It’s my bar mitzvah, and I’m a Reform-raised thirteen-year-old in the house of a Hassidic rabbi in Florida. I’m watching myself take to the air as if powered by some esoteric magical spell. I know this is happening, but something about it is quite unreal, like the fantasy world I have been designing in my room with ten- and twenty-sided dice.

* * *

The rabbi’s home was a quiet, dark enclosure filled with the wafting smell of fruit punch and cleaning fluid. The television was up on top of a high shelf crowded with books. The TV could not be really watched from that height, but it still wasn’t exactly hidden, suggesting it had some use. Later my father told me that the Hassidic men in the community would gather at the rabbi’s house to watch the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, then the messianic leader of the Lubavitch sect of Hassidic Judaism, address his followers over cable access.

There were three of us that came every Sunday morning to this Miami Chabad house, each of us twelve, preparing for our bar mitzvahs. The house was an island floating in an ocean of strip malls, country clubs, gated communities and swamps. I never asked myself what I was doing here. This was like nothing I had ever known, an expression of Judaism as foreign to me as Israel. Yet, there was something familiar, something in the preparation and practice that, like a magnet, pulled me into its center.

Still, every time I asked what it might all mean, the rabbi gave me quick and infuriating answers. I begged to be shown that what we were doing here on these Sunday mornings was something I could take home with me. I wanted this Jewishness, his Jewishness, so different from my own, filled with mystery, arcane secrets, knowledge. My home was too much in the goysiche world, I knew, despite the other lovely Jewish families on our block. It was a world where I was learning biology and Shakespeare, reading my older brother’s dirty magazines, watching Doctor Who, and eating ham and cheese sandwiches. (At least they were on rye.) It was nothing like the home of the rabbi. But to the rabbi, I was an alien: a pork-eating Jew who didn’t know Hebrew.

When it came time for my parents to decide what to do about my bar mitzvah they needed to act quickly. We had just moved to Florida from Massachusetts and didn’t belong to a synagogue, so our options were to the Chabad house in nearby Miami. After a few phone calls, Rabbi B., a leader in the community, agreed to teach me on Sunday mornings. The bar mitzvah itself would then be performed in his home, which doubled as a place of community worship and prayer. My parents knew that this was not the Judaism of our own home. Still, they seemed to hope I might find something to relieve my private anxiety. They also might have had some regret and guilt for not having a more traditionally Jewish home. The other extreme, if only for a year, must have felt like a mitzvah.

Rabbi Borowitz was a large man, with broad shoulders and arms like pillars. But he never seemed weighed down, at least not by his own body. He was jubilant and patient, but he had no time for anything outside our studies. That year Steve Martin had gone on stage in bunny ears and exclaimed, “Well, excuse me!” Once when reading from a text, the rabbi remarked the meaning of slichah, “excuse me.” I kept disrupting our study session with outbursts of “Well, slichah!” in my best Martin voice. Rabbi Borowitz never once laughed. He didn’t have any idea what I was referring to. He also never asked.

No matter the rabbi’s selective ignorance of 1970s American culture, I still believed he knew something I didn’t—that he walked in two worlds, the one where he taught me the aleph-bet and another where he knew the real power of the letters, and what power could be wrought through their correct permutations. I wanted to know how these two worlds spoke to each other, what the common language might be. We read from Genesis, and while I knew it was myth, I also believed that myth stood for something real. Myth was the language of the numinous, a bridge from what was secret to what could be known. I couldn’t have put it into such words at the time, but my insides were on fire with a desire to glean secrets from the other side, looking for answers to the riddle of my restless soul.

Rabbi Borowitz reeked with God’s potent charm. This was a rabbi who purposefully kept the family television just out of each, who kept the lights in his home only bright enough to read in. This was a rabbi who prayed, who really tried to speak to God, a word he wrote only as “G-D.”

I had been going to the rabbi’s home on weeknights during the few weeks leading up to the day. I even had him recite my blessings into a tape recorder that then I played back over and over again, memorizing the sounds, not the content, until it became perfect music in my head: “Baruch ata adanoi…” It was theurgy, where mysticism becomes magic.

I knew enough about wizards and sorcerers from fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons to know that language was where power resided. There are legends of Jewish mystics who try to gain access to the various levels of heaven. At every step, fearsome angels bar their ways. The only way for the mystics to gain power over these creatures is to learn their secret names. Once they do, the mystics become magicians, wielding power rather than just hoping to know God. I wanted this kind of experience. I believed in these other worlds, but I didn’t want to encounter them to become one with God. I wanted power, a power over my anxiety, over my awkwardness in the world, over the world of adults where I didn’t belong. And so I learned the Hebrew—without knowing what it meant or why I had to say it—because I thought it could open some door to a world only my rabbi could see.

The morning of my bar mitzvah, I woke early, feeling a bit uneasy, but also excited. Whatever had been hidden during my studies on Sunday mornings would certainly be revealed on this day. I got dressed in my blue suit. In the kitchen, my father greeted me with a gift. I knew what it was before I even opened it, something I had wanted for so long: a digital watch. It was a Seiko, with a liquid crystal display, chronograph, alarm, with the date and day in tiny letters on the face. It was beautiful.

And it didn’t fit.

The band was made for an adult, and although my father promised that he would get me the right size, I started the day defeated. Whatever magical knowledge or experience that was being offered to me by Rabbi Borowitz and my family was lost.

My brother had it made. He was bar mitzvahed in high suburban style in a little Reform synagogue in the suburbs off the Massachusetts turnpike. Uncles and aunts from all over the country were there, with little envelopes and kisses. And they shmoozed and had a few drinks and my brother giggled with his friends, hundreds and hundreds of friends, it seemed. Everyone danced into the late hours of the afternoon.

