XENOFOODIA (11/23/03)

I'm telling you now: If one day they find me dead from an overdose of rare roast beef, have my mother posthumously arrested for contributory negligence.

Growing up in a kosher home is hardly a life of self-denial. Just check out my girth. Jews have always found ways to partake lavishly of the bounty that the Good Lord permitted them, and let the pork chops be damned. Yet, kosher has its rules and its stringencies, a resounding “No!” to the decadent life of the Whopper, the Surf' ‘n Turf, the Egg McMuffin.

Now try overlaying the demanding minutiae of kosher regulations with a second system of taboos. They are ordained neither by Talmud nor Torah but an otherwise rational mother who suffers the ravages of Xenofoodia, the phobic abhorrence of strange and untried gentile foodstuffs.

"Spoiled" was my mother's code word for the array of foods that induced Xenofoodia. Only later did I discover that "spoiled" was a euphemism for "goyish," a mild pejorative meaning "of the gentile persuasion." "Spoiled" was my mother's resolution of the dilemma of raising a child in an environment free from prejudice, yet inculcating him with a resistance to odd and alluring temptations.

Foods designated as spoiled included any meat not pot roasted to the consistency of wet hemp, any steak not immolated to the texture of vulcanized rubber, fried chicken, fried onion rings, fried anything, cream-filled anything, any gravy thickened with flour, cream-of-anything soup (except when used to bind the omnipresent tuna casserole), any foodstuff prefixed with the appellation "barbecued" or "Southern style." All spoiled.

White bread was spoiled. This was a particularly bitter pill for a tot under the daily influence of Howdy Doody, who was sponsored, as you might remember, by Wonder Bread. The taste of white bread did not cross my vestal lips until I was six, when the doctor recommended -- before the days of fiber and oat bran -- that it would be healthier for my grandmother. Obviously. My grandmother lived to a crotchety 93. Her well-intentioned doctor dropped dead of a heart attack at 48.

Near Terre Haute, Indiana, on a trip to Florida at the tender age of nine, my mother somberly introduced me to the Hash-Brown/Grits Line, prototype for the newly erected Berlin Wall. It is a North-South demarcation more taut and inviolate than Mason-Dixon, determined by the lump of regional starch placed gratuitously next to your eggs at Howard Johnson’s. I remember inquiring about the blob of white stuff that graced by breakfast plate. "Spoiled!" my mother pronounced the verdict, and a choir of angels intoned "Amen!"

At 17, I returned from a year of rare-steak debauchery at college in New York. Naive and arrogant, I propose to "treat" the family to a rib roast dinner I will prepare in honor of my first Sabbath home. Rib roast, naturally, is the quintessence of spoiled. My mother reluctantly indulged this caprice, on the premise that it is best that I be humbled and learn first hand the error in my ways.

My grandmother, though, will have no part of it. At the very moment that the roast should be attaining the zenith of its succulent perfection, she, with atypical impulsiveness, decided to pop a potato kugel (pudding) in the oven, irreparably sabotaging my masterpiece. To make the lesson stick, my mother unceremoniously served the roast still cold and quivery in the middle, at Sabbath dinner. It is greeted by a chorus of "Spoiled" and the ultimate Yiddish taunt of disapproval, "Feh!" My mother deftly sliced a salami-in-waiting that is served with the golden-brown potato kugel, met by accolades of "Ah, better!" By the next day, the roast has been mercifully festooned with vegetables and potted to a fare-thee-well . . . the way God intended it to be. Sic semper tyrannis.

The years quickly pass. My kids have been raised in a kosher home, but with remarkably worldly palates, largely liberated from the ravages of Xenofoodia. I, for my part, have gone on dabble in an odd and curious variety of cuisines: Szechwan, Korean, Cajun, Thai.

As generations came full circle, I occasionally found myself cooking up something exotic for the kids and me at my parents' home. I would always prepare my parents alternative foods, since the ones that the kids and I ate were spoiled. My father, may he rest in peace, would from time to time furtively pick a Southern fried drumstick over a roasted one, but approached it as gingerly as had it been booby-trapped.

My mother, however, remained resolute. Confined to a wheelchair, spirits undimmed, she would hermetically double-seal my teriyaki sauce, my sesame oil, my ginger root, my file powder, in baggies and twist-ties before they were quarantined on a special shelf in her cupboard, a safe distance from the foods we know to be ethnically and theologically pure.

They were, after all, spoiled. She was, after all, a Jewish mother. Ever the defender of the faith. May her memory be for a blessing.

A TIME OF INNOCENCE, A TIME OF CONFIDENCES (11/11/97)

How can you remember nothing, and yet remember everything?

I was so small when we would celebrate Hanukkah at my Aunt Leah's that I ought not hold claim to memories whatsoever. An only child, an only grandchild, I was raised in a circle bereft of contemporaries, dependent for family ties on a network of great- aunts and uncles and their children, all of whom were at least old enough to be my babysitters.

I was precocious, and spoiled, too. Aunts and uncles would poke each other to pay attention to some new wisdom that would emit from my three-year-old mouth. They would repeat it over again for fear that its profundity might not be properly savored: "Did you hear what Maisheleh said?" It was precisely the way one would expect immigrants to marvel at the mystery of new life, still in disbelief of having found refuge in Columbus’s bounteous land, still shaken by the holocaust that had so utterly devastated their towns, their families, their memories.

Chicago was sufficiently large and our lives sufficiently upscale that by 1953, our families could head their separate ways in relative obliviousness to each other's comings and goings. Few were the occasions that the Levin family still broke bread at a common table as they had done faithfully on Sabbaths and Holy Days while the patriarch and matriarch, my great-grandparents Maishe Yitzchok and Rochel Levinski, were still alive.

So Hanukkah became the annual catalyst for the Levins to reunite around that common table, as much a roll call for them as a homecoming:

Ellis the Gentle Giant bouncing me to dizzying heights on his shoulders. Penny the Nearly Bohemian, whom my father tastefully dubbed “the educated idiot.” Shirley and Martin and David, the idealistic young communists, undaunted, uncompromised, by McCarthy witch hunts and the Rosenbergs' executions.

Uncle Harry, who made and lost ten fortunes as the Bootleg Horseradish Czar of the Old West Side. Tart-tongued Auntie Levin, who fed my unsuspecting greenhorn grandmother pork chops as a crash course in the American lifestyle. Uncle Izzy, the most endearing schlemiel, self-taught electronics wizard, whose unfailing mantra through more bad times than good was, "Everything'll be all right.” And Uncle Abe, the timid musician who spoke little but entertained me ad infinitum with origami birds that he would fold out of dollar bills with the flourish of Mandrake.

But Hanukkah belonged to Aunt Leah, my grandmother's youngest sister, Uncle Izzy's wife, mother of Mary and Dolly and Penny the Nearly Bohemian and Ellis the Giant. Aunt Leah was a plodding woman of innocent wit and demeanor, more loveable than pathetic, less an adult than an overgrown child. The reason for Aunt Leah's state of perpetual childlike whimsy came yet from the Old Country, never spoken above an ominous whisper, divulged to me as part of my rite of passage to adulthood:

Dina, the oldest Levin sister, was married to the crotchety Uncle Louie, the notorious family scrooge and sire to the only Levin offshoots who could afford to buy clothes at Saks. Uncle Louie once got into trouble with the local Polish authorities and was thrown in jail. The youngest of Dina's sisters, Leah – a child of ten, fair of complexion, pigtailed like a peasant girl – was impelled to go to the jail and sneak a ration of food to Louie.

The guards seized her immediately. They tied her blonde pigtails to a horse and dragged her around the jail courtyard. Traumatized and bewildered, she never fully recovered, part of her psyche forever stunted at the age of ten. She occupied her days cooking heaping platters of simple foods in the Old Country manner and sewing delicate wardrobes for her collection of dolls, with whom she would engage in hushed conversation.

I remember little of the 1953 Hanukkah menu at Aunt Leah's. But I do vividly remember her mile-long dining room table overloaded with unfathomable mounds of Old World delicacies, an immigrant paean to America's bounty. I do remember resisting most of those delicacies, as a child typically resists dishes of odd name and curious texture, which did not stop doting aunts from heaping them compellingly on my plate. I do remember stuffing my already rotund form with Aunt Leah's thick, spongy potato latkes, the quintessential Hanukkah treat. And I do remember, my eyes glazed from gluttony, not comprehending my grandmother's grousing on the ride home that her latkes were superior to Leah's, because they were thin and lacy like the ones Bubbeh Rochel made in Suvalk.

I do remember shining faces of great aunts and uncles and babysitter cousins basking in each other's radiance around that abundant table, progeny of Maishe Yitzchok and Rochel Levinski, transcending for one sacred moment the compulsions that summoned each one to his or her own separate destiny. I do remember, with deference to Paul Simon, that it was a time of innocence, a time of confidences, most truly a Festival of Lights. I do remember that I was enveloped by a nurturing embrace of security and all's-wellness, the stuff of which unrequited mid-life yearnings and tears are made.

For all that I do not remember of Hanukkah at the tender age of three, that which truly endures I do remember, and crave, only too longingly. Wistfully I ponder among the tears, "Preserve your memories . . . they're all that's left you," and I cry a good cry for all that has gone and for all that I know shall, must, somehow forever abide.

THE ANONYMOUS TURKEY (Thanksgiving Day, 2003)

Interesting? Perhaps. Significant? Maybe. Paradigmatic? I dunno. Mountain out of molehill? Probably. Reaction of a knee-jerk liberal? Of course.

The President, up-close-and-personal, pardoned, as always, the official White House First Turkey. Then, just a couple of days later, there he was, chowing down on some faceless-headless-nameless anonymous turkey with the troops in Iraq.

Is there something about being up-close-and-personal that makes pain or death just that much more difficult to inflict? Is it harder when one looks the potential victim in the eye, establishes a relationship, builds some kind of a commonality of presence? How much easier is it to shoot the enemy when he is remote, depersonalized and demonized into a “Gook,” “Kraut,” “Nip,” “Veet-namese” (Thank you, Robert McNamara.), “Towelhead,” or part of the “Axis of Evil”? And, how much more attractive is it to rant about “niggers,” “Jewboys” and “faggots” in their anonymity than it is to croon the same epithet to their face?

