Good God: Faith for the Rest of UsA website about spirituality & culture.
Good God: Faith for the Rest of Us
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Good God: Faith for the Rest of Us provides a spiritual connection for the disaffected, disenfranchised and disillusioned through a reconsideration of timeless tenets for skeptics of “institutional religion.”
“With humility and hope, I offer a suggested course for a challenging moment in our history… one rooted in the traditions of monotheism but aware of the need to liberate its wisdom from the shackles of human frailty and fear.” - Daniel A. Weiner
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David Brooks offers a great post-pumpkin pie piece in this morning’s Times. See my similar take from a spiritual perspective regarding the Grateful Dead in a previous post. While Brooks is definitely showing his age, the larger issue of multiple sources for multi-faceted education is the emes (truth). One wonders if today’s bands and their overly cyber-stimulated fans possess the same fertile sources and/or same ability to discern unconventional lessons. What do you think?
Blessed are you, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who makes us holy through commandments, and commands us to kindle the Sabbath lights. Friday evening Sabbath Prayer for Jews
As with many faith traditions, for Jews, light is a symbol of more than just physical illumination and warmth. It celebrates and sanctifies intellectual enlightenment as a means of achieving moral purpose. The Ner Tamid(Eternal Light), the universal synagogue fixture directly above the ark containing the Torah, possesses the subtlety of a spiritual sledgehammer. If the Torah enshrined beneath this ubiquitous lamp is God’s chosen manner of revelation, then the inextricable link between the cerebral and the sacred is plain.
My rumination on varying forms of enlightenment was sparked by a recent essay on the cultural impact of Amazon’s Kindle. Anthony Grafton’s piece, an analysis and book review, covered the expected tension between the tactile pleasures of the tome v.s. the convenience and accessibility of the cybercodex. But beyond ease of portability and the compulsive urgency of first adoption, the larger issue addressed concerns the probability and viability of the Kindle and its kin as surrogates for hardcopy. Will pulp, gloss and the bricks and mortar required to produce and house tangible knowledge go the way of vinyl, tape and disk–a rarefied, arcane and luxuriant mode for bibliophiles and neo-Luddites?
Certainly dispute and discomfort met the transition from tablet to parchment, from manuscript to press. There will always be Theodorics of York condemning Gutenbergs and Bombergs, heralding the perils of machine replacing man. But despite the beauty, craftsmanship and uniqueness of the ornately illuminated, only the uncharacteristically literate and economically lucky perused books regularly, with fewer actually owning works costing a serf’s seasonal wage. The democratization of knowledge through mass production and the power it conveyed was an unprecedented dynamo in the growth of culture and civilization.
But beyond modes and forms, the kindled dawn upon us is more evolution than revolution in substance and content. The most enduring narratives and traditions passed through the millennia were religious. The integrity of the sacred message, and the concomitant consensus of tradition and authority such secure passage ensured, derived from a remarkable ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The course of Jewish history, from tribal nomadism to national monarchy, from periods of autonomy to abject oppression, found apt reflection in evolving Torah. Epics sung around the clan fire were forged through the centuries into rudimentary texts, truncated and shaped with interpretive, agenda-driven vigor by succeeding generations into the common canon we have today.
The means and the message inextricably fused well before such phenomenon were popularly observed and theorized by McLuhan. The portability of mass marketed texts did more than serve the needs of style. Their prevalence and permeation in Western culture amplified the effluence of faith, and the faith itself was marked by the medium. Gutenberg’s choice of text did more for the followers of the Jesus/Paul matrix than Constantine’s edict. And the ability to carry revelation in a rucksack, especially when escaping burning synagogues and villages, enabled the faith of Moses to transcend the long and painful absence of tangible shrines and established homeland.
It may be too triumphalist to declare the Kindle the leading edge of a new Enlightenment. And there are practical pitfalls plaguing the device that cast doubt on its longterm viability. But these will be remedied. The dominance of digital reading is simply a matter of time, beyond speculation and debate. But rather than fear and deride the inevitable, we should take inspiration from the countless who came before us, expanding horizons of knowledge and perspective that can only come from dramatic change. Let’s take comfort in the Chinese axiom that seems eminently semitic: Better to kindle light than curse the darkness.
