=kitc23.txt

CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER INTERNATIONAL

The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis

LESSON 23
IN SEARCH OF THE DIMENSIONS OF OUR IDENTITY
COMPARISONS BETWEEN BUDDHISM AND SUFISM
SATIPATHANA: WATCHING OUR PERSONALITY

PRACTICE:

Watch your personality.

Observe your personality without identification,

"as though it could be the personality of another person." 
EVOLA, THE DOCTRINE OF AWAKENING, LUZAC 1951

"As in a mirror, he looks at himself again and again..."
MAJJH LXI

It will now appear to you as a compound of idiosyncrasies
inherited from the whole universe, albeit limited by being
transmitted by dint of your ancestral heredity. You limit your
identity to being the observer, while ultimately God is the
witness.

This composition of idiosyncrasies appears as a transient
formation fortuitously offered to you by the universe,
irrespective of your "I," as are your body and your mind. Your
personality also is obviously conditioned.

However the personal dimension of our identity can trigger off the
unfurling of resources latent in the transpersonal dimensions of
our identity.

To undergo transformation one needs to make three steps:

i) free oneself from one's self image;

ii) dis-assemble the construct of the idiosyncrasies one's
personality;

iii) restructure a totally new configuration of one's qualities by
calling upon one's transpersonal resourcefulness.

STAGE ONE: WHO WE THINK WE ARE

It is one's self image that constrains one in the personal
dimension of one's identity. It is deceptive.

BASTAMI:

" "Ya Khada! Ya Khada!" Hoax, hoax! "Ya Muakhir!" Deceiver! O
deceiver! O leader astray! When God reveals Himself to the sages,
in an initial stage, he shows them a market in which only effigies
of men and women are on sale; and those who venture in this market
will never visit God. Oh God beguiles thee not only in this
market, but also in that of the next world."
 MASSIGNON, 1975, VOL. III, P.175

PRACTICE:

Notice that normally you assume, perfunctorily, that you are what
you think you are: your self-image. Take heed of the fact that the
representation that you make of yourself is only an incomplete,
incomprehensive portrayal of who you are.

PICTURE OF BUDDHA

MUSIC: TIBETAN MANTRAMS

For Buddha, our personality, in most cases, is defiled by our
craving, our covetousness. This is due to our slipping into a
state of ignorance (avvidya), in the samsaric "vicious circle."

"The ascetic has given up worldly craving."
 DIGHA, II, P. 68

This is the way of the ascetic alienated from the world.

Sufis concede that the divine emotion is constrained, defiled and
distorted at the scale of the individual.

PRACTICE:

Reconnoiter your desires. Discriminate amongst them and dismiss
those that are demeaning in your estimation.

Honoring and actuating one's real being requires a catharsis.

'AYN UL-QUDAT HAMADHANI:
"When the subtle nature owing to man's inclinations has become
pure, he contemplates within himself whatever is of the same
nature in the cosmos."
 CORBIN, 1978.

MUSIC: Weber, Requiem, Miserere, Pie Jesus

PRACTICE:

You might ask yourself: since one could never countenance that one
is without faults, is there any hope to attain a transformed
personality?

The Sufis counter one's scruples.

PICTURE OF RUMI

RUMI:
"Do you not see that the Absolute appears in the attributes of
contingent beings and thus gives knowledge about Himself, and that
He even appears in the attributes of imperfection and blame?"
CHITTICK, 1974, 43

PICTURE OF HAZRAT INAYAT

HAZRAT INAYAT:

"What a great treasure it is when a man has realized that in him
are to be found all the merits and all the faults which exist in
the world, and that he can cultivate all that he wishes to
cultivate, and cut away all that should be removed! It is like
rooting out the weeds and sowing the seed of flowers and fruits."
 PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, MYSTICISM

SHABISTARI:

"Behold the world is entirely comprised in yourself. The world is
man and man is a world."
( 1880, 15.) 

