From Cambridge to Munkatch

I'm back with a minor story to relate, which actually began about 5 years ago. Otherwise, I've been kept busy by unimportant ad-hoc assignment at work, which I attempt to complete with cheerful aplomb. The mortgage must be paid you see, so too yeshiva tuitions and Saturday night restaurants dinners for the wife (so that she continues to like me), which also means a $12/hour babysiiter.

Robert to Avram Part I

I used to work for an energy trading concern in Midtown Manhattan, a sort of mini Enron. Like many other companies like it, it closed after the collapse of Enron. Many interesting, well educated and talented young people worked there, most holding advanced degrees from Princeton, Harvard and MIT. One of my buddies there, I’ll call him Robert, held degrees in physics, mathematics and philosophy from MIT, and was one of the designers of the system of wholesale electric power trading in the US and elsewhere. Robert was a brilliant little guy with lively inscrutable little eyes hiding behind thick glasses and a mouth naturally shaped into an impish Mona Lisa smile.

When I first met him, and after years of wrestling with the issue, he had finally decide that he did believe in god, and had entered the next stage: the process of accepting that the one true revelation is the one received by Moshe at Sinai.

'Why?' I asked him.

'Because I believe!' He answered happily.

Now known as Avram, he moved to the Upper West Side (for a ‘true’ Jewish experience), hosted shabbes dinners at his house, and invited attractive twenty- and thirty-something potential baal tshuva candidates to share his revelation. He invited to once: during dinner an Aish haTorah rabbi (a former reporter and himself a Harvard grad) rose to speak. The assembled 'attractives' listened raptly, and nodded enthusiastically. Their souls were introduced to prophecies revealed through hidden codes, to the notion (the fact, he said) that 2.5 million people at Sinai can’t lie and couldn’t be wrong and more ‘facts’ I can’t remember. Also, I tried to raise several points, but after two (surely brilliant) questions, the Rabbi was on to me and ignored my raised hand. He wasn't interested me. I was rejected for the new revelation. He wanted fresh meat, tabula rasa, naive and wide eyes with no base of knowledge. New 'naaseh venishma' troops. He had no need for an ex-yeshiva boy cynic, and so he brutally cut me out. I was left to nibble on one of those spicy Israeli pickles.

But Avram remained hungry. He became dissatisfied with what he thought of as uninspiring, dry moderdoxy and was getting bored by Aish haTorah.

To be continued...

On this day in the life of the Jews...The first Auto de Fe in 1481; The Spanish Inquisition established by Sixtus IV, but it didn't begin in full force until 30 months later, when six men and women were burned publicly in Seville for 'Judaising'. This was the first of about 2,000 such burnings across the Iberian peninsula, the last of which occurred in 1826. In total, 31,912 were burned in person (alive or dead) while another 17,659 were burned in effigy. And in our own day, Jew hate in Spain especially, has been redirected into vicious Israel hate. For as anyone with seychel realizes, Israel is the embodiment of the 'The Jew', since it's not vogue -- not yet -- to be an overt anti semite. Not yet