Category Archives: Judaism

Boulder, Colorado, Family, Judaism, Politics, US History, World History

It’s Personal

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Monday gratefuls: Buphati. MRI results. The Ancient Brothers. Shadow. Water. Food. Natalie. Tom. The Happy Camper. Driving, painful. Ruth in Alaska. Mary in Seoul. Guru in K.L. Me on Shadow Mountain. Great Sol. The bird of morning. BJ. Pammy. Gabe. Family, flung far.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Books

Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

One brief shining: The greenhouse has more than plants and memories; it will be therapy and prayer, too, an everyday exercise in tactile spirituality, joining with the evolved life of plants in an act of co-creating abundance: Lettuce in a bowl with dark red Brandywine heirloom Tomatoes, rings of Red Onion, a diced orange Nantes Carrot, not yet, no, but soon.

 

Judaism in trouble:

Front page news from Boulder. A fiery assault on demonstrators bringing attention to hostages still held by Hamas. This apparently not Nazi nostalgia, but Palestinian weariness with the long, long war and its murderous execution.

Not only Boulder, but the home of UC-Boulder, Ruth’s university.

You may recall that my conversion was to have taken place in Jerusalem, October 31st if I recall correctly. That pleased me because it married my pagan observance of Samain with my immersion in an ancient mikveh in the holy city.

You do recall, I’m sure, why it didn’t happen. On October 7th, Hamas attacked kibbutzim near the border with Gaza, killing and raping as they went. A horrific act of terror. Really, a brazen pull on the nose-ring of militant Israelis.

For many dark reasons, Israel stepped into the trap Hamas had made. Netanyahu needed to avoid corruption charges. A never-to-be-realized war aim of eliminating Hamas. Frustration with continued anti-semitic activity by Iranian supported actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The out of proportion political influence of the Jewish ultra-right in Israel that wants genocide. The perilous location of Israel.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) continues to pound Gaza, killing civilians, civilians, because Hamas hides among them. Many (most?) of us who love Israel as a needed safe place for Jews long ago stepped away from support of this “war.”

The immorality of bombing starving women and children. Using up whatever goodwill Israel had accumulated. Being tone deaf to the world’s critique. Bad, sad days for all.

No wonder the anger and frustration has spilled over into the U.S. No wonder, too, that this same anger and frustration has served as fuel for the alt-right with its white supremacist views, its Hitlerian hagiographies, and not only them, but American Muslims, college students who see an asymmetrical war, politicians who want any lever they can find to bring the East Coast elites to heel.

In the same ugly way that testosterone feeds prostate cancer, the war over Gaza feeds hatred and bigotry all over the world. We will all be poorer when it ends.

Boulder is an hour from Shadow Mountain. I’ve been there many times over the last year plus for breakfast or lunch with Ruth. She’s a Jewish student in a time when Jews, again, are persona non grata.

This attack was not something I read about. It’s personal.

 

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Health, Humanities, Judaism, Kabbalah, Literature, Myth and Story, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Torah

This Is Not the Way

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Sunday gratefuls: A day of no-things. Shadow and I outside, drop, walk, stop, drop, turn, walk, drop. Her eagerness. Her five o’clock licking. Sciatica. Morning darkness. The morning service. The Shema. Tara. Ruth, home two days ago, leaving for Alaska today. Gabe, now a senior. Whoa. Mary in Seoul. Seoah, Murdoch. My son. Mark walks to downtown Al Kharj. Shadow Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: MRI

Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

One brief shining: Sorry, Marines, pain is not weakness leaving the body, no; but, it is a constant reminder of being alive, of still having a body that can identify itself through the jolt that starts in the hip, gathers intensity around the knee, and on occasion flashes to the foot.

 

Back and cancer: Get MRI results tomorrow. Buphati at 3 pm. On Friday I see Kylie my Army officer retired P.A. for preparation. I have a SPRINT device in my future. The bogo MRI. Checking for cancer and readying me for a pain reduction, elimination procedure. Rare confluence of medical care.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. ouch. Sciatica is a son of a bitch. Above 10. A crescendo, then a falling away. I. Do. Not. Like. It.

If the SPRINT device works, I will send up hallelujahs in the name of its inventor, Kylie, and the doctor who installs it. If it doesn’t? I’m no worse off than before. Probably nerve ablation.

If there’s cancer in my hip? Don’t know. But Buphati will have things to recommend, I know.

 

Reading: I’m on a run of science fiction and magic. John Scalzi’s Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. The Gray Man and Daniel Silva set aside for the moment.

