Don't Gel Too Soon

One Account of the Jerusalem Violence

The murders in Jerusalem were, I believe, the first time terrorists had struck inside a synagogue. The story is terrible; what follows is a truncated account sent to friends of a woman in the neighborhood. I know some of the word are unfamiliar (I have explained a couple) and the names are unfamiliar sounding. I hope you can get past them and, whatever your politics, try to imagine this happening in the neighborhood where you live.

Dear friends,

Yesterday at about 7am my daughter Miri called. “Mordechai just came home from shul (synagogue) . He said that Arabs came in and are shooting, and that a man with an axe is hitting everyone. Some of the people threw chairs at them, but it didn’t help”. The twelve year old had hit the floor along with everyone else when the bullets began to fly. He was fully aware of what was going on, and what it meant. He somehow found the courage to let go of his father’s hand, crawl towards the exit and break into a run.

Mordechai is blonde, freckled, and a soft spoken somewhat introverted and studious boy, much like his father, Shmuli. He is not Huck Finn, and the courage he found at those moments were a gift straight from G-d. By the time he finished telling Miri what happened, sirens from Hatzalah ambulances, police cars, and Magen David could be heard telling her that there were casualties.

“Where’s Shmuli” was the thought that entered her mind again and again as the seconds which felt like hours began to tick. She called me and said, “Say Tehillim (NOTE that’s Psalms – often read as a prayer in such circumstances.) There is shooting in Bnei Torah”. I began to say the ancient prayers, knocked on my neighbor’s door and told her to do the same. Chani called and told me to look at the news to see what was really happening. Nothing was reported as yet. Of course not. It was only 7:10.

I realized that the whether or not the attack was over, that no one as yet knew whether the murderers escaped. I called again, asking that everything be done to see that no one leaves the campus, and then called Miri. Thank G-d she had the sense to stay indoors and not run to the besieged synagogue. When Mordechai came home, the shooting was still happening. By 7:20 we both realized that if she didn’t hear from Shmuli, something was very wrong. The police and other services had no information as yet to give to the public, but a family friend who had seen the terror with his own eyes, said that Shmuli had been taken to Haddassah EIn Karem. When Mordechai let go of his hand, he instinctively ran after the child placing himself in the sight of the terrorists. One of them attacked him with his axe, hitting him on the left side of his head, his back and his arm. Somehow he made it to the door. Josh White, a student of Machon Shlomo was riding down Agassi on his bike. He noticed what he described later as “a lot of confusion” in front of Bnei Torah, asked someone what was going on, and the man answered him in Hebrew.

In the midst of what to him was gibberish, he picked up the word Aravim (Arabs) and immediately grasped what was happening. He approached the shul and saw Shmuli who was still aware. The Machon student took of his shirt and stopped the bleeding, a move which may have saved Shmuli’s life. The shooting was still happening inside. It was about 7:15! The emergency crew drew back, but because SHmuli was already outside, they evacuated him thus making him the first of the wounded to be taken to Hadassah, another factor in his survival. Before collapsing, he asked where Mordechai was, and when he was told that the boy ran away from the carnage, he said, “Baruch Hashem”. Inside, the terrorists were continuing their “work”.

When they entered they turned to their left, and immediately cut down Rabbi Twerski and Rav Kalman Levine who were standing in the corner. Reb Kalman was the husband of Chaya, formally Markowitz who was a student and later a madrichah at Neve. Her husband was not a regular attendee of Bnei Torah. He would generally daven (pray) in the earliest possible minyan so he could get in a couple of hours of learning before beginning his day. Yesterday he had a question about something he had learned and had gone after davening to Bnei Torah to put the question to its erudite rav, Rabbi Rubin. The question will now only be resolved in the Heavenly Acadamy. Rev Avraham Goldberg, the third man to be killed is Breina Goldberg’s husband. Many of you know Breina as the warm caring efficient secretary cum mother figure at the front desk in the afternoon. I don’t as yet know how her husband, or Reb Kupinski the fourth victim met their deaths. The only thing that I know, is that it was brutal and swift.

