The Sweating Pianist

One evening, when I was about 12 years old, I was in the television room of my parents' house, sitting down and watching a classical music concert with them.

This concert featured a solo pianist. I cannot tell you whether he was any good, for I remember just two specific details about this ivory tickler, which undoubtedly were not completely unrelated: (a) he was quite hefty; and (b) he was sweating profusely.

The second observation struck me as bizarre in the extreme. I recall thinking: "This man is doing absolutely nothing but sitting on a bench and moving his fingers back and forth along a line." Even though, at my then tender age, sweating was not something I did often, I could at least on an intellectual level understand that strenuous activities, such as running, lifting heavy weights, or playing sports could induce perspiration.

But to sweat merely due to pressing down on some keys? Piano keys are so light that even a three-year-old could strike notes on them. So how much of an effort could be required to sit down and play the piano? From my point of view, what this man was doing was only marginally more strenuous than sitting still and doing absolutely nothing! Small wonder then that watching the torrent of perspiration pour down his face boggled my mind.

What I did not know on that evening, but would learn years later, is that when you play the piano with passion, as this man obviously was, you are not playing with your fingers. You are playing with every single cell of your body, and every single fiber of your soul.

Let us play the instrument of life with passion.

Munchie's Theorem

It's late in the evening. I'm home, relaxing and reading. Feeling good. Chillin'. Comfortable. Life is good.

Out of the blue they appear, like a wild beast suddenly materializing on the horizon. They spring into action and launch their attack.

The munchies.

Yes, a craving for something tasty. But I know I've already eaten three solid meals today, and I don't really need anything else. After all, late night snacks go straight to the waistline. So I ignore them, and keep on reading. But a few minutes later...

They're still here.

Looks like they mean business. Put my book down, walk to the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and look inside. Hmmm. Nothing really tantalizing. Open the cupboard door. My eyes survey the scene, sweeping across and lingering over each foodstuff item, mentally weighing its potential to appease the munchies. Nope. The other cupboard? Nada. Well, that's okay, I'm not really that hungry. Back to my reading.

A few pages later. The cravings beckon me again. And who am I to ignore their call? Back to the kitchen. After all, I didn't really look that closely the first time. Maybe there's a good snack in there that I missed. So I open the fridge door again, inspecting each shelf a bit more thoroughly. What's that hiding behind the milk? Hmph. Just some cottage cheese. You think that's going to satisfy the munchies? No, sirree. Same story with the cupboards: I strike out again. A few mildly interesting items, to be sure, but nothing that will really hit the spot.

By the fifth time this scene has played itself out, I could draw from memory a perfectly accurate diagram of the inside of the fridge and cupboards. And yet, despite my knowing full well that what I will see when I open that fridge yet again is identical to what I am already seeing right now in my mind's eye, somehow, some vain sense of wild optimism propels me forward, as if the next time I open the fridge door, some delicious cold treat will be staring me in the face, that I somehow missed on the previous excursions. I am quite amused by how capable my mind can be at fooling itself.

Of course, there is another dynamic at work here. For on each subsequent trip to the kitchen, some of the items I see before me somehow seem a tad more appealing than the previous expedition. This is a corollary of Munchie's Theorem: there exists a direct linear correlation between the strength with which the munchies have struck me on a particular night and the probability that some item which barely caught my eye on my first kitchen inventory will eventually pass muster.

And so it goes, the Battle of The Munchies, one of life's quintessential moral struggles.

Alms Qualms

Once, in my early twenties, I spent a few days in New York City. A friend who studied at Yeshiva University (which I would later attend myself) was kind enough to let me stay with him. On one evening of this trip, returning from an evening out with a friend, I found myself in Grand Central Station.

I was approached by an Israeli, who spoke to me in Hebrew. He had, he explained to me, been locked out of his hotel room, where all of his possessions were located, by the hotel manager, apparently over some monetary misunderstanding. He needed $100 to get back in and straighten things out, and get his belongings back. He told me that he was visiting from Israel, and that he was completely alone in America, and that without the money, he would be completely stranded and would have no place to spend the night.

I generally strive to be a good Samaritan. In fact, you could say that I have a problem saying "No" to people, and that night was no exception. I definitely wanted to help this man, who seemed to be in dire straits. So my initial reaction was to automatically pull out my wallet.

But then, as I was pulling out the money, other thoughts crept in. $100 is not a trifling sum, especially to give to a complete stranger. So after a few moments of reflection, hesitancy crept into my thinking.

My new friend sensed this, and began to plead his case. He quoted from Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish scholar, who extols the virtues of giving charity. I continued to hesitate. He continued to describe the desperation of his situation, and how badly he needed the money.

After a few minutes, I was truly torn, between the impulse to help my fellow man, and my sense of caution and prudence. My mind was double-tracking a mile a minute. Two miniature versions of myself, one perched on each shoulder, were having it out. The one argued: What if, because of my refusal to help this man, he ends up stranded alone at night in a foreign country? Am I really that miserly? The other countered: What do you know about this man? How do you know he'll return the money to you? And all during this time, my new friend continued his entreaties. As the two strands of this dilemma raced in my mind, one observation suddenly struck me like a bolt of lightning:

He was too calm.

The thought struck me just like that. I know myself: if I were in a strange country, where I didn't know a soul or speak the language very well, locked out of my hotel room, and access to all of the belongings I had brought with me, with no money left, I'd be absolutely hysterical. No doubt about it whatsoever, I'd be manifesting 1,001 symptoms of anxiety: sweating, eyes popping out of my head, high-pitched voice, flushed red, gnarled body language, shortness of breath, visibly shaking, hands gesticulating wildly, and so on. This man was not exhibiting even one. Throughout his entire pitch, he was completely cool and relaxed, speaking with such an even voice that he sounded like an FM radio broadcaster. Something is not kosher here was the thought that entered my mind. In that brief moment, I looked at him with an odd clarity, as if his face were behind a magnifying glass.

Still, I was not absolutely sure. What did I do? I decided that I needed an objective opinion, from someone not swept up in the emotions of the situation. So I called my father long-distance on a public phone, described the situation to him, and awaited his verdict. Three guesses as to what my father advised.

You can imagine my new friend's reaction as I delivered the verdict. Visions of a hundred-dollar-bill with wings, flying away. Still, my mind could not completely rule out the possibility that his was a legitimate case, so I told him that he was welcome to come with me to my friend's dormitory, and we'd find a place for him to spend the night. He declined, and repeated a phrase that continues to this day to mystify me: "I blame myself. I blame myself."

My only qualm in publishing this piece is the apprehension that I may be tipping off con artists out there as to how to improve their technique. So if any of you are reading, I say this: Maimonides tells us that truthfulness is an important virtue.

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk!

Are you a Three Stooges Fan? If you are not familiar with the Stooges, then, by all means, familiarize yourself with them through this short clip containing a delightful ditty.

The Three Stooges have a fascinating history. Initially, they were part of a vaudeville act called "Ted Healy and His Stooges", in which Master Healy was the front-man, and the Stooges merely side-kicks (and I do mean kicks!). However, when their first film came out, the Stooges were so well received that within three years, after several disputes with Healy, the Stooges had a contract with MGM, sans Healy.

The rest is history. For the next thirty-plus years, the Stooges eye-poked, socked, smacked, pinched and booted their way into the slapstick canon. Moe Howard and Larry Fine were the mainstays. The inimitable Curly Howard, Moe's brother, rounded out the trio until 1947, when a debilitating stroke rendered him unfit for further antics. For the next twenty years, Moe and Larry carried on with a rotation of replacements.

Now what I wanted to tell you all about was what I saw, watching television one fine evening, about twenty years ago. When whichever show I was watching paused for a word from our sponsors, a commercial came on advertising the services of an attorney.

If you're familiar with the genre, you'll know that it began along the lines: "Need a lawyer? Been hurt on the job?" The commercial then cut to a clip from a Three Stooges film, in which Moe kicks Curly where the sun don't shine. Cute, nice touch, I thought.

The commercial continued: "Been involved in a domestic dispute?" followed by Larry on the receiving end of a smack from a lovely young wench. Funny! The commercial continued in this vein, with two or three more similar situations, each punctuated by a Three Stooges brouhaha. My initial enthusiasm gradually waned, and I began thinking: "Nice concept, guys, but I think you may have overdone it a bit."

Another clip or two, and I actually started to feel uneasy. As the commercial proffered yet more clips of various and sundry Three Stooges squabbles, I began to genuinely feel sorry for the attorney who had put together the commercial. "This kid is really out to lunch", I thought, as the commercial showed one more pratfall, one more bop on the head. I winced, and began to wonder how much the lawyer had paid to have this commercial made, and seriously began to worry that not only would this ad garner him no new clients, but that it would utterly destroy his credibility, and he would lose his existing clientele.

