This past
Sunday, as I write, was the “Culture Mix All-Holiday Party,” which our
elders’ group co-organized with Safe Passage Family Resource
Center. The party was the brainstorm of the fabulous,
irrepressible Irene Malone, who is active in both groups. Her
idea was to invite local Latinos and local Jews, and anyone else of any
cultural stripe, to share some food and some songs and stories around
the winter holiday time. At our most recent elders’ meeting,
Irene made her proposal, and it was enthusiastically chosen by the
group.We got together to plan with some of the Safe Passage crew (many of whose clients are Latino.) We decided right off the bat that we should serve latkes and tamales. Well, how many latkes and how many tamales? How many people did we really think would show up for something like this? The most cautious among us suggested we plan for twenty (“and that will be lucky.”) The ever-hopeful, me among them, said we should plan for fifty and just be prepared to buy back extra tamales to take home afterward.
So all of us were happily blown away when there was a lively buzz of more than a hundred people, of all ages, speaking several languages -- even though the 100 latkes and 120 tamales vanished in minutes. The party was scheduled for two hours, and that’s exactly how long it lasted. Fifteen minutes for a little mixing game, 30 minutes to eat, the planned songs and stories and genug -- we were cleaning up and out the door. Not a big deal.
At the beginning of the party I did a demonstration of the mixing game in front of the crowd. I had a word taped to my back, and I had to ask questions to try to figure out what it was. I hardly speak any Spanish. One thing about being a rabbi is that you get used to doing things you don’t know how to do in front of a crowd, so I gamely stammered in both languages as people laughed and cheered me on. It was actually way more fun than mortifying. Later I sat down at a table with five or six women and children speaking Spanish, and I smiled and shrugged quite a bit as I tried to enter the conversation, and they did the same in return.
The next night I was in La Bamba with my boisterous post-yoga crowd having our weekly burrito feast, and the woman working there greeted me and started talking with me a bit. She said that she had seen me many times before at Los Gallitos, where she also works (and where our Monday gang usually has our after-class feast.) She didn’t speak much English at all, but I understood her just fine, and we made a nice connection there for a minute. And it struck me that we had seen each other for many years and never had made more than eye contact before that night. I don’t think she was at the party the day before. It seemed like a pleasant coincidence that she had picked this particular night to chat with me.
This got me to thinking about my own shyness when trying to speak another language or make myself understood to someone who doesn’t speak much of my tongue. Well-meaning as I may be, I have an instinctual reticence to, I don’t know, sound foolish? Make mistakes? Be inappropriate? So, while I am smiley, I seldom make contact across those barriers.
And this has left me, over a lifetime, with a kind of subtle inner loneliness that I very seldom notice. But it rises up sometimes. I remember a couple of years ago when (for reasons of a political event which I can’t recall now) I went to a big, big rally in Fort Bragg about immigration. And I saw many hundreds of Hispanic people, many families, babies in strollers, men and women whose faces I dimly recognized from various local businesses. It was beautiful to see so many people of color together on Main Street. And I had that little pierce of loneliness then -- here is this vibrant community right here, and I hardly know anybody...
It’s not quite the same thing, but over the years I’ve been part of a number of interfaith programs. After September 11, I remember that we held a couple of forums (fora?) at the shul in which many different clergy sat together, and people from our various communities came together to hear our little five-minute statements. Again I was kind of blown away by how many people showed up and how strong the energy felt. I particularly think of my Foursquare Gospel Church colleague, Rev. Don Stiltner, whom I admire and miss, and the warm feeling of sitting next to him in front of the ark. I thought at the time: it’s not necessarily because any of us was going to say anything earthshaking. There is just something healing and moving about seeing people of obvious different-ness sitting together. Sometimes that vision is particularly sustaining.
When I was in Cape Town on my sabbatical, I spent many of my days at the University of Stellenbosch Medical School, where the Desmond Tutu TB Centre has its offices. It’s a stunningly multi-racial and multi-lingual scene there, and within it the TB Centre all the more so was a microcosm of the colors and languages of South Africa. Good will abounded. But I was still conscious of how the nursing students in the cafeteria at lunchtime clumped at tables by color. I was aware that it wasn’t until my second year that I was a guest in the home of someone black or coloured (nor, as I now think about it, did I ever have anyone of color over to my “dungeon.”) I was aware above all of my own slight self-consciousness when I chatted with black and coloured co-workers, whereas I quickly became close to a white couple (for whom English was not their first language either, for that matter.) Hmmmmm.
These are awkward things, and I admire those of you I know who --either because of your natural social comfort or because you’ve worked at it -- have expanded your circles of friendship and community across cultures, languages and races. And I am grateful for those friendships of my own which have overcome shyness and reticence to connect across cultures.
But I suspect I’m not completely alone with that little tinge of loneliness and self-consciousness arising from my racial, cultural and religious isolation. I think that might have something to do with the energy of these little gatherings, however modest, where the intention is made explicit to mix it up.
I even wonder if something about that Culture Mix party on Sunday -- and specifically something about my standing up in front of all those people with a post-it on my back and asking silly questions until I guessed my word (which was “candle / vela”!) -- that made me a look little more approachable the next night at La Bamba... so that it was that night, of all possible nights, the woman working there introduced herself and chatted with me? Who knows?
I’m glad it happened, and I look forward to more get-togethers where we can put tamales and latkes on the same plate!
- Rabbi Margaret Holub © 2010
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Updated 02/02/2010 (rge)