I will never forget my first sight of New Orleans. My parents, my brother, and I had taken a 24 foot motorboat from Nashville down the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi Rivers, and we pulled into the Port of New Orleans the night of July 4, 1971. Coming through on the river, it was romantic as hell: fireworks over the city, lights everywhere, little bits of music and cheering floating over on the air, gorgeous. After the sinister miles south of Baton Rouge, where the Mississippi started spreading out into BayouWorld and it became very difficult to discern the channel (but alarmingly easy to discern alligators, even in the dusklight) the festivities in New Orleans were a welcome sight.

Then we put-putted into the Port proper, and I got the living daylights scared out of me. A port full of ocean-going freighters is no place for a 24 foot runabout. The wakes of the big ships were like mountains, even in the cautious waters of the port. We'd fly up to the top of one, as if the boat were going to lift off on an early moonshot. Then we'd plunge down the other side, farther and faster than could possibly be a good idea. I was sure we were going to die.

At last we pulled into the lock to Lake Ponchartrain. Ever since, I've thought of the lake as a safe haven, even though it was also an accident waiting to happen. The thing is, New Orleans is all about accidents waiting to happen. It's like Key West, and Macau, and other places where bidness goes on, some of it pretty evil bidness, much of it pretty necessary bidness, and the tourists come and go.

It had that old-city smell, almost but not quite a bad smell, that carried the scent of rotting things, and urine, and secrets. I fell in love with it instantly, and have fantasized from time to time about living there. I've always said, though, that I am too much of a wimp for a New Orleans August: the wet heat, the carnivorous bugs, the threat of storms. I've always admired people who could stand up to a New Orleans August.

I had no idea.

There are many good places to send money to help in the Southeast, and many good people trying to cope with the many people who were displaced by Katrina. If you haven't already done so, consider sending cash to the Union for Reform Judaism Hurricane Relief Fund or go to the Red Cross website to volunteer and/or contribute.

My high school classmate, Rebecca, forwarded an email to me last week from Father Tim Hurd, in Zwolle, LA:

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Katrina did not send wind or water this far west, so we still have power etc. What has happened though is that buses of evacuees are being herded into every nook and cranny of the state. here at St Joseph's in Zwolle we're expecting another 100 or so to arrive at any time. The parishioners and local people here are trying to be helpful and are remarkably and tremendously generous/

The greatest problem/fear: There are at least two kinds of evacuees.
1. Those who left as family units before the storm: they have some sort of transportation, a few belongings, etc.
2. Those who are being picked up along the highways, those who would not/could not leave before, those being plucked up out of the sewage/mess in New Orleans, the stragglers that can't find family, that have nothing, that are totally exhausted, famished, some are vomiting, they're all angry: at God, us, the state, the feds, the sun, the grass,..... this group is really a mixed group. There are crack heads going through the DT's, the people who are HIV+, inner-city thugs, people who are desperately trying to find someone they know/knew.... all mixed in ......suffering, hurting people...

Those are the people who we are being asked to house and are or will be staying here; those are the group from which we'll be getting another 100 or so..... probably for 2 months at least--could be 3-4 months they're warning. Our community here is mostly poor to lower middle class, mostly based on the Timber industry (which is running out of diesel fuel). Zwolle is a simple, somewhat backward town ( imagine a Mayberry/Deliverance cross!?) with hardworking, good people. We're scared, they're scared, everybody's scared....

It seems harsh, but our local law enforcement is begging the state to divert some of them elsewhere. But we'll do whatever we need to do.

I'm tired and obviously leaning to the exhausted side--so forgive please if I seem dramatic to you......
We'll keep going, jump into the unknown (it looks better than the 'known' at this point).
Pray for us, please. And give a prayer of thanks when/if you look in your underwear drawer and see more than one pair........

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I wrote to Fr. Hurd and asked him if cash would help, and if so, where to send it. His reply:

Bless you....

Our address here is:

St. Joseph Catholic Church
P.O. Box 8
Zwolle, LA 71486

We've run out of sorting/storage/distribution space for clothes and such and I am trying to find out where to send on those things. I'll try to get back to you with that.

Thank you.

Fr. Tim

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It's now Elul, the month leading up to the High Holy Days, and I've begun practicing the chants and prayers for the solemn services. One of the prayers, the Unetaneh Tokef, reminds us that we do not know who will live or die in the next year, who by fire and who by flood. As in 2001, those words are particularly sharp this year, since we have just had a demonstration of how unpredictable life can be.

There are lots of different ways to theologize about it, and lots of reasons to be angry and targets for the anger, lots of analysis and lots of words that can be said, but in the meantime people are hungry and homeless and there are caregivers stretched to the brink. I encourage you to join me in finding your own way to help the sufferers. If not now, when?

