Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Denise Levertov

Seven years ago I wrote here in Reckonings a few words about three poems of 

Denise Levertov, which stand now as well as they did then as reason for my 

sustained admiration:

Denise Levertov's last volume of poems, This Great Unknowing:
Last Poems, was posthumously published by New Directions in 1999. She
died from complications of lymphoma two years before at the age of 74. Her
father was a Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and became an
Anglican parson in England. Levertov came to the U.S. in 1948 at the age
of 25. She was a major voice in American poetry for over forty years.
Among her persistent themes, as Robert Haas has written, were "the
brokenness of the world, its violence and injustice, and her longing for
wholeness, the longing that sent her back to her Christian roots at the
end of her life." 
In a final interview only two months before her death, Levertov
said, "There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful
ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on
this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical
development does not match our technological development. This sense of
spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to
all that technological euphoria....When you're really caught up in writing
a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what
I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in
different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is
a form of prayer."
She once wrote that she found "certain analogies, and also
interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith,"
and in an essay written in 1984, "A Poet's View," she wrote that
the "acknowledgement and celebration of mystery probably constitutes
the most consistent theme of my poetry ..."
“Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely,
to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the
incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to
comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties.
It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward
faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems
present their testimony as circumstantial evidence, not as closing argument.
Where Wallace Stevens says, 'God and the imagination are one,' I would say
that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is
the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable,
to experience God."
_________________________

I believe that is an important statement about the centrality of imagination 
in spiritual life, in our capacity as artists, scientists or parents—as human beings—
to realize ourselves and truly to embrace our fellowship with creation. 
Imagination,as Levertov uncommonly recognizes, is a faculty of perception. 
It can be terribly misused--think, after all, of the inhumane ways we have 
synthesized "intellect, emotion and instinct"--but without its creative
exercise we remain, as Hasidic legend has it, imprisoned "as in a
block, so that [our] hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head
lies on the knees."  
That is suffering, and that is a posture of prayer. 

The Fountain

Don't say, don't say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
 
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
 
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
 
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,
 
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
 
Don't say, don't say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
 
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
 
up and out through the rock.

Variation On A Theme By Rilke
 
(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)*
 

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me -- a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic -- or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
 

~ Denise Levertov ~
 
 
(Breathing the Water)


* Book 1, Poem 1 of Rilke's Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and
and Anita Barrows:

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather

Editor's note: The following four articles were written for Parabola by my son, Joshua Boettiger, who is rabbi of Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon. I include them on Reckonings with pleasure, admiration and pride.

 

Joshua Boettiger

Published in Parabola

Summer 2011 issue

My friend Bene is one of the great gift-givers – not only because of what he brings as a gift when he comes to visit, but because of how he gives it. He smiles broadly, puts his hand on your shoulder, and presents his offering with the other hand: a perfectly ripe mango, a Bucky Dent rookie card, a Japanese chisel.  He’ll be hours late sometimes, because, one suspects, he is looking around for the right gift to bring.

We human beings have an innate desire to be given gifts that we feel reflect who we are. Sometimes we ask for a specific gift, and what we had requested is given. Other times, we want our need to be intuited, to receive a gift that feels reflective of who we are, or who we might be. Both models are ultimately about being seen by another, and about how we see ourselves. There is a thrill when we receive the right gift and that is the thrill of being seen.

We might associate these gift-giving models with different developmental stages. For young children, perhaps it is more important that their will be heeded, that a parent give them what they have asked for. We imagine a greater maturity would enable one to risk being given something unknown. And yet we find ourselves in relationships where we desperately want our beloved to see us in the right way, to anticipate our needs without our asking. We think it crass to make a list as a child might, and to name requests outright. Often, we don’t know how to ask. “If you loved me,” we think, “you’d know what I really want.”

The book of Exodus illustrates these two models of gift-giving. The first, and more famous, is the gift of Torah, which appears to be the latter model: a gift God gives the Israelites that they didn’t ask for. Either God sees the people more deeply than they see themselves and gives them something they never dreamed of asking for, or God sees what God wants for the people, rather than what they want for themselves. The people are alternately thrilled and terrified by this gift, running forward towards the mountain to receive it, and then retreating just as quickly. Is this reaction because of the inherent difficulty of receiving, or is it a mixed reaction to the way the gift itself is being offered? 

The tradition is split about this. On one hand, there’s a well-known midrash that imagines God holding a mountain over the Israelites’ heads, essentially saying, accept this gift, or accept the mountain crashing down on you. That is hardly a fair choice, and the idea here is that the Torah was hardly what we would traditionally think of as a gift. On the other hand, the Torah records the people, when told that the gift of Torah was forthcoming, responding with brazen and beautiful faith,  “Na’aseh v’nishmah,” meaning, “We will do and we will hear.” The tradition interprets this as the people saying, “We will do [whatever this gift requires of us]. Now what does it require?” Essentially they are saying to God, we will trust your seeing of us and we will receive this gift fully – even before we know what it is. From the beginning, the Israelites don’t know quite how to receive this gift. And we are still figuring this out today, alternately rushing to the mountain and retreating back again.

One finds the next model of gift giving soon after the account of the giving of the Torah in Exodus. Here, it is the people who give God a gift, but it is a gift that God has asked for – and it is spelled out by God in painstaking detail. God asks the people to build a mishkan, a sanctuary, so that God will be able to dwell in their midst. God gives detailed instructions about just how many bars of gold, dolphin skins, acacia wood, crimson yarn, and so on, to use in constructing this ark. The details can seem cumbersome and overbearing. One can imagine the Israelites wanting to say, “Let us express our love for you creatively; let us build you a sanctuary that we feel reflects you. Let us put some of ourselves into this gift. Trust us.” And yet the text says that the people’s hearts moved them and they threw themselves behind the task enthusiastically. Miraculously, the possessions of the Hebrew refugees fit perfectly into God’s blueprint. The end result of the building of the mishkan was, remarkably, relationship. God dwelled in their midst. Tradition teaches that the years in the desert, despite seeming at times like torturous wandering, were also years of spellbinding intimacy. 

The detailed nature of God’s request for the mishkan always irritated me; that is, I saw it as a lesser form of gift-giving, subservient to the creative, risky model we see with the giving of the Torah. This changed when, early on in our relationship, I heard my wife give a teaching that talked about the mishkan model as the more mature one. That love – and the relationship between God and the Israelites in the desert is nothing if not a love story – is being able to ask for what you need. And a true gift is when someone asks for something specific and is given just that.

One thinks of the Bob Dylan song, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” In it, the narrator’s lover is leaving on a long trip and she asks him if there is something she can bring back. She is told over and over in the succeeding verses just to come home “unspoiled,” just to simply bring herself back – that this will be gift enough. And this is how we always respond, with imagined couth, “Oh, there’s nothing I need. Just come.” Deep down we might hope that a suitable gift would be found, one that reflects us truly, but we lack the language or the courage to ask. And yet she persists – are you sure there is nothing I can bring back? At the end of the song, when it is clear that she is not returning to her lover – “I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again / It depends on how I’m feeling” – he is finally able to ask for a specific gift, too late, “And yes, there is something you can bring back to me – Spanish boots of Spanish leather.” Perhaps if we read further into the song, we might surmise that it is the narrator’s refusal to ask for something specific that drives her away in the end. She wants to be able to give him what he needs and is frustrated that he doesn’t know how to ask for it.

When we name what we want and what our needs are, we are making ourselves vulnerable. Asking for just what we want is daring, because we might not receive it. In the mishkan model, God is able to be vulnerable and to ask for just what God needs. In the Torah model, the people are not allowed to ask for what they want, and are not able to be vulnerable. And yet maybe it is not that simple. Is there a way we can save the paradigm of how the Torah is given? In the Biblical account, the gift of Torah comes first and perhaps this is a clue.

