Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  force) to the Jewish crowds, who in his narrative roared out, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children!’45 The Christian Church has drawn much out of Matthew’s literary decision. It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate. If that lingering and humiliating death on the Cross had been the end of the story, then the tale of Jesus would have remained embedded in Judaism. Jesus might have made it into the history books, even inspired a new departure in Jewish faith, but there would have been little likelihood of a separated or wider religion. Jesus’s public ministry had been to Jews; otherwise he made some forays into the territory of their despised cousins the Samaritans and Mark and Matthew once record him straying out of this Judaic world, into ‘the region of Tyre and Sidon’, where he met his match in wit with a Greek-speaking ‘Canaanite’ woman desperate for him to cure her mentally disturbed daughter.46 Jesus spoke Aramaic as his first language. As the encounter with the Canaanite woman seems to indicate, and is in any case to be expected, he could speak marketplace Greek when he needed to, but that knowledge has left no trace even where one might expect it, in the filtered versions of his story in the Greek New Testament. Jesus left no writings – in fact the only record of his writing is of some doodles in the dirt as a diversion in a tricky situation, and we have no idea what might have been read in them on that day which saved the life of a woman taken in adultery.47 What the Gospels tell us happened after the Crucifixion was the ultimate good news: Jesus came back to human life after three days in the tomb. Somehow a criminal’s death and defeat on the Cross, ‘Good Friday’, as Christians came to call it, were transformed by his followers into a triumph of life over death, and the Passion narratives ended with the story of Easter Resurrection. This Resurrection is not a matter which historians can authenticate; it is a different sort of truth, or statement about truth. It is the most troubling, difficult affirmation in Christianity, but over twenty centuries Christians have thought it central to their faith. Easter is the earliest Christian festival, and it was for its celebration that the Passion narratives were created by the first Christians. Belief in the truth of the Resurrection story and in Jesus’s power to overcome death has made Christians act over twenty centuries in the most heroic, joyful, beautiful and terrible ways. And the fact that Christianity’s Jesus is the resurrected Christ makes a vital point about the misfit between the Jesus whose teachings we have excavated and the Church which came after him. It mattered much less to the first Christ-followers after the Resurrection what Jesus had said than what he did and was doing now, and who he was (or whom people thought him to be). And as he emerged in the first Christian writings, they now thought

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Great Church at the summit of a city overwhelmed with murder, rape and looting, when the Ottoman soldiers battered down the massive door reserved for imperial processions and overwhelmed the worshippers during their defiant last act of divine praise. The Emperor’s head was stuffed with straw and paraded around the cities of the Muslim world; his dynasty was scattered from the city of Constantine.48 Just before the wreck of 1204, the Arab gazetteer Ali ibn Abi Bakr al-Harawi had commented admiringly and wistfully that Constantinople was a ‘city greater than its name! May God make it [an abode] for Islam by His grace and generosity, God the exalted willing.’49 Now the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet had achieved that dream of Muslim conquerors since their first expansion out of Arabia. He had done what neither the Latin crusaders of 1204 nor the divided Greek successors to the shattered Komnenos inheritance had been able to do, and restore the boundaries of the Eastern Empire much as they had once been; there would be more Ottoman expansion to come. The shame and grief in Western Europe was immense and widespread, but despite the usual papal efforts to summon a crusade to attack the city, really there was nothing now to be done apart from mourn for the city and fight to stop the Ottomans moving any further west. So in 1455 the West’s greatest living composer, Guillaume Dufay, far away in Italy in the service of the Duke of Savoy, composed four different polyphonic motets lamenting the end of Constantinople, to words which had been written in Naples. One of Dufay’s motets dramatically reproaches God himself in the person of the Virgin Mary: Most piteous one, O fountain of all hope, father of the son whose weeping mother I am, I come to lay my plaint before your sovereign court about your power and Human Nature, which have now allowed such grievous harm to be Inflicted on my son, who has done me such honour. And weaving around that cry of pain in French is the sonorous accusatory voice from a tenor in Latin, applying the Prophet Jeremiah’s words about fallen Jerusalem familiar in the ceremonies of Holy Week: ‘All her friends have dealt treacherously with her: among all her beloved, she hath none to comfort her.’50 How did the Duke of Savoy react to this implicit reproach to himself alongside all other Western monarchs? It was the Serbian city of Belgrade, far to the west of Constantinople, which benefited from the wave of emotion generated by preachers and musical publicists like Dufay, for it was temporarily saved from Ottoman capture by desperate Western armies in a new expedition in

