Diwali: Atman (The Light Within)

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.

Sukkot: Koheleth

Koheleth says that life is futility.
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.

I could imagine a short play for five characters who squabble about the meaning of life.

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.”

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.