Leaving the Saints

I'm reading a fascinating book by Martha Beck, a therapist/life couch and columnist in O Magazine. It's about her upbringing and official abandoning of the Mormon religion, with some amazing fascinating details about the inner-workings of the church.

Did you know that Bringham Young University, in its library of over 1 million volumes, actually goes through and censors out any published article that criticizes or contradicts official church doctrine?

Did you know sexual abuse and incest rates are probably far higher in Mormonism than any other religion in the U.S.? (And you'll have to read the book to understand Beck's theories why).

Did you know it is still the official church position that women are lesser forms of men who cannot get to heaven without marriage to a Mormon man (who, conveniently, upon his death, will turn into a God himself, with his own planets and wives to rule over)?

Uhhhh ... yeah ... I didn't know that. Fascinating stuff. Here is an excerpt I found particularly shocking:


Latter-day Saints are taught to test religious claims against their own sense of truth. This approach of learning, encouraged by (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith and his successors, made Mormonism very appealing to the religious seekers of the 19th century – but of course it has its exceptions.

One day, when I mentioned Mormon truth seeking to a non-Mormon friend, she said “Wait – I’m utterly confused. Wouldn’t that mean they’d encourage discrediting Church claims that aren’t true?”

“Utterly confused” is exactly how I felt most of the time I was Mormon because the “seek your own truth but believe in the Gospel” tradition is one huge double bind. It goes something like this: Before you accept any religious claim, you must scrutinize it to see if you really believe it’s true. However, if it’s an official church doctrine and you feel that it isn’t true, this is the work of a sloppy soul, or, worse, the devil. On the other hand, if you accept the advice of a Church leader, which then turns out to be wrong, it’s your own fault for not “discerning” that in this particular case, the leader was mistaken.

To deal with these contradictory instructions, Mormons are advised to use something called “the shelf.” “Put it on shelf” is the phrase used to describe the tidy act of deliberate denial that allows the Saints to keep occasional surges of disbelief from troubling them.

If it bothers you to know that Joseph Smith said the moon was populated by small humanoids who dressed like Quakers, “put it on the shelf.” Likewise if you find it improbable that God gives his favorite Latter-day Saints their own special magic rocks, called “seer stones,” which allow them, among other things, to find buried treasure. Or if you don’t wholeheartedly believe that there is a trio of immortal pre-Columbian American Jews, known as the Three Nephites, who were spared by Jesus from the curse of death and have spent centuries wandering the American continent, assisting Latter-day Saints with anything from missionary work to flat tires.

The improbability of these ideas needn’t inconvenience any Saint who has a sturdy, commodious and well-maintained shelf.

“Leaving the Saints: How I Lost Mormons and Found my Faith” by Martha Beck (p 230)

The other side of Israel

A fellow classmate is fulfilling our school's Israel residency requirement by living in the West Bank and working on Palestinian justice issues. She's keeping a fascinating blog, which is worth visiting if you have the time:

http://palestiniantalmud.blogspot.com/

Home again, home again jiggidy jig

It took 25 hours door to door (including a missed connection in Paris and a diversion to Montreal), but I am back home. Tired, hungry and happy.

Check back in another few weeks, once school has started, and I'll keep you apprised of the latest goings on at school. Thanks for reading!

The B'hai Temple

Today we went to visit the B’hai Gardens – the most famous site in Haifa. It is considered the second-most holy site for the B’nai faith, because its founder is buried here.

The gardens, as you can see, are spectacular. It’s as perfectly manicured and arranged as a Japanese garden. Our guide said that their gardeners literally walk around with measuring tapes and trim the plants and bushes to centimeter-specific guidelines. The architect was a famous guy who also built a prominent temple in India, although, sorry Aaron, I can’t remember which one. I’m sure it is google-able.

Laura, my roommate from Holland, was also on the tour. She and I agreed that the whole place is pretty amazing, but we both had mixed feelings about the amount of money and labor it takes to maintain such a place – and then keeping it basically barricaded away, so it can’t really be enjoyed.

Japanese gardens are places for quiet strolls and silent reflection. At the B’hai Gardens, you can’t go in without a reservation, made several days in advance; then, when you arrive, two tour guides shuttle you through briskly, forbid photographs in all but designated places, and tell you to hurry up and “stay with the group” if you linger too long on a landing. All the grassy areas are roped off, of course, and the few benches dispersed around the gardens are inaccessible. Even drinking the water we were carrying was forbidden, and it was 110 degrees outside.

Eze basa I learned to say today. What a pity.

Laura had a neat idea. Wouldn’t it be cool, she said, if you could enter the gardens and linger as long as you like, and placed discretely on little plagues with inspirational sayings or quotations from the B’hai faith, which one could sit and contemplate.

Yeah, that would have been cool!

Our place

It’s official. All the residents in our apartment have cast their votes, and the verdict was unanimous: We have the coolest group of gals on the University of Haifa campus!

Laura is 34 and comes from a working class Catholic family in the Netherlands. In two months, she is flying to London for her conversion ceremony because her Conservative shul back home doesn’t have a rabbi. This is her second summer studying Hebrew in Israel because, she believes, it’s important to know Hebrew if you’re going to be a Jew. In her other life, she works as a laboratory technician in a research facility. Since coming here this time though, she’s strongly weighing her options. Rabbinical school maybe, or at a minimum, moving to New York and earning a master’s in Jewish education at JTS. Next year, she says, she will come to the U.S. instead of Israel, to scope out her options.

Trish just celebrated her 50th birthday – though she has the skin tone of a 35 year old! She lives with her husband and three nearly grown daughters in San Francisco, where she is earning a master’s degree in sociology. She’s thought on and off over the years about becoming a rabbi, but because her husband isn’t Jewish, there’s no where she can go. And, as she says, “I still think he’s kinda cute.” She’s not sure where her new degree will take her, but most importantly, she is enjoying the journey.

Monique is about to begin the third of her fifth year of rabbinical studies at Leo Beck in London, although she is an American. Her new husband, an Irishman, manages an animal sanctuary/camp-type facility a few hours outside the city. Nigel is in charge of the facility, and when she’s home on the weekends, she helps out. She’s also had the chance to officiate at several weddings there. They have about 40 children – all of them with at least four legs. I’m so jealous. Hopefully I’ll get to visit them someday!

Favia, also in her late 40s, is a French wig master and makeup artist for the Paris opera house. She used to be a professional acrobat, but after a serious injury, she learned her new craft and stayed with the theater. She travels around the world several times a year to accompany them on their shows. She’s here to learn Hebrew, in part because she’s Jewish and in part because her boyfriend has many friends here and might, someday, like to buy a vacation home in Israel. Her English isn’t super strong, but she actually learned hairdressing in Germany, so she talks to me in German, I answer her in Eng-Ger-Brew, and between all that, we eventually figure each other out!

Finally, our one brave Israeli roommate, Hadass, is an undergraduate student at Haifa, studying psychology. Her English is pretty impeccable and she has shown gracious patience listening to the rest of us slaughter the holy language on a daily basis. I’m a little confused by all the seemingly disparate school schedules everyone has here, but from what I can figure out, she is still taking exams and is preparing for a big exam to apply to the psych master’s program in another year.

Shabbat at the University of Haifa

On the upside, I've learned how to say the sentence "I threw up last night" really well in Hebrew!

Oye. It appears the antibiotics I finally got for ear infections (probably caused by the diving) aren't sitting too well in the ol' stomache.

It's Shabbat here in Haifa, and I'm spending my last weekend in Israel on campus. It tends to be pretty quiet here in general (as most students live off campus), but it is particularly quiet over the weekends. The minimarket shuts down, the computer labs are closed -- even the library shuts its doors, which took me quite by surprise the first time I realized that!

I've been getting some extra Hebrew help from a generous man named Elan, a Hebrew and Arabic professor who is here on campus chaperoning his 10 undergrad students from Baard College in NY. He tells me that the campus life I've seen in Haifa this summer is pretty typical for Israel.

"Israeli students don't start undergrad until they are 20 or 21, after military service, and then once they do, they usually have to work. They don't have the time or luxury to sit around and only study all day, party at night, for four or five years, like happens in the U.S. They have to actually earn money. The fact they are starting college relatively late, they feel very motivated to get through it, get jobs and have families."

A native Israeli, Elan taught Arabic at Tel Aviv University for 20 years before coming to the U.S. 10 years ago. He said working at a U.S. campus was a huge shock to him when he first got there, because of how starkly different the culture was. He was shocked by how much alcohol and drug abuse there was; and by how many kids endlessly party and never really work very hard.

At first, he said, he couldn't believe that any of these kids actually grew up to have real careers and families -- but he's been teaching long enough to know that the majority of them do. "It's a phase, it's a cultural phenomenon that goes on, and fortunately, most of them seem to grow out of it -- but it still sometimes shocks me to see it," he said.

These are all generalizations, of course, but generally speaking, I can really see what he's talking about. Given that he teaches at a university where the annual tuition is $50,000 (as opposed to, say, a state university), I imagine the phenomenon is all the more true there. Then again there is the infamy of CU-Boulder ...