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.

Mayim Bialik Goes Hasidic

Mayim just sent out this puzzling email, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to publicize it or not, but she is awesome, and so I am. Any time she's on TV, it's better than her not being on TV.

Which is why you should all watch Saving Grace tonight. When the one and only Mayim Bialik is going to guest-star as, I believe, a Satmar Hasidic Jew living in Williamsburg.

i am certain you are dying to know what i would look like as a chassidic jew and on 'saving grace' on TNT tonight you can find out. here's a hint: no make-up, snood over my hair, very roomy clothing.
so tomorrow morning, please don't ask me about if i liked it.
just enjoy a laugh at my expense.

my upcoming role on secret life of the american teenager will be much more exciting i promise.

Let's all hold hands, sing "Kumbaya," and celebrate Hasidic Jews finally being played by someone who doesn't hate Hasidic Jews.* And, in the morning (or, for those of us who don't own TVs, whenever they put Mayim's episode online), let's all tell Mayim how hard she rocked.

* -- Not including Natalie Portman and the real-life Satmar guy in that short film. It was never released, anyway, so it doesn't really count.

Everybody Wants a Tail

Not to get too furry on you people, but my friend, collaborator, and ex-housemate Ethan Young's comic Tails just got written up in a big way in Comic Book Resources. Like the reviewer said: "It's a largely autobiographical comic about dating and cats. None of those things sound like something I'd be interested in....but yet in less than two dozen pages, Young charmed me with his drawing style and his jubilantly downtrodden protagonist."

It's an appropriate sentiment: people can write stories about the most esoteric things and make them universally-relatable, and people can write stories about walking down the street that no one in the universe will relate to or care about. Ethan falls squarely in the first camp.

(And Ethan and I are working on something together, too...I can't say what, yet, except that it's nothing like you expect and it's going to be awesome.)

Here, check out a page -- and then go read the rest:

16 Days with No Music

Sixteen days to go, that is -- out of a total of 21. During the Three Weeks, we're not supposed to listen to music...leading people like me to drive ourselves insane. This is about when I usually reach my breaking point. For a perpetual headphone-head like me, who likes to walk around with a soundtrack to everything, it's hard to just give up my iTunes -- let alone, the 15 CDs that I always carry around, because I am Old School like that.

Finding something good to listen to during the Three Weeks: How not to get 'Lost'

Here's a few of the tricks I've worked up.

* The Lost Rewatch.
Listening to TV shows is fun! Especially when you're in a forlorn cubicle and the only other sounds would be Manhattan commuters damning each other to eternal purgatory with their horns. Nothing beats a fight scene with no words -- where, for 5 entire minutes, you hear a whiz, then a boom, then the sounds of someone clubbing someone else's brains in. How do you know who won? If they're still speaking at the end. The first four seasons are free to watch (or listen to) on the Lost website.

* Archive.org.
We can't stop praising this site. Books, old radio shows, and even TV and Smashing Pumpkins concerts are all up here, for free. But we're not concerned with any of that -- not for another 16 days, anyway. The Naropa Poetry Institute just provided a massive portion of their archives, which includes Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti lecturing and reading poetry. And there's also (ahem) a few Jewish spoken-word shows by me.

* Authors Talk about Cool Stuff
I can't tell you why, but Neil Gaiman's 7-minute speech from the PEN World Voices convention is really, really beautiful. Something to do with talking about the Chronicles of Narnia and not being able to go home again, I guess.

* AM Radio
I used to hate listening to talk radio. Everyone was either rabid right wing or rabid left wing. Even supposedly funny people like Rush Limbaugh, whose views I couldn't take seriously from the start, stopped being funny when you started realizing how many people were listening to him, regarding him with UTTER SERIOUSNESS AND DEVOTION. I had a friend (uh, acquaintance) (actually, we almost got suspended for beating each other's lights out) who literally took notes during Michael Savage.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered the joy of AM radio. By far, my favorite was Coast to Coast with Art Bell, who invited every manner of supernatural nut, and a bunch of people who actually did know things, onto the show. He'd talk for hours about UFO abductions, telekinesis, paranormal phenomena and the Yeti -- and every moment was a window into the life of someone I'd never have otherwise known about.

There are several other worthwhile non-musical radio shows that you have to check out -- the two essentials are Car Talk and, of course, A Prairie Home Companion -- both available free online, both new episodes and a 14-year archive.

How I Wrote a Film Script in a Week (drugless and caffeine-less)

Over Shabbos, I read my screenplay.

I know -- three logical responses to this:

* So what? You wrote it.
* What, you don't remember it?
* It's been, what, a month?

