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Hanukkah: Time to discuss Hillel v. Shammai,  Addition v. Subtraction, Iris v. Greta,  and the possibility that there’s more than one way of doing.

12/25/2016

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Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing
There is a field.
I will meet you there.
                   from the Persian poet Rumi  1207-1273

*
In the 1st century BCE, in Jerusalem, two schools of Jewish thought — the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai — constantly argued matters of theology, ritual practice and ethics. The disciples of Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai engaged in over three hundred disputes, though Hillel and Shammai personally debated only three issues, one of which concerned the order of lighting Hannukkah candles.

Shammai said, “You start with eight candles on the first night and decrease to one candle on the last night.” Hillel said, “You start with one candle on the first night and increase to eight candles on the last night.”


Commentaries on this Subtraction v. Addition disagreement abound, but I’m most drawn to the words of the 17th century Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim ben Aaron Luntschitz. “The House of Shammai,” Rabbi Luntschitz taught, “are of the opinion that the Hanukkah lights represent the body. The body ages over time and gradually deteriorates. Just as a candle flame dwindles over time, so, too, does the human body. For this reason, we light the candles in descending order to acknowledge the diminishing of our strength.” Put another way, Shammai suggests that energy eventually runs out. The oil gets used up. Lamps go dark. (No kidding . . . )


Moving on, Rabbi Luntschitz wrote, “The House of Hillel are of the opinion that the Hanukkah lights represent the soul. Since the soul always matures, the Hanukkah lights are lit in ascending order to acknowledge our increased wisdom and the endurance of the Jewish people.” In short, Hillel suggests that we can always grow, add, and contribute to the world. (Someone please remind me of this when I’m still in my PJs at noon.)


To support Hillel’s positon, let us now consider legendary style icon Iris Apfel who, at the age of 95, keeps adding stuff to her closet. A coat created from red and green rooster feathers;
​red suede trousers slashed to the knees; shaggy goat-fur moonboots; bracelets made of plastic animal eyes; amber and turquoise and coral necklaces, the beads big as birds’ eggs. The 2005 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection, made her an international star. Since the Met show, Iris created a lipstick line for M.A.C, jewelry for Home Shopping Network, taught at the U. of Texas and appeared in car commercials for Citroen. Just like the cruse of oil in the Hanukkah story, Iris Apfel is apparently inexhaustible.


On the flip side, Greta Garbo is the Shammai subtraction poster girl. She started big and then flamed out, turning her back on the Hollywood lights, retiring at thirty-six. Unlike Apfel, Garbo pared down to the minimum, her public appearances diminished to occasional walks on Manhattan streets, alone, in dark glasses, wearing no makeup, a hat pulled down over her aging face. “I am living my usual rut again,” she wrote in her later years. “Seeing nobody, never wanting anything . . .” Except to be left alone.


Jewish law almost always follows the rulings of Hillel — as they did with the Hanukkah candle lighting debate. Still, the Sages believed Shammai’s opinions were valid, too, which gives us permission to follow either Iris or Greta. We can choose to add to our lives, or subtract from our lives. To remain visible or become invisible. Pick what you will. Either way, you’ll get no argument from me.


In his sermon, Hillel and Shammai: How to Disagree, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler said, “I watch with dismay as our government grinds to a halt, held hostage by those who reject the very idea of respectful dialogue and creative compromise. (Let us) give up the fortress of being right, and walk out into the open field of possibility, knowing that we cannot by definition know all the answers . . .”


If I’m not home, you’ll find me in Rumi’s field. 



    

































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Kosovo. Aleppo. Did (Will) Any of the Boys Grow to be Men? 

12/17/2016

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     The Stari Most, Mostar's spectacular 16th-century stone bridge and one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's greatest architectural treasures, collapsed yesterday in a barrage of Croatian shells.
     Built in 1566, supposedly with mortar made from egg whites, the Stari Most was once compared with a rainbow rising up to the Milky Way, but war turned it into a battle-scarred monument to the gap between the Croats and Muslims fighting for Mostar.    
     
In Sarajevo, dead and wounded children littered a playground and classroom when mortars wreaked havoc on an infant school.    
                   
                     From Croats destroy Mostar's historic bridge by Robert Block and Christopher Bellamy
                        for independent.uk, November 9, 1993.



                                                                   *

The 1990s conflict in Kosovo is old news. Photos of ethnic Albanian refugees stumbling barefoot across the border toward Macedonia in 1999 have morphed into TV footage
of Aleppo residents running from death, streets littered with rain-soaked corpses,
the sound of children crying out from underneath rubble. The destruction of The Old Bridge in Mostar by Croat mortar fire is mirrored by Syrian Arab Army forces who flattened the 400-year old Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue in Damascus — destroying thousands of irreplaceable Jewish artifacts — and the imminent loss of the ancient Central Synagogue of Aleppo which served as one of the Jewish world’s oldest houses
of prayer.    

In his book, Killing Memory, Andras Riedlmayer writes, “When a person dies, it is that person’s life, that person’s family that’s affected. When a culture is killed, it forecloses the future and destroys the memory of the past. Even if the people to whom those monuments and documents belong survive, they’ve lost their anchor, their connection to who they are, of how they belong to a particular place . . . . I think that you cannot separate the sufferings of people from the destruction of monuments of culture. The killing of memory is as great a tragedy as the killing of people.”    

