H&H Bagels and the Mysteries Eternal

In this newsletter: A deranged heresy, some thoughts on Omicron, and words of advice.

Part I: H&H Bagels and the Mysteries Eternal

If our general slide towards chaos and destruction over the past decade is the direct consequence of the closing of the H&H Bagels on 80th Street and Broadway in June of 2011, what can we infer about the nature of God?

Try to remember what things were like in early 2011: Lonesome George was still alive. The ocean was half a degree cooler. There were seven times as many bats in Acadia National Park, around 150,000 fewer cases of Lyme disease treated each year in the U.S., and only four common types of human coronaviruses.

Then comes June of 2011, H&H closes, and the world tilts in its orbit.

I can only relate my personal experience here, which was that I worked down on Maiden Lane, and one day in August of 2011 I’m sitting at my desk and I get this weird sensation like my stomach is rumbling, and it turns out that it’s not my stomach but rather the whole city that’s rumbling, and we go downstairs and everyone’s standing around in the street, wondering what to do and talking about September 11th.

And then like two days after the earthquake there’s a hurricane that causes insane flooding in New Jersey, and it seems for a while that it’s going to sink Manhattan. In the end it doesn’t, but that was one of the most profoundly weird weeks I’ve experienced in New York City.

And then Occupy Wall Street started the next month, and people always remember the occupation of Zuccotti Park, but another thing that happened was that police occupied the whole area around Maiden Lane; literal battalions mustering over on Cedar Street, and walking out to Chipotle for lunch it felt as though there had been a coup and a white shirt junta had seized power below Fulton Street.

A year later, Hurricane Sandy: Red Hook underwater, a half-mile gas line at the Hess station on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, splash marks six stories up on the inland side of a building on Beach 28th and Surf. And then things got hotter and wetter, and the subways just stopped working, basically, and all the bats died, and the lights went out at the Super Bowl, and there were so many ticks whenever you left the city, and now it’s almost 2022 and we’ve been stuck in our apartments for like two years and who knows if we’ll ever get to do anything fun ever again.

There are, of course, other possible explanations for the earthquake and the hurricanes and the Super Bowl blackout and the deer ticks, aside from the closing of the H&H Bagels on 80th Street and Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in June of 2011. One, presumably, is that all of these phenomena are roughly independent of each other, and that we live in a universe governed by chaos, and that no narrative can explain the flow of human, natural, and unnatural events. But man hungers for meaning, and chaos is boring, so there’s no need to dwell on it.

It’s also possible, I suppose, that some discrete event did cause the earthquake and the hurricanes and etc., but that it was something other than the closing of the H&H Bagels on 80th Street and Broadway. Perhaps the closing of the last Champagne Video on the West Side sometime around 2008? The fart of a dog in Tempe, Arizona in March of 2011? The end of the Space Shuttle program that July?

Perhaps. Perhaps. The veins of causality that may or may not connect, say, a spilt cup of diner coffee on the seat of a downtown D train to a burst tire on an Kenworth T800 18-wheeler on the bridge where the New Jersey Turnpike crosses the Rahway River, are impossible to trace, and to attempt to comprehend them we must rely on the intuitions that filter in through our subconscious, which, in this case, point decisively towards bagels.

So let’s assume, arguendo, that it was the closing of this bagel store that knocked the flow of history sideways in the middle of 2011. What does this tell us about the nature of the universe?

The H&H Bagels on 80th and Broadway has been closed for a while, and I hadn’t been a regular for a while before that, but here’s what I remember: Sawdust on the floors, like at Fairway. Long lines at the old-fashioned register. Plexiglass cases stuffed with piles of bagels. On the wall, a poster of that Norman Rockwell of the kid at the lunch counter with the bindle at his feet. Gumball machines. And behind the register, the mysterious bagel-making apparatus; an oven, maybe; some kind of a dunker? It was hard to see from the back of the line, and by the time you got to the front you had to hurry up and order and there wasn’t time to look, because there were people behind you and the line wasn’t getting any shorter.

H&H had absurd hours; I don’t know if it never closed, or if shut down for like an hour around 3 a.m. like Big Nick’s down the block, but you could effectively always stop in for a bagel. The other thing was that it wasn’t some kind of an appetizing like Russ & Daughters or Barney Greengrass. You didn’t go there to get a toasted sesame with lox and capers and a tomato. You went there for your bagels, hot out of the oven and as expensive as a plain bagel could possibly be. A fresh plain bagel from H&H was the perfect snack, the platonic ideal of a snack, the snack you always wanted when you wanted a snack, and that you still always want when you want a snack, and, now that you think about it, maybe you haven’t had a really excellent snack in the decade since it closed, and maybe you’ll never have one again.

