Oh God – Part 3 (An atheist in shul)

My friend Melissa in Sacramento has a knack for getting to the heart of things. She wrote after one of my recent posts: 

Since I don’t believe in God, I don’t go to synagogue because I am alienated by a service full of prayers to a God in whom I don’t believe. And I don’t envision a Bat Mitzvah, because it surely would involve worship of same. I wait with great anticipation to see how you reconcile these seemingly conflicting beliefs (non-beliefs?) Carry on!

I’ve spent the past two blog posts more or less talking about what I don’t believe.

So let’s give a little time now to why I in fact love the Reform Jewish liturgy – why I enjoy going to services even if they are full of God God God – and why I’m studying to become a Bat Mitzvah.

Services are a rare place in our modern American world where people talk about the big stuff. Mortality. The meaning of life. Forgiveness. Becoming a more loving, generous person.

Most of the time we run around completely preoccupied with daily life. There’s the whole materialistic drumbeat of buy! buy! buy! But even those of us who don’t buy into all the buying still get caught up in the scramble to get dinner on the table, hold on to our jobs, volunteer at our kids’ school, fix the broken toilet, keep up with the latest convoluted turns of the health care debate.

We don’t talk about death. (Well, except for those famous death panels.) We don’t talk about how precious life is. We don’t stop to remember how utterly long-shot miraculous it is that our temperate, water-filled, oxygen-filled planet with its millions of forms of life even exists.

But in services we do that. And for me, all those “Gods” in the liturgy are a stand-in for life, or for our universe. For creation.

When I say Baruch atah Adonai Eloheynu – blessed are you, Adonai our God – I am expressing my awe that all of this exists.

I am reminding myself to feel awe that it exists.

I am reminding myself that I am just a minuscule piece of a very big picture.

Going to shul (synagogue) gives me an opportunity to do this on a regular basis – even if I haven’t had a particularly awe-inspiring day, even if I have just spent the last four hours fighting with traffic jams or a moronic boss or a sulky teenager.

And it lets me do this in public, out loud with a bunch of other people, which is more powerful than thinking it silently by myself.

One reading that I love within the Reform siddur (prayer book) cites a Chasidic leader from Poland around the year 1800, Rabbi Simcha Bunam, who said:

Keep two truths in your pocket and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be “For my sake the world was created.” And the other: “I am dust and ashes.”

Wow! I don’t think you need to believe in God to find that profound.

So yes, sometimes all the God-language in shul (synagogue) gets to me like it would get to Melissa. But most of the time I take it as a metaphor.

And there’s a lot in the Reform siddur – like the Rabbi Bunam saying – that speaks to me with a depth and “big picture” perspective that is missing from other parts of my daily life.

P.S.  Want to read a Yom Kippur sermon by a modern rabbi on that saying by Rabbi Bunam? It’s here.

Oh God – Part 2 (An atheist without a foxhole)

So why am I an atheist?

There are two ways to approach this kind of “why do I believe xxx” question. One is to address its substance – to articulate the reasoning behind my conclusions. 

The other is biographical or psychological — more of a novelist’s approach. No matter how much we might admire Spock or Lt. Data, most of us don’t reach conclusions about things like God on a purely logical basis. We’re products of our families, our experiences, the things we cherish and the things that cause us to run from the room screaming.

I pretty much grew up an atheist. I’m not sure my father or mother would have used  that word to describe themselves, but religion was a non-factor in our home. We didn’t belong to a synagogue or go to Hebrew school. We were Jewish, and we had a Passover seder and lit Chanukah candles, but we also decorated a Christmas tree and dyed Easter eggs and cooked a Thanksgiving turkey and watched fireworks on July 4th. These all seemed like secular, cultural holidays – excuses to be happy, eat, exchange gifts, and see relatives. God never entered into any of it.

When I got older and claimed a Jewish identity for myself, it was a cultural and political one rather than a religious one. My most wonderful experiences as a teenager were in a socialist-Zionist youth group called Hashomer Hatzair, which had ties to the kibbutz movement in Israel.

Hashomer at the time was a quirky mix of early 20^th century European socialism and American 1960s idealistic radicalism. Religion was the opiate of the masses. Passover and Chanukah were holidays of freedom and national liberation. Zionism was an effort to create a state where Jews could live securely like any other nation, not an effort to fulfill a divine mandate.

God, once again, never entered into any of it.

That’s the biographical back story. But shifting now from background to substance…  the common conceptions of God just make no sense to me.

Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the recent spate of books on atheism, and don’t have a battle-ready arsenal of reasoned arguments. No Christopher Hitchens here!  But on a gut level: 

• Science is able to explain so much of our world these days – including many of the mysteries that people traditionally ascribed to God. Even those near-death experiences where people talk about seeing a tunnel of light – there’s brain research that suggests such visions may be a neurochemical phenomenon.
• The concept of God changes whenever humans’ need for a God changes. In ancient times, we needed some way to control rain and crops! So people prayed to rain gods and fertility gods. Well, now we have weather maps, fertilizer and  even GMO seeds. And we don’t pray to rain gods any more. To me, it seems so obvious that people create God rather than God creating people.
• Then there’s the Holocaust. (As simply the most extreme example of unprovoked evil.) If there were a God that acted the way the Bible says – a God that rewards good and punishes evil, a God that cared enough about the Jews to take them out of Egypt — how could such a God have let this happen?

Recent take on the pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport by the S.F. Chronicle's wonderful Don Asmussen

Honestly, I don’t think you need God to be spiritual. I don’t think you need God to be a good human being.

It is totally possible to be in awe of the miracle of existence — this planet, this universe, life, nature, human beings, love — without believing in God.

You can strive to do justice and love mercy without God.

When asked to sum up the teachings of Torah in one sentence, Rabbi Hillel said: “What is hateful to thyself do not do to another. That is the whole Law, the rest is Commentary.” No God in there.

Of course, someone far less eminent than Rabbi Hillel also said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” And I must admit that my own atheism has never been tested in any foxholes.

I’ve never been in war. I’ve never starved. I’ve never watched a child die. I’ve never faced a deadly disease or extreme pain. I’ve never (yet!) been old and felt death tiptoe closer each evening.

I’d like to think I would be able to maintain my principles –  could live under duress and not turn to the theological equivalent of Superman or Batman for help. I’d like to think that I would be able to acknowledge the pointlessness of suffering and the end of consciousness that comes with death and the limits of my own power without blinking.

 But who knows? I haven’t been there. I wouldn’t presume to say how I would respond.

And I suspect that facing adversity, just as you can have a crisis of faith, you can have a crisis of no-faith.

 Next: So why go to synagogue? Why become a Bat Mitzvah?

 

Oh God – Part 1

Oh God. I need to write a God post. 

I want to set down, soon, while I am still at the very beginning of the Bat Mitzvah process, what I think about the idea of God. 

Maybe my ideas will change during this process. Maybe some of you will respond in ways that challenge my thinking. (Yes, that’s an open invitation. Especially to the Episcopal priests among you, ahem, Jim!) In any event, I’ll have a record of what I thought at the beginning and it will be interesting later to look back and see what, if anything, has changed. 

But how do you write about something like God in a blog? When every convention of the medium calls for you to be short, sharp and snarky?

I’m going to try and do this in multiple posts. So I may not be sharp and snarky, but at least I can be short. Or short-ish.

In a nutshell: I don’t believe in God.

Let me list the concepts of God that I don’t believe in, which will probably deeply offend half of you along the way:

•  I don’t believe there is an old white man with a long white beard sitting on a throne up in the clouds, chatting with angels and running the universe. 
• I don’t believe there is a super-powerful being who decides whether it rains on the night of the Julia Morgan School auction or whether someone’s child gets cancer.
• I don’t believe there is a being that listens to and answers people’s prayers.
• I don’t believe there is a being that judges us and sends us to heaven or hell when we die.
• I don’t believe there is a being that had one-to-one conversations with Abraham, Moses or any other Biblical figure. (Nor a being who set desert bushes on fire or parted the Red Sea.)
• I don’t even believe there was a being that created the universe, then stepped back and left us on our own to muddle along and sort out good from evil.

(Maybe I should create my own radio show: Instead of NPR’s “This I Believe,” it could be Ilana’s “This I Don’t Believe.”)    

Now, I accept that there might be some kind of cosmic life-force or spirit that sparked the universe and resides in all living matter. It’s plausible to me that people may have “souls” or some kind of intangible essence inside them that is part of this cosmic thingamajig. I know there’s more to the universe than we were taught in 1970s Newtonian high school physics, and the little bit I know about quantum physics (which is so little as to be virtually non-existent) leaves a lot of room for mysteries.

So I’m totally open to the idea that out there, amidst the dark matter and theoretical strings and hypothetical multiple universes, there might be souls. Or a force. (May it be with you!) Or something along those lines.

Does that make me an agnostic rather than an atheist?

