I went to Marine Park this afternoon though I should have been camming.

It was an odd hour of the afternoon, too close to dinner time, so there weren’t really any families milling around, not even around the sports fields and walking paths before the Salt Marsh trail. I didn’t see or feel that much of interest, but I took photos of the milkweed flowers and looked at the osprey chicks through my binoculars. I saw some crabs, I saw a mute swan. On the way back, I biked on a different street than usual and saw various Jewish families along a tree-lined and rather shady stretch of houses.

The area south of Brooklyn College has become an icon of a wish for me.

Midwood, which I believe much of the Jewish community simply calls “Flatbush,” is a suburban neighborhood spanning Avenue H to Avenue M, bordered to the West and East by Ocean Ave and Nostrand Ave. The houses and shuls and kollel are large and beautiful and Bedford Ave is so wide there, and it takes one all the way to Brighton Beach. I’ve gotten in a habit of going to Pomegranate Market to buy a few Kosher meats each Sunday, and of going to Wolf’s, a small bodega-like grocery store just a few blocks away from me, to buy pineapples. I bought a pineapple and a few shallots, and some Satmar chicken bones after my outing to Marine Park, and also picked up a a copy of the Jewish Press at the entrance. There was a full page ad for Cuomo, with a list of all the Jewish sects that had endorsed him. There were ads for Inna Vernikov of Sheepshead Bay; she’s the only Republican councilwoman in Brooklyn, and I later learned that she had brandished a gun at a pro-Palestine demonstration at Brooklyn College. This world is very different from the one I have been educated in, and I imagine many of my peers from high school or college would feel a certain ire towards these Zionist ads, and I find myself sympathetic to both sides, though the argument for Cuomo as a champion of the Jewish community seems much flimsier than the argument for Mamdani’s lesser interest in being friendly with Israel.

It’s hard to write about what makes me so fascinated with Jewish Midwood without cutting to the fact that two parents of two men I’ve liked or loved are from here. Jed’s mom is from Flatbush, which probably means Midwood, and Adam’s dad grew up in Kensington and went to high school in Bensonhurst but went to Brooklyn College. I don’t know anyone who lives in Midwood now, or at least I didn’t, until I started taking the train more regularly in the mornings. There’s always a handful of Orthodox Jews on the 8:50 or 8:44 Eastchester-Dyre bound 5 train, and I have come to recognize at least one person on the train almost every day. We all take the 5 train to Bowling Green, Wall Street, or Fulton Street, and try to get somewhere before 9:30.

These are Modern Orthodox men, who wear kippahs or baseball caps and the usual office clothes of those who might work in finance. They are not “black hatters,” for the most part, and I rarely see any Jewish women on the morning commute.

I am in love with one of them in particular, a man whom I’ve dubbed “Jewish Daddy.” His hair is silver, he’s not a young man, but not particularly old either. He wears a Yankees cap, silver glasses, and a black polo and black pants and black ON running shoes. He always carries a black laptop bag and an orange flamingo tote bag, with the word and an animal-shaped logo. This turns out to be a Jewish baby clothing store.

He hunches over his phone and reads intently on the train. Well, that’s what I thought. What else would he be doing, staring intently at his phone, but reading? One day he sat next to me, and I looked over and saw that he was reading a text in Hebrew. It was labelled in English as the Siddur Ashkenaz; those were the only words I remembered. The next time I saw him, I saw that his mouth was moving along with the words; once his voice became minutely audible as he hit a certain word, like a chord, like an organ pedal. It’s not quite reading, this act of davening, which involves reciting the words silently. As he does it, it is so rapid, and I wonder what he retains or what he feels as he recites a text he no doubt knows from heart and has known from heart for decades.

I actually know his name. His bag, I realized one day, has a company logo emblazoned on it. He works in corporate law at a firm in 3 WTC, the same building Sam works in, which I got to go inside of once. His name is Ben Bomrind and he is 50 and he is married and has three children. He lives in Midwood, he went to a Rabbinical college, and then he went to law school. I watch him pray on the train once or twice a week.

Ben Bomrind is strong-looking, and probably six feet tall, with fierce blue eyes and silver hair. He was blond when he was younger, which the company photo confirms, and his phone’s lock screen shows him with his blond son. I figured out that he has two daughters as well, and at least one is married. They are about my age, or a little younger, it seems. I know all this through fastbackgroundcheck and facebook.

