The Purpose of Life

Today was not really a good day. I did remember, belatedly, the advice not to give a label which contains a narrative to something abstract, because it creates the thing it describes. In other words, a bad day is just a series of events until you label them “A Bad Day.” You can’t point to a “Bad Day” and see an object sitting there, rather you conceptualise it as a bad day. Still, a lot of stuff seemed to go wrong.

I thought I overslept. I hadn’t, but it meant I felt that I was on the back foot from the start of the day. I woke up out of what was probably on some level an anxiety dream about my shul (synagogue) and possibly about what would happen if I wanted to get married there (although the actual dream was about someone stealing the rabbi’s hat).

Much of the day at work was just boring, sorting through my predecessor’s emails and deleting those which are spammy or trivial. J told me that I had been consistently doing one task wrong, forgetting to record details on spreadsheets. I was recording on one or two, but there were another two to complete. There are so many spreadsheets in this job! It is hard to remember all of them even without autistic multitasking issues. Then I went to the bank, got a quarter of the way there and realised I’d filled in the paying-in slip wrongly as J had given me another cheque after I’d filled it in and I’d changed the spreadsheet, but not the physical slip (multitasking and spreadsheets again). I thought I would correct it in the bank and carried on, but when I got halfway there I realised they have taken all the pens away because of COVID. So I had to go back to the office and tell J what happened, correct the slip and then go out again. I felt like an idiot.

After that, the day went into terminal decline. J wanted some papers that I’d given him and wouldn’t believe that he didn’t already have them. Then he needed some other papers and I couldn’t find them. Eventually we discovered I’d filed them in the wrong folder. Then I photocopied them instead of scanning them, then scanned them as one document instead of two. Then it was leaving time, but I realised I’d forgotten to give J my invoice for July and I’d forgotten that he wants me to work on Tuesday next week instead of Monday (although at least I found out now and not on Monday).

***

Good things-wise, I wrote to my writer friend the other day about tips for finding an agent and she sent me some resources (and a warning to beware of fraudulent agents, which apparently are A Thing). That said, I think my first stop will be one agent E suggested who works with literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy with Jewish themes, so who might be sympathetic both to my desire to write specifically Jewish books and my desire to write literary fiction as well as science fiction and fantasy novels. I had been concerned an agent might want to force me down one path or the other.

The other good thing today was talking to E and hearing some good news, which I will not mention now as it’s still very up in the air. (Before you get too excited, no, we’re not engaged.)

Things did get better and I feel vaguely embarrassed about getting so upset about my work mishaps. I guess it shows that there isn’t such a thing as a Bad Day, merely a narrative about certain incidents in close temporal proximity to each other.

***

I’ve been thinking a lot today about The Black Iron Prison, Philip K. Dick’s gnostic/psychotic (in the literal, psychiatric sense) vision of the world and its politics as supernatural dungeon. And I was going to write about it, but after speaking to my parents and E I recovered from having a bad day and decided I didn’t want to write a melodramatic political post, so The Black Iron Prison will have to wait for another day when I’m feeling down and grumpy.

***

Reading an old blog post elsewhere on the internet, I came across this quote about Rabbi Chaim of Volozyn, nineteenth century Talmud scholar and mystic and founder of the first modern yeshiva (rabbinical seminary). The quote is from his son, Rabbi Itzele Volozyner: “He would routinely rebuke me because he saw that I do not share in the pain of others. This is what he would constantly tell me: that the entire person was not created for himself, but to be of assistance to others, whatever he finds to be in his ability to do.”

This is interesting because, more than almost anyone else (except his teacher, the Vilna Gaon), Reb Chaim embodies the attitude of total focus on Talmudic study as the primary religious practice (or primary practice full stop) of the religious Jewish man. Yet here the focus is on being good to others, in whatever way you can, or even just empathising with them. I suppose it makes me feel that my Jewish life can be worthwhile even if I am bad at Talmud study, if I can help others somehow. Admittedly I’m not great at helping others either, but it’s more achievable, and I do hope that writing and even blogging (and commenting on other people’s blogs) can help.

Normalising Religious Struggle

Yesterday and today I listened to an episode of the Normal Frum Women podcast on Normalizing Religious Struggle. I thought it was a brave episode for opening up the whole idea of religious struggle, whereas usually in the Orthodox world people suppress any religious struggles they are having and don’t talk about them with others.

I did find it interesting that the podcast focused mainly on halakhic and sociological struggles, that is, practical struggles rooted in Jewish law or the Jewish community, rather than theological struggle. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot of theological struggles over the years (a while back I listed about a dozen different potential philosophical or textual arguments against God and Judaism, and I’ve wrestled with most of them in my time) or maybe it’s because when I joined the blogosphere around 2005/2006, there was a lot of fierce discussion of theological challenges, particularly evolutionary science (the fallout from the Slifkin Affair[1] was still, well, falling out) and Biblical Criticism (Higher Criticism; Lower Criticism didn’t seem to bother people as much).

Either way, it did make me wonder if people were too scared to voice doubts about the existence of God or the divine origin of the Torah in public or if people simply care more about a practical issue (how women should dress or how to clean vegetables of insects) than anything more abstract. Certainly the “how should women dress?” issue is probably on some level a proxy for deeper, and perhaps partially philosophical, discontent about women’s role in the Orthodox world. This was actually voiced by one woman on the podcast, a lawyer, who felt more respected for her intelligence and professionalism in her non-Jewish workplace than in the Orthodox community.

Despite this, it was a very brave topic to broach, so I thought I would talk about some of my own struggles.

My big halakhic struggle was around 2016-17 (I think… to be honest, that period of my life is a mess of anxiety and despair when I look back it). At this time, my religious OCD was at its height and the whole issue of kashrut, the dietary laws, particularly regarding separating dairy and meat, and the special Pesach (Passover) dietary laws became almost unmanageable to me in the volume and intensity of anxiety they threw at me. It wasn’t until I did exposure therapy that I began to realise that most of the conflicts were imaginary, inasmuch as the halakhic (Jewish law) issues I saw simply weren’t there. Until then, I was consumed almost constantly with anxiety that we (my parents and I) had treifed up (made religiously inedible) our kitchen. I asked almost daily questions of rabbis and the London Bet Din Kashrut Division question service (which was probably not intended to be used that way). Almost everything was OK, but I was terrified of having done the wrong thing, particularly with regard to Pesach (where, to be fair, we had done some things wrong in the past).

I felt that God would punish me for doing wrong, but I was also terrified of having some major fall-out with my parents where I wouldn’t eat in their home. The fear of argument with my parents is telling, as it seems likely that the OCD was largely triggered by our moving house when I didn’t want to move, as well as the fact that I was conscious of still living with my parents in my thirties due to my history mental of illness. (I did in fact move out at one point to try to get things under control.) The OCD made my already existent depression worse and for a while I was deeply depressed and struggling to have any kind of joy in my religious life (or any other aspect of my life, for that matter) and I viewed kashrut and Pesach with a mixture of dread and anger. For a while I became very angry and resentful of God and the calmer religious lives other people seemed to lead. Fortunately, I’m a lot better these days, although I have to be vigilant against falling back into bad habits of checking and questioning; even this week I’ve felt myself slipping slightly and needing to be strong.

My main problem nowadays is sociological rather than halakhic. I still struggle desperately to fit in to an Orthodox world that seems geared up for neurotypical, confident, healthy married couples, not an autistic, socially anxious and sometimes depressed older unmarried person. I would of course suffer in any neurotypical social environment, but the Orthodox world has a lot of specific stressors, from an approach to prayer and religious study that is often louder and more vocal than in other religions to a culture of intricate ritual even in interpersonal interactions. This is compounded by consciousness of being a ba’al teshuva (someone not raised religious who became religious later in life) and my regret at not having gone to yeshiva (rabbinical seminary), even though I doubt I would have been happy there.

Related to the last point is my consciousness of not being able to study Talmudic texts independently or even really to keep up in group discussion, even when I prepare in advance (which I do at least try to do). I do feel like there is something lacking almost in my masculinity, in Jewish terms, from my not being able to study Talmud, something which is only compounded by my failure (so far) to marry and procreate. The fact that I am (I think) reasonably good at understanding aggadic (non-legal) Jewish religious texts is a strange kind of consolation prize, as this skill is not rated highly in the Orthodox community, particularly among men. I used to be able to daven from the amud (lead services), but since moving communities, my social anxiety has kicked in there too and I try to avoid it, so that’s another area where I could have felt that I was fitting in, but don’t and instead seem passive and ‘useless’ (by the community’s standards).

The reality I have come to lately is that my problems are as much due to my faulty autistic brain wiring than the community itself. I struggled to feel accepted in online Doctor Who fandom too, a much more open and less rule-bound environment, so maybe it is too much to ask to feel accepted in the Orthodox Jewish world. As with my religious OCD, my fears are probably more imagined than real. I don’t know how other people at my shul (synagogue) view me, but lately I’ve become more open to the idea that they don’t hate me and think I’m an idiot, which I guess is progress.

A side-light on this comes from Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side, Jonathan Boyarin’s ethnographic study of yeshiva study (“learning”) in a New York yeshiva, which I’ve been reading the last few days. Part of the interest for me is the way Boyarin negotiates his situation being, on the one hand, an ethnographer doing a study project and, on the other, being a Jew wanting to study Torah for its own sake (albeit by his own admission a Jew less Orthodox and strictly observant than the other people he meets at the yeshiva). It’s a kind of hokey cokey of being an insider and an outsider successively or even at the same time. I find it interesting that I understand and relate to my own community better through the eyes of ethnographers like Boyarin or Sarah Bunin Benor (Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism) than I do in person. Maybe that’s the autism/Asperger’s again.

Ultimately, as the podcast stated, Judaism is ultimately a relationship, involving trade-offs and compromises. I’ve never got to the point with Judaism where I’ve walked out — not a trial separation and certainly not a divorce. I suppose that must count for something. Past theological issues notwithstanding, I think I have a deep level of faith in God and Torah that transcends any particular doubts or social awkwardness. The thought of not being Jewish in an Orthodox sense seems barely imaginable, even as I acknowledge that the vast majority of Jews, let alone non-Jews, are happy with living their lives that way. This is my identity in a very deep-seated and secure way, even if I can’t articulate it to others. In some ways, the inarticulacy is the proof of how embedded it is in my psyche; it’s deeper than words.