The first policemen to enter were traffic cops who knew what they were facing, and also knew that they were not wearing protective gear. They entered anyway and together with the forces that came afterwards ended the bloodbath. By 7:30 the murderers were apprehended.

Miri, my daughter Guli, and her husband were in Hadassah. Miri’s other kids were watched by relatives and friends for the day. Mordechai was urged to speak about what he saw again and again in order to diminish the damage of the trauma he had undergone. The rest of the family flowed in, saying Tehillim and waiting for updates. The hospital social worker, Aviva, who is blessed with the rare gift of being empathic without being overbearing, and the women of Ezer Mitzion (a volunteer organization) kept us well supplied with food, calming conversation and practical advice. We were allowed to see Shmuli who was put under anesthesia. We don’t know if he heard us or not, but we were talking to him stressing that Mordechai was fine. In the hours before the surgery was done, we found ourselves with Risa Rotman. Her husband, Chaim Yechiel ben Malka, was also attacked, and the extent of his wounds are very serious. Some of you may know Risa (who if I am not mistaken also is an OBG) and those of you whose husbands learned in Ohr Sameach or who recall Reb Meir Shuster who he helped unstintingly for years, may know him as Howie. The policeman who entered first, passed away. May Hashem (God) avenge his blood.
Please please continue saying Tehillim (praying) for Shmuel Yerucham ben Baila and the other victims. Daven that Hashem give strength to the five new widows and 24 new orphans.

NOTE: Some of what I removed is about news coverage, which was not exemplary. Some other material of a personal nature and I felt that I did not have the right to post it.

Tears for the Music (and Cheers too.) So Many Emotions

WHY is it The Girls in Their Summer Clothes? Of all songs. My heart is in my throat – I really might cry. It’s just one of many Spotify ambushes. Mark Knopfler’s Cannibals. Nils Lofgren’s Black Book. About 30 other Springsteen songs including Thunder Road, Jersey Girl (Yes I know Tom Waitts wrote it, but still) and My Hometown ( I just don’t listen to that one anymore.) Oh and from another end of the universe, of Scarlet Begonias.

Every once in a while Peter Rothberg at The Nation posts Top Ten Songs (from a The Nation perspective of course:) Top Ten Veterans Day Songs, Top Ten Back-to-School Songs, Top Ten Songs About the Environment, Top Ten Labor Day Songs, Top Ten Death Penalty Songs (In Tribute to Troy Davis),Top Ten Songs About Class, Top Ten Songs About Nuclear War, Top Ten July 4th Songs, Top Ten Memorial Day Songs. They always inspire a lively conversation on his blog, including nominees to join his own ten. Many of these are offered with deep feeling and conviction, the power of music spread across issues as well as hearts.

Nothing original here; we all know it. In a stadium, at a demonstration, a party, the beach, the gym, in a car, a crowd or a quiet moment, it’s always there for us when we need it – often taking us places we didn’t mean to go.

Facing the Political Future: a Sadly Personal Perspective

I’ve been hiding from the news, which is weird since I spent most of my life as a journalist. I’m not sure though, that after 8 agonizing years of W and then 6 frustrating ones with President Obama (much of it not his fault) I can face what the next congress will do.

Do you remember the various, endless Clinton hearings? Even more than the impeachment battle, the moment that I keep remembering was deeply personal: Sen. Alphonse D’Amato questioning Deputy Chief of Staff (and my longtime friend) Harold Ickes, whose father, also Harold, had been Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, and credited with implementation of much of the New Deal.

His father, D’Amato told Harold, would have been ashamed of him.

I had worked with Harold when we were all young, so along with political anger came real pain that, beyond the issues, he had faced such very cruel personal grandstanding.

