The Center Cannot Hold!

Once again, to my combined pleasure and discomfort (mostly pleasure), Monsey is in the news again, this time as the setting for Shalom Auslander’s new memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament.” Though foreskins have never really been my "thing," a recent statement by Auslander felt eerily familiar:

“The people who raised me will say I am not religious. They are mistaken. I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious”

None of the articles I’ve read that quote this line explain what he means by “religious,” I’m not sure I understand what he means by “religious.” But I think it relates to a larger problem I’ve been having lately with the whole religion/literature/what to do with my life odyssey and I’ll try to explain why.

I learned a couple of things when I was in English literature graduate school, but this above all: after the 1890’s, maybe before, religion and good literature stopped operating hand in hand. "Good literature" is of course, a category that’s up for debate, as is, once again “religion,” but I think we can come up with some ballpark categories. For one: Literature and its scholarship will fling you in all kinds of directions, providing new language and concepts to refine our sense of the world and our place in it. The possibilities are endless in this kind of centrifuge, as are the conclusions you will draw. Religion on the other hand, while certainly less simple than the Dawkinses and Hitchenses of the world would maintain, is ultimately a centripetal force- drawing its adherents in to some kind of unnamed center, ordering reality and subjugating it to one or maybe a handful of things. Though the results are invariably messier than intended, the force is generally, I think, about streamlining, reigning things in. Every discipline has affinities to this aspect of religion, but when God is completely, utterly, divorced from the picture, the results end up looking really different. I.e. you actually have difference! So even though the NY Times will seem chock-full of these Jewish interest pieces as it has been for the past week, it will also have as many or more articles about Iraq, the Red Sox, Google, the environment, the DOW, gourmet olives, birth control, and Latvia. It’s true that it often does seem like the Times does have a kind of messianic impulse toward articles with Jewish content, but for a good portion of its readers, I would imagine, the Judaism stuff does not suck them in and dominate their attention the way it does for people raised Orthodox. It’s interesting, like lots of stuff is interesting, and that’s really it.
So what to do if you are not one of those regular readers? Or more specifically, if you are not one of those readers but have a sinking feeling that they are right. That in this crazy mixed up world (yes I say that way too much) there is no one thing that can really justify the streamlining of our thoughts and actions. Or, as Yeats said it:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Of course, Yeats goes on to talk about some beast slouching toward Bethlehem, indicating that even he is ok unifying all of reality into one bizarre religious figure, but his point still stands. The center cannot hold, and yet, it continues to grab, tackle and drag me in. So what to do?

A few possible solutions:
1) Revive some kind of organic Jewish commonwealth.
Almost everyone agrees that the Bible is a good piece of literature, even though it is religious, and that is because it is lots of other things as well. When God is a stable and unquestioned part of your environment, other things can pursued without awkward dissonance. Its not an issue of center versus periphery, it is the food we eat, the air that we breathe. This of course, may not be the most realistic of options, historic attempts at realizing it have bordered on the insane, but it can be actualized in a more diluted fashion in the form of a:

2) Move to Israel.
I don’t think that religion equals God, religion is all kinds of things, and for me, for the most part, it’s a language; a way of communicating meaning and values etc... Living in Israel certainly does not equal believing in God, but it does get you closer to that language, if only because of the biblical roots of its own. The whole good literature versus religious literature divide doesn’t really make sense in Israel, religion is in the food, the air, the kool-aid etc… Yehuda Amichai is very different than Rav Kook, but when you thing about him versus John Ashbury or William Carlos Williams start to multiply and multiply until they are not even worth talking about. Actually… is that true? Whatever, despite strong religious/secular frictions in Israel, I see more potential for a kind of healthy cultural continuity happening there than here.

3) But we are here, and they are there. Thus, luckily, there is always that third path: simply addressing the topic itself ad nauseum. This has been the path of Shalom Auslander, Noah Feldman, and other notables, and it can be pursued in one of either two frameworks: a) Talking about secular stuff to religious people, and b) talking about religious stuff to secular people.

I think I basically do the first one in most avenues of my life. This is satisfying because the movement OUT from a defined center can feel very similar to the movement IN to a defined center. The work of centralizing things is done for me by my students, so I don’t have to feel intellectually dishonest, and I can constantly bring things back to Judaism, which I would do anyway, but without the fear of being pigeonholed. But this path is also problematic because it limits your impact. To only talk to Orthodox Jews for the rest of my life? Yikes. Yet the other path, bringing Judaism to the Nations of the World, does not seem much more appetizing. I hope Shalom Auslander can write the great American novel one day- but for now, brachos bees and Yeshiva of Spring Valley seem to be the stuff of his artistic engagement. Half of his writing will always be translation, and until we revive that religious theocracy thing, we’re all bound to have to do the same.

4) I should mention that there’s always that final, somewhat terrifying solution: Stop whining and get a real job. This prospect makes me more uncomfortable than all the religious/secular dichotomies in the world combined, and will consequently not be discussed any further.

So the tension still stands, and I think that’s why someone would say he is “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious.” It’s crippling because you keep coming back to it, it keeps you from fully throwing yourself into all the various frontiers that modernity has to offer. But its always nice to have something to come back to.
On that note, its good to be back!