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| On Mt. Parnassus. |
And once in a while, there’s a spiritual impulse that just
wants to be expressed in a pagan idiom, no matter how dyed-in-the-wool
a monotheist you happen to be.
And such was the progression of things for me this week,
taking off for the family trip to Greece (Israel next week), reciting a tefilat haderech, the traditional travel
prayer, and slowly experiencing my trusty religious touchstones falling away.
At first I didn’t see it. I’d been to Athens more than
once before, so climbing the Acropolis was mostly to show this wonder to my
family. And it is a wonder, somehow still managing to move and impress, despite
the attention-grabbing behavior of scaffolding, cranes and thousands of
tourists with selfie-sticks. Still, I was there as a tourist, not an acolyte,
and my touristic needs were more than met.
But on Friday morning the feel of this ancient and
densely historied place began to change. Our Athenian friend and host brought
us to his hometown of Elefsina, the historical Eleusis where, as we all undoubtedly
recall, Hades emerged from the Underworld to abduct the unsuspecting
Persephone. Elefsina still contains the ruins of a large temple compound. Not a
single pillar is standing. But the footprint is so well preserved that you can
easily imagine the temple’s grandeur and the dignified movement of pilgrims and
priestesses in its courtyard. It is dedicated to Demeter, goddess of the
harvest and mother of Persephone. In ancient times devotees would walk from the
Acropolis in Athens all the way to Eleusis with gifts of grain and cakes. Now,
above the ruins, there is a tiny Orthodox church. Visitors leave offerings of
loaves of bread.
Elsewhere in the compound is a rock where legend places
Demeter, sitting and weeping for her lost daughter, not yet having heard of her
abduction to the underworld or the whole sorry pomegranate seed business. At the
mouth of a shallow cave several feet away there is the foundation of a small
temple of Hades, marking the spot where the cave opened up just long enough for
god of the underworld’s quick incursion into the land of the living. While
Demeter sat and wept, the crops refused to grow. A shrine to Hades so close to
the source of what is remembered as worldwide famine is hardly surprising. It
is only we who carry the illusion that somehow there will always be enough.
Our Athenian host grew up just outside the fence of the
compound. While many people complain about where their upbringings, he is the
only one I know who could, with some legitimacy, claim to have grown up at the
Gates of Hell. But in actuality he has great fondness for this ground that was
the scene of such an archetypal story. The ruins were his playground; the gods
his friends. As we left I saw that in a crack at the back of the cave someone
had left a pomegranate.
We took our leave of Demeter and returned to Athens. That
evening, the college boy (and best friend of our 18-year old) who is traveling
with us, and who has not been out of the country before, staged a coup. Waking
us all from our late afternoon jetlag-induced naps, he proposed a visit to the
Poseidon temple in Sounion, south of Athens, for sunset. Bleary-eyed and heavy-limbed,
we agreed. By the time we got in the mini-van we knew we’d never make it by
sunset, let alone by temple closing time. But somehow, once Poseidon was
invoked, we didn’t want to let him down. We drove south, and when Apollo’s fiery
chariot closed in on the horizon, we scrambled down to a rocky beach and
watched the turquoise water darken and the sky grow golden over it.
It was now Erev Shabbat. As I sometimes do when I’m
traveling on a Friday night, I imagined the Shechinah approaching in her Shabbos
bride drag. But somehow she couldn’t quite compete in that moment over
Poseidon, in his native land, trident gently, incessantly, stirring the
opalescent waves.
The next morning we left Athens and headed west. We had a
date to keep with the oracle at Delphi, and this would be our travel day to get
there. It was an easy day – we drove, settled in, hung out in the sleepy
village of Aráchova. Then the college boy got a second wind. We had spent time
on the drive reading through entries in the goldmine that is the 2-volume
Pelican Greek Mythology by Robert
Graves. In it he not only retells the myths we learned as children, but every
variant version, every tangent, every increasingly horrifying detail that had
been politely omitted in school. The college boy and I speculated about the strata
of history reflected in the mythology: underlying migrations, conquests,
advancements and terrors. We wondered about the religious life of the ancient
Greeks. We commented on how well their pantheism suited the experience of
life’s random brutality. Because so much of Greek mythology is about the
tension between randomness and fate. You couldn’t predict what would happen.
And you could predict it all. You could, if you bothered to read the texts,
foresee that no matter how many babies you left to die on hillsides or
swallowed whole, they would invariably come back and cause your ruination. No
matter how humble a life you led, your one moment of smugness would cause some offended
deity to turn you into something ironic, and you would go from being an average
Joe to a smirk-worthy example for generations to come. Even as we drove in the
car I found myself starting to watch my words, lest I piss off some Olympian
still haunting this epic landscape, lurking behind one of the petrol stations
or unfinished housing developments that Homer could not have foreseen. I didn’t
actually believe they were there, but
hedging my bets felt prudent.
So as I said, the college boy was again on fire. There
was a cave between our lodging and Delphi that was vaguely connected to the
Delphian rite – it was the weekend time-share of the oracle or something. It
was also home to Pan, the half-man, half-goat demigod of revelry, mischief, licentiousness.
The cave is not far, reachable by car and a short, 500m hike. Can we go? Right
now?
Yes. Of course yes.
As it turned out, the short hike was not. It lasted over an
hour in the heat, up a steep mountainside rising out of a valley that was
itself high up on Mount Parnassus. It was a hot evening; my lungs strained
against the thin air and my t-shirt filled with sweat. The only sound
accompanying us were bells worn by goats in the valley below us, goats that
suddenly and mysteriously appeared on and around our path, watching us, like
Pan’s vanguard.
