Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Religion

Closing the Circle

Yesterday we observed Yom Kippur, a day that always strikes a strange balance between finality and renewal. The end and the beginning of a circle. Much to be pondered, between the call for atonement and the tenet that on this day your fate is sealed for the next year. What happened to the promise that if you try harder, things might change? If the outcome is preordained on this day, why try at all? Can your honest remorse move the outcome, just a little bit?

These are, of course, the naive questions of someone not particularly educated in the interpretations of Judaic commands, but they are questions any person should ask themselves in general. What is the relationship between redemption and effort? How do you motivate yourself to be and do good, regardless of reward that might or might not be dangled in front of you? Why do different religions take such different views of predestination – some as fatalistic as Calvinism, where everything is believed to be immutably preordained?

How do you function if there is no hope for forgiveness or change, no acknowledgment of agency? Is there a connection to the attempts of many religions that appease you with promises for a better time in the after life or during the next one? A successful attempt to square the circle?

I can’t provide satisfactory answers. I can, however, show you why circles were on my mind to begin with.

The recently opened basketball arena for the Golden State Warriors, Chase Center, is a singularly unimaginative building (at least from the outside,) in my opinion a squandered opportunity to build something new and exciting in a marvelous location overlooking the bay, for $500 million no less. Many longtime residents also felt that constructing a new arena for the Warriors is a manifestation of the phenomenon of gentrification. Additionally, many who supported the Warriors throughout their years at Oracle Arena feel betrayed by the team’s decision to relocate to San Francisco. There is also the issue of public costs associated with the new arena, both in San Francisco and Oakland. Or so Wikipedia tells me.

In front of the entrance are huge mirrors, art work by olafur eliasson which consists of five fifteen-and-a-half-feet-tall polished hydro-formed steel spheres that stand in a circle around a central space. Seeing Spheres (2019) double and redouble the reflections around them, making the space look larger than it is and drawing the Instagram crowd and other photographers, your’s truly included.

Associations to Paul Klee’s work with circles were one of the things that came to mind when I looked at myself in those circles with their conic sections, looking not a day under 90 when the skies were colored by fire, aging like the person in his 1922 portrait Senecio (BaldGreis.) The title is believed to refer to a medicinal plant Senecio Vulgaris, also known as Old Man in the Spring, and is also a pun in German, literally translated along the lines of soon to be senile.

The painter has not only done wonders with wit, circles, squares and lines, echoes of which I saw all around me when staring into the Eliasson spheres. He has also left us with a map to understanding the strategies, methods and insights leading to his creative output – his notebooks (Bildnerische Form- und Gestaltungslehre) document 10 years of lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus. They are available in their completeness with transcriptions, drawings and references here (not sure if translated into English, though.)

Gaze, 1922
Gaze, 2020

Now where can we find an equally detailed and instructive map for figuring out how to lead a morally and ethically sound life in the Jewish year 5781 without being inscribed for an immutable outcome? Or any old year?

Music today is an homage to Klee, a concert with pieces that show parallels between his visual art and music. Some educational talk in-between, but worth listening to the pieces!

4 Comments

L’Shanah Tovah

“ARMENIANS AGAINST HATE” it says in fat letters on a large banner hoisted in front of an Armenian Community Center. I drive past that center twice daily, since arriving in San Francisco a month and a half ago to tend to my son, severely injured from a catastrophic paragliding accident. It is located between the Beth Israel Judea Synagogue and the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church on the aptly named Brotherhood Way.

I can never predict when the banner is up, its appearance sporadic. But my mind is glued to the statement whenever I drive by, searching for interpretation. What hate are they against? The one extended towards them by their genocidal persecutors, or the one they feel towards their historic enemy? The hate in the world, bubbling up wherever we look in these desperate times? Are they really able to speak for the group at large, a uniform Armenian mindset?

My mind roils, the topic of hate of personal relevance. I find myself caught by hate these days, an emotion I despise and have rarely given into across my lifetime. I hate the cruel twist of fate that destroyed my kid’s body in a nanosecond of miscalculating height and wind speed. I hate the medical system that is unable to provide pain relief for crushed spinal nerves, phantom pain and abdominal spasms. I hate the war with insurance companies trying to duck out of obligations. I hate the way the urban environment is set up, making it hard to push the wheelchair.

