A Day of Atonement

On my 40th birthday, I watched Atonement and Into the Wild. I had read Atonement years earlier but not Into the Wild, so I had no idea how it ended. Deaths all around. I wept during and after both films as if the disasters had happened to me.

The other day a friend remarked on how much mileage I was getting out of telling friends and strangers about my apartment fire. At the time I bristled, probably because I felt busted. Later, I realized it was because I felt fear – fear of losing the one thing I had left after losing everything else: my story.

And that’s exactly what Atonement and Into the Wild are: they are the what’s left.

In the case of Atonement, the protagonist, Briony Tallis, realizes she must put her writing skills into the service of atoning for her sins. The people she sinned against have all died, but she still has her ability to write her apology. We will never know, however, if Jon Krakauer imagined a reader for his journals because he died somewhere in the Alaskan bush, and his journals were published posthumously. Was his diary a place where he could privately atone for cutting off his family? Or, did he imagine the life he was leading would one day be published as a book in which he could say, “mom, dad, look! I made good on the gift of life you gave me. I lived!” Their atonement, it seems, was to turn his diary into the book, Into the Wild. In it, they are not painted in a flattering light, but they must have believed that publishing his journals would serve as a kind of public apology for not appreciating Jon as he was when he was alive. Atoning was all they had left.

With my own journals, the ones that burned in my fire, I did always imagine a sympathetic audience as I wrote them -- readers who might one day know my inner world. That hope is now gone. But I know it’s not that way with everyone’s journals. Some of us really do need a private outlet, and we might even think we will one day burn our journals in a bonfire of release down the road, with no one the wiser to who we really are...

No matter what fires consume our lives, accidentally or on purpose, what’s always left is our ability to make amends.

This morning I woke up vowing to fast for Yom Kippur (I had already failed after sundown last night – stuffing myself with popcorn and chocolate while I watched a chickflick). At 8:00 am, my vow still seemed possible. By 9:30 am, I had walked around the block and decided that if I were to give proper attention to my atonement process, I would need to caffinate my headache since it was far more distracting than my hunger pangs.

Yesterday, I made a public declaration about taking myself offline and off phone in order to add outside pressure to my commitment. But thoughts of e-mails from friends and hopeful online horoscopes and life-affirming phone calls have been coming as frequently as breath. I keep vacillating between wondering what denial has to do with atonement and registering dismay about my inability to conquer my various addictions. Yom Kippur requires 25 hours of abstinence from food, liquids, marital relations, the wearing of leather, general pleasures and work. After I drank my coffee, I scarfed down a few slices of watermelon, "for health reasons," I told myself. Then I opened my computer and began writing. After an hour of writing, I checked my e-mail. All this before noon. My purity of action had spent itself during the first hour and a half between waking and walking.

And now the guilt is setting in. Which, more than my attempts at fasting and thinking about my sins, is making me feel like a real Jew.

Thanks to a smattering of meditation training, I know that I need to stop letting my id and superego drive. I need to get myself into the observer’s seat. In order to keep pulling my mind back from thoughts of dinner 8 hours away, and the myriad failures of my life – why am I not able to keep my weight down? Why is my career so all over the map? Why I am not marriedwithkids? – I keep repeating, mantra-like, the bigger questions at hand: What are my sins? How can I atone for them? And, since I don’t believe in God, who am I atoning to, exactly?

Not being raised religious, the concept of sin, thankfully, is a tad foreign to me. Don’t get me wrong, I have developed, hopefully, some sort of moral and ethical universe in the absence of a religious one, driving me to right the wrongs I have committed against strangers, friends and family. I guess it all boils down the same thing – “wrong doing” or “sin”, whatever you want to call it, the act and the feeling are the same: bad.

Just after noon, I wrote a letter of admission and apology to a friend whose privacy I had invaded. I read his personal writing when I was not supposed to. The writing was kick-ass publishable, but it was private, and, therefore, not for me to judge, much less read. Far-too-swiftly, via e-mail, came a more-than-generous forgiveness, one I did not feel I deserved. And still I did not feel atoned. The afternoon yawned before me...

