Is there such thing as an artistic photo of a cute kitty?

     My appreciation of cute kitties is limited.
     Or was. 
     That seems to be in flux, I have discovered, to my amusement and quasi-horror.
     Just last spring, when I was searching for a plausible April 1 joke, I shifted this blog to feature kittens in yarn. That seemed an apt metaphor for all that is cheap and sentimental and time-killing about the online world. This fabulously advanced technology, digital computers and a world wide web, used to pass along cute kitten photos. Sad. 
     Then my co-author, Sara Bader, passed along the photo atop the blog, which she took. And my first, unfiltered, uncharacteristic thought was, "I love that. What a cool photo. I'd like to post that photo atop my blog."
      Several theories:
      A) Maybe it really isn't a good photograph, but my judgment is skewed by bias. Sara is my co-author. We've been working on our new book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery for, jeez, nearly four years now. A better, harder-working and more valuable partner I cannot imagine.

      When Sara isn't working in publishing in New York, or busy with our book, she volunteers taking photos of cats for Infinite Hope, a pet rescue shelter in Brooklyn, so the photos can be posted and people can fall in love with the cats pictured and rush to adopt them.  
     So maybe my esteem for her, and admiration for the noble purpose behind these photos—to find the cats good homes— colored my sense of the photo. I recognize that. Or,
     B) Maybe it really isn't a good photo, but my judgment was warped not so much by bias but by age.  Old people are famously susceptible to all kinds of maudlin crap: sad clowns and oils of giant-eyed puppies cowering by garbage cans and schmaltzy violin orchestras led by that Austrian imbecile who always pops up on PBS, or did back when I used to watch TV even a little. Perhaps admiring this photo is a Bad Sign, which I seem to find more of as the days run on.
     C) It actually is a good photo, serene, nostalgic in a positive way, with a 1940s vibe, a sense of time, of years past, from the clock and the black and white photograph of the young girl, and I picked up on it, showing the kind of iconoclastic courage that I flatter is still my strong suit, despite my slide into dotage. A sophisticated critic like George Jean Nathan could praise Krazy Kat, which was shocking for its time, and I can praise cute kitties. The masses of hipsters assume that certain artistic forms are tot zur kunst as they say in German, "dead to art," but the truly savvy know otherwise. Why not a laudable cute kitty picture? Lawn gnomes are sentimental junk, but a really great sculptor could craft a lawn gnome that would make you cry. It's possible, is it not?

     Actually, I have no idea if they say tot zur kunst in Germany. I just made that up. It seemed to work better put that way. Which is my definition of art: art is what you can get away with. 
     Okay, caught me again. It's not my definition. Andy Warhol actually said "Art is what you can get away with." But I agree with him and thought, for a moment, it might be some kind of surreal twist at what I'm striving to make the end of my rumination on photographing cute kitties, to pretend I said it. Maybe the kittens have rendered me punchy. Maybe I am, independent of the kitties, and am just blaming it on them, which is sad. But anyone can take a picture of scary twins or an albino covered in bees make it seem artistic. But with all the cute kitties flooding online, it takes something special to snap a really good photograph of a cute kitty. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking with it.  I wanted an excuse to post the photo of Linus behind the clock, and now I have done so.

Terrifying Ebola virus "quite likely" to hit Cook County

Cooler, Illinois Anatomical Gift Association

     Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story” has sat on my shelf for the past 20 years. And though I haven’t cracked it since reading it last in 1994, I knew exactly what I would find when I opened the book again Friday: that horrendous description of the death of a Frenchman whom Preston calls Charles Monet, a worker at the Nzoia Sugar Factory.
     Monet had been exploring in the bat guano- and elephant-dung-caked caves of Western Kenya. He came down with a mysterious illness that started with “a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs” and quickly got worse: headache, fever, violent nausea, facial paralysis.
      “His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance ... the eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red.”

     To continue reading, click here.

