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We are all time travelers who keep on returning to the past to figure out how to get to the future, forgetting that we need to be in the present and start from there.
Starting can be quite difficult, trying to understand the past without sacrificing the present. I have been struggling to write this essay for a few days now. Writing can often be a struggle – what sounds so good when you think of it, what sounds so eloquent and profound as it comes together in the mind ends up falling flat on the paper (or as it is typed into the computer). This is never truer than writing something that strikes close to the heart, which is more personal than one ever imagined when one started to write. It seems that this topic is one of those for me, something that strikes close to home, more personal that I ever began to imagine. I decided to write about belief, how we come to our beliefs (both in terms of religion and politics), why we hold on to those beliefs, why we continue to accept or reject them.
The interest (or concern really) developed years ago in a conversation with a friend over religion and the relevance of certain practices and beliefs. In fact this friend was asking me about certain practices that were part of the Orthodox Jewish faith. In actuality I was ill-equipped to handle these inquiries. Though I was born into a Jewish family and was raised to think of myself as Jewish, with the exception of the major holidays we never followed any of the prescribed practices. As a child being Jewish meant not eating bread on Passover, having to wear a suit on Yom Kippur even to go out and play, going to my great Uncle’s house for dinner and eating certain kinds of deli meats. We never set foot in a synagogue, did not follow the kosher laws, and I was never expected to learn Hebrew except for having to learn a few words of it to get through my Bar Mitzvah.
Growing up this way did not appear to be a problem since most of my Jewish friends practiced in a similar vein. For my friends that defined themselves as Christian, it was pretty much the same thing – though they did tend to go to church on a semi-regular basis. As I became a teenager and young adult, this all appeared as so much hypocrisy. I started to see all the inconsistencies in the way my family practiced. Especially since we did not even keep to the few practices we actually claimed to follow. I found myself moving further and further away from the familiar sense of what it meant to be Jewish.
Over the years, while acknowledging my heritage, my spiritual practices have moved far a field from how I was raised. I have come to acknowledge the strong spiritual content of Judaism, but with the exception of those times when I join with my wife and observant friends, my relation to Judaism as it is practiced is sparse.
Due to the fact that I was close to a number of observant people and have learned quite a bit from them, as well as having acquired a certain level of knowledge through a scholarly interest in religious practices and spirituality, I was able to talk to the basic facts but not to the spiritual experience and impact of these practices. The friend with whom I was having the conversation, who was raised as a Christian, started to speak to his experiences. Raised in a deep and abiding faith, even though he had since moved away from the denomination in which he was raised, he still practiced the Christian faith and spoke about the power and meaning of these practices. Though having been raised a Christian he had a number of options, among which were to either to embrace the faith in the manner in which he was raised, to reject it all together and find a different spiritual path, reject all manner of spiritual practices, or to find a way to follow the Christian faith in a way that made sense to the person he had become. I couldn’t help but think what if he had been raised an Orthodox Jew instead of as a Christian, would he be telling me now about the power and beauty of those practices instead?
On looking back at the decisions that I had made in response to my upbringing I realized that I had similar options. I either could have continued to practice in the way in which I was raised, or bothered by the hypocrisy in the way my parents had practiced, I could have become more observant. I could have abandoned the faith of my ancestors altogether and pursued a different path, or rejected all spiritual practices. I ended up pursuing a combination of the last two options, at first rejecting all spiritual practice to eventually find myself on an alternative spiritual path despite all my best efforts to avoid them completely.
I have come to realize that to a large extent the choices I have made have been influenced by the way in which I was, or was not, raised, in the Jewish tradition. Though raised to acknowledge the history of that tradition, I was never made aware that there was a spiritual component as well. As a result, when I found myself becoming a spiritual seeker the last place I would think to look would be within Judaism. Though I have now come to recognize and respect the spiritual aspects of the faith, my path has taken me elsewhere.
What is true in regard to religious and spiritual beliefs, is true for political beliefs as well. Often, as we have all come to learn, there is a connection between the two. Political beliefs, and the frameworks in which we view the world, are conveyed to us all at a very young age. We can eventually choose to accept, reject or accommodate them in one way or another, but we never fully shake them off. I was raised in a solid Democratic home, where the name of Franklin Roosevelt was considered to be sacred (especially by my mother). In this arena, rather than totally rejecting this tradition and then looking elsewhere, I tried to find a more authentic variant where the ideals and hopes that fueled my political faith were practiced. I found this initially in a number of leftist political organizations, which is the side of the political spectrum on which I have continued to reside as I continue my explorations.
In writing this essay, as I began once again to explore my spiritual and political beliefs in order to understand how they came into being I started to wonder to what extent that history, that movement from then to now, keeps us all trapped and limited, keeps us from seeing new perspectives and possibilities. The ways in which we define who we are and where we belong can serve to both ground and mire us. Someone I know was recently told about the teachings of a Christian minister she might find inspiring. A generally open person, having been raised as a somewhat observant Jew, she initially recoiled at the idea. To her credit, she was able to put her biases aside and at least to be willing to listen. This does not always happen.
The past is a powerful force, potentially restricting the possible futures that are available to us. Each influence and each subsequent decision limits the options we see as being available to us. It is one thing to look back at the past to see where we all came from. This can be a valuable tool, a way to understand why we did what we have done and what we may want to do differently when a similar situation arises. In too many cases we are embedded in the past, cutting us off from the other alternatives that may exist in the present. Who we “are” can often get in the way of who we can become as individuals and in our collective lives as members of a community, a religion and as a nation.
To what extent does the way we define ourselves as a nation influence our responses to the war in Iraq, whether we support or oppose it? To what extent is our reaction and our evaluation of the available alternatives determined by our perception of the past rather than a full understanding of present circumstances.
There have been many references over the past few months, on both the left and the right, to how Iraq is similar to Vietnam. There are many lessons to be learned from that earlier war, but the lessons we take from the past are often very selective, using only those that will support the stance we have taken. It is only by being fully in the present moment that we can adequately assess what the past has to teach in deciding what to do in the present. It is the future that rests in our ability to see how we came to where we are, accept it with an open and critical mind, and while starting from the present be open to the options and possibilities for moving on.
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