The Zeitgeist

 Davening in The Hall of the Dead

This story appeared in many Jewish newspapers in the US in September, 2019

The lights are lit bracketing the bronze plaque bearing the name of Herbert Barbanel, Nechemia ben Avraham Moshe. It’s up front on the right, towards the bottom of one of the giant yahrtzeit frames that fill nearly all the wall space in this small old beit medrash.

When in New York (I spend most of the year in Miami) you can find me in the second row to the right, perpendicular to the plaques of my parents. By Long Island standards this is an old room, built in the early 1950s. It has all-original brass chandeliers and casement stained glass windows. The dedication plaque commemorates the donors’ parents who were nifter in the Shoah. By Brooklyn or Manhattan measure, it’s not that old of a room. Yet this space houses what seems like the names of thousands of the dearly departed spanning most of the 20^th and up through the first 20 percent of the 21^st Century. Vacancies are in short supply. If you want to be memorialized in this small sanctuary, you’d better reserve your spot pretty soon.

Before, during and after davening my eyes wander across the walls. I see the parents, grandparents and other relatives of most of the Five Towners I know along with other members of the shul who I knew back in the day.  If you ever want to feel relatively insignificant in the panoply of Jewish life, just spend time in this room. Life is finite and it’s molded in bronze. The plethora of yahrtzeit plaques makes tangible King Solomon’s words in Kohelet that if you want to understand the meaning of life, visit a house of mourning not a house of partying. Like on the Mount of Olives when all the wall space is gone they’ll have to start double and triple stacking.

There are also very sizable metal plaques recognizing those who built the shul in 1950-51 and then those who built the annex with the social hall in 1972. All of these leaders of the community from those days are long gone. It gives you a sense of how short the lease on life truly is. In 25 or 30 years, the names of those who paid for the recent renovation will also seem like ancient history to those milling about the lobbies.

Herbert Barbanel was my father and his second yahrtzeit is coming up fast. To everyone but his kids my father was variously known as Herb, Herbie, Chem or Chemki depending on who you were in the hierarchy of family and friends and when you met him; Mr. Barbanel if you please in business. I first met him in the Fall of 1962 when I had just turned four years old. He and my Mom met and started dating on Labor Day weekend of that year. To my mother it was imperative that whomever she dated would hit it off with her son and want to be my father. No evil or indifferent stepfathers need apply. Dad fell in love with my mother and with me. We came as a package. He committed to the two us at the same time and he lived up to that commitment in heart, word and deed from the very first day together to his very last.

A real Horatio Alger story, my Dad grew up dirt poor in Brownville, Brooklyn. His father died when he was seven. He went to work at an early age and attended high school and college at night. A member of “The Greatest Generation,” he served his country in the Navy (stationed in Norman, Oklahoma of all places) during the last year and a half of World War II. He scratched and fought his way up from nothing, ultimately to sit with princes of government and captains of industry and commerce.

In 2017 when Dad passed at 90, he had some famous company. Martin Landau (89), Fats Domino (89), Hugh Hefner (91), Harry Dean Stanton (91), Jerry Lewis (91), Adam West (88), Roger Moore (89), Don Rickles (90) and Chuck Barris (87). Fame can be fleeting indeed and soon forgotten. But love, values and Torah endure in the newsfeed of forever.

Like many in his cohort, Dad lived a life of quiet heroism – it’s no small matter to send kids to Jewish day school (as many know all too well today), to camp, to Israel, to college and grad school. Dad was not very Jewishly educated but it was a priority for him to send my brothers and I to get the education he missed out on. They say a mark of a successful Jewish life is if a person has Jewish grandchildren. Dad lived to see those grandchildren and a great-grandchild – all Jewishly committed. Dad, like Noach was “righteous in his time,” the 1950s-1980s was an era of rampant assimilation with most American Jews running as far away as fast as they could from Jewish life. In the face of this Dad wanted Shabbat dinner with kiddush and motzei; celebration of the holidays and a kosher home. If you grew-up on Long Island in that era these were not the prevailing winds in the Jewish world. But against the wind he walked, which ultimately bore fruit in his descendants. V’shinantam l’vanecha. He accomplished that.

