Princesses are from Mars, Glenn Beck is from...

The lovely Dejah Thoris, courtesy of Rob Ullman.
Can amity between red and green Martians, and Earthlings,
be a model for ourselves?

Today I return to the blogosphere with a discussion of Glenn Beck and Mars. No, it’s not what you think.


Earlier this summer, Rob Ullman, a cartoonist and artist whose oevre includes sports, comic books, science fiction and culture drew a portrait of Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book of the same name. I’ve never been a huge sci fi fan myself. (OK, I went to one Star Trek convention years ago, but that’s a separate story.) Still, having read Burrough’s Tarzan when I was a kid, I picked up a copy.

A Princess of Mars came out nearly a century ago, and it’s far from a Nobel- or Booker-worthy read. (After all, there are fifteen-foot tall, six-appendaged green monsters and the aforementioned Ms. Thoris wears no clothing apart from her jewels.) But the scenes between John Carter, the novel’s hero who is mysteriously transported from Arizona to the plains of Mars (which the inhabitants call Barsoom), and Dejah Thoris are wonderful to read because of the civility and formality with which they address each other—like when Dejah Thoris tells John Carter that she has been engaged to another man:

“It is too late, John Carter, my promise is given, and on Barsoom that is final. The ceremonies which follow later are meaningless formalities. They make the fact of marriage no more certain than does the funeral cortege of a jeddak again place the seal of death upon him. I am good as married, John Carter. No longer may you call me your princess. No longer are you my chieftain.”

They speak to each other reverently. Now distinguish this from our political discourse. As it’s all too easy to tell from watching the campaigns, and the reaction to recent debates about healthcare reform, economic stimulus and so on, we live in a poisonous political environment. Leslie Marshall, who hosts a talk radio show out of Los Angeles, asked the other night what was missing from politics. I said a sense of civility, particularly since Glenn Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial had just happened. A little to my surprise, the event turned out to be more church revival than Nuremburg rally. (Never mind that neither he nor most media addressed the double standard between vilifying a Muslim community center proposed for “hallowed ground” in lower Manhattan and holding a right-wing rally on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech.)

As I thought more about Leslie’s question, though, and contemplated the root causes of the lack of civility, I dare say that I thought Beck may be on to something. Far from me to think that injecting Christian revivalism into politics is a good thing. But I think what’s missing from politics is a sense that we are all created in God’s image. Even those of us who worship a different God—or no God at all. I’m now preparing for my second year of teaching interfaith fifth graders about the life and times of Jesus. Being in an interfaith marriage, I can say that I’ve had so much joy brought into my life by being open to more than one form of belief. I only wish that our politicians (and us, as a culture) could be more interested in living our motto: “out of many, one.”

Watch! This! Space!

A posting to follow--very possibly tonight!

I know, I know, it's been many, many moons since I last posted to this blog. It's been an exciting summer. Very, very busy, which is a good thing given all the concerns about slowing economic growth. Let's pray that the gray economic clouds reported last week are the gray clouds we've grown used to and not another gathering storm.
 
What have we learned?

• American politics are even nastier than we thought they were.
• It takes just about a hundred days to plug a hole in the ocean.
• The benefit provided to a baseball team by a rookie pitching phenom (during his rookie year) is inversely proportional to the size of the contract signed by said rookie.

I plan to write a a more detailed post involving Glenn Beck and Mars (and not in ways that you may think). Watch this space and hopefully it won't be quite as dormant!

 

What Part of "Happy Interfaith Marriage" Do Some People Not Understand?

It's been a very long time since I was motivated to post on this blog. Life, as it does sometimes, intervened. But the op-ed by in today's WaPo Outlook section by Naomi Schaefer Riley got me very hot and bothered this morning and not in a good way. It made me almost choke on my banana Cheerios, in fact, as I was getting our kids ready to go to our interfaith gathering.

You can read the article for itself, but what I find most grating about it is that pretty much all she cites are studies that retread all the arguments I've heard about interfaith couples, right up to "the family that prays together, stays together." Well, my family prays together. We say grace at dinnertime and we go to faith gatherings together. When I have some concern about someone's health, job, or life, I pray. Does this always happen at a synagogue, or a church? No. Is it exclusively Jewish or exclusively Catholic? No. But we have a shared experience in faith. And after a year of teaching a Sunday school class on the historical Jesus, I can say that I know more about Judaism and Jesus--and what my wife's and my own faiths have in common--than I ever did before.

