Why stop at the 10 Commandments? Let's teach Hebrew to schoolchildren in Louisiana

     Children aren't born religious. They have to be taught. I was taught to be Jewish at home and at Beth Israel — The West Temple. "West" because it was on the West Side of Cleveland, where my family lived. I learned Hebrew, with the same sense of joy I mowed the lawn or other obligatory tasks required of me.
     But Rabbi Eric Hoffman's Talmud class was different. It made me think, and I liked that. This was in the mid-1970s. I was around 16.
     The Talmud consists of dozens of books of rabbinic commentary on Jewish law. For instance, the central tenet of Judaism is the Schma. A brief prayer — "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One" — said by devout Jews three times a day: morning, evening and bedtime. The question we were discussing in Talmud class was: when to say the Schma for the third time each day? Answer: at night. When is it night? When it gets dark. When does it get dark? When the stars come out. How many stars? Three. How big? Medium sized stars.
     I raised my hand. Given that Reform Jews like ourselves don't say the Schma daily, never mind three times a day, I asked, why does it matter when the third time should be? Why are we learning this?
     Rabbi Hoffman — a trim, compact young man with a dark black beard — explained the Talmud offers a way of thinking."Talmudic reasoning." A method of breaking down problems into basic parts; that has been very useful ever since, both personally and professionally.
     What he didn't say was, "Do what you're told." Compulsion is not educational. Compulsion is slavery. The way the state of Louisiana is legally forcing all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
     That bit of news drew no surprise or outrage from me, but pity for a state that is a backwater. Louisiana is called the Pelican State, but it is also the Dead Last State. The perennial bottom dweller of state rankings. The worst crime. Worst economy. Nearly dead last health care, in education. Sticking up the Ten Commandments is gilding a turd.
     The real point is to float the case to the Supreme Court, where Donald Trump's missionaries can enshrine it into law and other states can follow suit, under the flag that being denied a chance to shove their own religion down everybody's throat is oppression — to the top dog religion doing the shoving, that is. Everybody else has to smile and take it.

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Nothing conveys the warm human touch like a robot

Elmhurst Hospital

    
     Hospitals make a lot of money. And since they can't lower the cost of healthcare — that would violate some unwritten maximalist healthcare provider code — they tend to build ever more ornate structures, such as the lobby of Elmhurst Hospital, part of Endeavor Edward-Elmhurst Health. An indescribable medico-magnificent decor, all stone and woodwork, the unimaginable Prairie Style on steroids outer office of Ayn Rand.
     I was there last week because my mother has been there — she turns 88 today, by the way, I'm going over there later for an impromptu birthday lunch — being treated for the effects of age. I'll admit, I welcomed the grandiosity — it was soothing, made me think she was in a good place. As did the attentiveness of the 5th floor nursing staff, who answered all my questions, assured me they'd keep us posted which, I assumed, meant they'd let me or my brother know when they released her. Even though they didn't, sending my mom back to Golden Haven in Addison without telling anyone, only to have her pass out as she left the medical transport van. She had to be taken straight back to the hospital. Nice work guys.

Moxi

     They might not have gotten the call-the-family-of-aged-patients-before-you-kick-them-out routine down. But they do have Moxi, an "autonomous point to point delivery robot," which I passed in the 5th floor corridor after visiting my mother. The product of an Austin,Texas company, Diligent, it — whoops, "she," the robot is female — is supposed to free up nurses from the bother of delivering prescriptions, lab samples and small medical devices from one place to another. Its — whoops, her, I guess the idea that nurses are female dies hard — little blue screen read "Pickup Going to 1A Telemetry," but Moxi just sat there in the few seconds I regarded the thing while it, she, blinked stupidly, like a cow.

     Moxi has a robot arm and, according to the robot's web site, "A friendly face that nurses and patients look forward to seeing," which seemed quite the oversell for two dozen blue dots arranged into a pair of circles.  Though the circles not only  blink but, judging from this video on the Moxi at Edward Hospital in Naperville, form half circles and even little hearts — to show affection, I suppose. Moxi wuvs you. There were 100 Moxis blinking and delivering bottles of ibuprofen in various hospitals by the end of 2023, including Northwestern Memorial, which is an investor, and six other Chicago area hospitals. You don't buy the robot, you lease, ah, her. It — whoops, she — was doing 20 tasks a day at Edward, though the company says some hospitals get 100 jobs a day out of Moxi, which supposedly isn't intended to replace hospital staff. Yet.

