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.

THE HEALING POWER OF CHICKEN AND PASTA

Please, please, this is not a living obituary. Inflicting such morbidity would be wrong for me and for you, much more so for Lenora, who might also read this column.

I got the call a scant six weeks ago. Lenora, a friend, congregant and fellow educator from my Charlotte days was riddled with cancer. It exploded all at once. By the time it was detected, it had invaded lungs, liver and bones. Desperate chemo has not worked.

We still cannot find within ourselves the clinical objectivity to spit out the word “terminal,” but we already choke on words like “incurable” and “dire.”

Part of our denial is just plain denial. A good measure of the denial, though, is the good nature, glibness, even silliness, that still emit from this woman who knows the eventuality and whose body is overtaken by disease. I mean, Lenora is a once chubby, moon-faced woman who reveled in dressing up like a huge M&M or a French maid to underscore some facet of living a life guided by mitzvot.

As I say, though, this is not a living eulogy.

Please, then, afford me the cathartic self-indulgence of reflecting on my own struggles with this moment in her life that are such a jumble of the bitter and the sweet.

For a decade, I had not been a good friend to Lenora. I had not even seen her in six years. No, we had had no falling out, simply the loopiness of life’s paths that bring two people together, then lead them on their separate ways. Hence, my responding to her crisis certainly was tinged with, if not consumed by, the guilt of now coming too late with too little. Ironic, but as hard as it is to account for “Where were you in the bad times?” it is sometimes even harder to answer to “Where were you in the good times?”

Yet, we can dispel guilt. The avenues of confession, contrition, new resolve, absolution, forgiveness, remain open. Helplessness, though, is a terminal condition. We stand by as the life of a lovely, decent person slips away before our eyes, and we flail our arms in desperation and curse our futility in making it better. No matter how much peace we ultimately make with the resolve that “we did our best,” the pall of helplessness remains forever.

The ministry of our presence is all that we have left. Perhaps this is the most sublime gift of all. Our presence cannot cure Lenora, but it can help to heal her, and heal us, as well. Every moment of our unconditional presence affirms that she will not face her fears alone.

Yet, even in offering our presence we remain unsettled. The thought that “I don’t know what to do, but I gotta do something,” eats away at us. The feeling is so pervasive that we laugh at sitcom scenarios when, facing whatever the crisis, someone is bound to say, “I’ll go put up some coffee.”

Personally, when I do not know what to do, I cook. So, yesterday, I cooked frenetically, as if I had taken half a bottle of dexies – chicken marsala, pappardelle, field greens with balsamic dressing and candied pecans, garlic bread, peach compote . . . I even found a long lost bottle of not-too-bad Israeli port. Then I schlepped it up to Lenora and Bob’s in Charlotte. She had conserved her strength to set a beautiful table in the dining room of their modest home. Schlemiel and schlimazel that we are, the power went out, but it fortuitously came back on in just enough time to warm the warm and chill the cold.

Soon, elbow-to-elbow, friends came and surrounded the table. We blessed the bread. Ate with gusto. Drank wine with abandon. Toasted each other. Joked and laughed. Caught up on old times. No sense of teary bon voyage.

And, Lenora kept pace with us all the way. She promised to take me to a new restaurant that she knew I would love, and there was not a touch of bitter irony or squirmy denial in her voice as she extended the invitation. There was no discussion of Divine justice or theodicy or God’s presence, for in our ministry of presence was the most manifest sense of God’s presence. Yes, we affirmed, God is best sought and found in breaking bread in the midst of human fellowship.

How long will the afterglow last? Call me a Pollyanna, but I believe it will endure until the next dinner, and the next dinner, and the next dinner, cooked by loving friends who “didn’t know what else to do” and served to a circle of the beloved who know to celebrate the eternity of the soul more by instinct than by theology.

As I finally drove off, I cried. Yet, the tears were as much of the sweet as they were of the bitter. For, ten years of indifference had somehow melted away. In its place, a modicum of comfort settled in as I realized that the simplicity of chicken and pasta and the presence of friends may not cure my friend Lenora, but it may help her – and us – to be healed.

THE TRAUMA OF TAKING AWAY THE KEYS

Katie is looking her most intently journalistic as she questions a representative of AARP about problems with older drivers, in the aftermath of that elderly man killing ten folks as he plowed his car into a crowded market.

“How does the family deal with the most painful issue, not allowing father or mother to drive anymore?” Katie asks.

The AARP-person acknowledges the trauma. As Katie nods her polite, tentative professional nod, the woman dryly suggests that this might be better accomplished by asking “someone more detached and objective, like a therapist, doctor or family clergyman” to break the news.

People who have not yet faced that daunting prospect might actually think that is a good idea, if not an easy out. Children of aging parents, like my kids, who know the eventuality they are facing, might still think it is a decent alternative, but may feel a creeping edge of skepticism, as the advice grates against a higher filial instinct.

And then there are the people who have themselves been obliged to take away the keys, face the trauma, recognize its necessity, yet still struggle with the guilt.

I am one such person.

My dad’s descent into senile dementia came in jagged steps, not a smooth slope. Tragically ironic, but one could chronicle those jagged steps by the evidence he left in their wake: He would work daily on his stamp collection, until one day he simply stopped, catalogues lying open, tweezers, stamps, hinges, all left in place from the day before. Likewise, his photography, his crosswords, his newspapers and magazines, his inability to answer the phone, pay the bills or even click the TV remote.

I, who was obliged to move back home to care for him and my mom, died a thousand deaths while clearing a small space for myself in the den. I asked his permission and removed some of his long-abandoned photographic equipment. But, his confusion still beckoned him to repeatedly demand, “Where are you taking that?” I would explain it to him ad infinitum, but nothing satisfied him nor assuaged my guilt.

All this, of course, came in tandem with taking away his car keys. The car went to my son, but each day my dad would ask, “Where is the car? We have to go shopping!” I would repeat as compassionately as I could, “Joey has it. I’ll do the shopping.” Each exchange stabbed me in the ribcage and forced a little more life out of my collapsing lungs.

All of us who have been there grieve and torture ourselves 10,000 times, not over the rationality of protecting our parent and the public, but over the irrational feeling that we are doing some evil by denigrating a parent’s independence and ability to make responsible decisions. The torment we feel is about being the reluctant catalyst for a journey on the road from which there is no return. The pain is about losing any last pretensions of our own fleeting youth. The trauma is about a little part of us dying, and dying again, with each bit of mortality that we acknowledge in our mom or dad. The heartache is about the futility of yearning for the momma and poppa who enveloped us in their all-protective arms when they and we were young. The grief is about being orphaned while our parents are still clinging to life.

Yet, I believe that any one of us who has faced the trauma would tell you that s/he would not have done it any other way. We would not plead or even infer our martyrdom. We would tell you, however, that we did not abrogate our responsibility to our parents’ safety and wellbeing – that we for a moment sublimated our own grief to face the pain it sometimes takes to care for those who have given us life. We would tell you that, for all the self-recrimination, the thought of some indifferent surrogate letting us off the hook would be even more grievous.

We would tell you that deluding ones self into believing that s/he has “gotten off the hook” is likely to eventually bring even greater intrapsychic torment than facing the responsibility to ones parents personally and forthrightly. My guess is that, despite the AARP’s assertion, any honorable therapist, doctor or clergyman would tell you the same, not be co-opted into absolving a child of a painful mission that s/he alone must accomplish. Finally, we would tell you that the pain we withstood, and that torments us even now, was still the highest articulation of our love.

