Story and Photos by Diane Joy Schmidt

Due to the generosity of an anonymous donor, I was selected to receive a scholarship to attend the four-day joint Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly and American Jewish Press Association conference in Washington, D.C. in November as one of ten journalists who had won Rockower awards.

After riding the metro from Reagan International Airport, I walked into the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue.

It was Sunday afternoon. Security was tight. There were body scanners and guards with bored looking guard dogs and plain clothed men on stairwells sporting plastic earbuds with muscles tight under their suits. At registration I was handed a cleverly humorous booklet of events with snazzy graphics. Then it hit me. The combined experience of 5,000 years of bar mitzvah, wedding, and more recently, Washington D.C. political event directors, had not gone to waste.
Then into the first hall. Riotous splashes of color were achieved through 20 foot high banners, and this intensive planning included a sophisticated cell phone app that would regularly buzz to remind me of all the events I had chosen to partake of.

On the press stage, an intense conversation between Ambassador Dennis Ross and Gary Rosenblatt, editor of The Jewish Week of New York was being closely followed by a rapt audience.  Every hour different luminaries of public office and journalists interviewed each other discussing all the pressing issues from every angle imaginable. In the background a TV news monitor broadcasted news of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival. He would be meeting with Obama at the White House the next morning. The complete program of the general assembly, including videos of speakers, can still be viewed online at http://www.generalassembly.org/

40 booths around the main hall included Nefesh B’Nefesh, the organization that helps Jews to make aliyah to Israel, the Harold Grinspoon Foundation with the latest PJ Library books, J Street, the Jerusalem Post, the Ethiopian National Project, students of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, and many more.

That night, buses shuttled to the National Portrait Gallery; it was a unique opportunity to wander the museum, opened privately to the party-goers, and also gorge on tables heaping with pastries and be deafened by a live band in the central hall.

The real unexpected highlight came the next day – a private briefing Monday afternoon at the White House for the Jewish press following Netanyahu’s meeting with President Obama. As a line of shiny black taxi limos pulled up outside the Hilton to ferry us there, a person from our crowd hopped into the front seat of the first one and called out, room for more! I jumped in, and was joined by St. Louis Jewish Light editor Ellen Futterman and publisher Larry Levin. Our host in the front seat turned out to be Steve Rabinowitz, president of Bluelight Strategies, the organizer of the entire event. Traffic came to a standstill as we approached the White House, and we got out and walked, just in time to see the presidential motorcade leaving. Rabinowitz, who has worked closely on nine national presidential campaigns and served as Bill Clinton’s White House director of design and production, pointed out the two separate limousines for the president, so that no one could be sure which one he was riding in. As the motorcade passed out of the gates, I captured a silhouette of a tall person on the phone in the second limo. It was followed by heavy black vans that contained sophisticated communications and security details.

We entered the president’s executive offices in the Eisenhower building next to the West Wing and wound our way up a staircase to a diplomatic receiving room to receive an off-the-record briefing from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro and two other high level White House staff. This following the anxiously anticipated meeting earlier in the day between Obama and Netanyahu. Able to speak freely, they each gave a clearer picture of what really was on their minds, and these career officials and their insights greatly impressed me with their integrity and that of the Obama White House.

I asked if tensions were less this time at the meeting between Obama and Netanyahu, and got a picture of the actual sophisticated working relationship that goes on day by day with Israel that has nothing to do with the exaggerated emphasis on personality clashes featured in the press, covered like so much celebrity gossip. As this smoke cleared away, I saw the enormous efforts being made to keep this country, and Israel, on a democratic course.