I feel uncomfortable with much of the discussion around intersectionality, but I feel that the last five months, since my autism/Asperger’s diagnosis, have led me to a re-examination of the “intersection” of my Jewish and autistic identities and a sense that, even if my behaviour and socialisation doesn’t meet the required standards of the community, it is at least the best I could do. Perhaps a better, if darker, image than ‘intersectionality’ is drawn from Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, which he said would end with the main character, K, being told on his deathbed, that his legal claim to live in the village was not recognised, yet he was permitted to live and work there, an image that combines acceptance and isolation at once.

[1] Rabbi Nosson Slifkin, as he then was, wrote three books on Torah/science controversies, including, but not limited to, creationism and apparent scientific errors in the Talmud. He only quoted accepted mainstream rabbinical sources. He largely accepted modern science and reinterpreted problematic statements in the Torah as metaphorical, and saw those in the Talmud as simply errors coming from the rabbis relying on the science of day rather than being based on a religious tradition that had to be accepted as revelation. This approach is based on major Jewish thinkers like Rambam (Moses Maimonides) and Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and initially gained cautious acceptance even in parts of the Haredi world (ultra-Orthodox), but eventually the books were banned by a number of prominent Haredi rabbis, causing a huge ruckus about both science and Torah and about the limits of rabbinic power that still thunders on in parts of the internet. In the early days of the Jewish blogosphere, where someone stood on the Slifkin controversy became an indicator of how Haredi or ‘modern’ they were.

***

As for today, the morning was taken up with volunteering for the food bank. We were short-staffed again (I guess some of the younger people are still leading summer camps and maybe others are on holiday), so I was glad I went. It was cooler this week and I didn’t get a migraine. I did have to shleppe a lot of stuff, especially as we didn’t seem to have the trolleys we usually use. The afternoon was mostly taken with writing this post, which may not have been the most productive use of my time, but helped me unwind a bit. I also spent an hour or so writing a glossary for the (nearly 100) Hebrew and Yiddish words and phrases used in my novel. I’m not sure how consistent and thorough I was. It’s really intended as a quick reference and not a detailed philological guide! Also, the word ‘Yiddishkeit‘ is really hard to define. But this means that my novel is pretty much ready to go out into the world and try to find an agent and a publisher!

I watched another episode of The Blue Planet and was struck by the penguins: ungainly and even comical on land; graceful and elegant in the water. There is probably a lesson in there about fitting in to your environment, although I’m not sure how it applies to me and shul.

Writing from the Margins

I felt mildly down late last night. I’m not sure why, possibly because I wanted to waste a few minutes on Jewish websites, and they all seem full at the moment with two things: My Unorthodox Life (reality TV series about a formerly religious, now very not religious, woman) and Ben and Jerry’s boycotting the West Bank. It annoys me that I’m supposed to care about either of these things just because I’m Jewish. I’m not responsible for every Jew who stops being religious (or stays being non-religious) and I’m not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government or other people responding to the Israeli government, but somehow there is a sense that I should be, and that if I can’t do anything else, I should at least be OUTRAGED.

There is even a Talmudic term for this: kol Yisrael averim ze ba’ze: all Israel are responsible for one another. That really means that Jews should look after each other, and can pray on behalf of one another; I don’t think the rabbis of the Talmud meant that every time you see someone criticising Judaism or Israel on Twitter you need to be OUTRAGED in case someone believes them and thinks Jewish life is imperfect.

The problem is, on some level I do feel responsible. Perhaps it’s just me, or perhaps it’s Judaism’s self-critical culture. Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, is a relentlessly self-critical work (this became a problem when non-Jews got hold of it) and Jewish media outlets are hugely self-critical. Part of me feels I should do something, not about these specific things, but when Jews are outraged about something that is worth being outraged about. But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to write polemic.

Twitter is probably also responsible, shortening every serious debate to a few hundred characters and encouraging instant response instead of reflection. Whoever even pauses to make a cup of tea before hitting “reply,” let alone waits to sleep on a matter. By the time you’ve slept on something, Twitter will have moved on to being OUTRAGED about something else. E thinks that, if I get a publisher, they may make me go on Twitter, a thought which terrifies me, because I don’t know how to avoid getting sucked in to the OUTRAGE. There is also the time-wasting aspect too. No wonder journalists seem to find all their stories on Twitter these days; they simply aren’t out in the real world any more (this was obviously worse when Donald Trump was President and American government policy was actually being made on the fly on Twitter, but it’s still pretty bad).

What do I want to do, then? I want to write, not polemic, but description. It is hard, as I am probably a better observer of negatives than positives, which makes my writing seem opposed to the things I write about, which are actually the things I care about.

Writing about Rudyard Kipling (in the essay of the same name), George Orwell says that Kipling was able to write about British India because he existed on the fringes of Imperial society, “just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes.” Kipling’s unusual position on the boundary of two very different worlds, “coarse enough” to mix with soldiers and Imperial administrators, but highbrow enough to write well, gave him a unique position to write about British Imperial life, something that no true soldier or administrator would have done, but which no other writer of the period would have the experience or desire to do and which, Orwell argues, is pretty much unique in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain.

I feel that if I have any future as a writer, it is on the fringe of the Orthodox world, trying at least to produce a real record of it for posterity, and perhaps for those among the non-Jewish (or non-frum) world who are willing to listen. Not to do kiruv (proselytise among non-religious Jews) or hasbarah (make pro-Israel arguments), but simply to describe.

Interestingly, Orwell says of Kipling that he “he did not greatly resemble the people he admired.” I think this is true of me as well. I don’t greatly resemble the Kotzker Rebbe or Rebbe Nachman, but then neither do I really resemble my secular literary heroes, Kafka, Borges, Philip K. Dick and Orwell himself.

***

Other than writing this, today wasn’t great. I slept too long again. I rushed to get dressed in five minutes so that I would be just barely able to daven a bit of Shacharit (say a bit of Morning Prayers). I was glad I rushed, as I really still felt tired and didn’t want to do it. I cooked dinner (vegetarian chilli), went for a walk and drafted my devar Torah for the week, and I Skyped E, but I didn’t manage much else. I wanted to read more of Yeshiva Days and start to write the Hebrew/Yiddish glossary for my novel, but I didn’t manage to do either.

I feel a bit stressed at the moment and I can’t work out why. I’m frustrated that E can’t visit and I’m nervous about trying to find an agent for my novel, but neither of those seems big enough to cause much stress. Maybe I’m underestimating them or perhaps I just need a break. There’s no volunteering for the first two weeks of August and J is away the second two weeks, so I may get some kind of break. I’d rather save work holiday for when E comes, but I’m not sure how much of my job I can actually do without J being around, so I may have to take the time off.

***

I’ve nearly finished The Master and Margarita. I just have the epilogue left. It got better, but I still feel I didn’t really “get” it. I am not engaged enough to want to read the enormous, thirty page “About the Author” section. I think my favourite novel about black magic in the Soviet Union is still Monday Starts on Saturday by the Strugatsky brothers (imagine Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University in the USSR).

I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper

I struggled to sleep again last night, although the temperature has dropped a bit. I’m not sure why I’m having trouble sleeping at the moment (trouble falling asleep; I have no trouble staying asleep, unfortunately!); maybe it’s connected with the slight uptick of anxiety and irrational (I think irrational) guilt I’ve had lately. Drinking hot chocolate seemed to help, and it’s far fewer calories than eating porridge, which I had been doing when insomniac. I think I’m adjusting to the sweetness, which may not be a good thing.

Work was pretty dull and I felt I was clock-watching even more than usual. I don’t know how people do dull office jobs 9.00am-5.00pm and five days a week. Part of the day was spent looking for invoices that we didn’t have, and which probably don’t exist, which is irrationally more frustrating than if I’d spent an identical amount of time and energy searching for invoices we do have.

I was surprisingly busy when I got home, doing some late research for my novel (see below), cooking dinner (plain pasta, I didn’t have that much energy) and trying to do more Torah study (I do some on the Tube into work), but being too tired to do much, and then feeling vaguely guilty about prioritising novel research over Torah, although I honestly thought there would be a period after dinner where I would feel more alert and less distracted for having eaten before the tiredness set in.

I told E yesterday that I’m vaguely anxious lately, and vaguely anxious about why I’m getting anxious, which I suppose is meta-anxiety (anxiety about anxiety).

***

I’m currently reading Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side, an ethnographic study of a yeshiva (“rabbinical seminary” although many of the students are not intending to become rabbis, and certainly not communal rabbis) in New York by Jonathan Boyarin. It was supposed to plant ideas of incidents or anecdotes for my novel, but it’s not really the same type of institution my protagonist (I can’t really think of him as a ‘hero’ despite/because he’s based on me) attended. It is interesting to read, though.

It did make me wonder whether I misunderstood what yeshiva study involves somewhere along the line, although the institution in the book isn’t the type of yeshiva that I could have studied at, not least because it isn’t residential (the thought of communal living and shared dorms is hugely off-putting). Boyarin spends some time looking at the intersection between the yeshiva and popular culture. He says there are more references to popular culture than would have been the case at a more “right-wing” (=fundamentalist) yeshiva, but at the same time I think references are mainly to popular culture that people grew up with (either before becoming religious or when a child and allowed more freedom), rather than contemporary popular culture they might experience as an adult. In other words, it’s OK to have had access to popular culture, but not necessarily to have access to it now. I’ve noticed this in my shul (synagogue) too (the rabbi referenced Space 1999 this week!). I saw something similar on a blog years ago, where the blogger said that even in very fundamentalist communities where university was forbidden, it was OK, even celebrated, to have gone to university in the past, particularly if you got a prestigious qualification like medicine, just as long as you weren’t currently at or planning to go to university.

Watching Boyarin navigate the multiple levels of meaning and depth (religious, political, social, humorous) in the conversations at the yeshiva, I realise that maybe it’s not surprising that I struggle in similar situations. After all, Boyarin struggles at times, and he isn’t (I assume) on the autism spectrum. And when I say conversations, I don’t just mean the study conversations; even the casual bantering can work on multiple levels and require effort to keep up with it. (I have seen this at shul too.)

Reading the book, I’m brought back to what I think I’ve wanted since university, even if I haven’t always been able to articulate it: a chevra, a group of friends who I really connect with and can feel comfortable talking to and joking around with, like I used to have at school, where there were only about five people I could talk to (out of a school of 1,500), but I was completely unselfconscious with them. This is possibly not something I should be looking to replicate (even aside from Asperger’s/autism).

***

At least E knows what to say to me. Her verdict on Doctor Who: Rise of the Cybermen (new series, 2006): “that episode just sort of seemed like an inferior reworking of Genesis of the Daleks” (original series, 1975).😍

Vague Anxieties

Shabbat (the Sabbath) was OK. It was the first Shabbat without compulsory masks in shul (synagogue). I wore mine anyway, despite the discomfort. About ten or twenty per cent of the people there wore them. There didn’t seem to be any particular demographic (age, religious observance etc.) that wore them more than others.

