D’var Torah: Pinchas….Of Superheroes and Defining Moments

What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want to live your life?

Before we get to those questions, let me tell you how one man, Pinchas, lived his life. When we meet Pinchas at the end of last week’s Torah portion, he had just saved the Israelites from their own worst enemy – themselves. The Israelites are once again ignoring the lessons of the past and engaging in idol worship and illicit affairs with foreign-born women. God is obviously displeased with this latest example of human transgression, so he sends down a clear and direct message in the form of a plague. Pinchas takes it upon himself to make things right. In one fell swoop, he uses his spear to kill an Israelite man and Midianite woman who were having an illicit relationship. We learn their names in this week’s Torah portion: Zimri and Cozbi. One strike of Pinchas’s spear and they’re both dead. Immediately after Pinchas slays the couple, God lifts the plague.   

It would be easy to think of Pinchas as the Torah’s first superhero. The Amazing Pinchas: mild-manner priest acts without divine intervention, comes out of the crowd and slays a lawbreaking couple in a single bound. There would be merit to this analogy. Mythology focuses on the superhuman. Humans and demigods with extraordinary abilities appear in many cultures, ancient or modern. Look at Gilgamesh. Or Spider-Man. These figures have a real purpose, and that’s to show us that if they can do the impossible, so can we. But there’s a deeper layer to the superhero story. What’s the difference between a superhero and the rest of us? What is it that makes us soar above the crowd if we have to? Is it something within us – something in our character that some of us have and others do not? Or do external events inspire us to rise to the challenge?

“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing….What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

That’s Winston Churchill talking about the point when life hands us our defining moment. We don’t know when it’ll happen, or under what circumstances, but it happens to all of us. The first thing is to recognize it. That doesn’t always happen.  The second critical element is to act on it. Pinchas, grandson of Aaron, recognizes his defining moment. He sees a crisis, assesses it, and decides in an instant that he’ll do what he can to restore God’s law to the Israelites. He acts at an important time for the Israelites. When Pinchas makes his move, freedom is close at hand for the Israelites. They’re in Canaan, just east of the Jordan River. The Promised Land is within sight. But the Israelites are still ill-equipped to handle the challenge of freedom. They forsake the Torah and worship idols, just as they did in the Golden Calf episode. Pinchas behaves better than his grandfather, Aaron, did. When he’s tapped on the shoulder, he acts.

Elsewhere in the same Torah portion there are other defining moments. The five daughters of Zelophehad – Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah (their names always appear together) – they see their defining moment and muster up the courage to act on it. They approach Moses, the chief priest, the leaders and the entire congregation and ask for something unheard of, something unprecedented. They ask for their father’s land inheritance since there are no male heirs. They ask boldly. They don’t beg. “Give us a holding,” they say. Their action initiates a change in Torah law. This is one of just three instances in the Torah where we witness the process by which Torah law is changed. It’s the only one set into motion by women.

Later in the Torah portion God instructs Moses to ascend the heights of Mount Abarim and view the land that he, Moses, will never inhabit. This, I believe, is Moses’ defining moment. Some might say Moses had other defining moments, like the exodus from Egypt, where he had the collective energy and forward momentum of the Israelites right behind him. Or the moment when he received the Ten Commandments, and then smashed them, because he knew the Israelites were not worthy of this gift from the Almighty.

It’s easier to be courageous and act with fortitude when you’re in battle mode, but much harder when the war is almost done, when your strength has worn down. Think of a marathon runner. During those last miles, you find yourself pulling out strength from reserves you never knew you had. Crossing the finish line becomes sheer agony. In this Torah portion, Moses is near the end of his marathon. He knows his days are numbered. He knows that although he fought the war, he’ll never celebrate the victory. Yet he climbs Mt. Abarim and looks at the Promised Land. He appoints Joshua to succeed him. Before the entire community he does what God commanded him to do – he lays his hands upon Joshua and makes possible a future that he will never experience, a new world of freedom that he will never explore. There’s a quiet elegance in Moses’ actions. Old, with the full knowledge that his dream has been dashed because he disobeyed God, he acts selflessly and bravely and fulfills God’s will. That is his defining moment.    

