Editorial notes:
In October 2016, Shai opens his eighth blog, entitled “A Bashful Hope“ and sub-title “Dreaming of meaning”. Between October 2016 and December 2016 he posts 13 articles in this blog.
This blog is clearly a work-in-progress and its menu structure suggests that Shai planned to incorporate articles across the vast areas of Kabbalah, Torah commentary and Zionism. I can only speculate, but I believe that the volume of Judaism-related work documented elsewhere was meant to find its way into this blog.
And, just like in a previous post, Shai is using the platform he created to elaborate on his state of mind and his internal challenges and tribulations.
Today is the first day of the week before Shabat of Noach.
I am apologizing for my hubris, for the arrogance that underlies all my attempts and intentions. There is so much more that I need to apologize.
I am apologizing, not in order to redeem myself, which would need so much more, but in order to provide an epistemological defence for my opinions. I want to give an explanation for why you can read this, and why it might not all be wrong de facto.
Of the few excuses that survive the days’ tallies is: my life is unique in my own particular way, just as all others. Can we share in this defence? That each of us is hopeful.
The defence I’m mounting for the conceivability of my owning these ideas is this: it’s not because I’m good that I have these ideas. They’re just an expression of my uniqueness. Just as we’re all unique. So that if anyone says, Why would you be the one to bring these ideas to the table. I would say, Because I’m the one who travelled through these peculiar educations.
What follows will stink of the very arrogance I am attempting to negate.
I could describe to you what makes my life’s education unique, but instead, I am going to give you an insight into how I (sometimes) experience Jewish literature. Both describing my education, and describing such experiences would be done in such a way that would echo arrogance. But I’m only using these to make my point, which is that I’m offering a peculiar perspective.
When am I allowed to express the thoughts I’ve constructed and perceived and proven into the limitations and flawed crevices of my experiences?
And for those who want to say that first, I should describe my education. I have already done so, elsewhere. And anyway, what would it prove. The point would be to say that that education preceeded a peculiar capacity for experience. Thus what follows is not necessarily a right expression or description, but it suffices for this current purpose.
When we make our blessings before eating, have you wondered this; why is the phrasing so obtuse? First we direct towards our Master, but using a liminal verb/adjective/adverb that is both retroactive/passive and reiterative/active, then a pronoun indicating shared reference, immediately contracting a plurality into a singularity that hints back to the attribute of lordship, and finally pointing to the crux of the phrasing (e.g. “shehakol ne’asa bedvaro“) in which the past is lauded, but directed by way of a public announcement. (Etc)
Here I am using a common religious experience, viz. the blessing before miscellaneous food, to prove that our religion is hard to intuit; that even the phrasing of our common blessings are suggestive of secrets and allusions. One could only hope to understand them piece by piece, each time extracting a principle of the phrasing’s construction. But then how would one fit that analyzed blessing back into the moments of saying the blessing?
One solution could be this? By meandering the positioning and shaping of the phenomenal director of the blessing. For example, first the mind exists in a state of attendance to mental formations by way of dual conception, then immediately it references this by way of an intersubjectivity that is directed to the Infinite as present, then the reference of that direction is invoked by way of devotional attendance, that same invokation then has its subject…
Here I am attempting to describe some of my experiences of the blessing to show that our religion might be proposing an amazing phenomenological flexibility in its conception. I do not claim to always have such flexibility, nor to experience it accurately, nor that my peculiar experience which I am calling “flexibliity” is the right one. The point, to re-iterate is this, I want to bring my own experiences to the table.
I’m not a good Jew. I desecrated my most recent Yom Kippur. I hope to live until the next.
No one should think that I am writinig these things because I think I have a spiritually superior vantage point. In fact, the opposite is what I fear. Hence my arguments depends on a communal hope: I hope that we all have value. That all our lives will one day be seen from a perspective that all that they rose and fall served some purpose that transcended our understanding in those times.
The narratives of my life include both blasphemies and strong arguments for dismissing everything I could ever say.
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