Kabbalah -- Just like I expected and not like I expected at all...

The Sages state that it is "only at the age of 40 that the disciple is fit to understand properly the thought of his master," for "40 years is the age of wisdom." That is why, in general, the kabbalists prefer to "transmit" their teaching to disciples who are at least 40 years old. In their opinion, at that age the human soul becomes spiritually mature. The Hebrew word 'neshamah,' soul, confirms this; the letters which compose it also make up the words 'mem shanah,' 40 years.

For many years, I've had a non-interest in the study of Kabbalah. I'm not very into mysticism, and if you've read this blog before, you know I'm a skeptic. I don't believe in the supernatural, and I'm a follower of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. Theodicy -- why bad things happen to good people -- has always been a stumbling block for me and the answers religion offers just don't satisfy. 


I've also, for many years, used the convenient excuse that the study of kabbalah is restricted to those 40 and over. Yeah. That excuse fell by the wayside recently. 40 I now is.


So when our rabbi announced that he was offering a new class on kabbalah, I decided to sign up. I love studying with our rabbi, and I get out of the house every Tuesday night to spend time with other adults, learning something. Besdies, with a title like: Kabbalah: Hidden Truths: The Earth-Shattering Kabbalah of R'Chayyim Vital and R'Nachman of Bratslav, how could I resist?


It's Just Like I Expected


We spent the evening studying the personal journal of Chayyim Vital, a kabbalist and student of Isaac Luria from the late 16th century (WIki here:) and reviewing and dissecting the various levels of Souls, Mystical Worlds, Sefirot, Partzufim, etc. The graphic below makes it entirely clear.

All the four worlds are contained in each of the five levels of the soul, and each of the partzufim are contained in each of the four worlds which are contained in each of the the five levels of the soul. To move up in soul levels from lowest to highest, you have to rectify/integrate all of the levels of all of the other parts. Again, a simple visual explanation:

Moving up each of these levels moves you closer to The One (God), until you are about as close to God as a human being can get. 


Fellow classmate Peter said it was like becoming a Jedi. I kept think of Pokemon (thanks, 10-year-old son) and how they evolve from one stage to the next. Also Angry Birds, where to progress to the next level you have to complete all the puzzles of the previous level. In the Soul Game, however, you'd have to complete all the levels with 5 stars, no exceptions. And if you fail a level, you may have to go back to the beginning. With reincarnation -- yup, Jewish reincarnation -- this becomes a long, long process.


For those like me who are pretty darn sure souls don't even exist, these mental gymnastics about it seem like a waste. Reading the journal of Vital is like reading the scribblings of a man suffering from delusions of grandeur. Everyone he meets is a fortune teller who tells him how great he is -- the greatest in his generation. His belief system -- all of this soul-raising -- must feed on the self-centerdness. 


Why, asks the woman of logic and science, do you all have to make things so complicated?




It's Not Like I Expected


Sometimes I forget the benefits of being an adult student in a completely optional, taking-it-for-fun class. While I am there to learn, I am also there to learn on my own terms and take from the material what I want -- and that might be very different from what's being offered.


As we discussed last night, there is no such thing as a direct transmission of knowledge or ideas from teacher to student. We all have our own perspective and our own interpretive frame from which we cannot escape. What Isaac Luria transmitted to Chayyim Vital; what Rabbi Ben teaches me; perhaps even what God transmitted to Moses... all of the students put their own spin on things. 


Vital interprets Luria
Moses interprets God (oooh, that's a whole other blog post there...)
Susan interprets Rabbi Ben, who interprets Vital, who is interpreting Luria, etc.


I get my own spin, too.

• As a study of Jewish history, kabbalah certainly offers some of the more interesting characters. Vital is annoying, but fascinating, and how many other journals from the late 1500s have I read? About zero.
• I'm fascinated by the ways people rationalize their supernatural beliefs, and these guys are experts. Why is casting magic spells and making amulets prohibited in Vital's time? Because we don't have the ashes of the red heifer, of course. Sorry.
• Even something like kabbalah can be dangerous. I was disturbed by the connection made between ailments of the body and the mystical belief that it's connected, somehow, to the way your soul-work is going, etc. What a terrible burden to put onto people for their physical ailments. You're in pain? You must not be doing X, Y, Z in the spiritual realm correctly. Pshah.
• The underlying message -- when you strip away all of the religious layers, may still be relevant. I'm working on this one, but a little self-awareness can be healthy, and kabbalah seems to be saying the same thing as Shrek -- we're like onions. Or, if you prefer Donkey, like parfaits. We all have layers. Call them soul layers if you're religious, or psychological layers if you're not, but we've all got them. Why not explore them?