Seven years later, at my own bar mitzvah, none of my friends were there.

At the rabbi’s home my family was greeted by the rabbi’s wife and children. She led my mother and sisters into another part of the main room behind a long white curtain that had been affixed to create a separation. These are the kinds of surprises they should have let me in on during my bar mitzvah training. None of my friends were around; I would not be getting wads of money like my brother had at his bar mitzvah; and my mother, grandmother, and sisters were going to be hidden away. What little control I thought I might have over all this was quickly being taken from me. Once I could no longer see my mother, I tried to cling to my father, but he was lost in the sea of all these other men, none of whom—except for Rabbi Borowitz—I had ever seen before. They all looked the same, elders of a society to which I didn’t belong. But here they were allowing me a glimpse.

I was led to the front of a room where I met another rabbi who looked just as I imagined Tolkien’s Gandalf would. He unrolled a torah scroll and placed in my hand a remarkable object. The yad, or torah pointer, is a thin rod of silver, about the length of a fork. At the end is a tiny hand with its pointer extended. With the yad, you point to the torah without having to touch the scroll. I was then instructed to recite my “portion,” and the wizened rabbi held my wrist and guided my hand holding the yad across the torah. I tried to read the Hebrew, as it was, with no vowels, nothing like the Hebrew I had been taught on those Sunday mornings. I could barely get through, feeling more and more a separation between myself and whatever these rabbis felt was happening.

These old world Jews here in very contemporary Miami were not Jewish in the same way I was. My Judaism was suburban, a Judaism that had left its Jewishness mostly behind. Even more than that, though, I was separated from these men because of God. For them, this was a time of worship to a God with whom their relationships were intimate. For me, God was a vague sense of otherworldliness, something that haunted me. The God I believed was something hidden, a private thing to wrestle with while I tried not to fall asleep.

I was sweating, my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t see my mother. She was the only one of us who knew anything about any of this. I had watched her light the Friday night candles, watched her go into a trance of sorts, her palms resting over her eyes, the candle flames rising up, straining, to meet them. She knew the secret.

When it was over, I thought I would be allowed to sit down. I badly needed to. But then there was singing, and all the men got into a circle and lifted me up, tossed me around with such joy, that for a moment, I felt like an honored guest. These men were so utterly happy, as if they had witnessed something miraculous, something that had transformed them and me.

I wanted to feel this change, wanted to believe I was now a man. But the watch didn’t fit. I was proud that I had at least gotten through it, but I was still afraid of the other, hidden reality. This other world had not appeared as I had hoped. Instead, as the men chatted and ate, and my mother and sisters continued to peek out from behind the curtain, my rabbi led my father and me over to a table of drinks. He poured some vodka into a shot glass and said, “You’re a man now.” I tossed back the vodka as he and my father laughed. It went down hard, burning all the way.

Afterwards, the rabbi and his wife would visit our house in the hopes we would join them for Shabbat, or that I would continue to study with him. My father would quickly but politely close the door, and that was that. Later, in my twenties, when I was struggling to identify as a Jew, I wished I had been a different kind of boy. Being secular didn’t make us worldly so much as it cut us off from experience. This is the problem with the secular fear of religion: It doesn’t believe it can participate in any way that wouldn’t be a compromise. But my family didn’t have to compromise anything. In fact, it was the rabbi that made the compromise, to bar mitzvah a boy he knew would likely never return.

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“At the same time we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and scriptural expression of our friendship towards the Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.”

Over the years I've been skeptical when evangelical Christians have suggested that their support of Israel is strictly for the good of the state and the Jewish people, and has no bearing on End-Time beliefs or a hope for the eventual conversion of the Jews. I have also had a number of conversations with evangelical and born again Christians who insist that their love of the Jews stems from the Abrahamic underpinnings of their own faith, and that God has a special plan for the Jewish people.

On an episode of Donny Deutsch’s show The Big Idea last year, Ann Coulter discussed how Christians want Jews to “be perfected.” This message was seen as intolerant, bigoted, and smacking of anti-Semitism. No one wanted to accept that this is what Christians really believe—not even many Christians. Meanwhile, just last week in the New York Times Magazine, the ever-deposing Deborah Solomon interviewed the televangelist Reverend John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel. Solomon asked him if their mission was completely noble — simply support for Israel out of Christian love for their Jewish cousins. He replied, “Our support of Israel has nothing to do with any kind of 'end times' Bible scenario. My support of Israel is based on a recognition of the enormous debt we gentiles owe to the Jews.”

We seem to be receiving some mixed messages, and last week's New York Times ad from the World Evangelical Alliance is no different. You see, they didn't just take out a $60,000ish (yes, these things can cost tens of thousands of dollars) full-page ad to let everyone to know they love Jesus. Instead, the ad goes on:

“We believe it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World.”

So there it is. Finally. And if you think that support of Israel can still be enacted by evangelical Christians without any future desire for a total Jewish conversion, note the last line of the ad:

“It is our profound respect for the Jewish people that we seek to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them…for we believe salvation is only found in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and savior of the world.”

It is impossible, as someone like Rev. John Hagee would like us to believe, to divorce the theology of the Christian messiah from End-Time and rapture theology. And evangelical Christians cannot hope for their own salvation with the coming of Christ without the implicit necessity of the New Testament prophecies regarding Israel and the Jews.

