Not long ago, I saw and heard (on television) the anguished yet determined report of a mother whose soldier-son was killed in a far-off ambush in Afghanistan. The news media, which drowns us with equal parts information and hyperbole, was trying to extract a statement from her—a woman reeling from fresh grief—about whether or not the current president had phoned her. (He hadn’t.)

We absolutely do not feel personally safe in the current national environment.

With painful dignity and uncommon nobility, this poor lady simply stated: “I don’t care if I hear from the White House or not. I just want my son to be remembered.” And she pronounced his name out loud, her trembling voice a slab of quiet strength and fortitude. It was yet another of the million saddening dispatches we’ve been suffering in this grim year of 2020. (I personally could have lived without the 21st century, which began with 9/11 and now drowns us with a pandemic and the worst spectacle of federal leadership in the history of this republic.)

We absolutely do not feel personally safe in the current national environment. And a horrifying number are frightfully sick while an explicable number are losing their lives. We have both viral illness and viral racial injustice–they have eerily converged into an uncommon veil of American disease, distrust, disavowal–but, yes, hope. We the people, the authentic American body-psyche, have become the default leadership of our complex nation. Knowing that we’ve been forgotten, many of us have decided to remember what principles this country telegraphed when we threw off the shackles of royal colonialism. And we the people (some of us, anyway) have picked up on the social hypocrisies of the same men who pronounced justice and equality for all yet heedlessly continued to enslave millions of forcefully imported black people. COVID-19 notwithstanding, we regular Americans have decided to become the vaccine for this systemic dehumanization of a proud and noble race descended from African splendor.

We working Americans, befuddled by governmental bureaucracy and incapacity, scraping for wages and the jobs themselves, gripping with the fears of pensions drying up or simply being filched, are grappling with profound anguish. We often dance with desperation–becoming cynical, but not resigned, to the entrenched ineptitude of too many elected officials. We have become unhappily accustomed to their disingenuous patterns of speech and behavior. At ground level, there is no trust. Not even their elected concern for our health and safety.

I walk among my fellow citizens of all colors, creeds, and moderate economic categories in the non-effete city of Oceanside, California. They are out and about, many wearing masks, looking for affordable gasoline, grabbing groceries, seeking non-robotized, more personal services for their home and personal needs, stealing a few weekend moments at the public beaches and parks. There is a prevailing sense of loneliness out there—we don’t expect our streets to be paved smooth, our mail to be delivered on time, and we are burdened with mixed feelings about our police officers. There is hectoring and bile coming at us nonstop from our national leadership. Bickering among them that recalls children throwing their toys at each other. The ground is not secure under our feet.

So I think a lot about the street sweepers, the grocery clerks, the fire fighters, the school teachers, and the emergency room nurses. They live in simple houses and generally evoke more decency than the entire crew occupying the White House. Many still raised a flag on Independence Day across their unassuming porches and then tried to pay their taxes on time for services they find hard to recognize. The harder they work, the harder life treats them in a land so afflicted with civil negligence.

We’ve gotten used to all of this and it does not avail us. Clearly, it should not be alleviated by any violence. Especially against innocent street protesters exercising their constitutional right to peaceful assembly. And it does not appear to be totally solvable through the democratic process for now because too many of our elected leaders are feckless. So what do we do?

We do not settle for it. We look out for each other. We actually go over, maintaining social distance, and discover who our neighbors are and what they do for a living. We say hello, even while masked, to every person who passes us by on our walks or runs. We linger in conversations because there is nothing worse than loneliness. We let that guy into our lane as we drive along and we wave friendship in his direction. We call our kids and our friends for no reason other than find out how they are. We make a covenant to help at least one person along the way every single day.

Then, sooner than later, the negativism that pervades our good land will at last be Trumped. And then the healing will slowly ensue–in all categories.

Like anybody, I have endured periods of grief and have been affected with depression and yet informed by the bittersweet wisdom. Death is grief, divorce is grief; losing a job is lamentation; coping with disease is mortal suffering; discovering that one’s child is addicted to opioids is woe.

