Rolling on my bicycle through bucolic Wisconsin countryside on a spectacular June day, all felt well, secure, and settled. The undulating lanes meandered past picture-perfect family farms; around gentle bends stands of leafy shade trees gave way to valley vistas. Drivers of occasional cars raised two fingers from the steering wheel in typical country-lane salute. Tidy white clouds dotted a blue sky that perfectly augmented the crisp green fields.

Then kablam, hiss, and I pulled to the side of the road with a flat front tire. No problem; I carry extra tubes. Quickly I saw that the tire itself had ripped open. Big problem. We were nine miles from the nearest bike shop. The plan was for my wife to ride there and back with a new tire, while I waited by the side of the road.

Sitting on a corner of a freshly mowed yard my thoughts turned to Syria, another place with beautiful country and family farms. Syria is a place of barbarity and slaughter; Southern Wisconsin decidedly is not. What tips the balance between slaughter and security, sanity and madness? How do we preserve the precious blessings we have and avoid, for generations to come, the horror that others endure?

Stranded by the side of that peaceful lane, gazing out on fields of prosperity, I at once felt thankful and alarmed. I was grateful only to have something as trivial as a busted bike tire chief among my immediate concerns, and haunted to imagine how the scene before me might appear were it the battleground of warring factions who cared not a whit for the toll of suffering they extracted from innocents.

In the middle of my muse a woman with her dog strolled over from a nearby farmhouse. "Everything OK?" she asked. "Need help?"

When I told her my wife had ridden off to the nearest town, she immediately offered to take me there. "Otherwise you'll be sitting here for hours!" she said.

In the car, we chatted about local life, and I asked her what she does for work. "I'm a deputy sheriff," she offered. I asked her about local crime.

"Thefts, scams, and drugs," she replied. "So many people have lost work, and they're increasingly desperate. We've had three heroin deaths recently, and we're going after the people who sold the drugs. Crime definitely is going up as people run out of money."

As she spoke, besides nature's emerald veneer I saw a sad narrative--of shuttered factories, closed shops, foreclosed farms, and broken dreams. Not to overstate the case, I saw the long slippery slope, which becomes a society's undoing if it slides down unchecked.

Of course, we are nowhere near such a catastrophe. As I spoke to my new deputy sheriff friend, we shook our heads and shared the concern that as a society we can ill afford any step that moves us in that direction.

"The only good news is that an uptick in crime brings me job security!" she quipped. As for me, I shared with her the deep satisfaction my colleagues and I derive serving an organization that helps people who are in hard straits.

I retrieved my new tire; she drove me back to my bike; my wife and I met up and continued our long and luscious ride. It was good to come back to work this morning, and continue the business of maintaining a safety net that, with everyone's help, can check the slide to despair.

The biblical imperative "Bakesh shalom v'radfehu" (seek peace and pursue it) came to mind the other morning as I awoke to a local news story that nauseated me.

The story concerns a blatantly Islamophobic birthday card produced by Noble Works and sold locally. It features a hijab-wearing Muslim doll along with several incendiary phrases, overtly linking anyone who wears the traditional female Muslim head covering to terrorism. (Traditionally observant Muslim and Jewish women share the custom of covering their hair.) 

There's no dearth of stories that enrage, nauseate, terrify, disgust, or make me just want to stay in bed; this one struck close to home because, unlike the slaughter in Syria or many other world problems, you and I can do something about this.

We can be mindful of what we see on the shelves of stores selling greeting cards that cross the line of civility, and other public displays of bigotry. We must make our voices heard respectfully whenever we feel that something we see endangers the core values of our society.

This card, by directly linking traditional Muslim dress to terrorism, is totally objectionable in an open, diverse and pluralistic society. People of good conscience should oppose it for the same reasons they should oppose cartoons riddled with anti-Semitic imagery, such as appear all too often in newspapers around the world (and especially in the Middle East).

Is the card protected under First Amendment rights? Yes. Can a stationery story sell such a card legally? Yes.

But is it good for us as Americans--be we Jews, Muslims, or Christians; of African, Asian, or Latin descent; straight or gay--to acquiesce to dangerous stereotypes of "the other," whoever he or she may be, bandied about as though hateful words and images have no consequences? NO!

