Tale 2: All Things and Nothing
In the beginning was the Old New Land.
All things and nothing.
Heaven was earth and earth was heaven and both were hell.
And hell was bad and good.
And good was earth and bad was heaven.
And heaven and hell were inextricable.
Therefore in the beginning man created God, who created the Heaven and the Earth.
For the earth was both with form and void; And the spirit of God moved upon the face of men.
Who said, There was light, and light there is, therefore light let there be.
And man saw the light, that it was good, and man divided the light from the darkness.
And some men called the light Night, and some men called the darkness Day. And the evening and morning were the first generation.
And man discovered firmaments in the midst of the waters, and waters in the midst of firmament.
And man divided the firmaments and used the waters to grow the firmaments, and in competition for the water, man rose up against man, and it was so.
And man called his own firmament Heaven, and the firmament of others Hell. And the evening and morning were the second generation.
And man said, let the men under the Heaven be gathered unto one place, and let God appear, and it was not so.
And man called the others with land heretics, and the occupation of lands he called Holy, and man saw that it was bad, and he called it good.
And man said, since the earth brings forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, and it is so:
Let us bring forth more and better grass, more and better herb yielding seed after his kind, more yielding trees bringing forth more and better fruit, upon the earth, and man saw that it was good and saw no bad in it.
And the evening and the morning were the third generation.
And man said, there are lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from night, let them be signs, for seasons, and for days, and years:
And the firmament of the heaven gave only the light upon the earth that was already upon the earth, and it was so.
And man made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,
But man set them both in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness, and man saw that one light was good and one light bad, but none could determine which to each, and man fell eternally upon man over which light was the greater and which light the lesser. And each man called that which he was good.
And the evening and morning were the fourth generation.
And man said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly for our people of the light, and scarcely for their people of the darkness, that farming may fail upon the part of the earth closed to the firmament of heaven.
And man created great works, and every living creature that moveth were forthwith affected abundantly after their kind, and every work fulfilled after its kind, and man saw their works benefit all men, and men saw that it was good and not good.
And man cursed their works, saying, be fallow, and divide, and fill the waters with poison, and let division befoul the earth.
And the evening and morning were the fifth generation.
And man said, we brought forth on the earth living creatures after our kind, but thou art cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after thy kind, and it is so.
And man made men into beasts and cattle and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after their kind, and man saw that bad was good.
And man said, let us make all men in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And to every man that is like beast, to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth, all wherein there is life shall serve us, and it was so.
And man said, Behold, we have taken every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to us it shall be for meat.
And man saw every thing that he had taken, and, behold, he saw that it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth generation.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And in the seventh generation all life that served men did rebel against that work which he had made, and they fought to rest in that seventh generation from all work which they had made.
And they did create a new god to bless that seventh generation, and sanctify it: because in that god they would rest from all their work which without a god they created and made.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they are created, in the days that men make the earth and the heavens,
And every plant of the field after it is in the earth, and every herb of the field after it grows: until the Lord God shall not cause it to rain upon the earth, and there is not man to till the ground.
For we work, and we work, and we work; and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
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I currently write on January 7th, 2021, the day after Trumpers stormed the Capitol - though in fact I began the sentence the day it happened. It is, in fact, my father’s 75th birthday today. I never thought much about the cliche of how quickly one grows old, I suppose every person thinks it won’t happen to them when they’re young, and for a while, you guard against that cliche vigilantly. But then one day you forget, and that is the day when agely acceleration begins. And suddenly Dad is 75 and you’re nearly 40. I never found 30 that big a deal, but watching Dad turn 70 when I was not quite 34 was a huge milestone, and now it’s five years later, I’m almost 39, having watched as so many people I know flow broadly onward in the river of progress.
The place I write is my parents’ dining room table, used once a month or so for shabbos dinners when they entertain guests in their mildly large upper-middle class rancher on a hill on the Western corner of Pikesville, MD, a town name like any other town in America, denoting no special qualities in its name except suburban non-entity; not even a community, just a bunch of houses built in the fifties boom that by the 2050’s will be razed. Everyone has a town of origin, and if Pikesville is a town, it is very much mine, it is very much ours, but not much of a town. Most towns have a town center, but right in the center of our town is a giant goyisher cemetery. For decades we had one bar in the whole town, Jilly’s, known as the ‘divorcee bar.’
