Next Year in Jerusalem
I. Genesis
In the spring of 1975, my brother Michael, then 24, was on his way home from his third trip through Asia when he arrived in Israel, planning to stay a few weeks before heading back to New York. On April 28th, he wrote to our parents: “I’ve been staying at, of all things, an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva — when I got to Jerusalem I went to visit the Wailing Wall and got invited — they hang around there looking for unsuspecting tourists to proselytize. It’s sort of a Jewish Jesus-freak type outfit — dedicated to bringing real Judaism to backsliding Jews. I haven’t been especially impressed by the message, but it’s been a really interesting week.” On June 4th, he wrote me, “I’ve had my lack of faith shaken.”
I appreciated the ironic turn of phrase. Then its meaning hit. I read on: “I’ve read and talked about it enough to realize that the arguments for the existence of G-d (a spelling which shows how superstitious I’m becoming) — and the Jewish version of it at that — are very plausible and intellectually if not emotionally convincing . . . It’s frightening, because while I can convince myself of the possibility and even probability of the religion, I don’t like it — its 613 commandments, its puritanism, its political conservatism, its Jews-first philosophy. On the other hand, if it is the truth, not to follow it means turning your back on the truth.” He was postponing his return till the end of July.
I called my parents. My mother thought I was being an alarmist — Mike couldn’t be serious about religion; it was too removed from the way he’d been brought up. “He’s spelling God ‘G-d,’ “I said. There is a religious law that you cannot destroy paper on which you have spelled out “God.”
Two weeks later they got another letter: “I haven’t written because I’m having trouble describing what’s happening. I feel more and more that I’m trapped into a religion whose truth I can’t deny . . . .I’ve never given much thought to the existence of G-d — my LSD experiences had (same as with Ellen) left me with the idea that there was ‘something’ there, but I never thought it was knowable or explainable (& if it was explainable certainly more in terms of mystical experience & Buddhism than the ‘G-d of our Fathers’ of Judaism). But my time here has really forced me to come to terms with what that ‘something’ might be. . . . I’m not Jesus-freaking out — I haven’t come to this through any blinding moment of illumination or desire to be part of a group — it’s been an intellectual process (which I’ve been fighting emotionally all the way), and I’d like nothing better than to reject it — I just don’t think I’ll be able to.
“The final shock in this letter is that I may not leave here at the end of July. If I accept this as the truth, I have to take time to learn about it.”
The “truth” Mike proposed to accept was Judaism in its most extreme, absolutist form: the God of the Old Testament exists; He has chosen the Jewish people to carry out His will; the Torah (the Five Books of Moses and the Oral Law elaborating on them) is literally the word of God, revealed to the Jews at Mt. Sinai; the creation, the miracles in Egypt, and other biblical events actually happened; the Torah’s laws, which are based on 613 mitzvos (commandments) and govern every aspect of one’s existence, must be obeyed in every detail; they are eternal, unchangeable; Conservative, Reform and other revisionist versions of Judaism simply reflect the regrettable human tendency to shirk difficult obligations.
My parents had the same first impulse: “Let’s go to Israel and bring him home.” My father was already out of his chair and about to leave the house to go buy plane tickets when they looked at each other and decided they were overreacting. My own reaction was a kind of primal dread. In my universe, intelligent, sensible people who had grown up in secular homes in the second half of the 20th century did not embrace biblical fundamentalism — let alone arrive at it through an “intellectual process.” My brother was highly intelligent, had always seemed sensible. What was going on?
My father is a retired police lieutenant; my mother is a housewife. They married during the Depression and now live in a house with a paid-up mortgage in a modestly middle-class section of Queens, New York. They are college-educated, literary-minded and politically liberal. I am the oldest of their three children; my sister, a graduate student in linguistics, is in the middle; Mike is the youngest. Mike and I were born in December, nine years apart almost to the day. The coincidence of birthdays is one of many similarities. If the prospect of Mike’s becoming an Orthodox Jew was frightening, it was not simply because he was my brother, someone I loved. I felt an almost mystical identification with Mike. Our baby pictures were identical, and though Mike was now taller and thinner than I, we had the same fair skin, curly brown hair, and astigmatic, sleepy green eyes. We were (not that I really believed in that stuff — still — ) cliche Sagittarians: analytical, preoccupied with words and ideas. We were inclined to repress feelings; our intellectual confidence coexisted with emotional insecurity and a tendency to depression.
I was fascinated with the notion that Mike was what I might have become had I been a man, the lastborn instead of the first-, a child of the Seventies rather than the Sixties. I wondered how much the differences between us had to do with our circumstances rather than our basic natures. For there were differences, of course. Mike was much more reserved than I; he rarely talked about his feelings, his problems or his relationships. I was more worldly, more willing to compete in and compromise with a hostile system. My friendships were central to my life; he was, or seemed to be, a loner.
The qualities we shared were more pronounced in Mike, the opposing tendencies more hidden. Next to him I always felt a bit irrational and uncool. Picture a recurrent family scene: my father and I are sitting in the kitchen, having a passionate political argument. My brother is listening, not saying a word. Suddenly I put myself in his place, become self-conscious. I hear all the half-truths and rhetorical exaggerations that in the emotion of the moment I have allowed to pass my lips. I realize, with chagrin, that my father and I have had, and my brother has listened to, the same argument at least half a dozen times before. I am sure Mike thinks we are ridiculous.
