Yesterday, my wife and I went to a bat mitzvah. My wife works for a CPA and it was for his daughter.
This is our fourth bar or bat mitzvah. A little side note, my wife’s boss and his wife are from Persia, Iran,
yes, there are Persian Jews. Anyway, the bat mitzvah began at 3:00 and was supposed to run to 10:00 at night.
Yep, 7 hours of fun, fun, fun. Now, I am not Jewish so I know next to nothing about the ceremony, I am there
to eat the food and believe me, Persian food is fracking great. So we begin with an persian buffet, great and
then around 4:30 we have a ceremony, basically thanking everybody for coming out and then the reading of the Torah
in hebrew with all the males wearing those hats, whatever they are called. The ceremony last about an hour, so we then head
for dancing area. everybody heads out to the dance floor and begins to dance. My wife and I don’t dance, so we went to our
table. Around this point we run into the CPA’s cousin, shawn. My wife because of her job being a secretory knows everybody at the
party, anyway we meet shawn. She ask shawn why he wasn’t at the ceremony, he tells us a story. He was jewish as was 97%
of the party and in 1998 he was with some girl. He said he was angry and fighting with this girl about stuff and after fighting
for a while, he wanted to get out of the house. This girl was catholic and took him to some catholic church in San Jose,
So she went in and went to the front and bent down to cross herself and he being a good guest did the same. Being jewish he
said, he has always prayed in church, but here in this catholic church, his prayer became a conversation with god.
And he felt god in his head and heart and soon was on the ground crying hysterical . His girl friend became concerned and ask him if
he was ok, and he said he wasn’t sure. About 8 months later, shawn converted to Catholicism. He did not attend the ceremony because
he did not feel himself to be jewish anymore and did not want to be in the presence of the rabbi. Shawn was a very intense speaker, speaking
with his heart and very emotional. So then he saw someone he knew and he left us. Around 7:30, kids playing right behind us, knock over
a table with 4 pitchers of ice water and the pitchers hit the ground and water went everywhere, well that everywhere was me and my wife.
we were soaked from head to toe with this ice water, so we left to go home to change. Got home hours before we were supposed to be home,
I changed and turned on the TV. At 9:00 came on this show on PBS, called “GOD on trial”. I had heard about this show. Supposedly, during the
holocaust at Auschwitz, a group of Jewish prisoners, put god on trial for their sufferings. The charge was that God had broken the covenant
he made with the jews way back when. The play was fascinating, as these jews were fated to die within hours. The verdict was god
had broken the covenant with the jews and was found guilty. And I was left with a problem. The heart of philosophy is, take every
position seriously. If I take this seriously, how do I reconcile the two positions. One, god is guilty of breaking the covenant with the jews
and that free’s the jews from upholding their end and two the fact is I spent the day with jews who maintained their covenant with god.
And then I have the example of shawn who left the jewish faith for catholicism. If god had broken his word, why where we there at the
bat mitzvah? God had been found guilty in a trial by his believers. God had been judged and found wanting, now what?
Kropotkin