ON BEING JEWISH

This piece is composed of two separate but somehow linked powerful experiences of being Jewish. The first occurred on a recent trip to Budapest. The second occurred many years ago on a trip that began in Poland and continued in Israel.

1) Budapest: Summer 2007

It was my first day of sightseeing in Budapest. I had decided to leave the Jewish quarter until after the four day conference I was attending---the official purpose for my visit. I had been warned that the story of Hungarian Jewry just before, as well as during, the Holocaust was particularly dark. Hungary was an ally of Germany during the war, had passed its own exclusionary laws in the 20s, and until the very end took care of its "Jewish problem" on its own.

Much of the afternoon I walked around the inner city assiduously following a walking tour in my Frommer's guidebook to Budapest. Determined to pack as much into the day as I could, I crossed over the Danube to Buda and took the funicular up the hill to the castle district. In addition to its monumental buildings, the castle district consists of a number of streets with attractive small houses. The guidebook listed a number that were of note. One, at Tancsics Mihaly u. 26, had been a medieval Jewish prayer house. This is what Frommer's had to say.

This building dates from the 14th century. In the 15th and 16th century, the Jews of Buda thrived under Turkish rule. The 1686 Christian reconquest of Buda was soon followed by a massacre of Jews. Many survivors fled Buda; this tiny Sephardic Synagogue was turned into an apartment.

The house was distinguished by its color and a tiny bronze plaque saying it had once been a synagogue. I can visualize it now close to the corner of the street, painted a tasteful yet alive orange--- what I think is called burnt orange. I love that shade of orange; one of my first thoughts was that its inhabitants were lucky to live there.

Then I saw unbidden in my mind's eye men in long dark frocks and yarmulkes, wearing intelligent, worldly expressions, coming out of the building, perhaps after prayers. They did not seem exotic or even strange to me. Instead I experienced a striking kinship in consciousness with them, perhaps more so than with any other figures I have read about and/or conjured in my mind from the past. I felt I knew them---could feel their inner current, sense their joys and concerns and how they held them together. I continued on my tour, without even thinking of taking a picture.

While I was recounting my adventures to myself at the end of the trip, I left this one out. In the back of my mind I knew there was one more, of a slightly different kind. Indeed the image was among the most vivid I've ever had ---at least of things I have not actually seen or experienced.

2) Poland, Museum at Auschwitz: Summer 1979.

Close to the end of the exhibition, the photos gave way to canvases showing Jewish life. A tableau of a bar mitzvah boy reading from the torah, flanked on one side by his father and on the other by the rabbi, conveyed both in the treatment of the figures and the light, a strong sense of the sustained upward impulse of Judaism towards spirit. In it I discovered the basic religious urge that is at the core of the Jewish experience. From childhood on, even as a reformed Jew, I had experienced it again and again, but mythically in the sense that I could not abstract its meaning from the experience. I realized that even as an agnostic, I had been strongly influenced by this very gentle reach of my community upward toward the sacred. Before it had been somewhat comforting to unknowingly partake of it from time to time; here at Auschwitz I understood what it was, saw how much it had shaped me, and realized its sustaining power.

Israel---Summer 1979

After visiting Auschwitz, I longed to be in Israel. However, once there I felt dispirited and disoriented. I blamed the heat in August and being alone after having been so well cared for in Poland. From my current vantage point I recognize that my distress resulted from my recent encounter with the destruction of European Jewry and the impossibility of satisfactory integrating these events.

As I was going through the motions of being a tourist, I met an English actor, about ten years older than me, on a camping tour of the Sinai Peninsula. An orphan, he had been brought up by the Jesuits. When I told him of my visit to Auschwitz, he shared the Jesuit perspective on anti-Semitism. Christianity was viewed by his teachers as an advance over Judaism because it offered the hope of resurrection. The resurrection of Christ held the promise of the induction of individual souls into a heavenly life at death. The rejection by Jews of Christ was then a rejection of the concept of individual afterlife. The basic impulse of Western anti-Semitism, my friend felt, arose from an unconscious mechanism by which Christians who lack faith in the possibility of life after death combat their inner doubts about life after death by attacking those who do not believe in the resurrection of Christ.

I was intrigued by the ability of this theory in one deft stroke to account for so much. It seemed to explain Hitler's obsession with a "final solution" and his sense of it as righteous work in a particularly powerful way. At one level I was convinced, but at others harbored some doubts. Even though I knew Reform Judaism does not mention life after death, I was poorly informed about other Jewish views. Moreover, the Messianic tradition clearly implies a resurrection of a sort.

