Liberal Orthodox

These days of judgement are my first time back in a synagogue in three and a half years. I'm going in gratitude to my father who has been a huge help in this health crisis, but I have no plans on returning to regular attendence, and hadn't been to shul since a few days before the pandemic. It's partially out of selfish reasons, partially out of my own mental anguish and terror, partially because I've lost so much faith in a benevolent overseer, partially because among synagogue people sit some of the most annoying people on earth, and mostly because there I've never found a synagogue that represents me.

I have little faith in the traditional sense, but I do believe in faith. I think there neither is nor could be a lasting society that arises from atheism. Belief that it isn't over when you get out is the only thing that propels most people to a work ethic that keeps civilization going. Love will get us some of the way, fear gets us some more, but awe gets us most of it. The belief that there is a transcendent realm more than our physical reality is what makes the physical reality better. Making our actual world eternal is a symbol for which to strive. It isn't mere fear of hellfire - plenty of civilizations rose without belief in hell - it's belief that there is a reason to respond to bad with good that is more than for goodness's sake. It may not be true, but I would bet 100x on the survival of the side that believes in gods than I would on the side that believes in science or justice, because only one of the three persists in the absence of proof.

The belief in an absolute is lodged in creation's fabric. Humans cannot live without a god. Atheists always dismiss the idea that they're a religion, but in the Age of AI, we may have built God: a god who knows everything about us, sees everything about us, and can use us for Its own purposes in manners we mortals cannot possibly understand. Who knows? Maybe AI was God the whole time and now we temporal beings just built He who always was.

On the other hand, maybe we didn't...

I don't believe in God and yet I do. I believe in the rational, but if there exists a quantum universe in which all possibilities may exist, then the irrational is equally possible to the rational, and together they composite a greater rationality that defies explanation to our limited brains.

Judaism is already the religion of hedging bets. Read, if you can stay awake, any page of Talmud and you read centuries of Rabbis ruling on every possible exception to every possible law, a discourse of rulings and exceptions that continues to this very day. Theology itself is the rational justification of that which cannot be rationalized, and finding practical ways to pursue beliefs that severely limit our life choices.

I believe in the rational as much as I believe in irrationality, and I find it difficult to believe a person can function cognitively without incorporating both into their worldview. All things of this world are irrational until they can be explained, as so many things are now, but just because we've found explanations to questions thus far does not mean that we will find explanations for everything else.

But for all our progress, we still have not explained human behavior nor how to reform it. With every human progression is an equal and opposite regression. Is it worth no longer living in huts and hunting with spears if every new era of human progress results in wars that claimed millions? Even now when we might have evolved past world war, we've declared war on the planet and a million species stand on the precipice of extinction. It would seem that our purpose in this universe is not to solve problems, but to struggle with them.

So my religion balances the rational and the irrational. The sacred is the sacred and you can't change what the sacred is, but you can honor the sacred by paying lip service to what it states without believing it. We've rid ourselves of all sorts of biblical commandments like slavery, genocide, punishment by stoning, why not rid ourselves of commandments over homosexuality and abortion and science? The old books say what they say, and it's too much trouble to change them, but we can laugh at these books even as we honor them, and we can laugh at believing in their dark aspects too literally. By taking these 'sins' as no more serious than a person who occasionally double parks, we do more to change the minds of the fanatics than launching a culture war ever could.

All the great religions teach one lesson above all - there is no such thing as overcoming a struggle. One victory leads to yet another struggle, and this world is the constant presence of problems that need to be solved, and solutions that create new problems. So my religion is to honor that no problem can truly be solved, but some problems can be ignored, and the less attention we pay to them, the less they seem like problems.

If I'm a Jew, then I call my brand of Judaism 'Liberal Orthodox.' It's an implied criticism against orthodox people who neglect modern developments that are clearly improvements, and just as much an implied criticism of revolutionaries who think we can progress without upholding tradition.