Besides, how could I not love a class where Jedis, Stargate, holograms, holodecks, mind-enhancing drugs and pissing in the temple courtyard all came up for discussion. 

Good-bye, Francis

Our veterinarian has played the cruelest trick on us.

This morning we were so worried about our dear feline, Frankie, that we called the vet who then told us to bring him in immediately. He hadn't eaten for days, he had stopped grooming himself, and he had lost a significant amount of weight. He looked uncomfortable in his own body; his back legs were bent awkwardly when he stood, and he had trouble getting up and down from our bed, his home base.

Evan phoned the vet, who said to bring him in right away. He was down to 9 pounds, from his most robust 16, and all of his blood test results were off the charts...on the low end. He was extremely anemic. There were possible underlying reasons, the vet said, but it wold cost hundreds of dollars to find out what they were, and since Frankie is 19, there didn't seem to be much point. He was giving us the signal -- I'm done.

Evan and I made the decision, together, to bring him home for one more night with the family and then bring him back to the vet tomorrow for euthanization. (I wrote that sentence five other ways before I decided to  just say the truth.) It felt like the right decision for the right reasons.

Before Frankie came home, the vet gave him IV fluids, a pain killer, and an appetite stimulant, which, as she said, would "perk him up a little bit." And it has worked. Frankie does seem to have a little more energy. The decision I was so sure about last night and this morning is tearing me up inside now. 

We've been here before. The same exact scenario happened with our dog Daisy. We went to the vet with an animal we were ready to let go and returned home with one who was, temporarily and deceivingly, better.

Frankie is not better. He will not get younger. He will not magically being taking care of himself again. He will not regain his appetite (even tonight he turned up his nose at food and his most favorite treat, milk.) He will not be healed, and, without significant medical intervention, and maybe even with it, he will not live more than a few more months.

I know all of these things, and I want to believe none of them.

When we bring a pet into our lives, we know it will not be forever. Their life spans are but a fraction of ours, and though we may trick ourselves into believing otherwise, we will outlive almost all of them. As their guardians and custodians, we have the biggest rewards, responsibilities and burdens. The have placed in us a sacred trust, to be, in the truest sense, their guardians. 

So tomorrow morning we will take our beloved Francis "Frankie Blue Eyes" to the vet and she will inject him with a fatal dose of something or other. He will die, and I will wonder for a very long time whether we made the right decision. 

Controversy: It is natural to believe in God, so more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheists.

Humans are designed by evolution to believe in GodPublished on April 11, 2010 by Satoshi Kanazawa in The Scientific Fundamentalist

Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious

It is natural to believe in God, so more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheists.
Religion is a cultural universal, and its practice is observed in every known human society.  However, as I explain in earlier posts (Why do we believe in God?  Part I, Part II), recent evolutionary psychological theories suggest that religiosity may not be an adaptation in itself but may be a byproduct of other evolved psychological mechanisms variously called the “animistic bias” or the “agency-detector mechanisms.”
These theories contend that the human brain has been selected to overinfer agency – personal, animate, and intentional forces – behind otherwise natural phenomena whose exact causes cannot be known.  This is because overinferring agency – and making a Type I error of false positive – makes you a bit paranoid, but being paranoid is often conducive to survival.  In contrast, underinferring agency – and making a Type II error of false negative – can result in being killed and maimed by predators and enemies that were incorrectly assumed not to exist.  So, evolutionarily speaking, it’s good to be a bit paranoid, because being paranoid can often save your life.  Religiosity – belief in higher powers – may be a byproduct of such overinference of agency and intentional forces behind natural phenomena.