Supreme Court recognizes the obvious

Topper from weddingcollectibles.com

    Give the Supreme Court credit. It didn't drag its feet on this one. On the first day of the term, it took the biggest issue on its agenda and made the right call. In the long run it wouldn't have mattered. Freedom once realized doesn't go back in the jar easily. The arc of history, as Martin Luther King said, bends toward justice. But ruling a different way would have emboldened bigots and hurt a lot of innocent people, and it was refreshing to see a case where the Far Right didn't battle for every inch of ground in their Long March retreat from modern life.

     In 1776, when the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable  Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” they were not thinking of women. Nor were they thinking about their black slaves.  And they certainly were not thinking of what they would have referred to at the time as “Sodomites” and we now consider “gay.”

     But freedom is a virus that, once released, tends to spread to unexpected places. One by one, those oppressed groups, deemed marginal by God and nature, law and custom, seized that tool of freedom, crafted by white Colonial planters for their own benefit and used to strike off their chains.

     In the first half of the 20th century, women won the vote. In the second half, African-Americans established that they could do anything a white person could.

     And while both of those struggles go on — women still earn 2/3 of what men do; blacks still deal with a system that is separate and unequal — we live in an era of extraordinary progress for gay Americans. In the lifetime of many reading this, we went from a time when the police thought nothing of harassing gays for daring to gather in a bar — New York’s Stonewall riot took place in 1969 — to Monday, when the United States Supreme Court declined to hear five pending same-sex marriage cases, essentially upholding the legality of such marriages in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.

     There have been many of milestones in this lengthy process, both nationally and locally: Gov. Pat Quinn signing the Illinois gay marriage law last November; couples taking their civil union vows in Millennium Park on June 1, 2011, and on and on.

Wedding cake topper from Wedding Collectibles

     But this court ruling — or precisely, this court declining to get involved, letting the lower court rulings stand — is a truly significant moment because this was really what might have been the last stand, when the accelerated progress that gay American citizens have made could have hit the roadblock of a conservative Supreme Court. It only takes four justices to ask to review the case; four justices obviously didn’t ask.

     One of those milestones was the ruling Sept. 4 by Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who eviscerated the Indiana and Wisconsin cases in such strong language (the states’ arguments weren’t just rejected, wrote Charles Pierce of Esquire, but “tore into tiny pieces, lit on fire, and fed through a wood chipper”) that even a revanchist blowhard like Justice Anton Scalia would be reluctant to grapple with his white hot logic. Some credit must go to the Chicago judge for his watertight arguments.

     “The challenged laws discriminate against a minority defined by an immutable characteristic, and the only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction — that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended — is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously,” Posner wrote, for the three-judge panel. “The discrimination against same-sex couples is irrational, and therefore unconstitutional ...The harm to homosexuals (and, as we’ll emphasize, to their adopted children) of being denied the right to marry is considerable.

     “Marriage confers respectability on a sexual relationship; to exclude a couple from marriage is thus to deny it a coveted status. Because homosexuality is not a voluntary condition and homosexuals are among the most stigmatized, misunderstood, and discriminated-against minorities in the history of the world, the disparagement of their sexual orientation, implicit in the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, is a source of continuing pain...

     “Not that allowing same-sex marriage will change in the short run the negative views that many Americans hold of same-sex marriage. But it will enhance the status of these marriages in the eyes of other Americans, and in the long run it may convert some of the opponents of such marriage by demonstrating that homosexual married couples are in essential respects, notably in the care of their adopted children, like other married couples.”

     Which is the bedrock of fact at the bottom of all this. Gay couples make no worse spouses, no worse parents, than anybody else, and it is the poisoned fruit of religious bigotry married to ignorant malice to suggest otherwise. Chicago’s great legal thinker, Richard Posner, said it so clearly, if he didn’t convert opponents on the Supreme Court, he made them reluctant to argue the point.

Photo atop blog: signing Illinois gay marriage into law, November, 2013. 

Chicagoans burn while Great Chicago Fire Festival fizzles

     The city and Redmoon say they're ready to try the (Not So) Great Fire Festival again next year. That's a good idea, though I'm wondering whether the group responsible for the flub are the ones we should entrust with trying it again. In the real world, you do a botch job, you get fired. But that isn't the approach Chicago is taking. Maybe what we also suffered was a failure of imagination, and perhaps the best people to remedy it are the very people whom this festival supposedly celebrates.

