Not Quite Caligula

Dance recital, culmination of ten months of weekly practice, monument to secular ritual and tradition.  Tight spandex, heavy makeup applications, glittered costumes, hair pulled back.  People congregate, drop their daughters in a staging area before they stake their place in line.. Rumors of a packed house prompt many spectators to arrive early.  Fathers, brothers, and grandfathers are among those mingling with the sixty percent female majority.

The up sell continues in the lobby.  After significant class fee, costume charge, and recital fee, you encounter t-shirts, flower bouquets, and pre-order recital DVDs.  My daughter played out the string, excited for the culmination of preparation but she never caught the dancing bug.  With my mother in law delivering the traditional bouquet of flowers, I felt no pressure to purchase any up sell items.

Finally, the house lights dim.

Show time.

Art evokes emotion.

The paint that attracts your gaze, sound that catches your ear, an artist creates in order for you to hear, think, feel, become witness to their experience. Picasso’s cubist portraits of lovers, Rodin’s sculpture of ‘Eve’ or John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme,’ are examples of artists conveying their interpretation in a creative medium. How you feel when you behold Rodin’s ‘Eve’ or hear Coltrane’s emotion laden tenor on ‘A Love Supreme,’ is an emotion totally your own. However, each artist created their works to elicit certain emotions whether you feel them or not.

Sir Mix-a-Lot penned a song called Big Butts.

With Big Butts pulsating through speakers, one can easily envision how the song’s author intended listeners to physically interpret his song: quick movements, gyrations, emphasis on moving ones behind.

No issue with freedom of expression.

Picasso can paint as he sees fit, Sir Mix-a-lot or 2 Live Crew can rap however they want.

Unencumbered freedom of expression is a cornerstone of our democratic, free society.

HOWEVER, when artistic expression involves a human body, live human body, you expect to be at Lincoln Center, a dance club or the Canadian Ballet. Not at a nine year old’s dance recital.

Watching the needle move cultural norms from Ed Sullivan, the inability to show Elvis’ below his waist, to a dance recital with nine year old’s gyrating and fifteen year old’s contorting their bodies in two piece uniforms, one wonders if artistic expression should not be an inalienable right to a nine year old.

Do sports put you in uncomfortable sexual situations?

Neither the tennis outfits on prodigies nor leotards on pre-pubescent gymnasts ever elicited pangs of discomfort.  When the music pulsates, lyrics bespeak moving ‘booty,’ artistic interpretation should take the form of J. Lo, techno, dance club moves.

HOWEVER, I was not at a dance club or pop concert, I sat perplexed in the fourth row of my daughter’s dance recital.

Are Situational Ethics the New Moral Imperative?

(The following article appeared in the September 22, 2011 issue of the Jewish Ledger in Rochester, NY. This article was intended to be published after 'A Tale of Two Cities.' Unfortunately, miscommunication with the Jewish Ledger's editor led to this article being published and 'A Tale of Two Cities' being pulled)


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Are Situational Ethics the New Moral Imperative?

Staring at blind man on the corner waiting to cross the street towards the ballpark, those around him oblivious to his plight, I left my son to his autographs and crossed the street to help the gentleman.

Are you oblivious to the plight of those around you?

To rationalize not helping someone in such obvious need as the blind man in front of the ballpark, one need employ situational ethics. “I do the right thing, I am concerned about my fellow man BUT my bus is almost here.” To ignore the blind man’s plight, one must view the man as an “It,” to borrow from Martin Buber, as a thing, as a noun to which we adorn adjectives. The moment we decide to keep to ourselves, we enter into a relationship with the blind man as an object.

How do we traverse the chasm between relating to the man as an “It,” to defining our relationship as one of distance to experiencing the man as a “You,” not an “it?”

Situational ethics.

Situational ethics define our actions. Why would you ignore the blind man? How else do you explain ‘normal’ citizens walking by a beaten man on a New York City Subway? You can’t spare a five spot for the malnourished homeless addict on the corner?

Situational ethics.

When posed with a particularly difficult situation, all of us, at some time in our lives, compromise our ethics. Make no mistake: in certain situations, momentarily augmenting the importance of one ethical standard over another is permitted. When your friend’s wife glances at her twelve week year old daughter and joyfully proclaims to you “Isn’t she cute?” does the situation call for the ethical stalwart of honesty? Should you tactfully convey your firm conviction that her child is not so cute? Or, should you exhibit the emotional intelligence of empathy, ethically bound to preserve the woman’s mental health and feelings of joy?

For a moment, consider the tenuous predicament of Temple Beth El mentioned in last issues Urban Drash. To refresh your memory, the word ‘Jew’ was spray painted on the back of TBE’s religious school in November 2010. The red spray paint remained on the religious school for three weeks before TBE’s facilities manager removed the defacement. According to sources at TBE, the city dragged their feet in removing the graffiti. Whether the police department failed to view the graffiti, necessary before removal, OR, the person responsible for graffiti removal was not dispatched after an official police assessment, those facts remain uncertain.

What we know as fact is an anti-Semitic act occurred at Temple Beth El which was dealt with in a slow manner geared to hush any publicity.

Is Temple Beth El obligated to publicize the incident, exhaustively investigate, and use an unfortunate event as a profound teaching tool?
Is following the moral law to teach from an unfortunate incident self defeating? Does moral law change such that TBE’s actions in the day of Synagogues as business are permissible?
Or does TBE have a moral imperative to employ situation ethics? Should TBE let reason and pure logic guide their response and purposely sweep the event under a rug?