What good is a federal government that is so slow to react to the peril of an entire region?

Daughter of the South that I am, I have always believed it was a good thing that the Confederacy lost its war. Slavery was and is wrong, will always be wrong, and no amount of romanticism or revisionist history will ever make it even a little bit right.

But I looked at the news this past week, and I wondered: what good is a federal government that is so slow to react to a threat to the lives of such a large segment of its citizenry? I wondered if Jefferson Davis & Co may not have had a point, when it came to one of the issues other than slavery: the fact that to much of the rest of the United States, the South is a joke, an afterthought, a scapegoat. Exactly what is the purpose of this vaunted Union?

Rep. Maxine Waters took a bus to Louisiana to see events first hand, and to rescue whom she could. She represents South Central Los Angeles, and I imagine she would agree with me that the racism and classism we are seeing in this national tragedy are not confined to the South. I just find it hard to imagine that a major city outside the Southeast would be allowed to go for days and days and days after such a disaster. If a hurricane headed for New York City, do you think the reaction would be so slow? When a major earthquake hit Los Angeles in the 1990's, people were not left to fend for themselves for days and days, living in filth and squalor. L.A. has seen its share of riots and looters, but no one seemed to think that simply abandoning the city and bulldozing the site was a solution to anything.

It's no secret that I disapprove of the current administration in Washington. They've bungled this job, just as they have bungled a lot of things. That almost goes without saying.

But I think I'm through being a "good sport" about people making fun of my regional accent, of jokes about the South and Southerners told by people who'd be really, really annoyed if someone behaved that way towards almost anyone else. Quit using the South to reassure yourselves, America, and look into the mirror: African Americans (AMERICANS) and poor Americans (AMERICANS) are suffering because in the minds of too many, New Orleans was a play-city, a joke town, that didn't need the money to pay for the maintenance of real levees.

Even "wealthy" (as in, had a car so they could leave before the storm hit) New Orleanians are suffering, with every thing they have worked for all their lives under many feet of filthy water, and no real idea when they can even assess the damage. Many of the "wealthy" don't have a home to go back to, a job to go back to, a bank account at a bank that is above water, or a clue what they are going to do when they run out of cash or the relatives get sick of them.

My guess is that many of those people sent good wishes, and money, and firefighters, and assistance to people suffering in New York, and Los Angeles, and Oklahoma City. I know for a fact they've been paying federal taxes just like the rest of us, on the notion that when they needed the federal government, when they needed the rest of us, we'd be there for them. They paid taxes on the notion that if we can send pork barrels here and there, we can pay for legitimate needs like FEMA and flood control.

I'm sick. I'm angry. Don't you dare make fun of the way I talk.

Sometimes I wonder what possessed me to go back to school at age 47. I know that a few of you have wondered the same thing. It isn't easy, it certainly isn't convenient, it isn't cheap, and it is sometimes pretty darn lonesome, since the people I love are several hundred miles north of here.

Today is a day when I don't have to wonder. It is the first day of classes, the day when I am given a pristine new syllabus, full of promise and mystery, and I can see the new things I will learn stretching out over the photocopied pages. It's the day I get a fresh steno book (my preferred notetaking device), a comfortable pen and assortment of markers, and begin to chart the journey into new water. It's the day I walk in with no homework (yet), and pretty much boundless enthusiasm for the work that will weigh heavier by this time next week.

I love the first day of school.

I love radio, and I listen to lots of it. Radio has been my window on the world ever since I was a kid, sneaking into the den at night to turn on my father's huge AM/FM console radio after everyone was asleep. I'd listen to Havana and Little Rock and other foreign places; I remember one thrilling night when the "skip" was good and I heard Chicago and New York City.

When I am homesick for the Bay Area, I can turn to 740 to listen to KCBS after dark. When I was in Israel and homesick for the United States, I discovered that I could listen to NPR via the internet, and was soothed by Bob Edward's voice. On my drives up the Central Valley, I tune from one tiny religious station to another; I started when "Passion of the Christ" came out and I wanted to know if it was bearing any anti-Semitic fruit I should (as a good student rabbi) know about for my congregation's sake. It wasn't; mostly the radio preachers seemed bothered by the same assortment of historical glitches that were bothering me.

Sooo, a few days ago, as I drove down Wilshire Blvd., I turned to an LA radio station to which I'd rather not give any advertising. Rush Limbaugh was blowing hard, as usual, and I listened to hear what he was up to these days. I don't like Rush, but I like to know what his listeners are hearing. Even for Rush, though, this was a new low.

Rush was trashing Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who had taken her grief and her questions to President Bush's vacation spot. First he implied she's a fake (her protests are "staged") and then he compared her protest to "forged documents," which sounds to me perilously close to calling her a liar.