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And he put his hands on my shoulders, this man who had grown fat since he’d last had to wear a suit, and I couldn’t believe what I had done to him, his eyes glittering green like Alaska’s but sunk deep into dark sockets, like a green- eyed, still-breathing ghost, and don’t no don’t don’t die, Alaska. Don’t die. And I walked out of his embrace and past Lara and Takumi to her casket and knelt before it and placed my hands on the finished wood, the dark mahogany, the color of her hair. I felt the Colonel’s small hands on my shoulders, and a tear dripped onto my head, and for a few moments, it was just the three of us—the buses of students hadn’t arrived, and Takumi and Lara had faded away, and it was just the three of us—three bodies and two people—the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us, too much keeping us from one another. The Colonel said, “I just want to save her so bad,” and I said, “Chip, she’s gone,” and he said, “I thought I’d feel her looking down on us, but you’re right. She’s just gone,” and I said, “Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,” and the Colonel whispered, “I’m so sorry, Pudge. I know you did,” and I said, “No. Not past tense.” She wasn’t even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense. The Colonel knelt down beside me and put his lips to the coffin and whispered, “I am sorry, Alaska. You deserved a better friend.” Is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one? seven days after I SPENT THE NEXT DAY in our room, playing football on mute, at once unable to do nothing and unable to do anything much. It was Martin Luther King Day, our last day before classes started again, and I could think of nothing but having killed her. The Colonel spent the morning with me, but then he decided to go to the cafeteria for meat loaf. “Let’s go,” he said. “Not hungry.” “You have to eat.” “Wanna bet?” I asked without looking up from the game. “Christ. Fine.” He sighed and left, slamming the door behind him. He’s still very angry, I found myself thinking with a bit of pity. No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness, the frank knowledge that you killed her and robbed her of a future and a life. Getting pissed wouldn’t fix it. Damn it. — “How’s the meat loaf?” I asked the Colonel when he returned. “About as you remember it. Neither meaty nor loafy.” The Colonel sat down next to me. “The Eagle ate with me.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The balance of forces in Orthodox Christianity was never the same again after 1204. Orthodoxy beyond the Greeks could now fully emerge from the shadow of the empire which had once both created and constrained it. King Stefan Prvovenčani (‘first-crowned’) of the newly emerged state of Serbia first explored what privileges he might get from Innocent III, but he was deeply offended when the Pope changed his mind about granting him royal insignia. Although both Bulgaria and Serbia did eventually receive crowns from the papacy during the thirteenth century, the momentum of Orthodox practice was too strong to pull them back for long into the orbit of Latin Christianity. Both the newly consolidating Serbian monarchy and the Bulgarian monarchs (who were now calling themselves tsars, emperors) found it convenient to look to the patriarch in Nicaea for recognition of their respective Churches as autocephalous (self-governing). Mount Athos was a major influence in their turn towards Orthodoxy, and in Serbia the memory of one charismatic Athonite member of the princely family, Stefan Prvovenčani’s brother Sava, was decisive. As a young man, Sava renounced his life at Court to become a monk on Mount Athos, where he was joined by his father, the former Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja. Together they refounded the derelict monastery of Chilandar (Hilander) on the mountain, and then Sava returned to organize religious life in a Byzantine mould in Serbia, becoming in 1219 the first archbishop of an autocephalous Church of Serbia. 12. The Byzantine Empire at the Death of Basil II Although Sava and his father might be seen as having renounced worldly ambition in turning to the monastic life, their status as churchmen had a vital political effect on their country. The monastery of Chilandar became an external focus for the unity of the Serbian state and a symbol of its links with the Orthodox East. The monarchy did not merely adopt Byzantine trappings of power but ostentatiously rooted out Bogomil heresy from its dominions – while around 1200 for the first time it also encouraged the use of the Serbian language in the inscriptions of Byzantine-style church paintings. Chilandar became the centre during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for a major enterprise of translating Greek theological and spiritual writings into a formal literary vernacular which would be generally comprehensible to the varied peoples who spoke Slavonic languages. Above all, Sava’s immense spiritual prestige gave a continuing sacred quality to the Serbian royal dynasty amid the poisonous divisions of Serbian power politics. His memory became so much part of Serb identity that when the conquering Ottoman Turks wanted to humiliate and cow the Serbs in 1595, they dug up Sava’s bones in Belgrade and publicly burned them.27 13. The Byzantine Empire Reunited under Michael Palaeologos ORTHODOX RENAISSANCE, OTTOMANS AND HESYCHASM TRIUMPHANT (1300-1400)

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  We gotta go study. I gotta go.” “Will you call us later, then? I’m sure Dad wants to talk to you.” “Yeah, Mom; yeah, of course. I love you, okay? Okay, I gotta go.” — “I think I found something!” I shouted at the Colonel, invisible beneath his blanket, but the urgency in my voice and the promise of something, anything, found, woke the Colonel up instantly, and he jumped from his bunk to the linoleum. Before I could say anything, he grabbed yesterday’s jeans and sweatshirt from the floor, pulled them on, and followed me outside. “Look.” I pointed, and he squatted down beside the phone and said, “Yeah. She drew that. She was always doodling those flowers.” “And ‘just doodling,’ remember? Jake asked her what she was doing and she said ‘just doodling,’ and then she said ‘Oh God’ and freaked out. She looked at the doodle and remembered something.” “Good memory, Pudge,” he acknowledged, and I wondered why the Colonel wouldn’t just get excited about it. “And then she freaked out,” I repeated, “and went and got the tulips while we were getting the fireworks. She saw the doodle, remembered whatever she’d forgotten, and then freaked out.” “Maybe,” he said, still staring at the flower, trying perhaps to see it as she had. He stood up finally and said, “It’s a solid theory, Pudge,” and reached up and patted my shoulder, like a coach complimenting a player. “But we still don’t know what she forgot.” sixty-nine days after A WEEK AFTER THE DISCOVERY of the doodled flower, I’d resigned myself to its insignificance—I wasn’t Banzan in the meat market after all—and as the maples around campus began to hint of resurrection and the maintenance crew began mowing the grass in the dorm circle again, it seemed to me we had finally lost her. The Colonel and I walked into the woods down by the lake that afternoon and smoked a cigarette in the precise spot where the Eagle had caught us so many months before. We’d just come from a town meeting, where the Eagle announced the school was going to build a playground by the lake in memory of Alaska. She did like swings, I guess, but a playground? Lara stood up at the meeting—surely a first for her—and said they should do something funnier, something Alaska herself would have done. Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy, half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me, “Lara was right. We should do something for her. A prank. Something she would have loved.” “Like, a memorial prank?” “Exactly. The Alaska Young Memorial Prank. We can make it an annual event. Anyway, she came up with this idea last year. But she wanted to save it to be our senior prank. But it’s good. It’s really good.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  1456.51 By then there was nothing to be done for ‘the City’ itself. A century later, in 1557, a scholar-librarian in Augsburg, Hieronymus Wolf, invented the Latin word which I use freely throughout this book to describe the culture of the Greek Orthodox East: he took the old Greek name of the city Byzantion to create the term Byzantium.52 It took an external observer from the Renaissance West to formalize this description, with its resonances of a Christian culture whose roots were in the pre-Christian world – and for Wolf, the term referred to a culture, not an empire. By Wolf’s time Byzantium had long ceased to be a living political reality, and it never would be again. The people of Constantinople who could not flee did indeed suffer the fate which Guillaume Dufay had recalled from Jeremiah: like the people of Jerusalem long before them, they were sent off into slavery. But the Sultan wanted his new imperial capital brought to life; he could not leave the city as a wasteland. Almost immediately he began bringing in new people, and the majority of them were once again Christian and Greek. The Sultan realized that a vital encouragement as earnest of his good intentions would be to restore the Oecumenical Patriarchate, and within less than a year after the capture, he was able to choose a distinguished clergyman, George Scholarios, who now as a monk took the name Gennadios. Scholarios had been a delegate at the Council of Florence while still a layperson, because of his familiarity with Western theology and scholastic method; but usefully for the Sultan, the experience had turned him against the West and against the union with Rome in particular (naturally, Gennadios now made sure that the union was repudiated). One of the first things which the new patriarch did was to burn one of the most important writings of fifteenth-century Byzantium’s most distinguished philosopher, Georgios Gemistos (who wrote under the pseudonym Plethon, suggesting both ‘fullness’ and Plato). What he objected to was Plethon’s impassioned advocacy of Plato’s philosophy and even of pre-Christian Greek religion. Such censorship was understandable in the Patriarch’s own terms, but it was an important signal about the future direction of Greek Orthodoxy. This was a time when the Renaissance of the West was reaching the height of its rediscovery of and enthusiasm for Classical literature and, through Plethon, Plato in particular (see p. 576); Plethon’s surviving manuscripts found a safe home and much esteem in Western libraries.53 As in literature, so in art. The growing naturalism of late Byzantine art, such as that wonderfully presented in the mosaics of the Holy Redeemer in Chora, was left behind. As significant as the fate of Plethon’s manuscripts was the strange career of one of the most brilliant and original artists in sixteenth-century Christendom, Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614). Born in Crete, Theotokopoulos trained on the

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And you’re gone.” I followed him into the room. He grabbed the almanac from his bunk, zipped his jacket, closed the door, and POOF. He was gone. — With morning came visitors. An hour after the Colonel left, resident stoner Hank Walsten dropped by to offer me some weed, which I graciously turned down. Hank hugged me and said, “At least it was instant. At least there wasn’t any pain.” I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn’t get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving. And what is an “instant” death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. Was there time for her life to flash before her eyes? Was I there? Was Jake? And she promised, I remembered, she promised to be continued, but I knew, too, that she was driving north when she died, north toward Nashville, toward Jake. Maybe it hadn’t meant anything to her, had been nothing more than another grand impulsivity. And as Hank stood in the doorway, I just looked past him, looking across the too-quiet dorm circle, wondering if it had mattered to her, and I can only tell myself that of course, yes, she had promised. To be continued. — Lara came next, her eyes heavy with swelling. “What happeened?” she asked me as I held her, standing on my tiptoes so I could place my chin on top of her head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Deed you see her that night?” she asked, speaking into my collarbone. “She got drunk,” I told her. “The Colonel and I went to sleep, and I guess she drove off campus.” And that became the standard lie. I felt Lara’s fingers, wet with her tears, press against my palm, and before I could think better of it, I pulled my hand away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Eet’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be een my room eef you want to come by.” I did not drop by. I didn’t know what to say to her—I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side. — That afternoon, we all filed into the gym again for a town meeting. The Eagle announced that the school would charter a bus on Sunday to the funeral in Vine Station. As we got up to leave, I noticed Takumi and Lara walking toward me.