I missed shul on Shabbat morning. I woke up about 8.45am and could have gone to shul an hour or so late, which I have done before, but I couldn’t face walking in so late and ended up staying in bed until I fell asleep again, which is social anxiety avoidance, I think. I told myself not to feel guilty, that I had a hard week, with last Shabbat being Erev Tisha B’Av and so not being as restorative as usual, then Sunday being Tisha B’Av (the saddest day of the Jewish year), not sleeping Sunday night, difficult phone calls at work on Monday, Zoom shiur (which was very draining) on Tuesday, my family birthday get-together on Wednesday, a lot of car travel and more difficulty sleeping on Thursday night and the shock of discovering more dark secrets from my family history the same day. That’s all true, I did have a tough week, but I did feel somewhat guilty. I wanted to go, and now I worry I’m back in the socially anxious, “out of the shul habit” mindset.

I’m having weird guilt thoughts or feelings about something else too at odd times, so I guess I’m in the guilt mindset more generally.

I was worried I would not sleep last night, as I slept so much during the day. I tried drinking hot chocolate before bed, which seemed to help me sleep. I had never drunk it before. I wanted to find a less calorific alternative to porridge, as I don’t like warm milk by itself. The hot chocolate was OK, but it’s very sweet to the point of making me feel somewhat sick.

***

My parents were going out to friends’ house at lunchtime today and I wished them a good time. “Not really, as we’re going because we couldn’t make it to [friend’s mother’s] stone-setting [tombstone consecration].” Ugh. I have a lousy memory for things that don’t directly concern me, and sometimes for those things too.

***

I’ve had some vague anxiety today, a bit like the anxiety that I used to get every Sunday evening as a teenager, when I would be anxious about the new school week, although I didn’t recognise it as anxiety at the time. (I think I was a lot more anxious and unhappy about school than I realised until years later.) I don’t know what is fuelling it today. I guess there’s the realisation that I’m at the stage with my book where lots of people are going to criticise it, even in the best-case scenario, and also realising the challenges that E and I are going to have moving our long-distance relationship on. To be honest, we’re both pretty sure that we want to get married to each other, but also that if we tell anyone that at this stage, when we’ve been actually together in the same country for about four days in total, they will think we’re completely mad. Even when it’s socially acceptable to get engaged, there will be a lot of practical and financial difficulties in getting married and finding somewhere to live. I even worry a bit about what if I suddenly die and E is left alone (yes, I’m a cheery person… listening to the song Moonlight Shadow probably didn’t help with this — it’s a song about a woman whose boyfriend is shot dead by a criminal on the run. Good song, though).

My Name is Luftmentsch

Today was mostly dull, except for a time-consuming bit that made me realise my family history may be even murkier than I thought. That story also involves the awful way mental illness was treated by society in the not-too-distant past (things now are often also bad, but we tend to be somewhat more wary of institutionalising people for decades and just forgetting about them). I don’t really want to go into that story at this juncture, though. Otherwise it involved sitting in a car for about three hours in total, which is something I don’t like much at the moment, and losing work because of misunderstanding what I was cancelling. I am pretty tired now and didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to do. What I did do was Skype E, which was good.

***

My non-Jewish readers will have been spared the many, many, many articles on Jewish social media and websites this week talking about My Unorthodox Life. I haven’t seen the programme. E told me that it was like The Kardashians, but with formerly-religious-but-now-very-not-religious Jews. I’m only vaguely aware of who the Kardashians are, but I have no real desire to find out more. I didn’t really intend to write about this, not least because writing about what you hate is a surefire way to tell people to watch/read it (Ayatollah Khomeni boosted The Satanic Verses‘ sales more than the publisher’s PR department did) and mostly because the discussion is really repetitive and tedious. However, this article is somewhat wider-ranging than most, looking beyond specific TV programmes or specific laws and attitudes to compare individualist-secular Western society with communitarian-religious Orthodox society, which is something I’ve often touched on here.

The author’s conclusion is similar to the one I have come to after years of feeling on the fringes of both societies: the strengths of each society are also its weaknesses. Orthodox society has a massive social support network that left-wing political parties can only dream of, but it functions by ensuring members signal their acceptance of the society’s values through a degree of social conformity that the secular West would never accept (Moshe Koppel (Judaism Straight Up) writes about this too). Conversely, the secular West offers more individual choice than any society in human history, but a society of extreme individuals is likely to be dysfunctional and uncaring. Without external communal bonds, many people feel little kinship with the needy and at best delegate their care to the impersonal state, and too many people find themselves socially isolated, free to do whatever they want, but without anyone to do it with or with any way of finding bonds of commonality with whoever they might happen to meet.

I feel a bit like a free-rider on both societies (Koppel talks about that too), not really conforming to either ideal, but trying to find the best of both worlds. I am quite individualistic, or at least idiosyncratic (high-functioning autistic people often are), but also I keep halakhah (Jewish law) and I desperately want to find an Orthodox Jewish community that will accept me for who I am, and which I can accept in return. If not a free rider, then I’m trying to find a Lagrange Point where I can be free to do (a lot of) what I want and still be (reasonably) accepted. That’s a bit of a simplification, as I do want to keep Jewish law, I just struggle to keep the social mores, as well as sometimes following minority opinions, particularly doctrinally.

It’s not really an abstract issue, but a practical one that appears time and time again as I navigate things like Yom Ha’atzma’ut observance, dating, or creationism vs. evolution. Above all, I want the intellectual freedom to write books dealing with Jewish subjects without feeling obliged to “prove” the “correctness” of Orthodoxy, and to be able to deal with difficult, shocking subjects, like pornography addiction in the frum (religious Jewish) community in my most recent writing idea. Although, forget my rabbi, I’m worried enough about my parents finding out about that one.

I guess the parallel for me isn’t My Unorthodox Life, but Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev, about a young Hasidic boy who is driven to be a serious artist in the Western tradition, including painting nudes and crucifixion scenes, and gets rejected by his community as a result (the sequel novel The Gift of Asher Lev sees him somewhat re-accepted into his community).

The Review of Reviews

I only slept for about four hours last night. I’m not sure why I couldn’t sleep; probably from the heat. I tried to sleep on the sofa downstairs, as it was significantly cooler there, but I couldn’t get comfortable; I am really too tall to lie straight on it and the armrest was at the wrong angle even with a pillow. I did manage to get to volunteering on time this morning, but after less than an hour, I was getting a migraine, I guess from shlepping boxes around and moving up and down a lot in the heat. I usually come home on the bus, but I phoned Dad to ask for a lift, despite having to wait twenty minutes for him to arrive with nowhere to sit, because I was worried that the stopping and starting of the bus and having to wear a mask on it would make me throw up; as it was, even the car journey nearly made me ask Dad to pull over a couple of times in case I was sick.

By the time I got home, the solpadeine I had taken at volunteering was beginning to have an effect, but, unusually for me, I couldn’t shake the headache completely. I was OK if I sat still, but it hurt if I moved and later there was some pain behind my eyes. I took more solpadeine in the mid-afternoon, but I felt bad enough that I didn’t manage to do much today. Aside from some Torah study on the bus before the headache started, the main thing I did was draft my devar Torah for the week (I’m not hugely pleased with it — I quoted a number of sources, but couldn’t really synthesise them or draw them together). That took quite a while, admittedly because I kept getting distracted online. I didn’t feel well enough to work on my job application, or maybe I was just glad of the excuse not to deal with it.

Eventually, I decided to give up on trying to do anything. Trying not to move my head much, I watched Doctor Who: The Girl in the Fireplace, one of the few Doctor Who overt love stories that I have much time for, and a relief after a bunch of not-so-good episodes in E and my new series marathon. I’ve been critical of David Tennant’s performance before, but, to be fair, his delivery makes some corny jokes and clumsy exposition seem naturalistic, and it’s really a performance that is not to my taste more than one that is bad. And I laughed at a couple of jokes I’d forgotten, and even jumped at one of the monster bits. When I’ve watched this episode in the past, I’ve usually empathised with the Doctor: “Oh, such a lonely childhood! Doctor, so lonely, so very alone… Such a lonely little boy. Lonely then and lonelier now. How can you bear it?” It was good that I still enjoyed it even now I’m not lonely. (I’ve also always been vague about money too.)

I felt better by the time my sister and brother-in-law came for my birthday dinner (takeaway pizza and chocolate fudge cake). It was good, although I always feel I don’t talk enough at family things. I got rather a lot of books as birthday presents (I was given a budget and just ordered things…). I might talk more about the books (six fiction and two non-fiction) another time as I’m rather pressed for time now — dinner went on quite late.

I also discovered my father had mistakenly put a fanzine that contains a review of my non-fiction Doctor Who book with the birthday presents. I think this is the first review of anything I’ve ever written! It took me a couple of minutes to read, as I got a little overcome with nerves mid-reading and paused, although (full disclosure) the reviewer is a good friend of mine and I knew he would only have bothered to write the review if he’d had positive things to say — “unjustly neglected” was his verdict! Maybe I’ll pick up a couple more sales off the back of it — and, indeed the one I registered the other day might be the first.

The dinner made up for the discomforts of earlier in the day, although I will now be rushing to get ready for bed now, and to snatch a few minutes alone time to recover from peopling, or I won’t sleep even without accounting for the heat. J has asked me to come in to work earlier than usual tomorrow as we will be going out of the office in the morning, which is probably not the best timing, but at least it means that tomorrow morning won’t be too intense.

They Killed K9!

Today is my birthday according to the solar/Gregorian calendar. Although the tendency in the Orthodox Jewish world is to see the Jewish/lunar birthday as the real one (inasmuch as birthdays have any significance in traditional Judaism, which is not much), I keep the solar birthday, not least because a couple of Medieval authorities see birthdays as going by the solar calendar, plus I’m not sure how my family would cope with a switch to the lunar calendar (and when Tisha B’Av falls on a Saturday, the next day, my Hebrew birthday, becomes the saddest day of the year by default).

This is basically the first time I’ve ever been in a relationship on my birthday, albeit a long-distance one. Technically I had been dating my first girlfriend for two or three weeks when my birthday came around, but we weren’t ‘officially’ a couple and she was away leading a Jewish summer camp anyway.

I can’t find any particular significance in becoming thirty-eight, but according to tradition a number of Jewish figures had major life changes in their late thirties or early forties. According to one tradition, Moshe (Moses) spent forty years as an Egyptian prince, forty years as a Midianite shepherd and forty years as prophet and Jewish leader. Rabbi Akiva was an illiterate shepherd until he was forty, when he started to study Torah and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was thirty-six when he stopped being a humble worker and became a public tzaddik (righteous holy man and leader), at least according to tradition (I think recent scholarship has found a more public role for him earlier, although he still remains a fairly elusive figure in the historical sources).