     Where was Mrs. O’Leary’s cow when Chicago really needed her?

     OK, historians agree that it wasn’t Cate O’Leary’s cow knocking over a lantern in the barn at 137 DeKoven Street that touched off the Great Chicago Fire on Oct. 8, 1871, leveling much of the place and setting the stage for the city we see today.

     But somebody needed to show better skill in the setting-things-ablaze department than was shown by the Redmoon Theater Saturday night, as its first Great Chicago Fire Festival turned into an epic fail and embarrassing fizzle for all involved, particularly Mayor Rahm Emanuel, on hand to personally witness his latest setback.

     Some 30,000 people came downtown on an unusually cold and rainy early October evening. But in a town used to putting 60,000 hardy souls in Soldier Field on a single-digit day in December, bracing unpleasant elements is nothing unusual, and as darkness fell, the pre-flop mood around the river was boisterous by all reports.

     The procession of barges — Victorian mansion-shaped floats — made their appearance. Flame was put to them. Only the things wouldn’t burn.

     Minutes passed. The crowd started chanting: “We want fire! We want fire!”

     The Twitterverse had no trouble igniting in a firestorm of scorn.

     “Is anyone downtown at the Fire Fest?” WGN’s Dean Richards tweeted. “54 min late . . . nothing happening at State Street!!”

  “‘It’s cold, I’m hungry, nothing’s on fire.’ Common refrain I’m hearing right now at Chicago Fire Fest” tweeted WTTW broadcaster Paris Schutz.
     To be clear: I wasn’t there. I had contemplated going, the way you muse you really should get up on a ladder and clean those gutters. I raised the subject as we broke our Yom Kippur fast at a Korean barbecue joint late Saturday afternoon (close enough; though if you’re looking for a cosmic reason to explain the Great Chicago Fire Festival Fiasco of 2014, consider its scheduling on Judaism’s holiest day: Always a bad idea to give the finger to the God of Deuteronomy).
     But the temperature was a paltry 42, a penetrating cold due to the drizzle, and my wife said there was no way she was heading downtown. She made a counter suggestion: gelato and a movie at home instead. I wasn’t about to argue that one.

     Still, curiosity had me online at the appointed hour, smiling benevolently at the snafu, which I had foreseen in my Aug. 25 column where I toured Redmoon’s Pilsen headquarters, viewed the floats being built, and saw that, five weeks before the event, they didn’t seem to have their act together.
     “The preview had a hasty, shambolic quality that made me wonder if they’ll pull it off,” I wrote, and happily retweeted Saturday night, a rare moment of prescience.
     Though to be candid, I was more worried about blazing floats getting out of control; the thought that they couldn’t even get the things to light in the first place was so extremely lame as to be beyond imagining.
     What now? Anyone purporting to hold a public event, particularly in Chicago, has to accept the occasional disaster, from the monsoon that washed out what was supposed to be the first night game under lights at Wrigley Field (“8/8/88,” remember?) to that storm forcing Lollapalooza to be evacuated in 2012. As much as I was disappointed by the New Age, twee, self-adoring execution by Redmoon, an organization that lost its soul catering birthday bashes for billionaires, there is a good idea lurking somewhere here, and lame as its debut was, it would be even lamer to drop the idea altogether. Many a cherished tradition crawled slowly out of the blocks. The WOOGMS Parade, a beloved and now extensive Memorial Day celebration that has enlivened Lake View for half a century, began with Al Weisman getting an American flag on a 5-foot-long flagpole and marching down Oakdale Avenue, followed by the neighborhood kids.
     Why not rethink the thing? Redmoon was so wrapped up with artsy-fartsy nonsense that their barges didn’t burn. Have a dozen barges, not three, and allocate each to a neighborhood group or charity — maybe they have to pay for the privilege. Let them construct a big, flammable edifice under the close supervision of somebody who knows what they’re doing. Let the whole thing benefit the Chicago Fire Department or a related charity, like Bucks for Burn Camp. Pry the buttered fingers of Redmoon off the event; send them back to serving canapes to Sam Zell’s friends. If we quit now, the entire effort was a waste. It we declare it a do-over, it might someday be seen to have worth. That’s the true Chicago spirit. We don’t quit.

