Slate on Slat
by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08
I first heard about restoration versus renewal in the dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama that I wrote about years ago. The Tibetan leader had asked for the “secret of spiritual survival in exile.” Rabbi Yitz Greenberg went back two thousand years to the time the Romans destroyed the Temple and enslaved and exiled the Jews. He said the people were faced with the choice: restoration or renewal. The zealots, the fanatics of restoration, wanted to fight the Romans again and take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple just the way it was.
This was relevant to the Tibetans because they had their own restorationists. Having lost their monasteries in the old country, the old abbots were determined to rebuild them brick by brick and monk by monk in South India. Their instinct was conservative in every sense: to go back to the beginning, to train the monks in India as they’d been trained in Tibet, to essentially ignore the changes, the new situation, and the new environment. They figured if they rebuilt, eventually they could go back and rebuild the old ways. As if nothing had changed or could change.
The other option, the option the first rabbis took, was renewal. They accepted that they were in a new situation—that they couldn’t go back to the old Temple and priests, or to the old Jerusalem. They had to find a new way to operate in a new environment, without a country, without a homeland. They needed a portable religion, not a fixed temple. They needed to keep alive the hope of returning, but they also needed to create a new way of living in the meantime. That new way of living was strong enough and flexible enough to survive in almost every environment, from Poland to China, from the ancient world to the modern. And that was a good thing because “in the meantime” turned out to be almost two thousand years of human history.
When I heard the story told to the Dalai Lama, I identified with the renewalists. But when I faced my broken roof, I had a new feeling for the restorationists. The renewalists were visionaries and they were imaginative; they understood that the only way forward was forward, that trying to rebuild things exactly the same way would only lead to another catastrophe. The restorationists were just clinging to an instinct, but the gaping holes in my roof told me that sometimes an instinct is all you’ve got.
When everything gets destroyed, a restorationist has an instinct to rebuild everything exactly the way it was in the first place. That’s just what I wanted to do, on the scale of my house: I had a slate roof before, and I wanted one again.
It wasn’t practical. Practical was the nice architectural shingles that are applied in strips. Some of my neighbors had them up before the storm, and their roofs had done just fine. They were guaranteed to handle winds over a hundred miles per hour, so the next time—and everyone was thinking about next time—I wouldn’t have to worry about replacing slates.
The only problem with architectural shingles is that they require plywood sheathing underneath to be nailed to. Which means basically that moisture gets trapped underneath and, over time, it will rot. Whereas, theoretically, a slate on slat roof could last forever—or at least a hundred years—until the slates themselves wore out.
In Dharamsala I’d favored the renewalists, and looked down on the restorationists. How could they think that they could rebuild things exactly the way they were, or that it was even a good idea? But in New Orleans, I understood better the other side. It wasn’t theoretical: it was an instinct. I’ve lost everything, and now you want me to renew? Hell no, I want to go back to the way things were. That must have been the explanation as the slates piled up around my house, under my house, on my porch and in my shed. While I waited and waited for someone who knew the old ways, and knew how to nail them back up.
I see that New Orleans also has its renewalists and its restorationists. And that, at least in the beginning, the restorationists were dominant. They put up the signs in the Ninth Ward that said, No Bulldozers. They fought and are still fighting to keep Charity Hospital open. They fought to keep the housing projects open.
Sometimes they were saying things like: New Orleans has lost its soul and we have to get it back. The concern took various forms, but at its extreme, the idea was that, unless we rebuilt New Orleans exactly the way it was, we would lose the music and the food, and the second-line dancing, and the Mardi Gras Indians, and many other delicate and fragile expressions of the unique soul of New Orleans.
For me, I focused on piling up my slates. The slates were my protest against time, against change. If I could just get someone to put those slates back up, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad. That’s the thing about old material culture, it’s linked up to people. The slate doesn’t mean a thing without the man who knows how to climb up there and nail it.
If your roof is made of slate on slat, it means you need someone who knows how to walk delicately without breaking his back, someone with pride in an old trade who’s willing to pass it on. The problem in New Orleans is the roofs outlasted the people. The slates stayed up there, and the craftsmen—mostly the old Creole craftsmen who knew how to plaster a wall, and nail slate, and cut the delicate gingerbread, and passed that knowledge on, mostly father to son—they died out.
In the Ninth Ward, that instinctive protest, that innate howl, came at a time when the place was completely in ruins, when one house was shoved pathetically into another and you could see people’s stuff splayed out all over the broken foundations of their homes. This was a little crazy, because it was pretty obvious from the look of the place that bulldozers would have been a blessing. At a certain level of destruction, you are going to have to bulldoze first just to get started. But the fear was that some developer was going to pave the place over and fill it with fancy apartments and we’d end up with upper-class folks buying gourmet cheese at the Fats Domino shopping center, or looking down at the river from the “Ain’t that a shame” office complex, and whatever the Ninth Ward used to be would be no more.
And what was also crazy was the assumption that, because we so valued the culture that came out of places like the Ninth and other damaged parts of the city, that we should place people back into situations where they might not be safe. To me, it felt like some folks were more concerned about the survival of the culture than the survival of the people. But it turned out the people themselves had more sense. When I see block after block of property in New Orleans East or the Ninth Ward or Gentilly that hasn’t been rebuilt yet, I see a lot of common sense. I see people who understand that it really isn’t safe to build there yet, who don’t trust what the Army Corps says, and aren’t going to trust it for a long time.
