Views

Social distancing puts intentional Jewish community to the test

RABBI JOSHUA LADON | GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

Schools are closing, synagogues are altering service schedules or outright canceling, funerals are limiting numbers to just a minyan. For those of us embedded in lived Jewish community, this moment of social distancing is a rupture to our system of intentional community. But, if we view them right, engaging with the system of mitzvot which draw us into community — what Maimonides prescribes in the Mishneh Torah as the fullest expression of “acts of loving kindness,” like visiting the sick and comforting mourners — has been practice for moments like these, when we need community the most.

As social distancing becomes the norm and as more people enter quarantine is exactly the time to ramp up our efforts to ensure vibrant Jewish community. I have been thinking a lot about what I will need as a husband, father and rabbi — what my community will need and what I will have to give. It is counterintuitive but clear that if we are going to get through this social distancing, we are going to have to do it together.

This is the time when our social networks are going to have to be real social networks and not simply soapboxes for shouting into the wind. All the rabbis I know work tirelessly to visit the sick and make sure the needy in their community are taken care of. In this moment of social contraction, as work is slowing and kids are home, people looking for ways to pass the time can aid in the holy work of ensuring each member of our community is seen and heard.

Here are some ideas to make social distancing a moment of real Jewish community

1. Kids home from school can virtually visit the sick.

They can FaceTime with elders of their community, they can make cards, they can make videos where they sing and dance. Rabbis have lists of people who need joy in their life; all the people who used to be sick, are still sick and we are going to have more people in quarantine before this gets better. This should be a moment for connection!

2. Remember phone trees?

Communities should make phone or text trees, where everyone in the community is asked to phone or text five people a day, simply to check in, to see if anyone needs anything, to provide an outlet and a reminder that everyone is being thought of. Create the community WhatsApp groups we should have already developed. Parents are going to need serious mental support to get through weeks of school closure. People need to know others are going through similar challenges. People need places to ask for help. Let’s create the networks we wish we always had.

3. Turn yourself into a delivery service.

Social distancing does not mean quarantine. And there are plenty of people who will need goods delivered to them. This is a time to make sure everyone in our communities has the food and supplies they need, and to mobilize those who can deliver goods.

4. Rethink rituals.

Ritual has always been something that helps us transcend time and space. However, Jewish ritual life assumes some range of communal practice. The technology that connects us today is a powerful tool for us to reimagine communal ritual. We need to think about how to use this technology in synchronous and asynchronous ways. Yes, we can livestream services, but more so, Rabbi Joshua Ladon is we need to think how to the West Coast director of take our rituals at home education for the Shalom and reimagine them as Hartman Institute. He lives communal. in Berkeley with his wife 5. Learn some Torah. and three children. Learn Torah with friends on the phone, on video, on WhatsApp. Rabbis, maharats, cantors, teachers — take the leap and put yourself on Facebook Live, YouTube or make a podcast. This is the time to fill the world with Torah!

6. Embody your Jewish practice.

Jewish life is not just communal and cerebral, it is also embodied. This is the time to clean for Passover, to draw posters for the Sukkah, to learn how to tie tzitzit or write Hebrew calligraphy, to make an Omer calendar or Rosh Hashanah cards.

7. Get to know your neighbors.

I know my Jewish community better than my most immediate neighbors. This is the time — from a distance — to check in and be aware of what my closest neighbors, from all communities, need. If this virus has taught us anything, it’s that we are all deeply connected.

8. Ask for help!

This is going to be scary and lonely. We need to commit to be charitable in listening to others’ needs and open our hearts.

Lived Jewish community is thick. We eat meals together, visit each other in sickness, sit together in sorrow and laugh together in joy. All of these practices are in service of illuminating the divine light in the world while bestowing dignity on one another. And all of these practices have been practice for this very odd moment, when we have to contract from the world. Perhaps we can fill the space left behind with these acts of kindness, so that we may radiate God’s divine light. n

This is the time when our social networks are going to have to be real social networks and not simply soapboxes for shouting into the wind.

last week on Polsat TV news from Poland. He is a far-right Polish politician, philosopher and writer.

Korwin-Mikke, repelled early by science and history, says coronavirus improves humanity’s gene pool by eradicating the weak through natural selection. Hmm. I guess that means that the people who died heroically gave up their lives to make the rest of us stronger. Regarding pogroms, Korwin-Mikke’s fresh approach sees them as a kind of contest. When asked why pogroms were good, he said “because the weak in the Jewish community died and the strong survived.”

Aha, now I understand. Before, I naively believed that my paternal uncle was killed in a Bialystok pogrom just because he was a Jew. But Korwin-Mikke explains that my uncle was shot and killed because … he was weak!

