Judaism: To Me, to You

Judaism: To Me, to You

(Inspired by thoughts the weekend of Sept 14, 2019).

Whether we realize or recognize it or not, we all have relationships with many different things and phenomena. Consciously, subconsciously, overtly or covertly, we all deal with everything: the weakness or strength of those relationships depend on a lot of factors. Like gravity to celestial orbs, or the awareness of their pulls, we are affected by them whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. We all have strong or weak relationships to things, ideas; to so many endless things!

For example, every human being has a relationship with the sun. Likewise, we have a relationship with the moon, also. The connection to the moon is probably a weaker relationship with it--this lifeless earth satellite that we observe mostly at night--as opposed to the gaseous oven of our nearest star that at times blinds us, but assuredly keeps us alive. However, despite their differences, both heavenly bodies offer significant relationships to each human, and millions, or billions or even trillions of animals and plants, too. All of those things affect the rest of us as well.

We humans all have a relationship with climates, regions, languages, music. My wife has a relationship with a climate due to Mediterranean experiences. She has has a relationship with this particular temperate climate: southern California, southern Spain and northwest Africa, south-central Chile, south east Spain; I do also, I too have lived in this climate, considerably less than her: southeast Spain, south-central Chile, Israel and Palestine, southern California. My daughter does have a relationship to this climate too, which would be: southern California, south-central Chile.

Beyond the physical and the temporal, we all have relationships with more meta-physical entities: our governments, economies, religions, entertainments, artists, novels, etcetera. It goes on possibly forever: Families, priests, store owners, teachers, pets, books, on and on... Each entity provides a different relationship, weak or strong, formidable or seemingly meaningless.

I would like to consider Judaism as a key relationship that all of us should consider. 

We all have strong or weak relationships to organized religions: their thoughts and ideas, their practices, their examples and impacts, their peoples and legacy.  Some of that connection might be personal or immediate, while other things and effects of them are harder to gauge, which are more general to our everyday history and existence.

I will make this personal and impersonal, both subjective and relatively objective, to let you mull it over and reflect upon. 

Judaism, the people known as Jews, and their history and presence, have been around in our collective conscience as long as we human historians have been able to track. The Bible is part of their and our legacy; Adam and Even and Noah and Enoch predate Abraham and his children and grandchildren, whether we recognize them as prominent spiritual or historical figures or not. Millions if not billions of us do recognize them as hugely significant to us, then and now. They, these ancient Biblical personas, even figure into our personal and collective futures, according to some. I believe it, but that may be beside the point.

Moses of the Hebrews began the written chronicles, according to many. These are the five books of the Greek-named Pentateuch, the basis for the Law or the Torah of ancient and current scriptures, valid up until today. This led to the Hebrew hero Moses, the legacy of Joseph of Egypt; an Israelite favored by his father Jacob, the one apportioned the kunya of Israel, a given name by Jehovah, or nickname or title, if you will, to signify his and his people's importance. Like so many "El" people in the history of the Hebrews: Samuel, Emmanuel, other Hebrew and later Jewish heroes, as a group known as "the Israelites", a tribal identity later to become known as Hebrew and Jewish, specifically through that ancient language and the tribe of Judah, one of Jacob's twelve sons.

Don't get too lost, it's all there in the Bible and modern day interpretations of scriptural and secular history. Paging Josephus or Herodotus! 

