tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4807633697363264032024-03-12T21:17:06.306-04:00Water Over RocksHistory, Memory and Civic ResponsibilityAndy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.comBlogger924125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-43034930357494714342018-03-20T10:07:00.001-04:002018-03-20T10:07:23.188-04:00Since You ExistI went for a beer with my brother-in-law last week at the Other Half Brewery. On a Saturday afternoon it is mobbed with craft beer zombies and everyone is just toasted enough that though it's packed with people, the elbows aren't sharp. It's a vibrant, noisy and mellow scene. <br />
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We took a backgammon set, nestled it in the thin bar space we were able to secure, and started banging away at the game. Our neighbors to the immediate right soon after engaged us in a conversation about the game, dusting off their memories from beers and games gone by in order to remind themselves of the set-up, the rules, the strategies. They were two veteran city employees, out on a date, talking policy, and having laughs. At times Brooklyn can be so low and cozy, so down to earth. It was an affirming moment after a painful week of protesting city traffic laws and street planning that were in large measure responsible for the loss of life in our neighborhood. There are times when we are all so hunkered down into our own worlds that life in New York can be alienating and heartless. And then there are times when the jumble of bodies pounded together into desirable spaces somehow makes *more* room for an original human encounter.<br />
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The civil servants left, bidding a friendly farewell, and we were placed by two young women, one of whom immediately said, "Is that backgammon?" Yes, I answered, and she said, "I used to play that with my Granddad." She was transfixed by memory. And the word "Granddad" seemed to be like a rich, black stock of alluvial nostalgia that rooted her somewhere else. Not just back in Texas, where she said she was from, but to a place somehow less transient, more permanent, even edenic. <br />
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Her Granddad fought in the Second World War, which my father did, making her young enough to be my own kid. Dads and Granddads and battlefields -- whether real or recreational -- were in fine focus while the rest of the room was softly hued. "I called mine "Grandpa," I told her, and upon mere mention of the word a kind of shamanic power descended. I thought of how my kids call theirs "Grandpa" and how for every kid, that general term, whether Poppa or Grandpa or Zayde or Grandad or whatever is far more precise than the name itself connotes. <br />
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It applies to all but there's only one.<br />
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I'm conducting interviews this week for the Bronfman Youth Fellowships, an annual ritual where I join the organization's gifted Executive Director Becky Voorwinde and meet with nearly one hundred finalists in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in order to pick twenty-six 17 year old students for a five week summer seminar on Jewish life and identity in Jerusalem. <br />
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This year I am acutely aware of Grandpas. And Granddads. And Zaydes. And Bubbes. And Grandmas. It is extraordinary how vital a grandparent is to a child's identity and sense of rootedness in the world. Grandparents are like a compass or generational gyroscope. They have the power to make life move for kids even when they don't always realize it.<br />
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But talking to these candidates, who are thinking deeply about what it means to be a young Jew in an increasingly complex world with multiple identities mashed together for attention, each vying for singularity, I keep hearing about grandparents. Grandparents who give books as gifts; who take kids on trips that expand hearts and horizons; who are triumphant survivors of the horrors of war, communism and the Holocaust. And I'm struck by how important these sources are to the formation of the self of these teens, who all stand at the liminal cusp between childhood and adulthood. <br />
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It makes me proud and grateful myself that we managed, in our family, to cultivate an incredibly close relationship between our daughters and their grandparents. Early on in my rabbinic career, I heard a Jewish leader once say, "You know you're Jewish when your grandchildren are Jewish," which I have continually returned to as one of those truisms in life that is always proven to be, well, true.<br />
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Imagine saying, "You know you're just when your grandchildren are just," or "you know you're compassionate when you're grandchildren are compassionate." In other words, we only get credit for who we are if we can have a lasting effect. Like a teacher who shapes students year after year after year, our contributions are investments in a future we may never live to fully see. Humbling but true.<br />
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"May you live to be 120." That's what we say when someone celebrates a birthday. Moses was 120. Hillel. Akiva. The Sages in Judaism conceived of this age as a full life. But what to do when no one really lives to be 120? Why say it?<br />
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I like to think it's about generations. 40 + 40 + 40 = 120. Three generations. Children. Parents. Grandparents. <br />
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You know they existed since you exist. There is wisdom in this.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">born in 1963</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">born in 1924</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSns3aZH5dcG9g6eWc4M05wPZesM-TnkNeQpiukml_VsRkDeVwirhek9cA2HIa5nGaNn7yJnMyxOJtSo-LEmA2X_R7TSECJaE4iVJTFjQz7W7Nih_JwZFgL7STYeF-m-oaNgI08lrsIz9X/s1600/IMG_20180226_194041.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="458" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSns3aZH5dcG9g6eWc4M05wPZesM-TnkNeQpiukml_VsRkDeVwirhek9cA2HIa5nGaNn7yJnMyxOJtSo-LEmA2X_R7TSECJaE4iVJTFjQz7W7Nih_JwZFgL7STYeF-m-oaNgI08lrsIz9X/s320/IMG_20180226_194041.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">born in 1893</td></tr>
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-27484086023129915242018-03-01T20:18:00.000-05:002018-03-01T20:25:23.536-05:00What It Means to be Jewish and HumanOn a rainy night in Tupelo, Mississippi, I dropped by a used books and record store in a strip mall not far from the burger stand where Elvis got his favorite junk food as a kid and I hid among the shelves, killing time. I struck out looking for an old copy of Otis Redding's famous recording, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Live-At-Whisky-Go-Recordings/dp/B01J5W0MQA">"Live at the Whiskey a Go Go"</a> but fortuitously came upon <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Children-David-Halberstam/dp/0449004392">David Halberstam's monumental book, The Children, </a>about the extraordinary group of young African American students centered in Nashville at Fisk, Tennessee A & I, Meharry Medical School and the American Baptist College. who launched the sit-in movement and the Freedom Rides. It's a seven hundred and fifty page edge-your-seat work of journalistic genius. (And, as an important aside, it brings to mind the school children across the country who have moved on to the front lines of the movement to pass sane gun laws. It is humbling to remember how much sacrifice was needed, how many bodies were on the other end of a bullet and a club in order to pass meaningful civil rights legislation--that may be what it takes to reverse the power scourge of assault weapons in our society.)<br />
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In one particular passage, the student activist Diane Nash speaks about her coming of age in Chicago; her parents efforts to instill in her the pride of being American as an expression of or proof of loyalty to whites; and how, transformed by the commitment of her peers, she came to see that in her self-expression as a young black woman, fighting with non-violence and dignity for her people -- that was the moment she truly became American. That in being fully black, only then could she be fully American.<br />
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I carried that thought with me on my journey through Mississippi and Louisiana during the second half of my trip for the <a href="http://www.isjl.org/">Institute for Southern Jewish Life </a>in mid-February. And I thought of the parallel ways that Jewish Americans, like African Americans and so many others find in their own personal fulfillment the ultimate realization of their, if one can use such a word, "Americanness."<br />
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Consider if you will the radical ludicrousness of "Make America Great Again," a simple enough message but not when full-fistedly embraced by an angry white mob wanting their country back. What makes this country great, what is inspiring about the constitutional model of government created by the all male, all white Founders, is that despite their prejudices, they planted the seeds of others' redemption. Women were denied the right to vote; African Americans were stripped of their names, places of origin, faith and language and denied their very humanity; but the Constitution redeemed them through blood, toil, tears, sweat, the law, and more blood. What actually makes America great is that each of us can be fully realized here as American, most certainly not that one is inherently more American than another. (Unless, of course we're talking about Native Americans, in which case, discussion over.)<br />
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Everywhere on this trip, this theme returned to my mind over and over again. And then, like a burst from the blue, my friend Noah wrote me from Tel Aviv. We were knocking ideas back and forth about the state of the world and the condition of the Jews and Noah wrote in an email, "Maybe what you're getting at here is that one becomes a true American by becoming a true Jew." You gotta be true to yourself. And we all need to see that in one another. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?" That's Hillel more than two thousand years ago. It applies.<br />
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Among the Jews in Columbus, Mississippi I found as I discovered everywhere on this trip an incredible warmth and hospitality; a yearning for connection; a desire to remain alive in the world. Located near the Mississippi State University, there were a number of Jewish academics and professionals around the dinner table and the response to my talk about "History, Memory and Civic Responsibility" was positive. I'll admit to eating bacon on these trips and really wanted to go for the broccoli-bacon croquettes on the menu but was told by one of my hosts that the restaurant had been instructed not to serve pork to any of us. Alas, I was told by my host that it was for my benefit and so I quietly accepted this cruel fate.<br />
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For me the highlight of this visit was the cemetery, which the community's president Paul Lassky, maintains with incredible care and love. He grew up in a neighboring town where his parents owned small stores and so he could fit together the lives of those buried in the B'nai Israel Cemetery with the mastery of a puzzlemaster. "They say I'm the synagogue president," he confided, "but I'm really the gofer." Hardly. He is a noble keeper of the flame.<br />
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The Jews of Greenville, Mississippi greeted me with a lasagne dinner and salad; a robust history museum chronicling this historic community that was once a thriving center of the "Cotton Belt" (the museum has memorabilia from Jewish Confederates who fought in the Civil War and Nazi flags captured by Jewish soldiers who fought in the Second World War and liberated concentration camps) and plenty to argue about. We were all still in shock as the unfolding tragedy of the school shooting in Lakeland, Florida was becoming more painfully clear and we dove among weighty matters from Jewish history to Israel to the 2nd Amendment and hyper-local politics with the agility and color of a great cable news show. (Note: It would be interesting to podcast these trips, wouldn't it?)<br />
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After my talk in Greenville the synagogue president asked if I had any questions for them. I told them the famous Isaac Bashevis Singer line about a "long way between dying and dead" and I asked if they were a dying community. "Do we look like we're dying?" was the response from everyone--all ten in attendance. "On March 1 we will host our annual deli lunch. Been happening since the 19th century. We are going to serve 1600 sandwiches in the Temple that day. We are still, despite our small numbers, an important part of this community." It was a real testimonial. <a href="https://www.hebrewunion.net/">You can see pictures on their website right here. </a><br />
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The Bashevis Singer line, by the way, is a kind of literary leitmotif these days. The American Jewish project, that is to say the communal and institutional Jewish efforts to sustain Jewish life in the twenty-first century, must reckon with this ultimate challenge: Why continue as a people? And if so, in what form? As a people of faith? As a nation in a land? As witnesses to history and advocates for justice? As lovers of smoked fish and a good schvitz? I mean, what? What is the point of it all?<br />
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The very question of "why be Jewish?" animated the last decade of my friend Edgar Bronfman's life, triggered in no small part by the recognition that his grandchildren were coming of age biologically, socially and economically in radically different circumstances than he. It stands to reason, therefore, that if each of us were honest with ourselves, we'd have to reckon with the past, present and future in each breathing moment of our Jewish selves. This truth gives Singer's quip a particular poignancy and one that I am particularly attuned to when on these visits in the South.<br />
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"Do we look like we're dying?"<br />
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Of course not. And here's where they really aren't dying or dead. At Jim's Diner, a real true greasy spoon down on Washington Street, downtown Greenville, the morning after my talk. Three guys from the synagogue, all third and fourth generation Greenville Jews who could remember vividly a time when this city was bustling and Jews owned 75% of the businesses; and three guys who are not Jews, or, how shall they be described -- white? They eat breakfast together several days a week. They know one another. Their lives have been and are intertwined with one another. Each are citizens of Mississippi. And yet, it was also clear that there was "difference" at the table: difference informed by history; by divergent relationships to holy scripture; by awareness of and relationship to "otherness."<br />
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We started breakfast by ordering. I followed everyone's lead. Two eggs medium, bacon (crispy) and grits. That seemed a safe bet. The coffee was good. I was exercised about Lakeland and launched into a small speech about the nuttiness of assault weapons. Which led to a Second Amendment argument. Which yielded a laugh when one diner, a Jew, said to another diner, a Gentile, "Oh, come off it now: You think a hydrogen bomb is covered by "the right to bear arms?" The response? "If I can fit in my pocket it does."<br />
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Defused bomb.<br />
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A third generation Mississippi tugboat builder asked me, "Rabbi, what do you talk to your people about down here?" and I told him that I am teaching that the Bible isn't exclusively concerned with faith as much as its concerned with justice. I described for him the trajectory from God making the human in the divine image, with the ability to distinguish between good and evil, to Noah, who didn't quite do enough to save humanity and Abraham who could do nothing but and how often we mistake obedience for faith when in fact Judaism demands of us argument, objection, opposition -- all in the name of striving for justice. "That's really interesting. I never heard that before." And I never met a man who made boats. Little did he know how much I have always revered those who made a life for themselves actually making things. We all do what we can with what we've been given.<br />
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I could stay on this breakfast forever. In fact, I could really soapbox here and say that every American in the age of the buffoonery of Trump should have such breakfasts, if only to dispense with the platitudes of political oppositionalism and truly engage their fellow citizens but I won't (even though I just did.) But the breakfast broke and the Jews went to Greenville's Jewish cemetery where we visited graves, heard stories, and said Kaddish for the giants who forged life's rivers, making the way for us. The river flows and as those in Delta know, even overflows.<br />
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"Do we look like we're dying?"<br />
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I caught my breath in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi. My pal Macy hosted me and we celebrated his wife Susan's birthday with burgers at a blue's joint. I enjoyed the grape and slept well before rising early and heading over to <a href="https://www.tougaloo.edu/">Tougaloo College,</a> an historic Black school founded by the Freedman's Bureau and which remains both a vibrant and iconic institution of African American genius and resiliency. I was treated with such marvelous hospitality; was toured around campus by four freshmen whose pride of place on this quad was inspiring; and was deeply moved by their own reverence for the history that grows deep there: a post-slavery legacy past Reconstruction and on into Civil Rights until today. At one stunning and moving moment, we stood together in the chapel on campus and beheld the pulpit where Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Julian Bond and Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael all spoke. The wood, well worn, told stories. We were in rapture.<br />
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I shared with these students my experiences in Berlin and Minsk, of a Jew going home to devastation and destruction and I asked them what was it like to be raised in Mississippi and move about a campus built by former slaves. "It's all around us, every day," they said. "This is life and this is history."<br />
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Students walked past us on the way to class. Birds flitted in trees. My guides burst with pride in being third and fourth generation Tougaloo students. Lessons stood tall and permanent. We bowed our heads in reverence for family, faith, education and tradition. If you ever see me wearing the Tougaloo College hat I bought at the college store, you'll have a small idea of how proud I was to be among these fine men that day.<br />
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The next morning I hit the road for Monroe, Louisiana. Those Jews packed it in. Friday night services and dinner at a nice Italian restaurant. Tot Shabbat at nine followed by Torah study at 10. Lunch with congregants. Basketball game between ULM and North Texas and beer at Flying Tiger followed by Havdalah and a talk and dinner with this unique and warm community. Truth be told, the Jews in Monroe seem to come from everywhere but Monroe but they're there now. And home is home, right?<br />
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My nine days down South began in Tupelo. Then Florence. Then Brownsville. Then Columbus. Then Greenville. Then Jackson. Then Monroe. In each community I found small but vibrant, loving, deeply rooted and committed Jews making their lives as Jews in all the ways they can. I was humbled over and over again by their efforts, their pride and determination, and by their own humility in recognizing the necessity of their efforts to keep the flame alive.<br />
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If we all could take such pride in the simplest of efforts.<br />
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Realization and joy of what it means to be human and Jewish is within our grasp, isn't it?<br />
