======================================================= ======== ON THE RELATION BETWEEN JUDAISM AND THE 'SUFI' ORDER In Memory: Chana (Amy Chaimowitz), zl'b ( Written in the mid-'70's, as I recall, and probably placed in a Hertz annotated Siddur to be placed in the stone chapel (built under the supervison of Lynn the Stonemason) by the meditation grounds. (Re-)typed Old City (Rova) 1982; Re-typed Moshav Meor Modi'in, 1990; this re-type Mevo Modi'in 8 Jan '04 (14 Tevet), with appended notes. I am grateful to Alifa Sadya for perserving this printout.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Before Shabbat, Chana used to drive around in her little car, the "Honey Bee", giving away the whole wheat challot she'd baked. As a member of gthe Abode Family, and then as a founder of the sister "Canaan Family" (an intentional Jewish spiritual community in Canaan, New York), she tried to demonstrate that the spirit manifest in the Abode of the 'Message' could infuse 'neo- traditional' Jewish practice. {nch-1} The Siddur offers precise -- channels, lenses -- for 'spiritual energy'. (One could correlate passages in teh Siddur with passages from HIK.) [1] Genesis and Exodus, the history of an in-the-world spiritual community, offer archetypal illustrations of problems encountered putting spiritual insight into practice. "Why do you look up there -- it is here, here!" {nch-2} "As close as your camel's nose." {nch-3} (Or as far, if you're trapped in the city.) _____Jewish mysticism is esoteric, fences within fences, veiled and embellished with scholarly, intellectual, and literary contrivances; only ostensibly anchored deductively (Cf. Spinoza's Ethics, a gem of spiritual rationality) {nch-4} in prooftexts. )) _____The words of HIK are like water. __________It would be suprising if such a thinker missed something. Keep a Sabbath; santicfy daybreak, mealtimes, nightfall, new and full moons, first fruits of the season, all first joys. It is a great wrong to uproot a spiritual people (eg, American Indians, Tibetans) from their traditional land. Judaism outside eretz Isreal, the land of the children of Jacob/Israel, is 2-dimensional, a faded tapestry on a wall. But in Israel the Bible and Siddur (traditonal prayerbook) become multi-dimensional guidebooks Learn to follow (orthodox) servides if you can; at least come to see and feel. _____Little Joe [Taos Pueblo] would often say: "I tell the Professor, 'You don't know nothing.'" Ok: here's a conceptual proof of the compatability of universal mysticism with particular religions: _____The universal dimension of Truth is unique. _____A clear-sighted, honest, literate -- reporter, "Prophet", "Messenger" -- can express that truth. _____Insofar as his/her -- "Message", universal religion, common- denominator mysticism -- is complete and accurate, it will be compatible with the truth of all particular religions (eg the 'Torah' of Judaism). __________(Cf. the teachings of Felix Adler, founder of the Society for Ethical Culture.) Hence "Sufism" _____[ie, the 'Message' of HIK, Founder of the 'Sufi Order in the West', as extended by his designated successor, PVK. ] is not a new competing religion [2]; and a service of 'universal worship' (HIK) or 'Cosmic Celebration' (PVK) is a new and alternative ritual (although many often take or use it for such) but rather, a schema for paying one's respects to the ritual observances of all "religious" persons. [3,4] II. Death judges the survivors and leaves them in debt. We meet obligations to our dead by continuing their life's work (symbolically, by sanctifying the Name of Heaven in their honor (reciting 'Kaddish')) and by helping as many others as possible in the ways we failed to sufficiently help them. _____(One who has suffered temporary psychologic disorder becomes painfully aware that the range of available assistance and "therapies" is inadequate at best; and at worst idolatrous [5], psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and psychically brutalizing. The healing arts and sciences of "mental health" are still in the Dark Ages. One is permitted to flee from torture by any means available. [5] ---------------------------------------------- [Notes] [To my original typescript] [1] A few easy examples, starting with the daybreak Psalms, which culminate in silent deveoiton at sunrise: the kavannah preceding enwrapping onself in tzitzit correlates with practices of light; 'Adon Olam' touches on samadhi, the first three b'rakot corrlate with the purification breaths --- [2] [Text: "Hence 'Sufism' [ ...] is not a new and competing religion ... "] This point becomes important re: a court case dealing with the Law of Return. _____[ I assume I was referring to the Brother Daniel case, which unsuccessfully (to the point of disaster) challenged