My serious reading of late has been for my two Kabbalah Experience classes. A New Story for Human Consciousness and the Radical Roots of Religion. The first, learning to retell, reimagine the story of Adam and Eve. And, in so doing, realizing we can reframe, reconstruct any story, including the one we tell ourselves about who we are in this world.

The second investigating moments when Judaism received a radical refit. Focused on Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reb Zalman, and Art Green, but looking backward to Maimonides, the Bal Shem Tov, the destruction of the second Temple and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.

I’m excited about these classes. I want to retell the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe my own story, too. Most of all I’m excited about considering what the next revolution might be in Judaism, imagining it, perhaps helping to build it.

 

Just a moment: Whoo, boy. We’ve crossed over and I didn’t really get it until I read this paragraph in an article titled: “Why Trump’s push for ‘gold-standard science’ has researchers alarmed.”*

Crossed over to what? An age of ideology, a time when political thought, doled out by political commissars, trumps (see what I did there?) decision making for any other reason.

This is a direct route to a Stalinesque, Mao Tse Tungesque form of governance. It is, as George Will observed in his strange opinion piece about Trump as a progressive, a form of Statism.

I admit I’m an Enlightenment, scientific method guy. But. I know that science does not occur in a political vacuum. Its funding, its direction, even its focus often has political influence. Look, for example, to the Agricultural and Mechanical universities dotted around the U.S. and delivering junk methods to farmers that kill the soil and enrich Big Ag.

Even so. I support science and the scientific endeavor to understand, to grasp the world around us as it is, not as we either imagine or wish it to be. No political commissar will know scientific facts better than scientists themselves.

I do agree with one facet of this critique of science, however. Many Americans have lost faith in science and we need, as a country, to help restore it. This is not the way.

 

 

 

” “And in a “Gold Standard Science” executive order last week, President Donald Trump outlined a new level of oversight over what counts as quality evidence and what does not, (emphasis mine) putting “a senior appointee designated by the agency head” in charge of overseeing “alleged violations.” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a briefing that the goal of the executive order is to “rebuild the American people’s confidence in the national science enterprise … the status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust.”” Washington Post, June 1, 2025.

Garden, Great Wheel, Mountains, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Talmud, Torah, Wild Neighbors

Artemis: A Riff on Tactile Spirituality

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

A Tactile Spirituality

“I live at 8,800 feet in zip code 80433. I’m having a greenhouse built in my backyard. What vegetables will grow well in it. Look for heirloom varieties. Include recommended planting dates. Mostly I want salad ingredients and greens. Tomatoes.”

This is the prompt I gave chatgpt for a quick assist in knowing what to plant. I got back 21 pages of detailed recommendations, including specific heirloom varieties of Tomatoes, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots, Beets, Onions, and Herbs.

Spirituality has the curse of the three-story universe, René Descartes, and destructive deconstruction. That is, Abrahamic prayer and devotional practice has historically “aimed” its prayers up toward the heavens and away from the corruptions of the flesh. Descartes’s dramatic division of the mind from the body reinforced a religious path focused on the immaterial mind, released from the body. And, in turn, Mother Earth. While deconstruction did unveil the power dynamics involved in how our agriculture works, how choice of books for a syllabus reflected white privilege, and the patriarchal symbolism of the three-story universe, it also made demythologizing a knee jerk way of removing mystery and grace.

As a result a tactile spirituality seems, at first look, an oxymoron. The mind. The heavens. Transcendence. Those are the domain of spirit. Not the soil. Not the forests. Not the feet or the hands. Not the world of this reality, this busy, noisy, fussy, often bloody and violent reality. How can we gain the peace, the calm, the centeredness where spiders crawl, illness ravages, and death dominates?

That’s where Artemis Greenhouses comes in. About as down and dirty a human activity, or I should say, human aided activity as I can imagine. Soil (no, not dirt) under the fingernails. Nurturing small plants. Beets. Spinach. Lettuce. Radishes. Plucking off predating insects. Blocking out Deer and Elk. Harvesting the red and white Radish. The red Beet. Rainbow colored Chard. Green Kale and Spinach. Eating them.

Fuel for the body. That most inelegant of spiritual residences, the body. Full of blood and waste, nutrients and foreign matter. Under some understandings only a vessel for the soul, a way to keep the mind alive.

No. Souls are us. Our living flesh ensouled. Sacred. Hardly ordinary unless you call, as I do, the ordinary sacred. What we touch feels the hand of a god, the god. What we embrace knows the warmth of a god, the god. The soil in which we plant seeds quickens when we work it.

