Before Shabbat

I happened upon a very old photograph of myself, standing next to my sister Marta, aleha hashalom. I looked at her — this cute, pudgy girl in a horizontally striped blouse. Every camera she ever stood in front of loved her; she was beyond photogenic. Then there’s me: skinny, unremarkable, perhaps vaguely uneasy at getting my picture taken. My sister Joan was either not yet born or just an infant, so she’s not part of this tableau.

I assume that’s me in the photo, though I have absolutely no recollection of the moment. But is it really me? Does that anxious seven-year-old have any connection to who I am now? Does that me still exist in some form, stored away in the folds of my neocortex? Can I find that child the way I can Google any question — say, where long-term memory is stored — and get an answer?

And what about Marta, who died almost nine months ago? Is she gone? Does she still exist in some noncorporeal form? If you’d asked me forty years ago, I’d have scoffed a hubristic scoff: “Of course not! Ashes to ashes…” But now? I keep returning to the writer Meghan O’Rourke: “A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?” And if Marta does exist, what is she now — and what makes that thing identical to the little girl in the picture? Can she remember that day, while I cannot?

It’s no more or less preposterous to imagine some transcendent link to our dead than it is to accept dark energy: we infer it from the way the universe is flying apart, yet we’ve never observed it directly and still have no idea what it actually is. So I scoff at nothing — not in the realm of memory, not in the stories we tell about ourselves and one another, the stories that define us. All we have is our stories.

I look at this little boy in 1959 and wonder: do he and I really share the same body? How can that be, when nearly every atom that made up that skinny child has long since cycled out — through breath and food and waste — and been replaced many times over? And if our bodies share so little, our points of view share even less. My perspective would be as inaccessible to him as his is to me now.

Now turn it around. A year from now, the world will be full of people, and one of them will have a peculiar, singular property: that person will be you. With any luck, a year from now someone out there will be you. But what is it about that person that makes that person you?

I don’t know. In fact, there is no definitive answer. But to wonder what my essence even is — how it links the boy of sixty-some years ago to whoever I’ll be a year from now — is thrilling and frightening and wild.

Particularly reassuring is a small piece of biology. A few parts of you barely change across an entire lifetime. The lens at the center of your eye. The enamel of your teeth. The neurons of your cerebral cortex are as old as you are.

So even as we wonder who and what we are, and who we will become, something is in here, consistent and present. The very parts of you that do the seeing and the remembering are, atom for atom, among the least changed of all.

Two months ago, I’d never heard of looksmaxxing. I thought it was a typo. It isn’t.

It makes sense that I was ignorant of this craze. It isn’t aimed at men in their seventies. Its audience is young men in their teens and twenties — discouraged, unseen, convinced they’ve been cheated of an authority and a respect they believe was their birthright.

They speak of being disenfranchised. Cheated by liberals and progressives who challenge the traditional power structure of Western civilization. They say women don’t respect their inherent historical position, that women ignore them. Many call themselves incels — involuntarily celibate. It isn’t a badge of honor. They wear it as a scar, one they believe women carved into them.

In what amounts to an “I’ll show you” act of retribution, looksmaaxers throw themselves at the project of the perfect physique. Hours of weightlifting. Steroids. Supplements by the handful. Some go further and pick up a hammer, believing — falsely — that they can pound their jawbones into a more sculpted shape.

The goal is to manufacture a body worthy of adoration. It is misguided. It is sad.

Watching clips of Braden Peters — better known as Clavicular, the unofficial face of looksmaxxing — I kept thinking what a narcissistic indulgence the whole project is. Doesn’t he know that when Genesis says God created humanity in God’s image, the verse is precisely NOT about the container we live in? God’s image isn’t visual. It’s the expression of the sacred: compassion, empathy, discernment.

Jewish tradition is full of warnings against the seductions of beauty, full of calls toward wisdom instead — wisdom, which doesn’t fade. Pirkei Avot, the Mishnaic collection of rabbinic aphorisms, puts it plainly: Al tistakel b’kankan, ela b’mah she’yesh bo. Don’t look at the vessel — look at what’s inside.

It breaks my heart to watch so much effort poured into beliefs so twisted, so empty of wisdom. The grievances, the enemies named, the appetite for retribution, the lines drawn by race, gender, and religion, the hierarchies of authority — all are symptoms of a world out of whack.

