All through college and up until the time of my second Israel trip, I didn’t even know where the Jewish student union was at Stanford. But my grandmother, my mother’s best friend, and I sent my mom to Israel for her fiftieth birthday, and when she came back she got involved with the Jewish community on campus. Just a few years later, I was offered the job of temporary executive director of the Stanford Hillel, which I turned down. I’ve always wondered if I’d taken that job, would I have started He’brew at all? Probably not.
At Stanford, my major became a hodgepodge of everything I could justify under the theme Theories of the Individual. Technically the B.A. says English with an Interdisciplinary Emphasis, which came to mean, as I was scrambling to graduate on time, that I could justify credits for everything from literature to psychology to history, art history, philosophy, Greek mythology, and even earth sciences (how we experience the earth). Classes on Jung, Marx, Freud, central European novelists (just as the Berlin Wall was coming down), religious rituals across world cultures, the political art of the French revolution, and of course the great western canon, from man’s state of nature through predestination vs. free will and deconstructing post-modern pop culture. Everything, that is, except business and economics, hard science and math. Advanced volleyball — two separate quarters — counted as class credits, though not toward my major. I tried.
Starting school, I was all the way into a full-blown Jim Morrison phase. Sitting in the dark in my dormitory bed, writing poetry. Awful shit I never want anybody to see. My girlfriend at the time, Olivia, led me on our bikes out to a construction site on the edge of campus, where she had spray-painted a quote from the Lizard King’s book of poetry for me on a thirty-foot plywood wall. By far the coolest thing anyone had done for me up to that time. Cool, for the moment — she ended up dumping me and sleeping with this jack-off, one of those pseudo-genius psychologist types everyone knows in college. He was so… intense.
Spring quarter of freshman year, I joined the ranks of the worst college DJs ever. We had three lectures a week for Western Culture, the core block of my Humanities higher education class, and I cut one session each week to spin records. At KZSU in the basement of Memorial Auditorium, I’d bring three beers with me and play wonderful, terrible classic rock. They still had a set format, with jazz from six to nine a.m., classic rock from nine to noon, and progressively wilder, newer (and better) music though the afternoon, wrapping around to “anything goes” from midnight to six a.m. Normally the newbie DJs got stuck with the three a.m. shifts, but since no one wanted to play classic rock, I got lucky (for me, not for the listeners). I went head to head with KOME, KSJO, and KRQR (the Rocker!) for morning AOR attention. I invited friends to guest-DJ, including Jim in his post-operation Frankenstein neck brace, and Ben, who cut class from spring semester at my old high school to judge such epic battles as Randy Rhodes vs. Angus Young and themed shows such as the Rush Hour (all B-sides). I consistently left the microphone off by accident, most notably during a three-minute dirge tribute to the death of Andy Gibb, and played records at the wrong speeds. I got a lot of angry, disgusted phone calls. But I gave them free tickets to local shows, which seemed to calm the raging beasts.
I did a little college theater as well. I played Creon, the Greek king, in a play that was this guy’s senior thesis. I got to play the ruthless, one-dimensional tyrant in Bertolt Brecht’s version of the myth. Never able to really get over myself to commit to any real form of acting, I’d started in high school with whatever Steve Gill called his introduction to acting class. Trust exercises, the mime box, and simple scenes, along with some experimental stuff I likely didn’t throw myself into. Generally, I stared at Pammy Brown, at the time the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen up close, not really knowing what I could possibly ever do about it. She was a senior.
At college, I played rugby for two years. My buddy Gabe told me, “Seriously, our team sucks. (Not true for long: Just a few years later, they would start making the regional and national playoffs consistently, with no help from me.) But you’ll get into great shape. Then you drink a bunch of beer and try to pick up girls, who for no understandable reason like hanging around muddy guys singing about incest and bestiality.” The bumper sticker sounds heroic: “Give Blood. Play Rugby.” Over the course of my career, I had a couple of nasty injuries. One time I went up to catch what’s called an up-and-under, a high kick, and the ball came straight down from two stories up, directly onto my pinkie. I got a spiral fracture in the third joint of my little finger. It fucking killed, like the end of the world, every time I had my hand in the scrum. I tried unsuccessfully to play with a finger cast, so I went on injured reserve for a few weeks, until the bone fused.
