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Leviticus 16 is the section of the Torah read every Yom Kippur.  It’s not the most exciting portion, and it’s not one that normally gets under my skin like all the infertility talk on Rosh HaShanah.  (That service is like navigating a land mine.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten through it without crying at some point.)  Leviticus 16 is the story of Aaron and the two goats.

Two goats are chosen from the herd.  They must be exactly alike, practically indistinguishable.  For instance, you cannot take one healthy goat and one unhealthy goat, or one fat goat and one thin goat, or one unblemished goat and one blemished goat.  Exactly alike.

One goat gets sacrificed as an offering, and there are strict rules for how to use the goat’s blood.

The other goat has a very different fate.  It is told all the wrongdoings of the community and then sent away to wander the desert, far away from the people whose sins he is forced to figuratively carry on his little goat shoulders.  (Do goats have shoulders?)  He is — as you probably guessed — the scapegoat, forced to own everyone else’s terrible decision.

But here’s the thing: Those two goats are exactly alike.  Their fate is determined by a lottery.  Each has an equal chance of being driven out of the community.  And, frankly, as much as it would suck to wander around the desert without water and likely die in the wild, it would suck more to definitely be killed as part of a goat sacrifice.  In one situation, you have a fighting chance for your life, and in the other, you don’t.  And, let’s all be honest, as we read this, we think these outdated ideas are a little odd, right?

Right?

I guess this Torah portion got under my skin because we are in an election season where the scapegoats are being named, left and right.  Whole genders, nationalities, religions, sexual orientations, and physical situations have been blamed for amorphous issues such as unemployment, terrorism, and crime.  The people in those scapegoat groups are going to have their lives as they know it obliterated, more akin to the sacrificial goat than the wandering one.  If Trump comes into power, families might be separated, marriages might be taken away, more violence might errupt.

But here’s the thing that goes back to those goats.  With the goats, everything was equal.  Each had a chance to have to carry the burden of the community.  But there is a lot of inequality with the groups targeted as scapegoats this election.  There is a lot of privilege being abused in the name of bettering the country.

It is so easy to blame other people for your problems. It is so much harder to sit with your own role in creating that problem or admit that there are problems without clear-cut solutions.  I am terrified when I hear Trump speak.  When I think about the direction his rhetoric is taking the country.

This country needs fewer scapegoats and more people willing to work together to take care of the herd.

I was trying to remember a song this week.  Usually I have a song pop into my brain, and I have to figure out how I know it or the words that go with the tune.  This time, I remembered that an old friend had taught me a song, but I couldn’t remember any other detail other than (1) it was in Hebrew, (2) I used to sing it all the time and (3) I heard it again at a Purim party a few years back.

I searched popular song lists and my notebooks, but I couldn’t remember anything about this song: not the tune, not a word in the title.  I could just remember where I was when I learned it and this memory: when the boy sang it to me for the first time, I was thinking about a child I once saw in Tzvat struggling to carry an enormous dog down a set of stone steps.  I had asked the boy if I could take his photo because it was such a funny image, but the boy refused to have his picture taken.  That’s what I was thinking about while the boy sang — that child and his dog.

I decided that I wouldn’t bother wasting my whole morning trying to remember the song title; I would go straight to the source.  I would Google the boy who taught me the song and email him.  It had been his favourite song 20 years ago.  He would know exactly what I was trying to remember.

The first hit was his obituary.

He died about two years ago.  His picture was at the top of the obit.  He looked the same, though his curls were thinner.

This is what I thought about as I looked at the photo:

After my grandfather died, he organized the whole camp to sing John Denver’s “Country Roads” when I returned to work because he knew I needed it.  He would call me up in the middle of the night and invite me out to eat cake.  I think of him every time I use the word ‘incredulous’ because one time, while we were eating lunch under a tree, I used the word while speaking to a child and he said, “I am incredulous that you would use the word incredulous with her.”  And I looked at the child and said, “What does incredulous mean?”  And the child returned the definition.  He used to go with me every week to the Peace Pagoda.  He once kissed me in my living room while I was balancing on the bike I was rebuilding, my feet on the pedals and my hands on the back of a chair.

All those things happened, and now he was gone.

I don’t know why I felt so sad.  I hadn’t seen him in 20 years.  I hadn’t spoken to him in probably 15 years.  I felt like I didn’t have a right to feel sad; like it wasn’t my death to mourn because I chose to let us drift apart when I moved out of town.  But I was sad.  I was really sad because there was once this person on earth who would thoughtfully teach an entire camp of children to sing a person’s favourite song just because he knew she was having a hard time and now that person was gone.

I started crying, and then his song popped into my brain.