What the people and God learn in the giving/receiving of the Torah is that life itself is full of these kind of “gifts” – offerings we didn’t ask for but that are given to us for some mysterious reason that may not be clear to us at first, or ever, and we need ultimately, to learn how to receive them. There is no choice with these “gifts.” Often, they change who we are and it involves tremendous work to learn how to make them our own. A birth, a death, an illness, a powerful transmission that comes out of nowhere and that we are forced – as if a mountain was held over our heads – to receive. What makes this receiving possible is trust; trust that the relationship itself - between God and us - is the most important thing, and the content of the gift is secondary. It is from this place that the Israelites say, before they know what the gift even is - we will receive it. The struggle over learning to see what has been given as a gift will continue. When we feel there is enough trust, that we are at home in the world enough, at home with God, then we are emboldened to ask for what we need, to make ourselves vulnerable. It is after the Torah is given that God is able to ask that the sanctuary be built. It is after the sanctuary is built, that God is able to dwell with the people, that there is true relationship.

There are gifts we have asked for and that are given to us (or not), and gifts that descend upon us and stretch us to receive. And sometimes someone comes to our door with just the right piece of fruit or baseball card. All reflect our core desire to see and be seen. Ultimately, with the Torah or the mishkan, the true gift is closeness.

 

The World is on Fire

Published in Parabola, Spring Issue, 2011

Joshua Boettiger

Rabbi Isaac told the following parable of a man who was traveling from place to place when he saw a castle in flames. He wondered: is it possible that the castle is without someone to look after it? At that moment the owner of the castle peered out at him and said: I am the owner of the castle. So, too, as Abraham was wondering, is it possible that the world should be without someone to look after it? The Holy one peered out at him and said: I am the world’s owner.

The unsaid connection in this parable is clear: the world is on fire. And lest one think that this implies an absence of providence, we learn that the “owner” of the world exists, even appears to the Abrahams among us from time to time. But rather than arriving with the fire brigade, he seems resigned to what is happening to his castle.

The Kotzker Rebbe reads it another way. In his telling, the owner is suffering also. When he retold this parable to his students, he described Abraham as a lost wanderer who is at first overcome with joy at the sight of the castle, then crestfallen when he sees it in flames. Assuming it has no owner, Abraham then hears a voice coming from inside, crying, “Help me, help me, I am the owner of this castle!”

However we understand the tenor of the call from the castle, we see Abraham awoken to an experience of a God who is immanently present in the midst of fire, of a God who is accompanying him in an unexpected way. Not fixing, not protecting (in the classic sense), but present and sharing in the experience. In short, this ancient and well-known midrash tells us that the world is on fire with suffering, and that God is in the fire with us.

How much easier it would be if the someone looking after the world was actually looking after it! Or even, if we knew that the burning proved once and for all that there was no one in charge—at least then we would know where we stand. As it is, the parable paints an evocative picture of human suffering, and where God might be found in it, but one that needs some unpacking.

We can ascribe meaning to suffering. We can see it as part of a narrative arc that leads to redemption, or describe it away as punishment for untold misdeeds. We can write theologies around it that try to ground it, give it a name, and make it a little less bottomless. But ultimately the question of suffering is a pastoral one. In the end, what we have is the direct experience of being wounded and the question of our relationship to God and each other in the presence of this wound.

 

Unconditional Accompaniment

The writings of the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, give us a striking look at how different Jewish models of meaning-making in the face of unspeakable suffering were applied (or not) to the Jewish community in Poland in World War II. The Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire), as Shapira was known, understandably cycled through these models as the war and the peril of the Jews in his community escalated. Toward the end, his writings invoked the rabbinic theme of divine suffering. The rabbis of the Talmud depicted God as having been captive in Egypt with His people, and also going into exile with them when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. The Esh Kodesh delivered a teaching building on this theme in February 1942.

Now the Jew who is tormented by his afflictions thinks that he alone suffers, as if all his personal afflictions and those of all Israel do not affect God above, God forbid. Scripture states, however, “In all their troubles He was troubled” (Isaiah 63:9), and the Talmud states: When a person suffers, what does the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) say? “My head is too heavy for Me, My arm is too heavy for Me” (Sanhedrin 46a). Our sacred literature tells us that when a Jew is afflicted, God, blessed be He, suffers, as it were, much more than a person does. It may be that since He, blessed be He, is not subject to any limitation…therefore his suffering is also boundless.

The Esh Kodesh writes that if the world were able to hear the divine weeping (infinite in its depth as God is infinite), we would not be able to bear it. He writes that because God weeps in secret, in His inner chambers, that it is up to us to meet God there, to push in and weep together with God. When we weep alone, the pain may break us, but when we weep with God we are strengthened.

Perhaps in the Western world, we have gotten sidetracked with the question of why suffering happens, and it has taken our energy away from other, more pressing questions; such as, what does it mean to suffer with another? How are we to be with one another when we are in the presence of suffering?

Like our theologies and theodocies that attempt to solve the problem of suffering by explaining it or talking about future redemption, pastorally we also jump to try to make meaning of someone’s suffering, rather than simply loving them, accompanying them, opening to our own experience of being in their presence. We do this for good reason—it is hard to be in the fire, whether it is our own or another’s pain. It is so scary to simply meet the pain on its own terms.

 

Job and His Friends

Job’s friends are the best models we have in the Jewish tradition of what not to do when we are accompanying another. Moshe Halbertal has said that the real evil in the story comes from Job’s friends, who essentially blame the victim and try to justify what has befallen their companion, saying, in effect, “You must have done something wrong.” To follow this reasoning further, theology and theodicy are, in a sense, evils in themselves in that they try to explain, or solve; any pat answer about why we suffer often creates more suffering. Yet we talk and write about suffering and try to make sense of it because what else is there to do, what else is there to write about?

Job’s is a story of personal, not national or collective, suffering, yet it is through Job that we enter a portal to the universal human experience of this phenomenon. Here is our first lesson, then: suffering is always personal, but through suffering we are connected to the larger collective. Perhaps this is the only thing we can say for sure about suffering: it is a doorway. When the heart breaks, the heart opens. Suffering is not the final word.

For a combination of reasons, Job has traditionally been depicted as a patient and faithful sufferer. A deeper look at the text, however, shows Job shaking his fist at heaven, cursing life itself, raging against the absence of justice. “Therefore I will not be silent, I will speak in the anguish of my spirit.” And yet, Job is not consistent. He cycles through emotions in the presence of his suffering: blame, anxiety, recapitulation, obsequiousness, rage, denial, sadness, fear. And as many of us know from our personal experience with loss, there is no right way to suffer, no map.

Job’s lament is not ultimately answered so much as given context. Stephen Mitchell writes that God’s response to Job amounts to: “Do you really want this moral sense of yours projected onto the universe? Do you want a god who is only a larger version of a righteous judge, rewarding those who don’t realize that virtue is its own reward and throwing the wicked into a physical hell? If that’s the kind of justice you’re looking for, you’ll have to create it yourself. Because that is not my justice.” God is saying, in effect, suffering happens because loss happens--it is built into the fabric of a universe that is amoral.

It is unclear how much of this Job is able to take in. It is unclear how much of this we are able to take in. In the end, we cannot live in such a reality. We will still live in the world of the dual. In this world, loss brings suffering. My wife and mother like to say that they are part of the same club that does not believe the oft-quoted truism: pain is inevitable, but suffering isn’t. We can say suffering isn’t inevitable until we’re blue in the face, and still we suffer. Even if what we call God contains all lives and deaths, endless risings and fallings, a kaleidoscopic reality that we cannot decode or penetrate, still we commit to our personal lives, to the life of the temporal, the flesh, which will break our heart by design. There is no way around it. If we pull away, we pull away from relationship. And Judaism insists on relationship fiercely, so that is not an option. We are here to love and be loved, to experience attachment and to have our hearts broken and we must trust that there will be emergence, a different kind of redemption that we cannot possibly imagine or maybe even ever fully understand.

