Well. It was only a matter of time before I joined the pop blog culture; Life has been interesting, and I wanted to share broadly…

For those of you who haven’t yet seen these, here are the posts in question:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sea-change/

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/calm-sunday-and-good-enough-friday/

I understand your name: Wailing.

They’ve misunderstood and think
*they* are meant to wail
but I know it’s you, Wall, doing the crying:

How much can you contain the anger fear devastation desperation contempt of others
before you harden to smooth,
past able to absorb
blacken
from the endless need
so many hands
…simply crumble?

Now they call you “Western”

but I hear you Wailing
and I have some advice from
My tenure as everybody’s
refuge -shadow -rock -barrier:

Quit
While you are 2000 years behind.

They will only miss you
when they can’t punch and kiss you.

- God, 2014

The following mini-rant is not about regaining our sense of privacy in a self-absorbed digital age. It is not about the ravages of social media on our actual confidence and our notion of what matters. It is not even about a too-soft generation taking back responsibility, disappointment, and control. Well, it’s also about all of those things. But it is mainly about reinstating our own core instincts, intelligences, and centers of vitality, and redrawing the interpersonal boundaries required to separate true creative power and personal agency from a slow nuclear leak.

It is about being more ourselves by being less invested in projecting who we are. It is communications advice for individuals (brands are another, also complicated story) which I am certain will upset people — and which I stand by anyway.

Here it is: What you’ve done is not communication, or even art, if your need to express yourself outweighs the benefit to other/s of consuming said expression.

Let me restate this in the cruelest terms: If the only thing you’ve changed by posting or writing or speaking or making something is delivering your own psychic payload, you have not engaged in creation or communication, but have bombed the listener / reader with auto-therapy. (Consuming this form of expression is the legitimate domain of actual therapists or best friends, and, if you are lucky, siblings and parents. We will get to significant others in a moment.)

In the real world, listeners or readers or viewers need to walk away inspired to act, better informed on something they care about, or in some way enlightened, relieved, entertained, or changed. You can assume your receiver is intelligent, but you ought not assume they speak the language inside your head, or want to hear you all the time. No one owes you that. Not for free.

Even if the subject is personal, it is actually not about you – it is about the one you are giving your ideas to. Once these thoughts or feelings are out of your brain, they must be able to do something to or for the intended audience – of one or one million – or they should never have left that cozy grey room.

Your ideas are the components of energy. You have broken your core to let them out: How could they be anything but? Why would you not want to keep them to better run *you* until you were sure their release was strategic, or at least somewhat necessary, rather than wasteful or even toxic?

Think about the most charismatic people you know. Their communication finds the specific listener, like a smart-bomb.

Very few people care simply about your need to express yourself or to create internal order, and as a consequence, those who want to read or hear or see anything filled primarily with angst, anger, self-praise, unwarranted apology, a crazy level of detail or repetition, or over-sharing, will have their own side of the bargain they expect from you. What this is might blindside you when the relationship becomes suddenly bilateral. Such is the nature of proliferation.

No-no’s includes not only excessive complaining but also gushing, excessive praise, which I’ve discovered actually minimizes the receiver instead of building him / her up. Because toxic leaks are not only about angry or crazy or whiny: admiration, too, can feel like work to read or hear when it is offered mainly as a release of need.

This is all especially true for communicating with your boss and colleagues, where sanctions are often subtle but swift. But it is even true for most friends, and also for lovers / partners, if you want the relationship to maintain its fullest power.

Consider the price of another human being holding the sealed barrel with your energy leak. You rely on them to catch your sometimes toxic secondary output, while your fullest creative product, your best behavior, is given elsewhere, to those who won’t hold your worst. Exchanging need is actually not a bad reciprocal arrangement and is often the happiest and most enduring kind of union, but we should call it what it is, which is mutually assured destruction: containment. It’s not a bad deal, often necessary, but it costs you the heat generated by being at your best.

You might be shaking your head and saying – that’s so not fair, and it’s so sad that she thinks that, this damaged woman just set my therapy / marriage back ten years, what a bitch.

That last thing might be true. But it is not especially sad, if you consider all the time potentially saved by people becoming their own centrifuge, and what the human race could accomplish with this savings. We are talking sustainable energy.

What greatness could emerge from more external silence and better tolerated and carefully monitored internal noise?

Maybe people would exercise more from all the frustration, and discover they prefer ripped abs to writing long emails or producing unintelligible art or going straight to Facebook with every observation or complaining for hours to their wife.

Maybe we would work more and work better to avoid making excuses or apologizing or making more and more lists. Maybe our communication would be more significant if we updated fewer statuses and re-learned the power of making people miss us.

