The One Where Charlie Starts Reading the Bible
A sort of "not-religious, but spiritual" dive into ancestral knowledge.
Hey y’all - been a minute since I have written. I have been busy with touring and choring around the house. I have been writing a lot, but it is a longer form project that I won’t be sharing quite yet. But, I wanted to hop on here to write something a bit different than past posts - the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) begins the cycles of reading the Torah once again.
Judaism has a “book club” element built into it - each year, the Torah is read, along with other passages of the Old Testament. Now, I certainly fall into that “spiritual-but-not-religious” camp, but an idea I read from GI Gurdjieff stuck with me. I generally have an understanding that there is one reality that we live within and that all major religions have shared in the objective of understanding this reality and how to live within it. Thus, I believe there is a great deal of wisdom to be gained by looking at just about any ancient spiritual text - these texts have survived so long because they contain something deeply valuable within them.
The idea from Gurdjieff was just that, as children, we are usually exposed to the sacred texts and ideas of the religion we are brought up within - in this exposure, the ideas, motifs, and archetypes of these texts and stories become deeply embedded in our psyches. For many of us, who have felt alienated by organized religion, this deep embedding has often felt oppressive, like something we must get away from and slough off like a snake shedding its skin. In America today, we see this being quite prevalent - among the peoples alienated from organized religion, we see a strong inclination towards eastern religious ideas, whether it be the popularity of yoga, Zen Buddhism, or what-have-you.
Of course, the institutions of modern organized religion have alienated many of us. Organized religion has taken on an overtly political, non-spiritual role in our lives. For me, growing up reform Jewish, most spaces I was in were more concerned with the Israel-Palestine situation, with minimal emphasis placed on spirituality. We also had a bit of “Latin” problem a la the Catholic Church - for many American Jewish folk, the sacred texts were read in Hebrew, a language many of us do not understand. As such, for me, the only aspects of religion that were accessible were the political dialogs - with the spiritual aspects being buried beneath a layer of not-knowing-how-to-speak-or-understand-Hebrew.
Yet, despite never reading the majority of Judaism’s sacred texts in a language I understood, the stories of Judaism have been deeply embedded in my psyche. From the Garden of Eden to the Flood to the Exodus to Esther and Haman to the Maccabees - these stories were fed to me at the very birth of my own imagination. I came into being with these stories. Living in an overtly Christian nation, a vast majority of us share these old stories deep within our psyches.
Gurdjieff’s general idea was that, if all religions are gravitating towards the one reality we all share, then all religions offer a path to that one reality - and if you are so lucky as to have one of these religions embedded in your psyche, then you are quite fortunate and lucky. For many of us Americans, religion is something that happens in organized settings. Whereas, much of our exposure to Eastern religions - such as Buddhism - seem to emphasize the individual spiritual journey we must each walk (perhaps this is due to our individualistic lens though…I don’t have Buddhism embedded in my psyche, because I did not grow up in a Buddhist setting).
That being said - the path to a spiritual life is, in the end, a path we must walk alone. It doesn’t happen in a church or a temple, but in our minds and hearts - which can happen from the comfort of a synagogue or from that of our own home or from the top of a mountain. “You must walk that lonesome valley - you must walk it for yourself”, an old folk hymn.
And so one of my intentions for this year, is to spend time with the Bible - both Old and New Testament. I am drawn to the Old Testament because it is what my ancestors read - the closest I can draw to the spirit of my ancestors is to read the same stories and to engage with the same ideas. As well, growing up in America, it is kind of impossible to also not have Christianity embedded into your psyche, and so it also feels rather valuable to me to actually see what the New Testament is about.
So, I don’t know how much I will write about it, but I wanted to spend some time writing about my experience reading from these books. I hold the belief that all sacred texts and sacred ideas were birthed from humans who discovered something valuable - I believe deeply that we must come into our own knowing of divinity and that there are countless paths to come into this knowing.
In the end, I wanted to share the experience of “falling in love” with religious texts without needing to be “religious”. It is deeply freeing to come back to these books knowing that they are to be read symbolically and not literally and that, contained within these stories, are quite powerful archetypes that modern religious interpretations seem to have left behind. So, here is my first entry in this series:
The Garden & The Flood
With Rosh Hashanah arriving, I decided it was a good time to read the Torah. It is the Jewish tradition after all, to read the Books of Moses each year, and I realized I really hadn’t engaged with the actual text - in a language I could readily understand - only knowing the broad strokes of the most famous stories. As a note, I am a spiritual person, but have long fallen in the atheist/agnostic end of the spectrum. A lot of my spiritual awakening has been via Eastern religious ideas, though I recognize that Judeo-Christian doctrine has been deeply embedded in my psyche from early childhood.
I don’t think it is wise to read anything too literally and so I haven’t felt comfortable coming back to these books and reading them for myself until very recently - our spiritual lives are not tangible and the lessons required to live well are not easily expressed in words. We must be comfortable thinking in symbols and archetypes and we must be comfortable understanding the context in which stories are told. I think that, traditionally, elders have known of the symbolic nature of sacred stories and that a big part of the coming-of-age rituals of most religions has been in bringing the child from residing solely in the literal, tangible realm to adulthood into the metaphysical, with symbols and stories as signposts to guide the way.
