The opening of Thy words giveth light;
It giveth understanding unto the simple.
I opened wide my mouth, and panted;
For I longed for Thy commandments.
—Psalms 119:130–31
As for me, religion entered my life strangely. Actually, I don’t think it entered. I think it was always there. I have one memory. I was a young boy, maybe five years old, running in the streets of the Bronx. And I remember a Jewish newspaper was blowing in the wind. I didn’t understand a word of it, but because it was written in another language that I thought was a holy language, I assumed it was holy writing, I picked up every sheet of it, took them home, and said to my mother, “Look what I found in the street. I saved it,” thinking I had saved some holy text. Well, it obviously was just a newspaper written in either Hebrew or Yiddish, but I didn’t know that. There are other distant memories of my relationship to my ancestral language and my ancestral religion, which will come up throughout this book.
And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
—Genesis 1:27
A Four-Year-Old’s View of God
My friend, Daniel, has two lovely children. His little daughter, Chloe, is four years old. He said that she wanted to learn about Hanukkah, so he bought her a book on it for Christmas. She asked him to read it to her. He got to the part where the Greeks took over the temple, and she asked, “Daddy, what is a temple?”
Daniel said, “It was a Jewish White House.” In those days, religion and politics were the same.
Then the questions from that precocious four-year-old resumed. She asked, “Why does God want us to have a temple?”
He said, “I don’t know, but that is where people go to talk to God.”
She asked, “What do they say to Him?”
“Well, they say a lot of things. They thank God for making everything.”
She asked, “Why did He make everything?”
He said, “I don’t know, but we are here and we’re trying to explain why.”
“Well, what did He make us out of?”
Dan said, “Well, people believe that God made us from nothing.”
She asked, “But why did He do it?”
“There are many views on that.”
“Who made Him?”
“Well, that’s the big question,” he said. “If there was nothing, then who made God? A bigger God? Also, if God could do anything, can He make a car that everyone else can drive but He can’t?”
She said, “I know, Daddy, it doesn’t make sense. What do you think?”
He told her, “I think that you will have to decide for yourself and pick answers that are best for you.”
He then showed her the Ten Commandments, which are in the book, and he told her, “Here’s the good part. Honor your mother and father.” The little girl smiled.
Then he read the part that said, “Thou shalt not murder.” Chloe said, “But you can protect yourself.”
He said, “Yes. Just not murder someone. Murder is killing without defending someone.”
“Murder is killing without defending someone?” she asked. “But people are doing that already.” She then asked, “How do we know that God really gave us the Ten Commandments? How do we know this?”
He said, “It’s what people believe based upon what is in the book.” Dan then tried to put Judaism together with his wife, Val’s, Episcopalian background, and he said, “The Ten Commandments is a part of both of our religions. It is God’s instructions to the Jews.”
The child asked, “But what about Jesus, Daddy? Was he God?”
He said, “The Jews see him as a Jew. He followed Jewish law, and he was really, really smart. If he was God as a person, or a Jew who was really smart and kind, it doesn’t matter. Both are good.”
Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
—Isaiah 7:14
“But, Dad, why would God be a person? What does God really look like?”
Dan said, “I think God can be a boy or girl or anything God wants.”
“Well, how was he born if he was God?”
Dan said, “He was born as a Jew. That is for sure. The Christians believe that wise people knew of his birth and he was very special right from the beginning. So we both agree that he was special, but the Christians believe he was special because he was God on Earth.”
Chloe asked, “But why would God want people to see a baby born? How did they know to come to see him?”
Daniel said, “I don’t know. That’s what they believe: that somehow they knew.”
Chloe said, “That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would God want people to visit a baby? I want to see this in a book. Did anyone write about this?”
You can see where this is going. The fact of the matter is that children are more rational than adults in many ways, and they want strictly rational answers to questions for which there are no answers. That’s what makes them so insightful. This is the essence of faith. Faith is the ability of a human being to believe in something for which there is no proof.
Fundamentally, that’s the whole point of this book: to believe in God, you must have faith. There is no proof that God exists.
Is God Real?
Sometimes I ask myself, “What is real?” We’re living in a society where everything is fake. The food is fake. Nothing tastes good anymore. Ersatz wine is chemicalized, as are the air, the water, everything. And, of course, we all know the news is fake. Were the media ever the harbingers of truth? No, they always made up what they were feeding us, by and large, with a few notable exceptions. We have too much fake science. For example, inventing whole phony disciplines to support the climate change hoax, which is a political movement, not a scientific one.
What do you turn to, my dear, beloved readers? Where do you turn when you want something real? Every institution we grew up with in this country has been blown up. There is almost nothing left. And I’m not talking about older people. Not at all. I think they still have their religion, their family, and their values. But society at large is a different story.