The only blood I gave through injury actually happened the night before a match. In a particularly intense game of Nerf Hoop in our dorm, my friend Matt went up for a jump shot and threw a huge right elbow that smashed me flush in the center of my face. Bleeding uncontrollably, I went to the campus clinic, and they stuffed it with gauze and sent me home. On Saturday morning, we drove to Sacramento for the game. I played the position known as a lock, where your shoulder supports the ass of the guy in front of you and your head is jammed between everyone else’s knees in the scrum. Rather uncomfortable with a broken schnozz.
In the spring quarter of my junior year I went to Italy, which, of course, had a whole lotta Christianity going on. I’d taken a captivating art history class the quarter before, and I loved the three months in Florence and the nearby towns, going from church to church, seeing variations on the Annunciation to the Pieta, all the Bible scenes created to glorify the wealthiest ruling families and educate the illiterate masses on the ways of God. A few years before at Stanford, one afternoon we were tripping on acid, floating through the main quad. I remember staring at Memorial Church, with its huge mosaic of preaching Jesus, and thinking, I’m so glad I have my own thing and don’t need to be a part of that whole thing. What a heavy trip, man. Well, gotta go play frisbee!
By the time I went to Italy, I’d stopped freaking out about churches so much and became fascinated with the history and creativity pouring out of these institutions. I lived with a cool, very “modern” Italian family — as in, the mother was rarely around, and the father was never discussed. When I arrived, speaking no Italian (even after over a year of classroom language instruction), a slightly hunched older woman in a house dress greeted me at my new home. I assumed she was the Mamma and stumbled through some very very basic greetings and thanks. Took me about four or five days to realize she was the maid, and that the mom was out of town. There was an older sister who was my age, a hot Florentine, who would come home after her job, get food on the table for her younger brothers and me, and then go out every night, dancing and smoking hash until two in the morning. She had no interest in talking to yet another American college boy. I played soccer with my “brothers,” who were maybe eleven and fifteen, and we had a blast. They let me use the family scooter, just fixed after a recent crash, and I’d cruise through five hundred-year-old streets to meet friends at the college bars cranking Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
My growing curiosity about art and the hero-worship of Michelangelo and related artist rock stars led to a senior thesis on two paintings - Velazquez’s Las Meninas and Picasso’s late-career reinterpretation. Turned in only two months after graduation (thanks for letting me walk, Professor), my opus, termed “A Question of Meaning,” studied three sets of critics looking at the same paintings, each reaching wildly different conclusions about what the art, and the artist, meant. The possibility of multiple, even contradictory, truths embedded in the same text or tradition feels so reasonable to me. This openness to an intuitive struggle with interpreting ideas, images, and culture has long informed my sensibility about so many parts of my life, from rock lyrics to beer flavors to a crafted sense of my own Judaism.
During college, Ben and I had crashed a spring break in New Orleans with our high school friend Jim, who was in architecture school at Tulane. There was no last call, and extensive funk possibilities beckoned. After graduation, Cristi and I decided to relocate to the French Quarter.
I had a vague notion about doing something with art or literature, maybe music promoting, or even theater. I had a spectacular time in New Orleans, though Cristi, I know, had less of a great time, at least when I was around. Longtime close friends, we were roommates on Toulouse Street only briefly. In a serious relationship with a good friend of Jim’s, Cristi got a job as a paralegal, for which she had to wear panty hose to work every day, and be at the office at eight a.m. A major damper on our weeknight festivities. What the hell? I thought. We were going to be artists, right? Or at least committed bohemians, low-level hedonists, blah-blah-blah Dadaists. Justifiably so, Cristi never tires of calling out my hypocrisy for giving her shit about being a paralegal — and then later becoming one myself in Washington, D.C.
