Monument Valley, a poem

Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone
each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement

nails across the blackboard 
of my sleep.

Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do
then drive myself crazy till sunset.

Freed prisoners will commit a crime
to return to the solace of jail.

I’ve been listening to music by dead people
hoping to set their souls at ease

though it might be because there’s nothing
I want to listen to.

Tonight I am having trouble surrendering
to the night, my body quaking 

with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect
from the maelstrom of my head

How I wish for something diagnosable
The ability to put a limit to my problems, say this is it

draw a box around them
then step outside it

G-d just seems to never want tonight to end
I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars

Wondering what happens if I start walking among them
and don’t stop till I reach what comes next


______
Image from page 138 of The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend (1919)

Pray Loud

Yankel, who used to be Jack, got kicked out of his last club on a Tuesday night. He wasn’t acting rowdy, not nearly as rowdy as the night when Nail and Anarchia brought the homemade volcano to the Dismemberment Plan concert, not even as crazy as the Godheadsilo show where he’d jumped from the balcony into the audience below. It wasn’t a 21+ show — not that that had mattered for quite a few years now. He even had I.D.

It was the bouncer. He was a big shaved-head guy of indeterminate ethnicity, his face like a Disney gargoyle’s face frozen with a piece of sharp metal hanging out of it. The guy did have the metal, a whole row of hoops erupting out of his lower lip. He looked like every James Bond henchman at once.

He was doing a sweep of the crowd, making sure nobody was up to no good. It’s the hardest part of these shows, Yankel knew from experience. Over the years he’d worked both sides of the table. The guy passed over the guys with piercings sharper than knives, passed over the pot-huddle in the corner. And he stopped in front of Yankel.

Yankel pretended not to notice him. It worked every bit as well as it did when he was 16.

The guy gave him a shrug, crossed his arms. It wasn’t a fierce arm-crossing. It was just to show Yankel that he wasn’t impressed.

“What are you doin’ here, man?”

Yankel leaned forward.

“I’m sorry?” He cocked an ear. Maybe he’d misheard? “What is the problem, sir?”

He’d always been polite, no matter what else he had going on. He respected these guys. It was hard being paid to constantly be about to fight and never fighting.

The guy undid his arms. One of his hands he waved at Yankel. Vaguely at first, fanning the air around him, then zeroing in on his belly — his white shirt, his black vest, the stripes of his over-the-shirt tzitzis that his potbelly poked out like a family camper.

“You, man. It’s no problem, I ain’t kicking you out — but it’s you, man, what’s somebody like you doing here?”

Most nights Yankel didn’t come to these things alone. He brought friends, he found buddies. The few guys still in town from the old days, or someone from the forums. Yankel worked in computers, on the days when business was slow, he still logged onto the chat boards, eavesdropped on what people were saying about the bands he liked, which new bands were like them, lobbing insults at each other for musical taste, avatar use, lyrical quotes in their signatures. Yankel was brief and to the point. He tried never to insult people. His avatar was a gray profile. He didn’t have enemies. No friends, really, but everyone was his ally.

Tonight, though, none of his conspirators could make it. He came alone. Watched the opening band alone. Bought a beer for him and for nobody else. Stood alone in the corner between acts, drinking it as a substitute for between-sets small talk.

“I just come for the music. I like this music.”

The guy wasn’t buying it.

“You people have your own music, man. You ain’t here to dance, you hear to look. Listen. You wanna hook up, there’s a bar across the street, this trance bar, you can rub up against all the girls you want to over there. Girls, boys, whatever you’re after. Maybe take off your little cap next time, dress a little more low key.”

“No, you don’t understand — this band, I got all their albums, I got everything.”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said the guy, hands up, backing away. “That’s all.”

Yankel didn’t have to leave. Yankel left anyway. He listened to the first two songs of the next band’s set, his favorite band from when he’d started coming to these places — but there was no point. It was so long ago. You could hear it in the music, the band’s passion just wasn’t there anymore.

**

He can hear the goings-on inside his house from down the block. The screams get louder as he gets close. They are tiny, breathless, pathetic. The most incredibly syncopated rhythmic cries, like some weird Norwegian or Icelandic art-rock sampling crew.

He climbs the stairs to his apartment, kicks snow off his boots, removes his coat and heads straight for the dark room in the rear.

At once he is confronted.

“Yankie, please, take her.” She thrusts the baby into his hands. The little thing sits there, tiny arms drooping over his huge hands. “She’s been nonstop since dinnertime. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t make her stop.”