I pray that my own children will remember the responsibility that I awkwardly took, and the grief that I suffered, in acknowledging that my dad’s vitality had dimmed and that it would return no more. So may it be with your kids. Perhaps they will realize that the fullness of life is messy and not without its price, and that it cannot be sanitized by a gloved surrogate-for-rent and hermetically sealed in a zip-lock bag.

Let them at least know while we are still of sound mind that they have our blessing to take away our keys, literally and figuratively, when we can no longer safely drive our own lives. Let them at least know that the love we show them now might eventually counterbalance the trepidation and guilt that might confront them later. Let them at least know that we love them and know that they love us.

Somehow, I believe that if we give them the message, they will get the message.

“ONE DAY, WITH GOD’S HELP”

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

This was common knowledge to a generation of students who tolerated a year in his Talmud class at the Chicago Jewish Academy. Pudgy. Balding. Vaguely effeminate. We mocked his swishy walk and his unmanly affectations. We mimicked his high-pitched lilt and the perennial confusion of "s" and "sh" that pervaded his thick Lithuanian Yiddish accent.

We felt ourselves well justified. He would teach us the Talmudic text in an undertone, barely audible, chanting the Aramaic in the singsong of the Eastern European shtetl. There would be an interminable moment of silence. Then, uncontrollable frenetic laughter. Or worse, he would fix his stare, clench his teeth and explode in a burst of unfocused rage. And then, with neither acknowledgment nor apology, he would return to interpreting the intricacies of the day's sacred text.

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

His students regularly fell in and out of his grace, first engulfed by his love, then accused of betrayal or some imagined affront, then with similar caprice, restored to his favor. Talk was that he regularly co-opted the younger, more impressionable students to squeal on the older boys for infractions of religious behavior or getting too chummy with the girls. And we all knew that if he patted you on the back, the act of endearment was a ruse to check if you were wearing your arba kanfos, the fringed ritual undergarment mandated by Numbers 15.

Rabbi Juzint was crazy.

We recognized the numbers that the Nazis had tattooed on his arm. We heard hush-hush murmuring about how they had somehow diabolically maimed him for life. On rare occasions, perhaps too rare, he would speak to us of the tender years of adolescence that he spent in hell: of concentration camps, and forced labor, and starvation, and disease, and beatings, and the stench of death that was an ever-present, all-pervasive daily reality. How the great rabbinical masters of the yeshiva of Slobodka had been murdered at the final utterance of their plaintive Shema. How mother and father and God-knows-how-many brothers and sisters met their end in gas chambers and crematoria.

And of them all, either as a fortuitous gift or the most cruel and haunting injustice, only one, young Meir Juzint, survived. A witness. A tormented soul. Orphaned. Alone. Struggling forever, not so much to make sense of it all, but simply to find a moment's respite between outbursts of giddy laughter and unbridled rage. And we, his rambunctious, over-indulged sophomoric charges, were all too quick to see lunacy, but only too slow to hear the immeasurable pain.

How ironic, as I look back 40 years later with an understanding that accompanies what Wordsworth calls the "years that bring the philosophic mind." I read afresh the brokenhearted lament of poems he inscribed in a thin Hebrew treatise and nod my head wistfully at the title he chose, "The Consolation of Meir." I close my eyes and hear again his plaintive Old World chant as, burdened with grief, he prayed the penitential prayers for our infantile souls and for the souls of so many babies thrown alive into satanic fires:

Account not to us the sin,
Which we committed in our folly.
We beseech you, speedily heal the afflicted babes,
The blessing of your fruitful vineyard.

And then I think, for the first time in years, about the words he wrote to my parents on my ninth grade report card, "One day, with God's help, he will become a great scholar."

And we mocked and we mimicked him, the way that teenagers typically mock and mimic. And we thought he was crazy. And the remorse that I feel 40 years later is surmounted only by the bittersweet knowledge that only years and tears can bring, that somehow his encounter with us had not been entirely in vain.

For, if we have learned to have more than a modicum of compassion, it must in some way be bound up in the ability we have cultivated to listen to the cry of the tortured soul and the sound of the breaking heart. It is to know that we have heard more than the empty nattering of one whom we would otherwise cast aside as just another crazy.

And I hear, I pray not too late, pain, power and pathos that I had never heard before. And I think to myself that maybe one day, with God's help, even I might grow up to be a great scholar.

INTO THE CIRCLE

My mentor and friend Reb Leib Groner caught up with me recently at his granddaughter’s wedding. Broad smile across his face, he nonetheless chided me, “I haven’t seen much of your writing lately.”

So, I countered with a wisenheimer retort. “Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right places.”

Besting me with his quick wit and an advantage of at least 50 I.Q. points, he shot back, “Maybe that’s because you haven’t been writing about the right things!”

You might not know who Reb Leib Groner is. For forty years, he was the private secretary, personal aide and intimate confidant of the Grand Rabbi of Lubavitch (“Lubavitcher Rebbe”), spiritual leader of the world’s most influential Chasidic community and Jewish outreach program. To know of Reb Leib’s worldly wisdom is to realize that he must speed-read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 17 other periodicals each day, in addition to his daily devotion to intense prayer, communal needs, and the study of Torah, mysticism and Chasidic philosophy.

I came to know Reb Leib through his son, Yossi, the Lubavitch emissary to the Carolinas, a man (nearly) as gifted as his father and mother. He is my Jewish exemplar, teacher, confessor, and one of a scant handful of compassionate people who stood by me and validated my humanity during the hardest times in my life.

I have spent numerous Sabbaths and Holy Days enjoying the hospitality of Rabbi Yossi and his brilliant, quick-witted wife, Rebbetzin Mariashi. I have watched intently as their ten children have grown to adolescence and adulthood, and prayerfully as their son, please God, surmounted a nearly devastating leukemia and bone marrow transplant.

I have spent relatively little personal time with Reb Leib. I catch myself as I write these words, because on the clock the time has been relatively meager, but all the encounters have been intensely personal: two Sabbaths in his home, a moment’s greeting at two weddings and a bar mitzvah, and that is about it.

Reb Leib is also one of that handful that gave me validation during hard times. Do not think for a moment, however, that the validation was all warm fuzzies. He is an expert practitioner of tough love. With insight and consultation with the Rebbe – which in itself touched me for the magnitude of his concern – he chided and cajoled me to take challenging steps that became the turning point for my personal and professional restoration.

My veneration for Reb Leib and his son has an additional dimension. They are intensely orthodox Jews, black hats, caftans, untrimmed beards, all the accoutrements. I, on the other hand, am fallen-away orthodox, still greatly respectful of its pious way of life and still closely aligned with its theology, but no longer strictly observant of all of its nuances and demands. Father and son are well aware of that. Yet, their warmth is genuine, their acceptance is unjudgmental and unconditional, their welcome is enthusiastic, never a proselytizing word toward their way of life, just to be an honorable person and to conduct my dealings with integrity.

