Books, Arts & Manners: Wall-Eyed

‘IN LOS ANGELES, no one can hear you scream,” says a paranoid friend of mine. Living in a free-standing house in one of that city’s semi-suburban quasi-neighborhoods, she has always felt unnerved by the distance between her and her neighbors. Whereas in New York paranoia feeds on proximity, which is, I think, the reason I have been feeling paranoid lately. Specifically, it’s the obscene graffiti that have begun appearing about me on some pleasant residential side streets of the Upper West Side.

It was the first day of Shavuot, the Jewish festival that commemorates the giving of the Torah by God at Mount Sinai. On Shavuot, after an allnight session of lectures by rabbis, Scriptural verses are chanted narrating the most awesome event in the Bible: from a pillar of fire, the voice of God was heard by 12 tribes’ worth of very much alarmed Israelites. On two stone tablets God then inscribed ten basic moral obligations and handed these to Moses.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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‘IN LOS ANGELES, no one can hear you scream,” says a paranoid friend of mine. Living in a free-standing house in one of that city’s semi-suburban quasi-neighborhoods, she has always felt unnerved by the distance between her and her neighbors. Whereas in New York paranoia feeds on proximity, which is, I think, the reason I have been feeling paranoid lately. Specifically, it’s the obscene graffiti that have begun appearing about me on some pleasant residential side streets of the Upper West Side.

It was the first day of Shavuot, the Jewish festival that commemorates the giving of the Torah by God at Mount Sinai. On Shavuot, after an allnight session of lectures by rabbis, Scriptural verses are chanted narrating the most awesome event in the Bible: from a pillar of fire, the voice of God was heard by 12 tribes’ worth of very much alarmed Israelites. On two stone tablets God then inscribed ten basic moral obligations and handed these to Moses.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.