You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 10th, 2008.
I linked to a post on Velveteen Rabbi about the separation wall in Israel a few days back. Well, now there’s a great post by Rachel Barenblat about the Western Wall, the last remnant of the old Temple, and the competing Conservative and Orthodox claims to the site.
In a bigger-picture sense, I can’t help thinking this is a major challenge to liberal Jewish life in Israel. Not just the question of who can pray at the Kotel and how, but the question of how and whether the Orthodox rabbinate will ever come to respect other strands of Jewish tradition. Non-Orthodox rabbis can’t officiate at weddings here, unless the couple goes to Cyprus and has a civil ceremony first. (Kind of like me, as a not-yet-ordained rabbinic student, in most of the U.S. Except that someday when I get smicha, my status will change — in the States; here I will continue to be persona non grata, in an official sense.) I’m not sure what it will take for Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal rabbis to be respected here. A seismic change, a paradigm shift, for sure. Kind of an irony, that so many American rabbis seek, and find, spiritual renewal in a place where the state religious apparatus doesn’t honor our rabbinates.
There’s a book out called Nixonland, a political and cultural chronicle of the growth of the conservative movement in the United States as a cohesive bloc. The book’s central thesis? The ongoing chaos and confusion of the 1960’s resulted in more than flower-haired radicals — it also galvanized the “silent majority” into wanting to take their country back from the brink, to restore stability and sanity to their society. All of this, author Rick Perlstein maintains, was responsible for Nixon’s astonishing return to dominate politics. A staunch anticommunist, he had built his reputation as a McCarthyist, and there was no better time for him then 1968, when he honestly seemed the one man who might be able to end the insanity.
I am absolutely raring to read to this book, and I know that seems odd; I’m a 23-year old college student, born in the mid 1980’s, the child of baby boomers. If anything, I’ve grown up with their narrative — the sixties as this age when everyone woke up and realized that peace as possible and love could be free, hell, that invented love and good music, and brought about Woodstock, the most significant cultural achievement of the modern world. To my parents’ generation, the Sixties were the most important time in history, the age of political awakening and personal enlightenment.
That’s a narrative I’m entirely sick of, and there’s an entirely different one I’d like to explore.
Really, I’m sick of the whole decade. My entire life has been filled with remarks about how great they were, that lionized hippies and portrayed their musicians as cultural heroes that nobody could ever hope to match. There will never, I am told, be another guitarist as good as Jimi Hendrix. Of course, you could argue against that, but the Boomers wouldn’t hear it. Nobody will ever be as good a singer as Janis Joplin. Nobody will ever write like Joni Mitchell.
All this from the generation that thinks it invented love and discovered sex.
Imagine what it’s like to be the generation after them. How can we ever hope to match their achievements? How can we create a real identity for ourselves in their shadow? Nothing we do will ever begin to match up to the myth they’ve written about themselves. I think of Family Ties, about that very situation, and how the only way the kids of ex-hippies can have an identity is by overt rebellion against their parents. But I don’t want to define myself against something.
I write about cultural memory a lot, and this is one instance where I won’t mourn. When the sixties leave living memory in twenty-or-so years, it will be for the best. Maybe then we can look honestly on those ten years, and see a different story. Not something romanticized, no rock hagiographies, no wistful reminisces about how nothing will ever be like Woodstock again, but an appraisal of how society looked like it might at any second come crashing down.
It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell, myself. My partner on Sanctuary, Kevin Roberts, and I have been discussing doing a comic about a working-class family, centered on the father, and his fear and difficulties in trying to protect and maintain his family in the midst of the splintering of the world. Instead of the standard “My dad doesn’t understand me and my need for love and freedom and peace,” we’ll get “My son is a goddamn idiot.”
I’m not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the myth needs to be broken for my generation’s sake and the generation now being born.
