Laughing When We Can: Life Without a Plan

When I got to the University of Rochester in July of 2015 to take what was supposed to be a one-year gig as interim director of Hillel, the first thing I did was reach out to the student president. Rebecca was a senior and had grown up in Rochester. Unlike most U of R students, she was there year-round. We met for coffee and a muffin in College Town. I liked her instantly. She was warm, friendly, intelligent, and had an unruly, brown mop of Jewfro framing a face set with laughing green eyes.

The thing that struck me about Rebecca was her clear sense of direction about, well, everything. She had decided in elementary school that she wanted to be a doctor who delivered babies and had stayed true to that goal. She entered U of R essentially pre-admitted to the medical school. She graduated in December of 2015 and after working with me at Hillel for one semester, I tried to get her to abandon the med school nonsense and make a career in Jewish communal service. She was intrigued and made a show of considering but that was not in her plan.

It's the exact opposite of how I’ve lived my life.

Growing up, I never had more than the vaguest notion of how I wanted to use my life. I remember when I was in elementary school asking my mother what would happen when I was finished with elementary school. She explained that I would go to junior high school. This would be followed by high school.

“And then?,” I wondered.

“Then college,” she said.

“And then?”

“Then you get a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“Whatever you want.”

I couldn’t imagine a job that I would want except maybe astronaut.

I went to high school. It was a city magnet school that focused on engineering. The experience was such that I knew quickly that I didn’t want to be an engineer. The classes I liked best were English, Chemistry, and a little mini-class in computer programing. My high school had a big ol’ IBM mainframe in an air-conditioned room that could be fed Fortran programs with stacks of punch cards, one card for each line of program. I loved writing programs for that beast and I loved the sound the card reader made as the programs fed in. I gained some small degree of respect from my classmates who discovered that I could spot quickly errors in their programs. I wasn’t great at physics and worse at math. So much for becoming an astronaut. I don’t think it occurred to me that computer programmer might be a job.

I decided on a college because the father of my best friend across the street said I should go there. He was a Quaker and suggested Guilford, a small Quaker college in Greensboro, N.C. I received little guidance from my own parents, whose main criteria was that I go somewhere inexpensive. At $4,500 per year room, board, and tuition, Guilford wasn’t exactly cheap (in 1979) but it wasn’t crazy expensive either. I took an overnight bus to Greensboro on my own and looked around. It seemed pleasant enough, and more importantly they accepted me with my mediocre high school grades.

It turned out to be a great choice or maybe just lucky chance. At Guilford I studied English lit because I liked to read novels and found it easy to write papers about them. It was clearly a path of least resistance. I had no idea what one would do with a degree in English lit besides teach and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. What I did want to do, I had no idea. I did two semesters abroad, one in Munich and the other in London. The opportunity came along, and the cost was about the same as being in Greensboro – why not? They were two of the best semesters I spent in college, indeed some of the most memorable months of my life. I also met the person I would marry at Guilford during the one semester that we both attended.

I had a vague idea of the things I wanted when I graduated. They were pretty unimaginative. Get married, (in the unlikely event I could find someone willing to marry me), have children, find tolerable work, obtain health insurance, retire someday. But I had no idea or plan how these things might come about. It all seemed so intangible. I don’t remember being anxious about it though. Somehow I felt the universe would look after me. Somehow it would all work out.

After college I found myself in Arlington, Va. outside D.C. where my mom lived. With no skills and no real goals or ambition, I found myself waiting tables at bad Italian restaurant run by an Iranian immigrant family. In my free time (there was a lot of it, I worked lunches only) I volunteered at National Public Radio answering requests from listeners for recordings of program snippets that they had heard and wanted to hear again. I would find the segment, make a cassette tape and put it in the mail. This led to my first “real” job.

Thanks to my girlfriend Barbara who spotted an ad, I got hired to work for a company that had contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services to run health information clearinghouses for the federal government. These clearinghouses were how people got information in the dark time before the internet.

