Fear Not The Gods: Exploring Religion in New York City

In Which I Fear the Gods Exceedingly: My Visit to the New York Shamanic Circle

2007-06-17T17:21:00.000-05:00

It’s true, it’s true, I ran out on the shamanic circle. But let me explain.

There was a long buildup to this visit – it took forever to find out whether the shamanic circle was even going to meet last weekend. First I heard yes. Then I heard maybe and, then, again, call back later, because, maybe. My contact seemed unsure whether the guest-star shaman was going to show up at all. I called back the very day the shamanic circle was supposed to happen, which was a Friday, and was finally given a confirm, that yes, the shaman was coming, the newbie-friendly Open Circle was going to happen.

I had actually wanted to go to the Saturday session led by this guest shaman, wherein they were going to summon Ipupiara (a fresh-water dolphin) from the Ureu-eu wau-wau (the people of the stars) tribe, who was going to “share with us for the first time the concept and healing methods used in his native Amazon to remove evil spirits, evil eyes and attachment of bad spirits.” However, I was told that this session was not for beginners, and in any case it would cost $120. So I settled for the open circle.

The circle met at an elementary school in Tribeca, in a regular school building. I walked up to the main door, saw there was a receptionist, and thought to myself “Am I really going to ask this harried receptionist where the shaman is at? Is she going to think I’m totally out of my mind?”

I was tempted to just leave the building, but I have committed to my new religion-hunting hobby for better or for worse, so I had no choice but to ask. The woman was juggling three phone lines and a whole lost-looking family standing in front of her, but she immediately nodded and pointed toward the stairs. “Third floor auditorium.”

“Oh, good, an auditorium,” I told the Companionable Atheist. “This means we aren’t going to have to, like, interact.” I imagined the two of us sitting peacefully in the back of a large room, behind a couple of very high backed wooden chairs, as the shaman performed his art for a quiet, appreciative audience.

Instead, the third floor auditorium turned out to be a gymnasium, with fans blasting at all the windows, and mats laid out in a gigantic circle (a square, really) on the floor. About 40 people were already there, sitting cross-legged or kneeling on the mats. In the middle of the circle lay a stretched out sheet with a pile of ritual objects on it: candles, wooden rattles and drums, flowers, sea shells.

Though the room was mostly full, I walked over to the nearest mat, confident that people would scootch over and greet me with open arms, as they had greeted me basically everywhere else I had ever gone.

“Is someone sitting here?” I asked the closest woman. The woman stared up at me blankly. “Yes. See the handkerchief?” She turned away.

I backed away awkwardly and tried another gap on the other side of the room. “Excuse me, is someone sitting here?” Another blank stare. “Yeah.” I couldn’t believe it. I tried my adorable pathetic look. “Do you see anywhere around here I could sit? I’m having a hard time.” She shook her head. “No, I really don’t.” And again, she turned away.

Finally I just decided I was going to sit down whether they liked it or not, and if a spirit needed to move me, I would just move then. The Companionable Atheist and I squeezed onto the corner of a mat and I checked out the crowd, which included people of various ethnicities, in normal garb, with a touch of the hippie (a guy in a button-down shirt with a foot-long ponytail; a woman in a pastel cardigan with big seashell earrings). Some of them were super-hippied out (dreadlocks and batik overalls) but the rest were decidedly normal looking. In other words, it was no stranger looking a crowd than your average subway car contains.

A few minutes after we sat down, people started banging drums and hitting their rattles, in a pretty fast unison beat. I stole two rattles from the center of the circle, and was not yelled at for doing so. The banging went on for about 15 minutes, reminding me a little bit of the construction that is currently underway in my office building. I briefly worried that the entire 90 minute service would just be drumming, but eventually the drumming stopped and we got a “welcome everybody." The guest star, a shaman from Brazil, got a special welcome, and he gave a thoughtful nod of acknowledgment.

We passed a candle around the circle and said our name out loud, and the whole group repeated our names back to us. The shaman, a middle aged Brazilian guy with long hair, decent English, and a little bit of a paunch, told us, “Once a circle like this is created, it exists forever.”

The Companionable Atheist and I looked at each other. We had already resigned ourselves to becoming Mormons in the afterlife (since they believe that people can be converted after their deaths), so the thought that we were already going to be claimed by a shamanic circle for eternity kind of threw us for a loop. “Can I be a Mormon and be in a shamanic circle?” I asked. I don’t know how anyone could find the answer to this deeply modern theological question, but somebody really ought to look into it.

Then four volunteers got up, lit big seashells full of some kind of spruce-smelling incense, and held them in front of each person in the circle. The people waved the incense onto their bodies like they were washing themselves in it, or swimming in it. I studied the gesture as it was passed around the room (maybe there’s a certain number of times you’re supposed to wash your head, and then your body, and then your head again), but I’m not sure I got it right. The volunteers didn’t care. They were nice, and they were patient with everyone’s different needs for incense bathing. I found this energy-clearing to be very enjoyable.

Then we cleared our energies with sound. The same volunteers came around and shook seashell rattles above our heads, in front of us, and in circles around us. This was also pleasant.

Then we faced in each of the four directions and at the request of the Brazilian shaman, repeated the Brazilian name for each direction. He himself was cool as a cucumber, but he got a little bit into the MC shtick here, telling us we weren’t reciting the names loud enough.

Then the drumming started again, and everyone started dancing, skipping or shuffling in a circle around the pile of ritual objects. Kind of a freestyle session, I guess. People were singing, howling, or chanting in monotone whatever they felt like saying. I stood and watched, and got kind of looked over by everyone as they passed me in their circle dance. Most of these looks were much friendlier than the freezing cold reception I’d gotten when I came in. Still, the scrutiny was intimidating, and the circling mob was starting to disorient me.

So I started cracking up. The grin that I always get when somebody starts telling me about energies came and parked itself on my face, and it wouldn’t go away. The harder I tried to restore my solemn Exploring Other Cultures face, the harder the grin came back. And soon, I realized it was hopeless. The freestyling was about to end, the journeys would start, it would get really quiet, and I’d be laughing uncontrollably in the back of the room. This would be embarrassing for me and offensive to the shamanic devotees. My energies would screw everybody up, and the healing dolphin would not arrive.

I got up and basically ran out of the room, with the Companionable Atheist (who had dutifully maintained his own poker face) in pursuit.

And that was the end of Exploring Other Cultures for that evening. I went home and had a couple of drinks, regretting that I’d missed the journeys (guided meditation), but glad that I’d left before anyone had to throw me out.

I don’t know why the shamans got to me so badly. I think it was the change in format – at most religious events I’ve been to, I’ve been able to sit in the back and watch (and pass judgment) on everyone without being watched in return. This won’t fly in a shamanic circle. Everyone watches your face, and I was positive that all the shamanic devotees were reading my thought bubble of “you guys are all crazy.”

Then again, I’m also fighting against the feeling of being part of a group, which is of course a very seductive feeling. If there are 45 of them, and only one of you, and they’re all doing the same thing and feeling the same thing and you’re not, their group behaviors, which would seem lunatic in any other context, create a powerful gravitational pull. But I couldn’t do it, just like I wouldn’t have been able to take communion. Ritual behavior has its own logic. If you do it - if you're part of the circle - that means you are it, and you are helping to create it. And I just couldn’t. I don’t believe in cleansing energies. I don’t believe that a shaman can see a cancer or summon a dolphin or cure an ailment. I couldn’t even stand watching people who did believe these things. The cognitive dissonance was just too great, even though if I met them in any other context, I might like quite a few of them.

It’s funny, I was recently taught about a text where the ancients are arguing this same point. In Yehuda HaLevi’s Kuzari, there’s a passage where the rabbi tries to convince the king of the Khazars that his religion is the only true one. He does so essentially by telling the Khazari king that he isn’t going to try to convince him, because there’s no point. His own people have received God’s revelation, so he believes it. He says:

“If thou wert told that the King of India was an excellent man, commanding admiration, and deserving his high reputation, one whose actions were reflected in the justice which rules his country and the virtuous ways of his subjects, would this bind thee to revere him?

The Khazar king retorts,

How could this bind me, whilst I am not sure if the justice of the Indian people is natural, and not dependent on their king, or due to the king or both?

The rabbi reasons,

But if his messenger came to thee bringing presents which thou knowest to be only procurable in India, and in the royal palace, accompanied by a letter in which it is distinctly stated from whom it comes, and to which are added drugs to cure thy diseases, to preserve thy health, poisons for thy enemies, and other means to fight and kill them without battle, would this make thee beholden to him?

Khazari:

Certainly. For this would remove my former doubt that the Indians have a king. I should also acknowledge that a proof of his power and dominion has reached me.

The Rabbi:

How wouldst thou, then, if asked, describe him?

Al Khazari:

In terms about which I am quite clear, and to these I could add others which were at first rather doubtful, but are no longer so.

The Rabbi:

In this way I answered thy first question. In the same strain spoke Moses to Pharaoh, when he told him: 'The God of the Hebrews sent me to thee,' viz. the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For Abraham was well known to the nations, who also knew that the divine spirit was in contact with the patriarchs, cared for them, and performed miracles for them. He did not say: 'The God of heaven and earth,' nor 'my Creator and thine sent me.' In the same way God commenced His speech to the assembled people of Israel: 'I am the God whom you worship, who has led you out of the land of Egypt,' but He did not say: 'I am the Creator of the world and your Creator.' Now in the same style I spoke to thee, a Prince of the Khazars, when thou didst ask me about my creed. I answered thee as was fitting, and is fitting for the whole of Israel who knew these things, first from personal experience, and afterwards through uninterrupted tradition, which is equal to the former.

On its face, this passage seems perfectly reasonable. If you experience something – if its truth is proven to you directly – you should believe in it. But there’s a hole here, of course – through most of its history, Israel knew of God’s miracles through tradition rather than direct experience. Uninterrupted tradition, okay, that’s great. But doesn’t “tradition” kind of foul up the notion of proof?

The rabbi feels such a kinship, such a sense of peoplehood and of oneness with his ancestors that he believes whatever they tell him must be true. At first I thought that here was the difference between the ancients and the moderns – there is no group of people with whom I feel such a sense of kinship that I’d take whatever they told me on face value like that.

Then I figured out that wasn’t true. Most of the ludicrously implausible things that I believe have been “proven” (subatomic particles; the solar system) I am actually taking entirely on faith. Dave Barry has this great bit about how subatomic physicists actually spend their gigantic government grants on booze, then lie around, get drunk, point at their multibillion dollar equipment and shriek “There goes another one!!!” I believe whatever those guys tell me. My prophets are Google and the New York Times. Am I really better than the shamanic believers here here?

Then again, they believe that a magical person can heal their bodies by touching them and reciting things and talking to invisible, imperceptible beings. So, yes, I am.

Then again, throughout history, most people have believed in magic, in miraculous healing and in supernatural powers. Today, 73% of Americans believe in miracles, and 68% believe in angels. I look at these numbers and feel the “rational” world kind of dropping away. Robert Orsi recently wrote an essay in the American Scholar that argued that historians needed a new vocabulary to describe human interaction with the supernatural, which is, after all, the norm in human experience rather than the exception.

This is the language I’m groping for, too. “True” and “false” aren’t quite holding up to the challenge. Particularly in an elementary school gym, heated to 90 degrees and scented by incense, staring at two miracle-working shamans and the 45 shuffling, dancing, ululating, perfectly normal-looking New Yorkers who love them.

In Process

2007-06-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

Hi all,

This past weekend I visited a shamanic circle, which made me so uncomfortable that I had to leave in the middle of it. Stay tuned for a full account of this event, which may take me some time to put together.

Witch Class

2007-06-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I went to a witchcraft class in the East Village. I was expecting gloomy Goths and unreformed hippies, the kind who still live in the woods around where I grew up in North Carolina.

Instead I found a really great witch, whom I will not name because I do not want to clog up her Google results. I'll call her Moone.

Moone was neither Goth nor scary aging hippie. She was a friendly, cheerful, bustling, buxom lady, maybe in her mid 30s, in a long flowing skirt and a bright green tank top that allowed much of the buxom to flow over the top of it. She'd just moved the class to a community center in the East Village since she'd overflowed her previous space. She was maybe Caribbean by way of Canada. She seemed to enjoy her religion a great deal.

I took an immediate liking to Moone, who waved us all into the pastel-colored community center and sat us down in a circle. There were a couple of earnest young men, one of whom was clearly the teacher's pet and had maybe had some kind of special relationship with Moone, or had at any rate spent a fair amount of time receiving private tutelage. There were a couple of earnest, adorable young women, one couple wo had rode in on a motorcycle, an 18 year old Goth who slept through most of the class (Sunday mornings can be hard on teenagers), a boomer-aged Hispanic guy who said absolutely nothing, and a couple of boomer-aged women who talked a lot. Like the kids in section who think they know as much as the professor. They drove me nuts.

Moone's two hour class (for which she charged the modest sum of $5) discussed some of her favorite spells and where one could find them. Apparently, many great spells can be found on the internet. And just to be clear, these spells require nothing sinister except maybe spending a little too much money at Whole Foods.

I'll provide one sample spell for you free of charge:

To Attract Money:

You'll need a green candle, 5 silver coins, a small jar filled with sea water, your magick wand, Money Drawing Incense, Mmoney Drawing Oil, Charcoal, Matches, and Jasmine< Basil or Marigold herbs or seeds.

On the night of the full moon, go into the woods or by the sea to a spot where four paths cross (if possible, if not, improvise). Here you will inscribe with your wand a large circle with a pentagram in the center. Dig a small hole in the very center and place the jar in it so the top half is exposed to the moonlight. Place the green candle on top of the jar. Light the candle as you chant the following:

My Lady of the Abundant Sea,
Bring me Wealth and Prosperity.

Now take the silver coins and place one on each point of the pentagram as you chant the following:

Silver Coins that Sparkle Bright,
Increase my Wealth Five-Fold This Night.

When the small candle is completely burned out, open the jar. Pick up each of the silver coins one at a time, an dplace them in the jar as you chant the following:

Earth to Sea, Earth to Sea,
Bring me the Money I Now See.
As I will, So Mote It Be!

Sprinkle a drop or two of water on the ground and thank the Goddess for her blessings. Bring the water home with you and anoint yourself with it every day until it is gone. Snuff out the candle and take it home to continue it's work. You can also carry a pouch filled with jasmine, basil and marigold seeds, drops of money oil, candle droppings. Place oil on hands and on all your bills.

During the class, we walked through spells such as these, and people raised their hands if they asked questions. They were mostly how-to questions, like "Where can I find almond oil" and "what if I hate the smell of jasmine." Moone's answers were generally kind versions of "do the best you can."

I actually really enjoyed the haphazard nature of Moone's witchcraft. If your spell doesn't work, maybe it just wasn't meant to happen, or maybe you had a cold, or maybe your prayer was actually answered, just in a different way. I got the feeling she didn't take the whole thing too seriously - unlike some of the "experts" in the room, who got in arguments with each other over whether you can use oil from the supermarket ("there are all kinds of bad energies in the supermarket") and whether you can really raise magical energies by having sex, or whether all those energies will just end up being dissipated because you'll keep getting distracted by the sex.

"I've done it," one of the middle-aged students said smugly. "You just really have to concentrate." She started lecturing the rest of the class about this, to our horror, and to the annoyance of Moone, who turned away towards her other students and mumbled "That's bullshit. Nobody can do that." Mostly, though, Moone took this counter-lecturing with good grace.

A confession: I used to do this. I don't even think my mom knew that. I went to a hippie school, and in the sixth grade, there was a witchcraft fad, the same way there would later be a Converse sneakers fad and a knitting fad. My inspiration was Joyce, a very cool fellow sixth grader, who even had an altar in her room (she kept precious stones there, and we weren't allowed to touch it, because it would disturb the energies). And, okay, I had some precious stones maybe sitting around too, and maybe I read some books from the library about making offerings to the earth and the different energies of different types of herbs. It was just - cool. I gave up more because I was embarassed about it than because I had any spiritual objections to it or because I "realized" it wouldn't work. I don't think I ever really thought it would work. It was just fun. I've always had trouble with the abstract nature of "pure" religion - with thinking about a God who cannot be imagined or described. Rituals you can hold in your hands are very, very appealing sometimes.

Witchcraft is also different from any of the other religions I've researched because it's so anti-authoritarian. You can go to conventions and group bonfires and rites and such if you like, but really, you don't have to. You can just do it on your own, like Starr, and cast a million protection spells on your kids, and find pretty stones, and oils that smell good, and rituals on the internet that feel right, or write your own. You don't have to go to anybody's sermon or donate any money to anyone. You don't have to take orders from anyone. Witchcraft supports eclectic, practical prayer, and you hold things in your hands that help you focus on your prayer, and nobody else really has to know.

At my job, I hear a lot of rhetoric about how great and important community is. But a lot of the time, community is just a group of people who tell you you're doing it wrong and drive you crazy.

Forget those people. Go out into the woods and light yourself some candles. Why not?

Moone is great. You can hire her for private parties. Write me and I'll send you her email address.

Soporific Ethics, and a Great Central Park View: The Society for Ethical Culture, Manhattan

2007-05-23T09:54:00.000-05:00

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing about my experiences at the Society for Ethical Culture this weekend. The reason for this, unfortunately, is that it just wasn’t very interesting. And it was also a little depressing.

The Ethical Culturists own a truly gigantic building right on Central Park West. Their view of the park is fabulous. Their deal is that every Sunday, instead of a worship service, they have a lecture from an academic or somesuch person about an important ethical topic. Their slogan – displayed prominently in their sanctuary – is “Where People Come To Seek The Highest is Holy Ground.” They’d changed it to “People” from “Mankind” 20 years ago, and they were still talking about it. Three different Ethical Culturists referred to this change on three separate occasions over the course of 75 minutes. This gives you some idea of the glacial pace of change at the Society for Ethical Culture.

