Interfaith-Interracial-Class-Gender “At-One-Ness”

Interfaith-Interracial-Class-Gender “At-One-Ness”

Is Benchmark of Year of Altruism's Success

How do you ever really know when “good” is “good”? Was the movie “good”? The pizza? The sermon? We hopefully grow up to realize that – beyond genocide and the Lord's Prayer – the criteria for “good” are largely subjective. I can't get dogmatic about pineapple on pizza if you don't like it. I can't credibly tell you that a preacher is good, if I can't really put my finger on what I like about him.

Here in Greenville, we are readying for a “Year of Altruism.” August 19 marks its first event, and it will continue through May of next year. The objective of our programs is our desire to foster idealism, compassion, altruism. Events will range from community service projects, to interfaith worship, to family programs, to learning opportunities, to theater, to an evening with Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, to a concert by our Symphony that celebrates altruism.

But, how will we really measure whether YOA has been “good”?

We would certainly declare success if Greenville embraced a pervasive sense of uplift and higher purpose, walking away with new resolve and head held high. No question about that, even if we couldn't measure it.

But, there is also nothing wrong with setting specific benchmarks by which we can measure the success of YOA. Financial solvency may be one. I can already tell you that by that criterion, we will have failed. Our financing is built on faith as much as on contributions. A full house for Professor Wiesel, symphony, and interfaith service, would certainly be a legitimate measure of success. The altruistic projects we leave behind definitely meet the criteria.

Now, let me tell you my own:

I will know that we have succeeded when YOA becomes the catalyst to unite this richly diverse community in “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.” (Sorry, I am still stuck on the lyrics of “Hair.”).

Celebrating diversity has become a basic criterion for YOA's success. But, another measure outweighs it: Unity. Bridge-building. At-one-ness. Mutual appreciation. Commitment to the values that unite us. YOA will bring plenty of opportunities to ponder, discuss, exhort, about the ideals of unity, and how to prevent them from breaking down. But, more importantly, YOA will provide opportunities to unpretentiously be at one with each other, at the same places, at the same times – talking, enjoying, appreciating, learning, celebrating, even grieving. It will happen only if we will put away preconceptions and contrived boundaries, and delight in the essential universality of the human spirit.

When Congressman Jim Clyburn delivers his keynote on August 19, should we regard it as an “African American” event? Isn't Jim Clyburn a ranking member of the House, where he speaks for all of us and to all of us?

What about our commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of Dr. King's “Dream” speech on August 28? Do we dare call that an “African American” program, particularly in light of events of the past weeks?

Is a symphony that celebrates altruism a “white” event?

Who comes to a family concert? Only middle class kids, or disadvantaged and homeless ones, too?

When we observe the Holocaust memorial in March, is that a “Jewish” event?

Is the Warehouse production of “Angels in America” reserved for the GLBT community?

When we observe the National Day of Prayer, will it be a service for liberal Christians, Jews, and other “religious exotics”? Or will brother and sister Evangelicals raise their voices with ours?

YOA is paying heavily to market programs that attract the broadest base of our community. I already hear myself repeating, “This is an interfaith-interracial event,” regardless of the group with which I am speaking.

But, good PR can do only so much. Building bridges of at-one-ness must come from a soulful resolve that is at the essence of YOA: Put down pretensions and nudge yourself outside the box, because that's where all the best stuff is. A white kid must also celebrate Dr. King's Dream. Straight folks must gain empathy for issues of being gay as they watch “Angels in America.” Ultimately, it must come from within.

So, will YOA be “good”? May it be its lasting legacy. But, there is a special yardstick that will measure its success. It is the extent to which we achieve at-one-ness, not by analysis, but by simply, universally, being people with people.  You, all of you, are cordially invited . . .

BORN TO CONFUSION – DEDICATED TO WOODY ALLEN

I was born from a womb of confusion.

An American Jew. A Jewish American? I can never get it straight.

We were poor Jews.

Five people in two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, and a living room.

I slept with my apnea-snoring grandmother until I went off to college.

A Beatles-crazed only child of an off-the-boat family.

I was born into English at school, Yiddish at home.

Hebrew National hotdogs.

Never Oscar Mayer.

Talmud by day. Chaucer by night.

Holy days surrounded by thick-accented relatives, who pinched cheeks and adulated me as the first fruit of Columbus's paradise.

They wept over family that was marched off to gas chambers and crematoria.

Shuddering with guilt over what more they might have done to save them.

My grandfather spent every penny ransoming relatives from Hitler's grasp.

He was a well-dressed, shiny-shoed womanizer.

My Uncle Joe. He married frigid Aunt Rhoda.

My Uncle Joe. The only one who ever took me to a ballgame.

(The Sox, remember, won the pennant in '59.)

