Hebrew for Vulcans

(Disclaimer: This entry may sound really dumb to folks who speak Hebrew fluently. I know there are a few of you dovrei Ivrit out there among my readers, so apologies for stating the obvious! And, if I get things wrong, please correct me.)

In my most recent entry about studying prayerbook Hebrew, I promised a follow-up about what I find really cool about Hebrew as a language.

It’s children’s building blocks.

No, I don’t mean literal blocks, although I am sure you can buy some nifty ones in Israeli toy stores.

It’s building blocks as the metaphor I use in my head for thinking about the roots of words in Hebrew.

Every verb in Hebrew is based on a three-consonant root. The verb “to speak,” for instance, is based on dalet-bet-resh (DBR) or דבר. The verb “to learn” is based on lamed-mem-dalet (LMD) or למד.

To conjugate the verbs, or turn them into different tenses, you take those same three consonants and trim them with different stuff — add or subtract vowels, endings etc.

For instance, “I speak” is ani meDaBeRet. “I spoke” is DiBaRti. “He will speak” is yiDaBeR.

I picture the roots of Hebrew verbs as a set of three square alphabet blocks. You can move them around, place them closer together or futher apart, and add smaller blocks at the beginning or end to create all sorts of interesting structures. But the structures are all ultimately built on those same three alphabet blocks.

And it’s not just conjugations of verbs. There are all sorts of nouns built around those same three-consonant roots.

Take the noun DiBuR – it has the same three core letters as “I speak” and it means “speech.”  Or DiBeR  means “commandment,” as in ten of them. And DaVaR means “word.” (Uh oh, here’s where it gets complicated; the letter bet can sometimes turn into vet, so a B sound becomes a V sound. But let’s not worry about that now.)

It’s so logical. It’s so geometrical, so spatial. It appeals to the part of me that aspires to the rationality of a Vulcan.

Mr. Spock demonstrates the Hebrew letter "shin"

If you know the basic building blocks, you can figure out the meaning of lots of unfamiliar words. Just look for the root!

You can also make connections. For instance, way back in my teens, I learned the verb “to learn” — it’s one of the first things they teach you in an Ulpan, or modern conversational Hebrew class. Ani lomedet Ivrit– “I am studying Hebrew!” With LMD as the root of “to learn.”

It wasn’t until this winter, when I started thinking about Hebrew in a religious context, that I realized that those same three building blocks are at the root of the word TaLMuD — the collection of rabbinic writings and law that are central to Judaism.

I think about Talmud a little differently now, knowing it is not just an arbitrary name for a set of writings,  but has a literal meaning (“learning”) that shares a root with everyday words like “to learn” and “student.”

It’s not only profound connections like the literal meaning of Talmud. Last week in my prayerbook Hebrew class, I learned the verb BaTaCH – to trust in, or rely on. (As in, “trust in God.”)

And then I realized that this ancient religious word shares the B-T-CH root with two words that are used all the time in modern Hebrew — bitachon (“security,” as in military security or social security) and betach (which means ‘of course” — or more literally, I realized, “for sure.”)

I suppose that for native Hebrew speakers, none of this is a big deal. But for someone learning the language, each connection is an “ah ha!” moment.

I wonder what it would be like to be a native or fluent Hebrew speaker, who without even thinking about it perceives countless connections and connotations of words. When I read a line of prayerbook or Biblical Hebrew, I plod along one word at a time, happy if I can translate each one into an English counterpart. What would it be like not to have to translate, and to automatically perceive all the shadings of each word, the translucent ribbons connecting it to other words?

I don’t know enough languages to have a sense if Hebrew — with its beautifully geometrical building-block roots — is structured more logically than most. It certainly seems to have more of an internal logic than English.

Any linguists out there want to weigh in? Or perhaps some Vulcans?

The black hole of parenthood

I fell into that black hole of parenthood again yesterday. 

It happens increasingly often – I realize that something that feels recent to me actually happened decades ago. I’ve concluded that my 16 years of being a parent are a kind of black hole that swallows and collapses the passage of time. Fast forward: One minute it’s 1993, next minute it’s 2010!

