Raksha's Personal Blog

Jewish Identity: The Battle for Self-Definition - 2

2012-01-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

(NOTE: This is the continuation of an essay originally written to be posted as one long blog entry. I had to break it into two parts because of technical issues I'm having with the Blogger draft window. Part 1 is here.)

The reason they so desperately wanted us to rebuild the Temple for them was so that the Antichrist coulddefile it.

THAT was the fulfillment of the prophecy they were trying tofabricate. It originates in the book ofDaniel, specifically Daniel 9:27. Googlethat verse and you will turn up more paranoid crackpot websites than you couldpossibly deal with in several lifetimes. I suppose I should have been grateful (at least a little bit) that theybelieved the magical goose still had one more golden egg in her, and wastherefore worth keeping alive in order to produce it for Redemption 2.0. After all, only Jews would be capable of rebuilding the Temple and re-institutingthe animal sacrifices--assumingwe were interested. And of course onlycertain Jewish males belong to the hereditary priesthood, now clearlyidentifiable by the “Cohen gene” on their Y chromosomes. But even if the starring role remains withinthe tribe by necessity, the High Priest is reduced to just another bit playerif the script is written by the adherents of another religion, who claim toderive their legitimacy from us but who have all too often been our enemies.

Forme that was absolutely last straw, the final insult—that they appropriated tothemselves the authority to write the script. I said so to anyone who would listen, and I wasn’t tactful about iteither: “They are trying to turn theJews into bit players in our own messianic drama, extras straight out of FundieCentral Casting,” I said about a couple of my more obnoxious sparring partners.

That was what enraged me more than anything--that ourenemies would try to co-opt the ultimate meaning of our long and tragichistory, to twist and distort it into something that had nothing to do with us. But underneath that there was a deeperinjustice that filled me with sadness more than anger. They never asked me what Judaism was or whatit meant to be Jewish; they toldme! They not only would not, but could not, ever grant me the right ofself-definition because they could not grant it to any Jew, or to Judaismitself. That’s how cognitive dissonanceworks, after all. If to hear andunderstand something would unravel your entire belief system, well…you simplydon’t hear it.

I didn’t express my frustration in those words at the time,but I found a closely related frame in the language of existentialism, andspecifically in the I-Thou philosophy of Martin Buber. My friend and unofficial debating partnerBarry considered himself a Catholic existentialist, although I don’t know ifhe’d still describe himself that way. Hehad read Buber and had no problem understanding me when I told him the fundieswere incapable of entering into an I-Thou relationship with me or evenapproaching it. That is to say, theywere incapable of a subject-to-subject relationship with me, where they saw meas another person like themselves. Thestereotype of “Jew” always got in the way and so they always saw me as anobject, not as a person. Even when theyclaimed to be awestruck by my perceived status as a member of the ChosenPeople—and believe it or not, some of them did!—it only turned me into a glorifiedobject. It still didn’t make me a personin their eyes.

WhenI first conceived the idea for this post, which has been incubating for severalmonths, I felt a strong need to get Barry involved if only for moralsupport. In our Prodigy days we engagedin an extensive email correspondence, trying among other things to understandthe fundies and their manifold forms of cognitive dissonance. Barry has never lost his addiction to theinterfaith debate boards, and I knew where to find him. So about two weeks ago I signed up with hishome board again and began posting on a topic he started. Although I haven’t been active in that forumfor a couple of years, a few of the regulars who have been there for a longtime still vaguely remembered me. One ofthese regulars immediately started interrogating me—not about Judaism per seand how it differs from Christianity—but about being Jewish and why did Iself-identify as a Jew? That was thestart of the mini flame war I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Although there was no overt hostility, I call itinterrogation because that’s what it felt like. Right from the beginning Isensed a note of challenge. This createda feeling of tension that made me very uneasy, but I tried to ignore it andanswered her questions as straightforwardly as I could. As it turns out, my instincts were right andI really was being baited. Inretrospect, I realize that it was just a turf war, a struggle for dominance. She’s been a regular on that forum for yearsand has a lot of seniority. She has anestablished position there as the resident alpha female. As soon as she registered the presence of a newbie“challenger” on her turf she just hadto challenge me; it was almost a conditioned reflex. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize she was doingit until after she pushed me too far. Then she discovered she was taking on another alpha female even moreterritorial than she is—and with much more reason to be.

So do youconsider being Jewish as your ethnicity or your religion? Isthere a difference? Have you ever known a fellow Jew who is anatheist? If so, does he/she still self-identify as Jewish? Also, if you don't ID yourself as religiously Jewish, why do youself-identify as a Jew at all, especially if you live in the USA? IOW, what does being Jewish mean to youpersonally, and why is it so important to you that people know you are Jewish?

There is nothing intrinsically wrongwith those questions. As a matter of fact,they are very good questions, but they are open-ended questions. They don’t allow for sound-byte answers. And before I can even begin to answer them, Ineed to know something about the person asking them, especially if that personis a Gentile. What does this individualknow or think he or she knows about Judaism? Or as Mark Twain famously said: “Itain't what you don't know thatgets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

As a rule it’s the more fanatical evangelical types who are mostlikely to shout me down with “what they know for sure that just ain’t so.” But in the past I’ve also had plenty oftrouble with secular types, usually over questions like “if you aren’treligiously Jewish, why do you self-identify as a Jew at all?” It became clear as the interrogationproceeded that my challenger had picked up some negative stereotypes from somewhere,even though she said she had never met a Jew. And that meant I had to put my foot down.

“Defensive? Oh absolutely, although personally I think of itas protective. My screen name, Raksha, has a curious double meaning inSanscrit. It means both demon and protection. Raksha was also thename of the she-wolf who adopted a human baby in Rudyard Kipling's “The JungleBook.” Kipling made it clear that Raksha would fight to the death for her cubsboth wolf and human. I have very similar instincts in certain areas, as I'msure you've noticed. When anyone makes an insensitive or borderline anti-Semiticremark they are encroaching on my territory, so they shouldn't be surprised ifI bare my fangs at them.”

By then we were both getting pretty tired of thewhole thing and agreed to call a truce. It became clear to me however that if I really want to explore thequestions she asked me, and all the other questions that branched off from them,that I would have to do it on my own turf. And that can only be here on my blog, where my right to define myself inmy own terms is unquestioned and unchallenged. I can’t explore them in any depth and guard the boundaries againstintruders at the same time. And theydeserve to be explored in depth, which can’t happen in the combative atmosphereof an interfaith discussion board. Also,Jewish identity is itself in a state of flux or transformation, as it has beenfor most of my life. We are moving intouncharted territory now, which gives those questions new relevance andurgency. So I’m going to take a deepbreath and take them on one at a time

Jewish Identity: The Battle For Self-Definition

2012-01-25T12:51:00.000-08:00

I don’t know why I never got around to saying this in somany words before. For years I’vebelieved that the foundational freedom, the one essential right that precedesand supports all the others, is the right to self-definition. By that Imean the right of any identifiable group to define itself in its own terms,rather than being defined by outsiders--often hostile outsiders--but in anycase outsiders who never seem to question their own right to make authoritativepronouncements about the inmost nature of a category of humans to which they donot and cannot belong. I’m acutelysensitive to this issue of self-definition because I belong to two such identifiablegroups: Specifically, I am Jewish and I amfemale.

My frustration in both areas is roughly equal. I’ve asked myself many times whichstereotypes are more infuriating, the ones men project onto women or the onesChristians project onto Jews. It’salways a toss-up. I guess it justdepends on what I’ve been reading in any given week or who I’ve been arguingwith. Last week I found myselfunexpectedly challenged on the subject of my Jewish identity. Oddly enough, my interrogator wasn’t theusual Christian fundamentalist who wanted to debate the old and new covenants,but a self-proclaimed atheist living in the buckle of the Bible Belt whoclaimed she had never met a Jew. Duringthe brief flame war—a skirmish, really—and the intense email post-mortem thatfollowed, I have been trying to understand why she was able to push my buttonsso easily.

