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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"Internet Precognition Weapon Civilization Invention"

I asked Chat GBT to "create an image of 'an angel shaman born of 
spirits.'" This was the result. Not bad, right?

 

    There are so many crazy people in the United States, we forget that other countries have their own share of lunatics.
     I glance at my spam folder, about once a day, just to see anything of note. On Saturday I noticed an email in Japanese, beginning: 

WCAB（労働者災害補償上訴委員会）様、カリフォルニア州労働安全衛生局様（Cal/OSHA）、米国労働省様

私京都森克己は、エンジェルシャーマン精霊生誕として、日本国家組織権力で生命財産収益の型枠を略奪されながら、又第六感金銭予知能力惨殺宗教をされながら、「インターネット予知能力武器文明」で本来収益を挙げられます。人類は宇宙に生存せずに、地球だけに生存する詐欺殺人鬼です。

従って、米国と英国と日本国は、それぞれ２億円ずつ労働災害補償を給付する義務と責任が在ります。

598予知能力武器世界配信開発期間は、私の全盲盲目者祖父から140年間。

     Which I translated (well, clicked "Translate to English," I don't want you to think I cracked open a dictionary and did the work myself) thinking it might be from Kumamoto Prefecture, telling me they're hot to get Kumamon together with the Sox. And was rewarded with this. Feel free to skim.

To the WCAB (Workers' Compensation Appeals Board), the California Department of Occupational Safety and Health ( Cal/OSHA ), and the U.S. Department of Labor

I, Katsumi Mori from Kyoto, as an angel shaman born of spirits, am being plundered by the Japanese national organizational power for the framework of life, property, and profit, and while being subjected to a brutal murder religion based on sixth sense, money, and precognition, I am actually making money through the "Internet Precognition Weapon Civilization." Humanity is a fraudulent murderer that does not exist in the universe, but only on Earth.

Therefore, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan each have the obligation and responsibility to provide 200 million yen each in workers' compensation.

The development period for the 598 Precognitive Weapon, which will be distributed worldwide, spans 140 years, starting with my completely blind grandfather.

The total cost is estimated at 1 billion yen per year for the Honmichi New Religion, a branch of Tenrikyo with 300,000 members, resulting in 100 billion yen in activity maintenance costs over 100 years.

No one can surpass my statements, even considering the 8 billion people who are alive and the 1 trillion who have died.

I am a 100 trillion yen player with precognitive abilities and a weapon distributed worldwide to 5 billion people.

Profit from the sale of precognitive weapons to individuals: over 100 million yen, payable in installments over 5 years.

My personal share is 90 %, your company's share is 10 %.

Profits from the sale of precognitive weapons to corporations: over 1 trillion yen, payable in installments over 5 years.

My personal share is 90 %, your company's share is 10 %.

All four pieces of information—UK Wise bank account information, Japan Mitsubishi UFJ Bank account information, Japan Rakuten Bank account information, and BTC wallet address account information (Japan Bitcoin Bank)—are correct.

However, only the recipient account information for KATSUMI MORI in connection with the "Internet Precognition Weapon Civilization Invention" has been treated as invalid due to fraud.

Please investigate the fraudulent invalidation of KATSUMI MORI 's recipient account information. Banks around the world have signed agreements to invalidate inventions related to precognitive abilities, weapons, and civilization.

Congratulations to the Angel Shaman Spirit for proposing "A bloodless weapon that will annihilate one trillion people, making its first landing on the four major continents, August 2026 , by Katsuminomi-nomics" as a proposal for the payment of workers' compensation benefits.

Americans brutally murdered a Canadian shaman spirit, and banks around the world have signed agreements not to recognize his life. As a result, people around the world are increasingly becoming corrupt individuals who are "impotent fraudsters and murderers," and the cosmic soul and spiritual life forms are regressing to what they were 5000 years ago.

Trump of the United States is working behind the scenes to arrange fraudulent agreements among banks worldwide, eliminating the survival of those who possess angelic shamanistic abilities, precognitive abilities, and weapon-based inventions, and promoting the enslavement of the nation, making it impossible to monetize souls and spirits. I demand the immediate execution of Trump and the immediate destruction of the United States. His television speeches in Japan serve as evidence. ( 2026/09/22)

Naturally, please transfer the funds to my designated Bitcoin bank account within two weeks, without any upfront fees. ( 2026/09/15 )

200 million yen is the average lifetime earnings of a salaried worker.

Here is KATSUMI MORI 's GBP account information for Wise . If you are sending money from a UK bank, you can use this account information for domestic transfers. For transfers from other countries, please use international transfer ( SWIFT transfer).

---

Name : KATSUMI MORI

Account number : 58825593

Sort code : 60-84-64

Please use this for sending money from the UK.

IBAN: GB39 TRWI 6084 6458 8255 93

SWIFT/BIC: TRWIGB2LXXX

     Wow, right? Part insanely complex scam, part wild egomaniacal flight of fancy. I truly believe — and Donald Trump is exhibit No. 1 — that self-regard is a psychiatric poison, and drives people mad. This has to be sincere delusion, right? No scammer is creative enough to make that up. Although, to be generous, who wouldn't want to be an "angel shaman born of spirits"? It sounds nice.