I got a job in the Quarter at Crescent City Brewhouse, which would be my first specific exposure to craft beer. The older brother of a guy we knew from Stanford had opened the first brewpub in Louisiana with a German brewmaster, Wolf, who remains there to this day (and is now, I believe, the exclusive owner). Kent planned to road-trip to New Orleans to work at his brother’s pub, surviving and thriving in what would be a skanky, cockroach-infested summer sublet. The last week of school, Olivia, my ex-, and Kent’s current girlfriend, introduced me to Peter, his New Orleans co-conspirator. Never knew the guy during our four years of college, but when we started talking, Peter and I realized we’d been at all the same parties and knew all the same people. We’d both gone to the Neil Young-Sonic Youth concert, the same Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd shows; we were both regulars at the same jam-band Happy Hours. Peter would soon become one of my best friends and, eventually, the most consistent and generous donor to the Shmaltz couch-surfing foundation.
The Brewhouse was my first real bartending job. I think the management thought I was better friends with Kent and his family than I was, so with my comment about having “bartending experience” (two shifts for my dorm R.A.’s bartending scam for campus events), they let me get behind the bar right away. After my first preposterous attempt to make a Dewars and water (this story only works with the thick New Orleans accent — come to a book reading), I spent most of my time pulling drafts. They made all their own beer, and it was good stuff — the beer was better than everything else they served there. They made three styles: a pilsner, an amber, and a dark beer called Black Forest that was my favorite.
The job itself wasn’t the greatest, but it was a hell of a lot better than most others in the Quarter. I’d just gotten my second and third ear piercings, but management didn’t let you wear earrings. I told the boss some story about a fictitious girlfriend getting it for me for sentimental reasons while we were apart. I worked every shift for nine months with a Bandaid on my earlobe, covering the new studs.
This being the service industry and New Orleans, the staff had some eccentricities. All the chefs seemed to have gout — chubby fingers swollen over wedding bands after a lifetime of too much decadence and too little fruit. One manager hawked his five thousand dollar crotch-rocket motorcycle to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. A month later, she ditched him but kept the ring. Understandably, the guy was pissed, but I guess he was too much of a pushover to get it back. Instead, he chose to direct his bitterness at the staff.
Another manager was doing a ton of blow, and later smoking crack, in the downstairs bathroom. One night he grabbed the entire night’s cash sales and split town. Unbelievably, after he returned to town and set up a payback plan, they actually let him come back several months later and return to his old position. The last manager played it cool and plotted quietly, finally stealing over fifty grand — basically all the money the place earned in a week — never to be heard from again. Rumor had it they sent the FBI after him.
Creatively, I tried my hand at a few different things during my time in New Orleans. My first paid acting gig came as Dead Body #2 in a Bourbon Street dinner-theater murder mystery. A plant from the get-go, I came in with the audience and made small talk like I was there to see the show. In the middle of the salad course, I jumped up to escape the lead “detective” and got shot in the back, my corpse dragged off by two plainclothed “policemen” (bar-backs). Twenty-five dollars a night, free dinner and booze. We opened with three performances the first week, two the second, one the third, and closed. One more night of work on a paddle boat for the same show, and that was the last of my working actor-slash-bartender career.
Though I lacked the lifestyle commitment of the originator, I started taking some Bukowski short stories and turning them into one-act plays. I planned to start a little theater group, and even got one of the hottie waitress/actresses from work to agree to perform. After a botched tryout reading of Ginsberg’s “America” for a well-respected regional theater group, I closed the curtain on my short lived acting career and started a literary magazine instead — well, a ‘zine, during the early-’90s self-publishing renaissance.
I had no idea how to do anything in publishing or graphic design. I got a job answering the phone at the office of the New Orleans Symphony, which, as it was going out of business, needed one lone soul to sit in a grubby little room in an anonymous Central Business District building. It was very slow, but a guy next door ran a computer center, training arts groups to use technology. Extremely encouraging, he let me learn how to use Pagemaker for free while I waited for Symphony calls to come in. I started soliciting writers and artists to contribute (mostly my non-starving, non full-time-artist friends), and I called the magazine Projector. I got a few of the architecture professors at Tulane, local poets, and grad-student friends of friends to submit stuff. I’d print maybe a couple hundred copies. I sold subscriptions to my friends and family — I think I sold seven, or twelve — and I put out five issues. I used to walk around the French Quarter and Uptown and sell them for a dollar on the street. Sweet margin. My most illustrious sale was to Richard Ford’s wife, who was evidently staying in the Quarter. I said, Hey, want to support New Orleans artists?
“I already do,” she replied.