Later I found out that the focus of the Jewish tradition is indeed generally on present life: on reaching to God through ritual observance, prayer and even complaint, on acts of loving kindness, and on social justice. However various Rabbis over the centuries have spoken of individual resurrection and afterlife. The mystical arm of Judaism emphasizes the fate of the soul after death. But they teach that originally a spark of divine light, the soul at death merges with its divine source.

I returned to Jerusalem and said good-by to my actor friend. A day or two later, my eyes happened to meet those of a pleasant, simply dressed young man. In part from the extraordinary depth of repose I experienced when our eyes met, I realized in an intuitive flash that this man was a Christian---and a true one. I understood the tranquility and penetrability of this apparently simple young man to reflect his close grounding here in the Holy Land---possibly even unsullied by scientific thought---to a religion that holds at its core the view that individual life can continue in some manner after death.

Whether this man in fact was a Christian is not important. He embodied for me in its purest form a different organizing filter than my own and my tradition to the question of living. I am still engaged, and suspect I will be for a long time, in the process of reclaiming from that unconscious place where intuitions come from and are again stored all the insight inherent in that moment when my eyes met those of this young man.

In the years since I returned from this trip, I have become more involved in Judaism and spiritual life. I yearn, I question and I wrestle, in the manner of many Jews, to know first hand that organizing filter or psychic signature of my religion at its best. I first saw it fully amid all the death at Auschwitz.

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These passages were part of an early version of a chapter for an anthology on growing up Jewish in America, called Daughters of Kings. In the end I decided not to include the story about my actor friend and his theory about anti-Semitism in my chapter, called "The Other Side." In it I write about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, attending a Trinitarian boarding school, and the trip I took to Poland, Auschwitz, and Israel after handing in my dissertation.

CONTEMPORARY ALCHEMY

Prague Castle, like most everything else connected to tourism in Prague midsummer, was too crowded. My guidebook warned me to get there early. Instead I spent part of the morning exploring the once funky, hidden-in-the-hill neighborhood above the castle. I was shown around by an older Czeck woman and her daughter I met by chance while asking for directions to the castle. They were delightful and happy at the opportunity to practice their English.

It was difficult even finding where to pay the entrance fee to the castle complex. The audiotour I purchased with the hope it would provide structure to my visit was so detailed, or perhaps poorly done, it left me more rather than less disoriented. I was more than relieved when my due diligence was complete and holes had been punched adjacent to the five or so sites included on my entrance ticket.

I continue to feel out of sorts even after my unofficial sightseeing ended. My rather pleasureless wandering in the gardens behind the castle was punctuated by two sights that at least momentarily pulled me from my funk. One was of a striking couple, both very thin and willowy, dressed alike and all in black. They fit together so well they seemed like twins--- like adjacent puzzle pieces. The other was of a nun dressed entirely in white walking meditatively halfway down the long peaceful grassy slope that went from the palace gardens back to the town.

Heading away from the crowds, I took an obscure wall-lined backroad down from the castle. I was not sure where it would lead, but the views were lovely and I hoped for the best.

Halfway down---there was the twin-like couple. They were peering intently through a gate, the woman taking pictures. My camera was ready and I took several shots of them.

I was intrigued by the idea of capturing this fascinating couple taking pictures of something unknown. They finished their shooting and moved on. Delighted to have caught them on film I forgot about everything else. Only when I came level with the gate did I remember the mystery. This is what they were looking at.

Wolfgang Pauli on Kepler and the Transition from Alchemy to Classical Science

When I opened my new guidebook at random, of all things, it happened to fall on a page listing an alchemical museum. I was delighted at the thought of visiting on my upcoming trip to Prague what was billed as the only alchemical museum in the world. Yet when I looked a second time I saw it was closed for the summer. Instead I had to satisfy myself with rereading an article on alchemy by physicist Wolfgang Pauli I had found very thought provoking. He uses the work of Johanus Kepler as a lens through which to view the transition from alchemy to the classical scientific perspective.

Pauli is best known for his work on the spin of elementary particles. As a particle physicist he grappled closely with the wave particle duality. He also was a patient and collaborator of Carl Jung. He worked with Jung to integrate the intuitive, imagistic, and feeling material that came through his dreams with his much stronger thinking side. Like Jung, he came to feel that both mind and matter were manifestations of the same primary material or force prior to both. The article called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler" appears in a volume with an essay of Jung's on synchronicity. The book is entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche and was first published in 1955.