Just as my anxiety reach its crescendo, the commercial flashed some text along the following lines:

THREE STOOGES MARATHON FILM FESTIVAL. APRIL 23-25

My grave concern instantly turned into peels of laughter.

Shalom to Shalom

I immigrated to Israel towards the end of the year 2000. I spent quite a bit of time, both in the two years preceding my Aliyah (Hebrew for "immigration to Israel"; literally, "ascent"), and in my first year as an Israeli citizen, brushing up on my Hebrew.

I had a reasonably good foundation in Hebrew: I had attended Jewish schools throughout my elementary and high school years, where Judaic subjects were overwhelmingly conducted in Hebrew, usually by native Israeli teachers; moreover, I had spent a couple of years studying in Israel following high school.

And yet, even with that considerable background, I was amazed at the huge number of Hebrew words and phrases that I did not know, including many which any nine-year-old native Israeli would know, such as: doorknob, supposed, realize, bathing suit, sewer, report, couch, and steering wheel.

As the first step in my effort to improve my Hebrew, I decided to read novels in Hebrew. In order to make that endeavor easier, I decided to read Hebrew translations of novels I had already read in English. The familiarity with the story ensured that I would never be completely lost, and I knew that I would not be bored, since these were all novels which I loved. I began with Chaim Potok's "The Chosen". Subsequent books I read in Hebrew included: The Godfather, The Bonfire of The Vanities, Presumed Innocent, and The Silence of The Lambs. I read about a dozen books in this manner.

As I plowed through these books, I recorded every single unfamiliar Hebrew word or phrase in a dictionary file which I compiled. I could see the progress I made, as the number of such words and phrases gradually decreased, from over 10 per page, to just 2 or 3 per page.

One droll side-effect of teaching myself from reading novels was that my vocabulary now contains a mixture of colloquial and literary Hebrew, both current and out-of-date. So in any conversation, I'm liable to throw out a word or figure of speech which you would never hear in daily conversation, eliciting an amused reaction from my Israeli audience.

Once I arrived in Israel, another step I took in expanding my Hebrew vocabulary was to read, in entirety, the label of every single product I bought, from laundry detergent to breakfast cereal to clothing. Thus, the Hebrew words for sodium, carbohydrates and recycle entered my vocabulary. Likewise, I studied all of the signs I encountered on the street. Finally, I read many articles in Israeli newspapers. In all of these undertakings, I continued to look up and record every unfamiliar word or phrase. My list grew into the thousands.

One of the things that struck me the most was the huge number of Hebrew words which Israelis have abandoned in favor of the transliteration of the English word. I was very stunned that nobody in Israel uses Shalom any more, preferring Hi and Bye. Are you kidding me?! Shalom is to Israel as the maple leaf is to Canada and apple pie is to the U.S.A. National pride, people! It was an especially odd feeling for me, given that I had started greeting people with Shalom for a year before moving to Israeli, in an attempt to get myself into an Israeli mindset. Little did I know.

So I had to "unlearn" dozens (hundreds?) of Hebrew words I had taken the time to memorize. I now know that a baby-sitter is a baby-sitter and not a shmar-taf, while a steak is a steak and not an umtsa. More recently, "Sorry" has replaced the erstwhile "selicha". I get a sense that Israelis feel that sprinkling their speech with English words and phrases elevates the level of their speech. Of course, as an immigrant trying to speak with Israelis exclusively in Hebrew, it is a bit jarring. Sometimes, I had to fight the urge to use the proper Hebrew words which I know that nobody uses any more, just so that all the time I spent learning them won't have been in vain.

In many cases, Israelis do not seem to realize that the words they use are lifted from English. One day, when I was still a greenhorn, I was in the supermarket, and wished to purchase crackers, whose Hebrew equivalent I did not know. So I told the manager that I wish to buy something, but I don't know the Hebrew word for it. I explained to him that it's like a cookie, but not exactly -- it's more salty than sweet.

The manager's eyes lit up. He told me, in Hebrew: "I know exactly what you want. Come with me." I followed him to the next aisle, and when we reached the product he was searching for, he stopped. He picked up a package and, with a flourish, presented it to me. He beamed at me, the delight of teaching me a new word plain on his face: "This is what you are looking for. The Hebrew word for it is "Crackerim", clearly enunciating each syllable of that mysterious new word to me.

Selfish Altruism? (2)

In the first part of this piece, I presented a friend's point of view, that all acts, even ones that appear to be selfless, are in fact done for some selfish reason. I would now like to attempt to refute this claim.

I would place all ulterior motivations for seemingly selfless acts in the following categories:

1. Enjoyment. I'm doing an act that helps someone else, but I genuinely enjoy the act I am doing.
2. Material gain. I'm doing a "selfless" act now in the belief that I will receive a tangible benefit in the future.
3. Status. I'm not necessarily looking for any material benefits; the reward is the knowledge that others will hold me in high regard.
4. Self-esteem. I perform a kind act for the good feeling I receive from knowing that I am the kind of person who helps others.

I think that I can, for argument's sake, agree with my friend regarding the first three categories -- in each of those, there is a clear ulterior motive behind the selfless act, rendering it, by definition, no longer completely selfless.

I will therefore limit my disagreement with my friend to the final category. Thus, ultimately, what I'm attempt to do is to refute the argument of the bank robber who says: I'm no morally different from the philanthropist -- he and I are each simply doing what makes us feels good.

I have two objections to this claim. For one thing, as stated in the first part of this piece, I disagree with the entire premise, which I consider unproven, that behind every selfless act is what my friend might term a "selfish altruism" -- a self-satisfied feeling of moral superiority.

But even if I, for argument's sake, accept my friend's premise, that even every selfless act is, at its heart, done for some personal benefit, even if it is simply for the sake of feeling good about oneself, I still claim that this does not erase the selflessness of the act.

I would first posit that certain acts, such as rape and murder, are inherently hurtful to others, and other acts, such as giving food to a starving person or raising a child, are inherently beneficial to others.

Next, I would claim that in many, or even most, cases, acts that provide tangible benefits to others can often be performed only at the expense of benefits that could have gone to ourselves, and conversely, acts that are harmful to others are often committed for the benefit of ourselves. Stealing from someone else puts money in my pocket; money spent for my child's tuition is money I could have spent on a vacation for myself.

Let me now digress for a moment to consider the following scenario: two boys wish to master a musical instrument. One boy practices for an hour each day, while the other plays video games for an hour each day. At the end of several years, one boy is an accomplished musician, while the other has spent his time playing video games. I choose this scenario because it does not involve anyone else: the choice each boy makes affects him alone.

Now if we were to extend my friend's thinking to this scenario, we would say that there is really no difference between the two -- both boys simply did what they felt like doing. But I think this is a simplistic view, and that the truth is more complex than that.

Let's assume that at the outset, both boys:

• had an equal desire to learn how to play a musical instrument;
• had an equal love for video games; and
• were equally unenamored at the prospect of sitting down and practicing a new instrument for an hour each day.

So both boys were faced with a decision: (a) sit down now and enjoy a video game; or (b) sit down now and practice for an hour, in the hopes that maybe one day, years from now, I will be able to play a musical instrument.

So yes, on one level, it is true that both boys acted on self-interest. But on another level, it is certainly not true that both decisions were equally easy to make. The decision to sit down and play video games was a no-brainer. The decision that the other boy made, in contrast, to give up an hour of video game fun, and instead spend a not-exactly-thrilling hour practicing, in order to fulfill some dream that might come true years hence, was a difficult one. Moreover, throughout the hour, that second boy was working hard to continue practicing, even though the video games most likely were beckoning him the entire hour, while the other boy was chillin' and having a most enjoyable time.

It is thus the difficulty of the decision, and the struggle involved in adhering to that difficult decision which is the crucial difference between them, and which makes the second boy's choice so admirable. Put another way, the first boy decided: I'm going to do what feels good to me this moment, while the second boy decided: I'm not really enjoying what I'm doing right now, but I'm going to do it anyway, for the sake of some future goal.

Let us now return to our original discussion. Jim is committing an act which is enjoyable to him but harmful to someone else, while Bob is doing a deed which is not enjoyable to him, but is beneficial to someone else. Jim claims: "There is no difference between me and Bob [Jim was not a great student, so please forgive his grammar] because we're both doing what feels good to us; Jim's good feeling is in knowing that he is such a good person."

To Jim I would respond: "No, Jim, there is a difference between you and Bob. What you are doing is easy for you to do. You are enjoying the act you are committing right now. Whereas Bob is going through an effort and a struggle to carry out his decision.

"Since both your decision and Bob's carry a selfish reward, then if all Bob cared about were feeling good, he could have easily chosen your path, since that would give him a good feeling right now. Bob making the "selfish" decision that involved a difficult struggle in the present moment, as opposed to the selfish decision that would have been fun in the present moment, was done for no other reason than to be helpful to someone else, and for this reason, Bob's choice is ultimately altruistic after all."

