Running language lightly over the sensorium
One fun poet out of three - not bad.
This week's Reading Between A and B made less of an impression than the last one I went to - maybe because I didn't have a nice chat afterwards to preserve it for later musing - but worthwhile nonetheless. Kathleen Ossip read from two thematic collections. The first, Cinephrastics, a book of movie poems, were at their best epigrammatic; at times I felt lost, because I don't know much about movies -- my fault, obviously. Another collection is set in the period of the Cold War. (So long ago!) It relied on an easy cliché, superficial suburban complacency beneath which roils a turbid undertow. (The work on the web site is more complicated and interesting than what she chose to read.)

Mary Jo Bang is well known and highly regarded, two risk factors for the Great Poet Syndrome: a tendency to orotund truisms (death is all around us, George Bush is a bad president), and an even more dreaded complication, the Great Poet Voice. (Imagine your most boring high school teacher. Then subtract intonation.) She also read from a thematic collection (these seem to be de rigueur), based on the letters of the alphabet. The most successful of these goes like this, in its entirety:

B is for Beckett
There is so little to say.

Here's another nice line of hers, plucked from context. It's about doctors. [I don't know where the line breaks go.] "How little else they know unless you tell them. I tell them I wish I could lie under the summer."

Chris Nealon, the middle poet, was entertainingly arch - qualities helped by his natural, fluid reading style. I appreciate poets that bring a persona to the microphone, and he was a jokester. Maybe his reading, his wit, his sexual jokes, can be identified with a "gay jester" type (Merrill, Powell). (If he's gay, that is. Maybe I'm wrong.) I wish I had more to quote, but he was reading pretty fast and I had had a bourbon to start the reading off (which I was well into by the time Nealon read. Maybe that's why I liked him the most?). A favorite line, again context-free: "She said: I want a tattoo. / She said, I want a thigh wound." Or the image of the city full of "instructible sparks." Or the title of this post, taken from a poem of his.

I would have bought his book, but the bourbon took up my free cash. I won't make that mistake again.

Insensitive introjection

I don't know if any of you remember my Medicine Mensch column way back in April, when I described a "code" on the ICU - that is, the death of a patient despite attempted resuscitation. I just now noticed a letter to the Forward written in response later that month, which I point out now as an instance of a common phenomenon: the tendency to ascribe to me, the columnist, an attitude in agreement with the attitudes described in the column. Thus:

In his April 14 Fast Forward column (“Springing Into Action”), Zackary Sholem Berger captures the unquestioning introjection of emotional insensitivity into the psyches of our physicians in training. As such, he seems unaware of the recurrent abhorrence to those outside his insider’s narrative: the initial “frown” by the resident whose chat was interrupted by a nurse’s concern over a dying patient; the “workplace banter” while the life of a husband, father, brother, friend… hung in the balance; the incompetent obscene specialist whom Berger feels compelled to shield, and finally, the reassurance of “the attending… that we should not beat ourselves up about the patient’s dying, that everything had been done the right way.”

Perhaps reflecting his own indoctrination, Berger attempts to anesthetize the reader’s pain with a reminder that those outside the code are the “uninitiated,” that the complete absence of any feelings whatsoever over a man’s death is sanctioned by a review and validation of the emergency protocol, as well as by the hollow reassurance of one’s superiors and peers.

The letter-writer, it seems, equates the depiction of emotional insensitivity with emotional insensitivity on the part of me, the writer. This is certainly possible but I think untrue in this case. Indeed, I share his concerns about the emotional insensitivity of many doctors; on the contrary, a careful reading of the article would not find a "complete absence of any feelings whatsoever" over the patient's death. In short: depiction of the status quo does not connote satisfaction with it.

Yiddishy doings
On Thursday, at the 92nd St. Y, a number of leading contemporary Yiddish vocalists will perform the songs of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. (Here's my most recent post about her.)

Also at the Y, on November 1st, Alana Newhouse moderates a discussion entitled "The Joys of Yiddishism." The question on the table (apparently): "Why are so many young Jews becoming interested in a language considered dead?" (Answers: (a) not so many; (b) superficial interest; (c) not dead.) More complicated, interesting, and articulate answers to be furnished by Alyssa Quint (literary scholar and Forward columnist), Itzik Gottesman (associate editor of the Yiddish Forward, and - by the way - Beyle Gottesman's son), and Allan Nadler (author and Forward columnist). Sense a trend? Newhouse is, of course, arts and culture editor at the Forward.

