Michael Jackson, Power Girl, and the Deeper Meaning of Chests

I just took a walk outside on the rare lunchtime spent in the company of fresh air -- well, as fresh as it gets in urban Manhattan, anyway -- and I can report back, with almost no mean degree of inaccuracy, that this is going to be the summer of the Michael Jackson t-shirt.

I'm serious. For a while, I thought that Barack Obama was going to take the cake -- I mean, the t-shirt stores and bridge-table vendors near Times Square have been selling BO t-shirts and baby tees since January, and back then no one was even wearing t-shirts -- but things change, and the stakes are raised. After all, nobody expected the King of Pop to die.

And then I start wondering, where did we get this idea to wear our heroes on t-shirts in the first place? You didn't find the Children of Israel wearing I Heart Moses t-shirts, and how many times did he save their lives? More than Michael Jackson did, for damn sure.

Recently, in Israel, a clothing manufacturer started selling baby t-shirts that bore Rabbi Akiva's summary of the Torah, the words V'ahavta l'recha kimocha -- literally, "love your neighbor like yourself" -- written across the bosom. As much as Rabbi Akiva probably didn't linger too long on the free-love double entendre of his core principle, it's not a bad thing to go spreading to the rest of the universe. And, hey, it encourages various rereadings and reinterpretations...which is the essence of Torah commentary in the first place, right?

When I started working at MJL, there was a dress code. I suppose most day jobs have one. But, being as though I'd spent the past three years doing single days at law offices and anywhere that needed something typed, I wasn't used to having to do something that didn't require my one tie and single pair of fancy pants.

I learned pretty quickly, however, that the MJL dress code didn't cover much -- basically, it was no t-shirts with writing on it. It sounded pretty simple at first (I mean, the last thing that fosters a productive work environment is an ALOHA FROM MAUI shirt, or one of those ITHACA IS GORGES joke t-shirts that nobody really understands but everyone spends hours looking at, trying to figure out) but I soon came to have a different understanding of the rule. Wearing a word on your chest, whether it's "Sexy" or "Rock Star" or "I Voted for Fred Thompson," it's making a statement. It's limiting you. Even if the word is as simple as "hope," it's still setting a direction for your day. And the beauty of us as human beings is, our days can go anywhere.

In DC Comics, there's one superhero, Power Girl, whose uniform, in place of a Superman "S" or a Batman bat logo, has -- to put it delicately -- a lack of fabric. For years, it was never mentioned. Then, in a recent issue of Justice Society of America, it was called attention to rather vividly (and, at first, rather indecorously). At the end of the issue, however, there was a blazing monologue that caught me off guard: "Superman can wake up every morning, put on that big 'S,' and he knows exactly what his job is," she said (I'm paraphrasing). "Batman can wear a bat and strike fear into people's hearts or whatever. But I don't know what my mission in the world is, yet. I'm not ready to limit myself to one thing. So I have to keep searching."

Which is the biggest reason (though certainly not the only one) that I'm not going to wear a "V'ahavta l'recha kimocha" t-shirt. But even if there's nothing across my chest except for a blank shirt and a couple buttons, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Baba Sali: The Messiah Is Coming

The Internet has been around for a while -- and, while the immediacy of the medium is unsurpassed in spreading news stories and viral videos of nose-picking politicians and lightsaber duels, the most emotion that's most commonly associated with retrospective looks at internet viral memes is one of acute, painful embarrassment. For every "ZOMG Look At This" that us bloggers have posted, and then proudly bragged to our colleagues that we broke the story, there are a thousand things that would have made the world a better place if we'd totally ignored it in the first place.

And then there are the truly sad ones. The Heaven's Gate cult, originally thought to be harmless -- hey, they weren't recruiting, and they weren't affecting anyone but themselves -- who were among the early Web presences and whose site endures as a testament to their mass suicide.

Okay, but I wanted to talk about something that also has elements of pathos and sadness, if on a totally different level. It's all about a watch.

The great Moroccan sage the Baba Sali ostensibly gave a couple of watches to Rav Mordechai Eliyahu, one of the most important Sephardic rabbis in Israel. One was silver, one was gold. The watches are broken -- or, rather, they move much slower than normal watches. According to Mishpacha magazine (quoted here), Mordechai Eiliyahu's son relates how the watches work:

"One day, the Baba Sali's son came to my father and presented him with a watch. He explained that his holy father had come to him in a dream and told him that he should look in a certain drawer in a certain desk, where he would find this watch. He was to give it to my father and tell him that when the watch reached twelve o'clock, then Mashiach would come. At that time, the watch hands showed twenty minutes to eleven. Since then, my father keeps a very close eye on the watch, and found that sometimes it goes and other times it just stops."

