“Your father’s dead,” he said. “It’s on Wikipedia. Look it up. Your family didn’t even tell you. You’re dead to them.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” I said and immediately hit Google. “That’s not right. Not right at all. You’re a terrible man to tell me such things.”
“It’s all on Wikipedia,” he said. “You’re a shanda. You’re killing your family. How could anyone with any decency do the things you’ve done? You don’t have blood in your veins. You have ice. You don’t care about anyone. And no one cares about you. I don’t know why you don’t go back to being a Seventh-Day Adventist. Take off your yarmulke and tzitzit. Eat ham and eggs and marry Hayley Rivers.”
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At age 18, I left Christianity. I wandered for a few years until embracing Judaism at age 23.
I am not unmoved when I move in Adventist circles. I come from that womb. I can not be indifferent. I have my moral and rational critiques of the church but they are like trying to make moral and rational critiques of your parents. How can you pronounce on your mom and dad who gave you life and loved you and watched over you when you helpless and nursed you through illness and despair and fed and clothed you and educated you and gently sent you out into the world to make your way? I feel like I can no more critique Adventism than I can critique my own parents.
When I converted to Judaism, I was born again according to the Jewish perspective. Who I used to be and who I used to feel allegiance to, those ties have been broken. That’s true in many ways but it is not true emotionally. I can not set foot in Adventist territories without wanting to cry. I have no desire to be an Adventist again, but the saddest day of my life was not the day my mom died (I was not yet four years old, too young to understand what was happening) but the day I found out (in August 1980) that we would not be going back to the church, to Pacific Union College, but that we were on our own.
And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.
Christians did not create Auschwitz (Nazism was profoundly anti-Christian) but without 1900 years of Christian hatred of Jews and Judaism it could never have happened.
I grew up with the message that the Jews have suffered over the past 2,000 years because they rejected Christ. Because they crucified God. That Jews are God-killers.
I was also taught that Jews are not true Jews. Christians are the true Jews. Christianity superceded Judaism. Jews today are therefore imposters, rejected by God.
On the other hand, some individual Adventists in Europe rescued Jews.
If there was another genocidal targeting of Jews today, what would the Adventist church do? I view the Seventh-Day Adventist church as an essentially amoral organization. I think the church today would be as likely to assist in genocide (as parts of it did in Rwanda last decade) as to oppose genocide. As for individual Adventists, I suspect that perhaps one percent would be rescuers and perhaps one percent would actively assist in genocide.
Check out my live online talk show tonight at 7:30 pm PDT. People can join the chatroom and ask questions. Shlomo Walt will be giving chizzuk (encouragement) and talking about concrete ways we can bring about positive changes in our community through Ahavas Yisroel (love of your fellow Jew).
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Upon entering your bedroom, Luke Ford immediately begins to analyze your linen seams and pillow placement, planning a tucking strategy as you enjoy a glass of water he has poured for you. After you hydrate, Luke’s sinewy, well-groomed fingers delicately raise each sheet and blanket over your body until you’re comfortably bundled. Careful not to disturb any children who may be in the adjacent room, Luke leans in and uses his summer-breeze-like voice to gently sing you one of the five lullabies he has authored.
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The building admin called my boss. There was a complaint about my using the single-occupancy Ladies room (when the Men’s room is in use). All sorts of men on the floor do it but I’m the one who gets busted. What am I supposed to do when the Men’s room is occupied? It’s rank anti-Semitism. Next they’ll want to put me in a special camp for my own protection. This is just how Hitler started.
In January 1983, my favorite sports team, the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League, made it to their third straight NFC championship game. They’d lost their previous two.
This game was January 22, Sabbath morning. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, I was prevented from following the action live. My parents would never have sanctioned it.
That morning, my family went to this Sabbath-keeping Baptist church in Sacramento. At intermission in the service, I told my mother that I had left something in the car and could I borrow the keys.
She gave them to me. I went to the car, put the keys in the ignition, turned on the radio (a sin in my home on the Sabbath) and found out the Cowboys were getting thrashed. They were losing 14-3. Their quarterback Danny White had been knocked out of the game.
When I tried to remove the keys from the ignition, they wouldn’t budge, no matter how much I jangled.
Frightened of being caught in my sin, I went back to the church and told my mother that I had put the keys in the ignition while looking for my book and now I couldn’t get them out. She said I just had to press a button and they’d release.
I don’t think she realized I had been listening to the radio.
After the Sabbath, I turned on the TV as we ate our evening meal and found out to my heartbreak that the Cowboys had lost. After catching the highlights of the game, I kept turning to other channels throughout the evening to watch the highlights again and again. This made no sense to my parents. They protested. I was wasting time.
No non-sports fan could conceive of how much I hurt that day. Three NFC championship games in a row for quarterback Danny White and three straight losses. I felt gutted.
Six years later at UCLA, economics professor Russell Roberts told our class that “what is important to you is peripheral to others.”
After January 22, 1983, the Cowboys did not play in another NFC championship game until January 17, 1993.
