Book of Days: asher553

The Orthodox Union Nach Yomi (Daily Bible chapter) cycle has left the Books of Kings and is now in Isaiah. (With all respect, that fellow had rather a lot to say.) I started Kings with teeth gritted in a sort of "let's get this over with" frame of mind. So many names to learn, so much violence, so many lives and battles and events coming onto the stage and leaving it. Lots of people with the same or similar-sounding names. It looked like a big chore. And yet, now that the daily chapter cycle has moved on, I find that I don't want to leave Kings.

What makes the Book of Samuel memorable is, largely, the figure of King David. He is one of the most revered and beloved kings in the Jewish tradition. Surely his son Solomon, who was the wisest of all men and who merited to build the Temple, should be at least equally renowned? But David is real for us, I think, because Samuel gives us such a rich and detailed picture of his internal struggles as an individual. That's what makes him real for us, and that's what makes him memorable.

Kings doesn't give us that. What Kings gives us instead is something different: the internal struggles of a nation. The first and foremost of these is, of course, the Divided Kingdom itself: this is the very reason why Jews are called Jews, and it is here in Kings that we learn of it. This is the overriding and overshadowing reality of the Jewish people throughout the historical era, from the beginning of written history as we know it until the present day. We also have the struggles among the classes of the Hebrew people: kings, prophets, priests, sages, warriors. And, foreshadowed by the Exodus in the Torah but made explicit and palpable in Kings, there is the collective near-death experience. For the Northern Kingdom of Israel, it was more than a *near* death experience in the end. And for the Judahites, or Jews, the reprieve from Sennacherib's siege only meant being delivered into another captivity fifteen years later. So the question of national survival was paramount.

Kings lacks the narrative sophistication of Samuel, but I'm beginning to think it doesn't need it. Maybe the importance of this book is in its mundane details: the lives and deaths of the twenty kings of Israel and the nineteen kings and one queen of Judah. Most of them were bad. Even the good ones were deeply flawed. But I'm going to figure that the spare accounts of their lives and deaths are here to tell us something. (I can't help noticing the parallel between the twenty monarchs of each nation, and the twenty generations from Adam to Abram.)

The books of Early Prophets - Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings - are among the most violent in the Hebrew Scriptures. I sometimes tell people that Early Prophets is the Game of Thrones of the Bible. But I'm finding that I want to take my time with the spare prose of Kings and really get to know these people, because I figure they might have something to teach us. [530]

Boarding School

This writer's experience with boarding school (and life after it)

[https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/went-boarding-school-why-apologise-090000692.html]

got me thinking about my own time growing up and my school years. Annie Hayes writes

'My roommate, Lily*, had a rocky start to university life. As soon as her parents left, she started to cry. She had never left home. I empathised with her. I knew my boarding school experience had set me up for living miles away from my family, something she would have found much harder than me.'

Eventually Lily gets her own room, complaining that boarding school veterans like Annie have 'been given it all on a plate.' The assumption is that boarding school families must be wealthy, but I think there's another grievance at work here: Annie does have an advantage, because she got an early start with the experience of living away from her parents.

I think Lily envies Annie, though she can't admit it. She might not envy the boarding school experience itself, but she envies what Annie got from it: confidence and independence. While Lily was living at home with her parents, Annie was living away from home among other girls, in a structured environment. Lily accuses Annie of having "been given it all" exactly because this is the exact opposite of the truth, in terms of the two girls' experiences. However comfortable Annie's home life might have been, she clearly was not enjoying those comforts at St. Margaret's. Lily accuses Annie of being spoiled precisely because she worries that it is she herself who has been spoiled - literally rendered unfit for adult life. And none of this is Lily's fault any more than it is Annie's, it's just a perfectly normal human reaction.

Looking back, I think more time away from home (and away from my dysfunctional family) probably would have helped me, provided it was a healthy environment. There was brief talk of sending me to a prep school in Connecticut called Loomis-Chaffee, but that never went anywhere. Realistically, by the time I was high school age I was probably too much of a mess myself for it to have helped, even if I'd been magically given a scholarship.

But I think part of me always secretly envied young people who did have the chance to go to school away from their families. [302]

Elijah: "No rain until I say so" (v. 1). Elijah's Boss hears this and says "Hey son of man, it sounds like you've forgotten Who sends the rain." God orders Elijah to go to the Wadi Cherith and wait there. God sends ravens to feed him solid food (like Rebeck in FPP) and he is to drink from the wadi until it goes dry. Then he is sent to Zarephath, where "I have instructed a widow to sustain you." (JPS has "feed" but it's לכלכל which is significant.)

Now Elijah's immediate problem is thirst, and the first words out of his mouth are "Please bring me a little water" (v. 10). The widow goes to get the water - the text doesn't say from where - and Elijah adds a request for bread as an afterthought.

The widow's problem is hunger - not thirst. She must have a supply of drinkable water, perhaps a cistern in her house. Not nearly enough for irrigation (that's why the drought is a problem) but enough to keep herself and her son hydrated for long enough that starvation will be their main concern.

So, what happens here is an exchange: the widow provides water, and Elijah furnishes solid food, by the grace of God, Whom he duly acknowledges (v. 14). Elijah is "sustained" with both water and solid food, and the widow's life and that of her son are saved (the son a second time in v. 17 - 23). And Elijah gets a lesson in humility - the widow isn't high-status, or even an Israelite - and accomplishes a kiddush haShem.