On a more universal level, I hate the way the pandemic is allowed to rage, adding isolation to someone confined to a sickroom to begin with. Hating the tragedy of unnecessary deaths for those exposed to the dangers of the virus for lack of economic security, the drama of all these generations of children missing out on equal education. I hate the system that allows climate change to go unchecked, leading to fires that bring untold suffering to mankind and nature. I hate the way I see the poorest of the poor, the unhoused, crowd the sidewalks unprotected from the ashy air, cough shaking their emaciated bodies.

I don’t want to be consumed by hate. In some ways I cling to it, however, as a protective measure. If I peeled back the layer of hate, like peeling back the layers of an onion, I’d come to layers so suffused with grief and fear I might not function. Just like thinking about the riddle of hate-opposed Armenians protects me from thoughts about my helplessness in view of suffering for yet another day, week, month, year, the anger protects me from far more painful feelings.

Yet today, according to the Jewish Calendar, we end this year and start off fresh. A period of contemplation invited to draw parallels with what people lived through and survived for thousands of years, putting personal hardship in perspective. Reflection on right and wrong instills a sense of obligation to go beyond individual tragic times and focus on communal effort to improve the world as a whole against the forces of darkness that currently surround us.

I will peel the onion. Tears will flow. May they cleanse the way to the promise of sweetness still contained in a possible future. L’Shanah Tovah.

7 Comments

Consider the Lilies of the Field.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: Matthew 6:28 (King James Version (KJV) of the New Testament.)

In a week where a bible was used as a prop and a dogwhistle, let us actually open one. You don’t have to be Christian to be familiar with these words from the Sermon on the Temple Mount; nor do you need to be religious to understand the meaning of the entreaty: there is a higher power that provides for you, do not spend your life in fear.

In general, I’m all in favor of being counseled not to fret. I do start to get suspicious, though, when it becomes an admonition for those worried about their existential conditions, asking for help only to be quieted by vague references to a God who will provide, rather than to be allowed to demand a share of the pie.

A God, in the case that I am trying to think through today, that is also known as the free market. Before you judge me blasphemous, I am just using the metaphor as a pointer to the economic concept of all-knowing, invisible forces that regulate our society for the good of all, rising tides carrying little ships, trailing freedom in their wake. Or so they say.

Funny thing is, while we all are told not to worry, there are others who systematically, sometimes clandestinely, work hard on being protected from anything that could make them worried. They do so by shifting risk to those who cannot easily defend themselves. I believe knowing some of the history of our economic system in this regard is essential to understand why we see such concentrated, pent-up rage (beyond the injustices of racism) of large parts of the population in the course of the pandemic.

My (by necessity simplified) summary today is derived, among others, from articles I read by Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Edward A. Purcell, Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School, both not exactly hotbeds of anti-capitalist insurgency, last I checked. The worries, in other words, are described by people who are generally in favor of a market economy.

There have, at the ideological extremes, always been two views about capitalism. For some it produced freedom, opportunity, economic growth and ultimately led to prosperity, democracy, and international cooperation. It linked your risk taking to your reward. For others it created massive inequalities, political oppression, and international rivalries and ultimately led to fascism, imperialism, and war. It saw no reward for those who shouldered most of the risk. Yet all agree that our economic system has always bent towards methodical risk calculation. You could make money with it: think Life Insurance. Or bets on the stock exchange. Or risking a fortune to develop a medicine that in turn made you even richer. Yet in addition to calculating risk to create value, e.g. take risk as an entrepreneur or corporation, those who had the means have managed to shift anticipated risk to weaker parties.

“Releases” from workplace or consumer injuries, “independent contractor” agreements, anti-union policies, race- and gender-based wage discriminations, and the use of part-time employees and unpaid interns shifted operational costs onto the weak, uninformed, and vulnerable. On a more sophisticated level investment banks, brokerage firms, and credit agencies used risk analysis to design complicated financial instruments that generated huge fees and profits while shifting the risks of those instruments onto distant, ill-informed, and often misled investors.” (Ref.)