Jailers are consistently warned not to build an empathic relationship with convicts. Recently, I visited a maximum-security prison just 20 miles from my home to minister to three Jewish lifers. That in itself is a story. The prison, though, was in lock-down, because a few days earlier, the chaplain, a truly decent, compassionate guy, was taken hostage . . . and blessedly released unharmed.

Certainly, the executioner must be a detached non-persona . . . and so many of them ultimately suffer residual trauma, anyways. Dylan the Bard articulated it in the early 60’s, in anticipation of an impending nuclear holocaust and a war that we could not win: “The face of the executioner,” he drawled, “is always well hidden.”

Perhaps when the enemy is really evil, fueled with genocidal venom, anonymity is essential to doing the heroic task at hand. Then again – here comes the unrepentant liberal in me – perhaps that theory is a confusion of cause and effect: Dehumanization, perhaps, is the force that gives birth to genocidal agendas. Maybe that is why the only people truly beyond redemption are certifiable psychopaths, sociopaths and malignant narcissists.

The roots of benevolence-up-close-and-cruelty-afar likely derive not from higher human conscience, but from our basic animal nature. Decades ago, Robert Ardrey expounded on this thesis in his The Territorial Imperative. The animal kingdom typically stakes its turf. It is hyper-protective of those who are near and dear and hostile to “outsider” beasts whom they perceive as encroaching on their territory.

Hence, too, human turf-protectiveness, sometimes to the point of irrationality. Hence, too, the rise in crime in tandem with the invention of the automobile, as conscience and fear of social sanction lessen when the victim is of another place and circumstance. Hence, too, the distrust that inheres in no longer knowing ones neighbor or walking the street among faceless strangers.

And, yes, that protectiveness of the up-close-and-personal extends even – for some people, especially – to the animals that surround us. Seasonal children’s farm-tales abound about fattening up the Christmas goose, only to find that it had become so much of the family that it was spared from the chopping block. In these stories, though, the punchline is typically not about substituting an anonymous goose, but by the family eating mashed potatoes and salad for Christmas dinner. (A friend once suggested that Jewish vegetarians should serve “paschal yam” at the Passover Seder!)

And, Garrison Keillor likewise has a wonderfully bittersweet tale about the elders of Lake Wobegon conducting the annual pig-slaughter as a solemn sacrament, not cruel carnage, and training their young sons, as a rite of passage, to carry on the sacred tradition.

I have plenty of gripes with the President, but on this one I will give him a pass. My Thanksgiving turkey, too, is an anonymous bird, slaughtered, plucked, hermetically sealed and frozen, from some unknown place straight to our abundant table. But, in the throes of a distant and nearby war and too many young men and women coming home in body bags, slaughter of any kind might give us pause to consider the inestimable tragedy that anonymity can leave in its wake.

Then again, Hillary went to Afghanistan to spend Thanksgiving with the troops, up-close-and-personal. Eat turkey? Of course. Eat crow? Never. So much for knee-jerk liberalism.

SCHMALTZ AND THE PORNOGRAPHY CONNECTION

Schmaltz, that mystifying alchemy of onion-infused rendered chicken fat, is Jewish pornography. It corrupts ones brain and heart. We hide it from our children at the back of the shelf, where only the adult hand may reach. It tempts us, and if we capitulate even a little, it punctuates our otherwise bland existence with a little randy diversion into vaguely illicit pleasure – the fantasy, not the pursuit, of a voluptuous mistress. Those of my coreligionists who eschew schmaltz do it with the credibility of the quasi-prudes who announce that they peruse Playboy “only for the articles.”

My mother used to render a sublime schmaltz, drawing forth globules of fat and the skin thereunto attached from well-bred chickens. This, too, is a sign of the times, as today’s frozen kosher poultry is largely denuded of its finest fat. It leads me to believe that it disappears into a huge, bootleg schmaltz cauldron in the Catskills or is sucked up in the Ronkonkoma triangle.

Rendering schmaltz typically involves the addition of chopped onions that sizzle and seethe with the liquefying fat until their brown-black shards join gnarled skin-cracklings at the bottom of the shimmering virginal pool. This lowly residue is so highly prized that attains the status of “gribenes,” Church Slavonic for “scraps.”

Gribenes may attain their destiny by lovingly fortifying an otherwise mundane blob of mashed potatoes or by adding a dimension of bawdiness to a too-tame bowl of chopped liver. Or, one may recklessly tempt fate by eating the gribenes au naturel, like popcorn. At 13, my 200-pound heft and terminal acne attested to mother-love run amok in the bowl of gribenes that my mom dotingly placed beside me once or twice a week while I watched American Bandstand. And, of course, the wages of sin are still manifest in the two coronary stents and pacemaker that took up residence in my body by the age of 50.

Schmaltz, thus, has omnipotence second only to the Greek male’s application of a therapeutic schpritz of Windex to all of life’s vicissitudes. Fry an egg or some hamburgers in it. Wondrous. Slather it on a piece of matzo, sprinkle some coarse salt and broil for a moment. Nirvana. Schmaltz enriches mashed potatoes, binds chopped liver, and perfectly melds together the elements of an egg salad unlike any that Mrs. Loopner ever concocted for Todd and Lisa.

Indeed, herein lies an immigrant’s tale of acculturation: Mayonnaise was entirely foreign to first-generation Jewish-American homemakers. Moreover, they refused to believe that its creamy texture could be achieved without the addition of some dairy product, thus making it unfit for home-cooked meals, which were usually meat-based. Likewise, Pa and Bubbe could not give away Crisco or margarine to their customers, because it looked so much like . . . feh . . . lard. Thus, for decades schmaltz was pressed into service for all sorts of culinary processes, until Jewish homemakers either stopped being so meticulous in kosher observance or they started believing (“What do men know?”) the orthodox rabbinate’s reassurance that mayo and vegetable shortening were indeed fit for Jewish consumption.

In the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno there must be a repertoire of stories about the toxic relationship between gentiles and schmaltz. Archetypical among them is surely a cautionary tale that I witnessed late one night while forcing myself to finish a Brobdingnagian hunk of cheese strudel at the legendary Carnegie Deli. Next to me sat a classically Upper West Side couple and their guest, a businessman from Texas.

Allowing him no choice, they ordered a platter of chopped liver “just for the experience.” Then they requested from the waiter a pot of schmaltz from the back room “to complete the effect.” They heaped spoonfuls of the viscous schmaltz onto the already greasy-shimmery chopped liver, handed a piece of rye bread to Tex and insisted he dig in. They snickered furtively at the unsuspecting rube. But he loved it. And I betcha he loved it again and again and again all night long until he hated it. And if he slept at all, I guarantee that he arose with a Jewish intestinal hangover that only a Bromo could fix. And I betcha that he hightailed his way back to Big D fully aware for the first time that the most dangerous part of the steer is not its long horns.

Everything in moderation, I parrot the cliché. And, in fact, it has been years since I have been so brazen as to render a pot of schmaltz, or enrich my chopped liver with it, or baste my Thanksgiving turkey in it (Try dry sake instead), or nosh on gribenes a-nekkid. But, I still yearn for it, crave it as one craves the love of his youth and the delicious temptations that tried his innocence. I dare not, I say to myself. I cannot. I ought not. And, God give me the strength, I will not.

Capitulation, though, is an ever-present urge. That day may come. When it does and you read my obituary, do not believe what it says about succumbing to aortic stenosis or cerebral embolism. You will know the truth: Schmaltz was my lethal paramour. Thus, you may be certain that just as my pacemaker shorted out and my stents collapsed, I toasted my Jewish heritage, went gently and well greased into that dark night, and died one happy, corpulent guy. Inscribe this on my tombstone: He liked his mayo, but gave his life for his schmaltz.


Visit one of Marc's pet projects, JEWISH CHAPLAINCY OF THE UPSTATE.

MEL GIBSON’S PASSION – NO BIG WHOOP

You know what I think about all the hoohah over Mel Gibson’s movie about Jesus’s trial and execution, The Passion of the Christ? z-z-zzz . . .

Is it anti-Semitic? Is Mel Gibson a well-motivated or ill-intentioned fanatic crackpot? Is his intention and/or mission to tell a revisionist “real truth” about culpability for Jesus’s death and pin it on the Jews? Does he want Christendom to declare a Holy War to avenge the Jews’ guilt?

Does any of this really matter? Nope.

The only question of any relevance is if this potboiler will change anyone’s mind about Jews and their intended destiny. I weigh in on the side of “no one.”

Moderate, open-minded Christians will remain moderate and open-minded. They will continue to accept Jews as friends and Judaism as another legitimate path toward God, like their own. Even if they wish for Jews to embrace Christianity, they will witness through their works, not their browbeating, to win our hearts to their Christian beneficence.

The Catholics? The vast majority of Catholics already think that Gibson is loose-cannon-cum-nutcase, and for nearly four decades, Papal authority itself has declared anti-Semitism taboo. So, if the Knights Templar are going to mount a crusade against the Jews, it better be a quiet one.

Conservative Christians who are faithful to fundamentalist doctrines certainly do not want Jews persecuted or dead. Indeed, to the Fundamentalist, the very redemption of the world depends on the exaltation of the Jew, not his undoing. If there is any rub between Jews and Fundamentalists, it is over the Fundamentalist claim to the exclusivity of salvation and the dynamic tension that inheres in any avowedly loving relationship that revolves around “I love you. You’re perfect. Now change.” But, to this I will attest: Some bellicose Fundamentalists may annoy us, but they do not hate us. And, the wacky perspective of an off-the-deep-end Catholic will certainly not change their minds.

