Before Shabbat

Thanksgiving has always been a big deal with the Stern Gang. For years we’ve alternated between big family multi-generational gatherings and festivities with dear friends from Tulsa. There’s lots of food, fun, laughter, singing, and joy.

This year our Thanksgiving experience has been attenuated by Covid time and the restrictions it slapped on us. This year we had hoped to celebrate Thanksgiving with Liza’s dad, Herb. All kinds of work around plans were being carefully reviewed, even as the CDC warnings grew tougher and scarier. But he did not live long enough to make it to the table. We are left with the gratitude and appreciation we had wanted to show him.

Psychologists studying gratitude note that being grateful means much more than just saying thank you. Not only is the experience and expression of gratitude broader than thanking others but it requires … a set of complex socio-emotional skills. For example, researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Greensboro argue that gratitude involves perspective taking and emotional knowledge, skills that children begin to develop … around ages three to five.

This Thanksgiving has been, more than ever, about perspective taking. This is the right time for looking around and realizing how lucky we are, despite the limits imposed upon us by law and circumstance. This is the time to relish the moment.

There are differing philosophies on the appreciation of the moment. Liza quotes a friend’s mother, who once said, at age 90 something, “Don’t worry; it only gets worse.” Yes, phenomenologically one could objectively say that getting very old is not big fun. This casts the future as a successively darker journey as we age – and that’s without cataracts. It makes it difficult to appreciate the journey.

I’m not saying, to quote Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy.” I am saying that I want to be thankful for this moment I’m living in, despite the truth of my decrepitude and obsolescence. It’s not “no, but”, it’s “yes, and.”

There is a Japanese tradition called Mono-no aware: the ephemeral nature of beauty – the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life – knowing that none of it can last. It’s basically about being both saddened by and appreciative of transience – and also about the relationship between life and death.

This is what we have right now, this moment. And in this moment there is pain and sadness and the looming unknown. And that will always be so, on one level or another.

But there is also the beauty of a new day. There is the beauty of memory and hope. We have music and art no matter what darker issues lurk around us at the same time. And we have each other.

As a young child, I had a kaleidoscope. I loved it! I stared into it for hours. Well, it felt like hours… Sometime I would see a phenomenal pattern. I don’t know what made it so special, but it caught my attention. And then I tried to figure out how to get the same pattern back again. I’d shake it, turn it quickly, and anxiously look, again and again. But no matter what I did, I could never recapture that pattern, that moment.

It was a waste of time trying to get back to where I had been. Not only was it frustrating, it was futile. And another thing: it was a total waste of time. As I frantically attempted to find the lost pattern, I wasn’t seeing the beauty playing out in front of me. All I wanted was, by the very nature of physics and statistical probability, impossible.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, I am deeply grateful for the time I’ve had and all that comes next. I do occasionally yearn for some beautiful moments of the past, but that’s what memory is for. I give thanks for the ability to keep turning the kaleidoscope that’s right in front of me, filled with so much potential beauty. Along with all of the tragic, monstrous moments of 2020, I have experienced extraordinary meaningful moments: moments of connection, of love, of community, of healing.

Here’s to, “yes, and.” Here’s to you and our kaleidoscope.

Shabbat Shalom

In the middle of a lush green jungle in Puerto Rico sits an astonishing testimony to the scientific imagination. The Arecibo Observatory is an engineering marvel, constructed over 50 years ago. It is a huge radio telescope scanning the heavens and recording a variety of planetary phenomena, asteroid approaches, odd energy bursts, radio signals, and other heavenly things that I do not know how to define. You’ve probably photos of it: a huge dish nestled in a sinkhole. Above it hovers a sub-reflector and a waveguide. It looks like an alien encampment, stark and vaguely threatening.

The Arecibo Observatory has accomplished much over the years in the way of astronomical research. Hundreds of programs and projects were birthed right there in the jungle. As I understand it, the original intent for the construction of this breathtaking telescope was to create an advanced means by which to detect Russian missiles launched against the USA. That didn’t work so well. But what they were able to detect was the action in our solar system. And as technology ramped up, from massive, slow computers to ultra-advanced software systems, astronomers were able to see more and more.

There have been many firsts from the jungles of Puerto Rico: the first asteroid ever imaged; the true rotation of Mercury; signal emissions from a brown dwarf star; the rotation speed of pulsars; the chemical composition of the atmosphere of moons of Jupiter. These are examples of the work done at Arecibo.

