We were slaves, now we're free, or at least reasonable

     The second night of Passover is a bit more informal than the first in our family—the Seder not quite as long, not quite as thorough.  Jews don't always hold two Seders a year, but we do, for obscure religious reasons too uninteresting to be worth explaining. The second night is still pretty much a reply of the first. We gather around the Seder table to eat and drink—well, everyone else drinks, I take it sober, as is my fashion: in fact, Saturday will be my 20th Seder lubricated only on grape juice. 
     So stop whining about how long the meal is; it could be worse. Though to be honest, I think I have a better time now than I did back then. Four cups of wine were never enough.

    I wrote this piece just before my first on-the-wagon Seder, and I think it set the proper tone for the ones to come. If Jews ran TV commercials for the faith—and we should, everyone else does, maybe people wouldn't hate us so much—the one for Passover would mimic those "What's in your wallet?" TV commercials, except the punch line would be "What's enslaving YOU?" Because we all are enslaved by something, trying to strike our chains off, or keep them off. Anyway, here's hoping you have a happy holiday, free of whatever it is you need to free yourself from. 

     Much of religion is rote -- going through the obligatory motions, mumbling prayers you neither understand nor believe (oh no, I don't mean you -- you of course are the alpha and omega of sincerity, speaking from your heart with a perfect faith, pausing only to note the murmurs of approval from a grateful Lord God Almighty . . .)
     Where was I? Most religion is rote. Which is why I love Passover so much. Passover -- which begins tonight -- is no dry routine, no hazy abstract construct. The Exodus was real. We were really slaves in the land of Egypt,* and now we are free.
      Nor have the centuries dulled its timeless message -- look up from your muddy brick-making, cast off your chains, whatever they are, turn your face toward grace. Ask yourself: what in my life enslaves me? Who are my task masters? And where is the wrong that, as a free man, I can help correct?
     Seders adapt to the times, or should -- in the 1970s, we included the Jews imprisoned in the Soviet Union. This year, there is a big effort to recognize the genocide in Darfur, because even though the victims aren't Jewish, they are victims, and as such warrant our prayers and our action. Because so few cared when it was us.
     I'll bring the Darfur material tonight -- there's a ton of it on-line if you are interested. Nobody will roll their eyes or tap their watches. I'm lucky, because at our Seder, people actually pause to ask questions, to discuss, and generally behave as if there were a purpose to the gathering beyond just dropping their snouts into the chow.
     If you are not so fortunate, then you must lead the way. Just this once, as an experiment, slow down. Listen to the Exodus, one of the most thrilling and beautiful tales ever written. The food won't go anywhere. Take time to remember how you -- yes, you Mr. Harvey Finkleman -- were once strangers in a strange land. . . .

    ——Originally published in the Sun-Times April 12, 2006

* Readers pointed out, after this ran, that there is no historical evidence whatsoever, outside of the Bible, that the Jews ever were enslaved in Egypt, never mind that they exited in such a dramatic fashion. Which is curious because the ancient Egyptians were crazy for record keeping. Maybe the evidence is slumbering among the wall rubbings tucked away in some back drawer at the Oriental Institute. But nobody has found it yet. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Last year, you guys really impressed me by nailing the location of a certain horsy bookshelf. Here, I'll reprint the photo. I'll delay saying where it is, so those who missed it the first time can see if they'd have any idea. Someone did.

    
I was researching a story in another office last month, and noticed some similarly distinctive books from a vastly different field. Take a look.

    And since, at heart, I'm pulling for you guys to solve this, and these books could be more places than the ones atop, which were ... here it comes ... at Wagner Farm in Glenview, I'll post a better look at that lower shelf, to help narrow the location.

    Okay, that should do it. This is obviously a medical facility, but which one? Where IS this?  
     The winner receives one of my ultra-collectable, beautifully-designed-if-I-say-so-myself, official signed and numbered blog posters, which look like this, and are also for sale, for the reasonable price of fifteen dollars, if you despair of ever winning, or just want to throw some money my way. 

   Please place your guesses below. Good luck. 

