I'm going to hang this one up for awhile.

I'm going to let this blog go quiet for awhile.

I have nothing new to say that needs to be said here, and I am trying to focus more on the present.

Be kind to each other and turn the lights off when you leave the room.

Cheers.

Late stage capitalism is NOT. YOUR. FAULT. Don’t take it personally.

In the news today:

— Alice Munro’s daughter calls her out for staying with her husband, even after knowing that he abused her daughter.

— Trump orders his zombies to strategically backpedal parts of the Project 2025 doctrine so as not to scare voters (and to bring in the undecideds to his camp), and no one of any power or importance is paying attention.

— the Democratic Party is chasing its tail, again, and squandering whatever time or efficacy they might have still had.

— the GOP a candidate for Governor in North Carolina just gave a fiery sermon in which he clearly and blatantly endorsed political violence (“Some folks need killing.”) and far too many Americans even batted an eye.

There is no more room for maturity, nuance or even kindness in this country anymore.

It has been inculcated and insinuated and threatened out of the fiber of this country over the last ten years and there is no way to bring it back right now.

Apparently, the only way forward is to “fight.”

But fight whom? And how?

*********

What I need to be reminded of, every day and sometimes several times a day, is that depression does not operate in a vacuum.

Sure, there may be some chemical impulse involved; our bodies are holistic systems and chemical impulses can inform, and be informed by physical and emotional stimuli.

They can, however, also be informed by social and political stimuli.

And this is what reminds me that my depression is not my fault.

Let me say that again, a little louder for those in the cheap seats:

MY DEPRESSION IS NOT MY FAULT.

I did not create it, and I do not feed it. It is not an inherent character flaw, though some want desperately for me to think that it is. My depression does not exist in a vacuum, separate and apart from everything else that exists in the world.

That is why I need to be reminded that to be depressed in this world today is to be aware, is to be shackled to a system that benefits from keeping me depressed and benefits from making me think it is all my fault. The grand myth of capitalism is that my state of existence can be changed if I pull myself up by my bootstraps, save some money each payday, stay hydrated and stay healthy so I can work endless hours a week for someone else, and in so doing I can stay housed and secure.

That is a lie. 

And I know it’s a lie because of how much goddamed money is spent every day on advertising to try and convince me that coloring inside the lines will get me ahead, if not today then someday.

Not gonna happen. The game is rigged.

Depression and capitalism have a direct connection. Depression and capitalism are flip sides of the same coin. The difference between me and someone who is not depressed, who is always healthy and secure and comfortable, may be as simple as the fact that he and I are not working with the same coin. 

Because in capitalism, we can’t. For a wealthy capitalist to be healthy, safe and secure, many others must be unhealthy, unsafe, and insecure. The condition of the former relies on keeping the latter in a state of dependence on the system that keeps them down. There are two ways to escape this dependency: accruing  enough wealth to avoid it, or dying. The people who own and operate the system do not care if you die. But if you accrue too much wealthy quickly, they will get nervous, because with enough wealth and influence you can change things, and the powers that be do not want anyone to change anything.

To be depressed is to be aware that the game is rigged, and to understand how and why you are on the short end of the stick.

What’s the cure for such depression?

Well, meds may help, if only to keep you on killing yourself or someone else. And counseling as an adjunct to that may be useful as well, though if you want to see meaningful change then the counselor isn’t the right person to talk to. And if you can access these things without breaking your bank, do it. Because we need for the aware people to stay alive and be aware and say something. For real change to happen, the depressed person needs to call bullshit on the whole system in any way possible, and to take actions of any size to gnaw away at the machinery to help bring it down.

Write.

Draw. 

Sing and dance. 

Take incriminating videos of the systems at work, and share them widely.

Play with children and keep them as far away from the machinery as you can, while they’re young enough to form healthy memories that can inform their adult choices. 

Share your excess with others who are in need. 

Don’t be afraid to engage in a little petty theft if you’re up against the wall and your next meal depends on it. The capitalists will tell you that when you steal, you’re stealing from the store employees, but you’re not. You’re stealing from the capitalists, who steal from their employees anyway no matter how “honest” you are on a given day. So if you must steal to avoid starving, don’t feel guilty about it. You’re starving because someone far more powerful than you wants you to. They benefit from your having less of everything you need to survive, and to thrive.