Now, in a clear, unashamed, and unabashed message, evangelical Christians are admitting to Jews that they do not believe salvation is possible for us without Jesus. I am pleased about this admission. It openly confirms all the things I intuitively knew to be true. But what is disturbing about this ad is that is fails to recognize that the very idea of unredeemed Jewish people is bigoted, and foments anti-Semitism. I am not saying many signers of this document are anti-Semites but surely it is not enough to say in the ad “we do not wish to offend our Jewish friends."
Every year on Yom Kippur Jews all over the world gather in synagogues and shuls to pray fervently for redemption—redemption promised by God in the very same scriptures that Christians use to support their own history and their own promised redemption. To suggest that Jews cannot be redeemed without Jesus is not only theologically unsound; it removes the very bedrock of the Christian religion. The Jews, Christians have always maintained, are God’s chosen people and are secured a place in God’s plan through Torah and mitzvoth. Jesus never reneges on this, and arguably would have believed it himself. But enough with the theology lesson. Now we can finally reach across the religious divide and feel the joy buzzer in the evangelical handshake. This is a watershed moment in evangelical Christian and Jewish relations. Many liberal Jews have looked with skepticism at some Jewish leaders’ willingness to go to bed with evangelicals over things like Israel and other policy issues.

How will it feel now, knowing with certainty that the people who claim to want nothing but the best for their “Jewish friends” really only want to see our eventual “completion"?

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To say that we believe means that at the center of our lives is an idea of God.

Now, our embarrassment, shame, nerves and fear around making this very simple claim have had mostly to do with wanting to keep our faiths free of associations with scriptural literalism and religious narrow-mindedness. We haven’t wanted to be misunderstood. And because we’ve been embarrassed and hesitant, our professions of faith, when we’ve made them, have tended to be almost entirely defensive. Yes, we believe, but we’re not like those fundamentalists and the Bible-thumpers. Yes, we believe, but we’re not on the front lines arguing against gay marriage or stem-cell research. Yes, we believe, but we’re not praying to usher in the end of the world. Yes, we believe, but we’re not the Moral Majority. Yes, we believe, but we’re not going to try to convince you to believe what we do.

All this backsliding, all these buts, have often made ours a negative faith. Because we find certain, often very public, religious views not just distasteful but also often culturally blinkered and politically dangerous — arguments for a six-thousand-year-old Earth, for example, turn our stomachs as much as they offend the truths we know about the natural world — until recently, we’d turned inward.

Before we knew each other, our faiths had been our own private affairs, pilgrimages we’ve undertaken in the hope of both finding and, yes, pleasing God. All alone, unfortunately we could do neither.

Faith is not, we’ve learned, a private matter at all. We’re tired of faith coming between us. God’s will is that it may live between us. Faith is nothing if not shared. And so, over the years, in becoming faithful friends we’ve told each other stories about where we’ve come from, how we’ve believed through our joys and our tragedies, how we’ve faced God alone, how we’ve both sinned and overcome sin, how we’ve both nearly died and overcome death. For us, this storytelling—religious confession, in a way—has become a key to our religious lives. But once we started talking, the important stories of our faith became inseparable from the friendship itself. Not only were we finally opening up about faith, but we also began inspiring and teaching each other to live more faithfully.

In the years before we met, our faith lives had become compartmentalized. We’d made our ways into and within communities that were at best skeptical, and at worst hostile, towards both religious sentiment and any appearance of belief in some religious truth. We understood why—again, hating literalism and religious sanctimony—and genuinely participated in that skepticism and hostility, while at the same time privately praying and attending religious services. Often alone.

Although they did not start out this way, our approaches to religion had, by the time we met, become largely academic. As undergraduates, we took The Bible as Literature, looked for biblical allusions in literary texts, studied religion and politics, and distributed in creative writing workshops stories and poems loaded with religious themes. Faith, or belief in God, was hardly a matter worth discussing. Skeptical of both the pious-seeming “College Catholics” and the overly studious and insular Hillel groups, back then we existed on the religious fringe, preferring rock shows and girls to Bible study and campus-sponsored Shabbat dinners. We each learned to pray quietly, and anxiously.

Later, though, we both studied theology in graduate school, and largely for the same reason: with the belief and hope that we could reconcile our academic interests, which included the desire for intellectual honesty and integrity, with our admittedly irrational religious devotion. What better places, we thought, to do this than divinity schools attached to major academic institutions?

Scott chose Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, which is affiliated with Columbia University and is the former home of neoorthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed in 1945 for his part in an assassination plot against Hitler. Peter chose Harvard Divinity School, onetime home of American religious giants Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Santayana, and studied with Richard Neibuhr, son of the famous Union professor. We found each other after we left divinity school. We became friends.

Of course, after we met, as we’d been with most of our other friends, we were quiet about our faith lives at first, as had become normal among people like us: in short, East Coast liberals with advanced degrees who read contemporary literature and listened to independent music. Relating our experiences of faith had never been easy. Having learned to protect ourselves from embarrassment in public, we rarely spoke explicitly about God, often throwing our hands up when asked to answer one way or another whether God existed or not. Palms turned up seemed a strange gesture for two men with graduate degrees in theology.

Yet fortunately, with each other, our language betrayed us. The tension between a comfortable and acceptable skepticism and our undeniable religious temperaments had created in us the hypersensitivity we needed to recognize each other as kindred spirits. Possessing something like what’s known as “gaydar” in the queer community (but may be even queerer in our world), after a little hinting around, Peter finally asked: Do you believe in God? With each other we have finally learned to be more expressive about God. Over the same time we’ve grown more comfortable being expressive among other friends and family and, to some extent, in public. Through this effort, we’ve tried to prove that one can have an authentic religiosity and a genuine appreciation of holiness that is marked by healthy questioning and doubt—without needing to ever say anything definitively or universally about God. This was the great discovery of our friendship.

