Joy

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.

Page 141 of 299 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  19 Finally the Kabbalists were taught the mystical practices that have evolved in most of the world faiths, which help the adept to access the deeper regions of the psyche and gain intuitive insight. In Safed, meditation centered on detailed, skilled reconfigurations of the letters composing God’s name. These “concentrations” (kawwanot) would help the Kabbalist to become aware of a trace of the divine within himself. He would become, leading Kabbalists believed, a prophet, able to utter a new mythos, bring to light a hitherto unknown religious truth, just as Luria had done. These kawwanot certainly brought Kabbalists great joy. Haim Vital (1542–1620), one of Luria’s disciples, said that in ecstasy he trembled and shook with elation and awe. Kabbalists saw visions and experienced a rapturous transcendence that transfigured the world at a time when it seemed cruel and alien. 20 Rational thought has achieved astonishing success in the practical sphere, but it cannot assuage our sorrow. After the Spanish disaster, Kabbalists found that the rational disciplines of philosophy, which had been popular among the Jews of al-Andalus, could not address their pain. 21 Life seemed drained of meaning, and without meaning in their lives, human beings can fall into despair. To make life bearable, the exiles turned to mythos and mysticism, which enabled them to make contact with the unconscious sources of their pain, loss, and desire, and anchored their lives in a vision that brought them comfort. It is noticeable, however, that unlike Ignatius of Loyola, Luria and his disciples devised no practical plans for the political salvation of the Jews. Kabbalists had settled in the Land of Israel, but they were not Zionists; Luria did not urge Jews to end their exile by migrating to the Holy Land. He did not use his mythology or his mystical vision to create an ideology that would be a blueprint for action. This was not the job of mythos; all such practical planning and political activity were the domain of logos—rational, discursive thought. Luria knew that his mission as a mystic was to save Jews from existential and spiritual despair. When these myths were later applied to the practical world of politics, the results could be disastrous, as we shall see later in this chapter. Without a cult, without prayer and ritual, myths and doctrines have no meaning. Without the special ceremonies and rites that made the myth accessible to the Kabbalists, Luria’s creation story would have remained a senseless fiction. It was only in a liturgical context that any religious belief became meaningful.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This inevitably brought them into conflict with the new hard-line Shiism of some of the ulema, who drove Mulla Sadra out of Isfahan. For ten years he was forced to live in a small village near Qum. During this period of solitude, he realized that despite his devotion to mystical philosophy, his approach to religion had still been too cerebral. The study of jurisprudence (fiqh) or extrinsic theology could only give us information about religion; it could not yield the illumination and personal transformation that is the ultimate goal of the religious quest. It was only when he began seriously to practice the mystical techniques of concentration and descended deeply into the alam al-mithal within himself that his heart “caught fire” and “the light of the divine world shone forth upon me … and I was able to unravel mysteries that I had not previously understood,” he explained later in his great work al-Asfar al-Arbaah49 (The Four Journeys of the Soul). Sadra’s mystical experiences convinced him that human beings could achieve perfection in this world. But, true to the conservative ethos, the perfection that he envisaged was not an evolution to a new and higher state, but a return to the original pure vision of Abraham and the other prophets. It was also a return to God, the Source of all existence. But this did not mean that the mystic abjured the world. In The Four Journeys of the Soul, he described the mystical journey of a charismatic political leader. First, he must journey from man to God. Next he travels in the divine sphere, contemplating each of God’s attributes until he arrives at an intuitive sense of their indissoluble unity. Gazing thus on the face of God, he is transformed and has a new perception of what monotheism really means and an insight that is not unlike that enjoyed by the Imams. In his third journey, the leader travels back to humankind, and finds that he now sees the world quite differently. His fourth and final quest is to preach God’s word in the world and to find new ways to institute the divine law and reorder society in conformity with God’s will.50 It was a vision that linked the perfection of society to a simultaneous spiritual development. The establishment of justice and equity here below could not be achieved without a mystical and religious underpinning. Mulla Sadra’s vision fused politics and spirituality, which had become separate in Twelver Shiism, seeing the rational effort that was essential for the transformation of society in the mundane world as inseparable from the mythical and mystical context that gave it meaning. Mulla Sadra had thus proposed a new model of Shii leadership, which would have a profound impact upon Iranian politics in our own day.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Immediately, crowds gathered at the spot and walked toward the soldiers, led by young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives. The army began to retreat, the soldiers firing at the ground to keep the people at bay. The next day, tens of thousands went back onto the streets to protest against these killings. 81 By mid-January, it was all over. Prime Minister Bakhtiar negotiated the shah’s departure, which, to save face, was declared to be only temporary. The royal family flew to Egypt, where Sadat took them in. Bakhtiar tried to stall the Revolution by ordering the release of political prisoners, dismantling SAVAK, refusing oil to Israel and South Africa, and promising to review all foreign contracts and to make major cuts in military expenditure. Again, it was too late. The crowds were clamoring for the return of the man they called their Imam, and on February 1, 1979, Bakhtiar was forced to allow Khomeini to return. Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran was one of those symbolic events, like the storming of the Bastille, which seem to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, inside and outside Iran, it was a dark moment, a triumph of superstition over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, who had long feared that Islam was about to be annihilated, it seemed a luminous reversal. For some Iranian Shiis, Khomeini’s return seemed a miracle, and inevitably, it resembled the mythical return of the Hidden Imam. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds shouted for “Imam Khomeini,” confident that a new age of justice had dawned. Senior mujtahids, such as Ayatollah Shariatmadari, were incensed by this use of the title of Imam, and it was firmly and officially stated that Khomeini was not the Hidden Imam. But whatever the official line, for millions of the Iranian masses, Khomeini was an Imam until the day he died. His life and career seemed clear evidence that the divine was present and active in history after all. Like the Revolution itself, Khomeini seemed to make an ancient myth an actual reality. Immediately before Khomeini’s return, Taha Hejazi published a poem that expressed the eager anticipation of many Iranians: “On the Day the Imam Returns” looks forward to universal brotherhood. No one would tell lies any more, there would be no need to lock the door against thieves, everybody would share their food with each other: The Imam must return ... so that right can sit on his throne, so that evil, treachery, and hatred are eliminated from the face of time.

