Dear Sister Fiedler, I've written the letter pasted below, and tried to mail it to you but you don't have a physical address anywhere on your site for your Interfaith Voices radio show.. So I've pasted it also into your "Contact Us" tab of your website. As I note in my letter, your rejection of discussion of my book has given a welcome of opportunity for thought on sanctity. I hope, with deep respect, to hear from you. I would love to talk....
My Letter:
Dr. Michael Rosen
Lower East Side - New York, NY
rosen@michaelrosenwords.com
917.650.4944
October 2, 2009
Sister Maureen Fiedler
Interfaith Voices
http://interfaithradio.org/
http://interfaithradio.org/contact
Dear Sister Maureen Fiedler:
I value Interfaith Voices, and am writing because you recently rejected a discussion of my book, What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse. One of your producers said, "the religion angle isn't strong enough for our show." Your thought provided a welcome to consider what a "religion angle" is in the service of sanctity. I returned to my touchstones of sanctity; Matthew and Jesus, the prophet Micah, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his friend Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr, the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Han, and though he might have disagreed (yet also smiled), to Robert Frost, the poet of the state of my youth.
My title, What Else But Home, is from Frosts' Death of the Hired Man; the farm hand Silas returns to the place of "no where else to go," where "they have to take you in," without the reader yet understanding he's come to die. Frost leads us along with Silas' promises to clear the upper pasture and ditch the meadow, to trade work for care. Frost entwines us with a conundrum between of means-ends expectations, on one hand, and love, compassion and home, on the other. The wife, Mary, defending Silas, answers her husband's cynicism:
"It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he's nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."
If abandoned, therefore, to be given love as much as the stray dog. So Frost is telling us of Matthew 25:34-40, but I'm rushing ahead.
The nine of us, in our extended family, are Catholics, a Protestant and Jews, black, brown and white, some of us are conventionally "religious" and most are not, we are from poverty and wealth, we are young and middle aged.
My business was destroyed during September 11th, my office then on Rector Street near the Trade Towers. My employees and I watched the destruction and death and I decided after to write about compassion and community, the dimensions and boundaries of our responsibility to each other.
My wife and I are White and Jewish. We live in the Lower East Side of New York, a racially, economically and religiously diversified neighborhood. We adopted our oldest son, Ripton, here. Our youngest son, Morgan, was born in Grand Prairie, Texas, and we brought him home after the week of interstate compact.
In the miracle of adoption, neither of our sons, each White, looks particularly like my wife or I, but so much of them is us. We converted them to Judaism, and brought them up as such.
Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1998, Ripton walked us onto a blacktop baseball field in a small park across the street from our apartment. He joined an ongoing sandlot game, the only White boy, and invited his teammates home after. Ten or a dozen came for video games and food. Five of those boys, four and five years older than Ripton--Black, Dominican and Puerto Rican, Catholic and Protestant, English and Spanish speaking, from public or other subsidized housing--moved into our home over the years and also became our sons.
When Ripton walked us onto that Tompkins Square baseball field, he and Morgan were attending the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, a Jewish school named for the rabbi who marched with Reverend Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery arm in arm with Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a Catholic nun and some others, all garlanded in white flowers. I've read that bigots spat on the nun, Rabbi Heschel later telling Reverend Niebuhr that this dishonor disturbed him nearly most of all. How can we "Love your neighbor as yourself," Rabbi Heschel asked, if we oppress and ghettoize our neighbor. Rabbi Heschel walked in the shoes of Jesus and Hillel - "Do to others as you would have them do to you." When asked why he marched, Rabbi Heschel answered, "When I march in Selma, my feet are praying."
I know, when we took our five bigger boys (now young adults of twenty-three and twenty-four) into our home and family, that we were praying. They were hungry, certainly at the end of every month when their mothers' assistance checks ran low, and we fed them. They needed clothes and other belongings of youth--books, sneakers, baseball gloves, balls, bats, and we shopped with them. They needed health care, my wife is a physician and we provided for them. One of our sons unfairly ended up in jail and we helped him to be released. Others of our sons were accosted by police and together we averted prison. We have helped when their brothers have been incarcerated. Most importantly, we continue to empower them by pushing unrelentingly for education; each of the older boys quite amazingly finished high school, often with our effort, and we have now gone through years of financial, emotional and tutoring support towards college degrees. We now have six sons in college--each of the five bigger boys and Ripton.