"Behold the world mingled together: angels with demons, Satan with
the archangel; all mingled like unto seed and fruit...together and
gathered in the point of the present.
(Shabistari), ( 1987, 80 )

HAZRAT INAYAT:

"Man does not know that there is nothing that is not in him. A
person who says to himself: "I do not possess that faculty" shows
his lack of understanding what he is. Most men can only see the
limitations of his human life, and can never probe the heights of
his divinity; comparatively few can do this."
(HIK),  UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

The flaw here is that when one says, "I do not possess that
faculty," one is identifying with one's personal identity.

Surveying the links in the causal the chain (pattica samupadha)
leading to the suffering attendant upon existential conditions,
Buddha infers that it is due to craving (asava) normally rendered
by desire ignorance is begotten, whereas liberation from
attachment to "contact" of the world sparks realization and
enlightenment. He considered suffering as due to involvement in
the vicious circle of becoming - identifying with our body or
thinking or psyche by succumbing to conditioning - and searched
for freedom from conditioning which leads to the detachment and
aloofness of the ascetic.

Suffering is triggered off by contact.

"Watch over the door of the senses."
 MAJJH XXVIII

Evola:

Contacts wound - the primitive anguish which lies at the base of
samsaric existence and which produces attachment. Ibid, p. 173

PRACTICE:

You will be able to ascertain that in many instances one's
desires, including noble ones, are frustrated, resulting in
suffering.

Attachment is an intoxication. BUDDHA finds that the cure from the
wounds in our psyche calls for disintoxication. That is: freedom
from attachment.

"Upon perceiving a form the ascetic conceives no inclination."
DIGHA, II, P. 64

"The ascetic causes the awakening of mindfulness derived from
detachment." 
MAJJH, LXXVII

PRACTICE:

I presume that you will, as I do, judge this disinterest in the
miracle of life whereby thoughts, emotions and the intention
behind the divine programming are manifested by means of forms in
the existential world, as nihilism.

Of course, no doubt, to eschew being inveigled in the rat race,
one is protected by the imperturbability furnished by detachment.

Recalling thoughts from the previous lesson:

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The real proof of one's progress in the spiritual path can be
realized by testing in every situation in life how indifferent one
is."
 SANGITHA I

However HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN cautions:

"He who arrives at the state of indifference without experiencing
interest in life is incomplete and apt to be tempted by interest
at any moment; but he who arrives at the state of indifference by
going through interest really attains the blessed state."
(HIK),  SPIRITUAL LIBERTY

How can one reconcile these two objectives pulling one in opposite
directions?

"Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a
phenomenon of interest. All this world that man has made, where
has it come from? It has come from the power of interest. The
whole creation and all that is in it are the products of the
Creator's interest. But at the same time the power of indifference
is a greater one still, because, although motive has a power, yet
at the same time motive limits power. Yet it is motive that gives
man the power to accomplish things."
(HIK),  THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS

"So long as a man has a longing to obtain any particular object,
he cannot go further than that object."
(HIK),  BOWL OF SAKI

"The soul reaches a stage of realization where the whole of life
becomes to him one sublime vision of the immanence of God. "
(HIK), SUFI TEACHINGS

"The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man".
(HIK), SUPPLEMENTARY PAPERS

"Manifestation is the self of God; but a self that is limited - a
self that makes His perfection known when He compares Himself with
the limited self we call nature."
(HIK),  THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

Let us once more compare the craving regarding which Buddha warns
us which inevitably leads to frustration of one's desires and
consequently suffering.

Buddha is seeking freedom - awakening beyond life, while the Sufis
enlist our nostalgia to awaken in life and see what is enacted in
the human drama.

Sufism distinguishes between craving (which is personal) and
nostalgia whereby one is giving an, albeit personal, expression to
the cosmic emotion sparking the whole process of existence -
according to the Sufis Ishq Allan. The very foundation of Sufism,
based upon the famous Hadith Qudsi, earmarks ishq (variously
translated by desire, love, nostalgia) as the motivation behind
the great achievements of our civilizations.

The existential state must have a purpose other than just offering
a leg-up for awakening beyond it. What a loss of an opportunity to
escape from it and thereby neglect all the enrichment that it
offers!