These emotions rushed forth fresh and new just a day ago at Rabbi Yossi’s daughter’s wedding. I pop my head into the pre-ceremony reception, and with a flick of Rabbis Groner-junior-and-senior’s hands, I am beckoned to a seat at the head table. An hour later, I am standing on the sidelines watching the exuberant Chasidic dancing, and in a moment, Reb Leib is yanking me by the arm, pulling me into the dizzying circle, tightly gripping my hand as this man twenty years my senior nearly lifts me off my feet in response to the tumultuous music.

The meaning of that yank is unmistakable: “Not words, but passion draws you to our circle. No one is a wallflower when we rejoice.”

As I realize that Reb Leib is tugging at me, not at one of the attending dignitaries or Chasidic rabbis or well-heeled donors, the yank takes on one more meaning: The circle is especially intended for the least among us – the tattered, the torn, the fallen away, the otherwise rejected and dejected. It does not cost a penny, just the hopefulness that rejoicing and exuberance can restore ones soul.

And, I further realize that never once through all my dalliances in the various “liberal” denominations of Judaism have I ever been so eagerly invited into the circle. It then comes to me more clearly than ever that the saintly Rebbe and Reb Leib, Rabbi Yossi, their Rebbetzins, their colleagues and disciples, may well be “orthoprax” – unwaveringly meticulous in their traditional practices – but not by any means “orthodox.” For they are the least narrow, most worldly and unconditionally inclusive in the basic doctrine of their faith: “The circle has room for everyone. Let me pull you into the circle and galvanize the strength you never knew was yours. The music is joyous, and the exuberant dance is itself the gift of life.”

Reb Leib, thank you for giving me life by drawing me into your circle. Your charge has been fulfilled: I know that at least for once I have written about the right thing.

SO MUCH FOR THE CHARM OF SMALL-TOWN AMERICANA

Chances are that ninety-eight percent of this readership has not spent much time in the rural South. The Interstate system and its network of pit stops have made poking around Main Street Mayberry all but irrelevant. Hence, for most of us the image of the charm of small-town Americana remains rhapsodically intact.

Well, my life requires meandering in the rural South Carolina Upstate within a fifty-mile radius of Greenville, a relative metropolis. Thus, my observations, however tinged with romanticism, are of a more clinical, critical nature. The most critical among them regards the unsettling nature of rural poverty and homelessness.

Anyone who thinks that homelessness is an exclusively urban, inner-city phenomenon needs to look again. Small-town homelessness is particularly insidious in that – despite the protestations of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly – the resources through which homeless people might transition to independent living are so scarce -- resource like safe, affordable housing, job training, essential medical and social services, employment at a living wage, and most importantly, transportation for homeless people to access the empowering resources.

Sadly, the fifty-mile radius around Greenville is merely emblematic of a national reality that should give even us urban folks cause for concern. This is what you would likely see if you wandered down Main Street of small-town America:

You would notice that “the other side of the tracks” is not simply a euphemism, but a reality that is defined not so much by race as by lack of economic and social empowerment.

Perhaps this is due to my own prejudices, but you would also see that on the more prosperous side of the tracks, there are any number of comfortable, if not affluent, houses of worship. The old tall-steeple churches are meticulously groomed and classically Andy-and-Opie small-town charming. The newer churches are large and imposing, although usually paeans to high-tech functionality more than aesthetics.

More noteworthy, however, is that so many of these congregations have little if any interaction with the festering reality of homelessness in their communities. Yes, perhaps a congregation here and there does. Perhaps through financial contributions at arm’s length. Perhaps an eagerness to address poverty through missions to Jamaica, Haiti and third-world countries. But, woefully little hands-on toward the other side of their charming town’s tracks.

We all remember the long-venerated virtue of small-town Americana. It is so highly regarded that it has by now been mythologized. Friendly Village. Centerville. Mayberry RFD. Now, despite its dogmatic defenders, it is merely a dewy reminiscence. Once upon a time, rural congregations were singularly committed to “taking care of their own.” "Their own” was understood as broad enough to include the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the handicapped, the alcoholic, the homeless, and most generally, folks in crisis by dint of illness, death, crime, natural disaster, or any reversal of fortune.

The small-town church was the motivator and clearinghouse of compassion, benevolence, and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This was the epicenter of “share your bread with the hungry, bring the poor into your house, clothe the naked, and not hide from a fellow being.” The words are not mine or those of a contemporary do-gooder, but of the ultimate ol' time do-gooder, God. (Isaiah 58)

Rural congregations, motivated by the spirit of the Divine, could revive their honorable tradition and do all this and more to address the blight of homelessness, rather than avert their eyes from the squalor on the other side of the tracks: What about job training? What about classes in life-skills? What about helping someone navigate the head-spinning bureaucracy and paperwork that comes with assuming responsibility for ones self and family? What about local employment? What about a few local doctors, dentists, and lawyers helping folks with essential medical and social needs? What about some folks offering guarantees to utilities and phone companies for the exorbitant deposits required for moving from homelessness to a new home? What about providing transportation from where poor folks live to the remote places they need to be – clinics, hospitals, social service agencies, jobs?

You should realize by now that the issue is not for rural America alone. Once upon a time, urban churches and synagogues had an equally broad definition of “their own” and addressed their needs accordingly. Now we in the cities have many, but never enough, social service agencies, clinics, soup kitchens, and suicide intervention hotlines. But, we have largely lost the notion that the bottom-line “looking out for our own” squarely belongs with our houses of God. Politics and economics may fail us, but the Divine imperative will forever endure.

Small-town Americana may have lost much of its graciousness to pernicious indifference. Our big cities are no better. Wherever we live, there is always “the other side of the tracks.” Whether we consider its residents as “our own” remains to be seen. But, of this we must be sure: No entity can accomplish the task more capably and devotedly than the places where the good news of Isaiah and Jesus are regularly preached and should be practiced. A house of God is no house of God unless it is also a house of humanity.

A HOLE-Y HERESY

One cannot turn on the TV these days even for the most legitimate reasons without being taunted by the sacrilege: ham-on-bagels.

Ham-on-bagels . . . Heresy. Blasphemy. Desecration.

The bagel is the quintessence of the Jewish Experience: crusty exterior, soft at heart, hard-boiled, half-baked, growing stale if it stays in one place too long.

Some would say, apocryphally, that the name “bagel” is related to the Aramaic word for “to hasten,” as in “to hasten the coming of the Messiah.” The Messiah may tarry, but a bagel lovingly slathered with chive-flecked cream cheese and enshrouded in two (OK, three) slices of velvety lox, is for a moment the long awaited return to the Garden of Eden.

Let me say a word or two about lox: Lox is not “smoked salmon.” I have no scientific data to substantiate this. But “smoked salmon” is eaten on toast points with creamery butter and chopped egg whites by people named Miffy and Trent. Lox is down-and-dirty two-fisted food, consumed by people named Marv and Sylvia, washed down by a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray or semi-viscous black coffee.

Lox may be either salty or “Nova.” Growing up in Chicago, we knew not the Nova species. The first time I asked my mother about Nova lox, she told me it tasted “spoiled.” I have since move on, grown more cosmopolitan, and dabbled a bit in Nova, but never without the image of my mother’s consternation haunting the recesses of my middle-aged psyche.

The furthest a bagel should be allowed to stray from lox is to a delicate layer of strawberry or raspberry preserves on top of the cream cheese. So long, that is, as we understand it as only a moment’s diversion from the earthy reality of bawdy lox and authoritative slices of Bermuda onion.

