Once and Future Hometown

B"H

The Seattle Weekly recently ran their 30th anniversary appreciation of Ecotopia. One piece of the history they don't cover is the Ecotopia Babies, like me: children born into the landscape and the culture of Crunchy Cascadia in the '70s, who are now "grown up" and building families, enterprise, and a part of the region's future. Ecotopia is, for me, more than a naive 30 year-old ideal, it's also the cradle of my childhood, so it holds a real persistence in my thinking.

I think one overtone of G!d's voice to the individual's guidance is childhood memory of a specific sort, the kind of past-memory that is at once also a future-memory, the utopian hometown, a striving to perfect that which was the original model for good. For humanity, this utopian hometown is Gan Eden. For Israel, it is Jerusalem. And for me, it is Olympia.

I try to be a champion of Place in general, and I will continue to strive for many community-building endeavors in a variety of settings. But Olympia is the Alpha Hometown, and the motivation behind all of my utopian visioning. It's one of a handful of communities in Greater Cascadia where the Ecotopian civic ethos survived the '80s. (Others arguably include, Saltspring Island and Nelson in British Columbia; Bellingham, Port Townsend, and Winslow in Washington; Eugene, Ashland, Corvallis, and, some even say, Portland itself in Oregon; and a number of Northern California towns right down to the Mothership -- or should I say, Gaiaship -- Berkeley.) At its least silly, that ethos produced an earthy, do-it-yourself communitarianism that, I believe, represents the most spiritually faithful, and the most worthwhile, synthesis of New World and Pacific Northwest values. Ecotopia happens to have been pioneered by not a small proportion of Jews (and not coincidentally, I think); consequently it has all sorts of Torah folded into it, and, in practically every one of its remaining vital pockets, a genuinely funky Jewish community persists in living out, almost invisibly, the vision of the Jewish Catalog.

Olympia's distinctions among this surviving archipelago of rarified hippydom are that it: is geographically central to the system, features unusually rich volcanic soil, is literally the greenest (also dampest), produces the best strawberries by far, and has the strongest independent music scene. Most importantly, though, Olympia does not function as an island -- meaning, it is both geographically accessible, and culturally porous, with respect to the contemporary "mainstream," to an extent that I consider rare. Consequently, I think it would be easier to use Olympia as a sort of entryway for North American Jews from conventional lifestyles in conventional cities (like, say, Seattle, which is just an hour away) into a more deliberate, self-owned kind of Jewish domestic life. It also happens to lack visionary Jewish leadership at this moment, but the population is there and the possibilities are vast.

My ultimate hope is that, b'ezrat haShem, I may live and labor to see the cultivation of the following, based in Olympia: an intentional Jewish community, co-operative Jewish education, and religious self-sustainability collectives (farms, if you will) for arts, for Judaica craft, and for agriculture (and textiles? anyone for textiles?). Imagine the domestic functionality of an early kibbutz, distributed into a small West Coast city. I would also like to see meaningful interfaith dialogue sustainable outside of a tailored institutional context, which I believe is possible in a small city.

This will take more time and organization and energy (not only mine, obviously) than I can say. In the meantime, though it doesn't seem Aviel and I would be able to plant our family there, the Point Roberts "artists colony" model is, I think, a worthwhile project that should give us the opportunity to lab-test the vision. (Because property there is artificially cheap, self-employment and self-sustainability are forced somewhat by the geographic isolation, and yet a full big-city complement of religious resources is just a 30-minute drive away.) And we have hatched a plan for planting our first seed in Olympia itself, which involves working with The Evergreen State College to build a contemporary version of The Integral Urban House, which would then constitute our personal landing pad. :)

So there you have it -- in celebration of Ecotopia's anniversary, a canvas bag-load of granolabar-in-the-sky idealism for the next generation. These are my dreams of Home.

Ameyn.

Farting Proudly

(with kavod to Ben Franklin)

B"H

Purim came and went. I leyned from a Megillah scribed by my wife the Soferet, while wearing her wedding dress (she wore my outfit too, and there were many remarks upon our similarity in size, though at least one complaint that I don't "fill out" the dress like she did). We hosted our dear friend Kyla up from Seattle that day and through the weekend. Shaloch manot were given and received. Haman was remembered and erased and remembered and erased, and the general merriment tinkled straight into Shabbat.

But there was no post about profanity.

Alas!

