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Faith, Falsehood, and Fiction

Posted October 8th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Here’s Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the newly crowned Nobel literature laureate and a proud agnostic, talking about truth, lies, and fiction in a piece called “Is Fiction the Art of Living?“:

THE lies in novels are not gratuitous – they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all.  Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels.

Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.

I’m not at all sure about that idea of novels providing a “service,” but this is nevertheless an excellent explanation of why totalitarian societies clamp down not only on civil rights and freedom of expression, but on that most essential and potentially most subversive of individual rights — freedom of imagination.

Now it’s time to catch up with Vargas Llosa.    Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter sounds like farcical fun, but this accidental theologist really has to start with The Storyteller, in which a saintly, disfigured student presents himself as the official storyteller for a rainforest tribe and the repository of its collective memory.

Long live stories!

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File under: agnosticism, art | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, faith, fiction, lies, literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel prize, truth, uncertainty | 2 Comments
  1. Andreas Moser says:
    October 8, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    I can’t decide which book of Mario Vargas Llosa to read first. Help me please by taking part in my poll: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/mario-vargas-llosa-poll/
    Thanks 🙂

  2. The Books She Carried « The Accidental Theologist says:
    November 13, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    […] Faith, Falsehood, and Fiction […]

Holy Bull

Posted May 10th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Must-read for non-hypocrites:  an open letter to Elie Wiesel in response to his urging President Obama not to “pressure” Israel into stopping Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem (the latest stage being the eviction of Arab residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which has led to a protest vigil).

Wiesel maintained that Jerusalem, the most politicized city in the world, is “above politics” by virtue of its holiness — an argument that looks and smells like what it is:   a steaming pile of holy s**t.

Fortunately, the Israeli writers of this open letter, among them political scientists and Israel Prize laureates Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell (who not long ago survived attempted assassination by a fundamentalist Jewish settler), put it rather more elegantly.

“We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name,” they say.   To claim that Jerusalem is “above politics”  is outrageous.  “Being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one’s life.  We cannot stand by and watch our city… being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim that Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation, while all the while frantically ‘Judaizing’ East Jerusalem in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition….

“We who live in Jerusalem can no longer be sacrificed for the fantasies of those who love our city from afar.  Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it.  Only a shared city will live up to the prophetic vision ‘Zion shall be redeemed with justice.’  As we chant weekly in our vigils in Sheikh Jarrah, ‘nothing can be holy in an occupied city!'”

To which, as a former Jerusalemite, I’d say ‘Amen,’ and add this:

When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel was cited for his “practical efforts in the path of peace” and for his “powerful message of peace, atonement, and human dignity.”   If it was unclear exactly what he’d done for peace, people kept quiet(ish) about it.  Now that it’s crystal clear what he’s doing against peace, it’s way past time for the Nobel Committee to demand their prize back.

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File under: Judaism, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, Avishai Margalit, Elie Wiesel, Jerusalem, open letter, Sheikh Jarrah, Zeev Sternhell | Be the First to leave a comment

Kaddish for my Mother

Posted May 8th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

The day we bury my mother, the rabbi surprises me.  He asks if I’d like to lead the Kaddish prayer alongside my brother.

He’s new to this orthodox Anglo-Jewish congregation, but perhaps he’s heard of “the scene” I made at my father’s grave thirteen years ago.  In insult at being excluded when the shovel was handed first to my brother and then to my uncle, I’d grabbed it and offered it to my mother, then warded off all protests as first she and then I sent dirt thudding onto the pine boards of the coffin — the terrible, sobering sound of undeniable reality.

Now, as my brother and I lead the Kaddish together, there’s a murmur of consternation behind us.  Women in orthodox Judaism are not even counted as part of the minyan, the community of prayer.  What we are doing is distinctly unorthodox.  But the ripple dies down as my voice rings out — louder and more confident than my brother’s since my Hebrew is fluent while he just sounds the letters.

I am surprised by how right this feels.  Surprised at my agnostic self finding consolation in any prayer, let alone this haunting one whose words have nothing to do with death.  On the page, it’s just another prayer in praise of God, whom I am in no mood at all to praise, even if I thought there was something as simple as a “who” to be praised in the first place.

