I read two Jewish women before I went to bed last night. (Actually, in bed. My wife’s away, I get to read in bed.)The latestCommentary had arrived (sorry it’s not on line) and there are pieces by Midge Decter on Ted Kennedy and Ruth Wisse on a modern Orthodox shul she goes to at Loon Lake in the Adirondacks, that’s been there for nearly 50 years.
The Wisse piece is excellent. It’s a small piece about a small part of the world. She writes very clearly and there is a great feeling of warmth for that orthodox community she’s a part of. It’s a very positive piece. Write what you know; and Wisse knows this world. That said, it’s also narrow in the Ruth Wisse way. She rationalizes the mehitsah, which separates women from men in Orthodox practice, and other stuff I find of little spiritual use. The piece also invokes Wisse’s idea of community, which is very Jewish and conservative. The need to find a minyan compels Jewish observance, even on the part of Wisse’s husband, and as she says, this need has propelled the Jewish community through history. "[T]he requirements of Judaism [are] felt existentially and on an ongoing basis." I don’t feel the same sort of allegiance; and of course my fallings-away are regarded as treason, often enough; but look at Ruth Wisse, who regularly apologizes for Jim Crow in Israel and apartheid in Palestine, so how good are those existential requirements?
The Decter piece is another matter. She’s the mother of the editor, and as I went to bed I kept thinking up snickering headlines to make fun of the fact that Commentary editor John Podhoretz can’t edit his mother. "It’s hard to edit your mom…" Like that. Because the piece is at times unreadable, or fatally overblown in manner. "Throughout this process of ambitions realized and ambitions thwarted, he [Joe Kennedy Sr.] had played some crucial part in the fact that the subjects of his paternal striving were being surrounded and cosseted by a circle of loyal and gifted sycophants and mouthpieces: servitors and companions who would prove to be so usefully sensitive to the rapidly changing winds of social and cultural, and hence political, fashion that by the 1960s were commencing all too unheeded to blow through the country like a tsunami." It’s hard to say where that sentence begins and ends. And did we really not heed the 60s changes? Does a tsunami blow? By the way the word cosseted is used later in the piece, too. And though the point about the Kennedy servitors might be interesting, who does she mean? She never names them. And what was Joe Kennedy’s role in getting them on board?
I slept and had a dream where the Olympics were taking place in my town and this old famous woman was in the marathon. I went out to watch her. She wasn’t running, she was just walking, and holding a big beautiful carpetbag up formally as she walked. She was larger than life. She was old, but she was noble. She was wearing a fancy old dress and walking along at a stately pace on the marathon course, with dignity and even athletic grace. She had a younger old woman at her side, and they invited me to walk with them. We went back to their place, and the slightly younger woman said I could come along to her party later, if I was willing to go with nothing on underneath, like no socks, or no undershirt. It wasn’t clear.
And later in the dream I was gossiping with a third woman right in front of these two older women, about them. Being mean.
I take the dream as a sharp rebuff to my thoughts on going to bed. Midge Decter is 82 years old. She is trying at her age to write (as I also am trying) and as my wife likes to say, there’s nothing more admirable in life than trying, doing it, showing up. So I don’t like a sentence or two that she wrote, or wish there had been a clearer line in her piece. Isn’t it great that this older woman is charging ahead ambitiously? Yes.
The younger old woman in the dream seems like Ruth Wisse. With the ritualistic rules of her community–I associate orthodoxy with rules about what shoes you wear and undergarments, so Wisse fits that character.
And of course I’m gossiping on both these women, right in front of them. A shitty thing to do. But in the dream the women have nobility.
The days of awe. I gotta get right with the lord.