Maybe looksmaxxing is a flash in the pan, a blip that gives way to whatever TikTok serves up next. Maybe my concern isn’t warranted. There are bigger issues in the world.

My main concern is not with looksmaxxing as a fleeting fad, but with what it reveals about deeper issues: specifically, the desperation young men feel to find purpose and meaning, and how this desperation can become entangled with resentment and blame. The key point is that the search for meaning is distorted into a harmful cycle of self-blame and blaming others.

They have built a community of mirrors, surrounded by images of themselves, excluding everyone else. It’s sad. It’s also a pernicious sign of how twisted human longing can get when it has nowhere good to go. A deeper rot festers in the American soul: a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness, a relentless focus on “getting mine”, that leaves us feeling empty and devoid of purpose.

Don’t look at the vessel — look at what’s inside.

There are some things we do as part of our Jewish practice that we assume are somehow, somewhere codified as halacha: Jewish law. Covering mirrors in a house of mourning is one such ritual. So is using the back of a shovel when burying someone at a Jewish burial. For Ashkenazi families, it’s transgressive to name a newborn after someone who’s alive.

None of the practices mentioned above are halacha. They are deeply rooted superstitions. Many have to do with a fear of death. In fact, one of the most common Jewish expressions is a prime example of such a superstition: kine hora! This phrase is an exhortation which means: don’t tempt the evil eye. It’s that convoluted magical thinking that warns us against saying the ‘wrong thing’: talking about one’s children, moving to a new home, detailing a new travel plan, even exclaiming “I feel great” or “It’s a beautiful day!” can bring disaster.

I’m not sure from whence this comes. Maybe it’s recognition of the tenuousness of life, how nothing is assured. Perhaps it also comes from living in the Diaspora, where our ancestors had so little control over their fate, and where a sense of vulnerability was acutely felt every day. Add to that an overall fear of death, and one achieves the perfect recipe for desperately hoping we might control the trajectory of our lives.

There is another Jewish superstition: never count people directly. If you need to know whether a minyan has gathered, you don’t point and say one, two, three. Instead, you recite the first ten words of the first morning blessing:  Mah-tovu ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael V’ani b’rov chasdecha Avo b’techa— and let the words do the counting. Each person gets a word, and when the verse runs out, you have your answer. Another approach for minyan gathering is to go around, saying, “Not one. Not two…” All the way to “not ten”.

We are, right now, in the book of Bamidbar — Numbers —when God tells Moses: Se’u et rosh kol adat Bnei Yisrael — “Lift up the head of the whole Israelite community.” Count them. And they do, elaborately, tribe by tribe, each man above twenty tallied with almost bureaucratic precision. The total: 603,550. The Israelites, freshly liberated, newly covenanted, on the verge of their long march toward home — counted, recorded, known.

But this census is not a headcount. Each person contributes a half-shekel, and the coins are tallied. The people themselves are never directly numbered. God commands the census, but even God’s census uses an intermediary object. The half-shekel stands in for the person. The coin is countable. The person, apparently, is not. This makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective: just count the coins rather than have people stand in long lines.

But there’s more here than bureaucracy or a kine hora. Not counting affirms the value of the individual. Judaism spends so much time in the world of the first-person plural. It’s all about us, the people of Israel. But to ignore the needs and thoughts of every individual, subsuming them in a corporate whole, steals from them – from us! A true sense of self, without which we become automatons, the masses.

In the Talmud it says, that each person contains an entire world. If that is true, then a human being is not, in any meaningful sense, a number. A number is finite. It can be added, subtracted, compared. But a person who contains a world? You can’t really count that. You can only approximate it, and every approximation is a kind of loss.

Philosophically, the half-shekel works as a ritual solution. It doesn’t pretend to capture the person. It stands in for them, modestly, as a placeholder. The coin says: I acknowledge your presence without claiming to measure your worth.

We live in an age that is extraordinarily good at counting people. Algorithms track us, data brokers sell us, institutions reduce us to demographics, metrics, risk scores, engagement rates. There is a census happening around us all the time.

This is our supreme balancing act: recognizing the needs of the community and considering the needs of the individual. This is why it’s hard to be a Jew. This is why it’s hard to live in a democracy. We are human and thus, vulnerable to pain and illness and confusion and anxiety. And every human deserves respect and concern. Kine hora.