An e-mail from my rabbi, who’s moved to the West Coast, says they’re “happier than pigs in shit.” Something forced about that. People with a new grandchild don’t boast that way, usually. But my rabbi’s different, trying, despite fame as a teacher, to prove something. Let’s speculate that those pastoral visits to sickbeds, those weddings, those grave-side prayers, gave him an anchor to the unremarkable, the basic nurturing commonness of others’ lives. Out there he’s free of all that–or denied it?–and is hoping that–if he tries writing daily–he’ll capture in a novel everything he knows. Joy. Despair. “Some days,” he says, “I feel like jumping off the Golden Gate.” Odd to hear that from a man who once said that God turns tragedy and comedy into history, if we wait.