Whither the Beloved Country

 

   We have just been through the dirtiest, most acrimonious presidential campaign that I can remember, the acrimony has not stopped on either side, and my mood is down.  Like most American Jews since the Great Depression, my sympathies have been aligned with those of the Democratic Party.  I say “have been” because the party is listing so far to port that it is in danger of capsizing. One of my first political memories was visiting my maternal grandfather ע''ה, who actually lived and raised two daughters through the Great Depression, mentioning or perhaps hearing somebody else mention President Eisenhower, and hearing my grandfather say in substance: A Republican – yuk.  I reached voting age in 1970, with the passage of the 26^th Amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 nationwide.  I did not wait, but went to the Brooklyn office of the Board of Elections to register as soon as possible, before the Orthodox establishment got on the bandwagon and instructed all of us to register and vote, because if we did not then our concerns would not count.  I would have registered even if the gedolim had told us not to; it is my sacred obligation as an American and many good Americans died so that we could choose those who would govern us.  Of course, I registered as a Democrat and remain so registered.  Where I live the Democratic nomination is usually tantamount to election, and I wanted my vote to mean something.  The first Presidential election in which I voted was in 1972, Richard Nixon was seeking a second term against Democrat George McGovern with the war in Vietnam still raging.  As a student at Columbia I was safe from the draft with a 2S deferment, in what turned out to be the last age cohort where 2S (undergraduate student) deferments were given, and I dutifully completed the paperwork to renew the deferment each year.  I voted for Nixon, the Republican, feeling that his Democratic challenger would sell small allies like Israel down the river, and that his domestic ideas were too far left to work.  Answering a pollster at Columbia that I voted for Richard Nixon took some political courage, but that was okay.

 

   The primary season leading up to last summer’s nominating conventions and last November’s general election was a disaster.  The Republican side went pretty much as I expected, the Republicans having been the “party of stupid” for quite a while.  Anybody they nominate could be counted on to be a science denier and/or Christian fundamentalist.  A Republican presidency is inevitably bad news for science (especially biology) teachers, as well as knowledgeable citizens concerned about climate change and members of religious minorities staunchly defending separation of church and state.  This time, however, a businessman with no experience in elective office threw his hat into the ring and proceeded to double down on what has become typical Republican buffoonery.  His name?  Donald Trump. From the beginning he made no secret of his racism and xenophobia.  His utterances about Mexicans and disabled people in particular were what few citizens in this day and age, and certainly no candidate for our highest office, would dare to say in polite company.  This wouldn’t bother me, I being quite politically incorrect myself, if his statements were true, but that was far from the case.  He repeated age-old canards and it was clear that he believed them to be true.  People hearing him were mostly confident that he would have no chance at the nomination, but they failed to reckon with Americans’ (myself included) frustration with a long running war seemingly going nowhere, with terrorist attacks occurring with disturbing frequency, with increasing racial tensions and police violence, and so forth.  Americans, except for those in the liberal bastions in the Northeast and California, were fed up and wanted change.  They got more than they bargained for.

 

   As for the Democrats, they have quite a few men who would have made good Presidents, but they were all afraid to challenge Hillary Clinton, as if she was already a sitting President from their own party.  The only man to run against her was Bernie Sanders, a Jew who grew up in Brooklyn, but an avowed socialist not to be trusted.  He gave Ms. Clinton a better fight than most of us expected, but in the end he lost the nomination to the former President’s wife.  She was widely regarded in middle America as the ultimate insider, too invested in the status quo to make the changes they deemed necessary.  Her victory would be tantamount to a third term for Obama, of whom we were not enamored.  This image was not helped by a scandal involving emails from her tenure as President Obama’s Secretary of State having been stored on her private server where they were vulnerable to hacking.  I, male chauvinist that I am, was not about to support any woman in time of war short of Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher.  So now the major parties served up two lousy candidates and we were expected to choose the lesser evil.  Had I lived in a “battleground state” that could go either way, I would have swallowed hard, held my nose and voted for Trump, who at least advocated a tougher posture toward our foreign enemies.  But I live in New York, and it was a foregone conclusion that New York would be carried by Hillary Clinton.  I therefore cast a write-in protest vote for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, peace be upon them.