Salon of Hairdressing

 

It's always good to take two snaps of a scene. In case you get a mayfly in one of them.

     Being a two-birds-with-one-stone type of guy — okay, I don't like the idea of hitting birds with stones, even as metaphor. A multi-tasker then. 

     Either way, after realizing I had to leave my car to be serviced at the Mazda in Evanston for a few hours on Thursday, my first thought was how to fill the time. Sure, I could sit in the comfortable Mazda lounge, reading The New Yorker and drinking spring water and trying not to eat too many granola bars. But that seemed so passive.

     The drop-off was for 11:30 a.m., so lunch seemed appropriate. My usual Evanston lunch companion, Prof. Bill Savage of Northwestern University, was unavailable, so I tapped ... oh, I shouldn't say ... a local politician. We'd talked about having lunch. 

     Trouble was, the Mazda service center is sort of off the beaten track — 2201 Autobarn place, behind a Target. Way off the beaten track, actually. A 50 minute walk to Lucky Platter, where this fellow and I met last time, years ago. An Uber would cost more than lunch, and be a sort of surrender. I thought of asking him to pick me up at the dealership. But that seems, oh, high-handed. So I looked at Google Maps, and found an eatery just a 15 minute walk away, Main Pizza Chalavi. Never heard of the place. I looked at their menu online. They had salads. He agreed.

     It felt odd to be walking down Howard Street on a bright June day, past the tiny brick homes. But also good. I got to my destination about 15 minutes early, and paused before the above unassuming structure pictured above and saw ... well, let's see if you notice what I noticed. Take good look.

     The sign on the building said, rather grandly considering its modest brick facade, "Salon of Hairdressing" while the sign jutting from the building read "Franz Hairdressing Salon." And I realized that I hadn't a clue what those various parts of speech are called. No grammarian I. And what is the difference between A of B and BA? The former certainly sounds grander. "House of Lords" is much more high toned than "Lords' House." What part of language is this?

     At first I suspected the genitive case — showing possession. "The health of Bob" is also "Bob's health." " But hairdressing doesn't possess the salon — it isn't Hairdressing's Salon. Rather, the dressing of hair is what occurs there. There is no possession. It's really a noun-as-adjective pair, like "bowl of water" and "water bowl." The water describes the bowl, as the sort of vessel water goes in. Franz works in the sort of salon that does hairdressing.

     Setting aside the grammatical issues for a later time, I approached the door. The place seemed abandoned, and I assumed it would be locked. But I pushed. The door opened several inches. Peering in, and saw those old-fashioned hood dryers that I associate with women in the 1960s smoking cigarettes and having their bouffants teased. I should have gone in and written a column about the quirky characters there. But it was silent, empty inside — and I could have just as easily been shot. I departed, already castigating myself as a coward.

     Main Pizza Chalavi surprised me, by the way. Since I was early, I took a stroll around inside. It did not scream haut cuisine. But the bins of salad looked fresh. I took up position outside, thinking I might persuade my lunch mate to go anywhere else, maybe the Mexican place across the street. The railing I leaned on gave way a bit, and I quickly stood up straight. Checking the rail, it wobbled. I could have easily wrenched it off. The building was a former Gulliver's, and whoever had turned it into a Kosher eatery hadn't put much money into rehab. Maybe something they could take care of. The place seemed busy, populated by men in beards and tzitzit, and several matched sets of ultra-Orthodox children.

     My lunch mate showed up. I suggested we hop in his car and go anywhere else. No, he said, this was intriguing. We went in. I ordered the cranberry salad, which was truly excellent. Really, a first rate salad, even though I couldn't get any chicken on it — it was a dairy salad, and God forbids it. They made do with cashews for protein. My friend and I had a lively conversation and I even remembered to stop talking at various points and ask him about himself. 

     I'm tempted to go back, have another salad, then gird my loins and plunge into Franz Hairdressing Salon or, to put on airs, the Salon of Hairdressing. There must be a story there.

