Challenging Night

Sleep has run into a few snags.  Consecutive nights of deficit, difficult compensation the following day.  These challenge my commitment to follow professional sleep hygiene recommendations to set the bed as off-limits for all but designated sleep hours.

My first glance at the clock registered as 12:15AM or so.  Then periodic assessments of my watch most subsequent hours through the night.  Seconds each time, though never arising from bed.  Shifting my pillow a lot. Not changing position that much but redirecting my down cover, sometimes to enhance warmth, other times to increase exposure.  The room had not achieved its customary darkness.  Door to bedroom left open, with a dim light in the upper hall.  Bathroom door left open, though with curtain obscuring ambient light in the backyard.  I've been wearing a Casio 168 most nights.  To make the numerals visible,  I tap a button that makes the window transiently robin egg blue to highlight the black numbers.  Each tap and reading takes seconds.  This watch does not track sleep.  I have a Tozo 3 that does, though not worn for a few months.  While the accuracy of its sleep estimates falls well short of a sleep lab, a few nights with this on my wrist may enable some corrections.  I do not know how much sleep I got from my usual lights-out time to arising, but the frequent clock checks suggest a deficit.

Despite some deprivation, I arose from bed at my usual time.  I had scheduled a fasting lab draw for 8AM. Technically, coffee with no additives does not affect Fasting Glucose or Lipid results, but I stayed at my keyboard without my usual morning stimulant.  I swallowed the morning pills dry.  I knew the day would expose some impairment, but getting to the lab on time, maintaining good cheer while there, and driving attentively in each direction did not impose any difficulty.  Often on fasting lab days, since I am coffee-deprived, I follow the venepuncture with a breakfast outing or a stop at a coffee shop.  I did not bring any pen or paper with me, nor could I think optimally if I had, so I just went home.  By then I felt tired, though light chores remained within my capacity.  Deep Work, those challenging mental tasks which usually dominate my mornings, got postponed to later in the day, though not entirely eliminated.  Instead, now feeling some energy impairment, though not a desire for sleep, I substituted a few easy items.  Crosswords done with reasonable proficiency.  Snafu from lab reported to my doctor to try to avoid a fasting redraw.  Arranged an important phone call with my financial advisor.  While I avoid Social Media on Wednesdays, r/judaism still seemed within my mental capacity to participate.  I even wrote a thoughtful response to one of the posters.  

Finally, a k-cup of coffee.  Then I set a timer for 45 minutes.  Glasses off, into my recliner at full recline.  I never fell asleep, but felt my energy had been sufficiently uplifted at about 40 minutes.  More easy tasks, or at least those not requiring mental prowess.  I followed my MWF Stretching video.  A little later, I completed my assigned physical therapy program to allow a medial meniscal injury its best chance to heal. By then that mug of coffee had provided a boost to alertness.

Late afternoon has arrived.  I still don't feel sleepy.  Getting back to fixed sleep times, which has been successful over a year or two, seems within reach.  I'd still like to tackle one or two challenging cognitive tasks before the day ends.  I probably can.  Priority after supper. Not expecting my best work, but above threshold.  Some reading, some evening chores.  Address a few neglected initiatives.

While sleep deprivation feels uncomfortable and it detracts from performance, I have enough valuable activities that do not require maximum mental or physical attention.  These today.  Reset to the most challenging tomorrow.

Visiting Grandchildren

We live in the best of times, despite public turmoil.  Those same technological advancements that now enable Conflict Entrepreneurs to motivate tribes to stomp upon other tribes, also allow more gratifying connections.  My father never met his grandparents, my mother only her paternal grandfather, after whom I am named.  My grandparents sailed across an ocean, never expecting to return, and they didn't, except for my maternal grandmother who travelled with a measure of hardship to the new sovereign State of Israel not long after its Independence to see a few surviving relatives of the Holocaust.  She left my grandfather alone for weeks to do this.

I knew all four of my grandparents.  They survived to my mid-childhood, lived a drive away, not so far as to require significant planning, and connected by a new superhighway that my father traveled daily as he commuted to work.  We saw them often.

My children also knew their grandparents,  though under much easier circumstances.  Their maternal grandmother died before their birth, but my father had remarried, leaving them with four grandparents.  We lived an easy drive from one set, and eventually a flight from another.  We enjoyed ample income and enough protected time to enable travel.  And despite accessibility, we visited them far more often than they made a trip to come to us.

Our children made my wife and me new grandparents in 2025.  We navigate a different world, mostly better.  College and advanced degrees, which our two children each earned, essentially train them to secure employment.  There were no family businesses, though they each entered professions that distribute employment to all parts of America, unlike government, entertainment, and financial employment, which have regional centers.  They settled in suitable situations, one a five-hour drive, the other a five-hour flight.  American demographics now have people marrying later and starting families later.  My father became a grandfather at age 61, not quite retired, nor as well off as his sons.  My turn did not arrive until age 74, long retired with ample funds and discretionary time.  Yet, health and local commitments limit our ability to spontaneously get in the car or arrange a five-day cross-country visit

Communications have advanced beneficially. In lieu of travel, we can watch our infants progress to toddler on WhatsApp or Zoom.  It's hardly the same as holding them, but this form of remote contact remains available almost any time.  As a result, my grandchildren see us with more frequency than I saw my grandparents in the 1950s, despite more distant geographic access.  

My children, and now their children, have less reservation about air travel or even long road trips than my wife and I do.  Each infant has flown cross-country.  A five-hour drive from my son's house to mine, extended another two hours to visit his wife's sister and her family, needs some planning, but not a lot.  Getting to the other set of grandparents takes nine hours by car each way.  They've done it.  My senior citizen view of travel has lost some of the spontaneity of my youth.  Occasionally I will offer my wife an unexpected out for dinner or treat myself to a slice of pizza without planning, but most travel, even errands, imposes some preparation.  Distance visiting also eliminates day trips, the most frequent format for seeing my grandparents and my children's maternal grandparents.  No matter who travels, us or them, it becomes an expedition.  Mostly we accommodate each other in our homes, reasonable comfort for visiting my son, more spartan in my daughter's apartment on the opposite coast, and definitely improvised when they come to us.  In their cities, though, my wife and I also travel with an element of tourism, selecting a few sites we've not visited previously.

This season I had intended to travel to each of them.  The car trip should have been straightforward.  Pick a long weekend and go.  We did.  But they have activities of their own.  Son with work obligations, daughter-in-law with professional obligations.  The following weekend, they make the nine-hour round trip to the other grandparents.  Then two more weekends when my wife has commitments.  They will share Thanksgiving with us instead.

I had intended to a transcontinental trip after OLLI concludes, and still might.  A few days with descendants, a few days of tourism.  My own medical care needs do not yet have the predictability to make air reservations with a week's hiatus from different elements of care that folks on Medicare anticipate.  So again, daughter and granddaughter come to us.

There seems a measure of justice built into our situation.  When my wife and I selected an optimal place to settle and begin our family, we included parental visits in our preferences.  Easier for us to get to them than for them to get to us.  And that is how it played out.  The distances of my kids' generation are much larger, but it still seems easier for them to visit us when they want than for us to travel to them when we want.  Probably how it was always meant to be.

Jewish Reading

Several years ago, for one of my semi-annual projects, I committed myself to two new periodical subscriptions.  I sought guidance, some helpful, some not.  Eventually I selected two with daily on-screen issues.  Years later, The Forward and The Atlantic remain on annual autopay.  I target myself to read one each day except shabbos from The Atlantic and two from The Forward. For the most part, I've done rather well over several years.  The Atlantic offers audio versions of most features.  I never just listen, but commonly read along as the narrator's  AI voice recites the words.  Most of what I select as my preferred daily article takes 8-12 minutes.  One feature took 53 minutes:  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/  I did not listen to this one but read it in segments over a few days.  The author, a staff journalist, predicted the decline in attentive reading, the type that makes the higher brain centers sort out ideas, along with accumulating information.  She acknowledged that our screens and feeds have forced us to read more words but of less complexity.  We see and absorb snippets.  Social media posts, advertising that psych grads from competitive schools chose for us based on intensity of reaction.  Junk mail, nearly all unread, fills mailboxes.  Email scrolling with its FOMO displaces better activities, though still with a few opportunities for interaction with another person at each view.  Her theme seems to be that this increase in word volume falls short on purpose.  The effort I made in choosing my new paid subscriptions, including a modest financial commitment, suggests that I sought presentations that would pass through an editor before getting to me.  What I got to read would force some upgrade on my intellect.  It did. 

