There are so many things to write about this week, how government that is not responsive to the people it serves is not only useless, but destructive (that means you Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi---the public wants national health care insurance, even if campaign contributors don't) and newspaper and television people who believe that every opinion, no matter how daft, is entitled to equal weight, but it has been decided that this is the wek that we become obsessed with popular music. I don't want to be a stick in the mud even though the person "the world is mourning" (as the New York Times website proclaimed for a few hours Friday until somebody realized that it did not) is not anyone whose music, dancing, or other things were never of interest to me.

So what does this have to do with being Jewish as my current headline announces? Stick with me for a second or two, below the fold,  and see if I can keep you interested.

In the few years since these posts started appearing, it has been necessary on several occasions.to admit that Barth's alter ego is Jewish. One time was to explain why the continued presentation of the United States as a Christian nation is not only wrong, but a rude attempt by people who know nothing, and have no right to do so, to invite me to leave the nation where I was born and love for what it means around the world.

Other posts require an identification as a Jew because the subject is Israel. Barth, nor his alter ego, can determine how much of his (my) views about that nation are related to being Jewish. I have never been there but would very much love to go someday. In the meantime, I admire those people who have settled there with all that that entails. I do not have the courage to do so but that's another story.

The story I want to tell today is about Regina Spektor. Not about her as much as a new "album" (CD?, "group of songs"? I don't know the proper nomencalture anymore) and less about the record as about one of its songs.

To write about the song requires that you know this. This young woman, now about 29, came to the United States from the Soviet Union, as Russian Jewish emigres. She was enrolled in Orthodox Jewish day schools, but ultimately attended and graduated Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey (near where I grew up many centuries earlier).

She became a musician, after years of studying classical piano, but now singing her own music, best described, using the names used today, as "alternative" as useless a description as there can be. If Nellie McKay and maybe Norah Jones, Feist, KT Tunstall, Eilen Jewell or even Aimee Mann and Dar Williams mean anything to you, that's probably where she fits.

Her first albums were, to put it mildly, quirky and not completely "produced" but now has had "professional help" to come up with Far which is, in my opinion,a great album from start to finish.

But though the greatness of some other musician seems to be the subject of the day, so important that no other news is worthy of reporting anymore, it is not my intention to waste precious space waxing poetic about how much I enjoy this album but to talk about one of its songs which has many layers of meaning for me.

One, and the irony that a young woman raised as an Orthodox Jew has brought this to my attention is inescapable, is that it reminds me that my version of being Jewish, and Reform Jewish, is as real and legitimate as anyone else's, something Orthodox Jews generally contest. I have for years used the expression that I am not particularly religious because I rarely attend a synagogue or temple except for family events, I married someone who is not a Jew, and my daughter, who considers herself Jewish, I think, was neither bat mitzvahed, nor did she attend formal religious school on Sundays or any other day.

But I am Jewish, and being Jewish is an important part of who I am, and I am also a father, a public servant, a native of New England, an American and, of course, a serious fan of the Boston Red Sox. Nobody can take any of that from me as much as they try to with a sueriority to which they are not entitled.


So it is that this song, Laughing With, written and performed by a woman born in Russia and raised Orthodox, exactly describes what being Jewish means to me:

Laughing With


The song reminds many, me included, of the Eric Bazilian song, One of Us, made famous by Joan Osborne but also covered, I think, by the great Alanis Morissette, but aside from being about how to consider God, without the trappings of organized religion, they are almost radically different songs. One is a bit scary, the other hopeful. Or maybe both are both scary and hopeful. Maybe Eric and Regina can work that out.

If none of this means anything to you: you believe, for instance, that science and religion cannot occupy the same space, I understand that. I have worked this out for myself as have many others. But if you see it otherwise, I am okay with that, so long as you don't elevate "what you believe" over scientific truths and then try to impose your beliefs on me. I have friends and family afflicted with serious illness and disease that embryonic stem cell research could cure and wish you would keep your religious obligations away from my non-religious government.

