In Bruges

The prophets probably didn't know about the afterlife, and even if they did they certainly didn't tell anyone. There's no mention of heaven or hell in the Old Testament. Salvation, judgment, redemption were collective and in this life.
Here and now.

By the time Jesus came along the idea of "there and then" had evolved. He wasn't challenged when He spoke of life after death. (Except for the Sadducees who were old farts that nobody cared about anyway.)

Talmudic Judaism and the early Church developed the idea of the next world; the resurrection, Judgment Day, heaven, hell. Of course this presented a new problem. If there is a day of judgment then, and people are living and dying now, then where are the souls in the meantime? Lets say that Joe died in the year 1000 AD and Judgment Day is only in the year 2000 AD. (Theoretically of course, because who could have imagined that God would tarry so long.) What happens to Joe for a thousand years?

The Jews, or at least the more mystically inclined, decided that Joe is here. After he died he got a second chance and a third and so on. He got reincarnated to make a "tikkun", to fix things he'd screwed up in his former life. His soul would "roll over" (the term for reincarnation in Hebrew) again and again until he got it right. The soul, so they said, is definitely here and now.

The Christians, more specifically the Catholic ones, invented something new. When Joe died his soul went to a place called Purgatory where he worked off any unsettled accounts with God until Judgment Day. According to the Catholics, after the body dies the soul is there and then.

It is this nagging question about the time and place between the debts we accrue in life and payday that is at the heart of the film "In Bruges". Two Irish gangsters are sent to Bruges, Belgium after botching a hit in London. They are told to wait there for instructions, but at least to Ken, the older of the two, its clear that there will be a reckoning.

Bruges is a well preserved Medieval European town, "something out of a fairytale" one of the thugs calls it. Ken is more aware than his mate of their predicament and in no hurry, but young Ray chafes in exile. He is tortured by guilt and oblivious to the charm of Bruges. He wants to move on, not knowing that here and now is all he has left.

Bruges, a place in between, after life but before judgment.

The great sage Maimonadies understood something that eluded others, both Jewish and Catholic. Time and place are created. God doesn't exist in time or place, and when we leave this life our souls are no longer bound by either. We don't have time to kill until "then"; we don't roll back over and over again "here".

"In Bruges" is a black comedy with an irony that makes sense in a daft mad Irish state of mind. The setting and hints like the painting "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymous Bosch (Note how grotesque characters like in the painting appear throughout the film.) point to something deeper. If there is such a thing as purgatory, its here and now. Ray wallows in guilt, but does nothing about it. Ken finds a way to redeem himself.

Bruges – a fairytale land or a tortured conscience in exile. Bruges, untouched by time, is where we are, where we will be. Heaven and hell don't begin when this life ends. For the soul there is no boundary between "here and now" and "there and then".

So maybe the Old Testament prophets were right after all. The next life starts now.

Ray: "Prison...death...didn't matter. Because at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn't be in ****in' Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, **** man, maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in ****in' Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die. I really really hoped I wouldn't die."

From "In Bruges"

ONCE: Falling Slowly

Funny Words

to Xiu

I went to college late in life. They call it "Adult Learning" in the States nowadays. They called it strange back then, over here. We're catching up with our American cousins like everything else and there are more people my age advancing their educations at advanced ages.

I was different than my fellow students not only because I was older than most of them, but also in that I didn't have any particular reason for being there. I studied things that had no connection whatsoever to how I made my living and with no intention of using it in the future. Like a seamstress buying a welder.

Now I see that the "reason" was how I saw myself. I didn't feel as good as those guys that had done the smart thing and finished college before setting out in life. They never rubbed my nose in it and I suspected that I was every bit as intelligent as they are, but nevertheless that's how I felt.

Now days they have funny words for the reasons I had for going back to school – "self validation" and "peer recognition", but there are old fashioned words for it too. Vanity. Ego. I would knock myself out cramming my brain with stuff I didn't care about in order to impress profs that didn't care about me. After exams they'd post our scores on a board outside the administration office, and like everyone else I would search for the numbers beside my ID number to get the verdict. It was never enough for me to have done well – if it wasn't the best I walked away disappointed. Even then I knew how pathetic it was, how vain, but I couldn't help myself. And the worst part was that I didn't dare tell anyone because everyone hates the smart kid.

Donald Miller talks about the ol' lifeboat dilemma in his book "Looking For God Knows What". Imagine this lifeboat and there's a young mother and her baby, an aged WWII war hero, an escaped convict, a scientist who can find a cure for cancer – and you. Only 5 people can stay in the lifeboat, six is too many and the boat will go down with all aboard. Who do you kick out?

Nobody wants to chuck out the baby, and by default that means the mother is safe. If you keep the scientist there's the bonus of saving millions of cancer patients. It's not right to kick out the war hero (Even though some people do because he's old and besides those hero types jump out to save the others anyway.) That leaves you and the convict. Some people want to keep the convict in the boat because they want to give him a chance to redeem himself (a very noble notion). But that's what it comes down to; most of us are trying to prove that we're more worthy than the criminal and deep down we know that we're not because deep down we all know that we're all sinners.

Miller says that this lifeboat mentality is the root of all the rottenness and sickness in society. We are all competing for a place in the lifeboat, scared to death that our peers will find out what we already know – that we don't deserve a seat with mothers and scientists and heroes. We need self validation and recognition like lifesavers to save ourselves. Vanity is fear.