My Uncle Joe. He traveled from Gary just to entertain me, until the day he embezzled too much from the IRS.

My Aunt Minnie. Succeeded in the diamond trade, but never was lucky in love.

My Aunt Minnie. Family whispered that she never got over losing my dad to my mom, so she played Scrabble with him, instead.

My Aunt Minnie. I suspected her of being a lesbian.

My Aunt Minnie. She hated dogs.

My Aunt Minnie. We named our puppy in her memory, Minnie.

I was fathered by a flag-flying army colonel.

Everything by the numbers, everything empirical, everything perfect.

My father, the seat of intellect.

He won first prizes for me by doing my science projects and essays.

Once, he even wrote me a great paper on Silas Marner.

“Daddy, what if someone found out?”

“Nonsense,” he would answer.

My father, the arbiter of culture.

He impassively changed the channel just as the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan.

We watched Lawrence Welk.

I was born to a Jewish mother.

Smothered me with love, then threatened to withdraw it every time I stepped out of her line.

Forbade me from making friends with kids she thought were dangerous.

Later on, she did it with girls, too.

I dated clandestinely.

I lost my virginity on my wedding night.

I spent a lot of time alone and lonely.

I was born to a mother who spoke in euphemisms.

Women were never “homely.” They were “handsome.”

Women were not “lesbians.” They were “special friends.”

And masturbation, if it ever came up, was delicately called “relieving yourself.”

I was a castrado.

Every day mother was tormented by my live-in grandmother.

Mother once beat me for saying that I didn't love the mean old lady.

But, mother smiled, spoke sweetly, and took it for thirty years, then exploded in wrath the day after the old lady died.

I was born to a mother who defended the faith.

Despite eight years in seminary, I don't claim to do it any better.

Her kitchen was the bastion of faith, where food was a final defense against assimilation.

“Beware of the things that goyim eat,” she would say. They are all “spoiled.”

Fried chicken – spoiled.

Wonder Bread – spoiled.

Cream gravy – spoiled

Rare steak – spoiled.

Grits – spoiled.

Barbecued anything – spoiled.

Chinese – OK. It's a Jewish thing.

My mother suffered from Xenofoodia.

It was her legacy to me.

Finally unfettered, I cook and eat as I please.

But, if you find me OD'ed on rare roast beef, don't blame it on my mother.

She paid her dues.

She defended the faith.

Now I am suddenly an old man, more decades behind me than in front, and I have yet to figure out the oxymorons and confusions of a muddled and befuddled coming-of-age.

O, could I only be 14 again, eat something that wasn't spoiled, listen unimpeded to the Beatles, and contemplate my imminent redemption.

LET US NOT LOSE FAITH IN GOD OR HUMANITY

After Newtown, most of us have gone back to “business as usual.” Thus, most of us beheld with half-horror, half-complacency, a teenager in Brunswick, Georgia, indiscriminately blowing away a one-year-old in his stroller. It's just become so much “business as usual.”

What do we cry out? That another weapon has fallen into the hands of a beast? That it's the product of a culture bred of anger, violence, and devalued life? That it's just more evidence that evil is a real presence, which we too easily doff off as insanity or culturally-driven malevolence?

Our understandable instinct begs to punish the predator. Hang him. Poison him. Gas him. Fry him. Even those folks who oppose capital punishment start equivocating. I asked Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel about this, and his seemingly not-too-philosophical answer was, “Sometimes it's just different.”

But, immeasurably more elusive are the questions of faith, ones that cannot be whitewashed through sociology and psychology. They are not theological abstractions; they shake even people of belief to the core: Where was God? How does a benevolent God let such bestiality exist? Why a precious, pristine baby? Why?

Are there really answers? After all has been spoken, even a thousand philosophers or theologians cannot explain away the death of one innocent child. The belief that this child now rests peacefully at the throne of the Divine can bring only the vaguest comfort to a grieving mother. Do you mean God is so selfish that He would rather have a blameless baby with Him than with his loving mama?

No satisfactory answers. A test of faith? Possibly the hardest. Yet, most of us do somehow continue to believe, and our faith remains to sustain and comfort us. As Wiesel's rabbi told him after the death camps, “The question is not how I can believe, but how can I not believe.” Faith may be preposterous, but the specter of living without faith allows nothing to make sense. My mother would say more succinctly, “God is a big boy. He knows how to fend for Himself.”

So God is a big boy. In the long run, I don't fear for His derision anywhere nearly so much as I fear losing our own basic faith in humanity – man's capacity to be more than a beast. We face so much damning evidence that believing in the human capacity to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly” (the prophet Micah's admonition) becomes all but impossible. We need not look back to the Holocaust to witness humanity gone malignant. Holocausts still rage. The conscienceless murder of even one blameless baby is no less than a holocaust in microcosm.

