A Very American Path in a Crisis: "You Should See A Rabbi / My Rabbi"

Congregation Shaarai Shomayim where 

Jack Paskoff is the Rabbi

In October of last year I had a day that could only happen in America.  In the morning, I went to a counseling session at the Statewide Adoption Network, the people who helped us adopt our sons.  I had been seeing a counselor to help me deal with problems my older son was having, and to help me deal with the problems I had dealing with my older son. 

At the end of the session, the counselor, who is an Asian-American from India, asked me about the bicycle trip I took across Eastern Europe in June and July. She knew I was seeing Holocaust sites and memorials.  I told her the trip was wonderful, sometimes very emotional, but I expected that. One of the days was in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But after the trip I came home to Nazis marching in the streets in America yelling, “Jews will not replace us.”  I told her how that affected me.  She knew my father was Jewish and I grew up only nominally Jewish.  At the end of the session she said, “You should talk to a Rabbi.”

That same day I had an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon about an injury. He also knew I had gone on the trip to Eastern Europe so after the exam he asked, “How did the trip go?” I told him about the trip and about Charlottesville.  He said, “You should see my Rabbi.” 

He gave me the phone number for Rabbi Jack Paskoff. The Synagogue where he is the Rabbi was on the way home so I stopped, met the Rabbi briefly and made an appointment to talk.

Two weeks later we talked.  I told him about my very happy life that got turned over in November of 2016 and then knocked flat watching torch-carrying Nazis marched in America. 

After about 40 minutes Rabbi Paskoff said, “Ever since you left home after high school, you have chosen your identities: airman, soldier, husband, father, student, writer, racer, your choice. Now your identity has chosen you…….

Welcome to the Jewish experience.”

He then said I was welcome to attend Torah study and services. He hoped that the congregation could help me find peace. 

I started attending Torah study on Saturday mornings and Wednesday morning prayer. After the prayer meeting on Wednesdays, several of the men meet for breakfast. The man who invited me is a retired Army Sergeant’s Major. At the first breakfast, I found six of the eight men, including me, were veterans. Most served during the draft.  In the 45 years since I first enlisted, I have never been part of a veterans group. Now I am.

Rabbi Paskoff said the question of anti-Semitism is never “if?” but “when?”  Until Charlottesville and now Pittsburgh, I could navigate the prejudice. But the events in Charlottesville and, more importantly, the President’s response, said the danger is real. President Obama recently said in a campaign speech, “How can it be hard to condemn Nazis?”  He made it sound like a joke, but the former President knows exactly why the current President can’t condemn white nationalists: racists and Nazis are the base of the Trump Party. 

The gunman in Pittsburgh said on line that the caravan lie was the reason he chose that moment to murder. The day of the shooting and every day until the election, the President said the same lie, loudly and stridently, as did his worshippers in Evangelical pulpits and on Fox News. 

Racism, horrible racism in the form of Slavery and Jim Crow, is as American as murdering Native Americans to take their land.  Virulent anti-Semitism is back with a Presidential Seal of Approval.

After Pittsburgh, I decided to become a member of the Synagogue where Jack Paskoff is the Rabbi.

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Meeting Gil Hoffman, Israeli Podcaster

Gil Hoffman, politics reporter at the Jerusalem Post and

Host of "Inside Israel Today."

On Monday night I heard Gil Hoffman speak in Lancaster, Pa., at Congregation Shaarai Shomayim, the synagogue where I have been going to Torah Study and Minyan for the last year. I have been listening to Hoffman’s podcast on The Land of Israel Network for a little more than a year. 

Hoffman is a political reporter for the Jerusalem Post and one of eight hosts on The Land of Israel Network. They post a new podcast almost every day (except Shabbat) from one of the hosts. Hoffman’s podcast is titled “Inside Israel Today.” The other podcasts cover the history of Israel, politics, faith, Torah study, and more politics.

How does one become a fan of an Israeli podcast network?  Recommendation from a good friend is the way many people find a podcast they love. That was true in my case, although more than a little ironic. 

My path to following The Land of Israel Podcast began on Friday, August 11, 2017, when I saw Nazis marching on an American campus chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”  The next day, the Nazis and their white nationalist allies murdered a woman and maimed innocent people on the streets of Charlottesville. 