Yesterday’s black hole moment came from a San Francisco Chronicle interview with Patrick Stewart, who played the wonderful Captain Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Sam and I watched assiduously (obsessively?) in our pre-parent days. 

Patrick Stewart and William Shatner answer questions at a Star Trek convention in SF, Jan. 2010. Photo by Lacy Atkins/The Chronicle

Stewart mentioned that he had started playing Picard 23 years ago. 

Twenty-three years! 

That seemed so much longer than I would have estimated. It felt to me like maybe twelve or fifteen years since Sam and I started watching the show. Certainly a while, but not a quarter century. Not twenty-three years!

Another recent instance: The son of my sister-in-law got married in January for a second time. My sister-in-law was talking about the wedding and mentioned that her son was 38. I almost fell out of my chair. Thirty-eight! I still think of him as a 22-year-old, just-out-of-college techie whiz-kid. And now he’s thirty-eight?

 I did the math about my sister-in-law’s son and realized I was missing 16 years. Those 16 years had just slipped by me somehow. And how old is my daughter? Sixteen.

That’s when it hit me about the parenthood black hole.

Some whole swatches of pop culture and politics got sucked into that black hole. For instance, I don’t know much pop music from the 1990s. Nirvana who? We were too busy playing Broadway Kids and Raffi in the car all the time.

I kind of missed Health Care Reform Debacle, Round 1 (but oh joy, I got to experience Round 2 this year). I missed nearly any popular movie from the ‘90s and early ‘00s that didn’t involve a princess, talking animals, or wizards with British accents.

And then my 40s vanished wholesale. One minute I was 35, an eager young newspaper reporter, and now suddenly I am 52 and my industry is on life-support and the AARP keeps sending me membership solicitations.

Of course, the parenthood black hole is finite.  We have only one child, and in two and a half years she will leave for college. Already she’s receding from our daily lives – lots of sleepovers at friends’, hours in her room with the door closed, plans to travel to Israel for a month with a group of other local teens this summer. This year more than ever I feel like the ground is being laid for us to become empty nesters.

So when she’s gone, will time slow down again? Will years feel like years again, and not like minutes?

Maybe it’s not just parenthood that causes this. Maybe it’s being involved and engaged in life. You get involved, you get busy, time passes, and… poof! Patrick Stewart is 70 and you’re 52. 

I don’t know, but I hope things slow down. I love being engaged, I’ve loved being a parent (well, most of the time), but I also don’t want life to flit by so fast.

I kind of miss sitting in a really tedious college lecture or City Council meeting and thinking: “God, this is lasting forever. Won’t it ever be over?”

Forget cryogenics.  Tedium may be the key to living forever. Or at least feeling like it.

Let’s keep God out of Haiti

It’s felt strange to continue posting about personal matters like studying  Hebrew while the whole world is focused on the devastation in Haiti. But honestly, I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to add to the chorus of horror, sympathy and analysis. There are plenty of people with more experience and knowledge than me who are writing about Haiti. 

But I did want to weigh in on one small point – God and Haiti. 

There have been all sorts of sound bites and stories trying to connect God with Haiti’s tragedy. On the crudest and most repulsive level, there was Pat Robertson’s now-infamous comment that Haitians brought their suffering on themselves by making a pact with the devil to win independence from France back around 1800. 

On a more thoughtful level, people have raised the classic question that goes from the Book of Job up through the Holocaust – how could a just God allow this kind of tragedy to hit innocent people who were already among the poorest on the planet? 

But I don’t see the Haiti disaster as something that God is responsible for, either actively or passively. 

To me, the most telling fact to me was presented by David Brooks in a New York Times column: The size of the Haiti quake was almost identical to the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in San Francisco. 

Yet in San Francisco, just 63 people were killed, while in Haiti the death toll is estimated in the hundreds of thousands. 

The quake was so devastating precisely because of Haiti’s history of underdevelopment and poverty. The country and its people continue to suffer from a legacy that includes slavery; neo-colonialism; alternating bursts of military intervention and neglect by the U.S.; and local ruling elites characterized by greed, despotism and viciousness. 