I walked into the ceremonial hall. Plain, simple, dark brown wood. Chairs instead of pews. Stained glass windows depicting families standing in noble postures of familial concern. (At the front of the room, instead of any kind of altar, they have a mirror…. You get it, right? You yourself are what is holy.)

There were about 35 people there. The demographic breakdown was as follows:

People in their 20s: me and my friend and another member’s young son (3 total)
People in their 30s: 0 total
People in their 40s: maybe 2 total
People in their 50s: maybe 2 total
People in their 60s, 70s, or 80s: maybe 28 total.

That was it.

Last week was the anniversary of the establishment of their Society, so they had an open afternoon lecture where members of the Society gave testimony about why they joined it. “Ooh, testimony!” I thought to myself. “Surely, through testimony, I will learn about the burning heart of this tradition – what draws people to participate in it and what binds them to it.” I thought about the Mormon testimonials I’d seen, where desperately sincere 20somethings stood up and talked about how Jesus and the Mormon Church had changed their entire lives, saved their souls, brought them deep spiritual contentment. I thought that this was going to be great.

Instead, five elderly members of the church got up and told very boring five minute stories about when they were young children on the Upper West Side, they realized that God didn’t exist, so they didn’t know where to go to find people like themselves, and then they found the Society, and everyone was so friendly, and everyone was so ethical, and now they sing in the choir.

That was it.

It’s too bad, really. You couldn’t find a nicer, gentler group of people who were more dedicated to left wing principles and to not doing anybody any harm. According to their literature – though I saw no evidence of this – they have a long tradition of social justice and social action. But what I saw was more like a group of kind elderly friends who agree on the principles of right living, and who gather and discuss these principles now and again. Well, honestly, even more passive than that - they listen to lectures on these principles. I saw no passion, no strength, nothing directed outward to the world.

The “Senior Leader” (pastor) seemed aware that this was an issue. He’d structured the afternoon meeting as an open house, so more people “from the community” would want to walk in and learn about what the Ethical Culturists did (in a gentle, non-judgmental, non-intrusive fashion). But there was nothing to draw us in. And the Senior Leader hardly seemed upset. Coming from the Jewish community, where testimonials about impending demographic catastrophe serve as preambles to just about every single goddamn communal conversation, I was totally startled by the Ethical Culturists’ calm in the face of their certain extinction. Particularly since most of them were Jewish.

Before the boring stories started, I actually asked the one member who seemed aware that newcomers were in the house, “Why is everyone here so old?” (Though I asked it more politely than that). She nodded thoughtfully and said that it was true, that virtually all the children and grandchildren of the Ethical Culturists had either become completely secular, or they had reverted to the religions of their grandparents or great-grandparents. She was not really sure why this was the case.

Are we really such primitive people that ethical behavior without any kind of smells, bells, rituals or supernatural beings holds no appeal for us beyond a single generation? I saw a dying culture last weekend. I saw a group that represented not the start of an enlightened new tradition, but that represented the end, the remnants of a progressive idea that had failed to perpetuate itself.

To tell the truth, I didn’t find it very appealing either. It was a bunch of Jews who’d built for themselves a very gentle, very secular kind of something that gave off a very polite little odor of twice-shampooed Episcopalianism or Methodism. I wish them the best of luck, but I’m never going back.

Order, Disorder, and a Brief Encounter with a Messianic Jew

2007-05-14T22:03:00.000-05:00

"It takes a lot more awareness to be a Jewish Catholic than to be an Irish Catholic," the guy with the Jewish mom and the Catholic dad told me earnestly last night at Mary Help of Christians Church, which is closing its doors permanently this coming weekend. (Well, actually, it's going to become a "Church of Convenience," under the auspices of the surviving neighboring parish, but none of the locals seemed to know what that meant. Nor did they much care for the idea.)

The thing was, I kind of got what he was saying.

I can listen to anybody. I ask the right questions, and when I concentrate, I can put myself in anybody's shoes. I am Little Miss Pluralism. When bright-eyed youngsters tell me that the practicing Catholic ("Jewish Catholic") guy is Jewish and I'm not (because his mom was born Jewish and mine wasn't) I can nod thoughtfully and smile. I can nod thoughtfully and smile at anybody.

Except... except the Messianic Jew who I also met last night at Mary Help of Christians, who'd been worshiping with his Catholic fiancee at this East Village church since their college graduation. "Finding Jesus just enhanced my Jewishness," he told me thoughtfully, widening his big, earnest blue eyes for emphasis. "I'd been a Jew all my life, but I always felt like I was never good enough. And now I do."

As I must have mentioned, I'm a little bit of a junkie for uncomfortable religious situations. Every time I go into into a house of worship - whether of my own religion or of someone else's - I get this little tingly feeling of "I really don't belong here. God lives here. Wait, what is God? This is creepy." It took a long time for me to figure out why I'm attracted to this feeling, but I think I finally get it - I''m trying to really get in touch with my own prejudice. Because I was so gently reared. After eight years of Quaker school, six years of politically correct prep school, four years at a global university with students of all different backgrounds, and two years of working at an organization promoting religious pluralism, I really shouldn't have any prejudice left.

But oh, I promise you, I've still got plenty. And a lot of it came to the surface last night talking to the Messianic Jew. The Evil Demon of Prejudging Somebody For Their Religion leapt onto my shoulder, and I froze, and I couldn't think of any more thoughtful questions to ask him, any way to find out more about his religious journey without showing him my profound dismay.

I was raised to despise and fear Messianic Jews. I'm sorry, but I just was. My hometown rabbi was perfectly respectful of Christians, but he always sort of feared that when he sent his young flock off to college, Jesus might get them, and particularly Jesus might get them through the sophisticated wiles of the Jews for Jesus, with whom we could dance a hearty hora and then - lulled by this familiarity - with whom we might show a monumental lapse of good judgment and accept the Lamb of God into our hearts.

Jewish leadership talks about pluralism and openness and cultural exchange constantly - but when they think nobody's looking, they're still counting heads. Who married out? Who married in? How many kids are they having? How many are we gaining? How many are we losing? Why is it taking her so long to finish her Ph. D.? Doesn't she know how fast her eggs go stale after the age of 30?

The Jews for Jesus (they are just one particular organization of Messianic Jews, with a strong brand identity) freak us out because they think they're in - but really, they believe in Jesus, which pretty much makes them Christians.

Oddly, the Jewish community as a whole is far more tolerant of the Chabad-Lubavich, who maintain that the rabbi came and his name was Menachem Mendel Schneerson and he died in the early 90s but maybe he didn't really die and maybe he's actually coming back. According to the Companionable Atheist, whose dictum is that the absurdity of a religion is directly proportional to how recently it claims to have witnessed miraculous acts, this makes the Chabad-Lubavich even crazier than the Scientologists (and way crazier than Christians as a whole). But mainstream Jews tolerate the Jews-Who-Think-Schneerson-Is-Christ in our midst; allow them to hang out at our schools and give us super-kosher matzahs and harass us about performing mitzvot that most of us never even heard of, whereas we really, really, really don't care for the Jews-Who-Think-Jesus-Is-Christ.

I was once taught that Jewish cosmogony and Jewish practice identified the holy as that which is divided from the ordinary, or even the dividing force itself. God divided day from night, men from women, the sabbath from the week day. In our religious practice (which most of us don't practice), we are told to divide milk from meat, menstrual days from child-conceiving days, wool thread from linen thread, men from women. The OCD part of my brain finds these divisions very appealing. Each thing in its place. The world and the calendar take shape, fighting chaos. The mixing of Jewish stuff and Christian stuff? To a, like, profound religious thinker, this creates a truly profound chaos.

Although really, to most people, it's like, what's the big God damn deal if you want to have a Christmas tree. And, of course, I see that point of view too.

If pluralism only flourishes in public spaces - if you can attend Catholic Mass with a messianic Jew and be welcomed with open arms and discover you share many of the same values and you're really just all humans striving to do the best - but if all of this Sharing really just fills you with the uncontrollable urge to run home and share the experience with all the people who are most like you and laugh and tear your hair and laugh some more - does this kind of pluralism really count?

Let me be a poser annoying academic here and answer No and Yes.

No, it doesn't count, because in my heart of hearts, I'm not that comfortable with people who are different than me.

Yes, it does count, because we're not chasing each other with swords, and while pluralism may give you a headache, a guy with a sword would certainly give you a worse one.

Religious Symbols the US Army Will Put On Your Tombstone, Part II

2007-05-06T14:34:00.000-05:00

If you scroll down to the bottom of this list, most recently made famous for its inclusion of the Wiccan pentacle, you will see the following "fine print:"

No graphics (logos, symbols, etc.) are permitted on Government-furnished headstones or markers other than the approved emblems of belief, the Civil War Union Shield, the Civil War Confederate Southern Cross of Honor, and the Medal of Honor insignias.

In other words - the US Government will acknowledge your membership in any of the following groups:

1.) Your religious community
2.) THE UNION ARMY
3.) THE CONFEDERATE ARMY
4.) Group of soldiers who are very brave in battle.

Obviously, the way we live is more important than what we put on our tombstones. But if you are given the chance to sum it all up - to declare your allegiance to one group, for once and for all, after paying the ultimate price, in the year 2007 - why are you allowed to declare what side you'd have joined in a war that ended in 1865? Is this declaration a statement of equivalent value to a statement of religious faith?

We live in a very strange country.

Joseph Smith and his Times

2007-05-06T14:29:00.000-05:00

"Any theory of the origins of the Book of Mormon that spotlights the prophet and blacks out the stage on which he performed is certain to be a distortion. For the book can best be explained, not by Joseph's ignorance nor by his delusions, but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions ofhis time. He had neither the diligence nor the constancy to master reality. But his mind was open to all intellectual influences, from whatever province they might blow. if his book is monotonous today, it is because the frontier fires are long since dead and the burning questions that the book answered are ashes."

-Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History

What Do You Do With Your Holy Book, and Where Are You Going To Put All Those Icons?: The St. George Greek Orthodox Church on 54th Street

2007-04-26T20:07:00.000-05:00

When nobody’s speaking English, how do you make sense of what’s going on in a worship service?

I decided to visit the Greek Orthodox church on 54th Street partly because it was very close to my apartment, and Fear Not The Gods does not love to travel long distances on Sunday mornings to pay tribute to foreign gods. But I also chose to visit the church because it advertised “Worship Service in Greek AND English.” That sounded just about right, I reasoned. Enough Greek to get the flavor of the time-honored tradition, but mostly it would be an English service with the familiar elements I would recognize from the Protestant services I have attended.

Not so. Fear Not The Gods, the Companionable Atheist, and the Grandmother of Fear Not The Gods took ourselves to St. George Greek Orthodox Church’s last Sunday for the morning worship service, which we managed to sit quietly and observe for approximately 70 minutes. Approximately three of these minutes were devoted to prayers or readings in English. The rest of the time, obviously, they spoke Greek.

Why This Church Is Kind Of Jewish
If you could ignore the architecture, you might be able to say that the Greek Orthodox Church is the most, um, Jewish of all the churches out there these days. They spend the first hour or so of the worship service singing a couple songs, listening to the Chanter(aka the chazzan). The “eastern” key and the ornamented single-voice melodies of these songs are very familiar to me. Then there’s some prayer, then somebody walks around and holds up a copy of a silver-covered book, which is second in importance only to the part where you eat Jesus's body and drink his blood (okay, that part is not very Jewish). They read a short excerpt from the book. Then comes the communion, and then it’s over and you can go have lunch.

Why it isn't
However, one cannot ignore the architecture, even in a church like 54th Street, which is in the grand scheme of Orthodox Churches, a very minor and modest single-room establishment. Truth be told, it had a sort of a King Tut’s tomb look about it – a lot of gorgeous, gilded, decorated things all jumbled together. The walls were covered with mural paintings of the Stations of the Cross, and Mary and Jesus and whatnot, and liberally ornamented in gold. The paintings were in that austere Eastern style, with Jesus and Mary very pale and thin and staring at you with wide serious eyes. Orthodox Jesuses and Maries also have very good posture, unlike those Roman Catholic Jesuses and Marys, who collapse against each other and against the crosses, in the dramatic fashion that was clearly very exciting to Italian painters.

This church had layers on top of layers of decoration. Icons and paintings of Jesus and Mary and the saints were propped against the painted walls. We guessed that maybe these were donations from the various parishioners’ families, and how could the church establishment refuse to take them, even if they were cluttering up the place?

The front of the room was just as elaborately decorated as the front of the Hare Krishnas’ sanctuary, and even more cluttered (though no life-sized wax statues). There was a screened off portion in the very back, covered in latticework, where we found out later in the service that some priests had been lurking, and in front of the screened off places were wooden and golden crucifixes of various sizes, wreaths of real flowers and fake flowers, a big Greek flag, a big American flag, something made out of evergreen branches, more paintings, more icons, several carved wooden podiums, a table with chalices and brightly covered cloths and other holy paraphernalia on it, several lecterns, and one incongruous microphone that one of the priests kept having to noisily move as he shifted his position. Other priests kept coming out and doing things on the altar table that we couldn’t quite see because they were facing away from us. We thought this was somewhat inconsiderate.

We Take Our Places
There were only about 20 people there when the service started, mostly older, and mostly women, and we were clearly the only first timers, because we were the only ones looking at the books and the only ones who weren’t crossing ourselves at appropriate moments in the liturgy.

When you can’t figure out what’s going on, first you try looking in the prayer book. The prayer book, in this case, was a three-ring binder with about twenty pages of prayers in it. The entire service in Greek was written on the left hand side of the page, and the entire service in English was written on the right hand page. As I mentioned, 95% of the time, the prayer leader was using the Greek, and when he used the English, he seemed to be using a different translation from the one printed in the book. We tried to keep up.

I know that sounds easy, but this worship service was complicated. The text itself was mostly your standard things about praising God (very little petitioning God, very little talk about peace for all humanity – the Greek Orthodox seem to stay very focused). We kept hitting new sections and losing our places when they started again in Greek. There was some call and response, where it was written in the text that the priest should say one thing and the worshippers should say something in response. In the religious services I’m used to, this is very simple, because the rabbi slows down and makes sure everyone’s on the same page. In this service, the guy who was singing most of the songs took the place of the congregation in reading the response. I mean, there was one old lady I saw who was doing the responses, but mostly everyone was just standing there.

Occasionally they’d stop and one of the priests would swing some bells and incense around (like the altar, the strings of bells were cluttered - there were about 20 bells on his string, of all different shapes and sizes).

The Father Is Going To Walk Through There
We had been sitting quietly for about fifteen minutes, minding our own business, when one of the old ladies got up and came back to our row and shooed us out of it, admonishing us in Greek as she did so. "English?" I asked meekly, and she said "The Father, he is going to walk through there." And soon enough, he did, processing to the back of the room and back.

There was a lot of choreography in the service. There was the chanter in black robes, who stood in one place for basically the whole service, sang all the songs, and read the parts marked "congregation" in the reader. There was the priest with a wrap around his shoulders, who made only guest appearances from his back room to read important prayers from the Greek. Sometimes he prayed out loud in a low voice while the chanter sang loudly over him. This was a very cool effect. There was a third priest in dark brown robes, who seemed to be doing most of the gofer work, and there was a fourth priest who only came out when things were getting very important with the communion.

There was only one guest star – a woman who got up and chanted – in English, but to a Greek melody – an excerpt from the Gospels, about how the Hellenes chastised the Hebrews for spending too much time in the study house and not enough taking care of the women and the poor, and some of the head honcho Hebrews said, you know the Hellenes have a point, and seven of them volunteered to go help out the poor and the women so that the ones in the study house wouldn’t get harassed about this kind of thing anymore and could go back to their studies.

Then the priest carried a big rectangular book around. It was covered with silver decorations. He read another excerpt from the text. Ah, the holy book, the CA and I said to each other wisely. We get this.

We left when it seemed that everyone was gearing up to take communion. We were just too dazed by the language barrier to keep going, plus we would be the only ones sitting in our row and refusing to take it...

As I mentioned, in some ways, I found this service to be the most familiar of any non-Jewish service that I have attended. The structure of the service was incredibly complicated, but it was stabilizing. There were candles and there was a holy book. There was Eastern music. The iconography and the communion, of course, were totally alien to my tradition. Plus, this was the least outwardly friendly service I attended. It was totally frontal, and almost no congregational members participated. The priests were busy! This wasn't about personal testimonial - there just wasn't time. There was stuff to get done. THe service was distinctly of and for people of Greek ethnicity, but not in the generic, schmaltzy way that Americans (as Matthew Jacobson explains in his brilliant book Roots Too) are used to expecting ethnicity to be presented to them. This wasn't about bringing new people in. This was about - they had 2000 years of approved traditional things to do, and they had to get through them. If you wanted to be there, that was great, but it wasn't necessary.

The church did seem to be conscious of how it would come across to outsiders. My three-ring binder contained an entire page of explanation of why non-Orthodox Christians, even those baptized in other churches in good standing, would not be able to take communion at the Greek Orthodox worship service. Basically, it said "our tradition is very old, we've been doing it this way forever, this is the right way to do it, and while we respect you and we're glad you're here, if you're not part of it we're not going to try to act like you're part of it." In a way, I found this extremely comforting. When people greet you at a worship service, whether you accept it or not, they're making you part of their religious experience. These ones said, we're not going to try to bring you in, so let's not pretend we are. Come, and witness, and leave. We'll keep doing our thing.

RELIGIONS THE US ARMY WILL PUT ON YOUR TOMB STONE, PART 1: Eckanar: Religion of the Sight and Sound of God

2007-04-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

After about three minutes of research, here is what I know about Eckanar, which has a logo officially recognized by the United States Army.

Eckankar is ancient wisdom for today. Its teachings, which resurfaced in 1965, emphasize the value of personal experiences as the most natural way back to God. Whatever your religious background, they show how to look and listen within yourself—to expand your consciousness and enjoy spiritual freedom. See, perhaps for the first time, how to lead a happy, balanced, and productive life and put daily concerns into loving perspective.

