Plant the Sapling First

I've been reading this book, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamenetz, for about a week. I've been looking forward to doing so since I saw it, what, 25 years ago, as I was stocking copies in the Religions-Judaism section in Barnes and Noble. I had somehow thought of it all these years as an exploration of Kamenetz' own experiences in India, but he was actually operating as a journalist traveling with a Jewish delegation meeting with the Dalai Lama. Doesn't matter, it's a good book. 

It's in his position as the outsider, secular Jew traveling with rabbis and their coterie, that he raises fascinating and difficult questions about both Judaism and religion. The Dalai Lama had requested, after a visit to the US, to meet with Jews who might commiserate with him regarding being a part of a diaspora, recognizing  the reality of Tibetan spiritual homelessness. There are many good segments but this one comes during the presentation by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the Orthodox representative, who takes the Dalai Lama through the early history of Jewish diaspora. 

[The] Babylonian story offers...hope. But I knew why Yitz chose instead to make a parallel with events surrounding the Roman destruction. The Tibetans might well be facing a long exile. And not far from his mind was also the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises...How can Jews affirm faith in God and his covenant with the chosen people after Auschwitz? The question is settled for most secular and liberal Jews--they can't. Obviously such a position is unacceptable to an Orthodox Jew...In contemporary Orthdox Jewish theology, Rabbi Greenberg's own substantial contribution has been the concept of the "voluntary covenant." According to [sociologist Arnold] Eisen, "The word 'voluntary' is crucial...It emphasizes that the initiative--now, more than ever--is on the human side rather than on God's. It suggests that we will be faithful, we will uphold the covenant, even if God in the Holocaust did not." 

Here, I would add a massive exclamation point to the text if I could. This is radical Orthodoxy as I understand it. 

[Rabbi] Greenberg told the Dalai Lama that the covenant is "the most seminal idea" in Judaism. The covenant that began with Abraham has not been abrogated--even at Auschwitz. Instead..."The creator God seeds the universe with life. Humanity can become a partner with the divine in making the world better or perfect." 

What has changed is the human role in the partnership. And that happened, not in recent times, but "about nineteen hundred years ago, halfway in the history of the religion. The Jewish people in Judea were conquered by the Romans and their Temple destroyed by the Roman  empire. It was devastating." 

...In the first century, many interpreted the Roman destruction as abandonment by God, the end of the covenant. "And since the whole Jewish idea of covenant is that the world can be made better, this would be such a victory for evil that many Jew simply gave up. They assimilated and joined the very dynamic culture around them, Hellenism. Another large groups, the Zealots, put all of their energy to recapturing and rebuilding the Temple..."

The Romans not only destroyed Jerusalem, they renamed the capital and drove her people into exile. More than one million Jews died at that time...But Judaism did not die..."There was one great rabbi of the time, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud says, when the Romans had Jerusalem surrounded and were about to destroy it, he was able to break through to the Roman emperor and was given one wish. He said, 'Give me Yavneh and its scholars. I want to set up an academy there.'" There he told his students that they would outlast the exile by teaching, interpreting, and preserving the tradition.

"Yochanan ben Zakkai basically said, 'If we don't have our Temple, but we have our learning, our texts--our Bible with us, we have the power by learning to create the equivalent of the Temple. It's a portable homeland.' 

"It's not enough to preserve...[As] partners in the covenant, fallible humans have the authority to add new insights, so that their activity was the equivalent of a renewal of the covenant. Their courage to renew preserved the past."

[Yitz said the first-century rabbis] did not choose to believe that God had abandoned them, and they insisted that the Torah was still fully binding and valid. They interpreted God's nonintervention with the Roman destruction as a sign that, henceforth, in history, the human partner in covenant must take more responsibility for the outcome...God was no longer going to step in and do the miracles for his human partners.

...The memory of the Temple was never lost--but it was turned into literature...More--the magical side of religion, especially the yearning for a messiah--was subdued, if not basically suppressed, by the rabbinic sages. And this became a dominant cautionary note in rabbinic thought for centuries to come, extended not just to messianism but to mysticism in general...Reason became the keynote of Jewish religion, and though some of the rabbinic sages were themselves mystical practitioners, the Talmud certainly expresses strong caution against too much interest in mystical topics.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had had good reason for such caution. He had seen that excessive messianic faith had led the Zealots to challenge Rome, only to bring destruction on all of Israel. His is quoted in the Talmud as saying, "If you holding a sapling in your hand, and someone tell you the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go looking for the Messiah." 

Supertrees

We continue to pretend as if climate change is something happening to us rather than a result of what we do to ourselves, as if we're passively receiving the actions of an angry, unforgiving God. But most of us are aware, even if we refuse to say it out loud, that we are reaping the benefits and the issues of our practices.

This is an excellent essay, too complicated to cut and paste here, that explains if we nurture the right trees and in large enough numbers, we may be able to stave off the disaster we threaten ourselves with. While I'm comfortable with the idea that the civilized world might end, I know not everyone is, and some might even act to counter the destruction. If you consider yourself one these latter, you can do worse than explore this idea.

the world tree and my dad

In sorting through boxes of photos last Wednesday searching for pictures of my dad I realized I have hundreds of photos of the outdoors and dozens of crooked, gnarled trees. I guess I have an affinity for them, which makes my walk up to this one outside Coudersport a pilgrimage. The invention of camera phones has made it unusual, I think, to look at old photos as usual process except, as in this case, when we sort through them for pictures of someone to illustrate one of those posterboard collections to put on stands at someone's funeral. 

Dad died a week ago this afternoon. It was, as I understood it, a peaceful death. I'm told by the caregivers at his nursing facility, who were taking turns watching over him, that one minute he was breathing and the next he was not. I was with him the week before, having driven out with my wife. The weekend before that he had experienced a seizure of some sort that, after tests came back negative for all sorts of guesses, they determined was yet another stroke, maybe strokes. He lost his gag reflex, at least for a while, and hadn't eaten or drank in several days. We knew this would be our last opportunity to see him. 

It was a good week. Dad had always been a nervous, anxious kind of man, but now he was relaxed, calm, at peace. He looked out at the world with the soft eyes I associate with someone in meditation. We spent hours daily with him. His ability to swallow returned, so when he asked for something to eat he could have a few small spoontips of applesauce followed by a few sips of orange juice thickened with nectar. We placed him on hospice, knowing that this wouldn't be enough to sustain him long. He recognized me by name the afternoon we arrived, and my wife by name (although he hadn't seen her in 6 years) the next morning. My sister was there and he sometimes recognized her, sometimes didn't. That was usual, this sometimes-knowing, sometimes-not. He could only croak out a couple words at a time, usually "good" when asked how he felt, "I should get up" when he was tired of lying in bed and wanted to sit at the nurses' station or one of the visitors' lounges to see people. We left him on a Thursday morning, knowing it was the last time we'd see him alive. 

After the phone call, I began planning my drive out for his funeral. Fortunately, we had already made arrangements for that and dad himself had already written his obituary. Dealing as I do with death on a more or less daily basis, I can attest to the help that planning out one's service is to one's survivors. It's not so much that we don't have the time or inclination to plan these things after a loved one's death, but we are experiencing grief and that can suck up so much brainpan activity that, if it's possible to do so, planning everything out in advance not only is easier but ensures what someone would like is going to happen. 

The events of my return to The Thick, dad's memorial and interment, my time spent with my sister and her family as well as cousins, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly 4 decades, the drive there and then the drive home, and the reconnection with my wife and animals, all that is personal and banal at best. If you haven't experienced something similar, you will. 

I'd rather talk about this tree. It sits on a hill outside the town where dad spent his last years, about a half hour's walk from the motel I frequented all these years, and something of a fixture of the many walks I took while visiting him. A couple decades ago I wrote, in relation to hiking, how for many wanderers in the woods there is a tree that he or she feels drawn to, a touchstone maybe, or a companion they can feel comforted by seeing. Sharing one's tree with others is like sharing one's personal name for God with them. In my very romantic view of my own death, I will somehow peacefully expire laid out beneath one of my trees, looking up into their old, gnarled branches and seeing something like eternity or redemption. In reality, of course, that's unlikely. But just in case, I choose a tree everywhere I go. Just in case. 

The ancient Norse had their concept of Yddrasil, the World Tree, and there isn't much I have adopted from them but I do like this idea. It's reminiscent of the interconnectedness of everything, the reliance on everything else that each individual has. In this view, old and gnarled trees are to my father as they are to my own sense of my mortality (as well as my wish for how my mortality plays itself out). At one time in my life, I cherished the notion that my ultimate reincarnation would be as a tree on a cliff. In reality, it's nice to think of, and it's nice to think my dad may have had such a profound life that he's earned a turn as a sequoia or a fir. But it's as unlikely as anything else, or as likely as anything else, and I suppose what's important is that, if I think of my dad or myself as a tree, it only means I think that being one is better than being a person. 

258 candles-day 36

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I've often contemplated this, "returning" in some meaningful sense as a tree.  

258 candles-day 9

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Africa's Great Green Wall.