Theological Disneyland

I left home just too early perhaps and quite weary from the unresponsiveness of all my addreseès, as to want to delude myself into some theological excess if only in order to bring upfront the untheological nature of my living together with that un-Christian faith that has led me through and through for a few years now - an anti-metaphysical view of the world, but a very beautiful one. Leaving was a sort of a betrayal to that intense thinking-through I had been engaged since the morning after speedily recovering from the excesses of the night before, or rather of the morning a few hours before touching the dim light of awareness. The night before was one of un-adulterated truth, and how much I long for censorship sometimes! In besonderes... emotional censorship! My encounter with Michalis was really unexpected and in this contingent world everything is really all too likely to happen, the encounter of the thin line between life and death typical of the postmodern man, a blurry encounter almost clothed in the sensuality of murder. That was an encounter of theological measures, yes... my best friend of all in the world of the Talmudic academies and Halachic discussions - doubtless a different sort of anti-metaphysics, but not that I would praise for its aesthetics. That friend who also rebuked me for my Christianity of fathers, for my lack of interest in the world-to-come (something that Asher has beautifully interpreted for me, it isn't a world to come but an ever-coming-world, an ever-be-coming-world). Somehow he knew my heretic heart from the outset, my lack of conformity and henceforth, of happiness. One couldn't be too much at home in a yeshiva, certainly not as someone who had seen the world and that came to study the Talmud with the stiff and subtle touch of a Greek ear, albeit today I must recognize the flaws in my protracted insights - I truly don't know what the world is, unless I'd return to my most recent 'chiddush'; that worldliness is the application of love, the poetry of 'acting in the world', and therefore the only possible autonomy of the political. I came armed with little more than those years of Biblical Hebrew under Noél's mentorship, and honest truth is that studying Biblical Hebrew with a former Jesuit with twenty sociology students of Marxist tendencies, one failed seminarian and one cocaine addict aren't exactly what you would call apophantic enlightenment, it was hardly gnostic at all and merely pink dots in the life of a young man for whom the Jewish school and the Hebrew lessons in Sunday school were something as far off removed as adulthood is from wisdom. I had learnt already the Hebrew from the streets of Tel Aviv, which had stolen from me all my epistemological innocence at the same time that it remained at best a bad translation of Pauline Greek!

And oh Michalis, my good friend... the Ruth of our times, joining the Jewish people by a personal decree, as though one were granted, fix the days and hours of his elonged and eroded life-long death! For us, members of the too-choosen-nation, these privileges are a thing of pagan times and all the more informal in the age of identity cards and Jewishness certificates printed by a bunch of idol-worshippers that trade women's divorces like one plays truth-or-penalty with a bottle in the company of the least inspiring youths. So many hours he and me spent in the cafés, an early and more day-timely version of la bohéme, thoroughly vanquishing in spirit from the skull-caps and after-meal blessings known all too well. Of course as a philosopher I had to be always wrong, since I knew in a Socratic fashion that the enterprise was faulty from scratch, unlike my friend... a man of faith whose whole knowledge of the world was based on repeating second-rate Semitic poetry day after day (and in a Lithuanian style) in a way unfashionable enough as to cause one less lust than irony. He had visited me several times after my descent from the stinky households of divinity and had been less keen to show his shame about my relinquished spiritual status than I had expected. So many opportunities I had to share my public secret, but I always found the trick to delay it once more, it kind of lost all its theological importance too early in my holy career and became rather the stumbling block of socialization; it was impossible to find myself in any of those elegant soirées in East Jerusalem without being the victim of a flirtateous diplomat or clerical doll - the curse of all socialite, so that one had to lie so much as to pretend not to notice any of that but with a blinking eye spurious enough as to notice the change in the pressure cooker from a distance of a thousand miles. My secret was indeed so public that no one would comment on it anymore, lest it be Sister Bernadette, the kindest of all nuns in Mount Zion who one day slumbed the door of the concert hall on my face, believing it to be that of an Arab trying to disrupt into the peaceful harmony of a lost collonialist power... only in order to provoke me later, into "reading" theology with a certain Lebanese intellectual who had as much theological interest in me, as I have now metaphysical interets in the legs of a certain voluptuous female instructor of political science whom I have to see more often that I would even desire to see the jaded-eyed and most beloved recipient of my endless letters.