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I return to Diane Nash, who found realization of her African Americanness to be truly American. I think of my grandfather, whose yahrzeit I marked this week (he'd be 125 if still alive) as quintessentially Jewish and American. And I think of you. And me. Who will we be? And what of our being will make America really, truly, great?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjo7GFULYq-hPctKsUkSiDZO7r7ZPpXh0K1DlEsqkhzST7exDvgFhyjOl3b56Bn9h3IvZXyV5sRO6oexn8Q_CKvfDJBYL6MCO9yBJlfOLne0vD2-FQQZ1_ZS_jOm1SZqNByfjpEpARg8l6/s1600/IMG_20180215_095120.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjo7GFULYq-hPctKsUkSiDZO7r7ZPpXh0K1DlEsqkhzST7exDvgFhyjOl3b56Bn9h3IvZXyV5sRO6oexn8Q_CKvfDJBYL6MCO9yBJlfOLne0vD2-FQQZ1_ZS_jOm1SZqNByfjpEpARg8l6/s320/IMG_20180215_095120.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At the Jewish Cemetery in Greenville, MS</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3RWsLj8fIw4d1aA4vKSk6wbK1QletZXfHVIjC84cFx6KDrPW558YM2aJpOnQe0DlF2r4t9iD0MlE3QDMrE5nVw9g3A1bbcNuM6nqLE2sMfJKXrc8L05gvC1C_BigGt1_tpSH6fYqLUlez/s1600/IMG_20180216_112139.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3RWsLj8fIw4d1aA4vKSk6wbK1QletZXfHVIjC84cFx6KDrPW558YM2aJpOnQe0DlF2r4t9iD0MlE3QDMrE5nVw9g3A1bbcNuM6nqLE2sMfJKXrc8L05gvC1C_BigGt1_tpSH6fYqLUlez/s320/IMG_20180216_112139.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tougaloo's Chapel</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnf-XSqzjHcD2WvCwb3Z2DNiai4H-BwiA-4uMsVqhvjv5h3W50yMKC8n4Hzc7FuaORTXp1EH4VYdgWYxiM0a-SJSEFeY2LYRK67Dzwq9Em6MaBMYpgR20k4iIgafusY9YCBd2Zc8amLVlZ/s1600/IMG_20180216_115059.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnf-XSqzjHcD2WvCwb3Z2DNiai4H-BwiA-4uMsVqhvjv5h3W50yMKC8n4Hzc7FuaORTXp1EH4VYdgWYxiM0a-SJSEFeY2LYRK67Dzwq9Em6MaBMYpgR20k4iIgafusY9YCBd2Zc8amLVlZ/s320/IMG_20180216_115059.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My generous hosts at Tougaloo</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMB9E8806Af3Jzb2uS_GjJzxsfWR6EmRc5HOmw99Xe8IS9CaCwoMHSGi4xTSRsScfxlJ6APZwUrGIq_baK44WN8qggcIfM_08Qt6QQ50fxVcFiryO6XgQCqwy4v21MYmZqitiERsUgY88X/s1600/IMG_20180213_212421.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMB9E8806Af3Jzb2uS_GjJzxsfWR6EmRc5HOmw99Xe8IS9CaCwoMHSGi4xTSRsScfxlJ6APZwUrGIq_baK44WN8qggcIfM_08Qt6QQ50fxVcFiryO6XgQCqwy4v21MYmZqitiERsUgY88X/s320/IMG_20180213_212421.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Synagogue, Columbus, MS</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eVhlMIwRzKlwpDD1QrSrXPmBLE5AEmCfMD-BPcHuX_ulryuDZWxWhdnauHBj0mg20gfAkLbzIwYxJgTiBphKBUPGUCiR2sfO7TmZoyUyR_MsQD_lxF2AHkpBvtaI4CjnhAAO40NAwj7P/s1600/IMG_20180215_150134.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eVhlMIwRzKlwpDD1QrSrXPmBLE5AEmCfMD-BPcHuX_ulryuDZWxWhdnauHBj0mg20gfAkLbzIwYxJgTiBphKBUPGUCiR2sfO7TmZoyUyR_MsQD_lxF2AHkpBvtaI4CjnhAAO40NAwj7P/s320/IMG_20180215_150134.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ceSjF7DSx3BVPg-WtykmyqB8NeyuXqnzzyXa4q4rVgVYzJNWP4-MKqwE9x5wK-ahVKVD4OL56RDyYkC4sf2wAsoMX2xdd5ZMQ1JvXIyIgqU54seAsmx6Oxkk-XrfW77eXYi_BFg9zdqC/s1600/IMG_20180218_075849.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ceSjF7DSx3BVPg-WtykmyqB8NeyuXqnzzyXa4q4rVgVYzJNWP4-MKqwE9x5wK-ahVKVD4OL56RDyYkC4sf2wAsoMX2xdd5ZMQ1JvXIyIgqU54seAsmx6Oxkk-XrfW77eXYi_BFg9zdqC/s320/IMG_20180218_075849.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from the Jewish Cemetery in Monroe, LA</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK8iE19pIvn5S9xlT5wqI1ATevBDIn9CUlj4h-AbS2M7rAvYr2Bl5CsM9y_jnRqT0N96b0lQnSkohqwDrBA6_T0VVzz3yKz94NOI6OVCVOq_-Nqm1gDfG1SUB9haJklvDtwSIQpEM10Fe7/s1600/IMG_20180215_091246.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK8iE19pIvn5S9xlT5wqI1ATevBDIn9CUlj4h-AbS2M7rAvYr2Bl5CsM9y_jnRqT0N96b0lQnSkohqwDrBA6_T0VVzz3yKz94NOI6OVCVOq_-Nqm1gDfG1SUB9haJklvDtwSIQpEM10Fe7/s320/IMG_20180215_091246.jpg" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdlnJZXKtIORENTgtSt6_gvic9XEvY2e3sD7aBM6MdyM_OABRM_7ay-DfL9ba6OCvyze8SeLst2kRrtZpvhEHByfALnacIdtfhKxPImq9bRC7ArJTRRBxaLqLAKaJ1NI8_M6f-bXeA44uL/s1600/IMG_20180218_080116.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdlnJZXKtIORENTgtSt6_gvic9XEvY2e3sD7aBM6MdyM_OABRM_7ay-DfL9ba6OCvyze8SeLst2kRrtZpvhEHByfALnacIdtfhKxPImq9bRC7ArJTRRBxaLqLAKaJ1NI8_M6f-bXeA44uL/s320/IMG_20180218_080116.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-84459480811109469902018-02-14T09:44:00.001-05:002018-02-14T10:02:50.954-05:00History and ReconciliationIt's mid-week of a nine day journey that has me serving as a rabbi in Tupelo, MS, Florence AL, Brownsville, TN, Columbus and Greenville, MS and Monroe, LA. When I told my pal Macy Hart how thrilled I was doing this work, he said, "That's great. You're also going to be exhausted!"<br />
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Hell, if Bob Dylan can be on a Never Ending Tour, what's a few days in the South?<br />
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As a student of history and a rabbi and a fairly curious person, I'd have to say that everyone from the North should leap at the opportunity to travel in the South for a period of time. The mythic and often tragic dichotomy between Red States and Blue States really does melt away to a degree with each conversation. Getting to commonalities, shared interests, civil disagreements and enlightening openings happens with time, for sure. Every day since last Friday, at virtually every meaningful interaction, I have seen my own and others' barriers to regional divide fall away.<br />
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One of the secret ingredients to that falling away is simply being present. Over and over I have heard from people how grateful they are that I have taken the time to come down here and teach. To make the trip, expend the effort, and perhaps most important, to ask questions and listen. In our maddeningly loud and divisive world, the quietude of listening goes a long way.<br />
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Back up in New York, where I have worked in the Jewish community for more than 28 years, Jewishness is everywhere to such a degree that one can effectively take it for granted. Down here, especially in these smaller towns where the Jews are keenly aware of their history, their legacy and the humbling notion that they are not replacing themselves with new generations of Jews, there is an acute desire to be heard, to tell their story, to pass it on so that it will not be lost. In distinction from other Jewish communities in history that ended abruptly do to persecution, dislocation and genocide, communities here in the South are representative of a kind of American Jewish success story, where immigrant Jews established a foothold, thrived and progressed, but then watched as economies shifted, as the nation evolved, and as a younger generation chose their future in more populous and urban locations.<br />
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On these trips I often mention the line attributed to the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer when he won the Nobel Prize. When asked how he felt about winning the prize for writing in a dead language, he said, "There's a long way between dying and dead."<br />
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It's a bittersweet observation but one that is not lost on the communities down here. And to see how it close up is to appreciate just how deeply imbedded Southern Jews have been in the American South and to bear witness to the pride they have in moving the needle of progress, particularly in the post-Civil War period.<br />
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No surprise that much of the history is an oral history; and there is also a remarkable amount of documentation and small museum displays as well. The Institute for Southern Jewish Life has built a museum to Southern Jewry that will soon open in New Orleans. Cemeteries and street markers tell the stories as well -- the latter an inspiration for my work in New York, trying to wake up civic leaders to the notion that public displays of especially important and difficult chapters of the history of race in America is a Northern responsibility as well as a Southern one. Folks down here really appreciate it when I say that we in the North love to point our finger of shame at the Southern racists while tolerating unacceptable de facto racism and segregation in schools, housing and the workplace.<br />
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And while Santayana's famous line about avoiding the doom of repeating our history, I'm more inclined to talk about the obligation to take responsibility for what this country has done to Native Americans and African Americans. E Pluribus Unum is meaningless unless we acknowledge, mark, talk about and reconcile with one another. Period.<br />
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Everywhere I have gone so far, I have been deeply moved by the stories I have heard.<br />
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In Tupelo, Mississippi for Shabbat last week, I learned about the challenges of practicing Judaism in the face of the invasion of Church of Christ missionaries who like to show up at Torah study and challenge the validity of the Jewish Biblical narrative. But this remarkable community holds on with love, humor and a deep care for one another. Their walls are adorned with photographs and documents testifying to their meaningful legacy.<br />
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In Florence, Alabama -- the heart of the Muscle Shoals -- a similar pride flourishes. Families with deep ties continue to stick together; Jews affiliated with North Alabama University root the community in learning and critical thinking; and the Jews in both places, many of whom are transplanted from other Jewish areas in the North, bring a wandering awareness of ever-changing horizons that fuel their future.<br />
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In Brownsville, TN I will admit to being deeply moved. My host there, Fred Silverstein, whose family roots reach deep back into the 19th century, is a recognized leader in town, in the African American and Christian community. At my talk there on Monday night, the city's first African American mayor, Bill Rawls, was in attendance, as was the former Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, Lyle Reid. Other area mayors joined the talk along with a representative from U.S. Congressman David Kustoff. I was under no illusion that there were there to hear me; in fact, they were there because of their admiration for Fred Silverstein and the Adas Israel community. When your relationships are strong, you can call on your friends to show up for a conversation.<br />
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Fred showed me the Jewish cemetery, Tina Turner's one room school house restored from segregationist times; took me to Judge Reid's radio show to be his guest; took me tour on David Levy's plant farm, one of the three largest nurseries in Tennessee. David's family also dates back to well into the 19th century and his ancestors brought one of the synagogue's Torah scrolls to Brownsville from Germany. Tree of Life, indeed. Fred introduced me to his dear friend Rev Bob Thornton, a Methodist minister whose family has hosted tent revival meetings in Brownsville for more than two hundred years, which I learned about while eating incredibly delicious pulled **** shoulder at Helen's BarBQ; Billy Tripp's ecstatic and eccentric "Mindfield;" and so much more.<br />
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But perhaps most significant was viewing the new historical marker in the center of town that remembers the murder -- effectively a lynching by bullet -- of Brownsville's NAACP secretary Elbert Williams in 1940. Elbert and his wife Annie were early members of the NAACP in Brownsville in 1939 and their efforts to register African Americans to vote were met with violent resistance. In the midst of a white terror campaign in 1940, more than 20 African American families fled Brownsville and on June 20, 1940, Williams was taken by police for questioning. As the sign explains, after three days his mutilated body was found in the Hatchie River and his death was ruled a "homicide by unknown parties." The Second World War drowned out the furor and it wouldn't be until more than 70 years later that the city of Brownsville acknowledged this heinous deed.<br />
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Fred Silverstein led a civic effort to raise that sign; to insist that the story be told; and as he explained to me, he did so from a deep sense of Jewish pride that history, decency and justice really, truly matter.<br />
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More stories to follow in the days ahead.<br />
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I'll leave you with some of my favorite pictures thus far.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQQxIVR1t2WTD8tWewnlxremXBDRFyrDkWtvOVEd5usjT3Bqz1-JIAXWjmNw4bwvaU79MYOskfDS1FVewOITv4Myf6ppbIPqkVvL4qQpbijWa2qC72jNRCvNBq_4VCkDmdhs0IIdi3wKvq/s1600/IMG_20180209_200034.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="615" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQQxIVR1t2WTD8tWewnlxremXBDRFyrDkWtvOVEd5usjT3Bqz1-JIAXWjmNw4bwvaU79MYOskfDS1FVewOITv4Myf6ppbIPqkVvL4qQpbijWa2qC72jNRCvNBq_4VCkDmdhs0IIdi3wKvq/s320/IMG_20180209_200034.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jewish Community in Tupelo, MS</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9DX6Jt43MOgHHXpB-HvdIpQQaJaS95wv67_2dEw_gS1_gmxZE03WZcwz4fHsPCB9wfbBHSfPp-27WGm9EBC9St_8E1ngSVf5-hKN1ixn6ZK3Tzrqnsob5OI30TZbmX4NjyZsBbJwfKIpN/s1600/IMG_20180210_115604.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9DX6Jt43MOgHHXpB-HvdIpQQaJaS95wv67_2dEw_gS1_gmxZE03WZcwz4fHsPCB9wfbBHSfPp-27WGm9EBC9St_8E1ngSVf5-hKN1ixn6ZK3Tzrqnsob5OI30TZbmX4NjyZsBbJwfKIpN/s320/IMG_20180210_115604.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These Two Women Identified Themselves as Tablet Magazine Fan Girls</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiJa3-DUAot-g35zfVlW9QbVd8MK5TTGCQ0ZlwXsiBAHSu2DvbY0G8ijEPRlsjLw6-kB3K-otbnfVkrMqdq8GNXW-LVtTzyyITI_rkb6_oZVAkkS9aGBrlNqp_dl5jRrG69KfqXBqN-r43/s1600/IMG_20180210_150703.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="615" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiJa3-DUAot-g35zfVlW9QbVd8MK5TTGCQ0ZlwXsiBAHSu2DvbY0G8ijEPRlsjLw6-kB3K-otbnfVkrMqdq8GNXW-LVtTzyyITI_rkb6_oZVAkkS9aGBrlNqp_dl5jRrG69KfqXBqN-r43/s320/IMG_20180210_150703.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmzWQgw8oNuNC7szpwGSiOG6_EryooLpE1zatbtVOz0W5eXjITvg5DBd0RL3QFpsMsmaBekObheRbiivTKNtvblogbwXf_8VVfh3ppY_lm2sKMPexcO0kHBe3nEfq4mCQcwV4C4Yvb0MK/s1600/IMG_20180212_094435.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmzWQgw8oNuNC7szpwGSiOG6_EryooLpE1zatbtVOz0W5eXjITvg5DBd0RL3QFpsMsmaBekObheRbiivTKNtvblogbwXf_8VVfh3ppY_lm2sKMPexcO0kHBe3nEfq4mCQcwV4C4Yvb0MK/s320/IMG_20180212_094435.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Organ at FAME Studios used on Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man."</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzvuwFowTfEAur5ujYDt_BGFRGuEINs1ls989mO29d0GKnBs2f-Tkt3JSXMREiRM5Tx5lCLcIeNvLpUvYTcIOZ_en5SajdiF8iwcfNIEUSOMsD_wevYfNKXS5GDkXwKj9643aITFgfLzf4/s1600/IMG_20180212_104700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzvuwFowTfEAur5ujYDt_BGFRGuEINs1ls989mO29d0GKnBs2f-Tkt3JSXMREiRM5Tx5lCLcIeNvLpUvYTcIOZ_en5SajdiF8iwcfNIEUSOMsD_wevYfNKXS5GDkXwKj9643aITFgfLzf4/s320/IMG_20180212_104700.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The well at which Annie Sullivan gave Helen Keller language</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9vdQnSGgabU514jlr0S6rHkOZp7zeg8BtyAcuGAh1nkoYj6aqLwugurjSfHZsBkoD4iToNZsZ858zBhIm3YiYrA8OeKFr_U8Dsiih5Zx6fiN0c1xZWH09NQ0OHSSnlHCEGDHZS7ci4Xgy/s1600/IMG_20180212_123744.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9vdQnSGgabU514jlr0S6rHkOZp7zeg8BtyAcuGAh1nkoYj6aqLwugurjSfHZsBkoD4iToNZsZ858zBhIm3YiYrA8OeKFr_U8Dsiih5Zx6fiN0c1xZWH09NQ0OHSSnlHCEGDHZS7ci4Xgy/s320/IMG_20180212_123744.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Abe's Burger in Corinth, MS was delicious!</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHkR-WXZRDOVPsFoNq4rkPftE7f4h95Bk0sO1XuQwf9JxbFoikhdHWMfyteTFBCa2DqP9ixCNpN27qDFcXvNVyAVUKBEvXXBNFn0pBPIBrRl33-t1ZTT74xX5PloGWGqO34KWCNkFX4vt7/s1600/00000IMG_00000_BURST20180213083731_COVER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="615" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHkR-WXZRDOVPsFoNq4rkPftE7f4h95Bk0sO1XuQwf9JxbFoikhdHWMfyteTFBCa2DqP9ixCNpN27qDFcXvNVyAVUKBEvXXBNFn0pBPIBrRl33-t1ZTT74xX5PloGWGqO34KWCNkFX4vt7/s320/00000IMG_00000_BURST20180213083731_COVER.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Fred Silverstein and Lyle Reid at 95.3 Brownsville Radio</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix6DFGbD5cCw3Cz_U266K-AqWL7aChyphenhyphenVmCtyfhDtFE8WKXanMiOg2cC6_W8yg7JOl9WMMgtFdk2LdV133elGhi8Z7I9YLCsCWzWrSIMxNJfwhhKRmprYm8-_2Oq9Qh9zCIAA4SoVPNTTCH/s1600/IMG_20180212_161414.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="615" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix6DFGbD5cCw3Cz_U266K-AqWL7aChyphenhyphenVmCtyfhDtFE8WKXanMiOg2cC6_W8yg7JOl9WMMgtFdk2LdV133elGhi8Z7I9YLCsCWzWrSIMxNJfwhhKRmprYm8-_2Oq9Qh9zCIAA4SoVPNTTCH/s320/IMG_20180212_161414.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUxKXerQQmXo4_nNOgAGnN9PRPIwVkhTRUbptZUyMnwW51U_pMuy8ALBgT23cRspwKHQfwXTF5H1QDtyNXkEvQlGwIifKnvaIwbA6uvEJhjHUgFSGwunG0tA-r1UsONgx5LW1kS1BxFWM/s1600/IMG_20180213_102121.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiUxKXerQQmXo4_nNOgAGnN9PRPIwVkhTRUbptZUyMnwW51U_pMuy8ALBgT23cRspwKHQfwXTF5H1QDtyNXkEvQlGwIifKnvaIwbA6uvEJhjHUgFSGwunG0tA-r1UsONgx5LW1kS1BxFWM/s320/IMG_20180213_102121.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Billy Tripp's "Mindfield"</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizH-87v8OtJfVxHA6pnbamGtLaYpL4A1iPsn58-knYf7XP-lXnj27DGAk4VsE7BYFA7QEe2o9tV5b9WOJO1nnlr_ClH7h3JYGEkcUHZJ9bYvM4uoVxMtnQGhMNdytFaPtXeNJ_YKrh_IQy/s1600/IMG_20180213_120358.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizH-87v8OtJfVxHA6pnbamGtLaYpL4A1iPsn58-knYf7XP-lXnj27DGAk4VsE7BYFA7QEe2o9tV5b9WOJO1nnlr_ClH7h3JYGEkcUHZJ9bYvM4uoVxMtnQGhMNdytFaPtXeNJ_YKrh_IQy/s320/IMG_20180213_120358.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Helen of Helen's BarBQ</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOg9rhSLPO6NHNKvDAyao9yBeyxxRRJLIo7Mu18AbRQG3cb0v7HMdGle0BC96oGrZTZPBzpvqQJM6iSsB4UjF2qtQb8h9qm6WAj-iiAvkS8p7LiuJcanMwCJQ_ITSrKW65zusfy0tNZw0a/s1600/IMG_20180213_121439-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOg9rhSLPO6NHNKvDAyao9yBeyxxRRJLIo7Mu18AbRQG3cb0v7HMdGle0BC96oGrZTZPBzpvqQJM6iSsB4UjF2qtQb8h9qm6WAj-iiAvkS8p7LiuJcanMwCJQ_ITSrKW65zusfy0tNZw0a/s320/IMG_20180213_121439-1.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Torah's at Adas Israel</td></tr>
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-46988901871889615542018-01-17T10:55:00.000-05:002018-01-17T11:35:42.157-05:00Lukewarm and BewilderingOwning a billion dollar sports franchise in the heart of New York City should come with a greater sense of responsibility and civic vision than what was on display at the Barclays Center for Monday's <a href="https://www.netsdaily.com/2018/1/15/16889656/brooklyn-nets-ny-knicks-martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-day-kristaps-porzingis-rondae-hollis-jefferson-nba">Martin Luther King Day game between the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Knicks.</a> While certainly not the Eighties Showtime Lakers, the Riley Knicks or even Jay-Z's Nets, these two franchises missed a major opportunity to showcase Dr. King's vision for a just society and instead seemed to expend more energy on gyrating dancers and free t-shirts than they did to a genuine message of justice and freedom for all Americans.<br />
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I've been a Nets season ticket holder since their inaugural season, mostly because I love the idea of walking to a home game, rooting for a local team, and somehow (sentimentally and nostalgically) imagining what it may have been like to walk over to Ebbets Field for Dodgers games. Would that it were.</div>
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Is there a greater basketball town than New York City, whose legendary epicenters in Harlem and Brooklyn continue to capture the imagination of young kids all over the world? Is there a greater epicenter of Black culture in America? From the Studio Museum, the Schomburg Center, Alvin Ailey and the Apollo Theater to the African Burial Ground, Weeksville, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy and Brownsville, along with a larger concentration of African American churches, one would have thought that the Nets and Knicks might have pulled out all the stops and curated a full-throated and prideful embrace of Dr. King's legacy for an audience of 18,000 fans drinking $9 Cokes and $15 craft beers. </div>
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Nope.</div>
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Had it not been for a pregame shout-out to MLK Day by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/allymisslove/?hl=en">Ally Love's</a>, the Nets' court host, one never would have known that January 15 was a special day on the calendar. Then, just before tip-off, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson was handed the microphone and reminded the fans that this was a special day for us to come together in love and unity. It was a fine message, sure; but Dr. King died for Justice and Equality, two words airbrushed out of the Nets' player's statement. </div>
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Professional sports leagues spare no expense when they decide to wrap their players in the mantle of militarism, with all manner of camouflage swag worn in the NFL, MLB and NBA; so why not special uniforms for MLK Day? The "I Am a Man" iconic image? A quote from Dr. King on each jersey? Commemorative shirts or posters for kids to take home, put up on their walls, and be reminded that we all stand on the shoulders of those who came, who saw and who died before us?</div>
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Instead, we 18,000 spectators were given a few videos from the can of the NBA Films department, admirable albeit bland platitudes about Dr. King.</div>
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There was no resonance in the crowd. There was light, if any applause. Imagine if the Nets and Knicks had been brave enough, bold enough, and generous enough with their profits, to give some voice to leaders from across the city to speak openly about racial and economic justice, the causes for which Dr. King lost his life. Imagine not neutral videos but a message of unity against our racist President for calling Haiti and African countries "shitholes;" imagine a message rejecting the increasing incidents White Supremacy being validated by the White House; imagine a reminder that the GOP tax-cut will disproportionately favor the wealthy over the poor; imagine players reminding fans that they are well aware of the injustice of millions of Americans losing their health care. The notion that athletes ought not to speak out about major issues has been pierced not only by Colin Kaepernick's principled position but by other players as well, who have used social media as individuals to decry the spike in racism and extremism in our nation. But what of the efforts of whole teams? Or even an entire league? Their relative silence is troubling and speaks to a country still more concerned with the bottom line of profit than the equalizing stability of justice.</div>
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But remember: James Dolan, the owner of the Knicks, has already begun investing in President Trump's 2020 campaign; and Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is a distant Russian oligarch with a checkered past who is already shopping the team. So if you're an employee in either one of these billion dollar franchises, there isn't much room for innovative messaging about social justice.</div>
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So I sat back and watched the Knicks dismantle the Nets. I admired Jeff Hornacek's motion offense more than the Nets rather staid approach. I drank a $15 beer. And I read Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which I carry in my pocket each year on January 15, along with Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." </div>
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In Monday's Washington Post, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/15/martin-luther-king-jr-s-scathing-critique-of-white-moderates-from-the-birmingham-jail/?utm_term=.c6268d27c724">DeNeen Brown had a powerful, short piece about that legendary letter</a>. She reminded readers that one of Dr. King's most noteworthy phrases was about the complacency of "white moderates." Dr. King wrote, "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."</div>
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Amen, Dr. King.</div>