With that history of oppression and poverty, of course they didn’t have adequate building codes. Of course they didn’t spend money on well-built housing, schools or hospitals. Of course they didn’t have all the emergency equipment and systems in place that we do in the Bay Area. 

It doesn’t seem like rocket science to understand that “natural” disasters are particularly disastrous when they occur in poor, underdeveloped countries. 

And we’re going to see a lot more such disasters over the next century due to climate change – as it hits Third World countries that don’t have the resources to build things like seawalls and desalination plants, or relocate their populations, or diversify their economic base. 

Geological forces – not God — created the quake in Haiti. Human forces – not God — created a society that would be particularly devastated by it.

And we humans have an obligation not only to provide emergency aid when a once-in-a-century disaster strikes — but to foster just, democratic and economically viable societies that can ensure decent lives for all their people, all the time.

So let’s keep God out of the Haiti discussion. 

Except to the extent that God — or the universe, or nature (take your pick of whichever concept works for you) — gives us humans the intelligence and power to take care of each other.

And along with that, gives us a moral obligation to do so.

Half-baked Hebrew

In addition to my sporadic meetings with the rabbi and the cantor, I just started going to a weekly hour-long Hebrew class.

I’ve got a – shall we say — complicated relationship with Hebrew.

The letter aleph

I picked up a bunch of modern Hebrew as a teenager in Hashomer Hatzair and when I worked on a kibbutz for a few months after high school. Then I picked up more modern Hebrew when I lived in Jerusalem briefly in my early 20s and attended an ulpan, an intensive Hebrew class designed for new immigrants.

But all of my exposure has been to 20^th century conversational Hebrew, not prayer book Hebrew.

Here’s an example: When I was studying in the ulpan, my class included a number of Orthodox Jewish immigrants. We were all advanced beginners, but our vocabularies were like night and day. They knew words like angel and holy and blessed. I knew words like cow barn and dining hall and political party.

We each thought the others were morons. (And that’s not even going into our political differences.)

Meanwhile, I’ve never really mastered reading.

I can sound out words and recognize all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but I never learned the alphabet in order.

You know how in preschool we all learned that a-b-c-d song to the tune of “Twinkle twinkle little star”? We never think about it, but that sequencing of letters was a really important chunk of knowledge. It’s a chunk I somehow missed in Hebrew.

So I have a devil of a time trying to look up Hebrew words in a dictionary. I sit there feeling like an idiot going, “Resh? Resh? Now where does the letter resh come in the alphabet? Is it before or after samech? How much after samech?” It takes me about two minutes of fumbling around just to find the right page. Then it takes me another minute to locate the word somewhere on that page.     

I also constantly transliterate in my head.

When I think of a Hebrew word, I don’t picture it with Hebrew letters. I picture it as we would write its sounds in English. So when I think “ani” (Hebrew for “I”), I don’t visualize aleph-nun-yud. I visualize a-n-i. My brain is a word processing program that doesn’t have a Hebrew font. And it’s been like that for 30-plus years.

So on the one hand, I’m almost fluent in some basic Hebrew conversational phrases: There are words and sentences that pop into my head at random moments even though I haven’t used them in 25 years.

And at the same time I’m less familiar with the Hebrew alphabet than an Israeli four-year-old.

Complicated.  

Luckily the class I joined is focused on my area of deficit – reading the prayer book and Torah. With only three other students, it’s small enough to be pretty flexible. And the teacher, Temple Sinai’s award-winning educator Ophira Druch, seems willing to accommodate my spotty background.

Coming next: Why Hebrew appeals to my geometric mind.

Spenser, orphaned

One of my favorite writers died unexpectedly on Monday – Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser detective novels. 

Parker didn’t fit the pattern of authors I typically like. For one thing, I don’t usually read crime fiction. And most of my favorite authors tend to write nuanced psychological novels: The rare detective novels I like are by people like David Liss who offer so much fascinating historical and psychological detail that the crime part seems almost incidental. 

