I caught early chunks of Obama’s acceptance speech at the gym of my local JCC. Not surprisingly, the crowd that night was heavily Republican, and there were mutterings of concern: Is Obama truly committed to Israel? Is Obama too soft on terror? Is he simply another pie-in-the-sky liberal, full of fancy talk, elaborate plans and much hot air?

No one was concerned about Obama’s skin color.

We’re less than 145 years removed from slavery and only 40 removed from legal segregation, and we may very well elect a black man as president. No matter your political affiliation, chances are you understand it was an historic moment for America.

I left part way through Obama’s speech and drove to a Jewish community nursing home to make a late visit. While the nursing home is affiliated with the Jewish community, most of its residents are not Jewish. In order to accept federal, state and local funds, nursing homes cannot discriminate based on religious affiliation, color, country of origin, sexual preference, or gender. Years ago, the Jewish community opted to take government funds, a decision that eventually turned the facility’s resident base into a pretty fair representation of the local population, rather than a spot on representation of the Jewish community.

With this change came good and bad. The good is diversity. The bad is Christmas trees, Christian prayer services, nuns in the hallways, and an atmosphere that at one point, before some modicum of balance was struck, had Jewish residents feeling like an oppressed minority in their own home. During the peak of this, even the facility’s rabbis felt beleaguered.

I asked one if she had anyone who could help a resident light electric Shabbat candles. With tears in her eyes told me, “There isn’t anyone. There’s nothing Jewish here.” Another had his facility-wide Purim decorations ripped down by staff and replaced with St. Patrick’s Day ornamentation when the two holidays coincided on the calendar.

Not too long ago, a new resident – an elderly black woman whom I’ll call Jennie – was admitted. Suffering from a form of dementia, she’s often overcome with fear. She hears noises in the hall and thinks neighborhood thugs are breaking in to try to kill her. She thinks everyone is conspiring against her and that her food is poisoned. She can be loud and disruptive, breaking into tears and sobbing or putting on her best street bravado to ward off enemies that are not there.

As much as I try not to let myself judge an elderly, demented person by her actions – and especially by their skin color or religion – there are times when I catch myself thinking about how disruptive, non-Jewish residents should go to non-Jewish facilities.

A few months ago, I had a moment like that with Jennie. She sat in a lounge area, alternately threatening to “pop” imaginary intruders and breaking into tears. I told myself what I always do in encounters like these: Reverse the situation. How would I judge it if the disruptive demented person were Jewish and the nursing facility was not? Would I think it’s okay for that facility to remove the sick, elderly, disruptive Jew because he’s Jewish? Of course not. So why should the reverse be any different?

I sat beside Jennie and calmed her down by asking about her youth.  She told me that as a child, she had known freed slaves. She'd been born dirt poor and had faced intense discrimination. But she raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And she had built a successful business.

After a while she asked, “Where are we now? What’s the name of this place?”

I told her. She looked at me, startled, and then looked around her. “I used to work here,” she said, “in the kitchen, along time ago. But it looks different.”

I told her this was a different building in a different neighborhood than before. Then she told me about her friend the kosher butcher, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, whose shop once stood nearby the old building. “I used to buy all my meat from him when I first got married,” she explained.

I said that I had owned that store years later, and the same butcher had been my landlord and friend.

A few nights later, I found Jennie wandering in a hallway without her wheelchair or her wandering alarm. I had her hold onto a railing so she wouldn’t fall and I called for help. Then I asked Jennie why she was up so late, wandering around alone. “I’m a poor black woman,” she said. “If I don’t get up and get out of this house and find me some money, I’ll never go to college.” I asked her what she wanted to major in. “I want to be an engineer,” she replied.

When I arrived at the nursing home on the night of Obama’s speech, all the residents were asleep except Jennie. It was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, providentially coinciding with Obama’s. Obama’s speech had ended and a T.V. station was showing a documentary on the two. Jennie sat silent in her wheelchair in front of the TV, watching King and Obama. Gone were the disruptive behaviors, the paranoia, and the pain.