The Mule Deer Doe who feeds her newborn fawn feeds a divine presence, a unique and precious never to be repeated instance of god made flesh. Maxwell Creek filled with Spring Rain pulls bits of Rock and Earth from its bank as the god-in-water, returning the Rocky Mountains to the World Ocean.

Sure. The Torah. Yes. Talmud Torah. The hands of living gods have written it and the minds of living Jews finds god within, upon its pages, in its stories. It teaches us. Yet, it teaches the same message as Maxwell Creek. That god rushes to the Sea. That god fills every molecule of Water.

I read the scripture written in the bark of my Lodgepole companion. I see the yellow Flame of the Aspen Catkin against the blue Flame of a Colorado Sky and read of life’s elegant and graceful re-emergence in this, the wet season.

In my world all spirituality is tactile. In Shadow jumping on my legs. In turning the pages of a Torah commentary. In hearing the voice of Luke or Ginny or Janice. In tasting a bit of Lettuce, an Onion, a fresh heirloom Tomato. All of the tactile is spiritual.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Hawai'i, Health, Judaism, Mountains, Paganism

Another Place I Could Be Happy

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Friday gratefuls: New, piercing pain. Left hip and leg. Shadow. Natalie. Alan and Joanne. Dandelion. Donyce. Rich. Ruth’s 529. Now available. Lifealert. New fob. Diane. Jogging again. Living with aging bodies and alert minds. Halle. New physical therapist. Mary, coming today. My son. Seoah. Murdoch.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth and her first international trip

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: A busy, physical week of doctors, long drives, filling out forms for the cancer support trial, Amy, two zoom classes, that would have been a decade ago a light week, the difference pain can make.

 

All I can say is, damn it! Now the left hip, so painful. Wasn’t sure I could get down five stairs holding onto the rail and a cup of coffee. That’s beginning to get in the way of daily life.

Sorry. Don’t mean to leave a trail of agony on these pages, yet honest reporting requires acknowledgment of what’s going on. After seeing Buphati, I’m left wondering if both hips might have metastatic cancer. Sure hope not.

We’ll know soon. Next P.E.T. scan June 3rd. Not yet scheduled for my open-sided MRI. But in the next week or two.

This cancer/pain path I’m on demands a lot. Got accepted into a Sloan-Kettering trial to determine the better of two therapeutic protocols for cancer patients over the age of 70. Filled out pages and pages of a survey about anxiety and depression, other mental health matters. I’ll have eight phone therapy sessions with somebody. Then, booster sessions after that for four months.

There are nuances to managing my mental health and my spiritual health (which I see as more important than either physical or mental health). I look forward to discussing them with someone paid to listen to me.

Why is spiritual health most important? Because it contains the broader context in which both mental and physical health reside. Being one with the Tao, allowing the wu wei of physical illness and pain to run their course without stiff-arming them. Experiencing the occasional fear and dread as part of my inner work, work strengthened by mussar, by being part of two sacred communities. Taking the solace of Shadow Mountain, its Lodgepoles and Mule Deer and Aspen and late season Snow as it offers itself to me. Seeing the whole sacred world as my home.

With those as context neither pain nor death can have permanent control of my psyche. Because pain and death are momentary, passing, but my location in the sacred unity of all things will remain.

 

Just a moment: I find myself watching TV shows set on Islands. Death in Paradise. Hawai’i 50. Deadly Tropics. Moana and Moana 2, movies. I know, low brow in the extreme. Yet I love the combination of lightly considered mystery and the sights and sounds of Islands.

Something about Island life calls to me. Not over against Mountain life which I also love, but as another place I could be happy. Why Hawai’i itself reached out to me not so long ago.

Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism

A Good Friend

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: Detente with Shadow. Ruth with all A’s to finish her freshman year. Sweet Sue, my PCP. Abby, med tech and phlebotomist. Dr. Buphati’s quick intelligence. Rich, a good friend. A second MRI, hips this time. And, for good measure, a PET scan. As many images as a celeb out for a party evening.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rich

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: On the way back from a Mountain hike, he mentioned Bees, explained his hives-on-a-wire (Bear protection), invited me over right away to see his setup; Rich and I have developed a friendship, one rooted not only in Bees, but in the work of mussar, his work as my lawyer, his kindness after Kate died, his presence at my oncology appointment, a mensch.