On the surface, God’s response to Job is not one of unconditional accompaniment. Yet God still answers Job much like the enigmatic owner of the castle, saying “here I am.” Things are not as you imagined them, but here I am just the same.

 

Live in the Layers

Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers” is itself a midrash on suffering. At the key juncture in the poem, Kunitz writes:

How shall the heart be reconciled

To its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

The manic dust of my friends,

Those who fell along the way,

Bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

Exulting somewhat,

With my will intact to go

Wherever I need to go,

And every stone on the road

Precious to me.

I once heard this poem read at a friend’s rabbinic ordination. At the end of the evening I found myself in an elevator with the writer and teacher Leonard Fein, and asked him about the poem, essentially what he thought Kunitz was saying about how the heart was to be reconciled. The key, Fein said, is the word, “somewhat.”

In the wake of loss, how are we to live? What does it mean to be true to the experience of suffering, to turn towards it fully and then to again turn towards life fully? Judaism says we must do both. We turn towards life, after loss, and we exult, but it is not the same. Maybe the joy is compromised. Maybe the joy, now including sorrow, becomes more expansive. But however you slice it, it is not the same joy. Perhaps there is something that happens in the turning: to joy, to sorrow, to our direct experiences moment by moment of being human that Kunitz is able to describe with the mysterious phrase: “exulting somewhat.”

Increasingly, in the images of God that I cycle through, I imagine God as witness, or as companion. I’ve been influenced by my stepfather’s image of God, as that which looks through his eyes at what he sees, at what he is experiencing, and says softly, yes. Yes, it is so. It is not so different from my mother speaking to her late mother, my grandmother, telling her things that are happening in our family’s life, and hearing her respond, compassionately, softly, “Of course, darling. Of course.”

Like Abraham in the Kotzker’s retelling, we are at first overjoyed to have this companionship, then crestfallen because we realize it won’t save us, then perhaps overjoyed again, exulting somewhat, in the possibility of accompaniment, of being all in the same ship together, of a new kind of possibility.

At the end of his retelling, Wiesel writes, “The Kotzker repeats, ‘The castle is ablaze, the forest is burning, and the owner of the castle cries for help; what does it mean? That the castle is not empty and that there is an owner!’ And the Rebbe began to tremble and all those present trembled with him.”

Alone, with Others

 Published in Parabola Summer 2012 issue

 Joshua Boettiger

 Watering the Root

The solitary Jew lives with the cyclical reasoning that the world was created for her sake^[1], yet her task in the world – it is made abundantly clear elsewhere--is to serve others. Ben Azzai says in the Talmud^[2] that it is prohibited for a man to not take a wife, but oddly enough, he was never married himself, saying in his defense: "What can I do? My soul is bound up with the Torah." The tension between alone and together is a creative tension. As human beings we balance our longing to belong to another, or to the collective, with our desire to be true to our individual paths.

Judaism is well known as a tradition that insists on community. It does not privilege asceticism, there is no concept of individual salvation, and sacred texts are preferably studied in tandem with someone else, reading out loud. Jews pray most often in the first person plural and in order to remember the dead, sanctify God’s Name, or hear Torah read, one needs to pray with nine others. We remember God reasoning in Genesis, "It is not good for man to be alone," and so we deduce from all this that Judaism does not value being alone. Yet if we follow this line of thinking, we misunderstand the invitation within the tradition. 

Togetherness depends on authentic aloneness. Let’s offer a parallel: Jews are the people of the book, a people to whom words are particularly sacred. Yet the word would mean nothing if it did not arise from a developed and disciplined silence. To whatever degree we could hope to hear the word, we must cultivate the silence.

So it is with the vision of community. A community that does not value the necessity of the aloneness of each of its adherents and that does not trust what arises out of that aloneness will be an autocratic community, one held together by gravity and habit but not by the living God.

What Judaism insists upon is that the one who is alone return from her inner work and, to paraphrase Bunny Wailer, "water the root; not just taste the fruit." The root is the evolving tradition of the communal, collective body. The one who goes up the mountain or into the desert for forty days is honor-bound to return to share what she has received, and in addition, to know that the integration within the collective of what has been received will involve compromise--since this is the cost of belonging. We water the root when we return, and attempt to put into form what we have formlessly received.

Levadoh 

Judaism’s insistence on togetherness has sometimes caused its adherents to lose sight of the necessary inward journey that ultimately makes togetherness possible. Perhaps in the naming of the primacy of community, the invitation to go up the mountain or into the desert has been largely lost. Yet it is there--we can see its imprint everywhere.

Jacob was alone, in Hebrew levadoh, when the angel found him by the banks of the Jabbok River and wrestled with him till dawn, bestowing upon him the name Israel, one who wrestles with God. This wrestling, this naming would never have happened without the levadoh that preceded it. In another well-trod tale, Moses comes down off the mountain, where he has been alone receiving the Torah. He comes down despite the pain and misunderstanding that he knows await him below should he try to bring back the teachings to the collective. But it’s not just that Moses should come down the mountain--the very reason Moses is on the mountain is in order to come down again. The act of prophecy itself is predicated on the experience of going into the place of aloneness and returning again. We learn from the experience of the classical prophets that to be alone is code for being alone with God. That is what is implied. And it is only when we are irrevocably alone that we realize we are not alone. This is the leap of faith we take when we risk aloneness.

Rabbi Shimon and the Cave

The story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son^[3] is a great example of the journey between retreat and return. Father and son are forced to seclude themselves in a cave for twelve years to hide from the Romans. They study Torah all day, and are magically sated by a carob tree and a stream that appear in the cave next to them. They attempt to return when they are told the threat has passed, only to have their zealousness get them into immediate trouble. When they see a man plowing and sowing his field on the Sabbath, they are enraged--everything they set their eyes on catches fire because of the intensity of their judgment. God sends them back to the cave with a fierce rebuke: "Have you emerged to destroy my world? Return to your cave!" They stay in the cave for another twelve months, presumably until they are ready to endure the costs of belonging and compromise. Like Moses learned when he came down the mountain, Torah is only Torah when it functions in the marketplace: in real-time, in real relationship, in imperfect togetherness.

The story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son is a cautionary tale, and in the way of cautionary tales, it belies an invitation. Go into the cave to save yourself. Return when you are ready to save another. 

Reinterpreting Levadoh

We are talking here about re-embracing aloneness. But we should also talk about re-interpreting aloneness. Perhaps part of the confusion here is that we misunderstand the experience of aloneness. We take it too literally, and we only associate it with literal separation, retreat, and physical isolation. Another way to understand aloneness is how Leonard Cohen described his monastic routine with his fellow monks on Mount Baldy: "There was no private space and virtually no private time, we were all working shoulder to shoulder. There is a Zen saying: ‘Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish one another.’"

True togetherness allows us to feel that we are alone with ourselves while we are with others. We can enter this realm in different ways. On mediation retreat, purportedly an experience of being alone, I have experienced powerful togetherness--a silent community supporting each other’s aloneness. On the other hand, while davenning with many worshippers in a synagogue--purportedly an experience of being together--I have felt profound aloneness, being held by the community and its intention, and being free to go towards my own experience. In the presence of such moments, it is clear that we don’t need to choose between being alone and being with others. An authentic experience of each leads us towards the other.

We can also enter this alone/together realm with one other person, a witness, a lover, a true companion. Someone who loves us is someone who sees us in our aloneness, and as Rilke wrote, stands guard over our solitude. Not only can we be aware of our solitude in another’s presence, but we can also help another be aware of their own solitude. This is not the same as being "lonely" in another’s presence. In some ways, it is the opposite of that. It is through feeling our aloneness that we can then feel truly with another.

Judaism reminds us that the spiritual encounter is not always on the mountaintop or in the desert. The Zohar does not describe individuals on mountain tops as much as it does a group of merry pranksters traipsing around the Galilee, with much weeping and rejoicing. Even though Moses was the one who ended up being up on the mountain--alone with God--receiving the Torah, the original intention was that the entire community would be up there. Aloneness, most of the time, happens with others.