Of course, there are cases when we so identify with another person, that even in the present moment we get a good feeling from helping them. To this I would simply reply that this person has arrived at this mindset through past moral struggles, and that therefore the above reasoning applies here too.

Is my argument convincing? (Somehow, I highly doubt that this piece would change my friend's stance.) Does it ultimately matter whether, on a philosophical level, my friend is right or I am, as long as we both act kindly towards others? What say you?

Selfish Altruism? (1)

A couple of months ago, I had a pleasant evening out with a nice woman. The conversation turned to philosophical matters, and we ended up debating whether there is in fact such a thing as altruism.

My friend claimed that altruism in reality does not exist. She believes that every single act we do, every single decision we make is, at bottom, done for selfish reasons. She believes that even when we make a decision to forgo our own material self-interest in favor of that of someone else, we invariably do so for some underlying selfish reason.

Now I do not dispute that this does in fact occur. There are any number of ultimately egotistical reasons that people may perform kind deeds for others. For example:

1. A person may act kindly to another in the belief that the beneficiary will reciprocate at some point in the future.
2. A person may know that they will receive public recognition for their acts of kindness.
3. Conversely, a person may act kindly for fear that if they do not, they will be perceived by others as callous.
4. I may actually enjoy the activity involved in helping someone else. For example, someone may need to know a certain piece of information, and I enjoy the intellectual challenge of finding things out.
5. A person may act kindly in order to reinforce a positive perception of themselves, be it a feeling of superiority over another person, or simply a feeling that I am a good person.

However, I disagreed with my friend's categorical claim that behind every selfless act there lies a selfish ulterior motive, for three reasons:

1. Experientially, I know that I have been in situations where it certainly felt to me that I was helping someone else for no other reason than simply that is what needed to be done because justice demanded it, without any thought of what reward would accrue to me personally.

2. Intuitively, it is very hard for me to accept the point of view that an armed bank robber and a mother caring for a sick child are simply both pursuing their own self-interests, and the only difference between the two is the form that this self-interest happens to take. It certainly does not seem that people who commit acts of cruelty are acting from the same inner place as those who commit acts of love.

3. If all acts that people commit are done so for selfish reasons, it would seem that there is no basis for morality. For on what basis can we deem some acts moral and others immoral if every act we do is done for our own selfish good? On what basis can we try to appeal to someone to choose act A over act B if we believe that in both cases, the act will be simply one of self-interest?

When I asked my friend what evidence she had that all acts done for others are ultimately done for some form of self-gain, her answer was that if there were no self-gain, we would not do such acts. I think this answer is tautological. My friend has simply taken it as axiomatic that all acts are performed for self-gain.

So for my friend, even a mother nursing her infant is doing so for selfish reasons: she sees the baby as an extension of herself, and therefore, since she so identifies with the baby, any acts which she does for her baby is in fact an act done for her own benefit.

Or take someone who has suffered from a disease, and then establishes a charity to help others suffering from the same disease. My friend claims that here too, the philanthropist has their own self-interest at heart, in trying to attain vicariously a sense of healing through the help they provide for others.

I believe that it is possible to demonstrate the falsity of my friend's position. I will attempt to do so in the second part of this piece.

From Point A to Point A

Ever since I discovered that I had an aptitude for it, at the age of 12, long-distance running has been, off-and-on, a mainstay of my life. Now I'm not talking distances of the marathon realm; we're talking a mile or three.

I've engaged in other aerobic activities, such as bicycling and skipping rope -- which I did for about 5 years -- but none of those gives me that excellent feeling that my body is working at full capacity. Your lungs fill with delicious oxygen, and the pulse of your heart is sweet music. Runner's high indeed. Even aerobic recreational activities such as dancing and ice skating, which I absolutely adore, do not give me this. This I get from running alone.

Now running outdoors has several disadvantages: traffic lights, cars, crowds of people. Inclement weather can also pose a problem. All of these problems fell by wayside about 15 years ago when I met one of the great loves of my life: the treadmill. My mother bought herself one -- she still has it and uses it! -- and when I tried it, it was love at first sight.

Well, maybe second sight. Because one of my earliest experiences on the treadmill was off the treadmill. Off, as in getting tossed off. Have you ever fallen off a treadmill? There's nothing quite like it. It's a sudden complete disconnect with the world, and a rude entry into a zone of total chaos. Of course it's completely unpleasant, but it's oddly exhilirating at the same time. And, to add insult to injury, when I got up to resume my run, I learned, the hard way, that getting on a treadmill going at a high speed is not the best idea. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Some people eschew the treadmill. They long for the great outdoors, the wind on their face, under the blue skies, the green, green grass of home. Let them have it, I say! Give me the pristine, rarefied, artificial, completely controlled environment of the treadmill. I am a person who likes to focus, and when you are on that machine, programmed to the desired speed, there are no distractions. Some need a television screen, but not I. Just that 5-foot-long track turning below you and the control panel in front of you, showing your progress -- to the second, and to the tenth of a mile! I'm here to run, and the treadmill laboratory provides me with the means of focusing exclusively on just that.

One day, a few weeks after my discovery of the treadmill, I was out walking, and approached an intersection. I was in a hurry -- perhaps to catch a bus -- and sensed that the green would not be with me for long, so I decided to quickly dash across the street. And, since I was treadmilling every day, I was more than fit for a quick sprint.

But something very strange happened when my brain sent an impulse to my legs, commanding them to start moving. My legs gladly obeyed the order immediately, and started running. But something completely unexpected was taking place. Or rather, was not taking place. For I was running and running, but I looked down and found that I was still on the sidewalk! I was running in place! I decided to try to run faster. The result: I indeed ran faster. And remained just as firmly in the same spot.

"Hey, you guys! You're not getting us anywhere!" barked my brain to my legs.

"Dude, we're doing our best! We're running as fast as we can!" replied my legs defiantly.

I subsequently learned to compensate, but on that day, my legs were unable to get their act together and run in a forward direction, so I had to abandon the effort, and instead walk across that intersection.

What I found so bizarre about this episode was the illogic of it. True, when I ran on the treadmill, I never actually moved forward from point A to point B. It was point A, point A, point A, all the way. But surely, that was simply because the track kept on turning. Wasn't the motion my body was making identical to that of actual running? Take the runner off the treadmill and put him on a regular surface, and he would start to move forward, would he not?!

To this day, I'm not clear as to whether the motion of running on a treadmill is, contrary to my intuition, actually different from that of running on a regular surface, and that is why I ran in place that day, or whether the motions are in fact identical, and it was some bizarre mental paradigm that kept me on the sidewalk that day.

In any event, the amused surprise of seeing myself running in place that day, when I was trying with all my might to run forward, so tickled my funny-bone, that I laughed out loud! So the next time you're out and you see someone running in place and laughing, now you'll know that you have just met a novice treadmiller.

Why Do They Cry?

Many years ago, I saw an extremely well-made documentary on the Holocaust. The film consisted of a series of interviews of Holocaust survivors. If I recall correctly, the interviewer was not on camera.

The film was very well done, but I have a memory of just two specific aspects of it, and both involve crying.

The first. In one interview after another, the survivors were able to speak at length about their horrible ordeals and retain composure. And anyone with any familiarity with the holocaust will know that we are speaking about unspeakably abject circumstances, the likes of which many of us have great difficulty even imagining. But these survivors were able to relate them all and still maintain control of their emotions.

Until they discussed their relatives.

It was remarkable to see these people able to discuss their own travails at length, calmly describing one abhorrent cruelty after another visited upon them -- humiliation, starvation, bitter cold, beatings -- but then, the moment when they would mention a brother or a cousin or a niece, they would stop. Seconds later, a lip would quiver; a chin would tremble, and then, more often than not, they would break down and weep.

Such is the raw emotional power that comes from the love that is based on family ties. Time had, in some sense, healed the deep wounds and scars that these survivors had suffered themselves, but the loss of their beloved family members -- mama, papa, sister, brother, son, daughter -- the pain of these losses still seared their souls, all those many decades later.

Indeed, all of the interviewees wept only when they began to discuss family members.

Except one.

This gentlemen, like the other survivors, was able to maintain his self-possession as he described the barbarities he had suffered. At one point, the interviewer asked him how he was able to survive such unendurable agony. The man paused to think, and then replied that he had had to change himself, to become tougher. And it was this thought -- again, not the actual monstrous events themselves -- that made him break down and weep.

This man was weeping over the loss of what was for him the most precious thing in the universe: himself. For the sake of remaining alive, he had had to make the formidable decision of ceasing to be himself, and instead, becoming a different person -- one with a personality that would be more adaptable to the dire conditions of that place and time.