MUSIC: Bach, Preludes et fugues, G. Gould

PRACTICE:

Can you earmark in yourself an enthusiasm, an appreciation for the
bounty that the whole of life offers you: the flowers, the
crystals, a sunrise seen from mountains, the stars, music,
beautiful moments, beautiful monuments, lovely people, ingenious
technological inventions, research into meaningfulness.

For the Sufis the existential world is the fulfillment of the
divine desire to manifest and actuate the potentialities latent as
principles or archetypes in the cosmic code.

For the Sufis, realization in life is attained by fulfilling the
purpose of life which is actuating the splendor behind the
existential level in "building a beautiful world of beautiful
people."

In the course of accomplishment new horizons of meaningfulness
reveal themselves.

STAGE TWO: DISINTEGRATING THE AGGREGATES OF OUR PERSONALITY

Now for the next step: before constructing one's personality, one
needs to first dissociate the aggregates that make up the
individual dimension of one's being,

"...overcome the bond of personality... "
EVOLA, IBID, P. 153

"According to Buddha it is identification with our personal 'I'
that is the cement holding the fortuitous configuration of the
aggregates of our commonplace personality together. Hence he
enjoins upon us to liberate ourselves from the notion of 'I'
(ajjhatam vimoka)."
 SAMYUTT, XII, 32

This is corroborated by HAZRAT INAYAT:

"The highest perception of freedom comes when a person has freed
himself from the false ego."
(HIK),  IN AN EASTERN ROSE GARDEN

PRACTICE:

Question yourself whether your usual sense of who you are, based
on your idiosyncrasies, is really you. Now try to reconnoiter your
real being which lurks as a potentiality behind that commonplace
projection in which we slip into surreptitiously.

THE BREAKDOWN THAT MUST LEAD TO A BREAKTHROUGH

For a radical metamorphosis to occur in one's personality, one
needs to submit to a breakdown of one's personality structure,
which is the condition for a miraculous breakthrough.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"To some persons it comes in a moment's time-by a blow, by a
disappointment, or because their heart has broken"

First comes the dark night of understanding:

"He finds that all he has hitherto known is useless... everything
appears the opposite to its previous appearance."
(HIK),  SUPPLEMENTARY PAPERS

MUSIC: Gregorian Chant

Saint John of the Cross found that it was in the obliteration of
our equivocal understanding, as though the mind were blindfolded
in total obscurity, that one finds freedom in one's thinking. He
illustrated this by the fact that it was thanks to the darkness
that he was able to flee from prison.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The outlook becomes quite different."
(HIK),  THE PATH OF INITIATION

As one teeters into still deeper darkness, the deepest phase in
the dark night, Saint John points out that one's sense of identity
breaks down - one's personality breaks down. This is what he
called the dark night of the soul.

MUSIC: Jewish Women Wailing

[ Footnote (sa) kitc23__1 ]

MUSIC: Jewish Women Wailing
[ Footnote (sa) kitc23__1 ]

This is a dangerous condition which could (and does in some cases)
lead to a psychopathic collapse unless countered right away by a
shift in one's identity, by identifying with the transpersonal
dimension of one's identity. It is this light at the end of the
tunnel that is luring Saint John out of the darkness, that rescues
one from dangerous collapse. It is that which does not change,
maintaining itself in the midst of that impermanency that Buddha
keeps referring to, which keeps one afloat.

This is impersonal sense of identity that Buddha prescribes. It
is, indeed, precisely corroborated by Hazrat Inayat Khan.

PRACTICE:

One needs to be cautious before engaging oneself in this hazardous
drastic psychological operation.

However we all to a larger or lesser extent struggle with the
impending breakdown of our most basic sense of whom we are which
always lurks threateningly when we confront, cross- examine,
evaluate, judge and censure ourselves eschewing justifications.