Here’s how little I knew about what I was doing: I had a friend in design school at UCLA, and she suggested, “Why don’t you change the font? It all looks the same.” Already on my third issue, I said, What’s a font? She made me some gorgeous pieces that I put in the next issue. (Where are you now, Kelly?) I wish I’d kept it going. I was quite proud of the last issue of Projector. By then I had moved up to the position of Desktop Publishing Assistant at Kinko’s, doing resumes and menus for po-boy shops for $6.50 an hour, by far the most I ever made in town.
I stumbled into another part-time job on my block, selling tickets to shows at a new-ish club on Decatur called Storyville. Named after the notorious red-light district that had been closed for nearly a century, respected movie director Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray, the video for Lionel Ritchie’s “Say You, Say Me”) opened a comedy and music club that mildly referenced the days of much wilder jazz and legalized prostitution.
I worked in a tiny cubbyhole overlooking the sidewalk for $4.50 an hour, plus a few drinks each shift and free shows. After the manager with a far-too-large coke habit died at way-too-young an age in the bed of his not-previously-disclosed mistress, the joint went under and was remade as Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville. Insert snide “Cheeseburger in Paradise” comment here.
Watching the acts come through sort of deglamorized what I imagined was the whole show-business gig. Many comedians had plenty of talent, but as regional guys without TV fame, just grinding out the comedy tour, most of them underwhelmed, if not flat-out bombed, with the southern tourists and suburban Metairie couples the place tended to draw. Many of the comedians ended their week-long runs bitter, insulting the crowd. The bands usually got the same treatment. We were no Tipitina’s or Maple Leaf, and there just wasn’t the right vibe. I saw Dream Theater, sort of a minor-league Rush, who went on to have a long and successful career as a working rock band. At the time, they stacked an enormous wall of amps in the huge echo chamber of the main room. Besides me, I really don’t remember anyone else watching the show. Deglamorizing for me. Demoralizing for them.
Working at Storyville was the first time I experienced the sideshow shtick that would become such a big part of the success of Shmaltz. When Jim Rose’s Circus Sideshow opened for Lollapalooza in New Orleans, the crew threw a private party at the club. I believe it was Mr. Lifto who had somebody come up and drink beer through a straw stuck through the tip of his penis. That someone was not I.
I also met a long-haired, fresh-faced bartender recently arrived from Boston who stepped into our manager’s office to apply for “whatever shifts you have.” Jim Sullivan (professionally, these days, James) and his sweet, hilarious, and lovely wife Monica would become some of my dearest friends during our New Orleans days and beyond, as we both moved from city to city over the next two decades. Jim/James, who’d started writing record and band reviews for a local Boston music paper, plugged away at freelancing with the New Orleans music rag Offbeat, among so many others, eventually committing to the craft in San Francisco, where he would serve for many years as the Pop Culture Critic at the Chronicle. Back on the east coast, he would become a consistent contributor to the Boston Globe and settle into writing books. Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon; The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America; and, most recently, Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. And now the tale of Shmaltz Brewing.
Other than the violence, the crime, and the entrenched poverty, I loved the whole experience of living in New Orleans, and have tried ever since to continue making as much of life as possible an adventure. Standing on our raggedy front porch overlooking Decatur Street near the French Market, I remember a lady hollering from the street below, “Do any of you people have real jobs? How the hell do you live like this?” It never occurred to me that a career should be the most important thing. Whenever I have to choose one over the other, I’ll always choose less money and more flexibility, lifestyle over cash.
However, after a year and a half or so of the Big Easy, I decided, along with so many enthusiastic young peers, to flock to Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just been elected, and I wanted to share in the excitement of what we thought might be true progress. I was nothing but a voter — I hadn’t taken any responsibility for the victory that past fall. Still, I figured I was young, eager, and smart enough, and I had one or two connections in D.C. I would become a White House whiz kid, fixing the world.
I arrived into Union Station on February 1, 1993. It was thirty-one degrees and raining sideways. Other than skiing a few times, I had never been in cold weather before. I walked around in my dyed-burgundy Army jacket, in a turtleneck and tennis shoes with two pairs of socks. Walking down the Mall to check out my new home, I thought, Shit, it’s cold. Wow, it’s really cold. Holy crap, I’m fucking freezing!