The truth is that most of us are not Pinchas. Most of us are like the Israelites, moving imperfectly, and sometimes gracefully, as we make our way through a world of unknowns, a world where turmoil ends up in our laps. We’re not Moses. We’re the huddled masses who entered New York at Ellis Island, people working hard to make our way in a land where those around us don’t understand the language we speak — or don’t bother listening to the words we say. Finding the courage to move forward or stand still, the courage to make a life or let the world control you — these are the types of choices at the heart of the defining moment.

Some of us are middle-aged men and women caring for our aging parents, giving their lives happiness and purpose when we know full well how the story will likely end. That is a defining moment. We cope with sickness – our own or our loved ones’— and with the reality that not all endings are happy endings. That’s a defining moment. We stand behind our friends in their time of need, even when most people walk away – in fact, especially when most people walk away. We pull each other up from despair. Loyalty and compassion inspire many a defining moment.

What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want to live your life? I asked these questions at the beginning of this d’var Torah.

Defining moments have the potential to make super-humans out of all of us. We’re not as impulsive as Pinchas, perhaps, and most of us have no desire to shoulder the kind of burden that Moses did. What we do want to be is the kind of person who moves ahead with courage, honesty and conviction — no matter what. We want to live our lives with decency and kindness, the way God intended us to, and with passion, empathy and intelligence.

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his famous “Citizen in a Republic” speech in Paris where he described what success really is:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”   

It’s often the ordinary, day-to-day struggles, not the extraordinary events and crises, which create our defining moments. Like Pinchas and Moses, let us not shy away from our struggles but embrace them. Let us learn from them. Let us all have the ability to recognize our defining moments for their potential value, which is to make us better people than we ever thought we could be.

Amen, and Shabbat Shalom.

D’var Torah: Balak…..What We Can Learn From a Talking Horse

This week’s Torah portion could be entitled “The Jackass and the Donkey.”

The jackass is Balaam, the seer who’s hired by Balak to curse the Israelites. He takes his donkey and embarks on his mission. It’s a mission that God doesn’t think too highly of, for obvious reasons, so God places an angel right in Balaam’s path. But there’s a catch — only the donkey can see the angel. One thing leads to another and the poor donkey gets whacked not once, but three times, by Balaam when the angel blocks his path. If you didn’t like Balaam before, now you have even more reason to dislike him. He’s a false prophet and an animal beater.

Then something amazing happens. The donkey starts talking to Balaam, wanting to know, reasonably, why he was getting beaten up. Balaam doesn’t find anything unusual about his donkey talking to him, which says something about Balaam right there. He accuses the donkey of mocking him and tells the donkey he would’ve stabbed him with a sword if he’d had one. Even then Balaam doesn’t realize how dumb he sounds. He was ready to curse the Israelites off the face of the earth but he would need a sword to kill a poor donkey. Finally God opens Balaam’s eyes to the presence of the angel. Balaam sees that his ass was the true seer and that he, the false seer, was the true ass.

More than a few commentators have compared the talking donkey to another cultural icon – Mr. Ed, the talking horse from the 1960s TV show. Like Balaam’s donkey, Mr. Ed could only be heard by one person, Wilbur Post. Wilbur was a nice but bumbling guy who was always getting shown up by his horse, who was both intelligent and clever. We see a lot of talking animals in literature. Think of Aesop’s fables. The rabbits in “Watership Down.”  Or one of the best-loved children’s books of all time, “Charlotte’s Web,” where Charlotte the spider takes on a mission to save Wilbur the pig from the slaughterhouse. When children learn about this Torah portion, they probably think of another talking animal from the movies, the donkey in “Shrek” (with the voice of Eddie Murphy). It’s believed that this donkey was, in fact, based on Balaam’s talking ass.

It should be noted that there’s only one other instance in the Torah where an animal talks, and that’s the snake in the Garden of Eden. There’s no question that it’s a powerful device. But is it so far-fetched to be this unusual, really?

