Heavyweight - #8 Jeremy

Episode Date: November 15, 2016

When Jonathan was 16, he went to synagogue every morning. He even thought that one day he might become a rabbi. Things didn’t exactly work out that way, but he’s always wondered what if they had. In this episode, he finds out. Credits Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein. This episode was also produced by Chris Neary and Kalila Holt. The senior producer is Wendy Dorr. Editing by Alex Blumberg, Paul Tough, and Jorge Just. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Steven Page, Paul de Jong, and Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Haley Shaw.  Music for this episode by Christine Fellows, with additional music by Steven Page, Y La Bamba, Farnell Newton, Chris Zabriskie, Todd Hannigan, and Marmoset. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello? So I have a favor to ask of you. No. I was wondering, since this is the last episode of the season, if you could introduce the show. No, Jonathan, I'm not going to introduce the show. From Gimlet Media, on behalf of Jonathan Goldstein, this is Heavyweight. From Gimlet Media. On behalf of my best friend.

You're not my best friend. Okay, my second best friend. No, hold on, let me think. Karen, Mary-Claude. Yeah, you're definitely second tier. Top five. Top five is pretty good. All right, here we go.

From Gimlet Media, on behalf of one of my top five friends, Jonathan Goldstein, this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Jeremy. Today's episode, Jeremy. Thanks, Jackie. Take it easy now. Take it easy. I want you to know, okay, this is it, right? Be well. Promise me. Take it easy.

Promise me. Be well. John? Yeah. Is that right? promise me take it easy promise me be well John yeah is that right but you know what yeah there's gonna be season two pardon me

season two yeah yeah no no no comes after season one no no no no no no oh come on you like talking to me I do

I do yeah alright my friend hasta luego Dawn, you like talking to me. I do. I do. Yeah. All right, my friend. Hasta luego. Thanks for introducing the show. You're welcome. From Gimlet Media, on behalf of one of my top five friends, Jonathan Goldstein, this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode, Jeremy. 770 is on that side of the street. You want to cross over here? Not long ago, I moved from Canada to Brooklyn. And while walking to the bank in my new neighborhood, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. I'd walked the route dozens of times, but never once did I notice the building I was passing right by.

Excited, I grabbed Emily to share with her my discovery. Also, you are not looking for cars. You just walked straight across a light. I'm still alive, aren't I? We lived down the street from 770 Eastern Parkway, the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, the place where, 30 years ago, I came to meet a man many Jews considered to be the Messiah.

And you had told me a few things, or sort of hinted, not ever really told, just hinted a few things over time about your sort of mysterious religious past. Emily and I were only married last year, so we're still in that early stage of marriage, when you share things about your past. I long for a day when we'll have motored through all of this getting-to-know-each-other stuff, so we can move on to the more serious business of sitting in silence, in cabs, bars, and restaurants,

where we can quietly and properly digest our meals, with the added pleasure of depressing other patrons. But for now, we are learning about each other. And so, I station us in front of 770 Eastern Parkway and hold out my arm to the place, like a tour guide to my own life. I explain to Emily that the last time I stood on these steps, I was 15 years old and traveling without my parents for the very first time. I tell her that for the first time in my life, I felt a sense of belonging. Judaism gave me that. So much so that I was going to synagogue every single morning. I was considering becoming a rabbi.

I'd even committed dozens of blessings to memory. And to all of this, Emily says, It surprises me. You're not the kind of guy, like you can't remember how to get home from your gym to our house. You don't seem like somebody would have all these blessings memorized. There must have been something about it that really

spoke to you. It did. And although it no longer does, that 770 Eastern Parkway is so close to my new home feels almost too coincidental. It makes me feel like a character in a lazily plotted religious parable

about a guy who'd given up on Judaism, but on whom Judaism hadn't given up. But lucky for me, I do not live in a parable. I live in Brooklyn, where random stuff happens all the time. Maybe it's not random at all. It honestly freaks me out.

But if I'm saying maybe you were meant, or maybe it's fate or something, wouldn't that mean that, like, God has a plan for you? Yeah, then God's plan doesn't include you. That freaks me out. Why? Why couldn't God's plan include me? Because you're not Jewish. Well, that doesn't seem very fair.

Did you get that? My Gentile Minnesotan wife thinks my Hebrew lord, a deity so smitey that he cursed Cain's entire lineage because the meat he'd sacrificed was a little on the gamey side, that this guy wasn't fair. While her Midwestern take-a-penny- sense of fair play is one of the many reasons I love her, Emily just doesn't get my people's lord at all. Fair. 30 years ago, when I set out on my pilgrimage from Montreal to 770 Eastern Parkway, my family was convinced that I'd lost my marbles.

