Fallen angels

"Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

     Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, many young people enjoying a music festival. Plus the 250 Israelis taken hostage, sparking the War in Gaza. About two dozen of those hostages are still being held.

     That the war's subsequent bloodshed has eclipsed the initial horror hardly needs to be said. Very little energy in the world was spent sympathizing with the Israeli loss. Just the opposite. The Palestinians position — that Israel should never have been created in the first place, so any attack upon any Israeli, or any Jew anywhere in the world for that matter, can be rationalized as "resistance" — dominates much of the conversation. Sophomores who won't eat meat out of sympathy for the suffering of animals unquestionably accept that.
     Many Jews, for whom the existence of Israel is woven through their religious liturgy, looked on increasingly aghast as continuing warfare caused the loss of 66,000 Palestinians, a third of them children. Israel's argument — they need to destroy Hamas, the terrorist organization that sparked and continued the war, the elected leadership of Gaza — could not compete with the jarring photographs of grieving mothers and emaciated children. It is rejected in Israel itself, which has been riven by demonstrations against the war. Being a democracy, they allow that. Gaza is not a democracy, and any ill-feeling about Hamas can be lethal to express. Israel's continuation of the war was denounced as genocide, with few observing that if that is indeed the case, it's the rare genocide where the suffering party could end the bloodshed at any time but doesn't.

     Even though I am free to comment on the situation, I generally don't. Mostly because I've expressed myself on the stalemate repeatedly through the years. The situation hardly changes — though the past two years have cranked up the bloodshed by several orders of magnitude — and my position has not changed. I'm against killing. I'm for people living in peace. I want the Palestinians to live free, unencumbered lives. I'm also for Israel, conceptually, as the world's one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of Jews living in a place, a centuries old dilemma where the Jews neighbors periodically decide, vis a vis nothing, that the solution for all their problems is for all these Jews to go live somewhere else. Even if the place they're living is where they've lived for 3,000 years. Even if the people claiming it never lived there, themselves, but believe they ought to inherit it from their displaced ancestors. Every inch of Chicago is also land that was stolen or swindled away from Native Americans. Yet if what Potawatomi remain started shooting up schoolyards, demanding it back, I doubt they'd be received so enthusiastically on campuses across the world. Though maybe I'm being overly optimistic here. 

      Public reaction to the war is an eloquent rationalization for the existence of Israel, as is the world's lip service toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Talk is cheap.
     What else? I wish Benjamin Netanyahu, a self-dealing nationalist cast in the Trump mold, had never been elected. Israelis who feel he cynically prolonged the war to cover himself politically are probably right. I don't know. But my wishes are immaterial here. 
     Attempts at peace since Israeli occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 have been chimeras, and I imagine this latest attempt will vanish in a similar fashion, just another trick of the desert heat. When the conflict eventually ends, it will will end the way all such strifes ends — when one side destroys the other or, as in Northern Ireland, when both sides tire of killing each other and mutually decide to try something different. The lack of creativity applied to this situation is astounding. The Palestinians have two tools: violence and world opinion. Their strategy seems to be to lash out at Israel, then cast Israel's reaction as inexplicable barbarism. Give them credit: it works. The world buys it. Nobody says, "Gee, if the Israeli's are such murderous barbarians, then why do you keep attacking them? Is that a good idea?" Do that, and they sound the liberation buzzer, drowning you out.

     Second, I don't write about this much because the subject is an agony to me. I was raised in the Six Day War era when Israel was bold and smart and beloved. My colleague Bill Mauldin depicted Israel as a spunky sabra soldier, David versus Goliath, threatened by enormous Arab countries. 

    The point of the column at left still holds, though the scale has changed. Just as 9/11 provoked the United States to constrain its own freedom in the name of security, so the Oct. 7 attacks engaged Israel into betraying its humanitarian core. Israel literally lost its mind. The country pull offed feats of intelligence such as the raid on Entebbe. Now they seem brutal and dumb — the exploding pager piece-de-resistance notwithstanding. That was brilliant. 

     Otherwise, that seems part of a past as distant as the United States when it was a force for good, at home and abroad, not twin giants of oligarchy and authoritarianism, supporting each other, growing in power and recklessness, to howls of approval from a mob too stupid to realize that, when laws and norms are simply cast aside, they could be next, at the tyrant's whim. And even if they aren't, the people who are being abused will be missed. As bad as ICE seems now to Americans who think and feel, it'll feel worse when the strawberries are rotting in the fields. Even the Germans eventually had reasons to regret banishing all those Jewish physicists, who happily developed the atomic bomb for the Americans.