The general decay that’s set in since June of 2011 suggests the existence of a deity who feels that same sense of grief at the loss of the possibility of a fresh plain bagel since the closing the H&H at 80th and Broadway. Who would this deity be? Here we must enter into the realm of the theological imagination, but we can paint a hypothetical picture: A personified god who lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side, close enough to the 79th Street station that the H&H at 80th was generally on their way home. At the Apthorp, most likely, because that seems like the obvious spot in the immediate vicinity where a god might live; maybe somewhere on an upper floor. (I’m open to arguments that such a deity would actually live at the Ansonia, in one of those apartments at the top of the corner turrets with a circular living room beneath an ice cream scoop dome, but I just think that’s a bit too far south to develop a real reliance on H&H, and a deity living at the Ansonia seems more likely to be committed to the famous hot doggery of Gray’s Papaya than the hot fresh plain bagel at H&H, but then again who can fathom the routines and preferences of the divine?)

Other assumptions we can make about this deity: A regular at the afternoon screenings at Lincoln Plaza. Still gets both Commentary and Dissent. Wins a tote bag every year calling into Brian Lehrer’s end-of-year news quiz. Never cooks pasta. Still calls the PBS NewsHour “MacNeil/Lehrer.” Avoids dogs. Not a member of a religious congregation, because why waste your weekend praying to yourself, but would belong to Ansche Chesed if it did, just for the kibitzing.

This deity is a deity of habit. A god whose Sunday routine — get up, get dressed, ride the elevator downstairs, nod to the doorman, buy the paper at the newsstand on the corner at 79th, get a coffee in one of those blue paper cups from the New Wave Cafe across the street, stop by H&H for a half-dozen bagels (whatever’s just out of the oven, one for now and the rest for later in the week), and then head down toward the boat basin to read by the water, first the Times magazine and then the front section, and then a paperback from the deity’s holy pocket (lots of Simenon) — had been fixed for a hundred thousand lifetimes, and was disrupted that spring morning in 2011 when the H&H doors were locked shut, the bagels already going stale.

The deity didn’t despair, not at first. There were other decent bagels on Broadway. At Zabar’s. At Fairway. Heck, probably at Westside Market on 76th. That first Sunday of the post-H&H era, the deity went across the street to the little Zabar’s café on the corner. There was a novelty to it, sure, and the coffee was better than at New Wave, but it didn’t quite fill the hole. The next week, the deity went farther afield, up to the Hot & Crusty on 88th, which was disappointing. The week after that, the deity had friends in town (from Frankfurt? Valhalla? Portsmouth?) and did Sunday brunch with them at the restaurant upstairs at Fairway, and by then the routine had been broken, and something felt off.

And that’s how you get earthquakes, and near-miss hurricanes, and as the deity realizes what’s wrong things only get worse, because now the deity knows what’s missing, and, what’s more, knows that it can never be regained. Yes, there was, for a while, another H&H location by the Intrepid. Yes, there was a store with the same name on the East Side. But the deity didn’t want to go to the Intrepid, or to the East Side. The deity wanted the deity’s Sunday routine back, and, what’s more, the deity wanted to be able to stop in for a fresh plain bagel at 1:30 a.m. on the way home from Malachy’s or the Hi-Life or wherever, and whenever the deity found themselves in the mood for a fresh plain bagel, which was often, the deity thought about what the deity had lost, and the deity got upset, and eventually the deity began to despair, because the deity realized that nothing lasts, and if nothing lasts, maybe nothing matters, and if nothing matters, then why keep up with the various heavenly responsibilities that the deity had shouldered since the very beginning, when the vessels first splintered. And that’s where you get Hurricane Sandy and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps.

There’s something unsatisfying about this notion of a deity becoming undone over a missing bagel. If we imagine a deity so fragile that the closing of H&H throws off the balance of the universe, we must explain why, for example, the sun didn’t explode after the New York Times merged the Metro section into the front section in 2008. What’s more, if we attribute at least some beneficence to this deity who keeps chaos at bay, whose role through all eternity up until the closing of the H&H bagels in June of 2011 had been to maintain some sort of balance such that a novel coronavirus does not spread in successive waves around the world, then we need to reckon with the homeless people who held the door at H&H for tips at all hours of the day and night. How could this deity have passed them by every week, or twice every week, during millions of looped lifetimes, when the deity had enough power even in the shard of a hangnail to bless them and their children and their children’s children, for a thousand generations?

There might be some answer to that paradox; some theodicic proof that can explain this deity’s apparent failure to intervene. Yet rather than strain against the obvious logical current, we could, instead, follow the more rationale course, which is to look elsewhere for our deity whose eternal existence has been disrupted by the disappearance of the H&H bagel.

