This post contains the preface to the book I am working on. I will publish other parts as we go. ALL comments are appreciated.
Please note that I do not defend nor debate my opinions.
When I was in the fifth grade, a girl named Norma sat next to me in band. She was the only other tenor sax player in the grade school band, so we were probably destined to become either friends or enemies. A cautious friendship/rivalry began to emerge since we were not comfortable with those other two choices. We fought like brothers and sisters but we never really meant to be mean and we truly had mutual respect and affection.
There was nothing especially remarkable about Norma. She was pretty, thin, and loud, and at that age, all knees and elbows and teeth. The most distinguishing thing about her in my mind was that she was Jewish. Far a ten-year-old Alabama boy who, in 1959, had been transported from the less-than-modern thinking of my home state of Alabama to an experimental grade school situated between the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where the weapons of the Cold War were being designed, my friend was an exotic, a member of a culture and a religion that was, to me at that time, no more lucid than Buddhism or Islam.
My small Alabama home town that had only Baptists and Methodists and a very few Presbyterians. There was no Catholic church and certainly no synagogue. They were not necessary in a community in which Catholics were distrusted and unknown and where Jews were nowhere to be seen, a land where the King James Bible and ONLY the King James Bible was the ultimate authority on life, faith and behavior. There was one thread about Judaism, however, that made Norma’s religion intriguing: it was where my own religion had come from! After all, Jesus, Himself, was a Jew. That seemed pretty cool to me. If Jesus was Jewish, why wasn’t I? I would later become intrigued by the fact that Judaism had survived thousands of years of other cultures trying to destroy it and always emerging at least somewhat intact. For now, however, the question was: how did Norma’s religion turn into mine? From that time, I have been intrigued by Jewish culture and history.
I don’t know where Norma ended up but I did soon become friends with another Jewish boy, Alan, who became a good buddy until we moved to Florida. Alan’s father was an Eastern European immigrant and knew a lot about religion. He gave me my first lessons in comparative theology...on a fifth-grade level, of course. In the next few years, my mother had become close to a woman whose family were big-time Billy Graham followers and had a close friend who worked in his crusade. Being an impressionable twelve-year-old, I developed an interest in that form of Christianity. We moved to Florida that year and I was no longer so intensely exposed to that version of Christianity.
In junior high and high school, I knew a lot of Jewish kids at school, but no one in Tampa seemed to see them as exotic. They interacted just like everyone else. All through high school, I went to church and sang in the choir, but the ideas around religion were not what occupied my mind all that often. In college, I became involved in a folk music group made up of students from Miami. There was one red-headed Irish kid named Malone and three Jewish kids. Jay, Naomi, and Marcia. None of them were especially religious but they were clearly products of an obviously tight community whose members shared a lot of cultural memory and belief.
I tend to pay attention to the things that go on around me so I absorbed a lot of that culture. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Miami had an active folk music scene, linked to the scene in Greenwich Village at the time. If we explore that scene, we find many people with names like Zimmerman, Ochs, Simon, Ginsberg, Garfunkel, and Spoelstra. I think it was during this time and during this era of cultural input that I began to develop some questions in my mind about the religion I grew up with and its origins in that Jewish tradition that have come into focus only in my late 60’s and early 70’s after my career and family occupied my attention in the intervening decades.
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