Fifty Years Together: A Riposte to Election Day's Dark Side & Inaugural Myopia...

Several winters ago, my wife and I took our year old son for a long weekend, and escaped the Midwest to New York City, my old home town. A highlight of the visit was reconnecting with old family friends, Frank and Pat, an elderly couple who’ve known me since birth. They were, at that time, 85 and 78 years old respectively, and had been together nearly 50 years, most of which they lived in a Greenwich Village high-rise apartment overlooking NYU and Washington Square, with a stunning Manhattan skyline all around them (the photo above is from their window looking north; photos below from the same NY trip). After visiting for a while in their apartment, they drove us down to Ground Zero to view the progress on the site since my wife and I had last been there as Red Cross volunteers after 9/11. Sitting in the back seat of their old Cadillac as we headed downtown, they picked on each other as older couples often do over who drives better and about what was the best route to their destination.

“Hurry up and make that light!!! Geez, Frank, you drive so slooowly!”

“And if you were driving on these lousy pot-holed streets,” Pat would respond, “We’d have four flat tires and a broken axle.” With good-hearted smiles, they’d both roll their eyes. Underlying the bickering, their affection was clear.

Frank and Pat are both men.

Frank is a World War II veteran. He joined the army in 1942 and served his country with distinction. After the war, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI bill and returned to the U.S. to become a teacher. In those days, teachers in his home state of Maine earned $2,000 a year so he went to California where teachers made double that. After a year, however, the death of his father brought him back East where he stayed to help his widowed mother. Following her death, he moved to New York where he worked as a manager in the same company, a loyal employee for forty years.

Pat, meanwhile, is a singer who at 78 still performs regularly in weddings, funerals, and leads the choir in a local church. Now 82, he still does all that. Because it was Easter week and Pat had choir obligations on Thursday, Good Friday, and, of course, Easter Sunday, he had to leave us to rehearse. Frank offered to baby-sit for our son, allowing us a few hours in the city without a stroller, which, as we revisited Times Square at rush hour, was no small gift. Frank offered to baby-sit as much out of his own grandfatherly instincts as out of any generosity towards us. He doted on the baby like the sweetest grandfather one could imagine as he’d doted on me over forty years earlier. I only wish he lived closer so he could be the Great Uncle Frank I know he’d be to all our children.

As the senseless crusade against gay marriage creeps on, like spikes in the Ebola Virus, as abominations like Prop 8 and the Arkansas ban on adoption by unmarried couples erode our American democracy, I think often of Frank and Pat. I don't get how anyone could see people like Frank and Pat as a threat to the institutions of marriage and family. They represent among the best role models I’ve ever known when I think of values like love, commitment, and, yes, marriage. It saddened me then, it saddens and angers me now to contemplate the barriers these two would face if they were young men today, wanting to commit themselves through marriage. Frank and Pat have much to offer many straight couples who may, say, read the bible and have children, but are terrible spouses and awful parents. Marriage, in my book, is about love and commitment, something a lot of us heterosexuals screw up. Marriage is not about exclusion based on whom you love.

Frank and Pat don’t use the word gay to refer to themselves nor can I imagine they ever considered marriage. And though they’ve lived in tolerant communities in Paris and New York, they have always been closeted to the outside world, keeping a low profile when it comes to their relationship. As long as I’ve known them, they’ve kept separate bedrooms and they refer to themselves, at this point, as really good, old friends. Out of respect for their privacy, I include no pictures of them here. And the names are pseudonyms.

I left New York inspired and grateful to have these wonderful human beings in my life who have given so much to their country, their church, their community, each other … and to me personally. To honor all they’ve given, my personal commitment to social justice will always include making this world a place that’s safe, inclusive, and respectful of all people including those who may love differently than I do.

Mumbai Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving for me this year was overshadowed by the attacks in Mumbai, especially being at my father-in-law’s home, where cable TV—absent in our home—meant the coverage on CNN was available to me for days. I couldn’t pull away. It’s taken me some time to distill my thoughts and emotions after the attacks in Mumbai. This reaction takes the form of two stories, separated by decades and continents.

First, there's the story of the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was my first stop in a year spent backpacking across Asia in 1986. Deborah, my girlfriend at the time, and I left from London on New Year's Day 1986, flew overnight and arrived in the pre-morning darkness. We headed straight for the 5-star Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel which we'd heard was a landmark from which we could get to a hotel we could afford, one on the other extreme of the luxury scale. On the bus into town from the airport, Deborah became angry with me that I’d discouraged her from bringing her sleeping bag with us on the trip. By the time we reached the hotel, our fighting was full-blown.

We "broke up" under Mumbai’s most famous monument across the street from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Gateway to India, a grand arch built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. It’s a huge structure, complete with turrets and intricate latticework carved into the yellow stone. Next to the arch, there are steps leading down to the waterfront of the Arabian Sea.