I stopped to say hello. King was on the screen.

“They shot him, didn't they?” she said.

“They did,” I told her.

She turned and looked at me. “And now a black man could be president?”

I said he very well could.

She turned back to the screen. “And now a black man could be president,” she said watching King. This time it wasn’t a question.

Barack Obama is not the Democratic nominee because of his skin color or despite it. He isn’t a token or a novelty. Barack Obama is the nominee because his was the strongest message and the best run campaign. This is the first time America has been truly colorblind.

I don't know if Barack Obama will win. He wasn’t my first choice among Democratic candidates – I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for come November. But there is one thing I am sure of: America is a better place because Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

Daniel Koffler is a friend as well as my successor at Jewcy, but we have had this disagreement in private so I see no reason not to air it in public.

In his increasingly partisan and silly attempts to define down Barack Obama's disreputable decades-long association with Jeremiah Wright, he has now taken to comparing the fetid sermons of the pastor to statements made by two figures of moral and rhetorical genius: Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not only has Daniel quoted extracts which are light years beyond the eloquence, probity and suasion of anything Rev. Wright is capable, but he has fashioned a rod for his own back in titling his post "Putting Jeremiah Wright in Context." Let us by all means do just that.

Judging from the first link he provides, it's clear Daniel did not bother to look up Douglass's full speech on July 4, 1852, choosing instead to lazily lift the extract from a reader's email sent to Andrew Sullivan, a blogger who, it is worth reminding ourselves, used to have an award named for Susan Sontag that he'd bestow upon anyone trafficking in exactly the kind of racist, ultra-leftist, anti-American blather he now contorts himself to apologize for on Wright's behalf. That extract reads as follows:

[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Perhaps it was a space-saving measure that excised the first two sentences of this paragraph: "What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." [Italics mine.]

And who could argue with that in 1852? I would no more have asked a white Northern industrialist to celebrate the birthday of the United States in its incomplete and hypocritical form, in which the Southern economy was based on human bondage and all states operated under a national covenant drawn from the highest principles of the Enlightenment, than I would a freed slave liked Douglass when the above was recited. As Douglass acidly and ironically opened his speech, making it plain that a request for his unbridled display of patriotism was made of him by some arrogant fool beforehand:

"Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodies in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?"

So you might say that the Fourth of July had it coming. It should also be noted that Thomas Paine or John Brown wrote like this in their passionate attempts to erase the foundational stain of slavery. (Douglass himself maintained that his father was white, so I wonder at what point of diluted negritude an abolitionist's sane pleas for social justice would be immune from such sickening analogies to modern-day frauds.)

Here is how Douglass concluded his remarks on that day, offering a course of action that could redeem the young republic on its own terms -- precisely the sort of thing that Rev. Wright, in his unlettered, hate-filled and conspiracist harangues, chooses not to do:

"Fellow citizens! The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.

Oh be warned! Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"

 

As for Dr. King's noble opposition to the Vietnam War, and his words to that effect -- these pilfered by Daniel from E.J. Dionne's latest column in the Washington Post -- nothing here strikes me as remotely comparable to Wright's effusions:

"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

King is right on the essentials: the U.S. was guilty of war crimes in Vietnam. The above may have been controversial for 1968, but today it is hauntingly close to the conventional wisdom about a disgraceful period in our nation's foreign policy. (I wish King hadn't had recourse to divine retribution, but nobody's perfect.)

I don't think, forty years on, the same will be said of Jeremiah Wright's bull session on international affairs. Here is how he accounts for the American response to 9/11:

"We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed enemies. We want revenge, we want payback, and we don't care who gets hurt in the process."

Wright grounds this malediction in the famous Psalm 137, which relates to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C and the retroactive Zionism of the Jews, now lamenting the state of their exile. The hymn ends thus:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us- he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Wright quotes the gruesome final couplet (how moral are the teachings of religion) to argue that the United States, under the guidance of its "men of faith" (read: the president), murders women and children deliberately out of cold vengeance. This is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden's pronouncements about our intentional collapsing of "mud villages" over the heads of Muslim mothers and their babes.