If these theories are correct, then it means that religiosity – belief in higher powers – may have an evolutionary origin.  It is evolutionarily familiar and natural to believe in God, and evolutionarily novel not to be religious.  Consistent with this reasoning, out of more than 1,500 distinct cultures throughout the world documented in The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, only 19 contain any reference to atheism.  Not only do these 19 cultures exist far outside of our ancestral home in the African savanna, but all 19 of them without an exception are former Communist societies.  There are no non-former-Communist cultures described in The Encyclopedia as containing any significant segment of atheists.  Nor is there any reference to any individuals who do not subscribe to the local religion in any of the ethnographies of traditional societies.

It may therefore be reasonable to conclude that atheism may not be part of the universal human nature, and widespread practice of atheism may have been a recent product of Communism in the 20th century.  So belief in higher powers is evolutionarily familiar and natural, and atheism is evolutionarily novel.  The Hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheist than less intelligent individuals.

Once again, analyses of large representative samples from both the United States and the United Kingdom support this prediction of the Hypothesis.  Net of a large number of social and demographic factors, including education, more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheistic than less intelligent individuals.  For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “not at all religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 103.09, whereas those who identify themselves as “very religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 97.14.


Even though past studies have shown that women are more religious than men, the analyses show that the effect of childhood intelligence on adult religiosity is twice as large as that of sex.  Remarkably, childhood intelligence has a significant and large effect on adult religiosity even when religion itself is statistically controlled for.  So it appears that more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be atheists than less intelligent individuals, and the Hypothesis provides one explanation as to why.

Rights are not a matter for public referendum. Ever

"Dear God, we should not put civil rights issues to a popular vote to be subject to the sentiments and passions of the day. No minority should have their civil rights subject to the passions and sentiments of the majority.”

I can't think of a single one. Can you?

Why Contraception and Marriage are Still Political, and What's Wrong with That

Take a close look at the graphic above, which was created by the organization Doctors for America, a group who supports universal health care as a human right. (How can anyone not support that?)

It's only been about 40 days since we flipped the calendar to 2012, but I'm wondering now if we made a mistake and flipped it back a century or so. Issues I thought would have been long settled by now, including marriage equality and the protection of women's reproductive rights, are still part of the public discourse.

And here is the truth: Religion is part of the problem. Heck, it's not even part of the problem. Let's be honest. It's the problem.

Of the arguments I hear against gay marriage, almost 100% of them are religious. Regarding contraception (contraception, really!?!), all of the arguments against it are religious.

Sadly, religious people of a certain stripe want to tell other people how to live. Live and let live simply isn't a motto of the evangelical. They don't trust you to make your own choices about your love life, your marriage or your body, because you might make the wrong one.

Take a close look at the consequences of these choices, however. The real life consequences of gay marriage and contraception are private. They affect the people in the relationships and in the families.

But to the religious, the punishments for gay relationships and contraception use are eternal.

To which I simply say this: If you believe that being gay and/or using contraception is a sin and will damage your eternal soul, by all means, don't participate in gay sex and don't use birth control. You'd think it would be that simple.

Has anyone else noticed that this kind of preaching doesn't go both ways? No one is telling straight couples that they need to be gay. And, despite the recent furor over Catholic hospitals providing equal health benefits under the law, no one is telling Catholics (or Orthodox Jews or anyone else who has moral issues with birth control) that they must use it.

As I age, I find myself becoming more of an absolutist. Not necessarily a curmudgeon. I still like people just fine -- as long as those people don't want to tell me how to live based on some ancient religious fantasy of morality.

If you want the legal and biblical definitions of marriage to match, go ahead. I dare you. You might want to follow this guideline:

Unnecessary List #1

11 TV Shows I Really Like

1. Sons of Anarchy
2. Fringe
3. Castle
4. Downton Abbey
5. Bones
6. White Collar
7. Being Human (UK)
8. Modern Family
9. True Blood
10. Justified
11. Walking Dead

And 4 I Don't but (kinda) Wanted to

1. Being Human (US Version)
2. Terra Nova
3. Grimm
4. The Office, post Michael Scott

Like a Boss

I have a great manager at work. He's been in program management for many years, and my co-workers and I often turn to him to put difficult things into "manager-speak." The bad news doesn't sound so bad and the good news sounds great.

