spirituality

This evening I welcomed the sabbath bride while Lola and I walked up High Park avenue. The light was just so, the street smelled like recently awoken soil and trees budding, the moon was a bright hanging sickle.

We walked slowly, listening to the ambient noise of the neighbourhood winding down, and it came to my mind that the day of rest was beginning, and it was my job in that moment to welcome this turn of events and give thanks.

For some reason this morning, I stumbled upon a series of posts in the Guardian blog called "How to Believe" and started reading. The series on the whole looks at philosophies of belief, et al, and the first two articles are about Heidegger (of course), who thanks to a couple of uni professors I have a very 'fleeting' familiarity with.

So far this resume of his 437 page master work is making for a pretty easy morning read. However as always, when someone is para-phrasing the old curmudgeon I feel like those professors who assigned 'The Question Concerning Technology' (yes I had to read it twice and it still wasn't enough), would say " well, maybe, but that's not quite it either." Anyways, here's a quote to start you off:

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls "phenomenology" – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

But we should note the difficult of the task that Heidegger has set himself. That which is closest and most obvious to us is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself in my average, indifferent everyday existence, but how to describe this? Heidegger was fond of quoting St Augustine's Confessions, when the latter writes, "Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Heidegger indeed means trouble and one often sweats through these pages. But the moments of revelation are breathtaking in their obviousness.

Micro-blogging et al, while interesting to me as a practice is less meaningful than the continued maintenance of this blog because I think the breathtaking obviousness of revelation is exactly what blogging was made for.

140 characters is not exploring it's just babbling.

One thing I have always loved about being a Reform Jew, is that my people, have very little beef with same sex relationships. I mean sure it's written in the Torah that a community should stone homosexuals to death.

But there are 612 other laws, such as; "An Ammonite or Moabite shall never marry the daughter of an Israelite" that we conveniently ignore, and for quite some time now, the same sex stipulations have been pretty handily swept under the rug.

So how irritating is it (like seriously hair-pullingly frustrating and stupid) to read this article in Rabble about how the B'nai Brith is running around to different Pride sponsors trying to get them to pull support from the parade on the basis of one *float* that is critical of Israel. Not the who parade, just the views of one group.

Talk about back-stabbing
Talk about petty
Talk about denial of freedom of speech
Talk about hatred and prejudice obstructing vision and justice

If supporters of Israel continue to curry favor with people who use hate as a weapon, (and of course I am thinking of the evangelicals here), then I will not be surprised if the evangels turn out to be right and Israel becomes nothing more then a cog in the giant armageddon machine.

My People, what are you doing??

Since I happen to have all 613 commandments open in another window, let's take a look at what the Torah says about the Jews and property rights:

A big day for reading in the hottest apartment in Toronto.

After I finished Bedlam, I wandered over to my friend's bookcase to look for something to preoccupy me. It seemed I had caught a mild flu so the question of socks was out the window for today.

My friend has made the interesting decision to put all the in-house spirituality books on one shelf, the shelf directly at eye-level. Since I am at heart a browser and not a searcher, I picked a book by Karen Armstrong and took it with me back to the living room.

10 hours later, here I am book finished, sweating and a little hungry. I did actually make some noodles, and I did in the immortal words of Sheryl Crow "scrape the mold off the bread", I made regular toast though.

The book so good I ate moldy bread is called The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness. It is Armstrong's personal account of the years, the career and the transformation of faith that followed her decision to renounce her vows at the age of 24 and leave the convent she had joined when only a 17 year old in in 1962.

Of course the book is not simply about leaving her faith. It is about regaining one's sanity after nervous collapse, living with failure, finding a vocation, and ultimately discovering a transformative faith and in my opinion a renewal of the self.

It is also about developing compassion, in a major way, but I will leave that for tomorrow's post which will doubtless be huge unless I have to actually spend time with my family who would probably like to see me.

For now I will leave you with the T.S Elliot poem that served as inspiration for Armstrong's journey, and is a fitting testament to all people who wrestle with lives that seem not to be a "broad, noble flight of steps", but a "twisted spiral staircase".