Forgotten Questions

Last week my wife and I went to our lawyer’s office to sign our wills, powers of attorney, living wills, and health care proxies, all of which the prudent person is told to possess. These were not our first wills or health care proxies, but we’d never organized the other two. Now that we’ve signed all four, we’re reasonably prepared for the last act.

The signing took place in a conference room on a dizzyingly high floor, with spectacular views to the west. Two witnesses and a notary public participated in addition to our lawyer. I suppose these were present when we signed previous wills, but somehow this time I felt the ceremonious aspect of the event more keenly. My awareness that this was likely to be the last of my last wills and testaments probably contributed to this perception.

Before each of us signed our wills, our lawyer asked us individually a series of questions, to which each of us answered in the affirmative. I remember that an affirmative answer was both reasonable and required, but even though I answered these questions only last week, I have no memory of the questions themselves.

The only other occasion in which I answered a solemn, publicly asked question in the affirmative was at our wedding, when the rabbi asked me if I would, if I was willing to – but what in the world did he ask me? I don’t remember that either, but the ceremony took place more than 48 years ago, so I suppose I can be forgiven for forgetting. Besides, I was so nervous that the rabbi might as well have been speaking to me in Greek - or in Hebrew, come to think of it - except that I somehow knew that an affirmative answer was required. I do remember my response, though. It was “I will.” I hope I've done what I promised to do.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

Hurricanes

It’s Sunday morning as I write this, two to three hours before Hurricane Irene is due to hit New York City. A Category 1 storm, it’s already knocked out electrical power for millions of residents along the Atlantic coast. A storm surge four feet above normal levels is expected about now, which may penetrate lower Manhattan’s underground system of electrical cables. The city has been in a state of suspended animation ever since the mayor closed the metropolitan transportation system yesterday at noon, the first preemptive closure in its history. The streets outside right now are deserted, except for a young man in a white shirt and black backpack running towards Borough Hall. Great sheets of wind fly past our windows.

The storm has already caused at least eight deaths, including that of a boy who was in bed when a tree crashed through his roof, but it's unlikely to create the devastation caused by the Great Hurricane of 1938. A Category 3 storm, it caused, according to Wikipedia, about 700 to 800 deaths, destroyed or damaged more than 55,000 homes, and resulted in property damage equivalent to about 41 billion dollars in today’s money. Brooklyn and Queens experienced winds of more than 100 mph, the East River flowed inland for three blocks into Manhattan, the wind is said to have caused the Empire State Building to sway, and the whole city lost electrical power. In Westhampton on Long Island, a cinema was blown two miles out to sea and all 20 people inside, including the projectionist, drowned.

Damaging as the storm was in New York, its greatest damage was in New England, which to this day has not experienced another storm as severe. My home then was in Brookline, a town surrounded on three sides by Boston. On September 21, 1938, a few months shy of my seventh birthday, I stood at my bedroom window in the late afternoon, looking at the great tree outside being lashed by the wind.

The tree swaying outside my bedroom remains a vivid memory. On September 21, 1938 my sister was a baby, my brother was a toddler, our parents and all our aunts and uncles were still alive, some of my cousins were as yet unborn, and I was still a child. What remains of that child besides the memory? My siblings and I are now grandparents, and we’ve replaced our own grandparents as the family elders. If the child is the father of the man, as Wordsworth famously asserted, what traits of personality or character, if any, in that six year old have persisted to this day?

Seventy-three years separates me from that child, who has traveled from Brookline to Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem, and to say that the two are the same person strikes me as absurd. It seems to me that the difference between the child and the man is as great as the difference between a butterfly and the caterpillar from which it emerged. The butterfly has no memory of the caterpillar, but I remember the child I once was, and I remember him looking out the window at a tree in a storm.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

A Sigh, A Starry Night, and a Frog

My wife and I are fortunate in our friends, and the couple we visited last weekend are among our most treasured. They are both retired university professors, both stars in their fields. I first met him in the sixties, when we attended one or two academic conferences together, and when my family and I went to Israel, for what we thought would be a two-year assignment, he met us at the airport and drove us up to Jerusalem. He was spending the last of his time there on a Guggenheim fellowship and before leaving for the States, he and his wife took us all over the country on a kind of farewell tour for them and an introduction to Israel for us. It was during that summer that we became friends.

