Holiday Update: Washington and New York

I guess it's a symbol of how alienated I feel in West Virginia, that I was so happy to be in the Washington area Thanksgiving, and in New York for a week around Christmas. Part of it was being with our families. My nephew is now back with my sister for a short time, and I enjoyed his company. A highlight was playing "Cards Against Humanity" with my sister, my husband, my nephew and two of his cute 23-year-old friends. Hard to imagine my mother doing that, or Joe and I being able to do that as The Rabbi and His Spouse in Morgantown. My sister Robin, and Joe bonded over Scrabble, which I won't play. They are both too cutthroat for me. We also visited Baltimore, where I picked a bunch of historic sites to visit. I loved showing Joe parts of my original hometown.

Joe's siblings all showed up in New York City, and we were able to hang with his father's beautiful widow, Naomi. She treated us all to dinner at a restaurant with fine food, all recognizable and not food-porn stuff, and great service. Joe and I attended services at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah Friday night. We arrived via subway, and worshiped with probably two hundred other LGBT Jews. Joe caught up with friends from high school and college; I saw three of my cousins and a college classmate I still talk about all the time. I loved being around people who aren't thinking that we are less than they are because we are Jews or a same-gender couple. Good to be with people in our age group too.

We had each picked a play we wanted to see in New York. His had already closed, so I bought tickets online to my choice, "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical." I loved the dedication of the cast, the singers and dancers portraying The Shirelles, The Drifters and Little Eva. I understand that, at sixty-five, I am the target audience for this show. 

New York and Washington are both beautiful cities. People here in Morgantown will brag that they have never been to either. We walked around Central Park in unseasonably warm weather Christmas Eve, counting how many foreign languages we heard - lots. I imagine many of the people are tourists, as we were. I just loved being there.

Growing up in Maryland, with four grandparents living in New York, I feel close to both New York and Washington. It feels more "at home" than Morgantown ever will.

It's New Years Eve, about 11 A.M. as I write this. Joe and I are meeting with a friend from Tree of Life for lunch at a restaurant. It's sunny out, but about 22 F. and windy. We don't really care to go out tonight. We'll probably watch one of the screeners I have from SAG-AFTRA for the SAG awards and go to bed early.

For 2015, I hope to be more at peace with where we live. I was reminded this morning of how blessed  I am. In the comic strip Dilbert, he has gone online looking for a date. He said "Tall, with hair and a job" and got thousands of responses from women. When I met Joe, I was, as I am now, short and bald. I worked no more than seven hours per week when we met; I don't work at all now. Still, he stays with me, and we support each other. It's worth living here to be with him.

Joe, playing scrabble with Robin, Greenbelt, MD

In Baltimore, Thanksgiving weekend

With my first cousin Eric Polk in East Northport, NY

Dinner with the Hamples and partners at Pasha Turkish Restaurant in New York

Broadway in the 70s. Joe and his brother are walking away from me

With one of my college housemates, John Hnedak, at The Met

Joe with Steven Levine, his friend from school days, Scarsdale, NY

With my cousin Howie Rotblatt near Times Square

Joe by Central Park Reservoir

Israel

Note: I am in a same-gender marriage to Rabbi Joe Hample, spiritual leader of Tree of Life, a Reform synagogue in Morgantown, West Virginia. I am publishing this without showing it to the Rabbi. The opinions here are my own, not his. Nor do they necessarily represent the views of members of Tree of Life.

Rabbi Joe sermonized about Israel on Yom Kippur. He called for a separation of the Jews and Arabs in Palestine with the establishment of an Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza. It was brave of him to say that when the government in Israel seems to be opposed. Still, if Israel is to remain a Jewish state, the Arabs need to have their own government.

Since then, the world has seen the rise of militants in Iraq and Syria, failing governments in Yemen and Libya, and Arab attacks on Jewish civilians in Israel, particularly in Jerusalem. This past Tuesday, November 18, two Arabs attacked a group of Orthodox Jews at morning prayer in Har Hof, a West Jerusalem neighborhood favored by English speakers from the United States and Britain. People were shot, stabbed and hacked with a meat cleaver in the middle of their prayers. Ultimately, a police officer, an ethnic Druze, shot and killed the two attackers. The policeman himself died of injuries.