Zeke Emanuel guesses how he'll feel in 2032

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

    Attempting to explain the impenetrability of Richard M. Daley, I coined the phrase: "Trying to get to know him is like trying to peel a ball bearing with your thumbs." Maybe some people can, maybe the man has friends who understand exactly what he's all about. God I hope so. But to the rest of us, it's a smooth, slippery, sealed mystery. I don't believe Daley himself has a clue about who he really is or why. 
    Though not quite as murky, Rahm Emanuel is similar enigma. He talks more than Daley did, true, but in a sense he's just as unknowable but for opposite reasons. If Daley's a silent sphinx, Rahm's a babbling brook, a Twitter feed, an endless gush of spin and pronouncements and self-congratulation. It's hard to find a few nuggets of reality floating in all that.  He reflects himself, but a funhouse mirror version, with the good distorted, and the negative shrunk down to nothing.
     One indispensable guide to Daley was his younger brother, Bill. Rich might never say anything of substance if he could avoid it—he'd cough up a wet furball of mangled syntax and consider the topic closed—but Bill liked to talk, and sometimes he would cast a wan ray of light down the pitch dark well of his brother's soul. 
     As with Daley, Rahm's older brother Ezekiel Emanuel provides a valuable perspective on the unknowable. His book about growing up with Rahm and Ari, the youngest boy, Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family painted a surprisingly candid—read "stark"—view of their lives, with a pediatrician father who had a tendency to bring stray foster kids home to live, and a driven, occasionally unhinged mother who dragooned her children to picket their neighbors' homes and forced them to attend rallies for causes they could barely understand. It explained a lot. The parents drilled into the boys the need to compete, and the three siblings tried to top each other in a semitic North Shore version of the Kennedys.
     Reading it, and assuming that the truth was a derivation or two worse, you have sympathy for Rahm. Of course he'd be the way he is, the poor bugger, a driven little machine of achievement, running after the next prize. To the public, he's rich and powerful. To him, no doubt, he's never rich or powerful enough. 
     Now Zeke has written an essay in the current Atlantic magazine, "Why I hope to Die at 75," that is causing conversation for what it says about aging, the suggestion that rather than clawing at the curtains of life, one should reach moderate old age and resign yourself to a hoped-for swift death. An interesting premise, though I'm more fascinated by what it tells us about  the general Emanual worldview. 
      A doctor and bioethicist, Emanuel argues, correctly, that as we age our bodies decline and our minds become less free-ranging.
     "We literally lose our creativity," he writes.  "But the fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us."
      That's enough for Emanuel, 57, to announce that he'll be happy to go at 75, to avoid the gentle slide into non-productivity. He won't kill himself, he hastens to add, without quite explaining why not. He'll just refuse all life-saving medical care at that point. He seems to think he's making a bold declaration though I couldn't have been the only reader who felt the nearly two decades between this promise and the fulfillment render pretty much everything he insists he'll do or believe essentially meaningless. If I told you what type of tea I'll prefer in 2032, you'd look at me askance, and rightly so. 
      Still, it's the measure he uses to value life that I find fascinating. Forget 75. I hate to be Debbie Downer here, but the truth is, at 65, or 45, or 25, most of us, the vast majority,  aren't winning any prizes in the creativity, originality, or productivity departments. So the decline of whatever scant prowess we may have once had isn't the biggest loss, to us or anybody else. Certainly no reason to step away from the one life we've ever had. The Atlantic piece reflects the mindset of man who is blind to anything that isn't success, the morality gleaned from sneaker commercials and stockbroker ads, that postulate a nation or Iron Man Tri-athletes (like Rahm) where nobody retires to potter in a garden and do the crossword puzzle, a doom that Zeke Emanuel in essence mocks. 

