I don’t usually address You this way.  I don’t mean it like I’m starting a letter.  I mean, Dear One.   You Who are tender and compassionate toward Your creatures.  You Who are precious Yourself.  You Who may have created us, humans, in Your image so you wouldn’t be alone — but like all children, we have grown beyond Your expectations and control.  I think that happened on Day 1 of our existence, exercising our free will to choose something You had told us not to.

I don’t usually address You this way.  You are far more abstract and metaphorical to me than personal, up-close, and known.  I respect Your mystery and know You best as Creator: When I lift my eyes to the starry sky and contemplate the depths of space, You are there.  When I tell my storytelling beads and consider the magnitude of Creation and the brevity of our lives against the backdrop of 13.7 billion years, You are there.  When I reach into my tradition and the words, the melodies, the images speak across thousands of years to illumine our today, You are there.

But I don’t usually lean on You as a Friend.

Dear God.  You who must be more troubled than any of us tonight.  Dear One.  Be with them.  The families.  20 families (as far as I have heard) whose children will never be coming home.  6 families whose beloveds will never be coming home.  One family whose son and mother are dead but not only that — their son and brother (nephew, cousin) is the perpetrator of this horror.  The families whose teachers will never return to their classroom.  An entire school bereft of its principal — apparently, so I have heard, gunned down while trying to tackle the gunman, and the school psychologist similarly.

Dear God, help them.  Shield them.  Comfort them.  Strengthen them.  You who are close to all who call — I am calling.  But not for me.  I’m ok, thank God.  My children are ok, and thank you God for that.  (This hit me as a mother for the first time.  I don’t know if it’s because I’ve now been a mother long enough; or because if that were my town I would have had two children in that school, my two youngest.  I don’t know.  But it did.)

But for me it’s just reflected grief, shared in some tiny measure with others whose life-long burden it has become.

I haven’t heard, but it must be that among all the families, for some the sixth light of Chanukah has now become forever the night that their children didn’t come home.

And for the rest, probably, there are already presents under the tree, or wherever they’re kept mid-December.

Dear God.  Be with us yet. And especially, be with them.

For the rest of us, our job is just to be there; and then to continue to have, as civilly as possible, the very difficult American discussion about what “a well-regulated militia” might mean in terms of “the right of the people to bear arms.”  A discussion much of the rest of the world looks on with astonishment.

And our job is also to fund more complete mental health care, and restore the grants which provided for staff training in schools on how to avert or lessen tragedy when it comes to call.  These teachers were practiced, and undoubtedly that saved lives.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet / Lest we forget!  Lest we forget!

That’s not where I thought I’d end.  Kipling’s poem is titled “Recessional” and I have that sense tonight of having turned a corner: the wave receding down the beach, the funeral over.  But that’s only me.  I make sense of things once I begin to understand the story, and though we don’t know the story of the shooter, there are other stories which are more important to remember and it’s been good to hear them.

But I know that Newtown has turned no corners, except that people have found each other.  For them:  Light one candle. It’s what we ended the service with last night, and as always when strong emotions are engendered by circumstance, some of the words simply leapt out at me.  “Light one candle for those who are suffering / the pain we learned so long ago.” “What’s the commitment to those who have died / That we cry out they’ve not died in vain?”

This is why we will not fail. Our tradition teaches us to bring light.  Our history teaches us that, indeed, the light will not go out; I think after 3 millenia we can be fairly confident in that.  So that’s what we do: Bring hope of continuity even in the moment of radical discontinuity.

But our tradition also tells us: Do not seek to comfort your neighbor while his dead still lies before him (Pirkey Avot 4:18 or 4;23, depending on your translation).  So I do not say these things so that mourners will hear them.  For the mourners, our job is to be still and be present.

Don’t just do something, stand there.

Dear God, stand there with them.

My Facebook profile picture since March 23 has been this:

(Note that this “hoodie” — we just called them sweatshirts when I was a kid, or hooded sweatshirts — is from the Women’s Rabbinic Network conference in 2001.)

As of today, I’ve switched it back to something else.  George Zimmerman is being “welcomed” to the Seminole County Intake Center.  If I were him I’d be terrified, and I am sad to see this.  His life has changed irrevocably, and I don’t wish him ill.

But I am still glad that he has been charged and arrested.  That is what the hoodies and marches and petitions have been all about.  Not a conviction or punishment, but a call for the system to be working properly.