An aside and plea: Read the Bible and go to Sunday school! Go on a Friday night service to synagogue, go to a Friday sermon of mosque and study the Quran, listen to the sermons of the Muslims and scholars, attend Saturday services with the Seventh Day Adventists, watch their television programming, study with the Witnesses at Kingdom Hall on a weeknight, attend a Protestant gathering or revival, visit a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint visitor center or historical park, attend a Catholic mass at Midnight or a Sermon Saturday evening, talk to a man or woman of the cloth, dialog with military and civilian chaplains and clerics. Read the famous secular and quasi-religious philosophers and thinkers, Darwin, Kant, Nietzsche, Jung, Spinoza, Marx, Friedman, and on and on. Take classes and attend lectures, both paid and free. Read, watch, discuss, analyze, ponder, and collect. The truth and truthes are out there. They are in you and in us, too. Check out a Greek Orthodox liturgy or chapel, or find and connect to any number of Hindu or Buddhist shrines. See what Bahai or Unitarian Universalists are about. Meet them, talk to them, soak it all in. Talk to atheists and economists, theoreticians and scientists of all makes and, of course, consult with your friends and family and media types. Do not live in a self made bubble. Strive to find places where you may not agree, but find those people and places! This includes books, periodicals, and articles and shows and presentations of all natures.

Anyway, there is a lot to take in and absorb, to process, for all of us. Narrowing it down, perhaps it is easier to scrutinize today's Jewish presence, for the sake of this current understanding and purpose of this argument, and investigate our own lives in relation to it, them, and us. It may be one angle to a start. And it by no means can be ingested in one blog post. It will take life times of searching and learning. Just this simple yet broad topic alone.

I was born in 1970, a time when the modern state of Israel had been forcibly established, rocking the Arab and Muslim worlds post World War II, thus creating rippling effects on all of us. The early 1970s, a time when Henry Kissinger, a German-born Jew and directly affected by the rise of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, was one of the most powerful people in the world; a person who I would argue has had his policies and ideas kept and enforced more by the United States and its allies larger than any other single person then or since, which means currently 19 years into the 21st century, years, decades, generations after Nixon and his Secretary of State's tenures in the White House. (See balance of power, U.S. foreign policy). 

On the more personal level, I was born of a mother whose sister, (one of four, but one she was close to for me growing up), was married to a Jewish man who raised the four cousins, his children, more or less Jewish. I knew them and their father considerably growing up. I was exposed to a bar mitzvah and some of the culture at an early age in and around Boston.  I also grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, which in my neighborhood had a disproportionate number of Jewish families, and therefore I mixed with and befriended my share of Jewish cohorts at an early age, and on through high school. I noted when they would miss school during the High Holy Days. I observed when some would complain about learning too many Christmas songs in music, despite the fact that our music teacher herself was Jewish. Some practiced kosher dietary laws, and their parents had different world views.

I also watched movies, television, listened to music and concerts, and attended plays and read books, even secular ones apart from the Bible. 

Judaism is alive and well in our media and print. News flash! 

Politics and social history are also rife with the Judeo-Christian influence and ethic, if I may put it so.

My parents were counseled by a secular (I think) Jewish counselor during their separation and divorce; I grew to know him. I had a Jewish English teacher and, perhaps others, in high school who, according to my high school chums who had studied with her the year before, while I took a different course, "harped on the Holocaust daily", which for them was overplayed or was emphasized too much.

Even then and all these years later, I might side with her. Mrs. Granich, a Jewish-American, a survivor of an awful century of extermination and terror.

I have thought for decades, until now: How would it be if half of my people (American, Latter-day Saint, Hoosier, German-Irish-American, what have you), were wiped out in a tragic genocide? How would it be if my kin had been starved and murdered in droves?

I cannot fathom it fully, I do not think. But it would certainly form me, affect me at so many levels.

It does affect me still, and I am a goy.

I am non-Jewish, according to Judaism. However, I am part of a faith that is strong in Utah where the joke is that Utah is the only place where a Jewish person is considered a "Gentile". More on that later, maybe, if you do not get it.

Throughout my life, I have had interactions with Jews and Gentiles. The dual relationship, somewhat symbiotic in the West. It has been the air I breathed, at times. Politically, Israel has been a constant. The nightly news brought me Begin, Sadat, and Carter. The huge NBC series "The Holocaust" left a huge impact in my conscience, probably when I was eight years-old. Yes, Mrs. Granich, my maligned English teacher, no small thing, that. Later I grew up with Spielberg and others, whose Jewishness was either directly evident or more sublimely presented. They say that E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial, represented his Jewish isolation in a Gentile Arizona. And of course,  later he brought to life so many millions, and certainly residual survivor's guilt in his epic, "Schindler's List". A couple years later after watching that must-see film, I, like millions, visited and respected his grave in Jerusalem. A Gentile German who saved so many people of Judah in a dark and crazy time. May he and others be blessed forever. Saleh.

It is rich and deep, this interplay of Judaism with me, my family, my neighborhood, my region, my country, my world and planet. There is no end to it, despite the pogroms of the Russian steppes, the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, the aforementioned German Holocaust--a painful irony of nomenclatures-- persecutions of all places and times, sackcloth and ashes of the Old Testament, the Law and Prophets, Sunday School classes and General Conferences, usually during Passover and the High Holy Days (wait, some cosmic coincidence or perhaps by design?) seminary early mornings or institute by night during college... Learning the Good Book, learning the laws and the prophets.

My friends, my enemies (sometimes, unfortunately), my playmates, my crushes, my jokes, and comedians, entertainers and story tellers, my counselors and professors, my film and T.V. makers and music teachers, my books and magazines and comics, my music (David Lee Roth of Van Halen is from Bloomington, who knew?). My God, even, is Yahwei, even my vacations to Caribbean touched on the Israelites in Jamaicans and far off places.

All this BEFORE I went to Israel. I was there for a summer at the end of college and it has not left me.

Jerusalem, if I forget you. (Reference to Jewish artist, Matisyahu).

Here I am. Here we are, sons and daughters of Israel.

As my ultimate Jewish hero, Yeshua, the son of Miriam of Nazareth, was, is, will be, so are we: we are in the air and history of our planet. I recall my first visit to New York City and receiving a tract from a fervent Jew for Jesus. I have met and seen them the world over, in person and through literature and media. Larry King? Dinah Shore? The Three Stooges? Adam Sandler...

I remember a Persian Christian neighbor, recommending her favorite author, of whom I read, Malamud.

Who are they? Who are you? Who am I?

In the end, we are all the Elect of God. We are the Chosen, as Chaim Potok has titled a great book.

I hope to find out what that means. We must.

Aside: As many times in my rants and writing forays such as this, there were things shared that I intended to do, and other things unexpected.

Judaism: to me, to you

Hurrah and hallelujah.

Rejoice! We are alive and free to speak of it! God bless our Constitution, the secular Torah of the ages!

We are good, we are Jew and Gentile, bond and free.

Amen.

I give thanks to many people and things:

God! He is alive, and His unspoken bride, His begotten, too, if possible in the realm of possibilities.

Mercy.

Passion.

Compassion. 

Understanding.

Patience.

Thrift.

Kindness.

Godly sorrow.

Witnesses of justice and peace. Warriors, of truth and strength.

Observers, of good and ill.

Parents, and parents of their parents. Back to our first parents! May we never forget!

Books, and authors and writers.

Shabbat shalom, and a heartfelt shalom havarim. La he trai ot. Song of our family.

Shalom. Shalom.

Poets, priests, politicians. (Shout out to Gordon Sumner, aka Sting. We saw him perform a few weeks ago! No, he is not Jewish, but a citizen of the kingdom that brought us Ivanhoe, and those memorable Jewish characters and influences).

Judaism. Jewsishness. My friend Sandy who wished to do a doctorate in Latino Jewery in the Americas. The southern accented rabbi who read the Friday prayers in Kuwait, and afterwards shared lox and gevelte fish. Bosses and colleagues, past and present.

Life. 

The Universe.

We give thee thanks.

Judaism has and always will be a part of it. Thank you Jewish people.

Thank you Orthodox Jewish man on the bus in Los Angeles when I was a graduate student. Thanks for your light and knowledge and understanding, and humanity. Thanks to professors Stein and Wolfenstein and Baum, whether secular or believers, your humanity and intellect is observed.

Thanks for your Godliness. Your Divine spark. Your survival.

Your pervading influence, known and mysterious.

We are grateful.

We are they, they are we.