John Neeleman's "Logos": Book Review

Extrapolating the accounts of the Jewish War by Josephus with what we know of Saul-turned-Paul, the tension between his mission to the Gentiles with the Hebrew-centered Christian cult of James, the brother of Jesus, the ministry of the man born as Yeshua himself, and the influences of Philo of Alexandria, the Sicarii rebels against Rome, and the Essenes, as well as imperial machinations, this novel takes on a complicated situation. Perhaps gleaning hints how a pre-synoptic ur-gospel [called Q if not here but by German critics 160 years ago] came to be imagined and composed, John Neeleman presents his reconstruction in a sprawling tale. He makes a clever case for his bold theory of origins.

Jacob ben Aaron rises up in the higher ranks of those centered around Temple ritual in Jerusalem. Starting around the year we know as 46 when he was born, this focuses on the great revolt which for a time drove back the Romans who sought to crush Palestinian resistance. Frustrated by Hebrew intransigence, the rulers who collaborate with Rome make a convincing argument for capitulation, so as to keep a limited form of autonomy. But radicals take the lead and spark insurgency, hating Rome. Jacob learns to carry this revenge himself after sufferings hit home. To avoid spoilers, let's say that he is affected deeply and, caught up in the revolt, he survives partially driven by his own desire to fight back. He wanders from the fallen Temple around Roman territory. This allows Neeleman to introduce him and us to the teachings of the Essenes, the thoughts of the Persian Magi, the ideas of the desert Ishmaelites, and the philosophy of the Hellenized Hebrews who studied in Alexandria. All these, with a hint of Egyptian myth, build upon Jacob's childhood preparation in the Torah and the classics alike.

Neelemen cleverly creates a protagonist eager for knowledge of both great systems, sacred and profane, Greek and Hebrew, and by taking them in, he can integrate them, while remaining somewhat doubtful about the power of his traditional beliefs. At one low point, the theodicy he challenges "all seemed contradictory and an extended rationalization for failure." The "same formula," as he is told by one mentor of many, repeats the story of a nobleman anointed before being cast into the wilderness, only to overcome deprivation to be revealed "as the savior of humankind and the bearer of a word and bringer of a new and better age." This realization enables him to be open to syncretic patterns, as Jacob watches the Christian sect grow, and witnesses when Rome tries to come to terms with this restive message of liberation from outmoded ways. Jacob is well-placed to take advantage. 

"Logos is order. Logos is balance, measure for measure. Wisdom is understanding the Logos." Jacob hears this translated from lofty concepts to clever realpolitik by one well placed to put this into effect. The demand is that while "the will to power, desire, money, sex" may all be "stigmatized" as passions unbecoming the new world order, the fulfillment will entice many into the embrace of "good news."

Neelemen lines up many personages, and while their conversations as in such accounts may imitate the didacticism and erudite tone of the classic and ancient tellers in his own prose, this stately pace does blend with the feel of an antiquated chronicle. The expository content, as many doctrines, disputes, and dissidents have their lengthy say--often with citing Scripture as readily as does Jacob the epics--slows modern expectations. But judiciously dramatized battle scenes, frank but honest sexual encounters, and a determination to endure make Jacob's journeys worthwhile, especially after he must leave his hometown of Jerusalem. This mixes a coming-of-age saga with an novel of ideas, too. To sum up, if you wish an expansive but thoughtful examination of how Christianity might have evolved in its earliest days, as one man in the flesh became the creator of the word as Logos, it's here.
(Amazon US 3-10-15)

Facebook's Community Standards + Censorship

 

As I wrote two months ago about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and their tragic aftermath for my friend's free-speech Irish-themed site The Pensive Quill, and as anti-censorship has always been a pursuit I've encouraged in my teaching, my personal life, and my discussions with patient pals, I share Justin King comments in the Pontiac Tribune about Facebook's updated Community Standards.

Of course, parsing FB's carefully worded and superficially cheery phrasing to compare with King's Orwellian interpretation opens this Big Brother interpretation to debate. There's lots of wiggle room when you compare the standards under "Encouraging Respectful Behavior" for the overview, nudity, hate speech, and graphic and violent content respectively. After gently warning us that we may find opinions different from ours in the big bad online realm, it then adds: "To help balance the needs, safety, and interests of a diverse community, however, we may remove certain kinds of sensitive content or limit the audience that sees it." Global sensitivity appears a goad, and while, for instance, we are assured breastfeeding or post-masectomy pictures are fine, as well as art of the nude, sex itself or the parts of us which engage in those actions are prohibited. Yet, as this French case about Gustave Courbet's "L'origine du monde" shows, FB censorship enters when art, freedom, standards all collide.

When it comes, too, for "hate speech," we might all agree in theory that "content that directly attacks people based on their: race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases" is not a feature of a civilized society. Yet, what about groups raising feminist protests against Muslims, or Palestinian commentary linking "the Zionist entity" and the IDF to the Third Reich? The line between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism itself is very, very blurred, as repeated instances occur on FB of liberal criticism of Israel's policies.

In turn, FB remarks that on some "important issues,"these "involve violence and graphic images of public interest or concern, such as human rights abuses or acts of terrorism. In many instances, when people share this type of content, they are condemning it or raising awareness about it." The distinction between awareness, protest, advocacy, and glorification, and who is a terrorist and who is an insurgent, who a freedom fighter and who a traitor, depends on the perspective of more than one. 

At least sharing of these standards generates healthy and necessary debate. While FB is often a forum for petty and sometimes raw discussion, should it be curbed? King states: "Is my newsfeed pretty diverse? Yes. Are some of these statements offensive? Sure. Should they be banned? Of course not."
(Reprinted for The Pensive Quill, 4-8-15)

Je Suis Charlie depuis deux jours

Only the Independent targeted the mix of defiance and puerility that combined in Charlie Hebdo's fatal art. That paper's front page illustrated a middle finger lifted from out of Hebdo's yellow background, its own bold frame ready to be dramatized by an inker's touch. That touch died, digit extended, surrounded by blood spilled into or as if red ink.

The New York Times refused to reprint Charlie Hebdo's often juvenile, if sometimes clever in startling or unsettling ways, determinedly satirical cartoons that led to the murders of eight artists, three police (one of Algerian descent), two more dead, and two days later, four Jewish hostages. A Yale UP book on the 2006 Danish cartoons did not dare to include those depictions. With such hesitancy by publications purporting to critically investigate this issue, I fear this leads too much to caution. While understandable, this failure of nerve lest nervousness grow may erode our liberty due to too much tolerance. Inviting discussion, as I sort through journalism, memes, and commentary I've compiled, in ‘Je Suis Charlie depuis deux jours’, (‘I Was Charlie for Two Days’), I share here an array of perspectives as I watched and participated in the spirited discussion and debate. The whole episode spanned two-plus days, but it warped rapidly online.

Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian also asserted that his paper should not reprint the images. From what I can gather, neither the Irish Times nor the Telegraph printed any of them as well. More on that as this essay continues. For now, at least Freedland also covered what in the aftermath of the attacks remains to me tellingly an under-reported aspect. Freedland asks why innocent Jews at a kosher supermarket should be held as if guilty of crimes in Gaza by the IDF. This reductionist ‘blaming the victims’ was also being marshaled to spin the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists' fate. This direction, as far as I could follow, emerged soon after the initial shock many testified to on hearing about the attacks.

