“Bring me that horizon!”; or, random thought of a Thursday

I really think that the odd little essay toward the end of Vol. VIII may be my favorite of Rav Hirsch's essays. One seldom gets to see much of the rav himself in his writings; this essay is an exception: there he is, leaning on a ship railing, looking at the stars.

Anyway, at one point in this essay (which meanders like Iyar itself) he observes that Torah may be sailed through any weather, under friendly colors (that is, it applies in every era, to all that is good and noble in contemporary culture, and should be presented as such).

In his time, contemporary culture meant romanticism and science.

In our time, contemporary culture means the sort of fragmented idealism that gives us such interesting things as organic vegan GMO-free “strawberry cupcake popcorn,” of which we just received three bags for Purim.

Strawberry cupcake popcorn?

Actually, I rather liked it; and I like the fragmented idealism behind it; and yes, I called the day the list came out to put my name down for a swath of the PDX airport carpet.

But I like history so much that there are days when the “friendly colors” I would be inclined to hoist while sailing through contemporary culture would be the stateless and idiosyncratic colors of a pirate.

...however, stateless and idiosyncratic pirates are a flourishing part of contemporary culture. So it's all good.

What Is a Gemach?

Did you ever, as a child, dig for buried treasure in the schoolyard?

And when your efforts were frustrated, did you remedy the situation by burying something for the next kid?

The Portland library has deep trenches running the length of the library tables; as teenagers my friend and I used to amuse ourselves dropping poetry in the trenches to be found by strangers.

Nowadays this sort of activity is called geo-caching.

I never went geo-caching, but I have opened an electrical-utilities box in a Jerusalem hallway to flick the fuse and found instead a library of English-language crafting books.

GeMaCh is an acronym for gemilas chasadim, an act of lovingkindness.

In modern parlance a gemach is an institution or person that you can call up or visit for a specific favor. Often but not always a gemach is a library or distribution point for a specific kind of thing.

Gemachs are an integral part of the Jewish community. Some are modest operations in someone's living room (or fuse box); walking into others is like walking into a retail shop.

Between the white pages and the yellow pages of any Jewish community phone book are the gemach pages.

Among them –

Gemachs for a single book. Someone reads a book and likes it so much that she decides it should be available to everyone in the neighborhood, so she purchases multiple copies to loan out.

The chickpea gemach. There's a custom to serve chickpeas on the Friday night following the birth of a son. If your family is busy, or if your son is born, say, Friday afternoon, the chickpea gemach sends round a bowl of chickpeas.

The carseat and crib gemach. You can leave a deposit and borrow everything for your new baby, or a crib for your guests, or a carseat for an outing.

The wedding-dress gemach. Women who have bought their own wedding dress (or mother-of-the-bride dress, or eight-sisters-of-the-bride matching dresses) and aren't using it anymore donate it to this gemach, which lends it out to other families, charging a small fee to cover mending, dry-cleaning, and rental of the space needed to store all those dresses.

There are also everyday clothing gemachs to sell secondhand clothes. (Stores with leftover merchandise send it to clothing gemachs at the end of the season.)

A housekeeping-for-newlyweds gemach: pots and pans and sheets and towels at cost price.

I always said I would never be the lady who has a cardboard box gemach, although I have benefited from box gemachs in the past, because cardboard is hard to store properly. But then we moved, and we had a huge pile of cardboard boxes, and it seemed a pity to throw them out when they are so useful to people who are moving (or sledding), so now I am the cardboard box lady after all.

The gemach gemach. If you want to start a gemach but need a filing system to keep track of information, and hangers or shelves, you can go to a gemach gemach and get them.

The “dial-a-diary” gemach. In large Jewish communities it can be tricky to schedule events; so you call the local “dial-a-diary” gemach before and after you set a date, to make sure your event will not conflict with anyone else's.

One of the kedoshim who was murdered just now in Har Nof had a freezer gemach. Har Nof is a steep hill; you get from one street to the next using stairs. I run out of energy walking up and down Har Nof carrying nothing, let alone a stroller; but he would load a whole freezer onto a handcart and bump-bump-bump it to whoever wanted to borrow a freezer.

(eulogy.)

I have a friend with the neighborhood printer gemach. If you want to print something small, like a government form, you call her instead of having to hike to the print shop. No charge.

And so on, and so on, and so on. Kerosene, hot plates, centerpieces, garlic and sugar; there is even a lady who has made her phone number a “gemach” for women who are having a bad day and want someone to encourage them. I always wish there were an airplane gemach (in effect, a nonprofit airline) to shuttle people to and from Israel.

I wrote this post because people who have not lived in a community with a thriving gemach culture tend to assume that gemachs are only for emergencies. I have had people jump on my offer of cardboard boxes until I called my stack of boxes my “box gemach” and then they recoiled, saying, “Oh, no, no thank you, I don't need to use a gemach, we can buy our own boxes.”

(No! Please! Come take my boxes!)

