BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technicolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca Barbed Wire is produced by a group of enthusiastic malcontents. This is a short- term project, a premeditated cultural blip, planned for 12 issues. Original illustrations are by Geoff Carter. ISSUE 9 - The Religious Issue C O N T E N T S The Religious Issue Message From the Editor Religious Experience THE (IR)REGULARS IN BOX Readers write: misdirected praise, solicited phone calls, Kool Aid Acid Test, and employment enquiries. Lost and Found Alex Mackenzie finds a shopping list in the stairwell of a Vancouver apartment.. C O M M E N T Make Room George Kaplan is worried about our collective enthusiasm to reproduce."Human population will level out at a cozy 12,000,000,000 in about 150 years," he reports. Thematically linked stories from the Barbed Wire stable S C R I P T U R E Religious Tourist Ununcumbered by pious parenting, spiritual dabbler Meredith Low has been shopping for a fitting theology since she was a child. "At the tender age of four, I headed to the temple of worship by myself," she tells us. The Thirteenth Apocrypha: Technicrommicon Chuck Blade takes a Dante-esque descent into the underworld and rubs shoulders with Stephen Hawking, JFK and Andrea Dworkin. "I am beginning to see that there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly stated," he mentions. Even Heathens go to Weddings Mindy Gold attends the wedding of her Lubuvitch sibling and considers the effect of religion on each member of her family. "What happened to make my brother choose a new community that is now more important to him than his family?" she asks. UnJewed Paul Levine maps out his journey from the suburban orthodox synagogue to the pig roast. "I have lived outside of the restrictions of Jewish life for so long now that I define myself in opposition to it; Strangely, and with a hypocrisy I'm well aware of, I still consider myself a Jew," he admits. Hell is for the Unbelievers A youthful dalliance with a human rights organization prompts Kelly Patterson to confront her Holy Scriptures teacher. "Every time I left an Amnesty International engagement, I felt like a freedom fighter!," she tells us. S C R I B B L I N G S Bus Stop Crucifixion Artwork by Fernando Medrano. The Chaos of Cults Artwork by Geoff Carter. Conventional Wisdom Artwork by Micheal Corkill. S N A P S H O T S Ethnic Cleaning Alan Sirulnikoff has been taking photos of the laundry throughout the world for over 15 years. Message From the Editor Religious Experience Those who pay creedence to theories of a global Zionist conspiracy, particularly in regards to the entertainment industry, will not be dissappointment by this - the Religious Issue of Barbed Wire. While there are writers representing a wide variety of faiths to be found in this particular volume, a slim majority of Jews fills these pages. Along with Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Stephen Spielberg, we're doing our part to maintain control of the media. A number of writers have chosen to survey their own religious lives for your entertainment. My own Unjewing examines a religious experience rejected, while Meredith Low's Religious Tourist looks at a spiritual quest sought out. Mindy Gold takes us on a journey to New York, to visit her Lubuvitch brother in Even Heathen's go to Weddings, while Kelly Patterson transports us to her Holy Scriptures class in Hell is for the Unbelievers. On a different tact, George Kaplan in his Make Room urges us stop reproducing, perhaps in an effort to cut down on the number of religious people inhabiting the planet, while Chuck Blade takes us on what we hope is a speculative journey to hell in his The Thirteenth Apocrypha: Technicrommicon In the art department, Geoff Carter continues to provide story illustrations in addition to a section entitled The Chaos of Cults. Two other local artists have also contributed pieces for this issue. Check out Bus Stop Crucifixion and Conventional Wisdom by Fernando Medrano and Micheal Corkill respectively. Finally, photographer Alan Sirulnikoff returns with another selection of photography, Ethnic Cleaning, which gives us a look at the laundry of parts of Kenya, Israel and India. We welcome contributions for future issues to paull@istar.ca as long as you keep in mind that we have low standards and if you don't meet them your submission will not be published. Feel free to throw your story ideas in our direction if you're uncertain about their suitability. Writer's guidelines are here. We also welcome your feedback. Please address all correspondence to paull@istar.ca Paul Levine Vancouver, Canada April 1998 Make Room by George Kaplan When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest in 1953, the savage peak stood as remote as the dark side of Mars. By 1996, author Jon Krakauer found himself running out of precious bottled oxygen at Everest's 27-000-foot death zone but couldn't descend a narrow cliff face. It was clogged by slow climbers. Everest's notorious Hilary Step evolving into the Santa Monica freeway seems perversely inevitable on a planet where five human beings are born every second. Spend 30 minutes watching George Costanza remove his shirt when going to the bathroom, uh oh, there's 9,000 more at the party. Spend five hours watching Super Bowl Sunday, there's a new Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's a formidable pace. Even driven by AIDS, famines, war and natural disaster, death can't keep up. It claims two victims every second. About every 110 hours, a million more people arrive than depart. The World Overpopulation Awareness (WOA!) homepage calculates we gain 100 million-a new Mexico-every year. You can even keep score on the Internet's world population counters. The tickers all list just over 5.9 billion right now, with projections that we'll celebrate the millennium with stalled computers and six billion human beings. As a species, of course, we haven't always been this prolific. It took us thousands of years stretching from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, past the Age of Enlightenment and the Napoleonic era, until 1830 to reach the one-billion mark. Since then, the global population-growth chart looks like an Olympic ski ramp. Fueled by improvements in agriculture and medicine (and evidently some very provocative advances in sexual aids), population doubled to 2 billion in about 100 years. By the time baby boomers began entering the stream in 1950, global population had reached 2.5 billion. In the next 45 years, another 3.5 billion have elbowed their way on stage. The numbers games fascinate and terrify. The combined number of people living in India and China today more than doubles the population of the entire planet 160 years ago. In 1950, the United Nations ranked Japan as the world's fifth-highest population at 84 million. By 2050, the UN projects Nigeria will need 339 million to claim the fifth ranking The figures melt the mind. But the most amazing issue about human population growth today is that it's not much of an issue at all. Instead, we endlessly analyze problems exacerbated or driven by human overpopulation without taking a step back to ponder the root cause. In the jaded First World, we wring our hands over traffic gridlock and its new beast-cousin, road rage. We bemoan soaring housing costs, air pollution, water pollution, overburdened garbage landfills, urban sprawl, urban overcrowding, urban alienation. Media features report on the eradication of wildlife habitat and animal extinction, rainforest destruction, famine, disease, global warming, and slave-wage labour pools undercutting each other to stitch shoes for Phil Knight. With casts of thousands and millions, human calamities vie for the assignment editor's eye and 180 seconds on the evening news. But like the fat, ignored elephant that lounges at the kitchen table, the human species' explosive growth hasn't been widely discussed since the publication of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 provocative book, The Population Bomb. The bestseller prompted news and talk shows to temporarily place the topic on the media stage, raising public awareness and leading to lots of people wearing Zero Population Growth buttons. But you don't see ZPG badges anymore. Ironically, our torrid rate of procreation isn't "sexy" enough for the news. It lacks the immediacy and celebrity needed to warrant a new Special Report designation from CNN. By it's very nature, overpopulation presents the media with a subject that overwhelms yet lacks the violent eye candy offered by floods, tornadoes or war. The viewer's eyes glaze over as birthrate tickers click away. Very honestly, unless Oprah or Leonardo DiCaprio drop an isn't-awful-about-all-the-people sound bite, the mainstream press may never cover it again. But who can blame them? Covering human population is politically messy and bad for business. Acknowledging the problem opens the door to dialogue about population control and family planning, a socio-religious morass any network or newspaper chain would rather avoid. Talking about fewer babies can be also perceived as being anti-baby or anti-family. A recent national advertisement for the U.S.