Kepler (1571-1630) was a devout Christian with mystical tendencies as well as an important figure in the history of science. Converted to the Copernican heliocentric universe early in his career by his tutor, he became obsessed with proving that the planetary orbits were circular. He was strongly influenced by, among other things, neo-Platonic philosophy, which explored the harmonious mathematical relationships behind music and tried to generalize these to nature as a whole. Kepler saw the Divine in the regularity of geometry and saw the cosmos as what might be called Divine Geometry. The sphere was for him the most perfect geometric form. He felt its harmonious proportions encoded the Triune Christian God (with the Son standing for Creation), the relationship of the soul to the body, of God to the human soul, and, at least early on, of the sun to the planets. (The picture is a model of Kepler's early view of the solar system.) He thought the soul responded instinctively to the harmonies of the sphere because, as Pauli puts it, by virtue of its circular form [it] is an image of God, in Whom these proportions and the geometric truths following therefrom exist from all eternity. " Below are a few passages from Harmonices mundi, Kepler's book on "the harmony of the worlds."

... the movement of a point located in the center [of the sphere] to a single point on the surface, represents the first beginning of creation, emulating the eternal generation of the Son in that the center flows out towards infinitely many points of the whole surface, which, under the rule of the most perfect equality, is formed and described by infinitely many lines; and this straight line is, needless to say, the element of corporeal form.

The point spreads itself out over this extension so that point and surface are identical, except for the fact that the ratio of density and extension is reversed. Hence there exists everywhere between point and surface the most absolute equality, the closest unity, the most beautiful harmony[literally: breathing together!], connection, relation, proportion, and commensurability. And although Center, Surface, and Distance are manifestly Three, yet they are One, so that no one of them could be imagined to be absent without destroying the whole.

...the circle beautifully fits into the intersecting plane (of which it is the circumscribed limit) as well as into the intersected sphere by way of a reciprocal co-incidence of both, just as the mind is both inherent in the body, informing it and connecting with corporal form, and sustained by God, an irradiation as it were, that flows into the body from the divine countenance; whence it [the mind] derives its nobler nature.

Alas poor Kepler, working with the careful astronomical data collected by Tycho Brahe, found that the planetary orbits are not circular. However his commitment to geometry had not failed him since he eventually was able to show that they are elliptical. He also determined that a planet swept out equal areas of its orbit in equal time periods (click for an animation of Kepler's 2nd Law. Finally he recognized the mathematical relationship between the (mean) distance of a planet from the Sun and the size of its orbit. By doing so he found a much more complex harmony in nature, which finally enshrined the sun at the center of the universe. Kepler's work was essential to the formulation of the law of gravity by Newton, who lived from 1643 to 1727.

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The final part of Pauli’s article explores the vitriolic controversy between Kepler and his contemporary Robert Fludd, a practitioner of alchemy.

Kepler's understanding of a rational universe ultimately grounded in the harmonies of mathematics collided with the traditional alchemical view based on a “archaic-magical” apprehension of nature in which boundaries between the real and the symbolic were completely absent. Like Kepler, Fludd understood the Divine to be reflected in the cosmos, yet much more dimly. Thus the relationship between the Divine and his creation was not harmonious for Fludd and other alchemists. They saw a cosmic struggle between form as the light principle, and matter, or darkness, which dwells in the earth. This struggle could only be redeemed by the alchemical process, which releases from matter its latent light and by the same token transforms the alchemist. The pictures below, what Fludd called "hieroglyphic figures," demostrate his view of the cosmos.



Pauli writes, "Fludd never distinguishes clearly between a real, material process and a symbolical representation. Because of the analogy of the microcosm to the macrocosm the [al]chemical process is indeed at the same time a reflection of the whole universe.... After the withdrawal of the formal light principle matter remains behind as the dark principle, though it was latently present before as a part of God…. In the middle, the sphere of the sun, where these opposing principles just counterbalanced each other, there is engendered in the mystery of the [al]chymic wedding the infans solaris, which is at the same time the liberated world soul."

Quantitative measurement has no role in, and was indeed a threat to, Fludd's understanding of the universe. Pauli quotes Fludd's spirited attack on Kepler's Harmonicies mundi and defense of the alchemical approach.