The speakers and commentators tonight have impressed me greatly.  Angela Corey, the Florida prosecutor who brought the charges.  She spoke clearly, to the point, powerfully, and intelligently.  It cannot be easy to be a woman in her job, and she walked the line between tough and sensitive with a skill I have rarely seen.  But the thing that impressed me the most was that she spoke simply and truthfully, refusing straight-out to answer questions that she should not answer, putting no one down, making no predictions.  I suppose it’s ok for a public servant to begin a private meeting with bereaved parents with prayer; it makes my church-state-sense a bit queasy, but I suppose no harm done and comfort perhaps brought.

Trayvon Martin’s parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton.  Dignity.  No anger.  Specifically, Tracy Martin said that they do not feel anger at George Zimmerman.  That is an amazing thing to say.  I would be furious.  They spoke of gratitude, and they spoke with sadness. Gratitude that the justice system has gotten un-gummed and is moving again.  Gratitude for the outpouring of support from around the country.  Their on-line petition showed that a lot of people were noticing, and I cannot believe that it was irrelevant.  As one of the commentators said, that pressure wasn’t what resulted in charges being brought, nor should it be.  But the pressure got the powers that be to take a second and clearer look, and that in turn resulted in the merits of the case commending themselves to the special prosecutor.

George Zimmerman’s (new as of today) lawyer Mark O’Mara on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”  Honest, fair, clear, to the point, sensitive, and intelligent.  And classy: he began his first appearance (I didn’t see it, but he spoke of it when asked) by offering his condolences to Trayvon Martin’s family.  The lawyer for one of the members of that family said it made her proud to be a lawyer.  It’s so simple; but so rarely done.  Nobody is disputing the fact that an unarmed child died (though show me the 17 year old who wouldn’t hate to be called a child!).

The three commentators on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”  Three black faces and three measured, thoughtful responses.  Their faces are becoming familiar to me from appearances on MSNBC, but names don’t stick in my head; O’Donnell’s blog doesn’t mention them, so I can’t look up who they were.  One was from TheGrio.com. Another, a man from Washington DC with locks, spoke words that Jews could really identify with, historically.  I paraphrase:  This restores your faith in your country.  It restores your sense of belonging.  It deletes that sense of powerlessness that was hanging over you while it looked like someone was going to get away with murder (metaphorically speaking, at least), again.  You come out of this feeling like a full human being again — not because you weren’t one, but it felt like you were being treated as if you weren’t, as if you and yours didn’t count for as much as other human beings.  He spoke of restoring your manhood, as a black man.

So I’ve changed my Facebook picture back.  Nothing will bring Trayvon Martin back to life, but what’s happening is finally what should be happening, and it only took 45 days.  Justice had to be on bed rest for a while, but she has not miscarried.

I know.  This isn’t news.  I’ve even thought about it with my own children, two of whom are young black men.

But my heart is in my throat because Trayvon Martin could be my son.  And while we talk about race and color and perception and prejudice and difference and history — and our common humanity — a lot in our house, there’s still so much more we have to do.

Corey Dade:

I am a black man. This is one of the realities I have lived. My parents prepared me for it.

To be sure, my parents taught me to transcend matters of race, interrogate them when necessary, and even ignore them where possible. However, they also gave me “The Talk.”

For other boys coming of age, parents may end “The Talk” after a lecture about sex, drugs, alcohol or Internet porn. The rite for black boys often is more rigorous: We’re also drilled on a set of rules designed to protect us against suspicions too often associated with the color of our skin.

“There is still a tendency to see you first as ‘here comes a black man,’ so we teach our black children how to handle other people’s problems,” says professor William E. Cross Jr., of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

From “Florida Teen’s Killing: A Parent’s Greatest Fear” by Corey Dade.  He listed 5 rules:

1. Never leave a store without a shopping bag
2. Never loiter outside, anywhere
3. Never go anywhere alone (but travelling in a group of black men is dangerous too)
4. Never talk back to police … and never, ever, reach into your pocket
5. Never doubt trouble may strike anytime, anywhere

Cosby Hunt:

The detail about Trayvon’s death that stands out for me is that he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. My youngest son, Ellington, who turns 3 tomorrow, wears his Batman hoodie with the ears as much as a he can — sometimes to bed if we’ll let him. Freeman, our oldest, prefers to battle his bad guys as Captain America.

Every night at dinner my wife and I ask the boys what their favorite part of the day was. As they get older, the dinner table may also need to serve as a place for cautionary tales.