A few days after Charlottesville, after hearing the President refuse to condemn Nazis, I called my best friend Cliff to talk about what happened. Cliff is a monk in a monastery in Germany. We were roommates on the Cold War U.S. Military Base in West Germany in the late 1970s.  I left the Army to go to college. He stayed and became Bruder Timotheus. 

Cliff travels to Israel as part of his ministry. He suggested I listen to Ari Abramowitz and Jeremy Gimpel, two Rabbis who host the “Israel Inspired” podcast on The Land of Israel Network.  I listened. They disagreed about Charlottesville and Trump. I liked the podcast, even if I disagreed with Ari Abramowitz. So I listened to the other podcasts on the network including those by Gil Hoffman, Josh Hasten, Rav Mike Feuer and Eve Harrow. 

I started learning about Israel politics from Gil Hoffman and Josh Hasten.  From Rav Mike Feuer, I learned about the History of Israel. Eve Harrow is a tour guide who talks about the beauty of Israel among other topics.

So thanks to my friend who is a brother in a Lutheran monastery in Germany and has friends in Israel, I am learning a lot about Israel, past and present.  It was a lot of fun to meet Gil Hoffman. I hope to meet other hosts from The Land of Israel Network when they travel to America or when I next travel to Israel.

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World War One Centennial and a Welcome Home

With fellow awardees and organizers

Today my son Nigel and I went to a ceremony honoring veterans of World War I and all veterans.  It was also a Welcome Home for me and four other Vietnam-era veterans who received lapel pins and sincere thanks from other veterans and members of the Harrisburg community.  

Harrisburg Police Honor Guard

The entire ceremony was in three parts and lasted nearly three hours.  We first gathered in the Midtown Arts Center and heard talks and proclamations honoring the service of veterans and firefighters.  I was one of the speakers.  I began by telling the audience that I was invited to speak to save time. I enlisted and re-enlisted for four different wars over a forty-year period, so I could speak about wars I signed up for between 1972 and 2016.   

After an hour at Midtown Arts we walked four blocks to the Susquehanna River.  There was a band and the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle group along with two horse-drawn carriages.

At the river more people spoke about World War I while we crowded around the statue of a soldier from that war.  The Harrisburg Marathon route passed in front of the statue, so we had to be careful crossing the street not to impede the runners.

After a wreath ceremony we walked back to Harrisburg Arts where five of us received pins for service during the Vietnam War. We were also welcomed home.

Along with me there was a Navy Veteran and three members of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Group.  My son and I left immediately after the ceremony hoping to catch the finish of the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Brazil.  I should have written down the names of my fellow awardees, but I assumed everything would be on line.  I was wrong.  If I am able to get the names in the future I will update this post.

The emcee for the ceremony was Brigadier General Wilbur Wolf who invited me to speak. I finally met Wilbur's wife Amy at this ceremony. We talked a lot about kids and college.

Bishop Nathan Baxter offered the prayers at the beginning and end of the ceremony.  Some of his incredible career is here.

Suzanne Sheaffer, a Gold Star Mother, was one of the organizers as was Lenwood Sloan. Rick Kearns read poetry and other writings for the ceremony.

Command Chief Master Sergeant Regina Stoltzfus spoke at the monument.

Leader Yasin Sharif gave a prayer of reconciliation at the memorial site.

First Meeting of "Sapiens" Book Discussion

In life, there are few things better than a lively discussion with bright people.  The first of four meetings of the “Sapiens” book group was exactly that. Five of us discussed the first six chapters of Noah Yuval Hariri’s book about the history of our species.  Three more people intend to join the next meeting in December.

For me, this is my second reading of the book and my second discussion centered on this fascinating book. Last year “Sapiens” was the book discussed by the “Evolution Roundtable” at Franklin and Marshall College. It is a group of professors that meets weekly to discuss a book on evolution. This book generated a lot of controversy.