Some general form of risk shifting has forever dominated our system: we historically asked our government (the taxpayer, all off us) to shoulder the greatest risks for the benefit of private profiteers. The government was called to build and maintain massive infra- structure, invest in institutions that secured order, like “courts, postal services, and police and military protection to highways, canals, railroads, and facilities for air travel to the internet, cybernetics, digitalization, and nanotechnologies, government investment and leadership underwrote economic growth, spurred ever more efficient methods of transportation and communication, and generated stunning new technologies that entrepreneurs exploited to create new products and industries. “(Ref.)

Industries also exploit risk by selling you things to “reduce risk,” (AK-15s , anyone?) or lie about the danger of products to continue selling them (cigarettes, anyone?) Risk assessments are used to discriminate against certain groups of customers (higher interest rates or premiums) etc.

Importantly, businesses avoid risks of liability for the wrongs they cause by adopting legal devices that make it impossible to sue them. We are seeing a clear case of that now in what is discussed around Covid-19 related infections, industry liability laws and Trump’s Executive Order. If your unemployment benefits run out and you HAVE to go to work to put food on the table, into an environment that does not protect you from infection, you have no recourse if you get sick. Which also means employers will have ever less incentive to make the work place safe. We are worse off than before the 1920s, after which ultimately workers’ compensation programs were passed to help with death and disability. Even though these programs are still around, they only compensate for documented injuries incurred on the job – virus transmission on the job cannot be easily verified. It looks like organizations are succeeding in pushing us back into early industrial America, before (socialized) safety-nets were established.

In other words the original link between risk and reward, the historical justification for the way our economic system works, is broken. The increasing demand for ever less interference in “free market” regulations, calls for less taxation and fewer social welfare programs add to the destruction. We see the consequence of this anti-government sentiment clearly: tax-cuts brought huge deficits and reliance on foreign investment. Budget cuts led to decline in services and safety-net measures. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Public education is undermined. And wealth inequality is rising to proportions that were unthinkable during the early, enthusiastic days of capitalism. And now we have 40 million people without a job, and consequently without health insurance, with no end in sight. Economists predict that up to 40% of the lost jobs will never be reinstated and we are facing long-term unemployment worse than that of the Great Depression, all while awaiting the announcement of the first ever trillionaire.

We started with Matthew. Let’s end with Proverbs. 31:9, to be precise (KJV):

“Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”

Check.

Music today is mix of protest ballads. Here and in Germany.

1 Comments

Invented Words

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.” –Joseph Conrad

Yesterday I wrote about Ida B. Wells’ intention and ability to make the world see with her words, see the disgrace, the horrors, the inhumanity on one side, but also the innocence, the courage and the determination on the other. It brought to mind, don’t ask me why, the power of another unusual woman who tried to make the world see, with new words, an entire new language in fact, focussed on the beauty and blessings of the world around us.

No clue, what propelled Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) into my consciousness, other than perhaps a chain of associations to remarkable females, particularly those who lived in times where everything but everything was stacked against their ability to leave a mark. (Times that lasted – it took more than 800 years for the church to canonize her, in 2012, finally.)

We generally know her as a 12th century Benedictine Abbess, a mystic, a composer, a scientist, poet, writer and artist, who had visions, most likely induced by severe migraines. We might remember that she founded two monasteries, in the Rhineland, a fertile part of Germany, and flew, for the most part, under the radar of Church authorities with her unorthodox teachings, since they simply took her not seriously as a woman.

We don’ think of her as the tenth child in her family, brought into an isolated monastery as a gift to the church as an 8-year old, confined to a stone cell with a small window for most of her life, with one meager meal in winter, two in summer. Or as a crafty rebel. I remember a story in my childhood “Famous Women in History” primer that had her act more like an Enid Blyton heroine than a nun:

“A man who had been excommunicated for involvement in revolutionary activity died, and she gave permission for his burial in the abbey cemetery. With the local bishop absent, the canons of the church demanded Hildegard exhume the body from consecrated ground. She refused, claiming she knew the man’s sins had been forgiven. So the canons authorized civil authorities to dig up the body. On the evening before their arrival, Hildegard, vested in her attire as abbess, went to the grave, blessed it, and then, with the help of her nuns, removed all the cemetery markers and stones, so the plot of the excommunicated man could not be identified. The irate canons placed the abbey under interdict; Mass, sacraments and the singing of the divine office were forbidden on its premises. Still, she would not yield. Church authorities finally lifted the interdict. “

