There's a Whole in the Bottom of the See

Purim late than never, right? I consider Purim to be a two-day affair, the
first day fasting, making sure the
tzeddekah gets into the right hands, in my case giving it to a rabbi of a
large orthodox congregation, and buying what I need to make some shaloch manot. I never expect to actually see the rabbi,
when I do it is always by accident, running into him at the store or I walk
into the main office as he pops out of his private office, and so our talks are
two minutes at the most. As is turns
out, even though we rarely see each other, these brief meetings show that we
are somehow walking in the same direction, albeit on parallel paths. He is the most public of figures, I am quite
private. And this was what our two
minutes was about. I explained to him
why I haven’t been around for so long.

The reason, I explained, went all the way back to the months
before my daughter was Bat Mitzvahed,
that she was having trouble thinking of a speech, and I just asked to her tell
me about Gd. Her answer would have been
appropriate if I had asked to tell me about the scariest monster in the
world. Until that point she had only
attended private Jewish Day Schools, preschool in the rabbi’s own synagogue and
the orthodox day school closely associated with his synagogue. His head bent and he shook his head. I’ve been saying that to my congregation for
some time, he said. I’ve been telling
them that for many observant Jews they see the commandments as a shield against
this horrible smiting Gd, he said.
There’s nothing in the Torah to back this up, and there’s nothing that
can be done about it. Of course there is
something that can be done, I said, but our two minutes were up. He had another appointment scheduled.

We were both right.
He can’t fix the problem, because the neurotic and even paranoid fear of
Gd is what keeps his congregation together.
That’s why they come to shul, that’s why they give money, that’s why
they send their kids to the day school.
And yet, this very sick relationship with Gd cuts to the heart of
anti-Semitism, it provides the seeds from which anti-Semitism can grow. Talk about a double-bind.

Let’s talk about why this is the case, let’s talk about the
cause and effect that is happening.
There is a concept in Judaism called kavanah. And it is, simply, the most powerful
force on earth, possibly in the universe.
If we list the forces holding the universe together, we could add kavanah to the list. So let’s do that. There is gravity, there is the strong force,
the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and kavanah. Loosely
translated, and loosely is the most we can do in English, it means
‘intention’. But of course, in English,
the word intention is benign, so the English is really the opposite of the true
meaning of the word. And yet book after
book is coming our by physicists talking about the power of human consciousness
in the quantum, Einsteinian, superstring universe in which we live. I say that kavanah is the most powerful force because in the scriptures there
are instances of Gd tweaking the other forces, such as gravity, the strong and
weak forces, and the electromagnetic force.
Gd even bends timespace and light.
But Gd does not, not, not, mess with
kavanah. There is even a section in
the Talmud, in tractate Rosh Hashanah, that if a person’s kavanah is to become the world’s most successful thief, then Gd
will assist him in becoming the most successful thief. The problem is that we can’t always tell what
our kavanah is—and that is why there
is so much emphasis in Judaism on introspection. You just have to learn how to lift the hood
and see the engine. How else can you fix
the engine?

That’s Day One of Purim.

Day Two started with the evening Megillah reading, then the morning reading. Here, I ran into someone, another rabbi, who
I thought had moved out of town, which he had.
I just wasn’t aware that he had returned. He left to study medicine, which was a
painful choice for him. He would have
much preferred to be a rabbi, not a doctor.
We had a history of longer conversations, and so we started where we
left off. It seemed ideal, because for
me, the remedy for the first rabbi’s dilemma was a healthy mingling of science
and Judaism, and this rabbi was studying a lot of science.

Well, if Purim is a holiday of forced confusion, that is,
please do everything you can to mess up your default mechanisms of thought,
then this was Purim alright. This
conversation started fine enough, I told him of my concerns, I told him about
the previous day’s conversation, and he was shocked—not shocked, shocked—but
just shocked that someone could attend a Day School and come away with this Gd
paranoia. But he also said that the
roots of the word kavanah mean ‘to
line up’. I take this to mean
‘integrate’, he took it literally, to mean place in a line. I say this because the opposite thought
process to integration is to compartmentalize—which is the default mechanism of
western thought, dividing life and school, universities and just about
everything we know into categories and subjets, each category and subject has
its own jargon, and never does the knowledge we have touch each other, like
different foods on a toddler’s dinner plate.

He did not like the science he was learning, and he did everything
he could to keep the science and Torah separate. He said this himself. And then the conversation turned into a
verbatim reading of the finale of Inherit
the Wind. Surely you allow some
science to get into the way you see the world?
No, I see the world as Gd says I should see the world. You believe the earth travels around the sun,
that was revolutionary physics at one point, you believe that the earth is
round, that was revolutionary at some point.
That was a new physics during the Renaissance. Right?
After all, your eyes tell you the world is flat, your eyes tell you that
the sun revolves around the earth, and yet the Torah doesn’t tell you one way
or the other. I just don’t think about
it, he said. I won’t think about
it. Do you know about Chaos theory? Yes, he said. (No, turns out he was confusing
that with entropy). But he didn’t want
to know either. The compartments had to
remain intact. Never mind that the
opposite of compartmentalizing, integration, can also be said to be cross
referencing—and the Talmud and Torah cannot be learned if you don’t
cross-reference. Never mind that. Never mind that compartmentalizing completely
screws up kavanah like spyware and
computer virus’ crash a computer.

And never mind what happens when the walls we erect in our
own consciousness fall like Jericho. Actually, mind that. It’s a daily experience to cherish. A little bit of Purim every day is a good
thing.