Beginning with the Holocaust?

Krakow - main square 

When I landed in Krakow, I started to think about my relationship to Judaism. Let's just say I think it was a good thing I decided to begin The Heathen with religions I knew absolutely nothing about:  Hinduism and Buddhism. The next three - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are going to be a challenge because of what I think I know, what I don't know, and what any readers of The Heathen know and feel about these religions.

Why am I going through the training for these faiths in this order? To begin with, because of basic chronology. Judaism came first, then Christianity, then Islam. But the relationship between the "religions of Abraham" is deeper than that, of course: Christianity was built on the foundation of Judaism, and Islam was built on the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. Makes sense to start at the beginning, right?

Okay, so it's important to bring out any baggage I've got before I begin. I've always thought that Judaism and Islam would be the toughest for me, the ones that would require a bit of airing out of old ideas so I can start with as open a mind and heart as possible: Islam because of 9/11, Judaism because of family.

My father, who is now a devout atheist and, in fact, against religion of any sort, was raised in a Jewish home. Sort of. He was a bar mitzvah at thirteen but more because of his grandparents than his parents. His wise-cracking, playful father and more sharp-edged mother cared about cards, family brunches and traveling. My grandfather died playing pinochle with friends. I don't remember my grandfather or grandmother in any religious event or ceremony. The most religious person in my father's life was his grandmother, Bertha. "She used to bribe me to go to synagogue with her," my Dad said. "If I went with her, she'd take me to the movies after, the ones with the show and cartoons before. So sometimes I'd go. She was a lot of fun."

I think if my father had married someone more observant, he might have gone along with it but he didn't. My mother has no use for groups of any kind or anything she considers weak and the need for belief of any kind,  she feels, involves both. Her father felt the same, a bah-humbug man, for sure. He was born in the United States in 1896, shortly after his family came here from Poland and grew up in Irish-Catholic South Boston, the son of a Jewish doctor. That couldn't have been easy. Her mother, Opal, was my only grandparent with any vestige of religious feelings left over from her Methodist up-bringing in far northern Maine, but it was a pretty pale remnant: she cared a lot about having the palm leaves in the shape of a cross in her home on Palm Sunday.

Together, my parents feel quite clear that things like 9/11 and the Holocaust -- and virtually every war going back to the beginning of time -- have been caused by religion. Far from being a positive force in the world, they really believe it is the root cause of dissension and hate. It's not hard to see why they think that.

As for me? I have felt completely frozen by this concept. Just because someone claims to act in the name of a faith, is the act caused by that faith? If I rob a store and claim that I'm doing it in the name of Mickey Mouse, is Disney to blame? But, given how little I know about any religious tradition at all, I've been pretty much stuck having to listen to pundits -- never a good place to be.

This explains part of the provocation for The Heathen but I need to get back to laying out my personal baggage as I begin to learn about Judaism. When it's family baggage, there's always more, right?

My father's sister married a guy who was in the Army with my father in the Korean war. My aunt and uncle became fairly observant of certain Jewish traditions, especially Passover. We were invited every year and, in spite of my mothers deep-seated discomfort with my father's family and with any religious traditions at all,  we went. We went and my mother made quiet quips about the proceedings to whichever one of us was next to her and spent the car ride home picking at the moments she felt were full of it. It didn't help that my uncle loved being the center of attention in a kind of creepy way and that we had other reasons to be deeply uncomfortable with him. So the only practice of Judaism I really ever witnessed was all tangled up in uncomfortable family dynamics.

Anyway, for better or worse, the little personal contact I had with any religion as a child were these Passover seders and the Christmas plays at my Episcopalian school. Which brings me to the final piece of baggage to trot out: shame.

I cannot mince words: I went to school in a deeply antisemitic, bigoted community. I know this because girls in my class would tell me what they thought of Jews in general and the Jewish girls in our class in specific. In middle school my friends all went to dance class, ballroom dance class with mandatory white gloves, at a club that did not admit Jews or blacks. Catholics were just getting the privilege of admission.  I was told that Jews ate funny food, didn't get to have fun at Christmas, and were cheap. "Drop a penny and see if she picks it up!"

Yes, girls in my school did this to classmates of theirs.

In my neighborhood, we played games nonstop including tackle football and our made-up game of Spy. Dory Strittmatter always loved playing the villains. His villain of choice: the Nazis. One day, when I was about eleven, my brothers and I were playing football with the rest of the guys on the cul de sac. My brother, Robbie, somehow mentioned that we were Jewish. On the way home I took him aside and hissed at him: "Never tell people we are Jewish because we aren't!"

When I got older and it became clear that I was, according to my school classmates, part Jewish, they thought they were paying me a compliment by telling me that "you don't look Jewish."

One of the few remaining
synagogues in Krakow

But, even if both my parents were Jewish, if they taught me nothing about it, why would someone consider me Jewish? Isn't faith something you practice? Something you believe? It makes sense that you tend to believe and practice the faith of your parents but it's not an inherited trait like eye color, right?

I used to joke that I wasn't Jewish enough for Jews but I would have been for Hitler.

So now you have all the baggage I come with as I begin Judaism.

Still, to start my Judaism studies with a visit to the epicenter of the hatred of the Jewish people (and Catholics, and gypsies, and homosexuals etc etc etc) feels a bit off. That hatred emanated from ideas that, really, had nothing to do with the teachings of Judaism. But, if the purpose of this project is to understand, in some kind of visceral way, whether hatred between people of faith has, in reality, anything to do with those faiths and what kind of response these religious atrocities demand of us, then perhaps Auschwitz is really the dark heart of the matter. And I don't think it's possible to learn about the practice of Judaism, as a child of the 20th century, without standing squarely in some earned knowledge of the Holocaust.

I'm not at all sure I'm equipped to handle this.

Memorial to the victims of the Krakow Ghetto
Plac Bohaterow Getta  

Fake

Children – they force you to deal, don’t they?

Do any action you must do,
since action is better than inaction;
even the existence of your body
depends on necessary actions.

The whole world becomes a slave
to its own activity, Arjuna;
if you want to be truly free,
perform all actions as worship.

Bhagavad Gita 3.8-3.9

Luke, Matt, and I sat at the breakfast table eating. I told them all about the Kali puja and the overwhelming display of food at the Swaminarayan New Year’s celebration.

“Well, Mom,” Matt offered, “I’m sure when you get through with your spiritual quest you’ll know what religion to choose.”

From the other side of the table, Luke attacked: “She’s not on a spiritual quest. She’s on a fake spiritual quest. Maybe once she’s done, then she’ll start to figure it out.” Luke turned to me for verification, “Right, Mom?”

I said nothing at all back.

And the vacuum was filled with fraternal verbal swordplay over whether what I’m doing is real or fake and what real or fake means anyway and whether the other could possibly understand anything at all in the first place and getting words in “edgewise” and who was interrupting whom.

I was taken aback by Luke’s words. It was almost like he was asking me to reassure him I wasn’t actually on a personal spiritual search but just engaged in a safe exercise in journalism - the look on his face, his full blue-eyed question, the morning light on the tiled floor, on the corner of the yellow table cloth, the complete momentary pause in the conversation.

Why can’t I answer? Is what I’m doing fake? And what could fake possibly mean when I’ve dropped everything in my life to do this and only this?

I have to admit I’m on some kind of personal search. If “fake” means I don’t know whether I’ll get anywhere, if “fake” means I might not get to any definitive place, any definitive faith by the end of this, if “fake” means I might find out I don’t have the ability to be what people call “spiritual” within me, then I guess I must accept that label as possible. What I’m doing is nothing more than what every single human being, aware of their own mortality, must go through in one form or another.

But I want something more from this than digging up my own personal belief system. I want to understand what’s happening in a world beset by violence that claims religious doctrine as its source and that obsession of mine is very real. And, whether global or just personal, I do have faith that my effort will be worth something in the end even if I can’t know right now in what way precisely. That faith isn’t fake. That faith I have. That faith is real.

"I have a swami!?!"

Kevin and I went to pick up Luke from his girlfriend Amy’s house after dinner. Our route home took us within blocks of the Vedanta Society.

“That’s where my swami is!” I said, pointing to some treetops barely visible above a freeway ramp.

“That’s ‘where my swami is?!?’” Kevin smiled that gloaty smile. “I wish I’d had a tape that I could have played for you before we ever moved here: ‘No, really, this is what you’re going to say to me seven years from now’ - you never would have believed me. You would have told me to get out of the car.”

He was having a good time over on his side of the car.

But, who could argue?


18 October 2006

Mea culpa...

A sannyasin, who has experienced the transitory nature of enjoyment, is qualified for Self-Knowledge; but such enlightened ones do not constitute the major portion of society. It is the duty
of others, who belong to the first three stages of life and who identify themselves with the body and mind and seek material happiness, to engage in sacrificial action.

Swami Nikhilananda
Introduction to the Upanishads, Volume 1

Kevin came home late from work and sat down at the kitchen table with his papers and trade magazines all around him to eat. I sat down to keep him company. It was dark outside the bay windows, a perfect fall night.

I asked, “How was work?”

“I don’t want to talk about work right now. I don’t want to think about it.” Kevin looked back down at his plate, the day’s replayed conversations going on in his head were visible. When he forgets someone is watching, he actually nods and shakes his head when he thinks about what he wished he’d said or done. It’s like he’s trying to make the past come out right this time. He was deep in it that night.