That’s not important in policy terms and is probably mild compared to the harshness that any witnesses at the pending, inevitable deluge of hearings under a Republican congress will face: two years of destructive power escalating the politics of obstruction to that of destruction. Beyond what that will mean to our country, poor people, women, immigrants, ACA users, voting rights, Supreme Court nominations, and the jeopardy we face around the world, none of which will receive much attention except as political weapons, it’s just not something that will be easy to watch, especially for an unrepentant dreamer like me.

Whole Foods, Whole Paycheck, Whole Antivax, Holy Cow!

. . . Whole Foods’ clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion… until they get to the parking lot. Then it’s war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says ‘NAMASTE’. Poor lady didn’t even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther. Kelly MacLean on The Huffington Post

You know it’s true. I’ve asked many Whole Foods workers about the rude entitlement of so many of their customers and they roll their eyes and nod. Now there are efforts to organize these workers, against major C-Suite opposition, and it won’t be pretty.

It’s all starting to piss me off. Between the company, its image and its customers, it’s easy to get angry. I’m a Sixties product with all the baggage that that implies, including the right to organize, and basic kindness and respect from one person to another, but at my most granola I didn’t question the responsibility of public health, of immunization, first for me and later for my kids, and wasn’t predictable enough to produce this:

I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people. Science journalist and MIT professor Seth Mnookin in a 2011 interview

So here I am, cranky and irritated after an emergency trip to one of the many Whole Foods in the Bay Area, astonished at the alleged vaccine/Whole Foods connection and up to my ears in fair trade, cruelty free, organic, shade-grown, beautifully displayed, hugely costly foods, vegetable prices determined partly by the cost of workers piling and re-piling them in perfect order (not that it’s not pretty, it just seems so….)

These are cruel and dangerous times. We have substantial issues to confront. We should be healthy and well-fed when we face down these crises but how did we get to a place where it is also a virtue to be smug and self-satisfied about being able to do that?

I will be a proud Progressive with my last breath, but please try to get those rude, cart-pushy, deli-line crashing, parking place stealing people to behave a little more socially conscious about the people in their immediate environment (um, your store), oh Whole Foods, so the harmony you sell (see image at the top of this post) in your ads can emerge inside your stores, too.

#Whiteprivilege, San Francisco Style (Not Big Things, Just Wrong Anyway)

It happened three times in one week; things that would have happened very differently to people of color. First came a real, seriously sizable pack – yes pack – of teenage boys running down California Street after dark, screaming and cursing — looking maybe like all of them were chasing the first one. Except for the dog and me, nobody seemed to care. No one yelled “slow down” or “quiet down” in this family-rich neighborhood. No one called the police to report a dangerous group of boys intent on making, if not trouble, at least way too much noise — and on a school night! Did I mention that they were white?

This morning, for the zillionth time, a very large off-leash dog came at our very large, protective, on-leash one. He feels helpless when he’s on a leash and approaching dogs aren’t, and gets very agitated. When I called to the owners to please call their dog back toward them, they yelled at me! Why does this matter? The park trail is strictly for dogs on a leash. Almost no one follows the rules. When we moved here, I asked our dog walker about it; she smiled indulgently and told me to “just turn around and go the other way.” Each culprit, it seems, sees this particular infraction as ok – for them, and raising the issue would do no good. Did I mention that they were white?

Night time crosswalk edited — One of the Crosswalks in Question

Finally, there’s this: California law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks. Our non-commercial street is pretty busy despite being almost totally residential. At least one in four drivers rush right through even when pedestrians are already into the street. At night it’s more than that, and since they don’t see people as quickly in the dark, far more dangerous. Did I mention that many of them are white?

We live in this neighborhood because it is diverse. Signs in the library are posted in three languages (see below) and we hear more than that on the street, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Russian. Even so, the people involved in this law-breaking — did I mention that they are all white?

For months I have had the privilege of listening to sisters of color speak and write among themselves and to the rest of us of the moment after moment, incident after incident, that are part of their lives. Many are desperately terrifying or heartbreaking, or both. Like the ones described here though, they are automatic assumptions of white privilege, of the right to break an inconvenient law without consequence and to censure people of color for similar infractions. As small as these examples are, or maybe because they are, they teach us how much we all presume, how automatically we assume it’s ok for us to break the law or the social contract. What they haven’t taught us yet – horrible huge assault or small presumption, is how much each one diminishes us all.