     You can support a country without approving what it is doing right now — every Democrat knows that. Love of what America represents, what it has been and might yet be again, is only strengthened seeing how easily millions would trash it all for nothing. Love of what Israel represents — a safe homeland for Jews, one that has a quarter of its population non-Jews, living in peace, generally. That said, Israel has similarly gone down a dark path — Netanyahu left the door open for the Oct. 7 attacks, and his rage against the Palestinians that Hamas hides behind is neither smart nor will it be effective, except for perhaps, finally, pushing all involved to push for a solution which, now that I say it, strikes me as the most extreme optimism.

     Sunday's blog post was about mourning my mother and my cousin, and I've already strayed too far into politics — I'm doing it here because I have no Monday column in the paper, having chosen to interview the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, slated to run in the Sun-Times Tuesday, on the anniversary. The war is such baffling folly, to me, that I wanted to hear an Israeli official try to explain it. I hope you'll read that in the paper tomorrow. 

    Until then, I just want to draw attention to all the lives lost, on both side. I had a niece in Israel Oct. 7, a bright young rabbi little different from those slain. I see her, I think of them.

    And when I'm holding my new granddaughter, and she cries because she's hungry, I extend my hand for a bottle and someone quickly hands one to me. Even a few seconds are frustrating. But during that wait, it often occurs to me how horrible it would be to be holding a baby in some Gazan ruin with no bottle to give her and none coming. I don't see how anyone of any stripe can accept that. When I was talking to the consul general last week, I pointed out that the situation in Gaza was the sort of disaster that Israelis used to pride themselves in leaping to help fix, publicizing the teams they rush in to respond to every earthquake and tsunami, all over the world. Yet this one is done by them for purposes which they insist are rational.

     I don't like politics because it isn't real. You can't hold politics, or touch it. It's important, but notional. People are real. They can suffer, and be lost, and be missed, and grieved. We need to focus more on that, and the politics will unravel themselves. 

     The bas relief above is "Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia. Crafted of glazed terra cotta about 1475, in 2008 it inexplicably fell from the wall above a doorway at 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and shattered on the stone floor. It took years to meticulously reconstruct the artwork and return it to public view, in 2016.
     The consul general mentioned a Jewish value, tikun olam, repairing the world. Not everything can be fixed — the dead stay dead, the traumatized might never heal, the past can be hidden, or distorted, but never altered. Yet fixing the world today, despite the horror and loss, is always an option. Working to make something better than this. It's hard work, far harder than blame and condemnation. But not impossible, unless you never even start. I truly believe there has been enough breaking stuff. It's long past time to start trying to fix things. 

"Like the generations of leaves..."

      My wife and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, went to Starved Rock on Wednesday for Yom Kippur. We've done so once before in the past, but not recently. The park, two hours southwest of Chicago, has a certain serene glory that goes well with the solemn holy day of repentance. And you don't have to dress up.
     We picked a quiet spot in a canyon to perform a yitzkor service — a memorial for the dead. I lost two of the most important people in my life this summer — my mother died June 21. I said the mourner's kaddish for her the night before, at Kol Nidre, where we unexpectedly — for me, anyway — found ourselves at a small, century-old synagogue in Utica. I'll write about that later.  
     My cousin Harry died Aug. 31, so I said kaddish for him. I don't hold many rituals to heart, but a loved one dies, you're supposed to say kaddish — a prayer that never mentions death, but celebrates the greatness of God — for them. Because ... well, it's what you're supposed to do. Because, I guess, you die, you want someone to notice, and to do something, and saying kaddish is both.
     Two quotes came to me. The first one was a snippet of verse from the back of some reconstructionist prayer book that I read, flipping through the pages in some previous hours-long service, waiting for it to end. We have the book, and while I went looking for it before the trip, I couldn't find the lines, which didn't matter, because I knew them. In a passage about lost parents it said, "once we were their dream, now they are ours." Or words to that effect. I liked that.
     The second quote came to me standing in the canyon at Starved Rock, looking at the ground, which was surprisingly covered with maples leaves — brown and dry, from last year. "As a generation of leaves, so is that of men" Homer writes in the Iliad.

     We finished our ad hoc yizkor service, hiked around a bit, and I found myself in different canyon, where the leaves were oak, not maple. Maples are pretty sturdy, but oaks are even more long-lasting magnificent. It occurred to me that the leaves fall and die, but the tree remains. Our loved ones fall and die, but we remain. Then we too fall and die, but life — the tree — remains. Judaism is big on the "tree of life." I never quite got it before. Now I do.
     Later I went looking for the exact Homer quote.
     Book Six, lines 146-149. The original Greek:

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη·
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.

