Disclaimer The authors statement in the preface below might be mistaken as a theme to unify the narrative that follows;

in fact, it is no more than a much-needed reminder of those limitations on his writing which he is most prone to forgetting. Please understand it as such, benevolent Reader, and forgive these scattered thoughts their vain aspirations to journalism. Pardon a literary death sentence of solemnity, and never make the mistake of taking what is said seriously without first giving it a good elbow in the ribs to see what kind of noise it makes.

Preface This is not an epic. Nearly two centuries ago, a native of my hometown, and an authority on all manner of diction, defined an epic as a poem which narrates a story, real or fictitious or both, representing, in an elevated style, some signal action or series of actions and events, usually the achievements of some distinguished hero, and intended to form the morals and affect the mind with the love of virtue. To each of these charges in turn, we are called upon for a response. By way of immediate reassurance, none of the segments of this journal will be poetry, though of poetic fluttering at a storys edgeas windtorn curtains wreak futile reproach on shattered nothing paneslittle can be done to mend. Moreover, though the word narrative has already skipped rashly out upon the page, it is a euphemism at best, and far more likely an utter malapropism, for our soon-to-be unfolding account. You will find within no single plot or resolution. What follows is closer to a correspondence between two intimate but long-separated friends, as a lone sailboat speaks lovingly to the lapping sea it never fully joins. This is a compilation of excerpts from a conversation between the authors soul and his peoples homeland. There are many stories here, but no endings. Forbear your direst misgivings, kind Reader, and rest assured that this journals flickering candle will illuminate nothing real but that which may already be seen by the light softly seeping through our worlds broken fabric. Whatever else you doubt, believe in that. Of the already evident depression in style, you may be dismayed to learn that the worst is yet to come; struggle on, brave Reader, and may your valor be its own rewardthere is none other here. (If our Muse is to be faulted for his excessive use of the comma, he will shine in this context as never before.) Finally, pray forgo any discussion of distinguished heroes; by now we may have stooped to satire, but not yet, let us hope, to farce. The Reader, who has already exhibited considerable virtue by reading thus far, is heretofore charged with the formation of his own morals. Exhausted of defenses, the author must absolve himself of any remaining responsibility, leaving for the Reader nothing but a signpost at the door with this simple prayer: that within these pages, as in the life you lead, you may find humility in righteousness and nobility in suffering. The rest I leave to you. Emmett

19 May-28 June, 2011 FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS IN ISRAEL As do all conversations, this one begins with a question: How does a journalist meaningfully document a conversation? No synopsis can be honest in the way that a transcript can, yet even a transcript fails to capture many true and important parts of a conversation. Some magic in a momentary glance sideways or upward, the tug of nose or beard that clarifies nothing but the tangible humanity of the speaker, a quasi-indecipherable mumble at the near-end of a sentence (triggering a splitsecond decision to ask or not to ask for repetition), the glimmer of approaching realization before an instant of true communication, and countless other irreducible moments separate human conversation from all attempts at replication, even by the most exacting application of our language. My mother once challenged me to explain why multiple performances of a single written classical composition are not played identically. Why dont the composers describe on the sheet music how the piece should be played? she asked. Struggling to answer, I managed to propose little more than the word interpretation. Yet now I begin to realize what wonderful truth lies hidden beneath that simple question. As a written word invokes a distinct image in each readers mind, so that actors of every age may bring Shakespeares Macbeth to life again and again anew, likewise the chords of a prelude or sonata awake a different emotion in each human heart, such that no one will ever play Schumanns Traumerei quite like Horowitz (who, as his heart ripened with age, never played it the same way twice). Music has been called the universal language, yet for all its power to transcend culture, space and time, the effort to grasp its sublime meaning will always reside in the intimate receptacle of the human heart. We should not be surprised, then, that our clunky, makeshift language, even in the pens of our most ingenious playwrights, can do no better than sketch the borders and lightly shade the contours of human communication. And if these most human of intangibles are not to be found in Schumanns manuscript corners or Shakespeare stage directions, how can they possibly be rendered? If they cannot be captured in print, at least their space may be preserved, they way a clever artist leaves space in his painting or an architect openness in his arch for the viewers eye, so that we may recapture in these hollows the form of the ineffable. These tiny moments which trickle beside the course of the flowing conversation, only occasionally joining the confluence of speaker and listener attention, may also flit noiselessly between the lines of a novels pages, or the bars of a journals cage, suddenly to be noticed or imagined by the reader. If I have not failed you utterly, Reader, you may glimpse them here and there in a flash of splendor or a sordid dropping, a sudden spurt of grooming or a brief lapse in peacocks vanity. Interpret freely where my narrative is silent. Be assured that yours is not its first imaginative re-invention. You must not be offended, then, that my story begins with a man who does not fit on paper. He is simply too great, and if I tried to leave enough space for him, these pages would be blank. So I will write around him, and you will be left to imagine what I cannot tell.