Only that man himself knows the specifics of the ramifications of this decision. A piece of bread hoarded instead of shared? A deaf ear to a girl's cry? But here was a man who had been forced to knowingly part company with his very self -- the self that he loved. This, above all else, was the loss that he mourned, in some ways the most heartbreaking of all.

Mosaic Mnemonics

Throughout most of my childhood, my father and I would go to Synagogue together every Sabbath morning. We usually frequented a Synagogue named Beth David, which was located about half-a-mile from our home, but on the rare occasion, we would trek out to Beth Emeth, the Synagogue at which my parents were members, but which, at a mile-and-a-half away from our home, was too distant for us to attended more regularly. (We did not travel by car on the Sabbath.)

Now just about midway between our house and Beth Emeth, we would come up to a main intersection which had the only traffic light in our journey. Over the years, my father would tell me that he didn't know whether this intersection was closer to our home, or closer to the Synagogue, but that whether we were walking to the Synagogue, or back home, whenever we would reach this street, it always felt like we were more than half-way there. So this intersection always gave us a pleasant psychological boost on our relatively long walk.

When we hit this intersection, on one of the first occasions we walked to Beth Emeth -- I would be about five years old -- my father told me the name of the main street we were crossing: Sheppard Avenue.

Now, since, as stated above, our trips to Beth Emeth were rare, it was several months before we made the journey again. So when we revisited that main intersection, my father, curious as to my powers of memory, asked if I could recall the name of the main street we were crossing. My response: "Moses Street". Moses Street?!  But my father understood the association I had made: he quickly realized that I had learned about Moses in school, and that Moses was a shepherd.

My father beamed at me in appreciation. If I had started to recite the Magna Carta by heart, I don't think my father would have been any prouder. He was absolutely radiant as he reminded me of the actual name of the street and helped me clarify the link my mind had made between the two names. And of course, even years later, every so often we would pass that intersection, and my father would ask me if I could recall the name I had once given that street. Over time, however, this vignette gradually faded from my memory.

Fast forward forty years. It is a Friday; I am living in Jerusalem, and need to do some errands in my neighborhood. (In Israel, Friday is Unofficial Errand Day.) I set out, and in mind, I go over the various errands that I need to do, and the location of each. I decide that I will first tend to the one that I need to do on Rachel Street. A ten-minute walk later, I'm at my destination. But I look up at a street sign, and notice that I've made an error, and that the name of the street is actually not Rachel. Its actual name?

Bethlehem Way.

(Genesis 35:19: "And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.")

Making History in a Taxi Cab

I lived in Manhattan in the early 1990's, studying at Yeshiva University, a largely Orthodox institution, which combines Judaic and secular studies. I attended YU's Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, where I pursued a Master's Degree in Bible. (I can still recall an acquaintance's reaction when he heard of my decision: "Oh, yeah, I hear that IBM is hiring a lot of Bible students these days.")

As many readers will know, much of Manhattan is a grid, with the Avenues running from north to south, and the Streets running the width of the island, from east to west. This regular structure is a veritable dream come true for anyone who has a poor sense of direction.

For your convenience (or due to some street namer's lack of imagination), both the Streets and several of the Avenues are numbered. The Avenue numbers rise as you go west; Street numbers as you go north. A random sampling: Times Square is at 42nd Street. Lincoln Center is at 62nd St. The 92nd St. Y is at, well, 92nd St., and Columbia University is at 116th St. And way, way up, at 185th St., is Yeshiva University, in the area known as Washington Heights. I was once told that adjacent Streets are all equidistant from each other, and that the distance between every 20 Streets is exactly one mile, which I don't think is completely accurate, but is respectably close.

Much of NYC night life takes place in lower Manhattan, and it was quite a trek to get down there from the Great White North of Washington Heights. First of all, there was the walk from the campus, at Washington Heights's east edge, to the subway station, at the west. Then a descent by elevator into the 7th gate of Hell, and a long wait on a filthy, smelly platform. And then, la pièce de résistance, a 7-mile NOISY subway ride.

Returning to the campus often presented a dilemma for me. On the one hand, after an outing, tired, late at night, the thought of that long voyage back north in a seedy subway car, followed by a ten-plus-minute walk through even seedier neighborhoods, was not particularly inviting. On the other hand, the alternative, a cozy ride in a taxi crab was an expenditure that this poor student could not indulge in lightly. For the most part, frugality won the day.

But one Saturday night, feeling particularly exhausted, I splurged and hopped into a cab. It was a street somewhere in the 30's I believe. I told the driver my destination, way up in the tundra, and off we went.

As mentioned above, the distance between Streets was 1/20 of a mile. I should mention that there is a traffic light at each Street. You could get a few green lights in a row, but every few streets, you could expect to hit a red light; you might do a bit better if there was less traffic. In fact, I once heard that the traffic signals are timed so as to discourage speeding: the faster you went, the more red lights you would encounter, while travelling at the speed limit would maximize the number of green lights that would greet you.

Now on this particular night, there was very little traffic. So the first few streets, we were met with green lights. Nice. After a dozen consecutive green lights, I found myself thinking that this was most pleasant. But after 25 straight green lights, I found myself thinking that this was something out of the ordinary.

60th St. Green Light. 70th St. Green Light. 80th St. Green Light. By this time, I felt that we were entering a new zone of existence. The response I received from my pilot when I asked him if he had noticed that we hadn't hit even one red light yet confirmed to me that he and I were of one mind. We exchanged few words after that, not wanting to mar the magic of the moment with mundane words, or even, worse, jinx our streak. And anyway, the form of communication we were sharing transcended mere words.

For we were Lewis and Clark. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Thelma and Louise. Captain Kirk and Mister Spock. 90th St. Green Light. 100th St. Green Light. 110th St. Green Light. The thrilling excitement from knowing that you are, impossibly, defying the very laws of physics. Boldly going where no man has gone before.


120th St. Green Light. 130th St. Green Light. 140th St. Green Light. Yes! Yes! Yes! By now, we were experiencing a mind-blowing mixture of elation, as we broke through one barrier of existence after another, and nerve-wracking apprehension, for each traffic light we encountered could easily be that dreaded bloody crimson, signaling bitter defeat.

150th St. Green Light. 160th St. Green Light. 170th St. Green Light. The tension by now was roaring in our ears. We were weightless in time and space, with no precedent to guide us, as we entered hitherto unexperienced realms of reality. It was all we could do to hang on by the skin of our teeth, and maintain some semblance of composure.

The home stretch. Just a few streets left and we've completed our odyssey. Another green light. And another. Now we were Sandy Koufax in the bottom of the ninth, just one strike away from a perfect game. Would we succeed in our quest for perfection, or would we fall off the precipice, as so many before us had, in pernicious ignominy?

185th Street. Destination Attained. Mission Accomplished. Flushed from the excitement, drenched in sweat, my pilot and I exchange beatific grins. Time will not diminish this milestone of human achievement. Ours is a feat that will inspire others to greatness for generations to come. As I get out of the cab, and turn to hand my brother-in-arms the fare, he waves the money off. "You know that I could never accept that. What we experienced tonight was a reward in itself, far beyond the pettiness of filthy lucre. Don't you understand? We've made history. Thank you. I will never forget you." And rode off into the moonlight.

Out, Damned Spot!

In the mid-1980's, I worked for a small computer software developing firm in Toronto. At one point, I shared an office with a man in his 30's. Nice guy.

One day, all of a sudden, he emitted a loud sound indicative of great distress. The reason? A pen clipped to his shirt breast pocket had broken and leaked ink. Quite an impressive sea of deep blue had formed on his shirt. It would have made for a great Rorschach test image.

Now a shirt stain is not a pleasant occurrence, but I think most of us would not allow it to seriously disrupt our workday. A trip to the bathroom, a vigorous rubbing with some water and maybe a bit of soap would be about all one could do for the moment. Back to work.

Not so my friend. He immediately put all of his work on hold and got ready to leave the office. When I asked him where he was going, he explained to me that he was going to the store to buy a new shirt.

That seemed a bit extreme to me, but I could see it. After all, he often had to meet with clients, and undoubtedly wished to put his best face -- and shirt -- forward, and this most definitely did not include an unsightly blotch on one's shirt.

But this was not the reason for my friend's sudden shopping excursion. My friend continued to explain to me that he was going to buy a shirt identical to the one he was wearing -- sans spot, of course -- and throw out the old one. The reason? He did not want his wife to find out what had happened to his shirt. He was scared of the reaction he would get from her if he were to come home with a messy, ink-stained shirt. So off he went to the store, to buy the brand new shirt that would enable him to erase all tracks of his crime.

See Spot. See the person who has made the Spot run...