It could lead, in the extreme, to self-hate or demoting oneself in
one's personal self-esteem. When caught in this perspective, one
easily forgets that one is assessing a sliver of who one is.
Therefore the answer is to remember:

i) the peri-personal;

ii) the potential, subliminal;

iii) and the transpersonal, extra-samsaric

dimensions included in our being.

STAGE THREE: RECONSTRUCTING THE SELF

Having dismissed your perfunctory notion of yourself, the sense of
your real being will start announcing itself.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:

"a dim sense of 'me'..."
(HIK)

"When the false self is gone from before us then all other selves
can come, then illumination comes; then, when the individual self
disappears, the spiritual self appears. Only the illusion is lost;
the self is not lost, but the beginning is annihilation."
(HIK),  SUFI TEACHINGS

"It is the annihilation of the false self, which gives rise to the
true self. Annihilation (fana) is equivalent to 'losing the false
self (nafs)' which again culminates in what is called Eternal Life
(baqa)." 
(HIK), THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

For Hazrat Inayat Khan, it is not the ego that is annihilated, but
the notion of 'me' alienated from its cosmic ground.

This is what Hazrat Inayat Khan calls 'God-consciousness' (on
condition that we do not consider God as 'other'). This cosmic
dimension of your identity is what Hazrat Inayat Khan calls your
real ego - I am - of which your being is a unique expression. If
one is oblivious of this (as one generally is) one identifies with
what Hazrat Inayat Khan calls: "what one has wrongly conceived as
being one's real being - one's false ego." One fails to actualize
all the resourcefulness incorporated in one's personality.

IBN ARABI:

"Most of those who seek to know God make a ceasing of existence
and a ceasing of that ceasing as a condition of attaining the
knowledge of God, and that is an error and a clear oversight."
(IBN ARABI),  (1976, P. 5). 

"It is not thy existence that ceases but thy ignorance." 
IBID., P. 9

If there is any possibility for the soul to attain perfection,
that perfection lies in realizing the universe in us.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:

"Realize the self by unveiling it from its numberless covers which
make the false ego."
(HIK),  THE SOUL WHENCE AND WHITHER.

"When his soul is awakened, he becomes in one moment a different
person."
(HIK),  THE PATH OF INITIATION

According to Buddhism, having removed the obstacle to realization,
owing to one's ignorance, avjja, inveigled in the vicious circle
of the samsaric hoax, that is thanks to awakening,

"...there might arise in the samsaric consciousness an extra-
samsaric force and vocation a will that overcomes the normal will
and arrests the flux; a vision that can now discern what is noble
and what is common."
 EVOLA, IBID, P. 230

"...the extra samsaric element appearing in the personality is
gradually integrated." 
IBID, P. 147

MUSIC: Allegri Miserere

"Monks, there is an unborn, a non-become, non compounded , non
perishable. And if it were not for this non-become, there would be
no escape from all of this."
 UDANA, VIII, 1-3

It would be like identifying oneself with the stump of a tree. If
the trunk is sawn off it may grow again. It looks similar yet not
exactly as it was. Is it the same tree or another tree?

This surprising notion of an extra-samsaric dimension of our being
(called in Buddhism panna and in Sanskrit prajna) that may
permeate our commonplace samsaric personality does parallel the
Sufi call upon one's divine inheritance.

You will notice that it is God who inherits that which showed
forth in man of His attributes. They are two poles of the same
reality.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"He remains totally unaware of the spark which continually shines
in his heart and which may be called his divine inheritance."

This is paralleled with the Buddhist's highlight of our trans-
personal identity.

"One who has entered the current has transformed the root from
which he sprang into life: in the current of which he is made, we
now find the element 'bodhi,' something that is extra-samsaric,
which is destined to determine a new line of heredity. We can now
think of a super-individual matrix or root, no more exclusively
samsaric, of existences, which tends towards liberation." 
EVOLA, IBID., P. 247

This could be illustrated by the difference between the forward
march of evolution (the samsaric wheel is not just rotating around
its hub, but advancing) and escaping the rotation of the wheel (on
a tangent which nevertheless acts as an attractor upon the wheel).