While my professional activity was medical, for which targeted study remained a priority during a long career, my more casual reading had a Jewish underpinning.  Much of what I read came to me passively in the form of synagogue newsletters, a local Jewish weekly intended to promote the organization with my attachment to it as a byproduct, and a more substantial monthly periodical in magazine print.  I have followed Parsha of the Week commentaries since the early days of the internet and quickly latched onto yutorah.org in the MP3 era, though most of those presentations were audio, not visual.  Newer research suggests that audiobooks have less impact than struggling with written words and sentences.  I probably could have figured that out from college where lecture content whizzed by but mastery of textbooks enabled high exam scores.

Now in retirement, my professional reading mostly includes three articles from each weekly edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.  Jewish reading has taken on a greater daily focus.

I complete a fair amount of regular reading, some scheduled, some not.  Two articles daily in The Forward.  A previous editor used to publish the emails of her journalists.  This has enabled me to make comments directly to many of the authors, including herself.  If not overwhelmed by email and the comments are specific to the piece, these correspondents have a tendency to write back.  Some give a "thanks for reading" response, but the younger ones seem more appreciative of the feedback on their content and expression.  This moves daily reading upward, from a benefit to me to a shared exchange which enhances the consumer of content and its provider.

The Atlantic covers a diverse array of topics, though with a weight towards political analysis.  I tend to gravitate to the Jewish themes.  These usually come from people not on the magazine's payroll and are longer.  Often they take more than one session for me to read, but they are substantial.  Many authors have their own websites with contact information, so a direct or indirect email with my own perspective on their subject can be conveyed.  These people have prominent positions that overwhelm them with email, but responses occasionally happen.  More recently, The Atlantic has instituted a readers forum where a few hundred comments get added for most articles, including the Jewish ones.  There is a mechanism for responding to individual comments, resulting in threads.  I prefer to post my own thoughts on what The Atlantic published.  Responses to my input are minimal, but forcing me to think about what I just read has its own value.

In the last year or so, I've added eJewish Philanthropy to my daily Jewish consumption.  It arrives in my email at different times, but only on rare weekdays does it not appear at all.  My relationship to Machers could best be described as inconsistent.  Some admirable, many self-promoting in the quest for status.  At least those I encounter locally.  The universe of Judaism is quite large.  Many I only know on paper or on screen.  And I know that funding enables many good projects.  If I were a mogul, would I fund Day Schools or Symphonies?  What I tend to read from eJPhil are two things.  Usually I select an article, mostly an op-ed promoting a pet project that a person of title has.  I can usually relate to what is written.  They allow comments.  I add my own.  Mostly, they have an editor that keeps those from cheerleaders and nodders but denies print to those from critics.  That view of Achdus, or Unity, has probably diminished organizational Judaism in my lifetime.  I no longer look to see if my remarks appear.  I also tend to search the Birthday acknowledgements placed at the end.  I open the links for my contemporaries, mostly people with more impressive cv's than me, often linked to their Wikipedia profile.  Many law alumni, many financial mavens, a few with organizational titles.  Doctors underrepresented.

These relatively short articles, most readable in one session, now arrive on my screen passively.  They keep me engaged.  They also give me a questionalble justification for what I don't read, those links to local personal encounters that generated an unfavorable impression, even resentment sometimes.

While short reading and selective responses on my part meet the small but consistent efforts that lead to a measure of mastery, books also remain part of my Jewish engagement, two or three most years. Arc of a Covenant took three library renewals to complete.  Corresponding with book authors has become more difficult, though not impossible.   Books published by commercial firms have to go through considerable editing, so the end reader can rely on a professional improving the fluency, upgrading detail, and minimizing loose tangents.  They tend to be more complex, more dependent on other writing dozens of previous pages ago.  Sometimes engaging with my Jewish world, or my professional one, requires undertaking the most difficult projects.  Books serve that purpose for me.  A consistent slog to get the entirely read, typically a half hour most nights.  The satisfaction of completion, though, exceeds what my daily reading of news articles and op-eds generates.

Slow but consistent.  Two articles from The Forward, one from The Atlantic with Jewish themes as a priority, one from eJPhil most days.  A comment on content twice a week, directly to the author if an email address is available, to the Disqus option along with the observations of other readers. Four parsha commentaries every Thursday, now mostly written but audio in previous Torah cycles. And two books of suitable complexity each year.

Something remains missing.  In college we used to have term papers, those explorations of a  topic that require seeking resources and creating a presentation.  These have not entirely disappeared, but have become rare.  Occasionally I will get an invitation for a presentation at synagogue that requires some exploration.  And I write my own op-eds and narratives, submit a few haphazardly, but rarely reach anyone else.

Reading has a way of keeping my thoughts open to what others think.  It has its limitations, particularly in the social sphere.  Committee meetings and personal gatherings also promote exchange of ideas between people.  Zoom sessions have inhibited this, as people need to take turns, much as they would take their turn to type a statement onto Disqus at the end of an article.  Yet little elevates my mood more than a response from an author to whose work I have assessed, sometimes challenged.  Interactive and community does not always require personal presence.

So for now I seem content with my daily quota of Jewish thought and the format by which it comes my way.

Avoiding Bed

OOB.  A common entry I often wrote on inpatient order sheets.  Nurses understood it as Out of Bed, either daily or twice a day.  Leaving recovering patients to loll delays their recovery.  Nurses know this, but they have a lot of urgencies, from administering medicines, changing IVs, and preparing patients for procedures.  Presenting mobilization of recovering patients as a specific task to get checked off as a to-do assures that it does not sink to an undone low priority.

Approaching my mid-70s with few mandatory daily tasks that require mobilization, staying horizontal, whether bed or lounge chair, comes too easily.  I sleep there, but also read, banter with my wife sometimes.  She watches TV there, though I prefer the recliner of sub-optimal comfort in My Space.  As I review daily tasks, most require me to mobilize myself.  And even those reading tasks lose attentiveness when done in bed instead of at my desk or at a round table at OLLI.  

Staying OOB has a more important objective than productivity, though.  It is integral to sleep hygiene.  This enables more restorative sleep for the properly assigned sleep times, which leads to more energetic daylight hours.  As a result, I've gotten fairly rigid at when I can occupy my bed.  Mostly off limits from 6:50AM which I've assigned my rising time to 9:30PM which has become my wind-down hour in preparation for lights out at 10PM.  I still have the downstairs sofa as horizontal, something needing its own elimination, and my recliner for watching TV.  This unfortunately has become a surrogate for extending my morning sleep hours, though nearly always with an interruption for dental hygiene first.

While I committed myself to following sleep hygiene recommendations, and I note the benefits which have come my way, it remains a hard thing for me to do.  The fixed wake and sleep times do not always match my energy cycles.  The hours in bed, while maintaining predictable sleep stages, do not always leave me rested.  Fortunately, people and other animals have a mechanism for sleep interruption with catch-up later for essential tasks, like answering a baby's cry to escaping a predator.  The respect for that daily 6:50AM nudge, though, does not always move me to something essential.  And when sleep-deprived, irrespective of reason, I might fall asleep in the lounge chair with the TV's blue emitted light unable to overcome genuine fatigue.  Sleep hygiene takes some real effort for some genuine benefits, though physiologic failures require gracious acceptance without berating myself for weakness or inadequate grit.

