File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0106, message 377


Date: 24 Jun 2001 16:16:13 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: religion and culture (response to tahir)


I'm a bit surprised at these pro-religious esponses, but I think the issues that underlie our differences will undoubtedly come out with other threads, so we can probably leave the debate until then. But on the other hand I think it's important to say that the position I was articulating was not a simple negation of religion, e.g. as simply "false consciousness", I think I was endorsing something a bit more Hegelian than that. I meant that the falsity of religion lies in its particularity (or its partiality rather), whereas its truth is realised in a higher form of consciousness, in philosophy.
More later (maybe!)
Tahir

>>> canito3-AT-earthlink.net 06/24/01 06:12AM >>>
Well...
Since we are making religious confessions...
And before I say this I have to admit I am a little hesitant to confess any
of mine for fear of being labeled Zionist or particularist or...

but the fact is I am a Jew, even as I am working out another biological fact
that my dad was not Jewish (and also had some elements of anti-Semitism.. he
once called my mother a kike, and when I as very young, and made a ward of
the State of California, he said that there was a Jewish conspiracy to take
me away from him ...  you might say I have some complex 'issues' involved
with my identity ...)
and I am attached both positively and negatively to Jewish culture, and
Jewish history. And I have no problem with reconciling this with Marxism or
working class internationalism. The revolution is a secular conception of
the messianic age, at least in my perspective, and when Marx said the
working class had no homeland, as far as I am concerned he was drawing
directly from the "Wondering Jew's" experience of the Diaspora.

And I was just reading Goittein's _a mediterranean society_ and I was amazed
at the class consciousness, the adversity, but also the faith and the piety
of the "Geniza people". And I saw very similar attitudes in Morocco when I
was there in 1996.

And I think the most awesome experience I ever had was the Yom Kippur I
passed in a little synagogue in Fez. It was the first time I fasted. I was
up in the balcony with the women, it was hot, and by the afternoon we were
all sleeping on the benches, it was simply too hot to go home. I could never
imagine sleeping in a synagogue in the US, but people sleep in mosques all
the time throughout the Middle East, and I could write a whole dissertation
on the connections between Judaism and Islam and between Islam and Judaism
in the Arab World... The chanting was amazing, and if you knew enough Hebrew
you could make out some pretty revolutionary and communistic sentiments in
some of the Yom Kippur prayers (and even the Berkat HaMazon, the blessing
said after the meal).

Why should I have to give this up? What universal philosophy would I replace
it with and would it be any better?

At the same time I also have very ambivalent feeling towards Judaism,
towards Jewish law, and towards the coercive way it is practiced in Israel
and in some Orthodox and Hassidic communities. And yet I also find a great
deal of Reform Judaism to be vacuous. But what was amazing to me was that I
realized I wasn't alone in this. I met several Jews in Morocco who had the
exact same reservations. In fact I was sitting in the synagogue with a
Rabbi's daughter and she turned to me and said, "What right does my husband
have to wake up every morning and insult me? And what about the 'goy'? Why
should he be insulted, it isn't his fault he wasn't born a Jew." She was
referring to the lines in one of the morning prayers that thanks God for not
being made a woman or a non-Jew. I went with this same woman on a ziyarah, a
pilgrimage to Essouira (Mogador). She and her husband had sold everything
and were about to immigrate to Israel. We sat in the grave yard, in a little
cement dome that covered her father's tomb, as she said her final goodbye to
her father and cried. She had lost her father when she was very young. I too
had lost my father when I was very young, and I too cried.

We all have very complex identities, and cultures, and histories and
memories, and it is sheer dogmatism and prejudice and ignorance to say that
we suffer from false consciousness, or belong to racist, particularist,
dirty mundane cultures, and that our only God is money.

In truth I guess I have a love hate relationship with Judaism and with
organized Jewish communities and institutions. But my approach to history,
to philosophy, to theology, and to political economy is definitely from a
Jewish paradigm. And I hope you will forgive me the ethnocentrism and
audacity if I wager that probably a 'bisele' of Marx was too.
b'slama
Sharon 


> From: Thomas Seay <entheogens-AT-yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu 
> Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:59:14 -0700 (PDT)
> To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu 
> Subject: Re: AUT: religion and culture (response to tahir)
> 
> Commie00, I would like to say that I agree with
> everything that you said on this.  I, myself, have
> certain religious urges.



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