I worked on a program called the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Clearinghouse. I was the project assistant. I was hired to answer the phone, open the mail, and send information to those requesting it. It was much like my volunteer work at NPR. A week or two after I started, the project manager quit. By the time the new project manager started a month later, I had picked off all the parts of her job that looked more interesting than my job and started doing them, leaving the boring bits for my new boss.

This became my modis operandi for the rest of my career. Do things that seemed interesting whether they were my job or not and offload the boring bits to someone else when possible. I am not saying this was the right thing to do, it is, however, what I did. For some reason my bosses almost never objected.

I became the editor of the monthly newsletter and proficient in the database program that ran our information response system. I even learned enough of the programming language to be able to fix minor bugs. I obtained the administrator password by looking over the shoulder of our “information services manager” as she typed it in. I still remember it: Daytona. This gave me full access to every part of the system. She never found out that I knew it.

I quit that job in February of 1986 so that Barbara and I could travel the world. We each threw $5,000 of hard-earned savings in the kitty and set off with backpacks and a tent to travel until the money ran out, which it did 16 months later in Thailand.

We spent our last few dollars to get home and put down a deposit on an apartment and I again went looking for a job. Thanks to Barbara who spotted an ad, I got, a position as a research assistant at an organization called the Public Risk Management Association (PRIMA). I didn’t know what risk management was, or what an association was for that matter, but I proceeded to unconsciously pursue the same career strategy at PRIMA that I had employed previously: I tried to take on the things I found interesting and to ignore or offload the things I didn’t. I became the bookkeeper and I taught myself accounting. Then bookkeeping became repetitive so I convinced the director to hire another bookkeeper and make me the finance director. When the director left and the assistant director became the executive director, he made me the assistant director. Two years later, four years after I started as research assistant, I was the executive director.

In 1998, I quit my job again to go to graduate school. I only knew that I wanted to pursue my Jewish journey by working for a Jewish organization. I had no idea what that would be. While I was in school, my now wife Barbara spotted an ad for a job at the Hillel International Center. Money was running short. I applied for and was offered the job. I worked there for 14 years. I was hired for one thing but ended up doing many others (see MO above).

I retired in 2020 at age 58 and was quite content to spend the next few years reading, writing, walking and, once Barbara retired, traveling. Then in February of this year, my friend David called me and asked if I’d be interested in being the finance manager of his nonprofit start up. I thought about it for 7 seconds and then said, “Sure, sounds fun!”

And this has been my career, indeed my life. I can’t say that things didn’t turn out as I expected because I didn’t really expect anything. In my career, if you want to call it that, I pursued the things that interested me. I never worried much about salary or advancement. In my entire career I never negotiated or asked for a raise. It was a textbook case of how not to manage a career, of how not to get ahead.

And yet…

I always made a living, a decent living. And, I realize now, just as important, my work always met three criteria.

1. It was interesting. Most days I went to work there was something to learn, something for my curiosity to pursue, and problems I enjoyed trying to solve. I always remained slightly incredulous that I was being paid for what I was doing.

2. I loved the people I worked with. I mean that very literally, I found I came to care about the people I worked with like family. Also, like family, they could be irritating, occasionally infuriating but I loved them, nonetheless. Most of them anyway.

3. I saw my work as meaningful and believed that it was in some small way making the world a better place. Whether being a supportive voice on the other end of a phone line for a parent who had lost a child to SIDS, providing resources to those working to ensure public safety, or serving up a home cooked meal to students away from home, my work always felt like more than just a paycheck or a way to make someone else rich. I was very lucky there.

I used to wish that my parents had given me more direction. Suggested a college, or a career, given me a Jewish education or just a stronger sense of identity or destiny. But now I see that my folks like Forrest Gump’s mama had it right when they said effectively, “Y’gonna have to figure that out for yourself.”

I read somewhere this week that you only see the hand of God when you look back. I understood that to mean that the trajectory of your life only makes sense in retrospect. But I still envy those who have always known what they were meant to do, those who made a plan and stuck to it until realized.

Rebecca began medical school at the University of Rochester in the fall of 2016. Today she is a doctor, an OB/GYN at a clinic here in D.C. It’s all working out according to her plan.