 

Another one of those days. A medical day. With Sue in the morning and Dr. Buphati in the afternoon. Sue has to see me every 3 months because she’s managing my tramadol prescription. A regulated substance. She’s a delight. A caring person and a good doc. She has an FNP-BC which is a souped up nurse practitioner certification.

Nothing new this visit. But still reassuring to see her.

After my time with her, I drove over to Rich’s office and we went to lunch at the Nepalese/Himalayan place in Bergen Park, the downtown Edina of Evergreen.

We ran into his 86 year old mom who had come shopping there. She had her helper, Linda, and her dog, Sparky, with her. Obviously bright and with it, she’s become frail, and Rich coaxed her to come up two steps. He’s a kind man.

Rich drove us into Englewood for my visit with Dr. Buphati and came in with me. My blood work showed stability in my cancer. Always good news. Concerning though was my right hip which threatens to buckle under me at times.

“We’ll need an MRI of that hip to see if it’s arthritis or cancer. I’m also scheduling another PET scan.”

Even with an open-sided MRI I now know I’ll need medication. Claustrophobia. “I’ll prescribe an ativan.”

Rich volunteered to drive me to the MRI. After a procedure with sedation, state law requires a driver. I’m learning to accept help; Rich and Alan and Tara have made it easy.

I’m feeling settled with the cancer. It continues, as it will. My medical team and I push back at it and it slows down. Matters will progress at whatever pace they do.

The back pain much less so. It continues and offers now a stabbing pain in my left hip followed by a thrill of pain that descends from the hip, along my left thigh, past my knee and down to my foot. While sitting down. Sitting down used to have no pain.

Physical therapy, round two, starts today for my back. As Rich suggested yesterday, I need to develop enthusiasm for working out. Again. A substantial practice for this month. And, a necessary one.

I know. An organ recital with too many notes. Still…

 

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Health, Mussar

A New Pope

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Friday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Alan. The Cheesecake factory. Shadow, the night Hawk. Pope Leo XIV. A Chicago boy. Exhaustion. Ritalin. 12″ of heavy Snow. Melted. The Solar Snow shovel. That long nap yesterday. Cookunity.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: An American Pope

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: After a late night from MVP, Shadow kept me up even later, past midnight, then licked my head and whined at her usual 5 am time leaving me more than exhausted yesterday and napping through the morning missing Diane and my class at Kabbalah experience.

 

Also failed to pick up my ritalin, I realized. No wonder I crashed on Thursday. Gotta switch those meds to Safeway. Can’t get ritalin or tramadol through the mail. Controlled substances. Walgreen’s made sense when my doc was in Evergreen, but the clinic is moving here to Conifer.

Anyhow Thursday was a washout, rest and relax day. Unintentional since Thursday tends to be my busiest day of the week with Diane, Kabbalah class, and Thursday mussar.

 

How bout that Leo XIV? Chi town. A south sider. A naturalized Peruvian. Another Pope from Latin America. One with a bias toward the poor, the left out. The marginalized.

An adroit move if the consideration went: Trump is a big problem for the world. For the poor. Look at USAID. Francis sensitized us to the needs of the marginalized as a world church. How about an American pope with strong ties to the Third World? Multi-lingual. And familiar with the Vatican and its ways. Prevost was that guy.

He headed the Vatican department that vetted bishop candidates. A gatekeeper role for future church leadership. He also spent decades among the poor in Peru. While there he twice became leader of his order, the Augustinians.

I’m heartened by his selection. We need more voices for the poor, for justice. No, I won’t agree with all of his views, nor he with mine; but, we share core values, too.

 

Meanwhile on Shadow Mountain. Shadow of Shadow Mountain has regressed in her coming in and going out. Unpredictable. I may have to open the door for her several times before she feels comfortable coming in the house. Why? I have no idea. If I did, I might be able to figure out a solution.

Too, the twelve inches of heavy, wet Snow that fell on Tuesday and Wednesday has melted off roads and driveways. Still some patches in my north facing backyard. Enough to move Smoky’s hand from high fire risk to low.

 

Just a moment: I’ve been pondering a view of the human from the stand point of mussar and Jewish thought.

Here’s some preliminary work. The neshama, the pristine soul, our link to the whole, still must engage the world. That’s what the nefesh does. Spurred by the pristine connected neshama, the nefesh moves me out into the world through desire. Desire for food, for safety, for love, for education. Desire without valence.

Our yetzer hatov, our good inclination, and our yetzer hara, our selfish inclination, try to influence how we live our desires. Our will recognizes both the desires and the yetzer’s attempt to direct our action. That is the bechira point, the moment when we actively choose to satisfy a desire following a healthy, just path, or a selfish, self involved path.