“Whatdoes being Jewish mean to you personally?” A seemingly innocuous question, and yetpersonal to the point of being invasive—not so much because of the questionitself but because no matter what your answer is, it’s almost always going tobe judged by somebody. It could besomebody who knows a lot about Judaism or somebody who knows next tonothing. But somehow the questioneralways feels perfectly entitled to measure you against some arbitrary yardstick. And so especially if you are a nonobservantor only marginally observant Jew, you can find yourself locked in a battle forself-definition whether you asked for it or not.

Atleast that has been my experience. Youcould say that I’m sensitized and it’s true. I could have avoided taking on the stereotypes if I had really wantedto, but instead I went out of my way to confront them. I don’t know why exactly, but I guess I wason a one-woman crusade to raise consciousness. In the 1990s especially, after my husband’s death and after I got myfirst computer with a modem, I spent endless hours on the ProdigyDebates/Religious Issues board debating religion with Christian fundamentalistsand others. These debates could getquite heated, and occasionally I’d be confronted with full-blown anti-Semitismof the most toxic variety. It’s wellknown at this point—or it should be-- that the Jews have been the primary focusfor Christian shadow projections for close to 2000 years, and that theseprojections can be and have been secularized without losing any of their toxicand dangerous quality. As a member ofthe first post-Holocaust generation, I have always been acutely aware of thesenegative projections and was to some extent prepared for them.

What I was absolutely notprepared for were all the other kinds of projections about Jews I would encounteron the interfaith boards. Not all ofthem were negative, although many were. Some were quite positive on the surface. Often they were completely bizarre and verypersonal, although the personal ones usually turned out to be the fever dreamsof some deranged cult leader. But to methey all seemed equally bizarre. Themain difference between the obviously cultish projections and the moremainstream ones by Christian standards was the number of adherents. All of them centered around one major pieceof cognitive dissonance: God made aneverlasting Covenant with Israeland the Jews are God’s chosen people...BUT at the same time Jesus is thefulfillment not only of biblical prophecy but of the Torah itself, which becameobsolete at the Crucifixion. So there isno longer any need forthe Jews to observe the commandments. Nomore reason for our continued existence, come to think of it, since we hadalready served our purpose in God’s plan of redemption. From the standpoint of orthodox (post-Nicene)Christianity, we were the theological equivalent of the goose that laid thegolden egg. (I just now thought ofthat.)

Thisglaring contradiction--together with the fact that the Jews were emphaticallyunconvinced by any of it and refused to cooperate in their own extinctionwhether physical or religious—gave rise to a whole new set of bizarretheological fantasies, mostly centered around Christian eschatology, i.e. the EndTimes or Second Coming. The fact thatthe year 2000 was rapidly approaching gave these fantasies an additional boostof hysterical urgency that manifested on all the religion boards. I called it “Millennial Fever” and the late1990s were the height of the epidemic. We could very well be dealing with a newer and even more dangerousoutbreak this year, but that’s a subject for another post.

It was on the Prodigy Debates/Religious Issues forum, that Ifirst encountered Christian Zionism, and I haven’t fully recovered from theshock yet. The nakedly imperialist,power-seeking aspect of it was very much a reality but it was still somewhatcamouflaged, not quite as overtly political as it is now. On the interfaith board the regulars thoughtof the millennialists primarily as religious nuts. I don’t think the term “Christian Zionist”even existed at the time. But whateverthey were or weren’t called, I still found them unbelievably offensive thefirst time I encountered them. Theirbelief system, or at least that part of it that concerns the Jews specifically,centers around a crudely literal understanding of certain prophecies in thebook of Daniel. It is a recent interpretation,predicated on certain crucial historical events of the 20^th century,especially the founding of the modern state of Israelin 1948, reinforced by the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Without the existence of an actual Jewish state, it would be impossiblefor even the most delusional Christian millennialists to imagine thisparticular end-times scenario. And theynot only imagine it but act on it, with the cooperation of certain extremeright-wing elements in Israel.

Roughly summarized, the preconditions for the Second Cominginvolve the building of a new Temple in Jerusalem on the site of Herod’s Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in70 C.E. Then the re-instatement of thesacrificial cult. Never mind aboutwhat’s supposed to happen to the Dome of the Rock that already exists on thesite. God and Gush Emunimwill take care of that.

This unholy alliance between the most extreme and fanaticalof the Christian fundamentalists and their equally insane Israeli counterpartsterrified me then as it does now. But myoverwhelming emotion when I finally understood what the Christian Zionistend-times scenario was all about was rage—overwhelmingragesuch as I have rarely felt before or since in my life. That’s saying a lot because I have a famouslyshort fuse, and when it finally sank in I went totally ballistic.

The reason they so desperately wanted us to rebuild the Temple for them was so that the Antichrist coulddefile it.

(Continued in Part 2)

Raise High the Roof Beam

2012-01-23T02:06:00.000-08:00

OnFriday, January 13^th, I decided at the last minute to light theSabbath candles for the first time in about a year. I also bought a loaf of challah at the bakery,and this time I asked David to leave it unsliced. “Last one,” he said as he slipped it into aplastic bag. It was long after sunset bythe time I got it home, along with the box of utility candles from the outletstore. But I knew fromexperience that it would work, and it did. The atmosphere in the room changed and I felt peace for a few minutes. I have always been surprised at the power ofthis small ritual, and the immediate sense of Presence it always brings.

Then on Saturday morning Ireceived a notice from Congregation Emanu El in my email and made anotherlast-minute decision. The constructionof the new temple in Redlandsis proceeding very rapidly, and on Sunday we were all invited to sign themassive ceiling beam destined to support the roof of the sanctuary and thesocial hall. It reminded me of theconstruction of another Reform temple, where it really all began for me 50years ago. The confirmation class of1961 was the last one to be confirmed in a rented hall. After that the congregation moved into thenew building in time for the High Holiday services and the beginning ofreligious school in September.

What doesbeing Jewish mean to you personally?

Even if I can't answer the question verballyI can answer it graphically. It suddenlybecame very important to place a design symbolic of my karma and my Jewishidentity on that roof beam. I wasn’tsure I could pull it off at the last minute because of the usual transportationproblems, but on Saturday afternoon my son agreed to drive me there. I made a point of wearing the filigree Starof David my sister sent me from Israelyears ago. It was important to get thedesign for my symbolic graffiti just right, so I worked it out on paper firston Saturday night and Sunday morning. When we arrived at the construction site, I discovered there was plentyof room on the beam to write whatever I wanted, so I added a last-minuteinscription: To the Jewish community of San Bernardino & Redlands from LindaSiegel Sang—her own private gate.

Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times

2011-12-02T03:39:00.000-08:00

NOTE: My daughter sent me this beautiful essay by the very wise teacher, storyteller and neo-Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes several years ago. It isn’t new; it was originally published in 2001 as Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times: with the subtitle, Do Not Lose Heart, We were Made for These Times. What I believe originally inspired it was the selection of George W. Bush to the presidency of the United States by the Supreme Court, an unprecedented event which many people called “a bloodless coup.”

On October 18th Dr. Estes reposted this essay on her Facebook page, adding the Creative Commons license so it could be reposted anywhere. I believe it was reposted in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement because she added the following note: “I would be made especially happy if you were to post it in places where those struggling in the streets across the world, might see it and be heartened.”

Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times

Mis estimados:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for "good" in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, "the new normal," the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people's worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

…You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet ... I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is - we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

…I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

…We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over -- brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially … we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered - can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

…Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say "fat chance," and "management before mercy," and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been 'to Hell and back' on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, that smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like "barely" are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

…In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

…In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core - till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair - thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts - adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ... causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both -- are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

…There will always be times in the midst of "success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen" when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

…This comes with much love and prayer that you remember who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.

--Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Copyright ©2001, 2003, 2004 Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All rights reserved. Creative Commons License by which author and publishers grant permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety word for work, and not altered, not added to, not subtracted from, and that it carry author's name and this full copyright notice, including email address as below. For other uses, Permissions: projectscreener@aol.com

Random Thoughts on Judaism, Paganism and Genocide

2011-09-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

Very often I catch myself using the comments section of other people’s blogs as a launching pad for my own ideas, an excuse for ranting about whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time. I did it again this morning. This time the unwitting soapbox provider was Rabbi Rami Shapiro, and the springboard was a recent post of his called Interfaith and Abrahamic Faith. It’s a very good post and I agree with everything he said. That’s precisely what inspired me to write a spin-off on it in the comments section.

After I spent about two hours writing and editing the comment, it suddenly occurred to me that I have my own blog where I can rant to my heart’s content, so there is really no need to hijack someone else’s blog. So I decided to repost my comment here, adding a few lines to explain the context. If my focus on Judaism appears to single it out as being somehow more intolerant than the other Abrahamic faiths, that would be a total misreading of what I actually believe. Historically, Judaism has had far less opportunity to exercise its triumphalist and repressive tendencies than the other two Abrahamic faiths. It’s just that Rabbi Rami lists them in chronological order, the order in which each one first appeared on the stage of history: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. And then each one comes in for its share of criticism. I simply didn’t get any further than Judaism.

As usual I started with a short quote from the post I was responding to, and then went on from there.

Re The Hebrew Bible makes it clear that there is only one true faith, and the Jews have it. If biblical Jews had any interest in other religions it was to destroy them...

Yeah, sure they did. This is yet more evidence that just like history, Scripture is written by the winners. Or at least it's heavily edited, rewritten and censored by the winners. I'm currently reading The Hebrew Goddess by Raphael Patai, which paints a VERY different picture of "biblical Judaism" than what the official monotheistic party line tries to tell us has "always" been the case.

Anyone who didn't have an inkling of it already would be shocked at how "pagan" the religion of our forefathers and foremothers (very important!) actually was. I don't mean only the folk religion of the villages, but also the royal cult as practiced in Solomon's temple, and later in Herod's temple right up until its destruction in 70 C.E. The archaeological evidence, which can't be edited or censored, bears this out.

One part of the standard disclaimer concedes this point, but condemns the behavior at the same time: "Oh yes, our ancestors did all that pagan stuff, made all those graven images of naked goddesses and stuff like that. The prophets tell us all about how they were constantly backsliding. But they were bad, bad, BAAAADDDD and God punished them for it."

Am I really supposed to accept that kind of simplistic orthodoxy at face value? Pretend I don't know that it was that very same Semitic paganism, which after going through many transformations, eventually became the heart and soul of esoteric Judaism?

But even with all that in mind, I think it's very unfortunate that the commandment is still on the books to wipe out all the seven nations of Canaan down to the last man, woman and child, and that many people still pay lip service to it. Is that in Deuteronomy? Sorry, but I don't know the Torah all that well.

I'm familiar with all the official apologies and disclaimers, such as the fact that by the time that passage was written it was already too late for any such "final solution" to be possible, assuming that anyone had actually wanted it. By the time that passage was written, the Israelites had already been intermarrying and interbreeding with the Canaanites for generations. So what it really amounts to is nothing more than wishful thinking on somebody's part about something that "should have" happened generations earlier. "If only we had killed them all, we wouldn't have to put up with all this freakin' idolatry now." Sound familiar?

I don't find that kind of explanation very satisfactory or reassuring at all. It still presents what is commonly understood as a divine sanction for genocide--with tragic and bloody consequences I don't have to spell out for anyone. I've had Christian fundamentalists throw it in my face that the Israelites disobeyed "God's" command to wipe out the Canaanites, and that was the beginning of all our troubles for the next 2000+ years. To which I can only answer, "God does not command genocide. Period."

I have no choice but to say that to anyone, Christian or Jew, who cites that as a precedent or rationale, even if they further distance themselves by saying the commandment was impossible to carry out and was therefore null and void. Because anyone with a genocidal mindset is sure to identify their favorite scapegoat as the physical and/or spiritual descendants of the seven nations of Canaan, making it not only necessary but actually virtuous to exterminate them. That's guaranteed, and we can see many examples of that kind of thinking right now.

The image at the top of the page is an ivory relief depicting the complex and paradoxical West Semitic goddess Anath, also known as Astarte. It shows her in her fertility goddess aspect, as Lady of the Wild Things, but she is primarily a goddess of love and war, as indicated by the skulls under her feet. I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about Anath lately, and I’ll have more to say about her down the line.

Broken Glass

2011-09-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Broken Glass

I saw the shattered light on broken glass
Reflected in your eyes when we were young,
Though you were still unborn
The night the glass was broken.
I could not name it in those vanished days--
Some of it, yes—but not all of it,
Yet I vowed to keep the flame alive,
To bear witness to what I could not name.

Now, having learned better how to translate
The unspoken knowledge of the heart--
More of it, yes—though never all of it,
Today I renew that vow
Looking north through the plate glass window
of a bakery on Highland Avenue.
It isn’t quiet here, but the background noise
Consoles me with its mundane normalcy:
The loud hum of the air conditioner,
The sound of the passing traffic
fifteen feet from the unbroken window.

At two degrees of separation
I recall the sound of the sledgehammers
Crashing through the plate glass windows,
And the stained glass windows as well.
Afterwards the sidewalks were covered with it:
Broken glass, broken glass,
Blood and broken glass—
As memory turns to foreknowledge
A cold shadow passes over me.

It seems so peaceful here, yet I remain on guard.
Beneath the growing avalanche of hatred,
I hear the staccato crack of breaking glass.
The day draws near when this false peace,
Brittle and fragile as any window
Whether of plate glass or stained glass
will lie shattered on the sidewalks of the world.

“Get over it!” they say.
“How much longer will you Jews
Keep obsessing over your private tragedy?
Do you really think no other people
Has ever suffered genocide?
Time to move on,” they say.

Let them believe I’m picking at old scabs
Or getting paranoid over nothing; I don’t care.
It should be self-evident that the scars remain
After your heart has been pierced by broken glass,
Even at two degrees of separation.
But no matter what they think I’m saying
Or why they think I’m saying it,
The pain itself is beside the point.

And so we bear witness to what matters most:
That the echo of the sound of breaking glass
Spreads through the intricate web of love,
Past the boundaries of space and time,
Relentlessly out to infinity. And as it spreads,
It changes. Yes, I’m talking alchemy here--
Just so we’re clear on that.
This is our secret strength and hidden truth:
That empathy begins as shared grief,
but ends as shared knowledge.

© 2011 by Linda S. Sang

In one very significant way, this poem is very different from the two previous ones I’ve posted on this blog in the past. Both of those poems were written within a few weeks of each other over 25 years ago, in the spring of 1984 shortly after my sister’s death. This poem was started two days ago, in a bakery on Highland Avenue on Wednesday, August 31, 2011. I did the final revisions a few hours ago.

I went to the bakery with the intention of writing, but what I was planning to write was something very different from what I ended up bringing home with me. What I had in mind was prose, for one thing. Until Wednesday, I had not written any poetry for years and pretty much assumed I never would again. I started writing what I originally had in mind, but my heart just wasn’t in it and my mind kept wandering.

I had a folder with me containing some printouts of recent e-mails, and in an attempt to regain my focus I began reading them over. A response to one particular communication began shaping itself in my mind after I read it for the second or third time. To my total astonishment, instead of being a standard prose e-mail reply my response seemed to be trying to take the form of a poem. So I decided to let it go where it wanted. I grabbed a blank sheet of looseleaf paper just like I used to do in the old days, and followed my thoughts and feelings wherever they wanted to take me.

