Sternal Re-journal: Does God put me on a "to smite" list because I only pray when I'm scared?
One of the great SternJourns from the first era
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SHOWS:
Comedians from the Future. May 2nd, Near Me Comedy! (I got comps galore!)
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Comedy Loft (DC). May 28th. featuring for the great Sam Salem.
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Hiya Sternal Journalists,
Comin’ a little early this week because I’m on the East Coast and I ran a half marathon today. There are no epic stories like last time (mostly because I ran a smarter race and remembered Body Glide), but perhaps at some point in the neat future, I’ll get my Murakami-Gladwell on and write a little essay about the race.
In the meantime, I’m going to reprint an interview from the Sternal Journal hall of fame. It’s a conversation with my friend who is a Rabbi specifically about my anxiety and whether God puts me on a “to smite” list because I only pray when I’m scared. It was originally published four and a half years ago on November 8, 2019. I’m republishing it now for three reasons:
I need to go to sleep.
I re-read this on the flight over here and was comforted with how far I’ve come in terms of my flight and other anxiety (which my dad will be happy to hear about because his response when I first wrote this one was: “I had know idea you were still struggling with this. see someone dam it”)
It is still one of the interviews I’m most proud of! I think it is as interesting and illuminating for people who don’t suffer from crippling anxiety as it is for people who do, and ditto for those who are very religious or aren’t religious at all.
I hope you enjoy! If you have any feeling at all, lemme know! And away we go:
If you don't know, I have more fears than your average person. I was diagnosed with OCD at the age of 11 and have not looked back since! (except of course to check whether (a) someone is following me, (b) an earthquake has broken out without me noticing, or (c) grab bag!)
Sometimes, people find this out about me and are surprised because "Julian, you seem so chill! So cool! How do you do that with your hair?"
And the answer is: coping skills! (Except the hair. That's just genes)
Because I've been facing these beasts head on for two decades now, I've gotten exceptionally good at taking a wave of crippling fear, tossing a boogie board on it, and riding it our onto the white sand beaches of San Tolerable-amounts-of-anxiety.
To that end, I had a recent conversation with a dear old friend of mine, Samantha Frank. Samantha and I have known each other since we were months old as is evidenced by the photo above, and it's been a joy to stay friends and confidants as we grow up—me, into whatever this is; her, into a Rabbi!
Yes, Samantha is a fountain of rabbinical and general wisdom. I talk to her about pretty much everything, and more than knowing the right thing to say—because, as you'll see, some of the questions I lob at her simply don't have a right response other than maybe "Shhhh"—she always knows the right direction in which to guide the conversation.
And when I was flying a bunch for weddings this year, and suffering from severe anxiety about it, something popped up for me that I knew Samantha would have great insight about it.
So I called her up and peppered her with questions! The conversation covers religion, history, prayer, a bit of pop culture, and a whole bunch worrying.
Please enjoy it, transcribed and lightly edited below.
— — —
JS: Who are you?!
SF: Well, I always like to say my name is Samantha Frank. I am originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, which is where the two of us met, which is so cool.
Right now, I live and work in New York City. I am a rabbi and among other things, I run a Jewish instagram, @modern_ritual, and our hope is really that—we’re looking to democratize and inspire people around Judaism.
A lot of people have questions about what it means to live a meaningful life and just don’t know where to start, so we have some tips and tools and we’re so, so excited to share what is impacting our lives Jewishly and what inspires us to take better care of the world and to understand the world as we move through it.
JS: Jewishly.
SF: Jewishly.
JS: I like Jewishly.
SF: Yeah. it’s our background. Totally.
JS: So this is all an experiment and I appreciate you coming along with me for it—
SF: Oh my gosh, totally. That’s what Modern Ritual is.
JS: Excellent. Two experiments, working together. So I’m gonna say who you are to me.
Which is: you are someone I met when I believe we were about one-year-olds in daycare? And well before you became officially a rabbi, I have been referring to you as my rabbi because you’ve always been a very wise, grounding force. And even though I’m not Jewish, and am at least agnostic, I very much appreciate having a rabbinical influence in my life.
