Peter Geffen: “[It’s] one of those borders where I can go this far but can’t go further.” (5/22/18)

Face-to-face(s) with Peter Geffen, founder of my gap year program. On dreams, liberalism, and activism: what we think we understand about them, what they mean, and my underlying fears (in light of attending a nortiously “liberal” college in a few days...)

portrait by Gabrielle Amar It seems like a writer sits behind the triumphs and serendipitous encounters of Peter Geffen’s life. ​There’s the classic tale of an 18-year old Peter, who, on his first trip to Israel in 1964, sat in on a private meeting with former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, which his group leader had secured by consistently prodding various layers of security. Ben-Gurion spoke about Israel as the only future hope for Diaspora Jews, and then asked the group, “If there were a war and we were in danger, how many of you would come to help us?” Peter was the only person to raise his hand. Furious, Ben-Gurion walked out. Peter returned to Israel to volunteer three years later during the Six-Day War. There’s the eternalized picture of two young Jewish civil rights workers -- a 19-year-old Peter Geffen and his friend Mickey -- standing next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the summer of 1965 as they tried to register disenfranchised African Americans in the south, dodging the bullets of policemen (who doubled as Klansmen). There’s the funny anecdote of Peter and another civil rights worker being put in charge to find the second mule that had gone missing on the day of MLK’s funeral procession (and of Peter discovering himself amidst the procession crowd in old video footage on TV years later). There’s the story behind Peter’s prosthetic leg: in January 1994, the coldest winter recorded in New York’s history, in which solid ice fell from the sky and froze the streets, Peter stepped out of his car onto the ice-covered road when a driver, who couldn’t see where she was driving, rammed into him. The ice cauterized his blood. He was left unconscious, his leg mangled. Doctors estimated that he’d have to undergo 15-20 surgeries and couldn’t promise that they would save his leg. Peter ultimately forwent the operations and turned to the nurse after the amputation: “Well, I guess I have just reduced my athlete’s foot and mosquito bites by 50 percent.” Less than a year later, Peter hiked up Masada’s entire snake trail with his new prosthetic leg, and nearly gave his physical therapist a heart attack (more likely because the video posed high prospects of a lawsuit than a stunning testament to his perseverance). There’s the lesser known story of a 22-year old Peter, who had also been assigned by the SCLC to escort Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to MLK’s funeral. Peter asked Heschel “what are we to do now?” in the wake of both MLK and JFK’s assassinations. Heschel kept walking in silence, and then turned and spoke to Peter the words that Peter would forget as a young person but return to years later after founding the Heschel School in New York: “you must teach the children. You must teach them a Judaism that can remake the world.” Who is Peter Geffen? On paper, he is the recipient of the 2012 Covenant Award, the highest award in Jewish Education. He is the founder of the Heschel School in New York, established in 1983. He sat on the board of directors of Breira, the first national Jewish organization to advocate for a two-state solution in Israel. He co-sponsored the first Holocaust Conference in the Arab World with Muslim students at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco in 2011. He led the first Arab student Israel seminar in 2012. In 2015, he organized a memorial attended by over 700 people, among them the Moroccan UN and US ambassadors and invited Princess Lalla Hassan of Morocco to receive an award on behalf of her grandfather, King Mohammed V, who refused to comply with Vichy France’s orders for the liquidation and deportation of Morocco’s 250,000-300,000 Jews during the Holocaust. He is also the founder of the only Jewish educational program teaching Arabic, about Islam and traveling into the Arab world. ​In person, Peter is, above many things, a dreamer. He is a person who has committed his life to reimagining and changing Jewish-Arab, Jewish-Muslim, and Israeli-Arab relations. I don’t use “dreamer” in a narrow and reductive sense. We often default to cynicism when the words “hope” or “change” are uttered (and a lot of the time with fair reason). We’ve lost trust in our governments, in the power of ideas, and in our neighbors. We’ve either stopped believing in our dreams or have ceased to dream altogether. We’ve convinced ourselves that dreams demand a cost too high that we can’t afford. Dreaming is now equated with a waste of valuable time and/or money and the relinquishment of our own security or sanity. Dreaming now means the impossible demand for a dramatic break with problems we don’t know how to deal with, or people we don’t know how to engage. But dreams aren’t this -- or shouldn’t be, at least. A dreamer is not necessarily someone with a big imagination. Not someone who seeks art mainly for refuge or escape. Not someone who gets swept up and carried away in the swirls of idealism and either stays floating on fictitious hope or falls face flat on the static ground of reality. Peter had introduced me and a few of my friends to Bobby Kennedy’s famous “Day of Affirmation” speech (also known as “A Ripple in a Dream”). It was given at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1964. Kennedy in one paragraph describes a truth we’ve seemed to forget (or were never taught in the first place): it’s the “belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs -- that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems.” There should be no contradiction between dreaming and acting, between the conception and application of an idea founded upon strong convictions. Dreaming is the beautiful, delicate fusion of efficiency and idealism. It teeters with the present and its possibility -- not back and forth between the two. A dreamer’s work does not end with our imaginations… if it does, then it’s not a full dream. Full dreams are the translation of an attitude into some real, lasting impact. Pressure exerted against a dream is our own anticipation for what we’ve convinced ourselves is idealism’s bound defeat. We see self-destruction as the natural course for ideas and miscellaneous impractical things. And I think we’ve convinced ourselves -- or perhaps I should only speak for myself here -- that dreaming fully -- the combination of thinking and acting, the combination of idea and execution -- is often too difficult and too high-risk to pursue seriously. To keep ourselves from this inevitable doom, the majority of us have developed little harbors for our dreams to bob over the waters of our imaginations at night and thick tethers to reel them in lest they float away into the real world. This resolve means dreaming’s passive withdrawal from reality and reality’s passive withdrawal from hope. This is the “dreaming” that I, and I think most people, are most acquainted with. Paradoxically, our imaginations are sometimes easier to believe in and face than their merging with reality. Our imaginations don’t have responsibilities. Dreams