SUPPLEMENTS

In this section we feature submissions from authors that are pertinent to recent issues of Meanjin but that for reasons of space or time or balance of subjects we were unable to include in the pages of the magazine. This material is presented here as originally received from the authors concerned

Articles in this section:

• wave to wave by Jen Jewel Brown
• All that Jazz (January 1998) by Chris Grierson
• Stratocaster Ode to Leo Fender (1909-1991) by Paul Cliff
• If You Meet A Rabbi on the Roadby Yvonne Fein
• A Society of Strangers David Schütz

MORE ROCK - POETRY

wave to wave
by Jen Jewel Brown

-goodbye to my friend Paul Hewson, piano player in Dragon
(25 October 1952 - 9 January 1985)

sound deliciously stretching

to john cale   sibelius   zappa

frappé coffee    hissing in a loading dock

pushing intrigue and dread

there submarine timbers creak & sway

gigantic   water a little cloudy   teal

     the sandpaper thump of a bronze whaler

cutting into shadow

like a smiling building

 

goodbye, adieu, see you, paul

 

birthday in your suit, your scoliosis

your first day school   the mormons

music escaping from your hands helplessly

other hands colliding in applause

aotearoa's waves to sydney 's

missing your son danny

pain comes in waves too, pain

      and so a little something

for the twisted scissors of your back

 

oh bury me under the airport and weep

mr asia 's flying in the king white tide of heroin

    that pushes sydney off the edge

damn ambulances thread kings cross

howling for st vincents packing adrenaline

                                    who'll play the jester now?

 

remember the elizabeth bay afternoon

when our friend belle fell suddenly-

OD'd and turned unearthly blue?

my god, paul, we're kneeling over a meat doll

just through discussing her role in

                                    neighbours

so

you showed me how

to work the ribs

the heart, the lungs, while you

held her nose and kissed her   

 

dead hands cross her chest

x marks the spot

press down hard

keep the rhythm

the rhythm, you said

 

and with a great ripped gasp and a sigh

belle reprises her role as belle

and i look you in the eye, steady, wild

            you have both escaped

                                     . this time

 

you knew how to tie a bluebird to a piano key

never saw the april sun in cuba

said in this life you're either a patient or a nurse

had a voice dipped in soft apologetic sexy innocent absurdity

 

annie, marc and todd and me and robert with spaghetti legs

and sue and kerry and michelle and jessica and you

so, so bored on the running free tour bus

you'd fall down 20 steps to make us laugh

 

a dragon, folding like a butter-slipping broken parrot umbrella still talking

a surprised duchamp wonder of turquoise-streaked black jack sparrow hair

a blur collecting himself, lean and sweet and shy

ill advised, a marvel, dusting down

before the wet, writhing company

on the cement floor

 

tour manager big tall dennis

off shooting holes in helpless eucalypts

having left the gig money under the bed

 

and you, dry grandmaster flash you

played me spassky vs fischer, and

kasparov and karpov and the dreaded moroczy bind

showed me your chequerboard heart

and slayed me at scrabble

aqua eyes bowed over generous grace

 

one cheap electric piano

shred of melody thrown together on a nothing morning

walking through, hesitant, more insistent .

now the song arrives

marc strolls in and takes it for a croon

tears it like an abandoned draft

      of this poem, and leaves it sobbing

hanging on a shaft of light, a bone

for the rhythm section

to ponder

 

sound deliciously stretching

to lou reed   ella    bon scott    unfurling

are you old enough in this sun-cracked

                        cheap motel

 

the four of you

marc, paul, robert, todd

sweet ragged choir, islander and celtic

lifting the roof, igniting sunbeams

but you're skulking near the curtains

out of focus fixating on the tiny version

leaking from the plug-in radio by the bed

thinking 'bout my baby

watching as my life goes by .

 

                        bye-bye

off you go, romeo, mercutio

            you and marc-

two swells eternally swinging through morwell

singing   sinatra    geyer    waits   & brel

all smoke and mirrors silk scarves flailing

off to cause a riot in the solidly heterosexual

burger shop in the mall by the stock & station

eyes glittering like obsidian

            at young bree behind the till

and her mum teri handing over

the steaming with-the-lot bags blushing

    like a brushfire unfamiliar with

       the principle of flirtation

                 (but now coming to the gig)

 

sound deliciously stretching

to john cale   sibelius   zappa

frappé coffee    hissing in a loading dock

pushing intrigue and dread

there submarine timbers creak & sway

gigantic   water a little cloudy   teal

     the sandpaper thump of a bronze whaler

cutting into shadow

like a smiling building

 

goodbye adieu

this one's for you

 

 

 

All that Jazz
(January 1998)
by Chris Grierson

 

Where the hell have you been?

We've been waiting with our best suits on

-Echo and the Bunnymen, 'All that Jazz', from the album Crocodiles

and we're drunk

wedding reception legless

because

 

                                    well .