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

  The overwhelming preoccupation in the parables, despite their various accretions after Jesus’s time, is a message about a coming kingdom which will overwhelm all the normal expectations of Israel and take its establishment figures by surprise. People must be watchful for this final event, which is inevitably going to catch them unawares: so both the wise and the foolish virgins snatch a nap before the bridegroom arrives, but the wise virgins have provided ample oil for their lamps of celebration, still burning when they need to wake up.31 In a gem of sarcasm, Jesus points out that a householder would not have left his house to be broken into if he had been informed of the burglar’s intended hour of arrival – ‘for the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour’. How extraordinary to compare the fulfilling of God’s purposes to an act of criminality, even violence!32 Much celebration and joy run through these stories, which tell of feasts and wedding banquets, yet also custom, common sense and even natural justice are at times ruthlessly ignored: labourers in a vineyard who have done a full day’s work are told to stop complaining when they get the same wage as latecomers who only put in an hour.33 The coming kingdom will make up its own rules. The later Church found this an uncomfortable message as it settled down to make sense of people’s everyday lives. This sense that all the rules have changed is to be found in many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, particularly those which in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels have been gathered into an anthology, known from Matthew’s version of it as the Sermon on the Mount (Luke’s shorter version actually places the event on a plain, not a mountain, but somehow that setting has never captured Christians’ imagination to the same extent).34 It begins with a dramatic collection of blessings on those whom the world would call unfortunate, such as the poor, the hungry, those weeping, those who are widely hated. All these will have their fortunes precisely reversed. These ‘Beatitudes’ have remained as a subversive tug at the sleeve for churchmen in the centuries during which they have had too much worldly comfort, an encouragement for the oppressed, and even a stimulus to many Christians to seek out deprivation and practise humility – an inspiration to monks and friars in later centuries, as we will see. Jesus’s breaking of conventions continues after the Beatitudes: traditional sayings are quoted, such as the admirable ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgement’, and then they are put on the rack or disconcertingly extended to their logical conclusion. So physical killing ought indeed to be condemned, but so should all people angry with their brother who then turn the anger into verbal violence; they shall be liable to the Hell of fire.35 There is much punishing fire flickering round the preacher’s words. There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of

• From The Lover (1984)