-based advocacy group Negative Population Growth (www.npg.org) had to come out and say `we like babies', arguing what it advocates is a better quality of life for future generations by making the planet less crowded. However, the same ad entered volatile waters by questioning tax breaks which underwrite larger families and supporting limits on immigration. Globally, examining population growth means delving into have and have-not issues and gender politics. As you would expect, UN figures show fertility rates (average number of children per adult woman) are greatest in underdeveloped countries lacking medical and educational resources (7.7 in Ethiopia compared to 1.9 in Canada). But birthrates are also high in wealthier countries with belief systems which restrict independence and decision-making power for women (6.5 in Saudi Arabia, 5.9 in the United Arab Emirates). Focusing on raw numbers, India provides the most dramatic example of the stakes involved in attitudes towards population control. In that country, government- sponsored family planning has traditionally faced a tough battle, squaring off against religious foes of many stripes including the unwavering Mother Theresa. Resulting fertility rates have remained comparatively high, 3.4 in 1993 compared to China's rate of 1.9. The result? According to the UN, India will easily outpace China as the world's most-populace nation before 2050. So, what to do? Individually, the information is there if you look for it-- online databases from universities, think-tanks, and the United Nations-and the news isn't even all bad. The rate of growth is starting to slow down, fertility rates are dropping almost everywhere except the Gaza Strip (8.4 in 1994), sperm counts are mysteriously declining and somehow the UN predicts human population will level out at a cozy 12,000,000,000 in about 150 years. Won't that be a nice era? At any kind of significant social and political level, however, the elephant is essentially ignored. Occasionally, stories cover American politicians calling for welfare incentives to reward non-working mothers for having fewer children, but such instances are rare. Realistically, overpopulation is probably too divisive, overwhelming and insoluble for mere mortals to comprehend. We'll even resort to pretzel logic to look the other way. Consider a Southam News story from February, in which U.S. scientist and researcher Thomas Samaras cautioned that improved nutritional standards were resulting in men and women around the Pacific Rim becoming taller and bigger--thus consuming more food and resources. And the solution? Let's not look at fewer human beings, let's engineer them to be smaller and easier to pack together. "Height increases with industrialization, economic improvement and what people call good nutrition," Samaras begins. "I'm not advocating malnutrition, but I would like to see us feeding our children a well-balanced, nutrition diet but one that is less rich and lower in calories." Make room. George Kaplan Religious Tourist by Meredith Low I'm obsessed with having options. I need an escape plan from every situation, or I start to itch and chafe. I need to know where the emergency exits are, how much it costs to cancel the flight, if we can break up without having to return any of each other's possessions. Naturally, there are consequences to this particular quirk. I'm usually single, and sometimes lonely. I haven't let myself fall too far in love with anyone, at least not so far that I couldn't climb out by myself. Yet. Once I dated someone just like me. It must have been funny watching us trip over each other as we raced to the fire exits. I change jobs a lot. I probably only think my current working situation is OK because the last line in my contract is the fixed end date. I'd rather have a great job that ended soon - to permit me to look for an even better one - than an OK job that was permanent. It's easier to finish a contract than quit a perfectly good job. Of course, it's because of fear. Fear of being trapped, or abandoned. Fear of betting the farm and losing. Fear of putting my faith in something, or someone, and being disappointed, or betrayed. I don't follow any religion, either. I just haven't been able to make the commitment. And maybe I don't feel my soul is in sufficient peril to bet on a particular point of view. It's not that I haven't checked out my options. Gotta know what they are, after all. I started going to church as a child. Not with my family. They were non- practising United Church Protestants, which is to say they didn't give religion a second thought from one end of the year to the other. No, at the tender age of four, I headed to the temple of worship (the local Methodist church) by myself. (It was the same church where, years later, I watched my father marry my stepmother where his mother braided the fringe on my crocheted pink poncho; the only time I ever saw her nervous.) I was taken under the wing of various solicitous adults, who probably wondered about the morals of my family, who were, at that very moment, making pancakes. I coloured pictures of a nightgowned Jesus, and learned the names of the other kids. It wasn't satisfying, somehow, and, after a time, I left the house of the lord to rejoin my family at the house of pancakes. I was looking for a faith, but also a reason to believe. I was an infant rationalist. If heaven was indeed full of astronauts, as my brother and Joni Mitchell both told me, then where was this God I kept reading about in my Anne of Green Gables books? Show me some evidence, I said. I became a religious tourist. Naturally, I started close to home. I asked my father if he believed in God, and I think he said no. He said "Gail does," so I looked at my stepmother and asked her if it was true. She said yes. I asked her how she could believe in a God that would let children starve in India (or wherever), and she sat there, folded her hands smugly, and said, "He's been good to me." I found this kind of personal testament unconvincing, not having the perspective to understand whether God had been good to me as well. Family friends took me to church. I went to Anglican mass for a pompous and curlicued Thanksgiving ceremony, which befuddled me utterly. I'm not sure who found God there, but it was all a bit much. The Presbyterian, Episcopalian, United, Pentecostal, and Lutheran churches all got their shots to convert me in those early years, but none succeeded. On a camping trip through Alberta, I talked my mother into stopping at the Mormon temple at Cardston. There I found out from a very nice tour guide that women could never go into the centre of the temple, no matter how devout they were. Crossed the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints off my list, right then. The best moment in this phase was at a French Catholic mass in a huge stone church in a tiny village in Quebec, when I was sixteen. My French was so bad that I couldn't tell when they switched to Latin, so it was all mellifluous nonsense to me. I stood and sat and kneeled, and even went up to receive Communion (not knowing any better, despite my assiduous research). I loved seeing the party guys pull up in their Sunday-best clean white T-shirts and jeans, and climb off their motorcycles to attend church to make their grandmothers happy. I loved to see all the two-child families praying solemnly along with the priests' intonations, even as they went straight to hell in a handbasket for their grievous sins. Growing up all the while in a northern mill town, I went to high school with born-again Christians - bible thumpers and holy rollers of every description. At slumber parties, Colleen and Lisanne played tapes for me - preachers playing ELO backwards to demonstrate the Satanic message in the music. I pointed out all the flaws in the arguments, all the ways the hellfire-for-hire Reverend could be doctoring the tapes himself. As always, I wanted cold hard facts, proof. I debated their beliefs with them and cut them down ruthlessly at the first sign of wavering. Luckily I never made it to a Saturday night prayer meeting at the Pentecostal church downtown - seeing people speak in tongues and undergo tearful conversions either would have dragged me down the same road because of the undeniability of it all, or sent me screaming out of the room to become a Satanist to spite them all. I haven't stayed in touch with the friend who went off to Oral Roberts University. These influences were countered by my stepfather. He was a philosophy professor and a devout practicing agnostic, who would have fallen on the atheist side of the fence were he pushed. The fact that he later converted to Anglicanism to marry his third wife, a minister, and that they started their relationship while he was still married to my mother, well, that makes the issue a bit cloudy for me. But that's another story. By the time I was around 18, I was no longer looking for conversion, but I was