This guy is the current leader of Eckanar.

This is the symbol that you can put on your tombstone if you are his follower.

The basic beliefs are the following:

Soul is eternal and is the individual's true identity.
Soul exists because God loves It.
Soul is on a journey of Self- and God-Realization.
Spiritual unfoldment can be accelerated through conscious contact with the ECK, Divine Spirit.
This contact can be made via the Spiritual Exercises of ECK and the guidance of the Living ECK Master.
The Mahanta, the Living ECK Master is the spiritual leader of Eckankar.
Spiritual experience and liberation in this lifetime are available to all.
You can actively explore the spiritual worlds through Soul Travel, dreams, and other spiritual techniques.

Religious Symbols Provided to You On Your Tombstone by the US Military

2007-04-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

These symbols now include the Wiccan Pentacle, as you may have recently heard in the news.

A lot of the other symbols are worth looking at too, though. The Christian Scientist symbol and the Muslim symbol that are not depicted "due to copyrights."

The Eckanar? The United Church of Religious Science?

Fear Not The Gods will investigate these religions further.

UPDATED: To me, what's interesting here is that in death, all these beliefs are treated the same. You get to check one box - you have a few square inches of logo space to express what you stood for. Atheism, Christianity, United Methodism, IZUMO TAISHAKYO MISSION OF HAWAII. "Religion," in a sense, is defined by what goes on your tombstone. It's like, in Jackson Mississippi, people ask you what's your name, where are you from, and what Church do you attend here in Jackson. "Temple Beth Israel" is a perfectly acceptable response to this question. Cause, duh, it's the Jewish church.

Long Stories and the Hare Krishnas, Part III

2007-04-11T17:08:00.000-05:00

As the lecture began to wind up, people started slipping out to get a good place in line for dinner. The Companionable Atheist and I stayed mostly to the end, and learned that we were supposed to be good to other people for the sake of God. "What about the announcements?" I asked him. This has become sort of a running joke between us - whenever the worshippers get most antsy, that's probably when the announcements are about to take place.

Then we went down to dinner to meet the Sunday school teacher and his wife. As we walked in the dining room, a purposeful local intersected us J(almost a body check, really - they're probably used to some serious moochers) and told us to go up and out and into a different line. "But we're with him!" we announced righteously, and pointed to the Sunday school teacher, whose fraternity sweatshirt made him easy to pick out from the other side of the room.

The Sunday school teacher had a bunch of other things to take care of, which seemed to include herding an unruly bunch of elementary school-aged kids who weren't quite willing to end their previous activity, drumming class. (Musicians know how this is. Drummers are never willing to lay down their weapons). The Sunday school teacher gave us a harassed wave. Somehow he collared one of his charges, and before we could say "no thank you, we'll do it ourselves," the kid had gone and brought us plates of delicious Indian vegetarian food (dairy okay, no meat and no eggs). We said thanks but the kid had already gone. The Sunday school teacher rejoined us and gestured at the kids apologetically. "Earlier this afternoon we were actually teaching them lessons, which was a little..." "but yeah, they really like the music stuff."

Okay, so good to know that the Jewish professionals tearing their hair out about the fact that their kids are bored in Sunday school, at least they're not alone!

Finally he managed to sit down with us, and his wife soon joined him. I noticed that while he assumed we wanted the Indian food (we did) the two of them had both opted for pizza (the pizza also looked good). Another couple was also sitting at our table - a bearded guy and a girl with blue-tipped hair. Ah, maybe these are hippies, I thought to myself. I'd been on the lookout for hippies ever since my pre-Sunday Wikipedia search had revealed that in the 60s "Hare Krishnas became confused with the hippie subculture." See, I don't know why I said I hadn't done any research.

But they were not hippies, really. The guy was a Catholic student theologian (interestingly, he had been raised an evangelical Christian, just like the devoted Episcopalian guy I met in January). He was studying the overlap between the Hindu tradition of illustration/pantheon and the early Christian illustration tradition. I am probably not describing his thesis very well (Jon, if you're reading this, please correct me). He was studying this stuff at a seminary in Belgium, where he had apparently discovered a great number of similarities between the two traditions. He explained this.

The Sunday school teacher responded with many further tales from the Mahabharata. Stories on stories and stories. He told us another story about how Karna's teacher found out that he was a warrior - because a bug bit him on the leg and it bled a lot but he didn't stop doing what he was doing, which was sitting peacefully with his teacher snoozing in his lap. So when his teacher woke up and found Karna sitting peacefully in a pool of his own blood ("Good morning!") he realized that he was a warrior. I asked, kind of to be obnoxious, why Karna's invincible armor didn't stop the bug from biting him. I thought this was a joke, but the Sunday school teacher answered seriously, "Well, there's actually another story about that."

So, inevitably, I had to pull out the "Yeah, and I'm a Jew." And there was a long religious trialogue about Our Various Traditions, And Their Iconography (I didn't have much to contribute here) but it didn't get acrimonious or sappy. It was just cool. We also didn't get very far, because we were coming from totally different places, but that was okay too. Theologians and Hare Krishnas are both very used to having to explain what in the hell it is that they believe in. They are very patient.

And then we went home. I missed the premiere of this episode of the Sopranos because we had been at dinner for so long, but it was totally worth it.

I highly recommend that everybody visit the Hare Krishnas. A bunch of nice people with a lot of good stories. I continue to be disappointed, though, with the underlying message of these religions, which is be good because God wants you to. And then praise God, because God is good. A couple of years ago, I made my peace with this - it just doesn't quite work for me - by solving it like an algebra problem - God was whatever it was that made me feel compelled to do good. But it doesn't quite work anymore. Luckily, I don't feel like I'm on an urgent spiritual quest right now. I like to see myself more as a peaceful, wayfaring anthropologist, not the kind that brings back natives to study and accidentally infects them with deadly smallpox, but the kind that serves as an honest and interested witness to the ways that other people convince themselves and each other to be good. More on this later.

Stay tuned for next week: Can I Get A Ride in a Mitzvah Mobile? Even though I'm a chick and they're all dudes? What if I ask really, really nicely?

Telling Long Stories.... The Hare Krishna Temple, Part II

2007-04-11T14:53:00.000-05:00

Just inside the door of the Hare Krishna building, a receptionist was waiting to direct traffic. I gave her my winning smile and said I was here for the worship service. She gestured behind her, where there was a huge room filled with about 150 pairs of shoes, and told me to put my shoes down there and to go on in.

In the central room, about 150 people stood, clapped, and danced in a loosely circular mob that was slowly rotating around a couple of guys singing into a microphone near the back corner of the room. One of these guys was white, a couple were Indian. They were also playing some good drums. The worshippers were probably 85% Indian (or Indian-American or whatnot) and the rest black, white, Asian, whatever. Nobody was wearing the orange robes that I associate in my head with Hare Krishnas (later it was explained to me that these were the monks, who have given over their lives to praying and proselytizing, but that the majority of practicioners don't live this lifestyle). Lots of kids were running around. A lot of the women were wearing saris and a few of the men were wearing traditional white tunics and little cloth bags on strings around their neck. The celebrants had all painted their faces with the same little mark - an elongated gold oval on the nose with two arching branches - like the horns of the Taurus zodiac sign - going up to their hairlines.

The room was big and high ceilinged, and it smelled like incense. Metal chairs ran along the sides. There was a big, shiny altar/creche thingy in the front - with sparkly statues of Krishna and his consort, flowers, colorful painted panels, and baskets full of fruit.

In the back of the room where we came in, facing the altar, was a giant throne, also multicolored and covered with flowers, and seated on the throne was a life sized statue of -- I'm not exactly sure who. Maybe the founder? A big white pillar, which wasn't attached to the ceiling at all, stood behind the founder and to his right, a little bit. Frankly, I found this statue pretty scary - it was a little too realistic. But then I used to get really freaked out by department store mannequins, so maybe I'm just over sensitive.

There were also yellow banners all over the walls, announcing the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Hare Krishna movement (1966-2006). These posters also displayed the official logo and what amounted to a brand name of the Hare Krishna movement, which is ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness). There are local ISKCONs all over the country. They are registered nonprofits. There's even one in Hillsborough, NC, for all you Triangle Area readers...

The Companionable Atheist and I had just started to get a read on this fun dancing scene, when we got collared by a cheerful member of what looked to be the unofficial greeting committee. "Have you visited our temple before?" she asked. We said no, and she invited us to go over and sit with her in their temple office to get a crash course on what was going on.

As I mentioned, I hadn't done my homework, so she had to start from the very beginning. The upshot is that the Hare Krishna movement is a subsect of Hinduism, devoted to the particular deity Krishna. Krishna is their particular favorite god, though he also represents all gods.

They are also devoted to a particular worship practice, which is the reciting of their mantra:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

Want to know what this means? Think it's maybe some big secret? I guess maybe I thought so at first, because I kind of laughed at myself when I found out it means "praise god." Hare means praise. Krishna and Rama are two names for God. They just say "Praise God" in more contexts than I say it. You know. To remember that they should be mindful and do everything for God. The usual reasons. At the Hare Krishna temple, they answer the phones "Hare Krishna." They say "Hare Krishna" when they hang up, and also when they greet each other. This is surprisingly contagious. The Companionable Atheist really slapped himself on the forehead when he called for directions, thanked them, they said "Hare Krishna" when they were about to hang up the phone, and he blurted it right back at them. These religions, they just get you sometimes.

The Hare Krishnas trace this religious practice and belief back to 1000 AD, but it really got revived by an older fellow in India who was involved in India's nationalist movement and then started getting religion. He began hanging out with the monks and soon received his calling - to go around the English speaking world to spread the Hare Krishna religion and practice to English speakers. (I bet this is somehow related to his experiences in the nationalist movement, but how he developed this idea in relationship to the nationalists I have absolutely no idea). So in the late 60s this monk, whose name was A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, went to the US. He ended up in New York, preached his beliefs, and served a free vegetarian meal to everyone who showed up for worship services (the practice continues to this day!) Whether due to the beliefs or to the vegetarian dinners, ISKCON has maintained a foothold in the US. Prabhupada continued to travel, set up ISKCON centers, preach, and translate the Vedas into English throughout the rest of his life.

Anyway, nice Geeta our guide took us back into the office, which was beautifully colored and covered with paintings of various Hindu deities in various situations. She was soon joined by her husband, who was the son of one of the local guys in charge so he really knew a lot. While we were talking, the guys in charge wandered in, chit chatted, wished each other Hare Krishna and wandered back out again. It was all a very pleasant, relaxed atmosphere, and where I usually get a little bit of the heebies when someone takes me into an office, I was totally fine with this happening here.

With the help of her husband, she explained everything from her life background (raised Hindu in Texas; only became a Hare Krishna participant within the last five years or so) to the forehead decoration (representing the leaf of a sacred plant connected to the footprint of the god) to this whole religious backstory, and several of the legends of Karna (one of the heroes of the Mahabharata) thrown in for good measure.

By the time they were done, the singing and dancing were done, and the white guy who'd been helping lead the singing was now giving a lecture, as all the participants sat on the chairs against the wall or on cloth mats on the floor. The Companionable Atheist was not so fond of these cloth mats. They had only the thickness of that kind of potholder that is too thin to keep you from burning your hand on the pot. People were wandering in and out with their kids, cell phones were ringing, you know, the typical modern religious experience. I kind of like it - I enjoy the chaos. Keeps everyone from taking themselves too seriously.

This story (of Karna's birth) was hard to follow as the guy was longwinded and soft spoken. It contained elements of the Virgin Birth (Karna's mother summons a God to be her "boyfriend" but then changes her mind; the God, annoyed to be summoned refuses to go away without impregnating her but agrees to do said impregnation by hands-off and Godly means), of Achilles (Karna is born with an impregnable suit of armor that he is tricked into removing, just as the prophets predicted at his birth) and of Moses (Karna's mother sends him down the river in a basket when he's born, and he's fostered by the king's charioteer and his wife). At the end of the lecture, the lecturer tried to cobble together a "The Moral Of This Story Is" but I didn't find it very compelling. It amounted to that Karna was a really good guy. Most of the time. He tried to do his best and not hurt people. So we should do that too.

Why is the story always better than the moral? The Companionable Atheist prefers the firm story arc and the straightforward morals of Aesop to the rambling and overlapping tails of the Mahabharata. I find that I have a preference for the latter - it's hard to draw any life message from these stories, but the characters are certainly compelling. And their messiness echoes the messiness of life.

Stay tuned for Part III: We eat the long-awaited vegetarian dinner and hold an impromptu religious trialogue...

Dancing, Eating, and Listening to Very Long Stories in The New York Hare Krishna Temple: Part 1

2007-04-09T12:33:00.000-05:00

The Companionable Atheist and I were wandering through Brooklyn on a cold evening. The sun was setting. We'd walked through Park Slope, across several windswept blocks that didn't seem to be part of any neighborhood at all, as the multimillion dollar brownstones gave way to empty storefronts and garages, and back to brownstones, and back to garages, and we had asked directions at a Holiday Inn Express and also at a Walgreen's.

Finally we found Schermerhorn Street and our destination: The New York Hare Krishna Temple, a handsome, well-maintained building in the middle of a not-so-posh block. I got my usual thirty seconds of "Why am I doing this?" feelings as we walked up to the door. Going into a new house of worship is like walking up to a stranger's home - you think they'll be home, you think you know the right way to behave, but you're never exactly sure.

I was particularly unsure about what to do here because I hadn't done my usual homework, not a bit of it. I know what to do in a church (sit in a pew, don't take Communion), in an conservative Orthodox synagogue (stand up when everyone else does; look both ways before shaking hands), but in a Hare Krishna temple? I knew nothing.

Fear Not The E-Meter: Part the Last

2007-04-02T07:24:00.000-05:00

The 'guy in sales' was named Alex. He was a Russian immigrant who lived in Queens and worked in construction. He had a friendly, assertive gaze and wore a nice suit. He described himself as a consultant, and sort of winced when he heard that the technician had referred to him as a salesman. Like all the other staff at the center, he said, he was basically a volunteer. He made enough money from consulting potential Scientologists to afford train fare in from Queens, and for lunch, but that was about
it. He had been a Scientologist for five years, and had found the center by just walking by it, the same way I did. He said I'd done the right thing by trying to find out about Scientology on my own, rather than just taking for granted what other people had said. ("That's what L. Ron Hubbard did, find things out for himself.") He recommended a two-day intro course, which would have cost about $50, as well as the course on communication skills that the evaluator had recommended. He asked me questions about how I was doing in my personal life, the better to recommend the appropriate classes to me.

I was distracted by a chart on the wall behind him, which represented the progress that a Scientologist could make toward becoming a Clear (and then toward the levels beyond that, which were called Operating Thetan I, II, and so on). I asked him what level he was on. He pointed to a level about three from the bottom. (out of about 40, and Clear was at about 12). I said, this all seems very interesting, and I get how it helps people, but that seems discouraging to me. After five years of study and practice, the Scientologist consultant was not even close to becoming a Clear? He smiled and said that different people had different priorities, and he'd been putting his priorities in other places.

I said I'd have to think about it and come back, and he smiled and said that was totally fine. When I went out, I was intercepted by the first guy we'd met, who said that he'd not been able to get our phone numbers. I said, what with all the phone solicitations these days, I didn't want to give out our phone number. "Not even so I can just give you a call, and see how you're doing?" he asked. I said no thanks, the
CA and I would have to talk about the program together on our own. He smiled and said that was totally fine. He said I could go up to the second floor where there was a display about the life of L. Ron Hubbard – his youth as a dashing adventurer in a chapeau, his midlife as Executive Director of Scientology, his later life as a philanthropist. There was also a birthday cake standing on a table against one wall that said "Happy Birthday Ron!" on it. It was
standing below a TV screen. The TV was showing what looked to be a televised concert in honor of L. Ron Hubbard's birthday party. Performers were dancing and singing a pop tune of "Happy Birthday" while confetti came down from the ceiling and lights flashed.

My original contact followed me up the stairs. 'I saw you went up to look at the display," he said. He told me that today was the celebration of L. Ron Hubbard's birthday! The actual birthday had been earlier in March, and all the Scientologists had gone down to their headquarters in Florida for a live party. The regional celebration was occurring that very evening. I wasn't going to be able to go, so I
asked him what they did at the celebration. He said about 150 or 200 people gathered at a nearby hotel conference room, and watched a 3.5 hour video about the life of L. Ron Hubbard, which included interviews with old folks who knew him "way back when." He said I could go if I wanted to, but that I should introduce myself as someone new so that a staff member could help me understand the terminology they used, which
I wouldn't necessarily have been able to understand. These old guys were serving as the apostles of Scientology, I thought. The last eyewitnesses to anything that actually happened back in the day. In this day and age, their testimonies can be recorded on TV…

Finally, on the way out, I bought a copy of Dianetics for $8. I figured that at the very least, I'd gotten an hour and a half of entertainment out of the Scientology Center, so I might as well make a contribution. I'll keep you posted on what I learn.

Fear Not The E-Meter, Part III

2007-03-28T09:07:00.000-05:00

The first test I took at the Scientology Center was called the Oxford Capacity Analysis. The test evaluator told me that the test was invented by people at Oxford (I assume she meant to imply the University) but a little bit of research shows that it came out of the Church – either written by Hubbard himself or by some associates. We could respond to each question on the test in one of three ways: "Agree," "Sometimes Agree," "Disagree," or something like that. The test had two hundred questions, and we were supposed to take as long as we wanted to answer. The questions were generally standard questions about one's mood and personality, like: "I sometimes feel depressed for no reason at all" or "I have no trouble acting decisively."

There were a few more peculiar questions thrown in, though, like: "My muscles sometimes twitch for no reason," "my voice is monotonous rather than varied in pitch," or, "Children sometimes irritate me." A very few were quite peculiar, like, "I would be able to kill an animal to put it out of its misery" or "I believe in class distinctions and the color bar."