  Everyone’s barefoot, including our mother. She laughs. She’s got no objection to anything. The whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight, especially when it’s mixed with the other, the smell of yellow soap, of purity, of respectability, of clean linen, of whiteness, of our mother, of the immense candor and innocence of our mother. The house-boys’ families come along, and the houseboys’ visitors, and the white children from neighboring houses. My mother’s very happy with this disorder, she can be very very happy sometimes, long enough to forget, the time it takes to clean out the house may be enough to make her happy. She goes into the sitting room, sits down at the piano, plays the only tunes she knows by heart, the ones she learned at the normal school. She sings. Sometimes she laughs while she plays. Gets up, dances, and sings. And everyone thinks, and so does she, that you can be happy here in this house suddenly transmogrified into a pond, a water meadow, a ford, a beach. The two smaller children, the girl and the younger brother, are the first to remember. They suddenly stop laughing and go into the darkening garden. I remember, just as I’m writing this, that our elder brother wasn’t in Vinh Long when we sluiced the house out. He was living with our guardian, a village priest, in the department of Lot-et-Garonne. He too used to laugh sometimes, but never as much as we did. I forget everything, and I forgot to say this, that we were children who laughed, my younger brother and I, laughed fit to burst, fit to die. I see the war as I see my childhood. I see wartime and the reign of my elder brother as one. Partly, no doubt, because it was during the war that my younger brother died: his heart, as I’ve said, had given out, given up. As for my elder brother, I don’t think I ever saw him during the war. By that time it didn’t matter to me whether he was alive or dead. I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin. We go back to the apartment. We are lovers. We can’t stop loving each other. Sometimes I don’t go back to the boarding school. I sleep with him. I don’t want to sleep in his arms, his warmth, but I do sleep in the same room, the same bed. Sometimes I stay away from high school. At night we go and have dinner in town.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It illuminated their dark world and made life not only tolerable but joyous. When confronted with the Lurianic creation myth, a modern person will immediately ask: “Did this really happen?” Because the events seem so improbable and cannot be proved, we will dismiss it as demonstrably false. But that is because we accept only a rational version of truth and have lost the sense that there might be another kind. We have developed, for example, a scientific view of history, which we see as a succession of unique events. In the premodern world, however, the events of history were not seen as singular but as examples of eternal laws, revelations of a timeless, constant reality. A historical occurrence would be likely to happen again and again, because all earthly happenings expressed the fundamental laws of existence. In the Bible, for example, a river parts miraculously on at least two occasions to enable the Israelites to make a rite of passage; the Children of Israel are often “going down” into Egypt and then making a return journey to the Promised Land. One of the most frequently recurring biblical themes was exile, which, after the Spanish catastrophe, seemed to color the whole of Jewish existence and to reflect an imbalance in the very ground of being. Lurianic Kabbalah addressed itself to this problem by going back, as all mythology must, to the beginning in order to examine exile, which seemed one of these fundamental laws, and to reveal its full significance. In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent. The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum (“withdrawal”): the infinite and inaccessible Godhead, which Kabbalists called Ein Sof (“Without End”), had to shrink into itself, evacuating, as it were, a region within itself in order to make room for the world. Creation had begun, therefore, with an act of divine ruthlessness: in its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile upon a part of itself. Unlike the orderly, peaceful creation described in the first chapter of Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters, and false starts which seemed to the Sephardic exiles a more accurate appraisal of the world they lived in. At an early stage in the Lurianic process, Ein Sof had tried to fill the emptiness it had created by Zimzum with divine light, but the “vessels” or “pipes” which were supposed to channel it shattered under the strain.

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

  orderly recital from the Psalms of David followed by a short time of silent prayer (in his case, a hundred times a day), and meditation on the Bible, which provided the seedbed in which prayer could grow. He was a strong believer in the human ability to receive God’s generosity and mercy and grow in grace: ‘we come into [this] life possessing all the seeds of the virtues. And just as tears fall with the seeds, so with the sheaves there is joy.’ In an echo of Origen’s universalism, he repeatedly asserted that even those suffering in Hell kept those imperishable seeds of virtue. No wonder his Church decided that he was dangerous.50 The very fact of the deliberate competition between Egyptian and Syrian monks in striving for holiness demonstrates their consciousness of the wider world; they were far from detached from the life and concerns of the Church. Monks and monastic leaders now often complicated political struggles and exercised power in ways which seem far from the Saviour’s admonitions to humility, love and forgiveness. First in the Eastern and then the Western Church, they proved to be key players in theological confrontations, beginning with the struggles which erupted in the wake of Constantine’s new ecclesiastical alliance. CONSTANTINE, ARIUS AND THE ONE GOD (306–25) Very quickly the Emperor Constantine I learned to his cost that Christians were inclined to imperil the unity which their religion proclaimed. The first instance of this came as a result of the Great Persecution: renewed quarrels about how to heal the wounds to the Church’s self-esteem. In Egypt, hardliners were so shocked at the Bishop of Alexandria’s willingness to forgive the repentant lapsed that around 306 one of them, Bishop Melitius of Lycopolis, founded his own rival clerical hierarchy, which disrupted the Church in Alexandria for decades.51 An even more serious split took place in the North African Church, where equally issues of forgiveness were combined with the problem of who had legitimate authority to forgive. A disputed episcopal election took place in Carthage, product of complicated arguments about who had done what in the crisis, combined with personality clashes. The Churches in Rome and elsewhere recognized Caecilian as bishop – one of the prices of recognition being his abandonment of the view of baptism which Cyprian had upheld independently in North Africa (see pp. 174–5). The opposition, furious at what they saw as this final proof of Caecilian’s unworthiness, rallied behind the rival bishop, Donatus. The centuries-long Donatist schism in the North African Church had begun.52 Constantine’s interventions in this intractable dispute have a remarkably personal quality, as the ruler of one of the most powerful empires in world