There, under the arch, she and I began pulling our backpacks apart, separating our gear in anger ... Eventually we stormed off in different directions. I was twenty-four and sleep deprived (or so that’s my excuse in hindsight).

That breakup didn't stick. We’d have a daughter two years later. But the memory of that incredible place did stick.

The streets of Mumbai were just coming to life as the sun rose in a big fiery ball casting the entire neighborhood in hues of orange. Down every nearby alley behind the ultra luxurious Taj Hotel, locals were rising from where they slept on the street on flattened cardboard boxes or on rickety string beds. As dawn broke, the fishing boats that were moored on the waterfront were also starting to teem with movement. Fishermen emerged from under blankets on deck and leaned over the side of their boats to wash their faces in the sea. This was where we experienced our first sunrise in Asia, a stunning opening act to a year spent on that amazing and vast continent.

We would spend nearly four months in the magical, complicated, and diverse country that is India: from Trivandrum at the subcontinent’s southern tip to Kashmir in the north, the territorial objective of the Mumbai attackers; from Jaisalmer in the far west, less than 100 miles from the Pakistani border, to Calcutta in the east. We weren’t in Mumbai long. But notwithstanding our own interpersonal melodrama and in spite of stark contrasts of poverty and wealth, on that particular morning Mumbai’s waterfront by the Gateway to India felt like an incredibly peaceful place. Seeing death, explosions, and gunfire over this past Thanksgiving was jarring and profoundly upsetting in a way that felt personal, like an attack on a friend.

Then there is my story triggered by the killings at the Nariman House, the Chabad Jewish community center in Mumbai where the young rabbi and his wife and others were killed ...

Two decades after being in Mumbai, my wife Dawn and I went to visit the Jewish ghetto in Venice, the "original" ghetto, where the word originated. I saw a few Chasidic-looking men walking around, bearded and in black suits and black hats. I thought OK, we've seen the Jewish ghetto. We can go. A young red-bearded and bespectacled guy, one who looked not unlike the rabbi who was killed, invited us through a door off the ghetto’s small piazza into what was evidently Venice's Chabad House. It reminded me of Israel where random religious Jews in Jerusalem on Friday afternoons would ask me, "Are you Jewish?" If I said yes, they'd invite me to their homes for Shabbat dinner. I never went then, secular and resistant 22 year old that I was.

This time, with Dawn’s nudging, we went inside. It was a small study room, lined with books, four or five guys, all reading and studying. One was British, the rest Americans, all in black pants, white shirt, beards and kippas on their heads or black hats. The one guy asked if I'd been bar mitzvah'd. I hadn't, a legacy of my mother's ambivalence about organized religion despite (or perhaps because of) her father the Cantor, my father's gentile background, and their separation right at the age when bar mitzvah training might have begun. Oh, and my mom had open heart surgery around that time. So they kind of had other stuff on their mind.

“Why don't we bar mitzah you now?” the redhead asked me. At forty-five, you can do that, I asked? In effect, he said, we can. So, for the first time in my life, I put on tefillin, that odd set of black boxes, with leather straps that are wrapped around the head and left arm. The young man had me repeat a long torrent of Hebrew prayers which I didn't understand. It went on for a while. But compared to actually learning Hebrew, this was easy. This was Bar Mitzvah Lite.

When I finished, the young man smiled and said "Mazel Tov." He sang and danced with his arm around me. He exuded joy. It was infectious.



As I left the Chabad House, I was no more than a dozen steps outside the door when I broke down in tears. I actually wept. I still don't know why to this day. I hardly became a more observant Jew. Nor do I even feel more identified with that part of my background than I did before. In fact, recently when Obama was asked what kind of dog he'd get his daughters, he said he'd like to get a dog from the pound, "a mutt like me," he said. THAT is what I still identify with, feeling like the perennial mutt, foot in more than one culture, heart and head (in my case) not quite in any.

That European trip ended in Barcelona with my old friend Jacquie, a Southern Baptist raised in Alabama who moved with her husband Jed to raise their children in Spain. She'd become drawn to the Chabad movement in her own spiritual quest and she shared the following with me: "This is related to a Torah passage about the temple, describing in great detail how the temple had to be set up: the measurements of every part, where everything must be, the kinds of material to use, the colors, etc. In the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant lies, there is a fire for the sacrifices. This is the place where the high priest goes to communicate directly with God, to be actually in the presence of God. Then outside in an outer patio, there is also a fire for sacrifices. In the Talmudic interpretation, the Rabbi comments that normally we would imagine that the priest would take fire from the inner Holy of Holies, the place where God is and take this fire outside to light the fire out there. But in fact, it is just the opposite. It is the fire from the outer patio's sacrificial altar which is taken inside to light the fire in the Holy of Holies. What is this telling us? We also think many times that first we have to light our inner fire, work on ourselves, get ourselves together before we can help others in the world, that we are no good to others until we have lit our own inner fire. But the Torah passage is telling us otherwise. It is through our work in the world, through what we do to help others that our inner fire is lit."

