Friday, October 26, 2018

Nostalgia and Memory

I was in high school during some key years of the American war in Viet Nam. My friends and I participated in large protests in Washington, like the Moratorium and the Mobilization in the fall of 1969, but we also organized our own protests at the school. We held a rally one afternoon in the bleachers by the football field. We wore black armbands one day in all our classes. After the murders of protesting students by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio and by police at Jackson State in Mississippi, we held a memorial in the park in front of school, which included lowering the flag to half staff.

One day during my senior year I was discussing the antiwar movement with a classmate, a girl who was not in my social circle, who told me that she, too, was opposed to the war. With my adolescent arrogance I asked why, if this were true, she did not participate in our Students for Peace organization, or in our protests. She told me that we were no organization at all, we were simply a clique. I insisted that she was wrong, that our meetings were open, and challenged her to come to the next one, which was in a few days.

That meeting was in the basement of a friend's house, which should have given me a clue. She arrived well after we started, with a friend for moral support, and left well before we finished. I was feeling pretty vindicated (and happy to have recruited two new members). But before they could exit through the basement door at the top of the stairs (and while I am certain they could hear) one of the members said, "Well, guys, should we let them in?"

She had been right. This was a clique after all. I felt pretty chastened. I apologized profusely to her. I expressed my strong disagreement to my friends over the notion that we were voting on new members, like a private club. And I am afraid this was not the last time I was mistaken about the true nature of something to which I committed myself.

I have reflected on that experience often over the years, usually to remind myself to be more open to comment and criticism. But I was reminded of it this week by people who remembered that same episode, but differently and fondly!

One of my high school classmates posted a photo on Facebook of a band practice. It was the same fellow in whose basement we held that Students for Peace meeting and the rehearsal was in that same basement. And -- reinforcing the critique that the peace organization was really a clique -- the set of people who were musicians in that band intersected considerably with the set of Students for Peace. I was a little surprised by the level of excitement that photo caused, but it was mostly people who I don't even have as Facebook friends, so... different strokes, you know?

Then, on day six of the nostalgia fest (really, it just kept going) certain people started reminiscing about the time the popular girls came to a band practice and asked to join! How am I certain that they were referring to the same incident? Because they called my name; they said the girls visited with me. They recalled this as a transformative moment, when the outsiders became insiders, when the insiders begged to join the outsiders. And this characterization is reinforced by a particular adolescent insecurity, the sense that some other circle of friends occupies a higher status than yours and is aspirational.

I understand this in teens, I really do. I have to say that I saw it much less during my career in city high schools than I did in the suburban high school I attended. In the fifteen years I spent in a school of 6000 I thought that was because there were just too many kids for them to be aware of any social hierarchy, only of their friends. In my twenty years in small schools I thought it was because we worked hard at creating community across the board, a sense of belonging and mutual respect. But maybe this kind of stratification is really a suburban phenomenon. I don't know. I really don't have broad enough experience to comment.

But I do feel uncomfortable seeing sixty-five year old men and women for whom this is still so vivid and so present. I am left wondering why they are still so identified with that moment, that band practice. Granted, there are ways in which I never graduated high school, since I attended every day until I was sixty or so. But I think I continued growing. I hope I continued growing.

أهل الكتاب‎

"People of the Book." We Jews like this designation that we were awarded in al Qur'an. And we have produced a lot of them. Tanach, (the Bible) is already an anthology of 24 books. The Mishnah contains six volumes. The Gemarah is typically published in 70+ volumes. And there are so many more that we consider authoritative -- if not canonical -- by Rashi, by Rambam, by Joseph Caro, and others. There are also esoteric texts to study, like Zohar. A lot of books.

A little thought will suggest that so many books will find ways to offer different viewpoints and approaches: multiple Judaisms, if you like. There is a Judaism that foregrounds the purity laws, a Judaism that wants to restore the Temple worship, a Judaism that stresses our ethical treatment of others, a Judaism that seeks hidden truths in the texts, and a Judaism that highlights the united Kingdom of Israel and Judea.