without action are fluff to fill our imaginations, holes to offer us refuge from the harshness of the outside world. Our fantasies can be anything and do not have to exist as anything simultaneously. But creating a reality -- bringing a dream to life -- is different. We’ve convinced ourselves that the possibility of our airy fantasies existing in the real heavy world, or the possibility that our highest of aspirations will find their pace down on earth, are more impossible than our fantasies themselves. Peace (between Jews and Arabs in Israel, between Jews and Muslims around the world, and more generally between other groups who misunderstand each other) is perhaps the greatest fable and the most daunting dream of our time. Perhaps Peter’s story — a pursuit for this peace — sounds like fiction to me for this exact reason. His is the fantastical fable of a Jew on a quest seeking the impossible: peace between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs. Peter told us most of his stories, but sometimes, other people and I would share and consume bits of information, and through the process, would turn these stories into a contemporary folklore of our own. This quick-turning circulation of talk did not resemble Marvin Gaye’s vengeful and lurid’ grapevine, but an excitement bordering happy disbelief. It might sound nice, but it’s quite sad. The only relevance dreams still seem to hold is one that seems incompatible with how we really live or see the world today. Peter’s meeting of important figures such as MLK, Rabbi Heschel, David Ben Gurion, and the profound influence that these interactions had on him; his adverse experiences, and his resolute optimism in their face; his deep commitment to coexistence work and the lasting strides he’s made in both Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab relations all sound crazy to me on their own, as just stories. But these stories sound even wilder to me and even less believable knowing that they are real, that they did in fact happen. ​Peter sees humans as “an end-in-itself,” to use Kant’s words (this is pretentious and the only concept I can recall of his). Peter doesn’t see humans as merely a means. The human spirit is boundless in his eyes. He pursues what’s important to him with focus and sharp precision, but also with an intensity that’s uniquely personal. He lends legitimacy, relevancy and vitality to what’s often disregarded as “the spiritual.” “What’s happening inside of you?” Peter once asked my group in a reflection session after a long week. “I’m not talking about your brain, but your heart. What’s happening in there?” The question was so honest and deep and appropriate, but I had never taken the time to ask myself it -- or even consider its importance -- up until then. Peter remembers the qualitative in a world so obsessed with the quantitative. He reminds others that the things we sometimes ignore (feelings) or have forgotten (hope) are no less real or important. What makes Peter Geffen? Peter, the Jewish educator, the entrepreneur, the forward-thinking leader, the dreamer. How does he dream? What spurs his activism? How does he define his liberalism? (What even is liberalism?) What explains his interest and love for people, his seriousness about the spiritual? Peter agreed to answer a few personal questions (not yet knowing how much sleep he’d have to sacrifice), and left me with this crazy energy that kept me up writing the whole night. ~ I first asked Peter to talk about his family -- purely for the sake of context. I was expecting to transition to other things after 10 minutes. We spent almost an hour on his family alone. (I should’ve known better, since he studied history.) 30 minutes in, I told Peter that I wanted to focus more on him. “This is all focusing on me,” he told me. (Again, I should’ve known better.) On his mother’s side, Peter is the grandson of a businessman, who, at the turn of the 20th century, was one of America’s three Jewish millionaires. William Fischman owned the largest women’s coat factory in the country. He was also a philanthropist. He used his money to help fund the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Downtown Talmud Torah, the first after school Jewish program to offer classes to both boys and girls. Patrilineally, Peter is the grandson of a Rabbi Tobias Geffen, a great Talmudic scholar from Kovno, Lithuania. Tobias left for America with his wife and two little children following the Kishinev pogrom. Peter’s grandfather expected the pogrom’s repercussions to reverberate farther than the 100 deaths described in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “City of Slaughter.” The move to America meant blasphemy to the community and safety to Peter’s grandpa. Tobias ended up as the Rabbi of Shearith Israel Congregation in Atlanta, Georgia where he served for 60 of his almost 100 years. His most famous Rabbinic decision emerged from New York Rabbinic anxiety over whether Coca-Cola was kosher for consumption year-around and during Passover. Peter’s grandfather was friends with the company’s lawyer, Harold Hirsch, who arranged for him to gain access to the soft drink’s secret formula. It is reported that Tobias was and still is the only person outside of Coke’s executive committee to have seen the secret ingredients. He was able to get Coca-Cola hechshered by replacing glycerin with a vegetarian substitute, and a second ingredient with one not containing chametz at Passover time. This kick-started a “kosher revolution” in America, where companies across the country started to realize the profitability of kashrut certification. (see Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food by Professor Roger Horowitz.) Peter descends from two traditional Orthodox lineages. He is the least religious of his grandfather’s children and grandchildren. I knew about Peter’s professional background (and the kind of gap year program I would be attending) before I knew Peter. I imagined that there was some kind of radicalism bubbling inside him. A radicalism that had replaced religion altogether and allowed him to successfully pursue coexistence work with Muslims and Arabs and base an educational program around that work. And then my initial impression of Peter reinforced this misconception. In one of our first conversations -- one I will never forget -- Peter taught me that Hatikvah’s lyrics are problematic and explained why: its language describes the resoluteness of the Jewish soul and the specific struggles of the Jewish people, but 20% of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. How could an Israeli Muslim or Christian or Druze sing about the yearning of the Jewish soul and people? The lyrics must change, Peter concluded, in order for all citizens of the nation of Israel to relate to the Israeli national anthem. Those few minutes were distressing and painful for me. For all of the conflict’s messiness, the national anthem had always seemed so benign to me. I had never been exposed to such language about it — let alone from a Jew. What I thought I was experiencing was a manifestation of “liberal brainwashing,” a scary expression of fanaticism that I was warned to stay far away from when I read the news or went to college. What was so threatening about Peter’s idea? What seems an idea radical? When does something expository or challenging