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

  praise of the Festival of Christmas in images of a riot of wealth, hospitality and also – audaciously, but just like Jesus before him – wild looting: Behold, the First-Born has opened His feast-day for us like a treasure-house. This one day, the [most] perfect in the year, alone opens this treasure-house. Come, let us prosper and become rich from it before it is closed. Blessed are the vigilant who plunder from it the spoils of life. It is a great disgrace if one sees his neighbour carrying away treasures, yet he in the treasure-house reposes and sleeps to come out empty-handed. On this feast let everyone garland the door of his heart. May the Holy Spirit desire to enter in its door to dwell and sanctify. For behold, She moves about to all the doors [to see] where She may dwell.68 Ephrem’s musical precedent remains one of the most widely appreciated (if not always acknowledged) legacies of Syrian Christianity. His achievement prompted the writing of hymns in Greek, and the result has been that all Eastern liturgy has become far more based on poetry and hymns than the liturgy of the Western Latin Church. The Syriac musical tradition contains hymns sung in vigorous repetitive metre, a very different sound from that of the Greek or Russian Orthodox tradition. Moreover, preserved in the worship of Syriac Orthodox Christians from Edessa, who were expelled in the 1920s and are now living just over the border in the Syrian city of Aleppo, there is a distinctive form of liturgical music in chant and hymns. This is a proud heritage for the descendants of the refugees in Aleppo who have formed the Church of St George; it is likely to represent a living tradition from the oldest known musical performance in Christian history.69 But music is only part of the Syriac legacy. Music is an aspect of worship. In the Syrian Churches, principally the Church known as the Church of the East (about which we will have much more to say in Chapters 7 and 8), but also parts of the Church which over the centuries have accepted the authority of the Catholic Church of the West, there remains a regularly used form of prayer for the Eucharist which is the most reliably ancient of any in Christianity. Today this prayer is the heart of a structure of eucharistic worship for the Church’s year and

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Rebbe was at home in the world. His scientific knowledge coexisted with the old mythos of Habad Hasidism. His studies in marine biology had not robbed him of his vision of the divine sparks; he would develop a strong messianism, and won the election to the leadership of Habad by claiming to be in mystic communion with the deceased Sixth Rebbe. In his spirituality, logos and mythos were complementary sources of insight. He interpreted the Bible as literally as any Protestant fundamentalist, convinced that the world had been created by God in six days just under six thousand years ago. But he also believed that the discoveries of modern science about the connection between body and soul, or matter and energy, were leading human beings to a new appreciation of the organic unity of reality, which, in turn, would predispose them to monotheism.39 His immense campaign was organized upon modern lines, and he understood how to exploit his resources and speak to secularized men and women. It seems, however, to have been the mythology and mysticism of Habad that gave the Lubavitch the confidence to sally forth into the world instead of retreating defensively from it. Recent rebbes had turned against the spirit of the Enlightenment, but Rabbi Schneur Zalman, the First Rebbe and founder of Habad, had helped his Hasidim to cultivate a positive view of the world of their day. The Seventh Rebbe seemed to have returned to this original spirit, using his rational powers within a mythical context, as Zalman himself had done. Habad had refused to accept the modern separation of sacred and profane. Everything, however base and mundane, held a spark of the divine. There was no such person as a “secular Jew,” and even the goyim had a potential for holiness. Toward the end of his life, convinced of the imminence of the Last Days, the Rebbe began a mission to the gentiles of America, which, he acknowledged, had been good to Jews. The Lubavitch had suffered greatly in the modern period and had even faced extinction, but the Rebbe trained them not to see the Galut in a wholly demonic light, not to nurture fantasies of hatred and revenge, but to see the world as a place to which they could reintroduce the divine.40

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On Independence Day 1967, some three weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War, Rabbi Kook was delivering his usual sermon at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva . Suddenly he emitted a sobbing scream, and uttered words that completely broke the flow of his speech: “Where is our Hebron, Shechem, Jericho and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?” 88 Three weeks later, the Israeli army had occupied these biblical cities which had previously been in Arab hands, and Rabbi Kook’s disciples were convinced that he had been inspired by God to make a true prophecy. By the end of this short war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The holy city of Jerusalem, which had been divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was now annexed by Israel and declared to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Once again, Jews were able to pray at the Western Wall. A mood of exultation and near-mystical euphoria gripped the entire country. Before the war, Israelis had listened on their radios to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea; now they were unexpectedly in possession of sites sacred to Jewish memory. Many of the most diehard secularists experienced the war as a religious event, reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea. 89 But for Kookists the war was even more crucial. It seemed conclusive proof that Redemption was indeed under way and that God was pushing history forward to its final consummation. The fact that no Messiah had actually appeared did not worry the Gahelet; they were moderns, and perfectly prepared to see the “Messiah” as a process rather than a person. 90 Nor were they disturbed that the “miracle” of the war had a perfectly natural explanation: the Israeli victory was entirely due to the efficiency of the IDF and the ineptitude of the Arab armies. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides had predicted that there would be nothing supernatural about the Redemption: the prophetic passages that spoke of cosmic wonders and universal peace referred not to the Messianic Kingdom in this world but to the World-to-Come. 91 The victory convinced Kookists that it was now time to mobilize in earnest. A few months after the victory, rabbis and students held an impromptu conference at Merkaz Harav to find ways of foiling the plan of the Labor government to relinquish some of these newly occupied territories in exchange for peace with their Arab neighbors.