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

"There is a time in life when a passion is awakened in the soul
which gives the soul a longing for the unattainable, and if the
soul does not take that direction, then it certainly misses
something in life for which is its innate longing and in which
lies its ultimate satisfaction. This craving for the attainment of
what is unattainable, gives the soul a longing to reach life's
utmost heights. It is the nature of the soul to try and discover
what is behind the veil; it is the soul's constant longing to
climb heights which are beyond his power; it is the desire of the
soul to see something that it has never seen; it is the constant
longing of the soul to know something it has never known. But the
most wonderful thing about it is that the soul already knows there
is something behind this veil, the veil of perplexity."
(HIK)

MUSIC: Bach organ Pasacaille

PRACTICE:

i) Can you spot a quality that, although latent in the seed-bed of
your personality, has at some point in your life actualized itself
in your personality in a positive way? It was always there (Ya
Muqaddem) but latent (Ya Batin). At some point as you advanced in
your developmental stages, it became manifest (Ya Zahir) for
having been actualized in the existential (Ya Mawjud) dimension of
your identity and is now there for good.

ii) Can you see that it affects the entire programming of your
life? If you had actualized this quality before, you would have
dealt with challenges in your life differently consequently what
happened would not have taken place. Now, having consolidated this
quality, circumstances are going to change.

iii) Can you now espy a level of your identity which is not
subject to change?

PRACTICE:

This is not the same as trying to improve one's personality. If
you try to improve your personality, while identifying with your
personal identity, your self-image, you will notice that your
habit of identifying with your self-image resists change. Whereas,
if you identify with your transpersonal identity, which is eternal
and therefore not subject to change ("this becoming does not lead
to the non-become"), it transfigures your personality
dramatically.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The ego itself is never destroyed. It is the one thing that
lives, and this is the sign of eternal life. In the knowledge of
the ego there is the secret of immortality."
(HIK),  THE MYSTICISM OF SOUND AND MUSIC

"The highest ideal of man is to realize the unlimited, the
immortal self within. ...when man holds this ideal in his vision,
he expands and becomes all he wants to be."
(HIK),  SPIRITUAL LIBERTY

"The life one recognizes is only the mortal aspect of life. Very
few have ever seen or been conscious of the immortal aspect at
all. Once one has realized life, that which one has hitherto
called life is found to be only a glimpse or shadow of the real
life that is beyond comprehension. To understand it one will have
to raise one's light high from under the cover that is hiding it
like a bushel. This cover is man's identification with his mind
and body; it is a cover that keeps the light active on the world
of things and beings."
(HIK),  IN AN EASTERN ROSE GARDEN

EVOLA:
"Bodhi, the wisdom that liberates, is illustrated by Buddha as
lightning, vajra, because of its extra-temporal character"
 CF. ANGUTT, III, 25

"Illumination is the flash in which, beyond all time, the
eternally present without a past is apprehended."
 EVOLA, IBID., P. 241

Consequently it could be attributed to a so-to-speak vertical
rather than horizontal vector of time.

Music: Bach Overture of Saint John's Passion

As in Buddhism Hazrat Inayat Khan highlights our transpersonal
identity over our personal identity. Here lies the secret.

However the Sufis still are aware of our personal identity
provided that it is apprehended as a function of the
transpersonal. Hazrat Inayat Khan suggests interpolating those two
poles of the same reality.

"Buddha does not say the 'I' does not exist; but rather that
nothing belonging to samsaric existence and personality has the
nature of the 'I.'"
 EVOLA, IBID., P. 98, CF. MAJJH, XXII

The Sufis concur that, optimally, the fashioning of our
personality is intrinsically linked with the whole formative
process of the universe.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"In reality in the making of the personality it is God who
completes His divine art."
(HIK),  THE ART OF PERSONALITY

Therefore in reconstructing oneself, one needs to link the
idiosyncrasies of one's personality with their archetypes, which
the Sufis consider as the divine attributes, earmarking the traces
of God's being in yourself.

