Kol Nidre Sermon, 5770

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My daughter and her husband came to Kol Nidre services with me tonight; they also brought Ari's best friend from law school, Natalie, a sweet Irish-Catholic girl who had never been to a Jewish service. I was glad Ari was there because I was so nervous. I almost never speak from a text because I have no nerves when talking to undergrads.  But tonight, many of my colleagues were there as well as a number of former students. Moreover, I had never done a sermon before and I was uncommonly nervous. I had even tried rehearsing it and had kept stumbling but when I got to the podium and started to speak, the nerves melted away and it all flowed. What a relief that's over! Whew!                                                                                                                                                

Ari said that she was surprised that I had done it so Talmudically, meaning that I had really stuck to a commentary on the texts in the Mahzor (the High holyday prayerbook) but that's what I was asked to do, what we call a Drasha. It ran about 12-15 minutes.

If you are interested, here it is.  One note of explanation: Alan Shawn Feinstein is a local philanthropist who gives huge amounts of money to almost anything you can think of in Rhode Island. I have often heard him criticized for his conspicuous giving but I admire him because he is so generous and seems to be genuinely kind. He supports the food banks and leads the movement to end hunger in RI.

The Drasha:  Kol Nidre 5770 (2009-2010)

Read together, the scriptural portions for Erev Yom Kippur and the Yom Kippur day services offer complex lessons that flow together but are not identical. Together they emphasize the collective responsibility we have to each other; a lesson that in this age of rebuilding New Orleans, massive American unemployment, and people losing their health care and retirement funds, we must heed and act upon. 

Kol Nidre begins with a heartrending melody that brings to mind all the exiles of the Jewish people, when we were forced—in order to survive—to hide, to practice our faith underground, and to make false promises. From the forced exile from Jerusalem by the Romans, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the pogroms in Russia and Poland, onward, our people been victims and have justifiably done what we could to survive. But Kol Nidre is only the beginning of this night of remorse and contrition. We ask for forgiveness for acting out of fear; for failing to have perfect faith. But these historical tragedies are at a remove; they didn’t happen to us or our families, though those some of us may still have grandparents who fled Europe or lost relatives in the Holocaust.

I have often wondered if all of those who went to their deaths in the gas chambers singing “Ani ma'amin be'emuna shlema,” “I believe with perfect faith in the Messiah's coming, and I will wait even if the Messiah is delayed,” were bound to chant the Ashamnu. Of course, as members of the community, they did. And if they were herded into the gas chambers on Yom Kippur, at Kol Nidre, were they exempt? Whose faith could have been more perfect?

The Ashamnu, the alphabetical prayer of confession, does not require us to call out our individual sins. It isn’t like a Quaker meeting where some, individually, express their thoughts into a weightless silence. The confession or Ashamnu names every sin that every Jew in the world might have committed, and we express our remorse as we go through the list alphabetically: We have Acted out of malice; we have Back-bitten; we have been Contemptuous; we have Double-crossed…and so on. We recite these the way we eat popcorn: done quickly and without much thought. 

There are other sins that aren’t listed—yet. Let us think back to Michael Milken who, because of his junk bond ventures, left retired people with nothing but social security for their old age. 

Let us think of Bernard Madoff, who made off with millions of dollars and thus destroyed people’s retirement funds; deprived and destroyed charitable organizations; victimized his own people and the thousands and millions, Jews and Gentiles alike, who depended on those charities.  

Or think of the rabbis, like Rabbi Israel Weingarten of Brooklyn, who have been accused of molesting their or others’ children. 

Or think of some of the Israeli actions in Gaza during the invasion last year, where members of the IDF have come forward to denounce the killing of innocents who were killed for no reason by their own forces. Will we then recite, we bombed a house where a doctor lived with his daughters, and we killed all of his daughters?

In our own backyard, think of the resentful comments I have heard people express of Alan Shawn Feinstein and his noticeable acts of charity. Is it guilt that we do not act as generously as he does, within our means? We judge him: He should be less conspicuous in his generosity for Maimonides teaches us that the highest form of giving is to give anonymously. While that is one of Maimonides teachings, it is not the only level of giving, and it is not even the highest one. There are actually eight levels. Each ascending rung represents a higher degree of virtue:

1. The lowest: Giving begrudgingly and making the recipient feel disgraced or embarrassed.
2. Giving cheerfully but giving too little.
3. Giving cheerfully and adequately but only after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving when you do not know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient knows your identity.
6. Giving when you know who is the individual benefiting, but the recipient does not knows your identity.
7. Giving when neither the donor nor the recipient is aware of the other's identity.

8. The Highest: Giving money, a loan, your time or whatever else it takes to enable an individual to be self-reliant.

And who are we to criticize Mr. Feinstein when most of us may make it to level 4, “without being asked”; or even six, “where the recipient does not know your identity,” but we still fall short of perfect charity.

