promise of dawn

dark morn­ings

As the north­ern hemi­sphere moves deeper into win­ter with less light for each day, our morn­ings begin near dawn. This is a beau­ti­ful time of begin­nings and promise. While the sounds we hear each morn­ing are not those of birds chirp­ing and chil­dren learn­ing, but the clank­ing of men at work, even these call out for bless­ings. I recall a favorite melody Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels, a class­mate, com­posed for the begin­ning of ברוך שאמר (baruch she’amar) the first of the פסוקי דזמרא (pesukei dez­imra) recited at the begin­ning of the “morn­ing cheers”. I rarely hear any­one sing it, though I believe it expresses the text beautifully.

mark sings neil’s ברוך שאמר

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writ­ten or spoken

This came to mind when I learned from Avi­gail that she is involved with a project called “Sha­harit: A Think-tank for new Israeli Pol­i­tics” and its Eng­lish lan­guage pod­cast “The Promised Pod­cast” …being a pod­cast for any­one who wants to under­stand Israel beyond the head­lines. Or, as they write:

Finally, after thou­sands of years and so many desert sojourns, it’s here! Grip­ping dis­cus­sion and per­spec­tives on Israeli pol­i­tics and cul­ture. You’ll won­der how you ever lived with­out it.

the promised podcast

Pod­casts are not my medium of choice. My BA was in music and I’m rather attuned to sound, but I did not have an iPod until I needed a new phone in Feb­ru­ary of 2011. I had my hear­ing checked in late Octo­ber, learn­ing that my hear­ing is quite fine (for my age). While I’m begin­ning to lose those upper reg­is­ters, I’m nowhere near need­ing an “aid”. I rel­ish the “Silence” (which I owned for many years).

I appre­ci­ate Oscar Wilde’s com­ment in “The Critic as Artist”:

Since the intro­duc­tion of print­ing, there has been a ten­dency in lit­er­a­ture to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the stand­point of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of plea­sure it should abide always.

Nonethe­less, I’m a text guy. I don’t lis­ten for my infor­ma­tion, I read. Even though I pre­fer to read, one of the rare pluses of need­ing to drive while liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia was the time I would spend in the car lis­ten­ing to var­i­ous news and infor­ma­tion pro­grams. Oth­er­wise, when I sit at my desk with my com­puter in front of me (which is the vast major­ity of my time), I read and write. If I’m doing chores in the apart­ment, or cook­ing, and I’m alone, I will some­times turn on my iTunes, set the music library to ran­domly select any­thing from the (cur­rently) 14,771 “songs” amount­ing to 76.7 days, or 75.17 GB of files. I like to start out the selec­tion with some­thing from the 1,347 “songs” amount­ing to 36.4 days that I’ve not yet heard since adding them to the library. [Yes, that’s an odd ratio. And a lot of lis­ten­ing yet to do.]

walk­ing and talking

How­ever, there are times when I will go for a walk alone. Most of these walks are within a 7-block radius from the apart­ment: to the library, the cob­bler, the vint­ner, the cleaner, one or another mar­ket, the post office, (not the butcher, the baker, nor the candlestick-maker); the usual neigh­bor­hood errands. These jaunts are too short to merit plug­ging the ear­buds into the phone and lis­ten­ing to any­thing other than the city’s sounds. Other times I will walk for a mile or more. These longer walks might be for exercise/pleasure or for an errand beyond the imme­di­ate ‘hood. In such a case, I will plug in, and, if the city streets are quiet enough I can hear some­one talk­ing on a podcast.

It was on such a walk one morn­ing in late Octo­ber when I was finally able to sam­ple the “Promised” pod­cast. The ses­sion I hap­pened upon was the one recorded imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the release of Gilad Shalit. The ini­tial seg­ment had Ger­shon Baskin as it’s guest. Aside from his dis­cus­sion of the role he played in the release of Shalit, I learned that he and the three reg­u­lar dis­cus­sants on the pod­cast are all “grad­u­ates” of Young Judaea. I sud­denly felt a spe­cial kin­ship, as I was also deeply touched by my expe­ri­ence in Young Judaea.

some move­ments end in a whim­per, oth­ers due to success

Both the inter­na­tion­al­ist Jew­ish left that con­sisted of first-generation Amer­i­cans (and their chil­dren) and the Zion­ist youth move­ments that helped cre­ate the State of Israel had thou­sands of adher­ents in the early and mid­dle 20^th cen­tury. They are nearly non-existent today at the begin­ning of the 21^st cen­tury. Both of these move­ments (though antag­o­nis­tic towards each other) added a vibrancy to Amer­i­can Jew­ish life. What hap­pened? I am not a his­to­rian, but I know from per­sonal expe­ri­ence that most of the chil­dren of the immi­grant mem­bers of YKUF rose out of the work­ing class, became pro­fes­sion­als and, while they main­tained a fond­ness for Yid­dish, were not able to cre­ate Yid­dish speak­ers and read­ers of their chil­dren (the third-generation Amer­i­cans). Among the Zion­ists on the other hand, they were often so suc­cess­ful in impart­ing their ide­ol­ogy (as was the case wtih the Habonim ken (“nest” as in group of young­sters) in Los Ange­les) that the entire lead­er­ship made Aliyah leav­ing those behind to strug­gle, often unable to main­tain the con­ti­nu­ity of the group.

While I had grown up in a Yiddishist/Internationalist home, my par­ents intro­duced me to Zion­ism in my early teens (I think for the sake of using the local Habonim sum­mer camp). I con­tin­ued my involve­ment dur­ing the year, accept­ing the nation­al­ist argu­ment. It was in the Habonim Make­lah (cho­rus) that I met Bonia Shur. But, when the reign­ing hadracha (lead­er­ship) made aliyah and the social fab­ric of our ken dis­solved, I looked for another group. Our fam­ily friends in the Bay Area had long been involved in Young Judaea, but its non-political nature had not been attrac­tive. Nonethe­less, I con­tacted the local group and attended some gath­er­ings. The Young Judaea group in Los Ange­les in the early ‘60s was much more intel­lec­tu­ally involved than was Habonim. I don’t remem­ber ever par­tic­i­pat­ing in a dis­cus­sion of Jew­ish thought in Habonim. But at reg­u­lar meet­ings at the home of our Young Judaea madrich (he must have been in his early 30s, with a young fam­ily; he lived in a duplex on 6^th St. between Fair­fax and La Cienega) we enjoyed dis­cus­sions of the work of Mar­tin Buber and A. J. Hes­chel.

In the process of becom­ing more active in Young Judaea, I learned of it’s Israel Year Course pro­gram. Our fam­ily friends’ daugh­ter would be par­tic­i­pat­ing in it the year she grad­u­ated high school, 1964–65, the same year that I would grad­u­ate. This seemed like an amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity not to pass up. While now Year Course is mar­keted as a gap year pro­gram, in the mid ‘60s (and prob­a­bly for many years later), only some­one who had been active in the move­ment could par­tic­i­pate. Because I was a new­comer (I’d never been to any Young Judaea sum­mer camp, and had been involved in the local group only a year), I needed to “prove” my accept­abil­ity by attend­ing the “advanced” pro­gram of the national camp Tel Yehu­dah in Bar­ryville, NY along the Delaware River.

Though I was born in Spring­field, MA, and spent a cou­ple of years in Akron, OH, I don’t think I had been east of San Bernardino, CA since the age of four. I flew east on my own. I don’t remem­ber if I was met at JFK by some­one from Young Judaea or by my uncle who lived on Long Island. Be that as it may, I spent a great time at camp “Machaneh Avo­dah” (work camp), where aside from study­ing Zion­ist thought and inter­na­tional work­ers’ songs such as Bandiera Rossa I learned how to milk a goat.

mark (on the right) with other campers, sheep… and goat at machaneh avodah

The Year Course itself was a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence. Though while many of the other par­tic­i­pants were thrilled by the Southern-California-like appear­ance of Israel, I (hav­ing grown up in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia) won­dered why any­one would (should) feel any spe­cial con­nec­tion to the land if it were not for the Zion­ist idea (which was one of our text­books). Through­out the autumn and win­ter we lived in what was then the quiet and small city of “divided” Jerusalem. After break­fast at our “dorm” the San Remo hotel on the cor­ner of Strauss and HaNevi’im, we walked every morn­ing, up King George Street to what was then the Hil­lel build­ing on Bal­four Street for four hours of Hebrew study. The after­noons were filled with courses in Jew­ish his­tory, phi­los­o­phy, and Zion­ist thought, the phys­i­cal geog­ra­phy of Israel and more. The remain­der of the year included a month liv­ing with a fam­ily and work­ing on a moshav (Kfar Yehoshua), three months on var­i­ous kib­butzim (Hulda), and other adventures.

On our return, I remem­ber a woman from Hadas­sah, at the time, one of the adult spon­sor­ing orga­ni­za­tions of Young Judaea, remark­ing that they often see grad­u­ates of the Year Course return­ing to the States and becom­ing involved in Jew­ish com­mu­nal life on a pro­fes­sional level… some­times as rab­bis. The Jerusalem cam­pus of HUC-JIR had opened the year before my Year Course. I had walked past it many times. Lit­tle did I know then that in eight years I would be back, study­ing at that cam­pus. I know of other col­leagues who also “came through” Young Judaea.

lis­ten to the promise

Since that Octo­ber walk I have had other oppor­tu­ni­ties to lis­ten to this “Promised” pod­cast. While I am not sure what it is that is promised, nor who it is that does the promis­ing, I know that each time I have lis­tened I have gained through the inter­ac­tion of the three pri­mary participants:

• Dr. Eilon Schwartz, found­ing Direc­tor of Sha­harit as well as the Hes­chel Cen­ter for Envi­ron­men­tal Learn­ing and Lead­er­ship and Hebrew Uni­ver­sity professor
• Don Fut­ter­man, fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to Haaretz, blog­ger for +972, and Israel Pro­gram Direc­tor of the Moriah Fund
• Dr. Noah Efron, Sr. Fel­low at Sha­harit, HUffPo blog­ger and lec­turer at Bar Ilan Univesity.

The whole first third of the Octo­ber 28^th pod­cast is all about the state of higher ed in Israel.

I encour­age you to give it a listen.

lis­ten to the dawn

Many orga­ni­za­tions, espe­cially youth move­ments have pro­duced lapel but­tons. I have a num­ber of these made by Young Judaea. For some rea­son, Young Judaea has also been known as “Hashachar” (the dawn). This but­ton dates from the mid 1970s the period when the pod­cast pro­duc­ers were active in the move­ment. I won­der if they ever wore it.

HashachaR

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.