For a moment the tiny thing is confused. Then it regains its motivation, starts screaming again, its entire face contorted into the wrinkles around one huge gaping void of a mouth. There aren’t even teeth. No creature in G-d’s great Earth has ever screamed so mightily, so forcefully, and yet still produced such an insignificant squeak.

The door shuts hard. From the other room he can hear a rustle in the closet, a shuffle, a sigh, the welcome sound that the Netflix makes. She is such a special woman, and so selfless. He is unworthy of her.

But what he’s really unworthy of is this baby. This tiny beautiful creature who he has somehow contributed to the existence of. Even as she cries he wants to hug her, to squeeze her tight and protect her from the world, to find anything in the exile of our lives that could possibly be good enough for her.

He rocks her. He jiggles her. He puts a lullaby on the tape player; he tries reciting to her from Psalms, which always seemed like a good idea. He tries everything. From the other room, a fresh theme song. The episode has ended. Another is starting.

“Ba, ba, baba,” he coos softly in her ear. “Ba, ba, baba. I wanna be sedated.”

The tickle of his voice on her earlobe only protracts the worldly anxiety. Her scream becomes an uproar. Her entire body shudders with every blow.

He has no choice but to match it.

“When we have nothing left to give,” he sings, “there’ll be no reason for us to live.” The music screeches with urgency, the backing music in his mind, and he sings, louder now, “We owe you nothing,” again, “We owe you nothing,” and now he’s really screaming out, “We owe you nothing, you have no control,” and “You are not what you own,” and all the lyrics are tumbling out of him now, all the words to all the songs, and he is roaring them at the walls, roaring them against the night, against the world of exile, against his entire life, and remarkably, miraculously, the louder he goes he is like an all-encompassing tsunami, he is nature sounds, he is every white noise at once, and her eyes flutter, maybe taken by surprise or maybe just amused, and her mouth exercises into shapes, an O, an O, a horizontal I, and he is consumed by everything and she snuggles contentedly into the warmth of his exploding chest and settles into a perfect sleep.

Image by Jon Pack, who was very amenable about my waking him up in the middle of the night and asking if I could use it. Find more of his stuff here, or you can acquire some of his work for yourself right here. Lyrics sampled from Fugazi and the Ramones. 

I Am Broken, I'm the Glue

 

I didn’t know what I was going to say to my kids this morning. Each of them is at a different point of comprehension: The election didn’t turn out the way we wanted. That guy who was being mean to girls won the election. 

Women can do anything they want to, but there’s not going to be a woman president quite yet.

I prayed in English this morning. I mostly know what the Hebrew words mean, but my brain needed something simpler, more easily digestible, something I could believe in without asking myself How could this happen? and Do so many people really think this way? and Why is there so much hate in the world? The verses came fast and hard. We are but dust. Not for our sake, but for Your compassion. The rule of man over the animals is nothing, for all is but a fleeting breath.

By the time I finished the sun had risen, it was morning for real. I started with the 6-year-old. She wouldn’t budge, she was dead to the world, and I didn’t have the heart to make her — I’d woken at 5, lay in bed for an hour, unable to summon the courage to move. The Shulchan Aruch says you have to start the day like a lion, ready to pounce on whatever comes, but today I’d felt like prey, not predator. I would let her sleep a little longer, spend another 5 minutes in a place where a woman might still be president and not someone who assaulted them.

The 8-year-old was more responsive. She leaped up, brushed her hair from her eyes, and said, “Today is Vampire Day.”

Oh, good. I didn’t have to tell her, she already knew.

Umm… “What do you mean?”

“My friends and I are dressing up as vampires, so I need a brooch. Can you find me a brooch?”

A, I do not have any brooches lying around.  B, I actually have no idea what a brooch is and, though it might expand my knowledge, I’m not sure a simple Google image search is gonna produce the desired object in a usable form. C, do vampires wear brooches?

D, is this the first morning of a world controlled by an orange sycophant?

We agreed on an ensemble (her uniform, but presented in a slightly vampier way — collar turned up, maybe?). Somewhere along the way, I mentioned to her, Hillary lost the election.

“Oh.” Disappointment and confusion flickered alternately across her face. “So that means Trump is going to be president?”

“Im yirtze Hashem.” If G-d wills it. He could die soon, I thought to myself. He’s old, who knows what he’s been through. Or the revolution could happen. Or he could do something monumentally stupid and the Electoral College could step in, vote in Paul Ryan as an emergency candidate, do something, anything, to save us from ourselves.

“What’s the Electoral College?”

The ditches I dig myself into.