These specific examples are not the distant, recited alphabetical sins of the Ashamnu; these are real and they hit close to home. They can be included in the more detailed Al Cheyt, the Great Confession of the Morning Service for they are not the mere labeling of a catalog of sins but force us to express the deep consciousness of sin. You may ask how can I be responsible for Milken or Madoff’s thievery? Or for what happens in Gaza, so far from me? Or sins of molesting children, so far from most of our lives? We can accept responsibility for the small stuff, for our own lack of charity, for our petty resentments and our falling short of our own ideals, but the conundrum with which we are presented by the Yom Kippur prayers is that we are collectively responsible: we stole; we deprived others; we caused grievous injury. It is a bitter pill to internalize these sins, to take responsibility for them, and ask forgiveness for them.

But Yom Kippur wears us down; we declare our sins again, and again until we accept the responsibility.                                                                                                                                                          

But the teaching of Yom Kippur doesn’t stop there, for in the morning service, Isaiah calls upon us to care for the poor and the downtrodden, “...to breathe new life into the humble. To renew the heart of those who are crushed.” This is not simply spiritual cleansing but an affirmation of life, of collective responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves. It is not enough then, to repent, express remorse, and be cleansed over and over. You could do that and leave the synagogue in a purified state without having made your life better. Isaiah is relentless, “Look here; on the day you fasted you were looking for business, Grinding down the toilers who work under you!” 

“Is not this the fast I ask for: To unlock the shackles of evil, To loosen the thongs of the yoke, To send forth crushed souls to freedom, To tear every yoke in two! To tear up your loaves for the hungry, To bring the poor wanderer home, When you see the naked, clothe them… Your reputation for justice will precede you And the glory of God will follow close behind.”

On Yom Kippur afternoon, we are reminded that even complying with those prescriptions isn’t enough. In the afternoon service, we are taught two lessons of perfect faith, of Abraham, asked to sacrifice his only son; and of a virtuous man, Jonah who, told by Adonay to go to the City of Nineveh to warn them to repent or face his wrath, refuses. 

Adonay chooses him BECAUSE he is virtuous but Jonah is content with his life and he does not want to save them; they are sinful; let them reap the wages of sin. Adonay is relentless, he casts him into the belly of a whale and compels him to go to Nineveh. Jonah rebels; he doesn’t want to do it but Adonay teaches him compassion; explicitly compassion by causing him to endure the discomfort of direct sun; then creating shade and thus, comfort for him, then taking it away, making him so miserable that Jonah wanted to die. (This translation is a bit different from the one in your Mahzors.)

“And Adonay said, ‘You have pity on the gourd, for which you have not labored, neither did you make it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand persons that cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?” These are Adonay’s children; Adonay’s creations that she labored over. How can she destroy them willy-nilly? 

In essence, Adonay cares enough to want to turn her creations away from sin and save them; she knows that humans are not always aware of or responsive to her, but they cannot ignore we who stand there in our flesh and blood, to turn them towards virtue.                                                          

This is not the wrathful God that we are told resides in the Bible. This God is a compassionate God. Who are we to judge and withhold help from those we decide are unworthy when Adonay worries over their failings? 

In Jonah, we see the fulfillment of Ashamnu and Al Cheyt, of Isaiah. Reciting these prayers, we admit our failings, we express remorse, and we repent of our own failings but it isn’t enough. We reach to help the helpless, but THAT isn’t enough. Our souls may be cleansed and we may feel righteous but Jonah teaches us that we cannot stand passively by, enjoying our own virtuousness. We cannot be passive; we are compelled to act. We must work with others to make the world a better place

In Memory of Celeste Sullivan, 1955-2009

My friend Celeste Sullivan was killed when she was run over by a bus. The bus driver, a good and responsible man with a flawless driving record, had a heart attack. His bus jumped the curb, jumped the island and killed her as she waited for another bus. She was 54.

This is the remembrance I wrote of her on the day of her memorial service. Below that, you will find the article from the newspaper about her death and her obituary from the Providence Journal.


I went to the memorial service for Celeste today. It was held at Brown University's Manning Chapel; a nice, plain space. There was an altar and lots of flowers; in the warmth of the summer afternoon, one could really smell the flowers. We were halfway through the service before I realized that the vase in the center of the altar was actually the urn with her ashes.

Celeste lived in my house for two years. Yehuda knew her from the neighborhood and so when she lost her lodgings, he asked me if we could let her rent the third floor. She was quiet, small, slender and quick as a little bird. She had converted to Islam so sometimes, when we were eating something she could eat, she'd eat with us. When we celebrated Passover, she came representing the pharoah. It was our little joke.