My friend's explanation evoked in me two very strong impulses, which, as mutually contradictory as they may seem, actually emanate from the same place: (a) a desire to burst out laughing; and (b) a profound sense of compassion for the man. For imagine a man who stains his shirt, and his first thought is: "Oh, no, my wife is going to kill me!" Talk about walking on eggshells, the poor devil. In fact, as an interesting mental exercise, just try to imagine the kind of scenes that had obviously already actually taken place in his home in his interactions with his wife, that could have led him to believe that the consequences of showing up at home with an ink-stained shirt would be so painfully abhorrent, that it was best for him to drop everything in his busy day of work and execute a scheme designed solely for hiding the truth of that ink-stained shirt from his wife.

Throughout history, men, from professional athletes to presidents of superpowers, have famously engaged in different forms of conduct which they have attempted to conceal from their wives. But a leaky pen may well be the most curious of them all.

I wonder how perceptive my friend's wife was. Perhaps she noticed that my friend's shirt looked just a tad too new when he came home from work that day. Maybe she casually mentioned something about it to him, and noted a trace of anxiety in his voice as he responded. She hires a private investigator to uncover the dirty truth. And then, my friend's worst nightmare comes true: he comes home one day to find his wife waiting for him, holding the ink-stained shirt in her hand!

A number of months later, the owner of the company threw a dinner party in his home, to which all employees and their families were invited. Naturally, I was fascinated to see the woman who so completely subjugated my friend. If I recall correctly, my sense of apprehension prevailed over my sense of curiosity, for I did not introduce myself to her. I believe that, just by seeing her from a distance, I got a strong enough vibe to satisfy my sense of curiosity.

Only now, many years later, as I document this episode for posterity, does it occur to me what a missed opportunity there was here. For I could have become the first person in history to engage in stained shirt extortion. I stroll up to my friend and his wife at the party: "Hello! So nice to meet you! I've heard so much about you! You know, I really enjoy sharing an office with your husband. Such a good worker. And such a good dresser! Always the latest fashions, always in such good taste. And his shirts! Always so impeccable!" My friend nervously looks on, quickly getting the message. Hurriedly takes me aside, and shoves a hundred-dollar bill in my hand.

Finally, I wonder if my friend and his wife ever went for counselling. Goodness knows, theirs cannot be the most open of marriages. I picture them sitting in the therapist's office. The therapist begins: "I would first like to conduct a small series of routine tests, in order to get to know the two of you better. We'll begin with a Rorschach. Please tell me what you see when you look at this picture."

A Rambler But Not A Gambler

I've never been a gambler. Heck, I've never even bought a lottery ticket. The whole concept goes against my grain. I like the pleasure of knowing that whatever I consume, whatever I own, I've earned with the sweat of my brow. I think there might be a moral/psychological element at work in my mind, that I don't feel that I deserve something unless I've worked for it.

My father once said, especially regarding government-run lotteries, that he is opposed to them, because it gives the people, in his words, "false hope". It is well known that the poor disproportionately buy lottery tickets, hoping each week that theirs will be the ticket (in both senses of the word) to wealth.

You can easily imagine the miniature roller coaster going on each week in the mind of the poor old woman who buys a ticket (or several), her spirits rising as she wonders whether maybe this will be the one, and then, deflating and coming back down to earth, as the answer is the usual no, you are going to remain in your current poverty yet another week.

I agree with those who call government-run lotteries a "regressive tax". Now a "progressive tax" is one in which the rate increases proportionately to the level of wealth or income. But a regressive tax is the opposite: the poorest pay the highest rate. Since governments run lotteries in order to fund government projects, they are essentially another form of tax. And as those paying this tax are disproportionately the poor, it is thus a regressive tax.

In Israel, there are, in each town, public buildings, such as gyms, funded by such lotteries. I have very mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, they serve a public good, but on the other, I have an uneasy feeling about any building funded by exploiting the false hopes of the poor.

The truth is that I did gamble, exactly one time in my life. I was 24 years old, and had just moved out of my parents' house to live on my own. I moved into an apartment building, where there were many single guys my age. I heard that a few of them got together once a week for a game of poker. Now I had about as much interest in poker as I did for, oh, curling, but I did have an interest in meeting the guys from my building, so I went. In my mind, this was a social event, an opportunity to get to know the guys in my building over a friendly game of poker.

Boy, was I wrong.

Instead of the fun, relaxed, friendly, male-bonding atmosphere I was hoping for and expecting, it was two hours of pure cut-with-a-knife-thick tension. There was absolutely no idle chatter, kibbutzing, gossiping, chewing the fat. These guys were serious. Focused. Playing to win. No smiles and grins. Poker faces all.

As I had almost never played poker in my life, I wasn't very good. Did I say not very good? Scratch that -- I was absolutely awful. I'm sure I didn't win a single hand that entire evening.

All the time, I kept thinking to myself: "And this is supposed to be fun?" This was like sitting in a doctor's waiting room for two hours with a bunch of other patients, everybody nervously waiting to find out whether the blood tests had come back negative, and at all costs avoiding eye contact with the other patients. I couldn't understand why these guys would willingly subject themselves to this every week.

Now it's not as if these were high-stakes games. Michael Jordan comes to mind, who was capable of losing more money in one gambling session than most people earn in a year. No, as poorly as I played, my total losses for the evening amounted to a bit more than twenty dollars -- the biggest loss of anyone that evening.

But there was a brief moment when the tension in the room broke, and it was all friendly smiles. It was at the end.

"So, it was great meeting you! We really hope you can come back next week!" Never in my life had I become so instantly and unanimously popular with a group of people. Somehow, I rather doubted that it was my wit and conversational skills which led them to so eagerly seek my return. I declined.

Borscht Belt

When I went to Israel after high school, to study in a Yeshiva (a Jewish theological seminary), one of the things I did soon after my arrival was to make contact with my Israeli relatives. The relation was not close -- you had to go back about 4 generations to establish the connection. Invariably, they would invite me to spend a Sabbath with them.

I often stayed with elderly relatives who lived in the modest town of Hadera, about midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. They were very hospitable, and I ended up staying with them many times, over the two and a half years I spent in Israel.

On the first such visit, I arrived on a Friday afternoon. My hostess, being a good Jewish mother, immediately served me a tasty lunch. With one notable exception.

Have you ever drank borscht? If you are of the Russian persuasion, your answer may well be da. Borscht is a beet-red cold drink, which is hardly surprising, given that it is made from beets, and actually contains beets. And we are not talking tiny pieces of beets, like pulp in orange juice, but rather prodigious hunks of the plant. I recall my father occasionally downing a glass of borscht at my grandmother's home. In many, many ways, I am my father's son, but if paternity were determined based on the borscht-loving gene, such a test would indicate that I was adopted.

This, however, was the first occasion in which I was directly confronted with a glass -- a tall glass, mind you -- of borscht that had my name on it. I did not wish to be rude and leave the glass untouched, so I braced myself. I don't think I had ever actually tasted borscht, but as bad as the mental image I had formed of the taste of the stuff, the actual brutal reality of the experience left my imagination far behind, trailing in its dust.

I tried my usual trick of blocking my nasal passages by breathing through my mouth, but to no avail. Among other things, this strategy did not help with those colossal pieces of beet, with their unpleasant rubbery-like consistency. In desperation, I lighted upon the idea of eating bread with each bit of borscht I imbibed. The taste and consistency of the bread neutralized those of the borscht -- not completely, mind you, but sufficiently to get by.

Now the amount of bread required to achieve the neutralization effect was considerable. I must have eaten an entire loaf of bread in order to get down that glass of borscht. Every five minutes, I would psych myself up for the next round, as one might for a root canal, and would down another teaspoon of borscht, chased down with another slice of bread. They say that an optimist looks and sees a half-full glass, while the pessimist looks and sees a half-empty glass. But when the glass staring you in the face is half-full of borscht, there is no room for optimism or pessimism -- a primal survival instinct eclipses all other emotions.

An hour later, in front of me was a blessedly empty glass of borscht. Just at that precise moment, my hostess returned to the kitchen. "Oh! You finished the entire glass! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!" and proceeded to pour me another brimming glass of borscht.

I leave it to the reader's imagination to fill in what happened next. And by the way, today I love beets -- but I have not yet encountered another glass of borscht.

No Speaka

When I was in the eleventh grade, I got my first job.

Before I continue, two points of background:

1. A "shtiebel" (literally, "small house") is a house used as a Synagogue, in contradistinction with a building built exclusively as a Synagogue.
2. Part of the Sabbath morning prayer service is the chanting of a portion of the Torah. Since the Torah is written on a scroll, which lacks both vowels and the cantillation marks which indicate how the portion is to be read musically, most Synagogues employ someone to prepare the weekly Torah portion and that person, often called the baal koreh, chants the Torah each Sabbath in Synagogue.

So, when I was in the eleventh grade, a shtiebel, which had been in operation for many years, was seeking a baal koreh. Word got out that this was something that I did, and so I began to chant the Torah for them. I ended up spending four happy years at that Shtiebel as their baal koreh.