Chris Rock’s has a new documentary film about the role of hair in African-American community, Good Hair. In an interview with Elvis Mitchell on his show The Treatment. Click here to listen to Chris Rock’s view of men’s hair.
What’s with the hair? I know I’ve been less focused on football over the years, reconnecting this season with past passion, but the “New Hirsute” seems a sacrifice of strategy to style. Take a look at Larry Johnson’s infamous tackle of Steeler safety Troy Polamalu. Any questions?
It’s also obvious why, of the 164 players (10% of the NFL roster) counted amongst the rapunzeled, maned and dreadlocked, most play defense, offering few opportunities for a follicular takedown. But despite the fusion of fashion and football borne of Broadway Joe’s centerfolds, this concession of practicality to primping seems to have crossed a hairline.
Polamalu’s helmeted flow is an understandable ethnic tribute to his Samoan heritage. And Titan’s safety Lamont Johnson’s dread-therapy to promote patience is similarly commendable. But the majority must be succumbing to something else, something beyond mere trend, to offer such an easy tackling target.
Expressions of faith in sports have grown precipitously, even amongst the already sanctified precincts of the midway. Football has often been employed as metaphoric inspiration and microcosm for many broader concerns, from muscular foreign policy to apocalyptic battles between the forces of light and darkness. There is an increase in post-play genuflecting in place of the more typical spins, flips and Jaggeresque cock-walking. And from the expanse of the Meadowlands to the modest chalked pastures of rural high schools, concern for injured players has almost universally provoked entire teams to take a prayerful knee .
With this in mind, I wonder if these hefty hippies are inspired by the biblical Samson. Certainly the myth that Samson’s power resided in his hair resonates with players looking for an edge that can’t be drug-tested. The pedigree of holy hair emerges from the biblical Nazirite, a person who takes on a temporary vow to abstain from wine, proximity to dead bodies and the clean cut Mad Men look. In the ancient Near East, the grown and shorn was potent offering to the deity. And whole armies would vow off barbering until achieving victory, a quirky practice akin to many bizarre compulsions of professional athletes.
I think it has something to do with untrimmed hair as a celebration of our natural state, a shout out to the divine or the transcendent that supersedes enslavement to fashion or social norms. Thus, a cornucopia of keratin testifies to a faith in God-given skills, strength and will that belies the commodification of sports as mere statistics, forecasts and endorsements. The hu-mane restores the human to the game.
Let’s hope the Deliliahs of the Commissioner’s office ignore calls to cut these locks of love, whether they are statements of fashion or testimony to faith. And if the rules prohibit a takedown by jersey or shoulderpad, the bushy, wavy and dread-locked should also be off limits. That, or the 164 players might look into an industrial strength conditioner.
His words were painfully prophetic. Though paraphrasing and telescoping his sentiments, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, whose murder was commemorated this week, often cited fundamentalism as the greatest enemy of peace and freedom. Not Islam as a faith or culture, and not any specific Arab nation. And this from the warrior general whose “Iron Fist” policy proved futile against the first Palestinian Intifada.
As if to prove Rabin’s point, Yigal Amir, a delusional Jewish settler fed a steady diet of fanatical rabbinic fatwas and bombastic comparisons of territorial withdrawal to Nazi population transfers, stopped Rabin’s progressive agenda by stopping his heartbeat with lead. The Mossad never thought to defend against a Jewish threat. Now they do.
As followers of this blog can increasingly attest, I seek meaning in serendipity. And thus, find it more than coincidental that the massacre at Fort Hood came within the same week that we remember Rabin. The post mortem (of many) analysis grows and morphs. The shooter, Maj. Hassan, an American born Palestinian, was an army psychiatrist overwhelmed by the pressures of his job (debriefing traumatized soldiers), plagued by fears of active deployment, intensely ambivalent about fighting other Muslims, and troubled by perceived anti-Muslim bias in the military.