 

 

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Men, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Torah

Freedom. Often painful. Always difficult.

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Sunday gratefuls: Joe. Bill. Rob. Seth. Matt. Jim. Allan. Jamie. CBE men’s group. The Cow Elks and Bull dining while we talked. Berrigan Mountain and Elk Meadow behind us. Sanctuary outdoor porch. The wonderful Ponderosa with its twisted limbs. A breeze. My son. Donyce. Rich. Shadow, greeter of the dark Morning.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, talking

Week Kavannah:  Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: As Mother Earth kept turning toward the east, Berrigan Mountain slid across the horizon and Great Sol seemed to move lower in the Sky, the Air around us grew chilly while we talked on of 8 year old sons, narcissistic ex-husbands, mothers who shamed us, the isolation of Covid, getting caught driving while drinking, hoping that somehow our story would intersect with another’s lev, allow us to be seen and heard.

 

A young Bull Elk with only two points had a harem of ten Cows, unlike Marlon Brando in Waterfront, he was already a contender. His virility displayed itself as I turned past the Life Care Center of Evergreen and drove up the asphalt road leading to the synagogue. Men’s group.

We’ve begun to open ourselves, still easy to move into the head, Jewish men after all,  acculturated to hide vulnerability, paper over feelings with work and vain glory. American men.

Some lonely. Some afraid. Some eager. All glad for the presence of other men, a rarity for most. Like Shadow trust will not come without time, without bravery, without tears and laughter. Well begun.

 

Torah study in the morning. Ten tests of the freed Hebrew slaves as they move through the desert wastes of the Sinai. Taking the slaves out of Egypt. Yes. Taking Egypt out of the freed Hebrews. Hard. Liberation begins in the lev. Backsliding, fear, regression. Part of the package.

Why bring us all the way out here? So far from the familiar life. This cannot be what freedom is. Or, if this is freedom, I prefer the certainty of servitude. Let me go back. I’m scared. What if I’m not strong enough, good enough. Enough.

To move away from oppression to liberation requires sacred awareness, awareness of the power and resilience beneath the beaten down heart, the overworked, over stressed body. Realizing, yes, that fear of liberation, of gaining personal freedom and responsibility can cripple us, too. As much, early on maybe more, than the dull routines of our personal Egypt.

Not different from the confinement of maleness in America.

 

Just a moment: Men showing off their brute strength by deporting the weak, the outcast, the poor yearning to be free. Mocking the great Lady of New York Harbor, inverting the American promise, slashing the preamble of the Constitution into shredded parchment. If it’s aesthetic or academic or kind. No. If it’s crude, cheap, destructive, dogmatic, malicious. Yes.

Can you hear the slaves wandering in the desert where capitalist shrouds constrain all the loving-kindness, all the justice, all the mercy, all the rational and life-saving thinking? If it’s not good for the bottom line, what good is it? The Egypt of an extractive, idolatrous economy. Killing all of us while making some very comfortable in the funeral procession.

No. He will not be the Pope. But. He’s already Pharaoh.

Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mussar

A Busy Thursday

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Friday gratefuls: Alan. Snow. Ruby’s all season shoes. On Monday. Plus many fluids. Back pain. PSA blood draw. Cancer. And other fancy stuff. Shadow and the marrow bones. Tom’s portrait of Shadow. Lake Superior. The Boreal Forest. The Arrowhead. Grand Marais. Thunder Bay. Up North. Parashat Tazria-Metzora

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being a student

Week Kavannah: Persistence. Grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: The Mountains rise up and slope down into Valleys, our roads here in the Rockies thin slices of asphalt or gravel following the rising up and the sloping down, the changes in direction commanded by rocky prominences and Snow melt filled Streams carrying the Mountains themselves downstream ever so slowly, slowly.

 

Yesterday. Seems so far away. So far away. Diane reminded me to ask for help. To set up ways to get to appointments-not only when I’m being sedated. I know this transition has to occur. Yet I’ve gone so long now on my own. I need, yes need, to let others do for me what I would do for them.

Irv and Paul and I discussed the nature of evil, whether it exists at all or is just a human construct.

At the Kabbalah Experience we continued our exploration of the story of Adam and Eve. This time wondering about our ability to live outside the givenness of our lives, to see what we cannot know exists.

Dave Sanders offered the Truman Show as an example. A simulacrum. Where is the edge of our learned world? Do we need a stage light to crash through the set for a big reveal?

