what would dad think?

polity not piety™

Yes, that’s a “trade­mark” sym­bol there. Why not? I con­tinue to tell peo­ple that I came to the rab­binate out of “polity” not “piety”. My involve­ment was as a com­mu­nity orga­nizer. A quick check on Google indi­cates that I’m nearly the only per­son to have used it… and, at that, sig­nif­i­cantly more frequently.

nathan hurvitz

Our father died 25 years ago today (29 Iyyar 5746). He was only 71. He had a weak heart from rheumatic fever. And he lead a stressed life as a “Type A” Per­son­al­ity (though while he could be hos­tile, at times, he did not express “free-floating hos­til­ity”). And then at 41 he had a mas­sive heart attack… fol­lowed by a cou­ple more in the next few years. Were it not for the fact that this hap­pened in the late ‘50s and that he had a weak­ened heart to begin with, he would likely have been a can­di­date for coro­nary artery bypass surgery. But life did not work that way. Instead, he lived the next 30 years, a full, but care­ful life.

Nate Hurvitz grew up in Cleve­land, OH, in the “first area of set­tle­ment” (oddly enough, I thought this was a com­monly used soci­o­log­i­cal phrase, but I can find noth­ing that explains the phrase on the Web). His par­ents had come to the States from Chernigov, Ukraine, Pale/Settlement via Ham­burg, Ger­many on the Printz Adal­bert which arrived at Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia on April 14, 1914. (How Hil­lel Gure­witz and Fayge Brinn trav­eled from Cernigov to Ham­burg, I never learned.) In Cleve­land, his par­ents were blue-collar work­ers who iden­ti­fied as Jews and extreme left­ists, and inter­na­tion­al­ists. Hil­lel, now Harry, sang in the choral group of his Jew­ish work­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion. Fayge was a seam­stress and took in piece­work. Nate’s first lan­guage was Yid­dish. In fact, he did not speak much Eng­lish until he began pub­lic school, and, even when he was in his early thir­ties, he thought the Ger­man word for “old woman” was “alte yid­deneh”. Nate was 14 years old when the Great Depres­sion began. Dur­ing the 1930s, as the fam­ily lore has it, Nate, a good speaker, was able to draw a crowd while orat­ing from a soap­box. He would do this in front of a house in fore­clo­sure where the owner’s goods were being removed. As the crowd gath­ered lis­ten­ing, oth­ers would be busy mov­ing the objects back into the house. But, Nate wanted to be a writer, not an agitator.

nate hurvitz the writer

on cre­ativ­ity

Dad would have agreed with Ein­stein:

Imag­i­na­tion is more impor­tant than knowl­edge. Knowl­edge is lim­ited. Imag­i­na­tion encir­cles the world.

Dad wrote poems, plays, songs, short stories.

the word (words & music by nathan hurvitz)

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I have many slips of paper on which he wrote; slowly I have begun dig­i­tiz­ing them so that our broader fam­ily can have access. He also wrote numer­ous arti­cles, both in his pro­fes­sional field and in areas of inquiry that engaged him.

Though he died 5 years before it launched in 1991, he would have loved the Web. He often used web imagery when talk­ing with us about learn­ing, a sim­ile I now use with our children:

Learn­ing is like cre­at­ing a fish­ing net or a spider’s web. The more you weave into it the more it is capa­ble of catching.

He would also say:

Don’t let col­lege inter­fere with your education.

His cre­ativ­ity led him to work in var­i­ous media.

faye hurvitz with one of nate hurvitz’s cre­ations at barns­dall art exhibit, los ange­les 1973; photo by nate

nate the sculptor/astronomer

I’m ahead of my story

Even though he con­tin­ued to write all his life, and had projects on which he was work­ing when he died, Dad was never able to make a liv­ing from his writ­ing. On his return from his “all expenses paid tour of Europe dressed in green” he devel­oped an intense inter­est in Jew­ish his­tory and life… espe­cially the life of the destroyed com­mu­ni­ties of East­ern Europe from which his par­ents had come. He worked, not as a writer, but as a social worker in the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and then in pri­vate prac­tice as a mar­riage and fam­ily coun­selor. He and our mother col­lected arti­facts that depicted the life of the working-class Jews of East­ern Europe. (He used to joke that this was our yerushe ירושׁה (inheritance).)

part of our (phys­i­cal) inheritance

After Dad died, Mom arranged to give their col­lec­tion of graph­ics (wood­cuts, lith­o­graphs, and etch­ings)to the Magnes Museum in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia which exhib­ited the collection

shtetl life brochure

and pro­duced a cat­a­log of it.

shtetl life cat­a­log (front)

noth­ing alien

Dad was a life-long athe­ist, and though he never read Rosen­zweig (pre­fer­ring his­to­ri­ans to philoso­phers), he would likely have agreed with the para­phrase of Ter­ence attrib­uted to him (Franz): “noth­ing Jew­ish may be excluded as alien”. Dad was com­mit­ted to the sur­vival of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Even dur­ing his years as an Inter­na­tion­al­ist (as con­trasted with being a Zion­ist), he and Mom sent me to Habonim sum­mer camp and encour­aged my par­tic­i­pa­tion in Zion­ist youth activ­i­ties. As an athe­ist Jew­ish fam­ily, we observed Shab­bat in our home with can­dle light­ing and its bless­ings, kid­dush, and motzie. When Dad’s col­leagues would join us for Shab­bat din­ner they would won­der why “Natie Hurvitz the athe­ist” was say­ing the bless­ings. He responded by say­ing that:

These are the folk­ways of our peo­ple. As the world turns toward dark­ness, it has been the role of the Jew­ish peo­ple to light can­dles in the dark. By doing so we iden­tify our­selves with Jews every­where and through­out his­tory who have lit their candles.