SF: While you were talking, I was reminded that I have a screenshot that I took from a text message from one of our conversations that I took years and years ago when you were asking me some sort of question, and I was like, “I’m the rabbi with the answer!”
So it has also for a long time brought me a lot of joy to think with you about the most fun and challenging questions of our lives. This is what I love to do, to just think about what ancient Jewish wisdom we can apply to our lives today. I’m excited for this conversation.
JS: Great. So we’re going to apply ancient Jewish wisdom to one of the newest things. So I thought about talking to you when I was recently flying a bunch. I’m a scared person, I have bouts of OCD—diagnosed, thank you very much, especially when I’m flying.
But I was flying a bunch for weddings this year, and I was thinking about how one of the only times I pray in life is when a plane is taking off. And when I do that, I think to myself, “Is this a legitimate prayer?” If there were a god, would that god say, “This is fine, he uses it as his grounding thing. Even though he’s only doing it when he’s flying, I’m down with it."
Or, as I put it to you over e-mail, would it be not cool that I am only praying when I fly, and would it draw attention to myself and put me on god’s “To smite” list.”
SF: Well, I’m gonna answer your question with a story, but first I’m gonna say, I don’t believe in a god that has a “To smite” list. So we’re gonna hold that for a second. We will talk about that more.
So I was just on a Friday night at services, and we were singing a song. It’s a song that has existed for over seven hundred years, and the last stanza says, “When I go to sleep, I place my soul in God’s hands and I do not fear.” And then it continues to be like, “God is so great.”
And it really struck me that—if that song is around seven hundred years old—for at a minimum seven hundred years, people have been afraid of going to sleep. And have sort of drawn the idea of God really close when they are getting ready to go to sleep because they are so afraid. I just thought, this is wild. Think of how much we have in common with people who we’ve never met, people in the middle ages who were afraid to go to sleep.
And I tell that story at this moment because I think it’s actually one of the most normal, normal things for humans to be afraid in moments where we don’t feel grounded. When you’re flying, you’re literally the opposite of being grounded. You’re leaving the ground and going into the air.
And people who lived 700 years ago--we didn’t understand dreams. We didn’t know what happened when we went to sleep. So I think that it’s like one of the most natural times to pray or to talk to God in whatever format that any of us does or doesn’t.
And this question that you’re asking about “Am I causing God to take notice of me in a negative way by only praying in moments of fear?” I think about God in a lot of different ways. I don’t really think of God as omnipotent and I don’t exactly think of God as omnipresent. But I do think we have the capacity to experience godliness in every type of moment that we live in—you have to stop me if I’m not making sense.
JS: Um, no, I think you’re making sense.
SF: All of this is to say that I don’t think there’s a god who is accounting for when we call on God.
I think if you have ever had an awesome, awesome experience with a friend or you’ve been in nature and you’re just completely in awe of what you were seeing or what you were experiencing, different people throughout time have called those experiences of God, or ways to get to God.
So I would say like, maybe you’ve been experiencing God, but you haven’t been naming it as God. The god that I believe in wants us to like care for the world in an honest way and is not so vain about when we call on God.
I will also say that we have really good reasons to think of God as vain. There are whole biblical stories and biblical characters who really shape our understanding of God as super petty. Like half of the Torah—Genesis through Deuteronomy, the first five books of the bible, so much of that is God smiting us. And you’re just like, “What the hell, God? So uncool.”
JS: Well, what the hell then. How do you reconcile what he’s up to for those first five books with the one that you want to believe in?
SF: Well, yeah. Okay, first of all, God does continue to do that for further than the first five books.
It’s like really wild. In one sentence, it’s, “There will be a perfect peace and everyone will live in beautiful harmony,” and it’ll be written in beautiful poetry. And then the next line will be like, “BUT YOU HAVE REJECTED ME AND I WILL BRING DESOLATION ONTO YOUR TOWNS AND YOUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN.”
And you’re just like, "Geez Louise."
JS: So wait, why doesn’t that guy have a To Smite list? It sounds like he does.
