My friend and I separated on a drizzly, windy corner of Howard St. in Baltimore. She boarded a bus back toward her house in Hampden, and I considered running back to Mariner Arena to find out what the printed program had meant by substituting the traditional Diwali fireworks with what the program called "virtual fireworks." They were scheduled to start at 9PM, but I was a long way from DC and dependent upon public transportation, so I bought my light-rail ticket and waited in the light rain.
The headlights of three different light-rail trains illuminated the mist and passed me by before the train I was waiting for squeaked to a halt and opened its doors for me.
Inside, I pulled the printed program out of my backpack and leafed through its pages, sounding out the names of the Indian oncologists, dentists, and real estate agents, whose business-card-sized ads sat stacked inside text reminding celebrants of the meaning of Diwali.
The days leading up to Diwali all have a special meaning. Five days before Diwali, it is a good day to go shopping. Four days before marks Krishna's slaying of Narakasura. Three days before is the day of Lakshmi Puja, and two days before is Govardhan Puja. Puja simply means "worship," roughly, and Govardhan is not a god or goddess, but a holy mountain. The day before Diwali is a holiday for celebrating the relationship between brothers and sisters.
Overall, the celebration of Diwali is meant as a celebration of good over evil, as symbolized by the lights.
Paging through the program, I lingered over a full-page ad for the temple I'd attended for Navaratri. Here I learned that all of the Deities in the temple are modeled after other existing Deities, so that, the temple claims, a walk through the worship space is "equivalent to visiting several temples in India."
Turning the page, I happened upon an essay about Vedanta written by Vijay Kumar, a self-described "disciple of Swami Chinmayananda," which was printed opposite an ad offering best wishes for the contestants of the 14th Annual Miss India-DC Pageant.
Swami Chinmayananda? That was the name printed on the banner at the Vedanta table. I skimmed the rest of Kumar's biography: organizer of Vedanta discussion groups, member of the Washington Interfaith Association, IT Engineer for the Pentagon.
Interesting. I began to read his essay.
Kumar: Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of the soul, and the harmony of religions.
The lights flickered inside the train car whenever the driver blew her horn for us to cross an intersection.
A few seats behind me, a group of young women gossiped loudly about another woman who was not present, mocking her weight and appearance. They used coarse language to speculate that the woman – who rarely dates men – is probably a lesbian, and a really slutty one too.
The noisy women carved up the missing woman's body and described each part to each other – her bad teeth, her damaged hair, her stretch marks, her skin.
Kumar: Vedanta asserts that you are essentially divine. God dwells within our own hearts as the Supreme Self.
In front of me, a man boasted on his cell phone about cheating on his girlfriend.
He laughed that the girlfriend has no idea what he's up to. He called her ugly names, pridefully describing how he fulfills her highest (and only) worth by using her body for sex.
He talked loudly about how much that sex might hurt, because of how aggressively he pursues what he wants. After he paused for a moment for other end of the line to speak, he said, "She better not cheat on me. I'd kill that fucking bitch."
Kumar: The Atman is never born, nor will it ever die. Pure, perfect, free from limitations, the Atman is the Brahman.
And what is the Brahman? Kumar describes it this way: "According to Vedanta, God is infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss. The term for this impersonal, transcendent reality is Brahman. … Who is God? Consciousness. What is Consciousness? You can go on and on."
The conductor blew the horn and the lights dimmed. We had arrived at the end of the line, and I boarded my bus for the next leg of my journey. I had thought I would pass the time by reading an article on "untouchables" in the 21st century that was featured in a copy of the Indian American that I had picked up, but my bus had no overhead lighting. It also had no cruel and noisy passengers, so I sank into my seat in the silence, as if at a Quaker meeting, and reflected on the day.
Diwali celebrates the Atman as the inner light. The victory of good over evil is the victory of Krishna over Narakasura, is the victory of light over darkness, is the victory of the Atman over… what? I do not know a Hindu term for inner darkness.
I do know this: I know that while English-speakers may tend to translate Atman as Self or Soul or Inner Light, the root meaning of Atman in Sanskrit is actually "breath."
And I know that in Sanskrit, Atman is not the only kind of breath. There is also prana, as every student of yoga learns. ("Breathe in, breathe out.") Atman is spiritual, prana is physical.
I thought about how the word for "breath" in Koheleth (“hebel”) has come to mean something hopeless, while the breath of the Atman is deeply hopeful.
I thought about the difference between "breath" and "a breath." I wondered how true scholars of Sanskrit and Hebrew might negotiate the difference between hebel and Atman.
A breath...
a gasp...
a moment…
an eyeblink...
a flash before darkness.
Breath...
inspiration...
animation...
illumination…
light.
Add a character to the short play: The guru says that life is Atman. Now add a character locked in struggle with the new addition. The guru says that life is prana.
Now ask each of the characters: What happens to us when we die?
In my reading, Koheleth says we are finished. My sense is that the teacher, the philosopher, the quester, and especially the preacher would hedge about this, though. They would insist that by viewing the text of Ecclesiastes through the lens of the other 65 books of the Bible, we can find hope for eternal life. The preacher (and others?) would insist that we can only find this hope if we allow ourselves to be born again through Jesus Christ.
The gurus, of course, would say we are born again and again and again.
The Atman never dies. We struggle to break the cycle.
And Jesus has nothing to do with it.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Diwali: Festival of Lights (Lakshmi Puja)
I had celebrated Diwali one time before this year.
Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.
This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."
Nope.
While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.
When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.
This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.
When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.
I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.
I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.
Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.
On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.
I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.
After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."
Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.
Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.
I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).
The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."
After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.
Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.
After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.
While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.
Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.
The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.
When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.
Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.
Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.
I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”
I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.
When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.
It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.
I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.
Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.
This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."
Nope.
While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.
When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.
This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.
When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.
I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.
I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.
Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.
On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.
I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.
After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."
Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.
Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.
I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).
The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."
After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.
Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.
After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.
While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.
Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.
The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.
When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.
Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.
Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.
I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”
I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.
When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.
It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.
I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Sukkot: Koheleth
Koheleth says that life is futility.I could imagine a short play for five characters who squabble about the meaning of life.
The preacher says that life is vanity.
The philosopher says that life is useless.
The teacher says that life is meaningless.
The quester says that life is smoke.
They parse the shades of meaning between the very similar language they use to express their thoughts. Perhaps each would use some sort of representative prop that helps define him or her as a character; the quester carries a map, for example, or the preacher a holy book. The reveal at the end of the play is that the characters are all the same person.
The five sentences above are inspired by five different translations of the Hebrew text that came to be known in English as the book of Ecclesiastes.
Preacher/vanity comes from King James, philosopher/useless from the Good News, teacher/meaningless from the New International Version, and quester/smoke from the Message. I keep each of these texts on a shelf in my house.
Koheleth/futility comes from the translation printed in the prayer book at Tifereth Israel, the synagogue I attended for Shabbat/Sukkot services Saturday morning. Koheleth is the actual Hebrew term, which many sources (including a footnote in the Bible that translates it as "teacher") state originally meant "member of the assembly." In synagogue this morning, we treated it more or less as a proper name. (“Let’s see what Koheleth has to say.”)
The word that has been rendered as futility, vanity, useless, meaningless, and smoke apparently shows up as "breath" elsewhere in the Hebrew Psalms.
I had selected Tifereth as my synagogue of choice this morning, because they advertise American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for their Saturday morning services. I don't know Hebrew, but I'm competent in ASL, so after reading four versions of Ecclesiastes during the first four days of Sukkot, I was eager to see it rendered in ASL -- a language of face and body rather than a language of voice and breath or a language of the printed page.
Services were scheduled for 9 - 12:30, with ASL translation beginning at 9:45. I woke up late and didn't leave my house until around 8:45. I thought of biking, because Tifereth is nearly an hour away on foot, and the bus is sometimes unreliable, but I decided arriving just in time for the ASL to begin would be fine. I preferred to take the hour to clear my head on a crisp fall morning, and I knew from a previous visit that most congregants don't arrive until around 10.
To get to the synagogue, you walk about four blocks from my house toward the Unitarian Church. At the Unitarian Church, you turn left, and then walk a straight-shot north of about fifty blocks or so, passing literally dozens of other houses of worship (Seventh Day Adventist, Greek Orthodox, AME Methodist, etc.), as well as the Carter-Barron Amphitheater and the Walter Reed Medical Center.
I strode up the street in grey wool pants, a black silk shirt, blue corduroy jacket, and black boots, listening to music and admiring the morning light and the slight turnings of color on the trees' leaves. I dialed my iPod toward a list of “recently played” tunes, which eventually cycled around to a song from Dolly Parton's 2005 album of 1960s-era covers -- her bluegrass version of Turn, Turn, Turn. This song, made famous in 1965 by the Byrds, is, of course, a musical rendition of the most famous section of Ecclesiastes.
To everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
A time to plant, a time to reap;
A time to kill, a time to heal;
A time to laugh, a time to weep;
A time to build up, a time to break down;
A time to dance, a time to mourn;
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together;
A time of love, a time of hate;
A time of war, a time of peace;
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, a time to lose;
A time to rend, a time to sew
(A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.)
Dolly Parton can play the part of Koheleth today, I thought!
She sang her way through the entire song, and I had the same problems with the text of that Scripture as I always do. I love most of the couplets and the overall message about duality in life, but if I were to record a version of this song for myself, I could not record it as written.
For one thing, the “time to kill” line triggers not only with moral issues with the text for me, but also raises concerns about the overall logical consistency of the poem. The rest of the couplets all present opposites (gain/lose, rend/sew, etc.). “Kill” and “heal” are not opposites.
The opposite of “to kill” is “to resurrect.” The opposite of “to heal” is “to injure” or perhaps “to sicken.”
Furthermore, the other verbs all refer to human activity. But for the most part, humans do not heal. I suppose that across time doctors and prophets and others have been considered people who heal, but I don’t think healing is the same sort of universal human activity as dancing or laughing or weeping. And killing?
Broadly speaking, I do not believe in killing. We could parse out the lines of argument on all sides of many divisive issues, from capital punishment to assisted suicide to abortion, and I'd start to nuance things a bit, but even at that, "killing," like “healing,” ruins the universal appeal of the poem. Society absolutely restricts legitimized killing -- to medical professionals, to law enforcement, to soldiers.
A believer might say that killing and healing are activities that should be left for God, and they don’t belong in a poem about the dualities of human life.
Rather than “heal," humans nurture. We nurture each other and hope that it leads to healing.
I don’t know what the original Hebrew for this couplet meant. But I do know that to coax the poem to make consistent moral sense to me -- to make it into something I could recite or sing -- I wish to edit the line about healing and killing.
If I could edit Ecclesiastes 3, I would change the third verse to read:
A time to nurture others through their pain, and a time to accept nurturing for our own.
I would not be the first to make a change. The final line of Turn, Turn, Turn, (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late“) does not exist in the Bible, and Dolly-as-Koheleth also tragically eliminates two of the best couplets from Ecclesiastes:
A time to search, a time to give up;
A time to be silent, a time to speak.
*****
Tifereth is a conservative synagogue that requires kippot, so I pulled mine out of my pocket and bobby-pinned over the baldest part of my head when I was about a block from the building. Tifereth’s sukkah, like the orthodox sukkah in the park, was made of a metal frame hung with white and blue plastic. The roof, however, rather than being made of fronds, was composed of branches from deciduous trees (tulip poplars?). The branches appeared to be cut, rather than fallen, and their still-green leaves were drying to a sickly gray.
I entered the building and hung my corduroy jacket in the coat room. I accepted a program and a supplemental prayer book from a woman in a flowered suit and pink hat standing at the door to the worship space. The woman and I greeted each other with a “Shabbat Shalom,” and I noticed that she gave my head a quick glance to check for kippot, much as Zaki had slipped a quick glance at my wedding ring finger at the Ahmadiyya mosque. I took a seat toward the front, but off to the side.
The ASL interpreter was not working yet, and as it turned out, she wouldn't start translating the service until about an hour later, when one deaf woman arrived alone. As a result, when the reading of Koheleth/Ecclesiastes began a few moments later, I did not get to see the ASL version. Rather, I followed along with the English translation in the supplemental book, and also raised my head to watch the speakers.
Tifereth employs one rabbi and no cantor, and encourages its congregation to accept leadership roles in the service. So, four chapters of Koheleth were recited by a combination of six people (three men and three women), including the rabbi. Their voices varied along a continuum of chanting versus singing. Five of them held their books aloft, in front of their chests, though the third reader left her book resting on the podium in front of her and gripped the sides of the podium tightly with both hands. She wore a white crocheted kippah and a white shawl over a simple brown dress, and she wore her thick, brown hair very long, to her waist. Her interpretation seemed, to me, the most intense of the six of them, and I wondered what I was missing by not knowing how she was accenting or emphasizing or shaping the phrases of her Hebrew to color its meaning. Her voice was huskier than Dolly Parton's and her delivery was more forceful than Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's.
After the section of text chanted by the rabbi, he took note, in English, that he did not approve of all he had just said. I wondered if he disapproved of the same section of text as I.
