The Empathy Strikes Back

Photo taken at the Women's March in Washington by Wendy Rabinowitz

I read in Real Simple magazine that empathy is trending. But those streams of people hurtling off the Van Wyck, those pro bono lawyers camping out cross-legged in the terminal, the magnificent Judge Donnelly....that's not a trend, that's a major spike. That's the yeasty conscience of America rising up and saying NO. The news will not continue at that exhilarating pace, but something is definitely happening here. The action that some people are taking is lifted up by the empathy bubbling up from a great many more people.

Of course, like hot yoga and the paleo diet, empathy isn't for everyone. In his recent Tikkun article, "Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option," Henry A. Giroux writes that the perpetrators of the invasion of Washington are engaging in "a demented appropriation of Ayn Rand's view that selfishness, war against all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals" and further, that going forward "compassion and respect for the other will be viewed with contempt." Up until now, it's been greed that has stumped me, left me shaking my head in bewilderment. How much is enough? How many Lamborghinis can one person drive? But this, this is a new frontier, beyond greed, beyond racism and misogyny, to the core of a Darwinian universe. Not only don't I care about you, but I have nothing but disdain for anyone else who might care about you. It's the twenty-first century law of the jungle, complete with twittering fiber optic cables strung from tree to tree.

Everything disseminated from Pennsylvania Avenue can now be traced back to a deep aversion to mercy, considered a symptom of womanish weakness. Pre-existing condition? Too bad. Immigrant from the wrong country? Shoulda been born in Omaha. Think you're entitled to free public education? Guess again. Take notice. There will be no more liberal mewling over equity or the plight of the less fortunate. Ridiculing a disabled person is now an acceptable form of theater. From now on, success will be calibrated in units of high-rise real estate and wattage of celebrity. If you don't measure up, your speech will be drowned out by the jingoist brass band and you will be herded into the stadium to cheer for the all-American winning team. If you don't fall in line, you will not only be considered a loser, but an enemy. Nikki Haley, the new American ambassador to the UN, made this clear when she intoned about the expectation that countries will either support any and all US positions or be put on a list. All communication contains an implicit "or else."

But the empathy strikes back. This is because it is fundamental to our humanity, as old as nursing mothers, as ancient as nourishment itself. Anyone who has ever been fed or offered sustenance understands the essential connectivity between people, the hunger to know and to serve. Right now, empathy is coursing through our veins after a consumerist dry spell. Lao Tzu says "Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield." Think of Steve Bannon as a boulder. Think of all of us eroding him until a few gifted and determined people knock him off the precipice.

Empathy is a bio-spiritual condition of being, a process that normally ebbs and flows like desire. It's always there waiting to be aroused, constantly on the alert for opportunities to replicate, to insinuate itself. Here's how I think it works in the everyday. A seventysomething friend tells me that after a period of uncertainty, she has decided to devote her remaining time to fighting for social justice. I feel the tears welling up in my eyes. This takes place in between dance numbers at someone else's 70th birthday party and I am taken entirely by surprise. I have forgotten that empathy is the reason that people cry just as much at weddings as they do at funerals. Because it is not only about being willing to see other people's suffering. It is in the first instance about recognizing our shared humanity and how much we are alike, warmed by the same sun, breathing the same air. Palestinians in Dearborn breathe. Mexicans in Phoenix breathe. When cowboys in Washington try to round people up like so many farm animals, we all feel fenced in.

These days, empathy is a contagion that has spread rapidly, starting with our smallest private gestures and already resulting in millions of people marching on January 21st.  It is a flood of human connection, biblical in its proportions, already sweeping the country. There will be no reconstructing the city of indifference.This is how the species survives. This is how the planet survives. Empathy is the foundation of the resistance to tyranny.

