Pilgrims of the absolute:
Garvey, John
PILGRIMS OF THE ABSOLUTE
THE SEARCH THAT NEVER ENDS
Julius Lester, the author of a number of books (including the excellent To Be a Slave, a Newberry award winner which really should be required...
...I am only doing what I must do, not knowing what it is I am doing...
...It is important not only for what it says about a unique American writer and his personal journey, fascinating as that journey is, but also for what it says about some deeper currents in our common life...
...In Love-song: Becoming a Jew (Henry Holt and Company, $19.95, 248 pp...
...For, if a mythic value system is going to be involuntarily absorbed by a kid of mine, I'd rather it be a 2,500-year-old mythos, the product of the constant working and reworking of the most creative minds of a society, than a tinny narrative worked up during a twenty-minute meeting in a sleek-lined NBC story-conference room...
...the experience of his conversion may still be too fresh, or perhaps it is because the book is put together loosely in a form which resembles entries in a journal and uses some already published material...
...There are also moments of humor...
...I read Lovesong just a couple of days after reading a column by Mark Jacobson in the March issue of Esquire...
...Is it the warmth of gratitude to God that I am blood and bone and flesh and anxiety and arrogance and sentimentality and exuberance and coldness and cruelty...
...His Liberation column took on fering, particularly their refusal to condemn Palestinian terrorism while actively endorsing the Palestinian cause...
...As a Christian I am sorry Lester moved away from Christianity...
...Religion has been freed from that, and if the danger here is that it can be seen as a form of therapy, a consolation, it is also free to be about life's meaning, something which it cannot be-or anyway cannot be clearly or cleanly-in a theocracy or in a society which regards religion as a respectable thing...
...It's something parents should do...
...The only answer I can offer is that I am following my soul, but what does that mean...
...He understands that the most important questions cannot be dealt with politically, or even at a clearly conscious level...
...Jacobson says that he feels ' 'under the gun in this moronic social climate" and that friends from a lot of religious backgrounds are beginning to doubt their adolescent doubts...
...The passage quoted above leads almost immediately to a description of the worship service, during which Lester is distracted because he is half-involved in a conversation he could not have expected: as some people pray in Hebrew, two men in back argue over a baseball game...
...The faith may not be the faith of their own fathers and mothers, and the quest for meaning can lead down some funny paths, like trance-channeling or witchcraft or fundamentalism...
...The concern Jacobson shows for his children is (thank God) not unique...
...is the crazy thought that it might be possible that one of my children has a special talent for accepting God, knowing him, loving him...
...Lovesong is too uneven to be considered Lester's best book...
...Lester writes about his family-at both ends, his parents as well as his children-with care and sensitivity, and the passages concerning his father's death are particularly good...
...The fear is existential, because I do not understand myself...
...They were my sins...
...it is "Kol Nidre," the song sung on the eve of the Day of Atonement...
...I first came across Lester's writing in the radical magazine Liberation, where he had a regular column...
...The first of his many books, Look Out Whitey...
...My kids are too good to have their imaginations press-stamped on a cultural assembly line...
...I am going because lam afraid...
...PILGRIMS OF THE ABSOLUTE THE SEARCH THAT NEVER ENDS Julius Lester, the author of a number of books (including the excellent To Be a Slave, a Newberry award winner which really should be required reading before any American child is graduated from high school), converted to Judaism in 1983...
...These controversies are dealt with in Lovesong, but are seen in a larger perspective: the book is intensely personal, and for the most part places the politics of the civil rights movement and later controversies in the context of a life-long spiritual search...
...There are risks in writing as personally as Lester does here...
...he does not respond to what he sees as the Christian doctrine of atonement: ' 'Why should I give my sins to Jesus...
...He made ideologues on the left nervous...
...Is the language of the soul that swelling exaltation of tears and laughter...
...She told him monks don't do anything, but he understood then that there was something more important in life than doing...
...This may be a common understanding of Jesus, and it is easy to appreciate why it does not appeal to someone who has emphasized personal responsibility throughout his writing life...
...A book of this sort must, however, take the risk of being this personal if it is to be helpful to others...
...So Jacobson has been, as he puts it, "shopping" for a religion with his daughter...
...I'd rather have them lost in a cloud of unknowing than wondering who shot J.R...