***

I saw a library job going that I feel I ought to apply for, part-time at an mental health library. You may find some ambivalence in “I ought to apply”. I’m apprehensive about working three days a week rather than two and about having to deal with a more intense working environment. I feel I’m only just coping with my current, less intensive, job. I’m not even sure I really meet the criteria of the health library job: I have never worked in a health library and the job description seemed contradictory as to whether that was necessary. I don’t have much experience doing literature searches either, I haven’t really done any since my master’s. But I will apply if I get the time between now and the closing date, which is surprisingly close (the job was posted a few days ago, but expires on 28 July. My Mum wonders if they want to award the job to someone already in the organisation and are just posting it publicly to meet the legal requirements). I do feel that I’m applying from obligation as much as desire though.

At least I can use a previous application to the same organisation as a basis for the application. I’ve added some stuff on my new job to bring it up to date; the main thing I still have to do is the personal statement where I state why I want the job and would be a good fit for it. This is probably where I get into trouble these days, given that I’m so equivocal about my librarianship ability and have always been bad at selling myself. I also feel it’s not in my favour that I have so many gaps of unemployment, or employment in non-library jobs, something underlined by the insistence on the application that I provide a character reference to cover periods of unemployment. Presumably they worry that, if I wasn’t working, I must have been robbing banks to fund my crack habit and they want to talk to my rabbi to check that this was not the case.

My Mum was for many years in a secretarial job where there was less and less work to do and there were no real prospects for the future, but she stayed with it because it was local, because her bosses were friendly and let her take time off for Yom Tov, and especially because they would let her work flexible hours or miss time at short notice due to family emergencies. When we got to the point where I was very depressed, this became a bigger thing, as Mum would take me to psychiatrist appointments and the like. I wonder if my current job is becoming a bit like that: I stay with it because I know I can cope with it, because my boss is understanding and because it’s a Jewish organisation so I don’t need to worry about taking time off for festivals.

***

I didn’t want to apply for the job today, although I did fill in some basic parts of the form. I did some dusting, which was a dull birthday task, but needed doing. I hoover my room most weeks, but I don’t dust very often because it takes a while because of all the bric a brac I have (much of it not worth keeping out on display, I suspect, but I can’t let go) and the miniature models I’ve painted. Other than that I didn’t do much other than go to Zoom shiur (religious class); it was too hot for exercise and I decided we would celebrate my birthday en famille tomorrow because my shiur was this evening. I did have cake though, and a really nice birthday card from E (I got my cards today, but we are doing presents tomorrow).

Also, E really liked the novel I’m writing, which was a good present! Speaking of books, I think I recently had another payment for my self-published Doctor Who book, which I think is beyond the last sale I knew about, so I (probably) sold a copy to someone I don’t know! Like a real writer!

***

TV today was Doctor Who: School Reunion as part of my watching with E. The episode wasn’t as good as I remembered. These days I hesitate to criticise Doctor Who because (a) now I’m a writer, I realise how hard it is to write anything and regret how quick I was in the past to criticise (what I saw as) bad writing and (b) the Doctor Who format is flexible enough to be twisted into lots of different shapes, so I frame it more as “I don’t like this“ rather than “This is bad”, but even so, School Reunion hit a lot of my I don’t like this buttons that the programme regularly hit when Russell T Davies was showrunner, someone who I suspect has a very different opinion to me on what constitutes good Doctor Who (although the episode was actually written by Toby Whithouse, whose later writing on the show would sometimes be more to my liking). I did like Anthony Stewart Head as the villain, though. I wish we’d seen more of him.

***

It’s kind of depressing that trying to google a Talmudic quote by writing some relevant words and then “Talmud” leads to lots of results that are either hugely antisemitic or just proselytising for Jews for Jesus. Then I eventually found the quote offline and realised that I had misremembered it, and that I would have to write a completely different devar Torah…

Creativity in the Frum Community

I went to bed late, unsurprisingly when the fast didn’t go out until after 10pm. I don’t know if it was the heat or the fact that I slept so much during the day or the fast disrupting my body’s natural rhythms or the fact that I hardly did anything all day or all of the above, but I did not sleep. Not one wink! About 4.00am, the neighbourhood dogs started a barking contest and I had to shut all the windows despite the heat (although I never leave my main windows open for fear of burglars). At 4.40am I finally decided that I might as well get up and start the day in the hope that I might get an early night this evening.

This was not the best start to my Hebrew birthday! My Hebrew birthday falls on the nineteenth of July this year. My secular/Gregorian birthday is the twentieth, although we’re really celebrating on Wednesday as I have shiur (religious class) tomorrow evening.

I managed to stay awake at work; coffee was drunk, more than usual. I stayed awake even though the tasks today were very boring: copying and pasting from a spreadsheet to a Word mail merge and deleting old emails from my predecessor. I was glad that in the afternoon I could listen to music again, as the Three Weeks of mourning are over, as I needed help getting through it.

I went home on the Tube today as J isn’t driving to work now lockdown is officially over. I was glad to be able to read on the journey home, which I couldn’t do in the car, and not to have to listen to talk radio. Mask compliance was very bad on the Tube today, unsurprising as there are no signs up saying that masks are actually still mandatory on it.

I shaved my Three Weeks beard off this afternoon, so I no longer look like a bohemian and/or religious extremist. I Skyped E and had dinner with my parents, watched Doctor Who and will shortly go to bed as I feel very tired and ill (headache, nausea).

***

E sent me a link to something on Instagram the other day. I could read the post, but not the comments, as I’m not on Instagram. It said something I’ve thought for a long time, that rather than complain about the misrepresentation of Orthodox Jews in the media (I mean in fiction here (novels, TV, films), not the news media, which is a whole other problem), the Orthodox community should produce writers, directors, producers and so on who can create stories of their own set in the frum (religious) world — but that these stories should be real i.e. show the frum world in its complexity and with its faults, not just the positives in “soft focus.” E said the comments showed a lot of support for this.

As I say, I’ve thought this for years, and I’ve thought it long enough and hard enough to try to become one of those writers (we’ll see how that goes…). I worry whether the Orthodox world puts enough value on fiction and creativity generally for a whole wave of Orthodox creators to take off. There has been some movement in this direction, but there’s a long way still to go.

I do feel that I want to move on with my novel. I feel I’ve done as much as I can do to it without outside help from an editor. I do really just want to get it published so I can see if writing for a living, or at least a meaningful addition to my income, is going to work. This then ties into wanting to earn more money so I can marry E (partly to pull my weight in the household, but also because immigration is going to be really hard on our combined income level).

I think I also finally feel in a state of ‘flow’ first time in a long time, perhaps in my whole life. Writing is hard work, but I feel that I’m thinking of ideas and finding the words to say them. Dating long-distance is hard, but our Skype dates and texts flow very naturally. Things feel “right” at the moment in a way that I’m not used to.

Shabbat Hazon and Tisha B’Av (Mood Diary, Not Another Religious Post)

Shabbat (the Sabbath) was OK, except that I did not manage to fall asleep until 3am on Friday night, possibly because of the heatwave, so I overslept and missed shul in the morning again.

I went to shul (synagogue) for Minchah (Afternoon Prayers) and Talmud shiur (religious class), then went again after seudah for a pre-Tisha B’Av drasha. It was good, but I felt self-conscious not just in a blue shirt, but no jacket or tie. I think I could have got away with no tie, but I should have worn a jacket. My parents said I would be too hot and I agreed, but deep down I knew that everyone in my shul would be wearing a jacket even if they took it off on reaching shul. Also, the rabbi had said something about my wearing a blue shirt during the Talmud shiur — not critical, but it made me feel self-conscious.

I didn’t have a low chair for Tisha B’Av and was planning on just sitting on the floor (Tisha B’Av is a day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem; in Judaism, sitting low down or on the floor is a sign of mourning). Someone lent me a low chair, but I didn’t want to use it. I’m not sure why. I was a little worried it was higher than permitted, but I think mainly I just felt too self-conscious by that stage: was he being friendly or did he think I was a total am ha’aretz? And my non-leather trainers (not wearing leather shoes is another mourning custom) weren’t particularly comfortable either, although that could have been from sitting on the floor. I also got confused too about when to wear a COVID mask, and realised that I gave my mother mistaken instructions regarding end of Shabbat ceremonies when Tisha B’Av starts immediately afterwards.

Along with this, I couldn’t really follow Eichah (The Book of Lamentations, read on Tisha B’Av). I don’t know why I’ve found it so hard to engage with it the last few years. I just can’t follow or connect. To be fair, I find the Hebrew quite hard to translate in my head, but even following along seems to be hard. I just can’t concentrate that much at 10pm, especially in a heatwave and while sitting on the floor (and feeling socially awkward). Then in my shul we do kinot (laments) to ourselves, really quickly rather than slowly and communally as in my old shul. I read some kinot in Hebrew without really connecting with the poetic Hebrew, so I switched to English (really the only time of the year where I say set prayers in English), but still ran out of time. I did the last kinah at home, in Hebrew, but looking at some of the English, which felt a bit better.

As usual after Shabbat when I’m in shul I helped to fold up the tablecloths, but I’m so bad at that that I feel I would be better off not helping, except that it feels wrong to just walk out without helping. I was reminded of something I said on Ashley’s blog last week about autistic people wanting to help, but actually just getting in the way.

I struggled to sleep again last night, because of the heatwave, because of creative thoughts I kept having that I kept getting up to write down, and perhaps because shul had left me feeling disquieted. Perhaps consequently I overslept today, and when I woke up, I was not able to get up for a long time. I felt utterly drained again, and perhaps somewhat depressed, and aware that I didn’t want to break my fast until halakhic midday, a little after 1pm. I missed Shacharit (Morning Prayers. I think I finally got up about 2.30pm, made havdalah (on tea) and had something to eat. I felt a bit better after that, but I did feel that I wasn’t quite in the right mindset for Tisha B’Av, but also that I was scared to get into that dark mindset. I read Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust for a bit (a book I’ve been reading only on Tisha B’Av; in about five years, I have not finished it yet, although I might try to finish the few remaining pages before next year) and listened to a Zoom talk on antisemitism via my shul. I also went to a Zoom shiur (religious class), again through my shul, but the organiser hit “Mute all” and forgot to unmute the speaker’s computer, so it was inaudible. Someone posted in the chat to say there was no sound, but it took a while for someone present at the shiur to notice and unmute it.