And what are those pink and blue things that some trendy “shoppes” try to pass off as bagels? Feh. Horse fodder. Do not get me started.

Some entrepreneurs have had a modicum of success in marketing a “pizza bagel.” Purists may one day come to accept the pizza bagel, this half-breed child of two robust, passionate cultures. It may, indeed, more quickly bridge the gap between Rome and Jerusalem than a Papal visit to Miami Beach. Mario Puzo and Philip Roth are collaborating on a position paper.

But ham-on-bagel is heresy tantamount to erecting a statue of Zeus Olympus in the Holy of Holies. The Faithful have fought and died for less.

Brothers and sisters, what will be next? Matzo balls bound with fatback? Chopped liver garnished with mayo? Knishes masquerading as dim sum?

Lord have mercy on us all . . .

So, let Mickey D. revel in his illicit porcine pleasures, but, hey, gimme back my bagels!

DON'T LECTURE ME ABOUT COCKTAIL PARTIES!

So there I sit, captive in my car, navigating the construction on 385, when this mellifluous nitwit comes on "All Things Considered" preaching about contemporary cocktail rituals. He pronounces the age of sushi and sashimi dead and extols the return to "authentic, traditional cocktail fare": finger sandwiches and canapes.

Literally and figuratively . . . baloney!

I hate to pull rank, but don't ever lecture a Member of Our Tribe about "authentic, traditional" hors d'oeuvres. I come from the chosen people who invented the cocktail hour while the Mayflower crowd was still chowing down on kidneys and haggis.

We Jews invented the cocktail hour. All right, all right, so we didn't call it "cocktail hour." It didn't precede the annual debutante ball in Kishinev or the opening of opera season in Bialystok. Nevertheless, come with me to a traditional chasseneh (wedding), Bar Mitzvah, or better yet, a bris - yes, a circumcision, Dr. Freud - and I will show you cocktail goodies that will forever confirm the suspicion that the best of your goyishe finger sandwiches are Spam-putty on surgical cotton.

Hors d'oeuvres, meaning, "set apart from the main work," best describes Jewish cocktail eats: The magnitude of the ensuing meal is irrelevant. Bring on another platter of knishes. Presbyterians may speak of "finger sandwiches" and "munchies." The undernourished English language lamentably has no equivalent for "up-to-the-elbows sandwich" and "bloaties."

Alas, outsiders do not commonly know Jewish cuisine for its extensive palette of cocktail foods. We hide the best for ourselves. Indulge me, as I now wax rhapsodic over my three favorites:

THE KNISH - The knish is sodden dough enveloping leaden filling. The egotistical knish never lets you forget its presence. It leaves its calling card, an indelible grease stain, wherever it momentarily rests its oily head. The filling may be oniony beef, oniony potato or oniony buckwheat. Its closest Episcopalian cousin is the potato puff. The knish is the potato thud.

CHOPPED LIVER - I caught grief when I recently made sport of folks who bind their chopped liver with mayo. Go ahead, if you must. We won't. Ever. Never. It's just too close to Miracle Whip. For the same aggregate of arterial goo, why not commune with authentic Jewish nirvana?

Nap your chopped liver in schmaltz, onion-flecked chicken fat, liquid heartburn. Grind in some gribenes, crispy shards of greasy chicken skin. When no one is looking, eat some straight from the bowl. Sam Levenson called it "Jewish Popcorn." Gribenes are solely responsible for my 200-pound girth and terminal acne at the tender age of 13. Do not mention chopped liver in the same paragraph as . . .

. . . pâté. Pâté contains hostile adulterants like cognac and mace. If you were a calf or chicken, would you want your liver's final repose to be cognac and mace, or real-people stuff like schmaltz and gribenes? I rest my case.

HERRING - When the final chapter of history is written, scholars will prove that Jewish explorers introduced herring to the Swedes. As a rotund pre-teen, I loved herring: au naturel ("schmaltz"), pickled, chopped, fried, baked. My dad would kid about chocolate-dipped.

The family herring ritual would start at 6:15 with an insistent rap on our back door. My grandfather, a retired grocer, would trek to Municipal Market before dawn and bestow my mother with a "surprise" gift of a tub of herring. At age four, I was delighted by such affection. I could never understand my mother's rancor. So what if the herring had to be prepared NOW or start to stink like, well, old fish? So what if it meant canceling a day's worth of her plans? So what if the world had to mark time in deference to herring?

That evening, the air still pungent with the volatile fumes of pickling brine, the Wilson's celebrated herring-fest. Guests were never invited. We still had our dignity, however tarnished by a day spent knee deep in fins and scales. True, some of my co-religionists consider herring beneath their dignity. Then again, some of my coreligionists consider the Jackie Mason tasteful. Yet, show me a bris without herring, and I'll show you a Son of Israel destined for the analyst's couch.

What of the cocktails at an "authentic, traditional" Jewish cocktail hour? Entirely secondary. Nearly irrelevant. Just bring on the chopped liver. Wine means thick, syrupy, grapy goo in which a knife could stand perpendicularly until it decomposes. All liquor -- scotch, bourbon, Canadian -- is interchangeable, generically known as "schnapps" and drunk straight from a shot-glass. It wasn't until I spent some time amidst proper company that I learned that the Upper Middle Class uses a shot-glass for measuring, not drinking. So much for Jews and hoity-toity cocktails.

But, as far as eats are concerned, don't ever prate at me about "authentic, traditional" cocktail fare. I'll match you knish for canapé any time. And, when you've come to see the error in your ways, talk to me for a moment about your tomato aspic and calamari. Feh. C'monna my house. I'll show you better.

AN EPIGRAM ON THE DEATH OF A FEELING

The classical philosophers incessantly debated whether the order of the universe is innately natural or whether our minds create relationships to delude ourselves into believing that chaos is inherently orderly.

Whatever, our last week was quintessentially chaotic. On a moment’s notice, we were flying to eastern Pennsylvania for the funeral of our niece, who succumbed to bulimia at the age of 19. Her body was so depleted of electrolytes that the impulses that regulate heart and brain simply ceased. She and her parents had taken every therapeutic step to intervene in her disease. It was not meant to be.

Perhaps it was serendipity, or perhaps it was just more raging chaos, but I mindlessly flipped through the channels on the eve of her funeral. In the nanosecond that it took to jump from C-SPAN to SpongeBob, my attention was riveted by the image of a young grunge, fingers deep down his throat, inducing himself to vomit into a fishbowl. Once, twice, then with what seemed to be a gallon of water, he puked up a goldfish to the hoots and cheering of a gaggle of associate grunges. Then he held the fishbowl victoriously aloft, just as I remember Bobby Hull jubilantly hoisting the Stanley Cup skyward during the glory days of my beloved Blackhawks.

Here I watch some moron gain a moment’s celebrity with a gleeful upchuck, just as we poise ourselves to bury a gracious young woman who struggled with her adolescence, her relationships, the angst-laden lyrics that she sensitively composed, her prominence as a recording artist, the demons and insecurities that haunted her, despite her outward air self-assuredness and confidence.

I guess that I had never imagined self-induced vomiting as an art form and that its public display would sell enough commercials to make it a media event. Crude enough to offend public sensibilities, or so I had hoped, and crude beyond tolerance when your niece has just died of bulimia.

