Saturday, June 30, 2007

Context of Klezmer

When you can't understand what someone is saying, when you don't know their language or syntax, it's pretty much impossible to respond with any intelligence. Intelligence, you see, resides in understanding. At Temple Emmanuel on a gorgeous Friday evening, there was no understanding on my part, and only partly because of the Hebrew.

The service, "Shabbat Unplugged" they named it, was basically a three piece band--percussion, keyboard and guitar--instead of a cantor singing songs of a repetitious nature in Hebrew for a full hour and a half. Three times the rabbi got up from his seat in the congregation to face the audience and deliver a brief homily; I couldn't tell you what he said anymore than I can tell you what the singer sang even though the rabbi spoke in English.

Understanding, I'm beginning to see, is not at all the point of religious services. With the possible exception of the Buddhists and the Quakers among the religions we have visited so far, the point of religious services seems uniformly to be submission and acquiescence to a condition of mindless worship of an other, an abandonment of individual intelligence in favor of group conformity. I know that some of the members of this Jewish reform congregation remember enough of the Hebrew learned for youthful bar/bat mitzvahs that the refrains of the songs were comprehensible, but that does not mean the words were intelligent; the few lines that were translated on the media screen (oh shades of the Christian evangelical congregations) were singularly unmoving and uninformative, things like, "The bride is at the gate."

So perhaps it isn't really that surprising that the members of this congregation get up and do a little Middle Eastern circle dance around the temple while the band is singing on stage. What's to listen to? What's to learn? What's to think of? The Jewish Mother in me shrugs well-rounded shoulders. So what's wrong with a little dancing in the temple? Is it my fault God gave me two good feet and a set of hips that was built to sashay every bit as much as they were built to bear children, may God grant you many and may some of them be boys... Dance, as the Hasids and the Sufis know, takes you out of your intelligence and into your physical self. Ecstasy is a physical condition, as Pentecostal Christians know so well.

It seems the main point of the Friday service in this large, urban, reform temple was to stake a claim on legacy, to make sure no one in the congregation forgot at the end of the week that they are, first and foremost, not accountants or lawyers or medical receptionists wearing nice cardigan sets: they are Jewish. The Hebrew, the dancing, the long recitation of the names of the dearly departed, the constant reference to Israel evoking an alliance not only with the tribe of Israel, descendants all of King David, but the Land of Israel, may the one rest in peace, may the other somehow achieve peace. The service is done to solidify the group identity. The use of Hebrew, the failure to enter the Western mainstream with the adoption and use of English, makes the distinction between these Jews and the rest of the world clear. No one welcomed us; no one even smiled at us, except the little girl at the entrance to the synagogue who handed us a weekly bulletin of events.

At one point in the service, everyone rose to their feet and turned around to face the back of the temple. I don't know what the intention of this was, as the Hebrew that was being chanted was meaningless to my ears, but I got the feeling we were waiting for one of the prophets to enter the temple, like the place set for Elijah at Passover. But the facing backward seemed significant to me in another way, too. The whole service seemed to be looking backward, into the past. In both Christianity and Islam, there is an orientation toward the future, when judgment will be clear and the dead divided between the rewarded and the horrifyingly punished. In Judaism, there is only today, the moment to remember the past and who the Jews have been. Say Kaddish. It all makes the idea of the nation of Israel, the existence of a Jewish state, part of the unthinking acceptance that is the hallmark of religion.

Don't think about it. Just go along. Sing what's on the board. Read the words we set in front of you. Dance. Get away from that nasty bugger, Intellect. Move those feet, sway those hips, bear more children and make sure they go to temple with you. Is there safety in numbers? Will your daughters marry good Jewish boys and your sons good Jewish girls? When is that Messiah coming, anyway...

When I was a very young woman I wished I was Jewish. They all seemed so smart.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Rumiatic Fervor

I don't know what it is about the Unitarians that irks me so. I have thought about it considerably, especially since my sister is in the process of becoming an ordained minister of the Unitarian faith. I've been thinking about it additionally since Mady and I went to visit the Unitarians up in Boulder last week. I've been thinking about it and feeling additionally disturbed.

It all seems so pointless and self-important. Self-congratulatory, really, a roomful of white people come together ostensibly to celebrate a sense of community, a community of the perfectly well-intentioned and generally well-heeled. There are hardly any poor Unitarians, I have noticed over the years, except for an occasional student in temporary poverty or once in a while a stray artist whose art is obviously not sufficient to create meaning in his or her universe. In the congregation we just visited, the ease and affluence of the members was readily apparent in their proclamation of "Joys and Sorrows," wherein the joys were all trite and the sorrows mundane. Those left gasping by the blows of cruel fate are not gathered here nor are the ecstatic creatives.

