The Future is Now

Well, it was one of those days.

Slept in, because I didn't get called to go to work. I continued a project I started several days ago, but which keeps getting interrupted. It involved recording my voice using the computer and then burning a CD of it. Well, the mic levels were way too low, inexplicably, and I spent a lot of time fiddling with that, not getting much recorded, and making a lot of time-consuming-to-fix mistakes when I did. Also, I was checking my email every 2 minutes for a piece of news I've been waiting all week for, a piece of news that could be good or bad, but which had to come soon. Never really got a good rhythm going.

The day sort of slipped away. An old friend from elementary school--BG--showed up and we "caught up" for an hour or so. Strange how our lives have taken such different directions, or maybe our lives--if you believe in predestination or early childhood determinacy--were already pointing in different directions and just ran on a nearby parallel for a brief and incidental period. Anyway, good guy. Very gental person who joined the military at just the wrong time and got caught up in the war. He was lucky, since he came back in one piece physically, and in not too many more pieces psychologically than he had when he joined. It may even have been a positive thing for him, when viewed in retrospect. But he just doesn't belong with a gun in his hands in the middle of Afghanistan.

Tried to run some errands, with a 50% success rate, including exiting the freeway too early and getting stuck in a mini traffic jam trying to get back on. At staples I kept dropping my credit cards trying to check out.

Got to yoga a couple minutes late and I just never got into my yoga consciousness. I was the only man and the only person below 40 in the class. I hate that. Also the instuctor had all the mats pointing into the center of a circle, instead of all facing one wall. Yeah, it was earthmother time. Everything involved cocking the hips or grabbing your big toe with your hand or kissing your knee or doing the splits or arching your back. I couldn't do hardly any of it. I'm better at the positions that require strength, rather than flexibility. The teacher was really nice though. She kind of went out of her way to try to make me as comfortable as possible, but to both of our dismay and my embarrassment that at one point meant stacking two yoga blocks vertically the long way, since that was as close as I could get my hand to the floor in triangle position.

Right now I'm listening to some music of the genre of techno known as "ambient" apparently. It sounds like the music for one of those wonderful old Nintendo games, like maybe Metroid or Masterblaster or something where you travel through space doing stuff. Composer is ISRAELI!

And then...I got that news I have been expecting for so long. And it was in the positive. And that felt so good. I've been dealing with rejection and information vacuum for many months now, and it feels just great to know I'm going somewhere. Something in the future is now definite. I have something to look forward to, to bank on, and to prepare for. And somebody wants me.

Well, let me talk for a moment about selflessness. An old Polish woman was honored the other day for saving Jewish children during the Holocaust. She saved thousands of children and she was tortured by the Nazis to give up their names. She did not give up their names. Sounds like a real lamed-vavnik. Anyway, when asked by the reporter about why she was willing to do this, she said it was what anyone would have done. I think the reporter noted that this particular expression of humility was characteristic of everyday heroes. I am reminded of the guy who jumped on top of a complete stranger having an epileptic seizure and held him down while a subway train ran ove both of them, while his children watched from the platform. He said, "It's what any New Yorker would do."

I think back to the words of Avot. We are to judge others with kaf zechut. In other words, in absence of actual evidence that a person is saintly or meritorious, we are still to view his or her actions in the most favorable light. We are supposed to assume good intentions. These heroes seem to practice an extreme form of kaf zechut. If one believes their account, they believe everyone else is a saint. (Their post-facto, back-looking, subjective testimony, I acknowledge, is suspect.) But check this out, quoting from this good book:

R. Yehoshua Leib Diskin suggests another motivation. A fundamental factor in the avoidance of sin is the embarrassment associated with iniquity. Believing that society on a whole adheres to a higher standard is essential to maintaining this attitude. Thus, it is necessary to assume that the behavior of one's social group is exemplary; this is aim of the obligation of dan l'chaf zechut.

In other words, you assume that others are saints in order so that you will act as a saint because of the "peer pressure" as it were, or just the desire to conform.

Could it really be that these lamad-vavniks act saintly because they honestly believe that everyone would do this thing in this situation, and that their peers would look down on them if they found out they failed to do what was required? Is it not more likely these saints are just being humble? Or perhaps shrewdly trying to suggest universal saintliness to get others to be saintly out of the felt "peer pressure"? Even assuming they did think any average person would have risked a painful and untimely death to save those innocent victims, what would then keep our would-be heroes from taking the next step and concluding, "Well, if I don't, someone else will. I'll just let someone else do it"? I mean, is that not the obverse of Diskin's prediction? Were these heroes not doing what they did l'havdil because they didn't think anyone else was going to step forward and do it? Perhaps Diskin's prediction is true and these heroes did think that way, but with the small modification of a local abnormality to the saintly uniformity. In other words, "Anyone in my position would save this person, except these people in my immediate vicinity. I just so happen to be surrounded by some exceptionally wicked people unrepresentative of humanity as a whole, at the moment." ("I knew it; I'm surrounded by assholes," as Rick Moranus so pithily put it in Spaceballs.)

Well, I'll just close with some vague statement about how this proves the world of our ideals is more real that the world of present existance, since prophecies are self-fulfilling and perception is reality and attitude is everything, etc.