Change the channel, you say. No, this is not about boycotting advertisers, or making a ruckus on O’Reilly, or calling out the morality police, or even changing the channel. This is about self-imposed discretion. This is about how even people who push the envelope of outrageousness need know that the pain inflicted by putting a laugh-track to tragedy demands self-restraint. This is about having the decency to say, even in the freest of societies, “I know that I could go there, but my conscience will not allow it.” This is about how the final line of demarcation between human and beast is in the self-motivated human ability to say “no,” particularly to the allure of a prurient impulse.

So, go make fun of the outrageous, of human foibles, of bombastic politicians, of hypocrites who demand our adulation while betraying our trust. But, vomiting is not funny. Self-induced vomiting is really not funny. There is a market, I am sure, for comic routines about the Holocaust, dead babies, amputees, lynchings, starving African children, the mentally and physically impaired (“RE-tards”), AIDS victims, anorexics, and a plethora of other human tragedies. Howard Stern knows that he can gain ratings by verbally jerking around a mentally-handicapped guest. Someone who calls herself Chrissy (Conant) Caviar purports, as an artistic statement, to market her ova to childless couples as one would Beluga, and the New York critics rave at her beyond-the-fringe contribution to an exhibition simply entitled “Family.”

Howard, and Chrissy, and goldfish-vomiting reality TV, and comedians who make hay of dead-baby jokes have every right to go there. But, their inability to stop of their own accord only bespeaks their cruelty and the receptiveness – or at least numbness – to cruelty of the audiences that make them pop icons.

Nietzsche was a pretty gloomy guy, so perhaps he is not the most credible authority on comedy. Nonetheless, he observed, “A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.” We laugh at a man who slips on a banana peel and only later, if at all, do we inquire if he broke his neck. Ask someone who has been there about the comedic quality of watching a baby die, or losing a brother to AIDS, or knowing that ones mother was gassed by the Nazis, or nursing a handicapped child . . . or losing a niece, a daughter, a sister, to bulimia. No wishes the same on you. Just a little empathy. A little common sense. A little self-control.

FEEDING THE APPETITE FOR SCHADENFREUDE

A recent edition of an online Jewish periodical poked fun at a prominent rabbi who was caught propositioning an illicit sexual act (not pedophilia) in a public place. Good for a cheap laugh. Good for self-proliferating email distribution and a yuk around the dinner table. Good for feeding the public’s insatiable appetite for schadenfreude – taking delight in another’s undoing.

Perhaps in this open and unrelenting society, comedy was in order. Winding up as a one-liner in a Leno monologue or a Letterman Top Ten list has become part of the ritual of public purgatory, if not a bullet on the 15-minute pop chart.

Call me a sourpuss, but let me give this pants-down scene a different perspective: Despite the rabbi’s willful misdeed, this situation was a tragedy, not a Seinfeld sketch. A once-respected leader capitulated to misbegotten lust. Who knows the demons at work in his soul? Who knows the conflicts that tormented his conscience? All we do really know is that he is already suffering all the grief he deserved and then some. He is likely to have forfeited his job, his marriage, his esteem, his clerical authority, his ability to walk down the street without facing murmured scorn or derision.

And yes, perhaps he deserves all that. But, after society has meted out its explicit and implicit punishments, who will be there to give a modicum of solace and encouragement to a hurting, isolated, failed man who gave in to impulses that bespeak tortured unwholeness, not criminality? Who will comfort him, show him some understanding, restore his sense of self-worth?

It will not be a psychotherapist at $200 a session. It will, and must, be a person of exceptional compassion, tolerance and insight. Perhaps someone who has himself been humbled by scandal or impropriety, who knows the internal conflicts and lurking demons, a “wounded healer,” who has gained a great ability in comprehend others' troubles thanks to the awareness of his own pain.

Having mercy on a person who has suffered undeservedly is, sadly, a rare quality in our contentious, calloused society. Having mercy, or even understanding, to one who had done wrong and deserved punishment is even more exceptional. Yet, anyone who has been there knows that everyone needs someone by his side, someone who may loathe the sin yet acknowledge the humanity of the sinner.

“Everyone needs someone,” you say? Even Hitler and child murderers and cold-blooded killers? To that I have no rational answer, but I do have an existential one that I learned from Elie Weisel. I was privileged to have coffee with Weisel at the time that Ivan (“The Terrible”) Demjanjuk was on trial. Knowing his staunch opposition to capital punishment, I asked Weisel if his opposition extended to Demjanjuk, et al. “No,” he said. “That’s different.” He did not elaborate, and there was a note of finality to his voice. It said, “This should not require further explanation.”

I guess that there is a point of malignant depravity that moves beyond any claim to compassion or even human validation. And I guess that we must rely on some higher instinct with which we are blessed to know where to draw the line. This, however, I do know: Soliciting an illicit sexual act with an otherwise consenting adult is not mass murder. Likewise 99.9 percent of the sins that feed schadenfreude-hungry audiences a steady diet of scandal, titillating innuendo, lush gossip, comedic scripts and unjustified intimations of our own moral superiority.

OK, OK, so we got a good yuk out of a rabbi pathetically getting caught with his pants down. Next week another deserving candidate will be slimed. But, who among us will see tragedy in another’s downfall? Who among us will be there to wipe their tears and ease their burden?

If the public has a right to the comedic dimension of human downfall and moral frailty, then let them know well enough to also see tragedy as tragedy. For, imputing only comedy to a person’s undoing is the greatest tragedy of all.

“WHATEVER-NESS” MAY BE THE WORST FORM OF ABUSE

When you think about it, a “high-end outlet mall” is an oxymoron, or at least it attracts a clientele that defies categorization. Probably it is best for us to simply marvel, “What a country!” Newly arrived immigrants, compulsive bargain hunters and folks blue of collar or red of neck can purchase deeply discounted Armani suits and Gucci handbags, then stop right next door for a slurpy, Cinnabon and a gag gift at Spencer’s.

Moreover, attire is no indicator of class distinction. My own wardrobe on that Sunday, just north of Atlanta, is a grubby tee shirt and tattered jeans, while shoppers presumably of lesser socioeconomics are still dressed in their going-to-church finery.

I guess that the abuse I witnessed is also immune from class distinction.

As Linda continues her perusal of Neiman’s discount haute couture, I retreat to the food court for a Coke and mid-afternoon crash. Now, you and I have witnessed many a frustrated parent give a rambunctious child a yank or a scolding in a crowded mall. Maybe we are jaded, but we would hardly consider that abuse. One would hope, on the other hand, that even in our largely indifferent culture, someone(s) would come to defend a child being beaten senseless by his/her mother. Yet, I beheld an episode of equally heinous abuse while onlookers, including my own now guilt-ridden self, did nothing but keep to ourselves.

An older and younger woman (mother and daughter?) are arguing at 120 decibels. Cursing, in each other’s face, poking, shoving, screaming accusations and threats. As the battle rages one’s cell phone rings, they pause briefly, the younger woman answers, and then whoever is on the other end of the line is drawn into the battle, too. An ugly, ugly scene.

And, through it all, a little blond-haired girl, no more than seven, stands by helplessly. Oh, she begs her mother to stop. Then a moment of bewilderedness crosses her face, perhaps shame, as well. Then she tugs at her mother for attention. Finally she resigns to that half-blasé, half-frustrated look that says, “Whatever.” Clearly, she has seen it all before. And again. And again.