Like Rumi. Whom I think of because he was the subject of the sermon: "Rumi: A Poet Philosopher for Our Time." More aptly, the title might have been "Rumi: Mystic Sufi as Utmost UU," for that was what the reverend seemed mightily to be implying. I have never heard anyone so grievously misrepresent Mawlana, as he is more rightfully called. The centrality of Islamic belief to his poetry and world view and passion was totally ignored by the Reverend Gunn. I'm not even sure she ever bothered to mention that he is probably second only to Muhammad in the prominence, prevalence and proliferation of the precepts and practices of the Islamic religion. Rumi, as we choose to call him in the West, like he is a lapdog poodle, craved reunion with the Qu'ranic god in a passionate and poetic life that spread Islam not only through the Middle East but which eventually made Islam appeal to Europeans and then Americans, and not least of all, to Unitarians. He does not talk of killing or fatwahs or the right to tear the membranes of posthumous virgins; no, Mawlana talks of love, the Beloved, his long lost friend, with whom I cannot help but believe he was truly, deeply, and ultimately inconsolably in love, and whom was probably killed by the order if not the sword of Rumi's son. And the Unitarian minister smiles benignly and crashes through a stanza of Rumi's poetry as if it was forged of iron and not the liquid of wine. It is the liquidity of Rumi which allows his words to endure; his words are molten fire; they lick your thighs even as they burn you.

But the reverend seems to miss all this, or perhaps she just doesn't want to disturb the bland faces upturned to her. We sing half-hearted and simplistic songs throughout the service, songs someone must have been paid a hefty $5 to create on demand, especially for the UU's liberated hymnal. But there is one song everyone seems to like, and lo and behold, it's ascribed to no one but RUMI! "Come, come whomever you are/Wanderer, worshipper, lover of living, it doesn't matter./Ours is not a caravan of despair/Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times/Come, yet again, come, come." Only problem is: this isn't Rumi, but a verse falsely assigned him. The minister likes it so well, though, she quotes it in her sermon as well.

I've read what Mady wrote in response to our Unitarian visit. What would Rumi say to these people gathered here; would he be pleased? Here are his own words. "If anyone interprets my words in any other way, I deplore that person and I deplore his words."(Rumi and His Sufi Path of Love, M. Fatih Citlak, ed., 2007). He was speaking of those who distill his poems of their praise for Allah, who distort his meaning to create an earthly and un-Islamic impact. Rumi was a mystic, an esoteric mystic who cannot help but remind me of Jesus, both of them craving reunion with god, both of them full of proverbs and tales and love, love, love.

It's something you just don't sense in the community of the UUs. Passion of any kind seems entirely absent, replaced by its dull and glazed cousin, self-love. At the end of the service, all those gathered rise and form around the periphery of the church, a single circle. There are no whirling dervishes, no dancers, there is only the smug certainty that once again god has been served by the chosen ones, the nearly perfect already. Or could it be something different, that god has served these chosen ones...

I've been reading Christopher Hitchens, in addition to Rumi this week, and I underlined the following sentence from the first chapter of his latest book God Is Not Great: "There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness." The former case seems exemplary of the Unitarians' Sunday gathering. The latter is more closely aligned with the stricter and monotheistic religions of the world. I'll be reading Hitchens next Sunday. He's more interesting, by far.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Rumination

How would Rumi want his biography related? Through a fat woman who makes you hold hands in a dark room so that the word community can be stuffed down your throat and washed down with curdled proclamations of the word "Love," like it means something?


Or is it possible that Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī would relish how Westerners can't pronounce his name. Is it possible, that his understanding of the divine could be more clearly communicated through a night time sand whirlwind during which a giant rod of lightening struck, and in striking created from its' immense heat a glass bowl of sand which could afterward only continue to spin around like a dreidel. God's very own play thing which would be whipped around until he grew bored.

Happening upon that glass dreidel, divine, squinting through the places where there was only enough sand to make a small hole and peaking inside one could see various items trapped inside. A woman is sitting upon her horse, still comfortable as if the storm had not even touched them. It seems they must have emanated from the lightening. The woman holds a candle which seems not to flicker and in the light of it you can see that the coat of the horse and that of the woman seem to from the same seed for the color is impeccably matched.