I was disturbed and mystified by what I saw as my brother’s swing from a skepticism more rigorous than my own to an equally extreme credulity. How could anyone familiar with the work of a certain Viennese Jew possibly believe in God the Father? What puzzled me even more was Mike’s insistence that he was being reluctantly convinced by irresistible arguments. It seemed to me that his critical intelligence could only be in the way.
On acid I had, as Mike observed, experienced the something that Westerners have most commonly called “God” — the source of all truth, beauty, goodness. Unlike Mike, I had felt that I knew what it was. “So this is what it’s all about,” I had marveled. “It’s so simple, so obvious. And I’ve known it all the time. I just didn’t know I knew.” But when I came down it was less obvious. The ecstasy — a word that didn’t quite convey a feeling as natural as a spring thaw, as comfortable as coming home — gradually slipped away. “All God is,” I would try to explain, “is reality — the simple, wonderful reality behind the abstract concepts and ingrained habits of perception that keep us from ever really experiencing it.” And I would sound hopelessly abstract even to myself. Soon, whatever clouded the doors of perception in ordinary life began to invade my acid trips as well. I tried to fight that process — doggedly pursuing the right mood, the right situation — and only made things worse; finally, frustrated and demoralized, I stopped tripping. The entire experience had a permanent, profound effect on the way I saw myself and the world. I knew that connecting with Reality — I couldn’t call it God; to me that word meant an old man with a white beard — was the crucial business of life, the key to freedom, sanity, happiness. I knew that if I could make the connection I would think: “How silly of me to have forgotten!” But I didn’t know how to proceed.
This problem was not, of course, peculiar to me. It had been plaguing spiritual seekers for thousands of years. Many had tried, far more eloquently than I, to express what they agreed was inexpressible. Recognizing the inadequacy of intellectual analysis, religions tried to evoke the crucial connection through myths, rituals, rules of conduct. But in the end religion, like language, tried to express the truth in concrete form and so inevitably distorted it. If all religions were inspired by a common Reality, each reflected the particular cultural, political and psychological limitations of the people who invented and practiced it. Which posed another problem. If you understood that your religion was only an imperfect approach to the truth, you remained outside it, an observer, a critic. If, on the other hand, you truly believed — worshiped an omnipotent God, accepted Jesus as your savior, surrendered to a guru — you were confusing a set of metaphors for reality with Reality itself. And that put you back on square one. Or did it?
On my second acid trip I had had a joyous vision of the birth of Christ. In one part of my mind I had become an early Christian, experiencing the ecstasy of grace, redemption, the washing away of sin. But on a deeper level I had remained aloof, thinking, “Remember, you are a Jew.” For the first time I had had a wistful inkling of what it must be like to be committed to a powerful myth. Maybe if you had faith that Jesus would save you, He would. Maybe the point was simply to stop listening to that observer/critic inside my head, to surrender my will, to have faith, and what I had faith in didn’t matter any more than whether I took a train or a bus to my destination.
“Suppose you had faith in Hitler?” my observer/critic, that irrepressible crank, could not help objecting. Still, part of what had messed up my acid trips was doubt, whispering like the serpent: What if the straight world is right, and what you think is Reality is a seductive hallucination? I couldn’t assent to the experience without reservation, following wherever it led; it might lead to insanity. So I tried to compromise. I wanted to tap the ecstasy whenever I wanted and be “normal” the rest of the time. It was, I suppose, the same impulse that makes sinners go to church on Sunday, with much the same result.
I was aware of the link between my skepticism and my Jewishness. It was, after all, the Jew who was the perennial doubter, the archetypal outsider, longing for redemption while dismissing the claims of would-be redeemers as so much snake oil. But what did any of this have to do with the kind of Jewishness my brother was talking about?
Mike had grown up into the economic and cultural slough of the Seventies. Though he had always been an excellent student, he had never liked school; he had found college as boring and meaningless as high school and elementary school before that. Since graduating from the University of Michigan in 1970, with a B.A. in Chinese, he had spent nearly half his time traveling. Recurrent asthma had kept him from being drafted. Between trips he would come back to New York and drive a cab to make money for the next trip. He had never had a job he liked. During his last stay in New York he had begun writing articles about Asia, and he had gone back with the idea of doing more. He had had a few pieces in newspapers, but no major breakthrough, and one major disappointment: an article he’d worked hard on was first accepted by a magazine, then sent back.
Mike was also depressed about Cambodia and Vietnam. In 1973 he had spent almost two months in Cambodia and had come away convinced that as much as the people hated the corrupt Lon Nol government, they did not want the Americans to leave and permit a Communist takeover. As Mike saw it, they wanted to be left alone to farm, while the Khmer Rouge made them take sides and shot those who chose incorrectly; they were religious Buddhists, while the Communists were antireligious and would make young men work instead of becoming monks; in short, they wanted to return to their traditional, prewar way of life, which the Communists would permanently destroy. Those premises had led Mike to what seemed an unavoidable conclusion: the Americans should not withdraw. For someone who had shared the American left’s assumptions about the war, it was a disturbing reversal. If he had been wrong about Cambodia, he thought, perhaps he had been wrong about Vietnam. This past fall, a return trip to Cambodia and two weeks in Vietnam had reinforced his doubts.
Next Year in Jerusalem, Page 1 of 11