   And then, as walking becomes harder and the pain of arthritis limits the fingers’ mobility, life comes to center around sitting in the den reading or listening to books on tape and doing crossword puzzles. And then …

    Emanuel immediately kicks open an escape hatch. "Maybe this is too dismissive" he quickly adds, lest anyone latch onto his implication that if you aren't writing Infinite Jest you might as well be dead. But that is what he is saying. The idea that life is, itself, a joy, a unique gift that can be savored even on the most limited terms, never seems to occur to Zeke Emanuel. That waking up, making a cup of coffee, assessing the sky and beginning another day, alive, where one can talk to friends, read books, walk the dog, whatever one can, is enough to live on, despite the pain, indignity and decline of age, is unimaginable. He charts the average age men win the Nobel Prize: 48. Well, we all better get on the stick then.
     Emanuel never mentions that plenty of adults lead lives that are diminished, by general standards, from day one. By his measure, they shouldn't give flu shots at Misericordia, because the sooner those folk die, well, the better for them and everyone else. Yet they do, and those of us whose lives barely register on the Emanuel Scale resist writing lengthy pieces in The Atlantic (are there any other kind?) eagerly anticipating our rendezvous with death.
     Emanuel mentions that his parents are both alive, his father 87, has "slowed tremendously" and isn't churning out professional successes anymore.
     "Despite this, he also said he is happy," Emanuel notes, dubiously.
     I have an arthritic hip, a balky memory, and am in desperate need of bifocals, my eyes weakened no doubt from staring hard at the horizon, waiting for a ship that never came in. Yet I truly can say I enjoy life more back when I was 25 and all my neurons were on line and firing properly.     
    Emanuel doesn't perceive it, but his parents being alive skews his judgment here, because he theorizes their decline will blot out the good memories he has of them.
     "Yes, with effort our children will be able to recall that great family vacation, that funny scene at Thanksgiving, that embarrassing faux pas at a wedding," he writes. "But the most-recent years—the years with progressing disabilities and the need to make caregiving arrangements—will inevitably become the predominant and salient memories."
     At times perhaps. But my impression is that difficult declines are kept in a separate category for most people. My parents are 82 and 78, and while they are not hiking glaciers in Colorado the way they used to, they just got back from taking the Queen Mary up to Nova Scotia, and if you asked them, they would say they have their good and bad days, but all told they do not wish they had died years earlier. Nor do I wish they had. I talk to my mother on the phone almost daily, and she manifests her distinct personality quite well—sometimes too well—despite being three years past Zeke Emanuel's sell-by date. And my father, well, the passing years have filed off some sharp edges, and I have to say that the version circa 2014 is in some ways preferable to the 1984 model. We argue less.
     That is meaningless in Zeke Emanuel's world. To him, if you're not rocking your profession back on its heels, well, the grave calls. He wants the last image that his kids have of him as vibrantly climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, not leaning on a cane and feeding pigeons. The fact that his own kids vehemently disagree with this gets waved off, several times. Respecting the opinion of others, giving it weight and significance, is not an Emanuel survival skill.
     Whatever life holds in store for my parents, I'm not worried it's going to efface the memory of Hanukkah 1967. I now this because my wife's parents are both gone, sadly. Both went through difficult, painful deaths which, despite Emanuel's postulation otherwise, did not wipe out the decades of happy memories for their children. Nobody liked seeing them suffer, but nobody was rooting for them to nip out earlier either, including themselves. They had a toughness that has nothing to do with running a marathon. There's a creepy, detached, inhuman quality to Emanuel's argument, but that can't come as a surprise to anyone living in his brother's city.
      Achievement is a great thing; I'm big on it myself. But it can have a monstrousness, and it vibrates under his argument. When Emanuel writes "It is much more difficult for older people to learn new languages," you wish a more practical, human person, grounded in quotidian life, had pointed out to him that, luckily old people seldom need to learn new languages. Whatever the remaining years of my life holds, mastering Mandarin isn't part of the program, and I'm okay with that. 
      Being an Emanuel, he lards his essay with enough caveats and escape clauses that nobody can really be offended by it, and Emanuel allows himself freedom to renounce the whole idea as he approaches 75.
      "I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible," he writes, lest Atlantic subscribers show up to his East Coast home with torches in 2032.
      I don't want to criticize Emanuel too harshly. I'm glad he wrote the piece, as our aging society will demand a re-thinking of how we approach medical care at the end of life, and what he calls "a tsunami of dementia" will become a problem we can't avoid, assuming it isn't already. Our ethics and approach to health care lag tragically beyond our technical medical capabilities, and change must happen. It is too easy to slip into the protracted, technology-ridden death alone in a hospital ward that nobody wants for themselves or their loved ones.
      It can be very difficult to talk to parents about these issues—he discusses that—and we need to create a world where doing so is essential.
      So this sort of article is helpful, as part of a conversation we should all be having. But it also confirmed what I know about the mechanistic, Energizer Bunny of endless action that Chicago has for a mayor. I'm not complaining—I think he's doing a good job, in the main, and perhaps a regular human being wouldn't take it on, never mind perform it as well. But there's a mystery to Rahm, and this helps us make out its contours in the darkness. If there seems a disconnect, a gulf of incomprehension between Rahm Emanuel and the 2.7 million flesh-and-blood people he leads, or tries to, well, it obviously runs in the family.