Back to the Insistence

Why the Jewish insistence on community? The reasons for this are many, and are multifaceted. But let’s look at it for the corrective it offers in our contemporary "spiritual marketplace," where we most often speak about the spiritual path as one that begins and ends with the fulfillment of the individual seeker. Maybe an insistence on community can help balance the cult of the individual seeker, and the idolatry and narcissism that this search can sometimes foster. It compels us to ask the question, either on our way into the cave or on our way back out: What have you learned that you can give? Community gives a shape and larger purpose to the solo journey. And while our contemporary model of search contains pitfalls, it also has the potential to enrich the collective beyond measure. The collective, in fact, depends on this kind of seeking.

Mordechai Kaplan named an ancient tenet of Judaism when he asserted that belonging is more important than believing. Something happens, is made possible, in the human heart when we are told we belong. It is something underneath language, something embodied. Belonging to a tribe teaches us how to belong to all humanity, to all creation.

But it is not so easy to belong. Because it involves a deep compromise, and we can feel that it corrupts the "purity" of our aloneness, we resist belonging. Yet this is the way of the world. We belong--to our people, to all life--whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not.

The Dance of Vitality

This movement between alone and together is a dance of vitality. The one returning from her authentic aloneness, bringing the fruit of that to the community, and the one setting out again into the wilderness--both are necessary to have a community that is transformative. Think of the community like a mikvah, the ritual bath that Jews immerse in to mark various transitions. In order for a mikvah to be kosher, it must have water flowing in and water flowing out. In order for a community to be kosher, it must have people flowing in and people flowing out. Any tradition needs to cultivate this alone/together dance to experience vitality.

In our synagogue in Vermont a verse from the book of Exodus is inscribed over the doorway: "God led the people by way of the wilderness."^[4] The wilderness is the place of being alone. The word midbar, in Hebrew, includes the root d-v-r, the root for "word," or "thing." It is in the wilderness of our solitude that we encounter the word, the thing, that will connect us to God.  It is only through that being alone in the wilderness that one can merit becoming part of a people. The ideal is that we each will go into our wildernesses from time to time, that the community will make room for this and affirm this, and that it will receive us back again.

 

 

---

^[1]  Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5

^[2]  B. Talmud Yevamot 63b

^[3]  B. Talmud Shabbat 33b

^[4]  Exodus 13:18

Naming The Unnameable

Published in Parabola, Fall 2012 issue

Joshua Boettiger

 And The Words Get It All Wrong

 It seems like the height of human chutzpah to give God a name. The word, God, might be better understood as a placeholder for everything we can’t name: the unknown in all its kingdoms and manifestations. Yet we never stop naming God. There are said to be 72 names of God in the Jewish tradition, and even that figure is limiting. The Torah itself has been described as one long name of God. And perhaps each utterance, spoken truthfully, is itself a name of God, reflecting the ancient longing to pray without cessation, to never stop calling God’s Name.

The one who prays is like the poet who chooses language knowing that language is not ultimately representative. And yet, the poet figures, at least it brings us to the table. Even if language never succeeds in naming the moment, it is a noble attempt. Jack Gilbert writes in the poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite / Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write / and the words get it all wrong.”[1] We wouldn’t presume to not speak because the words get it all wrong. It is something we live with. We don’t really aspire to getting the words right, at least in any absolute kind of way. We’re usually content to live in the world of the relative, with all of its longing, with all its heart.

When we used to become frustrated in seminary about theologies of all stripes (including our own) not letting the unknown be at peace, or remain nameless, my friend Benjamin would always paraphrase the teaching of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s that even if the unknown is ineffable, we have no choice but to “eff” about it.  It’s what we do. And maybe all this effing is forgivable if there is the presence of a wink in the midst of it all; a nod in the direction of the un-nameable.

Choosing The Dualistic

This leads us to the classic dilemma that the great religious traditions share. If, as the mystics all tell us, we can scratch the surface of everything and find God peering back at us; if there is a unitive consciousness that underlies all life – what are we to make of the practiced dualism that our spiritual traditions seem to adhere to? In Judaism, there is a blessing one recites upon hearing good news and a different one prescribed for bad news. We speak in the language of forbidden and permitted, pure and impure. The spark of the undifferentiated glows from the center of the tradition, but it is often buried with grime.

We name and choose particular paths because we need relationship. For instance, as a Jew I face East when I pray, towards Jerusalem. The part of me that faces East, honoring the locus of my tradition, coexists with the part of me that knows (or suspects, at least) that God is in all things and all moments – that God is everywhere we turn. What is gained by facing East? Relationship. Community. And a path that helps us move through a reality that appears to us to be dualistic the vast majority of the time. We need spiritual practices that help us to skillfully navigate this broken world, not just ones that describe a state that can feel remote much of the time.

When I face East, shorthand here for committing to a particular, dualistic tradition, I also have a direction I can prostrate before; I have an opportunity to surrender. If I try to surrender in every direction, I get dizzy. But I can face East and bow and enter into a prayer that is dialogic. My theology is that all is one. My practice is decidedly the opposite. I need a God to talk to, and I need a tribe to support and inform this conversation – to give me the language, if you will. But what is lost here? Is my dualistic practice keeping me from a more truthful relationship with the unknown? Put differently, when can I stop naming God?

The World To Come

Judaism holds that the Messiah has not yet come and that when s/he does arrive, we will be ushered into a new time/space often referred to as olam haba, the world to come. This longing for olam haba, for healing, for arrival in true home, feels authentic to me, in that it is reflective of my own lived experience of distance, of loss. Olam Haba also feels like one way of referring to the unknown realm.

Olam haba is often talked about in tandem with its cohort, olam hazeh, meaning “this world.” The two worlds are set up as a duality. In Mishnah Avot[2] we read the following statement: “Better is one hour of repentance and good works in this world than the whole life of the world to come.” But a few verses earlier the same rabbi writes, “Better is one hour of bliss in the world to come than the whole life in this world.” What’s going on here?  At first, it seems like a flat contradiction, a scribal error. But I think the rabbis are trying to get at something else with their mixing the worlds around. Perhaps it is that in our most accepting moments in this world, in the moments where we see most clearly what is, we are indeed in the world to come. To give a colloquial example of this, I have a friend who when she tastes something delicious will say, “Ah! A taste of olam haba!” When the rabbis talk about the world to come, I think they are often talking about what is possible in present moment awareness in this world. Our reality doesn’t change, but how we experience our reality can shift (and then shift back again). The unknown has a way of folding itself into the known. The cell wall that separates them is thin, indeed.

My brother Paul and I were speaking recently about the spiritual path, and the maddening promise we often attach to it that we will reach another state, different from this one. Yet, olam haba is olam hazeh – the difference being our level of acceptance of where we are. There is no other state to achieve; rather, we are only changing how we inhabit this state. Olam haba is simply olam hazeh, with a wink.

The Messiah Is Here (Sort Of)

Once a rabbi met the prophet Elijah. The rabbi asked Elijah, “When will the messiah come?” Elijah said, “Go and ask him yourself when he’s coming.” The rabbi said, “Where is he?” Elijah said, “He’s sitting at the city gate, covered with bandages” (an alternate version of this story has the messiah changing the bandages of the lepers at the city gate). So the rabbi went and asked the messiah, “When will you come?” The messiah said, “Today.”

The rabbi came back and relayed this to Elijah: “The messiah is coming today!” Elijah responded with temperance, saying “the messiah meant, today, if you listen to God’s voice.”[3]. The tradition practically begs us to realize, the messiah is here. The world to come is here. The unknown is as close as your breath. What this means is that, as Wendell Berry writes, “What we need is here;” yet we must be careful to not grasp in the presence of that knowing, lest we fall too irretrievably into the world of names.

