The Real McCoy

I have absolutely no business writing a blog post right now; I've got a talk to finish for tomorrow night and notes to write for a presentation next week, but I couldn't let the day pass without saying something about the passing of Law & Order. If you know me, and if you happen to be a reader of this fine but lately neglected blog, then you know that one of my favorite pastimes is passing the time with my favorite fictional New York City detectives. In fact, my personal concept of God - if I am indeed created in Her image - is a vision of a vibrant, full-figured, thoughtful and creative woman who often retires to the couch with a carton of cold lo mein and a DVR full of Briscoe and Green.

I was a regular from the beginning. Mainly because I found myself, in 1990, away from New York and everyone and everything I loved. I was one of those kids who went away to college because everyone else was doing it. But I was homesick as hell, and hating every moment of my academic and social life at Delaware. Law & Order gave me a chance to go home for an hour every week. Even more so, because my dad, as many of you know, was a retired NYC detective. Every Thursday morning of the regular season (and even some repeats) from the show's premiere until his death in 2005, my dad would call me to discuss, recap and rate the episode.

Some of them were direct plot links to cases he worked on (the one featuring the murder of a violinist from the "Manhattan Symphony Orchestra" comes to mind), while others were cases that his friends worked. And some, as he said, were just plain bullshit, made up by writers who didn't know jack about police procedure. "If you're going to write, Ann," he'd say the morning after a particularly unsatisfying episode, "get your facts straight. Don't make it up. Ask people who know." My dad always chuckled at Adam Schiff, remembering his own days working for Robert Morgenthau in the DA's office on the Detective Task Force, his last assignment. And there was plenty of insider language that made the show real to us both. Whenever I heard terms like DD-5, Jade Squad, Molyneux and Miranda, it felt like home.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I was homesick at Delaware was because after I expressed an interest in applying to NYU, my father, that very Detective First Grade from Manhattan South, whose stint as a member of the Sixth Precinct put him smack in the middle of Greenwich Village in the late 70s, gave me my own personal tour of the campus. "Yeah, I investigated five or six murders here," he said confidingly, as we walked together through Washington Square Park, munching hot pretzels from the vendor cart. "One of them was a castration with pliers. That was pretty bad. Then there was the serial rapist on Jane Street. He got more than twenty women before we were able to make an arrest. Then you've got the drug dealers on West Fourth. And of course, the underground bomb factory on MacDougal. Yep. Tough town," he said, brushing the salt from his fingers. And before I knew it, I was a freshman in Newark, Delaware, on a campus known more for its chemistry labs than its meth labs.

As the years progressed, and changes were made to the cast, my dad usually had a comment or two about it. DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest) was a bleeding heart liberal loser who'd never get re-elected. Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm) was an idiot who wouldn't have lasted three minutes in the DAs office. Fontana? Guy's a crooked cop. And the plot line about McCoy and Kincaid was too much of a soap opera. He just wanted to see good cases in the hands of competent actors. The passing of Jerry Orbach, just a few months before his own death, was hard for us both. Faced with seeing the names of his friends, one by one, appearing in the obituary column of The Gold Shield newsletter he got every month, the departure of Detective Briscoe was a reminder of times gone by, of an era that had passed - of the institutional memory of a department he served giving way to a new era of detectives who were younger, tech-savvy, and sometimes even female.

I'd always been a loyal viewer, but following the events in the fall of 2001, I became something of a junkie. My dad didn't love the 9/11 story lines all that much. "Too political," he'd say on the phone on Thursday morning. "I don't mind Fred Thompson, but Dick Wolf is trying too hard." I, on the other hand, loved seeing my own experience of the city where I worked and commuted and panicked on a regular basis. The 9/11 story lines never felt exploitative to me. They made me feel as if I wasn't alone.

One night in 2005, a few months after my father died, when I still wasn't quite used to the sound of the silent phone on Thursday morning, I was having dinner on the West Side with a friend of mine, when Sam Waterston walked into the restaurant. He looked exactly the same as he did on the show: jacket slung over one shoulder, heavy brows, kind smile. He was seated with three other people at the table next to mine. Now, I'm not a fangirl, but my heart was seriously palpitating at the sight of one of my character heroes. I remember wanting to say that I loved the show, that it was, in many ways, what had gotten me through 9/11, what was getting me through the loss of my dad. That it was a comfort to me to know that the fight for justice still went on, even if it was fictional. But I didn't say anything at all. As we got up to leave, I looked back at him just as I was about to walk out the door. He looked up at me and smiled. It was enough.

