True Ancestor

Embracing Our Inner Reverend Wright

It's that time of year again -- that time when nothing that's irritating shows signs of going away.

It's the endless expiration of the Midwestern winter (even though tomorrow is Opening Day), the sado-voyeuristic pleasure found by the financial press in the mess of our markets, the slow-motion, anarchic implosion of the Iraq War, and the logorrhea of the presidential campaign.

This latter is defined lately by the hand- and neck-wringing over the issue of race. The issue of religion is tucked neatly within that of race, and like a pair of Russian nesting dolls, perhaps they're concealing smaller but no less remarkable issues further down.

Those who would castigate Obama for his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright are somehow overlooking the fact that the pulpit has been used in every religion, throughout that religion's history, to set boundaries between one community and another. What Reverend Wright said from his pulpit  -- Cliff Notes:  'May God wreak vengeance on [fill in the blank]: oppressors, unbelievers, evil, those different from us' -- has been said from lecterns in churches, synagogues, mosques -- probably in every religious edifice except Baha'i temples and Quaker meeting halls -- since the first pulpit was hewn or hammered together.

Belonging and belief create communities in part by reinforcing boundaries, and one of the ways boundaries are reinforced is through reminding parishioners of collective wounds and grievances -- making sure they never forget the wrongs done to them, and never lose the resolve to redress those wrongs. A preacher may urge transcendence or he may urge revenge, but either way, Scripture has his back, because transcendence and vengeance are simply two sides of the same currency. And written on that currency are the words:

We can be better than we are, and we are damn sure better than Them.

I wonder: if a Catholic were running for president today, would we be scrutinizing the utterances and policy pronouncements of Pope Benedict? Would the Easter baptism of a prominent Muslim, or Benedict's utterances on the evil and inhumanity of Islam, reflect on a candidate the way Wright's blandishments are dogging Obama?

What about the fact that Benedict has moved to restore the Latin or Tridentine Mass, with its prayers for the conversion of Jews?

There's a distinct and well-documented relationship between proselytizing and demonizing the Other (as Professor Larry Hoffman said to our Wexner group, "To know who you are is to know who you're not"). There are more than two ways to strengthen a faith community, but among the most prominent are winning converts and erecting barriers between your community and those that cannot or will not be a part of it. In this way, Jeremiah Wright and Pope Benedict aren't so different.

Open any book of Jewish prayer and ritual and you'll see (with a little help) that Judaism remembers its grievances and sees vengeance as a critical component of redemption. Jews affirm belief through memory, and the Siddur, or prayer book, includes prayers that leverage the victimization of Jews as a way to strengthen conviction and community. The Siddur was not created at the stroke of a pen, but evolved over time and is revealed in archaeological layers. In 200 CE, for example, when post-Temple Jewish liturgy was still in its early stages, Jewish prayer was highly extemporaneous and relied heavily on oral transmission, not unlike today's pulpit-pounding preachers.

The first blessing of the central Amidah prayer, for example, is, according to Professor Hoffman, a polemic against Gnosticism written in a primarily Gnostic environment. (The blessing praises God as "creator of all," whereas Gnosticism holds there is a Creator of Light and a Creator of Darkness that are at war with each other.) The twelfth blessing urges the punishment of heretics; the thirteenth prays for reward of the righteous. All the middle blessings of the Amidah, according to Reuven Kimelman of Brandeis, can be seen as a counter-messianic manifesto, written at a time when several different strains of Judaism (among them the messianic and their less wild-eyed brethren) were equally prevalent and defining themselves in opposition to each other.

The Passover Haggadah, the most widely read Jewish text of all, and which we're about to open at the Seder table, contains this passage, just after we open the door for the Prophet Elijah, whose coming is said to herald the Messianic Age:

Pour out your wrath upon the heathen who will not acknowledge Thee, and upon the kingdoms who invoke not Thy name, for they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling.

What seems, taken on its own, to be a blood-thirsty call for the slaying of non-believers is actually a 12th-century cry for justice -- a response to the wholesale destruction of European Jewish communities during the Crusades of 1096.

(Of course, plenty of Jewish text also supports healing and reconciliation: the Wexner Foundation just sent all its participants a book that builds on Judaism's rational and pacific strains to build bridges between denominations, faiths and worlds. It's You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Building Faith Without Fanaticism, by Brad Hirschfield. It jumps to the top of my reading list.)

