impossible loves, part 2 (letting go)
Aug. 23rd, 2008 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupI couldn't stop thinking about R for the better part of 1991. Initially she was uninterested in my attention, but in the spring I asked her to a dance and something seemed to soften in her. When my brother found me an archaeological dig in Czechoslovakia for the summer, she surprised me by asking to come. So for six weeks we shared a room in the barracks for the Czech students on the site and traveled over Moravia and Austria together. While she made clear that she wasn't sure just how she felt about me, she consented to my affections readily enough, and we agreed that when we came back to Chicago in the fall that we'd see how it would go.
I could never tell whether she was in love. On one level she just didn't find me all that physically attractive, comparing me at some points to her father, who had always been sickly and suffered from various mystifying and apparently illusionary ailments. R would be warm emotionally but coy about her true feelings, and never really succumbed to anything like passion. The result, of course, was that I made myself completely insane worrying about what she really thought about me, reading her every word for significance and taking every syllable desperately to heart.
And then, one day in the fall, she was talking with my friend J (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
genme) about love and silly boys, and J compared me, out of all people, to Cyrano de Bergerac. And R's response to her was, "at least Cyrano had muscles."
When J told me that, it was as though a switch went off in my head. Astonishingly to me, I lost every bit of desire for R, in an instant. It wasn't that I thought it was wrong or trivial of her to focus on something I didn't have -- we are who we are and we want what we want. I just realized suddenly that there was no way to climb this particular hill, and that in fact, I really didn't want to anymore. I'm not sure if it's that my head finally conquered my heart, or if my heart simply rebelled against her in that moment. But it was done.
When I told R it was over, she actually cried.
*************************************************
So when we get caught up in the idiocies of our lives, there are points when, after much travail, one can come to one's senses and pull out of things with immense clarity.
I've caused some consternation here with talking about giving up Judaism. So I have some splainin to do. As usual, it's kind of long winded, but you know me.
S has a penchant for exaggeration, but when she compared our relationship with our synagogue to having an abusive spouse, it actually seemed close to the mark.
I won't go into too many details here; anyone who's been hanging out in my journal for years knows the gripes well enough. The place is small and declining, there are few people our age there who are active, and spiritually the place is basically dead. And to add insult to the whole thing, the leadership is obsessed with the idea of moving the congregation ten miles to the south of us.
What do I get out of it? It seems like such a small thing in the world -- to walk to synagogue (this is important to me) and to have a little service that I like in my community. And for the ten or so people who come regularly -- people fifty and older -- I have come to feel real affection. So today, like most days, I put on my suit, push my son the half mile in the stroller, help lead the little service with 11 people, have a bissel herring on some challah afterwards, and for that moment, I'm fine with everything.
But this year, almost every week, this little ritual is then followed by something that upsets me profoundly. Someone from the leadership talks about the move, or suggests mutilating the service in the name of inducing attendance by the 95% of the congregation that never bothers to show up. Because those of us who actually have kept the place open for years are just so much chopped liver. And I go home fuming that my little tiny thing, the only thing I get out of the place, is constantly under siege.
There are a host of practical problems with being something like the only quasi-observant people in one's neighborhood, but they would bore most of you. But the practical problems with the synagogue say something bigger to me about the kind of Judaism that I believe in and what kinds of dilemmas it's gotten me into.
One can, as I've done for years, separate the place and the people from the idea. If you judged an idea by the people who claim to profess it, or the institutions that nominally carry it, you wouldn't believe in anything. But to take a page from Bertrand Russell, I'm starting to feel like my Judaism is a really good idea that someone ought to try someday. I am getting tired of not finding what I need.
I'm not going to give the most honest accounting of my own sense of faith here; this is too coy of a medium to do that. But let's say that, whether you call it God or the cosmos or whatever, if you're lucky, when you've been in the right time and place you can feel there's a live wire running under the ground going somewhere powerful. Being able to feel that is what it's all about; anything else is just mummery and social convention.
Judaism is beautiful in that it recognizes and enshrines, as it were, all the aspects of the human condition, so that you feel them and sing them each in turn as you think about existence that transcends yourself. But one of the ones that speaks to me most these days is the sense that the world is broken, that we long for things to be restored and whole and integrated when our consciousness is fragmented. When we know that things aren't as we want them to be, as we think, in our minds, that they're supposed to be. You run your finger over the cracks in the wall and wonder why they're there. If you live in this mode, you get angry. Angry at people, angry at God, angry at yourself. And you realize the need to comfort everyone and yourself and you think about how damn little comfort there is in the world.