Parker’s Spenser novels, on the other hand, are pure noir detective. They’re pretty predictable and formulaic. And they are light: I used to marvel at how much white space his publisher let him pad his pages with. His chapters are only three or four pages long. You can get through a Spenser novel in about 87 minutes.

But what a wonderful 87 minutes! 

Parker’s books were like a welcoming, dependable friend. I could count on a moderately interesting plot, amusing dialogue, a smidgen of social commentary, but most of all the familiar and very engaging voice of Spenser as narrator.

Spenser was a classic insider-turned-outsider – onetime cop who couldn’t live with the rules and hypocrisy of the system, and so struck out on his own. He was both arrogant and self-deprecating at the same time. For instance, Spenser describes trailing a suspect in the most recent novel, The Professional:

I went every day to Pinnacle Fitness.  I had to be careful. If I improved my body further, the paparazzi would begin following me. So I worked out sparingly and spent a lot of time watching the snugly dressed young women, looking for exercise tips.

Spenser was cynical about institutions, politicians, the rich and pretentious, the young and beautiful, to name just a few. He was happy to diss his own clients to their face – often with such deadpan wit that they didn’t even realize they were being mocked. Yet under that cynical surface he carried a strong personal code of ethics.

I loved the repartee. I loved the point in nearly every book where Spenser would do something risky, ill-advised or economically self-destructive to follow his code of ethics. I loved the spare writing: For aspiring writers seeking a vaccine against verbosity, Parker is right up there with Hemingway.

I also loved Spenser’s continuity and evolution through the 37 novels Parker wrote about him, starting in 1973. Spenser developed friendships with Boston police and gangsters who learned to respect his peculiar integrity. He settled into a deep unmarried monogamy with psychologist Susan Silverman.

But I wanted him to evolve more. After all these years, Spenser was getting middle-aged. Maybe more than middle-aged. Occasionally there were hinted references at this: He didn’t have the physical stamina that he used to have. But I kept waiting for age to hit him seriously – the detective who could no longer detect.

What would that mean for his self-identity? His life? I was tired of the same romantic routines with Susan, the same joking conversations with his tough killer buddy Hawk.

I was ready for Spenser to grow up, by which I meant grow old.

I thought it was coming. I thought Parker would face up to it, just as Spenser always faced up to the dark side of things. I hoped Parker would bring the series to an end – a conscious, plotted, controlled end.

And now he won’t. Spenser is effectively orphaned, a creation without a creator. The New York Times obituary said that there are two more Spenser novels in unspecified stages of the publishing process. But Parker wasn’t anticipating his own death; he was apparently in excellent health. So I suspect these two last novels will be more of the same. Which will be lovely, for the 87 minutes it takes me to read each one, but will leave things feeling unfinished.

Spenser the lost boy. Remaining 65 – or whatever age he is – forever.

I am so sad that Robert Parker is gone. Because I love the books, and there won’t be any more after these next two. Because Parker was so talented and productive: The Times said that he died of a heart attack at his desk, where his routine was to write five pages every day except Sunday.

And because I won’t get to see Spenser grow old. We lost two people this week – both Parker and Spenser. And I won’t get to travel any further down the road with either of them.

Let the chanting begin!

I had my first meeting with the cantor on Friday. At our synagogue (is this how it works elsewhere? I have no idea), the cantor and the rabbi divide up the work of preparing the B’nei and B’not Mitzvah. 

The rabbi works with you on the meaning of your Torah portion, and on the drash or speech you are to write and present about it. The cantor helps you learn to lead prayers and to chant the Torah and Haftarah portions in Hebrew. 

Up until now, I’ve been meeting about every two weeks with our temple’s senior rabbi to talk informally about Judaism. It’s been totally unstructured and conversational – the only agenda has been the questions that I bring in on that particular day. 

Now, with the cantor, things are getting a little more structured. 

My Bat Mitzvah binder

I’ve got a three-ring binder with the words, translations and transliterations of the major prayers that make up a Shabbat service, and a CD of what they sound like when they are sung or chanted. I have a workbook (kind of like a 3^rd grade math workbook) published by the Union for Reform Judaism with the Hebrew and English text of my Torah and Haftarah portions. 