I know that the show will live on in reruns, and that the sixty seven episodes on my DVR should be well enough to keep me going for quite some time. I even know that I haven't been the most loyal viewer for the past couple of seasons. Once it left the Wednesday 10PM time slot, it was hard to find; I didn't know these new detectives; I was baffled by some of the story lines. And I knew I could always find the comforting ones - the old school episodes - on TNT. As the show slid into jepoardy every season, and the press picked up the story, I became aware that I was part of a coterie of smart, cool women who were completely addicted to L&O. And I always knew that the cancellation was coming. Even I, for so many years a regular in the squad room, thought that it was going downhill fast.

And now the time has come. As the prayer book - and George Harrison - tells us: all things must pass. All that lives must die. My father's L&O seasons - fifteen in all - still remind me of what it was like to be a child of the NYPD, of what those stories and cases and trials meant to him and to me. That the people were represented by two separate, but equally important groups - the police, who investigate crimes, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. That their stories were our stories. And that "justice, justice, you shall pursue" wasn't just a hollow saying. That pursuing justice is serious business, no matter what sort of wisecracks got cracked in the process. That doing the right thing wasn't a joke. "If I were joking," said Detective Lenny Briscoe, "I'd be wearing a fez, and no pants."

The Wailing Wall of Facebook and My First Anti-Semite!

I'm the first to admit that sometimes, especially as a Jew by Choice, I take my Jewish identity a little too seriously. Anyone who knows me through my temple could tell you that: I serve on seven different committees (down from eight last year); I'm a member of the board of trustees, a regular at Shabbat services and at the Torah study table on Saturday mornings. More than even my Jewish identity, however, I'm a huge advocate for Interfaith bridge building. Why? Because this is where I come from, as an interfaith kid. To that end, I teach a session on conversion and interfaith Outreach for every student taking Intro to Judaism through the Union for Reform Judaism in NYC. I even did a stint as a Jewish educator for the Interfaith Community of New York. I'm even a twice-trained Schindler Outreach Fellow for my congregation, which means that I work with people in the process of conversion, and with families where there is never going to be a conversion, to help integrate people into life at our temple.

And life at our temple is pretty sweet. It's a home for a lot of wonderful people I know, both Jewish and not Jewish. That's why we were selected to host a weekend for 15 rabbinic students from the Reform seminary campuses in New York and Cincinnati. I think the students had a great time with us. I think some of them had their worlds turned upside down. And I think that we, as a congregation, were not exactly what they expected.

Imagine a sanctuary where people of many diverse faiths come together in a place we all call home for a great Shabbat celebration on Friday night. Where I read Torah in honor of dozens of families who not only raise intelligent and sensitive Jewish children, but families where the parents themselves are wonderfully connected and involved in their own right. Where temple leaders, both Jewish and Christian, stand on the bimah to share their journeys of faith and open-mindedness. A place where I taught not only is conversion not for everyone, but it's not even remotely a requirement. Because our central prayer, "You shall love the Lord your G-d" begins with the same Hebrew grammar construction as the commandment, "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The one thing I hoped the students would take away from this weekend was that loving the stranger brings us closer to G-d - and that loving the stranger is not conditional on them joining the tribe.

It was a wonderful weekend. My highlight was having the opportunity to facilitate a panel with four of our temple community's teenagers, where they answered questions from the students in such an amazingly articulate way that I wanted to get up and cheer. They told truths to the students that I would be too intimidated to admit. That before my conversion, I always referred to myself as half Christian and half Jewish, because it made life easier, and I didn't want to be disconnected from either side of my heritage. And when two of those young women, raised as Jews, admitted to still really liking Christmas, because it is a family holiday and, as one said, "You HAVE to love Christmas!" it was as if I was getting to talk out loud, too.

The weekend, as one might imagine, took a huge amount of work to put together. Housing the students. Making sure they arrived safely. Providing transportation. Arranging all the meals. Getting people to host Shabbat dinners. Making sure various medical issues, dietary restrictions, and pet allergies were taken into account. I had a fabulous, energetic, awesome committee who gave me all the help I needed and more. But let me tell you, by the time it was over - and it was over early due to a huge storm that knocked power out at the temple - I was exhausted.

Maybe that's why I didn't answer as nicely as I could have when a Facebook friend - a former neighbor in my old building in Larchmont - sent me a message this morning, asking (not for the first time) why I keep my Facebook wall private. Now, I do this for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that some time ago, someone innocently posted something on my Wall that contained some bad language. This doesn't really bother me, really, but at the time I was working at a company where my Facebook was under scrutiny much of the time. It was a post you wouldn't want impacting your professional life. So I deleted it and made my Wall private from that point on.

