While standing on one foot

In the OR today, one of my nurses asked me if I’d celebrated Christmas this year.

“No,” I said, a bit confused, since she knew the next part: “I’m Jewish.”

“Well, some people celebrate Christmas even if they’re not Christian.”

This is true, and I said as much. My wife’s family (Buddhist) always celebrated Christmas, and their Buddhist temple puts up a humongous tree every year. Considering Christmas’s pagan/druidic roots, why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun. Those trees smell nice, too.

At this point, one of my other OR staff people asked, “So you don’t believe . . . I mean, you must believe in something.”

Something was accompanied by a waving of hands towards the sky, so I assumed her real question was, “You must believe in God.” My regular readers know that’s a whole ‘nother box of matzoh for me. Bottom line, I’m a Jewish agnostic, but since my rabbi claims it’s okay to be a Jewish atheist, a Jewish agnostic is one step even closer to mainstream. But back to my staff person and her quandary. She had been raised Catholic, hated it, turned her back on religion and now considers herself an atheist. She lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge of religion — any religion.

This isn’t my first encounter with such a tabula rasa. In grad school, one of our technicians had been born and raised in the Phillipines. She was a Catholic who couldn’t conceive of other Christian denominations — and the idea of someone not believing that Jesus Christ was Lord and Savior blew her mind. (How you can grow up in the Phillipines and not be aware of Islam, at the very least, blows my mind.) On more than one occasion I had to grip her by the shoulders and say, “What did those nuns teach you?”

It’s a wonder to me that more people aren’t like this. Religions are hopelessly complex, and in my opinion, that’s religion’s greatest sin. Religions are leviathans, and if they’re to have any chance of surviving the millennia, they have to be big and hulking and sweet as cotton candy and narsty as a braided whip. They’re memetic organisms, and memes are all about the carrot and stick.

But if you want simplicity, it doesn’t get much better than Hillel the Elder. In what is arguably the most famous of Talmudic stories, a gentile complains to Hillel that Judaism is way too difficult, and he challenges Hillel to summarize Judaism while standing on one foot. Hillel obliges the man, and says, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is just commentary.”

In other words, the Golden Rule is everything. We don’t need anything else.

My nurse anesthetist, upon hearing me tell this story, said, “Well, we were taught that there were really only two rules: love thy neighbor as thyself, and love God.”

But even that’s unnecessary. Why love God? God doesn’t need our love. Speaking as an agnostic, I think any God worth respecting would want only one thing: for us to take care of each other. Since this respect-worthy God doesn’t care that we love Him (for lack of a better pronoun), we can concentrate on the important stuff — taking care of one another.

Note that this simple belief system doesn’t exclude a belief in God. It simply leaves it out of the picture. And with all of that other clutter tossed aside, wouldn’t we be left with something we can all agree on?

It’s a great ethical/moral system for a small planet, too; we choose not to foul our home out of respect for ourselves and all the others who share it.

Well, that’s my soapbox for the day, and I’m getting tired of standing on one foot. Much of this came to mind not just from today’s OR conversation, but also from some blogsurfing over at Lilith’s religion blog, God and Consequences, to which I contribute occasionally. (Okay, once, I contributed once. But that’s pretty occasional, wouldn’t you say?) And through G & C I found the deliciously snarky The Gods are Bored (subtitled, Praise and Worship suggestions for those longing to be Left Behind). Those are your “For Further Reading” assignments, chillun. Have fun.

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Tonsil day today. Another three pairs of tonsils bit the dust. If I have time, I’ll post excerpts from Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy — in particular, the story about his tonsillectomy, which I’ve mentioned previously. I can’t find it online, and it really deserves wider exposure. What a great story.

D.