Tradition!
A Retrospection
My relationship to religion has always been, in a sense, mercurial.
My preschool was at a reform synagogue in California, so I quickly learned a great deal of the Jewish perspective on just about everything at a very young age. In those days, my father was very committed to his Judaism and my mother was along for the ride (she was raised Episcopalian but in a largely agnostic household.)
Zionism was just like, this thing going on in the background of everything that nobody really focused on all that much. I don’t actually ever remember anyone talking about Palestinians at all. I do remember a moment, likely around the age of nine or ten, when I felt strongly that Zion, as I understood it then, was wherever you might choose to make it. I guess that might fall somewhat into the ideas of Rashi, but I’m not much of a Yeshiva student, so I guess I’m just rambling.
When my parents got divorced, my Mom ended up working at a Catholic school. Of course the religion of the family, as my Dad dictated it, was still Jewish, and still more or less is. The world as I knew it, however, was changing, and my understanding of G-d was in flux.
Naturally, I had Arab and Persian friends who filled me in on their take on things, and later Israeli friends who filled me in on their take. Juggling all these perspectives while keeping things civil is a bit like a game, but when I was young, it was hard to really distance myself from anything that I was taught.
Eventually, after a nasty break-up between me and a girl who might as well have been a nihilist, I picked up a copy of the Tao Teh Ching, and several books on Buddhism. I started meditating a lot. I admittedly and subsequently dabbled a bit into the more occult side of things as well, and I read up on witchcraft and later kabbalah and the i’ching. I taught myself how to read Tarot Cards too.
Over time, I came to find myself, and determined how I viewed the world, striving for a sense of non-view that was always impossible due to human limitations but not without the hope that it could be nearly attained—the nibbana that is.
With my brother, we took a trip to Israel to see it all with a birthright tour group. It was an enlightening experience. But in the end, I think it pushed me further to the teachings of the Buddha just as it made me understand my own conflicted though respectful positions on Judaism and also its relation to Islam.
One thing that happened on that trip, well, there was a girl I liked. But she went for the Israeli medic. Such is life.
A few months later, I was sitting in a movie theater, wondering what it’d be like if she was sitting next to me. But such is life. We imagine fantasies to keep the harsh hand of reality at bay.
And that is what people of all religions, philosophies, and creeds seem to do, at their very core.