I had no clue that she invented an entire language, Lingua Ignota, that was likely intended to make the holiness in all things visible, acknowledging how a higher power shapes our existence. The Lingua Ignota can be found in the Riesen Codex (Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 2, ff 461v-464v), also called the Giant or Chain Codex, a compilation of Hildegard’s theological writings that were collected near Hildegard’s death. The language consists of about 1000 words, introduced with but one sentence, who appear in the hierarchical order of her medieval world: God and angels, then humans, then animals, then plants etc. The words are entirely new, but shaped by German and Latin roots and pronunciations, though apparently having a sing-song feel, which, of course, ties into her extraordinary musical gifts.

Here is a sample:

  • Aigonz – God
  • Aieganz – Angel
  • Inimois – Human
  • Korzinthio – Prophet
  • Peueriz – Father
  • Maiz – Mother
  • Sciniz – Stammerer
  • Kaueia – Wife
  • Ornalz – The hair of a woman
  • Milischa – the hair of a man
  • Pusinzia – Snot
  • Zizia – Mustache
  • Fluanz – Urine
  • Fuscal – Foot
  • Sancciuia – Crypt
  • Abiza – House
  • Amozia – Eucharist
  • Pereziliuz – Emperor
  • Bizioliz – Drunkard
  • Haischa – Turtle Dove

Only for the curious (and those with expendable time) here is a video that explains the details – high speed talk and thought of a Jewish scholar, who draws interesting conclusions.

Here is another Jewish scholar of mysticism:

“Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.” –Abraham Joshua Herschel

For Hildegard von Bingen the deeds envisioned to spring from her words were perhaps acts of faith. For Ida B. Wells it was political action aimed at ending racism. Which words will WE choose today to act on?

Photographs are from Heinsberg, a small town in the Rhineland, where I went to school and which had symbols of the catholic faith distributed everywhere. (Incidentally it is also the place where one of the first serious Covid-19 outbreak in Germany occurred – during the gregarious, touchy/feely times of the annual carnival before Lent.

2 Comments

Happily ever after?

Several large wedding ceremonies were held over the last weeks in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish Community, despite the city’s requirements of social distancing and federal recommendations to avoid large groups. As of last Saturday more than 240 participants registered as fallen ill, in three clusters in Borough Park and Williamsburg. Not only is this a tragedy for the families and neighborhoods involved, but the insistence on large communal events is also sparking fears of anti-Semitic reprisals.

Blaming the Jews is, of course, nothing new. (I am not endorsing holding mass weddings right now, mind you, even if religious laws are cited to justify them. Last I looked, a primary pillar of Judaism is the value of life, which allows all kinds of abandoning of rules associated with Shabbat, fasts, etc., when a life is to be protected.) I am more interested in the fall-out from irrationality and behavior in the face of looming, uncontrollable diseases.

Here are some of the historical facts. Jews were persecuted in huge numbers, whole communities, whenever epidemics broke out (and particularly through out the mid-1300s with the first wave of the Black Death), accused of malevolent well-poisoning. This was done by the local gentile populations even if the Church or the worldly rulers warned against it, partially driven by the convenient fact that the confiscated belongings of the murdered would be distributed among the villagers. Hundreds of Jewish communities were massacred, even though as a group they had been harder hit by the plague than most. Their constrained living quarters in ghettos and lack of access to clean water made them a sitting target for the fleas that brought the disease.

*

Blaming the Other is, however, not a preoccupation solely reserved for non-Jews. There is plenty of evidence of irrational accusations to be found in Jewish history as well. Natan M. Meir, the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, is about to publish a book that lays out in great detail how Eastern European Jewry resorted to fear management via scapegoating marginalized figures in their own communities. Stepchildren of the Shtetl, The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 will be published in July, 2020. Assuming we are still home-bound by then, it might be just the right thing to read when we need to convince ourselves that things could always be worse….(Having spent some time with Natan when we were both panelists discussing text and translations of Jewish sources, I can vouch for the passion and learnedness he brings to everything he tackles.)