 

   Then the impossible happened.  Shades of Dewey vs Truman in 1948.  All the polls predicted a victory for Clinton, who narrowly won the popular vote. However, due to the peculiar method prescribed by the Constitution for electing the President, Trump narrowly won enough states to give him a comfortable majority in the Electoral College.  Therefore, despite some childish political maneuvering aimed at getting enough electors to betray their trust and deny Trump the election, Trump was elected and duly sworn in on January 20.  It has been a frenetic month and, for me, a sad one.  True to his campaign pledges, he appears to be doing an about face in our Middle East policy.  His appointees for secretary of state and ambassador to Israel are friendly to Israel and see it as America’s only strong and reliable ally in a very rough neighborhood.  He is likely to pay lip service to the “two-state solution,” actually a three-state solution since the “Palestinians” already have a state called Jordan that sits on 80% of Mandatory Palestine and has a “Palestinian” majority.  But indications are that he will stand down as Israel’s popular right-wing government creates facts on the ground that will make large land giveaways in Judea and Samaria impossible.  He has a much warmer personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu than President Obama ever did.  But that is where the optimism and satisfaction end.

 

   The rest of his acts in office betray his utter lack of experience in government.  He promised in his campaign that he would “make America safe again.”  With crime at an all-time low, one can only assume he meant safe from terrorists.  He wasted no time imposing, by executive order, a 90-day moratorium on immigration and acceptance of refugees from Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen.  These are all countries that are known either to be state sponsors of terrorism or to export terrorists abroad, or not to have functioning governments that can provide information on prospective immigrants and refugees.  The moratorium was supposed to give the government time to map out the “extreme vetting” that the new President wants put in place to keep out evildoers while letting in legitimate immigrants and refugees.  There is no question in my mind that the President meant well but, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  The President and his advisors used a meat-axe when a scalpel would have been more appropriate.  His order included holders of “green cards” authorizing permanent residence in the country, as well as holders of valid visas.  It resulted in chaos at always-busy airports like JFK in New York and LAX in Los Angeles.  Volunteer lawyers and others hastily made their way to the airports to assist those people who now found themselves in limbo.  Later on, watchdog groups obtained court orders putting the Presidents order on hold; Trump plans to appeal and to pursue other avenues, like using the proverbial scalpel to carve out another order more likely to pass muster.  We know there will be terrorists embedded with the refugees; ISIS says as much.  We also let in, a century ago, tens of thousands of Italian immigrants knowing that we were also importing the Sicilian Mafia.  The difference is that Mafiosi usually kill one another, one at a time, for motives that are entirely economic.  The Muslim terrorists that we’re fighting go in for mass casualty attacks and their aim is to bring down the American government and impose their own tyrannical brand of Islam on all of us; not even the Muslim immigrants that were here for years pursuing the American dream have any use for them.  We have to vet these people in their home countries before they get here.  If they’re coming with families or if they are single older men they are probably legit.  Single men of fighting age are more likely to be terrorists and should be turned away.  Those likely to face religious persecution up to and including murder (i.e. Christians and Yazidis) are most unlikely to be terrorists.  Some would-be immigrants and refugees might have to be quarantined on Ellis Island or elsewhere pending further investigation, as was done at the turn of the 20^th century.  Those that are let in should be let in slowly, so that the communities in which they settle will have time to absorb them and they will have time to adjust to our culture. 

 

   The media in describing the President’s order and the way it was going to be carried out before the courts intervened were most unhelpful.  They kept writing and speaking about a “Muslim ban,” when it was neither Muslim nor a ban (Remember the Holy Roman Empire which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire?).  The President wanted a temporary breathing space so he could figure out how to admit legitimate immigrants and refugees while keeping us safe from terrorists; by calling it a ban the media implied that it was permanent.  In reality the President sought an indefinite ban only in the case of Syria.  The media also characterized the affected countries as “Muslim majority countries,” as though that was the President’s reason for imposing a moratorium.  The media weren’t lying, but were not telling us the whole truth either.  There are over 20 Muslim-majority countries on earth; the moratorium covered only seven.  Turkey and Indonesia, for example, are overwhelmingly Muslim but they were not included in the 90-day freeze.  Why?  They do not sponsor terrorism or export terrorists, and they have stable governments with which we can do business.  The media will not allow for the possibility that the President might be telling the truth and should be given a chance, having been chosen by the American people in a democratic election.  Who elected the pundits that are pooh-poohing him at every turn?