In the summer of 1980, my father lost his role as a Seventh-Day Adventist minister and our family moved out of the church and to Auburn, CA, 45-minutes drive north of Sacramento, where dad set up his own non-denominational evangelical Christian foundation Good News Unlimited.
I was 14.
For the first time, I went to a non-Adventist school, Forest Lake Christian. I thought I hated the school but I probably just hated life at that time, torn away from all that was warm and familiar.
Forest Lake was a two-hour commute each way. During winter, I left home in the dark and returned home in the dark.
It was a tough year for me. I had two hours of homework a night. That Fall semester, for the first time in my life, I failed classes (Spanish and Algebra) and finished with a 1.2 GPA. I was not happy.
In the Spring semester, I failed no classes and gained a friend — Lane Van Howd.
My family had moved to a new home and Lane, a year ahead of me in school and a stratosphere above me in social status, lived about a mile away. I started getting rides to and from school with his family.
I remember Lane as always in motion, always teasing and laughing, always lifting the mood of those around him, always with the beginnings of man hair above his upper-lip. He was reckless and utterly convinced he knew better than those around him.
In January 1981, I watched the Super Bowl at his home (the Raiders crushed the Eagles). “God comes first in this home,” said his mother that day. “And sports comes second.”
In my home, by contrast, sports was regarded as idolatry and I learned to hide my interest.
Another cool thing about Lane’s home was that he could talk about girls. In my home, there was no conception of dating. When the time came, you got married, but meantime, there was no salvation allowed from the opposite sex. No banter about crushes. No compromise with the wider society.
During those first weeks together, I was a little unsure of Lane’s last name and so when my mother called that Super Bowl afternoon looking for me, she took the info I had given her and called Mrs. Van Howd “Mrs Lane”. There was an awkward conversation and when I got to the phone, my confused mother ordered me home early.
Lane’s father was Douglas Van Howd, President Reagan’s personal artist.
Every so often, good people come into my life and adopt me. Lane was such a person. The bus would drop us off in Auburn in the afternoons and while we waited for his mother, Lane would buy me cold drinks while he checked out the latest ski equipment.
Lane was at the pinacle of my world. Women found him attractive. He was smart, good and athletic. His younger sister Holly was similarly gifted. They had everything to look forward to. The world was at their feet.
Lane and his family were my first non-Adventist friends.
Ninth grade ended in June 1981 and my family moved a few miles away, foolishly buying a second home in the belief that they could quickly sell the first (that didn’t happen until 1985). I didn’t see Lane any more.
In mid-July I got word that Lane had died. He was killed in a car accident (where he was the passenger, nobody else was hurt).
My friends the Badziks (Doug was in my class and perhaps my best friend though his memories of me are not fond) picked me up to go to the funeral. I was dreading it. I had never been to a funeral of somebody my age. The Van Howds were a different type of Christian than my hyper-intellectual family, they were Pentacostal. I was scared.
The drive to the funeral reassured me. While I had been habituated that you had to keep a solemn silence at such times, I learned that day that you could talk like a normal person. You could laugh as well as cry (not that 98% of Protestants I knew would every cry at a funeral).
I was tipped off that the service would be Pentacostal and that God’s direct intervention would be sought. This was never the Adventist way and I steeled myself for displays of emotion.
Lane’s service was in a different type of church than I had ever been in. It might’ve been Assembly of God. There was an open casket. Lane looked good. He wore his Sunday best.
I don’t think I ever looked in an open-casket before. We didn’t have that custom in Australia.
Unlike many of my friends, I had been to funerals before of people I knew, but they were never my age.
The pastor invoked a more imminent sense of God than I was used to. And at the peak of his message, he said, “If you believe God can raise Lane from the dead right now, please raise you hand.”
Along with almost everyone in the church, I raised my hand, and even though I was raised with an academic approach to God, I really believed at that moment that God could raise Lane from the dead.
Closing my eyes, I prayed for God to do a miracle and to revive my friend. Then I opened my eyes and holding my breath, I stared at the coffin, waiting for a resurrection that never came.
I don’t think I was much of a comfort to Lane’s family that morning. My words were probably few and my physical expressions even fewer.
And that was the last time I spoke to them, to the Van Howds, to the good good family that had sheltered me.
I think Mrs. Nancy Van Howd called my mother a few years later to touch base.
But the pain that family experienced, I couldn’t face it.
From tenth grade on, I went to public school. There was no talk of resurrection there.
Van Howd’s relationship with Reagan began in 1972 when Reagan received a gift of one of Van Howd’s statues, a lion, and one of Reagan’s aides invited him to drive down from Auburn to meet the governor. The friendship lasted until the 40th president faded into dementia.
The lion was one of Van Howd’s first sculptures. Now, his pieces sell for thousands, tens of thousands and more. He favors Western scenes and characters and wildlife. He is working on an elephant, 13 feet at the shoulder, for the government of Tanzania. Reagan will stand 7.5 feet.
In 1981, at the start of President Reagan’s administration, the president asked Van Howd to become the White House artist. His first task was to sculpt a gift to be presented to the Netherlands.
