Ripples

My brother Michael and me. 1966. Cape Town.

Nelson Mandela lived opposite me.

Me in my big house, him on Robben Island

Although I never knew that.

I would stand for hours by the fence, looking at the sea,

Looking at Robben Island and at the setting sun turning the buildings below golden.

I remember how lonely I felt.

I remember feeling like I was the only one,

Like I was the only one that felt ashamed of what I saw.

And ashamed of myself for not doing more

Today I learned I was not alone then.

My father felt that too.

This is how he tells it:

"I was a medical student at Cape Town Medical School in 1942.

Cape Town Medical School allowed White and Coloured students to go there, but not Black students..

Black students had to go to Medunza or Durban.

If a Coloured student came to Cape Town Medical School, their parents had to sign a letter saying their child would be admitted to Medical school under the following conditions:

1.       They could not dissect a white body

2.       they could not attend a white post-mortem

3.       They could not attend an operation on a white person or examine a white person

4.       They could not be taught on a white patient.

If they did any of these things, they would be expelled"

This was progress. Before 1942, Coloured students were not admitted to Cape Town Medical School at all. They had to qualify in London, Glasgow or Edinburgh.

My father remembers they had a brilliant professor who was an admirer of the Nazi party in Germany.

All the other teachers would teach on Coloured patients, but so as not to miss an opportunity to humiliate the Coloured students, this professor made a point of bringing in White patients.

My father remembers how the professor would look at the Coloured students, tilt his head toward the exit and say officiously:  “Come along, people”

The Coloured students would then have to get up and leave.  My father says all the White students just sat there in silence.

“Not one of us got up. We just felt ashamed” he says.

(Subsequently, they went to the Dean and complained and the professor moved to a different teaching hospital)

But that encounter in the moment, the opportunity to do something kind, something ethical, something moral, was gone.

When the professor died after a long and successful career, 5,000 people came to his funeral where he was buried with full honours. There is no Justice my father says.

But Nelson Mandela, the man across the water, taught me something else- that anything is possible.

It is shame that makes us blind to the possibility of action.

In each moment, there is always the possibility to transcend our loneliness, and see that we are all connected.

On the 6^th of June 1966, when I was four years old, Robert Kennedy made a speech at the University of Cape Town.  My parents were there.

I was probably at home, looking across the sea at the time.

I like to imagine Mandela was looking over the rippling sea back at me.

I like to imagine us both listening to these words:

 “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance”

I like to imagine that in listening,  I am part of that ripple.  And that you are too.

Kaddish for Normie

My father, David, with his mother and brother on Muizenberg beach

My father didn’t like going to Shul and this is why.

His mother died suddenly when he was 15 years old, and for the next eleven months he went to Shul every morning to say Kaddish.

He says he was diligent and never missed a day.

“Magnified and sanctified may His great name be in the world He created by His will”

He says in that year of mourning, he was never offered an Aliyah, even though he went to Shul regularly.  

He was a kid among all these men, and no one noticed him. No one recognized or comforted him.

No one explained to him that in saying the words of Kaddish he was earning merit for his mother by being her son who is a person who praises God.

“Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, praised and honoured, uplifted and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He”

So my father was bitter about Shul generally and about his Shul specifically. 

As a surgeon working at the coalface against cancer and disease for fifty years, he also has issues with God.

His Shul is the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation but it’s always just called by its address -

Marais Road.

Marais Road was where my parents got married and where we went on Friday night and for the Chaggim.

A few years after I was born, Marais Road Shul employed a new shammas, called Norman Isaacson.

Normie was an ex- weight-lifter who spoke with a thick South African accent.

He spent his life serving the Marais Road community in a thousand tiny gestures of kindness.  He noticed who was struggling. He remembered birthdays.  He made you feel at home.

On Normie’s watch, a kid like my father would have gotten an Aliyah.

My father called me yesterday to tell me Normie had died. Apparently Shul was packed for his memorial service, and Rabbis of all kinds came together.  Apparently they brought the coffin into the Shul.

My father praised the service and said at last he feels that Marais road is his Shul and the Marais Road congregation is his community.

“May He who makes peace in His high places, make peace for us and all Israel”

Normie the Shammas achieved in his death one final good deed– he helped my father make peace with his Shul. 

The jury is still out on God.

Normie Isaacson - shammas

Marais Road shul

   

Listening

I ran in silence yesterday on the Heath.

Before I set off, I said to myself just run for an hour without stopping.

And so I did. But I did stop after 40 minutes to look at the swans.

For months now, I’ve been watching them.   I watched the mother swan sit on the nest.  
I watched the eggs hatch.
I watched the baby swans swim.

So I stopped to see how they were doing. 

They were bigger now, still grey and they sailed towards me in a row.

I wasn’t watching alone. 

There was a woman next to me with two small children watching too.

It started to rain gently.

Tiny concentric circles formed on the pond.

The mom said: “look, summer-rain”.

The boy in her arms said quietly: “the sun is crying”

I wasn’t quite sure I heard properly. I asked him to say it again. And he did.

I said; “that’s beautiful”

I was glad that I was there and I was listening.

I was glad I had gone for a run and stopped to see the swans.

I was glad to hear the leaves in the trees.

I was glad to hear the universe talking to itself the only way it can.

I heard the universe again while I was running today.

It was before I even got to the swans.

I ran past a woman sitting on a bench next to the path.

She had no teeth, leathery skin and had little stuffed animals all over her.
She smelled slightly of urine.