Still, for me, having no plan also worked out. I followed my curiosity and always found interesting work. I accepted whatever I was paid and just made sure that I spent less than that. If I was offered a promotion, I took it.

I married my best friend. Two beautiful children appeared and grew into kind-hearted adults. It was a lot more luck and chance than anything. Certainly, nothing I deserved.

There is much wisdom in the Yiddish saying, “Humans plan, God laughs.” It suggests that it may be best not to plan too much. Maybe we should leave the planning to God while we do the laughing —when we can.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.

Tune Up: Supporting Your Jewish Friends Who Care About Israel

My Civic had been nudging me for the last two weeks. Like most modern cars, it reminds me with increasing frequency and urgency when a maintenance interval approaches. Finally, the vehicle would brook no further deferrals or delays. A yellow warning light came on and stayed on insisting that an “A17 Service” was required now! I booked an appointment for the next day and drove the car to the Honda dealer. (Don’t judge, I trust the work they do at my dealer. I know I am paying too much).

I like to wait while the service is being performed. The waiting room is clean and nice. There is free coffee and doughnuts, solid wi-fi and little cubicles if you want to work. So, I declined the proffered ride back home or to the metro and settled in for an hour or two while my oil was changed, my tires rotated, and my brake lines flushed.

A few minutes later a young woman came in with her little girl. The woman was on the phone and I quickly realized that she was speaking Hebrew. Of all the languages I don’t speak, Hebrew is the only one that affects me emotionally the moment I hear it. Hebrew speakers know that almost no one outside of Israel will recognize the language never mind speak it. To acknowledge to a Hebrew speaker that you even recognize the language is to effectively declare to them that you are a fellow Jew.

I don’t always say something when I hear a person speaking Hebrew but sitting next to this mother in the waiting room, I felt a sense of kinship. After all, we were both Honda owners.

As she hung up her call, I turned to her and asked, “How is your family?”

It took a second for her to process my question. I could see the wheels turning as she said to herself: this apparent stranger heard me speaking Hebrew, knows I am Israeli, he is probably a Jew (he sure looks like one) and is asking about my family back home because he cares about what is going on. He cares about me.

And then she told me. For about 10 minutes she told me about her family, who she knew that had been murdered, who had been kidnapped, who was in the Army, what part of Israel she was from, and what was happening there. I said little except to present my credentials as a frequent visitor and member of the tribe. In other words, I am an American Jew who has personal connections to Israel and cares about what happens there. But that was established in a sentence or two. Mostly I just listened. Her Uber arrived. The conversation ended. She and her little girl left. No names or particulars about either of us were exchanged but I felt a connection, nonetheless. I hope that she at least took away a feeling that American Jews care about Israel. That we see her struggle and pain as ours too.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been surprised by and grateful for non-Jewish friends who have reached out with words of comfort and support. Some know the deep connection to Israel that I feel while others don’t necessarily know but assume a bond just because I am a Jew.

For the most part these have been overwhelmingly kind and supportive. But one or two have been unintentionally (I think) thoughtless, even cruel. If you are not Jewish but want to express empathy for me or for your other Jewish friends who cherish Israel, here are a few things to consider if you want to avoid pushing some buttons. (If you actually are trying to provoke, consciously or unconsciously, perhaps examine your motivations carefully and consider not doing that right now.)

Here are some things to know about me and Israel. These may or may not be true about your other Jewish friends. Although many American Jews will find resonance with what I say, the American Jewish community is diverse to say the least. Perhaps you’ve heard the old saw, “Two Jews, three opinions.” Try to understand with whom you are speaking and listen rather than assume you know what they are thinking and feeling.

Here’s where I’m coming from.

