Category Archives: Judaism

Jewish red thread

Ethics, Judaism

A part of my autobiography that I had to compress into two lines was my experience with Jewish thinkers. Judaism only became a serious interest for me following my very strange experience of intensive study of Nietzsche starting in 2002 and extending to around 2006. During this time under Nietzsche’s influence I excavated the assumptions at the foundation of my understanding of the world.

Nietzsche was absolutely insightful on many points, but rarely as right as his here: If you want to get at the assumptions that matter, the most important thing to dig up is the ground beneath the warning signs that say “Do not dig here.” Those signs mark the pay dirt of self-transformation — at least if you begin with morality. (I believe this qualification is another insight of equal value to the first. Questioning values you do not actually hold — values which you have not internalized, that you do not live and that are not the the stand-point and vanishing-point of your perspective — is lazy nihilism or cynicism and it will do nothing or worse.)

From the Preface of Daybreak.

At that time I undertook something not everyone may undertake: I descended into the depths, I tunneled into the foundations, I commenced an investigation and digging out of an ancient faith, one upon which we philosophers have for a couple of millennia been accustomed to build as if upon the firmest of all foundations — and have continued to do so even though every building hitherto erected on them has fallen down: I commenced to undermine our faith in morality.

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to — obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been — is that not — immoral? — But morality does not merely have at its command every kind of means of frightening off critical hands and torture-instruments: its security reposes far more in a certain art of enchantment it has at its disposal — it knows how to ‘inspire’.

But despite what so many people say about Nietzsche, his goal is not at all to live an amoral and unprincipled existence. It is to reform one’s own relationship with morality. I believe his purpose is to re-establish one’s own values on realities that are less speculative and vastly more immediate, motivating and durable.

Nietzsche did a bang-up job with the demolition and ground clearing of my worldview. But it was a chain of Jewish thinkers who help me piece my soul back together, and to reassemble it toward a reality not confined to my own mind. And that realism most of all included the belief in the sacred reality of other minds.

Somewhere I made a list of the names of the Jewish thinkers who helped me, and I plan to expound on each, but for now I will just list some of them.

I was especially interested in the fact that whether the thinkers were religious or secular there was a distinct commonality among them, and I felt that this commonality connected with me in a vitally important way. It might have been an inheritance from lost Jewish ancestors, or maybe it was transmitted to me via Christianity, but the total experience of reading these thinkers made me want to enter and participate in the Jewish tradition.

My 500-word spiritual autobiography

Biography, Judaism

As part of my conversion process I’ve been asked to write a 500-word spiritual autobiography, and to pick out a Hebrew name. I thought I would choose Israel or Yisrael, but then I found Nachshon, and it is perfect for me.

Reading back over my own autobiography, I feel a need to thank and apologize to everyone who has known me too much, especially my poor Mom.

Here’s the final version, 72 words over the limit, but OKed by my rabbi.

 

I was born into a religious vacuum. The worldview I inherited had no space for religion. My first memory of religion is my 4-year-old self sitting on the potty asking my mother what God is. Her answer: “God is love.” I became an atheist.

Once I could read I gorged on mythology and Mark Twain. This antithetical pair of threads drawn from my earliest reading — a strand of constellated meanings twisted around a nasty strand of critique — has run through my life and connected my various interests and activities.

When I was ten my family moved to a town with a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. I was made to attend Sunday services. I’d rant all the way home. According to adolescent me, UU was vapid! insular! a parody religion! a detox program for religion addicts! But when I charged UUism with hypocrisy, it backfired: attacking UUism with UU values, I internalized them, and infected myself with faith in reason, tolerance, self-criticism, pluralism, and dialogue.

My atheism ended after I met my future wife, Susan. She crushed me in an argument on the foundations of my morality, which resulted in 1) self-demotion to agnosticism and 2) love.