Pool your resources with others so each of you can live on less. Find a job where you can earn just what you need to to keep body and soul together, and if you can get away with working less than full time, do it. Time isn’t money; you can always make more money but you cannot make more time. Every part-time worker who chooses to remain part-time is stealing their time back from capitalism and spending it in other, more human-scale and beneficial ways. 

Remember that we will all die someday, each of us. Embrace your mortality so it might inform how you will live each day. Capitalists thrive on our fear of death, and use all their powers to convince us that living forever is the more desirable option. It’s also a lie. We can take back our death and own it for ourselves. It won’t prevent my death but it will be real and it will be my death, and no one can take that from me.

Every now and then, things will get hard. The owners of the systems will win, and you will suffer.

But nothing lasts forever, not even suffering. The pendulum swings both ways. I try to remind myself of this whenever I can so that I don’t go off the deep end. I try to remind myself that my depression is not my fault, and it’s not of my making.

Suffering does not preclude or prevent art, joy or love. (In some ways, these things may be intensified by the experiences of suffering, but I am not the scholar who can facilitate an in-depth discussion of that point. As always, Your Mileage May Vary.)

The conditions that caused it happened long before I was born. Sadly, they will exist after I die. So my life will have to be a series of little rebellions every day. The best I can hope for is that someone else will see what I am doing, and choose to follow suit in their own distinctive ways.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can hope for, and on my best days it’s a pretty good best.

(P. S. Dear Mom and Dad — please don’t be mad at me. You didn’t know. You couldn’t know at the time. I believe that if you did know you would have tried to do something. I hope that if there’s a glimmer of your knowing left anywhere in the universe you’ll be proud of me. I love you.)

Memento mori.

A friend posted on Facebook today, “ I can't believe this is happening. How is this happening? How is this happening? HOW IS THIS HAPPENING!?!”

And I was inspired to respond to him privately.

But upon later reflection, I decided to share what I wrote here. Because it actually makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, especially those of us who are approaching or in retirement age. Because what is happening is very likely unstoppable by average citizens. I’m not going to call the general election in July, but I am going to say that unless the Democrats pick someone else RIGHT NOW and do a hard sell, things are going to go south. 

And if they do go south, there is nothing I or you or any other ordinary person in this country can do to prevent that. 

*******

I stopped pondering escape long ago. I have neither the means to escape anywhere (not even out of state), nor the robust health to storm the barricades.

Instead, I have been pondering my mortality.

It’s not entirely bleak.

Of course, no one wants to die. But we all must die.

I leave no children behind, and more of my years are behind me than ahead.

(Don’t worry, I’m not considering suicide. I still love my life.)

I’m just having significant conversations with death and not shying away from them.

I recognized very long ago that I simply do not have the power, status or money to change what is happening in a significantly meaningful way.

So I am focusing on smaller pieces of meaning and moments much closer to the present. 

And that is probably the best I can do.

******

I shared this response with my friend, who until now had been exhorting everyone he knew to hang in and fight. But tonight, he admitted, after reading my response, that he was coming to a similar conclusion. I felt sad for him, and for all of us. Especially for those of us old enough to remember how life used to be.

Those of us who’ve lived long enough to remember when democracy meant something, when America was still a nation where most people tried to get along because behaving badly was still an embarrassment and behaving violently was still a crime. We kept our cruelest thoughts to ourselves when we got old enough to understand that this was how adults were supposed to behave, because getting along with our neighbors was still a worthy pursuit for most of us — we will remember what that was like.

Today, opinions and behaviors we once saw as marginal, fringe, have become the norm and have entered the mainstream. Elected officials have given their constituents permission to say and do horrible, awful, evil things to anyone they might disagree with, in the name of creating a more homogenous American society, and anyone who doesn’t fit the new norm — white, straight and conservative Christian — doesn’t matter. If you go after someone who doesn’t belong, you will not be punished, and you may even be called a hero by the people in charge. The  lives of those who aren’t part of the now-ruling majority no longer matter to the majority, whose protected status has been assured by powerful interests who stand to benefit by having their constituents as compliant, enthusiastic sheep — and heavily armed sheep at that.

The pendulum swings both ways.

When I was a kid, it swung one way. As I enter my later years, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. And it will likely not swing back in my lifetime. 

So what is left is memento mori. 

Remember that you must die.

What is the purpose of such a reminder in times like these?

I believe it helps to clarify not only what I can and cannot do, but what’s really important in the here and now. What’s in front of me. What I can touch and feel right now. Who matters and who I can be in this moment. 

