Sublime

(It is interesting, in light of the role that food plays in Jewish culture, that intense grief and guilt are expressed by giving up food!)

I appreciate that we’ve more or less agreed that there’s no permanent hell—that idea never caught on in Judaism).

Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period.

Twenty-two years later, a more recently arrived relative, a middle-aged man who is also the kindest of their lot, will throw my first novel on the floor and spit on it, perhaps out of ideological considerations. When I think of my relatives, I think of this kind of emotional village excess. To throw the book on the floor, fine. To spit on it, sure.

Maybe he was hoping he would come back as candy.

he still couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, like old medicine bottles full of remedies that never worked but that you didn’t dare throw away on the off chance they would someday do what they promised, that you’d be stricken by chance with the one disease only they could cure, two weeks after they’d been pulled off the market.

Jewish families have taken the money that might have been spent on a fancy casket and given it to a charity that had meaning to the deceased.