We did not plan to give them advice about hoodies, but now I see we’ll need to have that talk, too. We will have say, “You know how you used to wear your hooded Batman sweatshirt when you wanted to fight the bad guys as a kid? Well, now that you’re older, some people will be confused and think that you are the bad guys if they see your hoodie and your skin color. It’s silly and wrong that anyone would think that you are the bad guys, but we don’t want you to be hurt. We don’t want the real bad guys or even some guy playing superhero to hurt you.”

My wife and I don’t dread having this talk, but we do need to make sure that we have it.

From “Trayvon Martin: A Tragic Death And A Lesson Learned” by Cosby Hunt.

Last summer my tall oldest son, who was almost 13 and muscular from soccer playing, was stopped by the State Police while he was walking home from the Brunswick Library with his backpack on. He’s an avid reader and we’ve judged him old enough to walk carefully along the busy road we live on, where there are no sidewalks. So maybe once a week he’d don his backpack, walk about a mile to the library, load up on thick fiction, and come home.  And of course stay up till 3 in the morning devouring the latest.

He was in sight of home when he was stopped, and felt fortunate that when they asked him, “Are you lost?”, he was able to point and say, “No, I live right there.”  And then scarper home.  It was scary, he said.

Turns out it wasn’t scary enough.  We, his mothers, realized that he’d been stopped because he was black.  A white kid walking down the road in broad daylight in Brunswick when school’s out wouldn’t be stopped.  He would just be going somewhere, going home or going out.  But a black kid — who didn’t look like a pre-teen — must have been out of place.  Not easily explainable.  There aren’t very many black families out here in Brunswick, so what was he doing here?

And in fact, his mothers are white, as is our tenant, so if they knew about the adults who live here and hadn’t noticed the children, this wouldn’t register as a black or multiracial family.

We’ve talked about taking cookies and going over to the State Trooper barracks, at the end of the road, and introducing our kids. Haven’t gotten around to it.  Aren’t entirely comfortable with it.

But I wonder if we’d better just get over our discomfort and do it, for their future safety.

Turns out that Eldest Son hadn’t a clue that his being stopped might have been racially motivated.  Had that conversation with him tonight.  Invited him to sit down and watch the news coverage of Trayvon Martin ז”ל (z”l, an abbreviation for Zichrono Livrachah, May his memory be a blessing).  And he got it.  That young man was walking where he had an absolute right to be, but not where he was expected to be; a guy with a gun started following him in a big SUV, and when he got scared and tried to get out of there, then when he was cornered and asked a reasonable question (“Why are you following me?”), he was shot dead.

Walking While Black.

And the shooter — who apparently is Hispanic and not, thank God, Jewish (Zimmerman — reasonable assumption) (not that it’s any better for him to be Hispanic, but this feels so personal and so scary that I don’t want to have more scary complicated identity issues in it for me)(correction; police identified him as white, his family says he is “also” Hispanic.  Someone in the family Jewish?) — is not arrested, is not in jail.  Say again?

My heart is in my throat.  That’s my son who was shot.  That’s any of our sons.  He doesn’t have black radar about racism; he’s being raised with the best awareness we can give him, along with his two black siblings and his white sibling, but I guess we’re not doing enough.  He needs to know, in his gut, that he’s not as safe as we wish he were.  His youngest brother needs to know that although he likes to imagine himself a superhero and talks about punching a policeman if he ever got in trouble, he needs to move slowly and keep his hands in sight and say “Yes sir” and “No sir” and not assume that he’ll be treated as he should be.

Trayvon Martin’s father tried to warn him of that too.

We do not live in a post-racist society.  This horrible bumper sticker is proof enough of that:

Went viral, apparently the manufacturer (known for such crap, pardon me) pulled it.  But who would create/sell/buy/display such a thing?!  Apparently some Americans.

I keep thinking about congregants of mine, two white women raising a very tall black son whose name is not Ezekiel.  When he was about the age my son is now, one of them reported to me a conversation she’d recently had with his Montessori school teachers.  Mom was talking about having to teach son coping skills for being black in white parts of the world, because he could be mistreated e.g. by police.  The white teacher(s) replied, “Ezekiel?  But he’s so wonderful, he’s such a leader,” etc.  To which Mom replied, “They won’t see Ezekiel, they’ll just see a young black man.”

As a Jew, as a lesbian, I can pass.  As a woman (usually), as a person of color whose skin or features identifies them, one cannot.

My son has a favorite hooded sweatshirt that he wears all the time.  I don’t know exactly why he likes it, though I suspect that he sometimes keeps the hood up when his hair isn’t looking good, and other times feels safer with his emotions in there.  I know enough about traditional manners that I’m uncomfortable with him wearing the hood indoors, but if he wants to hide, I try to let him.  But at the back of my mind is also this worry.  A young black man in a hoodie …

Please read about Trayvon Martin.  I’m scared.  This could be my son.