1. I don’t care how many articles you’ve read on the internet or in the New York Times or listened to on NPR, I know more about Israel than you do. I know more about Jewish history than you, and I know more about the conflict than you do. I’ve been to Israel more than 17 times including having lived and worked there for three months. I’ve been to every part of the country including the part that is under Israeli occupation. I’ve led 14 Birthright trips, a ten-day trip around Israel with 40 college students and 8 Israelis of similar age. Each of these trips is a history lesson in itself. I’ve had right wing guides and lefty guides. I’ve met and talked with Jewish settlers in the West Bank and with Palestinians. I’ve studied Israeli and Jewish history both formally as part of my master’s degree program and informally. I spent a year as a Shalom Hartman Institute Fellow learning with Jewish and Palestinian scholars about the conflict and its history. I’ve also been to several Islamic and Arab countries, including Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco, and listened to people there and learned about the conflict from their perspective.

2. I have a deep personal and emotional connection to Israel. I have dozens of friends, co-workers, former students, and family members who live in Israel. Some of the people I care about most about in the world live there. Some of them are on active duty in the military. Virtually all of them have a child or close family member who is on active duty. Israelis do not pay a professional army to protect them. Almost every Israeli man and woman (really boys and girls) does several years of military service, and even when that service is complete, they continue as reservists until at least age 55. I am no more than one or two degrees of separation from people who are being held hostage or have been murdered.

3. I see every Jewish Israeli as a family member and a countryman. Israel is not only the name of a country. It is the name of my tribe and the name of a land in which my people have had a continuous presence for more than 3,000 years. The words Israel and Jew are synonymous to me. I see the Jewish state as existential for the Jewish people, our only chance to survive in a world whose other civilizations have for the better part of the last 2,000 years tried very hard to destroy us. Since 1948 it has seemed less likely that they would succeed.

4. Like most Jewish houses of worship in America today, my nearly broke synagogue pays a substantial amount of its annual budget for an armed guard to stand outside the doors anytime there is an event in the building, from a prayer service to religious school for the children of the community. I am part of a group of volunteers who serve as additional guards rather than participate in services so that the rest of the congregation can pray with peace of mind. I do this at least once a month. We must do these things, or we too could be murdered for just being Jews. And it is not just synagogues and temples. Most Jewish organizations from Jewish Community Centers to any other Jewish identified building has an armed guard, metal detectors, and bomb resistant glass film on the windows. Yeah, in America.

So, if friendship and comfort is your actual goal, be kind. I am in mourning for my comrades and my tribe. The attack on Israelis was to me an attack on Jews everywhere. Many American Jews are feeling even more vulnerable than ever in the history of this country. We may also be feeling a little defiant.

Also understand that not all American Jews have the level of connection that I do. Many have never been to Israel, others are deeply ambivalent about Israel’s role in the conflict. A few Jews even agree with Israel’s enemies that it has no right to exist. Still others have an even deeper connection to Israel than I do. I have friends whose parents and/or children and grandchildren are all in Israel and many of those are serving in the military. Compared to theirs, my relationship is like a puddle next to the ocean.

In short, don’t assume that you know how someone feels about Israel just because they are Jewish.

If empathy, kindness, compassion, and a willingness to listen are the dos, here are a few of the don’ts. Again, I am presuming that your intent is to console not to provoke.

• Avoid blind cc’d emails “To my Jewish Friends.” There is likely no exact sentiment that applies to everyone you know who happens to be Jewish. If you want to reach out, take the time to write to each person separately and ask how they are feeling, if they have family or friends in Israel. If they do, express a wish that they are safe and will remain safe. You’ll reach fewer people or it will take you longer but the interactions will be more genuine.

• Don’t tell us that Israel is to blame, even in part, for the cold blooded murder of its citizens. Even if you believe that, now is not the time to assert that belief, and certainly not over email or text. It’s like messaging someone whose mother just died of lung cancer to chide them that the deceased parent had been a lifelong smoker and brought it on herself. Likewise, do not send me articles accusing Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or suggesting that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist or defend itself.

• Don’t refuse to engage face to face. If you are troubled by what is going on in the region (and who isn’t?) let’s talk about it in person. If you are sincere and open to enlarging your understanding, so am I. Why don’t we speak to each other with respect instead of launching missiles over email? Likewise, if I invite you to talk and you refuse, that tells me a lot. How many disagreements or conflicts -whether between two people or between civilizations - have been resolved where the parties aren’t willing to even talk to each other? Pretty sure that number is zero.