She finished writing her dissertation while she was living with us but I had no sense of her as a scholar. She got her degree in linguistic anthropology and wrote about the relationships between Urdu, Arabic and two other languages spoken in Pakistan. What we studied was so far apart from each other, our interactions were entirely on the daily human level. You know some people are brilliant because they are snobs, or they are self-conscious about their intellects or they are so accustomed to being set apart by their intellects that it shows immediately. Celeste was so humble, so simple in her ways, that you had no sense of her intellect.

I found out today that she was brilliant. I knew that she was the daughter of an English professor; she had given us a book he'd written on Emily Dickinson. But we didn't know that she'd gotten her undergraduate degree in Egyptology and could read hieroglyphics. I knew she spoke Urdu because she'd married a Pakistani half her age while she was in Pakistan doing her research, and she spent the next five years trying to get him into this country. Every Sunday morning, she'd stand in my kitchen (where she got the best reception for her phone), shouting into the phone in Urdu. After she got a part-time job teaching at UMass Dartmouth, she moved to New Bedford but kept my address as her permanent address while she dealt with immigration. She finally got her husband into the U.S., He is a handsome fellow--Bollywood movie star handsome. He was younger than her children. Her children were furious at him; they thought he'd married her just to get into the country and get his green card. The irony for me is that his Green card came less than a month ago. I last saw her--and met him for the first time--three weeks ago Tuesday, when they came to get the green card. She used to tell me that they just didn't understand but she told only her oldest son that her husband was now in the states; she figured that she'd tell the rest of them when he had settled in. They couldn't even live together--she'd gotten him a job here in Providence and she was living in New Bedford where she was working. They left his name off of the obituary; she would have been upset by that.

She was a bit eccentric but more than that she was just a free spirit and a deeply good and kind person. She'd had four children by three different fathers, only the first of which she'd been married to, and she raised those kids on her own. Her first husband and the lover who followed him were both black men, and her children are gorgeous, and they all exactly look like her. Her black lovers were Rastafarian and the boys both have long dreadlocks. Once when we were talking about her children, she described raising them alone as a single mother. That must have been tough, I said. She replied that it was but she had these three wonderful children to show for it so she didn't mind at all. One of her children, Mary--her older daughter--was by a white man and she is a a blond version of her siblings. Mary married the youngest son of our across-the-street neighbor Lisa; thus they became good friends. Lisa gave Celeste a child's bicycle--one that a 12 year-old could ride. She was so small and slender that it suited her perfectly. I will always think of her riding that little bike.

It is so ironic that on that rare occasion that she rode the bus, a bus would jump a curb and and an island to kill her. I still can't get my brain around it.

As artist Christopher Marley said, "Success is living your own life in your own way." And the Dalai Lama says that "Happiness is the purpose of life." By any measure, she was a great success.

I skipped the reception after the service. The humidity had given me a headache and I just didn't feel like being sociable. I spoke to her children at the service but slipped away right afterwards. Sometimes sociability is too much to ask.
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http://www.heraldnews.com/sports/local_sports/x540126557/Woman-hit-by-bus-was-UMD-professor

Woman hit by bus was UMD professor

By Grant Welker

Herald News Staff Reporter

Posted Jul 22, 2009 @ 11:52 PM

---

Dartmouth —

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth colleagues described Celeste Sullivan, the woman struck and killed by a bus in New Bedford Tuesday, as charismatic, charming, dedicated and insightful. Sullivan joined the Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime and Justice Studies program as a part-time faculty last year.

“For someone I knew so briefly, she made an extraordinarily strong impression,” said Larry Miller, the acting department chair. She was enthusiastic and a gifted teacher, very popular with students and someone whose thoughts he found himself referring to regularly, he said.

Sullivan, a 54-year-old from New Bedford, was hit by an SRTA commuter bus Tuesday morning after 60-year-old driver David Rebello apparently began suffering chest pains. She had been waiting for a bus at the city’s main terminal when the bus crossed a median and hit her. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The District Attorney’s Office was still investigating the incident on Wednesday.

Sullivan was not going to return to UMass Dartmouth this fall because of personnel cuts, Miller said, but he was planning on bringing her back for the spring 2010 semester. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Worcester State College and graduated with a doctorate degree in anthropology from Brown University in 2005, he said. She also received a Fulbright Scholarship for research in Pakistan.

“It’s a great, great, great loss,” said Ida Almeida, the department secretary and one of few colleagues who got to know her well during her year at the university. “I can’t even put my head around it.”

Almeida also described Sullivan as having a “big impact” during her short tenure.

Sullivan didn’t have a driver’s license and often walked or rode her bicycle to get around, she said. Almeida believed Sullivan may have been on her way to the University of Rhode Island for an interview when she was hit.

