I Don't Know What to Believe. Ben Kamin

rationalizing the intermittent hypocrisies and felonies of your ordained church leaders?

      People are buried, married, and even circumcised throughout the scriptural narrative. In no case is a specific day or time of day invoked—what resonates is the spiritual impact of these rites. The Sabbath day is certainly venerated and structured in the Torah; both Christianity and Islam have adopted its concepts of rest, renewal, and creativity on Sunday and Friday, respectively. The Old Testament specifies that one should not work on the Sabbath. How does a ban on “work” conceived by a nomadic desert people four thousand years ago transfer into an injunction against driving your Toyota to visit your grandchildren on a Saturday afternoon?

      We need the safety valve of spiritual honesty to service and liberate the old texts from the dust of their ancient caverns. Truth is portable as sure as the sun and the moon are in constant motion. Life is a river of informative situations and mysteries but only when the river is not frozen. It needs the heat of the sun as surely as we need the warmth of pastoral kindness. Judaism and Christianity both assert that the ultimate law, the supreme concept, is “love thy neighbor.” Compared to this nonjudgmental, peace-seeking idea, the rest of the text is commentary. And it is vulnerable to manipulation by clerics or cultists who have forgotten about love and just have a need to control.

      Every religion survives not because of its restrictions, but via its freedoms. When people dictate what you think and do and the intent is to supervise your soul, invariably there will be a problem. Liturgies and laws aspire to line up things into some kind of order that can be helpful, especially when certain rituals link you to the past and help you walk to the future. The reality is that life rarely lines up itself; it is not a grid and it does fall into place neatly.

      When I remember my relatives and friends who have died, I surely recite what the Jews call the “Mourner’s Kaddish.” This old Aramaic prayer (most Jews mistakenly assume it’s in Hebrew) joins me to my parents and other elders and some departed young people as well because it links my grief to a calendar cycle—and that’s fine. But if I just voice the Kaddish as a procedural and then resume my business, not much has really happened. Religion is grammar, but spirituality is language. Religion is words; spirituality is love.

      When I remember my dad while saying the Kaddish, really remember him, then I’m thinking about his deep brown eyes, his magnetic smile, his strong hands, and, yes, his flights of anger. I think about him, and therefore he lives. I can hear his voice. His soul has wings. A prayer that is felt and not just spoken is a chance to visit with somebody.

      A death certainly needs an organized response. But it requires pain, bewailing, listening, and our agony cannot be managed into a box. It also needs the unbound therapy of grief, which is as personal and multifaceted as the way people die and when they die. Meanwhile, we, their survivors, also cope with the tyranny of mortality—the prevailing sadness of human life.

      The only constant is that we all die. While we are living and dealing with the dead, we cannot be administered by a rote formula; there is no such thing. That would be the equivalent of asserting that every person who has died was not utterly unique, or that we each contemplate and fear death identically. There must be safety valves laid into the religious constructions or we shall be further afflicted by the harsh realism of someone’s death rather than grow with the experience.