January 2, 2007

Lech lecha: experiencing the world as home, the birth of the ecological principle.

Much has been said about these ancient obscure words (appointed for this morning’s prayer) that have no direct parallel in English, the words that form the matrix of ethical monotheism. I believe it is Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s last literary character, who says in profound nonchalance, As everyone knows, we are alone. Bellow is a respectful non believer, non practicing Jew, a scion of Abraham but not a follower, though like Abraham an intellectual whose intellect challenges the received orthodoxy: Abraham’s assertion: beyond the sun and the moon there is one organizing personal force of Grace, a universal brainstem integrating the two lobes of the brain, more like a person than a blind force, but as a force, more like the tug of gravity that is the physics of love…the Strange Attractor of Chaos Theory.

That aspirant, the breath of life, that wind of creation, that Spirit of Pentecost, is added to his name signifying the spiritual element of God has entered him; that Ravelstein is wrong, we are not alone and we belong to this earth; it is our home wherever we are from, wherever we roam, even as we experience ourselves as alien, disaffected, living in estrangement.

The words function like the Christian cross, a call of renunciation and in that a promise of hope: to have a future of Grace the perceived absolutes of the present must be denied, the gamble must be waged.