Month: January 2016

Did you miss me? Tuesday night I took my buddy Roni Rachmani out for dinner to celebrate his recent birthday and we caught a late screening of an excellent movie, “Concussion“. By the time I got home, it was almost 1 a.m. and I didn’t have the energy to blog, which takes me about two hours a day.

The movie stars Will Smith as Dr. Bennett Omalu, a Nigerian pathologist working in Pittsburgh who discovers the sometimes fatal damage caused by concussions in football. It follows his courageous campaign over several years to force the National Football League to finally admit that as many as 28 percent of league players were suffering brain damage.

The movie is all about shining a light in dark places. Which is what we used to say journalism was all about. The principle still exists in some pockets, such as Vancouver’s online The Tyee. But in the daily newspaper world, corporate concentration and desperate cost-cutting are relentlessly silencing voices.

Yesterday’s cutbacks at Postmedia  across Canada were a major topic of conversation as we ate Tuesday night. Roni writes from Vancouver for the major Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, and was a reporter in Tel Aviv on the media before immigrating here. I spent more than 30 years at daily papers, including The Vancouver Sun, The Toronto Star and The Province, where I took early retirement in 2006. I’m glad I got out when I did. The main image in today’s post is from a fabulous fake front page full of inside jokes that colleagues presented to me on my last day.

Roni and I see newspapers dying a slow death everywhere. Many papers are reducing the number of days they produce print editions and flailing in their attempts to make digital news gathering profitable.

When I was at The Province, people in the newsroom were constantly speculating about when the paper would be killed off. Tuesday was a big step in that direction with the Sun and Province newsrooms being merged. I got a hint of that when I contacted the human resources department recently about a pension issue and learned the email address is now @sunprovince.com.

There is still good journalism at the Sun and Province but the papers are pale shadows of their former selves. For my news, I subscribe to the Globe & Mail on Friday and Saturday, The Economist weekly magazine, and for the rest I go online and CBC Radio 1. I also try not to miss my old SFU friend Allen Garr’s solid opinion pieces in the Vancouver Courier.

Where do you get your news? Is there life after newspapers?

As an 18-year-old reporter at The Sun, one of my first assignments was to interview Santa Claus.

On the way to Dances of Universal Peace last night, I stopped at Spicy House Korean Restaurant on Lonsdale in North Vancouver for dinner. I’d never been there before but when I saw my favourite Korean dish, bibimbab, posted on the menu outside, I had to go in.

At Spicy House, bibimbab is cooked soybean sprouts, carrots, spinach, zucchini, a small slice of beef and a fried egg on a bed of rice served sizzling hot in a stone bowl. In South Korea, I was usually served more mountain vegetables, like fern fiddleheads. As with every Korean meal, mine last night was served with several side dishes – such as potatoes simmered in a savoury sauce, and kimchi, which is spicy, pickled Chinese cabbage.

Kimchi is a Korean staple, eaten with most every meal. For me it is also a not-exactly- kosher, guilty pleasure in restaurants, one that is at odds with my dietary practice. When I shop for kimchi in Asian markets, I make sure to check the ingredients and buy it without the usual tiny salted shrimp. But when I eat out, I can be pretty sure they’re there.

I call my dietary practice Eco Kosher Lite. It’s “eco” because it’s more important that my food be organic or local or both than have an official kosher stamp of approval that its production has been supervised by a kosher authority. It’s “kosher”, because I don’t eat pork or shellfish and I don’t eat meat and dairy in the same meal. That last point comes from a biblical proscription against “boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.” That has come down through the ages to mean no cheeseburgers in today’s world. And it’s “lite” because I don’t go crazy with separate sets of dishes for dairy foods and meat foods, and other strict practices.

I didn’t grow up eating this way. We ate everything in my secular home. My favourite sandwich to take to school was – gross-out alert – bacon and peanut butter. Once when my family went out to eat with my orthodox grandfather, my zaida Abraham Shuer, I ordered a Crab Louis and my mother kicked me under the table.

In 1997, at a Jewish spiritual retreat, I decided to get more serious about my Judaism and adopted my current dietary practice. It makes me more conscious of what I’m putting in my body, and I feel I’m connecting across the generations with my zaida.

