Blessed Be...

Religion and Me

I received a blessing this morning.

There’s a man whose singing appears on Facebook and Instagram and whose every song carries messages of God. He has a rich baritone and sings with profound joy. I don’t know much about who the singer is (his introduction is SALM L.M.K.), where he comes from, or whether he is part of any particular church or organization. I do know that when I encounter him in the morning, between perhaps a thoughtful comment by Malcolm X and a Betty Boop cartoon on Facebook, he cheers my day.

I have shared this singer’s videos twice on my page and twice he has personally responded with thanks. Are these words truly personal or do they come from some kind of list or with a request for money? Neither I think. They sound as sincere as his singing. Here is the latest: “Juliet Wittman, thanks very much. I’m so grateful for such words. You’re a blessing. Be blessed.”

Tears came.

I notice blessings often receive a warm response. How often, scrolling, do you encounter the lovely Irish blessing that begins “May the road rise to meet you” and find yourself smiling as you share?

I was intensely religious throughout my teens. I had no interest in organized religion, however, and only rarely went to the synagogue although I was fiercely proud of being Jewish.

I think the interest started with Graham Greene whose work I discovered at the age of fourteen with an early novel, Brighton Rock. Greene was a passionate Catholic but also rebellious--he called himself an “agnostic Catholic”-- and his questioning aroused the ire of the church.

The protagonist in Brighton Rock was Pinky, a young criminal who believed in the saying “Between the saddle and the ground/ He mercy sought and mercy found.” This meant that anyone who repeated a prayer even seconds before death would be saved. Alas, this belief didn’t serve Pinky well.

And then came the far more complex novel, The Power and the Glory, in which a priest who had broken the tenets of the church, and who Greene dubbed the whisky priest because he drank alcohol and betrayed celibacy having fathered a daughter. He lived in a state in Mexico where at the time Catholicism was banned and a priest could face execution. Despite the danger, the whisky priest went from place to place ministering to the poor--many of whom longed for benediction--in the belief that God could manifest even through his sad and tainted body.

This mingling of wrongdoing with shining virtue amazed me and I was entirely sure that as he stumbled toward execution the whisky priest found the mercy he had earned.

That was the beginning. I read the Bible from the Old Testament to the New, though I did occasionally skip a passage. I dived into biographies of saints, trying to fathom what qualities won sainthood. It did seem to almost always require oppression and some kind of hideous death. Also I found myself intensely disliking St. Theresa who dubbed herself Little Flower and--if I remember her book correctly--was filled with rage when a young French student offered her a helpful hand as she descended train steps. How dare this toxic young male touch her sacred body? This woman seemed to me mimsy, self-absorbed, and downright stupid, saint or not.

It was easy to avoid established religion when, despite an established Church of England, the Brits were far lest religious than their American counterparts. According to an old joke they attended church only three times in life--when hatched, matched, or dispatched. But there was no way to avoid the beauty of religion itself.

Unlike many of the Jewish students at my grammar school I never resented morning assembly where hymns were routinely sung. We were allowed not to sing and had our own assemblies in the gym, but I could never resist those lovely songs.

There was also the Royal Albert Hall where my kindly brother-in-law introduced me to music. In those post-war years the arts were strongly supported by the government and you didn’t need a lot of money to hear, as I did and for the first time, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Handel, their works rising perceptibly to heaven. At the National Gallery I found myself sitting on a bench for perhaps half an hour staring at El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross” or stopping to gaze at a medieval Madonna and Child. How could a child so tenderly cherished be so cruelly murdered as a man?

And those churches, the magnificent cathedrals, the beautiful buildings you found in rural Britain. Just step inside one of these, many built over centuries and by workers and architects spurred by passion and belief and you found your spirits soaring.

True, I did sometimes find myself grumbling about why all this miraculous art could be claimed solely by Christianity but of course art wasn’t and isn’t. We Jews have visual artists, musicians (think Leonard Bernstein), dancers, and film makers (my mother met Alexander Korda in London, the Jewish immigrant from Hungary who started up British film making). There have been scientists and philosophers too, many Nobel prize winners and of course Einstein.