“So when we vote for president, we’re not actually voting for the president.  We’re picking someone else — say, we’re voting for Ani,” I plucked a doll at random, “and in a few weeks Ani is going to go and vote for president for real.”

“Papa, but why?”

“So that if someone really dangerous or evil gets elected, there’s still someone to stop them before they really get elected…but, uh, that doesn’t really ever happen…”

She was looking at me the same way she did when I tried to explain animal reproduction.

A moment of deliberation. Then: “Papa, you’re so silly,” and a grin breaks out.

Not for our righteousness, O L-rd. Not for anything we’ve done, but because of Your generosity and compassion.

So she didn’t completely understand, but that’s about on par with the rest of America. A few minutes later, I go downstairs to wake up the other kids and break it to them. The six-year-old screws up her face, crosses her eyes, sticks out her tongue into a popsicle shake and jams her finger up her nose. “Well, THAT doesn’t make any sense,” she says.

Two minutes later, we are locked in a wrestling match, with her on my stomach and the 2-year-old cheerily perched on my face.

There’s no happy ending to this post. The next four years might suck, and they might suck bad. Or they might not — for all the jejune awareness of how politics really work, you can’t tell another country you’re building a wall and now they have to pay for it; that didn’t even work in kindergarten when Tim Shaw stole my snack and so I figured I would be able to just take his. The president really isn’t that powerful, and in recent history the people who actually hold our nuclear codes have a lot more sense than the people who ostensibly have the power to launch them.

When I broke up with my first girlfriend, I remember how full the world seemed of her. Everywhere I looked and everything I thought about related back to her — the toys in my room we’d played with, the apple juice boxes we’d smuggled to each other. (It was first grade.) (Mostly-true story: She moved away in first grade, but we wrote each other letters for a little bit; to the best of my knowledge, she became a covert operative for the CIA.)

But the more time I spent away from her — the more of my life became filled with not-her things — the easier it was on my tender little heart.

Last night, as the results were pouring in, my wife was out for her first night out since the baby was born. I was left at home with an infant who does not inherit my predilection for bottles — and, for good measure, a beat-up old Saab outside whose alarm went off whenever another car passed by. Yes, bad news was hurling at me like tomatoes toward Fozzie Bear on a good night. But it was all relative. The infant in my arms, who knew nothing of political pain, bellowed at the top of her lungs for milk. And then she had it. And then she was asleep.

Right now we are bellowing. Right now it feels like the whole world — especially if you are at an office job with Internet access, especially if your only way of staying in touch with your friends is them posting memos about the end of the world.

But, as the ancient rabbis said (well, it was on Buffy), we’ve faced the end of the world once or twice before. We’ve pulled through.

It sucks to tell your kids. It sucks to tell yourself. But we’re going to pull through again.

 

photo: “I think I’ll start a new life” by Noukka Signe

Pee Break

 Sometimes you just need to get out.

There’s that moment at the bar where the debate is getting a little too intense and I’m getting a little too evasive, and it hits. The realization that I haven’t peed in two hours. Yes, I am sitting with one of my best friends in the world, and yes, we are yelling at each other at the top of our voices, but the moment I stand up, something changes — I have a bit more of my personal space to myself, I am seeing the room from a different vantage point, and the world seems like a little bit of a different place.

“Excuse me,” I say, in a completely different voice from the one I’ve just been using, and using words, like excuse me, that I never thought I’d speak again. And then: “I’ll be right back.”

And when I slip away, the world slips away from me.

Sometimes it’s just so good to go to the bathroom. Not the act itself, but the act of leaving behind the world and making yourself alone. I’ve been operating on a constant emotional peak over the past few weeks, and I keep telling people, “I feel drained.” Those three words have never seemed so inappropriate: Whenever I feel an emotional overload, what I really should be saying instead is, “I need to drain.” There’s a Hasidic concept called hisbodedus where you leave your surroundings, leave your world and run to the nearest forest and scream as loud as you can, at the top of your lungs. Peeing might be the urban version of that.

I’m not talking about the actual act — or, at any rate, not the actual act of what you do while you’re in the bathroom. No, I’m talking about the journey itself, the process of getting up and leaving wherever you are and interrupting the normal and mundane rhythm of your life in order to just pish.

It’s not a revolutionary idea. No, it is. I once worked in a place where nobody spoke to each other, we were all in the same big room, at our own desks, each of our heads glued to our respective computer monitors. Nobody even left for lunch.