What about the secular humanists? Well, despite the pronouncements of some conservatives, lots of secular humanists are truly warm, compassionate, ethical people. They truly do walk the talk about universal harmony. Yes, the more contentious among them also have their minion. But, they are invariably more wrapped up in keeping the Christmas tree and/or Chanukah menorah off the village square. Somehow, avenging Jesus’s death does not even make it to the agenda.

So, whom does that leave? Hindus? Buddhists? Baha’i? Zoroastrians? Moderate Muslims? Somehow, I am not scared.

Ah, the radical Islamists? Well, if you give a gander at the bilious anti-Semitism, secular and religious, vomited forth each day by the Saudi press and Al-Jazeera, you will immediately realize that anything Gibson has produced looks like a Hadassah convention.

I guess that leaves just the folks who are already anti-Semites. And, since most of them hate the Catholics as much as they hate the Jews, chances are that Mel’s movie will do little more to stoke the fires. We have had to worry about the hardcore anti-Semites all along, and one way or another, we will have to worry about them forever. They come in all shapes and flavors, but lowest on their list of “things we can blame on the Jews” is the death of Jesus.

You may say that I sound sarcastic, even cynical. Nope, I am just jaded. I am a thirty-plus year rabbinic veteran of the maelstrom of Jewish life. In that time, I have heard doomsayers declare countless irreparable breaches in Jewish-Christian relations and anti-Semitic watersheds. (Remember the ruckuses over Jesus Christ Superstar, Passover Plot and Last Temptation of Christ?) Now, I simply nod my head and wearily say, “Here we go again.” Why? Because at the end of the day, the apocalypse had not arrived, and the ominous threats and explosive issues had made little more than a dull thud. Honorable people stayed honorable, scoundrels remained scoundrels, and ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life somehow goes on.

So, go see Gibson’s magnum opus, if you wish. Or, stay home and watch Friends. If you do decide to go, good luck trying to decipher the Aramaic. If you ask me nice, I may be willing to give you a hand.

BEWARE OF THE WHITE-COLLAR REDNECK

How can smart people be so stupid? Every talking head and syndicated pundit is on a tear about Howard Dean and his ill-spoken one-liner about courting the redneck vote. Defend him. Criticize him. In the panoply of last week’s political blather, it was nowhere nearly so idiotic as the President’s vision of Middle Eastern theocracies and monarchies epiphanic embracing of Western-style democracy.

Believe me. I live in the heartland of guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. And, do not forget Confederate battle flags defiantly unfurled from front-yard flagpoles and vituperatively racist bumper stickers. (I saw it with my own eyes: If I Knew You’d Cause This Much Trouble, I’d Have Picked the Cotton Myself!) These are not nice people. These are folks who are still ranting about secession and slavery and “outside agitators.”

Do they scare me? You bet they do. Does their influence befoul the entire civic-economic-social-cultural-political agenda of places like Greenville? You bet it does. Howard Dean will never get their votes. If nothing else, he is a slick Yankee who went to med school at Yeshiva University and has a Jewish wife and kids.

The rednecks really worthy of fear, though, are those encircled by white collars and Brooks Brothers ties. Their agenda may not be quite so radical and the rhetoric not quite so bellicose, but the underlying ethos is the same as that of their grimier cousins. And worse, their wealth and power enable them to impose the redneck agenda, not merely rail about it.

At its crux, the white-collar redneck agenda is also about segregation and marginalization. The extent to which it enforces racial boundaries, though, derives from the compulsion to divide the America into haves and have-nots. The haves must perpetuate a socially- and economically-bereft underclass on whose backs their comfort and fortunes are built.

I worked for a couple of years as factotum to a prosperous boss, compelling me to be an observer of an affluent community’s power-elite. There, I witnessed first hand the openly discussed machinations of the overclass. The plan always revolved around subjugating the underclass to ensure that a continuous flow of fodder would sustain the prosperity of the overclass's factories, mills, ziggurats and palaces. Have-nots were treated benevolently, but not so benevolently that they could ever transcend their paltry wage and inferior housing and education. And, if the economic winds were to shift, somehow the overclass would find a way to maintain its gracious lifestyle, while the underclass would get laid-off.

I have seen enough of the underclass to know that it is not full of shiftless, drugged-out ignoramuses. If it suffers from any malady, it is hopelessness. Its hopelessness is well justified by the ludicrousness of trying to sustain a family at minimum wage.

It comes from the pre-planned inferiority of educational opportunities and social services. It comes from public transportation systems that get servants to and from their masters’ homes but that are willfully not routed from where poor people live to where they might find better employment. It comes from the bureaucratic labyrinth and its indifferent bureaucrats that homeless people must navigate to gain basic sustenance, much less to transition themselves out of homelessness. It comes from tokenistic urban renewal for the poor, while community after community arises to feed gentrification. It comes from creating an urban facade that keeps poor neighborhoods just out of sight, so that no one proper might see the eyesore and realize that the streets are so narrow that they cannot be reached by fire trucks and EMS.

No, theirs is not the kind of hopelessness that one transcends with a “Golly gee! Time to get off my butt!” Theirs is a hopelessness meticulously choreographed by the overclass largely for its own selfish purposes. For, however threatening a crack dealer or a panhandler might seem, face it, they are nowhere nearly so threatening as a truly empowered underclass.

Hence, the rancor should not be over wooing pickup-truck rednecks. It should be over the courtship of the white-collar rednecks, the ones who really wield the influence.

You see, you battle-flag-wavin’, snuff-dippin’ rednecks need not despair. Your goals are already being well accomplished by the rednecks who can make a difference. They are white-collar guys like George Bush the Younger, who will make sure that his button-down buds prosper through an economic upswing and social programs that are built on the back of the hopeless underclass. The only thing that you pickup-truck rednecks have not yet figured out is that you, too, are just part of the same hopeless underclass. And guess what? President George W. Bush does not care about you any more than does . . . Howard Dean.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME AND THE ECLIPSE OF COMPASSIONATE LIBERALISM

Let’s acknowledge reality: Talk radio is the province of American neo-conservatism. Even as an intrepid liberal, I believe that we should surrender that genre to them, not try to one-up them. Sometimes surrender is not surrender but a redeployment of ones best resources.

I listen to way too much talk radio. I justify my fascination by calling it “background noise” or “stylistically engaging.” I listen to the callers out of morbid curiosity, to hear what angry white men have to say in their delusions of disenfranchisement.

Naturally, I tend to overreact. Hearing talk radio and the rabble it rouses sometimes flummoxes me into believing that a reactionary, mean-spirited mindset dominates the American agenda. Then I return to reality and remind myself that talk radio is just another genre, one that is owned by a lowbrow, belligerent brand of conservatism, its overall influence questionable.

Liberals would be wise to realize that talk radio cannot and should not be the genre of their message. In the ideal, liberalism should be the antithesis of mainline talk radio’s cynicism, holier-than-thou-ism, black-and-white-ism, and shut-up-or-I’ll-cut-you-off-ism.

“In the ideal” is the pivotal phrase. I grew up on a liberalism that was hallmarked by its idealism, not by its belligerence, narrow-mindedness, and my-way-or-highway mentality. To the extent that contemporary liberalism has sold out to that kind of misanthropy, it has defamed its own legacy and been blinded by the Stockholm Syndrome – becoming like its captors instead of liberating itself from them. In the ideal, liberals do not see enemies as enemies. They do not resort to their enemies’ tactics in trying to transcend them. Hence, the fallacy of “liberal talk radio."

That prospect is a microcosm of liberalism’s descent into deservedly ugly disrepute. The images of liberalism that I venerate are of dignity, compassion, circumspection, honorable speech, openness, respect for ones opponents. They are images of JFK, Dr. King, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The bellicosity of James Carville and Al Sharpton betrays the virtues of classical liberalism. Likewise the sloth and boorishness of Michael Moore and the surly inarticulateness of Sean Penn. Al Franken is a terrific standup satirist. Trying to transform the same talents into substantive political commentary reduces his punchlines to little more than ill-tempered cheap shots. I am no great fan of Ronald Reagan. But, the demeaning treatment he is receiving from high-profile liberals in his debilitated state is not merely salacious. It desecrates the liberal virtues of compassion and respect, not derision, for the helpless soul.

We snicker at George Bush’s vaunted embrace of “compassionate conservatism.” The mission of today’s liberals must be to regain the defining genre of “compassionate liberalism.” The mandate is not to imitate our detractors but to rise above them. I have good faith that when the American public again hears the compassionate, visionary message of genuine liberalism, it, too, will reject mean-spiritedness and eagerly embrace the liberal values that we hold most dear.

So, feel free to call me a bleeding-heart liberal. I am not offended, but delighted by the genre. I would rather have a heart that bleeds for the poor and oppressed than a heart that is made of stone.

A HOUSE OF GOD, A HOUSE OF . . . CLEAN RESTROOMS?

Whenever I enter a house of worship, the first place I check out is the restroom.

Naturally, you will say. He is a middle-aged man. Regardless, I am always interested to see if the bathroom is clean. A clean restroom, I have found, is prima facie evidence of a congregation’s overall wellbeing – pride, stewardship, energy and honor for the house in which God’s spirit dwells.

The epiphany came a year ago as I was gathering up Christmas presents for homeless families at Brookwood Community Church. I already knew that this congregation had its act together, an exemplar – welcoming, God-filled, well functioning, uplifting preaching, engaged in myriad community service projects.

Brookwood conducts three Sunday services. I visited the restroom before the first one. Meticulous. Before the second service and then the third, I visited again. On each occasion, a layperson was touching it up. Wow. The correlation between bathroom cleanliness and congregational all-together-ness, I realized, must be more than coincidental.

Have I done definitive research? No, but I have a growing file of evidence: Christ Episcopal, First Baptist Greenville, Westminster Presbyterian, Tabernacle Baptist. . . all congregations of extraordinary vitality, and all with spotless restrooms.

Doing some organizational consulting for a congregation in the Northeast, I visited its cross-town competition. The competitor was succeeding; it was failing. Just as I expected: clean bathrooms. I returned and told my hosts, “No wonder they are winning. Their restrooms are clean!”