...What he has expressed in many words in long discussions I have compressed into a few words and explained by means of hieroglyphic and exceedingly significant figures, not, to be sure, for the reason that I delight in pictures (as he says elsewhere), but because I…had resolve to bring together much in little and, in the fashion of the alchemists, to collect the extracted essence, to reject the sedimentary substances, and to pour what is good into its proper vessel; so that, the mystery of science having been revealed, that which is hidden may become manifest; and that the inner nature of the thing after the outer vestments have been stripped off, may be enclosed, as a precious gem set in a gold ring, in a figure best suited to its nature---a figure, that is, in which its essence can be held by eye and mind as in a mirror and without many-worded circumlocutions.

For it is for the vulgar mathematicians to concern themselves with quantitative shadows; the alchemists and Hermetic philosophers, however, comprehend the true core of the natural bodies.

...I contemplate the internal and essential impulses that issues from nature herself; he has hold of the tale, I grasp the head; I perceive the first causes, he its effects.

Kepler answers:

If you know of another mathematics (besides that vulgar one from which all those hitherto celebrated as mathematicians have received their name), that is, a mathematics that is both natural and formal, I must confess that I have never tasted of it, unless we take refuge in the most general origin of the word...and give up the quantities. Of that, you must know, I do not speak here. You, Robert, may keep for yourself its glory and that of the proofs to be found in it---and how accurate and how certain those are, that, I think you will judge for yourself without me. I reflect on the visible movements determinable by the senses themselves, you may consider the inner impulses and endeavor to distinguish them according to grades. I hold the tale but I hold in my hands; you may grasp the head mentally, though only, I fear, in your dreams. I am content with the effects, that is, the movement of the planets. If you shall have found in the very causes harmonies as limpid as are mine in the movements, then it will be proper for me to congratulate you on your gift of invention and myself on my gift of observation---that is, as soon as I shall be able to observe anything.

Pauli points out that Kepler, a transition figure, overstates the empirical impetus behind his ideas. Pauli is also unwilling to side completely with the quantitative mode that Kepler defends, lamenting what was lost in the transition to the classical science that was to come. (Even thought Newton was a devoted alchemist, he kept his scientific work and writing separate from his alchemical concerns.)

Whereas as Kepler conceives of the soul almost as a mathematically described system of resonators, it has always been the symbolical image that has tried to express, in addition, the immeasurable [emphasis added] side of experience which also includes the imponderables of the emotions and emotional evaluations. Even though at the cost of consciousness of the quantitative side of nature and its laws, Fludd’s "hieroglyphic" figures do try to preserve a unity of the inner experience of the "observer" (as we should say today) and the external processes of nature, and thus a wholeness in its contemplation....

Pauli felt psychology as well as physics was beginning to bridge the gap between the quantative and qualitative that Kepler's work helped bring about. My sense is that more than 60 years after Pauli's article, this important coming together of the quantitative and the qualitative is still just beginning.

Of Temples and Grasses: A Visit to the Yucatan Peninsula

I’m just back from a conference in Mexico held on what is called the Mexican Riviera on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. After the conference I spent a number of days on the Yucatan Peninsula visiting Mayan ruins. In part I felt I SHOULD, but something else seemed to be calling me as well. I first went to Merida, a former Mayan city that was destroyed by the conquistadors and is now a city with a strong colonial influence. Only the cities that the Mayans had already abandoned were NOT destroyed.



The first day I took a tour to Uxmal and then to Kabah --two Mayan ruins about an hour away. I approached them as a tourist, conscientiously trying to take in as much information as I could. The picture shows the main temple at Uxmal. The Mayans were inveterate temple builders, often building temple over temple on the very same site, as they did here. They painted them bright red.
The next day I had planned to take a tour to see some caves and three lesser Mayan sites. I wondered whether it was really worth it. After all I was going to go to Chetzen Itza and then Tulum and could instead use the day to explore Merida. Wouldn't the law of diminishing returns begin to set in? Nonetheless I decided to go ahead with the plan I had so carefully worked out.

The bed and breakfast I was staying at had an arrangement with a tour company. I signed up with them, rather than with another company that had an apparently similar tour about 15 percent cheaper. It was easier and I wanted to help out the inn keeper.

I had great trouble understanding the tour guide who picked me up. Eventually I realized that he was announcing that lunch was not included as I (and apparently many others) just assumed. It seems to be the custom there and it was included in the other tour.

