Dear God (if you exist and pay attention to and intervene in human affairs),
As a Jew, I am supposed to fast once a year on Yom Kippur - a holiday that began as I started this diary at the sun set over Midtown Manhattan - while contemplating and atoning for my sins. I haven't fasted in years; part of my belief is that you don't (or Thou Doth Not, if you prefer) care that much about the things we say and gestures we make to you, and instead care very much what we say and do to each other. But this year, I think maybe I'll fast. I'm not going to services; I don't have a reservation. But I offer you, if you exist, my (overly long, I'm sorry to say) Yom Kippur contemplation.
Thank you for an interesting High Holiday season so far. Some of the wicked may actually be getting punished soon, just as you have sometimes promised. Then again, you sent Katrina, and that earthquake in Kashmir, and - well, maybe I can't blame you for the bankruptcy bill. I agree with Bertrand Russell, who said that you don't give us enough information, and also with Kurt Vonnegut, who replied that frankly we haven't been doing enough with what information we do have.
As you know, if you exist and are omniscient, I'm not a particularly observant Jew, though I do suspect, like Hamlet, that there is more to life than dreamt of in rationalist philosophy. This belief may be based on my doubts that science can fully explain consciousness and the operation of will, or perhaps is just wish-fulfillment: I'd like the consequences of my words and deeds here on Earth play to a larger audience than some amorphous vision of History that will millennia from now decipher the new tag system in dKos (by then no doubt a holy writ) and find the first one labeled "Yom Kippur". So perhaps I'd just like to believe that someone keeps the cosmic scorecard. I don't know. Anyway, I have some questions.
I want to ask you about charity.
Having grown up in the U.S. in the 1970s, I've had a privileged life. Do I thank you for that, or is that a kind of trap you set for some of us to see if we descend into the fatuous, pig-headed, callow belief that this privilege is something we've personally earned? Anyway, I thank you for the relative lack of pain and relative surplus of goodwill around me. I've tried to spread those advantages around a little, though not enough, I'm sure. How much is enough? You never quite say. I'm old enough now to have had friends who have given and given - and left life poor and discouraged and underappreciated. (Others have given and felt the better for it. It's not clear what makes the difference.) I have no children, but many nieces and nephews. How would you have me balance their interest - a year in college, say - against the needs of strangers in New Orleans and Pakistan? I know - perhaps I ought not think of those non-relatives as strangers. But Ye Who Created Economics didn't make that sort of approach easy. And should my choices for myself become (as they will be perceived, if I promote them) as condemnation of others? I belong to a political party, O Lord, that has tried to inch in the direction whereof you speak from time to time, and Thou Hast Not made it easy on us. Many of us think you are in the process of making it harder. I hope you know what you are doing.
I want to ask you about worship.
I am a small part of a political community that, I think, tries to put what I think are your likely ethical preferences into action. (One thing I like about this community is that we're self-conscious enough to realize that every movement that doesn't deny your existence seems to think it is serving you.) We serve you on the basis of ideas such as the Golden Rule and the Veil of Ignorance and the Harm Principle and Freedom and Liberty, ideas that seem befitting of the being that created the Maxwell Equations and neutron stars and the mazurka-creating being named Chopin, compared to belief predicated on the basis that certain numbers, words and books have supernatural qualities the recitation and understanding of which substitute in Thy Eyes for doing good works. (You gave a lot of mystical baggage to us Jews, Lord; I hope you don't mind that so many of us ignore it.) I tell myself that trying to serve my fellows is more what you want of me than attending meetings to worship you each Friday night; am I wrong in that?
I want to ask you about hatred.
Is hatred a sin, or, dropping the religious jargon, counterproductive? The legends about you and the Amalekites and, for my Christian friends, the Moneychangers, suggest it's OK. But I don't go by the Book. You (or we? did we have much choice?) have created a world when victory often goes to the unprincipled - the better liar, cheater, betrayer; the Sunshine Patriot - and where those of us who think globally tend to get creamed locally. Honestly, Lord, it seems that hatred is sometimes the driftwood that keeps us afloat in the ocean of despair. Hatred of injustice is Popeye's spinach, it's penicillin - but sometimes, it seems, also like the impotent barking of squirrels. The opponents you have given us, Lord, foreign and domestic, can wield hatred like a bullwhip. Daily we hear that powerful cracking sound too close to our ears. In my virtual community righteous indignation abounds while others of us, casting a wary eye to how we will be perceived by fence-sitting blobs, strain to color within the lines of rationality and civil discourse. Is one or both sides right or wrong? What right have I to try to extinguish another's flame?
Frankly I don't want to ask you about Israel, but then I would be remiss.
