What's to be learned from understanding that the root of the word "heretic" is the Greek for being able to choose? Nothing more than a reminder that my friend Pamela Webb, though a conforming member of a congregation was, from Sunday to Friday a kind of heretic, someone who made choices not only for herself but even for those who didn't know that her choices were good for them.
At death's door, she had the rabbi round. She was a skeptical and thus sound member of that congregation of thinkers, Havurah Shalom. She designed for them a beautiful place of worship from or out of a rat-infested old warehouse. And so the grateful rabbi blew the shofar for Rosh Hashonah, a new year in which she would barely set foot--tekiah, shevarim-teruah, tekiah--as she lay like one who is already dead. I'm told it stirred her, caused her to smile.
An ending is not of course even the beginning of a poem, which is what now, in addition to myself,
I am trying to compose.I'll try a different tack, examining the idea of heresy. You won't have met these, my doubts. They came to the funeral under duress. You, being a philosopher, of course are familiar with them generally, as a kind of thing, but yours are probably all grown up. Mine are silly, but still surprisingly powerful, like my daughter was as a toddler, sometimes known only by a tug on the hem of my jacket, but occasionally becoming Queen of the Universe, in a mood to have some planets moved.
This doubt is a trivial one. I'm wondering whether I am really the right person to own and wear a Resistol self-conforming hat. I bought it at a sale in the Masonic Temple of Salt Lake City. It's a beautiful hat; there's no doubt about that. I quip that the issue is my self, what you philosophers might dub the essence of me, for like many other selves I believe it resists all conforming.
But actually that's not it at all. I just can't see how to wear the hat. This is a plain fact, a tangle with the orthodoxy of dress. Of convention. I'm sure Pam could have helped, deciding in an instant, "It's sooo beautiful," or dismissing the purchase with a laugh.
Finally, it is her heretic's laugh that will most be missed. That is that and this is this. Tekiah gedolah. http://www.biblicalgallery.com/images_templ/combination.au David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html