come in, she said, i'll give you shelter from the storm

most of us can remember cutting our musical teeth. for me, it was on my brother's large collection of dylan records. baptized in language and heart-breaking harmonic interludes, i fell in love with lyrics that sometimes only made sense to the soul.

sometimes there are so many things you leave unsaid. unspoken because it seems like the words you find don't sound right when held up to the light of what you mean.

when the choking swell in your heart stands at a loss, the raspy, plaintive breath of the harmonica can stand in your stead; the images sung in rhyming verse will present your case; robert zimmerman can become your voice.

several times a month, there is a music jam in our family room. it is mostly bluegrass, new grass or old tyme; soul music of mountain people. last night one of the musicians was late; a co-worker had been killed in an untimely accident having hit a patch of black ice. leaving behind a family of four daughters and the remainder of life unlived, his family requested this musician play a song at his funeral. turns out this man loved bob dylan. his family asked for "forever young".

the wishes of this song play like a rabbi's blessing. dan, sitting poised in the wooden chair, sang for the jam as a sort of practice for the funeral. my daughter, annie, and i turned our heads to the window. what is it about that music that pulls you from your now and carries you with it? like a cosmic magnet, we turn in reverence to its pole.

he is speaking our language.

it is a visceral response, that connective thread that needs no explanation.

sometimes music takes your wounded self and hides it in its bosom. dylan's "shelter from the storm" answers the yearning my brokenness feels in its repeated wooing, "come in, she said, i'll give you shelter from the storm". no matter if i am a creature void of form or an old man with broken teeth stranded without love, dylan sings this anthem of unconditional love. Feeling like this worn traveller, i take the healing balm of this last verse- "well, i am living in a foreign country
but i'm bound to cross the line
beauty walks a razor's edge
someday i'll make it mine
if i could only turn back the clock
when God and her were born
Come in, she said
i'll give you shelter from the storm"
there is no mystery there.

spare pair of striped pajamas

*please note: this blog contains a spoiler for the movie "boy in the striped pajamas", so please don't read on if you haven't seen the film.



even though you clearly see it coming, it doesn't soften the blow.

bright-eyed innocence crushed in a net of evil should always feel like an unwelcome slug in the gut.

my mind scrambles for more meaning, so i google to see if this is a "true" story, as in taken from an actual event. the context, of course, is real and the players were put in place in actual circumstances but the ending was the author's choice.
just ever so briefly if you haven't seen it-- a german boy's nazi father is "promoted" to commandant of a concentration camp. "papa" doesn't give either his wife or children the details of where they are going, so the young boy, bruno, thinks the camp is a farm. he has been forbidden to explore but as young, bored boys will do, he does. upon arriving at the "farm", he sees a boy sitting near the barbed wire fence with which he soon becomes friends- the jewish boy himself doesn't understand his situation; but he knows this is no farm. as the story unfolds, bruno's mother finds out the truth and slowly descends into a sort of madness, his sister embraces hitler youth and bruno builds his days around his new friend.

one knows that when you enter a movie, there are times when you suspend your sense of logic. that is the magic of film-- it brings you places you wouldn't have otherwise been able to be. one critic of the film thought it too much, though, to believe that bruno, at age eight, would've been so naive and not figured out his situation.
is that so hard to believe that in the age before show-all television, violent video games and the internet, an eight year old boy might find it hard to deduce that the acrid odor that is spewing from the distant chimneys contains the ashes of his new friend's grandparents, or that a little boy like himself would be put in a work camp when he had done nothing wrong? None of these things makes "sense", so why should he "figure" this out?
in the end, bruno full of an eight year old's sense of loyalty, bravado and curiousity, answers his friend's new call of distress- his father his missing after the last work detail. bruno grabs a large sandwich and a shovel and digs under the fence, dons a set of "striped pajamas" schlomo brings and they are off to search for his father.
unfortunately, efforts to enforce the final solution are stepped up and bruno and schlomo are rounded up with a large group of men and brought to take a "shower". by the time bruno's parents discover where he has gone, he is dead.
how to sort this sadness? what is the greater one? the innocent boy from outside of the fence dying in a brave act, the innocent boy on the inside of the fence dying in a senseless act or the evil that knows no parameters-- the hate of men?

putting on the spare pair of striped pajamas changed bruno's fate; but he chose to wear them as a symbol of solidarity with his friend's cause. perhaps this isn't a cause for sadness but a call to hope. in the midst of great evil, there is the hope of a friend.

you are the last generation

i cried into my lunch today. no, it wasn't the slightly stale peanut butter crackers. it was the life of irena updike, soon to debut as play on broadway at the end of march.

i came into the middle of the discussion with the playwright on the radio; this is a brief rendering of what i heard.

irena was a 19 year old polish catholic girl in 1939 who was hired as a housekeeper for a nazi major. ( i missed alot of details; i have questions, too) somehow she was presented with the opportunity to rescue 12 jews. she hid them in the cellar of the nazi major's house for over a year and a half without him knowing. she wove a gingerly executed dance of moving the jews from attic to cellar depending on who would be where in the home. She was discovered after this year and half and the major put forth this proposition: sleep with me and be my mistress and i will let you keep your jews.

she chose to keep "her jews". she was his mistress. was there some element of eventual love or pseudo gratitude that softened this young girl's choice? no, she always thought him a pathetic, old man and despised who he was.