For the past ten years or so, they’ve organized family reunions for their children and grandchildren, each year in a different locale. Among these have been Tuscany, the English Lake District, and the Hamptons. All of these places had swimming pools, a sine qua non for their five grandchildren. This year’s reunion represented an exception, because the venue offered no pool. However, it fronted on a large pond, with its own dock, a floating platform, and two kayaks. The kids, now 8 to 18, fished, swam, and went kayaking, when they weren’t playing board games, reading, or hiking on excursions organized by the adults.

The place our friends rented is in Franklin County, the northeast corner of New York State, which features hundreds of lakes and ponds and numerous rivers along with the mountain scenery. The main house and its two cabins are able to sleep 18 people, although our friends needed only 14 places. In the end, their pregnant daughter-in-law was confined to bed rest, so she, her husband, and their two children were unable to come, reducing the size of the gathering to ten. Our friends invited us to spend a few days with them, so while we were there we were twelve in all.

It’s always a treat to spend time with this family. I could give you numerous reasons for this pleasure – their stimulating conversation, their good humor, their energy, our shared histories, etc. – but this would only be searching for reasons, some of which may have nothing to do with the fact that we like them so very much.

We shmoozed a great deal, partly on the dock, partly at meals, partly in passing, and when we weren’t talking, we read, played board games, took short walks, and looked out the large picture windows at the lawn sloping down to the pond. The trees up there are mainly evergreens, but there are enough deciduous trees for us to notice that their leaves were turning color and falling, telling us- as if the cold nights were not sufficient evidence – that the summer was drawing to a close.

Our hosts are religiously observant, which meant that all cooking had to be completed before the onset of the Sabbath as well as arrangements for keeping the hot foods hot or at least warm. Lights in bathrooms and other strategic places in the house were turned on and would remain lit until the conclusion of the Sabbath the next evening. Laptops and i-phones were put away. Work comes to a stop on Shabbat. When it was time to light the Sabbath candles, our hostess gave a mingled sigh of relief (she had, after all, organized, before the onset of the Sabbath, 36 meals - the next three meals for twelve people) and pleasure at the 25 hours of rest awaiting her.

After dinner, we went out onto the lawn that slopes down to the water and gazed up at the stars, brilliant and innumerable, a vivid contrast to night skies in the city.

The next morning, as my host and I walked up to the house after sunning ourselves and shmoozing on the dock, he pointed out a small frog. Perfectly immobile, it could have been a broach from Cartier’s, striped horizontally in gold and green. We stared at it for several minutes, which seemed not to disturb the creature, which was probably waiting for an insect to fly near enough to be zapped by his tongue. None came, however, and he hopped away.

We arrived on Friday afternoon and left, most reluctantly, on Monday afternoon. Our visit was too short but we were grateful for it all the same.

2010-2011 Anchises - an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

The Collector

The other day, when I unwisely told my wife that I needed a project, she suggested that I undertake the sale of her grandfather’s stamp collection. Her grandfather (1880 – 1955) was a noted obstetrician and gynecologist, a president of the New York County Medical Association, and the author or co-author of occasional articles published in medical journals. But in the ten pages that Google’s search engine yielded about him, his role as a book collector was cited much often than his contributions to medicine.

At the height of his career, he delivered 1,000 babies a year. How he found the time and energy to devote to collecting in a deep mystery. He must have possessed enormous energy. His collections of the works of D.H. Lawrence and John Steinbeck, including letters and page proofs, now reside at Columbia University’s rare book and manuscript library. His collection of early medical books is now in the library of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. His collection of Lincoln photographs, letters, and ephemera, begun by chance when a patient gave him a photograph of Lincoln, has been dispersed, part of it given to Columbia, some of it sold, and some of it in the hands of his grandchildren.

In his “The Physiology and Pathology of Book Collecting” (1949), he wrote about his book collecting passions and about some of the incidents related to them. Alas, our copy is in storage, where I can’t consult it. I only remember one incident. A book collector came to view one of his collections. As he was leaving, my wife’s grandfather noticed that his visitor had pocketed one of his volumes. Drawing his visitor’s attention to this lapse, he then gave the book to him. Whether this shows greatness of spirit or the exquisite infliction of humiliation or a little of both, I leave to you.

