To My Young Son

As you so eloquently put it: “There is a D’var Torah hiding in today’s events.” My only disagreement is, with apologies to Bethany and company: you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a D’var Torah. There’s nothing hidden about it.

There are two versions of the same story in Talmud. A student was obsessed with learning from his rabbi, so he:

hid under the rabbi’s bed / followed the rabbi into the latrine

whereupon he watched the rabbi:

service his wife / take a dump

The rabbi became aware of the student and screamed: “What are you doing here?”

The student responded: “Master, this too is Torah and I must learn.”

Why do things happen the ways they do? Discounting free will, and chalking it all up to predetermination, I guess the answer is “they just do”. We can even come up with a mechanical explanation.  If Archimedes had a big enough computer, and if he knew the properties of all objects in the universe, he could undoubtedly predict the future and unwind the past.  But there is that pesky uncertainty principle, so this all falls apart at the quantum level. But kudos to Schrodinger for giving us a way to picture this given our limited perceptions.

As a Jew I am supposed to always keep two things in mind.  First, I am dust.  No problem there:  it’s obvious.  Second, the whole universe was created just for me.  Also, obvious.  The Almighty has spent so much time protecting me from my own stupidity that Hashem could hardly have time for anything else.

I’m sure you’ve heard the notion that the space/time continuum splits up continuously, with every possible event either happening or not happening.  That’s way out of my ability to explain or understand, but if it’s true, there is an infinite number of versions of myself who must be miserable.  To be sure, I’ve made a lot of good decisions, but there are so many times when I’ve been shielded from the consequences of my mistakes.  How about that time when you were about six months old, and my carelessness brought you within an inch of death?  It must suck to be that version of me in the other timeline.

When you were a little kid, you were always asking me to tell you a story from when I was a little kid.  Well, here’s one.  I was kind of a brooder – I guess that’s not much of a surprise.  I might in fact hold the world record for the youngest person ever to believe that life had passed him by. I always hoped that my future self would use time travel to come back and explain it all to me.  That never happened. As I got older, I started fantasizing about transmigrating into my kindergarten self, reliving my life with the advantage of having all my memories and knowledge intact.  That never happened either.

Things changed a bit when you were born.  It did feel a little like coming back to guide my younger self.  But I was never able to figure out how I could relive my life while still managing to meet your mother and beget you.

Although I pray every day, I try to limit my supplications. I don’t know how much juice I have, and I don’t want to waste it on small stuff. When you were applying to AIT, I called upon your uncle to intercede on your behalf.  I was frenzied about it, and I did feel a tangible connection.  That doesn’t really sit well with my rational side, but there’s nothing I can do about it.  More recently, when your wife was being considered for her current job, I asked all my ancestors to intervene. However, I usually restrict my requests for help struggling with depression.

I routinely direct that any badness headed for you should land on me instead.  In this case, I’m feeling a bit let down.  If Hashem gets back to me on this, I’ll post an update.

It’s odd, even a bit serendipitous, that you mentioned a Christian praying at a baseball game.  I remember one of my horrible Hebrew school teachers being outraged that some Christians cross themselves before coming up to bat.  He thought that it was obviously horrible to bother the Almighty about such a trivial thing.  But then, he disapproved of anybody that disagreed with him in the least. There are many differences, some subtle and others not so subtle, between Christianity and Judaism.  But my Moreh was full of it.  By tradition, we Jews recite benedictions before just about everything we do.

And then there’s this midrash from M*A*S*H:  Father Mulcahy was pacing around outside the operating room when the snobbish Doctor Winchester walks out.  The father asks: “How is Private So-and-so?”  The doctor replies that the private had pulled through.  The father cries out joyously: “Hallelujah! I prayed that he’d recover!”, to which the doctor responds: “Father, it was not your prayer, but my skill as a surgeon that saved him.”  Undaunted, the father gets the last word: “Ha! That’s just what I prayed for!”

I’m pretty sure that was from one of the Christmas shows.

I do remember a difference between Jewish and Christian perspectives as related to the Book of Job.  A Catholic friend named Martha told me about some discussions she had with her priest when she was preparing for her confirmation.  Whenever she disagreed, he’d always respond with: “Martha, Martha, you are worried about many things, but only one thing is needed.”

(Ask your wife – that’s from the Gospel of Luke.  I suppose the priest thought he was being clever.)

As far as Job goes, Martha just couldn’t get her head around that, after all the misfortune the Almighty arbitrarily dumped on Job’s head, Job was still able to have faith that Hashem knew best.  And I agree with Martha.  And if I understand the Jewish interpretation correctly, Job merely concluded that he would never be able to understand the Almighty.

I’m in a pretty good place with my life.  Even the bad memories have shaped me into what I am.  Sometimes, it’s the recognition that things could have been worse. Other times, it’s due to the perspective I’ve gained.  And frequently, I can see precisely how I’ve ended up where I am now.

You are named for your mother’s father, a man you never met.  I am also named for my mother’s father, a man I never met.  My mother loved telling me that she was pressed to name my sister for her father, but she insisted on trying again for a boy.  Given the fertility issues she had to deal with, this might have been foolhardy.  But I came along, and I was my parent’s love child, or so my mother repeatedly told me.

You have always known that you were a technology baby.  Although that was a bit frustrating for me, it was far harder on your mother.  At one point, I really wanted to give up, but she insisted on pressing forward.  I like to think that I’ve been a good father, but you owe your entire existence to your mother.

And why Hashem has dealt so favorably with me?  I don’t have a clue. Certainly, I’ve done nothing special to earn it. Except having a son.