Likewise, I knew a congregation whose bathrooms were consistently untidy and malodorous. The rabbi regularly admonished the indifferent custodian and even complained to the leadership. Yet, time and again, especially before the Sabbath, he or the secretary would have to repair to the closet for supplies and do the cleaning him/herself. The point is that everything else about the congregation was also a dysfunctional mess.

As my grandmother would say, “Feh.”

I have a few theories about the relationship between clean restrooms and congregational vitality. Not rocket science:

First is the simple a fortiori notion that a congregation of clean restrooms must have well-functioning systems of responsibility, follow-through, accountability and professionalism that also extend to the “more important” facets of congregational life. Money can buy only so much janitorial service. The rest, only a committed, well-focused laity can achieve.

But, much more of it has to do with pride and dignity. They always seem to begat neatness: The spit-and-polish Marine. The luster of a beautifully set table. The car waxed to a glossy sheen. Children in their holiday best. “Poor but proud” invariably connotes dignity of ones place and presence that mere money cannot buy. And, “grunge” is not so much a fashion statement as it is a frame of mind. Likewise, a congregation and its spotless – or grungy – restrooms make an emblematic statement of its dignity or its basic lack of pride. Congregations with inferiority complexes almost always seem to have poorly kept bathrooms.

Ultimately, though, the correlation comes from a congregation’s understanding that the spiritual commitment affirmed in the sanctuary that “This is a House of God!” is the same one embraced in the boardroom, committee meetings . . . and restrooms. I laugh when someone blubbers about “more spirituality in the services,” when the occasion most bereft of spirituality is the monthly board meeting. The most vital, spirit-filled congregations are invariably those that assert through their deeds that “the greater glory of God and humanity” is not an empty platitude, but a virtue made manifest in every mundane cranny of God’s house.

An office building’s restrooms should be clean for hygienic and good-business reasons. A church or synagogue’s bathrooms should be clean because cleanliness in ones bodily functions is the fulfillment of a Divine imperative. We Jews bless God even on emergence from the bathroom for “creating within us miraculous systems of vessels and orifices.” Yes, it is a miracle.

So, take a look at other people’s houses of worship and see if my hypothesis is true. Then look at your own and ask yourself whether a congregation can be permeated by Godly wellbeing unless even the least of its facilities bears a sense of honor and dignity. See if you discover what I have: The pastor or rabbi can deliver the most inspiring sermon from the pulpit, but if the restrooms are not clean, it is a sign that the congregation still does not get the message.

AMBIVALENCE TOWARD RUSH’S CONFESSIONS . . . SO FAR

I cannot help but feel sad and sorry for Rush – no sarcasm, no cynicism, no schadenfreude. We all have our addictions, some more obvious and self-destructive than others. And, we all would do well to transcend them, knowing that we have the encouragement and good faith of decent people who only want to see a man who is hurting ascend to healing.

Admission of ones weakness and responsibility is the first critical step toward recovery. Hence, I have rarely met a guilty man in jail. Just ask him. He has invariably been set up by a crooked judge, a bribe, a competitor, a case of undeserved vengeance.

Rush appears to be on the path to doing better. But, he still has a harrowing challenge before him, as harrowing as actually being in treatment, one that is the essence of the self-scrutiny that leads to restoration. He must renounce any remaining vestiges of pleading “guilty with explanation,” a mincing step away from the nolo contendere copped by everyone from pedophile priests to the smugly ignominious Spiro Agnew. Anything less still bespeaks the victim mentality so excoriated by Rush and his dittoheads.

So far, Rush’s mea culpas, so eagerly accepted by his otherwise unforgiving apologists, have been tinged with equivocation: I am not a victim . . . but I had botched spinal surgery. I am not a victim . . . but at least I got there through licit means. I am not a victim . . . but I had to have something for my pain. I am not a victim . . . but I tried and failed at rehabilitation before.

I am not a victim . . . but please understand the circumstances.

Well, maybe we should, and maybe we shouldn’t. My empathy for Rush is complete. (How ironic that now he is caught in the conundrum of accepting or rejecting overtures from his supporters that begin with “I feel your pain.”!) A member of my own family is so wracked with chronic, but not terminal, pain that she, too, is hooked on increasing doses OxyContin, so far legitimately obtained. Neither she nor we know what we will do if/when her licit access runs out.

On the other hand, Rush, like most of us, came forward, confessed and submitted to treatment only when his back, literally and figurative, was up against the wall. It was still the honorable and therapeutic thing to do, and please God, not too late. But the mea culpa did not come earlier on, when his physician must have conveyed to him that his dependency had gotten out of hand, if only by refusing to prescribe more of the narcotic. A timely admission and the circumspection that should have accompanied it would have reflected the integrity and character that Rush so piously preaches.

Moreover, he resorted to illicit means to allay his pain. When he sought other modes of treatment that failed, he should have listened more carefully to the preachment that he routinely prescribes for other unfortunates who are on the down-and-out: Live with the pain. Who said life is always fair?

That is the essence: Everyone who turns to the illicit is responding to some kind of pain – yes, sometimes self-inflicted, but too often it is from fate of birth, abuse, endemic hopelessness, inescapable violence, insurmountable poverty, gang-driven join-or-die. These, too, are all backbreaking traumas, burdens to heavy to bear without something to ease the overwhelming pain. They are, to paraphrase Kipling, all reasons for failure, but not among them a single excuse. They can be transcended, but not without struggle, and certainly not without an environment full of empathy, support and encouragement. They can be transcended, but not through derision, cruel sarcasm, broadside judgmentalism and platitudes that border on hypocrisy. They can be transcended, but only when the transformation begins with “I make no excuses.”

Any one of us who has ever been in that situation, dependency on drugs or any other self-destructive habit, will tell you that that unequivocal confession of responsibility is absolutely preessential for restoration. It is true for inner-city crack addicts. But, it is equally true for Rush.

Rush deserves our empathy, support and encouragement, even/especially when they come from an unrepentant liberal like yours truly. He has already taken the crucial first half-step. The second awaits. He must yet make his commitment to “no excuses,” more for his own sake than for his audience’s. If he has already, then God bless him. And, if it ultimately brings him to another kind of sobriety, the sober humility that makes him less judgmental of the folks he so eagerly maligns, what a genuine moral exemplar he would become for his huge and doting constituency.

SOPHIE, MEET SOPHIE. UH, SHE ALREADY HAS!
I am delighted to share this essay that Ben wrote about his little niece and my granddaughter, Sophie . . .

Sophie is apparently Sophie. Yet, one Sophie never met the other. In fact, had Sophie the Elder not predeceased Sophie the Younger, their names would have never created such a wondrous connection.

Sophie the Younger is my very first niece, my sister’s daughter. She is named – most auspiciously, we discovered – after my late grandmother, my father’s beloved mother and matriarch of our family. The name they share is only the beginning of the incredible, even eerie, déjà vu.

Once upon a time, no one doubted that a person’s name expressed his/her essence. The Bible is full of these instances: Abraham is the “great father.” Israel “struggles with God.” Moses “draws forth” his people from slavery. The four-letter Hebrew name of God so embodies God’s essence that it is never even pronounced. Today, when a child is named after a deceased relative, the gesture is typically symbolic, reflecting honor and fond memories.

For two-year-old Sophie, the ancient significance has taken over. My mother’s genes are obviously so dominant that neither I nor my siblings look anything like my father’s family. But then came Sophie. Straight out of the womb, she looked precisely like her great-grandmother. Then came the little facial expressions that stunned us. How could it be? They were precisely the same as those by which we so lovingly remembered my Grandma Sophie. My father was once so startled that he peered at her through the bars of her crib and whispered, “Ma, you can’t fool me. I know you’re in there. It took you 79 years, but I know you’re back!”

As the months came and went, the déjà vu became even more profound. When we gather at the Sabbath table to sing Shalom Aleichem and welcome the ministering angels, Sophie sways back and forth to the rhythm, precisely like her great-grandmother did. Likewise, when we recite Eshet Chayil (Woman of Valor, Proverbs 31), she averts her eyes, apparently with the same humility that her namesake did.

And then there was the music. Sophie the Elder’s tastes ran to arcane Yiddish folk songs and show tunes. From the age of five months to this day, Sophie the Younger sits on my father’s lap as he sings her the very same songs, and she falls silent and listens intently for longer than anyone would expect.

None of these similarities, though, is anywhere nearly so profound as how Sophie’s emerging personality reflects my grandmother’s. Just like her namesake, she stops to study new situations with riveted fascination. Once, an older child nearby threw an awesome tantrum. Sophie stood in place, watching and watching, taking in every nuance of this “novelty.” Just like her great-grandmother would have, we all instantly commented.

Little Sophie’s instinctive compassion and caring are the epitome of the déjà vu. Sophie the Elder did not have an evil bone in her body. Every one of her instincts led her to be a calming spirit, full of compassion, offering solace and comfort, trying to help people, even strangers, over the hardest of times. And now, her spirit has been hauntingly resurrected. Little Sophie is compassionate by instinct. When she sees someone crying or appearing to be sad, she stops everything, even if she has been in a foul mood, runs to him/her, plants a huge hug and kiss, and tries to bring the sadness to an end. One Sophie just like the other.

What is the origin of a child’s basic demeanor? How does s/he embark on the path or compassion or cruelty, selflessness or selfishness, calm or angry? Psychologists will forever argue between “nature and nurture.” I cannot tell you how sweet, compassionate Sophie will affect the debate. This, however, I can tell you: She “appears to be on a good path.” Ironic, isn’t it, that those are precisely the words that her beloved great-grandmother would use to show her approval whenever we achieved something small or large?

Grandma, you can’t fool me. I know you’re in there!

WHAT WE DO IN THE NAME OF JUDAISM THAT DESECRATES JUDAISM

Being away from home for the Holy Days seemed only to amplify the most woeful meaning of “away from home.” I found no consolation in knowing that nowadays various forms of familial apartness make my own story all too typical. Moreover, the world has become an increasingly hostile place, full of contentiousness, mean-spiritedness, and cruel anonymity. The need for at-home-ness has become a full-blown emergency.

