The Most Durable Double Standard

Sunset over the Roaring Fork River in Basalt, Colorado

I think for myself. Certainly, this also is true for anyone I count as a friend. What is occasionally unclear is whether others expect that we do so.

When I travel, work and live overseas, people I meet often engage me in conversation about the United States, what goes on here, what I think about our government or the current administration, and how I feel about it.  I always take it as a complement that they view me as someone with whom they can chat about issues related to America and our actions and place in the world.

I am cognizant that the willingness of people around the world to approach me with their questions and concerns belies an essential underlying belief: in a republic, the actions of the government do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or values of the nation or its people. To be clear, it is possible that my presence overseas, on the ground, trying my best to order lunch or simply be friendly in a foreign language that I may or may not speak, and my lack of white tennis sneakers, an American flag polo shirt, and cartoonish American nose-first voice may single me out as someone to whom people may safely and respectfully seek out answers. This is particularly striking in our case as Americans given the outsized attention our Republic receives around the world and the impact of our economy, our media, and our political and military strength. There is one other nation and its people in particular who suffer considerably from the opposite treatment.

A substantial issue affecting British post-war politics has been thoroughgoing antisemitism on the political left. This is not new. Digging deeper there are several factors that make liberal British antisemitism thorny: a long history of anti-Jewish violence in England, true antisemitism among the elite of the former British Empire, the nuances of Middle Eastern politics and the British role in directly creating those conditions, the ease with which the Jewish people are convenient scapegoats (a term taken directly from the Hebrew Bible), and the inability of the media and public figures to distinguish between actions of the Israeli government and the hearts and minds of the Jewish people and individual Jews worldwide. It’s become common in the UK, here in America, and around the world for people to sympathize with the legitimate plight of the Palestinian people on every level by taking overtly antisemitic positions, sometimes with violent effect. “From the river to the sea” chanted by crowds is an overt expression of the desire to wipe all Jews from the planet – it is not an expression of the desire to restrain or reform Israeli government or military actions towards Palestinians, and it is not an expression of the Palestinian people’s longing for their own state. Secular Westerners adopting that chant and or other similar positions in their meme-filled ready-for-social-media simplifications is a victory for Hamas and their similarly a-moral, hyper-violent, unapologetically extremist brethren. Period.

I do not apologize for Israeli actions. I do believe that after millennia of hoping, enduring, surviving, and suffering at the hands of the enemies of the Jewish people, the Jewish state is a miracle. With that as historical context, I expect better of the it - I expect the State of Israel to be humanist in a way that belies our experiences as the historical other. Nonetheless, I do indict the people who fail to give the Israeli nation and the Jewish people the same respect we Americans and the Brits receive from others around the world as individuals. I am confident that American tourists in Vietnam do not have to suffer the indignity of being shouted-at about the My Lai massacre while traveling there, and I do not qualify my commemoration of Veterans’ Day with its memory. I do not take the time during Christmas or Easter to tell my Christian friends that their holiday observance should be tempered because of the litany of horrors inflicted on my people throughout the last two thousand years in the name of Jesus or with the complicity of institutionalized Christianity.

Yom Hashoah in April is the Israeli national remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust (the “Shoah” in Hebrew). This is distinct from International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is in January and was established by the United Nations General Assembly to coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp in 1945. On both occasions this year, a popular meme that generated notable amounts of attention on social media espoused the position that any Holocaust remembrance should be qualified because of Israeli government actions in Gaza. A few people with whom I am friendly and who are prone to meme-i-fying their political views shared this idea widely. When I politely suggested that they are conflating Israeli government actions and conduct with the Jewish people, our religion, our culture, and our history, they responded angrily. When I told them that their anger reflected antisemitism rather than anti-Israel sentiments and that doing so was a victory for Hamas, they were still more angered. Why these people do not afford the same latitude and respect to the difference between Jews around the world and Israeli state actions that they expect to receive as American or British people is between them and their consciences. It pains me to say so, but these people who so easily apply this most ancient and durable double standard are no longer my friends. I expect better of my friends in the same way I expect better of the State of Israel. For every complex question there is a simple answer that is wrong, and sometimes that simple answer becomes hate or violence.

One of my favorite places to be on Planet Earth is the table of an exceptionally dear friend in New Zealand who is an ex-pat American and is Muslim – everyone should be so lucky. Although on paper we are as different as you can imagine, she is family to me, true mishpocha. We have dissected and made progress on a long list of vexing issues over the years, usually while preparing, eating, or recovering from some shockingly amazing meals. Politics, capitalism, gardening, gastronomy, skiing, fart jokes, you name it, nothing is off the table and all of it with the constant underpinning of love for each other and for humankind, and of our shared desire for peace. Our friendship and our common bonds are never, ever reduced by the actions of others or of any current or historical government claiming to act on our behalf.  This is what a friend is to me and going forward I shall endeavor to be more careful and that particular. With love in my heart. Inshallah; shalom aleichem.

