S.E.T.I. Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Nonplussed In Crown Heights, Orthodox Jews Say We Could Use Some

'I knew it', said Abe Finkelstein to his lifelong friend Shmuel. 'I always said we needed it', referring to a headline stating that the first messages from an extraterrestrial intelligence had been received. 

Abe and Shmuel had joked for years about the dumbing down of America, and how they would welcome an alien intelligence which might up things up a bit.  They both lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the most Orthodox Jewish neighborhood outside of Jerusalem, a place of faith, learning, and modest living. 

 

Abe owned a small clothing store on Flatbush Avenue, catered to the old yentas of the neighborhood who still made their own clothes, as severe as Iranian burqas, but with none of that Islamic panache.  

At least those Iranian women wore their drapes in style - the finest gabardine and silk, tailored to perfection, the line impeccable, the cut magnificent - and Abe offered advice to Mrs. Pinkus and Mrs. David to look, just look at what could be done with the severe clothes they were expected to wear. 

 

'You're a beautiful woman', Abe said to Sadie Pinkus, 'and with all due respect to you and your husband, please look, just look at what I can do for you'.  Abe Finkelstein was not only a clothier but a tailor who had learned his trade on Seventh Avenue, cutting fabric for Lowenstein & Markus in an industrial loft but the magic of his scissors, how he turned a bolt of cloth into something the Queen of Sheba herself would wear, became the talk of the trade.  

When he decided to buy his own shop in Crown Heights, Lowenstein himself took him aside and said, 'Money is no object', but of course money was always the object for the old Jew who had made more than a king's ransom thanks to pinching pennies and squeezing the cutters.  No, Abe said, thanking his patron, I want to go on my own. 

Shmuel was a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar, one of the few Jews in Crown Heights who had memorized the entire Pentateuch in the original ancient Hebrew, could quote chapter and verse with ease and always with exact and pertinent reference.  He was proud to be one of the People of the Book, a caretaker not only of the Bible, but of Jewish history, the Semitic tribes of the Arabian desert, the Babylonian exile, the Kingdoms of David and Saul.  It was all one, universal whole.  Every time he read Exodus he thought of his own travels from Egypt to Jericho, reliving the hegira of Moses. 

Shmuel wished that his friend Abe would return to the book, not just sit seder every once and a while, or go to temple on Yom Kippur and Purim,; but travel to Israel, pray at the Wailing Wall, and reconfigure his life to resemble Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

But Abe had no patience for such Biblical academia. The world needed only so many rabbis but how many tailors of his genius and clothiers of his canny business sense were there?  Ok, many, but that was beside the point.  Life was to be led, enjoyed as far as tradition, culture, and society permitted, and to die a prosperous man. 

What the two men shared was an incredulousness about the state of the nation.  Morons on every streetcorner, standards lowered to let anyone with racial sob story into Harvard, jungle music, pimps, tarts, hookers all breeding and interbreeding until New York was seething with addicts, delinquents and criminals.  'Another flood', said Shmuel, 'even if it involves us.' 

'Did you read the paper?', Abe asked Shmuel one afternoon when they met at Rapaport's for mushroom barley soup.

'Why?', said Shmuel. 'What did I miss?

'Only the biggest story this side of Pearl Harbor', said his friend. 'We have been visited', and went on to tell the story of the coherent, constant, repeated algorithmic signals coming from outer space.  For the first time since S.E.T.I, the agency in charge of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was formed, its parabolic antennae pointed towards Alpha Centauri and beyond, and information concerning life on Planet Earth was sent, was there a response.  

 

In a guarded public announcement, the Defense Secretary simply said that 'We're working on it' and deferred questions of a coming alien presence on earth.  Yet, of course there was no way to gloss over the bare fact that an intelligible, intelligent, highly complex series of mathematical equations were being sent from an unknown extraterrestrial source. 

'What else is new?', said Shmuel, 'God is infinite, and I'm still hungry'.  The soup and sesame rolls were never enough but Abe never wanted to go the extra block to Katz's ('I've gotta watch my heart') and so they ate light.  

'Don't be so nonplussed', said Abe, incredulous at his friend's nonchalance. 'This will change everything'; but Shmuel was unmoved.  A few equations didn't mean the end of the world, and maybe they could help.  