Art, Truth, Feminism, JD Salinger, Lena Dunham and Sex

when: From Lena Dunham’s Website

Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days. If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.

Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling. It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.

Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty? It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:

Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.” (Seymour, an Introduction)

SHABBAT SHALOM (Posted Friday Afternoon)

Have a wonderful weekend. See you later.

This Just In: The Longer You Live, the Older You Are!

Banksy seniors — Banksy’s view of older folk

They look like big insects with wheels, those people with walkers and canes. I pass so many of them on the streets. Every time, it gets scarier.

“That’s OK” I tell myself, “Lots of them are really obese, many are clearly far far older or looking it and some are obviously dealing with life-long disabilities. They need all those appliances. I don’t.” Even so, each time they pass I see, for the first time, not another species but a possible (perhaps inevitable) future.

We all age. Our grandsons are growing so fast; miss a week and they seem transformed. Our kids have somehow become men of 35 and almost 40! Younger people are more willing to reveal their resentment of those of us from the 60’s and 70’s. (“We’re just bitter because the media spent our formative years (well, the teen and college ones) calling us slackers and then our entire generation got known as a waste of space. It’s still mean about us! I think we are the hardest workers who will work until we drop dead.”)

I understand what that means, even though I disagree with much of it. I don’t mind the idea of aging; so far I’m pretty lucky in how I feel and what I can do and think and be. Even so, I know it all turns on an illness, or a fall, or a loss of strength or hearing or sight. I continue to see myself apart from those old people, but somewhere inside I know the truth. I can’t hide from it forever.

We all get old. We all change, sometimes decline and sometimes gain wisdom. Boomer or Millennial, Gen X or Y – all of us move along the continuum no matter how much we fight it. And no matter how long I sit here trying to finish this, I can’t find a way to make it any better.

Mo(u)rning in America: 2014

I spent W’s eight years in political despair. It was hard to watch the news or read the paper, harder still to think of all our fellow Americans without resources who would, and did, suffer on a very concrete level. Our kids were educated, our mortgage getting paid; we had work and health insurance and political and religious freedom but for many the pain of those years was personal.

Barack Obama’s election felt like the turning of a corner. This morning, as we face the unremitting and successful (and un-American and cruel and racist) assault on voting rights, the prospect of Joe McCarthy-like hearings in both bodies about almost everything that this president has been able to accomplish despite unprecedented, treasonous opposition, certain continued and brutal safety net cuts, violation of workers rights, a terrifying, determined erosion of the rights of women, a near-caliphate level of fundamentalism among even some of our newly elected members of Congress, the now-certain, veto-proof approval of the Keystone Pipeline, obscene power grabs by wealthy oligarchs and their ALEC, Americans for Prosperity operations not only nationally but state-by-state and unimaginable foreign policy attitudes, it’s a grim day.

Friends of mine have posted look-ahead messages and I admire them for it. For me, it’s going to take a little longer.

Damn! Scary Days Ahead!

My son called tonight to ask me if I was finished packing and ready to leave the country. He was kidding… Sort of. And I joked back at him… Sort of.

This is a tough night. So much was at stake and so much has been lost. I’m not certain how grotesque the new government of our country will be, but it will be hard to watch. Right now Joni Ernst is making her victory speech and it’s all I can do not to throw something at the TV. She, Cory Gardner in Colorado and several others hold views so extreme and benighted that it is painful to imagine what our lives will be like for the next two years

Of course they didn’t win in a vacuum. Democrats made mistakes, ISIS and Ebola didn’t help and the deep damage done to President Obama by the Republicans from the day he took office didn’t help either, nor did the long years of gridlock or the disproportionate number of Democratic seats up this year. But they won, and excuses won’t change that. I think I’m giving up MSNBC for Netflix for a while.