Or we’d take a few more risks in life or in love once we’ve thought and planned but perhaps before we’ve spoken or written. And maybe end bad things sooner, instead of burying them in verbiage. Enough saved up energy is excellent at very clean destruction when this is what is called for, with far less bloody carnage than the gradual relationship or job phase-out.

Maybe we’d produce better art as a society, and would not have to choose so often between accessibility and quality.

Maybe we would learn to sit longer with our thoughts and the complexity of our feelings, get comfortable with contradictions and discomfort, and discover we are so much tougher than we thought. So much readier to challenge and be challenged.

Meditation would not be about clearing your mind and being nothingness. It would be about being *everythingness* and containing that, sparing the world our truth until the best and most useful explosion was fully spun.

What greatness could emerge from more external silence and better tolerated and carefully monitored internal noise? I think it could be game changing, and could proliferate quickly.

You can take it or drop it. I’ve spoken enough.

What hurt most was the lack of recognition
when I bumped into myself last night;
I surfaced by the river
in no light,
and asked myself my name,
old fool that I am – -
till it hit me, by (of all things)
pulling at my leg.

Aha! It’s me! I cried – -
How many ways
I’ve tried
to run…
but in the end, something always pulls
(especially since it all began that way, for us;
The God of Abraham
is fond of structure.)

No matter;
I am more whole now that I am shattered:
Less scattered.
And somehow I am sure
that I will meet myself again – -
perhaps I will keep breaking.

From too many years
of faking.

- Jacob / Israel

Our house was purchased when I was twenty-two, and there are mortgage bankers in North Tel Aviv who must rejoice about this every morning at their granite sinks. Back then, most of my friends in this fair suburbia were old: 32ish, and we were all hell bent on being super close, pathologically admirably committed to our nascent community, and pretending to hate the lack of privacy. There were sometimes other people’s small children in your bedroom when you walked out of the shower, but if you sneezed, there would be a pot of soup on your table in three hours.

This was my whole entire world for a decade and a half: building a family and a community with a dash of career, for flavor and the aforementioned mortgage. We were so young that the big questions of the universe were already answered. Even throughout some serious fertility business in my mid-twenties, I remained committed to keeping everything in place – except my sense of control, the renouncement of which was such an enlightened move that I could barely contain my spiritual achievement.

This translated into complete dedication to the greater communal good. If there was a synagogue or school committee to be on, I raised my hand. This was my way of paying back the universe for having me, and for letting me reproduce.

Our house now sits at the center of a city divided by what many call a religious war, and others, a power struggle. I call it the way things go, but worth resisting – if you still have the energy, and a mortgage.

Essentially, our paradise might just be lost, in no small measure because paradise never lasts, not even the Original. That Paradise ended because someone (yes, a woman) chose knowledge over eternity. Go, Eve.

This paradise will one day end if not because of avarice and corruption, then because our kindergartens are emptying and our careers are developing in the big city, and our kids often don’t return here as adults. And because 30,000 residents and 100,000 residents just throw a different vibe.

Older now and more invested in privacy for real, we can no longer countenance strange little kids in our room after we come out of the shower, although we do still love getting the soup. Committees, too, have lost their sexy activist sheen for many of us. God bless the next generation of committed builders and bakers.

Still, many of my friends (and husband and oldest son) are very invested in trying to save Beit Shemesh, because there might be a different future in store for this town (Hi-tech park bedroom community?), and because something you worked this hard to build is worth fighting for.

This is especially true when your city is seen as a bellwether for the national scene. The canary in the coal mine, to which Israel is often compared on the world stage, is Beit Shemesh in terms of a creeping theocracy and municipal malfeasance in Israel. If we lose here, it bodes badly for the rest of the country. That is why a whole lot of national politicians have their hands in our pants, and it’s why we kind of like them there. (How you doin’, Minister Bennett?)

Paradise lost also describes my own evolution fairly well. I’m still here in Beit Shemesh, but at least half of my heart is in the Eternal City (Jerusalem, not Rome, although…), whose evening air makes me higher than the prices of its apartments. I don’t want to forget about it; I will simply wait.

Waiting. Waiting is a skill I have recently learned. Also caring a little less.

And not knowing.

The more I live, the more I feel ready to blow the lid off the whole operation: No one knows anything “for sure.“ Not even science, certainly not religion, and not even your very own experience. Self- reliance needs to come from believing like crazy in an idea and your capacity to execute it with the full knowledge that you may just be wrong, and that the world will not spit you out if you are.

There is just no other way to survive long-term in a community, a family, a career, or you own skin but to blur a few lines (#Truthe), most notably those between ambition and acceptance. To paraphrase Ben-Gurion, you must follow your dream as if there is no alternative, and embrace alternatives as if there were no dream.

I still have a fire in my belly to be sure, but it is about breaching the walls of suburbia to contribute to the much larger world, with a broad network of people who are often not at all like me. To innovate, agitate, and create something that gives the planet something only I can give it.