Two times I fixed dinners for Michalis, while we discussed in between the screeching noises of burstling oil and frying potatoes, the insights of Leo Shestov's "Athens and Jerusalem", the most discredited of all existentialist books perhaps because it's too Jewish to indulge in the 'authenticity' required by all existential philosophy, an authenticity in fact so devastating that it needed to have a political arm burning each and every possible Jewish book in the land of the philosophers as to set a precedent for their lack of authenticity. For him it was the most befitting of all philosophical books (only from the introduction though, the book is in fact so heavily Western that it could only exponentially bore the poetical but Philistine and sentimental mind of my good friend), someone living in Athens and then in Jerusalem with a stoppover in the Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods of Manchester, a ghetto so authentic in its worldlessness and backward ways that even the residents of Bnei Barak find it be, not sufficiently modern or adaptive for contemporary religious practice. So that in the end I had to find the best of all moralizers inside the uncleanest loop in town, at which I arrived willy-nilly not even prey to my own desires, but rather wafting from one excess to the other in one of those typical Jerusalemite nights where one is forbidden to sleep away his own inner urgency... I find myself there not quite elated yet and very unkindred from the endless text messaging, one could as well call but no, that's how the cowardice of romance is, especially when coupled with friendship and love... it's never timely to do what one deems correct, it's always expected that one will do the outright wrong thing. Thus I'm summoned to the street to find that my favourite Jew is actually also a criminal who shares in the same public secret of mine but in reverse dialectics: his is a secret publicity, because after all if one's going through a "regressive therapy" to change his 'taste', as though one could take a crash course in antinomian aesthetics in order to enjoy newspaper advertisements instead of frescoes and oil-canvases... it's all made funny by turning up in one of those loopholes where the wrecks of internet-educated humanity gather at the orgiastic tunes of industrial noises that preclude concentration and biffurcate desire. Yet, if one's allows like some of us are, to either speak to God in the middle of that bacchanal of bad taste or write research notes in the middle of a Eurovision night, I guess it's completely OK to go out in the world and try out his luck in regressive therapy in such a milieu.

So it's no wonder I would awake to such hysterical un-drunk tunes this morning and even less that I would pray for a little miracle that would draw me to the divinity, more out of hunger than of faith. I walk slowly toward the stone, keeping a faithful encroaching behind my pullover soaked in eau-de-toilette from the night before that the stone will actually glitter in my soul this time... but Vitaly was always right about this, no matter how much one tries it's all about praying for the powers that be, at best one can get a good lie in lieu of religious contigency, namely the attitude that one day you can believe such and such, and then just as easily believe something else later on that day. Vitaly of course was the most religious of all Jews and a Zionist at that, only out of not knowing what that religion says about anything at all and even more beautiful, out of being a three-quarters of a Jew that can't be Jewish at all, but at least he's granted to be beautiful and angry, two qualities unheard of by our Talmud-army. The arrival to the usual orgiastic idol-worshipping in Aramaic was not at all surprising, but I couldn't help to find it as funny as I usually do and less aesthetic than ever, except for neatly ironed fur coats that unbecome any possible religiosity. For the millionth time I was unable to pray at all, in fact this writing is as close as I could ever come to praying in any language, plus one thing I do know about poetry is that it forbids one to separate praying from murdering, so that the Biblical Cain remains the endless topic of so many verses, while the goodie-goodie of his brother is only a secondary character in third-rate theater plays that not even Brecht would have found amusing at all, and that would have been banned in East Germany anyway because they contain too much sexuality. Too many of the faces were familiar already, but yet I was unrecognizable... not because the gloom has shrunk my body weight but because I've just changed too much through the days, every month I seemly have a different past of my own. Yet, they all remain the same... so that in the process of human evolution I've lost just too many valuable friendships out of progressing too rapidly into decay... that is, growing so young and disgusted all the time, that the salvation never stood as far removed from me than it does today, so that the sin is the only possible way to live a life. I walk in between the ocean of black silk and find myself to be a tourist in the most absolute sense, spotting the eyes of every possible outsider and their normal desbelief as to remind myself of both Vitaly and Guilel, two rather different figurines but yet one body of letter-writing and for-the-sake-of-nothing praying Angst. I planned steadely on joining the orgiastic liturgies knowing I wouldn't be able to fulfill my promise, and then just go home... the latter especially I knew, it wouldn't be feasible.