I feel like I don’t find Tisha B’Av as meaningful as I used to, and I don’t know why. Not fasting (because of the danger of fasting while taking lithium tablets) is probably a big part of it. Fasting used to make me ill (headache, nausea, sometimes vomiting), but not fasting feels like not really participating. I tended to avoid shul during the day even pre-COVID, because I don’t want to have to turn down a mitzvah because I’m not fasting. Plus, I often experience burnout after the night of Tisha B’Av from the shul experience (as much social anxiety as religious devotion this year, as I said above) and then crash on the morning and struggle to get up, especially as I try to fast until halakhic midday. Or maybe not being depressed means that Tisha B’Av is not the day that I most connect with emotionally any more, the one where I can easily get into the right state of mind. To be honest, I feel like as a general rule I’m not as connected to the festivals and fasts as I’d like to be, and I don’t know how to change that. I spend so much of holy days either worried about social interactions or sleeping and trying not to oversleep that religion struggles to get in there.

I did write a Tisha B’Av thought, on the suggestion of my rabbi mentor that it would make the day more meaningful for me. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, though. In the end I posted it here, although it’s not really a good match for my blog, but I don’t want to send it to my devar Torah mailing list as it doesn’t seem right for there either — maybe not quite frum (religious) enough and a bit too daring.

Tisha B’Av and The Trial of God

When I told him I was worried about how I would get through Tisha B’Av today, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, he suggested that I write something relevant. I wasn’t sure whether it was entirely appropriate to paste it here, as really I think it will only speak to other religious Jews, who comprise some, but not all, of my audience. But I don’t feel comfortable sending it to my general devar Torah audience, so I’m posting here after all. Please don’t feel obliged to read.

The rabbi of my shul raised the question in his pre-Tisha B’Av drasha yesterday: if God is our Father, how could any father treat his children as the Jews have been treated through history, as we recall today on Tisha B’Av?  And really, we do not know the answer to this question, but we can investigate it.

On Tisha B’Av only three (really two and a half) books of Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) may be studied: Eichah/Lamentations; the bleak passages of Yirmiyah/Jeremiah (not the verses of consolation and redemption); and Iyov/Job.  Iyov is the odd one out here.  Eichah and Yirmiyah deal with the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish people, so it is logical to read them on Tisha B‘Av when we recall this.  However, Iyov is a parable about suffering, a book that starts with moral certainties, but ends in questions, explicit and implicit.

One motif in Iyov is the concept of wanting to put God on trial, which is Iyov’s recurring fantasy.  This idea, buried in Jewish thought, resurfaced later.  A number of Hasidic stories retold in Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim deal with this concept, typically involving a humble Jew who has suffered putting God on trial before a Bet Din (rabbinical court) headed by a prominent Hasidic rabbi, with the verdict going in his (the Jew’s) favour and, miraculously, his situation suddenly changing for the better.  These stories are perhaps a product of a period of relative stability in Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Most famously, at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel witnessed God being put on trial for His role in the Holocaust by the inmates there.  He was found guilty.  After a long pause, the court dissolved so that those present could pray Ma’ariv (Evening Prayers).  Wiesel would later rework the experience into a play, The Trial of God, which would intimate that it is the Angel of Death who defends God, while human beings must accuse Him.

All of these stories are based on two apparently contradictory premises that are both held to be true in Jewish thought: the reality of God and the reality of human suffering.  The Mishnah teaches us that when two verses of the Torah appear to contradict each other, we search for a third verse that harmonises them.

Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tl remarked that in Greek philosophy truth is logical and universal.  If something is true in London at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, it is true in every place and every time.  Truth in Judaism, however, is chronological and dialogical, meaning it unfolds over time and through dialogue between different individuals who all have access to only a part of the truth.  So we can say that the reconciliation of these ideas of God and of suffering is still unfolding, through God’s intervention in the world, especially through the coming of Mashiach (the Messiah), who according to tradition is born on Tisha B’Av, and through the ongoing dialogue of Jewish study, particularly as we listen to the voices of people who were once marginalised.

Beyond this is another aspect of contradiction, which is that God is with us in our suffering.  This was also seen by Wiesel at Auschwitz, where a young boy was hanged by the Nazis, and one inmate shouted “Where is God now?” and Wiesel felt an inner voice inside him say, “He is here – He is hanging on this gallows.”  This is the understanding of God being with us even when it feels like He is not with us, or even that He is complicit in our suffering.  It was brought out strongly by the Piaseczno Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira in his sermons from the Warsaw Ghetto, the sense that God is with us even as we suffer.  Again, this transcends logic, by adopting a viewpoint that unfolds over time and which has not yet unfolded to its full extent, to the point where it can be fully understood and instead we affirm it now as an act of faith, in the belief that one day it will be understood by reason too.

Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam was the Rabbi of Klausenburg.  He lost all his family and Hasidim in the Holocaust, yet afterwards he was able to declare, “The biggest miracle of all is the one that we, the survivors of the Holocaust, after all that we witnessed and lived through, still believe and have faith in the Almighty God, may His name be blessed.  This, my friends, is the miracle of miracles, the greatest miracle ever to have taken place.” 

Fear of Normality

I had a stressful day at work today, but mostly tied up in the difficult task that I sometimes have to do that I don’t really want to talk about here for confidentiality reasons. So I’m a bit stuck with my usual strategy of blogging to offload stress. I told E and my parents, which seemed to help. The other problem at work was the water cooler leaking, which was quite a big thing, but isn’t really worth relating here.

***

I just emailed a friend and, without really thinking about it, said that I’m a bit nervous about elements of coming out of lockdown. That surprised me a bit, but when I thought about it, I realised that I am nervous, although I hadn’t really considered it before, and although part of me wants to be out of lockdown. I hate wearing a mask, but I think I’m now scared to be in crowded settings without one, and with other people not wearing one. Already people on the Tube are not wearing masks, even though Transport for London has made it clear that masks will be required for the indefinite future. And from next week I will (probably) be travelling home on the Tube at rush hour. Sooner or later I’ll have to start coming in during morning rush hour too.

I am also nervous of the return to socialising – or not socialising, in my case. The feeling of being left out when everyone else socialises and I’m too anxious (or friendless), and also the discomfort I feel generally in social situations that I might try to join in, like shul kiddush (refreshments after synagogue services). Then there’s the fear that COVID will return, or something like it, or something worse (there are viruses more infectious and deadly than COVID).

The good thing about coming out of lockdown is that it brings nearer the time when E will be able to come over here to visit! But that’s still not looking like it’s going to happen soon, given the restrictions on US-UK travel. So it feels a bit like all the scary social stuff I’ve avoided for nearly eighteen months is coming back, but the one thing I really want to happen seems as far away as ever, which doesn’t really seem fair.

Carry That Weight

I went to bed ridiculously late last night. I’m not sure why; I don’t really have an excuse except bad time management and the fact that I generally prefer to go to bed late and get up late unless I have a good external reason not to do so. Still, I felt shockingly drained and burnt out when I woke up today, low mood and zero energy, and I’m not really sure why. I didn’t think I did that much yesterday, but maybe I did, or maybe I’ve just been pushing myself too hard cumulatively lately, to try to finish the latest draft of my novel so that E can read it and so that I can start looking for an agent and a publisher; trying to keep up with my shiurim (religious classes) and divrei Torah (Torah thoughts) as well as prayer and other Torah study; trying to exercise (which has almost dropped off the radar totally), to help around the house a bit and so on.

I listened to music to try to lift my mood a little and get energy. I feel bad about doing that in the Three Weeks of mourning when religious Jews are not supposed to listen to music. I know my rabbi mentor said it was OK, but part of me at least feels too functional to take advantage of that, and I have a lot of uncertainty about whether what I feel is “really” autistic burnout or what. Autistic burnout is a poorly-understood phenomenon, only recognised as a real thing by the psychiatric world about five years ago. But what I really want is to shave my itchy Three Weeks beard off, which is driving me crazy. But I will wait until Monday afternoon for that, as I’m supposed to.

E is really supportive, but we both feel frustrated about being on different continents and not knowing when that will end.

After lunch, I felt a little better. I drafted my devar Torah. It ended up not being what I intended, as the introduction grew too long and became the bulk of the piece, with an also longer-than-intended unrelated Tisha B’Av thought at the end. In fact, the whole thing took longer to write than I’d hoped, about an hour and a half. I spent half an hour or more working on my novel too, which wasn’t much, but I was reasonably pleased with what I had done. I Skyped E in the evening too, so it ended up being a better day than I expected when I woke up. I do usually manage to get to a point where I can do some things regardless of how tired/depressed/burnt out/whatever you want to call it that I feel when I wake up, I just wish I could move that point earlier in the day.

King David’s Anxious, Depressed Army

Today was a slowish day. I tried to recover a bit from the last week or so, which suddenly seemed very stressful and overwhelming, even though there was no obvious cause. I cooked dinner (vegetable curry), worked on my novel for an hour, went for a half-hour walk and went to online shiur (religious class). That was probably still doing a lot, but I feel a little better, although I’m still not going to volunteering tomorrow as I feel I need to rest a bit more. It’s too late to change my mind anyway, as they need to know who is coming in advance for security reasons.

The work on my novel was particularly frustrating as I changed a lengthy section into the present tense in the hope it would make it more immediate, but ended up changing it back to the past tense as I was worried it was off-putting and confusing. But I guess sometimes you get days like that, and at least I’m prepared to countenance radical rewrites if necessary.

While I was walking I started listening to a Normal Frum Women podcast* about ba’alei teshuva (Jews raised non-religious who became religious later in life). I haven’t heard the second half of the podcast yet, but there was some talk about the difficulties of navigating frum (religious) social settings where people can work out your religious, or non-religious, background by asking about what school you went to, what summer camp you went to (or youth movement in the UK) or which other Jews you know. I am familiar with these feelings. I did actually go to Jewish schools, but the secondary school I went to is not particularly religious (which I know sounds bizarre from an American point of view, but our religious school system is very different to theirs) and certainly I avoided the usual Jewish youth movements.

I feel that as a person on the autism spectrum, I have an additional problems with this even for the period after I became religious. I don’t know so many people in the communities that I have lived in or at school or university because I tend not to socialise so much or even talk to people. I know J has tried to play “Jewish Geography” with me, asking about people I might know from school or the community I grew up in, and usually I only knew those people as people I would recognise in the street, not people I talked to at all, and sometimes I don’t know them at all.

