One and One is One

Back when I was a teenager, my Dad took me and my step-mom and sister to Europe. In retrospect, that trip was a big deal for me. It gave me a real taste of (and for) the big wide world. One of the things we ended up doing was peeking in on Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, and seeing all those Catholics in that beautiful building singing in French was really something. Ever since, I’ve have an abiding affection for other people’s religious rituals.

As a confirmed agnostic and dabbler in personal mysticism, it’s a real treat to be welcomed into another cultures’ spiritual practice as an observer or novice participant. Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending my Nephew Jacob Friedman’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Rabbi rendered, the kid’s a mensch. He did a good job with all the tricky rituals and language, and more impressively rendered a philosophically sophisticated opinion on the meaning of the Tower of Babel story that was the subject of the service.

To wit: if all people were united and making the biggest tower ever, why would God break up that scene? There are traditional answers about idolatry or excessive materialism, and about human hubris, but his reading was a bit deeper I think. If we have everything, we cannot really be happy. Thus the scattering and confusion assist humanity by creating adversity, challenge, difficulty and loss. Only in the presence of sadness is there joy.

Anyway, smart observation; especially for a thirteen year old. Mazel Tov to him.

A few other things came to me in the service. The first and foremost was the primacy of family, both that we are given by blood and that which we take in by choice — close friends, lovers, colleagues and mentors — as well as the wider community we inhabit. These are hugely important things in human life. I sometimes think these are the most important things beyond simple survival, and it’s a worthwhile temper to my internal ambitions and drive to consider what it’s really all about in that context.

The other thought I wrestled with started as a famliar gut level reaction to the implied subservience resident in most religious texts. Exalting your deity, proclaiming his/her/its glorious supremacy and promising obedience aren’t actions I associate with freedom or liberty or enterprise or creativity, so I sort of recoil from that at first; reject it out of hand. But in reading through the accompanying text analysis in the service book around the story of the Tower of Babel, I started digging a little deeper.

As I said, the typical lesson of Babel is that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches as a species, and basically I disagree with that. I believe that people are what should (and in most cases do) matter to people. As per the above note on family/community, first and foremost we are all about us: we exist for, by and through one another. As such, I’m all for the exaltation of human works. Let’s go ahead and build mighty towers — or maybe shoot a few people off to the moon, or whatever — as a way to flex our muscle, make some history, and celebrate ourselves.

However, without some careful steering that line of thought does run us right into the Icarus ditch. Technological idolatry (fanboyism) isn’t particularly effective, and what’s worse it can blind us in important ways. We currently struggle with a global/generational crisis because for centuries we thought that treating the air like an open sewer was pretty much fine because of how awesome coal-fired power was. Flew too high, now the wax is melting, our wings are coming apart, and it’s a hell of a long way down.

It occurs to me that you don’t really need to subscribe to the notion that some sentient force created the universe to realize that the universe is frackin’ awesome, and that some consideration and awe of this creation is justly due. Whether this deference is to creation itself or to “the creator” is largely a matter of semantics, and perhaps the attendant humility is more important as a best-practice compliment to the manic, churning, can-do spirit of industrialized man.

So, for instance, I’m an environmentalist, but only of a sort, more on the spaceship earth trip than concerned with saving the whales per se. I believe need to manage the planet better because if we don’t life will suck and we may die in large numbers. That said, I really don’t want Polar Bears to swim to death, and I think maybe it’s a Good Thing to imbue the rest of the biosphere with a little divinity.

Quite often I find there’s real value in the ability to blend seemingly inconsistent or irreconcilable ideas and traits. The Jungian Thing. In the Rabbi’s discussion of what made Jacob a mensch, she gave a compelling case for moderation — something that’s too often associated with bland, watered-down timidity, or bullshit equivocation (c.f. “bipartisanship”) — by talking about the need to be passionate, but not uncontrollably ruled by passion, and so on. Feels like the old, Romantic Polytheism.

At the end, I come around once again to a familiar vision in which the creator is creation, and moral necessity springs from the necessary practice of enlightened people existing in simpatico. Being right with one another demands some honesty, trust and charitable spirit, but it’s generally not rocket science to do the right thing. Like the soap bottle says, we’re all one or none.