still intrigued. I visited Jewish friends in Montreal, where I got to eat kosher meals and observe the shabbas ceremony, but we went out to party instead of going to synagogue. Later, I finally made it to one for a friend's wedding, where I promptly committed an offense by pointing directly at the piece of the Torah behind the altar. Oh well. It's my experience that you can get away with a lot as an outsider, within certain limits. I did learn the utility of religious rites by working closely with a Muslim woman. Being a devout and disciplined kind of person, she prayed five times a day. This involved washing hands, face and feet, and then performing obeisance on the prayer rug, having first ascertained the relative direction of Mecca from one's whereabouts. All of which gave me time to do other things, like eat lunch, or read, or call my sweetie on the phone. I began to appreciate the time... I would probably be a better person were I to take time out from my day to meditate on things spiritual five times a day. And chant in a language that I don't really understand. And maybe do some yoga. Whatever. But perhaps I have to admit, finally, that I just don't seem to be drawn to a religious kind of life. I'm just not convinced. Occasionally that has created rifts. I worked alongside Anglican missionaries in Africa, who were pretty easygoing for people with conversion on their minds. But they were hardly more zealous than the students I was teaching - I still bear a grudge against Prudence Matsele for giving me a lecture on the dangers of not going to church. I should have told her to sit down and do her lesson. Eventually, I had the Talk with one of my missionary friends, David. We reached an impasse. I told him I just couldn't make the leap of faith that I felt religion needed. I had investigated and found out all I wanted to intellectually, but I just still hadn't heard anything to make me believe. David, previously so mild-mannered and English in that pallid kind of way, actually got angry at me. He talked about how one just sees is as the truth, that it's a revelation. He said there was no kind of leap about it. We had quite a blowup, which in retrospect I can't help but wonder about in non-religious terms. We could only agree, at long last, that I would read G.K. Chesterton (representing the Christian branch of world religion), and he would read Bertrand Russell (under the banner of secular humanism), and compare notes. Seven years later, neither of us has, but at least we still keep in touch. I like to think that if I actually got around to reading Chesterton, I might be won over. That's a seducing kind of idea. My ultimate ace in the hole. I too could have spiritual certainty, if I only put in some effort. But effort is exactly what I don't want to exert. I'm waiting to be tapped on the shoulder by God, up close and in person. I can't be bothered to unearth the possibilities or investigate the claims of each sect. I don't want to have to decide on one or another. I am a prime candidate for a deathbed conversion, though. Just keeping my options open in the meantime. Meredith Low The Thirteenth Apocrypha: Technicrommicon by Chuck Blade Canto One I am enduring another fitful night of abortive sleep. Of late I have had no dreams. My nights pass without record. My days offer no respite from the endless accumulation of detrital matters which do nothing to alter my station. My spirit is vexed and, so that I can extract a modicum of satisfaction from these paltry days, my mind conjures rhetorical conflicts: advantageous schemata for the substantiation of an Anomie Politik. This, of course, is pure folly. In fact my life has been shaped little by intellectual pseudodevices but more by magic. The fool: my ruling arcanum. For what else can we call a thing of nature that cannot be eradicated by the soothsayers of the New Science and what else can be said of he who has sought out its consoling illusions. This thing I speak of was prophesied by an acolyte witch, practising her fledgling divinatory powers she carelessly informed me that I would, late in the third decade of my life, contract an illness for which there is no cure. Being that I was merely a child at the time, my mind retained but did not dwell on this dark omen. As the loveless years accrued so too did the effects of my invisible determinant until, its accession complete, it now presides over me by fiat. A sibylline judgment that has manifest itself in the blood. The Holy Ghost. My blood, that of The Son, a virulent legacy, in the name of The Father. The mirror has cracked and I am no longer my familiar. I see my dolorous countenance reflected ad infinitum in an endless array of shattered glass. I cannot breathe. My mouth becomes a rictus of sheer terror as my body silently convulses in paroxysms of asphyxiation. I feel the cold downrush of unconsciousness. Everything fades to black and I breach the threshold of Nothingness. Canto Two Has sleep's heavy down swathed my mind so that I can finally find repose from these torments? No sooner is the question asked does its answer ensue. Raising myself up from the prone position and casting my gaze about I discover that I have been transported to the top of a wind swept mesa. Doth mine eyes make a fool of my other senses? Before me stands a massive dolmen upon which an inscription can be read: Hope To Abandon Ye Who Enters Here What sepulchral visions are these whose otherworldly presence plays on my wits as if they constituted a matter more real than the real? My thoughts were spared elucidation when I perceived a movement in the shadow of the stone. A demon like I have never beheld skulked forward on all fours. Massive and hairless its Cerberean anatomy moored me where I stood with a paralysis of dread so complete that all I could do was watch its fearful approach. Three sweaty tongues lapped from three pink mouths as it drew its three identical heads inches from where I had taken root. A necrotic stench issued forth. " More real than the real? How prey would that feel?" Incapable of marshaling my thoughts for an answer to the riddle I played a gambit, more for time than position. " Should I reply correctly what will you bestow upon me?" " Your life!" It shot back. " You insolent cur. Or we consign you forever to that which you were. Now be quick and respond. How would the more real feel like, you pawn." Before I could rejoin a voice behind me spoke out. " Like oblivion." The beast lowered its heads and withdrew in growling disapproval yielding access through the portal. I turned to meet my liberator. Canto Three A decrepit and broken down old man dressed in rags and carrying a tree branch for a walking stick slouched before me. In his other hand he carried plastic bags filled with yellowing newsprint. We stared at each other at length until I broke the silence. "Thank you." He gestured with his hand as if it were all a trifle. " So first came Orpheus for his Eurydice, then came Dante for his Beatrice, and now you. For whose love do you journey through the valley of death? What name shall your salvation bear?" "I don't know." He shrugged his shoulders unconcerned by my feeble-minded rebuttal. "Art thou then Virgil? " I asked. " No I'm his cousin Mimo. He told me to let you know he's sorry he couldn't make it but he's very busy right now working on a new poem." It is just my luck that rather than the bard I should get a buffoon as my guide through the underworld. " So it's true, " I said, " it is a fine line between Tragedy and Comedy." " Sure it is, " he agreed, " sometimes I laugh so hard I cry. Now cast off your pusillanimity and follow me for it is a long journey to the end of this night and you'll need all the mettle you can forge." Impressed with this dramaturge I fell into step behind the tattered train of his shabby cape as we passed through the vestibule. Canto Four Passing through the gate I heard strange sounds, simultaneously mournful and ecstatic, echoing within the antechamber of rock. Disembodied voices that chilled my heart with their profound song. Breaking through to the other side we stood on the edge of a large meadow covered with weeds, unkempt and wild, an obvious simulation of a natural state but a simulation that seduced the eye nevertheless. Thick hedges of morning glory lined the circumference of the field which was peopled with disturbed looking creatures. Some wailed and shrieked, gesturing wildly at invisible assailants. Others sat peacefully in a catatonic state. Most roamed the green expanse of field. " Who are these people?" I asked. " These are the people who were never really alive. Who never awakened to take any part in either good or evil. These are the insane." A man approached us, his gaze turned to the heavens. " Look! Do you see it? There in the sky! Do you see it?" He was clutching my shoulders shaking them wildly. " Orgone everywhere. Everything is Orgone." My guide gently took his arm and led him away. " There, there, Wilhelm. All the misfortunes of the world are written in the northern sky." He gestured for me to follow him. Crossing the pasture we found