email #42 — sleep-deprived ramblings about penitence, in low judeo-english

[Leon Kraiem]

Dear friends,

It is 6:17 am, and I have not slept. I had a shift until midnight, and I have another shift starting at 8. There is a war on; if this is what I have to complain about, I have nothing to complain about; still, my eyes are baggy. I hear something in the distance, and it might be the call to prayer. Shameful is the one who is awake until Fajr and still hasn't davened Maariv.

—

Anyway, I figured in this interim, since I don't think I'll be sleeping, I'd share some reflections from Yom Kippur, instead. There's a phenomenon, I'm sure someone over the millennia has named it — or, more likely, two people have named it, for their intra-chevruta idiolect — which is that when I'm praying, so many interesting things about the liturgy pop out at me; double entendres, new ways to look at things, allusions I'd missed before; but as soon as I'm no longer in the liturgy, it's dead again. 

I suspect that prayer was created to be this way. There ought to be a screen between embodying something and analyzing it, after all, and of all the arenas in which to shore up that divider, this most intimate and theopomorphic one is probably the most important. Still, I have a desire to try to catch some of these kavanah fireflies and stick 'em in a jar, and... okay, this is starting to sound cruel and selfish. Long live the spiritual blood-brain barrier, I guess.

But not completely. Here are a few things I was thinking about this year, while LARPing as an angel like only a human can:

1. "To no avail"

There's a phrase at the end of the confessional prayer, after rattling off the acrostic of all the sins that Israel is guilty of, where you say: We have strayed from your mitzvot and your laws, to no avail. 

The first meaning of this is, I guess: "We did all these things, and look how it turned out. Now we've gotten ourselves into a mess, and we see the error in our ways, and we regret it. Will you take us back despite our terrible mistake?"

And that works. But this year I heard an added layer, that I thought was interesting. 

The high holidays are a trial. We're standing for judgment, with the prosecutor-angel (Satan) on one side, but no angelic defense attorney on the other; we make all sorts of arguments — "remember the merits of the patriarchs; you made us, you can fix us; even if we did it, pardon us anyway" — but the main one is: we know not what we do.

It struck me this year that "to no avail" is also a sort of insanity defense: look, God, we did this crazy thing, and we didn't even get anything out of it. It wasn't selfish, it was self-destructive. If it had been in our interest, then you could say: He weighed his own interest against the will of his creator, and he chose his own interest — that's a criminal. But if it wasn't even good for us, and we insisted on doing it anyway? That's not a criminal, it's a meshugeneh. We need a hospital, not a prison. We aren't fit to stand trial. 

2. "the book of memories"

The images I have in my head during Unetana Tokef, which I assume I got from the inimitable Rabbi Anne's family service at BJ, like most of my deep-seated theological convictions, is of two big books: a Book of Life, and a Book of Death.

Now and then, you get an image of a lot of books — a Book of Health, a Book of Income, a Book of Success, a Book of Sickness, a Book of War, etc. etc. And all of these books, when you open them, are essentially just lists of names. You want to get your name written in the good ones, and kept out of the bad ones. 

Here, it's useful to remember that the word "book" refers, primarily, to a specific technology for binding paper — not for any particular type of content. And the "books" we're talking about here wouldn't be books today — they'd be one big spreadsheet. We are essentially praying: "Write us in the Excel column of life, not the excel column of Death." 

Many of you have heard me rave over the years about this paper by rabbi/philosopher Sam Lebens, "God's Imaginary Friends" — the idea is basically: what it means for something to exist, at least on this plane we all occupy, is for that thing to be an idea in the mind of God — part of a story that God is telling, or a dream that God is having. The easiest metaphor in this framework is of a work of fiction. God is J.K. Rowling; we are Harry Potter. 

This solves a lot of thorny theological problems — among other things, how there can be 10 Sefirot that are all God but still only one God (for readers who are lost, this is basically the same problem as the Trinity.) It also provides a beautiful model for how human beings can influence God — doesn't every fiction writer say he learns from his characters things he would never have figured out on his own? And it's a satisfying answer to the free will problem, too — we have free will the same way Harry Potter does, but God is to us as JK Rowling is to him. Within the Harry Potter universe, HP makes choices. But Rowling, outside that universe, chooses what choices he makes. (I'm an ignoramus, so don't quote me on this, but I think the idea here roughly tracks to what Buddhists call 'relative reality' and 'ultimate reality.') 