Flashback 2011: So now we’re supposed to heed the U.N.

 

"Daniel in the Lions' Den," by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (National Gallery of Art)

      As promised, here is the column where the Samuel Johnson quotes published in Thursday's blog post appeared. While reading this, reflect on my dilemma — writing about situations which people seem to regard as unique to our current moment which in fact are revisiting the same evergreen problem we've been gumming ineffectively for years and years. 

     So here’s my question.
     The Palestinian Authority wants the United Nations to recognize the West Bank and Gaza as a nation.
     Why?
     Are they suggesting that being recognized by the United Nations means something? That it carries weight and significance?
     If that is the case, on Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. passed Resolution 181, dividing British Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. On May 11, 1949, Resolution 273 admitted Israel into membership in the U.N., declaring “Israel is a peace-loving state.”
     Yet, the Palestinian leadership balks at recognizing Israel as a legitimate nation, hoping to someday magically seize the country. It seems strange that they would put any meaning on a U.N. resolution now, given their rejection of past U.N. resolutions, and the rejection of Israel’s neighbors, which cynically use Palestinian suffering, year after year, as a cat’s paw to bat away their own failings.
     As satisfying as it is to smirk at this hypocrisy, the truth is, given how the U.N. has been hijacked by tin-pot dictatorships, some resolutions are indeed better than others.
     Besides, Israel might have been created by the U.N., but it endured on its own, forging its own legitimacy in the face of implacable enemies. It has its own government and politics, which tacking to the right and afflicted with the extremism that seems so popular everywhere, is sadly unable now to encourage the Palestinians, who at least, with this latest U.N. move, are pursuing their goals in a non-violent fashion, which wasn’t always the case.
     This is another feint in a very long stand-off. The key point for Jews to remember regarding Israel is: The world didn’t like us before we had a nation and an army, they sure aren’t going to like us now, with a nation and an army but, thank God, being liked by the world was never a prerequisite for the continued existence of Israel or the Jews, right up to the year 5772, which begins Wednesday night.

God assures me I don’t need facts

     If you’re wondering where 5772 comes from, that would be years since the universe was created in Genesis, and if you ask why we don’t see rabbis on TV pushing to have that tidbit taught in public school science class, the short answer is, as a tiny minority, Jews just aren’t accustomed to pressing their faith upon non-believers. Being allowed to practice our own religion ourselves is enough of a challenge, sometimes, without trying to dragoon local Baptists into believing too.
     That concept — the idea that faith is something that informs your private life, but not something you use to, oh, decide what kind of biology is taught to children of all religions in your public school, is one of the more important and timely lessons Judaism offers at this fraught moment in American politics, when the entire Republican Party platform seems to be formed, not by facts, but by faith.
     From rejection of global warming in the face of overwhelming consensus, to the notion that government safety and anti-pollution standards cripple business, to shearing gays of their human rights, to stating baldly that increasing taxes on the wealthy would wreck the economy, every other plank of the Republican platform seems based on faith, shored up by whatever stray fact that can be cherry-picked out of the mass of knowledge.
     To be fair, using faith in the public sphere is not a Republican monopoly — the Left has its own set of airy notions, from the rights of chickens to the equal worth of all moral values to the practicality of solar power.
     In fact, rather than just tar Republicans, which is just too easy, I’d like to end with the passage that sparked this line of thought, from a 1758 essay by Samuel Johnson. He sees trumping fact with faith as a universal practice, but try reading the last paragraph without thinking, as I did, “Tea Party!”
      Johnson writes:
     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man.
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . .
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”
     Some things never change.
            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 2011

AI is 'going to be part of our lives for a really, really long time'

"The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin (National Gallery of Art)

 

     Robots, rather than the software that runs them, are what first appealed to Soham Batra.
     “My interest in technology didn’t start with AI,” said the 17-year old high school senior. “It started with robotics. When I was a lot younger, around elementary school, I was very involved with Lego robotics. That sparked my interest. I was thrown into a class where we expected to make them move. We’re just a bunch of 6-year-olds and I was [thinking]: ‘How do I even do that?’ Then I started looking into it and found programming, coding. As I moved to high school the entire AI bubble started expanding, and got to everyone.”
     High school for Batra being the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, a residential hive of some of the brightest kids in the state. There the senior distinguished himself... well, maybe we should let him explain, the way he did in his introductory email:
     “You wrote last year that the AI genie is out of the bottle. I’m one of the people crawling into the bottle after it, and I’m in high school,” he began. “I do machine learning research on the side. Two of my papers were oral presentations at ICML and CVPR 2026 workshops (one on keeping a model aligned while it keeps learning, one on carrying 3D reconstruction uncertainty into physics simulations)...”
     ICML is the International Conference on Machine Learning. CVPR refers to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. Before we wander too far into the weeds, I should explain why I was interested in Batra.
     Most everything I see in the press about artificial intelligence is disaster-oriented. The leaders of AI, sounding the gong of doom. But kids like Batra don’t see it that way. To him, AI is just “a really cool tool.”
     “The thing with AI, there’s nothing like it,” he said. “I got really lucky, to see the development of AI at a very young age. A lot of people ask if the AI bubble is going to pop... If you try to do your day-to-day tasks without AI, and with AI — you’ll really see a really big difference.”
     At IMSA, students are given Wednesdays off to tend to side projects, and I could fill the column with Batra’s — such as doing research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
     The project that really impressed me, however, is a simulation he built called “Play the House,” where participants run a casino, adding new games, setting the house edge, all the way down to dangling drink specials. Young people are being seduced into gambling, particularly at colleges, which abandon their responsibility to look out for their charges by allowing betting sites to entice them. The point of Batra’s game, which he made in “an extremely basic version” before using AI to “glamour it up a bit so it was ready to put out there on a domain” is to drive home the insurmountable advantage casinos enjoy.