I do a few things most days as an incentive to avoid my bedroom during assigned waking hours.  Either my wife or I make the bed as soon as the second of us arises.  I don't want to upset handiwork that took effort, even if only about three minutes.  I will place things on the made bed, often a basket of laundry, to make it harder to just plop myself back down at the first hint of sleep.  And for some reason, the master bedroom has the least adapted climate control of any room in our house, which has caused me to place a window air conditioner for the summer and an electric space heater for the frigid times.  This can discourage being there when I don't need to be.

OOB has a daytime purpose, whether for patients recovering from illness or myself trying to get the most out of my waking times.  How well the restrictions I accepted for myself played out in my senior years gets a mixed scorecard.  Restricted bed times effectively creates a box of time when the bed is off limits.  Productive time is the intent: some creative, some challenging, some maintenance of ordinary household tasks.  That requires other specified times.  Prime time, the mornings, at my desk.  Focus time, another struggle.  Appointments:  doctors, shabbos services, OLLI.  Things to do that have no assigned times:  grocery shopping, laundry.  Habitual activities:  meal preparation, hygiene.   And dead times, mostly driving to where I need to go.  The assigned bedtimes have the purpose of supporting the waking times.  For the most part, my adherence has enabled that, as the sleep hygiene experts suggested it would.

As a result, this remains a priority.  How I feel when my clock radio sounds mostly becomes subordinate to my promise to myself to get up, even it requires a snooze in the lounge chair later.  At 9:30PM, screens go off in anticipation of lights out a half hour later.  Assigned times have only a loose correlation with physiological realities, but close enough to respect them in anticipation of a future benefit.  And with this effort, I still feel reasonably spry as my years advance.

Faulty Sukkah

My Jewish attachments have many beneficial non-negotiables, or at least minimally negotiables. I follow dietary restrictions.  My weekly Shabbat has its protocols that shut down some of the urgencies of the other days.  The Jewish calendar mandates seasons, usually in the form of Festivals.  Each has its joys, some its burdens.  Passover foods, the Omer Count, a dairy meal challenge for Shavuot, and uncomfortable Tisha B'Av in midsummer, the assembly of people not seen in a while for the Holy Days, the Sukkah that follows, festivities of Hanukkah, fruits of Tu B'Shvat, and the merriment of Purim.  Most challenge me in some way, whether creating a dinner, cleaning house, learning a liturgy portion, or simply being in shul when that's not my preferred destination.

Physical demands only come twice.  Preparing my house for Pesach requires multiple trips between my home's first floor and the basement, mostly to bring sometimes heavy boxes of stored dishes and cookware upstairs, then back down again at the Festival's conclusion.  Washing them can be tedious but preparing the food glorious.  Sukkot requires me to build a sukkah, a flimsy transient structure with a few requirements to make the structure valid.  That Festival is in progress.

Building our sukkah has gone through a few transformations over many years, but having one for our family, and usually for guests, has become one of those non-negotiables.  These structures vary considerably in durability, though none intended to be durable, and in effort required to assemble them.  Mine has transformed from one of wooden beams and cloth walls to a more commercial frame of rust-resistant steel pipes connected by plumbing joints.  A skin of canvas then gets placed around the frame, held in place by bungee anchors inserted into grommets and wrapped around the steel tubes.

The sukkah's validity is established by its roof.  Traditionally, that must come from branches, mostly evergreens, sometimes parts of corn stalks, not always readily available.  The commercial kits, which we use in recent years, have a series of wooden slats that get rolled out over the steel tubing.  The fit could be better.

As my wife and I enter our senior years, the physical capacity to assemble this has waned.  It requires a step ladder, which I have, but which has weathered over decades.  The tubes do not always fit securely into the joints.  Always a two-person job.  And placing the prefab roof atop the frame exposes the limitations of its construction which leaves little leeway for lapses in placement.  I found the branches easier to place, though harder to find.  

And then we have weather, once assembled.  The structure resembles a box kite.  Over the years, brisk winds of the noreaster season have displaced ours.  This year the winds created a topless sukkah, no longer in conformity with the rules of construction.  

Construction has taken a toll on me.  While coping with medial knee pain through physical therapy, the ups and downs of the step ladder, the need to reposition myself to insert tubing into joints, thread the bungees through the grommets, and balance the wooden roof onto the frame has challenged my physical therapy progress.  NSAIDs have gone from PRN to q12h with some benefit, but not enough to postpone orthopedic assessment.

While having my own sukkah has been a seasonal non-negotiable, the toll it has taken requires me to reconsider.  I could hire a handyman and direct him.  Or with some luck, the ortho folks can restore my knee, though they cannot reverse some other aging features that hint maybe a ladder creates too much risk.  Communal sukkahs trace to antiquity, suggesting that individual ones so common in suburbia many have in another era exceeded the financial ability and physical capacity of our ancestors.  This year's effort brings me to a branch point, figuratively and literally.  The sukkah will come down more easily than it went up.

Voters Decided

When I participate in a Zoom session with folks from other parts of America, as they express irritation with their representatives, I almost gloat that my state remains pretty mainstream.  We do not elect racists, idlers seeking entitlements, or people who think green everything should get mandated by law.  I've not even encountered public hostility ot Jews or our attachment to Israel as a place of Jewish sovereignty, something that has no bearing in our local elections beyond the positions of those we send to Congress.  My state has a single dominant statewide party, the Democrats, with legislative majorities, though not quite supermajorities.  For the most part, our officials function as technocrats, people who understand economic growth, the importance of favorable bond ratings, and an element of sensitivity to those segments of the public that have not fared well. Divisive issues are settled by primaries, not general elections.  This biennial expression of citizens' preference took place this week.  Nationally, I sense a desire to hit the reset button, throw the rascals out.  And to some extent the registered Democrats did that.  

Statewide we returned incumbents and replaced a vacancy for State Treasurer with a professional finance expert.   For the legislature, many office holders got their termination notices, including my State Senator.  I've known him for some time.  A competent, decent fellow.  An administrative career professional rising to a position of prominence with my state's largest employer.  I voted for him.  He lost his primary, as he had been ousted from the State Assembly in a primary a few years before.  I got to know the Assemblyman who beat him, another very worthy fellow who seems more empathetic than my more businesslike friend.  

This round of primaries saw an upstart sub-party.  The Working Families Party seemed loosely organized, adequately funded, and probably made themselves more visible than some of the incumbents.  They turned over eight seats, cominng within a few votes on another.  They will have a presence in the legislature, though I am not sure what type of legislation they will either create or insert provisions into.  They do not seem woke, as in gimme what you deprived me of through history, but they set a divide between those who have prospered and those who have not.  Since only 22% of registered Democrats voted, they likely targeted neighborhoods where they would generate motivation.  Their candidate came to my front door early in the campaign season, as did my friend who lost.  I was not home for either, but they left their advertising.  

And elsewhere, Democrat voters expressed a desire for change, or at least avoidance of impropriety.  My wife's hairdresser's husband had held an elected county office for decades.  He got voted out, probably more related to unfavorable publicity that he could have avoided than any dissatisfaction with his performance in office.

And another familiar face enters.  One of my students from my synagogue teen classes finally won a seat somewhere.  He made it to County Council by about 30 votes.  He promotes himself as an environmentalist.  He seems a bit of a luftmensch, that type of fellow who sort of has a job but not one with responsibilities and advancement.  He does have engineering degrees from well-known places but I suspect his classmates have advanced in their careers more than he has.  And I've not seen him or his twin or his mother at shul in recent years.  But he got enough voters to go his way.  And his engineering degrees will likely pay off, as our county legislative business seems dominated by various forms of land use and construction.  We seem less focused on his issues of Green Space, though I can understand why his campagn to protect our county from endless suburban sprawl would have its appeal.