The messiah is here. And yet we pray, perhaps with a wink, with all our heart for the coming of the messiah because this prayer reflects our human experience of longing, and suffering; our need to reach out towards an Other. The wink is a nod to the unitive consciousness, even as we commit dualistically. Is such a wink sustainable, satisfying? I used to think it was, but today I’m not so sure.

I remember when I lived in Philadelphia, occasionally going to pray with a Sufi community nearby. One such morning, I had breakfast afterwards with the prayer-leader, who was born Jewish. I asked him about his path, assuming he had chosen Islam somewhere along the way. He winked at me, smiled, and said, “Either way, it’s all a lie, right?” As if to say, any one designation doesn’t represent the totality of the all. We’re all just naming God and it is sort of ridiculous, even if it is what we do as humans.

There Is A Field

My favorite Rumi poem gets at this dynamic brilliantly. “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field / I’ll meet you there.” The poet has clearly visited the field at different times, yet speaks as someone who is also not in the field at the present moment: “I’ll meet you there” perhaps expressing his own current remove. The knowledge of the field – gleaned from our own and from others’ accounts - can strengthen our faith, can help us continue to practice. But it still makes it seem like there is somewhere to be that is not here. 

Maybe when we say, “there is a field” we make room for the unknown, the wordless place. And when we say, “I’ll meet you there,” we make peace with the dualistic path that may yet take us there.

---

[1] Gilbert, Jack The Great Fires: Poems 1982 - 1992

[2] Mishnah Avot 4:16-17

[3] Sanhedrin 98a

Global warming and the limits of empathy

The Baby in the Well

by Paul Bloom

The New Yorker

May 20, 2013

Note from the editor of Reckonings:

The following excerpts from Paul Bloom's article in the May 20 issue of The New Yorker relate particularly to the issue of global warming and the challenge of securing enough commitment to attend to it seriously: a very serious challenge that thus far has almost precluded such attention. Bloom does not argue against empathy, but he makes a persuasive case that empathy must be supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by reason and judgment.

 

[Jeremy] Rifkin and others have argued, plausibly, that moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family and the tribe to humanity as a whole. Yet it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love....

The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”....

Consider global warming—what Rifkin calls the “escalating entropy bill that now threatens catastrophic climate change and our very existence.” As it happens, the limits of empathy are especially stark here. Opponents of restrictions on CO₂ emissions are flush with identifiable victims—all those who will be harmed by increased costs, by business closures. The millions of people who at some unspecified future date will suffer the consequences of our current inaction are, by contrast, pale statistical abstractions.

The government’s failure to enact prudent long-term policies is often attributed to the incentive system of democratic politics (which favors short-term fixes), and to the powerful influence of money. But the politics of empathy is also to blame. Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countless people in the future.

 

Related articles

Paul Bloom: The case against empathy.

The Limits of Empathy

The Limits Of Empathy

Dire outlook despite global warming 'pause': study

Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians

Talking with God

I wrote a few days ago about the growth and regrowth of spirituality in human development, so it may be useful to describe something of my own.

Since I grew up in a nominally Episcopalian family — my parents did not go to church, and prayer was unknown in our home, even grace at meals — I suspect I learned some of the early sense of what I am comfortable calling God's presence from my nanny when I was very young, until I was five; that and roaming the woods, fields and lakeside near our home on Mercer Island. As Wordsworth says, it is the earth that is "apparell'd in celestial light" for those who have eyes to see.

 

My nanny's name was Marian. I have photographs but no real memory of her; she created a wonderful scrapbook of my life as infant and small child. I spent more time with her than with my parents. She put me to bed, played with me, dressed me, sat me on the pot (I was taught to shout "Finis!" to call her back),  in effect raised me, along with the kind Secret Service agent assigned to my protection, Henry Hazen, who drove me back and forth to school and kept a watchful eye as I explored. 

Later, when I was a more grown up boy, in the autumn of my eleventh year, I had a very long paper route. I took shopping news, not a real newspaper, from house to house along the streets of homes before the hill begins to rise above the town of Berkeley, California. It was a lonely time, despite my mother's best efforts to offer companionship. 

I was grateful for the times we spent together, especially when we set up a card table in front of the television, ate our meal - I especially remember ground lamb on a stick, a ground lamb drumstick, with mint jelly - and watched a drama called "Studio One." But there were too few of those times. My mother worked during the days I went to Garfield Junior High School, and she had a boyfriend, a doctor named Leo Doyle. I recall little of those school days. The most vivid recollection is of the school library and the librarian, Nell Stone, who befriended me. I used to sit with a book in the cubby under her desk. I climbed trees, swinging from branch to branch like a monkey. And I loved to clamber onto people's house roofs at night, looking in at scenes of their lives, unobserved. 

My father died that year in New York. He had suffered from recurrent depression for most of his life, and without work he respected, separated from the woman he loved, with almost no money other than a life insurance policy of which I was beneficiary (he returned his wife's check, unwilling to accept her assistance), he chose to jump from an eighth floor window of a hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Because of his connection with the Roosevelt family, the news of his suicide was in newspapers all over the country. Much later, I learned that he had left me a short note: "My dear Johnny, Goodbye my son. I love you dearly. I have faith and pride in you. You will make a great and useful man. I wish I could watch you grow. I love you. Pops"

I remember the telephone ringing in the early morning, my mother answering, the seriousness of her voice. Somehow I knew what she was hearing. I missed my father, and had received only postcards and Christmas presents from FAO Schwartz in the two years since we had last been together. I also feared him. Of his last visit to our home in Los Angeles, the only memory I have is that he drove a maroon Ford with a curmpled fender. Earlier, after he left our home in Phoenix, he took me to two dude ranches in Arizona. All my memories are of being frightened: his teaching me to shoot his pistol, waking in our cabin at night to see a figure standing over me, seeing a tarantula beside the swimming pool, feeding pigs that hungrily drove at me standing on a stump, an image of a wire stretching across a riding trail that seemed just the height to decapitate a boy on horseback.

I lay awake that morning of my eleventh year, knowing that my mother would come into my room to tell me. I pretended surprise. She said I didn't have to go to school that day, but I saw no reason not to go. What good would it do to stay home? When I walked into my homeroom, the teacher said she was sorry my father had died. "That's OK," I replied, as if I wanted to comfort her. I just wanted to escape her attention, be by myself. That afternoon, my mother asked her friend Leo to come in and ask me if I wanted to talk. With him? I thought. No way. So for many years, my mother thought I would ask to hear about my father "when I was ready."

She wrote my father's widow Virginia, "For the present I have decided not to show Johnny the farewell letter his father wrote him or any of the other letters, because Johnny still hasn't reached the stage where he talks naturally and normally about his father. As you say, we can never be quite sure of what goes on deep inside a child, and Johnny has been almost completely 'bottled up' about his father since he died.... So, all I can do at present, it seems to me, is to bring John into our conversations whenever it seems natural and easy, hoping that before long, whatever bothers him about his father's death will come out in the open and can be talked out." That readiness was long in coming.

One night during my college years, a decade later, I was living with my grandmother Eleanor. Her grandchildren called her Grandmère. I had given her that morning, as I was leaving for my summer job with a publishing house (pasting reviews into scrapbooks),  a short essay I had written on the United Nations. At 1 or 2 AM, when I returned home, Grandmère was still up, at her desk dealing with a small mountain of correspondence, the only light a small gooseneck lamp over her desk. She was playing Gregorian chants on the phonograph.

When I arrived she asked me in. She told me that she had read my essay and enjoyed it, and said — this was what I was waiting for without knowing it — "Johnny, your writing reminds me of your father's writing." She asked me to join her sitting by the fireplace, and finally I began to learn about my father. My grandmother told me she had loved him. She was still troubled, a decade after his death, that she had been able to do nothing to save him. 