The services were held in the basement of a large house, about a twenty-minute walk from mine. About 30 men attended. A couple of young men and myself aside, the age range of the congregants was 60-80. There was a very positive energy about these older men, most of whom were originally from eastern Europe, and being in their presence was a very pleasant feeling for me. The shtiebel had a very gentle, relaxed, warm atmosphere.

The women's section -- in Orthodox Synagogues, men and women sit separately -- consisted of a small, dimly-lit adjacent room, with a small window into the main section. On a typical Sabbath, only one woman attended -- the woman who owned the house, who was the widow of the Rabbi who had begun the shtiebel, and had passed away several years earlier.

I remember just one thing about the first Sabbath I spent there.

After services were over, the men and I walked up the twelve or so steps to the side door, and then walked around to the front of the house. After a couple minutes of schmoozing in the driveway, we all started walking home, each man in his respective direction. Now it turned out that one of the older men and I found ourselves walking in the same direction, so we started to walk together.

A short, small man who was probably about 75 years old, he was speaking to me in a very animated manner. Problem was: (a) he was speaking Yiddish; and (b) I do not speaka da Yiddish. So I immediately stopped and interrupted him, and said to him, in as clear and loud (within the bounds of etiquette) manner as I could, articulating each word slowly and distinctly, so that there would be no misunderstanding:

I'M. VERY. SORRY. BUT. I. DO. NOT. SPEAK. YIDDISH.

The  man looked at me, paused for a brief moment, and then offered me a one-word response: "Shein", essentially Yiddish for "fine". And then, continued speaking to me in an animated manner. In Yiddish. Curses. My attempt to gain linguistic asylum had failed. I was trapped in the shackles of social etiquette. Resigned to the situation, I continued to walk with him, as he regaled me with tales of I'm not quite sure what. His latest escapades at the supermarket? Tales of his childhood? The mysteries of life? Stock tips that would make me a millionaire? I haven't an earthly clue.

Now the two qualities of this man of which I was most acutely cognizant at this particular juncture were: (a) he had an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of subjects to discuss; and (b) he was a rather slow walker. And so, the minutes dragged on and on, with him happily chatting away, and me, doing my best to keep an interested expression on my face.

Einstein's attempt to explain the theory of relativity to us common folk was:

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

I wonder what Einstein would have said about listening to someone speak in Yiddish.

At any rate, after a relatively long time, my new friend and I arrived at a main intersection. At this juncture I had to turn and walk west, whereas he turned his body the other way, indicating that his domicile lay in the easterly direction. Elation! Go west, young man! Parting is such sweet delight! No person who has ever been rescued after spending years marooned on an island has ever felt a greater sense of relief.

But I was premature in my belief that my reprieve had come, for the man, instead of continuing to walk, instead, stopped, grabbed my arm, and continued talking. My heart sank, as I continued to be assailed with the gibberish sounds of an unintelligible language.

Eventually, some other impulse apparently overrode his considerable penchant to speak, for he finally bid me a Git Shabbos, and we parted.

This was far from the only such stroll. No, ladies and gentlementschen, this man and I shared many such post-shtiebel excursions in the years to come. While I would like to say that I learned to actually look forward to these jaunts, my capacity for transcending reality is not that good. But I think I did manage to tolerate them.

Interestingly enough, although I never had a clue as to the content of my friend's soliloquies, I learned to pick up the tenor of the discourse. So I would laugh out loud if I could tell that he had just shared with me a joke and sensed that he wanted someone to appreciate his wit. I would put on a long face, shake my head and emit either a "ts-ts-ts" or a guttural "huh", if it was clear to me that he had just told a tale of woe and wanted someone to commiserate. I even knew when the moment was right to throw out the occasional "uh-huh". And throughout, through my body language, punctuated by enthusiastic nods, I always strove to portray a sympathetic and interested audience.

My one fear was that sooner or later, one day he would stop and ask me a question based on what he had just told me, and would look at me expectantly, waiting for my reply. My entire facade would come crashing down, and my fraud would be exposed. Happily -- and not altogether surprisingly, given the dynamic -- this never occurred.

The one English word that would occasionally make its way into the conversation was, oddly enough, peoples. Invariably in the plural. So from my point of view, my landsman's locution sounded something like this:

Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword, Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword. Yiddishword peoples Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword; Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword -- Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword? Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword, Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword peoples Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword Yiddishword!

Oh, and by the way, the man's name? Kafka.

Chocolate Is The Root of All Evil

One lazy afternoon, when I was a young lad of about 8 years of age, I was in my room, holding a chocolate bar in my hand. To be specific, it was a Coffee Crisp, a dizzyingly luscious treat, made of layers of chocolate, wafer, and other delightful ingredients.

So why, you may ask, was I holding it and not eating it? Good question.

Ours was a Kosher family. On that day, we had had meat for dinner, which meant that I would not be able to eat any dairy products for four hours. (Most traditional Jewish families wait either 1, 3 or 6 hours after eating meat before eating dairy; our family, for some reason unbeknownst to any one of us, had stumbled upon the apparently unprecedented tradition of waiting 4 hours.)

Now my intuition told me that a chocolaty treat like this must be dairy. Still, hope springs eternal, so I began reading the ingredients, hoping against hope that the treat would prove to be "pareve" (containing neither any meat or milk; "neutral" might be an appropriate translation).

When the first few ingredients all proved to be "pareve", I found myself, against all reasonable expectations, actually thinking that maybe, just maybe, the pareve gods would prevail, and that chocolate bar and I would be imminently united. Each non-dairy ingredient was bringing me one step closer to chocolaty bliss.

But it wasn't to be. I can still see those two dreaded words before my eyes. Milk Solids. Argh! Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps greed is the father of deception. For my next move, in my unrelenting determination to consume that chocolate bar, was to take pencil in hand, and cross off those two cursed words from the list of ingredients. And my next move after that?

"Mommy, is this chocolate bar milchig (Yiddish for 'dairy')?" I asked, handing the Coffee Crisp to her.

I'd love to tell you what happened next, but I'm afraid that that is the end of the story, as far as my memory goes. (Mom, do you remember?)

But the most interesting part of this tale of desperation is what was going on in my mind when I put pencil to chocolate bar wrapper. Clearly, when I saw those two words that will go down in infamy, I knew that I wasn't supposed to eat the chocolate bar, but rather should wait till the four hours were up.

So the two most obvious choices would be either to reluctantly set the chocolate bar down and begin the countdown to parevedom, or to defy the rules and brazenly give in to temptation. But apparently, both of these two options were so distasteful to me that I sought a way to, if you'll pardon the expression, have my cake and eat it too.

And let's consider the improbable assumptions behind my nefarious plan:

1. That my mother would read the wrapper, and fail to notice the rather glaring fact that two words in the midst of the list of ingredients were covered by messy pencil scratches; and
2. That, even if I knew full well that the chocolate bar really did contain milk, as long as I had fooled my mother into believing that it didn't, and she told me that it was permissible to eat the chocolate bar, then on some moral level, it would then become okay to go ahead and eat it.

Odd, isn't it, that I am able to remember the first half of this story, four decades after the fact, in such loving detail, yet my mind draws an utter blank as to the outcome of my ruse. Perhaps my mind has repressed that part. For it's hard to see a happy denouement to this sordid tale. Either my mother gave me a green light, in which case, I ate the chocolate bar, which my very active capacity for a guilty conscience probably would not have allowed me to enjoy, or my diabolical plan was exposed.

But knowing my mother, I'm sure she handled the situation with wisdom and kindness.

One Fine Summer Morning

One day, a number of years ago, I had to take an early train. Departure time 7:30, perhaps 7:00.

So I woke up early (for me), got dressed, and set out. Walking towards the train station, the streets were empty. Not a soul out and about yet.

Except for three boys.

As I walked past a schoolyard near my home, three boys, about 13 years old, were out jogging, in single file. They were not going very fast, and they still looked pretty groggy. One of them was short, one of them chubby, one tall and skinny.

I thought to myself and imagined the sequence of events that had led to this moment: those three boys obviously had not simply by coincidence all shown up at that schoolyard at that early hour and spontaneously decided to start jogging. Rather, they had clearly planned it in advance. They had been sitting around, schmoozing, and somehow, the idea of jogging together had emerged, and after discussing it, they had formulated a plan and had agreed to meet at the schoolyard at that early hour and jog together.

I picture each of them going to sleep a bit earlier than usual, setting their alarm clocks. Then, waking up, recalling what they had planned for that morning, pulling themselves out of bed, getting dressed and ready for their jog, and then heading out to the schoolyard. Meeting their friends, and getting busy jogging.

And this, mind you, was during summer vacation, so they could have all slept in as late as they wanted. So what had prompted them to do this? Was it part of some larger project? Were they preparing for some sporting event? I know not.

