Running with Elijah

Credit: Aria AI

I mentioned in my previous post, “A Jew in Full,” the unsettling, snoring reality in which I found myself during the year that I studied in the Overseas Program at Haifa University. There were exceptions to that reality: other members of the program would sometimes show interest in one course or another, and I too would sometimes find myself nodding off in a class. There were two courses, though, where all but I slept the semester through. I wrote about the second of these in “A Jew in Full.” The first course, called “Jewish Thought and Ideology,” was the course that changed the arc of my life.

I am not sure if I would have taken the course had it not been obligatory. I felt that I had performed my required duties before family and tradition during my first year at Wabash. I was not in a religious state of mind, and I was comfortable with myself. There had been one “incident” on the flight to Israel as we descended towards Tel Aviv, wherein I woke suddenly from a deep sleep remembering the last image of my dream, and it was startling and beautiful at once, but at the time I attributed no significance to it. I thought: “just a dream.” Later—much later—I understood it to be what humans experience as a “premonition.”

The classroom for the course “Jewish Thought and Ideology” was not well-lit. I never understood that. We brought it up on the first day of class, and our instructor told us that he had asked maintenance if something could be done about it and was told that nothing could be, so there we sat, in a cave-like atmosphere, opening our Bibles to Genesis. Here we were, in the primordial classroom before the creation of light (damn maintenance), for the most part doing what humans do when in darkness, meaning, falling asleep. In this classroom too, I found myself in a one-one-one discussion with the instructor.

What sparked my re-engagement through this course with the Bible? The first words that came out of the mouth of the lecturer, Rabbi Bernard “Bernie” Och. He said that we were going to begin by looking at the book of Genesis through the eyes of traditional Jewish commentary. Why that shocked me is a little embarrassing. I thought that I came prepared for this Bible class with my year of religious studies at Wabash, but when Rabbi Och mentioned Jewish commentary, I realized that I had no idea what he was talking about. I should have had some idea. Why wouldn’t there be Jewish commentary on the Jewish Bible? I felt foolish, but at the same time I felt as if I were at the start of an adventure. I sensed a dark cavern of ignorance and I had the desire to fill it with light.

Rabbi Och focused on the Hebrew. Some of the students had rudimentary Hebrew, a leftover from Bar or Bat Mitzva studies, and a few had spent the previous summer at a kibbutz. I had nothing, except for the basic Hebrew course we were all enrolled in as part of the overseas program. There we had a terrible teacher who managed to turn most of the class against the idea of learning the language. That course had the utilitarian purpose of enabling us to make our way around a supermarket or public transportation. The teacher mangled the job, and what Hebrew we did learn was mostly outside of that classroom.

I began learning Hebrew in Rabbi Och’s classroom. In my mind it was fitting. Learn the holy tongue using the Book written in the holy tongue. We would seldom deal with more than a few verses in a given class session, and over time, what I began to see as the magic in the Hebrew language—and the magic of the Hebrew scriptures—began to emerge. I could clearly see that the story reinforced the language used to tell it and that the language reinforced the story as it was told. As it was meant to be told, I thought. I emerged from that darkened classroom shell-shocked anew after each session. Rabbi Och was an attentive guide. He seemed taken aback when I brought up my trusty ancient aliens to explain some esoteric passage. He gave me the impression that he had heard just about everything, but that this was new to him. He did not reject my lightly-held observations outright; he simply countered with traditional Jewish commentary.

By shell-shocked I mean that I was silenced by what I had learned. Besides Rabbi Och, I had no one with whom to discuss this subject. In addition, I was highly suspicious and took a critical approach to the process that was clearly under way in my inner soul. I would not allow any hints of religious fanaticism to take root. I did not want to be offering up my own homemade version of being “born again.” I disguised my interest in what I was learning as being nothing more than simple intellectual curiosity. Still, when I would bring up the subject of Judaism I quickly learned that all of those surrounding me, the American Jews and the Israeli Jews, were estranged from Judaism. There were one or two observant Jews among the Israelis but they kept to themselves. My roommate Emeka was not interested in discussing religion at all.