Links:

Huffington Post: Final moments captured in phone call

ABC: Phone call triggers demand for immediate arrest.  Includes video.

Huffington Post:  Million Hoodie March

USA Today: USA is soul-searching.  Includes video and lots of links.  I linked to this article above in the post as well.

ThinkProgress.com: What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin.  Starting with the fact that this happened three and a half weeks ago and I only heard about it on NPR yesterday.  I also linked to this article above, in the post.

NPR: A Parent’s Worst Nightmare.  Including the rules that the reporter’s parents drilled into him.

I am a black man. This is one of the realities I have lived. My parents prepared me for it.

To be sure, my parents taught me to transcend matters of race, interrogate them when necessary, and even ignore them where possible. However, they also gave me “The Talk.”

For other boys coming of age, parents may end “The Talk” after a lecture about sex, drugs, alcohol or Internet porn. The rite for black boys often is more rigorous: We’re also drilled on a set of rules designed to protect us against suspicions too often associated with the color of our skin.

“There is still a tendency to see you first as ‘here comes a black man,’ so we teach our black children how to handle other people’s problems,” says professor William E. Cross Jr., of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

GlobalGrind.com: White people, you will never look suspicious!

Huffington Post: Seller of similar bumper sticker says it’s not racist and neither is she.  In fact, “According to the dictionary [the N word] does not mean black,” she said. “It means a low down, lazy, sorry, low down person. That’s what the N word means.”

Yeah, like “Jew him down” didn’t originate as a slur upon a group, it just means “bargain effectively.”  And “Welsh on a debt” isn’t a slur on a particular nationality, nor is “going Dutch.”   And “Jeez” isn’t a disrespectful form of the name of the deity in Christianity.  Sorry, “negro” is “black” in Spanish and it has roots in Latin.

For me, Tikkun Olam is inextricably intertwined with sustaining the world entire.  It always has been, though I didn’t know those words for it.  I was always out in nature and also trying to see the biggest picture.  When I was at Camp Swig in California in the summer of 1974, in my first intensive Hebrew summer camp session, I remember arguing with fellow campers that the maintenance staff shouldn’t come and exterminate a wasp nest near one of the cabins; those wasps had a right to live just as much as we did.  We had a camper terribly allergic to stings — bee? wasp? hornet?  Did we kids know the difference, really? — and so I was confronted with an argument for the other side that I couldn’t answer either: What right had we to ask a fellow camper to assume a danger we didn’t have to assume?  Though again, I didn’t have it thought out quite like that at the time, and that’s not at all what my interlocutors meant; they simply privileged human life above wasp life.  Which isn’t an unreasonable position for a human to take, but it wasn’t mine, in theory at least.

So here I am at a Tikkun Olam seminar, reveling in the sustainable farming going on right here at the retreat center.

Studying Mishnah Gittin 5:8 with Rabbi Tzvi Blanchard of CLAL.  In English, he insisted, because we’ll be teaching it in English if we ever teach it (except to my amazing Advanced Adult Hebrew Class on Sunday mornings!) and also because it allows us to see the text through other eyes than whatever was presented to us in rabbinical school.  Here’s how he framed it: “It’s either a short story or maybe a poem.”  Then he had us tell the story or speak about the poem.  And Wow!  Here’s a translation of the original text:

Traps for wild animals, or birds, or fishes come partly under the law of theft — in the interests of peace.  Rabbi Yosi says:  This is undoubtedly theft.

In case you can’t parse this (I couldn’t at first), read it as:

[Concerning animals removed from] traps for wild animals, or birds, or fishes: [This is sort of considered stealing, and therefore is adjudicated] partly under the law of theft — in the interests of peace.  [But] Rabbi Yosi says: This is undoubtedly theft.

Under Maine or Massachusetts law, or for northern trappers of a previous century, I think it is undoubtedly theft: nobody is supposed to mess with your traps, and anything in them has become yours.  But under Jewish law, ownership of the animal is different from ownership of the container: ownership is established not by the animal’s location, but by your action of physically lifting it.  Till then, it’s a wild animal, free to anyone, even if currently trapped.

“It’s about a lobsterman, and he’s out on his boat hauling up his traps, and the bait is gone but so are the lobsters.”  For the fun of it, starting off with a real-world but very trefe example.

“It’s about a single mother, and she has no way of feeding her family, and she’s so desperate that she’ll go out after the lobster fishermen have baited the trap and take what she can get.”