So … uh … his death and the deaths of my murdered grandparents actually have improved the stock of the Jewish people? Hmm. How self-sacrificing they were.

Korwin-Mikke declared, “Jews are now powerful because they had pogroms.” Well, that’s a different way of looking at some things that some people did.

Korwin-Mikke also claimed that not only were rabis in favor of pogroms, but they also actually provoked violence because they understood that “natural selection” benefits from massacres, and massacres are what make Jews more powerful. Who knew?

JUNE BROTT | WALNUT CREEK

Illogical use of Torah

In his recent letter to J., Mark Cohen quoted the Torah parashah Mishpatim, in which Jews are directed to take care of strangers, and then wonders: “Aren’t these Torah principles … as important to consider as is support for Israel — if not more so?” (“A Torah-values voter,” March 6).

Placing support of Israel on an equal footing with caring for strangers — and claiming that this is the Torah’s way — could have come only from misplaced priorities.

This is just one more application of the old adage of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Of course the Torah teaches us “not taunt or oppress a stranger.” But its Five Books of Moses are dedicated to a much greater goal of creating a nation of Israel, its land and ways of life. And this is the only major and magnificent Torah way.

VLADIMIR KAPLAN | SAN MATEO

The importance of print

I get most of my news by watching TV or sometimes by going online. For the past several weeks it has been exclusively about the coronavirus, with very brief breaks for weather and traffic. It’s so overwhelming at times. The bonus of print is that there is something else to look at, something else to read, something else to remind us of what it was like before the “new normal” took effect.

We can’t escape the virus, but we can escape the anxiety and changes to our day-today lives by picking up a printed publication and just turning to the pages not devoted to covid19.

STEVEN PALMER | ALAMEDA

LETTERS POLICY

J. welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must not exceed 300 words and must be dated and signed with current address and daytime telephone number. J. also reserves the right to edit letters. The deadline is noon Monday for any given week’s publication. Email letters to letters@jweekly.com or mail to J. The Jewish News, 225 Bush St., Suite 480, S.F., CA 94104.

Mentoring is a gift, asking for help a blessing

ANASTASIA TORRES-GIL | GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

When I got off the phone with the national president of Hadassah (the world’s largest Zionist women’s organization), who had called to invite me to serve on the board of this amazing nonprofit, I was filled with a sense of resolve, renewal and responsibility.

I was also a bit overwhelmed.

Of course, I knew about the work of Hadassah — the creation of two hospitals in Jerusalem that were known as “bridges to peace” in the Middle East and were world-famous for their medical miracles, such as stem-cell treatments that reversed the effects of multiple sclerosis.

I was eager for my first board meeting. I’d served on other boards and I thought I was experienced enough for my new role, but I quickly realized that to truly be effective and not to feel like deadwood on a board — which I detested from my days as a nonprofit director — I couldn’t go it alone.

It has taken me many years (and many failures) to realize that asking for help is a sign of strength, not of weakness. I wish I could go back in time and convince my younger self this.

I’d never had a mentor. Maybe it was because it didn’t occur to me in my youthful ignorance that I needed one, but it’s more likely because, as a professional in a male-dominated field, no one had ever offered or felt particularly approachable.

The corporate culture I was most familiar with was “sink or swim,” and you’d better do it quickly and you’d better be tough.

Fortunately for me, by the time I was mature enough to realize I would benefit from a mentor, I was already a dedicated volunteer with my local Hadassah chapter. I was surrounded by smart, compassionate, accomplished women who were typically 20 years my senior. They were not interested in taking me down but in lifting me up.

One of these women, Liz Alpert, was also on the Hadassah national board. Liz is whip-smart, bold, adventurous and, to my delight, lots of fun. Liz is also generous about sharing her time with me.

Because of her decades of Hadassah national leadership, Liz was like my personal encyclopedia of Hadassah. She could fill in the blanks, read between the lines and give me the historical perspective that wasn’t possible to glean no matter how thoroughly I would prepare for the board meetings. Sometimes we disagreed on matters, but I always respected her well-reasoned opinion.

Somewhere between meetings and conferences, Liz and I became great friends. We led a fashion, food, wine and design travel tour to Israel, where I depended on Liz’s detail-oriented personality more times than I can count. We’ve had fun together at Hadassah conferences across the U.S., and I discovered from our “walks and talks” along the beach in Santa Cruz that Liz has more hustle than I’ll ever have.

Recently, Liz and I were walking around Lake Merritt in Oakland (well, Liz was walking and I was perpetually hurrying to catch up to her). The lake that morning was like a mirror, particularly tempting as we got to the boathouse.