He also made it a point to always be home for dinner and to be there. Family was his first priority. When in camp, I would get a short letter from him every day. Not that the letter said all that much, but he wanted you to know he was thinking about you. As I moved into adulthood, we would speak most days, often for just a minute or two and at the end of each call he would say in his Burgess Meredith-like voice, “I love ya, kid.” To say I miss that is a major understatement. He passed just before Rosh Hashanah two years ago and not seeing him there in shul with us for the High Holidays is like a dull ache that does not fade. Dad chose to love me and I him. Often the loves we choose are greater than the loves we have to have.

So, kaddish is coming and it will be said in that room where several generations of mourners have already rent their hearts if not their clothing. There is a comfort in the ongoing continuity of kaddish – a chain that stretches back to the dawn of Jewish time. No one is truly alone or forgotten in the House of Hashem.

I continue to go to shul each day and try to live a good life in the merit of my parents and in the hope that in Olam HaBa G-d will reward this by enabling us to be together again for all of eternity.

The Zeitgeist

 

The late Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong (left) and the late Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek (right) The fight goes on?

A “One Taiwan” Policy? Let’s Take Out the Chinese?

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on December 5, 2016

Much brouhaha has been made over the weekend phone call between President-Elect Donald Trump and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. On the surface you’d think that calling out for Chinese would be no big deal, but this conversation wasn’t about Moo Goo Gai Pan and by merely having any conversation at all, a lot of mainland Chinese bile has hit the wok.

Taiwanese Presidents have been untouchable by top US leaders for nearly four decades owing to the “One China Policy” created back in the 70s by former President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This policy in a nutshell says that the US and most of the West recognize that China is one integral, indivisible country and that the Communists in Beijing by dint of controlling over 90 percent of it are the legitimate government of this one country.

Conventional thinking is that partition is ok for Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, for Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis but not for China. This is a big burr under the posteriors of the Beijing Politburo because any deviation from this position implies the Communist regime perhaps isn’t as legitimate as they’d like the world and their own people to believe and that the Chinese civil war hasn’t been resolved. It infuriates the Communists that any remnant of non-Communist China exists because that existence means there must be another political point of view and in monolithic mainland China, that’s an anathema because the people of China aren’t meant to have any say as to who their leaders are and how their country is run.

For nearly four decades, the US and the West have been cravenly kowtowing to the Communists by dint of their strategic (and now economic) importance in the world. Nuclear missiles, millions of soldiers and really cheap consumer goods speak louder than the principles of freedom, democracy and human rights.

The Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan are the heirs to the popular revolution more than a century ago to overthrow the millennia-old Chinese monarchy and create a republic. Seeing an opportunity to further international Communism owing to the instability within China as a result of that revolution, the Soviets poured money and materiél into the fledgling Communist guerilla insurgency led by Mao Zedong. Mao made life miserable for Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists who were concurrently battling breakaway warlords, the Communists and then by the late 1930s, the Japanese who were trying to conquer the country.

During World War II the Soviets instructed Mao to take a break from beating on the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, but after 1945 the civil war resumed in full earnest. From the late 1920s until the Communists conquered the entire mainland in 1949, Mao slaughtered and starved hundreds of thousands of opponents and after 1949 the Communists killed millions more of their own citizens through their Stalin-esque Gulag system, endless purges and forced collectivization.

Chiang’s troops, driven from the mainland, fled to the island of Taiwan along with a couple of million mainlanders and declared that the Republic of China was now situated there and they hoped to use that island to eventually invade the mainland, resume the civil war and overthrow the Communists. For about 30 years the US backed the Nationalists on Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China. In the 70s former President Nixon “opened up” Communist China as a way to create a strategic wedge between and the Soviet Union and China thereby weakening global Communist forces. In this Nixon succeeded. While switching recognition from the Nationalists to the Communists, the US also ambiguously pledged to ensure that Taiwan wasn’t forcibly integrated into the mainland and could defend itself and maintain its de-facto independence.

Over the last few decades the government in Taiwan has evolved from an essentially pro-West fascist dictatorship led by the Kuomintang (KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912) to a multi-party pluralistic free democracy where there have been peaceful transfers of power between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Taiwan’s current President is from the DPP. Taiwan today is a free-enterprise economic powerhouse with the rule of law, freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, travel, livelihood, etc.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Communists still have an iron grip on any political expression. Basic freedoms are still repressed. The people are made quiescent by a potent mixture of intimidation through force and the injection of state-sponsored capitalism which allows folks to make money and buy creature comforts. Ironically, the Communist Party has transmogrified into a fascist dictatorship themselves which enables them to stay in power. But the people are given no other options. It’s kind of like both Saudi Arabia where silence is also bought with money and ancient Rome where the masses were quelled with bread and circuses.

