It was sung at his memorial service Saturday. My cousin, Mary, said he never wrote a note of music in his life. You’re just supposed to sort of give yourself to the music with an Irish enthusiasm. It works.

Take my heart, O Lord, take my hopes and dreams.
Take my mind with all its plans and schemes.
Give me nothing more but your love and grace.
These alone, O God, are enough for me.

Take my thoughts, O Lord, and my memory.
Take my tears, my joys and my liberty.
Give me nothing more but your love and grace.
These alone, O God, are enough for me.

I surrender, Lord, all I have and hold.
I return to you your gifts untold.
Give me nothing more but your love and grace.
These alone, O God, are enough for me.

When darkness falls on my final days,
take the very breath that sang your praise.
Give me nothing more but your love and grace.
These alone, O God, are enough for me.

— John Bossidy (04.18.1931 – 06.18.2019)

The local news had a story the other day that they teased as a “David vs. Goliath” battle. In this story, the “David” was the little guys living in $3-5 million apartments. “Goliath” was developers building $10-40 million apartments for the superrich. So, even a one-percenter can be the “little guy” when up against the 0.1%.

The issue here is new super tall, but skinny, skyscrapers being built that will block the views of those in some of the older buildings. A few years back I started to notice some of these residential towers while looking at the midtown skyline from the Jersey side. In the past, the really tall buildings were iconic ones like the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. These new towers have none of the styling of the older buildings and are just very thin rectangles sticking up into the sky.

The controversy here has to do with the zoning laws. There are limits to the residential square footage allowed in a building. That, however, does not include any structural or mechanical spaces. Since a 90th-floor apartment can be sold for much more than a 40th-floor unit, developers add numerous mechanical spaces to help them push the residential spaces skyward.

432 Park Avenue stands 1,400 feet tall. According to the New York Times, a large percentage of that space is designated as mechanical:

But 432 Park also has an increasingly common feature in these new towers: swaths of unoccupied space. About a quarter of its 88 floors will have no homes because they are filled with structural and mechanical equipment.

These voids allow for a taller building with penthouses in the $30 million range.

Exploiting this loophole may seem a little sleazy to some, but it is also very clever. In a bigger sense, it shows a problem that goes beyond construction and zoning laws. Laws are more complicated than they need to be and the people voting on them don’t know what they are voting for. When politicians try to regulate things they don’t understand, they are going to mess up.

This is true for too many issues. Politicians who call every rifle an AR-15, who don’t understand the difference between automatic and semi-automatic, who judge weapons by appearance rather than firepower, they want to give us “common sense” gun laws. They give tax credits for things like solar and wind, when no one knows what form the next great innovation might take. Where else do you see regulations that don’t do what they were meant to do because politicians got in their own way?

Here’s a beautiful thought from Sivan Rahav-Meir (translated from the Hebrew):

“In this world, in which G-d is hidden from us and does not reveal Himself to us, we grasp onto proofs for the existence of G-d like fish arguing about the existence of water.”

Why wasn’t the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, twice destroyed by our enemies, rebuilt in the last 2,000 years? We have had all those years to pray, to yearn. And yet we are seemingly no closer to the rebuilding of the Temple than we were after the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus.

The question is especially pertinent when we accept that, for the first time during this period, the Jewish people are now in control of the land on which the Temple, the “Home of the Tabernacle,” stood. And so I used to think as many others do: that we simply lack the courage to do what needs to be done. If this is so, we could say that our medieval, ghetto mindset has not been updated by the existence of the State of Israel. I think this is part of the answer. But it is not a complete explanation.

Until we understand why the Temple was destroyed in the first place, there is no reason why G-d should give us another chance. After all, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” (Rita Mae Brown). We had the first two temples. And we lost them both, which means that thinking that if we restore what we had in the past we would get a better result would be, in a word: insanity.

If we were “doing” the temple wrong the first two times, then perhaps we are not supposed to build the third Temple until after we understand why G-d commanded the tabernacle to be built in the first place!