My current job (since mid-February) is part IT and part warehouse work. The warehouse portion entails a fair amount of physical labor; the upside is that I'm saving a ton of money on gym memberships. The IT part is more administrative than technical, and it consists mainly of receiving returned equipment at the warehouse and entering tracking numbers, model numbers, and serial numbers into a spreadsheet. The reader may have surmised that this is picky and somewhat tedious work; and the reader would be correct. The saving grace of this job is that it's a very short commute - literally a 4-minute drive from my apartment, past the traffic light on Evergreen and turn left and drive 2 blocks and I'm there. On a nice day - and those will be coming very shortly - I'll be able to walk to work.

New in the mail is my print copy of Damon Knight's 'Creating Short Fiction', which I am reading and enjoying greatly. Knight was well known as a science fiction writer and editor, and he led creative writing workshops for years. The book itself is beautifully written and a model of clarity. DK includes one of his own stories, titled 'Semper Fi', with annotations explaining how he introduces various details at certain points to build the picture in the reader's mind. Dialog between the two main characters - the self-indulgent Mitchell and his pragmatic foil Price - develop the growing unease around the "mentigraph" invention. (The story would be a good example of the "out of the bottle" genre in STC vocabulary.) The story, first published in 1964, seems eerily prophetic. And Price's ominous question to Mitchell - "What's going to happen to the world if the brightest guys in it drop out of the baby-making business?" - stands as a stark warning to our present day.

Over Shabbat, I re-read Agnon's 'From Lodging to Lodging', enjoying it even better the second time round. The narrator, in pursuit of new lodgings for the sake of his physical and mental health, rents an apartment in Tel Aviv, but soon discovers that he is bothered by the city noise, and by the needy, clingy child of the landlady, who has a habit of poking him in the eyes. He finds an idyllic cottage a short distance away, which promises to offer him the peace he craves.

It's at exactly the moment when the narrator has resolved to leave this noisy apartment (at the beginning of section 6) that he no longer feels trapped there, so that "I paid no attention to the roar of the buses and the tumult of the street. And since I stopped thinking about them, sometimes I even slept." But it's only after his sudden business trip (which he does not elaborate on) that he walks up to the much-anticipated cottage - and then walks away from it. He returns to the noisy apartment. In the end he is forced to admit that he has grown fond of the neglected boy who pokes his eyes.

It occurred to me that the plot graph of 'From Lodging to Lodging' would closely follow the arc prescribed by Knight, with the tension rising in the beginning and middle sections, becoming acute at the climax near the end, and finally ebbing into resolution.

I was re-reading Agnon's 'A Book that Was Lost' (the story, in the collection of the same title) this morning. The first part of the story involves events that transpired maybe a century before the narrator's lifetime; so the narrator is effectively in omniscient, rather than first-person, mode here. We may assume that he pieced together the events of Rabbi Shmaria's absent-minded encounter with the bookbinder (and with the manuscript of the then-new Machtzit ha-Shekel, which R Shmaria believed eclipsed his own work) from circumstantial evidence or from oral history from the townspeople.

My first take-away on this story, speaking as an IT professional, is: This is why you always back up your data before you send your media out!

But the thing that jumps out for me about this story is the theme of self-doubt: R Shmaria, thumbing through R Kolin's work, immediately concludes that his own work of 12 years was a wasted effort and abandons the ms. on the counter of the bindery; and the young narrator, eager as he is to restore R Shmaria's work to its rightful place, sends it off to Jerusalem without copying it, apparently on the assumption that he himself will never see Jerusalem - even though he is busying himself with Zionist journals and activism.

I think there's a key in the narrator's observation that "every man who does not live in the Land of Israel is put to the test whether he is worthy of settling in the Land of Israel" (and likewise for Jerusalem itself). (This might also be a key to understanding 'Agunot', where Ezekiel makes aliyah to Israel and Jerusalem - seemingly a good thing - but for the wrong reasons, because of Ahiezer's slight against the existing community there; so the result is tragedy.) R Shamaria's doubts about the value of his own work are seen to be unfounded, as everyone who reads it - "[the narrator's] father, my teacher of blessed memory, and ... other scholars" - agree that it's a fine and worthy work; but all of this comes much too late to do poor R Shmaria any good. And the narrator's own younger self, even as he reads 'Hamitzpah' and writes poetry about Jerusalem, cannot really envision a future in which he himself will make the journey to Jerusalem to deposit the precious manuscript in the Ginzei Yosef archive; instead, he entrusts the manuscript to the post office. (Didn't even get a tracking number.) And - spoiler alert - the manuscript never arrives in Jerusalem; it is lost forever.

The narrator, now firmly settled in Jerusalem, attests that he has made many trips since then to the archive in search of the manuscript, but it has never been found. There's an ironic reversal in the ending of the story: the curator tells him that "due to lack of funds, piles and piles of books are lying around that still haven't been given out for binding". And yet the whole reason the manuscript was written (as well as the better-known Machtzit ha-Shekel) was to serve as an exposition for the classic work Magen Avraham - which is "obscure and enigmatic due to overabbreviation. For though a man of great learning, he was poor, without the means to buy paper ... and when a piece of paper came into his hands, he would compose his thoughts and jot down their essence in extremely concise language." So the problem went from being not enough paper (due to lack of funds) to too many books (due to lack of funds).

So at the end of the story, the "book that was lost" is never found, but the narrator does settle in Jerusalem, where he had long dreamed (even if with perhaps imperfect faith) of settling. How did he overcome whatever doubts he might have had? He tells us: "I can't tell whether the poems of Zion and Jerusalem brought me to Jerusalem or whether it was my longing for Zion and Jerusalem that brought me to compose poems about them." In either case, the narrator perceives a direct causal connection between the expression (in writing) of the wish, and its manifestation. [684]