I am in regular discourse with Muslim Americans of faith, who share the same values as I do when it comes to the kind of society in which we both wish not only to live, but to live and let live. Proud Americans of all faiths must be vigilant if we are to preserve a society ruled by law, where people are judged, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "not by the color of their skin [or whether or not they wear a kippah or for that matter, a hijab] but by the content of their character."

The anti-Muslim card is a gratuitous, opportunistic, and disgusting display of fear mongering. For Jews it offends our ethical values and insults our collective memory. We know, better than many, how slippery the slope can be from hate speech to violence.

The purveyors of hateful message targeting a specific group may have the right to peddle their brand of pornography in public. Those who recognize it for what it is have the responsibility to raise our voices in protest. That is the best way I know to seek peace and pursue it.

My e-reader is a constant companion during commutes, airplane rides, and even lying on the sofa or in bed. Lightweight, fitting easily to hand, and with a screen that glows in the dark after the spouse says "lights out," the little thing is a window to anywhere my mind wants to go.

The device weighs the same no matter how many books I squeeze onto it; best of all I can read them all with equal ease by enlarging the screen font as big as I want.

That counts most for me as a visually impaired person.

For me seeing anything in detail literally is a headache. I was born with a rare neurological problem, for which there's no fix. Practically no public signage is legible to me. I never was able to play team sports. The teenage right of passage of getting a driving license? No way (though I was required to attend the non-driving part of driver's ed).

Throughout my growing up no one ever helped. The schools I attended "mainstreamed" me-meaning I was completely on my own; no public school I ever attended provided any useful assistance. I never was able to read a blackboard. My parents tried workarounds, but nothing worked.

"Wear glasses." "Sit in the front row." "Stand next to the blackboard." These were the standard responses from teachers and administrators. They didn't understand that glasses and sitting in the front row helped not at all, or that standing next to the blackboard was a non-starter for a self-conscious adolescent.

"You're not blind, are you?" the teachers would demand in a tone that to me sounded sarcastic. "How many fingers am I holding up?" my classmates would taunt, and then switch the number before I could answer.

A gym teacher in elementary school would pretend to pitch the ball to me, and I would swing the bat, just hoping I would hit it. That was amusing …. I wondered to myself, isn't there an option to standing on this baseball diamond? Apparently there wasn't. I didn't know how to advocate for myself, and my parents-despite their best efforts-had little luck either.

Everyone has some irritating problem for which he or she must learn to compensate. And learn to compensate I did! Having honed my skills at auditory learning, I excelled at language and became a writer and editor. Not being able to drive I became an avid cyclist (though I hate it when I fail to see branches or some potholes until it's too late). My wonderful spouse has done far more than her fair share of chauffeuring. Computer technology has been a godsend. With ageing my vision has improved a little.

I experience annoyances, but thankfully in no way am I disabled. But I think of the people whose problems are beyond irritating: they're blind, or deaf. Or both. They're missing limbs, or have organs that fail them. They have cognitive or mental deficits. They and their loved ones experience difficulties-emotional, financial, practical-that seriously impact their quality of life.

I got to thinking about all this as February is Jewish Disability Awareness Month, a time when our Federation and federation system recognize and increase awareness of the needs, strengths, opportunities and challenges of people with disabilities in our Jewish community and throughout North America.

I think back to my lonely struggles at school, and then feel grateful for the support of JUF, my employer. How important it is that our entire community is working to address the issue of disabilities.

Of course people with disabilities can't confine their challenges to an arbitrary chronological boundary; they face them all the time. Thankfully, thanks to your support through JUF, our Jewish community is there to help whenever the need arises. If you or a loved one needs advice about how to deal with a disability issue, Jewish Child & Family Services is there to help. Email ask@jcfs.org, visit www.jcfs.org, or call the one-stop, toll-free access number, 855-ASK-JCFS (855-275-5237).

It's a little like having an e-reader; hopefully it helps put a big solution in your hands.

Jewish Child & Family Services is a partner in serving our community, supported by the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

Thanks to mobile technology, I tuned into Galei Tzahal, Israel's freewheeling and wildly popular Army Radio, while riding the Metra from Central St. Evanston, near where I live, to downtown Chicago, where I work. Streaming Internet radio put me right in the heart of a little slice of Israel on a hot election day, even as I rode the rails through deep-freeze Chicago.