I know of no living person whose command of both music and storytelling surpasses that of my Uncle Tim. I can tell you everything I know about him and many things Ive often wondered but never dared to ask; cast his image on the page with swift, deliberate strokes and paint his famed expressions in pointillist prose; capitalize and underscore, italicize, boldface and hyphenate until his expletive-laced verbal concoctions bleed through the page, but for all my toil, you will never know the wonder of his stories until you hear them yourself. The night before I left for Israel, reclining behind long-empty plates of my Aunt Nenes hearty chicken stew in the cluttered staff lounge of a recording studio too mighty to die, yet too noble to survive, my Uncle Tim lit up the night with hour after hour of stories. As the warmth of the meal and the exhilaration of his stories carried me through the darkening Jersey night, I gradually saw my task for the summer set before me. Uncle Tim inspired in me a maxim to live by this summer: to listen to the stories of all I met, to share in their humor and hopes, to celebrate and love their eccentricities, to step cautiously into their worlds and extend meaningful invitations to my own, to seek purpose behind our relationships, however brief, and thereby to make an attempt at that impossible understanding between two human beings that no words can describe. The next morning, I boarded an El Al passenger jet in Newark, and found myself sandwiched between a secular Israeli businessman returning to Tel Aviv after an advertising campaign in the States and a Hasid from Brooklyn visiting family for Lag BOmer. The symbolic dimensions of this quintessentially Israeli juxtaposition are so glaringly overplayed in comic stereotypes that even this trick bag of clichs finds them unpalatable to discuss at length. Whatever Yisroel and Oved were meant to represent in a cosmic sense, each of them very personally became for me a gatekeeper to his own culture and identity. Yisroel stands at the gates of a community that values its traditions above modern convenience and normative values. Raised in a home without a television, where most new movies were blacklisted and pop culture considered laughable at its most innocuous, I found this idea of cultural isolation rather comforting. Yet contrary to my expectations from a representative of such isolationists, Yisroel began quietly and patiently, but quite unmistakably, making a shrewd Brooklyn case for my personal Hasidic transformation. Oved, quite literally on the other hand, was beginning my cultural preparation for modern Israel. He flattered me for my strains of broken Hebrew, announced on my behalf how much I was going to enjoy Tel Avivs vibrant nightlife, and leveraged with quiet insistence his fear that his children were losing touch with their Judaism. Thus, my introduction to Israel began on a runway in New Jersey, with an abrupt immersion whose fittingness I have only appreciated more with each passing day. Six hours into the flight, I returned from the restroom to find Oved and Yisroel deep in conversation. Content to leave them to their business, I wandered around the flight, dodging the restless tide of children swelling over the narrow straits of rows and isles. Religious Jews in full prayer garments held services and nodded gently off to sleep over their prayer books, prickly flight attendants bickered and bustled through the plane on their way to dismissing another passengers concern, the blue light of personal electronics cast the profiles of American and Israeli teens on the pages of their neighbors books, and blanket-swaddled couples shifting restively to and fro in sleepy confusion dreamed of the day when a screaming bundle might encapsulate all their hopes and dreams (and every sleepless airline passengers utmost dread), filling the space between them where now only their locked fingers staved off the loneliness of separation.

