Who was Alan Lew?
Glancing at the timeline on the previous page, you can see that Alan Lew’s life entailed numerous, and at times disparate, events. Some of the experiences on the previous page were mundane, other’s clearly life-changing. And, among them there were ups and downs; moments of joy and periods of self-doubt. But merely listing a few details about Alan Lew’s life does not tell us who he was, at best, a timeline can be a sort of chronicle – it lets us know what happened when. Most importantly, a chronicle lacks cohesion, significance, and meaning. The timeline on the previous page does not let us know how 65 years worth of life experiences and choices led to Alan Lew being Alan Lew.
People, historian Willaim Cronon suggests, are naturally storytellers. When we think about and talk about our individual pasts, we unconsciously create narratives that give our lives meaning. Alan Lew was no different; he was a fond of describing himself as a Zen Rabbi. In the books he wrote, the sermons he gave, and the interviews he participated in, he routinely cited his embrace of Buddhism in the early 1970s and return to Judaism at the end of that decade as two pivotal moments which deeply impacted how he saw the world and understood his role in it.
Thinking like an Historian
It is now your turn to consider how to use the tools of history to make sense of Alan Lew’s life. Doing so demands that we make some choices. And, few decisions that the historian makes when crafting their narrative is as important as the choice about what information to include and what to leave out. Take a moment to think through the life events on the previous page and consider which ones you think are most important. If you had to choose ten events to tell his story, which ones would it be? What if you were limited to only five? Are there pivotal moments which seem to be critical to Alan Lew's path as a Zen Rabbi? As an activist? Or, a father? Your choices will limit and reveal how you will describe Alan Lew. Depending on what events you select, you may portray him as any number of things: father, son, Rabbi, divorcee, husband, bus driver, Buddhist, or spiritual seeker. Perhaps you would even describe him as all of the above, or, maybe you elect to forgo all of these options all together. Regardless of what you choose, by weaving multiple events together into a cohesive narrative, you are doing what an historian does. You are telling a story.
Storytelling is, to an extent, the job of the historian. When people write history, however, we do not simply compile and repeat facts. As Cronon explains, practitioners of the discipline “configure the events of the past into causal sequences – stories – that order and simplify those events to give them new meanings.”[1] That is not to say that historians can tell whatever story they want about the past. Those who practice the discipline must be loyal to the sources they uncover. Rather, it is in the organizing and analyzing sources – the act of making meaning from the materials an historian uncovers in an archive or oral history interview, for example, that transforms a litany of events into an interpretive narrative of what happened in the past.
If the act of producing history is, in large part, a process of selecting, organizing, and connecting past events, then what does that mean for our understanding of Alan Lew?
[1] William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” in Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1, 1992): 1349.