Where do we take refuge? One would hope that turning toward ones faith-community would provide some modicum of gentle kindness. We cannot deny that our Torah mandates that the community be a taproot of compassion, acceptance, and an antidote for the cold world “out there.”

How grievous is it when Judaism reneges on its calling and becomes a grotesque caricature of a hostile society? What happens when Judaism itself become the source of belligerence, even cruelty? What happens when its spokespeople become ludicrous mimics of the sanctimonious meanness of El Rushbo and Ann Coulter – and, lest we be accused of leaning leftward – James Carville and Al Franken?

How nice if Jewish compassion would come instinctively via Jewish inbreeding. It does not. It must be learned from the pulpit, yeshivot, seminaries, federations, teachers, periodicals, lay leadership, et al. More significantly, so must its negation, and it seems that negation is the order of the day.

A young ba’al teshuvah who went off to study in a respected yeshiva called me to report a dilemma and its proposed resolution. His niece was having her Bat Mitzvah at a Reform temple. Her parents were going through an ugly divorce, and the family was distraught. His rosh yeshiva had instructed him not to attend, given the prohibition among some Orthodox Jews against entering a Reform temple. What did I think?

I told him, “You should absolutely attend. As the only frummeh Yid – pious Jew – in the family, it would be a kiddush Ha-Shem – a sanctification of God’s name – for you to serve as conciliator, kindly presence, and promoter of shalom bayit. What a profound message about the essence of Jewish piety.”

Well, he brought this argument to his rosh yeshiva, then called to tell me that his rosh yeshiva had counseled him to tell the family that he would attend, then to call them a day before the Bat Mitzvah to tell them he had taken sick and could not be there.

“Your rosh yeshiva told you to lie?” Silence. “So, he believes that God is such a jerk that He is more pleased by lying and pouring frum salt on your family’s festering wound than by your being a peacemaker and Jewish symbol of compassion? Tell him that the God in whom I believe is not a jerk!” Did he attend? You guess.

Sadly, it is not an isolated incident. I have attended plenty of synagogues, shiurim, and lectures, rabbis’ eyes glinting with contemptuous smugness. The ratio of harangues to preachments about lovingkindness and against social injustice is at best four-to-one. The harangues are not all about Bin Laden and Arafat. They are more likely about entities at odds with their own vested interests, dogma, and worldview.

And, God knows, the mean-spiritedness is not merely public. It pervades private conversation as well – salacious gossip, rumormongering, defamation. One particularly embittering example: A prominent rav and posek who had never met a friend of mine nonetheless denigrated him behind his back for his divorce, not knowing, ironically, that he was speaking to a family member.

Neither is bellicosity the exclusive province of orthodoxy. If you have read Fried’s The New Rabbi or been privy to machinations of the other Jewish movements, you know that pettiness, backstabbing, ruthlessness, xenophobia, and bureaucratic intrigue are broadly nondenominational. Likewise, most congregations’ policies are long on hardnosed business processes and woefully short on basic compassion. All this contentiousness does not promote, but only impedes, the essential divine mission to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” If your congregation and rabbi have done better, then consider yourself blessed, but also know that, sadly, you are the exception, not the rule.

At this moment you may indict me for the same kind of belligerence. I can defend myself only by responding that mine is a belligerence against belligerence. I have just delivered four High Holy Day sermons calling for a return to a “kinder, gentler” Judaism, as God, the Prophets, and the Sages had intended.

Might you challenge your rabbi and religious movement to do the same and to keep preaching and practicing it all year long? Sure, you and I will foul up along the way, let ego, anger, and nastiness get the better of us. Yet, as we so often tell our Christian questioners, God does not demand our perfection, just our continuing upward climb.

The plaintive refrain to one of the Shabbos zemiros beckons, “From whence will we find respite? From whence will we find joy?” The storms of life “out there” batter us and demean us with cold anonymity. The monsters abound. What a cruel nightmare when we think we have escaped the monsters by taking refuge in our Judaism, slam the door shut, then turn around only to find that the very same monsters are right in there with us.

We wake up screaming. We should be screaming. We should demand better. God certainly does.

EMPTY ROOMS + RELIGIOUS CALLING:
AN ANTIDOTE TO LEAVING THE HOMELESS IN THE COLD

In the best of all possible worlds, all homeless people would transition into independence and off the public dole. That is happening to some significant degree via agencies whose sole purpose is to provide the resources and guidance to move the homeless into productive lives. These initiatives are still receiving considerable public funding, as they should be. The premise is one to which liberals and conservatives should both subscribe: It breaks the vicious cycle of welfare dependency.

So much for the best. Chronic homelessness will always be among us. Once "cursing the bums" subsides, I hope we would agree that barebones emergency shelter for even the most persistently homeless is a societal mandate. The alternative would likely be sleeping in a rusted car or under a viaduct. Besides, they are not all "bums." Homeless also includes blameless babies, abused women and people without means who are mentally/physically disabled. We can let them starve or freeze, or we can provide them a roof, a cot, a shower and at least a bologna sandwich.

Ask anyone who works with homeless people. The emergency shelters are already full. People are on waiting lists. Resources are depleted. Babies are out on the street for want of any port in the storm. And, it is not yet even winter.

Public funding for emergency shelter? Yes, the issue is debatable. But, this I do know: Public funding should not be an issue. Drive up and down your neighborhood. Look at all the big houses of worship. Look at all the rooms with lights off. Look at all the unutilized space. Look at the kitchens that are used once, maybe twice, a week. Look at how few houses of worship provide a meal and shelter for the homeless. Despite their heroic efforts, look at how few houses of worship even offer their space to initiatives like Interfaith Hospitality Network.

Sometimes it is tough to figure out whose job it is to provide essential community services. In this instance, there is no question. Houses of worship not only have the divine mandate to feed the hungry and offer refuge to the homeless. Many of them also have the space, manpower and wherewithal to bring homeless people under their roof, at least during the coldest months of winter. They are not doing it. They may contribute generously to other overtaxed ministries and agencies, but their own space remains clean, heated, lighted . . . and unoccupied.

Lots of programs in houses of worship come into being from the bottom up. Well-motivated, eager laypeople can pull together the resources to do honorable things. But, the mandate to do something so visionary and aggressive as providing shelter for the homeless demands a top-down initiative. Bluntly, if your congregation is ever to provide shelter, it will emerge from bold call from the Sabbath pulpit by the senior pastor/rabbi/priest. Pastoral "support" is not sufficient. Unless the charge comes as a prophetic imperative from the congregation's highest spiritual leadership, lay-driven efforts will likely not sustain the energy for such a demanding undertaking.

I speak from a modicum of personal experience. Calls from my own pulpit in 1982 and 1986 established the first two synagogue-based shelters in the country. I would like to say that I was the "founder" of the shelters, but the best I can aver is that I was their primary stimulant. From that point on, the laity made it their vision, and all I need to provide was encouragement and some personal time working in the trenches.

Every pastor must know that feeding and sheltering the homeless is a biblical imperative. It is literally the punchline of Isaiah 58. ("This is the fast I desire . . .to share your bread with the hungry and to take the wretched poor into your home.") I will not debate the issue of "salvation by grace through faith" versus "salvation by works," but I have read the Synoptic Gospels. From those it seems clear what Jesus would do, even without looking at a WWJD bracelet. Hence, this issue is not "Should the preacher preach about it?" but "Will the preacher preach about it?"

Every homeless person we see huddled under a viaduct should tug at our conscience. But, every persistently unutilized room in a house of worship should evoke words like "shame," and "dishonor," and "disgrace." That profound sin of omission should lead us directly to the study of our minister/rabbi/priest, where our appeal should bear the reminder that before one can save the world, he must bring the "wretched poor " into his home.

WHAT IS THE SENSE? INDEED, WHAT IS THE SENSE?

You may not have seen the story last week, and if you didn’t, I certainly don’t blame you. It got short shrift, no more than a passing mention if at all, in the national and local media. This, despite the extraordinary tragedy, the bloody death of an American citizen and his daughter, on the eve of her wedding.

I got the news via a blurb in the New York Times, confirmed it via a lengthier story in the Jerusalem Post, and have spent my days under a shroud of helplessness and depression ever since. I requested from the local news editor and a reporter that they tell the heart-rending story, perhaps even through my eyes as a grieving friend, but I got neither yes nor no, just silence on the other end. Something, I had hoped, to put a human face on far-away terror, a story with which any loving parents and decent being could identify.

David Applebaum was a classmate from yeshiva days. We were not the closest of friends, but we did pal around a bit, share an occasional lighthearted moment, maybe because I was the only one nearby who had a car. Transportation from Skokie to Rogers Park was a highly valued commodity.

But, I knew David Applebaum. He was the only kid in seminary at that time that still wore old-world payes, the traditional unshorn forelocks. He prayed with particular fervor. He observed the commandments meticulously. He excelled in his studies.

We have come to expect that young people of such deportment almost invariably suffer from terminal religiosity and seriousness. David, from all appearances, transcended the stereotype. A dead-on sense of humor. A healthy dose of sarcasm. An ingratiating streak of goofiness. A demeanor that bespoke his reluctance to take himself and the yeshiva milieu, which he loved, too seriously.

We all knew that David would achieve. And he did. After his rabbinic ordination, he went off to med school, where again he excelled, and for reasons yet looming serendipitously on the horizon, he specialized, then lectured prolifically, in emergency medicine. Then he resettled in Israel and started a family.

I cannot tell you why, but even early on, I sensed that David had an entrepreneurial inclination. At best, this seemed an oxymoron when played off against his altruism. One could only assume that his destiny was to an altruistic deployment of his sense of promotion. (Who else but David, I thought, would imagine treating a group of visitors to the Jerusalem emergency center he founded with a Texas-style barbecue?)

