So Park Slope has a little Nazi.

A small, angry Nazi.

I met him this evening.

Returning from an unveiling at a Queens Cemetery, I was parking the car at 8th and Garfield. The little Teuton was crossing the street in front of Shul against the light and I gave him a gentle toot of the horn. He barked something about the procreative act; I leaned my head out the window of the car to inquire after his health and he said, in plain English, “There weren’t enough ovens to kill you. I’d like to finish you off.”

I didn’t have too much time to think, so offered what I could to the dialogue.

“Go to hell you little Hitler. Where’s your Nazi armband?”

He said, “I wish I had an armband. I’d like to finish you all off.”

(With an armband?)

Anyway, I replied that he didn’t have the biological chops to complete the task. But my language was slightly more off color.

I have to say, I remain amazed that someone went right from the “intersection to the ovens.” It seemed like an extreme move.

Extreme. A Nazi. Imagine.

Bucolic, urban idyll: Park Slope.

I can see the posters in the Real Estate Offices now: “Great schools; Prospect Park; 5th Avenue Shopping; We even have a Nazi!”

When I was student in Madison in the 80s, someone I once worked with said to me after hearing that I worked at a Jewish summer camp: “Jewish Summer Camp: What, do you teach the kids about gold and stuff?”

That was benevolent Prairie antisemitism.

This guy from tonight was either from Central Casting or a Rod Serling script.

Either way, it was weird.

I wish he could have really known that the reason I was driving around was because even the Rabbi can’t get special parking privileges in front of his own Shul. If only he knew–Jewish power is a myth!

But little Hitler scurried away before I could explain.

Next time…

This is a special Shabbat reserved for those of you with mommy and daddy issues.

From Kedoshim (Leviticus 19), the Eternal says, “Every person should revere his mother and father and you should keep my Shabbat, I am the Eternal your God.”

This one simple line, so seemingly uncomplex, gives rise to a variety of questions. One of them is: why are these two seemingly separate mitzvot linked in the text–to honor your mother and father and to honor the Shabbat?

The Hatam Sofer attempts to answer this question quite cleverly and with a hint toward all those future therapy bills that people would be paying.

Echoing a cry of distress from the Psalmist who wrote in Psalm 27, “for though my mother and my father have forsaken me, the Eternal will take me up,” the Hatam Sofer argues that one parents indeed bring a person into the world; but once we reach a certain critical age, isn’t it true that we navigate our moral universe “independently” or, in religious terms, with God?

And therefore, just as one leaves the original source of the “making,” namely the biological enterprise of the family home, we go out on our own to complete the work and do so by imitating God and resting from the work on the seventh day.

Shabbat completes for the individual, in existential terms, what was begun by the parents.

I see a kind of in-your-face marketing campaign: Grow up! It’s Shabbos!

The Hatam Sofer, appropriately, is more sober. He said that each complements the other in perfect form–the honor due to parents leading one to observe Shabbat; and the rest on Shabbat helping guide us back, in the sublime spirit of the day, to the wonder of creation and the birth of our existence in this world.

Each in relation to the other, in this portion, an expression of holiness, a trace of the Divine in the clear language of Torah.

Sophomore year in high school, everything began to shift for me.

It was the last hey-day of any illusions I had of being a basketball player, let’s just get that out there.

I was the starting point guard on a pretty good high school JV team that won its division on defense, good passing, and the skill of a relentless shooting guard who came from some hard knocks in the City of Milwaukee–”a transfer student”, which was the district’s special term for someone who was black.

He endured a family murder that season and kept on playing through it; I would double up in stomach pain in the locker room before games and fret about the players from the far west side of town German schools that chanted anti-Jewish slogans at us when we played them. I think my bourgeois angst amused him. After games we went to McDonalds, laughed at each other’s bullshit, and tried bravado on for size with an Earth, Wind and Fire soundtrack.

Could it be more Seventies? Most certainly not.

