Weekend Frivolity: Reflections on Community and My Mother

My mother (at right, with my wife and me), who will be 92 in June, was hospitalized this week.  She lives in Jerusalem, and I live in Oklahoma.  Not much I can do but watch for reports from my brother who has gotten into a routine of driving up from his Kibbutz in the Arava (the southern section of Israel that borders on Jordan) when my mother gets sick.  She is not particularly ambulatory, but she is sharp and as active as she can be.  She was frustrated that she could not get released in time for a meeting of her women's organization (Na'amat).  An offshoot of Israel's national labor organization (Histadrut), Na'amat focuses on childcare and women's issues related to employment.  Much of my mother's adult life when she lived in the U.S. was devoted to volunteer work for that organization, and she went to work for them full-time when she moved to Israel in 1983.  She had baked cookies for the meeting, and as she was not able to attend, she dispatched her home health aid to deliver the cookies to the group. 

My mother's commitment to her Na'amat club is of a piece with our upbringing.  The central experience of my youth -- far more important than school or schul or neighborhood friends -- was the labor-zionist youth movement (Habonim -- now Habonim-Dror) of which I was a member from the time I was nine years old.  I devoted every summer to the movement's camp in Michigan until I graduated high school.  During the school year, I attended regular meetings of the organization on weekends, meetings that I led when I entered high school.  I have an ambivalent relationship with Zionism, but the communitarian ethos of the organization has stuck with me, and it is something that links me to my siblings to this day.  My sisters homes are gathering places.  My brother lives on a  collective (Kibbutz) that is being progressively privatized, over his objections.  My daughter (below left, with me and her grandmother) attended the same summer camp I did , not because I planned it that way, but because we visited for a reunion when she was eight , and she asked, "Dad, can I go to this camp, because I think it's a really good camp?"  

At that reunion, I was reminded of an incident of which I have no clear recollection.  When I was twelve or thirteen, Habonim had planned a winter seminar to be held in the one winterized building in our camp in Michigan.  Participants drove down from Wisconsin and then gathered in Skokie so that we could make the trek together, but a winter storm closed the roads, and we were all stranded in Chicago's north suburbs.  There were fifty kids with no place to go, so my mother offered our house, and we hosted the winter seminar in our 1200-square foot home.  Everyone had brought sleeping bags, and so at night there likely was very little floor space in the house that was not occupied by a sleeping child.  The person who reminded me of the incident had been one of our guests that weekend.  He thought my mother was extraordinary to host 50 kids for a weekend.  I could say that the event made no impression on me because it was extraordinary only in its magnitude.  Otherwise, it was totally in keeping with my mother's commitment to community.  That is true, but it is also true that  I just have very few memories of my childhood (and college is pretty spotty too).   I had to confirm the details with my sister.

I think I became an academic for two reasons.  First, I wanted to live a life of the mind.  Second, I wanted to be part of a community, and universities are ready-made communities.  Valparaiso's law school was a great first home for me because, when I arrived, there were still faculty who had been there since the 1970s and for whom the law school was the center of their existence.  Some of them lived within walking distance.  Many of them were in the building at all hours and on weekends.  They hosted events for students in their homes.  We had a reading group.  We knew each other's families.  Now that attitude towards a workspace is rare.  Staff and administrators sometimes praise me because, unlike many of my colleagues, I come to work every day.  I can't take credit for being more devoted to my work than my colleagues.  I just crave community.  

These are hard times for communitarians.  JFK said "Ask not what your country can do for you. . . . "  Ronald Reagan encouraged voters to ask not whether the country was better off but whether  they personally were better off under the Carter administration.  I wasn't old enough to vote, but I bristled.  The country voted for Reagan, and many still revere him.  He didn't single-handedly deflate the communitarian ethos of the New Deal and the New Frontier, but he paved the way for a libertarian ethos that seems to many of my students to be the only perspective that makes any sense.  And then came COVID, which took us from the world of bowling alone to a world in which professional success is measured in terms of one's ability to demand that one be permitted to work from home.

It is not for me to pass judgment.  There used to be communities for people like me outside of religious institutions, and now they seem to be dwindling.  That makes me sad, but I can see retirement on the horizon, and I may take some comfort then that the academy I leave is not the academy I joined.  Still, if I am blessed with  my mother's longevity, I hope that there will still be groups for whom I can bake some cookies.