Club 69 update

Today I’m welcoming my friend Jack Resels to Club 69, show here with his lifemate Soorya, married since 1969. (Hey, that’s another 69.) They live in Belterra, the new cohousing community on Bowen Island.

And I’m lamenting the passing of English actor Alan Rickman, who played so many great character roles, including Prof. Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies. He was born on Feb. 21, 1946, and died on Jan. 14 reportedly of pancreatic cancer, after only being diagnosed a few months ago.

Fergus kept a steady beat on the drum as Jutta strummed her guitar and a dozen of us sang and whirled around the room. Sometimes we held hands moving in a circle, sometimes we circled around a partner offering blessings, and we chanted in Arabic, Sanskrit, Hebrew and English.

It’s an interspiritual practice called Dances of Universal Peace, introduced in the 1960s in California by Jewish-born Samuel L. Lewis  (1896-1971), who was recognized as both a Zen master and a Sufi master teacher. The Dances have since spread around the world.

Last night, the Dances were held in the former-church-now-studio next to Presentation House Theatre in North Vancouver, led by Jutta, Allaudin and Steve. The music, movements and high ceilings elevated our spirits.

Dance has been a thin thread in my life, occasionally woven into some of the decades. As a nerdy teen I danced in a Viennese waltz team at junior high, was part of a square dance team, and was known as “Spider” during the height of the Twist for the crazy way I moved my legs.

At 19 as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun, I sweated through a 27-hour dance marathon, from 9 p.m. on a Friday night until midnight Saturday. We were allowed five-minute bathroom breaks each hour, which I often used to phone in updates to my story to the newsroom.

A year later I met and fell in love with an American named Betsy on a kibbutz in Israel. While she studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, I took a few of the classes. Men were scarce but I was no gift to the dance world. This past summer, Betsy and I had a sweet reunion in New York, where she is still a dancer, after not seeing each other for 40 years.

Over the years, I did some spiritual dancing called zhikr with a mystical school, the Arica Institute, and danced at parties and social events. More recently I have performed at sacred dance festivals with Ofira Roll in Vancouver and Courtenay, B.C. I enjoy going to Unity Dances at the Quaker Hall in Vancouver led by Amir O’Loughlin, a local Sufi teacher.

This afternoon, at the end of a Vancouver Cohousing community meeting digesting the latest construction delays, we danced and sang to the classic R&B/soul tune, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” a hit for Marvin Gaye.

Oh baby, there ain’t no mountain high enough,
Ain’t no valley low enough,
Ain’t no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you babe

That’s me, Vancouver Sun reporter Lorne Mallin, a little worse for wear after a 27-hour dance marathon in 1966.

Performing with Ofira Roll at the 2011 Vancouver Interspiritual Dance Festival.

This morning at Or Shalom, Vancouver’s East Side synagogue, was the Bar Mitzvah of a young man named Devon. As usual during this rite of passage, he helped lead part of the Shabbat morning service and chanted from the Torah in Hebrew. The 14-year-old took on the additional challenge of chanting the Haftorah, in this case a reading from the prophet Jeremiah.

Then Devon delivered his Dvar Torah – his thoughts on the Torah portion of the week – and held the congregation spellbound with the quality of his mind and his command of language. Here I am 69, without half the critical thinking skills of this remarkable kid who is barely a teenager.

This part of the Torah tells the story of the last three of the 10 plagues that befell the Egyptian people and their Pharaoh, who refused to let the Israelite slaves go free. Here are short excerpts from Devon’s presentation:

This week’s Torah portion discusses the final stages of the plagues of Egypt in a way that causes me to question the judgment or teaching of God. In this portion God says, “I have hardened the mind of Pharaoh.” I wonder what the point is of painting one who is already evil as even more exaggeratedly flawed, and what the point is of sacrificing firstborn children and animals all across Egypt just to teach that one guy a lesson.

On first reading, this stupefied me.

But I have come to realize that as sacred myth the Torah is using Pharaoh as a symbol of immorality. And that what is described as consuming all of Egypt, including its crops and animals, symbolizes and makes viscerally real the fallout of slavery.

• • • • • •

Perhaps the disasters expressed by nature in the plagues demonstrate the pervasiveness of consequence.

Maybe the learning is that we cannot contain the evil we unleash. Another teaching is that the presence of good does not, necessarily, offset evil or save us from the consequence of evil action.