Wright is at once too general and too specific. He cites in this particular sermon -- helpfully added to YouTube by Trinity United Church itself, under the eye-catching heading "FOX Lies!!!" -- that the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan claimed the lives of "hundreds" of civilians. There was one fatality. And however much the timing of that bombing may have resulted from Bill Clinton's "wag the dog" scheme to distract from the Lewinsky affair, it was later defended cogently by the counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and David Benjamin and Richard Simon, authors of The Age of Sacred Terror, all of whom showed that viable U.S. intelligence indicated the factory was in fact being used by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons.

All told, Daniel picked a lousy day to defend Obama on his religious affiliations. Comes the news that on the "Pastor's Page" of the July 22, 2007 newsletter of the Trinity United Church, Wright chose to reprint approvingly an LA Times op-ed written by one Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas. In it, Marzook of course defends the use of terrorism against Israeli civilians (dashing infants heads against the rocks is selectively appropriate, one would assume) and rejects any precondition that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist. What must have especially caught Wright's eye in this license for mass murder and Judeocide is the passage in which Marzook brings up the Declaration of Independence and American slavery. Good to know how Jeremiah Wright thinks Palestinian self-determination should work.

Context is everything, isn't it? Daniel may wish to argue that, at bottom, Wright is no different than Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or any number of febrile leftists in our midst. But I suspect he knows what a pickle it would be to explain to voters why such a person has had the ear of, and served as metaphysical counsel to, the Democratic front-runner for president. So instead we get hastily assembled carnival comparisons to MLK and Frederick Douglass; insults to them and insults to history.

Rev. James Meeks: He shall not inherit the earth.However, if Daniel is still not impressed by Jeremiah Wright, I have another humdinger of an Obama religious adviser that might just do the trick.

Meet the Rev. James Meeks. I quote from the gay rights website Queerty*:

Rev. James Meeks is a close friend and spiritual consultant to Sen. Obama. Rev. Meeks appeared in TV ads for Obama’s US Senate campaign; Obama campaigned at his church; and went there for prayer the night he won that primary. Meeks was on his exploratory committee for the Presidency, and his church choir performed at a rally for Obama the night he announced. Rev. Meeks is also an Illinois state senator who has aggressively campaigned against gay rights and complained about “Hollywood Jews for bringing us ‘Brokeback Mountain’.” He ran for governor on an antigay platform. He calls being gay an “evil sickness,” and his gigantic church is one of those which sponsors a Halloween fright night in which, according to the “Chicago Sun Times,” among those “consigned to the flames of hell” were “two mincing young men wearing body glitter who were supposed to be homosexuals.” His church has also launched antigay petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute, and Meeks is also aligned with Antigay Industry powerhouses Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Americans for Truth that proclaims “fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking.” We do not know if Sen. Obama was also too busy campaign for US Senate to “go after him” as he’s said he can do to get others to do the right thing. We only know that his close friend and advisor, the Rev. & Sen. James Meeks voted against SB3186, against LGBT equality in Illinois, and is apparently, just like Donnie McClurkin, just as homohating as he was before ever meeting Barack Obama.

Here is how Meeks sings the body electric:

Just another angry black preacher. Never fear. I'm sure there's a photograph floating around somewhere of Meeks gladhanding the Clintons to make this sickly Obama association null and void, too.

*Ed note: The reference to Meeks is from a comment on a profile of three gay Obama supporters. His information, however, can be substantiated. The Chicago Sun-Times piece referring to "Fright Night" is available here. An excerpt from Cathleen Falsani's book on Obama's spirituality, which mentions the Meeks connection, is available here. See also David Ehrenstein's brief against Meeks in the Chicago Tribune, here.

The civil rights icon's incredible final speech -- from April 3, 1968, the day before his tragic death:

I'm still not voting for him. That's a figure of speech meaning I'm still not voting for him.

