I’m a bad Jew. When living in Brooklyn, I was a member of a congregation, doing volunteer work, enrolling my daughter in school there, and attending shul whenver possible. I would have the honor of treating my parents to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur tickets and I could successfully say hello the Rabbi there without feeling shy and somehow ashamed. I had and have had many ambivalent feelings about synagogues in general; typically, they require you to put your head down and push forward and one has to ignore whatever class and economical factors there might exist at the congregation. Too often, I kind of had to seek out those who were like me, or felt like me, in their commitment to religion and observance and I think I almost found that in Brooklyn a few years ago.
I’ve found that Rabbis and staff at synagogues to be invariably committed to the facility and collection of often difficult congregants that congregate there. I also found that a synagogue is typically run by a few very, very tireless individuals who want to make sure that the place can be the very best it can be; these are the ones who organize events, initiate fundraising, request speakers, and help educate children. It’s an amazingly huge set of responsibilities to be a full member of a congregation and it’s one that I hope I’ll have a chance to have again.
But since moving here, I’ve found it difficult to find just the right place (or know of the right place) to “belong.” It’s a matter of speaking with people, visiting congregations, and, ultimately, taking a risk. No one shul is perfect but there must be a place here where I can call home. We haven’t had the sheer time to do the research but I do hope there will be time soon.
But I’ve also felt like a bad Jew because I haven’t been doing the many things that I associate very strongly with Judaism and Jewishness – volunteering in the community, donating one’s earnings, praying and singing and dovening, and, mostly, reading. I’ve gone Jew LCD: Jewish Lowest Common Denominator.
It’s particularly difficult right now (spiritually or psychologically) because Christmas is almost upon us in full swing. And while, in New York City, one’s religion or religiosity could kind of get lost in the shuffle (for good and for bad), here it’s more apparent. One of the parents at Maeve’s school said today, “Don’t forget to get your Christmas money to me for our present.” I didn’t know what she meant and she explained that she was collecting funds to give to World Vision to give a gift of two goats or a dozen hens to an African or Asian family to give to the teacher. All of the commercial streets in our area have Christmas wreaths and, one by one, the lights are going up on each of the houses around here. We’re not the only Jewish family in the area. But it doesn’t make it any more odd to feel like a self-imposed minority in a new city that, truthfully, seems about as open to minorities as I could imagine.

Some new friends in Winnipeg invited us over for an American Thanksgiving this evening. It was very informal and very delightful. Like us, he is American and she is Canadian. Like us, they have a small child and feel blessed to have a warm, small house in a small city. And like us, they are kind of economic refugees (my new term of phrase, coined via my wife) from the U.S. Both academics, they found it difficult to raise a kid in San Diego and get the most of their lives with their salaries and their livelihoods.
Anyway, I had two Thanksgivings this year and so, here are the things I’m doubly thankful for (in no particular order):

• Orange Juice
• Dark Blue
• Sincere Simplicity
• Sheer Strength
• Bad Television
• Good Movies
• Fine Chocolate
• Small Books
• Warm Homes
• Great Friends
• Family Commotion
• Tough Tears
• Canadian Music
• Two Felines
• Adobe Photoshop
• Utter Silliness
• Wood Fires
• Smelly Poopy
• Large Paintings
• 2000 Saabs
• Usable Websites
• Handwritten Letters
• New York
• Apple Computer
• Tyra Banks
• Savings Accounts
• Independent Entrepreneurship
• Cold Coke
• Smooth Stones
• Sweet Words

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Jason Kottke’s recent post about tidying up. Sometimes, and it is a rare occasion, an idea stick in the craw of one’s brain and doesn’t let go. In Jason’s post, he noted that cleaning up is an activity that is also well represented by numerous other, more metaphorical, activities such as modern sports.
But as I’ve been doing a lot of interface design the past week, I’ve been thinking about how designing is itself a physical process that echoes if not mimics cleaning up. When working on a website interface, I’ll typically add, piece by piece, more and more elements until everything is starting to look like chaos hit the fan. I’ll place photographs, pop-in a few gradients, push a few lines here and there, import some Illustrator elements, pull in a few color swatches and add more text than is really needed.
Then I pare down, little by little, pixel by pixel until there’s only what I feel is needed. I’ll try to kill everything that is superfluous. There’s even a little tool I love in Photoshop called “Delete Hidden Layers” which, in one fell swoop, takes out all of those little layers of photos, gradients, lines, swatches and text that are not being used. It’s a very physical process of cleaning and the end result is that (after a few hours of cleaning) I gain (or my client does) a successful design. I know this is not news, and many others have better stated it.
What interests me about the subject now is that cleaning appears to be an inherently radical phenomenon. Cleaning is about saving what you want and destroying the rest. Its relationship to racist heterodoxy and to environmental degradation and to all things morally repugnant are clear. We know that, en masse, by cleaning our hands too often with anti-bacterial soap, we are giving the germs out there a fighting chance to replicate and fight against us with better offenses. We know that the worst crimes in the past 100 years have been carried out in the name of keeping continents, countries, and cities free from a specified group of individuals. And we know that providing a monocrop in the growing fields can have large effects on food security, health, and local environments. Cleaning is a conservative value that adheres to no political ideology – yet it does lend itself to experimentation and, occasionally, criminality.
What I’m wondering about is whether design, if it is a form of cleaning and tidying up, which I think it is, is also a very real mechanism to take the nasty, organic, grotesque and fluid of the world and concretize it – to make it digestible and fine and even final.

I’ve never been a big fan of Veterans Day in the U.S. and that’s the clear “fault” of the realities of growing up directly after the fall of Vietnam and the crisis of Watergate. I sometimes thought that the war heros we typically celebrate or mourn in the United States were over-hyped and that the holiday itself was pure patriotism wrapped in fealty to the high offices of the land. I also thought that veterans themselves cared little about the working middle class and that, because “war” was an admission of the poverty of our imaginations, “veterans” were little more than serfs in the battle of those poor fantasies.
It’s hard to admit this today but it’s true. And kind of sad. After graduate school and an immersion in Jewish cultural history pre-1939, I became much more attuned to the world’s political realities and studied in Eastern Europe. It was there that I began to be able to give thanks to those who decided or had decided for them to fight against those in command of the European continent. I became tearfully impressed with those who sacrificed their very existence for the possibility (and it was just a possibility) that peace could break out in Europe and wrongs would be exposed. When I returned to the States in the late 1990s, I noted that Veterans Day was such a small holiday for most Americans.
In any case, here I am in Canada. And, while the US is embroiled in a major war in Iraq and other parts of the world, there seems to be so little media attention (at last online) being paid to those solidiers who died or are going to die. And, oddly, in Canada, the newspapers all week have pushed story after story about Canadians who died or who fought in wars during the past 100 years. Today’s newspaper here is full of information about how to celebrate Remembrance Day in town and there’s a huge pull-out section about the warzone’s lost and the living. Almost everyone is wearing these cloth red poppies on their coats in honor of this day. I’ve never seen such an outpouring of interest in remembrance of wars past and present.