Nice Things, Nice People

There's a highway overpass at 28th Street connecting Reservoir Hill with other Baltimore neighborhoods like Remington, Hampden and Charles Village.  A couple months ago I saw an older gentleman laboriously painting the cracking concrete walls of that overpass, covering with pearly white paint the weather-worn graffiti and rust-orange chain link run-off.  I remember thinking as I watched him work: "What a thankless job! -- earning a day's wage toiling in the heat of the day to make Baltimore just a little nicer."  A couple weeks later, I was driving on the same overpass when I saw fresh black graffiti scrawled across the white surface.  It read: "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS."  My heart sank.

I don't know who sprayed the graffiti.  My immediate thought was it must be some MICA student, someone who thinks they're being clever or ironical.  Indeed, I later discovered local artist Adam Kurtz's website where he now sells postcards with the graffiti from the overpass.  Click here to see the image.  Someone once told me that contemporary art must be judged, above all else, by how it makes us feel.  That display, if it was art at all, made me feel awful -- for the poor man who worked so hard to paint the wall, for the cars driving by and, perhaps most of all, for the misguided “artist."

Seeing those spray painted words made me think of the scene from Schindler's List when Helen, a young Jewish captive, is describing her abuse at the hands of the Nazi commandant, Amon Goeth.  "'Why are you beating me? [I asked him].'  He said, 'The reason I beat you now is because you ask why I beat you.'"  The abuse becomes, invidiously, self-fulfilling.  The comparison is imperfect to be sure, but both have in common a blatant violation of the principal of Bal Tashchit.  To create (life, beauty and, yes, art) is a great Jewish virtue.  God is, after all, the Creator.  The undoing of creation, then, the wanton destruction or abuse of things and people is an affront to God.  To spray paint something like "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS" and through that destructive process to actually ruin something which was, in it's own small way, a nice thing, is to go against everything that healthy (let alone sacred) communities stand for.

  

Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "When I was young, I admired clever people.  Now that I am old, I admire kind people."  I dated a girl in college who didn't like the word "nice," she thought it too banal or simplistic.  But I am often struck by society's dearth of simply positive qualities like "nice."  That day in my car I could only think, "but we can have nice things, we just need a few more nice people."  

It's months later now and the graffiti has since been covered over, perhaps by the same man who worked so hard to paint it in the first place.  I wonder what he was thinking as he repainted.  I know what I would be thinking:  "Some people might see this as art.  Perhaps it is.  But perhaps it's just mean."

My Week in Annapolis

It's been an exciting week.  Our program on Same-Sex Marriage (covered here in the Baltimore Jewish Times) was well attended and well received.  Many thanks to House Delegates Barbara Robinson and Luke Clippinger who attended and lent their support along with Israel "Izzy" Patoka from Governor O'Malley's office. 


Then, Friday afternoon, I was privileged to testify before a joint House committee in support of House Bill 438, the Civil Marriage Protection Act.  I am pleased to report that there were nearly one hundred others who testified in favor of the bill, many of whom were leaders in the faith community!  Kudos to the Governor who testified early and then returned to the hearing room around 11:15 p.m. (long after I was back in B'more observing Shabbat) to watch the final half-hour of testimony and reinforce his deep commitment to the bill.


This video was released by Marylanders for Marriage Equality who have been stalwart advocates along with their counterparts Equality Maryland.  You can also watch excerpts from last week's clergy press conference here.

You're Invited! The Religious Case for Same-Sex Marriage

A discussion led by Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg of  Beth Am Synagogue and Pastor Andrew Foster Connors of Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church about the theological and textual underpinnings of a progressive stance on same-sex unions.

Making a (Religious) Case for Same-Sex Marriage: An Invitation

For a description of our upcoming (Feb 4) program entitled "The Religious Case for Same-Sex Marriage," click here for Beth Am's website or here for a recent Baltimore Magazine plug.

I have always enjoyed the quote (attributed in various forms to Blaise Pascal, Woodrow Wilson, Thoreau and others) "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."  It's often hard to limit the scope or length of one's writing (particularly for rabbis who are almost definitionally verbose). In writing this blog, however, I have attempted to keep myself within the dalet amot (parameters) of two essential questions:

1. How do Jewish values inform city-living?

2. How does living in the city affect an ancient tradition as it renews itself for the 21st Century?

Often, these entries have been more experientially "exegetical": descriptions of living/working in Baltimore and Reservoir Hill and my attempt to frame these experiences in textual and/or Jewish values language.  Occasionally, I've also felt compelled to tackle issues that might not be obviously related to being an "urban rabbi" or living and working in what I call "The New Jewish Neighborhood."  The question of marriage equality is one of these issues.  I have not polled my neighbors to get their position on the current Maryland legislation nor do I think that for most of them this is their most pressing concern.  Most people nowadays (particularly in the African-American community where unemployment is nearly twice as high as the general population) are concerned about jobs and the economy.

