All posts by anomalogue

Jewish

Biography, Judaism

When people used to ask me what my religious beliefs were I gave a complicated answer: I have a Taoist metaphysic and a Judeo-Christian ethic.

Now, after taking six months of Judaism classes at a Reform synagogue, participating in Torah study, reading from Kabbalah and attending Kabbalah lectures, my answer is much simpler: My beliefs are Jewish.

I have found that Kabbalah contains the entirety of Taoist metaphysics as I understand it, and that Jewish ethics contains all of what I embraced in Christian ethics, excluding precisely those parts of Christianity I was never able to accept.

Now I have to put my Jewish beliefs into action and become Jewish so I can be recognized as Jewish by my fellow Jews. It happens to be a core Jewish belief that Jewish beliefs are only one part of being Jewish.

Judaism 102 homework

Judaism

I have been taking classes for Jewish conversion. Our latest assignment is to write a paragraph describing what we think God wants from us, and another paragraph describing how this impacts how I live my life.

Here is what I have written so far:

What does God want from us? My best answer is based on the words of Yeshua from Nazareth, understood in a rigorously Jewish, non-idolatrous way: 1) Lovingly respect God with the entirety of one’s being — that is, pursue God’s infinitude with all our thinking/judging/doing humanity; 2) lovingly respect one’s neighbor as oneself; and 3) regard the loving respect of God and the loving respect of neighbor as practically identical, which means recognizing that most of our relationship with God transpires through our associations with our fellow humans. If we work to find mutual understanding and loving respect with our neighbors, taking seriously not only their agreeable aspects, but also those aspects which confuse us, offend us and expose us to anxiety, this effort deepens our relationship with God.

How does this impact my life? 1) It means my faith always points me beyond what I currently understand, feel and believe and past how I already live. (While my faith produces beliefs, actions and moral responses, and these are the only perceptible evidence of my faith, faith is not itself a sum of these things and must not be reduced to them, or faith loses its transcendent thrust.) 2) It means I have to be careful with how I interpret and respond to conflict and discomfort, because conflict can often be an opportunity to deepen my understanding and my active relationship with God and God’s creation (including other people). 3) But it also means being careful to maintain myself as a person capable of loving and respecting and acting. Maximum altruism is not automatically the right thing to do in every case. 4) No ethical formulas guarantee moral action. Every particular moment requires attention, listening, thought, judgment, struggle and response.

Life is unfair

Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

fairness

This scale is an attempt to diagram a framework I posted to Facebook.

Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more people declaring that “Life is unfair.” I actually grew up hearing that.

I’m starting to believe this statement is the essence of right-wing politics. Degree of renunciation of fairness is what defines the right-wing spectrum:

Centrism views fairness as one legitimate political goal, but acknowledges practical limits to the degree of achievable fairness. Centrism sees over-reaching attempts at fairness to be artifacts of naive partiality with distorted self-serving conceptions of fairness. To the degree a centrist leans right, he sees increasing levels of unfairness as inevitable and acceptable.

Middle right believes that fairness should not enter the discussion. Fairness is an inappropriate goal for politics, and an inadequate framework for thinking about it. Politics should be thought about in terms of other dynamics (such as economics). These dynamics naturally produce a healthy equilibrium which are in fact the best possible political outcomes. The distorting lens of “fairness” demands that we “fix” precisely that which is not broken (and conversely, that we preserve the hacks intended to produce fairness, but which destroy natural equilibrium).

Hard right believes that inequality is necessary — that establishing proper rank is required for the health of a society. The strongest, or wisest, or smartest or the most righteous should have more power than the weak, foolish, unintelligent, vicious masses.

I can see the self-consistent logic and validity of these positions. But as a left-leaning person, I believe the elimination of fairness from political discourse is a disaster. To say “life is unfair” is to misrepresent a moral intention as a natural fact. It pretends to say “perfect fairness is not an achievable goal” but really means: “I have no intention of treating you fairly.” I do not believe I can credibly ask a person to trust me if I do not intend to treat them fairly.