What are you, a religious nut now? My father had asked. Although we were Jewish, we weren't religious. We didn't keep the Sabbath, eat kosher, or do good works. But did we enjoy accusing people of anti-Semitism every chance we got? Absefakakta lutli. My trip to Brooklyn was chaperoned by Rabbi New, a young, charismatic rabbi I'd met the previous year. We'd talk about things never touched on in school,

the important things like why are we here and what was the point of it all. We were going to Brooklyn to see Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson speak. Rebbe Schneerson was the leader of the Lubavitch Hasids, who many believed would one day reveal himself to be the Messiah. While for Christians the Messiah had already come, the Jews were still waiting. The Messiah stuff really spoke to me. Life back then felt like a kind of foreplay, like it should be leading towards something big. When the Messiah shows up, Rabbi New said, God will be revealed. He'll revive the dead, put an end to death. As a teenager, death irked me. Death was nothing, pointless, But the Messiah was something big.

Revelation could happen any second, Rabbi New said. We just had to demand it. He taught us a song called We Want Mashiach Now. We chanted in his dining room after Sabbath dinner, pounding the table hard enough to make the dishes in the cabinets rattle. The Messiah was so close to coming that I stopped doing my homework. What was the point of homework when the world as we knew it was so close to ending? It was just a matter of the Rebbe Schneerson knowing that the time was right.

Did you think about what your life would be like after the Messiah came? There would be no more doubt. Everything would be naked and exposed. But I want to know even more literally, if you were daydreaming, what were you wearing? I got to the point where I thought it was so going to happen any minute that I used to go to sleep at night wearing sweatpants because I thought, like, I'm going to hear the shofar. That's the first thing. The ram's horn, I'm going to hear that.

That's how you know the messiah's coming? Yeah, I'm going to run out into the street. It's going to be really sunny. Doesn't it seem like if there was a messiah going to come, they would have a more efficient way of letting everybody know than blowing a ram's horn? If you're a heavy sleeper and you sleep through the ram's horn. Why are you getting hung up on that?

Just curious. I'm just curious. So, uh, hello. I'm sorry to interrupt. How are you? This is Esther. I'm Esther. So nice to meet you. As Emily and I argue over the appropriate multi-platform rollout for a Messiah, something happens that we can add to the uncanny Brooklyn coincidence file.

Esther walks by. Esther's an acquaintance of Emily's, a friend of a friend. But what's notable is that she's the only Orthodox Jewish person Emily knows. It's the first day of Hanukkah and Esther is out shopping for a menorah, the traditional candelabra lit for the holiday. No sooner do Esther and Emily

begin to catch up than an eager Hasid approaches asking if we'd like to go inside 770 and see his menorah, his prodigious, super colossal menorah. It's a real big one.

It's really nice. Like a huge menorah. Yeah. You check it out. It's right here. Yeah, I'll check it out. It's a real big one. It's really nice. Like, a huge menorah. Yeah. You check it out. It's right here. Yeah, I'll check it out. It's six feet tall. Cool. I'll be there in a little bit. And then he turns to me.

Well, I'm okay. See ya. Right away, you were just like, no thanks. I just find, like, proselytizing, even if it's well-intentioned, it gets my defenses up. Why? Well, because I feel like I went through it. You know what I mean? I feel like I went through it when I was a kid, and it didn't work.

What happened? What did happen? Standing outside 770 that day, I struggled to give Esther a good answer. And in the days that followed, I found myself stuck on the question. How did something that once meant everything to me come to mean nothing?

All these years later, I still sometimes feel the absence. I'm not sure if it's an absence that religion left behind in its wake, or whether religion created it. Maybe such feelings just creep in as you grow older. But in the myriad alternate universes out there, I wonder if somewhere there's a black-hatted Jonathan Goldstein who stuck it out, who doesn't feel anything lacking, is that Jonathan Goldstein the kind of happy-go-lucky chassid who wears his kippah at a jaunty angle

and possesses the kind of thick, natural beard that retains the smell of varnishkas for days? That Jonathan Goldstein, I imagine, does not wonder about this Jonathan Goldstein. Though maybe, on some nights, he still feels the phantom pang of an Emily-sized hole in his heart. But he probably just shrugs it off as indigestion. If there's one person who could shed light

on the moment when these two Jonathan Goldsteins went their separate ways, it's the man who was there, who chaperoned my 15-year-old self from Montreal to 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. My old rabbi, Rabbi New. Hello, I'm here to see Rabbi New. So I went back to Montreal to see him. I went back to Montreal to see him. Thirty years ago, when I was a teenager, Rabbi New was the rabbi of a tiny synagogue.

