knew I was a foodie and liked to cook and they believed that I wanted to start a restaurant. I probably said something about wanting to start a restaurant but I don’t think they fully understood that I had no intention of doing such a project on my own labor here. I have and had absolutely no belief in the marketplace. I do not believe this marketplace would support an independent restaurant and I absolutely know like knowledge like I know the sun will come up in the morning that they would not support me. There was no possible way I would agree to the absolute agony of being on my feet all day and spending all of my money and energy on something that would never, ever, ever come back to me.
They thought I just needed motivation and manipulation. They thought they were being helpful.
The trick is in the Zen of it. For a million dollars and a house on the hill, I could never have taught this to the boy even though this was the only lesson I really wanted to teach him. Reading English or feeling more comfortable around English is as easy as opening up a book and fighting your way through it. Starting with the most simple books in the world, just take it word by word until you understand that the languages don’t translate and then you take it phrase by phrase where the languages fit together beautifully. It’s not really just the idioms, it’s being willing to get the phrases straight. It just takes time to acclimate. A little time and some good quality resilient attentive disciplined work.
So what can I say? This is life. I am genuinely happy to feel like this. Even though I am talking about bullying through things regardless whether they feel good or not, I haven’t felt this physically in a long time. I haven’t felt well enough to do the things I’m doing in a long time. Too many physical restrictions. Too many physical breakdowns. Too many health problems from my legs. Not enough freedom of movement. Too much time on my ass and on my back. Not enough time just simply walking around like a human being.
So like I’ve been saying this week, I am exactly in the place I wanted to be. I am exactly in the place I dreamed of. I am home. The only thing, really and truly and honestly, the only thing is that they just won’t stop having the mafia in Russia and they just won’t stop being what they are. They just can’t live without torturing people for their money and their time and their attention. They never let go of the animal farm. And if you want to get historical about it, the only thing we are looking at is a unique twist on the oldest game played out here. Now, the Russians are being the Russians but they are doing it in the style of The Americans. An entire War presented as performance art of Moscow imitating Washington.
Congratulations for further ruining my life. I truly appreciate the downward push and the suppression. Thanks. I appreciate your patronage.
So I guess I’m going to start by cleaning up around here a little bit. Probably today is house sweeping day. I don’t know if Lena is coming by or not. I could call her but I don’t particularly feel like she has any particular push towards performing her task. I don’t think she likes how the company has been restructured. Sorry, A lot happened while she was away on her vacation.
I have no lesson today, thank you for bringing me the student and thank you for taking him away. I do have the very last weekly parsha to go through. Again, today is the last reading of the five books of Moses before we turn it over and start again next week. Talk about a zen task. And after this, maybe I’ll give a little bit more thought to doing something about my well. I’ve been playing with several ideas that might somehow fix the problem. I’m not quite there yet but the army is amassing along the border for that fight.
So what is it going to be? Up up up or go back to sleep? You can let me know what you think in the comments and I will let you know what happened a little bit later in the day.
***
“Please forgive Adam. He tends to speak without a filter.”
What I want to know is what’s up with this filter shit? Who the hell said it was normal to have a filter? And who is editing the program on these filters anyway? Maybe we should spend less time working on our filters and start doing more work without them.
Me? I would like my information without so many filters please. Maybe I just want to hear the guy talk and hear what he has to say. Just give me the genuine information and I’ll make my own commentary, thank you very much.
***
Love this one.
***
It’s 9:15 and breakfast has been eaten, tea has been drunk and Lena has come and gone. Everything is a little bit cleaner and a little nicer. I got my gossip quota filled. I got informed of all of the moral obligations the world has to offer until how difficult it is to wrap one’s mind around things. I got the news.
It’s cold today. The sun is out which is positive but it’s bloody cold already. I noticed this even last night when I finally went to sleep. I actually hung out in the office for a long time. That wasn’t too cold at all. I was pretty comfortable in there. But then I gave it up and went to sleep and the first thing I noticed was that I was freezing. I had thought that I might not even need to light a fire. This morning I woke up and thought that very soon, I’d be lighting two fires a day. If I don’t the place will go Stone Cold and it will be hard to heat it again.
Seriously, the effects of frost are everywhere. The place has gone green again thanks to all of the rain over the last month. Once the summer proper gave up, only then did the rains come. New grass started coming in everywhere. Everything that grows has naturally come back. Now instead of looking like West Texas like it did a month and a half ago, now everything is lush and green and a little damp here in the morning. Something tells me it used to be like this all the time here. It used to rain a little bit all the time, just a bit warmer and greener in the summer and then white and gray and cold in the winter.
Lena told me something that I had never heard before. She said that what I have is called a finsky house. This would mean that it’s in Finish style. I wonder if this is on the internet.