And yet it is one of those American locales sprinkled with a certain bizarre magic for which there is no rational understanding. Every child birthed here is a scion sworn at his Bar-Mitzvah to uphold the White Picket Eruv of the Jewish-American dream; a separate but greater than equal Jewish society of doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, realtors, executives, businessmen, stockbrokers, bankers and accountants. Everybody hates each other, yet everybody gets along. Organization after organization are riven apart with constant gossip of internal dissension, yet the institutions never break apart. Families eternally gossip about other families, yet few families encounter divorce. It’s a town divided almost straight down the middle (literally) between secular/reform Jews and orthodox Jews, fraught by an eternal string of makharaykes over how much Judaism and Halacha to govern the town with, and yet neither has ever thought about moving further away. Every other liberal locale in America grows used to facts of modern American life, yet it’s still juicy gossip here when a kid comes out of the closet or an acquaintance gets divorced.
The neighborhood begins right at the Pimlico Racetrack - at the intersection of Park Heights Avenue and Northern Parkway. It goes down the Avenue for another dozen miles - well past Garrison Forest Road and trailing off into the neither regions of Baltimore County farmland. This road is the lifeblood of Jewish Baltimore; as important to us as Nile to Egypt or Vistula to Poles. In the fertile land that surrounds Park Heights Ave. lives 90,000 Jews with a median income well over $100,000 a household. Only sixty years ago the entirety of this land belonged to a few farmers. In the meantime grew as perfectly realized a vision of the American dream as exists in the whole country.
The 60’s never hit Pikesville. It is a place so bound by conventions, routine, and expectations that rebellion is virtually impossible within its town limits. The American Pastoral lasted for over half a century in Jewish Baltimore, and it’s an idyll well-deserved. No ethnic group save African-Americans paid for the American Dream in more blood, sweat and toil than Jews the world over. But there can only be two explanations for any community to experience the Postwar boom for nearly seven decades:
1. Jews were too new to America to yet see the problems that lurk within the American Dream.
2. The American Dream actually succeeded here.
For over a century, Jews worked in sweatshops, stores, factories and industry. And even those situations were preferable to the origins from whence they arrived. By the millions they left countries in which they were persecuted, discriminated, exploited and massacred. In their moments of deepest reverie, they must have dreamt of building a community exactly like Pikesville - a place where Jews could flourish free from want and molestation. It must have sustained them to have an idea that some distant ancestor might have a chance to build a community exactly like ours. And like all great dreams, perhaps the most damaging thing to happen to it was that it came true.
At the heart of our town lies the idea of a miniature America for Jews. As many subcultures of Jews live in Pikesville as there are ethnic subcultures: Modern Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox, Lubavitch, Messianic, Conservative, Reform, Conservadox, Reformative, Reconstructionist, Secular, Soviet Emigre, Israeli emigre, Holocaust Survivors, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Italian, even (God help us) Republicans. In its microscopic way, Pikesville is as diverse as America itself. But now that the first Jewish generation raised North of the Pimlico Racetrack reaches Social Security age, it suddenly finds itself as much a community in decline as its macroscopic counterpart. Baltimore can only decay for so long before its most promising children leave for better cities. The younger generation of Baltimore Jews never knew a time when Baltimore was not a dying metropolis. The best and the brightest of our generation have descended like flocks on DC, New York, Tel Aviv, Boston, Chicago, even California and London.
Their grandparents slaved their way into the middle-class, but the grandparents had neither the money nor the connections to send their children to anything but state schools. Their parents slaved their way into the upper-middle class, and they did have the money and connections to send their children to Ivy League schools. Their children will be among the best and brightest of a city that can provide them with a greater future. In our generation more than any other, the average Jew has his and her chance to take a place among the world’s elite. From here, there is no mobility but down.
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