You know that I am paraphrasing Matthew. I also spoke with your radio program producer about Rabbi Heschel, in relation to Ripton and Morgan's school and marching to Montgomery. I told her of our surprise meeting with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, Alabama, as our extended family made a trip across American. I told her of a theology interchange I heard soon after we met the bigger boys. "What are Jews?" one of them asked Ripton and Morgan. Another asked if Jews believed in G-d. Ripton and Morgan both answered "yes." Another of the five said that was impossible, Jews can't believe in G-d because Jews don't accept Jesus as G-d. So Ripton and Morgan, my wife and I could never enter heaven. Then the boys went back to their video games.
During the early years of knowing the bigger boys, two of Ripton and Morgan's babysitters were gay, causing that more stringent theologian among them to announce that our babysitters were condemned to Hell, though "good people." And in 2004 a group of our sons went to see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, prompting a conversation I overheard with the stringent theologian telling Ripton and Morgan that "your people kilt Jesus," as he understood from the film. We Jews bore that responsibility through the generations. He explained that he loved my wife, his two Jewish White brothers and me, but we were sadly condemned to an eternal hereafter of damnation, though we were "good people" (yet again). I joined that conversation, tried to paraphrase a Thich Nhat Han thought I'm fond of:
"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle."
That son wasn't having Buddhist thought about the miracle of life recognizing earth and embracing compassion.
I tried Saint Catherine of Siena: "All the way to heaven is heaven." My son remained unconvinced of a voice across systems of faith.
In explaining our story with your producer, I tried a touch of Talmud: "And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world." I told her about a friend who'd early on told me we were in a fight to save the bigger boys' lives. I doubted him, till he pointed to the murder of two of our bigger boys' fathers, the death by drugs and AIDS of a bigger boy's mother, the death by drugs and jail of a bigger boy's father, the drug dealing and jail terms served by some of their brothers, their siblings dropping out of high school, the early teenage pregnancy of a sister, the lack of job skills all around, the statistically early death and morbidity among poor people of color, particularly males. We were fighting for their lives by pushing them to complete high school and college degrees, fighting for their lives; the wage difference between college educated and not is often the difference between middle class life and poverty.
I tried more Mishna and a touch of Kabbalah with your producer: mip'nei tikkun ha-olam, "for the sake of repair of / perfecting the world." That through our actions we can bring justice and mercy to the world, repair broken vessels of sacred light. Your producer seemed unconvinced that the mundaneness of buying school clothes for boys on a baseball field without, of attending parent-teacher conferences for boys who weren't quite "ours" and who never had parents attend such conferences, could repair a few broken sacred vessels of light, did really address a religion angle of American life.
I also told your producer of my African-American Protestant son explaining to his college friends he was "half-Jewish" and calling me his "Jewish pops." I told her about our seven sons lighting Hanukah candles together each year. Of me finally buying Christmas gifts and decorating a tree in lights and stockings for our Christian sons--since I'd come to love them, their system of faith could have no less importance than mine within our home. I told her of our son Ripton's bar mitzvah in an Orthodox synagogue, all our sons introduced from the pulpit as brothers.
I am reminded of Rabbi Heschel's thought that "To maintain the right balance of mystery and meaning, of stillness and utterance, of reverence and action seems to be the goal of religious existence." I am also struck, in the diversity of our extended family, by Reverend Neibur belief that, "We live our life in various realms of meaning which do not quite cohere rationally. Our meanings are surrounded by a penumbra of mystery, which is not penetrated by reason."
It seems to me, in the details of our lives with the bigger boys, building family through accepting many mysteries and comprehending some meaning, in synagogue and in church, in celebrating disparate holy days, in trying to do justice, love kindness and reminding ourselves to walk with humility, that there would be a great deal for you and me to speak about concerning issues with proper "the religion angle" for your audience. But what do you think? I have faith that the mystery and grace of G-d also resides in the swing of a young boy's bat towards a baseball on a blacktop field.
In friendship,
Dr. Michael Rosen