Not only do you fast at Yom Kippur, you pay for the privilege

     Five years ago, at the height of the recession and feeling a pinch ourselves, it seemed apt to write about the economic jolt that Yom Kippur can deliver to the faithful. What sets this column apart is the extraordinarily tone deaf, tetchy and charmless response by the executive director at the Free Synagogue in Evanston, which I've appended below. 

     Chicago doesn't have a proper Jewish deli. Some will grumble at that statement, will point to Manny's on Roosevelt Road. But Manny's serves cafeteria-style, so it doesn't count -- cafeteria-style deli is like take-out French: the food could be wonderful, but the format undercuts it.

     I'm also biased against Manny's because I was first taken there years ago by Dr. Robert Stein, the Cook County medical examiner, for lunch after a long morning spent watching him perform autopsies. That tends to put off your appetite for a place, forever.

     Upscale delis like The Bagel certainly try, and their food is fine, I guess. But they're too clean. You want a deli to have a certain dingy, loud, shut-up-and-eat quality, not to be a bland plastic place. You want your waitress at a Jewish deli to be some harried Eastern European woman in her mid-50s with flabby, flapping biceps and a look of sour forbearance etched into her face, not a perky part-time aerobics instructor brightly suggesting you try the Chinese chopped salad.

     Of course, now that I ask myself what, indeed, I consider a real Jewish deli, I realize I'm thinking of Corky & Lenny's, in Cleveland, with jars of sour pickles on the tables and big baskets of fresh bread and chocolate phosphates slopping down the glass as they're slapped down before you. Of course, were I to go there now, I'm sure I'd find it doesn't compare to itself in memory either.

     Not that Chicago is without Jewish culinary institutions. There is, for instance, Romanian Kosher Sausage on Clark Street—everyone simply calls it "Romanian." The odd thing about Romanian is: Though I never think about it when it's not in sight—I never say to my wife, "Hey, let's drive to Romanian!"—I don't believe I've ever passed by without stopping in. 
     Because you can't get this stuff just anywhere—the best kosher pastrami, salami, garlic hot dogs, chicken, kishke—all of which we piled into a basket after Romanian's irresistible pull forced us off Touhy last week and inside. How can you not? People journey there from Indiana, from Wisconsin. They place enormous orders and drag them back to Jewish communities stranded in Iowa. The guy in front of me bought $445.58 worth of meat to take back to Michigan.

     "We get people from St. Louis," said the clerk.

     A bold sign in Romanian orders: "Get your Rosh Hashanah and Sukkoth fresh meat order in your freezer now!! DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE. AVOID HIGHER PRICES AND SHORTAGES."

     I admire the severity of that -- given the perils facing Jews, you really have to drive home a threat to catch our attention. This is a time of heightened alertness, because it's now September, the High Holidays loom, and they inspire a certain frantic, musical chairs angst -- the song stops Sept. 18 for Rosh Hashanah, and if you didn't plan ahead, you have no brisket. A week later, the needle is lifted for Yom Kippur, and if you weren't careful, you have nowhere to stand and beat your chest.

