Occupy

Occupy, By Mendel Hirsch

To occupy is more than to consume space; more than inhabiting.  To occupy is to influence an environment.  When being influenced, you are being occupied.

I occupy.

At home, I occupy.  Whether I’m aware or not, I occupy.   I’m a husband and a dad. 

In the community, we occupy.  Whether we’re aware or not, we occupy.  We are a Jewish community.

When unaware, we may be influencing negatively.  We occupy and we may be destructive.  When aware, we can focus on being constructive. 

Occupy; be present.

35 by 35 sewing challenge, and a teddy bear

I asked a dressmaker whether I should take a course in pattern drafting. "No," she said, "just sew 35 garments from patterns, and then you'll know how patterns work."
My goal is [to save the world! and in my spare time] to sew 35 garments by the time I turn 35 - at which point the Babyloops will be old enough to care about how she looks, and it will be a real advantage not to be dependent on the fashion industry, with its "one-yard wonders": we are a yardage-loving people.
Personally, I am one of those anachronistic wish-I-could-wear-hoopskirts-to-work people. (No, no, that's not an orthodox thing...!)

I'm defining "garment" loosely. Here is project No. 3 out of 35:

He is a wedding present for the new wife of our neighborhood greengrocer - hence the garlic print.
I used Simplicity pattern 5461, and hand-stitched most of him on buses and in waiting rooms. (Somehow I'm convinced it's a him.)
This pattern results in a fairly intelligent- and friendly-looking bear.

Entish for humans

If you don't know what Entish is, you obviously haven't read enough of Tolkien's fiction. The intrepid may venture here: http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/entish.htm
Entish words run extremely long, because each contains a detailed description: "Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalleyblack Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland". Trees, and their Entish shepherds, have time to talk like that. If you love poetic language, it's enough to make you want to be an Ent.

Is there a language with the integrity and evocative description of Entish that can be spoken at a pace suitable for humans?
There is. It's called Hebrew.

In Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew), every word - every word - has a three-letter "root". That root has a meaning.
This system exists, to some degree, in English: spoke, speak, and speaking are clearly related - enough that if you come across spake in an old text, you know what it means.
English is like Silly Putty - every language that ever got thrown at it stuck. By now English contains also spokes of a wheel, and specks, and spic and span, so that knowing speak  does not help you figure out what these other words mean. Speak and a dime will get you a ride on the subway.
In Hebrew the subway is free. All words with the same root are related.

More: all roots that sound alike are related.
More: each letter has a meaning (e.g. a ch will take the place of an h in a root to convey a harsher meaning), and all letters that sound alike are related. Entish is the language of Tolkien's trees, but Hebrew is shaped like one.
There are families of roots. There are families of letters. If you know one word in Hebrew, it isn't hard to learn a second. The Hebrew alphabet functions like the Periodic Table of the Elements.

This is seldom taught in Hebrew courses, which is a pity. People come out of Hebrew classes grousing that the language has two genders to keep track of, like French, and thinking that Hebrew is a difficult and sprawling language. Non, non, non. I used to teach Hebrew, and the shortcuts are real, and even before we get into its being a Divine language, it is an insanely gorgeous one, because if one letter has a meaning,
and you add to that another letter with another meaning,
and make of this a word with a root with a deeper meaning,
and this root calls to mind all the other words that grow from it, as well as the other related roots - by a power of association which does not exist in English- why, here we are with as complex a word as Entish, a word that expresses the essence of the thing, with perfect integrity, to say nothing of a great deal of poetry or of the joy of all those words being related to each other. And it took only three letters to get here.

(Why two genders? Having male and female words allows for subtle shades of meaning: e.g., using a female adjective for a male noun indicates something feminine about it.)

The Voice of the Kotel

I asked my friends to post here. Instead, they all sent their compositions to me.
Here's one by a friend in high school. Don't skip it just because it rhymes - I suspect it's better than you expect, especially if you've been to the place it's about.
The Kotel is the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed by the Romans c. 70 ce.
It isn't like a colosseum - it is a living place.


The Voice of the Kotel

I am a watcher, standing by
As thousands come to me to mourn.
They cry for what was lost to them,
And hope for it to be reborn.

Some never had the chance to come,
Though they've waited all their years,
Yet children can come touch my face,
Who have forgotten all those tears.

I cry out to my master's ear:
You've left your nation all alone.
How much longer must they weep,
Until you finally come home?

Sometimes I try to speak out-loud,
To some of  those who come to me,
To show them answers to their prayers,
As they stand begging at my feet.

When my master told them how to act,
When my master told them what to do,
He said what's missing from their lives,
To make these dreams they have come true.

Until they listen, here I stay,
Observing, still, always the same.
Silently waiting, hoping, sure,
But always crying for their pain.

Delicious Links

The English language needs new words for "friend".

There are the friends who can read you like a book, the girls in the next apartment whom you don't know as well as you should like, your former elementary school teacher with whom you now go out for coffee, and the people who so awe you that you can't bring yourself to address them in anything but the third person, even when speaking to them directly.

The Spilmans are what would be called "friends" of mine if it did not feel presumptuous to say that about people old and wise enough to be my parents.
http://jacobspilman.wordpress.com/ is Mr. Spilman's notes from learning Talmud with one of my favorite rabbis on the planet. It is delicious. It is my favorite website. Check it out.

http://devorahspilman.wordpress.com/ is films of Mrs. Spilman's storytelling, and something she calls "guided imagery", which I like when she is the one leading it.
She has always seemed to me like one of the characters in her stories: the holy Jew in the woods.

Frogs and Spoons and Orthodox Jews

I do not want to write a blog. I think it is demeaning for an adult to spout the details of her everyday life to an invisible audience of millions of strangers.
But, I sometimes suspect that there is no one addressing the general public to make the point that "Orthodox" Judaism is
1. not necessarily urban, but organic, green, skookum, alive, warm, familial, and comfy
2. not small-minded, but deep and profound
3. not Establishment, but personal
...in sum, poetic.
4. unlike any other "organized religion" you've ever heard of.

It is a bit contradictory to create a blog to make this point, because the medium itself is inherently impersonal - I do not believe that blogs have the power to change their readers in the same way as books, let alone conversation with real people. If you have a choice, and if you do not find it too daunting, stop reading here and go to http://www.shabbat.com/ and sign up to meet real people.
Otherwise, keep reading, because you probably will not find any other Orthodox women spouting the details of their everyday lives to millions of strangers.
I have asked several people to contribute to the blog - so there will be many different voices behind the word "I".

The decision to try writing a blog came when I read a newspaper article interviewing an Orthodox rav. He said something about how we should all do what G-d wants us to.
An observant Jew reading this paper will see what the rav said, and understand that although the thought was not expressed poetically, there are mountains and rivers under that idea, and births and deaths, and frogs and spoons, and nostalgia and parties, and if you just add water to those words and stir, they will burst into flame like potassium.
The average person reading this particular paper sees sees the word "G-d" and turns the page. Next.

Too bad. Someone has to demonstrate that Torah is poetic.
Stay tuned.