"More to flatter God than to worship him"

     "Blessed art thou, Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob; great, mighty and revere God, sublime God, who bestowest lovingkindness, and art Master of all things; who rememberest the good deeds of our fathers, and who wilt graciously bring..."
    So begins the "Prayer for Dew" — didn't know Jews had a prayer for dew, didja? That's okay, neither did I. But scanning my bookshelves, looking for nothing in particular, I noticed a blue book on its side, and pulled out Daily Prayer Book, translated and annotated by Philip Birnbaum (Hebrew Publishing Co., 1949). No idea how it got there; my guess is that it belonged to my late father-in-law and I saved it from the general disposal of their household effects.
     Scanning the table of contents, most chapters were unsurprising: "Morning Service" and "Reading the Torah," "Memorial Services" and "Guests in the Sukkah" — the booth used in the harvest festival; I was at one just a few days ago, guest of my brother- and sister-in-law, enjoying beef ribs that were smoked for nine hours.

     Praying for dew is something I hadn't heard before, and I had to read the rather lengthy supplication. Though it makes sense, as something people in the desert would pray for. To be honest, the initial blast of praise did not move me so much as remind me of a line of Benedict Spinoza: "Nothing has remained of the religion that used to be, beyond its external ceremony, by which the people seem more to flatter God than to worship him, no wonder that faith is nothing now but credulity and prejudices."
    Strong stuff. And if you think that we live in a blasphemous age now, remember Spinoza wrote that in 1670.
    The dew prayer has some lovely parts — "Dew refreshes the earth and its verdure/Joyous to be under thy protection/May dew — symbol of youth — shield our young."
     Kids are going to need something a bit sturdier than dew to get through the world we're leaving them. I never thought of dew as a symbol of youth, much, though it makes sense. "Dewy youth," and all. Honestly, I never thought much of dew at all. The closest I've come is reflecting on dew's chilly cousin, frost. 
    The prayer goes on quite a while; I won't burden you with it all. "Earth's depths are eager for the drops of dew; All the green meadows long and pine for dew ... Grant dew to favor thy land... Let dew fall on the blessed land."
     And — not to get political — if you're wondering what land the prayer refers to, a note reads, "The poems are the creations of Rabbi Elazar ha-Kallir, who probably lived in Palestine during the eight century" and who left behind hundreds of liturgical poems, 'many of which cannot be understood without a commentary."
    Coincidentally — or portentously, if you believe that sort of thing — just that morning, following Kitty along on our 6 a.m. walk, we cut across our yard, so heavily dewed that my boat shoes were soaked. A minor annoyance, at the time. But the prayer for the dew it foreshadowed instructs us that it's all a matter of perspective, of context. "Make us like a watered garden;/Bless our sustenance with dew;/Let no ill befall our flocks;/Bestow thy favor on the people/Whom thou didst lead like a flock."
    Holding the dew prayer and the Dutch thinker together, it strikes me that, sometimes, the gap between the pious, such as Rabbi Elazar ha-Kallir, and blasphemous philosophers such as Spinoza  seems very far apart. But other times, they're very close. While the former sees the hand of God in morning moisture, and the latter sees God in, well, the entire universe, they're both still seeing God. 

     Or as Spinoza wrote:
     "The universal laws of nature, according to which all things happen and are determined, are nothing but the eternal decrees of God, which always involved eternal truth and necessity. Therefore, whether we say that they are ordered according to the decree and guidance of God, we say the same thing. ... because the power of all natural things is nothing but the power of God."
    "All natural things..." like dew? They're really saying the same thing, in different ways, looking around and detecting the presence of the divine. It's enough to give an agnostic pause.
    
     
     

Works in progress — Andy Davis

     I try not to use the “c-word” — community — too much. A buzz term worn to a nubbin. But if my recent dive into Substack taught me anything, it is that a large and growing group of people view EGD as an valuable part of their day. Such as regular reader Andy Davis, who asked if I would plug a charity run he is doing a week from Sunday. Eager to inject other voices into the blog — and to take a breather from this quotidian treadmill — I suggested he take a swing at it himself, which you’ll find below. And as I never rattle a cup that I haven’t tucked a little something into myself, I can tell you that contributing to this good cause that helps improve our schools is both easy and satisfying.

Andy Davis

     On October 11th, 50,000 or more runners will take a 26.2 mile tour of Chicago, from the north side to the south side and back again. Each runner has their own reasons for running. While fitness and personal accomplishment are a given, many also run to support a cause or organization that matters to them.     