SF: Okay. Okay. This is why. I believe that our holy scriptures were conceived of and written down by men. Specifically men. I think women were mostly not educated and society wasn’t structured in a way where that many women were participating in the writing of our stories. Or if they were, they were edited out.
I just think, people three thousand years ago when they were creating this literature, they just lived completely different lives. They had no understanding of science, they really believed that they prayed to the gods for rain. And a lot of the stories where God smites us with a plague, it’s like, “Yeah, we didn’t really have good doctors, and people got sick by the hundreds of thousands.” In a world where you truly don’t have science, when you’re trying to make meaning out of the world, you label it God.
And Frankly, I still do that. I’m like, oh, its so amazing that there is someone in this world who I really love and I want to spend my life with. That’s so cool! For me, that’s about being grateful to God for like the fact that the stars aligned in such a way.
And the reason I’m grateful to God is that’s just the best word I have for it.
JS: Mmmm. Okay. That… makes a lot of sense. So, he doesn’t have—or she! God! I don’t know what… I’m obviously…
SF: We all grew up with this image of a man in the sky. It’s really hard to unlearn that.
JS: Right.
SF: It’s taken me over five years.
JS: Thank you for your generosity with that. Okay, so the reason there ever was an ideation around smiting or god doing all that stuff, is because people didn’t understand the science behind the world that was doing the smiting.
SF: Right, totally. That’s how I think of it. I don’t have a specific source on this, but it’s how I get through the world religiously.
JS: So we were talking about how people were scared to go to sleep. I realized as I was sitting down to think about this conversation that my earliest memory of praying was sleeping over at my grandma’s house, who you know and love, and who lives about eight or nine minutes from my house {Present day Editor’s Note: RIP ;( }.
I remember being scared that I was in a house ten minutes from home with people that I had known since birth, and had taken care of me since birth.
Which, first of all: I don’t know what I was scared of. There wasn’t anything specific other than the unknown. And generally when dealing with my history of OCD and anxiety, there are always things that I look back on and wonder, was that a normal thing to worry about? Would someone who didn’t have my brain chemistry be worried about that?
But as you said, people have been scared of going to sleep for centuries. So I would tell her I was worried, and she was like, "So yeah, just pray. Say ‘Dear God, watch over me,’ and end it with amen. You’ll be safe.”
And I remember it was very specific: “Start with ‘Dear God,’ end with ‘Amen.’ Say whatever you want in between.”
And that imprinted on me so much that even now, if I’m doing a little prayer while I’m flying, I will say “Amen,” realize I forgot to add something, add it, put another amen at the end, and then I have to will myself to stop praying. Cuz I’m like, “If I don’t end it with amen, if I put something else on the end, then I’ve gotten it wrong.”
And that’s, you know… that is textbook obsessing and being compulsive and having a disorder about it.
That’s all to say that the worry about formatting has always been a thing. So when you were saying earlier it’s like having an experience with nature, were you referring to that as prayer or were you..
SF: I was saying that’s an experience of God, and then I think some people put words to it that would be prayer. But it’s certainly very, very related.
JS: So prayer does have to be words.
JS: Yes and no. The ancient, ancient Jewish sources—the one I’m thinking about is from the Talmud—basically say that it is words. And even if you don’t say them out loud, the proper way to pray Jewishly is to move your lips so you form the words.
JS: Oh no! I’ve just been saying them in my head. I don’t even move my lips!
SF: I think it’s totally fine.
Basically, there used to be this huge temple in Jerusalem, and there’s still one wall that exists, but people would bring their sacrifices. Prayer used to be literal sacrifice, and it has since evolved to be about words.
And I have no interest in being in the business of prayer police. If you’re talking to God, and you’re just thinking it? Yeah, it’s prayer. I would say my life as a rabbi does not qualify me to judge your prayer. And another thing that I wanted to add is that Jewish prayer comes from a history.
There used to be set topics and then you could make up whatever you wanted to say within that topic. So whoever was in charge for the community on any given day, got to choose what they were saying and how exactly they said it.