Make no mistake, Synagogues are businesses and need to be operated as such. TBE made a concerted decision to not publicize an event few know about because unwanted, uncontrolled publicity would adversely affect membership: bad publicity is bad for business. Instead of speaking loud, they whispered in closed circles. Rather than inform the community, they chose to remain quiet.

Although TBE properly employed the moral imperative in this situation, I am reminded of my college admissions essay that asked to focus on a song that echoed your world view. I began the essay describing a record player playing Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, the lyrics as clear today as they were twenty five years ago: “Silence like a cancer grows.”

Is silence ever the answer?
The moral imperative says yes!

A Tale of Two Cities

The following article by H.D. Levy, 'A Tale of Two Cities,' appears in the September 22, 2011 edition of The Jewish Ledger, published in Rochester, New York.

Rochester and Brighton, two cities that border one another, at times uncertain where one city begins and the other ends. Two concentric circles, so close in measured distance yet so far in cultural sensitivity. Two cities that exhibit divergent responses to the emotional reservoir that runs beneath our society: racial hate.

In the home of the Underground Railroad, final resting place of abolitionist leaders, a town that welcomed integrated baseball to the East Coast long before other towns, an undertone of racial hate pervades civic action.

Recent anti-Semitic acts serve as the case study of how two cities’ responses, Rochester and Brighton, serve to illustrate how racial hate both fuels some to inactivity, others to focused action, and community leaders to cover up.

On April 30, 2011, two high school students used toilet paper and gasoline to burn a swastika on a street in Home Acres. Swiftly, the police responded by apprehending the two perpetrators.

Neighborhood emails circulated, vigils were held, community meetings filled rooms and even formal arbitration style conferences convened. Numerous stories appeared in the Democrat and Chronicle reporting the facts and promoting gatherings aimed at healing, understanding, and reconciliation.

In a subdivision frequented by Holocaust survivors on walks, in a community where public schools close on the Jewish High Holidays, the police responded in force to a hateful act.

The Home Acres swastika occurred April 30, 2011.

Did you hear about the anti Semitic graffiti that predates the Home Acres incident by nearly six months? Did you know a visible monument to Judaism, a stone’s throw from Brighton in the city, spiritual home to a large number of Brighton’s Jews, was defaced in November 2010?

The incident at Temple Beth El provides volumes of material for future critiques. This article only focuses on the City of Rochester’s response in stark contrast to that of Brighton.

In thick letters of red spray paint, the word ‘Jew’ adorned the outside wall of Temple Beth El’s religious school. Depending on whose account you believe, the Synagogue or the city, the police dragged their feet investigating the graffiti. Once alerted to the defacement, the city of Rochester’s police department responded slowly. The police were not immediately on the scene. The graffiti remained for all to see because the police, according to TBE, needed to perform some unknown duty before an official city graffiti remover could be dispatched. After nearly a month, TBE instructed their building engineer to remove the defacement himself.

No vigils. No inboxes inundated with messages. No Democrat and Chronicle articles.

No swift police response, rather a whimper from city officials and Synagogue personnel as the incident, by design, faded from memory.

Two cities, two anti-Semitic incidents, and two drastically divergent responses.
What does the city of Rochester’s response, as juxtaposed to Brighton’s, say about how acts of racial hate are regarded in the Flower city? Is Brighton too sensitive to acts of anti-Semitism, prone to overreaction? Are Rochester’s power brokers fueled by an undercurrent of racial insensitivity, of an anti-Semitism that use to pervade certain Brighton neighborhoods as recently as thirty years ago?

One fact remains clear, the city of Rochester, as represented by the police department, reacted to an anti-Semitic incident quite differently than Brighton. Why, maybe you need to look in the mirror.

Initial neighborhood response

In an effort to provide further context for the Tale of Two Cities article, Urban Drash will post a series of emails made available to the blog.

This first email was sent at 10:24am May 1, 2011, less than 24 hours after the anti-Semitic incident in Brighton. The email, from a Home Acres resident, speaks for itself...

From: ------------------ [mailto:-----------------]

Sundown last night began the Jewish Observance of Yom HaShoah, the remembrance of the Holocuast.

Last night around 11::00 visitors to, or residents of, Home Acres, chose to light a Swastika in gasoline on Edgemere between Southern Parkway and Eastland.

My daughter came upon it while walking home from a friend's house and showed it to my wife, who informed the police.

We are appalled and deeply disappointed that something like this could happen in our neighborhood, which we love.

I'd like to ask the board to ask the town to get the asphalt repaired/replaced as quickly as possible to remove this stain from our neighborhood.

Home Acre Board officially responds

The Home Acres Board officially responded to the act of hate in the email below sent at 4:13pm on Sunday, May 1, 2011.

Dear Neighbors,

As members of the board and residents of Home Acres we are saddened and angered by the senseless act of hatred that took place during the night last night when a swastika was burned into the pavement in the middle of Edgemere between Southern and Eastland. We are in the midst of planning what we hope will be a thoughtful response culminating in a vigil next Saturday after sundown. In the meantime, if you would like to come together sooner, some of our neighbors are planning to gather at the site this evening at 8 PM for a candlelight vigil.

An on-line Democrat & Chronicle article with additional information can be seen athttp://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20110501/NEWS01/105010372

Please watch your email for additional communication about this matter and share the news with neighbors who may not be receiving these messages.

Regards,
The Home Acres Board