This Friday, for free!, you can hear Your Favorite Blogger talk about Yiddish and today's Lower East Side. I will also read a couple of my Yiddish poems, with English translations -- and then, separately and a bit later, read our Yiddish version of The Cat in the Hat. Davening at 6, a little smackerel of something at 7:15, I should be talking at 8 or so. This is all part of Synaplex at Town and Village Synagogue. (Actually, the most entertaining part of the evening should be the Yiddish sing-along led by Binyumen Schaechter, also at around 7:15. Schaechter, of course, is Beyle Gottesman's nephew and Itzik Gottesman's cousin. Who said the Yiddish world is inbred?)

Top Five Hospital Euphemisms* for "I Don't Know"
The suspense.

Number five: "It's unclear."

*Among doctors.

Beat on

Hug me, driving soak.
Leave no dry swatch.
Rained on this way
is perfectly wet.
One sea-pane's difference
from drowning.

Who owns human tissue?
Halachic parallels welcome. (זכין לאדם שלא בפניו?)

Federal regulations are based on a notion of voluntarism, but the right to refuse participation in research is based more on ensuring that subjects can be the ones to judge how to protect their own interests than on a pure form of autonomous decision making, which would include a right to refuse for any reason or no reason at all. Hence, no consent is required for research deemed to pose minimal risk to subjects — or for research in which identifying information is obscured or from which it has been deleted (which protects privacy and minimizes social risks such as stigmatization or discrimination, but does nothing to recognize subjects' autonomy). And when patients' preferences regarding the kinds of research that may be performed on their tissue are ascertained, this is done as a courtesy, rather than as recognition of patients' rights to prohibit the use of their tissues for purposes of which they disapprove.

From R. Alta Charo, Body of Research -- Ownership and Use of Human Tissue. NEJM 2006;355(15):1517-1519.

Snows of yesteryear
Gone, daddy, gone.

Says my daughter, looking at a picture of a snowy landscape: "S'iz gegangen a shney!" ("It snowed!"). Then she paused, and said in English, "The snow's gone!" I didn't have the heart to correct such a cute calque.

When friends become bloggers

Long-time friend and consistent commenter Becca now has her own corner of the Yid-o-sphere. Recent posts include a review of a new-ish Conservative machzor, and a spirited, enlightening defense of why Geshem, a liturgical poem of the season asking for rain, should also include women among the ancestors whose merit we're invoking.

Misc.
Some-nium gatherum.

1. Look, Ma, No Bathrobe!

I forgot to wear my kitl to work on the morning of Yom Kippur, so I could wear it to minchah if I got out of work early enough to go to shul that day. I also forgot to leave my favorite machzor at shul before the holiday. Ditto my tallis. Thus, since I no longer carry in the eruvless wonderland that is now Manhattan, I was sans kitl, wearing the same pseudo-silk, slippy-shoulder quarter-tallises that everyone else was. Davening from the same gack-inducing translations. In other words, I had to leave my snobbiness at home -- salutary.

2. Chinatown Clinic

I felt great that I helped my patients today in clinic. Getting home before ten o'clock at night wasn't bad either. But I really felt like a kid in a candy store interviewing a patient for the first time in Chinese -- and he understood me. (If he had more complicated medical problems, I would have resorted to the translator phones.)

A non-ingenious paradox*
What's (not) eating you?

We're supposed to afflict ourselves on Yom Kippur. But I like fasting (apart from the associated lack of milkshakes). Unsurprisingly, then, material affliction can lead to spiritual pleasure. Or what can be mistaken for spiritual pleasure -- dizziness from low blood sugar is not the same thing. You have to be self-aware enough to realize that a temporary religious high (from fasting, prayer, and the like) is not the same thing as spiritual progress. That bowing your head like a reed on a fast day does not necessarily give you a backbone you'll be proud of on the day after.

*Quack, quack.

Let us get what we want
And let us want the right thing.

Or what's a New Year for?

A gut, zis, gebentsht, and adjective-rich yor.

