Ken Bresler
|
||
I first met Dick and Sherry in 1975. I was a high school senior, a
musician in a youth orchestra sponsored by the New England Conservatory of
Music, about to leave on a concert tour of Moscow and Leningrad. I was
preparing to meet refuseniks, Soviet Jews who had been refused exit visas.
As part of my preparation, I was sent to Dick and Sherry, who lived a
few blocks away.
Dick - and Sherry, too, if I remember correctly - had visited the
Soviet Union shortly before. Among the many refuseniks they had met was a
woman about my age. She had showed her ceramics to them. Dick and Sherry,
in turn, showed me photographs of the ceramics. They included a monkey
wearing a commissar's cap with a Red Star.
The ceramic figures reminded Dick and Sherry of Maurice Sendak's
illustrations in Where the Wild Things Are. They asked me
to take a copy of Sendak's book as a gift to this young woman. (You couldn't
count on refuseniks receiving letters or packages through the mail.)
After the airplane landed in Moscow, I was nervous while going through
customs. In my luggage, I carried a Russian-Hebrew siddur, a Jewish
calendar in Russian, and Jewish trinkets. I had one or two pairs of extra
blue jeans, which were valued enough in the Soviet Union that refuseniks,
who were almost always fired from their jobs for applying to emigrate, could
sell them and live on the proceeds for a short time. The only thing I had
for refuseniks that I didn't fear would get confiscated or get me in trouble
was Maurice Sendak's book from Dick and Sherry.
I delivered the book to the recipient, although not face-to-face. I
never met her or her family. But I got to meet Dick and Sherry early in my
life.
One message I derived from Dick and Sherry's mission for me is that Jews
need more than religious sustenance, financial sustenance, contact with
other Jews, and freedom. We need art and literature too. Another message:
Children's art and literature are not childish things.
***
I presented a drash once in the Newton Centre Minyan, asking that we
interpret certain harsh passages in the Torah less than literally.
Dick's stated his disagreement simply. He said something like, "You want
G-d to be a gentleman, but He is not."
***
When I ran for state representative in 1998, my campaign conducted only
two coffee hours for me to meet voters. We quit after two, because the
coffee hours took an enormous amount of resources and only half a dozen
voters showed up for each one.
Well, bless Dick and Sherry. They came to my second coffee. Maybe it
was their sense of civic duty; they wanted to actually hear a candidate
speak before making up their minds. Maybe they had already decided to
support me politically, and came to show their support.
Maybe they sensed how scared and stressed I was, and, paradoxically, in
that very public process, how isolated I was, and they wanted to be there
for me. Of all the other things that they could have been doing, they
attended my coffee.
***
Did you ever ask Dick for a source, and get the answer on photocopies,
the reverse sides of which were scrap paper? It happened to me a couple of
times.
The scrap paper consisted of different shades of white and near-white. You
could almost track his life from the scrap-paper side, such as notices from
alumni groups and Hillel fliers. I wish I could put my hands on an example.
One side of the photocopy was profound; one side, profane. One side was
timeless; the other side, out-of-date, sometimes by years. One side
destined for the geniza, the repository of holy writings; one side,
deserving of the recycling bin, but also destined for the geniza because of
its inextricable link to the holy.
It was startling at first. Who else re-used scrap paper like this? But
then it was marvelous, in so many ways that it is hard to discern the
message from the meta-message, the footnote from the annotation.
Dick might have said something like: "We live in the tension between
the two sides of the paper." One message of the recopied scrap paper seemed
to be the same as the Sendak-book-as-gift: Jews do not live by Judaism
alone. There is a temporal world to live in.
Another message: Be a guardian of the earth.
With his committed and inspired act, Dick taught that a clean world is
more important than clean photocopies. A beautiful world is more important
than what the modern business world defines as beautiful documents.
These double-sided documents were beautiful. They exhibited respect for
a formerly living thing, just as kashrut does. If you're going to kill
trees and animals, treat them right.
The recopied copies were a modern variation of a palimpsest, a parchment
whose writing is erased to make way for new text. Dick once wrote a
wonderful article on how the photocopier revolutionized Jewish study.
Before the widespread availability of photocopying, a group of Jews often
studied a text using a single copy. Dick's re-use paid tribute to trees and
technology.
And Dick's message behind the meta-messages: We can imbue every act
with a higher purpose.
***
I know that we experience different kinds of love: Love for spouses is
different than love for children. Love for parents is different than love
for grandparents. And so on.
I suspect that we also experience different kinds of grief. I'm grieving
for a teacher and role model.
Ken Bresler, July 26, 2000