I’ve also got some sheets that explain the Torah cantillations – little marks that will apparently tell me when to raise or lower my voice to correctly chant the Hebrew. 

Now, I have to say that this seems a bit unfair. It’s hard enough to navigate an entirely different alphabet without having a second set of alien symbols that are like traffic signs for all those foreign letters.

Go fast! Go slow! Watch out for the curve! Sheep crossing! No – no – no – baa! – aak!

But here’s my mantra whenever anything seems daunting about this process: 

Twelve-year-olds are doing this every day. My twelve-year-old did it. So chill out and do it.

In any event, I’m not cantillating yet. My assignment for the next two weeks is to review the major blessings and prayers from the Shabbat service – the blessing for wearing a tallit; the blessings before and after reading the Torah and Haftarah; the V’ahavta, Avot v’Imahot, G’vurot and Kiddush.

Most of these I already know. I didn’t grow up going to a synagogue, but I’ve been enough times as an adult, and I listened to my daughter practicing these enough, that I am easily able to follow along during services. The cantor had me chant them on Friday and said I did pretty well.

“That’s pretty good,” she said. “And remember, when you’re up there, there will be other people chanting along with you.”

But “pretty good” isn’t what I’m looking for.

I told her that I wanted to know all these prayers as well as I know the Friday night Kiddush.

“I want to know them well enough that if I’m shipwrecked on a desert island, I can lead a service on my own,” I said.

She nodded and seemed amused. And it is admittedly an amusing image – Robinson Crusoe celebrating Shabbat under a palm tree. (And what about his man Friday? Does Friday celebrate Shabbat? Or does Shabbat sanctify Friday?)

But in fact, I wasn’t thinking Friday or Crusoe or even “desert island” when I said “desert island.” 

I was thinking about concentration camps, and those stories of random anybody Jews leading a Passover seder or a Shabbat service in the bleak, dehumanizing barracks of an Auschwitz.

That’s part of the reason I undertook the Bat Mitzvah process. God forbid I ever end up anywhere close to an Auschwitz. But if I am, I want to be one of the people who can keep Jewish culture and identity alive.

I want to be able to rely on my own Jewish competence — kind of like having an earthquake survival kit, only for Judaism.

I shied back from saying that to the cantor because it seemed a bit melodramatic. I came up with the “desert island” idea instead.

But even setting aside the extreme Holocaust imagery, the concept still holds. I want the self-sufficiency of being able to lead a service myself. I want to feel secure enough in my knowledge of Judaism to pass the traditions on to the next generations.

Even here in 2010 California – where the biggest threat to those next generations is not anti-Semitism but Jewish ignorance and assimilation.

Invasion of the Jewish Undead

If adding a few zombies can put Pride and Prejudice on the bestseller lists, why not this blog? 

Sad to say, though, I’m not really writing about zombies today. Nor even about vampires or werewolves. Instead, let’s talk about Jewish conceptions of an afterlife! 

(Clunk. That’s the sound of my readership plummeting to rock bottom as all the zombie fans realize this is not their kind of undead discussion.) 

As part of my ongoing meetings with my rabbi, I recently read two books about Jewish ideas of an afterlife – What Happens After I Die: Jewish Views of Life After Death, by Rifat Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme, and The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, by Neil Gillman. 

What Happens After I Die is a short, easy-to-read summary of how various Jewish thinkers have approached this issue. (Like Sonsino and Syme’s other book on Finding God, it’s kind of a Cliff’s Notes for Jewish theology.) Gillman is a little weightier. 