His stamp collection at present consists of many volumes of first-day covers – letters postmarked on the first day a stamp was issued - several volumes of sheets of stamps, and a one-volume collection of stamps related to medicine. My father-in-law, who sold the valuable stamps, told my wife that what remained was worth very little. My recent conversation with a representative from a firm that makes appraisals, after I had described the collection and answered his questions about it, confirmed my father-in-law’s statement as to the remaining stamps’ value. But value can be measured in many ways. Building the collection must have been, for my wife’s grandfather, an enjoyable past time, and as the ads for Mastercard say, that’s priceless.

So now my wife and her sister must decide how to dispose of those stamps that they can’t use as postage. Can they bear to throw them out? It seems a shame to dump a collection that was lovingly formed by a beloved grandfather, but it does take up a lot of space. Will they can find a collector who might like to have them or a school willing to take them for use in art or history classes?

It's ironic that my wife’s grandfather, so distinguished and honored for his work as a physician, should be remembered today primarily for his collections of books. But being remembered beyond one’s family circle for anything at all, especially something positive, is no little thing.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

Walking in New York

New Yorkers routinely jaywalk when they see no oncoming traffic. Years ago, when I was visiting from Jerusalem, I stopped at a crossing when the pedestrian light turned red. “Dad,” said my daughter, who was with me at the time, “you’re in New York now.”I laughed because after all I lived in New York as an adult longer than she had. But she was right. I had forgotten the rules.

New York City is the safest big city in the country for walkers, with only half the rate of pedestrian fatalities as the next 10 largest American cities. Even so, streets are dangerous. According to the Tri-State Campaign, 440 pedestrians were killed on New York City streets in the three-year period 2007-2009. Of the five boroughs, Brooklyn had the highest number of fatalities, 152. So was that young man taking his life in his hands when he walked across Brooklyn's Adams Street against the light? Was I safer than he was by waiting for the light to change?

According to the Bloomberg administration’s study of pedestrian safety, released last year, the answer to both questions is “no.”The study was based on more than 7,000 traffic accidents between 2002 and 2006 that resulted in the death or the serious injury of at least one pedestrian. The study found that jaywalkers were less likely to be involved in a crash than law-abiding folks who wait for the light to change. Perhaps this surprising finding can be explained in part by accidents involving turns onto a pedestrian crosswalk. Walkers need to look in both directions and over their shoulder before stepping onto the crosswalk. According to the report, left-hand turns are three times as likely to result in an accident involving a pedestrian than right-hand turns, so we are advised to cross the street from the right-hand side of the sidewalk.

Of particular interest to this old man was the finding that seniors, who comprise only 12% of the city’s population, account for 38% of the city’s pedestrian fatalities. Our vision and hearing are less acute now than they once were, and we can no longer move so fast to avoid the onrushing traffic. So, fellow oldsters, try to cross the street from the right-hand side of the sidewalk and look in both directions and over your shoulder before you step onto the crosswalk.

Soul Murder

Last week, as I stood on the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Plaza Street, waiting for my wife to meet me, an old African American woman approached me. She was dressed in black, and in her hand was a small black book, open in her left hand. With her right hand she pointed to the text that promised me health and healing. I don’t remember what she said at first to engage me in conversation, but it was soon clear to me that she hoped that I would become an observant Christian, born again.

I immediately disabused her of the notion that I was a Christian, lapsed or otherwise. I told her I was Jewish. This information only encouraged her for, she said, Christianity perfected the Jewish religion. She went on to describe the Temple sacrifices of bulls, rams, goats, turtle doves, fine white flour, and oil, and then she told me that in the year 29 those sacrifices had become unnecessary. As a result, she said, the priests were unable to continue the sacrifices. "Yes,” I said, “after the Romans destroyed the Temple." No, she was not talking about the Romans’ destruction of the Temple in the year 70, but about the year 29, the year of the crucifixion.

“Isn’t it good,” she asked, “that we no longer sacrifice bulls, rams, goats, turtle doves, fine white flour and oil?” I agreed that it was good. The Almighty had a covenant with the Jews, she said, but the Jews broke it. To myself, I agreed she was right, not about the author of that contract but about the Jews’ not having lived up to it. She then reached into a commodious bag, which she had placed on the sidewalk, pulled out a bible, and opened it to Jeremiah, who, she claimed, predicted the coming of the Messiah, a prophecy she believes has been fulfilled. When I told her that she was wasting her time with me, she pointed to a passage from the Book of Daniel that Christians interpret as predicting the advent of Jesus.

