The Early History of God

Mark Smith’s The Early History of God: Yah--- and Other Deities in Ancient Israel is meant to be survey of early Israelite religion for non-specialists.  Smith marshals the biblical text, extra-biblical inscriptions and written records, and the archeological record to reconstruct what early Israelite religion might have looked like. This is not quite a book for beginners in the subject, but for those with some background in the area.  Smith covers a great deal of ground, and his writing is often like the professional shorthand.  His main thesis is that early Israelite religion was formed from the matrix of Canaanite religion, and was indistinguishable from it.  Only by a long process of adoption and dissociation, did a sense of Israelite separateness evolve. 

Smith makes many interesting assertions, but like so much work in the field of early Israelite religion, when you take a close look at the evidence for his conclusions, most rest on conjecture and guesswork.  Just take a look at the widely held assertion that Asherah was not a goddess worshiped by the Israelites.  Rather, her symbol, the pole or the tree, had been incorporated into the cult of Yah---- and divorced from the context of the goddess.  So, we are told, Yah--- did not have a female consort.  The evidence for this is slim, and also makes little sense.  Did people really separate the symbol of the well-known Near Eastern goddess from the Goddess herself?  It would be like certain groups divorcing the cross from Christianity and grafting it onto another tradition and giving it an completely different meaning.  Is this done at all?  If it is, it is minor cases, and not the mainstream use of the cross.

There is also the larger issue of the role of the Biblical text in these kinds of studies.   There is the presumption that the text is not always an accurate transmitter of early Israelite religion, yet it is also an indispensable source of material for the study of early Israelite religion.  So which is it?  This difficult dilemma leads to a great deal of cherry picking.  If a portion of the Biblical text supports a theory, it is used.  If it does not, it is a later corruption.  Confusion abounds.

Unfortunately, this goes with the territory of early Israelite historical study.  There is not much evidence outside the Bible, and what  evidence exists is highly equivocal.  Smith’s book is not poorly written because of these flaws.  It is simply endemic to the discipline.

That's Funny, You Really Are Profound

Whenever you search for categories like non-dual Judaism, Sylvia Boorstein’s That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish, keeps coming up.  For years I steered clear of the book, thinking that the gag title would treat the subject irreverently, or at least, be the outward marker of an inwardly frivolously book about the conjunction of Buddhism and Judaism. 

The truth is very different, of course.  Boorstein has a gentle, kind narrative voice.  She is a Buddhist, after all, and her compassion shines through in her voice.  She takes her subject seriously and calmly.  For Boorstein, Buddhist practices led her back to Judaism.  This odd premise worked well for her.  She began to see Judaism as a discipline, much as the practice of Buddhism is a discipline, and was able to renew her Jewish life.  

For many, the interconnection with Judaism and other religions is far more problematic.  There are Messianic Jews who believe Jesus was the Messiah, but still follow Jewish law.  Jews usually condemn this fusion religion, while maintaining a neutral stance about Buddhism. Christianity was long a foe of Judaism, and old antagonisms die hard.  Buddhism appears to be more neutral to many Jews.  But there is still a tension between Buddhism, Buddhist practice, and Judaism.  This is explored in Boorstein's book, but is not the central concern. Buddhism and Judaism work for Boorstein.  In this book she explains how.

For a book that outlines the problems of being Jewish and Buddhist, read Tatz’s Letters to a Buddhist Jew, where challenges of being Buddhist and Jewish are detailed in abundance. 

Anne Frank at 80

I must have missed this when Anne Frank’s birthday happened back in 2009.  Some enterprising soul age enhanced her photo to how she would look at age 80.

There is a sort of sadness in this act.  People want to know what the most famous victim of the Holocaust would have looked like had she lived.  And of course, she did not live. We are not even sure if she would have been famous had  she lived, which is one of the central ironies of her fate.  But one can never know.  Was the diary a fluke, propped up by tragedy and history, or the beginning of a writing career?

Art Can Help: Aharon Appelfeld's For Every Sin

Aharon Appelfeld’s For Every Sin follows the fruitless wandering of a camp survivor immediately following the war.  The novel is filled with dreary landscapes and details, and exhausted survivors of the camps who have little motivation to move on.  They drink coffee, eat food, and are shocked and numbed by their experiences.

The young protagonist of this novel is set on going back to his hometown, even though, in more sober moments, he realizes that his entire family is dead.  One idea keeps him going: the notion that he will convert to Christianity, which was dear to his mother’s heart, although she remained a Jew.

The theme of this novel is one of the elements that often makes some Jewish critics angry at Appelfeld’s books.  The main character is obsessed with being alone (away from refugees, which means away from Jews) and he sees in Christianity the perfect vehicle for this quest conversion.  Then he can be alone, in a religion that fosters solitude.  Here, critics complain, is a self-hating Jew.

But what critics fall to see is the delusion that Appelfeld is well aware of, and capitalizes in the narrative.  There is no way out of being Jewish, just as there is no way out of being a former victim of the Holocaust.  Ultimately, art can help; the ability to write, to explore a the world of words and their possible solutions, holds the key. 

Things Pass Away and Never Return Again

Philip Schultz has written a strong collection of poems in Living in the Past.  Written in four parts, the narrative voice remains constant, exploring the lost world of Jewish Rochester New York in the years following World War II.  

Schultz is best at exploring a particular niche of narrative space and then exploiting it, and he does so for the little Rochester neighborhood of Cuba Place.  He brings in characters, parades them about, leaves them behind, only to allow them to return later in the book.   

His pursuit of the ephemeral nature of time, its passing, and the destruction it brings is relentless.  This collection explores an element of poetry as old as human life: things pass away, and never return again.

The Key to Appelfeld’s Fiction

Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life should be read because it is a fine piece of fictionalized memoir.  Appelfeld utter fascination with silence find expression in this book: his long years alone in the woods fleeing the Nazis, his even longer years trying to find a voice in a new language in Israel (Hebrew) which would eventually become the language of his literature, is extremely compelling and even harrowing. Appelfeld tells an intelligent, heart rending story from start to finish.

This book is also a kind of key to much of Appelfeld’s fiction.  Many of the motifs, the fixations, the themes that are explored, especially in his early years, are here in an unmediated format.  This book is essential for Appelfeld readers. 

Religious Naturalism

Chet Raymo takes on a great many weighty subjects in his relatively small book, When God is Gone Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist.  The chapters of this book are not entirely related, but read like separate articles modified somewhat for book form.  Still, there is cohesion to the book, as Raymo works out the difficult program of creating a religious sensibility while working with the confines of modern science, to create a religious naturalism.

Although he does an admirable job hacking though these thickets,  in the process he paints too rosy a picture of both science, and the wonders of nature.  Indeed, science has allowed us to have better, longer, healthier lives.  But there is always a hidden cost: overpopulation, pollution, wars over scarce resources, the ravaging of our planet. With all the benefits we derive from science and technology, there is a dark side to this enterprise.  It is as if Raymo has never heard of The Battle of Verdun, Hiroshima, the death factory at Auschwitz. 

Raymo wants us to derive our sense of religious wonder from nature, both its beauty and wondrous complexity.  But for anyone who has had a painful, difficult disease, we know that nature, as exemplified by our bodies, can often cause us great, shattering distress.  Even with modern medicine, disease will still eat our bodies, and death, in some form, awaits us all.  Nature too, has a dark side.

Raymo is too dismissive of past forms of religious expression as having been superseded by science.  Well, science does not provide great comfort to anyone (except scientists secure in their labs, tenured, unable to be fired, working on questions that may or may not help us).  In all, Raymo is a little too sure of his conclusions. They leave a lot of us out in the cold.