Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
The future has looked brighter. In my exploration of Futurism, included at length in the newsletter last year, one of the goals was to try to find a vision of a positive future for the Jewish people - a long term goal reachable by well-strategized steps. This idea foundered for me on the sense that this was utopianism, rather than practicality. As Goya said, “The dreams of reason are madness.”
In the old Bet Midrash of the Rabbinical School at AJU one of our teachers, Janet Davis, hung a garage sale painting of a Simchat Torah Torah parade. When she had bought it, she asked the seller what he thought it depicted. He told her that it was a second line parade in New Orleans. There were times in our study that we would go off course and onto an entirely wrong path of understanding. She referred to this as “going to New Orleans,” in honor of the painting which then served as a reminder of the constant possibility of folly.
Billie Holiday sang the Eddie De Lange / Louis Alter song “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans,” with Louis Armstrong, that New Orleans always brings to mind for me:
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong, the feeling's getting stronger
The longer I stay away
Miss the moss covered vines, the tall sugar pines
Where mocking birds used to sing
And I'd like to see the lazy Mississippi
A-hurrying into spring
Over Mardi Gras the memories
Of Creole tunes that filled the air
I dream of oleanders in June
And soon I'm wishing that I were there
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart
And there's something more, I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans.
Ultimately, I care more for our fellow Jews heading into the future and what they need now than any desire I might have to see the future before its time. I have a constant frustration with the Jewish philanthropic world’s segregation of programming into age cohorts, but in this case I have my thoughts set more on the needs of our “young adults” (and beyond that a focus on the responsibilities of our not so young adults.) The challenges that they face are practical and spiritual, but the pain points in both senses are intertwined.
To start from an easier place, the AI revolution is causing a realignment of the ways that we provide for ourselves economically. I could have said jobs, but even the idea of what a job is seems to be up for grabs. Young people now face the questions,”do I have skills that will be relevant going forward or I am just months away from irrelevance?” and “Should I continue to try to do something useful or should I just get on the AI bandwagon now and onboard before they pull the ladders up.” That is: “should I discard all morality and trample over everyone else to save myself?”
There is an even more existential crisis moment brought on by AI. The tasks that we do in our work, out in the street, in our homes and places of worship, all of these are tasks that an AI can be set to do. Some will be done better than others by the AI and some can be done better or worse than what we can do by the AI. However, knowing that the AI is soulless and mindless as it does the same tasks that we do ourselves, we begin to wonder about the value and meaning of our own actions. In Maslow’s hierarchy of values, meaning making is at the top of the pyramid. It is a luxury item. However, if we look at the work of Victor Frankl, meaning making is foundational. The will to do the basic things that our body needs to survive are bound up with our sense that those things are, at the least, means to an end. We need to know that we are living for more than the momentary mechanics of survival.
If we drain the meaning from all of the details of our lives and see them as nothing more than mechanizable activities, we are at risk of falling into an existential void. There are mechanistic philosophers who view human life as lacking in meaning. They view the meaning-making exercise as fantasy building. This is a kind of nihilism. There are others who view their lives as meaningful, but disdain the lives of others as meaningless. They would be happy to erase much of the human race with machines, or if it is more profitable “cull the herd” and enslave the rest . To have to live in a world where there are people publicly trumpeting these views is to be subject to a form of violence and trauma.
As an older person, it is easy to misunderstand the way younger people feel about their lives, but most often, the real disconnect comes from failing to understand the differences in our experiences of our lives at comparable ages. I came of age in the shadow of the hippies and punks who I looked to as the older siblings I didn’t have (my brother and sister are younger than I am. I love them). In New York, in college in the early eighties the place started to fill up with Preppies on their way to Yuppydom. I was at the end of the boomer generation (no comments required). My non-conformism led me to critical views of what came before and what was becoming around me. I survived in these views because I was willing to live like a poor person, but I knew I had the solidity of my silent generation parents to fall back on in case of disaster.
Today’s younger people can’t be expected to function as idiosyncratically as I have and from my own peculiar perch it has been hard for me to intuit the normative experience of today's young adults. They are the children of the Yuppies that I looked down on. Rather than the nervous striving and the obsession with maintaining their place, their children find themselves well educated, burdened with the debt left from their education, and facing a job market with fewer jobs altogether. There are even fewer jobs that will get them out of debt and allow them to develop stable lives and support families.
The fact that this anger is the backdrop to the political positions of younger Jews today should come as no surprise. We see it motivating the pro-Netanyahu Israel partisans. They support Israel irrationally, without critical thinking. Their anger is combined with physical fear for the State of Israel and its inhabitants and with physical fear that the violence aimed at Israel will be aimed at them as well. The emotion that they feel is not unreasonable, but the conclusions that they let anger draw for them often are. Those in the anti-Zionist camp are angry that the narrative that they have inherited about Israel doesn’t match the reality they see in front of them. They feel betrayed because they feel that the values that they have been taught in the American Jewish community of democracy and civil rights are in conflict with the value that has been placed from the same leaders on support for the State of Israel. The emotion that they feel is not unreasonable, but the conclusions that they let anger draw for them often are.
Israel, for Jewish young adults, is dried tinder set out in front of the deeper anger caused by developments in our society that are much closer to home for them. If we, of previous generations, cannot respond to that anger with sympathy rather than condemnation, we will be the ones who are responsible for tearing our community apart. Please pardon me for saying it, but we will be putting stumbling blocks before the blind (with anger). It is not too late for us to help and be helped by reaching across the generations. If you know what it means to miss New Orleans…
See also: “When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?” by Molly Fischer in the New Yorker.