But then this is not about God.  It’s not even about what most of us think of as religion.  It’s about tradition, and identity, and family loyalty.

It’s about gratefully submitting to familiar ritual when death has utterly disrupted the familiar.

It’s about standing up and being counted, not as a silent bystander in the gallery but in a daughter’s rightful place, at the head of the community of mourners.

It’s about honoring my mother.  And in doing so, honoring all women.

— For Sybil, for Mothers Day.

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File under: agnosticism, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, Kaddish, Mothers Day, mourning, women in Judaism | 7 Comments
  1. Lilly Rivlin says:
    May 8, 2010 at 7:24 pm

    So succinct. So right on. It is about standing up as an equal in community.

  2. Rabbi Zvi says:
    May 9, 2010 at 4:23 pm

    As the Rabbi involved here let me first say that Orthodoxy sometimes does things because “they’re always done that way”, instead of doing them because Jewish Law allows them.
    The aim of the funeral service is to help to heal some of the pain felt at the loss of a loved one. This means that we should offer people opportunities to do what they wish as long as it is not unhalachic (i.e as long as it is ok in Jewish Law). I offer several options to mourners without actually forcing things on them. Different people choose to take up different things – like putting earth on the grave, saying kaddish or saying a few words of eulogy at some point in the seven days of Shiv’a.
    Being the father of two daughters I am intensely aware at the disappointment of a girl when she realizes that she has been written out of the activities of the bimah. As an Orthodox Rabbi (and as a Jew) it is my responsibility to ensure that no woman feels left out of shul or of Judaism, and that is why I open opportunities for people.
    There is a question about women in minyan and kaddish – many poskim say that a woman can say kaddish with a minyan even if she can’t count. Knowing your Mum as the lively woman she was it would have been an insult to her (as well as to you) not to offer you the chance to participate fully in laying her to rest. I am glad that it made a difference to you Lesley, and that your very Orthodox response to a traditional prayer and practice may have helped bring you some healing.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 10, 2010 at 9:16 am

      Thanks again Rabbi Zvi for being such a mensch. Secular dogma tends to scoff at religious ritual, perhaps not realizing that it became ritual and lasted through the centuries for a very good reason — it works. That it works regardless of belief is all the more testament (as it were) to its power.
      I see the Kaddish as part of what Freud called “the work of mourning.” Unbeliever that I am, I continued to chant it alone, at home, out loud, throughout the ritual thirty days of mourning. By the end of that time, I no longer felt a need to say it. I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t reached out and offered me the option of saying it alongside my brother — an offer made, it seems to me, not in the letter of Judaism, but in its true spirit.

  3. Lynn Rosen says:
    May 9, 2010 at 10:32 pm

    For Sybil, for all of us. Yes, so spot on. You speak for so many,

  4. Kathleen Kelley says:
    May 11, 2010 at 9:59 am

    To me it was beyond issues of woman’s rights, religious laws, tradition … all so human-made. It was your heart, Lesley, that was given voice. You honored everything – and everyone – by giving voice to the most powerful, fundamental aspect of being human AND spirit – which is Love.

    Thank you for sharing this deeply moving moment in your life with us….

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 11, 2010 at 11:32 am

      Thanks all for the thanks — it’s great to know I can give voice to others, not just myself.

  5. anne traver says:
    May 11, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    So moving. The other side of Mother’s Day is feeling the loss of my mother, who was my last remaining connection to the Catholic Church and all its rituals, rituals that somehow do not require me to believe to have meaning to me.

Let’s Ban Sunglasses!

Posted May 5th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

If the Islamic veil needs to be banned for security reasons — if the full niqab is indeed a form of criminal concealment, foiling identification by security personnel — then let’s be logical:

let’s ban sunglasses

and big floppy sunhats

and tinted contact lenses.

let’s ban wigs

and hair extensions

and make-up.

let’s ban beards

and clowns’ faces

and cosmetic surgery

and mustaches

and baseball caps

and hair dye

and skin lighteners

and spray-on tans.

let’s ban and ban and ban

until there’s nothing left to ban any more

and then we’ll be….

safe?