Is there an antidote that we can muster against inhumanity? Yes, there is so much we can still do. And let it be said, not gratuitously, that our own community has a gracious head start, because we are already so distinguished by our compassion, idealism, and generosity.

The answer is not merely an op-ed or “teaching” about altruism. It lies in making compassion and idealism all-pervasive forces that seep out of the pores of a community's life, forces from which you may be able to run, but not hide. Let those forces be made manifest through our faith communities and secularists, our schools, the corporate and non-profit worlds, civic organizations, government, arts, theater, music, and any other vehicles through which people of goodwill unite. Work individually. Form partnerships. Let there be major cross-community programs and projects, really outstanding ones, to celebrate the vision of altruism. Let there be thinkers and resource pools to percolate new, out-of the-box ideas. Let there be massive marketing and PR campaigns – all to cast an omnipresent aura of compassion over our community. The final objective? As my colleague puts it: The power to create. The will to perfect. The ability to dream. The capacity to love.

Would a community buy into such a cockamamie scheme? Would ours? Might we here declare a Year of Altruism?

Keep the name and idea in mind. You will be hearing more.

MAYOR KOCH AND I ONCE BUILT A SHELTER

Mahat bi-tahat – “a needle in the behind.” In Hebrew, that's what we called Mayor Ed Koch. He could be charming and witty. But when he got a mahat bi-tahat, he could turn around and ruthlessly inflict it upon anyone who was deserving.

I once had an encounter with Ed Koch in which he played the mahat bi-tahat. It was Thanksgiving week, 1983, about the time that homelessness became an emergent issue. Even “nice people” who lost their jobs or were a paycheck from poverty, were going homeless. Cities and welfare organizations hurriedly arranged shelters, and churches opened their doors.

Speaking early that week, Mayor Koch praised the churches that had stepped up to address the issue. Not one to keep the mahat in his tahat, though, the Jewish Koch then leveled a broadside at the Jewish community. He gruffly announced that he had not heard of a synagogue anywhere that was taking in the homeless.

The Jews were incensed. How dare Koch criticize? How dare he hang out dirty laundry? No one, we said, needed to defend the record of Jewish compassion and benevolence. The Jewish world sliced Koch to shreds.

The issue did not escape us in Atlanta. I knew that by the next Sabbath I would have to say something from the pulpit. But when Sabbath came, I chickened out. Instead of raining down hellfire, I avoided the topic and delivered a lame sermon on an unmemorable topic. Then I sat down.

The end, I thought. But, no.

Later in the service, I ascended the pulpit to deliver the weekly announcements. On pure impulse, not really knowing what I was doing, I said something like this:

After the dust settles and people calm down, we will realize that Mayor Koch was right. We Jews are to be the most merciful of people, and we have fallen short. Now, anyone who is interested in starting a shelter, please talk to me during the reception.

To my utter amazement, as I walked down the aisle I was bombarded by parishioners who did not wait for the reception to engage me: “I'll help organize the shelter!” “I'll volunteer!” “I have blankets I can donate!” “I know someone who can give us a washer and dryer!” “I'll talk to the youth group!”

That was the Saturday of Thanksgiving, 1983. By January 10, we opened a shelter for 20 homeless women. We served supper and breakfast seven days a week, provided showers and a washer-dryer, a lounge, clean beds and linens, and friendship. Everything was done by volunteers. The nearby churches worked alongside us. We asked for no outside funding, but the Salvation Army presented us with $10,000.

Interesting. The next year, another synagogue started a shelter. As time passed, other synagogues around the country opened their doors. I don't know how many there are now, but I do know that our wacky congregation had the distinction of being the first.

I moved on to Charlotte in 1985, and we organized a shelter there. Meanwhile, 30 years later, the shelter in Atlanta still serves the sadly burgeoning homeless population. Now they also have a social worker, medical and dental care, job placement and literacy programs.

What a-ha's can we learn? First, the commitment to compassion is not absent, but simply a sleeping giant, in most congregations. Once awoken, the potentialities are limitless. Second, when a congregation serves an ideal, the whole congregation gets healthier. When we started sheltering the homeless, everything began to thrive. Attendance at services, participation in classes and events, membership, all shot up. Third, working compassionately restores ideals to people who think their ideals have been lost. More than once I heard someone say, “I feel the same idealism I used to feel back in the '60s, that I never imagined would return.” Fourth, and most importantly, it affirms to a cynical world that altruism is still alive. It reigns.

This is not about what a “visionary” Marc Wilson was. I was no more than an alarm clock. The altruism was asleep, not dead. Ed Koch deserves all the credit. He may not have been a visionary either, but he was a superior mahat bi-tahat, just where and when it was needed. My tahat still smarts, but at least he and I did a little good. God bless his memory.