Love, law, limits and botched sign language. This is the story of my "San Francisco wedding" – and the particular moment in time it inhabited.
Read moreSuch Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of
So although I’m drawn to the mystical, I am quick, I fear, to pooh-pooh the woo-woo, as it were. If I experience something transcendent, I soon douse the experience in a bucket of cold water. But there are times when the mystical is so pressing, that it’s really hard to explain it away. Which brings me back to the dream about my mother 19 months ago.
Read moreAt the Rebbe's Gay Tish
And then the participants began to roll in. Like Chasidim would pour into Bratzlav or Berditchev or Lublin, to spend the Jewish holiday at the shtibl and table of their favorite rebbe. Instead of Yisroels and Motls and Shmuels, we instead had Davids and Steves and Marks and Sams – several of each, in fact. Instead of gabardines and shtreimls we had shorts and tank tops and, by the pool, nothing at all.
Read moreSpirograph, Leviticus, and the Cycles of our Lives
When Lynn and I work in the Chicago basement, it doesn't clearly feel like a cycle, but more often like one, unending difficult state. A jumble of reverence and frustration and ambition and despair. We look at all the holy relics with which my mother was entrusted and ultimately burdened. We sit inside of it and wish it had a cyclical quality. After all, even Sisyphus has his "up" moments. Where are ours?
Read moreA Ghost of Shtetl Future
But being a ghost here seems fitting... There are no more Jews in Krinek. Not a single one, as far as anyone knows. In 1941 they were corralled into a long, narrow ghetto running along the river from the town center to Gabarska Street, where the Jewish tanneries stood. And a year later the Jews were gone altogether and Krynki became a ghost town.
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