an exception to the 'Law of Return': that anyone born of Jewish ancestry [ 1/4, if I recall ] is deemed Jewish for purposes of the Law of Return, except one who has [ converted to, or taken on, or sworn allegiance to -- I don't know the wording] another religion. [3] This point is aimed at forestalling a challenge of 'avoda zora' -- they take the power of religion to make themselves islands. {I must say, the charge of 'avoda zora' is much mis-used. Heck, the meaning of the notion ['strange fire' AISh ZaRaH (Leviticus (ShMINI) 10:1)] ain't clear from the get-go./ sa Feb '04} [4] R. Zalman [Schachter] has a lovely tale of going to Hebron, even then a center of Islamic fundamentalism, and asking to say zikr with the Muslim celebrants. They could not understand how one could believe in the Prophet Muhammed and not be Islamic; until he explained that both Judaism and Islam descend from the Patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim, through Yitzak and Ishmail. So finally the old Sheik said, "Enough talk, I want to say zikr with this man." [5] This piont has obvious halakic implications, to whose exegesis, for the sake of consoling such mourners, I commend the learned. [ I have elsewhere tried, though not yet well, to suggest that the SO has not done well by, and maybe not quite kept faith with, those who fall and break down in pursuit of its ideals. (sa Feb '04)] Steve Amdur Old City, Jerusalem, 1982 MOshav Meor Modi'in, 1990 [Retyped verbatim but with new (noted) interjected remarks, Mevo Modi'in, Jan-Feb '04 ] ================================================================== Additional notes, Jan/Feb '04 (Meor Modi'in): {nch-1} Not merely compatability, but synergy, mutual empowerment. Warp and woof of a tapestry; the crystal vessels of the Siddur; the nectars from practices aimed at "bringing down" "Divine Attributes". ABOVE TEXT: "Why do you look up there -- it is here, here!" {nch- 2} {nch-2} [PVK, apr., noted from memory.] ABOVE TEXT: "As close as your camel's nose." {nch-3} {nch-3} _____[The Prophet Muhammed, (peace be unto him); recalled from a short secular collection of sayings (in English translation)] ABOVE TEXT: (Cf. Spinoza's Ethics, a gem of spiritual rationality) {nch-4} ______[as I learned attending a class by Paul Wienpahl at UCSB, catching onto Susie Harrison's insight; ____________she sat there, dancing to the music of Spinoza's Ethics; I watched her; everyone else was taking notes as fast as they could. ] ---------------------------------------------------------------- A LONGER NOTE (Feb '04): On the afternoon that the first Ruach camp had ended -- 1981 I suppose -- at the Abode Campground, I was , in my nonorthodox way, davening a solitary mincha when I was struck by the notion that the Jewish and SO paths in which I was dabbling were (to jump over a 3-block metaphor) warp-and-woof. I think I saw religious Judaism, especially the siddur, as the kelim, and the less-veiled SO mysticism of HIK/PVK as the -- well, nectar, light. Well, I've lived with this notion (like a silkie who won't go back out of the house into the cold water. maybe) for more or less 25 years, and broken down over it several times. And I must now say, (at the risk of theolog-izing a merely personal childhood -- trauma, neurosis, or ordinary parental ambivalence): It ain't that easy. Although many folks in the USA SO crowd are Jewish, and some from a religous background, fewer maintain religious let alone political loyalty to Judaism. And I recall "four entered PaRDeSh" and only one, Akiva, came back down alive and whole. R. Zalman once wrote: it was because his wife sent him off and welcomed him back with earthly love. (PVK notes that steak tartare and gardening/farming are also a help when one needs grounding.) David Lees, who told me how to walk to the Venice Ghetto from the train station, was interested in coming to Israel to give a talk. I said great, but take time first to get to know the country, don't come in and out like a rock star. I said, they'd fear you might draw them away from religious Judaism. He said yes, but only from the inessential parts. But I think HIK created a form that could accommodate even the rather strict practice of all religions; and I think that -- a highest common denominator, not a lowest common denominator -- is the essence of the Universel. (We were sitting up in a tipi at Dennis Long's. Justin found Jesus, and started acting a bit goofy. (Jane said: He fell in love.) I said to him in the morning: that road goes all the way.) But it ain't easy. Especially with politics getting into the act. All I can now say is: PVK's notion of 'attunements' helps here. ZR once said to me, why do you keep transcribing PVK seminars; he always says pretty much the same thing, though the Attunements