Crawling on the mountains
Shimon Adaf

You'll see,
my leaving will become my return to you.
Otherwise what's the meaning
of crawling on the mountains, the high stones
the stacks of wheat exhaling shadowy gold
into the night.

translation from the Hebrew: ZShB

To the Googler of "poem about milkshake"
We aim to please.

Working on it. But it might take me a while (what rhymes with "slurp"?).

Why did it happen?
Poem/שירה as witness.

[T]he song answers those who say "Why did all this befall us?"
--Ibn Ezra on Deuteronomy 31:19. (My translation. Loose, how I like it.)

The stick

When you finally got blood from the hard stick
You spotted the backflash (pulsating, red)
And said Thank God. The woman's legs and arms
Were everywhere; you were in the middle
Holding her down while wielding
A butterfly in the other. You stuck her and she bled.

You thank the Rock of Moses that she bled
And not you. He took a stick
To strike the rock, unwilling
To try his luck with persuasion. God read
This as rebellion. Here the test of mettle
Is not getting stuck. Fuck! you cry, and hold her arms

Again. Can she please quit moving her arms?
She's used and used. Most of her life she's bled
High, or been sick, or in the middle
Of other people's lives. Now she's screaming. Stick
It out or shut up, you could say. It's for your own good. Red
Is what you want from her. Would you help us? Are you willing?

You promise her a Snickers and she's willing.
Her drugs are stamped on her arms.
Her lips and nails are painted careful red.
Her AIDS showed on a blot of what she bled.
Moses lashed out with his stick
When he wasn't out front, but in the middle.

But that wasn't what you were thinking in the middle
Of multiple stabbings and wheedlings.
You'll send the labs. You'll treat. Will it stick?
Is Bellevue just another scar on her arm?
I'm sorry if you want suspense: you stuck, she bled,
She shrieked and thrashed, the gauze turned red.

Moses, stick in hand, didn't know he erred
Till God denied him. Force: it feels like meddling
To those on divine peaks away from blood.
But we down here see in the scars and whealing
Proof indirect that what we teach our arms
Is strength, not just intention. A stick

Read as a resting staff is idle; wielded
With strong arms is a try at mettle.
We bled her to cure. She was a hard stick.

Death and its complications

Jewish Ethics and the Care of End-of-Life Patients. Edited by Peter Joel Hurwitz, Jacques Picard, and Avraham Steinberg. KTAV Publishing House, Inc., in association with The Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland.

End-of-life decision making is now often left to specialists. This book presents their deliberations in a way meant to be accessible to the layperson. It is a dissection, perhaps over-specific, of general questions that many of us will face when we and our families get old and sick: when is the right time to die? What are the right criteria, and who decides?

Orthodoxy finds in the classic texts, Talmudic passages as well as later decisors, not just guiding principles but specific legislation, with one overarching conclusion: that every moment of life is to be actively preserved, even at the price of decreased quality of life. Every end-of-life decision is to be met with the same standards, and nearly every deliberation can find its relevant source in the classical texts. If the circumstances of terminal illness are different today, and death can be drawn out over long weeks of desperation and indecision, this should not divert our gaze but focus it even more intently on the principles that matter. On the other hand, Reform thinkers have pointed out for years that such texts are open to multiple interpretations – generalizations are risky, and every case should be considered according to its unique circumstances.

This book, in short, presents a canonical spectrum with familiar opposite ends: the Orthodox insistence on the eternal relevance of Talmudic passages (even to vastly changed modern circumstances) whose interpretation can change only glacially, and the classical Reform deconstructive approach to Jewish law.

A second question has to do with the many treatments which are given to (or foisted upon) the terminally ill. When the time comes to die, when there is nothing more to be done (or when what is being done is clearly inhumane or futile), how can we decide what to turn off? How can we stop impeding death without actively causing it – or is there a difference? In this book, the bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky considers Israel's new law concerning the terminally ill, which has something important to say about these matters.

The best-known element of this law is a technological compromise. Some explanation is in order. Many thinkers recognize a distinction between the hastening of death in the living patient (forbidden) and the removal of impediments to the death of a terminally ill patient (required). In other words, life must be maintained -- but death, once unavoidable, cannot be artificially kept at bay. This distinction, important in traditional Jewish law, is sometimes so unclear as to appear a contradiction.

