Sabbath Thoughts,

Sabbath Thoughts,

Billy’s parents are visiting, which is rare on a Saturday.  Usually I go to the IGA and fill my trolly with some things for me and some for Billy.  Then I bring mine home and at noon he texts me and I go round and cook us a mixed grill for lunch.

Cooking is the most forbidden thing to do on a Saturday.  We always think of Shabbat as it is “upstairs” but the downstairs Shabbat must have been much more significant.  It must have been a real rest for servants.  I have never seen “downstairs on Shabbat” ever portrayed.  It would make an excellent new idea for a book.  A totally observant Jewish family who participate in society as my grandparents and great-grandparents did. 

I was brought up in a very wishy-washy Reform sort of tradition, even though we went to an ostensibly Orthodox Shule.  I never experienced the separate, Orthodox, woman’s Shabbat, as I knew happened in the other rooms in the Rabbi’s house when I was invited for the third meal sometimes, and a shiur. I didn’t grow up with it.  My only glimpse was the one year I walked round with my Father on Yom Kippur to the Shule where his Mother still davened, because my Grandfather had died a year or so before I was born.  We went into the adjoining room where the women were sitting in rows, facing the curtain that covered the missing wall that behind which was the Synagogue.  I recall some women hushing and complaining that a man had come in, but when they saw me, they wanted me to stay, but my Father, having been shoed out, took me with him.  It must have been the last Yom Kippur before my Grandmother died, because we never did it again.  Never walked together again on Yom Kippur, I don’t know why.  And then eventually he died the day afte Yom Kippur, when I had missed the answering machine message inviting me to dinner before the fast, except that I was going to a rave before fasting or some such absurd plan, and so I missed the dinner my Step-Mother said later she had made that would have been the last time I saw him alive.

I imagine traditional Jewish Homes, with a Front Room with a table to sit round and a kitchen with a hearth or stove that can be stoked up and closed down to keep hot without being touched for the next day, to be rekindled from the remaining hot coals after Havdalla. All the women must sit around in a world I shall never see.   Little boys must find it familiar until their bar mitzvah, after which they are banned, as was my Father.  It must be in the home as well as in the Synagogues and Prayer and Study Halls.  I do not have those memories.  How wonderful it all must have been when it worked well, as it must have done in so many villiages, stetles and whatever.  Just like Fidler on the Roof, just like life in the middle ages between the writing down of the Talmud and the Haskalah.

I cook because I am wicked.  My great wickedness is that I break the first commandment in the Torah to be fruitful and multiply.  I never married and have not fathered children.  Having committed that first and greatest of sins the rest of the Torah is wide open for transgression.  For a time I started to work my way through all six hundred and thirteen commandments, or those that applied to me, as well as the mitzvoth as determined by the rabbis which is a parallel system, but I might have missed some.  Anyhow, I somehow derive some sort of ego-pleasure from transgressing the Sabbath.  I cannot blame Billy.  Also I cannot blame Billy for deducing I must not only be not-Religious, but also not Spiritual or anything at all.  It is a sad consequence and part of the general lack of understanding between us.

It is important that I am such a sinful, wicket person.  I have for years suffered from megalomania.  I wrote a couple of poems about it decades ago.  Anyhow, I keep having utterly insightful ideas about the world and history and so on and I think I see ways to solve the world’s problems or new ways for people to see the world and understand it and most important, how everyone can live in harmony.  I call it ‘Transcending the Duality’. It is a bit Hegelian.  Then I imagine myself winning the Nobel Peace Prize for it, perhaps the same year I win the Nobel Physics Prize.  Then I imagine a TV inverview where I am asked If I see myself like one of the Prophets, and I laugh, because I am such a wicket person, that it is only coincidence that I have these profound ideas that have changed humanity, and they result from my years of observing the world and introverted thinking, and jut working these things out for myself.  I certainly have not had any divine revelations.  I have not heard Angels telling me these things.  I just think them up myself.  But I do think I am an exceptional person because I do it, or can do it.  I should do it more.  Sometimes I think I should go public and pretend to be like the Prophets, even if I am not, and would certainly be honest about it and not claim any type of special religious experience or knowledge, but the messages I think up are brilliant and someone should tell everyone, and I don’t see anyone else, which does make me curious sometimes.  Anyway, if I was such a “good” person, then my life would have to be balanced with an equal amount of “wickedness”.  Once again, black is white.