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File under: Islam | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, banning the veil, Islamic veil, niqab, veil, women in Islam | 1 Comment
  1. Tea-mahm says:
    May 10, 2010 at 1:20 pm

    Ah, yes! Safe at last! It seems to be forgotten that “Islam” from the root – SaLaMa– means: peaceful surrender to Unity, it also has to do with feeling safe.
    Good poem.
    T’m

Veiled Hatred

Posted May 5th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

This obsession with the Islamic “veil” gets more absurd by the day.  I had no intention of posting more about it so soon, but now a Tunisian woman has been fined in Italy for wearing a full veil — niqab — as she walked to the mosque.   Belgium passed a no-niqab law last week, and France is about to do the same even though fewer than 2,000 Frenchwomen wear the damn thing .  And my brother let loose on the phone from England last night, shouting at me that every leading French feminist was against the niqab, that it was all part of France’s concern for separation of church and state, and that besides it was essential for security to be able to see people’s faces.

My brother the political cynic arguing for natonal security by lecturing me on feminism?  What kind of brave new world is this?

My feminist credentials are impeccable — infinitely better than those of all the male European politicians busy yammering on about women’s dignity, let alone my brother’s.  And I’ve been at it long enough to know when my feminism is being manipulated.

Of course I’m not “for” the veil.   I hate the idea of it.  But for European governments to legislate against it?  How exactly is this different from the Taliban legislating for it?

Good minds are being driven over the edge by the veil.  Just try reading this op-ed piece, a convoluted argument which appears to be that the essence of civil society is being able to see the whites of someone’s eyes.  Not so long ago, soldiers were ordered not to shoot until they could see those same whites of the eyes…

Do niqab-wearing women choose it or are they being coerced?  Nobody really knows, though we do know that banning it takes away all element of choice.   But then despite all the high-falutin’ talk about women’s dignity, that’s not really the issue.   The real issue is fear of Islamic extremism, and the veil as a convenient symbol of presumed extremism.  And women are just pawns in this game, being used by liberal secular authorities no less than by conservative Muslim ones.

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File under: Islam | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, banning the veil, feminism, Islamic veil, niqab, women and Islam | 4 Comments
  1. Zunaid Talia says:
    May 5, 2010 at 11:59 am

    I cannot believe that we are living in the 21st century. With laws like banning the niqab, I am beginning to think that these western democracies that promote the ideas of freedom and liberty are a fraud because they they apply the rules selectively.

    There is no sincere commitment to these lofty principles. It seems that everything we are told by political parties and leaders in the west is nothing but a lie. They decide when to apply the rules and when to relax them even discard them.

    Consider the economic crisis recently, we have been led to believe that government intervention in the free market is taboo, it should never be entertained – communism right. Then when all else fails guess who intervenes – the government.

    May be we will never really be free and the freedom we once thought we had finally won for civilisation was actually a con. It is phony. As long as you are prepared to conform you are free.

    Hypocrites, that is what I say. I conclude that we are probably hard wired to be hypocrites. Let us blame it on evolution.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 10, 2010 at 9:41 am

      Zunaid — I can’t remember right now who said that democracy is not perfect, just the least harmful of all the systems of government we’ve so far invented. We know it can never be taken for granted. The same with freedom and liberty. When we begin to take them for granted, we begin to lose them. Hypocrisy, as you say, is human, as is complacency. So if we are to be free citizens, we need to be part of the “they,” to actively stand up against both hypocrisy and complacency. We need to be capable of protest, capable of outrage, capable of calling government to account. Thanks for being part of that.

  2. The Ban: Hiding Our Deepest Fears Behind the Burqa « ANUSHAY'S POINT says:
    July 14, 2010 at 12:08 pm

    […] being said, I did stumble upon this blog by author, Lesley Hazleton. She articulates how we are hiding our hatred behind the veil, and articulates the core issues […]

  3. Amjad Qureshi says:
    January 30, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    Dear Ms. Hazelton,
    I was fascinated by your talk on Islam and listened to it repeatedly in an attempt to grasp its depth. It seems that you study the subject meticulously. I too am an avid reader of religious scriptures and am unable to finish a hot cup of tea when I start reading the Quran. Somehow, I start to read and forget about the tea, untill much later. I would like to know if there is a way for me to send you some reading material which is sure to fascinate you, as well.

Just How Kosher Does a Muslim Intellectual Have To Be?