Happy Passover and/or Easter

     Good Friday falls on the first night of Passover this year.
     Or, if you prefer Passover begins on Good Friday. 
     Whichever one comes first in your world, their overlap is fitting, as these holidays are when the two great Abrahamic faiths draw closest to one another.
    "Nowhere is the relationship between Judaism and Christianity better demonstrated than in the comparison of Easter with Passover," writes Jack Santino, a scholar of  holidays at Bowling Green University. 
     He points out many Christians consider the Last Supper a Seder and Christians increasingly hold Seders themselves—president Obama holds one at the White House every year (which, if you are of the alarmingly large minority of conservatives, might instead count as a Muslim holding a Seder). Meanwhile Jews will invite Christians to join them at their Seders, something I've done myself, first warning that it is a meal that begins by dipping celery in salt water and ends, six hours later, by singing a song about a goat.
     I could fill the column with examples. Eggs are big in Easter, being dyed or cast in chocolate, and in Passover, appearing on the Seder plate, gobbled by the bowlful—reminders us that religion can be a binding force, or it could be a separating force.
     The idea that we all our united by the commonalities of our religions generally sits waiting on the sidelines while a far more popular, far more energetic tradition—push your religion in the face of others—is given full play. We've been seeing this in the frenzy over "religious freedom laws," which are not designed to make sure you're free to be just as loving as your faith dictates, but rather to allow small business owners to better shun the people they've traditionally despised, using what they consider religious justification to do so.
     I heard from a representative of the Thomas More Society this week, asking me if I wanted to talk about Thursday evening's erection of a 19-foot cross in Daley Plaza to mark Easter.
     My initial reaction was, "And you want to talk to me?" But, getting in the spirit of the season, instead I said, "Sure."
     "There's a legal background to this," began Tom Brejcha, founder of the society, a public interest law firm, explaining how the organization was formed out of the legal struggle to keep a Nativity scene on Daley Plaza, after the ACLU objected to the fact that, even though a tradesman's union paid for the tableau, the city stored it and assembled it which put City Hall in the celebration of religion business.
     A valid point?
     "The idea is free speech," Brejcha said. "They have political rallies. All variety of expression. I watched Bill Clinton give a talk there once. So its a traditional public forum, with the government's role as a neutral gatekeeper We have a Constitutional right."
     I told Brejcha: when I pass Daley Plaza at Christmastime, and see the displays—their life-sized Nativity scene, tooth-by-jowl with that brutish steel Menorah plus whatever star and crescent the Muslims add, and a wan, really-is-this-the-best-you-can-do spindly red "A" set up by the atheists—I do not think, "Ah, the glory of belief manifesting itself through the miracle of free speech in the public square." Rather it seems a sad pissing contest that diminishes them all, led by Christians hot to thrust their symbolism into the heart of nondenominational government, and the other faiths following along, sheeplike, with a wan cry of "Hey, we're here too!"
     "It should start a lot of discussion," he said. "I urge people to look at the secular significance of Easter, the second chance," he said. (I should probably plump Passover, with its emphasis on freedom from slavery though, now that I examine them together, the two concepts aren't really that different).
     But shouldn't government build roads and levy taxes and keep itself a neutral space free of professions of faith? Aren't we hurtling toward a Daley Plaza filled with crosses and giant matzo balls and three-story Baal deities with red eyes and curling horns, while inconvenienced pedestrians try to thread their way through all this monolithic symbolism?          

     Wouldn't it be easier to leave that to our respective houses of worship?
     "That was part of the Protestant approach, to make it more private," he said. "I'm a lawyer, I believe in free speech, the role of government is to protect the speaker."
     He reminded me of the May 1 gatherings of anarchists on Daley Plaza. If they get to present their vision of a lawless chaos—and I agree they should—then why not mark the resurrection of Jesus?
     He must be a good lawyer, because while I couldn't quite say I agree with him, I stopped disagreeing.
     Santino, by the way, in his very useful book, All Around the Year, points out something about Easter I didn't know. That Protestants call the night of the last supper "Maundy Thursday."
     "Maundy is a corruptionn of mandate because on Thursday of that week, Christ proclaimed an new commandment, that we should all love one another," he writes. "Maundy is a corruption of mandate from the Latin Dies Mandati, Day of the Mandate, in recognition of this new commandment."
     It's true: John 13:34. ""A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
     Wow, why can't  more people emphasize that? It sure would have saved Indiana a lot of heartache this week.