Yet, as much as the language and myths of our traditions often highlight what is unique about our faiths—that God’s covenant is marked by circumcision, say; or that, in Jesus, such laws no longer apply—we share another language, as well, one of art and literature, music and sex, family and friendships, a cultural language that supports a much broader conception of faith. God can never be exhausted by traditionally religious language. Not only does no one tradition ever capture holiness, but from pop songs to birdsong, tics to tattoos, we find it everywhere.
Through our friendship—one based on curiosity, trust and difference in matters of belief—we’ve come up with a moderate approach to faith, one that’s easier to stomach, both for us and, we’ve learned, our communities than the louder, more extreme positions in the culture. We see myth as myth, edifying stories that tell only of the possibility of another world, and always in the service of this one. We see practice as practice, not only in our religious liturgies, but more important, even, through our attentiveness and actions outside of worship, performing the will of God. Being friends takes practice. And we encourage each other to practice being better sons to our parents, lovers to our partners, and even fathers to our children. In the end, we see religion as a way to engage ethically with our commitments to God in daily life, rather than a preparation for a final encounter with God in the afterlife. And all this without any shared belief in what God is, or is not. The faith between us is a faith in this world. Hastening the end of time, a key idea to many fundamentalist conceptions of religion, is to hasten the end of all we love. It is to hasten the end of practice. It is to do away with the languages we share, and represents a disastrous end of faith. Religious fundamentalism, like its opposite extreme, a vehemently secularist atheism, understands belief instrumentally and reads sacred texts literally. But, to read the scripture literally is to remove it from the world, to hide its frail, yet boundlessly hopeful humanity behind some perfect, almighty hand of God. Lost are its literary beauty, its wonder, and the more complicated ethical and moral teachings developed over centuries by all religious traditions.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY: Amy Guth interviews Korb and Bebergal

Excerpted from The Faith Between Us by Scott Korb and Peter Bebergal (Bloomsbury, 2007)

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There were a number of other folks there, who like me were a fairly un-athletic bunch. Their life long interests have usually kept them out of the sun and certainly not the people one imagines being proficient with a deadly weapon. Peter’s yeoman, an orthodox Jew by the name of Yaacov ben HaRav Eliezer was quick to point out to me where I had not found my correct anchor (a tooth that you press down with your index finger as you pull the bowstring,) and while he spoke his tztitzes blew in the wind.

But while Peter and Yaacov were gracious patient hosts, for most of the morning I had the strange feeling of not belonging. It’s a feeling I have long grown accustomed to. From the days in middle school when walking down the halls was like a walk across hot coals, to today if I am standing around a party when everyone is watching and talking about the football game on TV. More importantly it's how I've felt in many religious contexts, a believer whose not quite observant enough, or with my wife's family on Christmas, the tree looming over me like the inquisition. At archery practice with folks whom I know I share more than a passing interest in things like fantasy and role-playing, there was no friendly banter, no winking knowledge that what were doing was both awesome and awfully goofy. The nicer I tried to be, the more marginalized I felt. They could tell I just wasn’t one of them.

I hadn’t sewn my own quiver.

Recently I attended a science fiction convention in Boston, and looking at the list of events I was already feeling out of my depth. At what part of my geek life had I missed the transformation of dice wielding friendly misanthropes into polyamourous, leather clad martial arts experts? More importantly when did I stop being cool amongst the uncool?

I asked the science fiction author Jay Lake his thoughts on fan culture and he suggested my experiences are not that common: “One of the interesting characteristics of both the writer and fan communities within SF is a very strong social value placed on inclusion. When you see exclusionary cliquishness, it either arises from competition – the Star Wars people arguing with the Star Trek people, for example – or insecurity.”

But like any community with strong internal bonds, how easy is it for a newcomer to feel a part of? For two years or so I wrote a science fiction/fantasy book review column for the Boston Globe. I was pretty proud of it. Since sf/fantasy got so little coverage in the mainstream press, I only reviewed books I thought I could recommend, even as I was critical of them. After reviewing two books that I was quite fond of but suggested that too much science fiction is not character driven, I was lambasted on the now defunct, but extremely popular blog of the book review site Emerald City, which suggested that I was just one of those reviewers that hates science fiction. I felt like I had been kicked out of a club because someone in the locker room saw my circumcised penis.

A certain defensiveness, coupled with a kind of group aspergers, has forced many fans into a cliquishnesses that far exceeds anything I saw with cheerleaders growing up. In fact, while most cliques can have a mean streak built in, what I am seeing amongst geeks is a kind of righteousness due to their culture having been appropriated by mass culture: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and even the popularity of Battlestar Galactica and the science fiction pretensions of Lost. I feel the same righteousness, a sort of chosenness that I am also part of the tribe, even though I don’t always worship at the temple. With most groups there is a shared orthodoxy that keeps the members bound together. It’s not enough to attend services. To really belong you have to agree the earth was created six thousand years ago or that exclusion of Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings film was a grave sin.

Paul Di Filippo, a beloved and prolific science fiction author has had years of experience with fans and conventions. I confessed to him my feelings of inadequacy and he counseled me: “Anyone can plunge into the midst of any SF convention wholeheartedly and warmly embrace the most oddball geeks, nerds, dorks, pointdexters or otakus. You just have to cultivate your inner fan, and see past the superficial tics and mannerisms to the intelligent, entertaining people beneath.”

Like my religious life, my geek life has me torn in two directions. I long for tradition, to be with those that understand the sacred texts, can argue about the finer points, and embrace ritual and custom. But I also need a little distance, a little critical reflection, and maybe a little humor that sometimes, from the outside, this stuff can look a little goofy, and many folks are skeptical, if not downright atheists (one of my best friends is still oddly irritated that I like fantasy and comics books). But I will still attend. I will carry my tattered Dungeons Master Guide into the holy places with pride and hope that I can be accepted, even as go home to my gorgeous (and not Jewish) wife who will insist I put down my polyhedral dice before I roll around with her.

