From 8 to Love

Hi, Mishpuchah. Sorry it's take so long to shake off the weird combination of euphoria and horror (euphorror?) that followed the election and cobble together a post.

On the one hand, welcome to the Obama era, right? Lots of good stuff is going to happen! Yay!

On the other, what the fuck's up with passing Prop 8, Cali? (For our readers in Bahrain and Dublin who've been out of the loop, California narrowly passed a ballot initiative that changed our consititution to ban gay marriage.) That's some bullshit. And though the writing is on the wall, historically speaking, and 8 will be invalidated either by a court or by another popular vote (possible slogan for the counter-initiative: This time it's even more personal), we'd be lying if we said we weren't stung by this loss, this disgusting slap in the face to our friends.

So, let's review just a bit of recent history. Gay people turn their queer eye on your crappy fashion and make you prettier so you can get laid and advise you on turning your dump of a living room into a suburban palace and pepper your lame-ass sitcom with witty dialogue and produce your awards shows and write your speeches and take your temperature and administer your company and engineer your buildings and you're all, like, what have you done for me lately? Let's face it: If the gays ever go on strike, the straight world will end up curled up in a fetal position on the floor in about 14 hours. But their pursuit of happiness? Talk to the fuckin' hand.

But ranting gets us nowhere, and there's enough of it going on.

This whole struggle is about love. Those of us who argued against 8 - and we get it, we could've been louder, clearer and more effective - were motivated by the heart.

So we're going to shine our Jew-light on love. We're going to start telling love stories - gay, straight, whatevs. Relationships and valentines and ooey-gooey tales of romance. Bring it on. Because no matter what anybody says, love is love.

Tell us your love stories.

The Great Schlep: Jew Power for Obama
an early high-holiday card from Simon

Sera's in the Holy Land; I'm sure neither she nor it will ever be the same. But I've got a Wailing Wall of my own, and it's called this blog. And I'm-a use it.

Thanks to some killer PR and the hard work of folks like Mik Moore at the Jewish Council for Education & Research, among many others, The Great Schlep goes down on Columbus Day weekend. It's a mass pilgrimage of young Jews to Florida and other swing states, where they will endeavor to convince their older, often "low-information" relatives to vote for Obama.

I attended a beautiful fundraiser for said initiative the other night. It was held at the mansion-like home of some very generous entertainment-industry peeps, and I met a couple of mega-hot Jewish celebrities there who nearly made my knees buckle. The food, provided by the reliably brilliant Provisions (aka very haute Jew Lisa Feinstein and crew), was a gourmandish series of twists on classic bubbie nosh: brisket on toast, borscht shots (with crème fraîche and orange zest), mini-kugels, paté (chopped liver), succulent smoked salmon. The wine flowed freely. Handsomely attired Hebrews strolled the lush environs.

And yet, from the cocktail-hour chatter, you'd think we were all about to be herded onto trains to Dachau. Everyone was so worried. So terribly concerned. Worried about racist voters. Concerned about easily misled voters. Worried that Sarah Palin would become President in ten minutes and life would turn into The Handmaid's Tale. Concerned about what Bill Clinton said on TV. Worried about what their neighbors said in the driveway. Anecdotal blips on the radar screen were described like incoming ballistic missiles. For sheer doom-and-gloom certainty, I'd put any random bunch of Jews, even a well-heeled, high-information batch of Hollywood activist types such as these, up against the most rabid evangelicals in full apocalypse mode.

Fortunately, the presentation — by Mik and various other folks from JCER, JewsVote.org and other cool outfits (including friend of this blog and mightily pregnant genius Jill Soloway) soothed some of these fears by describing the Schlep and making a charming appeal for support before screening this inspired, typically raunchy promotional video by Sarah Silverman.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Before I go on, I'd like to say a couple of quick things about this video. First: Our Sarah will kick their Sarah's ass. Next: I don't wanna hear about how you found this video offensive or untoward or how it made you uncomfortable. It isn't for you. It's for the kids who are going to journey to the heart of their grandparents' couches to close the deal for Obama, and they fully get and love her spiel. So shut your homentaschen hole.

Now I'd like to speak to the kids.

We often hear that children are the future, and ordinarily I don't agree. I just don't see the proof. But in this case, yes, children — specifically motivated and liberal teenage and twentysomething children and grandchildren of poorly informed, slightly confused elderly voters in swing states – emphatically are the future.