When he looks around his eyes never settle. He finishes his prayers by the time we get to Atlantic Ave and a lot more people, often more professionally dressed, get on the train. His eyes rove around but he doesn’t stay with anything. I have no confidence that he recognizes me or notices me, which only makes him a more perfect subject.

And there is another man, much younger, probably in his 30s or late 20s. He is smaller and has dark hair. He davens too, but allows his eyes to wander off the page as he recites the words, and he has looked at me a few times in the midst of it. I enjoy the lackadaisical way in which he davens inasmuch as it shadows BB’s seriousness.

After seeing the second guy I decided to learn Hebrew, at least enough to be able to sound out the Siddur in Hebrew. I have the Sefaria app on my phone and I browse sections of the Torah on the train. There is so much text there, and I know there is no way I could learn this material without some kind of external enforcement.

I can’t truly focus or dedicate myself to this gargantuan learning project yet, so I’ve been reading an academic monograph called The Slayers of Moses more consistently. I found the book when looking for sources on Freud’s latent Jewishness, but have found the section on Freud less interesting than the first half of the book, in which the author draws out some fundamental divisions between Jewish and Christian thought.

“For the Jew,” Handelman writes, “God’s presence is inscribed or traced within a text, not a body,” unlike in Christian theology, which moves towards “visible theophany.”

According to Handelman, the word for “word” in Hebrew, davar, might be translated as “reality” rather than “thing.” It does not imply a radical separation between signifier and signified, there is no fundamental self-alienation in the word davar.

We must begin then, as usual, with the Greeks. And “Greek philosophy more or less begins,” writes Hans-Georg Gadamer, “with the insight that a word is only a name, i.e., that it does not represent true being.'” Indeed, the Greek term for word, onoma, is synonymous with name. By contrast, its Hebrew counterpart—davar—means not only word but also thing. It was precisely this original unity of word and thing, speech and thought, discourse and truth that the Greek Enlightenment disrupted. And this cleavage determined the subsequent history of Western thought about language. (3)

Though davar means both thing and word in Hebrew, it is crucial to point out that thing did not have the Greek connotations of substance. As I. Rabinowitz puts it, ‘the word is the reality in its most concentrated, compacted, essential form.' Reality is a far more appropriate word to use than thing, for it does not evoke the same connotations as do substance and being. (32)

In the Rabbinic view, by contrast, there is no mimetic conception of language, no radical separation of word and thing, signifier and signified. Consequently, there was no need for a mediator, no sense of language as loss, exile, detour, or the text as a curse. The movement out of the text was, instead, an exile and detour. (89)

Moreover, the Christian definition of sign and thing was entirely alien to Jewish thought, for the Christian ideas came from Greek ontology. Perhaps one of the most crucial moves was Philo’s use of logos in place of nous, his compounding word with the Greek principles thought and being. This was the Jewish davar (word thing) transposed into Greek ontology. The Hebrew davar was not, as we have seen, a res, a being in the Greek sense. The essential contrast for the Jews was not between sign and thing or spiritual and literal, God and the word—but between God and the world. The Jews did not need a mediator between signs and things, words and being. Reality was already divinely verbal, not silently ontological. (104)

I rarely experience the word as reality, or writing as a beautiful process of wording. It is a stolid, dead aftereffect, it is absolutely separate and dead and distinct from the real. I am a product of the Greco-Christian world, or a Greco-Christian education system.

But I have been moving toward reality as it exists in words. I think the clearest representation of this is in my decision to study and practice psychoanalysis instead of studying or writing literary texts. Psychoanalysis is the only domain in which words have a necessary relation to reality. I feel it as I listen to my patients, I feel how their words constitute a psychic reality. It’s a fascinating way of knowing words.

I dare compare it to the experience of watching Ben Bomrind.

I had other forms of religiosity before I got into psychoanalysis. I tried to render present a distant lover through the exchange of words, the exchange of letters. The epistolary mode of contact made the lover, or my conception of him at a distance, an idol. I came up against the limits of my devotion to this idol when I realized that what I really worshipped was his absence, or the act of addressing his absence through my modes of address. Somehow speaking about him before somebody else allowed to say something far more true than writing about him on my own, and I lost interest in the passion before the absence, or the abstractness of my sense of myself as feminine.