So it’s always been sort of spontaneous and contemporary and in the moment, and it’s a much later thing that we decided like here’s the way of doing it, and here are certain sets of words and certain orders that you say them in.
And there has always, always been space for personal prayer that is made up in the moment.
There has always been a space to say in your head silently, “Dear God, please watch over me. Thank you. Amen.”
That’s always been a part of people’s prayer experiences and I would say that, as a general rule, as a person and as a rabbi, I don’t think it’s very helpful to judge people’s experiences of spirituality or the divine or god or whatever language works for you.
JS: What about, in Judaism, is there—I didn’t have this experience, but friends of mine had experiences where their parents told them they had to pray every night before bed.
SF: In Judaism, there are three prayer times: morning, in the afternoon and then in the evening.
And that really depends on your level of orthodoxy. I recently asked myself this question because I also grew up praying when I went to sleep, and I don’t think my siblings did.
JS: Is that something from you or your parents?
SF: I feel like it might have been from books. The characters in my books would pray before they went to bed and I thought like, this is what you do. This is what good kids do. And I really wanted to be good.
I don’t know, I should ask my parents. I can’t imagine them saying this to us. Like, I don’t think this was a part of our bedtime lullabies.
JS: Ooh, what lullabies did they sing?
SF: My mom used to sing, “Lullaby, and good night,” do you know this one? “Go to sleep my little baby
JS: [hums along]
SF: Yeah, the basics. And then, maybe from Anna’s—
JS: This is our daycare that we met at.
SF: —yes, from our daycare. Possibly, we had this book, oh my god, I can’t remember. She used to sing about being an animal.
JS: Oh, that sounds familiar.
SF: Does it?
JS: I think so.
SF: If I was a fish, I would… dun, dunanuh. We had it on like cassette tape.
JS: It does sound familiar. I heard it at Anna’s or at your house.
Well, this conversation has brought something to light for me. I came at this from the perspective that sometimes my worrying affects the few times in life that I pray, and how I think about prayer. Especially as someone who doesn’t really fill my life with religion.
But in talking about how it started, I realize that—this is a no duh moment for you, I’m sure—but like, prayer and religion have sort of always been related to my severe worrying. It’s sort of a chicken and the egg situation.
Which is probably how it is for everyone and you sort of started this whole conversation saying that’s how it is—that’s how it’s been for at least centuries.
But I’ve always seen the worrying side of me as a monolith, separate from everything else. And I don’t know, that’s interesting for me. Even if it’s not interesting for anybody else.
SF: I think it’s interesting, and I would also just add that… one of the most irritating stories in the bible is the story of Adam and Eve. Eve is like never warned not to eat the apple from the tree.
Only Adam is warned, and the Eve eats from it and then they get banished from the garden, and Eve is told that as punishment, women will experience pain in childbirth. And I feel like again, like what the heck is this story?
And one of the ways that I understand it is that childbirth is a really delicate experience. It’s often dangerous, and I think that it must have caused people a great amount of fear, and women have been in pain during this process we know then for thousands of years. And it just tells me that the story of Adam and Eve, one of the things that it teaches me is that people have been afraid of being in pain for a really long time.
And I just think part of my experience of religion is knowing that I’m not the first person to have fears, and even if my fear is specific to me, and I have plenty of my own specific fears, I’m not the first person to have fear as an experience.
I’ll also say that I pray in the same way that you pray all the time. If I hear an ambulance going by, it often distracts me, so I’ll just take a minute and be like, “Hey God, please help those people be safe and help them be healed.”
And if it’s a police car, “Let that be a just police officer and a just reason for them to go, whatever it is that they’re doing, and thank you, and amen.”
And then I’ll just go back to whatever I was doing with my day. I think the reason I’m sharing that is just to say, not all of our prayers have to be big things in order to be heard or in order to serve a purpose.
I also don’t believe necessarily in a God that is paying attention to me all the time [laughs]
JS: But isn’t that what prayer is? Because you know god isn’t paying attention to you all the time, so you’re like, “Hey, look at me!”
SF: Umm! I feel extremely ambivalent to that question.
JS: [Laughs] Okay.