ourselves approaching a river. A dark figure stood at the bank. Canto Five " Just who do we think you are?" I turned to Mimo. " Is this the ferryman Charon whose burning eyes bid us enter his boat so that we can make safe passage across the river Acheron?" "No that's my crazy uncle Joe. Don't pay him any mind and that river's just a shallow stream. We should be able to cross it on foot." As we crossed the river I beseeched him for an explanation. " Why should the insane be spared? Do we not waste our sympathies by proffering it to the mentally ill?" " Can the stone choose its hardness? " He replied. " No. So having no choice, they cannot do wrong. Now silence your nagging tongue and behold: The Circle of the Great SoftHeads! " I could see nothing but a darkness as black as pitch. Not even my hands were visible at arm's length. He went on. " Here are contained the spirits of those whose endeavors captured the imaginations of millions and didn't hinder mankind nor aided it. Though they sinned not and though they have merit, it suffices not, for in the end it was all just so much excrement passing through the rectum of the world." It dawned on me that my escort was at least two parts olive oil charm. Groping blindly through the dark I went, musing upon Mimo's pontifications, when abruptly my balance was lost and I tumbled head over foot with a man seated in a chair. " Plth urmgh onn thlss," he said. What profanation of speech was this. " Mimo, can you decode this mans cryptic language? I can't make out what he's trying to say. " " He can't really say anything," he answered, stepping past me and helping the man back in his chair. " Excuse us Mr. Hawking but my associate knows not where he is going." Feeling our way through the dark we shuffled along. " That was Stephen Hawking? Tell me who else I might accidentally bump into around here?" " Well, Jean-Paul Sartre for example." " Sartre? Why Sartre?" "His treatise on Being sought to express the experience of the individual but instead only succeeded in transmitting neurosis to the culture-bound preoccupations of western metaphysics. Werner Heisenberg is here too, whose uncertainty principle stated the impossibility of exactly determining, more than one characteristic of a thing, at any given moment, therefore, destroying the dualistic universe, you see, but not showing us the way toward unity." " I am beginning to see that there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly stated," I added. Canto Six Gradually we made our way out of the dark circle. A dim light shined yet from no discernible source did it emit. Nevertheless it illuminated our path into the next circle. I stopped at a sign that read: Human Agency Through Collectivisation I perceived audible lamentations and an eternal trembling of the air. Before us lay an enclosure of land fathomable not by its abundance of open space but by the lack of it. It appeared as though every square foot of it was occupied by human souls but upon closer approach, narrow pathways were visible, giving the impression of large clusters of beings that moved, if shifting ones weight from left to right and shuffling a foot forward then back can be called movement, as if commanded by one order but independent of the other clusters. A disconsolate chanting could be heard as we drew nearer to these huddled and crowded forms. Every ism has its ist For without which Man has no gist. Without an ism There is no ist Nor an ism Without some ist. So every man Must be an ist So the ism Can exist. "Take caution my friend," Mimo said, " we lose many here. The urge to be part of a larger organ is a strong one married as it is to the concept of an individual as part of humanity." " I'm frightened. I feel the compulsion to join. To belong. Are we not social animals after all?" He gripped my hand and his manner became stern. " Bear this continually in mind as we force our way past this morass: suppress all rhetorical references that fail to differentiate you from other men." We squeezed our way through the crowds. Here I witnessed the manifold configurations of organization man: the isms and the ists. Abecedariannism, Adventism, Anabaptism, Assumptionism, Brownism, Calvinism, Catharism, Docetism, Frankism, Fundamentalism, and other christian and non- christian religions. Here too were the unending organizations by which man governed the affairs of others: Republicanism, Liberalism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, Leninism, Fabianism, Maoism, and on and on until, just as I began to lose my faculties of differentiation, we lost our footing and tumbled down a grassy knoll. Canto Seven Mimo's newspapers lay scattered about on the ground being blown hither and thither across Hell's half acre. " My papers, quickly, help me gather them." As we scrambled to collect them I had the unerring feeling of being watched. My attention was distracted from the observer by the bold headlines I read as I drew Mimo's papers together; After 25 years Buck Rogers is for Real Cryogenic Surgery: A New Dimension in Safety and Effectiveness Can Satellites Cut Communication Cost? Nuclear Energy: Man's Inexhaustible Power Source The Military In Outer Space " Why do you keep these old newspapers?" He looked at me slyly. " In life one must have one's papers in order." I saw a dark figure moving at the edge of my vision. A huge and majestically muscled man-beast tapped me on the shoulder with his tail. It was Minos. Guardian at The Gates of Hell. He was coolly considering us and not without a good deal of condescension. " So. What corruption of language shall you perform?" He said slowly girding his tail three times. "Hmm? How shall it make its eventual contribution to the sum of human misery?" Mimo strode forward. " It is his fate to enter every door." Minos leaned his torso forward, raising an eyebrow and looking askance, " It is only the pure who can pass through Hell unharmed." Mimo stepped between us. "To the pure all is pure." As Minos nonchalantly turned to go he said to me over his shoulder, " Watch where you go once you have entered here pilgrim and to who you turn." Was prophecy hid in his words? I overheard Mimo's bemused sotto voce murmurings. "That line works like a charm every time." We hadn't gone another two paces when he broke his reverie. " We've entered The Circle of Myths and Symbol-Hunters. Be on your guard for it is here that the metaphorical dominance of language prevails and in the absence of an attitude of self-conscious control led man to believe that nature itself could be bent to the demands of his will." Canto Eight Mimo's monologue was broken by a blood-curdling scream whose pitch could have shattered glass, would there have been any available to shatter, and whose amplification brought pain to my ears. The source of the tortured cries disclosed itself to us in a heartbeat. A man submerged up to his neck in a cauldron of boiling water. His face in spasms of intense agony. The sight nearly brought me to a swoon. His suffering brought howls of delight to a troupe of natives who periodically would jab him with their sharpened staffs. I felt Mimo's steadying hand on my shoulder gently urging me forward, bidding me to confront this horror show. With downcast eyes so as not to be overcome by nausea I asked in trembling voice, " Who are you whose senseless martyrdom pierces me to the quick." " I am Claude Levi-Straus," he replied through gritted and gnashing teeth, " my overdetermined formalisations of human nature caused me to subordinate beauty to the truth." A lance thrust to his chest encouraged further elaboration. " And, thanks to my European preoccupations with a rational god, relegated truth as utility's handmaid." Mimo's ministrations proved futile and I fell in a dead faint. John F. Kennedy appeared. He held his bullet rent head in his hands and it began to speak. One voice, noble and proud, issued forth from his mouth but another, whispering and sinister, spoke through the bullet hole in his skull. Ask not what your country can do for you. Submit to authority in all matters But what you can do for your country. Submit to authority in all matters Suddenly another man dressed in garters and stockings danced across my field of vision reciting an obscure mantra over and over again. Hughes Aircraft Corporation: Creating a New World with Electronics Hughes Aircraft Corporation: Creating a New World with Electronics Then he engaged in bestial copulation with Kennedy's headless corpse. Struggling to regain consciousness I could hear them shouting after me in orgiastic glee. Control of the universe, including our own earth, is at stake Mimo's words came to me as if through water. "You must display more self-control. Your journey's successful completion is at stake." Canto Nine " Where am I?" " I carried you bodily to the next circle." " How I had hoped to awaken in the warm comforts of my own bed." " Not yet. You have much work to do." He was wise to my peevishness and became remonstrative with me in a manner thus far uncommon in our pilgramage. " Do you think you have acquired sufficient compass of your moral