This “disguising” or camouflaging turned out to be a poor tactic. Even at that relaxed point of entry I found no interlocutors. That in and of itself was of course acceptable. I had by then learned that we are sometimes alone in our engagement with the cosmos. However, the simple fact that I presented my interest in Judaism as some sort of thought exercise, though it did not bring me dialogue participants, it did, regretfully, disguise myself from myself. Something that was meant to be a simple social tool became an interior barrier that I erected against myself. I was still attending the course and experiencing internal turmoil, but I had distanced myself from the action, so to speak. I was not addressing it directly. By this I do not mean to say that, sans the disguise, I would have been running up and down the campus of the University of Haifa shouting like my predecessor on Mount Carmel, Elijah: “Those who are with the true Lord, come to me, and those who are with Baal, go to him!” To convert Jews to Judaism was not a calling that appealed to me, nor, I thought, even applied to me.

All of which is to say, that by disguising myself from myself, by not directly confronting the tectonic changes that I was undergoing, in a post-hippie generation laissez-faire approach to life that sees life as collecting “experiences,” as one would pick blueberries in the wild, with the undeclared goal of being able to shout in secret knowing to one’s friends over one’s shoulder while flipping burgers on the grill, that most definitely—don’t you know it—one has “been there and done that,” by disguising myself from myself, I had blinded myself to what was approaching me with the force and speed of a tsunami. I was ankle-deep in moist beach sand, watching the waters recede, thinking calmly, “how interesting!”

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In the course we were studying the story of Abraham. This call from heaven, seemingly out of the blue, to leave everything that was known and familiar to him and to set out on a journey to the unknown resonated with me. At the time I did not see myself as a latter day Abraham, but my relocation to that far corner of the world, even if only for an academic year, led me to see in Abraham a kindred spirit. But it was more than that. Abraham was not a Jew when he received the call to take his family and leave the land where idol worship held sway. He was not on a personal quest “searching” for meaning in life; first and foremost he was to remove himself and his family from evil surroundings. Only then could the process begin of creating a new spirit in humankind.

Was I in the process of creating a new spirit in myself? I did not see things that way at first. When I arrived in Israel I saw myself as a detached observer of the world, not invested in any particular ideology. This, along with my “intellectual curiosity” disguise, prevented me from seeing what was in front of me. The slow tug of the few score of verses dealing with Abraham allowed me to continue to say to myself: “how interesting!”

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My mind was swirling with these short simple stories of Abraham. I felt there was a profundity to them, but I did not discern that profundity from the text itself. Regardless of the almost endless Jewish commentary and legends about Abraham that Rabbi Och brought to our attention, for me, the stories remained simple. Even the “Binding of Isaac,” which has served through the ages as the proof for the rejection or the acceptance in equal measures of the Divine will, did not seem too complicated to me. I understood the moral complexity of the story, but in the end for me the traditional Jewish understanding—that this was a test of Abraham’s faith that he passed with flying colors—sat well with me.

It was when I left the text behind, when I left the classroom, the building, that I became engulfed by the profundity of it all. For those short simple stories, in that ancient language, led in a straight line to the land upon which I now stood, the air which I now breathed, but more astoundingly, the people who surrounded me. The internal turmoil that I felt was in stark contrast to the liberal, secular society that was (and is) to be found at the University of Haifa. Everything in my background was evidence that I belonged to just such a society, and outwardly I continued to function accordingly, but the inertia that led me to do so was weakening, unperceived by me.

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It came to pass that I was in my dorm room one afternoon and decided to take a nap. Emeka was in class. I was alone. Once asleep I started to dream. I was falling through space on my back surrounded by darkness. It was a vivid dream, overwhelming. I came to a hover in some place, surrounded by events and personalities that passed through my vision as if on display, as if I were being shown events of my life and larger historical events about which I had learned from teachers, books, and movies. There was a purpose to the exhibition and in the dream I felt flustered that I could not discern the meaning for myself and there did not seem to be anyone to whom I could address my questions. The dream reached a crescendo, as did my lack of understanding, and I woke.