Casey Sheehan gave his life keeping the oath he took when he swore to protect the Constitution. Cindy Sheehan lost her child. She has every right to grieve, every right to be angry, and our vacationing President should have the common decency to take 10 minutes to say, "Ma'am, I'm so sorry," in a tone of voice that suggests actual sorrow.

Personally, I think she's asking some excellent questions, too. Why *did* we go there? Tha'ts less and less clear, as the administration has virtually admitted with its changing account of what it is: "War on Terror?" "Operation Iraqi Freedom", "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism?"and so on. Best of all, exactly what is the connection between the bloodbath in Iraq and the U.S. Constitution that Casey swore to defend?

And why, if it is so important that we be in Iraq, are we not sending everyone's children, instead of volunteer reservists who have been turned into virtual slaves, stuck in Iraq for long past the time for which they committed? Why are there no young Bushes in the service, if it's so important we be in Iraq?

Why are we simultaneously conducting a war, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and cutting veterans' benefits?

Why, why, why, Mr. Vacationing President?

I'm going to avoid that dial on the radio for a while. I can listen to a lot of stuff and be calmly interested, but I can't listen to that man trash a grieving mother. She's said some things I don't agree with, either, but were I to meet Cindy Sheehan, I would have only one thing to say to her:

Ma'am, I am so sorry.

The stories from Gaza are all over the news today. A soldier talks about obeying his orders, given him by a democratic government in search of peace. A government official talks about "land for peace." Anguished settlers cry and fight and finally hole up in synagogues, only to be carried out by young soldiers. A Palestinian spokesman minimizes the loss -- it wasn't their land anyway. Someone at the UN warns that Israel shouldn't think that this will make up for occupation.

I have never been a fan of the settlement movement, and my first reaction when I heard that Sharon had decided to pull out was that it was high time those people got out of there. I never visited the settlements while I lived in Israel, because I was told by the school that it was unsafe for me to go there. I did have the opportunity to meet and talk with people who lived there, and who believed passionately in what they were doing. Even after the conversation, my convictions were unchanged: those folks had no business there.

This summer, when I saw the orange kippot [skullcaps] and the orange-striped prayer shawls for sale in Jerusalem, to express solidarity with the settlers, I was impatient. In my mind, nothing good could happen until Gaza was empty of Israelis.

Intellectually, I still hold those opinions, but my heart breaks at the photos and the stories on the radio. The settlers moved to Gaza as a patriotic act, and from the day they moved there, it was dangerous. In 1970, they provided a settled buffer against Egypt. They built their homes and their greenhouses and grew organic vegetables; most of the cherry tomatoes in Israel came from the Gaza greenhouses. They were told by the government, and most especially by their hero, Sharon, that they were heroes of the Jewish People.

Now Sharon tells them that they are simply in the way of peace, that they have to move, that they have to start again, somewhere else, in that very unforgiving land. Other settlers in the West Bank are watching, as are the Israelis living on the Golan. Sharon may know where this will end, but he isn't telling.

Meanwhile Hamas hoots and hollers that they've driven out the Israelis, that if they keep on killing and shooting and bombing buses full of civilians, eventually Israel will go away. And some fool at the UN -- I didn't catch his name -- minimized the losses of the settlers and said that this really doesn't accomplish much; it's a step in the right direction, but that's all.

I had to shut off NPR at that point.

Jews are losing their homes, are being carried away from homes they have lived in for 30 years. Other Jews -- young men and women who are their cousins and siblings -- have to do the carrying. This is hideous and horrible, and utterly necessary. Without this move, peace is never going to come.

What I wish is that the other parties, the Palestinians and their supporters, could see this action for what it is. No one has been "driven off" -- a democratic society is making a historic step towards peace. And yes, it is unilateral, but so far I cannot see what the Palestinians have been willing to accomplish via negotiations: remember Oslo? remember Camp David in 2000?

I do not know what the answers are. I do know that while I do not agree with the settlers (on almost anything) I honor their losses, which are beyond my complete comprehension. For their sake, and for the sake of the Palestinians who will have Gaza to themselves, and for the sake of everyone in that region, I hope that this has accomplished something. For now, I just feel sad.

It may be only August 12, but summer is over for me -- I'm sitting in my "office" in Merced (aka Starbucks) back in the swing of my student pulpit, with an email box full of information about booklists, class schedules, and the usual beginning-of-term negotiations.

I feel a little frantic, but good. There's already too much to do, and officially, school doesn't even begin for a week.

This week begins Devarim [Deuteronomy]. The Torah seems to stop and repeat itself, sort of, only with more detail about the laws. September is like that. The beginning of the 4th year of rabbinical school is like that, too. We gather together, we take a deep breath, and we do it again.