And that morning had marked the successful outcome of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. The U.S. and Israel announced a renewed commitment to, and further agreements being made for, the next ten years of strategic cooperation and support by the U.S. for Israel. And as Netanyahu pointed out that morning, Obama has met with him more than with any other foreign minister. The Obama administration has also given Israel more military aid than any previous administration, which notably helped build the advanced Iron Dome missile defense system that kept most of the more than 4000 rockets launched at Israel from Gaza from reaching populated areas in 2014, and is now funding the more advanced David’s Sling and further iterations of missile defense systems.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu addressed the final plenary of the General Assembly. Before his entrance, the entire assembly rose and sang Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. There were an estimated 4,000 in the hall. It was an electrifying, life-changing moment, and in standing together with my colleagues from across the U.S.A., Canada, and Israel, including correspondents, editors and publishers of every major Jewish news publication, it felt like a reunion of compatriots. I felt, finally, at home. When Netanyahu entered, the applause lasted for a brief five seconds after he reached the podium.

The next two days included two tracks of trainings with the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA) conference, one track for reporting and one for the increasingly difficult business of keeping Jewish publications alive. Tuesday night the 34th annual Rockower Awards banquet was held at Adas Israel, Washington’s largest conservative synagogue and the one most often frequented by U.S. presidents. It was also the first synagogue to have Martin Luther King speak, in 1963.
The keynote speech given Alan Cooperman from the Pew Research Center was titled “The Tao of Pew: Putting Jewish population trends in comparative perspective,”about their recent survey of American Jews. On a positive if relative note, he said that while half of Jewish children today are from intermarried couples, they seem to be choosing to remain Jewish into adulthood longer and in larger numbers than the children from intermarried couples did in the past. Apparently it’s “cooler” to be Jewish nowadays. (see Pew Powerpoint slides 21 and 22).

As the Rockower awards were handed out, this reporter received two first-place awards, one for reporting in publications with a circulation under 15,000, and one for photography across all media. This was not just a first for the New Mexico Jewish Link, it was a recognition of the significance of the news made by the Jewish community here. The awards were for two articles in 2014 about how the anti-Israel BDS resolutions put forth in both the undergraduate and graduate student senates were successfully repelled by UNM’s Hillel students under the direction of Hillel Director Sara Koplik, and their Lobos for Israel student group founded by student Sarah Abonyi. To view these articles, published in the May and June/July 2014 print issues, as well as all print Link issues going back to 2011, you can download the issues as .pdfs at the Federation Jewish Link print archive webpage,  http://www.jewishnewmexico.org/the_link . The students repeated this success again in 2015 (read at nmjewishelink.com “Anti-Israel Boycott Resolution Hits UNM; Student Senate Pushes Back, May, 2015.)

Senior Rabbi Gil Steinlauf of Adas Israel came the next morning to the AJPA conference being held at the Churchill, a boutique hotel across the street from the Hilton, to talk about his personal experience of being the object of the Jewish press last year, when he came out to the congregation that he was gay, after raising a family. He said that he and his wife remain best friends and talk daily, and he seemed to have been particularly hurt that one media outlet published of a photo of one of his children, which they had pilfered through a ‘friend of friend’off Facebook.

His talk was followed by a panel presentation led by Alan Abbey of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem on meeting high journalistic ethical standards and maintaining a responsibility to report on issues in the Jewish community.  Abbey announced a joint project initiative of the Hartman Institute and the AJPA for developing journalist guidelines with a Jewish component. The moral challenges of doing so, of  practicing tikkun olam while also taking into account the prohibitions against lashon hara, an ‘evil tongue,’ which might defame a person, are issues that Jewish journalists particularly struggle with.

At the final show-and-tell event for the journalists, The Cleveland Jewish News showed off an impressive array of special editions and activities, including their recent forays into hosting conferences. I showed the AJPA international press members the New Mexico Jewish Link’s print editions that featured the demographic survey (February 2015, online) and the BDS issues, and spoke directly about the enormous challenges being faced on the UNM campus by Hillel students here because of the virulent anti-Israel BDS movement, which has also had the effect of increasing an anti-Semitic climate. On a lighter note, I mentioned how the demographic study uncovered that we have twice as many Jews in New Mexico as we thought, 24,000.