We're not on the savannah anymore

     This was in the paper Wednesday, but I held it so I could run my April Fool's Day puppet extravaganza instead (for readers who were excited about Puppetry Month, who shared the post with friends in breathless anticipation, my humble apologies. You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs). 
     Which means I've had the chance to dip my hand into the septic stream of confused prejudice that runs through the mind of certain conservatives. When reading this, ask yourself: "Where's the part I would violently object to?" Then check back on Sunday, I'll run a few comments from those who were sputtering in anger over this, so you can marvel at them too. 

     Perhaps a review is in order.
     Ten thousand years ago, humans lived in tribes—extended families really. A useful system for, say, hunting woolly mammoths and battling other tribes for scarce resources.    
     You stuck with your tribe, painted yourself blue like they did, hunted with the men, if you were man, gathered with the women if you were a woman.
     And the millennia rolled by.
     Meanwhile, trying to figure out the vast, lush, complicated, brutal, world they found themselves in, with its twirling cosmos and whirling seasons, these tribes formed all sorts of faiths, worshipping trees, rivers, the sun. Doing so gave them a way to understand existence, plus provided rituals and traditions to embroider their brief lives with meaning.
     The mammoths died out. Food was often scarce. Some ancestors discovered they could stack the hunting/gathering deck by raising animals and planting crops. The tribal unit still worked. But with the abundance that agriculture was kicking off, people had time to build cities. Suddenly various families congregated all in the same place, but that was okay, you were all Carthaginians, or Florentines, or whatever. People still felt duty toward their families, but now you could get in trouble putting their interests above your city's.
     And the centuries rolled by.
     Religion got complicated. Worshipping plants was old school. Jehovah was a beefier deity than a tree. Then Jesus showed up. And Mohammad.
     I won't burden you with the formation of countries, but form they did. Then 250 years ago, a dangerous notion got loose: people were not just the pawns of kings, but had their own inherent autonomy and worth, "a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as Thomas Jefferson put it. Think of that concept as a virus. The Founding Fathers let it escape, because it was supposed to help them, to help rich white Virginia planters justify their treason against the British crown. It did. But it also spread.
     And the decades rolled by.
     Those for whom it was never intended started to imagine this liberty thing, which worked so well for white guys, should also apply to others, who sometimes weren't even considered human--say black slaves. Or women, who not only couldn't vote, but couldn't own property.
     Two generations ago (!) in the 1960s, black people had to lead American society through the difficult process of accepting them as full citizens, who could vote and eat at lunch counters and everything. That process continues, obviously, with the effort to encourage police not to kill them unnecessarily. This generation, the past 25 years, has seen the journey duplicated by gay people, who started pushing hard for society to care that AIDS was killing them, then shifted to civil rights, causing this surprising general collapse of bigotry against them, thanks to marriage.
     Underline "general."
     And the years rolled by.
     But old ways linger. Some tribes hunted to the last mammoth in the shadows of the growing cities.  Not everyone can adapt to new ways. That is what we're seeing in Indiana, with it's laughable "religious freedom" law. The confusion is palpable. The Republican business owners and Gov. Mike Pence were truly gobsmacked by the general outcry over their bit of legislated bigotry, a law found sleeping in the books in half the states.  Religion, which was such a unifying force a thousand years ago, which worked so well in the Crusades, now commands the more tribal Hoosiers, ordering them to harass gay people (though the opposite is actually what is occurring: the desire to oppress comes first, the religion, seized as a convenient club). They passed a law because they thought they could get away with it. And five or 10 years ago, they could.
     But not now. The modern world says: you put your Mastercard down; if it clears, you get cake. There isn't room for the baker to squint and decide not to give you cake because he doesn't like you. That unravels the whole system because we all have our dislikes. This isn't either disrespect for religion or particular affection for gays; it's an acknowledgement that the world changes, and if faith didn't change too, we'd still be praying to trees. Progress is sporadic, and there's always that poor guy who shows up to the battle with a club when the other side has swords. That's Indiana, decked in feathers, armed with a pointed stick, and put to flight by those who could change. Don't feel too bad for them. Some part will get with the program, late, and some smaller fragment, clinging to tradition, will dab on their war paint and find another savannah to make their stand. They always do.