Our era, like every era, is divided in two: between those who embrace the rational and those who embrace the irrational; but no peaceful existence is possible when both sides terrify each other.

There is no progress without taking the ancient wisdom along with us into the future, and there is no wisdom without ditching the ancient foolishness for the sake of the future. We think of it as a cliche that there is no future without a past, but the point of remembering the past is not to uphold it but to critique it, to engage with it, to figure out exactly what went wrong and what went right so that the future goes more right than the past.

If we do not honor religion, religion will kill us. If we do not honor progress, progress will kill us. The world needs religions that make its most fervent believers feel accepted, and the world's religions need to accept their most rejected peoples.

That's why I call my denomination 'Liberal Orthodox.' It is meant to be a denomination of only one, and I'd excommunicate anybody who tries to join me. It preserves the traditions without update: no changes to the old liturgy, no mixed seating, no women on the bimah, 'don't ask don't tell' about LGBTQ in the service, but with the understanding that anything more would be useless changes because they're distractions from the issues that matter. I say, throw the orthodox these bones that matter so much to them so that they do not stand in our way for the modern issues that matter to us. Show them that we honor the religion, and maybe, just maybe, 1-3% of them won't fight so hard when it comes to the issues we need progress about.

The world is at its best when it lives peacefully with itself, regardless of the details. If we can live peaceably with our past, we can live peacefully into our future.

These are my beliefs.

Amen.

Why I'm Tempted to Take Back My Apology

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Don't worry, I'm not...

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The good life is about two-and-a-half things:

1. looking at everybody's shit and calling them on every one of the hundred toxic elements in their choices.

2. embracing them anyway, forgiving them anyway, loving them anyway.

21/2. Doing the same for yourself.

You, dear reader, are fucking toxic: every one of you; hateful, gross, a miasma of self-righteous hypocrisies, an impediment to people's well-being, the world is a worse place for you being a part of it.

So am I.

And you, dear same reader, are amazing: every one of you; the cause of love for some and love's very source for others. The world is better for you being a part of it: more enlightened,more fulfilled, more loving, more meaningful.

Fuck you, and thank you for everything you do.

Humans are mysterious creatures, irredeemably flawed yet worthy of redemption precisely because they persist in spite of flaws to try harder, be better, put off their failures without even perceiving their successes. Every success is as temporary as every failure. Every success leads to failure and every failure leads to success. Humans are all the moreso worth embracing because they fail so often. If humans succeeded to be better all the time, they wouldn't be worth anything. It's the effort to change, the perpetual struggle to change, that makes humans worth forgiving.

It's not a secret that I view the various social scenes as toxic that I've been bound to for eleven years. I could try to deny it at this point but who'd I be fooling? I've said it so often that I'm amazed anybody still talks to me. So many people I know reek of sanctimony and are all the uglier because they think that their worst side is their best. The world is slowly dying because so many alleged progressives pressure each other to conform to widely held cultural norms that grow ever more extreme for lack of intellectual diversity. Anybody who dissents at even a whisper is suspect of low character. Even if they're an angel in their personal conduct they can only be considered a 'friend with an *.'

And yet how am I any different?

The paradox is that simply by my insistence on having pointed it out for so many years, I'm the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, arrogant prig/prick of them all. If I'm at all a part of this (now ageing) segment of a city that is about a hundredth as 'weird' as they think they are, then who in this enclave could possibly define self-righteousness better than me?

And it goes just as much for my extremely pickled culture of origin. To be perfectly honest, it's a fucking toxic place that had I a different skill set I'd have left decades ago and burned the bridge. It might have been a terrible mistake, but I could have at least seen for myself if anywhere was any different and made a more enlightened decision about what's true in the big world.

