Book Review: The Lemon Tree

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Whenever I read books like this, I wonder about the men who sit around in secret rooms, redrawing the world's boundaries.  It never goes well but people keep doing it.  The founding of Israel is one such moment in time.  

This book focuses on one house and two families that call it home;  this is the microcosmic metaphor for the whole larger quagmire.  The Jew acknowledges that she stole the Arab's home but cannot go so far as to say he can have it back.  It is not enough for the Arab to hear that the Jew admits that wrongs were perpetrated;  nothing short of return is good enough.

There is no middle ground.

And if there is no middle ground, there is no resolution possible.

The Lemon Tree presents the history of the land interlocked with the smaller histories of two families caught in the whirlwind sociopolitical change told through the lens of a house that means so much for so many reasons.

The book is eminently readable.  It gives no answer.

But at the end, the Jew plants a new lemon tree in the courtyard of the home which used to be the Arab's home but was then the Jews home and is now a school for Arab children in the heart of Israel.  "This dedication is without obliterating the memories.  Something is growing out of old history.  Out of the pain, something new is growing."

And that is all we can hope for.


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Why Visiting Mr. Green?

Why Visiting Mr. Green?

If I had to grandly declare a theme for our 2011-2012 season, it might be “How we, as a society, treat ‘difference.’”  In Avenue Q, a motley assortment of puppets accept one another and work, in their own small ways, to make the world a better place.  In Beau Jest, Jewish parents struggle to accept that their daughter may not choose to marry within the faith.  In Tommy, a young man struggles with a burden that makes him close himself off to the world, and the world reacts in a variety of ways.  In the Laramie Project docu-dramas, issues of tolerance are viewed through many lenses, and reactions to these views are explored, dissected and pondered.

On the surface, Visiting Mr. Green doesn’t really fit in with this theme; it’s an odd-couple comedy about a crotchety old man and a young, upwardly mobile man caught in the corporate gerbil wheel.  But boiling underneath the light-hearted one-liners are themes of persecution, group identity and what one generation can expect or demand from another generation.  Mr. Green and Ross have nothing in common.  Yet they have everything in common.  It’s all in how you look at things.  Both have allowed difference to stand in the way of living and loving.  And both need to find a way to come to terms with that.

From the first line of the play, Ross and Mr. Green confront their difference (that’s the seed of the comedy), but as the play progresses, the characters embark on a journey leading them to confront their sameness.  Suddenly we’re in a deep, heart-wrenching drama.  They are both Jews, but that is not what makes them the same.  In fact, they seem to occupy polar opposite ends of the Jewish spectrum.  As Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard has written, “Jewish identity is made up of choices. We pick, consciously or otherwise, from a sort of identity menu that offers us options for behaviors that we understand as ‘Jewish’ because we see them as ‘Jewish things to do’ or as ‘done in a Jewish way.’”  So Ross and Mr. Green are both Jews, but their shared Judaism doesn’t really share anything.  At all.

And that’s a very potent metaphor for the larger theme of the play; we are the same, yet we are different, yet we are the same. 

Although the characters are Jewish, the core learning in this play is that people are the same everywhere. Everyone knows someone like Mr. Green, and everyone knows someone like Ross. Their specific characteristics make the story interesting, but their human-ness and their individual struggles are universal.

We all face challenges.  You may face the same challenges I face but for different reasons. You may face different challenges than I face but for the same reason.  But we all face challenges.

Tolerance comes from knowing that. 

Acceptance comes from understanding that.

Visiting Mr. Green is a blueprint of how we can move from hatred to dislike, to tolerance, to acceptance and, in the process, learn not only how to heal ourselves but also to mend the lives of those around us. 

Krista Lang Blackwood

Director of Cultural Arts

Jewish Community Center of Kansas City

Why The Laramie Project?

Why The Laramie Project?

In 1993, five years before Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die, a rock was thrown through the window of a home displaying a menorah in Billings, Montana.  The people of Billings rose in silent protest and paper menorahs appeared in windows all over town.

Nothing much changed for Jewish families in Billings in the aftermath of this event. Nothing much except the reassurance that there were people in their town who had a deep capacity for compassion.

Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot.

The most straightforward statement of the principle of compassion in the Torah is Leviticus 19:18; “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This ethic of reciprocity, this “golden rule,” is said to exist in every world religion.  

And that’s fitting because the question of how to treat others is a universal human question.  In a Jewish context, the ethical approach to compassion is referred to as “accomplishing a mitzvah.”   In its most literal meaning, to accomplish a mitzvah is to carry out one of the 613 Commandments of Sinai. But Jewish texts and teachings take the notion of a mitzvah further; any act motivated by spontaneous kindness toward another person can be considered the moral equivalent of one of the original Commandments. Translated this way, mitzvah means “good deed.”

In Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Ben Azzai is cited as saying, “Run to perform even a minor mitzvah, and flee from sin; for one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah, and one sin leads to another sin; for the consequence of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, and the consequence of a sin is a sin.”

Run to perform even a minor mitzvah.  Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot.

The problems of the world are huge and overwhelming.  Watching the evening news can be bewildering; story after story about the human capacity for hate, greed and violence.  Hate is complex.  It’s big.  It can seem unconquerable.  The power of The Laramie Project lies in the fact that the plays don’t gloss over that complexity, that largeness, that invincibility.  The Laramie Project plays face it all head on.  They don’t pretend to heal the wound with a contrived set of pat answers; instead they rip the scab forcefully off the wound and leave the audience free to decide how best to heal.

Perhaps one way to heal is to walk out of this theater newly resolved to do good deeds; to re-enter the world determined to find ways to accomplish a mitzvah.  Even tiny good deeds can make a difference; holding open a door, smiling at a passerby. And if you pay enough attention to the world around you to smile or hold open a door, chances are you’ll be well-placed to notice opportunities for more good deeds. 

Sometimes nothing much is a whole lot. 

There’s a story in the Talmud in which a young man walks up to Rabbi Hillel and promises to convert to Judaism if the Rabbi will teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel lifts one foot off the ground and replies, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your comrade; this is the whole Torah in its entirety; the rest is commentary: go learn.”

Go.  Learn. 

And, as Plato said, be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Krista Lang Blackwood

Director of Cultural Arts

Jewish Community Center of Kansas City

Why Tommy?

Why Tommy?

Released by The Who in 1969, the concept album Tommy was an important landmark of popular culture. After a couple of theatrical presentations in the early 1970s and the daft and delirious Ken Russell film of 1975, Tommy took a stage hiatus.  Then, in 1993, Pete Townshend teamed with theatrical director Des McAnuff to make Tommy into a Broadway musical. 

The seeds for the Tommy concept album lie in a stream-of-consciousness poem that Townshend wrote in 1967, inspired by his discovery of Indian mystic Meher Baba.  Drawing heavily on the writings and life of Meher Baba, the Tommy story was interwoven with allusions to Christianity, Eastern philosophy and twentieth century popular culture.

But, at its heart, Tommy is musical parable about false prophets and the human inability to see what’s good in the midst of what’s not.

What is a false prophet?  Deuteronomy 18:18-22 gives us one of many Biblical instructions on how to detect one; if his or her prophecies don’t come true, he or she is not a prophet.  Seems obvious, but it’s still good advice; we should always carefully inspect both the message and the messenger before investing our future in a forecast. 

Sometimes, however, our irrational high hopes, paired with our sense of helplessness, create “accidental prophets.” We hunger for answers - for someone to lead us out of the darkness - but often the people we follow are just as lost as we are.  And we follow them anyway.  Tommy is one such accidental prophet; the prophet who is false because he never meant to be a prophet in the first place.

“Why would you want to be more like me?” Tommy asks Sally near the end of the show.  “For fifteen years I was waiting for what you've already got.  In my dreams I was seeing it, hearing it, feeling it. Those are the true miracles and you have them already.”

In a 1969 Rolling Stone interview, Townshend is quoted as saying, "Tommy's life represents the whole nature of humanity - we all have this self-imposed deaf, dumb and blindness.”   It is part of human nature to close our ears, our eyes and our minds; to shut out the parts of the world we cannot deal with.  And too often, in doing so, we fail to acknowledge the good that surrounds us, because we’re so busy blocking out the bad. 

There is a Jewish tradition that encourages a person to recite a hundred blessings each day. That’s a lot of blessings; to get them all in, one would almost have to go straight from one blessing to another, putting one in a constant state of counting blessings each day.   

And that’s probably the point.  Counting our blessings, all of our blessings, inspires us to exist in a continual flow of gratitude; gratitude directed toward the things we see, hear and feel.  

And what could be better than that?

Krista Lang Blackwood

Director of Cultural Arts

Jewish Community Center of Kansas City

Why Beau Jest?

Why Beau Jest? 

“So Sarah has this Jewish boyfriend who is neither Jewish nor her boyfriend.”

That’s the tag line I wrote for advertising materials for our production of Beau Jest. I almost added the additional tag, “Discuss.” Remember the Mike Myers Saturday Night Live skit Coffee Talk? Myers played Linda Richman, a stereotypical Jewish middle-aged woman who wears gaudy sweaters, large, dark glasses and has big hair, which she constantly adjusts. “The chickpea is neither a chick nor a pea. Discuss,” she’ll say. Or “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is neither Mormon nor a tabernacle nor a choir. Discuss.”