She called out to me as I ran past: “Keep going, you’ll get there eventually, wherever there is”

I ran past the entrance to the ladies pond which was finally open again following the death of a woman my age. She had silently sunk into the end of the pond and never came out again.  They found her body at the bottom of the pond the next day.

I borrowed an old swimming costume from the life-guards, changed out of my running things and dived in.

I swam to the far end of the pond, thinking about what the crazy-lady had said.

I was afraid as I swam to the back of the pond.

I imagined monsters pulling my feet down into the darkness.

I forced myself to swim on.

I saw a heron at the back of the pond.

I thought I don’t know where I am going. I have no direction except forward.

I took off the wet swimming costume, dried in the sun, put on my running clothes again and kept running to my car parked at the top of Bishop’s Drive.

On the car radio driving home, I heard the universe again.

It was Jimmy Cliff singing Many Rivers to Cross.

This is what he said:

Many rivers to cross
But I can't seem to find my way over
Wandering I am lost
As I travel along the white cliffs of dover

I wonder what I'll hear next...

Oh, the places you'll go!

I was running with Anton yesterday on an overgrown path near my house.    

Anton is an athlete who was born in South Africa and now lives in London with his wife and two small children.  I listen to Anton. When he tells me to keep up the pace to the top of the hill, I do it even though I want to stop because I trust him.  

I’ve learned so much from him. Yesterday I learned this.

While we were running, I was telling him about my son who seems stuck at home at the moment spending all day in his room - reading, eating and sleeping. And that I couldn’t bear it.

Anton said to me quietly: “Ask him what his PVA is”

He said his high-school computer-science teacher would say that to anyone who came to her with a computer problem. It stands for Plan Van Aksie, which is Afrikaans for Plan of Action.

Got a problem? What’s your Plan van Aksie?

Overweight? Lonely? Bored? Unemployed? Stuck? What’s your PVA?

It means don’t just sit there waiting for the cavalry. Ignore the fear. Overcome the inertia. Just do it.

My favourite book of all time is Charlotte’s Web by EB White. In it, Wilbur the pig is trapped in the barn. He then makes a to-do list which involves food, sleeping and thinking about what it’s like to be alive, but it all falls apart when he realizes it’s not food he wants but love.  

I used to think of Wilbur’s to-do list when I was sitting in my apartment in New York on the 13^th floor, feeling bored and lonely, and too scared to go out into the city.

Dr Seuss calls it The Waiting Place, in his guide to life called Oh, The Places You’ll Go. I was waiting for the fish to bite and waiting for wind to fly a kite. I was too scared to leave the building and find the bright places where the Boom Bands are playing.  I spent a lot of time talking to the doorman, watching TV and eating ice cream before I realized no-one was coming to save me.

There’s something about making a PVA that makes you accountable for what you do. It breaks it down to baby-steps. It’s forgiving, adjustable and yours.

When I came back from my run with Anton, I wrote my PVA. This morning I wrote another. It was very similar to yesterday’s PVA but it has a new addition.

Leave house.

As I write this, my beloved son is sleeping, and regardless of whether or not he wants to do more than spend all day reading and eating, I will be leaving the house.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Many pillars support peace

Jewish grave-site in Mantua, Italy.

Over dinner one night in Mantua, a retired English psychiatrist asked me a question.

I had noticed that earlier he had ordered donkey stew (which I had found strange as we were part of a Jewish group exploring the history of the Jews in Renaissance Italy) 

I didn’t say anything as he went around the group offering everyone tastes of his meaty stew.  I silently ate my mozzarella stuffed courgette flowers, and tried to remain non-judgmental of his choices.

When the next course was served (I had pasta with capers, olives and tuna) he turned to me, pulled out one of the texts we had been studying and asked me to explain what Responsa were.

I told him that they were written over a period of 1,700 years and it’s a form of ask-the-rabbi. I said it covers questions about Halacha mostly in relation to everyday life.

He interrupted me angrily and said: “oh you mean like women showing their used tampons to their rabbi’s to see if they were ok. I read about it in a novel”

I had one of those moments when you don’t know which way is up, when the floor seems to fall away from your feet. I was speechless.  I wasn’t shocked by a man talking about women’s periods at the table.  I was shocked that his entire perspective on the issue was from one source. He didn’t want to listen to me at all.

I’ve read the novel he referred to. It’s about a woman straining to be free from Haredi society. I can’t remember much about it other than it wasn’t profound or well-written.

But that was all he was preferred to hear. And it’s such a loss to him. There are thousands of songs in our world. By choosing to hear one, you miss out on a rich and beautiful range.

I wish I had said the Responsa show the nuanced, multifaceted voices of many people on many issues. They are a window into an ancient world, and when we look through it, we can see how we are still connected.

Women’s galleries were all he saw in the beautiful, abandoned old synagogues in Northern Italy. His entire Jewish experience was around the need to liberate traditional Jewish women from perceived oppression.

That isn’t the way I see it. I have many encounters with deeply enlightened Haredi women today.  And their intelligence, love of life and respect for the other is also a joy to encounter. The women I have met don’t seem to need saving from their oppression.  They struggle with the same issues I struggle with.  Again and again, we both see that although we wear different clothes, we are the same underneath.  

If I learned anything about the Renaissance on my Jewish Journey, it was what I learned about dialogue with the other.

that the face of truth has many facets

And that in truth, there is no other.

I hope one day to sit down quietly and talk to the retired English psychiatrist about Responsa.

I hope he hears what I have to say.

And it is this:

We are all connected in the space between paradigms.

And that before we start liberating anyone else, 

we should start with liberating ourselves.

If I ever got a tattoo this is what it would say