Before we were married, Susan joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. I went with her to liturgies, and that was my first exposure to Judeo-Christian scripture. I tried to get inside the perspective but I was unable to connect with the doctrines or practices. My wife and two daughters were enmeshed in a community who regarded me as blind, ignorant and possibly wicked. My devout agnosticism appeared to most people in my life as a blotch of nothing to be disregarded. I think this is why I embraced Vipassana meditation. I appreciated its focus on practice and its deemphasis of doctrine, and it dignified my outlook with a name. Plus, it made me nicer, and the insights gained in meditation have helped me understand mysticism.

Late 1999 we moved to Atlanta. I stopped meditating, got consumed with work and became depressed. I learned a lot from this. Coming out of it I re-centered my thinking on lived experience, rather than abstract ideas.

Then I was transferred to Toronto. I started reading Nietzsche — initially to understand the “slave morality” in my workplace, but it was soon obvious the critique applied to me. I interrogated my moral, philosophical, and religious conceptions until they dissolved. What remained was a new and odd mode of thinking. I found myself unable to convey what I was learning without resorting to symbols and metaphors. Religious writing now made immediate sense to me. My agnosticism became irrelevant. It was exhilarating but painfully isolating.

The urgent need to explain — and later, to exit — this state of mind, and to reintegrate with humanity drove me into phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and eventually to Judaism.  I kept noticing that Jewish thinkers like Richard J. Bernstein and Martin Buber were especially, distinctively helpful. The values I kept finding in Jewish thinking resonated — especially around the religious significance of intersubjectivity. As I continued, I came to see Judaism at the root of everything I care about — the values contracted from my childhood harangues. I felt room in the pluralism of Judaism for religious life as I know it. I am a contrarian, but that doesn’t mean I do not need a home; it just means I can’t live most places. Coming here, I feel home.

Shells and pearls

Chord, Fables, myths & parables, Ideas, Judaism, Philosophy

This is a series of rewritten, streamlined posts on the theme of shells and pearls, which I’m considering incorporating into my pamphlet. I’ll link to the originals. If you have time to compare, let me know if you think anything was lost in the chipping, sanding and polishing.

Evert

Announcing an exciting new vocabulary acquisition: evert. I have needed this word many times, but I’ve had to resort to flipping, reversing, inverting, turning things inside-out.

Evert – verb [ with obj. ] – Turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out: (as adj. everted) : the characteristic facial appearance of full, often everted lips. DERIVATIVES:
eversible (adj.),  eversion (n.). ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘upset, overthrow’): from Latin evertere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + vertere ‘to turn.’

With this wonderful new word I can say things like this:

“An oyster coats the ocean with an inner-shell made of mother-of-pearl lined. Anything from the outside that gets inside is coated, too. A pearl is an everted oyster shell, and an everted pearl is a shell’s inner lining. Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean. Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is delicate oyster-flesh, which ceaselessly coats everything it is not with mother-of-pearl. It is as if this flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — father-of-pearl.”

Irridescent Irritants

Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating irritant reality with lustrous likeness.

Nacre

You are absurd. You defy comprehension.

That is, you defy my way of understanding. I cannot continue to understand my world as I understand it and understand you.

That is, you do not fit inside my soul.

I am faced with the most fundamental moral choice: Do I break open my soul? or do I bury you in mother-of-pearl?

Father-of-Pearl

(A meditation on Levinas’s use of the term “exception” in Otherwise Than Being.)

We make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.

Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most etymologically literal way, when they try to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.

In my own religious life, this category mistake is made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and then, consequentially, explicitly and consciously. Just as the retinas of our eyes see things upside-down, our mind’s eye sees things inside-out. We naturally confuse insidedness and outsidedness. By this view, human nature is less perverse than it is everse.

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Imagine, with as much topological precision as you can muster, expulsion from Eden as belonging-at-home flipped inside-out.

That galut in the pit of your gut: everted Eden?

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A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.

The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.

The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.

The earliest mention of pearls from this blog was posted on December 14, 2008.

Nacre

Pearls are inside-out oyster shells. Or are oyster shells inside-out pearls?

