Cat or Kid
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Part of my morning routine is getting really annoying. Every morning — and I mean every damn morning — I have to change the pee pads under my cat’s litter box because they are soiled. She refuses to pee in her litter box. We have tried everything: new litter box, different diet, more pets, cleaning. It simply doesn’t matter. We even tried to lock her in the laundry room with her litter box overnight, hoping the cramped space would force her to use it. When our parents left the dryer running while she was in there, we woke up and realized how cruel we had become in our attempt to train her. At this point, we’ve given up all hope. I just wake up and change the pee pad, if she agrees to pee on it, or wash whatever object turned yellow overnight.
I am a man of hierarchy. I rank everything from movies to toothbrush heads on a constant basis in my head and on my Notes app. One of the first notes I took when I first got an iPhone almost two decades ago was a ranking of pickup lines: “Nice shirt, it would go great with my floor.” I was a child, obviously single.
My household ranking is pretty straightforward. Our son is first, my wife is second (or, in the middle of a toddler tantrum, first), and our cat is third. This unremarkable hierarchy is based both on principles — humans over animals — and true love. I think about my child and wife way more than my cat; I spend more time with them; I write about them more; in an emergency, I would save them first. It’s not that I don’t love the cat, but she just doesn’t figure into the way I behave or live my life as much as they do.
Number one and number three have been having some beef. My one-and-a-half-year-old has recently developed a passion for hugging (euphemism for choking) and sitting on our cat. For some weird reason, she used to let him do this. Recently, however, she has been fighting back by play-biting and scratching him. We are worried that she will move on to actual biting if he doesn’t stop.
We’ve reached a point as a family where we need to come to a decision about what to do with the cat. The pee is preventing us from moving our son into his own room, because her preferred pee area is right in front of the door to his future room. As much as he wants to eat her litter and step in her pee, our parenting style is just not that permissive. The beef between them has me terrified that she will scratch his eye out, while all he thinks he’s doing is playing. This has to stop.
To me, we have to consider all of our options for a peaceful household. Getting rid of the cat — giving her away or having her live outdoors — is on the table for me. It might be the only thing left to do.
My wife sees it differently. She is not a hierarchy gal, seeing it as unnecessary and somewhat heartless. “I’m not saying the cat is as important as our son, but she is still part of the family. Ranking them is kind of silly.” To her, even considering the expulsion option is offensive. Not only am I in trouble for analyzing it, I’m also viewed with suspicion for even thinking of it. How dare I?
We had a proxy debate about this when we were discussing a section of The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Dara Horn’s excellent new book. We both read Dara’s thought-provoking framing of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:
“That wall is not the holiest place on earth for Jews. It’s the holiest place that Jews have access to,” she said. “The holiest place on earth for Jews is on the platform above that, which Jews call the Temple Mount, in a place that Jews don’t have access to, because it’s underneath a mosque called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” . . . “For Muslims it’s considered the third holiest site on earth, and for Jews it’s the Holy of Holies, but we don’t have access to it,” she said. . . .
“Muslims have access to it,” Brod Farber answered. “But Jewish people don’t. By Israeli law, Jewish people are not allowed to pray there.”
This basic fact is taken as a given by nearly every Jew on the planet, including me. The very few Jews who occasionally attempt to violate it are considered by the overwhelming majority of Jews, including me, to be extremists. . . . For most Jews, including millions who have prayed at the Temple Mount’s external retaining wall and even kissed its stones, the lack of access for Jews to Judaism’s holiest site has never felt strange.
But in that school chapel in Minnesota, still reeling from the massacre of a few weeks earlier, I recalled the name Hamas gave to its slaughter of Jews: the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” named after that very same mosque complex. . . .
I still had no desire to pray on the Temple Mount, and I still felt that Jews who did were extremists. But I tried to imagine a similar situation for another group, in which people voluntarily gave up access to their holiest site on earth in order not to disturb others who had built over it. . . . What I tried to imagine wasn’t just a cathedral built on the site of the Ka’aba in Mecca or a Hindu temple built atop the ruins of the Vatican, but also Christian and Muslim pilgrims gathering instead in a nearby parking lot that was once a parking lot for the Vatican or the Ka’aba, praying fervently in the parking lot and kissing the asphalt of the parking lot while watching streams of people file into their holiest site on earth. . . . I imagined billions of devout Christians or Muslims contenting themselves with kissing the asphalt of the parking lot, feeling profoundly moved by the asphalt of the parking lot.
