Dancing with the Story

Sitting at the chevra Torah table this past Saturday morning, when we got to the end of the final verse, the one that reads: Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display...and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel - I'll admit it. I got choked up. Being at the end made me really feel as if I had accomplished something, in partnership with my study group. And at the same time, I was suddenly scared of being at the beginning, all over again.

V'zot Ha-Brachah - And this is the blessing - is the name of Torah's final parsha. In it, Moses and the Holy One survey the land in an echo of G-d's creation - the very moment we are returning to tonight, almost simultaneously - so that when we end the Torah and begin it again, we read without end, without interruption the final words - l'einei kol Yisrael - before the eyes of all Israel - and the first: bereshit - in the beginning.

So that leaves me asking the question: what is the blessing? Is the blessing that we are at the end, that Moses has become holier and more esteemed in death than when he was alive and working wonders, that the questions are past us and that we have to live with the answers we came up with this year? Or is the blessing that we're at the beginning again, with the questions still in front of us, and the answers still waiting for us to find them?

This question and tension comes at an interesting moment; this morning, I was suddenly motivated to start working again on this four-hundred page love letter of a novel that I've been messing around with in my head for almost two years: a book called Not for Profit, which details some of the ridiculous actions and incomprehensible personal ethics of people in the business of doing good. I've got an outline, and a couple of chapters written, but for me, the part of the story I am most passionate about is the last two thirds. The question is, do I scroll this baby out and write from the end to the beginning? Or do I do what I did with Bookseller's, and write it beginning to end?

Jewish text, in this case, isn't really helping me answer the question. The discussion in my head is more Talmudic than anything else. "If you write from the end," one idea tells me, "you can back into the story. You know how it ends this time. Remember: you didn't know last time. Wasn't that the problem?"

Still another point of view tells me to do what I've done in the past, that it's a successful method for me, that it is practical and methodical and normal to use a timeline and follow it so that by definition, its rigidity will give me a structure in which I can be more creative. But the timeline also has its cost: my last book suffered from being too literal in a lot of places. And I'm afraid of getting bogged down in bones of the story. Especially because, as many of you know, the story itself is so delicious.

In the same vein, and much in the same emotional context, I'm nervous about attending Simchat Torah services tonight. I'm not much of a dancer, and dancing with the scroll always makes me afraid that I'm going to drop it or trip over my own feet or do something stupid. Put me up on the bimah and ask me to sing, or set me down in front of a computer and tell me to write a poem, and I'm your girl. But ask me to dance or skip or paddle or skate, and it's almost as if I've been asked to fly. I tell myself that I am no good at any of it in an effort to figure out whether I'm healthy enough to try. And I don't know the answer. Do I dance because in my heart I know I will be okay, or do I start slowly - at the beginning - and try not to be afraid to ask for help if I need it?

And again, here I am, afraid of getting bogged down in the logistics of the dance, when what I should really be focusing on is the joy.

Especially because the story itself is so delicious.

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof

My father Leo - may his memory be for blessing - had some definite ideas about justice. A 22-year veteran of Manhattan South Homicide, a detective first grade, and later in his second career, a tireless VP of Protective Control for Bank of New York, he spent a lifetime bringing people to justice, righting wrongs where he could, never afraid to stand up for what was right and see that the appropriate penalty was handed down. And he managed to do it all with tremendous style. Above all things he found a way to connect with people whether they were do-gooders or perps, always with an irrepressible grin and a twinkle in his eye. His way with people was a weapon far more powerful than the .38 he carried or the Glock he kept in the kitchen cabinet.

He cared about justice as much as he cared about his family, because he cared about families who had been touched by the damage that unchecked injustice can do. He never forgot a victim, never forgot a name, always made sure that he remembered that no matter what sort of evil or physical or emotional mutilation or destruction had occurred, that what he was bearing witness to was the human relationship of life-to-life in an ultimate transaction gone awry. He understood that all human beings contained the yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra - the good and evil impulse - in equal balance. But what he never let himself understand or accept was how people could justify their actions when they led to such a destructive end.