 

   The new President is giving us cause for concern in other areas too.  Like Reagan before him, his approach to filling his cabinet is to have a lot of foxes guarding a lot of henhouses.  His attorney general gives the impression that he intends to ride roughshod over the Constitution, his chief strategist keeps company with white supremacists, his Secretary of Education wants to divert resources from public schools to private, including charter, schools.  His chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency wants to gut the law authorizing that very agency, his Secretary of Energy wants to double down on coal and oil production, environment be damned, and so forth and so on.  To top it all off, President Trump is a raving science denier.  In what has become typical Republican pig-headedness, he insists that climate change is a hoax and to hell with all the evidence.  He cannot be expected to advocate in international circles for policies that might keep the planet capable of supporting billions of human beings, policies that must be global to be effective.

 

   Last but not least, when the next anti-evolution bill is passed and is challenged in court, we scientists and science educators will not be able to rely on the White House, the Department of Education or the Department of Justice to have our backs.  As a community and as individual teachers we will have to grow “stones” and take risks to be faithful to our obligations as professionals.  I wrote to a Facebook friend at the beginning of the Trump administration that the President’s first 100 days will be a time of watchful waiting.  Developments since then make me change that to “dark foreboding.”  I hope I am wrong, but hope alone will not suffice. 

 

   Since both parties have gone to the extremes and show no signs of slowing down, let alone going back, we are in desperate need of a third party.  This party will be unabashedly pragmatic and centrist, faithful to the Constitution and to the traditions that have made this country great.  It will provide a home to Rockefeller-Javits Republicans as well as Kennedy-Johnson Democrats, neither of whom are welcome in their own parties.  Since it will pitch a big tent, there will be vigorous debate but that debate will be civil, free from the name-calling and ad hominem attacks that have characterized American political discourse of late. The role of third parties in American politics traditionally was to be a gadfly, putting the major parties back on track when they got derailed, as is the case now.  If it succeeds, well and good.  If not, it should displace one of the major parties, preferably the Republicans.  Otherwise I see little hope for the world my grandchildren will grow up in, and we will have betrayed our obligation to leave our children a world in better shape than it was before we came on the scene.

 

 



Misery Loves Company

   In Hebrew, there is a saying: Tzarat rabim hatzi nehama, literally “The suffering of many is half a comfort.”  A rough English equivalent would be, “Misery loves company.”  I received two reminders that many of the troubles in the Orthodox Jewish community featured on my blog reflect deep rooted problems in the general society. 

   A month and a half ago, the New York Times Magazine published a story about a simmering sex abuse scandal at Horace Mann School in The Bronx, one of the country’s most exclusive and prestigious private schools.  As usual in such cases, once one victim found the courage to come forward, a veritable flood of similar stories surfaced, some recent enough to make criminal prosecution possible.  Before the dust settled, at least one student and one faculty member committed suicide.  One of the culprits was none other than Johannes Somary, a music teacher at the school and a maestro in the grand European tradition on the outside.  I own at least one disc of a classical concert he conducted.  Learning of his crimes was, l’havdil, like learning about Rav Moshe Feinstein advising teachers to tear pages out of biology books (Igrot Moshe Yoreh De’ah 3:73).  He was allowed to continue teaching at the school until he retired at the age of 67.  He subsequently died of natural causes, never having had to answer to the law.

                                                              Horace Mann School

   An even more publicized scandal took place at Penn State University, home of the Nittany Lions football team and their legendary coach Joe Paterno.   A low-level employee of the football program observed inappropriate conduct between an assistant coach and a ten-year-old boy and, at the risk of his job, came forward.  Things moved rather quickly.  After some initial stonewalling, the assistant coach was fired, and then convicted of multiple crimes involving children.  Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer soon after the story broke, had his name tarnished forever for his lack of leadership. 

