I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.