What is so amazing about this experience, once so commonplace in my life, is that I haven’t even tried to write a poem in years. That’s why the only poems posted on my blog are old ones—because there simply haven’t been any new ones. I have often wondered if I’d ever write another poem again in my life. This one didn’t come easily. I wrote three longhand drafts at the bakery over a period of about three hours. Fortunately, the owner of the place likes me and is more than happy to let me hang out there as long as I want to. Even though there are only two tables, I don’t recall that the other one was occupied the whole time I was there.

Although they got successively better, my handwritten drafts were sloppy, imprecise and out of focus--but then first drafts usually are. Fortunately, the notorious inner critic who plagues all writers didn’t get into the act too early in the game with her usual deflating put-downs. I felt that in spite of the amateurishness I had something worth pursuing. So I came home and transferred the poem to the computer.

I also made a point of checking out the Wikipedia entry for Kristallnacht as a precaution against any glaring errors of fact. If I had made any in my first drafts, I wanted to be sure I corrected them fairly early in the revision process. That involved another three drafts yesterday, plus a final one this afternoon. Wednesday night was the first time I’ve ever read a historical account of Kristallnacht, although of course I’ve read references to it in other works on WWII and the Holocaust. I was especially struck by one short paragraph:

The number of emigrating Jews surged as those who were able, left the country. In the ten months following Kristallnacht, more than 115,000 Jews emigrated from the Reich.^[33] The majority went to other European countries, the US and Palestine.... As part of government policy, the Nazis seized houses, shops, and other property the émigrés left behind.

Among those 115,000 Jews who left Germany in 1938-39 in the 10 months following Kristallnacht were the parents of the beloved friend whose childhood memories were the inspiration for this poem.

A Modest Proposal: Us vs. Them

2010-07-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

As long as I went so far out on a limb this past Sunday night, I guess it won’t hurt to go a little further. The scene of the crime was the comments section of my favorite anti-theocracy website, Talk to Action. It was my first-ever comment on that website, posted in an unusually long comments section. Many of the meticulously researched and well-written articles generate no comments or very few of them, and some of the regular contributors were wondering about that in the brainstorming session that followed this article by Bruce Wilson.

Mostly, though, they were wondering for what seemed like the 100th time how to publicize the acute danger to religious freedom and civil rights posed by a relatively new fundamentalist phenomenon known as the New Apostolic Reformation. The best-known example of the New Apostolic Reformation is Sarah Palin’s Wasilla Assembly of God church. Unfortunately, it isn’t the only one by a long way, because the movement is worldwide and officially nondenominational.

Since the regulars seemed to be inviting feedback, I finally screwed up my courage to say what I’ve been wanting to say for months, and at Talk to Action more than anywhere else. With all the proofreading and rewriting involved, it took me about three hours to write that comment. I realize it isn’t perfect, but I’m not about to waste all that work and (for once!) the hell with my perfectionism. It’s why so many of my blog posts never get written or posted at all. And one other thing: This way I’ll have a record of my comment if Talk To Action decides it isn’t up to their standards and deletes it.

I’m reposting it here pretty much as originally written, except for adding a few font changes and live links, fixing a few typos and also correcting the spelling of Rachel Tabachnick’s name, which I misspelled earlier. It begins with a quote from an earlier comment following the Bruce Wilson article.

A Modest (?) Proposal

Re “The underlying question is the same for both - why is writing thoughtful, well researched and important content not enough? And again, why do even the most important articles on this site receive so few comments?”

And then, of course, there is the Big Question: How to bring the very real threat posed by the NAR and similar theocratic movements to the attention of the mass media and the public?

I have been following the thoughtful, well-researched work of Bruce Wilson and Rachel Tabachnick and the other dedicated regulars of this site for two years now. I have read with growing alarm their exposes of the New Apostolic Reformation and John Hagee's Christians United For Israel (CUFI) and its unholy alliance with the Israeli extreme right both religious and secular. But for me and others like me to read this material and become more convinced and more outraged than we were already is basically just preaching to the choir. I was already convinced of the dangers of theocracy when I joined this site.

And yet this is the first time I have ever ventured to post a comment here. Part of the reason for that is because I have expressed my outrage at great length on other websites and discussion boards I frequent. But for the last several months (literally!) I have been trying to work up the nerve to suggest what I'm about to propose here, because I know it will sound perfectly insane at first reading.

The religious left has one weapon at its disposal it has never even picked up, let alone thought about using--namely moral certainty or moral absolutism. The same kind--and I mean exactly the same kind!--that the religious right uses.

Think about it. We have Truth on our side. We have Liberty, Growth and Evolution on our side. And what all of that taken together adds up to is that we have GOD on our side!

We are right and they are wrong.

Read that again, and again--until it sinks in. And yes, I know the right says the same thing! It's probably an occupational disease of progressives that we are way too reflective, too nuanced, too self-critical to be effective fighters.

The right is aware of this tendency both in the areas of religion and politics, and they use it against us. The worst thing about progressives--and one of the ways we hamstring ourselves--is that we allow them to get away with it, over and over again. I'm not saying we shouldn't be reflective and self-critical, but we can do that on our own time. It's none of our enemies' business and we don't allow them to make it their business.

I used the word enemies deliberately and for a reason. They have declared us the enemy. They have announced their intention of exterminating liberals of all kinds like rats. As a Jewish feminist with strong Pagan leanings, I can take a hint. I am already their enemy on at least three fronts, and most likely everyone reading these words can say the same thing.

So isn't it long past time for the religious left to launch a counter-offensive, to declare a state of spiritual and temporal warfare against THEM? That would get the attention of the media and the blogosphere like nothing else in the world. After all, the American public and the media love nothing so much as a great action-packed, elemental battle of Good vs. Evil. So that's what we should give them, and we'll get their attention. We are the good guys and they are the bad guys, and we need to get rid of any lingering doubts on that score, because they inhibit our ability to act.

For the record: I am very much opposed to dualism as a philosophical concept. As a universalist (if that’s even the word I want), I have to believe to that good and evil both have their origin in God, because God includes the totality of everything that exists. But as a purely tactical approach as opposed to a world-view, dualism has a lot to recommend it.

What I'm recommending specifically: For someone a lot more Web-savvy than I am to launch an elegant, beautifully produced and very comprehensive website to be called something like "Reclaiming the Seven Mountains." It's extremely important to use not just the same tactics, but the same symbolism that the Right uses. That way they are sure to get the message.

I've looked at the corresponding theocrat (NAR?) website, and I believe that some of the "seven mountains of culture" are Religion, the Family, Government, Education, the Arts...okay, that's five of them right there. It's been awhile since I looked at it, but I believe one other is Economics.

The point is that all seven are under attack by the forces of theocracy, and have been for the last 30 years or more. And the whole time progressives have been watching and documenting the steady encroachments on our civil liberties and religious freedom in growing horror but have been ineffective for the most part in stopping them, or even slowing them in any significant way. The important thing is to put the NAR and other dominionists on notice that we are no longer simply defending ourselves but counter-attacking--actively pushing back against their encroachments. And YES, I do understand that this is a dangerous project, but the danger is all the more reason to do what we should have done decades ago.

The good thing is that our enemies have given us several excellent step-by-step manuals of what they've done and how they've done it. The strategies that worked for them will work even better for us. After all, we are right and they are wrong. Therefore we can afford to be completely upfront about both our methods and our goals. There is no need for their deceptive Machiavellian tactics because we aren't Machiavellians. But aside from lying and other forms of deception, I think we can adopt most of their strategies.

So I suggest we adopt most of the tactics that have worked for them--including spiritual warfare and so-called "spiritual mapping." I'm serious. Places like Sarah Palin's Wasilla Assembly of God church and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church could be labeled "theocrat strongholds," and cities like Newark and even threatened states like Hawaii could be labeled "enemy occupied territory."

They have probably done most of the spiritual mapping work for us already--all that would be necessary would be to exchange their labels for our own.

Three reasons I hesitated for before I ventured to make this "modest proposal" in public. (1) I was afraid everyone would think I'm crazy; (2) I didn't want Bruce Wilson and Rachel Tabachnick and others to receive any more death threats than they already get; and (3) I don't want to start receiving any death threats myself. So far I haven't gotten any simply because nobody has ever heard of me, and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. I'm not even a very prolific blogger, just a nebbish with a long history of spouting off on interfaith discussion boards.

Just To See If I Can Do It...

2010-04-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

I just spent the last six hours trying to reconfigure my blog, and almost nothing I tried worked. That's basically why I decided to post tonight--I was determined to have something to show for all that frustration and wasted time if it killed me! Besides, it was getting embarrassing that I haven't put up a new blog post in over four months.

I still can't believe I'm doing this, though--actually typing a post into the draft window of my blog with no clear idea of where I'm going with it. The process itself isn't new to me. I've typed literally thousands of notes into the draft windows of my favorite discussion boards over the years. Often these posts are quite long, and some are pretty good if I do say so myself. But for some reason I've had cold feet about doing the same thing on my blog. Everything had to be written beforehand in MS Word, and then rewritten and edited endlessly. The entire process could take up to two days, and I could never set out to do that. That doesn't mean that I can't do it, or that I don't do it. I get carried away with my writing constantly.  But it has to sneak up on me from behind because I can't plan to do it. Everyone who knows me is familiar with my famous last words: "This is just going to be a short e-mail..."

This time, though, the words don't have to carry the entire meaning of the post, so it isn't necessary to put quite so much effort into them.  The main reason I decided to post tonight without anything definite to say was to see if I could get a couple of my recent pictures posted  For months I've been looking at wonderful pictures on other people's blogs and desperately wanting to post some of my own. But I didn't know how to go about it and was too embarrassed to ask anyone.  Now I'm really embarrassed, because as it turns out it's quite easy...a lot easier than trying to reconfigure my blog! I just didn't know that because I've never tried it before.

These pictures were taken a couple of days ago on Marshall Avenue in north San Bernardino, a few blocks from where I live. The top picture is one of the two ancient California pepper trees in the parkway, one on each side of a driveway. I'm fascinated by the gnarled, Baroque, high-relief trunks of those trees and always notice them every time I walk past them. For months I've wanted to do a study of them, photographing them from every angle, but most of the time I'm on my way to the store when I pass them, thinking about a dozen other things and don't have my camera with me. This time I had my camera, and the top picture was everything I hoped for.  And I'm not finished yet--I have great plans for those pepper trees!

Also on Marshall Avenue there is a flowering tree growing in someone's yard not far from the pepper trees. I don't know what kind it is, but from the shape of the flowers it seems to be a relative of the jacaranda, The flowers are hot pink instead of purple, and it blooms about six weeks earlier than the jacaranda. I missed the flowering season completely last year and never got a picture of that tree at all.  The one picture I took of it was disappointing and didn't capture its full glory, but I think that's because I had my mind on the pepper trees. But I loved the picture of the fallen flowers on the sidewalk, so that's what I'm posting here.

I've missed so many of the early spring flowers, but I'll still have another chance at the unknown tree with the hot pink flowers.  And one way or another I'll learn its name. And the orchid trees are in full bloom now and the jacarandas have yet to bloom. I'll still have another chance at all of them.

Gevurah

2009-12-14T23:58:00.000-08:00

Gevurah
To Jonathan Omer-Man

I stood alone at the foot of Sinai,
A stranger among my people.
There was one who called my name,
And we stood together at the foot of Sinai,
But my strangeness came between us.

I gave him my love on the Day of the Covenant—
He never knew what door it was he closed against me,
Or what was broken with my heart.
I turned away from him on the Day of Atonement,
Not giving, not asking forgiveness,
And away from the shadow of Sinai.

“It was your world!” I told him in despair.
Then there was a long silence.
I never told him that Sinai itself
Was his world, not mine—
I found nothing that day to deny it.

I have wandered now for twenty years,
Burdened with a twofold love and hate,
And God at last has thrown the gauntlet down.
By the ancient right of my people
I answer challenge for challenge,
Daring God to compare the weight
Of my grief against my treason.

Now it is the season of the Covenant,
And I have written him a letter
Not giving, not asking forgiveness;
Only knowing for the first time
That God’s justice and mercy are one.

Now I stand bruised but unfallen,
Awaiting the Day of Atonement,
The gauntlet in my hand,
Awaiting an answer to my letter,
Awaiting the blessing of God
Upon my battered arrogance—
A stranger among my people,
A daughter of Israel at last.

© 2009 by Linda S. Sang

I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all.
–Lawrence Durrell

This poem was written sometime in late May or early June 1984. It has no direct connection with my sister’s death on May 18th of that year, although there are a great many indirect connections. I can’t remember now whether I wrote “Unsent Letters” first or “Gevurah,” but there couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks between them. “Gevurah” commemorates an intense process of reassessment that was going on at about the same time. It’s hard to say when that process began—maybe a couple of months before my sister’s death. Although I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I now recognize that period as the time of my second initiation.

Maiden, Mother, Crone: I have experienced three major initiations in my life, corresponding to the three phases of the moon, the three stages of a woman’s life, the three faces of the Goddess. All of them unfolded over a period of about four months. They were not ceremonial initiations, although I’ve also experienced a few of those in more than one spiritual tradition. Judaism wasn’t one of them. But Judaism— specifically, my own experience of Judaism--was at the epicenter of all three of the inner initiations. After a real initiation, you can no more go back to being who you were before than a butterfly can go back into its cocoon. I’m grateful to Clarissa Pinkola Estes for giving me the language to talk about initiations, and for making it possible for me to recognize my third initiation even as it was unfolding. But that was many years after I wrote this poem.

On Yom Kippur 1964, when I was eighteen years old, I stood in the courtyard of a suburban Reform temple and silently made the vow spoken under duress, the Marrano vow. Of course it was many years before I realized I had done that. To this day, I can’t be sure whether what I did was a sin or not, although I’m inclined to the belief that it wasn’t. What still impresses me the most about that moment is its absolute inevitability. I can’t conceive of any alternate reality where something very much like it wouldn’t have happened. At times I’ve said—somewhat melodramatically, I have to admit—that I called down a curse on the Jewish community. But it wasn’t so much a curse as a massive counter-rejection of a world that rejected me—and had recently told me so in the most direct and painful way possible.

I have struggled to understand that moment ever since, although in the beginning I was simply reactive. When I walked out of the temple courtyard with my head high, taking great care not to look at a certain young man as I passed him, mostly what I felt was the grim satisfaction of seeing through a scam at long last. Nobody ever bothered to tell me that being Jewish wasn’t my birthright as I’d always been led to believe. It was something I had to be able to afford. If I hadn’t been such a naïve fool and so madly in love, I could have figured it out myself a long time ago. Oh well, better late than never.

But I’ve never been satisfied with easy answers even if they are my own. Even beyond the desire to avoid pain, even beyond the desire for love and acceptance and recognition, my deepest desire has always been to understand, to explore both wider and deeper, to discover the hidden connections between events and understand their significance. It didn’t take me long to realize there was a great deal of meaning under the surface of that moment when I stood at the crossroads in the temple courtyard. I also sensed there were some meanings that would only become clear as the future unfolded, not only for me personally but for Judaism itself. But it was a long time before I was able to overcome enough of the anger and bitterness to begin exploring those meanings.

So inevitably, my second initiation involved taking a long, hard look back in time at the first one. It was completed when I wrote the last line of this poem. I didn’t know I was going to end it that way until just before I wrote that line. I can still remember the tears streaming down my face when I realized there was no other possible ending for it. There was another quasi-ceremonial ending to the initiation a few months later on Yom Kippur, a small private ritual nobody knew about but me. I returned to the same spot in the temple courtyard where I stood 20 years before and formally retracted the Marrano vow.

That was the beginning of my “re-entry” period, although there was still plenty of leftover bitterness and resentment. It manifested as a hyper-critical attitude, a hair-trigger touchiness, my sensitive radar ever alert to the slightest hint of condescension or condemnation. I probably projected it a hundred times where no condemnation actually existed. A few months after Yom Kippur, I attended the first meeting of a lecture series on the tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav at the local Reform temple. I was very impressed with the speaker, but in his talk he used the word “heretic.” I walked up to him after the lecture with a chip on my shoulder the size of a log and asked him what he meant by a “heretic.” He answered thoughtfully, “I would say…someone who mistakes the part for the whole.”

I know he picked up on the Attitude right away, but he also saw past it and through it to the yearning underneath. That’s why “Gevurah” is dedicated to him.

The Sword of the Ashkenazim

2009-10-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

Right now I’m still recovering from my latest battle with a vicious, persistent and all-too-familiar stereotype. The aftershocks have continued for almost two weeks since then, giving rise to a series of brainstorming e-mails between me and a few of my close friends. Those of you who have been involved in this e-mail exchange or who were witnesses to the brawl itself already know what I’m talking about, but for everyone else a few words of explanation are in order.

I got myself embroiled in yet another flame war with a couple of anti-Semites recently. Yes, I should know better by now, and I do. The fact that I’m well acquainted with my sparring partners--having crossed swords with these two cranks on a series of discussion boards for almost 15 years now—only made the outcome that much more predictable. I knew going in that I’d come out of the battle angry, exhausted and a nervous wreck. And worst of all I’d still be the loser, because regardless of my historical knowledge and my lifelong familiarity with Jewish culture, I would totally fail in my objective of waking them up. And they would be the winners no matter how false and slanderous their arguments, because they’d emerge from the battle as triumphantly obtuse as ever.

And yet it was almost inevitable that I’d get sucked in again, because this tiny skirmish—doubtless one of thousands of that take place on the Internet every day--was a microcosm of the ongoing war between Judaism and Christianity. That war has been raging for almost 2000 years now, with only a few rare and brief periods of truce. I’m not going to waste my time on the standard qualifiers here or try very hard to spare anyone’s feelings. I am well aware that the majority of Christians in the 21st century don’t hate Jews, but that doesn’t change the historical track record. I also know that the possibility of interfaith dialogue exists, but true dialogue can only take place after a certain very difficult bridge has been crossed. The battles like this flame war I was involved in all happen on this side of the bridge, and on this side it’s strictly a case of irreconcilable differences.

Most of the regulars on the discussion board where it all hit the fan have learned to avoid any topic started by either of these two cranks, except to throw the occasional spitball in passing. That leaves the two of them to what you couldn’t really call a dialogue, although it may look like one on the surface. But it’s actually an endless, droning dual monologue on the subject of biblical prophecy related to the “end times,” or what Christians call the Second Coming. I have no problem at all with the archetype of the Second Coming, and there was a time years ago when I joined the two cranks occasionally in their speculations. For a while, I was an uneasy ally of the female one. That’s because it makes no difference to me or whether you call it the Second Coming, the Messianic Age, the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, the Great Turning or by any other name. I feel the wind in my face too, and I have felt it all my life.

The problem is that these two millennialist whackjobs are Christian fundamentalists. They have decreed unilaterally that there is only ONE acceptable spiritual language for the Great Turning, and anyone who dares to use a different one is an “antichrist.” Worse yet, one of them is a Christian Zionist. The Christian Zionists are closet anti-Semites, and possibly more dangerous than any other anti-Semites for that very reason. They go to great lengths to appear the opposite of what they really are. The most frightening thing about them is that they have a very specific script for the events leading up to the Second Coming. Their script calls for the active participation of the Jewish people, because among other things it calls for the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple. Even the most rabid Christian fundies know they have to enlist the cooperation of at least a few Jews for that little project, although I really believe they’d build themselves if they could get away with it. But the vast majority of Jews have no interest in following their script because we know how it ends. The end of their millennial spectacular calls for the violent death of most of us and the conversion of the small remnant that remains, traditionally numbered at 144,000.

Under their “Judaic” trappings and their loud and ostentatious support for Israel (translation: the expansionist neocon Israeli right), the true goal of the Christian Zionists is not the coming of the New Age under any name. What they hope to bring about is the end of Judaism as a religion separate from Christianity, and above all their ultimate revenge against the Jews. Revenge for what exactly? For knowing the truth about the origin of Christianity, and being able to reveal it at any time, given the opportunity. The entire blood-soaked history of Christian anti-Semitism can be read as the collective effort to make sure we never got that opportunity.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. What I just said is one of my conclusions, which came into focus gradually (and with a little help from my friends) after the smoke cleared. What I should really be describing now is the path that led to those conclusions, and the revealing little oddities I noticed along the way. I noticed them first out of the corner of my eye, and then front and center as I turned my full attention on them. Even in the heat of battle you notice small details out of the corner of your eye, and noticing those small details can very well save your life.

Last but not least, I should say something about the presentation on Ashkenazi intelligence I attended on October 16, 2009, after my enemies had gone flying for cover. That was when I learned that the sword that sent them flying, passed down to me as a legacy from my ancestors, was forged originally by the enemies of my ancestors in Christian Europe. Out of their relentless efforts to “protect” themselves from us, marginalize us, and above all silence us--the self-appointed defenders of Christendom forged the sword of the Ashkenazim with their own hands. And they couldn’t have done a better job of it if they tried! I’m still laughing at the delicious irony of it all.

This New York Times article was published the same day that a groundbreaking University of Utah study on Ashkenazi intelligence was released--June 3, 2005. It does a good job of explaining as succinctly as possible how the process worked:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html

Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased.

As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim. [My emphasis]

In other words, through a relentless process of natural selection--for the most part imposed upon them by their enemies--the mathematical and verbal abilities of the Ashkenazi Jews increased with each generation. While there are many types of intelligence, these two faculties are the primary ones measured by standard IQ tests and the SAT. At the end of the process they (we) emerged from the evolutionary pressure cooker as the most intelligent ethnic group on Planet Earth, at least by the traditional measurements. We retain that status to this day, both because the process is self-perpetuating and because the direction of evolution is ever onward and upward.

Of course in order to accept this hypothesis you have to accept the theory of evolution in the first place. The two cranks I was fighting with are as militantly anti-evolution as they are anti-Semitic. They refuse accept any truth they dislike in any area, as if truth actually depends on your likes and dislikes or what your church teaches. They refuse to believe you when you tell them what the Hebrew really says, as opposed to what they want it to say. They put forth a tremendous effort trying to make true appear false and vice versa. That’s the real reason they can never be a match for any smart Jewish girl who has just had her turf violated. But it doesn’t hurt to have the added advantage of the sword of the Ashkenazim. That’s one thing I’m grateful to Christian Europe for--although not for a whole hell of a lot of anything else

Unsent Letters

2009-09-10T22:54:00.000-07:00

Sonnet: Unsent Letters
In Memory of Jantha Rachel Siegel, 1949-1984

I have a whole black notebook full of these
Letters addressed to absent friends and lovers;
Unsent letters. In them one discovers
Traces of them and me, the hidden keys
To the past. And some are to her as well--
I cannot say why they were never mailed;
I only know how shamefully I failed
That bitter lovely girl at the gates of hell.

This one is the last. I will write no more
Unsent letters to her or anyone…
Here are my last pathetic words to her, unread.
Would they have kept the demon from her door?
Would they have kept her longer in the sun?
I wrote them three days after she was dead.

I wrote this sonnet in memory of my sister Jantha a couple of weeks after her death in 1984. I was originally planning to post it later on as the introduction to a longer piece about my sister’s tragic life and death. She died in her apartment in Jerusalem of an overdose of Valium and other drugs, about a month and a half short of her 35th birthday. It’s an open question whether it was an accidental overdose or not, and I still prefer to keep it that way. There is no question that she was suicidal. I can still remember her desperate transatlantic calls and how helpless they made us feel—my cousin Alice and my husband and me--because we were half a world away and couldn’t do anything for her, no matter how desperately we wanted to help her. But no suicide note was ever found, and it wasn’t like Jantha not to deliver her final parting shot to the world if she really intended to take her own life. About the only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that she wasn’t trying very hard to stay alive.