I drew myself up to a sitting position and stared across to Emeka’s side of the room. I was calm and collected, and contrary to my situation in the dream, I had an overwhelming sense of certainty; I understood what I had seen in my dream. There was then, as now, no sense that what I was experiencing could be expressed verbally. If anything, I reflexively knew that this would not be a subject to bring up in polite company. Crazy people spoke about things like this. Resolved to keep my secret, I still pondered the meaning of the dream, and without warning tears came to my eyes. I was sobbing, with no words to express the experience. No words, but a word: “Why?”

The visions of my dream loomed before me with their truth. I felt robbed. Robbed of my world-view and innocence. The lack of uncertainty I felt was based on a realization that everything I had known up to that point in time was based on a lie. I could not point to a specific “lie” that led to this understanding, but it was there. I felt this as a personal affront. Though it was clear to me that this new understanding was an all-engulfing, even universal one, in my immaturity and narcissism I concentrated only on my personal hurt. It was with a warm self-serving sadness that I turned to the ether and asked, as a child would ask: “What have I ever done to deserve to have been fed such dishonesty?” At the time, I had no consideration for the possibility that my ignorance had been a necessary step in a process of awakening. I felt only the personal affront of years of my life lost wallowing in falsehood.

In that envelope of self-pity I was drawn back to sleep, and to dream. Again, I was falling backwards into darkness and I reached the same place. This time there was a difference. I had a guide. Over my shoulder, unseen. A guide to what I was seeing. It seemed that it was the exact same dream, though I looked intensely at the visions, hoping to receive further enlightenment. Nothing. “What’s the point?” I asked the guide. Before the question was fully formed in my dream-mind, as if with the wave of a wand I received an answer. If what I had been seeing in the first dream and in this dream until that point was akin to being surrounded by a projection screen on which the visions had played out, now, in an instant, the screen disappeared and what visions I had were seemingly duplicated beyond without end, in all directions. But each vision beyond vision was slightly different. Similar but different. I was being given a vision of humanity, all of it, present and past. The lie was not personal. It was all-engulfing and formative to humanity.

It was the lie of idol-worship. From this dream I awoke as if I had not been dreaming. I sat up, possessor of newly minted wisdom, that my place in the world was with Eliyahu, on his side of the fence.

That did not mean that I had the courage to don a prophet’s robe and begin to hassle students as they walked to their classes asking them if they had heard the good news. No Kierkegaardian heroic “leap of faith” for me, of which I could have been rightfully proud. I may not have change my outward countenance, but I did act on my new wisdom. The next morning I rose from my bed, dressed, brushed my teeth, drank coffee, and left the dorms, entering a new reality that had been arranged and placed before me. Mine was to appreciate this sea-change and act accordingly. In this context that meant to walk directly to the building of Rabbi Och’s course an hour before class and to wait for him to arrive. People entering the building at that early hour could only manage a mumbled “good morning,” and I was glad of that, because if anyone had asked me how I was doing I have no idea what manic words might have ejected themselves out from my fevered head.

I saw Rabbi Och enter the parking lot and I approached the driver’s side before he managed to shut down the engine. He was surprised to see me standing there.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning. I want to convert to Judaism,” I answered.

“Whoa. Slow down for a minute. Walk me to my office.”

We walked together towards the building. Before we reached the entrance he stopped, twisted his head to look at me, smiled, and said: “I didn’t see that coming.”

“Neither did I,” I answered.

The Ongoing Archive Fishing Safari

At the end of each post I highlight an archived post that is behind the paywall. The idea is to entice readers to pay for at least a monthly subscription (7$) to support “A Pisgah Site.” You can cancel anytime.

Today’s choice is of a Russian new immigrant to Israel.