Maybe. But  “agnostic” seems to me like a wimpy cop-out. Frankly, the kind of life-force I’m imagining is so broad and impersonal as to be a “what” rather than a “who.” It’s not something with a mind or a will or a purpose. It’s not something you can talk to or petition. It’s not something that cares about us, one way or the other. It would be kind of like gravity, or the wind. So even if it exists, it doesn’t fit the common conception of “God.”

So I’m an atheist.

Next post: Why?

P.S. I started discussing this on the way to synagogue tonight with Sam and totally missed our freeway exit. “More driving, less quantum physics,” he said.

I have a date!

No, not the cute-guy-you-met-at-a-party type. (Relax, Sam!)

It’s a date for my Bat Mitzvah ceremony — February 26, 2011.

I met with the rabbi last Friday and went over my list of things I’d like to learn about. He reeled off suggestions for relevant books to read and discuss. I popped over to Afikomen yesterday and bought a bunch of them.

We’re also going to post a notice in the temple’s monthly bulletin to see if there are other folks interested in an adult Bar or Bat Mitzvah, so we could form a class.

More later. I just wanted to shout the date out loud! (Or the electronic equivalent of shouting.)

It’s that old reporter-with-a-deadline thing. Having a date makes this much more real.

Revise and resent

People in the publishing and writing world have a weird, Eskimo-sounding acronym for the month of November: NaNoWriMo.

That stands for National Novel Writing Month. Back in 1999, a group of 21 San Francisco writers decided to goad themselves into productivity by each writing a novel in a month. It has since evolved into an international event encouraging would-be authors to produce 50,000 words of fiction between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. It has its own web site and fairly minimal rules that include “Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.”

Meanwhile, various clever persons decided that NaNoReMo wasn’t enough Eskimo-talk and came up with ideas for a NaNoReMo (National Novel Revision Month) or NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month).

That’s where I’m living these days. It’s not a happy place. And I’m living there not just for a month, but for what feels like a geologic era.

By now, you may be wondering, where’s the Bat Mitzvah angle in all of this? I’m not sure there is one. So consider this a “midlife” post rather than a “Bat Mitzvah” post. I’ll have a bunch of these. Get used to it! (Or just skip these posts. I’ll be back to Bat Mitzvah news soon enough.)

In any event, I have drafts of two novels that are in various stages of the revision process. One has been in the works for a long time and has been through about a dozen versions. The other is a sprightly first draft that I completed last spring.

For the past few months, I’ve focused on my older (mature? ripe? aged-to perfection-like-a-lovely-Bordeaux?) novel, trying to get it into publishable shape. My agent had given me some broad suggestions, with which I pretty much agreed once I got through gnashing my teeth and rending my garments.

 But boy…

 Revising. Is. Hard.

 (Caution: Whining writer ahead.)

One thing that’s hard about it is managing to see your work as a whole. When writing a first draft, I just barrel along and try not to lose momentum. But revision requires stepping back and seeing which scenes work and which don’t, both in themselves and as part of a whole. When you’re talking about a 350-page manuscript, it is really hard to hold the whole thing in your head and get a sense of how different sections work together and the overall flow and rhythm of the work.

Another thing that’s hard – and this was a big surprise to me – is simply how tough it is to make my writing budge.

 It’s like pushing a refrigerator. You throw all your weight at it, and maybe it moves an inch. I sit down, all prepared to tear a section apart – blow it up! I tell myself, blow it up! – and I get all prepared to make MAJOR CHANGES. And I sit there and work and work and work, making those MAJOR CHANGES, blowing it up, and then  I stop and look at what I’ve done and I’ve maybe changed six words. It’s like wanting an entire hair-style makeover, and going into the hairdresser demanding radical change, but then getting queasy when you see the scissors and ending up with a trim around the edges.

You’d think that word processing would make this easier. You can totally revamp a manuscript and not lose anything. You don’t even have to retype it, if you decide you prefer the original version. So what’s there to fear in making changes? It’s just playing with words. But no. Once the writing is down on the page, it takes on this black-hole-like infinite weight and becomes very hard to move.

So that’s why revising is awful. Much less fun than writing.

Yes, I know, every writer has to do it. It’s what separates real writers from dabblers. It’s what separates good writing from bad. Etc. etc.

This is from an interview that George Plimpton did with Ernest Hemingway in a 1958 Paris Review:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.

I was spoiled by newspaper writing all these years. Revising a 1200-word story is nothing like revising a 100,000-word novel. And honestly, I never had to revise all that much as a reporter. Rewrite the lede, tighten things up, sure. But not this blow-it-up wholesale kind of revising.

So today I figured I had done as much as I could on this latest round with my ripe-Bordeaux novel. So I gave it a hug and a kiss and emailed it off to my agent.