Tifereth's standard prayer books don't have phonetic transliterations in them, so when we moved on to the Torah portion of the service, I couldn't follow along very well. I fell largely silent during the bat mitzvah portion that included a 13-year-old girl and great crowds of her relatives and friends leading the congregation through the annual text from Exodus (the section where Moses asks to see God, and God says nobody may see His face and live, so God shows his backside instead).
Of the supplemental texts on Saturday, the first was from Numbers, a text that lists God's desired offerings on the different days of Sukkot ("On the fourth day, prepare ten bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect ... On the fifth day, prepare nine bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect…” etc.) The second was from Ezekiel's prophesies about Gog and Magog descending on Israel only to be destroyed by God ("I will execute judgment with plague and bloodshed. I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur... and so I will show my greatness and my holiness.")
The girl sang all of this beautifully. She was afterward congratulated by the rabbi who praised her intelligence and creativity and compassion for the poor, as recently evidenced by a marathon jump-rope session she organized to raise money for charity.
The rabbi took this moment to illuminate his earlier comment about the disagreeable section of Koheleth. He did not zero in on the "time to kill" or the "time for war," but on the paragraph immediately before this section, which begins with the sentence: "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work."
The rabbi noted that there is more to life than this, and he predicted a lifetime of devotion to God and to others for the girl who was being bat mitzvahed.
Through all of this, my view of the interpreter, after she started her work, had been partially obscured. I was too far from her and at too much of an angle to see clearly, especially with other congregants shifting into and out of my line of sight. Also, I realized after a while that part of my problem was that the interpreter was left-handed, which is not a problem in normal conversation, especially for the fluent, but for me -- a relative newcomer to the language, and sitting at my weird angle -- it sometimes confused me. (Imagine a person whose speech is already muffled using an upside down mouth.)
I couldn’t catch nearly everything the interpreter was signing during the Hebrew prayers, and it was only after she had repeated a certain construction many times that I realized a sign I was apprehending as "school" really meant "praise."I stifled a laugh as the full phrase "Thank you God and we praise you" flooded into my consciousness.If I’d been interpreting, I probably would have made “praise” a bolder sign, and probably would have done it with an expression of enthusiasm and rapture on my face. Both signs look a bit like clapping, with “praise” looking more like “good job, way to go," and “school” looking more like “pay attention, class."
I knew "school" couldn't be right because it was a noun, positioned where a verb should be. And while a native ASL-user might not have found humor in the mistaken substitution (since school is always a noun in ASL), my native-English brain enjoyed the idea of "school" as a verb.
"Thank you God, and we school you."
It's slang, sure, but "to school" means …
to teach a lesson...
or to show better…
or to correct.
It‘s not much of an interpretive leap to: “Thank you, author of Ecclesiastes… and we’ll edit your text.”
Friday, October 17, 2008
Sukkot: Feast of Booths
"Have you shaken the lulav yet this year, my friend?" asked the man in the blue dress shirt, grey slacks, and black kippah. He wore tiny eyeglasses and sported a scraggly, uneven beard, and he held out to me the bundle of the Four Species as I approached his sukkah.
"I have not," I replied.
"Do you want to shake it?" he asked me, waving the Four Species back and forth, and then, before I could reply, he asked a second question: "Are you of the Jewish faith?"
Of course I am not of the Jewish faith, but I had been looking for a way to observe Sukkot this week, and because I have been busy, my observations have so far all been of the mental variety. However, yesterday, on Thursday, as I was walking to lunch with a colleague, I noticed that the National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation, had erected a sukkah in the park a block from my office building, two blocks from the White House. I did not wish to stop and visit with my colleague in tow, and we did not have time to do so anyway, but I held out hope that the sukkah would be there the next day, which is to say Friday, which is to say today -- and indeed it was.
Sukkot is a weeklong holiday that began on Tuesday, so today places us right in the middle of the celebration. For Sukkot, the faithful are instructed by God to construct a temporary house, or “booth” -- a hutlike space with a thatch-style roof for entertaining guests and observing the holiday. As I understand it, the hut represents the temporary dwellings carried across the desert by the Israelites during their forty years of wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt. The hut reminds us of God's faithfulness during difficult times, and that all things are temporary.
I find the reminder of life’s impermanence compelling, and the symbol of the hut interesting, but in actual practice, the demands of Sukkot seem culturally out of place for me as an urban apartment dweller. Just as hauling a Christmas tree into the living room seems better suited for a rural Bavarian farmhouse next to a pine forest than for my Washington, DC apartment next to a national park, so too does the sukkah seem better suited for a long-ago village settlement somewhere in the Middle East, where there is space to build, and where the palm fronds for the roof of the hut are plentiful.
As the holiday approached, I considered building my own sukkah in the alley outside my bedroom window, from whatever I myself might be able to scavenge from my own surroundings -- cardboard boxes from behind the local supermarket, perhaps, or fallen branches from the park, but I knew my free time would be short this week, and I wasn't sure the hut idea was truly meaningful to me anyway. Perhaps, I thought, I could make some temporary art instead, and I fantasized about some improbable projects like maybe a salt sculpture that would be washed away by the rain, or a Zen-garden-style space that I would rearrange each day of Sukkot.
Interestingly, when I went to scope out the alley, whether for a hut or a Zen garden or who-knows-what, I discovered a sukkah of sorts already sitting in my intended space. The apartment building in which I live happens to have some structural integrity issues, with the hundred-year-old mortar between its bricks continually crumbling out. This causes leaks into the apartments (I had soggy walls in my bedroom for a year), and over the course of the past two years or so, the management company has been replacing the mortar one section of wall at a time, with a new section tackled every few months or so.
When I walked into the alley on the first day of Sukkot, I discovered that the workmen had returned to repair a new section. They had erected a scaffolding for this task, and over top of the scaffolding they had flung a tarp. It looked like a close approximation of an urban sukkah (though it violated the rule that the roof must be organic), but I stepped inside underneath the tarp anyway, happy to have my booth appear by magic.
I went about my week, reflecting on themes of impermanence, reading the book of Ecclesiastes (already my favorite book of the Bible, and a required Sukkot text), and making plans to attend synagogue this weekend (tomorrow).
When I saw the booth in the park yesterday, I decided I should make time to stop by today, and experience the ritual apart from the synagogue. So at midday today, I wandered on over, hoping to spend my lunch break in the sukkah.
I approached from the rear and then walked around to the front, so I could apprehend the booth’s construction. The roof was made of some kind of fronds, balanced on top of a metal frame. Attached to the frame, white plastic walls with a blue stripe at the bottom hung toward the ground. The back wall contained a clear plastic window, and there was no front wall. The structure’s shape was that of a rectangle with twice as much length as witdth, about the size of a large van or a small truck cab.
It was when I had walked around the sukkah to the front that the man with the glasses and beard asked me if I wanted to shake the lulav, and then asked me if I was Jewish.
He actually pulled back a bit when I answered, “No.”
I thought he might then be interested in explaining the lulav to a Gentile, but that's not where he went next. I knew already about the lulav, from reading about it, but I kind of wanted the explanation from a practitioner. The lulav is a bundle of "Four Species": a frond from a date-palm tree, a bough from a myrtle tree, a branch from a willow tree, and a fruit from the citron tree. Some say that each of the four Species represents a part of the human body, such that binding them together represents a total devotion to God. Others say that the binding represents bringing various types of worshippers together before God.
I was curious which explanation (or perhaps a different one altogether) this fellow might give me, but instead, after asking if I am Jewish, he asked a second personal question:
"Are you religious?"
"I do not practice a religion; no." I replied.
"That's not what I asked you -- if you 'practice' a religion," the man quibbled. "I asked if you are religious. Do you believe in God?"
"No," I said.
The man holding the lulav literally jumped. He stiffened and he sniffed and he put the lulav back down on a table. Next he said, "Well, then, you will not want to pray."
"I do not know if I want to pray," I said, "What is the prayer?"
The man seemed confused and remained silent.
"Is it for guidance, or something?" I prompted.
The man launched into a hasty explanation that I did not follow exactly, but which could be summed up, I am pretty sure, as essentially the same as the five daily Muslim prayers: Thanks and blessings to God just for being God, who is great and awesome and so on, and thanks for putting together this religion for us to follow, amen.
Then the man told me he liked my beard, and said, "Good day to you; nice to meet you, my friend."
The words were spoken in kindness, but were clearly phrased as my dismissal. I wanted to talk more about Sukkot and what it means, and I wanted to understand the prayer more clearly, and most of all I wanted to be invited into the sukkah to sit on the chairs and maybe chat. I'm not always that willing to just talk with strangers, but the sukkah had a sign on it that said "welcome," and since they were in a public park, I assumed that the organizers wanted to talk to people about their religion. I assumed the non-Jewish and non-religious were being invited to learn more.
Also, a woman with a stack of six pizzas had arrived at almost the same moment I did, and she placed them on a table inside the sukkah, alongside several two-liter bottles of soda, some paper plates and cups, and a large, orange water cooler.
I did not really want any pizza (and I avoid drinking soda), but on my initial approach I had thought the man might welcome me into the sukkah for lunch.
Alas, I was wrong, so instead I just popped into a coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up and walked back to the carrots and dip waiting at my office.
"I have not," I replied.
"Do you want to shake it?" he asked me, waving the Four Species back and forth, and then, before I could reply, he asked a second question: "Are you of the Jewish faith?"
Of course I am not of the Jewish faith, but I had been looking for a way to observe Sukkot this week, and because I have been busy, my observations have so far all been of the mental variety. However, yesterday, on Thursday, as I was walking to lunch with a colleague, I noticed that the National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation, had erected a sukkah in the park a block from my office building, two blocks from the White House. I did not wish to stop and visit with my colleague in tow, and we did not have time to do so anyway, but I held out hope that the sukkah would be there the next day, which is to say Friday, which is to say today -- and indeed it was.
Sukkot is a weeklong holiday that began on Tuesday, so today places us right in the middle of the celebration. For Sukkot, the faithful are instructed by God to construct a temporary house, or “booth” -- a hutlike space with a thatch-style roof for entertaining guests and observing the holiday. As I understand it, the hut represents the temporary dwellings carried across the desert by the Israelites during their forty years of wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt. The hut reminds us of God's faithfulness during difficult times, and that all things are temporary.
I find the reminder of life’s impermanence compelling, and the symbol of the hut interesting, but in actual practice, the demands of Sukkot seem culturally out of place for me as an urban apartment dweller. Just as hauling a Christmas tree into the living room seems better suited for a rural Bavarian farmhouse next to a pine forest than for my Washington, DC apartment next to a national park, so too does the sukkah seem better suited for a long-ago village settlement somewhere in the Middle East, where there is space to build, and where the palm fronds for the roof of the hut are plentiful.
As the holiday approached, I considered building my own sukkah in the alley outside my bedroom window, from whatever I myself might be able to scavenge from my own surroundings -- cardboard boxes from behind the local supermarket, perhaps, or fallen branches from the park, but I knew my free time would be short this week, and I wasn't sure the hut idea was truly meaningful to me anyway. Perhaps, I thought, I could make some temporary art instead, and I fantasized about some improbable projects like maybe a salt sculpture that would be washed away by the rain, or a Zen-garden-style space that I would rearrange each day of Sukkot.
Interestingly, when I went to scope out the alley, whether for a hut or a Zen garden or who-knows-what, I discovered a sukkah of sorts already sitting in my intended space. The apartment building in which I live happens to have some structural integrity issues, with the hundred-year-old mortar between its bricks continually crumbling out. This causes leaks into the apartments (I had soggy walls in my bedroom for a year), and over the course of the past two years or so, the management company has been replacing the mortar one section of wall at a time, with a new section tackled every few months or so.
When I walked into the alley on the first day of Sukkot, I discovered that the workmen had returned to repair a new section. They had erected a scaffolding for this task, and over top of the scaffolding they had flung a tarp. It looked like a close approximation of an urban sukkah (though it violated the rule that the roof must be organic), but I stepped inside underneath the tarp anyway, happy to have my booth appear by magic.
I went about my week, reflecting on themes of impermanence, reading the book of Ecclesiastes (already my favorite book of the Bible, and a required Sukkot text), and making plans to attend synagogue this weekend (tomorrow).
When I saw the booth in the park yesterday, I decided I should make time to stop by today, and experience the ritual apart from the synagogue. So at midday today, I wandered on over, hoping to spend my lunch break in the sukkah.
I approached from the rear and then walked around to the front, so I could apprehend the booth’s construction. The roof was made of some kind of fronds, balanced on top of a metal frame. Attached to the frame, white plastic walls with a blue stripe at the bottom hung toward the ground. The back wall contained a clear plastic window, and there was no front wall. The structure’s shape was that of a rectangle with twice as much length as witdth, about the size of a large van or a small truck cab.
It was when I had walked around the sukkah to the front that the man with the glasses and beard asked me if I wanted to shake the lulav, and then asked me if I was Jewish.
He actually pulled back a bit when I answered, “No.”
I thought he might then be interested in explaining the lulav to a Gentile, but that's not where he went next. I knew already about the lulav, from reading about it, but I kind of wanted the explanation from a practitioner. The lulav is a bundle of "Four Species": a frond from a date-palm tree, a bough from a myrtle tree, a branch from a willow tree, and a fruit from the citron tree. Some say that each of the four Species represents a part of the human body, such that binding them together represents a total devotion to God. Others say that the binding represents bringing various types of worshippers together before God.
