Let’s Talk About Being Jewish
The Tin Drum Diaries, part 4
I did a one day Zoom writing happy hour/class thing last week, and I like what I wrote, so I’m going to put it here. I can tie it in with The Tin Drum flimsily, and I can tie it in with the my mother of it all less flimsily.
The class was led by Moriel Rothman-Zecher, the author of Sadness Is a White Bird. True story: one time I was at Powells in Portland with a gift card, and for my last book purchase, I walked through the fiction room and picked up books with interesting covers, then sat down and read the first couple pages and picked one, and this was one of them. That’s a big part of why I signed up for this class.
So he talked about how Hassids say there are two notes we should all carry with us in our pocket at all times: one says “For my sake, the world was created,” and the other says “I am but dust and ashes.” (I know, right? It blew my mind too. As you’ll see.) He related this idea to the practice of writing: how dare we be so audacious as to think that we have something important to say that hasn’t been said before? Or even to say something that has been said before again in such a magnificent way that we absolutely must write it down and put it out into the universe?
So those were our prompts: First, write about “For my sake, the world was born”; second, write about “I am but dust and ashes”; and third, write a conversation between those two prompts. So here’s what I wrote.
Prompt #1: For my sake, the world was born.
For my sake, the world was created. But my computer doesn’t fucking work, so not really. I tried to just open a Word Document and it took about four of the ten minutes we had allotted for this, and now that I have it open and am writing it stops about half the time because I have Zoom open and I got this computer in 2010 and it can’t do a whole lot. It’s appropriate, I suppose; this is a Hassidic saying, I believe he said, and I’m a non-observant Jew, so this is what I get when I try to speak to a Hassidic saying: fuck you, mortal, your computer’s not even going to work. I want to say something about the Cosmic Joke, about the joke being on me, about that being appropriate too, as a Jew, that it’s like I’m my own little protagonist of a Jewish folktale over here, silently screaming at my computer as I try to write for once. I’m also writing in the dark, I just realized, and getting up and walking to the other side of the room to turn on the light seems… also appropriate to all of this.
Prompt #2: I am but dust and ashes
Okay. I am but dust and ashes. I mean, yeah. I feel that all the time. These are what Hassids say we should have in our pockets at all time? This one makes sense to me, as a Jew and as a person; the other one, I guess coupled with it, feels less like a Jewish note to carry around. For my sake, the world was created; and I am but dust and ashes. Jesus. Who knew? I would think the notes would be more like, You can laugh at yourself, and God can laugh at you (and totally does), but you CANNOT laugh at God. This is maybe the most religious thing I’ve ever written. These two notes together in your pocket… I can’t get over it. It IS so Jewish, in a way, because it’s so frustrating. It’s like, instead of those two notes, you could have one note that just says, “Joke’s on you.” You’re born, and the first thing that happens is everyone in the room, the doctor and nurses and the doula and your parents and extended family, all just laugh at you. Welcome to the world.
Prompt #3: a conversation between the first two prompts
Now a conversation between the two… jumped the gun on that one maybe.
Maybe the sign that I am truly and really a Jew is that I’m inclined to say, the conversation between “For my sake, the world was created” and “I am but dust and ashes” is just life. There it the fuck is. Wherever you go, there you are. It takes all kinds. What are you gonna do.
Are you ready for me to tie this to The Tin Drum? Oskar has an interesting relationship with religion. The first time he sees a baby Jesus, he’s aroused (I didn’t write the book, take it up with Gunter Grass); later, he pretends to be Jesus, and some time after that, he pretends to be Satan. He also plays around a bit with the Jesus-as-me theme, giving a Jesus statue his drum to drum on; he plays around, I suppose is my point, where religion is concerned.
It all ties in with my mother, also; we’re kind of silly about Judaism (our game is which one of us can call the other to wish them a happy Jewish holiday before the other one, when such holidays arise; I win most of the time).
Perhaps we’ll cover it in an upcoming entry, where, I would like to hype, I will interview my mother! She got herself a non-falling-apart copy of TTD, and is currently reading it. Sneak peek of some of the can’t-miss hot takes from that interview: my mother has told me that she’s remembering now that some of the book is a little slow and hard to get through. Woo-hoo! Watch this space!