What I do know is that when I saw those three boys jogging together at 7-ish in the morning on that summer day, for some reason, my heart was filled with an enormous sense of joy.

'Tis! No, 'Tisn't!

Have you ever received a book as a gift, and shelved it, and then, on a whim, opened it years later, and found it so fascinating that you wondered why on earth you didn't read it earlier? Nah, me neither. Kidding aside, a book I received as a gift some years ago was "One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them". (Incidentally, the edition I received was a Hebrew translation.)

As the title suggests, the book is a correspondence between a Reform Rabbi and an Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi, debating the issues that divide them. A random sampling of some of the issues they tackle:

• Whether there was any Greek influence on any of the Rabbinic customs;
• The age of the earth;
• Whether the presence of different streams of Judaism, including Orthodox and Reform, is desirable;
• The role of women in Jewish law;
• Whether all passages of the Pentateuch are Divine.

I leave it to the reader to figure out, for each issue, which Rabbi assumed which position. :)

As someone who really enjoys discussing religion, I found the book highly interesting. But the one aspect that made the book so exceptional for me has nothing to do with the actual contents of the book. What I found so utterly fascinating about the book is that the two Rabbis debate the issues back and forth and throughout an entire book, neither one of them is willing to concede that even the smallest point that the other has made is valid!

Now, as a Jew who has experienced different streams, I was certainly able to see where both Rabbis were coming from. Each of the Rabbis made some points which I completely agreed with, some which I disagreed with but could understand, and some which I thought had no merit whatsoever.

But each of these Rabbis, over 300 pages of dialog, read every single word that the other Rabbi had written, on issue after issue, and was not able to see even one of the points that the other was making! How do you read 150 pages of correspondence and, for each and every single sentence, your response is: No, No, No, No, No, No...?

But of course it is possible. Clearly, each Rabbi was so determined to ram his point of view down the other's throat, that they were completely blinded to the possibility that perhaps their rival had some reasonable points to make. They were so intent on proving the other wrong, that when they read the other's letters, the only way they were capable of approaching them was to look out for ways to attack them.

What a different book would have emerged if each of the Rabbis, still coming from their radically different respective positions, would have at least conceded the obvious reasonableness of some of the other's positions. At least that would have been a dialog. Perhaps they would have been able to learn what values they shared in common, and pinpoint where their paths diverge. As it happens, the book was not so much a dialog as two interdigitated monologues.

I Do Not Look Like A Plate of Spaghetti and Meatballs. I Do Not Look Like A Plate of Spaghetti and Meatballs.

In my misspent youth, I used to be an enormous Mad Magazine fan. One particular cartoon has, in a sense, become my life's philosophy. I will spare you, dear reader, all of the unbelievably bizarre details, but the gist of it is that one man goes into an Italian restaurant for dinner, and, due to a preposterously unlikely -- and therefore side-splittingly funny -- sequence of events, gets into a heated argument with the staff there.

Meanwhile, another man is walking out of his psychiatrist's office. His psychiatrist gives him a little speech that goes something like the following:

"Well, Mister Fonebone, I believe our work here is complete. After years of hard work, you are now ready to face the world, secure in the knowledge that you do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs! Good luck!"

Mister Fonebone, who seems rather less confident in the success of the therapy than the psychiatrist, proceeds to walk down the street, all the time nervously chanting to himself the mantra: "I do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. I do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs."

Back at the Italian restaurant, the patron, in his anger at the staff, grabs a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and hurls it at the waiter.

What happens next? Of course. The waiter ducks, and the plate of spaghetti and meatballs sails past him, out the door and hits Mister Fonebone in the face.

And so the comic ends, with Mister Fonebone walking down the street, with a plate of spaghetti and meatballs plastered on his face, continuing to bravely chant his mantra:  "I do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. I do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs."

Why has this cartoon become my life's philosophy? Because I feel that each of us, in one sense or another, has this fear that we look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. And we find the belief very difficult to shake, even though part of us realizes how utterly irrational and ludicrous this belief is, and that it is just our mind which has created this false belief that we look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

And so, we go through life, constantly struggling to convince ourselves that in reality we indeed do not look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. And then, just as we feel that we may have finally overcome this illogical notion -- Wham! Some bizarre event takes place, and we are hit in the face (hopefully, only metaphorically) with yet another piece of irrefutable evidence that we actually do look like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

One Blonde Model, Please, Hold the Mustard

People often talk about the gap between the rich and the poor as a sign of the health or sickness of a country's economy. I've never been able to get exercised over this particular statistic. I'd rather live in a country where everyone was comfortable and there were several gazillionaires, than in one where everyone was dirt poor but equal.

I suppose those  who attach importance to this statistic feel that the ridiculously rich become so at the expense of the poor. I'm not sure that's the way the world necessarily works, but what do I know.

Anyway, the concept of the gap between the rich and the poor did hit home one day.

A man in my mid-forties who has never been married, finding my soul mate has proved tantalizingly elusive for me. Matchmakers, personal ads, websites, date after date after date, awkward silences, last minute backing out, unanswered phone calls, how many siblings do you have, what do you do in your spare time, how often do you visit your hometown, what should we talk about next, my mind is completely empty of any topic of conversation. The following quote from the movie Jerry Maguire comes to mind: "It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about."

So one day last summer, I read that tennis star Andy Roddick was engaged to marry a model. (Her name is Brooklyn Decker, and they have since tied the knot.) Now what struck me was how they met:

It was while Roddick was flipping through a previous swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated that Roddick first noticed Brooklyn Decker, and asked his agent to set them up.

When I read that sentence, in the context of my own romantic endeavors, the contrast struck me like a tennis ball travelling at 200 MPH.

Bachelor # 1 goes out on date after date after date, year after year, just searching for a nice Jewish girl, and finds none.

Bachelor # 2 picks up a swimsuit model magazine, flips through the pages, sees the model who suits his fancy, and has his agent order her for him, seemingly with the same ease with which I order a couple of hamburgers delivered to my home. What a nice world it must be for young Andy! Now such a lifestyle for me is about as realistic as flapping my arms and levitating off the ground. But this is actually somebody's life!

Gap between the rich and the poor indeed!

Now if you think that I'm morbidly lamenting this state of affairs, then you've got me all wrong, my fine feathered friend. In fact, I literally burst out laughing when I read about Andy's courtship, laughing at the delicious absurdity of the contrasts in this world. I wouldn't want the world to be any different from what it is. It is such contrasts which make the world a place teeming with rich variety, and therefore such a completely fascinating place! Vive la difference! Mazel Tov, Andy!

I Love You, Baby

Why do we love babies so much?

1. They will never laugh at our bad haircut or our poor fashion choices.
2. They will never ask you: "How on earth could you not know that?"
3. They will never become indignant over our religious or political views.
4. They will never come up with a snide remark that causes the entire group to laugh at you.
5. They won't talk your ear off.
6. We do not have to struggle to find a way to connect with them. Just a tickle here, a smile there, and a dash of "goo-goo", and we've won them over.
7. Their expression of joy is so primal, and therefore so pure.

Babies do not judge us and do not criticize us. They do not as yet have the tools necessary to evaluate us and find us wanting. We do not have to put on any artificial mask with them, since they have not yet learned the social skills which make such masks necessary.

Loving babies and small children is easy. Adults -- not always as easy.

Every single person in life was once a baby. Perhaps the loftiest goal in life is to find a way to love every single person as much as we all love babies.

Jewish Geography

"David, this is my friend Dinah. She's from Scranton."

"Pleased to meet you." Pause. "Did you say Scranton? Do you know the Rosensweigs?"

"Sure. We used to vacation with them in the Catskills. Their daughter is roommates with our niece Feige at Brandeis."

"Really? I think I know Feige! Her last name is Goldstein, right?"

"Close, it's Goldman. Her father is Chief Surgeon at Mount Sinai."

"Oh, we know him well. He operated last year on our Aunt Sarah. He's originally from New Rochelle, isn't he?"

Etc.

And that's Jewish Geography.

One subject at which I do not excel is Jewish Geography.

One Shabbat, when I was a teacher in Boston, a friend invited me to his parents' house for Shabbat lunch. There were many guests there. I was introduced to one of them, an elderly gentleman, and was told that he was from Toronto. When he found out that I was originally from Toronto, he was visibly excited at the prospect of a round of Jewish Geography.

So he rolled the dice and started to ask me whom I knew and was related to, in search of a Connection. Connections, you see, are the entry into the game of Jewish Geography. They are the equivalent of chips in a poker game. When I mentioned the name of my uncle, a somewhat well-known personage in the Toronto Orthodox Jewish community, his eyes lit up. A Connection had been established.