April is Puppetry Month

     The beauty of a blog is that you are flexible. We don't have to chase after popular trends, or the news of the day, or what some people consider "interesting." Rather, one can pause from the hustle and the bustle of this hustling, bustling world and focus on what is truly important, unencumbered by extraneous demands of bosses and the fickle marketplace. 
     Perhaps the most well-received feature I've had on Everygoddamnday.com was last January when, in conjunction with the Chicago International Puppetry Theater Festival, I presented seven full days of Puppetry Week, and like to think that I participated in the festival's success, and, indeed, consider myself responsible for it. 
     Some readers, true, groused a little, at first, before they got into the spirit of the thing and became enthusiastic, nearly. The overwhelming response was positive. 
    "Very good article! We are linking to this particularly great content on our website. Keep up the good writing. Also visit my webpage," wrote one reader. "Just want to say your article is as surprising. The clarity in your post is just cool and i can assume you're an expert on this subject," wrote a second. "It is in point of fact a nice and useful piece of info. I am glad that you shared this useful information with us. Please keep us informed like this," gushed a third. 
   Well, you get the idea. Given the reader demand, and my own inexhaustible interest in the history, lore, science and philosophy of the puppetic arts, not to mention the National Puppetry Festival, which is coming this August,  I felt morally obligated to designate all of April as Everygoddamnday.com's 1st Annual Puppetry Month. 

Icelandic puppet

     As for those who wonder if there are enough puppet-related stories to fill a month, believe me, the challenge was to limit myself to only 30 posts.  As my Facebook friends know, Edie and I visited Brúðuheimar, or the Centre for Puppet Arts in West Reykjavik in February,  and so I'll kick off Puppetry Month with a bang with three days on Icelandic puppetry, including an interview with Bernd Ogrodnik, the center's founder and master puppeteer of the National Theater of Iceland. The first week will be rounded out with looks at the exciting puppetry being done in the three Scandinavian nations: Finland, Norway and Sweden. 
    Then from overseas to our home of Chi-town, focusing on the vibrant local puppetry scene. First the recent controversy at the Chicagoland Puppetry Guild related to whether marionettes should be said to have "strings" or "lines"—I'll call it as I see it!—plus profiles on significant Chicago puppeteers, both of today and in years past. 

    I should also point out—and this is a complete coincidence, I assure you—but Every goddamn day is proud to be sponsored through the generosity of The Puppet Store, the Internet's premiere puppet location, with a full line of glove puppets, full/half body puppets, marionettes and realistic animal puppets, plus puppet accessories, including the hard-to-find puppet wheelchair. I hope you will turn to them for all your puppetry needs. You can access their web site by clicking here. 
    Later in April, there will be backstage visits to Opera in Focus, the marionette opera in Rolling Meadows, plus lots of other surprises. Take a look at the entire month's schedule. Thanks everybody, as we set off on our puppeterrific adventure together!