     Even the most casual, ham and cheese Jews like to visit a synagogue on Yom Kippur. The way to guarantee a seat is to join a congregation -- some don't let non-members in. But only 40 percent of America's ebbing Jewish population belongs to a temple, and the 60 percent who don't belong sometimes have to scramble.

     For synagogues, the High Holidays present a dilemma. On one hand, you've got all these twice-a-year Jews traipsing through -- what better time to put out the Welcome mat, wrap your prayer shawl lovingly around their shoulders and draw these strangers back toward the comforts of faith?

     On the other, the synagogue needs a new roof, you've got customers eager for what you're selling, and what better way to fill the empty coffers than to charge admission?

     On the Chicago Board of Rabbis Web site list (at juf.org), High Holidays ticket prices range as high as $500; Evanston's Beth Emet The Free Synagogue charges $400 -- ironic, given the name.

     Many synagogues will waive fees for students and the indigent. With the economy still in the toilet, others are scrapping tickets altogether.

Makom Shalom, a renewal synagogue in the South Loop, doesn't sell tickets and instead asks for donations.

     "People are under tremendous economic pressure," says Chava Bahle, rabbi at Makom Shalom. "The pay-to-pray model is not appealing."

     As uncomfortable as the topic is, touching on old slurs about Jews and money, it is also a significant issue in a faith that risks evaporating into the anything-goes polychromatic wasteland of American culture. A lot of American Jews wouldn't enter synagogue if you paid them, so the money question is one that synagogues are grappling with as they try to rally the tribe while there is still a tribe to rally.

     "Almost all congregations these days are really sensitive to economic realities," says Rabbi Michael Balinsky, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. "People have to understand, it costs something to do services -- rabbis have to be paid, rooms have to rented, synagogues have to pay their electric bills and water bills. That's the reality. Everything costs."

     AND YET. . .

     "The last thing we want to do is have people feel they can't come to services," he continues. "We want everyone to be there who wants to be there, and no one is going to be turned away for financial reasons." 
                                                                  —Aug. 31, 2009
HOW TO COMPLAIN

     The scorched-earth rhetoric that passes as political speech infects our daily conversations. People express disagreement by blasting away with both barrels. No one is mildly miffed -- it's always full-blown, quivering outrage.

     But to what end? The reason for complaint should be to get a point across, perhaps even change minds, and here a bit of sugar does wonders. You can insult or you can persuade, but you can't do both.

     Early last week, I ran a column that began by claiming there are no decent Jewish delis in Chicago, then shifted to the topic of synagogues charging for tickets at Yom Kippur. I expected to hear from delis, honked off at being overlooked.

     But the delis were very polite, and two had a point. Kaufman's on Dempster in Skokie sent a puzzled note. I wrote back that I've been patronizing Kaufman's for 25 years but didn't consider them because, in my mind, they're not a deli, but a bagel bakery that sells cold cuts. A fine distinction, perhaps.

     Max & Benny's, the Northbrook institution, also cleared its throat. I overlooked them because they're right under my ample nose. But space is tight, so we'll save them for another day.

     As for the tickets, Chabad, the ultraorthodox group, pointed out, in their characteristic friendly, upbeat fashion, that their services are always free. I've gone to Chabad services, and they are lively, if heavy on the Hebrew.

     In fact, the only real nastiness I got was from Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, aghast that I would make a pun about them.

    Here is the offending line, in its entirety:

     "Evanston's Beth Emet The Free Synagogue charges $400 -- ironic, given the name."

     I won't bore you with the full response from Bekki Harris Kaplan, Beth Emet's executive director, but it includes the words "angered" "obnoxious," "upset," "sarcasm," "character attacks" and "saddened."

