AN AMERICAN IN VICHY PARIS
What is left to tell you about my home town, Greenville? Twenty years ago, its downtown was a foreboding moonscape. Ten years ago, Mayor Heller, a Viennese Holocaust survivor, resurrected downtown.
Nightlife on Main Street has become the signature of downtown’s vitality. Successful new restaurants sprung up. On weekends, sidewalk cafes jam the traffic.
Linda and I love to stroll the downtown streets, and enjoy cuisine that ranges from pizza to Thai. After all, how else would someone weighing 220 kg judge the quality of downtown?
Ah, but where were the French? Only one French restaurant in the entire city.
I am inclined to say, “Who cares?” My disdain for the snooty French is equal to that of any self-respecting Jew. Yet, consider my foray into Greenville’s only French restaurant an exercise in morbid curiosity.
My first clue was that it was the only restaurant up-and-down Main Street that wasn’t full of patrons, despite its welcoming name, “An American in Paris.” Perhaps, we thought, the potential diners who walked by the place knew something we didn’t. Of course.
The cuisine – consciously or not – was a clear-cut case of anti-Semitism:
The tea was an anemic, tepid green. It was nothing like the robust, boiling, honey-brown Swee-Touch-Nee that honorable Jews use to wash down a heavy Shabbos lunch.
Linda ordered a salmon sandwich and made sure that it contained no pork. Out it came garnished with slices of bacon. Upon questioning the server, she protested, “bacon is not pork.”
Meanwhile, I opted for salade au saumon fume, which arrived as salade au babeurre of lettuce piled six inches high and two shards of lox, decorated with crabmeat. Again, we were told, “crabmeat is just like fish.”
The accompanying roll looked like barches, until the first bite hit my palate like mush. Finally, we ordered a Sacher torte, filled not with delectable Viennese chocolate, but with gooey pudding.
Yes, the menu was a clear exercise in anti-Semitism. No wonder no one was there, for the restaurant’s name in tiny letters read “An American in (Vichy) Paris.”
Shame on them for the deception. But we should have known better, on the night we went to see “I Am My Own Wife.”
February 25, 2007
THE STATEMENT THAT SILENCE MAKES
They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.
This is going to seem crazy coming from the pen of a Rabbi and intrepid liberal: Another South Carolina public forum, the Oconee County Council, was wrong in forbidding an invocation at its meetings, in deference to a moment of silence.
A moment of silence is precisely that: Silence. Yes, it may mean a moment of thoughtful reflection. It might be an all-too-precious opportunity to elevate ones heart and spirit beyond the mundane, that the affairs of state be guided by justice and equity.
But, a moment of silence, by dint of human nature, has likewise opened two minutes to chew gum, contemplate the dinner menu, or simply dawdle in emptiness. I dare say that most of the worshippers in our pews use an entire Sabbath for precisely those purposes!
Prayer on public occasions is a good thing because it makes an affirmative statement of God’s presence not merely in church/synagogue, but in the common avenues of life. For those people who find public prayer odious, the prayerful moment is still an opportunity for thoughtful reflection before everyone starts slogging around in taxes and culvert routes. If the noise of prayer interrupts the meditation, it’s no great task to “tune it out,” as my dad would tell my mother about annoyances, a classical army-officer response.
Ah, would it only be that the prayers were inspiring, but nonsectarian? Yes and no. Pastors who have sensitivity and wisdom will offer inclusive prayers that enfranchise the entire community in the commonweal. Some pastors might even momentarily suspend their own faith dogma to draw the community together in the spirit of at-one-ness.
Certainly, most of us look at God and His/Her way with the world through our personal filter. But let us agree that for all faiths – and perhaps even some atheists – our threshold understanding of God is that S/He is the sum total of all the creative and moral forces of the universe, and thus infinite. Most of us believe more of God than that, but it is certainly a good place to start.
What, however, of the pastor whose system of belief compels only sectarian prayer, as some Christians believe that God hears prayers only if they are offered through the intercession of Jesus. This matter is no more problematic than the Jewish dogma that God is absolute oneness, not comprised of the Trinity. Or, likewise the Catholic fealty to the Pope.
But, we should not see prayer as something offered in the spirit of exclusivity. To the contrary, we should be delighted to be a community that is a tapestry of prayerful idioms which testify to an interweaving that makes us all one peoplehood. I celebrate the various idioms of prayer whether or not I defer to their doctrines: white and African Americans in their own diverse idioms, my yarmulke and the affirmation that “The Lord is One,” and the Muslim proclaiming “Allahu akbar!”
I love the diversity of prayer as a statement of unity before a likely contentious meeting to follow. Would only our prayers for lovingkindness be answered and turned from aspirations to action. A naïve aspiration? Naïve aspirations are precisely what prayer is about.
So, “in the name of Jesus,” “Shema Yisrael,” “Bismellah,” and all the others do precisely the opposite of dividing a community. They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.