I was told Jews were people of the book which I took to mean we treasured knowledge and read a lot though it actually refers to the Torah. Still, we have hordes of wonderful writers from Franz Kafka to Isaac Bashevis Singer to Primo Levi to Hannah Arendt to Philip Roth. Have you seen Fiddler on the Roof dozens of times and found yourself admiring the dialogue, feeling, and songs every time? Thank the author Sholem Aleichem whose stories created the backbone, musician Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnic lyricist and Joseph Stein who wrote the text.

Best of all is the fact that Jews are very good at being funny. What can you expect from a people whose past is so shadowy and grim? Today we still have Mel Brooks (close to a hundred years old) and Jon Stewart among others. Sometime back, sadly, we lost Gilda Radner the funniest comedian I’ve ever watched. Further back still you get Lenny Bruce and the Marx Brothers. And of course there are many more.

There are books written about the murderous history of religion--the Crusades, women burned as witches, the Spanish Inquisition. The long, one-time oppression of Catholics in England. The wars fought in so many parts of the world for power and land. There is too much to be said here about the present time and what is happening here, in a country where the Secretary of Defense titles himself Secretary of War and promotes a Christian Nationalism that, he insists, requires mass slaughter. Within another nation--which purports to represent Judaism-- genocide against Palestine is embraced, along with bombing attacks on other countries. Israel has been relentlessly oppressing Palestine for decades and the great wave of destruction has lifted high and is crashing down over and over again destroying homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and even a synagogue in Lebanon. Journalists in Gaza are shot and snipers murder children with direct and deliberate shots to their heads and chests. Starving mothers watch the babies they can no longer feed die of starvation as Israel blocks the entry of blankets, medications, clothes, water and food, often killing the aid workers attempting to deliver.

For many years I wore a small gold Mogen David around my neck, a gift from my Hungarian stepfather, who himself had suffered Nazi imprisonment. With some sadness several years ago, having learned of Israel’s bestial crimes, I slipped it off and put it away. I had been taught from the beginning that Judaism profoundly values human life.

Decades ago Victor Gollancz, a writer born to a German Jewish family, published a book called A Year of Grace that stitched together my scattered and confused ideas. He had gathered the thoughts, writings, sermons, and ideas of priests, rabbis, clerics, mullahs, poets, essayists, philosophers--literally dozens of people who had devoted their lives to understanding religion--and his results were grouped in chapters with names like “Joy and Praise,” “Good and Evil,” “Acceptance,” “Freedom,” “The Self.” With him I encountered people from many countries, along with poets like William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, as well as quotes from Beethoven, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, and Aldous Huxley.

My favorite entry concerned a rabbi who, as he was returning home, saw a group of thieves walking away down the road with all his possessions. He stopped, stood aside, joined his hands and murmured “I give this to you” as each robber passed.

He wanted none of them damned, he explained later.

From all these riches I took a single essential understanding: There are myriad religions and myriad ways of worship in this world of ours, a disparate collection whose ideas and rituals vary greatly. Yet despite their singularity I could sense that the most crucial beliefs of the world’s great religions were wonderfully shared.

I think in every one of us there is a yearning, a search, a desire to understand the wonders of this world and the meaning of our lives, a longing for transcendence. That transcendence can be found sometimes in music, words put together by poets and novelists, an unexpected smile from a stranger, the sense that we ourselves have done something that--no matter how small it is--might put a flicker of kindness out into the universe. And of course in giving and receiving blessing.

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There are several of Rabindranath Tagore’s lilting poems in A Year of Grace and here is my favorite:

When I go from hence
let this be my parting word,
that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus
that expands on the ocean of light,
and thus am I blessed
—-let this be my parting word.

In this playhouse of infinite forms
I have had my play
and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.

My whole body and my limbs
have thrilled with his touch who is beyond touch;
and if the end comes here, let it come
—-let this be my parting word.