I visit my wife in the bathtub most mornings. A ritual of unemployment, or of the new employment, the home office. My wife is into yoga, and she told me about the feeling of a world community in yoga: anywhere she goes in the world, she can find a group of likeminded people engaged in an exercise that has a spiritual component and, like other religious congregations, calls on its members to be their best selves.
It reminded me of what a friend had said at his son's bar mitzvah not long ago. The son was the product of an intermarriage and the friend, giving the parent's speech that has become a staple of bar mitzvah celebrations, explained why he had compelled his son to take part in a tradition that he might well abandon the minute the tent was down. Because, he said, he will always be part of a community that goes round the world. In India or Australia, he will be able to find a group of kindred souls. And that community is not just extra-territorial, but extra-temporal: it goes back thousands of years. The words he says were murmured thousands of years ago, too.
At the time it had seemed to me a little mechanical. But my wife said that she likes the fact that yoga goes back thousands of years. You like feeling that it's not a fad, that it's tried and true, she said. It's not like phrenology or something.
Like my own, my wife's original religious community is in a crisis. In my case, organized Jewry is worried about the trend I represent, intermarriage, and is marshalling forces against the demographic threat. In my wife's case, the liberal Protestants aren't going to church any more. The Episcopal church is being rocked by change.
I have to believe that the trend in her church is related to the change in mine: that intermarriage, or the idea that it represents, of the uselessness of our relatively narrow religious traditions in a multicultural age, is affecting the privileged Protestants as much as it is privileged Jews (Let me say it again; we're the richest group by religious denomination in the U.S., per Pew). And of course many of the privileged Protestants are marrying Jews, being in the same ruling-class cohort. Thus: yoga. People have a hunger for lasting, global religious communities that address the actual conditions of their lives.