It seems that during the 1866 cholera epidemic, some Hasidic communities “declared that Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings were to blame for the epidemic,” with physical attacks on them following in short order. More generally, Rabbis blamed adultery as causal factors with some stories told that adulterers, reported by community members, were killed to help abate the disease.

And then there was the magical thinking tied to a completely different approach: the cholera wedding also known as the black wedding, believed to mitigate the impact of the scourge. (Excerpts from a review of the upcoming book here )

“The cholera wedding generally involved finding two of the most marginal residents of the town (whether orphans, beggars, or the physically handicapped) and forcibly marrying them, usually in the cemetery. The cholera wedding, also known as a shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene (plague wedding) was presented as an ancient Jewish rite, but Meir argues, it was a newly invented, modern response to what was then a newly arrived disease. Because it was a late-developing belief and not textually based, the mechanism by which it was believed to work is open to interpretation.

The last one we know of over here, happened during the flu epidemic 1918, in Winnipeg, “at one end of the Shaarey Zedek cemetery in the city’s North End, a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Jewish and gentile guests, with a minyan of 10 Jewish men conducting a funeral for an influenza victim at the other end of the graveyard.”

The cholera wedding didn’t have one single interpretation. For example, some rabbis felt it was efficacious because helping to marry off a needy bride was a great mitsve that would please God, all the more so for the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry in any case. However, what comes across in many of the appalling descriptions of the forcibly married, and their reactions to each other, is that the act was far more callous than charitable. But it was enabled by traditional attitudes around communal charity. Those who had relied on it were seen as being, quite literally, property of the townspeople and thus had no say when their (previously reviled) bodies were needed to protect the town.”

Who owns whom, and who owes what is a topic that really emerges in many contexts in these pestilential times, beyond issues of magical thinking, religious beliefs and despairing search for ways to ward off the worst. We’ll look into more of that during this week in the context of economy and power structures. At least that’s the plan.

Music from London-based She’Koyokh which will bring a spring into your step on another lonesome Monday.

If I could only visit to photograph you all dancing while liberally applying disinfectant to the surfaces of your homes….

0 Comments

Christmas Eve

I crave determination, cherish stubbornness, and celebrate intent. It can find you room in a stable, convert a manger into a cradle, get you through childbirth among strangers. It drives you across oceans and deserts, where you are about as likely to drown or die from exposure as not when fleeing war and torture in your homeland. It makes you hide what little is left of detergent so the teens in your refugee camp on the Greek islands cannot use it to attempt suicide in their despair.

I have often thought of faith as a form of determination. Take Christianity, for example. If people under the most dire of circumstances sit on Christmas eve and relish a reading of Luke (1-2,) with eyes now shining from the promise in Bethlehem instead of from tears, there is determination to keep up hope. Really a sheer stubbornness to keep the belief alive that somehow, somewhere there will be justice, as implied by the birth of God’s child. Never mind the inconsistencies when that same Luke (18-16) calls for letting the little children come, unhindered, but good Christians in Germany and Europe in general refuse dry-eyed to allow the 4000 (!) minors to escape the limbus of the aegean circles of hell. I’m not even starting to talk about the cruel disgrace closer to home. (And I am not exempting other religions from hypocrisy either (just look at Palestine) – it was just an example.)

Should we stop writing about the darkness that is hovering, stop reading about the despair descending? In the public world or the private one(s) with their own forms of impending doom? No, we should NOT! We should be determined to walk upright and do the right thing and preserve our last bit of self-respect and self-determination – and then share it with others, help them to prevail as well. Faith demands it. As does a different moral compass for the faithless, structured by a different underlying tale. Let us all be stubbornly inclined towards justice, in solidarity!

