If I Had a Hammer

A few weeks ago, in a discussion with some of my church friends about a particular social issue, someone made the following comment, which is edited for clarity:

I recognize and accept the fact that my rights and freedoms are not ultimately ever going to be met through the government or any earthly organization. Otherwise, I might spend my entire life fighting for things that don’t really last (like earthly peace, social justice, or marriage equality) instead of laying it down for what can never be taken away.

Wow. Not the way I think at all.

My wife says that I’m a very Jewish Lutheran. Now I didn’t grow up Jewish, but I didn’t grow up Lutheran either. I grew up reading, and that’s what got me where I am today. I was interested in Judaism as being the ultimate source of Christianity, and wanted to know how things might have been in the early Church before the Greeks and Romans got their hands on it and screwed things up.

But my point, and I do have one, is that my Christianity is very much informed by my knowledge of and interest in Judaism. And as a result, this comment during the discussion had me raising the metaphorical eyebrow.

“That doesn’t sound a whole lot like tikkun olam,” I said to myself.”

So what’s tikkun olam? It’s a Hebrew phrase that means “to repair the world,” and describes the Jewish concept that each of us is here to take some part, no matter how small, in the task of repairing the world. I like this concept. I like this concept a whole lot better than the ideas I hear coming out of the mouths of some Christians, that make it sound like we’re all just supposed to sit on our duffs until Jesus comes back, and then he’ll make everything right. You know…the people who say, “I don’t have to worry about the environment because Jesus is coming back for us.” (And by the way, it’s Christians like that who make the rest of us look bad.)

Now maybe this isn’t exactly what the person in the conversation meant, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. It still seemed to imply that there was no sense in trying to work to improve anything in the world we have now, because the only important thing, the only lasting thing is our lives with Jesus later.

And quite frankly, that still sounds a little lazy to me.

The idea of tikkun olam implies that I’ve been invited…yes, invited to work with God to make this world a better place. And that invitation to work with him should be seen as an honor, not as something that’s pointless, since our efforts could never compare to his anyway.

Now there are those, such as Humanist author Greg Epstein, who argues in his book Good Without God that the idea of tikkun olam is flawed, because since it talks about repairing, it assumes a “golden age” that we’re trying to get back to…a golden age that never existed. OK, I get his point. Even in the Bible, there seems to have been no golden age, because even in the beginning, that serpent was just slithering around, waiting to suck someone in. But he’s right, if you’re not religious at all, and don’t believe that there ever was a golden age to return to, then the idea of repairing the world makes no sense. What can we do then? What can we say that makes sense to everyone?

But you know what? “Repair the world” is only one interpretation of tikkun olan. It can also mean to improve it. Yes, rather than saying that the world is broken and needs fixed, it says that it’s flawed or imperfect, and needs some improvement. Either way, it says that things ain’t right and we should get off our duffs and do something…no matter how small, and no matter how pointless it seems in the long run.

And perhaps, for those who look at this from a Christian perspective, instead of looking at the mess we’ve left and saying, “Well, you lazy, arrogant little so-and-so,” when he comes back, Jesus will look at what we’ve tried to do in the name of earthly peace, social justice, and all those other things “that don’t really last,” and say “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

You can do what you want, you can say what you want, but as for me and my hands, I’m picking up a hammer. I’ve got some repairing…oops…I mean improving to do.

Sundays in Lent

Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is tomorrow. So here’s a quick quiz for you. How many days are in Lent? 40, right? OK now, how many Sundays are in Lent?

I can see you all looking at your calendars now checking, and I bet you’ve all come up with six, with the last one being Palm Sunday. But you’re wrong, and that could end up being a good thing for many of you.

Yes, you saw that right, you’re wrong. There are no Sundays in Lent. There are Sundays that fall during Lent, but I found out a few years ago that they’re not really part of the season.

How can this be? Simple. Count all the days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. That gives you 46 days. Subtract the six Sundays, and you get the expected 40 days of Lent.

But wait, there’s more! Since Sundays are always feast days because they’re “little Easters,” there’s no fasting then.

To borrow a line from Martin Luther “What does this mean?”

It means that those of you who gave up one of your favorite things for Lent can still have it on Sunday, because it’s a feast day.

And no, it’s not cheating. It’s not a matter of fudging the rules. It’s a matter of understanding what the rules really are, and remembering that every Sunday is a reason to celebrate, because of what we know will happen on Easter.

A Border Song

Holy Moses! We have been confused.

We just got back from a four-day weekend in Canada, and as we crossed the border in each direction, I got to thinking about what a border is all about. Actually, it got me to thinking about it again.

Now, you may think that I had been originally thinking about it because of the debates on immigration reform or securing the border between us and Mexico; and you’d be partially right. But I had really been thinking about it because of a History Channel series called How the States Got Their Shapes (highly recommended, we bought it from the iTunes store); a special on Bonnie & Clyde and the other machine gun-toting criminals of the 30s; an NPR piece on the impossible to police border between Texas and Mexico; and the curious cases of a few spots in the lower 48 where you can’t get from one piece of US soil to another by land unless you go through Canada.