First, I noticed my FB feeds and profile photos or friends fill with ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and fellow cartoonists' responses in solidarity. But, a few hours later (at least in the time lag given my ability to call up coverage and my own delay keeping up with the media blitz, for at work I had not even learned of the incident--indicative of my multicultural milieu, for better or worse, avoiding any such discussions), I found another twist. This asserted that while of course we do not justify violence, we feel sorry for those who found the caricatures offensive and racist and despicable, and we deplore their promotion, just as we would any which once darkened the pages of Der Stürmer or a tabloid.

Jay Michaelson issued a progressive's call for ‘maintaining composure in the face of anger. We should not deny the rage we feel at Jews being targeted in a kosher grocery store while they buy wine for Shabbat. That would only make the anger worse. But we should channel it into effective responses with cold, clear reason.’ This is how I first learned of the hostages taken, as this aside. I found no other posts on it, and when I scoured the NYT and LA Times websites, ‘grocery store’ in the latter led the sub-heading. After the sad standoff was over, three killers gained their martyrdom. Four Jewish shoppers had died for the sin of being caught in an ordinary business doing ordinary things hated by those who captured them; nobody else remarked on this directly in media or FB that I saw.

Christopher Hitchens took a nuanced turn on what is not found in a kosher market, and how we live with competing impulses between control and abandon. Back in 2006, he discussed the reaction to ‘the Danish cartoons’ and the refusal of most media to risk sharing them: ‘The innate human revulsion against desecration is much older than any monotheism: Its most powerful expression is in the Antigone of Sophocles. It belongs to civilization. I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a “holy” book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object.’ Wise words.

Giles Fraser, speaking of sacred fetishes, linked the terrorists to the cartoonists: both as iconoclasts. As for the Enlightenment values, two days before the attacks, the cover star of that week's CH issue,  Michel Houellebecq was interviewed about his new novel (released the day of the attacks and at #1 already), which dramatises the buildup to an election in 2022 France when ‘Mohammed Ben Abbes handily beats Marine Le Pen with support from both socialists and the right.’ He claims that those ideals are lost amidst dead consumerism and capitalism, as Islam rises and perhaps Catholicism might join forces with it against secularism. It has lost its appeal as a counter to the fundamentalist upsurge.

Houellebecq goes on to tell The Paris Review: ‘My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.’ And, ‘Islam is an image of the future. Why has the idea of the Nation stalled out? Because it’s been abused too long.’ No stranger to frank satire, I hope he is safer in Ireland than in his native land these intolerant days.

Jeff Sparrow in Australia considered a satirical cartoon published and then apologized for there during last year's Israeli incursion into Gaza. He asked how many would cheer its anti-semitic stereotypes. He distinguished defense of free speech from condoning the dissemination of such imagery: ‘you don't have to like the project of Charlie Hebdo to defend its artists from murder, just as you can uphold media workers' right to safety without endorsing the imagery they produce’.

Nigel Duara explained that this imagery reveled in a rather sophomoric intent to rankle and irritate, but being French and secular, it tried to raise everybody's hackles. In 2012, The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, offered what was the only inoffensive cartoon possible. ‘”Please enjoy this culturally, ethnically, religiously and politically correct cartoon responsibly.” It was four black lines. An empty box.' When spaces are illustrated, how much do readers and publishers collude in doing harm by stereotype? In Irish, NÓS recalled the precedents of the Third Reich and of Punch in Victorian England in spreading depictions that we acknowledge as worthy not of satire but contempt.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation balanced the tradition of Swift and Voltaire with a caution about the restriction of rights online and off. The speed of dissemination of the cartoons complicates the role of the press, as no censors or filters can shield journalists in a ‘global field’ where they are now vulnerable. Buzzfeed showed how many British and American press outlets have cropped or blurred CH covers, while others, as noted above, refused to reproduce them.

Michael Deacon at the Telegraph suggested the terrorists did not care about the cartoons themselves, but were using this as ‘bait’ to tempt counter-measures in turn guaranteed to stoke more support for Islamic extremism. Juan Cole popularised a similar thesis that the attacks were part of a canny agenda: “'Sharpening the contradictions' is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.’ In passing I must testify that some on the fringes of the media had accused Israel [and the U.S.] of responsibility under a ‘false flag’ operation smacking of the Reichstag Fire, as the attacks followed France MPs seeking national recognition of Palestine. I wonder if this accusation persisted after Jewish hostages were executed.

Naomi Wolf on social media urged restraint. She shifted blame back at Western hegemony for the anger expressed against CH. Others castigated ‘white privilege’ as indulging in unwise cruelty, goading on Muslims who then lashed back out of pride and solidarity. Others wondered why American policy was not held culpable, and the pro-Israel lobby. These retorts seemed to convince many progressives. For, once the sense of what the cartoons conveyed had been (if briefly) spread on the net (if less so in much of the mainstream press), the insistence that the freedom to publish provocation was weighed against--and found wanting by many on the left--fears of impending crackdown on Muslims by Europeans beholden to NATO and the U.S.

Wolf’s rhetoric and rush of words transmitted expresses this counter-narrative: ‘So now Hollande [thanks, typo corrected] is saying “France is at war with Terror” and this exactly echoes the “global war on terror” and “we are in a war footing” language that let Bush and Obama strip an open civil society at peace of every liberty and launder billions into untraceable “War” black holes. Worst of all is the way the open peacefulness of Europe is going to be shifted into constant terror hype fearmongering and militarization with continual attacks on civil society from the state. Beware beware France you have a far worse threat facing you than terror attacks!’

Oireachtas Retort listed a litany of ‘recent curtailments of freedom of expression’ in Ireland by the media and the government, exemplifying how nations less directly involved in the struggle between Islamism and secularism also encourage compliance to the norm as imposed by censorship and ignorance. For me, having the ability to seek out offensive content is as important as having the option to choose not to seek it out. I want to decide for myself, not thanks to a mullah or mogul.

Socialist Worker issued a SWP statement: ‘The media present Charlie Hebdo as simply a “satirical magazine”. But it is not the French equivalent of Private Eye as some commentators have suggested. It may have been once, but it has become a specialist in presenting provocative and racist attacks on Islam. That does not justify the killings, but it is essential background.’ This summed up another line of counter-attack, placing the Parisian crimes within a wider geopolitical, and right-wing dimension and equating Islam with a ‘race’-based polity. This to me feels at odds with what Malcolm X saw on his hajj to Mecca, when he witnessed blue-eyed and fair-skinned pilgrims join those of many ethnicities to fulfill their Islamic duty, I note in passing.

Simon Schama reminded readers of the history of satire against potentates, pontiffs, and princes as part of European progress. After all, the liberating dimension aligning humanist opposition and secular confrontations against those who rule in the name of gods from above or of the market also merits mention. ‘The horrifying carnage at Charlie Hebdo is a reminder, if ever we needed it, that irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom. I suppose it is some sort of backhanded compliment that the monsters behind the slaughter are so fearful of the lance of mirth that the only voice they have to muffle it is the sound of bullets.’ He upholds a ‘right to ridicule’, against those who send in clowns.

Joe Sacco began by mourning his fellow cartoonists. Then he reflected on their foolhardiness. This caught the double-take of many like him in the media, a day or so after the attacks, when initial ‘Je Suis Charlie’ posts and candlelit rallies with ‘Not Afraid’ blended with the second opinions of those who realised that the responses of Muslims angered by the cartoons might be taken more seriously than those of a more privileged, and therefore suspect, class of intellectuals and humanists, and those on the right who sought any opportunity to stoke anti-Islamic slogans and actions, from the Western ‘white’ world. This did, however, tend to polarise responses, as if none in the Muslim world, wherever that spans, objected to the murders and celebrated dissent.