Posted May 3rd, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

A bonfire of vanities is breaking out in the American political punditry about one single Muslim.   Not a terrorist, but a European intellectual — scholar and activist Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford professor who argues that Islam has a positive, ethical contribution to make to Western culture, and who was named one of the top innovators of the 21st century on the impeccably non-radical Time.com.

Fresh fuel for the fire comes from The Flight of the Intellectuals, a new book accusing American and European intellectuals of pandering to Islam, specifically to Ramadan, while ignoring signs of his extremism.

It will appear to be a splendidly principled debate, with everyone taking impassioned positions in defense of liberte, egalite, and if not fraternite, certainly sororite.   Women in Islam, that is.   As usual, male Western intellectuals get most worked up about “the question of women” in Islamic societies, thus presenting themselves as comfortably situated white knights in shining armor, armchair warriors protecting the innocent from barbarism.

It will also be a peculiarly sophomoric debate, essentially asking “who’s our Muslim intellectual?”  Is it Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose book Infidel rejected Islam outright and led to her flight for safety to the US, where she’s now at the American Enterprise Institute?  Or is it Tariq Ramadan, who has consistently argued for a “third way” blending traditional Islamic values with western democratic ones?

In books like What I Believe, Ramadan advocates greater democratic political involvement by western Muslims.  This may seem reasonable enough, but reason, for his critics, is just a mask.   His hidden agenda is an extremist one, they say;  see how he refuses to outright condemn punishing women for adultery (he only says he opposes it)  or antisemitism (oops, strike that one, he did).

In fact the language used about Ramadan has a distinctly antisemitic tint.   He’s shifty, they say;  he’s two-faced;  he hides his true loyalties — all the sort of things said about Jews in 1930s Germany.   They point to Ramadan’s “connections” (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, so obviously the grandson is carrying out the grandfather’s program).   So what if Ramadan is a charming and sophisticated European intellectual?  That very charm and sophistication make him suspicious.   (There’s a strong tint here of “who does he think he is?  he’s just a Muslim putting on airs”).  He has to be a fifth columnist in the ranks of naive post-Enlightenment scholars who have no idea of the treacherous and devious depths of Islamic thinking.

The ultimate insult for such critics seems to be that Ramadan is a religious man.   A pious Muslim, as they see it, cannot possibly be a liberal intellectual;  his whole argument that Islam and social democracy are not necessarily opposed can thus, ipso facto, only be false.

What they’re really saying is that the only kind of Muslim intellectual who’s acceptable is one who’s absolutely kosher.  One who, like Hirsi Ali, has renounced all ties with the demon Islam.  One who has repented, seen the error of his/her ways, and accepted the superiority of the secular.

Perhaps that’s why the bonfire:  the language, attitudes, and assumptions behind this debate all seem to me to bear the distinctly pious fervor of  Inquisition.

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File under: Islam, US politics | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, antisemitism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim intellectuals, Tariq Ramadan, women in Islam | 2 Comments
  1. Kitty Hoffman says:
    May 3, 2010 at 5:02 pm

    Here’s who would get my vote: Irshad Manji, young brilliant progressive intellectual Muslim…also happens to be lesbian, which led to a few death threats, or perhaps it was the combination of Muslim and feminist…
    Her very traditional Ugandan Moslem mother is one of her staunchest supporters.
    Canadian (of course, Canadians are good at combining the seemingly un-combine-able), now lives and works in the US.
    If you don’t yet know the name, you will soon; check out her writing.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 4, 2010 at 8:48 am

      Thanks Kitty. Yes, Manji’s book “The Trouble With Islam Today,” conversationally written and subtitled “a Muslim’s call for reform in her faith,” is wonderfully spirited. Ditto her website, http://www.muslim-refusenik.com. I see her as part of a western Muslim movement to liberalize Islam — one that includes, on a different level, people like Tariq Ramadan. Meanwhile very interesting work is being done by several feminist Muslim scholars, including the amazing Fatima Mernissi (“The Veil and the Male Elite”) in Morocco. Am reading Mernissi again right now, and will post on her soon.

Most successful logo ever? The cross.

Posted April 30th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Two strips of metal deep in the Mojave desert split the Supreme Court this week by a predictable 5-4.   The strips form a seven-foot-high memorial cross, put up privately on federal land in 1934 to honor American soldiers who died in World War One.