Verities

By Grace Cavalieri

Maybe she had dementia,
the old lady in the woolen hat,
I don’t know, but she
stopped short in the middle of the aisle,
when her son shouted, PUT THAT BACK.
Clutching a small bag of chips –
like a newborn against her chest,
like a prayer,
like something she owned –
her face collapsed,
Please, but no sound came except,
PUT IT BACK! NOW! PUT IT BACK!
This was Christmas Eve, not that it matters;
Why even embellish a story like that.
I can only tell you I walked behind her
as she walked behind her son,
until I could no longer watch,
yet there was something about
her lopsided hat, her lowered head
that made me sure
no matter what happened next,
she would not put it back.

Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright and radio host of “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland. She was awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from WASH INDEP REVIEW. She received the George Garrett Award from AWP for Service to Literature, the Allen Ginsberg, Paterson Award, Bordighera and Columbia Poetry Awards, A Pen Fiction Award,  CPB’s Silver Medal.

Photographs from yesterday’s walk near the ICE facility with its detainee holding cells on Bancroft/Macadam Ave. If you look closely below, you can also see homeless encampments dangerously close to the river.

And here is the perfect music for Notte di Natale by Corelli, cormorant giving his blessings.

1 Comments

I sometimes wonder…

I sometimes wonder where people come up with language that is at once enticing and also really, really far fetched. “Bedeviled by wanderlust” is an example, which sounds really cool and makes no sense when applied to a young child running away from home or a teenager trying to prove her independence (by biking alone through Spain, in 1886, no less.) “Stricken by lust for adventure” is equally annoying, when applied to that same traveler in her late seventies.

I am talking here about comments made about Alexandra David-Neel, who was neither bedeviled nor stricken, but just an all around feisty personality drawn to exploring the world. And then some. Never heard of her? Even though she spent 101 years on this planet, born in 1868, a celebrated opera singer, a writer and expert on Tibetan culture, an anarchist and learned Buddhist, no one seems to remember her, while they are all reminiscing about Gertrude Bell….

Well, a few people do. Here is some of her story in more detail.

Born to a French journalist father and a Belgian mother, she grew up in Paris. (Thus today’s photographs of neighborhoods she might have wandered.) David-Neel spent much of her middle life in Asia, after blowing through her inheritance and some of her (distant) husband’s fortune. She almost died of starvation in the Gobi desert (it is rumored the 5 feet tall adventuress boiled and ate the leather of her boots to survive,) escaped part of WWI in Japan and Korea (only to witness the brutality of Imperial Japan two decades later during WWII in China) and later met the Dalai Lama. She became passionately involved with Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal, the spiritual leader of Sikkim, who later died of poisoning while she was traveling.

Unable to return to Europe due to the outbreak of World War I, she fled and traveled over 5,000 miles by yak, mule and horse to Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and China, together with a young Lama, Aphur Yongden, whom she adopted in 1929 and who taught her Tibetan and traveled and lived with her for the rest of his life. Arrived at Kumbum Monastery, they immersed themselves in the study of rare manuscripts for three years, painstakingly translating Prajnaparamita (Sanskrit doctrines dating from the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD), the famous Heart Sutra, into French.

Through it all she became one of the foremost early experts on Tibetan culture in the world. Her 25 books on Eastern religion, culture, and travel included several that highly influenced the Beat poets, such as, “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” and the still amazing, “My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City.”

Here is a source where you can read a few preserved letters.

She walked through parts of China into India when she was in her late seventies before she returned to France, with enough funds from her book revenues to buy a house in Provence where she lived until age 101. It is noticeable, how the few who keep up the memory of this extraordinary woman focus on the adventure aspects of her life, or the independence shown by a woman in an era where it was rare. Here is the exception, written in Tricycle, a Buddhist Review:

“A woman who spent years in a mountain hermitage, who sat in meditation halls with thousands of lamas, who studied languages and scoured libraries for original teachings, who traveled for many years and for thousands of miles to immerse herself in a culture which few people had ever even heard of, writes with far more insight than someone who has only read about such experiences. It is her devotion to Buddhism and her willingness to trace it to its source that are finally most impressive about her life.”

David-Neel’s cutting-edge scholarship, her exploration of and dedication to the practice of Buddhism almost come as an afterthought for most of us. Do we focus on her daring rather than her spirituality because the former is newsworthy, the other old-hat with women? Or is there something similar going on to what I offered yesterday (in that case that there was a gender-based interaction between the reader or viewer and the writer or critic?) Even when learning about people outside of politics or other salient areas of controversy, we hone in on the information that suits us best, conforms to our schemas, plays to our desires or fits with our ideas of how the world should be. I’m the first to admit to it.