“It’s just the saddest thing,” she said. “She was very into her work, very into teaching.”
Miller appreciated the opportunity to remember Sullivan and tell a little bit about her. “I cannot say enough about what a wonderful teacher she was. She was a rare talent.”

E-mail Grant Welker at gwelker@heraldnews.com.

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Obit from the Providence Journal
SULLIVAN, DR. CELESTE MARIE, 54, of New Bedford, MA, died Tuesday, July 21st from injuries sustained in a tragic accident. She leaves two sons, Bernard Henson and Obasi Osborne; and two daughters, Maye Osborne and Mary Sullivan Niebles; her sister, Claudia Salloom and her niece Anne Salloom.

She was born April 1, 1955 in Boston, the daughter of Dr. William L. and Carol (Saurwein) Sullivan. Celeste was a 1970 graduate of Windsor Mountain High School, earned her BA from Worcester State, her Masters Degree in Egyptology, and in 2005 her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology, with a specialty in Urdu studies, from Brown University. Celeste will be remembered as a unique and gifted person. She had the ability to repair a diesel engine, navigate a yacht or translate the hieroglyphics on Ramses tomb. At the time of her death, she was in the process of turning her doctoral thesis into a book. She was a loving mother, caring friend and a truly amazing woman whose zest for life had no boundaries. The happiest time of her life was assisting her daughter Maye in the planning of her wedding.

A Memorial Service will be held, Wednesday, July 29th at 4:00 PM in the Manning Chapel at Brown University. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the charity of the donor's choice. O'CONNOR BROTHERS FUNERAL HOME, 592 Park Avenue, Worcester, is directing arrangements. oconnorbrothers.com

My First Impressions of Rio de Janeiro

MiApogeo.com
http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1124/4659/

My First Impressions of Rio de Janeiro

Lifestyle - Travel

Written by RosaMaria Pegueros

I went to Brazil for the first time last month, when my professional conference, the Latin American Studies Association, met in Rio de Janeiro. It was surprisingly different from what I expected. I had my first surprise when I arrived at the hotel. Weary from a long flight we entered our room and the porter explained that our key card had to be in a special slot that connected to the electrical system. If you took the card out, you would have a two minute grace period, and then everything in the room, except the mini-refrigerator would be turned off. Keeping the air conditioning on required the card. The toilets in the hotel were the low-flow type that conserved water, and of course, there was a note in the bathroom asking that we hang up towels that we could use again to save water by only laundering linens that needed to be changed. These people are serious about energy conservation. The worldwide economic crisis seems not to be affecting Brazil. It has a well-managed economy conducted by President “Lula” da Silva, a former union chief and socialist, that does not seem to have tanked, as ours has. When Lula won the election, the American press reflected our government’s usual panic over having a socialist in charge of anything within our sphere of influence. But all of the Brazilians I spoke with expressed support for him and his administration. Much of what I had read about Brazil, as well as the movies I’ve seen, featured the poverty there: favelas or urban shantytowns; street children; violence by police particularly against the street children. The first movie I saw about Brazil was Pixote, a 1981 film about a child’s life on the streets which imprinted itself on my brain; the 2002 film, City of God, simply updated the situation. I had expected to see poor, dirty children selling Chiclets or shining shoes; poor women carrying a baby and trailed by two or three filthy children as one sees in Mexico and Central America. There were no children downtown neither when we went on a walking tour nor when I spent an afternoon poking around Central Rio on my own. I realized after a few days that the only children I had seen in Brazil were well-supervised by their parents. This is not to say that poverty has been eliminated in Brazil. The favelas are still there and visible from the nicest areas. Some of the vendors who approached us on the beach were barefoot. I wondered where the middle class and working class lives. Rio boasts one of the most spectacularly beautiful bays I have ever seen, and I was born in San Francisco. I took a ferry trip in Guanabara Bay to visit Ilha Fiscal, an island which had been used by Portuguese royalty for dances and parties when they maintained a government in exile in Brazil during Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. I found myself to be the sole non-Brazilian on the ferry on a Sunday afternoon with many Brazilian families, some of whom had very small children. I was struck by how well-behaved the children were. I anticipated that some of the young children would be bored during the tour, but they were quiet. Spoken Portuguese is considerably different from Spanish and I had not had the time to brush up on my grad school Portuguese. It has a musical quality and a sensuality that is unique to it. I found that I could communicate with most people with my "portunhol." Rio is the second largest city in Brazil, after Sao Paulo. The amazing thing is how non-commercial it is, much more like Paris or Florence than the big cities in the United States. The hotel did not have a shop; finding toothpaste or other toiletries required a walk of a few blocks to a store. Only in a couple of places did we find the kind of tourist store full of souvenirs one finds in American airports, and tourist spots like San Francisco, where these stores are elbow to elbow in endless ribbons. While our hotel was located in the Beverly Hills of Rio, where there are very pricey and fashionable stores, one did not have the sense that the whole culture is anywhere near as consumerist as ours is. But neither is Brazil a Third World country. I was standing in front of a jewelry store, looking with some confusion up and down the street, for a CD store, when one of the sales people came out to ask me if she could help. I explained what I had been looking for and she went back into her store, looked up CD stores, and wrote down two addresses for me that were within walking distance. It was a generous gesture that I found to be typical of Brazilians during my brief visit there. This is not to say that there are no problems for tourists in Brazil. Everyone warns you to wear no jewelry at all—no rings, no watches—unless you are prepared to part with them. We were told not display our cameras, especially if alone. There are pickpockets everywhere; while I was there, one of the men on our tours had had his camera stolen from his pocket. Another man was crossing a street when he felt a hand in his pocket. He said he slammed his fist down on his leg and the hand withdrew, but it all happened so fast, he never saw who was trying to rob him. The anxiety of being super-vigilant does spoil things a bit, but even the Garden of Eden had a snake. Rio de Janeiro is an incredibly beautiful place. I will remember with pleasure sitting in the shadow of Pao de Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain) watching the sun set behind Corcovado, where the giant Christ statue stands over the city. It was one of those rare moments when our senses are overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of a place. I plan to go back.