'As I said' replied Shmuel, 'if they're so smart, we could use a little of it. '

Not everyone took the news so calmly. Across town in Tenafly, a meeting of the Baptist Ecumenical Ministry was hastily called to discuss the meaning of this astounding news. 

The pastors fought like cats and dogs.  One said that Earth was specially created by God and the sin committed on Earth would affect the rest of creation. The Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation. Christ's work of salvation can only apply to humans as the descendants of Adam. 

Another took the floor and insisted that although God’s dominion extends to all beings in the universe, if  an extraterrestrial lacks a spiritual aspect, an eternal soul to save, then it does not need saving.

A third contested the others and said that  perhaps extraterrestrials aren't sinners, like humans, and therefore aren't in need of saving.  But given the fact that all known intelligent beings (human beings) are sinners, it is likely that all other intelligent life in the universe would also be. 

Assuming that the latter argument is true – all intelligent life must sin – than God may have incarnated himself multiple times according to the particular configurations of sin and intelligence on other planets.  Noted Baptist theologian clotured the argument with this:

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately. However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years. 

'That's what resurrection will do for you', commented Shmuel. 'No wonder why Christians are upset'.  That was the thing about Judaism - no frills, no cannibalism, just a majestic universalism. 'Whoever sent those messages we could invite for seder'. 

Now, Jews have crackpots too and Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, is home to many of them.  They are convinced that each letter of the Torah has a numerical equivalent and the sum total adds up to the Fibonacci sequence or the Golden Mean, God's word, universal. 

'There's a Kabbalah in Red Hook', said Shmuel. 'They'll give an arm and a leg for those alien number sequences'. 

'And do what with them?'

'A ticket to ride.  There has to be someone at the head of the line on the spaceship'. 

'Don't be so Jewish', said Abe.  It's not a wedding. 

It turned out to be nothing.   A Chinese kid from East Orange hacked into the S.E.T.I. computer and fed it quadratic equations from his cousin's math book, set them on a timer for regular intervals, and went off to help his parents at the restaurant.  When the Defense Department finally figured out that they had been had, and not only that could not trace the hacker, the quickly covered their tracks, issued a non-committal statement of 'dysfunctionality' at the central New Mexico parabolic site, and let it go at that. 

'Too bad', said Shmuel when the hack became public. 'Kids today can't add 2+2, so we all could use a boost'. 

Small Town Values, What Exactly Are They? - The Same Priceless, Delightful Deceit Everywhere

Much has been made of small town values.  There is something almost mythical about the family farm, its moral rectitude, faith, patriotism, and hard work.  Up before dawn, to bed after sunset, hearty family meals, and everyone helping, doing their share, being part of family, community, and nation. 

The small town of which the farm is a part is also considered the model of the American way of life, its citizens all responsible, caring, and respectful. 

Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town set it in fictional Grover's Corners.

There is no culture in the town, says Mr. Webb.  It is just a plain, practical, hardworking place with nothing in particular to distinguish it. No, ma'am, there isn't much culture; but maybe this is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here. We like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of the seasons; yes, everybody knows about them.

 

Sinclair Lewis in Main Street takes a much harsher look at such towns - insular, snobbish, ignorant, and objectionably cultureless.  Carrie Underwood, a young woman from the big city, married to a country doctor, tries her best to reform Gopher Prairie to no avail.  The ways of the townspeople are too set, too contrary to anything beyond the prairie, the church, and the crops. 

The small town has been praised and criticized for decades.  Some see the big city as a sinkhole of moral corruption. Its size, complexity, and anonymity are no less degenerate and spiritually vacant than Sodom and Gomorrah.  These pessimists look to the small town as America's hope and salvation.  

We are a nation formed by settlers, they say, covered wagons, farmers, herders, cattlemen, and entrepreneurs.  Our values never veered from Biblical injunction, a devout sense of community, and a burning love of the new land. 

Others insist that the small town is simply a smaller, quieter version of the city.  Human nature, after all, with all its aggressive territorialism, bullying self-interest, suspicion, jealousy, and violent anger, is universal.  

There is something about the restrictive confines of a small community where everyone knows everyone else and where gossip, innuendo, and suspicious distortion, the byproducts of that intimacy, that make it the rule - a  hothouse where dark, irresistible impulses grow more quickly, morph and metastasize  and inward on themselves until the whole town is viral with endemic corruption. 