When I read this the first time, it threw me for a loop. I hadn’t heard this Jewish perspective before. Sure, I know that Mecca and Medina are by far the holiest sites in Islam, and al-Aqsa is also a holy site. But the idea that there was an explicit ranking wasn’t top of mind. If I’m honest, I’ve spent thousands of dollars and made the trip to Mecca and Medina at least seven times, but I’ve never made an effort to go to al-Aqsa — and it’s not for lack of funds or access. It’s because my mind immediately thinks of Mecca and Medina as the subject matter of most of the poetry, culture, and tourism infrastructure of my tradition. Sure, sure, I’m a bad Muslim, whatever.
When I read more, I came to the conclusion that the “third holiest” label is shorthand based on a prophetic tradition that singles out only three mosques for religious pilgrimage: Mecca, Medina, and al-Aqsa. A tradition that, for most of Muslim history, was ignored. Religious pilgrimage to the saints’ graves that dot the Middle East was an integral part of pre-modern Islam. But never mind that.
Still, the idea that another group of people might consider the Temple Mount their Mecca wasn’t something I thought about much until I read Horn’s book.
I had to discuss it with the only other person who could analyze this and challenge my thoughts: my lovely wife.
She was also baffled when she read this section. For her, the ranking of holy places was as offensive as my ranking of our cat and child. They are all just holy places. She could see and concede that the Jewish tradition thinks of the Temple Mount as a holy space, and perhaps Jews should worship there if they would like, but her initial reaction was to say the language is inflammatory and not constructive.
Dara Horn, the “Antisemitism Lorax,” got us hooked!
We got the full context of the book, which is great and only tangentially has to do with this claim. Her bigger argument is that antisemitism sticks around because Jews are endlessly forced to explain themselves to people who, like me, know almost nothing about actual Jewish life, and no amount of better PR or Holocaust education is going to fix that. Her answer, which I agree with, is curiosity: start getting people interested in how living Jews actually think, argue, worship, build, and understand themselves.
After getting that context, our debate was whether the Temple Mount should be partitioned between Muslims and Jews, which we ended up agreeing on, and whether Muslims should be blamed for the status quo, which we didn’t quite agree on.
I went further and tried to find another example.
Hebron. After a crazy gunman murdered twenty-nine Muslims praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, Israel divided the building between Muslims and Jews. That sounds like BS until you read that Jews had been barred from entering the mosque for centuries. This started in the 1200s under the Mamluks and eventually reduced Ottoman era Jews to praying from the famous “seventh step” outside a place which, according to legend, holds the graves of Abraham and his family. Muslim supremacy. That shifted my line of questioning: Why had Muslims gotten to call the whole thing theirs exclusively in the first place? Should we remain that intolerant now? Does that justify the current partition?
The issue, I concluded, was that each side was overlooking the effect of recent history on their gut reactions. Muslims were overlooking their historical power and sovereignty. They got to decide who gets to worship where and when, and now they can’t. And Jews were overlooking the current strength and coercive nature of the Israeli government (the current one specifically) in preference to their historical disempowerment, sometimes at the hands of Muslims. Not everyone, of course, we shouldn’t generalize. It’s all about power dynamics — which doesn’t make the gut reaction right or wrong. It makes it subject to further discussion.
Back to the cat. Unfortunately, we can’t split her. Can we reach a compromise that gets rid of the pee and solves her beef with my son? I am more willing to give the cat up because, well, I care more about my son and wife. My wife hates putting it that way, but eventually every theoretical hierarchy gets tested.
Thankfully, my wife isn’t sovereign over our household, and neither am I. We share the place, so neither of us gets to make laws based on our gut. We have to debate, compromise, and come up with something we can both live with — regardless of whether or how we rank.
Preferably with minimal damage to our house.