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  axis. The sun didn’t fall from the sky. One less person drew breath, one less person sat among us, but the world creaked on and on. Most of Brother Terrell’s longtime followers and supporters had left him by the time Randall died. After his release from prison in 1987 he put up tents that seated twenty-five hundred, small tents by his old standards, and was lucky to draw two hundred people. Some believers had drifted away years earlier when news of his relationships with my mother and the preacher woman became known. Others left when he divorced the preacher woman and married a woman young enough to be his daughter. On the day of the funeral, many found their way back. The Bangs church, built to seat about twenty-five hundred, was full. Old friends flew toward one another, often meeting in front of the casket, laughing and talking in subdued voices while Randall slept on, hands folded on his chest. The family sat quiet and subdued. A minister who was a friend to Randall and a colleague of Brother Terrell’s opened the service with a prayer. He spoke of Randall as a man of faith, a preacher. This image of Randall did not fit with my memory of the boy who could not sit through a tent service, the boy who was always angling for a chance to play husbands and wives. The minister looked down at the casket. “Brother Randall fasted, prayed, and believed the Word, just like his daddy. He taught me so much about faith. I know many of y’all came to hear him preach over the years and heard the story of how time and time again God raised him up from his deathbed.” The family shifted from side to side. We studied our fingernails. I noticed a long scuff across the toe of my right boot. “I know there are others out there who have stories of how Brother Randall’s testimony blessed and changed your lives. I invite you to come on up.” Pam’s husband walked up the prayer ramp and took the microphone. “Randall taught me a lot, and some of it was about what not to do. I remember the time he convinced me we could make extra money by charging people who came to the tent twenty-five cents to park. The money was nothing compared to the whipping Brother Terrell gave us. Randall also taught me the rules of fasting; if you can get it through a straw, it ain’t cheatin’.” Only the family laughed. We were not here to testify for Brother Randall. We were here to say good-bye, or hello, depending on how things went, to the boy Randall. My sisters approached the front of the church next. There were those who thought it wrong that these girls, women now, never publicly acknowledged by Brother Terrell, should speak in his church, but this was not their day.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in 1492, they inherited a new and substantial Jewish population in that city-state. The situation, they decided, had got out of hand, and as a final solution to the Jewish problem, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion. Spanish Jewry was destroyed. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen, went into exile. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews all over the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jews lost their land and were forced into exile in scattered communities outside Palestine, known collectively as the Diaspora. From that time on, exile was a painful leitmotif of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 came at the end of a century that had seen the ejection of Jews from one part of Europe after another. They were deported from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Augsburg in 1439, from Bavaria in 1442, and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. Jews were expelled from Perugia (1485), Vicenza (1486), Parma (1488), Milan and Lucca (1489), and Tuscany in 1494. Gradually the Jews drifted east, establishing, as they thought, a foothold for themselves in Poland.7 Exile now seemed an endemic and inescapable part of the Jewish condition. This was certainly the conviction of those Spanish Jews who after the expulsion took refuge in the North African and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire. They were used to Muslim society, but the loss of Spain—or Sefarad, as they called it—had inflicted a deep psychic wound. These Sephardic Jews felt that they themselves and everything else were in the wrong place.8 Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of the exile is wholly unfamiliar and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Kotler believed that his students kept the whole world in existence. God had created the heavens and the earth simply in order that men could study the Torah. Only if the Jewish people studied the Holy Law day and night would it fulfill its vocation. If they stopped, “the universe would be immediately destroyed.”25 It was a piety that sprang from too close a brush with total annihilation. Any secular study not only was a waste of time, but was tantamount to assimilation with the murderous gentile culture. Any form of Judaism which tried to absorb aspects of modern culture—religious Zionism, Reform, Conservative, or Neo-Orthodox—was illegitimate.26 In a world that had recently dedicated itself to the destruction of Judaism, there could be no such compromise. The true Jew must separate himself from this world and devote himself wholly to the texts. The new postwar yeshivot reflected the desperation of fundamentalist spirituality. The holy texts were all that remained from the Jews’ crushing confrontation with modernity during the twentieth century. Six million of the Jewish people had been killed; the yeshivot and Hasidic courts had all been destroyed, together with countless classics of Jewish learning; the lifestyle of the ghetto had gone forever, and with it an intimate knowledge of centuries of traditional observance; the Holy Land was being polluted by the Zionists. All that a zealous