Oxymoronic as it may seem, the sound of silence hurts and does not help a community’s wellbeing. Prayerful aspirations do.
They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.
This is going to seem crazy coming from the pen of a Rabbi and intrepid liberal: Another South Carolina public forum, the Oconee County Council, was wrong in forbidding an invocation at its meetings, in deference to a moment of silence.
A moment of silence is precisely that: Silence. Yes, it may mean a moment of thoughtful reflection. It might be an all-too-precious opportunity to elevate ones heart and spirit beyond the mundane, that the affairs of state be guided by justice and equity.
But, a moment of silence, by dint of human nature, has likewise opened two minutes to chew gum, contemplate the dinner menu, or simply dawdle in emptiness. I dare say that most of the worshippers in our pews use an entire Sabbath for precisely those purposes!
Prayer on public occasions is a good thing because it makes an affirmative statement of God’s presence not merely in church/synagogue, but in the common avenues of life. For those people who find public prayer odious, the prayerful moment is still an opportunity for thoughtful reflection before everyone starts slogging around in taxes and culvert routes. If the noise of prayer interrupts the meditation, it’s no great task to “tune it out,” as my dad would tell my mother about annoyances, a classical army-officer response.
Ah, would it only be that the prayers were inspiring, but nonsectarian? Yes and no. Pastors who have sensitivity and wisdom will offer inclusive prayers that enfranchise the entire community in the commonweal. Some pastors might even momentarily suspend their own faith dogma to draw the community together in the spirit of at-one-ness.
Certainly, most of us look at God and His/Her way with the world through our personal filter. But let us agree that for all faiths – and perhaps even some atheists – our threshold understanding of God is that S/He is the sum total of all the creative and moral forces of the universe, and thus infinite. Most of us believe more of God than that, but it is certainly a good place to start.
What, however, of the pastor whose system of belief compels only sectarian prayer, as some Christians believe that God hears prayers only if they are offered through the intercession of Jesus. This matter is no more problematic than the Jewish dogma that God is absolute oneness, not comprised of the Trinity. Or, likewise the Catholic fealty to the Pope.
But, we should not see prayer as something offered in the spirit of exclusivity. To the contrary, we should be delighted to be a community that is a tapestry of prayerful idioms which testify to an interweaving that makes us all one peoplehood. I celebrate the various idioms of prayer whether or not I defer to their doctrines: white and African Americans in their own diverse idioms, my yarmulke and the affirmation that “The Lord is One,” and the Muslim proclaiming “Allahu akbar!”
I love the diversity of prayer as a statement of unity before a likely contentious meeting to follow. Would only our prayers for lovingkindness be answered and turned from aspirations to action. A naïve aspiration? Naïve aspirations are precisely what prayer is about.
So, “in the name of Jesus,” “Shema Yisrael,” “Bismellah,” and all the others do precisely the opposite of dividing a community. They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.
Oxymoronic as it may seem, the sound of silence hurts and does not help a community’s wellbeing. Prayerful aspirations do.
THE DESCENT TO NOTHINGNESS
What transcendent lessons might we learn from Britany’s downward careen?
“Absolutely none,” you’ll wearily answer. A once-innocent child, coached by her handlers and her own narcissism, has decomposed into an annoying, but entertaining, puddle of schadenfreude.
The expected litany of cliches: Britney . . . “too much too soon,” “both a cause and result of the slack-jawed empty-headedness of today’s youth,” “a symptom of society’s pervasive decadence,” “a grotesque image of self-indulgence gone wild,” “a basically stupid, big-breasted girl co-opted by greedy phonies,” “simply self-destructive.”
Beyond all the clichés, the transcendent message is to let Britney choke on her own vomit. Stop with the pity. Stop with the excuse-making. Stop with the compassion. Stop the limousines dropping her off and then taking her back to 90210 after her field trips to rehab. Marginalize her as a loser, just another deflowered flower out on the street on a collision course with coked up ‘ho-dom.
Britney’s path has been sabotaged by greedy faux-friends. Nonetheless, her path has been paved with gold. She blew it herself. She had assistance, but she also was guilty of rejecting a better way, presumably inculcated by parents, school, church, and small-town values.
But now transcend Britney and consider people living in squalor on the streets. Most of us do not pity them, nor make excuses, nor show them understanding and the benefit of doubt, nor send limousines to pick them up and drop them off. At best, maybe they get is a corndog and a mat in a shelter, then to be booted back on the streets at 6:00 AM. They roil in their own vomit, some of them because they blew it via alcohol, drugs, or shiftlessness. But a majority of the homeless are out on the streets due to no fault of their own. They are there because of domestic violence, mental illness, lack of education and marketable job skills. Only a small minority of them will ever be in place to transition out of homelessness, because those resources are so pitifully scarce.
The homeless should not be relegated to the streets, but they are. Britney, in her lucrative self-inflicted destructiveness, should be. But she will likely never be relegated to a taste of the mean streets, but she should be.