I was curious which explanation (or perhaps a different one altogether) this fellow might give me, but instead, after asking if I am Jewish, he asked a second personal question:
"Are you religious?"
"I do not practice a religion; no." I replied.
"That's not what I asked you -- if you 'practice' a religion," the man quibbled. "I asked if you are religious. Do you believe in God?"
"No," I said.
The man holding the lulav literally jumped. He stiffened and he sniffed and he put the lulav back down on a table. Next he said, "Well, then, you will not want to pray."
"I do not know if I want to pray," I said, "What is the prayer?"
The man seemed confused and remained silent.
"Is it for guidance, or something?" I prompted.
The man launched into a hasty explanation that I did not follow exactly, but which could be summed up, I am pretty sure, as essentially the same as the five daily Muslim prayers: Thanks and blessings to God just for being God, who is great and awesome and so on, and thanks for putting together this religion for us to follow, amen.
Then the man told me he liked my beard, and said, "Good day to you; nice to meet you, my friend."
The words were spoken in kindness, but were clearly phrased as my dismissal. I wanted to talk more about Sukkot and what it means, and I wanted to understand the prayer more clearly, and most of all I wanted to be invited into the sukkah to sit on the chairs and maybe chat. I'm not always that willing to just talk with strangers, but the sukkah had a sign on it that said "welcome," and since they were in a public park, I assumed that the organizers wanted to talk to people about their religion. I assumed the non-Jewish and non-religious were being invited to learn more.
Also, a woman with a stack of six pizzas had arrived at almost the same moment I did, and she placed them on a table inside the sukkah, alongside several two-liter bottles of soda, some paper plates and cups, and a large, orange water cooler.
I did not really want any pizza (and I avoid drinking soda), but on my initial approach I had thought the man might welcome me into the sukkah for lunch.
Alas, I was wrong, so instead I just popped into a coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up and walked back to the carrots and dip waiting at my office.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Five Pillars: Shahada (No god but Allah...)
When I came up the stairs in the Hindu temple from Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's concert, I was running a bit late to return my rented car, but I wanted to see inside the worship space. I hadn't even peeked in before, while I was asking the man in the lobby shop where to buy my concert ticket, so after reading a couple of posted signs to try to ensure I wouldn't be breaking any rules by entering, I stepped from the lobby into the worship space.
The Muslim worship spaces I have experienced are empty, with rugs on the floor for praying. The Jewish worship spaces I have experienced have tended to be furnished with rows of chairs with arms, like a theater, with great variation in the style of ark situated in the front. Christian spaces, of course, have pews, with or without a baptismal pool or font in the front. The Hindu worship space surprised me in its difference.
Whether rugs, chairs, or pews, the monotheistic spaces are designed to arrange the worshippers in rows, facing forward, toward one thing: the ark, the East, the cross, whatever. The Hindu space (as perhaps I should have predicted, but did not) had no single focal point. Rather, the space contained shrines to 16 different named gods. The space was not quiet. People were talking and children were running around. Some people stood or bowed before particular shrines, others were simply sitting on the floor in lotus position, not apparently focused on any shrine in particular.
My instinct was to walk through the space and investigate each shrine one at a time. I walked up to Vishnu's space, because his was one of the largest, and because the depiction of the figure inside was different. Whereas many other shrines depicted a seated, standing, or dancing figure, the object inside the Vishnu shrine looked more like a corpse, or more specifically like a sarcophagus. There were flowers and bananas left on the stairs up into Vishnu's space and a sign at the top of the stairs reserving the inside of the shrine for priests only.
Next to me, a woman fell to her knees before the shrine of Hanuman (a god who symbolizes devotion to selfless service and humility), and pressed her forehead to the floor. This shrine also bore a sign reserving its inner space for priests, and the figure of Hanuman sat in a recess behind a curtain that could be closed. Next to the woman on the floor, another shrine, to I know not which god, had its curtain closed, and a living figure -- presumably a priest -- was moving around inside.
The rebuke from the woman at my last iftar rang in my head: "You can't be a religious tourist. Those people are there to pray."
I questioned my instinct to walk from shrine to shrine, wondering if treating the worship space like a museum might be unkind. Then I thought the better comparison might be to a Catholic, walking the stations of the cross -- something I have never done. I let the pressure of the car reservation make my decision for me, and after admiring only about a quarter of the shrines, I went back outside to collect my shoes from the cubby.
What would even the progressive Muslims of the suburban iftar have made of this temple, I wondered.
I have heard Christian sermons condemn Hindus for praying to "idols," and at the suburban iftar, I heard Richard (the convert from Christianity) criticize their polytheism as well. He mentioned it in the context of criticizing Christians for being "like the Hindus" in their worship of a three-part god.
"How is that monotheism?" Richard was asking a small group that had formed around him. "You've got Jesus, and you've got God, but Jesus is also God, and then there's this other thing, a ghost, and then you've got the Catholics, and they've got Mary all up in it too. And what's up with Mary always looking like some white woman from the Middle Ages? It's like, when somebody go all crazy and see Mary pop up her face on a piece-a toast or something, it always look like some white woman. And she’s a part of God too? What's up with that?"
The Trinity made sense to me as a child, but as an adult, I do feel like Richard has a point. I don't agree that the Hindus and Christians necessarily have it wrong somehow because their theism isn't as absolutely mono as Richard's, but I do see how being able to conceptualize God in three parts should put Christians in a bind to explain how they reject others who see even more parts to God, whether Catholics who add on Mary or the Saints, or Hindus who split the concept of God -- by some reckonings -- into millions of parts.
At the Kol Nidre service, we prayed to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Rebekah, the God of Jacob, the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah. I had done this before, but this year, for the first time, I heard the cantor explain her understanding of why we repeat the words "God of" each time.
"It's because each generation -- each person, really -- encounters God in his or her own way," the cantor explained. "We're not praying to this God of... a whole big group of people who always agreed on everything. We're praying to a God who was real to Isaac, and real to Rebekah, and to the rest, and we're honoring each of their encounters with the Eternal, as well as our own encounter."
So, by my count, that was seven gods at Kol Nidre. Or maybe a few hundred, if I'm counting the God of Jim, the God of Suzi, and the rest of the congregation celebrating High Holidays in the United Church.
When I went back to the United Church (aka Die Vereinigte Kirche) the following Sunday for Christian services, I wondered which God would be there. The God who just closed the gates in that same space on Thursday night? The God of the soprano cantor? The God of the woman who looked into my eyes and blessed me? The God of the Rev. Peter DeGroote, who would be preaching that morning? All of the above?
The giant banner depicting the Torah scroll had been removed from the cross at the front of the sanctuary, and on Sunday, the crowd was much smaller. Maybe 40 or 50 people attended services, most of them senior citizens and most of them women, including a returning pastor named Rita Horstmann, who was visiting from her home church in Cologne, having served as Die Vereinigte Kirche's German pastor in 2003 and 2004.
Rev. DeGroote was welcoming and kind, greeting me as an obvious visitor amongst the sparse crowd, since I was both male and off the average age by about thirty years. He and a younger pastor (who was about my age) wore black suits and clerical collars and no wedding rings. The younger man led us in song and prayer; the older man delivered a sermon based on the book of James (or Jakobus, as it was called in Der Bibel from the pew in front of me). The older reverend led us in some prayers as well.
We prayed to God, and we addressed one recited-in-unison prayer to "the Holy One," and we also prayed to Jesus, sometimes calling him Jesus Christ. We sang a song addressed to the "Spirit of the living God," which I had sung before at the Unitarian Church near my house. The song calls for the living God's spirit to "fall afresh on me ... melt me, mold me, fill me, use me" -- a very similar message to the "thou art the potter" hymn from my upbringing, and the God-as-potter song from Kol Nidre.
We also prayed pointedly to a Creator God (Brahma?), and we finished with the Lord's Prayer.
I know the Lord's Prayer. I have sung it and recited it hundreds if not thousands of times, sometimes with the language of “you“ and “your,” sometimes with the language of “thou” and “thine”… sometimes with "debts" and sometimes with "transgressions."
When I glanced at the upcoming text, printed on my church bulletin, I saw that Die Vereinigte Kirche addresses the Lord directly on the debts/transgressions line, using the phrasing "forgive us for wronging you” (no capital Y).
But that wasn't the only fresh aspect of their translation.
When Rev. DeGroote, and Rita Horstmann, and the senior citizens, and I, and the young, unmarried pastor all raised our voices to recite the Lord's Prayer to God, we said:
"Our Father and Mother in heaven, holy is your name."
The Muslim worship spaces I have experienced are empty, with rugs on the floor for praying. The Jewish worship spaces I have experienced have tended to be furnished with rows of chairs with arms, like a theater, with great variation in the style of ark situated in the front. Christian spaces, of course, have pews, with or without a baptismal pool or font in the front. The Hindu worship space surprised me in its difference.
Whether rugs, chairs, or pews, the monotheistic spaces are designed to arrange the worshippers in rows, facing forward, toward one thing: the ark, the East, the cross, whatever. The Hindu space (as perhaps I should have predicted, but did not) had no single focal point. Rather, the space contained shrines to 16 different named gods. The space was not quiet. People were talking and children were running around. Some people stood or bowed before particular shrines, others were simply sitting on the floor in lotus position, not apparently focused on any shrine in particular.
My instinct was to walk through the space and investigate each shrine one at a time. I walked up to Vishnu's space, because his was one of the largest, and because the depiction of the figure inside was different. Whereas many other shrines depicted a seated, standing, or dancing figure, the object inside the Vishnu shrine looked more like a corpse, or more specifically like a sarcophagus. There were flowers and bananas left on the stairs up into Vishnu's space and a sign at the top of the stairs reserving the inside of the shrine for priests only.
Next to me, a woman fell to her knees before the shrine of Hanuman (a god who symbolizes devotion to selfless service and humility), and pressed her forehead to the floor. This shrine also bore a sign reserving its inner space for priests, and the figure of Hanuman sat in a recess behind a curtain that could be closed. Next to the woman on the floor, another shrine, to I know not which god, had its curtain closed, and a living figure -- presumably a priest -- was moving around inside.
The rebuke from the woman at my last iftar rang in my head: "You can't be a religious tourist. Those people are there to pray."
I questioned my instinct to walk from shrine to shrine, wondering if treating the worship space like a museum might be unkind. Then I thought the better comparison might be to a Catholic, walking the stations of the cross -- something I have never done. I let the pressure of the car reservation make my decision for me, and after admiring only about a quarter of the shrines, I went back outside to collect my shoes from the cubby.
What would even the progressive Muslims of the suburban iftar have made of this temple, I wondered.
I have heard Christian sermons condemn Hindus for praying to "idols," and at the suburban iftar, I heard Richard (the convert from Christianity) criticize their polytheism as well. He mentioned it in the context of criticizing Christians for being "like the Hindus" in their worship of a three-part god.
"How is that monotheism?" Richard was asking a small group that had formed around him. "You've got Jesus, and you've got God, but Jesus is also God, and then there's this other thing, a ghost, and then you've got the Catholics, and they've got Mary all up in it too. And what's up with Mary always looking like some white woman from the Middle Ages? It's like, when somebody go all crazy and see Mary pop up her face on a piece-a toast or something, it always look like some white woman. And she’s a part of God too? What's up with that?"
The Trinity made sense to me as a child, but as an adult, I do feel like Richard has a point. I don't agree that the Hindus and Christians necessarily have it wrong somehow because their theism isn't as absolutely mono as Richard's, but I do see how being able to conceptualize God in three parts should put Christians in a bind to explain how they reject others who see even more parts to God, whether Catholics who add on Mary or the Saints, or Hindus who split the concept of God -- by some reckonings -- into millions of parts.
At the Kol Nidre service, we prayed to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Rebekah, the God of Jacob, the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah. I had done this before, but this year, for the first time, I heard the cantor explain her understanding of why we repeat the words "God of" each time.
"It's because each generation -- each person, really -- encounters God in his or her own way," the cantor explained. "We're not praying to this God of... a whole big group of people who always agreed on everything. We're praying to a God who was real to Isaac, and real to Rebekah, and to the rest, and we're honoring each of their encounters with the Eternal, as well as our own encounter."
So, by my count, that was seven gods at Kol Nidre. Or maybe a few hundred, if I'm counting the God of Jim, the God of Suzi, and the rest of the congregation celebrating High Holidays in the United Church.
When I went back to the United Church (aka Die Vereinigte Kirche) the following Sunday for Christian services, I wondered which God would be there. The God who just closed the gates in that same space on Thursday night? The God of the soprano cantor? The God of the woman who looked into my eyes and blessed me? The God of the Rev. Peter DeGroote, who would be preaching that morning? All of the above?
The giant banner depicting the Torah scroll had been removed from the cross at the front of the sanctuary, and on Sunday, the crowd was much smaller. Maybe 40 or 50 people attended services, most of them senior citizens and most of them women, including a returning pastor named Rita Horstmann, who was visiting from her home church in Cologne, having served as Die Vereinigte Kirche's German pastor in 2003 and 2004.
