Teshuvah – I'm returning.

Well, it's been over two years since my last entry here, and I'm reminded of an article that ran in Oberlin's now-defunct Junk Magazine when I was a freshman. The article was called, "Two Years Ago You Were Stupid" and was about how you should never read things you wrote two or more years ago because you will inevitably cringe.

Maybe I've just failed to mature at all in the last couple of years, but aside from a few minor errors ('Apparata'? Did I really not know how to spell 'Apparati'?) and a style of thought and writing even more navel-gazing than I have now (I was still in college two years ago, mind you), not much about my religious thought has changed.

I noticed this especially because, despite the large gap, the thoughts I logged on today to share seem to integrate seamlessly with my last entry. And it's also a total coincidence that this return I'm making to writing my religious musings down comes during the Days of Awe for this year – my teshuvah, in a sense. Even the medium itself is on point, as you'll see when you read the content I'm about to talk write about. Anyway, enough meta-musing, I'll get to the point.

I've just started reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I'm in the second chapter, and here's what I can say about the book so far: it's a polemic against the use of television as a substitute for print as the main medium for public discourse. It's well-written in several ways. It puts the transition of public discourse from print to television (he doesn't much mention the Internet; the book was written the same year I was born, 1985) in historical context, discussing the advent of spoken language, writing, typography, and clocks, and how each has fundamentally sculpted the content of our communications. He also manages to use the word "epistemology" and still make sense, which I find remarkable.

Anyway, that's just the context. What I want to share is this:

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin there appears a remarkable quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a religious sect known as the Dunkers [...] Welfare replied that [publication of the articles of belief and rules of the discipline of the Dunkers] had been discussed among his co-religionists but had been rejected [...]

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths, From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and leaders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

[...] Modesty is certainly the word for it, but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons, too. We have here a criticism of the epistemology of the written word worthy of Plato. Moses himself might be interested although he could hardly approve. The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down they principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time. [...] Their deliberations were in all likelihood a singular instance in Colonial America of a distrust of the printed word.

You might have noticed by now that everything reminds me of something else. This ideology of evolution posited by the Dunkers reminds me very much of those "God is still speaking" signs I've seen around Ohio. I don't know much about the church that prints and displays those signs, but I like the sentiment of them. However, like most people in our print-oriented culture, I was taught to think of religion as set in stone (sometimes literally) and that the idea that it is changeable, evolvable, and forever incomplete is at best a radical departure not only from tradition, but from the very purpose and intention of religion itself. I agree with the reworking of religion, but I'd always been troubled by the idea that, in so customizing it, that I was overruling some fundamental aspect of religion itself and therefore degrading its integrity and purpose.

However, in the context of what Postman puts forth about the written versus spoken word, this issue can be seen in a new light. It is written (and long before that, it was spoken) that God gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, but that the Israelites didn't all hear the same thing. The word of God, therefore, originated not as a static, written document, but as a stream of communication that was heard or perhaps seen or imagined rather than read. The advent of the Torah or Bible or Q'ran as a text, with all its attendant decisions about what makes it in and what is left out, is much more a departure from the original form of the Abrahamic religions than is the modern tendency toward departure from the text, back into the more fluid forms of experiencing God, meaning, nature, and the universal order. The mechanical printing and wide distribution of religious doctrine further cemented the sense of God's word as finished, complete, and static. The presence of God in the world becomes like the presence of the blocks of movable type on the paper, or the scribe's pen on the parchment: unilateral, as the instrument imparts ink to the page but cannot receive any response, and moreover, fleeting. By the time the text gets into your hands and eyes, the writing tool is gone, never to touch the paper again.

Thus, the medium of the great monotheistic texts contradicts their message. The actual content of the words, that our God is a living God, that the words of our God are continually spoken and re-spoken in the world, is lost in the necessarily static, nonliving nature of the letters and symbols. I argue that this is not true religion. The shapes of the letters, the kerning and ligature, the punctuation and diction, these are useful pnemonic devices for learning the word of God, but they are not themselves the word of God, nor of anyone else.

I agree with Postman in finding this of fundamental significance. In the first chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, titled "the Medium is the Metaphor", he suggests that the prohibition against making graven images ought to extend to graven images of words (and also of time... there is a very interesting discussion of clocks as a fundamental force in our way of thinking about the world and about eternity).

Of course, as a writer Postman finds considerable value in the use of the written word for communication, and presumably also finds value in clocks for such things as meeting with his publishers, if nothing else. But I believe the essence of his argument about text (which he only makes as a means of setting the stage for his argument about television) is that, like all media, it is not a passive representor of human thought and feeling, but rather, that it shapes the content as well as the context of that which it mediates, expanding possibilities in some directions, but limiting them in others.

So, this Yom Kippur, as you contemplate teshuvah, the turning and re-turning of your soul, its evolution and growth and perpetual striving for betterment, think also of this applying to our understanding of tradition and religion. Perhaps in so doing you will be better able to experience God as an actor in the world, as we are told is the case, rather than just a printer having left a few letters on it long ago, and the word of God as a living, growing thing, a tree of life to them that hold it fast.