Well, this has left me far too upset than I should be on a Sunday night. It's off to the grocery store and then to prepare a nice Sunday dinner. In an interfaith household in which we thank God every day that He led us to each other.

Goodbye to the Aughts, Baby!

Is it too late to write about New Years? Your blogger spent the holidays trying to take care of a sore throat/cold that (thanks to the very good Doctor at the local urgent care clinic) turned out to be strep throat. As a result, the January 1st posting has waited four days to germinate. However, I've been happy to have a few days to think about it.

2009 was a challenging year for all, but I like to think that in the crucible of the most intense recession of our lives, I learned how to prioritize better, to become more creative and resourceful in my work, and to not just accept things as they are. I think we'll collectively look back on the past year and be grateful about how we avoided the worst that might have been. Some will disagree, saying that Obama has taken us on an inexorable march towards socialism, but I disagree and refuse to digress.

What I've been thinking about the most is how we are now (arguably, at least) at the beginning of a new decade. There have been a few reminiscences about what this means in terms of the best television of the last ten years (I say in many cases that's an oxymoron), but honestly this one snuck up on me. I think this has been such a challenging decade that we don't feel much like celebrating it. More like turning the page on ten difficult years and hoping that the teens will be better.

What to make of this decade? What to call it? I do like the "aughts" because it sounds like the way the gentleman at the top would refer to it. It's hard to think of a personal pronoun to attach it to. The "me decade" is already taken, and the "us decade" doesn't fit. Maybe the iDecade because of the fast pace of technology. But here's what I'm thinking about what we were like from 1999 to 2009.

We were angry for much of the time. The decade started with the final fallout from the Lewinsky scandal. (Remember that one? Impeaching a President over a sex act seems, to borrow a term from the subsequent administration, "quaint".) Republicans manufactured a great deal of anger on their side, and Democrats felt like the President they voted for had betrayed them or been unjustly maligned. What a mess. Then George W. Bush and his minions squeaked by in the 2000 election. There are very strong arguments that they manipulated or stole votes in Florida, but at the very least it was an election in which 50 million people voted for his opponent and the other side, had it been as assertive as the Republicans, could have won just as easily. Did Bush govern with the "unity government" as was suggested? Of course not.

Then a litany of infuriating things followed. Worldcom. Enron. The failure of the Iraq war. The disaster of Katrina. On and on and on. And of course, the signature event of this decade and possibly our lives, the September 11th attacks.

September 11th channeled this anger, mixed with intense fear, and created a sense of rage and fear that drove politics for the rest of the decade.

I've wanted to write for a long time about September 11th and haven't been able to put it to words. This is not the time or place for that reminiscence, but if my own experience is any indication, the event brought forth an incredibly complex range of emotions, both all at once and over time: anger; rage; fear; deep, deep sadness, loneliness, powerlessness. I think our country went through a similar experience. We felt a great many things but internalized most of them. They manifested themselves in what I can only call a "rage-based" foreign policy under the Bush administration, focused on avenging the deaths of those killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. It resulted in what we thought would be an easy war to defeat Saddam Hussein, the hated Arab bogeyman and "appropriate" scapegoat; new interpretations of laws allowing the torture and indefnite imprisonment of our enemies; and a go-it-alone approach that alienated us from nearly all of our allies except the U.K., Israel and Australia. I think we're coming out of this funk but it lasted long enough to permeate our domestic politics as well. Witness the hyperbole and screaming about "socialist" stimulus packages and "Nazi policy" being made through healthcare reform.

With a new decade, I hope that we'll no longer be driven by anger and fear. I hope the recession is teaching us to live in a more grateful way and to appreciate our neigbors, rather than to be driven to annoyance or worse by our differences.

Interfaith at Christmastime: The Beginning of a Dialogue

One of my motivations for starting a blog was to begin a dialogue — or at least a monologue in the form of essays — on matters that I think about often. One of the things that often on my mind is the nature of religious identity in a diverse society. For me, this means that I'm part of the interfaith community. (Yes, as the picture to the right indicates, we have a Hannukah menorah and we put up Christmas decorations. The photo is from last year, when the holidays coincided.) With Christmas coming up — a Christian holiday that also has important secular meanings in our world — I'd like to begin a discussion of what it means to be interfaith.