Sotomayor: What kind of Latina is she?

Sotomayor: What kind of Latina is she?

Our Voice - Politics http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1076/4609/

Written by RosaMaria Pegueros

What kind of Latina is Sotomayor? The answer is both simple and complex. Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been enjoying a wave of felicitations and celebration from Latino communities across the United States. However, Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation, raised the question of which Latino community she actually represents. The answer to this question is both simple and complex. As a Newyorican, Judge Sotomayor represents the children of Puerto Ricans who have made their way to New York. But does she also represent Mexican-Americans whose families have been in Los Angeles since before the Mexican-American war? Salvadorans and Guatemalans who came in the wake of the civil wars in their countries? Chileans who fled Pinochet? Argentinians who fled the generals? Venezuelans who hate Hugo Chavez? Cubans whose families deserted Cuba when Fidel Castro came to power? Those are all really different populations. It’s not an apple pie, it’s a pie of which each slice is of a different type—mincemeat, apple, cherry, pecan, lemon meringue—every time you cut into the pie you call a Latino pie, you get a different kind of fruit. Not all these populations necessarily like each other or hold the same opinions on important Latino-related issues. Take immigration, for example. Those old Californians, who have accumulated wealth and power in Southern California, are not terribly happy to host the poor Mexicans and Central Americans who brave the desert and swim across the Rio Grande to come here. Many Miami Cubans, now conservative and Republican, who came here as refugees from a Communist regime, look down their noses at all who came here illegally from anywhere in Latin America. And what about the Puerto Ricans? Sure, they might be discriminated against in employment or education, but they didn’t have to sneak into the country. They are born with U.S. citizenship. They already have a leg up. Some of the South Americans, particularly from the Southern Cone, bristle at being lumped together with the Central Americans. Their families immigrated from Italy, Ireland or Spain during the 19th century, they don’t have any indigenous blood. They consider themselves European. And the Central Americans look down their noses at their Caribbean siblings because of the latter's African blood. After all, the islands were settled with Europeans and their African slaves after Columbus and his men killed most of the indigenous people. Then there are the hidden layers of Africans in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize... and so it goes. So who exactly does Judge Sotomayor represent? I hear the echoes of arguments in our communities over the use of “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “Chicano,” to represent us. And where does this leave Brazilians? And they Latinos? Does she represent them as well? Years ago, when my daughter was a child, we drove to visit friends in Arizona. We stopped at a Navajo reservation to have lunch and buy a doll. “Why does the lady [the sales clerk] look like Abuelita?” she asked me. My mother—-her abuelita—-is from El Salvador, and is dark-skinned. She happens to be an amalgam of several European nationalities but she looks Latina. We have no Navajo blood that I know of but she was right; she indeed did look like my mother. So I told her this: “Our ancestors came from many places, and it’s like a stew: There are pieces of carrots, onions, potatoes, and beef, and so every spoonful will be different; but it is the same stew and it all tastes the same.” Judge Sotomayor is a Puerto Rican woman born in New York. But if you dropped her in East L.A., or on 24th Street, in San Francisco, no one would give her a second glance because she is obviously one of us. When she walks into the Capitol rotunda, she will stick out like a sore thumb, because what she is not; one of the rich, privileged, white men who make up the ruling class of this country. When Judge Sotomayor describes her Mamita’s hard work in raising her and her brother to believe that if they became educated and worked hard, they could achieve and succeed, she could be any one of us; her mother could be any one of ours. And do you think that once she is on the court, all those privileged white men will remember that she is Puerto Rican rather than Mexican? Or Central American? I teach Latin American history and I can tell you that there are a lot of people who think “Central America” means Iowa and Indiana; or that Brazil is an island in the Caribbean. We are defined as much by what we are not as by what we are. Her voice in the court will bring the resonance of one who is not from a dominant culture but is also not exclusively Puerto Rican. She is our Latina, with all that name embodies.