Oved and Yisroel suffered from no such pangs, as I soon saw when I returned. In fact, the two had hit it off fabulously, and we all exchanged contact information at the flights end. Oved suggested that their friendship would be strictly informal, since Yisroels eight children were ample proof that he did not need what Oved was selling. I could scarcely believe my ears, even less so when Yisroel suggested that years down the road, he might indeed be in the market. Baffled, sleep-deprived, and still carrying a spark of my Uncle Tims laughter inside me, I watched with a touch of sadness as the two of them parted ways: Oved for Tel Aviv, Yisroel for Jerusalem. Home now far behind, I wondered what adventures fate had in store for me, and by what long and winding paths I would make my own way to the gates of each mans city.

The chronology of my wandering is lost now, if ever I kept its track. My too infrequent notes, salt-stopped watch, and dust- or is it sand-capped memories avail me little in piecing together the times and places through which I have passed. Fortunately, dear Reader, unlike mostpeople bound by wherewhen and yesno, we may explore this half-forgotten terrain with impunity. Let us go then, you and I

Everyday [Adapted from a letter to H.R.] Intelligence becomes a vice, as do most human virtues, when it mistakes itself for the proper object of its own attention and admiration. Intelligence without a sense of its limits leads to a false stop at the realization that most people and things are not as interesting as our own thoughts. Whereas intelligence is primarily focused on achievements of the intellect, an intellectual can find worthy objects for his intelligence in great and small things alike, transforming the emptiness of an intellectually bare landscape into a garden of mysteriously foreign yet familiarly loveable features. Attention to the minute and mundane does not limit one to quotidian minutia; it opens ones eyes to the glimmer of eternity in the fleeting tedium of the present. The first Hebrew word I learned on the job was balagan- mess. As most Israelis will readily admit, and in fact are quite fond of observing, things in Israel are a mess. That's not pessimistic, because first of all, it's the truth, and second of all, it isn't necessarily a bad thing (as you know I only include this stock phrase to free you of any suspicion that I may conceal a deeply inculcated preference for cleanliness, order, efficiency, personal liberty, and a few guilty pleasures leaning in the direction of refinement, i.e. Western Civilization). Now as I was saying before your cultural prejudices so rudely interrupted, Israel is a modernizing (and occasionally modernising), rapidly developing, second-rate first-world country. What this means on the ground is that they think they can offer (and are irrationally proud of talking about and showing off) all kinds of 21st century goodies: shopping malls, electronic transportation, wireless internet, and so forth, but they are not actually equipped with the infrastructure to build or support such glitzy commodities. A couple examples are the Tel Aviv Subway System, which Prime Minister Golda Meir began in the early 70s (not a single tunnel has been dug), the Jerusalem Lite Rail (in its ninth year of construction, the train still does practice runs instead of

passenger runs, and the specially constructed Lite Rail Bridge cannot bear its weight with passengers onboard), and the Tel Aviv University WiFi, which offers several thousand networks, each providing consistently low-bandwidth connection for four to seven minutes. I've downplayed the general disorder of things because it's my responsibility as an American visitor here to entice you to visit the friendly land of Israel, but I wanted to give you a general idea. If you've noticed, I haven't even mentioned the politics. This isn't actually a dodge, it's an accurate reflection of the way-of-life here. The conflict has very little to do with people's visible daily lives. They work, they go out, they have families, and though everyone talks about the situation (Israeli politics deal with little else), for most people its a small thread in the fabric of everyday life. In terms of my life here, I'm spending the hours of nine to five in the office, helping a gambling software company find new ways to get people onto on-line casinos, where they're encouraged to think less about how much indispensable income they forfeit to on-line gambling, and instead focus on how much fun they're having and how much money they might (in an extremely unlikely scenario) win. I've applied for a change of position within the company so I can research safeguards against gambling addiction instead of means to foster the same, but it's anyone's best bet what will come of it, and after four weeks at work, I've developed something of a paranoia that the odds will be stacked against me. As Joe pointed out, sometimes that kind of thing is a crap shoot. Balagan. Women Women in Israel defy all definition. You may have heard that they are beautiful, and this term is more apt to cover them in general than most of their clothing. You may also have heard that they are cold and unapproachable. Whether this reflects more accurately on some aspect of their social demeanor or on the forward nature of most Israeli men with their intentions, I am qualified only to conjecture. They are, without a doubt, mystical, protean beings, and so it should not surprise you when you cannot put a name to the fantastical aura that lingers at the boundaries of your thoughts even after the scent of conditioner and perfume fades. Then, after all but concluding they are entirely mythical, you will find yourself alone in conversation with one, and her transparency, genuine feeling, and urgent warmth will convince you that she possesses something the rest entirely lack. Not so, in fact. Even the arctic currents bear tropical waters, for though the summers snowmelt may seem only to swell the frigid waters, somewhere beneath the glassy calm there are veins within the living rock, waiting to be discovered and sprung. There is an incompleteness where women sit at tables and talk. You can see it in the acutely intent angles of their spines over tussled utensils; their exaggerated gestures and expressions to encourage, mollify, and defend each other; their eager hopeful smiles and uncouth laughter; the way they say one thing too excitedly to understand then unaccountably whisper the next. You know it, though unable to say why, from the way they cross their legs and hold their chins in slender wrists, assuming for a moment their consciousness of some semblance of you just as you are conscious of this semblance of them. Maybe it is a father, husband, or son they are missing, you ponder, imagining the invisible peripheral glances that women have mastered to transport your semblance to them and replace that missing figure without the slightest betraying sign. Then suddenly it strikes you that perhaps you too are missing something, as you sit here