The funny thing is that it turns out that there's room for everyone in God's lifeboat. – even for the ones that don't deserve it. And if you realize that, there's no need to compete, no reason to validate or be recognized. You can go to college, and even excel, if you want – or not. It doesn't matter because you have a reserved seat in the lifeboat.

I kept my marks a secret all through college. Outstanding students, or rather ordinary students with outstanding GPAs, get diplomas with some funny Latin words added on. "Summa cum something". They get called up first at the graduation ceremony, and since my last name came first alphabetically, I was the first in my class called up to receive my diploma. My cover was blown. My friends were aghast. I felt a little sheepish.

I don't know Latin. I bet those funny words on my diploma mean something like "really vain" or "huge ego". I hope I got more from college than a piece of paper with funny Latin words on it. I hope I learned something.

Because now I'm at a crossroads, and it looks like I'm going to do it again, if unwillingly. I hope that if I do it again I will do it different. Maybe if I put my mind to it I will even be able to fail once or twice.

A Cross between Oregon and Israel

Until last week, I had only ventured beyond Israel's borders to visit my family in Oregon. Last week we took a trip to Croatia.

Croatia is like a cross between Israel and Oregon. Mountains plunge into the Adriatic Sea on rocky cliffs under evergreen forests like Oregon's highway 101 on the coast, but the olive groves and whitewashed houses with red tile roofs stacked around small fishing harbors are Mediterranean.

Inland the deciduous trees were in autumn colors, but the paths and streams underneath were still sunless and damp like Oregon's rainforests. My photos of the countryside could have been taken from an album of the farm country where I was raised.

But unlike secularized Oregon, Croatia is more like Israel. Religion is everywhere. Croatians are devout Roman Catholics and certainly not ashamed of it. They adorn their streets and women with crucifixes; no village is without its church and it seems like every corner, whether uninhabited islands in the sea or isolated mountaintop, is the site of an ancient monastery.

The Croatians we encountered were rather reserved, like Oregonians. In fact, in general, they were kind of grouchy. Of course, we did meet some nice ones, but most of them work in the tourist industry, and as Yael pointed out, it's their business to be friendly. But if Croatians aren't gregarious, we were impressed by their order and honesty (Not qualities Israelis are known for.)

Croatians and Israelis have one thing in common: they are not strangers to war. We met a man in Dubrovnik that immediately took to us once he discovered we are Israelis. It turns out that he is the descendant of Jews that were forced to convert to Christianity in Spain. Somehow his ancestors had made their way to Dalmatia. We asked him about his family. He smiled and said that, like us, he had two girls and a son. Then his eyes saddened and he added that the boy had been killed in the bombardment of the city during the civil war in former Yugoslavia during the 90's.

Croatians like tourists. The nice thing about tourists is that they always go back where they came from and they always leave behind money. Apparently, Croatians have issues with people that aren't tourists and aren't Croatian. During the Holocaust, even the Nazis were shocked by the brutality which their Croatian collaborators carried out the elimination of Jews, Gypsies and Serbs. (Although they no doubt agreed with the objective.) A Jew had better odds of survival in Nazi Germany than in Croatia.

While Israel receives a lot of attention for its treatment of Palestinians, the western world seems to have overlooked what has and is going on in its backyard. In the 1990's ethnic Serbs in Croatia were 'persuaded' to become tourists. On the road to Plitzvice National Park you pass by one abandoned farmstead after another, each one mute evidence of ethnic cleansing. The irony of it is that Croatians are too xenophobic to let the Serbian owners return home, but too stuck on law and order to let squatters take their property. Being as clannish as Jews and as straight-laced as Oregonians can be a weird combination. (In contrast, while much of the criticism of Israel for discrimination is justified, the fact remains that Arabs make up 20% of her citizens, an active and vocal minority in Israel society.)

Until now, we had never gone abroad as a family except to visit my family in Oregon. I rented a camper and we traveled from place to place in Dalmatia, never knowing where we would end up at the end of the day. Being observant, we brought and prepared our own food in a country famous for its cuisine. The idea wasn't to just to get away and relax. We had fun, but the idea was to present ourselves with a challenge far from home in order to bring us closer together as a family. With Maayan being an adult and Netanel only two years away from his army service, this was perhaps the last opportunity to do that.

.

My family is like Croatia in a way. We are a cross between Israel and Oregon, a little bit of both. Oregonians are known to be an easy going and orderly people, but I have more than once noted that they are capable of saying and doing the meanest things in the nicest way. Israelis are outgoing and they mean well, but they are often abrasive and rough around the edges.

We have a little of Israel and Oregon in us, but that can mean any number of things. Its up to us to decide what we want to take from each.

I know its wrong to make generalizations about entire nations, but its only natural. I met a woman at Plitzvice that is from Wisconsin but has lived in Croatia for a few years. I remarked that the Croatians seem very honest, but they aren't very friendly, and that Israelis are outgoing, but they aren't always straight.

"Don't you prefer the first over the last; you know, being honest more than being nice?" she asked me.

I thought about it.
"Actually, I prefer both."

Crazy Croatia

(Note: in Hebrew, "zona" = prostitute)