Trego's Mountain Ear

I’m tired of anti-Semites. As I look back on 75 years, I’ve been blessed to somehow find several friends. Not necessarily people who see the world the same way as I do, but generally good people. Several of those friends have been Jews. None have been anti-Semitic. That will not change – hating a person because of skin color, or religion, etc. just isn’t right.

When I was a young man, some of the older generation had the forearm tattoos – from Auschwitz. They are gone now, but during the sixties and seventies, there was a time when my consciousness of the Holocaust was rudely brought to the front of my mind by a tattoo forced upon someone before 1945. The Hamas and Isis types have more in common with the Nazis than with me. And it makes me wonder about the narrative, the story that has convinced them.

I’m remembering Bob Mendelsohn – my teacher, my colleague, my friend. His tongue-in-cheek description of Nick’s Hamburger shop in Brookings – where cheese was added to a burger as a condiment, not cooked with the burger, thus maintaining a kitchen he could regard as kind of Kosher. When Bob retired, he moved from secular college professor to studying the religion he was born to, and eating according to Jewish teaching. He described how he missed deli ham sandwiches. Bob was a Jew who loved Christmas – the trees, the decorations, the songs. He’s gone now, but part of his lessons included leaving the campus – there is nothing less needed than a retired professor.

I recall Trinidad, Colorado – when I was there, volunteers from the local Catholic church were doing maintenance work on Temple Aaron – the town’s Jewish population was too old to do the work. There was no publicity – just younger neighbors helping maintain the synagogue that their older neighbors could no longer accomplish. That’s the way to treat people.

In Suriname, I saw Paramaribo’s mosque and synagogue adjacent to each other – here’s what it looks like there:

Somehow, I want a world where the tolerance I saw in Suriname is the norm.