with your legs comfortably crossed and chin supported in hand, wondering at the unknowable mystery of how women look and speak to each other when you are missing. Gifts A very wonderful man, who lent a great deal of purpose and meaning to my first encounters with Israel, once asked an assembled group of his students: Which comes first, loving or giving? Confused, we murmured pleas for clarification. Our teacher explained by posing two new questions for us: Does love generate the act of giving? Or does the act of giving generate love? By the time he is twenty-one, every Israeli Jew has tithed over a tenth of his life in service to his county. Most do so in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). A few remain in labs or university, laying the groundwork for the scientific and academic breakthroughs of the future. Religious Jews study in yeshiva, praying devoutly and maintaining, in their view, the crucial bond between God and His Chosen People that stands between Israel and a Second Diaspora. When asked about the army, most Israelis respond quite casually, like American students discussing where they go to college. They bear the institution no resentment, though they happily complain about the food, the lack of sleep, and the restrictions on commingling between male and female soldiers. There is, of course, an entire song by those within three months of graduation called Until When?, but it more closely resembles the last-period attitude of American high schoolers than the passionate indignation of our civil rights leaders. There are two explanations for this attitude. The first is that the army is so much part of life here that no energy is wasted on rebelling against it. The second is that every Israeli Jew understands, deeply and personally, how desperately his country needs his service. I have never met an Israeli Jew who does not love his country. Soldiers
Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, that we may walk the paths of the Most High. And we shall beat our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nationneither shall they learn war any more. And none shall be afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of Hosts has spoken. Isaiah, 2:1-5

In Israel, the soldiers pray for peace. They weep in the Mount Herzl cemetery, remembering the loss of fathers and brothers, friends and friends of friends, the unspeakable horror of a tombstone over the empty grave of a captured soldier, or the hero who cried out Shema Yisrael! as he threw himself on a grenade to protect his brothers. In full uniform, they cry for the horror and sorrow of war, for what has been done to their loved ones and what they in turn must do. Arm in arm, dancing into and out of shadow as the last light of the setting sun passes behind the Western Wall, they throw back their heads and toss up their legs, crying out, praying: May He Who makes peace in High Places make peace for us and for all Israel. They are still in uniform.

