A Windfall of Musicians
Some time ago, I talked about the gathering clouds over our country and our city. The question at hand was: when is it time to cut and run on the American Experiment? There is a form of an answer in the Jewish tradition: when one’s life is in imminent danger, one should do what one can to save oneself. It is a bit like the airline safety announcement reminding you to “put on your mask first before assisting others.” However, up to this point, our primary responsibility is a mixture of serving our own basic needs and behaving in an ethical and compassionate way towards our fellow Jews and the larger communities that we are a part of. This is America. We are (mostly) free to move about the country without restriction, but if we choose to move because we don’t want to pay the taxes that support the poor, the widow, and the orphan, the place we are moving from is the place where our Torah and our tradition live.
We know that in the dark times of the last century it was necessary for many to flee, many more than those who had the means to. Some, the lucky ones, escaped their pursuers. Among them, many came as far as Los Angeles. In her book, “A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigres and Exiles in Southern California,” Dorothy Lamb Crawford tells many of their stories. She briefly discusses the conductor Fritz Zweig. He had studied with Arnold Schoenberg early on in his career and later served as the conductor of the Berlin Volksoper. His fate: “Zweig was on the conducting staff of the Berlin Municipal Opera when he was removed from his post in 1933. He first fled to Prague, where he was a conductor for the New German Theater (now the Prague State Opera). When Czechoslovakia fell to the Nazis in 1938 Zweig went to Paris, and at the fall of France in 1940 he fled yet again to the United States.” At what point in our flights do we become exiles?
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piasetzna Rebbe, felt such love and obligation for his students that he purposely remained with them and kept them together in the Warsaw Ghetto until the night before the final liquidation of the Ghetto was announced. Then he told them to flee, but even then he remained among the people as the last survivors were transported to the Trawniki concentration camp rather than abandoning his community to save himself. The educator Jan Korczak could have chosen to try to save himself, but he also remained with the children that he cared for to the end. We don’t face such a dire situation yet, and although it seems like we are closer to one like it now than where we were just a few years ago, we shouldn’t live as if we did. And even if such a fate overtakes us (and if it does, we will be far from alone in facing it) we are not all leaders and none of us should be expected to bear such burdens.
Since I have been here in Downtown I have seen many upheavals. I went through COVID here, as we all did wherever we were. The riots that occurred here after the death of George Floyd were followed by weeks of peaceful protests and the arrival of a contingent of the National Guard who mostly just hung out and chatted amiably with the people in the neighborhood. After October 7th there were many pro-Palestinian protests. After the 2024 election there have been the No Kings protests. None of these really activated my fight or flight response in the way that the President’s decision to wage war on Downtown did during the ICE protests. We faced a hostile, angry and frustrated contingent of National Guard troopers who were brought in to intimidate us. We were placed under curfew and martial law. The possibility of a serious loss of civilian lives did not seem out of the question. It happened elsewhere later, but in the entire nation, the hand of the oppressor struck here first. That was probably the moment when I was asking: “When will it be time to go?’
In the McCarthy years many people fled from Los Angeles and the United States. The playwright Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hans Eisler fled to East Germany from LA. They weren’t the only ones. From San Francisco, the poet George Oppen fled to Mexico with his family. The muralist Bernard Zakheim fled San Francisco and the public spotlight to run an auto repair shop in the Central Valley and teach upholstery to prisoners at a state prison. All of this seems small when one thinks of the Great Migration that brought so many Black Americans from the oppression of their lives in the American South (segregation, share-cropping and lynching) up to Chicago and other northern cities.
My thoughts on flight and exile have changed. As much as I have made myself a person of the city of Los Angeles, I have a bodily feeling of exile being here. I follow our father Abraham in my attitude towards the city. When Abraham came to Shechem (the outskirts actually) he took it upon himself to do work to improve the place. It is suggested in commentary that he introduced the idea of currency, among other innovations. I feel that my obligations in a place are to try to improve it regardless of how long-standing my residence will be. It is an obligation brought on by my presence alone. I still answer to other aspects of my history, but they do not absolve my obligation here.
It is a fraught thing to judge for others what path they should choose for their lives. As a person who might be asked for advice on this question, it is better to make a hard separation between what I ask of myself and what I would ask of others.
There is an important difference between the last century and our current moment. The reach of the rising evil in our country internationally and the failure of our country to be even the mixed moral success that it has been has made much of the rest of the world less free for all and more hostile to the Jewish people. It seems to me that flight is less of an option. We might find ourselves like the dove that finds no branch to alight on. Israel, which has long held itself out as a place of refuge for the Jewish people, is in the midst of its own struggle for its soul. Make no mistake, if one wants to fight that fight then it would be praiseworthy to go there, but if not, there is a fight here to which we are obliged.
It is too early to think of our lives alone. We still live in a city of hunger and homelessness, where members of our community have been turned into fugitives, where children are still struggling to get the educations that they deserve, where the housing that is available is neither affordable nor always well maintained (regardless of cost), where race and ethnicity mean more than they should when it comes to opportunity, where the environment is respected only sometimes, where corruption is rife, and where communities that should be working together are turned against each other.
In the Ashamnu (confession of sins) we will pray this Yom Kippur that all of our failures to remedy the faults in our city will be worth mentioning so that we might do better. On that challenging day, rather than entertaining thoughts of flight, we should look forward to fighting the good fight for ourselves and our city.