Grief brings on informative distinctions; it has a way of revealing the ones who are actively on your side. My friends and I have all walked through the woods and bent many twigs together. My daughters have certainly helped me cross over the bridge from anguish to peace. I’ve learned how to be alone yet not to be lonely. I discovered that grief was not my friend but remains my necessary companion. There is no set formula for this; grief does not work well with old standard charts. But it is always defeated by love.

"I discovered that grief was not my friend but remains my necessary companion."

My younger daughter was married several years ago among citrus orchards in central Israel.  I remember how, as I gazed into the wedding canopy she exchanged vows with her betrothed, a lot of fears floated out of me. The professional dreads, the generational anxieties, the clinging grudges, and the pounding griefs of this existence all vanished. Time and mortality and the insecurities disappeared beneath the river of life.

The bride was happy; she was no longer a child, and the earth acceded under her feet toward eternity. Nothing cost anything, there were no cloaked resentments in the night air, and people were momentarily at utter peace with another. The only clock we knew had its hands in the stars; the moon knew everything, looked down, and sighed.

These are the moments when you just know there is a heaven somewhere. You float in these rare interludes of tender human milestones and you cross, with some of the mystics, over the Chinvat Bridge of Zoroastrianism into paradise.

You dance with the Hopi Indians, cotton strands in your hands, making flowers to symbolize the heavens. Your eyes sting with the Buddhist wisdom that those who live in these moments may yet bless this realm again with angelic insight.

You are at one with everything and your pockets, like the white burial shrouds of the Jews, are empty. Your heart is full and you are not afraid to die. The happiness of a child is the bridge that binds this side to the other, and there you are as you comprehend for a fleeting, delicious moment, why it is good to be born and it is okay to die.

When my elder daughter was born, I felt the stirrings of creation and my own particle of partnership with it. When my father died, inexplicably and impossibly young, and we opened the ground to bury him, my mother cried like a broken vessel under the cold sun. My little sister, unable to endure the shadows, frolicked among the nearby headstones and sang happy songs in defiance of the tyranny of time. Every moment like this has poured the peace into me; I know that the wine is sometimes bitter and sometimes sweet.

My now departed mother wept again as I gazed into the wedding canopy that night, smelling the nearby orange orchards of central Israel and the distant scent of the sea. It was not far from where I was born and it is also not far from where my parents—and all our elders—now sleep in the dust. I hear their voices from time to time, so I know that my children will one day hear mine. I don’t need anybody to tell me who or what heaven is and I’m no longer afraid of death. Experience and birth and sacred promises and exceptional pain have all filled me with quiet compliance. Who can be near a child’s rapture and not know there is hope?

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was looking to get more black attorneys active in the civil rights movement.  Louis Stokes, born of very modest means in Cleveland, became a lawyer for the NAACP and went on to one of the most illustrious careers in the history of the US Congress.

I remember him now as a staunch friend and ally and the smiling community neighbor in Shaker Heights who attended both of my daughters’ bat mitzvah ceremonies and often spoke from the pulpit of the temple I once led in Cleveland.   He never apologized, privately or publicly, for his tendency to rail against social injustice and ethnic snobbery.

My friend is surely convening a congress of kindness among the angels.

We did a lot of things together around town, from panel sessions to television appearances to hastily convened meals at one of the local delicatessens.   He loved life and lived it effusively, even with racially unpleasant experiences, for ninety years.  I just didn’t think Lou Stokes would ever die; he knew better.

He called me at home in September, 1993.  “Ben,” he said, in that familiar, strong, friendly voice, “there’s going to be a ceremony on the White House Lawn the day after tomorrow.”  He elaborated that the president of the Palestinian Authority at the time, Yasir Arafat and the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, were going to appear together and publicly sign a Declaration of Principles.

“Every Member of Congress is allowed to invite a single one of his constituents to attend this event.  I happen to know that this would mean more to you than any other person in my district.”  There was nothing in this for Lou—I was not a wealthy donor or powerhouse political figure.  I was just his friend.

With Congressman Stokes at my side, under a blazing sun on September 13, 1993, I witnessed Arafat and Rabin, plodded by President Bill Clinton, shake hands to an emotional outpouring of joy and tears. 3,000 people of every creed and color became one universal reverie of peace—that was a Lou Stokes moment.