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Citizen Kaufman

Four Freedoms march, photo by Lee Cheek

I am an American, although I've always secretly suspected that I'm not a real American in the Sarah Palin sense. As an aside, I find that I'm missing Palin's goofy Duck Dynasty style. Sarah, after all, was looking at Russia across the Bering Strait, not playing x-rated games or joining caviar-eating oligarchs in the baroque anterooms of Moscow's finest hotels. Still, long before mama grizzly broke onto the scene in the 2008 election cycle, I struggled to convince myself of the authenticity of my national origins despite the fact that both of my parents were born here. Last I looked, New York City is part of our country. I've always felt like an outsider. No Santa Claus in my childhood, no Easter bunny, no tendency towards flag-waving in the family. At the same time, I have, mea culpa, taken my citizenship for granted. In this regard, I am very different from my Congolese friend who was granted asylum here several years ago or my Chinese friend who jumped through many hoops to get his green card. Now, in the light of the present catastrophe, I am re-evaluating my identity and laying claim to being an American, to being a citizen. Please join me.

Last week, I paid a visit to the district office of my congressman, Richard E. Neal. I was relieved that he wasn't there. Not because I was intimidated by the prospect of speaking with him. I had heard him address the rally after the Four Freedoms march in Pittsfield a few days before and he seemed harmless enough. I was glad he wasn't there because there was such a banquet of political poison in Washington that I wanted him down there serving up the antidote. I spoke with his staff assistant who quaintly produced a pen and a pad that looked like a giveaway from an auto parts store. She took my name and contact information and asked me to tell her why I had come in. I said I wanted to be assured that not only would Rep. Neal support the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act, but that he would get dirty doing it, that he would actively go after the perpetrators of grand larceny now about to assume power in our country. I realize that the system is mired in corruption and that that won't change as a consequence of my little field trip, but it felt empowering and demystifying. So this is where Richie Neal hangs out when he's in town!

The march itself featured some 2000 people walking in solidarity down North Street from St. Joseph's to the First Congregational Church on a bitterly cold day. It commemorated the 1941 State of the Union address in which FDR outlined the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear - ideas illustrated in the famous paintings by Norman Rockwell of Stockbridge. Gathering to celebrate the foundational ideas of our deeply flawed democracy generated a kind of giddiness, even as we recognized the urgency of our situation together, the collective peril we are experiencing. For this particular newly awakened citizen, the march and the standing room only rally afterwards lifted me up, expanded my vision beyond the limits of my own concerns to include the wellbeing of the larger community. Real people shivering in the January cold. Not an abstraction. The march and the rally brought the issues off the page and demonstrated what is at stake in this fragile historical moment, the right to assemble in support of free speech, to defend religious liberty, to provide for the basic needs and protections that are our entitlement. We, whatever our individual stories may be, however committed to our democracy we may have felt previously, must now be part of the resistance. This is not a time to sit out the dance. This is a time to bring down the house, to twist and shout together, each of us for all of us.


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In a Beginning

In a Beginning, because really we have no idea if this was the first time God woke up with an itch that needed scratching, a burning desire to create, a sort of Jackson Pollack moment where all the colors just had to be splashed on the canvas...In a Beginning, the energy of the infinite inhale became so concentrated, so intense, that God couldn't contain it another second (even though you understand, of course, that there were no seconds, there was no time or space before Creation).  With an enormous exhale, out came all that is and all that would be. It was dark, dark like a threatening, shadowy  back alley and suddenly gusty, that city wind that traps you in between tall buildings on a side street going west to the Hudson in January. Fierce and unwelcoming. But God said, to no one in particular, yehi or, let there be light and there was light. Unbelievable. Mind you, the light came out of nowhere, without a source. No moon, no sun, no stars. Just the really good idea of light, the idea of nurturing and growth. God saw that the light was good and decided to give it a name. After that, everything that seemed warm and open and childlike and white was called Day and everything that was sinister and hidden and mysterious and black was called Night. This caused a range of problems.

That seemed to be enough work for one day. On the second day, it became necessary to create the sky. You would think that would have come along right from the getgo, but apparently back in the day there was water everywhere kind of like after your pipes freeze and burst and it was necessary to form the sky as a way of separating the water below like Lake Superior and the Ganges from the water above, whatever that is. Now things were starting to take shape. So God called forth the Earth to form out of the water and imagined vegetation of all kinds growing on it, apricots and arugula, bamboo shoots and bok choy, watercress and avocadoes and Granny Smiths were created and God was like YES! because who doesn't like salad?

All this happened, mind you, without photosynthesis. Pretty amazing but maybe not sustainable in the long run. So, on the fourth day, God put lights in the sky because this was before iPhones with flashlights and it was really hard to see where you were going. So the lights, the sun and the moon, were created and with them the cycles of time. Weeks, months and years were set in place and provided a structure for nostalgia for the past and anxiety about the future which, as we shall see,  would soon become essential. On the fifth day, the whole project really started to pick up steam with cardinals and blackbirds appearing in the sky, trout and catfish swimming in the rivers. God was delighted, clapping the divine hands and jumping up and down on the divine feet. P'ru ur'vu, God shouted. Be fruitful and multiply. Have lots of avian and underwater sex...which isn't as easy as one might hope.

Seeing the potential fecundity of the animal kingdom, on the sixth day, God just went for it, just went all out, calling for cattle, creeping things and wild beasts of every kind. Imagine the first rhinos lumbering around, the first leopards stalking. Must have been a sight to behold. But there was something missing. What was it? You can imagine God pacing up and down, trying to come up with a Big Finish. Suddenly, a radical idea just popped into the divine mind. What if God were to create thinking beings called humans, made in the divine image, beings preoccupied with the past and the future, who were capable of feeling and problem solving and art making and put these exalted beings in charge of the whole show? What could possibly go wrong?

It could be that God had some misgivings, because just before deciding to give it a rest some last minute items were thrown into the cart, some afterthoughts that needed to be included before all activity stopped for the first shabbes. And one of those items was the rainbow which was designed to explain to humanity that light is made up of many colors and to make it clear that the sun will shine through the rainiest day and the dove of peace will survive the flood. And God saw all that God had made and found it pretty good, but with room for improvement. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.


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The Sunny Side of the Street

My father, Sidney Rosenberg, with mustache, on one knee in the front row. 
My mother, Henrietta, hands on knees in white shoes.

Out of the blur of my childhood, I see my fundamental relationship to the world coming into focus. My witness to the famines, the refugee camps - from the end of WWII to the present - has somehow not altered my essential optimism.
The American Journal of Epidemiology reports that this may be good for my health. I'm not sure about that. On the contrary, a tablespoon of harsh reality taken once a day might improve my vision. But, insofar as the Journal's prognosis is true, I owe my conviction of well-being to my father. Last week, I observed his yahrzeit. He died on December 14, 1978. Lighting the memorial candle, I remembered him a little more than usual on 14 Kislev, the anniversary of his death on the Hebrew calendar. This year, the Hebrew and secular dates coincided on the 14th which is unusual, but then these are unusual times.

My father was born in New York and raised in the Yorkville section of the city where German was the predominant language. Too young for WWI and too old for WWII, he came of age in the '20s with no memory of trench warfare and no capacity to imagine the coming horror. He was an antiques dealer by trade, a clever business person, but also a man with any eye for beautiful things. He bought and sold objects made in Europe that became signifiers of culture to Americans who admired the filigree and gilt, the expert craftsmanship. It was understood that the merchandise in his dusty shop, an allergist's paradise, could not be arranged neatly in shelving and bins like so much underwear at Macy's. The display had to be casually profligate, haphazard, a commotion of cups and saucers. The customer was invited to wade through the stacks of dinner plates and tureens, wandering up and down the aisles, past the Meissen figurines and the Dresden dessert dishes, without a care in the world, without a thought of the real and very recent history of those places. This was the '50s, after all. My mother stood behind the glass showcase gossiping with the customers. My father cruised West End Avenue doing his best to acquire, at the most advantageous prices, the cherished valuables of widows with goulashy Viennese accents before the wobbly old ladies decamped for Florida. Like a surgeon, he extracted the heirlooms, polishing each piece with care so the old world tarnish would be removed. Then he re-sold the porcelain and sterling to shiny Americans, willfully ignorant of history. My father was a gentle, unmarked man. For him, Majdanek was like Aleppo. Something observed from a safe distance. Something that happened to someone else.

In our house, we took a sanguine view of things. We voted for Stevenson. We believed our country would one day embrace the Puerto Rican children my father lovingly tutored in English after school and the black people we saw on the IRT local, even the woman who came down from Harlem to clean, hanging her coat on a hook in the back bathroom off the kitchen. We were well-intentioned and criminally naive.

In our house, we were convinced that America would win the Cold War. That in the end, no country with a vulgarian head of state who banged his shoe on a desk in the sacred confines of the U.N. could come out on top. Poignant, isn't it? 2017 is the centennial of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had disposed of the Russian bear, but here he is again sniffing around the remains of our picnic. We continue to forage for the lessons of the last century. My father is gone, but I am still processing my grandparents' immigration and assimilation stories, the long journey out of the old world and into the new. We all drag our family stories around with us wherever we go, rarely setting them down long enough to listen to all the other stories. Your ancestors were brought here from West Africa in chains? Generations of the men in your family got their paychecks and their emphysema in the coal mines? It would shock my father and other shopkeepers in New York and Cracow and Budapest, where his parents were born, to discover that things could go bad and from there to worse. He provided my mother, my sister and myself a down-market version of the life of the wealthy family in the 1970 Italian movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, all out on the court dressed in tennis whites when the SS came for them.  Like my father, most of us know what we know and not much else. I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted. Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe.

A good place to begin is this piece by Timothy Snyder, originally a Facebook post: http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/

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The Great Awakening

Pottery by Ben Maisel

That was then, this is now. After the shock and awe of the initial assault on our sanity that occurred on election  day, we are now facing the daunting task of defending ourselves and holding our territory for the next four years. I try to avoid military metaphors, but there is a sense that we all feel embattled. We are partisans who will be fighting on multiple fronts, employing a wide range of skills and training. We cannot all be commandos.

Let's begin by laying a foundation of love in our own families and communities. You may have noticed that this is already happening. The energy of isolated iron filings magnetizing towards one another has been palpable from the onset. Love is strong. It empowers people to feel courageous and creative in the face of looming danger. It is the most potent antidote to despair. Love is a perennial weed. It blooms in unexpected places and defies all attempts to be tamed. Reach out to it and it will spread across backyards and fields where you live until you can no longer control it. Transplant it when you can and admire its beauty as you ponder how to contribute to the great awakening that needs to happen.

Fortified with a sense of connection to one another, to the Earth, we can begin to think deeply about how we came to be teetering on the edge of this particular precipice. Part of this process is the exercise of historical memory. I don't mean how the Clintons were tainted or how the press demonstrated its venality. I mean reaching back as far as we can to taste the rapaciousness of the western powers in the Middle East that flourished in the aftermath of World War I; the acquisition of vast resources for the purpose of lining the silk pockets of the already rich; the dominion of French, British and later American white men over millions and millions of brown people. Follow this juggernaut through a series of tyrannical regimes, the sputtering promise of Arab Spring, perpetual bombardment, the starvation of native populations, and the rise of ISIS. Congratulations, you have arrived at the refugee crisis. You are confronting a condition where virtually the whole of the western world is recoiling in horror as the people of color they have been only too happy to exploit arrive en masse at their doorstep seeking sanctuary. Enter Brexit, Le Pen, Putin and Donald Trump.

If you looked closely, you could see it coming and you could feel how this historical matrix would create a perfect storm of racism and xenophobia, set against a background of globalization-induced economic dislocation and environmental degradation. In our country, where the domestic presence of Muslims has up to now been less of a factor than it is in Europe, it's an easy sleight of hand to use the available raw materials to generate anti-Mexican or anti-Black rhetoric and violence, always bubbling just under the surface in the melting pot. The post-colonial tune is a theme with infinite variations.

Sitting with the weight of all this and being hammered day in and day out with the proposed appointments of savage ideologues, the presumed Health and Human Services secretary who doesn't believe in health or human services, the Education secretary who's never set foot in a public school, I feel on some days like I'm being force fed a banquet of barbarism and choking on it. On other days, I imagine a car that has stalled on the tracks. I'm in danger of being hit by an oncoming train. I can't go backward, I can't go forward. The only sane option is to get out of the car before it's too late, walk home and breathe deeply into the knowledge that I will only be able to exercise a narrow influence over events, but that when my influence is added to yours and yours and yours, the train will ultimately be stopped.

Some will march, petition, write to their congresspeople. Some will get involved with local efforts to sustain pluralism, resist growing income inequality, protect our land and water. Some will make art as Woody Guthrie did, as James Baldwin did, as Picasso did when he painted Guernica. And some will be charged with the task of holding the space so that there can be an ongoing conversation in the spirit of both/and. Both economic anxiety and racisim gave rise to Trump. Both understanding how the Democrats failed their natural constituency in the election and how in its aftermath we can and must resist the result. We are the only ones who can make change, inch by inch, row by row as we used to sing lovingly to our children. We are all at risk and we need each other desperately.

http://ncdd.org/22174  Check out the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation's program to "Bridge the Divides"

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Mourning in America

Collage by JoAnne Spies

It is astounding to me two weeks into this science fiction how much it still feels like a death. At first there was shock, disbelief. Then despair and an icy nightmare dread of the future. More recently, there has been anger and blame. The misdiagnosis, the FBI, white women. Someone must be held responsible. Hypervigilance is called for. If I forget for five minutes while I'm watching a Law and Order re-run, I am plagued by guilt. How could I forget? How could I forget? I have betrayed my country. I am a cheap date. The campaign was a long, protracted illness complete with remissions and periods of false hope. The election itself was a massive cardiac event, a failure of the heart. Now, in the aftermath, we are suffering from complicated grief.

Complexity will hunt you down if you give it the slightest opening. It will keep you awake at night and deliver florid dreams of your own complicity if you are fortunate enough to sleep at all. In the wee hours of November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, camps were already forming on the left. Some turned their rage on the power brokers at the DNC. Others railed against their own children who voted Green or not at all. People of color, Muslims, and immigrants woke up to a new and terrifying world. There is more than enough reason to fear the president-elect and his white supremacist minions. Those of us less likely to be immediate cannon fodder have a commanding moral obligation to join forces with the most vulnerable and stand up to emerging racist rhetoric and policy threats. Desmond Tutu said "if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you've chosen the side of the oppressor." No means no. Never Again means Never Again.

We arrived at this moment after months of unrelieved stress fed by the invidious pollsters. She's up by three. She has an 85% chance of winning. Some algorhithm that claims scientific validity, some mathematical hocus pocus that we are clearly not meant to understand, scanned the horizon and missed half the population. Sixty million people primarily in rural counties and small cities throughout the country voted for the Republican candidate. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic during the campaign "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally." I remember, nostalgically, conversations I had before the election about how we (liberals, progressives, people who were convinced they had the moral high ground) would accommodate the rage and despair of the Trump voters after they were trounced. We had a faint glimmer of the degradation of life in those remote flyover precincts - the abandoned mills, the opiate addiction and what The Nation has since referred to with maximum snark as the "economic anxiety." Note the quotation marks. But we had no idea of the magnitude of the desperation. Now we know.

I'm reminded of a story I once wrote about a woman who is among the mourners at a shiva. She sits and sits, eats cake and more cake, but can't seem to figure out who has died. It's like that now. We don't yet know who or what has died. Is it the First Amendment, the equal protection clause, a snowball's chance in limbo that we'll be able to reverse the onward march of climate change? We're still in the remains-to-be-seen phase, but every day brings us closer to the dark side of the moon. People in northern Florida and western Pennsylvania who voted for him will not get better health benefits. They will not get jobs that pay a living wage. Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people, the disabled and, yes, Jews, will be victimized, while the people in power compete for the biggest pieces of pie like contentious family members at the reading of the will.

We, the survivors, are called to remember the rising tide of hope that carried us during the last administration, especially in the early years. The attempt to provide affordable healthcare, the efforts to regulate the banks, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the spectacle of someone like Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. But to remember accurately without sanding down the rough patches, we will also have to call to mind the endless drone war, the growing horror of income inequality, the expansion of mass incarceration of inconvenient populations. The patient has been ailing for a long time. It is the daunting obligation of our citizenship that we maintain a panoramic awareness of the breadth and depth of the conditions that have led to this moment. We must witness with unwavering attention the hostile takeover of our country by a rightwing cabal that campaigned in a language that we do not speak and the anti-democratic forces that have since been unleashed. There will be a resurrection of the better angels in our wounded country, a renaissance of sanity, but we will have to fight hard for it. We will have to be patient and I am not always a patient person.

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They Can't Take That Away From Me

If you're anything like me, right about now you feel like everything you hold dear is imperiled. After tomorrow, we may be entering a new dispensation in which our president (God forbid) is intimate with both the KKK and the KGB. Your inclination is to focus on those things that give you solace, casting a soft glow on your life, inspiring gratitude and making you think of drinking pernod and listening to Edith Piaf. Writing in the second person gives you just the distance you need to escape the black hole of "it can happen here." So you go the second person route which you have not done since the very first blog post on seventysomething when you couldn't quite believe you were taking the plunge. You considered calling this piece "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things," but mindful that sentimentality is the flip side of violence, you determined that the treacly, alpine Julie Andrews lyric didn't fly. Instead, you went with Gershwin, 1937, Jewish New York, defiance in the face of brown shirts on the move. The following is a list, hardly exhaustive and in no particular order, of some everyday encounters, all virtually free of charge, that belong to you irrespective of the outcome of the election  and that fill you with tranquility, joy and amazement. So there.

Drinking coffee in bed. In the indolence of seventysomething, you don't generally rush out of the house in the morning. You can make a pot of coffee and pour a cup for yourself (black) and one for Frank (with milk). Then, you can get back in bed and read, letting the caffeine work its magic, orbiting other worlds. You can fly to Rome with Jhumpa Lahiri in the pages of In Other Words. Watch the remarkable Jhumpa, raised in Bengali and educated in English, as she surrenders to Italian. You can wander with Rabih Alameddine in Yemen, Egypt and Lebanon and tell him how much you admire his intricate novel, The Angel of History. You are hopelessly infatuated with books like a horny teenager. You can't live without them.

Lemons. You love their astringency, the perfume that floats up from the oil in their peel when it's grated over linguini. Lemons make everything taste better, cod, custard, cocktails. So Mediterranean. You love their color in a blue bowl, definitively yellow as if nothing else, no daffodil, no sundress could compete. The way they offer themselves up off the tree in your sister's backyard in Berkeley. You are grateful to lemons for their simplicity and their versatility, their willingness to make themselves useful.

Walking in Stockbridge. You never get tired of ambling in disbelief down Main Street from north of the library, past the Dutch roofed old town hall, past the gracious Riggs buildings with their charcoal shutters and matte blue doors separating the pain inside from the pain outside, all the way to the cemetery where your friend, Al, a wandering Jew, an interloper, ended up surrounded by legions of church people from old Stockbridge families. Nothing much changes in this town. The trees do what trees are called to do, leafing gracefully in the spring, exploding in cherry blossoms as spring becomes summer, turning pumpkin in autumn, letting go as winter approaches. You feel no need for a different walk. It's less than a mile down and back, but you see something new every day.

Words. English words inhabit your cells in densely populated housing projects. There are so many of them and each one plays different music. You love their roots in the classical languages, connecting you like ancient Facebook friends to Socrates and Virgil. Sometimes, they arrive in steerage or by caravan from the Arab world. Alchemy. Algebra. The history of language defies politics. Eighth graders in Indiana don't know they're engaging with the mathematics of the Arab world when they struggle to solve equations. They don't know that the word ojala, Spanish for hopefully, comes from the Islamic devotion, if Allah wills it. Words are sneaky. They don't carry passports. They vault over the big wall and set up shop. There are some that irritate and some that terrify, but truthfully, you love almost all of them promiscuously.

You will not be deprived of these pleasures no matter how far the armies of the night advance. You have read the history books and you know that the struggle to remain who you are in the face of the monster is crucial to survival. In the cacophony of the moment, you wish to make it clear that you
will not be bludgeoned.

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