Andy Borowitz tweeted: ‘I guess one part of their plan that the terrorists didn't think through is now Charlie Hebdo's cartoons are being seen by millions around the world instead of a few thousand in Paris.’ While this tweet was shared by those pleased by this, others reacted that mockery had met with revenge. And some of these did not seem overly displeased by this, even as they averred that the cartoonists did not merit death for art. Their riposte echoed: what right does the colonial have to ridicule the colonist?

David Brooks at the NYT may differ from that paper's editors. He chided a double standard. ‘Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.’ I made this same point before I read Brooks. I also wonder: many Irish a fortnight ago were angry at the BBC proposing a comedy about the Famine. How far can we push the limits of what we may find funny, but not others? Americans usually have fewer legal restrictions than elsewhere but socially, pressure continues to discourage many ‘offenses’. In Britain, ‘incitement’ is illegal for speech deemed leading to racial hatred; also, laws applying to all must be distinguished from codes applying, fairly or not, on a campus that tries to police itself apart from rest of society.

Ross Douthat takes up a defense of blasphemy. Although he and Brooks are the conservative minority at the New York Times, their stance encouraging opinions and depictions with which they disagree sustains a type of principle many liberals back away from taking to its uncomfortable limits, in a time when tolerance and sensitivity are urged, and when everyone is jittery about spreading hate. Yet, for reasons of public order and concomitant discretion in diplomatic rhetoric, this divergence from frank talk can echo when our politicians decry in Paris ‘terrorism’ without naming its context more specifically. This is another way we dance around the suppression of freedoms in the Islamic heartland. There is a ‘squeamishness,’ as Douthat's article links to in other journalism, about how many react. Part of the problem is that culture, religion, identity are all wrapped up into a massive package labelled ‘Islam’ differently than much of the secular realm, where many of us try to set religion into a category apart.

Here we turn to those not from Europe but from the Islamic world who have protested its ideology. While I raised this in exchanges with those on the left who took the ‘CH had it coming’ side, my claims that those in Islamic regimes also faced incarceration, torture, and death met with no reply other than that free speech used in such excess unwisely egged on those who, outraged, lashed back. I also challenged those sympathetic to Islamism to account for the crackdowns on those from Islamic nations who expressed opinions similar to CH. Could they be denigrated as ‘racist’ or ‘imperialist’? The pro-Islam, and somewhat anti-secular response, from those who some on the left supported is typified by this blog post, shared from Al Javieera: ‘One can condemn violence and at the same time sustain a critical stance against Charlie Hebdo. One can condemn the “asymmetric warfare” of masked gunmen and also reject racism, tyranny, and hate. One can denounce cold-blooded massacres while also unsubscribe from the horrible, orientalist titillation of Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the mental passivity of liberalism.’

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who knows firsthand the price paid by those who provoke Islamist power, fled her Somali homeland and then from the retaliation she faced after Theo Van Gogh was murdered and she went into hiding in her adopted Holland. Therefore, she feared capitulation once more. She urged the media to reprint the cartoons. It was our duty to stand up against forces sympathetic to jihadists: ‘The more we appease, the more we indulge, the more emboldened the enemies of freedom become.’

Salman Rushdie, who escaped a sentence of death, invoked as if in Islam's name, concurred in his statement. ‘Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. “Respect for religion” has become a code phrase meaning “fear of religion.” Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.’

Maryam Namazie agreed. She cites Raif Badawi's flogging with the first round of 1000 lashes in Saudi Arabia as one of many abuses and threats against those in Islamic heartlands who speak out. ‘With the focus now on Charlie Hebdo and the crucial need and right to criticise Islam and religion, though, let us not forget the many across the globe who face execution or imprisonment for “insulting the prophet” and criticising Islam. Below you will find some examples which include Muslims, believers and atheists; the charges aim not to protect “Muslim sensibilities” as we so often hear in the west but to protect the status quo and the political power of Islamists’-- As an Iranian activist now in London, this data verifying oppression may counter the ‘racist’ or ‘imperialist’ charges brought by some on the left who decry the Charlie Hebdo content as akin to Nazi, Klan, or orientalist caricatures.

And at least some outlets like the Huffington Post printed enough of the cartoons to let us judge, rather than editors or activists or clerics, about what we could reflect upon, laugh at, or cringe from. The Daily Banter went further, showing some other outlets would not due to explicit content. The Onion, as true satire, merits a reprint of their 2012 sketch: ‘No One Murdered Because of This Image.’ Still I note that that satirical site did not include the Prophet in their send-up of holy images desecrated gleefully.

Finally, the staff at Charlie Hebdo issued this simple remark: ‘Les caricaturistes sont morts dans l'exercice de leur métier et pour notre liberté. Leur plume était leur arme.’ (‘The cartoonists are dead in the course of their trade and for our freedom. Their pen was their weapon.’) May peace prevail.
The Pensive Quill Jan. 12^th 2015. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre and Carrie Twomey for publication.

P.S. Inevitably, more to share: Nick Cohen emphasises the necessary awareness to battle self-censorship: ‘European liberals ought to have stopped, as the lash fell on Badawi’s shoulders, and wondered about their queasiness at criticising the religions of the “powerless” and “marginalized”. The Saudi Arabian monarchy is all too powerful, as are the other dictatorships of the Middle East. Power depends on where you stand and who stands below you. The unemployed man with the gun is more powerful than the Parisian journalist. The marginal cleric may have a hard life, but if he sits in a sharia court imposing misogynist rules on British Muslim women he is to be feared’.

Olivier Tonneau offers a valuable insight into CH’s mission and equal-opportunity satire from its French contexts: 'A wave of compassion followed but apparently died shortly afterward and all sorts of criticism started pouring down the web against Charlie Hebdo, who was described as islamophobic, racist and even sexist. Countless other comments stated that Muslims were being ostracized and finger-pointed. In the background lurked a view of France founded upon the "myth" of laïcité, defined as the strict restriction of religion to the private sphere, but rampantly islamophobic - with passing reference to the law banning the integral veil. One friend even mentioned a division of the French left on a presumed "Muslim question".
            As a Frenchman and a radical left militant at home and here in UK, I was puzzled and even shocked by these comments and would like, therefore, to give you a clear exposition of what my left-wing French position is on these matters'….Tonneau's whole Mediapart essay merits reflection, as does this presentation, Le Monde journalist Nabil Wakim's explanation 'to my American friends'.

Max Fisher at Vox continued their critique of what they chide as Islamophobia, and also pointed out as does Tonneau the double layers at work, for better or worse, in the CH satire and 'news-mixing'. The Understanding Charlie Hebdo site places various cartoons in this perspective, as a corrective. Meanwhile, Olivier Cyran, a former staff member, confronts CH: '''Muslim bashing" dressed up as “intransigent defence of freedom of expression” has become your front-window showcase, which you take care to replenish regularly.' This stance 'allowing you to occupy a non-negligible segment of shameless Islamophobic opinion on the left.' Cyran, in a long letter documenting many cartoons, concludes: 'The machine for refining crude racism isn't just profitable, but also extremely fragile'.