And the answer to all three is: Actually, I'd completely forgotten it existed in the first place. I'd spent five months trying to write this script, and writing something -- a thing that, at times, I thought was the script -- only to realize, once the producer (also known as the guy who's bankrolling this whole affair) had flown to Spain to meet with the director and was deep into plotting out WHICH character should be in exactly WHICH place, and whether scenes that were supposed to be filmed out deep in the country would be filmed in the suburbs or a vacant lot in the city, that the movie they were going to be making....well, it was going to be a completely different movie.

What happened exactly was, the day I sent it away, I wasn't completely happy with one of the minor characters. And that character ended up having their own movie. And that movie...well, 15 pages came out that day.

The producer -- who, ordinarily, has a reputation for being a calm and reasonable gentleman -- yelled at me over an international number. His voice sounded more like the Matrix than an actual voice, but the meaning was still clear. "WE. NEED. A. SCRIPT."

"Seven days," I begged. "Give me seven days."

And, in those seven days, all the thoughts that I'd been pushing to the back of my head for the past of those five months came rushing to the front of my head, and the sides of my head, and filling the rest of it, too.

So I wrote it. Put it aside for a week. Realized the ending was wrong, and that there needed to be a scene that there wasn't, and rewrote that part. And, with that, I handed it over to the people who know much more about the visual moving image than I ever will.

That was a month ago. Friday night, everyone else crashed out early, and I found myself wondering what had happened to my main character. And I found myself reading it. The entire thing.

I used to read parts of Never Mind the Goldbergs when it came out. Candy, too. Losers, I haven't read at all. But I've never actually

((yeah, i'm not sure what happened to the end of this...but i figured it was important to post.))

Taking the Messiah out of the Three Weeks (and Putting Joy In)

Today is the 17th of Tammuz, the day when five big catastrophes happened in Judaism:

* Moses smashed the original Ten Commandments;
* The daily tamid offering was not offered in the Temple for the first time since it was constructed;
* The walls of Jerusalem were breached by Roman armies;
* A Torah was burned by a Roman general; and
* An idol was erected in the temple.

Last night was singer, pianist, and storyteller Rabbi Raz Hartman's last night in town. I got there late (I had a show of my own, and I was running late, and on low energy. But when I heard Raz singing, I bolted down the hall. (Being as though this was a fancy Upper West Side apartment building, with single-and-well-jobbed Jews all over the place, it was probably the first time the hallway had ever seen bolting.) It was a sudden rush of adrenaline, a memory of the first time I sat at his table for Shabbos. There's probably something in Hasidus that talks about the need for sudden devekut, but I don't know the quote. All I knew is, I needed to be there, right now.

And it was a joyous time. It was a really good time. I used to stay on the Upper West Side a lot, back when I was single and weird. I went to a bunch of social gatherings, and they were almost uniformly uncomfortable -- lots of "you're a professional poet? No, but what about for money?" -- and I was almost ashamed of my initial reaction that night, which was to gloat that I was the only male present (bli ayin hara) with a full head of hair.

But I pushed it to the side. Oh, there were the bankers and the lawyers and the people with their shirts tucked in and girls who wouldn't look twice at me, but I have my own girl, and I have my own job. And Raz was singing songs about rebuilding Jerusalem, and telling everyone in the audience that we need to come over for Shabbos dinner when we're in Israel. And it was so awesome and holy and joyful that it was hard to remember that we were on the precipice of a fast day, and that the next three weeks were the anniversary of the amazing city that we're singing and storying about getting ransacked and destroyed by the Roman army.

Occasionally, here at MyJewishLearning, we get in theological debates. (It is a Jewish website, after all.) When I wrote our article on The Three Weeks, I originally included a concluding paragraph that talks about the coming of the Messiah, and how the Jerusalem Talmud prophecies that the Messiah was born on the climactic day of the Three Weeks, on Tisha B'Av. It was cut out -- because, as one editor noted, some people don't believe in the Messiah.

Yeah, I'm Orthodox, and saying that you don't believe in the Messiah is like saying you don't believe in fairies -- you're either a heartless bastard or a 10-year-old boy with something to prove. The Messiah and the World to Come represent hope, and goodness, and that one day we'll have better things to worry about than bills and nuclear war.

To my surprise, though, they let me keep in a quote from the Munkacs Rebbe, who is totally awesome (and, by the way, is a cousin of our site's good friend Dan Sieradski) which closes out the article:

The Talmud says, "When the month of Av enters, one should decrease in joy." The Hasidic rebbe Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira (1861-1937) said that, though the Talmud says to "decrease in joy," it should be read, "decrease...in joy." In other words, though it is proper to mourn, even in that mourning, we should do so joyously, knowing that better times are ahead.

That, I hope, is a sentiment that everyone can get with. Whether they're balding or not.