CLAL Special Features
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Jewish Public Forum Seminar:
“What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001
Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:
“What Is Religion For?”
By Libby
Garland
A friend whose journalist husband has been
busy since September 11 compiling eyewitness reports of burning towers, hounding FBI
officials and jetting off to Florida on the trail of the anthrax spores says that she
envies him for having a job that has sanctioned his obsession with the news over the last
months. Like me—like many of us—she has had to be obsessed instead from the sidelines, in
her spare time. “Did you see that article in the New Yorker? In the Nation? Harpers?
The Guardian?” we ask each other. Our email
in- and out-boxes fill with links to online articles. Why has tuning in to NPR, scouring The New York Times’ new “A Nation
Challenged” section, and surfing the Web for news and more news come to feel so
urgent, like an addiction, or a life preserver? “Maybe,”
my friend speculated, “it’s an attempt to feel in control.”
Maybe. When I am not trolling for news
from official channels, I’m talking about It-all that unfathomable, interconnected
stuff-with everyone I know. We talk war, bio-terror, civil liberties, and religious
fundamentalism over dinner or email. We trade stories and information: A friend’s
friend who has come from Indonesia to do graduate work in small-town Illinois considers
leaving the country when her sixth-grade son gets summarily arrested after he fights with
boys taunting him for being a terrorist. A friend who is a diplomat in Yemen emails that
many people there quietly support bin Laden; an Australian friend writes that support for
Afghan refugees claiming political asylum there has evaporated. I talk to people I
don’t know, too—like the Indian cab driver in
New York who tells me people have spit on his car—and
eavesdrop on similar conversations on the sidewalk, in restaurants. But if all this
news-gathering is an attempt at control, it doesn’t work. There is too much to
process. Even while I know that this is always true, it has never seemed moreso than now.
How do you figure out what to pay attention to, what to care about most, in this deluge of
images and words from down the street and the other side of the globe? What to protest,
what to analyze, what to fear, what to do?
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