Jew could do to fill the void was to cling to the texts which preserved his last link with the divine. The destruction of the Holocaust had changed the nature of Torah study. In the ghetto world, many of the traditional rites and practices had been accepted as a “given”; there had been no alternative way of living or observing the Torah. The first generation of refugees still had that knowledge of exactly how these rites should be performed in their bones, but their children and grandchildren, who were so anxious to re-create the lost world of their murdered ancestors, were no longer so instinctively aware of this customal observance, which had never needed to be written down formally. The only way they could recover this vanishing Torah world was to comb the texts for scraps of information. From the 1950s, the yeshiva world was flooded by learned monographs describing in minute and complicated detail procedures which in pre-Holocaust Europe had seemed natural and a matter of course. Each succeeding generation would depend on such scholarship more than its predecessors.27 As a result of the destruction, Jewish life was more text-bound and reliant on the written word than ever before.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Some have found that, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, they can only see God as the suffering, impotent divinity of Zimzum, who is not in control of creation. 16 The imagery of the divine sparks trapped in matter and the restorative mission of tikkun still inspires modern and fundamentalist Jewish movements. Lurianic Kabbalah was, like all true myth, a revelation that showed Jews what their lives basically were and what they meant. The myth contained its own truth, and was at some deep level self-evident. It neither could receive nor did it require rational demonstration. Today we should call the Lurianic myth a symbol or a metaphor, but this also is to rationalize it. In the original Greek, the word “symbol” meant to throw two things together so that they became inseparable. As soon as Western people began to say that a rite or an icon was “only a symbol,” the modern consciousness, which insists upon such separations, had arrived. In traditional religion, myth is inseparable from cult, which brings eternal reality into the mundane lives of worshippers by means of ceremonies and meditative practices. Despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so crucial to the Jewish experience had it not been expressed in eloquent rituals that evoked within the exiles a sense of transcendent meaning. In Safed, Kabbalists devised special rites to reenact Luria’s theology. They would make night vigils to help them to identify with the Shekhinah, whom they imagined as a woman, wandering in distress through the world, yearning for her divine source. Jews would rise at midnight, remove their shoes, weep, and rub their faces in the dust. These ritual actions served to express their own sense of grief and abandonment, and to link them with the experience of loss endured also by the Divine Presence. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation that lies at the heart of so much human distress, but which is central to the suffering of exile. There were penitential disciplines—fastings, lashings, rolling in the snow—performed as acts of tikkun . Kabbalists would go for long walks through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah and acting out their own sense of homelessness. Jewish law insisted that prayer could have its deepest force and meaning only when performed communally, in a group of at least ten males; but in Safed, Jews were instructed to pray alone, to experience fully their very real sense of isolation and vulnerability in the world. This solitary prayer put some distance between the Jew and the rest of society, prepared him for a different type of experience, and helped him to appreciate anew the perilous isolation of the Jewish people in a world that constantly threatened its existence. 17 But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The myth of Husain had kept the passion for social justice alive in the Shiah, but his story and the story of the Imams also showed how impossible it was to implement this divine ideal in a world that could not accommodate radical change. 64 But this no longer applied in the modern world. Iranians were experiencing change to an alarming degree; they could not respond to the old rites and symbols in the same way. Shariati was attempting to reformulate Shiism so that it could speak to Muslims in this deeply altered world. Shariati insisted that Islam was more dynamic than any other faith. Its very terminology showed its progressive thrust. In the West, the word “politics” derived from the Greek polis (“city”), a static administrative unit, but the Islamic equivalent was siyasat , which literally meant “taming a wild horse,” a process implying a forceful struggle to bring out an inherent perfection. 65 The Arabic terms ummah and imam both derived from the root amm (“decision to go”): the Imam, therefore, was a model who would take the people in a new direction. The community (ummah) was not simply a collection of individuals but was goal-oriented, ready for perpetual revolution. 66 The notion of ijtihad (“independent judgment”) implied a constant intellectual effort to renew and rebuild; it was not, Shariati insisted, the privilege of a few ulema , but the duty of every Muslim. 67 The centrality of hijrah (“migration”) to the Muslim experience implied a readiness for change, and an uprooting that kept Muslims in touch with the newness of existence. 68 Even intizar (“waiting for the return of the Hidden Imam”) suggested a constant alertness to the possibility of transformation and implied a refusal to accept the status quo: “It makes [man’s] responsibility for his own course, the course of truth, the course of mankind, heavy, immediate, logical, and vital.” The Shiism of Ali was a faith that compelled Muslims to stand up and say “No!” 69 The regime could not permit this kind of talk, and in 1973 the husainiyyah was closed down. Shariati was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. He then endured a period of internal exile in Iran, before being permitted to leave the country. His father recalled that one night during this period, he heard Shariati weeping as he bade farewell to the Prophet and Imam Ali before his death. 