* Cross-posted at Mystery Theater

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We see it all differently. Religion need not start with belief, but rather with an understanding that encounters with holiness in the world demand—and have always demanded—a metaphorical structure to contain them and give them meaning. In other words, religion should take its myths seriously, but not literally, with the self-conscious awareness that behind these stories are actual worldly encounters with something amazing and often terrifying. In making meaning of what we perceive, religious myths bring us together. And when belief takes the back seat, moral innovation, the best that religion has to offer the world, can become the final measure of the virtue of faith. We begin with the premise that actual belief in God is not necessary to the religious imagination. It is within the religious imagination, in fact, that the very idea of God arises. Whether or not God actually exists, what makes God even possible is that through our encounters with others and the world, we are called upon to imagine something entirely beyond ourselves. We shape an idea of the holy. In his somewhat dated but still enlightening book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto describes the irrational moment that precedes belief. He finds that moment in our encounters with what he would call holiness, or the mysterium tremendum. For the ancients, holiness could be found in a thunderclap or a herd of bison just as often as in a moment of birth or death. So too for us moderns: From the deepest reaches of the cosmos to the twisting depths of a strand of DNA, creation still blows us away. (And no doubt, faced with a herd of charging bison, we’d still be scared to death.) Abraham Joshua Heschel agrees. In God in Search of Man, Heschel writes: “Faith is preceded by awe, by acts of amazement at things that we apprehend but cannot comprehend….We must learn how to see ‘the miracles which are daily with us’; we must learn how to live in awe, in order to attain the insights of faith.” The primal notion of the holy is not about ethics and morals, or even miracles, but more simply, terror and awe. Such encounters may generate the emotions of supreme empathy, compassion or love, but even these, in and of themselves, contain no moral instruction. Only as religious thought evolves further—through myths or religious laws—does the moral condition famously known as “fear and trembling” become associated with God.
Religion begins when people share these ideas of holiness, usually through the telling and retelling of myths. Assuming others encounter the world as we do—that is, they occasionally find it awesome, too—and that they possess the same imagination, it makes sense that we might begin considering whether there is some social value to our encounter with the holy. Beyond any individual experience that inspires thoughts of holiness, “we need myths,” writes religion scholar Karen Armstrong, “that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness.” Religious faith, then, depends on the decisions any of us make—or, as children, the decision we have made for us—to align ourselves with particular set of metaphors and perhaps one greater myth.

In describing encounters with holiness and the transformation of such encounters into something of transcendent value, Heschel, Otto, and Armstrong are primarily concerned with moments before belief. So even after communities form and specific beliefs begin to drive the way we see the world, actual belief itself does not come until we’ve already formed religious social contracts, or ethics. After all, religion is only sustained in society. God may (or may not) actually exist without people. Religion cannot. Once myths are written down and compiled, and begin to shape morality—when awe becomes aligned with guilt or our conscience booms from the clouds as the voice of God—religions start to form around the scriptural charge: do good and fear God. This is when a system of myths turns into the kind of religion to which Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are so fervently opposed. Again, the atheists aren’t wrong. Unquestioning faith in God—the yardstick by which both atheists and blinkered fundamentalists seem to measure religious commitment—is not the best true sign of religiosity. After all, once belief becomes the supreme virtue for religious communities, the absolute notions of what is “good” and how literally we fear God start causing problems. Just as an encounter with holiness can never mean “feed the poor” or “love your neighbor,” Otto would argue it also never means “kill the infidels.” Humanity is responsible for feeding, loving, and killing. Religion expresses our own desires, not the desires of God.
Belief can separate individuals from the rest of the world—from the heretics and the infidels. But communities cannot possibly depend on any of their members believing in precisely the same way. Such control would be impossible. So belief matters less for organized religion than the common recognition that a set of rituals, liturgy, and community actions invoke holiness in a meaningful and generally cohesive way. Central to faith communities’ cohesion around worship and broader practice is religious language. And unlike the language of science and politics, the purpose of religious language is to mythologize, to offer those who speak it a connection, at the most basic level, to the “eternal” cycle of new beginnings. This is where both the fundamentalist and the atheist get it wrong. A Christian fundamentalist reads the book of Genesis and says, “It says here the world was created in six days, so it must be true.” The fundamentalist, attempting to speak scientifically, commits the grave intellectual error of proof-texting inside the selfsame text. The atheist reads the book of Genesis and says “It says here the world was created in six days. Only a fool would believe this nonsense.” Refusing to admit that the scripture may hold some greater metaphorical truth, like the fundamentalist, the atheist can only read Genesis one way—as a misguided historical account of the beginning of time. But fundamentalist believers and non-believers alike would do well to remember that Genesis is not about belief at all. It’s a mythic vision that relates an encounter with the majesty and wonder of the world. It also has to deal with human suffering and temptation, and like any good myth, uses a foil, a trickster by way of a serpent, to explain the sins of humanity. Modern religious adherents have no one but their ancestors to blame for this confusion. Torah began a process that the Gospels and Epistles, the Koran, and most recently, the Book of Mormon continued, demythologizing our encounters with holiness by firmly placing them in history. For example, although Pesach attempts to eternalize the Israelites’ Exodus through ritual, the liberation of the slaves feels firmly situated in history. Today, at least on the surface, most religious celebrations commemorate historical events—Christmas the most notable in America. And as such, it is very seductive to read the myths behind these commemorations literally.
Myth can be understood, then, as the religions imagination sans belief. Judaism understands this more intuitively than Christianity, because its development was closer—historically and culturally—to classical understandings of mythology. Certain pieces of the Jewish scriptures, especially Genesis, maintain that classical mythic quality, with its focus on the eternal. “In the beginning…” is perfectly ahistorical. Christianity, though, firmly divorces itself from the classical world by grounding its story absolutely in history. “In the time of Caesar Augustus,” which opens Jesus’ birth narrative, is perfectly historical.