SF: On some days, I feel like god is with me all the time. On some days, I feel like, “No way. Thats completely absurd and ridiculous.”
When I worked in a hospital, I learned to not say, “God, please be with us.” Because God is always with us. But instead to say, “God, help us feel your presence.”
So… I think I experience prayer more as my opportunity to talk to god. It’s more about me. I’m like, “Hey god. Here’s what I have to say to you right now. Great, thanks for being there.” Even if what I’m saying is, “I’m mad.”
It’s not about being forgotten and then calling myself back into God’s attention. It’s more about figuring out how I’m going to attend to my relationship with God.
JS: Right.
SF: I would say it like this maybe: I think god always wants to be in a relationship with us, and it’s up to us—for me, it’s like how I’m going to be in a relationship with God. And I’ve had periods in my life where I’m like, “I don’t want to talk to God. I don’t have anything to say to God. I’m just so mad.” And I let myself be that way.
JS: Not to push back because everything you’re saying makes sense, but I think the difference—the thing that I feel when I’m like, “Oh, I’m going on the ‘to smite’ list” is that that is the only way that I pray.
When I’m sure that a plane is about to crash or at a low point for some other reason, whereas you, you’ve had periods where you haven’t, but your percentage of those times is lower in terms of your total prayers scored, I guess.
JS: Um. Okay, I think another thing that is shaping this for me is that Judaism is not a religion that is centered on faith in the same way that Christianity is. Instead, Judaism is centered on action. So like, I believe that—we just went through the high holy days in Jewish time, and one of the big metaphors of the holidays is that god has a big book, and God is looking through the book, and in the book, God has an accounting of everything that we did—
SF: Uh oh.
JS: Yeah. And we specifically talk about how God remembers the things that we forget, which I think can be either extremely comforting or extremely terrifying or both.
But I don’t believe that God has an actual book, I just believe that God is infinite and thus infinite in capacity, and that this book is about how we live our lives.
It’s about who we treat with kindness, it’s about how we treat ourselves with kindness, it’s about how we notice people on the street who are living without dignity, who need food and a smile and some human interaction.
It’s about how we call our elected officials, and tell them that we cannot have children living in cages on our borders, and it’s about how we treat out friends and family with kindness.
And also the second really, really important metaphor of this high holiday season is that we have a God who is not on a throne, but in the field with us doing the work, and that God is a god of compassion and loving kindness and mercy, and that we are linked to this god, and God has no choice but to treat us with love and compassion and kindness.
So that’s what I would have to say to you about being worried that your only prayer is in times of need. I don’t think that’s the way god is taking account of us.
JS: That makes sense. And also, just to be clear, I wasn’t pushing back because I’m trying to be “gotcha” about it. It was because this is the thing that I’m trying to rectify with myself, and you’re the person who I know, if I say, “But what about this?” you always have an answer. Once again, you do.
SF: [Laughs]
JS: You were talking before about the Adam and Eve childbirth situation, and also about the bible being written by men. That made me think about how, nowadays, when we are trying to be as generous as possible to people that we disagree with, —phobes of all types, we say, “This person was educated in the wrong way.”
One example, especially if you’re dealing with homophobia, is to say, “This person was raised in a certain religion and the bible taught them this.” So at times, the bible is treated as a good document. At other times, it can be treated as a thing that has pushed people towards bringing more evil into the world.
And it always felt like the buck stopped with the bible. We always talk about it like it is the word of God, but that it was written by men. And what I never thought about, but what you’re bringing up is that, just like there are scared men today who are homophobes, the men who wrote the bible were scared men of that day, influenced by whatever was going on in their lives.
SF: Right. And I would just add… well, I would say two things. One, there’s a lot of good stuff in the bible too. I think that’s why it’s lasted so long. It has everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly. If you’re looking for some of the worst things you can possibly think of, go to the bible. You’ll find it. I was about to give an example, but like, I’m not giving an example of that.
Oh, come on. I want hear it.