Meanwhile, I sit there like a sociologist, a detached observer, not a participant. Time and again, I almost step forward to intervene. What stops me? Perhaps an edge of fear that the rancor would be redirected toward me, or that I would exacerbate the situation, or turn a “scene” into a major conflagration. I cannot deny, however, that the larger measure of my reluctance is a product of the venerated ethos of not butting into other people’s business, looking on with slack-jawed indifference, not violating the privity of intra-family squabbles.

Before my ambivalence dissipates, the incident is over. The younger throws a package at the older, screams a final epithet, yanks her daughter and is on her way. The incident is over. The problem remains. It has festered in my head ever since. Someone should have intervened. I should have intervened. Not for the sake of the two foul-mouthed cat-fighting adults, but for the defenseless, once-innocent little child who had seen more than enough and had presumably seen it all before. She had had the inalienable right to an innocent childhood ripped from her, replaced by a model of base, violent adulthood, forced into a pitiful role reversal as parent to two miscreant children. And no one seemed to give a rip, much less from the womb that once swaddled her.

Had I gotten their ear, what would I have said? I would have told them to stop it for the sake of the child. I would have told them that they are searing indelible impressions in her delicate soul. I would have told them that their child deserves an unfettered childhood, or at least one not stamped out by people who are charged to nurture and protect her. I would have told them to look at her pathetic helplessness, the hollow eyes, as vacant as the eyes of a child starving in Ethiopia. I would have told them that whatever justifiable anger the two of them shared, the real harm was to their once pure, innocent child.

And, they would have probably told me to f*** off.

But, I should have told them anyway. We should have told them. For, if nothing rubbed off on them, perhaps for a critical nanosecond something would have rubbed off on that innocent little girl. Maybe she would unconsciously absorb that there is a different way, that some grownups protect children even at their own peril, that adults are to be their child’s safe haven, not their downfall, that kindness and gentleness might teach her not to replicate this horrific abuse toward her own children.

Her struggle with them to stop devastated me. Likewise her embarrassment and her frustration. But, I will beyond all never forget that resigned look of “Whatever” that crossed her face, as she bowed to a reality beyond her power to change. And I, as you, should tearfully confess that while the abusive language and posturing came from her kin, her benign expression of “Whatever” is simply a reflection of our own indifferent “whatever-ness,” the most heinous abuse of all.

GOOD MORNING, BAGHDAD-NAM

I derive no pleasure from these words, and certainly no gratification from a smug I-told-ya-so. I for one staunchly supported the war in Iraq. I was certain that weapons of mass destruction were in plain view, deployable without trepidation at a moment’s notice, trained on the free world. I knew as an article of faith that Saddam’s demise would be met by the jubilation by the Iraqi hoi polloi, setting it irretrievably on the road to democracy.

I cannot yet say that any of that is patently untrue, but neither is it the slam-dunk that Bush, Powell, et al, would have had us believe. The most strident among us would say that the party line on Iraq was intended to dupe us for whatever hidden agenda the military-industrial complex had in mind. The more circumspect among us, and herein I include myself, would be more tentative, now surmising that we were subjected to hyperbole and overstatement of the imminence of the threat and the democracy-craving spirit of the Iraqi people.

As the war transitions from a raging infection to a low-grade case of fibromyalgia, we who are children of the 60’s cannot help but feel a stomach-souring wave of déjà vu as we consider the ambiguities and hyperbole that sustained the war in Vietnam well beyond its dubious justification. Back then, the overarching concern, we were told, was not weapons of mass destruction, but the “domino theory,” that somehow stanching the rot of communism in Southeast Asia would prevent it from one day infecting Boise.
The theory, of course, was not entirely lacking in merit, but was certainly outrageously overblown and demonized, as we are now coming to surmise about Saddam’s vaunted arsenal. Likewise, the anticipated thwarting of the domino effect in Vietnam did little to stabilize Southeast Asia, certainly no more than Saddam’s defeat will bring stability to the volatile Middle East.

A generation ago, we were told that the plight of South Vietnam was an external evil perpetrated by Ho Chi Minh and his Soviet handlers on an oppressed, democracy-hungry populace. Yes, the populace was oppressed, but much of the defiance, we came to understand, stemmed from the core of that populace, and the regime we supported was so evil and corrupt that it made Ho Chi Minh look like a poster boy for brotherhood week.

Did the people of South Vietnam have a cultural and political context to understand democracy, much less appreciate and eagerly embrace it? Does the everyday Iraqi, much less its leaders-in-waiting, have any more context for craving democracy? Is it mere coincidence that the only true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, was founded and populated primarily by democracy-driven European transplants? Does “natural law” ensure that the unfettered human spirit anywhere in the world would instinctively be drawn to democracy?

Whether democracy is an eventuality in Iraq remains to be seen, but we were taken for suckers once we came to believe that the oppressed Iraqis would instantly celebrate democracy. No, Iraqi soldiers demand their back pay from the people they were commanded to vanquish. Folks want their water, and they want it now, likewise the other amenities that now, in retrospect, seemed so accessible in Saddam’s times. We take them for ingrates, but the psyche must be understood in terms of its origin in dependency, not self-determination. It is well to remember that another group of Middle Easterners, the Israelites, also reminisced and clamored about the good ol’ days of Egyptian enslavement just days after Moses introduced them to the insecurities of the wilderness. Not to worry, God will lead you forward. Right. And now, introducing the pantheon of Bush, Powell and Tommy Franks.

There will come to be a point, I sadly predict, when those pesky snipers in the Iraqi countryside will stop looking like frustrated Saddam holdouts and more and more like the Viet Cong. And, we will be told to be patient, that we are expecting too much too soon, that “victory is close at hand.” Perhaps we will be told that we will gradually replace American intrigue with “Baghdadization,” pitting Iraqis against each other, just as Robert McNamara tried to snooker us into believing in “Vietnamization” (pronounced “Veetnimization”) as a euphemism for defeat. Then, I fear, after years of futility, we will depart not with a bang but a whimper, once again crowing “proud to be an American” to the tune of “Taps” over the graves of 52,000 Americans who died senselessly prosecuting a war that we could not win, for reasons that even the decades could not help us to understand.

A PAINFULLY CLOUDY END TO A RADIANT MINISTRY

I just returned from Chicago, a sentimental journey, childhood friends whom I had not seen in 40 years. Oh, Devon Avenue is now the bastard child of Calcutta, Zagreb and Kiev, but even that is OK. The prune Danish (“sweet rolls,” if you are a true Chicagoan) are still the best, so who cares if you say “spasibo” instead of “thank you”?

The context of the visit was the retirement at age 90 of the beloved cantor of my youth. To this day, I call him “my cantor,” despite not having heard him chant a service since 1965. The title is reserved for a mentor, a father figure, beyond the years and miles that have separated us. His voice still rings melodic whenever I call, still flecked with the Norwegian accent that echoes his childhood in Trondheim. He is still eager to send me a tape of a melody for Li-David Mizmor or a new rendition of Adon Olam that he composed to the clip-clop of his treadmill.

I had the honor of paying tribute to him at his “last” Sabbath service in the cantorate, but the quotation marks bespeak only an official vocational transition. For the myriad who consider him “my cantor,” the lush melodies and self-effacing kindness will never cease.

