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Simply sharing life lessons through a Jewish lens.

17 April 2009 - 12:52Rebbe on the Road Cross Country 2009: The Entertainer

(Initially to the tune of Fiddler on the roof, please try it – yes, I know it’s a stretch.)

Transition! Transition. Transition! Transition. Transition!Just now I bite into a perfectly toasted bagel, note the blandness of the cream cheese, slippery fishiness of the lox, and the aromatic of the onion, soothing juiciness of the tomato, come to tell us, challah can’t be far beyond. Transition, transition! (musical interlude) Transition!

In our little village, the 5000 some person Crown Princess - a bagel, what simple happiness, and on a cruise ship the icon of rescue and freedom, the day after Passover.

Whoever said the hole is greater than the sum of its parts must have been Jewish. (ahem) Coming toward us is Shabbos and the aptly termed Turquoise (Turks and Caicos) islands. (The sea is turquoise, smooth as swimmable silk.)What does Shabbos mean after a week on a cruise ship? This will be my question for the internationally diverse minyan due to materialize towards evening. There’s a campy Yiddish song about a traveling peddler who visits the tiniest of Jewish communities, they call him the minyan man, showing up just in time for them to have the rare joy of a minyan, quorum of ten, needed to hold services wherever he is peripatetically drawn.I met my minyan man last night - he knows it. We’d asked the entertainment assistant director to tip us off to who the best musicians might be on this sailing. He named one “The Entertainer.” I was amused because that’s my private name for God. Well, until now it was private.Why “The Entertainer”? Consider Reb Nachman’s adage: “Mitzvah g’dolah lih’yote b’simchah tamid – a great mitzvah is to always live as though we are in happiness.” Note that it’s not the pursuit of happiness he seems to encourage; my take is that it’s rather to dwell embedded in Creation in a steady state of yirah, pure awe.We find the entertainer in Crooners lounge. Well into his sixties, he looked rather just post-chemotherapy, his voice raspy tinged by some deep disappointment in this life. “What do you want to hear?, he is looking directly at me.. “Jazz, I hear you have a background in it.,” I reply.He protests, “It’s too early, but I’ll do this for you.” He downs half a Mojito, and tah dahm, the grand piano arches its back in stunned pleasure as more keys are used than surely ever in its life. He tells us Sinatra had brought him to meet and Gershwin when the composer was 86. His improvisations of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue were stunning and we sit unaware of body, ship or world, in the River of Yirah, pure Awe, b’simchah tamid. We are four persons, two lone couples in Crooners lounge. He’d been Sinatra’s personal, in-house pianist according to the program. I, a pianist who belongs in a forest when she plays, though it would be unfair to the birds, plants and animals, had fallen into the River and would cheerfully die the death of hessed, in the Flow. “What do you want to hear?” He asks me again like a lover wanting to please. My soul croons back without thought, “Just be yourself.”Just be yourself, a deeply spiritual openly gay, Catholic, personnel director once told me this at a stunningly dysfunctional work site. “Just be yourself, that’s enough. Don’t try to please others or mold yourself to what you think people want, just be yourself. You are enough. Wherever you go from here remember, just be yourself.” We next met up with The Entertainer at Crooner’s bar, this night he was in a Liberace-type costume. (If the Messiah came would you recognize her?) He quickly grasped Barry’s South African accent and noted he’d been deported from

South Africa in 1973. He, his wife and two children had lived in beautiful

Clifton by the beach. “How’d you manage that?” I asked innocently, meaning, getting deported. Then British, if I got his story right, he was on assignment by a record company to record local talent. He’d recorded black musicians for the label. The authorities warned him, “We don’t do that here.”One night the next year, in

Johannesburg, authorities scoop him up, put him on a plane and he would not be allowed to return during Apartheid, and they disallow his wife and toddlers to join him. He tries all possible measure to get them papers, to get them out; no communication is allowed. She files for divorce. Decades and it seems, marriages later, today he co-owns a

California record company that signed Celine Dion among other notables. Barry and I are aware he’s ten minutes late to his curtain call. Barry tells him, “Did you know she’s a rabbi?” He replies, “And, I’m a Yid.”At the piano, he asks like a lover wanting to please, looking directly at me, “What do you want to hear?” “Just be yourself.”He says it like musing a question, “Something original………”He pushes the mike away and Smetena’s The Maldau and derivatives HaTikvah and the Schindlers’ List Theme and then keys are struck in rapid patterns of impossible riffs, with a building heat and speed, into the passion of a full blown hitbodedut, the prayer of your life when alone with a listening God. Inside The Entertainer is all the pain of the world. Hitbodedut is a reflexive verb, and it is as though The Entertainer is alone in the woods and it matters not whether these notes will ever fall on human ears. Our bodies recall us to time as the piano falls silent and a sit ensues. The Entertainer finishes his Mojito. Before he can ask, “What do you want to hear?” I slip in close en route to our cabin, pass him my card, and say, “I sense we’ll need a minyan tomorrow for Shabbos. Hope you come.”