The oyster coats its world with layers of iridescent calcium. With the same substance it protects itself from the dangers concaving in from the outside and the irritants convexing it from the inside.

The earliest use of this mother-of-pearl metaphor I can find in my stuff was posted on another blog platform in December, 2006. (Again this has been edited. In my opinion, the original was uglier and more opaque. I’ll post it in the comments.)

Transcendence, non-understandings, misunderstandings

An unresolved understanding becomes a live question — an existential irritant. To ease the pain of non-understanding, the question is coated with an answer, like a pearl. Such answers re-explain away ideas which were never offered as explanations. What ought to be known internally and poetically is known about externally and factually.

Any surprise that the mezuzah I placed on the doorpost of my library is encased in mother-of-pearl?

Hanging the mezuzah inspired me to clean up my office! It’s nice to be in here, again.

 

Nachshon

Judaism

I think Nachshon will have to be my Hebrew name.

Legend has it that Nachshon waded into the Red Sea, all the way up to his nose, before Moses parted the waters. If you (as I do) read water as symbolizing unfiltered, undifferentiated, unarticulated, unsettled, primordial chaos and the process of understanding as a dividing, navigating, moving process this is a highly charged-up symbol. Also in this story Nachshon demonstrates the admirable quality of “going first” — a Jewish virtue I want to cultivate.

I love the etymology, too. Hebrewname.org says that Nachshon means “snakebird”. A synthesis of the highest-flying and lowest-crawling animal, who can float on the surface of the water! That is symbolically irresistible. The snakebird is the magenta (a hybrid of the two opposite extremes of the spectrum, the highest and lowest visible frequencies) of the animal kingdom. In fact, now I have to draw a magenta snakebird.

Another site associates the name with snakes and heretical practices like divination and reading omens, and given my own mildly heretical tendencies, that’s not entirely unappealing.

Then there’s a connection to “stormy sea waves” which I just wrote about last week.

Plus, the name has a letter shin right in the middle, and I love the way that letter looks.

Just look: Nachshon is a good-looking, good-sounding word. Where do I get one of these patches?

Too many perfect connections.

Nachshon.

Procrustean skull

Judaism, Philosophy

People who hate the infinitude of reality have procrustean skulls. What refuses to fit inside the mind is chopped to fit or pulverized and poured in. (Transcendence is an experience — an intuition  of otherness or beyondness they’ll tell you.) …Or exiled and attacked as an enemy, because you can have your enemy …Or exiled and worshipped, because you can have your religion, and your object of worship, too …Or dominated and trained to stay curled up tight in a brain-sized ball …Or failing these: annihilated.

Look where the violence is directed, and there you will find God. Look into the origin of the violence and there you will find the mind who needs to be the know-all, be-all and, if necessary, end-all.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

Machloket

Judaism, Philosophy

Since last Saturday I’ve been obsessing on the concept of machloket, “sacred arguing”. I haven’t been this happy since I learned the word “agonism”.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I hoard ideas. This is the root of my terrible book problem. Many of the books I’ve collected are really just husks for a single gorgeous statement. Certain ideas make me so desperately happy that I try to anchor them to this world in every way I know how. I buy books that properly express and enshrine the idea and then I put the book in its place in my library. I scan passages (and often entire books) into my wiki, cross-referencing, thematizing and weaving them into the rest of the electronic fabric I use to augment my brain, which is inadequate for my purposes. I write about these ideas, sketch diagrams of their structures, and honor them with geometry and typesetting. I buy up domains. I know I do not and can not possess them, but I try anyway.

I just had to stock up on machloket books.

Reading together

Hermeneutics, Judaism

Intimacy is made possible by shared experience.

Some tangible forms of shared experience are: shared language, shared history, shared spaces, shared relationships, shared institutions, shared customs, shared beliefs.

Less tangible, but perhaps even more crucial forms of shared experience are: shared understandings, shared interpretations, shared tastes, shared expectations.