Israel annexed all of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War in 1967. Many in the Arab community, who were the majority in that area before 1967, are not happy to be in a Jewish state. They have the rights of citizenship, but Israel is clearly set up for the benefit of Jews. The definition of "Jerusalem" has been expanded to include all the land up to Hebron. Jewish-only settlements have been built on land the Arabs want for their own state.

Until the attack this week, I had the impression, from visiting Jerusalem in 1985 and 2007 and from talking to friends and reading about Israel, that religion was not an issue between people. There was a "live and let live" attitude. Tensions were worse between the so-called "Ultra-Orthodox" and "secular" Jews. I use quotes because many in both camps object to those terms. Some pundits think these killers were inspired by ISIS to kill Jews at prayer, and that is possible. Tension may be high because some Jews are demanding the right to pray on the Temple Mount, site of Solomon's temple, but the site of a mosque since the seventh century. After the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem, the Temple Mount was placed under Moslem jurisdiction and Jews could visit, but not pray. Maybe it shouldn't be a big deal, but I don't see the point of Jews praying there if it affronts Muslim sensibilities. Our prayers, as Jews, have not depended on being at the Temple Mount for almost two thousand years. As a liberal, Diaspora Jew, I say "Let them have it."

Speaking of liberals, the rhetoric from friends on Facebook has been hysterical and not helpful. People are quoting from sources without investigating them. I mean from "TheRightScoop.com or well-known haters like Pamela Geller or Michelle Malkin. People I know buy whatever these horrible people are saying about how "Liberals hate Israel."I won't even repeat what they say about Islam generally. In the past, I've asked well-meaning people not to post from people like Mike Huckabee,  Glenn Beck, or Ben Carson. When I read something, I consider the source before I consider their arguments. If it's Cal Thomas (who appears in the Morgantown Dominion-Post) or someone who I know is racist and homophobic, or if it comes from an unreliable source like Fox News, I ignore it. Yes, CNN, The Washington Post and even the New York Times have been unreliable. My readings on Israel are likely to come from Ha'aretz, a liberal, English-language paper from Israel that provides a variety of opinions directly from Israel. I follow Ha'aretz on Twitter. My few Israeli friends are people who have moved there from the United States. I don't often agree with them.

What I've read about the community where these murders took place is that the people are at prayer. Thousands attended the funeral of the non-Jewish police officer who was killed. They are not asking for revenge. What they have done is mourn the dead, affirm their attachment to Israel, to the Jewish people and to their own families. I join with my fellow Jews in these endeavors.

I feel helpless. The Islamic world is spinning out of control. Israel, like the United States, has become more divided, more ruled by ugliness, money and thuggery than in the past. I ask that we take a step back, listen to the other side, be charitable and pray for peace with respect for everyone in the world.

San Francisco

Joe and I have been in San Francisco for a week. He lived here for many years; I visited maybe ten times. Life there has changed. Here are some examples:

We met with my friend Art and his wife Carol for breakfast near where we have been staying. Art's parents were friends with my parents before we were born, so we go way back. Carol suggested a new place. We were early, before work for Art and Carol, so there was not a full menu. The early menu featured five-dollar donuts and muffins, lavash bread with roasted vegetables and a possible egg, something with "fennellated butter." Not real food in my book. The people who came in were young, white and Asian people. groomed to look disheveled, but not really. Years ago, when Art asked me to go to a coffee shop in Haight-Ashbury with him, he asked me not to be shocked at the place. Everyone there was dressed for Halloween. It was July. In the past, when we stayed with Glenn, Joe's friend, we breakfasted at Java Beach, a funky place with bagels and oatmeal and pastries. The clientele were aging hippies, old lefties, young surfers and the tatooed and pierced denizens of the area. The beach in San Francisco is not the rich part of town; by reputation it is fogged in, cold and moldy.