Did you know that Pan was also the god of terror? Considered
the source of unidentifiable woodland noises, his name gives us the word panic. I tried not to panic at the quivering
of my muscles or the angle of the climb. I veered off course more than once
(you’d think the culture that invented geometry would not use isosceles triangles as direction
markers); got caught in thickets of razor-sharp holly. At last I gave up and
told the others to go on without me. But as always, my husband allowed me my
moment and then gently urged me on.
And then we were there. The cave opened before us. We
stepped in and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. We couldn’t yet see the
ceiling or walls. But we could see our breath. The cave was big as an
auditorium and, the college boy and I estimated, at least 60 feet tall. Small
votives burned in various crevices, with roses and cherries and olives around
them. Someone had made a stone circle on the dark ground. Were these things
placed, were the candles lit, by Dodekatheists – modern pagans honoring the
Olympian gods? Or were there others who maintained an unbroken tradition of
caring for the place, dating back so many thousands of years? Like Sephardic
crypto-Jews in the Americas lighting candles on Friday nights to stay true to a
religion they no longer had a name for?
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| Pan's Cave, from the back, looking through and out. |
The site was simple. There was no temple. There were no
ruins. Just a dark wet cave. The college boy pointed out that it was, by definition,
the most intact shrine we had or would visit. He was right. It was whole and in
perfect working order.
I was nervous being there. Pan is a tricky god to like;
he represents what are considered in our culture to be shadow elements in us, sexuality
not the least of them. Whatever vestige of a hoofed deity existed in Judaism
was already, by Torah times, a spotty memory – Azazel, a goatlike creature in
the wilderness who would receive the annual offering of our sins, sent by
unlikely messenger – a goat. Our folklore over the centuries went on to recast
the hoofed deity as demon or imp. The Christians put the ribbon on the package
by imagining Satan as Pan, all grown up.
But a part of me felt happy too. What fun to be able to
reclaim one’s mischievous, irreverent, naughty nature as divinely inspired!
Because in a world in which the divine is made up of uncountable gods and
demigods, each with different characteristics, you can always, no matter how
unusual you are, find yourself reflected somewhere in the pantheon. The pagan cosmos
is refracted into infinite variety. There is male and female and fluidity
between. There is warlike and peaceful. Randy and chaste. Strong, swift,
studious and differently abled. If I am different from you, I can express that theologically.
I can say, for example, that Apollo is my patron, with an undercurrent of
Athena and Hermes, and some Pan on the side. I would visit their shrines and
leave offerings.
Trying to conjure up the Pan part of me in my Jewish view
of God is a taller order. And that is a built-in systemic difficulty in a one-size-fits-all
view of God. In order to feel ourselves, in all our variety, as tzelem Elohim, as being in the image of
God, we resort to imagining God’s many “aspects.” But the more specific we get
about those aspects, the more idolatrous it feels. Maimonides denied the
existence of aspects; he liked God singular, undifferentiated. Which leaves an amorphous, blobby sort of God, in
which we’re all included in a kind of abstract and not-always-satisfying way.
And, I often feel, just when we’re trying to reclaim or
reframe something about God in order to be personally connected, our old texts
step in and mess it up. If God remained an All-Is-One singularity, one could maybe
work with it with some ease. But once the One God gives a law, a hierarchy is inherently created. Some human
traits are honored and others delegitimized. The places where the law speaks to
you poorly or not at all because you are a woman or you are intersex or queer
or disabled or intermarried – these make it hard to see yourself included in
God rather than judged or dismissed by same. And so many Jews, full of
Athena-like wisdom and Apollo-like talent and Pan-like mischief walk away and
find their fulfillment elsewhere.
Monotheism might be our collective Jewish instinct. It
might be a good one. It might offer a hope of cosmic intention that we deeply
hunger for. But it also disappoints whenever we suffer. In the Greek world
suffering happened because the gods were sometimes nasty pieces of work –
impulsive, vindictive, unpredictable. And no one expected any better of them. But
in a cosmology in which there is only one God, a God who is loving, all knowing, all powerful, but who
allows the same awful stuff to happen and sometimes calls it punishment for our
moral failings, there is a disconnect. This is not divinity, this is dysfunction.
So we look for our ways to work around the systemic
problems of monotheism because we love our tradition, or we love God, or for some other reason we're willing to live in the mystery and the struggle. We scour our texts for ways to feel
better embraced. We adopt the Shechinah as our face of God because she feels
like a she and that already eases some of the tension, in a way that’s not
dissimilar to many Catholics’ devotion to Mary as a more loving, compassionate portal to the godhead.
But you know? All this work to reclaim God for those of
us the tradition leaves out is just that: work. Holy work, for sure. But work.
And sometimes you just want a day off. And here it was: shabbos! My grandmother
never, in her whole life, wrote on Shabbos. And on this one day, I decided not
to do so also. I would put down my pen, and take a break from writing
myself into our tradition.
So there I was, in a cave on Mt. Parnassus, smelling of
moss and incense. I thought about my own panic
qualities. I knew with effort, in days to come, I could find ways to describe
those Jewishly. But for this moment, I allowed myself to let it sit in its
native tongue.
I climbed up to one of the small Pan shrines in the back
of the cave. A small votive, like a yahrzeit candle, burned there. I looked at
the fruit and flower offerings left around it. I hadn’t brought an offering,
not having planned on idolatry when I
left the house. But being here in this sacred place, noticing my own easy
affinity for this god, it felt wrong to turn and walk out ungenerously. I fished
around in my backpack until I found a Ricola throat lozenge. I placed it next
to the votive. I figured after a long night of reveling, it was something Pan
might be able to use. And with that thought, this situational pagan once again
felt very Jewish.