The last public event we shared together was at the unveiling of the new Post Office in Shaker Heights that was named for his mother, Louise Stokes.  She had raised Lou and his brother Carl (who made history in 1967 by being elected Mayor of Cleveland) while working as a cleaning woman.  Lou asked me to come along and offer a blessing.

My younger daughter, Debra, was still a teenager at the time—and a favorite of the congressman.  She entered the post office a few minutes late, just as the cameras were rolling and Stokes was beginning to speak.  Never mind, Lou stopped.  He looked up and, with that trademark smile, bellowed, “DEBBIE!”  He chortled and walked over and put his arms around my somewhat embarrassed and thoroughly enchanted daughter.

That was also a Lou Stokes moment.  Somebody was showing up and there was hope in the air.  He knew what things meant to people because he hadn’t always had a lot of things.

Louis Stokes, who investigated assassinations, created the Congressional Black Caucus, advised presidents, helped the nation tackle AIDS, and launched countless urban developments, health clinics, and educational agencies, understood power.  He understood it because he was born without it.  A prophet of the poor has left this earth; my friend is surely convening a congress of kindness among the angels.

CHARLESTON, SC, June 21–Like a lot of people around the nation, I simply felt the need to be here on this Sunday with the good people of “Mother Emanuel”—The African Methodist Episcopalian Church.  Not everyone who was so moved could actually manage it, though one could feel the presence of millions of kindred spirits in the humidity and holiness of this aggrieved community.

I spoke about this with my friend and teacher, Lou Dunst—the renowned San Diego Holocaust survivor and healer.   Lou personally witnessed, a thousand times over, the kind of sudden, inexplicable, gory violence that occurred last week at Mother Emanuel.  He told me, “Tell them that we Jews and especially we Survivors know what they are feeling and that we send our blessings.”

Very few people can say that without patronizing the ghastly crime and unthinkable bestiality that took place here—even as God-fearing folks were simply studying scripture.

Reaching out to the Church community, I first made contact with an energetic, dauntless woman named Althea—she picked up the phone in her car when I called the Church’s main line on Friday.  A secretary of the Church, beleaguered and heartbroken, she explained that calls were being forwarded to her mobile as she drove all over the community, gathering and delivering supplies, water, documents, books, mourners, investigators, and people simply in need of direction and consolation.

Althea gave me her full attention.  I explained my desire to be present on Sunday.  “Yes, you would be welcome, that is so kind.  We need everybody’s prayers.  That sick boy sat there for an hour.  He asked, who was the preacher?  Reverend asked him to sit right next to him.  The boy got up and shot Reverend first.  We don’t know what to even say.  No, come on down.  We’re all the children of the Lord.”

The name of PASTOR CLEMENTA PINCKNEY reads, like a haunted graphic, on the church outside announcement board, above a growing bed of flowers and tributes and psalms.

I met Raymond, an ebullient, kind-hearted server at the Bonefish Grill, who was at the church this morning.  Like the hundreds of white people assembled, including entire families, prayer groups, and servicemen and women, he sweated outside in the mounting heatwave. He stood with his manager, Curt, a doe-eyed black man who smiled through his anguish.

The two men had delivered over 150 gallons of cold water to the Church in these blistering days after the attack.  Raymond said: “This kind of thing is not Charleston.  Charleston is quirkiness.  Charleston is love.”  Curt nodded in agreement and the two men raised their hands together as the gospel singers from inside the sanctuary came through on the public speaker in another rhapsodic wave of heavenly hope.

Carlos, a shuttle driver of Latin heritage, raised his hands in a sign of affinity.  “Charleston is growing,” he said to me.  “Look at what Boeing is doing down here.  Look at our Silicon Harbor.  No one maniac can stop us.”

The voice of Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, a New York pastor who is temporarily leading Emanuel AME, came booming through the loudspeaker.  Speaking of the “Mother Emanuel Nine,” he intoned:  “There they were, studying Your word. But the Devil came in and took control.”  He assuaged the anguish of the multitude with melodic invocations of the afterlife guaranteed for believers in Christ.

