Our Wonderful Rabbis

In a recent sermon, the "spiritual leader" of the Sefardi Torah Guardians, a large and powerful factor in Israeli politics, called upon God to kill the Palestinians in general and Abu Mazen in particular. Another rabbi has written a book that explains when, according to Jewish law, it is permissible to kill non-Jews.
While it is certainly troubling that among Israel's rabbis there are thinkers who rival the mullahs of Iran in their benighted extremism, it is almost more troubling to see the solidarity of much of the orthodox religious establishment in support of these disgusting figures.

If Clothes Make the Man, I'm in Trouble

When my elder daughter got married thirteen years ago, I bought a light brown, three piece suit in honor of the wedding - and I wore it. The wedding was in August, but it was outdoors, and the suit wasn't too heavy.
Since then I don't think I've worn the suit twice. The men in Israel who regularly wear suits are the ultra-orthodox, and the rest of us mainly dress casually. A shirt with buttons is pretty formal by Israeli standards.
When my younger daughter decided to get married, I planned to wear the same suit. I checked, and sure enough, I could still get into it. It needed pressing, but it still looked fine. So on my list of things to do before the wedding was to purchase a new dress shirt that would go well with the suit. I ended up buying one for 219 shekels, which is about $57, and I NEVER have paid that much for a shirt before. My idea of an expensive shirt is one that costs about half that amount. (You can guess where I buy my clothes!) But I figured that for my daughter's wedding, I could splurge for once in my life. Anyway, we were spending so much money, that $57 for a shirt was negligible.
In the end, I didn't wear the suit, but I did wear the shirt. Israel was plagued with an extreme heatwave this month, and if I'd worn a three piece wool suit, I would have been carried away from the wedding on a stretcher with an infusion sticking in my arm.
This morning I ironed the shirt, trying to persuade myself that the quality of the cloth and the tailoring justified its high price, which led me to think about why I hate to pay a lot of money for clothes. Is it just because I'm cheap? I don't think so. I'm not cheap about everything.
As for ironing my own shirts, I don't mind it. Every few weeks I have an ironing marathon and take care of a pile of my shirts, and while I'm doing it, my mind wanders all over the place - some pleasant thoughts and some less pleasant.
Among the unpleasant thoughts arose the memory of a British acquaintance of ours named Robert, a large, rich, extravagantly homosexual writer of sorts, who committed suicide by jumping out of his window a few years ago. Robert discovered a Christian Arab chef named Bassam who needed extra money and was willing to clean houses, and he recommended him to us. Bassam worked in our house a couple of times. He was a diligent, polite man, clearly much too intelligent and refined to be cleaning houses, and after a week or two he stopped doing it.
Robert, in recommending Bassam, also praised his skill in ironing shirts, and he immediately realized that he'd said the wrong thing to me. Just as I don't wear expensive clothes, I would never pay someone to come to my house and iron my shirts. But Robert was a wealthy man. I don't imagine that he had a single shirt that cost less than $57. But his life wasn't worth anything to him.

I Wonder About Poetry

In the past six months or so, I have been participating in a poetry workshop led by Jennie Feldman, a British poet who lives in Israel. She is a fine teacher, creating a supportive atmosphere in the group, heightening out appreciation of our own poems and those she brings in by recognized poets (she calls them published poems).
It's been valuable for me. Because of the group, I have written a bunch of poems, and because of the critiques and responses both to my poems and to the others, I've become a better reader of poetry.
However, in fact, I am not a reader of poetry. Occasionally I'll buy a book of poems, occasionally I'll skim through it and read something. But I would say that poetry accounts for maybe 2% of my total reading.
So why should I write the kind of thing that I'm not interested in reading?
One reason I don't read much poetry is that so much of what pretends to be poetry is simply dreadful. You have to wade through a long, long low tide before you get to the deep water. To illustrate:
Recently I was asked to be a judge in a poetry contest. There have been about forty entries so far, of which thirty could be dismissed immediately as (a) not poetry, (b) not written in literate English, and (c) not on the topic of the contest. I had a similar experience as the editor of a volume of a literary journal.
On the other hand, I do read the poems that appear in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, to which we subscribe. But some of them don't speak to me at all. I can see in some objective way that they are well wrought poems, but they aren't about things that interest me. I'm particularly suspicious of nature poems. I have picked a lot of figs this month, and I thought that someone else might write a poem about that. But harnessing nature to your poetry is cheating, in a way. It's like sprinting on one of those conveyor belts they have in airports.