The New England town of New Brighton had its sexual underground, its permanently sexual and devious side, the world of illicit affairs, shady dealings, and circus side shows of weird babies, thieves, and crooked gamblers. 

Melissa Blevins, for example, wife of the Methodist minister, who, like one of Tennessee Williams' frail, delicate women, lived a life of dutiful submission to her husband, to his faith, and to her two children; but beneath this patent veneer, she was a serial lover, a promiscuous, demanding woman who satisfied the priests, doctors, lawyers, and dentists of her town without conditions or consequences.  She was a libertine, a woman for whom no settled, muddled life would ever be enough.  She, like her Victorian counterparts, was careful and canny in her planning and deceit, and her cinq-a-sept rendezvous were quiet, hidden affairs.

Every morning Mrs. Miller, made up, chipper, and dressed in a bright pastel pinafores regardless of season, opened her front door at 8:30 exactly, walked briskly to the bus stop, boarded the 32 and headed off to her job as a dental hygienist in the same building as her husband.  Forty five minutes later Mr. Miller emerged, spiffily dressed, brown fedora in winter, straw boater in summer, into his car to head to his job in Wethersfield.  Both, at precisely 4:15 headed off for their assignations in Bristol and Meriden, and were at home in time for the casserole dinner Mrs. Miller had prepared that morning. 

Marvin Epstein was a furrier the go-to place for matrons from New Brighton and as far away as tony West Hartford.  Minks, sables, ermine, fox – he had them all, perfectly made by New York tailors, elegant, and on display.  It was rumored that despite his lucrative business and standing in the community, Marvin was involved in questionable securities trading.  

He was overheard talking about Grand Cayman, the Turks and Caicos, and the Canaries, but never went on vacations, and only traveled by the New York, New Haven & Hartford once a week – ‘to attend to business’, he explained to his poker group at the Jewish Club in Wethersfield, ‘nothing more, nothing less’, but everyone knew or assumed they new what he was up to.  What they did not know was that his trips were punctuated by afternoons at the Westerly, an out-of-the-way hotel too far west to be chic but clean enough for a love affair. 

Every small town in America is Peyton Place, the fictional town of early television which, just like New Brighton, was a model of rectitude, propriety, and good taste; but barely beneath this well-curated and –cultivated veneer was a smarmy, sex-smelling brothel.  What could be more dramatic? Intrigue, deceit, shameless sex and promiscuity, the fodder for Hollywood, was there for the asking.  No, it did not have the bright sun, tinsel, and palm -treed elegance of Los Angeles; and managed only a feeble sun in winter and cloying humidity in summer, but it had all the ingredients of hot afternoon soap opera.

Who cared whether Melissa Blevins bedded every dentist in New Brighton ? Or whether the Puccini Brothers were actually local fronts for the New Haven mafia.  Or whether or with whom Marvin Epstein was sexually entangled.  It was the rumors, the innuendos, the offhanded remark, the raised eyebrows which gave life to this otherwise dull and unremarkable city.

New Brighton had its share of tragedy - Irma Swanson committed suicide by closing the garage door and turning on the engine of her old Plymouth.  Her son found her ashen grey, splayed on the front seat, mouth agape, eyes wide open. No child should be subjected to such horror, but Herbie recovered, went to school the next day where the reports of his mother's death had already circulated. 

His classmates kept their distance, not knowing how to deal with such a horrific event or how to approach the boy who witnessed it; but they all were morbid enough to want to know more.  How does one do it? How long does it take?  Don't you gag on the exhaust and rush to open the doors before it kills you? What did she look like?

The parents fueled this curiosity with technicalities.  That old Plymouth with its worn rings would surely do the job quicker than our Roadmaster; and no surprise that she ended her life, what with Herb Senior as a husband, and that old crone of a mother-in-law picking at her day and night.  And what will become of the children, wards of the state since their father will certainly leave the county?

It was a grisly event in the first place, but once it made the rounds of New Brighton, it got macabre, unbelievable, and more horrific than a cannibalistic feast. 