I became a woman in order to have my desires participate in reality. I wanted to date men as a woman, and see what that was all about. I didn’t want to have my femininity remain abstract, or ideal. I had to become a woman in the real world, even if it would pollute my male fantasy of what femaleness could be and leave me without that private haven. And I had to see Z more, in real life, even if it would disillusion me.

I think of Jewishness as a mode of being-in-contact, of being in contact with the world, and this has a formidable influence on how I live my life. It often feels like writing itself is so out of touch with the world, but it remains the best way to remain in contact with those who aren’t here. Consequently I never write about the things that are close.

To see the things that are close, I have to create a separation, perhaps through comparison or figuration. When I write about a cock I defamiliarize it. But that’s because my experience of it in real life is defamiliarized, so what I write is not far from what I actually experienced or consciously thought of as I observed it in reality.

Handelman writes that “idols, as the Jews understood them, like fetishes, were a desperate attempt to render presence, a reified sign, one might almost say a metaphor. It is almost as if the gentiles, in the Jews' reading, sought to evade the temporality inherent in the human condition by reifying their signs and thereby eternalizing significance in the here and now.” (117). I agree, I think it is really essential to not evade temporality, to not evade the imbrication of acts and their consequences.

When I write I rarely employ metaphors, and maybe this comes at the cost of writing something more wonderful. But I am suspicious of creating immediate effects, and I’d rather fail than lose out on the tangled experience of reading something that makes you think. Nevertheless, I enjoy writing about cocks sometimes, because cocks are living metaphors. There is no way of knowing what a cock is without being able to construct a metaphor around a cock. But the cock is really a metonym for sex itself. I used to be so interested in the metaphor-metonymy divide. I wrote my senior thesis on this subject; there I referred to the theory of metaphor to challenge the separation of metaphor and metonymy. I invoked the idea of the parábola or parable as a kind of in-between, but ultimately I believe my thesis promoted metonymy over metaphor.

Metonymy is the Jewish mode of figuration. In choosing to represent something using a small part of it, one upsets or sets into relief the hierarchy between big and small, or subset and governing set, making us think about magnitudes and proportions and implications. The Christian parable does something close to this if understood as parabolic, but the parables end up being the one truth around the figure of Christ, who is employed largely as a metaphor. You could say that being the son of God makes him a metonym, but he is a metonym turned into a metaphor. According to D.H. Lawrence, Christ is what you get when you consider the fact that you need to die in order to be reborn. That you are dead, already. Christianity is the death religion, the religion of alienation from life and language. It is a “white mythology,” to use Derrida’s words.

In Greco-Christian thought, metaphor is what happens to a word or name and depends on a relation of resemblance where there is a transfer of one word or name or idea for another. Resemblance here passes over into substitution, election, identification, cancellation, and the differences underlying the transfer are effaced (“white mythology”). As we have seen, in Rabbinic thought, the relation of the word to the thing is not a relation of substitution to begin with. Rather, the relationships underlying the logic of Rabbinic (or propositional) interpretation—and psychoanalysis—are contiguity, juxtaposition, and association. Here resemblance never effaces difference, as if never becomes is, the literal is never cancelled. Say the Rabbis, “No text ever loses its plain meaning” (55)

I love that last line, no text ever loses its plain meaning.

I tend to equate writing with the plastic arts: drawing, painting, photographing. The writing on a personal website is more like a picture than it is like the text of the Torah, or the text of liturgy in particular, which does not engage in mimesis or representation.

The trouble is that writing is always losing its plain meaning.

And isn’t the metaphor the biggest trick, a thing of deadness, it kills time, it kills the diachronic passage of the one moment to the next, it says you can substitute one thing for the other and burn down the whole world. Sometimes that violence is breathtaking.

I don’t mean that writing is always innately figurative. I mean that the writing here is often nothing more than the oxidized, unclean traces of a long process of slaughtering and chopping and freezing and compressing. I don’t generally know how to make something that breathes and swims, something with gills and lungs and a heart.

The life of words isn’t preserved in the structure of a sentence.

On the other hand, the idea that writing could be nothing but communicative, that’s sort of far out for me. The idea that this could be nothing but a voice which one feels a kind of closeness with, like written fur pressed against the fur of the reader’s mind.

I like that, the idea of the closeness, and the fur, and the dead stuff underneath.