I was sitting on the bus in LA. A man walked on, mid 60s. Chinos. Blue jacket. Loafers. Baseball cap. Gold jewelry. He looked like Brooks Brothers or Macys. Not your typical LA bus rider. He stood stone still after he got on and then turned to me the only other white person and said in a booming voice: This town is becoming part of the third world.
It was early and I couldn’t help but wonder if some playful angel had planted him there as an Adar joke. I was in silent mode after two hours of flying. I was just happy to have caught the last Culver City Express to UCLA.
I managed a smile, trying to be nice to someone who clearly felt frightened and out-of-place. I also did a sweeping gaze around me. An Asian was across the aisle. Five black women were in seats behind. Not a scowl. Not a glance. Mouths stayed shut. It was as if nothing had been said.
He sat next to me and talked on, moving from the lower classes to the upper classes, slamming the Kennedys and trust fund kids. I listened, fascinated. He was Jewish, he said, and then he decided to slam the Jews.
I remember shutting my eyes. The day before I had been sitting on a sun-hot stone surrounded by snow in absolute silence doing the work I like most, with angels and beings seen by soul-eyes not real-eyes. I knew this fast drop downward. I had done this trip a lot: From the still silent voice, the wafting sense of God to what many people call reality. Today though, I felt like I had hit rock bottom, the lowest possible plateau on earth. It was lower than I expected. And suddenly the work I had done on the mountain…and yes it is work that includes the whole world…felt distant. Was I personally insulted? No. I’m not a prophet. According to Torah and the sages, Moses was insulted for God. I felt stupid, futile, like my whole world of energy and healing was a dream and this was the diseased world that I was really supposed to try and fix. Yeah, right.
He kept talking. His teeth were gray and small. The words cut like a million knives. They were ego-words gilded with intellect and conviction.
I’ve met too many people like him. And at this moment, I was too exhausted to be angry, to break the news that he was building idols of his own anger and fear. Yes, he was presenting his negativity before me as if it was the gilded calf and I was supposed to pray as well. I wondered who had given him permission to do this kind of thing. His rabbi? His father? His grandfather? Had he just thrown together a mix of his worst thoughts sparked by newspaper articles and CNN and was this the spontaneous result? He spoke loud. Joked a lot. Came off as a slick guy. Good sales pitch but I wasn’t about to buy. I knew at one point in his life he had to have been connected to some kind of God who would support grace and compassion, kindness and patience. But it seemed useless. I certainly wasn’t about to proselytize…though I could have. I was after all armed with more than the Ten Commandments but two whole tractates of Talmud and last week’s notes from respected teachers.
This is what I really wanted. I wanted to get my hand on a state of the art fear-and-doubt buster, the kind that would obliterate (yes obliterate) every negative cell in his body…all three thousand of them. Now, I want to be clear about this. If I hadn’t just come from the mountain and experienced a fast slide down to hard core society…I probably would not have wished for this state of the art consciousness weapon. If I had been hanging out in LA…even Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, on the beach, in the spa, the transition would have been smoother. But I had not been. True, I hadn’t been on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. More like four hours. But that was enough for me to feel that I had been dragged too far below heart-level.
I suddenly wanted to create a new plateau, a new demarcation of the lowest we as humans can go. And I wanted to cut off everything below with plague if I had to, make them swallow their own poison if need be. But I was just a rabbinic student on my way to UCLA..This is what I decided to remember though. That perhaps if I used my whole being as a fear-buster I would get somewhere. Maybe if I could just shine the light out hard and fast I could in my next life maybe or the life after that be like Moses and raise the lowest possible denominator of human consciousness.
This would mean the way I interpret written Torah as well, I decided as I stood to get off the bus. I mean we all are given a choice. We can continually see the slaying of enemies or even of ourselves as an issue to harp upon, lecture upon, moan about, question, raise up as Torah-mistakes, cling to like a cancer clings to its victim. Or… like the rabbis of Talmud…we can act with the knowledge that Torah is not nor has ever been a supporter of physical maiming and slaying, but that it demonstrates certain behavior and actions as symbols to bring us tools to help us behave with peace and light in the world today.
I am by no means supporting ignorance. People are killed for no reason with cruelty continually day and night. The question is if we fight the killers or heal the victims, if we join the confused multitudes and pretend to find some answer-to-violence or just shine- out as much light as we can. The world is not pretty. There’s manslaughter, murder, scorched earth policies, torture. But we want to fight the people who love war first and then the warriors. War after all is as sure and steady as the idols we build. History dictates that we can count on it. If there isn’t a war now there will be one later. One would think.
As I write this I remember meeting a Palestinian in Paris. It was 1975. I was 15. It was at a café across from the Opera. He yelled at me continually that I had killed his mother, his aunt, his brother. I was 15. I hadn’t killed anyone. He was doing the killing, or at least trying to…but if you’re in a shield of light you’re a tough one to kill. This was one war I wasn’t going to embrace. The only way (at age 15) I could show this though…to myself and to others… was by running to the bathroom in the café. I remember vomiting.
This moment on the bus, I smiled at the man and said goodbye. He asked me out to dinner. I declined. I felt sorry for him but I had done enough work for the day (and it was only 9 am) and though I yearned for the mountain…. now it was time for class.
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