So, why blog about marriage equality?  Quite simply because I believe that it is the right thing to do.  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated this week, once said: “Never, never be afraid to do what's right.... Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.” Supporting Marriage Equality is the right thing for my lesbian and gay congregants and for our shul's mission of inclusion.  It's the right thing from the perspective of Jewish values and therefore, I believe, the right thing in the eyes of God.  And it's the right thing for our "ancient tradition as it renews itself for the 21st Century."  If you're interested in learning more about my perspective, I spoke on this issue in a recent sermon which you can read by clicking here.

There is, finally, one additional reason why I think we Jews in particular ought to be concerned about the LGBT community.  If there is any minority, any group of people who truly understands the experience of the "insider-outsider," it is the Jewish people.  American Jews have always had to make difficult decisions about our own visibility: how "Jewish" to keep our surnames, whether to wear kippot in public, whether to challenge the name of the company "Christmas" party.  In other words, even though we Jews, more often that not, can "pass," more and more of us have chosen to wear our Judaism with pride, a phenomenon I referred to in an earlier post.  If we are motivated by what Rabbi Sharon Brous has called "Radical Empathy," if we value the right of all peoples to have equal protection under the law, then we must advocate not only for the private right of individuals in their own bedrooms but also the public right of gay/lesbian couples to stand before God and their communities and celebrate their love.  

The New Jewish Neighborhood (Part 5): Walking to Shul

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner likens the ranking of religious ideas and core values to a deck of playing cards.  Each religion plays with a full deck but stacks it differently.  To many Christians, a value like salvation is paramount, found at or near the top of the deck, while revelation is found a bit later.  We Jews have a strong belief in the unity of God (we came up with the whole "monotheism" thing), but for us concern about the afterlife is found well after the top ten in the deck -- certainly after values like community, kindness or justice.


When people ask me the inevitable question: "Why do you live in Reservoir Hill?" I find myself turning to Kushner's deck.  There are three cards that rise to the top.   Here they are (though not necessarily in order of importance):

1. Shabbat observance
2. Diversity/social justice
3. The intrinsic value of living near my shul

The first two are fairly straightforward; I have written extensively on the second in previous blog posts.  The third, however, is hardly self-evident.  Lots of people, the vast majority of people, live far from their jobs.  City-living helps some to cut their commute time down, but there are plenty of urban residents who drive regularly to the suburbs or to distant parts of the city.


Cities across the country, though, are creating incentives to live near work.  Here are two Baltimore programs: "Live Near Your Work" and a (related) Johns Hopkins program of the same name. An obvious reason to do this is decreased use of fossil fuels while increasing alternative modes of transportation like biking, walking and public transit.  But an equally critical value is, quite simply, to contribute to one's own community -- financially, ecologically and socially.  


The question is, though, not only whether we rabbis ought to live near our shuls but whether Jews in general ought to give this serious thought.  More than 60 years ago now, Jacob Agus, a Baltimore rabbi and giant of twentieth century Conservative Judaism, co-authored a controversial legal responsum which came to be known as the "Driving Teshuvah."  Though the teshuvah's agenda was much broader in scope (Agus was really trying to confront, through  a halakhic lens, the crisis of suburban sprawl and its implications for the dissolution of American Jewish communities) it is often debated on the merits of his legal reasoning.  But perhaps we ought to reconsider Agus' original concerns in light of early twenty-first century urban renewal.  


Leaving for another discussion the particulars of whether one ought to be igniting an internal combustion engine on Shabbat, I think the more salient question is: what does it mean to "commute" to community?  If synagogues (as I believe they should be) are a critical anchor in the life of a Jewish person, shouldn't proximity to a shul be one of the factors near the top of our decks when selecting a place to live?  


If urban life is, at least partially, about wanting to shrink the geographic radius of daily living -- if we truly like the idea of walking to parks or neighbors' houses, cafes or the dry-cleaner -- shouldn't we also rethink the value of walking to shul?