And, so it was. He was the invariable first-on-scene responder to every attack and bombing, even performing battlefield surgery under fire. He directed emergency services at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital. He founded a network of not-for-profit emergency clinics. To visit the clinics’ website, www.terem.com, is to see the amalgam of entrepreneurial spirit and idealism made manifest.

Then, on the eve of his daughter’s wedding, he and his daughter became the victims. A late-night stroll, a snack in a trendy Jerusalem café, chit-chat about the wedding . . . a suicide bombing. And, no time for a surrogate David Applebaum to save the lives of David and Nava Applebaum. Funerals instead of a wedding.

No, I had not kept in touch with David. In some odd way, that made watching his accomplishments from afar seem even sweeter, and his brutal death even more traumatic. Oddly, too, my impulse is not the desire to kill ten Palestinians to avenge David’s death. It is not to debate the philosophical or political implications of “moral equivalency,” or the absence thereof. It is to grieve the lost of a decent, giving, dare I say saintly, man, the loss of a life-giver, not a life-taker, and his innocent daughter-bride, whose dedicated work was to treat children suffering from cancer. It is to cry bitter tears over the senselessness of violent, hateful death, any violent, hateful death whatsoever.

It is to scream a helpless, yet-to-be-hearkened-to scream at anyone, everyone, who yet believes that violence paves the way to humanity’s highest destiny, not to the depths of hell. It is to scream, “Can you not see – whomever you are – that you are killing doctors and brides and babies along with your combatants and terrorists?”

Indeed, can we not see? Indeed, what is the sense? What is the sense?

PATRIOTISM – BLUBBERING AND SUBSTANCE

What was the 9-11 commemoration like in your community? Were you even there?

I have this stomach-souring feeling that, despite our blubbering about “remember this” and “remember that” and sanctimonious flag-waving, most towns’ observances were lame, vapid events to which almost nobody came.

That is certainly the way it was in my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, where the airwaves and letters to the editor reek of that volatile amalgam of blustery patriotism, fundamentalist Christianity and mean-spirited conservatism.

Actually, the ceremony itself was touching and thoughtfully scheduled before the normal workday began. A courageous EMT who volunteered for the toughest duty at Ground Zero brought stirring testimony. The piper’s haunting lament of Amazing Grace choked so many of us with tears.

The headcount was underwhelming, but let the laity square that with their own consciences. I have to believe that the crowd would have been greater were local clergy and public officials more encouraging of attendance, or had at least made the effort to make their own personal appearance.

So, let me start with my own ilk:

You could count the number of clergy who were present on the fingers of one hand. Many of them had received multiple emails urging their attendance, and all of them saw – or should have seen – the repeated announcements in the newspaper and media.

Do I speak for your community when I ask, where were you, fellow clergy? I betcha that I do. And, fellow clergy, do not tell us that you were there “in spirit.” Nothing short of your physical presence would have elevated the spiritual morale of the assemblage. Nothing short of your physical presence would have ordained you as spiritual leaders and moral exemplars in a time of tortured spirit and shaken faith. Nothing short of your physical presence would have given substance to this constant yammering about living by “biblical values.”

Even if you conducted a commemoration in your own congregation – which I bet most of you did not – it certainly does not substitute for your presence at a commemoration at “ground zero” of the community, particularly for those of us who protest that the spirituality has been sucked out of our secular city.

While I am on a rant, we ought direct our ire equally toward our elected officials. In Greenville’s case, the mayor was there, likewise the mayor pro-tem and the sheriff and one associate. The non-elected public servants, the real heroes, the ones who protect you and me – police, fire, EMS – were there in significant number. The rest of the political hacks, Democratic and Republican, were absent.

So, let us say it to our elected officials: You have been invested with the public trust. Your visibility would have contributed more than a spiritual aura to the occasion; it would have conferred an example of civic duty upon it. When a community unites to celebrate, you should be there. When a city unites to mourn and pledge new resolve, you should certainly be there.

No, do not protest that you had an excused absence, either. No priority should have been higher. Whatever else that was calling you should have been deferred to unite as one – liberal and conservative – to affirm the transcendent values of liberty and patriotism, not vice versa.

And finally, a word about “patriotism.” How easy it is to chant it as an empty slogan before a hopped-up throng. How easy it is to squeeze the substance out of one of the proudest words in the American vocabulary. How could you, civic officials, not seize a quintessential opportunity to affirm your patriotism, especially you in your star-spangled neckties and omnipresent lapel pins, especially you who justify every specious action you take under the guise of patriotism?

Did you not tell us in our backward little county that a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was “anti-patriotic”? Did you not invoke patriotism to justify school prayer and Bible reading? Did you not call social welfare programs “unpatriotic”? Dare we question not only your policies but also the real substance of your patriotism?

OK, I participated, so I can afford to wax self-righteous. For that I make no apology. I have no other way to gain your attention. If we are going to wax self-righteous, nine times out of ten it should be over matters of substance. But, that one remaining time out of ten, we dare do it over important symbolism, the kind of symbolism that could go so far to unite woefully disunited communities and spark spirit in places that too often seems so devoid of spirit.

So much for our recollection of treachery and valor. The months ahead will afford many other civic opportunities to make amends. Where will you be?

“HOLINESS” DEFINED BY A COLLECTION OF SACRED SNIPPETS

I was not cut out for theology.

I must have been absent on the day they taught us in yeshiva about how to define "holy." Three decades have passed, and it has not gotten any easier. I have hundreds of books and articles on the subject. They have all been nice, philosophically subtle, linguistically rich, but frankly, they have bored me to tears. Worse, they have confused me more than the legalese on the back of a Visa statement.

In my childish simplicity, I always figure that if God wanted everyone to be holy -- and "everyone" included cleaning crews, short-order cooks and truck drivers, along with theologians and philosophers -- S/He would not, just out of spite, have created a definition for holiness that was so confusing, abstract and unattainable that us simple folks would never “get it.”

Yes, it is easier to define holiness by its negation. Certain images of life instinctively set off an internal alarm that shouts "Not Holy!" Madonna and Britney open-mouthed smooching – not holy. Bin Laden, despite numerous pilgrimages to Mecca -- not holy. Marc Wilson, when he is arrogant or nasty or spiteful or cruel – not holy.

An entire catalogue of snippets and vignettes of disreputable people and events comes to mind the moment we hear "not holy." Could the converse also be true? Could it be, with deference to Justice Potter Stewart, that holiness is one of those things that we might never be able to define, but that we recognize by instinct?

Perhaps holiness is nothing more mystical than doing what is right because it is right, because it affirms the creative and moral forces of the universe, not because someone is looking.

Snippets of "holy" are all around us in the most unsuspecting places, if we would just move our hands away from our eyes. Take as an example a recollection of my mom and dad, intensified by their deaths, that feels as if it happened just yesterday. And, especially so when I repeat it over (yes, and over) to my kids:

My mother has just been wheeled back from cataract surgery to a cubicle in the recovery room. The IV is still dripping in her arm. She is propped up on the gurney in that ridiculous wisp of a hospital gown, no one else in the cubicle but my father and me. Her breakfast is sitting in front of her. She seems perfectly alert, she has been NPO since midnight, she usually has a fine appetite . . . but she is not eating.

We want to know what is wrong, but it is not until I draw very close that I hear in a barely audible whisper, "Baruch she-amar vi-hayah ha-olam . . . Praised is God whose command created the world. Praised is He, Author of all Creation . . . “

Only then do I realize that nothing is wrong, but that my mother is praying, as she prays every morning, before embarking on this long delayed and much-deserved repast of cereal and a banana. She is simply uttering the same litany that she recites every morning of her life.

I still cannot tell you precisely why, but that moment will forever be etched in my mind as a snippet of holiness. Perhaps it was simply the sight of a sincere and pious woman engaged in simple, understated communion with God, for no other reason but that it was right to be in such simple, understated communion.

A moment later, I leave the cubicle to make a phone call. When I return, I recognize instantly that I am intruding on another bit of holiness that I will carry with me forever:

My elderly dad, once a man of empirical science and technology, now drifting into the early stages of Alzheimer’s, is tenderly stroking the forehead of his wife of decades, the two of them cooing at each other like a couple of love-goopy newlyweds. Another sacred snippet.

I am through with convoluted textbook definitions of holiness. What is relevant is that we go through life with a series of radiant images that, by Pavlovian instinct, should flash into our minds whenever we think or hear "holy," and whenever we hear within ourselves the yearning to live our years as more than couch potatoes or party animals.

And sometimes, even when we are not thinking about holiness, it would really not hurt to run through that lexicon of snippets to reassure ourselves that holiness is not in some far-off heaven.

Amazing. Even in this goofy world, little snippets of holy are all around. Catch them while you can, before the camera breaks away for another look at what's happening with Ben and J Lo.

LOOK AT THE SUBSTANCE OF PUBLIC RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION, NOT ITS IDIOM

Almighty. Heavenly Father. Rock of Ages. Master of the Universe. King of kings . . .

All of these are names of God. Right? Well, yes and no. Yes, they evoke various attributes of God. Yes, they are verbal connectors to God. But no, none of these names God’s infinite, inscrutable essence, which – try though we may – is beyond human finitude, beyond the confines of language. These are all idioms for God, the best that our finite beings can do to try to grasp the infinite.

The observation is not originally mine, but that of Moses Maimonides, the preeminent medieval Jewish theologian. It is echoed by countless theologians of every stripe of every religious persuasion.

Yet, the issue is not purely theological. It addresses the sociology and legal climate of the here-and-now:

Once upon a time, I was, as a Jew and civil libertarian, patently offended by public prayer invoked in the name of Jesus or some other sectarian deity. I would voice my protest to the invocator, the city/county council, the newspaper, in harmony with the ACLU and the rest of the alphabet soup of defenders of church-state separation.