How can everyone else decide who and what is real? How can you judge who is real? How can you know if a person you are talking to, a person you get to know, a person you do business with, or a person you are dating is real?
I asked some of my listeners on The Savage Nation these same questions. Here is what one of them had to say:
“I would like to say that for an inward reflection in realness, hobbies. Personal hobbies, like playing an instrument, knowing exactly what’s in it, as far as, there’s not going to be any autotune,” said one caller.
“Exactly,” I replied. “And you’re either good at it, poor at it, or mediocre at it. You know it, and so does everyone around you. So playing music is real.”
Cooking was another great example that came out of that call. There is no way to fake cooking, even if the food is fake. Either it comes out tasting good or it doesn’t.
These are the basics that keep people going in a time where everything around them seems fraudulent. I find myself most at rest when I’m doing something with my hands, when I’m making or fixing something. That’s when I feel most stable. Gardening is one example. Seeing my peaches ripen and my tomatoes come up is real to me. I know I probably sound like the character in The Godfather in the garden, waiting to fall over. But there is something so real about planting tiny tomato plants and seeing them produce tomatoes three months later. That’s real.
There is a divinity in growing vegetables, which may explain why so many primitive cultures centered their religious beliefs around it. That and necessity, of course. Women enjoy an especially direct connection to producing life by bearing children.
My mind wanders when I talk to people. I don’t consider it a shortcoming. Some people can’t listen to other people. First, I do it every da
y on the radio. So when I get off the air, I don’t really want to listen to anybody. It can be hard to be around me for that reason. People can see my eyes rolling after thirty seconds, or they can see I’m stressing to make believe I’m listening.
Do you think I don’t know this? I know who I am and what I am. I live with it. There’s an oft-used phrase, “Comfortable in your own skin.” I’m pretty comfortable in mine. Do I have a choice? After all these years, I don’t know how to be uncomfortable in my own body. We’ve lived together for so long. We certainly can’t separate and become a duality. At least not in this life. Tomorrow it could all be over. But for the grace of God, right?
Here’s a typical morning prayer some religious Jews read to start the day:
Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has formed man in wisdom, and created within him numerous orifices and cavities. It is revealed and known before the Throne of Your Glory that if but one of them were to be blocked, or one of them were to be opened, it would be impossible to exist even for a short while. Blessed are You, Lord, Who heals all flesh and performs wonders.
The ancients who wrote the prayer books understood things about the human body that were not very well known outside the Jewish community. They codified them in the prayer book.
What is the point of reading this prayer every morning? Perhaps it is to remind us that every breath we take could be our last. It is supposed to humble us and make us understand that time is limited, that we’re finite. We’re flesh and blood, no matter how big we think we are.
Apparently, the prayer didn’t work for Bernie Madoff. Neither does it seem to work for so many people walking around in religious garb. Maybe they don’t read prayers like this one. Or they don’t understand them. For how many people are prayers like these just mumbo jumbo? If they understood their significance, they wouldn’t be stealing Medicare after putting on the outfit. Prayers like this are supposed to stop the gonif who wears the black clothing and does the shuckling and still rips off Medicare. In many cases, even the religious don’t believe what they read.
Years after discovering this prayer, I read something from a different religion, which said words to this effect: It doesn’t really matter if you read the prayer book every day and perform all the rituals. What really matters to God is whether you are sincere in your belief in Him. That sincerity is the reality I’m talking about.
Maybe reality is nothing more than sincerity. I don’t mean a con man’s sincerity or putting on an act. There is enough of that in the world. Every great salesman is a con man. He pretends that he believes in what he’s selling you. Maybe some do; maybe some don’t. You can’t prejudge everybody.
Think about all the fake movie stars with no talent whatsoever. They’re surgically altered, like androids or bionic people. You don’t know who’s real anymore. You don’t know what’s real. Maybe some people don’t need reality. Maybe they want someone who’s altered and looks better. That’s certainly another way to look at it, that the altered body is the better body.
The wisdom of the prudent is to look well to his way;
But the folly of fools is deceit.
—Proverbs 14:8
“Eternity, knowledge, and bliss, that is reality,” said one caller. “To solve the problems of birth, old age, disease, and death, that’s facing reality. Real reality is eternity, knowledge, and bliss because there is all this disease and death and birth that’s forced upon us. Nobody wants it, because by nature we’re eternal. We’re full of knowledge, full of bliss. But we’re all in the prison house of this material world. And that’s reality.”
The Buddhists believe the material world is a prison, an illusion. But I am not a Buddhist. I am reminded of a story I once heard about Einstein. I don’t know if it’s true. Shortly after he published his General Theory of Relativity, he agreed to an audience. He couldn’t meet everyone, but he admitted a prominent man, who said to him, “Herr Einstein, I understand your theory of relativity. Everything is imaginary. It’s all imagined.”
The story goes that Einstein went up to the man, slapped him in the face, and asked, “Is that imagined?”
Reality is great to talk about until you fall off a ladder and break a leg. I remember when I was eighteen years old and going through my Sorrows of Young Werther phase. I didn’t know who I was, where I was going, or what I was going to be. I was asking “What is life about? What is the meaning of existence?” and going through all the turmoil kids go through if they’re sensitive or have a brain. I think everyone goes through this phase. The toughest person on earth asks these questions at some point in their life, usually during adolescence.
Some people can’t get through that stage. They become drug addicts or alcoholics. They can’t get past it because the answers are not there for them. They’ve lost faith or have no connection to faith. They don’t believe in anything and don’t know where to turn.
One day during that time in my life, I was driving through the Catskills and heard a thunk under the wheel of my car. I stopped, got out, and saw a dead rabbit. I went home that night and wrote a simple line in my journal: “Today, I ran over and killed a rabbit. This is reality.”
Was that profound? It was to me. What I learned from running over that rabbit was that you can dream all you want, but at a certain point, when you run into a stone wall, you’ll know what reality is. Or if someone punches you in the nose, you fall off a ladder, you see a baby being born, or you watch a parent suffer and die, you’ll know what reality is. Trust me, reality has a way of kicking you in the behind.
Trust in the LORD with all thy heart,
And lean not upon thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge Him,
And He will direct thy paths.
—Proverbs 3:5-6
Where Is God?
Where is God? People seek to find God in as many places as there are on earth and in as many ways. I recall one of the pages from the great book Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. It’s the story about a monk who climbs a mountain in Greece with the chief character, Zorba. And when they get to a certain point and they’re relaxing, the priest tells Zorba a story about a woman he met in one of the villages. She was an outcast. She was a widow, and for some reason the people looked down upon her, thinking that she was a loose woman, so to speak.
The long and the short of it is the priest spent the night with her, had sex with her, probably for the first time in his life, and he told Zorba that when dawn came the following morning, he was closer to God than he had ever been in his life.
Well, that’s one way people find God. I guess it’s through transcendental experiences, whether they be sex, drugs, music, etc. People see God in their own way every day. Some people say they stand on a shoreline, listening to the waves pound against the shore, and feel closer to God. Or they walk on a beach or in a forest. There’s that famous song from many years ago about hearing the cry of a newborn baby and knowing why you believe what you do.
Those are the ways people seek communion with the greater spirit to which we are all connected. After all, what are we? In addition to being the blood, the bone, the vessels, the tissue, we are spirit. And everything we come into contact with resonates on or with this spirit, for better or for worse. We know that some people can bring us down or give us a headache, some can bring us up, some can make us happy, some can make us sad, some can elevate us. What is that about?
It’s about the fact that we’re like tuning forks and we resonate with other energy forces. The other energy forces can be other people, a pounding surf, an animal, a dog, a cat, a bird. But the ultimate tuning fork in the sky is what we’re talking about in this book. How can we tap into that resonance?
Some people go to church, and in joining a congregation, they are better able to resonate with the higher power. I remember when I was a young boy, I asked about my grandfather, who died long before I was born. The word came down that my grandfather was not a religious man, that he didn
’t go to a temple to pray. Instead, he said he could be out in nature with his back to a tree and talk to God. In many ways, the same is true for me today.
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise;
But the companion of fools shall smart for it.
—Proverbs 13:20
PART II.
GOD AND NATURE
Why did God create the world?
What is Man’s role in creation?
Does God intervene, and how much?
What is the relationship between God and science?
I wrote this book because I decided to get closer to God again. I’m at the same phase of my life as I was decades ago, when I moved so far away from God and became so cynical that my life started to unravel in a certain way. My head started to unravel. And it was only by getting closer to God that I was able to get it all together again. That’s when my life and career took off.
I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. It’s not as though my life is unraveling again, but I wasn’t feeling connected to the spiritual as much as I had before. And I wanted to be. I knew how to do it; I know who to be with; I know how to be there. It’s an interesting story.
A few months back, before I was due to have some dental work done, I was in LA. I came back home and wasn’t feeling good. I had the flu. On a Wednesday night, I had a dream that I was in a huge convocation of religious Jews. I was wandering around looking for a seat but couldn’t find one. There were tens of thousands of people. It was an almost biblical setting. Everyone had a seat but me. Finally I found a seat and sat down.
God, Faith, and Reason Page 4