It's not just religious communities that define themselves by calling upon God to aid their cause by punishing others. How about this ringing phrase from Benjamin Franklin:

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

Reverend Wright, in condemning the tyranny of racism, is hewing close to this sentiment. His cry to God is, or should be, immediately and intimately familiar to any person, of any faith, who prays.

And so, as this election season drags on, we should remember that all our faiths and all our communities cry out for justice, and that those cries, born of centuries of pain and privation, are sometimes harsh.

--T.A.

My rabbi's defense of Obama

The rabbi at my synagogue is a large man with a thick beard and a barrel chest and a somewhat misanthropic mien. This last quality is a strange one to find in a pulpit rabbi, but not impossible to understand, given the harangues to which he's frequently subjected on any sermon he gives, any offhand remark he makes, or any slight, real or imagined, of which he's guilty.

So last week, he took the unusual step of sending an e-mail telling the congregation he would, on the coming Sabbath, be giving a sermon about Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright and the issue of race in the current elections. He did this for several reasons:

1. So that people who knew they'd be offended would stay away
2. So that people who knew they'd be stimulated would come
3. Because it was Spring Break, there was no bar mitzvah, and he wanted to make sure people came to shul anyway.

This was cleverly calibrated to swell attendance, and it succeeded, because most Jews I know love to hear a sermon that offends them. So everyone came: people who hope to hear him slam Obama, people who hoped to hear him defend Obama, and people who like watching train wrecks.

The rabbi's remarks (which are not up on the synagogue's Web site yet, but I'll post a link here as soon as they're available) surprised nearly everyone in attendance. Ours is a Conservative, conservative shul: traditional in its observance, generally right of center in its political orientation. The rabbi, who feels that political endorsements have no place in religion (partly because they can endanger the institution's tax-exempt status), nonethless will sometimes delight the conservatives in attendance with withering remarks about institutionalized anti-Semitism in academia, about the double-standard applied to Israel and the Palestinians, or about positions espoused by other Jewish denominations.

This time, however -- after carefully, repeatedly saying that he was not endorsing Obama or anyone else in the Presidential race -- he said that Obama's speech on race was the best political speech of our lifetime, and that Obama was exactly right not only in what he said but in refusing to entirely end his relationship with his pastor.

The analogy he used was a striking one. What would you say, our rabbi asked us, to an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor who was unmoving in his conviction that all Germans were evil? What would you say to this person, who refused to interact with anyone German, no matter whether they were present at, involved in or even alive during World War II? The rabbi answered his own question by saying that you would, of course, repudiate the views of that person without cutting them off entirely.

He acknowledged that the analogy wasn't perfect, because the Holocaust survivor is among the generation that suffered first-hand the most violent of persecutions, while Jeremiah Wright's generation, a century removed from slavery, is not. Even so, the rabbi went on, slavery is the American Holocaust. It is the morally repugnant and inexcusable blot on America that continues to define the African American struggle for equality and full participation in American life and society. While you can't excuse Reverend Wright's remarks, you have an obligation to understand them in the context. The context of the Holocaust survivor's reaction to interaction with Germans, it seems to me, struck the right note.

The rabbi ended by saying that right-leaning elements in the Jewish community were doing the entire community a disservice by perpetuating slander and innuendo about Obama that is at best irrelevant and at worst clearly untrue. He dismissed the Jewish right's notions that Obama would be hostile to Israel, noting that every president has been a friend of Israel, because every president recognizes the facts of the region and the place of Israel in America's relationships and interests. (Even Jimmy Carter, the rabbi said, was a friend of Israel while in office, and only afterwards "sold his soul to the Devil.") The worst thing we can do, he said, is alienate a viable presidential candidate before the election -- and any of the three remaining candidates would, he said, clearly be a friend of Israel.

I was relieved by his remarks, and secretly delighted by the sight of the ruffled and offended partisans in our congregation. I don't know yet who I'll vote for, but I'm glad that my rabbi did his part to calm the hysteria and distortion that threatens to define the relationship of American Jewry toward the first viable African American presidential candidate.

--T.A.