PRACTICE:

The key to doing this is to give vent to your validation for the
miracle of life - of your being in the universe! This arouses one
to engage in an act of glorification (which is actually the most
gratifying meditation). To glorify, one imagines God by projecting
upon Him/Her qualities known to one, particularly one's
idiosyncrasies predicating one's personality, but representing
them as perfect as one possibly can.

IBN'ARABI:
"Since all that we know of Him is through ourselves, we attribute
to Him all that we know of ourselves."

A HADITH of Prophet Mohammed:
"Man arafa nafsahu faqad 'arafa rabahu: whomsoever knows himself
knows his lord."

Music: Call to Prayer

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:

"So far there has only been a belief in God. God exists in
people's imagination as an ideal. Believing is the first step. By
this process the God within is awakened and made living. It is in
those who are God- conscious that God becomes a reality so that He
is no longer an imagination...If there is any sign of God to be
seen, it is in the God-conscious... Make God as great and as
perfect as your imagination can. By making God great we ourselves
arrive at a certain greatness." 
(HIK), THE UNITY OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL

The consequence is that the qualities of your personality are
thereby upgraded.

How can we know these attributes that we are supposed to model
ourselves upon?

QUR'AN:
"God shows His signs in nature and in yourself."

JAMI:

"From all eternity, the Beloved unveiled His beauty in the
solitude of the unseen; He held up the mirror to His own Face, He
displayed His loveliness to Himself, He was both the Spectator and
the spectacle*lthough He beheld His attributes and qualities as a
perfect whole in His Essence....Yet He desired that they should be
displayed to Him in another mirror, and that each of His eternal
Attributes should become manifest accordingly in a diverse form.
Therefore He created the verdant fields of time and space, and the
life-giving garden of the world, that every branch and leaf and
fruit might show forth His various perfections." 
NICHOLSON, 1975, P. 80-81

Music. Bach, Sonates and Partitas, Milstein, track 8 (EMI)

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:

"When we consider the whole manifestation as a plant and God as
the seed we find that the final thing was the bringing out of
man.Man in the flowering of his personality expresses the
personality of God.People ask: "If all is God, then God is not a
person." The answer: though the seed does not show the flower in
it, yet the seed culminates in the flower, and therefore the
flower already existed in the seed. No doubt it would be a great
mistake to call God a personality, but it is a still greater
mistake when man denies the personality of God.... It is not wrong
to make God in one's imagination the God of all beauty, for by
that imagination he is drawn nearer and nearer every moment of his
life to that Divine Ideal which is the seeking of his soul....Man
in the flowering of his personality expresses the personality of
God."
(HIK),  THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

HALLAJ:
"O God, do away with my human idiosyncrasies (Nasutiyat) so that
they may be replaced by Thy divine attributes (Lahutiyat)."

QUR'AN:
"I emanated upon you a force of love that you may be fashioned by
my glance."
( XX 39)

HALLAJ:
"God, the most high wished to see this attribute which expressed
the desire. He entertained in the solitude of trans-eternity,
manifested as a form. He therefore drew out of the trans-eternal
state a form in which he manifested the bounty of His attributes
and within it He spirited the human person."

"Then God elected the human person as the chosen One. "Dhu'l-Jalal
wa'l-Ikram! Thou becomest in man at the end of time, in infinite
regress: the Lord of majesty and splendor! Ya Malik ul-Mulk." "
(HALLAJ, APPARENTLY)

"Thereupon, God glorified Himself. He glorified His attributes,
and magnified His names, for these were forms within His Essence."
(HALLAJ, APPARENTLY)

Continuing, HALLAJ says:

"And God saluted this effigy of Himself: man."

Imagine that, having earmarked something magnificent in your
essence, you rejoice in this discovery.

BASTAMI:

"My attributes were annihilated in His. And He invested me with
His own attributes. And God said: "Go forth with My attributes to
My creatures that I may see My selfhood in thy selfhood so that
whosoever sees thee sees Me." "
ZAEHNER, 1960, P. 207

Then BASTAMI responded:

"May I not be there, only Thee."