Old white volunteers walked around, passing cold water bottles to the thirsty.  A troupe of lithe young men and women, all colors, donning tee-shirts that declared FREE HUGS, collected arms and shoulders and turned strangers to each other.

I closed my eyes in the heavy warm air and tried to form some prayerful words.  I have no recollection of what they were.  My eyes opened and saw a gloriously beautiful child smiling up at me.  I have no idea what color she was.

View and listen to Ben Kamin discuss ‘DANGEROUS FRIENDSHIP’ on KPBS, Martin Luther King Day, January 19, 2015.

Salem, Va., 1/19/2015—Serving here at Roanoke College as visiting lecturer for the MLK Holiday, it occurs to me that there is a discomfiting gap between our impression of King and the actuality of the man.

Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 86 years old the other day, January 15.   As a pastor’s son growing up in the “Sweet Auburn” section of central Atlanta, pranking his friends and mimicking preachers with wicked accuracy, he’d had never dreamed that the day of his birth would be designated a federal holiday.

The best birthday present we could give to him is the truth:  Martin King was a factual human being, not tall, painfully vulnerable in appearance, given to a strange shyness and quiet demeanor in small public settings.

The grandiloquent trumpet within him that emerged, that made him larger than life, that sounded like an archangel of justice and mercy, that cast a spell over hard men and little children, and that brought down the walls of the Old Confederacy, was not heard while he enjoyed catfish and iced tea and gossip and ramblings with his close friends.

He was not the hagiographic image that is routinely co-opted by white apologists and black imitators.  King was certainly oratorically gifted and he relished a large church crowd.  But he was insecure about his own safety and he fretted about his sensitive, light-colored skin, which tended to rash late in the day.

Now we have the beatification of Martin Luther King Jr.—a real individual who had only some relationship with the champion we imagine.  The one person that would have stated that was the preacher himself.  Because now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a grandfather.

In his 20’s, King discovered something within himself to elevate his hard, quick journey (some say it was his deep love of ideas) and his uncommon vision. In truth, King lived a short, brutal life, filled with prison stays, bouts of depression, fear, and threats. Yet he sat with presidents and helped rewrite the Constitution of the United States—in particular, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the groundbreaking 1965 Voting Rights Act.

He had very little time with his wife and children, never accumulated any personal wealth, fought his weight, cigarettes, and an unrelenting physical exhaustion. He was harassed by common criminals and by the FBI—an agency that once advised him to simply commit suicide.

He was afraid of the dark jail enclosures into which he was cast so often. He positively knew that, in the end, somebody would shoot him. He was plagued by guilt and anguish, believing he had caused too many people danger and hurt by pushing them into the cause.

He was ultimately reviled by many of his allies in the federal government, including President Lyndon B. Johnson—when he unilaterally stood up and took a strong moral position against the Vietnam War. M.L. King, child of a domineering father, spent his adulthood as a prisoner of his own passions and skills. He was often as unhappy as he was lofty.

Over the hasty thirteen years of revolutionary King’s Civil Rights Movement, 1955 to 1968, the somewhat stout, almond-eyed American visionary lived such a passage. The preacher would replicate Moses opposite many Pharaohs—from Birmingham police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor to Alabama Governor George C. Wallace to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Sr.

These were all Pharaonic stand-ins who assaulted King and so many brave Americans, from honchos to housewives, who withstood their succession of fire hoses, state segregation laws, and polite agreements to ban black people from housing and schools and a share in the national journey.

King’s birthday is history.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who’d have rather been here to teach it rather than to be it.

If I expected it to be comfortable to watch and contemplate and evaluate Ava DuVernay’s artistic triumph as director and un-credited screenwriter of Selma, then I devalued the deeply nuanced—and brave—realization of this unexpectedly brooding and appropriately disturbing movie.

With imaginative, nimble performers who become, rather than play the principals; with sweeping camera angles that send tragedy into the air as if to disturb heaven; with long scenes of painful dialogue that unapologetically reveal the uncertain, terrorized inner lives of black Americans—the Edmund Pettus Bridge becomes a painful link between King’s work then and America’s unresolved racial burden today.