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And that's how I rate the MLK Day commemoration by two of New York City's most powerful and resourceful sports franchises. "Lukewarm" and "bewildering."</div>
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I hope they do better next year.</div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-72633077438023090542018-01-05T20:00:00.003-05:002018-01-10T17:23:39.651-05:00Eulogy for Uncle Bill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsmMFGyyq_vyP7jrG9EQeBNSNaPg1jjiBUVY3iKlR5Zi5baA31i9ToTK0dtj_CsYftkZe2oZacPbpj25j7SfC8PSiAGxUpJQFWk-RutcOZDbh6NLGqshpfV3wilutXA3opDJXl6sdAjLzB/s1600/IMG_20180103_173522.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="424" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsmMFGyyq_vyP7jrG9EQeBNSNaPg1jjiBUVY3iKlR5Zi5baA31i9ToTK0dtj_CsYftkZe2oZacPbpj25j7SfC8PSiAGxUpJQFWk-RutcOZDbh6NLGqshpfV3wilutXA3opDJXl6sdAjLzB/s320/IMG_20180103_173522.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Eulogy for Uncle Bill</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">January 5, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Congregation Shalom</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Milwaukee, WI</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-6ee91283-e22b-9ad5-fccf-aec6f71ee7ca" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Bill. Billy. Cousin Billy. Uncle Bill. Son. Husband. Father. Grandfather. Great Grandfather. Friend. Breeder. Businessman. Lawyer. Pugilist. Definitely Pugilist. For me, as his first cousin’s son, making me once removed or a second cousin but really, just family, he was only William J. Bachman, Esquire, once. It was after my sophomore year in Madison and I was home for the summer, hanging out with friends on the East Side til early into the morning. When, driving back to Tosa where Mom lived with Charlie Ott (who just passed last week), I fell asleep behind the wheel of our yellow Pinto, jumped the median and knocked over a light pole. I was charged with “driving at an imprudent speed” and given a court date where William J. Bachman, Esquire, represented me. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Our case was called and Bill told me to stay seated as he approached the bench. Here’s what I saw. Bill pointed at the ticket, then pointed at the judge. The judge shook his head. Bill pointed at the judge, then pointed at the ticket and the judge nodded his head. Then Bill nodded his head. And the judge pounded the gavel, announcing, “Case Dismissed.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Heading out of the Milwaukee County Court House, I asked Bill about the exchange. “It was simple,” he said. “I asked, ‘Your honor, what is an imprudent speed for someone who’s asleep?’ He said, ‘Good point.’”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">We had a good laugh over lunch and he headed back to work that day. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Smart, practical, opinionated, tenacious, loving and loyal: Bill Bachman was a truly original, warm hearted man. He was a generational figure, an icon of the Milwaukee Bachmans. He was unquestionably larger than life. He knew that about himself. He loved it. And he wore it so well.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I’m not sure where that happens in a person’s development. Like, when does a person know that about themselves--that they can occupy a place in the world that commands attention and respect? One of the places I often locate that insight, based on a lifetime of conversations and visits with my Uncle Bill, has to start with his grandparents, Jacob and Mary Bachman. There wasn’t a time in the last twenty years, as Bill approached his own old age and the grand period of reflection that such stature represents, where he didn’t fail to mention Mary’s beauty and kindness and love. He was in love with his grandmother, as all good Jewish boys should be. The very mention of her name was like an aura in the room that radiated family, continuity, legacy, rootedness, devotion and love. In fact, during my last conversation with Bill this Fall, he mentioned Mary’s eyes, her voice, and her potato pancakes. Enough said.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Jacob and Mary had Charlie and Joe and Lil and Irving. Joe married Rose, an uncommon beauty in her own right, whose portrait hung over Bill’s bed at St. John’s. Rose’s best friend was Barbara Siegel, my grandmother, an immigrant from Minsk, who was introduced to and then married Joe’s brother Charlie. Growing up in Milwaukee, these were the two Bachman luminaries who lit up the night sky. Charlie was a doctor whose gentle hands healed and who lived a kind of quiet leadership. Joe was a man of transaction and business. He was a builder. He demanded excellence, service, quality and loyalty. It seems like a generational characteristic that we no longer see in our age of mobility and geographic far-flung-ed-ness, but that pattern was repeated in our own family as well. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">As a student in Madison, where Bill excelled as a boxer and dashing dater of women (oh, he also became a lawyer) he went boating past a sorority house one afternoon and shouted to a pier of coeds, “Who wants a ride?” All the girls recoiled but one, Donna Schumm, who leapt off the pier and into Bill’s arms for more than sixty years. They had Mike, Pam and Jodi; embraced Barbara and John and became loving grandparents to Emily, Jake, Ben, Braydon and Dylan, Scarlett and Raphael, Sarah, Joshua, and Jacquelyn. They were great-grandparents to Ozzy, Lucy and Lily. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">The scope and continuity and blended nature of family was real and always a reason to express pride in this continuity.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">At Donna and Bill’s wedding, my dad Monas, Bill’s first cousin, met Barbie Mueller, Donna’s best friend from Wauwatosa. The two East Side Jews married the two West Side Lutherans. This did not go unnoticed. While my dad was more laissez-faire about ritual and religion, Bill was fiercely demanding. Donna became a Jew (one imagines Bill giving her a marriage requirement quiz like the Baltimore Colts quiz in Diner, but this is not confirmed.) Whereas my dad groused about a Christmas tree each year, said nothing and sulked much, Bill allowed the tree but with a caveat: it stays downstairs. If memory serves correctly, the Rexleigh house was split level and the tree never made it upstairs. I can’t tell you how many times I provoked Donna and Bill into talking about this, just to hear them fight about, laugh about it, and enjoy every single aspect of the telling and re-telling because it reminded them exactly why and how much they loved each other.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Like Charlie and Joe, Bill was an athlete, and his acumen for pugnacity is perhaps best exemplified in a few distinct ways. He was an avid biker and broke bones on more than one occasion getting knocked to the ground by some obnoxious driver. He was not afraid to confront civil code breakers. One year, at the annual fourth of July fireworks show down at the lakefront, the seven Bachman cousins were split up into two cars and I was driving with Bill when some souped up hot rod with a super fancy tail cut us off. Bill was furious and raced after the guy. Donna was yelling in the front seat that the offender would want to fight. At a stop light, Bill yelled at the guy, “What do you hang your underwear on that tail?” I laughed. Donna was upset and Bill said, “I can handle this guy.” And then with the agility of a boxer in the ring, swiveled in his seat, shoved his leg out through the window and started kicking in the air, laughing that loud Bill laugh. The light turned green and we all moved on.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">But my favorite Bill story goes back to 1969, when the Chicago White Sox used to play several games a year to feed the frenzy for Major League Baseball after the Braves flew south for an eternal winter. Bill and Dad and Mike and I went to a game where some real buffoons were getting drunk right in front of us. Bill asked one of the guys to pipe down. The guy called Bill a “kike.” Bill punched his lights out with one jab and we got out of there. In the parking lot, with my dad holding my hand as we walked briskly to the car, I asked, “What’s a kike, Dad?” “A Jew,” he said. “It’s what people who don’t like Jews call us.”</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Bill and I had a good laugh about that this Fall, and he recounted similar encounters with his pal Sheldon Lubar on their way to school. Perhaps it’s hard to imagine for a younger generation but there was a time in this country when a Jew had to fight for his place and Bill wore that battle armor well. His real victory was in family, in work, in community, and in tradition. And it’s that collection of achievement that we celebrate today.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">After my dad dies in 1983, Bill was so good to us. He gave my brother Steve a job at the Carriage House and when Steve wanted to get out on the sales floor, Bill tough-loved him and said, “Go to college, first.” I always admired that. He and I would get together once a year on my trips home and he followed my own path into the rabbinic world with enormous pride. He saw me off to Israel in 1985 and came over to hear all about it the next summer in 1986. He and Donna came to Baltimore for my wedding and he adored Rachel like a niece. “She’s a great girl,” he said. “A pistol.” Takes one to know one. He came to New York when I was ordained as a rabbi and loved reflecting that in the same way that he inherited a family trade, furniture, so had I in a way, since scholarship is what some of us did in the Old Country, too.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">One of my dear friends in New York is a guy named Mark Federman. Mark is just past seventy and stands astride a family business, Russ and Dauthers Appetizers (fish) that is in its fourth generation of family-owned business. When I had heard that Emily, the fourth generation of Bachman furniture peddlars, was in on the business, I called Mark. I knew he’d love that. So I called him yesterday from the airport and asked him to help me understand what it all means to him. Four generations is a really big deal, after all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">“There is a Jewish word for it,” he said. “Yichus.” Now Yichus, I will add, ordinarily means “lineage,” or “connections.” But Mark expanded the definition. “For me it’s about legacy. It’s about going out each day and knowing that the thing you did is being passed on. It means you go to work to work hard, to support your family, and you do it with a smile.” (I immediately thought of Bill shouting, “DONNA!” and each of them finding something new or old to laugh it resoundingly, over and over again.) “Furniture, Fish,” Mark continued. “It’s about legacy. About recognizing that it’s bigger than you. It’s about the ultimate measure of success in seeing that you passed it on.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">When one celebrates one’s birthday in the Jewish tradition, we say, “May you live to be 120.” Moses lived that long, as did Hillel and the great sage Akiva. But for us mere mortals, 120 is the sum of three generations: grandparents, parents, children. But of course for Bill Bachman, for Billy, for William J. Bachman, Esquire, he was all about that extra effort. 120 was never enough for you, Bill. You were about four generations, four times forty, one hundred and sixty long years of family, loyalty and love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">May you rest forever in peace, Uncle Bill. May your soul continue to light the way for us in the world. Thank you for everything. Rest in peace. And may your memory be a blessing.</span></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-26128960338795014582017-12-04T11:36:00.000-05:002017-12-04T11:36:01.686-05:00JCC BrooklynFriends. Here's the official announcement of my new adventure. Looking forward to sharing in the work with you all!<br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is with great excitement and anticipation that I have accepted the invitation of my dear friend Leonard Petlakh, Executive Director of the <a href="https://www.kingsbayy.org/">Kings Bay Y,</a> and his board chair, Stephen Reiner, to join forces and build a new model of a JCC for Brooklyn. Not the expected familiar and paradigmatic big building with a gym but a new template of JCC that inhabits multiple locations and storefronts; neighborhood-based spaces with many purposes, all uniquely attuned to the demands of those living in the particular communities that will surround the many JCC Brooklyns that Leonard and I plan to establish. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a vision for a Jewish future in Brooklyn which recognizes the hyper-local and unique character of particular neighborhoods across the borough. In this vision, what is privileged is the vitality found in smaller, more intimate settings where relationships are built, friendships made, and families together can root their lives in the questions and responses of a rich and meaningful Jewish civilization. JCC Brooklyn will offer the most meaningful Jewish childcare for our families, Shabbat and holiday programming with an especially secular foundation, volunteer engagement with our neighbors, Hebrew education, summer camp, teen programming, book talks and performances, and opportunities to travel to other parts of the United States, Israel and the world, to deepen our connections to the profound histories we share.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Picture a map of Brooklyn, especially the areas where most young Jews are moving: Downtown Brooklyn and Red Hook; Dumbo, Greenwood Heights and Gowanus; Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint; Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bed Stuy. In all of these locations, there is virtually no organized Jewish life outside of a scattering of Chabad outposts, and while this particular spiritual message may resonate for some, there remains an enormous opportunity to serve Jewish people who are interested in being engaged in new and innovative modes of cultural practice.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With regard to childcare, it is true that our cherished synagogues provide congregational or movement based Jewish day care, however, these experiences can only exist within these congregations’ boundaries and their corresponding mission for service. No alternative, movement-neutral experiences in Jewish life are currently available. JCC Brooklyn will answer that call.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A neighborhood-based approach will methodically and strategically gather Jews and their partners and friends in their specific areas, have community-wide conversations about what people want from an engagement with Jewish values. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Kings Bay Y has been leading the way in this area for the last many years. Jewish childcare centers in WIndsor Terrace, North Williamsburg and Fort Greene/Clinton Hill are already filled to capacity, proving the demand. When I visit these communities for holiday and Shabbat celebrations, I come face to face with the Jewish future: open, eager, young Jews seeking a framework in which to raise their families, ask their questions and put their values into action. The imperative to expand this model to other areas of Brooklyn is as strong as it is right!</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since moving to New York in 1990 from Wisconsin via Jerusalem, I have been working in Jewish service. Looking back at the last thirty years of my life, my Brooklyn-based activist, and ethically inspired Jewish life, one in which I have raised my family, the move to JCC Brooklyn is the next logical and natural step. Consider my arc: from being a student of history at the University of Wisconsin with George Mosse and Irv Saposnik to being a graduate student at NYU studying Jews and Blacks in 20th century American life; to becoming a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College and student rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn; as Executive DIrector of the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU; and then as the founder of Brooklyn Jews, an innovative approach to reaching a new generation of Jewish seekers and their partners; and finally to becoming Senior Rabbi back at CBE, helping to lead the synagogue in a new, open, pluralistic direction, as well as aiding in the physical restoration of its landmark buildings in celebration of its 150th anniversary in Brooklyn. Given this tapestry, I feel I know myself, my community, my rootedness in Jewish life, history and literature, and the specificities of my borough well enough to take this next step.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like our Biblical ancestors and generations of Jews since, I have always been drawn to the horizons of Jewish possibility, to the question of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what’s next? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for the Jewish people. In my education, I learned about the powerful ways that learning can change a person’s life. In the synagogue, I discovered the unique power of a central communal hub to care for its members from birth to death. On campus, I learned from students a generation younger than I about the tireless pursuit of the new, of the belief that Jewish progress has always been fueled by innovation, adaptation, criticism and tradition. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More, I have always been taught that Jewish civilization has one of the most unique gifts to offer the world--a response to existential loneliness. We Jews are at once a family, a people, and a nation, with a language, a culture, a calendar and a system of belief and law that is grounded in the notion of the oneness of humanity and the idea of universal justice. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since leaving the pulpit two years ago, I have pursued a handful of endeavors I was eager to devote myself to when I established Water Over Rocks and those projects will continue. Partnering with Bard College and the Bard Prison Initiative, I have helped launch the <a href="https://microcollege.bard.edu/">Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library,</a> a new model for a free, high quality liberal arts education for underserved New Yorkers. Working with leaders in New York City government, I have been establishing an Underground Railroad and Abolitionist movement Freedom Trail in New York City, which was the center of Abolition and the fight against American slavery in the nineteenth century. And finally, working with a partner in Eastern Europe, I have begun the slow, painstaking work of doing my part to join others to memorialize the destruction of European Jewry by marking cemeteries where our ancestors were once buried.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, I have been refreshed and renewed along the way, particularly by the work I have done with my friend Macy Hart, the brilliant founder of the <a href="http://www.isjl.org/">Institute for Southern Jewish Life</a>. In the past six months alone, I have visited Jewish communities in New Iberia and Lake Charles, Louisiana; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Bowling Green, Kentucky. I have also visited important Civil Rights monuments in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, and have been reminded, yet again, of the powerful partnership between Black and Jewish Americans to represent and fight for the cause of universal justice encoded in our American Constitution. History breathes into these visits. And I plan on carrying over the lessons learned there by answering the imperative demand here to learn how one’s local experience connects into Jewish life in Brooklyn today. This is the work of JCC Brooklyn.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During my nearly thirty years of service in New York, I have always been amazed by the capacity of every community to articulate its Jewish aspirations in the context of the charge articulated by the first century sage Simeon the Just: “The world stands on three things: on Learning, on Service, and on Deeds of Loving Kindness.” Jews of all generations--and I would argue Americans of all generations--have similar aspirations. We seek lives of meaning, connection to others and believe fervently in the power of education generally and in particular, community-based education that can transform our local and global world.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The new horizon for me is the JCC Brooklyn, a new model for Jewish life rooted in learning, service and care for neighbors. I look forward to your joining us on this journey.</span></div>
<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-38762589961744458812017-10-25T18:17:00.004-04:002017-10-25T18:17:50.051-04:00A Morning in HarlemAround the corner from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library. And across the street from both is the Harlem Hospital, long-serving that community and the recipient of publicity today in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/nyregion/story-of-sacrifice-and-survival-finds-home-at-harlem-hospital.html?_r=0">New York Times for their display of a mahogany relief mural</a> depicting African life, the slave trade, and the return of free blacks to Liberia. Created by Alfred Yeagon in commemoration of the Organization of African Unity conference in 1979, the piece went long neglected and unknown until its rediscovery by owner Maria King Wallace, who found in Yeagon's studio and brought it to the United States. It is now on loan to the Harlem Hospital, which proudly displays serious African American art in its buildings to celebrate the art for arts sake, and also, one might surmise, to posit that art has unique healing powers of its own.<br />
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The Christie's appraiser describes the experience of looking at the mural as "brilliant and magical and almost magical" and it's hard to disagree. If you have a chance to get up there, go.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGJ_Q7DzTZYgmu5nMTtkhbY0v7XRABhi6zyvWZtmWTAg7ppeVnJVO4QLvOen9BER-sYtT-bmAHNNY5-V99t-4Yr65W_dA-0eFDwWU6KLr0IUd6HglfbRl_WrKi51Mf_7kmrHLjeMC9uAC/s1600/IMG_20171025_111056.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGJ_Q7DzTZYgmu5nMTtkhbY0v7XRABhi6zyvWZtmWTAg7ppeVnJVO4QLvOen9BER-sYtT-bmAHNNY5-V99t-4Yr65W_dA-0eFDwWU6KLr0IUd6HglfbRl_WrKi51Mf_7kmrHLjeMC9uAC/s320/IMG_20171025_111056.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