This does not mitigate emerging evidence that he resonated with certain jihadist sentiments. But it does provide a wider context for his increasing psychosis, an illness exacerbated by all of the above. The critical concern demanding our careful vigilance: Out of fear and impulse, we not mirror the sickened fanaticism of Hassan–that we not allow our reaction to this tragic terrorism metastasize into hysteria over a domestic Muslim “fifth column” that can, with painful irony, bring about the kind of bifurcated, dualistic and hateful world sought by fundamentalists.
A criminal investigation is necessary, and perhaps even a congressional inquiry into treatment of Muslims in the military is in order. But let us not forget last century’s slippery slope of profiling that slid insidiously to Manzanar and McCarthy. Let us secure our freedoms without sacrificing our ideals.
Though extreme acts of negligence-cum-evil occur with blessed infrequency in our fairly advanced, fairly civilized society, they still shock even more than they sustain the ever-stoked urgency and doom ginned up by 24/7 news. The recent gang (describing both the number of perpetrators and their urban affiliation) rape of a 15 year-old girl outside a Richmond, California high school homecoming dance encompassed both familiar horrors and tragically contemporary twists.
The youthful rapists evoked expected disgust and shame, and the apathetic bystanders a growing anger with the banality of criminal passivity. The new, pernicious wrinkle to this increasingly familiar story was the abuse of technology to report on the more than 2 1/2 hour brutality to “friends” and to invite others in real time to watch, rape and comment. There seemed little inclination to face the immensity of the act or to call 911 rather than tweet a friend out of a lust for novelty that transcended basic morality.
After the initial shock and requisite investigation, the theorizing and punditry commenced. There were the Slouching Toward Gomorrah-social-pietists who prophesied yet another step toward a liberal cultural apocalypse. Some offered the attack as proof of emerging socio-anthropological theories, citing theKitty Genovese Effect, named for the unfortunate young woman attacked amongst scores of neighbors in New York in the 60’s, none of whom came to her aid for fear of “getting involved.”
Despite concerted efforts to root this in the degraded economies of inner cities and their impact on youthful despair, one possibility was scarcely mentioned for its implications: There are simply awful people, even amongst the young, who not only commit heinous, inhumane crimes but are willing to abet and support such incorrigible violence.
While many seek to draw on scientific and cultural resources to explain, put in perspective and perhaps remedy such behavior, there is a renowned narrative from Western tradition that speaks to both kinds of perpetrator, the direct actors and their supporting cast.
As is often the case with biblical interpretation, the integral lesson of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is lost in the muddled and obscuring Christian emphasis on discomfort with sexuality. A resort to the earlier, Jewish interpretation of this thoroughly Hebrew text recovers both its authors’ intent and more nuanced, relevant instruction.
Though the residents of Sodom sought to sexually abuse the visiting angels, a fate thwarted by Lot physically blocking the door to his home in which the guests were spending the night, the shocking outcry of Sodom reaching to the heavens and God’s notice was not sexual perversion (and certainly not its devastating misuse to demonize homosexuality). Jewishly, the sin of Sodom was lack of hospitality, an empathy and outreach to the other that transcends mere food and shelter. An awareness of the needs of the stranger, orphan, widow and poor–those with no stake or advocate in community–is a staple of Jewish morality rooted in both direct experience with slavery and covenantal commitment to God. But true menschlikeit–true attainment of the holy, human ideal of altruistic good–requires a remarkable willingness to support and protect the marginal against both the base impulse to minimize risk to the self and the social pressures to conform to the norms of the group, even at a cost to conscience and personal ethics.
The Sodomites not only tolerated, but accepted and codified abuse of the weak. And those who merely watched and condoned also possessed a guilt worthy of God’s wrath. Lot’s courage to stand for the stranger, to get involved even at risk to himself and at great sacrifice to his family, distinguished him as worthy of redemption and praise.
The mandate, the necessity, the obligation to act in the face of injustice and evil permeates the traditions of most faith communities and the civil sensibilities of our nation. It is too short a journey from myopic concern for one’s own pocket and status to criminal disinterest in another’s suffering, even before our very eyes! This is one of those rare and insidious cases in which slippery slopes can slide to true social decline.