70 In 1977, Shariati died in London, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents. Shariati prepared the educated, Westernized Iranians for an Islamic revolution. He was as pivotal a figure for intellectuals during the 1970s as Al-e Ahmad had been in the sixties.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the beginning of 1977, however, the regime relaxed somewhat and appeared to bow to public pressure. Jimmy Carter had been elected to the presidency of the United States the previous year, and his human rights campaign, plus a damning report from Amnesty International about the state of Iran’s courts and prisons, may have inclined the shah to make some concession to the prevailing discontent. There was little real change, but the censorship laws were eased and a flood of literature hit the market revealing frustration in nearly every sector of society. The students were angry about government interference in the universities; farmers protested about the agricultural imports, which had increased the poverty in the countryside; businessmen were worried about inflation and corruption; lawyers protested against the decision to downgrade the Supreme Court.53 But there was still no call for revolution. Most of the ulema in Iran followed the lead of Shariatmadari and maintained the traditional quietist line. It was not the clergy but the writers of Iran who made the most eloquent protest against the government in 1977. From October 10 to 19, in the Goethe Institute in Tehran, about sixty leading Iranian poets and writers read their work to thousands of adults and students. SAVAK did not interrupt these poetry recitals, despite their outright hostility to the regime.54 It seemed as though the government was learning to accommodate peaceful protest. But the new era did not last long. Not long after the poetry meetings, the shah clearly felt that matters were getting out of hand. A number of known dissidents were arrested and on November 3, 1977, Khomeini’s son Mustafa died mysteriously in Iraq, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents.55 Yet again, the shah had cast himself in the role of Yazid. Khomeini was already surrounded by a Shii aura and had begun to seem a little like the Hidden Imam in his exile; now, like Imam Husain, his son had been killed by a tyrannical ruler. All over Iran, the people gathered to mourn Mustafa Khomeini, weeping and beating their breasts in the traditional manner. In Tehran, the police attacked the mourners, and there were more arrests and beatings during poetry readings held in Tehran on November 15, 16, and 25. But still there was no sign of a general uprising. In Najaf, Khomeini, who used to call Mustafa the “light of his eyes,” was silent.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In traditional religion, myth is inseparable from cult, which brings eternal reality into the mundane lives of worshippers by means of ceremonies and meditative practices. Despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so crucial to the Jewish experience had it not been expressed in eloquent rituals that evoked within the exiles a sense of transcendent meaning. In Safed, Kabbalists devised special rites to reenact Luria’s theology. They would make night vigils to help them to identify with the Shekhinah, whom they imagined as a woman, wandering in distress through the world, yearning for her divine source. Jews would rise at midnight, remove their shoes, weep, and rub their faces in the dust. These ritual actions served to express their own sense of grief and abandonment, and to link them with the experience of loss endured also by the Divine Presence. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation that lies at the heart of so much human distress, but which is central to the suffering of exile. There were penitential disciplines—fastings, lashings, rolling in the snow—performed as acts of tikkun. Kabbalists would go for long walks through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah and acting out their own sense of homelessness. Jewish law insisted that prayer could have its deepest force and meaning only when performed communally, in a group of at least ten males; but in Safed, Jews were instructed to pray alone, to experience fully their very real sense of isolation and vulnerability in the world. This solitary prayer put some distance between the Jew and the rest of society, prepared him for a different type of experience, and helped him to appreciate anew the perilous isolation of the Jewish people in a world that constantly threatened its existence.17 But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy. The midnight rituals always ended at dawn with a meditation upon the final reunion of the Shekhinah with Ein Sof and, consequently, the end of the separation of humanity from the divine. The Kabbalist was instructed to imagine that every one of his limbs was an earthly shrine for the Divine Presence.18 All the world religions insist that no spirituality is valid unless it results in practical compassion, and Lurianic Kabbalah was true to this insight. There were severe penances for faults that injured others: for sexual exploitation, for malicious gossip, for humiliating one’s fellows, and for dishonoring parents.19