While we were taking this test, the promotional videos were blaring and two staff members had a loud argument in the hall. It was very hard to concentrate. "How come I never get to use a test room?" one yelled. "I never get a test room." The CA looked at me sadly and said, "those Scientologists are having trouble communicating with each other. I guess they're not Clears yet…"

When we had finished this test, our nice host came back and took it away and gave us a second test, theoretically a timed, half-hour IQ test. I have no idea whether this was a real IQ test or not. There were a lot of simple math problems, analogies, and pattern recognition problems. Some of the analogies were absolutely terrible – so bad that the CA and I would have to stop and consult on a problem, and it would become clear that there was no correct answer whatsoever. The CA and I went to good schools and we're just killer test takers, so we were enjoying this even though the Timed Test With No Right Answers is basically the Organization Kid's nightmare. In fact, we got very competitive about it. (The CA ended up beating me by about seven points, if you must know.)

Other peculiar elements - the answer sheet was numbered right to left, so if you sat down without paying attention you would fill it in all backwards. I asked afterward whether this was an element of the test, meant to see whether you were paying attention to detail, but the test evaluator didn't know. (I told the CA that my noticing this should count for at least three IQ points.)

Finally, there was a timed test that I believe was intended to check how well you read directions and how fast you could act under time pressure. The first three questions were a couple of simple logic problems. #4 on the test was just the statement: "A triangle has three sides." There were no boxes to check, or questions that followed this statement, so I had no idea what to do. The CA wrote "True" and I just skipped it. We judged which of two lines was longer, and we wrote our names in the margin of the page and circled our last names twice and first names once. Then we wrote down how long it took us to finish the test.

When we finished the test, we moseyed around for about 10 minutes until our tests had been scored. (How did they do it so fast? It wasn't electronic, because we were using red pens.) Then they escorted us into separate rooms (quickly, before we had time to protest), where evaluators talked to us about our test results.

The "Oxford" test scores different aspects of your personality, from -100, which is bad, to +100, which is good. The metrics include "unstable/stable," "depressed/happy," "nervous/composed," etc. I was in a good mood, so I scored above 0 on everything except "responsible/irresponsible" and "appreciative/lack of accord." I
scored particularly high on "aggressive," and so did the CA. But "aggressive" was listed as a positive quality. Odd. Or, I guess, if you think about Tom Cruise, not really so odd.

The evaluator sat me down, closed the office door, and asked me deep questions about my life based on this test. She was young and slender, with an accent I couldn't place and extremely thick black eye makeup. She seemed shy. Were there circumstances in which I felt unappreciative of other people? she asked. Was I sometimes critical of others unnecessarily? She told me I was careless in the third test, the timed test, but as far as I could tell, I hadn't made any mistakes on the test itself. She didn't give it back to me, though, so I'm not sure. She asked me whether I was careless because I was being distracted by issues in my life. She was a bit pushy about this, but nothing you don't encounter day-to-day with your basic AM New York pusher or film promoter on the streets around here. Perhaps I would be interested in taking a class on communication. She asked me about myself and my feelings. I could see where this was going. When you confide emotional secrets in a stranger, you feel a connection with them. You begin to trust them and you want to do what they say (recite Hail Marys, sign up for Scientology classes). I am certainly one of those people who, if you catch me in the right mood, close the door on me and ask me how I am feeling, I will burst into tears.

Thus, being behind this closed door made me nervous, and my Aggressive and Lacking in Accord sides came out. I was irritated that she kept telling me I had problems. The IQ test strategy had backfired - my trusty Organization Kid instincts had kicked in, and the test had built my confidence up instead of breaking it down. Plus, the questions were just so terrible. How could I respect a scary cult with such mediocre standardized testing?

With my nerd-powers surging, I brushed aside the evaluator's questions about my feelings, and instead asked her about herself, the tests and the classes. And she faltered.

"I'm just an evaluator," she told me. "I don't really know the answers to these questions. Let me get you someone in sales."

Sales?

I've read that other people had experiences with much meaner or pushier evaluators at the Scientology center. That some of them got told that their personalities were in deep trouble and that the situation was urgent and they had better take some classes ASAP. It could have been my fabulous test results that saved me from this experience, but my gut feeling is that my evaluator just didn't have the nerve to follow her script, or she had decided that her own sales tactics were better. Or maybe she'd already written me off as a waste of time.

Fear Not The E-Meter, Part II

2007-03-26T16:24:00.000-05:00

There are three main Scientology centers in New York. One of the three centers is in Harlem, one is in the theater district near where I live, and the third is on a posh block on the Upper East Side. This third is known as the Celebrity Center, and it is open primarily to "leaders in business, entertainment, and the arts."

I called this center on the phone to try to find out how it was different than the Scientology Center near me, just to see if I would be missing anything by going to the regular center in my area. The lady answering the phone said no, it was basically the same. The Scientology website elaborates:

"The largest of these churches, Celebrity Center International, is located inHollywood and ministers to parishioners who excel in the arts, entertainment and business professions. Celebrity Center International also provides ecclesiastical management assistance to the other Celebrity Center churches located in such places as Paris, Vienna, London, Munich, Florence and New York. By example and through their art, celebrities influence millions.

The receptionist then asked me in a perky voice, "And what do YOU do?" I didn't answer the question, because I didn't want to get into a whole discussion, and instead I asked her more questions about why there was a separate center for famous people. She didn't explain this particularly well, but the official website answer is below:

L. Ron Hubbard once wrote, "A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists." An artist in a number of fields himself, he recognized that artists supply the spark of creativity and the vision of the future which helps improve the condition of society. Thus, the Church established Celebrity Centers,
Church organizations specifically geared to provide Scientology services to such parishioners.

This lady then asked me again, in a warm, positive, friendly voice, exactly the same as before, "And what do YOU do?" This scared me, so I said in a warm, friendly voice, "This answers all my questions" (I'm a little bit of a mimic when I'm intimidated) and I hung up. Whew.

Since I live in the theater district, I decided to sidestep the Friendly What Do You Do Lady and visit the Scientology Center nearest to my home. The Companionable Atheist joined.

The entrance to the Church of Scientology is displayed prominently but not gaudily on Forty-Sixth Street just off Broadway. It has a "Church of Scientology" sign out front that looks a little bit like an old-fashioned Broadway sign. The building is very neatly decorated in glass and black metal. When you enter, you are on a wide staircase between two levels of the building. The receptionists are down a level and encourage you to go down to them. The building is bustling with people. Some of the people are obviously tourists – casually dressed, clutching their boyfriends and giggling, or trying to kill an hour between engagements – while others are obviously Scientology staff, dressed formally and rushing around on their various errands, or
standing crisply in the corners waiting to be of service. The building is noisy – aside from being filled with Scientologists and tourists, the building is filled with the noise of twenty televisions playing promo videos at the same time. There are three big flat screen TVs on every wall or panel of the floor, all showing different short videos about various aspects of Scientology. The generic Friendly Male Narrator Voice echoes from all these promo videos, throughout the building. It kind of gives you a headache. All in all, the center gives off the impression of a busy, well-staffed, new science museum that went a little too heavy on the TV displays.

At the center of the floor, there is a room mostly walled off with glass, where 10 or 15 people (including a 10-year-old kid) were reading books on Scientology and doing some exercises on paper, it looked like. On the wall, there is a progress chart with names on it, that showed how far along people had gotten in their courses.

On the day that I went, the receptionists, naturally, were the two youngest and most attractive women in the building. They were in their mid twenties and wore sexy
black dresses that were a little bit see through, and black high heels. They seemed a little bit hyper. They ran back and forth, directing tourists toward introductory information and pointing Scientologist staff toward visitors ready for test-taking (see below).

The sexy receptionists showed me and the Companionable Atheist toward a hall full of colorful displays explaining the principles of Dianetics, and toward several video screens that also explained these principles and those of Scientology (Dianetics is a specific group of practices that Scientologists use, based on one main theory; Scientology is the overall set of beliefs and practices, which are basically outgrowths of Dianetics. Dianetics was first introduced to the public through an article Hubbard published in a science fiction magazine in the 1950s). Overall, this information is a combination between basic psychology/self help principles and totally bogus "scientifically proven" information about the human subconscious. It's a bit difficult to sum up, but I'll try to give you the short version of the practice, as a beginner would practice it, as well as I understood it (and I may be missing some key elements, so my friendly Scientologist commentator from the last post should feel free to weigh in here). Ahem:

ABOUT DIANETICS:
Every human alive is traumatized in various ways. This trauma generally stems from incidents that occurred to people when they were unborn or unconscious. These traumatic incidents are called "engrams." If you are sometimes irritable, depressed for no reason, or if you startle easily, these are all signs that your engrams are bothering you. The initial goal of practicing Scientology is to get rid of all your
engrams. People who have gotten rid of their engrams (by taking many courses offered, at various prices, by the Scientology Center) are known as Clears. They are much better at dealing with others because they have worked through all their trauma. Another way of working through your trauma is by going through the Auditing process (that's the thing with the tin cans). The Auditor listens to you talk about your beliefs or experiences in your life, and notes when the meter spikes. The spikes represent stress, which represent areas of past trauma for you. Then through Auditing and through classes, you can get rid of that trauma.

Okay, so, you're starting to figure out what the core of the practice is, right? When you take an e-meter test, someone is listening to you calmly. You talk about your life and your problems. A person, who is clearly trained in some way, is paying attention to you talk about your life and your feelings and is not supposed to respond, only to draw you out as you talk about your life experiences. All the Scientologists I talked to on that day were very good about asking me about my own life. Which is a great way to get people to bond with you - because all of us like talking about yourselves! Scientologists are very sharp about this.

The Companionable Atheist and I spent some time perusing the displays and videos (after a sexy receptionist unlocked the video screen for us). There was a lot of discussion of not letting things in your past bother you – I remember something about how you are made up of who you are, what you do, and what circumstances you live in. You have two minds: the reactive mind, and the rational mind, and you can only be
really happy when you get rid of the reactive mind (and the engrams therein). When we came to the end of the videos, a nicely dressed guy of about 30 came over and introduced himself to us. He said that he'd been a church member for about a year, and that he'd found the church the same way we did – by walking by, walking in, taking some tests, and then getting excited about what he'd found. He invited us to take the tests that serve as the starting point of Scientology practice for beginners.

Stay Tuned For Part III: Hannah and the Companionable Atheist Take Some Rigorous Tests

Oh Wow

2007-03-25T08:54:00.000-05:00

Hi all,
I'd just like to point out that I posted this first blog entry at around 8:45. By 9:55, I received an actual comment on the entry by an actual Scientologist. Check it out below.

Fear Not The E-Meter: A Visit to The Church of Scientology Part I

2007-03-25T08:15:00.000-05:00

The Church of Scientology has a presence in New York that is entirely out of proportion to its size. People returning to parked cars often find them decorated with flyers advertising Dianetics (Dianetics, invented by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, is the "science" behind Scientology.) The Scientologists in New York are best known for their “stress test” stations in the subway, where alarmingly normal looking people offer passers-by free assessments of their stress level by asking them questions while they hold a tin can in each hand (the tin cans are wired to a little box with a couple of dials known as an “e-meter.”)

New Yorkers, of course, generally assume that any strangers trying to speak to them about anything other than “Which way is Madison Avenue?” are insane, so the vast majority have never taken e-meter tests. But millions of people use the subway each day, so whenever you go by, the e-meter testers are always busy with interested customers. Thus, I have developed the subconscious assumption that there are many active Scientologists in New York City.

When I told my friends that Scientology was next on the tour, I was startled by their responses. “They mail people live snakes,” explained my roommate. "I wouldn't go in there - they take advantage of people" a co-worker warned. Another mentioned that the Church of Scientology employs a gargantuan legal team and would not hesitate to sue me if I, um, wrote anything inaccurate about it. As we will soon see, Scientology is based around a truly comprehensive and bizarre belief system. However, what is interesting to me is that it has spawned a second complete mythology about it that belongs to outsiders. People pass on myth outside the same way they pass along myth inside. Just last week, for example, Star Magazine reports that the Scientology church is punishing Katie Holmes for disobedience by forcing her to live in a sensory deprivation chamber and drink cup after cup of vegetable oil fortified with niacin (Scientologists believe niacin is very important to brain function). Since none of us on the outside have any clue whether this is a reasonable allegation or not, we pass it on to one another cheerfully without any attempt at rational reporting whatsoever. This leads me to what will become the Fourth Principle of Fear Not The Gods: It is reasonable and right to be concerned about any practice concealed from outsiders.

According to Scientology literature, L. Ron Hubbard believed that a person ought to find things out for himself. So I did. And I went.

By the way. This is a photograph of science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard as a young man.
Cool cat, isn't he?

Everyday Ritual I: The Phone Ritual

2007-03-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

When you visit a museum that displays artifacts from the lives of Early Humans, has it ever struck you that an astounding percentage of these artifacts seem to be "for ritual purposes?"

I used to think this was probably just poor archaeology. But now I think that we still perform rituals constantly - we're just not as clear about what they are. My first example: the phone ritual.

Hannah makes a phone call.

Hannah: "Hi, X, this is Hannah. How are you?"
X: "Good! How are you?"
Hannah: "Good!"
X: "Good!"

Sometimes there are three people on the call. The ritual takes a lot longer.

Hannah: "Hi, X, this is Hannah and Y. How are you?"
X: "Good! How are you guys?"
Hannah: "Good!"
Y: "Good!"
X: "And how are you, Y?"
Y: "Good!"
X: "Good!"
X: "And your baby?"
Y: "Good!"
X: "Good!"

When this happens, I often get the urge to just say "Okay, good!" and hang up the phone before we go around any more times.

Fear Not The Gods on hiatus for food poisoning

2007-03-21T11:04:00.000-05:00

Was very sick this week. I am better now. Back up and running soon.

Forewarned is...

2007-03-15T13:33:00.000-05:00

I am visiting the Church of Scientology on Sunday. People seem to have a lot to say about this. Do you? Leave comments!

In the mean time, please enjoy its orientation video. It's blurry because someone was filming it secretly. It's a weird combination of goofball 50's educational video, science fiction (duh), and 60-minutes style documentary.

Religious Updates

2007-03-01T09:13:00.000-05:00

Article today about how the door-to-door proselytizing has been going for Mormons on the Upper East Side. Since everyone has doormen, it's hard to go door to door. Instead they stand on the street and hand out hot chocolate and stuff.

Also, according to the AP, a bunch of rabbis in Israel have decided they'd like to start sacrificing animals on the Temple Mount again. Great idea, guys.

Young and Soft Spoken: "KZ" on the Upper West

2007-02-26T21:59:00.000-05:00

About KZ:
Kol Zimrah is a five year old "independent minyan" that meets on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They also have an arm in Jerusalem but I don't know anything about those guys. "Independent minyan" means that it's a Jewish group for religious worship that owes no allegiance to any larger American Jewish institution (it's not part of the Conservative Movement or the Reform Movement or the Havurah movement or anything like that). They currently meet about once a month for Friday night services; the rest of the month, those members who pray regularly go elsewhere. The night I visited, they were meeting in the Jewish Home and Hospital on 106th street.

I was late.
Grr. I hate being late.

The Jewish Home And Hospital
What a jarring experience it was to walk into the Jewish Home and Hospital. The Jewish Home and Hospital is a very large and slightly run-down-looking institution that houses a number of older and infirm individuals. It looks like exactly what its name sounds like - a cross between an old folks' home and a hospital. After waiting for a tiny Chinese grandmother and her two granddaughters to walk slowly out of the front door, and then for a black grandfather in a wheelchair with his two kids to go out, I walked in the front door and asked the door clerk about the prayer group. We felt that this couldn't be right, but he nodded recognition and told me the group was meeting in the auditorium on the third floor.

I'm sure Jews will live in Manhattan for many generations to come. But the Jewish Home and Hospital is one glimpse of the future - institutions founded by Jews for the public benefit now inhabited by other folks who came to Manhattan at other times. (Though I'm rarely morbid about the Jewish future, sometimes I imagine that in a couple centuries the only Judaism left in this country will be Orthodox Jews; people who are paid to be Jewish (rabbis, non-profit directors); and Jewish-named buildings.)

The auditorium is a big gray-tiled room with a few Jewish paintings on the walls and a few kids' drawings beside them. There is a stage at one end of the room and a dark wooden ark (possibly with a Torah inside) stands kind of slantwise in front of the stage. To the other side of the room stood two tables where people put their potluck dinner entrees. One one table, vegetarian food; on the other table, officially kosher vegetarian food. (This compromise allows anyone to bring food and for the kosher people to be able to eat with the nonkosher people. This is important and wise. It is a truly upsetting thing, on a very deep level, when someone in your community won't share food with you. Two tables is no big deal.)

The Worshippers
The worshippers, about fifty of them, sat in disorderly concentric circles in the middle of the room, facing inwards. The average age was about 24. Some were formally dressed, others in jeans. Some stood aside and prayed while leaning against the walls of the room.

At first, it was impossible to figure out who was leading the service. AFter a few minutes I figured out that it was two soft spoken characters who were sitting in the center of the circle - a guy slouched forward in his chair and a young woman quietly strumming a green guitar. I actually know both these folks and they are great. But the leadership style of this service gave me a lot to think about.

Basically, the prayer service was completely anti-authoritarian - the opposite of the Big Man On Bimah model I and many other suburban American Jews grew up with. The two prayer leaders spoke very softly and sang very softly. In fact, they were so quiet that the group had a hard time following them - it took a couple measures for us to figure out what tune they were using to sing any particular song or what key they were singing it in. The guitar occasionally seemed to be playing in a different key altogether. Nobody seemed to mind. In fact, in a way, it was very restful. Nobody cared, really, what anyone else was doing - what they were wearing, how they were singing, or where they were in the prayer service. Though most participants used a common prayer book (a xeroxed packet with a plastic spiral binding), a substantial minority had brought their own books, which presumably held similar prayers.