This is the transcendent lesson of Britney’s self-debauchery: We who are warmly ensconced in the Upper Middle Class, just like me, have never tasted the bitterness of the streets, a descent from phony self-sufficiency to pathos to nothingness. Maybe an encounter with helplessness would so enlighten us to come away humbled, more cherishing of that which is sacred in our lives, understanding of the reality of the human condition, no longer so oblivious of love of neighbor and love of God.
A friend of mine, an orthodox rabbi in his 50’s, took the self-challenge to the extreme, at the advice of a Presbyterian colleague. My friend would take only the clothes on his back, a clean towel, and a knapsack. He would randomly pinpoint a town, fly there, and – devoid of any money or resources – find his way back home.
Upon his return, he spoke to me of the nights spent in shelters, sleeping on the streets, begging to sweep out a bar for $2 an hour, where the best place to hitchhike are (truck stops), learning how to beg, adapting to nothingness. My friend, a genius, scion of great rabbinical families, Johns Hopkins credentials, got a third of the way back home, from Buffalo to Atlanta, in a week.
He know that he would return to Upper Middle Class-dom. Regardless, the changes to him brought on not only stories, but encounters so core-shattering and life-shaking that they gave birth in him empathy, understanding, and self-doubts that he had never before experienced. The transformation of a life.
This is precisely what Britney, stripped of all pretension, needs. It’s likely what every one of usl need: an encounter with nothingness, a descent into relentless urban squalor.
Need we ourselves go on that same sobering journey? Is that what it would take to open our hearts and souls?
What transcendent lessons might we learn from Britany’s downward careen?
“Absolutely none,” you’ll wearily answer. A once-innocent child, coached by her handlers and her own narcissism, has decomposed into an annoying, but entertaining, puddle of schadenfreude.
The expected litany of cliches: Britney . . . “too much too soon,” “both a cause and result of the slack-jawed empty-headedness of today’s youth,” “a symptom of society’s pervasive decadence,” “a grotesque image of self-indulgence gone wild,” “a basically stupid, big-breasted girl co-opted by greedy phonies,” “simply self-destructive.”
Beyond all the clichés, the transcendent message is to let Britney choke on her own vomit. Stop with the pity. Stop with the excuse-making. Stop with the compassion. Stop the limousines dropping her off and then taking her back to 90210 after her field trips to rehab. Marginalize her as a loser, just another deflowered flower out on the street on a collision course with coked up ‘ho-dom.
Britney’s path has been sabotaged by greedy faux-friends. Nonetheless, her path has been paved with gold. She blew it herself. She had assistance, but she also was guilty of rejecting a better way, presumably inculcated by parents, school, church, and small-town values.
But now transcend Britney and consider people living in squalor on the streets. Most of us do not pity them, nor make excuses, nor show them understanding and the benefit of doubt, nor send limousines to pick them up and drop them off. At best, maybe they get is a corndog and a mat in a shelter, then to be booted back on the streets at 6:00 AM. They roil in their own vomit, some of them because they blew it via alcohol, drugs, or shiftlessness. But a majority of the homeless are out on the streets due to no fault of their own. They are there because of domestic violence, mental illness, lack of education and marketable job skills. Only a small minority of them will ever be in place to transition out of homelessness, because those resources are so pitifully scarce.
The homeless should not be relegated to the streets, but they are. Britney, in her lucrative self-inflicted destructiveness, should be. But she will likely never be relegated to a taste of the mean streets, but she should be.
This is the transcendent lesson of Britney’s self-debauchery: We who are warmly ensconced in the Upper Middle Class, just like me, have never tasted the bitterness of the streets, a descent from phony self-sufficiency to pathos to nothingness. Maybe an encounter with helplessness would so enlighten us to come away humbled, more cherishing of that which is sacred in our lives, understanding of the reality of the human condition, no longer so oblivious of love of neighbor and love of God.
A friend of mine, an orthodox rabbi in his 50’s, took the self-challenge to the extreme, at the advice of a Presbyterian colleague. My friend would take only the clothes on his back, a clean towel, and a knapsack. He would randomly pinpoint a town, fly there, and – devoid of any money or resources – find his way back home.
Upon his return, he spoke to me of the nights spent in shelters, sleeping on the streets, begging to sweep out a bar for $2 an hour, where the best place to hitchhike are (truck stops), learning how to beg, adapting to nothingness. My friend, a genius, scion of great rabbinical families, Johns Hopkins credentials, got a third of the way back home, from Buffalo to Atlanta, in a week.
He know that he would return to Upper Middle Class-dom. Regardless, the changes to him brought on not only stories, but encounters so core-shattering and life-shaking that they gave birth in him empathy, understanding, and self-doubts that he had never before experienced. The transformation of a life.
This is precisely what Britney, stripped of all pretension, needs. It’s likely what every one of usl need: an encounter with nothingness, a descent into relentless urban squalor.
Need we ourselves go on that same sobering journey? Is that what it would take to open our hearts and souls?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)