Hey There, Hi There, Ho There!

Our new Secretary of State’s first official visit to the Middle East has produced some considerable bit of news copy, and is staking out policy positions that make me, as a Jew with Jewish friends living, visiting, and doing business in Israel, uneasy about yet further Arab encroachment on the ancestral Jewish homeland.

“OK, Uncle Ber,” someone asks. “What do you think our Middle East policy should be?”

Remember, you asked.

First, RE: Israel’s pre-1967 borders – King David’s pre-1967 borders (“from the Reed Sea to the Euphrates”) – ok, let’s set ‘em there.

If that solution is really too hard to handle, how about then reviewing the UN partition of the British Palestinian Mandate, in which the Jews got Israel and the Arabs got Jordan (which is a lot bigger)? It wasn’t the Jews who backed out on the deal after all principals signed off and started a war rather than hold to their part of the bargain. I still hold for King David’s borders, though.

Next, Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided capital of the Nation of Israel – period. Israel liberated Jerusalem – including Temple Mount – in 1967 (it was in all the papers; look it up), then returned effective control of Temple Mount to the Arabs. What’s up with that? The Arabs should stand down from Temple Mount, and realistic arrangements should be made for commencement of construction of the Third Temple forthwith.

Non-Jews who wish to reside in Israel should be prepared to at least observe the Seven Commandments given to the descendents of Noah, and, of course, behave themselves. No more shooting at school buses or blowing up pizza restaurants. After all, Israeli Arabs are breeding faster than the Jews, and will outnumber Israeli Jews all too soon as it is if some place isn’t found for them.

Realistically, the Arabs have a lot more land than Israel. The Arabs have more in terms of natural and financial resources than Israel. If they really care about peace, they should stop financing terrorism and offer their own people great deals on real estate and cars. They have good-paying jobs in the oil business – for the time being. They can employ native talent. It worked for Texas. They should be looking after their own.

It’s a start.

As for Iran and Syria, certainly some solution between wholesale Israeli land giveaways and the total annihilation of Iran and Syria should be devised. I’m certainly relieved someone else is Secretary of State.

Bet you are, too.

* * * * *

A brief, but necessary word on Paul Harvey: I was not a fan of his, to say the least, but no one has sat down behind a radio microphone in the past sixty years without being influenced by his work, and we all, sometimes despite our better judgment, remember at least one one-liner of his. Mine for today is, “years do not necessarily bring wisdom, but always bring perspective.”

* * * * *

A chiyuv is a process; one settles into it eventually.

* * * * *

The gantze maiseh of Eliyyahu David is a long, strange story – even for me. And, at the same time, I learned out enough about him to deliver a quick, working summary in the first hour of our acquaintance. On his trumpet case was painted (as he used to say, “back when I was working for the Beach Boys, making real money”) a stormy sky, over which read the words, “Due to a critical shortage of qualified trumpeters, the End of the World will be postponed until further notice.”

They got one more Rosh Chodesh Adar.

Golus totally sucks.

* * * * *

He was put up for adoption at birth, and was adopted by the sheriff of Salinas, California, and his wife of many years. The Waites named him James, and because he was specifically chosen for adoption (a fact they never withheld from him) and the child of their older years, they indulged him, while bringing him up a proper law-and-order protestant like his adoptive parents. And what they indulged him – especially his music – he excelled at.

He was concert master of the S Barbara Symphony (the Waites moved to Goleta, just outside S Barbara, when Mr Waite the elder retired from law enforcement) while still in his teens, then moved to L.A., played ice shows, circuses, big bands, some session work and, as mentioned above, a few seasons with The Beach Boys. He then took a load of big band charts and rewrote them for maximum nine pieces. That was when he started seriously working on his improv. Some time over those years he changed his name to Jimmy Valves, earned his black belt in ai kido, recorded a classical album or two and got his Little Big Band into the studio.

I’ve never been a big fan of brass. Just ask Josh Alpert. I voted with my feet and my hands by making my music on strings. But Jimmy Valves defaulted to that same rich, sweet, classical sound Miles Davis built his career on, and he could make that piece of metal purr like a kitten. He, of course, had a lot of respect for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, but for him, the horn belonged to Clifford Brown. For all other musical considerations, however, Elvis Presley was the King.

