Folks,
In a city which many say has no seasons, each Angeleno has their own way of knowing when it’s spring. For some, it’s getting ready for Passover, or watching the Dodger’s first spring training game. For me, it’s the blossoming of our pomegranate tree.
This spring, the tree is full of the bright red blossoms of expectation. In a week or two, if the bases of blooms begin to round and grow, they are on their way to becoming fruit. If the squirrels don’t chew the green fruit first, around the time of the High Holy Days, the ripened poms will bring joy and promise to our New Year.
To begin the fruit cycle, the bees were out on the tree this week, doing their work gathering golden grains. Some years, they seem to bypass our tree, or arrive after most of the blossoms have fallen. But this year, adding to my hope of a city returning to its normal buzz, a few of nature’s pollinators, have returned just at the right time.
It is said that each pomegranate holds 613 seeds, one for each mitzvah in the Torah. (I counted them one year—let’s agree to say it’s a nice idea.) At the end of the day, as I see a bee flying away with legs packed with gold I wonder: how many grains of pollen has it gathered. Does the bee, like us, have some way of accounting for its actions in the world? If it has fallen short by a little, or even a lot, will it try again tomorrow?
Thanks to the generosity and good timing (and good taste) of one MegilLA reader, I can now send out this issue to our entire list. But to continue, more readers need to step up and become paid subscribers.
Shabbat Shalom
Edmon J. Rodman
GUIDE FOR THE JEWPLEXED
In pursuit of Justice
Edmon J. Rodman
Where were you when the verdict of the Derek Chauvin trial was announced?
In the future, in the non-trivial pursuit of sifting through your life to find a little meaning, you will want to remember this moment of justice that the Torah tells us twice to pursue.
Don’t forget that Judaism makes a big deal about remembering. We remember our dead, our teachers, Shabbat, and our eternal enemy, the Amalek. We remember the going out from Egypt, and when Jerusalem burned. We also remember which relative wrinkled their nose at us 25 years ago.
I remember where I was when JFK was assassinated and, when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. I also remember when I first saw the flames of a building a block away from my home burning, a few hours after the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King to a bloody pulp were acquitted on three charges. (On the fourth, the jury could not decide.)
We should remember this day of justice too, and pray for a day when we will not have to pray for them anymore. What was your initial reaction to hearing that Chauvin was guilty of murdering George Floyd? When I heard the news on the car radio I said, “Thank God,” and many of my friends and family said the same thing.
We were not alone. Darnella Frazier, the teen with a cell phone, who captured Chauvin squeezing the life out of Floyd, after hearing the guilty verdict, posted on Facebook: “THANK YOU GOD THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”
What does God have to do with it? Partly, it’s just something we say when we feel intense relief.
After hearing for days that police were in position, and that businesses were being boarded up in anticipation of the jury announcement, you could feel the the wings all aflutter in the City of Angels. But the danger of the moment did not hit home until while leaving Ralphs I noticed that a big guy positioned at the main doorway was wearing a gun.
Yes, “Thank God,” for not having to live through the burning and destruction of property, and the loss of additional life.
But "relief" doesn’t cover it.
The good thing, the right thing, the just thing, happens so infrequently, that a decision like this one seems touched by something beyond us, and in that moment of realization, when it touches us, our response takes a step outside of our usual sphere.
As Jews, we each come to an event like this with such different thoughts springing from our upbringing, education, life experience, and politics. But what we mostly have in common is a love of justice. No matter how much or how little we go to shul, we know that as individuals, and as a people we must pursue it; even if we don’t.
Though there may be too many days when we are consumed with the likes of Mrs. Mazel, Schtisel, or Unorthodox, on many others, we march, we write, we pray, we organize for justice.
It’s not that saying Thank God makes us instant believers. It’s more like we are thanking God that there is justice in this world; something we have believed for as long as we can remember.
Meet Hollywood’s yiddishe momme
In preparation for the Academy Awards, we can take a moment to recall actor Vera Gordon, who for many moviegoers from the 1920 - 1940s was the movie screen's Jewish mother they remembered most. After roles in Yiddish theater, and a starring in a role as a loving Jewish mother in the silent film “Humoresque,” she had a Hollywood film career of playing, among many other films, the Jewish mother in the successful series “The Cohens and Kellys.” In 1928, she moved with her family from New York to Beverly Hills. Stepping outside of the big screen, in 1936, she starred in the production of “Dreams,” a new Yiddish comedy staged at downtown's Mayan Theater.
Encore at the 'Oscars' of invention
Though actress Hedy Lamarr was never nominated for an Academy Award, she did win an award for an invention which plays an important role in our daily lives.
A Jewish Hollywood film star of the 1930’s through the 1950s Heddy was born, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in 1914 in Vienna.
After a brief film career in Germany, she was discovered by MGM’s Louis B. Meyer and lit up the screen opposite many of the leading men of her time such as Charles Boyer, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, as well as Victor Mature in the highest grossing movie of 1949, “Samson and Delilah.”
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for all her film work, but she was also an inventor. During WWII, Lamarr and her co-inventor, avant garde composer George Antheil, figured out how to use the mechanics of the player piano to create the earliest version of what is known as the "frequency-hopping spread-spectrum" system.
Lamarr envisioned using what they called a “Secret Communications System” to keep radio-controlled torpedoes from being jammed by the enemy.
What did Lamarr know about torpedoes? While married to her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, an arms manufacturer, she learned about military technology, from sitting in on his business meetings.
The patent application explained how the system based on a conventional player piano record with 88 rows of perforations, would permit the use of 88 different carrier frequencies that could be changed at intervals.
With the frequency “hopping” around, the intruder could not capture it, nor could they reconstruct it. From a security perspective it was perfect.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy ignored the innovation; the player piano concept was a bit too much for them. Did they see it as putting a piano inside a torpedo? Who knows? It was not used until 1962 when during the Cuban missile crisis the U.S. deployed the system in it's ships as part of the naval blockade around Cuba.
The invention, is considered as contributing to the concept of spread spectrum technology, and variations of that technology are now a standard part of cell phone networks.
As a result of their contributions, in 1997, Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award. That same year, Lamarr became the first female recipient of the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, a prestigious lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors that is dubbed "The Oscar of Inventing.”