Might I have a unifying assessment?  Like much of America, my locale has its share of people dissatisfied with their circumstances.  They cannot accurately blame their legislature as much as scapegoat them, which they did.  I saw people who could be moved to acting by somebody knocking at their door or engaging them in some sympathetic way.  The removal from office of my wife's friend suggests that people have become more intolerant of impropriety, or even those who enable impropriety while remaining personally reputable.  Our statewide office holders have represented us adequately, getting returned by big margins.  And those sideshows of woke and blaming Jews did not get tested in my district as they have elsewhere.

I'm currently enrolled in a course on The Federalist Papers at the state university's senior division.  In explaining the proposed Constitution to the skeptics of New York State, our national founders highlighted how they needed to restrain factions.  They did this in part by imposing term limits of various types.  I saw the plus and minus side to their reasoning this week.  We definitely had a faction, this time Working Families.  We also had incumbents who could only continue representing us by getting majority votes.  Statewide we avoided factions, as the founders predicted the outcome of a big electorate.  Locally where the number of voters were few, promotion of niche interests prevailed.  These candidates could go on the attack, while incumbents had to defend.  Indeed, my friend ousted in the primaries, campaigned on what he did in office, not what he would seek if returned.  The foters understood the difference.  They opted for people who would look for a future, not having a past to defend.  For many wage earners, the past did not fare well.  They opted for something else.  The new people will have to define more clearly what that something else is.  They will also have to engage in coalitions to bring their agendas to the voters next time.

Excessive Programming

What is the right number and frequency of events?  Those arias of congregational performance that gather community, though sometimes at the expense of the normal rhythms of Jewish existence, or at least my concept of how living Jewishly expresses itself.  These events attract people, for sure.  Create kehillah, maybe, or a sense of obligation to be seen, as the Protestant sanctuaries depended upon for much of the 20th century.  Attract consumers, yes.  Create engagement, more open to challenge.

These shabbat dinners now pop up monthly.  Selichot this season morphed from worship, reflection, and transition to a spectacle.  There's something not quite right about breaking into a line hora as the congregation recites the Yom Kippur confessional for the first time.  The clergy are not roobs.  Most of the folks stepping and clapping could probably appreciate that too.  I remember selichot from college as the ultimate expression of kehillah.  We reacquainted for the first time since departing the campus the previous May.

Judaism has its times of communal gatherings.  Shabbos, the synagogue sukkah, mass attendance for RH and YK.  There are opportunities, even obligations, to publicly honor people.  We have forums for those fulfilling special projects to present their achievements.  Learning sometimes does better communally, though "teach me something" with no personal effort emerges as a trap.

We also have those private times.  Judaism has its organizations, but it also has its more subdued moments.  Shabbos dinner, mostly with my household, which expanded and contracted over the cycles of life.  A few friends join us at our table a few times each year.  Small gatherings to observe shiva.  Those moments I allocate for myself each Thursday to explore what four whose learning exceeds mine have to say about the upcoming Torah and Haftarah portions.  Solitary time, though not lonely time, reading selected reports in The Forward and elsewhere about Jewish life, history, culture, and more, then sending a note of my perspective to the authors.  That's engagement.

There's a place for joining in, though it can and does create consumers who opt in and out.  Engagement is not that.  It comes in the form of contributing, conducting a class, learning a Torah aliyah or Haftarah that you've not mastered before, cooking the Shabbos dinner, getting asked onto a committee because you have proficiency with what that committee does.  Those people shift from consumer to contributor.

And then we have the creators, the people who design the programs.  I see too much restriction with Dominant Influencers, gatekeeping entitlements, a role that even the most talented cannot easily penetrate.  Those creators design the menu for consumers.  

So how many shabbos dinners do I want to attend, especially when the food from my kitchen surpasses the contents of the foil chafing dishes?  How much entertainment do I want?  How many classes when nobody asked me what education might enhance my Jewish experience?  As we get into the Holy Days, programmed by a Steering Committee of what the Protestants would call their congregational elders, judging a very iffy Selichot that prioritized popularity over propriety, I could see some divergence between my private Judaism over programming.  And I control that private Judaism.

Summer's Transition

Labor Day arrives at the last allowable date this year.  The transition to fall begins a little earlier in recent years.  Schools have mostly returned to session, colleges and public schools, before August concludes.  College football now has a Week 0.  Only a few games make it to my ESPN stream, but they include some teams that will get a significant viewership as the season moves ahead.  

My OLLI program, which coordinates with the state university calendar, still begins after Labor Day, by one day.  My course preferences all came through.  My medical care eased off a bit for the summer, not because it was summer, but some medial meniscus pain got me plugged into a physical therapy program, which should continue in earnest through the fall.  My other medical appointments cluster from September to November.  

Synagogue programming perks up with the Holy Days.  I cannot describe myself as emotionally captured by their arrival.  I approach them with a mixture of obligation, a small measure of renewal, and maybe some personal accomplishment as I build a sukkah to share with guests.  My congregation has doubled down on programming, some of it spectacles that don't generate a lot of anticipation for me in my later years.  I much prefer the rhythms of the calendar, those recitatives of shabbos each week with dinner for two at my dining room table over a communal event for thirty.  But in deference to others who feel differently, these events have significant attendance.  

Even OLLI has a different look for me this fall.  Only three lecture courses, one online.  The others require my participation:  non-fiction writing, a next try at violin lessons, a first try at the acoustic guitar, a course on acting.  Less sitting in a classroom, watching slides or DVDs.  Maybe a little reading to do for one course, but passive sitting for the lectures.  Engagement for the majority of selections that require me to perform in some way.  

Travel comes more easily in the summer.  No big excursions, no airplanes this year.  It is not impossible for the fall, though a strain.  Maybe a day trip, maybe a long weekend.  I'm not hot for adventure, though seeing the grandchildren, now each past their first birthday, adds some joy, enough to offset the car or plane time.  Day trips:  Haven't been to shabbos morning at Beth Tfiloh for a few years.  Probably some places in Amish country.  Maybe public transportation to NYC.  And take better advantage of my SEPTA Senior Pass.  Limited mainly by Physical Therapy schedules.  And every fall needs me to watch a West Chester U game live.

So while the closing months of the calendar year offer activities, I need to choose what I do selectively.  Amid OLLI, Jewishness, health needs, all emerging these months, I cannot neglect that precious ME TIME, sitting in my space, interacting with authors, experessing myself in different forums, and tending to some gradual decluttering of the house and acquiring more mastery in my kitchen.

Scheduling gives structure that better enables activities without assigned times.

Sleep Segments

Sleep patterns have a way of shifting in my later years.  Publicly available YouTubes delve into some of this.  Sleep trackers of dubious accuracy exist as phone apps next to a pillow and as watch features.  I've used both.  Sleep hygiene advice exists online from multiple sources, most pretty consistent.  Go to bed at a fixed time, arise at a fixed time, don't fidget indefinitely in bed when awake.  Getting up and reading results in sleep deprivation the next day.  And avoid the bed during the non-sleep times.

Some predictability emerges.  For me, it's lights out at 10PM, unless my wife is reading.  Shades down.  Bedroom and bathroom doors nearly closed.  Room cool with window AC if needed.  Its noise does not seem a deterrent to sleep.  Phone and laptop off at 9:30.  In bed with basic Casio watch, set to notify me at 6:50, which I mostly do not notice, and with wife's clock radio set to a classical station at 6:48AM.  So far, so good.  I'm rarely agitated in the evening as a source of initial insomnia.  I've learned to mark the end of each day: three things that went well, one that did not, and three sources of gratitude.  Then lights out and into oblivion within minutes, with a short recognition of my wife's arrival an hour or two later most nights.  

Middle-of-night insomnia has gotten predictable, typically at 3AM.  One reason I prefer Casio with no apps to my Tozo 3 with sleep tracker and countdown timers and heart rate record is its inclination not to look at it when I conclude my first sleep phase.  Sometimes I can see the electrical numbers on the alarm clock, sometimes not.  A quick illumination of the Casio reveals the time.  Not invariable consistency but most often within an hour of 3AM.  

