Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems. Jerry A. Moore, Jr.
 
The very first day of my seminary education I learned a lesson from Rabbi David Aronson, now of blessed memory. He said he never put much stock in the adage suggesting “I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”  In arguing for compassion for all people, he said that a rich man with a stone in his shoe hurts just as much as a poor man with a stone in his shoe.
 
I met Rev. Jerry Moore, now of blessed memory, many years later. He was the pastor of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church of Washington, DC, which was located on Sixteenth Street when I knew him. His church had purchased the building from B’nai Israel Congregation, which had moved to Maryland. Rev. Moore lived in an expansive home a few blocks from the church, and he graciously hosted a gathering of rabbis and Black pastors one evening. The conversation was intense, as I recall, and the hour began to get late when Rev. Moore began to speak. He must have rambled for close to twenty minutes as all of us began to fidget and raise our eyebrows across racial and religious lines. But he was our host, and no one was willing to interrupt him.
 
And then, with the skill that made him an admired preacher, he gathered the fringes of his remarks and with a few concise sentences tied them together, concluding with these words: People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems.
 
Collectively our eyebrows dropped and then our jaws. He had given us the mandate we had come together to discover. Though all of us intellectually understood that there was no value in comparing the suffering of one group with another – and in a roomful of Black and Jewish clergy there were plenty of metrics to go around – all of us had, one time or many, enrolled in some version of impatience with the complaints of others about (insert injustice here) because of our own experience with (insert different injustice here).  But why were we there together? Out of a shared impetus to solve problems.
 
There have always been divides in American society. The longest-established one, at least officially, has been between Blacks and Whites. More on that momentarily. But there are others – Christian and Jew, north and south, rural and urban, white- and blue-collar workers, management and union, and the ever-popular rich and poor, just to name a few. The desire of some to ameliorate those divisions has resulted in gradations that have made them more confusing rather than eliminating them. Accurately, “people of color” has replaced the monochromatic “black” to describe one side of the racial divide. And even on the other side, qualities that modify “white” create a sliding scale of whiteness for members of each subgroup. Sexual orientation and gender identification have moved from binary (male-female, straight-gay) to an expanding alphabet of possibilities and a redefinition of pronouns and their attending grammatical constructs. In my personal niche, I defy you to find a unified definition of what is a Jew, before you even get to the more complicated question of who is a Jew, and we are a low-single-digit percentage of the population.
 
I might suggest that all of this atomization of identity is an effort to shake a stone out of a shoe.  If I can name it, I can find it, and then I can rid myself of the pain associated with it. It is the way to solve the problem caused by my suffering. But that formulation does not sound right to me. My skin color or culture or orientation is not something to be ejected, even if such a thing were possible.
 
Instead, these gradations are too often a way to contrast with what has become the ultimate flaw: privilege. Hurling the accusation of privilege is a way to claim that there are some people who do not suffer in that particular way that I do – they are rich or White or cis-gender or typical or empowered.  They may have no shoes, but at least they have feet.
 
There is no one who does not suffer. But there are people who are told that they don’t suffer enough to qualify. Even for the miniscule part of the population for whom that representation may have a modicum of truth, it formalizes the empathy gap that the accusers so decry. People who don’t suffer don’t try to solve problems. Defining the current divide as between those with privilege and those without formalizes the suffering without provoking the solution to it.
 
No one should suffer. Everyone does. Until and unless we all affirm both statements, we won’t be solving the problems in our society.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Can you look in the eyes of someone you love and think that’s all synapse and no soul?   David Wolpe
 
In the debate between those who believe in an afterlife and those who do not, there are so many unresolvable variables that any conversation more resembles a Middle Eastern market than a courtroom drama. For those who affirm, the questions range from the very practical (e.g., how old will I be?) to the philosophical (e.g., will I answer for my misdeeds?). For those who deny, the questions still demand tremendous gradations (e.g., why be moral in this life?) and complicated definitions (e.g., when exactly does life begin and end?). As you read this, you are already thinking of many other questions and deciding what is false about other people’s answers.
 
In the European Jewish tradition, memorial services for, as they say, “beloved departed” are held four times a year in synagogue. It is usual in most synagogues for the rabbi to deliver some kind of message, sermonic or otherwise, on the value of remembering and the disposition of the force that animated the dead in their lifetime. The very long history of Judaism has always affirmed life after death. It begins with the very first death recorded in the Bible (see Cain and Abel: the blood of your brother cries out to me from the ground) and diversifies into metaphor and literalness as human speculation considered an increasing number of possibilities. Those rabbinic messages vary along the continuum of scholarly to speculative, but most of them, in my humble opinion, address the wrong question.
 
