Missing the Connection

What if I wasn’t me?  How would the world look?  I guess it would depend on whichever skin other than my own I stand in.

I’ll give you an example.  The other day, remembering my youth, I realized synagogues – Temple Beth David and Temple Emanu-El – stood on two of the four corners of an intersection a few blocks from my house.  This is neither remarkable nor ironic, unless you know that the intersection at which these houses of worship stood is of Titus Avenue and St. Paul Boulevard.

To me, a Catholic, this meant nothing for 50 years.  Had I been raised Jewish, I would have learned early that Titus was the Roman general (later emperor) who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, slaughtered thousands of Jews and dispersed the nation of Israel.  There are few villains in Jewish history more cruel than Titus.

St. Paul, on the other hand, was Jewish, but he was also the person who converted Christianity from a Jewish sect to one open to – and quickly dominated by – Gentiles, who then turned the church into an agency of anti-Semitism.

How must an observant Jew have felt in those years, coming to Sabbath services, standing at the corner of Titus and St. Paul, waiting for the light to change?  I hope she or he felt like the presence of the synagogues – Beth David conservative, Emanu-El reformed – at that particular intersection was a triumph of faith over oppression.  That’s what I hope; it’s more likely my fellow citizens just sighed, thinking that not only were they insulted by the Gentiles’ choice of street names, the Gentiles were not even aware enough to understand they were being insulting.

Eventually, Temple Beth David moved a few blocks north to a new facility and the old building sat vacant for several years.  In June of 1972, under the cover of Hurricane Agnes, I broke in with a few older boys.  We were motivated by curiosity rather than criminal intent.  We made several forays into the building over the course of a few weeks, wandered around, listened to the echoes of our voices in the vacant sanctuary, looked at the maps of Israel on the walls of the classrooms.  (They were probably left behind because the temple moved around the time of the 1967 war.)  We startled pigeons that roosted in the upper floor and had gained access through a roof door that no longer closed.  (The pigeons startled us too, initially causing us to flee down a stairwell until we realized what that loud flapping noise was.)  We stood on the roof and peeked over the edge at traffic in that intersection, the significance of whose names would remain meaningless to me for another 40 years.

This train of thought was inspired by a comment I heard on the radio: Trayvon Martin was shot because he “fit the profile.”  He was young and black and wore a hoodie (in the rain, no less – why would he not pull his hood up?).  Young black men who fit the profile in America are halfway to trouble as soon as they step outside.

I was only 11 when I was breaking and entering (let’s call it what it was) at the abandoned synagogue.  Through the remainder of the 1970s, I too fit a profile: a young white man who was simultaneously up to no good and up to no evil, either.  Not a bad kid, but pushing limits and seeing what I could get away with.  Just a teenaged knucklehead, but because I was white, I was halfway exonerated as soon as I stepped outside.

The police never busted us for the Beth David caper, but there were times when my friends and I were accosted by local law enforcement.  The cops told us to knock it off, behave, go home, stop acting like jerks.  In that time and place, if a white police officer wanted to send a white kid a message, he took your name and wrote it on the inside cover of his notebook.  Legally meaningless, it meant, “I’m keeping my eye on you.”  I don’t know what he did to send a message to a black kid, but it probably wasn’t the same.

Sure, they were cops and we took pains to act respectfully and did not mess with them, but at the same time, we knew police did not present serious trouble or danger. One of the cops was, after all, a customer on my newspaper route.  It was closer to Officer Krupke than George Zimmerman, because we were all – wink, wink – white.

Thing is, we didn’t know we were white or we assumed our experience was universal or we just didn’t care if we got off easy and black kids got hassled for no reason.  Our clan was OK and that’s as far as our concern carried us.  Just as it did not occur to me for decades that Titus and St. Paul is an ironic intersection for two synagogues, it often does not occur to many members of white society that young black men with hoodies are usually just teenagers, going to the store for a bag of candy for their little brother.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

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