We attach human qualities to animals all the time. Everyone talks to their dog or cat. If you have a bird, they even answer back. We’re always amazed by the intelligence displayed by guide dogs and service dogs, dolphins and, of course, primates. There was a guide dog in the news this week that put itself in front of a car to prevent its owner from being struck. The dog was injured, but survived, and was hailed for its remarkable loyalty. And rightly so.

I don’t think most people would go to those lengths to save a life that’s not our own. We would do it instinctively for someone we love – a child, for instance – and there are exceptional people who rescue strangers from drowning or jump onto the subway tracks to save a person who fell. But as humans we tend to think too much – about our own personal safety, or how much our loved ones would suffer if we put ourselves needlessly in harm’s way. It’s hard to fault ourselves for a quality that’s innately human and even sensible. But the animals in our lives don’t over-think. They act, and they do it for the right reasons. They’re loyal. Kind. Generous of spirit. They give us a big greeting when we come home. Nora Ephron, whose passing I mentioned last week, had my favorite quote about that: “When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

The rabbis regard the talking donkey as a miracle. But not just any ordinary miracle. In the fifth chapter of Pirkei Avot, Ethics of Our Fathers, the rabbis list 10 supernatural events that were arranged by God at one very specific time — at twilight at the end of the sixth day of creation, right before the Sabbath. The list includes things like the rainbow that God left as a sign for Moses and his family. The mouth of the earth that swallowed Korach and his followers. The script of the original tablets with the Ten Commandments, written by the finger of God. Balaam’s talking ass is given equal significance with these events.

Most Orthodox Jews believe the donkey actually gained the power of speech and talked to Balaam. As Reform Jews, we tend not to agree with this interpretation. We look for the symbolism and ask ourselves what message is being conveyed to us. What meaning can a talking donkey have in our lives? The answer is: quite a lot.

The donkey is everything Balaam isn’t. She — and it’s interesting to note that the donkey is a she – is honest, perceptive, and possessed with the trait we think of as horse sense. And, unlike Balaam, it’s the donkey’s natural inclination to do good. She doesn’t over-think whether or not to stop when she sees the angel. She doesn’t change her mind or worry about her own well-being. She acts out of loyalty to her owner. Simply put, she does God’s will.

The qualities that God wants us to display – decency, kindness toward others – have very little to do with the evolutionary ladder. In Genesis, God gave us dominion over animals. That meant stewardship, authority, even might and power. In Genesis 9:2, God says to Noach: “…let the awe and dread of you be upon all the land animals, and all the birds of the sky, and all that creep on the ground, and all the fish of the sea: they are given into your hands.” But nowhere does it say that dominion over God’s creatures is synonymous with superiority. Balaam’s donkey is a reminder of that. Who’s the finer animal here? The human? I don’t think so.

This talking donkey – and the significance our sages give this so-called “Shabbat miracle” – serves as a reminder that life can, and does, go topsy-turvy on us. This happens with alarming regularity and often when we least expect it. Our personal circumstances change. The world disappoints us. We’re reminded constantly on a global and individual scale that logic and human behavior often run in opposite directions. But sometimes the world needs to go topsy-turvy in order to wake us out of our reverie. It works for Balaam. He realizes the error of his ways and the potential dangers that his false prophecy presents. It works for us, too. Crisis and upheaval are painful, but also healthy. We hit our bumps and our brick walls, but we persevere.

“Make sure you are doing what God wants you to do — then do it with all your strength.” That quote is from someone who relied heavily on divine guidance to lead a people to freedom. His name was not Moses, but George Washington. On July 4^th we celebrated his commitment to his cause: to show an oppressed people that, while they may hit obstacles, their potential to do God’s will is limitless.

As we go about our lives, may we all have the strength to realize our own potential. May we continue to respect and appreciate the gift of freedom and recognize the presence of miracles wherever and whenever they appear.

Amen…and Shabbat Shalom.

Low Pay is Fine, as Long as You Walk Like a Model….

I was sorry to see that Senator Marty Golden cancelled his upcoming “charm school” event. Really.

For those not from New York, Golden is a former police officer and ex-catering hall owner (his brother and wife now run the business) who until recently was the only Republican representing Brooklyn in the State Senate. His base is in Bay Ridge, which is also home to two other elected GOPs, Rep. Michael Grimm and Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, and Marine Park, where the barometer has moved to the right due largely to the influx of Orthodox Jewish residents.