We met with friends and relatives. The biggest complaints were about the cost of housing. My cousin Emily, who teaches at Stanford and her husband, an acupuncturist, are paying $2000 monthly for a one room guest house in Mountain View. Real estate is astronomical; The Bay Area Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle note that renters in price-controlled apartments are being kicked out by unscrupulous landlords. The new people in town have been called "heartless, "overprivileged," "techies from Ohio with no idea what the values of the City are." Anyone who isn't filthy with money from their job at Google, Facebook, Twitter or some other hi-tech company is being pushed out of San Francisco. That's the narrative, anyway. I find it ironic that in West Virginia, any town would sell itself to attract young, educated hard-working people to the area. In San Francisco "techies" is a pejorative,  like "illegals" in Arizona, "Puerto Ricans" fifty years ago in New York, or for that matter "Jews" in the early twentieth- century. "Hordes" who are flooding our town, who dress funny, don't speak the language, and undermine our values. That's what I'm hearing.

We shared breakfast, lunch and dinner with friends. Two male couples gave us the same story. They are our age (late 50s into 60s) and are planning their retirement. Both couples are moving to Palm Springs in the next year or two. "We feel more comfortable there. There are gay people our age." All four are caring for elderly parents.

At Sha'ar Zahav (which means "Golden Gate" in Hebrew), San Francisco's venerable synagogue for LGBT people, we ran into a discussion of what the future will be. Their long-term rabbi is leaving, membership is declining, and there is a dispute about what to do. Some say there is no need for a special synagogue for LGBT people, with the mainstream Reform and Conservative synagogues much more accepting. One man told me "It's not fun like it used to be." That's probably true of a lot of gay life. Sha'ar Zahav started as a freewheeling group of social outcasts committed to Judaism. But the temple now has a professional staff, a building and a Sunday school. The free-wheeling people have grown up, or moved away, or had children, or died.

At one of our dinners, I suggested that Sha'ar Zahav declare itself "The Mission District Temple." A temple member was opposed, going on a rant about how gentrified the neighborhood was becoming, how "souless, cruel and uncaring" those people could be. She called them "bullies." But the temple needs money, and they have it. Maybe an outreach to liberal Jews, intermarried, gay or not, but living in the neighborhood, could save that temple. If it wants to be saved. If the members are open to change.

Some of our friends think change is good. The more conservative economically welcome the rebirth of neighborhoods. Those who know history just shrug when someone says, "Our neighborhood isn't what it used to be." Nothing is what it used to be.

I have only flashpoints of memories of San Francisco. I was there as a supervised teen, freezing in July in a T-shirt and shorts. In my twenties I indulged in some of the sexual excess of the times. In the mid-eighties, when I spent two weeks job training in San Francisco, I saw a handsome man on the Muni wearing gloves in warm weather. I could see he was not well, and I watched him struggle to walk up a hill after he got off the train. He filled me with sadness, and also fear. He might not have done anything I hadn't done.

Those of us who took the bait and married our boyfriends no longer hang out at the bars and baths. We feel left out of current culture, which would happen anywhere we went. We don't keep up like we used to, don't need to be in on the latest trend. Our generation, always young, died early. We are left mourning our friends who lost their life to AIDS. Joe's friends here are unwilling to move somewhere where they will have to fight for gay rights, as we do now in West Virginia. Palm Springs is warm, cheaper than San Francisco, and a gathering place for the remnants of our era.

Two stories. In one, we are on the N-Judah Muni train heading back to the coast where we are staying. Most people on the trains are young, not rich. There are people who work downtown, some oldsters and some down-and-out types. The train is late, overcrowded. One of the doors doesn't work. Many are standing in the aisles. With all the money in town, why isn't more spent on transit? Some of our friends blamed pensions and healthcare for the municipal budget problems, but what municipal worker on a pension can afford to live here? And yet, there was money to bring a yacht race to town.

We rented a car to drive to the Peninsula. We had to redo our plan and get a car earlier. A woman at Hertz downtown was helpful to us, but there was an issue about both of us driving. She needed my ID and credit card in addition to Joe's. But she stopped and asked "Are you two married?" "We are!" we said. "Then it's okay. I don't need any more documents."  We are not accepted as a couple in West Virginia, except among a close circle of friends. No one would help us because we are married. In that way, it does feel "at home" here in San Francisco.

It was great to reconnect with old friends, particularly for Joe, who met some of his San Francisco friends in college in the 1970s. But we don't really belong here any more, no matter how beautiful and how gay-friendly it is. It was fun to go to The Castro, the center of gay life in San Francisco, but there is nothing we need there. Time has passed us by. Joe's friends have moved on without us, and we are making our way in a different culture, somewhere else.