I decided to post this memorial sonnet today instead of waiting to use it later to remind myself why I’ve been laying myself on the line in such a personal way here. I did this because of a comment from my friend Lynne after my first blog post. Lynne actually posted her comment on September 6th, but I didn’t realize it was there until yesterday (September 9th). She told me about a young girl--a friend of a neighbor’s daughter--who took her own life at the age of fourteen. Yet another young and beautiful and gifted misfit, another victim of the world’s misunderstanding and cruelty.

"From all appearances, a lovely, talented child who should have been popular and well-liked, but the popular people shunned her and made her their object of ridicule."

It’s impossible for me not to relate to that, considering my own miserable childhood and adolescence. For Jantha the burden was somewhat different but ultimately heavier than mine, and in the end it crushed her completely. She wasn’t quite as obviously weird as I was, and so managed to escape being bullied and taunted as far as I know. It also helped that she was beautiful, with her clear, catlike green eyes and wonderful thick chestnut hair. She had a striking, classically Hebrew kind of beauty that I envied intensely. I always felt so mousy and washed-out compared with her. And yet she told me she didn’t feel beautiful and had never felt beautiful. She only believed it because people kept telling her she was beautiful, so she had to take their word for it.

And she was as gifted as she was beautiful. She had an IQ of 154, and she skipped a grade—I’m pretty sure it was the 5th grade, although I really don’t remember. From then on she was a year younger than her classmates. And she was at least as good a writer as I am, if not better. But years after the fact, I realize that she hit the trifecta: ADD + anxiety + depression, and very likely borderline personality disorder on top of all that. With me it's "only" ADD + anxiety (panic disorder), which hasn't bothered me all that much since I went through menopause.

So that’s why I’m blogging and why I’m making it so personal. I hope others will see themselves and/or their loved ones reflected in me, and that something I say here will help them find a way out of the labyrinth I know so well. I wish I could have said or done something to help that fourteen-year old girl Lynne told me about, even though I didn’t hear about her until after her death. And if not her, then maybe the next one, or the next one…or the one after that. Sadly, it isn’t an uncommon story by a long way, even now that so much more is known about ADD/ADHD and its co-morbid or complicating conditions than when Jantha and I were growing up. The fact that such tragedies are so common only makes them more tragic, not less. Every time I hear a story like that I’m outraged all over again at the appalling waste of life and possibility.

I’m not sure why I chose the sonnet form for Jantha’s elegy when I usually write free verse or prose. It seems strange that I imposed such a strict discipline of meter and rhyme on myself at a time of fresh grief. It could be that the first couple of lines came to me that way, so I had to be consistent and follow the form all the way through. But it seems very appropriate somehow. To me the sonnet form is a kind of funeral urn, a fitting and beautiful marble container for my grief and regret.

Coyote in My DNA (2)

2009-08-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

This isn’t the post I told everyone I was going to put up here as soon as I finished fine-tuning it. I had to set that one aside for now, because I became self-conscious and bogged down and I overworked it. After all the years I’ve been writing, I should really know better than that, but I fell into the spinning-my-wheels trap anyway. This morning I decided to write something brand new to pull myself out of the trap. So instead of being another flashback as I originally intended, this one is half flashback and half flash-forward to the present. Specifically, it’s a little clip from the conversations I had with some of my neighbors yesterday at Bennie’s yard sale. It seems to fit here, though, because those conversations are a microcosm of the inner conflicts that were the subject of my previous post.

Bennie lives around the corner from me on Arrowhead, and since her yard sales are her only source of income she has them practically every weekend. Most of her neighbors understand her situation. They not only don’t harass her but are actively supportive in a number of different ways. The only exception is the busybody troll down the block, who calls her “white trash” and complains about her frequent yard sales to Code Enforcement. We haven’t learned the precise identity of the troll or her address yet, but we have a lot of creative plans in the works for when we do.

Yesterday I planned on bringing a couple of crates of my small plants over to Bennie’s to sell for a dollar each, but I was late getting over there. I was at the computer trying to revise my second discussion board post, and also anticipating my third one. And that meant looking back…taking a long, long look back into the past. Pretty soon I was in over my head—not in a painful way exactly, but in a much more intense way than I really wanted to deal with yesterday morning. Still, there it was. However it gets out of the bag, it can be hard to stuff it back in sometimes.

I had been mulling over the idea of starting my third post with a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was the same sonnet I once read out loud to a sixteen-year-old boy in my bedroom in Redondo Beach, when I was also sixteen years old. The words of the sonnet started coming back to me, and the intense emotions carried on those words came flooding back also—along with sharper, more concrete images, visual images. I didn’t realize there were so many of those left in the storehouse. I remembered the turquoise-painted walls of my bedroom in the house on Marshallfield Lane, right down to the hole in the particle board that for some reason never got fixed. I remembered how much I hated that hole, and the longer I had to live with it the more I hated it.

My old copy of Millay’s collected poems is one of the treasures I lost in storage after I lost my house in Montclair. Over time that book became as personal as a journal, because of the little notes to myself I wrote in the margins of the poems—dates and initials and short, poignant reminders like “On Dec. 13th I cried over this.” That was all I needed. Reading over the note and the sonnet, I knew perfectly well why I cried over it on that particular night.

But I no longer have that treasured book, so yesterday morning I set myself a little challenge. I decided to write the sonnet down from memory in my current journal, to see how accurately I remembered it after all these years. Then after I had given it my best shot, I went online and did a quick Google search [Millay’s poems are public domain] so I could grade myself. If anything, I think I was more afraid that I would remember the sonnet word-for-word than that I wouldn’t.

It turned out to be not quite word-for-word, but pretty damn close! I only got one short phrase at the beginning of one line wrong. I had written: “If you were not lovely I would leave you now…” instead of “Were you not lovely I would leave you now…” which is how Millay actually wrote it. Considering my intensely nostalgic mood, I think I can be forgiven for not counting out the beats on my fingers, which would have helped me avoid even that small error.

So yesterday afternoon after I brought my crates of plants over, the four of us—Bennie and Tony and Jean and I—were all sitting on Bennie’s lawn eating sandwiches from the Subway over on Highland. Tony is Bennie’s partner, who lives with her and collaborates with her on the yard sales. Jean is Bennie’s next-door neighbor and friend—and my good friend also. The yard sale stuff was set up in Jean’s driveway instead of Bennie’s, so the troll down the block couldn’t complain to the cops or Code Enforcement that the yard sales are on the same property week after week, because technically speaking...they aren’t.

Things were kind of slow yesterday afternoon, and nobody was stopping to look at the yard sale stuff. I was beginning to give up hope of selling even one plant, but at least we could relax and eat our lunch in peace. I had brought over some homemade potato salad to go with the sandwiches.

I began telling my friends about what I had been doing in the morning—the challenge I had set for myself and the results. And I also told them about the note I wrote in the margin of the Millay sonnet, the note I cried and laughed over so many times in later years: “Read this out loud to L. on [don’t recall the date] but didn’t tell him at the time that I applied it to him.”

I started laughing again when I told them about it, even though I was embarrassed as usual. It’s hard to accept that I was ever that naïve, even at sixteen.

“Can you believe that?” I said. “Didn’t tell him I applied it him…good grief! Like I really needed to tell him after I read him that poem. After all, the guy wasn’t stupid!”

And then I recited the sonnet out loud. Again I stumbled over the line “Were you not lovely I would leave you now…” but I corrected myself.

All three of them stared at me in amazement, as though I had just performed some dangerous high-wire trick. It’s possible that none of them had ever heard of Millay before, had never read that sonnet even once, and had no idea whether I was getting it right or not. But they probably sensed that I knew—and they were right.

“She’s a prodigy,” Bennie said. “Do you know what she did? She quoted the other part of the inscription on the armoire in my living room. What was it again?”

She wanted me to prompt her, which was so easy it was almost embarrassing. After all it’s only two lines, and one of them is already inscribed on the armoire.

“It’s from Shakespeare,” I reminded her. “It’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on/ And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ The second part, ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep’ is the line on your armoire. All I did was quote the first line, because I recognized the second one.”

I never know quite how to respond in these situations. False modesty makes everyone uncomfortable because it indicates either phoniness or insecurity. At the same time, I know I can’t take credit for what comes naturally. So the following has become my standard approach, which at least has the virtue of being true.

I told them that I memorize poetry easily because I’ve always loved it, and read and wrote it compulsively when I was younger. Occasionally I would deliberately set out to memorize a poem, but most of the time I did it unconsciously. I would read over my favorite poems so many times that I committed them to memory without realizing I was doing it.

Jean took me aside and said to me very quietly, so that Bennie and Tony couldn’t hear: “Please don’t be offended if I tell you this, but Cheryl offered to clean your floors for you.” Cheryl is Bennie’s next-door neighbor on the other side, two doors down from Jean.

“I’m not offended,” I told her. You think I don’t know my floors are filthy? You think I don’t know how to clean a floor? That’s what it means to have ADD. Things that are so hard for other people, like memorizing poetry, are easy for me. But ordinary, mundane things like keeping the house clean are next to impossible. It’s because I can’t prioritize, and then it all gets away from me and becomes overwhelming. I can’t decide what I need to do first, so I end up not doing any of it.”

She seemed to understand and accept that even before I said it. “You wouldn’t have to move your boxes or anything. Just get rid of some of those bags. Cheryl says she’ll bring her cleaning stuff over and only clean the part that shows.”

I thought it was interesting that Cheryl was so afraid I’d be offended that she couldn’t make the offer herself, but had to ask Jean to do it for her. “Tell Cheryl to give me some time to at least make the goat trails between the rooms a little wider,” I said. “I won’t try to reorganize everything. It’s not like I don’t see all that clutter. It’s not like I don’t know the paths between the rooms are getting narrower. But I wake up in the morning and I see that horrible mess and it just depresses me no end. And then you know what I want to do? I want to get on the Internet and tune it all out…which is usually what I end up doing.”

Again she seemed to understand that before I said it. She probably doesn’t understand why I’m like that, but out of the goodness of her kind heart she saw my situation for what it is.

“If I ever say something like that and you feel insulted, please let me know,” she said. “I don’t mean it like that. We love you and we want to help you.”

“I know,” I said. Which was probably the biggest step forward of all. Not to turn away from the help I so desperately need, not to see it as condescension and reject it almost as a conditioned reflex, not to retreat into a cocoon of shame as I’ve done so many times before—that’s progress of a kind most people will never understand.

Introduction: Coyote in My DNA

2009-08-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

It’s more than appropriate that my first-ever blog entry began life a couple of days ago as a discussion board post. I have no experience at all with blogging, but plenty of experience spouting off on discussion boards and writing long, introspective e-mails to my friends. I’ve been addicted to Internet discussion boards ever since I got my first computer with a modem in 1994. That computer came with Prodigy software installed. The service is now known as “Prodigy Classic” to old Prodigy hands, but in those days it was called simply “Prodigy.”

It didn’t take long for me to find my cyber-home: the Prodigy forum on Religion Concourse 2 called “Debates – Religious Issues.” This was the most raucous and confrontational of all the Prodigy religion forums, and I guess there was something about the supercharged atmosphere that resonated with me at the time. I got into countless arguments, but I also made some very good friends on that forum. Sadly, I have lost track of many of those friends over the years, although I’ve remained in contact with others who have recently become my Facebook friends.

I probably made at least as many enemies as friends on that board, though. I’m an unabashed liberal when it comes to both religion and politics, and I’ve always been very outspoken about it. For several months, my signature line was: Everyone is entitled to my opinion. Anyone who knows me at all knows this is not an exaggeration!

After Prodigy Classic folded in October 1999, I became the co-moderator of a short-lived interfaith forum on the now-defunct Delphi service called “Conversations About God.” But the gravitational field of Prodigy (its second incarnation was known as Prodigy Internet) sucked me back in again and I began neglecting “my” Delphi forum. Again I gravitated to the Interfaith forum, and again I got into more than my share of raucous arguments. And I made new friends who had either never been Prodigy Classic members at all or who I never had occasion to meet there.

The forum where I am currently a regular could be considered the third and final incarnation of Prodigy, since it’s the brainchild of a former Prodigy administrator. A few regulars from the old days (both friends and foes) still hang around there. A couple of days ago I addressed a version of the following post and two others to my friend Sean on the Religion & Spirituality board. It is autobiographical in nature and doesn’t have much to do with religion except peripherally. I guess it’s become second nature for me to spout off about anything and everything on religion forums, and that’s what I did here. I found myself writing these posts almost before I realized what was happening.

Reading them over a day later, I decided they weren’t too whiny and self-pitying to be my first blog posts after all. And if they are...too bad! A certain amount of whining is to be expected or at least tolerated on any personal blog. I’ll try to keep it to an absolute minimum, but don’t ask me to make you any promises!

Coyote in My DNA

I was an intellectually precocious child who finished high school far too early and nagged my poor, but pliable, parents until they let me, aged 15, go away to college on the strength of an insufficient scholarship.

Sean,

WOW!!! I am truly impressed, even though I'm also gifted. This was noted early on, both by me and by my parents and teachers and everyone around me. After teaching me the alphabet when I was three, my mother was able to convince the school authorities to let me start kindergarten at age 4 1/2. After that head start, I was always six months to a year younger than my classmates, although I never officially skipped a grade. (My sister did, though.) When I was in the fourth grade, my reading skills were tested at the 10th grade level, the equivalent to a sophomore in high school.

Unfortunately, this amazing potential was never matched by any significant academic achievement, due to the genetic booby prize that went along with it. I have Coyote the Trickster in my DNA, commonly known nowadays as ADD or ADHD, depending upon whether hyperactivity is present or not.

But in the old days (the 1950s and 1960s) they didn't call it anything--or if they did, they called it "what the hell is wrong with you, anyway?" A question I couldn't even begin to answer until I was 57 years old. Or worse yet: "You have so much POTENTIAL, Linda. If you would only APPLY yourself, if you would only FOCUS." As if "focusing" were an act of will! Everyone believed that, including me. They all acted as though if I couldn't focus, it was simply because I wasn't "trying" hard enough, or because I had some mysterious phobia about success or “will to fail.”

Occasionally, some of the more charitable school counselors got a clue that one reason for my lack of focus was the fact that I was utterly miserable. Because I was shy and self-conscious and perceived as "weird" by my classmates, I was bullied and tormented nonstop all through school--from the first grade almost to the day I graduated high school. By then I was a confirmed Outsider, with a volcano of rage inside me and boundless contempt for the Establishment.

It got to the point where I absolutely cringed when anyone brought up the subject of my "potential." I reacted to that word as though I'd been slapped in the face. The guilt was just that overwhelming. NOBODY was more aware of my potential than me, and it was a standing reproach to me that I was apparently doomed to never actualize it.

Worse than that, my chronic underachievement often seemed like an insult to God who had so gifted me. I knew I couldn't claim credit for what was innate and inborn, but only for what I did with it. And I was seemingly unable to do much of anything with it, or only in fits and starts if I did. It wasn't until I was 57 years old, when a book on adult ADD practically fell into my hands in a library, that I finally learned the name of that nameless curse I had been aware of since I was five or six years old.

What I have just inflicted on you is the old tape, which I am in the process of replacing or at the very least revising. I guess it's painfully obvious that I haven't replaced it yet, but I'm working on it. But my wretched childhood and adolescence are one of the main reasons why I threw myself into the Sixties counterculture with a vengeance, including the "free love" aspect of it, and why I have absolutely no regrets about that to this day. I'll continue with that in another note, though.