Tomorrow they will put on their uniforms again and bury their tears, for there will be no time to dance and little to pray. For one more week, they will fight for peace. Survivors [Written at Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem] Is it a mistake to frame learning about the Holocaust in terms of changing perspective? Many arguments to increase the level of Holocaust education offered in American schools premise their conclusions on the notion that we ought to experience learning of the Holocaust in a life-changing fashion. This assumes that the Holocaust does not fit in to everything else we believe. For many people, the most troubling question is whether the Holocaust is inconsistent with what we know or believe about God. Others will ask if the Holocaust is consistent with what we know or believe about human nature. It seems to me that these questions belong together naturally. We must therefore ask: How could human beings formed in Gods image perpetrate such a monstrosity? The secondary question is then, not Why didnt God intervene? but rather: If we are at all like God (and if not, what informs us that we shouldnt commit such crimes?), why didnt we intervene? Why didnt we, as human beings, recognize and refuse to become complicit with evil? To isolate responsibility to Hitler is to ignore the choice of human beings who willingly became Nazis; to question the Nazis humanity is to call into question the humanity of the Jews who chose to serve the Judenrat; to assign to the Judenrat the title of Judas begs a new title for the allegedly complicit, and undoubtedly silent Catholic Church; to impugn the Church is to distract the rest of the Western Europe from its silent indifference; to bury the Europeans in shame for their inaction is to distract our attention from unearthing accounts of ten thousand Jews dying of starvation and sickness every month in Warsaw from page 28 of the New York Times. Denying humanity to the dehumanizers or their accomplices accomplishes nothing toward understanding the Holocaust in its true significance. It is a panacea to alleviate the terror of recognizing that we as human beings are capable of such deeds. If we can recognize that our cultures are all but branches from a single body of humanity, we must seek to discover what caused the gnarl that warped us from the planted root. If Hitler was the rotten fruit that brought the cultured German bough to the sodden ground, what gravity kept the rest of that limbs fruit clinging to his monstrous weight? Philosophy, art, music, opera, rotting away with him, putrefying the entire miraculous web of veins and arteries connecting Germany to its noble roots, dragging its people through the mud of humiliation and sowing into the fertile soil of its culture hate, opposition, resentment! How did it happen? The challenge and necessity of answering that question present to me the greatest value of reopening the pain-seared doors of memory to the Holocaust. To reconcile our capacity for evil with our promised inheritance of divinity, to call into doubt the superiority of a culture that claims progressiveness, modernity, and titles of privilege for those who preach its social gospel; this is to allow the Holocaust to change our world.

Desert [A piece I wrote for my friend Lindsay on her birthday.] If I say the word desert, you will think of the desert by day. You will picture the expansive flatnesses and sensuous dunes of gritty weathered yellow once-rock, lifted and raced by circling winds about the empty sky whose face you define by what you can only peripherally observe: the constant, scorching radiance that preceded and will outlast the sands; the unitary, unforgiving sun, nemesis of life, cruel taskmaster to man and beast, whose lives pass like vaporized water, soon mist, now gone... When you finally come to the desert you will see that everything you imagined is true. But you will also realize, as the sun tries to cremate the last evidence of the day's murderous deeds, staining the rolling sands incarnadine where the land meets the kindled western sky, that you had forgotten to imagine the desert by night. For it is only in the shivering blackness, spine gratefully pressed against the retaining warmth of a flat black rock, eyes raised from the mountains to the sky, wondering, "From where shall my help come?" -- it is only in this moment of solitary, infinite smallness, that you realize you live in a half reality of imagined places; the killing sun of your imaginary desert has become an imminently necessary source of warmth, the cloudless sky you thought empty is actually home to vastnesses of stars whose names you dream but never recall, the movement of land and sky which you experience in the present will pass through eternal infinity, transforming the granulated rock beneath you into polished glass, and your splintered half-realities into facets, tiny reflecting pendulums, on the immutably sublime chandelier that is humanity. And when you have spent forty years in this desert, pondering these things, perhaps you will be ready to enter the land of Zion, the seat of the city called Jerusalem

Israel, a nation that bloomed out of a desert, built by men and women from every corner of the earth, now rests quietly beneath me under the glowing rays of the setting sun. Thus ends my fortieth day. After the span of another forty days and nights, I will be in Highland Park, the town where I was born. This homecoming from my homeland, return from my return, will be a happy one, for it will be a great joy to return to all of you. Your memories, words and thoughts have touched me, comforted me, and inspired me from across oceans and worlds. There are few joys that compare to hearing from you, and none that compare with being home again. I will leave you with a prayer said by Jewish mothers and fathers over their children, a prayer which my mother has said for me and my brothers every year, as she reached higher and higher to place her hands on our heads: May God bless you and keep you May God shine his face upon you and be gracious unto you. May God lift up his face onto you and grant you peace. Shalom,