The Days of Judgement

 It's still difficult to write. I have so many ideas, but so little energy to pursue them to their logical conclusion. 

I'm eating again. Not binging like I used to when I was fat, but experimenting with food that is still ostensibly gluten free, and 'tis enough to make me sick every time. Day after day of food experiment because the usual diet is unbearably narrow for a solemn pain like grief, and day after day of illness. The burping, the bloating, the brainfog and memory problems, the dizziness and accelerated heartrate, the esophageal pain that occasionally emanates all through my back. Pretty soon there will be an outside shot I may follow Dad if these experiments do not cease. Such is the detriment of addiction. 

It feels good to say that out loud. I don't know if it's true, I certainly hope it's not, but it's right to think that way this fortnight. At the same time I want desperately to live a healthy life, I dream of an 'artist's death.' Working yourself into oblivion as your body fails, leaving things for eternity, posturing for history even as you depart from the here and now which matters so much more, but I'm so blocked, so lazy, so procrastinative. There are so many writers online with so much larger an audience, who can possibly be noticed among this buzzy din? Let alone a not much better than solid writer like myself.... All I wanted to do is be a great artist: instead I'm just a sloppy purveyor of sentences. Occasional flashes of something better appear, but who would notice among so much that's not much better than mediocre (I'll at least give myself credit that a lot of it's OK...). 

Nevertheless, on Rosh Hashana God opens the Book of Life and the Book of Death, and he chooses to inscribe us all in one or the other. 

That's the extent of our reason to be terrified. This time of year is more solemn than terrifying. Judaism does not believe in heaven or hell. Judaism consigns the dead to a place of purgatory for a few months where one atones for their sins, and then the soul ascends to Olam Ha'Ba, the Next World, where there is nothing to do but pursue the chiefest of all joys, the font and source of joy for all our lives: learn Torah.... for all eternity...

The terror is in this world. On Rosh Hashana we intone the awful fates of the Unetanah Tokef, the most terrifying among many terrifying prayers this time of year, giving us the awful litany: 

Who shall live and who shall die,

Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,

Who shall perish by water and who by fire,

Who by sword and who by wild beast,

Who by famine and who by thirst,

Who by earthquake and who by plague,

Who by strangulation and who by stoning,

Who shall have rest and who shall wander,

Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,

Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,

Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,

Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.

My father's parents were Holocaust survivors, and while Bubbie Witow lived her most blessed old age to a hundred, Bubbie Tucker would hear the great litany every year and weep. God alone knows what memories went through her head. 

But the melody of the Unetaneh Tokef is so beautiful, and Zaydie Tucker, with so little ear for music, truly loved it. In the last years of his life, beset by dementia terribly, Dad would sing the melody of its line, and Zaydie would smile. The melody of the two lines immediately preceding: 

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,

And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.

Almighty God, 

Please sentence me to life,

Amen