I saw him lose hours of sleep poring over the details of a case file, and come home in the early morning hours after a night spent in pursuit of a suspect. I remember the morning he came home after finally breaking the case of the murder at the Metropolitan Opera, when I was eleven years old. "We did it, Schnickelfritz," he whispered proudly as I padded down the stairs to greet him at our front door at five in the morning. And then, hurrying into the kitchen to grab a quick bagel with American cheese, he took the stairs two at a time to go up and change for the Commissioner's press conference. There was no mistaking it: justice realized energized him.

My dad understood that pursuing and obtaining justice was a team effort that required the cooperation of many discrete souls working towards one sacred goal. Fellow detectives. The officers who'd first responded, the coroner's office, the EMS teams, the crime scene technicians. The witnesses, the friends and family of the victim. And the random people you'd meet while following a lead, from the guy in the coffee shop or the mechanic or the bartender or the lady who lived next door to the crime scene. My dad could make a friend of all of them. You never knew who would give you what you needed to solve the case.

The toughest people he had to work with were the wrongdoers themselves. He hated the excuses, the lies, the rationalizations people gave him for doing the unspeakable - acting on their own selfish and destructive impulses, robbing people of their dignity, destroying the souls of the people left behind, turning a fellow human being into a victim, needlessly and recklessly abusing the ultimate power of G-d - ending a life -- and taking that power into their own hands. He could pretend a friendship with a criminal for the sake of getting what he wanted out of them - a confession of wrongdoing and if he was lucky, a willingness to accept responsibility for what they did. He was a big fan of the allocution process, when a person has to stand up in court and tell, for the record, what they did, in an unvarnished and factual statement. No justifications, no embellishments, no embroidering of the facts to manipulate the listener.

There were so many other people that my dad encountered during the course of an investigation - objective people, people with no investment in the outcome - who could tell the truth in a way that made it easy to see when someone else was lying. Not only did he work with the best in the business, but years of gathering honest testimony and witness statements made him absolutely pitch-perfect when it came to detecting the body language, tone of voice, and other characteristics of the liar. As a daughter, naturally, I got away with very little. To this day, I still believe that anyone who underestimates the ability of a New York City homicide detective to see through a lie is kidding themselves.

I've inherited some of his intolerance for injustice. Like my father, I do not suffer fools gladly. I do wish I had his way with people, but I am also too much my mother's stubborn and straightforward child to listen to lies and rationalizations with a smile, however insincere, on my face. I have very strong - perhaps too strong -- feelings about those whose deepest impulses drive them to hurt others, and then attempt to justify, rationalize and worst of all, cover up their actions.

To this end, the first Torah portion I ever learned how to chant, Shoftim, reflects this. Shoftim is the Hebrew word for judges, and the famous phrase above, Justice, justice you shall pursue, is at the heart of the parsha’s text.

The double justice we see in the text isn't there by accident. The way my dad, I think, would interpret it is that every crime has two stories: the truth of what really happened and then recognizing that vigilance is required to ensure that those facts are not in any way altered to gain sympathy or to rationalize the hurt that was caused to the victim. In my dad's view, the phrase, "I didn't mean for it to happen" was irrelevant. It happened, and nothing could undo those actions. The honorable thing to do is to accept responsibility, remember your actions and learn from them. Making an effort to change the story, or cover it up, or erase it was as much of an injustice as the crime in the first place.

For my dad, the pursuit of justice was as much about preserving the factual, ethical memory of wrongdoing as it was about making the bad guys accountable for their crimes. In Judaism, memory is the cornerstone of justice: remembering what was done to us to that we can learn from it and become better people. "May this memory be erased" is about the worst thing you can ever do or say - every person, every thing deserves to be remembered, both for good and for bad. We can't erase our actions, but we can take what we need to learn from them and move on. Without justification, without rationalization -- but with the hard-won wisdom we needed to gain from the experience.

Silence is not a Jewish value, nor should it be a human ethic. Because when the voice of the victim is silenced, and the injustice of that silence is followed by the memory of a crime being altered or erased, the opportunity to learn and grow vanishes with it.