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

  travelling on to Moscow, to the extent of leaving the second of them in a Polish jail for two years.58 Ivan IV won decisive victories over the remaining Tatar khanates in the 1550s, and it was to commemorate these, in particular the capture of the Tatar city of Kazan in 1552, that he ordered the building of the Red Square Cathedral of the Intercession. It is an extrovert symbol of the Tsar’s joy in victory and his gratitude to Mary, the Mother of God, the Trinity and the various saints whose intercession he had successfully invoked against the Tatars. Ivan’s eightfold victories provided a convenient historical accident which was imposed on all the biblical symbolism of the number eight and eight-plus-one already being exploited in the church architecture of Muscovy. So the building centres on an eight-sided church which becomes its own spire. This is surrounded by eight completely separate lesser churches, so that the ensemble is an eightfold star, or a pair of squares superimposed on each other – double the four corners of the earth or the four evangelists. In plan it seems rational and symmetrical, but no one except the architect and patron would ever have thought of it in terms of its plan. The exterior, so insistent in its monopoly on the viewer’s attention, is intimidatingly original: each lesser church bears an onion dome in extravagantly contrasting decoration, all threatening to throttle the central spire which catapults above them. The effect would have been inconceivable in Byzantium. Inside, nothing could be further from the congregational space of either the early basilica or the Protestant architecture about to develop in the West than this intricately clustered honeycomb of shrines of thanksgiving. Sudden soaring interiors in their verticality assault the Heaven to which the insistent eightfold design is pointing the worshipper. They are capable of arousing both claustrophobia and vertigo. Around 1560 Ivan’s reign took a dark turn amid growing political crisis. The death of his first wife, whom he seems to have loved genuinely and deeply, was soon followed by the death of his brother and of Metropolitan Makarii. There was plenty in Ivan’s previous career to anticipate the violence which he now unleashed, but the scale of it all was insane, worthy of the ancestors of the Tatars over whom he had triumphed – his second wife was indeed a daughter of one of the Tatar khans. Novgorod, once the republican alternative to Moscow’s monarchical autocracy, especially suffered, with tens of thousands dying in a coldly calculated spree of pornographic violence. The Tsar’s agents in atrocity, the oprichniki, were like a topsy-turvy version of a religious order: as they went about their inhuman business, they were robed in black cloaks and rode black horses, to which with equally black humour they attached dogs’ heads and brushes to announce their role as guard dogs and cleansers. After 1572, Ivan

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On Independence Day 1967, some three weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War, Rabbi Kook was delivering his usual sermon at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva. Suddenly he emitted a sobbing scream, and uttered words that completely broke the flow of his speech: “Where is our Hebron, Shechem, Jericho and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?”88 Three weeks later, the Israeli army had occupied these biblical cities which had previously been in Arab hands, and Rabbi Kook’s disciples were convinced that he had been inspired by God to make a true prophecy. By the end of this short war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The holy city of Jerusalem, which had been divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was now annexed by Israel and declared to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Once again, Jews were able to pray at the Western Wall. A mood of exultation and near-mystical euphoria gripped the entire country. Before the war, Israelis had listened on their radios to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea; now they were unexpectedly in possession of sites sacred to Jewish memory. Many of the most diehard secularists experienced the war as a religious event, reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea.89 But for Kookists the war was even more crucial. It seemed conclusive proof that Redemption was indeed under way and that God was pushing history forward to its final consummation. The fact that no Messiah had actually appeared did not worry the Gahelet; they were moderns, and perfectly prepared to see the “Messiah” as a process rather than a person.90 Nor were they disturbed that the “miracle” of the war had a perfectly natural explanation: the Israeli victory was entirely due to the efficiency of the IDF and the ineptitude of the Arab armies. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides had predicted that there would be nothing supernatural about the Redemption: the prophetic passages that spoke of cosmic wonders and universal peace referred not to the Messianic Kingdom in this world but to the World-to-Come.91 The victory convinced Kookists that it was now time to mobilize in earnest.