Because I think stuff like this is fun, I've been sitting in on a graduate seminar at Purdue called Moses and Modernism -- it's a class that explores all the modern and post-modern appearances of the biblical Moses in literature. It's amazing how overly-appropriated this Moses trope is. African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston turns Moses into an Egyptian magician (say that 7 times in a row as fast as you can) in her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain; William Faulkner gets down and dirty with the trope in his 1942 novel Go Down, Moses; in Ishmael Reed's satirical Mumbo Jumbo, well, the Moses myth "Jes Grew." And there's also Freud's "Moses and Monotheism," Buber's Moses, and what about movies like Cecil B. DeMille's Cold-War-hysteria-encoded The Ten Commandments and DreamWorks' multi-culturally diverse Prince of Egypt? Or, what about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s refrain of "I've been to the mountaintop," likening himself to Moses, foretelling his own death?

Moses is all over the place. Moses is da man!

I've also been thinking about polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1982 10-part film series The Decalogue, which re-imagines what it means to follow the Ten Commandments in a postmodern world. But in this one, Moses is conveniently missing, as if to say, "We don't need a Moses to have, understand, and follow commandments."  

The Law, the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, Mosaic Law—despite the various terms we use to speak about the Commandments, allegedly handed directly to Moses from God, there is one collective impulse that guides these artistic re-appropriations of the Moses myth, and that colors each philosophical inquiry into the nature of laws, law-giving, and law-making: make it new, as Ezra Pound would say, anti-Semite though he was. The impulse is not simply to create but to re-create, to resituate moments of literary or theological brilliance in contemporary, personal—and hence more individually meaningful—contexts.  From Milton’s Paradise Lost to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (an imaginative re-telling of the Jane Eyre story), within the history of literature there is a profound artistic awareness of the presence of narrative gaps and of the importance of making stories belong to us—of identifying in some of them a prophetic sensibility, and responding with the “Here I am” (Exodus 3:4) of Moses the lawgiver, the one who communes with God and receives god-like, almost magical, abilities. 

I wonder, then, if we might conceive of each artist who recognizes and responds to this call as a modern-day Moses, revived and reconsidered for our contemporary purposes. Not sure, but while we think about it, it might be worth watching this video: Ten Things I Hate About Commandments.

 

Bed is my synagogue. Dreams are my bible. Waking up my goal. Waking up is the entire purpose of the spiritual life, and waking up is hard to do! I depend on my dreams like I depend on my friends.

One of the best things I've done for my dream life is to get myself a Zen Alarm Clock. The zen alarm clock is not actually a clock but a "musical instrument for progressive awakening". At the appointed hour the most beautiful chime dings once and then stops, giving you time to go through alpha brain wave state and actually finish your dreams and then remember them!

I mean what's the point of truncated unremembered dreaming. A waste of energy! The tone is based on Pythagorian Harmonics. The whole thing is very scientific! You wake up with a "powerful charging effect on your mind". Or at least that's what they say. I would say a "powerful charging effect on my life"! Three minutes and 48 seconds after the first chime it chimes again. And then at intervals according to the Golden Mean and you never have to press the snooze button!

You never have to hear news about something awful first thing in the AM. You fall asleep gradually (hopefully!) and that is how you should wake up as well. It totally changed my life. But don't get the digital one. After years of dependable use in a fit of over enthusiasm I back slapped zenny to a concrete floor. Woops. The nice people at Now and Zen offered to replace my clock for half price despite the fact that it was well past its warrentee. So I got the more aesthetically pleasing, better for traveling digital model. NG. Get the original model. You will thank me. We will meet in dreamland..

If you are a student of Judaism you probably believe that words are magic. If so: armed is an anagram for dream. (One anagram for Beth Lapides is: shlep it a bed! go ahead go do your own name you know you want to!) And in a sense when we are dreaming we're arming ourselves with the inner knowledge available only with symbolic revelation. Aming ourselves like one of those many armed gods, giving yourself a greater ability to accomlish. (If like me you are a workaholic who needs to defend dreaming!) Unless you get lost in a dream world. Sometimes I tell my students to forget the dream, and focus on the passion. It's so easy to get plugged into the dream machine, where we can't even tell if our dreams are our real dream or the manufactured dream, the fame and fortune and red carpets. Like that blonde chick in "I'm From Rolling Stone", her "dream" was keeping her from her dream. Although another anagram for dream is "rad me" and maybe she knows what she wants.