Suddenly my Mexican friend appears out of the black waterish landscape of stone and summons me through the streets of Meah Shearim to join my old interlocutor at the Shabbes table, trying to release myself from the ambiguity of living in completeness with myself... not because of having adopted the Platonic circumlocution of not contradicting myself but rather out of being absolutely convinced the contradicting is the only possible form of dialogue. I sit at the same table than the year before and in this abnormality of circumstances I seem to fit all too well in the landscape: hundreds of useless books, shabby tables and all of it adorned with little pictures from a certain village in Russia. I start running my own show of heresies, and instructing my flabergasted hosts in the pidgins and slangs in use by the Israeli youth, as foreign to them as their God is foreign to me.... but on a positive note I found a book with that certain Midrash on Korach that I needed in order to complete my piece on Shavuot, without altogether understanding what on earth in Esther doing in that Midrash. The smells of the festive cooking drew me from a far into that idle conversation, because in my poetic madness one's fed with little more than one needs to better from malaria, while he's also fed up from it. The hours are horses dancing slowly in the palm of my hand and I dream about that unwritten lecture to be delivered in four days from now, while altogether I just set on a pilgrimage to prove my host the uselessness of the Jewish religion. In a way I did learn to keep quiet about my opinions, expressing them only insofar as they cannot be taken that seriously and presenting people with the innocent gift of laughter, which was the last thing Socrates could do before his death... and even Rosenzweig! Perhaps I wasn't Jewish enough to them, so it couldn't be too important, but what did matter is that my eloquent ignorance on all matters Jewish is not a public 'docta ignorantia', for I believe to have learnt as much as can be learnt from the academies, but it's still so little that I'm in the lame situation of being too much enlightened in so little. Doubtless that there was also some longing about my being there, because in a way it was a return to the only world in which I had ever been home, and that in an unsurprising way I thoroughly rejected only for the sake of diremption. This is still far from Cain's antinomies of love, that I could hardly swallow as an established dogma and that no less doubtless will hasten his spiritual death faster than a world like this can be unredeemed. The streets were so sweet and the dishes not as much, but they did accentuate my ability to be a visitor in so many worlds, so that perhaps one's inability to really live is a gift that comes not without the charm of being able to present everyone with a chasm about themselves.

On the way home I felt grateful for the largesse of the meal and laughed in my heart about the Socratic nature of Talmudic education; an almost Orphic crowd of believers gathering around a peripathetic and oversized wiseman, indulging in more Eros than they would admit to themselves, so that a certain very intelligent fellow from these circles would remark to me in a bar the night before that it's not rational to say that the Greek philosophers indulged in the pleasures of the flesh describes by the historians, because otherwise how would then the Jewish philosophers of the middle ages have turned to them with such blind adherence? It only proves that the world itself is an antinomy. The increasing pain of my rib couldn't distract me too much from this Gnostic luck-pot, even though I did pray silently that I would make it through the night, knowing too well in advance that I wouldn't die on such an amusing evening. The only moral of the story is that perhaps my Cain and me could learn so much about the Eros of conversation from our Talmudic foes, and no wonder he remarked once that his family didn't like Rabbis too much. It's all a matter of detesting an alterity that resembles oneself just too much and that is unwilling to lie to itself about the simplest issues of existence. Out of the theological disneyland I find myself in the bars again, knowing that the night wouldn't end up well, and anyway... how could a night want to end well after all, said Katharina. I loved being in that well-known crowd but only for the first ten minutes, after which I only wished to run away and encounter the silence of my own limitless lack of shame. So I find myself home again in this desolate laboratory of intellectual failures, simply writing as though it had any power at all to vilify the experience less than it could redeem it. Tomorrow I won't be as lucky, but there's no way to really know; at this rate my room does resemble what Arendt said, that we might have been turned from the people of the book, into the people of the papers... a motto that our local university has always known how to live up to just too well. But one can't have enough irony at 4 a.m. in the morning, so that it's better to turn in and leave the "abroad" of night excesses and shows to others, even if only for one day.