may vary greatly from year to year. (Well, I've tried to argue in the context of transcriptions that there are significant conceptual additions in subsequent years of Camps. And I'm pretty much deaf to attunements. Metaphysician's malady, I guess. ) Maybe 10 years ago PVK started, as a form of practice, juxtaposing apparently almost opposite wazifas. So that notion helps me. I'd like to say: the attunements of religious Judaism, especially as lived in Israel, and of the SO (which I've practiced mostly outside Israel, though that may be a cop-out) are very different. PVK once said: meditation is the greatest luxury this world affords [or maybe he said 'allows', but I don't think so.] So I want to say: the attunement in the SO can get so high I can sometimes not quite bear to experience it outside a SO camp. One becomes unbearably homesick, and wants to collapse into "a world of dreams" [Lennon: "and to all the broken-hearted lovers living in a world of dreams / there will be an answer: let it be." ]. And so I did, Harvey, melodramatically as the Millenium turned; and lived off leftover revelations for a year or so, and then found myself stuck in a rut, and then several years later, "kicking and screaming" rejoined civilization, with much help and patient tolerance from the RSC chevre (both official and de facto) at this Moshav. And now am trying to pay off a bit of my bill, without working too hard. So what I'm trying to say is: I can't now make that grand synthesis that was maybe what Sufi Sam Lewis [haLevi, I assume] was dreaming of; though sometimes, and sometimes when I don't want to, I get glimpses of it; it's always a great obligation that one can't dare to live up to. So it helps to think of it, for the time being anyhow, as merely the juxtaposition of opposite attunements. It's like the paradoxical apparent opposition between Hillel and Shamai, which Meshiach will resolve. (For a paradox -- paradigmatically, 'This statement is false.' -- is a merely apparent, and resolveable (ah, Hegel's dialectic) contradiction. ('This statement is false' is an abstraction of the paradox of the Cretan who says all Cretans are liars. C.S. Pierce analyzed TSIF in detail in an 1863 article in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy; it boils down to 'p if and only if not_p'; a self-contradictory biconditional. But I think a formal paradox necessarily has no resolution. Russell's Theory of Types struck me as an ad hoc quick fix, with no intuitive sense. To say that one can only refer to a statement from one level up is merely an arbitrary stipulation. A Hegelian synthesis necessarily occurs one level up from the synthesis/antithesis contradiction; like Sartre suggested (commenting on Les Sequestres d'Altona) Hegelian dialectic is modeled by a heli-cycle. This gets us nowhere; but it's fun. Most stuff that's for real is no fun. At least I've put academic philosophy where it belongs; in a footnote to the real stuff. Like, everyone knows: doxa is opinion, nous is knowlege; even the Aristotelian society knows that; so apparent conflicts of opinon (and PVK once said, in a tone of incrdulity, people even kill each other over differences of opinon) are resolved on the level of nous; that's no doubt what Hegel was trying to say. ---------------------------- A SECOND LONG NOTE: [This has to go into W.EXE; it's impossible otherwise.) Chana was a founding member of the 'Canaan Family' in Canaan, New York; near the Abode in New Lebanon, NY [both settled and I assume named by Quakers & Shakers ). It was, I think, intended to be a religious-Jewish analogue of the Abode, thus demonstrating the synergistic mutual empowerment of those two traditions. (Similarly, Gedalya Persky founded Ruach Camp at the Abode, but then steered it into orthodox channels. A loss and a lack; but he baked good bread once. (Joe Sunhawk's uncle was killed in a car crash below Taos. I tried to offer my condolences. Sunhawk said back to me: Yes, he's gone now; but once he was a little bitty baby. I don't get it; but one should jot these things down. That's best's as I recollect; it was about 30 years ago. Zalman kept his kippa on in the tipi. An Indian lady asked, why is he wearing his little hat. Little Joe said: It's his head. (Someone told me that one.) He used to say: Put it!. George Robinson said, he once asked him: Joe, are you a witch? George said he said back: I can do everything they can do. George used to say: Take care of what HE gave you. An honest reporter must declare his source. Like Plato reporting Diotoma's speech in the Symposium. And similarly, in '67, New Buffalo commune was founded at Arroyo Hondo, 10 miles up the highway from Taos; it survives, now as a sort of conference/retreat center. There is/was a Website: http://www.newbuffalotaos. com