Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

The rabbi nodded. “Do you know who Gershom Scholem was? He was a Jewish philosopher. He wrote about Kabbalah and Shabbtai Zvi and antinomianism. He spoke once about something called a plastic hour, that there are these times in our lives when everything is soft and malleable. We tend to suffer during these times, but his point was that actually, these plastic hours are times when you can make actual change.”

“I think that every family is its own Bible story. Every family is its own mythology. The people that were written about in the Torah—that’s just a document from a period of time. If the Torah had gone on, perhaps we’d all be included in it. Perhaps there would be a Book of the Fletchers.”

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

and he knew now that the only thing he ever had to apologize for was that he hadn’t recognized that the kidnapping was there to show him how every single other moment of his life, he was not being kidnapped. That there was danger and there was safety—neither of them are passive creatures—but he’d only ever acknowledged the danger. He hadn’t realized that the safety was aggressive, too. He hadn’t realized that for every single moment of his life that he was not in that basement, chained to a pipe like an animal, he was free like a king.

Yes, we comfort ourselves that perhaps the phantom limbs of their potential tingle enough to tell them that they missed their opportunity to rise from their comfortable circumstances and become the real people that only true adversity and fear can make you into. Genes can lie dormant, but they don’t dilute—even the recessive ones stand backstage in full dress, waiting for their turn to go on.