What do you know? It means a wooden house basically. This is true but I found a site that explains this really well. Here’s two paragraphs from gvozdem.ru.
When wooden houses only “came into fashion”, people built them up to the size of princely mansions. But over time, the excitement passed, and houses of this type faded into the background. People began to increasingly build residential buildings from brick and other similar materials. Finnish buildings were used exclusively as summer cottages or guest houses.
Now Finnish construction technology is in demand again. And the reason lies in the fact that only natural materials are used to build a house. At the same time, in terms of its comfort, a finished house is in no way inferior to a brick building, for example. As a rule, it is difficult to imagine a Finnish house without a fireplace. By the way, psychologists say that if a person falls asleep by the fireplace, then his tired body recovers faster and gains strength. But now it is not about that. A real Finnish-style house symbolizes durability, reliability and, of course, quality.
I like it. And I agree 100%. This place has been here for 50 years and it doesn’t look like it wants to fall down at all. It is very durable and very reliable. Like I said, I can definitely do something about the windows. I at least need to run some caulking to plug up the gaps. But the damn thing functions and keeps me warm enough. It doesn’t take much.
I was talking with Lena about the difference between our two houses. She is already heating the whole house. It costs her a reasonable amount of money in wood to keep her house warm. She also ascribes to the philosophy that if you do not heat the whole house and only try to heat one room, that room will grow cold very quickly. I do not find that this is true. One fire in the morning and one fire in the evening is enough to keep the walls warm. If the walls are warm in this room where I keep what will be both my office and where I sleep, it’s enough. The rest of the house may be cold but I only really need the office and the kitchen. If I even use The Summer kitchen, it’s just to talk to people when they visit. The fire in there is much more decorative than it is useful.
But it’s definitely getting colder. It’s something that you can feel when the real winter starts. Today is the 13th and when I lived in town, the 15th would be when the heating comes on. Possibly the 15th is when I start mandatory heating here. Up until now, I’ve only lit fires in the evening when it felt a little cold or if I felt I needed it. Probably starting soon, maybe even today I will like two fires and even a third in the middle of the day if it gets really bad.
***
If I were to open a restaurant, this would be one of my variants or at least one of my menu options. Vegan ramen. I thought about this before I decided to have another breakfast. I am exactly eating vegan ramen right now. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
I really like how these become gentler and more peaceful as you go down the list. Seriously, this is soul food. This is spiritual.
***
Well, this tells you how observant I really am. This week’s Torah portion is for a holiday called Sukkot.
Sukkot is a Torah-commanded holiday celebrated for seven days from the 15th day of the month of Tishrei. It is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (Hebrew: שלוש רגלים, shalosh regalim) on which those Israelites who could were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. In addition to its harvest roots, the holiday also holds spiritual importance with regard to its abandonment of materialism to focus on nationhood, spirituality, and hospitality, this principle underlying the construction of a temporary, almost nomadic, structure of a sukkah.
Perhaps this is where my need to build came from. I don’t know. I’m not really very good at following the traditions except for taking a day off and being outrageously kosher by simplifying things and cutting out meat entirely. I also don’t drink wine. I’m just bad at this.
However, there are brief holiday readings from the Torah this week. There are seven days of Torah readings to pay attention to but the actual tour reading not counting repetitions seem to be as follows. The book of Exodus 33:12-34:26, Leviticus 22:26 to 23:44 and the book of Numbers 29:12 to 31.
I am not doing this in proper order this week. Next week is the holiday of Simchat Torah where we finally come to the end of the five books and start all over again with “In the beginning…”
Again, I am no good at this so I am going to check out these three portions in chronological order and do this week’s reading in three parts.
From the book of Exodus:
Moses is in conversation with god and the Lord has just instructed him that he will lead the children of Israel. Moses is a bit confused because he does not know if he will be alone or even if what he does pleases God. But then the Lord tries to make him feel better by saying he will be with him, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and compassion for whom he will have compassion (he doesn’t really get into the vengeance part or the perpetual disappointment. Everything is new at this juncture still; they are still on their honeymoon). But then God says that no one can see his face because they will die but he tells Moses that his presence will pass through him and people can see this and they will know he’s the guy.
Then in Exodus 34, God commands Moses to go carve a second set of stone tablets, replacing the first pair that Moses broke when he lost his temper at how badly the people behaved. While he’s working, God basically dictated what he wanted to see saying that he was compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Again, this is the stuff that happens when you’re in a really good mood. Moses throws himself on the ground and begs the Lord to be true to his word because he knows, I mean, he knows like knowledge that the children of Israel are a stiff neck people who will never, ever, ever toe the line.
This is what I’m saying about setting up sustainable enterprises versus things you do because of spur of the moment decisions and emotional thoughts. No good ever comes from doing things on whims. Somebody should have known better but of course, this is religion so you get what you get.