Lord, if you exist, you know the depths of my ambivalence. Especially since moving to New York, I have met so many wonderful Jewish men and women with whom I can talk about anything in the world except Israel and the Arab peoples. What sort of sick game is this? I'm certainly not anti-Israel enough for many of my political community, but I feel that even a step away from orthodoxy poisons me among these friends and my family. I feel sometimes that the joke you have played on the Jewish people, Lord, is to finally let us discover that given territory to defend we are in fact just like everyone else. It's not like (if one credits the legends) you didn't warn us not to put too much store in earthly objects of worship: you did rain wrath on those worshiping the Golden Calf by causing it to be melted down and poured down their throats. Are we being similarly disdainful of your will, with similar results?
I remember feeling nothing short of agony on learning in the 1980s, while supporting the self-determination of the peoples of Central America, that Israel was training and supporting the Guatemalan death squads, or while working for a nuclear freeze that Israel had reportedly assisted the apartheid government of South Africa in its nuclear program. I tremble today when I hear talk from Israelis about the expulsion of Palestinians, or about the advisability of pre-emptive first strikes on Iran. And the list could go on: Vanunu and the claim to exceptional status in the nuclear world, spying on the U.S., collective punishment of Palestinians - dagger after dagger. And the disappointment, based on my belief that a Jewish state could and should be a leader in the arts, sciences, and charity towards the world. My friends are right in saying that other countries are just as bad or worse in many ways. But as with the U.S., I aspire to higher standards than what is normal for the world. (I also worry about the discrepancies between what I hear in the U.S. and what others hear overseas, and I'm not prone to trust our media -- nor, necessarily, anyone else's.)
And yet, O Lord, I think of Rabbi Hillel's most famous statement: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?; if I am only for myself, what am I?; and if not now, when?" Sometimes I think that Hillel hit on the fundamental difference between Right and Left in the first twenty words: conservatives see their responsibility as standing for their own parochial interests, and damn the commonweal; liberals see their responsibility as balancing that self-interest with the needs of the larger world. It is easy as a Jew living outside of Israel not to feel the personal sting of threat to it; that may be why within the U.S. Jewish community it is so easy to get people to stifle inclinations towards dissent on the topic. It almost stays my hands from publishing for fear of doing harm to my community, many excellent members of which will be indignant at these questions - or, worse, cowed by others' agreement with them or extension of them. But this is Yom Kippur and I owe you, if you exist, my honesty and candor.
I want to hear Arab and Muslim leaders recognize the right of Jews to a homeland, and I want to hear them do it under circumstances that their doing so is not capitulation, is not sucking up (perhaps as a temporary strategy) to America, is not a betrayal of the feelings of their own people, but is the extension of the frequent tradition of forbearance within Islam that helped Judaism survive the agonies of the much of the last millennium. I'm not sure how to create the reality where that can happen, if it's possible at all. I also wonder if the deep desire of Jews for Israel to have respect as a nation has skewed our thinking: is it really smart, in a terrorist world, to concentrate such a high proportion of the Jewish community in such a small place? Is it just to threaten the destruction of multitudes if we are not left to live in peace? Is it wise to be the sand grain in the oyster of Islam around which are formed an endless supply of poisonous pearls of fundamentalist vengeance? My friends and family tell me that the alternative is oblivion. I do not trust my own arguments in response; I suppose I'd be most likely to say that God, if God exists, cares more about means than ends. Is that even true? (Tell me that and maybe I'll know what to think about Harriet Miers.)
Love for Gan Yisrael is bred in my bones, but what I feel on this day of contemplation and atonement is that we must make the integration of Israel into the world community work, if it is to work at all, by force of persuasion and character rather than of arms. As an American, God, I know that my country is paying a lot of the bills, and I don't trust that we will continue to do so when the chips are down and the oil wells are dry. So, if not now, when? Now. I have not been sufficiently a part of the effort at reconciliation in the Biblical lands - respecting the legitimate interests of those who oppose Israel without betraying the legitimate interests of those of my own community - and for that I do atone. I did not know, when starting this diary, that it would end up here. Maybe there is something to this contemplation and prayer after all.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Ephraim and Mannaseh, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. And Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, Paul Wellstone and Abbie Hoffman, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart - though also, lest we get too complacent, of Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, Alan Greenspan, Elliot Abrams, Meir Kahane, and too many others like them. I have stopped what I was doing and spend some time contemplating. The sun is now setting on my birthplace three hours to the west and my relatives will be worshipping. I will not eat today, if I can manage it after so many years, and be once more part of this grand tradition for a time. If this is really the kind of thing you care about, God, I hope that you are pleased. May all of our fasts be easy.