Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion but doesn’t.   Variously attributed.
 
I dedicate these words to the estimable Rabbi Reuven Taff (aka Bobby) whom I subjected to continual disdain for his virtuosity on the squeezebox.  I meant no harm, except maybe to the accordion. (Also, I exempt Randy Stein who limits himself to the English Concertina, which I find more tolerable.)
 
Lots of people have said some version of this quotation. Mark Twain allegedly said it about the banjo. Oscar Wilde may have said it about the cornet. The piano, saxophone, and bagpipes have also been so derided. But Steve Martin, Ralph Kramden, and others have at least momentarily redeemed previously reviled instruments. Yet, as Robert Klein once said, the only excuse for an accordion is in a prisoner of war camp.
 
Please allow me a very important distinction here. Some very fine people play the accordion. In addition to Rabbi Taff, I know other rabbis, educators, childhood friends, Weird Al Yankovic, and Myron Floren to be people of stellar reputations, compassion, and delightful company. But for whatever reason, they were drawn to the accordion, on which every song ever played sounds like “Variations on Lady of Spain.”
 
The polka, a joyous cultural icon, relies on the accordion for its recognizable rhythm and bounce, which I find tolerable only when almost drowned out by the woodwinds and vocals that enhance it. Folk dancing at summer camp, a favorite of those who attend (actually, more usually the hard-core staff), might not exist if it weren’t for the portable music box that was necessary before the availability of battery-powered playback devices.
 
Why is the accordion the source of such disdain? Perhaps it is the way it makes its sounds – air squeezed through a sort of bellows, like its thoroughly intolerable cousin, the bagpipes (which makes every song sound like “Variations on Loch Lomond”).  Maybe it is because the person straps one of these beauties on their chest suddenly looks like the guy you call the bomb squad about. Maybe because when the air is let out it goes flaccid with a discordant sigh of disappointment (make of that what you will).  I don’t know.
 
Victor Borge similarly dismissed the viola, claiming its only advantage is that its size made it burn longer than a violin. But you can chalk up viola jokes to snooty violinists who nonetheless rely on the viola to enhance their own performances – maybe a little jealousy there. No pianist, however, envies the accordion, except perhaps for its portability. Still, they mostly would rather just do without.
 
So this pithy observation, rooted in the decidedly antiquated notion of what it means to be a gentleman, will reinforce the bias of those who agree with it (like me) and insult those who do not, especially if they play what Walter Kuerth called “the happiest instrument in the world.” There will almost certainly be some reader who will take such umbrage that I will receive a nastygram far more vituperative than when I have blasphemed or deconstructed a cultural icon.  Maybe it will outdo even some of the response I got years ago when quoting John F. Kennedy’s claim about our nation’s capital ("Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency,").
 
But, in the end, I myself will continue to admire the consideration of the person who knows how to play the accordion but doesn’t.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
I’d rather have a memory than a dream.    Leonard Feather and Bob Russell
 
Sarah Vaughn sang the ballad with this name (and first lyric). It was written by two Jewish guys who went on to have better careers than this modest song might have predicted. (Feather was a renown jazz critic and Russell eventually wrote “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” for the Hollies.) I never would have heard of the song were it not for baseball legend Buck O’Neill, but that’s a story for another column.
 
The song is about love, as you might expect. I’d rather have a memory than a dream; I’d rather have your kisses than your smiles. And so forth. As romantic as the sentiments are, they stand in contrast to other aspirations that are familiar to me.
 
A dream, after all, looks forward. A memory is, by definition, in the past. Anyone who has nurtured a dream knows how idealized it can become, especially if the dreamer holds it, unrealized, for a long time. As a Zionist (BTW, if you object to that word, get over it), I know that the dream of thousands of years for Jews to be a free people in their own land found its most pithy expression in the words attributed to the man credited with founding modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl.  In the 19th century, he called on activists to believe, im tirtzu ein zo aggadah. The highly interpretive translation into English is commonly “if you will it, it is no dream.”
 
And so dream they did. The socialists dreamed of a socialist state. The militarists dreamed of a power state. The religious folk (who allowed themselves to dream) dreamed of a spiritual heaven on earth. And so forth and so on. As long as there was only the dream, the homeland for the long-dispossessed Jewish people was perfect.
 