Rev. DeGroote was welcoming and kind, greeting me as an obvious visitor amongst the sparse crowd, since I was both male and off the average age by about thirty years. He and a younger pastor (who was about my age) wore black suits and clerical collars and no wedding rings. The younger man led us in song and prayer; the older man delivered a sermon based on the book of James (or Jakobus, as it was called in Der Bibel from the pew in front of me). The older reverend led us in some prayers as well.
We prayed to God, and we addressed one recited-in-unison prayer to "the Holy One," and we also prayed to Jesus, sometimes calling him Jesus Christ. We sang a song addressed to the "Spirit of the living God," which I had sung before at the Unitarian Church near my house. The song calls for the living God's spirit to "fall afresh on me ... melt me, mold me, fill me, use me" -- a very similar message to the "thou art the potter" hymn from my upbringing, and the God-as-potter song from Kol Nidre.
We also prayed pointedly to a Creator God (Brahma?), and we finished with the Lord's Prayer.
I know the Lord's Prayer. I have sung it and recited it hundreds if not thousands of times, sometimes with the language of “you“ and “your,” sometimes with the language of “thou” and “thine”… sometimes with "debts" and sometimes with "transgressions."
When I glanced at the upcoming text, printed on my church bulletin, I saw that Die Vereinigte Kirche addresses the Lord directly on the debts/transgressions line, using the phrasing "forgive us for wronging you” (no capital Y).
But that wasn't the only fresh aspect of their translation.
When Rev. DeGroote, and Rita Horstmann, and the senior citizens, and I, and the young, unmarried pastor all raised our voices to recite the Lord's Prayer to God, we said:
"Our Father and Mother in heaven, holy is your name."
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Yom Kippur (Ne'ila) and Durga Puja
After spending the day in reflection, as well as reading my Muslim texts, I washed my feet and hands and face and performed the Asr prayers before dressing for Ne'ila services and the conclusion of Yom Kippur. I was fasting for G-d, and for Allah, and for Durga, the warrior goddess who claims the final three days of Navaratri.
In the middle of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep while reading the Koran, and lost about two hours of productivity, which seemed like a kind of karmic humbling after I had posted so grumpily about Muslims who snooze through their fast.
I bicycled back down to the United Church wondering if I would have to stand, but I found the crowd greatly thinned from the Kol Nidre the night before. I took a seat in a pew on the main floor toward the back, almost exactly on time for Ne'ila. This time, I could see the worship leaders. They were a man and a woman, probably both in their fifties or sixties, both wearing prayer shawls.
The Ne'ila service included repetitions of some of the prayers sung at Kol Nidre, and I was able to sing them better because their melodies and the Hebrew syllables were fresher in my memory than normal. I have been to enough Jewish services to navigate them well, even when the prayers are unfamiliar (which is most of the time), but the repetition made it even easier. I could raise my head out of the prayer book more and look around and sing with confidence.
Normally, my face stays pointed down into the book, because there is so much to look at, and so much to engage the brain within the pages. There are the elegant and yet meaningless (to me) forms of the Hebrew letters on one page. On the facing page, there is usually an English translation, and at the bottom of the page, sometimes (but not always) a transliteration to help the Hebrew-challenged follow along with what they are supposed to be singing. There is also occasional rabbinic commentary printed at the bottom of the page, or simply a footnote from the writer of the prayer book. Unlike a Christian hymnal, there is no musical notation. You have to follow the melodic example of the people around you.
Usually, at a Jewish service, I find that my concern about agreeing one hundred percent with the words I am singing is diminished. It's a false comfort, of course, born entirely of the fact that the meaning of the Hebrew syllables feels less present since I don't know the language. If I'm in a Chrsitian church, and a song like, say, "Have Thine Own Way, Lord" is on the agenda, I'll feel torn about singing it -- like it's maybe less offensive and more honest to be silent and non-participatory than to sing lyrics I might not mean, like these:
I feel dishonest, singing in English, about being willing to let God have His way with me, and about "yielding" to the shaping forces of a God whose presence I do not feel. And yet, that second line there, about God the Potter, comes up every year at the Kol Nidre service -- and every year I sing along. The image comes from the book of Isaiah, which both Jews and Christians accept, and the similarity between the religions of the images for God does not end there.
At the Ne'ila service, I sang for forgiveness from a G-d described as both Father and King in the Avina Malkeinu, and I belted out a series of metaphors about the human relationship to G-d in a prayer called Ki Anu Amecha. (Examples: "We are your children; you are our parent." "We are your sheep; you are our shepherd.") The shepherd metaphor, of course, to me, feels very Christian, as does God as King.
My colleague Rachel, in a conversation before the High Holidays, remarked to me that Yom Kippur feels like the most Christian to her of all of the Jewish holidays, focusing as it does on repentance and forgiveness. I replied to her that despite the thematic similarities (in fact, because of them) Yom Kippur in actual practice feels utterly foreign and extremely non-Christian to me, since it deals with those themes of repentance and forgiveness with absolutely no need for Jesus. It's a conversation directly with G-d, without the mediation of a bloody god-man sacrifice, and it introduces other not-very-Christian metaphors, such as the idea of a gate closing at the end of the holiday.
I understand the appeal of a one-time acceptance of Jesus for the forgiveness of all sins. It’s quick and complete and eternal, and I did it once myself. But for figuring out how to navigate human relationships and improve one's own life, I prefer the Jewish practice of checking in once a year.
So, the practice, I get. The belief, I do not.
At one point during Kol Nidre (i.e. day one), the cantor instructed us to page through an amidah, or standing prayer, on our own. She told us to listen to our own voices and the voices of those in prayer around us, and upon finishing the prayer, she told us, we should listen to the voice of G-d before sitting down. What does that mean? If I had obeyed, I would never have sat, and would be standing there still.
At the Ne'ila service (day two), one of the cantors read a prayer that used the phrase "the Eternal One" as a name for G-d. In the prayer book, I noticed, the text stated that "the Eternal One is a compassionate God and a gracious God." The cantor said aloud however that "the Eternal One is Compassion and Grace." I decided to file this away as a tactic for translating what people mean when they say "God." Since God is an abstraction, whenever “God” is combined with an adjective, why not just combine the words all the way, producing the adjective's abstract noun form as the name for God?
I followed this new tactic the next time I opened the Koran and discovered it works quite well for that text. Quite often, Muhammed follows mention of God with a comma and then two adjectives, like this: “There is no God but He, the Powerful, the Wise.” Or: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”
To appropriate the cantor‘s formulation, then, “God" is Power, Wisdom, Compassion, Mercy.
As at the raga concert at the Hindu temple, I felt moved to dance at Ne‘ila when the music occasionally picked up a faster, more rollicking beat. Many of the songs were somber, of course, given the theme of the day, but as we got closer to the end of the service, the joy embedded in the songs seemed to emerge. Nobody danced, but many people clapped or stomped their feet, and I kept the beat by clacking the ring on my pinkie finger against the pew in front of me.
Is there a name for the type of Jewish song that breaks away from the Hebrew and just uses simple syllables? Ai, dai, dai, dai, la-dai, da-dai, dai, dai-dai. Those are so much fun to sing! A stuffy old Protestant church doesn‘t necessarily seem the right space for it though; I am put more in mind of dancing around a campfire (a pillar of fire?) in the desert, under the waxing moon.
It was during one of these more joyous interludes that the cantor announced that Fabrangeners believe that we are all priests, and we were encouraged then to accept our priestly role and raise our hands to bless each other as we sang. I put down my prayer book and raised one hand toward the older man seated to my left. On my right side was the wall, so I raised my other hand above the mother and daughter who were seated in front of me. They had raised hands to each other, until the mother noticed me behind her, and moved her left hand to bless me. She smiled broadly and I smiled back. We made bright, friendly eye contact, which seemed deeply pleasant. How often do we maintain a good-hearted gaze with a stranger?
I noticed some congregants raising over each other a split-fingered gesture that I recognize from pop culture as the Vulcan hand symbol -- which I found startling -- only to discover later that I had the origin of the gesture backward. It was a Yom Kippur symbol first; Leonard Nimoy appropriated a Jewish priestly blessing for his character’s alien greeting on Star Trek.
After the blessings and the final closing of the gates, three men in the balconies raised shofars to announce the end of the service. We all offered “shana tovas” to those around us.
Three days later, I would return to the United Church for a third time, and from the spot where the shofars ended the Jewish High Holidays, a powerful blast from a church organ would start another Christian Sunday morning service.
UPDATE, 10.13.08: The joyful, often wordless songs are called nigunim.
In the middle of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep while reading the Koran, and lost about two hours of productivity, which seemed like a kind of karmic humbling after I had posted so grumpily about Muslims who snooze through their fast.
I bicycled back down to the United Church wondering if I would have to stand, but I found the crowd greatly thinned from the Kol Nidre the night before. I took a seat in a pew on the main floor toward the back, almost exactly on time for Ne'ila. This time, I could see the worship leaders. They were a man and a woman, probably both in their fifties or sixties, both wearing prayer shawls.
The Ne'ila service included repetitions of some of the prayers sung at Kol Nidre, and I was able to sing them better because their melodies and the Hebrew syllables were fresher in my memory than normal. I have been to enough Jewish services to navigate them well, even when the prayers are unfamiliar (which is most of the time), but the repetition made it even easier. I could raise my head out of the prayer book more and look around and sing with confidence.
Normally, my face stays pointed down into the book, because there is so much to look at, and so much to engage the brain within the pages. There are the elegant and yet meaningless (to me) forms of the Hebrew letters on one page. On the facing page, there is usually an English translation, and at the bottom of the page, sometimes (but not always) a transliteration to help the Hebrew-challenged follow along with what they are supposed to be singing. There is also occasional rabbinic commentary printed at the bottom of the page, or simply a footnote from the writer of the prayer book. Unlike a Christian hymnal, there is no musical notation. You have to follow the melodic example of the people around you.
Usually, at a Jewish service, I find that my concern about agreeing one hundred percent with the words I am singing is diminished. It's a false comfort, of course, born entirely of the fact that the meaning of the Hebrew syllables feels less present since I don't know the language. If I'm in a Chrsitian church, and a song like, say, "Have Thine Own Way, Lord" is on the agenda, I'll feel torn about singing it -- like it's maybe less offensive and more honest to be silent and non-participatory than to sing lyrics I might not mean, like these:
Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after thy will,
while I am waiting, yielded and still.
I feel dishonest, singing in English, about being willing to let God have His way with me, and about "yielding" to the shaping forces of a God whose presence I do not feel. And yet, that second line there, about God the Potter, comes up every year at the Kol Nidre service -- and every year I sing along. The image comes from the book of Isaiah, which both Jews and Christians accept, and the similarity between the religions of the images for God does not end there.
At the Ne'ila service, I sang for forgiveness from a G-d described as both Father and King in the Avina Malkeinu, and I belted out a series of metaphors about the human relationship to G-d in a prayer called Ki Anu Amecha. (Examples: "We are your children; you are our parent." "We are your sheep; you are our shepherd.") The shepherd metaphor, of course, to me, feels very Christian, as does God as King.
My colleague Rachel, in a conversation before the High Holidays, remarked to me that Yom Kippur feels like the most Christian to her of all of the Jewish holidays, focusing as it does on repentance and forgiveness. I replied to her that despite the thematic similarities (in fact, because of them) Yom Kippur in actual practice feels utterly foreign and extremely non-Christian to me, since it deals with those themes of repentance and forgiveness with absolutely no need for Jesus. It's a conversation directly with G-d, without the mediation of a bloody god-man sacrifice, and it introduces other not-very-Christian metaphors, such as the idea of a gate closing at the end of the holiday.
I understand the appeal of a one-time acceptance of Jesus for the forgiveness of all sins. It’s quick and complete and eternal, and I did it once myself. But for figuring out how to navigate human relationships and improve one's own life, I prefer the Jewish practice of checking in once a year.
So, the practice, I get. The belief, I do not.
At one point during Kol Nidre (i.e. day one), the cantor instructed us to page through an amidah, or standing prayer, on our own. She told us to listen to our own voices and the voices of those in prayer around us, and upon finishing the prayer, she told us, we should listen to the voice of G-d before sitting down. What does that mean? If I had obeyed, I would never have sat, and would be standing there still.
At the Ne'ila service (day two), one of the cantors read a prayer that used the phrase "the Eternal One" as a name for G-d. In the prayer book, I noticed, the text stated that "the Eternal One is a compassionate God and a gracious God." The cantor said aloud however that "the Eternal One is Compassion and Grace." I decided to file this away as a tactic for translating what people mean when they say "God." Since God is an abstraction, whenever “God” is combined with an adjective, why not just combine the words all the way, producing the adjective's abstract noun form as the name for God?
I followed this new tactic the next time I opened the Koran and discovered it works quite well for that text. Quite often, Muhammed follows mention of God with a comma and then two adjectives, like this: “There is no God but He, the Powerful, the Wise.” Or: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”
To appropriate the cantor‘s formulation, then, “God" is Power, Wisdom, Compassion, Mercy.