SF: Well, one of the worst stories… Here. King David is like super, super, super celebrated and has a really interesting ascent to power. And part of him losing his strength as a person of moral superiority includes when he sees a beautiful woman bathing on a roof, sends for her, has sex with her, she gets pregnant.
He calls back her husband from war so that her husband will have sex with her and think that the baby is his, but the husband refuses to do that because he’s a man of noble character. He’s like, “What? I’m a general in the army and all my men are fighting. I’m not gonna come here and just enjoy myself for the hell of it.”So then King David has the husband killed, and then later sort of repents, but also allows for rape to happen in his own household by other people and doesn’t really do anything to clean up those messes. And women’s lives are ruined and it’s very sad.
So I think everything is meant to learn from, and some of what we learn from the bible is, ”This is really old, this is how we lived then, and we don’t have to live that way now.”
JS: Right. That is a great way to look at it, and so simple! I mean, obviously not simple, but I think you put it more simply than I’ve ever heard it.
SF: It’s pretty amazing what some people decide to stick to from the bible. We read in the bible not to mix certain fabrics, and people ignore that, and they fixate on essentially one homophobic line, and allow that to define them.
I think there are a lot of good resources if you’re looking to understand the homophobia of the bible. I would point people towards Keshet. They have really good ways to understand it. It’s an LGBTQ Jewish organization.
Anyway, yeah, I think we should take everything in moderation including our religiosity. And to your point earlier about arguing with people who are saying really horrible things: there does have to be a line. You can be compassionate to all people, and it doesn’t mean that you have to be in conversation with all people. There are definitely people who are not gonna come into a conversation in a fair way in terms of being open to discussion.
And just because we should be compassionate to everyone doesn’t mean that like, everyone should be making legislation.
I think we can be serious religious people and also be people of good conscience, and allow our conscience to shape our religiosity rather than say, “Oh, well. The Bible says it, so… you know, oh well.”
Wait, can I add one more thing about this praying on the plane I wanted to mention earlier?
JS: Yeah!
SF: One of the absolute oldest prayers that we have is the Traveler’s Prayer, and it says, like…
Hold on, I keep a copy of it with my passport.
JS: Smart.
SF: Yes. So…
“May it be your will, o god, our god, and god of our ancestors, to lead us in peace, and direct our steps in peace, to guide us in peace, to support us in peace, to bring us to our destination in life, joy, and peace". Aka don’t kill me.
"Deliver us from the hands of every enemy and lurking foe, from robbers and wild beasts on the journey, and from all kinds of calamities that may come to afflict the world and bestow a blessing on our actions.Grant me grace, kindness, and mercy in your eyes and in the eyes of all who behold us, and bestow love and kindness on us. Hear the voice of our prayer, for you hear everyone’s prayer. Blessed are you, god who hears prayer.”
JS: That literally covers everything I cover when I pray on a plane, which either means I am a genius, or whoever wrote that was pretty in touch with what people were worried about.
And you said that’s from ten, twenty years ago?
SF: [Laughs] It’s one of the oldest ones we have. From like two hundred CE.
JS: Dang. Well, that’s pretty cool. I think that’s a great way to end the conversation.
SF: Awesome.
JS: I do want to throw you… this could just be between us, but I’m curious what you say about it. Do you know who Ritchie Valens is?
SF: Ritchie Valens? No.
JS: He did the song La Bamba.
SF: Oh, okay.
JS: So he’s a singer, and he was one of the singers, along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, who went down The Day the Music Died, which was a plane crash where three massive stars of the time died. Ritchie Valens was seventeen years old, but he grew up with this fear of flying because when he was in middle school, there was a mid-air collision above his middle school playground, and the planes crashed into his playground and it killed one of his friends.
SF: Oh my god.
JS: And so he was like, “I’m never gonna fly.” And then he gets big and his manager convinces him to fly for his career. And it wasn’t the first flight he ever went on, but at some point, he died in a plane crash. And I always think, if Ritchie Valens had just stuck to his guns about not flying, he could be alive today.
And I don’t know what to do with that information. Because technically, if you don’t fly, you’re not gonna get in a plane crash.