I definitely should have asked where his office is. Now he's the rabbi of a large synagogue, of many floors and offices. Good afternoon. Hi there, I'm the same guy as before. I guess I should have asked where... Come up here to the second floor. Okay, thank you. Don't worry.

Don't worry. Don't worry. Hi. Nice to see you. My office? Sure, yeah. Rabbi New's beard is now white, but otherwise he looks the way I remember him. We catch up.

He tells me about his children and his children's children, and I tell him about my marriage to a Gentile. And even after all these years, I still feel myself fearing his disappointment. I struggle to ask the question I came here to ask. Uh... I mean, I, I don't know if it's... You're trying to understand what happened. A little bit. I do recall your parents were not supportive.

They thought it would jeopardize your, I mean, it would compromise your career. You know, that you'd become a rabbi or something. It's not what they envisioned. If there's anything, it's this, it's the wanting not to disappoint. I think that was a barrier. That didn't allow you in all of this to be you in the fullest sense.

To the point where you had to stop, kind of, because you weren't going to go further. It's hard to imagine my parents exerting that much control over what I ended up doing. Yes, they were against my becoming religious, but then they were against so many things that I persisted with. Certain friendships, my love of David Bowie. There was more than just my parents'

disapproval at play. Something else was taking shape, too. At first, learning I had an everlasting soul was great. But because of who I am, my fear of death evolved into a new fear. A fear of going on forever. Going on and on.

Past boredom, past nausea Through millennia upon millennia And never being able to turn my brain off That somehow felt worse than death God or no God Messiah or no Messiah It started to feel like maybe it all didn't matter anyway. I might not die, but I'd always be me. Awkward, teenage, acne-ed, me.

As that fear grew, I decided one night to go see Rabbi New. I was desperate to believe, desperate to just be a normal person like everybody else. Maybe if I was honest about my most secret, anxious thoughts, if I just put them out there, he might be able to help assuage them. At his house, I laid it all out, and in the ensuing silence, I remember Rabbi New simply saying that this wasn't a good way to think. I walked home that night looking up at the stars, but rather than feeling cozy and warm

as I used to, assured of my place in the universe, I felt the horror of all that going on and on forever. I was unable to make my peace with it, and I no longer felt that Judaism had the answers. Trying to will myself to believe was as futile as willing myself to fall in love. I was left feeling that if there was a God, he was too big to know with my small brain, too inhuman to know with my human heart. Was that disappointing to you? It must be on some level, of course.

Yeah. Even after all these years, I have concern for your disappointment. The story's not over. It scares me to think of that also. Like, I don't... I love my wife, you know, and I... Who says she's not part of it? Everything is, ultimately. So who knows?

Who knows? One of the last nights Rabbi New had me over for dinner, there seemed to be a whole new crop of young people over at his house. They seemed more serious, more mature. One of them was a boy about a year older than me with a very rabbinic affect. His name was Jeremy. At the end of the meal, he and I wandered the empty nighttime suburban streets, talking. It turned out Jeremy was in the midst of converting

from a secular Christian background to Judaism. Unlike a lot of other religions, Judaism doesn't really welcome converts. Traditionally, when a non-Jew comes knocking, he's supposed to be turned away over and over. And so while I was passively drifting away, Jeremy was actively pounding on the door in pursuit of a religion that didn't even want him. We walked around until very late into the night, and I remember him coming along with me to a gas station where I bought a pack of cigarettes,

and because I had no matches left, I lit one off the other until half the pack was gone and my voice was hoarse from talking all night about God and life and all the other kinds of things I no longer talk about. And though I was never to see Jeremy again, I've always thought of him as the closest thing to the alternate universe me

a Jonathan who went all the way I asked Rabbi New if he still saw Jeremy and he said that he saw him all the time that he was a part of his congregation and I said I'd been thinking about Jeremy and wanted to see him again I kind of want to know, you know, what his life is like. You'll find out, but not what you expect.

After the break, inviting myself over to a man's house I only met once, 30 years ago, to see if what I expect to not expect is unexpected. I wondered what Rabbi New's words meant. Why would Jeremy not be what I'm expecting? Was he no longer religious? We'd met at a crossroad, me walking away from Judaism

and he walking towards it. I wanted to see what Jeremy's life is like slash what my life is not like slash what my life could slash might have been slash be. When I phoned Jeremy to see if I could come by, he said, sure.