Memento Mori

Last June, my husband Yehuda Lev, 82, collapsed. In the months that followed, he has alternated between several week-long sojourns in hospital and living in a nursing home because the nature of his illness makes it impossible for him to be cared for at home. Traditionally, we had hosted a large Pesach Seder, a ritual Passover meal, for as many as 25 people. This year, my daughter and I struggled with our choices: Should we forego our celebration and go to other people’s homes? Should we go ahead and host it without him? Should we have our Seder and connect to him with Skype, an Internet video connection? Finally we decided to do the Seder at his nursing home. It was small; twelve of us—only our extended family and closest friends.

The following is the drash, or commentary I wrote to welcome our guests to the Seder.

For me, Pesach is a holiday laden with memory. I first felt my daughter move within me during my pregnancy on the first night of Passover, 1980. We shared Pesach with Yehuda's mother and stepfather several times, and I have wonderful memories of them on those occasions. Then there all the Seders that we have shared with our friends and family here in Providence as well as the many we shared with friends in California before we moved here: a rich panoply of happy memories.

It is wonderful that in spite of the difficulties of the last year, we were able to be together here in Yehuda’s home away from home, Summit Commons nursing home.

You build a life and you believe that you have some control over it, and then an accident or a sudden illness occurs, and you find that the life you carefully constructed will sweep you along, like a fish in a river, and you have little control over anything. You are left to wonder at the arbitrary nature of life, at the chaos that now rules it, and to pray for the strength to meet the unfamiliar challenges that lurk just out of view.

Mathematicians say that the nature of life is chaos. Unlike many things that they assert, this last year has made me understand this concept. And we, ever human, try to impose our small bit of order over the chaos.

As Henry David Thoreau, said, in Walden,
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”

As I prepared for the Seder this year, I was thinking about the Israelites who had to leave the familiar oppression of life in Egypt for the great unknown of life in the wilderness: Where would they sleep? Where would they get water? Where would they get wheat to make their bread? What flora and fauna would they find to feed themselves and their children? Slavery was horrid but wandering in the wilds for an indefinite time, which ultimately turned out to be forty years –almost two generations—was terrifying.

Small wonder that they wept with joy at the magical manna that appeared so they could make their bread, or that, in a rare moment of doubt, Moses struck the rock twice to draw water for his multitudes. In the midst of the wilderness, it is hard to imagine that we will survive our terror and uncertainty. So here we are, and to the question, “How is this night different from all other nights?” we add this answer to the traditional answers: Tonight, we are acutely aware of the transitory nature of life, in a way we have never been before, and I offer this “Prayer for Embracing Life’s Mysteries” by Rabbi Naomi Levy:

"Teach me to bend with life, how to repair what I can repair, how to live with my questions, how to rejoice in Your wonders. When I am faced with events that baffle and astound me, help me to transform my frustration into humility and awe. Teach me to embrace the mystery, G-d. Remind me to enjoy the ride. Thank you. G-d, for this spectacular life."