But, with all that being said, here is a troubling question: can right-wingers actually trust the left to treat them fairly? Because being fair means making the question “what is fair?” an open question for discussion, and I am not at all sure this is the case with many Clinton and Sanders supporters, who seem to have already decided unilaterally for themselves what is fair.

When asked for the left half of the scale, I added:

Hard left wants to maximize fairness by ensuring that everyone has exactly the same resources. Middle left believes politics is essentially about achieving maximum fairness. Centrism, as it leans leftward, sees fairness as one key condition of freedom for all. Fairness and freedom will never be perfect, but we are obligated to pursue it.

I do not care what you think

Philosophy, Politics

It is easy to disregard what someone thinks if that person lacks the resources to make you feel the consequences of your disrespect and disregard. We only say “I don’t give a shit how you feel” to people who are powerless either to help us or to harm us.

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A person or a group we treat as a powerless nobody will seek opportunities to return and confront us as a powerful somebody — as somebody who can command our attention, or our respect, or — and God help us if it comes to this — to make us feel what it is like to be a powerless nobody.

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Perhaps the biggest difference between left and right comes down to the question: Which segment of the poor and powerless mass deserves to be courted and which deserves to be despised?

On Jewish conversion

Judaism, Philosophy

I’ve been asked: “If your faith is essentially Jewish, why would you need to go through a formal conversion? Aren’t you already Jewish?”

My answer is: “Because that very Jewish faith tells me that I will be Jewish only when Jews recognize me as Jewish.”

A Jewish faith is not a faith of comprehension of truths. Judaism is not essentially a “belief system.” Jewish faith is orientation toward what transcends one’s own finitude in time, in space and in understanding — calling for a whole-being response: whole mind, whole heart, whole strength. And the faith is oriented toward reality that responds back. Judaism is radically and actively mutual.

I’ve been asked: “Why undergo all that arbitrary ritualistic rigmarole of Jewish conversion?”

My answer is: “Undergoing conversion is my way of honoring the priniciple that the most important things we can learn are arbitrary until suddenly and miraculously they stop being arbitrary to us. These rituals might have enormous meaning that I will understand and re-understand later. Until then, participation in these rituals is, for me a ritual of demonstrating my teachability. That’s the first part. The second part is the blunt fact that this is what it takes to recognized as Jewish by the Jewish community, and even if I do not understand the requirement, I respect it as something I do not understand. In undergoing conversion I am making a sacrifice of intellectual self-mastery to the transcendence of other understandings and to other people. Compared to what was asked of Abraham, it is a minuscule sacrifice.”

Humility

Philosophy

We people are sparks inclined to mistake ourselves for galaxies. There is truth in the indentification of spark with galaxy, but a truth is true only when its limits are observed. Humility is the observation of this particular truth, the fundamental truth of relationship between finite part and infinite whole.

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Humility is proactive humiliation. Do it yourself or it will be done to you.

Going first

Ethics, Judaism

Being morally responsible means going first. Trying first. Opening first. Listening first. Repenting first. Giving first. Disarming first. Showing goodwill first. Seeking forgiveness first. Acting first.

We can speculate on how others will respond — whether they will or won’t reciprocate, cooperate, collaborate, exploit or humiliate us — but we cannot really know what is possible until someone actually makes that first move toward mutuality.

Being morally responsible means being that person.

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Being morally responsible means acting on faith that other people do not live inside our own minds. They can shock us with the reality of who they are and how much it differs from our ideas of them.

Tour of the asterisk

Judaism

purpleasterisk

We cannot live in an imagined future within our own mind. The future is real and it will reveal itself when it arrives. The future will defy our specific predictions and our general expectations.

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We cannot live in a remembered past within our own mind. The past was real and what it showed us when it was here can never be fully reclaimed. If we allow the past to speak it tells us scandalous and amazing things. Usually, though, we ask it leading questions and it obliges us, confirming what we suspect, flattering our conceit that now is fundamentally different: we know better now. But we have always known better now.