Across the atrium from Yeagon's mural is one of Harlem Hospital's famous WPA murals--this one by Georgette Seabrooke, who created a Harlem lifescape in 1936-7 for President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. It's a particularly moving piece of art, both for its color and skill, as well as for its historic value. While the notion of the United States federal government funding artists for the sake of supporting their work and allowing their voices a platform to envision a better America may seem quaint, its survival is testimony to an idea that still lives (present presidential mandates excluded.)<br />
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I was struck by Seabrooke's color choices, the way she shaped her bodies and faces, and I couldn't help but think of the Israeli illustrator <a href="http://heflinreps.com/illustrators/artist/rutu-modan">Rutu Modan,</a> whose characters and colors have always seemed to me to be something of a throwback to a past aesthetic, reified.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghHqUOXLwYR2ukoJ4pHwTHs6BTMW30ub6zc2kZJLmeWYwLQBkWeSa5U-LlCGqPKlvMkrw7BzECLe6ap26ZDfmysb0XYBo5NKNREzecg4j-B0mXLOTd4PwfYcuHShS56YaldJMjLja6o7Hz/s1600/IMG_20171025_105622.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghHqUOXLwYR2ukoJ4pHwTHs6BTMW30ub6zc2kZJLmeWYwLQBkWeSa5U-LlCGqPKlvMkrw7BzECLe6ap26ZDfmysb0XYBo5NKNREzecg4j-B0mXLOTd4PwfYcuHShS56YaldJMjLja6o7Hz/s320/IMG_20171025_105622.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq2ickAqaqyn1ZSPBdWEgO1NyB4edJEyMWkRgbDCZdbxg3g_L4wZW-4Qpw4a7TZC8T6wHylmf2KaVv_zVGhT5ebV5-ROHd8pe-5NSKQJzFiu1y_ewSlYXObwDnxhgAquiIcXaX2Kep3I-J/s1600/IMG_20171025_105609.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq2ickAqaqyn1ZSPBdWEgO1NyB4edJEyMWkRgbDCZdbxg3g_L4wZW-4Qpw4a7TZC8T6wHylmf2KaVv_zVGhT5ebV5-ROHd8pe-5NSKQJzFiu1y_ewSlYXObwDnxhgAquiIcXaX2Kep3I-J/s320/IMG_20171025_105609.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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A staff member of the Public Affairs office of the hospital was kind enough to show me around today and directed my attention to a helpful brochure, describing the pieces. It was there I learned that while artists were encouraged to pursue their vision for the pieces, hospital administrators objected to the work once it was completed. New York City hospital superintendent Lawrence T. Dermody objected to Seabrooke's piece in 1937 because there was "too much Negro subject matter," that "Negroes may not form the greater part of this community twenty-five years hence,"and the hospital is "not a Negro hospital, therefore why should it be singled out for treatment with Negro subject matter."</div>
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Well then.</div>
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WPA artists struck back and the Harlem Artists Guild partnered with the Artists Union and sent letters to Mayor LaGuardia, President Roosevelt and his entire cabinet as well as New York City newspapers and black newspapers across the United States. The Hospital reversed itself and the images were allowed to stand. </div>
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The center of it all is an entire room dedicated to the murals of Vertis Hayes, which I was also graciously shown by my wonderful host and his depictions of African American history in the United States is breathtaking. I can't wait to go back with students and teach this inspiring chapter of history.</div>
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Back across the street I stopped in on the Countee Cullent Branch of the NYPL. What a space. In the entrance to the main reading room is a sculpture of Cullen and his literary muse.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiibkKbCn2DJa6lra2p_lp4GO0AqhG22XU4L43FIswUlhDcKwWJsNOmZISOEsSeoN_8p4xnHo-TitqI2sSt7iN41FJGIL2C_PgoqsMl8uBNfJah9_x4jw6GLX_wCrQeHYvOl0ElZsO4XcF9/s1600/IMG_20171025_112508.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiibkKbCn2DJa6lra2p_lp4GO0AqhG22XU4L43FIswUlhDcKwWJsNOmZISOEsSeoN_8p4xnHo-TitqI2sSt7iN41FJGIL2C_PgoqsMl8uBNfJah9_x4jw6GLX_wCrQeHYvOl0ElZsO4XcF9/s320/IMG_20171025_112508.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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On the sculpture's plinth, four excerpts from this great American poet's work. One of my favorites, is "Incident," which I share in full.</div>
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Once riding in old Baltimore<br />Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,<br />I saw a Baltimorean<br />Keep looking straight at me.<span style="text-align: center;"> </span></blockquote>
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Now I was eight and very small,<br />And he was no whit bigger,<br />And so I smiled, but he poked out<br />His tongue, and called me "Nigger."<span style="text-align: center;"> </span></blockquote>
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I saw the whole of Baltimore<br />From May until December;<br />Of all the things that happened there<br />That's all that I remember."</blockquote>
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Memory is long, isn't it? And Art testifies to truth and justice. </div>
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Amen.</div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-16635797762692006862017-10-19T12:00:00.001-04:002017-10-19T12:00:26.798-04:00Many Miles to GoWhen I was traveling around Arkansas and Mississippi a couple weeks ago as part of my work serving as an itinerant rabbi to Southern Jewish communities, I took several details in the Mississippi Delta. From Jonesboro to Memphis on into Jackson, I wanted to stop by sites related to both the history of American folk music -- the Blues -- as well as noted landmarks in the fight for Civil Rights for African Americans. Of course music was central to the struggle, with musicians often using their poetry and lyrics to voice their own observations about property, race, sexuality and politics. It was a civil rights movement of its own, one might say, masked by steel guitar, harmonica, and some deep, dark humor.<br />
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My pal Mike gave me a good map to follow, and I synced my Spotify to play Sonny Boy Williamson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and yeah, Bob Dylan who seems to me nothing if not an electric blues man. I was traveling on Highway 61, after all.<br />
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It was a warm Sunday so most everything was closed; but the cotton was in bloom, the air was dusty, and I don't think I've ever had the experience of rhythm and melody so at one with the environment that at times I felt like I was driving in a trance. <br />
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In West Helena there was Biscuit Row and a memorial called Freedom Park, built to celebrate the freed slaves who joined the Union Army as freedom fighters after the North conquered the area liberated these men and women. I visited Stovall Plantation where Muddy Waters came from and said Kaddish on a spot where his once stood, at the edge of an endless sea of cotton. At the Crossroads I had a brisket sandwich at Abe's, a BBQ joint founded by a Lebanese immigrant who couldn't make sense of serving black and white separate so he simply integrated right from the start, his own pact with the devil, I guess. <br />
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But after lunch as I headed out toward Jackson and passed through Tallahatchie County, I went looking for Emmett Till. Now mind you, I'm aware that Emmett Till is buried up on the south side of Chicago in Burr Oak Cemetery (Dinah Washington is there, too). So by looking for Emmett Till I meant I wanted to find his spirit, figuring it must still be there, haunting the area, and why wouldn't it. Shit. If I were a fourteen year old boy visiting my Mississippi family for the summer and get brutally murdered for having the audacity to whistle at pretty woman, and by murdered I mean beaten, pistol whipped, shot in the head with a .45 caliber World War Two issued pistol ( a pistol issued to kill Nazis and Fascists and Racists), and then have an all-white jury acquit, hell, I'd haunt the area if I could. You know what I mean?<br />
<br />
I followed signs for the Emmett Till Museum in Glendora (where Sonny Boy was born, by the way) and while the museum was closed, there was a family out front of their home next to the site that was welcome enough to explain to me where I was and when I told them I was heading to Jackson, they said to make sure to see Medgar Evers house, since he was of course the NAACP lawyer who represented Mamie Till in her quest for justice for Emmett. <br />
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Just then a train came whistling by, right past the house, and this was the Chicago line and my imagination was lit with thoughts of all the songs about trains and freedom. Transfixed, like some damn fool, I took out my phone and started shooting video of train, clickety-clacking along, right up to the caboose, which then trailed off into the distance, north. When I turned around, the family was just staring at me and I was so embarrassed. "I live in New York," I said. "I don't get to see this often." <br />
<br />
"Son," said the patriarch. "You can head out to the intersection about a mile up the road and see this happen twenty-four times a day!" They all burst out laughing. Damn.<br />
<br />
==<br />
<br />
Sumner, Mississippi was dead quiet. It looked like a town built by Hollywood. I half expected girls in capri pants and Keds and boys in khakhis and checked shirts to come parading down the street carrying picnic baskets and daisies. But the Sumner County Court House is a beautiful structure, stately, appropriately imposing for a seat of justice, and surrounded by plush trees. The sign in front, which rests beneath the shade of a tree, is plain enough to see. <br />
<br />
Take a look.<br />
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Roy Bryant and JW Milam were acquitted by the jury even though they would later admit to the crime. It was Bryant's twenty-one year old wife, Carolyn, who fourteen year old Emmett whistled at, which of course deserved nothing more than a pat on the head and a wink. Nice try, kid. But Bryan's husband Roy and Milam abducted Emmett Till, beat him, pistol whipped him, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The picture of his deformed head, grotesquely misshapen by the violence and the soaking in the river, was published widely and began to slowly awaken Americans to the brutality of southern racism in the Jim Crow era.<br />
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Directly opposite the staircase leading into the Sumner Court House is a statue to a Confederate officer. "For truth dies not and by her light they raise the flag whose starry folds have never trailed; and by the low tents of the deathless dead they lift the cause that never yet has failed," wrote Virginia Boyle, whose quote is carved into the plinth of this Confederate statue. The United Daughters of the Confederacy raised this statue in 1913. "The cause that never yet has failed."<br />
<br />
In 1912, there were sixty-four African Americans lynched in the South. In 1913, there were fifty-one lynched. If you figure that it took a couple years to make and prepare the statue of the Confederate soldier, that means that in the two year period, one hundred and fifteen black Americans were lynched, murdered, hanged, without trial, for the "crime" of being black. "For truth dies not and by her light they raise the flag."<br />
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If you want to know why I'm so personally passionate about and committed to the right of athletes to take a knee for racial justice as the National Anthem plays, this is why. A Confederate statue raised at the height of Jim Crow, during one of the largest killing sprees in the history of our fragile republic, adorned with a poetic cry for the just cause of the Confederacy to never die, towers over a mere historical marker for a fourteen year old boy from Chicago who was murdered forty-two years later, his killers exonerated by an all-white jury. <br />
<br />
Justice delayed is justice denied. Take the knee.<br />
<br />
==<br />
<br />
I learned something interesting this week that I never knew. In John Edgar Wideman's stunning and hypnotic book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, we discover that two weeks after the acquittal of Bryant and Milam, the NAACP tries to have the murders prosecuted for kidnapping. But while the grand jury is in formation, Louis Till's US Army file mysteriously appears, and it indicates that in 1945 Private Louis Till was hanged in Italy, on charges of committing rape and murder. The grand jury never meets. Kidnapping charges are never brought. Not even the smallest sliver of justice for Emmett Till, who was a year old when his father shipped out to serve his country, who never knew his father, and so why there should be any connection whatsoever between Till's murder and the deeds, true or false, of his father, is beyond reason. <br />
<br />
Wideman exhaustively explores this, weaving together his own biography with that of the Tills, melding fiction and non-fiction and pushing the reader to probe and question, to doubt and fear, and leaving us with no small amount of outrage and anger. The condition of black soldiers in the segregated units of the Second World War was one of the great stains and shames of an American democracy fighting against racism, anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe. The poor treatment of black soldiers was a major issue for the NAACP during the war, eliciting protests over segregation, poor treatment, racist commanding officers, and, as one can imagine, a radically disproportionate number of prosecutions and executions for the charge of rape of women in France and Italy during the war. According to the historian Mary Louise Roberts, whose What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, is an enlightening if disturbing read, says that in one particular zone in France in 1944, accusations of rape against black soldiers outnumbered that of white soldiers ninety-five to five. <br />
<br />
That means United States Army military courts in Europe during the war hanged black soldiers in vastly disproportionate numbers compared to white soldiers. That's disturbing as hell. And it's not really a thing of the past, is it?<br />
<br />
Virtually everywhere in the United States, the poverty rate for blacks is two to three times higher than it is for whites. Housing, jobs, education, violence--each tilt tragically, weightedly, toward black Americans.<br />
<br />
We are to be reminded, by writers, by athletes, by our neighbors, that we have many miles to travel before we are truly free as a nation. Music and historical discourse provide insight and at times even comfort. But the road ahead is long and we have many miles to go, many miles to go. <br />
<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-61494148702194678872017-10-17T10:43:00.000-04:002017-10-17T10:43:25.980-04:00From the Past, Forward to Justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
When I came back from a trip to Munich, Berlin and Minsk in the summer of 2016 and the presidential election was iron hot with Donald Trump's hateful campaign rhetoric, I knew that the time was right to engage the public with responsible lessons in the history of the fight for justice and equality for all Americans.<br />
<br />
In Berlin I was moved by the sense of civic engagement around the Germans' sense of responsibility for Nazism and the Second World War. Everywhere we traveled in Berlin, history rose up before us and addressed us with the urgency of memory. From tripping stones and museums that confronted the past to the inescapable reality of the contemporary refugee crisis across Europe, synthesizing the past and the present seemed a prevalent and shared civic duty. Not without controversy, of course. Not all Germans are united on questions of complicity for past sins; nor is there agreement on history's applicability to current events. Nevertheless, there is leadership in the country from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has stood tall among world leaders in addressing hatred head on.<br />
<br />
As I wrote about when I returned, Minsk was a different story. While I met many kind people and some deeply committed educators seeking to reconcile an honest assessment of the past while addressing that past in the public realm, there is still much distance to travel. More than eighty percent of Belarusian Jewry was murdered in the Second World War, targeted and brutally executed town by town, there is very little recognition of the Holocaust with the exception of what Jewish tourists are able to accomplish by erecting small memorials in various places. One million Jews lived in Belarus. Some of European Jewry's most prestigious yeshivas once thrived there. And while many of the buildings still stand, virtually none are marked as such. It's as if the Jews simply disappeared, leaving not a trace.<br />
<br />
In Berlin, buildings and homes are marked and honored as places where Jews once lived; in Belarus, one needs a knowledgable guide to show you the way. All is left to the imagination.<br />
<br />
Here are two blogposts from the trip. <a href="http://www.andybachman.com/2016/08/history-and-reconciliation-path-forward.html?q=belarus">One.</a> And <a href="http://www.andybachman.com/2016/08/the-complex-map-of-our-past.html?q=belarus">Two</a>.<br />
<br />
When I returned to New York City, it immediately struck me that how I felt walking around Belarus must be similar to how African Americans must feel walking around New York City, certainly Lower Manhattan.<br />
<br />
Buildings that still stand and mark the colonial era and antebellum city were built by African American slaves. The wall of Wall Street (how do you think it got its name?), erected to prevent Native Americans from attacking colonial New Yorkers, was built by African American slaves. Only Charleston, South Carolina sold more African men and women into captivity.<br />
<br />
New York City, where slavery was legal until 1827 and where, even after slavery's legal abolition in New York, slavecatchers could still roam and capture fugitives, returning them to their enslavement. Offices, churches, and homes where Abolitionists worked, organized, raised money to free escapees, published papers, spoke and agitated, are all over New York City--from Herald Square down to the Battery and then across into Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights and on into Brownsville. Only Plymouth Church on Orange Street, where Henry Ward Beecher used his pulpit to free slaves; and David Ruggles home at the corner of Church and Lispenard in Manhattan (now home to a Colombe coffee shop) are marked as confirmed locations of resistance, as Abolitionist holy ground, as historical places with lessons for us all.<br />
<br />
For the better part of the past year, I have talked to leaders across the city--museum heads, historical societies, libraries, foundations and non-profits, about the need to mark the story of Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad once and for all. Water Over Rocks mission is to do just that. And everywhere I have gone, people have been enormously receptive and enthusiastic. It's the right thing to do at the right time, people say.<br />
<br />
That's why I am so thrilled to have heard that my City Council Member Brad Lander has joined forces with his fellow Council Members Laurie Cumbo and Jimmy Van Bramer to encourage New York to call for the creation of a new NYC Historic and Cultural Marker Program. <a href="http://bradlander.nyc/news/updates/proposal-for-a-nyc-historic-cultural-markers-program">You can read about it here</a>. As the council members explain, there are many such places throughout the city that can serve as examples of the greater fight for freedom and justice for all people, from the 1863 Draft Riots and the Underground Railroad to the offices of the NAACP and the first Planned Parenthood Clinic in Brownsville, and many more such locations.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/reading-greater-gotham-and-reviewing-new-yorks-historic-monuments">New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb celebrated this proposal </a>last week and reading it thrilled me with the possibility of what it will mean to engage New Yorkers and those who visit the city in this vitally important conversation at a critical moment in our nation's history.<br />
<br />