 

we're feeling .

 

                        beautifully melancholic .

 

or is that-

 

                        satisfactorily useless .

 

My grandfather always swore

it was necessary to do and feel

two things at once because

'You get twice as much done.'

Not that he understood

the economics of poetry, or music,

'Twice as much for half.'

Thank god and our country for the stereo

and Kevin Jacobson for the reunion tour

which is who my grandfather always thought I'd be

when I told him I was into music.

'Blue eyes still packs them in. And Natalie Cole.'

It's already a bad year for poets

with John Forbes gone

re-reading Stunned Mullet, John,

I remember you always said religion was an easy

standpoint for a poem, if only

that was your addiction, because I think

you left the room too soon as well

but then the poems, they wouldn't stand that

and Echo and the Bunnymen cancelled their tour

lack of interest like a publishing house

which proves they were little more than

a fashionable accessory better left in the wardrobe

with mothballs and memories, doesn't it, John?

And hell, when we look back at 1980

a simple smoke machine was all they needed

with three angry chords and the desire to do it

stay sober enough late on a Friday night

which is what it's all about, for me: desire.

I know you'd disagree, John, it taking talent

and education/reading as well

and taking care of the rent

not letting it take care of you

and I think you're right

but the latest Bunnymen album wasn't great

which only proves for me

that with desire you've got to strike fast and sure

when you are a fashion accessory

in the public's mind and in the mood:

still and empty, somewhat useless, with thoughts chorus wide-

 

See you at the barricades, babe

See you when the lights go low, Joe

Hear you when the wheels turn round

Someday when the sky turns black

Stratocaster
Ode to Leo Fender (1909-1991)
by Paul Cliff

We speak in praise of Leo Fender:

master electric guitar-maker.

Tone-deaf non-muso, and dirt-farmer's son-

Father of the Strat!

 

Keith raps its essential lightness-of-being:

hugging your body's coastline

and not dragging you down;

playing all night without strain to your shoulder or back.

Kick of a mule; style and pace of a racehorse.

'Everything needed to do the job. The max.'

The 'Big Boys' Tool'. The Ultimate Axe .

 

Praise Leo! Praise Leo! Praise Leo!

Gloria in excelsis . Magnus laudum as such:

Hail the Strat!

 

For Eric, the Strat just is Rock'n'Roll,

pure, simple and whole.

It's sexy-and lustful.

A great white page

on which to write your electric self.

(With already a lot of him in it, he found.)

He buried his Gibson and Gresch at the crossroads.

Headed for town, never looked back.

(Bought a dozen as gifts for his muso mates.)

 

We gather in praise of Leo.

First came Telecaster; then Broadcaster-

then came the Strat.

Sixties Stradivarius.

Timeless; inspired.

The only guitar in the shop,

incontestably where it's at.

Not 'Clapton is God!'-but the Strat!

 

It will croon to your cool, it will eat from your hand.

It will second-guess you, it will understand:

tremolo, echo, wah-wah, feedback.

Through mellow downstrokes and soft-licking chops,

to 'blow off your sox'-

wire your amp up whatever-whichway,

the Strat rocks!

 

We gather in praise of Leo Fender:

guitar-maker extraordinaire,

tone-deaf non-muso, and dirt-farmer's son.

We gather to rap the Strat!

 

In Jimi the instrument met its full match.

Ground-zero . Endgame, and then some.

Whomp!-Vamp! Zonk-Fizzz! Ker-SPLATTTT!!

Like the devil, he played left-handed;

upside-down, with his teeth, through his legs,

and behind neck or back.

Electric Beastmaster: hurling his angel-demons down.

Rode the thing naked through smoke and ball-lightning

-bareback.

Pushed the Strat to the edge of its envelope,

then turned the Mothership safely for home .

 

Though Eric and Keith were both shocked

when Jimi smashed his Strat at Monterey Pop

like a bar-room chair on the stage floor's brawl of sound.

Kneeled, baptised it in lighter fluid,

and set it aflame.

Keith: 'The idea of smashing up a Strat-

I'd rather cut someone's throat than do that.

It's like deliberately stacking your Rolls.'

 

The Fender MD agreed:

'To wilfully destroy such an instrument;

I know he's dead, but I'll never forgive that young fellow,

it's a fact.'

 

And, perversely-in this Vale of Tears,

in the wicked, Sex-Drugs-&-Rock-'n'- Roll Way

of this World-

Strat sales went right through the roof after that.

 

We come to praise Leo! Praise Leo! Praise Leo!

Tone-deaf non-muso, and dirt-farmer's son.

Guitar-maker extraordinaire.

Father of the Strat!

 

NOTE

Developed from the Ray Minhinnett documentary Curves, Contours and Body Horns-History of the Fender Stratocaster (1994), and associated webpage. Musicians cited: Keith Richard, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix.

