Bonding with the Punk Star

Well, Shabbat at Woodstock was interesting, and lazy. Last night, I helped cook for the day, which was a rush to the finish. We had to make chicken soup, a stew, coffee, and rice, everything to tide us over, as cooking is forbidden on Shabbat. We barely finished by sundown.

The, I accompanied the rabbi to the police station, where he tried to get help with his synagogue rental situation. Essentially, the police said that while the landlady had no right to lock him out when he hadn’t broken the rental agreement, there was nothing they could do unless the problem escalated.

Dinner was calm and uneventful. Even though dozens of people had come to party with the rabbi the night before, only one woman and her two children came to dinner for Shabbat service.

But after dinner, the real conversation started. Sitting around the kitchen table, the rabbi asked me about my faith, Quakerism, for the first time since I had been there. It didn’t go so well.

As I explained, he crossed his arms, and didn’t even seem as he was listening. In fact, his first utterance wasn’t even a question, but a statement. He said he was familiar with Quakerism, and that we all follow William Penn. (That’s not true. While William Penn was a Quaker, he isn’t a basis for the faith.)

And, as I continued to explain, his questions stopped coming. He wasn’t being attentive. He had fallen asleep. I thought it was rude, but Mad Dog, another guest at the house thought it was funny. “You left him speechless! I’ve never seen anyone able to do that!” he exclaimed.

And so began my night with Mad Dog. A punk rocker, he is best known for being Tommy Murphy, part of Murphy’s Law, a punk band which began in the 1980s. Here he is with his bandmates when he was 19 (he’s on the left):

And here he is now, with me on the porch:

Talking with Mad Dog was great. He regaled me with stories of traveling around the world, touring with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, and the general ruckus he created on the punk scene.

But we also talked about faith. Mad Dog has an intriguing story. His mother died when he was six months old, and his father wasn’t on the scene. Both were Jewish, and Mad Dog was adopted by a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, who raised him Jewish until he was 14.

Then, something changed. For reasons Mad Dog still doesn’t know, his father decided that he’d had enough of the Judaism, and plopped him in a Catholic school, where he was told everything he believed was wrong.

Mad Dog remained removed from his faith throughout his career, until a tragedy three years ago. Running drunk through the rain, he tripped on a pallet negligently left by a construction site. He broke his neck, was in a coma for weeks, and was never expected to walk again. But after much rehabilitation, he is almost as good as new, but with many paralyzed fingers and numbness and instability in his legs.

As he awaits a settlement in his lawsuit, he has come to the Chabad house in Woodstock to learn more about his faith and to reclaim the meaning and stability in his life. He no longer does any drugs, and learns Torah every day. Nevertheless, the dogmatic manner of the rabbi drives him crazy.

The rabbi, although he’s liberal with the alcohol and the rock ‘n roll, isn’t that into other aspects of the rock lifestyle of many of his friends, and let them know it often. For instance, he hates tattoos, as traditionally, many Jewish scholars have seen it as idolatrous, damaging, and possibly prohibitive of being raised from the dead at the end of days.

But Mad Dog takes a more nuanced view. A long-time tattoo artist, his business put him through college when he left the band. He’s seen it as a way of expressing love, individuality, and even religiosity. In a way, he’s seen tattooing turn lives around.

This is just one example of the exceptions he sees in the rabbi’s strict approach.

I have a tattoo on my back, that I’m rather proud of. A merging of a hand of Fatima (known to Jews as a hamsa), an elephant, and a crescent moon, I modeled it after the first sura of the Qur’an that I learned in college in my Near Eastern Studies major, number 105 – The Elephant. It comes from a time when the people in Arabia did not use numbers to mark calendar years, but rather events that happened. In the year Muhammad was born, an army invaded on elephants from Ethiopia, and was defeated:

“In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful: Have you noted what your Lord did to the people of the elephant? Did He not cause their schemes to backfire? He sent upon them swarms of birds that showered them with claystones, making them fall like wheat after the harvest.”

I have always intended that tattoo as a symbol of the beginning of my spiritual journey. As I feel I progress, I intend to surround it with birds, representing getting closer to God.

And Mad Dog promised to give me my next tattoo, which is fantastic.

The next day was lazy and uneventful. We slept until noon, learned a bit of Torah, and slept some more. The rabbi made judgmental, self-righteous fun of Catholicism and Mormonism, but that was nothing new. (Although I don’t know how much more of it I can handle.)