In Pursuit Of God

My first class took their first exam. Immediately as I passed the tests out, half the class went to sleep. One plugged her thumb in her mouth. Another snored gently. Two others engaged in flicking each other off by rubbing their middle fingers casually across their heads and ears as though scratching. One star pupil decided to take off both his sneakers and clean them. I walked around the room, desperately tapping on desks—it’s the only way I’m allowed to wake the kids up. One girl cocked an eyebrow at me the second time I did it, and when I gestured to her test, she sat up. My grin must have cracked my face in half, and she set to work with a good will when she saw how happy it made me. She, and the industrious, attitude-filled student up front who quietly went about the test, underlining phrases and looking over her work with such a solid attitude it made me joyous, got me through that exam, until the point of half an hour left when my kids all set to with a good will. Afterwards, my proctor told me he thought my kids probably did really well, based on the amount of attention they gave the exam.

“All except that one fellow with the shoes. He didn’t take it seriously, not at all.”

Afterwards I showed Freedom Writers, and kids started rapping along with Tupac. They leaned into the movie. They were very proud that they know what the Holocaust is.

Shavuot was lovely, perhaps my favorite holiday with its focus on cheesecake and Torah learning. The parts of Judaism that really matter. I had several of the young Jewish community over for dinner, and our conversation took a fascinating plunge into the intricacies of rabbinic guidance. It left me cogitating upon the ways my spiritual outlook has shaped itself over my adult life, from Israel, to Norway, to Toronto, to here.

This year in North Carolina has many things in common with the year I spent in Norway. In both places I ventured outside my regular rounds, met people with lives wildly different from my own, stretched my abilities and challenged myself, and learned more about what kind of world I want to make than ever before. However, as the year winds down, I find myself thinking about how powerfully G-d entered both places, both parts of my life.

To be fair, Norway and North Carolina were bookended by cities on my personal timeline that couldn’t help but make G-d look good elsewhere. Toronto is lacquered with a hard, shiny materialism that leaves no place for G-d to get a purchase. The synagogues were full of stylish atheists; the university of intelligent agnostics. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, G-d is spread thin by a population that voices Him so often, the city is suffocated in a meaningIess membrane of divinity, with gaping holes in it where children poked at Him too hard as they do with a ball of silly putty stretched tight and clear.

After Israel, it was muvan maalav that I find Norway charged with the grandeur of G-d. Not a moment passed without a heady sense of heaven. G-d gave Norway so much beauty, there is little left in comparison for the rest of the world. Nothing can approximate the allure of the country. Dahl’s paintings are faint eldritch echoes of the landscape; Tennyson’s lines hang scantily across the mountain ranges; Grieg’s symphonies ring tinkling next to the roaring power of fjord and fosse. There was little left but to praise G-d with every breath, to salute work well done with every step, to wonder how it is possible to live other than with the exaltation and simply pleasure in life that the Norwegians so encapsulate.

North Carolina is not as gaspingly gorgeous as Norway. It does not impress one with the sheer necessity of G-d at every look. One does not breath in a blend of salt spray and mountain breeze that comes from Elysium. Yet, G-d is persistent here. 

Here where a student focuses on her work despite the chaos around her, unbendingly and stubbornly pursuing a path to college despite pregnant friends, a drunken father, a school with more weed available than books. G-d is here with a teenage boy who fears every day that he will be deported, but nonetheless rises through halting English to the top of the class. G-d is here with the gang member who smiles boyishly as he explains his tattoos and offers to stay late to reset the desks in the classroom. G-d gives strength to the girl whose father was shot before her eyes just a month ago, sending her into school to succeed. G-d watches the one who has spoken of suicide, the one who’s scared of bullies but nevertheless comes to learn, the one with a learning disability who’s made friends with the child who can coach him through. At every second, in the children’s laughter, in their politenesses, the way they ask to clean the board and ring out cheerfully in morning greetings to their teachers and hold each other tight when something has gone horribly wrong, there is some divinity at work, holding us all through and bringing us out the other side. In a year filled with the most difficult moments, I have never been so aware of finding grace.

I Step Outside Myself
I step outside
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good 
this devilry that has happened. 

-Ingeborg Bachmann