Anyway, I was conjuring this image a lot amid the Book-talk on Yom Kippur, and in some ways it feels a more apt metaphor than the spreadsheet model. Rather than a bunch of different binders with long lists of names — it's one book — The Book — all of reality, from our point of view. And we're praying to the Author about what sort of a book we want it to be — not the Book of Life — a Book of Life. Not the Book of Peace — a Book of Peace. When the angels come up to God and say, "What happens? Do all the people die in the end?", we want Him to tell them, "No! What sort of a book would that be? Not one that I want to write." 

(This also, FWIW, lines up nicely with the "on RH it is written, on YK it is sealed" thing/"the gates are closing — wait but not really, actually they only close for real on hoshana raba — no wait, actually" infinite extensions thing; on RH, it's a manuscript. On YK, it goes into print. Authors can actually change their books once they're getting printed, it's just a lot of money and publishers generally won't put up with it. Lucky for us, God's book is self-published.) 

3. general reflections on the determinism of forgiveness

The first and second of these thoughts sort of weave together into this theme of determinism on Yom Kippur. Whereas Rosh Hashanah is all about agency — the Akedah being the paradigmatic act, in which Abraham (and, in some tellings, Isaac too) overpowers even his paternal love to become a total slave to God, regardless of his own wants or needs — and Israel's job on RH is to coronate God, i.e. to take the agency we have and offer it up to God, to be willing subjects of a legitimate King — and both of these themes are symbolized by the shofar — Yom Kippur is all about our lack of real decision-making power, the fact that we literally can't do what we want even if we are allowed to, and that this is true especially when we think we're acting all liberated — and the shofar is only sounded to signal the day's conclusion. 

The holiday starts with an annulment of vows, which is a pretty unjustifiable idea, given that it obviously undermines the entire point of vows to begin with; then, as if by way of explanation, the person who just officiated the annulment declares: "And all the congregation of Israel are forgiven, along with the strangers living in their midst, for they acted without knowing what they did." (The actual Hebrew is maybe more striking here, given that it's not a past-tense verb, it's a present-tense state-of-being word, with legal ramifications, whose straightforward meaning — that a person did something by accident — manslaughter rather than murder, e.g. — seems to be undermined in the same way that vows were — we did know what we were doing, at least a lot of the time!) 

Then, we (who have just declared our vows to be meaningless) point out that God said he would always forgive us (actually, if I'm not mistaken, we quote Him, quoting Himself, in the future tense, in the past) — and then we say a blessing: "who has caused us to live, and caused us to exist, and caused us to arrive at this time." 

In other words — we have nothing to do with any of this. It's all the big G. We're basically a bunch of NPCs. Maybe Truman Burbanks, if we're lucky.

And it seems, throughout the holiday, that this is where the forgiveness of Yom Kippur comes from; not “forgive and forget,” but “remember so much that you can’t but forgive” — and not even at the level of extenuating circumstances, “I guess you can’t blame him” — no, to the point of “it could not have been otherwise, and ought implies can.” We are like clay in the hands of a potter, molded into what He wills. So surely this is on Him, not us, right?

The High Holy Day watchword uv’chen —“And so,” per the Sacks translation — reads on Rosh Hashanah as the “therefore” of an appeal, like the start of a “whereas” clause — given this, this, and that, the reasonable decision is such-and-such”— while on Yom Kippur, that same word reads like the “therefore” of necessity — “this, therefore that, hence this, which can only mean that.”

It gets tricky here to distinguish between inevitability and actual logical necessity — “can you imagine a world where knowing something is water doesn’t mean you know it’s wet?”, that sort of problem – but wherever you end up, it’s a world away from how we normally think about freedom and responsibility, of a world of could-have-done-otherwises. We always want to wipe the slate clean, as in: erase what’s written on it. But in this model, we’re trying to wipe the slate clean — to remove all the accumulated gunk so we can read everything ever written on it. And that requires a big, unintuitive leap of faith, that following the truth will get you to a more, rather than a less, compassionate place. That you shouldn’t be afraid of knowing more, and that — paradoxically — recognizing the ways you’re determined is the way to get free.