As I am writing this, I get a flash of insight: Atonement and Into the Wild provide the best mirrors for my malaise, for why I still feel something is missing in my process today. Both Briony and Jon not only atone in their writing, but they atone through their writing. Not only that, they basically atone through the act of living – Briony courageously carries on while her loved ones have died, and Jon packs about ten lifetimes into one, honouring every moment of his existence, good or bad, chalking it up to experience and gift.

And that's the nugget I have been searching for all day: I am pretty good at atoning in writing and in person, but I often feel I am a waste of my gifts.

What I should really atone for is an over indulgence of feeling sorry for myself. My life is a goddamn gift! This blog has been exceedingly helpful in giving me the space to do SOMETHING; I’ve never been more productive. But I feel more is still required. More work on my book, and on my painting projects. More recognition of how much it tears my parents apart when I am down on myself because what they see is a woman with an abundance of abilities, ones they gave me. Not appreciating myself is tantamount to not appreciating all they have done for me. I must write them a letter...

As much as I want to do more, I am also grateful for all the less I have ... less extraneous stuff I don’t need -- real or imagined or longed for -- thanks to my fire. Truth be told, if what's left is a story to tell, that is more than enough. It’s bloody well everything.

The Jewish Elvis

It’s the first day of Rosh Hoshana and I’m thinking: Elvis.

Six Elvises, to be exact. Andy Warhol's silver Elvises all lined up in a row, six silver guns aimed at the viewer, point blank.

“Speak!”

That’s what those guns seem to say . . .. today. Speak your truth. It’s now or never. Well, at least until this time, more or less, next year.

According to Lisa Katz’s blog (a primer for understanding Judaism),

It is believed that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribes us in “books.” God decides not only whether we will have a good or bad year, but also whether we will live or die in the upcoming year. Then on Yom Kippur, God seals these "books."

It follows that during the Ten Days of Repentance, the "books" are still open. God has judged, but not yet passed sentence. Repenting (as well as praying and giving charity) during the Ten Days of Repentance is the way to reconcile with God and change His inscription in the "books".

I love the idea of being inscribed in books. Not only does your fame last longer than fifteen minutes (if that’s something you care about), but you become part of another world, a parallel universe full of possibility. Even more, I love the idea of the book being re-writable for ten days, and then again for another ten days the following year, and so on, and so on. The book is never really closed then, is it? As long as you are alive, you have ten days every year in which to get the story right. And not only do you have a willing listener, but you have the most powerful listener in the universe. Getting your story down is none other than God. OK, so in the end you don’t get to decide your ultimate fate, but you do get to plead your case, which you are given ten days to reflect upon first, and ten days in which to perfect your story telling technique, a process you get to repeat for ten days every year until you die.

What I love most about the whole shebang is this: Repetition. Repetition exists in absolutely every part of our lives. It’s in the change of seasons, in the way we learn to play piano, in each attempt to reproduce Bubbie’s breaded chicken wings (which no one has successfully accomplished, but we all keep trying), in every relationship we work at in the hopes of getting it right this time, and so on. We repeat ourselves for many reasons: to hear ourselves think, to enjoy that cake again, to turn a wrong into a right, to learn a lesson we have not yet learned. Cliché as all this may sound, and even though I know you know what I mean, it still bears repeating.

Repetition often gets a bad rap – being called tedious, or boring, etc. – but a truth about repetition is that it is not only necessary for our ongoing survival (we learn as often through non-repetition as through repetition, the former being intimately tied to the latter), but we actually find repetition exciting because no two repetitions are alike, thus keeping repetition fresh! Summer is never the same as last summer. And next summer will inevitably be different again, giving us something to look forward to. When Gertrude Stein wrote a rose is a rose is a rose, what she really meant was a rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose because each one takes up a different position in time and space. You are not saying them at the same time, you are saying them (or reading them, or experiencing them ) in discrete moments. So each rose is either a painted rose, or a written-or-spoken-word rose, or a plastic facsimile, or a thorny reality, or a metaphor, or a cliché and so on . . .

