Ok, so how do you list mental groceries if your brain is empty?
Devoid of intelligence. Bereft of thought. Not even terribly interested in it.
I think I know what this is. It’s the fact of several insane weeks piling up to one grand finish in the pre-Passover madness and then the Seder and then – boom. Done.
It’s the fact of the holiday itself, yesterday, lovely and lazy and full of food and friends.
It’s the fact of the kids home on Spring Break, and, hey now, there they are! At every turn!
It’s the fact of other kids coming and going all day. It’s the fact of getting snacks — and weird, pesadika (kosher-for-Passover) snacks, at that — for kids all day. It’s the fact of kids wanting to be out front, and then inside, and maybe upstairs, and back out front all day.
It’s the fact of spring having sprung to the tune of, like, 75 degrees F today, warming the sap in my joints and slowing the sap in my head. It’s the fact of the ENTIRE neighborhood emptying out of their houses as if on command, everyone with a dog or in flip-flops or on a scooter or having a catch or all of it. At once!
It’s the fact of being here in the gentle exile of American suburbia when I want to be a Jew among the Jews, as the Jewish homeland continues down a path of self-destruction and heartbreak.
I haven’t turned on the news, I’ve barely looked at the blogs. I know the world is there, I know what awaits, I know my head will soon be un-empty, and I will be un-uninterested, but right now, I am as a blank slate. It will wait a few hours, maybe a day more. It won’t go anywhere.
*****
If I lay here, if I just lay here/ Would you lie with me, and just forget the world
Forget what we’re told, before we get too old/ Show me a garden that’s bursting into life
אותו דבר משוכנעת אני
dmf
/ April 1, 2010GROSS: Let me quote something from your book, a couple of things, actually. You quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as describing the Sabbath as a cathedral in time. And then you write: Sabbath takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time. That’s really nice.
Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yeah.
GROSS: So I want you to elaborate on that.
Ms. SHULEVITZ: Well, I struggle with this idea. And actually, the best I can do with it is to think about the psychoanalytic hour. This is because – and as I say in the book, I’m in psychoanalysis myself. And as I am with Sabbath rules, I adhere to them, and I’m sometimes quite grumpy about them. But in this psychoanalytic hour, you must show up on time. You leave on time. And in that time, there’s a kind of openness and inchoateness and a boundary-less-ness(ph) where you can explore. And then time is up, and you go back to being your normal person, your normal self and, you know, you sort of go about your business.
That time, that openness is, to me, the best I can do with the idea of sacred time. It’s other time. It’s time where you are not what you are. You are something else, and you are open to something else.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=125386822
Paul in KY
/ April 1, 2010Hope you & your family have a great Passover holiday.