YouTubers claiming expertise offer explanations, few provable, and solutions, none effective for me.  My guess is that my primitive brain takes over.  Sleeping through the night seems a recent addition to human behavior.  In hunter-gatherer or early community eras, the night presented as two sleep times.  Nature determined darkness, with a hormonal mechanism to adapt.  Dawn determined awakening.  And about mid-way between, people got up to spot-check danger.  Later in the early communal phase, people took turns as sentries, covering overnight shifts.  We employ people in that fashion today in our police and medical teams, but we move their assigned shifts, keeping them the same length.  So there is a physiological explanation, along with some hormonal and medical ones.  A few tries at melatonin otc did not change that.  Dr samples of Ambien did, though I have no interest in medical manipulation of sleep with a stable pattern established that does not leave me impaired when my OOB time appears.

That second half of most nights appears in a minor transition.  Returning to sleep has also established predictability.  It takes just over an hour most of the time.  I rarely feel edgy or an inclination to make myself productive, in effect creating a second nocturnal work time.  Some nights I think about activities of the previous days or decision dilemmas.  I recognize some impasses as solved from having slept on it the first half of the night, but I do not keep a pen and paper next to the bed to record what I think.  On rare occasions, a dream awakens me, more often a nightmare with distortion of the familiar than a sleep hour of REM ecstasy.

The interval of night's second half seems recently different.  My ability to doze off again has gotten less predictable.  When I do, the second half rarely brings me to my assigned wake time.  I can expect a second awakening about an hour or so before the scheduled clock radio brings my ear some measures of a symphony and my Casio chimes a minute or two later.  At the second awakening I rarely feel ready to arise earlier than the alarm.  Most often I lie quietly, glance at the clock or watch periodically, then arise when I intended to.  That part goes well.  What does not are those nights when I only stay awake for minutes on the second arousal, drift back to a deeper stage of sleep in that final hour, then get an unexpected jolt from the radio's timer.  I rarely feel motivated to emerge from bed under those circumstances, though I will mostly keep my commitment to myself, and to sleep hygiene advice to get up and proceed with dental hygiene, irrespective of how I feel.  I almost always adapt once I see daylight through the bathroom window and complete the session with my electric toothbrush.  Then downstairs, go outside to retrieve the newspaper from the end of the driveway, and let natural light reset my intrinsic patterns.

Might I feel better, or at least have a longer duration of energy through the day, if those overnight interruptions disappeared?  I don't know, though in late life I do not feel energy deprived.  I am able to recognize the pattern on my own, without the aid of an electronic device.  Polysomnography might determine cause, though I suspect my sleep pattern will differ in a semi-public space hooked up to wires and sensors than it does in my own bedroom or a hotel.  Not worth the effort, though I sometimes wonder how much more energy can come my way with small tweaks in the things I habitually do.  

For now, my pattern, while not optimal to the YouTube gurus or the sleep advocacy organizations, gets me by.  No reason to change my current circumstances.

Made the Trip

 

Shop-Rite has largely abandoned its previous Kosher commitments, mostly for understandable reasons.  Skeletal fresh poultry, almost no beef.  Trader Joe's has added steaks, ground beef, and sometimes cubes.  This mostly suffices a couple of empty nesters.  But I really got spoiled on my visit to Baltimore.  Seven Mile Market is apparently the largest dedicated Kosher market in the USA.  I could find anything on my visit.  Its distance makes it impractical for the few things I'd get.  Much closer sits a project similar to our Shop-Rite agreement, of blessed memory.  It serves a much larger Orthodox and Conservative group of kosher consumers.  The GPS set the trip at 45 minutes to cover the thirty miles, including a bridge crossing.  

The challenge to my driving skills aside, I found the scale of the surroundings intimidating.  This supermarket probably has twice the square footage of my local Shop-Rite.  It sits at the edge of a shopping complex with its two entrances separated by 0.4 miles.  The parking area and the store just seemed vast.  People take their carts from dedicated sections where the previous shoppers left them.  Apparently they economize on gofers to harvest the carts back to the store's entrance.  Not seeing any at the entrance, I went back to the parking lot to retrieve mine.

Knowing that the store was immense, I started at Customer Service to inquire which sections contain the kosher products.  Unlike my local store which had cases of meat with other meet, a bakery, and a deli case with other deli, this Shop-Rite consolidated their kosher offerings as effectively a mini-store within a store, though keeping the baked goods with other baked goods, but labelled as kosher-pareve.  I walked in, where I greeted the attendant.  As I conveyed my story of my local arrangement shutting down, he responded that he also lived in my town for two years during the early days of the agreement.

I came for beef and found quite a lot.  Big slab of raw pastrami.  An eye roast, beef cubes.  I even found a veal chop at a price acceptable to me, something I've not had for years.  They had prepared stuff.  I got a chicken pot pie.  And a salami and a tube of kishke.  A few other things not available to me at home.  The kosher nook even had a tzedakah box, a tradition at kosher shops.  I added a dollar.  As tempting as the meat cases looked, I did my best to limit purchases to what could fit in my freezer.  All fit into the single insulated bag that I brought with me.  $149.  As I added to my cart, I also considered when I might use each item.  Beef cubes, Rosh Hashanah which spans Shabbos and Sunday.  No guests coming, have to be able to get to services.  Crock pot of cholent or stew will satisfy that.  The eye roast:  guests in the sukkah.  I bought a slab of beef:  subdivide for three shabbos dinners.  The pastrami:  guests, as we have no upcoming birthdays.  Tub of  chopped liver, that's mine.  Turkey slices, weeknight dinner probably.  

Waze took me through places I'd probably not choose to drive on my own.  Interestingly, when I first came to the Philadelphia area as a student, then borrowed my parents' car to visit my girlfriend the last two years, many of the highways I use now had not yet been developed.  The NJ Turnpike exited me near Cherry Hill, followed by a drive past strip malls and auto malls, into some parts of Camden where you try not to stop, then across the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia.  I've not driven across the Ben Franklin in decades, and can't remember the last time I took a bus from Philly to NYC that crossed it.  Yet the highways on the NJ side had a familiar look.  The shopping places had greatly expanded with chains that did not exist 50 years ago.  And the life of the roads also showed deterioration with partial repairs.  I remember transitions from one numbered route to another that required drivers to express some chutzpah to claim the lane they needed.  On the route from home to Shop-Rite, it spared me the dangers of Camden itself, but skirted it more closely on the way back.  Waze's algorithm returned me home by a route better maintained, roads more suitable for modern highway driving.

I am hoping that my purchases will last from about the Holy Days through Thanksgiving.  Shop-Rite and Trader Joe's offer enough for ordinary uses.  Now that I have a few hard to obtain treats, though, I have to invite more guests.

Substandard Encounters

Elul has arrived.  This sixth month of the Hebrew calendar serves as an intro to the Holy Days that approach the following month.  Our synagogues have their usual cloth adornments changed to white ones.  We are reminded to reflect on our missteps, things we did that caused harm to others or to the community or to ourselves.  An abundance of these.  We also have people victimized or treated in a less than dignified way, not just by individuals but by our Jewish institutions working within their customary formats.  Often justified in the name of Achdoos, or public solidarity.  Nobody caused these things, but often nobody takes responsibility or ownership of them.

I have my own gripes, accumulated over a lifetime, too often under a Jewish banner.  Some worth pursuing, as my untoward experience often reflects customary practices that need to be reconsidered.  Our synagogues and federations make great whipping boys.  They populate with officers, the best and brightest, chosen for some mixture of obedience and deficit of contrition.  People who think that if you resent your experience, there must be something inferior about you.  Probably no better way to account for the institutional attrition, aging without optimal generational replacement, that plagues so many places less robust or secure than a generation ago.  Malice rare.  Insensitivity without accountability too common.