“Let’s rent a rowboat,” I said. Liz asked if I’d rowed before. Yes, I replied, and off we went.

In the middle of the lake after I’d lost the oar (yet again), Liz realized that she should have asked me not whether I’d done this before, but whether I knew how to row, which I did not. Of course, Liz knew how to row from childhood summer camps.

She spent the rest of the morning patiently coaching me and taught me how to row at least well enough to get back to the dock.

I think the rowboat adventure (or misadventure, depending whom you ask) is a good analogy for our mentor-mentee relationship. I had the passion, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Luckily, Liz was there to teach me how to safely navigate.

Our mentoring relationship is a wonderful mélange of mother-daughter, sisters and friends. It’s women supporting and nurturing women with love and wisdom, and it creates a family bond without biology. I have experienced this in one other area of my life, with Sammie. Sammie Rogers came into my life as a teenager when I became her quasi-foster mother, and over the years we, too, have evolved into this Anastasia Torres-Gil is a retired attorney who headed up the first hate crimes unit of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. She is the creator of the online pro-Israel comic strip “Zionist Pugs.” This piece originally appeared on ThriveGlobal.com. same wonderful mélange. It seems the key to creating this is for both partners to be open and take a leap of faith. Without the competitiveness of a work environment or the invariable drama involved in mother-daughter relationships, something special but unnamed is created.

I can offer to help Sammie navigate life’s challenges without the subtext of the frequent mother-daughter condemnation and hurt feelings. And Sammie offers me love and inclusion that helps fill my heart. It’s a wonderful feeling as a mentor to root for your mentee and celebrate in her successes and in the way she confronts life’s challenges and loss and to watch her persevere and thrive.

Mentoring is a celebration of strength of both the mentee and the mentor — and of the bond between them.

While I am confident in Sammie’s strength and perseverance, she is confident in mine. And we rely on each other.

I brought Sammie to Israel for a vacation, but she brought me up to the top of Masada to see the sun rise. She led the way, she encouraged me, she stayed with me while I caught my breath. Neither of us could accomplish what we did without the other, and we had fun doing it and such a sense of renewal, resolve and responsibility.

That’s what mentoring brings to both partners. n

Liz Alpert rowing on Lake Merritt

Urban Adamah makes house call with produce for seniors

Lorelai Kude, a member of Aquarian Minyan in the East Bay, wondered what Urban Adamah, the Jewish urban farm in Berkeley, was doing with all of its fresh produce during the shelter-in-place order. She called the farm on March 16, and the next afternoon a volunteer, Nir Berenzovsky, arrived at her house with a crate of rainbow chard. “We’re taking care of between 30 and 40 households of elderly members,” Kude said. “They harvested it wearing gloves and masks, washed everything, bagged it and delivered it to my house, fully protected.”

A few members of the minyan, most of whom are in their 70s or older, came by to pick up some of the produce and distribute it to other members who live near them.

“They were enthusiastic and super-kind and generous,” Kude said. “We are blown away by their generosity.” n

LORELAI KUDE Nir Berenzovsky, an Urban Adamah volunteer, drops off fresh produce at the home of Lorelai Kude.

My parents, McCarthyism and how ‘the unthinkable is always possible’

MATT ELKINS | GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

My parents, Morton and Thelma Elkins, liked to say that California was founded by those who chose to leave someplace else. My dad arrived from Philly in the late 1940s to attend graduate school at Stanford on the GI Bill. My mom graduated from Hunter College, took a job in the New York shipyards, then visited a friend in San Francisco and never went back East. They both left behind families bewildered by their choice to relocate so far away.

Political southpaws, they soon found themselves involved in the hot mess known as McCarthyism and its “theater” production, the House Un-American Activities Committee. They bore the scars of this era for the rest of their lives, in ways I could not fully comprehend.

My sisters, Rachel and Judy, were 6 and 4, and Mom was six months pregnant with me, when my father and his attorney entered S.F. City Hall in May of 1960 for his confrontation with HUAC. He had lost his job as an English teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District for refusing to sign the newly legislated loyalty oath, known as the Levering Act, and had been subpoenaed to appear before the committee.

The oath required state employees to defend the constitutions of California and the United States, and to forswear allegiance to radical causes. Protesters from all walks of life refused to sign, and lost their jobs; my parents were among their ranks.

The new oath was simply unacceptable to them, as it violated freedoms ensconced by the Constitution. Their refusal to sign was an intellectual exercise; the paranoid mood that pervaded government (and much of the public) made their refusal subversive and, therefore, a possible communist conspiracy.