To make a few dollars, I got a lousy temp job, working in an open-air warehouse putting together flowers for Valentine’s Day. The locals took one look at my chilled California bones and said, “Hey Man, what are you doing? Get boots and a heavy jacket, a scarf and some gloves.”
I went to a Democratic National Committee job fair with a resume highlighting my ‘zine, the New Orleans Symphony, Kinko’s, and some assorted volunteer stuff. I got in line with about a thousand people. All the guys in front of me were carrying briefcases and wearing suits. All the women behind me, too. The guy on one side of me was talking about how he’d run Clinton’s campaign in Kentucky, and the one on the other was doing some innovative project for the Department of Education. I had on my turtleneck and wool sweater — the nice one — and my Army jacket and my spit-shined, slightly battered Doc Martens.
Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the hook-up with the White House whiz kids.
The closest I could come was to get a job as a paralegal, for a woman whose husband was the junior senator from New Mexico. Anne Bingaman served on the board of trustees at Stanford, and she liked to pack her staff with as many Stanford kids as possible. The Friday before I was supposed to start, I read in the Washington Post that she’d been appointed to the Justice Department as the assistant attorney general for antitrust. And just like that, my vaguely glamorous connection was replaced by a nice-enough, but generally uninspired, Jewish lawyer from the Atlanta office. I’d been hired to work on a contingency-fee case against the phone company in Florida, which had bilked millions of people out of $1.75 a month apiece for ten years. Added up, the scheme raked in something like $500 million. I started in a cubicle before moving up to a tiny shared office, where my officemate and I eventually installed a dart board and a Nerf hoop.
It was my first time in a professional office. On the first day, I wore my Docs until a smiling, passive-aggressive H.R. manager quietly suggested I go out and buy a pair of business-appropriate shoes. I went to a mall in northern Virginia and bought two pairs of slacks, one black and one dark green, that I don’t think I ever bothered dry cleaning. It was just work anyway, and who would even notice? I had two ties from high school, got another as a gift from Mom, and bought one more on the street for three dollars.
As corporate law firms go, Powell Goldstein was rather progressive. They took on projects like Democratic housing proposals and health care, but of course with the usual Fortune 500 clients as well. We took classes with paralegals from other offices, learning things like how to use Lexis-Nexis. They’d say, “You have it good. We have to put on our jackets just to go to the bathroom.” Still, the hierarchy was brutal. Most of the partners would not even look at you in the hallway. The “lowly” paralegals, most of whom had Ivy League degrees, would go to Happy Hour with the young associates, who soon enough would need to decide if they should get off the track to pursue their intellectual and professional passions, generally guaranteeing a sizable pay cut. Either that, or they would ride that train to partner-land, with a fat hourly increase… and spiraling expenses, perhaps a mortgage on a second vacation home, private schools, newer-bigger-swankier cars, and rare breaks from their own rain-making grind.
We went to Anne Bingaman’s appointment announcement in the Justice Department courtyard, which included the infamous Lani Guinier thumbs-up moment. I got to shake Clinton’s hand, and at the party for Anne’s confirmation, my co-worker and roommate Porter and I approached Janet Reno when no one happened to be around. I told her my mother and my grandmother, being staunch feminists and huge Clinton supporters, would be so thrilled that I’d met her. And she blurted, “Well, when your mother comes to Washington, make sure to look me up, and you can come over for a drink.” Porter and I looked at each other thinking, these folks don’t get out much.
I lived at first in Adams Morgan in a rented room on the top floor of the house of a woman who was slowly going crazy. One time I peeked in her fridge, and it looked like somebody had thrown a bucket of wet mud inside. Next I moved into a place in Dupont Circle, where I lived with six guys - my first pseudo-fraternity scene. Everyone in D.C. at the time was young and idealistic, very fired up. At a house party in New Orleans, you’d be drinking beers, talking shit, chatting up on girls with fresh tattoos. In D.C., the girls would be working for, say, Al Gore, the guys all excited about a new supercollider project, or strategic plans for a bullet train in their home state. I thought, Wow, these are my peers.
