Ahz mah (So what)

This spring, for the first time, I attended a hearing at the state house. The hearing was about proposed legislation to protect the rights of immigrants in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. The large room was packed, predominantly – although not entirely – with supporters of the legislation, who had to be continually reminded to be quiet and maintain the decorum of the proceedings. It was also uncomfortably warm in the hearing room. For hour upon hour, with no break, the legislative committee respectfully listened to testimony from citizens ranging from high powered attorneys to a somewhat disheveled and incoherent man who seemed to be hearing God speaking to him directly. It was a marvelous, ordinary day of democracy in action. I was proud of my Sharon Interfaith Action colleagues who were there to testify on behalf of the diverse immigrant population in Sharon and in particular our Muslim neighbors. But what I remember most about the day was a very different image. A middle-aged whi...

I was speaking recently with two very elderly women, D and S, who I see once a month at the local nursing home. D just turned 95, and S will be 93 next month, God willing. I asked them how they face their fears. Here’s what they told me: daily prayer, expressing gratitude every day, staying present to what is happening right now, and letting go of thoughts of being in control of what’s happening. D and S are not saints. They are wonderfully ordinary women who have lived full lives and experienced their share of both suffering and joy. They know, with a clarity most of us lack, that their lives are finite. Quite unselfconsciously, they seem to embody the biblical proverb “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Why do I say that they embody fear of God? How do we even understand that concept, especially those of us who don’t believe in a personal God? It is obviously not fear in the sense that we tend to use the word, nor is it fear of God in the child-like sense of fearing punishment ...

On the evening of May 17, a man wanted for armed robbery committed a few months earlier was witnessed fleeing a personal altercation near the Econo Lodge on Route 1, within the Sharon town line. On-duty Sharon police officers were dispatched to aid other town and state police in locating this person, believed to be on foot heading northward, just west of Route 1. Now it happened that on the evening of May 17, I was just buckling my seat belt in the passenger seat of a Sharon police cruiser when that dispatch call came in. I was doing a “ride along,” part of a nine-week community education program offered by the Sharon Police department. And so, for the next three hours, on the evening of May 17, I was swept up in a search for a human needle in a haystack: a thin man in a gray sweatshirt, on foot, somewhere in the neighborhoods or woods of Walpole. At dusk. Possibly armed, and therefore possibly dangerous. Was I frightened? I have to say that there were only a few moments when my a...

This summer I attended an event featuring three elderly Holocaust survivors. S, one of the survivors, seemed to be hard of hearing. I had that impression because his comments were consistently unrelated to the interviewer’s questions. He also seemed to be increasingly distraught as the evening went on. Eventually I realized what was happening. It wasn’t about his hearing loss. He was purposefully ignoring the interviewer’s questions. Why? The constraints of the interviewer’s questions did not permit S to tell his story of suffering and survival in a way that allowed him to feel heard. So instead, whenever it was his turn to respond, he turned to the audience and cried out a heart-wrenching “ I want you to know ….” And then he would tell another piece of his story. S had directly faced death many times as a young teenager during the Holocaust; he said he had no fear of death, and I believe him. But his behavior during the panel discussion touched a nerve in me around a different ki...