No Comments | Tags: Torah, Music, spirituality, Caribbean, world cultures, prayer, mitzvot, travel

12 April 2009 - 11:23Rebbe on the Road North America 2009: Part I, Times We are Free

Goldie: “Zman heyruteynu mikra kodesh - times we are free holiness happens,” this line from the Passover Kiddush leapt to mind as one of the docent’s vignettes struck a chord of awe. Last week, in Richmond, VA we perched for one-night at the reasonable and excellent Museum B&B. While the art museum itself is under renovation, I felt drawn to enter the white clapboard chapel just behind, because it resembled the style of my first and very beloved pulpit, Temple Beth El, in

Hammonton, NJ.Inside we were startled as a man came towards us in the darkness, his features etched by glowing stained glass bearing Confederate flags and dedications to the service of fallen Confederate veterans. Clearly happy for the company, he offers an uninterruptable river of information. The chapel is the only remaining part of Robert E. Lee Camp # 1, a home for needy Confederate Civil War veterans, chartered in 1884 by the

Commonwealth of

Virginia., (the war ended in 1865.) Surviving Confederate soldiers and families were often homeless and part of the retribution was to also be vote-less and benefit-less for many years after the war’s end. According to what I recall from the docent, a Union Veteran from

New England visiting the South, was deeply affected by the plight of the Confederate vets. He described the situation to his lodge brothers in the North, they hosted Confederate Veterans for discussions and became involved in funding Robert E. Lee Camp #1, including commissioning a stained glass window, which became the basis of gathering which today we might term a rite of reconciliation towards healing.

Barry: My take on this is incredible awe at the ability of people to be shortsighted. Even in the 19th century they had to know that the future of the economy in the south could not be based on slave labor. Yet they couldn’t wait to go to war over this right. Today descendants of these same people shout “drill baby drill” and in hindsight couldn’t wait to go to war in

Iraq for an oil dependant economy..Goldie: Very rational, dear. Dehumanization justified by economic rationale is a pervasive human foible, an anti-middah (attribute). This very day an egregious individual example is in the news, in

Saudi Arabia a judge upholds the marriage of an adult male to an eight year old girl. The recipient of this debt-payment has pledged not to consummate the marriage until she reaches puberty. She was given over by her father to resolve a debt. The issue here would seem to be that he has religious freedom to do this under Sharia, so it’s rational. Yes? The judge says she has the right to petition for a divorce at puberty – who will she become raised by either the father or the recipient? The illusion of the value of the rational/irrational split is ever evident. Her parents are divorced; her mother does not have custody. She is her father’s commodity, the human child, dehumanized while her mother and rights groups keep trying (and losing) in the courts to save her daughter. Are there transcendent values, beyond the unholy split of rational and irrational? Or am I just a westerner apply culturally specific values and other civilizations have the right to decide if women, children and their neighbors are human and to be treated humanely or as chattel? Dehumanization is pervasive in industry, whether the sex industry or the investment industry treating us as trusting fools (we were/are), or as you often note, how medical residents are abused commodities in a for-profit, rather than for-people, health care system.
So is it even true, zman heyruteynu mikra kodesh – times we are free holiness happen? Not necessarily, there’s another step to the mitzvah, it is “zeycher yitziyat mitzrayahm, remember leaving

Egypt.” Remember what took to get the freedoms we savor, over 300,000 died in our civil war. I love that President Obama hosted a seder in the White House, an orange and “Obama” on the seder plate to me are icons of our evolution as a species. Whoever has labored to be free - through spiritual practice, divorce, war, and so much more. Remember the suffering that it took until you were ready/able to leave or narrow places, our mitzrayim in this live and throughout all time. In the millennia hopefully to come, may each Passover mark increasing freedom for all, and the capacity of more of us to relate to our freedom with kindness and justice for all. May we be blessed for the world’s diverse opposing forces, bimheirah v’yameinu, quickly and in our time, to recognize each other’s humanity. And,

And yes, we are having fun while teaching and traveling and finding meaning in all four dimensions – physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual. The south is in the full flush of Spring and we’re also seeing evidence of beautiful flowers past, such as the Beaux Arts Ballroom at the Jefferson Hotel we visited here. The old-world elegance soothes one into softness and I imagine myself garbed in a flowing silken gown under the great stained glass dome looking down on once-swirling couples on the dance floor below. So far the people are gracious, and the streets are lined with columned homes. At a visit to the State House, gleaming white high on a hill we learned the Queen of England had been by with her 32 hat boxes (yes!) and entourage two years ago. Barry wondered aloud why she carries a purse? It seems there are biscuits in there for her Corgies and also, when she moves it from one hand to another, it’s a signal to her team that it’s time to move on. Go figure.

Our next posting will be about our time in

Greensboro, N.C.