I also feel that religious life is supposed to go in life stages, or at least it does for most people: childhood, yeshiva/seminary, marriage, parenthood, grandparenthood and, increasingly, great-grandparenthood. Somehow I missed a number of those stages that I should have reached by now. If being a ba’al teshuva means not having the same childhood or yeshiva experiences, being on the spectrum means that I haven’t married or become a parent yet, even though I’m nearly thirty-eight. I do feel that I don’t fully fit into my shul community because of this. I tend not to go to communal social events because I feel out of place without a spouse and children at events that tend to be geared around families rather than individuals; I’ve noticed the small number of other “older singles” (I hate that phrase) and divorcees in the community also seem to avoid them too.

Incidentally, there isn’t really any communal support for high functioning autism in the Anglo-Jewish community, so far as I can tell. If you’re independently functional, you’re really left to find your own way in the community, difficult though it is to do that when you don’t have a brain built to handle interpersonal communication and relationships easily. Dating is an issue for me and doubtless for others, but also feeling that it’s OK not to want to marry and have children is not something that is really allowed for those who don’t want to go down that route. (There is an obvious halakhic issue in that Orthodox Jewish law requires men (at least) to try to get married and procreate, but I’m not going to address that now.)

I feel there are probably a lot of other people in a similar situation to me, even if they aren’t on the spectrum. I mean people who don’t quite fit into the community, who have missed the lifecycle stages and so on. I would like to reach out to some of them with my writing. I have noticed that the people I tend to connect with best online and often in person are those who are “broken” (I don’t mean this in a bad way — I apply it to myself too). The type of people where society might say that they aren’t quite normal. There’s a line about David (before he became king) that I’ve always found attractive, in 1 Shmuel 22.2 (I Samuel 22.2) about, “They gathered to him, every man who was in distress, every man who had a creditor and every man who was embittered of spirit, and he became their leader; there were about four hundred men with him.” I don’t think David’s band of warriors was literally made up of people with clinical anxiety and depression, but I don’t think it’s too extreme to see it as an army of outcasts. That is what it would have been, it’s just that different things make someone an outcast in the contemporary Jewish community as opposed to the iron age community of David’s era.

A flipside of this that I was also thinking about today is that I tend to idealise the frum community somewhat and assume that only I’m struggling with certain things. It’s easy to think that I’m the only person struggling with (for example) struggling to have kavannah in prayer (kavannah is literally ‘direction,’ is usually translated idiomatically as ‘concentration,’ but is perhaps best translated as ‘mindfulness’) or the only person struggling with understanding passages in the Talmud.

Obviously the more shameful something is, the less it is spoken about, which makes it harder to believe that lots of people struggle with it. It’s only really through listening to the Intimate Judaism podcast that I’ve learnt that lots of Orthodox Jewish teenage boys and men struggle with issues around masturbation and pornography, something that probably should have been obvious to me before (call me naive). Some things are not spoken about, hence my perhaps somewhat perverse desire to write books about these topics. I think fiction has an advantage of addressing a controversial topic at one remove which can be easier than writing non-fiction about it.

*Yes, I know I fail to meet one if not two of the qualifications for this podcast.

Arguments from Design

I’m in two minds about blogging today. I feel the need to offload a bit, but I am aware that I can’t actually say that much here about my job, plus I feel tired and want to get away from computer screens (although I was barely on the computer at all at work today).

Suffice to say I had to go somewhere by myself this morning for work without preparation, somewhere vaguely eerie to be by yourself if you haven’t been there much. I dealt with it OK, I think. To be honest, I was more worried about missing my bus stop than anything once I actually got there.

In the afternoon J and I went over the valuables I inventoried some time ago. Unfortunately, it was some months since I worked on this and I had forgotten some of what I had done. J was also critical of the way things had been assigned reference numbers in the past. I had not done this, I had just used the reference numbers provided, but I worried irrationally that he was annoyed with me too.

I didn’t feel autistically burnt out today, but I was exhausted by the time I got home. I read a novel for a while as I didn’t want to sit at my computer, but reading was a bit of a struggle. I really just wanted to vegetate, but I didn’t want to watch TV until later in the evening when I was really tired.

***

Lately I feel as if I’ve had OCD-type thoughts and catastrophising thoughts lurking at the fringes of my consciousness. I try not to give in to them, but the more I think about not thinking about them, the more I think about them. I’ve also noticed that over the years I’ve had varying level of discomfort about some things, like wearing shoes and watches, something I now associate with autistic sensory issues. It’s got worse recently, to the point where I regularly take my watch off while at work and put it in my pocket (possibly rendering wearing it redundant, although it’s easier to look at it quickly on my journey to work than getting my phone out of my pocket). I don’t take my shoes off at work, although sometimes I wish I could, but I do take them off at home. I’m not sure why this would suddenly get more difficult and intense, but I wonder if it’s part of a general feeling of being overloaded recently.

Speaking of which, I’m not going to volunteering this week. I do get a lot out of it, but I feel exhausted and can’t really face the early morning. I feel like I need to take some recuperation time. I feel a little bad, as I know they probably have fewer volunteers this week, but I feel that I need to look after myself to avoid more burnout.

***

I’m still watching The Blue Planet wildlife documentary. The undersea photography is as awe-inspiring as the sundry whales, sharks and other marine life. Watching nature reminds me of something my rabbi mentor once said to me, that two people can look at the night sky and say diametrically opposite things. One can say, “How can you look at that and not believe there is a God?” and the other can say, “How can you look at that and believe there is a God?” I guess you can say the same about the wonders of the plant and animal kingdoms, that some people see in them God’s handiwork and others just see nature. And it’s not even a creationism/evolution issue. I can accept evolution as a proof of God’s prowess. There’s a quote I think from Rav Hirsch in the nineteenth century that evolution proves God’s creative power more than separate individual creations, as all He did was create one single-celled creature and the principle of evolution and from that millions of species evolved. I think the point is that nature can point to God, but you have to be leaning that way in the first place. It doesn’t necessarily point there of itself.

For myself, I have always tended to find God more in the apparent vicissitudes of history, particularly Jewish history as well as my own personal history, and also in the depth of the Jewish tradition, as well as in human dignity and moral fortitude, but I’m aware that these don’t necessarily point to God of themselves either.

Dig A Pony

I’ve been feeling really drained all over the weekend, really drained and burnt out rather than just fatigued. On Friday I was drained even before I went to shul (synagogue). I was a bit late, for various reasons, and someone was sitting in my usual seat, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Then there was a lot of noise, clapping, thumping tables and so on during Kabbalat Shabbat. I’m not sure if there was more than usual or if I’m just worse at coping with it mid-autistic burnout. I thought a bit about leaving in the middle of the service, which I haven’t done for a long time, but I stuck with it until the end. I’m still not sure if that was the right decision.

I didn’t do much in the way of hitbodedut/spontaneous prayer at home in the evening, and I didn’t do any extra Torah study, I just read for a bit and went to bed about as early as is possible on a summer Friday, about midnight. Even so, I slept for thirteen hours, completely sleeping through the morning and missing shul. I slept for another hour and a half after lunch too, despite drinking coffee to try to stay awake as I was worried about not sleeping in the evening.

I did get to shul for Minchah (Afternoon Prayers) and Talmud shiur (religious class) afterwards. I struggled with external things again. This time the table where I usually sit was simply not there; I’m not sure where it was moved to. Then I was given Peticha (opening the Ark and taking out/putting back the Torah scrolls), but there were no tallitot (prayer shawls) and there was some confusion over who should do what as we come out of COVID regulations (should I take out the Sefer Torah and put it back or should the chazan etc.). I know this doesn’t sound like much, but with autism this kind of confusion and uncertainty can be a great deal, particularly if I’m already burnt out. I did cope with it, but I was drained again by the evening and read in my room after seudah (the third Shabbat meal) instead of playing a game with my parents.

Perhaps inevitably, I had insomnia after all that sleeping during the day, although I felt too tired to do anything useful. I ended up watching The Twilight Zone, which may not have been the best thing to watch, although it was a good episode – ten episodes in, I feel I’ve reached the type of eerie stories with a twist that I was expecting. I do admire the economy of storytelling needed to create characters and tell a whole story in just over twenty minutes, usually including establishing a fantastical premise, even if it sometimes seems like it could have done with another five or ten minutes to breathe.

Today I woke up drained again, too drained to do very much, certainly too drained to go for my usual Sunday run. I went for a walk instead, primarily to buy coffee, so I got some exercise. I relied on the heter (permission) to listen to music in the Three Weeks of mourning if you’re depressed. My rabbi mentor said it applies to autistic burnout too, but I’m not sure how to distinguish burnout from ordinary fatigue any more. There seem to be different views among people on the spectrum and researchers on whether burnout is just a long-term phenomenon (months or years), or if it can apply over a day or a number of days. My instinct is that it can be over a number of days, and that I’ve burnt myself out doing too much last week, so I let myself listen to the music to try and get myself to a normal state of mind, but it didn’t really help.

If anything, my mood slipped over the afternoon and now I feel drained and also somewhat depressed and lonely. Loneliness is more apparent than real as my parents are here (albeit absorbed in the football) and E has been texting during the day. I do miss E, though, and it’s frustrating not knowing when we will be able to see each other in person. Perhaps it’s harder to bear the uncertainty on a day like today when I don’t feel well.

I did a bit of Torah study in the early afternoon, but I didn’t feel up to doing any work on my novel. I would have liked to have done more Torah study, or just read a novel (I stopped awkwardly in the middle of a chapter of The Master and Margarita at lunchtime), but I was too drained to concentrate. I did go on a virtual tour of Jewish Rome (as in ancient Rome) which was booked for the afternoon, and I did enjoy it although my attention wandered by the end. E was supposed to come on the tour with me, but she had to duck out as she’s going to look after a friend who had surgery. She tried going at an earlier timeslot, but it didn’t work out; hopefully she’ll be able to watch a recording. After that I was exhausted and watched TV, The Twilight Zone and The Blue Planet, where, bizarrely, David Attenborough kept talking about “The twilight zone,” by which he meant the deep part of the ocean where there is almost no sunlight light.

It feels like I didn’t do as much as I wanted, but also that I probably did more than was wise, which just makes me feel that coping with autism is like navigating a maze in the dark while blindfolded. Just trying to feel myself along and often falling over. I’m just glad I have my parents and E to help me.

***

While I was listening to music this afternoon, The Beatles’ song Dig A Pony came on. It’s one of John Lennon’s “nonsense poetry” songs where the words don’t really mean anything and are just there for the sounds and rhythms. This lack of coherence seemed appropriate to how I feel today, or rather, how I am (or am not) thinking, hence it became this post’s title.