Don Juan tells Carlos Casteneda in "The Art of Dreaming": "...dreaming is perceiving more than what we believe it is possible to perceive." In these times of transition, shift and change, dreaming may be the best way. In a time when solving our problems seems too hard, dissolving them may be a better approach and sleeping and dreaming amazing tools for this dissolution.

This year on MLK Day I listened to his "I Have A Dream" speech. It's not "I had a dream", it's "I have a dream". Present tense. In the now. Might be a good listen as you get ready to celebrate freedom this Passover.

Nussbaum had a dream too. Unfortunately his was often interrupted by heartburn.A sermon recorded in 1965 by MLK to a Jewish congregation in Beverly Hills was broadcast on NPR.

In 1965, a Rabbi named Max Nussbaum asked Martin Luther King Jr. to address his congregation at the Temple Israel in Hollywood.

Nussbaum was not only active in the civil rights movement, but he also made his name as a rabbi in Berlin by using the pulpit to rail against the injustices of Nazi Germany.

King accepted Nussbaum's invitation, and his sermon was recorded onto an old-fashioned, reel-to-reel audiotape. The tape was then forgotten, lost in a pile of the rabbi's other audiotapes and papers.

The rabbi died, and his widow Ruth came upon the reel while sorting through his stuff more than a decade ago. She submitted it to the Temple library, where it sat again.

The Temple has just made the tape of the speech available to the public for the first time since 1965. Ruth Nussbaum, 95, tells the story of the speech.

To listen to the commentary, as well as the full sermon, go here.
My father is rolling his eyes at me as you read this.

As an Atlantan and a Jew, I’ve heard a lot over the last few years about Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. In particular, here in Georgia, Jews are very much aware of how the bombing of Atlanta’s oldest Jewish community became a turning point in the integration of our city. A really amazing story and saga that you’d all do well to read up on, though I knew nothing about it when I moved here from Iowa.

Today, in honor of Dr. King and my fair city, I want to suggest we consider the relationship between Jews and blacks through the past few decades. Although we’d like to imagine that as minorities and oppressed populations, we’ve always supported each other, that’s (of course) not true. But it is true that there have been stretches of time and movements that have brought our communities together, forced us to look past our bigotry and made us stronger communities.

However, there’s a trick to this kind of work… often it becomes interfaith work, and often black communities are deeply spiritual communities, rooted in evangelical Christianity, which makes Jews feel uncomfortable.

Yesterday, I decided to honor Dr. King by going to hear the Ebeneezer Church Choir… and I was struck by how, even for me, a girl with a Catholic mom, who has worked on interfaith and ecumenical councils, the name “Jesus” is awkward. Words like “salvation” still give me the heebie jeebies.

So I’m thinking today about how we can balance our own natural feelings with the desire to work alongside other religious communities. Because we must. Because there will always be a need for social justice (whether it is the soul of Judaism or not) , and that takes leaving the safety of our own backyards.

Have you ever worked in community with devout Christians? Would you?

A converted neo-con gives an Orthodox spin on the infamous I have a dream speech

With my apologies to Dr King.

I have a dream that someday, the son of an FFB and the daughter of a BT can marry without scandal.

I have a dream that one day a man can choose to spend his life dedicated to his profession and to being Koveai itim LaTorah, supporting Tzedaka and good deeds, without being judged deficient.

I have a dream that one day, a young frum woman's worth will be judged by the strength of her Middos and the power of her intelligence, not the monetary support her parents can provide.

I have a dream that some day a man will be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his hat.

I have a dream that someday, even Bnei Barak, a city sweltering with religious intolerance and injustice, will become a model of Orthodox Haskafic diversity.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Jewish dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "Elo Velo Divrei Elokim Chaim."