It is possible that he would not wanted his life admired by mere holding of hands. By egotistical pattings on the backs of each other, or by hymns rewritten with attempted-divine words filled with emptiness. It is possible

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Hope of the Hopeless

I took tons of notes, shocked by the words boring into my ears, reaching for Mady's proffered notebook soundlessly, dumbly, she somehow knowing and anticipating my need, my craving to document and quote, to verify that the words assailing me are not fragments of my worst consciousness nor repetitions of the worst of contemporary cultural commentary, but in fact are there, real, of this particular moment: uttered and received by this congregation of poorly dressed sycophants as truth. Somehow, writing the words not only documents them but distances me from them, like raising a fence around me for protection. For I do feel assailed. I do feel assaulted. The hatred and the sense of violent vindication both terrifies and appalls me. At the end of this service, both Mady and I need to flee.

When we approached the enormous edifice that is the Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colorado, we were first greeted by two uniformed police officers and only secondarily by members of the congregation. I asked the police officers why they were there, pretending to assume they were there because of some raised terrorist alert. "Oh no, m'am. We're just here to make sure no one gets hurt." At the end of the service, they are still there, posted just outside the chapel doors again, keeping the peace. There is also an ambulance on alert in the parking lot. God forbid anyone of these just and righteous churchgoers should meet their end during the service. These, after all, are the Chosen. These, after all, have the Hope and the Promise of the End of It All. But God forbid their lives should end before that Glorious, All-Out End.

How horrible, how paltry and frustrating, how completely unfulfilling their lives must be that they can actually look forward to the End of the World. It does not take so much for most of us to find life justifiable, bearable somehow. Our daughter looking beautiful, shining clean and radiant in a prom dress next to some unknown young man even though we know full well we shouldn't care whether she looks beautiful or whether she has a date;, our son winning honorable mention in a contest he rightfully should have taken first place, our daughter emerging from under the hood of an old jalopy, grease streaking her happy features, a sunrise, a sunset, waves breaking on the watertop. But these people have lives so patently completely without joy that the pronouncement of the imminence of the end of the world as we know it makes them break out into applause, makes the husband in his cheap and shapeless suit bestow the fondest of smiles upon the joyous face of his wife, upturned.

It's Mother's Day. The moms of the congregation are called down to the front for a special blessing. Mady urges me to join them. I, frozen in fear, cannot. "If anyone asks, I'm your crazy spinster aunt," I hiss back at her. The moms are rewarded for their mommerly excellence with a gift: an emery board. I am so vastly relieved that I am not among them. A fingernail file in return for your life. It makes my puny bookseller pay look formidable somehow. Oh yeh. Moms also are rewarded for their selfless service to their children with a free doughnut following the service. Let them eat cake, and let them have nicely shaped and manicured fingernails, oval and smooth, betraying not the work they do.

This is the most sacrilegious religion I have ever witnessed and one I could not have imagined, even in the worst of my nightmares and day panics. Their foyer is full of booths, where cheap trinkets are being sold. Nothing at all religious, just baubles and bags and ornaments. I cannot help but think of Jesus entering the temple in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his crucifixion and overturning the tables of those who would do commerce in God's holy place. In the women's bathroom, a sign in each stall instructs Spanish speaking users to make sure to place their tampons in the proper receptacle. English speakers apparently know how to properly dispose of their waste and need no physical reminders. Reminders of Israel, flags and maps and brochures, are everywhere. It's like a travel bureau, one in which every traveller's going to Israel.

This puzzles both of us for a while, but by sermon's end it is all terribly, dreadfully, appallingly clear. These Christians love Israel and, in particular, love the war and the pain and the bloodshed that has lasted so long between the Jews and the Palestinians. This hatred, this conflict, this bloody fight for a small stretch of desert land on the other side of the world is, by these "Christians," the beginning of the hastening of the End. When Jesus comes back, you see, he will enter by the East Gate of Jerusalem. There can be no political settlement, no ceding of this Holy Gate to the Palestinians. The war must continue. We need to support Israel, so the Lord can come and smite all of these damned heathens so stone cold dead only hellfire will return them to screaming, tortured life again. The end will come only if we continue our present path of hatred and violence. We not only have no obligation to nurture peace, we have no reason to feed the poor or cure the ailing; all this sadness and evil is a sign of the Glorious End Approaching.

I can say no more. The pervasiveness of despair and hatred overwhelms me again as I write; words may create a fence that keeps these people from touching me, but it is such a small fence, a little white picket fence, and theirs is the barbed wire fences around Auschwitz, Bergen Bergen, Baba Yar....