Gemachs are a convenience for everyone. Millionaires also run out of children's Tylenol in the middle of the night and visit the Tylenol gemach. There's no reason why people should need to buy new clothes unless they want to, when others in the neighborhood are looking for someone to adopt their like-new ones.

So, don't be shy about calling the gemach. Most are intended not as charity but as a public convenience.

Fun

I have a randomly vivid memory of once working on a small but satisfying project and, when I got caught at it, I shrugged, “I had fun,” which brief and dismissive adjective does not begin to capture the thrill of it.

This came to mind recently when I was speaking with a learned friend who had just stayed up all night working on a composition in a somewhat obscure corner of Torah which she then mailed to the world expert in that subject; and as my jaw was dropping on the other end of the phone, she dismissed the evening as, “I had fun.”

And I began to think that there was an essay in the making here when another teacher recently described his aspiration in life and concluded, in the tones that schoolgirls use for giggles, “It'd be fun!”

The word “fun” exists to describe superficial pleasure, the sort of thing that you like even when you are too old to esteem it as deeply important. “Fun” is what fun parks are for. “Fun” is the aesthetic that has replaced “beautiful”: e.g., 1920's-styled shoes are beautiful but bright aqua 1920's-styled shoes are both beautiful and fun. I like fun but the feeling that you are doing what you were put on this planet to do is quite another thing.

In Hebrew there are oneg and taanug, which are related forms of pleasure, and there are other adjectives for the sort of pleasure that one gets from bright aqua shoes, and there are ten different kinds of happiness (gila, rina, ditza, chedva, simcha, sason... I actually know a family who went down a list like this to name their daughters) but there is no direct translation of “fun” – no word so bland that it can be flung about to mean anything from “cute” to “reckless”. Hebrew-speakers who need to use an all-purpose word like “fun” have to borrow the word kef from Arabic.

I'm beginning to wish that the word didn't exist in English either. People hide behind it when they are feeling emotional about something and are disinclined to express how strongly they feel about it.

Last night I asked a young veteran what it's like to be shot at –which is, to be sure, an invasive question; but he brought it up-- and he said, “It's not fun,” and with that I had to be content.

I propose that we all take the trouble to fish about for a better adjective when we are caught red-handed    having emotions.

'To Spring' by William Blake

Just for fun.
Have a chag kasher v'sameach

O THOU with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn'd
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth
And let thy holy feet visit our clime!
Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumèd garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.
O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish'd head,
Whose modest tresses are bound up for thee.

Ha, look at what I just found in Rav Hirsch

Describing a man met on a boat.

“...He was one of those people who, as their life's treasure, carry an ideal in their heart and would not let it be robbed by the sophistication and tension of a desperate time, who would not let themselves be deprived of their faith in the present, of the possibility of a better present. Because of their ideals, these same people carry an immeasurable pain in their breast, because it is clear to them in every situation what it could be like, what it should be like, and what profoundly grievous contrast the ideal presents to what the situation really is. Unknown, ignored and lonesome, they walk this earth. Nobody suspects the pain and nobody suspects the bliss that lies in their warmly beating hearts. Narrow-minded pity shrugs its shoulders about the kind-hearted romantic who does not know how to fit into today's situation. 'Look here, look at the fools of the past,' the clever people of the present say. And they do not know how precisely those that they call the fools of the past are truly men of the future.”

Vol. VIII, p. 677.

Reprinted with the kind permission of Feldheim Publishers.

(Thank you, yay Feldheim, everyone support this great publishing company, no they didn’t ask me to say that.)

Ruskin

John Ruskin was a 19th-century critic. You sometimes hear him called an art critic but the truth is that he was a critic of everything.

I like his writing, though half of it is half-mad. I think he was a genius and also something of a failure as a human being.

The tragedy and greatness alike of Ruskin is that he was able to stay so completely within his own mind – he had a clearer perception than most people of what went on in there, of the richness of ideas of which his mind was capable – that he never learned to come out of his mind far enough to love people for their own sake: he loved them only as part of that beautiful cosmos in his mind.

When he met people in person he was disappointed by the disparity between his idea of them and reality; he really couldn't handle it. (This hubris killed his marriage.) He had the same problem with landscapes.

He was a walking experience of the tragedy inherent in Plato's theory of ideal forms, the idea that this world is just a shoddy imitation of a beautiful abstract. At the end of his life he retreated into his mind permanently.

I think of Ruskin as one of those elements toward the far right on the periodic table: so full of electrons, but not quite enough; made unstable by the sheer frustration of it.

You can see (or anyway I see) in Millais' famous portrait of him that he is surrounded by a talkative landscape, including the gneiss rock he loved, but he seems to be looking at nothing that actually lies before him.

The real reason is probably that although the painting was begun by that Scottish stream, the figure of Ruskin was filled in in Millais' studio. Ruskin was all about Truth in Art and No Compromises (he once forced Millais to return to a site to fill in a last few square inches of shrubbery) so it is perhaps telling that he allowed this artifice of being painted separately from the world around him.