     A 1990 translation by Robert Fagles puts is this way:

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

    I'm okay with that. Which is good, because I have to be, and if I weren't okay with it — which sometimes I'm not — it would still be exactly the same.

Mixed message

Starved Rock State Park, Oct. 1, 2025.

     My first instinct was to simply post this photo without comment. Let the headline be the punchline.

     But that seemed perhaps a touch too wry, for the matter at hand. Death by falling is a perennial problem at Starved Rock, whose dramatic precipices make it a place of beauty and danger. Accidentally and intentionally. In 2022 the Operation Disrupt Signs went up, in Starved Rock and 16 other locations around the state. But the signs — which are not just at this overlook — did not prevent two people from committing suicide at Starved Rock in 2024. 

    So I thought a few words were in order. The boardwalk helps a lot — stay on the wooden paths, behind the rails, and you won't slide off any precipices. Not unconstrained nature in the usual sense, not the deeply-ravined woods you got in the pre-boardwalk days — which I remember, scarily, and not just out of fear of falling. But better to stay on the pre-approved route than boldly forge your own path off a cliff.
    I was mildly curious as to whether there was any history to this "Lover's Leap" — I assume it's a common mythic local place name, like "Dead Man's Curve," and is a reflection of danger more than any association with specific death. None presented itself to me but, then again, I didn't look that hard. This is one of those moments in our nation's history when to reflect on anything other than gathering doom feels terribly beside the point. Twiddling your thumbs on a sinking ship. I'm not a believer in leaping to one's death. Life is but the once, and we should all tough it out, no matter the hardships of our public or private conditions. But I understand why people do it. 

Survivor's plate

 

     The problem with vanity license plates is that, typically, they're more vain than clever. "CAR4MOM" or "VROOOM" or whatever. I can't recall seeing one and thinking, "'Yes! That's very cool."
     Which sums up my thinking when I saw this plate in the parking lot of a trailhead at Starved Rock State Park on Thursday. While I've never had a mammogram, the process has been described to me well enough to know exactly what "Smush" refers to, and in case there were any question, the plate has the pink ribbon of breast cancer prominently displayed.
     As I was admiring the plate, the owner arrived, and seemed nonplussed to find a stranger examining her car closely. That's the beauty of surviving an ordeal — you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
    Karen Aldworth, of Shorewood, laughed when I asked if I could take her photo and told her the name of the blog I intended to post it on.  She said yes but, being a thorough, considerate sort, I explained that once a thing goes online, you never know how people might react.

     "I don't care!" she exuded. That's the beauty of...well, you get the point. She explained the process behind coming up with the plate.
    "I thought,'breast cancer survivor,'" she said, of herself. "It's a mammogram plate. I wanted something to go along with a mammogram plate."
     "You immediately know what you mean," I said, citing the mark of good writing. 
    "You do!" she said. "Men and women both know what I mean." 

    And she was was gone, off into the woods, hiking briskly.
     

Boxed in

    My older son moved to a place without grocery stores, Well, there must be some somewhere, but none within walking distance, and he doesn't own a car.
     Which is not the problem you might think it is — okay, not the problem I might have thought it could be — because he gets all his groceries from Amazon. He orders them now, Whole Foods drops them off in an hour. It makes a lot of sense.
     To him. To me, well ... I knew Amazon was there, and knew it owned Whole Foods, but to see it in practice was ... a surprise.  I like going to the grocery store. Ride my bike to Sunset Foods, disconnect the front basket, wear it over my forearm, almost like a purse — almost like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." I feel part of something. Almost like I belong.
      My wife orders things from Amazon. "Need anything from Amazon?" she says. I thought hard, then said, tentatively: "You know those gel pens? We don't have any. Some gel pens might be nice. Blue."
     A day or two later, this box showed up. Gel pens! I'm not going to insult you by making the obvious observation, that the volume of the box is 50 times greater than the size of the pens. It would be inefficient to have boxes in more sizes than necessary, and small boxes could get more easily lost. Toss it in a box, deliver the box, recycle the box. Who cares? Not me. No siree.
     I only note these changes, I don't shake my fist. A postman was a member of the community. He checked on shut-ins, collected a cookie at Christmas. Northbrook has a bronze memorial to a beloved mail carrier. The Amazon driver, well, he's in and out, pausing only to snap a picture of the box on your stoop, to wash his hands of it. You could be hanging out the window with a knife in your back and ... well, I don't want to malign out of ignorance. I'm sure plenty of Amazon drivers have burst into burning homes to rescue a baby. At least I hope they have.
     Even that driver, he — or she — is an interregnum. In a few years — five, ten tops — the truck will drive itself, and some drone or little wheeled thing will spurt up your driveway, fling the box at your steps and retreat back to the truck for the next box.
     It really is a very nice pen. But good only for writing things. In a notebook. We all have our limitations. 