These are not exclusive. Plenty of observant people attend to all these, albeit to a greater or lesser extent. But that caveat -- "greater or lesser" -- means that not everyone with fringes is dreaming of the same Messiah. Look at the purity laws, such as kashrut. We know that the Torah forbids us only from cooking a calf in its mother's milk. Over the millennia we have adopted various stringencies (chumrot) that "make a fence for the law" in order to avoid accidentally transgressing it. Nowadays, no observant Jewish person would eat cheese with turkey. This despite the fact that turkeys are not mammals and consequently have no milk! But there are common stringencies and there are those that go beyond. Observant Jews eat no leavened bread during the festival of Passover.  But some insist on Shmurah,  or "guarded", matzah which tries to ensure that there is no possibility that the wheat in the matzah be exposed to water even before it is milled. The wheat is raised in areas without rain. The farmworkers may not have water bottles in the field. This is a special emphasis on Exodus 12:17, which reads "You shall guard the matzah." (Although the KJV reads, "Ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread.) My point is that some people are always looking for additional stringencies.

I grew up reciting the prayer "Restore the service to your sanctuary." I didn't give it a huge amount of thought, and certainly had no great ambition to see animals slaughtered and burned on the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock, قبة الصخرة‎ , now stands. I have no interest in rivers of blood and shit in this holy place. When I thought of it at all, I considered it a metaphor for something. The rabbis of the first centuries after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans devoted a lot of attention to discussing the minutiae of that Temple worship. I always thought studying those texts was a perfectly acceptable substitute for actually killing all those animals. As the Prophet Isaiah said (during Temple days!): "Of what use are your many sacrifices to Me? says the Lord. I am sated with the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of fattened cattle; and the blood of bulls and sheep and he-goats I do not want." Nevertheless, today we have a trend in Judaism that wants to bring all this back. They obsess over the details of priestly robes and utensils and are practicing to perfect the offerings themselves. I find this, too, rather bizarre.

But I think that the sect with the most peculiar reading of Judaism may be the largest one. This is the Judaism that finds its text in the Books of Joshua and Samuel, although most of them haven't read even those books. They seem to believe that the State of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet (internal security) and Mossad (international espionage) constitute the highest achievements of the Jewish people. Some of these people are conventionally observant of kosher and Sabbath laws, but many are minimally Bar Mitzvah and know nothing of sacred scripture or thousands of years of Rabbinic literature. You can see their work in TV and film stories ("NCIS", "Covert Affairs", "The Blacklist") that have Israeli agents embedded with every NCIS, SEAL, and Delta team. You can see the young people who take their Birthright Israel tours and return thinking this is the height of Judaism. You can see it in the Jewish Day School graduates taking a gap year in Israel before starting college.

It is evident in the proliferation of Krav Maga schools. It is evident in the little boys who have no intention of serving in the US armed forces running around in their IDF tee-shirts. When high-profile scumbag Harvey Weinstein wanted to erase the evidence of his serial sexual abuse of vulnerable female actresses, he hire a firm called "Black Cube" led by former Mossad agents.

I understand the desire to separate ourselves from the self-image of weak yeshiva boys. The Jewish emigres to Palestine of the early 20th century substituted the imagery of halutzim, pioneers, who were tanned and muscled from outdoor work. But this is a militaristic cult, and - moreover - one to which the American Jews who join it have no legitimate claim. My father, may his memory be a blessing, used to say these were people sitting in the safety and comfort of suburban New Jersey who were willing to fight to the last Israeli.

There is Jewish liturgical and exegetical literature that I find sterile, but there is much with which I am proud to claim my familiarity and kinship. The same with philosophy, science, and fiction. We have a long and rich history that remains worthy of study. I am proud to be Jewish.

But the worship of guns and missiles and warships is a death cult. It is idolatry. It is tref, forbidden. I condemn it.

Reach Out

Fifteen years ago V--- was a ninth grader in the inaugural class of a brand-new high school in the Bronx. With no older kids to teach them how to act, with too many rookie teachers, with a lack of preparation by the project director, I will charitably describe the environment as "challenging." But V--- stood out for her intellect, seriousness, and cooperation. Our most intellectual teacher, a career changer who picked and chose who he wanted to connect with, made her one of his group.

We sent four kids to a leadership retreat that year with students from the Connecticut suburbs and two other Bronx schools. I can't remember exactly why we identified V--- to be one of them, but I remember that we bypassed the obvious stars and selected boys and girls who we felt could step up and lead with just a little support. The idea is that we were not only investing in those individuals, but in all our kids by creating more leadership.