Uninspired by work and a little cooked from the office routine, after I’d been in D.C. a year I took a couple months off and went back to San Francisco. I officially informed my mother and grandmother that I would not be going to law school, not pursuing the path we’d all assumed I might follow.
When I returned to D.C., they kindly let me work part-time at the law firm, and I grabbed some evening bartending shifts at a couple of cafes on U Street. There were no rooms left at the house, so when I got back to town I moved into the walk-in coat closet. It was big enough to install a single bed, a chair and a tiny desk over a defunct radiator. I offered to pay $275 a month. My roommates accepted; only later did they tell me they’d never planned to charge me for the closet. They thought that was hilarious.
Dr. Dre had a banging video at the time showing a fridge full of glowing green forties and scenes of an ongoing house party. One weekend, the roommates all went to the 7-11 across the street, ordered twenty cases of Olde English, Mickey’s and Colt 45, took the shelves out and filled two fridges. We invited everyone we knew. Awesome sight, to see cute girls standing in the hallway, talking about healthcare reform while pulling straight from the Bull.
Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly focused on craft beer at that point.
My plan at the time was to move from city to city and see the world: Rio, Sydney, Shanghai, and just keep rolling. I picked up some flyers for Jerusalem and came across a program that looked like a ridiculously inexpensive way to get to Israel and live near the center of town. Livnot U’Lehibanot — “To Build and To Be Built” in Hebrew — ran a three-month program of studying, hiking, and doing public service. Sounded like an interesting way to live, and I figured we’d have plenty of time outside of class to check out the country. There were sixteen of us when I signed up for the program. None of us had any idea how intense the experience was going to be.
The first day we got there, a little posse of us went to Tel Aviv, swam in the Mediterranean, drank strawberry daiquiris, and slept on the beach. That was our idea of going to Israel. But we proceeded to have a three-month experience that proved to be life-changing for nearly everyone on the program, certainly for me.
Of the sixteen, there were only three guys: myself, Tony from Australia, and Phil, still in college, from Colorado. A few of the girls were friends from college, and others flew solo, from Chicago, Baltimore, Florida, and Cleveland. Jill and Stacey, Jen and Jenny — pretty much everyone had had the same lame Jewish education: enough to think they wanted to go to Jerusalem, but not enough to know much more than that.
I ended up liking it so much, I stuck around as a counselor for the three week version of the program. So I got to see it from the inside as well. It’s still not quite clear to me whether Livnot was designed as a cult, or whether real Judaism simply is like a cult. Which doesn’t have to be bad. In many ways, observant Judaism can be nearly totalitarian in its regulations about everything we do — what to eat, what to do on weekends, how to interact with family, how to handle your sex life, what to do when you get up in the morning, or what to pray for every time you get on a bus. The goal is to elevate one’s daily life, one’s labor, and one’s ritual life, to seek the sacred and to increase the spiritual aspects of our experience in the world. That idea sounds pretty good to me.
But it’s also true that if you choose to live outside self-contained, intensely religious neighborhoods, most Jews simply choose not to follow every, or even most, of the rules. There’s 613 mitzvot, or commandments, just from the Torah, not to mention thousands of years of traditions, texts, and teachings beyond the Hebrew Bible. Everything from love to work to food to idolatry, incest, bestiality, clothes, courts, slavery, kingship, death, birth, crops, holidays, and so much more. (It’s fun to read the list; check it out in the Appendix.)
Many say they keep kosher at home, but not outside the house. Or they’ll celebrate Shabbat every Friday night, but head to kids’ soccer games on Saturday. For the vast majority of Jews, it’s a balancing act. Numbers suggest that about ten to fifteen percent or so of world Jewry is Orthodox, with another sixty to seventy percent claiming some type of “religious” affiliation, such as synagogue membership or celebration of the main holidays. Most Jews are picking and choosing, engaging and struggling (or not), even while they’re being faithful to the concept of identifying as Jewish.