I asked her how she would feel if I tried to convert her to Judaism, but I was beating my gums in vain just as she was beating hers, neither of us listening to the other. Finally, she gave up. She had met a hard nut and if she had failed to crack it, she had at least done her best. As we parted, we smiled to one another and wished each other good luck.

But I was a hypocrite. I didn’t take kindly to her attempt to convert me. In Wednesday’s post I wrote that the Hebrew scriptures’ injunction to destroy the Canaanite places of worship and their idols would, if carried out, have destroyed Canaanite identity, which was tantamount to soul murder. I was thinking about this when along comes an old lady who tries to murder my soul. Maybe she was an angel in disguise, sent by the Lord in one last-ditch effort to save me, but somehow I doubt it.

This was not the first attempt to convert me to Christianity. The earliest, I think, was by a high school girlfriend. She never discussed her beliefs with me but she invited me to accompany her to a church service. Curious, I willingly went with her, not once but several times, but the attempt, if that’s what is was, died there.

Then there was the missionary in Addis Ababa, where my family and I were living more than 40 years ago. I don’t remember how I met him or why I invited him to dinner, but he abused our hospitality by staying on well beyond the normal time allotted a dinner guest in a futile attempt to save us. He was serving in the deep countryside, and maybe he longed for conversation with native speakers of English. Who knows? But if he displayed as little tact with the Oromo tribes that he hoped to convert as he did with us, he could not have been very successful.

The old lady who stopped to talk to me on the street meant well. She hoped to save me from an eternity of hellfire. Missionaries in general mean well. Some serve heroically in desolate and dangerous lands, building and operating clinics, hospitals, and schools. But nonetheless they are killers, destroyers of the cultures in which they work and murderers of the souls of those they attempt to convert.

2010-2011 Anchises - an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved

History Rhyming

In our minyan last Shabbat, I gave a brief commentary on that week’s portion, Va’etchanan, f0cussing on the very last part of the portion. Moses is addressing the Israelites, who are camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, ready to cross it and conquer the Promised Land. How should they treat the indigenous inhabitants, the Canaanites? Moses conveys the Eternal’s instructions: “You must doom them to destruction, grant them no terms and give them no quarter” (in the Gunther Plaut translation).

The Almighty, in other words, is ordering genocide, which to the modern reader is disquieting, to say the least. I tried to square the Divine’s injunction with modern notions of justice, by pointing out that the Israelites are also directed to smash the Canaanites’ holy places and to burn their idols. If the Israelites had done that and then firmly suppressed the Canaanite cult, they would have destroyed the Canaanite people as surely as if they had killed them. The Canaanites would have lost their identity along with their myths, their idols, and their worldview. It would have been murder, yes, but soul murder instead of physical extermination.

Va’etchanan is the second portion of Deuteronomy, which was composed during the eighth and seventh centuries before the common era. Even if you believe that its authors wrote it with the help of Divine inspiration or even with Divine guidance, you don’t have to believe that they wrote it in an historical or political vacuum. The authors remembered the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom; they remembered the Babylonian exile; they knew that conquerors deported large portions of a vanquished population to make room for colonization. So the command to destroy the Canaanites was probably not as shocking to contemporary audiences as it is to us. The authors also knew that Israelites were marrying Canaanites and, worse, were worshipping Canaanite gods. So the injunction to destroy the Canaanites along with their religion reflects what the authors wished had been done at the time of the Conquest.

Although I didn’t allude to it in my comments, except to say that the Israelites did not find “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a slogan popular with the early Zionists, it cannot have escaped my listeners that the conflict between the Israelites and the Canaanites parallels in some respects the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It’s a good example of history not repeating itself but rhyming. There are, of course, many differences. Unlike the contact between Canaanites and Israelites, there is little intermarriage between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and virtually no threat to Judaism from Islam, as there was from polytheism. The Canaanites eventually disappeared, which is unlikely to be true of either the Palestinians or the Jews, in spite of the wishful thinking of each side.

If Israel and Palestine can ever come to an agreement that lasts – a questionable outcome - will the legacy of hatred and suspicion between the two nations dissipate? Will the two peoples begin to interact normally with one another once again? Will a modern prophet rise to denounce intermarriage and whoring after false gods? We’re not likely to find out for a long time.

2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All rights reserved