Now that the president has declared the Swine Flu epidemic a national emergency, the hysteria of hype has let loose the dogs of lore. Not an indictment of Obama, who did what any responsible leader should do, but rather the 24/7 chum-seeking media shark seeking justification for its existence at a cost to our reason and safety. It’s more of the same blameworthy behavior of the previous week, a lust for notoriety that both inspired and exploited the balloon boy daddy. But this circus maximus of overexposure feeds rumor and misinformation that can gravely worsen the innate panic over illness with which civilization has constantly struggled.
I am a card carrying (laminated and bacteria resistant) germiphobe and an idealistic devotee of the helping professions, and so the internal struggle pitting my irrational fears against my altruistic aspirations is microcosmic of the battle of compassion v.s. self-preservation writ large upon our culture. And when the overoptimistic promise of sufficient vaccine meets the rationed reality of inadequate supply, the prospect of further descent into our more primal, insular allegiance to family and self threatens the fraying fabric of our social compact.
A recent Times op-ed piece on the Vote and Vax program, utilizing the polling system as template for vaccine distribution, offers some compelling and promising strategies. But perhaps a lesson from the Torah might offer solace if not solution, despite current skepticism of religion or the limited credibility of premodern views of disease. In the Book of Leviticus, the most tedious and ritualistic amongst the Torah’s narrative and casuistic tomes, the chapters dealing with communal response to leprosy, the panic-inducing plague of its time, provide some intriguing approaches to our current outbreak. Long the bane of Bnai Mitzvah students unable to find relevance in meticulous discussions of skin afflictions apart from their own struggle with acne, the portion became more instructive in recent decades as a series of highly publicized global infections captured our attention.
Though the worldview of the ancient Near East most often understood disease as divine punishment, and thus its prevention and treatment the purview of priests, the response of the early Israelites was distinct from that of surrounding cultures. While unqualified ostracism was the usual, draconian remedy, emerging Judaism sought to balance irrational fear and responsible public health concerns with essential compassion and the recognition of the spark of divinity residing within each person.
Though the leprous were banished outside the camp, their exclusion was not permanent. Judaism developed a system to constantly reevaluate the condition of the afflicted and, if healed, to reintegrate them into the community with full acceptance and status. Those whose symptoms never abated were most likely cast out forever, reflecting the Hobbesian standards of antiquity. But many of the healed were fully embraced back into the fold both physically and spiritually through a ritual of cleansing that assuaged the irrational and volatile fears of the community.
In this way, the Israelites were affected but not defined by disease. They retained the capacity to transcend bodily affliction and base impulse with the power of the spirit and its moral demands in the world. They met illness with ideals, fear with faith. The wisdom of the ages still possesses much to offer the immutable challenges of our limited but promising humanity.
Then YHWH replied to Job out of the tempest and said:
Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? Gird your loins like a man; I will ask and you will inform Me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations…Shall one who should be disciplined complain against Shaddai? He who arraigns God must respond.
While the Coen brothers went light on special effects, forgoing the ventriloquism-out-of-the-whirlwind at the conclusion of their film, their denouement, like the Book of Job itself, left the viewer with more questions than answers. And this frustrating but necessary response to the issue of theodicy is but one of many ethnic echoes the Brothers Coen embrace in this most avowedly Jewish of their films.
The very encompassing of the sublime and the suburban gives this foray into faith a comprehensive feel, as the most daunting and annoying struggles of the human condition compete for our consideration and entertainment. A Serious Man is a love letter to the 60’s midwestern suburbia that drove the Coens to non-comformity. And while it stops short of the Rothian and Malamudian ruminations on identity and assimilation, there are familiar tropes of culture clash and nebbishe neuroses.
Amongst the plaudits and pans cast against this work, some critics thought the encapsulation of the 60’s into references to pot and rock were too myopic. But the essence of Job itself is its narrow focus on individual faith and morality against the backdrop of Israel’s national covenant with God. Job is a very personal, and thus abundantly accessible text, and the Coens do justice to its scope and purpose.