I just don't have time to write the durn thing. But here's the gist: Typical, I believe, of musicians, I have a widely diverse collection of music, and I enjoy mixing it up, especially while wholesomely engaged in monotonous, mindless labor. Occasionally, a certain song by a certain Texas-based acoustic roots band, addressing a certain subject (sex) with a certain focus (anatomical in nature), comes up in the playlist. And Aviel will roll her eyes, not that it's that song again but that I will be so visibly happy to hear it. To be honest, it brings me joy.

By any conventional measure, this song is pure, unadorned profanity. I can argue that the energy and musicianship behind its performance is dazzling, which it is, or that the lyrics are admirably clever, which they are, but if the subject matter were lofty philosophy or theology, would I be so delighted? Perhaps (if the song were as good), but probably not any more. So what's my problem?

I think what delights me is that such an "earthy" subject has been given so much attention. I mean, how could I not take delight in another mortal's expression of unabashed glee at the simple pleasures of his mortal condition? Every detail of my life, even a smelly one, is in some way or another an expression of my Divine purpose. That's why I say a brakhah for moving my bowels.

I remember once having a lovely argument with a great rebbetzin, over the meaning of the religious dictate that holy books should be removed from open view in a room where partners make love. Loveliest about this argument was that we ended up agreeing: the books and the lovemaking are separated because each is so holy that it requires its own separate sanctuary. What this sounds like, then, is that there is always sacredness (sometimes even profound sacredness) in the profane.

This rankles, because the classical constructions of "sacred" and "profane," to my knowledge, are as opposites, and it seems to me that they can't be. Either that, or (more likely, I suspect) we just don't have a good grasp on what profanity really is. What I want to do is go back to the sources, beginning with Gen. 4:26, and take a survey of the term's usage, and try to rattle a serviceable definition out of it. But, like I said, I don't have time to do that right now; so, instead, I'd like to open the floor to discussion, ideas, anecdotes, confessions. Especially confessions! I've noticed that most people I have encountered in this life who have a truly vital connectedness with Divinity, also have a healthy appreciation for the profane. Stand up now, and be counted. :)

On Consumerism and Religion

B"H

Excerpted from correspondence with my dear friend R' David Ingber:

What angle are you interested in? Jewish or secular or both? Are you interested in approaching this from a Halachic or Meta-halachik perspective?

Well, I'll tell you how I arrived at the topic, which may help. I have been taking time here and there to ripen up my "Slow Judaism" thesis, which evolved from a case for small-town Jewish community into a kind of general anti-movement manifesto. So my interest at entry is in the Jewish meta-Halakhic angle...

But I've found the ramifications of consumerism in Jewish religious life very difficult to write about with precision or consistency, because I don't have the language to describe religious consumerism in general (so I find myself haphazardly making it up as I go). What I'm asking, I suppose, is whether such a language has already been developed adequately by another contemporary writer.

One text that immediately jumps to mind is Nachmanides famous interpretation of the verse, "Be holy, for I, G-d, am holy." We are not allowed to be "Naval B'rshut Hatorah", which loosely means that Torah sanctioned decadence is prohibited and spiritually unhealthy.

Though I could see it becoming a blunt instrument, ... the first apikorsus that leaps to mind is whether the consumption (so to speak) in a particular mitzvah or class of mitzvot, to the extent that it blocks other dimensions of engagement with haShem and His Works, could be considered decadence in this sense [of naval b'rshut haTorah]. Anyway, it seems the basic notion is, for the mortal to aspire to depth in his experience, he must maintain the capacity for balance. And it is a mitzvah for the Jew to aspire to depth, therefore excess of any kind, which necessarily sabotages individual balance, is asur...

Meanwhile, my meta-halakhic angle goes something like this: All Judaism today is Modern ..., in the sense that it is produced and marketed and consumed on an industrial scale. This means all religious Jews, whether Orthodox or Renewal or Reform [or full-on, unadorned Humanistic], and all religious Jewish communities, share a common spiritual challenge, which is to identify and smash (transform, reattribute, ...) the idols of Consumerism. So, from a standpoint either of spiritual counseling or of religious community-building (and I honestly don't know which of these is my personal calling, but I suspect it's at least one of them), "movement" -- [i.e.] brand -- affiliation is irrelevant to the basic need for a way to make deep sense of our relationship with consumer choice, because consumer choice is the principal slavemaster of our age, affecting all Jews and communities more or less equally.

In order to do my real avodah in this life, I need tools for understanding the capacities of consumer choice to limit self-realization. I know that it has these capacities. I can see it all around me in this beautiful, deafening city. (And why else would the movement orthodoxies be so powerful if it weren't for a massive tide of Jews growing overwhelmed and stifled by too much choice?) But I need a way to get at it. I need a language, so I can build myself a good sandbox, and play.