So you know your job, right, kinder? It's up to you to convince Bubbie and Zayde (and great aunt Rivke and cousin Manny and all their friends at the Senior Center) to cast their vote for our guy. This may not be as simple as it sounds. All kinds of ridiculous lies about Obama being a Muslim or not supporting Israel or whatever have been circulating like swamp gas among Jewish retirees, fueled by the Karl Rove innuendo factory. Then there's plain old ingrained racism, about which we'd like to think Jews would be more enlightened, but there you go. You will encounter resistance.

You must crush that resistance with everything you've got.

If you think I mean "Ply nana with an extra pot of Russian tea and tell her about Barack's thoughtful foreign-policy stances," you need to get real. I'm talking about tough love. I'm talking about winning this thing. Like Sarah S. suggests, I'm talking about emotional blackmail.

Nana has to understand that if she doesn't vote for Obama she's endangering her relationship with you.

This may seem harsh, but let's face it: If McCain wins this thing, we're mega-fucked. So it's time to put all our chips on the table, including our willingness to stay in touch with low-info relatives in swing states.

Look, I just want to help. I don't have any relatives in Boca, and my peeps are all voting for Obama anyway. But I thought I'd just sketch out a couple of talking points for you.

Of course, you do want to blow away the nonsense: No, he's not a Muslim, and a prominent Chicago rabbi wrote an editorial about how spreading this smear is lashon ha-ra. Barack's been endorsed by 900 rabbis. The Israelis like and respect him. You'll also want to make it clear that McCain's campaign is full of classic Jew-haters, and that Sarah Palin is a dangerous fanatic who scares the crap out of Israel. She believes Jews must be converted, she quoted racist Westbrook Pegler in her acceptance speech, and her church hosted a witch-hunting wacko who made some classically anti-Semitic inferences that can be found here. You might imply casually that she writes erotic fiction about the Third Reich under a nom de plume; can anyone prove she doesn't?
And given the age of your audience, it wouldn't hurt to remind them that McCain, not Obama, wants to bet their Social Security check on the same stock market that just fell apart.

Still, we both know that voting often comes down to abstract, emotional issues. For whatever reason, many older Jews have inhaled enough miasmic right-wing spew to feel an ingrained distrust of our candidate. That's where the tough love comes in. So let me offer you a few constructive dramatizations.

"Nana, you're going to vote for Obama. He's a wonderful candidate and the only one who can save our country. A vote for him is a vote for my future. So if you love me and want me to have a future, you will vote for him."

Let's say she looks down at the plate of kichel, heaves a weary sigh and says, "I'm sorry; I just can't vote for him." What are you gonna do, pack up your stuff and head for the bus station? I think not. You're gonna double down.

"Bubbie, let's be clear: You will vote for Obama. If you don't, you are dead to me. Because you will have chosen your wretched fears over my fondest hopes and flushed my dreams down the crapper because some idiot alteh cocker down the hall told you the shvartzeh won't stand up for Israel. And I don't care if you call him by that vile word as you pull the lever for him, even though every time you old Jews say it the little children who died in the camps and are now in heaven cry tears of blood that stain the fluffy clouds beneath their angel feet. You will vote for Obama because you if you don't, I'm going to come back here and we're going to get a knife from the kitchen and you can stab me right in the heart, just as Abraham was prepared to do with Isaac before the Lord stayed his hand. Is that what you want to do?"

I'm thinking by this time she's going to start to come around.

Sure, it's a risky gambit to fire these emotional cannons at our frail old family members. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Plus, when Obama wins in November and you come back to show them a bunch of family videos and have a nice picnic at the wrought-iron tables in the condo courtyard, they'll be delighted beyond belief. And so will you.

If, like me, you can't personally go on the Great Schlep, why not make a contribution? Even if you're broke, you can honor the classic grandparent tradition and slip a fiver into a card like this.

Let's Get the Hell Out of This Desert.
Some Disorganized Passover Thoughts From Simon

It won't be the same watching The Ten Commandments this year, what with the guy who played Moses having passed on. ("I guess we can take his gun now," said a less-than-reverent friend. "Oh, too soon?")

But we've got plagues of our own to worry about; didn't you see that ABC debate? Some people aren't wearing flag pins!

We've been so damn busy, in fact, that my family didn't even get around to planning our seder until a few days ago. While Julia and sister Jo normally undertake the Charoset preparation, this year we opted to outsource to brilliant local cateress and VHJ Lisa Feinstein, whose Provisions offers an enticing, original Pesach menu (full disclosure: she's also a client. But I wouldn't steer you wrong).