And what else struck me as admirable, fitting into my own preoccupations? Through all of her travels and adventures she insisted on a daily bath and a cook, the two remnants of her bourgeois upbringing that she could not, would not shed. My kind of woman! Just wondering if cook prepared the leather boots meal for her too….

Music today is from an opera about her by Zack Settel and Yan Muckle, 2 short excerpts and then a clip about the making of the opera.

1 Comments

Contemplation

Animals have a great advantage over man: they never hear the clock strike, however intelligent they may be; they die without any idea of death; they have no theologians to instruct them…Their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and often objectionable ceremonies; it costs them nothing to be buried; no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

—Voltaire

Who can say what cows feel, when they surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?

—Charles Darwin

It was the last day before the cows would be herded to different grazing grounds. Hunting season begins October 1st, and they have to be out of the way. It was thus also the last day for a walk around this particular area of Sauvie Island. From now until April 1st hikes are severely restricted.

I have no clue what cows feel. Does the possibility of not knowing about death outweigh the burden of not knowing that pain ends, either? Be it the fleeting pain that you and I know will be gone either by passage of time or the next dose of Ibuprofen? Or the chronic pain that we know will end with the loss of our current consciousness?

I have also always wondered about the fact that cows look at you. Ever noticed? Other animals out in the open might strike you with an evaluative glance before they decide to scurry to safety. Maybe your domesticated friends look at you when they want food, a walk or are simply bored or proud to show off a trick – but that prolonged stare of interest that you get from cows who don’t expect anything from you? It is puzzling.

Of course the premise that animals don’t know about death itself – still prevalent in the early 1970s, when anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Denial of Death that nonhuman animals know nothing about dying: “The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it” – is questionable. Scientists now believe that at least some species recognize the special nature of death, elephants and chimpanzees among them. There is certainly some form of grieving in evidence, when loss occurs.

*

You might wonder why the theme of death pops up a second day in a row: it is the season in the Jewish calendar where thoughts of life and death (as well as our personal behavior and responsibility for our actions) is writ large. The days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement are meant to be days of contemplation, days of fear of punishment but also of hope that repentance and change is possible and able to avert divine retribution. The core of the message – independent of religious belief – speaks to me: annual re-assessment of our own moral compass and conscious decisions to try to do better is a valuable thing.

The poem that is recited on the High Holidays, the Un’taneh tokef, captures it aptly, with looming threats and the possibility of getting it to the point.

Here is an excerpt:

Let us now relate the power of this day’s holiness, for it is awesome and frightening. …….All mankind will pass before You like a flock of sheep. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the destinies of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity annul the severe Decree.

……

Here is a traditional recitation by a Cantor.

And here is a Leonard Cohen songs that riffs of the poem:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMaBreDuF4

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur – I will be off-line.

And thus the inevitable question if cows like music has to wait for another day.

3 Comments

L’Shanah Tovah

Happy New Year to my friends and family who celebrate this new beginning – let’s hope the year 5780 allows for a re-set. In our private sphere, public life or wherever else it is needed.

Happy reading to them and everyone else of the two pieces below. In my attempt to make this year more balanced than the last, I have added something serious and something funny: one piece explains the meaning of the holiday in ways that I find affirmative and encouraging. They provide us a reminder and a space to check if we are keeping up with our resolution to lead an ethical life, and a nudge to do better…

https://theconversation.com/universal-ethical-truths-are-at-the-core-of-jewish-high-holy-days-123831

The other piece is just – well – hilarious. (Source: The ONION)

In keeping with my decades of tradition to make a Rosh Hashanah image, here is another version of apples, to sweeten the year. Note, no honey…. the other traditional ingredient. That is meant to remind all of us to step up in our engagement towards protecting the environment – otherwise we’ll have no more bees to bring us sweetness. Or pollinate plants in general to provide our food.