As at the raga concert at the Hindu temple, I felt moved to dance at Ne‘ila when the music occasionally picked up a faster, more rollicking beat. Many of the songs were somber, of course, given the theme of the day, but as we got closer to the end of the service, the joy embedded in the songs seemed to emerge. Nobody danced, but many people clapped or stomped their feet, and I kept the beat by clacking the ring on my pinkie finger against the pew in front of me.
Is there a name for the type of Jewish song that breaks away from the Hebrew and just uses simple syllables? Ai, dai, dai, dai, la-dai, da-dai, dai, dai-dai. Those are so much fun to sing! A stuffy old Protestant church doesn‘t necessarily seem the right space for it though; I am put more in mind of dancing around a campfire (a pillar of fire?) in the desert, under the waxing moon.
It was during one of these more joyous interludes that the cantor announced that Fabrangeners believe that we are all priests, and we were encouraged then to accept our priestly role and raise our hands to bless each other as we sang. I put down my prayer book and raised one hand toward the older man seated to my left. On my right side was the wall, so I raised my other hand above the mother and daughter who were seated in front of me. They had raised hands to each other, until the mother noticed me behind her, and moved her left hand to bless me. She smiled broadly and I smiled back. We made bright, friendly eye contact, which seemed deeply pleasant. How often do we maintain a good-hearted gaze with a stranger?
I noticed some congregants raising over each other a split-fingered gesture that I recognize from pop culture as the Vulcan hand symbol -- which I found startling -- only to discover later that I had the origin of the gesture backward. It was a Yom Kippur symbol first; Leonard Nimoy appropriated a Jewish priestly blessing for his character’s alien greeting on Star Trek.
After the blessings and the final closing of the gates, three men in the balconies raised shofars to announce the end of the service. We all offered “shana tovas” to those around us.
Three days later, I would return to the United Church for a third time, and from the spot where the shofars ended the Jewish High Holidays, a powerful blast from a church organ would start another Christian Sunday morning service.
UPDATE, 10.13.08: The joyful, often wordless songs are called nigunim.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Yom Kippur (Thank you, frailty?)
My friend, whom I'll call Jim, was raised Catholic. He just got engaged over the summer to his girlfriend (I’ll call her Suzi), who is Jewish. Jim and I have talked about religion a lot. I don't have anybody in my circle of friends who, as an adult, is as much a disaffected Protestant as me, but Jim probably qualifies as an equally disaffected Christian -- though my upbringing taught me that as a Catholic Jim should not be considered a "real" Christian.
Jim never attends Mass anymore, I don't think, but sometimes goes with Suzi to Shabbat services with the same young and progressive crowd as my colleague who read the poem about women's voices as vowels a few weeks ago.
Suzi invited me to her pre-fast dinner for Yom Kippur this year, starting at 4:30 on Wednesday, but I was too busy to get away from my office at that time of day, and had to miss it. I brought a full dinner to work with me that day instead, and ate it quickly at my desk at about 5:30, before rushing to make Kol Nidre services by 6PM.
The Shabbat group that Suzi and my colleague attend does not put together its own High Holidays services, though many of them join with a larger, older, progressive Jewish group in town called Fabrangen.
I have an older acquaintance who is quite active with Fabrangen, and through a tangled web of connections, I've ended up at Fabrangen's Kol Nidre for the past four years in a row. Like the Shabbat group, Fabrangen does not own a building or employ a rabbi. For High Holiday services, the group appropriates the space of a willing local church, and this year had found a space called The United Church, luckily only eight easily walkable blocks from my office.
The United Church is so named because it was formed (in the 1970s) when two different Protestant denominations, who worshipped two blocks apart from each other in downtown DC, decided to merge their services. A United Church of Christ merged with a Methodist Church, and one new "United" Church was born in the building that housed the Church of Christ.
When the Church of Christ was built, in 1833, it originally was known as the German Evangelical Concordia Congregation, and it served as something of a community center for a good portion of the city's German/Christian population at that time. The combined church still advertises German language services every first and third Sunday of the month, and the first thing I noticed as I approached the church was the tall stained glass window above the entrance, which bore a cross draped in a white sash marked with an elaborate phrase of German calligraphy.
Men and women in kippot and prayer shawls mounted the steps beneath this window, and I fell in line behind them. Inside, as usual, the Christian symbols had all been draped with Jewish art -- painted or embroidered stars of David, or Hebrew messages, or depictions of the Book of Life. I was just barely on time for the service, but I did not see any of my friends or colleagues, so I took a seat by myself in the center toward the back.
The service did not start on time, and worshippers continued to stream in, to the point that I started to feel self-conscious about being a bareheaded single Gentile with a fairly good seat, while whole families were peering around for a space to sit together. I still did not see anybody I knew there, so I rose and went upstairs by myself to the fairly empty balcony.
By the time services had started, I had relocated myself twice more to an ever-worse seat, ending up in the back row of the side balcony by an open stained glass window, which turned out to be a really interesting (and surprisingly comfortable) location for the services. For one thing, worshippers continued arriving even after services had started, such that there were people sitting in the aisles and on staircases, and spilling out into the upper and lower lobbies. This meant that the church grew stiflingly hot rather quickly, increasing the value of the refreshing breeze wafting through the open window.
Secondly, my back-balcony vantage point meant that I could not see the stage at all. I know that the cantor who led most of the service was a woman, but I have no idea what she looked like, or who else might have shared the stage with her. Her disembodied instructions on when to sit or stand, or which page to locate in the prayer book, floated up to the balcony like the voice of God. (God sings in a confidant soprano!)
Two and a half hours later, the soprano God announced that we had arrived at the conclusion of the Kol Nidre service "unconscionably early," and invited everyone back for the full day tomorrow before dismissing us. It took some time for all of the worshippers to file out of the church, which gave me the opportunity to spot Jim and Suzi and a colleague of mine I'll call Rachel in the crowd below. I gestured that I'd wait outside.
On the sidewalk, we chatted about Jim and Suzi's pre-fast meal, and everyone's plans for the next day, and Rachel asked me what part of the Kol Nidre service I liked the most. I answered with some comments about the al-chet portion of the service, a recitation of 44 types of sins, for which the congregation repents and asks forgiveness.
On a previous year, I had been quite moved by a modern adaptation of the al-chet prayer written by a Febrangener, which, as I recalled it, barely mentioned God at all, and really resonated with me as capturing the meaning of the al-chet and translating into a language easily understood by a 21st century… uh, humanist? Atheist? Gentile? (Me.)
The creative, modern al-chet also seemed like a convincing motivator for right action, couched in the sensible language of moderation, rather than the fiery language of condemnation or the moaning language of remorse. (Sample couplet: "For the sin of taking ourselves too seriously, and for the sin of not taking ourselves seriously enough." Sample couplet #2: "For the sin of demanding the power to change others, and for the sin of neglecting the power to change ourselves." If I were compiling a holy book, this prayer -- written a few years ago, I believe -- would be in it for sure.)
Glancing forward in the prayer book during Kol Nidre, I had felt disappointed by this year's al-chet that I saw coming up. Its recitation of sins seemed old-fashioned to me, and not so relevant, and a little ridiculous. It called for repentance for sins that are meaningless to me, like desecrating God's holy name, or for sins that I'm pretty sure I haven't committed, like bribery or extortion or "casting off the yoke of Heaven" (whatever that means).
However, when we got to the al-chet, the cantor did not go by the book. We sang a few Hebrew verses of the prayer, and then the cantor opened it up to the worshippers to raise their hands and volunteer a sin. With each suggested phrase, the cantor would sing it back, and then the congregation would follow it with a short section of the Hebrew prayer. After each three or five sins, we would return to the book, and sing a full couplet, and then take more suggestions from the group.
"The cantor took the personal and made it liturgical and I found that very powerful," I told Rachel. "Sin is a weird concept to me, and I have a hard time coming up with what I think my sins are, but when I hear someone else throw out 'the sin of pettiness' or 'the sin of holding onto anger,' I know I'm implicated too, and there's something really close and human and supportive about everybody admitting frailty together and making a vow to do better."
Congregants offered up the sins of "not caring for our planet" (I thought of how I don't dry my clothes on a line), of "not caring for the poor" (I can't say I'm a champ in that arena either), and two people offered variations on "holding onto anger with parents" (I guess this one's pretty universal).
Rachel asked me if I was planning to return for the full day of Yom Kippur services the next morning. I had planned to take the day off from work as one of two annual "personal holidays" we are allowed, but I told Rachel that traditionally I only attend Kol Nidre, and spend the next day in personal contemplation. Rachel encouraged me to change my plans this year.
"You don't even have to follow along through the whole thing, if you don't want to," she told me. "I bring my own readings sometimes and will sort of hop in and out of the service as I feel moved. You could bring something else, if you want."
"Well, I didn't manage to finish all of my Ramadan reading last month," I told her. "I could bring my Koran, or some of the other books on Islam that I'm reading, like No God But God, or The Muslim Jesus."
Rachel treated it as a joke, but I had been serious.
Her instant reply was that bringing Muslim books probably wouldn't be a good idea, and then there was a split second where I think it wasn't clear to either of us whether my suggestion was utterly out of the question or whether a progressive Jewish congregation with no rabbi meeting in a Christian church might happily endorse an ex-Christian reading Koran in the pews on Yom Kippur.
"Well, think about it," said Rachel. "You could at least come back for Ne'ila at the very end. It should be starting around 5:45."
"Yeah, come back for Ne'ila," Suzi chimed in, breaking off a side conversation with another congregant, and looking as enthusiastic and serious and emotional as I have ever seen her. "It's at the end of the day, and the sun’s going down, and you're so empty from the fast that it's easier to be ... filled."
"I'll think about it," I said, as our sidewalk group disbanded, and I walked back to my office to retrieve my bicycle.
Jim never attends Mass anymore, I don't think, but sometimes goes with Suzi to Shabbat services with the same young and progressive crowd as my colleague who read the poem about women's voices as vowels a few weeks ago.
Suzi invited me to her pre-fast dinner for Yom Kippur this year, starting at 4:30 on Wednesday, but I was too busy to get away from my office at that time of day, and had to miss it. I brought a full dinner to work with me that day instead, and ate it quickly at my desk at about 5:30, before rushing to make Kol Nidre services by 6PM.
The Shabbat group that Suzi and my colleague attend does not put together its own High Holidays services, though many of them join with a larger, older, progressive Jewish group in town called Fabrangen.
I have an older acquaintance who is quite active with Fabrangen, and through a tangled web of connections, I've ended up at Fabrangen's Kol Nidre for the past four years in a row. Like the Shabbat group, Fabrangen does not own a building or employ a rabbi. For High Holiday services, the group appropriates the space of a willing local church, and this year had found a space called The United Church, luckily only eight easily walkable blocks from my office.
The United Church is so named because it was formed (in the 1970s) when two different Protestant denominations, who worshipped two blocks apart from each other in downtown DC, decided to merge their services. A United Church of Christ merged with a Methodist Church, and one new "United" Church was born in the building that housed the Church of Christ.
When the Church of Christ was built, in 1833, it originally was known as the German Evangelical Concordia Congregation, and it served as something of a community center for a good portion of the city's German/Christian population at that time. The combined church still advertises German language services every first and third Sunday of the month, and the first thing I noticed as I approached the church was the tall stained glass window above the entrance, which bore a cross draped in a white sash marked with an elaborate phrase of German calligraphy.
Men and women in kippot and prayer shawls mounted the steps beneath this window, and I fell in line behind them. Inside, as usual, the Christian symbols had all been draped with Jewish art -- painted or embroidered stars of David, or Hebrew messages, or depictions of the Book of Life. I was just barely on time for the service, but I did not see any of my friends or colleagues, so I took a seat by myself in the center toward the back.
The service did not start on time, and worshippers continued to stream in, to the point that I started to feel self-conscious about being a bareheaded single Gentile with a fairly good seat, while whole families were peering around for a space to sit together. I still did not see anybody I knew there, so I rose and went upstairs by myself to the fairly empty balcony.
By the time services had started, I had relocated myself twice more to an ever-worse seat, ending up in the back row of the side balcony by an open stained glass window, which turned out to be a really interesting (and surprisingly comfortable) location for the services. For one thing, worshippers continued arriving even after services had started, such that there were people sitting in the aisles and on staircases, and spilling out into the upper and lower lobbies. This meant that the church grew stiflingly hot rather quickly, increasing the value of the refreshing breeze wafting through the open window.
Secondly, my back-balcony vantage point meant that I could not see the stage at all. I know that the cantor who led most of the service was a woman, but I have no idea what she looked like, or who else might have shared the stage with her. Her disembodied instructions on when to sit or stand, or which page to locate in the prayer book, floated up to the balcony like the voice of God. (God sings in a confidant soprano!)
Two and a half hours later, the soprano God announced that we had arrived at the conclusion of the Kol Nidre service "unconscionably early," and invited everyone back for the full day tomorrow before dismissing us. It took some time for all of the worshippers to file out of the church, which gave me the opportunity to spot Jim and Suzi and a colleague of mine I'll call Rachel in the crowd below. I gestured that I'd wait outside.