My own recent encounters probably illustrate the underpinnings as well as anything else.  At synagogue, I only serve on one committee.  Nobody invited me to it, but the chairmen tend to function with sign-up sheets.  This one they accepted me.  I'm not at the core of the mission, but I can be very useful.  My ability to explore other organizations' experiences with similar projects and tap into experts has its place.  And I've been invited to each meeting, attend nearly all, and contribute.  No invitations to be part of the any committee activities between meetings.  I could not attend a recent meeting due to travel.  Before the meeting, I sent the chair a note to include me in the next project.  I returned from vacation to find a follow-up note.  I had been excluded again from something I wanted to do.  Blackballed?  Not an unreasonable conclusion based on who did get some of the assignments that I expected.  I don't know.  Pursue it?  Probably I should, as it violates some dearly held principles.  

As kids, later as an employees, we each brought a few strengths.  Even if you brought no strengths, once on the team you were part of the team.  The weakest athlete in gym class or camp still got to play his one at-bat, stand in right field, do five minutes on half-court basketball, or get pinned faster than a Prom Queen on the wrestling mat.  A Bar Mitzvah kid, irrespective of achievement, got his morning in the limelight, with public appreciation for what he was able to accomplish.  It also broke down, into exclusionary USY Cliques.  There were also places where you had to earn entitlements.  Scouts had ranks and they had merit badges.  Boys needed neither to attend a camping weekend.  Once there, though, the marginal kid still received responsibilities for cooking, cleanup squad, a chance to hold the flag.  Being a member and being treated unconditionally were core values, with leaders committed to enforcing them.

Later in the workplace, once hired, once part of the group, people not only received responsibilities but trust.  I had the good fortune to work in a high-end profession.  Everyone took call on scheduled weekends, everyone got assigned to present a conference or two each year, everyone got assigned a committee or two.  

Much of my Jewish experience has been more conditional than that, places with gatekeepers, places that judged people as useful or not.  Inherently important is a very different mindset.  In my younger years, I used to chant High Holiday Torah reading for one of the days, which varied from one year to the next.  Only machers got aliyot, all men despite gender equality policies of that synagogue, all dressed in Brooks Brother's suits.  Same men for each occasion each year.  They hugged each other when they completed their blessings.  Despite my flawless, expert chanting, I could expect two handshakes each morning.  I was useful.  I remember that decades later, long since transitioned to a different synagogue that values different things.

I'm still a HH Torah reader, though always Yom Kippur.  Initially this occurred for practical reasons, as my wife and I attended elsewhere for Rosh Hashanah, where she could function more as a participant.  Now that we have returned for all the Holy Days, I expressed an interest in swapping my YK reading for one of the RH readings.  Too much trouble for the person doing the assignments.  Forgive me, but  a few years ago I gave part of my assigned reading to another newer member who had joined our Torah reading rotation for many a Shabbos.  He deserved an invitation.  My thinking of him, not the VP considering how to make our services more inclusive and honoring a decent man not yet honored.  He had to learn it de novo, but succeeded.  Often filling the same assignments by default bypasses people who deserve better.  Despite my wanting a new challenge, I was again rejected but defaulted to what we've done before. Purposeful disruption sometimes has advantages over established practices.  Insensitivity to my skill, my willingness to expand that skill, and a different perspective of being part of my congregation's RH experience.  Pursue it?  Maybe.  After all, the Rabbi has a responsibility for advancing the participants, even when his VPs slouch a bit.

As we get into the services of the Holy Days, an individual has the task of bestowing honors on as many men as he can invite.  Most require no advance skill.  The vast majority entail opening and closing the Ark where the Torah scrolls are housed at specified times in the liturgy.  Other men get asked to lift or tie a Torah scroll or open the ark when those scrolls are removed or replaced into it.  When our congregation had far more people, it was easier to standardize.  Most years I received notification of which page my Ark opening would occur.  Two men ascend to the front at the same time.  I knew who my partner was.  As families left my congregation, the remaining men would have more than one opportunity to perform these over the course of several services.  My invitations eventually shifted from Ark openings to more visible tasks.  And I opted out a few years back.  The honor, or more recognition, became less authentic.  This serves as the school or camp rule that everyone, or at least the men, all get their At Bat.  It is designated an Honor.  I'm not sure it is.  It was not earned.  It's more of an entitlement of that male phenotype and membership that comprises the team roster.

For a few years I've declined these invitations.  Not because I object to being recognized as a team member, but because I have a different sense of what it means to honor somebody.  An Ark Opening is more of a Certificate of Attendance.  During the Holy Days I like to be more of a contributor than consumer.  My wife and I donate to the fund for the two people bestowed with real annual High Holy Day Honors.  These go to two people or organizations that made activities of the synagogue happen, the creators or designers or sometimes yeomen.  I do some of the Torah reading, in part because I know how, and in part because those present need to sit in a place where the effort and expertise have value.  We honor others by recognizing their talents, their uniqueness, and their willingness to have everyone contribute and create.  It requires sensitivity, something not conveyed with optimal consistency in my Jewish world over an adult lifetime.  An Ark Opening hardly compensates for rejection, not only experienced but expected along the way.

We can show up.  Woody Allen quipped that 80% of life is showing up.  And that may be how many of the key people measure the success of effort.  Attendance at events.  But Judaism in its most alluring form also has a rhythm.  It's a chance to not have a sign-up sheet but to seek out what people at their best can do and invite them to contribute, design, and create.  I've found that too restricted, even sometimes stifled by key people. But the Honor comes from letting people perform, seeking them out, creating those dialogs where spirit prevails over groupthink. 

So Elul, with its preliminaries, will move one day at a time to Tishrei, the cluster of Festivals, the chance to engage.  A chance to take account, correct some of the insensitivities, to reconsider the talent in place, who you've sought out, who you've made more important than they were, and who you kept on the same list from last year.  

, 

Missing Stuff

One great frustration has always been losing stuff, or really misplacing it, or more frequently having my wife move my things to wherever it might fit at the moment to accommodate visitors or prepare for the cleaners.  Sometimes my fault too.  I bought a VLog kit with an Amazon honorarium, used it twice to make brief movies of my grandchildren and never saw it again.  While I own lots of shoes, a few are versatile to many situations, including gray suede chukka boots.  Very few places they could be, though not in the closet with the rest of my shoes.

Sometimes I stumble on a cache of moved stuff.  When purging my family room of clutter, I happened upon a cardboard box wedged under the edge of our oak coffee table.  I removed one item at a time.  Women's clothing.  Also a variety of my stuff.  Stationery supplies, swag taken off tables at expos, handyman stuff that I'm surprised I never had to go back to the hardware store to replace.  I found a pre-inked stamp given to me by my hospital, complete with name and degree, intended to clarify who provided a marginally legible signature.  I removed the protective plastic cover and pushed the rubber surface onto scrap paper.  Out of ink.  No surprise for an item probably not used for fifteen years.  But it's mine.

What struck me about that box was not so much its contents but how unsorted it was.  Having like things together.  There is a place where paper hole punchers go and a place where a tube of plaster filler goes.  Those homes are different.  My desk, among my most protected places, has stuff that I would use at a desk.  It does not have paintbrushes or torn wallets that I've not gotten around to discarding.  My closet has designated places for dress shirts, pullover shirts, sweaters, and long pants, the latter organized by jeans, casual pants, and dress pants.  While it does not eliminate decision fatigue the way only having khaki pants would, it saves me from a clothing hunt when I try to dress in a way appropriate to my activities.  When I need to wrap gifts, the supplies are only in two places.

I've taken to sorting rooms as recent Semi-Annual projects.  My son's bedroom last cycle, our family room this one.  These spaces are not mine.  I am not the principal user of either.  But orderliness for myself also helps the user, whether my son who has not occupied that room for 15 years or my wife who sits on the family room couch as her prime space.  Most of the stuff there is not mine to discard, but enough is to recapture what is mine.

I found the VLog Kit in a laundry basket.  Not found the suede shoes.  Handyman stuff will go to the basement.  Not sure about the best destination for Expo tchotchkes.  But none of this stuff will get assigned to a random box.