When my father passed away three years ago, a friend suggested to me that as a way of finding comfort, I should choose a Torah portion or prayer moment to remember him by. While Shoftim was certainly the obvious choice, there is also a liturgical stronghold that has become a way for me to pay tribute to my father every Shabbat. During the second prayer of the Amidah, as we recognize the Holy One as one who “keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,” I shift my prayer book in my arms so that I can touch my left hand – my dad was a lefty - to my heart.

My dad’s life was about keeping faith with those whose lives were shattered into dust, those who met with their final sleep too soon. He may not have been the most observant or exemplary Jew who ever lived. But his legacy is justice and remembrance, and the knowledge that lives in the world as a result of the ongoing struggle that we continue to face: ensuring that the truth of injustice is ever brought to light. As in the words of St. Thomas More: "In the things of the soul, remembrance without knowledge profits little."

Shabbat shalom.

Farewell to the Runway

Well, Leanne won with her petal architecture in spite of Korto's beautiful use of color and beading. A lame end to a lame season, but I'm sad that it has come to an end nonetheless. I never expected to be a fan of Project Runway, but it has ended up influencing me in ways I am realizing now that it's all over (on Bravo at least. Results of the lawsuit against Lifetime are still, I believe, pending.)

I ended up a fan by accident. When I came home from that first stay in the hospital in September of 2006, I was in so much pain that I couldn't stay in my own apartment. At my mom's, I could barely make it from the downstairs bedroom into the living room. A raging bacterial infection had destroyed my left leg and settled into the bone marrow of my foot and ankle. Six days of intravenous antibiotics only succeeded in pissing the infection off even more. Just sitting in the car, coming back to my mom's house, was agony.

So when I arrived there with a purse full of the stuff they give you for anthrax (six weeks' worth!) there wasn't a lot I could do. Mom was working during the day; before she'd leave she'd set out sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice diluted with water, ice and a pitcher. I was barely managing on the crutches. She knew that I couldn't make it to the kitchen.

When she came back from work in the afternoon, she'd immediately turn the channel to Bravo. "You've got to watch this, Ann," she'd say. "I think you'll like it."

And like it I did. The insane personalities. The creative quirks. All the kooky ideas and fabrics and the trips to mood that felt like getting out early from school. Kayne and Jeffrey and Laura and Alison. The design process and Tim's comments. It reminded me of writing, my best writing and my best days of writing, amazing teachers and mentors who had guided me to be even better than I thought I could be, who didn't mind my occasional indulgences into self-reflection. It was wonderful.

But I wasn't. All that fall I just kept getting sicker and sicker. My walk and energy improved, but my bloodwork didn't. I went back to work, barely able to handle the piles that had accumulated on my desk during the three weeks that I'd been home sick. But no matter how tired I was, I always stayed awake for Runway. My mom and I watched the Couture challenge in Paris with eyes that never got tired of gazing upon the City of Light. "Just get better, Ann," she'd say, over and over. "Just get better, and we'll go."

I didn't get better. Not until that December, when I'd been let go from the job I wasn't dealing with, got an IV port installed in my arm and a dead, infected bone surgically removed from my foot. Then I started ten weeks of IV treatments, two a day, still at my mom's. It was gross. My hair fell out, my body ached, and my stomach hurt, not to mention the chronic cough thanks to an allergy to the heparin I had to use to flush the IV lines.

Together, my mom and I watched Jeffrey win, marveled at the appalling mediocrity of Top Design season one, and rooted for Betty to lose and Sam or Marcel to win on Top Chef. Bravo's reality gave us something to focus us away from the reality of sickness that had come to shape that fall and winter.

Now, two years later, still struggling to find wellness and move forward, I'm sad to see Runway roll up the white carpet and become part of the past. I think I'll miss it in the way I miss the old episodes of Law & Order. The same way that I feel when I see Lennie Briscoe and think of my dad, I think every time I see Tim Gunn I'll think of what it was like to be cared for again, and safe, even while doing battle with the most serious illness I've ever faced. As each designer fought to make each creation they were challenged with something that would ultimately adorn and beautify the bodies they were dressing, so it was with me, with pills and potions, medicines and Mom, trying to redesign reality, and make it work.