The Only Soprano Sax in Town

When we went to Cyprus a couple of months ago, I brought along the new soprano sax that I bought, a very inexpensive (and consequently not terribly good) instrument, which has the advantage of being light, small, and, if it's damaged or lost, not a big risk.
I don't like to go without playing at least every other day, if not more often. I've invested a lot of effort in getting as good as I am, and I'm struggling to maintain my level as well as improve. But it's not only the compulsive side of me: I enjoy making music. When I travel, I usually don't bring printed music with me, so I play what I remember by ear, I play various exercises, and I improvise. This time I brought my portable computer with me, and I have some pdf files of Realbooks on it, so when I couldn't remember a song, I could look it up.
We were staying in a pension in a tiny village in the Trodos Mountains, and when I played, the sound carried all over. Usually I don't like to impose my practising on everyone else in the vicinity, but people kept telling me that it sounded nice, so I was undeterred.
So there I am, in the bedroom, in between phrases.
Sometimes I think there's an inverse relation between the amount of equipment a person owns and the level of his or her skill. The worse you are as a photographer, the more cameras, lenses, and accessories you acquire. The worse you are as a musician, the more instruments you own.
Of course, like a lot of clever statements, that one isn't true.
Some excellent photographers own dozens of cameras, piles of lenses, and so on, and some excellent reed players might own every kind of woodwinde imaginable. There are different kinds of artists: the ones who keep working in one medium, in one way, forever, finding creativity in depth and concentration, and the ones who take up one medium after another. It's a question of personality, of course, and also one of searching. Sonny Rollins, for example, found the tenor saxophone, and that was enough for everything he wanted to express. But a player like Yusef Lateef used the oboe and other instruments, always looking for the instrument that would play the music he wanted to play.
Anyway, in the end, it's not the instrument, but the music!

Progress (in Pottery)

I made the hand-washing cup on the right about a year ago, and I brought home the one on the left just yesterday.
The older one has a kind of childish charm to it, but it's heavy, the handles are clumsy, and the drawing on it is crude.
The recent one is a lot bigger and more gracefully shaped. I wasn't able to make large pots at the time that I made the first one. The glaze came out pretty well, the handles are neater, and, while I expect that in a few years, if I keep doing pottery, I'll see it as crude and clumsy, the flaws in it are more apparent to a potter than to an ordinary person.
I imagine I'll reach an age when all my systems will be in decline, but, fortunately, I'm not there yet. I'm still engaged in things that I can get better at.
For now, I'm less concerned with the things that I make in my weekly pottery class than with gaining skill and mastery. I'd like to make large pots, but, though I'm improving, I still can't keep the clay centered well enough to do it consistently. For the sake of discipline, I spent the last five or six sessions making nothing but mugs. Some of them came out decently, but I still am not able to produce a form that I have in mind in advance, and to produce the same form consistently, time after time.
I could rationalize (and I do), saying that it's more creative and spontaneous to work the way I do, but higher creativity comes from mastery of technique, and higher spontaneity comes from the ability to do what you set out to do.
Still (here's the rationalization): I know, from writing and music, as well as from pottery, that the best moments are the ones when you surprise yourself, when you write something you hadn't thought of before, when you play a solo that is better than you thought you could play, and when you see and feel something in the clay that you didn't know was there.
By the way, for anyone who might read this and isn't familiar with Jewish ritual, the hand-washing cups are used before meals, with a blessing for washing hands, before one recites the blessing over bread.