Reading the beginning of Genesis, I was quite struck that these stories had the flavor of “children’s stories” - in that, it was quite easy to imagine an elder orating these stories to young children. The stories are also surprisingly short compared to what I remembered. Perhaps that is the great power of these stories, is that they can readily be given to children, but that they can offer a greater depth as the child chews on the stories into adulthood - as the child transitions from viewing the stories literally to symbolically.
Contextually, it occurred to me that each story seemed to answer a series of questions about “why the world is the way that it is”. You can imagine a child asking, “Where did we come from?” and a happy-to-oblige grandparent saying, “oh, well, you see in the beginning there was nothing, and then God made the light and the dark…” and so-on-and-so-forth.
For children being raised in an agrarian setting, where the family and village spends six days a week working the land, it seemed only natural to then ask, “But, if God made all these wonderful things for us, why do we have to work all our lives?” and the grandparent responding, “Well, that’s because Eve ate the apple…” and explaining the fall of man.
Now, the fall of man can be interpreted in so many cool ways. The Buddha said that “life is suffering” and the curious Jewish child asked, “but why is life suffering?” The fall of man offers both a literal and symbolic answer - for the child, the story of the apple suffices the needs of their imagination; for the adult, the fall of man offers an acknowledgment that there comes a moment where the innocence of childhood ends and the responsibilities of adulthood begin, that it becomes our responsibility to navigate the sufferings in life by our own capabilities. Or, perhaps more simply, that there comes a moment where we are struck by the lightning of self-awareness - it is our human curse.
Fans of fantasy and science fiction will recognize that the stories of the Torah are all about “world building” - that is, providing a mythological basis for the world that people found themselves occupying. These children were born into a world with many tribes and cities and states, villages and kingdoms - while there are many lessons from the story of Cain and Abel, it is the first example in the book of defining the different peoples of the world. Cain’s descendants went one way and Seth’s (Adam and Eve’s third child) another - the progenitors of the various tribes and kingdoms known about in the modern day (modern day of the stories being told).
So, a child may ask, “if there are so many different ways to live, so many different tribes and kingdoms with unique ways of living, what makes ours so special that we should keep it alive?” - and that brings us to the story of Noah and the Flood. A child is told that these other people came to be quite wicked and evil, that they made God very upset and so God decided to rid the world of evil. But, God recognized those who were good and offered them a chance to save themselves, by building the ark before the flood came down. Enter Noah and his kin and his ark full of animals.
I find the flood story quite fascinating in our modern times. While I have no doubt there have been cataclysmic floods throughout human history, I think the symbolic nature of the story is extremely relevant today. Surviving is incredibly difficult and we survive generation-after-generation by developing rich traditions of survival - the Torah represents a book offering such traditions. I don’t think when the Bible says people were “wicked” and “evil” that they were like, literally “bad”, but simply that they have been disconnected from a true tradition of survival - or, in more digestible language, “disconnected from God”.
Today, we live in an age where most people don’t know how to grow food, don’t know how to cook, don’t know how to build and care for a home… I mean, people need salt to survive and how many of us actually know how to, like, find salt on our own?!?! This does not make us “wicked” or “evil” in the literal sense - but, it has made us dependent on a society that does appear quite “wicked” to an outsider (and to many of us inside of it)…one must only turn on the news to be bombarded by strife and needless suffering.
So, what would happen to us if some cataclysm hit? I live in the American West where cities vie for limited water rights under the constant specter of forest fires and earthquakes. Armed with a true tradition of survival, human beings are very resilient to calamity. People who know how to survive by their own hands are able to survive very difficult times - people who don’t know how are vulnerable to disaster.
I am not meaning to sound like a doomsday-prepper…no. But, I think that this story of Noah and the Flood holds a very important message within it. That when we get disconnected from a tradition of survival, which includes a spiritual connection with reality, we become vulnerable to the calamities that will naturally happen. Part of surviving is being resilient and the flood story offers up a warning that children ought to take tradition quite seriously - else, they may become quite vulnerable in this life.
Now, I’ll wrap up this post with a bit I found quite funny. At the end of the Noah story, God makes a promise with Noah never to flood the earth again. God says that the rainbow is the symbol of this covenant and that Noah and his descendants can rest assured he will not flood the earth again.
I find this funny because I imagine an elder telling a child the story of the flood and, upon the next rainfall, the child becoming consumed by anxiety that the flood was coming and they were not prepared. The elder, of course, knew the story was symbolic, but the child took it quite literally (for the child had not eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge) and so the child took the story quite literally. So, the elder, in an effort to ease the child’s heart, pointed to the rainbow above them and said, “no, no, no…see, God made rainbows to let us know he will never flood the earth again.” And once that child dozed off to sleep, the elders all looked at each other with a great sigh of relief and said, “let’s just put the rainbow thing in the story from the get-go from now on.”
I love what you wrote about the transition into adulthood being a transition into interpreting stories, and life events, through symbols and archetypes too. Thanks for this. I’m still chewing on larger definitions of what “good” versus “evil” means and the symbolism of the flood. Your interpretation of the rainbow is funny. I can totally see some elders saying that to make their future storytelling easier.