Also, I must emphasize: repetition is not simply a copy, i.e. a poor substitute for the real thing, with a higher value placed on the latter. Within repletion lies the idea of a first instance, but we really don’t know when that happened. Far more poetic is this idea that repetition simultaneously contains the value of the singular moment and the potential of every other moment. For instance, take Andy Warhol’s approach to image making – churning out multiples as if they were widgets in a factory. The volume of output undermines the art-market value that gets assigned to one-of-a kind objects, imparting an accessibility (financially and otherwise) to art works hitherto denied the average person. Ironically (and this is the beautiful paradox of repetition), Andy Warhol’s renown, not to mention Elvis’s, ended up increasing the perceived value of the multiples, transforming them into rarified works that ultimately fetched the astronomical prices allocated to the aforementioned one-of-a-kinds. Similarly (but not the same), Andy Warhol’s multiples both reinforced and undermined Elivs's status. The proliferation of Elvis's image ensured he became a household celebrity, but also ensured no one Elvis was The Elvis: everyone could have their own Elvis. As such, he is both out of our reach and within our grasp.

If we count ourselves among those who believe singularity is the ticket to heaven, we may agree with Tori Amos who laments, “There’s too many stars and not enough sky.” But I see celebrity itself as a repetitive category into which any number of persons can be inserted at any time. In other words, the sky is endless, big enough for us all, and endlessly reproducing shooting stars, and endlessly letting them fall. Personally, I prefer falling stars, like wilting flowers, finding beauty in their dying. We all die, celebrity or not, but we don’t all die in quite the same way, do we? (Elvis died sitting on the toilet.)

As I said earlier, repeating a story gives us a chance to perfect it; Yet, as I am writing it again, I realize that repetition does not always strive towards perfection. Andy Warhol’s mechanical approach to image making deliberately undermined the concept of perfection (I was going to find another word for ‘undermine’ because I’ve used it already, but then I remembered I had not used it in this sentence yet). He made sure each print resulted in imperfect colour and image registration, (Andy Warhol’s process suggesting that even a machine cannot create a perfect copy). The results, which vary from print to print, also undermine the possibility for locating a static identity: Elvis is slightly different in each iteration. When you first stand in front of the six silver Elvises, you are hit with a wave of sameness. As you stand there a little longer, you begin to look for, and see, little licks of difference.

But what I loved the most about the silver Elvises at the Warhol museum in Pittsburg is this: a rabbi wrote the didactic panel. More to the point, Rabbi Mark N. Staitman discusses the silver Elvises in terms of repetition, which he says is a key strategy in the Torah:

It is not uncommon that Torah seemingly repeats itself. Often the seeming repetition has a slight variation, but always a variation in context. While some may see this as a redundancy, Judaism sees each statement as having different meaning. God would not be redundant.

I did not expect Andy Warhol’s Elvises to evoke thoughts of Judaism, but the good Rabbi’s panel sent me down a path towards further research.

According to John J. Parsons at www.hebrew4christians.com,

The Hebrew word for emet [truth] has a more concrete meaning than the English word for “truth” (the English word derives from the Greek/Western view of truth as a form of correspondence between language and reality, but invariably languished over epistemological questions that led, ultimately, to skepticism). . .

. . . Indeed, Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” is a category mistake, since truth is not about “what” but about “Who.” That is, truth is not something objective and static, a thing to be known and studied from a distance. No. Truth is essentially personal. It is a personal disclosure of the character of the subject. Understood in this way, truth is a way of living, a mode of existence, a relational truth.