become problematic? My understanding of Peter’s values have changed significantly throughout the year. I learned that the worldview influencing his work as an educator and peace activist is not disconnected but a continuation and extension of a family legacy deeply engaged in Jewish life and practice. When he turned to me and said “my liberalism is not so radical as it might appear to you,” he wasn’t necessarily speaking about his own personal beliefs, but about a world experience influenced by and shared with other people who are much different from him. Peter first clarified for me that he does keep kosher and sees value in Halakah; he does not identify with the Reform movement’s rejection of Jewish law’s religious authority. He also told me that from an early age, he never felt limited by Judaism. He always saw tradition as something for him to interpret and renew. He learned this during his summers at various Camp Ramah establishments, for example with the “etz tfillah” (“prayer tree”) that was prevalent in many of the camps. The concept, in retrospect, Peter told me, borders pagan in influence, but it left Peter with the notion that tradition was something open for him to approach creatively.. I asked Peter about how his family specifically influenced his liberalism before he defined it for me. I got four more anecdotes in response: 1) His paternal grandfather, Rabbi Tobias Geffen of Atlanta and bearer of the great Coca-cola formula secret, raised Peter’s father and his other children in a neighborhood with non-Jews. On one side of the Geffen home was a big Protestant family, and on the other: a Catholic family, who had adopted an orphaned nephew named Charlie Lynch. On Christmas morning, the Geffen boys would tie a string to their brother Joel’s big toe, which ran into Charlie Lynch's window and would be tugged by Charlie once it was time to open Christmas presents. All of the rabbi’s sons would come down the stairs and into the Lynch family’s home and huddle together for the reveal. Peter told me he was actually raised in a much more provincial way compared to how his grandfather raised his father; Peter still recalls how disturbed he felt as a little boy when he saw a Christmas tree in a more assimilated relative’s home. His grandfather’s lack of fear of other religions was forward-thinking for a religiously-observant Jew for his time. As a rabbi in Queens, New York years later, Peter’s father became the chairman of the first Catholic-Jewish Relations Board of Brooklyn-Queens, the largest Catholic Archdiocese in the world. 2) Peter’s father and his brother, Joel, attended Emory University. Joel Geffen was the first Jew to ever attend the university, which was a Methodist school at the time. (Much has changed since then.) Peter encouraged him to go to college, regardless of the religious obstacles he would face and the flexibility with which he would have to approach the non-Jewish institution. He requested for the staff to allow his son to attend Saturday morning classes but not to take notes, and allow him to borrow others’ notes the next school day since he couldn’t write on Shabbat. In fact, -ll of the Geffen children went to university, boys and girls, and all of the Geffen children were encouraged to study Talmud by and with their father, boys and girls. 3) When Peter’s father, Samuel Geffen, asked his grandfather for lessons, his requests were ignored. Music lessons were then seen as unrefined and unworthy of a rabbi’s son’s preoccupation. Peter’s grandma arranged for secret private lessons, and within 5 years, after playing for the family after Shabbat, all of the Geffen children were encouraged by Peter’s grandfather to take music lessons and were hired for community parties with his full support.Peter’s father was first violinist of the Emory University Orchestra and played Second Violin for the Atlanta Symphony 4) After Peter’s dad went to law school, he left Atlanta -- and his whole family -- because he couldn’t stand riding on segregated buses. Peter’s father would tell him this every time they visited the city. His father was equally committed to civil rights, co-chairing the Black-Jewish Relations Board of Queens for several decades. His grandfather embraced religious differences and changed his convictions. His father fought for a vision of the south that he felt was compatible with his values and time. “When you ask what is liberal,” Peter continued, “liberal is a person who can look at reality and change their view. Can accept the fact that as time passes, our way of understanding things changes and therefore, you have to adapt to those changes… When I speak about a liberalism, it goes quite deep. [It’s] one of those borders where I can go this far but can’t go further.” I find the language of Peter’s last sentence interesting. From what I previously understood, liberalism is predicated on an open mind. Liberalism had always been elastic: an ability to embrace difference and change infinitely. I thought our limits -- mainly the restraints of our own inflexibility -- are where liberalism ends. But it’s interesting to consider that the recognition of our restraints is really where our capacity for open-mindedness and change begin: knowing you’re limited and that other things exist outside of your brain or experience give way for someone else’s truth to be recognized. ​It’s important to remember that “liberal” means different things -- today, in America, around the world, and throughout history. Liberal was the cause of small businessmen seeking free trade during the Enlightenment in Europe. Liberal was the cause of anti-interventionist capitalists and policy makers. Liberal was also the cause of European nationalists who wanted kingdoms to disintegrate and free countries to emerge in the mid-19th century. Liberal came to mean the social reforms of the French Revolution’s calling for “fraternity, equality, liberty” and the fight of the Republican abolitionists in America. In the 20th century, liberal was the development of social programs, pensions, and the welfare safety net in America. Liberal today means platforms that advocate for greater personal freedom and minimized government interference, like free trade or the pro-choice movement, and movements that advocate for greater equality at the expense of personal freedom, like environmental protection policy and social welfare. “Liberalism” has transformed from an economic policy to also include social policy; in some circles, liberalism’s original focus on the individual has refracted and parts of it have shifted to focus solely on the collective; and it describes positions that oppose the ones it supported 200 years ago. Weariness or direct opposition to nationalism and capitalism are now “liberal” ideas. Liberalism is the cure to the world’s suffering to one person and the world’s diagnosis to another. It’s the truth or a sham. What I find most compelling, however, is that “liberal” has also come to mean a personality. Liberal is the person you admire or despise. It’s the hipster with the beard who sells your organic vegetables and non-GMO and gluten-free bread at the farmer’s market, the Westside elitist hot yoga-goer, the young high schooler you can’t take seriously at the dinner table, the college activist who you always see reading on the lawn, the hippie who doesn’t care about politics