Carolina in My Mind

The Queen City

Last week I moved to Charlotte. I drove down to the southeasternmost corner of Ohio, crossed into West Virginia and wended through the mountains for two hours. The drive was beautiful, and North Carolina is beautiful, and Charlotte is beautiful. Boulevards thick with trees and hedges dripping with flowers line every man-made structure, and a rich Carolingian friendliness overlays every interaction. I’ve already met three of my next-door neighbors (one dropped everything to help me carry a desk in), and even the clerks at the stores and the cashiers at the coffee shops engage me in breezy conversation.

Most of my time has been spent checking out IKEA, the library, Trader Joe’s and Harris Teeter’s and Book Buyers, and generally getting my bearings around town. Also, in putting together my apartment, which is absolutely beautiful—it has a fireplace, mirpeset with a view, and walk-in closet. 

I spent Shabbat at the house owned by the rabbinic family who run the Charlotte Torah Center. It’s only a half hour walk from my apartment, but they invited me, and this way I didn’t have to walk home from dinner late at night down the long, dark winding root-filled dirt road that leads down to the main road. There were three other guests staying, young “regulars” who spend nearly every Shabbat there. And I can see why. In any city that’s a Jewish outpost, you expect the rabbinic family to be warm, hospitable, etc, else why would they decide to be chalutzim like that? But this family is also bursting with personality. They have two of their boys at home for the summer, and the daughter will be back this week. The Shabbat table was uproarious and we jumped from controversial topic to hilarious questioning to meaningful discussion. Friday night, the older son and the rabbi and I had a long debate about whether Rabbi Akiva was right to leave his wife Rachel for 24 years of study, even if he did turn out to be one of the greatest teachers of all time. We ended it pleased all around, each feeling like we’d gotten to see something in a new way.

Shabbat morning they ran a learner’s service at Glieberman’s, the kosher restaurant and store in town. It was about an hour of exposition on brachot and the parshah to ten minutes of tefillah, and I’m not sure whether I may not tiptoe by Chabad for shacharit instead some shabbatot. The thing is, I love this family, so I’ll have to see.

Tuesday night, after a day spent shopping and constructing furniture, I went to the evening class on Jewish history at the CTC (Charlotte Torah Center, abbreviated thusly here on out). There were about seven of us there, and we focused on Polish history: the king’s invitation to Jews in the twelfth century, the Jewish golden age in Poland, the Chmielnicki massacres, and also, briefly, on the Reformation’s effect on Jews. How Luther first embraced them because he thought the only thing keeping Jews from converting was the Church’s corruption, and then wrote such vitriolic anti-Semitic stuff that is was used by Hitler a few centuries later. The question that emerged, as it always does, is how any country in which Jews have it good inevitably becomes the country that then decides to wipe them out—Spain, Poland, Germany, etc. And, of course, that light gets turned on America, and as always, we wonder how much longer we have here. Such negative thinking always seems alarmist to me. It’s not that I trust America farther than I can throw it, and having seen the ways in which European Jews must hide their identity and protect themselves with walls and guards, I’m well aware of how real and alive anti-Semitism is. But walking around with an us-them attitude seems unnecessary and too negative. The rabbi made a wonderful point; anti-Semitism is entrenched in Europe after centuries of Church oppression. But America is a country built by the religiously oppressed, by those who fled from and thus understand religious coercion. As such, we are freer here and can perhaps trust it a little more.

About a twentieth of the JCC

After the class, the rabbi took me on a tour of the JCC. Now, I come from Columbus Ohio, and am used to enormous, gorgeous Jewish community structures donated by generous benefactors. But this is without a doubt the most incredibly lavish JCC I’ve ever seen. The Levines, owners of the Family Dollar chain, built it (as well as the rest of Charlotte, some joke). It’s not a building, it’s a campus, with flower-lined drive leading to the sports center, gym upon gym and pools with slides and then the school connected by a hall, with teen lounges and senior lounges and unspecified lounges, newspaper office, meeting rooms and auditoriums and social halls. The kind of thriving Jewish life implied by this is a bit misleading, but there’s always hope—if you build it, they will come.

Off to my first day of FEW—first eight weeks—the professional development before classes start. Today is entirely logistical. Another round of fingerprinting, here I come!