So what’s a border for? Is it to keep one group of people out and another in? That may be what it’s used for in many cases now, but originally it was something totally different. It was about property rights and what rules got followed. Bonnie & Clyde and their compatriots used borders to their advantage when they outran the police in the state where they had just robbed a bank in order to cross the border into the adjacent one where they had no jurisdiction.

On a less violent note, crossing the border from New York, Pennsylvania, or Delaware into New Jersey means that not only do you not have to pump your own gas, but that you’re not allowed to. You’re welcome to come in, you’re welcome to stay, but if you pick up that gas pump yourself, you’re violating their hazardous materials handling law, and can be fined.

And then there’s our big friend to the north…Canada. Let’s not even talk about the border between them and us, I want to talk about some of their internal borders…the ones between Quebec and “the rest of Canada.” The moment you enter Quebec from Ontario or any of the other neighboring provinces, you become aware of the fact that you are definitely “someplace else.” This is because while English and French are both official languages of Canada, Quebec is the only province where French is the predominant one. Crossing the border into Quebec means that you’re in a place where the descendants of the original French settlers get to make the rules, and they make the rules to try to preserve their culture. The Quebec border isn’t about keeping anyone out, it’s about saying that this is a place where they are...well...more French than the French.

And looking at the borders in this way explains a lot. The border between the United States and Canada wasn’t drawn as a defensible border against attacks and “furriners” coming in. It was drawn to say “This belongs to Great Britain and this belongs to the Yanks.” People were welcome to travel freely in either direction, but the rules were different once you crossed from one side to another. The same with Mexico; it was simply about saying “this is yours and this is ours,” and not about trying to create a border that we could prevent people from crossing. When they were created, these borders were seen of as being not much different than the ones between Pennsylvania and Ohio or Utah and Nevada…or Ontario and Quebec; just on a larger scale. But somewhere along the line we got the idea that these borders were always about keeping people out.

Perhaps need to rethink that.

Redskins...It's Complicated

I’m a little behind on my NPR listening…as usual. I just finished listening to a piece from October 31 on whether or not the name Redskins was psychologically damaging. And at that point, after having thought about it before, I decided to do a little research. You see, the people pushing for the Washington team to change its name say that no team should have a name that’s an ethnic slur. But my question is “was that word always an ethnic slur, or have times and sensibilities simply changed?”

And let’s face it, times have changed a lot. I’ve been watching a six-hour documentary on the musical theater in America, called Broadway, and one of the things it mentions early on was that in the days of vaudeville, ethnic jokes were popular not so much to make fun of “those other people,” but because most of the people going to see the shows were immigrants, and the jokes about them made them part of America. They were included in the humor. And watching a lot of old Fleischer cartoons from the 1930s, you can see that. Jokes that we would think now were horribly insensitive, and especially accent jokes, were just part of the shtick.

With this in mind, we need to think about the term and the team name Redskins. A little history shows that the Washington team originally played in Boston as the Boston Braves, starting in 1932. But when they moved over to Fenway Park the next year, they became the Redskins. One version of the story says that this was in deference to one of the coaches who claimed to be part Sioux. Another possibility is that since Fenway was the home of the Red Sox in baseball, it should be the home of the Red Skins in football.

But the question remains: was the term always offensive, or have times simply changed?

In 1992 Clarence Page wrote the following in the Chicago Tribune:

[The Washington Redskins] are the only big time professional sports team whose name is an unequivocal racial slur. After all, how would we react if the team was named the Washington Negroes? Or the Washington Jews? ... It is more than just a racial reference, it is a racial epithet.

However, “negro,” while seriously outdated, was never a slur. And if you’re going to talk about naming a team the Jews, then we really need to talk about the Boston Celtics and the Minnesota Vikings. It would be much different if the team was called the Washington N*****s or the K***s. But no one, not even in their most insensitive moment, would’ve ever thought to use those as team names. While those terms may have been thrown around thoughtlessly by bigoted people, very few people would’ve thought to use them so publicly. Those words were such obvious ethnic slurs that they were beyond the pale.

But “redskins?”

I’ll be the first to admit that perhaps this word always was a slur, or seen as such by Native Americans, and most of us just didn’t know it until relatively recently. Or…it could be that this new feeling toward and old term came about as a result of the RedPower movement of the late 1960s, in which case a solution to this issue isn’t quite so simple.

Most people who support the use of Native American imagery and mascots for sports teams do so on the grounds that they believe they’re honoring their traditions of courage, dignity, and leadership…not to mention their fighting skills…and don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to be “honored” in this way. They also don’t understand why they can’t be allowed to have as much fun with their mascots as other teams do.

It's tough.

There may be a solution though. There is a people known for their courage, dignity, leadership...and especially their fighting skills. And no one would catch any flak for stereotyping them or desecrating their traditions. It wouldn’t be offensive to anyone. In fact, I think that Washington would gain a whole new fan base if they changed their name to represent this group.

Of course…they’d have to get the permission of Paramount Pictures first. But it’s the perfect name.

Can’t you just see it now…the Washington Klingons.