What I love about Galei Tsahal is what I love about Israel and her vocal citizens: No topic seems taboo, at least as far as this rusty and rudimentary Hebrew speaker can determine. People talk about everything and aren't afraid to express their feelings, just as we do here. But Israel is a tiny country with a tiny population, so there's something even more intimate about the Israeli discourse-and Galei Tsahal brings that intimacy right into my smartphone headphones. 

For 20 minutes this morning, I listened to a talk show host speak to callers who were declining to participate in the election, trying to convince them to vote for someone, anyone, and for any reason, because the basis of democracy is participation. (Some 66.6 percent of Israelis cast their ballots.)

The callers I heard listed litanies of why they wouldn't vote for any of the "fools" and "liars" running. Rifka, a 30-year old from Holon, spoke of her intention to leave Israel, of her despair of ever experiencing positive change.

"Are you a reader? Are you interested in literature?" the host asked.

"Of course," she answered.

"Well, I have Yoram Kaniuk on the line," he answered. "Maybe he can give you a reason for voting."

Kaniuk, now in his 80s, is one of Israel's most celebrated writers. He began to speak to Rifka of her obligation.

"You haven't left the country yet," he began. "As long as you're here, you have to realize that you have a voice, and it must be heard so that we don't create a vacuum for other voices-voices that might be extremist. You are still part of the crisis of this country."

Next the host enlisted Etgar Keret, the iconic literary voice of Israel's younger generation, to counter the complaints of Erez, a caller who seemed to be opting out of voting due to laziness more than deep disaffection (though perhaps I missed his point due to my limited Hebrew). Keret goaded the caller, with the help of the host, to just "get yourself to the polls and vote for anyone. Is there a candidate whose smile you like better? Vote for them!"

Despite Rifka's dose of disillusionment, the listening experience warmed me up on this frigid morning, the day after our own, American celebration of democracy. Of all our allies Israel remains one-and the only one in the Middle East-where the democratic discourse crackles, on Army Radio no less, and where great writers talk intimately with alienated citizens, if only to try to get them back on democracy's jostling rails.  

In loving memory of my father, Jerome Cohen, z"l, who died Nov. 28, 2012, 15 Kislev, 5773.

Life is fleeting and old age is relative. When you're fortunate enough to bury a parent as you, yourself, are middle aged, perspective shifts. You see the sweep of a long life as a series of moments and phases that tumble together and ultimately collapse on themselves.

Edifices of family roles and relationships—the structures that provide the shelter of your youth, and the confines from which you try to break free—prove fragile. Putting them back together again is impossible, though, with the death of a parent, you might try—all you have to work with are memories, narratives, and lore.

What remains of Jerry's 87-year life are memories, narratives, and much lore. Jerry the young Jewish boy who had to fight his way through a gauntlet of toughs to get to Hebrew school.

Jerry the high school track and field athlete.

Jerry the dashing naval officer, escorting convoys across the North Atlantic in winter, in wartime.

Jerry, the cool and rational psycho-physiologist whose glamorous academic life took us back and forth between Chicago, England and Europe.

Jerry the scrappy anti-Vietnam war protester, who took his children to demonstrate in Grant Park in the summer of '68.

Jerry the car guy, who in the sixties and seventies owned a Renault, two Citroens, an Austin, and two Fiats.

Jerry the lover, who was married for 57 years to Florence, my brilliant and passionate writer of a mother; and who, following her death 10 years ago, went head over heels for the amazing Ahlyce. “Aaron, the passion....,” he confided in me about his love for her. Not bad for a man then pushing 80.

Dad is now gone but his stories live on, and our heads and our hearts are full of them and of him. He was calm and unflappable, equinimious and ultimately deeply grateful for the gift of a long and interesting life. Florence and Jerome Cohen were fascinating people, who tapped life to the last drop, and served to their children, the full measure of its nectars and its bitters. They celebrated the intellect and the senses, cared not a whit for the mundane, and left as their legacy a rich and intricate residue.

