Marmalade Daydreams

"His disciples asked him and said,

'Do you want us to fast?
How shall we pray?
Shall we give to charity?
What food may we eat?'

Jesus said, 'Do not lie or do what you dislike, since all things are clear before heaven."

- The Gospel of Thomas

"What Grein sought did not and could not exist: he wanted the fear of heaven without dogma; religion without revelation; discipline without proscriptions."

- Shadows on the Hudson, Isaac Bashevus Singer

It's been over a month since I've written, but I was recently inspired by somebody else's cool blog that not every post has to be an epic piece. In that spirit, I'll try to spin off a few shorter ones to encapsulate the divided existence I've been leading of late.

First of all, I've been doing a lot of reading on New Age spirituality, which is a subject I have been considering as a subject of research for graduate school. I was originally drawn to the field because it was "fringe"; the New Age appeals to my taste for cognitive dissonance in its rejection of the material world through thousand dollar seminars, its followers' combination of rational and magical thinking, and their application of archaic belief to a postmodern world. And, as perhaps good research should, it has made me begin to question my own beliefs.

The Reform synagogue in which I was brought up valued questioning over most nearly everything. To follow the commandments "just because" seems an empty affair in our age of scientistism. I remember being taught to be critical of even the pillars of our Law -- the two tablets with their proclamations of religious and secular code -- and being taught that it was revealed to Moses because of his doubts and the transgressions of the Israelites. The lesson I came away with was that the pared-down faith that results from the trials of questioning is more authentic, more resilient, more personal than that of dogma and orthodoxy.

Studying existentialism at college, I was impressed by Kierkegaard's idealisation of Abraham, afraid and trembling on Moriah, as a 'knight of faith'. I sympathised with Schopenhauer's suffering from insatiable desire, and his will to escape through art. But more than any other author I read at Hamilton, I was taken by Nietzsche: by his confidence, his daring, his artistry; by his assertion that we are the gods, and to continue to project our best characteristics onto fictional external entities is to cheat ourselves of our finest riches. And would you just look at that 'stache? I sensed in his writings that which I admired in Emerson -- the call to write our own Bibles, the claim that "nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

And the words of Nietzsche and Emerson continue to inspire and resonate with me, but their deification of self, which, via cultural refraction has led to the self-spirituality of the New Age, now strikes me as dangerously narcissisitic. (Here's a link to a quality interesting article on the tension between religion and spirituality that lauds self-spirituality's history for inspiring social justice, but is critical of its contemporary self-absorption.) Yet it is taught within Buddhism that compassion should only be practiced once one has acquired the wisdom and discrimination necessary to apply it effectively.

But the question I have on the eve of Pesach, the Jewish holiday when we commemmorate the Israelites' liberation from bondage by "our God and the God of Moses" by ritually tasting salt water and bitter herbs to relive the tears and bitterness of slavery followed by feasting and reclining to celebrate our freedom, is how to balance spiritual seeking with cultural tradition? I love this holiday for so many reasons -- it teaches about compassion, the food is great, we sing "Dayenu" -- yet I have issue with believing that the spirits I believe are praiseworthy are "one" with He who slew the Egyptians' firstborn. The very meaning of "Pass-over" is tied into the Angel of Death buying our freedom with mass infanticide. Troubling.

And as I eat my Hillel sandwich tonight, the delight I take in our freedoms here-and-now, the sweetness of the charoset will be tempered by the bitterness of the horseradish. It makes me cry involuntarily, tears that fall for not only for the oppressed, whom the Haggadah mentions, but for the innocents who will die for the liberation of the oppressed, whom it does not. So does doubt strengthen faith? If not, I think it makes one more authentic and thoughtful. But then again, if you've got the faith of Abraham, you get to make bad-ass graphics like this one with the Lion of Judah, and never think twice about it. So I guess it's a trade-off. Oh well, I guess this wasn't exactly a shorter piece. Sorry. Pesach Shameach!