Today was a good news day. I've been assigned two huge new projects with high-profile clients. Their logos might just look like this:

It's a ton of responsibility, and the project needs a really competent leader. Enter moi.

But I'm not here to (only) brag.

I left that meeting feeling pretty darn good about myself. Not because I'd been handed the project, but because my manager said that he thought it was a good fit for my abilities, and that he knew I could handle the work, and that he was confident I'd knock it out of the park. Not only that, he knows I'm looking at moving up in the editorial world, and he's getting my foot in the door.

When I said Thank You, he said he was "happy to be able to do it". Really.

And then I wondered...

How many conversations can we have with our kids where they leave feeling great about themselves? More confident. Ready to take on the world.

How often do we lessen the blow of the bad news and spin it for good?

How often are we crystal clear about expectations and deadlines?

We shouldn't necessarily think of ourselves as the bosses of our children, but maybe sometimes we can parent...

Freedom from Religion

I am increasingly losing patience with people who want to see their religious values influence public policy. I was appalled by the news yesterday that the Susan G. Komen foundation has suspended all grant funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening. Read that again. The grants were only paying for breast cancer screenings, not abortions.

Why did the Komen foundation suspend this funding? Because their new VP is virulently anti-abortion.

From the National Journal:

Suspicion has fallen on the group’s newish senior vice president, former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel. Handel was appointed to Komen last April, and she was quick to point out her strong Republican credentials. That's not in itself a surprise--Komen founder Nancy Brinker is a Republican.

Handel had the backing of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in a failed 2010 bid to become the first female governor of Georgia, one that was spiced up by debates and negative advertising over Handel’s position on abortion rights.

Handel has complained about the attacks on her position and said she was “staunchly and unequivocally pro-life” in a blog post at the time.

“I believe in the sanctity and inherent dignity of human life, and I will be a pro-life governor who will work tirelessly to promote a culture of life in Georgia. And while I will not seek to prohibit abortions in the extremely rare cases of rape, incest, or where there is a real threat to the life of the mother, I will do everything in my power to encourage and promote alternatives to abortion in these tragic situations,” Handel wrote.

(Although she doesn't say it expressly here, Handel has written on her blog and said in interviews that her voting record is influences by her conservative religious beliefs.)

It's a failure in logic to say that you want to "promote alternatives to abortion" and "promote a culture of life" and not support Planned Parenthood, which provides birth control and counseling and STD testing and treatment.

I do not want to deny the right of politicians to hold their own, deeply-felt religious beliefs.

However, every public servant should remember that their real responsibility it to uphold the laws of the land, which all stem from the Constitution, which guarantees the separation of church and state. Any public officeholder in this country should be able to subjugate their personal religious beliefs and do they job they were elected to -- representing the people in their jurisdictions. All the people, regardless of religion.

I'm a Jew. If I were to be elected governor of Colorado, would it be morally OK for me to enact policies that prohibited the sale and consumption of pork and shellfish? Or shut down businesses on Saturdays for the Sabbath? Don't laugh -- ask yourself why you can't buy a car on Sunday in some states, or liquor in others?

Sure, shopping on the Sabbath and getting an abortion or entering onto a gay marriage all seem to carry vastly different moral weights , but that's not the real question. The real moral question is, "Is it OK to legislate the behavior of others based on the beliefs of one religion?"

You don't have to be an atheist to say "No" to that question. All you have to be is someone who cares about the 1st Amendment and the separation it guarantees.

Or, if you want to say "Yes" to the question -- you think it's OK to make law based on religious belief, ask yourself this. Is t OK for anyone to make law based on their religion? Jews? Muslims? Hindus? Scientologists? Where do you draw the line, and why shouldn't the rest of us draw our lines with your religion?

If you don't think you can keep your religious beliefs out of your life as a public servant, please, choose another career. God doesn't come before the law of the land, and our Founding Fathers knew that well.

The freedom our public officials enjoy to practice their religion also guarantees my freedom from their religion being imposed on me, and the law is the ultimate weapon of imposition.

I support the separation of church and state. Do you? Join us.

Freedom From Religion Foundation