Dad and I grew closer following my mother's death, and I have no doubt he appreciated my care and my friendship. I admired his courage and his self-containment. I was so lucky to be with him and Ahlyce when he died. I loved this man who loved the sea and who has sailed on his final voyage. I loved the frail old man and the immortal young naval officer, now tumbled together, in this passage, into one.

This past week the Turkish community staged another impressive Turkish Festival in Daley Plaza. My dream for an Israel Fest is to emulate what our Middle East neighbors and erstwhile (and hopefully still again) friends do to promote their nation and culture.

Meanwhile, I encountered truly touching hospitality at the Turkish Fest, thanks to the Turkish Consul General, a man who is at once a smart and savvy representative of his country, and a warm and congenial human being. He is working to keep Turkish Jewish relations on the right footing here in our front yard, and most certainly in Daley Plaza!

As a person long-fascinated with everything Turkish, it doesn't surprise me.

My first encounter with anything Turkish was in Cyprus, in 1961. I was eight years old, and my family was on its way to Israel by boat, having set out from Brindisi, in Italy. My father was an academic, and the family was spending part of the year in Bristol, England. We were headed to Israel to meet members of my mother's family who had moved there in the early 1920s. {My father's grandparents also went to Israel around that time; they were elderly, and had gone to fulfill a religious desire to be buried on the Mount of Olives, which they were.}

We had landed in Nicosia where my father hired a driver to show us the island. At some point we stopped for lunch, where I heard men speaking a language that captivated me instantly. Our driver was speaking to his buddies, and I was transfixed. How magical, how delightful, how playful that people could make such sounds—melodious, lilting, like birds, like water in a babbling stream.

At the time I didn't know it was Turkish. I had heard foreign languages. My grandparents spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and Russian. My mother knew French. My brother had studied Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, as would I.

This language in the restaurant was unlike any of those, but it stuck.

In high school I began listening to Middle Eastern music. I bought records when I could (Rose Records on Wabash was the only place, before compact cassette tapes, let alone CDs, were common. The internet was still a far-off dream.)

Over an old shortwave radio I listened to Sawt al'Kahira, the Voice of Cairo, and to Radio Teheran in the days of the Shah, when Persian classical music filled the state radio's air.

Eventually I discovered Turkiye'nin Sesi, The Voice of Turkey, and I was hooked. Whenever propagation conditions allowed I worked the receiver, struggling to squeeze a turku (folk song), agit (lament), or uzun hava (blues), from the din of static.

I rediscovered that gem of a language. More important, I met what would become, and still remains, a major love of my life, the baglama, the Turkish long-neck mandolin, or saz.

'Turkish' and 'saz' became part of my identity. I was the Jewish American guy—in fact the only one I knew—who had these obsessions. I set two primary goals: to learn to speak Turkish and to play the saz.

After studying the language and trying to teach myself saz, in 1979 I went on a hair-brained, open-ended trip to Istanbul. I flew a few weeks after seeing Midnight Express, and at a height of political instability and violence in Turkey. None of that registered until my feet hit the ground.

No matter. I made a beeline to Semsi Yastiman Saz Evi, the music store of a famous bard. I was enchanted and terrified, at loose ends and centered; unsure yet confident. The situation there be dammed. I immersed myself in Turkish and in saz, and encountered a welcome, a hospitality, an embrace, that blew my mind. My Turkish friends knew I was Jewish; to them I was no enemy, but rather a brother in faith.

Soon after I moved to Israel for a year to work on a magazine devoted to Israeli-Palestinian peace. In 1979, that, too, was unusual. But I had learned something powerful about brotherhood, even in the midst of fraught times in Istanbul, from Muslim musicians who had welcomed me into their lives and homes so openly.

I returned to Chicago from Israel in 1980, and buckled down to a career and marriage. I played Turkish and Armenian music in a small band, but after my kids were born I devoted myself to raising them and to work. Turkey became a private affair; I retreated into turkuler and other Middle Eastern music. By this time CDs were available, and the music was far more accessible than in my shortwave days.

Returning to Turkey in 2009 reignited my connection.

Fast-forward to today, and I am gratified whenever I can share with members of the Turkish community, in my poor Turkish, vestiges of that passion. Strong embers are stirred again even at noon-time, in Daley Plaza, at Turkish Fest.