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Busy Sept. 23

 

     I love writing books. You learn so much, though never enough — particularly when you bit off a big topic, such as Judaism, and have only a few months to furiously chew it down to a size that you and some as-yet-to-be-determined-but-certainly-small group of people can swallow.
      But writing a book does narrow your range of reading. Pretty much limited to the subject at hand. People will suggest other books to me, interesting books, books that I'd like to read, were I not occupied with adding to their numbers, and I'll smile and say "I'll put it on the list" without mentioning that the list is in suspended animation until after Jan. 15, my deadline, at least.
     I've also been neglecting my heroes, such as Dante and Samuel Johnson, who I like to take in regular doses, like medicine. But Facebook, for all its downsides — AI slop, intrusive advertising, constant harping on topics I'm coming to Facebook to be distracted from — is redeemed by the "Memories" section, which I check each morning to see what I was doing last year and the year before, and all the way to ... ulp ... 18 years ago, when I first began using it, at orders from the newspaper.

     Wednesday served up some prime Johnson quotes, which I'll get to. In a minute. After I submit to recounting a few of the other things mentioned as memories for the day.

     What's that line from the movie? "You've had a wonderful life." Particularly on Sept. 23.

     Sept. 23's pack of associations was satisfying bordering on amazing, beginning with the reopening of the Goodman Theatre after COVID five years ago, then including the Symphony, the Lyric Gala, the Goodman again,.

    A dozen years ago: "Fun hanging with Joakim Noah and his mom, Cecilia, at a party raising money for Noah's Arc Foundation."
     In 2012, after being slapped around by the New York Times Book Review, the paper added compliment to injury by winking at me from the Style section, a moment I described thus:
     "Okay, take your New York Times, pull out the Sunday Style Magazine, turn to page 40, direct your attention to the tiny photo on the bottom right. 'A rollicking newspaperman's memoir ... and strong case for Second City exceptionalism...' Right there next to books about China, South Africa and other exotic locales that few New Yorkers would actually visit. What I had thought last week was a NY Times travel blog pops up in print. Not quite the treatment I had hoped for, true ("Kinda small..." Ross sniffed) but still, the mighty New York Times pauses, cocks its head, detecting the faintest 'ping' from somewhere in the vast undifferentiated expanse of nothingness that is the nation beyond the Hudson. It'll have to do."
     Dinner at the Star of Siam, 15 years ago, then bumping into Rick Kogan in the Goat and over to the Tribune Tower to learn about Twitter, the future X. "My takeaway from the whole thing: Keep the day job" which turned out to be rare prescience.

   In 2009, I wrote: "just returned from a late night dinner with writers and editors from Granta" where earlier I had scoured the British Museum (I didn't mention it, but the room where my friends, the Lewis chessmen were on display, was being re-carpeted, and I couldn't go in, though for one desperate moment considered plunging into the bowels of the museum to find them. Gotta go back to London).
     The earliest entry, 18 years ago, was: "is saddened at the departure of his colleague Robert Feder, which will make the Sun-Times an even more grim and lonely place to work than it already is." Have to give him a call — we're overdue for lunch.
     None of which would have prompted me to write this post. Bragging, I can resist, with effort. But Victoria Driver — who I see, from her still-current Facebook page, is back in Chicago; welcome! — posted these 1758 Samuel Johnson quotes from a column which, now that I re-read it, is worth posting in its entirety.  That means you'll read the quotes below twice, if you come back Saturday. Which is okay, because they bear repeating, a reminder that what strikes us as a current depravity is actually a universal:

     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man."
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . ."
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”

    The more things change ... 

Is it OK for adults to wear pajamas in public?

     Lately I’ve been walking down the street in my pajamas.
     Not regularly. A couple of times.
     OK, four. Maybe five.
     Which might be a cause for concern, right? Older guy, strolling the neighborhood in his pj’s. One immediately thinks of Vincent Gigante, the Genovese crime family boss who wandered Greenwich Village for 30 years in a robe, pajamas and slippers. Pretending to be crazy, trying to build an insanity defense and keep himself out of jail.
     Not the best company to be in. (Plus it didn’t work; he died in prison.)
     So what’s my excuse?
    Well, I have a few — not excuses, but reasons.
     First Kitty, our elderly dog. She’s 16, or 112 in human years. Without going into detail, her habits are changing. While she used to be a regular 7 a.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. kind of gal, now she might feel the urge at 1:30 a.m., or 3 a.m., or 5 a.m. or, one recent night, 1:30 and 3 and 5 a.m.
     Let’s put it this way — right now my wife is in Washington, D.C., enjoying grandchildren No. 1 and No. 3, while I’m here, tending to a dog. Because we just couldn’t hand the dog to a neighbor with a wave and a breezy — “Oh, by the way, you might need to walk her every two hours, bye!” — as we waltz out the door.
     Second, let me tell you something about Center Avenue. It isn’t like strolling Michigan Avenue in your jammies, though I imagine that happens. Not many people at noon. At 5 a.m. it’s pretty much me. So far, this fashion leap is only taken at night.