Paradise Lost; Paradise Found

Aspen trees just about to burst into green in early May

 “What’s your definition of Paradise?"

In the many years when I would ski and occasionally coach in Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico, I was privileged to have become good friends with some legendary characters. Most glamourous among them was Elzabeth Brownell, and one of her wonderful stories has been on my mind lately.

Elizabeth was the owner and proprietor of the Thunderbird Lodge, a landmark Taos ski hotel with great food and a welcoming, convivial atmosphere – her countrymen in Bavaria would have called it a truly gemütlich place. She arrived in Taos early in the resort’s life in the 1960’s and she carved out her own successful life and business in that remote and beautiful corner of the Rocky Mountains with grit, determination, and copious amounts of charm and good humor. Elizabeth’s loyal staff referred to her behind her back as “the velvet fist”.

Elizabeth was a keen world traveler in summer and when I visited Taos we would always plan dinner or drinks at the Thunderbird so she could tell stories and show photos of the far-flung places she had been that year, always in her stubbornly present but gently time-worn German voice. Moving slowly through the details, from start to finish of any story she always made clear that it was the people who captured her interest and who were her source for learning and growth.

Skiing with Elizabeth Brownell in Taos Ski Valley always felt a bit like being elevated to the status of minor celebrity. “Hey, I saw you skiing with Elizabeth today!” Runs were non-stop, unhurried but never slow, and although everyone knew her and would say hello to her by name when we loaded or off-loaded the lifts, nobody outside that day’s ski posse would dare ask to join.

One of our Spring ski days together looms as among my most memorable. Deep, fresh, impossibly light New Mexico powder. Blue skies without a blemish of clouds, the mountain uncrowded as always in Taos, with the entire place and everyone in it seemingly lulled into a calm, joyful ease of mind. Impossible to forget, Elizabeth, probably just over seventy years old at the time, wore a classic canary yellow Bogner one piece ski suit and white knit hat that day, and every turn she made was equally stylish. I simply can’t express how it felt to be skiing with my friend, in her orbit, on that day. I treasure the memory.

Sitting together on one of the resort’s long, slow chair lifts, Elizabeth told me a story about a recent trip to Tahiti. One day while sitting around a fire with some locals on the beach in a small fishing village, she asked about their culture’s concept of “paradise”. Perplexed, they needed an explanation of what she meant. After listening to her description, they each looked at their surroundings and each other, their community, and made clear that they felt as though were in it, living in paradise. They wanted for nothing. And then, Elizabeth looked right at me, extended out both arms to indicate her embrace of the mountains she called home, and told me that on that day, in that snow, skiing together in that place, amongst that community, was at that moment her personal paradise.

It’s very easy to vacation in wonderful places and romanticize about life there, to imagine that a simpler way of life would be a better and easier way to find meaning. That can be equally true for our guests in Aspen Snowmass basking in the powder day sunshine as it was for Elizabeth on the beach in Tahiti. Still, even if only for a moment through rose-tinted lenses, there is truth revealed in the feeling of it. How my friend felt, what she expressed was real, was meaningful, and clearly stayed with me. It continues as an important guidepost in my own life and work in the mountains. Lately, the concept of paradise has been on my mind as I consider the political and religious views of some of those Americans who have been attracting a great deal of media attention.

My friend Elizabeth’s question is apt when considering all that has cleaved our own society at this moment in time: What is your concept of paradise? What is mine? Do we make our own paradise here on Earth or achieve it in an afterlife? To what sort of society do we aspire? Are we helping move forward toward that idealized place of peace and harmony or acting to move further from it? Are we doing our part or are we psychologically committed to a chronic myopia that narrows our focus to only our material needs and wants, or our fears? Is our concept of paradise inclusive of only ourselves or do we envision it as a place inclusive of our whole community, or even all humankind? In this query, I hope we are each answerable only to our own consciences and to the Almighty rather than to the judgement of the loudest voices in the room - I hope but I am not certain. My daily read of the newspapers tests this frame of mind and often leaves me concerned about the world we live in and the people who surround me. With apologies to Dante Alighieri, whether our society has lost the path to paradise or found it remains as yet undetermined.

I spend a great deal of time with people visiting the mountains for recreation, and it is one of several indicia of the success of our time together when they begin to ponder these and other, similar questions. In that way, I aspire to provide a little of what Elizabeth and others have given to me, what the Tahitian villagers gave to her. Even if only while skiing light, dry snow in the high alpine sunshine together. As for the rest of our nation and the world, I am answerable only to my own conscience and to my own standards, and I find peace and solace in those who share them.