Whoa!  I missed the second side completely!  Is that why it’s only *partly* considered a theft?  Is there a way to satisfy the needs of both A and B?

“It’s a poem written by PETA, and the theft is the theft of the animals from themselves; they are not ‘free for the taking,’ they are an integral part of nature and belong to themselves.”

“It’s about the theft of life from the animals themselves.”

“It’s about the theft of an entire species from the ecosystem.”  Depletion.

So there are more interested parties than just the two human beings.  The animals aren’t even players, just props, as the story reads in the beginning; but that’s not a big enough picture.  Add in consideration of the animal in question, the entire species, Gaea as a whole.

“It’s a story about the American West in a time of transition, and a question of allocation of scarce resources:  ‘The farmer and the cowboy should be friends,’ because each believes s/he has a claim on the open land, but for apparently incompatible purposes.”

“It’s a story about MacGregor, who owns the land, and Native Americans who used to trap and hunt freely on the land; when they catch something on their ancestral lands, he now claims that it’s his, because anything on his land is his and he has the papers to prove ownership.”

To whom do the resources belong?  If to anyone?  Are there ways to resolve this that bring peace — a win-win situation?  A win-win-win situation, taking into account the animals and the ecosystem too? And is any solution of necessity a temporary one, since cultures are in flux?

“It’s about the theft of traps.”  Who owns the means of production?  Are they perhaps Rabbi Yosi’s traps?!

“It’s about Goldilocks — wandering around in the forest, going into an unlocked house and helping herself to whatever she finds, without so much as a by-your-leave.  Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers.”  Or is Goldilocks a single mother, who stumbles onto a blessing that allows her to keep her family going for another day?

And so on, and so on.  And after that we started discussing what “in the interests of peace” might mean.  What a way to bring the text alive!

Rabbi Blanchard is an amazing teacher, appreciating everyone’s contributions and finding a way to weave each insight into a very clear statement of yet *another* thing to think about!  And then effortlessly connecting each way of looking at the text with real-world lobbying implications: What perspectives we might encourage legislators to see, how to think bigger and outside the either/or box to do creative problem-solving, etc.

And I sat by him on the ride out here (to the Pearlstone Retreat Center) and blithely discussed how domesticated animals have partnered with a stronger partner (us humans) to both our benefits.  I was harking back to conversations on this very blog from a year ago about whether it’s ok to raise animals for our own purposes.  I had no idea what a scholar and a mensch I was talking with!

Just look at wolves and dogs, said he.  Dogs are flourishing and wolves almost driven to extinction.  He said that on the ride, and referenced it again during last night’s learning session.

We Jews are a domesticated people, he said to me.  (I wonder if that was at all the subject of his teaching at the United Nations.) We have found a way to ally ourselves and partner with the dominant culture almost anywhere we have gone.  Usually to mutual benefit.  What a perspective!

Arrival at Pearlstone

At the Brickner Seminar listening to Sean Thibault, the RAC‘s Communications Director.

Ever heard of HootSuite?  I hadn’t, and it’s a couple years old already.  Manage all your social networks and blogs from one place.  Not only is it a central location for publishing and listening, but it has a crucial tool:  A SCHEDULER.  How often have I written something but not wanted to send it yet?  (Or to remind myself later?)

One rabbi sits down and writes 2 weeks of daily “Torah gems” and they go out religiously.  (Of course, pun intended.)

One could send stuff out for Shabbat — the Torah portion, for instance — written whenever one has time.  One could send out stuff *on* Shabbat (when, apparently, Facebook traffic goes way down) and tag it “Written before Shabbat and scheduled for later delivery.”

Video yourself delivering a drash or invitation or talking about an exciting new thing, or do the “ShabbatCast” announcing what’s going on this Shabbat; schedule it to be posted close to the time of the event.  (Thank you R. Michael Latz of Shir Tikva in Minneapolis.)

I’m going to have to join Twitter, too — apparently quite popular with post-college to age 30.  If it’s good enough for His Holiness the Dalai Lama…  Though as someone across the room just pointed out, Buddhists tend to talk less than Jews, so getting it down to 140 characters might be a challenge for us…!  OK, I’ve joined Twitter.

If you are webstreaming services, you can tweet about it (pre-scheduled of course) …  (Here’s the web page for Congregation Bet Chayim Chadashim is Los Angeles which won a “Best Practices” award from the Reform Movement for its live streaming.  Hint hint.  We have two congregants who are very interested already; I think it’s just a matter of time.)