Studying Like a Kid -- Treated Like a Chump

Well, the good news about being admitted to the U. of Chicago Divinity School has been tarnished somewhat by the fact (confirmed by the Dean) that I am not being offered any financial aid. For four years. This puts a damper on the whole idea of returning to school. More than a damper, actually; more like the Kiss of Death.

There are some scholarships and fellowships out there, but the overwhelming majority of them are for people right out of school and/or under age 40. I'm neither. The University claims that reduced funding and the way money is allocated mean that I'll have to tough it out or find funding elsewhere.

It's a good thing I'm older, I guess. I'm not taking this personally. I'm taking it as a challenge. I figure that universities are businesses, too, and this is a business decision. If a 48-year-old guy wants to go to school, make him pay his own way (at least at first). Universities make investments in graduates who go onto careers in academia. Any career I have in teaching and writing will be a decade and a half shorter than the average.

On the other hand: kinda diminishes the thrill of victory, you know? Throws the whole enterprise into question. With two kids in college next year, and a third about 6 years out, I need every penny I can lay my hands on.

Any suggestions? Any hidden pots of gold? Any scholarships for old people?

Or should I just bag it...?

--T.A.

Shoaib Choudhury In Danger

This just in from Dr. Richard Benkin, Shoaib Choudhury's stateside advocate:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  MARCH 18, 2008
CONTACT:  DR. RICHARD L. BENKIN, drrbenkin@comcast.net; 847-922-6426; http://www.InterfaithStrength.com

ANTI-ISLAMIST MUSLIM JOURNALIST TAKEN BY PARA-MILITARY GOONS

DHAKA (MARCH 18, 2008) At approximately 7:00pm, Dhaka time, members of Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) stormed the office of anti-jihadist Muslim journalist, SALAH UDDIN SHOAIB CHOUDHURY.  A para-military arm of the government, RAB is notorious for its crackdowns on dissidents and wholesale violations of human rights.  They ordered all employees out of the newspaper and interrogated Shoaib , seizing his phones and not allowing him any communication with friends, family, or legal counsel.  After more than an hour and a half, RAB claimed to find a controlled substance in Shoaib's desk--an allegation that Shoaib's friends and associates claim is impossible.  His brother Sohail claims that any evidence had to be planted.  Shoaib was blindfolded and taken a RAB interrogation center in Dhaka where his captors verbally abused him for hours, repeatedly calling him a "Zionist spy and agent of the Jews."  The verbal assault, which included numerous threats, continued for another three hours until someone RAB described as a "high government official" telephoned and ordered them to release him.  When Shoaib asked about the contrived drug charge, he was told that they would not pursue it.

That order followed some immediate and direct action from several quarters.  Upon receiving the news about his brother, Sohail contacted Dr. Richard Benkin of Chicago.  After the two discussed strategy, Sohail called the US Embassy, and the matter was reported to the charge d'affairs.  Benkin contacted the office of Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL) who has been Shoaib's long time champion in Congress.  Kirk's staff, led by Andria Hoffman, set up a command center in his office, while Benkin contacted several other supportive members of Congress and Shoaib's international human rights attorney Irwin Cotler.  Benkin then called the Bangladeshi Embassy and demanded that Shoaib be released unharmed immediately or there would be consequences.  Soon thereafter, the embassy received telephone calls from several Congressional offices including Kirk's and those of Rep.Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA), Rep. Steven Rothman (D-NJ), and others.

Though Shoaib was released unharmed, the action represents a serious escalation of the government's harassment of the courageous journalist who now counts supporters on every continent save Antarctica.  People in RAB custody have been known to "disappear," and RAB does not carry out actions such as today's without serious consequences.  The raid could have been in response to several failed attmepts on the part of the government and radical Islamists to re-incarcerate Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury.  And in my years of work on this case, I have learned that every government action is a probe of our resolve to continue the fight against injustice--a resolve several government officials have told me we do not have.  And so we MUST respond.

PLEASE, EVERYONE EITHER CALL OR EMAIL THE BANGLADESHI EMBASSY.  IN THE US, 202-244-0183 and bdootwash@bangladoot.org.  FLOOD THEM WITH PROTESTS; ASK EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO DO THE SAME UNTIL THE NOISE PROTESTING THEIR EGREGIOUS ACTIONS IS HEARD ALL THE WAY TO DHAKA!