I think that what we wonder is not about life after death. Of course there is life after death.  Nothing in our physical universe evaporates into non-existence. The stardust from which we were formed came from somewhere, whether the Big Bang or what was gathered from the four corners of the earth. And though no longer combined and energized into human form, every quark of us will remain unfrustrated by its time in our bodies. I cannot represent with such certainty the entity of life-force that I and others call the soul, but I cannot imagine the universe had made a solitary exception for it. And how much the more so if I am willing to attribute all of this to God.
 
So stop wondering about life after death. In tiny pieces, you are immortal. What we wonder about is consciousness after death. Will I know I am me? Will others, by whatever means, recognize me, and I them? Will the feelings and inspirations, be they love or disdain, positive or cautionary, we who walk the earth insist survive death continue to be perceptible once we have succumbed to our end?
 
Ah, that’s where speculation, be it theological or scientific, is nothing more than opinion. If the thoughts and emotions we generate have the same permanence as our atomic particles, then we do not get to choose which survive. It is ego that insists that self-awareness generated in my lifetime has the power to override the universe(s).
 
Rabbi David Wolpe is a friend and a teacher, and he is smarter than I am in almost every way. If I am going to be honest, then I have to accept his challenge and give an answer to his question, posed to his congregation at the sacred moment of that memorial service on the holiest day of the year for Jews. My answer is no, I cannot look in the eyes of someone I love – or even someone about whom I am essentially indifferent – and think it is all synapse and no soul.  While there is no part of anyone that is unique, there are no two people who combine those common elements in the same way. I will call that uniqueness the soul, and it is more than the sum of electrical sparks in a human machine.
 
That’s why atheists prefer a favorite flavor of ice cream, root for different teams and fall in love.
 
But I am not an atheist. And all of my life I have desired to return to the source of my life.  The collective wisdom of our tradition is summed up in this claim: God is one. “One” in every sense. “One” as in only. “One” as in primary. “One” as in everything. Every thing, every place, every atom, every song, every word, every life.  It is all one. And, really, that’s all I want -- to be one with…the One. That’s the promise of eternal life. We will no longer be separate from the One. We will be one with the One.
 
In the end, we relinquish what separates us from God, and we are whole with the Everything of the universe. Consciousness, self-awareness, makes me separate. Death removes that barrier.
 
My conclusion might have made me profoundly sad at one time, but now it inspires me. With the limited time I enjoy my unique consciousness in the world, I can experience something that was and will be unavailable to me. It is my contribution to others; it is my contribution to the One. That’s more than synapses.

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It – Special Edition
 
Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.      Jimi Hendrix
 
New York and Los Angeles have an abundance of opportunities found only in smaller measure elsewhere.  Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, rich in cultural and ethnic heritage. The streets of Boston and Philadelphia lead to universities and colleges in every direction. Atlanta, Houston, Miami and so many others in the southern tier of the United States have a capacity to reinvent history.  But Memphis seems to pack more into every square mile than any place else in this country I have ever seen.
 
In a connect-the-dots picture of every important aspect of United States history and culture, Memphis seems to be a pivotal intersection.  It sits on the Mississippi River, it lays claim to Johnny Walker (distilled at the other end of the state), it has an elegant hotel where ducks live, it has a roster of sports teams, it is central to the civil rights movement.  And then there is the music
 
I know that Nashville will claim to be Music City and that the “recording industry” is really in LA. Atlantic Records grew out of jazz and the precursor to soul music performed at the Turkish embassy in Washington, DC. Austin is a destination no musician can resist. But block for block, starting with Beale Street, you can’t beat Memphis.
 
My visit wasn’t long enough to tour all of the sites devoted to music in Memphis.  But we saw two of the most important ones – the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Sun Studio where, arguably, rock and roll was born.
 
The two places could not be more different, but for one thing (you’ll have to wait for it).  Sun Studio was and is an old building outfitted by Sam Phillips who, with friends and associates, built a single recording studio with materials at hand.  He looked for music that would sell, and he was known to give a chance to local talent. He also rented out recording time to private citizens, like a kid named Elvis who wanted to record a birthday song for his mama. Eventually, that kid and another named Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison would get their start with records produced and distributed by Phillips and Sun Studio.
 
(BTW, he took the $35,000 he received for the rights to Elvis’s talent and invested it in a growing local franchise called Holiday Inn.  He did all right. Mama.)
 