These terms have been connected to a corresponding pair in secular bioethics: withholding treatment versus withdrawing treatment that has already been given. The claim is made that withdrawing treatment, once given, corresponds to "hastening death," while withholding treatment, in terminal illness, is just refusing to place an impediment in the path of a dying patient.

Here enters the technological compromise: a timer connected to a respirator. The timer converts a treatment continuous in time (and thus one impossible to stop without "withdrawing") into a "discrete" sequence of decisions whether to continue the use of the device -- that is, whether to "withhold" or not.

Ravitsky's analysis helps us understand why such a halachic-technological compromise is necessary. If the distinction between "withdrawing" and "withholding" were of ethical import, the timer -- designed to circumvent it -- would be an instance of deception. However, Ravitsky agrees with the position of the current Western bioethical literature, that this distinction is erroneous. There is no real difference between withholding and withdrawing. Therefore, "timers may be perceived as devices that enable individuals to overcome an emotional difficulty in order to do what is ethically right. They thus become an appropriate and clever way to bridge the gap between the desired moral outcome (death with dignity and respect for individual autonomy) and a cultural atmosphere (grounded in religious tradition and ingrained values) that does not allow renunciation of the distinction."

That is, Israel is confronting, albeit on a larger, public-policy scale, exactly what American Jews confront - a conflict between moral outcome and religious tradition. The editors have performed a valuable service in collecting thoughtful essays discussing this conflict from various points of view. It's another question whether laypeople -- who don't like to discuss death -- will pick up this book.

Has the bulb burned out on your Enlightenment?

Over at Gil's, they're still debating if it's okay to read books at YU.

Primeval compassion

. . . When the time has come for the renewal of the world, primeval compassion is awakened[.] Since the creation of the world was without any awakening on the part of humanity but only on the part of God, when that primeval compassion was awakened, the enslavement of Joseph and the slavery of our ancestors were annulled. It is thus favorable that every year the compassion of Creation awakes, as the Baal Shem Tov said in commenting on [a verse in Psalms]. Let there be light always keeps the world in existence. Therefore, when this compassion is awakened every year, and God is desirous, it is favorable for the people Israel.

--the Mei HaShiloach, aka R' Mordkhe Yoysef Leiner of Izhbits, on parshes Emor (my translation)

"And God is desirous"*: is this contingent?

*ולכן כשנתעורר בכל שנה זה החסד וחפץ השי"ת אז הוא ניחא לכלל ישראל.

False dichotomies
0 + 0 = 0.

Friend Becca in a recent Shefa post makes some points that I would like to reiterate - so let me do just that by cutting and pasting. (What my friend Lobachevsky calls "research.")

Apropos of Ariel's article (which I first read about from a Jewschool postin g about it) & responses to it:

[W]e should avoid false dichotomies & zero-sum perceptions both here & in general. There are plenty of other popular & pernicious ones--the one that comes first to my mind right now is:

outreach/less-affiliated enagement vs. inreach/core group engagement

but one could also consider (some of which we've discussed here before):

• egalitarian vs. traditional/halakhically serious
• GLBT-friendly vs. traditional/halakhically serious
• committed to social justice vs. committed to halakha
• welcoming to families of mixed religious backgrounds vs. committed to Jewish continuity
• encouraging of alternative structures for meeting Jews' needs (esp. young Jews' needs) for community ( e.g. independent minyanim) vs. committed to the USCJ and its member organizations (including synagogues)
• intellectual vs. social
• study (text) vs. ritual (action)
• respectful of others' practices & beliefs (among Jewish denominations; with regard to others' religions) vs. committed to one's own practices & beliefs

Whenever we treat one of these groups as "our side" and the other as "the enemy"--and ignore that these groups in fact are not separable except by ignoring all subtlety, complexity, and nuance--we all lose.

Concrete benefits to disseminated intelligence

Apropos of nothing (except perhaps my few days at the Yiddish Week which I am very much looking forward to) , I should say that Wikipedia is a fine thing. At least in this regard: the article on Yiddish, a few months ago just as laughable as anything you'd find in the lay press, is now something I can actually refer people to. Shkoyekh to those who are working on it!