   What do we learn from this?  First, not to be incredulous that such things can happen, in the best schools with the best and brightest teachers, coaches and students.  The yetzer hara [evil impulse] doesn’t discriminate, and pedophiles gravitate to occupations where they have access to victims.  One obvious such occupation is teaching, and good teachers suffer from the actions of the perverts in whose shadow they work.  No more being alone in a room with a student (of either sex) for after-school tutoring.  Second, for all that hazal did not know much about modern science, they were more insightful into human nature than most of us are.  They did not pretend there was no such thing as a yetzer hara, and prescribed modest dress for females, no casual touching of other men’s wives and so forth.  Third, incidents of sexual abuse cannot be handled internally within the institution.  The instinct of an institution, secular or religious, is to circle the wagons and protect the brand.  Only the authorities (police and prosecutors) have the legal authority and the technical know-how to conduct a proper forensic investigation and collect evidence that will stand up in court.  Since time is of the essence, don’t even ask a rabbi for permission (the Aguda got it wrong as usual).  Go to the police, go directly to the police, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

   The second reminder I received concerns the anti-intellectual, and in particular the anti-science mindset that infects the Orthodox community.  The same mindset. less pronounced, infects American society in general and prevents many public school teachers from teaching evolution and climate change as they should be taught.  Newsflash: Evolution is the sun around which all of biology revolves.  There is no controversy about this in the scientific community.  Likewise, there is a broad consensus in the scientific community that climate change is both real and anthropogenic, i.e. we are causing most of it.  But you’d never know it from following much of the popular press, conservative websites such as Townhall and, incredibly, many candidates for President of the United States.  The National Center for Science Education, a group that monitors the teaching of evolution and climate change throughout the country, pointed me in its weekly newsletter to a book, “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America,” by Shawn Lawrence Otto, Rodale Press, 2011.  It is at the same time enlightening and depressing.  The author indicts scientists for taking public money but communicating only among themselves, not bothering to explain to the public what they do and why they do it.  The result is that communicating science is left to science writers who often are not trained scientists themselves.  I might add that too many science teachers majored in education where, from personal experience, I know that they learned next to nothing, and do not hold an undergraduate, let alone an advanced degree, in the subject they teach.  Our children, whose world will be increasingly dominated by science and technology, thus grow up scientifically illiterate and unable to compete with students from other countries.  Then, when scientific theories seemingly contradict their comforting religious belief systems, rational discussion is foreclosed (you can’t argue with God) and we must rely on the courts to keep science in science class and religion out (see also Berkman, Michael and Eric Plutzer; “Evolution, Creationism and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms,” Cambridge University Press, 2010).  Relying on the courts leaves us complacent, but the other side does not take defeat lightly.  They keep introducing bills that they hope will pass muster, and eventually they will attempt to amend the Constitution to enshrine their own backwardness.   This cannot end well unless trained scientists engage the public and get involved in politics at all levels.  And it shows us Orthodox Jews that no matter how hard we try to wall ourselves off, we are part of the general society and we fail to engage with it at our peril.

Snowbound - Don't mess with Mother Nature

On Sunday night, December 26, a monster snowstorm barreled into New York City. By the time the snow stopped falling about noon Monday, better than two feet of snow was on the ground in some places. High winds continued to cause blowing and drifting until this morning (Tuesday). Shoveling was a Sisyphean task; as soon as one shoveled, fresh or blowing snow obliterated the work. Many homeowners just didn't bother shoveling until late yesterday or today. I was not one of them; I had cleared a path on my stretch of sidewalk Monday morning, and spread calcium chloride on the pavement. My wife could not go to work yesterday because the streets were treacherous when not downright impassable; two broken ankles are enough, thank you very much.