On a personal scale, as soon as we accept another human being as a lesser individual we close our minds from learning, we’ve “hardened” our minds as Pharaoh did. As soon as we accept that there is such a thing as ‘human’ and ‘subhuman’ we are falling into the steps of Pharaoh and leading ourselves to peril and who knows how exaggerated the real repercussions will be.

• • • • • •

As I become more and more aware of myself, I slow down, and as I slow down, I have begun to notice the grandeur of nature.

After a while, you start to become more and more amazed by how beautiful our world really is. And I realize that, in those moments when the patterns in the clouds swirl and the distant trees are swayed by a wind we cannot feel, I am, perhaps, as close to God, to our world, as I will ever be.

In such moments, we get a glimpse of the sheer joy of life, and that is almost too much to ever understand. That is what happens when we slow down and appreciate things; life gains newfound meaning. And would we not agree that to appreciate God’s Creation, or whatever caused this universe, is truly a holy thing?

Update on Joel Wambi’s angels

Three angels answered the call to help with the expenses for Joel Wambi, an orphan in Uganda’s Abayudaya Jewish community whose Bar Mitzvah is next weekend. Thank you! I wired the money to Uganda tonight.

Update on daily practice

I let Friday slip by without my daily spiritual practice of chanting, meditation and yoga. But I got back on the horse today. Fifteen out of 16 days ain’t bad for a New Year’s resolution.

If patience is a virtue, then my Vancouver Cohousing community of 45 adults and 16 children is approaching sainthood. The completion date for our 31-unit project has been continually delayed since September and we learned today that we’re pushing into late February instead of the end of this month. Since we broke ground in July 2014 in a tight construction market, it’s been challenging to get good crews for many of the trades.

As a director of our development company, this afternoon I joined two other directors in a conference call with our development manager. He told us issues with completing the siding and landscaping are the main reasons for the latest delay. We moved quickly to communicate by email and phone tree with our members. We’ll learn more at our monthly community meeting on Sunday.

As the email writer, I was hoping people wouldn’t shoot the messenger. So far, the response has been very understanding and typical of this amazing group of people. Since the very beginning in early 2012, we’ve made all of our decisions by 100 percent consensus, which means everyone agrees. We realize that in cohousing what is best for the community takes priority over personal concerns. Our process committee gracefully facilitates our meetings and has helped us navigate some very tough decisions, such as how to handle budget overruns.

After signing up as an associate member of Vancouver Cohousing in June 2012, I attended my first community meeting. Two of the members who stood up to speak that afternoon casually adopted the yoga tree pose – standing on one leg with the other foot pressed against the standing thigh. It takes balance, which for me was symbolic of the goal of a balance of privacy and community in my life. Later, I told members that “You had me at tree pose.”

I jumped right in, getting involved with the marketing and membership committees. I created posters for public meetings and other marketing materials, and came up with the idea for a successful Cohousing Fair that featured keynote speaker Charles Durrett from California, our original architect and the guru of cohousing in North America.

In the membership committee, I hosted many public information sessions at my home where a team of us made presentations to people interested in cohousing. Once any of them signed on as associate members, there was a three- to four-month process where they attended community meetings and social events, worked with a committee, had a financial interview and received an overview of our progress to date. At the end of that process, if they figured Vancouver Cohousing was for them, they asked for full membership. We asked the community for consensus to accept them, and they joined us.

This way we have become a self-selected group of like-minded individuals and families who work together beautifully and want to live a more collaborative and neighbourly lifestyle. We just have to wait a little longer to live together.

A new siding crew takes measurements Thursday at the front of the project where siding isn’t finished. The siding details are quite complicated and time-consuming, typical of many aspects of our project. 

Pouring cement Thursday for curbs at the front entrance, part of the “hard landscape” work still ongoing.

Still no plants in the courtyard planters on Wednesday, part of the “soft landscaping”. (Cam Dore photo)

Yesterday’s post about Joel Wambi stirred memories of the 14 months I spent in Uganda. I travelled to the eastern Ugandan village of Nabugoye Hill in April 2009. In my life to that point, there had been almost no black people. As I approached Nabugoye, I wondered  what it would be like to be surrounded by black Africans.