This year, as ever, a lot of us will participate in a ritual that celebrates freedom. And as always, we'll be asked to consider the ways in which we're still somehow enslaved – to our obsessions, our emotional baggage, our chemical dependencies and other bad habits.

Like every year, we'll be enjoined to recall our people's past sufferings and – at least at our table – to consider how we are obligated to witness and, if possible, alleviate the sufferings of Jews and non-Jews alike, everywhere in the world.

We'll parse the symbolic importance of the items on our seder plates, and the youngest child (ever more precocious and performance-oriented) will charmingly enunciate the four questions about why this night is different from all others.

But I've got a question of my own (I can't help it – I'm the youngest sibling myself): How will this year be different from all others?

I ask because I'm experiencing something strange and unbidden, something attached to and yet wholly separate from the dark, anxious meandering that has marked the last several years. Like I've been wandering in the desert but see, in the distance, the possibility of a shady sanctuary.

I promised myself, this election season, that I wouldn't get sucked into the vortex of political obsession. A lifetime of disappointments dotted with half-hearted victories – and culminating in the dumbshit dystopia of the Bush years – had persuaded me that laying my bleeding heart in the center of the highway as a ritual sacrifice was no longer an option.

I had just about comfortably settled into what I regarded as a Mature Middle-Aged skepticism, and thus could regard all electoral jousting from an armored remove. Exhibit A? An entry from this very blog that promised, "Your candidate is a sociopath." So much more fun. So much easier. So much less painful that having a dog in the race.

Then along came a candidate who got me believing.

So about this strange flowering of hope in the Bush-bleached desert of my soul. It's forced me to admit some things to myself. That as much as I've decried the politics of fear, and as much as I've turned the mighty X-ray of my dialectical mind on "hope" as a trope, I'm just as fearful as anyone.

I'm afraid that if I open myself up to the blinding rays of what could be, a trap will spring shut on my flesh and spirit. I'm afraid that if I dare to believe in a candidate who seems to speak for the best in us rather than the worst, I'll find myself deceived. That a Pharaoh or a Karl Rove or a James Earl Ray or some operative in a black helicopter will end it all with a bullet or a conspiracy or a conspiracy of bullets. For all the invective I've leveled at the fearmongers, I've been a loyal consumer of fear.

Here's the thing: Hope is the opposite of fear, it's true. But hope isn't just a big soft hand that lifts you onto a fluffy carefree cloud, far above the whirring blades of despair. Hope is an invitation, whether the hearty roar of a fired-up crowd or just a sexy whisper from the universe, to leave the dreary confines of one's grey cell of detachment. To come out and play. Hope will ring the doorbell, but you've got to drag your sorry ass outside.

I am 43 years old. During the sweltering, chaotic summer of my birth, three extraordinary kids drove down to Mississippi to stand up for a more inclusive vision of democracy. The loyal exemplars of traditional values, fine Christians all and fiercely protective of their local heritage, repaid the efforts of these hopeful Americans with a fusillade of bullets. The martyrdom of this trio fell hard on two California Jews who were soon expecting their third child, the one who'd later be tasked with the four questions at the Passover table. They gave me Andrew as a middle name, in honor of Andrew Goodman, a young Jew who sacrificed everything to extend the blessings of liberty.

I wasn't quite four years old when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Once again, the hopes of forward-thinking, open-hearted people were shadowed with anguish. And what followed might fairly be called forty years in the desert.

And in the decades since, so much destruction. So much betrayal. So much enslavement to triviality. In such a world, isn't hoping for better just a burden? Let's just hide in the bunker, catch up on some TiVo'd triviality and gird ourselves against the wicked, wasteful world with a Costco-sized supply of contemptuous wisecracks.

But then, wouldn't you know it, the doorbell rings.

Maybe you saw this video of a fantastic poem by an incredibly promising young writer/performer. It moved and delighted me because it cut to the heart of this dilemma I've been kvetching about.

Here's the part of the Passover story I'm focused on this year: Getting the hell out of the desert, and how seriously scary that is. How much easier it would be to stay in Egypt, to be gangsta-hard and stylishly cynical, rather than make the long, hot, sweaty, hopeful trek. How tough it is to believe that the angry red sea of the status quo will give way for us, no matter how resolutely we march. But also about how impossible it is, when hope rings the doorbell, to pretend you're not home.

Have a beautiful, meaningful Pesach. On this potentially liberating holiday, I greet you with all of my tenderly, tentatively hopeful heart.