So, I paid tribute with reminiscences:

How he struggled each week to teach us bratty kids songs for Sabbath and holy days. How he awakened my interest in Judaism by challenging me to read from the Torah, after five years of my being uniformly treated like an idiot by a cavalcade of religious-school teachers. How he compassionately broke the news to me of my beloved aunt’s sudden death. How I helplessly watched his daughter, my childhood playmate, succumb to cancer at age 38. How he retained his commitment to the integrity of his craft, the ancient authenticity of synagogue melody. How he never profaned the liturgy’s majesty with pop-cantorial renditions of Adon Olam to Rock Around the Clock, despite its cheap-and-easy road to being “cool.” How, through it all, he was and is a decent, humble person, a loving husband, a wonderful friend, a passionate fisherman. (Do I hear the icy waters of Norway calling?)

His rendition of the service that last Sabbath morning was magnificent – his voice still strong, resonant, never wavering, a special sincerity to his shaping of the prayers: “Redeem us, O Lord of Hosts, take pleasure in our worship, our choruses of praise . . .”

Yet, the occasion was clouded. For, at age 90, his retirement was still largely unanticipated and premature. A new rabbi with “different” ideas had taken the leadership of the congregation. Authenticity was great, but it had to be compromised for modernity’s sake. No, he did not want the cantor to conduct the Yom Kippur service, maybe chant just one or two prayers. He called the cantor “thin-skinned.” Then, one day during the Holy Season, the rabbi told him that, while the cantor-in-waiting was conducting the service, his singing with the congregation was “too loud.”

It was time to retire. Whether or not the cantor can stand it, the ignominy and irony of his departure stab me in the heart. At absolute least, basic decency if not crass realism should say, “How much longer will a 90-year-old be around anyways? What would it hurt to honor him and his vocation while they are still with us? Is the sanctity of the pulpit better found in up-tempo melodies at the expense of shaming an old man? And, what of the classic musical motifs of the synagogue? As the Golden Age of the Cantorate wanes, should we not venerate a beloved art form just a little longer?

But, the canard of “singing too loud” goes way beyond all that. To be demeaned for feebleness or forgetfulness is cruel enough. But, “singing too loud”? Criminal. Anyone who cannot understand sans explanation is as stone-cold as he who spoke the indignity. A man’s most finely tuned instrument, dedicated to sacred service, is marginalized to an annoyance.

No one should ever be told that s/he is “singing too loud,” even when the voice quivers, or the hands tremble, or the words do not come as easy as they used to. We stifle our children’s singing because it is disruptive. We stifle our elders’ singing because we see it as just another type of “acting out.” And in between, we rarely lift our voices in song, because it is embarrassing or because we are numbed to the prospect of voice-lifting joy. Yet, “singing too loud” might be the only shred of soulfulness left to ensure our sanity.

So, Cantor, you can come to my place and sing as loud as you want as long as you want. I promise to deliver to you a circle of forever-friends for whom “too loud” is an oxymoron. And, you will never hear those scornful words again. It is the least I can do for a man who inspired me, too, to lift my voice in celebration.

THE TROUBLE-FRAUGHT QUEST FOR GENETIC PERFECTION

Chalk it up to sweeps week, but you still have to wonder about the convergence of a docudrama about Hitler with multi-segment features on Oprah, Today and a bunch of their competitors on sperm and egg donors and the recipients and their children.

The deeper bioethics of donor confidentiality, paternity, maternity, gamete possession in case of divorce and the disposal/protection of unused fertilized ova, make my head spin. So, too, the what-and-when to tell the child thereby conceived. (I heard one talking head assert that a toddler should be told, “Mommy and Daddy had a ‘helper’ to give birth to you.”) To the contrary, as a delighted father and grandfather by means of natural conception, I celebrate sperm and egg donation as a way of bringing the ultimate joy of birth and parenthood to an otherwise infertile couple.

But . . . should we not acknowledge at least an ounce of equivocation?

I guess that the ounce of equivocation dawned on me in a highly personal way: I would not be anyone’s candidate for sperm donation – overweight, diabetic, two coronary stents and a pacemaker, rotten ears and eyes, a predisposition to bipolarity, a witches’ brew of daily meds and certainly no Robert Redford. Not that I am a blithering moron, but still nobody’s candidate for sperm donation.

Then I saw those eager parents paging through glamour-shots of one Adonis or Rapunzel after another. This one is a PhD. That one is a ballerina. She is a little on the shy side. He has a great sense of humor. Twenty-twenty vision, uncorrected.
Naturally straight teeth. Cheerleader. Gymnast. Harvard grad. President of her class. I laughed and cried at the dilemma of the straight-from-the-bottle blond prospective mom, dithering about whether the donor should be naturally blond or a brunette. I recollected how friends and I used to joke about the cruel trick that nature would some day play on the hook-nosed daughters of mothers whose noses were cute-as-a-button through the gift of rhinoplasty.

Then, there is the matter of lineage. Does he come from a “good” family? What do we know about her ancestry? Any recessive ethnicity we ought to consider? Does his Anglo name belie a lineage that dates back to some unpronounceable Slavonic mishmash surname ending in “czyk”? (In case you were wondering, Wilson was Wiludzanski four generations ago.)

Hence, this is the ounce of equivocation: Do parents not have a right to stack the deck for having a beautiful, intelligent, articulate child by selecting sperm and eggs that are genetically superior? Yet, what defines superiority? Better yet, who defines superiority? Moreover, what and who define inferiority? And, in relegating all of this to genetics, are we not implicitly trivializing, even marginalizing, the heretofore passionate debate as to whether ones essential demeanor derives from nature or nurture?

My health is a mess, and much of it is primarily genetic, so God bless those parents who would not choose me. But, I am also a Jew, a full-blooded Pole, a child of immigrants, a relative of communists, an object of persecution, unwantedness and genocide. Would undesirability also be a function of my lineage? And, what of somebody of jumbled ethnicity? When does s/he become a “mongrel”? Or, what of someone whose face is not perfectly symmetrical? Or, somebody whose uncle is homosexual?

We are fools if we deem these concerns alarmist hyperbole. Oprah, Katie, et al, have yet to feature prospective parents who do not instantly gravitate to images of physical, emotional and intellectual perfection. No one yet has said, “I do not care what s/he looks like, because beauty and charm come from within, and they will primarily be a function of how we nurture our child.”

How much of all this is culturally encoded? We tisk-tisk the American pop culture’s preoccupation with ephemeral good looks, sexuality and booboisee (with credit to H.L. Mencken). Yet, we would still predictably choose the skanky voluptuousness of Britney over the intellect of Jean Kirkpatrick, the Golden Boy media-friendly visage of John Edwards over the crankiness of Bella Abzug. Joe Lieberman might make a terrific candidate, but can we imagine anyone choosing his genes over Leonardo DiCaprio’s? Do we want a kid who looks, or acts, like Mother Theresa?

So, again and again, let us deem a blessing the opportunity of an otherwise infertile couple to have the joy of parenthood through a surrogate’s eggs or sperm. But, let it also be a challenge to our ultimate values and to that which we ordain as a society’s concepts of superiority and inferiority. It is well to remember that Hitler’s definition of racial superiority did not take a nation by storm, but by slowly creeping into its roots. Yet, his machinations would have never prevailed if his followers had not already been predisposed toward creating a “perfect” race rather than valuing decency, wisdom and compassion as the highest qualities to which humanity can aspire.