Cruelty to immigrants a game all can play — even immigrants

"La Soldadera" by Enrique Alferez (National Museum of Mexican Art)

     Since you're here, I assume you are a regular reader of newspapers, just like me. I get the Sun-Times and New York Times delivered at home, going through each pretty much cover to cover. I also subscribe to the Washington Post online. And the Tribune, though I don't always get to it.
     Many, many news stories. Most, you glance at the headline and move on. Others, you read a few paragraphs and quit. A few are worth finishing. Most are forgotten forever two minutes later.
     But every now and then, you read a news story, something clicks and you think: "That's it!" And you know the story will linger with you for a long, long time.
     I had that thought reading Emmanuel Camarillo's story (headline: "Ring of Ire") in Wednesday's paper. A story well summarized in the first sentence. "Advocates say the owners of a building across from a Pilsen migrant shelter have installed a loud noisemaker to deter shelter residents from gathering outside."
     But that isn't the really interesting part. The really interesting part is conveyed by two salient facts lower down. Two facts that might be missed.
     First, the building with the high-pitched noise device on the roof is used for storage but mostly vacant. So it's not an apartment building, where the baby can't sleep because the migrants are blasting merengue music.
     Elaborate spite projected against a notional harm that isn't actually being experienced by the aggrieved party — how much current American life can be explained by that? The desperate refugees arriving at our border are damned as "an invasion." No, what they are is an inconvenience. A logistical problem. A temporary challenge and permanent boon.
     Let's use a metaphor. One night trucks start pulling up in front of your house, offloading building supplies: stacks of lumber, bags of cement, boxes of nails, metal bracing, rolls of insulation. The stuff piles up and is unsightly. You can't give it back, so you grumble and hire trucks and rent warehouses and store it all, which is expensive and and bothersome. Until time passes and you start using it to build houses and make money.
     That's immigration. Raw material that built our country in the past and will continue to build our country in the future, unless we go crazy and seal the borders. Which lots of people want to do, even though it would be national suicide.

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A bullet to the leg put Chicago police officer on the path to the suburbs

Off. Angelo Wells touches the back of a car he has stopped for a traffic violation, a police
tradition designed to put a fingerprint on the back of a vehicle. (Photo by Ashlee Rezin).

    For years, I've been asking the Chicago Police Department to let me write something about what happens to an officer after being shot. Nothing. Silence. Then I met Angelo Wells. The Northbrook Police Department invited Ashlee Rezin and myself in, allowed us to sit in on roll calls, go on ride alongs, and were completely proud, open and candid. Meanwhile, the CPD couldn't even issue a comment, or put me in touch with someone in the department who could talk about what wounded officers go through. Transparency is a value in any organization. The results speak for themselves. 

    "I am God!" the big man screamed out the window of an apartment in the 1300 block of South Lawndale Avenue. "I am the man!"
     Then he started singing.
     What the Chicago Police Department calls a "domestic disturbance." A particularly dangerous situation for police to walk into, accounting for nearly a quarter of the murders in Chicago.

     Officer Angelo Wells Jr. and his partner had just come off a call and were leaving the District 10 station. They headed to the scene. Four more officers arrived. It was just after 3 a.m., Aug. 5, 2020.
     "Why don't you come down and talk to us?" Wells called up, framing the 33-year-old man in his flashlight beam. The man, on PCP, stopped singing, and started spitting at them.
     "Are you guys going to come up and help me?" a woman yelled from somewhere inside the apartment. A Chicago Fire Department ambulance arrived. Wells walked over to brief the paramedics on the situation.
     Five shots, in quick succession. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Wells took cover behind the ambulance.
     "Get down," he yelled, "Get out. Go go go." So the ambulance did, toward Douglas, leaving Wells exposed. Thirteen more shots were squeezed off. In two years on the force, Wells had previously been exposed to gunfire six times. The seventh proved unlucky — as he ran for cover, one bullet entered his right thigh and shattered his femur.
     "I'm hit," Wells shouted.
     Making him one of the 2,587 Chicagoans shot but not killed that year — including 10 police officers -- and changing the direction of his life.

Rebuilding a leg, and a life

     About 25 miles and a world away from District 10 lies the leafy suburb of Northbrook, where the police department is holding 5:30 p.m. roll call for five uniformed officers, Wells is one of them. The events of the past 24 hours — a beautiful early June day in 2024 — are reviewed. A woman locked out of her house. A man who thought people were following him committed himself to a mental hospital. An iPad disappeared from an office. A car blocking a driveway.
      How did Wells get here?
     "After the incident happened I had to figure out what my purpose was," he said. "I had to reevaluate a lot of things with my life, especially with my oldest two kids. Because they were old enough at that time to realize what happened to me. My son, my 11-year-old, was 8 at the time. To hear him crying over the phone, thinking something was going to happen to me. My son didn't want me to do this anymore. I told him to trust my decision."