but only love, the boy who talks about his mental health issues on social media. There are all of these unrelated archetypes that somehow all translate to also mean “liberal,” as if these modern personalities are each walking political statements. (Which, they, in some ways, kind of are, intentionally or not…) ​But I like Peter’s definition. It’s more general and all-encompassing: an ability to reassess reality. It’s interesting to me that for a word that means so many different (and sometimes even contradictory) things, its broadest definition now includes the word’s own evolution. “Liberal” has changed its meaning multiple times. The word “liberal” is a liberal itself! Being a “liberal” -- which is not the same as a leftist, a progressive, or a Democrat -- means living with difference. It means making space for difference of thought, recognizing differences in people’s experience, differences between historical time periods and cultures and their contemporary demands. In that sense, some of the most ardent Republicans who support free speech and tolerate others’ arguments, as my teacher David pointed out to me recently, better uphold liberal thought than progressives/leftists who completely disavow free speech. ​I think liberalism is also what feeds dreams. Liberalism opens the mind to an array of opinions and needs, which can be met through the conception and carrying out of dreams. This is how Peter describes the connection between following dreams and pursuing change: “Activism derives from the time and from its needs. And we have no shortage of needs. We’re here [in West Jerusalem]. And then 10, 15, 20, 100 feet away there’s a completely different reality for people who are also human beings… What are we going to spend our time on? Ignore and go to campus and wave a flag? Activism requires that I decide that I have to find a way either directly or indirectly to support causes and movements and ideas that I really believe make a difference in the world and I have no guarantee that what I believe is right. I have to act courageously on what I believe I feel is right and at a moment, of course if the world changes, I have to be courageous to let my views change, too.” ​ ​Liberalism, therefore, is as much about recognizing change in time as it is about recognizing change in people, including oneself. It demands steadfast convictions, but also an ability to turn on them. The courage that Peter described is- both deeply rooted and dynamic. And it’s expanded upon in an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's “Citizenship in a Republic,” which Peter had shared with me from memory: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ​What’s behind this fight? What keeps people like Peter still in the arena, dreaming intensely and risking unabashedly and, above all, fighting? The hope they invest in their dreams is really a hope in people. I think that’s all it comes down to at the end. I asked Peter about what spiritually sustains his work, and what keeps his vision for peace alive. “What even is the spiritual?” He asked. “I don’t feel the way the Dalai Lama feels about things. I just feel attached to what I think is important and believe what I do makes a difference. That’s all… if you’re involved in the lives of other people -- it’s the most fundamental piece of what you’re referring to, of the spiritual.” People’s needs are real. Our experiences and feelings are real. Our dreams are rooted in the liveliness and realness of our humanity. Reality — and not escape from reality, as is so commonly believed — is what dictates the necessity of dreams. I know that I should believe dreams are important. I know that I should feel people are important. I know that they have intrinsic value. I know everything regarding human life should be deontological, as something to be treated as an end and not as a means to fulfill some alternative purpose. And yet, sometimes I feel like I’m following a script. Reminders about our humanity and dreams sometimes make me feel like I don’t believe in what I’m telling myself is true. There’s often a condition attached: “believe in dreams to create change,” “see value in people to enrich your world experience and concept of humanity,” “read more and from different authors to be more open-minded and to deepen your thinking.” There seems to always be some other reason. Everything seems like a means to some other end. Sometimes, activism feels utilitarian because I am so overcome by grief. I often get overwhelmed with daily news sports. The world is too sore to touch. Its suffering paralyzes me. I feel removed from the intimate connection between dreams and their pragmatic realization. I feel lost in the strong tides of conviction and the equally strong tides of change that comprise liberal thought. I don’t know how to remain steadfast in the unpredictability of our changing world’s demands. I feel immobilized, and remind myself to dream and see value in other people to combat my low spirits and overcome this immobilization. Other times, though, the issue goes much deeper. Everything that involves loving or connecting to other human beings or improving our lives or world feels teleological now, born out of some kind of utilitarianism, with some kind of motivational benefit lurking behind it. I’m curious to know if this utilitarianism is a new phenomenon, or has always framed the way we approach loving human beings and improving our experience, or is just a projection of my own insecurity in light of Peter’s interview. This may just be me projecting — Peter disagrees with my conclusions when I shared this point with him — but I feel like I’m living in a hyperbolized new age of activism, which has only made people feel farther and dreams more distant. Support for “liberal” platforms is a kind of social currency now. People like to remind my generation of our unmatched and practically infinite potential for change, given our age of technological advancement: we have access to incredible resources, like social media and boundless educational tools; we are well-connected, motivated, and informed. But I wonder to myself: do we exhibit the same courage of Peter’s time? Sure, deep social movements always start with the engagement of a small minority, and perhaps I’m overlooking the fact that only a small number of civil rights workers fought for black rights in the 60’s and acted upon a similar deep and genuine concern for human beings that Peter also possesses. But I think there is a genuine question for us to ask ourselves today: do we still care about people? Are our dreams still deeply practical, our liberal convictions dynamic, our activism steadfast because they’re rooted in a primary concern for humanity? Are people enough to sustain us spiritually today? Or do we need other things too? The same resources that have made it easier for us to connect with human beings have also made it easier for us, on the flip side, to get distracted by technological efficiency, research, profit, “likes,” or image and forget about the centrality of human life. “I’ve never seen a problem that wasn’t created by humans. Why, then, can’t our problems be fixed?” Peter once asked a discussion group I was a part of in May. Perhaps, it’s not the belief in the power of dreams that’s most difficult for us to believe in and whose extinction we should be most concerned about. Maybe it’s people, really, that we should worry for. And maybe it’s people that we should believe in. Face-to-face(s) with Peter Geffen. On dreams, liberalism, and activism: what we think we understand about them, what they mean, and my underlying fears.