Does he remember the night we hung out? Possibly. Is he just being polite? Probably. Does he think it odd that I've pretty much invited myself over to his home after meeting him one time several decades ago? Odds are, Hello.

...abso-facock-dilutely. Hi, I'm here to... My name's Jonathan. Okay. Good to see you folks. Oh, thank you. It turns out that when Jeremy converted, he adopted the Hebrew name Irmiyahu after Jeremiah, the weeping prophet.

He and his wife Chaya live in a close-knit Hasidic neighborhood. Hello. Hello. How are you? So far, there isn't anything here I wouldn't have expected. Yirmiyahu is bearded and handsome, and to the casual observer, looks like a rabbi. He's even got a rabbinically appropriate number of children. Our oldest is Menachem, almost 20. Then we have Chana, she is 18.

Svi is 16.em, almost 20. Then we have Hannah, she is 18. Svi is 16. Dina, 12. Yirmiyahu and his wife have six kids. And not that it's a competition, but that's six kids more than I have. So, put another way, he is beating me 6-0. Or, to put it yet another way, if his children and my children were to face off in a game of Red Rover, his children would show up, see that their competitor had forfeited the match,

and, in a show of victory, form a triumphant human pyramid atop which Yirmiyahu could seat himself. Whereas I was courted by Rabbi New, Yirmiyahu, a convert, was barely tolerated. But it didn't matter. He jumped in, he says, feet first, going in a relatively quick conversion of eight months from being irreligious and atheistic to a life of orthodoxy. Thinking of how my Jewish parents tried to keep me

from getting too absorbed in Judaism, I asked Yirmiyahu what kind of pressure his non-Jewish parents placed on him. I had hoped initially that my parents could appreciate that this was something that enriched my life, but this was something that just, we never got past until the very final days. You mean the final days of? Well, my parents passed away last year. Both of them. Oh, I'm sorry.

Within three months. And my father, until literally the final years of our life together, would offer me a glass of wine or a steak from the barbecue or something like that. And he wasn't doing it intentionally. He just completely forgot. would offer me a glass of wine or a steak from the barbecue or something like that. And he wasn't doing it intentionally. He just completely forgot. He just forgot I can't eat that because it's not kosher. In many ways, I think it was actually better to be oblivious than my mother who was upset that I couldn't.

As loving as she was, she just couldn't respect what we were doing. as loving as she was, she just couldn't respect what we were doing. But unlike me, Yirmiyahu wasn't derailed by his parents' disapproval. He wasn't afraid to disappoint, to become the person he was meant to be. While Yirmiyahu seems certain of the path he set out on,

I'm still surprised by how precarious my sense of stability can be. There are times, often nice times, enjoying a good meal with people I love, when the darkness descends, unasked for and sudden, and I need to hit reset in the bathroom with cold water on my face. Just as we had 30 years ago, Yirmiyahu and I talk late into the evening, his wife Chaya coming and going, and all the while I try to share the best that I can, that feeling of just never being able to know

the most basic things about my own being and how scary that feeling has been for me. I tell him about how I wasn't able to move through that fear guided by belief because I couldn't believe. There was a time when the first thing I'd always want to know was like when I'd meet someone new is whether they believed in God. So it's that idea you meet a person and they say they believe in God. Well, what does that tell you about the person? Almost nothing. Or they don't believe in in god well what does that tell you about the person almost nothing or i just felt like they don't believe in god and what does that tell you

nothing but i i felt like it was almost like the most important thing to know in order to live you know what i mean the least important thing because don't you want to just discover who the person is and then decide how close they are to god regardless of what they believe or not how close they are to God, regardless of what they believe or not? Yeah. It became kind of moot. Like, I felt like, well, if you can't know, or I couldn't know, or feel that I knew that I had to figure out how to live an okay life anyway. Over time, the idea of knowing what God, who God is,

to getting to a point where it's just an absolute mystery, and then wondering how people seem so comfortable with that mystery. None of it makes sense to me. As time's gone on, and particularly recently, I don't understand God at all. And I think that, I don't know, maybe there's something healthy in that. I think there's a real power to not knowing, and I think that if we're really honest with ourselves, we really have no clue who God is, and that should maybe shame us a little bit into not acting with such conviction.