The serious gap in our understanding rests with a major purpose of the Temple: to offer sacrifices. Yet, the prophets and psalms have no shortage of exhortations about G-d NOT wanting the sacrifices that He told us to bring! Here is but a short sample:

For I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of G-d more than sacrifices. (Hosea 6:6)

and

Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats? (Psalms 50:13)

Yet the Torah commands us to bring sacrifices! What were the prophets and the psalms trying to tell us? Why did they seem to contradict G-d’s expectations for sacrifices? Does G-d want sacrifices, or not?

I think the prophets were making a more subtle, but profound argument: G-d wants us to understand that the commandments are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. And what is that end? God wants us to behave and live in a holy manner: Mercy. Love. Justice. Growth, both personal and societal.

So, too, the Temple, the house of the Tabernacle where we bring our sacrifices, is also a means to an end. Each of the parts of the tabernacle is rich with symbolism and meaning, capable of guiding us through the ages – but only if we appreciate the importance of seeking understanding, as opposed to merely ticking the boxes.

The problem is that throughout history, the Jewish people have forgotten G-d’s expectations and slipped back into mindset of Cain (G-d as a powerful entity requiring a payoff), Korach (G-d as pagan deity who is ultimately uninterested in the affairs of men as long as He gets His own offerings), and countless Jews who see G-d as nature and nature as G-d. For all these deities, man merely has to go through the motions, and the god is assuaged. None of these gods requires the worshipper to seek personal spiritual growth, to find ways to love the widow, the orphan and the stranger – let alone one’s own neighbor.

But the G-d of the Torah stands qualitatively apart from all pagan (and for that matter Greco-Roman, Norse and other) deities. G-d is not nature or one of its forces. Nor does He want us to serve because we acknowledge His power: He wants us instead to acknowledge and emulate his mercy and justice.

Hashem also wants and craves a relationship with us, one in which we seek to understand and perceive His thoughts. He commands us to bring sacrifices not because He is hungry, but because sacrifices, given properly, can help us grow and move on in our personal development and deepen our connection to and our relationship with Him.

When we instead practice what I term “Rain Dance Judaism”, we are reverting to a kind of “fill in the blanks” service to G-d that is much more pagan than Jewish. Instead of understanding why we have commandments, we think all we really need to do is follow the commandments, with slavish attention to detail. If we do things just right, then the Celestial Slot Machine will come up bells, and we’ll be rewarded with a cascade of quarters. This is precisely the same trap into which the Judaism of the Temple periods fell into!

Instead of understanding why we brought sacrifices, people assumed that as long as they followed the letter of the law, G-d would be happy. Instead of understanding why the Mishkan was commanded, we instead assumed that we didn’t need to know the reasons; we were only to show our devotion by doing precisely as we were told. And instead of understanding and internalizing the lessons contained within sacrifices, we mailed it in: give G-d lunch, and He’ll bless us – or at least leave us alone! We have forgotten that all of these actions, these commandments were intended to bring us closer to G-d and to emulate Him in our actions, words, and deeds.

Until we come to understand what the commandments are for, we will not have the opportunity to practice them fully, to use them as a way to learn and understand G-d. As we read on the day commemorating the destruction of the Temples:

Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches. But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD. (Jeremiah 9:23,24)

And it is in these things, lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, that we have been given the Torah and all its commandments. The challenge for us is to try to understand how and why the commandments in the Torah, including all of those of the tabernacle, lead us to making ourselves and our societies more loving, just and righteous. As we do that, we grow in our understanding and knowledge of G-d Himself.

When we meet that mental challenge, then we will no longer be doing the same thing over and over again, and we will be able to reasonably expect a different result. At that time, we will be ready for the Third Temple.

(another @iwe and @susanquinn production!)

The picture below shows members of Yamam, the anti-terrorist unit that tracked down the murderers of Dvir Sorek, who was 18 years old.

