Goodnight, Moon: The First Time I Used Electricity on A Saturday

The first time I used electricity on a Saturday, I was lying in a bathtub, stoned, wearing a blue two-piece suit. I made sure to lock the door, and brought a pillow, because I knew I was going to be there for a while. I watched several episodes of Uncle Sagan’s Cosmos in that tub, and didn't leave until moonrise. According to my calculations, it was exactly three years ago to this day.

It was summer, and like most Jews, I was in camp. I never liked camp. As an overweight, awkward, ginger kid from the west coast, I was an easy target for bullying. Why I volunteered to go back to the east coast for another summer in the Catskills is beyond me. I would like to believe it was to volunteer my help to an organization devoted to helping children with cancer and genetic diseases, but I doubt it. What I do know is that my faith and excitement to be around hyper-religious Jews were a lot stronger when I signed up a six months prior than when I actually arrived. I already had questions back when I volunteered, burning questions, the kind that if unanswered long enough, start to feel like answers. By the time I arrived at the gates of Camp Simcha (Camp Happiness) I was entrenched in the sort existential crises that inspires people to write stories like this. What better set and setting for a life-altering crisis than a compound with hundreds children suffering from life-threatening diseases?

I didn’t set foot in the synagogue for the entire time I was there. For years, prayer was my favorite part of religion, but by that time, and in that place, it no longer felt like an option to me. When one of the kids died, I heard a counselor telling another camper to pray harder, so that his life would be spared. If you had asked me at the time where I was at with God, I am not exactly sure what I would have said. But I did know in my bones that was the wrong thing to say to a child with no hair and one less friend.

But the anger and revulsion I felt in that moment were nothing compared to what I felt after a few conversations with my roommate. One conversation we had was part of a preparatory meeting we attended with other media staff. As photographers, we were to photograph every child in the camp, every day- anxious parents needed photo evidence that their child was doing well and more importantly, alive. But we couldn’t photograph every kid. There was a list of children who we not allowed to photograph, and when I asked why, I was told that it was out of concern for what would happen if word got out that one of their children had cancer. Because of the absurdity of the religious dating scene, that could negatively affect their siblings’ chances of receiving marriage proposals. That bothered me, to say the least. But it was nothing compared to a conversation I had a few days later, also with my roommate.

We were discussing some of the campers we were photographing. These were not kids with leukemia or brain cancer. These were kids, or rather adults, something between- small humans with genetic diseases, attached to machines, breathing through tubes, trapped in painful bodies. “How did this happen?” I asked. He explained that centuries of inbreeding meant that Ashkenazi Jews are highly likely to have genetic diseases- but that usually testing before dating eliminates the risk. These though, were the children of Chassidim. Often the product of marriages between first or second cousins, these people rejected such medical precautions as ‘goyishe’ science and procreated anyway. Here were the children of Chassidus, in front of me, breathing only with the aid of that same ‘goyishe science’. Here were the children whose parents marriage was blessed by the same rabbi they would go to with tears in their eyes to ask for a blessing of recovery from an easily avoided and horrific disease. Here they were, suffering in front of me, as I spent the day photographing them each, hundreds of times. Here they were, being instructed to pray harder so that the God who took their friend wouldn’t take them too.

Apparently, God’s love is self-replicating, and only the only way to keep it at bay is to irradiate said child’s body until his keratin gives up and falls away.

The cognitive dissonance was settling in.

I was still observant, more so than a lot of people I know today who identify as Orthodox Jews. I still believed, in some ways, but it was all unraveling. I was in the atheist closet, but so deep in it, I didn’t know it had a name. I was in some middle point between identifying with my mask and with a new emerging self behind it. I was losing my faith in the face of evidence and superior alternatives. But still, that was not enough, at least at that point, to keep me from breaking the Lord’s commandments. It was enough to allow me to drop some positive commandments, though- I was shirking some of my holy duties, like Tefillin and Tefillah. But to break the laws I had never broken would take more, that early in the game. Needlessly pained, dying children being verbally abused, for example. And the universe provides some things with astonishing consistency. Like suffering. There it all was, right in front of me. And I knew then that any God who’s master plan involves scores of children to suffer the way I saw them suffer, was no God of mine. The world, I had come to accept, was insane. But even now I do not think it insane enough to harbor a deity as bloodthirsty and hypocritical as the god of the Torah.

