Exile and the prophetic: Living in the Oprasphere

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

As part of my High Holiday diversion, Mahatma Condi brings me back to the real Mahatma and my recent travel to India.  When you think of prayer and devotion, India has to be high in the religious sphere.

There Gandhi is known and ignored.  Such is the fate of known.  They are discarded even as they remain in the people’s memory bank.  Like the Jewish prophets, Gandhi hovers over everything that is done and undone in the nation he helped birth.

I’ve traveled Jewish to Indias everal times. The first time was in 1986, when I went in search of a colleague named Siddhartha. You can surmise the rest of the story.  When Siddhartha didn’t appear, I bunked up with a Jesuit community who thought I was a Catholic priest because I taught at Maryknoll. Day by day I laid my life out to them.  The second day I told them I wasn’t a Maryknoller, the third that I wasn’t a priest and so on.  On the fifth day of my Jesuit sojourn, I told them I was a Jew. 

Quite a travel log that first trip to India.  Upon leaving I thanked the head of the Jesuit community for their hospitality and invited him to visit me in the United States.  He was noncommittal.  I asked him if he had ever been to America.   He told me hadn’t.  Then he politely rebuffed my invitation: “I want to see if I can get to heaven without visiting the United States.”

Humor with a bite, don’t you think?  My Jesuit friend placed redemption outside America’s imperial power.  He might have also been trumping America as a nouveau power.  India was an ancient civilization. 

Can Jews get to heaven without living in or even visiting Israel?  Only a very small number of American Jews have ever lived in Israel. A small percentage of American Jews have visited Israel.  Why, then, does our theology and communal consciousness tell us that Israel is redemptive?

In Israel, there is little vision beyond mere survival.  There isn’t much redemption consciousness there.  The trials of ordinary life predominate in Israel as they do elsewhere.  Redemption is for the mystics and the fundamentalists.

Among the Orthodox, sure, redemption counts.  Yet what does redemption mean if you only livein the land under the protection of a militarized state?  Call it Sparta’s Redemption, the film.  View it after Shoah. Make it short, though.  More than eight hours of Holocaust reverie is already a supreme challenge for our attention-deficit redemption- breathing brethren. 

There are so many accusing images regarding Israel today that Jewish audiences won’t even want the Shoah sequel played.  Perhaps just a scenic view of Jerusalem at the end of Shoah would suffice, a la Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.  Schindler’s List offered audiences redemption without the inconvenience of travel. From Lanzmann’s bully perch, Spielberg is on the Hollywood cheap, sugar coating the Holocaust and Israel for American audiences. Auschwitz as a hellish E T.

Roaming the internet highway, I see Spielberg’s net worth is estimated at three billion dollars.  Amazing amount of money for a sugar coater, don’t you think?  Sheldon Adelson bucks.

Spielberg grew up an Orthodox Jew and felt uneasy about it.  He also had youthful anti-Semitism thrown at him.  He did make it through, though, and has given back from whence he came, though always being careful of being bound to any Jewish religious authority.  Billions of dollars buys you that freedom.

I’ve never been a fan of the Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark film franchise.  I confess I haven’t seen any of them all the way through, but I understand there there’s a Nazi theme throughout and a race to find the Ark of the Covenant.  When they find the Ark – don’t tell me, I can feel the suspense – are there Star of David helicopter gunships inside?

On my next trip to India in 2001, I taught in a Christian seminary in Bangalore for three months.  It was a Left-leaning seminary but, as it turned out, the seminary was riddled with infighting and was completely dependent on Europe for funding. Thus it perpetuated the colonial model they ostensibly struggled against.  None of the students I taught had ever met a Jew, let alone be taught by one. It was quite fun at times.  I also learned that I had a romanticized sense of liberation theology.

Last year I was invited to New Delhi.  I visited a former student of mine, a true Christian missionary, who had a good relationship with all sorts of non-Christian folks in Kashmir.  When that idiot fundamentalist in Florida burned the Koran, my student’s life was in the balance.  One evening as the news spread of the Koran burning, he noticed folks camping out in his front yard.  Their presence was a sign that no retaliation should be taken against him and his family. 

It must have been quite a scene, and so moving. Local folks protected someone from a different faith.  Kashmir’s very own Neighborhood Watch.

That story one highlight of my travel.  Another was a Muslim group from Afghanistan that had come to learn more about the Islamic history of India. My Christian missionary student was their teacher.  My student wasn’t a proselytizing type. Instead he had become an expert on Islamic history.  The Afghan students were from different universities who were part of a project that emphasized the freedom to think and debate the issues of the day.  As you might expect, they had never been out of the country. They certainly hadn’t met a Jew who, by their accounts, had to be an Israeli. Aren’t all Jews, Israelis?

In between my lectures, I toured with the Afghans.  My student was our guide.  As you might expect, the dialogue was fascinating, with questions like:  “Professor, do you believe that God is perfect?”  To which I said, “No.”  Inevitably it came around to the Koran, and question of its perfection.  I gave the same response.  Did I believe Mohammed was the last prophet? “No,” again.

I was careful to preface each of my responses with the fact that they were mine alone. My answers didn’t carry any transcendental truth they should consider as authoritative.  After each question and response, we continued touring and speaking together. 

I loved our visits to the Hindu and Sikh temples.  I can’t help but admire traditions that have movable Gods and a Book that is treated like a royal guest during the day and night.  It also brought back memories of my former university where a head of department always insisted that America was the most religious nation on earth.  In India, the whole American exceptionalism thing is even more absurd than it is inside America.  Amazing stuff I lived with.  We live with. India has a way of wiping clean the ridiculousness of our “knowing.”

The highlight of my visit came unexpectedly.  There were two Afghan women on the tour. Both were immaculate in their dress and manners.  Each morning I shook the hands of the Afghan men. The women put their hand to their heart in greeting.  The previous evening I talked to the group about my views on Israel.  With the language, religion and cultural barriers, I wasn’t sure what the students understood about the perspectives I shared.

The next morning I greeted the Afghans as they arrived for the day. Instead of putting her hand to her heart, one of the women put out her hand as if to shake mine. I was shocked and hesitated for a moment.  I wanted to make sure I wasn’t mistaking her gesture for another.  As I hesitated, she clasped my hand.  She held it for long while in full view of everyone.  Then she smiled and placed her hand on her heart. 

Traveling Jewish.  The Indian Jesuit wanted to prove that God loved everyone, even those who didn’t make it to America.  Redemption doesn’t run through Washington.  The Afghan woman abandoned convention at her own peril. 

Indeed Mohammed is not the final prophet.  America – and Israel – is not redemptive.  Steven Spielberg is a billionaire three times over, living somewhere in the Oprahsphere. 

Oprasphere. Beyond Jewish power.  Do you need to be a billionaire?