I know I am not the only Jew in love with Turkish language and culture, for who Turkey holds a special place. There are others like me, perhaps the Consul General knows many.

To him and his colleagues, I say: "Biz de bir kopru. We too are a bridge." Just as Turkey itself is a bridge between East and West, we are a bridge between Turkey and Israel, between you and the Jewish people. We will work to maintain that bridge until the day when Israel and Turkey become friends again, and when the Turkish and Jewish people will embrace without suspicion or fear. Until then, we ask only that you meet us halfway.

 
Liel Dokarker, center, with her father, Yonah Dokarker and stepmother, Pam Bondy.

Sunlight filtered through Temple Sholom's stained glass windows when Liel Dokarker gave her d'var Torah, chanted her Torah portion, became a proud bat mitzvah, and received the blessing of her family, friends and wider community. It was a gorgeous morning, just a few days after the summer solstice. But the radiance filling the room was beyond the visible spectrum; its brilliance emanated from a source other than the sun, and would have been present even had the room been dark. How else to describe a sacred experience?

All lifecycle celebrations, by definition, are sacred. The connection between family members, friends and community; the filial strands of faith and tradition; the assignation of meaning to ritual—all of these elements are present, even if a child's voice is scratchy, or she lacks conceptual insight and the rhetorical power to convey it.

Liel is the daughter of my colleague and friend, Yonah, but her story is more complex than that. In fact the sacred force so present in the sanctuary in Liel's presence—the force of shleimut in Hebrew, or wholeness—was in direct proportion to the complexity of her story. For what is wholeness, or completeness, unless understood in relationship to incompleteness?

Liel's story is a powerful lesson in transformation from brokenness to wholeness, from incompleteness to completeness.

The road from Ahmedabad, India, where Yonah was born, to Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, where Liel became a bat mitzvah, is a winding road. For Yonah that road wound through Kiryat Gat, Israel, the town where Yonah grew up and worked as a teacher after his family made aliyah from India when he was a child. And it wound through Lebanon, where, as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, Yonah learned harsh lessons of life. Yonah's road also wound through Bergen, Norway, a place where, as a young traveler, he learned the life lesson that resulted in the birth of Liel to a Norwegian woman.

Yonah carried Liel in his heart and always worked to make her a part of his life despite the obstacles of distance and other challenges. A social worker involved with Liel in Norway felt that Yonah would be able to provide a more stable environment to raise the child, and Yonah dreamed of the day when he could bring Liel to live with him.

And then along came Pam Bondy from Chicago. Pam and Yonah met while she was participating on a JUF mission to Kiryat Gat, in JUF's Partnership Together region. The match was beshert; (destined); Yonah moved to Chicago; the couple married. Now Liel not only was Yonah's concern, but also Pam's.

Fast forward to 2009. After an arduous legal process, a Norwegian court—with the cooperation of a loving foster family who had cared for Liel—granted custody to Yonah and Pam, and they brought Liel to Chicago to begin her life anew. Begin it anew she did. She adapted to a new, stable home, in a new country, with a new language. She made friends, distinguished herself in school. She determined, on her own, to become a Jew. She gathered the strands of her identity—Norwegian, Indian, Israeli.

That alone might be her story were it not for one other factor—Liel is exceptional. She is not the child with the scratchy voice. She is not a child lacking conceptual insight or the rhetorical power to convey it. She is the opposite. She expressed herself so eloquently in (unaccented!) English about how she had come to America, to her new family, and to Judaism, like a fish out of water, and had become a guppy in a vast ocean of love, connection, and identity. Few eyes were dry when she finished her speech. And as for her chanting? It was as though an angel had descended to the bimah, and through Liel's voice had lifted the tall ceiling of Temple Sholom to the heavens.

So many people turn skeptical when they hear the word sacred; after all, what does it mean? I grapple with that question often, and often find myself skeptical and confused. At Liel's bat mitzvah, there was no doubt; all who gathered were witness to something sacred. I struggle to put that feeling into words, to describe what was so deep, so revealed, and yet so hidden-a fleeting glimpse at a force way beyond us, deep within us, which often eludes us, and, as on that day, drives us to tears of joy. May all who experience brokenness find shleimut; may all who doubt the sacred someday feel it. May Liel, may all of Israel's children, find peace.