Harvey Milk

WORSHIP

Harvey Milk

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, December 5, 2008

I don't usually get to see movies before they come to town, but over the thanksgiving break I had the opportunity to see the film MILK in New York. As our country prepares for one very significant electoral first, it was interesting to learn the history of another first. I wasn't living on the west coast when Harvey Milk was alive, so I was not that well aware of his story or significance. Ironically, I was more aware of the issue of the twinkie defense, which in Cincinnati I had heard criticized as if it were a liberal invention, which I now understand it certainly wasn't.

After seeing the film, I was particularly intrigued by the question of Harvey Milk's Jewish identity, and took a look at his biography, The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilt.

Harvey Milk came from a very Jewish family. His grandfather's name was Milch as in milchik, meaning dairy, but he changed it to Milk when he came to America from Lithuania and opened a dry goods store in Woodmere, Long Island in 1882. He organized the first synagogue in the area, Beth Israel and when Jews were excluded from the local social club, Harvey's grandfather, Morris, organized his own Jewish club as well.

Harvey was very moved at a young age when his parents shared with him the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He was involved in a Jewish fraternity at Albany State University and was militant in conversation when Jewish issues came up. He spoke a decent Yiddish and had many friends among those who founded Congregation Sha'ar Zahav in San Francisco in 1977. Incidentally, when Sha'ar Zahav opened their new building in 1998, one of the first services held there was a very well attended memorial service for Harvey Milk on his 20th yarzheit, the 20th anniversary of his death.

Years ago when I was teaching a class on Jewish women short story writers, I came across Leslea Newman's "A Letter to Harvey Milk". It tells the story of an older Jewish man, Harry, and his writing teacher at the local senior center in San Francisco. Harry is skeptical about writing, especially writing about his own life:

"Listen I want to say to this teacher. I. B. Singer, I'm not. You think anybody cares what I did all day? Even my own children, may they live and be well, don't call. You think the whole world is waiting to see what Harry Weinberg had for breakfast…..I eat, I watch a little TV, I write in this notebook, I get ready for bed. Nu, for this somebody should give me a Pulitzer prize?"

When he's assigned as homework, to write a letter to someone who is no longer alive, he finds himself compelled to write to Harvey, who he got to know in the neighborhood. The letter is eventually read aloud in class, prompting Harry's friend Izzie, a Holocaust survivor, to share with him a long repressed memory of his own friend Yussl, who wore the pink triangle, and was killed by the Nazi's in the camps. Reading the letter aloud also leads the writing teacher, a young Jewish woman, to share with Harry her pain at being cut off from her family. It turns out that after Harvy Milk's assassination she remembered his words, "If a bullet enters my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door," and had decided to come out to her parents.

I'd like to share a few paragraphs of the letter Harry writes to Harvey Milk with you:

"Dear Harvey,

You had to go get yourself killed for being a faygeleh? You couldn't let somebody else have such a great honor? Alright, alright, so you liked the boys, I wasn't wild about the idea. But I got used to it. I never said you wasn't welcome in my house, did I?

Nu, Harvey, you couldn't leave well enough alone? You had your own camera store, your own business, what's bad? You couldn't keep still about the boys, you weren't satisfied until the whole world knew? Harvey Milk, with the big ears and the big ideas, had to go make himself something, a big politician. I know. I know, I said," Harvey, make something of yourself, don't be an old smegeggie like me, Harry the butcher." So now I'm eating my words, and they stick like a chicken bone in my old throat...

Harvey, now I'm gonna tell you something. The night you died the whole city of San Francisco cried for you. Thirty thousand people marched in the street, I saw it on TV. Me, I didn't go down. I'm an old man, I don't walk so good, they said there might be riots. But no, there were no riots. Just people walking in the street, quiet, each one with a candle, until the street looked like the sky all lit up with a million starts. Old people, young people, Black people, white people, Chinese people. You name it, they were there. I remember thinking, Harvey must be so proud, and then I remembered you were dead and such a lump rose in my throat, like a grapefruit it was, and then the tears ran down my face like rain. Can you imagine, Harvey, an old man like me, sitting alone in his apartment, crying and carrying on like a baby? But it's the God's truth. Never did I carry on so in all my life.

And then all of a sudden I got mad. I yelled at the people on TV: for getting shot you made him into such a hero? You couldn't march for him when he was alive, he couldn't shep a little naches?

But nu, what good does getting mad do, it only makes my pressure go up. So I took myself a pill, clamed myself down.

Then they made speeches for you, Harvey. The same people who called you a shmuck when you were alive, now you were dead, they were calling you a mensh. You were a mensh, Harvey, a mensh with a heart of gold. You were too good for this rotten world. They just weren't ready for you.

Oy Harveleh, alav ha-shalom,

Harry.