guide to the jewplexed


 

A Small World Ride for a Country with Big Differences


In the years since songwriter Robert Sherman, who passed away recently at age 86, wrote, along with his brother Richard, the song for Disneyland's Fantasyland ride, "It's a Small World," the distance between individuals has grown.

Robert Sherman, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, as half of the Sherman Brothers songwriting team wrote the scores for many Disney films, including the Academy Award winning "Mary Poppins." When in the early 1960's  he wrote the "Small World" theme, which accentuates our common humanity, it was a time when the world was experiencing its first communication satellites, jet air travel, and more menacingly, intercontinental ballistic missiles. Indeed, we began humming this infectious tune, at a time when the world was growing smaller and closer, headline by headline.

Having grown up in Disneyland's hometown, Anaheim, California in the 1960's, I remember going on the ride, soon after it had been transplanted from the 1964 New York World's Fair. For those who have never been, you sit in a small flat-bottomed boat and a stream of water floats you by colorful diorama's of animatronic dolls, representing, continent by continent, the peoples of the world.

As you ride, the song plays (over and over until you're slap-happy), and even changes language along with the locale.

"It's a world of laughter, small world
A world of tears.
It's a world of hopes,
And a world of fears.
There's so much that we share,
That it's time we're aware,
It's a small world after all."

Expecting to see myself somehow in the ride, as my family took the ride for the first time, I remember asking my mother "Where is Israel?" (Only in 2009 was an Israeli haredi couple under a chupah added.)
But as I became a teen during the Vietnam War, I began to resist the Sherman's happy theme. Yeah, it was a small world, I thought, small enough to napalm a country as if its people were dolls.

In the 70's, as a college student when I again took the ride, the treacly music grew suddenly acidic with the thought of a world turned uncomfortably small by wildlife extinctions, water pollution, and smog. Our national denial of the environmental smallness of the world was going to impoverish our lives in so many ways.

Now generations later, I think of the song and suspect that during all those years, while the world was shrinking, the distance between us expanded. Once a melting pot, we are now an ethnic food court, and our national voice, which once at least seemed to speak for the majority on education, health care, taxation and foreign policy, now only seems to shout out for special interests. Once readers of USA Today, we now tune to FOX News or MSNBC.

During this period, American Jewish communal life also seems to have suffered from our unwillingness to recognize and respect our religious and political differences.

Has the small world turned small-minded?

Listening to the acrid tenor of our recent political discourse, I am wondering if the Disney ride now needs an updated companion attraction called, "It's a Small Nation."

Instead of seeing the world's peoples in historic or native dress, perhaps Americans need now to be reminded that we are not just a shouting mashup of blue and red states. Enough with the thrill rides. Maybe what we need now is a sweet, simple and not cynical.

Riding this prospective new "Small Nation," as I float downstream, I see representations of Americans who are occupying town squares, and others, town halls (There's a Mormon choir, and a gay man's chorus singing in the background), cooks from every region of the country flipping pancakes, cooking barbecue, or having a beer. There's a fantasy dance with elephant and donkey couples, and there's also a display of Sunday in America, with church, football and napping on the couch. There's a yoga matt filled with every ethnicity, and even a display for Shabbat with men and women reading from the same Torah.

As Robert Sherman and his brother Richard reminded us:

"There is just one moon,
And one golden sun.
And a smile means,
Friendship to every one.
Though the mountains divide,
And the oceans are wide,
It's a small world after all."

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."