Indignation, horror, anger and disbelief mixed with my intellectual, moral, and spiritual doubts. This combination was enough for me to break the Sabbath for the very first time. On one hand, I didn’t know I was going to do it. On the other, I was aware of a titanic force inside me that was going to do something. I wanted to make way for it. I dug into my backpack and retrieved a pot brownie I had smuggled in for just such an occasion. I ate it in its entirety and walked out of my bunk and onto the porch into the afternoon light.

The Catskills are a pretty place. I was very sensitive to the way the light was behaving. Spending the majority of the day looking at the world through a glass viewfinder will do that to you. Sabbath was the only day off- the rest of the week was a frantic mess of shutters clicking and yelling at sick kids to smile. I could hear the campers and counselors singing in the dining hall. They were singing ‘Shalshudis’ songs, the third and final meal of Sabbath, the spiritual climax of the day. This was a time I used to take very seriously. We’d sing kabbalistic songs about the Shechinah, the feminine presence of God, the presence I had devoted my life to. But I had found a better goddess in cannabis. She was already making herself known in the back of my brain, as the THCA began to enter my bloodstream. I knew I had around an hour until I started feeling it, so I settled down onto a bench on the porch and stared at the horizon. Right at its edges, the only clouds in the sky were forming. Deep, dark, dense thunderclouds.

Something is happening, I thought as I closed my eyes to meditate.

I didn’t open them until an hour later. It was a deep sit, the kind that contains a kind of nothingness memory can’t record. The sky seemed to have adjusted accordingly. It was gone. In its place was one gigantic mass of the kind of thunderclouds I had never seen in the west coast. Delicious.

The brownie hit me around the same moment the rain did, and in the same way. I surrendered to it, with my head back, and let the sheets of rain hit my grinning face. God knew what I was going to do before I did, I thought, and was preparing to smite me. I smiled.

Bring it on, motherfucker.

I stood in the rain for a while. Thunder clapped, lightning struck, and I laughed.

Something is happening.

I walked out of the rain and back to my bunkroom.

Thunder rolled along the sky as the rain beat away at the one window in the room.

I walked forward, bent down, and retrieved my laptop out of my backpack.

I was now touching Muktsa, a forbidden object. I was sinning.

My heart picked up speed, but nothing else happened.

The storm raged on outside, but the sound of the rain against the window was calming and peaceful.

I walked into the bathroom, in my soaking wet Shabbos suit, and climbed into the bathtub.

I placed the laptop on my lap and booted it up.

I found Uncle Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ and clicked play.

Stoned as I have ever been, I watched him explain the size and scope of the universe in rapturous awe.

And I didn’t get smitten.

Not even a little.

Later that night, I sat my laptop down on a bench and wrote: “I am writing this from the porch of my bunkhouse. I’ve got big headphones playing music at a volume just high enough to rattle my skull a tad, engaging my senses and keeping me alert. The white glow of my laptop screen is matched only by the moon, hanging three fourths full over a lake that meekly reflects the light back. The heady sensation of being in a place that is usually very busy but is temporarily completely still fills the air. I am not a night owl, but I can appreciate the irresponsibility of being up at an hour that we normally don’t touch in our working lives. If I reach out with the knob in my brain I use for such imaginary sensations, I can almost-kinda feel the rotation of the earth underneath me, slowly rotating around our star like a giant cosmic rotisserie. It feels special, not in the chosen sense, but in a more abnormal, weird sense. Alan Watts put it well when he said that it is a unique type of enlightenment, that brings with it a feeling of everything being highly improbable and uncanny. Good Night, Moon.”

The fact that in Jewish symbology, the moon represents the Shechinah, the Sabbath queen, and the seventh holy attribute of God, was not in my mind as I wrote it. But as I write this sentence now, its ironic appropriateness makes me grin.

I took this photo that night as well and added the aforementioned quote:

Goodnight, moon.