I would take the longest bathroom breaks. Luxurious, ostentatious ones. Just the walk from my desk (right at the head of the office, the furthest of all from the restroom door) would take a good two to three minutes. I stretched my legs, feeling each tendon loosen, feeling my butt balloon from its hours of squashedness, feeling the newfound if momentary freedom of all my limbs moving. I tossed my arms forward and back, that exaggeratedly comical 19th-century walking that you only see in Monty Python sketches. I would drop something on the way, a coin or a piece of paper, take my time picking it up — kneeling down rather than just stooping over, because I had this vague notion of it being healthier, or it being, you know, like exercise. A very minor form of exercise, I was well aware, and almost nothing when you consider that for almost the entire remainder of the day I was sitting at my desk, chair too high and keyboard too low, basically committing a slow form of suicide by laziness, whatever the opposite of yoga is.

This is nothing compared to actual restroom time. I have thought many times of acting like I needed to go to the bathroom at work — doing the walk, the flush, the running of the water tap in the sink, maybe even washing my hands for real, and my face for good measure, just because water in movies always symbolizes a new life and, hell, at 3:00 in the afternoon of a work day I can definitely use a new life, even if it’s basically the same as the old one.

Just, here’s the trick: I wouldn’t go to the bathroom.

I’d just stay there. Hang out for a minute, or two, or ten. Maybe check my email on my phone — no, don’t do that, because that’s basically the same as sitting at your desk. No: just enjoy the damn silence. I used to work in a neighborhood called DUMBO, by the East River and among a bunch of old factories, and there were tons of areas there where you could hide, write stories, make out, even take a nap if you wanted. Now I work in Manhattan, and what we have are bathrooms. It really is the city’s consolation-prize equivalent of a forest: if you want to be alone, this is what you’ve got.

When I was just getting started with being a parent and Mayim Bialik was a little ahead of me being a parent, she said that one of the hardest things about being a parent was that she couldn’t even get away with going to the bathroom. In the moment, I didn’t really understand. Can’t you just leave your kids for 30 seconds? Even easier: if they’re really that young, can’t you just bring them into the bathroom with you or leave the door open and have them crawl around or drool right outside for a few minutes? It’s only now that I truly realize what she was talking about: it wasn’t the shitting, it was the separating.

I once had a girlfriend who would never go to the bathroom when I was at her place. She said she thought it was indecent, that she didn’t want me to see her that way.

“But you walk around naked all the time!” I exclaimed.

She thought about this for a moment and then acknowledged that, yes, that was true.

“So what is it that you don’t want me to see?” I asked her, and in that moment the answer opened itself up in my head: It was that rawness, that fundamental grossness that we are all repulsed by yet that we all share, that raw and stinky moment of knowing — and admitting — that each other, and that we ourselves, are human.

Because I can talk about bathrooms as a place of escape all I want, but the truth is, it’s there for a very specific purpose. We place a holy scroll on every doorpost of our house except on the bathroom door. When excessively polite people talk about shitting, they call it voiding. One of my favorite Jewish prayers is the prayer for going to the bathroom (not going but, you know, going):

…You formed us with wisdom
and created within us
many openings and many voids.

And isn’t that all we are, in the end? A series of openings and a series of hollows, the things that fill us up and the things that will never fulfill us, the times that we are busy and full and productive and the times we need to just get away.

Praying, and Cookies

There's this little afternoon prayer service inside an office building. Today, because it was the anniversary of his aunt's death, one of the elderly gentlemen brought in boxes of cookies and brownies for everyone. Before anybody ate, this one guy held up his phone and said, "This is the kosher certification for the cookies. I'm not saying anything about it, good or bad. I'm just saying I don't recognize it, and you should all know that before you eat it." He didn't take any. I left right away, disgusted with that guy. Now I wish I'd taken a cookie right away and sank my teeth into it. Or maybe I just wish I would've sank my teeth straight into that guy's face.

Kid Crying Isn’t Real Crying

The morning started out good. First, I woke up at 7:30. Miracle! The kids went to bed late, and then my baby mama and I stayed up late, and I was sure I was going to be zombieied today. No such luck. I soundly ignored my vibrator-but-not-the-good-kind of an alarm clock, heard the baby singing in her cot, and jumped up to get her. Five minutes later, she was soundly clamped on a maternal boob*, the 3-year-old was clamoring awake, and I was simultaneously packing lunch, getting dressed, getting her dressed, and trying to say the morning prayers.

Our older kid is an impossible dresser. First of all, she has a new favorite color every day, and she will only wear that color. Secondly, she has of late developed an aversion to wearing anything below her waist. Also, she is militantly against eating anything until two minutes before she has to leave.