His point? The Garden of Eden as Seahaven, the village in Truman’s life. A small paradise filled with every needful thing. The stage light, the Snake and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. The expulsion as Truman’s daring escape on the sail boat.

Later Rabbi Jamie and our Thursday afternoon mussar group discussing the middah of bushah, most often translated as shame. Not in Jamie’s translation of the Orchot Tzaddikim. He uses self-consciousness or conscientiousness.

Bushah arises when we realize we have been less than who we see ourselves to be. Shame comes when we see ourselves not as less than we see ourselves to be, but when we see ourselves as less than intrinsically. Shame, in other words, is an extreme, even perverted instance of bushah. Guilt, embarrassment, chagrin may represent the mid-point of this continuum from shyness to shame, the healthy feelings that encourage us to investigate our behaviors, then act to change them.

After all that I drove over to Evergreen Medical for a blood draw, another PSA. My every three month peek into the status of my cancer. Waiting for the hormone resistant shoe to drop. Wish I could allay that feeling, expunge it. Just wait and see.

But I know that’s the next phase of this journey, that it marks a more treacherous road ahead. A part of me wishes we’d just get on with it. Go down the chemotherapy path or other treatments for hormone resistant Stage 4 prostate cancer.

I don’t want that, not really. I want to stay where I am as long as I can. Androgen deprivation therapy, my current protocol, always fails. Not whether, but when. The waiting though carries its own cost. Will this blood draw be the one?

Living with this uncertainty and the insidious effects of back pain can create moments of intense darkness.

AI, Humanities, Judaism, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History, World History

Reconstruction

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.

 

My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.

What fun.

 

With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.

What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.

That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.

The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.

Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”

There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows:  “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”

Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.

 

 

Health, Judaism, Politics, Seed Keepers

Back Pain and Wondering

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Friday gratefuls: Tom. His visit. Mussar. Luke. Leo. Shadow. Back pain. Excruciating. Rain. Rain. Rain. Our Fire risk. Insurance. While I have it. Writing. Lumbar support. Rich. Doncye. Ruth and her finals. Gabe and his grades. Chatgpt. Dramaturgy.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI

Week Kavannah: Sensibility. Daat.

One brief shining: Getting out of bed has become painful in the extreme, at the 10 level, more, dispiriting, even after nerve glides, nothing helps except leveraging myself out of bed and beginning to move around though the moving around, motion is lotion, hurts like the dickens, too, until my tin man joints began to creak apart and move more smoothly.

 

Dr. Shadow only knows how to do squeakectomies. Not much help. Although at certain points in the early morning, I feel like I might benefit from one.

I have discovered Chatgpt to be very helpful. This morning I uploaded my MRI results to it, described my Tuesday injections and my subsequent pain, asking if this makes sense.

Here is part of the reply:

“Yes, what you’re experiencing makes sense, unfortunately — and it’s actually not uncommon with your MRI findings and the nature of epidural steroid injections (ESIs).

Let me explain what might be going on, and why”

In what followed I got cogent and clear reasons why my back pain has gotten worse. To a guy like me information is therapeutic. If I can understand what’s happening, my what the hell attitude drains away and I can move to what might be helpful now.

It also helps me understand what the path ahead might look like.

I recommend Chatgpt for medical issues. It’s knowledgeable at a granular level, will expand on things that may not be clear, and offers suggestions about what to do next.

Just a moment: We continue to wonder, don’t we? Wonder what he, they will do next. Wonder how this nation we’ve known all our lives could dissolve in the acids not of modernity but of  reactionary political bile. Wonder how long this will last. Wonder what we can do. If anything.

If I were younger, say in my 60’s, I’d be prepping for a move to Canada. In many ways I’ve preferred Canada since those days in the ’60’s when it looked like a safe haven I might need.

A less coarse public culture. Further north, therefore cooler. Great culture in Toronto, Stratford, Montreal, Vancouver. Cool road signs with a crown on them. A public health system. No history as a colonial power. Boreal Forest and a long border with the Arctic. Poutine.

Sure, there are problems, too. Royal Canadian Mounted thugs. Abysmal treatment, like us, of the First Nations. But that’s all I can think of.

However, I’m 78. The whole emigre process seems more than I care to engage now.

Leaves me with various ideas I’ve had still floating. Seed-keepers, or a variant. Live boldly out of your own values. No shrinking or hiding. Support communities like CBE with presence and money. Hold friends close. Live your best life.