There is, of course, one thing possibly worse than rewriting.

That’s waiting for your agent to read and respond.

Time to inaugurate NaNoWaBeReMo?*

*(National Novel Waiting to Be Read Month).

Bat Mitzvah Barbie & Her Accessories

My decision to become a Bat Mitzvah began in part with a fashion accessory. Does that make me Bat Mitzvah Barbie?

I’m just kidding. Those of you who know me also know that I will never be mistaken for a Sex and the City character when it comes to fashion or accessorizing. But I do want to talk about a particular Jewish ritual item that helped inspire me to enter this process — the tallit, or in Yiddish, tallis.

A tallit is a fringed prayer shawl. Among Orthodox Jews, it’s a requirement that men wrap themselves in a tallit when they pray.  Among Reform Jews, it’s considered optional and may be worn by men or women during prayer.

The roots of the tallit tradition come from a passage in Numbers and Deuteronomy where adult Jews are instructed to add fringes to the four corners of their clothing.

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: ‘Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them throughout their generations fringes in the corners of their garments, and that they put with the fringe of each corner a thread of blue. And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them….’ (Numbers 15:37-9)

Sam and I present his old tallit to Becca at her Bat Mitzvah in 2007

At my synagogue, a minority of men typically wear tallitot and an even smaller number of women wear them. But my husband Sam always wears one, and when our daughter Becca became a Bat Mitzvah, we presented her with the tallit Sam had received at his own Bar Mitzvah ceremony. 

Over the past decade, I’ve eyed the people wearing tallitot in services and thought that I would like one. It seemed like it might help foster a reflective state of mind — reinforce on a visceral level that I was leaving behind all mundane matters of work, errands, and so on. In wrapping the tallit around my shoulders, I would be wrapping myself in a more elevated and thoughtful (spiritual?) mindset.

I suspected that a tallit would increase my feeling of belonging to the community of Jews there in the synagogue on that given day. It also would be a statement to myself, “I didn’t just drop in or drift in here. I am here in this service and this congregation on purpose.” Like a beginning runner deciding to invest in good running shoes, having my own tallit would signify a commitment to continue attending services on an ongoing basis into the future.

There was also the lingering feminist-rebel part of me that liked the idea of being able to diss the Orthodox Jewish world and say, “Yeah, women can wear tallitot too!”

Now, in Reform Judaism, there’s no test you have to pass to wear a tallit. No one quizzes you at the door of the synagogue and says, “Young lady, do you have permission to wear that tallit?” So I could have just stopped in at Afikomen, our wonderful neighborhood Judaica store, and bought myself a tallit. These days they make all kinds of beautiful multi-hued, silk-screened tallitot – with images of flowers or rainbows or Jerusalem or what-have-you – and not just ones with the traditional white-with-dark-stripe design.

But it didn’t feel right.

I felt like I needed to earn my tallit. It shouldn’t be something I simply bought, like an iPod or pair of shoes. I  needed to understand the structure and meaning of services, not just mumble and stumble my way through them. I needed to understand more about the religious part of Judaism.

In short, I needed to feel like I knew at least as much as the kids being given tallitot at their Bar and Bat Mitzvah services.

So… at the end of this process, I am promising myself a tallit.

And yes, as you guessed, the design that I chose for the image at the top of this blog is a a tallit. It’s a photograph of my husband’s tallit — not the one he gave to our daughter, but the one he uses these days and keeps in his closet near his ostrich leather boots and his 49 neckties.

As I mentioned, I’m not the one around here with the accessorizing issues.  :-)

Nice Jewish blog seeks same, for long walks on beach

You may notice that this blog — like lots of blogs — has links to some other people’s blogs and Web sites in the column running down the side of the page.

I’m starting with three categories — Other Jewish Blogs, Blogs About Writing, and Random Stuff I Like.

What? You don’t see a listing for Other Jewish Blogs??!

That’s because I haven’t found any yet that I really, really like. To be honest, I haven’t even started looking.

But I’d love some suggestions!

Are there Jewish blogs that you read and enjoy? Or how about really good blogs about broader issues of religion and belief?

I’d love to hear about them and – if I like them too - link to them from this page.

Questions, questions, questions

Some of you had great questions based on my initial blog post.

I’ve also got questions!  (More on that below.)