My Schizophenic Friend

I have known the man I'll call Mannie here for about fifteen years, and in the past five or six years, since we have been driving to a weekly activity - about forty-five minutes each way - I've got to know him very well, and, despite his severe mental illness, I can call him a friend.
Mannie is a large, slow-moving, gentle man in his forties. The drugs the psychiatrists have been giving him have made him quite fat - though sometimes he loses weight, because he has hallucinations about his food and can't eat anything.
It took Mannie years to trust me enough to admit that his illness was mental, and by now he often bares his soul to me, and I don't really know what to do with his confidence. I'm not a psychiatrist, and I'm never sure what I should be telling Mannie.
Mannie sometimes complains that he feels as if he's drunk, but without the pleasure of being tipsy. He hears voices that tell him to do all kinds of things: mainly to protect people about whom he's worried. He worries in particular about one close friend, who has stood by him for years. Mannie has often said to me, "I'm very worried about Arnold. I think I should park my car in front of his house all night and make sure nothing bad happens to him." Mannie thinks that the police or some other "bad people" will come at night to murder Arnold, and he can stop them.
He has similar fantasies about hospitals. The other day he told me that he had seen an elderly man dressed in blue and white, and he stopped his car to ask the man if he could help him. The man said he was going to Hadassah Hospital. Mannie offered to give him a ride, but the man said he would take a cab. Mannie decided to drive to the hospital himself, so that he could protect the stranger dressed in blue and white. He apparently spent a few hours wandering around the hospital, protecting the patients.
Just recently he told me that he was sure that some very evil people were doing bad things to him, making him ill, but that God had given him the strength to withstand it.
A few years ago, when the news was coming out about the accusations against Moshe Katsav, Israel's former president, I made the mistake of mentioning the case to Mannie. It was clear to me at the time that, where there's smoke, there's fire. Katsav would not have been indicted for sexual misconduct if there was nothing at all behind the accusations - whether or not he will ultimately be found guilty.
It was an error for me to raise the subject, not because Mannie was an ardent fan of Moshe Katsav's, but because Mannie believes he forced a woman to have sex with him in Eilat, years and years ago. He construes the most innocent remark, such as, "Mannie, did you bring your music stand?" as an accusation: "Mannie, you raped that woman in Eilat."
Mannie is a sweet, kind man, considerate, helpful, and even humorous, when his illness will allow him. His suffering is entirely incomprehensible - to him and to anyone who has never experienced something like it.
Sometimes Mannie calls me for advice, and I try to tell him: "It's only your illness talking." Maybe if he could begin to dismiss the voices that tell him that the people he loves are in danger, he could manage his life better. But from the way he speaks of them, it's clear that those voices have more strength and presence than anything I could tell him. Though he often seems to call me because he wants me to tell him not to go and guard Arnold.
Other times I tell him, "Mannie, it's normal to be worried about people. Everybody's worried about the people they love." Or, "Mannie, it's true, there really are a lot of bad people in the world, but here in Jerusalem we're well protected by the police and the army." He isn't entirely out of touch with what I think of as reality, and I try to appeal to that.
However, Mannie gets messages from the signs of buses and billboards, or from the way people in the street look at him. I sometimes try to say, "Mannie, we all feel that something could be a sign of bad luck or good luck." I also asked him, "Do you ever see signs that are encouraging?" He loves lights, the sight of a town from a distance, and he admitted that sometimes he gets a good feeling from them.
There's not much anybody can do for Mannie, beyond being patient and friendly. He's been in and out of mental hospitals very often, and the doctors haven't been able to find a drug that will control his psychosis. My contacts with him leave me feeling very troubled. I'm relieved that I can leave him behind and go back to my own life. But it's terribly sad to see a big, strong man crippled by the chemistry of his brain.