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We cannot know any particular entity just because we know about it in general. If we interact with the particulars of the world in new ways, paying scrupulous attention, striving to make coherent and general sense of what we perceive, these things will disclose truths to us that will force us to rethink everything we think we know. This process is unending, its content inexhaustibly volatile.

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We cannot know situations in general from what we have learned of the specific situations we have inhabited: those situation to which we are habituated. Only a minuscule slice of possible situations are habitable to beings like us, and within this range, the tiniest shift will throw us into shock. We love to hear the survivors’ stories, but these are exceptional.

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We cannot know another person by knowing about them. Each person is another instance of everything, containing anticipations, memories, understandings, and incommunicable experiences unlike our own, and person packs the power to teach us not only about realities, but to teach us into new relations with reality, which is to teach us out of old selves and into new ones. Be careful who you let teach you!

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And finally we cannot know ourselves, simply from having been ourselves so far. We are fragile, fallible, barely oriented, and packed with potential to learn, to transform and to live brand-new transfigured realities. Self-estrangement can throw a me into relief before a more enduring I. It is hard to want that.

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The varieties of othering experience

Ethics

Othering occurs in a variety of forms which can look highly dissimilar or even opposite.

There’s a complacent incurious othering: Those others are not really part of my life. I don’t know them, they’re not my problem, I don’t know how to help, and I don’t even know if I can help.

There’s an objective othering: Those others have different characteristics from us, which can be studied and comprehended factually. 

Another objective othering: I have studied those others and concluded that their problems are self-inflicted. They must solve their own problems.

There’s a smug and superior othering: We, unlike those others, are moral or talented or informed or enlightened, etc.

There’s a hostile othering: Those others want to do us harm, and will do so if they get the chance.

There’s a resentful othering: The principle pain in my life would not have happened if I were one of those others.

Resentful othering can evolve into a vengeful othering: The principle pain in my life, which is the pain of my people, would not have occurred if it were not for those others.

There’s a post-liberal othering: Those others engage in othering me, and I have found that I cannot avoid doing the same — at least as long as they persist in their othering. Perhaps othering is unavoidable. Perhaps the conceit of overcoming othering is a tactic for preserving the status quo.

These are dissimilar in ways: they are the products of different power relations.

However, they are alike in that they all lead away from mutuality, further from dialogical understanding and toward reciprocal dehumanization, force and dehumanizing counter-force.

Mutuality

Ethics, Judaism

It is important to distinguish between feeling as though you are member of a community because you share its values and beliefs, and actually becoming a member of that community by mutually acknowledging shared values and beliefs with fellow members. This is true of communities of dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions, and it is true of communities as small as two, such as friendships and marriages. Community is essentially mutual.

Similarly, there is a difference between forgiveness that involves making peace with estrangement with an alienated friend or loved one and the deeper forgiveness of mutual reconciliation. Most feelings of alienation come from a sense that one’s reality has not been acknowledged — from a sense that mutuality is lacking. Reconciliation is restoration of mutuality. Sometimes this is not possible (yet), and we do have to make peace with that fact in unilateral forgiveness, but we should know and feel the difference between this and true mutual forgiveness.

Mutual relationships transcend individuality and that’s what makes them sacred.

This view feels Jewish to me, and when I articulate it I want to be Jewish.

The responsible and the free

Philosophy

It is easy for those who accept responsibility, especially those who feel unable to avoid accepting it, to resent those who have embraced irresponsibility and who consequently experience an ecstatic freedom. For the latter, “the free”, this is an accomplishment, a liberation or redemption won through courageous insight; but for the former, “the responsible”, this is a seizure made through ignorant luck, willful contempt, or both fused in complacent incuriosity — all subsidized by the responsible.

It is hard to get outside of these two ethical perspectives, or rather this one ethical perspective composed of two interlocked conflicting judgments. From any point between these two poles, the two poles define the ethical gamut.