Snapshot

It is hard to know where to start from when I have so much to say.
Maybe today is not the right time to stars. I haven't even figured out how to 'work' the blog, or know what the word really means. Words and their meaning are important. Few realise this, and so words fly out of mouths of people, and from their keyboards with abandon unmatched in history, and yet they know little of what the words really mean.

Does anything have meaning today in a modern democratic consumer society? Is there a purpose beyond the money making, fun having, self-obsessed lifestyle of today? Does anyone care about anything that doesn't affect them personally? Does anyone do something not for the sense of gratification or the 'feel good' of it?
I don't know, and I haven't known for a while.

I have been pretty much alone for a while now...about three years, and I see no way out of this situation. Nor do I care. I know that should I go out and seek company of others, I would be as disappointed now as I had been in the past by the lack of depth in their soul. This is a big statement using a big word to condemn people I have not even met, but if I was to meet the people I want to meet, where would I find them?
Where does one look for a soul mate?

I looked. I have been looking since my late 20s, and I have been disappointed every time. Is it me? Quite possibly. There must be something wrong with someone who at my age has moved back in with his mother, is unemployed and keeps Shabbat although not a person cares whether I do or don't.
How did I get here?
I wish there was a fan slowly turning above my head so at least there would be the sort of drama to accompany this question that was so palpable in Apocalypse Now. Not that this would help because one of my social handicaps is that I don't drink. Why would I want to drink? I wish there was a pub for talkers. Just order your favourite 'scooner' of conversation topic and enjoy the flow of the conversation draining the subject, and changing threads one after another, becoming drunk on the sheer profoundness of the ideas shared. But there isn't such a place.

So here I am...writing to largely myself in what I understand to be a sea of blogs. If so many people have so much time to write, I can't be such an exception. The lonely generation. Just sit and wait until the marketing world discovers how to deliver advertising right before my window for another bit of consumer candy I never wanted.

I realised today that I absolutely abhor American TV shows. I hated the accent even when I lived there, always so...actually they are different all the time. Australians, and this I realised quickly, Australians are always same. You know where you stand with an Australian (at least an Anglo). Americans are 'correct'. A caring tone when required, and that idiotic tone of insecurity when they don't know something, and the self righteous tone in argument, and the way they take everything so seriously...I though I was serious before I went to US.
Worst of all the American shows almost always have a good ending. In a world where every day seems to have a bad ending, in TV land good is forever.

I realised something about Americans and TV, or media in general. Americans NEED the TV and movies. They need them for the reassurance that they are behaving correctly in the most insecure society on the planet. They need to know they are not breaking any laws, and they are keeping healthy, and that they are pleasant..which has been translated into 'fun', and all this to satisfy their innate, from-the-cradle-to-the-grave insecurity of people torn from their family and flung across the ocean to a land where no standards existed.

This I decided is what really describes Americans...the eternal search for normal. This is how it started with Puritans...rejects of Europe (or was it the other way around?). A people in black and white intruding into the world of coloured beads and feathers and pigment-coloured skins, how strange they must have looked to the natives. Ever since then they had been going there, rejects of Europe, forever driven to succeed to prove someone they left behind wrong, or to 'better' them, or to just get rich. And once they 'made it' to become like those they left behind. And torn out of their European social fabric the Americans seek some other way to be 'normal', or not.

Such a contrast, the 'Bible' belt and the gays of San Francisco, the 'white' militiamen of the North Mid-West, and the gangs of New Orleans. No wonder Jews found America such a welcoming place. After all Jews have always known the standards even before the Europeans did. Jews are admired even by their haters for their success in a country where only success counts.

I am a Jew, but I do not admire Am Yisrael. I know better. What is the height of civilizational achievement for the Europeans, and but an aspiration for the Americans is but a mark of failure for us. Where they want just a Queen or King (Americans LOVE royalty!), an honest government and low taxes, we want THE King, a government of Prophets and Sages and a tax given to no lesser then THE God! We are as a People a failure of our individual successes. Having survived empires, holocausts, expulsions, pogroms, death camps and Communism, we, the only people to return to their anointed land after 2500 years in exile, the nation that has made so much possible for some many in so little time, are failures of our own goal to be slaves to no one but our God.

I have lived among the Jews for almost 30 years. Even now five other units in the place where I live have Jews. I know and speak to only occupants of one. Two days ago the wife in that elderly couple told me that she hoped I would not move. She wished they had gotten to know me because I seem a nice man. It took them 15 years to say that.
And what of the family I used to go to for Friday night dinner almost every night? The day I left for US I never heard a word from them. Not them or anyone from the 'orthodox' world I thought I belonged to except when sons of one man suddenly showed up on my doorstep in the yeshiva unannounced. But they didn't come to see me. They were invited to the Rosh Yeshiva's home.

I went to the Rosh Yeshiva's home once. I don't remember much of it. It looked like every other Orthodox home, pastel colours, much silver, same 50s clothes on the female members of the household, same food, same books, same songs, same, same, same...
10 months after arriving there the man suddenly walked up to me one day and exclaimed "Are you still here?". He though I needed to leave. I KNEW I needed to leave at least three months earlier, but I wanted to leave after the winter. And yet I was essentially thrown out into one of the coldest winters in NY by the 'good' rabbis who only ever came to see me when they needed cash. I didn't even get help with finding how to move, where to live, where to pray. No cash, no help.

Do I sound bitter? I shouldn't be. It was my choice, misinformed as it was. What did I expect? Open arms, an understanding ear, a warm home? I got my hearing with the Dean for 5 minutes two weeks after I settled into a shared room with a teenager who had problems no one cared about. I got my chavruta who was clearly not the type for me to learn with, and who made every effort to let me know this, and the lack of his desire to continue. I got an 'invite' for Shabbat to the nice people of Moncey every ShabbOs, but who wouldn't want to otherwise encumber themselves with anything deeper then a smile as fake as the surgery gefilte fish they ALL served (with one exception). I wish I remembered that family's name. That was the best gefilte fish I had in two years in US. It was just a fillet of fish, lightly cooked so it still retained the suppleness of the flesh, and dressed in slightly spiced fish sauce. Yes, the 'Russian' recipe like I have had from mum's kitchen the rest of my life. In Odessa we never had the problem with fish not being fresh the way they had in Poland or Germany. It took until I returned to Australia to find out WHY ON GOD'S EARTH THEY MINCE THE FISH AND LOAD IT UP WITH SUGAR! This is the way you hide that the vast bulk of the serving is inferior and starting to go off due to lack of refrigeration. And so, despite the abundance of fresh fish in American shops, and those huge fridges they all have, American Jews is what I can only describe given my limited culinary knowledge as CRAP. Fish crap, maybe, but crap never the less.

You are what you eat, so goes the saying. Even the Talmud echoes with its four 'tastes' for learning. And yet what most Orthodox American, and Australian Jews eat is bland, tasteless, never changing, 'traditional' food. I did get lucky though just before I left New York.
Dr. Moskowitch (I think I spelled it wrong) was blessed to marry a woman with Sephardi roots. I should have moved to Brooklyn much sooner. Never mind that most Sephardim gave me about as much welcome as a Hamas suspect. At least I could get an interesting conversational and great food on Shabbat...and the singing.

I think it is the singing that pulls me in. I had only ever heard singing like that once in Sydney. Sephardim have great tunes. For all their enthusiasm the baalei teshuvah of the yeshivah could not hold a candle to Sephardi tunes. Not that I missed Brooklyn, not after 9/11.

I think enough for now. Some snapshot.