So you can imagine my surprise when she sprints straight for her clothes drawer. She hands me a shirt (weather-appropriate!) and pants (that match!), and patiently waits for me to tie her shoes. I slam down my upstairs prayerbook — I’m up to the point where I need to put on a tallis and tefilin, and that is downstairs — and yell back over my shoulder to her, “Come on! I’ll make you breakfast or you can play with your toys or whatever!” I touch ground at the first floor. Whereupon I hear her voice over my shoulder, wafting down from the second story: “CARRY ME!”

Dude.

Could you not have asked me thirty seconds ago? That’s thirty seconds, one flight of stairs climbed, that I’ll never get back.  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Just walk down yourself.” After all, she’s been climbing stairs for years. She’s a stairmaster.

And the mouth flies open. And the crying starts.

I don’t know if you know about kid-crying. It’s not like grownup crying (or even like teen-angst crying, which I am way more used to). It’s a combination guttural yell, swallow, choke, and burp. It’s totally tear-less, at first. In fact, behavioral scientists in my imagination have hypothesized that kid-crying is genetically related to crocodile crying, which is to say, it’s not actually sadness-related or pain-related at all, but is instead a technique specifically designed to lure in sympathetic victims until they’re in biting distance.

Actually, I think kid-crying brings on real crying if you do it long enough, thus preparing your child for a bright future as a stage actor with the rare talent to cry on command, or possibly as a manipulative future ex-girlfriend to someone exactly like yourself. Did I say that aloud? Okay, moving on.

I tell her, come on, it’s fine, I can make you breakfast if you want, and we have those new organic Puffins that actually taste good and that you love. The onslaught continues. I ignore her. My day-job beckons, after all. Not to mention G-d. So I wrap myself up in tefilin, grab my downstairs prayerbook, and start prayin’ like there’s no tomorrow.

She keeps crying.

There is a thump. A rhythmic thump upstairs, of clumsy wheels guided by clumsy feet. “What that?” my older daughter demands, and I can hear my wife explaining that the baby just got a walker.

“I want a walker too!” That sentence doesn’t actually end, per se, so much as the too fading into another wail.

And then a pause. “You got the baby a present and if you got the baby a present than you will get me a present too,” she says — and you’ll notice, of course, that there is no breath in between the crying and the talking, no wiping away of tears or swallowing of mucous that comes with real crying; it’s been crocodile yells this whole time — “What present did you get me, Mama?”

Alright, there’s no getting out of this. None of that parenting-book stuff we try to adhere to, where you try not to connect the presents with the temper tantrums, either as a reward or as a punishment. A tantrum is a tantrum, and both work and preschool are calling. In a few minutes, she will trundle down the stairs, on her own, and show me her brand-new baby hammock.

But for now, I close my eyes. I pray. Not drowning out the chaos of our morning, but becoming one more voice in the chorus of it.
_____
* — Yes, she’s still breastfeeding, although we have to supplement. Read here if you’re not yet entirely sick of the whole boob-sucking debacle.

The Moment When All Prayers are Answered

When you pray by the first light of dawn, the Talmud says, Heaven pays attention to your prayers immediately. And when you time your prayers so that they culminate with the Amidah prayer at the moment that the sun breaks the horizon -- again, according to the Talmud -- that's the moment where the gates of heaven are flung open unreservedly, so that any prayers are answered immediately and without question.

My daughter is still on East Coast time. She woke up at 5:00. This is the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean from the villa we've been staying at. (We're down the street from Julia Roberts and one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Although, at this particular moment, none of that earthly name-dropping stuff seems to matter.)

Re-Chametz-ification

I still haven't broken Passover. And I'm kind of cool with that.

(Okay, I sort of promised myself as I sat down to write that this wasn't going to turn into a my-Passover-was-cooler-than-yours post. I'll try to keep it that way. But it still might.)

A few years ago, when I was living in Israel, I went out to lunch with a bunch of folks. This was two, maybe three weeks after Passover ended. My friend B., who's kind of a spiritual giant and lives on a different plane of existence than the rest of us -- he routinely takes half an hour or longer to pray the (usually 3-minute) mincha service -- happened to mention, while we passed around the wicker bowl of laffas, that he hadn't broken Passover yet.

This was soundly greeted by a round of "Whut?!"s from the table.

B. explained. It's not that he was purposely prolonging Pesach (say that three times fast) -- he just wanted to hold on to the feeling. He didn't even say that. What he said was much more subtle, and much more wise. Something about how going from from chometz to bread, was a single huge step, like going from slavery to freedom, and if we do it all at once, we miss the full spiritual experience.