When I tell people that reading Freud was a religious experience for me, this is what I’m trying to talk about. People give you side-eye when you say you love Freud — “so what, you think you want to xyz?”; “you know, he said people are only abc because of a repressed childhood desire to def when they ghi”; have you heard theory about q?” — but the reality is those particular theories are irrelevant; what is extremely, relevant, though, is the change that happens when you accept that for all you know, they might be true, and if they are, wouldn’t that be something. Huh! Crazy what you find when you look down there. But you don’t need to be afraid of looking. It won’t make you a slave to every impulse or fantasy or complex, to make them conscious rather than repressed — to the contrary, it’s the only way to stop them from commandeering your higher self.

All of that sounds very abstract and sort of moralistic, but brass tacks, I’m just talking about the actual morality you unlock when you stop trying to moralize, and the freedom you unlock when you stop trying to control. That’s Freud, that’s Spinoza, that’s AA, that’s Buddha, that’s everyone, it’s The Big Idea, but it’s a paradox, and it’s utterly unintuitive, and that’s just how it goes.

It’s also, I think, the premise of liberalism, and especially of free speech. It takes faith to think more conversation will lead to a better world — but it does. It takes faith to let people preach wacky, dangerous doctrines and then let them practice what they preach. But you should. Nonviolence good. Bullying bad. It’s true every time. Lightening up helps people. Clenching hurts them.

4. you really can’t escape the fact that we’re murdering an innocent animal

Lastly, I’ll say: the scapegoat thing — it’s not great.

I know a guy who knows a guy who went to the Western Wall for the first time recently and started weeping uncontrollably because there’s no Temple. He’s not wrong. I mean, he’s wrong. But he’s not. But he is.

A few years ago, in the Holy City, I did more mushrooms than I had done before and I had a moment of panic when I realized I didn’t actually want to trip alone. When my roommate came home and held my hand, I felt limitless relief and safety. When she went to the bathroom, it was cold and scary and I didn’t know if it would ever end.

That’s exile. That’s the shekhina getting evicted by Romans. It’s what happens when God doesn’t have a house. We are all souls who took a crazy psychedelic drug called Body, and when the Temple is destroyed we feel like we’re tripping alone. Luckily, we’re not — Body distorts your sense of time, it makes you see things that aren’t real and not see things that are, your Tripsitter is still right there, you literally just need to turn around — but it feels that way. And you realize this, and you decide to Believe that You Made a Plan, and that you don’t need to worry, because sober you makes good decisions, and you remember that you left yourself a playlist (the Torah) and a checklist (mitzvot) and you’re actually with all your buddies (it’s just the Sinai crew, you’ve all tkaen Body like a hundred times, but you always forget you’ve done it before), and that helps you stay stable, and hopefully you have a good trip and you learn a lot, and when you start to sober up your friends hang out with you (shiva) and they check in on you for a while (kaddish) even though they’re still tripping, because that’s just the sort of people they are.

But what if God just, like, had a house. That would be so much more real.

At the end of the day, rabbinic Judaism is built on the foundation of a temple cult. All these wonderful prayers, this act of ontological necessity, per Heschel, this amazing spiritual etc. etc., is a substitute for slaughtering some nonhuman animal, that did nothing wrong, and doing a little dance with its blood.

It’s better than human sacrifice, for sure. Which is — sort of? — the message of the Akeda? We tell a story where God asks us to do this crazy barbaric thing that obviously God would never want us to do, and then at the last minute He tells us it was all a test and please for the love of Me, Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy, do not lay a fucking hand on the boy? Kill this goat instead? And then we pretend like we didn’t clearly want to do it all along, and this wasn’t God’s way of exorcising that demon, or at least engaging in some harm-reduction with it? (for more, see: Aviva Zornberg.)

The whole book of Leviticus is a cookbook. And there’s something deeply comforting about the idea that if we just make God’s favorite recipes, everything will be alright. There’s even something intimate and touching about it — see: the 11th verse of the 1st poem in Patuach/Sagur/Patuach — but ultimately, we are resolving our guilt by collectively killing another creature who didn’t do anything to deserve it, and that’s probably not a good place to be anchoring our deepest-held convictions.

—

As always, there is so much more to say. It is now 6:08 pm — I picked this back up after my shift — and the sun will set in ten minutes, bringing in Sukkot.

There are a few other emails I’ve been writing in my head that I want to actually write. We’ll see if I manage on the other side of chag.

As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are,
I will continue to keep you posted,
LK