     Besides proving that I’ve still got what it takes after my recent 70th birthday, I am running for the Education Equity Fund, a not-for-profit that I founded Six years ago. EEF helps ambitious and talented Chicago public school teachers finance graduate degrees in Urban School Leadership, a credential that allows them to become Chicago Public School principals. 

      The well-respected Wallace Foundation has stated that, “It is hard to imagine a higher rate of return than investing and supporting great school leaders.” Chicago’s future is unimaginable without a well-educated, literate cohort of Chicago Public School graduates, inspired by the great leadership in their schools. 

     Schools with strong leaders, principals who provide supportive atmospheres in which dedicated teachers can achieve their full potential as educators, will certainly determine our future. Please consider “investing in the long run” by contributing to my run in support of Chicago’s great school leaders of the future. Make your donation by clicking here.

Despite clown show at the top, local FBI still ‘very good at what they do’

The graduation ceremony for the FBI Citizens Academy takes place at the bureau’s North Chicago Regional Firearms Training Facility, a fun outing where we saw bomb disposal demonstration and the boys got to fire a Thompson submachine gun. 

     When the FBI called, I hesitated.
     Their request was simple enough. They wanted to bring me into headquarters, for briefings, once a week, for a couple months. Something called the FBI Citizens Academy.
     Why me? Agents in the Chicago office were readers. Flattering, though, the way my mind works, I instantly saw that this wasn’t necessarily a compliment — it was entirely possible that my perspective was seen as so woefully ignorant of the world of law enforcement, they felt duty bound to help me get a clue.
     Or maybe they just wanted to get me in their clutches. I’d end up handcuffed to a metal chair in a basement, a bright light shining in my face.
     One evening a week, for a couple hours, at their Roosevelt Road field office, learning the ins and outs of the department, the problems they face. Battling international terrorism, tracking cybercriminals and bank robbers.
     “It sounds like traffic school,” I told my wife.
     But I have a personal rule: if you don’t go, you never find out. Plus they would feed us — dinner from a different restaurant each week. Being fed always helps. I signed up.
     This was in 2010, so the specific program details do not pop out in mind. There were guest lecturers, short films, tours of their facility. I knew several of the attendees, and the academy was pretty much the entirety of my social life for a while.
      What’s strongest is the sense I took away about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were good people, working hard, battling bad guys. I’m sure that was the point. Not that the bureau’s often checkered history was whitewashed. Anyone who read Jonathan Eig’s recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King knows how the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, using the transcripts to try to blackmail him into silence, to urge him to kill himself, generating dirt they fed to his enemies. Knows that the FBI often strayed from protecting America to protecting a narrow right wing racist image of America.

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Those spewing hate often dribble on themselves

     Hateful speech is so pervasive online and generally consequence-free — try getting Facebook to suspend an account — that it can be almost shocking to realize that it can be otherwise in the living world of flesh and shadow.
     I can't be the only person mildly surprised to see a Niles man, Shahid Hussain, 43, sentenced to seven years in prison for spray painting swastikas around Northwestern's campus. Not the slap on the wrist most often seen in such cases.
    Particularly because he pleaded guilty — typically that involves a lower of sentence, and one wonders what he might have gotten had he gone to trial.
     The reason he got the book thrown at him, I imagine, is that Hussain was sentenced to two years in prison in 2022 for defacing a Jewish day school, bakery and several synagogues with hateful messages. He's a two-time loser.
     I can't speak for you, but for myself, the 2022 trip to the slammer would been a subtle hint that maybe I need a new hobby. But haters are not the brightest bulbs in the box. And there is an addictive quality to it — they're locked in the thrall of an obsession. This is worth remembering, since some Jews seem to think they're auditioning for haters, that their words and actions, or those of fellow Jews, somehow provoke antisemitism, so we need to be on our best behavior. When in reality, antisemitism isn't about us; rather, it is someone else's problem that sadly involves us, such as this Niles man caught scratching an itch that just won't go away.

     I almost felt sorry for him — maybe he thought that Northwestern was a safe space for expressing antisemitism. It certainly has seemed that way in the past. If only he'd stuck to the safer forms of hating Jews, respected the accepted etiquette, the specifics of which hardly need to be spelled out.

     The story shouldn't be buried in the Tribune, as it reminds all those keen to make their private urges into bold public statements that, depending on the time and place, tone and exact language, sometimes it blows back on you in spectacular fashion. It makes a lot more sense — safer, smart and morally right to boot — not to hate anybody. I wish more people would give it a try.

