'Shtetl Morning'

I'm writing *something* new. I believe this will be the title. Here is why.

I am Jewish. You guessed already from my last names. You’re so clever. I’m glad to have you as my clever reader.

23andMe has me hailing from Belarus, on one side, and Poland, on the other. Both genetic lines of my family might have frequently waved to one another, or a lot more than waved, from across an arbitrary border. Or maybe my distant cousins, not knowing they’d someday be my distant cousins, flirted with one another while running errands in Ukraine.

23andMe tells me I’m Ashkenazi and I feel true pride in that, for all the ancient and tribal reasons people feel pride in knowing where they come from, but, relatedly or not, I do not believe in God. Not believing in God is a glorious and expansive way to live.

When something terrible and grotesque happens — something like: “Did you hear? Our beloved neighbor has been impaled on a spike! Her young daughter witnessed the whole ordeal. Her dying words to the child were, 'I left the stove on and we have a gas leak.' The house went up in flames and her daughter fled. How she must have suffered, helplessly impaled on a spike, in her own yard.”

When you don't believe in God, you have the liberating gift of not having to say, "Well, God has a plan and 'it's mysterious.'" You don't have to twist yourself into knots saying, "That poor child! May God protect her." You can instead see the situation clearly and say, "Natural selection got that family real good. They won't be breeding now."

So what is a Shtetl Morning?

It's a phrase I coined (for my own philosophical purposes, and now for yours), I'm sure while I was having coffee, for that is when I am most apt to coin a phrase. A Shtetl Morning is when you awake to rain and gaze out your apartment's window — into your neighbor's window — and think "Anything is possible! Within a very finite realm of possibilities." It's the moment when you take your Prozac with your coffee and think, "Wow, I have really optimized this human experience."

It's knowing that the day will bring dread and discomfort, but opening — opening yourself to the glory of no God. A day that natural selection, in its inexorable march through all time, has made for me to sit here in the comfort of science and welcome this new day, festooned with the awe of agnosticism. Not agnosticism about the presence of God, but a simple splendid "I do not understand. And I have no story for this."
No mythology, as I gaze up, into my neighbor's window, and imagine the sky. I sit attentively with my honest bewilderment, which, with caffeine, can be called “wonder” and “gratitude.”

At my friend's 34th birthday, I led the table in a secular humanist prayer.*

At one particular moment, all of us around the table, aware of our pleasure and suddenly overcome, looked to one another and said, "Let's do a blessing of some kind! For us! For the birthday girl."

And I let it play out, to be polite, knowing of course that I would be doing the blessing. After the requisite "Want me to? Should I?" from my friends, I said, "Oh, shush, I'll do it." And the table settled.

I was newly sober at the time (it was recent) and very excited to flex my new mental capacities. (Sometimes I think I just drank to keep myself stupid so I'd fit in better. With America?) (In sobriety I can just be openly elitist and intolerable and I’ve been really enjoying this.)

My secular humanist blessing went like this:

"What an extraordinary feat that we are all here today, that our lives have overlapped in this expanse of time that we don't understand at all, that we find ourselves at this table in Brooklyn at the best, our favorite restaurant, Pasta Louise.

And let us bless this food and the people who labored relentlessly, with absolutely no assistance from a God who is not real, but people who, by their own sweat, crushed the grapes for the wine that I'm not drinking. Strained the cucumbers for my mocktail. Rolled out the extraordinary pasta and gave us the birthday girl, who, by the warp and weft of natural selection — across countless millennia, before recorded time, has been, somehow, brought to us here! Nearly perfect but for her herniated disc, the great wabi-sabi creation of a godless universe."

And that blessing, which I came to discover as I spoke it aloud to my friends, to the birthday girl, and to myself — I think, encapsulates a Shtetl Morning.

It brims with promise because, finally, you face reality. The constant craving for the world as it is not has ceased. You can begin, this morning, to create a reality based on your own story. And it is not a story you've been told before.

*The idea is inspired by my mother, Margie, who sometimes, rather bravely, does readings of a similar nature — at holiday gatherings.