Becoming Ballebatish

In the last seven months, I have, for the first time, been gainfully, full-time, non-seasonally employed. For pay. With benefits. Way more than 9-5, on most days, except Friday, which is more like 9-3.
And I'm married.
And I just volunteered for the leadership committee of the minyan we attend.
So, all in all, I'm a busy woman with much less time to think than I would like. Also, less time, and more importantly, inclination to learn. My job uses most of my brain power. I'm happy with my job. I like it alot. It IS somewhat of a culture shock to go from always doing lots of "book learning" to full time lab work and all the things that go along with it.
I think at some point in the near future, I will realize my dream of becoming a professional Niddah Guide (note, I did not use the words "Kallah Teacher." Not only Kallahs want to learn about Niddah, and I would definitely rather see myself as a guide to the sources than presenting myself as having all the answers.) So the only Torah learning I do lately is reviewing Niddah over and over again, in the hopes that when I have whom to learn with, I won't have forgotten everything I learned.

Knowledge and Nonknowledge

Reading more of The Family Mashber over the holiday I was struck by the narrative interpolations into the text. Frequently the omniscient narrator will comment on the story itself. He will tell us which knowledge we need for the story to move forward. Conversely, he will sometimes block his own view. Although this narrator, we assume, sets the rules, he will use the device of not telling us what happened between one or another of the characters. We know the narrator is omniscient, he tells us Moshe Mashber's dreams and Sruli and Luzi's dreams. But sometimes he sets boundaries to his own omniscience in a narratological version of צמצום.

microprocessing der mishpoche mashber

Oscillating between profligacy and parsimony, between town and country, Sruli Gol embodies an attempt to live processually. Formalizing the procedures that underpin all of life, Gol makes them explicit, adopts them as a metaphor for his own practice. Thus extreme piety can coexist with the impiety of spilling beer on graves of the righteous- not only in the same town but in the same person. We all know that among crowds we have the sinners, the poor and the rich, and at some level they are part of similar processes; in goal we see an attempt to rigorously define such processes and to live them within the cloistered confines of one body. Like those infinitely small dimensions given to us by quantum physics, Gol thus forms a microcosmic template of the life of the town. The horror engendered by such a sight is not hard to imagine; it is the uncanny horror of seeing the me/not me, the formalization or distillation of that which makes the me me wedded to extreme intentionality can only provoke horror. The challenge of laying out such a literary taxonomy lies in preserving this very quality: vivisection of the subject on the table, letting this tableau speak for itself.
So far the novel contains processes that converge in Sruli Gol. From Moshe to Luzi to Sruli is a straight line of miniaturization. What Moshe must do with a staff, with offices and politicking, Sruli does with a crumpled handful of promissory notes. That Sruli confides in Luzi is no mistake; Luzi represents a threshold from the world where distinction has taken place to the microcosmos of Sruli. Thus he is a unique position (that of Agamben's Musselmanner) to speak the lacunae inherent in speech. In this novel to speak means to unfold a microcosmos, and to be silent means to fold it back down again into the coincidence of Sruli. Luzi is the process at the beginning of being and at its end. Thus where Moshe is fully unfolded, Luzi is semi-contracted and Sruli is subatomic.