 

ON FAITH
ESSAYS/REVIEW ESSAYS

 

If You Meet A Rabbi on the Road

Yvonne Fein, Melbourne novelist and playwright, writes of her experiences, and those of certain other Australian Jewish women, when they have endeavoured to take instruction in the Torah

When Judah saw [Tamar] he took her for a harlot; for she had covered her face. So he turned aside to her by the road and said, "Here, let me sleep with you" - for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. When the time came for her to give birth, there were twins [Zerah and Peretz] in her womb! (Genesis, 38:15-16, 27). Peretz was the ancestor of King David.

The Sages warn against following Judah 's example and refraining, out of excessive prudery, from looking at one's female relatives. If Judah had not been too modest, the shocking incident with Tamar would never have happened. (Genesis Rabah 85.8 and Tanchuma I, 187)

No injunction could have been more clearly proclaimed to the Children of Israel in the desert than that contained in Deuteronomy 17:11-13: "You shall act in accordance with the instructions given you and the ruling handed down to you; you must not deviate from the verdict. either to the right or to the left. Should a man act presumptuously and disregard the priest charged with serving the Lord your God. that man shall die."

Yet of all the dichotomies to create that restless, analytical friction so characteristic of the Jewish psyche, of all the repeated bifurcations of directive and counter-directive, charge and counter-charge, verdict and appeal, could any be more insistently challenging than another clear-cut reality, which is to say -

It is not pandering to a stereotype to claim a Jewish proclivity for negotiation. Arguably, to deny this affinity might be construed as apologist. Jews are past masters of colloquy and consultation, conferencing and compromise. Everything under the sun is sufficiently fluid to be adaptable to adjustment. Deviating from the verdict, either to the right or to the left, is in fact an ethnic and a cultural imperative. After the Torah, the tractates of Talmud are our primary well-springs of rabbinic legislation and case law which chronicle Jewish moral, legal and societal codes. But what is this compilation, after all, if not one long, albeit incredibly mellifluous, negotiation down the centuries wherein sages address and agitate other sages - their peers and those long dead - over their opinions ranging from momentous questions of life and love, of death and the vast beyond, to the most infinitesimal, microscopic examination of legal minutiae? It is, possibly, the greatest register of negotiation preserved on parchment by a people who have become archetypal negotiators in direct response to their law's passionate proscription of the practice.

The hapless, would-be convert presenting to his or her teacher for the first time is like as not to be told that "Judaism is not a row of shelves in the supermarket. You may not choose the items you like best, take them home with you and ignore the rest. Each commandment - and there are 613 of them all told - is there to be learned and observed."

In a word? Not negotiable.

That said, there is one matter open to choice - on the books and off - open to the supermarket shelf protocol; open to negotiation if Option # One has proven unsatisfactory: the matter of choosing for oneself a teacher.

Pirkei Avot , interchangeably translatable as Chapters (or Ethics ) of the Fathers or The Book of Principles , is a compilation of ethical aphorisms attributed to sages from the third century b.c.e. to the third century c.e. In its very first chapter (and there are only five or six, depending on the edition you choose), readers may find the following:

"Yehoshua, son of Perachyah, says: 'Provide yourself with a teacher.'"

From this simple pronouncement a veritable forest of commentary has burgeoned, much of it mediaeval, yet for all that, much of it ahead of its time, particularly with regard to the setting of boundaries between student and master. Yet what emerges most clearly is the notion that, as students, we may choose and keep choosing, any number of teachers until we have found the primary guide ( Rav muvhak ) to lead us through the labyrinth that is classical Jewish text learning. We may, if truth be told, deviate as far left or right as our search warrants.

To highlight the profoundly unlikely nature of such latitude, it is worth noting the law in a comparable situation. If one were to approach one's rabbi for a ruling on, say, a question of business ethics or societal responsibility and found the rabbi's decision to be overwhelmingly not to one's liking, one is nevertheless expressly forbidden from shopping around for a more palatable verdict. When the rabbi has spoken, the supplicant is absolutely bound by the decree. If, however, a student finds his or her chosen rabbinic instructor wanting - for reasons which may be as trivial as halitosis or as fundamental as an unbridgeable ideological divide - the student is virtually obliged seek an alternative teacher.

It was a line from the pen of a friend and colleague, however, in response to this phenomenon, that truly gave me pause. She wrote: "The world, I discovered, is full of teachers. Some deliver difficult and painful lessons that fall like hard rain." ¹ We had, in fact, made that particular discovery together but it was not until I read her words that I was ineluctably reminded of Zen master Lin-Chi's intense, albeit somewhat recondite axiom: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

Unfortunately, at the beginning of my particular quest to delve into the ancient mysteries of my people, I had no knowledge of Lin-Chi yet suspect that even had I stumbled upon his remarks in my somewhat lunatic days of yore, I would not have appreciated their meaning. Still, through the scrupulously maintained lens of my retrospectoscope, I now recognise his injunction as one which demands of individual students that they think for themselves regardless of the presumptive wisdom, to say nothing of holiness, of the master in question. When Lin Chi's own master found his student's reasoning faulty or lacking, he expressed his disapproval by hitting the neophyte with a six foot pole. Would that my second mentor had been my first, and that she had had access to such an implement. Perhaps then I might have been spared the journey I undertook while fulfilling the sacred exhortation to provide myself with a teacher.