In 2001, when a federal judge ruled that the cross violated the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) by conveying “a message of endorsement of religion,” Congress did a quiet little two-step.  It arranged for the acre on which the cross stood to be sold to a veterans’ group, making it private land in the middle of a national park.  But the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco recognized the ploy for what it was and said the cross had to come down.  Thus the case reached the Supreme Court — whose majority has just ruled, astonishingly, that the cross is a universal symbol representative of all religions.

Some say that this manifest absurdity on the part of the five conservative justices — Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito — is because they are blinded by their Catholic faith. That may be part of it, but I’d say it’s due as much to their being blinded by the power of advertising.

Their brains have been washed by the most successful logo ever created.

The cross is so simple, anybody can make one.  Two scratches in the sand with a stick, two fingers held up across each other, or just one body with arms outspread, and there you go.   Abstract and figurative at the same time, it’s brilliant.   The Star of David and the Crescent Moon are graphic failures by comparison.   Only the Nike swoop (the simple tick copyrighted as a trademark) can compete for elegance, and I think it’s safe to assume that Nike will not last as long as Christianity.

The power of the cross is embedded deep in the superstitious psyche of the West.  Cross your fingers, touch wood, don’t walk under a ladder — all these are based on the ‘original’ cross.  Never mind that it wasn’t the original one.  Or that Jesus of Nazareth was only one of tens of thousands of people crucified by the Romans.  Or that the Assyrians were busily crucifying people when Rome was still a mere village.

Christianity adopted it as a symbol, and because that symbolic power is so entrenched, you don’t have to be Christian for it to get to you.  The seemingly endless rows of white crosses in the World War Two killing fields of Normandy, cited by Kennedy, Roberts, and Alito, are indeed deeply moving, though the ones that get to me most are the hand-made ones by the side of the road all over America, small altars to family members, usually teenagers, killed in car crashes.

But Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas — I’d use the title Justice if I thought it still fit — should know this:  if I die in a war or by the side of the road, erect no cross for me.   If you do, I swear I’ll come back and haunt you, a copy of the United States Constitution in my right hand, and a medieval Jewish amulet against evil in my left.  To you your symbols, to me mine.

Odd, though — I would have thought the Constitution was one of theirs too.



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File under: Christianity | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, Constitution, cross, crucifixion, First Amendment, logo, Supreme Court, war memorial | 3 Comments
  1. Olivier D'hose says:
    April 30, 2010 at 8:37 pm

    The decision from the Supreme Court is pretty troubling… But I guess we could apply the same logic to the swastika too then… It is a much older symbol than the cross in that regard (don’t believe me? check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika )… I wonder if it would fly…

    We live in troubling times…

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    April 30, 2010 at 8:45 pm

    I am absolutely sick to my stomach. The Constitution isn’t exactly open to this degree of interpretation, last time I looked at it. The only explanation is that the Justices conveniently forgot about it when making this decision.

  3. Lesley Hazleton says:
    April 30, 2010 at 9:18 pm

    That’s the power of appointing Supreme Court justices. And you thought the Bush years were over….

Theology for the People!

Posted April 28th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

I’ve been asked why I call myself a theologist and not a theologian.  It’s simple enough:  theologian feels wrong — too high-falutin’, too posh, too domineering.  It allows of no accident or serendipity.  It’s altogether too damned intimidating.

The dictionaries have both words meaning the same thing, though the OED seems to think that theologist is rarely used nowadays.   If so, it’s way past time to resuscitate it.  Theology for the people, you might say.

There’s that “ian” ending to theologian, to start with.  I trained as a psychologist, not as a psychologian;  a close friend is a sociologist, not a sociologian.  Stick that “ian” on to the end, and whatever it is seems to become more a matter of belief than of study or observation.  As in Christian.

So perhaps it’s inevitable that when I think of a theologian — with apologies to the many fine theologians I know — I still tend to think of a black-robed divine closeted away in his (always his) study or cell, reasoning out the dictates of his faith.   The word is somehow redolent with churchness, with the smell of incense and beeswax, the chants of monks and the echo of cold stone floors.  There’s a kind of whispery reverence to it.