One of Dvir’s teachers told this story about him:

“He was an amazing man, very sensitive, smart, modest, who fused wisdom and quiet. This is a man who at the beginning of the year saw an Arab walking around the area with a donkey that looked unwell, sick, so he offered to buy the donkey. He bought it, treated it, and sent it away,” Rabbi Sarel Rosenblatt, who taught Sorek, told Channel 12 news.

“I wanted him to be a man of standing in Israel, who would contribute a lot of his light to Israeli society, and his light was taken from us,” he added, describing him as a “sensitive man with a heart of gold.”

Dvir’s father, Yoav, reacted to the terrorists’ capture as follows:

“We are grateful to the security forces for their swift action in catching the terrorists, though we are disappointed they were captured alive. We are glad that Dvir, may G-d avenge his blood, didn’t see the faces of his killers, and we will try not to see them either, not now and not in court.”

Whether captured or killed, the terrorists’ families are richly rewarded by Abbas and company and, in reaction to the murder of any Jew, there is a celebratory mood as candy is handed out.

When I started college in the early 1960s, there was, in the parlance of the times, something going down: Colleges were drifting left politically, a few beatniks (who morphed into hippies) were showing up on campus, and the urban folk music scene was getting started. I remember going to a coffee shop a block off the University of Oregon campus and sitting on a bale of hay to listen to some folkies sing about how society should be rearranged.

The old-time folkies were still around, most notably the lifelong Communists (or fellow travelers, if you wish), Woody Guthrie (mostly a figurehead by now) and Pete Seeger. But a new generation of left-wing folkies, including Joan Baez and her boyfriend for a time, a scruffy kid by the name of Bob Dylan, were singing protest songs in Greenwich Village. The times they were indeed a-changing.

It was a heady time to be part of the Zeitgeist.

When Wordsworth, now something of a conservative, wrote The Prelude, he looked back on his flirtation with radicalism in his youth, especially his infatuation for the French Revolution, and exclaimed, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.”

When I read The Prelude for the first time, I knew exactly what Wordsworth meant by those words. Even now, as a longtime conservative, I look back with some measure of fondness for the folk and left-wing political scene of the sixties.

I wasn’t exactly a part all of this ferment. I was a mild leftie who loved folk music. I even took up the guitar and banjo and subscribed to “Sing Out!,” a small magazine which ran not only articles about folk music (Pete Seeger was a columnist), but also some left-wing stuff. To this day, acoustic folk music is still my thing. When Bob Dylan showed up with an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, I wrote him out of the movement.

All this was heady stuff for a kid from a family of Okies who moved to Compton, California — and then, after a stint in the Army, moved up to Eugene to attend the University of Oregon. How could I not feel the pull of the folkie and left-wing atmosphere?

In 1964, I remember wondering how anyone could vote for Goldwater. (I’m reminded here of the apocryphal story of Pauline Kael, the film critic for the New Yorker, saying that she couldn’t believe Nixon won because she didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon.)

So when it came time to pick a major, I chose English Literature, a specialty that seemed in some way associated in my mind with the left-wing and hippy movements— and about as far from my Okie roots and my dad’s work in the oil fields as one could imagine.

After declaring my major, one of the first classes I took was called “Folk Literature,” taught by a hip young professor who smoked in class (and sat his cigarette on end on his desk) and who would occasionally bring in his guitar and sing a folk song to illustrate some point or another. I wanted to make a living doing what that guy was doing, at least the non-singing part.

Over time, I became more and more conservative, until the riots outside the Democratic Convention in 1968 sealed the deal. I didn’t want to be on the side of those who spit in the faces of the cops.

But I still look back with fondness for those days when it “was bliss to be alive.” I’ve completely abandoned my infatuation with the political Left of those heady days, but I think there is still a touch of the hippie lingering within. I always liked the hippies better than I did the lefties.

And that’s where I am today: a little bit hippie and lot of conservative.