Caveat #1: Not everyone has the patience (or the space in their lives) for a full spiritual experience like that -- and most of us need to dive back into our bread. I was going to make a salad for lunch today, but I didn't have time, and so I grabbed a bagel from the freezer, slathered on some cream cheese, and made my train in time. But yesterday I packed Passover leftovers, and I was feeling pretty damn good about it. (Caveat #2: my wife is a personal chef, which most people aren't -- and hence, my lunch of manchego gratin and ratatouille was probably not most people's Passover experience. Gloat gloat gloat.)

People like B. amaze me, not because they have spiritual experiences, but because they have such a talent for making spiritual experiences last. For me, I have a great morning prayer, or hear a great song, it's gone the moment I step out the door and the angry Brooklyn traffic crashes me down to reality. Sooner or later, I know real life is going to sink in -- and, with it, the hametz.

i hate it when you say a blessing on food that's way too hot to eat but you already said it, nothing you can do, so you just have to shove it into your mouth and hope for the best.

just saying.

Praying (They Don't Think I'm Gonna Blow Them Up)

I'm reporting to you live on location from the airport lobby. At 6:00 AM, the place gleams with a shine usually reserved for window-washing commercials and baby's backsides. Even when it's hygienic, it still has that suspicious airport smell. I couldn't tell you why. I think it's just part of the way G*d created the world.

Anyway, it's not 6:00 AM anymore. It's a little past 9, and the place is a lot more filled and a lot less gleamy. And I'm in Terminal 5, the JetBlue terminal, instead of Delta, where my flight is, because people who fly JetBlue look less gloomy and because there is free (and non-hiccupy) internet.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We arrived at the airport and checked in at 6:02 AM. Turns out, Delta instituted a new policy -- YESTERDAY -- that you can't check in baggage less than an hour before a flight. Need I say that our flight was at 7:01? So the rest of the fam ran ahead, and I hung back to be the proud defender of our baggage.

And to try and scrounge for another seat. Now, I have anxiety issues. At 7:00, there was a flight that they couldn't get me on because they tried too late. At 7:45, same thing. Eventually, it was 8:30, I still didn't have a ticket, and I was getting dangerously aware that the latest time I could possibly pray was rapidly creeping up.

So what's a boy to do? What, indeed, except go and throw the politest, most courteous s#!+-fit that he could. And smile politely afterward and explain that he needs a ticket.

Sometimes, all you need to know is how to speak the language. Not more than five minutes later, ticket in hand, I sat, confident and assured that I still had nearly six hours to kill before my flight, and unwrapped my talis and start to pray.

This was the point where I noticed something was amiss. People were staring at me. And not in that hey-didn't-you-write-a-book-I-read way.

I started swaying into the prayers, trying politely to ignore it. Then I took out my tefillin and started wrapping the black straps around my arm.

That was when they started looking at me like I was about to blow something up.

It's pretty understandable, actually. I mean, I have nervous and paranoid fantasies all the time. I'm always thinking in terms of a worst-case scenario. (Like, for instance, whenever we're headed for an airport, I just know we're going to miss our flight. Totally baseless, and it never actually happens...whoops.) When some dude who looks like an alien with upside-down antennae covers himself in a white cloth and begins wrapping possible-dynamite-but-it's-actually-leather around himself, there aren't too many things that it could be.

And so, if I saw myself praying in an airport, I'd probably think something was up with that, too.

I tried to ignore it. I couldn't, of course, but I had a script in front of me in the shape of a prayerbook, and I just tried to do the best that I could.

And then I turned -- as I often do -- to Lost. Itta's been watching the whole series nonstop, and last night, in the middle of a stakeout (in a boat, watching for signs of the evil people who might not be evil...oh, never mind), one of the characters -- Sayid, the former Iraqi soldier turned US spy -- whipped out his prayer mat and started praying.

It was so nonchalant, and so much a non-event, that it almost seemed natural. The same way that the characters on Friends were always running to and from each other's apartments without knocking, or that a good friend uses the bathroom in your house without asking where it is, Sayid just took five minutes to do his Allahu Akbars.

So I did the same thing. Just straightened my posture, straightened my concentration, and started to pray. I don't know if anyone noticed -- anyone but myself, that is -- but I kind of got it going on. And I came out of it a little out of breath, a little sweaty (it is an airport, after all), but feeling pretty exhilarated. And it was the best praying I've had in a while. No one came up to me to compliment me on my praying skillz, but by the time I was done, I really thought they might.