agency? " He bellowed. His fury mounted as he struck the ground with his staff. " If you turn back now your spiritual itinerary will amount to nothing more than a false utopia worthy of the most paltry logic." I became recalcitrant. " Your blustering righteousness doesn't make it so. You're just talking loud and saying nothing." " Oh is that so. Well while our little beauty swooned he completely missed the last circle." " Which one was that?" " The Circle of the Omitters and Excluders." " How ironic. So where are we now then?" " The last circle before the inner sanctum; The Circle of the Word Men." " Before I fainted, I mean, the Circle of Myth and Symbol Hunters, it all seemed a trifle abstract to me." He hung his head and let out a deep sigh. " You're familiar with the American painter Edward Hopper?" I nodded in agreement. " Well when asked about the melancholy ambiance of his paintings he replied, ' I do not paint sadness and loneliness. What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.' " " Yes but..." " Banish these empty thoughts. Great distance impels us forward." With that he turned and walk on and dejectedly I did follow. Canto Ten Was all this proof that, in some phantasmagorical way, my judgment had arrived? What were my crimes if a delinquency of the spirit can be considered a crime? A fatal enthusiasm for life: this was my crime. An enthusiasm that predisposed me to passionate transgressions. My jurors have been legion. My sentence just. A wayward spirit duly punished by an affliction of the blood thus strictly circumscribing the fanciful curiosities of my body. Like a wounded I try to take flight only to remain forever grounded. House arrest. My movements are checked by a acute band of arthritis, originating Sub-Clavical and terminating in the Sacrum, that sears me with a firebrand of sickening, stiffening, pain. My character has been nurtured with an insipid poison. Nature never stood a chance. What fault then is mine if eternal justice created me thus. What limits should we place on these providential profanations of the human? To what extent should we permit these indignities? Will the computer, with its possibilities of a virtual reality, liberate us from Divine Judgment? Or is this merely the hypothesis of a project of irreversible disappearance in the purest logic of the species? Canto Eleven My desultory introspections were interrupted by yet another gruesome spectacle. The nude body of an obese woman hog-tied and chained to a post of gargantuan proportion and phallic aspect. She was being repeatedly raped by a trio of black satyrs who possessed the members of male elephants. " Who now then?" " Andrea Dworkin" " Why here in the Circle of the Word Men?" I asked in a manner betraying my disinterest. Mimo puffed out his chest in a deep breath slowly tilting his from side to side appraising the scene. " Well, in the classic Machiavellian tradition, she redefined human sexuality as a political problem in the methodology of social order. By degrading vocabulary into propaganda she incited a generation of women into a pointless and impotent revolution. Only I not sure her sentence is so apt. It seems as though she is actually enjoying her punishment." " Isn't the reconstitution of a world metaphor a supremely religious act?" I countered " True, but, not when it is seduced by the popularizing bait of the bookmakers hook." I looked upon the women for the last time. The expression of a pained pleasure was unmistakable. We marched on. Words fell from the heavens like acid rain melting the flesh of those stationed here with it's toxicity but leaving us unharmed. Again we encountered more insanity. An overweight oriental man, also nude and staked to the ground, was being force-fed chunks of his own flesh which were sliced off his hide by a coterie of male eunuchs bearing dull knives. " This is Mao Tse Tung," Mimo said before I could ask. " His crimes against human nature involved redefining politics as a secular problem in the methodology of social order. Do you catch the subtle difference there?" " There is nothing subtle about this." I pointed out. " I agree but ' Wherewith a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished.' " Chuck Blade Even Heathens Go to Weddings by Mindy Gold My brother's wedding happens in the parking lot of the building that serves as school, community centre and house of worship for the community of Lubavitch Jews in Crown Heights, near Brooklyn, New York. The ceremony takes place on a platform under the chuppah, the wedding canopy. Standing up there with my brother Sheldon and Anne, his bride-to-be, in front of all their friends and community members, are my parents, my grandfather, Anne's parents and two rabbis. Shoshana and Tamara-my two sisters-and I circle the crowd, searching unsuccessfully for a good camera angle. We can walk only halfway around the crowd of well-wishers, along the outskirts of the women's side. Sheldon stomps the glass under his foot and everyone shouts "Mazel tov!" He and Anne are led away by the rabbi to the yichud - the private room where they will spend the first five minutes of married life together, alone for the first time. The rest of us parade inside for cakes, cookies and fruit, herring, smoked fish and rye bread. The men toast the couple in their absence with shots of whiskey and noisy cheers. We are on the women's side, where the food tables are set up against the wooden partition that divides the room in half. Children chase each other in circles while my mom, my aunt Rita, Shoshana, Tamara and I sit down on plain wooden chairs with glasses of cherry red kosher pop. "When do we get to drink?" Shoshana asks. My mother rolls her eyes heavenward in a familiar silent appeal. Maybe having a religious son has convinced her she'll finally get divine help in understanding her daughters. I travelled to England with 14 other family members, none of us knowing exactly what to expect. Unlike the rest of us, Sheldon is very religious. He is a Lubavitcher, a member of a sect of Hassidic Jews who have followed Jewish laws, traditions and practices the same way for three hundred years. I'm not used to seeing him look like this: fuzzy dark beard covering his cheeks and chin, in a dark suit, fringes of a prayer shawl dangling from under his shirt, a long black coat, head covered by a kepah, and when outdoors, by a black hat. When Sheldon announced his engagement I sent him a card and sincerely offered to do whatever might be expected from the oldest sibling of the groom. It soon became clear to me that not only was I not expected to do anything, but that Lubavitch doctrine actually forbids me, as a woman, to participate in any meaningful way. Lubavitch women worship by keeping a kosher home, having children and raising them to be full members of the community. The crowd at the kiddush begins to thin. My father smuggles my sisters and I each a small vodka from the men's side of the hall. We add some red pop and knock them back. We still have the dinner to get through. I grew up in a typical suburban Jewish environment: we kept kosher at home, but not in restaurants; we went to synagogue on Saturdays, but didn't pray at all during the week; we went to Hebrew school, but didn't learn much. I remember enjoying going to synagogue. I loved the singing and knew all the words even though I didn't know what they meant. Sitting among a congregation of two hundred people, two hundred voices raised together in songs of prayer and praise, my wobbly twelve-year-old self-image felt like a member of a group. It didn't matter that other things didn't feel exactly right, for several short pure moments, I belonged. My sister Tamara remembers sitting in the main sanctuary with the adults, after the kids' services were over. "When I was younger I had more faith," she says. "I was more observant, I really did get something out of it - not so much spiritually, but the cultural belonging and familiarity, the feeling of home." Shoshana says she never felt completely comfortable. "I never really bought into it, even when I was young - I don't know why. I think part of it might be my lack of belief, but also because I always found it strange that we were supposed to be having some sort of spiritual experience by reading lines we didn't understand and singing songs that had a good tune, but had no meaning for me. I didn't expect a moment of revelation or anything, but I don't see how prayer can have any meaning when you don't even know what you're saying. Before the wedding ceremony, the women gather on their side of the hall for the bedeken-the veiling ceremony. Anne sits quietly in the throne-like chair, surrounded by artificial lilies and roses, all frilly with white and green. She waits patiently, refusing food and drink, as the flower girls are arranged around her for pictures. Once the pictures are snapped, the little girls wander away, their only function fulfilled. The two mothers remain standing on either side of her, carefully holding the lit candles they will carry outside to the chuppah. It's nearly time. The women cluster around the chair