Less well known is the sentence with which Lin-Chi follows his counsel regarding Buddhicide: "If you meet the Patriarch along your way, kill him, too," he declares. Now in Jewish law and lore the word 'patriarch' is redolent with sacred significance. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spring immediately to mind, as do the later founding fathers of all that we still refer and defer to to this very day: Rabbis Hillel, Shamai and Akiva to name but two illustrious triumvirates.

Had I met Abraham and his Sarah on the road, their hospitality to strangers was such - legendary, even in their own lifetime, with God himself popping into their tents for a snack - that they would surely have invited me in for repast and succour. How to raise a hand against them? And Isaac the fearful and awestruck? Who would harm a man so in tune with the spiritual? The sages tell us that when his prospective bride Rebecca first saw him as he meditated in the evening light, his connection to the divine was so a tangible phenomenon that it caused her to fall from her mount in dread, tumbling over the accoutrements of her saddlery with such violence that she lost her virginity. Finally Jacob, whose kiss on Rachael's mouth is the first recorded kiss in Torah, who broke down in tears at her beauty and who worked fourteen years for her father to earn the right to her hand - what savage emotion would I need to suffer to harm such a man?

Or am I taking the words of the peripatetic Zen master too literally? Some might claim my inability to fathom the answer is the reason women have been barred from such sacred studies till the present day; and moreover, that my reluctance to obey a master's directive is yet further reason.

Legend has it that 700 years prior to Lin-Chi's decision to become a wanderling, a Rabbi Simeon, son of Yohai, had taken to the road with his own roving band of scholarly drifters, and from their odyssey emerged the primary text of the Kabbalah, known as the Zohar or The Book of Radiance . The Zohar has been variously described as yet another commentary on Torah, or possibly a mystical novel written in the twelfth century that sets itself in second century Israel recounting the story of the ten companions led by the great Son of Yohai into caves, into the desert and into encounters with travellers and adventurers and spirits. In the Zohar, he is known as the Tree of Life itself and is, on occasion, called the mouth of YHWH.

But a third possibility is that the Zohar is more than commentary and more than a tale of a wandering band of friends. Unlike the Five Books of Moses it is not simply the story, or the history of the Children of Israel and the laws handed down to them, even though each line in it is an exegesis of that earliest work. The Zohar, it is claimed by the most knowledgeable of pundits, is nothing less than the biography of God. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai and his disciples, they tell us, yearned to be inside the soul of the soul, to stand once again at the base of Mount Sinai where they were convinced they remembered receiving the commandments and being as close to God as was humanly possible. But they also understood that such a level of the infinite could not exist without its vessel. Their questions hovered above the nature of infinity and the nature of the vessel that must try to contain it - an apparent paradox.

At the risk of having an accusation of solipsism levied against me, I defy anyone who alights upon such hypotheses not to find them seductive.

For reasons beyond the scope of this essay, I have vigorously pursued Hebrew literacy most of my life and, as a direct result, exposed within myself a vulnerability to all stories biblical. Even now, having managed at the penultimate moment to step back through to the right side of the looking glass, a frisson of desire can still beleaguer me when a melody in a minor key or a phrase of liturgy touches the God spot that was imprinted upon me, I can only suppose, in the womb, in a place on my anatomy, corporeal or intangible, so remote and inaccessible that I can never quite reach it to erase it.

So when I met the rabbi on the road I was ripe for the plucking.

A friend described the experience of her own personal plucking as a fluke of circumstance, a cosmic joke, an example of God's sense of humour.

The thing is this, [she wrote to me once], my father had closed the door, locked it, when he left Europe, the DP camps, the stink of death and irremediable pain, and swore he would never reopen it. From my uncle, I knew my father had been a Talmudic scholar of note; from the few early photographs, I knew he'd been handsome, a catch, a match, a gently humorous boy who sang and whistled as though he had the entire corpus of Jewish folk-melodies locked in his heart and whom the Holocaust had transformed into something other entirely. It seemed to me that all the days of my childhood, I was searching for the key to that door.

And then rabbi asked me what it was I wanted to learn . For a long moment, all I could hear was the darkness and then I thought it was possible to detect the sound of the dew beginning to form on the grass. My mouth was dry. An urge, insane and filled with distress, to fall to my knees. Lick the dew at his feet.