The people running the program were spectacular. Many, though not all, were Americans who had moved to Israel and made aliya — become citizens and made their homes in the Holy Land. They had an incredible passion for Jewish civilization and were able to communicate it, each in his or her own way. Some through cooking, others through conversations about history and politics through the lenses of religion, culture, philosophy, psychology. Still others just had amazing voices. There were times, singing and dancing, that brought back the feeling of being at the Maple Leaf in New Orleans at three a.m., watching the Rebirth Brass Band, high and happy, jamming the hardest you’d ever grooved. Hang on, we’re going for it tonight! You’re overflowing with joy. I had those experiences fairly regularly in Israel, with music and celebrating (and without drinking), that touched what I guess I would call the holy and the sacred.
The day trips offered a different kind of deep encounter. Crawling through caves dug out by hand in the foothills outside Jerusalem where the Jews hid, prayed, and lived, trying to escape from Roman soldiers hunting them after the final destruction of the holy Temple around 70 C.E. Camping on the banks of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus performed his water dance and many sacred Jewish writings emerged after the exile from Jerusalem. Waking to hike for three days over the mountains to the Mediterranean, over fifty miles west, all while busting open the Torah to understand, for example, why the name of a certain flower might share the same root in the Hebrew language as a character from Genesis, revealing some thematic and mystical connection across thousands of years, right to the sky above your head and the landscape beneath your feet.
In classes, we’d explore deceptively simple questions: “Why keep Shabbat?” or “What is kosher?” What might the calendar mean, or the holidays reveal? And there were more academic or literary questions about possible interpretations of the exile from Eden, the Flood, the Exodus — and how they might relate to us sitting around the table. And: how do they make challah taste so damn delicious? Then we’d walk out the door into Jerusalem or Tzfat and see people struggling or rejoicing, living those questions, and that life, every single day.
It was a relatively quiet time — optimistic, even — in politics, during what are sometimes referred to as the Oslo years. Rabin and Arafat had won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Second Intifada was still several years away. Though there were plenty of overcrowded refugee camps, institutional discrimination, brutal bus bombings, and consistent border clashes, for many people hope seemed possible, perhaps even more realistic than despair.
For one of our free weekends, we rented a car and headed north to explore. On our way back to Jerusalem, we decided to take the fast way through the West Bank. That year, Jordan and Israel had signed a peace treaty; new roads had been opened and tensions were seeming to wane.
There were six of us in an Israeli rental car, which had yellow license plates. The cars from the West Bank had blue plates. We were the only yellow plate on the road as we suddenly came into the middle of a small Palestinian town — myself, the two other guys, and three nice Jewish girls — on what seemed to be market day in Jenin.
People are pulling and pushing their donkeys and ponies attached to carts, schlepping goods. A few cars, bikes, and hundreds of people, all presumably Palestinians and Arabs — many looking directly at us — and we had nowhere to go but onward. We crept through Jenin and passed through Nablus (Schem, in Hebrew, where Abraham, Jacob, and Joshua all spent time) and Ramallah (future capital of the Palestinian Authority), before returning to the car rental office in Jerusalem.
When we got back to Livnot, we took out a map and showed the teachers where we went. They said, “OK. Jericho just opened, and there’s a new road along the Jordan River. And while you are with us, you will never go back to those places again.”
Three weeks later, two Israeli soldiers on patrol in Jenin got cornered in a cul-de-sac and were killed by a mob hurling rocks and bottles. Several years later, these towns would see some of the bloodiest battles of the Second Intifada.
We also spent some time (usually Shabbat, or after some hiking) in the settlements in the West Bank, on the far side of Bethlehem. Many families there often just moved for more affordable housing, and not necessarily ideological reasons. If you could ignore the wider conflict, the foothills and valleys were gorgeous places to live, reminding me of the hills of northern California. However, a lot of the other residents, particularly the younger ones that I met, were pretty aggressive, saying, “This is our land. God promised it to us.” The settlements often stood literally within minutes of Arab villages, their pastures for animals and groves and orchards for farming stretching out towards each other’s homes.
A lot of the cars from the settlements had steel mesh grates over the windshield to protect from the rocks often hurled at passing cars by the Arab teenagers. I heard sixteen-year-old settlement boys who said, “I can’t wait to get into the Army and fight for my country. Why don’t the Arabs go live in Jordan, or Syria? We’re the ones fixing the land, creating agriculture and technology. What have they done to the land in the last five hundred years?”