We have, thus far, presumed the god disturbed by the closing of the H&H Bagels at 80th and Broadway to be a creative spirit; that the imbalance came from the deity being less able to battle chaos after the loss of the fresh hot plain H&H bagel. But there is, however, another way of approaching the problem. What if the chaos, the imbalance, the sense of tilt and disorder, comes from some deity being rendered more effective, more powerful, by the closing of the shop?

It could have happened like this: There were rats, let’s say. A horde of rats living in a nest in the basement of the Filene’s Basement across the street from H&H, who would creep one by one across Broadway each night and assemble on 80th Street at the hour when the bakers at H&H threw out the unsold leftover bagels in big clear plastic bags. The rats would take one of the bags, pulling it inch by inch down the sidewalk towards Broadway, little rat mouths tearing little rat tooth-sized holes in the plastic as they dragged it down to 79th, and then down the subway steps, through the turnstiles, down the platform, onto the track, and into the 1 train tunnel, until they came to a little crack in the earth that led straight into the fiery belly of Sheol, where an alligator-headed god waited, drooling, in a chamber decorated with sawdust floors, Norman Rockwell posters, and, in front of a grinding cash register, a long line of damned souls recruited from the sulfur mines to act as extras in this demonic indulgence.

And there, down in the darkest depths of creation, the alligator-headed deity gorged on the somewhat stale bagels, and the hell-rats ate the crumbs that spilled from its horrible mouth, and the damned souls watched in horror. And in those hours taken up with demonically possessing the hell-rats, and anticipating the garbage bag full of stale bagels, and devouring the garbage bag full of stale bagels, and decorating the chamber to make it resemble the H&H Bagels store at 80th and Broadway as closely as any chamber down there in the belly of Sheol possibly could, the alligator-headed deity was not working to spread chaos and disorder, which disadvantaged that deity in the heavenly battles.

Then the store closed, and the alligator-headed deity sent the possessed hell-rats scrabbling up and down the corner for hours that night and then the next, but the garbage bags full of stale bagels never appeared again. So, the deity lost interest, and refocused its unholy energies on fomenting chaos and disorder and such. And with this alligator-headed deity fully reengaged in the heavenly battles again, the balance of the universe shifted and shifted some more, and soon enough we’ve got a global pandemic.

That’s one way it could have happened. Which just goes to show: The design of our urban spaces has unforeseeable consequences, both spiritual and mundane, and the plastic garbage bags crowding out pedestrians on every sidewalk in this blighted city are not just unsightly and annoying, but have the potential to allow bagels to slip into the netherworld, creating demonic reliance upon certain exhaustible human food sources, which, when withdrawn, can upset the very balance of the universe.

Amen.

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Rabbinic Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, December 5, 2021.

Part II: What Omicron Means For You

It’s nearly the end of 2021, but Omicron is making things feel a bit like early 2020. I spoke with a senior FDA official about whether we’ll need a variant-specific booster for Omicron, and how long it might take. Here’s what he told me:

In an interview with Barron’s, Dr. Peter Marks, the senior official responsible for the review of Covid-19 vaccines at the Food and Drug Administration, laid out a possible timeline that could have shots of updated vaccines going into arms in the U.S. by April, if necessary.

That suggests that even in a worst-case scenario… the pandemic situation could begin to stabilize again by late spring. A worst-case scenario, to be sure, isn’t necessarily in the cards at the moment. The variant has been studied for less than two weeks, and little remains known.

Read the whole story here.

Also this past week, I listened to yet another FDA advisory committee hearing so you didn’t have to, this one about Merck’s Covid-19 pill. The FDA advisors voted in favor of the pill’s benefits outweighing its risks, but only by a slim margin.

“This was clearly a very difficult decision,” said one committee member, Dr. Michael Green… Green said that if a Covid-19 pill were to become available with a better safety or efficacy profile, the FDA should reconsider [the Merck pill’s] authorization.

That story is here.

Part III: Words of Advice

• Watch a 480-foot-tall radio mast turn into a floppy noodle in about seven seconds. I know there are a million videos like this on the internet, but there’s something particularly satisfying and simple about this one. It’s like, yes, I suppose that’s what I expected would happen if you blew up one of the supporting wires of a 480-foot-tall radio mast? But it’s nice to see that it is, indeed, what happens.

• I had just finished writing the above absurdity regarding H&H when I discovered a forgotten item about H&H that I wrote a decade ago for the Forward, on the last day H&H was open, and found that I had unwittingly described the store in precisely the same terms in the two pieces, which is eerie.

• I went ice skating the other day and it was great, and then I fell directly on my chest like an idiot and it was fine and I kept skating, but now it hurts to sleep, and also to do basically anything. So the advice here I think is never do fun stuff.

That’s all I’ve got.