as the groom enters the room, leaning on the arms of the two fathers. He will attach the veil that symbolizes her virtues: modesty, dignity and chastity. It also signifies her unavailability to other men. Sheldon attaches the veil to the wreath of flowers in Anne's hair so that it hangs in front of her face-it is a solid, heavy, white, lace-covered satin square. He hangs a longer piece of lace in front of that. Finally, he lifts the filmy gauze attached to the wreath, the kind of veil used by most brides we've seen, over Anne's head to cover the other two pieces. The watching women "amen" in a flurry of flashbulbs as the men leave. My sisters and I look at each other, silent and wide-eyed. Anne, hands in her lap, her face now completely hidden, waits patiently for the mothers to lead her outside. "Anne," Shoshana says, pointing the camera at her. The white-covered head turns toward us. "Smile!" We all laugh, as much with shock as with amusement, and Anne's head dips forward as if she is laughing too. I enjoyed Hebrew school for the last two years, when I was 15 and 16. I got to study with our rabbi. Here, finally, was some intelligent discussion and some analysis, instead of just memorizing the days of the week in another language. With Rabbi Fine we were adults. By that time though, we had stopped going to services except on the High Holidays. Two years later I moved away to university. The first year I was away I returned home for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and kept kosher for Passover in my residence room. I felt good and noble for doing it. The next year I went home for the High Holidays, but didn't keep Passover. I felt a little guilty, but not less Jewish. Now, years later, I do neither and jokingly tell people that I'm not a practicing Jew because I got it right once. Tamara went through the same sort of process. When friends asked her about religion, she said, "It's under review." In terms of organized religion, she says "I have a problem with how religious fervour manifests itself. I would never do anything 'in the name of Judaism.'" Shoshana, on the other hand, was sure from the moment she was on her own that organized religion was not something she was interested in. "In essence, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims believe in many of the same basic human values," she says. "Yet they practice intolerance and hatred. I know this is often a bastardized interpretation of what was originally taught, but religion in general seems to lend itself to dogmatism. When you can claim that God is on your side, and that you don't have to justify your actions beyond attributing your inspiration to God, there is always trouble." The wedding dinner is held in a hall a few blocks away from the community centre. Once again, the room is divided in two, this time by a line of wooden trellises decorated with bright green fake ivy. Each side has its own head table. As sisters of the groom, we sit at one, along with Anne, the two mothers and Anne's other sister-in-law at the other end. We ask our dad for drinks again; this time he brings a bottle. Like all Jewish weddings, Lubavitch or not, we dance both before and after the meal. The difference here is that even the dancing is kept separate. The strangest thing is that it's like two separate parties, even for the new couple. The men dance, eat, celebrate and pray with the other men. The women stay with the women. The only time the two sides even get to see each other is at the end of the evening when we say the Grace After Meals: one part of the trellis is moved so the two head tables can see each other. We all dance to be polite after we're dragged into the circle by the energetic women of the community. I hate this kind of dancing: holding the hot, sweaty hands of people I hardly know. The hat my mother is unaccustomed to wearing keeps slipping down over her eyes. Because of Lubavitch ideas of modesty, and because she knows the other women will tell her to put it back on, she does not take it off. Tamara, Shoshana and I escape the dancing and replenish our vodka and orange sodas as often as we can without drawing attention to ourselves and our immodesty, or to the bottle hidden under the table. The place of women in Judaism has always been a problem for me. Even in Hebrew school there were some things the girls were just not allowed to do. Even at the age of ten I knew this was wrong but I wasn't sure why or what I could do about it. Now I believe all human beings should have the same chances and opportunities in their lives. To be able to make these choices, we have to know what the possibilities are. Even though she's seen the possibilities, by agreeing to be my brother's wife, Anne voluntarily takes a place in a world where she is excluded, kept separate and covered up. I don't understand how anyone can choose that. Looking at religion now, Tamara realizes, "Losing faith in faith happened at the same time as I began to develop my feminist sensibility." Shoshana agrees. "In Judaism and Christianity, women are ascribed subordinate roles simply because the 'bibles' were written by men and are a product of their time." Three days before the wedding we sit in the park a few blocks away from the synagogue where Sheldon is being called to the Torah. This honour, given to the groom on the Sabbath before his wedding, is where he stands in front of his family and community and accepts the words of Jewish law as his guide for married life. After the service the other men pelt him with candies to symbolize a sweet and fruitful union. We are in the park instead of the synagogue to avoid the disapproving looks of the women in the curtained-off women's balcony. Our discomfort stems not only from their looks, but from the notice on the wall forbidding talk during the service, and our inability to see or participate in the prayers because of the barrier. "Let's go back and tell him we can't come," Shoshana suggests. "He'll want to know why," Tamara warns. "We could tell him we feel uncomfortable with the way he worships and would rather not attend," I offer. But what I want to say is that I feel like a heathen, hiding from some ancient religious authority. Our brother has no idea how we live or who we are, beyond postal codes and professions. As we sit there, we each wonder what he would do if he found out some of our truths. What would he do if he knew one of his sisters was living with her non-Jewish boyfriend? Or one of us was having an affair with a married man, or was gay. None of us keep the dietary laws of his community, or observe the sabbath; we don't pray and don't believe. Not the way he does. We didn't make our choices according to the ancient rule of religious law; we live according to the rules and mores of our societies - we do what makes us happy, equal, contributing members of our communities, one that he chooses not to live in. But we are in Crown Heights, where the community of Lubavitch Jews is large and tight-knit. Sheldon and Anne were "introduced" by mutual friends. They had chaperoned dates, never spent time alone together, and a few months after they met, announced their engagement. This should be a proud and happy day for all of us, since Sheldon, the oldest, is the first one to get married. But neither my sisters nor I take any part in the festivities, either personal, ceremonial or honorary. Relegated to the edge of the crowd, our participation is not necessary for this ceremony to take place. Neither is our presence. It wasn't always like this. When we were kids we went to synagogue together. We also went to public school, the mall and parties. We had friends and part time jobs; we got older and went to university. I can't figure out what happened to make my brother choose a new community that is now more important to him than his family. He lives far away in miles, but he'd be far away even if he lived down the block. Even though we grew up in the same house, somewhere through the years we changed, we all changed. Mindy Gold UnJewing by Paul Levine Last Saturday - notably the Jewish Sabbath - I drove downtown, eyed some delightful trinkets that I thought might make good Christmas presents, had a lunch consisting of a shrimp cocktail followed by a bacon double cheese burger, and then went home and fornicated with my gentile partner. By any stretch of the imagination, and by the most liberal standards set by the most lax, reformed synagogues, I am not a "good Jew." In fact, my failure to adhere to the defining regulations of the faith; or, perhaps more precisely, my willful and indulgent neglect of the obligations of my birthright, bring into question the very notion of what it is to be a Jew. "If you keep doing that," my mother once told me in a unrelated matter, "you'll stay that way." The moral is applicable to my current irreligious status: I have lived outside of the restrictions of Jewish life for so long now that I define myself in opposition to it; Strangely, and with a hypocrisy I'm well aware of, I still consider myself a Jew. And even more perverse perhaps is the fact that my Jewish