One of the finest ways to achieve these latter shared understandings is the supremely inter-revelatory act of reading together.

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In Torah Study, the personalities gathered in the room sparkle against the ground of the text. Insight by insight, the flat black sky deepens into limitless space as it fills up with stars.

Transfinition

Judaism, Metaphysics

When I say that some fact is “definitely true” it means that I cannot conceive how it could be otherwise. Sometimes, however, unexpectedly and shockingly infinity will demonstrate that reality is otherwise than how I thought, despite the fact that this event was inconceivable. 

The very ground upon which things are defined shifts, relationships between thing and thing, each and everything are instantaneously renegotiated. Everything and every thing is somehow different while remaining the same. All this belongs to the phenomenon of paradigm shift. 

But let’s for a moment turn away from the things and from everything, and look into that blind void from which this shock emerges, ex nihilo. Let’s stare into this scotoma, where nothing exists, but also where nothing is missing — because it is from here that metaphysics pours out fresh reality. It becomes visible only through shock of revelation. 

It is from here, from this — from Whom? — that I relearn the difference between “everything” and “infinity”. 

But however many times I am shifted and shocked, I remain finite, despite all appearances and temptations. But each time, my “everything” enlarges, becomes more flexible, grows more permeable, that is, if I can continue to want and to welcome God, dread and all. 

Today “transfinition” seems the right word for this kind of event, where definitional fields shift, changing the meaning of everything as a whole and every thing in part, and implying the permanent possibility of other shifts. This keeps us aware of the radical difference between truth and reality, and gives us our closest approximation of understanding the meaning of infinity. We know infinity through transfinitition. We also believe in the reality of pluralism by way of transfinition. 

Or so things seem to me, at this point in my ongoing history of shifts. 

Thaumatolatry

Judaism

Thaumatolatry – Worship or undue admiration of wonderful or miraculous things.

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My religiosity is non-thaumatolatrous. God, being infinite, is present in all kinds of mundane miracles, like generosity, scientific research and conversation. I don’t rule out apparently magical miracles — I just don’t think they are the right direction to point our worship. The craving or fixation on that which seems to defy the laws of nature show that we’ve failed to recognize (or sustain recognition of) the significance of reality’s pervasive transcendence.

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.

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.”

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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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.

Secular mystic

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I told a rabbi that I am a “secular mystic”.

What do I mean by that? I see the transcendent realm as inexhaustibly understandable. The act of understanding incomprehensible phenomena increases our capacity to understand. The very increase that makes the understanding possible makes us aware of new incomprehensible phenomena (and with it, the limits of our understanding), re-arousing the need to understand.

I am most interested in the experience of these limits. This problem could probably be called “hermeneutical liminality” but these days I’m trying to find clearer, prettier and more pregnant language to express this kind of idea, which is precisely why I’m interested in religion. But I find that most people are so misaligned on what religion is and does that use of religious (or “spiritual”) vocabulary leads to instant misunderstanding. “Threshold” is pretty. Limbo? Border or boundary? For now, I’ll just call them “boundary experiences”.

What are boundary experiences like when we encounter them? How do we recognize them? What are their characteristics? What are our natural responses, and are other, better responses available to us? In other words, what are the ethical implications of boundary experiences? When do we keep going, and when do we stop? When and how do we involve others in boundary-crossings?

And then: where have boundary experiences been misunderstood? And what does that look like?

My hostility toward magic is bound up with this last question: what do misunderstandings of boundary experiences look like? What artifacts of such misunderstandings remain in our culture? My attitude toward magic has nothing to do with how it conflicts with science’s current view of the world (about which I am grossly under-informed, anyway) and everything to do with the functioning of religion. Magic forecloses religious questions, and removes intellectual tensions required for religious insight.

Again, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Or so it all appears to me right now, as I stand at the the threshold of Judaism. And one thing I’ve learned about thresholds is that something unexpected is always waiting in ambush — some unnoticed detail that changes everything.