The Vocabulary of Community Building

In my last post, struggling to describe locally-aimed financial support, I determined we need a new term: "locanthropy."  I talked about the value of volunteering and giving locally, supporting one's own neighborhood as a primary interest.  Contrast this with another approach, the Not in My Neighborhood attitude detailed in Antero Pietila's fine book.  During the decades detailed in the book, neighborhood transformation was often relatively swift from White to Jewish to Black and rich to poor and often from good to bad to worse.  Phenomena like "red-lining" and "block-busting" were critical factors in urban decay during an era when race and class defined much of Baltimore living.

Cities now have to contend with a different trend, and this one has a dictionary-endorsed word: gentrification.  There's an important distinction here.  Urban renewal, revitalization and neighborhood renaissance are good things, great things!  But, in this writer's humble opinion, great care should be taken not to reap the benefits of increased property value, better schools or improved amenities with a callous eye or ear toward one's neighbors who have been living in depressed conditions, in dilapidated homes or on the street.

As I've mentioned in other posts, my previous Chicago neighborhood was fairly upscale with wonderful amenities.  An important anchor in the community, however, was the Lakeview Pantry which provided food, clothing, case-management and home-delivery to the needy.  Walking by this beautiful, well-run, and (sadly) often packed facility was a critical reminder of the income disparity that existed in our own neighborhood and in the city of Chicago as a whole.

I was saddened to read a story in yesterday's Sun Paper that detailed the debate over whether the Beans and Bread soup kitchen in Upper Fells Point ought to expand and improve its facilities.  According to the paper, two neighborhood organizations are fighting the expansion claiming that it will attract more homeless people and further depress housing values. I don't know the players, the organization's history or the motivations of the parties, so I don't feel qualified to address this particular dispute.  Yet, similar debates have taken and are taking place all over the U.S. Homeowners, some of whom invested their life savings several years ago at the top of the market are understandably concerned about property value.  But neighborhoods are organisms with a thousand symbiotic components.  Wealth-building might be a benefit of savvy investiture, but it must not be its goal; too many lives are at stake.  The Torah tells us: "When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf in the field, do not turn back to get it; it shall go to the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow -- in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings" (Deu. 24:19).   This mitzvah (called leket/gleaning) cannot be done online or by commuting to some other "problem area" of the city.  This is, by definition, in our own backyards where the hungry are invited to walk into our fields and glean the harvest from our crops.

In order to lessen hunger we must first confront it -- not just the knowledge of it but its victims, and confronting the hungry is bittersweet because, on the plus side, it sensitizes us to the reality of poverty in our midst.  It might be, though I haven't seen any conclusive data, that well-run and effective soup kitchens or food pantries can lessen property values.  But relocating them, kicking them out of the neighborhood, desensitizes us and allows us to devalue human life.  True gentrification can be functionally opposite of locanthropy.   It is taking from one's neighbors in order to create a climate in which it is easier to replace them.  To explain it another way would be naive at best, criminally negligent at worst.

The New Jewish Neighborhood (Part 4): Calling All Locanthropists

Sometimes we can make a local impact without even knowing it.  A couple months ago, Miriam and I finally decided it was time to take the plunge and get a minivan. I would give up my old car and inherit my wife's Subaru. We contacted an organization called Vehicles for Change which accepts donated cars, repairs them when possible and distributes them across three states.  Two weeks later, a flatbed truck met me on Eutaw Place, across from the shul, and drove my car toward the highway.  

A couple weeks later, I got an email from our emeritus rabbi who lives across the alley from us.  “I think I saw your car in the neighborhood today,” he said.  “No, you must be mistaken,” I replied, “I donated my car.”  But sure enough, parked around the corner from my house is my old car with the same familiar stickers on the dash and the tell-tale portion of the key I once broke off in trunk.  

Rambam tells us that it is a higher level of tzedakah to give anonymously – and I certainly tried.  But the story reminds me how powerful it can be to support one's own neighborhood, one's own community.  The Talmud says: Ani’ei ircha kodmim, the poor of your own city (or community) come first, and we are reminded that we should construct our dwelling places so as to provide access for the poor.  Rashi adds that a gatehouse must be situated in a way that ensures the owner of the home will hear the tza’akah of the ani, the cry of the beggar looking for food (Bava Kamma 7b).*   This is how we harness the Jewish values of tzedakah and gemilut hesed.

The word "locovore" was Oxford's word-of-the-year in 2007.  Eating locally is great, but perhaps we also need a word to express the value of volunteering and giving locally, something like "locanthroprist."

Definition:  One who excels at locanthropy, of course.  


*Thanks for Dr. Aryeh Cohen for introducing me to this beautiful text.