Beau Jest is wonderful fodder for a Linda Richman tangent. Sarah is a nice Jewish girl from a nice Jewish family who has fallen in love with a nice Christian boy. But she tells her nice Jewish parents that she’s dating a nice Jewish doctor. It’s all nice. Until her parents invite the Jewish doctor, who doesn’t exist, to Passover.

Cue Guess Who’s Coming to Seder?

Beau Jest is funny, with its convoluted-interpersonal-relationships-based-on-mistaken-identity plot line. But it also engages themes that have deeper meaning; how important is a shared religion to a relationship? And how important is a shared religion to building a cohesive and strong extended family?

According to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, more than 28 million married or cohabitating Americans - almost one quarter - are interfaith. For some, the choice between their faith, which often incorporates their family and community, and the person they love is fraught with challenges and heartache. For others an interfaith relationship represents the ultimate reconciliation ceremony; it brings together the best elements from two faiths.

On the one hand, some believe that each member of an interfaith family will hold different beliefs about deity, humanity and the rest of the universe and the result will be irresolvable conflict. On the other hand, conflict over faith can happen in an intrafaith family as well; even with a shared set of beliefs, interpretations of those beliefs can differ. Two people of the same faith can take a religious text and come up with two vastly different interpretations and each person believes that his interpretation is truth because it’s based on scripture. Irresolvable conflict.

So how important is a shared religion to building a cohesive and strong extended family?

 Discuss.

 Krista Lang Blackwood Director of Cultural Arts

Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City

What's Jewish About Avenue Q?

I have a new job as the Director of Cultural Arts at the Jewish Community Center of Kansas City.  Though all Jewish Community Centers are structured a bit differently, most of them have a fitness component, an education component and a cultural arts component;  like a Y with college classes and great performances.  It's a brilliant formula for creating community and I'm sure to write more about it in future blog posts.

One of my marching orders is to expand the offerings of the Cultural Arts department and increase the level of "Jewish-ness," for lack of a better word, in upcoming performing arts seasons.  Another of my marching orders it to find ways to connect the current performing arts season to Jewish culture.

This is easy with a play like Beau Jest, coming up in December.  But it wasn't so easy with a production like Avenue Q, which opens November 5th.

What's Jewish about Avenue Q?

I had to answer this question for an essay that is featured in our Playbills.  It stumped me for quite a while.  Then, in one of those flashes of clarity that always seem to happen at 3:00 a.m., I lit upon a connection.  Here's what I wrote for the Playbill.  Enjoy.

One of the main tenants of Jewish thought is the concept of tikkun olam; repairing the world.  Making it a better place. 

One of the most wonderful functions of theater is its ability to provide reflection; to hold a mirror up to the world around us, enabling us to see ourselves more clearly.  Theater allows us to view our problems through the lens of fiction.  It allows us laugh at ourselves.  To cry.  To feel.  It opens us up to the experiences of others in a way that can make us more understanding and tolerant.  Theater makes us more human.

So what does this have to do with an R-rated production with full-puppet nudity?

Avenue Q is a coming-of-age parable, satirizing the issues and anxieties associated with entering adulthood. Its characters struggle with the schism between the world of Sesame Street and the world in which they now, as adults, must live.  Big Bird told them that they were “special” but they have discovered they are no more “special” than anyone else. This world in which they now find themselves is a far cry from the world they grew up watching on television; that world had simplistic problems and happy resolutions.  This world?  Not so much. 

So perhaps Avenue Q is about kids growing up with the concept of tikkun olam and then trying to find ways to live that philosophy in a world that makes it remarkably difficult to do so. 

You can do anything.  You can be anything.  You can change the world.  But can you?  Can you really?

In “Money Song” the cast trades riffs back and forth about how good it feels to help others.  The song culminates in with the lyric, “Give us your money! / Every time you do good deeds / You're also serving your own needs. / When you help others / You can't help helping yourself.” 

Seems cynical, right?   But real.  All too real.  And with a good outcome.  Even if the intent of helping others is to make yourself feel better, you still helped.  And by helping, even in your small, self-centered way, you have made the world a slightly a better place.  Sounds kind of like one of the most often quoted portions of Pirkei Avot; “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it (2:21).” 

Avenue Q is full of cynical optimism.  Life sucks, but everything is temporary -- the good and the bad. It’s funny and raunchy but also poignant and full of life lessons. 

But in a way, Avenue Q also represents the distance between the heady concept tikkun olam and Pirkei Avot 2:21.   You are supposed to fix it. You can’t fix it.  You still have to try. 

To quote a character in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, “An awful place, this sea, this gulf between the Intention and the Act, that people call ‘the world.’”  Avenue Q provides a possible blueprint--a racy, profanity-laden, hysterically funny and extremely uncomfortable blueprint, but a blueprint nonetheless--for navigating the gulf.

Krista Lang Blackwood, Director of Cultural Arts