...Jacobson, who thought at one point that his religious training had killed Judaism forever for him, finds himself looking at his daughter and realizing that he wants her to understand spirituality...
...There is more to this book...
...How do I know that I am hearing it and not some neurosis or complex...
...For me...
...Nevertheless, this is a response to a void which is at the heart of our culture...
...any criticism of the book will seem a criticism of Lester's life itself...
...What a weird way it would be, to return to the fold...
...They involve depths which frequently we do not now understand, and they bring us to the discovery of the holy, which can bring us not only to awe and joy, but to fear...
...As he presents it here there is no doubt of the integrity of Lester's journey, or its honesty, or its cost...
...However, I should make it clear that this book is far from an argument with Christianity or a polemic of any sort...
...Not so weird, I think...
...they are beginning to think about religion seriously, because of their children...
...Black Power's Gon' Get Your Momma...
...In previous ages religion was too often a sign of respectability or something accepted because one's parents accepted it...
...To give one's sins to Jesus felt like the effort to preserve innocence...
...What the hell is the soul, anyhow...
...That's why, with increasing urgency, I'm turning to religion...
...Both indicate a direction which gives real reason for hope real reason for hope...
...It was not Lester's finest hour...
...I know a lot of people whose adult religious lives have begun with marriage and the questions which surround children and what you give them...
...What he has to say about being a father, about being a son, and about parenthood is wonderful...
...As hostpf a radio program during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy in 1968, Lester allowed the reading of an anti-Semitic poem that brought about a most understandable wave of protest and did little to clarify a situation which already suffered from having Albert Shanker at its center...
...he recounts what took him from a childhood in the Methodist church which his father served as a minister, along a path which included activism during the most crucial years of the civil rights movement, a controversy in which he was identified by many as a prime example of black anti-Semitism, a careful and difficult spiritual search, and finally this choice to become part of the people who were, it turns out, his own on his mother's side: Julius Lester's great-grandfather was a German Jew who married a former slave...
...But Love-song contains, I think, some of his best and most moving writing...
...He will support what she is drawn to, Jacobson says...
...When he was a child Lester told his mother that he wanted to be a monk...
...On one occasion Lester finds himself compelled to attend a daily service at an Orthodox shul...
...It is plainly something that has not yet ended for him, and I look forward to whatever he gives us next...
...Its risks and occasionally murky areas are not unlike life, and where you wish things were more clearly known, more fully realized, or where you wish the author had not acted as he did, you realize this is not a novel but the messy business of getting through a life as honestly as it can be done...
...It was my task to mediate them...
...had a funny title at a time when humor in the civil rights movement was rare (and the humor was missed by a lot of white critics: Lester quotes a newspaper which ran the headline, "white mamas in danger, SAYS BLACK MILITANT, SNCC LESTER...
...This hardly exhausts the Christian understanding of Christ, and Lester makes no mention of the Jesus who is the Father's Word, the Logos, the meaning of the universe...
...Eleven years later Lester wrote an essay for the Village Voice criticizing the in-sensitivity of black leaders to Jewish sufnine, while practicing piano, he finds a piano score so moving that he returns to it again and again...
...At the age of eight or not only the targets favored by radicals during the sixties, but the movement itself, when it failed in honesty or compromised itself morally...
...It does not yet appear to have the depth or longevity of Lester's search, but it is not far from that search either...
...some people are possessed of a hugeness of spirit that enables them to embrace the universe with vastness of faith...
...Later he finds the books of Thomas Merton an important guide, and spends some time at the Abbey of Gethsemane...
...Is it a silence as deep and eternal and incomprehensible as death...
...I don't know...
...like any well-intentioned dad, I seek to protect my children from what I consider to be detrimental...
...He has not been afraid to make enemies, obviously, and according to this book (and to a recent report on National Public Radio) his movement towards Judaism and his unwillingness to follow a "party line" have alienated him from some of his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...There is a willingness here which strikes me as religious obedience in the most radical sense...
...This is one of secularism's gifts to religion...
...They have been to a Catholic church in Little Italy, and to a synagogue on the Lower East Side...
...Over the years new books appeared,' and there were controversies...
...I do not understand how I have lived, and how I have arrived at this place of so radically changing not only how I live but how I conceive of myself...
Vol. 115 • March 1988 • No. 6