So it is also a little about hunting for the “I” lost in so many, many years of “We.”

Leaning in. To hear the Universe whisper: You deserve to be here. Stop raising your freaking hand.

It is almost the Jewish New Year, and I almost care.

As the year begins, I can almost decide how I feel about work / family balance, about excellence and ambition vs. the heart of the work, about money and security, about close suburban community life, about a religious structure, and about what it all has to do with a God I almost feel.

I am almost looking forward to stepping into a synagogue tomorrow for the first time in about a year, which almost sounds impossible to my own ears.

As does the fact that this is the first thing I’ve written outside of work in many months, which definitely, not almost, makes me feel worse.

The actor Jason Biggs, last seen (apropos Rosh Hashana foods) being intimate with an apple pie, has come back to our screens as the fiancé of an upper middle-class convict in Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black. His character, a writer, becomes obsessed by the practice of “edging”. In terms I can discuss in public, edging is the transcendent space of the almost. But you can read more here if you are over 18 and not related to me by blood.

I, less literally than Biggs, think almost is underrated, because wholeness, certainty, and serenity bore me to tears. I feel almost like this is a lazy approach, and almost like it is brave.I feel like there is a lot of energy in almost, and also a lot to mourn.

The world, too, is rife with the almost, for better and worse.
We are almost at war with Syria, which is almost finally seen by the world as a truly very, very bad regime.

We are almost committed to peace at any outrageous cost (and the world Jewish community almost cares, while the world community at large almost certainly does not.) We almost definitely have no idea what peace means since we have never known it, and yet we really do believe it can be almost achieved.

I almost love, unreasonably, the Jewish People and the Jewish state, and I am almost always surprised by how this does and does not conflict with my professed humanism, which is almost sincere. I can almost believe that Israel’s rabbinic woes – the conversion crisis and the status of women most notable among them – are solvable in my lifetime, and that the rifts in our society can almost, one day, heal.

Local politics in a sleepy backwater can be almost interesting, and friends can be almost enemies and then almost friends again in just under three weeks’ time. We are almost afraid of polio because some of the population almost has plumbing – and others almost respect first world medical conventions.

I can almost identify, in the daily, not annual, soul search, (also – almost sincere) which hardened pieces of myself ought to be expunged, and which are positive markers of “leaning in” and growing up. Which I am almost ready to do. I have almost come to terms with being responsible for another human life, and then several, for half of my time on earth. I am actually OK with my oldest child almost going into the IDF as a combat soldier, and when he does go, I will be almost OK, since sleeping and eating are overrated too.

We are obsessed as a culture with very public almost-sex and almost-death, which are most certainly, and not almost, related. We are almost horrified by this. We almost believe ourselves when we talk about the inside of a person being the most important thing, and I am almost a feminist, except I love Robin Thicke, who most certainly won’t mind if I objectify him, and I don’t mind when bus drivers honk.

Our entertainment is almost real, and our relationships are as well. We almost believe what is reported and experienced as reality, and it interests us almost as much as the entertainment. We are almost horrified by this, too. We are almost convinced by self-posted digital pictures.

I almost resigned myself to spending the day in the kitchen to prove it can all be done last minute despite what they said, a plan which was almost derailed by the oven shorting out just after noon. I almost forgot that the thing I learned this year is that there is no strength like icy calm and tactical precision, at exactly the moments when you are almost completely sure you will lose it.

But I didn’t forget. And I am almost proud of myself.

Happy New Year, from the existential edge.

Rome and Paris are deeply embarrassing cities for artists and writers who have abandoned their craft. Before I became the manager of creative processes in the service of selling a secure future to the Jewish People, I was elbow deep in the creation itself, often simply in the service of the process.

In places where beauty and truth intersect purely for their own sake – places like the Sistine Chapel or the Villa Borghese or even a Parisian train station (!!) – one who writes or paints or sculpts but has not done it freely or deeply in a while feels like a dancer-turned-nun in Las Vegas. Bless me, Bernini, for I have sinned.

Now my blog of essays lies in an induced coma and the occasional poem or book outline finds its way to the notes section of my iPhone, but essentially I am these days more a father than a mother of new ideas: I seed them energetically, support them loyally, see them through rough patches and advocate for them… but they are gestated and tended to by others.

In Paris on business following Rome, I was working on crappy WiFi, searching for an old document. Sitting in the undying evening under an impossible kind of sky, I accidentally came across the below poem, which I wrote when I gave up on my 2001 novel manuscript ever being published. This poem told me that it is the motherhood of creation that scares me sans-merde (who can bear the pain, the work, the loss it entails?) and to which I must somehow return.

Can one be both father and mother? There is a room in the Villa Borghese that says yes.