'A very sweet guy who had every reason not to be'

Bob Kazel

     Bob Kazel was a gifted writer, a devoted friend, a caring volunteer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 18, and for the next 44 years battled manic depression until he died on Sept. 17.
     "He was a fighter," said Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who turned his own mental illness and addiction into a platform to encourage others to speak out and fund treatment and research.
     Kazel was born in Chicago — his father, Sidney, an electrical engineer, died in a car accident when Bob was 14. His mother, Beverly, became his steadfast supporter. Kazel was editor of the newspaper at Von Steuben High School and set his sights on the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism.
     "He always wanted to be a journalist," said his older brother Mitch. "When he was under 10, he got a typewriter for his birthday. He immediately started putting out a one-page newsletter of what was going on at home, with headlines like, 'MOM TO MAKE SPAGHETTI.'"
     Kazel got into Northwestern. Then things began to go wrong.
     "I started feeling overwhelmed," he said in "Profiles in Mental Health Courage," a 2024 book Kennedy wrote with journalist Stephen Fried.
     Kazel ended his first semester in the psych ward at Evanston Hospital. He went on lithium and restarted the next year at Medill, where he shined.
     "Oh, my God, he was the best writer at The Daily Northwestern," said Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for his biography, "King: A Life." "We had a few Pulitzers come out of that group, but he was the best. Incredibly creative."
     Eig pointed to a story Kazel wrote after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Kazel rode the L back from a downtown Medill class and pondered the subdued CTA riders.
     "Television,” wrote Kazel, then 22, “a keeper of dreams that had guided them all their lives around the world’s realness, had betrayed their trust and shown them their own nightmares. A glimpse of chaos, of a baffling arbitrariness that they now saw clearly and would try to work out, by themselves.”
     For Kazel, mental illness reflected the same "baffling arbitrariness."
     "Bob took his meds, went to his psychiatrist, took good care of himself, and for periods he could live his life," Fried said. "Then his symptoms would break through."

To continue reading, click here.

A number of readers wrote in to express condolences to me, and I should point out that while Bob was a devoted friend, he wasn't MY devoted friend. I never met him. I wish I had.

Bob Kazel at a 2008 birthday party at the Eig home. 

'Help me write'

     I read my email. Maybe that's old fashioned of me. I do so because a) I am old-fashioned; b) I'm also interested in what people have to say; b) some readers point out mistakes that I can then fix; c) others share interesting opinions, or situations I should be aware of.
     Then I answer my email, often. Because: a) it seems polite; b) sometimes, in crafting an answer, I coin phrases I like that can use later; c) it helps cement my bond with my audience, such as it is.
     Of late, artificial intelligence, as part of its general insertion of its enormous big money bazoo into our lives, has started offering email suggestions to me.
     For instance. Ken W. of Palatine writes:

     "Donald Trump has spent a lot of time lately calling all kinds of smart people 'stupid.' This is particularly rich coming from a guy who has an IQ of 72 and has the reading ability and temperament of the average 6th grader. He may want to be America’s Hitler, but happily he’s nowhere near smart enough despite his self assessment of being a 'stable genius.' He should have gotten the opinions of the other horses first."   

     While I considered a response, I hit "Reply" and my thought process was stalled by seeing a box filled with this hint, light gray, as if being whispered by some computer Cyrano de Bergerac:

     AI was putting words in my mouth, or trying to. And trite words at that — "a way with words" is a cliche, and not my voice. I tried to delete the suggestion, and instead it became regular print, ready for me to click on SEND. I defined and deleted it, then wrote my own answer:

Ken:

What's the truism about Trump? Every accusation is a confession. Thanks for writing.

NS

     My next step was to shut the damn AI email prompt thing off. I put the matter to AI, ironically enough, and got this instruction.

         Believe it or not, I made sense of that — went to the little gear icon, clicked it, and found my way to this.

     I shut the "Smart Reply" off and a few others for good measure, then returned to answering my email.  

     Not that AI gave up. When I go to reply, there is still two little glyphs — a tiny hypocycloid that seems as if it wandered off the old US Steel logo and a little pencil. Plus the plea, "Help me write," a phrase I've never uttered in my life.

     Now, there is no way I'm going to go with my gut and pronounce AI a bubble. I've seen too many dramatic social changes — heck, I remember pundits seriously explaining how restaurants will go out of business unless diners are allowed to smoke in them. Plus all those hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into it — they must know what they're doing, right? I mean, they can't be throwing their money away? Can they? That would be idiocy.
     Then again, put that way, maybe it is a bubble. There sure is a lot of idiocy going around.