Circular Cruises/Atonement
From Eccentric Flower
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Atonement 30 September 1998 Rabbi: What is it you want? - from "Angels In America" by Tony Kushner The interesting thing about Yom Kippur is that it works even if you're not especially orthodox - "a very secular Jew," as the Louis character from "Angels In America" describes himself. Even from my thoroughly goyishe standpoint, I can see how a day of fasting would inspire the correct attitude. No, I'm not being frivolous. Fasting is very powerful stuff. Those who believe that magic can be practiced will avoid eating for a day before doing any major rituals. It promotes focus. Fasting has caused people to see divine visions, and on the sinister side, has been used by such groups as the Spanish Inquisition to force religious conversions. Fasting and stress can cause actual psychological changes, cause your brain to work differently; this is a known fact. So, no matter what kind of Jew you are ... if you observe the high holiday enough to actually fast, then you're probably doing some atoning too, like it or not. I personally favor the Catholic method of repentance via confession (sometimes I get rid of my sins by confessing them publicly, as regular readers have surmised). I'm no more a Catholic than I am a Jew, but for some reason that method works better for me. I believe that sins flourish in the dark. If you shine light on them, bring them out into the world and make your shame public, they quickly evaporate. On the other hand, your memory of them never goes away, which is probably for the best. Otherwise you'd sin the same sins over and over. Some people do anyway.
Alex: Jerry, I need a straight answer. - paraphrased from Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein We are a world of different faiths but everyone seems to be mostly in agreement about what "punishment" means. Have you noticed that? If we come from different religions, we may argue about what heaven and hell look like, how they're arranged, and what constitutes a hell-worthy sin or a heaven-worthy virtue ... but the ways in which people are made to repent their sins, the methodology of suffering, is fairly consistent. Put another way: If a Muslim accidentally got sent to the Catholic heaven, he might not find it much of a reward, but if he accidentally got sent to the Catholic hell, he'd find it a more than adequate torture. Heaven doesn't translate as well as hell does. In Job, which may be Heinlein's best book (no militarism, no sexism, no laughably optimistic utopianism, no overt preaching), the central character, Alex, is an actual saint (although of course he denies it; that's the nature of sainthood. A person who claims to be a saint probably isn't). Alex gets swept up in the Rapture while still alive, goes to heaven, and finds it's not exactly what he expected; a cold, beautiful place where Rank Hath Its Privileges and the ordinary saved are not very high up on the totem pole. More importantly, his beloved isn't there. So it's not heaven to him. I think our standards for rewards are sometimes too demanding. ("You call this a reward?") We can get fifty thousand gifts and still not be happy if the one present we really wanted wasn't there. The penalty of this outlook is that suffering becomes too easy. If you only define one percent of the conditions as "success," then it follows that the other 99% are "failure." Maybe we expect too much from our heavens. Or some of us do. I personally would be happy with no longer having to till the soil, no longer needing to worry about where the rent would come from. There are others like me, I'm sure.
I have lost my faith that the ticket tells us where we are going. - from "Observation Car" by A. D. Hope I've noticed that the place where many people get stuck with religion is the point where they have to reconcile an omnipotent and just Divine with the fact that the world clearly contains pain and suffering. This is linked with the fact that your personal hell also is rumored to contain pain and suffering. If pain and suffering is punishment, so the thinking goes, then what is the world being punished for? What moral lesson does it teach us when a one-week-old infant dies? What is the point? There are three views I can take here. I already discussed two of these in my thoughts on religion, but there is a third, not necessarily more pleasant than the other two. One possibility is that there is no Divine, and the events which strike us down at random are just that - random occurrences in a fairly inhospitable universe. Another is that the Divine has wound this universe up like a clockwork toy and left it to tick unattended, gone off to start another universe or perhaps watch this one silently. Laissez-faire. But there is also the idea that all these calamities are a way of reminding us, the dominant species on the planet and one which has historically not shown much respect for the other species, that all flesh is grass. We, too, can be felled at random by something much bigger than us. It's a drastic way of teaching the lesson, and I don't care for it much, but given how often we forget it, maybe it's necessary. Maybe it's a good tradition, to set one day aside to repent. Not just our individual excesses, but our group ones. On the other hand, I cannot honestly say that I believe a day spent in atonement will make the world any less unforgiving for those who live in it. At best, it may make our hells a little less painful. Copyright © September 1998. All rights reserved. |