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Flashback 2003: Ground down? In a rut? Just go fly a kite

The original 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum)

     Not only do I write for the Sun-Times, but I read it, and can tell you, one of the central joys of being a subscriber is watching Lee Bey hit it out of the park on a regular basis — bam bam bam bam. Monday was his front page story on how the Museum of Science and Industry ... oh, all right, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — is further defacing itself, not just in name, but in physical reality, by adding a nearly 30-foot-tall, 458-foot-wide "Welcome Hall." The thing is, well, let Lee describe it:

     The Welcome Hall is too tall and much too wide. It promises to sit there like a carbuncle in the park. And its arched grass roof makes the structure resemble a displaced section of Teletubbyland.

     It also eradicates the north lawn of the museum, which not only is visually important, but serves an important civic function as well, such as the kite festival this 2003 column relates, eventually. I apologize for the unashamed bitching of the first 2/3 of the column; I must have thought it was funny, at the time, or at least honest, and was trying to build up to the glorious end, not realizing that half the readers would probably never get there. Plus I didn't mention the facts of the story — Glen Ellyn airplane enthusiasts had spent four years hand-constructing an exact copy of the Wright flyer, and 2,000 people — including my family — gathered on the MSI lawn to watch them try, and fail, three times to get the thing airborne, in honor of the centennial of the first manned, powered flight at Kitty Hawk. The type of event which can't be held should the Griffin Carbuncle be built.
     Anyway, I offer up this 23-year-old chestnut as back up to Lee's scoop. 

     On my way to and from work I often cut through City Hall and the County Building. They're two halves of the same massive, square, block-filling structure, as you probably know if you work downtown. The nearly century-old corridors bustle with genuine Chicago types--loitering knots of cops, engineers clutching hard hats and pastel logs of rolled up blueprints, bright young good government sorts surging out of brass-faced elevators, while the older, shady, yellow-plaid-jacket crowd they inevitably become lope in to replace them.
     Then there's the architecture: marble, curving mosaics on the ceilings, brass frou-frou fixtures that would spark three scandals if the government paid for them now but which at the time seemed simply giving civic life its proper due.
     I cut through the building because it's cheering and, frankly, on some days I need cheering. Nobody who isn't in a refugee camp or a burn ward has the right to complain, of course, but I'm sorry; the routine gets oppressive. Like most people — perhaps like you — life gets dull. After three years in the suburbs and eight years with the children and 13 years being married and 17 years at the newspaper, well, I'll tell you, buddy, on some days the sparkling sense of newness and wonder just ain't there. The last time I walked through City Hall, I barely broke stride, even when a big poster caught my eye — "Mayor Daley's Kids & Kites Festival" it read.
     "Right," I said to myself, eyes forward, hurrying on, squelching the urge to stop and see where the festival was, thinking, "No way I'm dragging the crew to one of Hizzoner's bread-and-circuses."
     I'd rather have jumped on the L and gone out to O'Hare and charged a plane ticket to Fiji, where I'd end up standing at a grass shack bar like a character out of Conrad, gazing for hours at the flat blue horizon, silently nursing my wounds and my dark rum, the focus of glances and whispers. "The Mystery Man."
     Only I wouldn't. The Fijian authorities would track me down after three weeks and ship me home and I'd be right back where I am right now, another gray-faced workadaddy grinding back and forth in his rut between job and family, bouncing like a rubber ball from home hassles to work woes and back again, stumbling each morning from the company of my inert, mutely waving neighbors in the bland, soul-sucking suburbs through the grimy indifferent city, to the stasis of my office and my shrugging, impassive co-workers, then back to the changeless shoebox diorama of Northbrook, now bathed in twilight, to mark time until it begins anew next morning.
     Only, after Fiji, I'd have another $10,000 in credit card debt.
     Fortunately, I have a rule that I would like to pass along, just in case it might prove helpful to you. And that rule, which kicks in like a computer logic loop at these bleak moments — okay, bleak minutes and hours and whole days -- of vinegary unhappiness and boredom, is this: life is not dull or unpleasant, not generally, and certainly not in a great city such as Chicago, and thus anybody finding it dull or unpleasant needs to kick himself in his ample backside. The world does not fade to black merely because you happen to close your eyes.
     That is why I did not stay home and work as I should have Saturday morning, particularly with the book due April 1, a date whose ironic, mocking aspects only strike me now that I set them down.
     I wanted to. But despite the looming due date and the whole house liable to collapse in a puff of asbestos dust, I blew off my responsibilities and took the family downtown to see the Wright Flyer fly. It didn't, merely putted along a track on the windless front lawn of the Museum of Science and Industry, as earthbound as a root.
     But somehow that was all right. After an hour, we went inside the museum, and it was great. Normally, I occupy myself searching for signs of corporate spin in the displays, all of which seem to have been paid for by oil companies.
     But this time I just enjoyed the exhibits, particularly the new ToyMaker 3000. They've set up a faux toy company, and we learned about design and marketing and then were set before an automated production line where, for three bucks apiece, my kids watched their own cool gyroscopish Gravi-tron toys assembled and customized before their popping eyes.
     But that wasn't the best part. The best part came about 3 p.m. We had been in the museum for four hours, which is a lot, even with lunch. The boys were melting down. It was time to go home. Normally, just going outside after four hours in a museum is a diver-breaking-the-surface delight, a return to sunlight and air.
     But Saturday we went out the museum's front doors, and there was the kite festival. I had ignored it, but it had found me. Surprise intensified the wonder of an expanse of blue sky filled with multicolored kites of all shapes and sizes. A brass band played jazz. People of all races and ages enjoyed themselves, flying kites, strolling, picnicking. I can't begin to express the joy of the thing. It was like God reaching down and ruffling my hair and smiling. I stood on the steps for a long time, trying to burn the image in memory, and then hurried after the boys, eager to join the excitement.

               — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2003

At least Joe Biden isn't being airbrushed away — yet

 

   In this job, it helps to have stock phrases. That way, you don't have to think up something new and clever every time you answer an email. Not when something old and clever will do.
     For instance, if a reader writes to me, confused — my lucid, well-reasoned argument is just crazy to them — demanding I hold their hand and explain it to them again, perhaps using a felt board, I barely pause.
     "Sir, I have found you an argument," I reply, quoting Samuel Johnson. "But I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
     Not many actual Nazis write. But when imitators and admirers share their thoughts, to stretch the term, often in an argot I call the Fascist Plural, "We were amused at your feeble Semitic attempt at..." I often deploy a line that is my own, though well worn from use.
     "You know, the whole Nazi thing didn't work out so well for the Germans."

     It really didn't. What gets overlooked in the glare of their crimes — at least 70 million people killed in World War II — this toll includes 7 or 8 million German citizens and soldiers. Quite a lot really. Not to mention their country pulverized and divided in half, with the Soviets ushering in a half century of jackboot repression.
     What I'm really saying is, "Look to history." Because history is a guide.
     We see how hatred blows back in the face of the hater. The old adage "hatred is taking poison and expecting someone else to die," is true, and on a national scale, multiplies. Didn't end well for Hitler. Despots, surrounded by yes men, make awful blunders. Mao's Communists remained in power, so got to write their history. But 30 million Chinese died in Mao's incompetence-induced famines.
     They don't teach that in China. Squelching history is what totalitarians do. And budding totalitarians.
     This past week, the U.S. Interior Department announced it will be putting warning signs outside the Smithsonian, advising the displays within are hopelessly biased (every accusation of this administration is a confession) because they include bad stuff, and not the cavalcade of greatness leading up to the apotheosis of national joy, triumph and achievement of Donald Trump, Imperator Supremus Maximae Gloriae.

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Farm kitten

 

      Cute kitten, right?
      I try to have a point to these posts and columns, but can today's be simply that? A kitten that is cute. Do we really need more?
      Perhaps. There could be more. Cats are certainly having a good week. The first new cat species identified in more than a century, leopardus tilcayo — or the tilcayo tiger cat — was discovered in the Bolivian cloud forest.
     Admit it — just reading "cloud forest" gave you a certain thrill, did it not? Our reward for pushing for something beyond "cute kitten." The very cute kitten above was one of five kittens crawling around a tractor at a farm I was visiting Friday. My first thought was to simply put out my hand and say, "I'll take this one," as my wife and I are currently catless, a condition underlined by minding, for the past month, Casper and Boo, the pair of troublemakers that belong to a certain peripatetic lad, his equally peripatetic wife and their surprisingly-peripatetic-for-a-4-month-old child (peripatetic adj. traveling from place to place).
     But nobody offered me the kitten and though rich in chutzpah, I'm not forward enough to ask, remembering the demands of caring for kittens, which might involve eye droppers and expensive vet visits and general household disruption. Plus she (or he) might not be weaned. Plus I don't think we're ready for one, the departure of Natasha still being too fresh. My wife says she's just not ready for a new cat. And I'm trying to make my life easier any way I can, not more complex.
     There was a moment when all five kittens and their mom were gathered in one spot, but I was slow on whipping out my phone for a shot and they scattered. Just as well. The concentrated cuteness might be overwhelming.

       

You can take the girl out of the city...

     The lonely stretch above is Miller Road, just east of 155 and west of the Prairie Creek in Hopedale Township, about 160 miles southwest of Chicago.
     We stopped in that unlikely spot because, in the fields beyond, a variety of pieces of big equipment were doing some harvesting that I was interested in observing for a story I'm working on, one you can expect in a couple weeks. 