The shift in my own life took place on the court in slow motion and in the bus after games and in the classroom in real time. I saw life begin to pass before my eyes. Dreams of success gave way to life’s realities, to people’s lives, and while both resisting the change toward a deeper reality and regretting its inevitable swing back in my face like the older, wiser branch of a maple tree, I understood that I wouldn’t be a ballplayer. I always tell students, “I didn’t start reading books in earnest til I was 16.” This revelation allows me to share my own journey as well as the word “earnest.” So be it. I’m from Wisconsin. Get used to it.

There were first the Existentialists, then the Romantics. The Russians. And then, as the Eighties emerged (God, I hated the Eighties), there was Every book about Every thing that was Wrong with the World.

And in the third year of the Eighties, like the rhythmic punch line of a joke: Nineteen (one) Eighty (two) Three!!! (three) my dad’s heart gave out (BAM!) and everything changed.

My dream to succeed in Sports gave way to my dream to succeed in Politics which yielded to my life in Religion.

I had to say Kaddish for a dead father. And so my fate was sealed. He wasn’t killed like the Shooter’s. He just gave out, a failure of will and the tragic fragility of God’s genetic randomness.

Kaddish somehow recognized it all; and that’s how I kept the flame alive.

Nisan–the Hebrew month we are preparing to enter–is when it all went down back then; and so, just a few days away again, I feel that yahrzeit breathing down my neck like a full-court press and the score is tied and we need a basket and the crowd is screaming and the ball is in my hands and I’m looking for the Shooter, looking for the Shooter, looking for the Shooter. And in real life, his father’s been killed. But he’s smiling, losing his man, getting open, putting up the shot, winning the game. I gotta have more fun, despite it all. Stop taking things so seriously.

And so I learn from another kid who’s in 10th grade but living wisdom beyond his years.

Maybe it’s the March Madness, the pleasure of my two hometown teams in the NCAA’s. Pride–O Vanity of Vanities! But I think of my Shooter tonight as I talk Torah with my current 10th grade class, on the Wednesday before a double Bar Mitzvah with twins who play basketball. And while talking about Torah on Sinai (and the flames and the thunder on the moutain) and the flames (on the swords of the Cherubs) protecting the Garden of Eden and the students are arguing about the Fire of Torah and Free Will and Law and what it all means and they’re not talking about ANYTHING ELSE BUT TORAH and they’re so focused and they’re so proud of themselves and they’re so INTO IT and as their rabbi I’m so proud.

I start daydreaming: I’m in the gym in the basement of our Shul. And I’m alone. And I’m shooting free throws. And they’re going in, one shot at a time. And I know that sound. I’ll always know that sound. You could beat me, blindfold me, throw me down a flight of stairs and I’d know that sound, a rhythm as steady as the Shema Yisrael.

One, two, three, shoot, follow through, in.

The Jewish word for spiritual intention is Kavanah. Direction. As in toes on the line. As in bend your knees. As in follow-through.

One, two, three.

God, Torah, Israel.

One, two, three.

Thank God for Tenth Grade.

Ann Hulbert shares some insight from a recent Pew study on sexual and political principles of Gen Next that are worth a look in today’s Sunday Times Magazine.

It captures, certainly from my own experience, the rooted openness of a cross section of this generation. Though specifically geared toward views on gay marriage and abortion, the study sheds light on their independence of thought as well as their deep connections to their parents’ generation. And dovetails with one aspect that summarizes their essence: they are, without a doubt, charting something of a new path–wherever it leads, in American political life.

More in relationship to homosexuality than on the abortion question, one sees this study validated, which I suppose makes sense given the more public nature of seeing or knowing two gay people than knowing who had an abortion.

Hulbert writes, “On one level, Gen Nexters sound impatient with a strident stalemate between entrenched judgments of behavior; after all, experience tells them that in the case of both abortion and gay rights, life is complicated and intransigence has only impeded useful social and political compromises. At the same time, Gen Nexters give every indication of being attentive to the moral issues at stake: they aren’t willing to ignore what is troubling about abortion and what is equally troubling about intolerant exclusion. A hardheadedness, but also a high-mindedness and softheartedness, seems to be at work.”