     

Out of the Darkness Walk raises awareness about the heartbreak of suicide

Shaylin Takesue (right) was one of nearly 50,000 Americans who died by suicide in 2023. Her friend Krissy Jerkatis (left) will be among 6,000 participants in the Out of the Darkness Chicagoland Walk Saturday at Montrose Harbor.

     Shaylin Takesue was smart and funny and beautiful, inside and out. In high school, she played volleyball, despite being 5-foot-1. She was a libero, the back row defensive player. At Illinois State University, where her little sister Olivia was also a student, Shaylin was busy and popular, interested in mental health. She had her own struggles, battling depression. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she sometimes spoke of suicide. But that seemed under control in the spring of 2023. Shaylin was out partying with her friends when, eight days before graduation, she abruptly killed herself at age 22, without planning or a note. Her sister found her body.
     “It’s hard,” said her mother, Michelle Takesue, of Batavia. “You always think it’s going to happen to somebody else. Not you. We spend our whole life as a parent trying to keep our kids safe. You love them more than anything in the world. You fear that something could happen to them, but you don’t really get it until something does, something you pray never happens, the biggest heartache anyone could imagine.”
     Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans in their 20s. Impulsive suicides are common — one study found that a quarter of those making serious suicide attempts consider the act for less than five minutes beforehand. Suicide can be seen as a kind of infectious disease — that’s why journalists are asked not to describe the exact method of a specific suicide, so as not to inspire copycats.
     Chicagoland Walk Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Montrose Harbor. Six thousand people whose lives are affected by suicide are expected to attend the walk, sponsored by the Illinois chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
     Sixty are representing Shaylin Takesue.
     “We did the first one in Bloomington-Normal, right after she passed away,” said her father, Tim Takesue. “To me, it was completely eye-opening. A little bit of healing, understanding that we are definitely not alone. To see how much this has affected people.”
     The walk is a blend of outdoor festival and somber commemoration, embodied by the “honor beads” participants wear — color-coded Mardi Gras strands: white for loss of a child, red for a spouse or partner, gold for a parent.

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Flashback 2012: Sculptures set inner kid free to soar

     

"Glider Pilot" by Bob Emser

     I do miss going into the office on a semi-regular basis. You never knew what you were going to stumble upon.