This friend, who as I said was a former neighbor, is definitely a little - not really sure how to say it - OK. Crazy. When I lived across the hall from her, she would stalk me after work, when I got home, and spend hours upon hours talking about herself, herself, herself, her life, her love problems, her family problems - more information than you'd really want to know in a lifetime. She seemed to be in conflict with a lot of people - most of her stories were about fights she was having in the various relationships in her life. And honestly, it was 2002, working in downtown NYC, and I was having enough problems of my own.

It wasn't a real friendship. Rarely did she ask, or care, what was going on with me. She just thought, because we were near the same age, and single, and living on the same floor in the same building, that I was her best buddy. And this went on for months. I could never really get away from her because she'd listen for the elevator, or my key in the door, and she'd come into the hallway and start in. It was the nightmare neighbor scenario from every bad 70s sitcom. One night, after a really long day, I got home and true to form, she came yammering out into the hallway, yakking away, and I told her that I really needed some down time, and to be on my own. That I just. Couldn't. Listen. Right. Now.

This was apparently a bad thing to do. From that moment, the tantrums started. Yelling. Screaming, Slammed doors. Hostile notes shoved under my door. Emails telling me that I was a bad, horrible, selfish person who deserved to be alone and a workaholic. That I was a bad friend and never listened to her problems. That someone with her problems deserved sympathy and I was an even worse person for victimizing someone with all the life-stress she had. I have to say that as hurtful as her words were, I didn't really care. I was just relieved to finally have some quiet. It wasn't like the loss of a real friend that hurts you in your heart. It was a relief.

Turn the clock forward to 2009, about seven years later, when she finds me on Facebook.

At first all was fine. What is Facebook, anyway, but a way to keep certain people in your life, and others at a distance. I approved her as a friend, figuring what the hell. We didn't live in the same place anymore.

It immediately started. The crazy comments on my posts, the constant stream of narcissistic and silly posts from her in my news feed. One night, she decided to pick a fight with one of my friends in a comment thread. Before my REAL friend got into it with her, I hastily scrawled an email: Back off - not worth it - this one's a nut job.

Which brings me to today's message: why do I keep my Wall private? She wants to post some pictures of the new Don Draper Mattel Doll. Ha! Ha! LOL! LMAO! and whatever other stupid hysterical internet abbreviations you can imagine. Anyway, after this weekend of pure hard work and intense spiritual seeking, I was tired. Really f-ing tired. So I wrote back: I just like to keep my Wall private. It's that simple. Hope you are staying warm and dry.

This was apparently another bad thing to do.

I will now quote from her response:

You can keep your rude comments to myself, my mother is in the fucking hospital and has major surgery scheduled - How fucking DARE you respond to me in that manner - "It's that simple" - How's THIS - You are blatantly and offensively anti-Christian and anti-Catholic in your pro-Jew rhetoric that NOBODY cares about or wants to HEAR on Facebook!! .... Consider yourself blocked.

And one minute later:

Typo: Keep your comments to YOURSELF, not myself.
I was so infuriated, I cannot even TYPE straight. It's THAT simple. Resentful witch.


And so, a supreme irony. I spent this whole weekend teaching Outreach - a culmination of years of hard work, of trying to help people feel more at home at my temple regardless of their faith. A weekend advocating for the non-Jewish journeys of faith in my own home congregation. And being told that I am offensively pro-Jewish and anti-Christian. If it weren't so stupid, I'd laugh. And if I weren't so tired, I probably wouldn't have let it make me cry. But I did.

I think - hell, I know - that I'm exhausted. But the words, "pro-Jew rhetoric" gave me pause. I looked back on my Facebook page, and sure, there are links to stories in the Jewish press, Shabbat greetings, things going on in my temple. But it certainly isn't there to convert anyone, or make any of my Christian, Catholic, or Pagan friends feel weird or excluded. I mean, damn - half the time the people responding to my typical Friday night Shabbat shalom are my friends of other faiths. And much of the time, the stories I post are ones that are critical of stuff going on in the Jewish community.

So what does a person do when she finds out she was connected by Facebook to someone who clearly has a lot of anti-Jewish hostility brewing beneath her surface? I don't know. But I think back to this past Friday night, when I lifted my voice in a duet on the bimah with my first Temple friend, not Jewish like I was when I first arrived at my congregational home. Or of my friend Jill, who spoke about her connection to our community not in spite of - but because of her deep Christian faith. Or of all my Jewish friends from Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, cultural and secular backgrounds. How different we all are. And how, in the end, it doesn't matter. What this person distinctly does not share with my friends is a sense of humanity. No one whom I trust, no one with whom I actually want to hang out or spend time, online or in person, is as full of conflict and hostility and hate as she is.