But the point of this post is to show how people made the effects of the storm far worse than they had to be. In Yiddish there is a word "knacker," (both k's pronounced) which has been translated as "big shot," but more often is used sarcastically to describe a person who thinks he's a big shot but he's really a stupid fool. We all knew a day in advance that the storm was coming. The Mayor advised people to keep their cars off the roads. In a storm of this magnitude, most private cars without four wheel drive, and even some with, are likely to get stuck in the snow and block snowplows from removing the snow and making the road minimally navigable. They also block ambulances and fire trucks, with sometimes fatal consequences. Did New Yorkers heed the advice? Too many did not. For instance, my side street had two private cars stuck in the snow, one traveling the wrong way up the one-way street. Knackers. Snowplows couldn't get through; luckily, to the best of my knowledge, nobody needed an ambulance and fire engines did not need to pass. We have a terrific Hatzalah here in Midwood, but even the best Hatzalah people cannot make their ambulances fly over a car that's blocking the street. And even a mild snowstorm presents the danger of unfit people having heart attacks shoveling snow. The drivers of those cars abandoned their vehicles; anyone stranded in a car in this weather is in danger of hypothermia. The cars remained on my street for hours until they could be towed away.

Scenes like this were common; knackers who thought they
were bigger than nature made life miserable for many others.

As if individual wiseguys with total disregard for the common good weren't bad enough, the city was inexcusably caught off guard. Again, we all had advance warning that this storm was on the way. That should have given all concerned ample time to prepare. For individuals this means assuming the worst. Roads will be impassable, stores will not be getting deliveries even if they can open, so stock up on food for several days. Bring everything that can blow around and cause damage indoors (cf. Ex. 9:19 in this week's parsha). Make sure you have sufficient supplies of salt (calcium chloride is more expensive than sodium chloride but it won't harm concrete) and snow shovels. If you are too ill or out of shape to shovel snow, arrange for someone else to do it; here's in opportunity for yeshiva students to earn hesed credit. Then hunker down. Don't be a knacker. Unless you are performing an essential service (police, fire, Hatzalah, etc) do not try to get to work. You will only make a bad situation worse - much worse - for yourself and others. Health care facilities that must be staffed need to make arrangements for skeleton crews to sleep in the facility the night before, so they will be at work when needed. For the City, it means be prepared. The Mayor should have declared a state of emergency and banned private vehicles from the road rather than relying on individuals to be civic-minded and stay home. The threat of hefty fines should deter most of the knackers. Snowplows, salt spreaders and their crews needed to be ready to clear the roads and the subway tracks. Elevated trains cannot run if the snow is deep enough to cover the third rail, and this time it was more than deep enough. One train was stranded for several hours in sight of a station. Without power the heat failed and riders shivered in the cold; luckily nobody became seriously hypothermic. The Brighton line (B and Q) that serves my neighborhood is completely out of service - Astoria to Coney Island - as of this writing! That means that people who might be able to get to work by train were unable to do so and were tempted to drive.

This storm was unusual but hardly unprecedented. People of a certain age remember snowfalls of two feet or more that crippled the city - for a day at most. Preparedness is the key. So is recognizing that nobody is bigger than Mother Nature. Don't be a knacker. If nature says don't drive, don't drive. We just have to live with the fact that we can't always get around in December as if it was May (those who plan weddings in wintertime - hint, hint). And the authorities must rein in the knackers and take the political fallout; that's what we elected them for. And don't hide behind "no money" either. Recession or not, we depend on government to provide essential services. Private cars blocked buses and ambulances, but they did not block trains. Failure to clear the elevated tracks is entirely the fault of the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and our elected officials must be held to account. And oh yes, get yourselves in shape so you can shovel your own snow next year.

Scientists are telling us that heavy snowfalls (we had several last year too, but not as bad) will be more frequent, ironically, due to the planet warming up. Warm air holds more moisture than cold, so when a moisture-laden air mass travels north and cools below the freezing point, it dumps its water as snow. What we had yesterday may well be the shape of things to come. As the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.

Mah Nishtanah? Is Israel another Iran?