Four days of meetings have since blurred together, but I came away most importantly having had the visceral experience and sense of being connected to the larger Jewish community, and being a part of something greater than myself.

And from this experience I can also see that, just as Jews in New Mexico may be a tiny fraction of the population here but have an outsized imprint, New Mexico itself, because of its uniquely diverse ethnicities, spiritual strengths, flavors and talents, also can hold an outsized voice in the national conversation this election year and in the shape of things to come.

New Mexico Jewish eLink February 19, 2016

Earlier that day during their tour of Canyon de Chelly, the one person Jerome had told Christophe  he wanted him to meet was Frank. Frank Morgan and Christophe Le Mouël meet again at breakfast. The bubbles of light, known to photographers by their technical term ‘circles of confusion,’ seem to be sharing in the mirth, a happy accident at that moment of laughter. Photo © 2014 Diane Joy Schmidt www.dianejoyschmidt.com

Judge’s comment “Thoughtful, analytical commentary on current events that educate and edify readers.”

Serendipity and the Power of Daydreams          

I knew I was angry and instead I decided to be creative as a kind of escape. We were going on a long drive up to Chinle, Arizona, where Frank was to deliver a training to Navajo health care professionals just before New Year’s. It was 11 a.m. when we started out from Albuquerque, and I started daydreaming that the car we were in was a floating ship and horses and flying coyotes and birds were accompanying us on our journey – and sure enough, I forgot very quickly about our argument and fell asleep.
Later when I woke up I couldn’t stop taking photos of the fantastic blue sky dotted with improbable puffs of cloud that we seemed to be flying and floating through as we gained elevation into the evergreens and snow and headed up toward Ganado and I thought – this is enough to sustain me, this beauty.
It wasn’t so hard to daydream, I found out. How fun! Why didn’t I ever think of this before? I’d always felt it was my duty to be as aware as I could as a photographer, seeing what was going on around me, although now and then coincidences would crop up in my photos.
As we approached Chinle, passing the turn-off for Pinon about four p.m., I asked Frank if he’d heard from Jerome Bernstein lately. Jerome is a prominent Jungian psychologist from Santa Fe who seeks parallels with Navajo understandings. He is the author of Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma. We’ll be staying at the Holiday Inn in Chinle near Canyon de Chelly, where three years earlier Frank had participated in a Jungian conference that Jerome had organized.
We’re having dinner now in the hotel restaurant, it’s about seven p.m. and I keep thinking Jerome is going to walk through the door. Then, Jerome walks through the door. It’s a Sunday, it’s Dec. 28, it’s 12 degrees outside, and here is Jerome, walking in with his two canes—“like a deer dancer,” he says, beaming. Jerome looks like Christopher Lloyd but with a gentler laugh. He has a great halo of white hair surrounding an otherwise bald pate. He has a friend in tow, who he introduces as Christophe, a French quantum mechanics theorist who is also a Jungian.

Christophe wanted to hear stories.  They’d gone for a jeep tour in Canyon de Chelly that afternoon but were disappointed the tour guide didn’t know the stories. So, Frank tells him the creation story about the Twins going to meet their Father the Sun – the short version, which goes on for at least an hour. I ask Christophe, what are you looking for? He says “I wants to go beyond my quantum mechanics view through my dreams,” and that he wants to hear others, that they may have the answer for him.
I say, “Look right here, you have an answer, you saw something very magical, very serendipitous. What are the odds that in the dead of winter you will run into someone Jerome knows here?  We’re over 300 miles from Santa Fe. The last time the three of us, Jerome and Frank and I, have been here was in spring of 2011, almost three years ago.” The quantum mechanics physicist says, “The odds actually are not too difficult to calculate.”
“But what are the odds,” I say, “that you will visit New Mexico this one week of the year, come on this trip, and run in to a Navajo friend of Jerome’s, who also doesn’t live here either, and hasn’t been up here for a year or more, but who had to arrive here tonight, and is not only a storyteller, but is willing to tell you the creation stories that you wanted to hear.” He laughs and says, “When you put it that way the odds are not so easy to calculate.”
Christophe then wants to know, is there another world beyond the Fourth World the Navajo say we are in now? Frank says, “They say there are seven.”