So what I'm trying to focus on is how I am really bound to all of my friends by something even better than sharing a faith in common: by the fact that we're all human and decent and trying to make a good life for ourselves and the people we care about. And that we all try to be good people. And maybe that's the lesson of Outreach for me this weekend.

I did respond to the horrible emails I received, and I was honest. I said that I was deeply hurt and sad by what she said about my faith, and that her emails brought me to tears. I also said that I hoped her mother would recover and that she herself would find the strength and grace and wisdom to care for her.

And my final hope for her is, in the illustrious words of my people: a meshugenem zol men oysshraybn un dikh araynshraybn.

Prologue


Save yourself, the plotlines and narratives and trajectories of the bestsellers crowding my night table earnestly urge in sweet, seductive whispers from their pastel-colored covers. And now, I am a typical reader: a casualty of intention and expectation, a woman shaking off a bad fall. Maybe I’m like someone you know: someone who believed she held all the answers until the day a bouquet of questions was delivered to her hospital room. And now I’m guilty of reading every one of these damn memoirs of reclaimed self-esteem, trying to figure out what just happened and what I'm supposed to do next. I’ve become a sucker for self-improvement, a postulant of positive messaging.

For someone living out her own cautionary tale, someone who started out on a pedestal of righteous good intentions and wound up crying herself sick and half-dead in a restroom off the New Jersey Turnpike, these books more than fit the bill, with their messages of salvation through cookbooks and ashrams and poems composed in serene Italian gardens. And like most parables, all of these stories come with a similar, simplistic message. Save yourself. Find yourself. Reclaim your soul from darkness and despair. Shine your light and proclaim your Truth from the hilltops, from the mountaintops, from your desktops and your laptops.

With time now to catch up on my reading, friends bring books by on a regular basis. I can’t help but notice that the covers of these stories I’ve been reading lately resemble nothing so much as board books– those chunky volumes meant to capture the attention of pre-verbal infants. By contrast, the young adult books lent to me by my young cousins and nieces are a coven of black covers adorned with gothic typefaces and distorted images of blossoms and flames and waterfalls in intense shades of orange and vermillion and ocean blue. The message of this phenomenon is that the next generation is valiantly protecting the world from supernatural forces. Women like me are merely trying to appease the demons they have created for themselves.

Like me, my favorite heroines start out in early pages weeping in places just as undignified as the Grover Cleveland Service Area – in a subway car, on the bathroom floor, just prior to the second act of Tosca, during the dessert course of an elaborate dinner party complete with wine pairings. A picaresque journey ensues, and by the time one reaches the acknowledgements and the book group guide at the end, my vicarious self has shed her dead-end job / fears about marriage / fears about motherhood / fears about Life Itself. Invariably, she has either jetted off to Asia to procure ancient wisdom, courageously cooked her own weight in artisanal butter, or bravely sets and raises her chin as she accepts the weight of a newborn or two nestled into her blessed, benevolent arms.

I, like so many other women my age, reach for one dog-eared volume or an interchangeable other in that final quiet hour of the day before sleep. We read along and imagine ourselves returning our table trays to the upright position, anticipating the descent into the foreign city that will lead us to our true selves. We picture ourselves at the stove, the wooden spoon at ease in our fingertips and the nutty aroma of browned butter and sautéed leeks filling the air as we embrace our destinies of home and hearth.

In the hour that transitions us from doing to dreaming, we try to reconcile our true potential with our deep fatigue; the equations of work and love and memory and independence relentlessly resolving and unresolving themselves with imperfect symmetry. We attune our ears to that distant melody, the song of self-salvation.

But until now, I have never been particularly interested in saving myself. I wanted to save the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I had found it. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a detective. In our house, fighting injustices – of crime, of poverty, of ignorance – was as normal as pouring the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was all I ever knew. I never for even one moment imagined that going out into the world, armed only with a talent for words and intentions of doing good, would do me no good whatsoever.

Now I know differently. Like my sisters in literature, I, too, have done my time on the bathroom floor; I know the feel of white tiles cold against my cheeks. Like them, I believed the old biblical saw: those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Something in me could never believe in a world so unjust, or a God so cruel, that those who sow in tears could actually reap a harvest that only brings forth more tears.

But I am not one of those heroines. And this is not one of those stories.