Distraction sometimes helps so I offered some. “Okay. Well, I think I have a problem.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t do rituals and I can’t figure out why,” I said. Kevin looked up so I went on. “I mean, putting flowers at the feet of statues or making a big deal out of any icon as if it was “It”, as if it was God, just plain feels wrong. Like the white bearded guy on a cloud. Maybe I’m just spiritually retarded.”

He started to smirk. My “plight” was making him happy, no doubt about it. He’d been pretty nervous about me lately, about this project of mine but, aside from occasional cracks about my falling prey to some cult, he was too supportive to come right out and say something.

I tried to head off whatever playful jibe I saw percolating by rushing on. “Swami Sarvadevananda says he’ll teach me some of what I’m supposed to do in a temple tomorrow, some of the rituals, but it feels weird to try to do them. I’m constantly judging myself.”

Matt wandered in wearing his white terrycloth bathrobe, fresh from the bath. He may be fourteen but he’s from some other decade with his love of bathrobes and formal pajamas, slippers and combed wet hair. And he has flawless radar for times when Kevin and I start to talk. He sat down to listen at his place at the kitchen table as Kevin asked me, “So what’s the big deal?”

“Well, if I can’t make myself at least learn rituals, if I can’t get over this, I have a big problem with this project.”

“So, just act ‘as if’ and see what happens.”

“But I feel like a big fake. I can’t even do simple things-- I mean, when you meet someone you respect, you’re supposed to touch their feet.”

“Ew.” Matt said.

“It’s not ‘ew’, Matt.”

“You don’t have to kiss them, too, do you?”

“No, you just bend down and touch them. I thought it was a ritual that only the Whittier temple people did but they even do it at the Vedanta Center which is pretty Americanized. Half the people are Americans and even they bend down and touch Swami Sarvadevananda’s feet. And tomorrow I’m supposed to learn the real ritual stuff. I mean, the whole point of doing these rituals is that it’s supposed to lead to devotional feeling, to some experience of the presence of God and I can’t even make myself do the basics.”

Kevin said, “Don’t you think that every Catholic who goes to mass doesn’t feel awkward sometimes?”

They do? It never occurred to me.

Kevin had been an altar boy and even went to Catholic school for a little while but he doesn’t go into church buildings anymore if he could help it. He has faith so long as an institution isn’t involved.

“Did you ever feel something," I asked, "when you did the kneeling and praying and stuff? Ever?”

“Maybe once or twice when I was a little kid.” He immediately bowed his head, mouth buried into his chest, and started mumbling something. As he came to what sounded like the end, he pounded his chest and said, “…Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” right as the back door flew open and in walked Luke, all teenage chest and long hair.

“What up? What’s going on? Was that Latin?” Luke’s been taking Latin since seventh grade, continuing it as an independent study when the school no longer offered it in high school.
Kevin answered, “Some of it. It’s what you say when you’re an altar boy. I never really learned the part in the middle but, if you mumbled it, no one ever really knew.”

“Did your dad know?” I asked. Kevin’s father was a Knight of the Catholic church.

“No, the priests always said ‘Kevin’s such a nice boy but quiet!’”

Everyone laughed. Stories about our messing up or having things we felt bad or awkward about when we were kids are always a big hit with Luke and Matt.

I tried to catch Luke up on what he’d missed. “I was just saying I’m having a problem doing the rituals. I walk up to the Swami and tell myself this is the time I’m just going to bend down and touch his feet and I can’t. It’s getting ridiculous. How am I going to get anywhere with this project if I don’t get over this?”

Matt thought he could help, his wet head tilted sideways and his hands spread wide on the edge of the table to broadcast his seriousness. “You know, you weren’t born with this like other people. You don’t know what they feel. You’re just going to have to do it to find out.”

Swinging open the fridge with a swagger and grabbing the cranberry juice from the bottom shelf on the door, Luke cut right to the point. “You’re too proud.”

“What?” I thought he said I made him proud. Okay, I was so desperate to hear words like these, I clearly was willing to just make them up in my head.

“No,” he answered. “I said, you’re just too proud to do what you’re supposed to do.”

Maybe I am. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. I want to be different, to not need ritual, especially because it’s so very, very foreign to me and requires humility. Humility and obedience, not my strong suits.

I had nothing to say so I looked at the clock and said. “Okay, too proud or not, it’s bedtime, way past time. What are you two still doing up?”

“Aw, Mom, why do you always do that?” Luke said, “Just when it starts getting fun.”

Matt agreed. “Yeah, you’re a real party pooper, you know?”

“That may be, but it’s time. Now. Do I need to start counting? Five, four, three, two…” And they were gone.

Why does counting still work, anyway?

And why do I hear what they say louder than anyone else?


(16 October 2006)