But of all the projects that have transpired at Arecibo, I am most transfixed by SETI: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We’ve all surely looked up at the nighttime sky, filled with so many shining stars and God knows what else, and wondered, “Is somebody looking back at me? Are there other places in the Universe with intelligent life? Or are we a lonely planet of strange lifeforms slapped together through the strange phenomenon of DNA?”

It’s one thing when you or I look up with awe and wonder in child-like amazement. But it is surely another thing when an astronomer or astrophysicist gazes at the same panorama. We see philosophy; they see science. We think about it all as a question, an interesting, ever unknowable question. They think about it as a problem to solve.

The urge to understand the cosmos and to solve the riddle of extraterrestrial life has been explored by scientists for hundreds of years. From Galileo to Newton to Einstein to Stephen Hawking to Kip Thorne, and a million people in between, scientists qua scientists have asked, “Are we alone?” – and then set out to definitively answer with real time data as evidence.

A group of scientists started the SETI project many years ago, using the Arecibo Observatory to scan the cosmos, looking for patterns, radio signals that repeat in a logical cycle rather than pulse randomly. So far – nothing. At least, nothing we recognize as anything other than energy impulses from the stars. But they’re still looking.

1974, some scientists adopted a new aspect to this work, called “active” SETI, or METI: messaging extraterrestrial life. They decided that, rather than wait for a message, we should send out a three-minute encoded pictogram into the cosmos, saying, essentially, “Hello from the planet Earth.”

And now, 46 years after sending out that cosmic message in a bottle, a series of budget crises, internal arguments about who really runs the Observatory, and grueling climate change wreaking havoc on the island of Puerto Rico 46 years later after, Arecibo Observatory is no longer. Engineers cannot find a safe way to repair it after two cables supporting the structure suddenly and catastrophically broke, one in August and one in early November. It is the end of one of the most iconic and scientifically productive telescopes in the history of astronomy—and scientists are mourning its loss. “I am totally devastated,” says Abel Mendéz, an astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo who uses the observatory.

I am devastated, too. That Arecibo is gone due to human foibles seems impossible. The neglect of science and the notion that it is anything other than essential to understanding our present and future is destructive. That climate change, which has altered weather patterns and has made the southern Atlantic area increasingly vulnerable to storms, is played down as a hoax while people suffer from its effects, is criminal. That internal political bickering threatens the very essence of American democracy, and puts millions of Americans at risk, is intolerable. The end of Arecibo is a parable about what happens as Nero fiddles.

Is anybody out there? And if someone IS there? Do we invite them over for a play date? Given the condition of Earth right now, how comfortable would we be receiving guests?

So many questions. So much strife and angst. And yet, even as Arecibo is slowly swallowed by jungle vines and buffeted by hurricane winds, the message in the bottle continues its way across the cosmos. Space is expanding and the stars drift away from view while the light from stars that were born a billion light years ago is just reaching us. Today. The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. And here we are, looking up at the nighttime sky, looking for someone else, looking for ourselves.

This week two men died, two very different men whose worldviews were inimical. Depending on your attention to current events and pop culture, you probably recognize one or the other. Some of you will undoubtedly know both of them. It is only on the obituary pages that their souls would ever share space.

The more famous of the two was Alex Trebek, who hosted “Jeopardy!” for a record-setting 37 years. I remember watching the first iteration of the show with emcee, Art Fleming, when I was 10 years old. I loved that game show. It was a place where being smart was considered a virtue. For an unathletic, “husky” boy, that possibility appealed to me from the beginning.

Alex Trebek was my adult guide to the shrine of knowledge. I admired him so much. He spoke so clearly, never fumbling with difficult words or names. Alex did his homework, and it showed. But more than that, he was the captain of the ship. He kept things going and did not do standup in the middle of a game. He would sympathetically wince when someone missed a Daily Double. He would grimace with slight disdain when someone gave a ridiculously wrong answer.

Jeopardy! was about facts – undisputable facts. And Alex had to hear the facts delivered in just the right way. If it wasn’t in the form of a question, you were wrong. If you botched a name, you were out. If you wagered all your money in Final Jeopardy, and lost, you went home with nothing besides a Jeopardy! boardgame.