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Off. Angelo Wells at the 5:30 p.m. roll call at the Northbrook Police Department (photo by NS)

Flashback 2006: Reparations can't fix problems of the past

Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial (National Gallery of Art)

     Mayor Brandon Johnson has established a task force to look into the city reversing the wrongs of slavery. Good luck with that. The obvious retort is that Chicago can barely run the present, never mind repair the past. Evanston does have a reparations program, which seems more high-minded boondoggle than anything else. I wrote a column for today — on the Northbrook police — but it was held for tomorrow for reasons of space. So, this being Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the freeing of enslaved Americans, I thought I would share this 18-year-old column — which back then ran 1100 words and filled a page. I have kept the various subheads, and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT

     Are you a victim of history? Or a beneficiary? Do the crimes of the past echo in your head? Or do you see farther, to paraphrase Newton, because you stand on the shoulders of giants?
     How you answer depends, I believe, less on your station in life than on your outlook.
     Though generally glum, I consider myself a beneficiary of the past, beholden to countless individuals who have gone before, from the Founding Fathers to Alexander Fleming to my ancestors to the guy who invented indoor plumbing.
     Their suffering and struggle turned sweet for me. I'll give you an example. Anti-Semitism was a terrible thing in Europe in the 1930s. But it got my grandfather on that boat.* If things were better then, maybe he wouldn't have gone, and I'd be writing this in Polish or, more likely, not writing anything at all.
     Their loss; my gain.

TO TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE

     In many ways, black people -- as a group -- get a raw deal in this country, compared with other Americans. Their salaries are lower. They go to prison more. Their health care is worse, and their lives are shorter.
     But if you compare them with Africans living in Africa, all that changes. Their lives are far, far better, by every measure.
     My guess is that the average African, scraping out a living in Uganda, would leap at the chance to change places with the most humble resident of the West Side of Chicago.
     Thus the slavery reparations struggle is a mystery to me. While slaves certainly suffered, terribly, their descendants benefit, tremendously, by being here and not being back in Africa. Why focus on the harm of the past and not the benefit?
     Bottom line: The reparations effort will fail, and that is a good thing. It both would not solve the difficulties of black America — it might make them worse — and would set a terrible legal precedent, inspiring other ethnic Americans to wander back into the past and lay claims based on historical grievances. Why couldn't Chinese Americans sue the railroads for their undercompensated labor? Or descendants of socialists deported in 1919 sue the steamship companies that bore them into unjust exile? The possibilities are endless.

NO NEED TO WRITE . . .

     Whenever I address reparations, a few readers triumphantly bring up the reparations pried out of Germany and German companies for World War II atrocities. Their assumption is that, being Jewish, I would support such payments.
     I don't. Rather, I find them unseemly — a kind of extortion, just like slavery reparations.
     Yes, there are elderly people living in poverty who once, say, worked as slaves in a BMW factory, and if some cash can be coerced out of the company to help them, great. And if Germany wants to soothe its eternal shame by giving cash to Israel, that's great, too.
     But don't be fooled. Nothing is repaired. The damage of the past is not undone, not by an inch.
     Similarly, slavery was too great a wrong, its damage too pervasive and — I believe — lingering for a lawsuit against a few banks and insurance companies to do anything. Ironically, those backing reparations minimize the very tragedy that inspires them, by suggesting that a check might fix things. It won't. We can't correct the past; we can only move forward.
     Being a slave meant that someone else was responsible for your well-being. Being a free person means that you, yourself are responsible, no matter the past. That is hard responsibility for some to accept. It's easier to sue somebody.