A  theologist, on the other hand, feels far more secular.   The word feels right for someone like me, an outsider with a strong sense of the inside, an agnostic freelancer in the world of religion, exercising her right to equal-opportunity criticism and/or appreciation.

This way, I get to enjoy the synchronicities.  Walking into a conference of Muslims for Peace held at Rutgers University, for instance, I recognized the vibe instantly:  600 believing Muslims gathered together to celebrate Muhammad generate a similar atmosphere of warmth and excitement, family and mutual support, as 600 orthodox Jews gathered together to celebrate, say, Moses.

Speaking at that conference, I found my words being acclaimed with a call and response very like Hallelujah-praise-the-Lord in a Baptist church.   Then as admired Sufi sheikh Hisham Kabbani took the stage, with his long white beard and white turban and white robes, I could as well have been in the presence of a great Hassidic rabbi.  In fact, I was.

Sheikh Kabbani is a theologian worth the full weight of the word.  Me, I’m just a plain everyday theologist.  That means exploring, getting lost here, discovering something there.  It means I’m often outraged, sometimes delighted, occasionally stumped.   It means that every answer I come up with leads to a hundred more questions.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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File under: agnosticism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, Hassidism, Hisham Kabbani, Muslims for Peace, theology | 5 Comments
  1. Linda Williams says:
    April 28, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    Wonderful to know that I can check in regularly and read the “wisdom of Lesley.” Refreshing to read a blog that has something to say!

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    April 29, 2010 at 4:11 am

    I might have to steal this and put it on my calling card: “an agnostic freelancer in the world of religion, exercising her right to equal-opportunity criticism and/or appreciation”. I love it.

  3. rbarenblat says:
    June 10, 2010 at 5:10 am

    What a lovely explanation!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 10, 2010 at 9:09 am

      Thank you, Velveteen Rabbi!

  4. rachel cowan says:
    June 11, 2010 at 6:43 pm

    I love this term – I want in on it too. It really describes the process of working away to live out a meaningful relationship with God without having to underpin it with theory and citations. Good job!

Who’s Innocent?

Posted April 20th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Last week, just in time for Earth Day, the carcass of a grey whale washed ashore here in Seattle with a stomach full of human trash: a pair of sweatpants (grey), surgical gloves, discarded duct tape, assorted pieces of plastic, two dozen plastic bags, and a golf ball.
The moment I heard about this, I was submerged in a feeling of pure wrongness. A kind of overwhelming awareness of how deeply we are sinning — yes, this agnostic uses that word advisedly — against the world.
I don’t know why this happens so easily when it’s animals that suffer from our wrongdoing, rather than humans. One of the reports from the Lebanon War in the early 1980s that most affected me was of militiamen shooting into huge flocks of migrating storks just for sport. Another was the image of an old man sitting outside the ruins of his bombarded Beirut home, holding a leaking plastic bag of water with a single goldfish in it. Nearly thirty years ago, yet I remember these relatively minor incidents precisely.
But why should I respond so viscerally to these reports as against the vast toll of human death and injury and misery in this morning’s paper — and yesterday’s, and the day before? Do I really care more about animals than humans?
I know, I know, slaughter of the innocents and all that. But I think it’s something far more invidious. In the face of so much misery inflicted by humans on each other in the name of God or nation, tribe or race, land or greed, the mind is always tempted to switch off. All that misery becomes part of the “cotton wool” Virginia Woolf talked about in “Moments of Being” — the vague, amorphous cloud of non-experience, or of experience refused. Then something happens like the grey whale with a stomach snarled by duct tape and we’re not prepared for it. It breaks through our defenses and “bam” — there’s a moment of real being, a sudden awakening to reality. And at last, a decent, human reaction: that overwhelming sense of wrongness.

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File under: ecology, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, Earth Day, ecology, Lebanon war, whales | Be the First to leave a comment

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  • The Free-Speech Challenge May 23, 2016
  • Category-Free April 20, 2016
  • Staring At The Void April 13, 2016
  • Sherlock And Me April 3, 2016
  • Hard-Wired? Really? March 22, 2016
  • A Quantum Novel March 9, 2016
  • This Pre-Order Thing March 4, 2016
  • The Agnostic Celebration February 29, 2016
  • The First Two Pages February 23, 2016
  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
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