The Merriam-Webster definition of "interfaith" is conventional, in the sense of its emphasis on the involvement of people of different religious faiths. In many instances, it is accurate. A Google search for "interfaith dialogue" yields some 514,000 results , includling efforts to promote interfaith dialogue on post 9/11 relations between Islam and the rest of the world and the AIDS crisis. These are ad hoc discussions that bring together people of diverse religious backgrounds to find common understanding of the world's major problems.

While these efforts are important, focusing on the ecumenical elements of interfaith dialogue, I think, fails to account for the many people who are in my situation. Namely, that I'm a person who grew up in a Jewish family, married a Catholic, and who, while secure in my own faith wants to make sure that my children have, as they are developing and growing, the security that comes from both faiths without feeling like outsiders or freaks. My family is very fortunate to have found the Interfaith Families Project (IFFP), here in Washington. It's a community of several hundred families, which share the same interest that we have in raising our children with the perspective of both faiths. We're very lucky to have become part of this extraordinary group. We're even teaching a Sunday school class on the life of Jesus, which has been a wonderful experience so far.

This is a very complex topic and I won't handle it all in one post. After this introduction, I'll be writing next about how I came to be part of an interfaith family. I'll follow that up with a "This I Believe" posting. Finally, I'll be posing some questions about interfaith life.

But I want to begin with a few stories.

I'm about ten years old, driving with my grandparents to their beach apartment. I've never even thought about kissing a girl but my grandparents are telling me and my sister about how they'd like us to marry Jewish people. I totally understood where they were coming from but even then something sounded wrong to me about thinking I couldn't love or marry someone because they didn't share my faith...

...It's my first week of college. My floormate Will, hailing from rural Arkansas, is asking all of us if we're Jewish (about two thirds of us are) — what he means is if we keep kosher, because he wants to cook some jambalaya for us. We thank him and assure him that even though we are "members of the tribe," we can eat his dish. "Good!" he says. "Jambalaya, dude!"...

...I'm hanging out with a dear friend from high school and her parents. Her mom says that marrying someone who isn't Jewish is like letting Hitler win...

...April 28th, 2001: my beautiful bride Melissa and I exchange vows in a Catholic cathedral, under a huppah, with a rabbi and a priest officiating. Two-thirds of a good joke, I say. Also the foundation of a wonderful life together. How blessed we are...

...This past fall, I'm at a book launch event for a study of the expatriate Indian Jewish community living in Israel, and am talking with two women my grandmothers' age about being interfaith, and doing my best to raise my children with the best of both traditions. One says she's an atheist and could't imagine raising her children with any religion. The other purses her lips and clucks, seemingly amazed that a young person would try anything so stupid.

I'm not the first person who has tried to express what it's like to grow up interfaith. Susan Katz Miller, a fellow IFFP member, has a blog that explores these issues far more eloquently than I could. There are no right answers here. Few people have tried to do this, and many, particularly in older generations, can't imagine why one would try to "be both." I like to think that it's one of the greatest advantages of living in a society as diverse as ours. There is no longer a "gentleman's agreement" restricting Jewish enrollment in major universities, or Jewish hires in businesses or agencies. And if we choose, we can marry anyone we want, and be accepted into their families.

So let's begin the discussion. Next, how I came to this happy place.

The Dance of the Sugarplum Interfaith Fellow

I have a confession to make. I love "The Nutcracker," the short ballet written (and some say, disavowed by) the great Russian composer Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, which has in the last half-century become one of the hallmarks of the holiday season, especially in the United States. The music in it is so much a part of the popular ethos that it's been appropriated by TV commercials and even Duke Ellington. (The image at the right is the backdrop for the second act, set in the Land of the Sugarplum Fairy, from the original production.)

I've been thinking about Nutcracker a lot lately because it arouses a lot of emotions in people, ranging from warm feelings of winter afternoons gone by to "ugh, I hate it." For me, it's a touchstone experience because I see it through the eyes of someone who is "interfaith" -- a theme which I'd like to begin exploring in this blog.

By interfaith, I don't mean "ecumenical" -- in other words, including people of many faiths in dialogue, particularly with issues that are important in modern society. These days we often hear about interfaith approaches to healthcare, or AIDS, or the war on terrorism. I mean something that I and many other families have direct experience with: the work involved in creating a family in which one spouse is of one faith (usually Christian), another spouse is of another faith (often Jewish), and the children, it is hoped, grow up with at least an appreciation for both.