I write all this because it was in a sense prelude to my experience of that endless paper route. Walking along, bored, throwing shopping news onto front porches, I began to talk with God. I suspected I was wishing I could talk with my father, imagining I could, if I made up his voice in my head. I did that a lot in the years to come. But this time felt different. How was I to know if I was talking with God, or my father, or my imagination? The solution came to me with the plainness of self-evidence. If the voice I heard used the word "altar," it was God speaking. No one else would know to use that word in talking with me.  So I talked with God. I have no memory of what we said to each other, but I felt companionship. I was less alone.

Why "altar"? I have no idea. I thought of an altar not as a place of sacrifice but as a gathering place of sacred objects — the cross, a chalice of wine, a plate of bread, the body and blood of Christ, which I knew in some mysterious way became mine — all of ours — in the symbolic transsubstantiation that is communion, the eucharist.

I suppose I complained about my paper route, because soon after I took to leaving bundles of shopping news in the hedge, rather than delivering something that was so useless. It didn't occur to me that my sense of utility might have been different from the families along my route. One day the director of paper distribution came to our door, explained to my mother what I'd been doing, and I had to go with him and pull the sopping bundles out of the hedge. I was summarily dismissed from my job, which I may have thought God's will.

In fact, I didn't think that. I don't recall God's speaking to me about my practice, but I was sure he didn't approve. My mother certainly didn't, and she was about as close to God as I got in the years after those conversations along my lonely route.

Still, the memory of those conversations stayed with me, are still with me more than sixty years later. My rational mind says the presence, the voice that kept me companion, was my imagination. In fact, I have no way of knowing. My family is not particularly religious. But I loved to go to church. I often went to St. James Church in Hyde Park with my grandmother when no one else in the family staying with her would go.

The music, the prayers, the incense, the very words of the liturgy, the sign of the cross, the portraits of Mary with her son, the crucifixion, the mystery of the trinity, especially the ceremony of communion, all drew me. Later I liked to find a church, most often a Catholic church, to sit alone in contemplation.

I feel almost as much at home in a Zen Buddhist sangha, or in the congregation of which my son Joshua is rabbi. I remember significant moments: going early in the morning and serving the priest in a small service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a time in Berkeley when I was asked to speak one of the passages from the Bible. I shook with nervousness. A hand reached out, touched my back from behind in reassurance, like the touch I described in the Zen story I wrote yesterday.

I no longer talk with God. Once in a lifetime is enough. I pray. I meditate. I sit in churches. If God responds, he does so unbeknownst to me, as mediator in my life, and for that I am grateful. The mystery remains.

There are many who in my adult years have had a formative role in enriching my spiritual experience. They include Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, poet Christian Wiman, Zen teacher Norman Fischer, my son, Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, the great Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the Hasidic stories of the Baal Shem Tov and his followers, translator and poet Stephen Mitchell (particularly his Gospel According to Jesus, his poem "Jerome," and his translation of The Book of Job), the scholar of Jewish mysticism Abraham Joshua Heschel, the monks of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, my dear friend and founder of the Cornerstone Forum, Gil Bailie, the congregants of St. Olav's Church at Modum Bad, in Vikersund, Norway, Isak Dinesen's tales, particularly "Babette's Feast" and the extraordinary film made from that story, Beethoven's pair of crowning achievements, his Missa Solemnis and his Ninth Symphony, Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine, and some of the songs of Leonard Cohen.

Spiritual development: a hypothesis and two poems

Talking with God

Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather

Related articles

A Zen story

A Zen Story

Paradox — or the appearance of paradox — seems to be at the heart of a lot 

of Zen Buddhist stories, which also often take the form of a short conversation 

between two monks — though it could be any two of us. 

For example, here’s a story about a conversation in which two men get off 

to a bad start, and emerge realizing not conflict but the simple (and elusive) 

fact of being. (I have adapted it from a more complex traditional account in

the literature of Zen Buddhism.)

The two monks both forgot themselves and knew themselves. They came to life 

in the midst of death. How can that be? How can we reconcile those apparent 

contradictions?

Let’s imagine two people meeting — rounding the same corner on the 

same narrow mountain trail, rock wall on one side, an abyss on the other. 

They are walking in opposite directions. So they literally bump into each other. 

At first, let’s say, they’re surprised, and then angry. They both want 

the other to get out of the way. But under the circumstances, 

that’s not practical.

“Where have you come from?” one asks, not politely. 

“From India,” the other one replied, “I assume you haven’t been there.”  

“If I had, I’d be there,” said the other, testily and enigmatically.  

“Tell me something more interesting.” 

“You wouldn’t get it if I did tell you,” his partner replied. 

That’s a turning point. Mysterious, maybe unlikely, but a 

turning nonetheless.

They might have come to blows, but both realized that might well 

lead to a fatal fall. So instead, something begins 

to change between the two. Instead of taking the bait, the partner 

found himself saying, 

“Maybe I’d get half of it, and you’d have the other half, 

so together we’d have the whole.” 

That seemed intriguing. They began to see each other, and so they were silent, 

in contemplation. Authenticity was dawning, and authenticity takes time and 

quiet to emerge.

So no more words for a while.

After a while one said, “If we said it, no one will get it.” The implication perhaps 

being, not even us.

 
That led to more silent contemplation. 

Finally, the other one answered, “It’s not that they 

won’t get it, but no one can say it.” There are no descriptive 

words, theirs or anybody else’s.

With that, the first monk

reached out and touched the second gently 

on the side of his head, 

In that moment both experienced a similar shiver of simply being — in their bodies, minds and hearts.. 

Each went on his way with livelier step, 
less self-conscious, 
more awake, 
not having the slightest idea 
what happened.


So let’s say it’s up to us.



What on earth happened? 
Perhaps some kind of radical openness.
They might have called it nirvana,
But that word is just a placemarker
in the book of life. It means nothing
apart from the experience it does not
describe.
 
So let's ask ourselves, for a start


Is there anything — in our experience, our life, 
of which their experience reminds us? Perhaps
a small everyday thing.
I have a hunch we’re not going to 
figure it out.
 
Meditation may help, or prayer. 


And we need each other.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Barack Obama: A friend's reflections

I reprint below some thoughts of a close and thoughtful friend and fine poet, Richard O. Moore, replying to a Reckonings post I offered some time ago. My brief reply to his questions follows his remarks.

Reading your recent posting raised a number of questions, as follows:

1. You refer to Eleanor as your “greatest mentor” which, for me, opens up the question as to your grandmother’s influence on your view of your grandfather. Is this worth exploring? At the risk of over simplification, it strikes me that the President was the grand politician (the art of the possible) in contrast with his wife’s views which were moral rather than political, although not without political consequences. Whereas the President never lost his vision of America as first among nations, Eleanor moved on to think of the world and it problems in global rather than national states and “spheres of influence.”  To what extent were you aware of this difference?

2. Are there circumstances in common with the 1930’s and today which in any way limit what a President can and cannot do? The title of the Brands biography [H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt] gave me a clue. FDR was a symbol of the ruing class who responded to the collapse of an economic system from the position of a supreme insider. Regardless of his radical policies, his credentials as an oligarch

remained intact. In sharp contrast, Obama enjoys no such advantage. At the time of the Great Depression his mere existence as a Harvard educated lawyer and successful politician would have prompted an image of the Anti-Christ incarnate. To say that then and now America is a racist society is to state the obvious. The obvious, however, is frequently the most ignored element in our daily life. To be black in America still means that inherently a black man has no legitimate power. This view is visceral and mostly unconscious in today’s political discourse.

Obama, who thinks and acts as if in a post-racist world, commands legally mandated lip service. FDR, although a “traitor,” retained his authority as “one of us.” Fortunately societies sometimes change. The Republican strategies from the “birthers” to the Tea Party purists are doomed because the changing demographics in the  U.S. will eventually produce a different society with its own problems.