A Serious Man saunters (and it does saunter) down this well trodden theological ground with fresh eyes and funky twists: Can the seemingly mathematic predictability of moral causation endure the inevitable chaos-seen-as-evil inherent in the world? Though the Coens demur any deep study of the biblical text as source material, their message parallels Job’s conclusion: The pursuit of faith in the face of chaos and evil is the only thing of which we can be certain.
But the movie is not for everyone. If you have a penchant for the quirky and the indie, and have continued the deep, often drug-induced conversations about meaning and morality beyond the earnest confines of the undergraduate dorm, you’ll find substance and solace. If not, check out the latest light comedy starring any configuration of Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Gerald Butler and Cameron Diaz to find the happy endings, or endings at all, that A Serious Man lacks.
In addition to an invented Yiddish folktale that commences the film, and which the Coens wryly contend has nothing to do with the rest of the story, the initial blackness of credits is pierced with a teaching by the seminal medieval rabbinic commentator Rashi. Though I’ve yet to locate the source text for this interpretation, it rings out with a potency that is both Zen-like and Hebrew-Scriptural in its terseness. Apparently food and the absence of Christmas join mystical ambiguity as links binding Asians and Jews:
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
A tall order for the anxious, compulsive descendents of pogroms, ghettoes and Madoff, but a high-aim aspiration for anyone in our current climate of doom, gloom and derivatives.
It’s one of those perplexing mental exercises in perspective and causation: What came first, chicken or egg? God or the awareness of God? Mounds or Almond Joy? For rabbis this conundrum derives from a sermon’s-eye view of the world. Everything is fodder for interpretation and illustration. And so I wondered whether last week’s debacle over Congressman Alan Grayson’s invocation of the Holocaust and my viewing of the compelling Israeli film Waltz with Bashir was miraculous serendipity or a well-honed preference for pattern recognition, like the putative face on Mars or the Madonna of The Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
Accompanying the hype and hysteria of a Democrat employing the banal, nasty and jingoistic tactics that are the bread and butter of what passes for current Republican statecraft was Grayson’s sloppy reference to the “Holocaust” of the uninsured. Point taken, but point lost as hyperbole raised hackles and diminished the potency of his presentation.
As with the wielding of the argumentative shithammer of Nazi as epithet, illustrating a point with the “H” word, even if the intention was generic and not specific to 1940s Europe, deters substantive discourse, detracts from thought and almost assuredly ends debate. And as always, there is the great risk of trivializing the tragically significant. A Jew (I assume Grayson is knish-carrying tribe member) has a bit more license and leeway to use it, but at equal risk as gentiles for distraction and futility.
A similar concern arises from Waltz with Bashir. Is this incisive and moving examination of the impact of the 1980s Lebanese War (and specifically the Sabra and Shatilla massacres) on Israelis 20 years hence helped by allusions to the Holocaust, or is it a red herring for later-day apologists to cry foul and feel exempt from the soul searching and conscience searing moral dilemma raised by the film?
With most of the uses and abuses of the Holocaust, the starting assumption is that there can be no analogy. This event was sui generis, a moral anomaly designated a “radical evil” by the modern philosopher Martin Buber. Its use in any context is disproportionate. But perhaps there is a legitimate use, a power and a purpose that is justified. Throwing down the “H” gauntlet raises awareness, shatters apathy and, ideally, compels action. Ironically, the very acceptance and integration of the full impact of the Holocaust may, arguably, desensitize us to acts of genocide lesser in scale and scope. What an analogy to Lebanon, or Darfur, or even the needless loss of the uninsured lacks in precision and proportionality it gains in the need to combat global ennui in the face of ongoing suffering.
A tasteless old adage, again permitted only to Jews, chides “There’s no business like Shoah business.” Nothing admonishes, evokes or infuriates like reference to the Holocaust. But in an era concerned that revisionism will obscure reality once witness concedes to age, perhaps more frequent evocations, even at the risk of trivialization and disproportion, will speak to an increasingly negligent world.
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His words were painfully prophetic. Though paraphrasing and telescoping his sentiments, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister 
