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PDF FormatI wondered if these guys were this good in English. Just my luck to meet up with the three most articulate initiates in the entire ashram (that they hadn’t read the books they were so zealously peddling, and were in large degree misrepresenting Vaishnava philosophy, was clear as glass. But so what? They were declaiming the world according to themselves—and no doubt according to their Israeli parents’ liberal-leaning “post-Zionist” progressivism—and that was more interesting to me, in any case. I wondered what their parents thought now).
“Yes, you have an antiquated attitude, my friend—a dangerous attitude.” This was Ofer, who was so tall that I found myself mourning his loss not just to the Jewish people as a whole, but to the Maccabee Tel Aviv basketball team in particular. He had managed to jettison pretty much every Israeli trapping that would have given him away, except the telltale Nimrod sandals and that really annoying hand gesture that means “wait” nowhere else on the planet except in our little corner of the Middle East. He used it on me now, as I tried to butt in and protest my general benignity.
“You Are A Fascist,” he proclaimed, enunciating each word with conviction and solemnity, as if he were a judge pronouncing a death sentence (that was it: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Yoga and Karma and Krishna and Swami-what’s-his-name were long gone. For the moment, anyway, I was talking to pure Israeli leftist). “What you’re preaching—it’s exclusivism, it’s discrimination, it’s segregation, it’s elitism… it is l’umanut,” he declared, employing for his coup de grâce a subtle nuance in Hebrew semantics which essentially distinguishes chauvinist from liberal nationalism (I doubted whether he found the latter any more palatable than the former).
“Why should people identify themselves according to this outmoded and flagrantly racist conception of yours?” he continued, “And how dare you define others based on such artificial and reactionary criteria?” (I’m translating freely here.) “Human beings should be judged by their individual characters, not by their national or religious affiliations! Why are you so prejudiced? Why do you play favorites? What, because I was born a Jew, and that man standing over there by the telephone was not, you should interact with me in a different way than with him? Maybe he’s the most upright, moral person in the entire city of LA, maybe he’s calling up some charity right now to donate a million dollars!” (I glanced over at the guy. He was unquestionably Jewish, and judging from his contorted visage and wild gesticulations, was probably talking to his broker.) “And because I had the ‘luck’ to be born of a Jewish mother, and he didn’t, because I got snipped a week after coming into the world, and he didn’t, for these reasons you should prefer me to him? You should care about me more than you do about him? Why, that’s SICK! It’s downright disgusting!”
I was glad he was done so I could stop craning my neck. He might very well have been arguing as much with his own internal inclinations as he was with me—I hadn’t managed to say very much, after all—but at any rate, Shira quickly laid a hand on his waist (you couldn’t really reach his shoulder) and led him aside. I wasn’t getting any closer to Krishna consciousness this way. The not-so-gentle giant inhaled half the oxygen in the arrivals lounge and rattled off three mantras at breakneck speed, all in one breath (not unlike the way we intone the names of Haman’s sons in the Purim Megilla). Then he was back, calm and cool, all smiles and ready to Rama.
Shira placed a hand on my shoulder (you can reach my shoulder) and spoke to me softly. “Don’t you see? All that His Divine Grace Swami Prah… is saying comes down to this: We must strive with all our inner strength to love all people equally. That is what these books we’re distributing teach as well, and, in the last analysis, isn’t that also the central message of that book, the one you’re carrying?” (she pointed to the Tora).
I stood there engulfed in frustration. What could I possibly answer “on one foot” (as we say in Hebrew), in the few seconds remaining to us, that would even begin to make a dent in all that? I heaved a long sigh of resignation. “When was the last time you read this book?” was the best I could come up with under the circumstances, appealing in all directions to imaginary back-up units.
“That’s not what this book says.”
My ride showed up, and was of course parked in the red zone, which as you know is for the loading and unloading of passengers only. There was a genuinely poignant parting scene—during which, among other unexpected events, Doron pressed my hand and slipped me a surreptitious “Shabat shalom, ahi!” (Good Sabbath, my brother!)—and the tantric trio from Tel Aviv went off in search of easier prey. I don’t know where my three semi-brainwashed but far from benighted Brahmins are now—whether they’ve since managed to achieve supreme bovinity, or whether they have fallen from grace and are currently putting their considerable mercantile talents to lucrative use fencing CD players on Olympic Boulevard. Either way, I sure hope I get to meet up with them again someday (yes, even if it means going back to Los Angeles). The ensuing pages contain the gist of what I would say to them, if I did.
II
You don’t have to be a disciple of Eastern mysticism or philosophy to be struck by the apparent anomaly of being a committed, involved or practicing Jew today. You just have to be pre-lobotomy. Whatever doubts I may harbor regarding their idea of a fun Friday activity or their strange notion of musical rhythm, the objections raised by my airport interlocutors are not to be sneezed, coughed, hiccupped or spat at. Stripped of their atavistic, pseudo-Aryan trappings and Utopian-socialist rhetoric, the positions propounded by Shira, Doron and Ofer collectively represent far and away the foremost issue and dilemma facing the current generation of up-and-coming Jews, as they decide just how Jewish they want to be, as they debate how much space and how much importance to give Judaism and Jewishness in their lives.
For the vast majority of us, after all, the poser is not “Should I be Christian or Jewish?” or “Should I be Buddhist or Jewish?” or even “Should I be Druid or Jewish?” No. The real quandary, the fundamental inner conflict affecting and preoccupying most of today’s Jewish young people—whether formulated in this manner or otherwise—is without doubt:
Should I be a modern, progressive, secular, non-denominationally affiliated American, or Canadian, or Citizen of the World (or just “Me” with no strings attached whatsoever)… or should I be actively and deeply and connectedly and unabashedly Jewish—and how much of each, or where in-between, and which elements (if any) of these two available alter egos can be reconciled?
Put in even more concise fashion, the puzzle of the hour for most of us is simply this:
Why on earth be a Jew in the (post-) modern world?
(An immediate qualifier: I am well aware that for a whole slew of young Jews, this issue burns inside them at about the level of a Bic lighter, if not lower. Such folks are complete strangers to the gut-wrenching inner turmoil associated with this question, and they are of two kinds.
The first group doesn’t think about this question because, to put it simply, they’ve already made their decision. Indeed, their decision was to a large extent made for them, long ago, by parents who for whatever reason did not expose their children adequately to one or the other of the two worldviews described above. Either the kids had religion shoved down their throats from age one—no doubts allowed (let alone cultivated)—and never really had the opportunity to observe the truly compelling aspects of life on the other side of the overly protective fence; or—what is far more common—they grew up with no exposure worth mentioning to Judaism or the Jewish people, save perhaps a few years in Hebrew school, which in the majority of cases simply furnishes the poor pupil with enduring reasons to get as far away from his cultural heritage as humanly possible. So, to you “already resolved that issue, don’t bother me” types, I say: Continuous self-re-examination, even after having arrived at what appear to be immutable conclusions, is the conditio sine qua non of wisdom, humanity, meaningfulness, relationships, progress, success, and pretty much everything else worthwhile in life. So I encourage you to read on.