Moreover, beyond simply focusing on one historical life, the Christian story abandons the mythic by prioritizing myth’s enemy, eschatology. Eschatology looks to an end of time within history—for Christian millennialists, often within their own lifetimes. Myth implies eternity. Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, and to save her Demeter stops the rains and creates the seasons. This cycle becomes eternal because the deal Demeter makes with Hades to rescue her daughter is forever binding. Likewise, Osiris continues, over and over and over again, to die and be reborn. Search though they might, religious seekers are never going to find God. Proving God’s existence is a worthless and truly unholy enterprise. We need to redirect our efforts away from believing so much in God, and toward understanding what God can mean. We must recognize that religious stories maintain their greatest potential in assigning, through metaphor, eternal meaning both to natural events and our encounters with the world—birth and death and all that comes between. (Of course, it’s crucial to remember that no matter the truth claims myths seem to make, they exist as expressions of our religious imagination—what Dawkins might describe as an evolutionary by-product—and have no necessary relationship to scientific truth.) Remythologizing these stories—in a sense, consciously reimagining myth as myth—would attach them again to the eternal. Ritual would regain its force as our tie to the endlessly recurring cycles of life. And never again would we hear that deathly and banal phrase, That’s just a myth. Myths are not lies. They are, to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Even the bible tells us so. Heschel’s idea that awe comes before faith is found appropriately with the first commandment, which requires that we love God, not believe in Him. The religious claim that belief is irrelevant—and the assertion that such a claim is actually biblical—depends on the further and equally biblical claim that ethical behavior is necessary to the religious life.
Grounded at the outset in the irrelevance of belief, which may itself have been the authors’ way of honoring the metaphoric nature of myth, the Torah did not simply leave the Jews to fend for themselves, but offered a collection of 613 mitzvot, or commandments, that established Judaism—and it follows, both Christianity and Islam—as a religion of action. Whether or not you agree that these commandments are actually helpful, or even entirely proper—homosexuality, for example, is proscribed by commandments 157-159—to be a Jew, the Torah says, you are not required to believe in the holy, but you must live holiness. While we surely should stand in judgment over evils once considered proper—slavery, for example, is and always has been a sin—it stands to reason that ethics would change over time. And if what makes us religious is not our belief in the holy but living holiness itself, it also stands to reason that religious life would involve developing ethical positions to allow us to deal with modern problems. While it might make good sense, as commandment 501 states, “not to insult or harm anybody with words,” and we still do not require defendants or their relatives to testify in court (575), we may rightly take issue with courts killing sorcerers (552) or the commandment to wipe out the descendants of Amalek (598). To be religious is to take on the responsibility of not just claiming and living by a set of ethics but also allowing those ethics to adapt to the world and its circumstances—in fact, demanding they do. As religious moderates, we find nothing more troubling than the belief that “faith alone” is what ties us to God and makes us believers. In this scenario, God seems needy and jealous, not at all a model for ethical living. This is not to say that we can’t believe—only that it doesn’t really matter. Emphasizing belief threatens to make religious action irrelevant. Atheists and religious people alike would do well to remember that it’s ethics and not belief that has, from the earliest moments of religious life, bound faithful people together. And it’s here still today—in stories of faithful friendships, the births of the children, the cycles of life and death, and the moral innovation necessary to make our synagogues and churches more inclusive—that the meaning of God is found.

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What is psychedelia?

What is loosely termed 'psychedelic music' has lately undergone a resurgence. Many mainstream musicians such as The Flaming Lips have drawn on its more accessible pop elements, drawing mainly from 60s British and American artists, while more alternative acts, such as the unequivocal Acid Mothers Temple and the splendid Swedish band Dungen, have moved deeper into the sounds of the 70s, infusing prog-rock with a more jam band sensibility.

At the leading edge of the psychedelic revival is a sub-genre often called psych folk, as it usually involves some fusion of traditional American and British folk elements alongside experimental forms, usually containing, but certainly not limited to, psychedelic tropes. Sometimes the folk sound takes precedent, and what is psychedelic is more subtle. In other cases, the folk elements are woven into noisy rock structures, often giving a kind of melancholia to discordant and aggressive frameworks.

There is no doubt that the rudiments of psychedelia are rather malleable. The use of electronics, looping, and found sounds, have helped turn a sometimes derivative musical genre into a serious creative platform. Yet it is still difficult to define precisely what psychedelia is, either musically or in terms of spiritual and mystical states of consciousness.

On the surface, the term “psychedelia” has long been associated with "Eastern religions," the amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions that became popular in the West in the 1960s. This is largely due to the efforts of American spiritual seekers who were discouraged by Jewish and Christian conceptions of God and saw other spiritual possibilities through the use of hallucinogens, only to find that states strikingly similar to those induced by LSD and mushrooms could also be found through "Eastern" meditation and spiritual practice. Ram Dass was one of the most important of these figures. Born Richard Alpert, Ram Dass was a young brilliant Jewish professor who, after getting kicked out of Harvard, along with Timothy Leary, for their infamous LSD research, went off to India in search of the kind of spiritual experience he had encountered on acid. After a few years of finding exactly that, he came back home and quickly became a leader of new spirituality of the soon-to-be baby boomers. Back home, Timothy Leary had already decided that any teachings he was looking for could be found in the drug itself and dubbed himself the “High Priest” of LSD.