Stax was a neighborhood hangout owned by Jim Stewart (St) and his sister Estelle Axton (ax) who were both music lovers. Estelle’s record store attracted lots of local kids who discovered each other’s music and then went on to make it.  Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Ike and Tina Turner, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and a lot of other names you know got their start at Stax.  Soulsville, as the neighborhood came to be known, was Motown before Motown was Motown.
 
Stax collapsed as a business but survives today as a museum.  Sun gives tours all day and operates as a studio at night – you can stand where Elvis stood and howl into the microphone he used to record “That’s All Right Mama.”
 
So what is that common point for these two competitors (and, truth be told, most of the rest of the Memphis music scene)? In a racially divided American South, black and white seemed remarkably irrelevant in those formative days. The prevalence of country and hillbilly music among the white population were the strongest influences on emerging black musicians. The church-based gospel songs and African rhythms embedded in the music of black musicians were used unselfconsciously by the pioneers of white rock and roll.  The music did not lie.
 
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the easy relationship among the communities of musicians changed, just like the rest of the country. The change that music carries is not always what we might want, but always holds the potential for our better inclinations.
 
And I think it is true of Memphis itself. The pervasiveness of music in this intensely rich community which is similar in culture to Jackson, Little Rock, and Birmingham -- all spitting distance away – means that there is a model of appreciation and collaboration you could find at the mostly-white Sun Studio and the mostly black Stax.  Music doesn’t lie.
 
Imagine if we could live into that change in the world.  Goodness gracious.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It – Special Edition
 
Every black man is his own Moses in this exodus.  Unidentified man during Jim Crow

We came around the corner and there was the sign for the Lorraine Motel.  We parked the car and started to walk to the entrance of the National Civil Rights Museum, and I lost my breath. There was the balcony, the railing, the door marked 306. My reaction was not elegant or polite – I interrupted a conversation.

I was fifteen on that day in 1968, not yet enlightened enough to comprehend what happened. In the years that followed I gained an increasing appreciation of the man who was murdered there and knowledge about the murder itself. I saw the pictures. I met the men who were on the balcony with him at that moment.  But I have to say that nothing prepared me for my reaction.

And I have been to other historical sites. I reached back across thousands of years to touch original buildings and roads in the Middle East. I peered into ovens at crematoria in Poland. I crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, stood in Dr. King’s pulpit in Montgomery, gave a speech from the spot that he Had a Dream. My friend went to the Texas Book Depository and Dealey Plaza.  He agreed with me – this was different.

To the credit of a few people with deep social consciousness, the motel – one of the few that served a Black clientele during segregated times – was transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum. From slavery to emancipation, from Jim Crow to voting rights, from activism to assassination to renewed activism, we climbed slowly across the first floor and then up the ramps to the second on a journey through the history of involuntary Americans. We heard the groans on the middle passage, visited the inadequate classrooms, sat next to heroes on a bus, and arrived to see the room where it happened. I stood alone looking out of the window onto the balcony and recited the liturgical memorial prayer, more to comfort myself than anything else. Only then did I begin to get my lost breath back.

Across the street from the motel is a tunnel that leads to the boarding house from which the murder likely took place.  It is a clear view from the bathroom window to room 306.  In the renovated space behind it is the evidence collected to convict the shooter, and a very thorough refutation of the alternate theories about the act.  There is a memorial wall to others assassinated for their beliefs – perhaps the only place Malcom X and Yitzchak Rabin appear together.

Perhaps you think I have shared a travelogue of one small space.  Memphis is known for many things – barbecue, BB King, the Million Dollar Quartet, the Peabody ducks, and these days for an increasingly admirable downtown renewal.  Of course, it is also known for the Lorraine Motel and what happened in front of Room 306. Each one has a backstory and a lasting presence.  But while you can go there to feel good about most of Memphis, you can’t visit the Lorraine Motel and come away feeling better.

Instead, if you immerse yourself in the story of Africans and their descendants in America, you come away with a feeling – accurate, I think – that even if you are the offspring of immigrants yourself (and most of the rest of us are), you are enslaved to the legacy of how our fellow Americans were treated. It is a long walk to liberation, one for which every person is their own Moses.

The walkway to the museum used to be its parking lot.  Now it is a plaza from which to approach and encounter, from just below, the line of fire that took away his breath. For a moment, and for a couple of hours thereafter, my breath was taken, too. My ancestors came to these shores in search of the promise of a much better life. They found it, and they bequeathed it to me. But, as Elie Wiesel said about people who convert to Judaism, they are entrusted not only with our dreams, but also our nightmares. Each person who loses their breath at Room 306 has the responsibility to awaken, reclaim it, and continue the exodus.