The “Sapiens” discussion group meets at the Rabbit and Dragonfly coffee shop in Lancaster, Pa. I first got the idea of starting the group from a fellow member of the Philadelphia Area Science Writers of America. She wanted to read and discuss “Sapiens” but lives in Bryn Mawr. I knew people in Lancaster and Massachusetts who would want to talk about “Sapiens” so I decided to start a group assuming we would meet in person and have people join on Skype. 

Susan could not join the first meeting, but we did have one Skype participant, Emily Burgett who called in from Massachusetts.  Emily, Sarah Frye Gingrich and I volunteered for the same English as a Second Language program for the last two years.  Also in the Rabbit and Dragonfly were Joe Steed, who I worked with at a dot-com in 2000 and Theodora Graham who was my first professor of humanities when I went to college after the Army in 1980.  

In the discussion, we talked about how different the actual spread of Homo sapiens around the world looks based on current research than we learned in school.  The fact that we co-existed and mated with Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominid species goes against the linear narrative of evolution in older textbooks.  The extinctions that early Homo sapiens caused were also surprising and sad for all of us. 

We talked about the Peugeot myth at that is central to Hariri’s presentation of the cognitive revolution and his funny and true assertion that wheat domesticated humans, not vice versa, from the standpoint of evolution. 

Next month we will go further into the agricultural revolution and how our species changed in the last 10,000 years.  In January we move to religion. That should be really interesting. In the five people in the first meeting we have two cradle Catholics, and Orthodox believer, an Evangelical and a Jew. 

But most of all we had a lively discussion among people of varied backgrounds bringing their own experience and insights to look at the same book.  I can’t wait for next month.

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A Marine, An Airman, and Two Soldiers Walk into a Meeting

Victory Parade in New York City at the end of World War I

Tonight I went to the third session of a monthly veterans meeting held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The meeting is called:

The Art of Reintegration: Veterans and the Silences of War. The group also includes family members of veterans, teachers, and a student who hopes to work in counseling veterans.  

In the meeting we watch videos, and talk about art and poetry that relates to the theme of the month.  This month was "Homecoming." We talked about homecoming for veterans of World War I since this year is the centennial of the end of that terrible war. We talked about parades in major cities for returning veterans and a country that greeted the soldiers as heroes.  

Then we talked about coming home from the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror.  

One of the veterans is a Marine who served in the Vietnam War. He talked about his experience of coming home. He got called a babykiller in the airport and in his home town.

Another is an Airman who loaded bombers for missions in Afghanistan near the beginning of the war.  He, like the two of us who are Iraq War veterans, got the "Thank You For Your Service" welcome home.  We talked about how the thank you can seem shallow, but it is better than the hate from the Vietnam era.

The Marine and I also served in the Cold War.

I heard about this group from a friend who works at the historical society.  I like discussing art and poetry with veterans. It reminded me of talking about the "Divine Comedy" and the "Aeneid" in Iraq. 

The group starts again in January. I'm looking forward to talking about more art and poetry with this new veterans group.  This morning I was in my other, more informal veterans group.  After 45 years of not belonging to a veterans group, now I am in two. 

I guess I'm just slow.

Along with the Historical Society, the group is co-sponsored by WarriorWriters.

An Army of One-Issue Voters

Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen hold radical opinions, sometimes crazily  contradictory opinions.

Many men and women in uniform I have known are one-issue voters.  So many soldiers I met in Iraq voted their guns.  There was no issue beyond guns that could sway them. The NRA rating of the candidate was like the score of an olympic gymnast.  That rating said winner or loser, loudly and finally.

People of Faith in the military tend to be radical. I knew one-issue anti-abortion voters in uniform, and I knew one-issue women's-right-to-choose voters in uniform who were really strong in their opinions.

One of the funnier categories for me was the libertarian soldier. I could understand libertarian soldiers when there was a draft, or in their first enlistment, but I have known many career soldiers who professed belief in small-government and were against socialism in any form--except their own lifelong government health care and VA benefits.  I knew one sergeant who was a libertarian and also a lobbyist working to get more money from the state and federal government for the National Guard.  He saw no contradiction. The money was for defense. That's good, he said.  It never occurred to him that every lobbyist thinks their own cause is good.

Because I served in the draft era, I have been a one-issue voter all of my life.  I won't vote for a draft dodger. I will vote for a person who chose not to serve, but not for a man who let someone else serve in his place. Since 1992 I have had a choice for President just once, in 2008. In that year, a combat veteran ran against a man who reached his 18th birthday long after the end of the draft.  I really did think about that choice in 2008, until John McCain nominated Sarah Palin as his vice president. The possibility that she would be President put me squarely on the other side. In every other election, there was at least one draft dodger running, so I voted the other candidate.

I voted today. The draft-dodger President said the vote today was about him. So I voted against him.

Physical Therapy, the Bible, and Fundamentalists

The Greek New Testament

This week I continued physical therapy after last week's knee operation. After some jokes about bones and joints, the therapist and I got into a discussion about Ancient Greek, Hebrew and the Bible.

He asked if Greek was like Hebrew because a fundamentalist family member of his often talked about those languages, though the family member does not know those languages.  I said they were not much alike at all, but they were two of the languages, along with Aramaic, that the Bible was written in.

Of course, the fundamentalist in his life bragged about taking the Bible literally.  Which led us to a conversation about what literal really means.

For Christians, the most important passages of the Bible are the words of Jesus.  Jesus is quoted throughout the four Gospel accounts. Each of those Gospels are written in Greek.  They are eyewitness accounts by four men who knew and followed Jesus during His brief, three-year ministry in Israel.  Jesus traveled, but only in Israel, then as now a very small country.  Jesus spoke to Jews and to people who lived in Israel, including Roman officials and soldiers.

All of the words Jesus spoke were in Aramaic and Hebrew.  Aramaic is very like Hebrew and was, at that time, the commonly spoken language of Israel and what is now the Middle East.

Fundamentalists believe there is a perfect autograph copy somewhere of every word of the Bible.  Therefore, they can take the Bible literally because every word is perfect.

If there is anything repellent to a fundamentalist, it is actual faith. They want certainty. The idea of perfect manuscripts fits with their need for certainty. But as with all of life, the reality is complicated, way too complicated for a fundamentalist.

Most of the words of Jesus recorded by the Gospel writers were spoken in  Aramaic. Jesus spoke Aramaic as He gave what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, also known as the Beatitudes.  This brief speech is recorded in the beginning of Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Matthew.  But Matthew did not write the speech in Aramaic, he wrote it in Greek.  Matthew translated the words he heard from Aramaic to Greek.

Most Americans speak just one language, so they don't deal with the problems of translation in their daily life.  Someone who speaks only English can think of translation as some kind of word-for-word swap from one language to another. But anyone who deals with multiple languages knows better.

In this case, Matthew's Greek version of what Jesus said is 87 words.  The closest I could get to Aramaic is a Hebrew version of the New Testament.  The Hebrew version has only 64 words.  A standard English translation has 121 words.

The fundamentalist version of Bible inspiration says Matthew was doing something akin to automatic writing. That he wrote 87 words of Greek that became the perfect original. Inspiration in this view is something akin to automatic or magic writing.

For this to be true, we have to imagine Matthew, a real human person, remembered the words of Jesus and wrote down the 87 Greek words that exactly corresponded to those 64 (or so) Aramaic words.  A real person translating those words would wonder "What about this word, what about this phrase?"

All language is culture which is why there can be a new translation of the Bible every year, in any language.  Matthew, the man, wanted to express what Jesus said, the best he could. In the process of writing the Gospel, he was not in a trance. He wrote, he thought about what he wrote, he changed what he wrote. As with anyone who has ever translated a sentence, or a paragraph, or a book, we must choose words, phrases and syntax to best express what we believe was said.

Matthew was also writing about a man he did not understand. Matthew knew Jesus, lived with Jesus, and like all the disciples, misunderstood Jesus.  How could it be otherwise? We never fully understand each other. Matthew heard the words of God in the form of man. Part of translation is trying to express not just the word, but the thought being expressed.  No translator has ever faced a greater challenge than a Gospel writer.

So Matthew was translating the words of Jesus from Aramaic to Greek and striving to pick the right words to represent the Words of God.  Matthew wrote by faith, not by dictation. Matthew had a different task when he was writing what Jesus did rather than what He said.  Then Matthew was turning his memories into words.  But, again, his task was not as straightforward as the same task would be for a native speaker of Greek.  Matthew, like every New Testament writer except Luke, was a native speaker of Aramaic. So he was writing in Greek even though Aramaic was the language of his early life and thought.  Matthew wrote good Greek, but not native-speaker Greek as Luke did.

Before the Bible was translated into English, the spoken words of Jesus were already translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. The idea of a perfect original copy fills many imaginations but simply does not exist. No one has the exact words spoken by Jesus. No one wrote down the exact Aramaic and Hebrew words Jesus spoke, so no one has what would be the true original copy.  What we have is the memory of four different men translated into Greek words. Those who can read Greek know that the four accounts differ greatly in tone. Luke wrote very good Greek. Mark wrote with a limited vocabulary using grammar and syntax strongly influenced by Aramaic and Hebrew.

Everything about real life makes a mockery of certainty.  We can only live by faith or make up a false certainty to hide behind.

The entire universe, from photons to galaxies, is at once too small and too vast to fully comprehend. The result is that those who reject all religion, such as Richard Dawkins, and those who reject all science, such as Ken Ham, are equally, extremely wrong.  Science of every kind opens new frontiers constantly because every aspect of life has new facets to discover. Faith flourishes in every culture despite all the skeptics.

The Bible itself can never be pinned down like a butterfly on wax by fundamentalists. Jesus left no writings. Every word of Jesus in Scripture recorded by the Gospel writers is a translation from Aramaic or Hebrew to Greek.  In English those words are two translations away from the original words.  And those words have ambiguities and connotations and shades of meaning even in the original language--which we don't have.

Accidentally Stumbling into Happiness

The Declaration of Independence

The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, along with Life and Liberty, as the foundational rights we should have as Americans--and a good reason to rebel against the English King. 

Pursuit of happiness, like pursuit of wealth, is not the same a having it.  Annie Grace, author ofThis Naked Mind helps people get alcohol out of their lives and live happier lives as a result. She is brilliant and very much data oriented. When I heard about her, I was impressed. So who has a happy life?  

It turns out that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence were doing many of the things that lead to real happiness. They were committed to a cause bigger than themselves; they had strong relationships (a real possibility of "hanging together" as Benjamin Franklin famously said); each one had a goal in life; and they were helping others. In their pursuit of happiness, they were doing the things that actually make people happy.

Annie Grace puts exercise and meditation at the top of her list of things that lead to true happiness and she uses a lot of data and brain science to show why this is true. Since I did not hear about Annie Grace until this week, I had not plan to follow her advice, but it turned I am doing most of the things she says lead to a happy life.

According to Grace people who have a happy life:

1.     Exercise, not just exercise but exercise with others toward a personal goal. Most of my rides are training rides with other racers.  When I was in the Army, I went to crowded gyms and trained to score high on the fitness test.

2.   Meditation. I started meditating this year. The program I use calls meditation, “a vacation for your mind.” They are right.

3.     Strong relationships.  It has been my immense good fortune to have a variety of strong relationships. I have Army buddies I am still in touch with from both the 70s and recent years. I have a wonderful family. I have friends from racing and friends who are as intensely into books as I am.  Recently I have added friends who share an intense interest in politics. I hang out with some of my former co-workers more than three years after I retired. Social media keeps me in touch with people I only rarely see in person.

4.     Having a goal in life. From the time I left home at 18, I have joined groups with shared goals and had goals of my own. In each of the four military organizations in which I enlisted, I was part of the mission. My professional jobs were in communications—my mission was to tell customers and other influential people that the place I worked is wonderful. I did far and away my best work when the communication goal was clear.

5.     Gratitude. Annie Grace recommends a gratitude journal, writing down five things I am thankful for each day. I am going to start.

6.     Helping others. I don’t do enough of this.

7.     Active leisure: Do sports, don't watch sports, at least while the sun is up. I am a member of book discussion groups and even had a couple of book groups in Iraq. My current college course is learning Modern Hebrew. 

8.     Belonging to something bigger than us. In real life, the Lone Ranger was miserable.

I really do have a happy life, but it’s nice to have data that confirms why I am happy.

I didn't start meditating or Yoga until this year. It's never too late to make changes.