On Page Numbers.
A minor issue that I have now heard come up several times in discussions of Jewish prayer services - as it clearly represents a larger issue - is the issue of Page Numbers. No, seriously. Right now, for a lot of people doing this Jewish prayer thing, page numbers are a big deal. In my congregation, growing up, the rabbi would periodically announce the page number we were at, in case anybody was lost (or daydreaming; or taking kids to the bathroom; etc). In super traditional congregations, nobody tells anyone the page numbers because you all pretty much know the prayers already. These newfangled prayer congregations, particularly those that are not tied to a movement, vary in their opinions on the page number issue. To announce the page numbers for the benefit of the newcomers and non-Hebrew-readers seems benevolent and inclusive. However, it is also disruptive to the overall flow of the prayer experience. And if you're really working on getting into the prayer experience, the page numbers maybe break that up for you. For a lot of independent minyans, page numbers represent them deciding what kind of congregation they want to be. Are they for people just learning how to pray, or are they for people who know the prayers and want to lose themselves in the prayer rhythm without any guy telling them from the bimah where they should be in their books?

God and Theater
I have no particular opinion about the announcing of page numbers, but for me, KZ was too far to this anti-authority end of the spectrum. I just think they were a little bit shy! If you're going to play a guitar with some people who are singing, play the guitar! If you're going to guide us as to which of the 100 tunes for "Adon Olam" we ought to be singing, guide us! Nobody will mind! These young, polite, sweet, inwardly facing young praying-people left me a little bit cold. I thought I would like that nobody was being pushy or showboaty. But I just don't have the internal prayer thing down well enough to enjoy doing this communal-but-on-your-own thing. I still need a little theater, a little showmanship, a little more leadership, to help me get into the right kind of introspective mindset to be able to even begin thinking about God. I just can't do it all by myself.

My Friend Nino Visits a Southern Baptist Church

2007-02-21T13:11:00.000-05:00

Nino is a good friend and music junkie who lives in DC. Here's his report on visiting a Southern Baptist church for a musical event.

More American Jews Found; Lost

2007-02-20T16:24:00.000-05:00

Among Jewish professionals, surveys are big, expensive instruments of political warfare. Believe that Jews shouldn't marry people of other religions? Commission a study from the right person, and he or she will give you the headline you want: "Jews who Marry Christians Less Likely To Raise Kids Jewish." (Angry community dialogue ensues). The opposite perspective can also be commissioned for $100-150K from a willing demographer. These aren't joke surveys either. People put a lot of work into them. But the conclusions usually boil down to one of two stories:

X is Good for the Jews (i.e. "The Jews are Flourishing")
X is Bad for the Jews (i.e. "The Jews are Floundering")

Watch this at work with the latest study to come out, called, "The Jews Are Multiplying", which says there are more Jews in this country than we thought before. (The people commissioning the previous and corresponding "The Jews Are Dwindling" study, apparently forgot to account for all the young people without landlines or who weren't home at 6 PM when the surveyors called).

The Jews Are Flourishing perspective: our numbers are growing!
The Jews Are Floundering perspective: there are millions more Jews out there that we, the people with money in communal institutions, have failed to reach through our programs! Woe is us!

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Right Across the Street from Lincoln Center

2007-02-19T23:30:00.000-05:00

As the Holy Book says:

“The Book of Mormon is a volume of holy scripture comparable to the Bible. It is a record of God’s dealings with the ancient inhabitants of the Americas and contains, as does the Bible, the fulness of the everlasting gospel.”

“The book was written by many ancient prophets by the spirit of prophecy and revelation. Their words, written on gold plates, were quoted and abridged by a prophet-historian named Mormon. The record gives an account of two great civilizations. One came from Jerusalem in 600 B.C., and afterward separated into two nations, known as the Nephites and the Lamanites. The other came much earlier when the Lord confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel. This group is known as the Jaredites. After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.

The crowning event recorded in the Book of Mormon is the personal ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ among the Nephites soon after his resurrection. It puts forth the doctrines of the gospel, outlines the plan of salvation, and tells men what they must do to gain peace in this life and eternal salvation in the life to come.

After Mormon completed his writings, he delivered the account to his son Moroni, who added a few words of his own and hid up the plates in the hill Cumorah. On September 21, 1823, the same Moroni, then a glorified, resurrected being, appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith and instructed him relative to the ancient record and its destined translation into the English language.

In due course the plates were delivered to Joseph Smith, who translated them by the gift and power of God. The record is now published in many languages as a new and additional witness that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God and that all who will come unto him and obey the laws and ordinances of his gospel may be saved.
Concerning this record the Prophet Joseph Smith said: “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”

In addition to Joseph Smith, the Lord provided for eleven others to see the gold plates for themselves and to be special witnesses of the truth and divinity of the Book of Mormon. Their written testimonies are included herewith as “The Testimony of Three Witnesses” and “The Testimony of Eight Witnesses.”

What I Knew Before Sunday
The one thing I knew about the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon Church, was that they believe in posthumous conversion.

My mother went through a serious genealogy kick wherein she spent many hours at our local Mormon church’s Family History Center. The ladies who worked there were lovely and helpful people who made their genealogy database freely available to her. It was then that we learned that the Mormon Church collects genealogical information because they believe that people can be baptized into the Mormon Church after they have died. Many Mormons, understandably, have felt the urge to baptize their ancestors. And guess what - a lot of their ancestors are your ancestors too! Thus, no matter what religion or form of atheism you and your family currently practice, odds are, many of your great-grandparents are now Mormons. So are most of our country's Founding Fathers and the deceased United States Presidents (Is this disturbing? I haven’t decided. On the one hand, it is not very nice of them to convert people without their permission. On the other hand, if you don’t believe that their conversion of your ancestors is valid, then why concern yourself about it?)

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, to give one perspective, has argued that baptizing deceased Holocaust victims destroys their dignity, seeing as to how they died more or less for their religion. In 2005, the Church issued the perplexing response, "It is important to stress that the freedom of choice remains a prevailing concept behind baptism for the dead... The freedom of the recipient to accept or reject the ordinance is an overarching principle ... " The Church now says if there are any objections to someone being baptized, you can ask them not to do it.

I went into this weekend’s religious experience without a guide because I do not know any actively practicing Mormons in New York (there are about 40,000, according to the Church). I do know, though, where they spend their time. The LDS church has a Temple in Manhattan, directly across the street from Lincoln Center. The building is only a few years old. It's built of classy, understated stone, and it really matches Lincoln Center very well. On the top of the building stands a statue of the angel Moroni (the one who gave the tablets to Joseph Smith).

I called the temple in the middle of last week to see if it allowed visitors. A nice lady by the name of Sister Ann Frost answered the phone. She seemed to be about 100 years old and she did not seem to know very much about the services. She did know that visitors were allowed in the chapel part of the building, where the regular worship services were held (there are three services each Sunday morning), but not in the Temple part of the building, where the more serious rites are performed (baptisms and such). This is a standard difference - there are LDS chapels all over the place, but there is only one Temple in New York. And unfortunately, only members of the Church who had been members “in good standing” for more than a year were able to go in it. This pretty much excluded me and my co-adventurer of the day, the Companionable Atheist.

Oh well. Fear Not The Gods is nothing if not devoted. The chapel would have to do.

On the bright side, Sister Ann Frost told me that one of the three Sunday morning services was at 12:30 PM. This meant that I could sleep until 11:30 and still pay my weekly homage to the gods.

Entering the Church
As I walked up toward the building, I saw people leaving from the last service. A mom in a floral print dress, a blond dad in a suit, and a little girl in a velvet dress and tights posed for a photograph in front of the doors.

Though the LDS building’s façade is impressive, the entrance and everything I saw was quite modest. Honestly, it looked like a small, modest hotel lobby, with a floral print couch (it looked like the one Hillary Clinton made her “I’m running for President” speech on), and a couple florid 19th-century-style paintings of Jesus doing various things.

A friendly receptionist greeted me the moment I walked in the door. (This rarely happens when you go into a synagogue). I told him about Sister Ann Frost and said the magic words, “We’re just visitors, we’re curious about the service,” and he just melted. “Great!” he said. “The service is on the third floor. I believe Colin is going up there right now. Want to go with him?”

We went over and introduced ourselves to Colin, a tall guy in his early 20s. Colin wore a nice suit, but he had a messy pile of hair and a sleepy stare that said to me, “In another life, I could potentially have been a huge stoner.” In this life, as far as I could tell, Colin was a devout Mormon, and he was definitely a friendly guy, totally comfortable with having a couple of total newcomers thrown his way. Recently returned from his two-year mission trip to Rio de Janeiro, Colin was finishing up a Construction Management major at Brigham Young University. Along with his sister Lucy, Lucy’s boyfriend, and a couple more related young people, Colin was visiting his brother in Brooklyn and scouting out a potential move to New York.

I explained myself and my background. I have this shtick totally down by now (that I’m Jewish, that I’m visiting different religious communities and looking at their approaches to involving their young people). Young religious people tend to respond very well to this shtick – as minorities within the broader American culture, they often feel like visitors. Older religious people tend to respond to it well because they’re thrilled when young people do anything religious. Even though my intro lines are completely true, I still feel like I’m putting something over on my hosts when I give them. I think this is basically because most people who come into worship services for the first time are spiritual seekers looking for homes, and while I’m a spiritual seeker in some sense, I’m honestly more like a spy.

Colin visibly brightened when I explained my background. “Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah, that’s cool. My dad lives here in New York. He’s a lawyer. He has a partner of the, um, the Jewish faith, Ira.” Colin was clearly not sure whether it was okay to call someone a Jew. I thought that was kind of cute.

We went up to the third floor in a wood-paneled elevator, which was decorated with wood engravings of beehives. Colin, taking his job as emissary very seriously, explained that Brigham Young adopted the symbol of the beehive to represent his group’s hard working spirit (Utah is now known as the Beehive State). The Companionable Atheist noted that this is an image from the Aeneid.

The Sacrament Meeting
We entered the chapel. Spoiled as I have become from my tour of New York religious institutions, I was slightly disappointed by the chapel. I could not have imagined a simpler, plainer room. The back half of it, in fact, was a basketball court. A movable room divider divided the chapel from the basketball court. The divider was noisily closed at the beginning of the service, and then noisily reopened about half way through, when so many latecomers had showed up that the pews were all filled up.

The front half of the chapel was just a room – a nice room, with bare walls and polished wooden pews. (“Mormon temples are all built with the finest materials,” Colin explained.) There was not so much as a cross in sight. A podium stood at the front of the room, on a raised stage. A blue Kleenex box sat prominently next to the podium. A plain wooden organ stood behind the stage.

The hundred-plus churchgoers all seemed to be under 30, which struck me as peculiar until Colin explained that I had wandered into the “singles’ service.” (I am sure it is not a coincidence that the singles’ service took place at 12:30 PM. What a great idea. Episcopalians and Jews: Take note!

I found these churchgoers to be a strikingly homogeneous group. They were all under 30, nice-looking, well-groomed people. The vast majority were white, though I did see a few blacks, Asians and Hispanics.

(

Mormon scripture says the following:
And [God] had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God; I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities." (2 Nephi 5:21)
2 Nephi also forbids miscegenation between the races, and describes Native Americans as being idle and "full of mischief and subtlety" (2 Nephi 5:24).
However, the LDS church has altered its approach to non-whites in recent years, and since 1978, African-Americans have been allowed to become priests in the Mormon church.

The men looked earnest and well-groomed. The women wore skirts or dresses (not one pair of pants in the place) and were perfectly put together – not a hair out of place, not an ear without an earring, not an eyelash without mascara, not a foot without a dainty high heel. I felt, and I’m somewhat ashamed to say this, as if there were a big flashing sign with a flashing arrow pointing at my head, that said “BIG JEW.” My hair was frizzy. My boots were dirty, and my skirt was totally wrong.

But whatever, they couldn’t have been nicer to me. I was just prejudiced. And nervous.

The weird thing was that they seemed to be nervous too. All the people who went up to give prayers were so nervous they could barely get the words out. Many of the women continued to seem nervous in the Sunday School that followed the service. They generally answered questions tentatively, or vaguely, and many spoke in high registers that were clearly not their normal tones of voice. Clearly, these were some really, really good girls.

The service was entirely lay led. A couple Brothers (official church members) were in charge of the whole thing. After everyone shuffled in and the organist stopped playing, one of the Brothers read the announcements (a brilliant approach to the ever-problematic announcements, because nobody is bored of being there yet). Colin’s sister Lucy sat in front of us during the service, and cuddled and smooched her boyfriend a fair number of times throughout. However, her boyfriend too was so clean cut and friendly looking that it was hard to see how Colin or even a Brother would have been able to object.

They sang two hymns. The singing quality was excellent – everybody actually sang in four part harmony like the hymnals say you’re supposed to.

Next, a solemn cohort of about eight guys went up to the front of the room and began to pass around the sacrament – the Mormon equivalent of the Communion, representing the body and blood of Christ. However, since Mormons don’t drink alcohol, they passed out tiny individual plastic cups of water instead of wine. Instead of communion wafers, they passed around silver trays with torn up pieces of what looked like Wonderbread on them. Colin told me I could partake of the sacrament if I wanted to, but I passed it along.

We then got to the core of the service, which was two “testimonies” given by two relatively new members of the congregation. These two, a man and a woman, both about 25 years of age, had been tapped by leadership to give their personal testimonies on the theme of “Faith and Jesus Christ.”

Wow. These were the most gaspingly emotional and sincere, as well as the least coherent sermons I have ever heard. The man tried to give a straight ahead lecture on the meanings of the word faith. The woman read from her conversion journal. Apparently she had found the faith beginning around the age of sixteen, when she started going to LDS services with a cousin. The community welcomed her, she said, and she embraced the faith fully. However, this did not in any way shake her relationship with her father, a lapsed Catholic. She interpreted her father’s dramatic recovery from a heart condition (after a successful surgery) as a miracle, a sign from God that the religion was true and that Jesus loved her. She spoke lovingly of her father, even though he didn’t understand her faith. She said she knew he’d join her in heaven. Both speakers ended with what must have been the ritual closing words, which were something like, “I testify that these books [gesturing to the Bible and the Book of Mormon] are true and that Jesus Christ is our lord and Gordon Hinckley is our modern day prophet.”

Gordon Hinckley is the current (fifteenth) Prophet and President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Then another young congregation member sang a Christian pop song, accompanied by a pianist.

Then another volunteer came up to give a closing prayer for the service. Like the opening prayer, this seemed to be spontaneous, or at least to have no specific form.

The Sunday School
At the end of the service, which lasted a little bit more than an hour, almost all the churchgoers split up into groups to go to Sunday School. Everyone, of every age, goes to Sunday School in a Mormon church – each week, the topic of discussion is assigned by headquarters in Salt Lake City.

We went up to a classroom on the fourth floor. Another earnest young man – maybe early thirties – led the discussion, which was on miracles. Forty or fifty young people crowded into the room to join the discussion.

Like the service, the class began with a member of the rank and file giving a prayer, “that we’ll understand and use what we learn today, and that we’re thankful for everything we have.”

Then class began. “Can anyone tell me what a miracle is?” he asked. People raised their hands and gave the standard definitions – something you can’t explain, something out of the ordinary. “Do miracles happen today?” he asked. A girl raised her hand, and answered, “Maybe we don’t notice them because The Adversary is so much stronger these days and with all the technology we don’t really know what a miracle is.”

The point about the Adversary got my attention but nobody really pursued this line of thinking. It is difficult for me to recap the thread of the conversation, because, quite frankly, the participants seemed totally confused. No elements of Mormon theology were made clear to me. There was almost no teaching; almost no reference to any text. The one text they did use was the story in the New Testament, I think in Mark, where a woman touches the hem of Jesus’s robe and is cured. All agreed that this was a miracle. Comments were something like the following:

“It was a miracle that he knew who she was, when he turned around and picked her out of the crowd.”

“It was a miracle because he didn’t set out to cure her, she was cured just by touching his robe.”

The Sunday school teacher let participants lead the discussion, which wandered away from the theme of miracles as God does them, and toward, if you give a homeless person something to eat, is that maybe a miracle? The teacher didn’t seem to have an answer in mind, so people just kept bringing up things they thought might be miracles.

The one theological element they did agree on was that miracles shouldn’t be used to prove to unbelievers that God existed. “Miracles are a magnifying glass,” one girl said. “It’s like your faith is written on a piece of paper, small, and a miracle just allows you to see it better, but it doesn’t create faith.” She said that someone had taught her this in seminary, and it was the closest thing to a coherent point about faith anyone made in the 45-minute class.

After class we said goodbye to Colin, Lucy and their friends. “Does one of you have an address?” asked Colin. “So we can send you a Book of Mormon, maybe?”

I happily gave him my card – it’s my work address, so I’m not worried about anyone showing up on my doorstep - and I escaped into the cold air.

Aftermath
When I got home, I Wikipedia’ed until my eyes burned. The story of Mormonism – both the founding story, and the subsequent travels of the LDS church’s followers, are truly astounding. I bought a book about Joseph Smith’s life and I’m going to post excerpts here over the next few days if at all possible.

And one last note - on the way home, the Companionable Atheist and I passed the Society for Ethical Culture (basically an Atheist Club), and the Companionable Atheist said, “You should go there next!” I rolled my eyes. “Come on! Those guys? But, ugh, they’re so self-righteous. So set in their ways, so uninterested in anyone else’s point of view…. Um….”

The Companionable Atheist raised an eyebrow. And yea, Hannah was thereupon shown to be a hypocrite. So we’ll probably go at some point. But what I really mean is that it’s probably a whole bunch of nonpracticing Jews, who sit around, talking about how they’re the ones who have the right answers about how a person should live her life….

Oh. There I go again. Oops.

