Letter From America: Thanksgiving

November 27
Portland, Oregon

I have been trying to find America's heartbeat. In the past it was easy because it was strong and steady. This week I tried to find a pulse.

The patient has seen better days. I grew up in an America where you worked hard and in time you were rewarded with the fruit of your labors. You joined the labor force, purchased a small home, worked some more and when you could afford to do so, built or bought something larger. You could expect to end your days secure and in comfort.

I haven't lived here for 27 years. In the meantime America has contracted a disease. The Subprime Financial Crisis is only the latest rash, but it's not the sickness. A lot of Americans got impatient. They wanted to taste the good life now and pay for it later, if ever. They didn't have to work hard. They could borrow the the things they wanted and the banks were dumb enough to let them do it.

Later is now. Of course, not everybody got sick, but this last year the ones that had been gorging themselves started heaving and puked. So these days Americans are trying to clean up the mess. They tell me about unemployment and reduced hours. Some of them, a lot of them are my age. There's not a lot of time left to work hard again.

But coming from a part of the world where health is the exception and not the rule, I see a country that is battling a cold but is still very strong. America enjoys the blessings of generations that did it the old fashioned way. Americans have a lot and they're grateful for it.

I haven't been in America for Thanksgiving for 27 years. I've been here a few times for Christmas and there's always been talk about how America has become commercialized and how holidays have lost their meaning.

America is sick and I don't think I have met one American this visit home that doesn't feel it on his/her own skin. So it is all the more inspiring how inspite of, or perhaps because of what ails America, Americans are truely thankful for the good land God has given them.

I took America's pulse this week.

Americans have a good heart. That's why I give America a clean bill of health.

Letter from America: The 'Loggers'

Wilsonville, OR

November 23, 2008

The United States of America was founded on the principles of democracy, but it took centuries of at times bitter struggle to come up with the recipe for tolerance and coexistance that you find here today. A variety of different ethnic groups, religious beliefs and political opinions that polarize other nations blend together in harmony, giving America its unique flavor.

But in the arena of sports pockets of still exist. This is where you find the high schools of small towns and farming communities battling each other in the minor leagues.

Last night Scio, Oregon’s (Pop. 600) varsity football team (the ‘Loggers’) squared off with Knappa (also called the ‘Loggers’) in a semi-final – the prize being a shot at the state championship. Scio doesn’t have the resources to develop a pass and receive strategy, so this year it played a running game with big farm boys plowing through their opponents’ defenses. Yard by painful yard, particularly for the poor slobs in the farm boys’ path, Scio’s Loggers plodded up to the top of the heap.

The two pretenders squared off at Wilsonville (neutral territory). Knappa played a more sophisticated game, passing over Scio’s defense and employing their own farm boys to block Scio’s. By the end of the first half , with Knappa leading 29-8, it was clear who would take the day. Scio didn’t lose heart and fought on, no longer out of hopes for victory but for more personal reasons. My brother Barry leaned over, “A lot of these kids are seniors. They know that this will be the last time they play the game. Ever.”

With four minutes left in the game, both teams caught a new wind. Knappa charged fast and furious, while Scio threw in all their reserves to hold them back. Barry’s a member of the school board. He remarked that most injuries happen when teenage athletes get whipped up and start taking chances.

“Why is Knappa pushing so hard?” I asked. It was obvious by now that they would win.
Barry replied in his fake foreign accent. “This is America. When we win, we’re in their face.”
“And what happens when “they” are in the Americans’ face?", I wondered.
“We nuke ‘em.”

America has employed and deployed young men and women around the world with the same competitive spirit that I saw on that field in Wilsonville last night. As Scio’s varsity team can tell you, size and strength don’t always spell victory, but it does mean that the other guys had better watch out.

Letter from America: The People's Choice

Portland, Oregon

November 22

Passing through America in November 2008 you can't avoid the election of Barak Obama at the beginning of the month. It has blasted a crater too big. You can't get around it.

Be they Democrats or Republicans, lean right or left; whether to their minds it is the breaking light of a new day dawning or the first sprinkles of fallout before a four year political winter, Americans are collecting their thoughts about what happened here. It's sitting there in the back of their minds, on the tips of their tongues, struggling to get out.

Maybe it's because I live far away, but I think that by electing Obama Americans cashed a note signed when slaves were emancipated 150 years ago. Obam took the last step in the march Martin Luther King Jr. started in Montgomery, Alabama. For me, this election wasn't about the next four years, but about the last 50 and the 50 to come. But alot of Americans aren't like me. They don't care about history. They live here, and they're worried about now.

Some Americans, apparently most, think that Obama is a savior that will extract them from the mud of a foriegn war and shore up a failing economy. Others say he's an antichrist (?) that has seduced the nation.