A lot of this was new to me, since I’ve never paid much attention to what Judaism says about death. Here’s my 30-second summary: 

• The Torah barely makes mention of the idea of an afterlife. It often talks about death as a return to dust. (“Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” – Genesis 3:19)  
• Sometimes the Torah refers to a shadowy underground place called Sheol to which all dead people go. This isn’t a place of punishment like later descriptions of Hell, just a dark silent  place. For instance, Job says, “As a cloud fades away, so whoever goes down to Sheol does not come up.”
• By the time the Talmud was compiled around 400 C.E., Judaism had developed a doctrine of physical resurrection – that someday when the Messiah comes, the dead will rise up and God will restore them to their bodies.
• There are various historical theories about why the resurrection doctrine developed – for instance, during an era of massive oppression and killings of Jews by the Romans, it filled a psychological need for justice. Bodily resurrection as a doctrine had its opponents (the Pharisees were pro-resurrection, while the Sadducees believed that once dead, you stayed dead). But whatever its genesis, resurrection of the dead ultimately became a key point in Orthodox Judaism.
• Meanwhile, the Greek concept of an immortal soul that is distinct from the body was also incorporated into Judaism. Maimonides included resurrection of the dead among his Thirteen Principles of Jewish Belief, but  gave much more of his attention to immortality of the soul:

“In the World to Come, there is nothing corporeal, and no material substance; there are only souls of the righteous without bodies…. The righteous attain to a knowledge and realization of truth concerning God to which they had not attained while they were in the murky and lowly body.”

• There are lots of inconsistent, sometimes conflicting, ideas about afterlife running through the past 2,000 years of Jewish thought. There’s even a Jewish version of reincarnation in the Kabbalah  – gilgul neshamot, or “revolving of souls”!
• When Reform Judaism arose in the 1800s as an effort to bring a modern, scientific world view to Judaism, it renounced the doctrine of bodily resurrection. The Reform liturgy removed the traditional wording praising God for giving life to the dead (mechayei hametim), and instead praised God for giving life to everything (mechayei hakol).

Rather than bodily resurrection, Reform Judaism followed Maimonides’ lead and focused on the immortality of the soul. Some Reform thinkers went even further and treated immortality as an abstraction – i.e., we live on after death through our good deeds or through people’s memories of us.

Recently, though, Reform has stepped back from its historical antipathy to the language of bodily resurrection. In a bow to tradition, the latest version of the Reform prayerbook gives congregants the option of saying mechayei hametim instead of mechayei hakol.

Yow! Maybe we’ll get some zombies into this blog post after all.

 Zombies in the synagogue social hall! Zombies in the sisterhood gift shop! Zombies on the JCC basketball court!

(Although I do need to add that the Reform movement doesn’t intend for people to take the revived mechayei hametim language at face value. “Most Reform rabbis don’t accept bodily resurrection literally,” my rabbi said. “Instead, they’re talking about things that are inside all of us — parts of us that may feel dead but we want to resurrect.”)

In any case, this is all historically interesting. But what does it mean for me personally? Not much.

I can’t even begin to take the idea of dead bodies rising up from their graves seriously. I don’t buy into ideas of heaven (Gan Eden) and hell (Gehinnom). Nor do I believe that I have a soul that will live on after I’m gone, although I’d be happy to be proved wrong. And the abstractions about living eternally through good deeds or others’ memories? That always feels like empty rationalization to me – no one short of a Shakespeare or a Lincoln is really remembered beyond their children and grandchildren. And in any event, I don’t want to be remembered: I want to be alive!

Ironically, the Jewish description of death that most speaks to me is the oldest and least sophisticated one – the Biblical one.

We return to dust.

To me, that is eloquent in its stark honesty. It doesn’t sugarcoat anything or succumb to wishful fantasy. It forces us to face the painful fact of our mortality.

And as a corollary, it challenges us to live a meaningful life since it is the only life we have. That’s kind of existentialist. It’s also very Jewish – do good, be just, be kind, not to win rewards in some future heaven but because it is the right way to live life here on Earth.

It also reminds me of the song When I’m Gone, by the brilliant, under-appreciated late folk singer Phil Ochs (download it! download it!):

Phil Ochs' I Ain't Marching Anymore (1964)

There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
You won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
My pen won’t pour out a lyric line when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone
And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone
Can’t be singing louder than the guns when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

Since posting this blog entry, I learned from my old college friend Eliot that Ochs was half Jewish on his father’s side! (See the comment section for this entry.) He was not actively Jewish, and I suspect he looked at all organized religion with a jaundiced, crap-detecting eye. But that song (I’ve included  just a partial excerpt) is one of the most moving and spiritual statements I’ve heard. It belongs in a siddur.