Helen's December Encounter with a Chabadnik

2007-02-11T21:53:00.000-05:00

Helen is in a bar at 1:30 AM during Channukah. Two Chabad guys walk in.

Chabadniks: "Excuse me, are you Jewish?"
Helen: "Uh..."
Chabadniks: "You are, aren't you?"
Helen: "Uh - yeah."
Chabadniks: "Did you know it's Chanukah?"
Helen: "Yes."
Chabadniks: "Want to light the candles?"
Helen: "I already did."
Chabadniks: "How many did you light?"
Helen: "Five."

[Pause.]

Chabadniks: "Okay. Well, did you say the blessings on the candles?"
Helen: "Yes."
Chabadniks: "Both of them?"
Helen: "Yes."

[Pause]

Chabadniks: "So, want a donut?"
Helen: "Okay."

[Chabadniks place donut on bar napkin in front of Helen.]

Chabadniks: "Do you have a boyfriend?"
Helen: "Yes."
Chabadniks: "Do you kiss him? Well don't kiss him. It's bad."
Helen: "..."
Chabadniks: "And when you marry him, you're going to cut off your hair and wear a wig, right?"
Helen: "Okay."

Helen's boyfriend enters.

Chabadniks [to boyfriend]: "Are you Jewish?"
Helen's boyfriend: "No."
Chabadniks: "That's okay. Have a donut."

Chabadniks leave.

Shearith Israel: The Ethiopian Shabbat Dinner

2007-02-11T17:17:00.000-05:00

As my date and I are walking in to dinner, a man in a black velvet hat gestures for us to come over and sit down by him, so we do. We introduce ourselves. Without thinking, I shake hands with him, and then my date reaches over to shake hands with his wife. Uh oh. She steps back half a step and crosses her arms, shaking her head apologetically and saying “I don’t….” My date reels as if she slapped him. No matter how many times I tell myself I need to remember the no-shake-hands thing, I always forget. I forgot to warn him. I feel guilty for the next hour.

Our dinner companions aren’t offended, though. It turns out they have only been members of the synagogue for a few years – and not only that – they’re baal teshuvot (literally: “masters of return,” or, “masters of repentance”) – that is to say, Jews who grew up in secular or liberal households, and who decided later in life to to take on all of the laws of traditional Jewish life, however they’ve decided to interpret that. (There are a lot of different things this could mean, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise). The husband, Bob, has a Turkish Jewish mother and a Chinese father, and grew up in a liberal congregation in New Jersey. The wife grew up in a liberal community on Long Island, and went to college at Duke, where she barely even attended the Hillel. Since their marriage, they’ve decided to go religious together. And they have that bright-eyed, proselytic air of the newly religious. “I’m so sorry I didn’t grow up religious,” Bob tells me. “There’s so much I’ve missed.”

Bob and his wife are really friendly - they seem to be working to make up for the handshake crisis. Yet our conversation turns again and again to religion. It’s like, my date and I joke morosely together afterward, like they’re joint golf fanatics or pet fanciers or something - you know how couples get into those shared hobbies sometimes? Like, one of them said “I’m not going to turn on lights on the Sabbath.” And the other one said, “I’ll take your no lights on Sabbath and raise you a kosher home.” And the other one said, “Oh yeah? I’ll take your kosher home and raise you Jewish marital purity laws.” Etc. Until they’re in their own world and can’t exactly remember how to talk to people about things other than (golf, parakeets) their religion.

The bright-eyed couple keep trying to convince me to visit a branch of a congregation in the East Village, called the Manhattan Jewish Experience. “It’s an outreach congregation,” Bob says, “but it’s independent, it’s not a branch of Chabad and Aish.”

Note: Outreach is a code word. I could write whole books on it. But to give you the short version - Bob is referring to a couple of Jewish organizations (almost exclusively Orthodox) whose mission is to proselytize to Jews. They’re awfully good, though often obnoxious in their tactics. When I was in college, they used to stand in the middle of campus and shout at students who they thought looked Jewish, to try to get them to come over and perform brief religious rituals. They were moderately successful at attracting students, but they mainly succeeded in giving every single person on campus a complex about whether they looked Jewish or not.

Chabad has a bunch of vans, Mitzvah Mobiles, which they drive around New York City (one often parks across the street from my office on Park Avenue) and try to collar zoned out Jewish students or unsuspecting Jewish businessmen to do the same thing. Everyone in the liberal Jewish community is very jealous of their success – rather than blathering about doctrines and politics, like the Reform and Conservative movements – and rather than focusing on business plans and institutional structures – they just try to get Jewish people to do Jewish stuff. It’s a refreshingly simple message, and one that sells really well: You’re Jews. Do Jewish stuff. Because the Torah said you should. They softpedal the morally conservative underpinnings of their movement, and it’s been tremendously successful. (Note: I don't think college students are getting snowed, for the most part. They know these people don't agree with them politically. But they're getting free dinner and having fun. Everybody wins)

I’m curious why Bob is selling this congregation as being “not a part of Chabad or Aish.” Does he think they’re bad organizations? Too pushy? Doctrinally suspect? I didn’t quite manage to get my head together to ask.

Meanwhile, the Shabbat evening programming begins. The star of this evening is an Ethiopian-Jewish academic, Dr. Ephraim Isaac. The organizers of the event had asked him to give the history of Ethiopian Jewry in ten minutes, which disturbed him greatly. He spends about half the minutes talking about how this was an impossible task. What did we learn? “Thirty years ago, nobody knew about Ethiopian Jews. They all wanted to know. They asked me, how can there be Jews, real Jews, in Ethiopia? And I told them then, what I’ll tell you now – Ethiopia is mentioned fifty times in the Bible. Poland? Not yet once.” He also seems indignant that Jews of Western European descent think that Ethiopian Jews have been “isolated” for the last thousand years. Instead, he suggests, they’ve been “shut off,” or some other phrase that to me meant something so exactly like “isolated” that I can’t even remember it. We are all so afraid of sounding un-PC that nobody has the nerve to ask him what this distinction meant.

Instead, the crowd asks timid, respectful questions like, “In our culture, here on the Upper West Side, we only wear the prayer shawl in the daytime. Why do you wear the prayer shawl on Sabbath evenings?” This kind of question causes Dr. Isaac to go on long tangents beginning: “This is what a Jew wears. You’re all wearing European clothes. Normally, Jews go around wearing a prayer shawl all day long, if you go to the market and forget your shopping bag, you can put the potatoes in your prayer shawl…”

Dr. Isaac led blessings over dinner – you could pick out familiar-sounding words even though the language was different. And again it was the eastern melodies, tight, controlled, ornamented, that give me chills. Dinner was like any other time I’d had Ethiopian food, except the bread was more like pita than like the spongy sourdough injira I associate with Ethiopian food.

Over dinner I turn to my other side. The woman on my left is a member of Shearith Israel, as well. About 40, probably, thin, beautiful, with a tight lacy top and leather skirt. I introduce myself and my date, and when my date returns to his dinner, she gestures at him and asks me, “Are you guys married?”
I say no.
“Are you getting married? How long have you been together?”
I dunno, maybe four months, I tell her.
“That’s long enough,” she tells me. “You should know by now.”
I look at her and try to get a glimpse at her left hand but it’s concealed. I ask her, “Are you married?” Because that seems to be the flow of the conversation.
“No,” she says, smiling, and looking down. “I’ve been really unlucky. But I’ve decided I’m getting married this year.”
“You’ve decided?”
“Yeah. It’s a state of mind. I’ve had a couple relationships that didn’t work, and I was even engaged once, but it didn’t work out. But now I’m really getting married this year. Now that I’ve taken on this state of mind, everything’s started to change.”

Once again, we reach the point in the evening where I am totally emotionally exhausted. After a lot of practice and personal maturing, I can mostly understand the very-religious lifestyle thing. It ties you to a community with a vast, private, special common language and tradition. There’s a right and a wrong way to do most of the things you do in your life. I get it. An Orthodox woman once told me that when she goes around with her husband, who wears a kipah, people constantly come up to them and ask him for directions. Why? They’re Jews. A guy with a kipah must be okay.

So I get this in theory. But I’m exhausted from trying to listen. Why is this woman, a total stranger, telling me about her broken engagements and telling me I should get married? And that she’s definitely getting married this year? I kind of have this theory that in cultures where women are separated from men so much of the time, they bond more quickly with each other. We’re all stuck in the balcony together, might as well make friends.

We had every intention of staying for the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, but we’re too wiped out, so we grab a couple of not-so-traditional-Ethiopian black-and-white cookies (a concession to the crowd, I guess) from the buffet line and make our escape…

I’m going back in a couple weeks because I’ve got to hear this music again. Anyone want to come with me?

The Remnant of Spain-Brazil-Amsterdam: The Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, 70th St and Central Park West

2007-02-10T15:29:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of things to remember when you go into an Orthodox synagogue. Do not attempt to shake hands with someone of the opposite gender. If you are a man, do not go bareheaded. And whatever you do, remember to turn off your cell phone.

Shearith Israel (“The Remnant of Israel”), alternately known as the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, is the oldest congregation in North America. Not the oldest synagogue building in North America, members are quick to point out. That would be the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. And you know what? Touro pays Shearith Israel one dollar every year for the privilege of occupying its own building. So really by any standard, Shearith Israel wins.

Sephardic Jews as we generally understand the term, means Jews descended from the vast Jewish community that lived in Spain and Portugal before the Spanish Inquisition. When Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal, a number of them went to Amsterdam and founded a prosperous trading community there, which combined cultural elements of Spanish Jewry with elements of Northern European Jewry who also lived there.

A number of the Dutch-Spanish Jews then went to Brazil. But in 1654, the Portuguese captured Recife, the last Dutch stronghold in Brazil. The arm of the Inquisition, then, extended to the Jews, who were forced to flee on Dutch ships. They intended to go back to Amsterdam. En route, however, a boatload of these Jews were intercepted by pirates. A French ship rescued them from the pirates – and this ship was bound for New Amsterdam, which is now known as New York (factoids from Edward Ross Ellis's History of New York and from tour of synagogue).

Thus, a community of Jews landed in New York in 1654 after what was really by any one’s standards a whole lot of traveling and adventure. And for the 350 years since, they haven’t budged. Their building is “new” (late 1800s) but the ritual practice of the community is virtually identical to what it was in 1654. And for the first 200 years of its existence, this congregation was the only game in town. Emma Lazarus went here. So did Benjamin Cardozo (hear the Spanish-influenced names?)

With my date, I am attending an Ethiopian Shabbat dinner in this building hosted by an American-Israeli exchange/social group that evening. But it says you can come earlier for services, so I do.

At first I can’t figure out how to get inside the building, which occupies almost an entire city block at Central Park West and 70th street. (Shearith Israel has occupied five buildings over the course of its history; each about 20 blocks farther uptown than the one before. It also has occupied three cemeteries in Manhattan, which are all designated historic landmarks). The entrance facing the park is blocked off with an iron fence. Bored people are sitting outside here playing on their cell phones. The real entrance is the side door. I go up inside. People are knotted by the front door, chit-chatting. I don’t know which way to go, but two ladies sweep by me and up the steps, so I follow them.

And it’s a good thing I follow them, because this congregation is sex-segregated; men worship on the ground floor and women worship in the balcony. I actually think the women get the better deal here.

The building is stunning; dazzling. The inside is about five stories high; I’m only about half way up. The walls are variegated golden marble; the balcony is supported with marble Corinthian columns. The seats are golden wood and dark red velvet. Centered on each wall are gigantic Tiffany stained glass windows, in colors that range from emerald green to ice blue to gold. The entire front of the room is devoted to the golden marble doors that enclose the ark, which encloses the Torahs.

In the center of the room is a raised platform, shaped rather like a the front of a boat. It is surrounded by about ten three-foot candles (which are actually lit with gas). The room is dimly lit, so it flickers to the light of these candles.

A rabbi, dressed in an ankle length black gown and a flat-topped black velvet hat, stands in the prow of the ship, facing the ark, leading prayers. Three other rabbis, dressed identically, stand silently behind him, joining in when appropriate. The rabbi sings beautifully, – racing through prayers in a full voiced, easy, ornamented style, without any effort whatsoever.

At the very, very top front of the room, smushed right up against the ceiling, in the right hand corner, stands a choir of about twelve – all men, of course ,since the Orthodox traditionally believe that the voice of a woman tempts a man to sin. The choir stand in a circle, mostly with their backs to the room. They sing traditional prayers in four and five-part styles; in mostly a western style – but at least a couple times in every time, a little thread of eastern harmony creeps in before disappearing.

The vocal interplay between the rabbi and the choir is astounding. It happens so fast. They all sing so beautifully. And the overlap between the rabbi’s eastern melodic phrasings (minor keys, vocal trills and ornamentations) and the choir’s lusty western harmonies, totally blows my mind. I can’t get enough. I’m totally dazed.

When I come to my senses slightly, I check out my fellow worshippers, of whom there are maybe 50 or 60. The majority are in middle-aged are younger. Their dress styles vary much more widely than I would have thought. Some of the men could have come straight from casual Friday at the office (khakis, collared shirt, sweater, kipah), while others wear full “Black Hat” regalia – black pants, baggy black coat, wide brimmed black hat.

The women, too, vary widely in dress. Some wear sweater sets and ankle-length skirts (with no slit, of course), and hats that cover their hair (traditionally, you have to cover your hair if you are married). One even wears a black lace mantilla. Some do not cover their hair at all. And others – quite frankly - look really sexy, in knee-length leather skirts, leather high-heeled boots, fishnets, and lacy camisole tops (though no bare shoulders, of course). I am feeling self conscious until I see one other woman in the balcony wearing pants. She’s an older woman and I wonder what the story is. Clearly nobody is getting kicked out for minor dress mistakes. I make a big show of holding the prayer book and turning the page at the right times so they don’t think I’m totally lost. And I’m not – I can usually follow along, though of course I don’t know the melodies. And the weird thing is, I feel much more comfortable here than I do with B’nai Jeshurun’s worldpop melodies. Maybe I feel more comfortable in a situation where nobody cares whether I’m following along or not. Where I know nobody’s going to try to make me dance. It’s an utterly solid, self-confident tradition. And yeah, I’m stuck in the balcony, but I love it.

As the women vary in dress, so they vary in their interest in the proceedings below. Some sit quietly, follow along, and rock back and forth as they pray. A couple of them blast in late, and spend most of the service talking to each other in not-very-quiet whispers. One woman comes in extra late. She plops her stuff down noisily, picks up a prayer book, and starts praying really fast from the beginning of the service, on her own, rocking extra hard to make up for lost time.

I’m also struck by how young many of these people are. This isn’t a community of old-timers. There aren’t huge numbers of them, but this place is not about to shut down.

The service is barely over an hour long (the heavy duty stuff comes on Saturday morning). We file downstairs, and all of a sudden, the black hats turn into people. Husbands and wives greet each other and schmooze with their friends, dawdling and blocking up the entry hall before they mosey on home.

I take a brief tour of the museum, where they have prayer paraphernalia many centuries old, including an entire Havdalah (Saturday night worship service) kit – hidden in a candlestick – a legacy of the Sephardic community’s centuries of having to hide their religion.

Then I go down to the basement, where the Ethiopian Shabbat Dinner is about to begin.

Jewish life in Casablanca, Morocco

2007-02-08T08:11:00.000-05:00

My friend Eric is currently a Fulbright scholar in Morocco. He just wrote an article about the Jewish community there. Stop by and check it out!

Hannah

As God Is My Witness: St. George's Church, Union Square

2007-02-04T23:28:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, Lauren and her husband Doug took me to St. George’s Church, an old and illustrious Episcopalian chapel conveniently located right by Union Square, downtown. Like most churches, this one seemed much bigger on the inside than on the outside. It looked exactly like what I thought an Episcopalian church ought to look like – shaped like a Catholic church, with tremendously tall arched ceilings, a long nave, and a raised altar in front, but in a way wiped clean – rather than gilded decorations or cherubs or Christs-on-Crosses, the front of the church was a bare white, with a simple giant wooden cross the only decoration. Paint is peeling off the ceiling.

The congregation dates to 1749; the building to 1846. Back when the people of downtown New York went to church, this was quite the scene. J. P. Morgan worshiped here. Now, with attendance dropping, St. George’s Church has an odd sort of rotation relationship with the parish of Calvary nearby. The church leaders go back and forth between the congregations, which has had a destabilizing effect on the church-goers.

As usual, going to the house of God is hard! Awkward! Even after a cup of coffee! Truthfully, I feel the same kind of awkwardness here that I feel in “my own” houses of worship. Because I don’t know what’s going to happen, because I feel like I don’t belong. Religious buildings are an odd combination – they are completely open, but they have very well defined borders. They’re emotional fortresses, and being inside when you’re not, you know, inside, is a truly odd feeling. Mitigating factors for the awkwardness: Since I’m a guest, I don’t feel like anybody is going to collar me and try to get me to do some sort of alarming public act (introduce myself; talk about my feelings; hold hands and dance across the room). Aggravating factors for the awkwardness: Since I’m a guest, I don’t really know what’s going to happen. (Well, okay, I know I shouldn’t eat the cracker.) Throughout the service, I dedicate a lot of energy toward appearing calm and comfortable, and assuming that the genuine feeling will follow. Which it eventually does. Mostly.

Jews joke about “Jewish time” but really most people are late at every religious service I’ve been to so far. My hosts and I are among the first 20 people in the building, though by the end of the service there are 60 or 70. (This is still only a tiny, tiny fraction of the chapel's capacity.) The churchgoers are diverse. There are a few older black women in hats, a few young hip types in jeans, a few young preppy blond couples in khakis and pastels. There is a rock band with a saxophone player. The guitarist looks hung over. The band plays softer rock than the Korean Presbyterians, but they’re not bad. The drummer is hidden behind a pillar, at least from where I’m sitting. Every time he hits his bass drum, a Divine-sounding thunderclap echoes unevenly around the church. It’s really kind of funny. The priest looks like he’s made his peace with this although it’s really not his thing.