Class Selections

Submitted.  My request for seven classes for the upcoming OLLI Semester.  I had seriously considered letting the next semester lie fallow.  The last couple terms had imposed a few strains.  I especially liked one course.  The others left me unenthused.  To be fair, I got closed out of one, the instructor took ill in another, and was judged inadequately qualified to enter another at mid-year.  

The fall catalog arrived online first, then as a printed brochure, which I did not use. While the University offered 435 courses total, this time it offered electronic screening by time, location, and subject.  I created a paper grid of fifteen squares, putting the five days horizontal and the three class times vertically.  I generally do not enroll in courses that begin at 2:30 PM and try to keep Friday afternoons free to prepare shabbos dinner when standard time returns.  I asked the program to list all courses each day at the local center.  I've mostly found the live experiences superior to watching on a screen, though some of the selections simulcast by experts who live in another part of the state have been excellent.  For each day, I placed the classes to consider further in their appropriate grid box.  

How do I cull classes?  Partly by topic, partly by prerequisite skills, partly by my willingness to sit through 75 minutes.  The professor matters more each year.  Experience has generated automatic exclusions.  I also do not particularly take well to classes where we watch a video for the majority of the class and engage in a discussion afterwards.  Despite these restrictions, I had ample options Monday through Thursday.  Friday morning contained a class that I could not take the previous semester.  And they offered violin lessons late Tuesday afternoons, which made the exclusion of late classes less than absolute.  Finally, I went to the Online options, selecting only ones with known top teachers.

With the grid filled, I next focused on how I want to spend my week.  I insist on one day off, usually two.  Having a late morning course followed by a break for lunch, then an afternoon class mostly has not gone well.  Certainly not more than one day weekly, and then to accommodate the weekly violin lesson.  

Finally, what do I like to learn?  Most of my educational experience and professional continuing education has involved lecture formats.  That has changed somewhat as on-demand videos expand options and much Medical Continuing Education for license renewal can be obtained from written text followed by questions that confirm the person read the material.  Indeed, I read quite a lot.  Three subscriptions, four Torah commentaries online each week, a quota of books each half-year.  I watch instructional YouTubes, several daily, so adding a DVD in class often feels like excess.  

What I do not do enough is engage in conversation, challenge ideas, perform with an audience, or get feedback on my work.  As I looked at each grid, I rationed the lectures which would have me absorbing presented material but expanded classes that would force me to create.

I came up with seven;

Lectures:

1. History of Advertising, conducted by a neighbor
2. The Federalist Papers, led by my favorite prof.
3. Delaware Landmarks, led by a committee familiar to me.

Doing:

1. Non-fiction Writing
2. Acting on Stage
3. Folk Guitar
4. Violin

I do not expect any to be over-subscribed.  It will require me to declare Tuesday as a work on-site day, due to a gap between my late morning class and mid-afternoon violin session.  I've done this successfully before.  Pack lunch, bring laptop and leather portfolio, then find a quiet room with a tabletop.  It helps immensely to know in advance what I will pursue over two hours of unstructured time.

The University recognizes that some students will regret their choices and assignments.  Within limits, corrections are possible.  I look forward to a few months of mostly daily structure.

Winery Experiences

What makes for the ideal visit?  America's proliferation of wineries in my adult lifetime has made sampling them part of my itinerary when I travel.  Sometimes they cluster, as in Napa, Finger Lakes, or Long Island's North Fork.  Other times the home states have established wine trails sorted by state zones.  I've pursued these in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Missouri, and a few others, usually not as my primary travel destination but as attractions near where I intend to visit.  

Experiences vary widely.  Most tout their vintages in some way.  For a fee that has ranged from complementary to high enough to decline and move on to the next place, a patron can sample 4-6 pours of 30 ml or so.  I've had them served in stemware most frequently, but also in small goblets and on occasion in disposabtsle plastic cups.  At some wineries they owners choose which, with samples of reds or whites on a list.  Other places offer a large sheet of the available wines with brief descriptions.  The taster selects five and the attendant either brings them all at once with instructions on the order or lets the visitor drink one, then the next gets poured.  Most vineyards or tasting rooms remote from the vineyard have something resembling a bar, usually with a wood base, from where customers place their requests.  Many will then ask the taster to pick a table to which a server delivers the selections.  Others continue the sequential tastings at the ordering site.

Most have plantings visible from the parking lot, if not the building where the vintages get poured.

Over the years, I've established my own preferences.  There is the wine itself, but there is also the experience of being at the winery.  The liquids all come with a description of what makes each glass special.  They don't all come with expert people.  I could probably sample a couple of tastes at a large liquor store.  The winery, though, needs access to the attendants.  I greatly prefer an employee, if not the vintner, explaining to me the history of each vineyard, which grapes grow especially well, when the harvests occur, whether the winemaster graduated from a university oenology program, how blending is done.  That and more constitutes the experience.  Many places also offer tours, usually of the production facilities and equipment, occasionally with brief excursions onto the fields.  That's what makes stopping there pleasurable.  The wines have tasting varieties, registered on a personal mental scale that gets forgotten in one minute.  Things the attendant conveyed about the individual winery or the geographic circumstances that enabled the products that I taste will get retained in my mind much longer.

So my own preferencss, now with considerable experience.  I much prefer being at the bar, standing up, with the attendant pouring the next glass as I finish the one already poured.  I then get to chat with her, it's more often a woman.  The vineyard.  What's it like living in a place often remote from an urban center?  I have no preference between me choosing five and the winery staff assembling their own list of which five would make a good themed selection.  I'm confident that they thought it out, while my selections tend to be more diverse, even random, with a white or two and a red or two and a sweet selection.  Stemmed glasses are the way to go.  Often I will purchase one to take home, though I am running out of room in my kitchen cabinets where I store them.  Plastic cups detract from my experience.  I like the brief tours, but don't find them essential.  I tend not to enjoy tasting rooms off-site from the vineyard, though these have enabled me to sample wines produced in regions I am unlikely to ever visit.  I could duplicate this aspect at a liquor store.  Do I need rinsing water or neutral crackers?  At my level of proficiency, I think they add little to the experience.

There's the taste.  There's the more composite experience.  I think the experience of being there matters more.

Soreness

End of the month.  To keep my exercise commitment humming, I need to build into the schedule recovery time and reward.  Every date divisible by 3, I let the leg muscles heal.  As one month transitions to the next, my treadmill time halts for three days.  A longer recovery and a small reward for dedication to exercise over the previous month.  It also serves as time to reflect on what my month's efforts accomplished.  Longer time, faster pace?  Some months, an unexpected layoff for illness, medical procedure, or travel.

It's been a mediocre month as I begin the first of three days of recovery.  One day off for a colonoscopy.  Reduced effort during the restricted diet.  Only partial recovery by the end of the month to where I had started at the beginning.  I worked through a sore right knee, getting by with an elastic brace but experiencing an ongoing soreness.  My breathing never limited what I could perform, but I could tell that my cardiovascular tolerance has ebbed gradually over six months.  And the last few three day recovery spans did not fully restore me to optimal for the next month.  

My legs, mainly thighs and knees, can tell that I did not shirk my best effort at optimal health.  I avoid oral NSAIDS, but have gotten benefit from topicals.  I could ice my knee twice daily, whether exercise days or days off.  

What I do not do is set treadmill goals for the month that follows.  I do not know what my stamina or soreness will allow.  Typically I resume at the intensity and duration where I left off.  That ache never fully disappears.  In the absence of real disability, my willingness to proceed with the benefits of an exercise schedule, which have been many, takes on a life of its own.  Within my capacity to cope.