But that wasn’t what first impressed me. What I saw were fellow Jews, living Jewish lives, keeping the sabbath, attending Shabbat services – just like me. I felt at home.

Home in this case was a sparsely furnished room in the new Abayudaya Guesthouse that had been built the previous year with funding from the San Francisco NGO Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue).

Before going to Uganda, I knew they didn’t need a journalist in a rural African village. So I took a course in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at Greystone College in Vancouver. While most children in Uganda grow up speaking tribal languages at home, they are in most schools taught in English.

The Abayudaya – the word for Jews in the Luganda language – administer a primary school and a high school, where Jewish, Muslim and Christian students study. Another U.S. NGO, Kulanu (All of Us), has been instrumental in establishing and supporting the schools.

I taught English writing in both schools. At Hadassah Primary School – not related to the American women’s Zionist organization – I taught Grade 7 and the school’s teachers as well. At Semei Kakungulu High School, I was overwhelmed by marking the papers of 35 students. So I cherry-picked the top 12 and prepared them for the essay questions they would face in government exams.

Then I created spelling tests at the high school and chose the top students for a spelling team. They were inspired when I showed them the movie “Akeela and the Bee”, about a black girl in a poor middle school in Los Angeles who rises to become the top student speller in the U.S.

Our team practised endless lists of words and then we challenged two prestigious schools in Mbale, the district capital about 5 km (3 miles) away, to what may have been the first spelling bee in the country.

On the day of the Mbale Spelling Challenge, I hosted our team to lunch at the guesthouse and then we drove by minivan to Mbale Secondary School, a treat for the students who usually walked to town.

The spelling judges I recruited came up with a tough list of words. Our team struggled and came in third. Afterwards, all the contestants drank soft drinks provided by a local distributor and received certificates of participation. Every student also got a T-shirt from MTN, the top telecom in Uganda. The shirts promoted a service for youth with the slogan “Late chat 4 shizzle.” The irony of spelling students and their teacher to be wearing that didn’t hit me until much later.

Our students sang all the way back to the village. It had been a great day.

Explaining the rules of the Mbale Spelling Challenge.

Students enjoying soft drinks after the spelling bee.

Joel Wambi will be a Bar Mitzvah boy on Saturday, Jan. 23. He’s one of the Ugandan orphans whose education is supported by donations we receive at Chanting & Chocolate evenings and my Shabbat potluck dinners. We have enough money for his education expenses but not to pay for his Bar Mitzvah – new clothes and shoes, and food for the guests who will congregate at the main Abayudaya synagogue in the red-dirt village of Nabugoye Hill, where I lived six years ago.

We need $150 Canadian for Joel, which includes the fee to wire the money to his teacher, Shadrach Mugoya of Namutumba, about 70 km (43.5 miles) from Nabugoye. I’m hoping there may be an angel or two who might help us put this money together. This is my Paypal donation link. If more than enough is donated, the extra will help with the education of the five orphans we support.

Shadrach, who has been preparing Joel for his big day, is enrolled in the rabbinic ordination program of ALEPH, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, with which my synagogue, Or Shalom, is affiliated. Or Shalom has made Chanting & Chocolate and our initiative for the orphans an official project of the synagogue.

If you’re wondering about the Korean T-shirt Joel is wearing, Uganda gets used clothing from the developed world by the container load, which has devastated the domestic clothing industry. I was once surprised to see a young Ugandan in the market in Mbale, the district capital near Nabugoye, wearing a Vancouver Sun Run T-shirt.

My purple kippa (Jewish skullcap) was crocheted in Nabugoye during my time there. When Semei Kankangulu, a powerful Ugandan military chief,  first declared himself a Jew in 1919, 3,000 people followed him. They knew they were supposed to wear a head covering but, cut off from the outer Jewish world, they didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. Living in an area with many Muslims, they adopted the shape of a Muslim kufi, and added the Star of David and other symbols to make it Jewish.

This evening I wore mine at Jutta Kanuka’s wonderful kirtan (sacred chanting) in North Vancouver, where I drummed and led a few Hebrew chants. It’s held on the second Wednesday of every month. This Sunday, she’s leading Dances of Universal Peace, at 7 p.m. at Anne MacDonald Studio next to Presentation House Theatre, 333 Chesterfield Ave. in North Van. Contact Jutta at poppymoonlight@gmail.com for more information.