For this Jew, though, the experience of hearing this song, considering what it says and how it has impacted on me is very meaningful. Which brings me, I guess, to this: an essay the same Regina Spektor posted on her own webpage last January which says a few other things that have crossed my mind, and perhaps my tongue and electronic pen, but maybe not as well put as by this 29 year old with a better appreciation of all that is st stake when she says:

To me it seems that the Palestinians and the Israelis are both being used by the World. They are both simultaneously scapegoats and decoys. And the World needs them that way. Because if they were gone, and the conflict was over, who would be the next target of the extremists.


I imagine this is the scenario that the World has in its sleepy mind: The World has just left the office. The World is walking home and taking its usual short cut. The alley it cuts through always makes its heart pound a little faster, but time saved is time saved, so it takes the shortcut every night on the way home to dinner. Over the course of its many walks home through the alley, the World has seen all kinds of muggings...The World has seen Israel get mugged, too. Sometimes harder, sometimes less. When this happens the World chooses one of three options... Option 1. Cross the street, pick up the pace, don't make eye contact, and get out of range of danger... Option 2. Go over to Israel and help fight the mugger off. But no. Those options are not what the World is choosing.


It's time for Option 3. Go over to Israel, and hold its arms back, hold it steady in place, and let the mugger beat it up good. Because the World thinks, innocently, of course, and full of fear in its beating heart, that if the mugger beats up Israel real good, good enough for a last breath, good enough so that when the World is making a short cut from the office, back home for dinner, there is no more Israel, and the mugger won't be there anymore, and the shortcut will be safe, and save time, and all will be great. So this is what happens. And the World walks home again. This time more relaxed, more at ease... A spring in its step.


And then the World feels a hand on its shoulder. Its the mugger. The World smiles. It makes a little bow. It tips its hat. Then the mugger starts mugging the World. "But I'm your friend, remember? I was the loudest denouncing Israel in public, remember? I helped you hold its arms back a little while ago, remember? Many times i helped you holding its arms back?..."


"But I'm a mugger." the mugger says."And I mug." the mugger says. "And you are next." the mugger says. And the mugger waits for someone else to take a short cut, to help out with the mugging in the hopes that they will be spared, and then they will be next... and so on, and so forth, and that's how it works...

Sometimes it feels that if there were no more Jews, or Israel (for the two are synonymous- Israel is the geographic embodiment of the nation) all of this would stop. Even some Jews feel that way. Many of us try to un-Jew ourselves all the time. It comes from a mixture of fear, guilt of surviving while others didn't, and embarrassment. We are the root of our and the World's problems, it seems. It is the Jews themselves that you will hear speak out most strongly against Israel. The instinct that drives them is the same instinct that drove them to blend in, and then be very surprised when they were put in the ghetto, too. The were surprised when they were put on the train, too. They were surprised when they were put in the gas chamber, too. They were surprised all the way till Death. Because "they weren't like those OTHER Jews"... Well. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.


And if anyone thinks that speaking out against Israel is anything other than thinly veiled anti-semitism, they are deeply mistaken.


"Maybe if i am quiet and at the back of the class and look down they won't notice." That should not be the motto of the World. Nor should "Maybe if I'm the loudest to condemn Israel, they'll remember me as a friend later." Because eventually, when there is only you left in the class, you will get noticed. We all will.


And I don't believe in good and evil. I believe that we cultivate fractions of qualities within ourselves like a delicate chemistry experiment, with droppers of human traits into a beaker or a test tube. And all those properties are ever changing. And the good ones stem from our love of self, and understanding of self. And the bad ones stem from fear. There is nothing that makes one a better person than realizing what you fear, why you fear it, and how that makes you closed off to others, and blame others...


I believe in God, and am a Jew, and yet i love all people of other faiths, and people of no faith, with my whole heart, so i know that it is possible. I love America, and Israel, and my mother country Russia, and all the countries i have had the honor and privilege to visit, and the countries that i have yet to visit in the future, and the countries i will never have the chance to visit in my lifetime, and so i know that it is possible. I love Humans and I love Nature, though from the beginning of time they have been destroying each other, and i love them both, and so i know that it is possible. And I feel that love without paradox. Without feeling for one at the expense of another. And so i know that it is possible.

So, yeah, that.