But from where I come from, detached and distant, I see this: nobody knows yet what the next four years will bring. The Bush administration isn't a hard act to follow; maybe all will be well. Maybe not. All I know is that it's too early to tell.

Leaders are servants of God. It is through them that He blesses some countries and punishes others. The democratic process has led people to believe that they are in some way masters of their own destiny, but despite of or even because of the fact that they elect their leaders, it is really only the means that God uses to reward nations, for better or for worse.

He just lets them choose their poison.

Letter from America

They say that every immigrant to Israel (Hebrew: "oleh") from North America is at first euphoric. The surge of moving to an exotic country, new surroundings, and being pumped with Zionist ideology is intoxicating. Eventually the emotional high wears off and the oleh comes to his senses and sobers up with one hell of a headache. The exotic has become foreign, the new has become routine and ideology diluted by reality is weak soup. (This doesn't happen to immigrants from Russia or other places where Jews are poor and persecuted.) I don't know who "they" are, but in view of the high percentage of American olim ("oleh" – plural) that eventually return and from personal experience, I tend to believe "them".

I got my Aliyah (Hebrew: immigration to Israel) hangover relatively late. I was in uniform only a year after my feet touched holy ground, and it's against Israeli Army regulations to get homesick. It took about 3 years before it hit me – I'm here. For good.

By then I had been released and was living on a kibbutz and when I wasn't scheming how to get myself and my family back to 'God's country' (Better know as the great state of Oregon), I was working in the kibbutz's cotton and wheat fields. Modern agriculture isn't really work anymore; nowadays it amounts to sitting on your butt in an air conditioned tractor cab listening to the radio while you keep the wheels in the furrow.

Pining as I was for my homeland, I would tune in The Voice of America and when that wasn't sending, second best was the BBC. One of my favorite programs was Alistair Cooke's "Letter from America".

(Now for those of my generation that don't tune into the BBC, let me remind you that Alistair Cooke was the British guy that hosted "Masterpiece Theater" 30 years ago on the Public Broadcasting Service, which I watched regularly in my youth; not because I was such a cultured teenager, but rather because I was a normal one that thought that the PBS was the only channel on television where there was the off chance of seeing naked women.)


Every Sunday Cooke would comment on the current events, American culture (or lack of it.), the days personalities or simple personal reflections with dry humor and a sophisticated not-American accent. What I loved about "Letter from America" were the bits of America and Americans that most Americans were either too oblivious or too American to admit.

I think Alistair Cooke's authenticity was due to the fact that he was never really quite an American. He lived there almost all of his adult life, received citizenship and genuinely loved her, but in the end he was the eternal outsider. He never was really a player and from his position on the sidelines could see things that were lost on those in the heat of the game.


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I have observed in the past (see "I am a Chameleon") about myself that I have this quality of blending in, but not really belonging. I am different even if I seem to fit in. I'm an outsider. And so, perhaps this blog offers the reader a novel point of view of Israel, maybe one that is as, if not more accurate than if I were a native son. Maybe I should call this blog "Letter from Israel".

It took time and not a little strain on my marriage to pass the crisis of immigrating and integrating in Israel, but in the end I made it and I'm not sorry. I love it here and I love the people in spite of it all. But I will always be me and part of that is being an American.

The funny thing is that by now, after 27 years of my adult life living in Israel exceeding the 21 years that preceded them, I'm an outsider in American circles as well. I don't think quite like them. I see things they don't see even if they're there.

So in the next two weeks while I visit home (America will always be as much home for me as Israel.), My People will be a letter from America. Hopefully my family and friends will be kind enough to let me post from there even though they probably will end up scratching their heads when they see how they and their America looks through my eyes.


I'll try to be gentle.

The Lowest Place on Earth

The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth and it's getting lower. A man made ecological disaster has and is taking place here in living memory. For centuries the Jordan River flowed from the Sea of Galilee and emptied into the Dead Sea, but now with Israel and Jordan pumping water out before it reaches the sea, it is drying up. Today the sea is actually two, separated at the waist by dry land that was still under water when I visited it for the first time the winter of 79-80.

Underground salt deposits along the shores melt when washed by fresh water until the soil covering them caves in. The ground under trees, cars, even people collapses without warning and they disappear into deep craters.

My 9th graders last year are now 10th graders. Last week we spent 3 days in the desert. We set up base camp between the Dead Sea and the Judean Desert and every morning we set out for one of the wadis that wind into the barren hills.

The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth, so no matter which way you go its uphill from there. Of course there are rewards. Desert springs aren't as big or impressive as the ones I visited in Croatia last month, but at the end of a long trail on a hot day, they are refreshing. Maybe it’s the contrast between water and the wilderness.