My dad’s grilling by the HUAC was broadcast live by KQED. The questioning focused on his job as a warehouseman, which he took after losing the teaching position. He had become active in the ILWU, running for office, organizing. This was another red flag for HUAC. After beating around the bush for a bit, they finally got to the point. “Did you ever take money from the Communist party?” If it were a thing at that time, he probably would have said, “as if.”

Granted, my parents’ friends held different political opinions and values, which were fully accepted in the openminded San Francisco discourse that was prevalent. Instead, HUAC was suspicious about which Bay Area educational institutions were recipients of my dad’s GI bill money.

I have the full recordings of his testimony, which my nephew found at the Library of Congress. I keep them on my phone for those times where I need strength, or just miss my dad’s mischievous voice and tone.

With a large presence of police, water cannons and protesters outside, he largely built a defense based upon the superseding rights guaranteed by the Constitution, quoting specific amendments at every turn, conferring with his attorney, and asking what relevance a particular question had to the task at hand.

The proceedings had a merry-go-round quality, with the committee asking the same questions in different ways, and getting the same answers. My dad was prepared. In his own, very familiar way, he utilized his time to defend, disarm and educate, flustering and flummoxing his interrogator before finally being excused.

My mom worked for the Red Cross, and managed to fly under the radar even though she also refused to sign the oath while employed there. Any organization that could be conscripted for “civil defense,” including the Red Cross, was not immune from the Levering Act.

She always held a special place in her heart for the organization, and the supervisor who had her back. She had

been fired as a social worker with S.F. Health and Human Services, as a non-signer. Her indignant response and protest to that act (in the form of a letter) carried a familiar lifelong warrior’s tone. So it was not surprising — given my parents’ actions — that they were subject to wire taps, threats, even a swastika scrawled on their new home soon after my father’s testimony was broadcast.

The conflict nearly tore my parents apart even though they agreed politically in the cause.

Raising a family and putting food on the table while being tailed by G-men in trench coats — and suffering unfounded, untrue accusations of communist sympathies — made for tough sailing in a more intellectual pursuit of justice and Constitutional clarity. My dad once said they were the frogs who knew they were slowly being boiled to death, which I always thought was funny.

Both had a deep dislike and fear of the communist witch-hunts, spreading like lava across the country, ruining lives in its cold-war path.

Not signing the oath, based upon their understanding

of the first and 14th Matt Elkins is a Novato Amendments, was an resident with a career not earlier, more dangerous related to his journalism version of “taking a knee.” degree. This piece would The outcome could eventu- make his mom very happy. ally lead people to jail, the poorhouse, even suicide (an outcome that befell a friend of my father, but that’s another story).

It’s impossible here to reveal the very real suffering the many years of McCarthyism foisted upon its victims. Many books and media have addressed the subject. One that I take great pride in is a dog-eared copy of Frank Rowe’s “The Enemy Among Us: A Story of Witch-hunting in the McCarthy Era.” I found it in my parents’ large collection of material from that era, and was gratified to see their names mentioned in the reflections and experiences of the author, himself a decorated war hero fired by San Francisco State University for refusing to sign the loyalty oath.

The Levering Act finally was declared unconstitutional in 1967, and my father went back to school, entering UC Berkeley for a master’s in social work. He went on to work for the city of Berkeley and Contra Costa County. Mom had a long career as a psychiatric social worker in private practice and at the Oakland Jewish Community Center. They also ran a travel store in Berkeley called Easy Going for several decades.

My parents stayed surrounded by the people who emerged scarred but alive from their political battles. They knew what to do when Vietnam and Berkeley met on Telegraph Avenue, marching with their kids down the street lined by the California National Guard.

They continued to fight other battles as they came up, whack-a-mole style. Even while she had cancer and was suffering from macular degeneration, my mother organized and fought for the rights of low-vision sufferers. This included founding a low-vision support group that met at her house, and has continued throughout the years with monthly meetings at Ashby Village in Berkeley.

Dad died in 1997, and my mom in 2017. While visiting KQED recently to record my reflections for a radio segment called “Letter to my California Dreamer,” I bumped into a senior editor at the station, who told me that, while discussing my story with her own mother over dinner, was surprised to learn that her mom also refused to sign the Levering oath back in the day.

At that moment, I could not help but think how happy my folks would be to know that their struggle could still be discovered, remembered and shared — not only for historical purposes, but also as a warning that the unthinkable is always possible. n

Mort Elkins in the Army Air Corps

COURTESY MATT ELKINS

ADD YOUR VOICE J. welcomes your local voice on timely Jewish issues and events of the day. If accepted, submissions are subject to editing. Approximate length: 750 words. Email to editors@jweekly.com. The views and opinions expressed in these essays do not necessarily reflect the views of J. or its board of directors.