It is a glorious 57 degrees this morning and the sun is shining. I opened the windows! Why is this exciting? Because this is most likely the last day of such splendor for Houston until October or November. Six months of humidity and sweltering heat, coming right up! So I’m reveling in the coolness and birdsong in this moment.
Life has been bopping along over here and somehow time seems to be speeding by. I read a couple of longer books this month, so the volume isn’t impressive, but I was immersed!
Study: I completed the course in Modern Jewish History and absolutely loved it (and got an A in it). I’m now in the third week of a “History of Sephardic Jewry” class, which has been just as enlightening. The class discussion forum and the readings keep me busy. I also just finished the midterm in my second Biblical Hebrew class. This one is so much more complicated than the first class and I’m in the middle of re-watching some of the class lessons to make sure I’ve got all these different verb forms down. There’s a big difference between “he will have shown” and “he had shown” and “he caused to have shown.” Oy. I think I may have to repeat this level. We’ll see.
Mussar: Our local Houston group continues to love the Middah A Month course we are doing. I started a new advanced class on Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe’s Alei Shur, and that has been fascinating. I am getting about every fifth Hebrew word correct, which is fun to see. I want to be able to read it completely in Hebrew. Avi is 2 generations removed from Rav Wolbe, as the student of his student, but he also knew him and learned from him tangentially for 2 years. He is actually the reason that he moved to Israel.
Chag Pesach Sameach! It’s Passover, and we had a virtual seder this year again. I wanted to make it much more personal and meaningful for our family this time, so I tried to “mussar”ify it! We’ve all been in our own narrow spaces this past year and it was a good opportunity to let go of that burden a bit. I think we often forget how much power we have to change our life if we desire. We don’t need to be stuck. Perhaps more on this soon in a separate post.
One question I asked the group was, “To who or to what are you enslaved, and when was a time that you lived according to your soul’s desire?” For me, that was traveling to Israel a year ago. Taking 2 weeks away from home and family and responsibility felt wrong, but I just had to do it… and I’m so glad I did. Now, studying the Torah each week, learning from so many scholars in many places online, and practicing Mussar and learning Hebrew also feel like I’m heading in the right direction for me.
Creativity: I have gotten away from my creative paint/collage time, but I feel that I’ll get back to it. I’ve been listening to audiobooks while I do my diamond painting, which I find really enables me to dive into the world of the book, yet still feel I’m accomplishing something. I just finished the Positano piece and started a forest photo from a trip we took to Georgia’s Lake Okonee a few years back. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever done.
I’ve also ordered some prints from my Israel trip and have this planned photo display wall for our upstairs loft. The 2 biggies are my diamond paintings of those photos. I’ll show you the final outcome when it’s up on the wall.
Home: My daughter is going to return to in-person school in about a month and so we are preparing for the first time we’ll be separated in the last year. She talks a big game but I hope she’ll be ok with it. She’s really excited to go back to summer camp in mid-June too. We talk about that almost every day so we’ll both be more emotionally prepared for her to hop out of our car and say goodbye for 3 weeks. She is gathering things to take with her. It’ll be so good for both of us!
Other than this, regular life continues. I’m paying bills today, doing laundry, and renewing my car registration… exciting stuff. 🙂 We’ve bought some plants to replace the ones that froze.
Here’s what I read in March:
“I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and the pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought the pain was weakness… In the past 18 years I’ve learned two things about pain.
“First, I can feel everything and survive. What I thought would kill me didn’t. Every time I said to myself “I can’t take this anymore” I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain, but I could be free from the fear of pain and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush. The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live… I’m fireproof.
“Second, I can use pain to become. I’m here to keep becoming truer more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I am meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold.
“Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain, that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts. It’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, numb. Numbness keeps us from becoming.“
“Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and, consequently, miss our becoming. That is what I must avoid. Missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process.” – How very Mussar!
Klara and the Sun: A novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro is a favorite author of mine. This is a stunningly told story about an Artificial Friend who seems much more real than the other characters in the book. I read it in 2 days.
‘Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?’
Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America by Stephen L. Klineberg
A sociologist looks at Houston over a period of 38 years, describing how the issues here are a microcosm or foretelling of the rest of the country. There are major environmental, educational, political, and business problems here, but we are also the most generous and philanthropic people in the country. How about that!
“Houston experienced more suddenly than most of the rapid decline of the resource economy and the rise of today’s restructured, increasingly unequal, knowledge based economy. Its Anglo population stopped expanding after the oil bust of 1982 and then declined slightly. All the growth of this rapidly growing city during the ensuing 3 1/2 decades has been due to the influx of African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics. In the 1980 census, Harris County was 63% Anglo, 20% African American, 16% Hispanic, and 2% Asian. 30 years later in 2010, it was 41% Hispanic, 33% Anglo, 18% African American, and 8% Asian. Ethnicity and age are intertwined in dramatic ways. According to the most recent census estimates, more than half of all the residents in Harris County who are under the age of 20 are Hispanics. Another one 5th are African Americans and just over a fifth are non-Hispanic whites. The demographic transformation is a done deal. You can close the border, seal off America, build an impenetrable wall, and deport all 10 million people who are here without the proper papers. None of these efforts will make much of a difference. No conceivable force will stop Houston or Texas or America from becoming more Asian, more African American, more Hispanic, and less Anglo as the 21st century unfolds. According to census projections for the American population as a whole, soon after 2040 less than half the country will be composed of non-Hispanic whites and the nation’s overall demographics will look very much like Harris County today. Houston is America on demographic fast forward. This city is where for better or worse the future of our nation is going to be worked out.“
Wow was this 1000+ pages of amazing. I rarely give a book 5 stars, but this deserves just that. Layers upon layers of history built up over time and excavated one by one, with relatable stories about each one. Loved it!
“My thought is that in those critical years Judaism went back to the basic religious precepts by which en can live together in a society, whereas Christianity rushed forward to a magnificent personal religion which never in ten thousand years will teach men how to live together. You Christians will have beauty, passionate intercourse with God, magnificent buildings, frenzied worship and exaltation of the spirit. But you will never have that close organization of society, family life and the little community that is possible under Judaism.” (p. 813)
“I would have thought… that the real religious problem is always ‘How can man come to know God?'” “There’s the difference between Old Testament and New. The Christian discovers the spirit of Go, and the reality is so blinding that you go right out, build a cathedral and kill a million people. The Jew avoids this intimacy and lives year after year in his ghetto, in a grubby little synagogue, working out the principles whereby men can live together.”
I found the archaeologist’s dialogues in the book about Islam, Christianity, and Judaism so interesting. I happen to be learning about the Spanish Inquisition right now, so it all came together.
For next month… I’m currently in the middle of these books:
- Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge by Edward Kritzler – absolutely shocking
- Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered by Howard Sachar – class text
- The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson – science is fascinating!
- The Alhambra Decree by Dr. David Raphael – reading for a paper
- Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love by Arthur Green – love it but slow-going and I’m getting bogged down in the footnotes. I want to read all these sources too!
So happy to hear about your studies. Wish we lived closer so I could find out more about your learnings. Love to all. xoxo