The music of the 60s embraced both these approaches — Leary’s almost maniacal insistence on the efficacy of the drug experience as spiritual, and Ram Dass’s more patently religious Krishna infused, “Be Here Now” lifestyle — with a combination of spaced-out jams and Eastern sitar-soaked instrumentation, largely due to the influence of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco. On the one hand, mainstream musicians such as Pink Floyd and the Pepper-era Beatles, played with every manner of instrument and electronic effect available at the time. On the other hand, the 60s also saw a strain of neo-ludditeism, where many musicians wanted nothing more than to strip away all the conventions of modern society and return to a simpler approach. Think of the Band, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and, for that matter, the later Beatles of Let it Be (originally titled Get Back). The Rolling Stones provide a striking example of this contrast. Their 1967 release, Their Satanic Majesties Request is a sprawling psychedelic overload, replete with backward guitars and organs. Their next album, the 1968 Beggars Banquet could almost be a different band if not for Mick Jagger’s drawl. It is a stripped down roots-record, more blues than rock ‘n’ roll, and functioned as an internal and external reaction to the direction rock was ultimately moving.

Early on, however, psychedelic folk music was already its own sub-genre. Tyrannosaurus Rex (later the glam-rock stars T-Rex) and The Incredible String Band certainly drew from the same well as the more typical American psychedelic pioneers like the Grateful Dead, but along with rock ‘n’ roll and Eastern music, these bands called upon their non-American, but absolutely Western roots of British and Scottish folk. Despite how different this approach is from the swirling psych-out guitar jams of bands like the Dead, the intent was the same: the creation of a musically generated altered state, one that is reflective of the LSD experience.

Fast forward forty years. Today, in the US and Britain, there is a major underground movement that continues to build on the musical ideas of the psychedelic sixties, in particular those parts that held fast to the folk roots. Yet, unlike the Eastern-informed music of the 1960s, today's psychedelic artists are moving deeper and deeper into Western religious imagery and sensibility.

Gregory Weeks, a solo musician and member of the lush pastoral psych band Espers, explains this transition from East to West: “Eastern mysticism seems much more like an escape, whereas the natural world is there to be seen and felt. When something threatens the natural world, that threat is tangible, as are the rewards and examples of nature and environment.”

2. The Drone and the Guitar

This focus on the tangible is evident in the music of pysch folk, where the space-out of the jam has given way to more physical musical effect: the drone. Strictly speaking, a drone is any repetitive or sustained, usually dissonant chord, which creates a musical theme to ground the rest of a song or movement. Wagner’s Rheingold contains a classical version, but for the most part, the drone is usually found either in indigenous musics, such as that of the bagpipe, spiritual music such as the chant of Tibetan monks, and experimental and underground music, such as doom metal.

I can think of no more disconcerting and unsettling music than doom metal when it incorporates the drone. And yet there is something frighteningly gripping. Almost completely in opposition to any notion of transcendence, drone metal gets its energy from a subterranean volcanic core. The music can make you feel as if the very plates of the earth are shifting in your belly. Beyond the apocalyptic, which at its heart includes an idea of hope and final redemption, doom metal sounds the alarm that something is on its way and it isn’t good. And yet, the two most influential doom metal bands, Earth and Sunn0))), have both spoken in interviews about how theirs is a music intent on a kind of spiritual transport. The use of drone is key.

The almost inverted notion of transcendence, a kind of thick and muddy immanence, is what many psych-folk musicians have found in using the drone. Pat Gubler of the musical outfit PG Six, part of the Tower Recordings collective, plays largely traditional folk with deep and subtle drone elements woven throughout. Gubler remarks, “One thing that a drone does is gives the listener a very direct experience of resonance. It's a physiological experience. And performing drone music even more so, especially if you are singing. You are feeling the tones produced by your body.”

Gregory Weeks describes the drone’s relationship to psychedelia and spirituality: “The drone is absolutely the fastest way to induce the drug phenomena or mindset within a straight listener or audience. It's also a very introspective experience, for player and audience alike if done well. Drones are so simple, one would imagine they'd grow incredibly stale after several minutes, but instead they increase in interest and intensity in many cases. That's because listening to a drone is like watching a fire take hold. Invisible frequencies manifest in the ear much like an elusive green flame appears amidst the oranges and yellows. A fire never gets old, there's something primal and primordial about its engagement. Droning sonics are similarly primal in their appeal. They evoke strong responses, both emotional and physical within the listener and player alike.”

In psych folk, while the drone helps sustain the potential for altered/spiritual states, it is the folk elements in the music that round out and layer the sound. Fursaxa, led by Tara Burke, is one of the more interesting bands that layers the drone and its ancient chant-like motifs with traditional folk, creating a unique kind of psychedelia. For Burke, using these elements is fairly deliberate, and yet, there is still something improvisational about it: “My folk elements are usually the instruments that I play — acoustic guitar, mandolin, balalaika, accordion — but when I craft a song I usually take the psychedelic approach and get in an altered state and compose my music. I also use various delay and loop pedals and such to achieve this.” These effects create an altogether otherworldly sound, and yet there is something eerily grounding about it. Burke continues: “For me music is more experimental and about blending different sounds together, sounds that can allow one to enter another world. I also hope that when people listen to my music they might think of plants and insects, or being lost in the woods, because these are things that are important to me and that I might be thinking about while making music.”

3. The Other-Worldly and This

Music has long played an important role in religion, but the particular phenomena of the chant or other intonations has often been believed to be attuned to actual physical vibrations which have an effect on the actual body. The mystical experience is not just about the mind, but the whole self as it exists in space. In this way, the tension inside the pysch-folk sensibility, particularly with drone, becomes less about East versus West and more about a primary tension within any mystical experience: how close can you get to God before you are shattered?