The retreat was facilitated by Project Adventure, Inc. and it was built around a ropes course with both group and individual challenges. By far the most dramatic of those individual challenges was a towering vertical obstacle course. It required the climber to switch from rope ladders to plastic handholds, etc. and to conquer their fear of height. Of course they were wearing a climbing harness and belayed by top rope, so the danger was all in the sensation. But that sensation is very strong. It's hard to imagine if you haven't done it yourself.

Few kids reached the top. Most of them turned back well before, after one or two obstacles, fifteen or thirty feet from the ground. Everybody received raucous cheers for whatever they accomplished and most of them responded with giddy enthusiasm.

Then there was V---. After some initial pride over getting up a third of the way she shifted into a determined, fearful, slow pace. She seemed deaf to the wildly positive support she was getting from the ground and simply struggled her way up. When she made it to the top, the applause went on and on.

But she would not come down.

Being lowered from a belay is an entirely different challenge. It requires you to surrender to the support of your partner on the ground. It requires trust: of the system and of that other person. You have to let go and drop into space and let the rope hold you. See would not do it.

No amount of explanation or coaxing or encouragement was enough to convince her to let go of the top of that tower. We were in the process of sending up a specialized rescue when we heard the thunder and heard the lightning in the distance. It was only an electric storm that convinced Vee to allow herself to be lowered from that tower.

Challenge rope courses provide living metaphors for the actual challenges we face in our real lives. I know that as well as anybody (a subject for another essay.) So over the next few years I referred often to that episode as I saw V--- insist on doing things herself. I pointed again and again to her refusal to accept an outreached hand from peers and from teachers. I kept reminding her how this insistent, stubborn self-reliance had almost got her electrocuted!

As a senior, V--- turned her ambition to the US Marine Corps. I had doubts about this, and they went beyond my concern about our already endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They went beyond my concern that women in the Corps seemed to cook and clerk for the men or put on makeup and recruit them. I was concerned about the Marines' emphasis on teamwork, because it was something that V--- still resisted. She was insistent, though. Uncles, male cousins and friends were Marines. She wanted to be, too.

Except. Except that this always capable student, easily in our top five, suddenly stopped working and even attending. This is not uncommon. Countless good students have gone to pieces in the spring of their senior year. It goes way beyond a "senior slump." That is the stereotypical calculated drop-off in work of a high achiever who gets a college acceptance letter and feels that what they do no longer "counts." No, this is the complete disappearance of the successful student who seems suddenly fearful of what is next. They have high school wired; what if college or trade school or employment (or the Marines) is totally different?

V---'s recruiter came to speak to me. I contacted her repeatedly and brought up all these things. It didn't matter. She failed to graduate. Her recruitment date was postponed until after summer school. Her teachers felt that now she would "learn her lesson." She did not. She failed to complete her summer school assignments.

The recruitment date was pushed ahead again and the recruiter asked if V--- could complete her work (only two credits!) independently with me instead of holding her back an entire semester. I was definitely in favor of this because I saw nothing to gain by asking her to attend another five months with younger kids for two hours a day. And, despite the fact that my work was considerably harder than anything she was supposed to have done in class, V--- completed those assignments brilliantly by the end of September. By October, she was in Parris Island.

I will skip ahead here because - although I have seen a couple of written letters and a couple of Facebook private messages from her in the intervening years - I have not seen V---'s face or heard her voice. She fulfilled her commitment to the Marines. She was married and divorced. She has two young children. Sometimes I hear back from her when I message, sometimes not.

And then Hurricane Florence. V--- is still living with her boys right outside Camp Lejeune, directly in the path of the storm. On Facebook she expressed contempt for preemptive school closings and evacuation orders. Then she acknowledged an about face and a fear that she had made a wrong choice. Then she posted that her lights were out. And then she was absent for two-and-a-half days.

I was frightened for her. So were her friends. There were multiple postings on her Facebook page by people asking whether anybody had been able to reach her. Nobody had.

My nervous energy got me googling. It was not a good idea. I discovered that she had been cited five times for leaving her boys to take care of each other while she was at work. I discovered that she had been cited for driving with a suspended license. These are not the offenses of just any single mom. They are the offenses of a single mom who insists on doing everything herself, who will not reach out for a helping hand.

This is not just my projection. When she got back online (her cell tower had been out) she said the city is flooded but everything could be rebuilt, so I offered what I could and noted: "I really hope you have gotten better at letting people help you."

Her reply? "Nope. Still the same old me."

But it is not. She has two young children depending on her, and I said so. I can only hope she can hear.