when the war ended, she was considered a collaborator because she had worked for a nazi. some jews who knew she would be tried for this crime dyed her hair black (the irony being previously jews had been busy dying theirs blonde to save themselves) and arranged for her to be put into a dp (displaced persons) camp under the identity of another jewish woman. when it came for deportation her option was to israel, which at that time was soon to become the site of another war. her jewish friends told the u.n. officials that she really wasn't jewish, but that she was a hero that deserved to have peace and should be sent to the united states. the united nations official granted her a visa to the states. since her only true friends were jews, irena took a job in the garment district of new york city. one day she took a sight-seeing trip to the united nations building. at lunch time the cafeteria was crowded and irena found the last table open. a well groomed gentleman came to her table and asked if he could share it with her as it was the last open space. irena saw this to be true and granted him a chair. staring at her face, he swore he had seen her someplace before. terrible at names but never forgetting a face he asked for some of her background. turns out this was the very same united nations official that had granted her a visa to the u.s.!

after many dates, they married... for nearly 50 years to be exact. when her husband contracted alzheimer's disease, irena's finances didn't allow for putting him in the kind of home he needed for proper care. a local rabbi stepped in and installed her husband in the best jewish rest home available at no cost ever to irena. he was the only non-jew in the entire facility. he remained there until his death.

irena said that when she received a visa to the u.s. she would put a sign on her story that said "do not disturb".

she said she felt terrible shame at having been the mistress to the nazi major. being a devout catholic, she felt she had committed something terrible that god would never forgive. one day irena heard a radio broadcast where some people were denying that the holocaust ever occurred. She turned to her husband and shouted "but i was there!". he told her- "don't tell me, tell THEM". irena toured schools telling each student gathering that they would be the last generation to ever speak to an actual holocaust survivor, therefore, they had a great responsibility to be keepers and tellers of the truth. she never did say how she got the nazi major to agree to keeping the jews. there was her place of implacable shame. it wasn't until the Vad Asham was going to award this nazi major an award for being a righteous gentile (having heard the story and thinking that he allowed irena to keep the jews out of some goodness in his heart) that irena stepped forward and told the full story-- how she became his mistress to save the lives of these 12 and soon 13 ( a baby born under her watch) jews.

some are born to extraordinary courage. without the benefit of years of experience, at age 19 a young girl went against all that she had been taught and waged her life, her virtue, her sense of peace to save what at that time was a despised and condemned group of people. every day she submitted to humiliations that disgusted her. and everyday as she gave of herself, she saved another generation of jews.

who are you? right now this day, march 18, you are part of the last generation.
are you born to courage? courage stated as standing against your religious teaching, your own needs, the current social structure, your own sense of preservation, your dreams, your friends and family, your ?-- you fill in the blank. every day we are faced with choices. probably not of the caliber as irena updike. but i am convinced that you prime the pump of your soul by making courageous choices every day. did god forgive her? i believe god was cheering her on. today is a day to re-evaluate what we are made of--

he is born

i had been trying to knit some thoughts together on the value of a life for several weeks after hearing a news story on a palestinian-israeli prisoner exchange.

the underlying cultural differences in viewing a life were striking and sad. it wasn't something new to me, just something underscoring what i already knew.

i could never seem to piece together anything powerful enough to convey this elemental issue.

until yesterday.

wyatt came at breakfast time, more delicious than any other earthly offering. i've dubbed him "cilantro skin" because his mom always says that cilantro is like eating fresh air. kissing his forehead, dusted with dark black hair, is just like that... fresh air. yielding to a kiss, yet offering the subtle resistance of touch.
his surreal arrival came after long and arduous hours of effort on my daughter's part. having to be freed from her womb by a knife, he came out perfectly unscathed, like a magical little fairy.
he instantly wove his tiny way into our hearts. we all felt a need to protect and love and declare to perfect strangers that our world had changed!
we made inward resolutions to be better people, eat salad instead of fries, watch our words.
we wept as we saw his mother's chin and his father's full lips knowing that he was a continuation of ourselves. linked together by blood and history, he had become the next step in our lives.
radiating from his nubby cotton blanket was new purpose for us all.
the world indeed now needs to go on.... for him.
so.
it becomes ever so much more clear how elemental it is how you view the value of life. if like in the israeli-palestinian prisoner exchange, the palestinians knew they could ask for many lives in exchange for this one jew. he was a valuable commodity worth the lives of many palestinians. it couldn't be a one for one.... a palestinian life simply wasn't that valuable. this cultural difference underlies so many wrongs in the world. didn't they all want to be better when one of their sons was born? didn't they make vows to protect and love and... and not to make that tiny dear into a human explosive?
i guess not.
it was reported that all over college campuses students are wearing the checkered keffiyehs, symbol of the palestinian people. is it a trendy fashion coup or a statement of solidarity? beware of what you are saying. the values expressed by the keffiyeh are built on a culture of death.
when i was in the sixth grade, a new fad had hit the country. we called them "surfer's crosses". what a surfer cross actually was though, was a the crooked symbol of the nazi party. it wasn't still very cool at all in those days to be a jew in middle america. kids made jew jokes, like polish or dirty girl jokes. you bastardized your name so you didn't sound ethnic. you fit in . you wore a surfer cross. when my dad, my jewish dad, saw the "surfer cross" around my fashionable neck his face said more than the few words he spoke. "never wear that again", was what he said but his eyes spoke of a betrayal, an ignorance, a loss of basic values he saw in my wearing this necklace, a "how could you?" not just to him, but for all mankind.
so, what is the value of a life? it streams with growing importance conveyed by words, deeds, vows, choices and even what we put on to wear in the morning. choosing life changes every life.