Ishmael's Life In Exile

Last night I joined the official Facebook group for fans of Shtisel. To join you had to say who was your favorite character and why. I answered that my favorite character was Lippe Weiss, because he was always being told he wasn't good enough, or was being scolded for failure, yet in himself he embodies true spiritual values such as humility, generosity and patience. I  guess I identify with his struggles to find success as a family man and as a member of a devout community.  I love the series and I have always loved Yiddish literature and depictions of shtetl life. Yet I also realize that of the millions of non-religious people who love Shtisel, only a handful would actually be willing or able to trade places with any of the characters.  Pursuing this orthodoxy thought pattern last night, I watched two or three documentaries about haredi life, two were about the Satmar, one portrayed the Adass community of Australia and one told the story of power struggle in the city of Monroe, New York, where a Satmar enclave there met with resistance from locals against expanding their community (City of Joel).  I feel there is a lot that is cult-like about the Hasidic form of life and I do believe that many individuals are traumatized by extreme, binding, legalistic, intolerant and oppressive religious cultures. Then why is it so fascinating and why do I return to this theme, over and over again?

I suppose I am attracted to Judaism out of my childhood experience. I grew up a "wanna be" almost anything since I had no ethnic identity of my own. Growing up in a bicultural home, we were not Hungarian but then, not really completely American.  I actually have a lot in common with pious Jews who reject Zionism, in that I was  raised to have no national identity or patriotism. As I said before, I obsessively studied the Holocaust over the years in fits and starts. When I once found  a book describing the childhood and psychology of those whose parents survived the Holocaust, there was a very close identification. My father behaved like a survivor. He raised us to always live in readiness for the onslaught of cossacks or nazis.  In fact, he brutalized us himself in the name of training and preparation for a dog-eat-dog world, and harmed us much more  that the outside world ever did. It was he who crippled us and clipped our wings.  He was a survivor of the Hungarian Revolution, and to that extent he did witness atrocities, only he was not Jewish or persecuted for his identity. Whether he was already twisted or the history he lived through twisted him, he should never have been a parent.  So I guess partly it is natural to seek an identity if you don't have one in childhood or youth. And it is understandable that I would seek to belong to a community since I had no family (in the emotional sense) and experienced society as an outcast. At the same time, having abusive parents exacerbated an inborn rebellious streak so my impulses were conflicted:  I wanted to belong but didn't want to conform. 

I think many people who are not born into pious or orthodox communities of various traditions may be attracted to such cults or communities for some of the same reasons as myself:  seeking a sense of identity and belonging; a greater purpose; a way to give meaning to one's life; a way of being of service, a substitute family, etc., However, in my case there was also a deeper need, that of being redeemed from the unworthiness, shame, and rejection I found myself saddled with soon after arriving into the world. People have a deep need to view themselves as being 'good' or acceptable to others, and they certainly have a need to feel loved. But Purity and the Law only condemn, they do not redeem or restore.  I had no self-possession as a child, no way to protect my "purity".  I only experienced a desperate need to be loved and affirmed. Even though my life was not under my control, and the abuse was not my fault,  I still felt shame, guilt, and self-hatred. What I wanted from religion was a way to make myself 'clean', to reclaim lost wholeness and innocence. Yet I was looking for love in all the wrong places,  because religion only condemns, shuns, judges, rejects, spits on. In my long history with various churches and spiritual groups and even one cult, no matter what the official claims of love and acceptance there might be, judgement and shunning always lurked.  Like Cain, my offerings were rejected and like Ishmael, I was cast out.

An incident from my youth perfectly encapsulates this conflict.  My parents had sent me to Hungary to meet my father's side of the family upon High School graduation. My Hungarian relatives had enrolled me in a boarding school for the children of expatriate Hungarians in the town of  Sarospatak.  I made friends there with two other girls at the school and one day the ringleader of our threesome made a plan for us to catch a bus to another nearby town and go on an adventure.  Even though it was against the rules,  I was game. I will never forget sitting near the window in the mostly empty bus, drinking in all the scenery. We passed what seemed to have been a very old building, a school or temple, where a minyan of young Hasidim were davening and praying in a circle outside...I was so fascinated I couldn't help staring and didn't think it was wrong to do so, after all they were some distance away from where I was sitting on the bus...All of a sudden one of the young men looked up and caught me watching them. He gave me the meanest, dirtiest look, as if I were some kind of pervert or voyeur.  I was deeply shamed and looked away...I felt as if I was irredeemably bad and rejected and would never belong anywhere. His condemnation of my innocent curiosity was an affirmation of all the negative things I believed and felt about myself. There is a reason for the things we remember and the things we forget. 

Overall I've healed to the point now where I accept myself and love myself mostly if not completely.  I've grown to the point I no longer feel the need to consider myself 'good' in and of myself. I am still seeking G-d, still trying to find a path somewhere in the middle between total immersion in piety (which never worked before and which I reject as not conducive to growing one's humanity) and doing nothing at all in terms of structure or ritual to acknowledge my indebtedness to my Higher Power; to worship my Creator and seek His face. Also I've come to understand that though I strongly disagree with many of the teachings and fruits of orthodox religion and am still deeply scandalized by how people claiming to love goodness or follow the example of Jesus/Yeshua can admire and empower wicked and hateful leaders, fight against science, progress and democracy; and serve as instruments of oppression and atrocity, still--  religious communities overall manifest the same mixture of good and bad, humanity and inhumanity, darkness and light, as seen in any other group of humans...The real question is, in view of the claims of religious people to "sanctity",  why does religion in fact fail to produce people truly more holy than the unbeliever or impious?  Religious people sin as much as secular people, they just sin in a different way. From a certain point of view, the sins of religious people are WORSE, given their alleged proximity to G-d or access to grace.  As much as I admire in certain ways the various orthodox religious communities I've become familiar with or the Ashkenazi shtetl I once romanticized, I know if I had been born into such a community, that I would most likely have left it, if at all I possibly could. 

1. Zohar Strauss as Lippe Weiss in Shtisel

2. "Isaac Born, Ishmael Banished", by Gustave Dore

3. William Blake, Cain and Abel 

4. Young Hasid with Shtreimel by Aristides Oeconomo, 1871 

5. painting by Odd Nerdrum