Ecological AlefBet Wisdom

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Why Is Fundamentalism All the Rage? Part I

B"H

The subject of rage has been in the air. I suppose this is because rage itself is out and about. I wonder whether it is one of the main defining characteristics of our age. I see it everywhere in international politics, and there's a lot more to its presence in domestic politics too, well beyond this whole shallow fascination with "negative campaigning" and how we just can't seem to get enough of it, even though we revile it so... Most significant movements in thought or in power today, as far as I can see, are staked on and stoked by somebody's rage.

Now, I've always held a lily-white pansy distaste for the stuff; so I think I've never even allowed myself to figure out what it is properly. Yet, ever since the Nov. 2 election uncorked a barrel of philosophizing by my friends, and me—to say nothing of the bloody pundits—the subject has been haunting me wherever I go. So it was that this morning I found myself in bed thinking about my long-lost (ever-had?) best friend J., and a quiet little eureka dropped on me: J., the self-effacing poet, ever above coarse common argument, the quiet, private, scholarly wallflower—J., is a perfect man of rage.

It's not merely anger, though certainly he had moments (some rather... large) of serious anger. Rage isn't anger, per se. Rage is not that hard, pointy energy of disappointment, frustration, denial, and fear. Rage is the uncompromising use of that (or another?) energy to empower the Self from despair. Rage is where an unequivocal stand is taken against, so that I am the victim and you are the cause of my pain. Rage, in a nutshell, is the preemptive attribution of the source of my unhappiness, in a situation where the true source is too difficult for me to see. Not being able to see the source of my unhappiness is disempowering, because that means I can't see how to better my situation. Rage is empowering, in that it establishes absolute clarity. But it is a cursed kind of power, because, in externalizing the problem and barricading my unhappy ego away from it, I have also established a state of siege, which means I now have no relationship with the roots of my unhappiness. They're on the other side of the barricade.

The Genius of Torah has always been its revelation of the whole universe in a sliver of nuance. I suspect that one such nuance is in the distinction between anger and rage. For years I have understood the rabbis to be opposed to anger, as a matter of general principle: it is non-constructive, if not outright destructive, and it denies Divine Care, if only for a moment. I have often invoked this argument against friends (or spouse) counseling me to stop suppressing my own anger in circumstances that have aroused it. And I have to admit to having been at an impasse over this lately—because there is something genuine about some of the anger I feel and have felt, and I'm not so convinced that the right thing to do is stuff it back down in my guts, to digest it without expressing it.

Now I am beginning to suspect that the rabbis weren't ever out to stop anger but, rather, rage. Because it is rage that retracts the individual's share in the work of Creation. It is a disengagement from riddling and relationshipping. In fact, it is avodah zara itself—not only because it makes one's unhappiness and victimhood precious to the brink of idolatry, but moreover because it sells off the radical unity of G!d's Work in the process, by claiming that there can be any disharmony in the universe that does not have a life with and within me.

I can be angry and still be honest with G!d. I can be angry and mean nothing more than: shit, this hurts, and I don't know what to do. But, in rage, I'm saying: shit, this is a crock, and there's nothing I can do, because it's someone else's fault. The problem, of course, is that it's always ultimately G!d's fault (with assists from other agents, arguably everyone and everything), and if G!d being at fault means there is no hope for a constructive way to reempowerment in concerted relationship with that G!d and His Works—well, then I have invented a new (kind of nasty) god for my own cheap comfort. Looks like idolatry, walks like idolatry...

So, if fundamentalism is the ideological expression of rage, and if war is the geopolitical expression of rage, then it seems we have an urgent need, in our time, to get to the heart of all this rage and build an alternative home for ourselves and our children. Or maybe just a viable home would do. J. never seemed to be at home except in his rage. Even if offered a place, or a relationship, within which to make home, he would end up decorating it with his rage, however quietly (or not). It was as though, despite those sparkly aspirations to be the great concert soloist, or the genius at the lectern, he could never be comfortable with that kind of responsibility unless there were an open channel across which he could delegate any kind of fault for any kind of discord. Outside of victimhood and tortured self-righteousness, J. was homeless on earth.

Here, then, is where I think this is all germane to Mishkaneering: rage is just a reflexive response to despair, and despair wells from cosmic homelessness—the terrible prospect that this Creation may be no place for a soul like me. That Adam and Eve may be banished from Gan Eden forever until death, with no way back in. (The Torah doesn't state this, but the fear is real, and on the rise.) It is a crisis of the spirit, to lose so deeply the taste, even if only in striving, for our true habitat.

Leaving aside for now all of the myriad obvious ways in which modern mass culture liquidates place, habitat, and home, let me ask one simple question: How could we ever not feel at home in the world G!d creates for us? I know everyone feels this, but how is it possible?