Sermons in Stones

I’m in Venice with my daughter, and Joy got her passport and arrives tonight. Munchkin asked what I want for my birthday, which is today, and what else could I possibly want? Another day like yesterday? I am beyond blessed to have life, my family, work that sustains me, and time to enjoy this beautiful world. On top of that, I get to be in this city, created by artists–and I don’t mean Titian and Canaletto, but the masons, architects, road-builders who surrounded themselves and the generations to come with beauty. I will add a thank you to forward-thinking politicians and the people who elect them, because I saw workers repairing some infrastructure under the street yesterday, and they had pulled up the stones whole and were saving them to replace. It would probably be cheaper to replace them with asphalt (or else why did we do it, in the US?), but instead, the skill to lay stone has been passed on, and the expense has been taken on, in order to keep this city one of beautiful stone streets.

Yesterday, each of us went out when she woke up, though it was well before 8 am and it took a long time for either of us to find a place that would sell us food. (Text from me to M: “I am leaving in search of food and perhaps daughter.” Response from M: “Lmk if u find food and the daughter will probably appear.”) Even though this carving was too far away for good resolution, I had to take a picture. St. Mark is the patron of this city and his symbol is a winged lion, so images of lions are everywhere.

Later, on a street so narrow that I could put my bent arms out and touch either side with my elbows, I saw a ruder version. At least, the doorbell looked like a stuck-out tongue to me at first. On getting closer, I decided it was more like a lion sucking a pacifier.

I eventually found a cafe that was open, got a latte and two croissants, and texted the munchkin. While I sipped and waited for her, I drew a window on the other side of the canal:

It was low tide when I left the apartment, as you can see from this photo of the steps down to the canal.

Later, when we ate outdoors, the tide was almost at its height and lapping around our feet.

The main activity of the day, between meals, was our walk to, and up, the Scala Contarini del Bovalo. Bovalo means “snail” (though the more usual word is the one I know, since it’s the same in Italian as in Spanish: caracol) and it became the nickname of the Contarini family after they built this loggia and spiral staircase. That can’t have pleased them, because apparently they chose their building spot–at a rather out-of-the-way cul-de-sac–so that they and their ill-gotten gains would go unnoticed. So said a tour guide we listened in on. Or rather, Munchkin listened in. I caught the 20% of words that were identical with Spanish, and so got some of what she was saying, but Munchkin’s Italian (honed on reading The Lightning Thief, the first of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, in translation) is getting better with each day here, and she translated to me afterwards.

We had a struggle turning our tickets into admission, as I had bought them online and thought having them in my email would be sufficient. Good plan, except I was having trouble accessing email, and so after a long, fast, sweaty walk, we feared we wouldn’t get in. Italian bureaucracy worked against us; I could show them the email but not the attachment, and they had to have the QR code to admit us. But Italian kindness worked in our favor: they did considerable digging to find our reservation on the who-knows-which website on which I made it, and finally entered their wifi password so that I could access the attachment afterwards, being the souls of patience the whole time.

Once admitted to the spiral staircase, we photographed each other looking pensively into the distance.

Having her face entirely concealed by her hat was apparently more pensive than M was asking for, so I asked her to give me some more poses and got this. Now that’s the kind of drama that made Orson Welles choose this as a setting for his Othello.

We had intended to continue to a park with calisthenics equipment, being that M is missing her three-times-a-week gym routine, but my leg was beginning to twinge, I was hungry and tired, and it was a mile back to the apartment, so we parted ways. She went on to her park, and I made my way back through the tourist-crowded central streets, stopping to refresh myself with the first gelato of the trip. “After Eight,” a.k.a. mint with very large, dark-chocolate chips. Exquisite.

I have had increasing sciatica flare-ups over the past several months, and I asked my doctor for a steroid injection before I left, scared that I would end up sitting in our lodgings all summer while J and M explored. The injection was astoundingly successful, but not quite 100%. It’s okay. The twinge, which was a daily event pre-steroids, didn’t start until I had walked 11,000 steps yesterday, and even with another 7,000 on the day, it didn’t get any worse. I’ll call that a win. Credit modern medicine, or else the gelato.

So, this is 55. The leg is still a little grumpy, but I’m about to head out in search of a canalside mocha, to be enjoyed while reading Mansfield Park. I don’t have to contend with any real-life Mrs. Norrises to speak of. Life is good.

We are in Venice! Minus Joy, because she is still waiting for her passport. Public service announcement: If you need a new passport, imagine how long each stage would normally take and double it. This part of the State Department is so understaffed, or whatever, that it’s not even possible to get an appointment in a passport office anywhere in the United States right now. So Joy is in New York, at least, enjoying the opportunity to be there and see friends.

The Munchkin and I arrived late last night. There’s so much we could do and see here. We’re right by or in the old Jewish ghetto, which, if not the first such place in the world, was the one that gave us the term ghetto for a neighborhood to which people are confined. Nowadays the methods by which we keep people in their place are a bit more subtle, which enables the people outside the ghetto to tell themselves that if anyone is still stuck there, it’s their own fault. So we could go to the Museo Hebraico. We’ll go to San Marco and all its accoutrements, of course, but in the hopes that Joy will join us within a few days, I want to hold off on going to Murano, the island of glassblowers. We’ve seen a bunch of posters for the Biennale, and I’d like to go into some of those exhibits. The moment I was awake this morning, Munchkin (who had already been out and about) asked if I wanted to climb a spiral staircase to a great view, and I said yes, but the first available tickets are tomorrow at 11:30, so we’re going to go then: La Scala Contarini del Bovolo, a late 15th-century palazzo. Apparently, it was made famous to the rest of the world when it featured prominently in Orson Welles’s movie of Othello.

