Editor’s Desk: What endures beyond the news | Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

Editor’s Desk: What endures beyond the news

   What a year 5775 has been — and not just because its numbers form a palindrome, reading the same forwards and backwards.

   This year has contained striking Wisconsin community activities. They have included:

   • the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s exhibit “Stitching History from the Holocaust,” which attracted attention nationally and internationally;

   • a huge Economic Forum sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation;

   • changes of rabbinical leadership at Congregations Shalom and Emanu-El of Waukesha;

   • the Jewish Community Relations Council of the MJF reporting a rise in local anti-Semitic incidents by more than 150 percent;

   • the defeat of a boycott-divestment-sanctions resolution against Israel at Marquette University;

   • and much more that you will see in this issue’s Year in Review section.

   And the whole Jewish year seems locally to climax with two events: The 2015 JCC Maccabi Games in August organized here by the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center (see pages 30-31 for photos); and, going on as you read this in the beginning of this month, the MJF mission to Poland.

   It has also been a huge year for national issues. As I write, the U.S. Jewish community, the country as a whole and Israel are debating vehemently the nuclear energy agreement with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration and several European countries.

   In addition, the country is dealing with the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding “same sex marriage,” a decision that many claim has implications for religious freedom. And, of course, the U.S. presidential election of 2016 is already underway, with a horse-race of candidates working toward party nominations more than a year in advance of the national conventions.

   And internationally, a wave of anti-Semitic agitation and attacks in Europe has been making Jews there and around the world wonder if those communities have a future in that region.

   Many of these developments are going to continue to make news into and through 5776. And that is precisely why I don’t want to talk about any of them in this column for our High Holidays issue.

   Rather, I am going to suggest that Chronicle readers do something that the great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza discussed in his “On the Improvement of the Understanding” — seek beyond transient news events to things that are, or at least seem to be, “eternal and infinite.”

   My own favorite of these is music, and an event toward the end of 5775 reminded me of that. In July, Theodore Bikel died after 91 years of one of the richest Jewish lives ever lived.

   Much of the world celebrated his acting in theater, movies and television; and others mentioned his political activism. For me, Bikel primarily was one of the stars of the great folk music revival that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. And this folk music wasn’t just American. Bikel, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers and many others were presenting music of many countries and cultures — including Yiddish, Sephardic and Israeli — long before “world music” became a classification.

   I grew up listening to that music and it has never really left me. I have moved beyond it to a primary interest in Western classical music, from the medieval Master Perotin to modern American Steve Reich. But even there, I have retained a particular fondness for composers who based their classical styles on, or made use of, folk music, from Renaissance masters like Guillaume Dufay through Romantic nationalists like Antonin Dvorak to modernists like Aaron Copland.

   Such tunes and styles seem to have what another creative person (I forget who offhand) called “the smell of the earth,” an appeal to something foundational in my and many other people’s senses and minds. Above all, this music seems to say that human-shaped sounds can reach beyond all cultural and political boundaries, all transient news of elections and conflicts, to something that all humans have shared since we began.

   Of course, music may not do this for everyone. But surely for nearly all individuals, there is something that, as British nationalist composer Ralph Vaughan Williams put it, can “stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty.” May you find and enjoy yours in the coming year and beyond. Shanah tovah.