Thoughts on Current Events, Cross Cultural Values and the Dealing With Anger
In 1994, on the Jewish festival of Purim and during the Moslem Ramadan, American born Israeli citizen Baruch Goldstein, M.D. slaughtered Arabs at prayer in a mosque in the cave of the Machpelah in Hebron, Israel -- the traditional burial place of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a place sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians. In the course of events, he soon was killed by the survivors on the spot. Rioting, exchanges between then Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat and the action was condemned.
The circumstances of his unpardonable act were numerous, complex and still debated. He claimed a moral imperative, one whose premise at its root I also share in principle, but I have acted upon quite differently. In the course of the investigation, there arose a general consensus that this situation was more of act of a single man gone mad with the burden of limited mental capacity – like a neighbor who has a "short fuse".
The fact that he paid for his action with his own death did not produce closure for me, and the fact that the incident is no longer in the headlines for communal discourse is no indication that the matter was then or is now closed. At the time I was looking for some way that the community could acknowledge that what is felt as a moral imperative needs to have a less drastic way to be resolved.
It was, and remains, unfathomable to me that any Jew, especially a religious Jew, would enter that holy space with the intention to kill another human, much less people praying in a sanctuary. Since that time, the events of the wars in the region have made me no less hopeful that humans are, by nature, peace loving, but of course, I am less naive about incidental realities.
Baruch Goldstein’s action, nonetheless, is part of the lineage of my people’s struggle to survive and flourish, but I found it extremely difficult to just chalk it up to one person’s internal imbalance because at some level, I share his premise, and I carry the burden of his conclusion. Needless to say, I do not condone his means.
I have worked for the “organized” Jewish community as a propagandist, promoting education, awareness and action to support Jewish life in its myriad forms – fragile and powerful -- throughout the world. We had no way to address this type of extra-ordinary behavior, save to wish that it would not have happened.
Within the month of this incident, I attended a staged “performance” at UCLA of Sikkim Gut, a centuries old funeral ritual” conducted by shamans from Chindo Island of the southern coast of Korea. Little did I realize that I would find in this communal ritual a way to recover the hope that it would not happen again.
I have been informally studying the work of the Korean shaman, mudang, for several years and have a keen interest in the evolution of spiritual awareness. So, my expectations ran from expanding my knowledge to being entertained. contribute to my knowledge. It went further than that.
As we know, one of the major differences between performance and ritual is intention. In Hebrew the word is kavanah. During a workshop earlier in the day, the head shaman explained that such ritual was used to cleanse the community as well as the deceased . He also explained the pantheon of spirits they usually invoke in the course of that ritual, but he said that because they weren't actually conducting a funeral, that he would invoke and be appreciative of the presence of any spirits willing to be present in Los Angeles. In addition, the mudang would be seeking good fortune for all present.
Well, if the difference between ritual and performance is intention, and all that they were lacking was the subject of a cleansing funeral, then perhaps I could implicate Baruch Goldstein into that role and coax the performance back into ritual mode, if only for myself. Baruch Goldstein was clearly in need of spiritual cleansing wherever he was, and that the Jewish community had to look itself squarely in the face and take responsibility for the actions of one of its members. He was just a human, like all of us, and something went crazier inside him than in you or me at that time. So, I followed this intention throughout the performance. Perhaps this was the first time a Korean gut was held for an orthodox Jew.
Now, if Baruch Goldstein were alive, he'd probably not be too happy to be associated with this event. But that's the rational mind at work. Nevertheless, whether he or I "believe" in the spirit which needed this ritual was immaterial, if "spirit" really exists. So, I decided to make the "stretch" and address Baruch Goldstein in my imagination and project it through the medium of the Chindo mudang. When I thought it was appropriate, I inserted his name to fill in the blanks.
