I just got back from a couple of weeks in Germany where I’ve been teaching for the last 20 years. This experience always leaves me feeling like I’ve learned more than I’ve taught.

Germany is my ancestral homeland; until their escape from the Holocaust, both sides of my family lived there for hundreds of years. I am the firstborn son of survivors, and my feelings of distrust, anger, and frank hatred of all things German was instilled from an early age.

It was only after I came to work in Indian country, where I was judged badly for being a white man that, I understood I was doing the same thing to Germans. I wanted to come to peace with my hostility, because it became clear to me I couldn’t be a healer walking around with that much resentment and anger.

I went to Germany for the first time when I was in my forties (which gives you some idea how long you can enslave yourself with your old judgments), and slowly learned how to write a new ending to that old story. Every time I return, I let go more of my reflexive hostilities.

This year I participated in a sweat lodge ceremony that took place one evening under three feet of freshly fallen snow. Surrounded by this fairytale setting, we held hands around the fire, and in the glow of shared community, more of the stain of my preconceptions was washed away in the ethereal, moonlit whiteness.

On my return, I took my grandkids to see the movie “The Boy in Striped Pajamas,” a devastating Holocaust story originally written as a chapter book for adolescents. It’s about two eight-year-old boys, one a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, and the other, the son of its Nazi commandant. It’s a poignantly sad story about children who struggle to understand the prejudices and propaganda that separates them. And, it’s a magical fairytale about two innocents who, at the end, face the banality of evil holding each other’s hands.

On Thanksgiving, we held hands with friends and relatives and said thank you for our togetherness. Thanksgiving is the time to remember that, in a world of explosive intolerance, our only hope is to hold each others hands as relatives.

Mi Takuye Oyacin,

For All My Relations,

Barack Obama, the son of an African man from Kenya and an American woman from Kansas, is the president-elect of the United States. Even though I admired his politics, intelligence, and articulateness in sharing his message of change and hope, deep down I didn’t believe a black man could become president of this country.

But I was wrong. A black man is the president-elect of the United States of America. A significant majority of Americans did not see race as the deciding factor; voters were drawn to the man.

Maybe it’s a generational thing? For those of us who were alive and active in the 60s, we remember not only the overt bigotry of the segregated south, but also subtle exclusionary practices that permeated the entire nation. Fifty years ago at almost this exact time, I sat with a friend at a segregated lunch counter in the Greyhound bus terminal in Richmond, Virginia. When we were finally dropped at the city limits, the police told us that if we ever came back, we wouldn’t be leaving.

When Obama delivered his acceptance speech, I wept. The tears began when he said, “This has been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” They came again when he said that he knew his grandmother was watching, and when he acknowledged “this victory is not mine it is ours … all Americans, Black, White, Asian, Native American, disabled and not, gay and straight, old and young… we are still a government of the people by the people and for the people and we will not perish from the earth.”

Before I went to sleep I reread Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech delivered 45 years ago in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It began, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

MLK went on to say that, in spite of progress in civil rights, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation “the Negro still is not free…. Still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Martin said that the “new militancy must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”

When I put it down, I remembered that day I got out of Richmond alive, and now I see in my lifetime an American president who, in addition to everything else he is and has accomplished, also happens to be a black man. Those were my last tears, and then I asked a blessing for Barack (whose name in Hebrew means “blessing”)… stay healthy, and lead us on a righteous path to be the nation our forefathers promised us, a land of liberty, with justice for all.

God bless you, Barack Obama, and bless this country as a beacon of hope and freedom. I say this for all my relations, mi takuye oyacin.

This is the time of the year, when my tribe declares a moratorium on everything ordinary. Beginning on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ending 10 days later on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At this time your task is to take a break from doing things the way you’ve always done them, and think about how you might like to be doing some things differently, Is there something you need to give up, stop doing ( or start doing), in order to live the life you really want. This is a chance to do some heavy editing of your life’s story; to look at yourself, with your competencies as well as your flaws and foibles, and get another crack at living a meaningful life; which is not simply a successful life, but a righteousness and forgiveness, so that you will be inscribed in the Book of Life before the sun sets on the Day of Atonement.

Every culture has similar ceremonial rituals; a time to cleanse oneself, to be exposed before the Great Spirit; to present yourself intimately without being afraid or running away. The best way I know how to be open and prepare myself for the journey within is to participate in a Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremony. I’ve incorporated this ritual into my tribal spiritual life, and every year on the Sabbath of Repentance, ‘Shabbat Shuva’, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I get together with relatives to prepare ourselves to be inscribed. We are not all Jews, but each of us comes prepared to get out of our heads and open our hearts, look at ourselves undefensively, and make some choices about how we’d like to be remembered. This time has always been pretty somber for me.

This year, I asked my adolescent grandsons to help me prepare the Lodge. The three of us would set up the lodge, build the fire, make the ceremonial water wand, and prepare the altar and instruments. When they arrived they brought along a CD and asked if I had a CD player that I could bring outside. They wanted to listen to tunes while they worked. I told them I’d hoped they might want to hear some different music. I had in mind telling them some stories about what we were doing out there. Of course a debate ensued, they presented the possibility that both could be done; and I said bopping to rap music would be distracting to the spirit of the work.

We started working outside as we continued to talk when some girls walked by that they knew. This led into a discussion about coupled relationships, and contemporary sexuality that got pretty intense, and very funny. Which then led to them asking me to teach them some limericks to In China They Eat It With Chili, which their parents said I had considerable familiarity. It started off pretty tame but they wanted the raunchiest lyrics and soon we were draping the sweat lodge in gales of hysterical laughter.

I flashed on its appropriateness at such a sacred time and holy place, but it didn’t last long; it seems to me that this is the music of life. Here with my grandsons, I watch my life story unfold sweetly,

To all of my relations, in this season of renewal I wish for you intimate laughter in all your sacred places and may you be inscribed in the Book of Life.