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

  forty) Jesus removed his presence from his disciples – was taken up or carried into Heaven, as two of the Gospel writers put it. Later Christians commonly called this departure the Ascension, and on occasion its final last moment has been portrayed endearingly literally in Christian art, when all that can be seen are Christ’s feet disappearing into a cloud.51 Historians are never going to make sense of these reports, unless like some of those who first heard them they choose to regard them as simply ludicrous. Nevertheless they can hardly fail to note the extraordinary galvanizing energy of those who spread the story after their experience of Resurrection and Ascension, and they can reconstruct something of the resulting birth of the Christian Church, even if the story can never be more than fragmentary. Whether through some mass delusion, some colossal act of wishful thinking, or through witness to a power or force beyond any definition known to Western historical analysis, those who had known Jesus in life and had felt the shattering disappointment of his death proclaimed that he lived still, that he loved them still, and that he was to return to earth from the Heaven which he had now entered, to love and save from destruction all who acknowledged him as Lord.52 It is hardly surprising that in the two millennia of Christian history since these profound surprises and mysteries, Christianity has been a perpetual argument about meaning and reality. Readers of this book may become bewildered, bored or irritated by my extended discussions of the theological niceties which once aroused such passions among Christians; but no history of Christianity which tries to sidle past its theological disputes will make sense. The problem is simple in its utter complexity: how can a human being be God? Christians can be passionately convinced that they meet a fellow human in Jesus who is God, but they may not like the implications of this: how can God be involved in the unhygienic messiness of everyday life and remain God? There are basic problems of human dirt, waste and decay from which devotion recoils – yet without dirt, where is the real humanity of Christ, which tears other humans away from despair and oblivion towards joy and life? The variety of answers to these questions dominated the development of the Church in its first five centuries, and at no time have those who call themselves Christians reached unanimity on the puzzles. And the disagreements were not academic in any sense of the word; they were matters of eternal life or eternal death. We will meet a crowd butchering a bishop who had signed up to the wrong solution; we will find Christians burning other Christians alive over matters which now seem no more than points to debate in a university seminar. We should try to understand why these people of past societies were so angry, frightened and sadistic, even if we cannot sympathize with them. That will mean encountering a