If you don’t know what he looks like, Golden is a white-haired fellow of Irish descent who wouldn’t have seemed at all out of place at Tammany Hall.  He sponsors community events like free summer concerts and a hugely popular Halloween Walk in Marine Park. My kids still talk about the Halloween Walk, not because of the blood-dripping ghouls that popped out at them but because it was the day Marty Golden gave them each a Hershey’s Bar. Yep, it’s gonna be tough to get their vote.

On Monday, at the height of the etiquette class furor, Marty Golden presented a proclamation at MCU Field in Coney Island honoring Gary Carter, the late Mets legend (see photo below). Wearing a dapper suit and smiling as he posed with Cyclones mascots Sammy and PeeWee,  he wasn’t breaking a sweat — not from the 90-degree heat or from the criticism from the National Organization for Women (NOW) and just about everybody else that he was showing his true colors an out-of-touch throwback, and a wolfish one, at that. I wouldn’t want to show up at Golden’s door for a job interview.

According to the taxpayer-funded mailer his office sent out, Golden’s July 24 seminar at the family-owned Bay Ridge Manor was supposed to teach women “what’s new in the 21st Century as it relates to business etiquette and social protocol.” The curriculum included lessons on “posture, deportment and the feminine presence,” such as how to shake hands, navigate stairs and — my favorite — “walk like a model.” (I guess Golden has been watching Liz Krueger in the Senate Chamber for too long.)

Full disclosure: I spent 18 years writing newsletters for another Brooklyn state senator. We had a few unintended gaffes over the years, like the prostate screening newsletter with the relevant anatomical illustration that offended some sensibilities in Borough Park. (A text-only “shlong mailer” went out the following year.) From experience, I can tell you that newsletters are usually created not by one person but by several. Ideas are bounced around among the elected official and staff. Once these things are written and a proof comes back from the graphics department in Albany, they’re proofread for errors. There’s always time to re-do something that looks funny or doesn’t read right. I’ll say one thing. If “walk like a model” passed muster with Golden and his staff, I can only imagine the other mail that’s gone out to the public. There’s a good chance I’ve been missing out on some entertaining stuff.

The woman scheduled to preside over Golden’s so-called career development event was Phillipa Morrish, wife of longtime Bay Ridge community activist Larry Morrish, who was billed as a “Certified Protocol Consultant” — the capitalization isn’t mine — and president of a business called Etiquette Training International. Morrish’s business website (http://etiquettetraininginternational.com/) contains information about her finishing school and online classes, along with testimonials that are all from people in Guyana. The course module is rather eclectic. If “creating a positive first impression” and “wardrobe chic” aren’t enough for you, you might choose to explore something called “techno-etiquette.” What is that, exactly?  Learning not to say “f–k” whenever you hit the wrong key? I really don’t want to know what “Gift Giving Home and Abroad” is, either, or what sort of gifts she thinks women professionals ought to be giving.

Today’s City & State has the top ten Tweets about the cancelled class (http://www.cityandstateny.com/top-10-tweets-marty-goldens-feminine-presence-class/). Rita Meade ‏@ScrewyDecimal, who’s #6 on the list, says: “This is my neighborhood. This is my (current) state senator. THIS is why we have to vote, ladies. Get him outta here.”

Actually, I think Golden’s opposition to a minimum wage increase and his continuing belief that women should get paid less than men are more than enough reason to get him outta here. The etiquette class, while quaint, is offensive only because it’s gender specific. When my 18-year-old daughter was little, she attended a day-long etiquette class for both girls and boys at the Plaza Hotel. She and her friend Emily learned to eat french fries with a knife and fork. I thought it was a cute idea, and one with some potential usefulness in the real world. Maybe Marty Golden hasn’t spent enough time sitting next to men picking their teeth at lunch. Or maybe, as I suspect, he’s just an old-fashioned guy with old-fashioned ideas. And in his old-fashioned way, he was trying to help.