The chief scientist of Israel's Ministry of Education, Dr. Gavriel Avital, questioned the validity of the theory of evolution, and the reality of climate change, and seemingly opened the door for Israeli high school students to be taught pseudoscientific nonsense instead of or alongside mainstream science. The story appeared in Ha'aretz and Ynet, and was picked up by the National Center for Science Education, a watchdog group defending the teaching of evolution of which I am a member. The Education Minister, Gideon Saar, said on taking office that he wants to reverse the decline in Israeli students' performance in science and math. But the "chief scientist" that he appointed is not even a scientist but an engineer from the Technion with no background in science education, and it shows. Engineers apply the findings of science to improve our lives; as a rule they are not involved in the creation or dissemination of new knowledge. Practicing physicians, as opposed to physicians engaged in research, are thus engineers more than scientists, and indeed many Orthodox physicians deny evolution, mostly out of ignorance. Dr. Avital would perpetuate that ignorance in Israeli schoolchildren as well.
Here in the United States there was a celebrated "Monkey Trial" in 1925 where a teacher was tried for teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law prohibiting it. It seems that we retry that case every decade or so, the latest iteration occurring in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. Israel does not need to import this dark side of American history. It does not need to throw itself back into the Dark Ages and to make itself a laughingstock throughout the world. It has enough bad press as it is, most of it undeserved, and the intellectual opinion leaders on American campuses are already biased against it. This imbecility will only make a bad situation worse. Why should America support Israel's struggle with the nuclear ambitions of Iran when both states are benighted theocratic cesspools, they will ask. What is the difference?
Thankfully, there is a difference. Israel is a democracy, and as seen in an editorial in Ha'aretz, there already is a grounswell of opposition in the scientific community and the Israeli secular public to Avital's policy. The editorial, in fact, calls for Saar to let him go. I hope he does. Free speech and a free press are the bulwarks of an enlightened society against just this sort of obscurantism.
I wish this whole affair was a premature Purim shpiel, but unfortunately it is not. We don't know how the story will play out, but we can keep following it and make our opinions known. Israel will NOT turn into a theocratic cesspool as long as I have anything to do with it.

Doomsday Canceled

Doomsday they called it. The day the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), bedeviled by a large budget shortfall due to the recession, was set to impose draconian fare raises and service cuts. Back to the 1970s and 80s, when service was spotty, derailments and breakdowns were the order of the day and riders deserted the system - and the city - in droves. Was there no institutional memory at City Hall and Albany? Albany, because NYCTA had long since been made a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA, no relation to the yeshiva), a state agency, in response to a previous budget crisis. The city, especially working stiffs like us, the majority of New Yorkers who do not own cars, was gripped with a sense of impending woe. The fat-cat bureaucrats, who more likely get to work in chauffeured limousines than on the subway, were determined to seal New York's doom for a generation. Against them were arrayed the poor shnooks: the Working Families Party, the Straphangers Campaign, Transportation Alternatives, and similar ragtag advocacy groups. The odds seemed insurmountable, but we triumphed over insurmountable odds before; was it not the month of Iyar? The Internet is free, and emails soon went out to us ordinary folks with phone numbers to call, addresses for email and snail mail, rallies to attend in New York and Albany. My state senator, Carl Kruger, was among the "Fab Six" who were blocking legislation in Albany that would rescue the MTA. The rescue, as nobody tried to hide, would have been at the expense of automobile drivers. Automobiles carrying only their drivers are the least efficient and most environmentally irresponsible way of commuting to work, and making driving a bit more expensive would accomplish a social good transcending the Robin Hood strategy. But - automobile drivers are more likely than subway commuters to have scads of campaign cash. Carl Kruger is a good senator with a strong record of cutting red tape for ordinary Brooklynites. He is also too smart a man not to know on which side his bread is buttered. There are more public transportation riders than automobile commuters in his district, as there are in the City as a whole. And so it was not without some trepidation that I placed a phone call to his office. I got a staffer, and told her that if doomsday happens because Senator Kruger blocked the relief bill, I would hold him accountable at the polls and so would many like me in the district. I also called the office of Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose staffer tried to cut me off by referring me to the state politicians. I reminded her that the federal government has a bottomless pool of bailout money for banks and bankers, and it was time for them to bail out ordinary people. She promised me to relay my views to Mr. Wiener. I don't know if she ever did, but federal assistance proved unnecessary. At the last minute Albany came through. We had exerted enough pressure on the fat cats to make them see that we may not have loads of money but we do vote, and our votes are not for sale. We are aware, we are involved, and we will not take abuse silently. The bailout provides for a reasonable fare increase that will not take effect until June 28. We are by no means out of the woods; the relief is a two-year stopgap and we still need a "Joseph strategy" to save money in good times for bad. But New York has a shot at remaining the greatest city on earth. And we learned again what one of my teachers at Yeshivah of Flatbush taught us: l'olam lo l'hitya'esh. Never give up. If you give up on something you lose it even if it's found. You can fight City Hall. And you can win.