In some respects the Thirties and today, instead of sharing similarities, are the opposite of each other. While reading your post  I remembered visits to the local A & P. The shelves in many parts of the store were bare. The Depression was an economy of scarcity. Today, regardless of the collapse of the housing market and other financial losses, there does not seem to have been a corresponding drop in commodity production [or consumption]. The shelves are full. We have an economy of surplus, which is no less of an economy in crisis but for different reasons.

There were and are other forces at work in these two periods.  For example: the Depression saw the rise of a powerful union movement. Today, unions can be said to qualify for an endangered species list. The same holds true for heavy manufacturing. It was manufacturing related to WWII that brought us out of the Depression. Today those jobs are for the most part gone and will not return. A new and highly skilled work force is needed to meet the needs of the new industries of the information age, but that work force will be much smaller. A substantial portion of today’s unemployed is in danger of becoming unemployable and the core of a permanent underclass. Two of the the challenges of the near future are how to pay for the rising demands of the welfare state and how to develop new social organizations and practices that contribute to the health and sustainability of the planet.   

Richard, I am grateful for your thoughts, and substantially in accord with them. The challenges you identify in the near future are critical, interactive and daunting: the danger of a permanent and restive underclass, the rising demands of a welfare state, and the development of organization and practice to save and nourish the planet. There is revolutionary potential in the first: it is hard to imagine the voting public or the Congress supporting adequate welfare for a large and permanent underclass.  

As my greatest mentor, my grandmother spoke of the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties circa 1956-62, my own writing at Amherst College and Columbia University, and for the Collegiate Council for the United Nations, which I served as president between 1959 and 1961, but not of her husband, my grandfather. I wrote later, in A Love in Shadow (NY: Norton, 1978), about them both.

Still, from her own writing and that of her biographers — Joe Lash and Blanche Wiesen Cook, primarily — and my listening to her speak with Adlai Stevenson, JFK and others at Hyde Park and in New York, I agree with your sense of their basic differences. Of course she had the advantage of not having or choosing to serve as president of the United States; FDR would surely have been different in a less constraining political role.

But even given that, they were clearly of different temperament and inclination, he more the political strategist and tactician who like his admired cousin Theodore, loved the bully pulpit, she not without canniness — witness her taking Cardinal Spellman to the cleaners, and her influential support of Stevenson's candidacy in 1952 and 1956 — but more the moralist with strong political views and unwavering commitment to social justice. 

Stevenson, inscribing to her a book about himself titled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics, wrote "To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience."

So yes, I was more influenced by my grandmother than by my grandfather. I admired them both inordinately, but I knew him as a child knows his grandfather. I knew my grandmother as I was at least coming into my own adult life. I'm convinced that she loved him, but as is widely known if not often well represented, theirs was not a close marriage. 

Revised and expanded — Spiritual development: two hypotheses, two poems, and Beethoven's conclusion

Dear friends,
 
This morning I reread this excerpt from Wordsworth's ode, "Intimations of 
Immortality," and it reminded me of a thought I've long had about our access 
to the deepest spiritual experience — we could say, our relationship to God, 
perhaps as at least distant kin to that of Moses by the burning bush.

Here is Wordsworth,
 from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" 
 
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more!

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

So something like this: There was once a time for me 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
 But no more; the "celestial light" is gone. The world is still lovely — 
rainbows come and go, I find delight in a rose, the moon, a starry night,
the warmth andlight of the sun. But that glory I once saw, I can no longer see.


The simple thought I had was only this: 
Like most of our generous capacities of body, mind and heart, the depth 
and range of our later experiences of spiritual life — in Wordsworth's 
terms, what we see and what we do not — are first and foremost nourished 
— if at all — in our years of early childhood, an interactive combination 
of neuronal growth — largely, perhaps, in the prefrontal cortex, but more likely 
throughout our bodies — and, critically, the deep bond with at least one Other 
that is secure, continuous, and deeply loving. 


We've usually imagined, and exhaustively observed, the early bonds 
between mother and child. It might not be mother — it could have been 
another, an aunt, a grandmother, a nurse, even a father or grandfather. 
But by age 5 or so that capacity for spiritual experience 
has often grown about as much as it will for the rest of life.
That is no small growth — the whole of life is immesurably
enriched. The early glory may still appear at moments of 
numinous experience. But as Wordsworth said with such
courage and anguish, its continuity is lost. 
And yet.... 


the remarkable plasticity of the human brain, of our whole body's 
neuronal capacity to regrow what was lost, allows for 
exception, for neuronal and social development later in life that 
can increase and nourish our capacity for spirituality — largely, 
I imagine, through enduring practice of spiritual disciplines —
particularly the practices of prayer and meditation —
and most often in the company of others sharing similar devotion.
The experimental evidence is compelling, from such sources as neuro-
imaging of Tibetan monks*, and at least suggestively in Dan Siegel's 
pioneering work at UCLA  in interpersonal neurobiology.
 
• See also:  
http://www.mindandlife.org (Mind and Life Institute)

http://www.psyphz.psych.wisc.edu (the affective neuroscience lab at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison)



Dürer's engraving depicting St. Jerome


Here is the second poem I promised, by Stephen Mitchell:
JEROME


In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.





Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language 
comes alive, bursts from the text into life. "Flesh" is descriptive 
of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, 
of all the earth. 


If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard 
his words, I can imagine Jerome at such a moment taking up 
his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something 
in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great life of the ancient peaks, 
the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... 
and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood;
and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, 
each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, 
they were a part of me. I was mankind also,
a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________



"I was mankind also, a moving lichen 
On the cheek of the round stone..." 
That is as lovely — I cannot claim as accurate — an image of 
humankind as I know — as lovely and as necessary to absorb 
into our hearts, minds and bodies, that we might renew 
ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.*


Finally, and most tentatively, because I am a beginner as a student of 
Beethoven, I come to what I've termed "Beethoven's conclusion."
I love his late work, the string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, and the 
adaptation of Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth symphony. 
I am adopting a hypothesis I first heard on NPR (Weekend Edition,
February 12, 2006) from the American composer Jan Swofford.


A reader must hear the music Swofford and I describe to begin to have an aural 
sense of its meaning. Even then the mystery remains. I suggest, whenever 
possible, listening to live performances of the Missa Solemnis and the 
Ninth Symphony, and then the recordings by the Vienna Philarmonic conducted 
by Karl Böhm. 


The key passages of the Missa Solemnis are the last two movements, 
Sanctus: Praeludium - Benedictus, and Agnus Dei ; and of the Ninth 
Symphony, the final "Ode to Joy." 
Here is Jan Swofford:
    The Catholic mass which Beethoven called the Missa Solemnis is rarely performed. 
It's eclipsed by the better-known Ninth Symphony. But taken together, the two works 
shed light on the composer's spiritual world view.
   The Missa Solemnis may be the greatest piece never heard. Nearly 90 minutes long, it requires 
a large chorus, an orchestra and four soloists. It's impractical for the concert hall and fits far less 
comfortably into a Catholic church service.
    It concludes with a fraught, fragile and unanswered plea for peace amid the drumbeats of war. 
    But the answer comes in the Ninth Symphony, with its chorale finale based on Schiller's poem
"Ode to Joy," written in a time of revolution.

Those words and Beethoven's music call for humankind to kneel before the creator, but for
answers to turn to one another. The path to peace, he suggests, is bestowed not from above
but from within us and among us, in brotherhood.

 
 * Note: I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of 
Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, to 

Stephen Mitchell's poems and his Jeffersonian volume, The Gospel 
According to Jesus (HarperCollins, 2001), to Joanna Macy's book, 
Coming Back to Life (New Society Publishers, 1998) for the gift of 
Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt 
from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of 
Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988). 


I want to conclude this circuitous exploration of spiritual experience with lines 
from Leonard Cohen's song, "Anthem" They should also be heard, 
in his voice, before they are read:
Ring the bells that still can ring, 
Forget your perfect offering, 
There is a crack, a crack in everything, 

That’s how the light gets in. 