So Forward we go! I very much hope to lend a hand in this effort. Stay tuned for more developments and thanks again to our city's leaders for reading the times right and galvanizing their voices to lift up the memory of those who came before us, lighting the way for Justice and Peace.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-63709846940667180562017-10-16T19:10:00.002-04:002017-10-16T19:36:08.462-04:00We're Coming for You<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have a relationship with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker which is similar to a lot of people: I read about him in the news and then react to what I read on social media. I'll admit to it being a shallow relationship, fleeting, and not particularly fulfilling, given that it is spread over the distance of 900 miles or so, as the crow flies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But for now it's all I got. And man, have I got a problem.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As a Wisconsin native living in Brooklyn for the past twenty-eight years, I always yearn for the homeland -- granted -- while being fully immersed in the world I inhabit in New York with my family. And while progressive politics and open government and participatory democracy and an independent spirit and common prairie decency were always readily present as I was growing up, so too was a more threatening underbelly of anger, hatred, bigotry and racism. I genuinely believe, in my heart, that there is nothing aspirational and everything limiting and mean about Scott Walker as Governor. While I am here and he is there, nevertheless, I intend to help represent not just the opposition but a better, more hopeful way forward.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">So let's get down to business!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Wisconsin isn't perfect. Crap. Let's just admit it. It wasn't unusual to get called a "kike" at basketball games in areas outside Milwaukee. Black friends were subjected to insidious taunts of "nigger" often enough. And certain social settings were at times weighted by a discomfort with difference.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Growing up, Milwaukee was as segregated as it is now. My school, Jean Nicolet High, participated in a busing program. This allowed for friendships to develop with black friends from the city (we met mostly in sports programs, not classes.) Of course at the time, we were only tangentially aware of the inherent complexity in this. Why sports and not classes, for instance? I can't recall a single instance of a teacher convening a conversation about the already deeply engrained inequities baked into the system. My primary education was excellent. My local property taxes ensured that. The kids bused in came from less well-funded public schools in the city and a very different family background from that which was celebrated or venerated by the suburban families who made up the majority of my school. Like some of the failed policies of the sixties and seventies, we learned the painful lesson that it wasn't enough to simply bus kids into a district and expect the school, filled with "more fortunate kids" and "better teachers with more resources" to transform people's lives. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">People's lives are made in homes, which are centered in neighborhoods, which have their own rules and borders and boundaries. One can't float in and out and be transformed. It doesn't work that way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But as I have come to learn in my life, over these many years, a distinct lack of patience with what it means to live in the world; a pathological and particularly American need to find and develop quick solutions and "move on;" and a stunning lack of concern and responsibility for the long-term effects of slavery and racism in our nation's history have all conspired to create the mess in which we currently find ourselves.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What is wrong with people? I really want to know. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As a kid I was always curious and that curiosity was encouraged. And if someone sought to squelch its urge, I fought like hell against it. Did I inherit this combative inquisitiveness? Is it a genetic trait that's Talmudic? Was it born in Egypt and hardened on down through the ages, made manifest on the courts and fields of Milwaukee? Why is what is so obvious to me not clearly apparent to others?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Genuinely, I don't get it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Back to Walker. Scott was born in Colorado. He grew up in Iowa. Then his family moved to Delevan, which is in South-Central Wisconsin. He moved a lot because his dad was a preacher. I'm a rabbi. So while I was never an itinerant rabbi, I can certainly relate to "the call" and what it might mean for raising kids.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As a young man, according to his biography, he went to Badger Boys State, an American Legion sponsored leadership program. I went to Badger Boys State, too. In 1981. I ran for "Governor" and was crushed by a Reagan acolyte who advocated exactly the opposite of what I advocated. I was for a ban on nuclear weapons, a disengagement of the United States military from Central America, and an infusion of federal dollars into education, welfare and jobs creation. I thought I'd win in a landslide.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Walker went to Marquette University and never finished. He has been in politics ever since. If he were a Democrat, which he is not, his GOP allies would call him a "career politician."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I went to UW-Madison and fed my curiosity. I studied hard. I asked a lot of questions. I listened to my teachers. I smoked pot. I went to Israel. I dropped out twice because my dad died and I was depressed. I actually noticed (based on my experience in high school) that UW, the state's best university, had very few blacks. Hmm. I have been a community rabbi for twenty-five years, give or take. I have seen it all, except for what I haven't seen. I have been with people of all backgrounds and all faiths, from birth to death. And I'll tell you something that I have concluded: Education, Support, Love and Tolerance are ALWAYS better than some inexplicable passion for tax cuts and the evisceration of benefits for working people. Call me crazy but I believe in both helping people and giving them the benefit of the doubt.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Call me stupid again, but I think I can relate to more residents of Wisconsin than he can. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">We have three girls and one is a junior in Madison now, doing her thing and excelling it. We visit her often. This last weekend I read a very disturbing article by Madison journalist <a href="http://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/booming-dane-county-leads-the-state-economic-recovery-but-small-towns-and-milwaukee-are-hurting/">Marc Eisen, about the ways in which the "economic recovery" is only aiding a certain Wisconsinite. </a> Most urban and black and rural areas remain neglected, underfunded, and in pain. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It's a cogently argued and well-researched piece of writing. Based on his Tweets, I'd guess that Governor Scott Walker hasn't read it. But he should. And he ought to be compelled to answer to it. While there are many things to say about it, one in particular really gets my goat, and that relates to the $3 billion tax break given to the Foxconn Technology Group to bring its screen making factory to Wisconsin. There has already been considerable ink spilled on this issue. Here's what got me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Venture capitalist Mark Bakken is interviewed by Eisen and Bakken speculates on what "could be" with a $3 billion investment in Wisconsin, rather than a tax giveaway. Eisen writes:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 800;">Bakken, who is a serial entrepreneur</span> (Goliath Networks, Nordic Consulting Partners, etc.) turned <a href="https://www.healthxventures.com/#about" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #ce1337; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">investor</a> in health info-tech startups, rolled into Ancora Coffee Roasters on King Street with a full head of steam and a great “what if” scenario.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What if the state of Wisconsin invested $3 billion in startups instead of Foxconn? He chortles at the prospect and quickly runs through an almost plausible scenario where a billion bucks could be quickly raised if the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which manages the public employee pension fund, committed only 1 percent of its $104 billion investment portfolio.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I can barely keep up as Bakken sketches out how the state could run a national competition — offer $100,000 to $200,000 for the 1,000 most promising startups in the country to settle in Wisconsin. Bribe ‘em in other words, he says. Sure, most will pack up and leave when it makes sense to do so. But some will stick.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">They could be scattered all over the state. Might the next Epic or Promega or Nordic or Kohler or Johnson Wax be among them, he asks rhetorically. Yeah, probably. For the purpose of diversification, Bakken tells me this strategy made a lot more sense than pouring $3 billion into a lone foreign-based manufacturer.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“For me it comes down to that two-thirds of all net new jobs come from startups,” he says.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As for Foxconn, it could create a whole ecosystem of advanced manufacturing in Wisconsin that would never arise without the subsidy, he admits. “It’s a huge, huge gamble — way more of a gamble than investing $3 billion in a thousand startups.”</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bakken, who briefly considered a run for governor as a Democrat earlier this year, offers a development plan that does not have a snowball’s chance in hell in the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Still, it’s important because Bakken’s idea signals there are other creative, if not more practical, ideas on how to create a thriving Wisconsin economy in the 21st century. </span></blockquote>
An array of journalists both locally and nationally have contextualized Scott Walker already. That's not my job here. He is, unquestionably, a tool of Libertarian billionaires, from the Kochs to the Mercers and the Bradleys, who see it as their mission to unravel American progressivism which arguably began with Lincoln and, in their minds, ended with Obama. Walkerism, in this context, is a real threat to the American ideal.<br />
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And here from Brooklyn, 900 miles away, I plan on using this platform to do my part to take this guy down. He's up for election again in 2018. He Tweets to his heart's content. As far as I can see so far, no one is really taking him on in any substantive or meaningful way. I want to lend a hand in changing that.<br />
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-9456206624942242182017-10-16T11:16:00.000-04:002017-10-16T14:48:41.081-04:00On Sebastian Kurz's Victory in AustriaNo amount of grooming -- from hair gel to slim suits, a fit body and good looks -- can remove the tarnish from Austrian political leader Sebastian Kurz, who rose to power on the re-branding of a firmly right wing platform of anti-Muslim immigration restrictions. Should Kurz enter into a government coalition agreement, joining his New People's Party with the Freedom Party, it will represent another example of Europe's dangerous, nationalist revival.<br />
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In the past century, there has been no other European ethnic minority that has suffered more from extreme xenophobic nationalism as the Jewish people. And with the rise of anti-Semitism again drawing our attention, while racism and anti-Islamic sentiment continue to animate American and European politics, it is essential that American Jewish leadership take strong and principled positions for the defense not only of Jewish civil rights but for the civil rights of blacks, Muslims. Latinos, Asians and other ethnic minorities who are singled out and often violently targeted by extremist groups at home and abroad.<br />
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The American Jewish community and its leadership has been at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights and equality here in the United States. Jews were among the founders of the NAACP and leaders of both the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee were important allies in the African American fight for civil rights. From organization and fund-raising to constitutional arguments in the United States Supreme Court, American Jewish leadership often took the vitally important position that the fight for the rights of Jews cannot be fully accomplished without the fight for the rights of all.<br />
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In the last several years, as global alliances have splintered and extremists have disrupted politics across many nations, several American Jewish organizations have too often taken a "circle the wagons" approach which violates the spirit and the intent of what early Jewish leaders sought to exemplify in an earlier generation.<br />
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Equal rights is not a zero sum proposition. Both Judaism and the lessons of Jewish history are firmly rooted in the notion of the inherent equality of all human beings. From the "human made in the Divine image," as taught in the Biblical Genesis, to the commandment of the Israelites to be "kind to the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt," Jewish ethical teaching has understood that equality and empathy for the oppressed are true expressions of the "birthright" of the Jew.<br />
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In addition, I would add that in my conversations with countless young people who embrace their Jewish identities precisely because they understand that "Jewishness" obligates them to a concern for the inherent equality of the Other, I hear a consistent concern of frustration at how much of American Jewish leadership can seem out of step. Where our black and Muslim and Latino and Asian neighbors suffer, our message must remain clear: We stand with you. Alliances are a two way street.<br />
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I would therefore hope that when a leading Jewish organization like the American Jewish Committee tweets out congratulations to a political leader like Sebastian Kurz of Austria, it is making every effort to inform Mr. Kurz of his obligation to protect not only the rights and safety of Jews in Austria but of every human being of every race and faith who are these days being targeted by forces of hate, fear and violence.<br />
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As we all saw most recently in Charlottesville, Virginia, both Jews, blacks and Muslims are the main target and enemy of White Nationalism -- both in the United States and Europe. And with no leadership from the White House on this front, it becomes critically more important for us to strengthen the relationships we do have with those who seek "liberty and justice for all."<br />
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We are made more strong by what unites us than what divides us and it is the obligation of American Jewish leadership to make that unifying idea as clear as we can -- from Washington to Vienna to Warsaw and beyond.<br />
<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-15335503910767790462017-10-10T10:42:00.002-04:002017-10-10T10:42:47.620-04:00Hey! What's the Big Idea?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Dvar Torah for Parashat Breishit</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A new year and a time for new beginnings. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur and on through Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, Jewish communities worldwide have looked inward through prayer and learning and rededicated ourselves, yet again, toward striving to do what is just and what is right. The Jewish calendar, the holy days, and the life cycle afford us this generous opportunity everywhere we turn. Even Shabbat, our weekly day of rest, is a sacred time every seven days to pause, reflect, rest, recharge ourselves, and begin anew.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-bc6719a2-06bc-0feb-4765-0050cf93d110" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so it is particularly thrilling every year to complete the Torah reading cycle on Simchat Torah and then roll the scroll back to the beginning, to Parashat Breishit, and begin again.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When looked at in the most broad terms, the beginning of the Biblical Genesis is the Jewish people’s ancient cosmology. It is our human origin story. From a massless darkness and chaos, God speaks and brings the universe into existence. The whole array of creation -- from the elements to the planets to every living thing and creature -- comes into being. And the pinnacle, the crowning achievement of this making is the human being, male and female, made in the Divine image; and then finally the Shabbat, the holy concept of rest. Just as the human is made in the Divine image, after God’s “likeness,” so too is the human commanded to rest, just as God rested from the torrent and the tumult of having created the universe in a mere seven days.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, for generations, Jewish commentators have not necessarily accepted the scientific basis for seven days of creation. For instance, in Midrash Rabbah 1:10, the Rabbis teach that since “breishit” begins with the letter “bet,” a letter closed on three sides but open on one, we Jews are not to look into the existence of God or what came before. As the “People of the Book” (and by association, the People of Science--how else to explain all those Nobel prizes!) the rabbinic commentators cleverly look past the literalist view of creation and instead seek to explain the Torah’s origin story in a different context.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The rabbis quote Proverbs 8:20-22: “I walk in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of justice; that I may cause those that love me to inherit substance and that I may fill their treasuries; the Eternal made me as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the beginning of His way,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the first of His works of old.” In this reading, “beginning” is the path of wisdom, justice and righteousness, which happened not in seven days or seven billion years, but happened and happens in eternal time. The purpose of the creation story in this context is not to explain the origins of the universe in scientific terms but in moral terms. It’s not how we got here as much as it explains why we are here and what we may do about it.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Similarly, in another profoundly inventive reading from the sage Rabbi Isaac, the Torah doesn’t “begin” here in Genesis but rather “begins” in Exodus 12, where God instructs Moses and Aaron in the “beginning of months” to teach the Israelites how to make their first Passover sacrifices -- from the slaughter of the first Paschal lamb to blood on the doorposts of the Israelite gates; from the roasted meat, the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs; to the first telling of the first Passover story. In other words, the Torah begins not at “creation” of the universe but at the creation of the Jewish people’s journey from slavery to freedom.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a stunning and powerfully innovative reading. The rabbis here place the commanded people at the beginning of creation, alongside the universal notion that slavery and oppression are an old and evil order meant to be toppled so that the Jewish people can be free to fulfill God’s word, “to walk in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of justice.”</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps a fair interpretative re-reading for the beginning of the Torah might be, “In the beginning, God created the idea that the purpose of creation is to do what is good, kind and just.” It’s as profound and simple as that.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One is reminded of the end of a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In his work called “Tourists,” Amichai writes:</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Once I sat on the stairs at the gate of David’s Tower and put two heavy baskets next to me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide and I served as their orientation point. ‘You see that man with the baskets? A bit to the right of his head, there’s an arch from the Roman period. A bit to the right of his head.’ But he moves, he moves!! I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told: You see over there the arch from the Roman period? Never mind: but next to it, a bit to the left and lower, sits a man who bought fruit and vegetables for his home.” </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.999999999999998pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“In the beginning,” therefore, resides the challenge to grasp the biggest of big ideas: to do good, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to set free the captive, and to be kind to the stranger, because we were strangers in a strange land.</span></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-6236964719581080462017-09-27T09:03:00.001-04:002017-09-27T09:03:31.384-04:00Forward to What Is Right<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was heartened to see that <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/2017/09/26/aaron-rodgers-asks-packers-fans-lock-arms-unity-during-thursdays-national-anthem/705963001/">Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers spoke up in a meaningful way about racial injustice.</a> Besides the wordless protests that have overtaken professional football and begun to creep into baseball and basketball, it's vitally important for white athletes to use their stature and voices to not only rally around team but to do so in the context of what it is that is being protested in the first place: a dangerous and troubling pattern of police brutality linked to deep institutional racism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To be American means facing these issues head on and whether we like it or not, athletes have a great amount of power and influence in the popular culture. What they say and do matters. And especially at a time when the most powerful office of the land, that of the President of the United States, uses the bully pulpit to degrade, denigrate and divide, we need other white leaders to show some backbone and stop up. Rodgers did that yesterday. And hey, why not throw in that as a holder of one single share of the Green Bay Packers organization, I'm especially proud.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">There is clearly much work to be done to address racism and its ongoing corrosive effect on American democracy. Sowing division doesn't help. Speaking and listening to one another does. And since leadership won't come from the White House on that score, we are simply left with no alternative but to find it elsewhere.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And how disturbingly ironic it was that President Trump traveled all the way to Alabama to campaign for Luther Strange against Roy Moore to replace Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate, dog-whistled his usual racist drivel, and lost. So much for the power of his pulpit. He can't pass legislation and even his own crazy talk is not crazy enough for the beast of anger and hatred and apocalyptic vision he has unleashed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Check out this quote from the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/moore-vs-strange-polling-opens-in-alabama-republican-primary/2017/09/25/9c7192f8-a253-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_alabamaweb-1245pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.fbf937989359">Washington Post's coverage</a> of the gun-slinging, Bible carrying, homophobe Roy Moore's victory. "<span style="color: #111111;">In downtown Montgomery, Mable Greenwood, 58, said she voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election but was now supporting Moore. 'The world, I don’t think it’s going to be here too much longer,' she said, explaining her attraction to Moore’s religious message. 'Everything that the Bible said is going to happen — it is happening.'"</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">When I watched Handmaid's Tale recently, I understood it to be fictional dystopia. We now have at least one near United States senator with some real frightening true believers. Imagine what must go through a person's mind to vote for Hillary Clinton a year ago and then decide the world is ending a year later and vote accordingly. It's almost nihilistic. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is a dangerous thread that has always run through American politics and recent cataclysms like earthquakes and hurricanes only make it even more seemingly true. I take odd comfort in this, or, perhaps to put it more constructively, just because others are freaking out, it doesn't mean we have to.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Athletes and artists and political leaders of good will continue to hold their hands on the wheel of progress. Millions more people of common decency get up each morning and try to do what is just and what is right. Beyond the white hot noise of hatred and division is the persistent, if less glamorous work, of repairing the world and trying to make things more whole than the broken state in which we have found them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-george-wallace-can-repent-and-atone-why-cant-others/2017/09/26/515fa266-a21a-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?utm_term=.de42051e2c56">Samuel Freedman has an important oped </a>about this notion of repair and forgiveness and he links it beautifully to the theme of Yom Kippur. It's about Alabama governor George Wallace who at one point in history wrapped himself in the mantle of racism, for his political gain, and then was gunned down. He lost his ability to walk. He suffered greatly. And his suffering softened his hardened heart. It's worth a read. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Until we recognize our shared responsibility for the wounds of racism in our nation, we will continue to be divided. Small steps, often unnoticed, have the power to transform. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/nyregion/rezoning-a-block-in-harlem-respecting-an-african-burial-ground.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront">The Times this morning reports that the African Burial Ground in Harlem </a>is finally going to be officially recognized. A modicum of dignity is restored. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is precisely why I chose to do the work I'm doing with Water Over Rocks in marking the places in New York City that were places of significance for the Underground Rail Road and the Abolitionist Movement. The erasure of history never allows the wounds of history to heal. Recognition, admission and dialogue is the cure.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Let's go Forward and do what is right. For ours and future generations.</span></span><br />