In the Ch'ong Hon the mudang danced with the chijon (fist-full of white paper streamers), and I settled into the wonderful sound of the musical instrumentalists of the band. Then she eventually placed them down together in front of her at the edge of the stage and sat with them, sort of caressing them. I decided that this was the "body" which was missing from the ritual. I imagined her lyrics to be a recitation of Baruch Goldstein's life, his successes, failures, loves and hates, a lyrical biography which included how he related to the community into which he was born, which nurtured him and of which he was a staunch supporter as an adult. Eventually, the mudang grabbed the chijon and whipped them up, one in each hand and began her energetic dance once again, waving them in Ss and Xs.
If the chijon were his disintegrating mortal remains, she now had captured his soul / spirit in them. I remember reading about a Tibetan Buddhist ritual called chod in which the practitioner envisioned him/herself being devoured, until nothing was left but the blood that was drunk from the skull. Certainly it was not Baruch's body that committed the crime. The body, like the mind, has no "opinions" of its own. When the mudang danced with the chijon, she had indeed invoked Baruch Goldstein's spirit and it was now in her "possession." (Or perhaps she was possessed by it? This distinction I'm still not clear about, not having had the experience of "possession" or sensed that I "possessed" a spirit distinct from myself -- not to mention my own). I may be entirely "wrong" about this, but it doesn't matter because it worked.
The second part was the Chesok Kut. While the reference is clearly Korean and Buddhist, nonetheless, it at least asks for good fortune for all of us. Thus, we needed no other explanation, happy to be granted good fortune in any form. We certainly need it.
Hon Siskkim Kut, cleansing of the spirit, was a ritual that I knew that Baruch Goldstein needed desperately -- as did I and the community as a whole. He probably needed it before he went into that mosque: the newspapers reported he was thoroughly frustrated over the deaths of a friend and the friend's son by Arab "terrorists," pushing his already well-demonstrated fundamentalist fanaticism to the complete end. It is this part that awoke in me something very unexpected: how in each of us - individually and collectively -- there lies a seed of that same nature which in Baruch Goldstein was pushed to its limit. It is the capacity to be so angry that hate shrouds everything and holds the rational mind a prisoner. In fact, we didn't need a real "dead" body on that stage; we had our own sitting in the seat. In every way, each time the mudang addressed (in my mind) the spirit of Baruch Goldstein; she was speaking to and about us. He was the classic "scapegoat."
One of the most important things I experienced was the notion of asking our now deceased community member to go now. Leave us. Resist attachment to the living and life, as we must not only resist hanging on to you. It also gives us the opportunity to support each other in saying to one of us to lighten up on our own attachment within and to life. It seems a greater comfort to me than ever before. It is the kavanah,the intention. 'I've never addressed a spirit before so directly. This must be one of the facilities of a kut -- to create an environment where this communication can occur free of the burden of fear of the inevitable.
How difficult this feels to me. In my few deeply personal losses of loved ones, the connection, conversation seemed more like a lament and an expression of grief. During the performance I again felt how difficult it is for me to detach from my ego, from my habits, from the preconceived notions I have about life and death, from my desires and passions. The ritual was working. I was connecting, not with something Korean or Baruch Goldstein, but something very intimate.
The next part, Kil Takkum, involved using a long stretch of fabric to create the myongdari" along which the spirit of the deceased must travel to the "other world." At this point, with all I had experienced, it was very clear that only with true awareness of who's really getting cleansed from what could anyone's spirit travel -- whether to an "afterlife" or the life each of us faces right here. What must the cleansing be like? What is it like to be so free from attachment?
The "performance" ended with an energetic drum dance, appropriately returning us back to our daily activities with joyous outlook.
I left the auditorium realizing the importance of gut in human life, whether it is here or in Korea, whether conducted in Hebrew or Korean -- but essentially the language "intention." How sad it has been that such rituals have been socially suppressed and our minds poisoned to reject them. I told a friend of mine that to go further toward my deep appreciation of shamanism, I had to "step aside" from my disbelief, not actually turn it into belief. It hasn't been easy. There's four decades of skepticism in there. But an equal amount of passion to go on We are fortunate enough to be able to have access to those people who, for whatever reason, do "believe" and are accept the responsibility on behalf of others. What is left for the rest of us is to honor the tradition on its face value.