Make a clear and very loud protest.  Let them know that the Bangladeshi government will be held responsible if anything happens to Shoaib.  People already are calling for a boycott of all Bangladeshi products after today; and the government should know that.  Let them know that they can't get away with this, that our resolve for Shoaib has not diminished one bit.  Let them know that there will be hell to pay.

If you live outside the United States and need information about your country's Bangladesh Embassy, contact me.

ALSO, IF IN THE UNITED STATES, CONTACT YOUR SENATOR OR MEMBER OF CONGRESS AND URGE HIM OR HER TO TAKE ACTION.   THEY CAN CO-ORDINATE WITH MARK KIRK'S OFFICE (202-225-4835).  If you live elsewhere, contact your representative in the legislature and urge him or her to take actoin.  Bangladesh is still trying to convince us that it is a "moderate Muslim country," but it is clearly a patron of terror.  The ONLY reason they maintain this admittedly baseless case against Shoaib--and they have told me this--is to placate radical Islamists.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT ME AT [drrbenkin@comcast.net] OR AT 847-922-6426.
Dr. Richard L. Benkin
http://www.InterfaithStrength.com

Studying Like a Kid, Part II

Some months ago, I wrote about the desire to go back to school to really study the workings and the history of religion. I have an active spiritual life, but it's defined by my intellectual curiosity. I felt I'd gotten to a point in my life, perhaps even economically (jury's still out), where I could pursue the study of religion single-mindedly, without dragging my family across the country, or the world, to do it.

So, naively, I applied to two PhD programs in the Chicago area. One -- Northwestern, the one I'd courted more assiduously and set my hopes on -- rejected me. Yesterday, I found out that the other, the University of Chicago Divinity School -- somewhat more prestigious, about twice as far from home as Northwestern, and the institution that set the backdrop for my childhood -- accepted me.

I have a terrible time making major decisions. I have no problem exploring possibilities, but when a possibility reaches some kind of fruition, I seize up. I text-message Oldest Daughter with the news. She texted back: "Daddy: This is not the kind news you text message! Call me when you get this." When I called her, she told me that if I did not go to the U of C I would regret it for the rest of my life.

Annie and Jacques called. Jacques left a message on my cell phone and said, "Congratulations on becoming Chief Rabbi," and then he and Annie dissolved in laughter.

My brother's wife, an Episcopal priest, went to Yale Divinity School. From her I began to learn that some divinity schools are more "church-y" than others, and that the U of C is not a "church-y" divinity school. So that's good.

It's also -- and I know this not just from my past in its shadow, and its reputation, but from asking around -- that the University of Chicago is a fiercely intellectual place. And I'm just not sure I have that kind of energy anymore (if I ever did).

Fortunately, I don't have to decide right now. I can feel good about getting accepted, and go teach my Jewish meditation class, and watch Scrubs with Gabe, be grateful for the opportunity -- and for the chance to let it sink in a little.

--T.A.

A Banned Book That Brings a Vanished World to Life

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

More often than not, banning books only tends to bring them more readership and their authors more attention and acclaim.

And you can only hope that's the case with Making of a Godol, a book by the son of a world-renowned rabbi and Torah scholar -- a rich and unusually historically faithful look at the vanished world of the Lithuanian yeshiva. The book has been banned by certain influential ultra-Orthodox and haredi sects, and even burned. The reason, apparently, is that a less-than-idyllic and idealized view of the Torah world threatens the Orthodox view of "the Sage as Saint." These were real people, living real lives and struggling with real issues -- issues like the burgeoning Communist movement, the universal appeal of and truths to be found and pondered in Russian literature, and the need to go out and make a living.

The ultra-Orthodox have banned or brow-beaten books before, and not just in the distant past. In 2002, an Orthodox and a Reform rabbi wrote One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them, a book exploring the divide between the Orthodox and Reform movements. The Orthodox rabbi, Yosef Reinman, was prohibited from accompanying his Reform co-author, Ammiel Hirsch, on a book tour.

More recently, Nosson Slifkin, also known as "the Zoo Rabbi" for his knowledge of and love for the natural world, had his books banned because his knowledge was at odds with ultra-Orthodox positions on the age of the planet and evolution.