My epiphany, however, came about 20 years ago as I participated in a citywide ecumenical service during Dr. King Week in Atlanta. Behind me, the magnificent choir of Big Bethel AME church rocked the floor and rafters with an unimaginably spirited gospel – the refrain, “Jesus! Jesus!” louder and louder with each verse. As always, I was quick to protest, and caught the ear of Dr. Joseph Roberts, a personal friend and Dr. King’s successor at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Joe patiently explained to me, “You will never understand the African American religious experience until you recognize that singing out in Jesus’s name is a time- and culturally-venerated idiom that has, since slave days, connected us to the Divine.”

“A venerate idiom” is what got to me. All of us who claim to be people of faith, I realized, use idioms ordained by theology or culture in our valiant attempt to connect with the Infinite One. The Christian invokes Jesus. The traditional Jew wears a skullcap. A Muslim bows to Mecca. The Catholic sees it in the bread-and-wine’s transubstantiation.

I daresay that even the now unduly controversial Ten Commandments are also an idiom – however supremely sacred for most of us – for the essence of humankind’s highest moral and creative aspirations. For those of us of religious faith, the Commandments elevate “recommended behavior” to imperatives. But, cannot even the atheist think of “the Lord your God” as an idiom for the sum of the universe’s moral and creative forces? Cannot even the atheist interpret “no other gods before Me” as a prohibition against self-adulation or glorifying the trivial or absurd? And, can the Sabbath not be understood as an idiom for a hedge against lethal workaholism?

These prayerful and consecrated idioms, however, should never be confused with the substance of prayer and consecration. Each faith may venerate its idiom as the most potent path toward God. The Christian praying in Jesus’s name is certainly testament to that. But, the rest of us ought not be offended by a particular idiom, even when it is invoked in public places. If anything, we should celebrate it as a benchmark of the diversity with which people of faith may freely commune with God, or not, in the blessedly free country in which we live.

I am, thus, no longer offended by a prayer offered in Jesus’s name or the public visage of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments. Likewise, I have never been criticized by even the most fundamentalist members of a county or city council for delivering an invocation while wearing my skullcap, and hope I never am. If anything, I would like to assume that they respect me for my convictions, not merely tolerate me, in the same way that I respect theirs – despite our theological disagreements.

It seems to me that we get ourselves in an awful tizzy about the idiom of public prayer but pay woefully little attention to its substance. I get far more rankled by the content of many of the prayers I hear than I do by the name in which the prayer is invoked.

Might we come to some consensus as to what comprises a worthy public prayer? Is the damnation of our enemies the ultimate objective of prayer, or is it the hope for mutual understanding and an end of strife? Should public prayer be a vehicle for social or political editorializing, or should we pray that all our leaders be guided by wisdom and good counsel? If we cannot come to consensus on any other yardstick, the substance of public prayer should at least remain focused on the Prophet’s plea for justice, mercy and humility and the virtues expressed in the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, even if the idiom bespeaks a particular faith, the essence of the prayer will be inclusive of all people of goodwill. That should more than suffice.

Perhaps you have heard the long joke about pastors discussing how they distribute the proceeds of their Sunday collections. I cannot remember all of it, but the punchline has one of the pastors saying, “I throw it all up in the air, and whatever God wants, He can keep!”

I guess that is how it ought to be with public prayer and the variety of idioms we use to connect the finite to the Infinite: Keep lifting it heavenward. Let God decide what is worthy and what is not. So much for nitpicking each phrase for perfect theological and political correctness, or let the lawsuits roll. I will cherish and defend the idiom in which you pray if you do the same for mine. God can certainly survive whatever indignity we toss His way, and probably wishes that we, too, would lighten up.

THE PAINLESS, EVERYDAY-NESS OF GIVING CHARITY

I would call this a personal mission, but that would be far too grandiose. Nor is the idea original, but a lingering childhood memory, still alive in a few scattered places. Perhaps my only contribution would be to the idea’s broader revival.

I remember that as a kid, one could not do business in a bakery or butcher shop along our neighborhood’s main shopping drag, Devon Avenue, without seeing a charity box next to the cash register. It was designated to a particular cause – leukemia, heart disease, a parochial school, an orphanage – and the idea was to drop some of the change from your transaction into what we called the pushke, a corruption of the Polish word for “box.”

Oh, you were rarely badgered. You could get away without feeding the pushke, and only occasionally would the storekeeper look at you cockeyed if you did not. But, the opportunity was there – tangible, immediate, unavoidable – a reminder that charity is, or at least should be, an everyday exercise. And, the neatest part about it was that you could do a good deed that was relatively painless.

You still see a pushke here and there. It is most usually at a convenient store along the interstate, and most usually collecting for a local person who needs an operation or expensive medical treatment. Some supermarkets and pharmacies do it around Christmastime. When you see that pushke, do you take a moment to drop some change into it?

We here in Greenville see ourselves as a most charitable community. I simply recommend that we broaden the opportunity for our citizens to feed the pushke wherever we do cash business and expand the scope to include worthy ongoing causes – healthcare, homelessness, education, church missions, the elderly – whatever the proprietor sees as his/her signature cause.

Every time that I get back a handful of change from a shopping venture, I ask the storekeeper to put a charity box labeled for a favorite cause near the cash register, right next to the “take a penny, leave a penny” ashtray. Chain it to the counter if you must, to prevent it being snatched and diverted to the wrong “charity.” After a month or two, count it up and give it to your chosen charity. Painless. Honorable. Helpful. Gracious.

To date, I have convinced only my cleaners, a devout Christian couple from Korea, to put in a pushke for their church’s missions. No, the results as yet have not been stunning, but they have started.

My appeal to the storekeepers of the Upstate, particularly those who run small businesses, is to simply do it. No frills. No feasibility studies. No contingency plans. No fanfare. Just pick a favorite cause and do it.

My appeal to the shoppers of the Upstate is to drop in a few coins each time you get back a fistful of change and know that beside your regular avenues of major contributions – church, United Way, whatever – you are doing a little bit of transcendent good each day painlessly. And, you will also know that the sum total of your contributions and that of others will have ultimate results that will be absolutely stunning. You could do even more by joining the “mission” and encouraging storekeepers to make the opportunity available to their patrons. The goodness will go well beyond the sheer dollars raised, because a community’s basic wellbeing is reflected most in its routine, random acts of benevolence.

While we are on the subject of the pushke, how many of you have a pushke at home? What a wonderful place to put your small change at the end of the day. What a wonderful lesson for the kids, that the family’s commitment to charity has an everyday-ness about it. What a wonderful sense that real charity means not giving ‘til it hurts, but ‘til it feels good.

We Jews customarily feed our pushkes just as week ends and the Sabbath candles are lit. Thus, the last act of the workaday week and the first act of the holy Sabbath is an act of giving, not taking. Just recently, looking through a Christian magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, I read an appeal for Christians to do the same – to end the week and start the Sabbath with everyone putting a few pennies in the charity box, regardless of the more substantial contribution we put in the plate on Sunday morning.

Huge magnanimous gifts are always in order, and without them, our hospitals, schools and houses of worship would simply not get built. If you can do that, then God bless you. But, whether you can or you cannot, let it not substitute for the unobtrusive, painless, anyone-can-do-it, act of putting a few pennies in the pushke wherever you shop and wherever you call your home.

YOU’RE RIGHT, YOU’RE WRONG, YOU’RE WRONG, YOU’RE RIGHT

To invoke Dr. King’s “I have a dream” would be too melodramatic. To cite a less reputable King’s vacuous plea, “Can’t we all just get along?” would be to trivialize the issue. So, somewhere between Rev. Martin’s and (li-havdil) Rodney’s calls for unity comes my appeal, my dream, for Jewish theists and Jewish humanists to scuttle the invectives and celebrate a common ground from which they both could take a few life-sustaining lessons.

Part of me laments the necessity of stirring the ashes of this centuries-old debate that seems to rear its head anew. Resurrecting the issue while the Jewish world is, as always, in such a mess, is like worrying about rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. We should have figured it out long ago.

Nonetheless, could we please take a moment’s respite from our us-versus-them contentiousness, and instead, reason together? Here are three foundations on which a common ground can be established, so that even the humanists, ethical culturists, and believers in the Divine imperative might pause, offer each other a little more mutual respect and a lot more ahavat Yisrael:

1. Let us acknowledge, even celebrate, that the primary thrust of the mitzvot is not so much the enhancement of the Jewish condition as it is of the human condition. We might even go so far as to say that the well-worn shibboleth of “Jewish identity” does not give Judaism sufficient credit. For, Jewish identity may be a critical virtue, but it is merely a vehicle – perhaps the most potent vehicle for Jews – to attain our highest human identity. One might even call this notion “revealed humanism.” Not an oxymoron.

We have an enormous body of ethical mitzvot that unambiguously confirm this notion. Not surprisingly, the Prophet summarizes “what God requires of you” in humanistic terms – “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.”

Moreover, the Rabbinic tradition has even interpreted many of the ritual mitzvot as driven largely by humanistic ideals: Tefillin are in large measure about mustering intellectual, spiritual and physical resources to do the work of God. Inserting Ba-Meh Madlikin into the Shabbat service ensures that latecomers will be escorted safely home, not left to walk the treacherous streets alone. The Seder cannot start without inviting the hungry into our homes. Tzedakah is incorporated into the weekday Shacharit ritual. The Shabbat challot are covered so that we do not “embarrass” them by blessing the wine first. And, who can tell me where the rituals of the Shabbat or Yom Tov table end and where the human fellowship begins? Is Shalashudes, or the Purim Seudah or Simchat Torah simply about rituals?

2. Just as humanistic Jews are at peril by stripping Judaism of God, mitzvah-observant Jews run the risk of threatening the luster and texture of Jewish peoplehood, by ignoring, even denigrating, the rich cultural legacy of Judaism. Yes, we are a religion with a mitzvah-driven action plan. But, we are also a repository of literature, theater, music, cuisine, dance, art, language, poetry – some of it not entirely “religious,” but still consummately Jewish, and certainly not a source of shame.

In earlier times, a premier American orthodox institution could build a major fundraising event around a concert by Cantors Rosenblatt and Hershman. No denying that today they would draw a bigger crowd with Schlock Rock and a Dougie’s rib buffet.