***

I’ve been thinking about my life again and trusting in God. For a long time trust in God seemed impossible. My life seemed dominated by bad decisions that I had made that had ruined everything. Now I feel that even if I had changed small things in my life (choice of school, not going to yeshiva), I probably would not have changed the outcome that much. It was determined too much by the big things. And if I had changed any of those big things, I would have been a totally different person. Maybe a better or happier person, but not me. And these days I have a degree of peace of mind in the thought of being me, certainly enough not to want to be someone else, at least not as much as I might have wanted to be in the past. So now I have some peace when I look back on my life and feel that it probably was for the best, and that it’s harder to totally derail my life than I thought it was.

Stuck in The Twilight Zone

I feel burnt out today. Really burnt out, not just tired. I did a lot this week (as E reminded me… she’s a good girlfriend that way), possibly too much. I need a “battery life” indicator for my body! And brain, actually, as the burnout is mental as much as physical.

The easiest way to change this is probably to stop volunteering on therapy days, despite the fact that I do get something from volunteering — as much to do with social contact in a “safe” environment, and the satisfaction of seeing a task through to its conclusion as with the actual chessed (kindness) element, although that is there. But it is exhausting on the weeks when I have therapy afterwards in the afternoon. My therapist is away for six weeks, though, and soon after that everything will be disrupted by a month of Yom Tov (Jewish festivals), and by that stage they are hoping to move volunteering to a place that I probably can’t get to easily as I don’t drive, so it’s probably academic now anyway.

Whatever the reason, I got up after noon, missed even the late time for davening Shacharit (praying Morning Prayers), struggled to get dressed and do my pre-Shabbat (Sabbath) chores. I worked on redrafting my novel for about half an hour. I didn’t really have the energy or time to do more than that today. I got through another chapter, but I didn’t change much, and I can’t work out if that’s good or bad. Good that it’s in a reasonable state or bad that it’s not in a good state, but I can’t work out how to change it. I don’t really have much objectivity about it any more.

I did about half an hour of Torah study too, less than I wanted, but I was running out of time before Shabbat (in the summer, Friday night dinner is so late that there isn’t time for Torah study afterwards, especially if I want to try to get up early in the morning for shul (synagogue)). I finished reading Ezra, which isn’t really a whole book. Originally it and Nehemiah formed a single book, but it was divided by Christian publishers. They also split Shmuel (Samuel), Melakhim (Kings) and Divrei HaYamim (Chronicles) in two. I can understand splitting those books, as they’re all very long, but Ezra/Nehemiah together still isn’t particularly long, much shorter than books like Yeshayah (Isaiah) and Yechezkel (Ezekiel). I feel my Tanakh study is a bit cursory when I’m reading without some kind of commentary, so I’m glad the Koren Maggid book on Nehemiah arrived yesterday.

***

I watched more Twilight Zone. I like it, but it suffers from telling stories in twenty-two minutes, to allow for adverts. The stories have a beginning and an end, but not always a middle. In Escape Clause, a narcissistic hypochondriac sells his soul to the Devil in return for eternal life and youth, unless he chooses to die, which he assumes he never will. The Devil, of course, knows that sooner or later he will bore of eternal life and especially the absence of risk, and ask to die. But we don’t see him get bored, we just jump from him signing away his soul to throwing himself under a train to see if it will kill him (it doesn’t). It was a bit jarring. That was the most extreme case, but there are other stories it affected too. (The other problem with Escape Clause, of course, was that censorship in the 50s meant that they couldn’t talk about Hell, which made the decisions seem rather less significant than they should have done.)

(Not) Bad Day

My day got off to a bad start. I overslept and felt burnt out and struggled to get going. I just missed my train, then got on the wrong train (going on the wrong branch of the Northern Line), but didn’t realise until two stops after the lines diverged. Then I got lost in Euston Station trying to find the right branch and get to work. I was fifteen minutes late for work in the end, although fortunately J didn’t object (or say I was an idiot when I told him why I was late). Then I made a mistake writing a receipt.

At this stage I was ready to label today as a Bad Day, but I remembered something I heard a few days ago from Kayla Levin on the Normal Frum Women podcast (which I listen to sometimes despite not being a woman and possibly not being normal) about being wary of creating narratives that have no objective measure. In this case, I can’t objectively see a “Bad Day,” it’s just a label I put on a series of events that I could understand and narrate differently.

So I tried to see it just as an ordinary day with some bad things, and I think I did OK with that. It wasn’t a great day, it was a dull and boring day at work followed by a Doctor Who episode I’ve never liked (New Earth) and distractingly noisy neighbours when I Skyped E in the evening, but not necessarily a universally Bad Day. And I enjoyed Skyping E.

***

On my blog and other people’s blogs, I shy away from controversy, particularly politics. I keep quiet rather than voice opinions that I feel others may disagree with. Yet, when I think about the type of fiction I want to write, I think I’m increasingly drawn to things that might arouse controversy and even “cancellation.” I can’t work out if I’m actually a secret controversy-hound, or if everything nowadays is politicised and there are no “neutral” subjects any more. I guess I want to write about things that interest me, things that make me feel emotional (positive or negative emotions), and to deal with topics where I’m trying to work towards some kind of understanding of a complex situation. Often those things lead to things that are controversial.

Then this evening I read an article about diversity readers (people who read a manuscript to critique its portrayal of some kind of minority identity). I had already heard about this, but I can’t make up my mind if they’re positive or not. I can see the advantage of weeding out egregious errors and pointing out if someone has written something grossly offensive, but I worry about a drift towards banning writers from imagining what it’s like to be someone else, someone very different, which I think is an important part of being a writer, not to mention a reader of fiction. As Lionel Shriver said, this will end in the banning of all writing that isn’t autobiography, because we can never really know what other people think.

Looking at my own writing about a high-functioning autistic character, an autistic diversity reader might see my novel as not reflecting their experience… but it’s based on my unique experience of autism, mixed in with artistic licence and plot necessity. I haven’t captured all of my experiences, partly because I’m not a perfect writer, partly because it’s impossible to capture a complex life in 80,000 words. I’m sure my other characters are open to criticism from an identity politics point of view, and up to a point I would work with criticism, but beyond a certain point it’s my novel, my characters and my plot, not the diversity reader’s.

Just to show how difficult it is to present an “authorised” version of someone’s identity, when the film of Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience came out, set in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in the UK, a lot of online American Jewish commenters complained that the characters were constantly wishing mourners a “long life.” “Jews don’t do that,” they said. Except that wishing mourners a long life is a very established custom across the Anglo-Jewish community, from the frum (religious) to the very non-religious. It just wasn’t a Jewish custom they were aware of, because they were so focused on Judaism in America and maybe Israel representing the Jewish experience everywhere. An American Jewish diversity reader might have criticised Alderman for writing something that was true to her experience of Jewish life in the UK. I think this shows how difficult it is to judge whether a depiction of an individual or community is “acceptable.”

Packing, Watching, Reading

I went to volunteering at the food bank this morning, dragging myself somewhat unwillingly out of bed. I was glad I did go, as we were short-handed (a lot of teenagers/young adults who help are away on summer camp, I assume as camp leaders) and one of the organisers described me as an expert in sorting the large bags of non-perishable food. I’m not quite sure where expertise comes into it, as I just follow a list of what’s needed, but I was grateful for the compliment.

I also did a stock check, which made me rather nervous about miscounting, or rather mis-estimating, as I was often dealing with large quantities of food, counting packets in large plastic crates and then multiplying by the number of crates, something that would only work if all the crates had equal amounts of food in them, or if I noticed and took into account which crates had more or less than average. I think I did OK, though, and I don’t think it has to be hugely accurate, just to indicate what we need to stock up on before next week.

I did make the mistake of saying that a parking space was free when the area was supposed to be used later, which I felt bad about.

In the afternoon I spent a while working on my devar Torah. I’m not sure if my idea this week was any good, but I’m committed to it now. I also had therapy, so I didn’t have any time to work on my novel; as I said yesterday, I expected this and did some extra work yesterday to balance it. I did some ironing in the evening, so it was a pretty full day.

***

I mentioned yesterday that E and I are watching Doctor Who in sync. As she can’t watch every night, and sometimes I’m tired enough to watch more than forty-five minutes of TV, I recently bought a couple of DVDs to watch by myself. I bought somewhat on impulse some programmes I hadn’t seen before. I’m getting a little better at taking a chance on TV I haven’t seen.

When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of wildlife documentaries, but over the years I drifted away from them. I bought The Blue Planet to see if I could get back into them. I watched the first episode tonight. It was interesting, and breath-takingly filmed, but I think my attention-span was small when watching to unwind after a busy day and I didn’t take much of it in. Still, it was good to watch whales, even if they were attacking and eating other whales; I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that killer whales eat other whales (I thought they eat seals and the like), but I guess the clue is in the name.

The other DVD I bought was season one of The Twilight Zone. I thought if I’m into eerie vintage TV science fiction, then I should really give this a try, this being the urtext in many ways, at least for American television (the UK had the Quatermass serials before The Twilight Zone aired. I really like those too). So far I’ve watched the first four self-contained episodes. They held my attention, but weren’t especially eerie or scary, with the partial exception of the first episode, which might have been more mysterious if I hadn’t remembered a spoiler that I must have read years ago. To be fair, most of them weren’t trying to be scary, which makes me wonder when the programme started going down that route. I’ll probably watch at least one more episode tonight, as it’s too early for bed, but I’m too tired to read. To my surprise, the DVD came with a free book about the series which looks interesting, although it has mixed reviews on Goodreads. I’m more likely to read a physical book than to read production notes subtitles or watch a DVD special features documentary, so this seemed a nice bonus.

Speaking of reading, I started The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov at the weekend. A bit like The Twilight Zone, it’s holding my attention, but I’m not quite sure why. It feels like it’s supposed to be a comedy, but I feel I don’t quite get the author’s sense of humour, like watching Monty Python when you sort of get it, but not quite. I’ll persevere for a bit and see what happens.

***

Not that I would ever go for such a job, but I saw an advert for a “Gag Gift and Prank Product Developer”. I do wonder what you would get asked in an interview for that job! I mean, presumably you would want to seem irreverent and mischievous, but not to the extent that you would swindle the company or get them into trouble with some misconceived/offensive/dangerous idea.

