Gratitude

I want to specially thank all of you who took the time to leave a comment regarding my Rav's suicide. Thank you for your understanding and wisdom and compassion, though I find my expressions weak and deficient in letting you know how much you have touched me. Your words mean more to me than you can imagine, in a world filled with shame about such things. Sometimes, it seems, it is strangers rattling about the four corners of this planet who bring comfort across seas and mountains, when others closer to you, do not, or cannot.

I scan J-blogs and it feels like a wildly colourful passing parade, flags fluttering and raised high, J-blogs crunchy and bitter and sweet in their offerings. It is a parade that I feel sliding by me, because time crumples into nothingness when there is suicide, and the world takes on the texture of a playground for innocents.

Somehow, blogging about this-and-that feels like such a gift, a privilege, a pitch for life, not death. I am so envious of those whose lives go on merrily, or crankily, thoughtfully, or superficially. I long to be in that stream, but suicide leaves you half-stunned, and part dead, raging with love, and it seems impossible to write anything unless you want to start a suicide blog. And you don't know when this exceptional, unwelcome, bitter and obsessive grief will die down, when the questions will be at least partially satisfied. There is a rent in the fabric of the universe, and that's all I know, right now.

So, I am deeply grateful, close to undone by those who came forward to succor the hidden, uncelebrated, ordinary person that is me. It is so tragically true that with suicide, unless you've been there you can't even begin to grasp the cacophony of grief. May you and everyone be blessed to never know its shattering grip. May you only know love, and may it keep you whole till love and time cease to exist.

Jewess

A lot of hits to this site follow the word, "Jewess". I currently came upon a site where a Jew was totally grossed out by the word, "Jewess". What can I say? It seems that he and I live on different planets.

I remember a few years ago, I had used the word "Jewess" in some email to a very popular Jewish site, and that email had been publicised. In return, I received an email from someone who was totally disgusted by my use of the word: he said, to this effect, "Don't you know how humiliating this word is, how denigrating"????

Well, uh, nooo. I was not here at the inception of its trashing.

I wrote back to him, and said that the word "Jewess" fills me with pride. It so reminds me of the word, "lioness". I always think of Jewesses as fierce, fiercely intelligent and protective just like lionesses (oh that reminds me, major props to The Lioness, a Jewess on my sidebar who is always an inspiration).

As for those who are repulsed by the term- meanwhile, I do recall from Ivanhoe, for example, a noble Jewess who sacrificed so much- so, what is your problem? Cause I am thinking it has way more to do with your identity as a Jew than mine. More to do with smearing Jews in general, a kind of self-hatred or uncertainty resulting from some sort of confusion and dependence on some evil zeitgeist that has nothing to do with our community. Cause in the end, tell me why the moniker of "Jewess" makes you gag. I'm thinking this was not a moniker promulgated by the "goyim". Cause then, are you telling me there is no grammatical feminine equivalent of "Jew" in Hebrew that we can proudly put out there?

I also do recall that a close friend, a Jewess, never used the word, "Jew", when she could use the word, "Jewish", instead.

I warn you though, I am not gonna be on your side about this. But I do wonder and I will listen. In the midst of this, did I ask a question? Yes, I did.

Ain't it just like Jews, to quibble over the details. I wonder what that means?

My Rav Z"L: All Honour To LARabbi™ and To Us

So, I've been reading a lot about suicide, and I have been reading about
the "shame" and "stigma" of suicide. I now have, as so many others have, experienced the muzzled, dirty consequences of that taboo. In addition, I remember, very clearly, when Ofra Haza, a popular Israeli singer, died, someone I did not know, and all the mystery surrounding her premature death at the time; no one wanted to admit that she died from AIDS. I also remember countless newspaper obituaries, where the word "suddenly", accompanied without cause of death, could readily be deciphered as "suicide". So great and pervasive is the shame.

I suspect that shame is also what led the family of my Rav, to ask the Executive Committee not to release details of his death until after the funeral. Rumours burbled throughout, and loshon hara grew exponentially- all because suicide is so complicated an experience, and so heart achingly raw that it fills you so full of guilt and grief and confusion, that understandably, anything remotely publicised would feel like standing naked in front of the world.

I have fretted about this for weeks, about what to say, if anything, and have been caught up in the shame and the sense of mortification that everyone attached in some small way to my Rav, feels. I have heard more than one person say, this all belongs to us, and we should not air our dirty laundry. This belongs to us. And I bought into it for a while (though not faulting them).

Yes, it does belong to us. And because it does, we can share. And there is no laundry dirtier, in my opinion, than the minds of those who determine that it is best to keep it amongst ourselves, out of shame. We point to dirt when we see dirt. And I was swayed by it, wandering in a world of really cheesy crap, till I got a clue, today. Because in my little world, there is nothing dirty or shameful about suicide, especially my Rav's suicide. There is shock, devastation, anger, guilt, grief, anguish, even blame, but not shame. Because, ultimately, there is a wanting to understand, and there is love, and a desire to make the future better.

I am not willing to define my Rav by the way that he died, but by the way that he lived. And "so", Kurt Vonnegut would say, "it goes".