The main attraction of Venice, though—the reason it was top on my list of places to go this summer—is just the city itself. I wanted to wander the winding streets and cross canals and soak up the centuries-old architecture. In our two hours of meandering and getting some food, I was confirmed in my conviction that I could be very happy here without going to a single “historical attraction.”

For example: This was the view out my bedroom window this morning.

The building in the distance on the right has a Pride flag hanging out the window, third window from the right.

I learned as a child in an observant Jewish family that the most important holidays in Judaism are:

• Shabbat, celebrated every week;
• the High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are ten days apart in the fall;
• and the three agricultural festivals: Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot.

Ah, Shavuot. Least-known and most boring of the major holidays. Far outstripped by its trivial younger siblings, Purim and, of course, Hanukah (as are most of the others). I always liked Shavuot, as a kid–I liked all of the holidays–but it caused me a little trouble. Like the other five of the above Big Six, and unlike Hanukah or Purim, it requires strict observance: in my family, no writing, travel except by one’s own power, or spending money. And you go to shul during the day. Mix those facts with people’s ignorance of its existence, and you get this exchange:

Student: I’ll won’t be here on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s a Jewish holiday.

Teacher: Another one?!

To be fair to the schools, I think this exchange took place only in my head, or between me and friends. The teachers were very professional and respectful of our civil rights. And I was a good student and kept up with my work despite the two-day embargo on writing. Oh, that’s another thing that makes Shavuot an odd one out. Unlike its triplets, Passover and Sukkot, which are a week long each*, it only gets two days (in fact, I started this on the first day of Shavuot, Sunday’s busyness intervened, and now I’m posting just in time for the end of the holiday). What the heck?

All right, so what is Shavuot? It celebrates the receiving of the Torah from God at Mt. Sinai. By tradition, this took place seven weeks and one day after the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. By way of celebration, one eats milchig, dairy–in the United States, blintzes are traditional, as is cheesecake for those who like that sort of thing (I do not)–and in the services, the central scripture is the book of Ruth. It’s a story of harvest, and also of refugees, so it’s a lovely fit.

Some questions I either never asked, or don’t remember the answers to:

• Tradition says Moses was up on Sinai for 40 days. But the people received the Torah 50 days after leaving slavery. So did the people take ten days to get to Sinai, and then receive the law after 40 more? Or did they take 50 days to get to Sinai, and didn’t actually receive the law until day 90? Ten days seems like a pretty quick trip; I don’t know precisely where they fled from, but Google Maps tells me it’s a walk of 3 1/2 days from Cairo to Mt. Sinai. Make it an entire people, including very old people, sick people, and small children, and maybe bringing some goats and such, and ten days seems unlikely. But if it took them 50 days to get there, first of all, that’s a really long time for a short distance, and second, it makes 50 days a strange interval to choose between Passover and Shavuot, since day 50 wasn’t when they got the Torah, but when they started waiting impatiently for Moses’s trip up and down the mountain to be completed. I could probably find out a lot more just by reading these chapters of Exodus, but I think I’ll just raise the question and let someone else research the answer.
• “The receiving of the Torah” is very confusing because, well, by the time Shavuot comes around, we’ve been reading the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, from the beginning since fall, and it has been mostly history. Did God give Moses the story of the Garden of Eden? I realize as I write this that what our teachers meant by “God gave us the Torah” was “God gave us the law,” which is a smallish part of the Five Books. The rest of the Torah is the story leading up to, and following, the revelation at Sinai.
• Also, there’s that whole Moses bringing down the two tablets thing. I had this vague sense that Moses brought down the Ten Commandments and that was it. Again on reflection, it’s clear that the images of Moses bearing the tablets are a visual metaphor for his bearing the entire Law in his mind.
• Why dairy, anyway? There are various theories, none very convincing. I always kind of figured it was just to give dairy a boost. Usually, holiday meals are fleishig, meat meals, I suppose because meat is expensive and appropriate for special occasions. Ours almost always featured chicken or, at Hanukah, brisket. Since observant Jews can have either one of these items or dairy desserts (you can’t eat milk for some hours after eating meat, nor meat for at least half an hour after eating dairy), this means you never do end up having cheesecake for dessert, nor cheese blintzes as an appetizer. So Shavuot is their moment. Or maybe, as in the joke about the Pope and the Wonder account, there was some lobbying from the dairy producers of the Jewish world.
• I still don’t know why only two days, instead of a week.
• And the biggest question, which I know I did ask as a child, but if I got a satisfactory answer, I have no memory of it: since this is the anniversary of receiving the Torah, why isn’t it the day to celebrate the same? Shavuot is celebrated in Sivan (June-ish; the Jewish calendar is lunar and so it doesn’t always line up with the Gregorian calendar). Why is Simchat Torah, the day of Rejoicing in the Torah (and one of my favorite holidays in my devout days), attached to Sukkot way back in Tishrei (October-ish), instead of to Shavuot?

So it turns out that little Shavuot packs a lot of questions. Whether you have any answers to them or not, if you celebrate Shavuot, I hope it has been a happy one and that you enjoyed every bite of your milchig meal.

*Though only the beginning and end of the week have strict rules. The days in between, Chol Hamoed, are pretty much like any weekday, except that in the case of Passover, of course, bread and grains are still off the menu.