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Noah and I lay down roots at Roasting Plant for a long chat about hazmat safety, haiku structure, playing music for Sixth & I’s Simchat Torah, jazz scaffolding, and making a tangible, positive impact on the lives of people around you.
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Noah: I’m from Lexington, Massachusetts. I moved here after graduating college – got out of school with no exact plan lined up, applied to jobs over the summer, and landed a job at the Department of Transportation. I’m a transit geek, so this is hopefully a foot in the door to a long term career. I’ve been working there a little over three years, and it’s been a fascinating time; I work in hazmat safety.
Samuel: What is that like? What’s the day-to-day in hazmat safety?
Noah: It’s a lot of working with engineers and chemists, or working with colleagues on regulations, or working with everyday people and businesses who will send a letter or call in and say: I don’t understand how this regulation works. Can you help me? Or: Can I do this? It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain into how everything happens, from batteries to gasoline to fertilizer to wet hay on farms. You name it.
Samuel: How do you see the world around you differently because of this work?
Noah: Whenever I see a carbon dioxide or oxygen tank drop-off at a store or restaurant, whenever I see propane delivery in a neighborhood, whenever I see a gas truck on the highway and the placards on the back of their truck…it’s like I’m actually seeing what’s happening. I’m understanding [more of] what’s making the world go ‘round behind the scenes. We have all these systems in place so that people are safe and don’t have to worry as much. I like to think that I worry so that everyone else doesn’t have to. It’s our job, as a safety agency, to do the heavy lifting and make sure those systems are in place. If everything is prepared and transported safely, then you don’t have to worry about what’s in that truck next to you on the highway because you know that they’re following the regulations.
Samuel: You mentioned being a “transit geek.” What does that mean to you?
Noah: I have a passion for helping people. When I get on a train or bus, I’m thinking about how there are so many people and hours of work that went into making this a seamless process that I don’t even have to think about. I tap my phone, I go through a gate, I hop on a train, and 20 minutes later I’m on the other side of the city. I don’t have to worry about the conditions of the brakes on the train, or what the schedule looks like, or whether the tunnel is clear.
There’s something about that kind of work where you can make a tangible impact to positively improve people’s lives in a way that, if we’re doing our job well, people don’t have to think about us. It’ll just be taken care of, and their lives will be more convenient and easier and better in the process.
Samuel: Switching gears. Switching tracks? What is your Jewish community like?
Noah: I was straight out of college when I first moved here. I’d been very involved in Jewish life at Williams College, in western Massachusetts. The community was so tight because…where else are we going to go? [Editor’s note: Williams College is beautiful, but also sequestered way up in the mountains] We did home-cooked Shabbat dinners every Friday, and would have a different club come in every week to pick a menu and help us cook. The rugby team made chili every time. But it was such a wonderful, tight-knit community, and then I graduated and…you know, you move on, and what happens now? Where do I find community?
When I first got to DC, I went to Sixth & I for Shabbat and was struck by how musical the services were. I didn’t go back for a while because that was unfamiliar to me, and what’s unfamiliar isn’t usually super comfortable. It took a minute before I finally went back and started going on a regular basis, and now I’ve met wonderful friends there.
Over the course of a year-and-a-half of going regularly to services and celebrations, I’ve been able to weave my music and musical experience in with Sixth & I – both to build community and also to finally find a creative outlet for a kind of music I haven’t gotten to play since I was in high school, which has been a lot of fun.
Samuel: I know you play the saxophone and clarinet. How has that translated into community-building for you?
Noah: I was invited up to play clarinet with the musicians on the bimah for Sixth & I’s Simchat Torah celebration, and I had the time of my life. It was so much fun to be there with such high energy and spirit, but also to be playing music that feels culturally relevant to my Jewish identity – wailing klezmer clarinet up in the high register, you know? There’s nothing like it. It was a dream come true.
Samuel: What else is feeling alive Jewishly for you?
Noah: The High Holidays being relatively recent is a really interesting point in the year. Growing up, you’d start a school year and miss your first class of something because you have Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, and it always almost felt like a nuisance or inconvenience to my school life. I think as I’ve gotten older, and felt deeply connected to my Jewish identity, the High Holidays have become a lot more meaningful. They’re a landmark moment of the year to refocus, recenter, take stock of everything and think about what I want the next year to look like.
Samuel: I know you write haikus. Do you find any overlap between that writing practice and your Jewish practice? Why is haiku the form you’ve focused on?
Noah: I love writing haikus because there’s a sort of bite-sized nature of a poem where there can be so much depth to it, to take the time to process and think about the meaning behind it. But also, if you want to just spit out a stream-of-consciousness haiku, that’s a lot quicker than a sonnet. Recently, I’ve been writing about what comes to mind in terms of mindfulness. If I’m feeling a strong emotion, I’ll see what comes to mind in terms of a poem, and often that takes the form of a haiku. I think a lot of that comes from being a musician, from the way my brain works with music. There’s something about the formula and rhythm of the haiku that’s just very satisfying for me.
Samuel: This is interesting to me, because your music passion is in this very jazz-y space, and haikus have such specific form…and at first glance, those two feel oppositional. How do those two interests talk to each other?
Noah: There’s actually a lot of overlap in my mind. Jazz is such a vast art form and broad umbrella for so many styles and sub-styles of jazz. A lot of the music that I’ve played does take that simple form approach; the 12 bar blues is one of the first things you’ll learn if you’re doing jazz education. That’s the chord and measure progression, the form, of that song, but extrapolated to a million other songs, over those same chords, over that same form. I think of jazz chords as often being very formulaic – it gives you a structure to work within. In the same way, a haiku is going to be 5-7-5…but what do you want to do with that? There’s infinite freedom within this extremely formulaic system. You’re taking a scaffold, and saying: What do you want to build with this? And you can build anything.
Samuel: Two quick ones to close. You’re hosting Shabbat dinner and can invite any three people. Who are you bringing?
Noah: First, Charles Mingus. He was a brilliant jazz musician, composer, and activist. One of his famous songs “Fables of Faubus” was fighting against segregation of schools, and he also passionately cared about education. I think he’s a figure who would be really interesting to speak to in modern times.
Then, someone who is in the zeitgeist right now as a nerd, Brennan Lee Mulligan. People have been saying that Dungeons & Dragons is in its Renaissance, and he has rightly pointed out that this is not a Renaissance, it is the Golden Age. And Brennan just seems like a very funny, interesting person who would be fun to talk to. And then, I’d bring my brother.
Samuel: Last one. Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Noah: Our community grows stronger.
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