Talmud, I said. And if words can unleash forces we do not understand, then with that word I thought I saw my grandfather in heaven shake his head and whisper Shame , heard my grandmother by his side wail as she dropped her forehead into her hands. I gazed into the rabbi's eyes. In the moonlight they gleamed silvergreen.

- So I will teach you Talmud.

- And will you take me home, take me back?

- I will take you anywhere you want to go.

Herein lies the essential gravitational pull: the promise of the journey, tantalising, magnetising, almost impossible to resist.. The rabbi will promise an enchanted flight - ongoing, endless - to the time before time when and where , tradition holds, the Torah already existed, inscribed in black fire on white fire, etched in dark ink onto pale parchment. But the sages argue over whether the ebony markings actually contain the original Torah or if it is the parchment's blankness, its spaces between the letters and the words, which might contain the words God played with for one thousand years before ordering them into chapter and verse. Black fire addressing white; white fire encircling black. Somewhere within the blaze, they aver, lies the mystic truth of the Hidden Torah.

In Melbourne , however, when referring to the 'Hidden Torah', as soon as you add the word 'women', you leave behind the sense of hidden as esoteric or impenetrable which, our sages teach, is the true Torah, accessible only to those who have reached the most sophisticated and elevated levels of understanding and holiness respectively. Unlike Israel and the United States , Australia offers little by way of in-depth textual learning/teaching without value-adding weighty ideological or religious constraints if students are of the female persuasion. Down Under, Torah is hidden from women. The best teachers will not teach them, certainly not in classes alongside men and certainly not offering them carte blanche with regard to the canon.

When I met the rabbi on the road, he offered to open up the entire register, from Talmud to Hassidut, from Midrash to Kabbalah - all the texts containing all the stories I had ever wanted to penetrate. Killing him was the farthest thing from my mind. But until a couple of decades ago - and even then, the numbers were infinitesimal - women had rarely if ever been disciples of rabbis. Women had not been in the habit of learning the truly sacred texts at the feet of the great scholars.

Yose son of Yoezer, leader of Tz'redah, says: Let your house be a meeting place for sages; sit in the dust of their feet and drink in their words thirstily.

When this aphorism was recorded, women's only concerns with dust were to sweep it away in the manner of all good housekeepers or be buried beneath it when their time came. The only words they were allowed to drink had to do with a savage ritual of ink and bitter waters forced upon them to prove either their guilt or innocence in the matter of adultery. Imagine, millennia later, being offered unfettered access to these words. Such a heady potion, men and women passionately debating the law or analysing the finer points of ancient narratives.

Who has studied Shakespeare or Dante, Milton, Byron and Shelley with a gifted teacher and not felt that volatile intoxication of drinking in both text and tutor in an atmosphere replete with the ingenious and the quixotic? Replace these classics with Torah, add women, as suggested above, after millennia of absence, stirred and mightily shaken, and the resultant brew is of such potency that, as one of the characters in my novel on the subject suggests, w omen kneel before it and men give away their independence just for the possibility of its elucidation.

I have sat in such classes where the charismatic master plays his students in the manner of Helfgott caressing a Steinway. At hour's end, each student leaves only with the greatest reluctance, desperately hoping she will be the one to be called back to clarify or crystallise in tranquillity a point made in the fury of the lesson's passion. And of course, one always is. Called back, that is. But should the student heed the call or refuse it? Which option presents the greater peril? In heeding it, coming back into rabbi's ambit, just you and he alone now, class dismissed, the risk is manifest. Yet in choosing to refuse it, to avoid the pitfalls of impropriety, the menace of misdemeanour, lies the probability of that rejection being turned back upon the rejector. Who is so brave as to risk as a consequence being thenceforth barred from the class?

While it may be worth noting that Judaism did not invent clerical impropriety, it is equally relevant to declare that even in the current ecumenical climate of moral panic surrounding such improprieties, the Jewish clergy still has a case to answer. Obviously, neither all priests nor all rabbis ought to be tarred with the brush of inappropriate behaviour, but when the moral majority closes its eyes to the licentiousness of the minority, then the former must ultimately bear some responsibility for the actions of the latter.

Just as the Sages later ruled against following Judah's example and refraining, out of excessive prudery, from looking at one's female relatives, [for then, if you recall, "Had Judah not been too modest, the shocking incident with Tamar would never have happened."], it behoves us to take heed of their warning in the present day. Segregation of the sexes in religious contexts of study and prayer, and in non-religious contexts of much social and cultural interaction may, in theory, focus the mind on correct and suitable behaviours. On the other hand, it may equally focus the mind, to say nothing of the body, on the forbidden.

