My Genesis and Exodus

I am looking back to where I strayed from the flock. What flock? Though I’m told I was born on the cusp of Aries I have no identification with sheep except for hearing their Bah, Bah, Bah.  I think of my childhood as being deprived of deprivation unless I count the absence of any belief in the supernatural as a privation.

I could blame it all on my mother. She was part of that familial wave of Jewish immigrants whose first priority was to disidentify with the Old World. That meant speaking with no trace of shtetl life and no observation of any Jewish holidays, high, low or in-between. Of course, she gave herself away with Yiddish curses directed against the gonif grocery clerk with his imagined finger on the scale and the momser landlord for holding back on the heat and against God for God-knows-what. Where was my father, I hear you ask. He was floating above the fray like the figure in a Chagall painting.

My one stab at Sunday school lasted two or three sessions. Two memories are in the residue. One has me sitting around a large table with about a dozen others trying to make sense of some preposterous fable having missed the early chapters. The second and far more vivid one has me opening a bathroom door and staring at the rabbi’s wife sitting on the toilet. This served as my own personal hasty exodus from the room, the house and the Bible.

I was not so much an atheist as an ignoramus which is to say I had not considered the matter and rejected it; rather I was too ill-informed to own that atheist designation. As an ignoramus I was granted the right to ignore. I grew up regarding Biblical text as having no relevance to life as I knew it. In fact, religion took on an association beyond irrelevance into one of exclusion with overtones of victimhood and superiority. I rejected all of it. The divisive walls, the ancient tongue and the tribe. I would like to think a spiritual dimension grew within me in spite of myself and possibly even because of my rejection. I say this since there appears to be something irreligious about religion.

Growing up with God's absence is not nothing; I never felt bereft. Only then can we find our existential  selves. What happens between people is my humanistic idea of holy. This along with our relationship to the natural world inspires reverence and worthship.                                                                                 

In the middle of this narrative lives the anomaly of my Bar Mitzvah. It was for me an exercise into the mysterious world of arcane mumbles. I had no idea what those sounds meant issuing from my mouth. I should take this occasion to apologize to anyone still alive who wasted their Saturday afternoon, seventy-six years ago, having to endure my singing voice which couldn’t carry a tune from here to there. However, my great uncle Peretz was pleased and seeing his face may have been a religious experience itself.

Now in my declining years which could go on for another decade, God willing, I have come around for a second look. Biblical text, with all its myths, has a certain appeal to my poetic sensibility. The tales are no less meaningful than Homer’s poems or Euripides’ plays. Metaphors lie within. I have made room for them. As for being observant of holidays that may take another incarnation. I still regard organized religion through a contrarian lens. As for my orthodoxy I am a devout believer in awe.