I’m an IT professional, specializing in health care technology. In my past, I have been a roadie for a rock band, a published poet, an uchi deshi (live-in martial arts student) for an aikido sensei, an editor, a teacher, a Doctoral student in pure mathematics, a sarcastic video store clerk, a house painter, a sandwich maker, a yacht club land activities manager, a project manager for a doomed project, and a t-shirt vendor in a Grateful Dead parking lot. I’ve been all over the world, and all over the USA.
I was born into a secular Jewish family. I have been a Quaker, a Unitarian, a Wiccan, a Taoist, and a Thelemite before learning about the religion of my birth and taking Judaism seriously. My mother’s mother’s side of the family have been secular Jews for five generations. My mother’s father, on the other hand, was religious, and was a Freemason. He was a surgeon, and was a pillar of his community. He founded a synagogue, and was one of very few Jews in 1940s Massachusetts to be invited by Christians to speak at their churches. He studied Torah and Talmud, and died five years before I was born.
For most of my father’s family, Judaism was cultural, a matter of protection rather than of faith. Both of my parents are B’nei Mitzvah, but both quit their religious education, and along with it, their religious devotion, quite soon afterwards. I never considered Judaism, even though I learned a fair amount of Qabalah while studying Aleister Crowley (I make a distinction between Qabalah, or Hermetic Qabalah, and Kabbalah, or Jewish Kabbalah). The ten s’firot were the first ten words of Hebrew I learned, except for the Yiddish Hebrew I picked up from my extended family: mishpachah, mazal, mitzvah, etc.
In my twenties, I read Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker, in which he advises that, rather than run away and try some flavor of Eastern spirituality, disaffected Westerners would do better to find the indigenous spirituality of their ancestors. I knew that some day I would probably become a religious Jew, decades before it happened.
As it was, I found aikido and mathematics, and lost them both, leaving a serious vacuum in my spiritual life. I earned my black belt in January 2000. I earned an MS in pure mathematics in May 2002. While aikido is grounded in the body, it is very spiritual, and while pure mathematics is rooted in the mind, it too can be very spiritual. I worked on Riemann Surfaces, which are locally two-dimensional, but sit in four-dimensional space. Spending hours every day mentally in four dimensions does something to one’s perception of this mundane three-dimensional world. Working in complex numbers makes real numbers seem limited and small. Aikido teaches about the true nature of conflict, and how nature handles conflict in ways that are sometimes far gentler than the way that humans handle conflict (and sometimes far crueler). Meditating upon how one can be gentler makes one perceive levels of gentleness inconceivable to most.
I stopped my aikido training when my responsibilities at graduate school became too intense. I went on to a PhD, which I worked on for two years. My Master’s adviser was a fierce polymath, an astonishing mind with an intense curiosity for all aspects of math and physics. He would often give an hour-long proof in a lecture without ever looking at his notes. I adored him. I found nobody remotely like him in my Doctoral program, and I despaired. I struggled through two years, and became horribly depressed. By the end of my time in my program, I was absolutely miserable. I gained weight, became a recluse, and fell apart.
After dropping out, I stumbled through a bunch of teaching jobs. I taught at a pre-Civil War military academy in the South, and then a school for emotionally disturbed rich kids, and then my mom’s old boarding school. I edited math textbooks, and later math websites, but all the while I was thirsty for a meaningful life. During a span of unemployment, I switched my computer to Linux, and taught myself some basic computer skills. Enough to get an entry-level job as a health care technology analyst. I paid off my debts, and finally had breathing room to take spiritual inventory.
Around this time, I read a book about Reconstructionist Judaism. I found it challenging, but it didn’t really hit the nail on the head for me. I then found a book by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling, and it deeply resonated within me. Reb Zalman described a religious life that was deeply spiritual, and yet totally livable. Flexible, funny, affirming, inclusive, contemporary, without the rigid dogmas of more Orthodox Judaism. I visited six or seven synagogues in the area, and found the one I currently belong to, run by a student of Reb Zalman’s.
Around the same time, the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts was airing the controversial “Ben Franklin” television commercial. Just previously, my grandmother had commented that my late grandfather would have been proud of my recent religious choices. Watching that commercial, I knew I wanted to be a Freemason like my grandfather. I did a web search. There were two lodges in my town, but only one had a website. I called the lodge secretary, and met with him that weekend in the lodge. He showed me around, and gave me a history of the lodge. When he showed me the diagram of the 47th Problem of Euclid on the Eastern wall, I was hooked. I petitioned the lodge, and was entered, passed and raised the very next time the lodge offered the degrees.
Since then, I earned my 32nd degree in a Scottish Rite one-day class. I joined the Lodge of Perfection, and have performed in degree work there. I later crossed the sands and became a Noble of the Mystic Shrine. I was the Inside Sentinel of my lodge in my first year as a mason, and will be Junior Deacon in September.
I lost my job in January, and started my blog, Corn, Wine and Oil, as a meditation on work, Freemasonry, and Judaism. The Sh’ma prayer, which religious Jews recite twice daily, includes the following line from Deuteronomy 11:14:
וְנָתַתִּי מְטַר־אַרְצְכֶם בְּעִתּוֹ יוֹרֶה וּמַלְקוֹשׁ וְאָסַפְתָּ דְגָנֶךָ וְתִירֹשְׁךָ וְיִצְהָרֶךָ׃
Which the King James Bible translates as: “that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.”
The Sh’ma prayer is the cornerstone of the Jewish religion. The initial line, Deuteronomy 6:4, is the fundamental testament of faith. The King James Bible translates it as “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:”. Traditionally, it is supposed to be the last sentence a Jew utters before he dies. Rabbi Akiva was tortured to death by the Romans, and uttered the line just before he expired. It’s not unusual for religious Jews in immediate mortal peril to recite the line.
In operative masonry, the wages of a craftsman were, in antiquity, given in corn (actually grain), wine and oil. When Freemasonry came into being, and masonry went from being operative to speculative, corn, wine and oil became the symbolic wages of a Fellow Craft, representing the needs of the body, the heart, and the spirit being met by laboring in the Quarries.
Also, because both Jews and Freemasons appeal to God to provide them with corn, wine and oil, as their wages, it seemed especially appropriate to invoke them when job-hunting. I am working again: currently under contract at a hospital chain, building new data connections for small practices joining the network. I mostly blog about Jewish and masonic ideas and how they influence each other, but I still consider the labor market from time to time.
Welcome!