We saw it then as a sort of model community, demonstrating the viability of an alternate life-style, aiming at self- sufficiency, within a sort of hippie American Indian context. (If anyone has a copy of my autobiography (=packolys.zip), please let me know.) Blonde Larry (Larry McIntire) used to say: "The only rule is, there are no rules; and to live here costs all you've got.". I "more or less" (Celso's phrase) dropped out of philosophy grad school then; it seemed to me that Plato talked about an ideal community, but we were trying to live it. Max Finstein, z'lb, once said: 'Rick just wanted a place where we could all hang out and smoke dope; and I talked him into building a new world -- darnit.' We were prepared for everything but reality. (Max must have comprehended that (I can say it but I don't see it), for he went on from New Buffalo to found another commune, The Reality Construction Company, on Mike Duncan's land up on the Mesa. (Mike met his wife, Gail, at McClean hospital; both were patients. Last I knew, she ran ABC Acupuncture in Brookline, MA. Ted Kapchuk, at Shattuck Pain & Stress clinic, used to hang around Haverat Shalom; he said Gail Duncan was a very good Chinese_herbalist_acupuncturer. Will Jonson once told me, in the Middle Ages you would have been burned as a witch; it's the ancillary nipples. (Cocteau too; so maybe it's not a Jewish thing. Maybe. ) It's enough to make Ronald Laird look reasonable. Timothy Leary was a major 20th century philosoher, though not great. He once said: The LSD yoga is the longest hardest yoga there is. He said of marijuana: Not one person in a hundred knows the proper use of that delicate, exquisite drug. He said: Turn on, tune in, drop out -- gracefully, gracefully. He said: Freedom consists in playing games of one's own choosing. He wrote 'Psychedelic Prayers', adapted from the Tao Te Ching. He said that one who is tune appears 'wary as a man in ambush'. I wrote a poem called 'How to Play Baseball': Stay loose, look dumb, and try not to swing until they pitch. His first psychedelic manifesto came as a preface to a book by Alan Watts -- a sort of minor, nicely illustraed coffee-table book; Alan Watts was a prolific writer. Shortly after his first bust, he remarked (that was at Columbia, in MacMillan Hall): My selves hate metal -- don't yours. He said something like: If you are planning a jail-break, you must first know the dimensions of your cell. He came to New Buffalo one evening the first summer, and sat by the campfire, talking to his own people. Someone told him of someone: he's keeping his wife happy. Leary said: That's a good yoga. I once went to the opening of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable or somesuch to see him. I asked him: do you know anyone who's trying to do psychedelic philosophy. He said: I don't know anyone who isn't. So much for my career. So I asked him, do you have any advice for me. He said: There is nothing to be afraid of. Metzger wrote a book, Patterns of Consciousness; displaying the Tarot, and 3 other things -- the I Ching, no doubt; and alchemy of course; I always forget the 4th -- as metaphysical conceptual systems. That's the Waite-whatever Tarot deck of course; I don't know the others. R. Shlomo once said at Yakar, I think I have it as input, the siddur works, in Hebrew. He said, but in English -- (meaning, he couldn't say for sure whether or how much it works in translation). I once reflected on one of Tolstoy's 22 Tales from a higher perspective. The one where the rosh yeshiva or whatever tries to teach these hippies the basics, and then sails away and is about to sit down to supper or Mariv or whatever when they come running over the water to him. I don't think that story works. (This methodologic point is R. Zalman's Oy Kreplach story, in Fragments for a Future Scroll. It occurs too in A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, but diminished there to a trivial joke. That book was my introduction to Judaism, in the USA 1950's. We were rather assimilated. For my father's generation, that was quite an achievement. There's other remnants of parables (in The Jewish Treasury of Folklore): Well, there's the one about the guy who can't stand the noise in his house, so he asks the Rebbe, and the rebbe says, take the goat into the house. And so on. I think that's from the same ur_parable, (archetypeal parable, meta-parable) as Reb Nachman's story of the exiled Prince who falls so low that when he finally sees the King his father again, all he can ask for is straw for his roof. But I can't recall now; can't quite get up there again to see. On the beach on Rodos waves of revelations kept breaking over me -- I'm pretty sure that they were real revelations; I think I can hold a mark in bad weather -- but I didn't have vessels -- kelim -- to take some home in. [ Oh: maybe that's what's behind the Talmud/Kitov story of the guy who goes to Gush HaLav to get some olive oil, and has to borrow every vessel in the city to bring it home in. ] (PVK said, you gotta earmark some of that bull.) ('earmark' was his word; the rest is my jive.) You see, that was the Age of Reason. Of realism (at the price of cynicism, after the CP-USA Americana romanticism), not mysticism. And they were very good at it. Hammett, and Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker, and Bogart. The private eye as knight errant; mean streets and all that. Hammet died, from cigarettes maybe. Somone asked Lillian Hellman: can I do anything for you. She said: Can you bring him back to life. He said, no. She said: Then I'll have a ham sandwich. With mustard. Justin Case once said of me: Steve is the only here who is trying to be a hippy. The rest of us figure we've more or less got it made.) Baker-Roshi (Tasajara) said of religions, they're just alternative meta-languages. Oy, applied atheism. As R. Shlomo would say: It's cute and sweet, but it ain't ---- whatever. So anyhow, it's always easier to build a world than to live in it. The house burned down, and the same night it was decided to rebuild it; and they did. But then a few chickens came home to roost, and chickens are not the cleanest of fowl. Came home from Vietnam, for one thing. Saw through our game and beat us at it. And Susie said, 'That atheist chick is riding my horse.'. Leslie came once, with the Lower East Side (UAW-MF) ex-SDS, on horseback from Colorado. She had taken the name Yesha. Susie said, that topless chick ate all my cake. I spoke to Rick in '88, on the company phone. She remembered her Hebrew, and was proud of it. She had lost touch with Carl Shrager (quite a good poet; very clean ) and was sorry for that. Once at Oberlin Ricky was talking to a nice young girl who was planning to hitch-hike. Rick said, you've got to know when to refuse a ride. The girl said, oh, I couldn't do that. Rick said: You'd better. Notes in bottles tossed on the sea. Creely said it first. Zalman said, why aren't we writing more Talmud stuff. Joel Rosenberg's poems are midrashic. Well, I haven't come to any sort of conclusion, but didn't expect to. Might as well walk over to Shoshana's restaurant for a bowl of Dinah's soup. ----------------------- sa, Meor Modi'inn, 5 Feb '04 -- 14 Shvat Susie said: Woman is half the universe. I was having a hard time toward the end of a cold winter at New Buffalo in our one- room adobe, (this was when the rip-off artists had arrived, and it seemed to me that no one else would try to shout them down), and she said, I will teach you to be like water. But I would not listen "for shortness of breath". Ciel said, they told her: You must be very considerate of the feelings of serving people (because they cannot run away). She was very strong. I said, I'd like to take a pill, and be strong like you. She said: Don't, they're bitter. Cavell says that too, in Walden, of Thoreau I assume: He knew the taste of self-knowlege; it is bitter. Marilyn Strauss (Lidov) said of Beethoven's Late Quartets: (this was in Oberlin, about 1960) You can't WRITE like that (in a tone of awe.) She once said: I've been crying inside. That's much harder than crying outside. She once hummed a run as played by Schnabel -- (2 notes slow, then then 6 faster with ralent, if I recall) and said: If I could play like that just once, I'd retire. Vicky Waskoff used to say: No one understands Beethoven, except maybe Marilyn. Vicky went to a student dance concert, and afterwards said to the choreographer: I SAW that fugue. She once said to me: It's too bad your mother didn't have a daughter (too); she would have done very well by her. She said that her mother once said: If the good LORD made anything better than sex, he kept it to 'HIM'SELF. (Or maybe that was Millia Kenin (Levin)'s mother who said that, but I don't think so.) Once, at the end of a class, I asked C.D. Rollins to explain Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He said: Ever try to divide an egg? Creely's book was "Islands", ca. 1966: the islands are washing away. I suppose he meant, in the Mississippi River. I once said "peace for a week or a weekend / crumbling islands in the sea"; but "I was very young them" (Shrager), and that's inapt. I usef to go up to Monhegan Island, that's off Port Clyde, Maine. Probably unchanged. For excitement folks go out to the lighthouse and watch the sunset. A pretty morning, almost-full moon going down behind high clouds, roosters calling. (6 Feb '04 -- 14 Shvat) ---------------------------------------------------------------- =================================================================