brethren, despite the litany of sins I perform daily, still also consider me to be a Jew. Should I ever decide to return to the fold I shall be embraced with open arms, my slate wiped clean, armies of rabbis running at me with prayer shawls, cups of ceremonial wine and Friday night reminder phone calls to attend synagogue. Which brings me to what I've always admired about Judaism: its reluctance to admit new members from outside and consequently its enthusiasm to forgive those born into the faith who have strayed from the path. This policy has had the unintended effect of giving me license to experiment freely with transgressing the boundaries of Jewish life. Should the Messiah that Jews worldwide are still waiting for finally arrive during my lifetime, I'll jump back into line. Until then, bring on the religious, moral and spiritual transgressions: I'm on a shopping spree. A recent television docu-drama called Hollywoodism examined how European Jews had escaped religious persecution by immigrating to America. There they set up movie studios, reinvented the delights of high society for consumption by the toiling working classes, and single-handedly invented the idea of social mobility and, by extension, the specious yet sustaining notion of the "American dream." Along the way, the studio moguls fell victim to their own aggressive assimilation: they lost their identities as Jews and eventually lost control of the studios. By contrast, my European relatives of the same generation escaped religious persecution by immigrating to London. There they sold clothing, furs and silver in the city's East End ghetto. England's firmly entrenched class system provided no illusions of social mobility and my relatives lived much as they had in their homelands - practicing with religious orthodoxy, and being thankful for being able to exist without any obvious tyranny, in parallel with the dominant culture rather than aspiring to infiltrate it. Wherever possible, they worked, socialized, did business and prayed with other Jews. Unencumbered by visible minority status, they moved with relative ease between the restrictive life of orthodox adherence and the practicalities of living in British society. A couple of generations later the various offshoots of my family were spread though London's numerous suburbs where communities of Jews had formed over time and synagogues catering to the various denominations had evolved. The suburb my parents had chosen to settle in was serviced by a synagogue with a level of religiosity roughly equivalent to what they'd been brought up with - conservative orthodox. The numerous festivals sprinkled throughout the year and the weekend Sabbath were celebrated with purist interpretations of procedure. All services were conducted entirely in Hebrew. Only men were eligible to participate in the rituals of public worship; women, whose separate seating area approximated a spectator's gallery, were relied upon to cook, reproduce and keep what is called a "Jewish home," one well stocked with children and kosher food. My parents did their best to keep in step with the demands of their chosen synagogue but, along with many other families in the community, practical concerns gave a certain flexibility to the rules. While we were expected to keep a kosher home we took certain liberties as a matter of convenience. While more literal-minded families had two separate sets of plates - one for meat, the other for milk products - we ate from only one set of dishes and avoided meals that mixed milk and meat. Similarly, at restaurants we were free to order anything that didn't contain pork or seafood. While operating any kind of machinery is forbidden on the Sabbath, my family - like so many others - drove to the synagogue when rushed and parked a few blocks away so we could at least approximate the illusion that we had walked. We attended the synagogue for most of the major festivals, sporadically on the Sabbath and particularly on the holiest day of the year - Yom Kippur - the day of Atonement, where Jews spend the entire day in synagogue praying for forgiveness for the moral transgressions of the previous year and fasting until sundown. The religious hunger I have felt through the course of my life has been far more literal than spiritual. Grumblings in my stomach have dogged most of my important Jewish moments. Like one of Pavlov's dogs, I have grown to associate Judaism with a longing for food. Besides the obvious lack of sustenance to be found on a day like Yom Kippur, my overly efficient metabolism has ensured that I sat uncomfortably in religious services dizzily anticipating the next meal rather than reveling in scripture. At weekly Hebrew classes I battled hunger as I learned what it means to be a Jew. For years I displayed an alarming lack of will to learn the ancient language of Hebrew and a clownish disregard for the numerous rituals, festivals and moral training that every week the olive-skinned daughters of rabbis and reverends would attempt to encourage me to learn. My aversion to Hebrew was purely instinctive: unlike languorous French or silky Italian, Hebrew is a horrendous clash of consonants hammered together with harsh guttural inflections - like Scottish meets Serbo-Croatian. I got a sore throat from speaking it and a headache from reading it. By eleven or twelve, as some of my classmates were capable of having polite social discussions in the ancient language, I was still struggling with sentences like "here is a dog." Part of my reluctance to participate enthusiastically in religious study was the increasing irrelevance of Judaism in my daily life. Most of my Jewish peers attended private Jewish schools, which provided a seamless continuity with the rest of their religious existence and sealed them off from the society of non- Jews that surrounded them. I, by contrast, attended the local state school populated entirely by the Christian children of the local working classes. Although the school was officially secular, the spectre of Christianity was ever present. In Hebrew classes I had learned that the Jews were God's chosen people and that other religions, while well intentioned, were suffering under terrible delusions. Particularly, I was told that Christians had been duped into believing that a mere prophet was the messiah. So when I sang the hymns in praise of sweet baby Jesus, and as I studied the life and death of the frail emaciated do-gooder, I couldn't help feeling a little smug for having infiltrated the world of the guileless gentiles, standing shoulder to shoulder with them in praise of the bogus prophet that provided the foundation for the meaning in their misguided lives. Yet after some time my allegiances became divided as I struggled to maintain the double life of cloistered Judaism at home and on the weekends and Christian-based schooling on the weekdays. The implied message from my Hebrew schooling was that Jews should mix primarily with other Jews, that social interactions with non-Jews should be avoided except where there's a practical purpose - like dealing with the authorities or in business. This dictum, so central to the maintenance of Jewish society, was impossible for me to maintain. I felt like an impostor in school for being intrinsically different to the other kids. Yet as I spent more time in the gentile world, my Hebrew studies and my time spent at the synagogue took on a fraudulent, alien ring. By the time I entered my teens I started to embrace the notion that neither Jews nor gentiles had a satisfactory foundation for belief. I despised both the voluntarily limited lifestyle of Judaism and the pervasiveness of Christianity. I was teetering on the verge of godlessness as I prepared for my Bar Mitzvah - the entrenched rite of passage designed to propel the young into a life of religious adherence. For me, it was the beginning of the unfolding of what little faith I had - in doctrine, in the security of community, and in God. Nonetheless, I performed well at my Bar Mitzvah singing a lengthy Hebrew passage to the congregation thanks to a tape the rabbi made for me to memorize to compensate for my meager grasp of the language. At the time I had a good singing voice and as I belted out Hebrew words I did not understand from the synagogue stage to the admiration of the community, I fully realized the power that appearances, rather than realities, played in gluing the community together - the family driving to synagogue and faking the walk, the state school student singing hymns to Christ during the week and verses to a Jewish God on the weekends, a godless teen miming his way through a complex religious ritual and winning the crowd over with showmanship. Moving to Canada with my parents in my mid-teens only served to accelerate my un-jewing. Vancouver had a very small Jewish community at the time and, as is typical in North America, the equivalent denomination to the one we'd left behind in England had a far more relaxed attitude towards religious adherence. Driving to synagogue was not only permitted; it was encouraged. Vancouver had only a handful of