He was a complicated, eccentric, one-of-a-kind Genuine Amurrican Orriginal.

He married, divorced, and remarried. The second time around, he really scored.

The story of Eliyyahu David comes together when Sarah Leah makes her entrance. I don’t recall anyone telling me how they met. They’d been married some years when our paths first crossed. Sarah Leah, then Kathleen, was, and still is, the most relentlessly cheerful, positive, optimistic, kind, sweet, downright saintly lady of my acquaintance. Ever. She puts all women I’ve ever met to shame. She’s tall, blond, in fabulously good shape, and, having been brought up Seventh Day Adventist, was a lifelong vegan and something of a health nut.

Because of the Adventists’ focus on healthy living, it’s not surprising that the SDA enclave of Loma Linda, near S Bernardino, produces some number of health care professionals. Sarah Leah has been an executive with Kaiser Permanente since at least the ‘80s. And, yes, she’s as good at what she does as Eliyyahu David was at what he did.

Musicians do not, as a rule, work all the time. The best of ‘em make good bucks when they work, but it’s not always consistent. Some session guys of my acquaintance do work pretty consistently and have houses, swimming pools, normal families, and investment portfolios, but they’re rare. Eliyyahu David worked when he could, and Sarah Leah brought home a steady, comfortable paycheck. It worked for them. Their marriage was always an amazement to me. Being an eccentric artist, Eliyyahu David could occasionally be a bit volatile, he was a raging homophobe with some very right-wing, orthodox attitudes – especially about a wife’s place in the home, with which I’m still not entirely comfortable. There was never a murmur of complaint or criticism from Kathleen, not while I was around. They were totally devoted to, and in love with, each other, each in their own way. It worked for them.

Back in the spring of ‘83, it wasn’t working for my then-girlfriend and me, and I was looking for a new place to live. At the time, I was working steady, with a small band in one of the high-dollar hotels in downtown L.A. Neither the band nor the gig was all that great, but it paid well and gave me a proper workout every day. The hotel was nice, too.

Jimmy Valves was a brilliant guy with a wide and fascinating range of interests. One was the manipulation of real estate. He wanted to open a trailer park, and could bring some fairly persuasive numbers to back up his notion that it was a gold mine. On his way to that, and their first house, Jim and Kathleen were managing an apartment building in North Hollywood, in one of the less overpriced neighborhoods in the world-famous S Fernando Valley.

Probably the most intense of his interests – next to music – was religion. Sometimes, especially when we first met, it got a little weird. I’ll always remember the newspaper photo he kept on his bulletin board, of Charlie Parker’s open casket with Jim’s hand-written, overlain caption: “The Wages of Sin.” Eccentric.

He looked at the name on the application I’d just completed for the vacant 1-bedroom apartment he was advertising.

“Berkowitz; you’re Jewish?”

“I was born that way,” I replied. “I don’t do Jewish these days.” I was, at the time quite comfortably ensconced in my Secular Period. I never said that G-d was dead. I just figured He went on vacation after Chronicles II (which would explain the Spanish Inquisition, Cossacks, pogroms, the 1940s, the death of my father at the ripe old age of 36, and Jonathan Pollard), having set the alarm on His digital watch for maybe a hundred years or so before the Days of Moshiach.

It made sense at the time.

We moved on to music. He’d recorded and been working his Little Big Band with an electric bass, but he really preferred upright. There were so many scaled-down Stan Kenton charts in their book, however, I knew that this was not the band for me. But Jim was very easy to like, the apartment was affordable and acceptable. Cats were not only ok, but almost required in the building. Jim and Kathleen had a brown-point Siamese (with an extra dose of Siamese cat attitude) named Spooky who pretty much owned the whole block.

It was to be the beginning of a long friendship.

* * * * *

Of course, having not been brought up very religious, I mixed with a fairly diverse crowd back home, most of them not very religious. L.A. musicians in my experience were not all that religious a group, even most of the country and “roots” music talent in L.A. When your travels take you to the Deep South, however, the atmosphere changes considerably. Not all, but many members of the Grand Ole Opry are serious Protestants, or at least they used to be. In that part of the music world, there are some groups who specialized in Protestant religious music. What Jew there still was in me would not, in good conscience, sing along, but the prevailing secular musician could appreciate the quality of their music.