Lauren, sweet, beautiful, and put-together, was raised in a non-denominational church. Her husband Doug, bearded and thoughtful, with gold earrings, was raised by a Baptist minister in Texas, but has since made a strong turn toward the high Episcopalian, which he views as more substantive, authentic and traditional. Church shopping has been a serious couple’s project for them. They have been going to St. George’s for a number of months, traveling the better part of an hour from Brooklyn every morning to get there. They settled on it after visiting about fifteen churches; they found it to be the best doctrinal compromise they could manage. Doug would like to go to an even higher church, with more formal ritual and liturgy (“smells and bells,” he calls it), but Lauren as a non-denominational does not find this super-appealing, so they seem to have settled at St. George’s for now. They also like the diversity. “The hipster church,” they call it. It’s not perfect, though -they talk about not feeling part of the church community, even after so many months and after they’ve joined the Bible study group – they think it may have to do with the rotating leadership.

For me, the most striking part of the service was the reading from scripture. I had to write a whole separate entry about it (see below). What else happens? They sing hymns, with the accompaniment of the rock band. They read the Nicean Creed. They read the Lord’s Prayer. They read a lot of things in calm, serious, old-fashioned language about Jesus and God’s mercy and the people’s redemption. They read the announcements, with numerous apologies about how boring the announcements are going to be (see, some things really are universal). They go up to the front of the church and take communion. Some little kids are running around.

After the service, we go around the corner to a diner and continue the conversation. Lauren, who has an art history degree, recently started working at a Jewish arts institution in New York. She’s low-key about it but I can tell something about it has really been eating at her. I don’t blame her. Older New York Jews, left to their own devices, can create this haughty, incomprehensible-to-outsiders in-club. They use words she doesn’t understand. They give her weird looks if she brings certain foods to work. They probably say obnoxious things about Christians or people with conservative “values.”

What’s really throwing Lauren and Doug about these old Jews, though, is that they aren’t even religious. The question they have for me, which they are almost too polite to ask, is, how can these people call themselves Jews, if they hate everything religious? I try to explain and end up giving them the whole history of American Judaism. How it’s more than a religion, more than a culture. As I blab, I keep having to stop myself to try to censor the jingoistic sentences creeping in about how special Jews are, how different we are than anybody else, how our definition of a people is the one that makes sense. These sentences are buried deep in the script that I’m repeating for Laura and Doug, as it was taught to me, and every time I start to go on autopilot, another one of the sentences starts to pop out.

I ask Doug, so, all these Americans who call themselves Christian and go to church on Easter and buy a Christmas tree at Christmas – are they Christians, in your book? Doug is also trying to be extremely polite, and he won’t say that the answer is no, but clearly he thinks the answer is no.

I ask him about the gay rights issue, or whatever you want to call it, that’s currently splitting apart the Episcopalian church in the US. Doug reframes the argument as something else – as a larger dialogue about change in the church. If you change one thing, what's to keep anyone from making any other changes? What’s the point of tradition if you can just change it?

This conversation was very interesting but it was very hard. It’s hard to really listen to someone and it’s hard to really say what you think. Most of the time we speak in verbal shorthand to people who are just like us. It’s exhausting to try to use words that carry an accurate and helpful meaning for someone with a different background. After lunch I was hyperactive and tired. I think I wore Doug and Lauren out too. Doug told me he felt uncomfortable reciting the Nicene Creed with us standing next to him. And then he thought, wait a minute, isn’t this what I believe? Isn’t that the whole point of saying it. It’s not a secret. In fact, it’s the opposite – a public declaration. Witnesses remind you of the significance of what you’re doing and saying. They’re powerful – that’s why we tiptoe around them, and that’s why we’re so happy talking to people who are like us, when nobody else is watching. The Nicene Creed is an oath – like a marriage vow, like the Pledge of Allegiance – and it’s still got quite a bit of power.

It’s good to be a guest and to be a witness. It makes you realize how much you take for granted in your own home. Maybe that’s why houses of God are mostly so open – even though prayer is intensely personal - it’s assumed that any guest might come in, and so you should be prepared for that, and be comfortable showing who you really are and what you really believe in, no matter who is watching. And maybe the point of this is to show you that you should show who you really are with all your actions, even when you’re not in church. And maybe one reason to believe in God is that God is like a constant witness to your every action. You do not go unobserved. Your every action has consequence. Everything you do sets you apart from all other people. How do you want to be seen – by others, by God, by yourself? It’s your choice.

Join Us Next Week For: The Sephardic Synagogue. And Possibly: The Darwin Festival.

Last Weekend's Sermon

2007-02-04T21:08:00.000-05:00

The Book of Luke 4:16-4:32
16: And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
17: And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
18: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
19: To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
20: And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
21: And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
22: And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's son?
23: And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.
24: And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.
25: But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land;
26: But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.
27: And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.
28: And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,
29: And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.
30: But he passing through the midst of them went his way,

Let me tell you this story a different way.

Let’s say we live in this town called Natzrat, in the hills. Nothing too special. We’re just regular synagogue-goers, at, say, Congregation Bet Elohim, in Natzrat. This guy Josh (Yeshua), a real nice hometown kid, has been out of town for a while, and we’ve heard that he’s been up to some interesting things. Josh was always a good Torah reader so when we hear he’s going to be in town for Shabbat, we say okay Josh, why don’t you read from the Torah since you were always so good at it, maybe talk to us a little bit about what you’ve been up to.

Josh goes up to the front of the room and reads from the Torah, and then he maybe reads the Haftarah portion or whatever, and it turns out the portion is from Isaiah, the part where Isaiah says that someday soon God is going to fulfill His end of the covenant, going to come back to heal the brokenhearted and the blind and to free the captives.

And Josh stops reading and everybody sits down and looks at him. And Josh says “This prophesy is fulfilled now.”

And we all go, What?

And Josh goes, You heard me.

And an old guy in the congregation’s a little confused and he asks, “You’re Joseph’s son, aren’t you?”

And Josh says “Yeah. Guys, I know you heard I did some miracles in Kefar Nachum. You’re probably ask if I can do some for you here. But listen. No prophet is ever accepted in his own country. There was a big famine in Elijah the Prophet’s time, and he only saved one widow. And there were a lot of lepers in Elisha the Prophet’s time, and he only saved one, and that one was a Syrian.”

And the synagogue-goers get really mad at Josh because he sounds like he’s crazy, I mean, this just sounds like total nonsense, and they throw him out of shul. And Josh skips town. And we think, wow, that kid sure turned out weird. Can't imagine we'll ever hear from him again.

Hyperventilation and the Headstand: The Jivamukti Yoga Studio at Broadway and Thirteenth Street

2007-01-28T08:50:00.000-05:00

I accidentally had a religious experience yesterday at the Jivamukti Yoga Studio at Broadway and Thirteenth Street.

For the past several months I have been going to a wonderful, flaky yoga class on St. Mark's place called Yoga To The People. My first time, I was very skeptical. I was really going to yoga? I was going to be one of those people? If yoga really helps you relax, why are most yoga studios filled with - and run by - tense, anorexic women?

Actually, it turned out to be great. I rarely sit still and do nothing for more than 30 seconds at a time. (Think about it - do you?) When my mother visits me in New York she tells me she wants to throw a sheet over my head to stop my constant overstimulation, so that I'll stop moving around for just a few minutes. She thinks I'll be less exhausted that way. Yoga allows a person to feel like she is still doing, you know, something, while in fact long periods of nothing are involved.

When you are doing yoga well, you are aware of every single inhale and exhale breath. All other sensations are secondary - including the sensation of fatigue or muscle exhaustion. The repetition of the breath and the movements of your muscles actually free your mind to wander. The complexity of the poses uses up the part of your mind that is usually wasted anyway, worrying about whether you should cancel your Netflix account, whether you've gained weight, whether things are going well at work. With that annoying voice quieted, your mind can free associate, can pursue long chains of improbable connections until - sometimes - you stumble into a realization that seems perfectly obvious after you've already got it. Often this is something like "I should do what will make me happy" - a thought that would totally annoy you if you read it on a Starbucks cup, or that you would brush off if your parents told you (and they probably already did), but that is a genuinely earthshaking revelation when you get there on your own. Plenty of rhythmic activities have the ability to free up your mind in this way - I've also gotten there through painting and long-distance running. I'm sure that prayer, for the practiced, has the same effect. For me, prayer has never been absorbing enough to have this effect. I have plenty of nervous energy left over to watch the clock, adjust my clothing, and ponder my Netflix account. How to take a step deeper into it?

Yoga To The People lacks most religious overtones. Classes there are primarily calm, peaceful workouts, and you pay by leaving a couple bucks in a Kleenex box on your way out the door. A thoughtful, poky, slightly paunchy mid-30s guy usually leads lessons (I almost wrote "services"). He limits religious overtones to mild exhortations to "think about your breath," "think about your whole being," and "be loving to other people." (In fact, he is sometimes so overwhelmed by his own directives toward lovingness that he often spends the last five minutes of class - while the rest of us are lying peacefully on our mats - making out with his wife.)

I guess that sounds creepy, but it doesn't really bother me. Much more creepy, to me, is the interaction (whether literal or symbolic) in the more traditional American yoga cosmology between Smiling Wise Old Male Yogi and Thin Young Earnest Female Acolyte. As a young woman I have a strong suspicion of old gurus of any kind. Thanks, Santa Claus, but no way I'm gonna sit on your lap. Even if you can do a really great headstand.

The change from my usual peaceful gang to the Jivamukti Yoga Studio (where my friend Allison got a free class by bringing me) was quite dramatic. Jivamukti is huge - there are about six big classrooms and many classes run simultaneously. The hallways are wide and noisy, and are filled with posters encouraging you to eat vegetarian and say no to fur. Nine out of ten people there are women - generally slender and dressed in correct yoga attire (sleeveless top in solid colors with built in bra; three-quarter-length black spandex pants). Classes at Jivamukti will run you 17 bucks.

Allison and I picked an "open class," which means that you can go whether you are a beginner or an Advanced Yogi, and you'll basically be able to figure out what to do. Our instructor was named Paisley. She was tense and very thin, with long blond hair and Horus Eye and Sanskrit tattoos on her feet. Paisley sat down at the front of the room in front of a shrine with icons of Hindu deities, a potted plant, candles, and a bunch of photographs of old yogis with the usual Clintonesque grins on their faces. We all sat down cross legged on our mats facing her. She began to chant, rocking back and forth, one line at a time, and we called the lines back to her. I have no idea what they meant. I was going to ask her afterward but I was too intimidated.

Actually, the singing was my favorite part of this class, and also the most religious-feeling. Paisley sang in loud, low, open throat tones that almost reminded me of women's singing from the Balkans. I completely buy that singing like this helps you relax - you can't produce those noises unless you are pretty relaxed in your whole throat and chest. My opinion of Paisley improved.

After the singing, unfortunately, the class deteriorated pretty quickly into a Series of Hard Things I Couldn't Do, and that I Particularly Couldn't Do Quickly. This included the first Hard Thing in the class - forced, huffing, hyperventilating breaths for a minute at a time, followed by maybe 20 seconds of breath holding at a time. Repeat. Repeat, Repeat. Ever been in a room with 20 people hyperventilating? It's terrifying. Their bony backs shake with the effort as their lungs expand and contract. Just as breathing slowly relaxes you, breathing quickly stresses you out. I gave up trying to follow the hyperventilation very soon, but my heart started racing anyway, in panicked sympathy.

Here are other things I couldn't do (particularly within the span of one inhale or exhale as commanded by Paisley):

[Thin, reedy cry:]"Inhale!" (Kneel, wrap left leg over right leg, thread left arm under left knee, wrap right hand behind back and grab left hand.)

"Exhale!" (Kneel, place forehead to floor, clasp hands behind head, press elbows together, raise self to handstand)

"Inhale!" (Full split, with left leg forward and right leg backward)

There was one guy at the front of the room who was literally in a handstand three quarters of the class. Showoff. My religious experience degenerated into, I guess, the equivalent of counting the pages until the Oneg: watching the guy in the handstand, sneaking glances at the clock, staring reproachfully at Allison.

Finally it was over and Paisley gave us a soft "namaste," with a humble, tense smile. We trudged out. She had totally schooled us. Next week I'm going to be back in the beginner class, where I belong.

Stage Lighting, the Lion of Judah, and the Bar Mitzvah Class from New Jersey: Congregation B'nai Jeshurun on West 88th Street, Manhattan

2007-01-21T15:13:00.000-05:00

I walk up the stairs into the synagogue and a guy starts looking through my purse. This is embarrassing. I’ve had a rough week at work, so he is finding a lot of Au Bon Pain receipts, crumpled flyers for events I probably won’t go to, and okay, a few cookie wrappers. I try to push the cookie wrappers down to the bottom of the bag. The crumbs are falling out of the bag and into my purse. I think he sees them, in spite of my efforts, but he doesn’t really care. He’s looking for bombs.

What a harsh reminder this is. We tell each other, “May you be blessed with Shabbat peace.” And it means – “let’s hope nobody brought any bombs.” Let’s not get misty for the good old days, though, when it meant “let’s hope nobody brought any Cossacks.”

Finally I’ve made it to B’nai Jeshurun. I’m having a hard time writing about it because it is such a known quantity to everyone I work with. To “professional Jews,” this is one of the handfuls of famous success stories of synagogue revitalization. Those to whom I confess wanting to finally try attending religious services here in New York reflexively answer, “oh, you should try B’nai Jeshurun.”

B’nai Jeshurun is the success story, the congregation that under the auspices of a charismatic rabbi grew from fewer than 100 households in 1985 to 1,900 member households in 2001 (2,800 adults and 800 children, according to their website). A professional Jew is obligated to ask herself – how did they do this? Was it a fluke? Was it following some kind of Synagogue Revitalization Effort that professional Jews might be able to write down in a binder, circulate nationally, and bring all Jews back to the synagogues they are currently ignoring so happily?

After I get by the bomb checker – come to think of it, it’s kind of like trying to get by a bouncer into a New York City club; once he decides your driver’s license is real, he’s let you in and you get this little rush of smugness -- we enter through an unimposing and rather confused passageway. People looking for books are going one way; people looking for kipot are going another; people looking for their girlfriends are standing there abashedly and getting in everybody’s way. I push by all these people and into the main sanctuary, which is really splendid.

Ornate wood paneling covers the entire front of the room. It is carved in complicated curlicues and is painted in strong jewel tones and bright gold. An alumna of 1970s Jewish Institutional Architecture, I have only previously seen this type of decorating in Jewish institutions that have been restored by historical preservationists. I keep looking to see if the paint is chipping, if the moldings are dusty. But they’re not. They’re lovely. The back of the room has an old fashioned balcony with a number of additional seats, and the back wall (nestled among still more Moorish curlicues) is painted with these medieval looking crests: one, I think, is the Lion of Judah. The other one is an eagle, or hawk, holding what looks to be the Holy Grail. Or, no, wait, maybe it’s a Kiddush cup?

One of the key moments of this congregation seems to be the Great Ceiling Collapse of 1991 – probably the result of building restoration gone awry. The congregation decided not to replace the ceiling curlicues – really they still have plenty – and instead put up a stage ceiling that’s pitch black except for where it’s dramatically lit in royal purple. It’s all framed by some kind of metal work. I’m usually a historical snob but I actually really liked this. My first thought was that it made the sanctuary look very dramatic and very up-to-date. My second thought was that if things are really collapsing maybe next time I go I shouldn’t sit in the balcony.

A small green “Save Darfur” banner hangs from the center of the ceiling.

We have a whole world pop band set up here in the middle of the room. (As is the cutting edge style, the seating fans out in a circle around the band and the rabbi. It’s anti-hierarchical). My companion and I go up to the balcony to get a better view. Guitars, electric keyboards, Middle Eastern drum, cello and mandolin. A female singer keeps pushing back her hair. Unlike the Reform congregation where I grew up, where they do basically all the components of the worship service Friday night, and keep Saturday open for Bar Mitzvahs, in this congregation they do most of the heavy lifting (Torah reading) on Saturday, and leave Friday almost exclusively for singing. Here again the feeling rises within me: “We didn’t do it that way!” and I have to remind myself, “I didn’t like the way we did it.” I stare down cautiously from the balcony. I don’t know any of their tunes, and the world pop beats seem suspiciously happy.

A number of the worshippers are also suspiciously happy. (I only make fun because I’m envious). They stand, sing lustily, rock back and forth, and move as the spirit moves them. At one point they join hands and start dancing around the room, they’re just that blissed out. I am totally impressed but I am just not in this zone. I don’t know the songs. I have spent the last five days behaving very decorously, and it takes me a while to come down. Not these guys, I guess. I am entranced by their total lack of self consciousness. My companion, noticing the same thing, gestures to a bunch of bar-mitzvah aged kids sitting below. All wear identical bronze kipot. None are dancing. “I bet those guys are all too cool to dance,” he says. It’s true. Why would they want to dance with a bunch of women their mom’s age? But just as we think we’ve figured this out, one of them leaps up, and it must have been the cool one, because all the rest of them follow and join in the dancing. Okay, except for two, who are still sitting there making wisecracks.

I still find this dancing thing very awkward. How can you dance with more than two thirds of the room just sitting there? At Yale, the Very Cool Kids used to throw Naked Parties. (I was never invited, so the dilemma of whether to attend did not come up). The strictest rule of the Naked Party (at which, by all accounts, people did the same things I always did at clothed parties) is that if you enter the Naked Party, you must be naked. When entering the room, you are required to stop in a totally blacked out vestibule where you remove all your clothing. Thus, you can’t see a Naked Person unless you yourself are also naked. I feel like dancing ought to be the same way. If people are just watching, (“aww, isn’t that cute? The young people are holding hands!”) it kind of ruins the mood. Come to think of it, this is a problem with a lot of Jewish programs. The kids might be having a lot of fun, but they just know they’re being watched. Awkward….