A Good Winter

It is customary among some of us to wish one another "a good winter" on Shmini Atzeret - Simhat Torah. I can't get the words out of my mouth. For me there is no such thing as a good winter. Winter is unmitigatedly bad. As soon as the temperature dips below freezing my mood flies rapidly south. Every time I venture outside I am reminded that I am not where I should be, i.e. somewhere between Beersheva and Eilat where the temperature never gets below freezing. It's like a five-month-long tisha b'Av descends on me every year. I get home from work and I'm too depressed to leave my warm house to go to a shiur or anyplace else. Because my temperature is low and I have little heat-retaining body fat (see my previous post) I must put on an insulated vest even to take out the garbage. I know about seasonal affective disorder (SAD) but that is associated with light, or the lack of it. My problem is temperature. On mild days, and throughout the unusually warm first half of last winter, I'm okay. DSM IV (the mental-disorder guidebook) doesn't recognize a temperature-dependent variant of SAD, so I'm literally left out in the cold. I can't enjoy the flaming colors of autumn because I know what they portend - the leaves will fall and the trees will be covered with snow instead. Snow. It's beautiful when it falls and when it lies on the ground in its pristine state. But within minutes it becomes ugly. Car exhaust turns it grey to match the sky, not to mention what the dogs do. Many frum Jews in my community don't bother shoveling their snow, so it turns to ice and makes walking treacherous. The advent of spring brings little comfort. When temperatures climb into the forties and fifties, I'm hungry for sixty. When they hit the sixties, I'm impatient for 70 and 80. The pall finally lifts when I can break out my summer running outfits and show off my muscles, thanking God for giving me a little bit part in writing "finis" to Jewish weakness, and for making my son a star of the show. Winter wonderland? The Christians can keep it!

But there's hope on the horizon. The knight in shining armor is - global warming! The past decade has seen the warmest winters (and summers) in memory. A lot of ink is being spilled over the horrible future in store for us on a warmer planet. Glaciers will melt. Cold-adapted species will go extinct. Droughts, hurricanes, and so forth and so on. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the doomsayers are from the Elyashiv-Feinstein-Kotler Fantasyland where the earth was created in substantially its present form 5768 years ago and has not changed since. In reality, our planet has always been a changing entity. Continents drift, bump into one another and split apart. Episodes of climate change have always occurred, most of them long before we humans came on the scene. Extinction is also part of earth's story. It is estimated that 90-99% of all species that ever appeared on earth are now extinct. Again, most of them disappeared long before humans became a factor, falling victim to abrupt climate change or meteoritic impact. So call me selfish, but if I don't have to be profoundly depressed all winter long I will not lose sleep over polar bears becoming extinct.

Alas, it's not that simple. The changing climate will have profound and unpredictable effects, both good and bad. We all know the highly touted bad effects: Sea levels are expected to rise, inundating coastal areas (possibly including lower Manhattan) and obliterating some island nations. Severe storms will become more frequent and more severe. Droughts will increase and marginal agricultural land will become unsuitable for cultivation. The earth might become unable to support its current human population, let alone the projected increase. And what good might come of a warmer earth, besides curing my annual struggle with depression? Well, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (the villain of the piece here, trapping heat and keeping it from escaping into space) might mean more photosynthesis, perhaps even another Carboniferous (the vegetation-rich geological period several hundred million years ago). We should be able to turn all that extra vegetation to our advantage, even if the earth's agricultural areas shift to higher latitudes. Right now, only a very few plant and animal species are domesticated and grown for food or fiber, and those are adapted to temperate climates. We might be able to domesticate more and better adapted species, thus expanding our food supply and discovering new drugs. Melting sea ice would mean year-round ice-free ports for northern countries (Russia's fondest dream and casus belli for centuries!) and a permanently navigable Northwest Passage, making international shipping much less expensive. Less ice on the roads translates into fewer automobile accidents, and warm-weather tourism gets a shot in the arm (ski resorts will have to adapt or perish). I think you get the drift by now. It will not be the end of the world, nor will it wipe out our species, but it will profoundly affect human civilization as we know it. God placed stewardship of the earth into our hands (v'khivshuha). We have to start planning for change before change overtakes us. If we don't, nature will certainly solve the problems, but we might not like its solutions.