Rabbi Akiva Tatz, my co-author on Letters to a Buddhist Jew, carefully vetted his idea with his ultra-Orthodox mentors before working with me to turn our correspondence into a book. The Orthodox community was eager to hear why Jews were drawn to Buddhism, but not always eager to hear from me personally. I was pointedly not invited to an Orthodox outreach conference shortly after the book was published. More recently, though, I was invited to speak, with Rabbi Tatz, at the Jewish Learning Exchange in London, where, I'm told, I was the first non-Orthodox Jew ever invited to speak (and certainly the last).

Some in attendance at JLE wanted to know why my exposure to Rabbi Tatz had not "converted" me to Orthodoxy. Perhaps if I had been younger when I had met Rabbi Tatz -- whom I love as a human being and admire as a scholar and teacher -- I might have been influenced in that direction.  But I live in a Jewish community that lives in the larger world, and I am too old and, I suppose, too contrary to be converted, to anything, by anyone. I also knew of the bans on Slifkin's books and the denunciation of Reinman's collaboration with Hirsch. I could never join or willingly remain within a denomination that censures and censors people in that way.

On the other hand, some wanted to know why I hadn't stood up to Rabbi Tatz and told him what a lot of crap Orthodoxy is for insisting on the hegemony of its own worldview and excommunicating those who don't strictly adhere to it.

The main reason I didn't was that our book wasn't banned (it's gone into its third hardback and second paperback printings. The hardback is sold exclusively through Jewish outlets). The Orthodox community understood that Jews are leaving in droves, and they knew that Judaism has its own meditative traditions and disciplines. Someone in attendance at our talk JLE asked Rabbi Tatz why Jewish meditation wasn't widely taught, and why JLE didn't teach it. Rabbi Tatz said he didn't know why, and he didn't see why JLE couldn't teach it. It was important -- quietly revolutionary -- that Rabbi Tatz said this before his colleagues and several hundred other people. Orthodoxy knows that there are legitimate Jewish meditative practices that can be studied, and learned, and taught. And that night, they admitted as much.

Banning and burning books is too reminiscent of the worst oppressive traditions for any Jewish denomination to sanction or practice it. Obscuring our view of Torah sages as real human beings is a disservice to Jews everywhere. Of course, banning book-banning might be fighting fire with fire. But Jews everywhere should be gravely concerned for our future whenever a Jewish movement bans a book.

And we should express our concern by running out and buying that book.

--T.A.

Mysticism and Trauma

In another eye-opening presentation, Rabbi/Professor Lawrence Hoffman told our Wexner group Tuesday evening about the cultural backdrop that created fertile conditions for Jewish mysticism. As comfy as we are after a couple of centuries (at the most) in America, imagine how fully Spanish the Jews of Spain must have fellt after 600 years there. Until the period that began with the anti-Jewish upheavals of 1381 and culminated in the expulsion in 1492, the Jews of Spain understood themselves to be Spanish and Jewish both.

They couldn't cross the Pyrenees -- they'd already been expelled from France in the 14th century, and France hadn't changed its mind. Some headed to Portugal and got booted from there a few years later. So many got on boats, set sail in the Mediterranean, and wound up in Italy, or in a rocky outpost of the Ottoman Empire, a town called Safed (pronounced s'-FAHT) in the northern part of Eretz Israel.

But they didn't feel they'd come home, according to Professor Hoffman; they felt deeply exiled. They were influenced, too, by the Gnostic thought prevalent at the time. Their world was in need of repair, the forces of Light and Darkness were in full battle array; the mystics saw brokenness as the inherent state of the world, and indeed the Universe.

They turned to Jewish text, and there they saw not only the battle between Light and Darkness laid out but the answers hidden in plain sight. Jewish text showed that God was exiled from Godself, and needed partnership with humanity to repair Godhead. Jewish Mysticism flourished in Safed under the influence of exiled Spanish Jews who felt that human beings needed to repair not just themselves, not just their world, but needed to partner with God to heal the very cosmos. The real meaning of tikkun olam (healing the world), the original meaning, was not social justice work: it was work on the self and on society, yes, but it was work on the Universe. We could work to heal God.

Advances in religious thought -- or political thought, or indeed thought of any kind -- often emerge from enormous trauma and dislocation. Think Declaration of Independence. Think Magna Carta. Think Torah. We dismiss the stories as dogmatic folk-tales meant to control our mind, and in fact bureaucracies can spring up and exploit them in that way. In fact, however, they are deep searches for meaning in the midst of upheaval. They have merit because they have meaning on deeper levels -- levels on which we exist but of which we're afraid.

