Dreams Realized…Dreams Dashed

Life can be good. In a few moments.

It was a beautiful summer’s evening and I was about to live out a dream I have had since I was 14. My family had tickets to The Globe Theater’s performance of the “Scottish” play. We sat in the galleries as the sun set on London and the Bard’s tale unfolded to a packed attentive house…as it has for centuries. Afterward, we walked along the Thames south bank to our hotel…discussing the performance, the wisdom of the age-old play and just living in, and savouring the few moments. It was one of the sparse high points of my life. I had to live over 50 years to get there. But it happened.


Only a week before that evening, I was standing in John Lennon’s boyhood home in Liverpool. Was there no end to this joy?
Yes.
We came home and went back to work. Life’s like that.
Then you have the kosher “few moments”:

Bump in the trunk! Jews rushing to get caffeine suppositories

By Andy Campbell the Brooklyn Paper

Not so fast!

Jews throughout Williamsburg snapped up caffeine suppositories today, hours before the start of the Yom Kippur fast that would deprive them of the jolt — and hunger suppression — that coffee typically provides.

The day-long fast is the centerpiece of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — but some religious Jews see a Talmudic loophole that allows them to ingest their daily dose of caffeine, albeit through a different orafice.

“It helps — you know, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re fasting and also addicted to caffeine,” said Baruch Herzfeld, an Orthodox Jew who owns a bike store in Williamsburg. “Some take it before sundown, but most take it throughout their fasting. These guys love a good loophole.”

These huge, rectally inserted pills are popular. Pharmacists at Rafieh — one of many distributors in south Williamsburg on Lee Avenue — sold nearly 150 suppositories today.

“We have caffeine suppositories!” the store’s handwritten sign heralded. “Be ready!”

But is it kosher?

There’s some controversy over whether Jews observing the Biblical fast should be taking an easy out (or, more accurately, in).

Some Jewish leaders said that consuming anything — through the body’s traditional entrance or its exit — is against the spirit of the ritualistic fast.

“We’re supposed to do it the old fashioned way — I wouldn’t advise [suppositories],” said Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, a Hasidic leader. “We wanna keep Jews in the synagogue and not in the bathroom.”

Now, I don’t want to be accused of somehow equating jewish assholes(literally) with a gorgeous summer evening at the Globe. Or even perhaps somehow tracing the scribe of the pendulum as it swings to it’s extremes…but. There are things in life that just stand out for me. And they glitter because of their merit or lack thereof.

I know…I know. You take the good with the bad. Everything has a price. Life does not in the least little bit resemble anything like a container of ripe red fruit. But somewhere up there in the old brain-box, I always imagined how it could contain some semblance of dignity. Some human denominator of worth. Then Yom Kippur and Kol Nidre roll around and I am awakened from my unearthly fantasy.

Back to work.