At this particular time of year we're still observing, in the liturgy, the destruction of the Temple. To most people I'm sure this seems like the most recondite, abstract thing; to mourn the destruction of some cultic center on the other side of the planet. But liturgically it becomes a very powerful symbol for the condition of Exile, the state of longing, the state of aching for things to be Right. For me, if I stopped being Jewish in every other way, I think I'd still fast on Tisha B'Av. You can't deny that the world is a broken place.
Right, right, well, blah blah blah, this is all very Romantic and deeply feeling and whatever, right? The point is that you confront my typical suburban Conservative synagogue with this set of emotional issues, and you might as well have three heads. The suggestions to amputate the service tell me that there's just a fundamental disinterest in these kinds of issues at my shul. (It's not that I'm unsympathetic to people who don't get anything out of it, just please leave my little narrishkeit alone).
The other congregations around here (and there aren't many) don't seem much better. So your next response is to say to me, nu, change denominations? And on some level I may be ready to do that, while on another this seems to me a lot like giving up on other things that are really important to me. (ETA: This is a classic example of whatflw just dubbed "goldilocksing.") Somehow it'd be easier to give up the whole thing.
So while we're on the subject, yes, I'm wondering if it's all strictly necessary. Or, rather, that the peculiar cocktail of love for certain things, excessive intellectuality, and pride and defensiveness hasn't landed me and mine collectively in a kind of trap.
So every week I think I'm ready to quit. And maybe if I quit the synagogue, I quit the whole thing? Because you can't just do it on your own, and I am fed up with not finding a community. But, not unlike the well-known (and offensive, sorry) joke about the man with the "goyische kop", here it is another week, and I find myself putting on my suit and putting the kids into the stroller anyway. I can't let go. It's too deep in me even as I increasingly wonder what the hell I'm doing and why.
At what point do you cut your losses on your own belief system? At what point do you realize it's not working out and you need to do something else? You can't spring a moment of clarity, true. But it feels like I'm due for one pretty soon.
I could never tell whether she was in love. On one level she just didn't find me all that physically attractive, comparing me at some points to her father, who had always been sickly and suffered from various mystifying and apparently illusionary ailments. R would be warm emotionally but coy about her true feelings, and never really succumbed to anything like passion. The result, of course, was that I made myself completely insane worrying about what she really thought about me, reading her every word for significance and taking every syllable desperately to heart.
And then, one day in the fall, she was talking with my friend J (
genme) about love and silly boys, and J compared me, out of all people, to Cyrano de Bergerac. And R's response to her was, "at least Cyrano had muscles."When J told me that, it was as though a switch went off in my head. Astonishingly to me, I lost every bit of desire for R, in an instant. It wasn't that I thought it was wrong or trivial of her to focus on something I didn't have -- we are who we are and we want what we want. I just realized suddenly that there was no way to climb this particular hill, and that in fact, I really didn't want to anymore. I'm not sure if it's that my head finally conquered my heart, or if my heart simply rebelled against her in that moment. But it was done.
When I told R it was over, she actually cried.
*************************************************
So when we get caught up in the idiocies of our lives, there are points when, after much travail, one can come to one's senses and pull out of things with immense clarity.
I've caused some consternation here with talking about giving up Judaism. So I have some splainin to do. As usual, it's kind of long winded, but you know me.
S has a penchant for exaggeration, but when she compared our relationship with our synagogue to having an abusive spouse, it actually seemed close to the mark.
I won't go into too many details here; anyone who's been hanging out in my journal for years knows the gripes well enough. The place is small and declining, there are few people our age there who are active, and spiritually the place is basically dead. And to add insult to the whole thing, the leadership is obsessed with the idea of moving the congregation ten miles to the south of us.
What do I get out of it? It seems like such a small thing in the world -- to walk to synagogue (this is important to me) and to have a little service that I like in my community. And for the ten or so people who come regularly -- people fifty and older -- I have come to feel real affection. So today, like most days, I put on my suit, push my son the half mile in the stroller, help lead the little service with 11 people, have a bissel herring on some challah afterwards, and for that moment, I'm fine with everything.
But this year, almost every week, this little ritual is then followed by something that upsets me profoundly. Someone from the leadership talks about the move, or suggests mutilating the service in the name of inducing attendance by the 95% of the congregation that never bothers to show up. Because those of us who actually have kept the place open for years are just so much chopped liver. And I go home fuming that my little tiny thing, the only thing I get out of the place, is constantly under siege.