MONKEY BUSINESS AND INFINITUDE

So, this British scientist sets a bunch of monkeys in front of a bunch of keyboards for a bunch of hours to (dis)prove the notion that, given enough time, they could produce a Shakespearian play. Instead, sure enough, they produced gibberish. See, I told you so. Case closed.

Call me naïve, but I always thought that that assertion was an attempt to illustrate the mystery of infinity, not about composing a sequel to Hamlet. I bet that if you turned loose a bazillion monkeys at a bazillion keyboards for a bazillion years, they still could not crank out Othello, because even a “bazillion” is dwarfed by the enormity of infinity. As, from the mouth of babes, my little Sunday school student told me, “Infinity just goes on and on and on and on . . .”

So, what did the Brit discover? Perhaps that people who cannot savor allegory and allusion will just never get it. The epitaph next to the 1966 yearbook photo of a hyper-literalist high school chum read, “Speak to him of Jacob’s Ladder and he would ask you the number of rungs.” Perhaps the Brit’s unintended discovery was that people who are enslaved to finitude will never come to perceive the infinite.

Or, maybe this is the point: None of us, however wise, however “big picture,” will ever completely comprehend the infinite. This is a humbling notion. Its incomprehensibility can be comprehended only through utter humility – which may be the reason that we who are tinged with arrogance will never fully comprehend it.

Theologians old and new collide with it as they contort themselves into spiritual pretzels trying to “define” eternity and God’s infinitude. Ironically, Harold Kushner sold millions of copies of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People to the narcissistic Me Generation by building it around the premise that we are mistaken if we think that God is infinite, or at least omnipotent and omniscient.

Astronomers curse their surrender to the endlessness of the universe, even as they push the edges of understanding ever outward. Molecular biologists pick apart fragments of the DNA double helix only to find that they will never fully comprehend the creative zap that converts inert chemicals into living organism.

Megalomaniacs as Saddam and Stalin slew millions in a vain, but bloody, attempt to prove their infinite wisdom and power.

And what of our daily encounters with folks who lord over us their intimations of omniscience or omnipotence? Intimations, I say, because they rarely surface as open claims, but as manipulativeness, self-righteousness, holier-than-thou-ness, and the list of “more . . . than you”: more smart, more wealthy, more influential, more important, more successful, even, damn it, more spiritual, more moral (attention, Bill Bennett) and more humble.

It read like the script of a sitcom: Linda and I recently found ourselves sharing dinner with new acquaintances, a doctor and his wife, who spent the evening prating about his $20,000 Rolex, $1,200 bottles of wine, humidor of finest cigars and how many billable patients he sees each day. All this, of course, was aimed toward Linda, who directs a program for the homeless, and yours truly, who is still among the chronically unemployed. Thus, I recalled the observation of Mark Twain’s contemporary, Josh Billings: “When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry – for the clothes.”

Bitter? Nah, not me. But it certainly offered a too-sad-to-be-funny caricature of the ways that the human incapacity to attain infinite power or wherewithal still do not deter so many people from trying.

This “incomprehensibility of infinity” thing is not merely theoretical. It is manifest daily in the frustration, angst and insecurity-cloaked-as-arrogance of pulpit-thumping demagogues, manipulative competitors, condescending professors and bosses, know-it-all talking heads and smugly self-righteous of folks who think that they have slam-dunked the claim to salvation. And, do not forget braggadocious dinner partners.

So, a finite number of monkeys at a finite number of keyboards cannot attain infinity or even The Tempest. Then again, a gaggle of people with graduate degrees could likely not accomplish the same. This should be no great revelation. The only difference is that the monkeys likely acquiesced to the reality. After all, it is like my momma always said: “When a man acts like a monkey, it is no big deal. But, when a monkey starts acting like a man, now that is a big deal!”

Then again, maybe if that Brit had upgraded to Windows XP . . .

MORAL WEAKNESS AMONG CLERGY DESERVES THOUGHTFUL EXAMINATION

Let us acknowledge that the vast majority of men and women who minister to congregations are honorable, morally-centered people. Nevertheless, let us also acknowledge that a disproportionate number of morally unwhole people seem to find their way into ministry. As recent traumatizing events in the national Jewish community shake us, we realize that the phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to the Catholic priesthood, despite the intensity of recent media focus. It is endemic.

Some clergy deserve the opportunity to heal their unwholeness. Others are simply not fit for ministry. And, others should sit, if not rot, in jail.

I would still like to believe that no one enters ministry with malevolent intent. Why, then, does the clergy attract so many morally unstable people? A good portion of the answer lays in unmodulated narcissism stemming from conflicts in ones vulnerable youth. The very drive that attracts morally whole people to dedicate their lives to interpreting God’s presence to a community is just one fatal millimeter away from an agenda to dominate, manipulate, and seek morally corrupt ways to slake an insatiable thirst for approval.

Moral impropriety is not the only way that untempered narcissism can misdirect ones ministry. Can we even start to count the number of nauseatingly egomaniacal, manipulative clergy who occupy some of our most prestigious pulpits with impunity, even adulation, simply because they have not been caught with their pants down or their hand in the till?

Enough armchair psychoanalysis. What kinds of early proactive interventions can seminaries, denominations, mentors, make either to heal a seminarian’s predisposition to moral unwholeness, or to dissuade a badly conflicted seminarian from a life in ministry? My own years among seminarians and clergy, and my own weaknesses and self-doubts, teach me that one need not be incredibly prescient to recognize the early manifestations of a psyche that is unsuited for ministry or vulnerable to its unhealthy allurements.

Counselors, teachers, mentors, even classmates, can usually see it from a mile away. Yet, they routinely blind themselves to the disquieting truth, or fail to build into their modus operandi opportunities for intervention and healing, or confuse a student’s intellectual prowess or articulateness for the qualities that make a morally whole clergyperson.

Nearly forty years ago, my classmates and I, and certainly our yeshiva’s instructors, recognized and openly discussed the intellectual genius, but radically psychotic disposition (“a nutcase”), of a fellow seminarian. Yet, he was duly ordained, recruited to work with vulnerable youth, rising to the top of the pop-chart. And now, his name disgraces national headlines for countless allegations of abuse, and all we can say is that “we knew it all along.” Shame on him, but immeasurably more shame on us.

For him, the die was obviously already cast. Yet, for so many other seminarians and neophyte clergy, timely intervention, mentoring, and an atmosphere that encourages self-scrutiny, can modulate unbridled narcissism and redirect it to a ministry of compassion, advocacy, and moral rectitude.

Finally, let no one say that the demands of ministry “made” a minister morally unwhole. Perhaps they can take someone predisposed to moral weakness over the edge, in the same way that a trauma can take a person who is predisposed to depression into a sustained clinical depression. Congregants can, and must, though, be vigilant about foisting unconscionable expectations on their minister, guarding their tongues from hypercriticism, and warmly validating – if not celebrating – their minister’s basic humanity. For, even the best of us is vulnerable to ego bruises and callous treatment. But, let the demands of ministry not be an acceptable excuse for moral failure.

A minister who morally betrays his flock, particularly its children, is contemptible. That should not cloud the abject tragedy of a talented life gone wrong. After punishment has been meted out, the time has come not for self-righteousness and schadenfreude, but for understanding and circumspection.