 This is not, like so many previous efforts, notably the almost-cartoonish King television mini-series of 1978—in which the heavy-shouldered and avuncular Paul Winfield played the preacher with a big grin under a fedora—a linear depiction of the MLK saga.  Winfield was physically larger than MLK; David Oyelowo, the intensive British actor is smaller and narrow-waisted.  Yet he almost implodes with the King’s throbbing amalgam of oratorical power and self-contempt.

Selma does not trek, like a cadenced death march, from Montgomery to Birmingham to Selma to Memphis, across a series of clichéd incidents and theatrical narratives painted conveniently onto the canvas of history.   Rather, it dwells in the deep well of Martin King’s soul: a place of murky introspection, vast guilt, and an uncanny political intuition.  This is because this motion picture is written in black ink and does not pander to white revisionism.

Ava DuVernay has too much respect for history—too much concern for the present—to send up a buffet of two-dimensional clips.  She understands that the thirteen years of King’s movement were a series of accidents and rivalries and blind intersections and shaky alliances and dead children and an Atlanta pastor who was real, admired, reviled, flawed, and trapped by the grim circumstances of his fate.

Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge was not an overpass he crossed by himself but it was a bridge for him between two dark places: his mission and his soul.  The screenplay, written on the pages of profound black anguish, does not seek to satisfy anybody’s gilded image of the civil rights story.

It does not mention or forecast the first African American president.  It doesn’t act like America was ready for anything but reminds us that we were dragged into a tentative racial conciliation because television burst into our homes with the ugly truth of white supremacy and the righteous howl of simmering black indignation.

Selma is not so much about enacted bills as it is about shattered bones; more about betrayals than reliabilities.  It has the boldness to be script of the most unscripted revolution in American history.

It does not service the white American hagiography that has converted Martin Luther King Jr. from a human person into a holiday ritual.  It lacks any conceit promoting the fiction that King and his colleagues were on a journey that they could actually discern.

It is simply the diary of hate and blood from which emerged a tentative burst of hope that is today blurred dangerously by Ferguson and Staten Island and the urban racial battle between police officers and black men.

David Oyelowo does not glorify his character; the real King hardly thought of himself as glorious.  His short and brutal life of 39 years, which ended exactly the way he knew it would, was more or less begrudged to him.  He captures King’s unique and stirring manner of emphasizing first consonants and even his inability not to be preachy around the kitchen table or while languishing in an Alabama jail cell.

Selma is a noble motion picture that dignifies the strident ambiguities of a man and a movement.  It valiantly understands that the struggle for human dignity in America has never been simply black or white.

Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers.

By Ben Kamin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

Reviewed by David Miller, Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of History, University of San Diego.

Ask the average American on the street today about Dr. King and you will likely get effusive praise. Americans today love Dr. King and assume that other Americans always have too. Ask that same average American about the people involved in the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and you will likely get a response about “black people in the South.” The Civil Rights Movement was a Black thing, right? These are two of the most common misunderstandings of the CRM. The fact is Dr. King was not only despised by many white Americans in his day, but he was hounded, hunted, threatened, and harassed by authorities at all levels. He was not always loved. And while yes, the primary actors and beneficiaries of the CRM with its abolishing of legal segregation, legal disenfranchisement, and second class citizenship were Blacks, the CRM extend to include a wide array of Americans, especially many historically marginalized groups – workers, immigrants, women of all colors, northern college students, Jews, Native Americans, and the list goes on. And they came from all parts of the country. While the CRM had Blacks at its center, it also had many actors, benefited a wide array of Americans, and was never as popular at the time as our average American in the street would like to believe.

Enter Rabbi Ben Kamin’s new book, “Dangerous Friendship.” His book tells the tale of Stanley Levison, a little known friend and benefactor to Dr. King and the CRM broadly. Levison was Jewish. Leftist. Radical. Complicated. At times paradoxical. And he scared the heck out of the FBI. He was also the perfect target. To be so closely associated with King was a liability. A dangerous friendship indeed. If anyone understood the need to check, constantly, the long list of white Americans’ objections to the CRM, it was King. He had to walk a fine line, as he did in nearly every avenue of his activism, between the benefits of his activism and the way the means might subvert his cause. This book tells that story and rightfully reminds the reader that the CRM was a complex, messy, controversial, diverse, and dangerous moment. And Levison, an American Jew, was right there in the middle of it.