It seems like a writer sits behind the triumphs and serendipitous encounters of Peter Geffen’s life. ​There’s the classic tale of an 18-year old Peter, who, on his first trip to Israel in 1964, sat in on a private meeting with former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, which his group leader had secured by consistently prodding various layers of security. Ben-Gurion spoke about Israel as the only future hope for Diaspora Jews, and then asked the group, “If there were a war and we were in danger, how many of you would come to help us?” Peter was the only person to raise his hand. Furious, Ben-Gurion walked out. Peter returned to Israel to volunteer three years later during the Six-Day War. There’s the eternalized picture of two young Jewish civil rights workers -- a 19-year-old Peter Geffen and his friend Mickey -- standing next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the summer of 1965 as they tried to register disenfranchised African Americans in the south, dodging the bullets of policemen (who doubled as Klansmen). There’s the funny anecdote of Peter and another civil rights worker being put in charge to find the second mule that had gone missing on the day of MLK’s funeral procession (and of Peter discovering himself amidst the procession crowd in old video footage on TV years later). There’s the story behind Peter’s prosthetic leg: in January 1994, the coldest winter recorded in New York’s history, in which solid ice fell from the sky and froze the streets, Peter stepped out of his car onto the ice-covered road when a driver, who couldn’t see where she was driving, rammed into him. The ice cauterized his blood. He was left unconscious, his leg mangled. Doctors estimated that he’d have to undergo 15-20 surgeries and couldn’t promise that they would save his leg. Peter ultimately forwent the operations and turned to the nurse after the amputation: “Well, I guess I have just reduced my athlete’s foot and mosquito bites by 50 percent.” Less than a year later, Peter hiked up Masada’s entire snake trail with his new prosthetic leg, and nearly gave his physical therapist a heart attack (more likely because the video posed high prospects of a lawsuit than a stunning testament to his perseverance). There’s the lesser known story of a 22-year old Peter, who had also been assigned by the SCLC to escort Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to MLK’s funeral. Peter asked Heschel “what are we to do now?” in the wake of both MLK and JFK’s assassinations. Heschel kept walking in silence, and then turned and spoke to Peter the words that Peter would forget as a young person but return to years later after founding the Heschel School in New York: “you must teach the children. You must teach them a Judaism that can remake the world.” Who is Peter Geffen? On paper, he is the recipient of the 2012 Covenant Award, the highest award in Jewish Education. He is the founder of the Heschel School in New York, established in 1983. He sat on the board of directors of Breira, the first national Jewish organization to advocate for a two-state solution in Israel. He co-sponsored the first Holocaust Conference in the Arab World with Muslim students at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco in 2011. He led the first Arab student Israel seminar in 2012. In 2015, he organized a memorial attended by over 700 people, among them the Moroccan UN and US ambassadors and invited Princess Lalla Hassan of Morocco to receive an award on behalf of her grandfather, King Mohammed V, who refused to comply with Vichy France’s orders for the liquidation and deportation of Morocco’s 250,000-300,000 Jews during the Holocaust. He is also the founder of the only Jewish educational program teaching Arabic, about Islam and traveling into the Arab world. ​In person, Peter is, above many things, a dreamer. He is a person who has committed his life to reimagining and changing Jewish-Arab, Jewish-Muslim, and Israeli-Arab relations. I don’t use “dreamer” in a narrow and reductive sense. We often default to cynicism when the words “hope” or “change” are uttered (and a lot of the time with fair reason). We’ve lost trust in our governments, in the power of ideas, and in our neighbors. We’ve either stopped believing in our dreams or have ceased to dream altogether. We’ve convinced ourselves that dreams demand a cost too high that we can’t afford. Dreaming is now equated with a waste of valuable time and/or money and the relinquishment of our own security or sanity. Dreaming now means the impossible demand for a dramatic break with problems we don’t know how to deal with, or people we don’t know how to engage. But dreams aren’t this -- or shouldn’t be, at least. A dreamer is not necessarily someone with a big imagination. Not someone who seeks art mainly for refuge or escape. Not someone who gets swept up and carried away in the swirls of idealism and either stays floating on fictitious hope or falls face flat on the static ground of reality. Peter had introduced me and a few of my friends to Bobby Kennedy’s famous “Day of Affirmation” speech (also known as “A Ripple in a Dream”). It was given at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1964. Kennedy in one paragraph describes a truth we’ve seemed to forget (or were never taught in the first place): it’s the “belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs -- that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems.” There should be no contradiction between dreaming and acting, between the conception and application of an idea founded upon strong convictions. Dreaming is the beautiful, delicate fusion of efficiency and idealism. It teeters with the present and its possibility -- not back and forth between the two. A dreamer’s work does not end with our imaginations… if it does, then it’s not a full dream. Full dreams are the translation of an attitude into some real, lasting impact. Pressure exerted against a dream is our own anticipation for what we’ve convinced ourselves is idealism’s bound defeat. We see self-destruction as the natural course for ideas and miscellaneous impractical things. And I think we’ve convinced ourselves -- or perhaps I should only speak for myself here -- that dreaming fully -- the combination of thinking and acting, the combination of idea and execution -- is often too difficult and too high-risk to pursue seriously. To keep ourselves from this inevitable doom, the majority of us have developed little harbors for our dreams to bob over the waters of our imaginations at night and thick tethers to reel them in lest they float away into the real world. This resolve means dreaming’s passive withdrawal from reality and reality’s passive withdrawal from hope. This is the “dreaming” that I, and I think most people, are most acquainted with. Paradoxically, our imaginations are sometimes easier to believe in and face than their merging with reality. Our imaginations don’t have responsibilities. Dreams without action are fluff to fill our imaginations, holes to offer us refuge from the harshness of the outside