--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

Welcome to the Grand Holiday Convergence.

I am indebted to Elaine for pointing this out, and I hope I'm not stealing something she was going to write about herself... but it would seem that everything is scheduled for the first half of this week. Today is Valentine's Day. (Well, yesterday, by the time I upload this. Sorry.) Tomorrow is Presidents' Day in the U.S., and Heritage Day -- whatever that is -- in Canada. The day after that is the Chinese New Year. Not to mention a new moon. Not to mention Mardi Gras. Not to mention the start of the Jewish month of Adar, a two-day semi-holiday that continues into the next day, which is Ash Wednesday. The Islamic month of Zul-Qada probably starts right after that, although I'm not clear on exactly how their calendar works.

In short, there's a whole lot of stuff going on right now, whether you're partying like it's 1999, 5759, 1419, or the Year of the Hare.

I suppose I might as well start getting into this stuff here.

So. As you may have gathered by now, I'm Orthodox Jewish. I keep kosher; I don't do a whole lot on Saturday; I believe in one good and perfect God; and, well, I do and believe a whole lot of other things, too many to list here.

I also proofread erotica on a regular basis.

This is not exactly normal behavior. Most of my Orthodox Jewish friends have never heard all of George Carlin's "seven dirty words" (umm, that'd be shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits), and wouldn't know what some of them mean. (It took me until after I graduated high school to learn them all, and that was through books; I didn't actually hear 'em out loud until I got to college.) I discovered at the start of the Monica Lewinsky thing that my oldest sister has no idea of what the term "oral sex" means, and she's married.

So... take it as established that some of my interests aren't things I'm supposed to know from, and that this causes not a little cognitive dissonance at times. I usually resort to compartmentalizing the parts of my life, preferring to ignore the conflicts, rather than giving up one side or the other.

It helps, I suppose, that having a complicated personality is a Good Thing in the Ivory Tower. By that standard, I'm a great person to know. The problem is, it ain't such a great thing from a Jewish standpoint.

I am Orthodox Jewish. I believe that God gave to Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai a few millenia ago, as witnessed by about a few million people; the entire Jewish nation. (600,000 males between 20 and 60 years old, plus women, children, and seniors.)

I don't believe this because I've been told so since before I started kindergarten, although that's the case. I believe it because, back in 1990, I argued with this, and a bunch of other issues, in an epic tag-team debate lasting the better part of a week. I had had several years to mull over every potential flaw in the Jewish approach, and when I finally snapped, I threw everything I had at it.

And lost.

I am not known for losing arguments. I can usually manage to win an argument even when I'm wrong. When I'm right, forget about it. And I don't concede defeat unless I'm really certain that the other side is correct after all. And this was the fight of my life. So while I no longer remember the exact details of the argument that won me over, I do know that it was a damn good one. And I do think the Orthodox Jewish way of explaining the world in general makes more sense than any other approach I've come across... and being a voracious reader, I've come across lots of them.

At the same time, I am a moral relativist. The bedrock of my belief system is logic, not faith. I believe in God because that makes the most sense to me; if it didn't, I wouldn't. Accordingly, I don't feel that my logic overrides anybody else's. I may be convinced that I'm right, but you have the right to come to your own conclusions. Your logic is potentially as good as mine; who's to say which of us is more correct?

The catch is that traditional Judaism does believe in absolutes.

Now, I can dance around this, and have for quite some time. I could point out that, as regards my personal value system, I'm okay with absolutes; I just don't think that they can be applied to others. As I see it, I have the right to make decisions affecting myself, but that's it.

Try as I might, however, there are some laws that are pretty hard to reconcile with that, if not impossible. I suppose this is the "leap of faith" everyone talks about; the feeling that The Truth is so clear that one has no choice but to take it as an absolute. And I understand the sense of urgency some of my peers have; if you're sure that you see somebody heading towards a cliff, could you really just stand there and let him walk off?

But I find that it's a leap I can't make. Nor can I say that I want to.

Part of this stems from my own nature; I'm never completely certain about anything. Perhaps more to the point, most of the trouble in my own life has come from people with the best of intentions, leading me to my Prime Directive: Thou Shalt Not Meddle. Throw in my second year in Israel, in which I learned just how important the separation of Church and State is, and...

I'm getting too far afield here.

In the meantime, I just like good writing. And if that happens to include activities and viewpoints that don't fit into my own way of life... well, they're only words, right?

(Right. I don't think any writer believes that words don't have power. I think it's that power that fascinates me the most some times, in fact.)