Perhaps this is a good time to take a deep breath and grab a beer. It was heavy stuff, quite a complex world, compared to the playlands of Palo Alto, the French Quarter, and Adams Morgan that I’d been used to.
After months of studying and hiking, painting houses for older folks, and joining an archeological dig near the Western Wall, the culmination of the program came as we set off for an overnight in the Negev desert in the south of the country. The desert in Jewish tradition has been the place of revelation, and of defining one’s personal and collective identity — Abraham and Sarah leading their nomadic clan to a new homeland; Jacob’s dream of the ladder to heaven and wrestling to become Israel; Joseph’s brothers throwing him and his dreamcoat into a pit before selling him to slave traders heading to Egypt; Moses’ burning bush talking him into leading a revolution; or the wandering Hebrews surviving the Golden Calf to finally receive the Torah. The prophet Elijah escapes to a cave in the desert to hear an eternal voice whisper his destiny.
With shorts, t-shirts, hiking shoes, and loaded with pita and hummus, we head into the canyons to explore, as we had in many other parts of the country. There are gorgeous red sandstone hillsides, carved paths and dry riverbeds, and beautiful lookouts as we descend to the desert floor, walking deeper into the valley.
A couple hours in, we notice a dark cloud rising over the edge of a distant cliff. Beginning to blow in toward us, a grey, brown, and black line in the sky growing perfectly defined, literally coloring in the horizon. We could see it coming, this massive wall quickly covering the entire sky. A towering sandstorm soon broke on the desert floor, filling the air with a sea of sand and rocks from the ground beneath us as far as we could see. Winds so violent you couldn’t open your eyes, the sand and stones pelting any uncovered flesh. I wrapped my thin rain jacket around my head, sealing my glasses, so I could witness the spectacle swirling for what must have been well over an hour.
Then came the rains — a torrential downpour with huge drops that soaked us instantly and began to pool and run across the desert floor, gathering into well-worn rivulets that grew into larger streams, and finally into rushing rivers of red dirt bursting over the paths we’d crossed, flooding into waterfalls over the faces of the cliffs. I wasn’t scared until the lightning came, flashing on the desert walls seemingly not far from our tribe, thundering through the waves of the deluge as we finally agreed that it would probably be a good idea to return to camp.
One of the directors was a guy who’d gone to journalism school in St. Louis before coming to Israel. On his own first trip to Israel, Michael went to work on a farm, put his hands into the soil and felt a shock run through his body. He said, “This my life’s calling. I’m staying here forever.” He’d been going on the desert hike for years, and he said, “I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in this country, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Later that day there was a sunset that looked like blood-red lava pouring over the universe. The singing and dancing that night was nuts. We all felt electric.
Kings 19:11 “Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks but the divine was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the holy was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the truth was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. A still small voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
At the end of my five months, my friend Michael, the director who had given up journalism for farming and then cultivating young Jewish sensibilities, said to me, “I’ve got to tell you, Jeremy — this was real. This was not just a vacation meant to be filed away in a photo album.”
“There’s a way to have a Jewish life in America. But in Israel, fostering and advancing Jewish civilization is potentially the most profound thing one can do with one’s life. So think seriously about it.”
This was a man I deeply respected. My dad was gone, and I had few male role models in my life. At Livnot, the group of guys between five and fifteen years older than I — Shmuel, Yehoshua, Gabi, and several others — were intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, serious and supportive, but also a ton of fun. They were a different kind of “strong” than I had come across before. The experience rocked my world. It seemed holistic, and I wanted to keep that multi-layered energy in my life back home.
The Livnot staff were smart and experienced. They didn’t encourage people to freak out and throw away their past lives. They said, “Go home and see what it feels like. Don’t get mad at your parents for ordering a bacon cheeseburger, which was probably your last meal before you came here. Take it slow, get involved with the Jewish community, and create a Jewish life for yourself.”
When I came back to the States, I was committed to jumping into the Jewish world. I volunteered for the Jewish Museum in San Francisco. I worked for organizations doing cultural programs out of the Israel Center — concerts, art shows, readings. I volunteered for the Jewish Film Festival, and I helped out a bit with Davka, an alternative Jewish literary magazine. Eventually, I started the beer business to create my own unique kind of Jewish community organization, to put my own small (less still ) voice into the world.