Male clergy untrained and unprepared for dealing with women are vulnerable. Given no boundaries, they are liable to be in breach of lines they do not wish to acknowledge exist. In their hands they possess and wield the power of the Text. In holding that knowledge and deciding to whom they will impart it, a whole universe of unbecoming conduct opens up to them. They may develop into classroom bullies, mocking or becoming unreasonably demanding or even verbally abusive of their female students. At a more intense level - and this is where most of the solecisms occur - they use the Text as an instrument of seduction. They take the poetry of the sacred and make it profane in a reckless pursuit of dissolution.

In his seminal tome on the history of the Chasidic Masters, those ultimate exponents of charismatic leadership, the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote that the "Chasidic movement transformed Judaism into a continuous adventure, giving every Jew a ladder with which to rise above himself." It is neither accident nor literary nicety that he utilised the singular pronoun in the masculine. Nor was there any irony intended in the opening sentence to his second chapter: "Personality cults have been rare in Judaism." He quickly went on to qualify this statement by declaring: "One of the few exceptions to this rule is Hasidism."

For a Chasidic Master, you should know, can have thousands of disciples, men who would do their leader's every bidding, following him into the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka, as too many to number did without demur. They literally eat the scraps that drop from his fingers or from his plate in the hope of imbibing some of his holiness. When the Rebbe sings, his disciples find the harmony; when the Rebbe dances, his disciples whirl around him in euphoric transports of exhilaration and infatuation; when the Rebbe prays, he takes his disciples with him to levels celestial they are convinced they could never reach without him. And these are just the men. Now women number among such disciples. Their rebbe is their sun and they revolve around him in dances far more sinuous than those of their male predecessors.

Hasidism is arguably the movement which today dominates Jewish Orthodox religious practice. Its continuity is dependent on the personality, perhaps even the celebrity of its principals. Charismatic rabbinic leadership, with all its stumbling blocks and its hazards has become the model upon which practice and prayer are now modelled. We could do worse than return to the first century c.e. when Rabbi Eliezer, in one of his many contributions to The Book of Principles advised:

Warm yourself by the fire of the sages, but beware of their glowing embers lest you be burned - for their bite is the bite of a fox, their sting is the sting of a scorpion, their hiss is the hiss of a serpent, and all their words are like fiery coals.

¹(Miller, Deborah, "'Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it': a Journey of Jewish Learning", in New Under the Sun , eds. Fagenblat, Landau and Wolski, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006).

---

A Society of Strangers

David Schütz , Executive Officer of the Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, writes of the pertinence to Australia of the recent book by Martin E. Marty, When Faiths Collide (Blackwell, Oxford , 2005

Most Australians would be surprised to learn that at the beginning of this millennium almost one quarter of all Australian citizens were not born here. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics:

At June 2000, the Australian population reached 19.2 million, of which 4.5 million (24 percent) had been born overseas. In total, 6 percent of the Australian population had been born in the United Kingdom , 2 percent in New Zealand and 1 percent in Italy . Just under 6 percent had been born in the three Asian regions. ¹

I was alerted to the astoundingly high percentage of immigrants among Australian citizens by When Faiths Collide , a Blackwell Manifesto by American religious historian and sociologist Martin E. Marty. In chapter three, he states that "in 1999 Australia included the largest percentage of immigrants in the population of any a nation; about one-fourth of the Australian population was 'foreign'." ² On the basis of such statistics Australian society could be said to be a society of "strangers". Since this is a central theme of When Faiths Collide , it must be regarded, beyond question, as relevant to Australian readers, despite its equally indisputable Americo-centric viewpoint.

The title calls to mind the now infamous phrase of Samuel P. Huntingdon, "clash of civilizations", but points to a central feature of these clashing civilizations, namely, their religious character. And this is perhaps odd, because Marty is not setting out to write a book about the theological conflicts between the faiths, but is quite clear that he is aiming his discussion at the secular and civil repercussions of this "collision". Several times, Marty insists that When faiths collide is "mainly about civil pluralism" ³; "theological pluralism...is not our main topic." ⁴ As he progresses, it becomes obvious that his main intention is to provide pragmatic answers to questions about the peaceful and harmonious ordering of civic society, not a theological reflection upon the phenomenon of multiculturalism and meaning of pluralism. In other words, polity, not theology is his main focus.

When Faiths Collide presents pluralism in three ways: as a fact of current civil life (eg. as shown by the Australian statistics); as a pragmatic strategy for social engineers; and only incidentally as a philosophical/theological ideology. Nevertheless "theological pluralism hovers in the background and presses itself forward is an issue." ⁵ It is eventually addressed in Chapter 7, the very first chapter I read (betraying somewhat both my special interest in the question and also my impatience to get to the nub of the matter). There, Marty makes "manifest" one of his "assumptions":

A blend of realism and theological conviction prompts [this manifesto]. As for realism: the notion that interactions of faith communities would lead to their complete overcoming of differences and toward their merger into one is a utopian notion. .As for the theological conviction: complete overcoming of difference and toward their merger into one violates the commitments of faith communities and the stories that animate them. ⁶

In what sense is When Faiths Collide a "manifesto"? Marty reflects on the definition of "manifesto" from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: "a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer". ⁷ Nevertheless, he himself acknowledges that When Faiths Collide is less of a declaration than a "conversation". ⁸

The central thesis of this "manifesto" is easily outlined. Marty takes up an essay by German sociologist Georg Simmel entitled "The Stranger." This he claims, "succinctly provided a framework for our whole inquiry." ⁹ From this work, he develops a (not wholly original) paradigm of "the stranger" and "the belonger." Simmel wrote that, "Two individuals or social groups cannot occupy precisely the same space, so the issue of exclusivity arises." Marty applies the paradigm to the religious sphere, where the belonger is the religious individual or social group who currently occupies a given civil space and the stranger is the individual or social group of a different religious faith who enters and attempts to coexist in the same space. The "stranger" is thus perceived as a threat to the religious security of the belonger.

Marty's manifesto proposes the exercise of the "risky" virtue of hospitality in order to avoid a seemingly inevitable " collision" between stranger and belonger. "I am dedicated to the ideal of inviting "the other" into the zone where common action can develop-and accepting invitations from others." ¹⁰ Marty, however, shies away from proposing anything as rash as a "solution to the problems of strangers." ¹¹ Instead, his "manifesto advocates, not the settling for tolerance, but the aggressive risk of hospitality, and the consequences that can follow upon the taking of the risk." ¹² Hospitality, he says, is

an instrument or means of dealing more justly and with more potential of satisfying the interests of faiths in collision and those who surround them and are affected by their interactions. For all such dealings, a pluralist polity has to be developed and ensured. ¹³

In essence he proposes that we reclaim the ancient middle-eastern virtue of hospitality, which is so beautifully captured in the traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths, and harness its possibilities for harmony within civil society. Abraham himself was a model host, showing hospitality to the three strangers who came to his tent. ¹⁴ Later tradition understood these visitors to be angels, leading to the comment in the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." ¹⁵

Marty believes that "there is risk even in employing and offering the concept of hospitality itself." ¹⁶ Hospitality includes self-criticism of one's own tradition, civility toward one another, welcoming the diversity of beliefs and opinions, engaging with one another on a personal level, and recognising that conflict is inevitable and can be creative.

All this sounds very fine, but Marty's manifesto is a little bit short on concrete detail. He himself acknowledges that his proposal raises at least as many questions as it answers:

However, for what we call civil pluralism, the creative interaction among people who may share some religious commitments, but not all, whose stories are incommensurable, cannot wait for answers that are finally satisfying to the philosopher. They have to live "in the meantime," seeking civil peace and just societies among those who are different, because they came as strangers, and thus as menaces, to each other-but who, by practising "counter-intolerance" and hospitality, made it possible to minimise conflict and produce works of civil value. ¹⁷

Still, in the end, I found When Faiths Collide far from satisfying. In a country such as Australia where just about everybody is a "stranger" to some degree, and only our indigenous population can truly claim to be "belongers" ¹⁸, the question is raised as to exactly who is the host and who is the guest. The problem with the paradigm of "welcoming the stranger", is that the stranger never actually becomes a belonger. In the end the stranger always remains one who is graciously and hospitably tolerated rather than fully accepted.

Perhaps it is a little too simplistic to describe religious conflicts in terms of relationships between strangers and belongers. Even in the most tight knit social groups, there is never complete homogeneity. All societies are to some extent plural, , and these pluralities give rise to conflict. In fact, a number of examples to which Marty himself alludes demonstrate this admirably. The mention of three will be sufficient:

1. Contrary to Simmel's insistence that qualities alien to a society "do not and cannot stem from the group itself" , this is precisely what happened during the period of the European Reformation. It was a real "collision of faiths", and it was not between strangers but between those who belonged to the same society. They became strangers, but this was not as a result of any alien importation.
2. Even today, religious conflicts are more likely to occur within than between religious communities. As Marty writes, "Baptists do not fight Methodists: they fight Baptists. Catholics do not fight Protestants: they fight Catholics." He says that "the hostility is most intense when it is the neighbour who is the stranger" and "aggression like charity begins at home." This tends to strain the definition of a "stranger" by describing members of the same community as such.
3. As a final example, he talks about some of the difficulties in interreligious marriages, or even in marriages where partners display a different degree of commitment to the same faith. These are real difficulties, but precisely because the partners are not "strangers" to each other. These are differences which no end of hospitality will overcome.

Marty should have been a little more critical of Georg Simmel's dictum that only one individual or social group can occupy precisely the same space. This is perhaps not even true in the natural sciences, let alone in sociology. The devil is in the word "precisely". It is perfectly possible for two individuals or social groups to occupy the same space-we call such groupings "neighbours".

Here, I find it useful to introduce a third concept to the dualistic paradigm of strangers and belongers: that of the neighbour.

A neighbour is someone who belongs to the community, but is not a member of the family. A neighbour may initially come to a community as a stranger, but finds a rightful place within the community without necessarily assimilating every aspect of the pre-existing culture. Being a neighbour to one another involves the recognition of one another's right to belong in the "same space". In social life, this means not only being civil towards one another, or tolerating one another, or even showing hospitality to one another, but the radical recognition in the other of a fundamental common humanity which means that we are all belongers, and none are strangers. This, I would, suggest is a far more "risky" proposition than mere hospitality.

Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan precisely to demonstrate what it meant to be a neighbour. The interactions between Samaritans and Jews in the New Testament provide close parallels to our modern interfaith encounters. The striking thing about the parable is the reversal of roles: the one who would normally have been marked out as the stranger is the very one who shows hospitality to the one marked out as the belonger. In acting as a neighbour, the Samaritan stranger steps right outside the stranger-belonger paradigm. In fact, the Samaritan acts as if he is completely unaware of the disparity in cult between himself and the injured man. Absolutely no interchange takes place between the two at the level of religious faith, and yet there is a perfect recognition (at least on the Samaritan's part) of the fact that they both belong to the common family of humanity.

Earlier I alluded to Marty's own admission that many will find this book philosophically and theologically unsatisfying. He tries to avoid the metaphysical questions by locating pluralism "in the sphere of politics". Although he believes that by so doing he has been able to avoid proposing a relativistic solution to the problems caused by dogmatic collisions in the civil sphere , in the end, Marty's vision for harmonious religious pluralism does included at least a degree of philosophical and theological relativism. It needs to be said that those faiths most likely to "collide" with other faiths are at the same time the least likely to embrace the relativism Marty proposes. This is probably the reason for the rather pessimistic conclusion that "faiths will continue to collide" , even if his proposal is embraced.

By introducing the concept of "the neighbour" into the stranger-belonger duality, we discover a way forward which draws upon ideas intrinsic to and shared by all the great religious traditions of humanity and which therefore does not require these religions to embrace theological relativism.

Theologically, the idea of "neighbour" carries with it a recognition of the essential and common humanity shared by both stranger and belonger. In Christianity and Judaism, this is expressed by the teaching that all human beings bear the image of God. This recognition is expressed in the "golden rule", which appears in some form or other in most religions: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Recognising that the stranger is already a belonger in the common society of mankind is the first step forward in the process by which the stranger becomes the neighbour.

If the humanity of the neighbour is a part of the "absolute truth" claimed by all competing religions, then truth claims of any one religion over against another poses no threat to the harmony of society. In preaching their beliefs and in seeking converts, the religious veneration of the neighbour will respect and uphold human rights-in particular the right to religion freedom and the right not to be forced to act against one's conscience. On the contrary, far from being a threat, the religions will be able to take an active and positive role in the promotion of universal peace and social justice for all.

Of the many examples Marty gives in When Faiths Collide of national policies for addressing pluralism and the threat of "the stranger", (including France, the United States, Great Britain and Australia), Australia is perhaps of all these the best placed to put in action an ethic of "the neighbour". For as the statistics show, we are in the unique position of having no dominant group which can claim the superiority of "belongers" over "strangers". We already have a high level of social harmony in Australia, which will be enhanced if the religious notion of the hospitality to the neighbour -rather than to one who is branded as a stranger- is embraced as integral to our religious endeavours.

¹ ABS Media Release "Long term migration dominates in net overseas migration: ABS", at http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/

²When Faiths Collide, p40. Statements like this send one scurrying for the Census data, especially as it followed Marty's entirely fallacious claim that "among these [Australian] Christians were also 1.3 million Muslims." The 2001 Census recorded 281,576 Muslims in Australia .

³When Faiths Collide , p165

⁴ibid., p69

⁵ibid., p165

⁶ibid., p149.

⁷ibid., p11, and http://webster.com/dictionary/manifesto

⁸ibid., p12

⁹ibid., p24. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger", in The Sociology of Georg Simmel , translated by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950).

¹⁰ibid., p12

¹¹ibid., p11.

¹²ibid., p124.

¹³ page 66

¹⁴ Genesis 18

¹⁵ Hebrews 13:2

¹⁶ page 128

¹⁷ p148

¹⁸ And even then, their predominant experience is one of being strangers in their own land.

¹⁹ibid., p24

²⁰ibid., p31

²¹ibid., p31

²²ibid., p22

²³ Luke 10:29-37

²⁴ibid, p70

²⁵ibid, p68

²⁶ despite his own claim to the contrary on

²⁷ Marty nominates "Roman Catholicism and Islam, for example" which "picture fulfillment if and when all of the world comes to unite with them. But we are talking about the goal of those whose work transcends the boundaries of individual faith communities." ibid, p150.

²⁸ibid, p178