Creating the Best Narrative

 

My news feed like everyone else's has no shortage of snipes at Jews, essentially ethnically profiled as supporters of the modern nation of Israel.  The linkage is true, the propriety of exclusion from activities of groups with overlapping interests, let alone physical attacks, is probably not justified.  While I read about this most days and think about it often, my own experience has not included any personal aspersions or threats.  Not that they aren't there. I knew the doctor slain at Tree of Life on shabbos morning from college.  That attack had no publi support, no rationalization.  More personally, though, my weekly Saturday morning now has me waving to a hired police officer in the synagogue parking lot and passing through a reinforced heavy entrance door, monitored by a congregant who must sit next to it as people seek to enter.  Other places, mostly larger, with doors leading to open space that must be crossed to reach the sanctuary, are often guarded by a uniformed officer, pistol in holster.  Some places will not let visitors past the entrance without a reservation obtained through the synagogue office during the previous week.

I miss the spontaneity.  Over sixty years, I've visited many congregations unannounced.  My classmates' and cousins' Bnai Mitzvah as a teen.  Travels for vacation or professional activities that spanned a shabbos.  Seeing a prominent Rabbi on TV and wanting to visit his shul if within reasonable driving range.  Getting irritated with my home shul and wanting a different shabbos experience.  I just went.  And as much as I've enjoyed the variations of worship and community, people have dropped in to my synagogue for a variety of reasons, always greeted as honored guests.  Our need to screen threatening people has burdened those whose entry would enhance the shabbos of the places they visit.

We serve as a useful target.  The people inside not only sustain these places of worship but maintain Jewish social organizations, stable businesses that depend on Jewish patrons, campus organizations from classrooms to Hillel Foundations, all now fair game for those seeking a statement of antagonism to Israel and to those who attach to it.  Interestingly, there also seems a curious element of sparing, though not entirely so, as the tragic shooting of a rising young philanthropist at Blackstone headquarters attests.  I've not seen Jewish summer camps, often set in remote areas, targeted for protest, even though these institutions invariably do their best to form a Zionist commitment to their impressionable children.  The medical centers with Jewish names also seem not to attract protesters toting anti-Israel placards.  Many of these places exist because that city's premier university-affiliated hospitals would not offer staff appointments to Jewish physicians.  Many of these places of Jewish origin now serve as desired residency destinations for top medical school graduates.  And Jewish people often drive wealth-creating businesses, from financial to high tech to communications.  Our financial upper crust.  The donors who make the Jewish organizational system thrive, who support Israel through donations and bond purchases, who sustain the budgets of the synagogues that now have enhanced security.  These businesses, even law firms with Jewish names on their entrances and letterhead, do not often have protesters nagging them. Boycott Dell?  Avoid Home Depot?  Hasn't happened.   The targets must be perceived as vulnerable in some way.  Or maybe not useful to the protesters.   Who is not targeted may be an important clue to reducing the threats to those Jewish organizations and individuals that are.

Approaching three years since a vicious attack on innocent individuals, complete with child abduction, hostages for barter or butchering while defenseless, displacement of people through the initial attack and warfare that followed, virtue has largely disappeared from the conversation.  We Jews have an opportunity to restore that lost element.  When Stephen Covey published his immensely popular work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, he opened his book by assessing two measures of success.  We can let superior tactics lead us to what we seek or we can let foundational principles guide us.  Both forms exist to antiquity, both forms have achieved successful and disappointing results.  How to attack and use vulnerable people as leverage is a technique.  It has also become meshed in principle, expressed as these people deserved it for how they treated us.  That has become the public narrative, the one that dominates social media feeds.  One that repackages repugnant as virtue, or at least the illusion of honor. For Jews, whether individually or through our advocacy organizations, to attack this directly has not worked out well.

We have succeeded as a people from the times of Exodus when our tradition establishes our Peoplehood, by a much different narrative. Our arc of success, with its fluctuations, moves ahead because we stay loyal to both our basic needs and our most noble aspirations.  The Jewish subset, whether small communities in isolation or now our sovereign nation to which we identify irrespective of where our house sits, has three basic elements.  We need a measure of safety, those basic survival needs that assure a tomorrow.  Jews historically have thrived and uplifted those around them when granted sufficient autonomy.  And once economic resources have been secured, the generosity embedded in our culture has enabled our very top talent to excel.  Jewish autonomy advances the world.  Those who snipe, those who attack do not fare as well.  That's the narrative that should dominate the modern global forum.  And it is one that we could control with some common ground rules.

Survival forms the base of Maslow's pyramid of basic needs.  The security measures of our synagogues and Jewish institutions appeared before the Hamas massacre.  October 7, 2023 served more as an inflection point.  It removed taboos, changed the attackers from fringe loners at the social margins to a more mainstream group of people with a future.  Students of selective colleges must have had something attractive about them to impress the Admissions Office.  Their professors who teach them the historical and social justifications for what they now promote have PhDs and have gone through Search Committees to get hired.  The Never Events of massacre get transposed to a historical timeline.  Our perceived victimhood justifies shifting who the victims are.  That's never a favorable narrative.  It also may be one that the Jewish community cannot effectively repel.  So we put our own masks on first.  Guard our gathering places, become less visible, buy pistols for our homes and cars.   And turn inward by inviting unengaged Jews to seek refuge, and maybe advancement, within our established institutions.  That requires no public presence.  We also have our measure of overt advocacy.  Enforce laws that already exist when an attack occurs.  Create new laws to discourage hostile mobs from harassing Jews or anyone else.  Exposing wrongdoers creates either celebrities or martyrs.  "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" our sage Hillel asked.  Protect ourselves..

The more neglected narrative may be our internal success.  Those with their fists in the air, the sign carriers, the trolls on the internet don't achieve what we have and don't prioritize the dignity of people the way we Jews have.  Our hospital wings have Jewish names, not Islamic ones.  Civil rights legislation in the 1960s served as a branch point for Jews along with people of color.  We moved ahead without the special compensatory or remedial program.  That's where our opponents are, people who could have done better than they did over those decades but pursued getting even.  The Jewish narrative does not exploit victimhood.  Certainly public support for a Jewish state gelled after an attempt at genocide, the real thing, not the usurped canard we see on our news feeds now.  But the nationalism that gives Jews our place was embedded with national movements before that, whether the breakup of the Ottoman Empire or dismantling of colonial domination of Asia and Africa.  Our narrative needs to be a common one.  And we know who opposed this.  The same Islamic populations that used terror as a deterrent, engaged in their own inept warfare multiple times, had alliances between totalitarians, including within their own caliphates.  That's what they are.  That's not what Jews are or what enabled our communities to forge ahead with commerce, science, and agriculture.  We are the world's winners.  We earn what we amass.  That's our story.  That's our contribution.  It may or may not be our attraction.

In order to fulfil this vision, I think our internal institutions need to be more welcoming in an unconditional way.  That is not what I've found over the years.  People point to titles, whether the organizations, their officers, or their benefactors.  While boundaries are an integral part of Judaism, leaving people on the sidelines or ignored is not.  Too many slights to too many people.  Invitations to engagement too restricted.  Easy to understand why touting institutional success sells less than it could when the sensitivity promoted by Dale Carnegie and other success-by-technique advocates has not become part of the foundation.  We've all encountered folks sitting alone in a crowded room with nobody approaching them.  And then we have people not even in the room.  If we hope to promote community and success, our best public face, we need to start by being fully welcoming to each other.  

And at the apex of our internoal growth we need to allocate for a veneer of excellence.  Innovations on a scale that our detractors cannot duplicate.  We've accomplished this in the financial realm.  Our talent writes books and essays that will survive them.  Perhaps we as a Jewish civilization have tolerated misuse of that excellence more than we should.  The IDF is effective, for sure, but not always functioning beyond public reproach.  The Israelis we support create for themselves decent places to live, without taking ownership of public and private damage that the expansion has caused.  Within American Jewish institutions we don't always value those of unique talent.

Multiple elements:  safety, widespread achievement, sensitivity, boundaries, value of excellence beyond our own interests.  That's a lot we could sell.  In recent years we may have gotten too defensive, letting our critics control the public face of Israel and the global Jews who see the sovereign Jewish state as an extension of the autonomy in other settings that have uplifted not only ourselves but other cultures in our midst.  Sometimes the best defense is an offense, a proactive expression of our story that our critics cannot control.