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

16 March 2008 - 12:11A well-churched rabbi

Here is a photo of our improvised Hanukkah first night candles, which we lit at a beachcomber dining spot near the sea in Rincon after getting lost in the pitch dark and not making it back to our B&B in time for sundown. While streets signs are in Spanish and English, English literacy is not emphasized so far as we can tell. The city museum in

San Juan does not have signs in English, most of the art museums have at least some English interpretative signs available. Fortunately, Spanish is easy to learn for those familiar with other romance languages, typically the same root words, so we’re punting as quickly as possible. Plus, art speaks for itself.

Pretty churches are major tourist attractions. Out of curiosity about the varieties of world religious traditions, I drop in on services in most countries we visit. The attendance is sparse here in

San Juan’s large cathedral, maybe thirty-fifty. Striving for relevance and congregant participation is evident as a small rock band accompanies one service, and lay vocalists and many readers of the lectionary (bible selection) are part of another. No one under 50 appears to be at either service save for two of the electric guitarists. I stand and sit with everyone to be an accommodating visitor, but stop short of kneeling, which feels like it would be inappropriate given I’m not a Christian, nor inclined to be one.The woman beside me in the chapel, is wearing an employee badge from an area market is weeping deeply. I offer a tissue and touch my heart to show empathy. Later she touches my hand in appreciation and seeing my open-gaze to be there for her, she elects to hold my hand for much of the service. I visualize myself as a representative of a tethering rock, tzur hevli b’yet tzarah, like in the Adon Olam prayer those of us inclined to Jewish practice say each day, the “Rock which anchors in times of distress.”

When Barry beckons from his wandering amongst the glorious classical art in the various chapels and nooks through out the cathedral, fortunately she’d already dropped my hand and gone into her own reverie. I slipped away softly, the service was becoming long for me sinceI couldn’t understand much of the Spanish other than the holy, holy, holy, which comes from Christianity’s origins in Judaism, as well as the Latin G*d words in the congregational responses. beisdes, I was allergic to the incense and sniffing up a storm, and having given away all my tissues…. Time for bright light and fresh air.

Often we proved a curiosity as Jews in Puerto Rico and when we did meet English speaking staff in museums, we were often asked questions about our people’s practices and traditions. As it happened, our host here at the B&B in Rincon proved to be Jewish. When she asked we explained how in the traditional blessing formulation, Barukh Atah Adonai, that Adonai has a root word, eh-den, meaning Threshold. It is also a place holder term for the letters yud hey vav hey, the “shmei rabbah” described in the Kaddish prayer, the Great Name. This most mysterious and holy name for the Jewish G*d idea, is made up of all the forms of the verb “to be”. So once could also say that for our people, G*d is the Infinite Potential for Change. It was wonderful to be able to share that with our host, as she’s been going to church to study bible with a priest and is married a Catholic from

Spain.

Having done my doctorate under a foundation grant that led me to study at a Christian Seminary, I now understand why the Jewish Scriptures (Torah) sounds rather alien interpreted through the lens of Christianity. Christians tend to read Jesus backwards into the biblical period by using key words like yeshua (it means “drawing out,” like Moses was draw out of the water, or in our Havdalah ritual, “the G*d who redeems me, who draws me out is, hinei el yeshua-ti” to mean that Jesus was already in the Torah. This core Christian belief, that he was predicted in such texts, is the heremeneutical device used to get Jews to think they can still be Jewish and believe in Jesus. Of course, educated Jews know our tradition allows no one human to be considered G*d. In Judaism, every human, in our tradition carries a G*d spark, a chip off the Old Block, if you will, our soul, and so we are each all-together b’tzelem elohim, made in the “image of G*d,” and yet like a flea could never grok the dog with which it is in symbiotic relationship, Jews accepted we can strive to grok The Big Picture, but never fully will. That existential condition is quelled by the experience of a Still Small Voice that can be heard within, light from the Spark if you will, that we learn to trust far more than dogmas from from professional institutional dogma generators who are inevitably tied to political dramas. Fortunately Christians and Jews share almost all the same behavioral values – so if your attention isn’t on the afterlife or committed to the Christian belief in the necessity of being “saved,” there’s no need for all that much conflict. It is no fun for any one religion to imagine it holds the keys to the doorway to the kingdom of G*d, gosh, what hubris. A G*d that doesn’t make one kind of rose, one kind of butterfly or one kind of universe, sure isn’t going to institute only one doorway to the Mystery beyond embodied life.

Jews believe everyone’s soul is evolving and that there’s no saving involved in moving on to the next plane of being, if there even is one, our musing on that question start with “no one knows” and include ideas from “we return to dust” to “re-incarnation.” In my next book, Living Jewish Life Cycle: Creating Meaningful Jewish Rites of Passage for Every Stage of Life (Coming out, if the publisher is on time, May 2008), I explain our life cycle perspectives in some depth, and also the wide range of contemporary and historical Jewish views on the after life.

No Comments | Tags: Puerto Rico, prayer, includes travel pictures, travel

16 March 2008 - 12:08Times We are Free Holiness Happens

Puerto Rican Pharmacy Museum Photo Digitalis Bottle The Passover Kiddush, a prayer for the holiday that is chanted over dark red grape wine or grape juice symbolizing the vitality of life reads, zman heyruteynu mikrah kodesh, “times we are free holiness happens.” Several things holy happened during free-time on our trip to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands.

The first was appreciating the difference between attending or teaching retreats and a trip that is mostly vacation. Definitely have to begin taking vacations more seriously. Feeling revitalized, filled with light in winter’s darkness from the outside-in. Teaching or taking intensives builds light differently, more so from the inside-out. Both are good and have different effects.

This is a dynamic, rather reborn Puerto Rico. In my youth I was an inner-city social worker and later, I served in Cumberland County, NJ, a farming area, so those born in

Puerto Rico who I tended to meet in the

US were more recent immigrant families and migrant workers. When I visited

San Juan some twenty years ago, it seemed a slum not dissimilar to living conditions of those I’d met in the

US. Not so on this trip.

The historic area of San Juan is colorful, completely rehabilitated, thriving, with boutique museums. In another section of town is a world-class art museum in a remarkable modern bulding.

In a tiny pharmacy museum, Barry was intrigued to see digitalis leaf among the containers. This triggered his memory of the US medical boards which, when he arrived only some 35 years ago, still contained something as irrelevant to modern practice as a question asking how many grams of ground leaf were required to treat some aspect of a heart condition.There are certainly areas here in Puerto Rico where homes have windows and balconies barred against crime, such as one sees in parts of

Jersey City, NJ. 4 million residents and not enough jobs leads to poverty and emigration, another 4 million Puerto Ricans live in the

United States, or so we heard on the news. Immediately next to the historic section of

San Juan, in a narrow area of land by the sea that one might have been temped to enter and wander, is the most notable area for drug-related crime. In the photo you see we’re walking with school teens and they’re message was unambiguous, go down there, into that neighborhood and you will get robbed, raped and shot dead.The many locals we went out of our way to encounter seemed actually happy to pause with curiosity on the beach or street to chat with us about their lives and ours. Catholic and Episcopal school uniforms abound and the youth did not exude the frighteningly wild behavior of kids near where we live do after school. Wonder what we will learn as we leave the town and tour the villages?

No Comments | Tags: Puerto Rico, prayer, includes travel pictures, travel, Holidays

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

16 March 2008 - 12:11A well-churched rabbi

16 March 2008 - 12:08Times We are Free Holiness Happens