Category Archives: Religion

The Separation of Church and State in Early 19th Century England

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When my brother-in-law died a cou­ple of years ago, I inher­ited from him a pris­tine set of The World’s Ora­tors, a mul­ti­vol­ume col­lec­tion of “the great­est ora­tions of the world’s his­tory,” edited by Guy Car­leton Lee and pub­lished by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1900. The other day, I opened Vol­ume 7, Part 2 com­pletely at ran­dom and came upon Sir Robert Peel’s speech, “On the Dis­abil­i­ties of the Jews,” which, accord­ing to the edi­to­r­ial note, Peel made in order to sup­port a bill intended “to place the Jew on the same foot­ing, so far at least as civil rights, as the Chris­t­ian.” The edi­to­r­ial note con­tin­ues, “Peel, who was usu­ally to be found on the side of tol­er­a­tion and jus­tice, [gave a] speech replete with a dig­ni­fied breath of tol­er­ance.…” I have not yet fin­ished the entire speech, but, early on, he makes an argu­ment for the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state that I find dis­turb­ing, not because any­one is explic­itly endors­ing this way of think­ing today, but because I think it is implicit in the notion put forth by some Repub­li­can can­di­dates for pres­i­dent, and cer­tainly by more than a few Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian voices I have heard, i.e., that the United States is, at heart, a Chris­t­ian nation and that our gov­ern­ment and our laws ought to reflect that fact. This is what Peel said:

I must in the first place dis­claim any con­cur­rence in the doc­trine that to us, in our leg­isla­tive capac­ity, reli­gion is a mat­ter of indif­fer­ence. I am deeply impressed with the con­vic­tion that it is our para­mount duty to pro­mote the inter­ests of reli­gion and it influ­ence on the human mind. I am impressed by a con­vic­tion that the spirit and pre­cepts of Chris­tian­ity ought to influ­ence our delib­er­a­tions; nay, more, that if our leg­is­la­tion be at vari­ance with the pre­cepts and spirit of Chris­tian­ity we can­not expect the bless­ing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my deci­sion on this ques­tion [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influ­enced much less by a con­sid­er­a­tion of polit­i­cal expe­di­ency than by a deep sense of reli­gious obligation.

Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Chris­t­ian there is, in my opin­ion, a vital dif­fer­ence. The reli­gion of the Chris­t­ian and the reli­gion of the Jew are opposed in essen­tials. Between them there is com­plete antag­o­nism. I do not con­sider that the con­cur­rence of the Jew with the Chris­t­ian in rec­og­niz­ing the his­tor­i­cal truths and divine ori­gin of the moral pre­cepts of the Old Tes­ta­ment can avail to rec­on­cile the dif­fer­ences in respect to those doc­trines which con­sti­tute the vital prin­ci­ple and foun­da­tion of Chris­tian­ity. If, as a leg­is­la­ture, we had the author­ity to deter­mine reli­gious error and a com­mis­sion to pun­ish reli­gious error, it might be our painful duty to pun­ish the Jews. But we have no such com­mis­sion. If the Jews did com­mit an inex­pi­able crime nearly two thou­sand years ago, we have had no author­ity given to us – even if we could deter­mine who were the descen­dants of the per­sons guilty of that crime – to visit the sins of the fathers upon the chil­dren, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hun­dredth or four hun­dredth gen­er­a­tion. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In other words, if we were a reli­gious Chris­t­ian gov­ern­ment, not merely a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment guided by Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, we would, per­haps, be in a posi­tion to make the Jews pay for their sins – in par­tic­u­lar the sin of killing Christ, but, more gen­er­ally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithe­sis. We are, how­ever, not that kind of gov­ern­ment and so (this sum­ma­rizes Peel’s argu­ment as far as I have got­ten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be con­sis­tent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.

What I find dis­turb­ing in these words is the, to me at least, clear impli­ca­tion that there is a part of Peel that would not mind hav­ing “the painful duty” of pun­ish­ing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is pos­si­ble that these two pas­sages are part of a rhetor­i­cal strat­egy that does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the actual posi­tion that he takes. Nonethe­less, Peel’s impli­ca­tion that a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment would, indeed, be jus­ti­fied in dis­crim­i­nat­ing against, if not out­right pun­ish­ing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Chris­t­ian politi­cians; and per­haps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not sug­gest­ing that any of those politi­cians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theoc­racy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.

