FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: Agreed. I'm sorry but, again, per the subject of this web site, traditional Judaism is the antithesis of Emerson's perspective. Judaism (read "Orthodox," the root of Jewish identity) is very heavy into LEGISLATION. Judaism is an avalanche of rules and systems of control. Judaism's God is quite a dictator. Christianity and Islam, of course, grew out of Judaism.

JODY: True, and I think this may present an answer to whether our current dialogue has a place on your site. If nothing else, a free discussion of universal questions and personal spiritual experience is a good answer to the Old Testament god of "No." Also, I think that an examination of what's wrong with Judaism in particular and ethnocentrism in general gets its meaning from the larger context, "What *is* true and real? What does it mean to be a human being? In what way are you my brother and I your sister? How should we live, and why?" Anyway, I'm finding it to be an interesting and fruitful discussion - in surprising ways - so I hope we can continue "the adventure of strangers" if you're interested and as we each have time.

Agreed.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: Joining a clan of some kind can fulfill people's primal needs. A bunch of absolute rules are thrown in your direction to follow, now you're part of a "community," and you don't have to think any more. Just follow the rules.

JODY: Yes. I think that a different, more fulfilling and life-affirming kind of community is possible - to some extent, we all have to live in community with others - but it takes a lot of conscious effort...and most people don't want to be conscious.

True.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: That's an enormous paradox. But life is rife with paradox. (Responding to Jody's comment: "Universalism and individualism are two sides of the same reality.")

JODY: Yes, and yes.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: Sorry. I haven't the slightest idea who Etty Hillesum is/was.

JODY: Almost nobody I know has heard of her, though I think her writings are fairly well known in Europe. I pulled her diaries at random off a bookstore shelf when I was 29 (coincidentally the same age she was when she died). She lived in Amsterdam...studied and taught Russian...kept a diary for several years before her death at Auschwitz. Her writing is very powerful - much like Rilke's in its spiritual depth (she was strongly influenced by his poetry and letters). I gave away my copy, but I have an excerpt on my computer:

ETTY HILLESUM excerpt: All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor. Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.... I seem to be able to see ever more clearly the gaping chasms that swallow up man's creative powers and joie de vivre. They are holes in our own mind. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And: man suffers most through his fears of suffering. The body keeps leading the spirit, when it should be the other way round....I once wrote in despair, "It is inside my little skull that this world must be rethought, that it must be given fresh clarity." I still occasionally think so, with the same, almost diabolical presumption. I know how to free my creative powers more and more from the snares of material concerns, from the idea of hunger and cold and danger. They are, after all, imaginary phantoms, and not the reality. Reality is something that one shoulders together with all the suffering that goes with it, and with all the difficulties. And as one shoulders them, so one's resilience grows stronger. But the *idea* of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. And if you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and then you will also have strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world's.

The thing that jumps out at me here, per the subject of this web site, is Hillesum's comments about suffering. She says "the 'idea' of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed." Now, this seems to me to be a COMPLETE rejection of Jewish identity. Jewish identity is predicated upon the "idea" of suffering, from day one: punishment by God for breaking the covenenant. Modern Jewish identity is founded on the notion of being CONSTANTLY persecuted -- Holocaust, pograms, Crusades, generic Christian "anti-Semitism," etc. etc. etc. into infinity. And persecuted for No REASON. The "Wailing Wall" in Jerusalem is the best known geographical site in Jewish tradition. It is about Jewish suffering, and actually celebrates it. Jews go there to be overwhelmed with alleged Jewish suffering, and cry. What is a Jew in Jewish convention, if not God's (and history's) Great Sufferer? The "idea" of suffering sustains -- and constantly fuels -- Jewish identity.

I think Jewish convention on this point is bogus (everybody suffers, everywhere and the Jewish community selects periodic violent episodes in its history [and what human community has not had them in our treacherous, chaotic world?] to define Jewish life IN ABSOLUTE TOTAL), but the Jewish convention has made it THE pillar of Jewish identity.

It seems to me that Hillesum was in the deeply reflective process of transcending the anchors of Jewish identity -- at least judging by what is evidenced here. Of what bars -- in the context I propose here to you -- does Hillesum seem to speak?

Is distinctly JEWISH suffering that which must be borne by each of us, or that of ALL and ANY peoples?

I also note that my understanding of Buddhism is that it accepts suffering as a kind of generic given. And that the whole game of true human progress is to conceptually evolve/transcend out of it.

Hinduism, to my grasp, also infers that what happens to you happens for a reason: karma. Actions beget reactions. What you do in this life impacts what happens to you the next time around. Again, this has profound implications to Jewish identity, in the collective sense. And Jewry's rather morbid convictions about its history of alleged innocense.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: Well, your self-definition of once being "neurotic" gives me pause here. What is it about Jewish experience that foregrounds that as a kind of norm in the Jewish realm? (Woody Allen is of course the stereotype for it). I have my own ideas about it. But, irregardless of what I think, it's obvious that many, many people of Jewish descent have a serious hurdle here. It seems that "being Jewish," so often in an elitist sense, often entails this "neurosis" of which you speak.

