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This is just a quick post, and later than I should've put it up: A few nights ago Rav Sholom Brodt spoke at our house. Here are my notes from what he said -- scanned, although I'm not sure the quality is good enough to read, either in terms of the scanning or my handwriting. If you're interested, totally go for it (click the images for higher quality) -- and if you like what you read, consider checking out the Shlomo Yeshiva, where he teaches.
this isn't mine, and i know the fonts are cringey, but it's what I needed to read today, I think. If you like it, check out shlomoyeshiva.org, cause that's where it comes from.
it's been hard being a single parent this week. i am so, so ready to be one of those workaholic parents who never sees his family and always mixes up everyone's names again. go corporate america!
A rabbi used to go around wishing everyone a kosher Purim and a happy Passover. Someone stopped him and said, What are you, crazy? Don't you have it backward?
The rabbi shook it off. "Not at all," he said. "On Purim, everyone is very concerned about being happy, so they make sure to do it. And on Passover, everyone's worried about cleaning their houses and getting rid of their hametz, so they make sure to do that. But on Purim, with all the happiness, people sometimes need to remember to keep it kosher. And on Passover, when everyone's stressed out, they need to remember to keep it happy."
I don't remember where this originally came from, but I heard it from Shlomo Carlebach, as quoted by Shalom Brodt. Either way, have a rockin' Passover. And, yes, a kosher one.
Today is the first day of Rosh Chodesh Elul, which is basically a whole month spent preparing for one day. We blow the shofar and start reciting selichot (well, unless you're Ashkenazic or something). At dawn and at nightfall, we recite Psalm 27, which is both weirdly hopeful ("The L*rd is my light and my salvation") and weirdly catastrophic ("Do not hide Your face ... do not thrust [me] aside ... do not forsake me, do not abandon me," which was actually quoted in a They Might Be Giants song. Well, a really gloomy TMBG song).
In this morning's Simchat Shlomo email, Sholom Brodt talks about how Yom Kippur is all about fixing our external behavior, the things we do to other people -- "both knowingly and unknowingly," as we say about a zillion times over in the High Holiday liturgy. Elul, on the other hand, is about fixing our unconscious, and making ourselves good on the inside, in our thoughts. It's like taking the potential goodness or badness of everything you can do, and making sure it's aimed in the right direction -- so that, once Rosh Hashanah rolls around, we're ready to make it actual.
One more thing: The month of Elul is symbolized by the letter yud and the left hand -- which sounds cool, although I've never really understood where all these things come from. (According to Rav Sholom, it's from the Sefer Yetzirah ... although that still doesn't explain it.) He writes: "The letter yud is the smallest letter and it is also a part of every letter -- as soon as you put the quill to the parchment, you have already written a yud. So the yud represents the innermost point--your innermost point of being a "yid'."
That part, I do get. Just by existing, we're continuing to create.
8:00 a.m. It's been 7 hours since last night ended -- and 3 hours since I woke up -- and I'm still shaking. 
I set up a reading with Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of the Muslim punk novel The Taqwacores -- mostly, I confessed on stage, so that I had an excuse to meet him. My old religion teacher, S.H. Nasr, always used to say how different religions were just parallel paths to the same destination, but before I read Taqwacores, I was never convinced that anyone was taking a path remotely in the same direction as mine.
When I showed up, Mike and his friend were already there. He was apologetic -- "I don't think I'm going to read from Taqwacores tonight," he said. "Not sure if that throws off the theme of the evening, or not." Instead, he said he was going to read from Blue-Eyed Devil, his travelogue of Muslims in America. "There's this ritual I've been thinking about," he told us. "When Shi'a Muslims pray, you remember the battle of Karbala and remember the suffering of the third Imam, Imam Hussein, and you hit your chest."
Sometimes, he said, the beating can get intense. People praying themselves into a frenzy have been injured, and sometimes killed. "There's this part in Blue-Eyed Devil about the bed of nails," he finished. "I think I'm going to read that while I administer the blows to myself."
I nodded. I'm only a dozen pages into the book, but I knew what he was talking about. It's just like the Jewish al chet prayers on Yom Kippur, slamming our fists into our hearts. Easy stuff. Divergent religions, comparable practices. Yay, Nasr.
And anyway, it wouldn't be my first time with radical performance art. I mean, I spent five years living in San Francisco. Having a conversation with someone who was self-flagellating or immolating was practically coffee-table talk.
I went first. I read out of the sequel to my novel Losers, where Jupiter forgets it's Rosh Hashana and then runs into God. It started out being about forgiveness and repentance, but somehow he ended up talking about having crushes on girls and checking out girls through the mechitza in synagogue. I can't really explain it. That's just Jupiter.
Then Mike got up to read.
He started reading about going to visit the grandson of Malcolm X, who was incarcerated at the time, and talking with him about Islam and prison life. Somewhere, he transitioned to talking about the Muslim al-chet prayer* and describing it being administered -- it's not just a simple fist-tapping-heart; you raise your arm up all the way, and then slam your palm into your pectoral muscle. Mike talked about people bleeding beneath their shirts. Others just ripped off their shirts to feel the full brunt of the blows. As he read, those people by the bar who were just ordering a sandwich began to order quieter; the line for the monologue show got a little less monologuey.
His voice was really picking up steam now. He pulled off his shirt. We almost didn't notice; it seemed like the natural thing to come after talking about it.
Then he started to read about men throwing themselves down on a bed of nails -- small nails, thousands of them scattered on the ground. Which is when he picked up a plastic bag and scattered a tiny golden rain across the floor.
We craned. Thumbtacks. Literally hundreds of them. He gave the bag a final shake, tossed it aside, and then threw himself on the floor.
When he came up, they were sticking to his arm in droves. They actually stuck to his arm, lining it, kind of like a He-Man villain, or like Dr. Claw on Inspector Gadget. Then he threw himself down on his other side.
Somewhere in between being introduced and when the reading started, I talked to Mike's friend. When we met, he was eating the most out-of-control pasta I had ever seen, but he wore a purple silk shirt and managed to evade the volleys of tomato-sauce with gusto and aplomb. He told me that he was scripting the adaptation of Blue-Eyed Devil, a kind of meta-commentary of Michael Muhammad Knight on himself, exploring his own faith at the same time as he's supposed to be writing an authoritative guide of American Muslims' faith. It's all pretty incredible. Before the event, Mike murmured, in what we thought at the time was a joke, "Maybe tonight'll become a part of the movie." Now, in that meta-meta-everythingle zone of retrospect, I'm not sure about the joke part.
Much later, we showed up to see Raz Hartman, the rabbi from our yeshiva, who was visiting from Israel. He was supposed to be giving a lecture in an apartment on the Upper West Side. As soon as I got off the elevator, I could hear a piano-drum-and-violin jam. I booked it down the hall. Rabbi Raz was perched at the piano, swaying like a spring hurricane in Kansas. He was shockeling, that back-and-forth motion you do when you're praying, but wilder than anyone in America knew how. His fingers never left the keys, though, and like a tornado, he had a steady epicenter that he always returned to. It was a totally different kind of passion -- not the kind that pierced you like pins, but that held you in place like pins.
Same tools, different direction.
* - whose name I can't track down, although I found a fascinating article about the ritual itself