Habits of heart are so hard to change. Even when we have a dramatic awakening, the habit is still there the next day. I know this. I have to receive the same epiphanies day in and day out. I think that's what they mean when they say "One day at a time" in the 12-step programs.  But I am haunted by this and all I know to do is to gather my thoughts here and communicate them to V---.

I only hope she can hear.

Music of Our Youth

In the fall of 1968, I was a junior in high school. Richard Nixon was running for President, promising a “secret plan” to end the American war in Viet Nam which he would accelerate and expand once he was in the White House. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had each been shot to death within the previous few months. 
I listened to WNEW-FM on a radio that was about 8” by 6” and probably weighed 2 lbs. Radio mattered. In the evening, a DJ named Rosko played whatever he wanted – in whatever genre - and read poetry by Kahlil Gibran and Yevgeny Yevtushenko and antiwar columns by Pete Hamill. Artists that caught my ear on the radio then included Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Temptations, and Miles Davis.

I also had a plastic record player that I equipped with a high-end stylus to be certain that I was caring for the LPs that I listened to over and over again. That fall those records were “We’re Only in it for the Money” by the Mothers of Invention, “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” by the Incredible String Band, and “Meditations” by John Coltrane. That last was not a new release (Coltrane died over a year earlier) but I just got it. I was still listening often to Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. My friends and I saw Jefferson Airplane the previous spring in East Orange. The opening act was Iron Butterfly who had not yet released the song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

Fifty years later I am a retired high school educator. We have a mid-term election coming up in which I am hopeful that at least one house of Congress will have a Democratic majority so that there can be (at least) committee investigations of, and (possibly) an obstacle to, President Trump’s corruption, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and endless lying. In the past few months I have been most agitated by campaigns of voter suppression; attacks on journalists, including arrests and murders; kidnapping of children at our southern border; and the ongoing and callous disregard for the people of Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from a hurricane over a year ago.

And what new music do I hear now? And where do I hear it? I have an iPhone. I look at the playlist and I see -- along with tracks from throughout the last sixty years -- “Cuba” by Arturo O’Farrill and “It’s Time” by Las Cafeteras. But they haven’t received nearly as much play as the older music. Songs that got multiple plays were “DNA” by Kendrick Lamar, “Bodak Yellow” by Cardi B, and “Despacito” by Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi. Those are all from last year, which shows how little I keep up. And the truth is, none of that newer music means as much to me as the stuff from before.

So what does that mean?

I am so tired of hearing people my age arguing that no contemporary music can possibly compare with the music of our youth. The truth is, I am tired of hearing people in their late twentiesarguing that no music of today can compare with the music of theiryouth! The simple response is that the culture hasn’t gone downhill; you have.

When I was in my teens and early twenties the music was everything to me. I studied mimeographed magazines like Crawdaddyas if they were sacred texts to learn what was going on outside Top Forty radio. The LPs I bought were generally the ones that I couldn’t hear even on FM radio stations that (at that time) allowed the DJs some freedom to play non-commercial and album tracks. I thought that our music was transformative by itself. 

But I think the role of that music as a soundtrack to everything else in my life gave that music a much larger resonance. I hear “A Very Cellular Song” by the Incredible String Band and I think of a girl I went out with in 11thgrade. I hear the opening bars of “Volunteers” (1969) by Jefferson Airplane and I am transported to the moratorium against the Vietnam War and the local demonstrations my friends and I organized and attended. Even a track like “Jumping Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones, which I never owned, makes me stand up and dance. And that is so significant, because it says that even a song that I didn’t love, a song I didn’tlisten to over and over, is coded in my memory with the feelings of being sixteen. I hear “I Wish It Would Rain” by the Temptations or “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf and I am  sixteen.

Each of us has a special connection with the music of our youth. And some of it has held up, too. I can listen to “Are You Experienced?” by Jimi Hendrix with the same enthusiasm as I did the week it was released in 1967. “Disraeli Gears” by Cream, which I compared to it at the time, failed to keep my interest even a few years later. I still listen to “Surrealistic Pillow” (1967) by Jefferson Airplane. I don’t care as much about “The Doors” (1967) as I did that year when I couldn’t stop playing it. But all those tracks bring me right back.  I will never care about the music of today in the way that I cared back then. That doesn’t mean that I have some compelling need to belittle Beyonce as failing to live up to the “giants” of my high school days. I ask that you refrain, too.