Classroom Battlegrounds: The Butterfly effect

ST. LOUIS, OCT — Only in St. Louis can someone contemplate going to his succah, the most temporary of shelters,  during a Tornado watch. But that’s exactly what happened here on  the last night of Hoshana Rabbah, considered by some Jewish mystics to be even more special than Yom Kippur, a day when all accounts are closed.

Just as we got ready to give the palm branches of the lulav a last shake, God, in his infinite sense of humor decided to give Missouri a little shake. As I flick between the evening news and entertainment shows, little blipping sounds erupt amid  pink and red warning signs appearing on all the local TV stations:  SEVERE THUNDERSTORM ALERTS AND TORNADO WATCH IN FIVE COUNTIES.

God is having his or her little joke: Hoshana Rabah and Shemini Atzeret involve special feasts of water and wind: mashiv ha-ruah oo-morid ha-geshem [Return the wind and the rain.] So, I initiate my new St. Louis minhag [that’s “custom” in the Jewish dialect of Missouri], and I head off to the bathtub, generally considered one of the safest places in a tornado.
 
In St. Louis, nestled between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, I feel no guilt sitting in the bathtub, while I would be bathing in water-angst if I ever did the same thing in my water-parched Israeli home.

There is another reason for this new custom of mine—going to the bathtub rather than the succah—and that is because the warm waters of the bathtub soothe my aching knees, a souvenir of running around local sites, especially the Jefferson Expansion Memorial—known to most as the Gateway Arch.

The 630-foot Arch is America’s tallest man-made monument, built on the Mississippi River gateway to the American  West that was explored by explorers Lewis and Clark at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson. Nearby is Missouri’s old courthouse, with its gorgeous dome and internal architecture,  where the infamous Dred Scott Decision was handed down. The verdict, denying freedom to a black slave, named Dred Scott, basically decreed America’s bloodiest conflict, The Civil War. It was a conflict in which more than a quarter of the combatants were killed or wounded.

It is a fine testimony to the developers of the Arch and the historical exhibits at  the Memorial and the Courthouse that they do not hide America’s somewhat sordid past—slavery and the sometimes genocidal war against the  “Indians”—while displaying America’s frontier expansion.

Missouri was and is a border state in many respects, and its inhabitants still have a conflicted identity—some  partly facing east, partly facing north, sometimes facing west and occasionally facing south. Here near  the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, one feels the presence of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and his tales of life along the riverfront.

Towards the evening, as I walk the grounds of the Arch memorial, I have another somewhat “mystical” experience: hundreds—or rather thousands—of huge bright orange and black Monarch butterflies seem to come out of nowhere to swirl around me and my wife Sara. This is one “Butterfly Effect” I have not felt before as we find ourselves walking in a moving vortex of beautiful insects.

Later, at the Insectarium of the famous St. Louis Zoo, one of the staff explains that the Mississippi acts as a kind of interstate highway for the migration of the unusual Monarch butterflies who travel hundreds of miles this time of year, unlike most butterflies who live for three days in our gardens.

It is well past the official start of Autumn on September 21, but the butterfly migration is one of the few signs of Fall. In fact, the high temperatures—28-35 degrees—continue well through the start  of October, laughing at the municipal signs posted everywhere “leaf vacuuming” and “leaf collection.”

These signs, however, are testimony to the well-ordered and stolid nature of Mid-western life, so unlike the unplanned and unscheduled reality of life in Israel. But this can be a dangerous illusion. For example, the people here—again so unlike Israelis—generally  drive calmly and slowly, rarely honking their horns, almost always courteous to a fault. This can lull you into danger, and few places are as dangerous as Delmar Boulevard, where I live.

There is a reason for the almost fanatical police enforcement of speed limits [people are regularly fined for driving 30 miles per hour instead of 25—in other words, about 50 kilometers an hour instead of about 42 km/h], particularly along Delmar Blvd, a rather sleepy-looking street that separates me from the Young Israel Synagogue less than 100 meters away.

It is this street that has claimed the lives of  two or three Jews on their way to or from prayer in the last two years, I am told. Deceptive hills sometimes hide cars and pedestrians from viewing each other until the last second. Also, St. Louis drivers have the habit of making U-turns across the central divider or pulling into traffic in ways that would cause a Lebanese suicide bomber to blush.

Furthermore, and you may find this hard to believe, the average person here cannot resist making a cellphone call right in the middle of making a turn or pulling into traffic. Yes, Virginia, Israelis are better behaved in this area than the inhabitants of St. Louis. Here, they never heard of using handless phone speakers or the ubiquitous blue-tooth-in-your-ear that are common place elsewhere. And for some reason, this kind of insanity is not against the law. The people here seem to start their cell phones along with their car engines, and I have seen many near accidents caused by obvious cell-phone overload.

On the other hand, I have never had to tell a student to leave my class because he or she has  left a  cell-phone on during a class—a sin that I have myself transgressed once or twice by accident.

In the classroom, my students are on-time and attentive, but the average American student, even at a great school  like Washington University in St. Louis, is generally poorly informed about current affairs and history. They also  seem to require  training  in writing and speaking skills. Too much TV and Internet and not enough books and writing have taken their toll. 

“Zion,” I tell them, is not the headquarters of the rebellion in the Matrix, but God’s name for the point on earth that has been designated for sovereignty and worship by the people of Israel. To their credit, my students seem to be bearing up under my harsh reading assignments, though they whine quite loudly, especially about the long term paper assignment. But to their credit, they generally laugh at my jokes and anecdotes in class, praying that I won’t require their recitation on midterms and finals.

Another party that is clearly failing its exams is the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which is allowing its consulate in Atlanta to hold a special student day, with a rather unlikely star, as the following e-mail message shows:

“Dear Michael, We would like to make you aware of the Consulate General of Israel's 4th Annual Student Conference on Sunday November 4, 2007!!! Consulate General of Israel to the Southeast Presents "Israel: A View From the Inside"--4th Annual Student Conference.”

The star of this production is Octavia Nasr, the senior Arab affairs reporter of CNN, whose qualifications to speak on “Israel: A View From the Inside” are not exactly clear to me.  But then again, next year’s guest at the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta could be Jimmy Carter or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  We should give thanks for small blessings, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry is a small blessing indeed.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi told the Winograd Commission investigating the 2006 war in Lebanon that she did not think that “hasbara”—or public information and PR—were part of her war-time duties. Apparently, she and the people under her charge at the Consulate in Atlanta still do not think so.

Michael Widlanski is the Schusterman Visiting Professor of Israel Studies  at Washington University for 2007-8.  An expert in Middle Eastern politics and communications, Dr. Widlanski  also served as a special advisor to Israeli delegations to peace talks in 1991-1992 and as Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Ministry of Public Security, editing secret PLO Archives captured in Jerusalem.
  
Professor Widlanski is a former reporter, correspondent and editor, respectively,  at The New York Times ,The Cox Newspapers-Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, IDF Radio, IBA Television,  and The Jerusalem Post, and he teaches political communication and comparative politics  at the Rothberg School of Hebrew University.