The other man who died this week was Tom Metzger, the notorious former Ku Klux Klan leader who rose to prominence in the 1980s while promoting white separatism and stoking racial violence. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt told The Associated Press, “Throughout his life, Metzger engaged in a wide range of hateful activities from spreading anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric to launching vigilante border patrols as a California Klansman to recruiting skinheads to the white supremacist cause.”

Metzger’s mission, his raison d’etre, was to cultivate fear and hostility. He wanted a race war and longed to create a white Aryan nation.  He took old antisemitic images and tropes and combined them with 20^th century ignorance and prejudice.

Tom Metzger used false accusations, showed contempt for the truth, and dismissed the simple facts of a multi-ethnic nation. His philosophy resembled the statement, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. It thus becomes vitally important to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie…” Of course, those words were written by Josef Goebbels.

It is uncanny how Tom Metzger and his determination to cultivate racism in America seems to be prophetic, in a twisted and disturbing way. Attorney Elden Rosenthal said. “What we have unfortunately learned over the last several years is that there’s a whole lot of people who share his views. … Once it seemed fringy, now it seems a bit frightening.”

Alex Trebek and Tom Metzger died this past week. One man represented knowledge and wit, the other disorder and ignorance. One man ennobled others with a sense of fairness and insight. The other delighted in destroying truth and discarding facts for fear.

I will miss Alex Trebek and the way he embodied the pursuit of knowledge. It was always so reassuring to see him standing there so calmly in control. He made us sit up and pay attention. We wanted to get it right for Alex.

As for Tom Metzger, there is an old Jewish tradition. Whenever the name of a despicable human being is mentioned, one is to say, “Yimach shemo” the translation of which is, “May his name be blotted out.” It’s a fact: the world is a better place without Tom Metzger in it. Yimach shemo.

Doomscrolling is a prevalent behavior in America, and probably the rest of the world, too. I love this word.  I firmly believe that it is destined to be Miriam-Webster’s word of the year (you read it here first!).  Doomscrolling is the act of reading an article, post, meme, or a piece of clickbait and then clicking on a link from that source to another article that further delves into the same subject. Oh – and for it to genuinely qualify as doomscrolling, the issue has to be about TEOTWAWKI: The End of the World as We Know It. And you have to do it just long enough to start feeling nauseated. Other symptoms include developing a tic, like slowly shaking your head back and forth, or yelling profanity out loud, or spontaneously reading a doomscrolling piece out loud, even if 1) no one wants to hear it, or 2) there’s nobody in the room.

Look – I recognize these patterns because, yes, I am a doomscroller. I can’t help it. I go down the rabbit hole without complaint or apology. And as I stew in the worry and the scorn and the disbelief, I wonder: how did I get here?

 Indeed, how DID I get here? And, speaking as an American citizen, how did we get here? In this odd place where one half of the country understands reality in a very different way than the other half, I mean here. This is not a rhetorical question. I don’t have an answer to unveil with much pomp and circumstance and drumrolls.

I grew up in the time of the Vietnam war struggle. I witnessed the battle for civil rights. I was party to the energy of the first wave of feminism. I was at the first Earth Day. Those times felt so dynamic, so filled with drama. But it never felt as bad as it does now. I don’t ever remember feeling quite so lost as I am now at the bottom of my doomscrolling well.

There is no easy path to find a bridge that we can all agree is mutually safe and sturdy. There’s just so much unease and such a lack of trust. It boggles my mind. I keep searching my memory for some hook, some means to get out of the doomscrolling.

How do we find a bridge? I don’t know. But maybe that’s no longer the top priority. Perhaps the thing to focus on is the work that must be done, no matter who is in power. The climate is in trouble right now. Systemic racism will still exist. The injustice we see will always be painfully limiting. Covid will continue to spread.

If it’s true that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” then we have to be involved in the physics of it all. A moral universe is not something to be discovered; it’s something that must be created. By us.

Rodney King once plaintively asked, “Why can’t we all just get along?” If that’s always been an operant question, then this year, it is louder than ever. It’s become the leitmotif of the 21^st century.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Spend a little less time head down in doomscrolling and a little more time with your head up; keep your eye on the sparrow. And as Stacy Abrams said, “Remember this in the darkest moments, when the work doesn’t seem worth it, and change seems just out of reach: out of our willingness to push through comes a tremendous power… use it.”

Shabbat Shalom

rebhayim