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Music Cues: Leonard Zakim
December 4, 1999
Leonard Zakim died this week, just before Hannukah. Hannukah has become regarded, in our times, as some kind of Jewish Christmas: a holiday for overindulgence and gift-giving. But Hannukah is the Festival of Lights. It commemorates the Jews who guarded the beleaguered Second Temple in Jerusalem, whose faith kept one night's small supply of oil burning for eight. Hannukah symbolizes survival against adversity -- the triumph of light.
In his 46 years, Lenny Zakim brought much light into this world. He was head of the New England office of the Anti-Defamation League, but that's like trying to put a title on a windstorm. For twenty years at the Anti-Defamtion League, Mr. Zakim was an inexhaustable schmoozer.
"I believe that relationships count for more than institutions," he said. "It's because you know someone that you begin to care about their issues." Mr. Zakim prowled Boston, the city he loved, in search of conversation. He went into Baptist churches and Jamaica Plain's barrios -- places, perhaps, which had never seen a bearded Jew outside of the confines of a television screen -- and listened, joked, and preached against prejudice. He organized annual black-Jewish seder dinners to revive and repair relations between two peoples who shared, he said, the historic burden of having been slaves. He brought Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law to Auschwitz in 1985, where they embraced and pledged to never permitt bigotry to divide people of different faiths.
Six years ago, Leonard Zakim started a project called Team Harmony. It brings many of Boston's best-known athletes into the schools of Massachusetts to speak with youngsters personally about what they know from their own experience -- that people of different backgrounds can be different and disagree, yet respect one another and work together to a great common
purpose.
"You've got to give young people the support to work against peer pressure," he said just two weeks ago at Boston's New Garden basketball and hockey arena. "These kids have to know that if they stop a racial slur or a bigoted joke, when they stand up for the rights of anyone, they are being as heroic as any great athlete."
Part of what made Mr. Zakim's incessant urgings so easy to accept was the joy of his companionship. He was a joke-teller and a mimic who loved to mock himself, sing-along, and stay up late into the night. Once, at some event, he handed me his card. "Call me if I can ever help." he said, "Or call me just to schmooze."
This past summer, when Lenny Zakim was in his final stages of cancer, one of his schmoozing friends, Bruce Springsteen, played Boston and dedicated a song to his friend who burned with light for as long as he could.
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