These 3 to 6 day outings in nature every year are a standard part of Israeli education, but the concept is foreign to Americans. Why do we send our children out of school to trek the desert and sleep in tents when they could be in a classroom?

In three years these kids will be soldiers and it wouldn't hurt them to start getting used to life without creature comforts. But we aren't Spartans and its not our job to supply the Israeli Army with hardened warriors. The reason we take them out into the wild goes deeper. What is education?

I think that Americans see education as a means of shaping the individual. You take a child and give him the tools to function one day as an adult.

In Israel we are creating a society. Sure children need to learn the fundamentals like reading and writing and mathematics. But by the end of grade school they have hopefully reached a basic level of knowledge and from there each takes a different path and majors in the subjects that interest them. And while they no doubt are learning things that are valuable, lets not kid ourselves – in ten years chances are that they will be employed in fields totally unrelated to the subjects they study now.

School is a fabricated society we have created with rules and values and objectives in a sheltered environment. We still have enough control to mold and shape the members, and by the time they leave and become citizens we hope they will have learned to work together toward common goals, to respect each other, to contribute and for each to take responsibility for more than his/her little corner. So a camp in the middle of the nowhere where the essentials of survival – food and shelter - depend on group effort is the ultimate lesson.

Almost two years ago the ground collapsed from underneath these kids in a way unusual even in Israel. For some of them, perhaps all of them, starting each day means setting out and climbing an uphill path from the lowest place on earth. They are learning that they reach those good places at the end of the trail when they pull together.

And what amazes me and inspires me is how even after having hit bottom they still have fun, have a bright take on life and push on. How they can just be a bunch of kids.

Union Boulevard

(I posted 'Union Boulevard' last April to mark the 40th year since Marin Luther King's assasination. With America coming down to the finish line in a landmark election year where for the first time an African American is running for the nation's highest office, I am reposting. Regardless of who proves to be the better man, for the first time in America all men are equal.)

After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, Moses' life was drawing to an end. He had one last request:

"Let me cross over and see the good land that is over the Jordan."

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He is allowed only to see the promised land from afar, but not to enter in himself. He gathered the children of Israel for one last time and told them,

"I will die in this land, I will not cross over the Jordan; but you will cross over and you will inherit the good land." (Deut. 4:22)
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The echo of Moses can be heard in the words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the great civil rights leader, in his sermon where America's blacks are likened to the children of Israel in the wilderness. He assured his people that one day they too would share the good land as equals;

"I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

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The next day he was murdered.

For black Americans Martin Luther King was Moses and the wilderness seemed endless. They took to the streets all over America. In Portland they marched down the nearest business district, ironically named "Union Blvd." After a week of rioting Union Blvd. looked like a tornado's path, with many of the businesses (mostly owned by whites) burned out ruins. When the smoke cleared it turned out that the wilderness had grown, for the workers and clerks (mostly black) that had been employed there on Union Blvd. found that their workplaces were gone.

Recovery was slow in coming. You could drive down Union Blvd. when I was a boy and see a wilderness of crime, poverty and hopelessness. Whites began to understand that it was time to include blacks and share the fruits of democracy. African-Americans realized that they wouldn't reach the good land by burning the wilderness; they had to cultivate and nurture it to make it blossom.

Martin Luther King saw a day when little white children and the sons of former slaves would hand in hand cross over to the good land. He saw a day when a man would be judged "not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character", a day when Americans would pull together instead of tearing each other apart.

I have seen the good land. Union Blvd. has been renamed Martin Luther King Blvd. (Called the MLK locally.) On one of my visits to Portland not long ago I walked down the MLK. I passed by businesses like "The African Art Gallery" and "African Bride Fashions", most likely owned by African-Americans, and the Oregon Convention Center, owned by everybody equally.

Last Friday it was 40 years since that day in Memphis that Martin Luther King's life was cut short. Today what was unthinkable the day of his death is a reality we almost take for granted. An African-American is a viable candidate to be the President of the United States of America. After 40 years in the wilderness, a new generation is entering the good land.

Of course all is not perfect, yet as one who remembers the wilderness 30 years ago, I know the good land when I see it. The good land is where there is hope. The good land is where things can get better.

Isn't it ironic that here in the good land that Moses spoke of, we are still wandering in a wilderness. Israelis against Arabs, Moslems against Jews, Jews against Jews. Driven asunder into camps we have yet to harvest the bounty of the land. We crossed the Jordan, but the good land eludes us.

I have seen the good land. Perhaps I will never dwell there myself, but I hope my children do.

I can see the good land. I don't know if I will ever cross over, but I know this: the only way is together. The way to the good land goes through Union Blvd.