There’s a song from the early 1960s that I’ve been thinking about ever since the “feminine deportment” fiasco. The song is “Wives and Lovers,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It was a big hit by Jack Jones, and it goes like this:

Hey, little girl,
Comb your hair, fix your make-up.
Soon he will open the door.
Don’t think because
There’s a ring on your finger,
You needn’t try any more

For wives should always be lovers, too.
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.
I’m warning you.

Day after day,
There are girls at the office,
And men will always be men.
Don’t send him off
With your hair still in curlers.
You may not see him again.

For wives should always be lovers, too.
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.
He’s almost here.

Hey, little girl
Better wear something pretty,
something you’d wear to go to the city.
And dim all the lights,
Pour the wine, start the music.
Time to get ready for love.

Dim all the lights,
Pour the wine,start the music.
Time to get ready for love.
Time to get ready,time to get ready for love.
Time to get ready,time to get ready for love.

You Can’t Stop the Wheels From Turning….

Children and wheels: It seems so easy, but I missed the boat on that one.

First you buy the kid a tricycle, then a bicycle, and if you’re a little crazy and/or don’t mind ER visits, a unicycle. (I used to see a kid commuting to Edward R. Murrow H.S. on one. Amazing.) You might throw in a scooter, skateboard and roller blades. (I can’t watch anyone zip through traffic on roller blades. Death by pothole is not a good way to go.) Finally you reach the point, usually at 16, where the kid wants to stray farther and farther from home, and go faster and faster, in preparation for leaving home for good. That’s the real goal here even if we don’t want to admit it. And that’s when driver’s ed becomes a part of your life.

Not my life. My daughter Emily, who’s 18 and leaving for college next month, doesn’t drive. I thought she was in a very small minority, but it turns out she’s on the cutting edge of a trend where young people are relying increasingly on mass transit or, in non-urban areas, Greyhound or Amtrak, to get anywhere. They’re just fine with that, too. Yahoo News ran a story from Reuters on Sunday and reported that more than a quarter of  people in the 16 – 34 age group — the article gave this demographic the annoying nickname Millennials — lacked a driver’s license in 2010, up 5 percentage points from 2000. http://news.yahoo.com/americas-generation-y-not-driven-drive-145632280–sector.html) The story also indicated that many young adults are turning to virtual media as a replacement for the open road. That’s just weird.

Until I read the Yahoo article, I was feeling a bit guilty about Emily’s lack of driving ambition. (The pun is intentional, but I’ll save that for another post.) I come from sedentary, slow-moving stock. In a wolf pack, I’d be the one invariably left with the innards. According to family myth, I didn’t walk until I was two and my mother, frustrated at having to shlep me around, dangled an Entenmann’s donut about a foot in front of me. It worked.

I probably should have done something to fend off genetic inertia in my kids, like encouraging them to take tennis lessons. But that involved more movement than I’m accustomed to. I’m also overly cautious by nature. The less you move, the less chance there is to break an arm or leg. People ski into trees. They drown in riptides. The world is full of peril. Better to stay safe.

I didn’t deny my kids’ need for speed entirely. They had one of those Big Wheel things — a three-wheeled vehicle that rides at ground level so there’s nowhere to fall. When Emily was six, she asked for roller blades. I  got them for her, along with the requisite knee and elbow pads, and we went into the driveway to practice. For the next hour, she clung to the gate and screamed whenever one of her feet began to roll. I still have the photos. She never put the roller blades on again.

Eventually I got brave enough to buy both girls bikes. I got myself one too so I could demonstrate. We walked to the local schoolyard to try them out. I rode around and around in a big circle for a while, impressing Emily and Kate with my long-forgotten prowess. I was feeling pretty good about myself, still going around and around the track, until I remembered that I never learned how to make a 90-degree turn. Riding in circles was the height of my ability, a metaphor for my career as an outdoorsy mom. Kate grew to like her Strawberry Shortcake bike, but the training wheels never came off. Emily fared about as well on her new bike as she did on the roller blades. Teaching the girls to ride was not within the realm of possibility for me. Way too scary. The bikes are still in our shed, collecting cobwebs.

Kate says she always felt deprived that I never bought her the only wheeled item that she really wanted. It was a motorized kiddie car, one of those overpriced pink monstrosities with a picture of Barbie on the side. It wasn’t fear that stopped me, but good taste.

Emily is leaving for Bard in a month and nine days. She’s counting, I know. So am I, but in a different way. I’ve done my best to put the brakes on her childhood, to stop the wheels from turning and time from rolling on. Despite my best efforts, I’m proud to say I’ve failed. Emily is growing up despite my craziness.

On August 11, I’ll be the instrument of her departure, driving the car that takes her 130 miles from home to a place where adventure, and, yes, peril, await. I’ll just have to hope for the best. She’s been mentioning lately that she’d like to learn to ride a bike since the buildings on campus are so far apart. But I know my kid. I make a mental note to buy her rainboots. She’ll be spending a lot of time slogging on foot through the mud.

In Praise of Busy

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

Are you crazy busy? Not because you have to be, but by choice? I read Tim Kreider’s “Opinionator” piece, “The Busy Trap,” online in the Times ( see above link) right after I did the morning prayers — my daily wake-up call — and right before I launched into my other usual early-morning activity, playing on Facebook.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Kreider’s piece talks about the maniacal need many people have to overschedule their lives, and often their children’s lives, as a conscious effort to avoid idleness, which is synonymous with sloth. If we’re busy, even it’s with work we don’t really need or activities that don’t enrich our lives, we’re able to maintain the delusion that that our lives have more value than they actually do. “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day,” Kreider writes.

A few thoughts here.

It’s important to note that the population he’s addressing has become increasingly small thanks to the lousy economy. I don’t know what kind of circles the author travels in, but most people I know work as much as they can because it’s a better alternative than, say, starving to death or living in your car. A week home with the flu is the closest many people get to idleness.

When I spent two days in the hospital after the birth of each of my kids, I joked that this was my idea of a vacation. Certainly it was the longest I spent in front of a television during my entire adult life, except to watch “Thirtysomething” in my twenties and, later, to feed my addiction to “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.” I was a busy person — busy not to avoid doing nothing, but busy because I genuinely liked to work. Still do, in fact. I enjoy the mental aerobics of work. I enjoy creating something from nothing. I like the discipline that work, in this case writing, gives my life. I’d feel like a complete sloth if I didn’t spend some time each day putting words on the screen in front of me.

When I’m not working or tending to responsibilities at home or chatting with friends, I tend to occupy my time with activities that give the brain a workout. I suppose Tim Kreider would still consider me busy, and this is correct, up to a point. I do the Times crossword (except on Saturday, when it’s impossible for any normal human). I run through books of logic puzzles. I read a lot. I go on Facebook or check out the media outlets on  Twitter. But here’s the thing. These “busy” activities usually have a multitasking component that encompasses a degree of slothfulness. I’ll generally be listening to music or have the TV on in the background. (My daughter Kate finds it amazing that I know just about every episode of “The Nanny” by heart without knowing what a single character looks like, except of course Fran Drescher.)

Somewhere in the middle of reading or doing some non-work-related mental activity, I’ll invariably start daydreaming. Sometimes I’ll fall asleep for a few minutes. But then I’ll return to whatever activity or activities I was doing before, including the mind-wandering part. For me, this constitutes idleness, because the activities I choose to fill my day leave plenty of gaps for rumination. Some really good ideas have come to me while I’m doing the crossword. So contrary to what Tim Kreider contends, keeping busy and letting your mind roam free are not always mutually exclusive. You can be busy, according to my definition, and idle, according to his, at the same time.

I cannot imagine sitting around and doing nothing — I mean, really nothing. I’d go nuts and, frankly, I don’t think one’s anxiety level benefits if the brain is kept uncaged too long. Depending on the particular monsters you have in your closet, too much idleness can be a scary thing. Keeping busy is therapeutic, a way of maintaining one’s sanity and keeping at bay the stuff that’s messy or painful to confront. Denial, you say? Well, maybe. Okay, yes. But there are times in all our lives when reality is acceptable only in bite-sized pieces.

For some, like the author of the “Opinionator” piece, idle time is a friend and a joy that too many cast aside as worthless. For others, it’s more complicated.  We all need our escapes.