Anyway – here’s the poem:

Bleeding

- SKE, Jan 2008

–
A balcony apart
From my heart
(Where a small, quiet temple with fewer rules renews one member
Every September)
–

Because this is not
a House of God:
What kind of holy gathering place
Has nothing growing? In which I cannot count ten.

What we have here
is a House of Men.

- SKE, March 2013

JREP – May 2006 Jewish Bookshelf Goes Primetime

One of the stars of that 2006 piece, Dr. Ruth Calderone, went on to make history last week in the Knesset, where she now serves as an MK for the Yesh Atid party.

I want you to read the PDF I linked to, so I won’t waste any more of your time on commentary here. Except to say that when I did the story, I was fairly certain that what I was seeing was only the beginning of an essential, growing trend, and I have never been so glad to be proven right with the years. Way to go, Dr. C.

The prospect of all sectors of Israeli society re-embracing our cultural heritage texts (I say nothing here about practice, because that’s a whole other tractate, as it were) is just as exciting as all of us sharing military and financial burdens equally.

When a heavy box of old junk that another has packed and stored badly *literally* falls out of the pre-fab suburban ceiling and breaks open on the ONE Day out of *hundreds* that YOU happen to be home, and THE OWNER/ PACKER / STORER happens to not be….What is the symbolism there?

At first I thought it was the boiler exploding. It snowed last night in Jerusalem, and temperatures in our town reached record lows. My contractor friends put out helpful emails to their neighbors: Leave on a hot water tap so your boiler doesn’t explode. I did.

I had just sat down to morning coffee on my first snow day in about 20 years. Earlier, my carpool texted me: The roads to Jerusalem are closed. We are not going anywhere.

I jumped up and down on my bed like an eight year old. I didn’t have to go in to the office, a rare reprieve to catch up on independent work: writing, editing, to-do lists, emails. The kids had school. The husband was running a marathon up north with a bunch of other skinny lunatics who think pneumonia can’t happen to them.

It meant that I had the house to myself for the whole day. Only about the third or fourth time it’s happened in the two years since I started working full-time on the outside, and my husband opened up his own practice from a home office. It was quiet, I was caffeinated, shit was getting done.

So when I heard the loud thud in the roof, I thought: Well. What do contractors know?! A closer investigation, however, revealed no gushing water (Glory Be!) but part of a box protruding from the hatch door leading to the attic. And the innards of that box vomiting out in a way that (of course) dared me to open the hatch, even though I was clearly about to get nailed by: 1. A lot of work *I* didn’t create and didn’t have time for but was going to have to do anyway; 2. Whatever hit me as I opened it. It was like an episode of Lost, only no sexy sweating, what with the freezing temps.

Emboldened by gratefulness that my boiler hadn’t exploded, I channeled my inner girl scout and figured out how to minimize injury and mess while facing this unwanted challenge, all before my coffee got cold. Spreading a heavy blanket on the floor, I pulled the lever to the hatch door and stepped away.

Out poured an old electric shaver (of blessed memory); an earthy green ceramic rock garden desk ornament which rained down intact due to my Be Prepared ethos; several issues of the Israel Law Review; a few much heavier, maroon-colored volumes with titles that made me feel deep sympathy for all lawyers; and the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. I fared much better than most who have been hit by Sarbanes Oxley. The avalanche ended with a flurry of certificates (never framed; my husband is a pack rat but never a show-off) and assorted papers.

Still in Amazonian mode, I climbed up to the roof to straighten out the boxes and check for anything that might have caused the fall. The diagnosis: routine shifting of elements due to extreme temperature and *too much crap*, which used to hide in the old office in Tel Aviv, and is now hidden from view of wife who generally throws everything away unless it breathes and has a respectable IQ.

I made sure the piles were stable, and I backed away without throwing out a thing. I just didn’t have the time.

As to the pile down below on the blanket: Surprise. Very little didn’t make it back into the mangled but salvageable box. Mostly because I want to see him have to hoist it back up, completely full.

It didn’t take that long, but I was ready to be extremely aggravated for having to deal with it at all. Then I found something he saved, something hilarious and brilliant that I had written in 2003 (I said my husband wasn’t a show- off, but I never said I wasn’t) and I read it and cried.

That he had saved it. That I used to write ALL THE TIME because that was all I did professionally. That I rarely do it anymore because my work is about much more than writing these days. That I had forgotten about this piece and it literally fell on my head on a day that I really needed to be reminded that I was am a writer.

I wiped my tears and put the paper on his desk.

Then I stole the rock garden for my desk at work. It is the fee for my time and it’s really more appropriate for a chick. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When a heavy box of old junk falls out of the ceiling and breaks open and you have to deal with it and you, in the end, don’t really mind that much…What is the symbolism there?