He told me that he had known my uncle. He continued: "Your uncle is buried next to my wife." The beaming expression on his face, pregnant with expectation, when he revealed this morbid social tidbit to me, suggested that he fully expected me to be highly excited at this Jewish Geography Connection -- as if he had just revealed to me the address of a long-lost sibling for whom I had been searching for decades.

Good grief, as Charlie Brown and Charles Krauthammer, two of my heroes, would say. So from "Your son studied at the same Yeshiva as my nephew" or "Your cousins stayed at the same hotel with us last Passover", we had now come to "Your uncle is buried next to my wife in the same cemetery"?! What next?

My diabolically imaginative mind produced the answer.

Scene: A gay bar in San Franciso. "Harvey, I'd like you to meet my good friend Rico."

"Hi, Rico. Nice to meet you. Where are you from?"

"The Village. I live on the north-west corner of Washington Square Park."

"Really? One of my ex-boyfriends lives there. Maybe you know him? His name is Gary Donen."

"Gary? Sure! My neighbor George went out with him for a while a few years back. In fact, George caught HIV from him."

"He did? Me too!"

Small world.

A Dollar Found

One day, when I was in the fifth grade, I was walking home from school with two friends. I must have been walking faster than they, because they fell behind. A few minutes later, they ran up to me, out of breath, holding a dollar bill, which they assumed had fallen out of my pocket. No, I told them, I had not dropped any money. Realizing that the found money was now theirs to enjoy, with pure glee, they ran ahead to the store a couple of blocks ahead.

When I got there, I found them deep in the blissful process of deliberating what to buy with their windfall: comic books, soda, chocolate bars, gum, candy, potato chips, ice cream, etc. Quite a bit of time this process took -- no man who has ever purchased a Mercedes took his decision any more seriously than my two friends did that day, pondering whether to get Richie Rich or Superman, Smarties or Coffee Crisp, Hot Tamales or Lik-M-Aid.

When they were finally done and had made their selections, they were holding a bag or two bursting with many, many items of the above selection. All for one dollar, mind you.

If A Tree Falls in the Forest

A number of years ago, I briefly dated a journalist. Although there was not much of a romantic chemistry between the two of us, she was so intelligent and knowledgeable that I always looked forward to our dates, if for no other reason than the intellectual stimulation they provided.

One story she told me in particular stuck with me.

During her college years, she was a member of a mock U.N. group, perhaps the Security Council. They would hold sessions, debate issues, and pass resolutions. She related that on one occasion, in order to illustrate a point she was trying to make, she referred to events that took place in Jordan in September, 1970, when the Hashemite Kingdom moved to suppress the activity of Palestinian organizations based at the time in Jordan. The events later became known as Black September. I do not recall what point my friend was trying to prove by bringing up this incident, but it does not much matter in the present context.

My friends' colleagues at the council had not heard of the events and denied that any such incident had ever occurred. My friend assured them that they had indeed occurred.

What happened next is the fascinating part: the representatives present decided to hold a vote and rule on whether the events known as Black September had occurred or not. My friend protested: "You cannot vote on whether something took place or not! The fact that you have not heard of the events and are not aware of them does not give you the power to vote them out of existence!"

No matter. The vote was held, and, it was decided, by a count of 14-1, that no such events as those known as Black September ever took place.

If You Leave Me Now

My nursery school was a small, white one-storey building, about a mile from my house. It was a one-class building: no other classes were held other than my own nursery class. There were about 30 of us in the class, and two teachers.

One detail I remember vividly about my first day of nursery school: my mother had to remain the entire day.

When my mother took me to the nursery school that morning and started to leave, the problem was not that I was so attached to my mother that I could not bear the thought of being separated from her for even a few hours. Rather, I believed, literally, that my mother was dropping me off at this strange place, which was to be my new home, and that she was returning to her home, and that this was farewell. I didn't grasp that I would be spending just a few hours there, and then would return home. Given this belief, little wonder that I was seized with a sense of panic.

Years later, I began to wonder why I was practically the only one  (one other mother had to stay as well) with this misconception. Was it that all of the other parents had explained to their children how school worked? Were the other kids more intuitive than I? Did they have a more trusting nature? Did I have too vivid an imagination?

I'd be fascinated to learn what really was the difference between what was going on in my mind and what was going on in the other kids' minds that day.

Writing vs. Programming

Two activities I enjoy doing are writing and computer programming. On the one hand, they do share a lot in common: both involve taking ideas and setting them down textually. Experientially, the two activities are very similar: sitting down at my desk, focusing on a topic, and typing the ideas which my mind produces onto the keyboard.

The huge difference between the two is the following.

With programming, what I want to produce is completely well-defined. A very specific problem needs to be solved, such as: display a list of names alphabetically in three columns, or compute the average of a group of numbers. So there is no question when I have reached my goal. In my mind, I know exactly what the result ought to look like. If my program is displaying the names in four columns instead of three, or if the columns are not balanced, I know I'm not done.  But when my program produces exactly the desired result, I know I am.

Actually, there is a second element involved in programming, which is efficiency. You can write a program which correctly performs the desired task, but this doesn't necessarily mean that your program is as efficient as it could be. Perhaps some part of your program takes more steps than it needs to. But in this aspect as well, I can generally tell when my program has reached the point where it is as efficient as it could possibly be.

When I have reached this point, I know that I am done, because the program does exactly what it is supposed to do, and does so in the most efficient way possible. There is nothing to improve. Time to move on to the next program.

There is no such "bull's eye" in writing. When I read over a passage that I've written, there is no such mental reaction which tells me whether or I have produced the desired product -- because in writing, there is no well-defined product! And therefore, instead of a simple "yes" or "no" reaction to the passage, the reaction is a continuum, ranging from highly satisfied to highly dissatisfied, including, of course, the infinite number of points in-between.

Of course, sometimes one reads over a passage that one has written, and will be so pleased with it that one knows that it is done. But more often than that, the reaction is neither a resounding "yes" nor a resounding "no". One wonders whether this phrase is awkward, whether that paragraph is too long, whether a certain part is unclear to the reader. Perhaps throwing in a metaphor here will make the passage more humorous. Should I use the first person here instead of the third person?

So, in dramatic contrast to the programmer, who can be absolutely certain that he is done with his task, the writer can potentially dwell ad infinitum on a passage.

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

English today does not always shine. So how on earth has the word "whilst" become so popular the past few years? Shakespeare and the King James Bible aside, I never remember seeing anything other than "while", until relatively recently.

My first encounter of the word "whilst" certainly raised my mental eyebrow. Is this a "whilst" I see before me? Pray, what next? Forsooth? Perchance? Methinks?

Perhaps these "whilsts" are tossed in in order to adorn the text, in a desperate bid to hide the fact that the rest of the text is so sub-par.

All of these "whilsts" in the midst of otherwise underwhelming prose remind me of the guy who orders a double cheeseburger, fries and a diet coke.

Meanwhilst...

Upstairs, Downstairs

When I was in the eighth grade, our grade went on a weekend retreat, or, in the Jewish parlance, a Shabbaton. What fun! It was winter, and we stayed at this rather large chateau in the country. We boys slept upstairs, the girls slept downstairs, and the main activities were on the ground floor.

On the Sabbath day, after prayers, the Sabbath meal, and some activities, most of us retired to our respective floors for an afternoon nap.

I woke up and looked around me. Familiar faces. The faces of the girls of my grade. The initial groggy pleasure at seeing their faces was soon replaced with confusion, disorientation and curiosity. How on earth had I gotten downstairs when I had gone to sleep upstairs with the guys? I didn't, and to this day don't, have a history of sleep-walking. But apparently, I had a case of somnambulism on that day. Certainly, there was a motivation on that day to end up in a different sleeping quarters than the one I had settled down in. Anyhoo, if memory serves correctly, one of the teachers discreetly escorted me back upstairs.

Flash forward three years. I'm schmoozing with one of my high school friends -- who had not attended the same school I did in the eighth grade -- and reminiscing about the aforementioned Shabbaton. His response: "Oh, that was the Shabbaton where a bunch of guys carried you down to the floor where the girls were sleeping!"

Hmmm...

Voluntary Chicken

One evening, some time after dinner, when I was about 11 years old, I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading.

In walked my father. He opened the fridge door, took out a piece of chicken, and sat down and started eating it.

I was flabbergasted.

To my way of thinking, chicken was something you ate during meal time because you had to. But between meals, if you were an adult, you could eat whatever you wanted! So if my father had the munchies, and it wasn't meal time, and there were no adults to tell him what to do, then why on earth was he eating chicken -- when he could be having some candy?! In my world view, willingly choosing chicken over candy made about as much sense as choosing a trip to the dentist to have a cavity filled over a vacation in the sun.

My shock was so complete that if my father had opened the pantry, taken out the flour container, and begun to eat spoonfuls of flour, I don't think it would have surprised me any more.