On My Mind

Littering Hallowed Ground

Cemetery Litter

This is the time of the year when many of us go visit cemeteries to connect to our loved ones.
Over the past year I’ve been hearing quite a few comments on the care and maintenance of some of the older Jewish cemeteries in the area.
We are always aware of the Jewish tradition of picking up a stone and placing it on the grave.
I would also like to suggest that if we see a piece of litter, a bottle or a can that’s been disregarded on this hallowed land, please go ahead and pick it up and take it home for disposal if no trash can is available.
It’s a small item, I know. But it just drives me so crazy when I see just simple things that can be done at the cemetery.
Next year, it is my intention to take a look at some of the older Jewish cemeteries, to walk through the areas and give us all a status report on what condition eternity looks like.
For now, though, bend over and pick up the piece of trash you might see. There’s enough hand disinfectant for sale at the store to go around for all. So, place a stone on your loved one’s grave. Place the litter in your pocket.
We’ll “talk” more about this in the future.

Dixon, Mitchell Need To Sit On This Lady’s Front Porch

Several years ago, my family and were staying over night in a motel along Rte. 80 between Detroit and Baltimore. My children were little at the time, and it was a Saturday night.
In the room below us, a party was going on. The noise was so loud it sounded as if it was in the room with us. No doubt, there was drinking, and goodness knows what else.
Now, this motel is a chain of high reputation in this country. So at about midnight, I went downstairs to the night manager and complained. The night manager, annoyed at my complaint, offered me another room.
I responded:
“Why should I be the one who has to move? I’m not doing anything wrong. Why shouldn’t the people below be asked to move…out of the motel.”
He didn’t have the courage to honor my request, and by 3 a.m., the noise subsided.
So I read in today’s Baltimore Sun about a woman from Waverly who has had it with the drug activity in her neighborhood. A home owner, she has actually confronted the young men who were hanging out outside of her home.
So now, they are in police protection. Their house has been vandalized and someone wrote “rat (expletive) on their front porch. The woman called police, and now she has to worry about her own safety.
Mayor Dixon; Councilman Mitchell, please.
While you’re running around the city talking about crime and education, you should be sitting on this woman’s front porch staring down these thugs. This IS NOT THEIR CITY! For us to begin to take the streets back from these thugs, our leaders need to stand up to them, sometimes in person.
This woman in Waverly, all she wants is a nice place to live, a neighborhood where her children can play outside and not worry about gangs and bums.
Go their Madam Mayor. Go there challenger Mitchell.
This woman shouldn’t have to leave her home.
But these directionless thugs, should be taken out and kept out.
They don’t belong in her neighborhood.

Hardly Green

Look, I’m not trying to paint myself as any sort of environmentalist.
It tickles me, though, when I read stories in our local newspapers and then I see what I see while I’m walking to shul on Shabbat.
There’s this obvious and worthy push towards the “greening” of Baltimore. It’s almost become a cause of righteousness among the printed media here.
Certainly the area’s major media are covering this and probably it wouldn’t take long to find some sort of editorial support backing these efforts.
But here’s what I see, and I know many of us see on our way to shul.
I see the plastic yellow, white or blue binding plastic used to bind stacks of newspapers. Only I don’t see them in trash cans. Instead, they are on front lawns, dangling on the sewer grates or just sitting pretty blatantly in the street.
A couple of years ago while working on a CHAI-sponsored Neighborgood Day, I worked in the Western Run creek. Ranking second behind discarded bottles and cans were strips and strips of these plastic binders. I mean I don’t think they were choking off the movement of the stream. But the local newspaper delivery people chose to use the stream as a dumping point for the materials. The materials were wrapped around rocks and tangled among branches.
But there’s more.
The very paper that we get on our doorstep is bagged in a yellow bag. The bags are attached to a cardboard handle that can hang on their car rearview mirrors. Slip the paper in the bag and toss it on the front lawn. Fine.
When the bags are used up, guess what often happens to the leftover yellow plastic and the cardboard handles.
They end up in the street as well.
It’s so blatant that there are often three or four of these handles just dumped on the corner.
I know it’s a small issue. But our local daily newspapers aren’t helping. If anyone would ask the editors of these papers, they’d probably be the first to say that they believe in a sound environment. Truth is, I doubt many of them even know that the remnants of getting their publications to their readers are being littered all over the community. But as you are walking in your communities, be it for exercise or for a walk to shul on Shabbos, count how many of these pieces of plastic you see.
Maybe call the local dailies and let them know.
Before we can be green, we’ve got to be clean.
Deliver the news.
But do it without leaving us to deal with your trash.

Real Talk

When I was a senior at Northwestern High School in 1971, I was taking a class called “Modern Problems.” The teacher was a marvelous man by the name of Mr. Grant. I don’t remember his first name.
There were two great parts of his class. One, the class reflected the demographics of the school at that time. It was about half Jewish from the adjacent neighborhoods and half black, with black students coming in from as far away as Cherry Hill. The black kids traveled long distances to get to Northwestern because it was a new school, and a good school.
What I loved the most of this class was that we would talk to one another. I mean really “talk” to each other.
We had classmates who had babies. I remember the courage it took for the Jewish kids to ask the black kids simply “how could this be? And why should there be a welfare system in place to pay for those children?”
The answer that came back to us was angry and direct. It wasn’t so much mind your own business as “who are you to question the love I have for my baby.”
But we were asked questions as well. Usually it had something to do with the myth that every Jew was rich. My classmates wanted to know why I was in public school, not in private school. I lived by the way, four blocks from school in a semi-detached house. My parents paid a mortgage of $124 a month. We were rolling in the dough I told them.
I guess what I’m writing here is that there was a freedom in this class for the black kids to ask Jewish kids and vice versa about stereotypes and prejudices.
Don’t forget we were just three years outside of the racial riots in Baltimore. Many of the Jewish kids in that class had parents whose businesses were burned to the ground by neighborhood blacks. And as it was handed back to us, there was a feeling by some of our classmates that maybe our parents had been ripping them off for all of these years.
That class was my favorite all time class in high school or college. It was a safe room, where culturally we could step over the line. And if you’ve never been over the line of “life’s authenticity,” let me tell you it’s something that we never learned in the pages of any textbook.
Okay, so I don’t know how this all relates, but why do I think of this?
Recently, we were invited to a Shabbat lunch. The host went overboard, inviting tons of people from different generations.
My wife and I started listening in on one particular conversation involving two sets of young, frum husbands and wives. They were talking about how best in their words “to beat the system” when it came to benefits for health and for food subsidies offered by the government for the poor.
Both couples were hardly poor in the classical sense. They were both from families where a home was owned and a couple of cars were parked outside. But hubby in both cases wasn’t working, he was learning in kollel. Wifey was having babies. Both sets of “parents” were pushing 21.
What concerned my wife and I wasn’t the aid they were getting as much as the calculating arrogance of the way they described their aid. They were “beating the system.”
My brain switched back to Mr. Grant’s Northwestern High School class in 1971.
Wonder what the kids from Cherry Hill would say about this one.