If we’re lucky, we may impart something of that to someone younger than we are, someone who will be around after we are gone. We can impart what we can, and hope that some of it sticks. That it sticks long enough for those younger people to grow up, get stronger, acquaint whatever will pass for power and influence in their prime, and maybe slow down the pendulum and nudge it in the other direction. It won’t happen in my lifetime, and maybe not in their lifetime, but it could happen somewhere down the line. Maybe “could” will have to be enough. 

I won’t live to see it. This change took a long time to come about and it will take a long time to dismantle. But knowing that it is possible is enough. If I cannot die peacefully when the time comes, I hope this knowledge will allow me to die at peace. I’m grateful to be old enough to understand the difference.

“Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.” — Anita Diamant, The Red Tent.

Thank you for a truly remarkable ride. FREE THE MUSIC!

Dear friends:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, All my music will now be available for free streaming and download on Bandcamp.

To be fair, I wasn't getting all that much traffic to the site anyway, and the multiple hoops I'd have to jump through in order to continue to receive funds from the site are far too onerous for me to work with.

Since I have retired from full-on gigging and touring, it seems like the best step to take.

If you want to obtain sheet music for my songs, please contact me directly.

It has been a truly remarkable ride.

Thank you for supporting Jewish Music Made By Hand.

https://bethhamon.bandcamp.com/

 

 

Truly honored. Thank you, Cantors Assembly.

A song of mine was shared last night at the Cantors Assembly conference.

I was invited to submit a song some months ago, and it was chosen as one of the songs that was performed last night.

Owing to my ADHD and my brain being pummeled by other stuff lately, I had forgotten which song I'd submitted. ("The One Before Whom you Stand", from my album The Watchman's Chair.)

Jen Cohen, a Cantor from New Jersey, learned my song and sang it beautifully last night, wonderfully accompanied by a guitarist whose name I don't know.

I was thrilled, and truly humbled.

Here you go.

I am so messed up about identity these days.

I know that saying something like that out loud is risky in today’s climate.

But to be honest, I also don’t feel like I have as much at stake within the Jewish community as many of my friends and colleagues.

Living a life mostly on the Jewish margins has given me a different view of things. I understand, after getting to know other Jews, that many of my friends grew up in the comfortable center of Jewish life, with synagogue membership, religious school, Jewish summer camp and homes located on neighborhoods that were predominantly Jewish. Who wouldn’t feel clearer and more secure about their Jewish identity, and their place in the world, as a result of all that?

Growing up as I did in working class neighborhoods, in schools were I was often the only Jewish kid and, for a year in middle school, was bullied specifically for being Jewish, even as I felt removed from Jewish communal life and had little knowledge of Jewish history and no sense of Jewish connection. My parents did nothing to instill Jewish “pride” in me and my sister — indeed, the emotion of pride was reserved for one’s accomplishments, not for identity. There was some vague vibe connected to Zionism where my mother was concerned, but the only time I ever got a glimpse of it was when terrorists invaded the 1972 Munich Olympics and murdered Israeli athletes. Mom sat in front of our TV set and cried. She could not explain her tears to me, nor did she expect me to feel as she did. I was horrified that anyone would sully the Olympics that way, regardless of whom was a harmed or killed. I saw it universally. I would have been horrified no matter who had died. She took it personally, Jewishly, in a way I could not understand or claim for myself.

At age nine, I did not stop to ponder that she might feel lonely in her Jewish grief. We were, after all, uninvolved in Jewish community at the time.

It’s strange to find myself in a similar space, but on the opposite end of things.

I do not feel specifically Jewish grief. Growing up as I did, left to my own devices emotionally and philosophically by hands-off parents, how could I? I see this as a universal tragedy, as horrible as when the  Tutsis and Hutus were at war in Rwanda. My parents didn’t drill the Holocaust into me as some “special” kind of suffering or hardship; while it was specifically Jewish and horrible, it would have been worse for many more people, Jewish or not, if Hitler had won. 

I know that this sounds crazy to anyone who was raised Jewish, or who chose Judaism and embraced a love of Israel with the fervor of a convert. I get that. But I continue to feel a detachment from the whole thing, an overwhelming desire NOT to embrace this too personally. I was bullied for all sorts of reasons growing up and very often my Judaism had nothing to do with it. (Kids can smell weird a mile off, and they’ve always been able to.)