In other words, truth is always my truth or your truth, not the truth. Since it is always tied to a person, it is necessarily filtered through that person’s experience, views, contexts and relations. Yet we cling to the idea of The Truth the way we grab hold of an anchor that seeks purchase on a shifting ocean floor. We believe The Truth will give us a point of reference: once we have located our true North, we will understand where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. (Also, we think that if discover where we are, we will have a better idea of where you are.) This desire to find a singular truth is what sends us to our synagogues, our churches, our temples, our mosques, our meditation mats – we retrace our steps each day, each week, or at certain holidays to our particular Meccas and repeatedly offer up our prayers for some kind of answer. For me, our endless search for truth (or beauty or love or whatever it is we are after) is no less than our declaration and celebration of being alive, no less than the repetition of breath, or step. The process is the truth and the beauty.

For me, Andy Warhol’s Elvises are a kind of prayer. Like repeatedly fingering worry beads, I run my eyes over the silver Elvises, from first to last and back again. Each Elvis stands in relation to the last Elvis as well as to the next Elvis and to Elvis himself – to all the ideas of him: the sexy, young buck who made girls swoon; or the fat, wasted Las Vegas Elvis who barely fit into his white leather pants. And each of those Elvises carries within him kernels of truth: Andy Warhol’s truth – that Elvis was and is both a celebrity and a reproducible image; and Elvis’s truth – that he was famous and the sky was the limit and yet he must have known he shit like the rest of us; and our truths – that Elvis lives as an idea in everyone else’s head. We cannot locate one truth about Elvis, only all the truths we each carry in our Elvis-loving hearts.

On this day, the first day of Rosh Hoshana, as I pack my bags to conclude my one-month stay in Berlin, and reflect on the various and competing stories of my life, I realize that one thing seems to remain true about me: I love to tell a story. That’s why I have always felt painfully dismissed when my listener complains, “you told me that already.” While I understand, and have experienced myself, the frustration of hearing a story again for the umpteeth time, there’s usually a reason the story gets trotted out again. My desire to retell the story is almost always about the particular moment I’m in, and usually related to the particular listener I’m with, and more often than not, it has less to do with the story itself and more to do with the tossing of a rope, hoping that you’ll catch the line and let me pull you in.

Jews for Elizabeth

Whatever experience I am having in the moment, I always seem to have it twice, often simultaneously: once while it is happening, and again as I tell the story to a specific person in my head, while it's happening. For instance, when I was riding Abi’s bike through Mitte and Prenzlauerberg, I realized I was now finding my way as Berliners do, keeping the television tower at Alexanderplatz in my sights. I was so thrilled I found myself telling Abi the story (in my head) like a child who finally masters bike riding, squealing with delight, “Look at me! I'm doing it!”.

During dinner with the Berlin Jews last night, I was committing detail to memory so that I could tell the story to Elizabeth later (you are all welcome to listen, too, of course). Elizabeth, New York Jewess in whose class on 19th and 20th C women writers (at Queen's) I found my voice. She has remained one of my dearest friends.

My Berlin friend, Eric, connected me with the Jewish community (this particular piece of it anyway) through the website, NetJewsishBerlin. The dinner, called Schmoozeday, was arranged for an Indian restaurant, which I found confusing, because I thought traditional Jewish food was Chinese!

Typical me, I almost decided not to go when I realized that if it was at an Indian restaurant, it would mean sharing food, and that reality panicked me for two reasons: one, Indian food is fattening and Germany has already expanded my waistline; and, two, I’m ashamed to say, sharing food likely meant sharing a bill beyond my budget. In the end, thankfully, my shameful cheapness shamed me into going as I asked myself, like a good Jewish mother would, what are you waiting for to start living? Another fire??? Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Everyone had either eaten at home already (to save money?), so they were just ordering appetizers, or else they were getting main dishes for themselves and not sharing (to save money?) I should have known! A table of Jews!

(I make such a bold statement because, as a Jew, I can get away with it; and let me tell you, nothing feels better than to reclaim a stereotype with humour.)