No lunch and all day with a tour guide I didn't understand (and another couple who did not speak English). I said I didn't want to go and asked for my money back. The driver kept crossing himself and spitting into his hands. We were a ways from the hotel by this time, so he drove me to the downtown office of the tour company. First they said I should go back to the hotel, they would call, and the hotel would give me my money back. When I asked them to put that in writing they said they would pay for my lunch, if I would go on the tour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I agreed.



The Loltun caves, the first stop, have been used since prehistoric times. The Mayans hid from the conquistadors in them. Extending at least 6 km, they have many broad caverns and massive stalagmites. (To see them required hiring a special guide---who used a laser pointer.) I realized for them alone the day was worth it.

The minor sites were-well minor sights---at least for someone without much insight into the intricacies of different Mayan styles. (Actually, I have now come to appreciate the unique style of these ruins.) They were largely free of other tourists. I tried to believe what my guide was saying but some of its strained credulity. By no stretch of the imagination could I see elephant trunks in the many odd shaped protuberances punctuating the façade of one of the buildings. Soon I stopped listening.





Instead I tuned into the peacefulness of the day and the calmness of the grass in front of the long temple. Eventually I glanced at where the grass met the corner of the wall of the Temple. I experienced the coolness and impartiality of the stones and the strength, permanence, and angularity of the wall. I realized that Mayan architecture served at least in part as a bulwark against the natural word--- against the softness and fecundity of nature, on the one hand, and against human dependence on it and powerlessness in the face of it whims, on the other. The wall had a presence---one that spoke back to the passing of time and our limited lifespan and said something forceful and lasting.

I recognized this "standing up to nature” as the masculine project. I do not identify with it personally, yet I do feel very appreciative of it. On the way out of the site, the guide called our attention to a carved pillar of a Mayan warrior off to the side of the path. He said that it was unusual for carved columns NOT to have hieroglyphics, but the Mayans wanted to have warriors on their columns because they were interested in “imposing constraints.” I suspect that carved pictures long predated carved hieroglyphics. Nonetheless with those two words, ‘imposing constraints,’ my guide--- full of the unexpected---had captured my new insight about Mayan architecture as well as the masculine project in a nutshell.

My experience at Chechen Itza helped deepen at the same time that it opened up my insight about the Mayans. I saw the main temple for the first time during the evening Sound and Light show. It had a presence and power that spoke back to nature in a somewhat different way.




In its perfection it captured not only the human spirit, but something other worldly as well. I found it awesome in the real senses of the word. The next day, even amid the crowds and the heat, from time to time I was able to give myself over to its power and authority. Then it spoke to me not only as a beautiful artifact, but as something charged with human spirit, even as it surpassed the human spirit. This was much more than just the masculine project—though I cannot say what it might be.

My guide the next day---a very thoughtful and sensitive man--said that the power of Mayan culture came from the fact that women were educated just like men and were considered equals. Given the hierarchical nature of ancient Mayan culture, I have my doubts that this is true (or true throughout the many centuries the Mayan culture flourished.) Jean Molesky-Poz, one of the woman I got to know at the conference, is an expert on contemporary Mayan spirituality, with a focus on women. She described a gentle culture in which people were very in touch with each other with the Earth and with Spirit. I am going to buy her book, which in part looks at the continuity between contemporary and ancient Mayan spirituality, to see if it might provide some hints of what “this more” is I experienced at Chetchen Itza
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As I waited for my bus in the parking lot to take me to Tulum, the Mayan city by the sea, I tried an experiment. Could I give myself over to other buildings in this way and would they speak to me as well? I tried ‘to listen’ to the buildings that housed the ticket office and market around Chechen Itza but they seemed to have very little to say.


At Tulum, known more for its setting than it architecture, I appreciated the beauty of this site perched above the sea. But when I try to ‘listen’ all that really spoke to me in this special way was the long grass towards the far end of the extensive site waving rhythmically and sweetly in the breeze.


The last picture is from the Governor's Palace in Merida. After my tour to the minor sites, I told the tour guide (of imposing constraints fame) to drop me off at the contemporary art museum. He said that I should go see the murals on the second floor of the Governor's palace instead. I didn't, but the next morning, I rushed out to get a look before my bus to Chetchen Itza. I am so glad I did. The 26 murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco depict the history of the Mayans on the Yucatan Peninsula. This is the center picture of three that frame the well of the grand staircase. It represents the birth of Mayan man from an ear of maze, as described in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayans.