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torahs and chromosomes
Saturday, November 10 2007
setting: Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
I was playing a little with my young nephew this morning and we were actually having fun despite the repetitive nature of play among kids that age. Everyone was planning on going to Saturday services at the meeting site for the local Reconstructionist Jewish congregation. (Gretchen is most fond of Reconstructionist Judaism because it maximizes traditional ritual and use of Hebrew while minimizing God talk, and is thus harmonious with both her cultural cravings and her atheism.) Originally I was going to stay home while the others went, but for some reason I was bonding with my little nephew, and he wanted me to come, so I said I would. (The others also wanted me to come, but pleasing them was less important to me.)
The meeting place was in a beautiful big old stone school building set in an eclectic neighborhood of old houses. The building is used for lots of different civic functions, although the Reconstructionist congregation seems to exercise particular control over the main hall, where they keep their ark full of torahs. Interestingly, this congregation does not have a rabbi and instead depends on a rotating group of its own members to serve this function.
Today's service was a particularly child-friendly one, and a little hippie-dippy as well, beginning with an exercise familiar from the one tantric retreat I attended back in 1999. This involved staring directly into another person's eyes. Then there was a warm-up where we were expected to crow like roosters, a novelty that had Gretchen rolling her eyes. From then on, though, services followed what I took to be a fairly conventional trajectory, one rich in songs and, later, reading from the Hebrew torah.
It was during the reading of the torah that I was hit by what I saw as an astounding parallel, one about which I'd had prior inklings. The relationship between a Jewish congregation and its torah is much like the relationship between a bacterium and its single chromosome. (I'd compare a congregation to a eukaryotic cell, but like a bacterium with its one chromosome, a congregation has only one torah, though they often have several identical copies thereof.) The reading of a torah is analogous to the transcription of RNA in that it imparts somatic (non-reproductive) knowledge to the congregation to help them better comport with the teachings of their culture. There is also non-somatic reading of the torah, which happens when it is copied. Obviously I didn't see that today, though I have a feeling this has many parallels with the DNA replication that precedes cellular reproduction. Gretchen pointed out a number of things about the torah ritual that struck me as eerily similar to the way a cell handles its chromosome. One of those things was the zero tolerance policy towards errors as it is read. Any error in the reading of a torah is immediately corrected by any of a small group of onlookers, similar to phosphorolytic error correction observed in E. coli RNA transcription. The reverence towards the torah, the fact that it is a scroll on a spool (much like DNA), and the fact that the congregation behaves differently when it is out of the ark, all have parallels to the way a cell interacts with its chromosomes. This stands as a good example of how objects fulfilling similar purposes in wildly-different settings can share many similarities despite massive differences in origin and scale. The torah, after all, provides the unchanging foundational wisdom of the congregation in exactly the same way as the chromosome provides the unchanging foundational wisdom of the cell. Before the torah, religious orthodoxy was impossible in much the same way that before DNA, cellular life was impossible.
Gretchen and I left services a little early so we'd be back at her brother's house in time to meet Gretchen's erstwhile girlfriend Barbara, the person with whom Gretchen lived for nearly five years prior to our relationship. Gretchen's relationship with Barbara had soured badly after their breakup and they had not been in contact for years, but in recent months there has been something of a rapprochement. Early in my relationship with Gretchen, I'd met Barbara briefly at the Manhattan animal shelter where she'd been working, but I'd never really socialized with her. Barbara lives in Pittsburgh, so while we were in town we thought it might be fun to get together.
Soon enough Barbara had picked us up in the rental car she gets to drive as part of one of her dog sitting gigs. She drove us to Square Café, a popular brunchy restaurant that in Pittsburgh passes for vegetarian even though it includes thick beef steaks on its lunch menu. Inside it was crowded, colorful, and cheerful, though an ærosol of eggy slime hung heavy in the air and I had to avoid glancing at plates for fear of seeing disgusting pools of yellow. I could see why Barbara liked the place; the waitstaff consisted entirely of young women, all of whom looked to be bicurious at the minimum (to the extent that books can be judged by the covers they'd have if they bound themselves).
Our meal conversation was mostly about Barbara's recent dating ordeals. I've never actually dated in a conventional way (the way that involves phone number exchanges and uncertain trips to coffee houses), so it all sounded like something out of fiction. Still, it was a fun conversation and I could understand why Gretchen had spent five years living with Barbara despite their various differences. She might not be Jewish, college-educated, or have a proclivity to over-achieve, and she might be a sucker for wacky spiritual ideas, but she's quirky, creative, hip, and hilarious.
Later we went to visit Barbara's sister Sissy in the neighborhood near Construction Junction. It's a "transitional" community, meaning Sissy and her husband were able to buy a palatial mansion on a grand lot for only $118,000. After much work by said husband, the house is nearing mint condition, with the exception of the four iron poles that stand in lieu of two-story columns in front of the house. Greeting us at the house was Sissy, her husband, their 9 month old baby Vi, and Barbara and Sissy's mother, about whom I'd heard many stories. She's a sweet old woman with a face of "rich Corinthian leather" and an unmistakable voice three parts cigarette smoke and one part old-school Pittsburgh. Gretchen had imitated this voice countless times, but it was deeper and raspier than Gretchen's version. While the others talked about old times and what not, I talked with Sissy's husbands about possible solutions to the column problem. He told me that all the solutions he'd priced had cost on the order of $11,000 per column. So I brainstormed alternatives, including one involving stacked cross-sections made of wood. Later we were given a tour of the first floor. There were more rooms than a family can reasonably occupy, including a butler's office and a back stairway so servants could prepare dinner and clean rooms like benevolent ghosts, never being seen.
Lastly we went to nearby Construction Junction, Pittsburgh's salvage exchange. Today the Junction was hosting an event in one of its large back rooms called "Handmade Arcade," featuring scores of vendors selling small handmade items, often made from unusual salvaged materials. Some examples: one vendor had made small purses from old hardcover bindings and another had made a series of lamps using the kinds of umbrellas one normally finds in one's drink while damaging one's skin on a Carribean beach.
More interesting than the crafts, though, were the people and the scene. The people reminded me what it was like to be around the young and the hip, people who go out of their way to be different but then end up looking kind of the same. The wearing of horizontally-striped Wicked Witch of the West socks was particularly common, for example. Over it all was the throbbing soundtrack, mixed up live by a DJ equipped with a stack of vinyl. No hip event is complete without one.
After Barbara dropped me off at Gretchen's brother's house, I found myself with Gretchen's mother and my young nephew trying to figure out how a complicated kit-based toy worked. It featured a couple dozen gear cogs that could be inserted into a grid of pivot points so the gears intermeshed and the turning of one would turn all the others. Columns could be erected to carry the gear-borne energy into the z-dimension, and there were also a number of widgets that could translate the rotational energy into other, more complicated kinds. And onto these gears one was supposed to attach little fish and dolphin figures, though these seemed beside the point. After getting the basics working, I introduced the idea of feeding paper strips and ribbons through the gears, an idea that hadn't been suggested by the directions.
Soon thereafter the engagement party happened. There was wine, beer, and a large spread of Chinese food, nearly all of it completely vegan.
Gretchen's brother and sister-in-law had concocted a quiz game wherein guests had to select the right answers from multiple possibilities
concerning the lives of the two who had become engaged. Later prizes were awarded based on how many correct answers had been scored, and these answers were based on the questions and possible answers. For example, a question about the female-half of the engagement (Gretchen's cousin) asked which thing she'd eaten only for its nutrient value despite her not having liked it. The answer was "bananas," so one of the prizes later awarded was a pair of bananas (which I won for getting 15 of the 20 questions correct). These in laws had made a similar quiz for our wedding party back in 2003.
Later as the party was winding down, Gretchen's father showed me a fascinating website called gapminder.org, which features a flash-based tool to visualize the relative progress of various countries in terms of a long list of quantifiable parameters. You pick the parameters to use for the x and the y axes, and then set it to do an animation through the years and you can watch countries rise and fall, expand and collapse, and (mostly) hurtle upwards on as-yet-unfinished j-curves. It is perhaps the most impressive use I've yet seen of computers for the display of vast amounts of data.
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