Starting all over again can be daunting. My first experience with starting life all over again was when when I was in 4th grade. My mom remarried. I woke up one morning in the Wasserman home with my mother, maternal grandmother and my dog, “Happy.” That evening I went to sleep in a new home with my mother and Happy, her new husband, his three children and their dog, “Skippy.” One day I was a fourth grader with my friends from the neighborhood. The next day I was the “new student” at a school on the other side of Louisville. I was a stranger to everything except my dog, Happy, and my mother who was no longer Mrs. Wasserman. She was now Mrs. Loeb. It was a new house, new school, new neighborhood = start my life over again!
Of course, I had to start all over again when I left home for University of Wisconsin in 1967. Then I started all over again after I got out of the Navy and ended up in Houston (1970). Of course, Pegi and I married in 1976 and we relocated to Rhodesia. In 1979, the two of us started again back in Houston, followed by Wisconsin and Louisville in 1981. 1983 had us back in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). In 1987, we were once again in Louisville — this time with the addition of Abigail.
Sheesh—that is a lot of restarting! I have found that rather than just accepting whatever comes along or relying on the assurances of others that things will work out, I have to try things out for myself, finding the “Jeff way” to live.
For instance, when I was three, my parents took me to Miami Beach. My dad had been in the Navy and my mother was a lifelong swimmer, so it seemed that the hotel pool would be the appropriate place for little Jeff to swim for the first time. With my mother all oiled up with sunscreen and sitting under a cabana, my father walked me to the edge of the pool where a lifeguard was already waiting in the water to introduce me to the swimming experience. The lifeguard extended his hands gesturing for me to jump, I hesitated and looked around to my dad. He smiled and picked me up in his arms only to toss me into the pool! I kerplopped into the water a few feet short of the waiting lifeguard [Airball!]. I went under the surface, but came up dog-paddling my way into his arms. My mother, dripping suntan lotion, came racing to the edge of the pool in a panic. I was giggling and happily paddling my way back to the side. I was only three, but to this day, I remember the malicious glare that she gave my father! No surprise here that they would be divorced in another three years!
I had gone down thrashing, but came up swimming. I would soon discover my love of swimming and all things water related. But, rather than just getting tossed in or climbing to a peak and jumping in, I found it best to get my feet wet first and then ease my way in. I approached the whole water experience at my own pace and ended up as a strong swimmer and waterskier. By the time I was 11, I was slaloming behind my dad’s 21-foot cabin cruiser, jumping huge waves created by coal barges as they traveled the Ohio river near Louisville.
It was just my father and me on one afternoon when a Navy destroyer was heading down the river to be put into storage. We regularly saw retired Navy vessels joining the “mothballed” fleet near downtown Louisville. These produced h-u-g-e waves even larger than the barges. I couldn’t ride those on my skis, and they could easily swamp a small boat like ours. So, I was caught off guard when my father headed straight toward this destroyer! As I held on to the tow line, he went full speed. I began to struggle staying on my single slalom ski and tried shouting and waving with one free hand. He couldn’t hear me over the roar of his Chris Craft 95 hp inboard engine or the thrum of the diesel engines from the looming destroyer. It was as if he had forgotten all about me. All I could do was to let go of the tow rope and stick my bright orange ski in the air to wait for another boater to pick me up. The Ohio is one-mile wide at this point and I had dropped off in the middle of the river to avoid being sucked by the wake of the destroyer.
Although I should have been worried, I just floated happily in the river, feeling like I was in control of the situation, waiting for someone to pick me up. I told you I was really comfortable in water! Just as my father had dumped me on my own at the pool in Miami, he had dumped me again short of insuring my safety. I was only out there on my own for a few minutes before my father came back to pick me up. And, I came up smiling in the midst of the waves. I had taught myself how to handle the situation and was undisturbed by the incident.
My father said he was sorry. It turned out that this destroyer was the sister-ship to the one that he had served on during WWII. He got lost in his own little world and forgot about me . . . for a few minutes. He said, “Let’s not tell your mother about this!” I said, “That’s fine. Let’s get back to skiing!” I was having fun and I don’t think that my mother ever heard about this.
My mother had been so focused on her new little world as Mrs. Loeb, that she frequently seemed to toss me into into situations too. I think she had learned that I would find my own way—teaching myself to swim. I was okay with that. In fact, I preferred it that way myself.
So, why am I telling this story here? I prefer to learn for myself at my own speed. I don’t just accept the assertions or instructions of others as to how to live. It isn’t that I can’t learn from others. I am constantly learning from others. However, I am the one who has to live my life. So, I like to get my feet wet first. Before I commit to something in life, I like to try it out—to see how it works for me or if it works at all!
This has been my approach to what people call “religion.” I have a Ph.D. in study of world religions, but I am not really comfortable with the word, religion. I don’t even think there is an adequate definition of religion. It is similar to “beauty.” Every eye beholds it differently. Maybe, I will write about this in a later post, but since religion is the conventional language people use when describing consciousness and connection to the universe, we will employ it at this point in the narrative. You really don’t want to hear my 3-hour lecture on this that I gave to every class I taught from 1999-2023!
But, my approach to religion has been to listen to and observe how others live out their lives in light of their connection to the universe and then get my feet wet one foot at a time, trying things for myself. I did this as a teenager observing my mother’s secular/Reform Jewish and my father’s traditional/Orthodox Jewish families and communities. I continued trying out the Hippie culture of the 60s for myself while living in a Jewish college fraternity. I continued this in my twenties with evangelical Christianity when the Jewish world I had been exposed to didn’t seem to work for my parents, me or anyone else I knew. [The only exception was my father’s older brother, Herman. I wouldn’t realize his importance in my life until I reached age 70, so when I get finished writing about the next five decades, we will discuss him.]
So why did I wander away from my Jewishness and into Christianity? Because the accumulated traditions of 4000 years of Jewish life were too turbulent for me. The waves of Jewish tradition kept me struggling to keep my head above the water. My exposure to the bits and pieces of Jewish life I experienced didn’t coalesce into something that could buoy me and allow me to propel my way forward. I couldn’t see the purpose, value or meaning of Judaism for myself. And, oscillating between my mother’s secular and fathers traditional approach, I couldn’t make it work for me.
At University of Wisconsin, I began trying out Christianity for myself. It was a new experience for me and I could see each individual element of it as I explored it. My early understanding of it seemed to contain most foundational elements of the Jewish tradition. It was then augmented with the some simple universal concepts that were better connected to my current understanding of the world. After all, the Christian tradition was half the age of Jewish tradition. My early understanding of Christianity was about the life of Jesus as a Jew with his Jewish disciples, so I was really only focused on the 1st century—not the rest of its 2000 year history. It seemed to work at first, but by 1987, I had enough experience with it to understand its weaknesses. It too, did not work as advertised—at least for me! The following chapters will detail how I gradually swam my way out of the waters of Christianity and began to dip my toes in Judaism as a more fully formed adult.
My dad’s boat became mine when I was in my mid-teens. He had named it the “King of Diamonds” since he was in the jewelry business.
I renamed it “Plein d’eau” - Full of Water. It had a habit of starting to sink each launch season!