Like, I'm probably closer to where you are at looking at the world than you're aware, right? where, right, that although our paths kind of took certain, you know, at a certain point is where I look at the world from now, there's absolutely no certainty. Maybe this is what Rabbi New thought I wouldn't expect, the similarities between Yirmiyahu and me. Though my inability to find certainty led me away, Yirmiyahu was able to embrace the uncertainty and find peace in it. When I ask him about the Messiah, if that was something that excited him, made sense to him, it doesn't seem like it was that important a thing. When you listen to the way he talks about Judaism, you can feel how deep it goes. While for me, all the rules and rituals were an impediment, Irmiyahu sees beauty in it.

I fell in love, and this is what I wanted to do. And you got the ha. I got, I could say ha and tz. So that was okay, too. I mean, everything down to the letters, the look of the letters, the script, was a beautiful thing to me. It's like a fire.

Each letter has a flame that rises up from it. And the people, something just felt like when I was around them, being at home. It really felt like coming home. like when I was around them, being at home. It really felt like coming home. Yirmiyahu, born a non-Jew, had found his home among people he'd never have expected to as a kid. And I, born a Jew, was heading in the opposite direction.

Hanukkah was winding down, and Christmas was on its way. Emily had asked me to join her in Minnesota for my first Christmas with her family, and I was hesitant. I might ruin the vibe, I said. You know, what with the jolliness and all that. But she wanted me. So I went. It's not even 7 o'clock in the morning. I've been up for like two hours.

I'm too excited that everybody's sleeping under the same roof. Or rough, as we say it here in Minnesota. And so, at my in-laws, in a house overlooking a frozen lake, in a guest room surrounded by baseball memorabilia, at some ungodly hour of the morning, I prepare myself for the hour of the morning,

I prepare myself for the rituals of Christmas morning. We get out of bed and have breakfast. Good morning! In a bright kitchen, Emily's family lounge around in slippers and bathrobes. Bathrobes. Coffee? We've got Johnny bread, which makes great toast. Johnny Bread.

And no sooner than I'm offered some, we all run to the window to witness a Christmas miracle. Oh my gosh! It's the Christmas fox! The Christmas fox. He makes an appearance once every four years on Christmas. Then we exchange gifts. Oh, wow.

You get the first present, Johnny. So I guess you're not saving the wrapping paper then. I open gifts that would have made the 10-year-old me very happy. A book about Houdini, a box of cards with optical illusions, and a pair of my very own slippers, the first I've ever owned. They fit perfectly, too. Emily's parents must have measured my shoes the last time I was here. Who does such things, I ask Emily.

And as I put them on, my heart grows three times its size. Just kidding. Only indigestion. After exchanging gifts, okay? Here we go. After exchanging gifts, we gather around the piano. You know those assholes who, when they sing jingle bells in a group and they get to the laughing all the way part, how they have to be the ones doing the ha-ha-ha part? Ha-ha-ha! Turns out, I'm that guy.

All told, Christmas in Minnesota was absolutely the most goyish experience I'd ever had. And the weirdest part was it felt like coming home. Maybe as you grow older, religion becomes more about finding your people, your family, and less about fretting over the things you'll never know, cannot know. The God itch could not be scratched by religion, the Messiah, or for that matter, by God. But as it turns out, it could be scratched, a little bit scratched,

by a book about Houdini and a pair of slippers. And in knowing that at least in a certain Midwestern corner of the earth, under a specific roof, I wasn't letting anyone down, and my existence mattered, and that being me, being here, for a little while longer, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit

Take this moment to decide. If we meant it, if we tried. Or felt around for far too much. From things that accidentally touched. Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, I can't believe you touched me. Stephen Page, Paul Dijon, and my number three best friend, Jackie Cohen. Music is by Christine Fellows, who has written a lot of beautiful original music for the show this season, and we feel extremely lucky to work with her, along with her occasional collaborator, John K. Sampson. Additional music credits for this episode can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight.

Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and ourmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. This is our last episode

of the season, but we'll be back before you know it. In the meantime, if you have a story you'd like us to do for season two, a moment from your own past

that you wish you could change that somehow derailed your life or that you wish you could change that somehow derailed your life or set you off on a surprising path, send us an email at heavyweightatgimletmedia.com. And one last thing. At Gimlet, we have a membership program that you can join for $5 a month. And with it, you get early releases, bonus content, and you'll get to talk with Gimlet staff and our members Slack group. In fact, I'll be doing a live online Q&A, that stands for questions and answers, exclusively for our members this Monday, November 21st,

from 3 to 4 p.m. EST. Stands for Eastern Standard Time, I think. If you want to become a member, head to GimletMedia.com to find out how. Thanks for listening. And if you feel up to it, leave us a comment on iTunes. A nice comment would be especially nice.