The Albright's boy Arthur was severely retarded, and the rumor was that his parents kept him locked in a windowless basement, feeding him slop and sending an old blind, homeless Negro man down there to clean up. The next in line to hear the rumor was at first incredulous, but when they began to think about it, and how weird the Albrights were, they began to understand, and when they passed all on to their next door neighbors, they had added their own frills and embroidery. 

The townspeople of New Brighton were not surprised when they read about Bernie Madoff, swindler, conman, fraudster, and thief who bilked millions out of his Jewish friends, or Jeffrey Skilling of Enron who 'invested' millions in shell companies, sold shares to credulous third party investors and walked off with a king's ransom. 

Why should they be surprised when their own Arnold Birnbaum got caught with his hand in the till to the tune of ten million dollars, money amassed through the same brilliant, underhanded trickery as Madoff; or when Hamilton Cabot, descendant of the famous Boston Cabots and longtime resident of New Brighton's West End, created financial instruments as canny and innovative as Skilling ever had?

On the surface, New Brighton seemed just like any other small town in America - like Grover's Corners in fact.  It was a model of good taste, good living, and upright men and women of good standing.  Its children were neat and well-behaved.  Its churches were filled on Sundays.  Husbands took their sons fishing and wives taught their daughters how to bake. 

But underneath all the heralded niceties, good manners, and good will, was the real New Brighton, the unvarnished one, the true one, the one with the same unspeakable crimes of anywhere else.  

New Brighton should not be criticized for hypocrisy or wrongdoing.  If the nastiness of New Brighton was common to all communities and all people - the expression of an innate, hardwired perennially unsatisfied human nature -  then there should be no room for censure.  People just being people. 

The stuff of melodrama, in fact. Peyton Place was a very tame version of what went on in New Brighton. 

Hannah Scribe's Scorched Earth Policy Of Love - A Militant Romantic, The Last Man Standing Would Be Hers

'Men', said Hannah.  'Can't live with them and can definitely live without them', but stuck she was in suburbia hating every minute of it, having moved out from the city in a failed desire for more room to grow.  Yes, they had a nice house, a lawn, a garden, and good schools, but what had it done for her?  Nothing, nada, zilch, zippo.  

She was as blindered, harnessed, and tethered as a Fifties housewife, and her husband was no better than the churchgoing Rotarians of a generation ago, giving a desultory swipe at the dinner dishes, cutting the grass like it was hunting prey on the veldt, going off every Thursday night to play poker with the boys. 'I didn't sign up for this', Hannah said. 

  

But of course she did.  She knew precisely what she was getting into, thought that Aidan Scribe was the man, the one whose boxes were all checked - kind, considerate, liberal, attentive, respectful.  She was less concerned with virility - that could be had on any streetcorner, and she had no intention of rolling over every night for her husband alone.  A modern marriage, she insisted, one with an exit strategy, a side door, a convenient way out but with a home to come back to. 

The city had been their mutual choice. Both had grown up around metropolitan areas and had gravitated to them for art, culture, and enjoyment.  New Brighton, where her husband was from was your usual small New England town, predictable for its bank, dry cleaners, Main Street dentists, and novelty stores.  'Not an unpleasant place to grow up', he said using that academic negative positive she hated, a manner of speaking which left no room for enthusiasm.  

If it hadn't been New Brighton it would have been some other routine, dismal place.  That's what the Scribe family was made of, simple expectations, and they could have been satisfied anywhere. 

She was from the Midwest - at least there people were proud of their simple Americanism, had no urban envy, and were just as happy with cows and chickens as other people.  Hannah left the farm for college, first Mason County Community College  then Ohio State, then one year of graduate school after which she left to follow the circus. 

Not really, but that was the way she liked to describe her 'fugue', a departure from the status quo to ride the rails with Billy Baxter, a bad boy but an irresistible one ('Why do we always fall for them?) and together they covered the territory - communes, birchbark canoes, Indian reservations, and the Muir woods. 

Billy turned out to be bust, a temporary anodyne, a good on-and-off switch but nothing more interesting or permanent.  It was a fling, a retro-hippy bus trip, but something to return from, not stay. 

Then there was Arthur from Beacon Hill, a patrician New Englander whose ancestors had founded the Massachusetts Bay colony, become Newport shipbuilders and Atlantic traders, and founded Parker, Perkins & Adams one of Wall Street's first investment banks. 

