Shock and Awe at Columbia

Summing up four years of college is hardly a task to relish. The past four years have changed me--and the world around me--profoundly. I have watched the skies of lower Manhattan explode in flame and smoke. I have watched our country go to war twice, once with Afghanistan and once with Iraq, in neither case leaving me with a clear opinion about the matter.

At the same time, I have had the luxury of retreating from the catastrophes of the world around me, and I have made all too frequent use of that luxury. As the president was deciding whether to invade Iraq, I was watching Dostoevsky's hero Golyadkin go mad in one class and Philo of Alexandria equate the Biblical patriarchs with the Graces in another. I have sinned against others and myself in my indecisions about issues of war and peace. I have failed to find the moral clarity necessary to goad me to action on the most pressing concerns of my time.

The past four years have left me a less naïve person than when I came in. I do not say "a more cynical person," as would so many of my Columbia peers, because I like to think I have not become truly hardened and cynical. My studies as a religion major have shown me numerous examples of what can happen when religious authority is perverted or abused, yet I remain committed to a firm belief in God's power to liberate human beings from lives of purposelessness and redeem them from moral chaos. That in and of itself saves me from cynicism. But I have become less naïve in my understanding of what faith in God can and cannot do for people. I no longer believe, as I once did, that religion can liberate and redeem people who refuse to cooperate in their own liberation and redemption.

My theological opinions have changed more times than Oprah Winfrey's weight. I learned that the Bible is the most chimerical of books; every line of it is as mysterious as the One who addresses its assortment of heroes, rogues, and prophets. I have lost faith in God's omnipotence but gained faith in divine perfection. I have watched God go into exile with the Safed kabbalists, appear to a quirky former professor at JTS in moments of awe and radical amazement, and transform himself, in my head, into Mordecai Kaplan's vaguely defined Power that Makes for Salvation. I have learned that the people who tell you what good Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists they are are seldom particularly good Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists. I have come to admire the quiet piety of those who take Shabbat meals to the hungry on Friday night more than the bombast of those who proclaim social justice in the editorial page of The New York Times or in evasively worded creeds and catechisms.

In the realm of politics, I have watched as so many of my classmates embraced distorted conceptions of freedom and imperialism that forever portray the United States, the country that has done more than any other to extend freedom around the world, as capable of doing no right. I have listened, stunned, as otherwise intelligent people told me I was an imperialist pig for suggesting that Upper West Side liberals should not only sympathize with, but actually do something for, Afghani women trapped in burqas, Iraqi women tortured by state-sponsored rapists, and the children all of these women put to bed hungry every night.

I have spent four years in a world that often seems willing to deny human beings what George Orwell considered the most basic of freedoms: the freedom to say, without reservation of any kind, that black is black and white is white. I have had to defend in a college paper the quaint notion that the meanings of a text can change people as much as people can change the meaning of a text. Orwell believed that the notion that objective truth actually exists is essential to political freedom; like him, I am horrified to watch ideologues chip away at that notion in the name of a morality that is as flimsy as a Jennifer Lopez dress and as elastic as Bill Clinton's definition of sex.

Mostly, I have wrestled with my own desire to speak coherently about things that transcend coherence or defy it. Amazement, horror, and religious ecstasy cannot always be summed up in neat platitudes. And I have had plenty to be amazed at, horrified over, and religiously ecstatic about. As much as I love bending sentences and phrases to my will, I have come to accept the inadequacy of language in expressing the things that are most important to humanity. God, salvation, freedom, truth--none are as simple as the words that denote them, or as precisely defined as their interpreters could wish. And so here I am, a month away from graduation, utterly amazed, utterly horrified, beyond language, beyond sorrow, beyond happiness.