The first time I tried to go to B’nai Jeshurun, I accidentally went to the earlier, family service. This turned out to be quite a lot of fun to watch, though there wasn’t a lot to the service. “Tell me something good that happened to you this week!” the charismatic head rabbi asked a shy five year old in his oh-so-charming Argentine accent. And wouldn’t you know it (welcome to New York), the kid goes, “I went to the opera!” The adults all around the room murmured their approval. The rabbi asked another kid the same question. This one was too excited even to finish a sentence, but spluttered “I did…. I went to the….It was the….I really liked….” The rabbi nodded wisely like they teach you in Rabbi School and tried not to crack up. “Okay, whatever you did, it sounds like it was really great. Now let’s all be thankful for the things we did this week….”

When it was established in 1825, BJ was the first Ashkenazi congregation in New York City, the ninth congregation in the United States overall. Clearly it’s gone through a number of changes since then. Back in the day, there were no denominations per se. You just hung out with your ethnic community and you did what they did (unless you said Fuck These Rabbis and checked out entirely, which was another popular option). Then BJ became a Conservative movement synagogue (the Conservative movement’s most recent claim to fame is its governing body’s recent brilliant decision, in the face of community deadlock on the gay rights issue, to rule both for and against gay ordination at the same time.) A number of people today are saying that the Conservative movement is falling apart – its more conservative wing is moving rightward to meet the the Modern Orthodox (all of the rules, none of the dress code); the left wing is moving leftward to meet the Reform movement (fewer rules; no dress code; growing interest in traditional liturgy and decreasing hostility toward Jewish ritual).

But that’s another post, for another time. in the mean time, we’re wrapping up the service. We mourn those who died this week and whose death-iversary falls on this week. We sing more songs that I don’t know. The boys in the bronze kipot, who turn out to be a Bar Mitzvah class from somewhere in New Jersey, pinky swear each other to secrecy about dancing with the middle aged ladies and peace out. We shake hands with a couple of people we don’t know (actually, we’re supposed to, but we don’t – we’re hungry and exhausted and head straight to dinner instead). We all file out; some nice man gives us pieces of challah.

A transformative religious experience? Not exactly. From the way this was sold to me, I got the feeling maybe I would feel instantly at home and have a transformative religious experience without putting in any work at all. Obviously, this was a lame assumption. It’s okay though - It’s just going to take some time.

Next Week: We Meet the Young Catholics

Welcoming, Hip-Hop Dancing, and the Message Bible: The Onnuri Korean Church on 68th Street

2007-01-14T15:42:00.000-05:00

In Which I Do Some Networking
When I decided to investigate New York religious communities, I thought my friend Mark might have some good leads. Mark went to college with me, and his work now runs parallel to mine in some interesting ways. A fearsomely talented, Alabama-born rock guitarist of Korean heritage. Mark now works for a non-profit serving the sizeable community of Korean immigrants in Flushing, Queens. Mark’s organization is a sort of one-stop-shop for immigrants - it connects them to English classes, jobs, health organizations, and the like. Last year I went to Flushing for the Chinese New Year celebration in Flushing and was astonished by the number of parade floats belonging to local non-profits. This struck me as a strong sign of community health.

The reason I thought Mark might know something about religious communities is that nonprofits in Korean Queens often have strong ties to the local churches - not because the organizations themselves are religious, but simply because Korean churches play such a central role in Koreans' daily lives. Korean immigrants are busy, insular and exhausted. Aside from their homes and businesses, the only place many of them go is church. Thus, all information relevant to the community – public health, politics – gets a tremendous boost if it is linked to the church, and the pastors of these churches wield significant local political power. Mark, who is well-educated, nice-looking, and personable, has been working in this community for only a year, and he has already been approached about eventually running for public office in Flushing. (A local paper gave him a front-page article last month, headlined something like “Smart Young Korean-American Comes Back to Help Community.”) However, to do so, he would have to become a presence at one of the local churches, which are overwhelmingly Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian. As Mark is a practicing Catholic, this might take some finesse.

Mark himself attends a Catholic church in the East Village, but many of his friends from college and from work attend Korean churches in the New York area. When I asked him if he had any friends who would let me tag along, he not only volunteered to come with me, but found a friend, Christina, who attended a church with an English-language service. Clearly, this made my reporting job a lot easier.

The Onnuri Church
The church I attended this morning - www.in2church.org - is a year-old branch of the 19-year-old Onnuri Church, a Korean (as opposed to Korean-American) Presbyterian church. It has run a Korean-language service since its inception, but just began an English-language service a month ago, in an effort to attract a larger student population. In fact, its congregation is primarily made up of students and young New York professionals - quite different than the Flushing crowd.

This church is currently holding services in York Prep, a private school on a quiet residential street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Oddly enough, York Prep itself is housed within a Jewish synagogue. Thus, we walked into the building under a stone façade reading “Jewish Institute of Religion,” descended into a basement gymnasium decorated with banners celebrating the achievement of York Prep’s sports teams, and settled in for an English language Korean Presbyterian worship service. The churchgoers, doing their best to improve the ambience, had covered the floor with blue tarps and had decorated their temporary stage with tall banners with quotes from Corinthians and pictures of clasped hands and blue skies.

An entirely separate Korean church was winding up a worship service when we arrived. (“They always run late,” a young deacon informed us apologetically as we waited in the upstairs room.) As the participants filtered out, we went in and took our seats. In the back corner of the room a rock band warmed up.

We were the first people in the room, but over the hour-long service, others kept trickling in, and we were at about 50 by the time the service wrapped up. It was an astonishingly young group, considering it was 10 AM on a Sunday; most attendees were singles in their early 20s. There were at least two women for every man (Jewish worship communies are similar in this respect). As far as I could tell, everyone in the room was ethnically Korean.

An older man in a suit said a brief blessing and then the rock band cranked it up. We all stood up and clapped along. The energy, considering it was 10 AM, was truly outstanding. As they played, a projector threw the lyrics of the rock hymns(?) onto a big screen with a background of sun coming out from behind the cloud so we could follow along.

The rock band's set was followed by a six-person, mixed-gender troupe of hip-hop dancers (“His Groove,”) which danced to two Gospel/hip-hop numbers by performing artist Kirk Franklin.
(

“It's a mystery for someone to give their life just for me /
What you did on Calvary/
Makes me wan’ love you more”.)

I see on Wikipedia that Kirk Franklin was recently on Oprah discussing how he overcame his porn addiction ("Only recently Franklin had informed his wife, after first having proposed to her to share the pornography together, which she rejected"). Hmm. I should also point out that Kirk Franklin has just been nominated for two Grammy’s.

The Message Bible
Pastor Marc Choi, a young guy in a suit and pink tie, began his sermon, which focused on the reading of the week.

The language of his reading struck me before the content. It was from the “Message Bible,” which seeks “to capture the tone of the text and the original conversational feel of the Greek, in contemporary English.” There are versions of the Message Bible in all different languages – it simplifies and paraphrases the text for contemporary audiences, so that they can focus on the message rather than puzzling through the words. This would horrify the shit out of a Jewish audience – the core of Jewish practice is the study of the original Biblical texts – but I can see how it would make sense for communities of immigrants, or maybe the younger crowd. Pastor Marc encouraged everyone to go on Amazon.com and invest in a copy of the Message Bible. Below, find the text of our parable for the week, from Matthew. (For a comparison excerpt in King Jamesian, you can go here:

14-18"It's also like a man going off on an extended trip. He called his servants together and delegated responsibilities. To one he gave five thousand dollars, to another two thousand, to a third one thousand, depending on their abilities. Then he left. Right off, the first servant went to work and doubled his master's investment. The second did the same. But the man with the single thousand dug a hole and carefully buried his master's money.

19-21"After a long absence, the master of those three servants came back and settled up with them. The one given five thousand dollars showed him how he had doubled his investment. His master commended him: 'Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.'

22-23"The servant with the two thousand showed how he also had doubled his master's investment. His master commended him: 'Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.'

24-25"The servant given one thousand said, 'Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent.'

26-27"The master was furious. 'That's a terrible way to live! It's criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest.

28-30"'Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this "play-it-safe" who won't go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.'

This struck me as a little harsh on the unfortunate thousand-dollar-servant, who really did seem like a nice guy – but on the other hand, this gives a lot more sympathetic portrait of the bankers/moneylenders than one usually finds in New Testament stories. (A coincidence that Pastor Marc chose this text to preach to an ethnic community with a strong entrepreneurial presence in New York? I don’t know.)

Next, Pastor Marc did a little stand-up act about his wife and two daughters going to the mall to get their ears pierced together, and made fun of his five-year-old-daughter, who volunteered to go first, then decided that one piercing would do her just fine. (“I told her I couldn’t let her go to school with just one ear done. They’d think her daddy didn’t have enough money to pay for both!”) This girl is going to kill him once she’s old enough to understand he’s preaching about her. Anyway, Pastor Marc then analogized being a Christian to being a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer, all of which he viewed as extremely difficult professions. (“Girls? How many of you want to marry a guy who’s a farmer. I don’t want to be a farmer. No, I don’t want to be a soldier either. I like it fine right here in New York.”) He exhorted his young flock to work hard at being Christians and at being professionals, and to serve as examples in their work places. (“That’s very Korean,” Christina told me afterward).

Wrapping Up
Next was “Offering,” which, when I asked another of Mark’s friends to explain to me beforehand, she just gave me a blank look and said, “You know, the offering.” Okay, so it turns out that “Offering” is when they collect donations – they passed around a red velvet bag and we all put in a dollar. During the Offering, this friend got up and sang. She is a classical voice student at the nearby New School, from which this Onnuri church draws many of its flock. She sang a Psalm, in Korean, while the psalm’s text, in both English and Korean, was projected on the slide projector.

Afterwards, Pastor Marc made the announcements. Finally, something I was completely comfortable with: it was just like in my Friday night Shabbat services at home, where everyone starts to shuffle their feet and pick up their papers, getting ready to jet, and the preacher’s voice takes on this slight edge as he tries to get through all the announcements before everyone runs for the door. However, unlike in my own Friday night services, I was actually paying attention. So I can tell you that the hip-hop dance team was recruiting new members. Pastor Marc is forming an “intercessory prayer team” to meet at 9:00 every Sunday morning, to pray specifically on behalf of us 10:10 AM worshipers. Furthermore, the Onnuri church is running a “40 days of worship” series of morning prayer services at its offices in New Jersey. It’s sort of a New Year’s thing so it goes until early Feb. They run a bus every day from New York City to New Jersey at 5:30 AM, and apparently, people really go. Yikes.

Then one more huge rock number, and it was over, but not before the pastor issued a special welcome to first-time visitors, asking them to stand up and be recognized. Someone gave us each a copy of the Onnuri monthly publication and a baggie with a couple of Now and Laters in it (religious subtext? Oh well, I already ate them), and then he asked us to come over for a few moments after the service for a greeting from the Welcome Committee. At the mention of the Welcome Committee, a young man in the corner sprung to his feet and raised a gigantic banner saying “WELCOME” over his head. The earnest young Welcome Committee didn’t know quite what to do with itself – we all went around the circle and said our names, our ages, and where we lived. There were about seven of us, all between 19 and 27. Half students, half working people. The Welcome Committee said a little prayer for us that we would find God and ideally that we would find God here with them as members of this church, and then they asked us to fill out a form.

On Prayer and Evangelism
I used to get kind of upset when people prayed over me, but I’m over it. It was certainly fair game this morning, given that we had just attended an entire worship service. But more than that, I’ve grown into my own skin. I"m not worried that anything's going to, you know, happen. Christianity is belief-based; if you believe in Christ, according to Christians, you’re in. Judaism is much harder to pick up and also harder to cast away. Most Orthodox Jews will accept converts to Judaism under extremely specific circumstances, but they often don’t accept that people convert out at all – they simply view them as Jews who have adopted some exasperatingly incorrect talking points. Christians will often identify Jews as those who don’t believe in Christ – but the truth is, we really just don’t think about him much, one way or the other. By this logic, you can’t really do much to us by praying over us. I remained a Jew. It was a very nice sentiment on their part. End of story.

Most Korean churches are strongly evangelistic. According to the New York Times, after the United States, South Korea has more missionaries abroad than any other country: 12,000 at any given time, in 160 countries. In fact, the main purpose of the 19-year-old Onnuri church is the training of missionaries. According to Pastor Marc, there are currently 614 missionaries abroad who belong to the Onnuri Church.

On Koreans and Jews
Christina explained to us that Koreans, even those who are practicing Buddhists, often attend Korean churches simply for the Korean network that they provide. Christina herself used to attend the interdenominational church in Times Square, but it “just didn’t feel right,” so she went back to worshiping with Koreans. We discussed the analogy to Jewish communities – the large and energetic subpopulation of Jews who are deeply committed to their Jewish identities but who are indifferent or even contemptuous for religious observance. They just like to hang out together.

Apparently we weren’t the first ones to think of this parallel – Mark just sent me an article from KoreanVoter.com that discussed the success of the Jewish community in achieving success in the broader American community while retaining its own identity.

The article, by Professor Pyung Gap Min, is called Korean Community at the Crossroad: What Can We Learn from the Jewish Community?

According to Professor Pyung Gap Min, “The Korean community in New York, as well as those in other cities, is currently experiencing an intergenerational transition….”

He contrasts the position of Korean immigrants, who are prevented by the language barrier from dispersing into the general labor market and who are thus highly dependent on their ethnic community, with the position of native-born Korean Americans, who “are greatly detached from the Korean community.” Professor Pyung Gap Min believes this is because native-born Koreans “have achieved social mobility largely based on their educational credentials and individual achievements,” and thus that they “do not feel the need for ethnic solidarity to protect common interests.”

“Moreover,” he writes, “since Protestantism is not a religion indigenous to Korea, Korean English congregations have eliminated much of Korean cultural traditions, with native-born Korean Protestants accepting Christian, rather than Korean, as their primary identity. Finally, native-born Korean Americans are very much detached from ethnic media because few of them can understand Korean-language ethnic media.”

He then contrasts this division among Koreans with the solidarity of American Jews [really? Solidarity? this is the only point at which I would quarrel with this article], writing that “Jewish Americans have been more successful than any other ethnic group in combining the adaptive assimilation with the ethnic retention.”

The rest of this article is so eloquent I'm just going to leave it in its own words:

“First, [Jewish Americans] put a great deal of emphasis on children’s education as the major channel for social mobility…However, Jewish Americans have also made great efforts to preserve their ethnic traditions and to help their members by establishing many Jewish organizations. …. Jewish Americans have had a huge advantage over Korean Americans in maintaining ethnic traditions and ethnic identity through their religion because Judaism is their ethnic religion. The Korean community in the New York-New Jersey area with about 200,000 Korean Americans has more than 1,000 ethnic organizations, far more ethnic organizations than the Jewish community in the area with about 2 million Jews. But almost all these Korean organizations are Protestant churches (about 600) and friendship associations based on pre-migration ties, such as alumni and district associations, with social service and empowerment agencies comprising a tiny fraction of the organizations.

“Moreover, Jewish Americans have made great efforts to protect their civil rights and to empower their community by establishing a number of civil rights and political organizations.... An important lesson we can learn from the Jewish community is that we need more and stronger social service and empowerment organizations in the Korean community to provide social services for different segments of the Korean American population, protect Korean Americans’ civil rights, and enhance Korean-American political power.”

Thank you, Christina, for being such a friendly and helpful guide. I learned so much today and I appreciate your time and the generosity and Godliness of your community.

Very best,
Hannah

Next week: The trendiest Jewish prayer community in Manhattan?

A Place To Start

2007-01-14T13:04:00.000-05:00

I am looking for a place where I can feel comfortable praying. This is complicated by two factors – the fact that I am not comfortable praying in the first place, and the fact that each place I visit inspires in me the response “This isn’t how I used to do it!” I must then remind myself that I didn’t like how I used to do it, either.

From second grade through high school, I more-or-less attended a Reform temple in the suburbs of Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina. There I received – sorry - a poor religious education, surrounded by classmates who hated being there. The underground description of religious education among Jews is “the only place good Jewish kids go to be total assholes.” They threw chalk and spitballs at each other (I know, so retro), talked dirty in chevruta, and hijacked every in-class discussion to return the conversation topic to Duke-UNC basketball games. When our synagogue published the inevitable “Where are they going to college?” issue of its bulletin, highlighting the successes of the few remaining non-dropouts in our religious school program, I was astonished to see that a girl whom I had never heard utter a blessed word since I joined the religious education program in second grade was attending an outstanding university. An arrogant teenager, I had mistaken her decade-long catatonia for idiocy, when it was in fact her defense mechanism against her peers. As she explained to me later, “there wasn’t anything I wanted to say.”

We made Seder plates out of paper, year after year. We learned the tunes for the prayers. What we did not learn – or what we failed to retain – is anything that would place us within the broader Jewish spectrum. A confession: my mother was not Jewish at the time of my birth. In what the Reform movement would probably term a success, and what I would term a failure, I was unaware that the vast majority of the Jewish community worldwide would not consider me Jewish for this reason. This brought me up short during the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel, a summer trip to Israel for 26 students of different Jewish backgrounds: Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, and “other.” I’ve gotten over the pain of being told I wasn’t Jewish – in fact, thanks to the Bronfman Youth Fellowships, I can sit at a lunch table and listen to a fellow Jew say just about anything about me without losing my cool – but I haven’t gotten over my anger at the movement that raised me for drawing its shutters so emphatically against the larger Jewish community. This does no justice to the Reform Jewish community, as it does no justice to the Jewish community anywhere. Too often I see Reform rabbis today crouched in this same defensive position. “They don’t recognize us, so why should we talk to them?” Because you’re pissing off your children, that’s why. You want to be part of the community? You are obligated to sit at the lunch table and take whatever they throw at you, until they’re exhausted. Then the real conversation begins.