But we all know that even at Disneyworld, even after wishing upon a star, dreams never exactly come true. The State of Israel has as imperfect a reality as any other nation, past or present or likely future. There are aspects of the variegated society that are beyond the fulfillment of wildest dreams. There are aspects that are closer to nightmares. And then there is the complicated question of ensuring the fulfillment of the dreams of the Palestinian people (BTW, if you object to that notion, get over it) who lay claim to the same land and human rights.
 
The person who claims “I’d rather have a memory than a dream” lives in a moment after awakening and before fulfillment. They live in that moment between the smile and the kiss, when everything is possible, and nothing has yet happened. In other words, they live in the present, romanticizing the aspiration of Feather and Russell. (In fact, when I get around to my Buck O’Neill quotation, you will see that even he messed with Mr. In-between.)
 
It's the sad person who gives up the dream once they have the memory. There is only heartbreak in demanding the perfect in an imperfect world. The word translated as “dream” in Herzl’s formulation really means “story,” a Talmudic kind of story that is true even if it is not accurate. It is meant to teach a lesson, to inspire, to illustrate something more important that plain reportage. Herzl, long before “Man of La Mancha,” was encouraging us to dream the possible dream.
 
I will take one moment to contradict myself before signing off. I recently had the privilege to experience the total eclipse of the sun from a rooftop in Cleveland, Ohio. Since I can remember, I have dreamed of seeing the moment of totality, the corona blazing around the darkened moon, the weather changing suddenly, the animals in momentary confusion. At 71, I figured this was one item on my bucket list that I would leave behind. But I found a flight and a place to stay, the skies were clear (enough), and my dream of more than sixty years came true. It was better than I could have imagined. I guess in this case, I’d rather have a memory than a dream.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It   
 
Don’t doubt the grace.        Anonymous Catholic priest
 
I am not a Roman Catholic, so I don’t even remember who shared this pithy admonition with me. The context (which I had the good sense to jot down) was not anything I experienced: a penitent confessed a second time to a sin for which they had already sought forgiveness. The priest shared these four words and sent the person on their way.
 
I love the notion that once a person genuinely repents, the forgiveness they receive is irrevocable. In the case of the Catholic confessional, the priest serves as the conduit of promised forgiveness from God. You can accept that theology and ritual or not, but the point is not the authority of the interaction to absolve. Every religion has its ritual of repentance and forgiveness, and every culture as well. If the offending party and offended party are both sincere, what matters is that sincerity.
 
But grace. Grace is a quality I only came to appreciate as I got older, not because I never heard the word, but because I didn’t understand its power. For the human heart, grace is not a quality of elegance, nor is it a prayer over food. Grace is the unforced and unearned gift of compassionate love. Grace is an act of generosity so powerful and unexpected that it provokes tears of gratitude.
 
Grace is not always about forgiveness, but I think it is most magnificent when it is. We were each graced with life. Most everyone has been graced by love, certainly by parents and with some serendipity by a life partner. The injury we do to ourselves when we act wrongly, however, requires something more than restitution to make it go away. That’s when grace is so profoundly important; it can be bestowed only by someone who need not do so. No wonder people of faith (like me) turn to God as the source of grace.
 
There is an addition to weekday worship in Jewish liturgy that is all about grace. It is called “tachanun,” which has buried in its grammatical construct the word “chen” (with a phlegmatic “ch”). It begins with all sorts of confessions of personal inadequacy, including bone-shaking trepidation (see Psalm 6), and pleads for collective and personal reassurance. I guess it is an irony that grace cannot be solicited, really – somehow the freewill nature of it is what makes it grace and not a favor or wish fulfillment. Tachanun is regularly omitted, sometimes by occasions on the calendar (like celebrations) and sometimes by people’s impatience with the length of worship (like me). I think that officially and personally, we do not take the priest’s advice (yeah, I recognize the absurdity of that assertion), and we doubt the grace.
 
But also, I think that grace strikes us as counterintuitive, especially in a society like ours that places so much emphasis on transactions. How can you receive anything of value if you offer nothing in return? The further along we travel on the road of life, the farther away we get from the act of grace that placed us here, and the more we seek to assert control over the blessings and misfortunes that are the signposts on that road. Our approach is reactive, even in our pleas for grace. And grace is anything but.
 