One of the remarkable ways in which hallucinogenics mirror what we might call a traditional mystical experience is in the tension between the knowable and the unknowable. The psychedelic experience is often one of wavering between bliss and terror, between touching the fire of the holy and in turn being burned up by it. In all the great myths and religious traditions there are stories of mortals being warned to not try to get too close to the gods. And yet, almost all these traditions include stories of face-to-face encounters with the holy, what the theologian Rudolf Otto calls the mysterium tremendum, and which, according to Otto, is the only truly authentic relationship one can have with God. It is Moses coming down from Sinai as “the skin of his face was shining”; it is Jacob after seeing the angels descend and ascend who proclaims, “How awful is this place.” And so the very telos of the mystical experience is one that is fraught with danger. Ezekiel sees the chariot and all its glory, but Moses is told by God “No one shall look up upon me and live.”

Psych folk, when done well, can gracefully inhabit this space. This also means the music is often not what might be called joyful, but is rather filled with sounds of dread, of melancholy, of the noise in the soul as you realize your incantation actually worked and God is staring at you from the inside of the grove. For Weeks, this takes place less in the music itself, but in the performance: “Most any performer will tell you that the synergy and/or chemistry ignited while playing (and especially improvising) with other musicians is ‘magical,’ or ‘spiritual.’ I’ve never experienced anything like it outside of performance.”

Psych folk that employs the drone also plays in an important role in the cultural disconnect that is often part of using hallucinogens. There is important work being done regarding the efficacy of hallucinogens and spirituality. A new generation of psychedelic anthropologists, including Daniel Pinchbeck and Jeremy Narby, is trying to return the use of hallucinogenics back to their indigenous use, rooted in shamanism and ritual practice. But being able to take ayahuasca with the natives is not easy for the average seeker. Dropping a few hits of smiley-face blotter acid will likely only mimic a mystical state while the playing of music can itself become a vehicle for entering into an authentic altered state. Gubler explains, “Music itself can be more effective in producing a profound effect on a person. I think drugs can possibly amplify or enhance an experience, but drugs can also get in the way and in fact detract. I remember being younger and reading about the Merry Pranksters and kind of romanticizing the idea of a psychedelic experience being a truly spiritual one, but I found that in my own experimentation with drugs that didn't really happen for me. Comparatively, with music there have been many times in my life where I've been able to go somewhere else in my mind.”

Psych folk taps into this dichotomy even more than traditional 60s space-out psychedelia because its very affect seems rooted in actual experience, not pop pretension about being “mystical.” The Electric Prunes’s “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,” one of the great psychedelic rock songs of the 60s, has a somewhat empty spiritual conceit. The folk underpinnings of psych folk keep it all so grounded. The Castanets, a band characterized by a kind of American Gothic roots sound, reveal this even in their lyrics:

 

What good these myriad mythologies And what good these magics not to be released And what good unknowable divinity If it's not the world?

The folk element shows that only in the world can the mystical experience have a peculiar character. Ascending to great mystical heights is not the point. Rather, the roots sound theurgically draws down the holy. Put theologically, the difference between space-out and psyche-folk is the difference between ascent and descent. We find a similar difference in the historical shift from Classical Kabbalistic to Hasidic mysticism. The former is mainly concerned with the experience of an other-worldly unity, most often in solitary communion. Hasidism sought to take whatever knowledge is gleaned from study and ritual and bring it to bear in the world as an ethical encounter. Where the mystic seeks to ascend the sefirotic tree towards the transcendent God, the Hasidic Zaddik, as Gershom Scholem explains, “is occasionally compelled to descend to a lower or even dangerous plane in order to rescue the scattered sparks of light…” to repair the world.

Arguably, the this-worldly orientation of contemporary psych folk — it is perhaps no coincidence that today's musicians are interested in Kabbalah and Christian/Pagan systems as thought as much as Eastern ones — makes it even truer to the psychedelic vision than the music of the 1960s. "The Sixties" as a cultural vision was born not only out of the drugs that fueled it, but the actual worldly situation. War, civil rights, sexual liberation, dastardly politics, created a need for a new holistic image of the universe. Eastern mysticism spoke to this need, with its teachings of the illusion of desire, the benefit of letting go of material goods, and its imagery: multi-headed colorful gods spinning around cosmic mandalas, free from the tether of technology and greed. But its politics were utopian, and thus ultimately unsuccessful.

For today's psych-folk musicians, spirituality exists in the tension between the great heights of ego-dissolution and the sunken buried claustrophobia of the self — not in the escape from one to the other. Pysch folk, particularly with drone, can have the qualities of an incantation, of a spell, the words learned first as a prayer, but manipulated into something magical. And yet, there is something oddly pragmatic about it. Like any good folk music, it is the music of community, of simple songs that become part of an oral/musical tradition, music that can be passed on. The subversive side of psychedelia — the effect pedals, reverb, looping — means that the community that will sustain it is also one that is of the 21st century. This combination of technology and the echoes of British folk partly gives psych folk a pagan quality. But this peculiar brand of musical mysticism more readily evokes a kind of pantheism: Holiness is hidden in the world; the right tool, maybe the drone of a computerized loop, can be the incantation to set it free.

For further listening:

Skygreen Leopards Life & Love in Sparrow’s Meadow (Jagjaguwar)

Fursaxa Lepidoptera (Atp Recordings)

Espers II (Drag City [Caroline])

PG Six The Well of Memory (Amish)

Samara Lubelski Fleeting Skies (The Social Registry)

Six Organs of Admittance School of the Flower (Drag City [Caroline])

Castanets First Lights Freeze (Asthmatic Kitty )

Akron/Family s/t (Young God Records)

Vetiver To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair)

Animal Collective Feels (Fat Cat [Caroline])

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