JODY: I said/meant that Etty was like me in many ways and that she was initially worldly and neurotic - not that she was like me in her neurosis (or worldliness). I don't identify with, for example, her weird romantic relationships with father figures, but I'm inspired by the fact that she overcame personal challenges and limitations to become a free and deeply spiritual person. (Personal challenges and limitations, I have my share of.) I feel an affinity with her inwardness, her way of thinking from the heart, and her struggle both to free herself from mental chains and to find an inner spiritual anchor. As for a traditional Jewish upbringing leading to neurosis, well, probably it does. Luckily, I didn't have a traditional upbringing of any kind...the ideas were around, but only as a vague backdrop - not internalized. Judging by the self-help sections of the bookstores, mental turmoil is pretty widely pervasive. To some extent, it may be a sane and natural reaction to the insanity, isolation, and contradictions of modern life.

I agree. But the argument of this web site is that Jewish identity, and Jewish power and insistence in exerting this identity, has had a profoundly disproportionate influence in contributing/creating the malaise of which you speak. Easy example: the bizarre and fraudulent psychoanalysis assertions of Sigmund Freud and its implicitly Judeocentric view of the world, coupled with the fact that it has found very strong anchors in modern Western culture.

And I mean, as another example, any ethnic group that holds -- as a foundation of its collective identity -- that they are persecuted ALWAYS, EVERYWHERE, and FOR NO REASON is going to have some serious psychological problems. As a group. Freudianism can't heal this wound. Because the premise, itself, of both exploitive Freudianism and perpetual Jewish paranoia, is crazy.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEBMASTER: Another paradox. A key towards evolving out of this dilemma would seem to be the spirited flying away from the troubled "Jewish" cocoon, which nurtures such a problem.

JODY: Yes. But what does it mean to "fly away"? To me, it means destroying "the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars" - not shunning (or refusing to love) people who are in the restrictive system.

Well, per our discussion earlier about Emerson, social conventions can destroy the individual spirit and render human will as merely a recepticle for more generic (and oppressive) social convention.

I do not think that "shunning, or refusing to love" fellows within self-deluding ideologies is the issue. The issue is to share the escape route with them. The idea, in the end, is not just personal liberation through the metaphorical "bars," but also communal. I forget who said it, but I recall a quote by someone who commented (to paraphrase): "I cannot be truly free, until all are free." This, of course, is an allusion to a social conscience.

FORMER COMMENT BY WEB MASTER: I listened to an audiotape "Poems of Rumi," translated and spoken by Robert Bly & Coleman Barks, a few weeks ago.

JODY: That recording was also my introduction to Rumi - it was amazing.

It's very good. The combination of the words, Bly's and Coleman's theatrical enthusiasm, and the music all make for maximum impact.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: It's like recognizing an old friend -- one you didn't know you had. It's also like being jolted awake -- in a very good sense. It's the sudden emotional release of wanting to laugh and cry at the same time -- about the human condition.

JODY: That's a clear and poignant description of what it's like. I remember feeling that way when I first read Rilke's Duino Elegies:
--- Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. ...Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening. --- There is also a feeling, always, when I encounter something beautiful or profound -- a tingling rush of energy as if the top of my head is opening up. I've often wondered if other people feel that, too.

Yes. But I merely point out that the "beautiful and profound" can rise up, like a tidal wave, from the very mundane. Say, you actually examine the mystery of a weed in an abandoned lot one day, finally, for the first time.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: I also point out that, as you surely know, GIVING is far, far more satisfying than RECEIVING. I learned this a long time ago. There is an enormous sense of self-worth in sacrificing part of oneself for the aid of others. Maybe sounds corny. But it's true.

JODY: Yes, very true... and I get almost physically uncomfortable when people feel indebted to me for something I've done, something that it was only right and natural to do. (The experience with the man in the soup kitchen was so moving because his words felt more like a blessing than gratitude.) Any kindess should be passed on, as you say, to someone else who needs it, in a continuous flow. If that man had taken your money, the chain of giving would have been stopped. (But in your place, I probably would have tried to repay him, too.) Another thing I've discovered is that we can help (or, no doubt, harm) people without any conscious awareness of it. More than once, I've been surprised to learn that someone was helped or changed by something that I didn't even remember I'd said. It was never anything earth-shattering; it just happened to be what they needed to hear at the time. These kinds of experiences are reassuring and humbling - as if gifts are passing through us.

True. But once you try to start keeping track of this, I think, it melts away. Once you consciously insert your (my) ego into it, it morphs into something less noble.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: In any case, how can mysticism be "Jewish?" Or Christian or Muslim for that matter. It's absurd. The true mystical searcher transcends such inane anchors. The idea is to get past such ethnocentric folly. The mystic is a mystic. Period. And when he/she floats into true Consciousness even the term "mystic" is senseless -- just another rope holding down the air balloon.

JODY: You're absolutely right. And it seems as if people can arrive there from almost anywhere, not only from a religious tradition but (like a man I once knew) even from a path as unlikely as the study of neurobiology. This convergence of paths at one center confirms for me that the mystical experience of being is Reality.

True.

FORMER COMMENT OF WEB MASTER: When I said that I nearly wept to Bly's and Coleman's translation of Rumi, I meant too that the truth I understood encouraged me to pick up a pen and write too. To dance too. To sing too. To play a stone like a flute. To toss my little dirty hat like an acorn in the ENORMOUS Ring of everything. To listen, you know, to the awesome music of our blood climbing up our veins.

JODY: That was lovely to read. You sound very alive. Jody

Well, I don't know. We're all in the process of dying, mired in the life struggle, always heading home. It's just that, say, simply feeling the rain on your arm can be rejuvenating: raw, free, irrational pleasure. Something extraordinarily simple. Modern illusory pseudo-culture tends to mute -- even kill -- that.