 

A Pretty Good Working Definition of Religious Fundamentalism

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I found this in Bar­bara C. Sproul’s intro­duc­tion to Pri­mal Myths: Cre­ation Myths Around the World. It has been a long time since I have thought of myself as a reli­gious per­son or had much to do with peo­ple who are reli­gious in the ortho­dox way many of my teach­ers were when I was in yeshiva. The descrip­tion below would not fit most of those men and women, whose com­mit­ment to their faith I con­tinue to respect and even learn from; but there were oth­ers for whom Sproul’s words seem tailor-made; and these oth­ers, of course, have broth­ers and sis­ters in all faiths.

Hold­ing lit­er­ally to the claims of any par­tic­u­lar myth…is a great error in that it mis­takes myth’s val­ues for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of reli­gios­ity. Such lit­er­al­ism requires a faith that splits rather than uni­fies our con­scious­ness. Think­ing par­tic­u­lar myths to be valu­able in them­selves under­mines the gen­uine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it trans­forms myths into obsta­cles to mean­ing rather than con­vey­ors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doc­trines come to describe a world removed from and irrel­e­vant to our timely one; its fol­low­ers, con­se­quently, become strangers to moder­nity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sac­ri­fice intel­lect, emo­tion and the hon­esty of both to sat­isfy their creeds. And this kind of lit­er­al­ism is revealed as fun­da­men­tally idol­a­trous, the oppo­site of gen­uine faith.

Continuing a Discussion about Brit Milah

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Com­ment­ing in the dis­cus­sion on Alas about a post deal­ing with the cir­cum­ci­sion ban that has been pro­posed in San Fran­cisco, Ching­ona wrote the following:

Sec­ondly … and here I’m try­ing to put into words some­thing that I think is felt on a sub­con­scious and instinc­tual level (with addi­tional caveats that I can­not speak for every Jew every­where) … with all the blood that has been spilt to main­tain Judaism over the cen­turies, there is a feel­ing that one, as an indi­vid­ual, does not actu­ally have the right to just dis­pense with some­thing so fun­da­men­tal as this. For more sec­u­lar Jews, to not cir­cum­cise is to say that not only do you not care if your kids aren’t Jew­ish, but to actu­ally push them away from it. You might be a scofflaw in a hun­dred dif­fer­ent ways, but to not cir­cum­cise would be to renounce your cit­i­zen­ship. It’s the step too far. And to take that step is to spit on the mem­ory of every Jew who died for being Jewish.

Even as I write this, I imag­ine you laugh­ing at how ridicu­lous it sounds. Do other Jew­ish peo­ple on this thread think I’m exag­ger­at­ing? Like I said, I’m try­ing to put some­thing into words that is more felt than thought, and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’m over­stat­ing the mat­ter. But in my expe­ri­ence, it’s some­thing in the neigh­bor­hood of what I wrote above.

It reminded me of some­thing I wrote in my first Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood post, called A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World. (I should add I have not edited this excerpt to take into account Grace Annam’s gen­tle admo­ni­tion to remem­ber that “there are women who have the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing had a penis.”)

Even now, hav­ing rejected cir­cum­ci­sion in my own fam­ily, it’s hard to dis­miss the rit­ual merely as the patri­ar­chal mark­ing that, at its roots, it is. Because what­ever else that rit­ual might be, the his­tory of the oppres­sion of the Jews has made it also a sign of defi­ance, a bod­ily affir­ma­tion of Jew­ish (male) iden­tity and Jew­ish (male) worth in the face of enor­mous persecution.