from MiApogeo: Too Few Latinos in Baseball's Hall of Fame

Too Few Latinos in Baseball's Hall of Fame

Our Voice - Lo Que Es

Written by RosaMaria Pegueros

Of the 289 players that have been named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, only ten are Latinos. Rosie Pegueros wants to know why. Spring is coming, and my thoughts turn to spring training. I forget about my winter preoccupations and start reading the baseball gossip. The one thing I really miss about living in Los Angeles is going to opening day at Dodger Stadium. There’s just something about being outside in the sunshine, the sound of radios all around broadcasting the game simultaneously in English and Spanish, and the roar of the crowd with every small victory. I’ve always loved the game. I grew up in San Francisco where, when I was very young, the Seals played until the Giants moved from New York to the City (as we natives call SF) in 1957. The Giants have the distinction of having won more games than any other team in the history of organized sports and of having the greatest number of Hall of Famers. Raised in a house full of brothers and a father who loved it, baseball was all around me. The famed Russ Hodges was always on the radio calling the games. My dad and the boys collected baseball cards and played on the street, in school, and on the local police leagues. I remember listening to the feats of Orlando Cepeda and Matty, Felipe and Jesus Alou, three brothers from the Dominican Republic, and, of course, the great Roberto Clemente. Even at a young age, I was proud of the Latino players. Later, in the 70s and 80s, part of the delight of going to Dodger games was getting to see Fernando Valenzuela, a young Mexican whose thrilling pitching won him the Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year Award in his first season with the Dodgers. You can imagine my interest when one of my college seniors asked if he could do his research paper on Latinos in baseball. This young man, who is not himself Latino, was the warm-up pitcher for our local team, the Pawtucket (Rhode Island) Red Sox (locally known as the Pawsox), the Triple-A farm team for the Boston Red Sox. He admired many of the Latino players so, why not? I was shocked when my student told me that of the 289 players that have been named to the Baseball Hall of Fame, only ten are Latinos. Ten?! That’s not even three percent. He was stunned; I was stunned. Are you SURE? He was. I went home and Googled the Baseball Hall of Fame. How could a game that is truly American a game as could be, that is played all over Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as the United States, and with so many outstanding Latino players on U.S. teams, have only ten Latino players in the Hall of Fame? The best known of the Latino Hall of Famers is the great Roberto Clemente (Puerto Rico) of the Pittsburg Pirates who died tragically in an airplane crash, trying to bring disaster relief to victims of the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake. Then there is Rod Carew (Panama) who, primarily with the Minnesota Twins, maintained one of the highest hitting averages in history and won ten batting titles. Then, in alphabetical order: shortstop Luis Aparicio (Venezuela); first baseman Orlando Cepeda (Puerto Rico); pitcher Martin Dihigo (Cuba); pitcher Alfonso Ramon “Lefty” Gomez (Mexican American, California); pitcher Juan Marichal (Dominican Republic), and first baseman Tony Perez (Cuba). The latest additions, in 2006, include pitcher Jose Mendez (Cuba) and executive/pioneer Alex Pompez (Cuban American, Florida). There are few things that are as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, but racism is one of them. African Americans did not break into the majors until 1947. Until that time, Blacks were kept in the Negro Leagues. When Jackie Robinson was selected to break the color barrier, he was counseled to eschew fighting back when confronted by racism. Playing in the Dodgers' farm team, among the challenges he faced were the objections of his teammates to riding the team bus with him. Cepeda’s road into the major leagues was not a direct one. In those bad old days, he came up through the Cuban and the Negro leagues before getting into the majors. Cepeda was not only Puerto Rican; he was black. Who elects the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame? Sports writers! One can disparage these shining practitioners of public literacy, but it is the only game in town. An actor can make fun of the Academy Awards, but the fact is that the Golden Globes and the People’s Choice Awards don’t hold a candle to the Oscars. As a humble academic, I can but rarely afford the cost of a ticket to Fenway to see the Red Sox play. But as a historian, and a believer in keeping an accurate record, the numbers bother me: ten Latinos out of 289 Hall of Famers. Today there are 750 players in Major League Baseball; 314 (42%) are Latinos born in Latin America, and 58 U.S.-Latino players: together, 372 players—almost half of the players in MLB. Barely 3% of the game’s retired Latino (both U.S.-born and Latin American) players, managers, and executives have made it into the Hall of Fame. Maybe the sportswriters shouldn’t be the only ones making the choice. After all, how many years do they stay in the profession and vote for the winners? Thirty years? Forty years? The judges change much more slowly than the athletes they judge, dragging their private biases and prejudices into every vote. Racism and ethnic prejudices have changed dramatically in the last forty years. If only there were some way to democratize the choice! But absent the active participation of aggrieved Latino players, it will never happen; the fact that only a quarter of the Latino players are U.S.-born contributes to their invisibility in the Hall of Fame. What I would love to see is a movement of baseball professionals to take the Hall of Fame selection process away from the sportswriters. Luckily for me, the Pawsox play in a stadium that is near me. Nobody knows them now, but they feed new players to “the show,” the big leagues. Who knows? The next Juan Marichal or Roberto Clemente might come from Pawtucket, and I will get to watch him play before he’s rich and famous. Ah, springtime… posted on MiApogeo.com on Monday, March 30, 2009 http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/852/1453/

Nuestros Hijos and the Iraq and Afghan Wars

Nuestros Hijos and the Iraq and Afghan Wars:

What this means to our Latino communities

Finding a person who knows how to cut curly hair is not easy. Lately, I've been visiting a salon in a Dominican neighborhood of Providence, where I live. I was sitting in the chair, wrapped in the plastic apron, when I spotted a photograph of a young man in uniform on the stylist's mirror.

"¿Su hijo?" I asked. "No, un vecino," a neighborhood boy, the stylist replied. Then she told me his bone-chilling story.

The young man had been blown up when his jeep hit an IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq. Now he is in an army hospital in Texas. He lost his limbs, a buttock, his anus, and has severe head injuries that have damaged his ability to think. Given his injuries, I cannot imagine what the quality of his life could be. His mother is now alone in Providence; her husband abandoned her years ago, and her other son was lost to street violence. The salon was raising money to finance the mother's trip to Texas to be near her surviving son.