A Most Inappropriate Song

So last week I started out talking about a friend who wondered if anyone really liked Spike Jones’s All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth, and I ended promising to tell you this week about a really inappropriate Christmas song that you’ll even hear sung in churches. But before I do that, I just want to devote a little time to a song that just grates on me.

Last Christmas.

My daughter says that had the words to this song been “Last August I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away…” it would’ve died a nice quiet death, and been forgotten by most of us. But because George Michael was smart enough (or evil enough) to put the word “Christmas” in it, he’s been raking in the royalties every December since 1984, as just about everyone who’s ever held a microphone has recorded a version of it.

And the really annoying thing is that this song is an earworm. It just has one of those tunes that you can’t stop humming, no matter how much you hate the song.

But enough about that, I want to get to that inappropriate song.

It started out simply enough, with a poem. A poem that Placide Cappeau, a local wine merchant and poet, had written at the request of his parish priest for the Christmas mass. But as he finished the piece, he decided that this was more than a beautiful poem; it had the potential to be a beautiful song. However, since he wasn’t a musician himself, he asked one of his friends for help. This friend happened to be one Adolphe Adam, a well-known composer of orchestral works.

However beautiful the words to this poem were, it presented a special set of problems for Adam. For you see, coming from a Jewish family, it was for a day he didn’t celebrate and about a man he didn’t believe was the son of God. Nevertheless, he set Cappeau’s beautiful words to an equally beautiful melody, and was performed three weeks later at the Christmas Eve mass.

The song was an immediate hit, spreading from Cappeau’s small town and becoming one of the most beloved songs in France. And then everything hit the fan. It began when Cappeau walked away from the church and joined the socialist movement. It got worse when church leaders discovered that Adam was Jewish. That was enough to cause them to start denouncing the song as unfit for use in church services because of its “lack of musical taste” and “total absence of the spirit of religion.” Seems to me that they were really arguing over its “pedigree” than any issues of musical taste or religious spirit.

That was really too bad, because even though it had been banned from use in church, the French people continued to sing it in their homes anyway, and it took on a life of its own.

In 1855, Unitarian minister and publisher John Sullivan Dwight published an English version of the forbidden French song here in the United States, where the abolitionist sentiments of the third verse made it particularly popular in the North during the Civil War, and is now one of the most popular Christmas songs in the world.

What song is this that was once deemed inappropriate for church use, but can now be heard in churches around the world on Christmas Eve? Perhaps the fact that it was written in France already gave it away. Perhaps it was the name Adolphe Adam that did it for you. And if you still don’t know what the song is, I’ll tell you.

It’s Cantique de Noël, or as we say in English, O Holy Night.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that a particular piece of music is inappropriate for church. Time may well prove them wrong.

Regular Christmas Music?

It started with a post from one of my Facebook friends, asking if anyone actually likes Spike Jones Christmas songs.

One person responded that he’d never heard of him, another said that he loves them, and remembered listening to them on Dr Demento. To that, my friend responded that maybe that’s where they belonged, instead of being mixed in with the “regular Christmas music.”

Well…if you know anything about me and music, you know that that got my brain spinning. Keep it with Dr Demento instead of mixing it in with the “regular Christmas music?” Oh my…the brings up the question of what is “regular Christmas music.” It also brings up the issue of the extreme segmentation of radio over the past 30 years.

You see, there once was a time when what was known as Top 40 Radio played a little of everything. If it was a big enough hit, you were likely to hear songs by The Beatles, The Supremes, Dean Martin, Patsy Cline and Allan Sherman on the same station. That’s right, what we call “novelty songs” were part of the regular mix of music played. That was until the advent of FM Radio and all of its added frequencies made it possible to narrowcast to very specific audiences, giving us the Pop station, Soft Rock station, the Hard Rock station, the Soul station, the Easy Listening station, the Jazz station, the Country station…and one two-hour radio show on Sunday nights, devoted to novelty songs.

All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth was a big hit for Spike Jones in 1948; once again, back when novelty songs were played as part of the regular mix of music. The novelty song I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas was a hit for Gayla Peevy in 1953. And then there’s the Christmas novelty song of all Christmas novelty songs, 1958’s The Chipmunk Song by Alvin and the Chipmunks. With that being one of the first records I remember, I challenge anyone to tell me that The Chipmunk Song is not only not a regular Christmas song, but that it should only ever be played on Dr Demento’s show. And what of the McKenzie Brothers version of The 12 Days of Christmas from 1981?

No…as I look at the list of songs I have in my playlist of Christmas favorites, even though Spike Jones and Gayla Peevy didn’t make the cut for me, their recordings deserve a spot in the category of “regular Christmas music” along with Alvin and other artists such as John Denver and the Muppets, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole, The Four Seasons, Manheim Steamroller, Burl Ives, Brenda Lee, Harry Connick Jr, The Roches, The Drifters, Vince Guaraldi, Barry Manilow, Paul Young, the Bowker Brothers, John Tesh, The Barenaked Ladies, Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, The Ronnettes, and of course Bing Crosby.

But now that I’m thinking about this, I gotta ask…does anyone really like Last Christmas?

Next week I’ll tell you about a totally inappropriate Christmas song that you'll hear even in churches.