• Finally, please don’t lecture me that “all lives matter.” Is it not human to weigh the lives of our families, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our tribe more than those of strangers? In the grand scheme of the cosmos, we might agree that all lives, even non-human lives, are equally worthy (or equally worthless), but within our human constructed reality, everyone cares most about the people they are tied to through love, blood, or narrative. If you deny that, well, I don’t believe you. And no, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about the suffering of Palestinian civilians and innocents.

Friendships are in a sense are a bit like a car. They need care, attention, and the occasional adjustment of the pressures. When a warning light begins to flash, take the time to figure out what is helpful. If you just whip out your big wrench and start loosening bolts before you really understand what going on, you could easily do more damage than good.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.

Israel and the Conversational Nature of Reality

The poet David Whyte often speaks and writes about the conversational nature of reality. It is an idea that what we believe we are, what we believe the world is, is constantly bumping up against the truth. The job of the poet, indeed of all of us, is to bring that truth into conversation with our deepest held beliefs thus changing ourselves and perhaps to some extent reality itself.

I’ve been thinking about Israel this week. Indeed, it’s hard to think about or write about much else. I am not one to process my deepest feelings publicly and, in any case, I don’t know that I could articulate them at this point. So, while I am still “processing” here are some of the actions and resources that are helping me come to terms with and make “sense” of what is happening.

• I reached out to many of my friends and colleagues in Israel with messages of love and support. I hesitated at first because I thought, the last thing my friends there need is to be responding to email but everyone seemed grateful that I had written. Throughout the week, I kept thinking of more people, I needed to be in touch with. Thankfully, everyone I have heard from so far is safe and their loved ones are safe. But everyone is no more than one step removed from someone who was hurt or is in danger.

• For the most part, I avoided doom scrolling the news. Instead of watching endless clips of violence and horror on CNN, I read the daily briefing sent out by the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester. These 3-4 pages tell me most of the facts I need to know about what is going on. I am grateful I quit social media.

• I made a donation for humanitarian relief through the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington Israel Crisis Relief Fund. Please donate if you are so moved and are able. Money doesn’t solve all problems, but it can help with many of them.

• I’ve turned to the voices I trust. Chief among them the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. The Institute’s two podcasts For Heaven’s Sake with Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein-Halevi and Identity Crisis hosted by Yehuda Kurtzer often mirror and help me make sense of my own thoughts and feelings. I found the montage of American Jews living in Israel describing their experience on “Identity Crisis” in the early hours of the invasion to be particularly moving. You can find both on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

• I watched my favorite Israeli chef make this. Then I made it.

Umbrellas over Jerusalem. 2015

I was surprised by the number of non-Jewish friends who have reached out to me with words of support and comfort. Many of them know that I have many friends in Israel having been there more than a dozen times. Others aren’t sure about my connection but wanted to express support anyway and still others only know that I am Jewish and presume Jews care about Israel. It is understood that Israel and Jewry worldwide are inextricably connected.

Compounding the surrealness of the week was the email that I got from the German Embassy in Washington informing me that my application for citizenship had been approved and inviting my children and me to a ceremony to accept it. An odd juxtaposition, to be sure, since the same catastrophe that led me to be eligible to reclaim my grandparent’s German citizenship also was a major force in the founding of the Jewish State. Accepting German citizenship comes with a host of complicated feelings but more on that in another post at another time.

With my Shalom Hartman Fellow cohort at the Kotel (Western Wall). December 2018

I’ve been thinking a good bit about what Cole, the little boy protagonist in The Sixth Sense, said about the dead people he alone can see. “They see only what they want to see,” he tells his friend Malcom. How like these dead people are we! We tell ourselves that Israeli intelligence and its army are superhuman. That an invasion of Israel is impossible. That the terrorists are too disorganized and incompetent to mount a serious threat. We tell ourselves the stories we want to hear, reinforce those stories with the stories of others that confirm our biases and then shut out the rest. Not just about Israel or America but about so much of our lives. What it would look like if we were to occasionally engage in a conversation with reality?

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.