His intense com­mit­ment to the Jew­ish people’s sur­vival, pos­si­bly blinded him in ways that caused him pain, and likely short­ened his life even more than the phys­i­cal prob­lems that he refused to allow to limit him.

but tweet­ing #torah?

How did the son of Nathan Hurvitz, the Yid­dishist Sec­u­lar­ist Inter­na­tion­al­ist Athe­ist, become a rabbi encour­ag­ing peo­ple to do this:

”Twit­ter Torah to the top” in the “cloud” as it appears above #Sinai for #Shavuot.

first: polity

With the world’s aware­ness of the “Face­book Rev­o­lu­tion” & “Twit­ter Rev­o­lu­tion” in Moldova as well as in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the Arab World, I won­der: can the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity use Twit­ter as a com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing tool. Can we “Tweet #Torah to the Top”? Can we use this it as an “orga­niz­ing project”, a test to see if some­thing more con­se­quen­tial than Justin Bieber, can draw people’s attention.

As MyJewishLearning.com expressed it recently in its daily e-newsletter called “Jewniverse”:

The project’s imme­di­ate goal is to make “Torah” one of Twitter’s most-talked-about topics.

I would call that a worth­while goal in and of itself.

This effort “democ­ra­tizes” Torah. Every­one can share a thought about Torah:

• Bar and Bat Mitz­vah stu­dents could be encour­aged to tweet a thought or two about their Torah Portion.
• Con­fir­ma­tion stu­dents could be encour­aged to tweet a thought or two about the Ten Com­mand­ments (as well as the Torah por­tion from their Bar or Bat Mitzvah).
• Any adult edu­ca­tion class could tweet their favorite Psalm, Prophetic thought, Rab­binic maxim.
• Any­one can tweet a thought about: what it means to be com­manded; what “rev­e­la­tion” means in a world of infor­ma­tion overload.
• In 5770 Rabbi David Levy of Suc­ca­sunna pre­pared a tweet for each of the Parsh­iot. I know that some peo­ple write haiku, oth­ers write lim­er­icks. These short forms often fit quite well as tweets.
• If you have ser­mons that are online, shorten the URL using a ser­vice such as is.gd and add that short URL to a phrase that describes the sermon’s theme.

I’m inter­ested in this as a once-a-year activ­ity, a sort of “pil­grim­age” or “gath­er­ing of the tribes”. After all, Shavuot is one of the three pil­grim­age fes­ti­vals. When you’re at the “be-in” unusual mixes occur. I want to see what hap­pens. On pre­vi­ous occa­sions (this is the third year) I’ve “met” peo­ple who have been inter­est­ing to fol­low (which means “learn from/with”).

As part of this project, I won­dered: “How does an idea go viral?” Social sci­en­tists have stud­ied the phe­nom­e­non. Some Twit­ter users have been able to fool the world about cer­tain actual events such as
Think­ing bin Laden Watched The IT Crowd and Big Bang The­ory. And so, I’ve mentioned:

In fact, on @TheDailyShow @billycrystal told Jon Stew­art “Jews should tweet.” Do you think he means “#Torah to the Top”? http://is.gd/nuryZj

Please join us if you have a Twit­ter account. If you have a Face­book account, you can “join” the event.

then: piety:

How­ever, MyJewishLearning.com takes the idea fur­ther, and in a very pos­i­tive man­ner. (Beyond: “I mean, like, who cares if you can make #Torah “trendy” for a day… doesn’t that seem to cheapen Torah?”)

But the larger goal is to remind us how inspi­ra­tional the Torah can be—even if you’re read­ing it 140 char­ac­ters at a time.

From all of these per­spec­tives, I’m sure that Dad would have thought this a valu­able activity.

and beside that…

both in rela­tion to Dad and Torah:

All his life, Dad worked for a nicer and bet­ter world. He shared those val­ues with his chil­dren who carry on his (and Mom’s) efforts. Though Dad rarely wore a lapel but­ton (Mom did, she had a few favorites), he would def­i­nitely agree with the sen­ti­ment expressed in this one. (The Eng­lish is: “a nicer/prettier and bet­ter world”.) He would also con­cur that this thought is at the core of Torah.

א שענערע און בעשׂערע וועלט

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jacket you no longer wear, or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lay­ing around that you do not feel emo­tion­ally attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. At some point they will all go to an appro­pri­ate museum. You can see all the but­tons shared to date.