And, by the way: JetBlue is not always the cheeriest terminal around. For the past 15 minutes, they've been playing all of George Michael's most heart-wrenching synth ballads. And I'm not even supposed to be listening to music in the first place.

How Jews Pray

How Jews Pray, the third in our "How Jews..." series, checks out what Jews are talking about -- from an Australian Jew in New York to an Argentinian Jew in Los Angeles, and other folks in the woods, the cities, and some places in between. What do people who don't believe in God think about praying?

When I was young, a secular Jewish kid living down the street from Hasidim -- a weird remix of The Chosen -- I thought it was mysterious how all the long-black-coated, hair-covered Jews was that they seemed to have their own way of talking to God. They didn't just go to synagogue and pray like normal people -- they would pray in living rooms, or in backyards, and they muttered to themselves walking down the street. Plus, they wore those funny clothes. Was God telling them something that God wasn't telling the rest of us?

I guess I just felt disenfranchised.

This was before I met Jewish Renewalists who meditate and pray. And musicians like Chana Rothman and Jeremiah Lockwood, who pray by singing their hearts out. And before I learned how to pray myself, wherever I was and whatever was on my mind, sometimes in a "thank you" way, and sometimes in an "I need to save myself" way.

A few weeks ago, in introducing his new prayerbook, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, "We have a problem with prayer" -- and proceeded to detail how, in this world where we're obsessed with talking about ourselves and eavesdropping on other people, we've forgotten what it's like to speak to God. Whatever each of us think of God, and even, in one person's case, whether or not we believe in God.

I think that's my favorite thing about this video, above all the others we've done so far. It helps us remember.

Koren Sacks Siddur: Jewish Prayerbook 2.0

In a few weeks, a new siddur is hitting the market with a translation and commentary by Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. The publication itself is noticeable if only because a siddur is something that's used so often by so many people, and comparatively few of them exist -- but, more to the point, the Koren Sacks siddur is attempting to do the impossible: to challenge ArtScroll's near-monopoly on the market. I'm getting one of these in the mail, and I've haven't been this excited to get a book since the board-book version of In the Night Kitchen came out when I was two.

The siddur is being published by Koren, whose biggest entry into the US market to date is the Jerusalem Bible. It's more widely known in Israel and Sephardic communities for printing a Shabbat prayerbook together with an ultra-thin Chumash, which provided the most luxurious experience my hand has ever had on a Saturday morning. You don't even have to go jumping into the mid-service melee before the Torah reading, because, boom! -- you've already got a Torah in your back pocket. Needless to say, my hopes for this siddur are high.

This JTA article does a good job of subtly making the point about ArtScroll's domination of the market. For a number of reasons -- everything from the clarity of its typeface and the helpful addition of gray-shaded boxes to separate special additions to the text -- to the fact that, sadly, there isn't much competition out there. But ArtScroll has come under fire for a number of offenses. Some of those offenses are textual. For instance, the ArtScroll Siddur translates the Song of Songs allegorically, translating "breasts" (to pull an example at random) as "the Twin Tablets of the Law." Its "Women's Siddur" has been widely criticized by both Orthodox and secular women's groups for asserting itself as a feminist prayerbook while simultaneously printing disclaimers before Kaddish that advise that it's inappropriate for a woman to say kaddish.

Despite all this, ArtScroll is still the preeminent prayerbook used in Jewish congregations -- both in Orthodox synagogues and in many Conservative and Reform shuls as well. The Orthodox Union -- which, in the past, has voiced its displeasure with the absence of the Prayer for the State of Israel in ArtScroll siddurim -- is on board as a sponsor of the new siddur. And Koren has pages on its own website that go on and on talking about things like paper weight and typeface choice, which makes book nerds like me go all shivery in anticipation. Even among the greater, non-nerdy Jewish community, there's a considerable amount of hype.

Is the new siddur worth it? Stay tuned -- in the next couple days, I'll be taking it through the motions, everything from morning Shacharit to the Bedtime Shema. Will it get the best of me? Or will I wind up loving every dot and dagesh? Stick with us for the answers.

Torah Commentary For the Rest of Us

This is the kind of commentary that the world needs more of. Last night I was at dinner with a friend from Washington Heights. As far as Orthodox Jews go, they're kind of the opposite of my Crown Heights world -- modern, shaved faces and striped shirts. While the Hasidim are overly concerned about things like the kabbalistic ramifications of our actions -- aah, what if I don't take on a new stringency this year? -- the folks in WashHeights are more troubled by the black-and-whiteness of it all, and will freak out for hours if they do something un-halachic, like touching the bottom of their shoe and not washing their hands immediately afterward.