     She said she wanted dialogue, so I wrote to her:

     "If you truly want dialogue, two questions: 1) Why is listing the $400 fee OK on the Board of Rabbis Web site, but a 'slam' when I include it in a column on the challenge of both welcoming Jews to synagogue and paying for services? 2) If I wrote, 'I was in the free weight room at the East Bank Club, which is ironic, because it costs $200 a month to use it,' I bet the general manager of the East Bank Club would be smart enough not to send me a starchy note. Why aren't you?"

     Alas, she did not reply, which makes for a very one-sided dialogue. In case she's moved to dialogue now, I'll add a third question: "How can anyone purporting to represent a people so rich in humor, irony, wit and whimsy collapse into a moaning heap of complaint when her own ox is nicked?"

     Postscript: A ticket to Beth Emet now sets you back $500, a 25 percent increase in five years, according to the Board of Rabbis web site. And yes, Ms. Kaplan is still the executive director of the Free Synagogue, no doubt using her charm to draw the faithful through their gates. I never did hear back from her.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     For the New Year (the Jewish new year, if you're thinking, "New Year? What New Year? It's October") I thought I would add an extra twist to the Where IS this? fun activity. Not only will a photo be tossed up to be puzzled over, but then, when it has finally been guessed, I'll post a bit of follow-up rumination about the place. I'm doing this because it was frustrating to display an interesting place, but not be able to say much about it, so as to not give away the game (not that people were stumped long anyway). 

    So I'm posting a picture of this enigmatic green blob, and then I'll fill in why I selected it after somebody figures out where it is. The winner will receive this pristine copy of the Nov. 5, 2009, edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, marking Barack Obama's first election as president. A True Collector's Item, as they say, it popped up while moving my office to the 10th floor; actually several of them did, and how many does a guy need? I see them selling for twenty bucks on eBay. You can have this one by guessing where this enigmatic green emblem is located. Please remember to place your guesses below, and good luck. Remember, I'll be at synagogue for a while today, so it might be later than usual before I can moderate your guesses. Be nice.

Postscript

     I'm a creature of habit when it comes to restaurants. I know what I like—Gene & Georgetti, Harry Caray's, Petterino's, Star of Siam, Sushi Sai, Prairie Grass—and I want it, again and again. But there is a chink in the armor; occasionally a friend will suggest trying "something new" and my accommodating nature trumps my hidebound habits. 
     So when a fellow journalist, a writer for The Economist, suggested a change of pace, I reached for one of those places I've been curious about. I actually thought I was suggesting the Raw Bistro, at 1901 N. Halsted, but somehow got us to a place called Raw, at 51 W. Hubbard, at the sign of the artichoke, or broccoli, or whatever that green thing is supposed to be. 

      I arrived at the first; punctual to a fault. Inside, I noticed it was more a carry-out store than a restaurant, just five or six stools, a refrigerator case, lots of large jars of

supplements. And everything was really expensive. Four dollars for a cookie. By the time my friend arrived, I was waiting out front, and suggested we try somewhere else. 

     No, she said, she lives nearby and is curious about this place. Okay, I'm game. I bought a kale salad for $12 and a carrot muffin for $6 that felt like a lead shotput. She got some dumplings and a $9 bottle of coconut kefir.
     The kale salad was astoundingly good. "So this is what all that kale madness is about," I thought. The amazing thing is, I ate and ate and ate, sharing with her, and when we were done I still had 3/4 of the salad left. I took it home, shared it with my wife with dinner, and still had plenty for breakfast the next day. And the carrot muffin—it was like eating a scoop of Jupiter: this dense, rich, orangish material. She liked her dumplings and kefir less, but we both agreed the place was worth the $20 apiece it cost for lunch. The clerk at Raw also kept setting out little paper cups with samples: sweet potato chips and pumpkin smoothie, mock tuna and a soy burger with homemade ketchup that definitely called for further investigation.  And considering how long the food they give you lasts, and how good and fresh it is, it's really not that expensive.
     Anyway I thought, in my role as a value-added blogger, I should not only use it as a contest location, but then tell you a little about the place. To be honest, I suspected it was going to taste really good, because Raw is vegan, and no vegan restaurant is going to stay in business long if they can't find a way to make the stuff taste good. I'll go back.