“So we hold the truth of our own wandering lives – and thus the depth of what is truly possible to experience and know in our lifetimes – at a distance. And we settle on more contrived and coherent, less complicated or challenging stories that translate into more easily digestible interpretations of our lives. Stories we don’t need our molars for; stories as slurpable as shakes. We do this because we think it’s what we need to do to continue going through the motions of daily life, effectuating our roles as responsible…roles. We do it because we think it’s what we’re supposed to do to preserve some inscrutable but totally necessary order handed down from above. We do it because we’re afraid, because we sense the alternative as unpredictable and unruly and who even knows what will happen? 

“So we stop considering the alternative – that life is a process of wandering into increasingly evolved and enlightened versions of ourselves via open-ended curiosity, experience, introspection. And then we stop remembering there ever was an alternative. And then we stop knowing what the word “alternative” even means. 

“And life itself becomes a stagnant, alienated labor of quiet maintenance: too distractingly monotonous and insufficiently robust to allow for more than the most threadbare defense against existence’s insistent tide of corrosive dying. 

“What’s the way out of alienated stagnation – the exit onto the path of non-linear wandering into the present moment? 

“How to begin? Where to begin?

“And if all beginnings are arbitrary – when to begin?”

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“To answer your next question: yes, I was very lonely freshman year of college…”

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I mention this in part bc I feel like a lot of liberal Zionists have the kind of parasocial relationship with Israel where they project their own high moral aspirations onto the Israeli government and end up extending it massive unearned benefit of the doubt based largely on vibez. Like in our zeal to defend Israel and combat anti-Semitism we are not really grappling with the actual people and positions populating this nasty, incompetent government of spoiled children, foaming ideologues, and racist thugs.

Like, genuinely curious, does it ever occur to the unconditionally “pro-Israel” that its leaders might actually be more aligned with the bad-guys of history than the good-guys? And that that very badness might be expressing itself in the decisions they make about the conduct of this war, it’s strategy and tactics?

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Mate arrives at this pregnant insight by mind-wandering all the way outside of our current, shared culture to “unfasten the myths that keep the status quo locked in place.” He shines a spotlight on some of the most insidiously inhuman, pervasive (and thus largely invisible) ideas,  ideals, practices, and norms that we’ve somehow become conditioned to accept as normal.

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“When he overcame them through the strength of his arguments, the king desired to kill him…”

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“Scans showed that when freed of task-performance, the brain doesn’t simply slip into sleep mode. Instead, other regions kick into gear: the regions involved in things like resolving areas of cognitive dissonance, chipping away at intractable life problems, reviewing unresolved memories, planning for the future, imagining other people’s lives. A highly engaged, associative, largely unconscious Wandering, whose job is weaving together all our disparate mental materials into the conscious experience of seamless subjective selfhood we all take for granted.”

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The skill of Mindwandering: holding a well-conditioned internal space for the passionate, open-ended pursuit an unresolved question, contradiction, or quandary. 

According to Maimonides, the skill embodied by Abraham. 

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For Maimonides, wandering – embodied by Abraham – is the single-minded commitment to a question and willingness to venture open-endedly into whatever reality that journey carries you towards.

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Whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or geographical, commentators attribute to Abraham a native propensity to roam outside the accepted boundaries of his known world in response to some basic unassuageable irritation: an out-of-placeness that sparks an unquenchable quest for answers to uncomfortable questions no one else in his world is asking. 

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We’re not supposed to wander…we’re supposed to be focused! Purposeful! Steadfast! Anything else should make us unhappy. And if it doesn’t…there’s probably something inside us that’s deeply broken and wrong.  

But what if we find it hard to focus, or if we focus differently? What if our focus accrues in non-linear forms, or is distributed at variable frequencies over intermittent, unpredictable time scales? What if our focus looks to the untrained eye like wandering? 

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…There is one particular special that growing up I watched, with my siblings, over and over and over. Richard Belzer in Concert. We memorized so many of these bits, constantly shot them back and forth at each other, trading lines, harvesting catchphrases that have survived the Private Sibling Lexicon to this day. I just rewatched it, and it’s crazy how much of it stands up. I kept thinking that he was channeling some uncanny Jewish Richard Pryor vibes, with the long stories of gratuitous everyday violence visited upon him by inane dumdums, the flurry of loud lanky-limbed act-outs interspersed with quiet pensive introspection. The sneaky casual virtuosity of every one of his impressions.

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…Here is a recent performance of Basya’s original arrangement of the Hanukkah blessing “Al ha-Nissim” (“On account of the miracles…”), performed with (as?) Pharaoh’s Daughter. The blessing itself is a recognition of miracles done then and now, “in those days, and in this moment.” Implicit in this expression of gratitude for past acts of manifest supernatural salvation is a steep but subtle challenge: a call to bring that same vivid recognition of divine care, that same authentic overflow of gratitude, to the events that are transpiring in our own time, in front of our own eyes…

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By the time the taxi dropped us off at the emergency room at 6 a.m. the morning after the dinner, I could barely breathe. Each attempt at inhalation brought pain. As I stumbled past the security gate, lightheaded and panicky, a young guard called after me to stop. But before I could respond, the cab door flew open and the driver leapt out, waving his arms at the guard and shouting, “Let him go! Can’t you see? This man is very sick!”

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“Honey, you’re whole.”

The voice is familiar but indistinct. On repetition, it registers as that of my wife, Sara. While the tone is comforting, the content is open to interpretation. It seems like the kind of thing you might say to someone whose chest has been cracked open and then closed with staples. It seemed less likely but still plausible that it’s something a wife might say to a husband who had suffered a stroke during an operation meant to save him from having further strokes. Was there pity — or self-pity — mingled with the caress of her hand on my hand? Was she being “brave”?

My arms and legs are still paralyzed, and I can only hope that this is from anesthesia.

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In one fell swoop, the original ancestor, the Founder, the first Jew, is utterly uprooted. And this is pretty much the first thing we learn about him, his introduction as a major character: that to be close to God and fulfill his potential - to embody a new path of human aspiration and become a channel of universal blessing - to “be” a blessing, to “all the families of the earth” - he can’t know anything from his past, or anything about his future. He must sever all preexisting social ties, erase all familial and cultural inheritances, inputs, imprints - and set off with certain purpose into the blank unknown.

“...out of your land, out of your birthplace, out of your fathers house, towards the land that I will show you.’ ”

Become a person with no past, no future.

Which of course, as everyone knows, is exactly what it means to be a Jew.

Wait what?

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