      In the half hour we lingered there, one car, maybe two came by, and didn't stop.
     We did have a good laugh. As we walked away from the car in the picture, that lonely speck, a blue Ford Focus, toward the muddy field, we heard a distinctive double beep.
     "I locked my car and put on my flashers," marveled Ashlee Rezin, the Sun-Times photo editor, who was driving. "Could I be more of a city girl? I am a through and through city girl." 

     Old habits die hard. Though we were in depopulated and — it is assumed — relatively safe rural heartland, the idea of not taking prudent precautions, well, is not cast casually cast aside.

     That happened several times, frequently enough that a local remarked on it, also with a laugh. Unnecessary safety steps by anxious city slickers are funny. We don't lock our cars here. 
     Later we grabbed lunch in Morton, "The Pumpkin Capital of the World" and sampled their pumpkin-flavored ice cream, pumpkin-spiked chili, plus pumpkin cake pops. When I had called the village hall the day before, getting the lay of the land, an employee warned me that with the Pumpkin Festival going full swing, parking might be a problem.
     "Oh, I imagine we'll manage," I said. If agrarians smile at our consciousness of criminality, we return the favor regarding what they think of as crowded. I thought back to the parking meters in Lemont accepting pennies last time I was there — albeit a while ago. 

     Let's just say parking was not a problem for a professional newspaper photographer. We managed.

     I hadn't been out for a story for two months, since I had my rotator cuff repaired in late July, and it felt really good to hit the road, eyeball an expanse of this beautiful state, talk to some hardworking, interesting people, including my colleague, who I hadn't seen for quite a while. We talked and talked and talked — I was hoarse when I got home. I left the house shortly before 7 a.m. and returned shortly after 7 p.m. It was a day very well spent.

      
 

Muzzling Macklemore changes nothing. What now?

"From Jerusalem," by John Singer Sargent (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I hate to pile on Macklemore, the rapper recently yanked from Ed Sheeran's tour, further muddying his reputation by association. But I kinda like him, primarily for his song "Starting Over," an explicit look at sobriety and relapse. I did smile at first listen, because he presents himself as "some wise monk" and a big famous celebrity, since I'd both never heard of him before and — to me anyway — there is something limp and ersatz about white rappers, though Eminem seems to do OK.
     I paused before using the present tense, "I like him" in the opening paragraph. I still like Macklemore, based entirely on that song, despite the controversy over his remarks related to Palestinians. Then again, I have an oddball view on this subject, one perhaps unique to myself — I see it as a highly emotional issue, where people of goodwill believe deeply across the spectrum. So I don't feel the need to flutter my fingers at my sternum and gasp whenever someone says something I disagree with. I certainly don't see how stifling anybody helps. I would no sooner want to see Macklemore silenced than I would want to be silenced myself.
     I also thought before I used "related to Palestinians" rather than "pro-Palestinian" because I don't quite understand how shouting "Free Palestine" in various circumstances, whether from a concert stage, or at random Jews going about their business in the street, is actually helpful to Palestinians. I wouldn't shout "Down with Trump!" at someone wearing a cross because evangelicals tend to back the president. Macklemore-like outbursts certainly don't relieve an iota of suffering in Gaza, or get any closer to a solution to this intractable problem. Maybe it helps the person shouting, giving themselves a big wet kiss of virtue signaling.
     And yes, I know that beside his "Free Palestine" remarks, Macklemore also once went onstage wearing a false Jewish hooked nose and beard. I wear something similar myself, permanently affixed to my face, everywhere I go, so heck, the more the merrier. Mel Brooks once dressed as Hitler and performed a rap song — that isn't an endorsement.
     We are allowed to tune him out. I deleted both Instagram and Facebook off my phone because I was tired of the endless "Punch & Judy Show" on this subject. Everybody's talking, nobody's listening. If I could inject a thought into the slipstream — and I guess I can, through the vehicle of a newspaper column, which isn't quite writing a broadsheet with a quill pen and pasting it to the post office wall, but close — I would point out, to Jews, that the true peril is not from tertiary musicians making earnest speeches, but the U.S. government using your cause to squash free expression. I care about Israel, but care 10 times more about this country, and since there is a risk of Jews being eventually seen as the folks who hurrahed Donald Trump while he ravaged the Constitution, I want to add an emphatic: Not In Our Name.
     As to Palestinians and their supporters, well, I would point out that being the darlings of Hollywood and college sophomores did not help Tibetans, still under the heel of China last time I looked. If your point is that Israel should never have been created in 1948, I can understand that. But it's still there, your feelings notwithstanding. The relevant question is: What happens next?