And Southerners, whatever baggage they may still have, are, for the most part, genuinely warm, friendly, kindly, and really serious about their religion. That’s why it’s called the Bible Belt. When I, a hippie-looking, secular Jewish Californian with an attitude, got my first offer to work the festival circuit, I was, understandably, a bit apprehensive

A Jew who is not Shomer Shabbos in California gets a bit of instant karma on Saturday mornings when one bunch of Protestants comes knocking on your door, magazines in hand, determined to “save” you. Some Protestants are really into that sort of thing and I had some concern about what I was walking into. I figured I’d just play my sets, shoot my photos, watch my manners, try to score some publishable interview copy for the magazines I was writing for, keep a low profile the rest of the time, and hope for the best.

Following that agenda seemed to have worked, and not a one of ‘em ever tried to convert me.

Every time I showed my face-for-radio on site on a Saturday morning, however, the gospel singers were the first ones calling me to task for not being in schul. Go figure.

There are a few more relevant stories from that period I’ll bring around another time. This is someone else’s story.

* * * * *

So, after having escaped the attempts of Southern musicians to shoehorn me into a religious life I was clearly unsuited for, I got to be living across a hall from this SDA jazz guy (he followed Kathleen into that life because they kept the correct Sabbath) who’s asking me questions about Judaism I might be able to answer now, but ‘way beyond anything I’d learned back in that day.

“Go talk to a rabbi,” I told him again and again.

He said he really couldn’t do that. He wasn’t born to it, it wouldn’t be right. The Waites had been open with him about the fact he was adopted, but rather vague about his biomom. He never saw any reason to look into it, and always assumed that she was a Latina. A dark-haired, brown-eyed Californian of uncertain parentage could easily make that assumption, and the Waites never went out of their way to disabuse their boy of it. I always thought the misconception contributed to his sometimes over-the-top antipathy toward the Catholic church.

* * * * *

Months became seasons, then years. Music came and went. Bands changed. I went to work for a while for the Feds, where I first got my hands on working PCs, Lester Catt and his sweet little sister Earline came to live with me, as did – yep you guessed it – another not-Jewish girlfriend. This one was more interesting than most, born in Nashville, brought up on 150 acres about 40 miles away in Smyrna, TN, by educated, sophisticated, self-made, deeply religious individuals, the daughter of the deacon of the Smyrna Baptist church who on her own started out to be a veterinarian, along the way becoming a knowledgeable enough amateur Egyptologist to have been entertaining an offer from the Field Museum right before we met. She had considered Jewish conversion before we met and maintained an interest for a while, but, left to her own devices she would rather have been a Celtic witch.

I was, remember, quite comfortably ensconced in my Secular Period. In context, it made sense.

Life went on for Jim and Kathleen as well. Kathleen got another promotion or two, another cat or three joined the Valves family, and Mr Waite the elder left this world at a distinguished old age.

I don’t remember when it started, or what set it off, but after a while the SDA came to be no longer intense enough to satisfy what Jim was starting to crave in his religious experience. The new books were taking on a dark, apocalyptic, and increasingly alarming tone. The conversation was taking in discussions of the satanic implications of some of the most innocuous of the commonplace and, of course, of musical expressions. He wasn’t playing as much as he used to, and they were finding churches to go to that I didn’t know existed outside the Bible Belt, and then only in rumor. Even the newspaper photo from Charlie Parker’s funeral came down. One evening my lady-in-residence came back from hanging out with Kathleen looking ashen and frightened.

“They’re going to snake-handlers,” she said.

Without attempting to explain more than the little I remember about these inhabitants of the religious fringe (look ‘em up, if you must, but prepared for some pretty upsetting stuff), suffice to say my friend was pulling his devoted wife into some very scary territory.

Then, one day, Ms Waite suffered a stroke. Jim and Kathleen, of course, dropped everything and rushed to his mother’s side. Ms Waite was well on in years by this time, and feared that she might be taken from this world – with a burden on her conscience.

* * * * *

Shakespeare said “brevity is the soul of wit.” Tell that to John Coltrane.

Shakespeare didn’t know jazz guys.

I told you it was a long story, and to get yet stranger. But there’s too much of it for a single posting.

So, in a blatant rip-off of another Brit, Charles Dickens, we’ll split this one in pieces.

Think of it as a long commercial break until next time.

Moshiach Now!