There are a host of practical problems with being something like the only quasi-observant people in one's neighborhood, but they would bore most of you. But the practical problems with the synagogue say something bigger to me about the kind of Judaism that I believe in and what kinds of dilemmas it's gotten me into.
One can, as I've done for years, separate the place and the people from the idea. If you judged an idea by the people who claim to profess it, or the institutions that nominally carry it, you wouldn't believe in anything. But to take a page from Bertrand Russell, I'm starting to feel like my Judaism is a really good idea that someone ought to try someday. I am getting tired of not finding what I need.
I'm not going to give the most honest accounting of my own sense of faith here; this is too coy of a medium to do that. But let's say that, whether you call it God or the cosmos or whatever, if you're lucky, when you've been in the right time and place you can feel there's a live wire running under the ground going somewhere powerful. Being able to feel that is what it's all about; anything else is just mummery and social convention.
Judaism is beautiful in that it recognizes and enshrines, as it were, all the aspects of the human condition, so that you feel them and sing them each in turn as you think about existence that transcends yourself. But one of the ones that speaks to me most these days is the sense that the world is broken, that we long for things to be restored and whole and integrated when our consciousness is fragmented. When we know that things aren't as we want them to be, as we think, in our minds, that they're supposed to be. You run your finger over the cracks in the wall and wonder why they're there. If you live in this mode, you get angry. Angry at people, angry at God, angry at yourself. And you realize the need to comfort everyone and yourself and you think about how damn little comfort there is in the world.
At this particular time of year we're still observing, in the liturgy, the destruction of the Temple. To most people I'm sure this seems like the most recondite, abstract thing; to mourn the destruction of some cultic center on the other side of the planet. But liturgically it becomes a very powerful symbol for the condition of Exile, the state of longing, the state of aching for things to be Right. For me, if I stopped being Jewish in every other way, I think I'd still fast on Tisha B'Av. You can't deny that the world is a broken place.
Right, right, well, blah blah blah, this is all very Romantic and deeply feeling and whatever, right? The point is that you confront my typical suburban Conservative synagogue with this set of emotional issues, and you might as well have three heads. The suggestions to amputate the service tell me that there's just a fundamental disinterest in these kinds of issues at my shul. (It's not that I'm unsympathetic to people who don't get anything out of it, just please leave my little narrishkeit alone).
The other congregations around here (and there aren't many) don't seem much better. So your next response is to say to me, nu, change denominations? And on some level I may be ready to do that, while on another this seems to me a lot like giving up on other things that are really important to me. (ETA: This is a classic example of what
flw just dubbed "goldilocksing.") Somehow it'd be easier to give up the whole thing.So while we're on the subject, yes, I'm wondering if it's all strictly necessary. Or, rather, that the peculiar cocktail of love for certain things, excessive intellectuality, and pride and defensiveness hasn't landed me and mine collectively in a kind of trap.
So every week I think I'm ready to quit. And maybe if I quit the synagogue, I quit the whole thing? Because you can't just do it on your own, and I am fed up with not finding a community. But, not unlike the well-known (and offensive, sorry) joke about the man with the "goyische kop", here it is another week, and I find myself putting on my suit and putting the kids into the stroller anyway. I can't let go. It's too deep in me even as I increasingly wonder what the hell I'm doing and why.
At what point do you cut your losses on your own belief system? At what point do you realize it's not working out and you need to do something else? You can't spring a moment of clarity, true. But it feels like I'm due for one pretty soon.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 04:18 am (UTC)I hope you won't give up on all of Judaism. It's much harder without a community, of course, but it's something deep in you and I don't think giving it up would make you happy either.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 03:24 pm (UTC)Thanks, Monica.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 03:35 pm (UTC)Second, I know from experience that the deepest disappointments in spiritual life derive from the imperfections of having to work with other people to make it happen. It's just the hardest thing. I haven't been to church in years. And certainly not any group ritual work in more than 15 years either, and not just because I've outgrown dabbling in the occult.
For Christians, communal service is one of the deepest sacraments - "whenever.. are gathered... I shall be there" - can be read as literally letting G-d into your space when worship is done as group. And yet, I still do not go.
I wish I could say something more helpful than yeah that sucks. :-(
no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-24 08:18 pm (UTC)So yeah, it's like being on an iceberg whose pieces are breaking up and drifting in opposite directions. You can praise ambivalence as an existential position, but at some point it's just ridiculous.