 

Rain - a poem rediscovered

"In From the Rain" (New York Times, 2 August 2009) is Verlyn Klinkenborg at his best, observant, attentive to the small dramas of the earth in ways that convey their familiarity and their sometimes ominous mysteries. Like him, I have been thinking much of water this spring, especially of the power and beauty of rain. 

 

Grey wall moving.

Darker air,

fresh wet smell,

wind filling the trees.

When the rain comes,

there is nothing else.

 

Rain among trees, a photo of John R. Boettiger (2009)

A letter from poet Anne Sexton to her daughter Linda

Anne Sexton was an accomplished poet, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die (1966).

The poet Maxine Kumin was a good friend who knew Sexton and her work well. Kumin wrote of Sexton's confessional poetry, "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry." Sexton completed an unusual revisioning of some of the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm — Transformations (1971), which I sometimes asked my students to explore beside the traditional Grimm translations.

 Sexton suffered from bipolar disorder, then called manic depression. Working with Kumin on revising the galleys of her last volume of poems, The Awful Rowing Toward God (published posthumously in 1975), Sexton returned home, put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Much has been written about Sexton's life and death, as well as her experiences in psychotherapy, including a wrenching biographical/autobiographical volume by her daughter Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, and a controversial biography by Diane Middlebrook.*

Denise Levertov wrote, "We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."

 This is a letter written by Sexton to her 40-year-old daughter Linda. 

Dear Linda,

I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her “I know, Mother, I know.” (Found a pen!) And I thought of you – someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me. And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won’t be flying, maybe it will be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40. Anytime.) – I want to say back.

1st I love you.

2. You never let me down.

3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 with a dead mother who I needed still. . . .

This is my message to the 40 year old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely. I know that. Now you too know it – wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I’ve had a good life – I wrote unhappy – but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda – Live to the HILT! To the top. I love you 40 year old Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are!—Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her – or she me! Silly Anne! So there!

XOXOXO

Mom

 

* See also — but take care in assessing — Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977). 

Related articles

Anne Sexton's Report Card

Eggs of Things: Anne Sexton's 1963 Children's Book

The Bedlam of the Witch Queen

A Poet of Consciousness: Wisława Szymborska

Mothers Day

A portrait of my mother hangs in the entry hall outside my apartment. It was painted by Elizabeth Shumatoff, the same artist who was painting my grandfather's portrait — "the unfinished portrait" — when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the 12th of April 1945. The nation stopped in disbelief to grieve the only president most of them had ever known: friend, trusted guide in depression and war, "traitor to his class," hero to "the forgotten man." My mother's hero. She treasured his companionship and love. When my father left for the war, she and I moved to The White House.

My mother Anna was a beautiful and gifted woman. Perhaps like most children, I wanted her more for myself. She lived gracefully in the shadow of two larger-than-life parents. She was proudly a Roosevelt through and through, but never only a Roosevelt. She made a life of her own, modeling that accomplishment for my sister, my brother and me, so that we could do the same for ourselves. I am five years older than she was when she died. In May each year, her birthday and Mother's Day, I remember her, miss her, am grateful for her.

For my earlier published writing about my parents and their families, see A Love in Shadow (NY: W.W. Norton, 1978)

 

Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, John Roosevelt Boettiger

Mercer Island, Washington, October 1939

Harvard's 2013 conference on teaching and learning

THE 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, held at the university on May 8, demonstrated commendable interest across the disciplines in improving the quality of undergraduate education at Harvard. 

There were, however, some notable instances of neglect and some important misfires. I commented on a summary of the proceedings included in Harvard Magazine. Here is my note:

There was much of value in the HILT conference: perhaps most notably, nourishing “the virtues of deep patience and close attention.” That such virtues are “no longer available in nature as [students experience it]” is a surprising comment by Jennifer Rogers, an art historian at Harvard. Nature is abundantly available, even in Cambridge, and always repays deep patience and close attention. Everything in nature takes time to see, no less than a work of art, and the joys of both can be astonishing and complementary. 

Evidently entirely missing from the conference proceedings, if one is to judge from the account in Harvard Magazine, was serious consideration of students’ emotional and spiritual development. Perhaps that critical dimension of education was considered appropriate to earlier centuries at Harvard, say the 18th or 19th, but not the 21st, replete as it is with demands for cognitive skills and the assimilation of information.

When someone says “teachers’ obligations extend to helping students make the choice between ‘being' and ‘doing,’ one must cry foul. Being and doing are best conceived as complementary: "making something of their lives in service [to] the world” and “deep devotion to others” are hardly obstacles to good education. They are part and parcel of “the undergraduate rite of passage.” Without them the relationship of teachers and students, however rich in cognition, risks dessication. 

 

Milestone: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

From The New York Times today:

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

The new measurement came from analyzers high atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide carbon dioxide trend.

The Ninth Stage of Life: A Work in Progress

Shakespeare's As You Like It is a comedy, but its most well known and widely quoted lines are more melancholic, darkly humorous rather than amusing, musing upon the seven stages of our lives, from infancy through old age.

Here is dour Jacques's solioquy in Act II, Scene 7:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The notion of life as seven stages was well known in the England of Shakespeare's day; his audience would surely have been familiar with it. King Henry V, two centuries earlier, had a tapestry portraying seven stages of man. The concept's origins may be traced to medieval philosophy's casting many things into sacred groups of seven: the holy week in which God created the earth, the heavens, the seas, and all their inhabitants, then rested on the 7th day, Shabat—and of course the seven deadly sins, born of Satan and his serpent, visited upon Eve and her credulous companion Adam, forever banished from the primal garden to serve out their remaining years in this world of good and evil entwined.

(to be continued over the next few days...)

E-Books and Democracy

An article with that title appeared in today's New York Times, recounting the ongoing negotiations between public libraries and ebook publishers concerning publishers' willingness to provide their ebooks to public libraries for patrons' reading.

It's a complex issue, involving wider public access to information and literature, fair compensation to authors for their books, and inevitably, publishers' profit margins for books sold. Ebooks are gaining a larger and larger share of the market for books. "E-book readership," the article reports, "is rising much faster than readership of print books; digital books could soon be the most popular book format. Readership of [the New York Public Library's] e-books soared 168 percent from 2011 to 2012; print circulation, while much larger, remained constant."

The publishers are slowly opening up to provide copies of their ebooks to libraries, but remain apprehensive about the impact on their businesses. All impose some kind of limits on the number of books provided to libraries and/or the number of books those libraries are permitted to circulate; and of course the model of "circulation" for ebooks is slipprier than for physical books.

The publishing industry, like most others, has moved toward a small number of very large conglomerates. Self-publication by ebook authors and small entrepreneurs like TidBITS offer a lively and desireable challenge. An earlier Times article  last November, "How Dead is the Book Business?", summarizes the current publishing world:

"Random House, an arm of the media company Bertelsmann in Germany, is itself made up of former independents like Knopf and Pantheon. Penguin, a division of the education publisher Pearson, contains Dutton, Viking and others. If market forces were the only concern, it’s possible that there would soon be only one or two publishers and that they might be folded into some larger infotainment company like Time Warner Penguin or maybe Random Viacom....

"But it’s difficult to imagine how, in the digital world, publishers could ever monopolize the sale of written material. Even if there were only one house left, it would compete with every blogger and self-published e-book author. Eventually, it’s likely that book publishing will embody both conflicting visions of digital-age commerce — lots of small businesses and a few massive ones....

Like Amazon.

It may be that the issue of patents is becoming a critical battleground — a ground in which the little guys are at a considerable disadvantage:

"Reuters recently reported that Amazon (which somehow holds a patent for the 'one-click shopping' button) was hiring several high-profile patent lawyers with the mandate to identify and evaluate strategic I.P. acquisition and licensing opportunities.' The company has argued that it buys up patents to defend against the lawsuits of others. That may be partly true, but the worst fate for readers isn’t the merger of a few struggling companies in a diminishing business. It’s the threat of another U.S. Steel."