Daily Kos shared a few of Cabu's CH cartoons, targeting French reactionary and state icons. See also at DK 'On not understanding 'Charlie": Why many smart people are getting it wrong.' About the sneering that replaced sympathy rapidly among some critics on the Anglophone left, Leigh Phillips at the Canadian site Ricochet takes on the standard reproach voiced as I noted above within a day or two: 'Of course the killing of journalists is a bad thing, so the argument goes, but come on, Charlie Hebdo is "a racist publication." So what do you expect? is the implicit, victim-blaming conclusion.'

Kenan Malik at the Marxist site Redline avers to the past two decades, when many leftists may promote 'a moral commitment to censorship, a belief that because we live in a plural society, so we must police public discourse about different cultures and beliefs, and constrain speech so as not to give offence'. David Riley at the Buddhist blog The Endless Further frames this hesitation for free speech within that system's fundamental aspiration to right speech: 'Where do we go from here? Do we encourage journalists to censor themselves? And if so, is it an act of tolerance, or is it just doing what the terrorists want us to do? Or, perhaps, the outrage, the defiance, the condemnation is exactly they want to see. Are we only displaying our wounds for their pleasure?' Out of another definition of the right to pleasure and to autonomy rather than conformity, Suzanne Moore takes a feminist stance. She retorts: 'don’t ask me to have respect for these kinds of fundamentalism that have none for me'.

My wife and I differ. She insists that if the cartoons targeted Jews, it'd be a very different matter, and besides, try as she might to reconcile the need for free expression with the magazine's images, she does not find them funny. For now, let's let survivors at CH have the last word, or pictures saying more than my past four-thousand or so words above, in their new issue (summed up in English).

Out of Clay

How loyal should Jews be to themselves, as opposed to others? As Hanukkah begins, this question lingers. After all, this in a revisionist if understandably less popular view celebrates the triumph of Hebrew tradition over assimilation. Refusal to give in to the Greeks and their lax practices and morals, at least as we get the version in Maccabees (not a canonical book of the Tanakh, but Catholics accept it for its hint of purgatorial affirmation, as an aside, in turn ironically reflecting Greek influence on the rabbinical conception of an afterlife with its hopes or fears). So, when Jews commemorate the victory of those who refused trayf on pain of death, and who then inflicted death on those they hunted down who had given in to the pagan ways and their uncircumcised fashion, do they realize the tension inherent in it? Does this undermine its family fun and, now, "co-exist" bumper sticker and postage stamp equivalent that leads us to all to wish "happy holidays" alongside the newest inclusion, equality with Eid al-Fitr? (I have yet to meet anyone who lights Kwanzaa candles, invented in 1966 by a black studies professor, within sight of where I teach.)

Michael S. Roth, reviewing in the New York Times Alan Wolfe's At Home in Exile, sums up that professor's approval of universalism against particularism, the two strains in Jewish identity which have bedeviled it for centuries, and maybe always. "Mr. Wolfe looks at Diasporic Jewry not as an endangered species threatened by aliyah (emigration to Israel) and assimilation, but as a vital and creative force that is also good for Israel. The 'best thing Jews can do to further the survival of the Jewish state,' he writes, 'is to remain outside Israel and keep the tradition of Diasporic universalism as vibrant as possible.' American Jews in particular, he optimistically concludes, 'retain a commitment to social justice in ways that resemble a biblical commandment,' adding, 'Religious or secular, universalism is part of who they are.'" So, Wolfe favors this separation as the way that, somehow, Jews will flourish, apart from the State of Israel and those Zionists who resurrected Maccabee heroes.

On the other hand, as David Remnick's "Israel's One-State Reality" (to me it feels too one-sided as it reasons that Palestinians will be satisfied with restoration of the West Bank; consider their militant dissatisfaction now in Gaza) in a recent New Yorker examines, the discontent in Israel appears to tilt the balance away from Wolfe's expectations of diasporic prosperity balanced with homeland security.

Near the end, Remnick observes a reaction common to those of us who, as in my city, see all around us the presence of Israelis who have moved away from their forebears' Zionist allegiance. They may still call themselves Israeli citizens, but their decision to emigrate proves they have taken a tangible, personal way away from the land of the particular, Eretz Israel, into the diaspora Wolfe welcomes.

"Many Israeli friends have remarked on the élite in the country—doctors, artists, engineers, businesspeople; call it two hundred thousand people—who provide Israel with its economic and cultural vibrancy. That élite is no less patriotic than the rest, but if its members begin to see a narrowing horizon for their children, if they sense their businesses shrinking, if they sense an Israel deeply diminished in the eyes of Europe and the United States, they will head elsewhere, or their children will. Not all at once, and not everyone, but there is no denying that one cost of occupation is isolation." Wolfe's observations certainly can be proven all around us, even if opponents claim pro-Israeli media dominate journalism. Anytime the New York or Los Angeles Times reports on this conflict, "the other side" protests its bias. Sympathy for Israel is weak from my observations of the wider media (if, yes, often outside the U.S. mainstream). On the L.A. Times' back pages, I read how a few left France for Israel instead to make aliyah, so discouraging was France towards any other support than that given Arabs nowadays. Any who stand with Israel, as the slogan goes, get relegated to the ranks of racists, hypocrites, right-wing fanatics, sometimes in caricatured stereotypes. The presence of Godwin's Law rapidly slips into pull quotes, cartoons of a crooked cross replacing the Mogen David, Facebook comments lambasting Israelis as tycoons and jackbooted stormtroopers. The inevitable elision of anti-Jewish attitudes under the guise of anti-Israel anger occurs, even if progressives take pains to deny this. I wonder, if ISIS had not burst into the news this same summer, if the global support for the Palestinian uprising under Hamas would have grown even more strident.

Anger at least online and in headlines came and it went quickly, if far more intensely than the previous reaction to the insurgency in 2010. This year's skew, with a flood of those charged images uploaded during Operation Cast Lead, in my FB feed tallied 99+% for Palestine and -1% for Israel, but that may reflect my own friends and the loyalties of those outside Judaism. Yet I hasten to add that nearly all of my Jewish friends who weighed in on the situation have posted against Israeli policy and U.S. connivance too; I suspect these are the types of collaborators and Hellenized fifth columnists those doughty Maccabees would have revenged themselves upon, I reckon. Nobody I know who is Jewish was happy with the results. Likewise, the BDS campaign in Europe and among the American left, mainstream Protestantism, liberal Catholics, and academia (these categories risk redundancy) gains momentum and becomes as unquestioned as was the global movement boycotting South Africa and Rhodesia for anti-apartheid regimes a few decades ago. Israel=apartheid is now an equivalence so common as to appear without comment in most of the press, in print, and on placards.

Peter Beinart in the New York Times Book Review also covered Wolfe's book and that by Joseph Berger on the Hasidim, The Pious Ones. Beinart challenges Wolfe's enthusiasm for universalism. "In 1970, 17 percent of American Jews married gentiles. Today, among non-­Orthodox Jews, it’s 71 percent." If Wolfe's love of Jews loving the Other continues to manifest itself such, not many Jews will survive to be embraced. According to a recent Pew Report, as Beinart cites, now among non-Orthodox, "43 percent of the children of intermarried parents identify as Jews. And even among those who do, only 17 percent marry Jews ­themselves." Universalism beckons, logically, to make Jews part of the wider community, but at the cost, inevitably, of their own assimilation to the norm.

Meanwhile, we will continue the haimish rituals that remind us of particularism among the universe. Candles lit, a song recalled "I have a little dreidel/ I made it out of clay" as my wife fries up oil for sufganiyot and latkes (the red squiggle under the latter as well as the former term shows not all particulars become universal in Netspeak), and our son, alone this year, will join us as he has all his life, even if his amount of presents diminished as he matures. Sons, parents, families: made of clay, the same that ha-adamah, the red-earth, vivified into Adam in an even older story. Our other son will be in Israel as soon as he gets out of college on his winter break. He signed onto Birthright as a recipient of the largess largely due to a particular billionaire who has made his stash in dubious casino deals, and who donates heavily to GOP causes tying him to evangelicals eager for Armageddon (triggered by the conversion of the Jews, or their saving remnant who survive another holocaust). An ethical debate: what I equate to a century and more of benefiting from Carnegie's libraries and Ford's foundation, Huntington's library and Stanford's university: how much does the 99% take from the 1%? Those who exploit weakness in particular, but who partially reform, if in the name of a higher cause meant for the universal good? I am sure son #2 will return next month with his own perspective on the issues I raise this damp (for once, so it's a miracle!) Hanukkah night.

Shulamith Hareven's "Thirst": Book Review

As biblical novellas narrating the raw core of what became mythic tales of Exodus and the settlement of Canaan, "the Desert trilogy" explores everyday characters on the fringes of the Hebrew migration and conquest. Hillel Halkin skillfully translates Israeli novelist Shulamith Hareven's spare, poetic, and blunt shifts of tone. Her characters struggle at the margins, far from Moses or Joshua, and they witness the dramatic changes in their lives distanced from the heroes, among scrub, wilderness, mountain hamlets, flimsy campsites, and uneasy cities, isolated and vulnerable. How the Exodus felt, if you were the type who was pushed aside or stayed out of Moses' way.

These accessibly told, yet literate and elegantly phrased stories combine vivid protagonists with an omniscient point-of-view which glides from interior observations of characters with untutored, basic perceptions to unsparing, distanced, modernist dispassion about their fates. We care about them, but we also watch them along with Hareven, as from a detached, resigned, existential perspective. All three figures "thirst" for understanding, but they confront a tense terrain where borders are invisible and where journeys may end in betrothal, betrayal, or sudden execution, and where enemies lurk unseen.

Eshkar's resentment of Moses and his fellow Hebrews who keep wandering in Sinai when they could easily enter the Land of Promise comprises "The Miracle Hater." The rabble of fleeing slaves and castaways from Egypt, along with hangers-on and no-accounts, relies on their leader. Moses promises the crowd they will enter the Land, but he exacts from them fealty. "He talked on about olives, about pomegranates, about grapes, about figs, and wearily they answered, yes, yes, anything you say, as long as we don't all have to drop dead in this desert, amen. No, they would make no more statues or graven images. Yes, they would not murder. They would not bear false witness. Whatever he told them, amen."

After the Golden Calf debacle, they submit to the Law. But, Eshkar cannot, and he herds beyond the movable camps of the desert tribe. "The deception of miracles was keeping them purblind and lost." (51) He enters Canaan, he sees it, and he returns, wondering why those he leaves behind delay.

There's no pat endings for his tale or the other two, but Hareven arranges the simple events in a manner that reflects how what the Bible makes grand once was so ordinary, as with Passover and the "tenth plague" emerging out of events barely elaborated upon, in an existential time without miracles at least as Eshkar can see. For Hivai, in the middle novella, "Prophet," his failure as such for his besieged city of Gibeon compels him to flee to seek sanctuary in nearby Ai, as the Hebrews press their campaign. (This is the longest entry and there's some wandering in its telling; the other two are more tightly told, but it never lacks inherent interest.) What transpires leaves Hivai "neither Gibeonite nor Hebrew," and the original situation for the Hebrews as marginal border-dwellers and outcasts becomes, inextricably, his identity as he shares their fate but not their satisfaction with the Land of Promise, until he meets another exile.

"After Childhood" takes us to the other vantage point, that of Salu, a "blinker" who lives in a hardscrabble hamlet near the Wilderness of Zin a few years or generations later. His marriage to a mountain dweller, Moran, allows Hareven to alternate between two main protagonists, and this enriches this evocation of the barren landscapes and intimate challenges faced by a bickering couple.

Just before the story concludes in a moving scene, Moran prefers--much of the book is in interior monologue with little dialogue--to stay apart from her Hebrew neighbors and family. "[S]he would rather God stayed away from her. Let him ignore her in his heaven, because the gods burned all when they came. They brought death and sickness and madness and drought. It's all we can do to make good what they ruin. Spare us both their honey and their sting. We're no match for them." (183)

Hareven's trilogy may be a metaphor for Israel and Palestine since, and this adds depth to her story, but taken on its own terse terms as an eloquent evocation of how people once scraped out a bare living in harsh times, it's also a universally applicable theme which will reward any careful reader. (Amazon US 6-4-12)

Rodney Stark's "Discovering God": Book Review

This sociologist of religion favors "divine accommodation" as his model: "God's revelations are always limited to the current capacity of humans to comprehend"--sometimes "baby talk" is needed, as Moses found out when encountering God, or when Jesus spoke down to his disciples in parables. (6) He dismisses those (see my review of Robert Wright's 2009 "The Evolution of God") who endorse a reductive materialistic--cultural, biological, or psychological--explanation for religious invention and elaboration. He minimizes naturism, animism, ghost theory, and totemism proposed by early anthropologists as rationalizations. He downplays class antagonisms and replaces them with doctrinal disputes. He favors a "universal revelation" by the divine power, given from humanity's dawn.

This book differs from his colleagues' works, which tend to marshal neo-atheist and skeptical arguments against divine inspiration as a traceable presence in the history of religions. While many scholars may disagree with his dismissal of their studies, he advances just as many scholarly works in defense of his proposition. The text tends to move quickly, and while accessible for a general audience, it deserves attention for his nuances and his qualifiers.

Stark surveys the progression from Stone Age to early states in the Middle East and the Americas to Rome efficiently. He marshals evidence that rituals and sacrifices to High Gods pleased prehistoric peoples, ushering in polytheists geared for a temple-oriented, sometimes despotically commanded, polity. This imposition of belief with power diversified into a market-niche strategy geared to a very diverse Roman imperial clientele.

Godless religions, Stark cautions, don't last long outside intellectual or monastic elites. Buddhism, Taoism, and Jainism soon incorporated older folk gods and elements aimed to please lay followers unable to be comforted by abstractions. While India's definitive faiths downgraded earthly existence and worldly attachments, the ancient Chinese blended folk religion with new beliefs. These appealed to everyday people, as Stark reminds readers, and explain why religions tend to multiply gods and rituals rather than remain stark and committed to perhaps a founder's more detached vision of austerity.

In turn, sects rise when the "high tension" of a bold new faith eases, and a purer or more radical version's needed to spark renewal among the laity, and against a complacent priesthood bent on traditional orthodoxy. The "Yahweh-only" faction in Israel demonstrates the force imposed by a minority, who in exile cast off less fervent colleagues to return to their homeland intent on eliminating polytheism, paganism, and tolerance. While Stark accepts that the Exodus happened at least among a small band of Hebrews, he aligns with mainstream theologians (if not congregants in many pews) who accept how many indigenous peoples allied with the Hebrew hardcore to forge a Jewish identity connecting Yahweh to the rise of Judea and Israel, until a tribal god became a national icon, and then not an international deity but a universal Lord demanding fealty.

Common people need assurances brought by easily placated temple deities, whom families can supplicate and feel blessed by. The ancient city-states and emerging nations knew this, while congregations, in Stark's revisionist view, often threatened a nervous Roman power. Before Christians emerged, followers of Isis, Bacchus, and the Jews already in Rome found themselves persecuted and executed by Romans, who suspected upstart religious groups which signaled subversion. Intensity in belief generates "fear and retaliation from less demanding religious organizations and from governments that favor them." (155)

Stark's best points remind us how families comprise the initial circle of those who trust the new founder of a religion, whether based on revelation or inspiration. It expands by tested social bonds, and then market niches which over time not only retain early adopters but attract converts. "Religious capital" invested by a believer may weaken over time, and a new version of the faith may win him or her to convert, but usually this is more likely when "cultural continuity" smooths the transition between, say, Judaism and Christianity, at least long enough to establish it widely so Gentiles can then join as it expands its franchise.

Similarly, pagans warmed better to a variety of the Good News emphasizing classical concepts or symbols. However, Stark argues that from the start, an historically plausible Jesus was "explicitly acknowledged as divine." He rejects any notions of a New Testament not grounded in reality traceable to eyewitnesses, and he denies any gradual shift from Jewish preacher followed by messianic Jews to Pauline redeemer of Gentiles.

This appeal, all the same, built on Jewish diasporic networks, which already had weaker allegiances to orthodox practices, while incorporating not sudden or mass conversions but social alliances which brought in committed members gradually, thus ensuring a devoted band of Christians. This weakened as soon as it became the state religion, and Stark argues how the seeds of the demise of European Christianity were planted as far back as the later Roman empire, when hereditary benefices encouraged family control. This fits into his model of how state religions stagnate, when cults become organizations. He contrasts this with recent growth of Christianity when state sponsorship's lacking; he wonders if a Muslim Europe and a Christian China might be the case a century from now, as fervent believers spread their faiths apart from state control or historical tradition in these lands. (335)

Islam's rise for Stark comes not from any material longing but a spiritual wish to transform trade networks into religious ones paralleling political paths to power. Muhammad emerges as a prophet ready to take advantage of this regional orientation, as a founder of the Arab State. Stark revises the ameliorative or apologetic versions of the Prophet's life, and includes his episodes of caravan robbing, score-settling by murder, and the massacre of the Jews who resisted his control of Medina. As often in history, religious zeal matters less than fear of non-conformity by religious enforcers, as determined as are tyrants and god-kings.

Unifying Arabia, Islam was able to command wider territory with small but disciplined armies. Conversions ("market penetration" to 50%) took two to three centuries, as they did across the Roman Empire for Christians. Neither faith was particularly tolerant once it gained control. Sects proliferated once more, too. As for Islam's demands, so for Allah: submission is required. He's less approachable than the Jewish or Christian God--incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Stark concludes that the Axial Age introduced the concept of ethical behavior rewarding one in the afterlife, or next life, as salvation for those freed from sin. Sin provides an effective social control, cheaper than policing! As statelets and empires emerged from clans and cities, people began to adapt a (Stark thinks diffusion is possible) notion that they were always if invisibly watched, and their secret as well as visible actions would be judged.

Stark reasons a discovery of God through consistent and gradually more sophisticated revelations at this formative period. He posits an "inspired core" from High Gods (regressing to polytheism) to the ancient Hebrews and Christians-- if God exists. In his too-compressed closing paragraphs, he accepts the Christian search for an intelligent designer (based on Alfred North Whitehead's surprising thesis) as the logical force that impelled theologians and scientists to progress towards a discovery of God. (Amazon US 12-13-11)

Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God": Book Review

Applying zero-sum theory to how religion matured as natural selection highlighted altruistic or selfish mechanisms, this surveys the growth of monotheism. Wright's evolutionary background assures that belief in an external power or set of forces remains speculative, not proving existence of such a presence, but explaining how a process parallel to the mysteries in electrons might account for why religion progresses towards tolerance or remains committed to belligerence. It popularizes how how we're wired explains we we're primed to believe, and why getting along with those around us accounts for why we invented religion.

"Religion, having come from the brain of people, is bound to bear the marks of our species, for better and worse." (32) Wright begins with hunter-gatherers, where the imperative to sustain morality need not have a deity's rewards or punishments come into the situation. Yet, the natural tendency to attribute spirits (as experienced in dreams) to the dead and then to build a system of explaining why right and wrong behaviors emerge from good and bad actions accounts for the start of what will become more organized as small clans of 30-50 people begin to trade and clash with neighbors, and as tribes form chiefdoms and nations begin.

I liked his anthropologically derived examples of what might echo these earlier stages in religion: a shark attack might be rationalized if one was a Polynesian thief. Eskimo shamans convinced women that they could be cured of sin if they slept with shamans. "Every religion, to survive elementary logical scrutiny," must develop "its explanatory loopholes." (66) Faith allowed justification for cooperating with the gods and priests and status quo; human unhappiness or the arrival evil came about when the gods and their representatives were opposed. Wright explains how this system was first analyzed. Functionalists who favor religion as leading to altruism and cooperation contended early on in anthropology with quasi-"Marxists" who found religion's "opiate" as another power play to enforce guilt, oppression, and hierarchy. (133)

He leans towards another tendency: using foreign and domestic policy as models for how, as in early Judaism, the tolerance of Canaanite-derived polytheism might be more or less acceptable for the indigenous Hebrews depending on how Judea and Israel were getting along with Assyria or Egypt at the time. This Abrahamic orientation, of a jealous and aggressive God besting His rivals, means that Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam, could argue that those within a faith were protected and empowered against their rival unbelievers, heretics, and pagans, depending on who was fighting whom and who was allied with whom.

He considers how Philo of Alexandria and Buddhist ideas of a force moving within history as well as free of it might be paralleled with the Logos advanced by Greeks and then the Gospel of John. (233) Wright's elaboration can be more mystical than logical, but Wright speculates how this Logos through Christ became a "divinely sponsored illusion." (302) That is, as religion evolved, this divine force became more apparent--not that it exists per se, but it may, as he suggests later on, be akin to how an electron is seen and not seen.

Wright's version of Christianity reminds us how Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews a harsher message of messianic imminence and apocalyptic predictions than Paul, who marketed a more internationalized figure of a redemptive savior for a more inclusive, faith-based, mutually supportive communal model tailored for a diverse Roman system of traders and buyers. Early Christians first used Jewish diasporic networks to firm up their brand appeal before going global. As with Bill Gates, Paul the Apostle was able to "borrow" what worked from earlier and competing systems to respond to what his customers wanted from religion. (246; compare the rational theory model applied by Rodney Stark in "Discovering God" recently reviewed by me.)

These computer analogies cleverly keep the argument intriguing, even though at many points, Wright's dogged return to non-zero-sum and zero-sum theory and very close readings of  Hebrew biblical scholarship slow the pace. By contrast he skims over the Hagarism argument of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook when it comes to analyzing how Jewish alliances might have been far more present in very early Islam than Koranic sources let on. Wright's presentation of Islam is peppier, however, and he invites us to consider how "modern" its message was by comparison, as it had the advantage of building on Judaism, Christianity, and Arab paganism which were familiar, as was Allah, to his first audiences, preparing them for another push of an aggressively argued bold "new" faith across the deserts and seas.

Could these three Religions of the Book have found a less angry path? The alternative of King Ashoka in India who converted to Buddhism after war but who then promoted peace and mutual understanding between faiths is raised briefly. Wright judges that gradually religion under monotheism has eased up on intolerance, as international amity trumps national or tribal animosity, but it's a very guarded judgement. Technology of munitions and of computers enables a sinister threat to spread along with fundamentalism.

In conclusion, Wright sums up religious parallels or open-ended encounters with science. This opens up what could have been another long book, but its conclusion deserves quoting. "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based material mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes." (482) Whether you agree or disagree with this statement, this book's worth studying.
(Amazon US 12-12-11; author's website for book)

Eric Weiner's "Man Seeks God": Book Review

"Confusionist,” reasons agnostic fellow traveler Eric Weiner, defines his "spiritual-but-not-religious" outlook. As a "gastronomical Jew" but not raised with any belief, this skeptical, neurotic journalist begins his global exploration by recounting a nurse's whisper to him as he lay on an operating table: "Have you found your God yet?" This inspires his search among eight "varieties of religious experience," as he credits William James’s pioneering study. He starts, as do many seekers, by going to California.

However, Mr. Weiner does not last long on the Mendocino coast at a Sufi camp. Falling down a "New Age rabbit hole," he laments that the establishment's more "camp than Sufi." As a National Public Radio correspondent, he had witnessed the darker side of Islam, and he wishes now to find the meaning of that word's core, "submission," in its more mystical manifestation. He departs for Istanbul, visits sites connected with the medieval visionary poet Rumi, and finds that surrender to Sufi's spell, as shown in the famous whirling dervishes, comes closer to the power of love than of capitulation to a cold creed.

His trek into Buddhist wisdom leads along a well-worn path, to Kathmandu. His guide, a Virginia-born investment banker who left Malibu to model in Asia before finding his fulfillment as a student of Buddhism, leads him first to ponytailed ex-pat Wayne from Staten Island, a fellow "middle-aged Jewish guy" in a baseball cap. From Wayne, Mr. Weiner learns to meditate, and not to do it as he does it. The process of self-examination as the way to liberation feels as if biting his own teeth, endlessly self-referential, but he perseveres a bit. He finally has a brief audience with a Tibetan guru. "Meeting a revered lama is like having sex with a woman you've fantasized about for a long time." That is, anticipation leads to anxiety, bewilderment and disappointment.

His breakthrough comes not with the guru, nor with an attempt to learn about the often-sensationalized Tantric approach. (That works less effectively for him than a visit to a massage parlor.) Wayne goads Mr. Wiener towards what gives him "pause." Between the moments, choices are made to attach or let go, and effects happen for better or worse. Buddhism elongates awareness of these moments, and allows practitioners to choose how to act and react to such endless situations daily.

Many Buddhists and a few Catholics praise fewer possessions as a way to increase spiritual maturity. With the grey-clad Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx, Mr. Weiner learns of their "radical dependency" on a life committed to poverty. Unlike most Franciscans today, these friars have returned to a rejection of most possessions, truer to the intent of their founding saint. They manage in their gang-plagued neighborhood to act as both "savvy and naive".  Accompanying Father Louis, who gave up a successful career in Manhattan, and Brother Crispin, Mr. Weiner witnesses their challenges, as they strive to detach themselves from their duty towards good works, doing tedious tasks to serve the poor, without congratulating themselves for doing so. 

As one friar confides: "You find yourself trying to love somebody who doesn't want to be loved." Mr. Weiner receives advice for his own skittish need to underline books, to analyze what he finds: "When in doubt, give thanks." Rarely thanked, these diligent if weary friars persevere.

Indulgences are discouraged for Franciscans, but encouraged by Raëlians. This, "the largest UFO-based" and IRS-registered as tax-exempt religion, glories in bonding, and hands out condoms. Founded by "a second-rate French journalist” who, for Mr. Weiner, espouses motivational-seminar speak as if "Tony Robbins in a space suit", Raëlism invites or expects less respect than the previous religions. One chant surrounds him at an enthusiastic meeting: "free your breasts free your mind."

To his credit, Mr. Weiner lets his prejudices ebb even as he keeps his critical acumen flowing. Talking to a convert, John, in a "gender-switching workshop," Mr. Weiner shares the appeal for many educated and scientific types of a religion based on a modern myth. He deftly connects strands of Raëlism with Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim predecessors, even if he cannot commend, finally, its lack of rigor or lowered expectations, where easy pleasure dominates as its "theme-park" message.

Next, the search brings him towards not a myth but the ancient homeland of a five-thousand word "short ode to conciseness," the Tao te Ching. Traveling to China's Wudang Mountain (gifted with an mist generator after "The Karate Kid" was filmed there), Mr. Wiener learns from a fellow American on tour, Sandie, how smoking and drinking are fine as pleasures as long as one is "in the moment." Taoism may share something of offbeat Raëlism as well as affinities with Buddhism, and Taoism looks to this world and this body as the gateways to truth. They "shape their God-shaped hole with a hole-shaped God." Their elusiveness--that which can be defined as the Way, the Tao, is not the Way," as the Tao te Ching opens--intrigues him. Sandie goes with the flow, literally, at the heart of the Tao. Whereas most religious folks, Mr. Weiner supposed, care more, Sandie as a Taoist tells him she grows to care less.

Taoism lacks a center, however. What if a religion had not one doctrinal approach, one god, but hundreds? What if it allowed choice, and inspired invention of new gods and goddesses? Wicca, as Mr. Weiner finds in Index, Washington, offers Jamie the witch this chance to guide herself by an ethical system open to possibility. Magic can be channeled for good, and what is conjured up as if invented then takes on a real power for those willing to guide its forces towards healing and renewal.

Mr. Weiner imagines the passion and intensity of Wiccan ritual to echo that of the now-faded ceremonies at the start of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Freed of sin, compelling its makers to use the forces for goodness and not harm, Wicca's ethical component resonates with Mr. Weiner. 

Its demands for moral accountability gain careful explanation. He tells of this often caricatured religion's attempts to direct natural forces to generate righteous behavior and careful choices. Yet, as with other religions he has encountered, it fails to appease his own darker side, his melancholy. Figuring that paganism's "lowercase gods" would have little time for him, he turns towards perhaps the ancient ancestor of witchcraft, and religions that have evolved slowly since, that of shamanism.

Shamans, after all, were primitive psychiatrists. Today, Dana, a former executive in Beltsville, Maryland, hosts a drum-led circle: "now materialize your power animal." Participants fantasize and let go of their worries. guided into realms of the spirits. While all this pleases the "smart-ass" Mr. Weiner more than he may have expected, he cannot shake the mental image of one dream weaver's companion, Sasha the Poodle, whose eyes lock into his as they both wonder what those humans are up to.

Finally, he faces his ancestral Judaism. Dreading the meeting, he goes off to Tzfat (Safed) on the Sea of Galilee, settled by Kabbalists expelled by the Spanish Inquisition. This settlement, orthodox yet open to Jewish misfits, endures as a spiritual center. What makes a place such, Mr. Weiner wonders, may elude explanation: is it the place that imbues its residents with an aura, or do holy people wind up in such a hallowed place? 

This thoughtful section of his tale takes him deep into difficulty. His psychological unease grows. He finds that one can convert to one's "own" faith, but the memory of his brother who embraced Orthodoxy creates more rather than less tension. 

In Israel, Mr. Weiner faces the Jewish reverberations of a faith dimly known but evaded and avoided for a lifetime. His Jewish soul, his "nefesh," a variety of patient teachers show him, reveals itself by patience, and by "kavanah," intention, within such a soul. Shabbat in Tzfat, when time appears to halt, opens up the promise of living within space devoted to peace, worship, and community. Here, he glimpses the potential of the oldest of all the organized religions which he has participated in during his quest.

The wise observer of the hopes for religious harmony in Israel, writer Yossi Klein Halevi, tells Mr. Weiner that the Jews need him. Those who turn him off, by rules and rituals, will choke the life out unless Mr. Weiner brings what he has learned from Kabbalah--that such teachings open up life by its eternal forces. Mr. Weiner cannot agree with Yossi; he insists that he remains temperamentally a seeker who must wander. He convinces himself as he leaves Israel that he is not a dilettante, but a universalist. He argues with himself, and sometimes others, how his orientation transcends any denomination or affiliation. 

In conclusion, Mr. Weiner remains faithful to his convictions. This narrative moves smoothly between erudite quotes from James, Jung, Heschel, Chesterton, and Durkheim. (It also recalls strongly here and there a recent work, J.C. Hallman's The Devil is a Gentleman, that had its author travelling to sites founded by America's new religions over the past century. It mixed personal interviews with Hallman's own story, through an application of William James's sociological research from a hundred years ago.) 

God Meets Man: My Flirtations with the Divine scans rituals so venerable they lack inventors and doctrines so fresh he watches them evolve in Washington State and Las Vegas. True to Mr. Weiner's nature, he constructs a composite God. One that cobbles from all the faiths he's studied, and more, yet has an identifiably Jewish angle that he finds he can admire. Mr. Weiner confesses that out of small steps, progress towards understanding emerges. He no longer flinches from observing the Jewish holidays with his little girl. (Featured at New York Journal of Books 12-5-11 in condensed fashion--about half the length of above!)

Jose Saramago's "Cain": Book Review

Sentences collapse; commas convey rapid, wry, ironic dialogue. Paragraphs expand into rushes of anger, bewilderment, frustration, and revenge. Cain’s life, one that will not end as God does not let him come to harm as an ironic judgment for the killing of his brother, Abel, upends the Old Testament through furious prose, ideological passion, and desiccated places. These themes inspired his 1991 revisionist effort, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ  (see my review). The author, a longtime anarcho-communist and outspoken atheist, left Portugal for Spain after the publication of this Gospel revision angered the Catholic Church. He died a few years later, at 88. This shorter, equally enigmatic 2009 tale, the final one from this Nobel laureate, arrives via Margaret Jull Costa’s fluid translation from Portuguese. 

In both novels, a distant, bemused narrator speaks omnisciently about God and his faulty handiwork. Saramago’s Jesus confronted his divine infusion and his messianic mission with doubt and hesitation, and that novel explored largely the “hidden years” in Nazareth and the desert before Christ’s public ministry. There, the author chose to blend critiques of belief with considerable insight into the comforts of faith, and the humanity shared by such fully drawn characters as Mary Magdalene, whose steady and sexual presence for Jesus eased the demands of a vindictive, crafty, and parochial father-figure. 

Cain’s story, by comparison, bursts free from its biblical origins, but Saramago hastens, in two or three pages, to recount the killing of Abel, and the punishment of God, who leaves a black mark on Cain’s forehead as a sign that he is not to be killed by other people, already roaming the plains outside of Eden. Cain holds his own against his Creator, whom he blames for refusing Cain’s own good-natured sacrifice of vegetables rather than Abel’s cattle, and whom Cain holds partially responsible for looking on rather than preventing the first murder. Cain assures his maker that “if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth.” 

Later in this exchange, the narrator edges in: “Poor abel, deceived by god. The lord had made some very bad choices when it came to inaugurating the garden of eden, in this particular game of roulette everyone had lost, in this target practice for the blind no none had scored.”

Saramago, as these excerpts show, employs his characteristic use of capitalization, as in Blindness, to refer only to the start of a quote. Unlike Gospel, which used capitalization of proper nouns, and periods to set off dialogue even if paragraphs subsumed it, here only commas set off one speaker from the other. Capitalization starts a sentence, but that sentence may be very long, interspersing dialogue and narrative with internal capitalization inserted to mark a switch in speaker, but without quotation marks or often clear attribution except in context. This rapid, challenging, but “consciously” appropriate style conveys the flow of thoughts in the mind as much as in conversation, as the narrator and the protagonist shift and blur in their perspectives nimbly, if demanding attention by any reader. 

This prose commands the reader by its own subversion of Scripture, as form matches content. Both seek to overthrow traditional models, and to replace them with imaginative ones. Saramago’s humanism and his championship of the underdog and the rebel remain prominent. He resists authority, and he defends sexual liberation and communal love of family, partner, and neighbor. Cain’s brave acceptance of Lilith as not only Noah’s wife but Cain’s mate provides the most vivid scenes, just as his earlier allegory had enriched the character of Mary Magdalene, similarly maligned by other believers and tellers. 

Later, as Cain must leave Lilith to wander as his curse, he intervenes in other events from the book of Genesis. The narrator accounts for this loose itinerary in time and space as Cain moves through “alternate presents.” These, as Cain stumbles first upon the sacrifice of Isaac demanded of Abraham by God, recall themes in Gospel, as God commands the ritual slaughter of those closest to the protagonist. 

“What are you doing, you wretch, killing your own son, burning him, it’s the same old story, it starts with a lamb and ends with the murder of the very person you should love most, But the lord made me do it, said Abraham, struggling, Keep still, or I’ll be the one who does the killing, untie that boy at once and beg his forgiveness, Who are you, My name is cain, I’m the angel who saved Isaac’s life.” 

This conversation reveals how Saramago can extract the core of the story. He polishes it, in prose that forces a reader to look at it differently, as Cain inserts himself into the biblical narrative and wedges himself into these patriarchal stories to undermine their presumptions and prejudices. 

They lack, however, some of the resonance in terms of character and description afforded biblical scenes in the earlier novel. Some appear to incorporate the words of Genesis among the narration, and however lofty or direct this familiar, resonant paraphrase, this can edge into summation or recapitulation instead of a fresh take on events so recognizable to many readers of this novel. Many episodes are compressed into this dense tale. At times this becomes a hasty if memorable tour whisking us past Babel, Sodom, and Jericho under the siege of Joshua trying to halt the sun. We hear but do not feel as we might the depth of Job’s predicament after his first family has been killed and his second one is expected to appease his discomfort and ease his sorrow.  

Still, a brief reunion with Lilith offers a welcome return to Saramago’s skillful use of a female figure to enhance the possibilities of amorous and emotional rewards, and she adds commonsense. Sodom, she learns, has been leveled by divine fire, not only the perverse men but the innocent women they spurned and their blameless children. Cain tells her: “Anyway, the innocent are now accustomed to paying for the sinners, The lord seems to have a very strange idea of justice, Yes, the idea of someone who hasn’t the slightest notion of what human justice might be”. Lilith pointedly notes that Cain killed his brother; he admits that God is still the one whom Cain, as a selfish man, holds more responsible as a person fated to carry out what he does in an eternal chain of cause and effect that no human can ultimately control.

This may seem to beg the question, but the Big Questions are not answered, nor can they be, Saramago seems to say, here anymore than in Gospel. Unlike that story, ending on the Cross at Golgotha, Cain’s tale diverges into a clever and more open-ended direction. Saramago as the tale reaches its conclusion offers unexpected tension, as Cain finds himself, logically according to God’s life sentence as if in a divine oversight, on Noah’s ark. The climax and ending to this tale, truly novel, I leave for you to learn.

(Featured at New York Journal of Books 10-4-11)