Postscript: I may have drifted into my English Lit major almost on a whim, but it somehow worked out well. What other job would have allowed me to sit in a corner office on the top floor of Faculty Hall and, for the most part, read and drink coffee? Then go down a few floors to the classroom and talk about what I enjoyed reading, sometimes for as few as nine hours a week. Even better, I mostly dealt with people who had every reason to be nice to me. That’s what I call sitting in the catbird seat.

Postscript on that last sentence within the Postscript: If that expression is beginning to get on your nerves, cut me some slack. I’ve been terribly fond of it ever since I met it in a James Thurber story, The Catbird Seat, about a man who is driven almost insane by his office mate, a woman who uses mysterious sayings throughout the day: “Are you tearing up the pea patch?,“ she asks him. “Are you hollering down the rain barrel?” she cryptically inquires. And especially, “Are you sitting in the catbird seat?” The man has no idea what any of those things mean, but they annoy him so much that he starts a plan to murder the woman who uses them. Thus far I’ve used the expression a number of times on Ricochet without reproof. Ricochet people are a forgiving lot.

Postscript number whatever: Some Ricocheters — you know who you are — feel shortchanged when I don’t post a pic of Bob. For those of you, here is my son Alan with the Bobster.

Why are so many of the most privileged people in all of human history so meanspirited and narcissistic? The educated elites in the developed world have a higher standard of living than has ever existed. Instead of a sensibility of gratitude, generosity, and open-mindedness, they (we?) are spiraling into a mindless tribalism in which signaling membership has replaced a substantive moral perspective.

They adhere to a mandatory oversimplified model of the most complex phenomena on earth (climate) in which ideology punishes inconvenient observations and calls that “science.” They opt for “solutions” like the demonstrably silly Paris Climate Treaty which is hideously costly and would have no measurable effect on climate. But that “solution” accomplishes the tribe’s usual dual purpose of (1) appearing to Do Something, and (2) disproportionately hurting the non-elite.

The “revolution” from 1960s radicals which the modern elite carries like a low-grade contagion has seeped into society resulting in the degradation of every social institution large and small, mostly to the detriment of the nation’s lower socioeconomic classes. The malformation of our young men is especially troubling but none of that can be discussed because the tribe offers no self-aggrandizing signals on such topics.

This is why Gun Control is such a sacred signal. Like the Paris or Kyoto Accord, these regulations offer zero curative effects but they distract from discussions that might reflect badly on the weltanschauung of the tribe. They are a form of harassment and a beatdown of non-elites and they strongly signal what now passes for virtue and a clean conscience.

The utterly incoherent immigration positions cheered by elites signal the tribe’s transcendence over outmoded and tacky allegiances such as patriotism and national identity. If implemented (even by inaction and legislative stalemate), they would disproportionately impact the non-elites as it already does by ratcheting down wages, creating troubled neighborhoods, and draining limited social welfare resources. But as a means of signaling, it’s a major win-win for those eager to remain in the tribe.

My mother’s southern family fiercely distinguished themselves from “poor white trash” by a sustained almost aristocratic demeanor even as the Great Depression greatly reduced the economic difference between them and their lessers. I see something similar in the tribe. The fear of falling out of the elite triggers an intense hatred of a caricature of the non-elite. The latent moral pull of the religion and traditions of immediate ancestors must be fought with a denigration of all religious people lest they be dragged back into less self-celebrating practices and duties. (Islam, Buddhism, and Native American religions have no such ancestral claims and can be safely respected like dolphins or the rainforest.)

We see millions of privileged young people in horrific debt to pay for bloated college administrative salaries (I fear I could endorse a revolution that focused on these people first). Their intellectual formation is noticeably inferior to that of older alumni, which makes them less able and far less confident about questioning the common wisdom. The sheer worthlessness of that education must foment an abiding feeling of vulnerability, as if they could be dragged down to live among the deplorables at any moment. Thus, the need to signal and affirm an utterly vacuous yet putatively elite sensibility is especially strong. We have produced a privileged class with little noblesse oblige and lots of fear and loathing.