I put the word male in paren­the­ses in the last sen­tence because, while cir­cum­ci­sion marks only men and is there­fore prob­lem­atic from the point of view of gen­der equal­ity within the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jew­ish moth­ers to con­tinue to allow their sons to be cir­cum­cised, or for Jew­ish women to con­tinue to value cir­cum­ci­sion as a reli­gious rit­ual, a phys­i­cal mark and as a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between the Jews and their god at times when forc­ing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would iden­tify appro­pri­ate tar­gets for their hatred and vio­lence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holo­caust, for exam­ple, Yaffa Eli­ach tells a story that, whether it is com­pletely true or only an embell­ished ver­sion of the truth, illus­trates pre­cisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a mas­sacre of Jew­ish chil­dren, the tale goes, a Jew­ish woman demanded of a Nazi sol­dier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bun­dle of rags on the ground near the saw­dust. She unwrapped the bun­dle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pil­low was a new­born babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and cir­cum­cised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the bless­ing of the cir­cum­ci­sion. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Uni­verse, who has sanc­ti­fied us by thy com­mand­ments and hast com­manded us to per­form the circumcision.”

She straight­ened her back, looked up to the heav­ens, and said, “God of the Uni­verse, you have given me a healthy child. I am return­ing to you a whole­some, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the Ger­man, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pil­low. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive dur­ing the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me pre­cisely for being “whole­some and kosher.” Yet while the vio­lence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in com­par­i­son to the vio­lence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonethe­less omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pil­low, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my cir­cum­ci­sion is my con­nec­tion to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who cir­cum­cised and were cir­cum­cised at a time when a cut penis could have got­ten them killed.

It was not an easy thing for me to arrive at the point where, as a Jew­ish man, I could choose not to have my son cir­cum­cised and also not feel like I was betray­ing my com­mu­nity at a much, much deeper level than any rejec­tion of circumcision’s reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance might rep­re­sent for me. This is some­thing I might choose to write more about at a later time, but for now I will say that it had to do with let­ting go of a cer­tain kind of cul­tur­ally incul­cated anger and fear, with decid­ing that doing vio­lence to my son’s body – to the body of any Jew­ish infant born with a penis – in order to mark that body over and against the vio­lence that has been done to Jews through­out our his­tory was, in some sense, only a con­tin­u­a­tion of that violence.

Nonethe­less, I have tremen­dous respect for the feel­ings of peo­ple who con­tinue to see brit milah – we might as well call the cer­e­mony by its proper name – as a way of say­ing not only to the cir­cum­cised child, but to the his­tor­i­cally hos­tile world in which that child will grow up, “You are here, in this world, as a Jew; we are here in this world, as Jews, and we are not going any­where.“

Our Newest Superhero: Foreskin Man?

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I found a link to Fore­skin Man on The Good Man Project. To respond fully will require a more care­ful read­ing than I can give the comic now, but even pag­ing quickly through issue two reveals an awful lot that is prob­lem­atic in the way the char­ac­ters are drawn. The Good Man Project pointed to this image of the evil Jew­ish circumcisers:

But the depic­tion of women is also problematic:

The rou­tine cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys, med­ical and oth­er­wise, is a prob­lem. Some­how I can’t see a comic like this being the way to address it.

Why I Won’t Give to The Salvation Army

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I am sit­ting in a Star­bucks in Man­hat­tan, pass­ing the time while my son takes an art class, and I am watch­ing three young Asian women wear­ing red Sal­va­tion Army aprons brave the cold. The one far­thest from me is ring­ing the bell — I don’t think her wrist has stopped mov­ing since I started watch­ing — while the one near­est me holds her gloved hands up to her mouth every so often and calls some­thing out to the peo­ple hur­ry­ing by. The third, walk­ing back and forth between the other two, has been using free candy as bait, try­ing to get passersby, espe­cially those with chil­dren, to stop long enough that they might decide to drop some money in the red bucket she and her com­pan­ions are hop­ing to fill. Some peo­ple stop and put some cash, or some­times coins, in the pail, but most, refus­ing both the candy and the oppor­tu­nity to give, walk past as if the women aren’t even there, and even most of those who accept the treat choose not to part with any of their money.

One woman, who at first allowed the lit­tle girl she was walk­ing with to accept a piece of candy, actu­ally sent the girl back to return it. She placed the choco­late gin­gerly in the open hand of the woman who’d given it to her and skipped back in the direc­tion from which she came. The Sal­va­tion Army vol­un­teer watched the girl go, lift­ing her eyes out beyond the win­dow frame, where the woman accom­pa­ny­ing the girl must have been stand­ing, and then turned to her fel­low vol­un­teers with a look of shocked non-comprehension on her face. She shrugged her shoul­ders and, on cue, as I have watched them do sev­eral times, the three of them burst out laugh­ing, reveal­ing a sense of humor about their task that it is hard not to respect, as it is hard not to respect what I hope is the sin­cer­ity and com­mit­ment they have shown by choos­ing to spend this first really cold Sat­ur­day morn­ing of the sea­son stand­ing out­side and being rejected over and over and over again.

The truth is, though, that I would be one of the peo­ple reject­ing those women, not because I don’t know that The Sal­va­tion Army does some very good and nec­es­sary work, and not because I am, in the lan­guage of the sea­son, a Scrooge, but because I will not give money — and, frankly, I don’t think any­one who claims to be in favor of diver­sity and tol­er­ance should give money either — to an orga­ni­za­tion which holds as the sev­enth of its eleven arti­cles of faith the belief that I, and any­one like me, because we do not have “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and regen­er­a­tion by the Holy Spirit,” are not wor­thy of sal­va­tion — assum­ing, for the moment, that we would want the kind of sal­va­tion The Sal­va­tion Army believes in.

Granted, at least as far as I know, the Sal­va­tion Army no longer injects reli­gion explic­itly into its inter­ac­tions with the peo­ple it helps; but the fact that they help poor peo­ple, vet­er­ans, addicts and the elderly, that they are involved in anti-trafficking work and more, does not erase the fact that this good work is moti­vated and informed by a reli­gious ide­ol­ogy that has, as one of its unstated goals, the extinc­tion of the reli­gious iden­tity and prac­tice in which I was raised, not to men­tion all the other non-Christian reli­gious iden­ti­ties and prac­tices that exist in the world today.

I rec­og­nize that no one is forc­ing me to give The Sal­va­tion Army my money, and I am sure there are peo­ple read­ing this who are think­ing, “Fine! Don’t give, but please keep your opin­ion to your­self.” The thing is, though, that The Sal­va­tion Army does not keep its opin­ion to itself. It is an unapolo­get­i­cally evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tion that looks for­ward to the day when all peo­ple accept Jesus Christ as their sav­ior and Judaism, Islam, Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, Wicca, Zoroas­tri­an­ism, ani­mism and shaman­ism, not to men­tion athe­ism, are mere words con­not­ing sys­tems of belief from which all life has been drained. More to the point, because I think every­one ought to ask them­selves whether they want to sup­port the ide­ol­ogy of an orga­ni­za­tion to which they are plan­ning to give their money, I think peo­ple need to under­stand that when they put money in The Sal­va­tion Army’s red pail, they are sup­port­ing not only the char­ity work that the orga­ni­za­tion does, but the reli­gious val­ues to which the orga­ni­za­tion subscribes.

Chris­tian­ity, of course, is not the only reli­gion that thinks its truth is the only truth; most reli­gions, in fact, do. So I am not here try­ing to sug­gest that Chris­tian­ity, or at least the kind of Chris­tian­ity pro­moted by The Sal­va­tion Army, is any worse than any other reli­gion; it’s just that The Sal­va­tion Army is very vis­i­ble at this time of year. Were there a Mus­lim, or Jew­ish – or Hindu of Bud­dhist or any other – char­ity that held sim­i­lar arti­cles of faith and whose vol­un­teers were sim­i­larly ubiq­ui­tous, I would be say­ing the same kinds of things about that group; and I want to empha­size that I am talk­ing about a group and its pro­fessed orga­ni­za­tional val­ues, not indi­vid­u­als and the faith they they hold. The Sal­va­tion Army is a Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tion that wants us to give it our money so it can do its Chris­t­ian char­ity work, part of which has noth­ing to do with char­ity and every­thing to do with bring­ing about a world in which Chris­tian­ity is the only sur­viv­ing reli­gion. For the rea­sons I have given here, I will not turn a blind eye to the lat­ter in order to sup­port the for­mer, no mat­ter how worth­while the for­mer may be.

Husband Murder on the Rise in Iran

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Saba Vasefi is an Iran­ian women’s and children’s rights activist who is now liv­ing in Aus­tralia. Her doc­u­men­tary, Do Not Bury My Heart–for which I have not been able to find much infor­ma­tion on the web – about the exe­cu­tion of minors in Iran was screened recently in the under­ground doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of the Copen­hagen Inter­na­tional Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val. She’s writ­ten an arti­cle, which I found on the Tehran Bureau web­site and which was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mianeh, about the increase in Iran of the num­ber of women accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands. “This is,” she writes, “a sig­nif­i­cant shift in Iran­ian soci­ety, where mur­ders involv­ing spouses have in the past almost always involved men killing women, often in what is known as an ‘hon­our crime.’” More­over, these mur­ders are usu­ally, nom­i­nally, legal since “Arti­cle 630 of Iran’s Islam-based crim­i­nal code makes it legal for a man to kill both his wife and her part­ner if he finds them in the act, and it is con­sen­sual.” This bur­den of proof, she goes on to say, “is rarely met,” with most honor killings being more about “jeal­ousy, sus­pi­cion or merely a way of end­ing a marriage.”

One of the things I found most inter­est­ing about Vasefi’s arti­cle is the dif­fer­ence between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands and what the avail­able research says.

In the case of wives who kill their hus­bands, the avail­able research indi­cates that two-thirds of cases are moti­vated by a desire for revenge for the hus­band being unfaithful.

The sur­vey that Moaz­zami and Ashouri con­ducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 per­cent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their hus­bands or fam­i­lies would not agree to it, or had chil­dren and would have had no means of sup­port­ing them­selves if they had sep­a­rated from their spouses.

My own research indi­cates that many women who resort to vio­lence are them­selves vic­tims of abuse, and have been unable to find jus­tice through the legal system.

She points out that many of the women who mur­der their hus­bands fit the same pro­file: they are poor, rel­a­tively une­d­u­cated, often forced into mar­riage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, cir­cum­stances which com­bine to make much more dif­fi­cult for them to get help through the legal sys­tem or to find other ways out of their sit­u­a­tion. Mur­der is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”

Akram Mah­davi, one of the women Vasefi inter­viewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a sus­pended death sen­tence for hir­ing a man to kill her hus­band, whom her father had forced her to marry – she was 20 and her hus­band was 75. Her motive? That she’d dis­cov­ered her hus­band was sex­u­ally abus­ing her daugh­ter and her attempts at secur­ing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t peo­ple in Iran try­ing to call atten­tion to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to set up shel­ters for bat­tered women for years, but the gov­ern­ment has always refused, “cit­ing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home with­out her husband’s per­mis­sion.” I con­fess that rea­son­ing leaves me almost speech­less, as it still does all these many years later when I remem­ber the cop who asked me, when I was six­teen and call­ing for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bed­room and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,“Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”

I don’t want to erase the dif­fer­ences between what hap­pened to my mother and what hap­pened to Akram Mah­davi, nor do I want to triv­i­al­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of the fact that, in Iran, the rea­son­ing that makes it so dif­fi­cult for bat­tered women, or women like Mah­davi, who was try­ing to pro­tect her daugh­ter from abuse, to find jus­tice is couched in an abso­lutist reli­gious rhetoric – though it’s not as if reli­gion has not been used here in the States to jus­tify treat­ing women, not to men­tion peo­ple of color, as sec­ond class cit­i­zens – but I find right now the sim­i­lar­i­ties more com­pelling than the dif­fer­ences. In each case, the woman’s auton­omy is under­stood to be cir­cum­scribed by the author­ity of the man who pos­sesses her sex­u­ally. In Islam, the hus­band must give her per­mis­sion to leave the sphere of his author­ity (and, there­fore, of his pro­tec­tion) with­out him1; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assump­tion was that I might have mis­taken some kind of sex­ual play, in which my mother was enjoy­ing the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a sit­u­a­tion in which the boyfriend was unwill­ing to let my mother go out­side the sphere of his author­ity and in which he might turn – was already turn­ing – vio­lent because she did not obey him. That the author­ity is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a bet­ter word, cul­tural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the author­ity, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.

  1. One of the odd­est expe­ri­ences I’ve had being mar­ried to a Mus­lim woman who occa­sion­ally trav­els to Iran has been the require­ment, imposed by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, that I write her a let­ter giv­ing her my offi­cial per­mis­sion to travel with­out me. [↩]

Persian Poetry Tuesday: from Saadi’s Golestan

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It’s been many years since I believed in a god the way I did when I was younger and I thought I wanted to be an ortho­dox rabbi. I’ve writ­ten here about one of the rea­sons I gave that belief up, but no mat­ter how far I am from the per­son I was when the monothe­is­tic god as the Jews under­stand him was cen­tral to how I under­stood the world, I am still moved by poetry steeped in spir­i­tual and reli­gious tra­di­tions, because even if you don’t believe in a god, you can’t deny the absolute nature of the unknown that lies beyond the bound­aries of this life, and I do believe every­thing that is poten­tially good in human beings, includ­ing how we give our lives mean­ing, comes from the rela­tion­ship we have with that absolute. Here, for exam­ple, is a pas­sage from Saadi’s Golestan that moves me every time I read it:

A man of God immersed him­self in med­i­ta­tion. When he emerged from the vision that was granted him, a smil­ing com­pan­ion wel­comed him back, “What beau­ti­ful gift have you brought us from the gar­den in which you were walking?”

The holy man replied, “I walked until I reached the rose­bush, where I gath­ered up the skirts of my robe to hold the roses I wanted to present to my friends, but the scent of the petals so intox­i­cated me that I let every­thing fall from my hands.”

Learn love, O morn­ing bird, from the moth’s
giv­ing itself in silence to the fire.
Pre­tenders seek enlight­en­ment in vain,
wait­ing to fol­low those who won’t return.
And You, who tran­scend all we can imag­ine,
whose exis­tence we can nei­ther guess at
nor claim to know as fact, of whose glory
all the world’s words — spo­ken or writ­ten — fall
immea­sur­ably short, the end is here,
and we stand as we did when it all began,
tongue-tied lovers, awe-struck at Your beauty.

Went to See Maz Jobrani Last Night

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I took my wife and my son for their birth­days, which are a day apart later this month, to see the Iranian-American comic Maz Jobrani last night at Town Hall. He is very tal­ented and very funny. One of the things he does to great effect is bring the audi­ence into dia­logue with him as part of his show, and so – since part of this agenda is quite explic­itly polit­i­cal, i.e., to use com­edy as a way of call­ing out and break­ing down stereo­types and other kinds of bar­ri­ers between dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple – he asks mem­bers of dif­fer­ent groups to iden­tify them­selves in the audi­ence: Ira­ni­ans (obvi­ously), white peo­ple, Arabs (mak­ing sure to spec­ify which coun­try they come from, to make the point, you know, that the Arab Mid­dle East is not all one coun­try), Jews, Lati­nos, etc. Per­haps my favorite joke of the evening resulted from this – not that it was the fun­ni­est, but it was my favorite.

He was talk­ing to some Pales­tin­ian women sit­ting in the front and then – I don’t remem­ber exactly who said what – iden­ti­fied some Jew­ish peo­ple sit­ting in the same row, more or less, but across the aisle. He asked them to wave at each other, which they did, and made the pre­dictable joke about the peace process start­ing right there as part of the Maz Jobrani show. There fol­lowed some other pat­ter and then he said, address­ing him­self to some­one else in the audi­ence, say­ing some­thing like, “See, now, we need to start with a wave. Can’t go too far too soon; there’s just too much dis­trust.” Then he turned to the Pales­tini­ans and said, “Please, now, don’t go throw­ing any­thing at them; I don’t know what you brought with you, but don’t throw it. Not tonight.” And then he turned to the Jews and said, “And don’t you go tak­ing her seat; it’s her seat. Okay?”