"Nutcracker" resonates for me here because my experience with is is very much interfaith. I grew up Jewish, in a family that was, on the one hand, very assimilated. We didn't keep kosher or go to synagogue regularly. But Christmas was often an isolating time in our house, in the sense that we didn't participate in any of the secular elements of the season. To this day, some in my immediate family are openly hostile to the holiday, resisting going to Christmas parties or dinners if invited, turning of holiday music when it plays on the radio, and so on. A recent blog posting by the JCC here in Washington talked about one parent's ambivalence about "Nutcracker."

My mom, who still takes ballet class, first took me to the ballet when I was about five to see "The Nutcracker." If I hadn't wimped out at the last minute, I would have been in my elementary school's talent show as a kindergartener dancing around to soldier music from the first act. This year, I bought a copy of the wonderful ABT production with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland to play for my daughter, who is the same age that I was when I first saw it.

To my mind, "Nutcracker" is wonderful. It's a story that only begins with a Christmas party, but that deals more with the imagination and joy inherent in childhood. A little girl dreams that her toy nutcracker comes to life and takes her to a magical land. That's it. It's based on a short story by the German writer ETA Hoffman, brought to life by a Russian composer, and now part of the cultural zeitgeist of postmodern America. So when I approach it it's not as a Jew, or as a Jew married to a Catholic, but as a human being of one particular background living in a diverse, modern society. The joy in watching this little ballet comes from the dancing, and the music, and reliving the joy I felt seeing it for the first time in seeing my daughter do the same thing.

I'll explore in later postings what exactly being interfaith means to me -- but for the time being, it's back to dancing with the sugarplum fairy.

Toward a More Grateful Afghan People?

I wasn't able to watch President Obama's speech on Afghanistan on Tuesday, but I heard much about it the following day and have been thinking about whether we are doing the right thing. I pulled out something I haven't looked at in a while. It's a Soviet campaign medal from their war in Afghanistan that I picked up from a Moscow street vendor back in 1992.

The reverse, in a master stroke of overestimated gratitude, reads "From the Grateful Afghan People" in Russian and Arabic.

Holding this medal again made me wonder about whether we're doing the right thing here. So in the tradition begun by Peter King in his football column, here are a few"things I think I think."

• The Santayana "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" conundrum. I can't help but be reminded that a number of empires have gone into Afghanistan thinking that it will be easy going, only to be bogged down. It was true for the "Great Game" fought in central Asia, it was true for the nine years the Soviets spent in Afghanistan, and it is true for the (at least) ten years that we will have spent in Afghanistan by the time our troops stop leaving.
• Afghanistan was envisioned as a short war, but it oviously did not turn out that way. The chief reason for this was that our forces were moved from Afghanistan to support the Bush/Cheney war on Iraq. If we had the resources on the ground in 2003, this war may well have been over long before now. So it is at the very least not helpful, and at the most a continuation of the Bush administration's pathological lying, lack of accountability, and refusal to admit complete and utter failure for people like Dick Cheney critizize Obama on this, particularly for their perception that domestic politics is driving the decision. This from a group that won the2004 election by branding any opponent of the Iraq war an al Quaeda sympathizer. I think that the new Obama strategy is sound, I'm glad that there is a sense of what success looks like, and I'm glad that the plan includes a set of guardrails to guide withdrawal. I hope that people remember the kind of support that Bush received at the beginning of this war. At least he got the benefit of the doubt that he was doing the right thing. Let's remember that as we think about our current Commander in Chief, who is infinitely more intellectually engaged in his Presidency, and is much better served by his civilian staff, than his predecessor.
• Afghanistan is only a piece of the puzzle. It is naive to think that by winning the war in Afghanistan that we thereby pacify Iran, stabilize Pakistan and decouple the political influence of the Middle East with our almost complete dependence on them for our energy needs. But I agree with my graduate school professor David Rothkopf that it's folly to underestimate the complexity of the raft of issues of which Afghanistan is only a part.

So that's what I believe about where things are in Afghanistan at the moment. Only time will tell if the result is a truly grateful Afghan people or another shiny medal. I'll look forward to seeing what comments are made on this posting--maybe they can be the basis for a future conversation.