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-34260550681079473432017-08-17T10:36:00.004-04:002017-08-17T10:37:03.521-04:00We Are All Strangers<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6GtBgze4zUQA1OxYoNEmjoPicSwoH8byXPSiqC0qn3FD0nxKg24g3FBpRDXRvODckqgNH-BtoS6JRA080AK8D88g3o0UQpu4G_ad6m0cmpn8cNTG1mkIbsXF7RNeFjGB0pxh-SOb40fCW/s1600/IMG_20170813_120427.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="620" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6GtBgze4zUQA1OxYoNEmjoPicSwoH8byXPSiqC0qn3FD0nxKg24g3FBpRDXRvODckqgNH-BtoS6JRA080AK8D88g3o0UQpu4G_ad6m0cmpn8cNTG1mkIbsXF7RNeFjGB0pxh-SOb40fCW/s320/IMG_20170813_120427.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Parshat Re’eih</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deuteronomy 11.26-16:17</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rabbi Andy Bachman</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this week’s Torah portion, as the Jewish people continue to be instructed by Moses on the importance of observing God’s laws before they journey into the Land of Israel, a dramatic scene is set. “See this day I set before you a blessing and a curse. Blessing if you obey the commandments of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adonai</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adonai</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your God but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day, and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.” (Deuteronomy 11:26-28). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At first glance, there is the simple and straightforward way in which Moses teaches the people. “Look,” he seems to say, “You can live a life of blessing or a life of curses. You decide.” In other words, the free will given to the people to choose the path of blessing and goodness is plainly spoken here. And, as our Sages have taught, it has remained a central tenet of Jewish observance throughout the ages. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven but the Fear of Heaven.” God knows all. Yet we still must choose to observe. In human terms, we might say that God wants us to choose to be in a relationship, to want to show our love and devotion, not to do so out of some robotic sense of devotion or duty. This concept is a fundamental idea to Judaism throughout time. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We choose to do good; we choose to do evil. The power of choosing is in our hands. And as our calendar nears September, how can we not think of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, fast approaching, when we will be called upon to take stock of the choices we have made in the past year? Have we provided more blessings or curses? What have we done to move scales of justice? And how can we use this time of reflection to recommit ourselves to the noble pursuit toward goodness, toward justice, toward blessing, toward peace?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But there is another interesting aspect to this statement. Moses tells the people that God is very concerned with loyalty. “Don’t turn toward other Gods,” he warns. God, as we learned in Exodus, is a “jealous God.” God wants singular devotion, and desires our love. This is also a very human idea. In relationships, in friendships, we cherish the notion of our uniqueness to one another, the inherent “specialness” to what it means to have a friend or to love someone exclusively. God seems to be expressing, quite simply, a desire to have that devotion to be shown and demonstrated over and over again. After all, God reminds the people, “I freed you from bondage, I gave you the Torah, and now I am bringing you into the Land of Israel. I ask for your devotion, in turn.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hammering home this point is the injunction God gives next: “You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worship their gods, whether on lofty mountains or on hills or under any luxuriant tree. Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is impossible to read these lines without thinking of the horrific racist and anti-Semitic display of death and destruction in Charlottesville this past week. How powerful indeed that the objects of worship of the evil scourge of slavery and the Confederacy symbolically sit at the center of this moment in our own nation’s history. Idols to “foreign gods,” masters of bondage and rape and lynching, idols of a supposed “white nation.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is both inspiring and terrifying about the Bible’s reach here is that it demands a total eradication of evil as a price to pay for the inheritance of the land. If this makes us think of the Taliban or ISIS, it should. And if it makes us consider the ways in which we humans wage wars of justice and then tear down the idols of false gods (Communists, Fascists, Nazis, and yes, Confederates), the Bible also demands that a system of universal justice is erected in its place. The bloodlust of destruction, even for those who see themselves on the right side of history, is never enough. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Destruction for its own sake is its own false god. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so the text pivots. It moves from destruction to construction. To society building. To a shared narrative about a common destiny. This is particularly poignant, again in the light of this fraught era in our nation’s history because it feels as though we are frayed as a nation, that we do not have a shared narrative, and that we are still fighting a war that goes back to the founding of the nation in 1619. Until we can tear down the idol that says a person is the property of another person, and agree that we are one humanity, we will never have peace.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the demand for loyalty to the Divine, a powerful equation is proposed. “I will do for you and you will do for me.” It says, “we are in this together.” It is the language of promise, of covenant. It says, in words known to many an American, E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One. We are all in this together.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The text makes clear that the pact, the promise, the Covenant, is not merely conceptual. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is rooted in the reality of human interchange. And so Moses prescribes the laws of eating, relating what the proper and improper animals fit for human consumption and how to acceptably slaughter and prepare them. “You are what you eat” means that the humaneness by which you come to take another living being in order to satisfy yourself is paramount to the pleasurable experience of eating. Additionally, Moses teaches the people a vitally important law about the Sabbatical year, the remission of debt, as well as the care and concern for the poor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“There shall be no needy among you--since </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adonai</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your God will bless you in the land that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adonai</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your God is giving you as a hereditary portion--if only you heed </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adonai</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> your God and take care to keep all this instruction that I enjoin upon you this day.” (Deuteronomy 15:4-5). Not only are we called upon to remember that the enjoyment of our meals is rooted in the obligation of humaneness toward the animals we eat, but that our own enjoyment of the very land in which we live obligates us to the least advantaged among us. God, quite clearly, makes the blessing of our living in the land to be contingent upon, to be a covenanted upon, our fealty to caring for the poor--”there shall be no needy among you.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, the text further states, “Do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman.” (Deuteronomy 15:7). The notion of a hardened heart is a deliberate echo of the Exodus story itself, where Pharaoh infamously hardened his heart to the sufferings of the enslaved Israelites. Our obligation to remember the Exodus, that we were once “strangers in a strange land,” is so central to Jewish identity that it is the mitzvah most repeated in the entire Torah. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely the Bible has something to teach us as Americans. The slavery narrative continues to haunt us, to disturb the sleep of ignorance and passivity. “Be kind to the stranger, because you were strangers in a strange land.” We are all strangers, aren’t we? Vulnerable, wounded, scarred, far from home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But the text holds out hope. And an idea for redemption. We are implored to listen, to choose for ourselves to care for others--especially those most in need. In this way, the Torah teaches us this week; we merit the blessing of living lives of meaning and blessing and peace in the land.</span></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-78776405181850513352017-07-13T04:02:00.001-04:002017-07-13T04:02:47.442-04:00Janesville<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "San Francisco", -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
I finally got around to reading Amy Goldstein's fantastic book, "Janesville," about the catastrophic collapse of the auto industry there in 2008 and the following years. In a bit more than fifty short, memorable chapters, she paints a portrait of the devastation that happens inside a tight-knit community when GM closes its plant and traces the lives of citizens in Janesville and Beloit in their efforts to pull out of a profound economic challenge: the loss of thousands of jo<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">bs, spikes in rates of depression and suicide, and the sacrifices families make to survive. Business and civic leaders, teachers and social workers, union bosses and job re-training experts, and two politicians whose actions amounted to a hill of beans.</span></div>
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I found myself moved and inspired by the characters in Goldstein's portrayal, but also enraged by the enormous neglect of political leadership to plan for the eventuality of such a collapse and then, to effectively do nothing to alleviate the suffering, other than pass legislation that broke the power of unions and cut health care, public assistance and school budgets in the name of cutting taxes (Scott Walker) while also championing the town for one's own political branding and aspirations only to effectively abandon it in a pivot to greater leadership in Washington (Paul Ryan.)</div>
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I was especially struck by the fact that both Walker and Ryan consistently lose in the Janesville electoral district, given that it was and remains a "union town." Their power lies not with the working people of the city but with other powered interests and in certain cases, more rural conservatives.</div>
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The book also highlights the short-sightedness of American economic planning, the myopic attention to the price of gasoline and an inexplicable obsession with low taxes, which saps good government of any meaningful ability to educate its citizens and care for its most vulnerable. As a country we have a long way to go before we come close to fully realizing the ideals upon which our nation was founded.</div>
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Of the many lessons I take away from this great book is that the human capacity for resiliency is bound up in the pride of not just survival but the aspiration to always strive to be better. The FACT that government servants like Walker and Ryan collect salaries and health care as civil servants is profoundly disturbing -- especially when one considers that their policies IN FACT deny those same benefits to millions of working people who make far less money than either of them do.</div>
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"The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice." A quote always worth repeating when we remind ourselves that righting the wrongs of the past is a life-long commitment. I'm just so grateful that there are good people along the way serving as beacons of hope.</div>
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Thank you Amy Goldstein and the people of Janesville and Beloit for an unforgettable and inspiring story.</div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-21190764299987988342017-05-18T19:42:00.002-04:002017-05-18T19:42:38.666-04:00No, No Joe<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "San Francisco", -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Joe Lieberman's name is back in the news as a leading candidate to head the FBI and it sent me back first to Philip Roth's cut to the quick takedown of Lieberman in "The Human Stain," the opening pages of which recall the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the Connecticut senator's particular moral judgment of it all, something Roth, quoting Hawthorne, referred to as America's "persecuting spirit." It's a harsh indictment of Joe: "(a)ll of them eager to enact the astringent ritua<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">ls of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten year old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again."</span></div>
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This begs the question: why would sanctimonious Joe even CONSIDER serving such a known lecherous man as Trump? It simply defies reason and rational explanation, except to say he must have missed the spotlight.</div>
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But more so: Joe, who when he ran as Al Gore's Vice Presidential candidate in 2000, was self-branded as a simple and smart and self-made man, hard-working, Sabbath observant, and so, so moral. And yet, in the last year, he has ushered before the Senate his endorsements of Betsy DeVos, whose known antipathy toward public education is well-documented; and Jeff Sessions, a known and quite quotable racist, who heads the Justice Department, must sit in recusal from the investigation because of his own errors of judgement in relation to Mike Flynn, and is personally reviving mandatory sentencing, a criminal justice policy that has strong opposition from both Republicans and Democrats who understand its profound and institutionally racist ramifications.</div>
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So yes, I strongly OPPOSE Joe Lieberman as head of the FBI. To quote a true patriot, Hank Williams, I say, "No, No, Joe"</div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-89582526581975493602017-05-16T15:19:00.001-04:002017-05-16T15:19:50.031-04:00First Trip Set for Belarus in August<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVyADb7Psz8hXVVyF_YLZO6FZ9N5bjrVh3Crn0v0uGoNPCKzWLxxahlv2cAYWCU-JCHDUmApnGiFZceKXfuSZf5Km4wpQTKTM_2hLmR_96b7NqIdleY_cXb6cgHVXpAjxXirrS2hmPWXl8/s1600/At+the+gate+of+the+Mir+Cemetery+in+Belarus.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVyADb7Psz8hXVVyF_YLZO6FZ9N5bjrVh3Crn0v0uGoNPCKzWLxxahlv2cAYWCU-JCHDUmApnGiFZceKXfuSZf5Km4wpQTKTM_2hLmR_96b7NqIdleY_cXb6cgHVXpAjxXirrS2hmPWXl8/s320/At+the+gate+of+the+Mir+Cemetery+in+Belarus.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4jFKT0c3lPgM_layiaPWfFi_t5HrA9cSPFOwtAua5MNCIic9_ocuapR7plabs8wfxa873Tuc_Uhz6BTNOSBtSwefTnOU_HJYHzFc6IBlScLyr1vT-h0OtIdAX9wvt7wNeeX_iZr6-NYRf/s1600/Gravestone%252C+Kopyl+Minsk.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4jFKT0c3lPgM_layiaPWfFi_t5HrA9cSPFOwtAua5MNCIic9_ocuapR7plabs8wfxa873Tuc_Uhz6BTNOSBtSwefTnOU_HJYHzFc6IBlScLyr1vT-h0OtIdAX9wvt7wNeeX_iZr6-NYRf/s320/Gravestone%252C+Kopyl+Minsk.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">So we have our first trip planned to the town of Korma in the Gomel region of Belarus. August 1-7. There we will restore the Jewish cemetery (cut grass, lift up fallen stones) and raise a memorial to the several hundred Jews murdered by the Nazi forces during the war. We will also photograph each grave, making a digital record of what we find. </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">There are Jewish connections in that region that date back to the early 1500s. Farmers, a small foresting industry, mostly peasants. In the Gomel region there were Bundists, revolutionaries, religious leaders, Zionists and just regular folk. </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Here is how you can help. </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">We need a quick campaign to raise $7500. </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">This will pay for: </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">1. Translator/Coordinator for the week ($1500) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">2. Petrol and Oil for Grasscutter ($50) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">3. Plants for boundaries/fence of cemetery ($2500) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">4. Transportation from Minsk to Korma ($750) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">5. Memorial Stone/Plaque ($1000) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">6. Flight/Hotel for Yours Truly ($1500) </span><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Please give, share and do what you can! Thank you! </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Here is the link to the GoFundMe site: </span><span style="font-family: Lato, Lato, Arial, sans-serif;">https://www.gofundme.com/water-over-rocks-begins</span>Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-38467091144087162032017-05-15T16:17:00.000-04:002017-05-15T16:17:32.507-04:00You Shall Not Be Silent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Another semester at City College of New York comes to a close. For the past year, I have been serving as an Adjunct Faculty member in the Jewish Studies department. As I was told by the chair, nearly 900 students enrolled in Jewish Studies classes at CCNY in the last year and 80% of them are not Jewish. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Think about that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It means at least two things. One, the department clearly does a great job recruiting students to take classes. The chair is warm and friendly; faculty are accessible; lunch & learn opportunities abound with interesting guest speakers (and free pizza for students); foreign trips facilitate the opportunity to learn about Jewish communities in places like Poland and Morocco. So kudos to the department for its noble hard work. It demonstrates that a liberal arts study track with a solid staff and programming has a unique ability to expand the minds of students seeking an education.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But the second lesson here is that hundreds of New York City kids with no direct Jewish connection have been able to demonstrate an interest in Jewish history, culture, language and literature and learn about the "other" in an academic setting, constituting the precise kind of mind-expanding that universities are meant to represent. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">CCNY is, after all, the "people's university." It was once, by charter, a free public higher education. Modern municipal budgets diminished that opportunity for the city's less wealthy residents -- including generations of immigrants -- and the City University budget, like many public universities, lives at the mercy or peril of politics and tax policy. Given that, it remains a beacon of hard work, curiosity and achievement. The students worked very to get where they are and often work one or two jobs to support not only themselves and their professional pursuits but they support their hard-working or struggling families themselves. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My class was called "Jews and Social Justice." In it, I try to demonstrate how the Jewish civilizational narrative, from the Creation myth through the Exodus and on through the rabbinic era in post-Second Temple times lays the foundation for the idea that Justice is very much at the center of Judaism and what it means to be a Jew. From the Middle Ages and the era of disputations to the Enlightenment and emancipation of the Jews to civil equality in the Napoleonic era, questions of justice and equality have animated the conversation about and dynamism of Jewish history. The institution of slavery in America brought forth fierce debates as did the era of mass pogroms, the rise of Socialism and organized labor, Zionism, Jim Crow, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement, whose early days of success were predicated on a now wistfully remembered "Black-Jewish" alliance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In my last class on Wednesday we'll listen to Rabbi Joachim Prinz's stirring speech which he delivered moments before Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. In the speech, titled "I Shall Not Be Silent, Prinz says, </span><br />