And then the Lord says to obey what he commands that day and if they do, he will wipe out all of their enemies. He reminds them not to make friends with the enemies and to completely wreck whatever it is they are doing. He reminds us to stay away from prostitutes and people who believe in false gods. And then he kind of gets into the commandments saying that we should not make idols, remember Passover but then make absolute certainty that everybody does their tithing and pays their taxes and keeps that flow of barbecue coming to the temple. Word of God right there.
And then at the very end of this, there is a reminder of a harvest party and to take a day off. Even if it’s harvest season you’ve got to take a day off. Then there will be a couple more holidays and please, keep kosher and not mix the milk and the meat. Or you know, you can just not eat meat or milk and then you’ll be fine.
The next portion comes from Leviticus. Everything in this particular section is about the holidays. The Lord basically tells Moses to remind everybody to keep the commandments but also to respect the following feasts and important days of the calendar. First is to remember to take a day off. Next comes the planting holiday of Passover in the springtime and then the harvest holidays of Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. The last of which conveniently falls right there at the end of the Torah.
The readings from The book of Numbers are basically about barbecue that should be around for the holiday of Sukkot. I’m not going to get into this specifics of animal killing because it’s just not my thing.
Or basically, it’s about food. What do you know about that?
It is funny what happens when you read Torah regularly. It is extremely hard for me not to be cynical or even facetious. Don’t worry, I am not the only Jew ever to be cynical and facetious or even outright sarcastic from reading the Torah. This is true in the original Hebrew and this is true in any language of the world you want to read this stuff in. You don’t go to hell for being sarcastic.
But then you run into Little moments, Little gems. You run into some thoughts that have wisdom in them. And sometimes you even get the feeling like everything you’ve been thinking of has been preordained.
The idea to write about food as the primary topic or scaffold to put a journal on came to me at the beginning of the year. The thought was as simple as asking myself what the most important thing in the world was. In 2020, I picked up the pen to write about politics in the year of the American elections in which I truly, truly believed that doing everything humanly possible to get rid of Donald Trump was called for. This was my call to duty. This was my hero run. I was going to do a stunt and I was going to commit myself to putting pen to paper every day in the hopes of convincing at least someone to listen to my wisdom that we absolutely did not need this man in charge of anything ever again.
Along the way, I picked up some thoughts about politics and myself and even the country I live in who also had a very consequential elections and also made riots out of it about whether or not the country actually allows freedom. I’ll give you a hint, it doesn’t but neither does the United States.
But one of the genuine truths that came to me during that election year and with all of the other writing I was doing at the time was that perhaps the most important things in the world to talk about was ecology. Doing translations of independent journalists in Western Russia about Russian corruption and eventual destruction of the people and the land of the region and watching the United States sell its soul again and again simply to keep the oil business going told me that if we did not pay attention to ecology, this world was not going to make it.
So last year I picked up the pen to write about ecology. I also left town to go to a place with a bit more clean air and ran into a remarkable cacophony of idiots who had no intention of listening to a word I said. I was a Jew, I was an American and nothing was going to take their comfort away from them. Such moves my world often even when all I want to do is talk to people about ecology and maybe help start a few ecologically sound businesses to help people both become aware of our need to go green as well as give him a few bucks to help them along.
What happened there? What do you think happened? They never heard a word or made a move and things got worse for me socially. It seems that the country was preparing for war and had no interest in any peacenik green vegan trying to save the planet or the local River or the health of the people around him. Nobody needed my noise. They just wanted more gas, more oil and for the love of themselves, more money.
So this year, for no other reason than I now had plenty of free time, I decided to keep this thing going. But when I thought about it this year, when I really dug down deep and asked myself what was the most important thing for all human beings to consider, I came up with the simplest answer.
It’s about food. It’s about having enough food, about having food security, about the quality of the food we have and about the reality of the world and its relationship to food. Food is life. Without it we die and surely as if we have no air to breathe.
So this is what I’ve been talking about and apparently, in the Torah when they start talking about holidays, what they are really talking about is making sure that people go to work in the spring doing their agricultural work and to make sure to show up for the celebrations with gifts for the priests and the folks keeping them honest. Why? Because it’s about food and community no matter how crazy we are, how evil we get, how many mistakes we make or what kind of fools we allow to lead us. At the end of the day, you’ve got to eat and if you don’t do your job and put the seeds in the ground, we don’t eat.
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If you will excuse me, even though I absolutely do not need it in any way, I’m going to go have my third meal of the day. Today has been a nothing day. I haven’t done anything and I’m sure it has a lot to do with everything I did in the morning. I’m talking about hanging out with Lena and I am talking about eating two breakfasts just because they were amazingly tasty. However, apparently there is wisdom even on days like this…
When you have a bad day
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