For each of us this unexpected meeting was a meaningful surprise. I know that Jungians and quantum mechanics theorists are especially interested in synchronicity. I imagine that Jerome and Christophe will be discussing what it means and work on putting it into a context that rubs up against Western knowledge.
For me, it’s nothing I can put into words. I can only tell the story. But this surprising experience, this out of the ordinary surprise, has renewed my faith in the magical, spiritual nature of things.
There is a reality that does transcend the normal, the everyday.
We know we are worried that mankind will not survive all this crap we have created in the world and that the world is now putting us through. Some believe that if we are faithful, and true, that somehow we will survive some sort of transition.
I say that I usually think that is just wishful thinking, and not being ‘real’ about fixing the world’s problems. Jerome then says, “Well what is real?”
Indeed. Maybe in these moments when we pray, or meditate, or daydream, or otherwise find a way to take ourselves out of an angry or negative or humdrum  frame of mind, we really are creating something better in the universe. I think I will daydream more about flying animals surrounding the space bubble vehicle that I travel across this earth in, my personal merkabah.

 Up to here, as published in the Gallup Independent – next section included in NMJewishelink.com and with photos:

A few connections we later made

I had asked Frank what this coincidental meeting meant to him, as a Navajo. At the time, he said, with something of the same amazement I was feeling, “I can’t explain it.” However, some days later back in Albuquerque he said, “We always, the elders say, that our thoughts and feelings have powers of creation. The four of us, there was this need that we all had, that we thought about, and then we met. When I got to the hotel and saw the sign for the restaurant on the stone building, Garcia’s, I remembered Jerome and all those Jungian analysts, and I had a certain feeling that their spirits were there, and then I thought–it’s probably just a memory. So, it’s not coincidence after all, we all in our minds got there first.”

One question in my mind is, did we create or foresee the event or both? How malleable is time and space and how much can our consciousness affect what is to be? Jerome later said that earlier that day in the canyon he had actually told Christophe he wished Frank was there to tell him the stories. Also, sometimes there is unseen help at work. Jerome was bringing Christophe to meet a medicine man the next day who knew he would be bringing an important guest.
I learned later also that Christophe Le Mouël is the executive director of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and I later wrote and asked him to tell me something of himself. He wrote back that “I left France (and physics) eight years ago to follow an American woman I met in Paris and we now are parents of 1-year old twin boys. My passion is the connection of psyche and matter and I have published a few papers on this topic. This is how Jerome and I got to know each other.”
And, he was in New Mexico during the holidays visiting his wife’s family. He had felt very close to his wife’s grandmother, Ruth Seligman, and had written about her in a paper “A Necklace of Numbers,”* for a Jungian journal. In the paper he wrote about this closeness he felt to this remarkable woman, in part because she too had come from Europe to America – sent ahead of her parents, she escaped Nazi Germany and came as a young woman of 17 to Albuquerque. Christophe writes in the journal article that, in a dream, Ruth Seligman gives him a precious gift, a “necklace of numbers” that has great meaning and that configures greatly in his integration into American life.

*Christophe Le Mouël (2014) The Necklace of Numbers,
Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, 57:4, 357-383

View at http://www.newmexicojewishelink.com/661-2/

First print version Spiritual Perspectives, Gallup Independent 1/3/2015.
Expanded print edition February, 2015, and online nmjewisheLink, 2/9/15
Also posted on Albuquerque Judaism Examiner, Part one, January 3, 2015  http://www.examiner.com/article/serendipity-and-the-power-of-daydreams  and, “Part two,” http://www.examiner.com/article/serendipity-and-the-power-of-daydreams-part-two 2/3/2015