I have read Kamin’s books and this one is to my mind his most scholarly and polished effort to date. He weaves together a complicated historical narrative with personal, readable prose. He manages the historian’s bifocals expertly; balancing the big picture with the personal and the individual. After all, the CRM was people. Kamin keeps that personal story front and center. With his colorful prose, you really do feel as if you are meeting Levison. Yet the book speaks to the broader interpretations of the CRM as an important historical moment. It will appeal to a range of scholars, including those interested in King, the CRM, American Jewish leftist history, or crime and the FBI. It will appeal equally to the average reader, an audience I for one think needs this book the most. Was King a hero of Civil Rights? You bet. But getting there involved a diverse cast and a lot of danger.

By Ben Kamin JULY 16, 2014

The latest round of bombings, rocket attacks, airstrikes — sparked in part by the abductions and killings of three Israeli teenagers and a Palestinian teen — make hope for peace seem as impossible as these outrages against innocents are beyond reprehensible. My nephews and nieces in Israel and their peers in Gaza run for cover and cower in fear. Both sides are killing the future.

Each time we suffer through this, I think even more about a little dialogue I had a long time ago with a Palestinian neighbor.

My nephews and nieces in Israel and their peers in Gaza run for cover and cower in fear. Both sides are killing the future.

–
In the fall of 1961, I was 8 years old and living in the Israeli hamlet of Kfar Saba, where my parents and I were born. We could see the Samaria Mountains from our porch, and the town of Kalkilya, now in the West Bank but then part of Jordan just a mile or so away. A valley of orchards and wild brush lay between us and was forbidden; the border was more or less defined by an old rail path.

But precisely because that citrus-scented valley was off-limits to me, it was also enticing one Saturday afternoon. I rode my bicycle past the village square, beyond the old bus station and into the valley that unfolded against the biblical mountains.

Kalkilya was close by where I walked in the thick groves that divided the two worlds. And then I realized that I was not alone. Standing and staring at me was an Arab boy, about my age, as surprised by this encounter as I.

We both froze in fear. But curiosity quickly prevailed and we began to talk. It was a halting mixture of Hebrew and English; I did not know any Arabic. I still remember that he knew words from both of my languages and I did not know any from his. I remember his face very clearly, particularly the way he smiled.

I told him about my village and described my father as a war hero and a mighty man who had once fought in that valley. He told me that his father was very tall and strong and was chieftain of his village. We talked about the orange trees, and we agreed to meet again in a week at the same spot. I told him my name. He told me his: Ahmed. We parted, the sons of fathers who may have once battled each other in that valley.

Our second appointed meeting was washed out by an autumn rain, but we did meet again several days later. I had not told my parents about the first meeting because they would certainly have disapproved. Ahmed stood waiting for me. There was a tension we did not understand. But we were driven by something good that we also did not understand.

We both knew that this second meeting would affirm the first one but probably would be the last. It was truly friendly. We taught each other words from the other’s languages, simple words such as “goat,” “bicycle” and “rain.” We compared notes on siblings.

Before leaving, we spontaneously reached for the same large orange hanging from the tree above us. We peeled it and shared the slices. How sticky and sweet it tasted. We buried the peels and the seeds in the ground under the tree. We promised each other that one day, when peace between our people came, we’d return to see if a tree had taken root and grown there.

I live in California now. In the television footage of the rage coming to us again from that valley, I look for Ahmed’s face. We are both middle-aged men now. Several years ago, I visited and found that few trees were left in that valley. Palestinian terrorists have several times set fire to the orchards. Israeli tanks have often rolled into Kalkilya. Unforgivable bombings have killed children in both villages.

I wonder where Ahmed is and what we would say to each other if we were to meet again. Might it be possible for us to reach reconciliation now? Would he remember that we once knew more about peace than the grown-ups on either side of our valley?

Ben Kamin, a rabbi, is the author, most recently, of “Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers.”