I am one who, through my work as a therapist and as a social worker in an urban high school, has spent over fifteen years "lighting fires," so to speak, by helping others in my own small way, in the world of my community. Yet still I have an inner fire that often flickers or dims with doubt. So I'm not sanguine that the Talmudic point of view quite works for me.

Perhaps I need a venue that allows me to light larger fires. Perhaps this blog is a start.

Nonetheless, this spiritual approach of giving to others as among the holiest things one can do is something even my secular self can buy into. It's not limited to Judaism by any means, but it touched me. And I think it likely informed the vision of those Chabad members who place themselves far from home and family, in places where they can light fires outside themselves.

So as images of violence saturated the airwaves over Thanksgiving, I grieved for the dead, wounded and traumatized, for their families, for the locals in Mumbai and for the foreigners (including Alan and Naomi Scherr, the American father and daughter whose photo reminded me of the father-daughter trips Nora and I took together)... and I grieved for these infectiously joyous young Jews whose love of life and community and warmth had touched me deeply. I’m thankful for the people I met in India. I'm thankful for that young man at Venice’s Chabad House.

It doesn't always work for lighting my internal fire, but I'll keep lighting those fires outside me...

Peace.

dani

Spring is here. Winter's coming...

I wrote this the day after the November 4th elections.



On election night, tears flowed. Literally tears. Tears of joy, hope, love. I've been jolted, as most of us have, to radically reexamine the American political landscape and my place in it, historically, today, and for the future.

My earliest political memories are family memories: my mother being "Another Mother for Peace" during the Vietnam War. Or my father conducting a memorial concert at Yale for the students killed at Kent State. And, as my mother cut my hair in the kitchen when I was seven, we heard on the radio about the shooting of Martin Luther King. I remember my mother's gasp. By the time I was in college, I was politically active, then in opposition to Reagan. A political lens has colored my worldview and my actions ever since.

A political worldview shaped the father I became. Nora, barely two, was with me at a 1990 Democratic victory party in Minnesota, as another improbable candidate, Paul Wellstone, rose to national office. Tragically, it was just a dozen years later when Nora and I walked together in a peace march to Wellstone's memorial service when she was fourteen. Now at twenty, Nora watched Obama in Grant Park in a crowd of hundreds of thousands. Her home-made shirt read: "Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so our children can fly." Her sense of hope and optimism, her generation's faith is infectious. I'm so goddam proud of her, it brings tears to my eyes.

The 2008 presidential campaign will include my five year old son Ezra's first political memories. Before he could pronounce it correctly, he would hear the name Barack Obama on TV or the radio and would excitedly proclaim, "Dad, they just said 'Barack Obama'!" Ezra heard someone on NPR say "I will vote for John McCain" and Ezra snapped back "What? Why would they vote for McCain?"

Last week, as Ezra and I were making the bed, NPR did a story about the skinhead plot to kill Obama and attack a black high school. "Someone wanted to kill Barack Obama? Why?" He seemed stunned. His best friend across the street is an African-American boy. So then came the discussion of how, sadly, there are some people in this world who want to hurt or even kill people just because of their skin color. Or religion. Or sexual orientation. Who knows how much of this he absorbed at age five and how much he'll remember as an adult? But I'll remember. And more discussions will follow.

Madison and Owen, our ten year old twins, will also come of age under an Obama presidency. At ten, they bravely stood up in their conservative rural school district and voted in their school election for Obama against the McCain majority. Madison was annoyed that it took us so long to get an Obama sign. Owen had developed an antipathy for the Bush presidency long before Obama was even the nominee. Children can be so smart.

And as a father, it's good to feel I'm doing something right.

My personal contribution to this election was small. But a consistent refrain of Obama's message is how this victory isn't about him. It's about us, each one of us. Each and every individual one of us who stood up, donated $10 or $25, made phone calls, went door to door... whatever ... each one of us helped make this happen. So I'm proud of my humble little list: Organizing a Barackstar chapter of high school students for Obama (yes, in Jackson, the birthplace of the Republican Party which went BLUE for the first time since Johnson was elected president, 44 years ago), presenting Obama's platform on education for a policy forum, writing persuasive letters to the editor, and helping get out the vote door-to-door on election day. And, of course, the unrelenting distribution and dissemination of articles, essays, photos, videos, jokes, and musings like this.

It just so happens that on the day I was born, February 2, 1961, Groundhog's Day, Obama's mother, pregnant with Barack, married Barack the father. Six months later, Barack Obama was born. Who knows what the Groundhog saw that morning in 1961? But in these early November days of 2008, I'm filled with the image of spring coming soon, of a new birth of hope and progress and peace.

Winter looms, literally and figuratively. The wars, the economy, poverty, and new challenges to equality and freedom like California's abomination, Prop 8.

But spring is in the air. Time to get to work.

With peace and love, hope and pride,

dani