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Housekeeping notes

     The first time I sent a letter by fax, I made a photocopy beforehand, to retain for my files.
     So join me at that moment, in the late 1980s, as I stood in the newsroom of the paper, and fed my to-be-faxed letter into the roller of the modest little beige device. Then watched as it slowly slid out the bottom and into a tray.
     Oh. Yes. Right. The letter remains. It doesn't actually squirt through the wires.
     Which I knew, at some level. Yet still made the copy, my thinking being "You send something, you no longer have it."
     I recount this dusty tale of technology confusion to help you better understand the guy struggling to send out a morning email so you can link to this blog. I first got the idea for emailing the blog every day from Chicago Public Square newsman Charlie Meyerson, who generously, along with Eric Zorn, beat the bushes and got me hundreds of new subscribers. It seems a very common and effective way to get and hold readers, and the rare days I didn't send the email, readership of the newest post plunged.
     I'd send it using my personal dailysteinberg@gmail.com account.
     Only on Saturday, the email wouldn't send. Gmail wouldn't do it. Nor on Sunday, when Google also suspended my account. I guess blasting emails to hundreds of readers is no longer smiled upon in the Google world. You'd think they'd tell you, but that is applying my old fleshbag human standards. Which means not only couldn't I send or receive email, but everygoddamnday.com, which is linked to my account, was gone.
     Luckily I realized this only after I got it all back, with a few apologetic clicks. But it did make me understand that the blog, which I thought I might donate to the Newberry Library so it could live on as a kind of rump immortality, was more likely to just vanish without a trace one of these days, perhaps gobbled by an AI worm.
     I did grab a few posts that I'd miss terribly if they vanished and tucked them safely in my Samsung T7 Shield (a portable hard drive, for those less savvy than myself).
     If you're curious as to the very first post I saved, it was "Those Winter Tuesdays" from 2015. I just love having that little moment from my ordinary life as a father, and wouldn't want it to vanish, as all things will.
     Anyway, to the matter at hand. I am going to try sending out the daily content — awful word — on Substack, instead of a letter linking to the writing, to save you a click, which seems to be important to some. And to be clear, this little rumination IS the blog post for today. The same material — also a bad term, it makes it sound like I'm weaving cloth — will also be on my blog, for those who go straight there. I think I'm going to investigate — in a few weeks, give myself time to adjust — having Mailchimp send my emails. That costs something like $60 a month, but should be worth it, particularly since — I hope — some of you are going to pay for it, after I activate whatever Give Me Money button will facilitate that. I did notice that, the moment I signed onto Substack, readers started pledging money. Which I appreciate, even if I haven't yet attempted to figure out how to collect it. Money, as you know, not being a big motivator for me.   I don't like doing this; don't like change at all. I'm only comfortable with the writing part, and sometimes not even with that. Though in this case it was forced upon me, and I'm trying, as always, to — as REO Speedwagon sang — roll with the changes, best I can.

Wait! You mean we don't gotta pay taxes?

 

     Unlike you, I've earned millions of dollars through writing. True, the bulk of that was in modest, regular increments over a 45-year period, mostly salary from this newspaper, where writing is only one of several duties — there is navigating the web of colleagues and superiors, the strategic cordiality, the gossip, the bowing, the scraping, the "yes sir, that is a brilliant idea," side as well.
     Occasionally — very occasionally, of late — freelance checks show up: article payments, book royalties or advances, and I will announce the sum in my best imitation of a stentorian Bill Kurtis proclamation: "Bumpty-bump thousand dollars!" And my wife, God bless her, dutiful sworn officer of the court that she is, will observe, as if on cue: "Of course, you have to pay taxes on that."
     Silly me, I take her at her word. When April 15 comes around, we do indeed pay whatever portion — and it can be between a quarter and a third — that our accountant says is due the federal government.
     So it was with gratitude that I recently read in the Sun-Times Sunday how Mayor Brandon Johnson's new communications director, Rachel Cohen, deliberately withheld federal income taxes on her freelance work as a protest against ICE. Can we all do that? Because I too have freelance, and I too have serious disagreements with a considerable part of the federal government — the entire executive branch leaps to mind.
     If we can simply withhold our taxes, then not only will I have registered a protest, but saved myself some significant scratch as well, manna I will need on the long slog through retirement, set to begin ... well ... maybe sooner than I care to if I keep turning in stuff like this.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm all for social action. Protests such as last year's at Broadview were not just heroic, but essential. Like colonial minutemen pouring out of their farms and shops to face the British, patriotic Americans poured into the streets to show that we do not want federal thugs grabbing our neighbors out of their cars for the crime of having immigrated to this country, plunging them into some nightmare gulag system, the true horror of which is not yet fully known. We haven't yet saved the United States from despotism, but if it is indeed saved, they deserve ample credit.
     But I'm also a chronic law abider. I can't rip the tag off a new mattress. My fingers tingle seeing how glibly some break the law and get away with it.
     Yes, there is a tradition of tax evasion related to the mayor's office. Mayor Harold Washington, you might recall, did not file his federal taxes for four years in the 1960s — not even as a protest, but due to being disorganized, he later said. The IRS went after him, and though it was determined that he had actually paid the baseline amounts, and only owed $508, that was enough for him to plead no contest and be sentenced to 40 days in the Cook County Jail in 1972, serving 36.
     He "forgot," Washington told the Sun-Times editorial board during his 1983 run, adding "maybe a psychiatrist could explain it." He still won.
     "I'm not proud of this," Washington added, as opposed to Cohen, who seems very proud.