0 Comments

Oh, just go to hell, they say

Actually it’s what I say. Every morning I say this when some fresh news pops up on my screen that confirms the sorry state of our public realm. I either say or think these words, un-specifically directed at the source of the bad news, my computer, or the world in general if I have a particularly bad morning.

Funny thing is, of course, that I believe neither in heaven nor in hell, as is Jewish custom and, in my view, required of me as a scientist. It was all the more interesting to come across a podcast that discusses a book about the origins of the concept. Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Torment by Marq de Villiers promises to be a fun and educational romp, should these kind of things interest you.

Here are some of the bits that I remember being discussed:

  • The majority of people in the US (60% and up) believe in hell, while not quite that many (40% or so) believe in heaven. Huh? In Canada that ratio is apparently reversed. Riddle me that….. Then again, many smart people did buy into the concept, across all of history, with Galileo, for example, trying to calculate the exact depth of hell under the surface of the earth…..
  • Almost all religions in the world (Judaism being a noted exception) have a construct of hell (some up to 44.ooo of them, one specific one for every imaginable infraction. I am hard pressed to come up with even 100 infractions. But then again, I’ve always been a good girl. Well, let’s not go into that. There is a hell for lying, I am certain.)
  • There is an incredibly interesting historic evolution of the notion of external punishment:
  • Even in the early days of mankind, when animistic notions prevailed, people needed to satisfy their hunger for causal models. Why did something go wrong that shouldn’t have? Why, some demon must have interfered! We see the first externalization onto some invisible beings.
  • With later increasing urbanization, people were better able to witness all the malevolence around them, murder, adultery, greed and embezzlement. Bad people seemed to prosper, which undermined another psychological need of all of us: the assumption that the world is just. Ok, so we just add on a next chapter, the afterlife, and that’s when things will get put right. And it will be judged by some invisible entity who can decide what fate awaits you, having clairvoyance as to what has been going on in your soul. Note that the very early cultures with this concept did not necessarily imply you would be punished – you just would not be ferried across a bridge, or down a river, or into a hole to enter the afterlife. For many African cultures it meant you would either be revered as an ancestor (good) or simply forgotten (bad=extinguished.)
  • It was the ancient Greeks who developed the notion of potential torture in that afterlife. Civilized as they were, however, punishment did not last for all eternity – you got your stretch and then were released on parole, so to speak.
  • Monotheism changed all that. You were going to fry. Undergo unimaginable pain. Forever and a day or two. The notion of hell became an instrument of control, with threatened consequences of a hellish sort shaping you into obedient subjects. The more the traditional religions (Christianity and to some extent Islam) saw themselves challenged by free thinkers or other sectarian branches, the more intense the visions of hell and damnation became. The stories fed on each other, becoming more lurid by the century, culminating in aggressive control attempts like the witch trials. Christianity in particular, was unable to solve an inherent contradiction: Here is the devil, a fallen angel, banished from heaven, the incarnation of evil and yet his function or role is that of God’s agent of cosmic justice. In other words, doing good….
  • Of interest is also that there were always sly escape routes – if you had power or money, that is. For the Egyptians, priest and kings were exempt from being judged if they were deserving of the afterlife – they got in automatically. In medieval Europe, you could buy yourself out of a pickle by donating to the collections of the Catholic church.
  • There have been multiple reports of people making it to hell and back, reporting similar stories of fire, pits, crows hacking entrails and so on. Also cross-culturally, people insist that hell is underground and different countries do pinpoint exact locations where hell can be entered through this or that cave. Some require passwords, almost all are gated. Some, like Fengdu in China, work even on the top of a mountain (the original city was destroyed when they built the dam which flooded that particular entrance to the next life….)

It all would be funny, if it weren’t so dire in its applications. When a construct of assumed external causality and balance between the now and later shifts into a systematic tool of oppression we have a hellish problem, as much of our history shows. And it is, of course, not over. Which gives me occasion to mumble, once again, oh, go to hell!

Photographs intent to show a stylish ascent/descent, should it become necessary.

Music is Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns; the top string, E, is tuned down a semitone, a technique called scordatura, to allow the violinist to perform the tritone chord associated with the devil.

And here is another waltz with the devil:

3 Comments
© 2024