Recently, I stumbled across, this post on another blog, which reported that one of the watches had struck twelve -- that the Messiah's arrival was imminent. Then I noticed the date of the post, August 2005.

Another Heaven's Gate, I thought.

My stomach sunk. I've always been an insufficient believer in the Messiah -- our sages say we should be ready for Mashiach's imminent arrival at all times. I always want to be. Messiah stories thrill me. But I haven't been able to get my head around the concept that the world might be changing, that I might actually see my grandfather and my dead best friend again. Shlomo Carlebach says that that's the kind of thinking that keeps the Messiah from coming. But, hey, I can barely believe that Obama is president -- and there he is, tellin' off the fat cats of Wall Street on the front page of the New York Times.

So, what of it now? Well, it turns out that the watch that struck twelve was only the silver watch -- and, as of November, there was a report (though unconfirmed) that, while Rav Mordechai Eliyahu was in the hospital, his son had custody of the watch, and it had moved to twelve. Or almost twelve?

I haven't been able to find anything more recent. But, as the Baba Sali Facebook group commemorates, today is his 25th yahrzeit. And I can't think of a better way to honor it by thinking that the Messiah might come today. Hey -- there's still hours before sunset. In New York, anyway.

Orthodox Jew s for Obama

Last night, the Orthodox Union called me in a frizzle -- they wanted to run an article on Inauguration. Did I have anything to say? Could I have anything to say?

I don't know how well-acquainted you are with me, but, uh, yeah. Throw me a party, and I will fill the house with ruminations on the Obamanation. I wrote about it once, in this book about chicken soup and Democrats, and I didn't think someone would be nice enough to ask for more. But here's what I said.

I have a friend, an underground playwright, who hates Obama. He's convinced that, six months after Inauguration, nobody's going to notice anything different from the past eight years of George W. Bush's administration -- we'll be paying just as many taxes, our troops will still be mired in war, and everything will be much the same. Nothing will have changed.

But he was one of the first Philadelphians in the poll booths.

Why? "Hope," he said. "The man's all about hope. He believes in something. It's a nice change from all the politicians who believe in nothing."

MORE >

Did you vote for this man?

I actually love staring at this picture and thinking, "This is the president-elect of the United States of America."

Transitions of Power

Welcome to the new world. In his last few months as a lame-duck president, Clinton declared a huge territory in Alaska to be a national park, and could therefore never be drilled or mined, and it was impossible to be overruled.

I'm kind of fearful for what Bush might do with *his* last few months in power. (Or maybe, like Judaism says, I should judge favorably -- he could always devote billions to cancer research or starving children.) And I'm kind of excited about Obama, and if any of the totally unreasonable superhuman powers we've girded him with over the past few months come true, maybe he'll be able to protect us from whatever madness Bush has in store.

Meanwhile: somebody should make a reality TV show about Osama Bin Laden's pacifist, cougar-dating, dreadlocked son, Omar Osama, who is asking for asylum in Spain. Spain? There doesn't seem to be any logical reason, except that, when I was researching Candy in Action, I discovered Spain has one of the most reliably all-night party junkets in the world.

She's 55, he's 27, and he really is a rebellious son. He says he's proud of his father's name, but keeps urging his father to "find another way." There should be some cracks to be made about how his new wife is old enough to be his mother, but considering his father has four wives and anywhere between 12 and 26 children, she's also old enough to be his sister -- which, at least theoretically, makes it less bad (or less hot, depending on your point of view).

Hol Hamoed Jam

Back from the Sukkos-imposed hiatus -- and, hey, the whole world has changed. For one thing, Prowler, the band that cameos in Losers, has a new music video...and also, I apparently guest-blogged on Jewish Grandchildren for Obama.

About a year ago, I wrote an essay for an academic anthology -- okay, no, it was Chicken Soup for the Democrat's Soul --saying how I really believed in Obama. He called on Congress to change. He asked the American people to believe in him. I think Shepard Fairy's Obama poster was the summit of this for me: the Senator's face and the single word "HOPE."

But this whole idea of HOPE is weird. You can HOPE for anything....

(keep reading)

And here's your Hol Hamoed jam: