Читать книгу I Don't Know What to Believe - Ben Kamin - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE HOT BREEZE WAS blowing across the rocky terrain south of Jerusalem, bending the nearby olive trees and sending dust upward toward the purple sky. The farmer knelt carefully over the slight hole he had just dug in the stubborn earth with a wooden spade, a small pail of water set down to his right. His hands were firm and covered with soil, a mixture of sand and gravel and clay that caked on his dark palms and looked pink in the afternoon light.
He thought he heard the wail of a ram’s horn coming from the walled city in the distance but focused instead on the fragile green sapling he had laid down on the ground a few moments before. He was almost prayer-like, keenly aware of the sapling’s vulnerability, its need for moisture and tenderness, its longing to be set into the ground and drink in the rare rain and then, in time, give shade to someone. The man hummed something to himself—a wordless melody that was old and unidentifiable and yet as familiar to him as the wind.
There was nothing else happening in the world for this grizzled farmer, his brownish head protected under a smudged woven cloth keffiyeh, the headdress held tight with a string cord, shielding him from the sun as his long and crusted fingers pulled away heaps of dirt. He was well-acquainted with the yellow-gray silts and sediments of the Judean basin and could even sense the invisible, microscopic organisms living within the soil he carefully shaped into planting sod for his young tree. The ram’s horn sounded again. People being called to worship or some new proclamation.
“Do it this way or you are damned.”
“Listen to me or you are out.”
The city was so often in some kind of uproar, he thought. I have important work to do.
He did not hear the voice of the other man at first. His mind, hands, back, and brain were all one motion of devotion and resolve. He wanted to plant the tree.
“Man!” The other fellow stood over him and cried out. “What are you doing there? You need to come to Jerusalem with me right now. Why would you tally here?”
The farmer was reluctantly pulled out of his trance of work and dedication. He looked up and blinked into the bright light, barely able to see the face of the excited intruder.
“Why do I have to come with you to Jerusalem?”
“Why? Haven’t you heard? The Messiah has arrived!”
“I see. But I am planting this sapling right now.”
The visitor took a step closer. His body momentarily blocked the sun and the farmer could see his face and his eyes and what he saw was a good man looking for hope in a bleak world. He saw that loneliness, that yearning to belong to something, to fit in somewhere, to believe in some great power that could turn everything into easy answers.
My visitor does not know the peace of the fields and the wisdom of the skies, he thought. He is not running to Jerusalem because the ram’s horn is blowing. He is running to find himself because his soul is empty and hurting.
“I understand what you are telling me, my friend,” said the farmer, setting his spade down and slowly standing up. “I have respect. But we have two positions here. You want to go to see a Messiah you don’t know anything about. I want to plant a tree I know everything about.”
“What shall we do?” asked the visitor, his eyes growing a little wild from the predicament presented so calmly by the old man who was digging a hole in the desert.
“Well, there’s a rabbi nearby,” said the farmer. “His tent is just beyond this olive grove. Let’s go ask him what he thinks about our problem. I agree ahead of time to abide by his decision about what you and I should do.”
The other man nodded and they walked together to visit the sage.
The rabbi greeted them and gave them both some water to drink. The three of them sat down in the tent, which was cool and pleasant.
“Rabbi,” began the farmer, “this man tells me I must run with him to Jerusalem immediately. Because of the ram’s horn.”
“Why would you not accompany him?” inquired the rabbi.
The other man interrupted: “He won’t come to see the Messiah! They say the Messiah has arrived. He’d rather finish planting this one little tree in the middle of nowhere. Can you believe it?”
“Believe what, my son?” asked the rabbi. “That the Messiah is waiting in Jerusalem or that this farmer wants to plant his tree?” The rabbi was weary and kind all at once. He had seen and heard a lot of things in his life but seemed quite content in his tent.
“I am confused by your question, Rabbi,” said the man in a hurry to reach the city.
“Then you are beginning to stop and think, my son. That is good.”
The farmer was thinking about his sapling, laying and baking on the hot earth, still unplanted. He spoke: “Rabbi, I have pledged to my friend that I will abide by your judgment on this situation. Perhaps you can direct us.”
The rabbi smiled as he sat and thought for a moment. Then he considered his two visitors with a serene look. There was a twinkle in his eye. He leaned a bit toward the farmer and said, “First plant the tree. It’s more of a sure thing.”
THIS STORY IS TAKEN from an old rabbinic parable and it speaks to the purpose of this book. The early devotions and aspirations of the world’s three major organized religions convey stories and ideas that completely refute the terrifying trend of extremism, violence, and terrorism committed in the name of these traditions. Not one of these traditions was meant to turn its followers into cult members nor have their disciples morph into the slaves of self-proclaimed, often brutal “deliverers.”
