Good To Be In Woods Hole

My kids just left the house with Alen at 4 am to fly to Woods Hole for a month.  This trip was planned since last summer and though I am going to miss them a great deal until I join them in two weeks, I could not be happier that they are going.

Growing up I had two anchors:  Judaism and Woods Hole.  I had the enormous privilege to spend every summer in Woods Hole, and it really was almost like another, non-competing, religion.

The values of Woods Hole began with reverence for Nature.  Louis Agassiz said, "Study Nature, not Books," and that was the motto of the Children's School of Science where we learned each summer.  During the day time the town is criss crossed by groups of kids with buckets, nets, and sometimes cameras, learning from the sea, earth and sky.  Seashore Life, Marine Biology, Oceanographic Electronics, Invertebrate Zoology, Advanced Marine Biology were some of the courses I took.  I'm grateful I had a great biology education before I met my sexist high school biology teacher Mr. DeMarco (maybe I'll write about him one day).  If you know Alen and her work you can understand how deeply I "get" what she does from this amazing aspect of our Woods Hole education.

Woods Hole, of course, is home to adults who study science as well, but my experience was from a child's perspective.  Adults worked in labs, attended lectures, spoke on the beach about their research.  Kids went to science school.

Though there was no synagogue in Woods Hole, there was a "rabbi", Phyllis Goldstein.  She was my childhood hero and even as an adult I held her in awe.  The religion she taught was democracy and human rights, reverence for all cultures and for history, and of course the joy and value of music.  She taught it through folksinging every Tuesday night, each summer for forty years.  She was a living role model who had lived through tragic loss and risen.  She was incredibly charismatic - at times stern (to keep kids quiet) and almost always smiling and laughing.  She seemed like a walking encyclopedia of history and music.  She taught us about the evils of slavery, the music that accompanied the fight for freedom, the labor movement, the history of whaling and New England, songs from Africa and elsewhere around the world, languages and more.  We used to sing "Everybody Loves Saturday Night" in about 20 languages.  The message of her songs was that all people have value, all people have songs and stories, all people can care for and about one another.  It's a message that never grows old.

(I wrote more about Phyllis here when she passed away in 2011.)

So now a terrible war is on, and my kids are getting on a plane.  I smiled and hugged them and reminded them that although they are leaving, they are going to be "mini-me".  With tears in my eyes I remember how we traveled to Woods Hole in 2002.  We had made aliyah during the intifada, and for 20 months had not returned home.  We went back to the US at the end of a year we had spent in Jerusalem when 200 people were killed in terror attacks in Jerusalem and the death toll from the intifada on all sides climbed over 2000.  I remember seeing Phyllis and talking to her, and I remember the look in her eyes when I told her I was living in Israel.  It was a look of incredible compassion, and a moment in which I understood that she felt the pain of what I was living through and she believed in me to continue to stand up for the values she had taught me, even when their realization seems hidden.

Jeremy Korr continues to sing Phyllis's songs in Woods Hole with a new generation of children.  And my kids (who met Phyllis when they were young) are going to sing and to feel the earth, ocean and sky.  And just maybe, they too will find their an anchor.