My memory of a trip to Kosovo is very much alive. I often flash back to 1972, to the time my husband and I visited there, and remember one rainy evening when we got lost on a dirt road in the mountains while trying to find a dot on the map spelled P-E-C. 
      
     Peck, we reasoned. Where the heck is Peck?    

Stymied, we sat in our rented red Fiat -- a pair of American tourists wearing jeans and fringed western jackets -- when out of the rain came our Messiah. A shepherd wrapped in an honest-to-goodness sheep’s skin, its tail and four empty legs flapping in the wind. The shepherd’s flock pressed against our car as he peered inside. We showed him the map. Pointed to P - E - C. But it was clear. The shepherd could not read. 
     
     PECK! we shouted. PECK! 
   

Finally, a look of blessed understanding came over the shepherd’s face. He grinned so wide we could see his three remaining, tobacco-stained teeth.
    
     Ah, he laughed. Peh-TCH! Peh-TCH!

Triumphantly, he pointed his stick towards Peć. The sheep pointed their wet noses towards Peć. The shepherd smiled and waved and we smiled and waved and even the sheep, I swear, smiled as we drove off towards Peć that evening in the mountains of Kosovo, before the war.
                    
                                                                          *    

When the Taliban, in 2001, dynamited and destroyed two sacred 6th Century Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, I flashed back to the morning we parked the red Fiat and walked to the the Old Bridge in Mostar. Stari Most, the fabled, stone bridge that was the city’s treasure and to which we came like pilgrims to a shrine. In our jeans and fringed western jackets we walked on the bridge over the Neretva River alongside horse-drawn wagons piled high with cabbages. On top of the cabbages, Gypsy women rode like princesses in howdahs. Unthinking, I lifted my camera. The women covered their faces with their gold-ringed hands, shielded their babies with their shawls and turned their backs.

    Oh, no. You will not capture our souls today. Oh, no.

But one small girl, still too young to recognize danger, smiled at my camera. She smiled and waved, but I could not bring myself to shoot.

                                                                        *

Today, without leaving my condo in Omaha, I access social media and see the body of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child washed up on a Turkish beach. Youtube offers pictures of The Ambulance Boy — five-year old Omran Daqneesh, injured in a Russian air strike on Aleppo, sitting stunned, covered with ash and blood. I read tweets from seven-year old Bana al-Abed. “I am talking to the world now live from East #Aleppo,” she writes. “This is my last moment to either live or die.” Are Bana’s messages authentic or fake news? Who cares. Our eyes bear witness to the truth. Innocent civilians, innocent children, are caught in the Syrian slaughter.

Such a leap from 1972, from the waterfalls and glacial lakes near Uroševac, the mountain town in Kosovo where we bought plates of steaming ćevapčići from a vendor in the park. Cevapčići -- those sausages of ground lamb -- skewered, charred -- shaped like fingers. We sat on the grass, eating, and watched a group of boys approach us. How old were they? Ten, perhaps twelve. School boys with book bags. Young boys in short, wool pants and thick, hand-knit socks. They came nearer, walked slower and tried not to stare at us in our jeans and fringed western jackets. I held out a pack of gum. Smiled. The boys stopped and the bravest of them, the tallest, inched towards me like a cautious puppy, sniffing at offered bones.
    
My smile said, Don’t be afraid. Nothing bad will happen. You are safe. The boy smiled back. 
    Juicy Fruit, I said, still smiling. Juicy Fruit.  

The boys gathered around us, another flock of sheep. 
    Ah, the brave boy said. Joo-cee Froo-dt. He took the gum and pointed at my fringed jacket.  
    John Wayne, he said, proudly. He pointed his index finger at me, his thumb up.  
    John Wayne, he said. Bang, bang!    

The other boys pointed, too, and laughed. We all smiled and laughed and the brave boy pointed his finger and said, John Wayne, bang, bang!  and all the boys pointed fingers at one another and said, Bang, bang!  You’re dead! Bang, bang! and fell down, laughing, that day in Kosovo, before the war.

                                                                          *                             

Stari Most has been rebuilt, and the New Old Bridge is considered, by some, the symbol of reconciliation and human solidarity. Bosnian political activist Predrag Matvejević might not agree. "When a bridge is broken,” he wrote, “there often remains, on one
​side or the other, a sort of stump. At first, it seemed to us that it had crumbled entirely with nothing left behind, taking with it a piece of the mountain, the stone towers on either side, lumps of Herzegovina's soil. We saw later, on both sides, real scars, alive and bleeding.”

I see pictures of Aleppo’s children and remember those school boys we met in Uroševac forty-four years ago. Are they now grown men, albeit broken and scarred? Or do they lay buried in Herzegovina’s soil.


                                                                                                  copyright 2016 Ozzie Nogg




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A Gemini considers duality . . .

12/3/2016

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​According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs,
and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

            Plato - The Symposium 







Each one of us
is two.

I am both Jacob and Esau
at war in Her womb
clutching my own heel
aching to come out on top
the favored
one






​We
each are 

the other.

The other 
portion of manna
the other
candle that remembers to keep
the other 
angel who weighs our Shabbat
thumbs up 
thumbs down

amen 

the other
soul that whispers See ya, sweet pea
and leaves me at sunset.

I am two broken tablets
held in Her heart through my wandering.
I am both yetzer tov and yetzer ha’ra.
Which wolf will I feed 
my mess of pottage
this coming week.

                                                        copyright 2016 Ozzie Nogg



























​


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