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Gush was pragmatic, clever, and resourceful. It appealed to atheists and secularists, but for its Orthodox members it was an essentially religious movement. From the Rabbis Kook, they had inherited a kabbalistic piety. Establishing a settlement in what the Gush believed to be Jewish land was to extend the realm of the sacred and to push back the frontiers of the “Other Side.” A settlement was what Christians would call a sacrament, an outward symbol of hidden grace that made the divine present in the profane world in a new and more effective way. It was what Isaac Luria had called tikkun, an act of restoration that would one day transform the world and the cosmos. The hikes, marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats were a form of ritual that brought a sense of ecstasy and release. After years of feeling inferior to both the secular pioneers and the scholarly Haredim, Kookists suddenly felt that they were at the center of things and on the front line of a cosmic war. By hastening the advent of Redemption, they felt at one with the fundamental rhythms of the universe. Observers noted that when they prayed, they swayed backward and forward, with their eyes tightly shut, their faces contorted and pained, and wailed aloud. These were all signs of what the Kabbalists called kawwanah, an effort of intensive concentration during the performance of one of the commandments that enables the Jew to see through its symbolic form to the essential significance of the rite.12 An act performed with kawwanah not only brings the worshipper closer to God but helps to rectify the imbalance that separates the mundane world from the divine. Gush activists not only experienced this ecstasy when they prayed; they saw their political activities in the same light. The spectacle of Rabbi Kook preaching and weeping before a huge crowd at the inauguration of a new settlement was a “revelation.” So was the occasion when squatters wrapped themselves, screaming, in their prayer shawls, clinging with bleeding fingers to the sacred land, while the army pried them away from a hill near Ramallah.13 These were not simply political moments. Activists believed that they had looked through the earthly shell of these events to the divine drama at the core of reality.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In these early years, it did indeed seem that a new world order was coming into being at these Pentecostal services. At a time of economic insecurity and increased xenophobia, blacks and whites prayed together and embraced one another. Seymour became convinced that it was this racial integration rather than the gift of tongues that was the decisive sign of the Last Days.43 The Pentecostal movement was not entirely idyllic. There were rivalries and factions, and some white Pentecostals set up their own separatist churches.44 But the extraordinarily rapid spread of the movement among the people reflected a widespread revolt against the status quo. At a Pentecostal service, men and women spoke in tongues, fell into tranced, ecstatic states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were laughing in unspeakable joy. People saw bright luminous streaks in the air, and sprawled on the ground, felled by what seemed a weight of glory.45 This wild ecstasy was potentially dangerous, but in these early days, at least, people did not fall into despair and depression, as some had during the Great Awakening. African Americans were more skilled in this ecstatic spirituality, though later, as we shall see, some white Pentecostalists would fall into unhealthy and nihilistic states of mind. In its infancy, the movement emphasized the importance of love and compassion, which provided its own discipline. Seymour used to say: “If you get angry or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.”46 “God sent this latter rain to gather up all the poor and outcast, and make us love everybody,” explained D. W. Myland, an early interpreter of Pentecostalism, in 1910. “God is taking the despised things, the base things, and being glorified in them.”47 The stress on inclusiveness and compassionate love was in marked contrast to the divisiveness of fundamentalist Christianity. If charity is the final test of any religiosity, at this point the Pentecostalists were pulling ahead.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  41 This first Pentecostal upsurge was yet another of the popular Awakenings that have exploded from time to time during the modern period when people have become convinced at gut level that a great change is at hand. Seymour and the first Pentecostalists were convinced that the Last Days had begun, and that soon Jesus would return and establish a more just social order. But after the First World War, when it seemed that Jesus would not return as quickly as they had expected, Pentecostalists began to interpret their gift of tongues differently. They now saw it as a new way of speaking to God. St. Paul had explained that when Christians found it difficult to pray, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans beyond all utterance.” 42 They were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech. In these early years, it did indeed seem that a new world order was coming into being at these Pentecostal services. At a time of economic insecurity and increased xenophobia, blacks and whites prayed together and embraced one another. Seymour became convinced that it was this racial integration rather than the gift of tongues that was the decisive sign of the Last Days. 43 The Pentecostal movement was not entirely idyllic. There were rivalries and factions, and some white Pentecostals set up their own separatist churches. 44 But the extraordinarily rapid spread of the movement among the people reflected a widespread revolt against the status quo. At a Pentecostal service, men and women spoke in tongues, fell into tranced, ecstatic states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were laughing in unspeakable joy. People saw bright luminous streaks in the air, and sprawled on the ground, felled by what seemed a weight of glory. 45 This wild ecstasy was potentially dangerous, but in these early days, at least, people did not fall into despair and depression, as some had during the Great Awakening. African Americans were more skilled in this ecstatic spirituality, though later, as we shall see, some white Pentecostalists would fall into unhealthy and nihilistic states of mind. In its infancy, the movement emphasized the importance of love and compassion, which provided its own discipline. Seymour used to say: “If you get angry or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.” 46 “God sent this latter rain to gather up all the poor and outcast, and make us love everybody,” explained D. W. Myland, an early interpreter of Pentecostalism, in 1910. “God is taking the despised things, the base things, and being glorified in them.” 47 The stress on inclusiveness and compassionate love was in marked contrast to the divisiveness of fundamentalist Christianity. If charity is the final test of any religiosity, at this point the Pentecostalists were pulling ahead.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Napoleon Bonaparte, a ruler imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, came to power in France and began to build a mighty empire, it seemed for a while that after centuries of persecution Jews would finally be granted equality and respect in Europe as well. Liberty had been the battle cry of the French Revolution, and was the watchword of Napoleon’s government in France. To the incredulous joy of those Jews who longed to escape the ghetto, Napoleon announced that the Jews of France would become full citizens of the republic. On July 29, 1806, Jewish businessmen, bankers, and rabbis were summoned to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where they swore fealty to the state. A few weeks later, Napoleon convened a body of Jewish notables he called the “Great Sanhedrin”—the Sanhedrin being the Jewish governing council which had not sat since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE . The mandate of this body was to give religious sanction to the resolutions of the previous assembly. Jews were ecstatic. Rabbis declared that the French Revolution was the “second law from Mount Sinai,” “our exodus from Egypt, our modern Pesach”; “the Messianic age has arrived with this new society of liberté, egalité, fraternité .” 15 As Napoleon’s armies swept through Europe, he introduced these egalitarian principles into every country he occupied: the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Prussia. One principality after another was forced to emancipate its Jews. But even during the first assembly of 1806, Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish people surfaced in an offensive address by Louis Count Molé, Napoleon’s commissioner. He had heard that Jewish moneylenders in Alsace were evading conscription and fleecing the population. The Jewish delegates to the Assembly, therefore, had the task of revitalizing that sense of civic morality which their people had lost during the long centuries of “degrading existence.” 16 On March 17, 1808, Napoleon imposed economic strictures on the Jews, which were later called the “Infamous Decrees.” During the three years that they were enforced, thousands of Jewish families were ruined. As the American historian Norman Cantor points out, Napoleon offered the Jews a “Faustian bargain”: they had to sell their unique Jewish soul in exchange for emancipation. 17 For all its inspiring talk about liberté , the modern, centralized state was unable to tolerate autonomous anomalies such as the ghetto. The enlightened polity had to be legally and culturally uniform, and Jews presented a “problem” that must be rationalized away. They must become assimilated, bourgeois Frenchmen, abandon their separate way of life, and privatize their religion: Jews as Jews had to vanish. The French solution became the pattern of Jewish emancipation in the rest of Europe.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the mythos made perfect sense. It revealed or “unveiled” a truth that had been evident before but which spoke with such power to the condition of Jews in the early modern period that it acquired instant authority. It illuminated their dark world and made life not only tolerable but joyous . When confronted with the Lurianic creation myth, a modern person will immediately ask: “Did this really happen?” Because the events seem so improbable and cannot be proved, we will dismiss it as demonstrably false. But that is because we accept only a rational version of truth and have lost the sense that there might be another kind. We have developed, for example, a scientific view of history, which we see as a succession of unique events. In the premodern world, however, the events of history were not seen as singular but as examples of eternal laws, revelations of a timeless, constant reality. A historical occurrence would be likely to happen again and again, because all earthly happenings expressed the fundamental laws of existence. In the Bible, for example, a river parts miraculously on at least two occasions to enable the Israelites to make a rite of passage; the Children of Israel are often “going down” into Egypt and then making a return journey to the Promised Land. One of the most frequently recurring biblical themes was exile, which, after the Spanish catastrophe, seemed to color the whole of Jewish existence and to reflect an imbalance in the very ground of being. Lurianic Kabbalah addressed itself to this problem by going back, as all mythology must, to the beginning in order to examine exile, which seemed one of these fundamental laws, and to reveal its full significance. In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent.