world. Our fantasies can be anything and do not have to exist as anything simultaneously. But creating a reality -- bringing a dream to life -- is different. We’ve convinced ourselves that the possibility of our airy fantasies existing in the real heavy world, or the possibility that our highest of aspirations will find their pace down on earth, are more impossible than our fantasies themselves. Peace (between Jews and Arabs in Israel, between Jews and Muslims around the world, and more generally between other groups who misunderstand each other) is perhaps the greatest fable and the most daunting dream of our time. Perhaps Peter’s story — a pursuit for this peace — sounds like fiction to me for this exact reason. His is the fantastical fable of a Jew on a quest seeking the impossible: peace between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs. Peter told us most of his stories, but sometimes, other people and I would share and consume bits of information, and through the process, would turn these stories into a contemporary folklore of our own. This quick-turning circulation of talk did not resemble Marvin Gaye’s vengeful and lurid’ grapevine, but an excitement bordering happy disbelief. It might sound nice, but it’s quite sad. The only relevance dreams still seem to hold is one that seems incompatible with how we really live or see the world today. Peter’s meeting of important figures such as MLK, Rabbi Heschel, David Ben Gurion, and the profound influence that these interactions had on him; his adverse experiences, and his resolute optimism in their face; his deep commitment to coexistence work and the lasting strides he’s made in both Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab relations all sound crazy to me on their own, as just stories. But these stories sound even wilder to me and even less believable knowing that they are real, that they did in fact happen. ​Peter sees humans as “an end-in-itself,” to use Kant’s words (this is pretentious and the only concept I can recall of his). Peter doesn’t see humans as merely a means. The human spirit is boundless in his eyes. He pursues what’s important to him with focus and sharp precision, but also with an intensity that’s uniquely personal. He lends legitimacy, relevancy and vitality to what’s often disregarded as “the spiritual.” “What’s happening inside of you?” Peter once asked my group in a reflection session after a long week. “I’m not talking about your brain, but your heart. What’s happening in there?” The question was so honest and deep and appropriate, but I had never taken the time to ask myself it -- or even consider its importance -- up until then. Peter remembers the qualitative in a world so obsessed with the quantitative. He reminds others that the things we sometimes ignore (feelings) or have forgotten (hope) are no less real or important. What makes Peter Geffen? Peter, the Jewish educator, the entrepreneur, the forward-thinking leader, the dreamer. How does he dream? What spurs his activism? How does he define his liberalism? (What even is liberalism?) What explains his interest and love for people, his seriousness about the spiritual? Peter agreed to answer a few personal questions (not yet knowing how much sleep he’d have to sacrifice), and left me with this crazy energy that kept me up writing the whole night. ~ I first asked Peter to talk about his family -- purely for the sake of context. I was expecting to transition to other things after 10 minutes. We spent almost an hour on his family alone. (I should’ve known better, since he studied history.) 30 minutes in, I told Peter that I wanted to focus more on him. “This is all focusing on me,” he told me. (Again, I should’ve known better.) On his mother’s side, Peter is the grandson of a businessman, who, at the turn of the 20th century, was one of America’s three Jewish millionaires. William Fischman owned the largest women’s coat factory in the country. He was also a philanthropist. He used his money to help fund the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Downtown Talmud Torah, the first after school Jewish program to offer classes to both boys and girls. Patrilineally, Peter is the grandson of a Rabbi Tobias Geffen, a great Talmudic scholar from Kovno, Lithuania. Tobias left for America with his wife and two little children following the Kishinev pogrom. Peter’s grandfather expected the pogrom’s repercussions to reverberate farther than the 100 deaths described in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “City of Slaughter.” The move to America meant blasphemy to the community and safety to Peter’s grandpa. Tobias ended up as the Rabbi of Shearith Israel Congregation in Atlanta, Georgia where he served for 60 of his almost 100 years. His most famous Rabbinic decision emerged from New York Rabbinic anxiety over whether Coca-Cola was kosher for consumption year-around and during Passover. Peter’s grandfather was friends with the company’s lawyer, Harold Hirsch, who arranged for him to gain access to the soft drink’s secret formula. It is reported that Tobias was and still is the only person outside of Coke’s executive committee to have seen the secret ingredients. He was able to get Coca-Cola hechshered by replacing glycerin with a vegetarian substitute, and a second ingredient with one not containing chametz at Passover time. This kick-started a “kosher revolution” in America, where companies across the country started to realize the profitability of kashrut certification. (see Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food by Professor Roger Horowitz.) Peter descends from two traditional Orthodox lineages. He is the least religious of his grandfather’s children and grandchildren. I knew about Peter’s professional background (and the kind of gap year program I would be attending) before I knew Peter. I imagined that there was some kind of radicalism bubbling inside him. A radicalism that had replaced religion altogether and allowed him to successfully pursue coexistence work with Muslims and Arabs and base an educational program around that work. And then my initial impression of Peter reinforced this misconception. In one of our first conversations -- one I will never forget -- Peter taught me that Hatikvah’s lyrics are problematic and explained why: its language describes the resoluteness of the Jewish soul and the specific struggles of the Jewish people, but 20% of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. How could an Israeli Muslim or Christian or Druze sing about the yearning of the Jewish soul and people? The lyrics must change, Peter concluded, in order for all citizens of the nation of Israel to relate to the Israeli national anthem. Those few minutes were distressing and painful for me. For all of the conflict’s messiness, the national anthem had always seemed so benign to me. I had never been exposed to such language about it — let alone from a Jew. What I thought I was experiencing was a manifestation of “liberal brainwashing,” a scary expression of fanaticism that I was warned to stay far away from when I read the news or went to college. What was so threatening about Peter’s idea? What seems an idea radical? When does something expository or challenging become problematic? My understanding of Peter’s values have changed significantly throughout the year. I learned