My father used to say to my sisters that I was the sensitive one. “Like a deer in the woods who hears a twig snap,” which I guess meant I had a kind of high strung alertness.

I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that alertness is manifested in my “spirituality.”

And so here I sit in a heated car, on a hill just beneath his grave, on a fairly normal, heartlessly gray late afternoon in Milwaukee. I have come here to accuse him, pre-Shabbos, of the sin of anger and dying young, two things I sometimes fear will take control of me as they took control of him. That’s why, as a strategy for survival, I became a rabbi.

I’m just being honest.

Yes: those fears propelled me, practically against my will, into the rabbinate, after his anger and heart shot him from life on a heartlessly gray day in Milwaukee twenty four years ago. That’s 2 x 12 Tribes years ago for you crazy mystics out there.

And so I stand with freezing feet in the snow, heart broken in accusation. I try to heal it by singing him the Kabbalat Shabbat, a rest and comfort against loss. I see his name, etched in stone:

Monas S. Bachman
Father, Brother, Son

I sing to him of Shabbat and my favorite Psalms. It closes the loop from the only Hebrew he taught me—well, not quite Hebrew but the vague shapes of the letters I watched him trace for me when I huddled up against him and a borrowed tallis in synagogue on the rare occasions that he took me with his own father to say Kaddish for the dead ancestors I never knew.

“Thank you father for teaching me that there is a form to our language.
A linguistic structure I filled in at the Universities I attended in Madison and Jerusalem.
It was in those cities that the replacement fathers were found
After you collapsed on your bedroom floor.”

In the Mishnah these new fathers, Avot, are rabbis, and those were the fathers (and one mother) I sought and found over the course of the last twenty-four years.

And slowly, one by one, they all died too.

First there was George Mosse.
And then Irv Saposnik.
And then Arthur Hertzberg.
And now Lisa Goldberg.

Each a teacher. Each a conveyer of wisdom. Each an exemplar of some aspect of the kind of life I wanted for myself, for Rachel, for the kids.

This is the first time that I stood above my father’s grave, with the stark reality of my own mortality staring me in the face. No image on the grave, no Russian icons looking back in my direction. Just a name—BACHMAN—an accusation in its own right saying, “Sentenced to death, eventually.” I say, “You’re gone, Dad. George is gone. Irv is gone. Arthur’s gone. Lisa’s gone. It’s all down to me. It finally happened. It had to, eventually.”

That’s right.

We will all die one day.

And the measure of each of us is how honest we are, how good we are, how generous we are, in the every moment of the every step we take.

And in this prayer, in the cold, with hot tears of anger and sadness overwhelming me in the Milwaukee snow and the background hum of East-West commuters moving down the freeway that abuts the cemetery, I understand another level of my own anger:

That we live and die is so obvious as to dictate, for those who can grasp it, why certain pretensions of power and authority are ultimately absurd. So that’s why you want to change the world! It’s absurd NOT to!

When you’re younger, you’re supposed to buck against the bridle of authority. That’s part of the natural growth process. But what happens to those who keep staring death in the face, whose lives are made up of visiting the sick, of burying the dead, of listening to questions about God and the meaning of life? Are we supposed to put on suits and act the part of Men Who Are Together?

Or do we stare into the grave and discover a greater freedom from it all?

What happens when your teachers die and you’re left standing at the grave, singing songs?

Who teaches me what to do next? Who says, “Keep on fighting, son?”

Is there a book for this?

A leadership training seminar I can take?

Psalm 92, A Song for Shabbat:
It is good to give thanks to the Eternal.
To sing praises to Your Name Most High.
To speak of Your Lovingkindness in the morning.
And Your faithfulness at night.

If I had a harp or a lute I’d go on; but I’m freezing my ass off, so I head back to the car.

To my wife and kids and Shabbat.