The trauma of exile meant that the Kabbalists went in search of healing their own world, which mirrored the fractured vessel of all of existence. They understood their trauma to be a symptom of a greater dislocation.

They were onto something.

--T.A.

"God" is just another word for an earth-shattering encounter

Like this one. Shot out of the sky during a World War II photo-reconnaissance mission, Fred Hargesheimer goes through a brutal test of survival and will, and winds up not only surviving but transforming his own life and the lives of the natives on the island onto which he parachuted.

There are probably other, less fortunate souls who, like this army lieutenant, got shot out of their planes but didn't land, or didn't land alive, or landed alive but mortally wounded, or who landed in one piece but got found by head-hunters or crocodiles or enemy combatants.

But the natives of New Britain didn't make Lt. Hargesheimer a prisoner or a meal. They went out of their way to nurse him back to full health (hiding him all the while, at their own considerable peril, from the occupying Japanese forces). And in the process, he became an exalted member of their society. Someone who literally landed in their midst. Someone whose life they saved, and who in turn built them schools and libraries, who helped them plant a plot of oil palm trees that turned into a plantation and created scores of jobs for the impoverished island residents.

He dropped into their midst and he totally changed them, because they totally changed him. He survived a brush with death; he prayed, and he practiced his survival skills, and in time he met a people in need of inspiration, just as they found a man in need of literal, corporeal salvation.

A rabbi -- I wish I could remember who it was -- once told me that "We invented God because God needs us." I didn't really know what he meant until I read this story.

Or, as Rabbi David Cooper said, God is a verb.

The question isn't whether God is this kind of confluence of energy and circumstance, or whether God causes these things. And anyway, there's no difference between those two possibilities.

Which means that God is just another word for a sea change -- the impetus, the something or someone, that comes along at the right time, in just the right way, and changes everything.

Forever.

--T.A.

Liar, Liar, Robe on Fire

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

Anyone who considers themselves spiritually awake and active will occasionally or eventually ask themselves:

Am I a big faker? Is this all a steaming pile of bull?

There's no question that my first professional incarnation (stage actor) employs the same part of my brain that engages in spiritual searching, and meditation and prayer: Presto-change-o. Out of nothing, something. A moment transformed. A relationship where before there was just -- air.

But sometimes I wonder: Is there more to it than that? Is my brain just built to engage in contemplation and to ponder mystery? Or am I a big phony?

Right now, I'm teaching a Jewish meditation class at a local synagogue. We meet once a week for five weeks, for an hour and a half. So I've got seven and a half hours to try to impart to some very lovely and curious people what meditation is, what Jewish meditation is, and the various ways in which to approach and practice it, and then finally to help them build a practice that will sustain them, and vice versa.

I'm learning what I'm teaching, as I teach it to them. The negative navigator in my head is whispering to me that it's all crap. At the end of the class, I usually seem to have overcome this voice: the students seem very moved and opened by what we've done, and they go home and they work on it.

Each morning, as I sit in meditation, I wonder: are they sitting, too? And are they doing silent battle with a voice in their heads, saying:

Oh, c'mon. Go get a cup of coffee. Read the paper, fer cryin' out loud. It'd be time better spent.

And if they are hearing that voice -- are they able to do that bull-fighter's move, and let that voice go charging by without goring them?

Or are they wondering: "Man. This teacher of ours is a big fat liar" ...?

--T.A.

I've heard of 'helicopter parenting,' but this is ridiculous.

A doting father in the affluent North Shore suburbs of my home town was concerned Saturday that his son was going to be late for a tennis session, a couple of days before the son's tryout for the high-school tennis team. Traffic was a-snarl, due to bad weather and compulsive shoppers.

So, like any good father, this gentleman hopped in his Piper Clipper and flew his kid to practice, landing his plane (which was outfitted with skis) on a snowy golf course across the street from the tennis center, and mere feet from a major roadway.

The police stopped the pair before they could cross the street to the tennis center. The father will be charged with -- something. Maybe tresspassing, unless the police can figure out a way to get a law against Criminally Indulgent Parenting on the books.

Helicopter parenting ascends to new heights. Or something.

Read all about it.

--T.A.