Perhaps some of the music of the Yiddish stage is a tad too bawdy for religious sensitivities. Yet, tell me how relatively steeped today’s ba’alei teshuvah and their mentors are in the magnificent compositions of the Cantorial Golden Age or the courts of Moditz, Ger, Bobov, Lubavitch, versus the disco-wannabe Miami Boys Choir or the warbling of Mordechai ben David. And, how many of the same folks are aware that the much-maligned Hava Nagilah is a song composed by the Klausenberger Chasidim? Who has read and tortured his/her soul over (the heretic?) Bialik’s pathos in Ha-Masmid?

Will someone please acknowledge that sucking the cultural legacy from Judaism leaves a stark moonscape of robotic yes-and-no Judaism, just as surely as sucking out God denatures Judaism of its limitless spiritual potentials and sense of driving imperative?

3. Let me suggest that truly ethical humanists believe in “God” more than they may realize. Perhaps it is not the fully refined, intimate vision of God to which we of religious commitment subscribe. But, let us at least concur that the threshold definition of God is the sum (to my belief, infinite) total of all the creative and moral forces at work in the universe. So long as a professing humanist believes in the world’s limitless promise of creativity and moral rectitude – that these are the very essence of the world and humanity at their best – then this too is a kind of belief in the Divine.

I call it “threshold,” because it will not entirely satisfy a believing Jew (or Christian). But, it is light years ahead of folks who believe that the world is condemned to failure, meaninglessness and the law of the jungle. Somehow, I cannot see a humanistic Jew eagerly concurring, “All we are is dust in the wind.”

Please indulge me in my dream, and do not be too quick to condemn me as a luftmensch. The common ground will not be established without everyone trying a little harder, and frankly, sometimes it seems that no one is trying at all. Please do not let this continue to degenerate into a wrong-versus-right disputation. We need save that for Saddam and Yasser. This is about Jews arguing with Jews. So, let it be a lovers’ quarrel, no more. Argue the details if you must, but at least savor all that we do really share. Nu, can’t we all just get along?

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS . . . OK, THIRTY-FIVE . . . YEARS AGO TODAY

It was twenty years ago today . . .

Jeez, it was actually thirty-five years ago, as I pause to marvel that I am still lustily singing along with Sergeant Pepper as though it were 1968. My pause is more than momentary, though, as I stop to contemplate my singular un-enthusiasm at the coming year’s political campaigns and conventions. I would call my state-of-mind “cynical,” were I not so listless, wanting to dismiss the candidates as a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Then I remember that that metaphor was most memorably invoked by the infamous George Colley Wallace . . . ironically, in 1968.

Then my wandering mind juxtaposes my sleepy lack of enthusiasm to a time a full thirty-five years ago when I built an entire summer’s worth of plans around being in Chicago for the momentous Democratic National Convention of 1968. Nothing, no threat of bodily harm nor dire parental sanction, could have kept me and my wildly idealistic companions away.

Thirty-five years have elapsed, and my story is a remarkably unremarkable cliche of the ensuing decades. Impassioned protest. Smug intimations that if the world were left to us we could finally set it right. BA in sociology. Avoiding (dodging) the draft. Vietnam. Marriage. Graduate degree. Children. The compulsion to get ahead and make it. A suburban home and Volvo. Self-doubts. Disillusionment. More self-doubts. Divorce. The gaps that separate me from my children. The sobering acknowledgement of one’s failure, finitude and mortality. Starting over. And over.

Despite all the changes and metamorphoses, there is a small, not entirely rational part of me that will forever be stuck in 1968. I know that I am not alone. Objectively, we can look back at 1968 and clearly see our naiveté and blindness, the glaring fallacies in our grandiose plans for a new social order, the ease with which we were co-opted into obedient lockstep by the Jerry Rubins and Abbie Hoffmans, whose deeper motives were far removed from altruism.

Objectively, we can look back and clearly see that we in our own way were no less self-centered and self-indulgent in 1968 than the aging-out Boomers we have become in 2003.

Objectivity, however, cannot overrule the gut sensation that our exuberant, youthful energies, however misguided and excessive, were at least fixed on ideals of harmony, understanding, justice, equality and on the convictions that we could convert those ideals into reality, if we could just get folks to listen.

But all pretensions of idealism were challenged to their limit that Summer of 1968. Martin was dead. Bobby was dead. Vietnam was a hellish abyss into which were sinking deeper each day. Dick Nixon was poised to reemerge from the shadows of political oblivion. And we marched, and shouted, and screamed, and were met with force that begat counterforce. And the more Insightful among us realized at that moment that even the noblest of ideals do not translate into reality quite so easily, if ever at all.

We know rationally that idealism did not die in the Summer of 1968. But many of us will forever reminisce about what we lost that August, the way we reminisce about the loss of innocence and the passing of our youth. Many of us will forever believe that that summer was the pivotal moment after which is because more and more difficult to convince young people of the middle class than ones sights should be set higher than perpetual partying, climbing the corporate ladder and amassing a repertoire of electronic toys.

That summer in Chicago we talked ourselves into believing that the whole world was watching. Many of us who were there are still, thirty-five years later, having trouble getting accustomed to the idea that much of the world is not so interest in watching anything more substantial than reruns of Friends.

No, things have not been the same since the Summer of 1968. The greater part of me will watch the 2004 convention and campaigns with appropriately mature interest and concern. But, I confess that the little part of me that hovers between exuberant youth and jaded middle age would just as soon put All You Need Is Love on my cool new MP3 player and have someone wake me when it is all over on November 2.

PRECOGNITIONS OF “A LAND SO SWEET AND BEAUTIFUL”

How many of you under-forty Jewish crowd can sing a few bars of Rumania Rumania? A majority of you probably cannot even recall the name Ceausescu or consider an era pre-Holocaust when Jews savored Rumania as “a land so sweet and beautiful.” And, even if you can, can you identify the sanctified Rumanian cuisine of mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea?

Yeah, and so what?

Well, that is precisely the point. Rumania Rumania is a venerated song of the Yiddish stage, composed by Sholom Secunda, whose Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen became a huge hit for the Andrews Sisters. It was the signature tune of beloved song-and-dance-man Aaron Lebedeff, whom a critic once called “the Jewish Maurice Chevalier.” Rumania Rumania is a lighthearted reminiscence of the salad days in the old country. “It was a place,” Lebedeff pines, “where we had no troubles” and even the simplest foods were delicious. Some of the lyrics are even ingratiatingly bawdy, like, “Rumanians drink wine and eat mamaliga, and whoever kisses his own wife is crazy.”

Nowadays, you rarely find anyone – save a few klezmer aficionados and a dying breed of old timers – who truly appreciates the song’s cultural context and Lebedeff’s intricate Yiddish scat. But, generations come and go, and then something really weird happens that bridges the ages while it completely defies rationality . . .

Simeon Isaac, my three-month-old grandson – whom I call “Shimon’dl,” just as my mom endearingly called my dad – is becoming more and more attentive to music, as infants typically are. A smile will cross his face, maybe even a little calm if he is cranky. So, we sing to him, and he is really starting to get into Baby Mozart, the new generation’s ultimate non-prescription narcotic.

So, one day I start warbling Rumania Rumania, and I do not get a mere smile from the kid, but a chorus of the deepest belly-laughs. His eyes are fixed on me with a knowing look, and the laughs just keep on rolling. A few minutes go by, and I try it again. By now we have an audience, and again, the kid cracks up. Rumania Rumania has now become our signature tune, and I am welcomed by same eyes and belly-laughs each time I sing the arcane, loopy melody. Shimon’dl gives no other song, whatever the language, such a spontaneously hearty ovation.

What is going on here? A developmental psychologist would likely say that the resonance of a particular meter or beat or note-combination sends the baby into fits of laughter. Feh. Let an overly romantic zayde offer an alternative theory:

Dr. Gladys McGarey introduced us to the idea that babies are actually "old souls in new bodies." Mystical? Genetic? You need not be a scientist. We who have birthed children know that our babies are indeed old souls, that precognitions both pristinely innocent and worldly wise dwell deep in an infant’s eyes long before its conscious conditioning begins.

So indulge me more in romantic projection than in clinical observation. You know why baby Shimon’dl rings with laughter whenever I sing Rumania Rumania? Because he has been there before. His old soul knows of a place devoid of tyrants and crematoria where “living was a pleasure,” where a glass of sweet Rumanian wine led to merriment and dancing and good-natured joking about the mishugas of kissing ones own wife. He stood behind the kitchen door as Moshe Chayim and Boruch Shmuel mischievously swiped a piece of the cook’s Shabbos kugel. He found delight in a simple peasant’s meal of mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea. And now he laughs and laughs whenever he is reminded of times full of sunshine and devoid of angst and worries and WMD’s and egotistical talking heads.

In that innocent ditty he feels himself again swaddled in the innocence of the womb, as he does at his mother’s breast and in his father’s protective arms. The wisdom he radiates declares that truth is found in the utter simplicity of the love of family and friends, a little merriment and frivolity, a savoring together of times now past, a table set with a modest meal, and a sip or two of sweet wine.

Does Shimon’dl really hear all that as he laughs with abandon at a nostalgically goofy song of the Yiddish stage? All right, maybe I have taken a zayde’s fantasy too far. Yet, if in a newborn babe’s innocence we feel our own yearning for innocence, and if in its wise eyes we see a reflection of our own longing for wisdom, and if in his laughter we hear our own hollowness begging to be filled with laughter . . . then maybe we, too, have in utero visited “a land so sweet and beautiful,” and reveled in times well spent, and now pine for one more chance to be enveloped in its glow of all’s-wellness. Perhaps the hope we see reflected in our grandchildren’s laughter and knowing eyes reassures us that age has not dimmed our own hope for tomorrow.

So, what are mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea? Go look them up in a Rumanian dictionary. Better yet, find an old timer who got out of Rumania with his life, and ask him. Even better yet, give my Shimon’dl a couple of years. I bet he will be able to tell you all about them in impeccable detail.