Finding Our Way: Jewish Texts and the Lives We Live Today

One -Tradition

ONE TRADITION When I think about religion, I often imagine a kind ofintersection where two roads converge. One road represents the world of powerful personal experience, the moments in which I have felt some profound connection to meanings beyond my self. These experiences may be ofjoy or of pain; they may occur in conventional "religious" settings like in a synagogue or at a holiday celebration, or more mundanely when I'm staring out the window or dusting the furniture. In fact the element ofsurprise seems to typify these breakthrough moments. One can sit many hours in a synagogue and nothing like it might happen. And then all of a sudden, you are there. To use the conventional language of religion , it is the world of the sacred, a moment ofholiness. And these times do tend to be moments. As much as surprise is part of them, so too the fleeting quality of these experiences is typical. We want to hold on to them, but in essence they are the present moment come suddenly alive. And then the present passes. Of course, even after the moment itself is gone, we retain it in our memories. It becomes part of us. For a while we can conjure up a strong echo of the experience itself, but slowly and inexorably it becomes memory or, as people say, "only a memory." Some years ago toward the end of my grandmother's life, my 15 FINDING OUR WAY father and I went to visit her in the hospital. It was a beautiful day, a sudden thaw in the late winter, and the three of us took a walk around the grounds. My father talked with his mother and I walked in silence with nothing much going on in my mind but thoughts of the pleasantness of the day. Then all of a sudden and quite by accident, it seemed, I looked up and found myselfstaring directly into my grandmother's eyes. She was not a sentimental person and though I had always been quite close to her, she was not the kind of grandmother who pinches you on the cheek and gives you a hug. Nor did she do that on this day. But she gave me a small, remarkable smile and appeared to step right outside the pain of 1;1er illness. Without words she seemed to say to me, "We do know each other, don't we?" And I had a sense of connection to her unlike anything I had ever experienced. All the while my father continued his conversation with her, but to my grandmother and me it seemed irrelevant, and my father was completely unaware that this something else was happening between my grandmother and me. For many years I thought about this occurrence and tried to figure out what actually had happened. I never talked to her about it. It didn't seem necessary. In fact, after she died I was glad I had never mentioned it to her, perhaps because I was afraid she might not have remembered it at all. Yes, of course it is possible that "I made it all up," whatever that means. But that doesn't really matter-the historical accuracy of the event has little significance. What matters is what I felt happening then and the way that that perception lives for me over the years. Of course, now, after all this time, it has become memory. I cannot really reexperience the moment; I know that it happened, but it has faded into personal legend. It has become the past. It is the past that forms the other metaphorical street of that intersection called religion with which I began this chapter. If one aspect of religion is the immediate "now" of my experience, like that moment of communication with my grandmother, the other is the "then" of the past. We all have the memories of our own past experiences, but for a religion like Judaism, there is also a larger picture: the echoing tales of our people's ancient ways. To 16 Tradition be sure, we like to believe that this vast repository of the past emanated from actual experiences. Indeed, the sacred books of Judaism recount those very moments: the stories ofAbraham, the revelation at Mount Sinai, the wanderings in the wilderness, and many others. But for us these records of experience have become the past and even their factuality remains...