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To break the deadlock with the Council of Guardians, the energetic Speaker of the Majlis, Hojjat ol-Islam Hashemi Rafsanjani, urged Khomeini to use his authority as Supreme Faqih to get the Land Bill passed. The constitution gave the Faqih final say on all Islamic matters, and he could overrule the decision of the Council of Guardians. Khomeini could, Rafsanjani suggested, cite the Islamic principle of maslahah (“public necessity”), which allowed a jurist to legislate “secondary ordinances” about issues not directly provided for in the Koran and the Sunnah, if the welfare of the people demanded it. But Khomeini did not wish to do this. He was beginning to realize that the position of the Supreme Faqih could weaken the authority of the institutions that the Islamic republic needed if it was to survive in the modern world. He was an old man. If he kept intervening and overturning the decisions of government institutions on the basis of his personal charisma, the Majlis and Council would lose their credibility and integrity, and the Islamic constitution would not survive his death. The impasse between the Council and the Majlis continued. Khomeini tried to shame the ulema by pointing to the example of the Iranian children who were dying every day as martyrs in the war with Iraq. These child martyrs show the moral dangers of translating a mystical insight into practical policy. From the moment war was declared, adolescents had crowded into the mosques begging to be sent to the front. Many of them came from the slums and shantytowns and had been radicalized during the Revolution. Afterward, they found their inevitably dull and grim lives an anticlimax. Some had joined the Foundation for the Downtrodden or worked for Construction Jihad, but this could not compare with the excitement of the battlefield. Iran was technically ill-equipped for the war; there had been a population explosion, and the youth formed the majority group in the country. The Foundation for the Downtrodden became the nucleus of an army of twenty million young people who were eager for action. The government passed an edict which allowed male children from the age of twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They would become the wards of the Imam, and could be assured of a place in paradise in the event of their death. Tens of thousands of adolescents, wearing crimson headbands (the insignia of a martyr), poured into the war zone. Some cleared minefields, running ahead of the troops and often getting blown to pieces. Others became suicide-bombers, attacking Iraqi tanks kamikaze-style. Special scribes were sent to the front to write their wills, many of which took the form of letters to Imam Khomeini, and spoke of the light he had brought into their lives and of the joy of fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”25

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The destruction of the Holocaust had changed the nature of Torah study. In the ghetto world, many of the traditional rites and practices had been accepted as a “given”; there had been no alternative way of living or observing the Torah. The first generation of refugees still had that knowledge of exactly how these rites should be performed in their bones, but their children and grandchildren, who were so anxious to re-create the lost world of their murdered ancestors, were no longer so instinctively aware of this customal observance, which had never needed to be written down formally. The only way they could recover this vanishing Torah world was to comb the texts for scraps of information. From the 1950s, the yeshiva world was flooded by learned monographs describing in minute and complicated detail procedures which in pre-Holocaust Europe had seemed natural and a matter of course. Each succeeding generation would depend on such scholarship more than its predecessors. 27 As a result of the destruction, Jewish life was more text-bound and reliant on the written word than ever before. There was a new stringency in fundamentalist Judaism. By the 1960s, Rabbi Simla Elberg, then visiting Bnei Brak, noted that an “extensive revolution in the entire alignment of the religious life” was taking place there. The Jews in the “city of Torah” were observing the commandments far more rigorously than ever before. 28 This effort to obey the law more fully than had been possible in previous ages was heroic: it was a way of incarnating the divine in a world that had been brutally emptied of God. The Haredim of Bnei Brak were finding new ways of being punctilious and exact about such questions as diet and purification, even if this made their lives more difficult. The Hazon Ish had set the tone in the 1930s, when he first arrived in Palestine. A group of religious Zionists had approached him with a query. They wanted to observe Jewish agricultural law in their settlement, and to farm the Holy Land according to the Torah. Did that mean that every seven years they should let their fields lie fallow, as the law enjoined? 29 To observe this “sabbatical year” would obviously cause great hardship and was a practice utterly opposed to the techniques of modern agriculture, which were designed for maximum efficiency. Rabbi Kook had found a legal loophole for the settlers, but the Hazon Ish was adamantly opposed to such leniency (kula) . The challenge, he said, lay precisely in the difficulty. The law demanded that the farmer sacrifice his prosperity for a higher good.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Spanish Jewry was destroyed. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen, went into exile. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews all over the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE , when the Jews lost their land and were forced into exile in scattered communities outside Palestine, known collectively as the Diaspora. From that time on, exile was a painful leitmotif of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 came at the end of a century that had seen the ejection of Jews from one part of Europe after another. They were deported from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Augsburg in 1439, from Bavaria in 1442, and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. Jews were expelled from Perugia (1485), Vicenza (1486), Parma (1488), Milan and Lucca (1489), and Tuscany in 1494. Gradually the Jews drifted east, establishing, as they thought, a foothold for themselves in Poland. 7 Exile now seemed an endemic and inescapable part of the Jewish condition. This was certainly the conviction of those Spanish Jews who after the expulsion took refuge in the North African and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire. They were used to Muslim society, but the loss of Spain—or Sefarad, as they called it—had inflicted a deep psychic wound. These Sephardic Jews felt that they themselves and everything else were in the wrong place. 8 Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of the exile is wholly unfamiliar and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God. The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Thus on February 18, forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds of mourners, led by the ulema and bazaaris, swarmed onto the streets of major Iranian cities to weep for the dead. Women students, many of whom wore the veil to dissociate themselves from the regime, and chadored women from the bazaar often led the processions, as if to challenge the police to fire directly at them. The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted.66 Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd.67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.”68 The word for martyr, shaheed, meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology.69

