Ground Zero

Woke up this morning feeling not too bad. I don't know why I am feeling not too bad. The storms of Passover are now over, thank god. Emotionally, it was a devastating time- so many old memories erupting through my endless and ongoing disappointment in my communal Jewish life.

I would like to think I am feeling not too bad because I have gone back to tallit and tefillin and morning prayer.

I finally made this decision: to pare down my religious life to essentials, to things that I know work for me and add to my life, not things that distress me and make me feel worse than before. Case in point: I am not good at kashrut; to me it means deprivation. I am hard on myself there. I guess I will never be that ideal kind of Jew. I just can't do it.

I omit pork, and mostly don't eat meat and milk together, and largely refrain from shellfish. But I don't think I have gotten very far. I need to drop this notion of my ideal Jew cause it just makes me feel like crap. I don't mind some discipline but for me it turns into utter misery that I think must be emotionally tied to something else, not to mention that it simply intensifies an already difficult life.

What I am good at, and love, is formal prayer. I feel connected then; often it gives me joy. I feel like G-d cares. It is pure. It places me in the realm of the divine, and that remembrance seems to suffuse my day. I've gone back into prayer with a new curiosity, and tossed out all preconceived notions about what prayer is about. I've discovered that I don't know what prayer is about, so I'm just letting it happen and going with it. How's that for ambiguity?

I no longer know what prayer is about because I've given up listening to everyone or to any authority about the meaning of my life (being seduced by authority is a failing of mine). A lot of people who put out a lot of ideas over a lot of millenia about what G-d is about, and about what a relationship with G-d is about, often think they know what G-d wants from, not only them, but from everyone. That was my mistake-- falling into the pit of shoulds, leaping into the maw of musts, surrendering blindly to the regime of god pictures, images of god that people have over the centuries promulgated as the god.

In the end, I realise, they are all false gods. Someone else's thought. I take seriously that wisdom from I Chronicles 16: for all the gods of popular imaginings are mere idols; and from Psalm 146: Trust not in human benefactors, in mortal beings who have no power to help. Their spirit leaves, they go back to the ground, on that day, all their thoughts are lost.

I chose Judaism for a myriad of complex reasons; but the simplest reason of all is that I was born with a Jewish soul, and by formalising that Jewishness, I have come home. It was bashert.
There has not been a moment that I have ever doubted it.

I've now wrestled through several stages of naiveté, thinking that everyone would act the ideal, thinking that community for a Jew is anywhere there are Jews, thinking that Judaism, the most perfect of systems of thought, makes observant Jews perfect.

And yet, like every system of thought I've encountered in my life, it all turns out to be just someone's opinion. And every system of regulations guarantees that there's someone who knows what's best for you, better than you know yourself, elevates itself to the level of dogma; find me a religion that doesn't. Judaism is no exception. To go one step further, much of this dogma is embedded in a religious Jewish culture so deftly that even mere artifacts of Jewish community and society become accepted on the level of Jewish law.

I've discovered that as much as I have wanted to painfully belong in doing things "right", I can't do dogma. There is something inherently unhealthy about a life of stricture and a whole bunch of people to tell you how you're failing; people who seem to know the desires of G-d even better than Moses did. People who have some image of god that they are sure is the one true god. And I'm not talking about some simple person out there who had a god experience, but learned authors, sages, all sorts of authorities.

Maybe I'm getting the message all wrong. Maybe I don't get it. But I have yet to read a disclaimer in any religious book that this is simply the author's opinion and that your experience of the divine or god or the ineffable may be entirely different, whatever your religious path and home (not "spiritual", but religious). I expect that's why explanations in theodicy are never really satisfying, except perhaps to the author.

Aspects of G-d- I think that's all there is. And I possess a rich tradition to choose from, to follow, to wrestle with; without that foundation, without doing it and experiencing it, how could I ever have questioned it? Somewhere, I think I got it all wrong, because some of the things that make Judaism great, and bring greatness, simply don't apply to me.

There is no place for me in the Jewish community at the present time; I'm still wrestling with poverty and have had to deal with more than my share of monsters and joblessness; I'm still worried about my next rent payment; I have been unable to make any Jewish friends here, but surprisingly a born again Christian friend who looks out for me; I have not found a felicitous Jewish circle even when serving at the homeless shelter, yet have found felicity at a housewarming full of Christians- go figure.

And it isn't as if I haven't tried; until this moment, this blog has been all about "wading through a sea of Torah and Jews", with trying to find community, a place and minyan with whom to daven, to learn with the learned, to no avail. I am single, "mature", female, bereft of family, and poor, and that puts you out of the mainstream of even Jewish community. To add insult to injury, Judaism stresses family and community, so I think it's all rather ironic, although there are some days it just makes me feel like crap.

I'm a fringe Jew, and it makes me wonder how, still, after millenia, the "problem" of fringe Jews never seems to change, how human energy always goes into maintaining the status quo. One would hope that that is one of the purposes of religion, to include everyone. Isn't that what all that talk in the Torah is about? Love the stranger, care for the orphan and the widow in a personal manner and not just as a charity case? Maybe that's just my idealism talking.

I'm not saying it's all bad, or disappointing....there have been Jews who live Torah who have kept me going on so many levels-- who exemplify what it means to be humanly holy-- I know I'm on the right track, when I encounter these souls....they shine, so.

But this is my life now. This is where I am. And I understand, much better now, the way of the world. I finally understand tradition's place, for me. So, I divest myself of the thought cloaks of others and am going exploring. Because for me, the one truth that comes to me over and over again is that there is nothing but G-d. And I want to meet that god.