On the sidewalk, we chatted about Jim and Suzi's pre-fast meal, and everyone's plans for the next day, and Rachel asked me what part of the Kol Nidre service I liked the most. I answered with some comments about the al-chet portion of the service, a recitation of 44 types of sins, for which the congregation repents and asks forgiveness.
On a previous year, I had been quite moved by a modern adaptation of the al-chet prayer written by a Febrangener, which, as I recalled it, barely mentioned God at all, and really resonated with me as capturing the meaning of the al-chet and translating into a language easily understood by a 21st century… uh, humanist? Atheist? Gentile? (Me.)
The creative, modern al-chet also seemed like a convincing motivator for right action, couched in the sensible language of moderation, rather than the fiery language of condemnation or the moaning language of remorse. (Sample couplet: "For the sin of taking ourselves too seriously, and for the sin of not taking ourselves seriously enough." Sample couplet #2: "For the sin of demanding the power to change others, and for the sin of neglecting the power to change ourselves." If I were compiling a holy book, this prayer -- written a few years ago, I believe -- would be in it for sure.)
Glancing forward in the prayer book during Kol Nidre, I had felt disappointed by this year's al-chet that I saw coming up. Its recitation of sins seemed old-fashioned to me, and not so relevant, and a little ridiculous. It called for repentance for sins that are meaningless to me, like desecrating God's holy name, or for sins that I'm pretty sure I haven't committed, like bribery or extortion or "casting off the yoke of Heaven" (whatever that means).
However, when we got to the al-chet, the cantor did not go by the book. We sang a few Hebrew verses of the prayer, and then the cantor opened it up to the worshippers to raise their hands and volunteer a sin. With each suggested phrase, the cantor would sing it back, and then the congregation would follow it with a short section of the Hebrew prayer. After each three or five sins, we would return to the book, and sing a full couplet, and then take more suggestions from the group.
"The cantor took the personal and made it liturgical and I found that very powerful," I told Rachel. "Sin is a weird concept to me, and I have a hard time coming up with what I think my sins are, but when I hear someone else throw out 'the sin of pettiness' or 'the sin of holding onto anger,' I know I'm implicated too, and there's something really close and human and supportive about everybody admitting frailty together and making a vow to do better."
Congregants offered up the sins of "not caring for our planet" (I thought of how I don't dry my clothes on a line), of "not caring for the poor" (I can't say I'm a champ in that arena either), and two people offered variations on "holding onto anger with parents" (I guess this one's pretty universal).
Rachel asked me if I was planning to return for the full day of Yom Kippur services the next morning. I had planned to take the day off from work as one of two annual "personal holidays" we are allowed, but I told Rachel that traditionally I only attend Kol Nidre, and spend the next day in personal contemplation. Rachel encouraged me to change my plans this year.
"You don't even have to follow along through the whole thing, if you don't want to," she told me. "I bring my own readings sometimes and will sort of hop in and out of the service as I feel moved. You could bring something else, if you want."
"Well, I didn't manage to finish all of my Ramadan reading last month," I told her. "I could bring my Koran, or some of the other books on Islam that I'm reading, like No God But God, or The Muslim Jesus."
Rachel treated it as a joke, but I had been serious.
Her instant reply was that bringing Muslim books probably wouldn't be a good idea, and then there was a split second where I think it wasn't clear to either of us whether my suggestion was utterly out of the question or whether a progressive Jewish congregation with no rabbi meeting in a Christian church might happily endorse an ex-Christian reading Koran in the pews on Yom Kippur.
"Well, think about it," said Rachel. "You could at least come back for Ne'ila at the very end. It should be starting around 5:45."
"Yeah, come back for Ne'ila," Suzi chimed in, breaking off a side conversation with another congregant, and looking as enthusiastic and serious and emotional as I have ever seen her. "It's at the end of the day, and the sun’s going down, and you're so empty from the fast that it's easier to be ... filled."
"I'll think about it," I said, as our sidewalk group disbanded, and I walked back to my office to retrieve my bicycle.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Navaratri (Thank you, India.)
Navaratri, a nine-day Hindu celebration of various manifestations of the Divine Mother, began last Tuesday, triggered by the same new moon that ended Ramadan and began the Jewish New Year. There's no way I can deny that I felt my heart leap when I first discovered that this holiday is meant to honor the goddesses.
I grew up with a Father God. This Father God has a Son, who lived and walked upon the Earth inside a male body. I have even met Christians who will insist that the Holy Ghost is male, meaning that the entire Trinity can be considered -- apparently -- as just a big all-male three-way, with the unmistakable understanding that THERE IS NOTHING FEMALE ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN GOD. Period.
So, after a month of focus on the Father God of Islam... and his male prophet... and the male-dominated worship spaces at the mosques, the sense of relief and balance that Navaratri might bring felt exciting to me.
Navaratri spends nine days and nights honoring the sacred embodiment of creative and feminine energy -- Shakti.
The holiday is divided into three parts, with three nights apiece devoted to a different goddess, each of whom represents a different facet of Shakti’s divine feminine power. The three first days and nights go to Durga, a fierce warrior goddess, consort of Shiva, and the mother of Ganesha. She rides a tiger and slays demons. The second three go to Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu, and giver of physical wealth. She is also closely associated with the upcoming holiday of Diwali. The final three nights belong to Saraswati, consort of Brahma, supreme goddess of wisdom and the arts. She is often depicted as a river, or as connected to rivers or water.
When I set about finding a Navaratri celebration in my area, I quickly learned that all of the Hindu temples are in the suburbs. I found two temples from which to choose, as well as one Hindu organization planning Navaratri celebrations for various school and university auditoriums in Maryland and Virginia. I was leaning toward a Saturday night celebration at a university, when I discovered an afternoon concert planned for 1PM at the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in suburban Maryland.
The flyer I found announced that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam would be providing vocals, with Avaneeswaram Vinu on violin and Shertalai Ananthakrishnanan on mridangam, a type of South Indian drum.
Perfect, I thought. If gay men know how to do anything worshipful, it's how to revere female vocalists as the incarnation of goddesses. So, I will go listen to Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sing. It will be a good excuse for me to show up at the Hindu temple for the first time, and it will connect to the theme of the holiday. Perhaps I will consider attendance at the concert to be my worship of Saraswati, and her connection to music and the arts.
Instead of biking, I chose to rent a Zipcar for the 17-mile trip.
The Sri Siva Vishnu Temple is located on a winding two-lane road accessed from a much larger suburban artery lined with strip malls, fast food, and gas stations. It is tucked away on this largely residential street behind some trees, much less obvious from the road than the houses behind their flat lawns. A sign in the full parking lot directed overflow traffic to park at the nearby Greek Orthodox church.
I did this, and then walked back to the temple on the shoulder of the road.
The temple is all white, with red doors. The basement of the temple isn't visible at the first approach, but can be accessed via a descent to the parking lot behind the building. From the front, a pedestrian can walk directly on top of this basement, onto a wide walkway with stone railings that encircles the main floor. On top of this, five tall, white, tapered peaks, inlaid with figures and carvings, set the building apart as a special kind of gathering place.
As I walked up to the walkway by the temple, I saw a sign that stated: "NO smoking, NO alcohol, and NO non-veg on premises. This includes parking lot."
The main entrance to the temple was in the rear, up a set of tall stairs from the parking lot, with the already elevated walkway around the temple leading directly to the main door. Outdoor cubbies clearly meant for shoes lined the walkway, so I shed my shoes and socks before going inside, though I missed the foot-washing station just inside the door.
The lobby just inside the front vestibule spanned the width of the temple. To the right, the walls were lined with shrines. In front of me, archways opened into the primary worship space. To the left was a small store with books and DVDs and incense, and next to the racks of retail goods stood a man behind a counter with a money box. I asked if I should buy concert tickets through him, and he directed me down a staircase to the basement.
The smell of curry grew stronger as I descended, and downstairs I found a tableau not that different from the basement of the church I grew up in. A lower-level lobby sat beneath the upstairs lobby, with doors opening into classrooms, restrooms, and a fellowship area connected via a serving window to a kitchen. Here, families sat together eating lunch from styrofoam plates.
Next to the fellowship area, doors opened into an auditorium filled with plastic blue chairs facing a stage draped with rust- and saffron-colored cloths. A chest-high goddess statue with four arms and a raised leg stood to the side of the stage.
It was here that I paid my $15 for the concert and took a seat.
When the musicians entered, they took their places on a low platform at the center of the stage set with three microphones. Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sat cross-legged at the central microphone and faced the audience. She wore an orange and green sari, a large, bright red bindi, and a gold necklace, with her hair pulled into a loose knot behind her neck. Her male accompanists, both in kurtas, one grey, and one rust-colored, sat on either side of her and faced each other.
Without comment to the audience, Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam then proceeded to sing ragas for three hours without a break. She acknowledged applause with a namaste, but otherwise did not appear to respond to the crowd. Often, I found myself with my eyes closed, transported by the music to a place where blanking out my mind was easy. Sometimes, the more upbeat songs made me want to dance, though I noticed the audience remained mostly motionless, and I noticed that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam herself limited her movements to keeping the beat with one hand slapping against her thigh. Less often, but frequently enough to notice it, I grew bored, with the unfamiliar words to the songs blending together and starting to sound "all the same" to my ignorant ears. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, I had to step out to phone the car company to extend my reservation.
At 4PM, a barefoot, bald man in a blue shirt and grey slacks took to the stage to announce that the concert must end, because some women needed to prepare the basement auditorium for another use later in the evening.
The man heaped praise upon Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam, three times calling her voice "melifluous." He was right. She was beautiful and entrancing. (If we have art, why do we need religion?)
"I hope you noticed how our musician today chose her ragas based on our season of Navaratri," the man said, though his thick accent and frequent use of long proper names made his speech difficult for me to follow. "Especially, I noticed her focus on Lakshmi, since today is one of her days."
The man took a few moments to praise the three goddesses of Navaratri for their gifts, and reminded us all that the primary Trinity of Hinduism -- Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu -- are nothing without their female consorts. He focused especially on the relationship between Vishnu and Lakshmi, since it was Lakshmi's day, and gave an example pulled from contemporary headlines.
"Just look at what's happening in our country now, with the economy melting down to nothing," the man said. "But what can the Protector do… what can Vishnu do to protect us without money? And where do we turn when the problem is with money? To Lakshmi."
Then a male priest in traditional dress with a grey topknot of hair and a red bindi entered the stage with a giant silver platter of fruits. The man in the blue shirt explained that the priest would now offer a traditional blessing to the musicians to thank them for their appearance today.
The priest offered his blessing, while each of the musicians touched a finger to a substance apparently pooled on the platter and rubbed the finger along their skin, around their necks and behind their ears. Then, each member of the musical Trinity selected a fruit, and took a bite.
The audience was leaving, so I went upstairs to check out the main worship space, before the reservation on my car ran out.
I grew up with a Father God. This Father God has a Son, who lived and walked upon the Earth inside a male body. I have even met Christians who will insist that the Holy Ghost is male, meaning that the entire Trinity can be considered -- apparently -- as just a big all-male three-way, with the unmistakable understanding that THERE IS NOTHING FEMALE ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN GOD. Period.
So, after a month of focus on the Father God of Islam... and his male prophet... and the male-dominated worship spaces at the mosques, the sense of relief and balance that Navaratri might bring felt exciting to me.
Navaratri spends nine days and nights honoring the sacred embodiment of creative and feminine energy -- Shakti.
The holiday is divided into three parts, with three nights apiece devoted to a different goddess, each of whom represents a different facet of Shakti’s divine feminine power. The three first days and nights go to Durga, a fierce warrior goddess, consort of Shiva, and the mother of Ganesha. She rides a tiger and slays demons. The second three go to Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu, and giver of physical wealth. She is also closely associated with the upcoming holiday of Diwali. The final three nights belong to Saraswati, consort of Brahma, supreme goddess of wisdom and the arts. She is often depicted as a river, or as connected to rivers or water.
When I set about finding a Navaratri celebration in my area, I quickly learned that all of the Hindu temples are in the suburbs. I found two temples from which to choose, as well as one Hindu organization planning Navaratri celebrations for various school and university auditoriums in Maryland and Virginia. I was leaning toward a Saturday night celebration at a university, when I discovered an afternoon concert planned for 1PM at the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in suburban Maryland.
The flyer I found announced that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam would be providing vocals, with Avaneeswaram Vinu on violin and Shertalai Ananthakrishnanan on mridangam, a type of South Indian drum.
Perfect, I thought. If gay men know how to do anything worshipful, it's how to revere female vocalists as the incarnation of goddesses. So, I will go listen to Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sing. It will be a good excuse for me to show up at the Hindu temple for the first time, and it will connect to the theme of the holiday. Perhaps I will consider attendance at the concert to be my worship of Saraswati, and her connection to music and the arts.
Instead of biking, I chose to rent a Zipcar for the 17-mile trip.
The Sri Siva Vishnu Temple is located on a winding two-lane road accessed from a much larger suburban artery lined with strip malls, fast food, and gas stations. It is tucked away on this largely residential street behind some trees, much less obvious from the road than the houses behind their flat lawns. A sign in the full parking lot directed overflow traffic to park at the nearby Greek Orthodox church.
I did this, and then walked back to the temple on the shoulder of the road.
The temple is all white, with red doors. The basement of the temple isn't visible at the first approach, but can be accessed via a descent to the parking lot behind the building. From the front, a pedestrian can walk directly on top of this basement, onto a wide walkway with stone railings that encircles the main floor. On top of this, five tall, white, tapered peaks, inlaid with figures and carvings, set the building apart as a special kind of gathering place.
As I walked up to the walkway by the temple, I saw a sign that stated: "NO smoking, NO alcohol, and NO non-veg on premises. This includes parking lot."
The main entrance to the temple was in the rear, up a set of tall stairs from the parking lot, with the already elevated walkway around the temple leading directly to the main door. Outdoor cubbies clearly meant for shoes lined the walkway, so I shed my shoes and socks before going inside, though I missed the foot-washing station just inside the door.
The lobby just inside the front vestibule spanned the width of the temple. To the right, the walls were lined with shrines. In front of me, archways opened into the primary worship space. To the left was a small store with books and DVDs and incense, and next to the racks of retail goods stood a man behind a counter with a money box. I asked if I should buy concert tickets through him, and he directed me down a staircase to the basement.
The smell of curry grew stronger as I descended, and downstairs I found a tableau not that different from the basement of the church I grew up in. A lower-level lobby sat beneath the upstairs lobby, with doors opening into classrooms, restrooms, and a fellowship area connected via a serving window to a kitchen. Here, families sat together eating lunch from styrofoam plates.
Next to the fellowship area, doors opened into an auditorium filled with plastic blue chairs facing a stage draped with rust- and saffron-colored cloths. A chest-high goddess statue with four arms and a raised leg stood to the side of the stage.
It was here that I paid my $15 for the concert and took a seat.
When the musicians entered, they took their places on a low platform at the center of the stage set with three microphones. Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sat cross-legged at the central microphone and faced the audience. She wore an orange and green sari, a large, bright red bindi, and a gold necklace, with her hair pulled into a loose knot behind her neck. Her male accompanists, both in kurtas, one grey, and one rust-colored, sat on either side of her and faced each other.
Without comment to the audience, Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam then proceeded to sing ragas for three hours without a break. She acknowledged applause with a namaste, but otherwise did not appear to respond to the crowd. Often, I found myself with my eyes closed, transported by the music to a place where blanking out my mind was easy. Sometimes, the more upbeat songs made me want to dance, though I noticed the audience remained mostly motionless, and I noticed that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam herself limited her movements to keeping the beat with one hand slapping against her thigh. Less often, but frequently enough to notice it, I grew bored, with the unfamiliar words to the songs blending together and starting to sound "all the same" to my ignorant ears. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, I had to step out to phone the car company to extend my reservation.
At 4PM, a barefoot, bald man in a blue shirt and grey slacks took to the stage to announce that the concert must end, because some women needed to prepare the basement auditorium for another use later in the evening.
The man heaped praise upon Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam, three times calling her voice "melifluous." He was right. She was beautiful and entrancing. (If we have art, why do we need religion?)
"I hope you noticed how our musician today chose her ragas based on our season of Navaratri," the man said, though his thick accent and frequent use of long proper names made his speech difficult for me to follow. "Especially, I noticed her focus on Lakshmi, since today is one of her days."
The man took a few moments to praise the three goddesses of Navaratri for their gifts, and reminded us all that the primary Trinity of Hinduism -- Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu -- are nothing without their female consorts. He focused especially on the relationship between Vishnu and Lakshmi, since it was Lakshmi's day, and gave an example pulled from contemporary headlines.
"Just look at what's happening in our country now, with the economy melting down to nothing," the man said. "But what can the Protector do… what can Vishnu do to protect us without money? And where do we turn when the problem is with money? To Lakshmi."
Then a male priest in traditional dress with a grey topknot of hair and a red bindi entered the stage with a giant silver platter of fruits. The man in the blue shirt explained that the priest would now offer a traditional blessing to the musicians to thank them for their appearance today.
The priest offered his blessing, while each of the musicians touched a finger to a substance apparently pooled on the platter and rubbed the finger along their skin, around their necks and behind their ears. Then, each member of the musical Trinity selected a fruit, and took a bite.
The audience was leaving, so I went upstairs to check out the main worship space, before the reservation on my car ran out.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
The Five Pillars: Sawm (Fasting)
For the brand of Christianity I grew up with, fasting has been largely abandoned.
The only times I can remember fasting coming up in church was when the sermon or the Sunday School lesson would cover the section of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus teaches that those who are fasting should conceal the outward appearance of their hunger. Those who look somber while they are fasting are here termed “hypocrites,” and Jesus informs his audience that “your Father, who is unseen, and … who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Growing up, I remember this fasting passage being used mostly as a metaphor. Though people fasted “in Bible times,” we don’t have to do that these days, it was implied, but we can learn how to keep our private struggles to ourselves and wait for our reward from God.
Reading through the book that Zaki the Ahmadi had given me, I learned that some Muslims take issue with a fasting-related edit that comes later in the book of Matthew. A story about the disciples trying and failing to cast a demon out of a boy ends with Jesus telling the disciples they have too little faith. Some manuscripts record that Jesus went on to say that such a demon will only come out “through prayer and fasting,” though this is relegated to a footnote in most current Bibles. According to The Introduction to the Study of the Holy Qu’ran, this is proof that even Jesus acknowledges that faith in Him alone is insufficient for salvation, absent prayer and fasting -- two of the Five Pillars of Islam.
“This criticism was so vital that Christians found themselves unable to give any reply,” states the Ahmadi text. “The only way of escape they found was in deleting the verse from the Gospel.”
I must admit that even in my well-marked copy of the Bible, I had never noticed this footnote before. My only margin-note on this passage was to write “faith in what?” next to where Jesus tells the disciples they haven’t enough “faith” within them to cast out demons. If I follow my scrawl correctly, my reasoning was that since Jesus wasn't dead yet, the disciples' faith couldn't mimic modern Christians' faith in the resurrection -- but if Jesus was in the process of bringing a new covenant to supersede Jewish law, would the disciples' Jewish faith in the God of Abraham be enough?
What were the requirements, exactly, of the nether-faith between the Covenants? (This question had troubled me early on, as a devoutly Christian child.)
In addition to the faith question, my scrawled Bible notes here include exclamation points and underlines of the quotes that reveal a sassy drama-queen Jesus who was fed up with His disciples.
"Oh, unbelieving and perverse generation," Jesus harrumphs. "How long shall I put up with you!"
You can almost see Him rolling his eyes, and hear the dramatic sigh. You can almost see the full sweep of his robe's sleeve as he gestures the next line.
"Bring the boy to me."
Then Jesus casts out the demon Himself, and then -- snap! -- he rips on the size of the disciples' faith in this well-known passage: “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Having not tried my hand at casting out demons or moving mountains during Ramadan, I can’t say if my fasting would have helped, though I’ve no doubt that the “faith” component in me is significantly smaller than a mustard seed. I've no more idea what "faith" should mean for me in the 21st century than I do for the disciples in the 1st.
And while the fasting of Ramadan felt like useful practice, it did nothing to increase anything I could call "faith."
In fact, partway through Ramadan, I read some news that, if anything, diminished my faith. I was astonished to read a newspaper article about how fasting is dealt with inside some Muslim-dominant societies of the world. The article focused on young Muslims in Saudi Arabia who are working to "reclaim" Ramadan, reinstituting a focus on fasting, God, and attention to the poor. I was surprised to learn that this is not the focus for Muslims everywhere on Ramadan already.
Though I have been separated from Christianity for 17 years now, I have long been appalled by the commercialization of the holiday of Christmas. I find it shocking that a religion could allow one of its holidays to be cheapened and hijacked the way Christmas has, with its plastic trees and plastic, plug-in baby Jesuses and the profligate spending of money on plastic junk for kids. No other serious religion, I once sniffed, would let such an important holiday slide into popular decline like this -- and I held onto that opinion as an indictment of Christianity itself.
Well, no longer. The way Ramadan is apparently celebrated by many means I have to admit Islam to this club, and it's a shame. It's a shame because perversions of Islam are already given quite a lot of attention by those of us in the West, as we react to the latest subway bomb in Madrid or London, or hear of homosexuals being beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or worry about the next terrorist attack emerging from the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The perversion of Ramadan is far less immediately grave in its consequences, than, say, the idea of a jihadic struggle motivating murder. But much like the birthday celebration for a charismatic leader who preached about caring for the poor has become a reason to go into debt indulging in over-consumption, so too, apparently, has a fasting holiday emphasizing self-discipline become a feasting holiday tending toward sloth.
According to the article I read, many in the Muslim world deal with the difficulty of the fast by essentially turning day into night and night into day during the month of Ramadan. Since the entire society is doing this, it causes no problems, and life can continue as normal. You can get a dental appointment in the middle of the night; your work will adjust to accommodate the shift in daily habits.
As one young Saudi put it in the Washington Post article: "We replaced the pain of hunger during Ramadan with the pain of overeating and indigestion. We've turned it into a month of soap operas and entertainment, a month of the supermarkets. ... Instead of saying hello to the month that purifies us of sin, we're saying hello to the month of samosas, entertainment, soap operas and shopping malls."
Sounds like the Saudi version of American Christmas to me.
The group of people with whom I shared my last communal iftar of the month seemed to agree. Many of them had spent time in Middle Eastern countries and talked about the vast differences between their fasting experiences there versus in the United States.
"I would get up at four o'clock in the afternoon. It did not feel like I was fasting," said one woman. "People who got up earlier than that would complain about having to go four or five hours without food."
"Over there, they think we aren't having the real Ramadan experience in the US, because not everyone is doing it," said Richard (the man who had cautioned against worshiping the sun). "They focus on how we're a minority, and the culture doesn't accommodate us. But for us, we think we're having the deeper experience, because we have to fit this focus on God into our regular lives. We have to make sacrifices to worship."
Others chimed in with their own strategies and thoughts on how to fit the holiday into their lives as unobtrusively as possible for the Christians and atheists and other non-celebrants around them.
Everyone seemed to agree that they preferred the private fast to the public feasting, and it struck me that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount would highly approve of these American Muslims.
The only times I can remember fasting coming up in church was when the sermon or the Sunday School lesson would cover the section of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus teaches that those who are fasting should conceal the outward appearance of their hunger. Those who look somber while they are fasting are here termed “hypocrites,” and Jesus informs his audience that “your Father, who is unseen, and … who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Growing up, I remember this fasting passage being used mostly as a metaphor. Though people fasted “in Bible times,” we don’t have to do that these days, it was implied, but we can learn how to keep our private struggles to ourselves and wait for our reward from God.
Reading through the book that Zaki the Ahmadi had given me, I learned that some Muslims take issue with a fasting-related edit that comes later in the book of Matthew. A story about the disciples trying and failing to cast a demon out of a boy ends with Jesus telling the disciples they have too little faith. Some manuscripts record that Jesus went on to say that such a demon will only come out “through prayer and fasting,” though this is relegated to a footnote in most current Bibles. According to The Introduction to the Study of the Holy Qu’ran, this is proof that even Jesus acknowledges that faith in Him alone is insufficient for salvation, absent prayer and fasting -- two of the Five Pillars of Islam.
“This criticism was so vital that Christians found themselves unable to give any reply,” states the Ahmadi text. “The only way of escape they found was in deleting the verse from the Gospel.”
I must admit that even in my well-marked copy of the Bible, I had never noticed this footnote before. My only margin-note on this passage was to write “faith in what?” next to where Jesus tells the disciples they haven’t enough “faith” within them to cast out demons. If I follow my scrawl correctly, my reasoning was that since Jesus wasn't dead yet, the disciples' faith couldn't mimic modern Christians' faith in the resurrection -- but if Jesus was in the process of bringing a new covenant to supersede Jewish law, would the disciples' Jewish faith in the God of Abraham be enough?
What were the requirements, exactly, of the nether-faith between the Covenants? (This question had troubled me early on, as a devoutly Christian child.)
In addition to the faith question, my scrawled Bible notes here include exclamation points and underlines of the quotes that reveal a sassy drama-queen Jesus who was fed up with His disciples.
"Oh, unbelieving and perverse generation," Jesus harrumphs. "How long shall I put up with you!"
You can almost see Him rolling his eyes, and hear the dramatic sigh. You can almost see the full sweep of his robe's sleeve as he gestures the next line.
"Bring the boy to me."
Then Jesus casts out the demon Himself, and then -- snap! -- he rips on the size of the disciples' faith in this well-known passage: “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Having not tried my hand at casting out demons or moving mountains during Ramadan, I can’t say if my fasting would have helped, though I’ve no doubt that the “faith” component in me is significantly smaller than a mustard seed. I've no more idea what "faith" should mean for me in the 21st century than I do for the disciples in the 1st.
And while the fasting of Ramadan felt like useful practice, it did nothing to increase anything I could call "faith."
In fact, partway through Ramadan, I read some news that, if anything, diminished my faith. I was astonished to read a newspaper article about how fasting is dealt with inside some Muslim-dominant societies of the world. The article focused on young Muslims in Saudi Arabia who are working to "reclaim" Ramadan, reinstituting a focus on fasting, God, and attention to the poor. I was surprised to learn that this is not the focus for Muslims everywhere on Ramadan already.
Though I have been separated from Christianity for 17 years now, I have long been appalled by the commercialization of the holiday of Christmas. I find it shocking that a religion could allow one of its holidays to be cheapened and hijacked the way Christmas has, with its plastic trees and plastic, plug-in baby Jesuses and the profligate spending of money on plastic junk for kids. No other serious religion, I once sniffed, would let such an important holiday slide into popular decline like this -- and I held onto that opinion as an indictment of Christianity itself.
Well, no longer. The way Ramadan is apparently celebrated by many means I have to admit Islam to this club, and it's a shame. It's a shame because perversions of Islam are already given quite a lot of attention by those of us in the West, as we react to the latest subway bomb in Madrid or London, or hear of homosexuals being beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or worry about the next terrorist attack emerging from the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The perversion of Ramadan is far less immediately grave in its consequences, than, say, the idea of a jihadic struggle motivating murder. But much like the birthday celebration for a charismatic leader who preached about caring for the poor has become a reason to go into debt indulging in over-consumption, so too, apparently, has a fasting holiday emphasizing self-discipline become a feasting holiday tending toward sloth.
According to the article I read, many in the Muslim world deal with the difficulty of the fast by essentially turning day into night and night into day during the month of Ramadan. Since the entire society is doing this, it causes no problems, and life can continue as normal. You can get a dental appointment in the middle of the night; your work will adjust to accommodate the shift in daily habits.
As one young Saudi put it in the Washington Post article: "We replaced the pain of hunger during Ramadan with the pain of overeating and indigestion. We've turned it into a month of soap operas and entertainment, a month of the supermarkets. ... Instead of saying hello to the month that purifies us of sin, we're saying hello to the month of samosas, entertainment, soap operas and shopping malls."
Sounds like the Saudi version of American Christmas to me.
The group of people with whom I shared my last communal iftar of the month seemed to agree. Many of them had spent time in Middle Eastern countries and talked about the vast differences between their fasting experiences there versus in the United States.
"I would get up at four o'clock in the afternoon. It did not feel like I was fasting," said one woman. "People who got up earlier than that would complain about having to go four or five hours without food."
"Over there, they think we aren't having the real Ramadan experience in the US, because not everyone is doing it," said Richard (the man who had cautioned against worshiping the sun). "They focus on how we're a minority, and the culture doesn't accommodate us. But for us, we think we're having the deeper experience, because we have to fit this focus on God into our regular lives. We have to make sacrifices to worship."
Others chimed in with their own strategies and thoughts on how to fit the holiday into their lives as unobtrusively as possible for the Christians and atheists and other non-celebrants around them.
Everyone seemed to agree that they preferred the private fast to the public feasting, and it struck me that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount would highly approve of these American Muslims.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Rosh Hashanah/Eid al Fitr/Navaratri
Seeing the emergence of a new moon signals the end of Ramadan, but for me, at the appropriate time, the moon remained hidden by the remains of a just-ended storm.
I stood on the sidewalk outside my apartment building and scanned for lucky breaks in the clouds, but, finding none, decided that I would break my Ramadan fast the next day anyway. All the Muslims I had met during the holiday were planning for Eid al Fitr on Wednesday, October 1. Plus, two other religious groups for whom the beginning of the lunar month triggered a holiday -- Jews and Hindus -- were already celebrating by September 30, while the moon was covered. Most of my Jewish colleagues had taken the day off from work for Rosh Hashanah, and I'd heard on NPR in the afternoon about a deadly temple stampede in India where the eight-day Navaratri celebrations had begun.
We had entered the following lunar months:
Shawwal, the tenth month of the Muslim calendar
Ashwin, the sixth month of the Hindu calendar
Tishrei, the first month of the Jewish calendar
So, happy New Year. Shana tova. And happy birthday too, to the human race, since the first day of Tishrei is the day on which YHWH created Adam.
Anyway, I had thought I might convince Mohammed to celebrate Eid with me (on Wednesday), but he was too busy. I myself was too busy on Tuesday to find a temple service celebrating Rosh Hashanah, because I had non-celebrant friends scheduled for a different occasion at my own house. Still, I served fresh apples and good honey to them, in recognition of the Jewish New Year, and looked for other ways I might mark the occasion by myself.
Through reading about Rosh Hashanah, I had discovered the Jewish custom of tashlikh, a form of repentance and symbolic casting off of sins at the new year. It derives from a verse in the book of Micah that states: "You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
The idea is that you proceed on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah to pray by a naturally flowing body of water, and cast your sins therein. Some observers also cast in stones or bread to symbolize the sins. I had missed the afternoon, of course, and had missed Rosh Hashanah altogether for those who hold that it is a one-day holiday. But, there is Jewish disagreement on this point, so for those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah as a two-day holiday, it was still on. I had some stale pita leftover from the Equinamadan party, so I decided to rise early on Eid (or, Rosh Hashanah, day two) and cast my pita into a flowing stream.
Luckily, I live right next to one.
I rose before the sunrise again the next day, and performed my yoga-Fajr before dressing for work, bundling the pita into my backpack, and walking downhill from my apartment into the huge urban park that stretches from the DC-Maryland border all the way to the Potomac River.
I have worked in downtown Washington, DC for nearly six years, and had always intended to rise early and experience a leisurely stroll to work through the park. I will now have to credit Rosh Hashanah with finally making that happen for the first time.
In the center of the park, Rock Creek flows south. I had envisioned standing on the first creek bridge I would come to, and casting my pita from there, but when I got to the bridge I felt exposed, and I wanted to be closer to the water.
So, I walked into the park, in the direction of downtown, following the footpath until a clearing opened up between the path and the creek. Then, I walked over to find a creek bank lined with smooth stones, and I pulled the bread out of my backpack.
Joggers and bicyclists and other walkers continued passing on the path, and for a moment I wished I had just planned to cast stones, which would perhaps look like a more normal activity than using the bread. I started quickly ripping the bread into pieces and flinging it into the creek, before I realized I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing. Also, I wasn't praying. No focus, no attention, no mindfulness to the ritual: What's the point of this, I thought.
I realized I hadn't looked up any particular Jewish prayers to have in mind, and I felt like a jerk.
So, I slowed down, and peeled pieces of the bread less frantically into the water. I held a stack of four rounds. I would break four pieces off at a time, and then drop them singly into the shallows at my feet.
I had tried to plan ahead and think about what "sins" from the past year I might place on the bread, but as I dropped the final piece into the river I realized hadn't been thinking about sin at all. The floating pieces remained uncharged and meaningless in my imagination and just sat there, bobbing, soggy.
I realized that the focus of my attention had been divided between the creek itself (listening to the water flow) and an awareness of the people on the path (wondering if they were curious about the figure by the creek ripping up the unknown breadlike substance).
Why hadn't I just chosen to throw stones!
I turned my focus to the right, where the water burbled over rocks producing a soothing sound, and I watched the sunlight trickle through the leaves overhead. The experience didn't feel religious in any way at all, though it felt like a good excuse to be out in the park in the early morning.
When I looked back to the left, the pieces of bread, which had been floating together directly in front of me when I had last seen them, were spread out in a long line down the creek, and they were all moving away from me. Some were hung up on rocks nearby and were making slower progress; others were far enough away to be on the verge of disappearing from view.
What if I had succeeded in charging the bread with my sins, I wondered. How would I feel right now?
Or…
What if those breads were to represent other things: insults I can't let go of, failures over which I might obsess, patterns of bitterness that might be unhelpful to retain.
Is bitterness a sin?
What if watching this bread float away on the water represents what it feels like to let those things go, with minimal effort, and with barely any mindfulness. Just tear them into pieces and drop them in front of you and look away and listen to the water. And when you wait a few minutes and look again, they're leaving -- not under their own power, but just through the passage of time, they flow away.
I felt suddenly emotional, and very happy I had not chosen stones.
(I walked the rest of the way to work through the park, stopping in a coffeshop by my office to purchase a coffee and a bagel -- in broad daylight! -- as my own private Eid.)
I stood on the sidewalk outside my apartment building and scanned for lucky breaks in the clouds, but, finding none, decided that I would break my Ramadan fast the next day anyway. All the Muslims I had met during the holiday were planning for Eid al Fitr on Wednesday, October 1. Plus, two other religious groups for whom the beginning of the lunar month triggered a holiday -- Jews and Hindus -- were already celebrating by September 30, while the moon was covered. Most of my Jewish colleagues had taken the day off from work for Rosh Hashanah, and I'd heard on NPR in the afternoon about a deadly temple stampede in India where the eight-day Navaratri celebrations had begun.
We had entered the following lunar months:
Shawwal, the tenth month of the Muslim calendar
Ashwin, the sixth month of the Hindu calendar
Tishrei, the first month of the Jewish calendar
So, happy New Year. Shana tova. And happy birthday too, to the human race, since the first day of Tishrei is the day on which YHWH created Adam.
Anyway, I had thought I might convince Mohammed to celebrate Eid with me (on Wednesday), but he was too busy. I myself was too busy on Tuesday to find a temple service celebrating Rosh Hashanah, because I had non-celebrant friends scheduled for a different occasion at my own house. Still, I served fresh apples and good honey to them, in recognition of the Jewish New Year, and looked for other ways I might mark the occasion by myself.
Through reading about Rosh Hashanah, I had discovered the Jewish custom of tashlikh, a form of repentance and symbolic casting off of sins at the new year. It derives from a verse in the book of Micah that states: "You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
The idea is that you proceed on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah to pray by a naturally flowing body of water, and cast your sins therein. Some observers also cast in stones or bread to symbolize the sins. I had missed the afternoon, of course, and had missed Rosh Hashanah altogether for those who hold that it is a one-day holiday. But, there is Jewish disagreement on this point, so for those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah as a two-day holiday, it was still on. I had some stale pita leftover from the Equinamadan party, so I decided to rise early on Eid (or, Rosh Hashanah, day two) and cast my pita into a flowing stream.
Luckily, I live right next to one.
I rose before the sunrise again the next day, and performed my yoga-Fajr before dressing for work, bundling the pita into my backpack, and walking downhill from my apartment into the huge urban park that stretches from the DC-Maryland border all the way to the Potomac River.
I have worked in downtown Washington, DC for nearly six years, and had always intended to rise early and experience a leisurely stroll to work through the park. I will now have to credit Rosh Hashanah with finally making that happen for the first time.
In the center of the park, Rock Creek flows south. I had envisioned standing on the first creek bridge I would come to, and casting my pita from there, but when I got to the bridge I felt exposed, and I wanted to be closer to the water.
So, I walked into the park, in the direction of downtown, following the footpath until a clearing opened up between the path and the creek. Then, I walked over to find a creek bank lined with smooth stones, and I pulled the bread out of my backpack.
Joggers and bicyclists and other walkers continued passing on the path, and for a moment I wished I had just planned to cast stones, which would perhaps look like a more normal activity than using the bread. I started quickly ripping the bread into pieces and flinging it into the creek, before I realized I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing. Also, I wasn't praying. No focus, no attention, no mindfulness to the ritual: What's the point of this, I thought.
I realized I hadn't looked up any particular Jewish prayers to have in mind, and I felt like a jerk.
So, I slowed down, and peeled pieces of the bread less frantically into the water. I held a stack of four rounds. I would break four pieces off at a time, and then drop them singly into the shallows at my feet.
I had tried to plan ahead and think about what "sins" from the past year I might place on the bread, but as I dropped the final piece into the river I realized hadn't been thinking about sin at all. The floating pieces remained uncharged and meaningless in my imagination and just sat there, bobbing, soggy.
I realized that the focus of my attention had been divided between the creek itself (listening to the water flow) and an awareness of the people on the path (wondering if they were curious about the figure by the creek ripping up the unknown breadlike substance).
Why hadn't I just chosen to throw stones!
I turned my focus to the right, where the water burbled over rocks producing a soothing sound, and I watched the sunlight trickle through the leaves overhead. The experience didn't feel religious in any way at all, though it felt like a good excuse to be out in the park in the early morning.
When I looked back to the left, the pieces of bread, which had been floating together directly in front of me when I had last seen them, were spread out in a long line down the creek, and they were all moving away from me. Some were hung up on rocks nearby and were making slower progress; others were far enough away to be on the verge of disappearing from view.
What if I had succeeded in charging the bread with my sins, I wondered. How would I feel right now?
Or…
What if those breads were to represent other things: insults I can't let go of, failures over which I might obsess, patterns of bitterness that might be unhelpful to retain.
Is bitterness a sin?
What if watching this bread float away on the water represents what it feels like to let those things go, with minimal effort, and with barely any mindfulness. Just tear them into pieces and drop them in front of you and look away and listen to the water. And when you wait a few minutes and look again, they're leaving -- not under their own power, but just through the passage of time, they flow away.
I felt suddenly emotional, and very happy I had not chosen stones.
(I walked the rest of the way to work through the park, stopping in a coffeshop by my office to purchase a coffee and a bagel -- in broad daylight! -- as my own private Eid.)
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