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