meetings with remarkable men

Actually, what I was after was a meeting with just one remarkable man. I had questions. He had answers.  Not answers in the usual way, but he could expound, he could encourage.  He could inspire. Influence. I could be bathed in his charisma. Be brought to tears by his wisdom. Stand in awe... Sit at his feet... You know the drill. Just your usual meetings with remarkable men.

I do have a rebbe who inspires in this way. And I heard him speak recently at a week long workshop at the Islamic Center  in Oakland, California. Yup, he's that inspiring. You heard me right. The Islamic Center. This is what makes him so inspiring.  The rabbi at the Islamic Center. It was also his birthday. He was turning 88.

He was more frail than I had ever seen him.  He was aided by a tall Shaikh with an exotic name.  There was even a zikhr in my rebbe's honor—an Islamic (Sufi, really) shared invocation of the Divine Name that can bring participants to trance, or tears, from the beauteous repetition of the holy name.  For me, it brought me to both.  Trance and tears.  To be in the presence of this remarkable man.  To think that I might not see him ever again.  To realize that the zikhr still holds so much power over me. And in the flickering contemplation at the back of my mind (or perhaps my heart) of the long-felt secret desire to convert to Islam, if only for the purifying effect of the zikhr.

But the power of my rebbe was such, that there was no need for conversion.  My rebbe himself practices zikhr.  He himself is a Shaikh. A Sufi master.  He practices something he calls multireligiousity, and advocates it mightily. Why limit yourself when there's so much out there in traditions not your own?  I'm pretty ambivalent about such a position. My Native American friends think it's dangerous horseshit. And they're pretty vocal about it.

But the argument is valid. Why should we be limited by the narrowness of our own natal traditions, when others are so (or equally) powerful?

My rebbe's not talking about appreciation-of-the-Other. Not talking about acceptance or tolerance. Or visiting each other's holy places and houses of worship. Not talking about broad-based scholarship. Not talking about fieldwork among. No. He's talking about practice. About becoming. And holding all of it (yours, his, mine), holding all of it in the same thimble. Drinking all of the medicine down. Becoming. Being. Experiencing.

My little rebbe and the tall shaikh are on the same page in this regard. You should have heard the shaikh's yiddishisms! A miracle, indeed.

But that's not quite what I wanted to say here.  What has brought me out of my long silence, after the death of my mother. Strange how her death brought me to a virtual paralysis of the fingertips.  For almost a year, I have hardly been able to write a word.  Strong mojo, that woman.  I still don't understand it. I had so much to say, and it was just washed away in the shock of her departure.

No, what brought me back to my keyboard was waking up to a dream this morning. And thinking that it was still happening. That I was still there.  It was one of those dreams. Hyper-real.  How could it not have happened?  It clobbered me. It shook me up.  Wagged its finger at me in admonishment. It taught me a lesson.  I'll show you, it said. You know. The usual dream stuff.

I needed to see Reb Zalman. I needed to confer with him about something urgent.  It had to do with the Biblical Hebrew word את in the first lines of Genesis.  It had to do with an important point in the film I'm making.  Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi had been too frail and exhausted to meet with the many of us who had wanted individual consultations at the workshop.  And I don't blame him.  It's the nature of remarkable men that we pull at them, that we want their baraka (or their bracha)... We followers must be an exhausting lot. But he nodded graciously at me, his acknowledgement. A little twinkle in his eye.  That in itself was precious, he was that holy in my mind.

But in the dream, I was given access. Here's the time. Here's the place. Here's the room number.

I took the elevator up to the 7th floor, and looked around.  The Organization up there was all in the service of the rebbe. I was definitely in the right place, and so I wandered around. Read the literature. Waited. I'd come early, of course, hoping for more time. My questions were just that urgent.

After waiting my fair share, I went up to the Reception because I couldn't find the room.

"You're on the wrong floor," the neo-frummish woman told me. "He's in Room 6.1, which is not on 7."

I had gone to the wrong floor. Written the wrong number. Was in the wrong place. Was going to be late for my coveted and hard-won meeting.

I wasn't worthy, after all.

The elevator didn't stop on the 6th floor.  That was a floor that required special access, and I seemed to have lost my privileges. The elevator no longer worked for me, although it would have earlier apparently.

I took the stairs.

The stairway door was miraculously slightly ajar. I was on the 6th floor at last.

And there, as I walked the hallway looking for 6.1—I saw every door somewhat ajar. And in every room sat a holy man or holy woman. Every different color. Bearded and unbearded. Gray haired and dark hair. Turbaned and veiled and uncovered. All. Waiting. Every door was open, every saint or shaikh or rebbe, every lama, every monk. Every insurgent rebel. Every learned practitioner. Every intuitive. Every tzaddik. Waiting there. All I had to do was walk through any door. Or all of them.

All, save 6.1. That one wasn't there at all.

I woke up this morning to a time change.  I'm still not quite awake, really.  Did time move forward or did it move backward? Or maybe it stopped entirely, and I don't have to teach my class. And what would I teach them, anyway?

There's this door, and there's that door I suppose.  And, okay, yes—they're all more or less open. And what's strangest of all—is that my students most definitely walk through mine.

multireligiosity

Okay. I learned a new word. And I'm not sure what I think about it.  In the past I've been downright incensed at the theft of indigenous spiritual practices by white wannabes.  True, my outrage is for the most part borrowed.  My indigenous friends just about foam at the mouth over this one.  Especially when the appropriated song or ritual or practice is used by the wannabe at the wrong time, at the wrong place, and for the wrong purpose.

How can you, they inquire, take my song and abuse it this way?  You took our land and our language. You stole our children and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools —and now you want our spirituality? Spiritual theft, indeed.  I get it.

Remember the Cherokee elders who heckled Felicitas Goodman one year when we were all in Tempe, "The Creator made you a Presbyterian," they shouted.  "Go back to church!"

My indigenous friends make the case for pure systems.  Or for trying to keep them as pure as possible given that these 'systems' are by now long ago polluted with otherness, or almost completely wiped out anyway.

I understand the indigenous complaint.  I'm sensitive to it.  My own people are practically extinct as well.  And I'd like to say that I don't beg, borrow, or steal from the traditions of others.  Surely I don't  practice anyone else's religion. I mean, I barely practice my own.  No wonder it's dying out.  So there should be nothing to complain about on that front.  And I've learned to be super careful about not inviting guest lecturers to speak in my classes if they're folk who are immersed in someone else's tradition, no matter how knowledgeable or devout or sincere they may appear.

But then there's Zalman.  Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, my mentor. Reb Zalman, whose teachings helped me reconcile my love for Islamic cultures with holding on to my own unshakeable (nearly extinct) Sephardi identity.  I had it all worked out at one point: I mean after all, it's because of the Ottoman Islamic State that my people survived at all.  And before that, we thrived in Islamic Spain.  It all sounds so rational when you put it like that.  I mean, it's not like I wear a hijab (though I think they're pretty elegant), and I certainly don't perform Islamic prayers five times a day. No.  I just appreciate Islam. It makes a lot of sense to me.

I hadn't seen Reb Zalman in many, many years, but here he was, giving a symposium for Star King at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oakland.  Three days of Zalman!

And the service had everything in it.

Just name a religion, and it's tradition was in there somewhere.  No pygmy chants that I recognized, but you get my point.

The word of the day was 'multireligiosity' —and the Star King folk, they practice what they preach.  And it was pretty stunning.  Each sentence was peppered with the weaving together of traditions. And so were the songs that were sung, and the gestures, and the clothing.

I want to call it syncretism, but it isn't.  It's something more personal that that.  For it seemed that every person in the hall had a different combination of religious affinities. And the lectures and sermons encouraged more of the same.

And to tell the truth, it was pretty neat to hear the Jewishisms coming out of the mouths of Muslims, and the Islamicisms falling out of the mouths of Jews.  It wasn't forced, or enforced—it was merely comfort and familiarity with the Other.  Or, no, not that—for Otherness had disappeared from their vocabulary.  It was fairly seamless.

Reb Zalman spoke of the virtues of being in-between the strict adherences of the isms.  He encouraged all to cultivate the larger tapestry.  What kind of religion serves best the healing of the planet? Go and practice that.

It was three days of religious liminality.  But it wasn't just about appreciating the Other, it was about practicing the practices of each.  The symposium wasn't just merged wordings—there was ritual too. Performativity.  And this is something I'm profoundly uncomfortable with.  But Zalman encourages participation (and sure, it's part of anthropological methodology as well) (and so, deciding to be a good sport, and put my bloody notebook down and stop taking notes) I found myself in —

zikr

—crying my eyes out, as we chanted and bobbed. The rhythm is exactly the type that moves me, or maybe moves everybody.  Look at films of zikr and you'll see just how entrancing it is.  And it made me feel instead of making me think.  Which is exactly what it's supposed to do. And exactly what Reb Zalman wants me to do.  After all, he's a Jewfi.

Two zikrs in three days can bring on an addiction for sure. It's precisely the practice of religious ritual that is so powerful, not the intellectual appreciation of it.  I'm still going to chalk it up to participant-observation, this time, at least.  But deep down, I'm not so sure.  I believe I'm in grave danger of wanting more.

And maybe of going out and finding it.

abraham, sarah and hagar, oh my

The question is do we feel sorry for Abraham, or do we say goddamn it, you knew what you were getting us into? Or is there some other way to resolve the whole bit? I've been thinking about this for at least a thousand years, maybe two. Maybe three. The whole situation sucks.

There's this couple, see. They're married. And their stagnant. They produce nothing — no offspring to call their own. Barren. And Sarah by now is way past menopausal by almost half a century. No issue will come from there, right?

But Abraham sticks with her. He doesn't take another wife. He's loyal. She matches. She's of the same basic lineage as he. Good solid stock, and lineage matters in the Middle East. Today, perhaps not as much as in Abraham's day. But today the wars over this still take a higher toll than they did back then.

He sticks with her. And finally, in a moment of enlightenment, she has an epiphany. By now she's old and gray, and set in her ways. Stubborn as hell. But her maidservant isn't. A bit exotic, from the other side of the tracks, so to speak, Hagar has something fresh to offer. And the two of them — Abraham and Hagar — produce something beautiful. A treasure, really. A first born — created out of their instant resonance. No plodding fruitless decades. No marriage just because she's a relation. They simply join forces and voilà, they birth something miraculous.

This must be fairly common on the horizon. Reminds me in part of Chango and his travails. Let me know what you think. Though this tale looms much larger. It has real-life consequences that are dire and bleak and current.

Ishmael means, quite literally, 'God hears' or 'God is listening.' And what does that mean to us? It means that this union is sanctioned, if not by tribal authorities and custom (ie, the State) then by a powerful spiritual force that cannot be denied.

But the Torah isn't terribly interested in any of this. It takes off, quite strategically, ignoring the potential paradigm shift here. Something new — this new couple might not match, but they definitely fit. Call it heterosis, if you need to explain it. Hybrid vigor. They produce something powerful. Who could have predicted it?

Sarah flips out, of course. Some angels come and calm her down a bit with promises. (I'm skipping tons here of course but it'll have to do for now). And she just cracks up, laughing at the prophetic angels. As does Abraham. And so, when miracle of miracles, she too produces a son, it is incumbent upon her to call him Yitzhak, for their (irreverent) laughter.

The difference in these names is extraordinarily telling. Ishmael, produced out of a resonant union, is blessed with God's grace. Yitzhak, emerges from a relentless ache of emptiness. He elicits derision, if not scorn.

But now for Abraham, there are two of them. Two women. One of whom (the illegitimate non-wife) produces his firstborn (legitimate heir), and the other (the correct and proper spouse) produces the second born with not much hope for the future under the prevailing inheritance laws.

But Sarah isn't stupid. She figures it out pretty quick. Get Hagar and Ishmael out of sight asap. Banish them to, I don't know, just make it far. How 'bout a desert they can't possibly survive?

What kind of parent can allow such a thing? (And of course, it gets worse — but the Akedah is for another day).

A new form of inheritance is introduced in the bible. Primogeniture, the right of the firstborn, is no longer the law of the land. Instead, manipulation of inheritance comes into fashion (more on that, too, some other time maybe).

Sarah wins, of course. And we've been paying the price ever since.

Sarah sees her son accede to legitimized inheritance. The bible makes it sound like Yitzhak is chosen for the Akedah. The line of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob is the foundation of the Jewish lineage and the root of Christian faith.

And Hagar wins, of course. And we've been paying the price ever since.

These are terrible ways of winning.

Hagar, in her suffering, takes her child out into the desert, and a desert people is born. The Almighty plants a black pearl under the sea, and the pearl begins to cry for her. A sea of liquid ebony amasses way under the dunes she traverses. She wanders. A new line is formed. Arabs are born, and then — the Prophet. And a religion arises that comes to span the globe. And then, much later, the discovery of those ebony tears...

Is one line better than the other? Is one endowed with greater grace?

And what of Abraham? Did he make choices? Or did he just follow orders. Did he just say yes to every opportunity. God says go and so he goes. God says sacrifice your son, and he says sure. Sarah says get Hagar and the goddamned thing you produced with her the hell out of here, and he sends her off into exile.

Islam teaches us that Ibrahim and Ismail have a bond no shrill and jealous mother/wife can rend. The two go off and build the Ka'aba together — a place where all can come and meet, mourn, and rejoice — and pray. It's not just that they experience God's grace. It's that they found a place where others gather to do so. Not just our own lineage. But a community that spans across all national and racial and ethnic borders.

The new paradigm of Islam addresses the inequality of inheritance very differently than does the Torah. The Torah foments sibling rivalry generation after generation — trickery, selling a brother into bondage, jealousy and strife. Islam says let all brothers be equal in their share, and let daughters inherit as well — another innovation. Calm the chaos of each generation's feuding. Well, that was the idea. Not that Islam solved that one, but Shariat Law did try. Then again, I'm not sure Freud did much better.

I put all this on the stiff and proud head of Sarah. Sarah who must reaffirm her priority and legitimacy of status. Sarah, who sends a mother and child into the desert, expecting them to die. It's that part that outrages me perhaps more than any other. Though there's still plenty to be pissed off about in here.

And Abraham. It takes him so long to get his act together. He too could have saved us all a lot of grief.

Next time, Abraham. Next time. Maybe in your next life. Take a stand. The three of you, please. I might even pray for it, if that's what it would take. And save us the disasters which follow you if you don't. Give us a new model. Cooperation. Mutual aid. Some new paradigm shift. Anything to end the agony that comes from experiencing one mother against the other. And their children at war. You can fix this. I know you can.