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

  She scooped me up from the low stool, and to my surprise, kissed me, right in front of everybody in the library, including Mrs. Baker. This was an unprecedented and unusual display of affection in public, the cause of which I did not comprehend. But it was a warm and happy feeling. For once, obviously, I had done something right. My mother set me back upon the stool and turned to Mrs. Baker, smiling. “Will wonders never cease to perform!” Her excitement startled me back into cautious silence. Not only had I been sitting still for longer than my mother would have thought possible, and sitting quietly. I had also spoken rather than screamed, something that my mother, after four years and a lot of worry, had despaired that I would ever do. Even one intelligible word was a very rare event for me. And although the doctors at the clinic had clipped the little membrane under my tongue so I was no longer tongue-tied, and had assured my mother that I was not retarded, she still had her terrors and her doubts. She was genuinely happy for any possible alternative to what she was afraid might be a dumb child. The ear-pinching was forgotten. My mother accepted the alphabet and picture books Mrs. Baker gave her for me, and I was on my way. I sat at the kitchen table with my mother, tracing letters and calling their names. Soon she taught me how to say the alphabet forwards and backwards as it was done in Grenada. Although she had never gone beyond the seventh grade, she had been put in charge of teaching the first grade children their letters during her last year at Mr. Taylor’s School in Grenville. She told me stories about his strictness as she taught me how to print my name. I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct. So by the time I arrived at the sight-conservation kindergarten, braided, scrubbed, and bespectacled, I was able to read large-print books and write my name with a regular pencil. Then came my first rude awakening about school. Ability had nothing to do with expectation. There were only seven or eight of us little Black children in a big classroom, all with various serious deficiencies of sight.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There are obvious difficulties in this spirituality of rage and reconquista. In 1977, for the first time in Israeli history, Labor was defeated in a general election and the new right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin had always advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan, so his election seemed at first to be another act of God. This seemed clear shortly after the election, when Begin visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkaz Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him. “I felt that my heart was bursting within me,” Daniel Ben Simon, who was present at this “surrealistic scene,” recalled later. “What greater empirical proof could there be that [Kook’s] fantasies and imaginings were indeed reality.”15 Begin was an outspoken admirer of Levinger, he liked to call Gush Emunim his “very dear children,” and often used biblical imagery when expounding his hawkish policies. After the election, the Likud government began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israel Lands Commission, declared his intention of settling one million Jews on the West Bank within twenty years. By the middle of 1981, Likud had spent $400 million in the territories and built twenty settlements, manned by some 18,500 settlers. By August 1984, there were about 113 official government settlements, including six sizable towns, all over the West Bank. Surrounded by 46,000 militant Jewish settlers, the Arabs became frightened and some resorted to violence.16 This should have been the perfect political environment for the Gush Emunim, who received much government support. In 1978, Raphael Eitan made each West Bank settlement responsible for the security of its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from their regular army units to protect their community and police the roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment. In March 1979, the government established five regional councils on the West Bank with the power to levy taxes, supply services, and employ workers. Gush members usually had key roles, even though they now supplied only 20 percent of the West Bank settlers.17 They had become in effect state officials, but their years of confrontation had made the Gush skeptical of government, however friendly, and after the Likud victory, members established Armana (“Covenant”) to organize and unify their own settlement activities, and Moetzet Yesha, a council of Gush settlements, to give them some independence.