     In a little room hidden somewhere deep within our brains, the little child we once were sits,  pressing his palms flat against the gouged, glue-spattered, heavily shellacked wooden desktop, puffing out his cheeks, listening to the clock tick, gazing at the rain streaks on the windows, waiting.
     I had just left the 8:17 downtown, shuffled in Fritz Lang lockstep with the other commuters through the platform’s smoky, dripping din, up the stairs, then surged across Madison, up more stairs and onto the plaza.
     Dihedral, I thought, getting a glimpse of the first of a trio of artworks, an installation called “Test Flight” created by sculptor Bob Emser that went on display earlier this month at 2 N. Riverside Plaza, or what we fogies refer to as the old Chicago Daily News Building.
     The dihedral is the angle of an airplane’s wings. I hadn’t thought of that word in decades, but it must have slumbered, scribbled on a scrap tucked into that little boy’s pocket.
     “Two x 2,” a pair of wing tips — a Supermarine Spitfire’s, among the most beautiful planes ever built — made of Brazilian walnut, with little aluminum insets. You want to run your hand over the rich wood but, trained not to manhandle art, even public art, I didn’t.
     Next is “Balsa Flies Better,” a large wooden skeleton of an airplane wing — a DC-3’s, another lovely plane. Typically, a kid would make one of these wings out of balsa, first cutting the pieces out with an X-Acto knife, gluing them together on a board with pins, later covering the fragile 10-inch lattice in paper, doping it until it stretches tight. This one was made of pine and 14 feet tall. I stopped in mid-stride — the other commuters nearly piling up, cartoon fashion, behind me, before flowing past like a river current around a rock.
     Suddenly it was all back: the colorful cardboard boxes, the T-shaped pins, the Saran wrap over the diagram plans, so the glue wouldn’t stick. Decals. Toothpicks. Not only a Spitfire, but a Hawker Hurricane and others.
     The third, “Glider Pilot,” is a little off-theme, but somehow pulled the three together. An exact model of those 19-cent — now $1.99 — Jet balsa gliders you’d get at Woolworth’s. Only this one was made of marine plywood and 12 feet long. Anyone who could make a Spitfire out of balsa disdained these gliders, though they would serve in a pinch.
     Art should do at least one of three things: It should be original in idea, excellent in execution, or dramatic in effect. The idea of making common stuff really big isn’t new; Claes Oldenburg’s “Batcolumn” is around the corner. The big model plane components were certainly precisely made. But the impact — at least to me — flew me back to Berea, Ohio, in 1970, though I suppose art that only touches men who once made model airplanes is aiming for a narrow and thinning audience. This particular subject couldn’t be an accident.
     “When I was a kid, I think that my first sculptural experience was taking these flat balsa shapes and ending up with this sensuous form,” said sculptor Bob Emser, 58, who has studios in Chicago and Eureka. He views the three pieces, together, as “a full theme of music stripped down to a three-piece band.”
     Emser built model airplanes for the same reason I did — because of his dad’s influence.
     “I wasn’t much for organized sports,” said Emser. “I liked building things. My father said this is something you can do in your bedroom and not hurt yourself.”
     The wooden sculptures secretly solve a problem that any artist hoping to display art on this specific spot must consider — that 2 N. Riverside Plaza is built over the Metra tracks.
     “There’s some problems putting large-scale sculptures over vaulted train tracks — most of it is pretty heavy,” Emser said. “I thought, ‘You know this is opportunity knocking to do something fun, quick, temporary.’ ”
     Underline “temporary.” I mentioned that someone with too little control of their inner child had jumped on the glider and cracked it. “Two x 2” was tackled by drunk Bears fans.
     “Stuff like that happens. It’s designed to be temporary. It’s not designed to last forever,” he said. “I’m going to go and reinforce that wing. I remember breaking lots of balsa wood planes. They’re fragile. I knew people were going to climb on them. That’s what happens when you put something in public. Still, I wanted to get the dihedral into the wing.”
     I smiled, hearing the artist speak the same recondite word that had popped into my head when I first saw his work. Kindred spirits. I told him, given how much public art in Chicago is garbage — the chunky Dubuffet jammed next to the Thompson Center, other hunks of metal signifying nothing — it’s nice to see something evocative, at least to me.
     “I even try not to call myself a ‘public art’ person,” he said. “I like to say it’s ‘civic art.’ It’s really about civilization and making civilization a happier place.” We can all use that. “Test Flight” is part of the 23rd International Sculpture Conference, in Chicago Oct. 4 - 6, and will be at 2 N. Riverside Plaza, north of Madison, west of the river, until mid-October.

            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 25, 2012

Hard to find a good kosher candy to throw at your kids

Sunkist Fruit Gems

     To be a Chicagoan — yes, I know I’m not — is to have a certain nostalgia about candy.
     Growing up here — OK, I grew up near Cleveland, thank you for noticing — meant to be aware of the enormous Brach’s factory on the West Side and the Spanish Revival Mars confectionery on Oak Park Avenue. Visits downtown were liable to give you a contact high from the cocoa aroma rolling off the Blommer’s chocolate factory.
     Being a fat kid — try snatching that away from me, you touchy chauvinists — I had a visceral understanding of the entire Brach’s line. The gorgeous slightly soft, matte milk chocolate stars. The shiny dark blobs of bridge mix, with its scorned peanuts and ultra vanilla creams.
     My mother played bridge — yes, in Berea, immediately west of Cleveland, geez, give it a rest, will ya? — and I would belly crawl, like soldiers on the “Combat!” TV show, into the living room, to snake my hand into a bowl and retrieve a fistful of mix, then scuttle back to my room to enjoy my prize. What a sight that must have been.
     And we — meaning Chicagoans and whatever unwanted interlopers manage to jam themselves among them — shouldn’t complain. Despite the insane sugar tariffs sending Chicago candy companies fleeing to Mexico, we still have a bounty: Ferrara Pan, churning out their vastly cool Nerds Gummy Clusters. Butterfingers and Baby Ruths are made in Franklin Park, which is not Chicago either, last time I checked.
     Some folks insist Tootsie Rolls are made in Chicago, though after a lifetime of being denied access to the factory, I hope you will forgive me for insisting Tootsie Rolls are actually made in the military dictatorship of Myanmar, excreted by emotionally-damaged French poodles trapped in inhumanely small crates and force fed a combination of high fructose corn syrup, industrial waste and the offal of rabbits who died testing cosmetics.

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