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<b><i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in </span><st1:state style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place>Berlin</st1:place> </st1:state><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder. </span><st1:country-region style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place>America</st1:place> </st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">must not become a nation of onlookers.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><st1:country-region style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place>America</st1:place> </st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">must not remain silent. Not merely black</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><st1:country-region style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">, but all of</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><st1:country-region style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place>America</st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself."</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The notion of acting for the "idea and the aspiration of America itself" is a profoundly moving notion indeed. It's echoed in much of the underlying narrative articulated so beautifully and forcefully by James Baldwin in "I'm Not Your Negro." "The story of the Negro in America is the story of America" Baldwin says. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And this was precisely the point of my class at CCNY. The story of the Other is the story of us all. Our need to meet one another, know one another, and build a better and more empathic world with and for one another. "The future of this country," to quote James Baldwin, depends on that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Today in class we examined aspects of the alliance between Jews and Blacks in the NAACP, looking in particular at legal advocacy, public relations and academic studies, all of which were meant to buttress notions of "equality and justice for all" in America. Jewish anthropologists--who fled rising totalitarianism in Europe to find refuge in America--like Prinz, were shocked discover that in America the Blacks were like Jews, oppressed for no reason other than their difference. And often, academicians from the field of anthropology were cited to argue against race theory and racism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">"The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment. We may judge of the mental characteristics of families and individuals," wrote Franz Boas in the Nation in 1925, "but not of races." As Hasia Diner makes clear in her work<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Almost-Promised-Land-American-1915-1935/dp/0801850657">In the Almost Promised Land</a></i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Almost-Promised-Land-American-1915-1935/dp/0801850657">,</a> the Black-Jewish alliance in the NAACP was but one of many examples where the strategy of a shared narrative among different cultures created a fierce bulwark against bigotry and hatred.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is precisely why I founded Water Over Rocks. In a world of great division and rising violence, of dangerous hatreds and ideologies and inexcusable disparities and injustices, our only hope as a planet is for us all to preserve ourselves through getting to know the other. While it is already trite to say, it bears repeating over and over again: Walls and Bans are more a threat to justice and equality than Welcoming the Stranger and Loving Thy Neighbor as Thyself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I'll sign off here with hope and an invitation <a href="http://www.joachimprinz.com/civilrights.htm">to listen to Rabbi Prinz.</a> You shall not be silent. But you will be moved.</span></div>
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-45393487987153730552017-05-11T17:11:00.000-04:002017-05-11T17:11:15.438-04:00FORWARD! Into a Better Future.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As Water Over Rocks begins, let me share with you some of the thinking behind the design of our logo, masterfully created by <a href="http://www.gailghezzidesign.com/">Gail Ghezzi.</a></div>
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In our conversations over the year, I wanted Gail to get a sense of the ways in which Water Over Rocks is about looking back to the past but very much with a forward push on into the future. Images that kept coming to mind for me, among my favorite in graphic art, are those images related to the great WPA poster art. That era of American history was, for me as a student of history, filled with a kind of uncontainable idealism and opportunity, even in the midst of some of the country's and the world's greatest challenges.</div>
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So much was changing so fast, industrialization was making advances but there was enormous dislocation as well. The Civil War was long past, but Jim Crow was wreaking ugly racist havoc throughout America. A mass of more than three million Jews had immigrated to America and new found freedom while millions more remained locked behind barriers of Nazism and Fascism. <br />
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I wanted to capture dynamism, urgency but also something that quickly makes you feel like you belong. And that's when Gail came up with this really cool idea of the triangle that one could imagine getting from a park ranger and a newly minted National Park that hell, maybe you just helped create!<br />
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Thank you, Gail!<br />
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Water Over Rocks is about the idea that there is so much we can do if we set our minds to it; and that when we do it together, bridging the differences that needlessly separate us, we really can make the world a more tolerant and just place to be.<br />
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Water Over Rocks is about the idea that the only way we can begin to make peace and justice in the present is by remaining still enough to listen to others' stories, understand each other's experiences, and find the commonalities that unite us. <br />
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Water Over Rocks is about the idea that differences in race, belief, class, gender, and nationality make life rich and interesting and should never, ever, be the cause or reason for doing harm.<br />
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Growing up in Wisconsin as a kid, I was always proud of the state's motto: FORWARD. One word that says so much about where we ought to be going, together.<br />
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And so here's to a better future!<br />
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<a href="http://wateroverrocks.org/">Water Over Rocks</a> hopes to help lead the way. <br />
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Please join us!<br />
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FORWARD!<br />
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AndyAndy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-39173598880792650962017-04-08T15:42:00.001-04:002017-04-08T15:42:22.757-04:00The Heart of the Stranger(Originally appeared in the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/08/at-passover-seders-american-jews-sing-of-the-heart-of-the-stranger.html">Daily Beast</a>)<div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The present: </span><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/04/now-europe-s-trying-to-wall-itself-off-from-migrants-and-trump.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A world-wide refugee crisis</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; the on-going scourge of radical Islamist terror; an opioid epidemic and massive, uncertain shifts in the world economy as tensions rise between national political priorities and those of the family of nations. For us Americans, this is all playing out against the backdrop of a horribly divided nation, a deeply ethically challenged President, and a wrenching, uncertain future.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The past: Once we were slaves, now we are free. The ancient sages of the Jewish tradition, like their Greco-Roman contemporaries, were fond of distilling complex messages to the briefest of truths. “Avadeem Hayeenu,” once we were slaves, exemplifies a radical truth of Jewish history that has animated our existence as a people and faith community for more than three thousand years. And consequently, this notion of having once been denied our essentialness as humans made in the Divine Image (a privilege shared by all of humanity) we open our telling of the Passover story at Seder meals around the world to embrace this status precisely because its ethical and moral implications are quite clear. “You know the heart of the stranger, because you were strangers in a strange land,” it says throughout the Hebrew Bible—the most repeated injunction in the entire Jewish tradition.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To be free, in other words, is to make oneself radically responsible to the other. To remember our own past and celebrate our freedom is to embrace the existential challenge for facing all those still “yearning to breathe free.”</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so we sing. We sing Four Questions to begin our Seder, making a song of our inquisitiveness. Why is this night, this season, this year, different from all others? What distinguishes our time from the past and what must we do to create a better future?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We sing of our enslavement and we rejoice in our freedom. </span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we sing in thanksgiving and gratitude for each of life’s blessings that if only one of them had been bestowed upon us, it would have been “enough.” </span></div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTb5rfqc9jo" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dayenu</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, perhaps the most famous of all Passover songs, retains this exalted status because its message is clear: Our freedom is ultimately a humbling reality. It is enough. And yet how fortunate we are that we are not only free but we have the Law, a Day of Rest, a land in which to live. It’s an embarrassment of riches and it demands from us a recognition of our shared fate to “know the heart of the stranger,” to share in his burden, to shelter her from the storm, and to sing in anthemic joy, that “this land was made for you and me.”</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is powerful to consider that one idea at the center of the Passover story is the question of idolatry and the power that images have over our existence. Pharaoh of Egypt was not only a mere human enslaving other humans but an idolatrous man claiming to be a god. This doubling of self-worship and self-aggrandizement is a powerful message for our own day.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Americans, whose founders saw themselves breaking the chains of Great Britain’s oppression, we have our own national anthem, which this week </span><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/07/brian-williams-makes-us-cringe-by-calling-syrian-missiles-beautiful.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was brought into stark contrast</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> with the songs we Jewish Americans will sing at our Passover meals. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Singing aloud before sporting events, rallies and other public gatherings about the explosions briefly illuminating our flag is deeply problematic, as those bursts of light blind us from the clarity needed to view war and discern its meaning after its fog clears. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We ought not be blinded by the rockets’ red glare ignited one time in Syria at the behest of President Trump, who has offered no broader vision at all for that terrible war and who has heartlessly striven to close borders, who has pledged to refuse shelter to those most in need.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So if our Jewish National Anthem is the Passover Songbook, I want to argue that we would be better served as a country if our American National Anthem was Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The penultimate verse of this heroic song ends with a question each of should be asking of ourselves in this most historic of springtimes:</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the relief office I seen my people;</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is this land made for you and me?</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A stirring notion: If my neighbor is hungry, so too am I. </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 29.5px;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.3800000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the Passover Matzah, the Bread of Affliction, means precisely that. On Passover eve when we grab hold of the first piece of matzah we will sing, “This is the bread of poverty and persecution that our ancestors at in the Land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. This year we are still slaves. Next year, free people.”</span></div>
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<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s a song I can sing. This land, this bread, was made for you and me.</span></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-342485925365273862017-02-27T17:44:00.001-05:002017-02-27T17:44:02.354-05:00#GiveWayneABanner<div data-tracked="true" style="background-color: #fafafa; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 60px;">
from today's Opinion Section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel</div>
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He is a five-time NBA All-Star. He was twice named the NBA Executive of the Year. He won an NBA title as a player with the 1968 Boston Celtics and was assistant to the president of the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971 when they acquired his former teammates Oscar Robertson and Bob Boozer, both instrumental in earning Milwaukee’s only NBA championship. A year later he was honored by being named the NBA and professional sports first African American General Manager. Leading the Bucks during that time period, for nearly 14 seasons, Wayne Embry’s Bucks were in the playoffs 11 times. And it’s not like the city of Milwaukee hasn’t honored his legacy before: More than a decade ago he was honored with the city’s Legends Award, joining fellow Wisconsin sports greats Willie Davis, Henry Aaron and Junior Bridgeman.</div>
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There’s only one honor missing: Wayne Richard Embry’s name and number should be hanging from the rafters at the new Bucks arena when it opens in 2018. Based upon his overall accomplishments as a leader in the Bucks franchise for more than 15 years, his complete dedication to the game and its integrity over a storied career, and his leadership as a businessman and civic leader, capped by the historic achievement of being the first African American in professional sports to be GM of a team, Wayne Embry deserves this long overdue honor. In fact, Wayne’s achievement as the first Black GM in sports paved the way for others to follow suit, with Major League Baseball naming Bill Lucas of the Atlanta Braves the first black GM in baseball in 1977 and the NFL Baltimore Ravens naming Ozzie Newson as the league’s first Black GM in 2002.</div>
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There is a precedent for honoring general managers' names and jerseys alongside those of players in the rafters of NBA arenas. Jerry Krause of the Chicago Bulls, Jack McCloskey of the Detroit Pistons and Carroll Dawson of the Houston Rockets have all had such ceremonies. Bob Lanier, who played only five seasons in Milwaukee, and Brian Winters, who played eight seasons in Milwaukee, both have their numbers retired. The GM who brought them to town and assembled the team’s perennial playoff appearances? Wayne Embry.</div>
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Honoring Embry is the perfect move for a renewed franchise whose motto, “Own the Future,” has captured the enthusiasm and loyalty of a re-energized fan base. Owners Wes Edens and Marc Lasry, who have demonstrated an admirable devotion to the city of Milwaukee, would do well to “own the future” by honoring a vital missing piece from a glorious past. And it’s especially important to do so at a time when Milwaukee is perceived as an increasingly segregated city with troubling racial equity divides in housing, education and employment. The Bucks' new activist ownership under the leadership of President Peter Feigin has not shied away from the complicated issue of race in Milwaukee. Celebrating the career of Wayne Embry and his contributions to Milwaukee’s civic life during his years in the city would be an important symbolic move to highlight the vital role African Americans have played in the history of the city.</div>
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One of the ways that I understand Embry’s 2004 memoir, “The Inside Game: Race, Power and Politics in the NBA,” is to see his story as a classic African American success story rooted in the power of family, education and hard-work in the face of enormous obstacles —including virulent racism — in order to achieve greatness. A descendent of slaves and sharecroppers who made it to Ohio during the Great Migration, Wayne was educated and excelled at basketball at the Miami University in Ohio before going on to a successful professional career with the Cincinnati Royals (predecessors to the Sacramento Kings), Boston Celtics and then the Milwaukee Bucks Along the way he ran successful businesses, employing hundreds. Through his leadership, he shaped the lives of thousands.</div>
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I am one of those thousands. Here I’ll admit to a personal stake in the matter. I have known the Embry family since 1970, when Wayne Jr joined my second-grade class. We became fast friends and for years I left Milwaukee for a week each summer to go to Nashua, N.H., to attend the Wayne Embry Basketball School. And while I never got much further as a 5-foot-9 guy who can’t jump, the lessons I learned from my friend’s dad and his staff each summer, the lessons of hard work, perseverance, optimism, team-oriented play, sportsmanship and leadership, are lessons I have taken with me every single day on my own life’s journey as a rabbi and community leader.</div>
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One lesson in particular from those summers stands out. Each night of the week, Embry would bring former and current basketball greats to talk to a rapt audience hungry for guidance and mentoring. Not only did we learn how to shoot, pass and play defense, but we were taught the most valuable lesson of all: When building a team, it’s important to remember where you come from and who got you there, and to honor the contributions of those who achieved great milestones in the history of a city and the history of sport.</div>
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Wayne Embry, his family, the Bucks, and the City of Milwaukee are all deserving of this important and worthy celebration.</div>
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<em>Andy Bachman is a Milwaukee native and community leader living in Brooklyn, NY. He is President and CEO of Sadie’s Coffee and Founder of<a href="http://www.andybachman.com/" style="color: #1990e5; text-decoration: none;"> Water Over Rocks</a>, a not-for-profit dedicated to </em><em>memory</em><em> and civic responsibility. He is on the faculty of the City College of New York and served in Brooklyn and Manhattan as a rabbi for more than 25 years.</em></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-17431293462409302302017-01-08T11:52:00.002-05:002017-01-08T11:52:32.427-05:00Pray, Talk, Walk, and Work for Peace<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV2pbTHQcsD_VhnlP3vt7U9bJvQfhyl0XM_3B7677YDVNeQnQ3GjgwR7XGnRGoEq0wWQ0i5AInkMmFmjMUpDko_yPnGy_BesshAQsAgOTBhN3MnJDw13V0JlJQ84-KMEg0xnYMkC1ZecZu/s1600/Scan.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV2pbTHQcsD_VhnlP3vt7U9bJvQfhyl0XM_3B7677YDVNeQnQ3GjgwR7XGnRGoEq0wWQ0i5AInkMmFmjMUpDko_yPnGy_BesshAQsAgOTBhN3MnJDw13V0JlJQ84-KMEg0xnYMkC1ZecZu/s320/Scan.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Minna & Me at the Promenade 2004. She will be there with classmates in February, for the 10th time.</td></tr>
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Another senseless terror attack in Jerusalem. Another nail in the coffin for the two-state solution. Another example of shameless acts of murder carried out by cowardly terrorists afraid to take the risks for peace. Another example of a strengthening of the Right wing's territorial agenda. <br />
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What a bloody tragedy.<br />
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As a teacher, rabbi, activist and sometime Jerusalem resident, I have been to the Promenade countless times. Too many to mention. And I am like hundreds of such leaders who have used the Promenade to actually teach one aspect of the conflict, to encourage a judicious understanding of the delicate balance of Jerusalem's contended reality, to show, visually and in that place, how both settlement policy and terror often work hand in hand to thwart compromise and a two-state solution.<br />
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When I woke to the news of the attack this morning, I thought of hundreds of high school and college students and congregants with whom I have stood at the site of the killing. I thought of my wife and children, and their deep joy at being witness to such a view of Jerusalem in all its glory. And I thought of the soldiers who were standing there today, obligated, regardless of political views, to serve their country. It's likely that one of the people killed was an advocate for justice for all peoples.<br />