I often hear Christians talk about living in a state of grace because of their acceptance of the basic tenet of their faith. I cannot recall every hearing such a claim by a Jew, except maybe in the archaic Hebrew of the liturgy. It seems to me that the importance of grace, however, is not so much receiving it as it is opening our eyes and our hearts to the capacity to provide it. To my mind, it is only God who can provide an unending stream of grace. We mortals are endowed with such complicated hearts that a few doses of hatred, envy, and grudge-holding, to name a few, are inevitable.
 
Yet even acknowledging that we can act with grace toward each other liberates us from the presumption of inevitability of our own sometime lack of lovableness. Watching for an opportunity to act with grace – not elegance, not performative thanksgiving, but rather the unforced and unearned gift of compassionate love – can bring real-world salvation to a wretch like me or you. And if you can offer it, then you can accept it.
 
And you never need doubt it.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
(On storing statues of Confederate generals): I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve. Erin Thompson
 
I am not sure this hilarious observation needs any explication, but that never stopped me before.
 
I have family in Richmond, Virginia, and inevitably when we would visit there would be a drive on Monument Avenue. It was not to see the statues that stood in the verdant median strip, but because it is the main drag to parts of the city we had come to visit. Those statues were erected long after armed hostilities ceased between the armies of the United States (aka, the North) and the Confederate States (aka, the South). They were part of an attempt on the part of descendants of the Confederacy to reclaim the dignity they felt they had lost when the North defeated the South and imposed the rule of law as enacted by Congress.
 
It included the elimination of slavery (or, as I understand current usage, enslavement). Once you declare that it is a crime to claim ownership of another human being, it is only a matter of time until those human beings expect to be treated as equals. What nerve. And as society began to creep with excruciating lethargy toward that goal, it became necessary to remind people – the equals and the previously unequals – that things were not always that way. And one way to do it was to erect ginormous statues of the soldiers and politicians who took up arms to preserve their way of life in which men were men, women were women, and people of African heritage were chattel.
 
There are many fewer folks who would defend any semblance of slavery these days, and most of them belong to groups watched carefully by the FBI and Southern Poverty Law Center. But there are plenty of people who believe that just because history should not repeat itself, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t celebrate that old times there are not forgotten. And honestly, I don’t care how skilled a general or competent a legislator or brave a soldier a person was in the mid-19th-century, if they were using those skills in the service of the Confederacy, they were dedicated to the proposition that some men (and all women) were not created equal. Putting a statue of Arthur Ashe at the front of the line only mitigates that fact if you never continue down the road to the rest of the canonized saints of human trafficking.
 
The mayor who had those statues on Monument Avenue removed grew up to overcome the residual obstacles placed in the way of his parents and grandparents. He was not the first Black mayor of Richmond, and therefore not the first head of the city to travel in the shadow of those who would have denied him the right to his elected office. It appears that these things take time.
 
But what should be done with the oversize representations of the heroes of the South?
 
There is an argument to make that statues and other public monuments are historical artifacts, and therefore, like archaeological treasures from past civilizations, they should be preserved for posterity. The guardians of the Confederate legacy, however, strike me as having more in mind than guarding resources for future understanding of the circumstances of the Civil War. Oversized and idealized representations of military and political leaders are designed not to call to mind any accurate representation of what happened to cause or fight the war. Those statues – created and established long after the war ended and the subjects were dead – were erected to celebrate a shameful blight on the promise of our democracy. Were a visitor from another time or culture try to analyze what they symbolized for adherents of “the lost cause,” they could not help but conclude that in defending the secession and independence of the South, those iconic figures were not merely endorsing states’ rights and economic freedom; indeed, they were defending the enforced dehumanization of an entire segment of the human family based on their race.
 
Do we need to remember these monuments? Take a picture. They add nothing to our knowledge of the men (and few women) they represent. Rather, they serve to deflect the conversations that might eliminate the obstacles to full equality for all people in this country by allowing the preservationists to lay claim to some bogus sense of righteous indignation about the past, while the great-grandchildren of the enslaved people wonder rightfully why those same folks don’t share their own indignation about being victimized.
 
There is only one reason to preserve these statues rather than melt them down: to give people a touchstone for their own remaining bigotry. That’s why Erin Thompson’s sardonic observation is correct.