In the meantime, I have one method of alleviating my frozen blues. Exercise, and running in particular, assuming that the streets are not slick with ice. The first steps out of the house are the most difficult, but once I'm under way I generate enough heat to lift my mood. I have to wear more clothes than most other runners (I get cold just looking at those hardy souls I see in shorts and tank tops on subway platforms traveling to winter races), so my times are not what they are in summer. But then, my race times fell precipitously following two knee surgeries, and my doctors are surprised that I can run at all. And I know that if I maintain my fitness during the winter, then when the holy month of Iyar comes body, mind and spirit will be on the same glorious page and I will be primed for some kickass runs. And that might be the next best thing to a good winter.

Write Us in the Book of Heat

This post devolves from my usual global (or at least Jewishly global) concerns to what might be considered a personal peeve. Our communal buildings literally chase me away, by virtue (vice?) of being overcooled in summer and underheated in winter. I had a particularly miserable Tishrei holiday season where proper tefilla was next to impossible. I had to leave in the middle of services on the first day of Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Shmini Atzeret. Why? The air conditioning was set so high that the temperature hardly ever rose above 70F. No problem for those generously endowed with insulating fat. Big problem for macho athletic types like myself. The cold literally sucked away my body heat to the point where kavana became impossible. Since we are not commanded to suffer on these holidays, except for Yom Kippur and even then hypothermia is not part of the mandated suffering, I picked myself up and left, just as I picked myself up and left my nephew's huppa several years ago when the hall was unbearably cold in mid-July. When I stepped outside into the natural unconditioned summer-like air, I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven. On Rosh Hashana I blew the last 40 shofar sounds for myself at home. Was it necessary to overcool the shul? Doesn't somebody in authority know how to set a thermostat? All the guidebooks tell us to set air conditioning no lower than 78F in order to conserve energy. Adding insult to injury, the shul cries poverty and wastes our time with appeals for money, even as it runs the air conditioner as if electricity was free.

On my way out, I said out loud, "Avinu malkeinu, kotveinu b'sefer hom." Our father, our king, write us in the book of heat. Why the book of heat? A little basic human physiology. Nature and nature's God (to borrow a quote from Thomas Jefferson) endowed the human species with a highly efficient sweating mechanism to rid ourselves of excess heat. This mechanism served us very well running down our dinner on the African savanna, and continued to serve us in physically demanding occupations until one or two generations ago, when manual labor was virtually abolished in our society. Nature gave us virtually nothing to deal with cold. We are not polar bears with a thick coat of fur. Nor are we whales with a thick layer of insulating blubber. All we have to handle cold is clothing and artificial heating, another example of cultural evolution outpacing biological in our species. Add the fact that my body temperature hovers at 96.5F, two degrees lower than it should be, and yours truly has very little wiggle room at the low end. When others are merely uncomfortable (and unnecessarily so), I am unbearably cold. If I could simply disinvent one of our technological marvels, after the atom bomb it would be the air conditioner. I was fired from a ba'al koreh job because I could not stay in the over-air-conditioned building. In the winter I have to wear more clothing than most people in order to function in a shul that is kept at about 68F to conserve fuel.

What with the climate changing, we can expect warm weather to last farther into autumn, just as happened this year. That is good news for thermophiles like myself. I will actually be able to eat more of my meals in the sukka, whereas in years past I often had to retreat indoors because of the cold - mitzta'er patur. However, it also means I will be spending less time in shul - unless. . . . I am old enough to remember a time when air conditioning was a luxury only the wealthy could afford, and few of us were wealthy. We made do with open windows and fans. Remember fans? Those gizmos that blow air around and enhance evaporation of (shhh, dirty five-letter word) sweat? We took off our jackets (or came to shul without them) and exposed more skin surface so sweat can evaporate. We drank a lot, and I don't mean alcohol. Today I cannot find a shul in Brooklyn that is not air conditioned. Can you? I would really like to enjoy being in shul again.