ABOARD THE 8:16

     I look up from my newspaper and lock eyes with a silver-haired lawyer who also rides my train. I flash him my standard, tight, I've-got-no-people-skills smile and am halfway back to the news when I realize he isn't just gazing at me, but also pointing and saying something.
     "Write a column about that!" he hisses in a half whisper, half shout, trying to communicate with me while not tipping somebody off. I look to where he is indicating: a heavy man in a blue jacket jabbering into a cell phone.
     "It's going to be a good week, a good week, we're going to see the football game Sunday, so that is good. . . ."
     I cup my hand over my mouth and do the same whisper/shout back to the lawyer: "I already wrote that one."
     Then I try to go back to my reading. But the guy on the phone has one of those voices — a certain timbre, like a heavily rosined bow — that just cuts through your head. I didn't notice him before. But now I can't tune him out.
     "Stotis is just like us," he says. "He's just like us. He's a good guy to have on our side. Un-huh, yeah. We'll have to concentrate on the meeting. We'll have to get that over to Near North. Who's his partner? I never met him. . . ."
     Why is it, I wonder, that people never say anything interesting into their cell phones? It's always what's-for-dinner and I'm-on-the-train. Why not . . . and here I slip into reverie:
     "Look, I simply must have more tritium! Un-huh. Tell Og to dial it up to 90 million volts and open all the valves and see if that helps. . . . Right, the magnospectrometer. . . ."
     Or,
     "But I am naughty, a naughty little kitten, and naughty little kittens must be spanked. . . ."
     Or,
     "I want him dead! I want his head, in a bowling bag, on my desk first thing tomorrow morning, and Reginald, try not to leave the hacksaw behind this time, OK?"
     By now I'm chuckling to myself, having completely forgotten about and tuned out the cell phone guy. A reminder: Annoyance with public cell phone yammering is a temporary cultural phenomenon, based on the technology's newness. We will, in time, learn to ignore it. I hope.

It's alive!!!

     This column passes under no fewer than four pairs of eyes, in an attempt to make me seem less flawed than I actually am, and to avoid lawsuits.
     Since I see such oversight as completely necessary, you'd think I would avoid public utterances that are not carefully screened.
     But I don't. The latest folly begins at 9:04 a.m. today, when I and other journalistic luminaries join Steve Edwards on WBEZ-FM (91.5) to discuss September's blast of alarming news. **

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Humor is fragile, and trying to analyze it proves inevitably futile, like trying to study clouds by catching them in mayonnaise jars.
      Only Joking, a new book by British wits Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (Gotham Books: $25), is an exception to that rule, not only commenting thoughtfully on the nature of humor, but passing on some really, really funny jokes.
     This one, by Carr, stands out, for its loopy simplicity:
     Throwing acid is wrong, in some people's eyes.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 29, 2006

* This was showing ignorance of my own family history. My grandfather came to this country in 1924.

** While not having much value now, I kept this in as a reminder that, once upon a time, I regularly was a guest on WBEZ. 

"It was a wild time"

     Both my sons came in town for the older boy's bachelor party, at a friend's lake house in Michigan. My concern immediately crystalized around the water — guys getting drunk, going boating, drowning. It happens. 

     A typical dad concern. I wasn't eager to mention it. Shutting up is an art form, one I struggle to master. Like all parents everywhere, I worry, and there is a talismanic quality to expressing that worry by delivering warnings about specific dangers. If you mention them, they go away or, at least lessen, and maybe even absolve you from blame, a little. I warned the younger boy: you're the best man. It's your job to make sure nothing goes awry. The point of a bachelor party is to set the stage for a wedding, not derail it.
     They left Friday. A cone of silence. "I hope they're having fun in Michigan..." I'd say to my wife, wanly, several times. Like trying to light wet kindling, but the topic died out there. Then both returned Sunday afternoon. At first reluctant to say what had happened. But eventually my wife and I drew it out of them. Jet skis. Fishing. Pickleball. Poker. And something called "Hand & Brain Chess."
     Despite a lifetime of playing chess, I had never heard of Hand & Brain Chess. It's a way for four people to play a game, two teams of two. On each side, one player is the Brain. The Brain announces which of the six varieties of pieces will move next: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king or pawn. Then the Hand makes the move by selecting one of the named pieces — a bishop, say — and deciding where it should go.
     Later, my older son was describing the weekend over the phone to his fiance back in New Jersey. He was sprawled on the sofa in our living room, so I didn't feel guilty listening in.
     "We opened to E4/C6," he said. The Caro Kann Defense. "Then D4,D5. There were isolated tripled pawns. We played to a draw. It was a wild time."
     I smiled, repeating that phrase to myself. "It was a wild time." So good to have the boys home, even briefly. I missed having their lives going on around me, and was silly to have  worried.