This cautionary notice appears in the early Bible: “If a prophet (the term here used as a warning) or a dreamer of dreams arises among you, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams.”
At its core, religion is not supposed to tell you what to think; it’s supposed to tell you to think. Within a hundred years of the origin of the sapling story presented above, Jesus pointed to a mulberry tree and challenged his apostles to think of the tree’s grace and power and use the tree as a metaphor for faith. Seven centuries later, Mohammed declared: “If a Muslim plants a seedling or cultivates a field, whenever a bird a human or an animal eats of it, it will be counted as a charity for him.” He is also quoted in Islamic verses as admonishing a fellow cleric who made a bigoted remark while they attended the funeral of a Jew. The Prophet replied, “Was he not a human being?”
The big religions—which loved the Earth, pleaded for social justice, and upheld personal freedom, and, yes, applauded love—appear to have been co-opted by fundamentalists and zealots. Hate crowds the pages of theological manuals, excommunication notices, and fatwās. This is not just recently; the path of religion is drenched with blood and littered with bones. Like a bad dream, we seem to be reliving its most melancholy and medieval travesties; we are living in a world of televised crusades and theological wars. It leaves us sitting in all-but-empty churches listening to useless pieties and waiting in choking, endless security lines filing past digital checkpoints. We are uncomfortable, wary, tired, and jumpy. If it’s not another suicide bomber or civil war atrocity, then it’s the latest scandalized bishop or charismatic preacher or disgraced rabbi. It leaves people like you and me shaking our heads and proclaiming: “I don’t know what to believe!”
And what person of any intelligence, any mercy, and any humility would not be asking this question? We are hardly all atheists; we need faith and caring and some rituals to connect us to our childhood homes, our parents, and our grandparents. We see something in a lit candle—a festive hope or a remembered soul. We find relief in confession; we get comfort and pleasure from holiday meals; we like to feel we can kneel on the earth, on a rug, or on the floor of a pagoda and speak quietly with God. We just want to trust the officers of God’s houses, and we want to make sense of what’s become a skewed scripture.
We don’t want somebody to tell us he or she is a messiah; we’d prefer to discover messianic moments by ourselves.
What of the little guy who can’t keep pace with all the edicts or can’t afford the membership dues or whose son or daughter falls in love with someone from “outside the faith?” All this guy wants is peace and acceptance, and he’s not even dealing with cults or fanatics. He’s dealing with a church or a mosque or a synagogue, and what he is getting is rejection and judgment. For God’s sake, we clergy should be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
We will find a lot to believe in again when we are permitted to stop confusing faith with the saga of a few lionized male leaders. When we stop hearing the ram’s horn as tyranny but as music. When we maintain respect for traditions but keep glory at arm’s length. When we are smart enough to sprinkle the salt of skepticism upon the hard-won bread of life.
Spirituality is the story of thousands of everyday people going about their nonsensational lives until, when trouble or cruelty or cancer call, necessity intervenes, and they show up, line up, reach out, and sometimes even pray. And there is hope when those prayers are not crushed by the small-mindedness of church leaders who care more about their power than our piety.
“Take off your shoes,” God admonishes Moses at the site of the Burning Bush. “You are standing on holy ground.” What was this God actually saying? Moses was not at the Vatican. He was not at the Mosque of Omar. He was not even in Jerusalem. He was in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere. In other words, wherever you feel God, that is holy ground; and what you feel and what you experience is real and it is what you believe.
A wise pastor of the Gospel once told me, “Religion works best as a salad. It has to have a variety of ingredients mixed together to come out good. Each one of us is an ingredient.”
These days, too many people are inbred from childhood to follow extremist chief rabbis and self-righteous evangelicals and sexually deviant priests. There are imams who have lost their minds and any connections with Mohammed. The majority of Muslims, who honor the Prophet’s historic message, have watched their faith become transposed in a regrettable way.
Mohammed was a complex and charismatic man who embraced all of the preceding faiths, affirmed the prophetic qualities of Moses and Jesus before him, and who stated: “Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do well and not to do wrong if they do evil.”
This is the beacon in whose name mothers send their children to be suicide bombers? Moses is the freedom marcher and teacher in whose standard clerics in Jerusalem spit at teenage girls, who excommunicate one another, and yearn for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock. Jesus asked, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” What are you to believe? One thing worth knowing is that the religions have somewhat fossilized into archaic, even dangerous organisms, spewing out hate and division, enslaving minds, and that you have to go back to the beginnings to rediscover that each one of us is God’s equal child and all we have to believe in is pastoral kindness.
Just because some of God’s professionals and profiteers have lost contact with the rhapsody, the aspirations, and the aches that came with their faiths does not mean that any one of us is going to give away our desire to believe in something or to feel a moment of awe without a priestly tutorial. In the end, the Bible is a library of ideas and people and oracles and phonies and miracles and romances and murders and music, and like the human experience itself, it is loaded with contradictions.
The Bible is, at once, the most widely published and completely unknown volume in the history of this planet. It sits unopened, like a perfunctory slab, in most every hotel room drawer on the globe. People open and shut the drawer, notice the book, but rarely pick it up. It seems to us like it belongs there—we expect it there, like some ominous reminder of forced, past devotionals or hand wringing on the part of a parent or a priest. But we rarely open or refer to it. It remains a bound mystery that we never really understood and we go on with our business.
The Jews say, “If you only have Torah, then you don’t even have Torah.” In other words, there’s more—a lot more—to living life and believing in something than just arbitrarily quoting from one segment, or even a single passage, from a book. It’s not holy because God wrote it. It’s holy because men and women inspired by God wrote it. With each successive writer came a new layer of insight, of pain, of yearning, and breakthrough. If we surrender the authorship to God, then we human beings are just vessels and poetry dissolves into the earth.
We upgrade or discard our cellular phones within months of each edition. Our cars become outdated within minutes of leaving the dealership, but we still believe in the automobile. Does all this make a cell phone or a vehicle any less essential to us in the twenty-first century? Can’t we be just as nimble with the data and the information we cherish and still pray while acknowledging that that book was canonized when people rode on camels and the only upgrade available back then was their imagination?
We know George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree. Does that make what he had to say and how he fathered the United States any less sacred? So does it really matter if Moses actually climbed up Mt. Sinai and came down forty days later with two stones inscribed, “with God’s finger,” and called them “the Ten Commandments?” Doesn’t it matter more that we have the legacy of law and decency and the notion of honoring our parents and the prohibition against stealing from others?
As I mentioned previously, the text is not our homeland; life is. God is not to be determined; God is to be discovered—like dawn is a personal experience and the moon is seen in as many ways as there are eyes that can look up.
I remember gazing into the wedding canopy where my younger daughter exchanged marriage vows with her betrothed just a few years ago. The evening ceremony took place outdoors in an orchard-filled community complex not far inland in central Israel.
The open field, the fragrant citrus, the celestial ceiling, the bittersweet sentiments of life and generations all converted the setting into a natural sanctuary. There was a palpable holiness in the air, none of it organized, legislated, or tethered to any one creed. Muslims, Jews, and Christians, agnostics, atheists, doubters, and zealots became one in the liturgy of love and the religion of romance.
I was there, simply as the father of the bride. Ironically, even though I am a veteran rabbi, I could not perform her ceremony. Israel forbids non-Orthodox rabbis from officiating at milestone events because the fundamentalist rabbis control all such things. And they actively prevent all other inclusive denominations from functioning. The ordination of Reform and Conservative rabbis is not recognized by the government, presenting yet another travesty of organized religion and its duplicity with cynical political operatives.
But it didn’t matter that night. God knew what was in my heart and my daughter knows how much I love her—therein is the sanctity. She was happy; she was no longer a child and the twigs bent under her feet toward eternity. I wasn’t concerned about religious ordinances and church hypocrisies. I looked up at the glittering sky and felt the moon knew everything that had to be known.
These are the moments when you just know there is a God and the best part is you don’t have to struggle with what that even means. You float in those rare interludes of tender human milestones and you cross, with some of the mystics, over the “bridge of judgment” into paradise.
You dance with the Hopi Indians, cotton strands in your hands, making flowers to symbolize the heavens. Your eyes sting with the Buddhist wisdom that those who live in these moments may yet bless this realm again with angelic insight.
You are at one with everything and your pockets—like the white burial shrouds of the Jews—are empty. Your soul is full and you are not afraid of the future. The happiness of a child is the bridge that binds this side to the other, and there you are and you comprehend for a fleeting, delicious moment why it is good to be born and it is okay to die.
I don’t need anybody to tell me who or what God is and I’m not in terror over death anymore. Experience and birth and sacred promises and exceptional pain have all filled me with quiet compliance. Who can be free near a child’s rapture and not know there is a God?
First plant the tree; it’s more of sure thing. And it’s what the true God wants us to do.