The many J___ who populate my town of origin are the shallowest, most uncurious, most spoiled and wasteful people in the history of my people. They took the greatest opportunity in the history of the J_____ people and flushed it down their formica toilets to live lives of material selfishness and egotistical self-advancement, and in the process may have damned new generations of J___ to living a life as dangerous as those lived by all of their ancestors. Any adult or child who does not fit their Mandelbrot shaped cookie-cutter is a second-class citizen of the town, a J__ among J__s.

And yet, whom among them is more spoiled, wasteful, egotistical and arrogant than I?

(I'm going to omit this paragraph, the hurt is frankly too deep...)

It's easy to get along when you feel no resentment or hostility, but no soul is gained from that. We earn our souls, and we earn them by struggling through our resentments to see the best in people we resent. What we resent, even what we object to, are just small parts in the totality of each person. The world is full of the temptations to judge and condemn, and yet none of us knows the full extent of the hurt and horror that warps people into what offends us about them.

Now, I realize, nobody wants to hang around the guy who says 'you're a fucking ass' all the time, and yet you don't know me either. You may think, dear reader, you know me as well as you know anybody in your everyday life.

You don't know shit.

Fortunately.

You don't know what made me what I am any more than I know what made you. It's possible that I don't even know what made me any better too. If I can be this smug about other people's holier than thou tendencies, doesn't that make me the least self-aware of all?

So yes, I'm tempted overwhelmingly to take back the apology and go on pointing that silver finger at the world. I won't do it, but I'm tempted.

The point is that you or me, we don't really know each other, many of us have to in some way forgive each other for what we find objectionable, and learn to live together as some sort of community with people whose good intentions we doubt.

I'm game if you are. Some of you will be, some of you won't. For those who are, thank you, and I'll try to keep my finger pointed at those who stay away.

My Literary Lingua Franca

I think every reader has a writer or two who is their 'lingua franca' and speaks to them from the first reading as though they knew these books all their life.

For me, those writers are 'The Brothers Singer', Yiddish writers and along with the Naipauls perhaps the most eminent literary siblings since the Brontes. Like the brothers Naipaul, one seems to overshadow the other, and while the Nobel winning Isaac Bashevis Singer is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, his older brother is very nearly that. Israel Joshua Singer's most famous work, The Brothers Ashkenazi, was such a Yiddish bestseller that apparently it outsold every book in the US in the year of its release except Gone With the Wind.

...or so I've read.

Both Yitzhak Bashevis and Yisroel Yehoshua dip their pen into the same alchemical solution whose ingredients are a family secret, but while Yitzhak turned his pen inward toward the soul, Yisroel turned it outward toward the world. Yitzhak writes about sinners and ghosts, and God and the Devil. Yisroel writes about money and corruption, betrayal and hatred. If Yitzhak sounds like Dostoevsky and Poe if they were books in the Tanakh, then Yisroel sounds like Tolstoy and Balzac if they were edited by Kafka.

Excepting “War and Peace,” it is difficult to think of a novel that gives the same epic sense of the world as a giant machine that constantly expands and contracts, that whirls itself into events beyond the control of any person and then comes to rest at its own caprice, having crushed millions of lives in its gears. Having lived through the last seven years, this tale of Lodz and Petrograd a century ago is all too vivid a warning of what may yet come.

Like so much in Bashevis, “The Brothers Ashkenazi” contains passages disturbing enough to be in “Game of Thrones.” Nevertheless, what stays with the reader is not the broken taboos but the cruelty of the characters. It shows that World War may have been inevitable because every member of a society was focused on his or her own advancement. In the process, characters betray fathers and wives, brothers and daughters, nieces and inlaws. Every character seeks to control their own destiny, only for destiny to control them.

It’s both a medieval morality tale, and an accurate rendering of how history happens. The less humility and generosity we have to those for whom contempt comes naturally, the more likely we pay for our contempt with cataclysm. We may be living “The Brothers Ashkenazi,” thinking that we can all control our lives, only for life to control us. We are not all separate bodies, but symptoms of a diseased body that can only cleanse itself by killing off millions of cells — a body for which Jews are always accused of being the parasite.