--from At Swim - Two - Birds, by Flann O'Brien

It could begin here:

I've spent the majority of my life in Orthodox Jewish religious schools. This started with kindergarten -- which I began attending when I was three -- in an elementary school where I was to stay for the next ten years, through eighth grade. Then across the neighborhood, to a religious high school, where I spent four years. Then I spent a year at various schools in Israel, then went back to New York for four more years of post-high school religious training, after which I went back to Israel for one more year. I began attending college the semester after I got back.

I began questioning my religion in high school, and, while outwardly keeping all the commandments the whole way through, I kinda decided by twelfth grade that the only reason why I bothered was because I'd been brainwashed that way.

You might say that I found religion -- or at least rediscovered it -- the first time I went to Israel, where, in an epic, tag-team debate with a couple of fellow students, I argued against everything I'd been taught -- God, Sinai, the works -- to the hilt, throwing absolutely everything I had at it... and lost.

I don't generally lose arguments. Even when I'm wrong. When I'm right... fuhgeddabowdit.

Anyway, that served as a guiding light until the second time I went to Israel, where I got terribly disillusioned, and realized how very much I love New York. I would hesitate to say that I lost my religion then also -- I certainly think the underlying logic still holds, and that it makes more sense than any other approach I know of -- but things certainly haven't been the same since. The religion might be fine, but I'm less than thrilled with the way many of my co-religionists practice it.

It may be worth noting that the three biggest problems in my high school were: Students listening to rock music; Students wearing unsuitable clothing, like (shudder) pants with big cuffs; Students going into town (two neighborhoods over), where they might, heaven forbid, hang out in a pizza shop. The horror.

Oh, and okay, there were occasional incidents involving fireworks, especially on the annual two-day trip to the country. And perhaps I'm romanticizing the whole thing a bit. But drug abuse, weaponry, and so on and so forth weren't anywhere near the map. And while I graduated high school in 1990, I'm fairly certain that this is still the case.

Which is not to say that high school was a picnic, but sometimes I wonder whether my community was really on the same planet as, oh, the rest of the country. Entries like this one, by Pamie just make me wonder even more. Which of us had the more "normal" experience?

I have a complex tangle of related topics that I want to cover, but have little hope of organizing them in a neat, linear, series of essays. Not yet, anyway. So what I'd like to do here is present a whole bunch of bits and pieces over the next few days, before connecting the dots and coming to some conclusions.

As near as I can pin it down, this is the way my mind works in general, which has been a mixed blessing in the past. Some people, I understand, start with the premises, and then work out the conclusions in a straightforward fashion. If A, then B. If A and B, then C.

I don't.

What I do is vacuum down all of the data I can get my hands on, make an intuitive leap to the conclusion based on the gestalt, and then work my way back.

This caused me some trouble a few years back, when I and a friend were working out a piece of the Talmud together, and we'd translate one line of reasoning, and I would immediately leap to a conclusion, skipping the steps along the way. And he would say, hey, wait a minute, where'd that come from?! And I'd say that it followed from what we'd read. And he'd say, well, why can't you say (some other possible conclusion)? And I'd show why you couldn't. And he'd advance a few other hypotheses, and I'd knock them all out, ultimately tracing back an entire line of reasoning leading from the original statement to my conclusion.

And lo, said friend got royally pissed at me, because, as he saw it, I was thinking through all the steps along the way more quickly than he was, but not bothering to explain them, instead just announcing the end result and leaving him in the lurch. But such was not the case. I didn't know the steps along the way until I traced my way back while arguing it out with him. I started with the premise, and jumped straight to the conclusion.

I'm not sure he ever bought that, but it's true.

This has its downsides. With another study partner, the usual pattern went something like this: We'd translate the text. I'd make an intuitive leap based on it almost immediately. He'd chew it over, going through it slowly and carefully over five minutes or so, and then point out an obvious flaw, knocking out my entire interpretation. Intuition's flashier, but careful logic's more dependable.

Still... in general, I've learned to trust my intuition. It tends to be right more often than not.

Last week, one of the readers of this journal sent me a link to this Salon article, which is about a bunch of ultra-Orthodox men harassing a mixed-gender Jewish prayer group at the Western Wall. Please follow that link, and read the article. It's an important piece of the puzzle I'm trying to assemble just now.

The question at hand isn't whether the actions described in the article are defensible; they're not. If nothing else, this article does illustrate at least one of the reasons why I became extremely disillusioned with Israel, the second time I went there. There's an extreme lack of tolerance on all sides, which may be the one thing almost everybody there has in common.

But that's not enough. The question is, why on Earth are Jews acting this way towards other Jews who, after all, are only trying to pray? Is this sort of thing mandated by Orthodox Judaism? And don't these people realize just how counterproductive their actions are? And can we at least understand what's driving them to react this way?

Not in 500 words or less. But I'm hoping to manage that, to some extent, in the following entries.