As he set about working on the idea, an American Indian and an eagle, atop a piece of petrified wood from Arizona, Reagan’s counsel, Herbert Ellingwood, delivered the terrible news that Doug and Nancy Van Howd’s son, Lane, had died in a car accident in California. He was 16.
“My mind wouldn’t accept it. Why is the top man in the White House telling me this. No, no, no, that isn’t my kid.” But it was. He couldn’t complete the sculpture until 1984. Instead of being given to the Dutch, the sculpture was displayed in the Roosevelt Room.
During Van Howd’s White House visits, schedulers learned to have the president meet him at the end of the day. That way, when they talked too long as they often did, Reagan wouldn’t be late for other meetings.
“I was like a breath of fresh air for him. We would talk horses. We had great conversations. He loved art. He told me a lot of things probably people didn’t know,” like about getting bucked from a horse while riding with Mexican President José López Portillo and hitting his head. “I don’t know that that was ever publicized.”
Walk through Van Howd’s Auburn gallery and you’ll see mementos of his time with the governor who became president. There’s a photo of him giving a ram sculpted of gold with silver horns to Oliver North, and a bronze eagle to Reagan’s interior secretary, Donald Hodel. He painted the portrait of Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush that was on the inaugural plates.
Partisan Democrats might be upset that Reagan will stand anywhere in the Capitol, even the “lower rotunda.” Civics lessons are important, however. Reagan is important in the history of California, the nation and world. His story is worth telling and retelling, unvarnished.
We ought to teach more history. Find space for Capitol statues of Earl Warren, the only California governor who became U.S. chief justice, and Hiram Johnson, the progressive responsible for the initiative process.
The state also should reopen the joint in the basement, without four- and eight-legged vermin. Call it the Well. Maybe even serve a little whiskey or wine. Reagan would have approved. Back when he was governor, I’m told, he’d enjoy an occasional sip.
The other day in a post you made that could be associated with this one, called ‘When Did I Hit Bottom?‘, you had an inspired comment by Chaim Amalek.
He suggested that your real problem was a need to write about yourself. Chaim Amalek rolls out very good advice to you. He sees through you better than anyone else who posts up here, including yours truly. Seriously, there is no doubt in my mind that you would be much better off had you followed his many cogent pieces of advice.
And yet there is a conundrum. Basically your blog is like one neverending memoir. And your life is the subject that you write about. When you are not writing about yourself, you are writing about Judaism.
The problem with Judaism is that it’s only interesting to other Jews. In fact, you primarily address the Orthodox community, and they are not even interesting to Conservative and Reform Jews.
Clearly when you were writing about pornography it was a sordid subject and yet a compelling and spectacular one. Although some people might be a little curious about the feelings connected with a guy who became famous for chronicling the porn industry after he converted to Orthodox Judaism, this is a subject that has diminishing returns.
You have to be a kind of weird dude like me to find your reflections about yourself to be sort of interesting.
I know that you are a fan of Tom Wolfe. But Tom Wolfe only marginally wrote about himself. Look at Bonfires of the Vanities, and even his early work. He sort of invented the gonzo sociological approach to dealing with contemporary subjects. (Occasionally he would talk about having finally become a “genuine, bona fide eccentric” and wore those white suits.) He chose subjects he could work with and found compelling.
Really your writing is more like a combination of Hunter S. Thompson and Bukowski. I don’t mean specifically your literary style, but more the attitude and sentiment that you bring to your pieces.
Hunter Thompson would do things that no one would recommend though, like go live with the Hell’s Angels OMG. Not recommended. And Bukowski. What can anyone say about Bukowski? You’re not going to start drinking, and you’re not going to start fistfights in a hobo jungle, and your aspirations for upward mobility are not going to lead you to the desire to live on today’s Skid Row.
So what is the solution? You’re a good writer, and you could take Chiam Amalek’s advice with profit, but then you wouldn’t have anything to write about. And you could stick with writing about the Orthodox Jewish community, but that is a bit dull and has an exposure to a limited number of readers.
Bottom line, I thing you need some new subjects.
You don’t want to go back to porn. You don’t want to join organized crime. (Jimmy Breslin has written some terrific pieces about organized crime.) So what you need is to take a Tom Wolfe approach to something like the fashion industry or Jewish restaurants or Jewish gun owners or Jews who are serving in the military. Etc., etc.
Or you could do the world a service and employ your talents in the place that G-d placed you. You could do what only you could do as well. You could write about building bridges between Orthodox Judaism and the Christian world, or even Orthodox Judaism and Conservative and Reform. You are uniquely situated to be a bridge builder. It would take some adjustment of your personality, but then that might be just the radical change you were looking for.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “The number of Americans who tingled at Barack Obama. The self-delusion on the part of every single person who believed in him is astonishing. He never did a thing for me, not on a personal level, not on a leadership level, let alone an ideological level.”
“Which side is more likely to be dazzled by superficial characteristics such as eloquence and looks? Remember JFK Jr? The left was bedazzled by him. He was their great hope. I didn’t understand any of his appeal. He was good looking. And his name. Who on the right dazzles people because of good looks and temperament?”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