Knowing the Difference

There's a woman my age here that decided to go to college. To be honest, until she told me about her decision, I had always just assumed that she had at least a B.A. in something, and I didn't rule out an M.A. as well, because she's this know-it-all type of person and comes off as being very authoritative.

A week or so after she started school, she showed me the final draft of an assignment, her first assignment, that she had completed. And not just to me; to everybody. She was like a first grader that had finally learned the ABCs, showing off and very proud of herself.

I had done the go-back-to-school thing ten years before and formal education doesn't make much of an impression on me. I read her assignment and pointed out a few things that she needed to work on. After all, she had asked me what I think. She was very insulted. After chewing me out with more than a few harsh words, she stomped off and pouted.

While her behavior was sophomoric, I was the one in the wrong. Even I know that children need encouragement more than correction. The first grader with her ABCs doesn't need to know that the 'i' and 'j' need to be dotted and that she's got the 'e' backwards. When she's finally made that breakthrough, she needs to be praised. Sooner or later she will make the corrections that need to be made. The middle aged lady/coed deserved the same consideration we naturally give to seven year olds, but I guess the fact that she isn't cute and missing her two front teeth threw me off. And I should have remembered that grown ups can sometimes behave childishly and when they do someone has to be the adult.

Sometime after this I overheard her talking about when she started school, and she mentioned that first assignment that I had 'corrected'. She voiced almost word for word the remarks that I had made before. And I'm sure that in time she will find that while higher education may require an enormous effort for old and rusty minds, objectively it's no big deal. But that is among those things that people need to learn for themselves, whether in the first grade or freshman year at age 50.

And I am learning that there are things that are true, and there are things that people need to hear, and wisdom is knowing the difference between the two.

In Bruges

The prophets probably didn't know about the afterlife, and even if they did they certainly didn't tell anyone. There's no mention of heaven or hell in the Old Testament. Salvation, judgment, redemption were collective and in this life.
Here and now.

By the time Jesus came along the idea of "there and then" had evolved. He wasn't challenged when He spoke of life after death. (Except for the Sadducees who were old farts that nobody cared about anyway.)

Talmudic Judaism and the early Church developed the idea of the next world; the resurrection, Judgment Day, heaven, hell. Of course this presented a new problem. If there is a day of judgment then, and people are living and dying now, then where are the souls in the meantime? Lets say that Joe died in the year 1000 AD and Judgment Day is only in the year 2000 AD. (Theoretically of course, because who could have imagined that God would tarry so long.) What happens to Joe for a thousand years?

The Jews, or at least the more mystically inclined, decided that Joe is here. After he died he got a second chance and a third and so on. He got reincarnated to make a "tikkun", to fix things he'd screwed up in his former life. His soul would "roll over" (the term for reincarnation in Hebrew) again and again until he got it right. The soul, so they said, is definitely here and now.

The Christians, more specifically the Catholic ones, invented something new. When Joe died his soul went to a place called Purgatory where he worked off any unsettled accounts with God until Judgment Day. According to the Catholics, after the body dies the soul is there and then.

It is this nagging question about the time and place between the debts we accrue in life and payday that is at the heart of the film "In Bruges". Two Irish gangsters are sent to Bruges, Belgium after botching a hit in London. They are told to wait there for instructions, but at least to Ken, the older of the two, its clear that there will be a reckoning.

Bruges is a well preserved Medieval European town, "something out of a fairytale" one of the thugs calls it. Ken is more aware than his mate of their predicament and in no hurry, but young Ray chafes in exile. He is tortured by guilt and oblivious to the charm of Bruges. He wants to move on, not knowing that here and now is all he has left.

Bruges, a place in between, after life but before judgment.

The great sage Maimonadies understood something that eluded others, both Jewish and Catholic. Time and place are created. God doesn't exist in time or place, and when we leave this life our souls are no longer bound by either. We don't have time to kill until "then"; we don't roll back over and over again "here".

"In Bruges" is a black comedy with an irony that makes sense in a daft mad Irish state of mind. The setting and hints like the painting "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymous Bosch (Note how grotesque characters like in the painting appear throughout the film.) point to something deeper. If there is such a thing as purgatory, its here and now. Ray wallows in guilt, but does nothing about it. Ken finds a way to redeem himself.

Bruges – a fairytale land or a tortured conscience in exile. Bruges, untouched by time, is where we are, where we will be. Heaven and hell don't begin when this life ends. For the soul there is no boundary between "here and now" and "there and then".

So maybe the Old Testament prophets were right after all. The next life starts now.

Ray: "Prison...death...didn't matter. Because at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn't be in ****in' Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, **** man, maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in ****in' Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die. I really really hoped I wouldn't die."

From "In Bruges"

ONCE: Falling Slowly