Music Bach Magnificat, Fecit potentiam

=================================================================
===============================================================

COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY:

(Well, for those who like to "move from the sublime to the
ridiculous", here are my (sa) comments on something very
peripheral to this Lesson: )


MUSIC: Jewish Women Wailing
[ Footnote (sa) kitc23__1 ]
[ Comment (sa): PVK often played this selection.  I think it is on
the Sacred Spirit cassettes.  I don't know what it is.  I think
it's maybe imitation_Jewish, maybe from that German broad
Magdalith.

As I note elsewhere, I don't quite catch her words.  Maybe it's
that some of her words are gobbledygook.  

Lots of folks demonize us, though many do it somewhat more
subtlely than 500 years ago.  And some folks romanticize us.
That's flattering, but it ain't something to rely on, becuase
nobody can live up to someone else's idealization for long.
"The Virgin and the Whore."

Imitation Judaism , goyim pretending to be Jewish -- I don't mean
gerim tzdakim, gentiles who have a genuine attraction to Judaism
and to Israel -- and I would strongly doubt that anyone who thinks
they are attracted to Judaism, or worse yet pretends to be, but
not to Israel, is authentic -- there's something off_key about it.

In Venice, last time I was there being 1999, all but one of the
old synagogues are now run as quaisi_musems by goyim.  And in
Praha too, all but the AltNeu Schul, which still has a good feel. 
In Warsaw, in 1998 leastways there's a Yiddish Theatre, done by
goyim, but I didn't get to see it.

For me the key to Judaism used to be that old_style Ashkenazi
hazzanut -- that's what I heard from the Cantor in Temple Beth El
in Belmont, Massachusetts -- very mournful and wailing.  Filled
with sorrow.

Well, that's from the early to mid 1900's.  And it's mostly Reform
Judaism, I think.  In Israel I did not hear a hazzan.  They just
daven straight.

My touchstone for Judaism then became Chagall.  He represents the
joy of Judaism, not the sorrow.

There is an ethos in Israel that I can't yet conceptualize.  Any
Israeli knows it, you feel it whenever you talk to an Israeli
abroad.  It's implicit even in the simplest language.  Some rather
subtle attitudes.  An optimism, a self_reliance, a capacity for
improvisation, a slighly cynical reiliancy , and an implicit sense
of solidarity, allowing as much room as possible, but no more, for
disagreement.  All unstated until needed.

I rather doubt that anyone in the SO has perceived this.  Well,
that ain't quite too, a few SO types have gone to Isreal and liked
it.  Haillie for one.  And Sakina_with_the_daughter.

As for those jukets lead by Atum & Ms. Giber -- a
secula_humaniast__Christian pilgrimage.

Oy, time to eat more whole_wheat pasta.  Might make me less
disagreeable.

Good pasta, and a beautiful rising moon just before Ma'ariv, but
it don't change my politics.

And then they have the chutzpah to tell us how to run our country
-- a country they don't even love nor live in -- a religion thaty
don't begin to comprehend -- a people whom they regard as alien --

-- to run our country, by giving away half of it to the first
grouop that cries 'Victim!'

And to suppose that somehow they have superior moral insight to
the rest of us -- 

It ain't us that thinks we're some sort of Chosen People --
whatever that might mean -- but them.  

Amd amyhow, were a choosin' people, not a chosen people.  We chose
to follow the Torah.  Anyone else who wants to, welcome.  All the
Rabbi's say that.  Midrashim too.

Like, they think it's a monopoly, we don't.  So for us there ain't
no need to write a 'New Testament' -- I mean, if you want to write
another contract, mazaltov, ecclesiastic lawyers have to eat too -
- but a new testament don't abrogate the old testament.  I mean,
Jones wants to open a new hardware store, mazaltov, but that don't
put Smith out of business.

I teach English too.  Real good.  None of this hoity_toity 'Help,
my postillion has been struck by lightning'and other converstion
gems.  English like it was once spoke.  In Skunk Hollow or
thereabouts.  Just watch out for the rattlers.

But I digress.

And the pasta's getting cold.

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