The government does not provide funding for that purpose. In fact, the Veterans Administration has been slow to respond to the need for treatment for vets with post-traumatic stress syndrome, as well as the head traumas and amputations, extreme physical disabilities that are the worst wounds of war. Helping families to travel to distant facilities where their wounded sons and daughters are being treated isn't even broached with Congress. Recently, Jim Webb led the Senate to pass part of an emergency spending bill that revises and upgrades GI benefits. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain voted against it, saying that the benefits would be so attractive as to be a disinvestment for soldiers to reenlist.

To our everlasting shame, this nation, which prides itself on having the finest military force in the world, is miserly in the rewards it gives those warriors upon their return.

The government has been negligent in the distribution of veterans' health care and permanent disability support. Systemic dysfunction can be seen in the undervaluing of injured veterans' disability ratings, forcing many of the most severely disabled to fight the system by hiring lawyers to intervene on their behalf, and resulting in delays of months in the awarding of benefits to wounded soldiers who deserve them.

Last year, Washington Post investigative reporters uncovered severe neglect in the facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The problems included rat- and cockroach-infested quarters; a lack of heat and water, as well as security problems that resulted in injured soldiers having to stand guard duty!

When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were mounted, few asked if we could afford them. Honor, revenge, power, and hubris overrode good sense in the rush to take up arms. We put the best interests of our own people at home in jeopardy in order to buy the costly weapons of war. How many school systems would be supported for the cost of one bomber? One helicopter? One load of bombs? How many schools could be built, outfitted and staffed by the money we are spending on Bhagdad's Green Zone? How many job programs and training programs could be funded to put all our unemployed to work? How many gangs could be undermined and prisons emptied if we poured the money we spent in Iraq in one year on education, training, and helping our impoverished citizens to get on their feet?

Our bridges and freeways are crumbling while Army engineers build armed fortresses in Iraq. Would it be a violation of government policy to put them to work here, rebuilding the infrastructure that we need?

In the run-up to the wars, President Bush insisted that he would not need draftees to conduct the war. As long as unemployed and underemployed people could be enticed by fat signing bonuses and the promise of funding for college, the pool of soldiers would remain large. For the first time in our history, we have a professional, all-volunteer standing army.

Many of the members of our armed services signed up because of a lack of job opportunities; they saw the military as a way to develop valuable job skills and experience. Most who signed up for the National Guard trained with the expectation of serving close to home. A weekend a month and a month's training in the summer prepared them for national emergencies at home. Once deployed, they never expected to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for second and third tours of duty because of Bush's stop-loss policy, his solution to the problem of replenishing the demand for troops and fudging the promise not to reinstate the draft. Instead, we have a backdoor draft that is taking advantage of the aspirations of our economically disadvantaged for better lives.

What has that meant for Latino communities?

Of the 157,000 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the surge, 10.5% are Latino/as; 17% of the combat troops are Latino. But there is a hidden layer: Over 8,000 non-citizen Mexicans are fighting for this country in exchange for the promise of citizenship if they survive the ordeal; nor are they the only foreign nationals seeking to earn citizenship in the same way. This has been a traditional way that the United States armed services have filled out their rosters, unbeknownst to many Americans.

What happens to a Mexican national when he is gravely injured? Will his family be allowed to come over the border to attend to him in a hospital in Texas? Who will advocate for him in Congress?

The military itself is not the only recipient of government monies allotted to war spending. In this war, profiteers have been quietly legitimized by the current administration. Blackwater, and Vice President Cheney's company, Halliburton, among others, have made billions of taxpayer dollars in no-bid contracts. The professional army is "spared" day-to-day tasks and certain protection duties because Blackwater -- which is subject neither to governmental or military control -- has taken them over, for steep fees.

No wonder Bush crowed that he did not need to reestablish the draft: By engaging in a shell game, he can boast of the greatest military force in the world, run a parallel universe of mercenaries and contractors, and hoodwink the poorest Americans and immigrants yearning for legitimacy into enlisting.

Profiteering is no longer a dishonorable activity. Kleptocracy, ie., a ruling class that guts the public treasury, is now the rule of the day in the US, as is kakistocracy, rule by the worst or most unprincipled leaders.

We will be paying for these wars long after the neoconservatives who started them have gone on to their eternal punishment. The Almighty should put government officials who bequeath such extreme debt to one's children and grandchildren in the first circle of hell. War is such a costly venture, it is hard for a reasonable person to understand what would possess a country to go to war. Looking at the bare and shameless profiteering in America's two current wars, there is only one answer: Greed.

And that wounded soldier's Mamita, trying to find a way to be by his side? She's on her own, still trying to scrape together her fare to Texas.


published on Mi Apogeo, September 2008
http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/300/932/