that the worldview influencing his work as an educator and peace activist is not disconnected but a continuation and extension of a family legacy deeply engaged in Jewish life and practice. When he turned to me and said “my liberalism is not so radical as it might appear to you,” he wasn’t necessarily speaking about his own personal beliefs, but about a world experience influenced by and shared with other people who are much different from him. Peter first clarified for me that he does keep kosher and sees value in Halakah; he does not identify with the Reform movement’s rejection of Jewish law’s religious authority. He also told me that from an early age, he never felt limited by Judaism. He always saw tradition as something for him to interpret and renew. He learned this during his summers at various Camp Ramah establishments, for example with the “etz tfillah” (“prayer tree”) that was prevalent in many of the camps. The concept, in retrospect, Peter told me, borders pagan in influence, but it left Peter with the notion that tradition was something open for him to approach creatively.. I asked Peter about how his family specifically influenced his liberalism before he defined it for me. I got four more anecdotes in response: 1) His paternal grandfather, Rabbi Tobias Geffen of Atlanta and bearer of the great Coca-cola formula secret, raised Peter’s father and his other children in a neighborhood with non-Jews. On one side of the Geffen home was a big Protestant family, and on the other: a Catholic family, who had adopted an orphaned nephew named Charlie Lynch. On Christmas morning, the Geffen boys would tie a string to their brother Joel’s big toe, which ran into Charlie Lynch's window and would be tugged by Charlie once it was time to open Christmas presents. All of the rabbi’s sons would come down the stairs and into the Lynch family’s home and huddle together for the reveal. Peter told me he was actually raised in a much more provincial way compared to how his grandfather raised his father; Peter still recalls how disturbed he felt as a little boy when he saw a Christmas tree in a more assimilated relative’s home. His grandfather’s lack of fear of other religions was forward-thinking for a religiously-observant Jew for his time. As a rabbi in Queens, New York years later, Peter’s father became the chairman of the first Catholic-Jewish Relations Board of Brooklyn-Queens, the largest Catholic Archdiocese in the world. 2) Peter’s father and his brother, Joel, attended Emory University. Joel Geffen was the first Jew to ever attend the university, which was a Methodist school at the time. (Much has changed since then.) Peter encouraged him to go to college, regardless of the religious obstacles he would face and the flexibility with which he would have to approach the non-Jewish institution. He requested for the staff to allow his son to attend Saturday morning classes but not to take notes, and allow him to borrow others’ notes the next school day since he couldn’t write on Shabbat. In fact, -ll of the Geffen children went to university, boys and girls, and all of the Geffen children were encouraged to study Talmud by and with their father, boys and girls. 3) When Peter’s father, Samuel Geffen, asked his grandfather for lessons, his requests were ignored. Music lessons were then seen as unrefined and unworthy of a rabbi’s son’s preoccupation. Peter’s grandma arranged for secret private lessons, and within 5 years, after playing for the family after Shabbat, all of the Geffen children were encouraged by Peter’s grandfather to take music lessons and were hired for community parties with his full support.Peter’s father was first violinist of the Emory University Orchestra and played Second Violin for the Atlanta Symphony 4) After Peter’s dad went to law school, he left Atlanta -- and his whole family -- because he couldn’t stand riding on segregated buses. Peter’s father would tell him this every time they visited the city. His father was equally committed to civil rights, co-chairing the Black-Jewish Relations Board of Queens for several decades. His grandfather embraced religious differences and changed his convictions. His father fought for a vision of the south that he felt was compatible with his values and time. “When you ask what is liberal,” Peter continued, “liberal is a person who can look at reality and change their view. Can accept the fact that as time passes, our way of understanding things changes and therefore, you have to adapt to those changes… When I speak about a liberalism, it goes quite deep. [It’s] one of those borders where I can go this far but can’t go further.” I find the language of Peter’s last sentence interesting. From what I previously understood, liberalism is predicated on an open mind. Liberalism had always been elastic: an ability to embrace difference and change infinitely. I thought our limits -- mainly the restraints of our own inflexibility -- are where liberalism ends. But it’s interesting to consider that the recognition of our restraints is really where our capacity for open-mindedness and change begin: knowing you’re limited and that other things exist outside of your brain or experience give way for someone else’s truth to be recognized. ​It’s important to remember that “liberal” means different things -- today, in America, around the world, and throughout history. Liberal was the cause of small businessmen seeking free trade during the Enlightenment in Europe. Liberal was the cause of anti-interventionist capitalists and policy makers. Liberal was also the cause of European nationalists who wanted kingdoms to disintegrate and free countries to emerge in the mid-19th century. Liberal came to mean the social reforms of the French Revolution’s calling for “fraternity, equality, liberty” and the fight of the Republican abolitionists in America. In the 20th century, liberal was the development of social programs, pensions, and the welfare safety net in America. Liberal today means platforms that advocate for greater personal freedom and minimized government interference, like free trade or the pro-choice movement, and movements that advocate for greater equality at the expense of personal freedom, like environmental protection policy and social welfare. “Liberalism” has transformed from an economic policy to also include social policy; in some circles, liberalism’s original focus on the individual has refracted and parts of it have shifted to focus solely on the collective; and it describes positions that oppose the ones it supported 200 years ago. Weariness or direct opposition to nationalism and capitalism are now “liberal” ideas. Liberalism is the cure to the world’s suffering to one person and the world’s diagnosis to another. It’s the truth or a sham. What I find most compelling, however, is that “liberal” has also come to mean a personality. Liberal is the person you admire or despise. It’s the hipster with the beard who sells your organic vegetables and non-GMO and gluten-free bread at the farmer’s market, the Westside elitist hot yoga-goer, the young high schooler you can’t take seriously at the dinner table, the college activist who you always see reading on the lawn, the hippie who doesn’t care about politics but only love, the boy who talks about his mental health issues on social media. There are all of these unrelated