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If you have been in Israel on a Sunday, you know it's the day that soldiers go back to their bases after going home for Shabbat. And you know that many soldiers spend part of their Sunday on mandatory education trips, learning about their own nation they are sworn to protect, working in communities at risk, and yes, learning about the very complexity of this horrible, seemingly endless conflict.<br />
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I've seen firsthand those soldiers ask searching questions, arguing with their teachers and fellow soldiers about the nation's direction, and growing into men and women far faster than most do--if only for the responsibility they carry with them each day.<br />
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And if you have been in Israel on a Sunday and walked along the Promenade, you have seen Palestinian kids playing soccer; young families having a barbecue, Israelis and Palestinians of a reasoned and steady mien seeking to set an example for what co-existence may look like. Those are "facts on the ground," too.<br />
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Through the tears and the cries and the condemnations and the recriminations remember this: Peace will come only when the worst among us can be stopped and when senseless violence, which serves no purpose, is brought to a stop. <br />
<br />
Man's particularly twisted habit of serving as his own worst enemy was on display in Jerusalem today. A freedom fighter doesn't drive a truck into a crowd of innocent people. And until Palestinian leadership gets that message straight and controls its population accordingly, the only thing they will be upholding is their side of a terrible bargain.<br />
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Pray, Talk, Walk and Work for the Peace of Jerusalem, not the shedding of its blood. This is our only Hope. <br />
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-90912059651569112522016-12-29T09:20:00.001-05:002016-12-29T09:20:41.254-05:00Waiting for Leaders to Step Forward and Make Peace<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "San Francisco", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the United Nations Security Council vote censuring Israel for settlements and their expansion in territories conquered in 1967 has generated yet another firestorm between Israel and the Obama Administration.</div>
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Sadly, this drama has played itself out before on numerous occasions over the past 8 years, representing, in my view, a series of gamesmanship maneuvers that are entirely and frustratingly predictable. Despite Bibi and Obama not having any great shared admiration for each other, the United States government under President Obama has consistently supported Israel in the court of public opinion and perhaps most importantly, with more military aid than any other American president has ever authorized. This is an incontrovertible fact.</div>
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As an American Jew who has long supported and defended Israel and its right to exist within defensible borders and as someone who has stood up for Israel in the face of virulent and passive anti-Semitism on the Left and the Right, I come to this moment with my own mild, if discernible battle wounds.</div>
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Having been born in 1963, I have only the vaguest memories of Israel's striking victory in the Six Day War. That it faced possible annihilation and virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric less than twenty years after the Holocaust only lent an air of the "miraculous" to its stunning achievement. Jerusalem became unified for the first time in 2000 years and Israelis were able to travel to Biblical towns that for generations were forbidden to them. From a purely historical and archaeological perspective, this was awe-inspiring (and frankly, remains so for lovers of history like me.)</div>
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But where I never stood as a Jew or as a leader was on the side of those who see God's hand in that victory. However, the Israeli government policy for the better part of the last nearly 50 years, has been to deploy the messianic religious fervor found most profoundly in the religious nationalist movement to channel a settlement policy throughout the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria in what the Palestinians rightfully claim as their homeland and to do so without an agreed upon policy based on negotiations. I have always believed that this is wrong.</div>
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My entire adult life I supported the idea of the two-state solution and like many, was sorely disillusioned by Palestinian terror which rejected compromise and unleashed a wave of murderous attacks on Jews in the wake of the Oslo Accords; and I was equally disillusioned by Jewish extremists who were responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.</div>
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And as each day goes by, I see the growing Palestinian disillusionment and the growing right wing Israeli nationalist movement as being locked in a zero-sum game that is as determined as it is dangerous. Each side is banking on the other backing down or being destroyed.</div>
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If the two-state solution is not dead, it is on life support with very little chance of survival. Where this leads is anybody's guess but like so much of Jewish history, there may be surprises both good and bad in the offing.</div>
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While I recognize that the United Nations Security Council has never really been a friend of Israel and most American presidents have generally used the veto there to prevent strident anti-Israeli measures (including Barack Obama on a number of occasions) this latest vote, based on relatively steady but critical language, is not the firestorm many people believe it to be.</div>
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It is true and it is just, this outrageous hypocrisy we sense in the U.N.'s inaction over genocidal massacre in Syria barely registers in the UNSC; especially when considering how easy it was to corral the necessary votes to censure Israel's settlement policy and make it across the finish line.</div>
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But let's be honest, please? When had Prime Minister Netanyahu or his Ambassadors to the U.N. ever shown regard or respect for that institution? It has a history of being anti-Israel and Israel has more often or not used the dais on 42nd Street to remind the U.N. of its hypocrisy.</div>
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Therefore, I am not surprised by the vote. It's disappointing to me that President Obama felt he had to do it as a parting shot at the end of a fraught relationship, but it won't amount to a hill of beans and three things remain certain: 1. U.S. military aid will continue; and, 2. so will the expansion of the Israeli settlement enterprise; and 3. the Palestinian leadership will not produce a viable partner and stable leadership to serve as a peace partner.</div>
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On goes the endless cycle.</div>
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Therefore, I conclude that the pronouncements, mostly hysterical, from Jewish leaders and organizations on the American scene ( and I refer here to the crowing Left and the angry Right) as well the undiplomatic and unprofessional comportment of Netanyahu, Dermer and many other members of the Knesset who rejoice in saying the most offensive things about Barack Obama while also cashing his checks is not about the issue at hand but really about their own relevance and survival.</div>
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Bibi is forever looking rightward because he's a master at political survival. And until an alternative leader arises to knock him off the top of the hill, the two-state solution slips further and further away.</div>
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They like to say that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. One could add a third: the inability to resolve sharing land that two peoples call home.</div>
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So we soldier on. Seeking justice in ways that we can and trying to argue with those we may disagree with respectfully.</div>
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It's a hard knock life.</div>
Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-1448528174797109752016-12-01T12:34:00.003-05:002016-12-01T12:34:44.951-05:00Water Over Rocks: An Introduction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7FbfmRB8m8uWmsQdloKH6htdYVpPE_A3YVmr4hz6S7vfS6AOUemK4lB9s85LlIoukYmjFC6F9RO1exYhyIo1ToVpAEeK3gK5DZq1Tkh20ZYqr-cB9O2D880EVONSrPWYZvXjWF_gwVBdc/s1600/IMG_5527.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7FbfmRB8m8uWmsQdloKH6htdYVpPE_A3YVmr4hz6S7vfS6AOUemK4lB9s85LlIoukYmjFC6F9RO1exYhyIo1ToVpAEeK3gK5DZq1Tkh20ZYqr-cB9O2D880EVONSrPWYZvXjWF_gwVBdc/s320/IMG_5527.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After a bruising election season, it’s clear we are living in truly historic times. Our country seems to be deeply divided, Many in the land are feeling lost, confused and angry. As one who has always believed in the best of our shared national values, and the honorable aspirations of those who yearn for a better world, I am more determined than ever to help empower friends and neighbors together to do good, deepen our learning, build justice and seek peace.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To that end, let me share with you my future plans and invite you to join me in this endeavor by supporting my new non-profit, “Water Over Rocks.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Water Over Rocks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a phrase that captures the moment when Rabbi Akiva, not yet a Sage but a 40 year-old farmer with no history of study, stood by the mouth of a well and realized that the steady, consistent pressure of water could hollow a stone. It is a metaphor that speaks powerfully to me in that it captures the idea that over time, we can change things that seem unchangeable.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While working mainly in the Jewish community, building Brooklyn Jews and serving at Congregation Beth Elohim, this was the name of my weekly blog. Now, I am ready to share the news of my new venture: a nonprofit dedicated to “History, Civic Responsibility and Justice.” It, too, is called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Water Over Rocks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. and I am writing to introduce you to its genesis, mission and goals. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I left the pulpit two years ago, I embarked on a year of intense soul-searching, and impactful experiences teaching and traveling in the American South, Germany, Belarus, and here at home in our own city, all with a focus on issues of reconciliation and justice. Throughout my thinking and traveling, the ways in which we remember, atone, and repair has emerged as paramount. Sharing the stories of our complex history and standing before memorials - the physical manifestation of how we remember - became a dominant part of affirming what matters to me, widening and deepening my long-standing interest in the architecture and environments of historical memory and justice.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Atlanta, Selma and Birmingham - the cradle and cauldron of the Civil Rights movement - I felt the pledge not to forget, met those who changed history, marveled at the South’s many memorials, and was ignited by the idea that we have yet to fully confront the legacy of race in the United States. As a Jew in Munich and Berlin, I saw how Germany today confronts the devastating consequences of two world wars and mass death with a distinctive public reckoning and vocal commitment to reconciliation. I had a very different experience in Kopyl, Minsk, the shtetl in Belarus from which my grandmother fled in 1903. There, I stood over a mass grave and said Kaddish for the 2965 Jews who were killed in one day in 1942. Very little marks the memory or reckoning required to memorialize this haunting site. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I returned to the United States feeling anew the ways in which our own country falls short in our historical remembering, in how we acknowledge our own shameful pasts of slavery, and other historical traumas. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Against the backdrop of these experiences, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Water Over Rocks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will launch the following </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">initiatives</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the early winter of 2017:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many Rivers to Cross</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will establish a dynamic and ongoing public history engagement with Slavery and Abolition here in New York, including creating government support for signage, building real and virtual walking tours, and writing school curricula, so that the children of our city know and understand the rich legacy that is literally buried beneath the surface and embedded in the walls of New York. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many Rivers to Cross</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will also bring youth and adults to Memphis, Little Rock, Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, the heart of the Civil Rights movement and build alliances for justice and equality in a new generation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sadie’s Coffee</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the name of a series of coffee shops staffed in part by graduates of New York State prison educational programs like the Bard Prison Initiative and the Osborne Association, trained in the vocation of food-services and hospitality. The philosopher Maimonides has taught that the greatest act of charity we can perform is to give a person a job and the training to navigate their way through life. This endeavor in particular humbles and thrills me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sons of Minsk</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will aid in the effort to restore the large numbers of Eastern European Jewish cemeteries that lie neglected or in ruins. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Water Over Rocks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will lead multi-faith participants to this work and partner with organizations that are slowly and single-handedly traveling to Eastern Europe to restore these sacred spaces as well as raise memorials in the towns where Jews were murdered.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With welcome legal support from the Pro Bono division an established New York City law firm in establishing Water Over Rocks as a 501c3, I am finally ready to begin. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My initial operations goal in this first phase is to raise $500,000 in order to make possible these projects. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sons of Minsk</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will initiate the restoration of three (3) cemeteries in selected towns in Belarus, in partnership with the Joint Distribution Committee and family-led organizations that have been slowly building memorials there. We will partner with local community organizations and educational institutions to create and build interfaith dialogue about Jewish life in Europe, both past and present. </span><a href="http://www.jdc.org/get-involved/travel-with-jdc/2017/belarus-and-latvia.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I happy thrilled to share that this first trip will take place July 23-28, 2017.</span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sadie’s Coffee </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will open three (3) locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, with the goal of having 50% staff be represented by formerly incarcerated men and women. Partners in this endeavor include the Bard Prison Initiative, the Osborne Association, Sugar Hill Capital Partners, and others.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many Rivers to Cross</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will lead two (2) civil rights journeys for people of all ages to Memphis, Little Rock, Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, in partnership with Etgar 36, a proven educational tour company based in Atlanta.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While I am encouraged by the support I have already had, donations from individuals will be a vital part of launching the non-profit. With great pride in the well of history from which to draw truth and inspiration, with an ever-flowing hope for a future founded on reconciliation and justice, and with deep humility, I ask for your help. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Checks can be made payable to “Water Over Rocks” and sent ℅ yours truly at 20 Plaza Street East, #E2, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Thank you in advance. Truly. </span></div>
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Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-480763369736326403.post-76792128255248054332016-11-18T10:30:00.000-05:002016-11-18T10:30:06.527-05:00Hope and Hard WorkHe said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, long-standing organizations at the forefront of the American Civil Rights movement, were "un-American" and "Communist-inspired."<br />
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He called African-American federal prosecutor Thomas Figures "boy."<br />
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He said the Ku Klux Klan was fine "until I found out they smoked pot." He later said it was a joke.<br />
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Hilarious guy, isn't he.<br />
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So funny in fact that his 1986 nomination for a federal judge position--a nomination made by Republican President Ronald Reagan--was ultimately rejected by a Republican Senate Judiciary Committee.<br />
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Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is a vocal opponent of the Voting Rights Act and is a proponent of mandatory sentencing, the leading cause of mass incarceration in the United States, which every objective measure shows effects most egregiously the African American community.<br />
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Our President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a racist to be U.S. Attorney General.<br />
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I've been to Alabama three times in my life. I found the people there, black and white, to be warm and hospitable and open to a critically important reckoning with the history of slavery, race and civil rights in this country. Are there still challenging examples of racism and discrimination there? Of course. But it's out in the open and slowly but surely, people of good will continue to endeavor, heroically, to turn the tide. It has taken decades and no doubt will take decades more. But as Martin Luther King, Jr, said as one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the "arc of history is long but it bends toward justice."<br />
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Bryan Stevenson, <a href="http://eji.org/">founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative,</a> which runs out of a former slave market in downtown Montgomery, often quotes Dr. King's line in the work he does defending inmates on death row, incarcerated youth, and advocating for a just and fair criminal justice system. You can see Bryan speak in this enormously powerful <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice">Ted Talk he gave.</a> <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="https://embed.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="560"></iframe><br />
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The Guardian carried a moving story yesterday about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/17/rep-john-lewis-national-book-awards-refused-entry-to-library-because-black">Congressman John Lewis winning the National Book Award</a>. Particularly stirring was his recollection that as a young child in rural Alabama, he was barred from the library because was black. He received an education, nevertheless. He rose to prominence in the Civil Rights movement. He was a founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He had his head beaten in by Klan members who were part of the Selma police force that attempted to stop freedom of assembly and protest of racial segregation in the Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery. He was there when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. He was shattered when Dr. King was assassinated. And then he went to Congress, where he has served Atlanta, with distinction, for a generation. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWG4ou4CJV0EqYP5i8p8invDEIUqI8DaO2QlADN1sfyDJChKJ5QTFihjBuL3opnMSU4wV7lQ7QHEiYGXLMMWZLBDIwnXnAbi82p1HPfHznziM21O4fqNytg4bX6s2H78mDTpov7zq18BhH/s1600/aclk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWG4ou4CJV0EqYP5i8p8invDEIUqI8DaO2QlADN1sfyDJChKJ5QTFihjBuL3opnMSU4wV7lQ7QHEiYGXLMMWZLBDIwnXnAbi82p1HPfHznziM21O4fqNytg4bX6s2H78mDTpov7zq18BhH/s1600/aclk.jpg" /></a></div>
And in his moving and inspiring life story, told in graphic novel form for which he won the National Book Award for youth literature, he brings readers to tears with the emotional impact of what it meant to sit on the Capitol steps and see Barak Obama be sworn in as President of the United States.<br />
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I read the trilogy this summer and I can testify, dear reader, that John Lewis will give you hope and strength in the weeks and months ahead as people of good will in our country come together to resist the forces of hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia that appear to be very much at the center of Donald Trump's vision for America. <br />
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Love does trump hate. The arc of history does bend toward justice. <br />
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Hope and hard work will get us through. Be inspired by the sacrifices of those who came before us. We really do stand on the shoulders of giants.<br />
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Now let's get to it! <br />
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<br />Andy Bachmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12793260246107995501noreply@blogger.com0