These might sound like the same thing, but they're not -- think of the difference between breaking the rules of your mother's cleaning regimen and breaking the rules of a really intense game of Risk.

Anyway -- the fact is, that's the way people in each community are supposed to be. How this plays out in real life, however, is quite different. More often than not, people are more concerned about the surfaces of things, less about what they're doing and more about whether they look like they're doing it.

That's why I love Frum Satire. He looks at the texts, not in a classical way of commentary, but how they're being utilized today. It's like a daily dose, not of MyJewishLearning, but of MyJewishLiving. Here, he's talking about kiddush levanah, the sanctification of the moon ritual that Jews perform every month.

Taqwacore wisdom

All weekend I've continued my obsession with Michael Muhammad Knight's book The Taqwacores, which follows a bunch of young Muslim Punks living in a group house in upstate New York. The setting is often just an excuse to explore the dynamics in Muslim culture, but those dynamics are insightful and often brilliant. In one part, the main characters (all single, all roughly college-age) are arguing over whether or not they're going to raise their children within Muslim tradition:

"I'd just give my kid a Quran," said Fasiq, "and tell him to be on his way. Go find your own truth, you know?"

"I dont' need my kids saying 'Allahu Akbar' when they pray," said Rabeya [who wears full-body burqa and sings Iggy Pop covers]. "That works for me, and I would teach it to them so they know me and who I am and where they're coming from, but if they found something else, cool."

"I wnat my kids to be smart," said Muzammil. I admit it took me a second to remember that homosexuals do raise families. "If I was ever a father I'd take my kid to every kind of temple, real early on. By the time he or she was eight years old they'd have been to a masjid, a church, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, a Sikh gurudwara, whatever we could find. I want a worldly child. Buy second or third grade my son-slash-daughter will have more appreciation for diversity and the beliefs of others than most adults."

"I believe in teaching my children Islam," I offered. "Just as Pakistan is part of their heritage, so is our religion. You can't separate it. I don't know how strict I'll be; maybe we'll just go to the masjid for Eids and that's it. I doubt we'd pray five times a day, though we wouldn't admit that outside the house. I don't know how I'd be if I had a daughter who wanted to go to the prom...or if my son came home drunk one night. But my own values are constantly changing, so it's hard to say. I honestly have no idea but I have a nice little image in my head of what Islam can be for them.

And, bonus: A startling, impassioned, and sometimes violent Al-Jazeera video segment that profiles the Taqwacore movement:

depression and prayer

A few years ago, right about the time I was becoming religious, I started getting hit with Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's a condition with possibly the dumbest acronym in the universe (sound it out, kids), but it was very real -- I'd graduated college, I was taking on all these new social restrictions (no more random hook-ups, no Friday night concerts) and I didn't have much in the way of happiness coming in.

I asked a rabbi about it, and he said to start regularly praying Mincha, the afternoon service. Ideally, you're supposed to pray right at sunset, which creates a separation (like one Jewish prayer says) between light and darkness, daytime and night. And that way, the sixteen-hour darkness doesn't seem overwhelming and like it's stealing from your day; instead, it feels like a new, unexplored territory.

From this comes the really cool site of the day: Borei Hoshech, a blog that examines the relationship between prayer and depression. At first it may seem like two arbitrary ideas thrown together -- or, on the contrary, two opposites (prayer=hope! depression=sad!) -- but the blog's anonymous author takes a non-judgmental, open approach to both depression and praying, dissecting the liturgical texts piece by piece to see if s/he can find deeper truths, connections, and hope.

In a series of entries on Modeh Ani, the prayer that's said first thing in the morning, Borei Hoshech agonizes over not wanting to get out of bed, and tries to find validation and hope from the words of the prayer:

So even though I am in the pit of a deep, dark depression, and certainly will not or cannot daven this morning, I will say these brief few words, as I struggle out of my pajamas and into work clothes and down a handful of M & M’s in an effort to propel myself out the door.

For Chanuka, Borei Hoshech quoted a disturbingly awesome passage of Talmud:

“Our rabbis taught: When Adam saw the days becoming shorter, he said: ‘Woe is to me, because I have sinned and the world is returning to chaos!’ He prayed and fasted until the winter equinox when he noticed the days becoming longer. ‘This is the way of the world,’ he said, and he established an eight day festival.’”

The author oscillates into and out of depression, and those entries with a distance from depression give a whole different perspective, equally insightful. Both are totally worth reading.