Arthur was the downer after upper Billy and his antics, and Hannah even thought he was the one - or was it the money, the Fifth Avenue penthouse, and a private plane? And if so, what did it matter? 

It did matter, actually, at least finding the right place to anchor; and Arthur was not it.  He was the kind of man who is always distracted, his mind here and there but never on anything vaguely interesting.  Perhaps it was the money, too many choices, not enough setbacks to focus one's attention. In any case, money and all, she left him. 

She married Aidan who had a little bit of everything, but not a lot of any one thing.  She thought that a potpourri, a smorgasbord, was better than a pot which could boil over, and her biological clock was ticking, so they tied the knot and moved to an accommodating apartment in Cambridge.  He trundled off to work at biotech firm in Boston, and she to a local advertising company which touted its Pahk the Cah Boston roots and wooed clients with its Southie and Charlestown working class background. 

So far, so good. A normal, expected, predictable trajectory, but when he came along ('He' was how she referred to her son, refusing to accept motherhood, and not giving him a name other than an indifferent pronoun somehow validated her independence) the apartment felt cramped and diapery and they decided to move. Cambridge, which she had valued for its cultural diversity, was in reality just a few streets of Pho, take out, Portuguese delis, Asian Harvard, and not much else; so it was time to move out. 

Hannah had been a dutiful, faithful wife during the Cambridge sojourn. No lovers, no cinq-a-septs, no liaisons or trysts.  Except for Jorge, Dominican transplant but no Romeo Santos but a MIT mathematician working on number theory - like Alan Turing, he suggested, whose first computer broke the German secret code, he was going to do the same with Russian and Chinese puzzles. 

Why she fell for him, she didn't know, but had no regrets.  Short, sweet, unpredictable, but satisfying; and when he took a professorship at Berkeley, she went back to hearth and home. 

In any case after a few years in the suburbs Hannah had become restive.  It was time to leave the nest even though her pick of men, with the possible exception of Jorge, had been a sorry venture. Men were not what they were cracked up to be, and while she had never consciously looked for Mr. Right, she recognized that as a woman, of course she was. 

Stepping out and away from Aidan on occasion was not picking up the scent once again, she said to herself, but adventure.  Had she been more honest she would have realized that she was once again searching for the Holy Grail of men. 

Aidan was, like many men, clueless and sure of himself, so he didn't even notice Hannah's absences. 'Working late at the office', the standard for feckless husbands, did not apply to women, at least not in Arthur's case, nor did long Saturday afternoons at the gym.  Infidelity was almost too easy, and as all unfaithful husbands and wives know, getting away with it is half the fun. 

Nevertheless, Hannah enjoyed her unquestioned dalliances and was open to as many as could be fit in to her busy schedule. There was Lawrence, buff trainer at the gym, Harper the top-tier lawyer who was defending her agency from libel, and Brainard, 'The Man Who Can Fix Anything' who worked on her pipes. 

Yet as pleasurable and diverting as all this was, it was still without focus. In the back of her mind, in her heart of hearts, in whatever way you wanted to say it, she was off the beaten path.  These men, as much as they satisfied her curiosity, libido, and need for risk and adventure, could have been poupées gonflables, off-the-shelf sex toys, dildoes.  She wanted a soulmate, for she had always expected to find one. Along with procreation, which she had already satisfied, that was a woman's prerogative. 

Not surprisingly feminists said it was a load of hokey.  There is ipso facto no Mr. Right.  He doesn't exist, never has and never will.  Sex is one bloody compromise after the other, so get used to it. 

But Hannah dug her heels in and thought she would give it one last try.  She gave up Alfonso the roofer, and Harkins, the accountant, and set her sails into the wind. Yes, she was married, but that was a desultory, stop-gap affair that could be easily dissolved.  Of course there was 'He' but he had his father, loving grandparents and a strong support group (another suburban ploy); so off she went, compass due north. 

Of course she ended up foundered on a deserted beach.  Compass or no compass, running before the wind can send you nowhere.  No Mr. Right, not even an approximation, so she reefed her sails and returned to port.  

That long episode did much to calm the waters, and she adjusted quite nicely to the suburbs after that.  Patient mother, dutiful wife, responsible professional, and satisfied that she at last confirmed what she had always thought, men were simply not worth it.