Back away from the horseradish

    Yes, that was me digging my thumbnail into a horseradish root at the supermarket Sunday, covertly bringing the nail to my lips, and tasting the crescent of white root material thereby excavated.  
    Which supermarket? Several. Trying to find the elusive Root of Extreme Hotness.
     Because, frankly, the entire Passover Seder, the Four Questions, the Story of the Exodus from Egypt, the Four Cups, Chad Gad Yad, everything, is shot to hell if the horseradish isn't hot enough. I always make the horseradish, the way I always make the stuffing, but this year my sister-in-law, well, something came over her, and while we were having coffee, she came up from behind and triumphantly shoved an open jar of HER homemade horseradish under my nose. She didn't have to say, "Smell how hot that is!" She didn't have to say, "Are your eyes watering from the incredible firepower of my horseradish or are you just weeping in defeat?" She didn't have to say, "So you can leave the family anytime you want because we really don't NEED you for anything anymore." 
     But the message was clear. 
    Okay, last year it was a mild crop of horseradish. Mine was not the throat-closing, eye-watering,howl-to-heaven that good horseradish should be. I'm sorry. 
    I guess another man would say, "Oh, you made horseradish? That's good. One less responsibility that I don't have to worry about."
     I am not that man. There are very few traditions in my life. Me and my buddies do not go to Las Vegas on my birthday to whoop it up. I don't greet the spring in my special fishing spot or return to Paris every two years to sit at cafes. I'm like Arnold Schwarzenegger pushing that grist mill in "Conan the Barbarian." I write stuff and that's about it. So making horseradish, I'm sorry, is my idea of fun. I'm not letting anyone take that away from me.
     Plus it's a tribute to my late father-in-law, Irv Goldberg, who taught me how to make horseradish. Maybe that's why my sister-in-law is so hot to grab the responsibility from me. It's a jealousy thing. Though if you read the following, you'll see that, well, as Horace said, "Sometimes even noble Homer nods." I'm planning to grind the stuff Thursday night, and if I have to add battery acid to give it the proper oomph, well, so be it. I'll let you know.
    This column from 1999 will explain how I was initiated into the sacred rites.

     Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle sounds lofty, but all it really means is that things are affected just by watching them. It's hard to understand when it comes to distant stars or flitting atoms -- how can they be influenced just by being looked at or measured? It doesn't make sense, at least not to me.
     The principle is easier to grasp if you think of taking a photograph. Your family can be sitting around, laughing, natural, casual as can be. Then you whip out a camera to record the moment and suddenly everybody stiffens up, awkward, smiling tightly, hands hanging limply at their sides.
     I don't know how stars or atomic particles mug for the camera, but apparently they do.
     Which is my roundabout way of saying that I'm afraid the horseradish won't be as hot this year at our Seder table because I watched it being made.
     For a number of years I had been dropping hints that I'd like to be inducted into the secrets of my father-in-law's horseradish, which each Passover is delivered to the Seder table amid gasps of pain and praise. Those hints had been ignored. Perhaps there was a grim implication in the request. Maybe I just wasn't deemed worthy.
     Anyway, last week, the message came: "Sunday morning. 10:30. He's making the horseradish." That was all. Nobody asked whether I could make it or not. The opportunity was presented. I wondered whether the odd hour was chosen for the same reason Professor Leopold used to hold his coveted international relations class at 8 a.m. -- to help weed out slackers.
     I should introduce my father-in-law, Irv Goldberg, at this point. I don't write about him much, out of pure cowardice on my part. He's a solidly built man in his early 70s who doesn't suffer fools gladly, but tolerates me because I'm married to his daughter and raising two-sevenths of his grandchildren. He drove a tank in World War II, painted a big peace sign on his roof in the 1960s to the horror of his neighbors in Bellwood, and owned a metal tube bending business. I assume he had machines to bend the metal tubes, but I'm not certain.
      I arrived five minutes early. The process was just about to begin. Two horseradish roots -- they looked like the top half of a leg bone of a very large man -- were laid out on newspapers on the table outside. Hint One: prepare the horseradish outside, to cut down on weeping.
     The horseradish was peeled and chopped into chunks. The chunks were fed into a food processor. (Food processors redeemed the Jewish people in a way not seen since Moses, considering the number of Jewish foods -- horseradish, potato latkes, chopped liver -- that require laborious grating).
     But not too much. I was struck by how briefly he ran the processor. I would have pulverized the chunks until they were puree. Hint Two: Don't. Just the barest shredding, then flip the blade around to cut up the shreds. You want texture to the horseradish, not gruel.
     Next, wine vinegar, plus salt and water. I can't tell you the proportions. Nothing was measured. Irv said it was 60 percent vinegar to 40 percent water, but I couldn't really tell. The salt was poured directly from the big blue container -- less salt than more, I figure.
     The result was not the explosive, grab your throat and die horseradish of years past. We were both a little shocked at this. I think it has to do mostly with the horseradish root itself, the growing conditions and such. But it might have been me. You see, my father-in-law usually washes the horseradish root with steel wool. But this year, in consideration of the presence of a journalist, he went out and bought a vegetable brush. Who can tell how the lack of microscopic steel wool remnants affects the taste? So from tiny atoms to distant stars to the horseradish you ladle on your gefilte fish, the Uncertainty Principle rules: You watch it, you change it.
                         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 25, 1999