SF: Yeah… I just will say, what happened to him was a terrible tragedy. He was witness to a terrible tragedy, and then he was a victim in a terrible tragedy.
I am also very afraid of flying, and when I went to Israel for rabbinical school, I was having my last therapy session. My therapist said, “Are you nervous about anything?” And I said, “Not really, mostly just the flight.”
And I chose that time to tell her that I was extremely terrified of flying, and she was like, “How have you not brought this up before? I’m your therapist. We could have worked on this.”
And I was like, “Huh. Good point.” And I told her about how, after that plane landed on the Hudson, I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading about other planes that had almost crashed.
And she was like, “Has it helped you to read these articles?" And I was like, “No. But I know more. About how planes work and about how planes crashes happen.”
And she was like, “But has it helped you?”
And I was like, “Well, I guess not.”
And the reason I’m telling you this is sometimes you have other information in your brain and you can convince yourself that it’s related, but it’s not related.
Like, I almost cried during our Yom Kippur services last week because I got really afraid that my parents, who were at a different service, would die in a car crash coming home from services.
And the reason I’m telling you these two stories is that the only conclusion that I have is that I cannot live my life afraid of everything. It won’t be fun. All of those things are real. They could all happen. I don’t want any of them to happen, and so I’m just going to have to get out there at some point.
So it’s not very comforting. [Laughs]
But at a certain point, we have to figure out what we’re gonna do to get out. And yeah, maybe Ritchie Valens would have stayed alive. But maybe he would have died in a car crash. There’s no way to know if he would have lived a long life, which is part of the tragedy.
JS: I mean, I think there is comfort in being released of paralysis. I think worrying is sort of the paralysis that comes when you’re trying to figure out the solution to something that doesn’t have a solution. And so being released of the pressure to solve it is comforting.
SF: And for me, when I know that there’s nothing I can do, saying a prayer gives me an illusion that there is something that I can do. Even if I know that it’s for my own anxiety, and I know that my atheist friends would be like, “It’s stupid to pray if you know that it won’t have an impact,” (and I know that’s what they thing because that’s what I used to think), I feel like, “Well, I don’t care. It helps me. If this makes me weak for needing a crutch, I don’t care."
"It makes my life better.”
-- -- --
Damn, if you made it all the way down here, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, whether it was a first time or reread! And now!
Recommendations!
pretty. Song. I’m doubling down on the Michael Aldag rec (I recommended this whole album last week) because I think you will all like it (One certain Sternal Journal brain truster has listened to the album four times already) and maybe if I just recommend a song, it’ll be more palatable.
The Gentlemen. Show. I’ve finished this poppy, rompy British-royalty-as-crime-lords show from Guy Ritchie. It’s never transcendent, but it (other than in my opinion a kinda boring non-finale) always is a fun time.
climbing. Poem. The person who is graciously letting me stay at their place while I’m in New York recommended a book of poems by Lucille Clifton. I’ve only read this one, but I really, really like it.
The TimeOut Market. Food Hall. I went to this in Brooklyn with a friend yesterday, and while I don’t respect the ouroboran nature of a collection of restaurants based on a newsletter that covers restaurants, I cannot pretend I didn’t enjoy this extremely millennial-targeted soma incarnate. I look forward to the Sternal Journal Market.
Alrighty, that’s all! have a wonderful week!
Love!
Julian!
Normally, I use this area to say that you can upgrade to paid if you’re rich. I hugely appreciate those of you who have, but nobody should ever feel pressured to! AAAAALSO though, if you’re the type to hit a like or leave a comment and you just haven’t thought of doing it on the SternJourn yet, come on in! Lemme know if you love or hate the recs! All engagement unfortunately is good engagement. But if you do not have time, get outta here and don’t worry about it! I’ll see ya next week!
P.S. Here is me eating a bagel at the end of the race. I heard a woman earnestly complain that they weren’t toasted, which is the most Brooklyn thing that could have occurred at this Brooklyn half-marathon
cannot believe the bagels weren't toasted, also not to get even more brooklyn about it, but it does not look like they gave you a worthy schmear. Congrats on the race! also loved this interview :)