I don’t have answers to everything, but that’s the point of going through this study process — I can find out the answers. Meanwhile, here are some that I can answer, even at this early point in the process:

• Has the rabbi done something like this before with a 51-year-old woman?  Ewww, you make this sound like an internship at the Clinton White house. Actually, adult Bat Mitzvahs are fairly common in the Reform movement of Judaism. (Of the three main strains within Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, Reform is the most liberal theologically and often politically.) My synagogue does maybe one or two adult Bat Mitzvahs a year. Several years ago there was a wonderful group Bat Mitzvah in which a half dozen women friends who had children in the preschool went through the process together.
• Did he give you some homework to do between now and the next meeting? Funny you should ask. See below.
• Can anyone become a Bat Mitzvah? You need to be Jewish. The different movements within Judaism have different requirements — for instance, the Orthodox do not let girls or women read aloud from the Torah so they cannot have a full-fledged Bat Mitzvah, although they have a lesser kind of ceremony for girls.
• Is a bat mitzvah anything like a “quincenera” here in Romantic Old Mexico? I don’t know. Invite me to quinceanera!
• Are you going to rent a limo to go your bat mitzvah? Only if it is a Prius.

Actually, it is a sad comment on American Judaism that so many of the supportive, well-meaning responses to my blog included jokes about the parties and gifts that typically accompany teenage Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. In our materialistic culture, the limos, fountain pens, gift cards, and catered ice sculptures often tend to overshadow the meaningful part of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

One wonderful thing about doing this as an adult is that I can focus on the substance of the learning and ceremony and not on a party!

Although Sam is making all sorts of noises about a party.

Hands over ears: Not listening, not listening, not listening…. :-)

Now as to homework: The rabbi told me to make up a list of things I would like to learn over the next year in my study process. Some of it is inherent in the process: I will learn the structure, Hebrew prayers, and translated meaning of a Shabbat service; I will prepare to lead the service; and I will learn to chant that week’s Torah portion in Hebrew and deliver a speech/sermon on the Torah portion.

But here are some other things I’d like to learn:

• More familiarity with the stories of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Leviticus) — the heart of the Hebrew scriptures
• Current historical understanding of when, why and by whom the various books of the Hebrew Bible were written — there is a whole tradition of archeological/historical study of this question of authorship
• The Prophets — a part of the Bible I’ve never really read with any focus
• What does Judaism say about the concept of God?
• What does Judaism say about an afterlife?
• What does Judaism say about evil and suffering?
• Blessings for everyday life — Judaism has blessings to sanctify routine moments of daily life,  not just the well-known blessings over Shabbat candles or food and wine
• I’d also like to learn more about the evolution of Jewish thought over the centuries — development of the Talmud, thinkers like Maimonides and Rashi etc.

Not much, eh? We should be done with this in a week or two….

In the beginning… here we go!

I stared at the prayer book, more nervous than I’d been since… when?

Interviewing with Phil Bronstein for a job at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005? Doing my first book talk for Where Girls Come First in 2004?

Heck, it had been a long time since I felt this kind of pressure. It took me by surprise. 

I had been meeting with the senior rabbi of my temple, Temple Sinai in Oakland, California, to inquire about studying to become an adult Bat Mitzvah. He was encouraging and enthusiastic. But one question was whether I could read Hebrew well enough to go straight into the Bat Mitzvah study process, or whether I would need to take a semester or two of Biblical Hebrew. 

So the rabbi thrust a prayer book at me and asked me to read a section out loud. I hadn’t expected this. 

I launched into sounding the words out. I have a passable but rusty knowledge of modern, spoken Hebrew from two stints living in Israel in my teens and twenties, but I never learned to read well. I wasn’t sure if it were worse to go slowly and get things right but sound hesitant, or go quickly and sound fluent but make mistakes. I went quickly. 

I clawed my way over each letter like someone climbing across a field of boulders. Every so often I would come to a word that I recognized and feel a shower of relief.

After less than two minutes, it was done. The rabbi said I could stop.

Had I passed? failed?

When I had showed up for our meeting, I hadn’t expected a miniature version of a Julliard audition.

“That’s fine,” he said. “You have problems with vowels. But it’s okay.”

And then we moved on to talk about the Bat Mitzvah process, and scheduling, and whether there might be enough other interested temple members to form a class. 

So it was a go. We set another meeting date for early November. At the ripe old age of 51, I’m now at the start of this road to becoming a Bat Mitzvah – something that Jewish kids typically do at age 13.

And you, dear blog reader, are invited to join me. I hope this may prove interesting, entertaining and (dare I say?) thought-provoking to both Jewish and non-Jewish readers.

At the very least, it will be a good way for me to process my own thoughts and responses. And at best, I look forward to learning from your comments, observations, comparisons and questions. Not just about the Bat Mitzvah process, but about midlife adventures and transitions of all sorts.

Will you join me?

More to come in this space soon!