archetypes that somehow all translate to also mean “liberal,” as if these modern personalities are each walking political statements. (Which, they, in some ways, kind of are, intentionally or not…) ​But I like Peter’s definition. It’s more general and all-encompassing: an ability to reassess reality. It’s interesting to me that for a word that means so many different (and sometimes even contradictory) things, its broadest definition now includes the word’s own evolution. “Liberal” has changed its meaning multiple times. The word “liberal” is a liberal itself! Being a “liberal” -- which is not the same as a leftist, a progressive, or a Democrat -- means living with difference. It means making space for difference of thought, recognizing differences in people’s experience, differences between historical time periods and cultures and their contemporary demands. In that sense, some of the most ardent Republicans who support free speech and tolerate others’ arguments, as my teacher David pointed out to me recently, better uphold liberal thought than progressives/leftists who completely disavow free speech. ​I think liberalism is also what feeds dreams. Liberalism opens the mind to an array of opinions and needs, which can be met through the conception and carrying out of dreams. This is how Peter describes the connection between following dreams and pursuing change: “Activism derives from the time and from its needs. And we have no shortage of needs. We’re here [in West Jerusalem]. And then 10, 15, 20, 100 feet away there’s a completely different reality for people who are also human beings… What are we going to spend our time on? Ignore and go to campus and wave a flag? Activism requires that I decide that I have to find a way either directly or indirectly to support causes and movements and ideas that I really believe make a difference in the world and I have no guarantee that what I believe is right. I have to act courageously on what I believe I feel is right and at a moment, of course if the world changes, I have to be courageous to let my views change, too.” ​ ​Liberalism, therefore, is as much about recognizing change in time as it is about recognizing change in people, including oneself. It demands steadfast convictions, but also an ability to turn on them. The courage that Peter described is- both deeply rooted and dynamic. And it’s expanded upon in an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's “Citizenship in a Republic,” which Peter had shared with me from memory: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ​What’s behind this fight? What keeps people like Peter still in the arena, dreaming intensely and risking unabashedly and, above all, fighting? The hope they invest in their dreams is really a hope in people. I think that’s all it comes down to at the end. I asked Peter about what spiritually sustains his work, and what keeps his vision for peace alive. “What even is the spiritual?” He asked. “I don’t feel the way the Dalai Lama feels about things. I just feel attached to what I think is important and believe what I do makes a difference. That’s all… if you’re involved in the lives of other people -- it’s the most fundamental piece of what you’re referring to, of the spiritual.” People’s needs are real. Our experiences and feelings are real. Our dreams are rooted in the liveliness and realness of our humanity. Reality — and not escape from reality, as is so commonly believed — is what dictates the necessity of dreams. I know that I should believe dreams are important. I know that I should feel people are important. I know that they have intrinsic value. I know everything regarding human life should be deontological, as something to be treated as an end and not as a means to fulfill some alternative purpose. And yet, sometimes I feel like I’m following a script. Reminders about our humanity and dreams sometimes make me feel like I don’t believe in what I’m telling myself is true. There’s often a condition attached: “believe in dreams to create change,” “see value in people to enrich your world experience and concept of humanity,” “read more and from different authors to be more open-minded and to deepen your thinking.” There seems to always be some other reason. Everything seems like a means to some other end. Sometimes, activism feels utilitarian because I am so overcome by grief. I often get overwhelmed with daily news sports. The world is too sore to touch. Its suffering paralyzes me. I feel removed from the intimate connection between dreams and their pragmatic realization. I feel lost in the strong tides of conviction and the equally strong tides of change that comprise liberal thought. I don’t know how to remain steadfast in the unpredictability of our changing world’s demands. I feel immobilized, and remind myself to dream and see value in other people to combat my low spirits and overcome this immobilization. Other times, though, the issue goes much deeper. Everything that involves loving or connecting to other human beings or improving our lives or world feels teleological now, born out of some kind of utilitarianism, with some kind of motivational benefit lurking behind it. I’m curious to know if this utilitarianism is a new phenomenon, or has always framed the way we approach loving human beings and improving our experience, or is just a projection of my own insecurity in light of Peter’s interview. This may just be me projecting — Peter disagrees with my conclusions when I shared this point with him — but I feel like I’m living in a hyperbolized new age of activism, which has only made people feel farther and dreams more distant. Support for “liberal” platforms is a kind of social currency now. People like to remind my generation of our unmatched and practically infinite potential for change, given our age of technological advancement: we have access to incredible resources, like social media and boundless educational tools; we are well-connected, motivated, and informed. But I wonder to myself: do we exhibit the same courage of Peter’s time? Sure, deep social movements always start with the engagement of a small minority, and perhaps I’m overlooking the fact that only a small number of civil rights workers fought for black rights in the 60’s and acted upon a similar deep and genuine concern for human beings that Peter also possesses. But I think there is a genuine question for us to ask ourselves today: do we still care about people? Are our dreams still deeply practical, our liberal convictions dynamic, our activism steadfast because they’re rooted in a primary concern for humanity? Are people enough to sustain us spiritually today? Or do we need other things too? The same resources that have made it easier for us to connect with human beings have also made it easier for us, on the flip side, to get distracted by technological efficiency, research, profit, “likes,” or image and forget about the centrality of human life. “I’ve never seen a problem that wasn’t created by humans. Why, then, can’t our problems be fixed?” Peter once asked a discussion group I was a part of in May. Perhaps, it’s not the belief in the power of dreams that’s most difficult for us to believe in and whose extinction we should be most concerned about. Maybe it’s people, really, that we should worry for. And maybe it’s people that we should believe in.