Taken aback by the “r” word

At a New Year’s Day party, I ran into an old friend whom I first met through a mothers’ group when our daughters were infants. The talk turned to work and she mentioned that she plans to retire at 59, which is about a half dozen years off for her.

I felt my chest tighten with a kind of shocked panic. I did not want to hear this. I did not want to think about this.

Retirement?!

It feels deeply threatening that someone whom I consider a peer is starting to talk about retirement. I’m barely adapting to other signs of the passage of time – that my daughter is no longer the romping puppy whom we took to the zoo on weekends, or that she will be gone to college in two and a half years.

And now… retirement?!

I’m not anywhere near ready to retire. I feel like I have barely made a mark on the world. Admittedly, I’ve spent almost 30 years in the post-collegiate workforce,  so I have a fair amount of road behind me. But my career consists of a bunch of splotchy patches: A half dozen years as a reporter. A year of maternity leave. Back to reporting. Six years working on a book and helping start a school. A few more years of newspaper reporting. Most recently, a year of unemployment and working on fiction.

I haven’t had anything resembling the classic career of my parents’ generation. That would have meant moving steadily up a career ladder, from small newspapers to bigger newspapers to even bigger papers or jobs in newsroom management.

Instead, I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but sometimes it feels just like that – “stuff,” not an organized and coherent whole. I don’t feel like I’ve fulfilled my potential or reached any kind of pinnacle or even had a chance to show my capabilities.

And most days, that’s okay. I assume there’s more time: If I can get this novel into publishable shape, that will be an achievement. When I get my next job, I’ll have time to make some kind of mark. I typically think of my future as wide open, pretty much as I did in my 20s or 30s or 40s.

But then here comes this friend talking about retiring.

And retirement signifies to me: You’re done. Through. You’ve had your moment on the stage and now it’s time for the next act to step forward — even if you barely had time to stutter through the first few lines of your monologue. Even if you had so much more to say.

I know, this is just narrow and old-fashioned thinking. If you love what you do, there’s no need to retire, ever. People today join the Peace Corps in their 60s. They campaign for elected office in their 70s. They run marathons and write best-selling novels at any age. Leonard Cohen did an awesome concert tour last spring at age 74. And so on.

But still… retirement. It is a sea-change moment. It’s a reminder that our road is finite, it goes in just one direction, and that we are pretty far along on it.

I don’t like it.

On the other hand, most of the time I am very happy living in the “midlife” part of Midlife Bat Mitzvah.

Midlife = experienced. Midlife = wise. Midlife = lots of stuff still to come.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to stay in “midlife” for a long time. My friend may be getting ready to retire, but I’m uncoupling my engine from hers. We may have had daughters at the same time, and watched them grow up at the same pace, but I am not on her timetable when it comes to work and careers.

I’m going to forget that entire conversation. I’m not going to think about retirement.

I’m going to focus on 2010.

2010 will mark 30 years since I graduated from college. Thirty years since I moved to California. Twenty years since I got married.

And I have two over-arching goals for 2010, bigger than studying to become a Bat Mitzvah:

(1) Get a publishing contract for one of my novels.

(2) Figure out what kind of work I’m going to do next.  (Hint to self: It’s not newspaper or magazine journalism.)

Content may settle

Since leaving the San Francisco Chronicle 15 months ago, I regularly read the writer/editor job listings on Craig’s List. The result is usually more sobering than inspiring – lots of listings for 23-year-old college grads who can live on intern salaries or people with esoteric translation skills. 

Like “Intern for green social website.” Or “Community bloggers: Sonoma County.” Or “Local data editor (Swedish).”

Yesterday I saw one that took the cake, though. “Exciting opportunity for writers,” the headline read, with a location of Downtown Oakland. Now I know that anything on the Web that bills itself as an “exciting opportunity” is probably trying to sell you Viagra, penis enlargement, or a Nigerian get-rich plan. But still, why not look? After all, downtown Oakland – I could bike to work like my Mr. Stud husband. 