So, last night I broke (naan) bread with such a range of people – Igor, Russian Jew who spoke no English (in his 50s), Jeremy and Lina who also spoke little English (in their 40s, from somewhere east of here), Johan – Berlin Jew born in Scotland but returned to Berlin in his youth, now in his 60s, with whom I spoke French, and whose grandfather also studied at the Bauhaus, like mine; Asaf, Isreali Jew, 34 years old, training for a marathon, moved to Berlin because he fell in love . . . with Berlin, but travels all over the world doing sustainable development stuff; Lewis, filmmaker in his 40s, Swiss who speaks like a street Londoner; Devora (late 30’s, early 40s?), Berliner encrusted with jewels, but tastefully, from the west part (“of course you think NeuKolln is exotic but you must come to my neighbourhood and go shopping!” yet she is nothing like the Westmount Jewesses I met in Montreal), she is a dancer; Raquel, young Connecticut/New York Jewess in her 20’s who is here working on American films and lamenting the fact that she can’t apply for a German passport because the US does not allow its citizens to hold two citizenships; and, last but not in the least, Irene, whose story I wanted to tell Elizabeth.

Irene’s parents fled Berlin in 1938, restarting their lives in New York where Irene was born, I believe. But after the war, being communists, the family returned to Berlin . . . to EAST Berlin . . . by choice! So, Irene grew up an east Berliner, committed to the socialist cause. Since all I know about east Berlin is a tangle of stereotypes and propaganda, I went straight into interviewer mode and asked as much as I could. Irene was more than obliging. Imagine a woman with all the speech mannerisms of a New York Jew, “you want I should tell you a story? Sure, I’ll tell you a story!” but now laced with a German accent. She told me that living in east Berlin had been wonderful, that she had fascinating jobs and freedom of movement (relatively speaking) with the ability to travel to other countries, but she had zero interest in going to west Berlin. She was a journalist of sorts, I'm still not clear on what that means. She told me about how she met rabbis in the US who told her to form Jewish groups in Berlin. As a socialist, she was not an especially observant Jew. But “the good rebbe in New York,” she explained, “predicted east and west would soon no longer be divided, and then the socialist Jews would go searching for their Jewish heritage, so I had to start an organization to help them find their roots.” Irene did not believe the wall would come down anytime soon, but she started her organization for Jews anyway. A year later, the wall came down, and Irene’s group – Judischer Kulterverein Berlin — thrived.

She told me the organization is in the process of winding down. When I asked why, she said its members, if alive, are now 120 years old! I asked about the next generations. I can’t remember what she said, to be honest, (must have been all the sag paneer pooling in my stomach, sapping the energy required for my synapses to fire) but I believe it's because my generation is active, and, therefore, does not need to be reconnected.

Irene also told me that she finds the orthodox Jews in Berlin the most welcoming and friendly. She said it’s because they think it’s more important that people reconnect to the Jewish heritage than how they do it. So, the orthodox synagogue turns a blind eye to reform behaviour and welcomes you. It helps that the rabbi is from New York, I think.

Irene tells me there will be a huge Rosh Hashanah celebration at a fancy hotel on September 29. Fifty euros to get in, but no cost for anyone who is poor. I am not poor. I realize this. And I want to go. To be able to celebrate Rosh Hashana, the first day of the Jewish New Year, marking the ten days of the year when God opens the Book of Life and gives mortals a chance to reflect on the past year, on the future as we would like to create it, and to atone for our sins – what a gift!

Irene asks me if I’ll be going to the event. I respond in the enthusiastic tones of my generation, and the generations after me, “I’m SO there!”

(p.s. This morning I e-mailed Irene to see if she wanted to have dinner with me on Friday night. This is the response I got:

Friday I will be at the film night against Neonazis – starts at 6 pm, ends at midnight. “Babylon” movie Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.

Of course you will be there, Irene, of course!!)

http://judaism.about.com/od/roshhashana/qt/when08rh.htm