I was folded forward this morning during yoga, in the middle of eka pada rajakapotasana, when it occurred to me that there was no one in the twins’ class named Greg.  Greg used to be enormously popular when I was in school.  Every class had “a Greg and a spare,” as I liked to say.  Actually, I never said that until today, but you immediately see the truth in the clunky phrase.

Josh looked it up for me.  (This is the benefit of doing yoga in your living room while your partner makes the school lunches.  You can call out the random things you think up from the mat, and he can Google them.)  Greg has not broken the top 1000 most popular names in the last twenty years.

The same with Melissa.  Every class had at least a dozen Melissas.  I may have inflated that number a bit, but Melissa was a very common name where I grew up.  And now it’s as if the Melissas have all scattered into holes in the baseboard, never to be seen again.  I meet Jennifers and Jessicas all the time, but all the Melissas have seemingly disappeared.  I can’t remember the last time I met a Melissa, even one my age.

I get that names go in and out of vogue.  The people who make those name pencils and name necklaces need a little variety in their world.  (I assume those are the people who decide the popularity of names because they have the ultimate power as they choose which names to etch onto shot glasses and which names to leave in the dust.)

But shouldn’t the people who had that name back in childhood still be around?  I used to know 3000 Melissas. (Again, that number may be a little smaller.)  Now I know zero.  Well, I know one.  Myself.  I am cognizant of my own existence.

Where have all the Gregorys gone?  All the Melissas?  Where are the Coreys and Bretts and Cynthias?  Where did the Candices run and hide when the 80s ended?

I’m starting an Ex-Popular Name Club.  Are you in it?

What would you think if I said I liked or didn’t like Joan Didion’s writing based on the work of her husband?  If I picked up a John Dunne book and read it and said, “Well, now I know everything I need to know about Joan Didion’s writing style,” I think you’d cock your head to the side and say, “I don’t know how the two are connected.”

Even if I continued, “Well, she gave him writing advice and edits on all of his books.  So now that I’ve read his book, I can totally imagine how Joan Didion writes.”  You might counter, “But editing isn’t the same as writing.  If you read her work, you’re going to discover that they have two very different voices despite having lived and worked together for many years.”

This conversation isn’t really about Joan Didion and John Dunne.

The point is… Hillary Clinton isn’t Bill Clinton, and she should not be liked or not liked based on the leadership style of her husband.  Yes, they have worked closely together for many years, and I’m sure she has offered him advice.  But you cannot know how she’ll be as a president based on how Bill was as a president — good or bad.  She is her own person with her own foibles and strengths.

And neither her husband’s infidelity nor his policies have any place in a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s ability to serve as president any more that we would ever look at Melania Trump’s parenting or career in order to judge Donald Trump.  The fact that Trump keeps trying to bring this topic into the discussion means he’s treating the election like a tabloid article and not the American people hiring our next leader.

While I believe she has a lot of strengths and that her foibles are generally the ones of all politicians as well as the narrative created by the media, the decision to vote for her has to be about her.  Not about her husband or other Democratic leaders or the DNC itself.  Just a lone woman, standing on a public stage, requesting that we allow her to lead the country.

Yes, I am a little cranky as I read yet more coverage that doesn’t allow the woman to own her accomplishments and keeps bringing her future back to her husband’s past.  Which, when you think about judging Joan Didion’s work by her husband’s writing style, is reductive and demeaning towards the individual.

Plus Joan Didion’s books are amazing.  I would have really missed out if I hadn’t given her a chance as a writer based on her own merit.

I was recently reading a piece by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine about his overuse of the Internet. He used a turn of phrase that caught my eye: living-in-the-web.

In other words, he didn’t use the Internet, partaking in it as a tool.  He lived in it, spending more conscious hours connected to the Internet than not connected to the Internet.  His primary mode of communication was writing or sharing on the Internet.  In his heyday, he posted every half hour or so.

And then he stopped.

I guess it struck me because I am always mindful of how much time I spend online, creating or consuming, and I try to set a lot of personal limits so I don’t feel as if I’m living in the web.  I like to visit, sure, but not live here.  Yet I do feel pressure to go online daily, and maybe I’m worried (and why I read an article that he wrote in the first place) that believing that I must go online is the first step to living in the web.

Maybe some of it comes down to that idea that if you use a smartphone, you’re taking the Internet with you:

At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing.

It is convenient, of course, but it’s more than that.  There is something comforting about carrying all of you in my pocket.  There is something empowering to knowing the answer to many questions that pop up during the day is in my hand.  I agree with him that the distractions that come from being plugged in often feel pleasant and not annoying because it’s usually people or information I want to hear from or about.

He writes,

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs.

It’s a long piece, but I recommend reading it if you’re interested in this topic.  I’ve been chewing it over in my mind for a few days.

I think I am doing a decent job of just visiting the web and not living here, but doing so means constantly looking at the way I use my time online.  Where are you living?