Apart From the Past

Were you born in the wrong time? I know I was. I don't suppose there is anything one can do about it and I suppose that is one reason there are so many movies, books, etc. that use time travel as the answer to present day misfortune. I really want to know if this is just a fixation of mine or do other people feel this way.

Sure I know more then a few people who would like to know how it was to live at a certain time period. How did people talk to each other in Shakespearean England? What was the mood during the depression? Was "Another one Bites the Dust" a popular song during the plague? and other important historical issues. I don't really mean those people. I guess it is more like the Woody Allen movie, "Midnight in Paris" where the main character romanticizes about living in Paris of the past (supposedly because he is lost in the Paris of the present.) That could easily be me and the way I feel now.

I suppose there is nothing I can do about it but more and more I get the feeling, or more accurately the yearning to go back in time...not too far perhaps the beginnings of the State, or the beginnings of the Kibbutz movement and see what the average person thought about and what they felt, not just the ideologues and the thinkers, the ones that put their thoughts on paper, the ones that drove the socialist movement, the ones that drafted and indoctrinated, and the ones that eventually become so frustrated that they too left the kibbutz fold. How did people react when the first person asked for something of his own? When the kibbutz decided to allow individuals to have their own tea kettle in their "room" were there people saying, It's the beginning of the end."

I would have loved to walk in the freshly ploughed fields near the Kinneret as the flies buzzed around me and still be able to marvel at the sun as it beat down upon me drawing out sweat and tears but to still see the beauty of the sunset and the shadows of the dusk as they slither over the Syrian Golan heights with nothing but fields and open space all around me. What would it have been like to imagine a vibrant state in a budding environment and what does it then feel like to see a bustling chain of communities clogging the roads and choking the last ounces of mother earth. The pioneers of those days built Utopia, at least in my mind, they built the perfect harmony of work, struggle, and accomplishment. Will future generations look back at us and think the same? or will they wonder at our selfishness and corruption of the natural resources we abused. Will they critique our lust for money and power? or will they wonder why we didn't wield even greater power?

I look over to Jordan (and what did I see...) and wonder what will change here in this valley during my children's lifetime. When I reflect upon what I have accomplished up until now, I am not too impressed. I have not built the Utopia I dreamed of in my idealistic teens and one could easily debate whether I am leaving a better world or a more complicated and dangerous world for the next generation. So you say, "Hey, get off your but and do something!" I agree and I am encouraged by many of my peers who volunteer, who build communities, who engineer demonstrations, and who, most importantly, are not complacent.

It is easy to look back at what appears to be a simpler time and yearn for our issues to be simpler and more easily understood and it is much harder to look forward and have a good sense of where to step up and act. The sun is going down and although the sky is filled with a haze that blinds me, the smell is of the incapacitated waste water treatment ponds, the buzzing of the cars from the highway but I know that the hills of Edom are turning blood red and the migratory birds are circling looking for shelter for the night. If I try hard I can block out the high tension lines and see just the mountains whose changing colors befuddle geologists and poets alike. Even if I am not sure where to act, I can start by imagining  the world in the way I dream of seeing it.

Shabbat Shalom

Hard of Herring

I am sick. My nose has been stuffed for about a month now (no kidding) and now my ears are blocked. Each time I go for nose drops I feel guilty. How many of those little plastic bottles am I going to use? Why don't they have an economy size for nose drops? I know you aren't suppose to use nose drops for too long but I weighed the option of not using them and the option of not breathing until the cold abates...guess what I chose. It is suppose to be hot here in the Sahara but not this winter. We really had a true winter...okay it didn't go down below freezing more than....well never but it is cold for us warm weather light weights.

Having my ears all stuffed up makes me think a bit about my oldest who is profoundly deaf and yet functions quite well armed with a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. The part for me that is hard to grasp is that even if intellectually he knows he is deaf, he doesn't really know what it feels like to be deaf. Sure every so often you might here him say something like, "Well I don't hear so well do I?", but that could be any teenager talking to his parent. When he was younger, before he had the implant and before he "grew up" he would often wake up in the morning, especially Shabbat morning, before anyone else. I don't really know why he did this, I used to say that he was more affected by the morning light than the rest of us, but that was a shot in the dark (ha ha). My son likes to do things and likes to be involved with something. Especially on the Sabbath he has learned the art of curling up on the sofa and enjoying a good book with a sidecar of hot tea and a bowl of Cheerios and ice cold milk. God bless him.

What I don't understand is why he doesn't put his hearing aid in when he first gets up in the morning. I would go nuts if I didn't hear anything. Like having my ears or nose blocked...I grab the drops and ease the congestion. I would reach for my hearing aid and then probably my teeth when I woke up. If my son never heard in his life, I would understand it. You can't miss something you never had to begin with right? But he has heard and he can hear, so why isn't his first morning impulse to go and put in his hearing aid? Even more so because when someone else gets up he might start a conversation with them. A rather one sided conversation which I find rather clever of him. So it isn't because he wants to shut himself off from the outside world, which is totally something I would do if I had a hearing aid and wanted to escape the big bad world. Okay, you caught me. There would be times I would want to hear and there would be times I would elect to shut down.

This question troubled me for awhile until I was speaking with a friend of mine who has some trouble seeing in the mornings. He uses a hair dryer to dry his eyes and only then can he fully function. He was describing how, on a non-work day, he would wake up and not bother with the normal ritual and deferred to other things before having to "get sighted". Now he wasn't not using electricity for purely halachic reasons nor was he being irresponsible; perhaps a bit lazy but the choice was intentional. One day a week, and not really a whole day, just a few morning moments that he could pigeon hole the routine and be himself for himself with no one else letting him know he is different. Perhaps for my son that is the way he feels too. When he would get up early in the morning and the only one awake was him, he could set the rules of what is reality. What is normal.

Now my son is much older and if he wakes at all in the morning it is to grab a bowl of cereal and to climb back into bed. Now that sounds like a plan to emulate.

Shabbat Shalom