Some Stories

from the outside from the inside

I don’t know what to make of some stories. I was sitting with my father-in-law this afternoon. He turned 100 last week. I was sitting on the couch where he lives and thinking about the manuscript I’m working on. It’s a series of stories that come from the places I’ve spent my time outside the lines/between the cracks/outside the camp/into the mystic where it has been my privilege to work. But they are work stories. My so-called career, the stories are unusual and they are many.

I was sitting on the couch thinking about the manuscript I’m working on. Then I was thinking about my teachers, I’ve had many who have been good guides for me. I was thinking: I have too many good teachers in my story to include in this manuscript. Those stories, too, are many.

Before I was done with the thought, I wrote this in a little notebook I carry in my pocket:

I’ve left the names and stories of my teachers out of this book. There are many of them. That will have to be another book.

This afternoon, the afternoon of the incursion into the synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, I was sitting on the couch with my father-in-law, 100 years old, he was watching the news on TV. I wasn’t paying attention to the TV.

Jimmy, he said, look – Detroit [they were talking about the event at Temple Israel].

Yes. I know that synagogue, I said, I went there as a little boy. At that time, it was in Detroit.

Thus this piece, the rabbi’s wife in third grade? That was Temple Israel. 3.12.26

Freedom Chain: links, an excerpt

What sets you free? Everything. A freedom chain, the links, every link contributes. You make time to thank them every time you can, you remember them.

You were a kid and a teacher paid attention to you, someone put down his papers when you walked into his office, a teacher in fourth grade asked you to stay after school so she could show you how to make your own book.

It is infinitely regressible, this freedom chain. Every act built on prior acts.

Each act in the chain of behavior which leads to freedom is built on a previous act. You may never know when it begins. Every act contributes in some partial way to freedom.

The rabbi’s wife in third grade* noticed you. She planted something in you that grew. Forty years later you had a portable phone in your car and you called her house on your way home from the synagogue where you were now rabbi. You thanked her.

No deed is done, no thought is thought, no dream is dreamed, for nothing. Everything contributes in some inscrutable way to freedom. When does freedom begin? It may begin today, with this thought.

Now you give it away. You give it away every chance you get. You thank every one you can. You do not wait.

jsg

*Temple Israel, Detroit Michigan, 1956