There are many on Taiwan who would like to put a formal end to the Chinese civil war, give up any claims to the mainland and rejoin the family of nations – essentially get on with their lives and have their own freedom and self-determination on Taiwan for Taiwan and leave the mainland to its own devices. The problem is that the Communists won’t hear of it. It’s an all or nothing, my way or the highway deal with them – no Chinese (except maybe in New York’s Chinatown) can be under their own umbrella – it has the be the Beijing parasol or you’re flat out of luck.

So, back to Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai. By even implicitly or by slight inference recognizing that Taiwan has a President and that this President might possibly be legitimate, it opens the specter of a brave new world vis-à-vis China that could have geo-strategic and economic implications of a potentially frightening nature.

Should the 23.5 million people of Taiwan have the right to self-determination free from threats of coercion and annihilation? Should the US stand firm for human rights and for what’s right around the world irrespective of existing political orthodoxies? A lot of folks didn’t think the Iron Curtain in Europe could ever be shattered, but it was. What about Asia’s “bamboo curtain?” (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea). Donald Trump could certainly make it an interesting ride to say the least if resetting China policy is on his mind.

The Zeitgeist

Donald and Melania Trump voting in New York on November 8, 2016

Trump Win Proves the Election and System isn’t “Rigged”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on November 9, 2016

The election wasn’t rigged.

Confounding the pollsters, the pundits, the media and conventional wisdom, Donald J. Trump, entertainer, entrepreneur and real estate developer was elected as the next President of the United States.

Improbably, a billionaire became the voice of the common man having run a populist campaign pledging to give voice to the ignored, the dispossessed and disenfranchised – those left behind in the high tech revolution, those passed over in the massive cultural changes of the past dozen years, those who felt palpable insecurity with the evaporation of much manufacturing, the explosion in health care costs and those who tired of accommodation and appeasement of violent Islamic extremists.

Trump put together a victory without the benefit of carrying the Northeast or the West Coast – the Trump win was a win for the “Flyover States,” as the middle of the country is sometimes derisively dismissed by the coastal elites. It was also a win for Texas and Dixie – the South rose up to repudiate an increasingly liberal and progressive vision of America as embodied by eight years of President Obama. Even Florida narrowly slipped out of the Democrats’ grasp. This is the first presidential election in perhaps a century that was accomplished without winning New York, Illinois or California.

The Trump win can be compared in to Richard Nixon’s in 1969 when Spiro Agnew’s “Silent Majority,” the everyday folks ignored by the media ushered in GOP rule as a reset to America’s “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. Trump’s victory also has echoes of Andrew Jackson – a sometimes vulgar and coarse blunt-speaking, hard-charging guy who eventually also overcame the disgust of the entrenched elites of his day and the dynastic entitlements of the Adams (John and John Quincey) family.

A majority of American voters were just not that into Hillary. Never an especially likeable figure and never an especially good retail politician, Hillary oozed aristocratic entitlement and fixed, smoke-filled room inevitability, which is why Obama was able to beat her in 2008 and why Bernie Sanders came awfully close in this primary season. That it was “her time” and “her turn” didn’t resonate with most folks.

In a sense it really was FBI Director James Comey who put Trump over the top. With his campaign swooning in the polls just two weeks ago, Comey’s letter to Congress about Huma Abedin’s laptop and more Clinton emails was the tipping point for many Americans. No matter that just before balloting Mr. Comey cleared Hillary yet again, the sense of many people was that Hillary was slippery, untrustworthy and dishonest. That Trump was able to maintain two weeks of self-discipline, stay on message and not go off the cliff on irrational Twitterized tangents made a big difference for many undecided voters.

Finally, the Trump victory also shows that the path for Republican majorities is in part paved with stifling discourse about people’s bodies and people’s bedrooms. Trump was heavily reticent on abortion and highly tolerant of the LBGT community, two areas of often strident posturing by GOP candidates in the past. People just want more tolerance and want candidates focused on big picture issues, not what goes on in their boudoirs.

Mr. Trump gets a solid GOP majority in the House and a secure one in the Senate along with winning The White House. A big mandate to roll-back much of the past eight years. Now all the kids have to play well together to get things done for the American people and we all have to hope and pray that Trump is capable of rising to the august office of the presidency so his late parents, his family, the GOP and the American people will be proud to have elected him.