We admire pilots; the mentally ill, less so

    
      "As I was at 5," Tolstoy wrote, "so I am today." Which I mention only to add a bit of literary heft to the following admission, which otherwise might seem humiliatingly juvenile.
     Airline pilots sometimes stay at the Holiday Inn in the Sun-Times Building (which sounds so much better than saying the Sun-Times is located under a Holiday Inn, though I suppose it's a matter of perspective).
     They're always getting out of town cars and buses, handsome in their sharp uniforms, toting their special pilot luggage. On my way into the office I see them and think, "Ooo, a pilot" with the same eagerness I did as a small boy flying Pan Am to New York City. I'd hurry up to one and ask for a pair of official pilot's wings, but he'd look at me strangely and, at 54, I've finally learned restraint.
     So I think well of pilots. Most people do We trust pilots, literally, with our lives.
      In a 2013 survey of the most trusted professions, pilots were No. 2, after firefighters, with 86 percent of the respondents expressing confidence in them (for comparison purposes, newspaper reporters scored 21 percent in a Gallup poll taken about the same time, but remember, when discussing journalism, experts insist there is a "multiple by 5" rule which means the public actually trusts reporters 105 percent).
     So in the wake of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who crashed Flight 9525 into the Alps last week, killing himself and 149 other people, nobody is going to react, "Fuckin' pilots! Always killing folk."
     Yet we need to understand this, or try to, though I sometimes suspect by "understanding" we mean find a convenient label to slap over the tragedy so we can more easily forget it. So we grasp at stuff.
     Islamic fundamentalism is the Type O universal donor to explain such situations. Happens enough that we accept it as a cause. A copy of the Qu'ran, a name with a lot of fricatives and we'd be home free. But that doesn't seem the case here. The "German" aspect is a possibility—"those Germans, they do like their mass murder...." Nope, his being a pilot draws him into the realm of BMW engineers in white coats. It's not like he was some skinhead from Bavaria.
     Lubitz being 27 has potential: these kids nowadays.... no, plenty of responsible 27-year-olds who don't slaughter those in their care.
     Which leaves mental illness, and there are indications, which the press latched onto, politely with the mainstream media, not so much with the tabloids.
      "WHY ON EARTH WAS HE ALLOWED TO FLY?" the Daily Mail howled, under "Suicide pilot had a long history of depression."
     Which I noticed when the depressed started passing it around Twitter.
     "I have a long history of depression," Londoner Juliette Burton wrote. "Should I not be allowed to drive? Work? Contribute?"
     She has a point. Though it took me a while to grasp it. Twitter encourages immediate reply, not careful thought. Others chimed in: "Glad the Germanwings coverage isn't descending into harmful, misleading hysteria," wrote GlobalNews' Anna Mehler Paperny.
     My gut reaction was: is it? The guy flew his plane into a mountain. "Why on earth was he allowed to fly?" seems a question well worth positing. I tweeted back that this is just the media trying to explain why this happened. Maybe I was being a low-esteem journalist defending his kind. Even as I did, I knew instantly where she was coming from: if Depression=Murder then we'd all be dead, in the same way that if Muslim=Terrorist, we'd all be dead.
     "Blaming depression isn't 'explaining.' It's irrelevant," another Canadian chimed in. "Did he also have a dog and like Cheerios at breakfast?"
     The best path is probably somewhere between the media blaming depression and sufferers leaping to dismiss it. By Sunday the press was discussing Lubitz's eye problems, and as someone who has worn glasses since he was 6, it bothered me not at all. If you look to the news for self-validation, you're already in trouble, no matter what the headlines say.