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Only that for my beloved Gennie, pain had become enough of a reason not to stay. And our friendship had not been able to alter that. I remembered Gennie’s favorite lines in one of my poems. I had found them doodled and scrawled along the margins of page after page of the notebooks which she had entrusted to my care in the movies that Friday afternoon. and in the brief moment that is today wild hope this dreamer jars for I have heard in whispers talk of life on other stars. None of us had given her a good enough reason to stay here, not even me. I could not escape that. Was that the anger behind her great closed eyes? The skin of Gennie’s cheek was hot and rough under my fingers. Why what? You know why . Those were the last words Gennie ever said to me. Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go. I mustn’t let her go. Two dozen empty capsules. Sitting through the movie twice. Standing on the corner waiting for the 14th Street bus. I should never have left her. But it was getting dark already. Scared of another whipping for getting home too late. Come home with me, Gennie. Not caring any more what my mother would say to that. Gennie, angry with me. Telling me to go away. I went . Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go. By Monday afternoon Genevieve was dead. I called the hospital from Hunter. I walked out of the building and went home, leaving my books behind, wanting to be alone. My mother opened the door. She put one arm around me as I walked into the kitchen. “Genevieve’s dead, Mother.” I sat down heavily at the table. “Yes, I know. I called her father to see if there was anything we could do, and he told me.” She was looking into my face. “Why didn’t you tell us it was suicide?” I wanted to cry—even that little piece was gone. “It’s her father himself said so. Do you know anything about it? You can tell me, I’m your mother, after all. We won’t say anything more about your lying this time. Did she talk to you about it?” I put my head down on the table. From there I could see out the kitchen window, slightly open. The woman across the air shaft was fixing food. “No.” “I’ll fix you some tea. You mustn’t be upset too much by all this, dear heart.” My mother turned, rubbing the edge of the tea strainer dry, over and over again. “Look, my darling child, I know she was your friend and you feel bad, but this is what I been cautioning you about. Be careful who you go around with.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  for ceremonies such as baptism and ordination which is known as the Liturgy of Addai and Mari. That lends it an association with those whom the Syrian Church reveres as its founders, but there is little doubt that it was the form of eucharistic prayer used in the Church of Edessa and it may be as early as the late second century. Nothing else preserved from anywhere in the Christian world has survived the austere scrutiny of modern liturgical scholars, to be authenticated as a form of worship that would have been familiar to very early Christians week by week.70 It is a rare privilege to have been welcomed as I was to a congregation of exiled Christians from Baghdad in their refuge in Damascus, still mourning those murdered in the latest agonies of the Syriac Church, and to know that words were being solemnly sung as so many centuries ago they had first been chanted in Edessa: Your majesty, O Lord, a thousand thousand heavenly beings worship, and myriad myriads of angels, hosts of spiritual beings, ministers of fire and spirit with cherubim and holy seraphim, glorify your name, crying out and glorifying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, God almighty, Heaven and earth are full of his glories’… Since Syrians lived either side of the shifting frontier between Rome and its eastern neighbours, the Church was naturally as liable to spread eastwards as westwards. At the beginning of the third century, Bar-Daisan could speak of Christian communities in the sprawling regions of Central Asia which now form such ex-Soviet Republics as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while from further south Christian graves have been found on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf which can be dated to the mid-third century. The Parthians showed little hostility to this new religion, but there was a significant shift with the founding of the Sassanian Empire in the 220s; the first restored shah, Ardashir, was the grandson of a high priest of the Zoroastrian faith and a Zoroastrian restoration became a keynote of the new empire’s drive to restore Iranian tradition.71 Relations between episcopal Christians and Manichaeans were tense enough, but that was because they had much in common in the role which they assigned to Jesus Christ. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity. Like Manichaeism, it was a dualist faith, but it was not the dualism which led Manichees and gnostics to regard the world and matter as evil. The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being, in which the world created by the ‘Wise Lord’ (Ahura Mazda) was the forum for a struggle between the creator and an uncreated ‘Evil Spirit’ (Ahriman). The Zoroastrians’ experience of the world was therefore shot through with divinity; Zoroastrians made animal sacrifices to Ahura Mazda and paid reverence to fire. They despised Christian and Manichaean asceticism, which were developing in Syria just as the