The Fandom Menace

E is becoming a Doctor Who fan. This was not my intention, although I’m not upset about it. E wanted to watch some Doctor Who “with” me (i.e. the same episodes on the same days, on different continents), so we watched the 2005 season, the first season of the revived series. E really liked it. Then we watched a couple of older stories, partly because I couldn’t face watching lots of the new series without a break, partly because I thought it might contextualise some things for E. We watched City of Death (1979), which E liked, but not hugely, which surprised me a bit as it has long had a reputation for being the most non-fan-friendly story in the original series and I feel it’s one of those closest in style to the new series. We watched Genesis of the Daleks (1975) because I thought she might like to see the origin of the Daleks, and she really liked it. This surprised me a bit as I worried she would find it cheap and a bit sombre as she had complained that City of Death, generally regarded as the funniest story of the original series, if not ever, was not funny enough. In the last few days we watched The Mind Robber (1968), which I was nervous about because it’s in black and white and has very different production standards to modern TV, and also because it has a special place in my affections (not my first story, but the first that really got my attention), so I was extra worried that she wouldn’t like it. However, E really liked this too, particularly the fantasy/Lewis Carroll atmosphere and the regular characters of the second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, a favourite Doctor-companion team of mine too. So it’s all good. Tonight we’re going back to the new series with the 2005 Christmas special and then the 2006 season over the next couple of weeks.

***

I felt drained today after doing so much yesterday, but also felt that I had no choice but to deal with things, where “things” were: working on my novel for an hour and forty minutes; going to a Zoom shiur (religious class); going for a short walk and doing shopping; and cooking dinner (bean burgers). I decided to work on my novel today and write my devar Torah tomorrow rather than splitting both 50:50. It seemed easier this way, given that I had already booked the shiur for today.

I also filled in an Office of National Statistics survey. I didn’t really want to do it, but Dad wanted the £10 voucher given as a reward and the whole household had to fill it in to qualify. They asked mainly about my employment status, but there was the usual issue of the ethnicity question, where “Jewish” is identified as a religious status and not an ethnic one. The reality is that there are lots of ethnic Jews who do not practice the Jewish religion, and converts (not as many, but a non-trivial number) who practice the Jewish religion, but are not ethnically Jewish. I don’t think this is hard to understand, but lots of people seem to struggle with it.

Hanging on the Telephone

I wasn’t going to blog today, despite things not being great, but they got worse in the last hour of work, although not hugely bad (trying not to catastrophise).

I woke up early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, then fell asleep and overslept. I had a weird dream, which I won’t go into here, which left me a bit unsure of what, if anything, my unconscious was trying to tell me — possibly something negative about myself, but probably just that I have mixed feelings about my religious community, and that I know someone in a position of religious influence who makes jokes that someone in his position should not make, both things I’ve known for a long time. Or maybe it was just a crazy dream that didn’t mean anything.

Work was slow today. It took three cups of coffee, a sandwich and two cups of tea for me to feel alert, by which time it was afternoon. But things were going OK until the last hour.

J has a habit of asking me to do something and then piling on more and more things. This can be a task (“Do X. And Y. And Z.”), but in this case was a phone call with more and more things to say. When he does this, I often don’t realise a long list is coming, so I’m not ready to write things down, then there’s a rush to try to catch up with him or to try to remember everything. I do need to feel more comfortable writing things down, as my memory and processing are not always good. This is undoubtedly an autistic executive function issue. Usually it’s not a huge problem as we’re in the same office so I can ask for clarification, but in this case it was a phone call and I couldn’t ask him for help. I got so flustered on the call, partly from the long list of things to say, and partly because I’m not good on the phone (autism again and social anxiety), that I was not sure if I had told the other person what they needed to do correctly. I also panicked and somehow convinced myself that I didn’t need to say the last thing on the list when it might have been helpful, not the first time I’ve done something like that.

My job isn’t hugely interesting, but I can do most of it after having been there for eight or nine months now (even given that my mind sometimes blanks and I suddenly can’t remember basic things). But I struggle with phone calls and don’t know what to do about them. J is trying to give me more experience with them, particularly this type of call, which I can’t explain here as it will make my job too obvious, but it’s something important that involves government bureaucracy and dealing with stressed, emotional people — not a good mix. But I worry that if the problem is autism, practise isn’t going to make the problem go away. It doesn’t help that there’s a key part of the journey of paperwork between government bureaucracy, our office and various other people that I just can’t get my head around properly, no matter how many times J explains it to me or I re-read my notes. I guess it’s because I haven’t been through it myself and it’s just too abstract for me at the moment. I suppose practise might help here.

I don’t know whether to say anything to J, or, if so, what. I don’t want to sound like I’m not suitable for the job, but I don’t want to monumentally mess something up down the line when I’m in the office without J.

***

On the way home, J had talk radio on as usual. It seemed a 50:50 split among those phoning or texting in between those who thought it insane and irresponsible that we are coming out of lockdown in just two weeks time (so soon!) and those who thought it insane and irresponsible that we were in lockdown for so many months in the first place (so long!). That’s democracy for you, I suppose. Like most issues nowadays, I have no real idea of what the right answer is and don’t feel myself knowledgeable enough to voice an opinion, but I will be glad if we can safely leave behind some aspects of lockdown, although public transport operators are already hinting at masks remaining compulsory regardless of the advice of central government.

***

I was pretty drained by the time I got home because of work, the phone call and the journey. I went for a walk in the hope that fresh air and time away from screens would help revive me. It didn’t, but it was worth exercising a bit. I did some Torah study and ate dinner with my parents. I had a long Skype call with E; apparently some screen time isn’t so draining!

***

A conversation on another platform (Livejournal) makes me wonder whether I left Doctor Who fandom as much because I don’t have time for it as because other fans seem to respond to the programme in very different ways to me these days, not to mention the politics I found on Twitter. I feel like time is a commodity I don’t have much of at the moment and I need to make room for more activities that are being crowded out, particularly fiction reading. I’m thinking of imposing – or trying to impose – some kind of time limit on my blogging and blog reading. I don’t want to give up on it completely, but I definitely need to get more time somehow and to stop idle procrastination. I’ve already become more selective in what posts I read. In the past I used to read all the posts by everyone I follow, whereas now I’m more willing to skip posts on busy days or if people are posting a lot. I enjoy encountering people online, but I enjoy encountering people in books too.

Busy Weekend

The last few days have been busy. I went to shul (synagogue). I felt thrown, and I don’t know why. Our rabbi was away, which I knew, although had forgotten, but another rabbi was there, a rather prestigious one who I thought had moved out of the area. I don’t know if it was an autistic thing, being thrown by a small change in plan, or my usual self-esteem issues, feeling that he could sense that I wasn’t frum (religious) “enough” somehow (from my non-white shirt?), even though he had his back to me for most of the service, but I felt awkward the whole time I was there. When I got home, I found myself sniping at my parents over dinner even though there was no good reason for that. Plus, I found myself overly-focused on an ongoing argument in the Anglo-Jewish community and wanting to write an angry letter to the Jewish Chronicle (which so far I have not done).

I woke up about 7.30am on Saturday morning. I should really have got up so I could go to shul, even though it was a little early, but I stayed in bed and wanted to fall asleep again and miss shul, which is what happened. I’m not sure why I felt like that, if it was a reaction to the previous evening. I did go to shul later, for Minchah (Afternoon Service) and Talmud shiur (religious class), which I followed a bit better than usual.

Today I overslept a bit and had to rush to get ready for dinner at my sister and brother-in-law’s house with them, my parents, my brother-in-law’s parents and his sister. It was inside, and technically an illegal number of people, which I felt bad about, but I also felt that I really had to go, particularly as they had got vegetarian food for me. I enjoyed it, but by 4.00pm, I was completely peopled out and spent the last hour or so catching up with blogs on my phone (I hadn’t really been online since Friday afternoon), even though I would normally consider it rude to sit at the table engrossed in my phone when everyone else is talking.

Other than that, I’ve just been depressed by reading about the Batley and Spen by-election, which seems to have had a lot of anti-Israel sentiment, alongside anti-Indian and anti-LGBT sentiment. Any election with George Galloway’s name on the ballot is going to involve a lot of excrement-throwing, but this seems particularly bad. Lots of traditional Labour voters were abstaining and I can’t say I blame them. Politics is too depressing for words at the moment.

I did manage to read most (although not quite all) of this week’s super-long double Torah portion today and still went for a run (I had a slight headache afterwards), so I guess it’s been a reasonably good and certainly very busy weekend. It’s not surprising I’m a little exhausted and in need of Doctor Who!

“Am I a good person?” ‘Pure O’ OCD

I’m slightly wary of writing this in case it exacerbates a delicately-balanced situation, but here goes: lately I’ve been having thoughts that verge on ‘pure O’ OCD (obsessive thoughts without compulsions). These never completely went away before, but had been quiescent for a while. Lately, they’ve sprung up again. I’m not sure why, perhaps, perversely, a response to various things in my life going better (job, getting back together with E, progress on my novel, feelings of religious progress).

Pure O OCD can take many forms. It often manifests in ways centred on moral worth, one way or another, hence its other name of ‘scrupulosity.’ It can appear as doubt about moral or religious worth: “Am I a good person?” or “Do I really believe in God?” It can also manifest in other ways, particularly where a concern about moral worth shades into fear of performing immoral actions: “Am I a racist? Do I want to hurt people? Do I want to abuse children?”

I’ve been having thoughts like this recently. Actually, I’ve had them for years, but they might be more frequent and disturbing lately. I don’t think they meet the requirements for diagnosis with OCD, certainly in terms of distress. I do not feel hugely distressed the way my OCD distressed me in the past. I know this is my brain, not me. Nevertheless, it is hard to ignore the “Am I a bad person?” thoughts completely, especially when they are pushing on an open door inasmuch as I wonder about my moral life a lot anyway.

The other, related, thing I’ve been doing lately is ruminating on certain things I’ve done in the past that were less than morally perfect. I’m aware that, objectively, the misdeeds were minor. If we have a scale of bad deeds from 1 to 10 where 1 is a minor breach of traffic law, for example, and 10 is genocide, then these are a 3 at most, probably lower (small breaches of lockdown laws included). And they were a long time ago, some going back to adolescence. There also isn’t really anything that I can do to change what happened or rectify things. But I keep thinking about them.

Part of me wishes there was some kind of ritual I could do to atone, or in Jewish terms, to make a tikkun (rectification), to draw a line under the past. But then, wanting to do a ritual to remove obsessions is OCD, so it’s probably not a good idea.

Like I said, I don’t think this is pathological OCD, so I don’t want to go to a doctor or psychiatrist. I might talk to my therapist, as I’m seeing her anyway. I’m not hugely distressed by the thoughts, I just worry where they might lead. I would be tempted to do some exposure therapy, but I find exposure therapy for thoughts without compulsions tricky and would probably need a CBT therapist to help, which, as I said I don’t want to do, particularly as I don’t think I’m actually diagnosable. If anything, I would worry that focusing on my thoughts for exposure therapy would make things worse. But the situation is there, and it’s upsetting and worrying me a little.