I feel weird, more than anything else.

Right now, I am equally repelled by the pro-Palestine crowd and the pro-Israel crowd. I feel I have no place among either. I feel repelled by the vehemence of the emotions at play, the violence of feeling, evident in the crowds on both sides. And I am not a violent human being. Having been bullied, I shy away from aggression.

So when I read, and reread, Frederick Foer’s cover article in the April issue of The Atlantic a couple of days ago about the decline of Jewish safety in America, I felt myself at something of a remove again. I understand the importance of Israel’s existence intellectually, but I do not feel strong emotions of connection and love for Israel on a personal level. 

I have held too many uncomfortable questions in my head about the origins of Israel statehood, and the displacement that was sadly necessary for it to come about. Was it really necessary? Did the world’s Jews have any other options, in a world where other nations did not want to take them in? 

At the same time, I can only shake my head at the repeated refusals of the Arab states that controlled the Palestinians to discuss sharing the land. Neither side has wanted to talk for a very long time, and far too many who are really invested in this endless conflict seem to want it to go on. 

All I know is that, when Jews in the United States stand together to sing “Hatikvah,” I am uncomfortable in my heart of hearts and almost always have been. Israel is someone’s, but it is not mine and has never been. If America is also not mine (for another set of reasons), it may well resonate with my discomfort at nationalism in general. It is hard enough to stand tall for a country that treats women like second-class citizens — still! — and came up with “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a workaround for queer equality. I can barely handle being tribal, let alone nationalist. The total stuff of who I am — my history, my brain, my orientation and my sex — have long pointed me towards another way. And while it has been a lonely way, at least it’s honest. I’m not sure how willing I am to trade that honesty for a community in which to belong, especially if the stakes for belonging are so fraught with assumptions on what makes a good this or that.

After reading this article, I feel like I’m lousy at being all sorts of individual, specific identities these days. I feel the separation that comes with clinging to an identity at the expense of being able to live in the whole world. I have loved living a Jewishly oriented life, but I also chafe at the constraints that it places on my ability to be fully in the rest of the world. I can pick and choose, like people often do. The result has been that I still don’t fully belong in — or fully relate with — any of them. 

Perhaps that’s normal for all human beings and I just feel it much more deeply. Perhaps my peripatetic youth laid the groundwork for a life where I would always question so much about the way we conduct ourselves in the world. In the end, it may not matter. I simply don’t know right now.

I have no more responses about Israel right now. Because fuck.

Iran fired missiles on Israel last night, supposedly as retaliation for Israel firing on the Iranian embassy in Syria, which may have been in retaliation for support Iran has lent to Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.
Nearly all the missiles were intercepted by Israel, the US or Jordan.

It's new because it's the first time Iran has ever fired on Israel directly.
It's old because Iran has funded other anti-Israel groups for years, and will continue to do so going forward.
It's really, really old because Israel was established in the midst of an otherwise hostile, Arab Middle East.
I know it probably had to be at the time. A third of the world's Jews had been murdered in WW2, and almost no other country wanted the remaining Jews to settle within their borders, so they had to go somewhere. Why not the land of Jewish biblical history? It made sense. A lot more sense than, say, Uganda. (Really, Herzl? Uganda?)

Unless you already lived there, and had to be moved aside to make room for so many refugees.

And this conundrum, this unbreakable Gordian knot, is why there will never be peace in the Middle East. Not in my lifetime, or in yours, or in your children's.

Sorry.

Forgive me while I struggle to find the purpose of praying for something that will never come about.

Forgive me for a lifetime of detachment that has effectively prevented me from buying into the whole story.

Forgive me for going small and inward just now. I am one of zillions who is fully aware of just how fucked we are, and how little any of us little people can realistically change the outcome.

All I can do is right here in my little corner of the world.

And God? What, even?
God didn't save the six million.
I am not convinced that God can save us now.
Is that because God isn't real, or because we didn't live up to the image of Godliness we've sold ourselves for millennia?
I don't know.
But right now, all I can really trust is other people close to me.
And whether or not that will be enough may not matter in the end.
It just has to be enough to keep me sane, that's all.
So I will love my people, my beloveds.
Not all of them are Jewish, and in the end that doesn't matter.

Love your people. Do it.

It won't save any of us from death, and it won't make the world more peaceful in the long run; but it will make our lives more tolerable in the times of despair and more beautiful in the moments of grace.

And at this point, that will have to be enough.