inconveniently located kosher food stores and only one, immensely over-priced, Jewish butcher. Before soon, our family standards concerning what constituted "kosher" dropped dramatically. Faced with a minuscule local community, my parents sent me off the Jewish summer camp in the hope that I'd meet some teenage contemporaries committed to the faith. What I met there, though, were ideologically entrenched Zionists committed to the idea of sending me off to Israel to work on a farm and eventually to complete a tour of duty in the army. I met a few Jews there who interested me far more for their sexual allure than their religious commitment so I continued to attend organizational meetings as a mock Zionist in the hope of procuring myself a badly needed grope. As I failed to hide my passionate disinterest in booking an El Al flight to the homeland I was eventually asked to leave to organization. "One bad apple," one of the leaders explained invoking fruit-farming imagery, "spoils the crate." This preposterous rejection from an ideological faction of my own faith further fueled my rebellion against all things Jewish. As I grew into my teens I started to back away from all but the most obligatory religious events. I took to taunting God by conspicuously sinning. At 15 I ate pork for the first time and, after lifetime of dramatic build-up, found it curiously unremarkable. Was God trying to tell me something? At 17, after a fierce argument with my parents, I committed the gravest sin possible - rather than attending synagogue on Yom Kippur and fasting my way through the day, I worked an eight-hour shift at my mall job unloading cheap fashion to teenyboppers. My un-jewing was complete. As an adult, I've delineated my own teenage rebellion from my core beliefs and concluded, sadly, that I do not have faith in God. Without this foundation, Judaism has provided me with the impetus for family get-togethers rather than a spiritual centre or a way of life. As I've watched Jews my own age, in both England and Canada, seal themselves off from the non-Jewish world, both ideologically and physically, in an effort to maintain their identities, I've reveled in munching on forbidden fruit while maintaining a tenuous grip on my heritage. My years of schooling in Jewish customs and practice now provide the faintest backdrop for my life. The identity I salvage now as a Jew is cultural rather than religious, an acknowledgment of the fact of my ancestry, a tip of the hat to the durability of a people whose way of life I cannot lead. Paul Levine Hell is for the Unbelievers by Kelly Patterson A product of the Catholic assembly line, I was baptized, celebrated my First Communion, shamed into hermetically sealed confessionals, and sacramentally confirmed in the eyes of the Catholic Church. I first suspected some pieces of my inherited puzzle were missing at the age of 13. My father's prescribed elite education and exposure to studies not afforded by public secular schools disassembled my belief in Catholicism. By age 15, I was convinced the puzzle could not be completed and upon procuring my driver's license, I publicized I was throwing the entire puzzle in the trash. They always said I was precocious. My father produced his own embodiment of the Inquisition. He, among others, questioned the source of my disbelief. After profound reflection, I believed my involvement with Amnesty International seduced me to question all my convictions. I began attending Amnesty International Club meetings after school, mainly because my hormones were stimulated by the sight and smell of Ashley Hawthorne. This towering hairy adolescent wore a turquoise beret (even during gym-class) and reeked of an intrinsic but unidentifiable odor (later classified as "pot".) Ashley founded the Amnesty International Chapter at our Caucasian-Children-of- Catholic-Baby-Boomers high school in Suburbia, USA. He worshipped Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela, ate everything with chopsticks (even French fries) and taught me the meaning of "blue balls." It took me several months to assemble the courage to offer him a substantial antidote. Every time I left an Amnesty International engagement, I felt like a freedom fighter! If Joan d'Arc could lead the French military to victory at age sixteen, I could, at least, liberate one "prisoner of consciousness" at age 13. I began watching terrifyingly disturbing films, like Closet Land, The Killing Fields, and Romero, based on Ashley's advisement. This sudden and violent, self-inflicted exposure to some of the most impressive displays of human ignorance, malevolence, and carnality in contemporary history, shattered my virgin, parochial mind. I no longer trusted Authority, in any manifestation. The severing question, which released the anchor impeding my teen-age enlightenment, was directed at Mr. Marsh, my Holy Scriptures instructor. "Mr. Marsh, I am doing a book report on Albert Schweitzer's life for Social Service Class. Albert Schweitzer says, in his book, that neither Matthew, Luke, Mark, nor John lived at the same time as Jesus. Which means they never personally knew Jesus. So, how do we know what Jesus really said, or even what he really did?" "Albert Schweitzer is Jewish, of course he would say something like that, Kelly," Mr. Marsh snorted, seemingly impressed with his wit. "The four gospels were dictated by divine intervention. God chose Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John to interpret his absolute benefaction, the manifestation of himself. It is the 'word made flesh', the biblical, historical prophecy. It is the core of our spirituality." He looked at me in repulsion, as if I was a pagan trying to accept the Holy Eucharist during Mass. Thoroughly perturbed by his patronizing response, I decided to annoy Mr. Marsh with my perceived idiocy a little further. "But, if the authors of the four gospels did not even live during the time of Jesus, how do we really know Jesus was the Son of God? Even if he was the Son of God, how can we prove what he instructed to his followers, or that he resurrected? How come no apostle's writings are considered 'gospels'? They LIVED with him!" I barked in my wounded contempt. Mr. Marsh's eyes grew to the size of billiard balls, tiny blood vessels emerged from his sunken sockets. His badly dyed toupee appeared to be crawling above his expansive forehead. "Kelly Patterson, YOU DO NOT NEED PROOF! You need FAITH!" he squealed in the falsetto voice of a television evangelist, causing a murmur throughout the classroom. "But, I do have faith, Mr. Marsh," I whispered. Hypnotized by the discussion, the class did not breathe or giggle. All eyeballs blinked at Mr. Marsh for a rebuttal. "Well, obviously you do NOT, Kelly, if you are asking me if THE LORD JESUS resurrected himself!" he squawked, while he adjusted his useless belt. If I knew what a eunuch was when I was fourteen, I would have used the word to describe Mr. Marsh. I did not learn the term until junior year, when we read Canterbury Tales. "I have never seen an electron, but I count them anyway, to calculate the atomic number in Physics Class," I responded with a serious expression on my face and my mind. "Kelly, you need to speak with Father Mangino, as soon as possible, you need some serious guidance!" Mr. Marsh concluded. "Hell is for the unbelievers, Kelly, remember that!" he threatened. By this time, I was humiliated, frustrated, and still he had not efficiently answered my questions. The words "this is bullshit" oozed like lava out of my sanitary mouth. The entire classroom gulped. In a vain attempt to expunge my profanity from Mr. Marsh's ears, I began to rattle explicit, horrifying human rights violations, as documented by Amnesty International. Like a manic, I slurred rapid tales of graphic human torture: plucked eyeballs, pliers-removed fingernails, whipping, homicides in prison cells, food poisoning, police brutality, etc. I condemned entire countries: Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, China, India, Ecuador, and Sudan, to name a few. I ranted until Mr. Marsh interrupted me with his hand. "Before I send you directly to the principal for your abhorrent behavior, Miss Patterson, I would like to know your point, as twisted as it may be," he stated calmly. "No religion can conceive a Hell more terrifying than what we have going on right here, right now on earth. Your dogmatic intimidation tactics have no power over me," I concluded on my way out the door. Once you strike Hell off your ideological list, Heaven naturally follows. The more religious texts I studied, I recognized the parallelism; just different names for similar characters and rituals. I have aged, but my life experiences and meditations have only confirmed I made the right decision (for me) at such a young age. I do not regret I threw out the hand-me-down, manhandled, incomplete jigsaw puzzle. I will encourage my children to play outdoors. Kelly Patterson BARBED WIRE webzine Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee also available in glorious technicolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca