{"id":8721,"date":"2017-09-10T15:03:42","date_gmt":"2017-09-10T22:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/losing-my-religion\/"},"modified":"2017-09-10T15:03:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-10T22:03:42","slug":"losing-my-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/opinion\/losing-my-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing my religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s too late for General Custer, too late for Robert E. Lee.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gotta get back on the highway, before it\u2019s too late for me.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 Neil Young<\/em><\/p>\n

Elijah Oberman is the musician of the decade. He\u2019s queer, transgender, and Jewish, and he plays a wicked violin for the rock band, The Shondes.<\/p>\n

I was hooked on the Shondes from the first song on their first album, The Red Sea (2008). The song, \u201cDon\u2019t Look Down,\u201d starts off driven by electric guitar and voice (Louisa Rachel Solomon\u2019s voice, which is a punk band unto itself). Then, a minute into the song, the guitar and voice drop away, and Oberman launches into a violin solo that\u2019s as Jewish as any klezmer riff, in some kind of Eastern European, Phrygian dominant scale, leaping semitones like an alley cat.<\/p>\n

The wonderful thing is how perfectly it fits, as if Oberman discovered some tonality that\u2019s been slinking around the back alleys of punk all along. That\u2019s the genius of Oberman and Solomon: they hear what\u2019s already punk and political in traditional Jewish music.<\/p>\n

Like Shane McGowan\u2019s creating the Pogues out of a heaping gob of rock-and-roll spit and an Irish musical tradition that was rebellious to begin with: Oberman and Solomon find in Jewish traditional music not some exotic cultural artifact of the shtetl, but the blood and politics that gave the music life to begin with: anger and joy, defiance and hope.<\/p>\n

That sounds like punk rock to me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking about this now because \u2014 well, because I\u2019m a child of rock and roll, and nothing runs through my brain without filtering through the music.<\/p>\n

But more to the point: I\u2019m searching my own tradition \u2014 my religion, Catholicism \u2014 and finding it at odds with the demands of the moment and political lines that keep getting drawn more and more clearly.<\/p>\n

Last week, a group of Christians called the \u201cCouncil on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood\u201d issued a statement \u2014 the \u201cNashville Statement\u201d\u2014 defining homosexuality as a psychological disorder and reaffirming their intolerance of gay and transgender men and women.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know any Catholics who support this statement, but the Church\u2019s position is fundamentally the same: homosexuality is a disorder, same-sex marriage forbidden, and heterosexuality the only acceptable avenue for sex \u2014 and a narrow corridor at that.<\/p>\n

The timing of the Nashville screed is hardly accidental. Throughout his campaign and into his administration, President Trump has created an environment hospitable to unabashed public ugliness from white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other racists and anti-Semites. Now, with Trump banning transgender men and women from military service and his Attorney General declaring that gay rights are not civil rights, the homophobes are seizing the day.<\/p>\n

The Catholic Church doesn\u2019t see its position on gay sex as homophobic, but call it what you will; to want to deny a person a job because he\u2019s gay or transgender \u2014 as the Catholic Diocese of Juneau, Alaska wanted last year when it opposed our city\u2019s antidiscrimination ordinance \u2014 is no better than denying him a job because he\u2019s black. It\u2019s the dictionary definition of prejudice: to judge an individual by his or her membership in a group. And no welcoming words from the pulpit will ever be truly welcoming as long as the Church insists on seeing gay sexuality as a mental illness.<\/p>\n

Historian Jaroslav Pelikan distinguishes between tradition (\u201cthe living faith of dead men\u201d) and traditionalism (\u201cthe dead faith of living men\u201d). Traditionalism turns our faith traditions into institutions, and we end up serving the tradition, instead of the tradition serving us. Christ saw the problem clearly and was unambiguous about how our religious institutions and dogmas relate to the well-being of men and women: the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.<\/p>\n

When my religion tells me that I should not celebrate the individual that a man like Eli Oberman is \u2014 celebrate all the complexities of his character, his sexuality and gender as much as the beauty of his music, the complexities that make his music so raucous and beautiful \u2014 then that\u2019s a problem with the institution. And I\u2019ll take my stand with the individual.<\/p>\n

Early 20th-century Reform Jewish rabbi Kaufmann Kohler said it best: \u201cThe true object of religion is the hallowing of life rather than the salvation of the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe that. So I\u2019m leaving the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2022 Jim Hale is a writer and resident of Juneau.<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s too late for General Custer, too late for Robert E. Lee. Gotta get back on the highway, before it\u2019s too late for me. \u2014 Neil Young Elijah Oberman is the musician of the decade. He\u2019s queer, transgender, and Jewish, and he plays a wicked violin for the rock band, The Shondes. I was hooked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-8721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8721"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=8721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}