The audi­ence exploded with laugh­ter. It was not his fun­ni­est joke of the evening, but it was in some ways his most point­edly polit­i­cal, and he car­ried it off so lightly, so well, I was clap­ping as much in admi­ra­tion as I was in laugh­ter. It made me won­der what he would have done with us had we been sit­ting close enough: a Jew­ish Amer­i­can man, a Mus­lim Iran­ian woman and our son. It also reminded me, for some rea­son, of one of my favorite poems by the 12th cen­tury Iran­ian poet Saadi. Here it is in my tranlsation:

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 5

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“You don’t know who you are any­more!” We’ve just fin­ished eat­ing lunch and my grand­mother is sit­ting across from me at her din­ing room table. “All your trav­el­ing, your read­ing, explor­ing other cul­tures,” she purses her lips and looks down. Then she tilts her head ever so slightly to the right and nods a cou­ple of times, a ges­ture that usu­ally means she’s look­ing for a nicer way to say what she really wants to say. After a few sec­onds, she raises her face to me but can barely meet my eyes. “You’ve for­got­ten where you come from,” she says at last, her voice more sad than accusing.

I know what this is about — I told her last week that my wife and I have decided not to have our son cir­cum­cised — but I ask any­way. She knows I know, and I hear in her voice when she answers how much she resents my mak­ing her say it. Oddly, though, she does not try to make me feel guilty about deny­ing my Jew­ish her­itage or about mar­ry­ing a non-Jewish woman. Instead, she says, “You’re only ask­ing for trou­ble, you know. When he gets older he’s going to want to know why he’s not like you; he’s going to think you don’t want him to be like you; and what are you going to tell him when he asks you? Have you thought about that? What are you going to tell him?”

•

My two-and-a-half-year-old son, who’s been sit­ting with­out his dia­per on the car­pet in the liv­ing room, gets up and sits down next to me on the couch. “Dad,” he says, “my dool is soft.”

“Well, it’s sup­posed to be soft,” I tell him.

“No, it’s soft,” he says, his into­na­tion mak­ing clear that I didn’t under­stand him the first time.

“You don’t like it when it’s soft?” I ask, wait­ing to see what he does with the open­ing I’ve given him.

“No,” he answers with­out miss­ing a beat, “I want it to be big…like yours.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “when you get big­ger, your dool will get big­ger to. Right now, it’s the just right size for—

Before I can fin­ish my sen­tence — “for your body” — my son looks up at me, his eyes widen­ing and his mouth curl­ing into a smile. “Dad,” he says, “come see my tools!” — my son is a bud­ding handy­man — “I need to fix the refrig­er­a­tor!” And as if the pre­vi­ous con­ver­sa­tion had not taken place, he grabs my hand and leads me off to his room, where we retrieve his plas­tic ham­mer and screw­driver so he can make sure the refrig­er­a­tor con­tin­ues to keep our food cold.

As we’re walk­ing, I laugh at myself, for I of course saw in my son’s desire for a penis as a big as mine a small moment of cri­sis, a fore­shad­ow­ing of all the ways in which he will try to mea­sure up to me and find him­self want­ing. Yet who knows what he really meant by what he said? And even assum­ing he meant exactly what he said, who knows what sig­nif­i­cance, pre­cisely, he attaches to the notion of big or what he thinks it says about me that my penis is big­ger than his, or about him that his is smaller? I remem­ber how the other day when were watch­ing tele­vi­sion, my son made a point of lay­ing on his side in as close an approx­i­ma­tion to my pos­ture as he could achieve and how he insisted that I notice him, “Dad! Look! I’m sit­ting just like you are!” Or how he takes his laptop-like alphabet-teaching-computer-game and sets it up so he can sit like I sit at my com­puter and type. More and more he wants to be like me, to do the things I do, and so it could be that his com­ment about his penis had noth­ing to do with any of the phal­lic anx­i­ety I could not help but hear in his words. Maybe he was just acknowl­edg­ing that while he can sit or type like I do, he can­not bring his body into con­gru­ence with mine.

My grandmother’s ques­tion and accu­sa­tion comes back to me—What will you tell him when he asks why he’s not cir­cum­cised and you are? He’s going to think you didn’t want him to be like you!—and I won­der not so much what I will tell him, but whether I will ever be able to know pre­cisely what he means by ask­ing.