There was in fact no Viagra in the ad (although apparently no downtown Oakland office either). It read: 

“We are an online publishing company that needs excellent article writers. Whether you have professional writing experience or want writing experience, we need you. You will be writing on many topics and will need a good command of the English language. Work is on-going – You can choose to work full time or part time.” 

Okay, so I proceeded to their Web site. The company appears to be one of many that offers content – i.e. articles – to various Web sites and uses freelance writers to create that content. The site looked attractive and fairly professional. My antennae went up at their requirement that all writers be “native English speakers” — in 20 years of writing for California’s top newspapers, no one had ever told me that being a “native English speaker” was a prerequisite, but what the heck? Maybe things are different on the Web. 

But clicking through the site, it became apparent that the people running this venture may not be “native English speakers” themselves. For instance: 

“Since more than two years now we have established a good reputation as content supplier…. 

“With us you’ll never have to worry again from where to get the next writing job or if your next customer will pay you or not.

“Our customers mainly need articles for their web sites and for article marketing. This means they ask for general informative that are a good, easy and entertaining read but are not too promotional because that turns readers away. However, some customers ask us to write promotional.”

Then I checked their pay rates: 

Minimum of  300 words:      $2.00 per article
Minimum of  400 words:      $3.00 per article
Minimum of  500 words:      $3.50 per article
Minimum of  750 words:      $5.00 per article
Minimum of  1,000 words:    $6.50 per article

Yow! Were my aging, old-media eyes missing a decimal place or two? 

Let’s see… when I started out as a summer intern at the Sacramento Bee in 1987, I was earning $350 a week. To make that much money through this company, I would need to write 54 thousand-word articles per week. Or 175 three-hundred-word articles per week! 

And to make as much as a somewhat experienced, Media Guild-covered newspaper reporter – say, $1,000 per week?

That would be… seventy-one 300-word articles each day, working seven days a week! 

Now I could go on a rant here, but this is so absurd that I can’t even bring myself to get upset. It’s just funny. 

I’ll save the rant for another day. 

For now, I’ll only say that the word “content” – digital lingo for everything from James Joyce and the Bible to celebrity tweets and pet photos – always makes me think of Costco-sized bags of junk food. 

Cheetos. Chips. Popcorn. Deep fried pork rinds. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s big, cheap and salty. 

As they say on the box, “contents may settle.” 

We all may settle.

Christmayear — the secret Jewish holiday

Did you know that Christmas and New Year’s are secretly a Jewish holiday? 

Well, not really. But maybe we can start an urban legend. An Internet hoax. A new Dan Brown novel. Or something. 

I was thinking about how this week between Christmas and New Year’s always feels a little unmoored and other-worldly. Schools are closed; workplaces are half-empty. When I used to be employed at newspapers, this was always a bad week to get your phone calls returned and a good week to organize your files. Yesterday I tried to borrow some books from our local public library and discovered it is closed until January, due to a combination of holidays and budget cuts.

Then it occurred to me… maybe Christmas and New Year’s are just one long eight-day holiday!

We have a bunch of these in the Jewish calendar. Passover lasts for seven days in Israel and eight days in the Diaspora. Sukkot lasts for seven days. Chanukah lasts for eight days. Orthodox Jews limit the kinds of work they do during chol ha’moed, the middle days of Sukkot and Passover. This final week of December feels similar to my vague, decades-old memories of Passover in Israel – schools were closed, some businesses were closed, families took vacations, everything slowed down a bit.

I guess Christmas at one point had 12 days of geese a-laying and lords a-leaping. But unfortunately for the goose and lord industries, no one here in the U.S. seems to celebrate 12 days of it.

So forget the 12 days or even Twelfth Night. What we’ve got is one eight-day-long holiday that begins with Christmas and ends with New Year’s.

So, happy Christmayear! Let’s formalize its rituals: Eating leftovers. Re-gifting fruitcake. Wondering whether to join a health club on Jan. 2^nd. Waiting in vain for people to respond to business calls or emails.

And let’s bring Christmayear out of the closet. Eight days – clearly an unrecognized Jewish holiday.

Chag sameach!