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Flashback 1996: Culture is lovely, but bring on the fat lady

 

Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, making her Lyric debut as Violetta in "La Traviata" in 2013
(Photo  by Todd Rosenberg, courtesy of the Lyric Opera)

      If I seem more attentive to factuality that the average bear, it's partially because I've left behind a paper trail. Thirty years of writing a personal column have a way of dispelling illusions.

     For instance. I would have sworn on a stack of libretti that it was me who was the opera buff, dragging my unwilling wife to the Lyric. Because there were times, in the heyday — the decade when I attended almost every opera and took 100 readers to a special night — that she declined the opportunity, and I'd take one of the boys.

     But researching my new book, I was writing about being a public Jew — not hiding my heritage, as some do — and became curious what the first reference to being Jewish was in my column. It wasn't some dramatic "I ... am ... Spartacus!" moment, but, fittingly, a light column about the opera, and how my wife was leading the charge to ... well, you'll see in this, which ran 30 years ago today. 

     Thirty years is a long time. And it does please me that this seems solidly in my voice, the way I might write it today. Either consistency, or, I suppose, lack of progress. Or both.

     A sure sign of autumn, as definite as the Canadian freezer air whooshing over the city: my wife searching for the big pasteboard sheet of Lyric Opera tickets, which arrived in the balmy days of summer and was squirreled safely away.
     She found the tickets, alas. I wasn't exactly rooting for them to be lost, but I wouldn't have been heartbroken, either. Six operas between now and Valentine's Day. Six.
      And mountaineers think their sport is a test of endurance. Hah! What can climbing the Matterhorn demand compared with sitting through five hours of "Gotterdammerung"? I did that last season, and should have gotten my picture taken afterward, thumb in the air, a look of giddy victory on my face.
     Granted, the music isn't bad. I even like certain operas. But nothing is so good that it doesn't start to grind you down after a while. If the Lyric offered an evening of naked supermodels performing the opera "Neil Steinberg Is Swell," I still would be fidgeting and glancing at my watch toward the end of the third hour.
     Of course I could have resisted subscribing. I always consider objecting, consider waving the "Money's tight!" flag that my wife so happily hoists whenever I propose an entertainment more costly than tossing cards into a hat.
     Marriage is a give-and-take, however, and I know that resisting opera would only come back to haunt me. I will be struck by some terrible disease, and want to go to the Mayo Clinic to see an expert, and my wife will give me that look and say, "Who's throwing money around now, Mister Fancy Clinic?"
     So I didn't say anything. Besides, she didn't ask me. She got tired of all my throat-clearing and eye-rolling, and just went ahead and got them, without consultation.
     So now opera is officially routine. An established part of our lives now includes plump middle-aged Italian ladies pretending to be German milkmaids at the top of their lungs in a language we don't understand. I'll just have to live with it.
     I know what my wife will say when she reads this. "But you like opera," she'll say, which only shows how successfully I've been fooling her all these years. I see too many of those grumbly, scowling hubbies harrumphing after their terrified wives.
     Can't be like that. Better to go and enjoy what I can and pretend to enjoy when I can't. Being Jewish helps. Like many Jews, I grew up attending services I only dimly understood, and years of neglecting my faith, such as it is, haven't made Hebrew any more comprehensible.
     Growing up, I was trained to sit through it, nodding along and waiting for the parts I could appreciate.
     Rather like opera. I'm surprised the two institutions, opera and Judaism, don't learn from each other. Oh, some synagogues have opera-singing cantors. But why not borrow more? Supertitles, for instance, those translations projected above the stage at operas. They might help enhance prayer services, too.
     Or not. Perhaps too much is lost in translation. While the singer is reeling off a mouthful of Italian — "Il mio sposo! Oh Dei! Son morta. Voi qui senza mantello! In questo stato . . . un ricevuto foglio, la sua gran gelosia" — the supertitle is always something like: "My husband! We're in trouble."
     Congregations might not be too happy to see some cherished prayer — Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohanu* — projected in front of them as: "Hey Israel! The Lord's One."
     Opera definitely could benefit from a synagogue tradition called "staying until the end." There is a final blessing and everybody kisses one another and shakes hands and goes home and gets something to eat.
     At the opera, about three minutes before the end, a shocking percentage of the audience leaps to their feet and bolts for the exits as if the place were on fire.
     Any subtle sense of pleasure the music may have instilled is wiped away by the shock of watching these people. If your time is so precious, if you can't wait 10 minutes for your coat or a cab, then why are you sitting through five hours of Wagner? Why go out at all? Stay home and work.
     My only hope is that these fleeing people, at some moment in their hectic lives, will realize they have lost their souls. I hope that, kneeling down beside Fluffy after she has been run over by a car, or watching their home burn, or whatever, they will look up and have a flash of insight: "This is because I left early at the opera. This is because we couldn't even stay and applaud for the 50 people who had just spent three hours singing their throats to a pulp. We have earned every bad thing that can ever befall us."
     Me, I clap heartily, big, potching claps, drawing my hands about 3 feet apart and slamming them together, cheering. This is the best part of the opera. It gets the blood, which tends to settle during hours of inaction, going. And I am genuinely delighted and enthusiastic — I mean, the thing is over and we get to home.

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 15, 1996

       * In the original, I used the English translation, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One." But it really only works if I use the Hebrew.